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place.
    We have to do some fixing up first: the old joint is pretty drack. A dance hall originally, up a flight of stairs. Thommo’s was there for a couple of years, it was a physical fitness gym for a while, then used for storage by the furniture shop downstairs. The old hardwood floorboards are split and worn, plaster is falling off damp spots on the walls. It needs rewiring. It needs a proper bar. But this just happens to coincide with the Alexandria electronics hoist. So we have our share of the readies.
    It costs a lot, but it gets done. Abe’s people work the bar. They’re ripping us off, but within reason. And we’re charging high prices. We have to pay proper bouncers now, and we have to kick back to the licensing police, the vice squad, the council, the health department and the fire brigade. We’re obliged to serve food – barely edible spaghetti bolognaise – for which we need a kitchen and a cook, of sorts.
    But still, by the end of the year we’re ahead. Just barely, but the trend is in the right direction.
    By then things are rocky on the home front. Eloise and I have more or less gone our separate ways – our mutually relaxed attitudes to foreign orders didn’t play out so well in the long run. In theory I still live at the big house in Woollahra, but sometimes three or four days go by without us seeing each other. I try to take the kids out once a week, and always sling some spondulicks into the kitty, make the mortgage payments.
    In her mid-thirties now, my wife still looks as impressive as ever with her billowing brown hair, her kaftans, her Black Russians. She affects the to-the-manor-born demeanour she learned when her dad Donny – then the licensee of a scungey Ultimo pub, starting price bookmaker, and occasional on-seller of stolen goods – sent her off to the very best ladies college on the North Shore, where she must have stood out at first, until she got properly tooled up for life among the upper crust. But Eloise understands the ways things really work in this town, did then and does now, and she backs me up when it’s needed without having to be prompted. Most of the time.
    When we’re stuck she comes down and pulls drinks or worksthe door at the House of Cards. Calls the punters “darling” in her posh voice, with the saucy inflection. She brings the kids along sometimes for an extra-special treat, just like Donny did with her when she was a sprout. “It’s good for the tots,” she says, “to see how their daddy’s money gets made.”
    Max Perkal is having a good time, too good. He keeps up there with purple hearts and joints, sometimes acid. Max with a bellyful of purple hearts and alcohol can play rhythm and blues pretty well, but anything non-musical he’s likely to stuff up. So when Cathy Darnley returns from Vietnam and starts dancing in a go-go cage at the House, there are emotional complications all round. Things move quickly.
    The House of Cards, under Abe’s protection and with the cooperation of various civil authorities, naturally becomes a bit of a drug market. Not always and not every day, but if you need to do a deal, the House isn’t the worst place in town for it to happen. You give the house a cut, of course. So when Max and Cathy pull their stunt, wise heads mutter that they saw it coming.
    The rip doesn’t take place in a house in Bondi, as whoever wrote the book has it – it happened late one night in the House of Cards, after closing. I wander in on proceedings, more or less as the book describes, maybe not buttoning my fly exactly, but kind of. A shot is fired, amid much drama. But no one actually gets hit. Which is not as big a distinction as you’d think, because a bridge has now been crossed: guns have been produced at a marijuana deal, and that’s a scary new thing.
    There is present, as the book describes, a motley gathering of heads and hangers-on, and the