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deal is indeed orchestrated by a doper of Greek extraction, name of Alex Politis. After everyone on the premises has been relieved of their drugs and money, the safe is emptied. Cathy walks out looking pleased and proud. Max is sheepish, shrugging at me as though it’s all out of his hands.
    And that’s the last I see of Max. Ever. I hear later that he’s in Melbourne, then later still that Cathy has cleared out, that Max is playing in some band. But by then I’m not inclined to go after him. I know there’ll be nothing to recover anyway. Thenearest I’ll get to Max Perkal again will be two years later, standing by his casket at Waverley Cemetery while Marty Mooney plays “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” on tenor sax, and a couple of hundred aging beatniks, jazz-dags and stoned young heads whimper into their hankies.
    Back at the House of Cards, the night of the rip, I’m left with a safe full of nothing. My problems – or “the Troubles,” as I come to think of them – are about to begin. And in short order they will have me living semi-incognito in a sleep-out behind a falling-down hippie house in Balmain, driving a cab on the night shift, neck-deep in unmoveable debt.
    * * *
    I woke with a start. It was two thirty in the morning. The music from Terry and Anna’s had stopped. I got out of the chair and made another pot of tea. I wasn’t going to sleep much anyway. I sat back down, lit another cig and picked up the book. Just holding it gave me a strange and creepy feeling, like I was being watched. I recognised the feeling, of course, the old paranoia. But this was something more.
    THE JAM!
    I took a room at the George. The next morning I sought out the publican, a harmless-looking old cat. I told him I was supposed to be meeting a bloke named Stan who’d said he was a friend of his. He said he didn’t know who I meant. I looked into his eyes. Not a flicker.
    I bought the local papers. Nothing about a jail escape in New South Wales, nothing on the radio either. I went to the municipal library that afternoon. The Sydney papers came in at three. There was a story on page two of the Tele .
    An escape from Goulburn Jail last night. A bloke servingfive years for armed robbery (the Commonwealth Bank at Bexley). Whereabouts unknown. Believed to be dangerous. But nothing, zero, not a word, about any cold-blooded murder in Bondi.
    I went to the milk bar and thought about my situation. The mob at the house had got rid of the Drew’s corpse after all. It’s harder than you might think – take it easy, my little ones, don’t ask how I know – but not impossible. Maybe Johnny stepped to the fore there.
    The drug rip was a bad scene, sure, and the boys back at that house would be spewing. But they were in Sydney, no doubt stoned off their dials by now, one way or another. I couldn’t see them coming five hundred miles after me, even if they knew where I was. So my resolution was: stay clear of Sydney, and with luck, further unpleasantness could probably be avoided. (Tip for hip ones: stay away for long enough and pretty much anything can be forgiven and forgotten. Hear me talkin’ to ya!)
    Cathy. Yeah, bad shit there. Cathy had been a mistake, as bad as mistakes get. Oh brother, she had powers, heavy powers, Christ knows what, white magic, voodoo, some twisted Vietnamese juju. Acid magic, too. LSD bestows weird and dangerous potencies upon certain souls, makes it so they can read minds, bend others to their will, even move matter by thought alone. I’ve seen all those things. I’m not for burning people at the stake and so on, but phew, heed me friends, don’t fuck around with the acid priestess.
    Strangely though, my thing for Cathy had gone. Pretty much. Which was further proof the girl had hoodooed me. Now the thrill was gone, the spell was broken, there was nothing in my heart but a big fat fucking ZEEEEEEEEROOOOOOO.
    The main