So where did I find the Kombi of my dreams? On the blasted computer, of course. And I made a phone call. ‘Could I see the Kombi you have advertised on the internet?’
‘Sure,’ said Rufus T. Firefly, owner and proprietor of the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe. ‘I’ll need a two-thousand-dollar holding fee.’
You see? Can you already hear the jingle-jangle of coins in his malodorous voice? Can you detect, too, the whiff of a sucker coming?
I declined to hand over the fee and temporarily abandoned the idea. But the dream scratched away. So a month later I decided to drive down to Duck Soup Beach, home of the Shoppe, and see the freedom box for myself. And that’s when I stepped into the rabbit hole.
You would think I might have shown more sense, hmm? I had, after all, worked for a part of my career in the vice squad. I had cracked heads that contained such complicated and intricate devilry that even these young contemporary computer hackers couldn’t find a way in. I had reduced some of my era’s meanest men to tears. (One actually slumped to the floor of the interrogation room, assumed a foetal position, and wailed for his mammy. I sang him an Al Jolson song, which only made him wail even louder.) I was once a great believer in the Eight-Point Philosophy of Persuasion. That’d be the eight bony points revealed when you close both fists.
But no. I was too fuzzy with the call of the wide-open road. Too blinded by the Kombi, a machine the equivalent of the good old-fashioned Australian swag. A bed on wheels. A hotel on four Dunlops. Peace. Love. Groovy, man. I was blinded by rainbows and Lucy, in the sky, with her ruddy diamonds.
I’d done my research. Since retiring to the Gold Coast, Peg had insisted I take on some ‘projects’. This is what happens when you retire. You do ‘projects’, which is code for something to keep decaying, pre-senile minds occupied, but which don’t actually contribute anything to society or impinge on it in any way. ‘Get a project,’ my doctor had said. Jack telephoned: ‘What project you got going?’ I had a yam one day to the postman, astride his puttering Kawasaki. ‘You doing any projects?’ he shouted through his helmet visor. I sensed a conspiracy.
So I took on the Kombi project. I immersed myself in the vehicle’s fascinating history. I read everything I could on that canny Dutch businessman, Ben Pon, who’d visited the German VW factories in Minden shortly after the Second World War. He loved Volkswagens, Mr Pon, and planned to become the Netherlands’ importer. (How dear Westchester Zim would have enjoyed Pon. How proudly they would have compared each other’s three-letter surnames.) It was in the factory, taken over by the British, that Pon first noticed the little Plattenwagen zipping about the floor on that April day in 1947. The Plattenwagen was a small, toy-like transport vehicle made exclusively to move parts about the factory. But in it — and this is genius — Pon saw the future. He scribbled down in his notebook a drawing of a van that looked like a loaf of bread on wheels. And there it was. The VW transporter. Able to carry about everything from a brass band to a gaggle of handcuffed war criminals.
So Pon is widely considered the big daddy of the Kombi. He was also daddy to Ben Pon Junior, a famous sports-car racer, who competed for the Netherlands in clay-pigeon shooting at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Pon Junior now owns a winery in Carmel, California. (This, too, would have pleased dear Zim no end.)
All this scholarship was on my mind when I first stepped onto the oil-spattered driveway of the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe at Duck Soup Beach. I’d caught the bus that day and en route had checked out the surf. (You see how adolescent my thinking had become, within the orbit of a Kombi?) Then I took the short stroll to the workshop in an industrial estate behind a row of hoop pines.
I was admiring the shells of several dozen Kombis littered about the Shoppe and wondering about Pon and how he couldn’t have known that the little bread box he sketched would lead to all this industry and dream-weaving on the other side of the world more than sixty years later, when I saw him for the first time — Rufus T. Firefly. He was wearing the uniform of Gold Coast tradesmen — Bermuda shorts, soiled runners without socks, a surf T-shirt and enormous tattoos. I’ve met some tough cases in my time, but Firefly sent a shiver down my spine. As did one tattoo on the back of his left calf, which later became the centrepiece of several of my nightmares. It was a picture of a Kombi submerged in water, with a woman trapped in the cabin, apparently drowning. Her floating aura of hair looked spooky beneath Firefly’s own wiry leg hairs.
‘Yeah?’ sneered Firefly. He had the eloquence of a caveman at the very dawn of human speech, when grunt gave way to words.
‘I’m here about the Kombi,’ I said.
He merely flicked his head. I followed him into the workshop, its dark corners sporadically illuminated by explosions of spark from a welder’s gun.
If I’d known this lowlife had had a hand in my good mate Westchester Zim’s death just a fortnight earlier, I would have popped him right there in his office chair, sitting all smug and evil below a calendar of a naked woman doing strange things on the pop-top roof of an innocent Kombinationskraftwagen. But I didn’t. I couldn’t have dreamt of the connection at that stage. Like an ageing baby deer in an old Hollywood animation, I had stumbled into a forest of fantastic depravity and wrongdoing. Its evil would reach deep into the soil like an ancient grapevine, and enter the dark corners of the police, the judiciary and government itself. I was busy wondering whether I was of too ripe a vintage to learn how to surf, or wear a tie-dyed T-shirt without looking daft.
And had you told me what was in store for my scarred and bloated frame, I might have avoided the great art of vehicle restoration and picked up a little Toyota straight off the showroom floor.
‘Have I gotta deal for you,’ Firefly said, setting fire to a small cheroot with a lighter fashioned in the shape of a woman with large, flashing breasts. That time-honoured phrase, that almost genetic cliche of the second-hand car salesman, should have set off every bulb on my switchboard. But it didn’t. I was in what the best psychoanalysts might refer to as a ‘Kombi trance’.
Then the fun began.
~ * ~
2
Let’s go back a few weeks, so I can tell you what my dear friend Westchester Zim was like — when he was alive.
Zimmy, as he was fondly known, was one of Queensland’s first, and finest, restaurant critics. He was first because when he started reviewing in Brisbane in the sixties, he only had about three restaurants over which he could cast his fearsome eye and skewer with his devastating turn of phrase. That’s not a terribly big and bountiful carousel to go around on.
He told me, confidentially, that to fill his newspaper column space in those days he simply reviewed the dinner parties he was invited to, and invented a name and address for the ‘restaurant’. His newspaper received hundreds of complaints from readers trying unsuccessfully to find, for example, ‘Le Petit Poulet’, or ‘Slappers and Flappers New York Ribs’. Once, after reviewing his tennis partner Mary Kostas’s souvlaki, giving the entirely fictitious ‘Dimitri’s Moustache’ a big thumbs-down, he was approached in Queen Street by a burly gentleman sporting a Mediterranean handlebar moustache big enough for a children’s bicycle. ‘You Zim?’ the brute said. ‘Me Dimitri.’ And he socked poor Westchester in the face.