JS: Ok, Dirk, so tell it like it was.
DD: Ok, I will. Your regular readers can rest assured that the last piece I’m on record as writing for Kyiv Unedited [Ed.: “The New Place”, of September 15, 2017] was in fact the Real McCoy.
That is to say that I really did record my hardly flattering experience at the Hotel Frunze, the intervention of my landlord for, as it later transpired, wholly selfish purposes, the leaks to the False Dmitry, which I now publicly admit couldn’t have happened without my unwitting participation, the turnip-faced nurse, and other unsavory stuff.
JS: Good, our readers need to know that.
DD: Which is why I’ve agreed to this interview.
JS: Go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.
DD: Well, as you say, your readers need to know the truth. I mean, what impression would one ordinarily come away with after reading that piece… I mean, it’s signed: “by Dirk Dickerson late night while apparently drunk.”
JS: That’s a fact. And we’ve spared no little effort to get confirmation on that byline, sending email after email to the editorial offices of Kyiv Unedited, but alas to no avail!
DD: I’m not surprised.
JS: It’s like no one actually works there. But you and I sort of know that they do, because we work there ourselves, and our reports have appeared on the site for years.
DD: That’s right. I was thinking the same thing. Anyway, despite the slanderous depiction of me as a mentally unstable idiot with perennial wife problems… I mean who doesn’t have problems with his wife…?
JS: Yeah, exactly.
DD: To which it would appear to the casual and possibly even some of the more devoted readers of Kyiv Commix that I was rightfully committed to the so-called “home for the spiritually troubled” on Frunze Street…
JS: And who needs that?
DD: I don’t even drink. So I couldn’t have been drunk when filing that story. And I wasn’t committed to the Hotel Frunze because I couldn’t deal with well-recognized stress experienced by anyone married to a Ukrainian woman.
JS: Ok, no one is denying it.
DD: I just want to make sure that this interview clears everything up.
JS: I got ya. So explain how you came to end up in the same nuthouse that your landlord had been in, the same one that housed possibly one of the most odious characters to have disgraced the pages of Kyiv Unedited… I’m of course referring to the False Dmitry.
DD: It was a coverup.
JS: Yeah, go on.
DD: Go on, what? You were there, remember [Ed.: Reference to “Who Cold-Cocked Jack Step” in Kyiv Unedited circa early May 2017 (Yeah, “circa”, all right, as that damn piece, which apparently just made it into this Commix Post Scriptum by the skin of its teeth, WASN’T EVEN FILED!, much less properly dated: The Secret Board)], playing dead for the newsboys while I was strong-armed it out of the safehouse in Podil by those bulls…
JS: Yeah, of course, but our readers really need to hear it from you. No one disputes the events of early last year and even before. Kyiv’s Jewish community is still up in arms over that strip bar. An investigation remains open into who killed Smith’s wife. But now, going on a year later, the trail’s gone cold. And worst of all, the last published reporting on the subject has you in a nuthouse… and then drunk.
DD: I don’t drink.
JS: That’s immaterial and you know it, Dirk. The reputation of the agency is at stake… and yours and mine don’t look much better. That, while Smith has shot out of short pants and plastic eye-spy decoder-ring and magnifying glass into the agency’s lead sleuth, Detective First Class, for heaven’s sake…
DD: He’s a punk.
JS: The Old Man trusts him and so, strangely, do the editors of this site.
DD: So what?
JS: So how did you end up in wet sheets with electrodes pasted to your temples… getting regular hypodermics in the ass?
DD: Expletive
JS: Come on, Dirk. Tell it like it was!
DD: I don’t know, Jack. Honestly, it must have been the bulls who hauled me out of the safehouse. You know I’ve had my problems in the past…
JS: I know, Dirk, I know.
DD: But I’m no more a basket case than anyone else on this site… [Editor’s Note: Going back to at least 2013, Dirk Dickerson, Kyiv-based detective, has been reported on this site as having: shot dead his shrink – Doctor Woo, tortured PR guru and self-published author Welsh Losser, and been the subject of a madcap manhunt along the streets and rooftops of Kyiv – on one of which he was even reported to have been killed by slipping and plummeting to the sidewalk below rather than being shot or pushed, as reported by some sources.]
JS: So you woke up in a roll of moist bedding in the company of an unattractive medical nurse… and that’s it?
DD: That’s it.
JS: And then once freed – it’s not at all clear how you actually checked out of the Hotel Frunze – you showed up at work and started rifling through the files of the False Dmitry… although it’s not known how he got a job with us at the agency in the first place…
DD: He didn’t. That was Smith’s report.
JS: So Smith’s lying?
DD: He almost never tells the truth.
JS: But Kowalski [Ed.: poet turned cub reporter] does, especially when he’s not supposed to…?
DD: Exactly. After reading Smith’s report, Kowalski hooked up with Dmitry and used him as a source for his newspaper article on the Hassidic Strip Bar, which to my knowledge has yet to be published.
JS: Except on Kyiv Unedited.
DD: That’s right… you know how the standards have dropped around here.
JS: Which is why we’re doing this interview for Detective’s Daily.
DD: But on Kyiv Unedited.
JS: All right, all right. Dmitry’s a phony, Kowalski’s a punk. But how did you get out of that nuthouse?
DD: I didn’t.
Filed by Jack Step for Detective’s Daily, a fully-owned subsidiary of Kyiv Unedited, January 23, 2018 (as far as we know)