Commix Girl, Jack Step and his burgeoning feelings at the agency (by Jack Step), and The Ferret, the unifying theme here being the odious Hasidic Strip Bar – held together in the middle by bookends at either side
Bookend 1: Commix Girl
It’s an early summer weekend in Kyiv – evening time. A tumult of beautiful girls walks naked through Podil, turning the balmy air sultry here.
They do not do this in Rome by the fountains or in Paris by the Seine, or anywhere else in the nominal EU – soon to be but a funny awkward anal-retentive sexually repressed page of Western history – but they do it here. Nor do they have girls such as these – and they never will. Commix Girls. They can only wish it, if they’ve been here and seen it for themselves – the men and the women alike. They can only dream their desire, breaking a sweat shaking breathing fast and hard with the semen, or other fine aromatized wetnesses, running down their jeans – those, who know what I’m talking about; those, who know what I mean.
I’ve been to many places and I am a witness. I know. It has all already happened to me.
As the long hot day purples into night, Commix Girl takes a moment to look out one of the big storefront windows of her empty Commix Café. She takes the Hasidic Strip Bar directly across the street into her steady focused gaze.
It is no longer about the petition she’s started to shut down the Hasidic Strip Bar. There is something rotten there, something so evil that it must be gotten at and destroyed. If the authorities were simply to shut down the place – yeah, fat chance that – the evil would still be there and would reopen under another guise – a gambling house maybe, or a whorehouse disguised as a hostel.
And that something much, much worse, that which is yet indescribable, perhaps unspeakable, would still be going on, in its depths, in its rotten guts; that which people cannot put a name to but causes them to shudder as they walk by, doing its roaring business underneath, like a great monster-jawed furnace, bottomless, insatiable, devouring people and feeding the abysmal darkness with a terrifying ball of inextinguishable fire beyond our ken or reach.
The Jews are in an uproar. They want the place torn apart brick by brick. They say they have nothing to do with it; that it’s not only a blight on the neighborhood, with its vibrant Jewish life and its hallowed ancient traditions reawakening, but on their name too. But Kyiv’s law enforcement merely laughs.
And if Commix Girl is sure of one thing, it’s that deep, deep inside the rotten guts of the Hasidic Strip Bar (whoever gave it that name and for whatever reason), perhaps even at its very core, loiters… The Ferret…
The Heart of the Story
So I get this memo from Mack that details instructions from John Smith he wants me to follow.
He wants me to case the strip bar, snoop around, “carefully, diligently check out the scene,” bring back a detailed report on all suspicious activity and any possible leads into what’s really going on there. “Make sure you don’t blow your cover,” he says, and all that, blah blah blah, like I’m some kind of kindergarten greenhorn idiot who doesn’t know his job born yesterday. Why say these things to me? Why do this?
And I’ve already done it. I keep going back. I don’t want to go back, don’t want to do this at all. I’ve got better ways of wasting my time. But I see I have to – Mack, don’t you know that? That place is rotten, Mack. Mack, it’s fucking evil. There’s something about that place that stinks worse than a pile of burning corpses. I went there even before the agency realized it needed to be done. More than once. Plenty of times, now, when once was more than enough. There’s nothing about that place that can get me off. Nothing about it that can satisfy me. I’ve got better ways to entertain my perversions, my depraved jollies, my warped and twisted needs. It’s a sick fucking place, and sick doesn’t begin to paint it. So I go back – each time, what I find out, it just gets worse. Each time, I feel I lose a part of my soul. I’ve brought back plenty on it. Written it up. The file’s thicker every day. Doesn’t Mack see that? Why’s he telling me this? To match my being an asshole with his being an asshole? Well, that’s not going to happen, Mack, because I’m the biggest fucking asshole there is. To bring me to submit to John Smith? Ain’t gonna happen either. Mack, Mack, it ain’t gonna fucking happen – ever. Fuck you and your fucking John Smith, Mack.
And what I’ve found out, Smith ain’t gonna like. And it’s not that he’s not going to like it, and I could give two shits whether he does or not, because at the end of the day I don’t think he’s cut out for this business, not any more he’s not, anyway, but he won’t stomach it. It’s not nice, what I’ve got to tell him. Not nice at all, what I’m going to say. Not my problem, either. And I’ve just scraped the surface. The only thing he’ll be cut out for is the funny pages. Or a straightjacket. One nuthouse for John Smith, coming right up! Or a coffin, when he commits suicide.
So it turns out the girls at the strip bar don’t just get tied up by the customers in the back. They dress these fucking perverts up like Cossacks and for their money they take these girls in the back and rape them. But they not only rape them, they murder them. That’s the connection between this Hasid bar and the mutilated corpses of young women we’ve been finding in dumps on the city’s edge. And Mack’s telling me all this in a memo as if Smith’s the one who found it all out, when it was me who brought it to him.
And he tells me about this scumbag, Rico Soiree. This fucking one-time low-level connected guy in the New Jersey garbage business running a state-sanctioned contracts game for the mob under the Board of Ed. This two-bit ginzo goon who couldn’t even make it in Kyiv, couldn’t even muscle a crusty old hillbilly, Josh Davies, out of the illegal Viagra trade, so the old man finally gets sick of him and hangs him upside down out on his balcony and slices his ears off, and so now this Soiree scumbag lives under a turban with some washed-up anemic plucked-chicken-looking media skank called Mustard. The name Kate is just too feminine for her, but Mustard seems about right. So Mack’s telling me how they just picked this Soiree scumbag up, outside the strip joint, as a suspect in a Kosher Girl rape and murder – on a tip! “They got him on a tip,” Mack says, for some reason adding an exclamation point at the end of the phrase. So where does Mack think that tip came from? With that exclamation mark, is he hinting that maybe that tip somehow came from Smith? Why’s he doing this to me? Has he lost his mind, or is it me?
And so just the other day, this huge Hasid comes barreling in here. I mean this guy was huge – massive, a fucking giant. He was bigger than the ones you see at the airports. He was maybe even bigger than the Jew in Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” – you know, the one who comes to the rent-controlled apartment.
So I’m saying, comes barreling in here. Wants me to shoot the place up – the Hasidic Strip Bar, I mean. Me! He’s totally distraught, he’s crying, he’s screaming. We’re just a detective agency, I say, we can’t go in there and just shoot the place up. That’s for the city of Kyiv to deal with, the boys in blue, not us. So this Hasid, he goes into a rage, and picks up that metal desk over there by a leg with one arm like it was a toy, and then drops it. Then he just starts tearing the place apart. It pained me to do it, but I had no choice, so I wrenched his arms behind his back – and this guy was huge, I’m telling you – huge! And so I slap him around – nothing that could really hurt him, but just to try knock some temporary sense into him – and finally somehow I kick his ass out of here. I didn’t want to see him go sprawling into the street any more than anyone else, but what choice did I have? Unfortunately, it’d been raining, so he falls face-first into a stagnant puddle of muck. And then he gets up, staggering and shaking, all wet and dripping with sewer filth, and with tears streaming down his face, into his beard, he’s shaking his fists at me and like up toward Heaven, his tassels flying all about him, belting out imprecations in Hebrew, or maybe some kind of wailing prayer, and so I slam the door in his face.
And all because he came to me looking for justice. Yeah, justice. And what kind of justice do you think he and his people will get? Him – or you… or me? Here? In Kyiv?
Yeah, justice, all right. Yeah, you bet.
Bookend 2: The Ferret
Deep beneath the Hasidic Strip Bar, The Ferret crouches in his lair – one he accesses, under the stress of paranoiac need, from a backroom of the club via secret entry to a low and narrow tunnel, specially burrowed – by The Ferret himself, no less – to tailor-fit his knotted stunted gargoyle-ghoul shape. Abruptly, the tunnel is a shaft that plummets straight down and deep into the joint’s rotten intestines.
Hunched and huddled in his hole, The Ferret seethes with rage, up, up through the layers of earth, foundation and floor, his beady eyes piercing the wall and the Commix Café across the street, where he knows Commix Girl stands, arms folded across her chest, looking through her window, glaring at him.
The Ferret is tormented by his defeat at her hands. He can’t take it. And it had followed so swiftly on the heels of his jubilant victory just moments before in the Whiskey Cellar over that poetaster pansy Steve Kowalski – the pretentious nature-boy freak dribbling his doggerel in the corner. The utter carnage she’d unleashed – he is completely obsessed by the pounding he’d taken, yes, even suffered, though he is loath to admit it, by his permanent crippling (the crushed wings, the broken bones, the scars, the blood)* and near destruction at her unremitting hands and feet. His little pointed mind cannot let it go. The Ferret is bent on revenge – and he means to have it. At all costs…
“Heh, heh, she didn’t get me. The bitch, heh, the fucking bitch. She thinks she did, heh, heh, heh-heh-heh, well, the fucking bitch can think what she wants. I don’t know who she thinks she beat up, but it wasn’t me – heh-heh. I knew it was coming. She took me by surprise. I had her, but the black thing took me away. Lucky for her, heh. The bitch. It took me away to save her. I’ve got powerful friends in low places, so you better watch it – heh-heh-heh. Hey, that was funny, heh, I made a joke. Why aren’t you laughing? You’re really immature, dude, you need serious help. I didn’t need saving. I could have taken her, easy. I almost had her. Next time, heh, there won’t be any saving. Next time, she’ll be dead. You didn’t hear it from me, because I didn’t say that. Don’t say I said so. You need serious help. You’re spreading rumors. And that’s like lying. I don’t like it. Heh. Don’t you know? The Truth will set you free. Heh… heh… heh-heh-heh-heh…”
Definitely continued
Filed by Jack Step, maybe CTFSA, maybe not CTFSA, June 14, 2016
* The Ferret even spent a few hours uptown in Hospital No. 1, but was whisked out of there again by the dark force to keep him safe from a potentially sodomizing visit from Welsh Losser, Welsh Losser’s older brother, who is himself far more obsessed with The Ferret than his younger (stupider, uglier, weaker) brother ever was – as can only be expected. Needless to say, even in that short time, and so soon after the event, The Ferret was already reflecting obsessively on his defeat, trying to deny it – Secret Ed. Bd.