Christ on a Bodgie Bike: The Dan Delaney Mysteries, #3

By David McGill

Teenagers Matt Delaney and his mate Ante Vukovich steal a priceless religious vessel and in the course of the burglary a man is killed, setting in motion personal and political mayhem. It is 1955 and they just want to be milk-bar cowboys against the squares and their suffocating rules banning unmarried sex and excessive speed and anything worth doing. Matt's uncle Dan Delaney is out of the police and in a dead-end job when Matt's alcoholic mother begs Dan to sort out a charge of murder against her son. They live in what is called West Auckland's Dallie Valley, Ante is Dalmatian and his fascist Catholic Croatian relation has arrived to reclaim the religious icon that could unite his homeland challenge to Yugoslav communist rule. Dan Delaney's only ally against the Croatian and corrupt and brutal police is an ex-Commissioner of Police assisting the National Government clean up the police and establish a separate security intelligence service.

 

'McGill's trilogy of local thrillers are all pacy novels that are informed by honest and astute social histories. He imagines political incidents and crafts satisfying narrative action around them that opens up an alternative history that just might have been!' Murray Gray, Founding Director, Going West Books & Writers' Festival

 

'Told at breakneck speed ... a gripping read full of fascinating history ... thick with 1950s slang and outlook.' Alyson Baker, Crime Watch

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silver Owl Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780995133693

David McGill

David McGill is a New Zealand social historian and fiction writer who has published 60 books. Born in Auckland, educated in the Bay of Plenty and at a Christchurch seminary, he trained as a teacher and did a BA at Victoria University of Wellington. He worked as a feature writer for The Listener, Sydney’s The Bulletin, London’s TVTimes, wrote columns for the Evening Post in Wellington and edited a local lifestyle magazine before becoming a full-time writer in 1984. His book subjects include Ghost Towns of New Zealand and the country’s first bushranger, local and national heritage buildings, Kiwi prisoners of war, the history of the NZ Customs Department, a biography of a criminal lawyer, a personal history of rock music, a rail journey around the country, historical and comic novels, several thrillers and six collections of Kiwi slang and recently seven Dan Delaney Mysteries. He collects owl figurines and reads thrillers. His website www.davidmcgill.co.nz includes blogs related to his books and synopses and reviews by clicking on covers.

Book preview

Preface

Bodgies and Widgies

Larrikinism found new expression in the 1950s bodgie (male) and widgie (female) sub-culture. Influenced by Hollywood movies of teenage revolt, they… listened to rock and roll music, often in American-styled milk bars…wearing distinctive clothes such as stovepipe trousers and brightly coloured socks. Many rode noisy motorcycles. In 1953 in Lower Hutt a sex scandal involving young teenagers resulted in a Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents. Its 1954 report recommended increased censorship of films, and of publications that featured sex, horror and crime.

Magistrates fined ‘milk-bar cowboys’ and ‘pie-cart Casanovas’ £5 to £20 ($200 to $900) … for mile-a-minute racing on suburban streets. Girls riding pillion on a motorbike driven by a male were termed ‘pillion pets’, and were seen as having loose morals. It was unusual for women to ride bikes themselves.

Leather-clad rebels who dressed like motorcyclists were glorified in movies such as The Wild One (1953), featuring Marlon Brando, and Rebel without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean.

Carl Walrond, ‘Motorcycles - Customisation and production’, Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

New Zealand youths quickly emulated American popular culture, modelling themselves on figures such as James Dean and Elvis Presley. Milk-bar cowboys – also known as bodgies – congregated outside milk bars on motorbikes. The 1950s saw the emergence of New Zealand’s first modern gangs, many centering on motorcycle ownership.

Greg Newbold and Rawiri Taonui, ‘Gangs - Motorcycle and white supremacist gangs’, Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

‘In 1954, sensational press reports of wild teenage orgies and erotic evils shocked the country … the Mazengarb Report … shamed the ready availability of contraceptives, alcohol and gambling, and young women enticing men for sex.’

Jessica Long, The Dominion Post, 23 September 2017

Chapter One

Matt Delaney tugged on the window latches. Yeah, stealing something they’d just stolen was maybe a piss poor idea.

‘Get on with it!’ Ante Vukovich hissed.

Matt couldn’t see what he was doing. Ante had switched off the mains power in the hall. Black hole of Calcutta.

‘I can see fuck all. Get’s a chisel. And a torch, while you’re at it.

In answer to his second request, a torch lit up the room.

‘That’s better,’ Matt muttered, blinking to clear his sight. He gripped the circular latches with his forefingers and wrenched upwards, to no avail. The last coat of paint must have sealed the window frame to the sill.

‘What you do, uh?’

The guttural voice of Ante’s uncle. He always sounded angry. This time he sounded like anger squared, to use an algebraic term Matt dimly recalled, without much idea what it meant other than doubling the power of something.

‘You mind moving the light out of our eyes?’ Ante asked faux-polite.

The light didn’t move, and it was blinding. Square that light power, this had the battery grunt of a police torch, something Matt was familiar with.

‘I ask what you do with Christ?’ Karlo Vukovich snarled.

Matt shielded his eyes, squinting sideways at Ante. He was holding the monstrance Ante said was called ‘The Tears of Christ’ high up over his face, not in the benediction the priest employed, but no doubt for the same reason Matt had his hand up. The golden spikes of the religious vessel were flashing shards of light about like one of those revolving ballroom glitter balls, making it even harder to see. He did catch a glimpse of the pistol in the uncle’s other hand.

‘For Christ’s sake as well as our own,’ Ante laughed, ‘lower the fucking torch, dad.’

Instead of lowering, the torch advanced. ‘Who you calling dad, uh? Give me Christ.’

‘Chill down, dad,’ Ante said. ‘You’ll burst your foofoo valve.’

‘I not tell you again, boy. Give me Christ.’

‘Sure, dad,’ Ante said. ‘Hey, catch.’

Matt heard the pistol report and ducked as the monstrance showered his already compromised vision with whorls of light like you get when a Catherine wheel jumps off its mount. The torch swung heavenwards and then, in the flashing arc of a falling star, bounced on the carpet and rolled light around the room until it came to rest, illuminating the delicate mahogany feet of an elaborate gramophone cabinet. Karlo Vukovich was howling with pain, the thump of his body hitting the thick Axminster carpet. Ante was cursing and holding his arm.

While Matt was rubbing the roaming planets out of his eyes, Ante recovered the torch and trained it on the slumped figure of his uncle.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘The fucker shot me in the arm.’

Matt could see the grotesque sight of the monstrance impaled in Karlo’s forehead, blood running over his face from the region of his right eye.

‘Is he okay?’

‘Jesus H Christ!’ Ante yelled. ‘Get the window open, will ya. Take my bike. Okay?’

‘But what about …?’

‘I’ll take care of him.’

‘What you goin to do?’

Ante grunted. He cradled his injured left arm into his body as he crouched and placed the torch facing the inert figure, putting a boot on his uncle’s chest. Leaning down and taking hold of the monstrance, he tugged hard. With a sucking sound he drew the vessel free. Matt cringed. There was no response from the uncle, unless you count the gush of blood released by the removal of the monstrance. There were flecks of blood on some of the golden tines, creating an effect akin to writhing metal insects. Matt felt his stomach heave.

Headlights were flashing slowly across the windows, the faint crunch of heavy tyres on the white shell drive.

‘It’s papa,’ Ante said. ‘Quick, get lost with the fucking thing. Otherwise we dip out on the big payday.’

Matt stared at the slumped figure, trying to see if there was any sign of life.

‘Never mind him,’ Ante said, poking Matt with the bloodied vessel. ‘Put it in the straps and scram. Now! You know where to put it.’

‘The window’s stuck,’ Matt protested, pulling at the latches.

‘Look out!’ Ante said, swinging the monstrance into the window, smashing the glass, jabbing about to clear most of the shards still attached to the base of the frame. ‘Go!’

Matt was trying to cope with the roaring in his ears, the confusion thick as kapok inside his skull. Ante slipped the monstrance by its straps on to his shoulders, nudged him over the sill. Matt was aware there could be vicious fragments of glass that would rip though his strides and do unthinkable damage to his balls. He could hear the thumping on the door, a muffled voice demanding to know what was going on. Ante pushed Matt through the window. He seemed to be suspended for the time it took to anticipate the awkward landing on the veranda, glass crunching into his hands.

‘Fucking go, man,’ Ante urged him. ‘You know where the bike is.’

Matt scrambled on to one knee, feeling a sharp stab, pulled himself up by the veranda rail. Ante was shouting, flashing the torch about above him. Matt heard the wasp whip of a shot and the zing as it hit the veranda roof iron, followed by another bullet disturbing the shrubs beneath the veranda. Surely Ante wasn’t trying to shoot him. He flung himself over the rail, crawled and ripped his way through too many rose bushes, pushing and twisting and cursing until he reached the lawn. Another shot cracked overhead. He flung himself flat. The bastard was shooting at him. He half-rose into a crouch and scuttled sideways, his chest tight with panic.

The pitch dark was his only ally. He half-crawled, half-kicked around the corner, bum-vulnerable, stood and took off for the barn. He could hear bellowing behind him, feet pounding round the side of the house as he found fleeting sanctuary behind the large wooden building. He jumped on the Norton, rammed down on the jump start. It kicked back with an almighty hiss. No flow. He reached under the engine, tickled the primer pump, raised his foot and kicked again. It half-caught, then it died. Not now, sweet baby Jesus, please don’t fucking flood.

The shouting was getting closer, the torch swinging about. Ante was yelling he must have got to the drive. Ante was leading them away, so maybe he hadn’t been trying to shoot him. Who then? Ante’s fucking father, he’d have no hesitation shooting at a burglar judging by the way he rough-handled Ante and everybody else, including Mira. If he knew what Matt and Mira got up to, he’d probably shoot both of them on the spot.

Matt lifted his body up above the seat and kicked down hard and the engine caught. He revved the throttle, drowning out somebody shouting about not shooting something. He engaged the gear and flicked up the clutch. The bike lifted like a racehorse rearing out of the stalls, got purchase and shimmied around the side of the barn. He didn’t dare switch on the headlights. He changed up and felt the incredible torque of the brand new 600 cc Dominator punch into his groin, the back tyre divoting out a rooster tail of gravel as he belted on to the drive, straight at the figures turning towards him. There was no impact, the figures leaping aside as he hurtled past.

He crouched over the mechanical beast and let her rip, straight at the faint white outline of the drive, the dark lines of trees flicking by on either side as he surged towards the turn. He was angling over, almost safe, when he felt a thump in his back. Then he was trying to keep the bike from skidding over, wobbling about but holding the bike above the critical angle, his left boot showering crushed shell and his wrists taking the strain as he hauled the bike around the circular drive in a long, controlled slide worthy of Ronnie Moore at Western Springs speedway. He was still going, so the bang in his back might have been a stone, or his imagination. He couldn’t credit any of it, but for sure he was on Ante’s incredible bike. Best dump the bloody Christ where Ante wanted it and get home and lie low. He switched on the headlights, wriggled his shoulders, they worked fine, so long as the sharp metal tines nipping at his back didn’t get any worse.

The huge sloping paddock of stony rows that was Waikumete Cemetery loomed ahead on the hill, on the brow the line of macrocarpas swaying about in the brisk wind. There was more light than he had left behind, but not much. It was as quiet as, well, the grave. Not even a morepork call, too windy for owls. No cars about, all the good citizens of Glen Eden tucked up in their regulation three-bedroom houses, getting the requisite eight hours of sleep before their eight hours of toil and eight hours of rest, the perfect Kiwi life, except it was dead boring. Better dead than bo-red, he joked to himself, and did his own cackle. Careful, mustn’t get carried away, concentrate, or he could easily come a gutser on Ante’s mighty metal machine. Nah, go for it. He changed down and revved up, the bike’s front wheel lifting as he shot across the railway tracks and up into the cemetery.

He parked the bike behind the macrocarpas, climbed off, his body stiff and his head feeling unsteady, like the bike when it shimmied about on the shell drive. He peered down the rows. The irregular outlines of gravestone slabs reminded him of the stupid cadet soldiers they had to play on St Peters quad. Lunatic older boy officer barking a succession of commands: ‘Ten-shun! Right turn! Quick march. Left, right, left, right, left, right. Stand easy. Stand at ease! Cadets, from the left, close up.’ At intervals there were needle monuments enclosed in wrought-iron fences like officers at attention on a dais taking the march past. A few marble angels with wings stretched overhead, some of the wings smashed by hammers. What’d Ante call it? Oh yeah, marble orchard. No sign of old Naismith waving his torch about. Probably flaked in his hut.

Black clouds raced overhead, a half-moon coming in and out of view, spits of rain, blown away by the wind. He could hear the macrocarpas creaking. The scuttling shadows were probably possums and other nightlife, rats picnicking on easy pickings. None of it worried him. Not like the bloody metal cross on his back. It was an adventure when Ante asked him to burgle the bloody thing from the McCann attic while the goody-goody Micky Doolan family were all off at benediction. Funny that. The glorified candlestick on his back was used in benediction. Typical hypocrite, McCann, pious prick, not letting on he had this religious souvenir taken from a church in Yugoslavia at the end of the war.

Karlo told Ante’s father McCann was given the monstrance. Apparently some soldier who did the actual nicking of the item asked him to look after it and he’d collect. Well, the person come to collect was no soldier, at least not a Kiwi one. Karlo Vukovich had been a guest of Tito for the last decade, presumably because he wasn’t a commie. His cousin sponsored him, which probably disappointed all those public service pen-pushers denied the opportunity to put a displaced person through the endless form-filling and nit-picking interviewing rigmarole.

Ante dropped him in it with his father, also called Ante, volunteering they knew the McCanns; Matt’s kid brother Mal went to school with one of them. Ante always sucked up to his father, Matt could see he was frightened of him. Come to that, so was Matt. Ante senior was built like the proverbial brick shithouse. Even his head was the shape of a brick. His eyes glinted like the rats you saw in the dark corners of outdoor dunnies. Obviously Ante did not inherit his father’s dire dial. He had his mother’s looks; Matt only half-remembered her from convent school days, she’d died several years ago.

On this occasion Ante junior magnanimously proposed leaving it to them to talk to the McCanns, meaning Matt would, find out if the father still had the stolen monstrance. Ante senior warned his son and Matt there was no need to mention it was priceless, that it was really important to the Catholic Dallies over there. Mal had no trouble extracting info from the McCann kid, that there was an old relic in the attic from the war. They’d never seen it, just dumped up there. So if Ante could get the monstrance without any problem, there was a big reward for both of them. For Matt it was no problem. He had done a number of house entries, only caught the once. It was a breeze scoring the monstrance.

It was all on track, the uncle promising a big payday for the burglary, more than enough for a deposit on a Triumph or a Norton. That all went west when the nephew decided to do this dumb double-burglary thing, just to wind up his uncle and bump up the payday. Matt realised now how dumb he was to agree, he was just thinking about the bigger, better bike he could purchase.

No question Karlo was barking mad and thick as two planks and deserved to be taken down a peg or two. Ante’s dim-bulb idea was they’d arrange to discover the relic in the family mausoleum, like a miracle had happened. Matt would do the miraculous deposit. Matt guessed Ante was partly doing it to impress his father, whose pride and joy was the mausoleum. Ante’s idea was his father and uncle would go spare about the missing monstrance, but then he’d tweak their superstitious peasant Catholicism.

Like a lot of Ante’s plans, it was Machiavellian for no good reason. He told Matt he would go to confession to the Dallie priest, say he’d had a vision the monstrance was in the mausoleum, the priest would tell his father and uncle, and voila! The monstrance was there on the altar overlooking the dead relations. His father had been going on and on about the monstrance, had rung the priest about it, who was bursting to see the miraculous monstrance. So they would. Where better than the mausoleum Ante senior had built, which he was always dragging the other local Dallies along to admire?

This had to be Ante’s numero uno screwy idea. Ante’s ideas usually got a little carried away, like leaving a decaying possum in the ceiling of his uncle’s bedroom, releasing stink bombs in fourth form chemistry class, scaring Mira by appearing at her bedside with a sheet over his head making groaning noises, tying double happy fireworks to cats’ tails and lighting them. Every idea had to be different and more exciting than the last. First he destroyed a dozen streetlights with his father’s 22. He followed that with an early-morning motorbike raid, beer bottles and Mighty Cannons destroying three shop windows in the village.

When Matt called him on this mad monstrance idea, Ante as usual got snaky, sneered he was chicken. Ante liked American slang, he was first with it, had the latest LPs from the States like Rock Around the Clock and this new kid from Mississippi called Elvis; Ante reckoned he was hot diggity, whatever that meant. Ante would know, spoiled fucking brat with his new Norton, leader of the pack, vroom-vroom. But now Matt had a chance at his first bike, he couldn’t jeopardise that; Ante could easily find some way to cut him out of the payoff. That was not going to happen. He had to have his own bike, so he could take Mira out on it, cut a few corners, cut the right moves, show her what he was made of, do the ton, and then do each other. It would be wild. God, he was getting a stiffy thinking about it.

Matt shrugged off the shoulder straps, twisted them together to steady the monstrance. The black clouds chose that moment to obscure what feeble light came from the murky moon. His hands caught on the sharp tines. He could feel the stickiness of the uncle’s blood and just about dropped it.

By the light of the emerging moon he did drop it, when he saw that the glass centre of the monstrance had been shattered, presumably from a bullet fired by Ante junior or senior, not the uncle, that’s for sure, he was badly bled and probably dead, at the very least blind in one eye. This couldn’t be one of Ante’s tricks, for he had felt the impact as he drove off. Whoever shot at him would have scored a bullseye in his back, if not for Christ’s divine intervention. It was like those soldiers you read about who were saved by a cigarette case in their breast pocket taking a bullet. If he’d been hit in the back, that would have been it. Jesus, a close call. Must’ve had the guardian angel the nuns claimed was always on your shoulder or, in this case, between shoulders.

‘Fuck me,’ he growled as he grabbed the base of the monstrance, reminded how heavy the fucking thing was. It must be solid lead or something. Holding the monstrance upside down, he stepped into the bricked area in front of the vault. The mausoleum was approximately the small cottage size of the Albert Street jakes, except there was not the sharp smell of spilled piss everywhere. The brick steps were slippery and he teetered but stayed upright, the bloody Christ jabbing into his thigh. The padlock was there but not locked shut, just like Ante promised; it was not that he couldn’t have popped it, padlocks were easy as pie. He put the monstrance carefully on the bricks, slipped out the padlock, heaving the heavy door open. Its hinges creaked as loud as the macrocarpas. He looked behind him. Nothing. No need to get jumpy. Just put the thing down in there and take off.

He couldn’t see anything, but he could smell something rotten, hopefully a decaying rat or possum, maybe another of Ante’s stupid ideas. Matt knew Ante’s grandparents and more recently his mother were there. Ante said they were properly stacked,