MORNING WITH THE sun back out. Chimneypots poured forth smoke and steam. From my window I watched slow trains pull into the yard by the river. Soon I was out on the street where frosted red leaves scratched along the pavement. The fresh wind snapped my mind into place and cleaned away any lingering shame from the shadowy night. I primed for action and walked to Windsor Station for a quick cup and smoke. Clear the decks and run up the colours: it’s time to attack. Jack had been bossing me, keeping his movements dark. I’d walked blind towards the enemy trench and if I kept following orders without direction of my own I’d catch shrapnel or worse. For too long Jack had twisted my tail; it was time now to do a little twisting back.
There were precious few candidates for pressuring: Brown the wee Customs man, that rat-bastard Bob, and oily Charlie the French mechanic-cum-lawyer. No, on reflection it was someone else who might provide a few answers: Harry Houdini. Jack hadn’t gone to the Medical Union by accident or merely for Smiler’s cocaine. There’d been the series of riddling questions, the unusual request for an unwritten book. If I entered at that angle and discovered Jack’s vector it might give me an inkling of the conspiracy I was now part of. Firm in my conviction I walked to the Windsor Hotel. It was near ten-thirty, earlier than the noon hour appointed for their rendezvous. I could intercept the flash, read the book or whatever it was and put it back. It was a start. At the front desk I spoke to a pockmarked clerk.
“Mr. Houdini has left a package to be collected here,” I said.
“What name, please?”
I gave the one Jack had used the night before.
“One moment, sir.”
The clerk picked up a receiver and whispered something. A moment passed in the murmuring lobby and was marked by the single chime of a bell. The clerk sneered and said: “Sir, Mr. Houdini left specific instructions that he wished to be informed the moment this package was collected. He will be with you directly.”
Merde. This was not anything I wanted part of. All I’d imagined was a peek at the book or message from Houdini Jack was after to see how it played into this malarkey. It was too late now to cause a scene ducking out. Remember Jack’s words: sheer brazen cheek.
Hell and damnation gang aft agley. What was I trying to accomplish, sniffing around the edges of his scheming like this? Parity, information, intelligence. The way he’d sicced Laura and Bob on me at the party and used me as an idle amusement: Jack was wrong. I was a free agent, unaccounted for and independent, with the power to alter events. This was something I’d forgotten while devoured by my inward world. Some message had passed between Jack and the magician and I, as always, was cut out. Later I’d been exiled from the gin party. If I was enemy, let me behave as one. Even now Jack was in all likelihood bedding a twist from the shindig whilst I waited amongst rubber plants and geraniums. Another clear bell sounded and the lift doors slid open. There was Houdini foursquare in the box. His gaze pierced yours truly and he marched straight over.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “You aren’t the man I spoke with.”
“No,” I said.
“Well, what the devil do you want? If you’re another crawler bringing warnings I advise you to push off.”
“Warnings?”
“State your business, man. I’ve no time for triflers. Mrs. Hou-dini waits upon me.”
“Mr. Houdini, I mean no offence. Please, if we might speak privately for a moment.”
A spasm of nervous constriction crossed his face and he tensed up. I fancied I saw his biceps flexing beneath the fabric of his morning coat. There was no wish on my part to tangle with the man; he was strong and a mite fearsome, though I’d a few inches and twenty-odd years on him. Houdini sighed impatiently. From so close he appeared worn, his movements stiff and pained.
“Very well,” he said, “but with some haste if you please.”
We drifted to a pair of wingbacks shielded by aspidistras from the desk. I gestured Houdini to sit and he did with an ill grace, pinching the crease of his trousers to keep their knife edge.
“Well?”
“Mr. Houdini, I came for the book.”
“Don’t be a fool. There’s no such thing. What do you want?”
“I want to understand what’s happening here. You say you’ve been warned. Was it by the man at the Union last night? The one I was with?”
“Ah! You’re an ignorant pawn. I expected better.”
“From whom?”
“From your masters! Ha! Warned, yes I’ve been warned, but it will take a power mightier than those behind your companion to stop Houdini! The truth will out, sir. The truth will out.”
“What truth?”
He barked a laugh.
“You think to draw me? Tell your masters that Houdini reveals his secrets to no man. He will not be drawn.”
“Have you been threatened?”
In Houdini’s hard glare there was a fierce suspicion.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“No one. No one of importance. I’m part of something I don’t entirely understand and beg your indulgence to allow me to ask you a few more questions.”
“Are you a reporter?”
“Lord no.”
Houdini snorted decisively.
“As I have said in the past I will have neither truck nor trade with fakers and charlatans. My exposure of the medium Margery in New York illustrates this point. Now, when I come to this fair Dominion with knowledge that may save her honour my sacred duty is to reveal the truth.”
The man’s intense manner was difficult to counter.
“You’ve learned of a false medium?”
“Far worse than some sham humbug. No, there’s a danger to this country. I provide a tit-bit for you to carry back to your masters, errand boy. When in London I learned the name of a highly placed official of your government who subscribes to superstition. Imagine the harm that may befall your people in these unsettled times, the danger to your sovereign. It is my duty to unmask these—”
“Who is this official?” I interrupted.
“Ha! Imagine my telling you! Inform your betters that none can stop Houdini, no gag, no chain, no fetter, no lock, not even death itself.”
He held me rapt, his eyes unblinking. Quick as thought now he stood and strode towards the lift’s closing doors. Their course was halted and they re-opened for him. Houdini ignored the elevator boy and entered the chamber and was gone. I remained seated, surrounded by the lobby’s confusion. Someone was watching me. There: at the front desk the pockmarked clerk pointed in my direction and with him Jack. Damnation. Jack came over and clapped his heavy hand on my shoulder.
“Well, what’ve we fucked up now, boyo?”
No humour or pleasure in his tone. Through a subtle physical coercion that I attributed to his training with the Pinkertons Jack directed me out of the hotel and onto Peel.
“Sticking your nose into where it doesn’t belong,” he said.
“Don’t you look at me. You’re the one who tied me up in this bloody tangle.”
“And I thought you’d manage some small competence. Jesus, Mick, you don’t have half an idea of what’s going on.”
“And that’s just the way you like it, me in the dark. The party last night with Laura and that bastard friend of yours. Nice of you to keep it under your hat.”
Jack stopped cold. His eyes shifted and he looked at his shoes.
“That one I didn’t know. Believe me, I had no idea at all,” he said.
“Bollocks. First it’s booze, then it’s Bob, and now Houdini. What are you trying to do? Flush him out or scare him?”
“Perhaps a little of both.”
“At whose bidding? This can’t be your idea.”
“That I can’t tell you,” Jack said.
“Well I’ve got a damned good notion now.”
“No you don’t. You have no idea, Mick.”
“I think I do, especially after what the man said.”
“What was that?”
Jack was all attention now. I could almost imagine the pressure he was under, and in a certain way I’d accomplished part of my goal. Let him hang out to dry for once.
“Your Houdini told me that a highly placed member of His Majesty’s government here was messing about with soothsayers and faeries and talking to spooks from beyond the grave. He thinks it’ll leave the Crown open to manipulation by the Bolsheviks or the Bavarian Illuminati or the Goddamn Japanese, I don’t know. Houdini’s going to spill to someone, the ’papers or the horsemen or the Prince of bloody Wales.”
It’s difficult for a redhead to turn pale but Jack was doing a fine job of it now.
“That’s what he said? Are you certain?” he asked.
“Sure as the pound sterling,” I said.
“Who is it? Who’s the official?”
“Houdini found out in London so it must be someone high up. That’s all I know.”
“Ye Christ.”
“Who is it? Don’t pretend you have no clue,” I said.
Jack took off his hat in agitation and ran his hand roughly through his hair. He looked at me.
“Listen: wait here. No, there. Across the street, in the square. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
He grabbed my shoulders, fixed me with a stare for a second, and pushed off. It amused me somewhat to see him on fire. Jack’s oblique route away took him towards St. George’s but then he turned right on Dorchester in the direction of the Grand Lodge. For the moment content, I opened my case, lit a Sportsman, and waited on a bench beneath the bare trees, watching pigeons peck the ground at my feet. They were joined anon by wild starlings, no doubt of it with that iridescence on their plumage. Here was a bird out of Shakespeare and Olde England, not New France. A pigeon took my tossed cigaret stub and ate it up.
THE DAY WARMED and the monument behind me became a sundial with the shadow creeping my way. It occurred to me I was hungry. Wistfully I looked at the Dominion Hotel and its attendant public house, a haunt of newspapermen, printer’s devils, proofreaders, and advertising salesmen, but not hellbound editors, publishers, and owners. The window advertised verres stérilisées in lowercase cursive neon letters: red, green, yellow. I carried silver in my pocket.
Inside the saloon I ordered an ale and took a seat by the window with a view back on the square. On the bench I’d vacated lazed two Siwashes furtively passing between them a bottle of what looked like salty Chinese cooking sherry. On another bench a codger old enough to’ve fought the Boer himself fed crumbs to gulls. The Dominion was thick with blue tobacco smoke from midday topers here for the free lunch of pickled pork knuckles, spuds, and Liberty cabbage. My stomach yowled so I joined the line-up and was back at my perch with a steaming plate and another schooner of Export, its price now twenty-five cents. No such thing as a free lunch, never.
Dollars danced in my pocket and the wad of folding-money rested safe and sound in my autumn coat, as did the loaded Webley. The wool of my half-decent new suit itched and the reversible celluloid collar bit. I wore clean undergarments, rain-polished black boots, and a maroon necktie to complete the disguise, an impostor posing as a normal human being. I touched and thus dirtied my freshly shaven face and with a slaked thirst lit another cigaret, then with a shinplaster two-bit note bought one more breuvage.
A sharper shoved me and I went rigid. You never knew who you bellied up with at a bar and anyone here could be a plainclothesman on the trail of the cinema-heisters or bootleggers. This narrow orbit was one of habit; in a city large as Montreal you kept to known watering holes as a creature of the forest. But it would be wiser to change hotels again, pay cash down, no questions asked.
Making for the outdoors, I pushed my way through massed shoulders, crushing broken peanut shells underfoot. Clouds now shifted across the face of the sun and rain threatened. Jack stamped in the square, waiting for me for the first time in his blessed life.
“Salut,” I said.
“Mick, dammit man, we’ve got to move.”
“Où?”
Jack shagged down a ’cab. We got in.
“Outremont,” he said.
“Quoi?”
“It’s been three days,” Jack said. “Charlie at the garage. He’s got to give up Martin.”
“Qui?”
“Martin, the third driver on the woods. The one who got away. Shape up.”
“Never.”
THE TAXI BEAT AGAINST a flood tide of city-bound traffic en route to Outremont. Ultramontane, with Pius XI on Peter’s throne. Park Avenue cut Fletcher’s Field off from the Cartier angel, which stared at the flapping pennant of St. George above the Grenadiers’ armoury. Very quietly I sang and Jack, despite himself, picked up the tune.
“Some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules, of Hector and Lysander and such great names as these, but of all the world’s heroes there’s none that can compare, with a tow row row row row row to the British Grenadiers.”
The ’cab had an open top and we smoked and sang. Fast sunshine after a squall was Jack’s mood, the cheerful sod. The beer had done me good and I felt better than fine. With some care I checked the cylinder of my Webley and thought on the full box of cartridges I’d hidden above the cistern in my bathroom at the Wayside. What now? Another draw of tobacco while Jack whistled “In the Clover” as we cut along past Mont-Royal Avenue. I saw well-to-do women shopping at dressmakers’ and one comely creature caught my eye. She wore an insolent pout that slew me where I sat. Who the hell needed Laura? I could buy myself a sloe-eyed vixen and have her crawl for me. The ’cab’s speed and rushing air mixed together in a delicious tonic and I felt exhilarated, alive. Colours leapt out in the crisp afternoon: the green of a tailor’s sign, a blue scarf on a Jewess, shining red apples in a barrow at the corner.
Our taxi swung into the bay of the filling station and Jack and I hopped out, full of beans and raring to go. His great capacity was to relish each new encounter. It was what divided our natures, but for the present I felt a part of what he must sense most days. We shared a glance and became kids again in Chinatown or on the mudflat houseboats of False Creek.
The garage was shut once more and wore the same sign: “Fermé.” It was my hope that Charlie hadn’t prepared for our return and was alone again with his sandwich and flask of coffee. Jack went around to the rear of the property and I followed.
Out back a ratty scrub yard led to two doors of the complex, one for the house and another that seemed to open into a connecting corridor. From a maple bough hung a despondent innertube at the end of a rope. Gallows and hangman’s noose. Leaves littered the dirt amidst a stench of old oil and rancid petrol. We tried the first door close to the garage and found it locked. Jack picked up a rock but I stayed his hand and turned the handle of the door to the house. It clicked open. Quietly we went into the kitchen. From our previous visit I recalled the little Indian-looking kid who’d popped out of nowhere, Charlie’s son. The violence had taken place the same time of day as now and the tyke might be home from a Jesuit school for luncheon with Papa. We crossed the threshold, adding to our infractions.
“Breaking and entering,” I said to Jack.
Jack took his Webley out and held it in his left. “Carrying a weapon,” he said. Carefully, we tiptoed through to a hallway, a staircase, and the front door. Next stop was an empty sitting room filled with pale white curtains, a black crucifix on the wall. Jack pointed upstairs.
“See if we’re alone.”
I went up to the second floor on creaking runners and poked through several bedroom doors: a baby’s room, the parents’ with another crèche, empty. Revanche des berceaux. In the boy’s room I was touched to see a lithograph of Wilfrid Laurier next to one of Ignatius Loyola. Back downstairs Jack stood by a door that aligned with the rear of the garage.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Steady,” I said.
“Go!”
Jack kicked the door open and went in, holding his revolver with both hands.
“Police,” he shouted in French.
The office sat empty but Charlie lay under the busted Chandler on his back. He was slow getting up and Jack was on him, his gun in the Frenchman’s face. With his right he grabbed Charlie’s collar and kneed him hard in the gut. Charlie went sideways and retched over the floor. Jack stood back and belted his Webley.
“Mick, the hose.”
I uncoiled a length from the wall and turned the handle, mixing water with purpling petrol and oil on the cement before reaching Charlie’s face.
“Hey Charlie, comment ça va?”
Charlie spluttered and gasped. Jack grabbed him and shoved the man up against the sedan, his elbows on the running board.
“Je voudrais Martin. Donne-lui à moi,” Jack said.
“Jack,” coughed Charlie.
“Maintenant. Now. Martin the driver. Où est-il?”
Charlie spat.
“Mick, toss the office.”
In the office I gave Charlie’s desk and files the onceover. There were piles of paper, a photograph of the ugly family, Paterfamilias Charlie with his thin dark moustache in the middle. A drawer held a few loose dollars, half a deck of Sweet Caporals, and a medallion of St. Benedict. I pocketed the lot.
“Mick! Done!”
Upon my return Charlie seemed freshly kicked about the head. Jack trained the hose over him.
“We have an address and a ride, right Charlie?”
The lawyer-cum-mechanic pointed to a set of keys on a hook. Jack tossed them to me. From outside I heard the snarl of dogs fighting. We left Charlie on the floor. At my last look at him I could swear he was smiling at Jack and me.
In the lot were three automobiles: a Locomobile, a Ford, and an Auburn. The keys fit the last, a right-hand drive. I pushed the self-starter and the motor rattled to life. The auto had a left-hand brake and gear-shifter and right pedal accelerator. I released the brake and gave the engine petrol, lurched forward, and stalled. Bloody hell. Jack slid into the back through a suicide door. I pushed the starter again and heard a roar. My foot pressed the pedal and I pumped at the gear-shifter as we lurched forward again, this time over a curb and onto the road. How much horsepower in this beauty? The interior was all blond wood and soft tawny leather, a far cry from the Tin Lizzies I’d learned on. Couldn’t remember the last time I’d been behind the wheel. We swayed and bucked as I pulled into a lane, thieves and bandits both.
“Where to?” I asked.
Jack read from a wrinkled scrap of paper:
“Numéro 1302, coin de Mont-Royal et Chambord.”
I cranked left at Mont-Royal, one hand clenched around the steering apparatus, the other clumsily grinding from gear to gear in an attempt not to stall again. East past St. Denis the city turned French-Canadian. On a rattletrap iron staircase that twisted down to the street stood a big-breasted black-clad matron cursing out children fooling in the alleyways. On another stair an old crone beat at a rug. A rag-and-bone man pushed his cart past three whiskered old worthies headed into Chez Normand’s Bienvenue aux Dames to sprinkle salt in quarts of flat Molson’s. My eyes moved between jaywalkers, horses, competing motorcars, darting urchins, and two elegant women walking arm-in-arm into a boutique.
“Here we are,” Jack said.
Number 1302 had a kind of pus-yellow painted thistlehead turret at its top corner with the rest an artificial blue. It was an unsightly, unlucky combination of colours, a poisonous warning. The Auburn choked to a stop and I resisted the urge to sound the horn. I left the keys in the ’car and we got out, Jack squaring up at the entrance, his boxing posture.
“Second floor, looks like,” he said.
“Oke,” I said.
A steep flight of stairs pointed up. I thought about our chances. The only entrance or exit was this spinebreaker. We made it to the top and a door.
“One more time,” Jack said.
“Ready?” I went.
“Steady,” he said.
“Go!”
Jack shouldered the door and it splintered open on a weak lock. He burst through and tripped flat on his face, with me stepping nimbly over him onto the empty level, my gun at my side. It was hot, with a dark hallway facing a kitchen to the left. Jack stumbled up behind me. I walked into the room and from the opening to the right a rude shape crashed towards my head. Then a blackness absolute.
FROM THE BOTTOM of the sea I rose, my ears ringing and eyes red. Chin on my chest and blood on the white linen of my shirt, head heavy, and a thick taste of copper and salt. Thirsty, tied upright to a chair, my hands lashed behind my back to the rear legs. A crushing headache and something sticky on my face. Blood, more blood. I straightened up and next to me a shape like me, bound, eyes open, Jack with his own bloody mouth. His eyes motioned mine forward and I complied groggily. Two tough louts leaned with their backs to the wall. On a low table before us rested our guns, the display a taunt. Jack hacked up and spat out a suspension of reddish fluid onto the linoleum. We were in the wrecked kitchen of a flat, a dirty place with a Virgin on the wall. The toughs looked like farmhands tricked out in city clothes. One raised an apparatus to his face and there came an explosion of light. He’d taken our photograph. Jack cursed at them. They didn’t speak.
Time slowed and the quality of light changed to a thin dimness. My hands ached and Jack seemed to slip in and out of consciousness. They’d given him a good drubbing. I closed my eyes and rested. Both trapezius muscles began to spasm. From a place came the laboured sound of heavy breathing. When I opened my eyes a fat man in a three-piece houndstooth-check suit sat behind the table. A little terrier bitch rested on his lap and one of the toughs handed him a bottle of Vichy water. The man wiped his neck with a silk handkerchief. He was curly-haired and covered in a fine stipple of freckles. My soul lusted for a drink of that water. He saw this and chuckled with a lazy wet mouth. Make no error, boyo, those eyes are hard and black as jet. The fat man turned and spoke to my companion.
“Monsieur Jack,” he said.
“Enchanté, Sénateur,” replied Jack.
That was a genuine surprise. Now we were moving up in the world. One of the toughs crossed his arms and I revised my opinion: they weren’t farmhands but hockey players, though in Quebec the crushers were usually one and the same.
“You have been very foolish, I think,” said the Senator.
“You might say that,” said Jack.
“You disappoint me. This wildness. It is not good. Time for it, I think, to end.”
“Now that I’m of no use to you.”
“It is true. This business with Charles Trudeau and Pierre Martin is how do you say, irresponsible. These man are innocent.”
“So you say. I say they sold me out.”
“Impossible. For them I vouch. For you that is enough.”
“Or what?”
“I am not so cold. For what you have done in the past I am willing to turn the blind eye for this indiscretion. An opportunity of grace, I think.”
“Mercy buckets,” said Jack.
“You will stay away from Monsieur Trudeau and Monsieur Martin. I protect them.”
The Senator stroked his terrier. I couldn’t help but think we were Bulldog Drummond before Fu Manchu the way he gloated. My life had become a story from Black Mask. The Senator motioned to his toughs and spoke a fast incomprehensible quacking French, the sort from up in Gaspé. It was pure Greek.
Jack turned his head to me, looked down, moved his right boot and looked back up. There was some weapon there, I surmised. Our Webleys remained on the table before us. The Senator said something to the farmhand who’d photographed us; the brute picked up the camera and left by a different door from the one Jack and I’d used to enter the apartment. The odds were better now. I flexed my bonds as the dog on the Senator’s lap yapped then curled a hind leg over its head to lick at its vagina.
“Alors, what is it we will do with you, I wonder,” the Senator mused.
“You could recommend us to Mackenzie King.”
“It is very droll, but, I think, unlikely.”
“I know what,” Jack said.
“What?”
“You could cut us in the line-up to fuck your wife.”
“Quoi?”
“She’s been had by every hack in Ottawa.”
The Senator rose and his dog leapt. The remaining tough stiffened and balled his fists. My bonds seemed loose; they’d tied us badly, the peasants. My left hand slipped free. I waited.
“Connard,” the Senator breathed.
“Yep, your missus is the biggest roundheel on the Hill. Takes it up the trou as well.”
“Infâme,” whispered the Senator.
There was no way of knowing what’d been planned for us. I couldn’t see a Liberal Senator having us killed, unless he learned we were Tories. A good beating was more the Grit style. Nevertheless, Jack’s strategy of provoking the man didn’t seem the soundest. Even if Jack had a knife in his boot we still had to cut ourselves free. The Senator’s dog scrambled to a corner and seemed to start laughing. The Senator, breathing heavily, placed his hands on the table before us. I could see his swarthy skin darkening with fury.
“Perhaps I am making a mistake with you, Monsieur Jack. The police will perhaps be interested in you and your friend here. Some information anonymous, I think.”
“What good’ll that do you?” asked Jack. “You were the Minister of Customs when this started. You think that because you’re in the Red Chamber King’ll protect you if I start to spill?”
The Senator motioned to his thug and the helpmeet came over and punched Jack hard in the stomach. Jack buckled and gagged. The goon blew his knuckles and turned to me. The Senator patted the thug’s shoulder and brushed him away.
“This I find distasteful, as I do your treatment of Charles Trudeau. But you are fortunate today, I think. I am merciful. It is simple: you and your comrade will leave the city. You are allowed to live a little more, hein? You should, I think, be happy.”
It was possible. My left hand was free and I could simply reach out and pick up my revolver. They’d been damned careless and arrogant, mocking us in our powerlessness. It was the same mistake we’d made with crafty Charlie Trudeau. Jack gulped air and the Senator loomed above me. I didn’t like his smell, rosewater and dog intermingled. My mouth was parched and my head still repercussed with the blow that’d knocked me out. The dog started pissing against a rotting wall, distracting the Senator and his tough.
“Rex!” the fat man barked.
Very cleanly I picked up the Webley with my left hand and pulled back the hammer with my thumb. The fat man froze. The tough backed up against the kitchen wall. Jack laughed, and slowly the Senator joined him in a baritone.
“You will not shoot me,” he said.
“You’re right.”
I pointed the barrel at Rex. The terrier came to me, interested.
“Aimez-vous votre canaille?” I asked.
“An Englishman would never harm an innocent creature,” the Senator said, his eyes widening.
“I’m Irish,” I said.
I pointed the barrel at the tough and fired. He dropped to the ground screaming: “Calice! Calvaire!”
With eyes screwed shut he grasped at his upper thigh. Lucky bugger. I’d aimed below the belt buckle. The dog skittered away in fear.
“You’re next after all,” I told the Senator. “Cut Jack free.”
The fat man’s skin had paled beneath his freckling. His dog and tough both whimpered. Smoke and a cordite reek hung in the close air. If the police caught me and I wanted to pass a paraffin test I’d have to scrub my face and hands with eau de cologne or an abrasive soap. The Senator moved stiffly to the countertop and found a rusty knife.
“Attention,” I said.
Awkwardly I hopped the chair around to keep the Senator in my line of fire. With thick, stupid fingers he sawed at Jack’s bonds. Partially free, Jack took the knife and finished the job. He stood, stretched, and gently prodded the Senator with his index finger.
“Get in the corner with your dog,” Jack said.
The Senator complied and scooped Rex up. The tough was shivering and putting pressure on his thigh where dark blood oozed out between his fingers.
“Hurry up,” I said. “We don’t want a shooting match.”
Jack cut me loose. I stood and felt my body itch and tingle upon its release. Jack’s face swelled and my head was logy and sore, ears ringing, copper in my mouth, bladder fit to burst. I leaned over the man I’d shot.
“You’ll need a doctor,” I said.
His shivering redoubled. I’d used the revolver at last, a prophecy come true. The Senator tried to make himself small and cradled his bitch. Jack picked up his own shooting iron and turned to the door. We heard the hard pounding of feet up the back stairs. More trouble there. Jack went over, laughed, and snapped his fingers in the fat man’s face.
“À la prochaine, monsieur.”
With that we scarpered. I started slipping down the stairs halfway down and rode the treads on my heels, turning backward at the door and bashing out onto the sidewalk. I landed on my coccyx but felt nothing save dizziness and exhilaration. Jack mounted the Auburn and pushed in the keys. A long black saloon ’car with chauffeur was parked opposite but the driver did nothing. He’d heard the shot and seen two bloodied men with guns come tumbling out of the building and decided his salary didn’t include getting plugged. Wise bird.
Jack started the engine, choked into gear, added essence, and swung around into the black ’car, the fender screeching across the enamel of the Senator’s ride. I jumped on the running board and waved my Webley.
“The South’ll rise again! Sic semper tyrannis!”
Jack roared down Chambord and I crawled in a window. Perhaps my cerebellum had been damaged by the blow I’d received. I was having trouble thinking, and everything was hilarious: Jack lighting a cigaret while driving with his knees, the sign on a storefront of a gap-toothed idiot sucking up spruce beer with a straw, the startled looks of pedestrians as we rocketed along the quiet street.
My hands only started shaking as I broke open the cylinder of my revolver and removed the spent cartridge. Jack was driving erratically, weaving along and finally stalling out by Lafontaine Park. We traded places and I turned right on Rachel and then left to line up with the clock tower at Victoria Quay. We rolled along downhill and crossed St. Catherine, then worried our way in low gear westerly to Griffintown and Jack’s hideout. I parked the motor on a dismal block behind a pile of empty chicken coops and kept the keys. The Auburn looked out of place in this part of town but we were too walloped to do much else. At a corner store I bought a bag of cracked ice and from under the counter a bottle of overproof rum. Jack sat on the curb in front of the building, his head in his hands.
“Come on,” I said.
I helped him through the entranceway and up to the third floor. Jack managed to pull out the large key and open the door. He made it to the bed and fell into a swoon. I collapsed into a chair, where I sat still for a spell and blinked out.
LATER ON I heard a voice.
“Charlie got his revenge,” Jack said.
“And how,” I groaned.
“Should’ve known better, dealing with a lawyer.”
“He was ahead of us,” I said. “It was a trap.”
“Didn’t give him enough credit.”
Jack nursed his face with ice balled up in a stained cloth. I lifted the rum bottle, cracked its seal, and added melting ice from the waxpaper bag to a chipped cup. George V’s own. Dusk now upon us. Jack took out his medicine and rubbed cocaine powder on his gums to numb the pain. I sniffed a little for renewed pep. We were well-hid in this bolt-hole but it felt as though the other shoe was about to drop. What I’d liked least about the Senator’s talk was his threat of the police; they’d been far too absent throughout our series of crimes. Jack and I had operated in a vacuum, abhorrent in nature. Bootlegging, armed robbery, and now a shooting. The man might bleed to death. Testing my sentiments I was interested to discover that I didn’t care. Sensation had been dimmed by the shock of my beating, further blunted by the drug and drink.
“Do you think the Senator’ll set the dogs on us?” I asked.
“No. His hands’re too dirty.”
“What about the shipment tomorrow?”
“He doesn’t know about that.”
“Are you certain?”
“Fairly.”
“That’s bloody reassuring.”
Time slipped by as Jack and I coughed over Charlie’s Caporals. I examined my fingernails and smelled my hands for tell-tale residue. There remained the faint aroma of gunpowder. Jack grimaced.
“Nice shot,” he said.
“You ever plug anyone?” I asked.
“Germans, mostly.”
“Maybe we should take the fat man’s advice and get out of town while we can,” I said.
“We will. After tomorrow. Now it’s war.”
“Plains of Abraham redux,” I said.
“Best two of three,” Jack laughed
We fell into talking Lower Canada: of English and French, Wolfe and Montcalm, Benjamin Arnold, Thomas Jefferson, Na-poleon, Louisiana, and the Empress Josephine. To be followed by a little treason concerning the King and Emperor of India, and how we might depose the throne in the name of Marxism and an international revolution of the proletariat.
“That Stalin’s a tough bugger,” Jack said.
“United Soviet States of America,” I said.
From nowhere a crow flew past the window, barely visible in the growing gloom. The bird the first corbeau I’d ever seen in Montreal, or the first I’d ever noticed. Its wings scratched like an umbrella opening and closing, or the black taffeta dress of a particular waitress at the Cherry Bank Restaurant long ago. What was her name? When it came I sang: “K-K-K-Katie, beautiful Katie, you’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore. When the m-m-m-moon shines over the c-c-c-cowshed I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.”
Jack lay on the bed, his necktie unknotted. I refilled my glass and swallowed more kerosene. I’d shot a man, and might be a murderer. I was a criminal. No more peace, order, and good government whilst Mick was around. The Pater’d be mortified. This drinking and fornication and more. And what was he doing on the other side of the Dominion? Three hours earlier there. Four o’clock. He’d be taking a nap.
“What’re we up against with this Senator?” I asked.
Jack motioned for more rum. I checked his face. He winced as I touched the bloated flesh.
“How’re your teeth?”
“Loose.”
The glass protecting the print of St. Veronica reflected my own map back, eyes like pissholes in snow.
“Who is he?”
“A Grit,” Jack said.
“That’s plain.”
“I was bagman for the party last election and did some other things as well.”
“Such as?”
“Running a crew in the cemeteries writing down names of the recently deceased so we could use them to vote at the polls. That’s a dodge old as Confederation. Our friend the Senator was a mere cabinet minister then. Customs and Excise.”
Jack stubbed out his cigaret and leaned back on the bed. He reminded me there’d been a federal election last month; I’d been holed away at Memphremagog away from ’papers and the wireless. Mackenzie King and the Grits had been in a minority government with the Progressive party propping them up against Arthur Meighen and the Tories.
“Have you ever seen him in the flesh?” asked Jack.
“Who?”
“Precisely your reaction if you had. Rex King is the dullest egg in Christendom and you’d forget him five minutes after shaking his hand. In fact he’s the foxiest bastard outside a briar patch.”
As Minister of Customs our friend the Senator had been duly compensated for failing to curb irregularities at the port, Jack explained. No law in our country forbade the sale of liquor to the Americans despite their Prohibition. The risk only came when actually smuggling across the border. Bonded whiskey from Scotland arrived in Montreal earmarked for trans-shipment south to the States. All well and good, and no duties collected here for the Crown.
“However, most of the booze never made it out of the country,” Jack said.
“Where’d it go?”
“Dry counties in Ontario, mostly. All the profits, fewer risks. Unfortunately for the minister, someone got wise.”
The opposition Tories learned that Customs agents were being compromised and payoffs were going straight to the top. The scandal threatened to take down King’s government. Our prime minister thus took preventative action against his minister.
“And made him a Senator. Saints preserve us.”
“Better yet,” Jack continued, “King formed a blue-ribbon Royal Commission to investigate the Port of Montreal. Hearings were held and detectives sent in to investigate.”
“Meanwhile the world kept spinning and molasses flowed in January. I follow. Then what happened?”
Jack laid out the lineaments of a parliamentary donnybrook: Arthur Meighen and the Tories howling for scalps, the Progressives defecting from King’s government, King visiting Rideau Hall and tendering his resignation, the Governor General weighing in on the side of the Tories, more shenanigans in the House of Commons, a midnight vote, a crisis of the Constitution and, after a summer election, Mackenzie King back at the top, his enemies defeated. Meighen was put to pasture, the Governor General on a slow boat back to Blighty, and the Customs scandal ploughed under entirely.
“Now Rex King’s lecturing the Empire on Canada’s sovereignty in London and it’s business as usual in Sin City, as you see.”
“And your role in this farce?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“I was one of the detectives the Royal Commission sent to investigate smuggling at the port.”
I burst out laughing. Lamp standards on the street now burned a soft gold. I opened a window and smelled impending snow. Before a stoop a bent figure sharpened knives on a whirling stone, spitting sparks.
“Pinkertons,” Jack continued. “When King worked for the Rockefellers in the States he used the agency. I came recommended for this line of work.”
“Naturally, with your gifts.”
Did Jack hear the irony in my voice? If he did, he chose to ignore it. In front of the tavern across the street stood two men in black surcoats. Working for the government was how Jack had aligned himself with bootleggers, Charlie Trudeau, and the Senator. Fox guarding the henhouse. Jack divined my thoughts, his nasty habit.
“There was too much money to be made,” said Jack. “If not me then who? The Senator still got his cut and Charlie Trudeau ran the trucks. The difference was I started smuggling to the States for keeps, and I was dealing with Italians across the border. Another world. Long way from Soda Creek. Which leads me to ask you, Mick. Are you still with me tomorrow night?”
I looked at the shabby brick tenements across the way and tasted coalsmoke. A child screamed from one of the rooms below us. A deeper cold fell and I shut the window. The two men in black did not look up. Was I with him after this? We’d come mighty far together.
“Pardon me,” I said.
I went to the lavatory and had a good long gander at myself in the dim light. With a sliver of soap I washed and scrubbed my face and hands in the frigid water and slicked back my hair. Wild notions rose within: walk away this moment. Jack will be your ruin. Crime is punished. What would I do with myself? I had no job and wanted none, no friends save he, no family. I’d lost my love. In the vile darkness I pulled out the revolver and returned to the room. I could easily shoot him and then myself. Jack sat on the bed, his gun in his hand. He looked at me and smiled.
“I’ll need another bullet,” I said
“Knew you were true blue.”
“Alea iacta est.”
We killed the bottle. The men in front of the tavern moved away. There came over me a flush of heat and cold commingled, of past, present, and future aligning, a fuse slotted into place. I’d never experienced anything quite like it and was at last allowed to identify the sensation: surrender. This was my fate, tangled in a skein with Jack’s. I must follow the thread to its end, wherever it led. While Jack slept I spent a painful night upright in the chair, the Webley in my hand, waiting for the dawn.