SOMETIME DURING THE long night it began to snow. I smoked the hours away and watched slow flakes fall from an iron sky. Near daybreak drays hauled wagons through the white. Plodders sloshed muddy footprints through the splodge and then came saltshakers, sandmen, and shovellers who cursed and huffed over heavy masses. By and by the sky unveiled blue and it became one of those sere eastern mornings I hated to admit I loved. By noon the city’s heat and friction would melt the snow to dirty gutter runnels. While watching Montreal light up I faded. A voice woke me.
“Friday.”
“Friday,” I repeated.
Jack’s eyes burned bloodshot and his face was raw, lip swollen. My poor body ached and itched, blood boiling from the rum and salt. The cardboard cigaret deck was crushed and empty, one bullet smoked for each regret. Jack sat Indian-style on the bed. On my sinister zygomatic ran a pulse of hot pain from the blow that’d knocked me out. The room stank of cordite, stale tobacco, and men, worse than a pool hall the morning after. Out the window fingers of ice weighed down telephone wires in the building’s shadow.
“So, what’s the interior of the Mount Royal Club like?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“You heard.”
“Clever brute,” Jack said.
His eyes glittered out from beneath lowered lids, a colder blue. My own were brown near black with the pupils pinholes in the iris, stinging and sullen.
“Hungry?” asked Jack.
“Not half.”
A gramophone wailed out Caruso from a downstairs room. I felt none too clean and in need of a cooking in the bath.
“Let’s move the motor elsewhere,” I suggested.
“Fine idea. We’ll need it later,” Jack said.
So Jack was determined to carry through his mad scheme. I noticed he hadn’t answered my question. We creaked to life, my mind pinwheeling, an ache near the crook of my arm where the needle’d bit through the skin back in the day. An observant coroner would see the scar there.
Together Jack and I shambled down to the street and walked to where we’d left the sedan. I circled the block to make sure it hadn’t been marked for a clipping. The Senator or Trudeau might’ve contacted the cops and given over our particulars, hoping the authorities were up to the task of taking us down. The force owned a fleet of five blue Frontenacs, and there were plenty more patrolmen on foot. The likelihood of our being rousted was low but we took meagre precautions nonetheless.
Jack suggested we leave the Auburn in a scrub lot on the back side of the mountain. I nixed the idea as obvious and with too many places for the police to stake us out, rifles at the ready. My notion was to scatter it as a leaf in the forest amongst other motors. Jack agreed, too tired to argue me, and we parked on a side street in east Westmount. From there we hacked it back into town, Jack off to his hotel and I to mine after a stop at the tobacconist’s for twenty Forest and Streams. We agreed to meet in the Morgan’s toy department at one.
With some care I approached the ancient ’hop in the faded red velvet coat outside the Wayside and slipped him two dollars. No sir, no one has been nosing around the hotel asking questions about any of the guests lately and your room has been entered only by the chambermaid. A nancy behind the front desk handed me my key without any interest and I went up. In the lift a frost seeped through me, a premonition, but the room proved to be untouched. Before anything else I went to the toilet and urinated, then refilled the Webley’s empty chamber from the hidden box of cartridges. I sat down on the bed in a cold sweat.
What was I becoming? One virtue of the recent activity had been its usefulness as a distraction from contemplation. Now that I was alone in a quiet room doubt made its assault. I was a pathetic creature prey to the manipulation of others. None of the fine qualities grafted onto me by my education and upbringing had flourished; I was no one’s idea of a gentleman, with no rectitude, no finer sentiment. Mens sana in corpore sano, my arse. There was an infection working through me, corrupting my actions, turning me into an antigen in the body public. I felt the locus of an impending epidemic, society’s immune system battling what it saw as the wayward seed of a moral cancer. The Pater, Jack, Laura, her father Sir Dunphy, the Senator, Charlie Trudeau, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lilyan Tashman, and that dirty four-flusher Bob—they’d all die, I swore. I hadn’t lasted to take the Hippocratic Oath, worse luck for them. The Webley’s action was smooth, its weight heavy in my hand. With disgust I put it down, tore off my collar and shirt, and threw them into the hallway incinerator chute, then stripped, brushed my teeth, bathed, and roughly scoured my nakedness with a cheap towel. With care I fastened new cuffs to a freshly boiled chemise and snapped a soft collar ’round my neck, then lay full-length on the bed. From the street came the sound of a woman screaming obscenities in French.
A reverie manifested from the future: I was a clerk quietly rolling pennies for the Bank of British North America, courting the fair stenographer daughter of a lumberman back in Vancouver. She and I would walk past the arch in Stanley Park and look across the inlet to the pyramids of raw yellow sulphur beneath the mountains on the far shore. We were engaged, and in love, and the Pater would officiate at the wedding ceremony. All my efforts at that hellish cabin in ’Magog where I’d wrestled away my addiction to morphine were rewarded, my trespasses forgiven. I’d turned over a new leaf and settled down.
It was no use. The Pater’d sniff out the corruption oozing from my pores. He’d recognize his son for a wastrel, a thief, a drunk. Jack was the true prodigal. It’s the way of the striving Scotch-Irish: without a calling or a title or a bank account I was the worst of my class.
The only way I was headed back west was in a box. There were no further colonies to ship me off to and hide the family’s shame, except the North. Fancy that, me manning a Hudson’s Bay Company post on Frobisher Bay or the bank of the Great Slave Lake, the true ultima Thule of atonement and toil. No. Better off in the great Republic to the south, where I’d be snapped up in a trice, my villainy, covetousness, and hypocrisy rewarded and praised to the heavens. Look at Warren Harding, for Christ’s sake.
With deliberate care I re-counted every banknote by denomination in piles on the bedspread, a finite amount shrinking nickel by dime. Tonight that’d change, should Jack’s plan play out. Thinking on that, I smoked. Truly the essence of life was in this endless waiting for something to happen. All the interstices, the queuing for tickets, crowded bus trips, and painful midnight walks to empty rooms, all the moments that the mind wiped clean. Instead it crammed itself with detritus and reckoned up restaurant receipt totals. Unwanted snatches of popular songs reverberated. There’s no drama in the quintessence, the eternal wasted moments like this point in space and time. The Earth was in constant motion and Einstein could do the maths. Was it possible to walk it all back, unshoot the Senator’s thug and cradle Rex the dog? The poor bitch cowering in a corner. I closed my eyes to banish the image and unbidden Laura’s shape materialized. I felt a tumescence of arousal and touched my erection. Humiliated, I rubbed my eye sockets and felt every dendrite fray, raw nerves spitting electricity. I rolled my money together and pocketed the gun. Animal vigour seemed the only real activity, a pursuit of appetite. It was time to go.
With my Gladstone carry-all I left the hotel but kept the key, having paid for three more days. From there I repaired to an old haunt on Craig Street for an ale. It was dark as sin inside, comme d’hab, low and mean and right. My skin crawled and my hands shook as I lit a match. In the Star I again read about the progress of the bloody queen of Rumania and a poor bastard who’d been struck down by a streetcar at the corner of St. Mark and St. Catherine. Still nothing on bootleggers, the Loew’s robbery, Trudeau’s beating, or a shooting fracas on the Plateau. To nourish my frame I ordered a Horse’s Neck and followed it with another ale. The chatter in the bar quelled slowly and I looked in a mirror. I was pale and interesting from exhaustion. Jack’s powdered pep would perk me up. He was getting it from Smiler, I remembered, and my humour leached of blood. Smiler and I had trained in leechcraft at the Royal Victoria Hospital. There was a Leachtown off the River Jordan on Vancouver Island; failed panners swirled for stray grains of gold there. Great rigs with thick cables were strung up to hew the forests down with a tearing and a rending, saws biting through wood as huge firs crashed down. There came a sharp cracking and the bar’s windowpane showed a long white line. Someone had thrown a rock. The ’tender went outside to investigate and returned, shaking his head.
“Personne,” he said.
A seedy egg in the back began blethering about the mayor so I killed the ale and left a little silver. While hiking away with my lousy bag I passed a pair of bobbies in leather Ulsters on the sidewalk and did not blench. Was any of this even happening? Was I being watched, an unwitting actor in a complicated conspiracy involving Jack and the Senator, an unknowing tool of some secret group manipulating my activities for occult reasons? Yes. It seemed clear to me I was being used to satisfy certain prophecies of the British Israelites and the Round Table to raise the Red Hand in Holy Ireland. I would rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem with an archangel’s name and the caduceus of Mercury, then claim my crown. It was either that or sire the Moonchild and assist Bolsheviks in the service of Marx and worldwide revolution. My random crimes undermined capitalism and the bourgeoisie’s complacency. I was fated to destroy the Commonwealth and the League of Nations. Do it, Michael. Be stern and cold, wield sword and cross.
I needed sleep. For a very few confused minutes I was at St. Pancras Station in London, then a Christmas panto in the West End with a chum from Victoria. My head spun as I dropped my Gladstone off at Windsor Station, under the angel guiding a dead serviceman to heaven, same as the one in Winnipeg, same as the one in Vancouver. With that reminiscence I completed a wide circuit to Morgan’s department store. What I needed was hot tea and rest to rid associative thought of its power. One face in the crowd held the shadow of the ghost of the smile of a girl I’d seen on a tram outside Covent Garden years ago, another stranger could have been the long-lost brother of my old headmaster at the Normal School. This series of interplayed mental connections, this bastard combination of paramnesia and nostalgia, would lead me up the primrose path to the crack-up ward.
Passersby on the pavement buffeted me as I crossed in front of Christ Church. Most of the snow had vanished but the Morgan’s door openers had availed themselves of the occasion to swaddle in fur greatcoats and hats. To begin with I disdained the entranceway and walked around an entire city block clockwise in order to clear my brain and check dark reflections in store windows for any pursuers. A mangled veteran begged for alms. When I flipped a half-dollar into his cap the wretch raised a metal hook to his eye and wheezed: “Anybody want a duck?”
As an officer and gentleman, second lieutenant in the Seventy-second Highlanders, I gave the victim another dollar to thank my lucky stars. But for the grace of God go you, Mick me lad, or Jack himself, a Duke of Connaught’s Own. The entire population was diseased or deformed in some way, within or without, including myself. My ailment needed a name related to its outward symptomology: the futile attempt of placing oneself within a comprehensive whole of variegated, pointless, randomized memory to find significance. I diagnosed myself with a terminal case of Mick’s Syndrome. Turning a precise ninety-degree angle onto City Councillors brought no greater clarity. Man had tried to impose a petty order by surveying straight lines, encoding secret equations in dead foundations. Below this system there reigned pure chaos, a blind worm chewing through space. By turning another corner I was satisfied and pushed through a revolving door into the great volume of the store.
Inside I was washed in the soft sea of the female. Perfume poured over me, a rich mixture: attar of rose and lavender, citron and orange and sweet talc powder. I closed my eyes and inspired and for a blessed moment was not cruel and cold and alone. I saw the temporary dream of crystal and chrome glittering as scent bottles and precious things sat ranged before fluttering women. Shopgirls wore smart navy frocks and waited on furred and feathered doyennes, the whole scene clean and bright, almost alien. Here was a high altar for that sisterhood of wealth, each movement part of a choreographed ritual conducted in discreet undertones. For a moment I smelled myself— sweat and tobacco and fear—and then my heart leapt as I saw Laura select something silver from a shelf. As a clerk passed the woman turned into another rich redhead and I breathed out. By God, this was civilization, why the mills ground fine and forges smelted hot. It was for them, to keep womanhood safe and soft and free from harm. I became covetous and wanted it, this world. I wanted it now.
As I took the staircase to the basement a large clock on the wall read one pip-emma on the dot, time for tiffin. In the toy department painted wooden imps hung smiling on hooks. To one side were train sets and baseball bats, on the other kewpie dolls and tea sets. Beyond a neatly stacked pile of Erector Sets and cowboy rifles Jack chatted up a pretty floorwalker. He touched her face and she flushed, embarrassed. I sent a loose hoop his way, my revolver in my pocket to play its own game in due time. The wooden circle hit Jack and fell spinning on the tiles. Jack turned to me.
“Adieu, mademoiselle,” he said.
Jack took the shopgirl’s hand, twisted it ’round and bowed to kiss her wrist.
“Valentino taught me that.”
He winked at her and she peered over to roll her eyes at me. That was a fine sight and I was secretly delighted. Jack’s charm could curdle. It appeared that he’d taken more cocaine as he violently chewed spearmint gum while at the same time smoking a cigaret.
“We’re set,” he said.
“For what?”
“A little light entertainment.”
We went back upstairs and outside and crossed the street to the Princess Theatre. It was closed.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A matinee,” Jack said, and smiled.
He turned to the grille of the box office wicket and rapped on the smoked glass. It was impossible to see anyone behind it. A dry voice asked: “Who’s calling?”
“Jack London, San Francisco Chronicle. I’m here for the interview.”
Jack slid a five into the gap. I heard a thumping and a click as a door unlocked. Jack carefully took the gum from his mouth and did a disgusting thing with it. We went into the lobby and found it empty. It was eerie. I fingered my gun and felt anxiety.
“Nice couvert charge,” I said.
The dry voice came from a speakerphone above: “Door to the left, dressing rooms backstage.”
We followed the directions. The theatre house was silent, empty seats before a half-closed curtain across the stage, a dusty smell of stale tobacco smoke and damp velvet. Reigning backstage we found a confusion of ropes and wires. Enormous padlocked boxes stencilled with Houdini’s name sat in the wings. These presumably held the secrets of the Chinese Water Torture Cell and the Milk Can Escape. Until the other night I’d only seen Houdini in a serial at the picture house: The Man From Beyond. He’d escaped from a light bulb once, another time from a paper bag.
“He got free from a Russian prison cell stark bollocky naked,” Jack said.
Echoing my thoughts again. I turned back on the empty house of crimson chairs. It was haunted. We were spectres. A phantom audience watched me, Ulysses by the pool of blood at World’s End as the sightless dead of Hades streamed past. Shakespeare played the ghost in Hamlet, fasting in fires. A thin, high, sharp note like the whine of a mosquito rose in my ears and abruptly quit. I turned away and Jack was gone. I noticed a line on the stage floor and bumped face-first like a fool into a large mirror reflecting a room behind me. I went into that and found Jack sitting on a barrel, smiling.
“Pepper’s Ghost,” he said. “You see how it works.”
“I don’t and what’re we doing here?”
Jack held up a finger and cocked his ear, then very quietly whistled the first bars of “Annie Laurie.”
“Bad luck in a theatre,” I said.
“Not for me.”
We moved ’round the stage machinery and found a corridor leading to the dressing rooms. From behind a closed door came murmuring voices. I made out: “...as the miracle at Cana or walking on the water. Think, lads, what I might have accomplished in those times.”
Jack opened the door to a room opposite and motioned me into it. It was a place for showgirls by the scent of powder. In the darkness Jack peered through a crack to see who came and went and consulted his wristwatch, a fine thin Longines. Nothing but the best for himself, my envy thought. I sat down on a wicker chair and was brushed by feathers. As I made to smoke Jack stopped me. He’d taken out his Webley.
“We’re going to have a private chat,” he said.
“With that?” I motioned towards the revolver.
“We’ll see.”
He held up his hand at a soft tumult and cry, then the sound of furniture shifting about. I joined Jack at the crack. A tall gaunt man with a long Mackintosh left the room across the way. A light lit his hollow face and left the afterimage of a skull on the back of my eyelids when I blinked. Jack chuckled. Beside me I could feel him set to spring, Jack-from-a-box. Opposite us the door opened again. Two more men exited and I recognized them with some small anger: Smiler and Jacques Price from the night of Houdini’s speech. Jack put on his gloves. I saw yellow pinpoints glow in the corner of the dressing room. A cat, I hoped with a sudden chill. We stepped into the corridor.
Inconsequential music ran through my head, bloody “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” A neurologist might be able to excise from my cortex the portion responsible for housing such tripe. A selective lobotomy a keen boon for the heartbroken. I took a deep breath to counteract a queasy swelling of excitement. Something unfortunate was about to happen and I felt an elation akin to morphine, ganglia pulsing with an increased cardiac cycle. Jack pushed open the door.
It was surprisingly cold. Houdini was on a chaise longue in the far corner, his eyes closed, for all the world dead. I touched the radiator by the wall and felt its chill. Jack was the first to speak.
“Time is, time was, time’s past.”
“Who dares?” asked Houdini, opening his eyes.
“Where lies the key?” countered Jack.
Houdini sat mum a moment, then shifted to his elbows and glared fiercely. His eyes were the same cold blue as Jack’s.
“You mere man,” he said.
“I’m not alone,” warned Jack.
“Yes you are.”
“There you are in error, monsieur.”
“What, this?” asked Houdini, looking at me.
“No. You see more clearly, I am sure,” said Jack.
There was a pause. Houdini sank back onto his bolster.
“Your masters,” he breathed.
“You’ve pledged to reveal all. This cannot be.”
Jack was getting mighty high-flown, in my opinion. Whether this was more than mere catechism I couldn’t say. The look on my friend’s face was past raillery. This was very serious to him.
“Truth will out,” said Houdini.
“Not this one.”
“The public must know. It’s dangerous for them.”
“Moreso for you,” said Jack.
Houdini started at this but then winced and pressed a hand to his wide forehead and closed his eyes once more.
“Are you well?” asked Jack.
“Some damn fool struck me. And my ankle was injured in Buffalo.”
Jack indicated me.
“My friend here has medical training.”
“No doctors,” said Houdini from his corner.
“Oh, he’s no doctor.”
I moved to examine the magician. He waved me off.
“I know why he bends to superstition,” Houdini said to Jack.
“Why?”
“I know because the same tragedy has befallen myself. But he cannot listen to that brood. They are jackals, vultures. To fall into their clutches means abandoning reason. I know this.”
Houdini looked at his dressing table where rested a gold-framed portrait of an aged lady.
“It is as much for his own sake as that of your people,” Houdini continued.
“No good will come of it,” Jack said. “Let the foundation rest; the walls are unstable. The key is in the bone box. Leave it there.”
“Is that a command?”
“To a greater or lesser degree,” said Jack.
“Well. It does not matter. The fire has died in me.”
He opened his eyes and looked into mine magnetically. Jack bent over a carafe in the corner. Houdini asked me: “And what is your learnèd opinion?”
The moment extended and I saw the world-famous man weak and alone like the rest of us. He didn’t look well. If it was magic he dealt in, magic I’d give him.
“Sacrifice a cock to Asclepius,” I said.
Houdini snorted with contempt. Jack handed him a glass. Houdini sipped from it and pulled a sour face. He handed it back to Jack, who ran the faucet in the sink. Houdini sighed and said: “Tell them the secret is safe with me.”
“I will.”
“Houdini is a man of his word.”
We made to leave. I looked back and Houdini’s eyes were closed again. The room was a tomb. We threaded our way through the back of the theatre to a door leading out to an alley.
“What’s the word?” I asked Jack.
He put a finger to his lips and smiled.
PAST SCRAPS OF dirty snow we made our way over cobbles to the street proper. The sun had come out, warming the steaming pavement; ’twas relief to trade Houdini’s mausoleum for the life and colour of the city. The contrast was striking. A pretty girl looked at me through long eyelashes. I was alive, an electric animal singing with power. At the corner a traffic accident had a policeman untangling arguments as vapour hissed from under a green Chrysler’s bonnet and people crowded ’round for the free show. We passed an Indian squaw carrying a papoose slung on her back. The baby smiled at me through a horrible cleft palate covered in streaming mucus. My stomach twisted at this, the true face of mankind. Jack walked along blithely and suggested a late luncheon.
He led us west to the Royale for either Oriental or Occidental cuisine. Jack ordered the former, a mess of tapeworm noodles and cat’s flesh. My plate sampled the latter cookery, leathery horsemeat with fried crow’s eggs. Instead of eating I smoked while Jack forked nourishment into his mouth.
“Not hungry?”
He finished his plate and with my nodding assent started on mine. Replete, he wiped his mouth with a serviette and asked: “Ready for tonight?”
“Yes. How’s it look?”
“Swell. Eggs in the coffee. There’s something I need to tell you, though. We have a third.”
“A third? Who?”
Jack lit a cigaret and raised his eyebrows. No. Not that sharper. Not now.
“We have to,” Jack said, reading me.
“Like fun,” I said.
“’Fraid so.”
“Then you lose me.”
“Mick, please.”
He reached across our ruined meal and put his hand on my shoulder.
“You can settle your score with him when we’re done.”
“It’s your hand in all this,” I said.
Jack leaned back.
“No. Bob met her through the theatre crowd. Laura cottoned on to the circle. Bored, I suppose. When I was at Victoria Hall for that dance she was with him. I didn’t know where you were or what’d happened, I swear. None of my business. This is. We need the third arm. Hold your nose and afterwards all bets are off. The trade is at the pier. We’re going to hit them before they board ship. The third’ll hang back as getaway while we go in for the goods. I’ve got it all worked out.”
“You’d better.”
“It will work or it won’t. Stakes are high but so’s the payoff. To the victor and all that.”
“Spare me.” I rose and went to the filthy toilet. Over the lavatory I read: “Get ready, the LORD is coming SOON. ‘Behold I come quickly and my reward is with me, to give to every man according as his work shall be.’” Below it was written: “If I had a girl and she was mine I’d paint her ass with iodine and on her belly I’d put a sign ‘Keep off the grass, the hole is mine.’”
At the basin I washed my hands and looked at the mirror. There was no one in it.
“Oke,” I said, back at the table.
“Christ but you’re a downy bird, Mick.”
He’d paid for our food and was sitting at his ease at the Formica.
“Tell me what was what with your man in the theatre there,” I said.
“I will, but later.”
“You afraid I’ll sing if I’m caught?”
“You can’t tell what you don’t know. And it’s not the cops I’m worried about but the other fellows. They’ll clip your ears for fun and games,” Jack said.
“That’s reassuring.”
“I know you’re up for it.”
“This’s all been some sort of challenge, hasn’t it? Why’re you doing it?”
Jack put his hands together and leaned in.
“What’re your plans for the future?”
“Unknown,” I said.
“Will you head back?”
“To the Pater’s? Not likely. Even with money I don’t want him sniffing at me. Without my medical degree I’m a dog.”
“Is that so?”
“Whereas you could show up at the door in chains and he’d open his arms.”
“Unlikely.”
“That’s what you think. The Sunday after you ran away and joined the colours he preached the Prodigal Son. He had a scrap-book hidden in his study. The pages were filled with clippings from the ’papers of every action your regiment was in.”
“Jesus, Mick, I didn’t know.”
There was a catch in Jack’s voice and I swore I caught a tear quickening in his eye.
“He’d forgive you everything,” I said.
“Not everything,” Jack muttered.
Now Jack was far away. Brightening, I said, “Well, you could be worse off. In me he sees my mother and hates me for it. Always has. You’re different. He chose you. He’d have left me on Skid Road if he’d been able to square it with the book and the kirk and the bloody Battle of the Boyne.”
“The Glorious Twelfth,” said Jack.
The Pater’d preached the Word to the hard men of the camps past Lillooet, men like the Wolf and Jack’s father, who’d disappeared prospecting up the wash one autumn, never to return. When my father’d found Jack he was near feral, shivering and begging for scraps from the Chinese camp cooks and cruel Indians, a cur kicked away from the fire. Indebted for his escape, Jack had played Christian soldier for the Pater, and my upright father prized his wildness and charm, whereas I’d only been a reminder of what my father had lost. I’d killed her by being born.
So I waited and watched as we grew up together down in Vancouver, watched Jack with the prettiest girls and fastest friends, real five-cent sports. My Scripture first was as naught to Jack’s second or third. I turned away from John Knox and my father and delved into different patterns of belief. Jack was the golden lad, ace cricketer and scapegrace, romantic and dashing where I was quiet and dark. He led our gang and stole bottles of wine from Italian greengrocers and horses from Siwashes in Chinatown, cursing in Cantonese as I’d learn to, in emulation of my captain. When alone and away from under Jack’s flag I’d be waylaid by jealous enemies from rival gangs and be given a good thumping, too small to fight back and too damn proud to run. That was the Irish in me, taking a beating and liking it. From my father there was little save silence when I’d return home bruised and cut. Only the amah cared, swabbing my cuts in iodine while jabbering in Chinook.
My father was born an Ulster Scot but my mother’d been a real dark colleen from down in the south and Catholic to boot. How they’d met and married the Lord only knew. For an amah I had a Carrier Indian, my mother’s servant and somehow kinswoman, the Holy Ghost and Old Ones meeting and mingling with Manitou and Raven. When my mother died the amah nursed me. From her I learned the twinned secret mythologies of two broken people. All his life my father’s creed had been reason, education, and light. The faith of my mother was tricky and dark. Somehow I’d been made in neither image and was reflected in the quicksilver of Jack: friend, tormentor, blood brother, the man who was going to get me killed one day. I crushed a cigaret out on a greasy plate.
“Better,” said Jack, patting his belly.
After the Royale we went to Jack’s hotel. He’d moved to the Queen’s on Peel and was registered as Jack Greenmantle. Up in his room he excused himself to defecate and I found a bottle of cognac on the sideboard. The alcohol stung and cleaned my teeth as I thought of Laura and Bob, that Yankee bastard. You’ll settle his hash tonight. He hadn’t seen me as I watched them in that upstairs bedroom. Only Laura, her eye meeting mine in the darkness. There’d been a telling in her gaze, a kind of triumph laced with something I couldn’t define. I took another swallow and it came: she’d been expecting someone else. Who? Jack yanked the chain in the jakes and came out buttoning his trousers.
“Yesterday’s news,” he said.
He sat down and laid out the night’s plans. Including Bob, the three of us were going to hit the competition before they ever set foot on the Hatteras Abyssal. The ship was tied up at Queen Alexandra Pier. Jack and I had one motor and Bob would bring another. It was Trafalgar Night and the lion’s share of the police force would be marching in the parade or directing traffic. The plan’s virtue, Jack claimed, was in its simplicity.
“That’s what you said about the bootlegging and the picture house. And now look at us,” I said.
“It’s better this way,” said Jack. “I’m not Raffles the Gentleman Cracksman. Make a meticulous plan and it’ll go haywire. I want to be spontaneous, to improvise.”
“Christ, you’re like a stick-up poet.”
“There you’ve put it with a nicety,” Jack said.
“We were lucky before. This is pushing it.”
“Count your money and tell me about pushing it. How’d you get it, now? Did it come in the mail? You wouldn’t have the spondulicks if not for Yours Truly, Esquire.”
“I never asked for them. You volunteered me,” I said.
“Knowing you as I do. This is bootless, Mick.”
“Let’s go over the ground at least. Is that too much to be asking after?”
“Lead on.”
OUR STEPS TOOK US in the direction of the docks, the streets still radiating the day’s heat. I looked up at a spider’s web of tramway wires. Underfoot nubs on manhole covers had been worn flat by countless treads and the metal slipped. My coat hung heavy on me, steaming with the city. A motorcar nearby backfired and I flinched, my hand bouncing into my pocket. Jack laughed. Drunken late-season wasps crawled in the gutter outside a warehouse from whence the sickly reek of rotting fruit seeped forth. It might’ve been an alky-cooker distilling cheap fruit brandy. Minute quantities of wasp venom can trigger anaphylaxis in the allergic. Put a drop on a needle for the perfect crime. As far as I knew Jack had no natural nemesis. Mine was the lychee, a lesson learned in Chinatown.
“Wonder how that fellow you shot is doing?” Jack asked.
“The Senator’s jobbie? He deserved it. Like Bob.”
“Put your animus away for the evening,” Jack said.
“I said I would.”
“What you do after that’s no skin off mine.”
“Mighty white of you.”
“Ain’t it though? Here we are.”
We took a dekko along the pier, staying in motion so as not to draw attention. Jack narrated: “We’ll park there and wait. You’re in the motor and I’ll loiter with intent. Bob’ll be in another ’car. Four men are coming with the money. They’re making the trade onboard. We’ll hit them before they pull up to the gangplank.”
“What if the set-up’s different?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean last week we drove trucks to the border. Why’re they doing it here now?”
“Boats,” Jack said.
“And what’ll they have? Tommy guns or pistols or what?”
“That I don’t know,” said Jack.
“Christ.”
“What do you want? These operators have paid for the convenience. This isn’t a battleground like Chicago. Montreal’s been nice and quiet since Prohibition passed. Last week was an aberration. I was set up and now I’ve been cut out. Truthfully, I should be on the hook for the shipment lost but there’ve been no reprimands from Chicago, and do you know why? Because I was to be killed. I was crossed by my own masters for some damned reason and this is my payback. Now I’ve got the inside dope and aim to clean ’em out.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the consequences?”
“You’d better believe it,” Jack said.
“They pull up, and then what happens?”
“Damn the torpedoes.”
“What?”
“Full speed ahead.”
“You’re crazy. Ram them?”
“That’s right.”
“Not me,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because the damn things are full of petrol. They’ll explode.”
“If you’re yellow Bob can do it and you drive the getaway.”
“He’ll blow the works for sure. Fine, I’ll do it.”
“There’s the man.”
Jack smiled.
“What happens after I smash them?” I asked.
“I make the grab.”
“Then what?”
“You cover me and we hop in Bob’s sled.”
“Jesus. This is a really beautiful, well-conceived plan.”
“Ain’t it though?” asked Jack again, grinning that grin.
“Let’s get a drink and go over it again.”
“If we must,” said Jack.
“Believe me, we must.”
A long slog in silence took us back to relative civilization and we repaired to another saloon advertising sterilized glasses, ordering two filled up with beer.
“How much do you think this imbroglio’ll net us?” I asked.
“The run last week was smaller. This shipment’s about five times larger,” Jack said. “Say, twenty thousand.”
“It’s a damned complicated plot you’ve got us wound up in.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Jack said.
“Do you really think a bunch of boyos like us can take on this outfit?”
“Why the hell not?” asked Jack. “Who says a pack of lousy Italians are smarter than we? They’ve got the Black Hand but we’ve got the Brotherhood.”
“The Brotherhood? Are they in on this as well? Whose side are we on?”
“Our own,” Jack said.
“That’s reassuring.”
Jack put down his glass and became very still and serious. He pointed at me.
“Listen to me. What has anyone ever done for you? The King, the Brass Hats, the Archbishop of bloody Canterbury, that lot would’ve let you be chewed up into hamburger in France without a twinge of remorse, and all for a lie. Believe you me. Now those are the jokers I’d like to take on but they’ve got a little too much muscle for the moment. We’ll just have to wait for the global revolution. Meanwhile I want some elbow room, and that means money. We’re stealing from criminals, Mick. Worse comes to worst we get shot for our trouble. Tell me, what’s worth living for, eh?”
This was something to consider, but there was more. Jack said: “So we lived through the war. I’m not going to croak an old man in bed. It’s this or something else. What difference does it make?”
“That’s a damned convincing argument. You should have stood for the bar. A judge’d love that defence,” I said.
“To hell with it all,” Jack said, and drank.
I looked moodily into my sludgy glass, divining nothing. Perhaps Jack was a blind prophet. In the drinkery a deep burnt-oil smell pervaded and I drank more of the rotten stuff, choking it back.
“We’d better go and wind up that motor,” I said.
“Now you’re cooking with gas,” went my Tiresias.
ON DORCHESTER WE caught a ’cab and took it to the street where the Auburn sat parked. While walking to it I heard hot jazz in my head, as though a record was spinning within, like a movie house pianist accompanying my actions. Someday they’ll play recorded music at the cinema like a radio play and make a talking picture, with coloured film for verisimilitude. It’ll be closer to real life, like now. Look at the purple grease on the windscreen of the motor, the curled rusty leaves, the indigo sky. The music continued to play in my mind’s ear, as it were: “Hot Potato.” Jack got behind the wheel.
“Shame they can’t shoehorn a wireless into a ’car,” I said. “A body could listen to music while driving.”
“Distracting,” Jack said.
He motioned for the keys and we swung away. The evening sun crept down near the mountain. By taking side streets and quiet lanes we slotted the motor in an unmemorable siding. It was suppertime. Around the block at a dry-goods merchant we each purchased a bottle of medicinal ginger wine, neither Jack nor I in an aquabibulous frame of mind. The bottles held a nerve tonic and stomach settler. The storekeep uncorked one and its contents tasted of Angostura Bitters laced with rancid sugar. We left to tread down empty redolent alleyways leading away from the river, industry winding down at this hour in our obscure corner of the Empire.
What did we talk of? Jack reminisced and we laughed as the tonic made us merry. I put away my shallow resentments and entered the absurd spirit of the thing. The past was ephemeral and faintly ridiculous, a series of harebrained scrapes and foolish amours. As dusk thickened we evoked our lost world of the West: the taste of raw Walla Walla onions big as baseballs, pickled herring, and Indian candy from Ship’s Point on Vancouver Island where Cook had anchored near heaps of oyster shells. Finishing the medicine Jack dropped the corked empty bottle in the drink and the river’s current pulled it away to join flotsam clinging ’round a rowboat tied up near a small freighter. Ship’s rope groaned as Jack discreetly checked his weapon. I did likewise and spun the cylinder of my Mark IV. It was the same sidearm make I’d been issued with my pip. Jack stuck his in his belt under a buttoned jacket and unbelted overcoat. I kept mine safe in an outer pocket. Jack spat in the oily water. There wasn’t a soul about, though I heard a faint shouting from some streets behind us. My nine hundred dollars and change was safe upon me so I lit a cigaret and Jack’s with the same lucifer.
“Never three to a match,” Jack said. “First one the sniper spots, the second he aims, the third he fires.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“One of those bits of advice that travelled up and down the line. You heard it all: crucifixions in No Man’s Land, ghosts and the Angels of Mons. Dammit, though, it was impossible to tell truth from fiction there, the whole thing was too bloody unreal. Whole world went down the fucking rabbit hole and where it’s going now I don’t like to think.”
Jack looked at his ring awhile and then said: “There’ll be another war.”
“They’ll fight it with Zeppelins and heat-rays,” I said.
“Damn me I don’t know.”
“We’ll be gone before it starts anyhow.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jack said, and spat again.
That was him all over. One minute careless and blithe, then queerly sober. He checked his wristwatch.
“Waiting to go over was the worst of it,” he said, “waiting for the whistle.”
I yawned, cracking my temporomandibular joint loudly.
“No rest for the wicked,” continued Jack.
“Sleep in heaven,” I said.
“Or the other place.”
We completed a circuit and I looked into the dirty water. Gulls circled and dove. No river is the same river, so sayeth Heraclitus. The St. Lawrence poured towards the sea, thalassa, thalassa. Jack checked the time again.
“He’s late, the bastard.”
“Alors,” I said.
“Wait a minute.”
A ’car careened into the crossing near the jetty, the rendezvous between Duke and Nazareth by the train tracks. It was a fawn Oldsmobile that swerved to intersect with us. Jack held up his hand like a traffic cop and Bob braked to a clumsy halt. He rolled down the window and grinned sloppily.
“Goddammit man, you’re drunk,” Jack said.
“Ain’t you?” asked Bob.
“Get out and take some air.”
“Oke.”
Bob dismounted. To open my bottle of ginger wine I pushed the cork down its neck out of ugly necessity, then took a long swig of the restorative. I handed it to Jack, who pulled and passed the bottle to Bob. Bob looked at me a moment with no expression and I was dead certain he knew nothing of my attachment to Laura. I tamped down a panicky sort of anger. I didn’t like him, how he’d touched the love of my life. For the life I couldn’t figure why Jack wanted his help. Bob had caused that fracas in the whorehouse. He was unstable. I wanted to smash his pretty face in.
“Sláinte,” Bob said, passing the bottle back to me.
“Guid forder,” said I, and drank.
Dammitdammitgoddamnationchristinheavensaveus. Breathe. Maintain an outward mien of calm and spit away your corruption. George V is your liege and lord by the Orange Lodge and the Law of this Dominion, so fuck the Pope.
A ragged dog came out from behind a rubbish tip and coughed at us as we waited hidden in deep shadow. I made up my face into a rueful, close-lipped smile as the bottle did another round. When I went to light a fresh cigaret I found one burning in my hand. Time slowed with the universe, entropic. Birds flew southeasterly towards St. Helen’s Island. An old lamplighter came our way, the antique figure out of Cruikshank’s etchings for Dickens. His toil gave the streets a bluish tint as night fell completely. Jack handed me keys and nodded to Bob. The two drove the Olds to another position. I finished the wine and carefully placed the bottle on a rotten turnbuckle before walking to the Auburn, then made to check my pocketwatch before recalling how I’d failed to redeem it from hock. No matter. There was no music playing in my head now. I felt drained of life. As I sat behind the wheel I listened to my breath and the dull rhythm of my heartbeat. At least the medulla oblongata continued to function. Along my arm came the familiar ache.
Talk about slowness, those days strung out along the opaque dragon’s tail, lost in morphia. The endless dreams, the fading to lonely worlds, a glacial death often punctuated by restless strength and creative activity. That was the drug’s Janus effect, withering the body and feeding the mind. Nothing on earth had been worse than the panic I’d felt when my supply had been exhausted. Periodic opium raids in Chinatown had pushed me into a corner and the McGill beaks came ever so damned close to catching me out at the Royal Victoria red-handed.
The last visit to the hospital before brokering my departure from the school had been an off-chance of lax security. There were new locks on the door and Smiler was with Jacques Price, the pair dissecting a beggar in the downstairs morgue. Smiler and Price’s scalpelwork was no patch on my own, I was pleased to note. Jack and I’d butchered enough deer and moose in our youth to make us old hands at vivisection. Once the Pater had potted a bear out by Yale and brought most of it back to our house in the West End. He’d skinned it for a rug and I remembered finding a tin rubbish bin in the yard with its lid held down by a brick. Inside had been the animal’s head, alive with writhing white maggots stripping the flesh off the trophy. Later the amah’d boiled the skull clean and the Pater’d mounted it on a wall near my bedroom.
My childhood home had been a sort of emporium, the attic filled with books, charts, photoengravings, and testaments. In a trunk were my mother’s few surviving effects, her communion papers and a golden shamrock of the Apparition at Knock. My amah had died while I was in Victoria getting a baccalaureate, the house now another museum of a broken colonist family, near empty save for the Pater in his rocking chair.
Returning to the present and the automobile I found myself thirsty and yenned for a cup of tea. The old streetlamps cast an arctic glow. What’ll newspaper headlines read like tomorrow? This was a very serious crime we were on the verge of committing, a chancy undertaking. Illogically I trusted in Jack’s star. I’d play my part, was all, and do what was necessary. It’d been a long day already, the longest one yet. I closed my eyes.
And opened them again as a long white saloon car pulled in. From Jack’s sketchy form in the darkness came the Scout whistle. I started the Auburn and shifted into gear, the headlamps off, accelerating over the short distance to ramming speed. I saw startled clean-shaven faces staring my way as the machines collided. There was a crunch of tearing metal and I was thrown onto the wheel as I caved the saloon’s passenger side in. My chest burned as I pulled out the Webley and opened the door to step down onto the road. A neat job, Mick, I thought, as I pointed the barrel through the rear glass at a surprised middle-aged man in the back seat. Jack was shouting. There he was in front with his gun on the driver. The front passenger lay slumped over where the Auburn’s grille had met the wheelwell. A radiator hissed steam. Jack shouted something across the bonnet at the driver, who reached down. Jack fired. The man I was covering hunched and I pulled the trigger. Glass cracked and shattered and his head bucked forward. Jack came by the driver’s side while the last man put up his hands. Jack shot again and the cabin filled with black gore. He pulled the handle and a bloodied body with a ruined face fell out clutching a black leather case. Jack grabbed the satchel, his revolver smoking in his left fist. He turned to me and yelled: “Ankle!”
I looked up at the moored ship; the men on the deck were just starting to stir. It had been quick. We ran, hotfooting from the slaughter. Maybe half a minute had passed. Suddenly I was lucid, my body heaving as I followed after as fast as I could. We made it over slippery cobblestones to the idling Olds. Jack hauled open the rear left passenger door behind Bob.
“Go!” shouted Jack as we clambered in.
He threw the bag onto the front passenger seat. Bob engaged the gear and we were off, my heart screaming and ears roaring from the gunshots and the crash. My hand tingled as Bob veered crazily, fear making him stupider. He got the ’car under control as we turned up McGill.
“Shit,” he said.
A procession of torches and mounted policemen holding Union Jack banners blocked our way ahead, the Sons of England.
“Trafalgar Night,” shouted Jack. “Turn right!”
Bob swerved at the Customs House and now we were caught in the crooked warren of the Old Town, passing the firehouse and a small square with a thin rough obelisk at its centre. It was a rat run with the risk of getting trapped in an old byway behind a horse and wagon or running into an outriding constable from the parade. Bob was driving too fast.
“Slow down,” I said.
He turned to me with a vacant stare. The man was more than drunk, he was on dope. I could tell if anyone could.
“Slow down!” I said again.
Bob focused and came back to his senses. Jack was clenching his teeth and muttering, his gun still gripped in his hand. We rolled left through Place d’Armes and around the statue of Maisonneuve and an Iroquois brave covered in gullshit, tomahawk at the ready. From Notre-Dame bells rang the changes. What time was it? An arc onto St. Lawrence Main heading northerly and slowing when Bob’s arm suddenly swung around at me with a gun at its end. Before he could fire Jack’s right wrist came up in time. Bob shot through the roof and I was deafened. The Olds skidded and slewed as I clawed at the door latch and fell out, out of a moving Goddamned ’car. I landed hard on my side, rolling and losing my grip on the Webley. The machine pitched Jack out after me, turning an awkward somersault to hit his head on the pavement. My ears were screeching from the report as I watched Bob get away, the rear door flapping as he straightened the Olds’s route out and powered off. And with him, the money. I looked for pedestrians or bystanders or police but we were lucky, lost on a rough corner with only a scavenging rag-and-bone man lurking in a dark storefront with his pushcart, near Craig and a long way from cover as my mind scrambled for what to do.
Jack waved and shouted as he rose. He staggered to pick up his hat and trotted off blindly. I scooped up my weapon and followed, pain coursing through every fibre and furious, ready to kill again. Jack turned up an alley and I knew where we were, able now to make out what Jack’s mouth was shouting: “Chinatown.”
MY REFLECTION IN A PANE of glass amethyst from the glow of a neon sign. I was a lean monkey with a gun in his hand. For a moment I could picture myself many-armed and fierce as a Hindoo idol, wielding knives dripping blood. I ran through the little quartier chinois and in another window saw a heterogeneous collection of objects: a wooden Confucius painted vermilion, shadow puppets from the Dutch East Indies, a Moslem screen of a white-veiled man before a dazzling blue peacock, a green copper bust of Emperor Augustus, dominus et primus inter pares. I kept burning shoe leather trying to catch up with Jack and wondered how much the Celestials were charging for Caesar.
Ahead of me Jack stopped, looked back, and hustled down a grimy stone staircase to a subterranean entryway. He rapped a sequence. The door opened and Jack pushed in past a small Chinaman in his pajamas. Bitter opium smoke and sweat drifted as I followed. My sense of smell was strangely acute, perhaps compensating for my deafness. I also tasted cordite and petrol. Sounds came faintly to me as the ringing in my ears lessened in intensity. I heard Jack bark in his rough honking Cantonese: “Hem ga san puk gai.” Out of my way.
He grabbed a skinny fellow by the neck and barked: “Kwan!”
Jack pushed the Chinaman down a flight of wooden steps leading deeper underground. I roughed my way in and shouldered the door closed behind me. My vision adjusted to make out cat-eyes glittering in the light of burning spills for the pipes. We were a fearsome sight for drugged Orientals: a pair of armed gwai lo barbarians with big noses sniffing at the stink. In the gloom I thought I saw a white woman being ministered to. This sewer was a crypt and I wanted a better way out but had to follow Jack down. The scene was something out of a pulp journal, the dread den of the dragon. Its inhabitants didn’t put up much fight and I pushed them away like yellow scarecrows.
A flickering electric bulb in the next room had the effect of turning everything into a staccato Zoetrope reel. Brass pots bubbled with a hellish brew while a wet Norway rat cowered by a sewer grating. Noise beyond led me out of the foul kitchen into a chamber with a stove and a table surrounded by fan tan players. A serene picture of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen faced me. Jack still held the skinny beggar by the scruff, then shouted loud enough for me to hear: “Police.”
I came in and backed his play, growling: “Nobody breathe.”
Jack shoved his captive to the ground and turned to me. There was a wildness to him, effect of shock and the blow to his head. He cocked his revolver and the gamblers sat still as hypnotized chickens. What was his intent?
“I want Kwan,” he said, as though to answer.
In the table’s centre was the black numbered square surrounded by money. The croupier had a downturned bowl in front of him. Jack stood still but seemed unbalanced: blood on his forehead, collar undone, coat torn. The gamblers let their cigarets burn. Six players sat ’round the table and the wretched coolie sprawled on the floor made seven. Jack reached over and lifted up the bowl. The croupier looked a dry stick with a thin beard. He betrayed nothing as the buttons spilled on the tabletop. Jack put the bowl on the man’s head, a terrible affront.
“Kwan,” Jack said, almost politely.
Still nothing. I was becoming nervous. We were trapped down here in an underground dead-end. The upstairs servants might’ve signalled for help and we’d be boxed in neatly. I held my gun at my side and was having trouble concentrating. The heavy odours and the stolid Chinese, with their blank faces and dark slitted eyes, unsettled me. One was holding a clay cup of tea. I felt like fainting. Jack hit the croupier a sickening blow to the head with his Webley. He shoved the counters off the table and gathered up the money.
“Kwan,” he repeated.
Jack stuck the barrel in the mug of a little shrimp wearing a collarless shirt. Clockwise he went from face to face. Jack’s mouth was open and spittle slavered off his jaw. He settled on a Fu Manchu type by me who lifted a bony hand. I saw light through long transparent fingernails and jabbed my gun in the gambler’s back. He twitched, then very slowly the victim moved a finger and pointed at the stove. Jack went to touch it and laughed. With a straining heave he pulled the stove away from the wall to reveal a gap with yet more stairs leading down.
“Get that,” Jack said, pointing at a light. “I’m going in. Stay here and cover me.”
I handed him the oil lamp. He crouched and went into the hole. I kept up a forbidding façade for the Chinamen but was outmatched by their studied impassivity. They were damned lucky to be here in Montreal. An act was passed by government a few years back against all Oriental immigration. No more Gold Mountain. In Vancouver I’d been a child when the Asiatic Exclusion League had smashed windows throughout Chinatown. Had they half a chance these characters would make me into chop suey as recompense.
Jack’s voice came from somewhere far away and I shuffled to the hole.
“Mick. Mick,” he said.
“What?”
“Come down. Watch your head.”
I took the stairs backward with the circle of motionless watchers staring at me, statues in a tomb. I turned and another dozen steps brought me to a narrow way filled with rotting burlap. A light flickered ahead as I came to a room lined with shelves stacked with old fowling pieces, rusty pikes and swords, a set of measuring weights, pots of opium, and boxes labelled in Chinese. Jack stood in the middle with a laughing man wearing a real pig-tail.
“Kwan here thinks it’s funny I took their money,” Jack said.
“Very funny, very funny,” Kwan said.
“Some joke,” I said.
My eyes roamed this Aladdin’s cave and my heart stopped when I saw a familiar rectangle of black metal. Jack and Kwan bantered and Kwan handed Jack an automatic pistol, a Browning. While they were occupied haggling I sidled over to the object of interest and opened it up. My nerves thrilled and pain receded. I closed the box and turned back to the pair. Jack gave Kwan some money and they shook hands curiously. When I pocketed the black box I tipped over Jack’s oil lamp. It smashed to the ground and I jumped back as the oil spilled over sacks and wicker pots. Jack and Kwan turned as flames spread to the shelves. In the enclosed space the smoke started choking and the fire blocked the way back upstairs. Kwan swore and hopped over to a corner where he began scrabbling at the wall. Jack staggered in the poisonous smoke and I pulled him over to the Chinaman. Kwan found what he was looking for and the wall crumbled away. We shoved into a recess and to a ladder leading up. Jack yanked Kwan down from it and started pulling himself up. I followed suit and kicked at Kwan as he clawed at me. Jack pounded on a trapdoor above through the thickening smoke and finally cracked it open in a shower of rust and dirt. He pushed up and out and I came after into an alley crowded with rubbish bins and restaurant waste. Smoke poured from the secret shaft and we could hear a rising wail around the corner. Kwan’s head poked out the ground as we dragged ourselves to the alley mouth.
“Du nu loh moa!” he screamed at me, then in English: “You son of bitch.”
“Shut up,” I said.
He came at me but I pulled out my gun and pointed it at him. It was too much and I was exhausted.
“Bugger off,” I said.
He spat and stamped and slouched away, shaking his fist at me. Jack was laughing broadly, tears streaming down his face.
“You’re a wonder, Mick, really you are. You truly have a gift.”
I was now lightheaded from the dope smoke but had enough presence of mind to straighten up and help Jack walk away as machine guns started clattering.
“Firecrackers,” Jack said.
Jabbering Chinese ran about and one had already wrenched open a fire hydrant as others began a bucket brigade. More limped and scattered away from what would soon be a welter of firemen and police. Jack and I went along St. Urbain and turned left. In a few minutes we were on a quiet street behind St. Patrick’s, where D’Arcy McGee had lain in state after he’d been assassinated in Ottawa. And where was Louis Riel? Buried facedown with a stake through his heart for treason. Old Tomorrow had said, as I did now: “He shall hang though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.”
From the neighbourhood came a rising howl of wolves roused by the fire engine and ruckus. My hearing had improved. The St. Patrick’s bell rang eight times. Only eight o’clock. It felt much later, the witching hour. Jack sat on the grass near an old wall. I stamped my feet to keep the blood moving. It was cold and I remembered I had nowhere to stay.
“That was bloody marvellous, Mick,” said Jack, shaking his head.
“It was an accident.”
“Of course it was. You’ve a rare talent. The perfect capper to a hell of a night.”
“I agree.”
“Now then, have you any money?” asked Jack.
“Don’t tell me you’re skint again,” I said.
“’Fraid so.”
“Well then.”
That son of a bitch Bob. It was the least I could do to give Jack two hundred dollars without asking where or how he’d lost his own stake. It meant I was down below seven hundred, but I held a hole card that’d make money irrelevant.
“What’re you thinking?” I asked.
“I was thinking how I’ve been nursing a viper at my breast this whole while. Dammit but I was napping.”
“Bob?”
“Aye. Now that Kwan’s buggered I’ve lost a line. What a balls-up. It’s going to take some time to straighten this mess out.”
“I could use some rest myself,” I said disingenuously.
“All right. We’ll split up for the time being. Were I you I’d change hotels.”
“Easy enough.”
“It’s Friday night. Check in a few days at the Hotel X for a message, name of Conrad.”
“You want any help?” I asked.
“Not just now. The money’s enough.”
“What’re you going to do?” I asked.
“Tace is Latin for candle, old man,” Jack said.
“Well I won’t whisper. We’ve done it now. Murder.”
Jack sized me up a moment.
“There is that. The wheel spins.”
He got to his feet.
“Remember, the Hotel X,” he said.
“Oke.”
Jack shook his head and reeled off into the darkness. I walked until I came back to Bonaventure. In the station I read an advertisement on a board for the Hotel Boniface so I telephoned in advance for a room, then walked over to Windsor Station and picked up my bag. In the grill I ate a hasty sandwich, drank a coffee, and pocketed a spoon. The hotel was on Dorchester and en route I stopped at a night-owl chemist for an apparatus. At the Boniface I signed the book Thomas Scott, paid three days in advance and asked for a candle. Upstairs behind a locked door I cleaned my hands and face in hot water with soap. I lit the candle, took out the vial from the black metal box I’d stolen, and began. Carefully I tipped salts into a spoon. The colour of the grains told me it was indeed morphine, not heroin, a relief. I fitted together a new hypodermic needle from the drugstore and bound my arm tightly with a towel. The salt and water solution I heated in the spoon and when it was ready I filled the device, drew the mixture, and injected myself. Slowly I blew out the candle, felt pain withdraw, and soon was gone to another place far away.