A late supper, a strange bed, Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin. Or had he been rolling with Esmeralda? Noble opens his eyes, scratchy with lack of sleep, headache compressing his skull. His nerves jangle, his mind trying to catch up with the events of the past few days. A kaleidoscope of fractured sounds and broken images that flit by too rapidly for him to do more than watch: Spoon and the gun, Jem playing on the beach with Butler and his kids, Mary and her note, the doctor’s hand on his arm, Esmeralda’s kiss, last night’s desolate walk along the dockyards, Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin. It’s a wonder he slept at all.
Turning over, his glance falls on the book pulsing at the edge of his bedside table. He shoves it under his pillow, sits to extricate his feet from the tangled bed sheet, swings his legs over the side of the bed and pushes himself up. The room faces west; the wooden floor is cold. His legs shake as he stands and his shoulder throbs as if someone was swinging on his arm half the night. Stiff, he moves like an old man. Characters in stories undergo a very intensive and concentrated existence. Yeah, yeah, Elinor, that’s for sure.
After using the toilet down the hall Noble pours frigid water from a crazed-glaze jug into a matching bowl on the washstand in his room, scrapes a square of hard soap over his skin and rubs himself down with the thin scratchy towel. He appraises himself in the dresser mirror, casting his eyes across his bare chest, the ravaged skin and muscle that is his left shoulder. It looks as if some wild animal has been chewing on him. Noble likes to think Esmeralda would have run her hands gently over the raw and angry-looking bumps and ridges, he affords her that much charity. Look at the company she keeps. Lillian would. Mary, once she’d overcome her initial distaste, had been fixated, had even seemed to enjoy the idea of his wound. In a braver moment Noble had started to tell her the story behind the injury but she’d stopped him before he could finish. She didn’t want to hear it.
Washed, dressed, hair attended to with wet fingers, teeth the same. Noble glances round the room for anything he might be forgetting. What about me? the book screams from beneath the pillow. He has to admit he’s disappointed. Not with the titillation, bravo Elinor on that score. But with the book’s lack of subtlety. Where are all those high ideals espoused in System of Writing? About finding material in the most ordinary places. And choosing ideas because they mean a lot to the writer, they have significance that the writer wishes to impress upon the reader. Apparently she doesn’t heed her own advice.
He should leave the book behind, hide it under the bed. He bends to look, grubby pockets of dust, a layer of grit. It would be a while before anyone found it there: weeks, months. They couldn’t connect it to him. He straightens. Noble has made few purchases in his life. To leave the book behind without having finished reading it seems not only a thoughtless waste of money but wrong somehow. Perhaps he owes it to Paul and the mysterious lady to see their adventure through to the end. Of course it will end. Such affairs have no future, not even within the confines of a book.
When Noble steps outside, it is obvious he has slept in. He had wanted an early start, but the sun has already climbed a portion of the sky and Halifax is bustling. In the years he’s been away from the city motor traffic has increased. And switched over to the right side. The street is filled with carts and trams and motorcars and delivery boys on bicycles, the sidewalks with pedestrians, shoppers, people all in a rush to go about their business. And beggars. Lots of beggars. Flotsam and jetsam from the war. Young men who don’t look so young anymore. Those who made it back to their hometowns and villages are secreted away by their families. A spare room, the attic. Summers on the back porch. But for those still ambulatory, still capable of rage, their world is now the more anonymous streets of Halifax. They hold out their hands as people pass, impale them with their haunted stares. Those who have eyes, that is, for a goodly number of these men are blind. Others are amputees. Some are masked, or partially so, protecting the innocent once again. These men fought alongside his brother. They might even have known him. Noble considers stopping one or two and asking, but they smell of anger or despair or both; it rolls off their ragged clothes in toxic clouds, fouling the air. Their wounds make a mockery of his. It wasn’t even a training wound. It was just a random accident.
He’d been walking down a country lane in the middle of the night. Noble and Lawson and some other men from their outfit. They’d been supping a few beers at the pub in the village. He heard the truck coming, but it was dark, and with the curfew and everything, its lights were off. He stepped out of the way. Or so he thought. The wing mirror was long and low. Pain arced through his shoulder and out through his mouth, blood in a spurt, the force cracking his shoulder blade, shredding muscles and tendons. His right arm danged uselessly, longer than his left. He’d spent six weeks in hospital, splinted and immobilized, and then he’d been discharged. The army had no use for a soldier who couldn’t raise his firing arm above his shoulder.
Noble turns from the veterans, fingering the change in his pockets, sorting it by size and shape, and makes his way towards the harbour.
Noble has to ask six or seven different people before he finds someone who may have heard of Will Brooks. Butler’s information isn’t as reliable as he thinks it is. Either that or Will Brooks is small potatoes in a city this size. The man points to an office atop a stone building. An office? Noble was expecting a shady doorway down an unpaved lane somewhere. The man up there may be able to help him. Noble opens the nondescript door and climbs a flight of stone stairs. In a room overlooking the water he finds a florid-faced, heavy-jowled man seated at a large oak desk. The man has a pencil behind his ear and a telephone receiver in his hand, either about to make a call or just finishing one. He replaces it in its cradle when he spots Noble.
“Can I help you, son?” Noble hasn’t been called son since he can’t remember when.
“Will Brooks?”
“Who’s asking?” The man frowns, narrows his eyes, but not before Noble catches a flash of curiosity. A man with a prosperous girth, he shifts in his chair and leans back. Still, he looks ready to pounce.
“I’ve come from Kenomee village, up on the Minas Basin.”
“And what might that be to me, son?” Noble had been hoping Will Brooks would be able to fill in the blanks himself.
“There was a schooner moored up there this past week.” Brooks stares at Noble with the patronizing boredom of a teacher listening to his pupil’s explanation. “The Esmeralda.” Brooks straightens in his chair and leans forward, elbows on his desk.
“And this Esmeralda is where now?”
“Couldn’t say. Somewhere between here and the Bay of Fundy, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Noble. Noble Matheson.” he wants to bite his tongue off. Why did he give the man his real name?
“And who sent you to see me, Noble Matheson?”
“The first mate. Fellow by the name of spoon.” Butler may know of Will Brooks, but there’s no reason Will Brooks has to know of Butler.
Brooks steeples his hands in front of his face, sucks at his lips. “So you’re here to tell me there’s some cargo ready for pickup.” He pauses a moment. “Some special cargo.” It isn’t a question, but Noble nods anyway. It’s a relief he doesn’t have to explain himself, but it makes him nervous to learn that other people know about the Esmeralda and the booze. He glances out of Brooks’s window across at the docks. How many other people out there might be in on the game? And are any of them already on their way to Kenomee? What else do they know? A picture of Jem waving goodbye after jumping down from the back of his truck. Please to God no one else can connect the boy to him.
“Good enough then.” Will Brooks reaches for the phone again. Noble is still standing by the man’s desk. An awkward silence passes before he understands he’s being dismissed. He came all the way from Kenomee for that? Couldn’t someone have called Brooks on his telephone or sent the man a wire? In code? That would depend on who was on the warpath for all that liquor. He turns to leave. “close that door behind you, would you, son?” Brooks calls out. “Oh, and by the way, I fired Will Brooks about ten days ago.”
Noble, hand on the door, spins on his heel but receives such a cold blank stare that he thinks better of a retort and turns and picks his way back down the stairs.
Now what? He’s not only no closer to finding Brooks but he’s probably tipped someone else off. What an idiot he is. What made him assume the man was Brooks? he hadn’t said so. Stupid, stupid. Why couldn’t he have been more wary? More suspicious? A great sleuth he’d make. Butler isn’t going to be happy. Has Noble foolishly unleashed a course of events he’ll live to regret? He steps back into the sunlight. He will recheck every loading bay and graving dock, ask everyone who crosses his path. He will find Will Brooks if it takes all day.
O’Malley’s is in the building next door to the New Halifax Hotel. Noble glances up at the façade. He climbs the stairs to the second floor, knocks in the manner he’s been told to and enters when the door is opened by a jumpy ferret of a man. Little attention has been given to decor. A naked bulb suspended on a cord from the ceiling casts harsh unequivocal light upon the room and its occupants. Grey complexions match the grey walls. A woman stands at a sink in the corner, her hands hovering over a jug. A makeshift bar of old bookcases separates her from the men.
Will Brooks, at least the man who fits the description Noble has been given, is drunk. He can scarcely keep himself balanced on the stool. Noble approaches the man but the woman steps into his path, her hand on the jug of rum. She pours him a glass and Noble forks over twenty-five cents, knowing that to refuse a drink will raise an alarm. For although the clientele are lounging half-drunk in and over the hodge-podge collection of stools and easy chairs, the proprietors are skittish and gruff with caution, poised at the first whiff of trouble to fling the illegal contents of their jug and glasses down the sink and bolt. Noble glances towards the tall window in the centre of the far wall. It opens onto a balcony, and he wonders if the drop is clear or whether he’d twist his ankle or, worse, break his legs if forced to flee. Conversely, if a liquor inspector were to suddenly appear in that window, having climbed up onto the balcony, could he make it back out the door in time? He cannot afford to add a conviction for consumption to his troubles. As it is he’ll have to spend another three dollars on a hotel room, now that it’s too late in the evening to start the long drive back to Kenomee. He regrets having handed over quite so much change to the men on the streets. He could sleep outside. But there are police patrolling the streets, this isn’t the village, they have vagrancy laws in Halifax. He could try his luck with the veterans maybe, unbutton his shirt and show them his shoulder, claim a kind of kinship. But with the run of luck he’s had so far, he’d likely end up in the city jail, closer to Esmeralda than he might wish to be.
Taking the small glass from the woman’s chapped hands, he puts it to his lips, tastes the fiery molasses. His stomach heaves, not having forgiven him yet for the Bushmills assault. He saunters over to Will Brooks, sagged against the bar, feeling both the woman’s and her partner’s eyes trained on him the whole time. A new face. Not to be trusted.
“Will Brooks?” The man either doesn’t hear him or pretends not to. “Your name is Will Brooks?” Head bobbing on his scrawny neck, the man turns slowly to stare at his interlocutor. Bleary eyes try to focus, lips part as if to speak, but no words come out. He belches a vile cocktail of stale alcohol and tooth decay. Will Brooks, whoever he is in the world of rum running, is rotting from the inside out. He places a shaky hand on Noble’s arm, brushing the Elinor Glyn book in his unsteady trajectory. Noble flinches. “You are Will Brooks, right?”
“Who wants to know?” A voice behind him. The ferret man at his elbow. “He can’t help you, whatever you might be looking for, mate. Comes in here for a quiet drink is all. Yous best be leaving him alone.”
“I have a message for him.”
Ferret man plucks the stub of a carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear, offers it to Noble. “You got a message, you write him a note.” Noble takes the pencil, wrinkling his nose as the man leans in closer. His clothes and skin reek, a more acrid and offensive smell than that of the begging servicemen. “Then you finish your drink and I’m gonna ask you to leave, fella. Nice and quiet.”
Noble lifts his glass and empties a third of its contents into his mouth. His eyes water and his nose runs. “Good grog, this. Might be tempted to stay for a couple more.”
“You finish that one, then you go.”
The minute the man’s back is turned, Noble is whispering Will Brooks’s name again.
It’s hopeless, Brooks is too far gone to comprehend language, and in the next instant, the danger he’s in. The door bursts open and two men enter.
“Liquor inspector, no one move,” the first one shouts as the woman dumps the contents of her jug. The policeman behind him bolts towards her. They struggle and the jug shatters on the floor at their feet. Ferret man, making for the window, briefly distracts the inspector, who, whether from excitement or stupidity, failed to lock the door behind him, and Noble seizes his chance. Grabbing Will Brooks by his jacket collar, he hoists him from the stool towards the door. Miraculously Brooks is able to put one foot in front of the other, at least he isn’t tripping, and the two make their way quickly down the stairs and out into the street. Noble marches Brooks around the corner and into a nearby alley. But Brooks’s cooperation, however involuntary, is short-lived. His feet stumble and his knees buckle until Noble is doing little more than dragging the man. They’ve covered only half a dozen yards or so before Noble has to lean him up against the wall so that he can rest his painful shoulder. Brooks slides to the ground and promptly passes out. Noble slaps him across the face a number of times, shakes him by his shoulders, but it’s no use. Should he leave him and come back in the morning? But there’s no knowing when Brooks will awaken or whether the police will find him in the meantime.
There’s nothing for it but to get Brooks to his hotel room. Noble squats to shoulder the comatose man to standing position, and then the sound of hurried footsteps reaches his ears. It won’t be long before his pursuer discovers which alley he’s dodged into.
Noble drops Will Brooks, cringing as the man’s head bounces off the wall with a sickening thud. His first instinct is to run. But the picture of Jem playing with Butler on the beach is burned into his conscience. He places his fingers under Brooks’ chin, searching for a pulse, and realizes he’s still clutching ferret man’s pencil. For the first precious seconds his mind is a complete blank. Then it comes to him: Esmeralda’s bagged a Moose.
“Hey, you there. Halt. stop what you’re doing.” Quickly he scribbles Butler’s message on the paper bag from the bookstore and then, rum water fuelling his legs, takes off up the alleyway. Elinor Glyn would be perspiring under her hatband.