The Man Who Killed (18 page)

“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.