The Man Who Killed (21 page)

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.