Wandering through Piccadilly one night he was drawn into his first, admittedly spurious, acquaintance with Canada through a theatrical poster.
EGYPTIAN HALL
Piccadilly
JUST ARRIVED
Canadian North American
INDIANS!
Will perform at the above hall, at 2 o’Clock in the afternoon, & 8 o’Clock in the Evening
A Grand Indian Council
In front of the Wigwam, when the whole Party will appear in FULL NATIVE COSTUME,
Displaying all the Implements of War.
THE CHIEF
Will Shoot An Apple Off A Boy’s Head!
A Facsimile of Scalping!
Never before attempted in this country
THE WAR DANCE
In which the Indians will give a true Specimen of the FURIOUS RAGE with which feelings are aroused against their adversary at an approaching conflict.
BURYING THE HATCHET, AND SMOKING
THE CALUMET (OR PIPE) OF PEACE.
A slash glued to the poster announced:
Entirely due to Sacred ABORIGINAL RITES
There will be no Performances,
Wednesday, Oct. 8 or Thursday, Oct. 9.
Thrilled by the events in Egyptian Hall, but naggingly suspicious of the chief, Ephraim slipped backstage after the performance. Voices were raised in the chief’s dressing room.
“Paskudnyak! Mamzer!”
“Hok mir nit kayn tchynik.”
“Ver derharget!”
His doubts happily confirmed, Ephraim kicked open the door. The hirsute, barrel-chested chief instantly dived behind a screen. His plump raging wife scooped up a hatchet.
“Izzy, come on out of there.”
“Ephraim!”
The two old lags embraced. “I told you I’d find you,” Izzy said, and then turning to his wife he added, “This lad here can set bones almost as well as I can. You can’t teach these things. You’ve got to have the touch.”
They repaired through greasy fog to a garlicky, smoke-filled basement kitchen in Soho that kept open late to cater to the troupe as well as other dubious night people. Buxom waitresses in stained lowcut blouses sailed through the jostling crowd, hoisting tankards of ale even as they slapped probing hands, their curses drowned in a cacophony of Yiddish, Greek, and Italian. In a gas-lit corner, an old jeweller, one eye sprouting a magnifying glass, bargained with a solemn moustachioed Sikh. At Izzy’s table, platters of chopped liver and shmaltz herring were followed by steaming trays of stuffed derma, boiled flanken, kasha drenched in chicken fat and potato kreplach. Shouting over the din, Ephraim congratulated Izzy on the full house at the Egyptian Hall and then asked why there would be no performances on the Wednesday and Thursday of the following week.
Affronted, Izzy replied, “I think it would be most inappropriate for us to perform the war dance on Yom Kippur.”
“Gottzedank,” Mrs. Garber said.
What finally brought Ephraim down, as it would many times in the future, was a dangerous admixture of vanity, lust, and recklessness. Many a night he entertained two particularly pert Irish girls, the Sullivan sisters, in his attic rooms. The obliging sisters, who lived in the same lodging house as he did, thrived as palmers by day, prostitutes by night. On occasion Ephraim, in a mood to go on the randy, would treat the two of them to an evening at the Eagle, splurging on a box. Not for the small profit involved, but because he enjoyed the sport of it, there were nights when Ephraim would go out bug-hunting with them. The sisters, posted under a gas lamp, would lure a likely, prosperous-looking drunk, preferably a country bumpkin, into buying them a tot in a gin-shop where Ephraim waited. Jammed tight against the crowded bar, Dotty would stroke him, lick his ear, and sing softly:
Meanwhile Kate would pick his pocket and usually that’s all there was to it. But if the victim caught on to what was happening, making a fuss, then Ephraim would be called upon to act as the sisters’ stickman. Simulating outrage, he would elbow through to the victim, vociferous in his defence, assuring him that he had seen everything. Then, as soon as Kate had slipped him the booty, he would rush off, ostensibly to fetch a peeler, but actually hurrying back to his lodging to await the girls, a bottle of claret uncorked on his bedside table. If necessary, back in the gin-shop the girls would submit to a useless search, protesting their innocence, bawling at their offended modesty, until the embarrassed victim would flee into the fog.
Bug-hunting became such a plague that questions were raised in parliament. Irate citizens wrote to the Times, inveighing against Scotland Yard’s ineptitude. And so, inevitably, one night the sisters’ victim turned out to be a police detective, working with an accomplice of his own. The accomplice, another detective, followed Ephraim out of the gin-shop, nabbing him as he was about to enter his lodging house. Even so, Ephraim might have got off with another six-month sentence, but the detective insisted on a visit to his rooms.
“You don’t understand, sir,” Ephraim said. “I don’t live here among the Ikey Pigs and I had no idea that those girls had slipped that gentleman’s purse into my pocket.”
“Why did you stop here, then?”
“You will think badly of me, sir, but I had come to await those wicked girls in their rooms. My father was taken from us at Trafalgar and now my poor widowed mother will be undone. I am a victim of my own lust.”
But a closer search of Ephraim’s waistcoat yielded one of the calling cards he had foolishly had printed and the address was the same. The detective and Ephraim proceeded to his attic rooms, where the work table was strewn with begging letters awaiting pick-up by clients. Burglar’s tools, actually not Ephraim’s but held by him for a ticket-of-leave man of his acquaintance, were discovered in the closet. A brace and bit fitted with a large, adjustable cutting head; a jemmy; a set of pick-locks and a peter-cutter. A desk drawer turned out to be filled with forged official seals. Another drawer contained a harvest of silk handkerchiefs, the property of the Sullivan sisters, but no matter. As the detective began to make notes, Ephraim lunged at him, knocking him off his feet, and flew down the stairs right into the waiting arms of the other detective, who had just entered the lodging house with the Sullivan sisters in tow.
“There he is,” Dotty squealed, “the fancyman who forced us into a life of sin.”
“He takes all our money,” Kate hollered.
Two
The fat pulpy man from the DEW line station offered him twenty dollars, but Isaac wouldn’t do it. Instead he continued as before. For five dollars he met the man once a week in the toilet of the Sir Igloo Inn Café and pumped his thing until it squirted. This time, however, the man gave him two hand-rolled cigarettes as well. “It’s a special kind of tobacco, kid. If you like it, and you want more, maybe we can talk again about the other deal.”
Isaac couldn’t spend his earnings going to a movie because they didn’t have one. They didn’t have anything in Tulugaqtitut. Bored, an irritated Isaac drifted through the settlement, cursing it. He paused at his customary vantage point, the one that offered him a view of Agnes McPhee’s bedroom. She seldom drew the curtains, and more than once he had seen Agnes going at it with one of the bush pilots, her quivering naked legs reaching for the ceiling. But today he couldn’t even catch her undressing. So Isaac wandered into the Hudson’s Bay trading post, Ian Campbell instantly alert, setting aside his ledgers to watch him. “Hey, Isaac,” Campbell called out, playing to the other customers, “has your father decided on which kind of boat yet?”