“The South’ll rise again! Sic semper tyrannis!”
Jack roared down Chambord and I crawled in a window. Perhaps my cerebellum had been damaged by the blow I’d received. I was having trouble thinking, and everything was hilarious: Jack lighting a cigaret while driving with his knees, the sign on a storefront of a gap-toothed idiot sucking up spruce beer with a straw, the startled looks of pedestrians as we rocketed along the quiet street.
My hands only started shaking as I broke open the cylinder of my revolver and removed the spent cartridge. Jack was driving erratically, weaving along and finally stalling out by Lafontaine Park. We traded places and I turned right on Rachel and then left to line up with the clock tower at Victoria Quay. We rolled along downhill and crossed St. Catherine, then worried our way in low gear westerly to Griffintown and Jack’s hideout. I parked the motor on a dismal block behind a pile of empty chicken coops and kept the keys. The Auburn looked out of place in this part of town but we were too walloped to do much else. At a corner store I bought a bag of cracked ice and from under the counter a bottle of overproof rum. Jack sat on the curb in front of the building, his head in his hands.
“Come on,” I said.
I helped him through the entranceway and up to the third floor. Jack managed to pull out the large key and open the door. He made it to the bed and fell into a swoon. I collapsed into a chair, where I sat still for a spell and blinked out.
LATER ON I heard a voice.
“Charlie got his revenge,” Jack said.
“And how,” I groaned.
“Should’ve known better, dealing with a lawyer.”
“He was ahead of us,” I said. “It was a trap.”
“Didn’t give him enough credit.”
Jack nursed his face with ice balled up in a stained cloth. I lifted the rum bottle, cracked its seal, and added melting ice from the waxpaper bag to a chipped cup. George V’s own. Dusk now upon us. Jack took out his medicine and rubbed cocaine powder on his gums to numb the pain. I sniffed a little for renewed pep. We were well-hid in this bolt-hole but it felt as though the other shoe was about to drop. What I’d liked least about the Senator’s talk was his threat of the police; they’d been far too absent throughout our series of crimes. Jack and I had operated in a vacuum, abhorrent in nature. Bootlegging, armed robbery, and now a shooting. The man might bleed to death. Testing my sentiments I was interested to discover that I didn’t care. Sensation had been dimmed by the shock of my beating, further blunted by the drug and drink.
“Do you think the Senator’ll set the dogs on us?” I asked.
“No. His hands’re too dirty.”
“What about the shipment tomorrow?”
“He doesn’t know about that.”
“Are you certain?”
“Fairly.”
“That’s bloody reassuring.”
Time slipped by as Jack and I coughed over Charlie’s Caporals. I examined my fingernails and smelled my hands for tell-tale residue. There remained the faint aroma of gunpowder. Jack grimaced.
“Nice shot,” he said.
“You ever plug anyone?” I asked.
“Germans, mostly.”
“Maybe we should take the fat man’s advice and get out of town while we can,” I said.
“We will. After tomorrow. Now it’s war.”
“Plains of Abraham redux,” I said.
“Best two of three,” Jack laughed
We fell into talking Lower Canada: of English and French, Wolfe and Montcalm, Benjamin Arnold, Thomas Jefferson, Na-poleon, Louisiana, and the Empress Josephine. To be followed by a little treason concerning the King and Emperor of India, and how we might depose the throne in the name of Marxism and an international revolution of the proletariat.
“That Stalin’s a tough bugger,” Jack said.
“United Soviet States of America,” I said.
From nowhere a crow flew past the window, barely visible in the growing gloom. The bird the first corbeau I’d ever seen in Montreal, or the first I’d ever noticed. Its wings scratched like an umbrella opening and closing, or the black taffeta dress of a particular waitress at the Cherry Bank Restaurant long ago. What was her name? When it came I sang: “K-K-K-Katie, beautiful Katie, you’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore. When the m-m-m-moon shines over the c-c-c-cowshed I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.”
Jack lay on the bed, his necktie unknotted. I refilled my glass and swallowed more kerosene. I’d shot a man, and might be a murderer. I was a criminal. No more peace, order, and good government whilst Mick was around. The Pater’d be mortified. This drinking and fornication and more. And what was he doing on the other side of the Dominion? Three hours earlier there. Four o’clock. He’d be taking a nap.
“What’re we up against with this Senator?” I asked.
Jack motioned for more rum. I checked his face. He winced as I touched the bloated flesh.
“How’re your teeth?”
“Loose.”
The glass protecting the print of St. Veronica reflected my own map back, eyes like pissholes in snow.
“Who is he?”
“A Grit,” Jack said.
“That’s plain.”
“I was bagman for the party last election and did some other things as well.”
“Such as?”
“Running a crew in the cemeteries writing down names of the recently deceased so we could use them to vote at the polls. That’s a dodge old as Confederation. Our friend the Senator was a mere cabinet minister then. Customs and Excise.”
Jack stubbed out his cigaret and leaned back on the bed. He reminded me there’d been a federal election last month; I’d been holed away at Memphremagog away from ’papers and the wireless. Mackenzie King and the Grits had been in a minority government with the Progressive party propping them up against Arthur Meighen and the Tories.
“Have you ever seen him in the flesh?” asked Jack.
“Who?”
“Precisely your reaction if you had. Rex King is the dullest egg in Christendom and you’d forget him five minutes after shaking his hand. In fact he’s the foxiest bastard outside a briar patch.”
As Minister of Customs our friend the Senator had been duly compensated for failing to curb irregularities at the port, Jack explained. No law in our country forbade the sale of liquor to the Americans despite their Prohibition. The risk only came when actually smuggling across the border. Bonded whiskey from Scotland arrived in Montreal earmarked for trans-shipment south to the States. All well and good, and no duties collected here for the Crown.
“However, most of the booze never made it out of the country,” Jack said.
“Where’d it go?”
“Dry counties in Ontario, mostly. All the profits, fewer risks. Unfortunately for the minister, someone got wise.”
The opposition Tories learned that Customs agents were being compromised and payoffs were going straight to the top. The scandal threatened to take down King’s government. Our prime minister thus took preventative action against his minister.
“And made him a Senator. Saints preserve us.”
“Better yet,” Jack continued, “King formed a blue-ribbon Royal Commission to investigate the Port of Montreal. Hearings were held and detectives sent in to investigate.”
“Meanwhile the world kept spinning and molasses flowed in January. I follow. Then what happened?”
Jack laid out the lineaments of a parliamentary donnybrook: Arthur Meighen and the Tories howling for scalps, the Progressives defecting from King’s government, King visiting Rideau Hall and tendering his resignation, the Governor General weighing in on the side of the Tories, more shenanigans in the House of Commons, a midnight vote, a crisis of the Constitution and, after a summer election, Mackenzie King back at the top, his enemies defeated. Meighen was put to pasture, the Governor General on a slow boat back to Blighty, and the Customs scandal ploughed under entirely.