“Now Rex King’s lecturing the Empire on Canada’s sovereignty in London and it’s business as usual in Sin City, as you see.”
“And your role in this farce?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“I was one of the detectives the Royal Commission sent to investigate smuggling at the port.”
I burst out laughing. Lamp standards on the street now burned a soft gold. I opened a window and smelled impending snow. Before a stoop a bent figure sharpened knives on a whirling stone, spitting sparks.
“Pinkertons,” Jack continued. “When King worked for the Rockefellers in the States he used the agency. I came recommended for this line of work.”
“Naturally, with your gifts.”
Did Jack hear the irony in my voice? If he did, he chose to ignore it. In front of the tavern across the street stood two men in black surcoats. Working for the government was how Jack had aligned himself with bootleggers, Charlie Trudeau, and the Senator. Fox guarding the henhouse. Jack divined my thoughts, his nasty habit.
“There was too much money to be made,” said Jack. “If not me then who? The Senator still got his cut and Charlie Trudeau ran the trucks. The difference was I started smuggling to the States for keeps, and I was dealing with Italians across the border. Another world. Long way from Soda Creek. Which leads me to ask you, Mick. Are you still with me tomorrow night?”
I looked at the shabby brick tenements across the way and tasted coalsmoke. A child screamed from one of the rooms below us. A deeper cold fell and I shut the window. The two men in black did not look up. Was I with him after this? We’d come mighty far together.
“Pardon me,” I said.
I went to the lavatory and had a good long gander at myself in the dim light. With a sliver of soap I washed and scrubbed my face and hands in the frigid water and slicked back my hair. Wild notions rose within: walk away this moment. Jack will be your ruin. Crime is punished. What would I do with myself? I had no job and wanted none, no friends save he, no family. I’d lost my love. In the vile darkness I pulled out the revolver and returned to the room. I could easily shoot him and then myself. Jack sat on the bed, his gun in his hand. He looked at me and smiled.
“I’ll need another bullet,” I said
“Knew you were true blue.”
“Alea iacta est.”
We killed the bottle. The men in front of the tavern moved away. There came over me a flush of heat and cold commingled, of past, present, and future aligning, a fuse slotted into place. I’d never experienced anything quite like it and was at last allowed to identify the sensation: surrender. This was my fate, tangled in a skein with Jack’s. I must follow the thread to its end, wherever it led. While Jack slept I spent a painful night upright in the chair, the Webley in my hand, waiting for the dawn.
FRIDAY
SOMETIME DURING THE long night it began to snow. I smoked the hours away and watched slow flakes fall from an iron sky. Near daybreak drays hauled wagons through the white. Plodders sloshed muddy footprints through the splodge and then came saltshakers, sandmen, and shovellers who cursed and huffed over heavy masses. By and by the sky unveiled blue and it became one of those sere eastern mornings I hated to admit I loved. By noon the city’s heat and friction would melt the snow to dirty gutter runnels. While watching Montreal light up I faded. A voice woke me.
“Friday.”
“Friday,” I repeated.
Jack’s eyes burned bloodshot and his face was raw, lip swollen. My poor body ached and itched, blood boiling from the rum and salt. The cardboard cigaret deck was crushed and empty, one bullet smoked for each regret. Jack sat Indian-style on the bed. On my sinister zygomatic ran a pulse of hot pain from the blow that’d knocked me out. The room stank of cordite, stale tobacco, and men, worse than a pool hall the morning after. Out the window fingers of ice weighed down telephone wires in the building’s shadow.
“So, what’s the interior of the Mount Royal Club like?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“You heard.”
“Clever brute,” Jack said.
His eyes glittered out from beneath lowered lids, a colder blue. My own were brown near black with the pupils pinholes in the iris, stinging and sullen.
“Hungry?” asked Jack.
“Not half.”
A gramophone wailed out Caruso from a downstairs room. I felt none too clean and in need of a cooking in the bath.
“Let’s move the motor elsewhere,” I suggested.
“Fine idea. We’ll need it later,” Jack said.
So Jack was determined to carry through his mad scheme. I noticed he hadn’t answered my question. We creaked to life, my mind pinwheeling, an ache near the crook of my arm where the needle’d bit through the skin back in the day. An observant coroner would see the scar there.
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.