Houdini looked at his dressing table where rested a gold-framed portrait of an aged lady.
“It is as much for his own sake as that of your people,” Houdini continued.
“No good will come of it,” Jack said. “Let the foundation rest; the walls are unstable. The key is in the bone box. Leave it there.”
“Is that a command?”
“To a greater or lesser degree,” said Jack.
“Well. It does not matter. The fire has died in me.”
He opened his eyes and looked into mine magnetically. Jack bent over a carafe in the corner. Houdini asked me: “And what is your learnèd opinion?”
The moment extended and I saw the world-famous man weak and alone like the rest of us. He didn’t look well. If it was magic he dealt in, magic I’d give him.
“Sacrifice a cock to Asclepius,” I said.
Houdini snorted with contempt. Jack handed him a glass. Houdini sipped from it and pulled a sour face. He handed it back to Jack, who ran the faucet in the sink. Houdini sighed and said: “Tell them the secret is safe with me.”
“I will.”
“Houdini is a man of his word.”
We made to leave. I looked back and Houdini’s eyes were closed again. The room was a tomb. We threaded our way through the back of the theatre to a door leading out to an alley.
“What’s the word?” I asked Jack.
He put a finger to his lips and smiled.
PAST SCRAPS OF dirty snow we made our way over cobbles to the street proper. The sun had come out, warming the steaming pavement; ’twas relief to trade Houdini’s mausoleum for the life and colour of the city. The contrast was striking. A pretty girl looked at me through long eyelashes. I was alive, an electric animal singing with power. At the corner a traffic accident had a policeman untangling arguments as vapour hissed from under a green Chrysler’s bonnet and people crowded ’round for the free show. We passed an Indian squaw carrying a papoose slung on her back. The baby smiled at me through a horrible cleft palate covered in streaming mucus. My stomach twisted at this, the true face of mankind. Jack walked along blithely and suggested a late luncheon.
He led us west to the Royale for either Oriental or Occidental cuisine. Jack ordered the former, a mess of tapeworm noodles and cat’s flesh. My plate sampled the latter cookery, leathery horsemeat with fried crow’s eggs. Instead of eating I smoked while Jack forked nourishment into his mouth.
“Not hungry?”
He finished his plate and with my nodding assent started on mine. Replete, he wiped his mouth with a serviette and asked: “Ready for tonight?”
“Yes. How’s it look?”
“Swell. Eggs in the coffee. There’s something I need to tell you, though. We have a third.”
“A third? Who?”
Jack lit a cigaret and raised his eyebrows. No. Not that sharper. Not now.
“We have to,” Jack said, reading me.
“Like fun,” I said.
“’Fraid so.”
“Then you lose me.”
“Mick, please.”
He reached across our ruined meal and put his hand on my shoulder.
“You can settle your score with him when we’re done.”
“It’s your hand in all this,” I said.
Jack leaned back.
“No. Bob met her through the theatre crowd. Laura cottoned on to the circle. Bored, I suppose. When I was at Victoria Hall for that dance she was with him. I didn’t know where you were or what’d happened, I swear. None of my business. This is. We need the third arm. Hold your nose and afterwards all bets are off. The trade is at the pier. We’re going to hit them before they board ship. The third’ll hang back as getaway while we go in for the goods. I’ve got it all worked out.”
“You’d better.”
“It will work or it won’t. Stakes are high but so’s the payoff. To the victor and all that.”
“Spare me.” I rose and went to the filthy toilet. Over the lavatory I read: “Get ready, the LORD is coming SOON. ‘Behold I come quickly and my reward is with me, to give to every man according as his work shall be.’” Below it was written: “If I had a girl and she was mine I’d paint her ass with iodine and on her belly I’d put a sign ‘Keep off the grass, the hole is mine.’”
At the basin I washed my hands and looked at the mirror. There was no one in it.
“Oke,” I said, back at the table.
“Christ but you’re a downy bird, Mick.”
He’d paid for our food and was sitting at his ease at the Formica.
“Tell me what was what with your man in the theatre there,” I said.
“I will, but later.”
“You afraid I’ll sing if I’m caught?”
“You can’t tell what you don’t know. And it’s not the cops I’m worried about but the other fellows. They’ll clip your ears for fun and games,” Jack said.
“That’s reassuring.”
“I know you’re up for it.”
“This’s all been some sort of challenge, hasn’t it? Why’re you doing it?”
Jack put his hands together and leaned in.
“What’re your plans for the future?”
“Unknown,” I said.
“Will you head back?”
“To the Pater’s? Not likely. Even with money I don’t want him sniffing at me. Without my medical degree I’m a dog.”
“Is that so?”
“Whereas you could show up at the door in chains and he’d open his arms.”
“Unlikely.”
“That’s what you think. The Sunday after you ran away and joined the colours he preached the Prodigal Son. He had a scrap-book hidden in his study. The pages were filled with clippings from the ’papers of every action your regiment was in.”
“Jesus, Mick, I didn’t know.”
There was a catch in Jack’s voice and I swore I caught a tear quickening in his eye.
“He’d forgive you everything,” I said.
“Not everything,” Jack muttered.
Now Jack was far away. Brightening, I said, “Well, you could be worse off. In me he sees my mother and hates me for it. Always has. You’re different. He chose you. He’d have left me on Skid Road if he’d been able to square it with the book and the kirk and the bloody Battle of the Boyne.”
“The Glorious Twelfth,” said Jack.
The Pater’d preached the Word to the hard men of the camps past Lillooet, men like the Wolf and Jack’s father, who’d disappeared prospecting up the wash one autumn, never to return. When my father’d found Jack he was near feral, shivering and begging for scraps from the Chinese camp cooks and cruel Indians, a cur kicked away from the fire. Indebted for his escape, Jack had played Christian soldier for the Pater, and my upright father prized his wildness and charm, whereas I’d only been a reminder of what my father had lost. I’d killed her by being born.
So I waited and watched as we grew up together down in Vancouver, watched Jack with the prettiest girls and fastest friends, real five-cent sports. My Scripture first was as naught to Jack’s second or third. I turned away from John Knox and my father and delved into different patterns of belief. Jack was the golden lad, ace cricketer and scapegrace, romantic and dashing where I was quiet and dark. He led our gang and stole bottles of wine from Italian greengrocers and horses from Siwashes in Chinatown, cursing in Cantonese as I’d learn to, in emulation of my captain. When alone and away from under Jack’s flag I’d be waylaid by jealous enemies from rival gangs and be given a good thumping, too small to fight back and too damn proud to run. That was the Irish in me, taking a beating and liking it. From my father there was little save silence when I’d return home bruised and cut. Only the amah cared, swabbing my cuts in iodine while jabbering in Chinook.
My father was born an Ulster Scot but my mother’d been a real dark colleen from down in the south and Catholic to boot. How they’d met and married the Lord only knew. For an amah I had a Carrier Indian, my mother’s servant and somehow kinswoman, the Holy Ghost and Old Ones meeting and mingling with Manitou and Raven. When my mother died the amah nursed me. From her I learned the twinned secret mythologies of two broken people. All his life my father’s creed had been reason, education, and light. The faith of my mother was tricky and dark. Somehow I’d been made in neither image and was reflected in the quicksilver of Jack: friend, tormentor, blood brother, the man who was going to get me killed one day. I crushed a cigaret out on a greasy plate.