I sealed the envelope flap and ducked out to put the note in a nearby mailbox. It’d be picked up in the morning and delivered with the afternoon post. When I got back the whole bar was in full throat, an Englishman, a pair of bohunks, the landlord, and finally myself joining with: “We’ll beat the bailiffs out of fun, we’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run, we are the boys no man dare dun if he regards a whole skin. Instead of spa we’ll drink brown ale and pay the reck’ning on the nail, no man for debt shall go to gaol from Garryowen in glory.”
By the end and despite myself my eyes were teared up by this camaraderie. I thought of chums scattered across the country or dead, places I’d never see again or ever visit. The Englishman shyly bought me an ale and suggested we have a bit of fun, with a nervous wink. When he went to relieve himself I paid and slipped out.
On the cold street I turned into myself again, an enemy of humanity. On a hidden piano someone practised a phrase from Mendelssohn over and over. Here on the sidewalk sprawled a poor young Hebress blowing soap bubbles that floated and disappeared over the tenements as a hard wind came gusting down from the north. People huddled into their overcoats against the gale. I skirted overflowing rubbish bins and the music prompted a memory of the recent past, the cathouse on Mountain with that bastard Bob plunking out “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” by Willie Eckstein and the Melody Kings on His Master’s Voice. The little dog sticking his face into the gramophone funnel, the Senator’s bitch Rex licking at itself, Celeste my whore and Lilyan Tashman with her stockings off and Laura, always Laura. Happiness in stolen moments with her and now I was apart and alone, anonymous, forgotten. Write your emergency testament on a clean white piece of foolscap and affix your signature, a holograph will. Leave Jack the Webley and case of shells.
The gun weighed my pocket down as I neared Chinatown. Would have to find what Jack had called the Hotel X. I understood that it was in the old quarter but couldn’t bear to see what I might’ve wrought at the gamblers’ hell so made a right instead, west on St. Catherine, away from any Oriental. In the darkness neon-lit storefronts painted me wild colours and I was a corpuscle in the metropolis’s bloodstream again, feeling the thrum of life as I shouldered through the crowd, my hat down and collar up, a figure modern and dangerous.
Nowhere like Montreal, the city a raw and freezing compromise between enemies, a manqué Paris fused with a poor man’s New York. Often it felt Russian, a tsar’s whimsy like St. Petersburg, or Petrograd they called it now. The difference was we’d never storm the Hôtel de Ville and burn the Golden Book as the Bolsheviks had invaded the Winter Palace. No, our King wouldn’t allow it. We were the fair-haired child of Empire, run for profit by the Scotch, fingernails pared, shoes well-tied, clean behind the ears. What Kipling called “Our Lady of the Snows”: still, empty, cold. A worse wind whipped down St. Catherine slashing at my face, bringing with it the smell of scorched toast and engine oil. I was driven into the Turf and the moment I entered felt a delicious frisson as warmth melted me down, a pure moment of welcome.
When the girl appeared I ordered a Western and coffee, suddenly famished. After eating, a postprandial cigaret burned as I stared through a liquid window at the world outside. Painted on the brick wall of the Bercy building up to the cornice were advertisements inciting citizens to purchase Darkie toothpaste, ivory hairbrushes, surgical trusses, ginger ale. The Dupuis Frères department store down the street offered a ruinous line of credit to the natives; between the company and vulture-priests in black soutanes the French-Canadians were picked clean to their last sou. For poor English the Eatons did the same. O Ogilvy’s, o mores!
Time waited on my leisure. The waitress ripped off a bill, making me forty-five cents poorer with a dime to the girl for her pains. A dollar would yield four German marks and that would take you a good long way, with the Krauts paying reparations in gold and having the devil of a time of it. I could live like a king in Berlin these days for nothing at all. I tied my serviette in a knot and left it in the centre of the dirty plate as I went out. The faintest tinnitus from Bob’s pistol shot continued to ring in my left ear. My hands began to shake and I recognized that another hunger needed satiation. The city sent me cues that I translated from an obscure code: tattoo drumbeat of a boiler on a roof conspiring with the traffic standards’ syncopation, green, yellow, red. On the street figures watched me, signalling covertly to undercover police agents. I began to lose my sea legs and staggered, wanting more than anything another injection of morphine. Teeth chattered, sweat dripped along my spine. I’d left it too long and they’d never let me back in the hotel. The gods had been angered. I was jostled, pedestrians tripping me up and stepping on my toes, crowded here with greasy pavement underfoot. An antique figure in long grey beard and ragged buckskins lay sprawled in front of the Union Tobacconist at Phillips Square, a ratty fur cap on the ground in front of him. Seized with superstition and wanting to propitiate the Fates I peeled off a hundred dollars and dropped the notes in amongst the few tarnished coins. His eye caught mine: a silver flash, a sigil of knowing. The man was Isaac Laquedem come over on the boat with John Cabot to the end of the earth or Hy-Brasil. He’d planted the banner of St. Mark and been left behind, fated forever to wander the earth.
Thoughts thus abstracted and with my hands stuffed in my pockets I stepped badly on the pediment of the statue in the square and went down. At the last instant I pulled them out in time to save my face and pearly whites. It happened too quickly. Now my hands were scraped and bloody. Like any idiot I looked around for a witness to my tumble. Out of the gloom a woman materialized and handed me a white mouchoir, a demimondaine alone away from the busy traffic, an angel, speaking very rapidly in a French I couldn’t quite catch. I embarrassedly thanked her and slunk off, staunching my wounds with the cotton cloth. She’d done something human, graceful, and selfless and I’d been too damned shamefaced to stop even a moment. The white light from a marquee lit the squalid scene and I saw the show’s title: So This Is Paris.
Behind the glass I read part of a review aloud to myself: “Monte Blue displays his virile mannerisms as the suave but willing Dr. Girard who leaves his wife and braves a gaol sentence to follow a will-of-the-wisp flapper in the person of Madame Lalle, played by Lilyan Tashman as a complete little vixen with a bag of cosmopolitan wiles and constant verve.”
Back in the hotel at last I wasted away, a knife blade on a whetstone, as I pushed the needle in. Next door a drunk sang psalms in a broken key.
WHEN I RETURNED to life the first thing I did was reach for the dwindling vial of morphine powder. The needle entered me dully, blunted by overuse. I put pressure on and dressed the puncture with styptic. A black line had burned across the bedsheets where I’d passed out with a lit cigaret. I imagined waking on fire and realized that I had, burning for the drug. My head sank back into the dense, mossy pillow and I closed my eyes.
Later there was the hullabaloo of a working day: shouts of men, grinding axles, the klaxon of an ambulance. Likely it was taking a poor beggar to a ward in the Royal Victoria and I diagnosed him from afar with hypoxia leading to coma and death, what Houdini braved upside-down in the Chinese Water Torture Cell. Could picture myself stretched out on the starched rough linen of a hospital bed listening to the din of the world, of milk carts clattering past and newspaper hawkers shouting headlines: “Queen of Rumania to arrive at Bonaventure Station Wednesday!” “Hurricanes in Cuba!” “End of the World Nigh!”
Very soon I’d have to visit the selfsame dispensary should my present pattern of consumption be continued, to join specimens in the morgue and be flensed by the coroner. It was getting there that’d be the trouble. Danger lurked all about, Turks disguised as Ruskies in the pay of the Kuomintang wanting vengeance for the fire I’d started in Chinatown. You will need to tread warily, boyo. Remember the post and that you must find Jack’s hotel at some point. Prepare.