“It was you who sent me the letter,” she said.
“Who, me?”
“Yes.”
“All I can tell you is that he asked me to meet you,” I said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“You should.”
“No. You’re lying. I should have known.”
“That I’m a liar? Pot and kettle, my dear.”
“I should have known that you’d stoop to this baseness.”
“Baseness is it?”
I stopped.
“What was that you were doing with that joker then? Who did you really want to see you two on that bed?”
“Certainly not you.”
“As I thought.”
Laura walked away downhill between upright markers.
“You play your pretty games and torture me,” I cried.
“I want nothing to do with you!” she screamed.
It was a pleasing landscape with nary a souclass="underline" no old widows tending graves, no mustachioed gents perambulating past fallen comrades. Laura was increasing her pace, slipping away. I came up quickly after her.
“You didn’t want me at all, did you? You wanted him. All this time you wanted him. Do you realize that we’re going to kill your pretty boy Bob? What do you think of that?”
Laura stopped. She put her hand on a tombstone. I saw where we were. Now I was hot.
“You didn’t know that, did you sweetheart? That fucker’s going to get it, with this.”
I showed Laura my gun. She stumbled backward, eyes widening. I moved forward and felt her shrink before me.
“Oh, but you’ve got nothing to worry about,” I said. “Not from this toy. Bob tried to kill us, not that you’d care if he had. He tried to blow my brains out.”
“Please, Michael. Stop.”
“We kill now, didn’t you know? Your three musketeers. And who made me do it? You did, Laura. What did I ever do to you? I loved you and you let me believe you felt the same way. Then I saw you rutting like a sow with that son-of-a-bitch. What can I do? Tell me! No, wait, I’ll tell you. I’m going to kill that Yankee bastard Bob. And then I’m going to shoot the love of your life. I’m going to kill Jack.”
“Michael, no.”
I closed with her and grabbed her shoulders. We were next to the empty graves I’d seen the day before. She reached up with her gloved hands and tried to break my hold. I crushed the velvet of her coat and pulled her closer. She struggled. I drank in her powder and scent: lemon and sugar. Her cloche hat fell off and she kicked at me with her booted feet so I pushed her onto a nearby cairn. Laura stumbled and her skirt rode above her knee. I went at her now in a blind rage, choking, unable to breathe. I put my hands through the white silk of her blouse and gripped the pearls around her porcelain doll’s throat. By God she was beautiful. She gasped and fought as I tightened my grip and started squeezing. My hands tangled in the pearls and thumbs dug into her trachea. I felt her weaken and a bloody mist clouded my vision. Her arms came up and I pushed and pulled her roughly about. Coming in close I saw the green in her eyes and wide staring pupils. Laura gazed at me and her pink tongue came out. Her light sparrow’s body clenched, spasmed, and pulsed and her head rolled back as I strangled her. My teeth were bared, penis erect, heart dynamiting in my ears, a torrid heat raged though my blood. I tasted her warmth and her last gasp. She stopped moving and went still. I let her fall to the grass by the heaped mound of earth, then dropped down beside her and cradled her in my arms, eyes pouring tears. Poor Laura. Poor all of us.
For a long, lost time I lay watching the stars come out, taking in clean cool air, feeling my pulse return to normal. At last I set to work. I picked up her hat. Digging in her purse I took the note with Jack’s name on it and burned it with a vesta. Her money I kept, twenty-odd dollars. Now was the moment for a ceremony. I was not in my body, but became an actor performing a dark rite. I lifted Laura and placed her in the hole. I arranged her hair as she’d always liked it, considered her face, her eyes, but there was nothing there. So I closed them forever and placed a coin in her mouth, for Charon. I climbed out of the grave and started to push dirt in, faster and faster, kicking and scraping, filling the empty space, consigning her to the earth’s indifferent care.
I rubbed my hands, chucked soil out of my trouser cuffs, and leaned back against a stone, then lit a cigaret and with the lucifer’s glow surveyed the scene of my crime. I started laughing, quietly at first, then louder and wilder. Strange thoughts filled my head, demonical notions. Grateful spirits whispered, congratulating me on my ascent. I walked away from the boneyard a king among the damned. The world belonged to me.
THURSDAY
ON WAKING I resolved to quit the filthy habit of smoking, substituting cinnamon chewing gum in tobacco’s stead. There was, however, no alternative to sweet morphine. Putting away every notion of restraint I prepared the drug again and relaxed. I’d bought the bulldog edition of Wednesday night’s Star and now read the transcript of a speaker at the Kiwanis Club. The Dominion of Canada would possess a population of one hundred and thirty-five millions in nineteen eighty-six. That was sixty years from now, a time too far in the future to contemplate. I was no longer interested in any possibilities; life was merely the here and now.
It was time to raise Cain and find Jack. I wanted to get even with Bob and take another scalp, add to the three thus far. I had the taste for it now, and I liked it. Time to count coup over a fallen enemy and take back what he’d stolen from us, a satchel full of money.
For luncheon I knocked back a schooner in a tavern on Stanley and began to lose my sense of the in-between. Automatic footsteps guided me to any port of call, a beautiful day to be in a bar amidst the unwashed sans-culottes swarming ’round the free lunch. I lit a cigaret to mask the stench of cabbage, corned beef, wet Stanfields, and rotten breath. Hunched in the corner I shivered with my hat down and collar up, unaccountably cold in an oven of close-packed humanity.
Concentration became difficult. There weren’t any women and I needed one to prove I could still love. A living carcass at the bawdy-house on Mountain would suffice, or a two-dollar tumble on Bullion. Lilyan Tashman would do anything for me in return for my wealth of morphine and money. We could finish what she’d started. Two workers next to me grouched about the price of steak as they hacked into hanks of coarse beef. Meat. Hole and a heartbeat was the cry of the barracks, man’s view of the weaker sex. I was a beast. We were all beasts.
Above the din rose a voice, a woman’s, lusty and loud. Conversations retreated as a path cleared for a big, brassy creature. She worked over the chorus of a number from last year: “A cup of coffee, a sandwich and you, a cozy corner, a table for two, a chance to whisper and cuddle and coo with lots of hugging and kissing in view.”
Between the tables she weaved, carrying a bouquet of cheap crepe-paper roses, her tits nearly spilling out her dress, a ratty fox fur ringing her neck. The singer seemed drunk, crimson lipstick slashed across her face. Old grey duffers dropped nickels and dimes into a shawl wrapped around her waist. I was trapped. She came directly towards me, trilling: “I don’t need music, or lobster or wine whenever your eyes look back into mine. The things I long for are simple and few: a cup of coffee, a sandwich and you.”