“Who’s your master?” I asked him.
“I am.”
“What happened last Friday? You told the Senator you’d done him some service last Friday. What was it?”
“That was the left hand.”
“And finding Laura’s the right,” I said.
Jack began to talk. Sir Dunphy had been the one who’d orchestrated the Royal Commission when the Customs scandal began to break. In the House of Commons Rex King stood up and said: “A detective has been sent to Montreal.”
“That’s me. I’m in Hansard. Look it up.”
“How’d you get picked?” I asked.
“Pinkertons recommened me to Sir Dunphy. Helped that I was a true fellow and brother, naturally.”
Jack worked the docks and traced the smuggling pipeline back to the Senator, then the Minister of Customs. Jack and he forged an understanding and combined forces, gamekeepers turned poachers. That was last fall, before a new group of Italians moved in from New York under a boss named Lucania. A fight started: New York Sicilians versus Chicago Neapolitans, with Montreal in the middle.
“Bob’s family waited on the fence until I was given the black spot. After Bob double-crossed us he went off the reservation. Shadow in the wind. Wants all the money for himself, I reckon. Man’s moved from cocaine to heroin lately. Spent all week twisting arms and busting doors. Pretty boy’s still in town.”
“What’s our plan?” I asked.
“Hunt him down. He’s been seen with a woman. That’ll be Laura.”
I controlled myself.
“Have a feeling he’s going to skip town today or tomorrow. Montreal’s too hot for him,” Jack said.
“Welcome to the oven,” I said.
The whole world could go hang fire. I prepared another syringe and rode it home.
JACK ROUSED ME.
“Come along. It’s close to five. You need to eat.”
We caught a ’cab and this time went east. I could smell burning. The ’cabbie’s St. Christopher medal swung like a censer as he sped and braked to a stop at Place d’Youville.
“There,” said Jack, pointing with his white stick.
Exiting a small cod-classical building was our man Brown. He stood in the doorway for a moment under a weathered stone Britannia fixed on the architrave. There was a vignette of Empire for you, if you liked: a petty Scotch official in a provincial backwater below the faded shield and trident of old Albion. With the setting sun turning the square and stones a mandarin orange the tableau had a certain shabby nobility to it, a minor, mournful grandeur. The ’cab pulled alongside the wee man and Jack shouted: “Hop in.”
Startled, Brown spun and fixed his eyes on Jack’s crooked finger, the digit beckoning through an open window. Jack got out and waved Brown in with a jesting courtesy, back to his old tricks again. The Customs man sat between us, smelling of cheese. His cheek bore a faded mark where Jack had struck him. Jack ordered the taxi east to just beside the construction site beneath the bare pilings of the harbour bridge.
We got out by the lee of a wall before a brick barracks. I could now almost taste the atmosphere; instead of smoke, it was the sour, thick odour of barley and hops, effluvia from the redbrick Molson Brewery nearby. In the wall was an olive-coloured door and a smaller inset door within it. Jack motioned Brown through and I followed them to an empty courtyard. In its centre stood a plinth supporting the statue of a green man bearing a flag. The barracks house appeared deserted.
“Recognize these, Brown?”
Jack held up several yellow slips of paper.
“Aye.”
“Your markers from the barbotte house on Cypress. Canny investment, wouldn’t you say?”
Brown stayed shtum. He shivered in his cheap snuff-coloured tweed.
“You know what I want,” Jack said. “Hand me the ’gen on our Yankee friend and you can start digging a new grave for yourself at the tables. Fair trade, eh?”
Brown nodded weakly. It occurred to me that the pair were both gamblers. Jack had probably already burned through every dime in his pockets, hence his desperation now. For all his control Jack was grasping at straws. The Scotchman was a last resort, a long shot.
“Cross me on this and I’ll feed you to the fucking wolves,” said Jack. “On your knees.”
Brown shook off his inertia and stiffened with the auld re-solve of Carlisle.
“There’s no need.”
“Kneel,” Jack insisted.
For a moment I thought Jack would kill him. We were alone. The courtyard was abandoned. No navvies swung from the partly built river span overhead, bearing witness. My senses sharpened. I handled my Webley. Jack was being needlessly cruel, I thought. Brown was broken; there was no need to kick the cur. The Scotsman creakily lowered himself, the brief flare of rebellion doused. I saw him for what he was, a small, frightened functionary in over his head. For a brief moment I had a fellow feeling that I quickly banished. I’d gone too far the other way and we could quarter the man for all the difference it’d make.
“Do you know this place?” asked Jack.
“No.”
“It’s where they hanged the French Patriots, the ones who burned down the Assembly. They were traitors. You won’t be given the length of a rope, Brown. I promise you that.”
Jack moved in, grasping the handle of his white stick. Brown flinched, waiting for a slash or blow. With an animal smile Jack slowly pulled a steel blade from within the sharkspine.
“Dieu et mon droit.”
He tapped Brown’s shoulders lightly with the sword, left, right, the burlesque of a knighting.
“Arise.”
It was dangerous to humiliate a man thus. Jack had refined his cruelty to the weak. He’d changed, and so had I. I was dead to pleasure, outrage, pain. I was a killer. Wind gusted off the water. There was no morality, only exigencies. My ethos: morphine and money. She was gone, at my hands, and I had nothing else to tie me to life. Brown would now pass along his shame to one weaker than he, the back of his hand to the wife, his belt to a child, the boot for a dog. The world spun ever thus.
“Homo homini lupus est,” I said.
Jack looked at me.
“On your bike, Brown,” he said.
The man got to his feet and shuffled off. Jack came over and lit a cigaret.
“‘Man is wolf to man,’” he said.
“Alpha plus.”
“Thank your old man. Not much Latin in the camps.”
He replaced the sword in its scabbard. We walked away together in another direction. I spotted a copper on the street and reached down to pinch it. It was an Indian Head from the United States.
“Find a penny, pick it up,” I said.
“Put it in your shoe for luck,” said Jack.
“Not how it goes. Here.”
I flipped it over to him and he called heads, caught it and laughed, then put it in his pocket.
On Viger we hailed another ’cab and stopped at the Victoria Tavern on William. Inside the bar a skeleton played a wheezy concertina: “Nearer My God to Thee.”
“Like last call on the Titanic here,” said Jack. “Let’s go elsewhere.”
We settled at the Victory and I sprang for all-dressed steamed Frankfurters on white bread with mustard and Kiri spruce beer to wash them down. We chewed and swallowed.
“Do you know what?” I asked.
“I don’t.”
“We’re not the sterling heroes in this tale.”
Jack ate.
“What d’you mean?”
“I mean you’re no Hannay and I’m not Tom Brown.”
“Who are we then?”
“The Black Stone.”
It gave Jack pause. I lit a cigaret and continued.
“We’re the ones you never read about, the ones who lean on weaklings and hand out beatings. Look at you, taking orders. We’re not racing to save the crowned heads of Europe or stop the next war. We’re the ones that the hero worries about when there’s a knock on the door. All our troubles come from that. No honour in it.”