“Trunk call to Montreal,” he shouted into the tube. “Hotel Montmartre.”
He winced as the connection clicked and screeched. Cross the river south and you were in another city, another world, French Canada.
“Bonjour, monsieur. Name’s Marlow, room something. Can’t remember. I checked in a few days ago. Marlow without an ‘e.’ By chance are there any messages for me?”
Jack closed his eyes and seemed to will himself still. I’d seen him like this at the races when his horse broke from the pack near the post. That gambler’s lust within him. Here was his long shot and he wanted it. I sipped the gentle beer and watched. A minute passed. He opened his eyes, that fierce blue.
“Parfait. Merci, monsieur.”
Jack rang off and grinned wickedly at me.
“Our bird’s in flight. We’ll bag him yet. Let’s go.”
“Where?” I asked.
“For a ride.”
Outside on the porch Jack oriented himself and then continued south to a cluster of irregular shacks between the highway and the freight tracks. He turned down an alleyway and we surprised brown rats skittering over a smoking mound of trash. Jack and I stepped over burnt vegetable waste, greasy crushed cans, and broken Coca-Cola bottles then through the slats of a fence bordering a decrepit house. Behind it sat a lorry with a jerrycan in its paybed. Jack touched the truck’s bonnet for warmth and shook his head. We went ’round an outhouse to the back porch and a screen door. Jack took out his Browning. All was still.
The door swung open creakily at his touch and we entered a dark, cluttered kitchen. Bedroom to the right, to the left a sitting room with a cold Quebec heater. Jack and I did a circuit. He found nothing in a wardrobe or under the stained mattress of the unmade bed. I spilled a glass jar of green-blue rusted pennies and Indian quarter-anna pieces on a table covered in scorch marks from forgotten cigarets. The icebox was bare and smelled of mould. The whole place was dirty, depressing. Jack pushed swollen copies of the Journal de Montréal off a seat in the living room and settled in.
“What’re we looking for?” I asked.
“Keys to that truck.”
“Whose is this dump?”
“Martin’s,” he said.
The third driver from our convoy all those eons ago. If, as it appeared, the Senator’d crossed us and sicced the police on Jack and myself, it seemed the least we could do was return the favour to his creature.
“We’ll settle his hash,” Jack said, crossing a leg and lighting a cigarette. My yen for the tobacco awoke flickerings of another, more substantial need. I swallowed and swallowed again.
“And your telephone call?”
“Brown came through. Bob and a woman crossed the border at one this morning. If I know my man they’re holed up in a hotel.”
“Where?”
“Plattsburgh.”
Jack smiled. I chewed my gum metronomically. Time passed. After awhile came the sound of heavy feet. Jack opened his eyes, yawned, and picked up his Browning. The front door opened inward and a burly man entered. He wore a stiff black wool suit and round hat. Jack waited. The man lumbered into the room, sniffed, and stopped at the sight of us.
“They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven or is he in hell? Comment ça va, Martin? J’espère que tu as pris ta confession avec le curé ce matin, connard. Assieds-toi. Now.”
The imperative was given with a vigorous flick of the pistol. Martin’s knees buckled at the anger in Jack’s voice. He put a hand to his mouth and I remembered that Jack’d beaten the teeth out of his skull only a week before. In this frame of mind my friend was ruthless. If he ever learned about Laura I could expect the same. Sensibly, Martin sat.
I picked up a pack of cards near my chair and flipped through them, an unusual antique deck with gilt edges. The queens were uncanny: clubs held a red flower, diamonds a mirror, hearts a bird, and spades a feathered fan. The ace of spades was worse, with a jester bearing a large spade on his back and beside him a puppy in a hat and a gnome holding a flail. Above all smiled a nasty sun surrounded by black stars. I shivered. That was my hunger. I went to the kitchen to prepare another syringe.
When I returned to the sitting room, Jack was speaking: “There’s no point. Donne-moi tes clefs.”
Martin pulled out a ring.
“Lentement,” Jack said. “There, on the table.”
Martin put the keys down.
“As-tu faim?” asked Jack.
“Non,” Martin said.
With the aid of my drug I could smell the driver, a sharp pungent note of fear. I kept my distance, alerted by Jack’s posture.
“No, I insist. You must be hungry. Le petit déjeuner,” Jack said. “Comme le serpent.”
He tossed Martin one of the sour little apples from beside the church. Martin reflexively grabbed at the fruit and there was a thunderclap. The driver dropped to the ground holding his stomach. I nearly leapt out of my clothes, notwithstanding my presentiment. Jack’s pistol smoked. He said: “If he lives Charlie Trudeau and the Senator can pay the doctor. If not, the gravedigger. Either way, it’s a message, COD.”
I looked at the body of the man, at Jack, back at the body, then down into my own hands. I felt a perfect accretion of nothing.
“Fitting,” I said, and flicked the card that was on top of the deck down onto Martin.
“What’s that?” asked Jack.
“It’s your card. Jack of diamonds. The laughing boy.”
We left Martin to his fate and climbed into the lorry. Jack punched the ignition and we drove through Chambly to the southeast. I lowered my window and breathed in the crisp air as the miles passed, small towns and telegraph poles one after another casting hard black shadows on the flat earth.
I slept, and when I woke Jack was singing: “I patronized the tables at the Monte Carlo hell ’til they hadn’t got a sou for a Christian or a Jew, so I quickly went to Paris for the charms of mademoiselle, who’s the lodestone of my heart. What can I do, when with twenty tongues she swears that she’ll be true?”
He saw me alert and said: “They crossed in a Graham-Paige roadster, Bob and Laura, I’m sure. Damn him: the money and the girl.”
“Sir Dunphy’ll be pleased,” I said, laughing inwardly.
“Well, he is hyas muckamuck.”
“Very hyas. Is he the one ordered you to shut up the magician?”
“That came from him through the tyee,” Jack said.
“What, the chief?”
“You bet.”
The prime minister. I’ll be damned. When he threatened one last astonishing revelation, Harry Houdini made the wrong enemy.
“How?” I asked. “How did you shut him up?”
Jack looked at me slantwise and smiled, raising one eyebrow. We rolled on in silence for a stretch.
“The glass of water, I suppose.”
“You’re a wonder, Mick. Alpha plus.”
“And what was it?”
“Biological agent. The Germans cooked it up in the war. One of their subtler killers.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, William Lyon Mackenzie King.”
BY EARLY AFTERNOON we’d passed through St-Paul-de-l’Île-aux-Noix and Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel. I was hungry.
“Bob crossed at Champlain. Rousses-Point coming up,” said Jack.
“What do we say?”
“We’re going over for a load of potatoes. Odds are we’re waved through. If not, the devil take us.”
Our concerns were mooted by the border. Both sets of guards had abandoned their posts for an early supper. We drove through unchallenged. Thus it was on the medicine line between the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada this day. Jack made a right at a building where the Stars and Stripes flew. The country felt different, as it always did, in myriad small ways: street signs and mailboxes, the Piggly Wiggly, billboards for Burma-Shave. Another hour of driving down lonely roads brought us to the outskirts of Plattsburgh.