The Man Who Killed (13 page)

She'd been kind enough to relate all this, considering at some point in the night my vigour had flagged, draining to nothing, and I'd withdrawn from her body ashamed and impotent. We'd lain together, smoking the rest of my Sportsmans as she plied me with tender gestures to placate the shame that moved through me. It happens all the time, she said. But hollow anger simmered. I wanted to break glass, destroy things, apologize on my knees. Pride prevented me, another weakness.

“And what about you honey, what's your story?”

It came out, halting at first. I omitted Jack. I was a backwoods boy, born in the Far West of mining camps and switchback trails through black forests. My father was a preacher of the Word in saloons and mess halls to the scourings of mankind, sinners lusting after gold, whiskey, and women. Finally he'd been given a summons to respectability from his elders down the river. We'd had a house in the West End of Vancouver by the sea, with my amah bringing me tea and our Japanese gardener bowing over flowers in the soft grey rain and cutting away Scotch broom and blackberry thorn. I watched Empresses at the port steaming away to Honolulu, Yokohama, Sydney, and Hong Kong, and CPR silk trains being loaded for back East. It was a youth of stolen firecrackers in Chinatown, of jabbering Cantonese and Chinook with the other boys, running wild. In the summer we swam in the cool water off Third Beach by Siwash Rock.

“What's that?” she asked.

“A faithful Indian turned to stone by a spirit as reward for his virtue.”

The Champagne was long gone. It was perhaps now two in the morning. Lillian tried to tickle some more life out of me but her ministrations failed. Nitrates could help, chemicals from the dispensary or extracts by Chinese apothecaries: ground bear testes, rhinoceros horn, goat glands. My body betraying me. The humiliation forced a curt, cruel word to slip out and Lilyan flashed on me.

“Listen, you. I liked your look from the get-go and was feeling blue and lonesome and thought you might be good company. Now you hand me this guff after all I've done tonight. I'm not some floozy you can pay to go away, you know.”

“I know. I'm sorry, it's just that...”

“What?”

She waited for my response.

“Christ, nothing.”

“All right. I understand. It's not easy for a man.”

“Please stop.”

“What is it? Is it me?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Because if there's anything you want me to do to help I will.”

“You've done enough already. It's my fault. I've had a tough day, that's all.”

“Doing what?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She left the bed, grabbed her shift and started to dress. I lay where I was, silent, biting my fool's tongue. She put on enough for propriety's sake and gave me a dead glance, then opened the door and exited without a word, stage right, down curtain, no applause. I got up and threw my cigaret in the toilet, closed the light and beat the pillows into a different shape. The sheets still held her scent. I went and opened the windows wide into the cold October air and stood naked and alone in the blackness of the night.

TUESDAY

T
HE NEXT MORNING I checked out of the Occidental and into the Wayside, nearer the station. There'd been something not altogether canny about the manner in which Lilyan Tashman had inveigled me into sharing her company. She had finagled herself quickly and efficiently up to my room, too sudden a seduction. My erotic appeal was not that strong, and yet she'd ended up leaving in what seemed a genuine huff. Was it really genuine? The woman was a professional, it would be wise to remember. Everything she'd told me might be a pack of lies. Since then, however, no danger had befallen me, none I knew of. By cultivating the notion that I was being singularly targeted I aggravated what the psycho-analysts would term a complex: paranoid persecution. Its symptoms were characterized by an unreasoning suspicion with regards to the malevolent motivation of others. Considering the circumstances, this conviction didn't seem entirely unhealthy. At the very least I was wanted by the police for robbing the kino, never mind my participation as accessory to other crimes. I knew a medicine I might take to palliate my fears: the analgesic morphine. I hankered after it with sharp pangs of need and hunger.

It was past time to purchase a proper suit and hat so I walked to the Old Town and found a three-piece worsted at the Hudson's Bay Company in addition to a box of cartridges for my revolver. If inclined I might purchase pemmican, snowshoes, a muskrat skin. I wore my new habille out of the store and had Jack's duds sent to the Mount Royal Hotel. It was now noon and I felt a respectable member of society once more so I grabbed a newspaper and hunted up a cup of java.

In the broadsheet I read nothing but breathless copy on the queen of Rumania in Philadelphia. Turning my mind to the current situation aggravated doubts. There was more to Jack's scheming, larger plots, entangling deceptions. He was using me for some reason, as a penance or salve to his conscience, while at the same time manipulating me. If this criminal course continued, it'd behoove me to ferret out any potential dangers. That raised the question of where to begin my investigation. As it happened, and as always, idle speculation led me to preoccupation with Laura, her elegance, presence, her charm. My love curdling to sweet hatred.

Turning back to the
Gazette,
I sought anything further on the movie house robbery, but the story'd fallen out of the 'paper, its column inches now occupied by advertisements for cold creams and Hallowe'en stout ale.

I lit a cigaret and again attempted to puzzle out Jack's actions, but with such scant information it was too much to ask of my brain. Coffee rolled in my stomach so I got up and left a few pennies on the table by way of a gratuity, starting to feel ill and jazzed. While walking St. Catherine west one of Robert Service's poems rhymed in my head, perhaps prompted by the rhythm of my paces. Fugitive pensées straying, my parasite flicking its tail. Kill it with a dose of hard brandy, bite at a thumbnail and notice your trembling fingers. My hands were clean as I moved lightly over the sidewalk, stepping nimbly between pedestrians slowing to gawk at displays in store windows. I went into Morgan's and bought a snappy new brim, fifteen dollars for grey felt. Put Jack's in a box. Across the street in the square the Salvation Army murdered a hymn.

At the Mount Royal, Mr. Standfast was not in. I left Jack's topper at the desk and at last placed his alias, from the novel by John Buchan. Lingering awhile I thumbed through an antique, greasy copy of the
Canadian Illustrated News.
Later, something in the newspaper raised my ire. From the desk I cadged pen and paper and wrote:

TO THE EDITOR,
The Gazette

Sir,

It has been said that an Irishman's only political plank is the shillelagh; nevertheless, an item in today's edition prompts a response. The Native Sons of Canada have yet again put forward a motion to adopt a new flag. The Red Ensign, it seems, is no longer good enough. Very well. This being the case, here is, and with all apologies to Dean Swift, my own modest proposal for Canada's banner. Simply, it should be a revised coat of arms, viz,

The shield: a potato on a bed of rice, symbolizing the country's two founding races, Irish and Chinese, supported by one pig sinister, for Ottawa, and one dexter beaver biting off its testicles, for the taxpayer.

The wreath: celluloid poppy flowers, symbolizing industry. The crest will be a carrion crow atop a battle bowler, our blazon resting on a field of green, for the almighty Yankee dollar.

The motto:
Proximus sum egomet mihi.

Once unfurled, this new Canadian standard will surely fly forth proudly and lead forward this great Commonwealth we call Empire!

Yr. humble servant, &c.,

Mr. Charles Uxbridge Farley, Esq.

Montreal, Canada

I licked an envelope and sealed the little humdinger. Instead of a stamp I put down the
Gazette
office as a return address. It'd take time to get there, but I'd saved a penny.

When I left the hotel I dropped my epistle into a blue Royal Mail postbox, its coat of arms—a lion and chained unicorn—the English again, sticking it to their defeated subjects with every common appurtenance of authority, this year in the reign of George V. The King's name prompted the memory of hearing his high, quavering voice coming out the funnel of a phonograph player somewhere by Phoenix Park. I'd been let out of hospital at last, recovered from the 'flu, taking in the city's sights: the post office still a ruin from the Easter Uprising, Parnell festooned with ivy, Nelson's Column. A crowd stood near the Castle and listened to their sovereign, the first time his voice had ever sounded in public. Beside me a drunk punter blew a raspberry in derision and staggered off. The drunk was followed away by a sober man in an overcoat, Holy Ireland an island of informers, spies, Black and Tans, Republicans, myself in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and eighteen.

Before being demobbed I received my back pay and a wire transfer from the Pater. With a few pounds to spend I foolishly used them to travel up to the family's old stomping grounds in the north, in January, most miserable of months. Belfast had been bad: grimy, stony, cold, soaked in inky rain. Londonderry was worse, to my mind, crowded, closed off. I visited a maiden greataunt and sat in a stuffy parlour drinking weak, milky tea in gloomy silence. She hadn't taken to my colonial accent, notwithstanding my uniform and pip. Perhaps it'd been the Maple Leaf at my collar or the fact that I'd started smoking asthma cigarets to strengthen my lungs and asked her for a whiskey against the damp.

The visit was your true eye-opener, and I understood a little of the Pater and why he'd left the Old Country. For a spell I regretted he hadn't lighted out for an American territory but the old man had always been loyal to the Crown and pink parts of the map. Upon reflection, my fate might've been worse and I could have been born near the tailings of Ballarat or Dawson just as easily as the panned-out wash of Williams Creek. Then my mind returned to its jumping-off point and the Service poem, with its strange things done 'neath the midnight sun. Purposeless speculation, I thought. Might've this, might've that. If the Pater had stayed in New Westminster instead of following his ministry upriver my mother might've lived. Every turn of the paddlewheel led the poor woman closer to her grave, to my life in Alexandria, to Jack. Mine was a makeshift story. The sound of a police siren brought me back to Montreal and I stepped on a man's shoe at the corner of Guy. The stranger spat:
“Connard!”

Taking that as a cue I got off the street and went to sit on a bench at Canada Place in wan sunlight. This city hated me. It was the same thing, the same damned streets, same rotten cafés and hotel rooms. Winter would worsen Montreal, make it even more petty and constricting. We weren't a generous people, by and large. Ours was a second-hand country with second-hand sentiments for second-hand subjects. The sheer vastness of the land did us in. Canadians were wards with no true say in the world, under the control of the Colonial Office, Whitehall, Parliament, the Privy Council, the Court of St. James's, the Crown on high. Maybe Borden had gotten us a seat at the table at Versailles and into the League of Nations but it was as though my countrymen were children wanting to dine with the grown-ups. We still jumped to attention at the red-tabbed brass's trumpet call, the “Ready, Aye, Ready” ethos of Laurier and Meighen. One would think that that spirit had been ploughed under at Vimy, but it hadn't, and now there were new pipers for us to follow, the banshee song of the south. It was ever thus, the Dominion pulled between paladins of Empire and plutocrats of the Republic, always in between and with no say in who ruled us. Canadians, it seemed, had inherited the worst characteristics of the English—snobbery, priggishness, supreme self-satisfaction, and purblind righteousness—and we'd combined them with the lowest Yankee traits: money hunger, small-town boosterism, false piety.

I was a welter of history with too much time on my hands. I picked myself up and walked back towards the main artery. Artery. The trembling one felt as morphine pulsed through the fibres on its royal road to the mind, there to soothe and unfold thought in all its textured variety. My use of the drug had never been emotional, leastways not at first. It had been an aesthetic addiction, a way to turn this brutal colonial city into a palace of memory and wonder, history and art. Here for example was Old Tomorrow in knickerbockers and robe, holding a scroll, the twin of his contemporary Disraeli. Across Dorchester stood a monument to Strathcona's horse against the Boer. I read its lapidary inscription, so very fitting:
Imperium et Libertas.
For that we'd fought Fenians and Louis Riel, had sailed up the Nile with Garnet-Wolseley to save Chinese Gordon at Khartoum and battled Ruskies at Archangel. Empire and liberty had put me in the itching wool of a Seaforth Highlander and sent me off to follow Jack in France. Two years ago it'd nearly led us against the Turk at Chanak until Rex King had done something no prime minister ever had before: politely declined the invitation.

Stopping at a stand I picked up another 'paper, the afternoon
Herald
, to read in the lobby of the Mount Royal. Splashed across its front page was an exposé of fraudulent spiritual mediums. A reporter had gone to a séance asking about an invented dead wife and from the seer received soothing messages from beyond the grave. The entire story had a phony wash to it. Betimes it clicked: Houdini was in town and this was manufactured publicity for his show. For an hour I lounged and read and watched a fat house detective with a short cigar stuck into his face lean against a column. The dick's lazy gaze at last left me to take in a tall blonde sashaying unevenly across the lobby's parquet. My ears pricked up when I heard her ask loudly for Mr. Standfast and I was just in time raising the 'paper to shield my face. It was the actress from the night before, Lilyan Tashman.