The Man Who Killed (17 page)

“I do,” said Houdini, reluctantly.

“I'm a quick reader and would esteem it a high honour should you lend it to a poor widow's son. I'll happily provide you with any surety you require.”

“None will be necessary,” Houdini said.

“Very well. Where may I call for it?”

“The volume will be left for you at the front desk of my hotel, the Windsor. Your name, sir?”

Jack gave one.

“Thank you, Mr. Houdini.”

They shook hands a last time. Smiler escorted the magician away. Sycophants dispersed. Jack stood still as though mesmerized.

“Jack,” I said.

“Eh?”

“Let's go.”

The hall echoed as we returned to the rain. Lubie squatted on the steps, snuffling like a swine. Jack broke from his trance.

“Come on,” he said.

“Where to?”

“You'll see.”

We walked quiet in the dark to the gates on Sherbrooke. True to form Jack was plotting, and I could almost hear the gears at work.

“I've never heard of that book,” I said. “Who wrote it?”

“No one.”

“What?”

“No one wrote it. Well, someone did, but he doesn't exist.”

“Who?”

“James Watson,” Jack said.

“Dr. Watson?”

“The same.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“But he did.”

“The other thing, your calling him out as a Jew and that. He's on the level.”

“And the square,” Jack said, hailing a taxi.

The 'cab went uphill and along Pine to a large stone house, all stern wealth. We curled along a drive and under a porte-cochère, where Jack paid off the driver. Here spread an aroma of the nearby mountain green and rich, wet red leaves soaking in the dark, the dim spread of the city below with a suggestion of the river beyond. Not for the first time I yearned for the clean vastness of the sea. I felt a deficit of fresh oxygen in the East and I sucked up two lungfuls, closed my eyes a moment, and tried to simply exist.

Jack whistled, gestured from between the white pillars of the portico and without further ado opened the front door, from whence issued the smell of strangely scented cigaret smoke, cloves, and a sweetish spice. In the vestibule a pretty girl tottered towards us, giggled, and vomited into a large Chinese vase. Behind her followed a tuxedoed blade, his white tie askew. He grinned stupidly and dragged the girl away. We followed a noise down the hall to its source in an expensive salon. Fifteen or twenty people made up the party and a Victrola played jazz, with barefoot couples dancing on the Turkey rug and gin bottles piled on a table. They were all young and loaded, high society nitwits. Eyes turned to Jack as he entered and swept off his hat in a gallant gesture. There were squeals from a few girls and a mild tumult.

I hung back and scanned the vapid faces of the bright young things. Louche forms in short dresses and bobbed hair draped themselves over Chesterfields. Quasi-Valentinos wearing pulled-apart eveningwear drank and puffed at little cheroots. On a far chaise in the corner I recognized Bob's blond head. He was talking to a copper-topped woman, her back to me and his hand high up on her thigh. As I was about to turn away I heard a laugh like a cork pulled from a bottle and felt my scrotum constrict. A face revealed itself, throat extended, mouth open with pleasure, lips a red circle. The eyes opened and looked into mine and it was her, Laura.

I stepped into the room.

“And what's this?” drawled a lazy voice.

A ponce wearing a monocle stood before me, cocktail glass in his soft pink hand.

“He's with me,” Jack said.

“Does it have a name?” asked the invert.

Fury, embarrassment, and fear clammed me up. I went dead cold.

“How very gauche,” the monocle said. “Send it away! Back out the tradesman's entrance!”

No one spoke. The only sound was a scratching from the Victrola's funnel. I was being looked at and felt a flush of heat in my damp suit, followed by a quick, choking rage.

“Easy, Roger,” said Jack. “Welcome your guests. Be a pal.”

The eyeglass turned to his coterie and their murmur. Someone changed the black disk and I saw Bob smirking my way but his hand was gone from touching her body. She looked in my direction, not at me but at Jack. The needle found its groove and out came Jelly Roll Morton. I could feel myself an object of scorn, persona non grata, a goat. Roger the pederast looked poison at me and his sentiment spread through the room. My true talent, Isis unveiled, the ability to provoke an instant dislike and to return the sentiment with interest. Weight of the Webley at the small of my back, six bullets ready to release. I opened my case and lit a cigaret. Jack had his overcoat off and was being poured two drinks by a flirt. He brought the mouthwash over and handed one to me, took the cigaret out of my mouth and placed it in his own.

“Trials of Job, Mick me lad,” he said.

“Why'd you bring me to this fandango? There's a time you'll go too damn far.”

“That I'd like to see. So far you're rock steady.”

“I'm being tested,” I said.

“You might call it that.”

“And who are you to set the examination?”

“Calm yourself, Mick. Play nice with others. Talk to some girls, make her jealous.”

Again that amusement in his eye. He wanted me uncomfortable and off-balance. Winding me up like a tintoy. Why did I put up with it? Because he delivered. I was in the same room as she.

A pretty little number dragged Jack off to turn a hoof. I went to the bottles by the window box and poured neat gin, my back to the revelry. I saw my reflection in the glass darkly, and felt my heart beating like a malfunctioning furnace. Ignore your parasympathetic nervous system, the baiting and humiliation. Forget it all, turn, and look at her from across the room. See her here, now. Drink it all up. Raw spirit burned going down.

There was Roger the lord of the manor covered in his leeches, Jack with another twist dancing close to a slow foxtrot. A roar of laughter, the tumble of bottles. Laura was gone. She'd left the salon, and so had Bob. A nerve jumped along my face and twitched at my left eye. The cigaret coal burned at my knuckle and I let the stub fall, let it smoulder and burn this house down and all within it. I cut out to the hallway to find the once-retching girl passed out on the marble with her idiot chaperone beside her. The front room was empty; another door was locked with no light through the keyhole. Had they left the house together?

Above my head the ceiling moaned. I climbed the carpeted stairs carefully, flanked by hanging tapestries: brass rubbings from Crusaders' tombs. It was too dark to see until the second-storey corridor. This wing had bedroom doors left and right, all locked tight except at the end. I could hear quiet voices and a muted squeal, a grunt and a gasp. The door was open a crack and a line of light led me as I came closer. Sway of a single candle flame with shadows thrown on the wall. A canopied bed. They were on their knees on the fabric spread in an indecent posture. I felt myself looming and fading into nothing, dead. My gun was infinitely heavy, too heavy to lift. Out of the orange glow I sensed the gaze of an eye pierce out and it was hers but I turned away and walked back from the gallows. She'd left the door open. She'd wanted to be seen.

Without knowing how it happened I found myself down in the cellar, somehow having passed through the kitchen and entered this subterrain by a fatal gravity, seeking a grave. A deep must and fungus filled my nostrils and around me 'ranged in racks were cobwebbed bottles from before the war. I wanted one, wanted an oblivion, anything but this numb agony. I selected a vintage and cracked it open with the butt of the Webley in lieu of a corkscrew but the whole thing splintered and broke, coursing staining wine over my hands as I dropped the mess to the flagged floor. Wine dripped from my fingers and mixed with blood from where the glass had cut my hand. An animal reaction guided the wound to my mouth and I tasted salt, copper, rot, death.

It was her pure hypocrisy, her feigned virtue and purity that wounded most. All that prudery, the dry passionless kisses and timid caresses broken off. There'd been no moral principle at work in her repeated denials, her frigid refusals, her contempt. It'd simply been me, me and me alone. She'd lie with others, but not with me. The wicked, evil, two-faced liar. The love of my life, squirming with another. The whore.

There was a thump above my head as they danced a Turkey Trot. Hunching in the basement I turned small and cold. I staunched the flowing blood with a rag. To the left was a passage elsewhere and I picked up two bottles to take with me. I followed the tunnel to an old barred door, locked from within. Wrenching the rusty bolt open started the blood again and my concern turned to a fear of contracting tetanus. Ozone poured over me. I was out on a street sloping downward into the city. There was a wind up, blowing east. The windows behind me filled with silhouettes swaying and moving. I took out the Webley, taking careful aim at a black figure in the window. Roger, fate willing. Instead I turned my back on them, pushed the cork down one bottle's neck, and drank until near-bursting.

On the march back to the Wayside a dirge welled up from within, Omar Khayyám by way of Fitzgerald: “A flask of wine, a book of verse—and Thou beside me singing in the wilderness, and wilderness is paradise enow.”

On an empty curb at midnight, broken and destroyed, I collapsed and croaked. I crawled on hands and knees to a wall, propped myself up, and emptied the second bottle. There was a light in a lobby—my hotel. By some remaining instinct I managed to get to my room and enjoy a drunken sleep filled with nightmares.

THURSDAY

M
ORNING WITH THE sun back out. Chimneypots poured forth smoke and steam. From my window I watched slow trains pull into the yard by the river. Soon I was out on the street where frosted red leaves scratched along the pavement. The fresh wind snapped my mind into place and cleaned away any lingering shame from the shadowy night. I primed for action and walked to Windsor Station for a quick cup and smoke. Clear the decks and run up the colours: it's time to attack. Jack had been bossing me, keeping his movements dark. I'd walked blind towards the enemy trench and if I kept following orders without direction of my own I'd catch shrapnel or worse. For too long Jack had twisted my tail; it was time now to do a little twisting back.

There were precious few candidates for pressuring: Brown the wee Customs man, that rat-bastard Bob, and oily Charlie the French mechanic-cum-lawyer. No, on reflection it was someone else who might provide a few answers: Harry Houdini. Jack hadn't gone to the Medical Union by accident or merely for Smiler's cocaine. There'd been the series of riddling questions, the unusual request for an unwritten book. If I entered at that angle and discovered Jack's vector it might give me an inkling of the conspiracy I was now part of. Firm in my conviction I walked to the Windsor Hotel. It was near ten-thirty, earlier than the noon hour appointed for their rendezvous. I could intercept the flash, read the book or whatever it was and put it back. It was a start. At the front desk I spoke to a pockmarked clerk.

“Mr. Houdini has left a package to be collected here,” I said.

“What name, please?”

I gave the one Jack had used the night before.

“One moment, sir.”

The clerk picked up a receiver and whispered something. A moment passed in the murmuring lobby and was marked by the single chime of a bell. The clerk sneered and said: “Sir, Mr. Houdini left specific instructions that he wished to be informed the moment this package was collected. He will be with you directly.”

Merde.
This was not anything I wanted part of. All I'd imagined was a peek at the book or message from Houdini Jack was after to see how it played into this malarkey. It was too late now to cause a scene ducking out. Remember Jack's words: sheer brazen cheek.

Hell and damnation gang aft agley. What was I trying to accomplish, sniffing around the edges of his scheming like this? Parity, information, intelligence. The way he'd sicced Laura and Bob on me at the party and used me as an idle amusement: Jack was wrong. I was a free agent, unaccounted for and independent, with the power to alter events. This was something I'd forgotten while devoured by my inward world. Some message had passed between Jack and the magician and I, as always, was cut out. Later I'd been exiled from the gin party. If I was enemy, let me behave as one. Even now Jack was in all likelihood bedding a twist from the shindig whilst I waited amongst rubber plants and geraniums. Another clear bell sounded and the lift doors slid open. There was Houdini foursquare in the box. His gaze pierced yours truly and he marched straight over.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “You aren't the man I spoke with.”

“No,” I said.

“Well, what the devil do you want? If you're another crawler bringing warnings I advise you to push off.”

“Warnings?”

“State your business, man. I've no time for triflers. Mrs. Hou-dini waits upon me.”