The Man Who Killed (24 page)

Dammitdammitgoddamnationchristinheavensaveus. Breathe. Maintain an outward mien of calm and spit away your corruption. George V is your liege and lord by the Orange Lodge and the Law of this Dominion, so fuck the Pope.

A ragged dog came out from behind a rubbish tip and coughed at us as we waited hidden in deep shadow. I made up my face into a rueful, close-lipped smile as the bottle did another round. When I went to light a fresh cigaret I found one burning in my hand. Time slowed with the universe, entropic. Birds flew southeasterly towards St. Helen's Island. An old lamplighter came our way, the antique figure out of Cruikshank's etchings for Dickens. His toil gave the streets a bluish tint as night fell completely. Jack handed me keys and nodded to Bob. The two drove the Olds to another position. I finished the wine and carefully placed the bottle on a rotten turnbuckle before walking to the Auburn, then made to check my pocketwatch before recalling how I'd failed to redeem it from hock. No matter. There was no music playing in my head now. I felt drained of life. As I sat behind the wheel I listened to my breath and the dull rhythm of my heartbeat. At least the medulla oblongata continued to function. Along my arm came the familiar ache.

Talk about slowness, those days strung out along the opaque dragon's tail, lost in morphia. The endless dreams, the fading to lonely worlds, a glacial death often punctuated by restless strength and creative activity. That was the drug's Janus effect, withering the body and feeding the mind. Nothing on earth had been worse than the panic I'd felt when my supply had been exhausted. Periodic opium raids in Chinatown had pushed me into a corner and the McGill beaks came ever so damned close to catching me out at the Royal Victoria red-handed.

The last visit to the hospital before brokering my departure from the school had been an off-chance of lax security. There were new locks on the door and Smiler was with Jacques Price, the pair dissecting a beggar in the downstairs morgue. Smiler and Price's scalpelwork was no patch on my own, I was pleased to note. Jack and I'd butchered enough deer and moose in our youth to make us old hands at vivisection. Once the Pater had potted a bear out by Yale and brought most of it back to our house in the West End. He'd skinned it for a rug and I remembered finding a tin rubbish bin in the yard with its lid held down by a brick. Inside had been the animal's head, alive with writhing white maggots stripping the flesh off the trophy. Later the amah'd boiled the skull clean and the Pater'd mounted it on a wall near my bedroom.

My childhood home had been a sort of emporium, the attic filled with books, charts, photoengravings, and testaments. In a trunk were my mother's few surviving effects, her communion papers and a golden shamrock of the Apparition at Knock. My amah had died while I was in Victoria getting a baccalaureate, the house now another museum of a broken colonist family, near empty save for the Pater in his rocking chair.

Returning to the present and the automobile I found myself thirsty and yenned for a cup of tea. The old streetlamps cast an arctic glow. What'll newspaper headlines read like tomorrow? This was a very serious crime we were on the verge of committing, a chancy undertaking. Illogically I trusted in Jack's star. I'd play my part, was all, and do what was necessary. It'd been a long day already, the longest one yet. I closed my eyes.

And opened them again as a long white saloon car pulled in. From Jack's sketchy form in the darkness came the Scout whistle. I started the Auburn and shifted into gear, the headlamps off, accelerating over the short distance to ramming speed. I saw startled clean-shaven faces staring my way as the machines collided. There was a crunch of tearing metal and I was thrown onto the wheel as I caved the saloon's passenger side in. My chest burned as I pulled out the Webley and opened the door to step down onto the road. A neat job, Mick, I thought, as I pointed the barrel through the rear glass at a surprised middle-aged man in the back seat. Jack was shouting. There he was in front with his gun on the driver. The front passenger lay slumped over where the Auburn's grille had met the wheelwell. A radiator hissed steam. Jack shouted something across the bonnet at the driver, who reached down. Jack fired. The man I was covering hunched and I pulled the trigger. Glass cracked and shattered and his head bucked forward. Jack came by the driver's side while the last man put up his hands. Jack shot again and the cabin filled with black gore. He pulled the handle and a bloodied body with a ruined face fell out clutching a black leather case. Jack grabbed the satchel, his revolver smoking in his left fist. He turned to me and yelled: “Ankle!”

I looked up at the moored ship; the men on the deck were just starting to stir. It had been quick. We ran, hotfooting from the slaughter. Maybe half a minute had passed. Suddenly I was lucid, my body heaving as I followed after as fast as I could. We made it over slippery cobblestones to the idling Olds. Jack hauled open the rear left passenger door behind Bob.

“Go!” shouted Jack as we clambered in.

He threw the bag onto the front passenger seat. Bob engaged the gear and we were off, my heart screaming and ears roaring from the gunshots and the crash. My hand tingled as Bob veered crazily, fear making him stupider. He got the 'car under control as we turned up McGill.

“Shit,” he said.

A procession of torches and mounted policemen holding Union Jack banners blocked our way ahead, the Sons of England.

“Trafalgar Night,” shouted Jack. “Turn right!”

Bob swerved at the Customs House and now we were caught in the crooked warren of the Old Town, passing the firehouse and a small square with a thin rough obelisk at its centre. It was a rat run with the risk of getting trapped in an old byway behind a horse and wagon or running into an outriding constable from the parade. Bob was driving too fast.

“Slow down,” I said.

He turned to me with a vacant stare. The man was more than drunk, he was on dope. I could tell if anyone could.

“Slow down!” I said again.

Bob focused and came back to his senses. Jack was clenching his teeth and muttering, his gun still gripped in his hand. We rolled left through Place d'Armes and around the statue of Maisonneuve and an Iroquois brave covered in gullshit, tomahawk at the ready. From Notre-Dame bells rang the changes. What time was it? An arc onto St. Lawrence Main heading northerly and slowing when Bob's arm suddenly swung around at me with a gun at its end. Before he could fire Jack's right wrist came up in time. Bob shot through the roof and I was deafened. The Olds skidded and slewed as I clawed at the door latch and fell out, out of a moving Goddamned 'car. I landed hard on my side, rolling and losing my grip on the Webley. The machine pitched Jack out after me, turning an awkward somersault to hit his head on the pavement. My ears were screeching from the report as I watched Bob get away, the rear door flapping as he straightened the Olds's route out and powered off. And with him, the money. I looked for pedestrians or bystanders or police but we were lucky, lost on a rough corner with only a scavenging rag-and-bone man lurking in a dark storefront with his pushcart, near Craig and a long way from cover as my mind scrambled for what to do.

Jack waved and shouted as he rose. He staggered to pick up his hat and trotted off blindly. I scooped up my weapon and followed, pain coursing through every fibre and furious, ready to kill again. Jack turned up an alley and I knew where we were, able now to make out what Jack's mouth was shouting: “Chinatown.”

MY REFLECTION IN A PANE of glass amethyst from the glow of a neon sign. I was a lean monkey with a gun in his hand. For a moment I could picture myself many-armed and fierce as a Hindoo idol, wielding knives dripping blood. I ran through the little
quartier chinois
and in another window saw a heterogeneous collection of objects: a wooden Confucius painted vermilion, shadow puppets from the Dutch East Indies, a Moslem screen of a white-veiled man before a dazzling blue peacock, a green copper bust of Emperor Augustus,
dominus et primus inter pares.
I kept burning shoe leather trying to catch up with Jack and wondered how much the Celestials were charging for Caesar.

Ahead of me Jack stopped, looked back, and hustled down a grimy stone staircase to a subterranean entryway. He rapped a sequence. The door opened and Jack pushed in past a small Chinaman in his pajamas. Bitter opium smoke and sweat drifted as I followed. My sense of smell was strangely acute, perhaps compensating for my deafness. I also tasted cordite and petrol. Sounds came faintly to me as the ringing in my ears lessened in intensity. I heard Jack bark in his rough honking Cantonese:
“Hem ga san puk gai.”
Out of my way.

He grabbed a skinny fellow by the neck and barked: “Kwan!”

Jack pushed the Chinaman down a flight of wooden steps leading deeper underground. I roughed my way in and shouldered the door closed behind me. My vision adjusted to make out cat-eyes glittering in the light of burning spills for the pipes. We were a fearsome sight for drugged Orientals: a pair of armed
gwai lo
barbarians with big noses sniffing at the stink. In the gloom I thought I saw a white woman being ministered to. This sewer was a crypt and I wanted a better way out but had to follow Jack down. The scene was something out of a pulp journal, the dread den of the dragon. Its inhabitants didn't put up much fight and I pushed them away like yellow scarecrows.

A flickering electric bulb in the next room had the effect of turning everything into a staccato Zoetrope reel. Brass pots bubbled with a hellish brew while a wet Norway rat cowered by a sewer grating. Noise beyond led me out of the foul kitchen into a chamber with a stove and a table surrounded by fan tan players. A serene picture of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen faced me. Jack still held the skinny beggar by the scruff, then shouted loud enough for me to hear: “Police.”

I came in and backed his play, growling: “Nobody breathe.”

Jack shoved his captive to the ground and turned to me. There was a wildness to him, effect of shock and the blow to his head. He cocked his revolver and the gamblers sat still as hypnotized chickens. What was his intent?

“I want Kwan,” he said, as though to answer.

In the table's centre was the black numbered square surrounded by money. The croupier had a downturned bowl in front of him. Jack stood still but seemed unbalanced: blood on his forehead, collar undone, coat torn. The gamblers let their cigarets burn. Six players sat 'round the table and the wretched coolie sprawled on the floor made seven. Jack reached over and lifted up the bowl. The croupier looked a dry stick with a thin beard. He betrayed nothing as the buttons spilled on the tabletop. Jack put the bowl on the man's head, a terrible affront.

“Kwan,” Jack said, almost politely.

Still nothing. I was becoming nervous. We were trapped down here in an underground dead-end. The upstairs servants might've signalled for help and we'd be boxed in neatly. I held my gun at my side and was having trouble concentrating. The heavy odours and the stolid Chinese, with their blank faces and dark slitted eyes, unsettled me. One was holding a clay cup of tea. I felt like fainting. Jack hit the croupier a sickening blow to the head with his Webley. He shoved the counters off the table and gathered up the money.

“Kwan,” he repeated.

Jack stuck the barrel in the mug of a little shrimp wearing a collarless shirt. Clockwise he went from face to face. Jack's mouth was open and spittle slavered off his jaw. He settled on a Fu Manchu type by me who lifted a bony hand. I saw light through long transparent fingernails and jabbed my gun in the gambler's back. He twitched, then very slowly the victim moved a finger and pointed at the stove. Jack went to touch it and laughed. With a straining heave he pulled the stove away from the wall to reveal a gap with yet more stairs leading down.

“Get that,” Jack said, pointing at a light. “I'm going in. Stay here and cover me.”

I handed him the oil lamp. He crouched and went into the hole. I kept up a forbidding façade for the Chinamen but was outmatched by their studied impassivity. They were damned lucky to be here in Montreal. An act was passed by government a few years back against all Oriental immigration. No more Gold Mountain. In Vancouver I'd been a child when the Asiatic Exclusion League had smashed windows throughout Chinatown. Had they half a chance these characters would make me into chop suey as recompense.

Jack's voice came from somewhere far away and I shuffled to the hole.

“Mick. Mick,” he said.

“What?”

“Come down. Watch your head.”

I took the stairs backward with the circle of motionless watchers staring at me, statues in a tomb. I turned and another dozen steps brought me to a narrow way filled with rotting burlap. A light flickered ahead as I came to a room lined with shelves stacked with old fowling pieces, rusty pikes and swords, a set of measuring weights, pots of opium, and boxes labelled in Chinese. Jack stood in the middle with a laughing man wearing a real pig-tail.

“Kwan here thinks it's funny I took their money,” Jack said.

“Very funny, very funny,” Kwan said.

“Some joke,” I said.

My eyes roamed this Aladdin's cave and my heart stopped when I saw a familiar rectangle of black metal. Jack and Kwan bantered and Kwan handed Jack an automatic pistol, a Browning. While they were occupied haggling I sidled over to the object of interest and opened it up. My nerves thrilled and pain receded. I closed the box and turned back to the pair. Jack gave Kwan some money and they shook hands curiously. When I pocketed the black box I tipped over Jack's oil lamp. It smashed to the ground and I jumped back as the oil spilled over sacks and wicker pots. Jack and Kwan turned as flames spread to the shelves. In the enclosed space the smoke started choking and the fire blocked the way back upstairs. Kwan swore and hopped over to a corner where he began scrabbling at the wall. Jack staggered in the poisonous smoke and I pulled him over to the Chinaman. Kwan found what he was looking for and the wall crumbled away. We shoved into a recess and to a ladder leading up. Jack yanked Kwan down from it and started pulling himself up. I followed suit and kicked at Kwan as he clawed at me. Jack pounded on a trapdoor above through the thickening smoke and finally cracked it open in a shower of rust and dirt. He pushed up and out and I came after into an alley crowded with rubbish bins and restaurant waste. Smoke poured from the secret shaft and we could hear a rising wail around the corner. Kwan's head poked out the ground as we dragged ourselves to the alley mouth.