The Man Who Killed

by Fraser Nixon

  An American sat talking to Jack about Coolidge’s trade policies. At the snap of fingers a venerable sommelier ceremoniously opened a bottle of wine. Jack and I treated the Yankee, who saluted the liberal liquor laws of the North.

  “It’s what I like about your country,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Jack asked.

  “Well, number one, none of our Puritan hysteria. I tell you, sometimes it almost makes me blush to think of what they’re trying to sell us in the States. Take that trial in Tennessee last year. Darrow showed Bryan up for a damn fool and the Bible for a pack of howlers, and he still lost! In the twentieth century! Evidence of science’s progress everywhere around us! Now, lookee here, evolution’s a fact, sure as this is fine wine, which I thank you gentlemen for. Now what are you going to believe, a book scribbled by Moses wandering in the desert three thousand years ago or one typed the other day by Mr. Einstein? What I mean is, we all know why the sky is blue, don’t we?”

  “Something to do with the sea?” I ventured.

  “Precisely.”

  The American drank. I waited for him to lay out the second point of his argument.

  “What’re you selling?” Jack asked.

  “I’m glad you asked, young fellow. Let’s call it peace of mind.”

  “Jesus,” Jack said.

  “No sir, but I do know some Bible salesmen. Good men, most of them, but they dip into their goods too much. Wouldn’t stand it in a whiskey merchant and it’s the same damn thing with Scripture pushers, rots the brain. Now, I was in Burlington just last night at a commercial hotel and I met one of these fellows. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. He sold me a book that you gents might be interested in. I have it right here, a real pip.”

  The American rummaged through his valise and found the volume in question.

  “The Man Who Nobody Knows. Take a listen to this.” Our guest opened the book to a marked passage and read: “‘He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world... nowhere is there such a startling example of executive success as the way this organization was brought together.’”

  Beet-red with enjoyment, the American took another mouthful and continued: “This, though, is a gem. Sums it up right prettily.” He cleared his throat. “‘He would be a national advertiser today... the founder of modern business, the author of the ideal of service.’”

  He guffawed and pounded his fist on his knee.

  “Can you beat that? The Messiah in a three-piece suit reading stock quotes on a tickertape? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand we’re the most advanced nation on earth, begging your pardon, and on the other we’re superstitious as a bunch of Pygmies. Selling Jesus to the poor and needy in the guise of a Goddamn tycoon. The man would cast down the lot of them for profiting from the world’s misery.”

  “We’re not much better,” Jack said. “We’ve got our own Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan, and if you want superstition drive five minutes out into the countryside. Talk to the peasants out there and you’ll learn Jews have fangs to drink blood from God-fearing Catholics and that the loup-garou roams the woods.”

  “Where’re you from?” I asked the American.

  “Baltimore, Maryland,” he said. “Home of the sanest man in the Republic.”

  “Mencken,” said Jack.

  “Beano.”

  “Speaking of trials,” I asked, “do you think they’ll execute those Italians?”

  “If they don’t I’ll eat my hat. The only thing the government’s more frightened of than Reds is Anarchists. They’ll make an example of that pair, count on it. Remember, no one ever caught whoever it was bombed Wall Street a few years back. If they want to keep the Babbitts and the booboisie happy and sinking their pennies into fly-by-night stock they’ll gas them or hang them or put a bullet in their brains.”

  “What, no electric chair?” I joked.

  “What brings you to town?” Jack said, sinking the last of his wine.

  “Keep it to yourself but I’ve got a hot line on a dehydrated vegetable soup company. Thanks again for the tip-top tipple. Be seeing you, fellas.”

  He whistled a waiter over, settled his bill, shook our hands, and was gone, taking his bulk and gravity with him but leaving his book behind.

  “Now Mick, me lad, you must excuse me but I’ve a few appointments to keep. Where can I reach you?”

  “I’ll probably get a room at the Occidental.”

  “What name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “Smith,” I said.

  Jack sighed.

  “Well, if you need me I’m under Standfast at my hotel. Ring me tomorrow and keep the evening open. We’ll meet. Oke?”

  “You bet.”

  Jack popped his hat on and stood up. I showed him the palm of my hand so he shrugged and slid out of the bar. I quickly paid the tab and followed, wanting to see if I could shadow him and get a sense of the larger picture, his connections in this mess. I knew of Brown the Customs man, Bob, and now Charlie the lawyer in Outremont. There was the missing driver Martin and the Lord knows who else. What I really wondered about was the identity of Jack’s bosses. How was he fixed up? I skulked out onto the street and watched Jack cross Sherbrooke only to climb the steps up into the Mount Royal Club, where the burly gorilla at the door let him through. Perhaps there was a way I might insinuate myself inside, fake moustache, tradesman’s stoop. No. I had none of the play-actor in me. I couldn’t pull off any foolishness of that sort. Theatricals were one of Laura’s delights, a taste she shared with Jack: charades, dramatic readings, songs around the piano. A suspicion slowly metastasized within me, and I chewed off a fingernail, chopping the crescent of keratin between my teeth. Laura’s father was a greybeard at the Mount Royal. I swallowed the nail and walked to the station.

  THAT AFTERNOON WAS spent getting my grip and renting a room. I bought a sheaf of magazines from a newsstand to while away my life, the green-covered American Mercury, Harper’s, The Goblin from Toronto for a laugh and Black Mask for thrills, plus a book of bathing beauty photos in case of self-abuse. At the Occidental I found a plain and quiet room where I put my few things in order. The hidden picture of Laura and myself fell to the floor. The snap was worn at the edges from where I’d handled it. A moment out of time.

  I picked up the telephone and asked the operator to put me through to the Dunphy residence. A maid answered. My throat constricted and I severed the connection. I sat on the bed in my shirtsleeves with my head in my hands. Jackass. Too old to be playing childish games of love. She’d led me on, Old Nick knows why, and finally dropped me without a qualm after all the devious stratagems I’d concocted to slip her lovelorn letters, all the artfully orchestrated chance encounters in social settings. I’d been stealing morphine and selling it to finance my romantic campaign. Was it any wonder that after Laura pitched me I began taking my own medicine? Soon enough I was skipping lectures and duties at the Royal Victoria. The money melted away. I became careless and was caught out. Or near enough. And no Jack to save me. Same as in the years after the war: he vanished. The Pater received postcards from San Francisco, Montana, London, then nothing. No one knew.

  After I returned from service my father sent me to a local college where we adopted Oxford bags and played golf between semesters. I’d picked up enough chemistry and biology to be accepted for medical studies here in Montreal, just in time for Jack to show up out of the blue, claiming to be enrolled in Divinity, one of his jokes, belike, but one never knew. Perhaps the Pater’s influence over him and a wish to atone. For what? Go ahead, Mick, and pound sand.

  Jack and I were Methuselahs amongst the stripling freshmen two years ago but we weren’t alone; my classes were filled with former soldiers playing catch-up after the war. Four semesters was all it took for me to be out on my ear, out in the cold. I was too damn old now, twenty-seven, child of the last year of the
last century. No, that wasn’t correct. The century properly started in 1901, the year Queen Victoria died and took all the old certainties with her.

  Unconsciously my fingers mimed the movements of preparing a solution, muscle memory. A steel hypodermic filled with release. Put the thought out of your head. Look at the marks on your pale skin. Smoke a healthy cigaret. Distract yourself. Think of what honourable work you can turn to, think about who you are, where you’re from. You’re the son of a Presbyterian minister born beside the Cariboo Road. You spent your childhood in mining camps and at the mouth of the Fraser, a motherless boy on the shore of the sea with a wild child for a friend, a changeling, a cuckoo’s egg taken under the Pater’s wing. Jack, brother and bane, wide and expansive where you’re narrow and small. Do yourself a favour: stare out the window into the city and a world spinning out of control. You’re nothing, not a mechanic of the human machine, not a son or a lover but a criminal, a shortterm ex-soldier unbloodied in war, an Irish Protestant, the worst of all worlds.

  I picked up the ’phone again and screwed my courage to the sticking place. Into my ear came the operator’s nasal voice, an electric screech as the connection plug was fitted into its hole on the board and a click as the receiver was picked up at the other end of the line. The same maid answered.

  “May I speak with Miss Laura Dunphy, please?” I asked.

  “And whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Professor Edwin Drood, McGill University.”

  “One moment, if you please.”

  The maid sounded like a Scotch domestic cleared from the Lowlands to serve different masters on the igneous North American rock. A new indenture, wearing wool while her mistress was clad in silk. Laura copper-haired and cool-eyed, the cat of the house. A muffled sound and then her, her voice low and thrilling.

  “Hello?”

  “What’re you doing tonight?” I asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me.”

  Silence. Then: “I thought that you would understand how I felt when I failed to accept your last invitation.”

  “That’s the best you can come up with?”

  “Honestly, this is too tiresome.”

  “Not like dancing,” I said.

  “I am sure that I do not know what you mean.”

  “Think about it.”

  “Michael, you are threatening to become a bore. Have you anything purposeful to say?”

  “Laura, you’re not talking to Little Boy Blue here. There’s a strong possibility I might be leaving town for good and I’d like the chance to see you before I go.”

  “And where are you going?”

  “Far away.”

  “I’m afraid that I am not at liberty to see you.”

  “‘My love swears that she is made of truth, and I do believe her though I know she lies.’”

  “Michael, stop this.”

  I hung up. Full stop.

  Depression seized me. I opened the window and smelled snow. I thought of my revolver and my temple. It was already past dusk. Oh, but the poor chambermaid who’d find this ruined body. There’d be another girl, a knock-kneed number in a sunny small town. I picked up the ’phone again for the front desk and ordered coffee, then leafed through the magazines in search of some truth. Instead of revelation I found tooth powder advertisements and cures for halitosis. There was nothing real, nothing like Laura in a black coat, black gloves on her elegant hands standing beneath a tree amongst the fallen chestnut leaves, her long hair blazing fire in the October evening light. Or had that been a painting in the Museum of Fine Arts?

  The coffee came but I sent it back down on the pretext it was stale. I started pacing, a kind of chattering voice chasing and echoing itself inside my skull. On the dresser was a wireless and I turned it on to the sound of a cat being strangled. The steel whisker went up and down the wire, picking up dance music, hymns, a snowfall warning for farmers, and then nothing but crackling. The empty skies were filling up with voices: Morse code, radio transmissions, unknown electrical rays. Airplane propellers drilled through the atmosphere. It was too much for one such as myself, raised in youth on the fixed verities to be found in Chums and the Boy’s Own Annual, tales of the Raj where cricket-playing adventurers always triumphed over dusky Arabs, the shaven-headed Bosche, and any stray Bengali tigers. It was a world with Kim astride the gun, Richard Hannay thwarting the Black Stone, and a sundowner under drowsy punka fans your just reward. We have got the Maxim gun and you have not. All of which had been torn apart one August morning in 1914, mowed down by ranks of machine guns and plowed under by percussion bombs.

  I resolved to walk and clear my head. I would hustle a game of billiards on the lower Main, see a moving-picture show, do anything but trawl through that sea of memory filled with lost loves, squandered hopes, wasted time, embarrassing drunken antics. I rode the lift down to the lobby and then, outside the saloon, hesitated.

  “BEG YOUR PARDON. Would you happen to have a light?”

  She was a little older than I, well made up and wearing a light fur and a black velvet ribbon with a charm tied high around her throat. I fumbled a vesta towards her face. She touched my hand as she lit her cigaret. A woman alone. I tried to picture myself as I must appear to her.

  “Are you from around here?” she asked coolly, regarding me from her perch at the bar.

  “Enough to know my way around,” I answered, scanning the room for its few denizens.

  “I see. Where are you from, originally?”

  “That’s a very good question,” I smirked.

  She laughed and I saw the smallest touch of lipstick on a canine. The colour of her eyes was difficult to tell in the light.

  “Well then, how long is ‘enough’?”

  “Two years,” I said. “Two years too many.”

  “Don’t you like Montreal?”

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Do you know what it is? I can’t stand the way people complain about the weather here.”

  “It gets pretty cold in the winter, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  I started to warm up.

  “Yes, but they’ve known that for four hundred years. It isn’t as if it’s a surprise every autumn when the mercury drops. The ’papers are always full of it as though winter’s an unusual hardship or some blasted thing.”

  “People like to gripe,” she said. “It’s the way of human nature.”

  “Like I’m doing right now. Would you care for a drink?” I asked.

  “How nice.”

  I snapped my fingers, showed the waiter part of my breadroll and beckoned him to follow us as we floated deeper into the room. The steward came and filled the lady’s glass, as though by telepathy. The power of money. The woman settled into the velveteen of a quiet settee.

  “Why are you here if you dislike it so much?” she asked.

  “War in heaven, evolution—take your pick.”

  I was perched on the edge of my seat, a dry vermouth in a cool glass in my dirty hands.

  “Clever fellow, aren’t you?” she mocked.

  “I failed charm school,” I said, and lit a smoke.

  She touched her hair. A tell, primping for me? Or was she on the job, signalling a watcher? What we had here was no randy young widow looking for kicks, that was for certain. She drew on her long, thin, perfumed cigarette. I became interested.

  “And a lovely young lady such as yourself, what brings you unchaperoned to this church bee?”

  She laughed and threw her head back. Her bosom swelled.

  “I’m working.”

  My eyebrow raised itself.

  “No, not like that. I’m in town for a show at the Palace,” she said.

  “Which one?”

  “So This Is Paris. We’re here ’til next Thursday.”

  “And they put you up in this dump? Why not somewhere decent, like the Windsor?”

  “This isn’t such a bad place. You’re staying he
re, aren’t you?”

  “How’d you know that?” I asked.

  “It’s raining out. You’re dry. Besides, staying here I can save a little money and get away from the rest of the company. When you travel in a group it’s nice to be on your own once in awhile.”

  “And no show tonight?” I asked.

  “The house is dark on Monday.”

  “Well then. Do you know Montreal?”

  “A little. I’ve been here on other tours. It’s changed. New buildings, new life.”

  “It’s all the liquor money. Do you like jazz?”

  “I play a character who does,” she said.

  “My name’s Michael, by the way, but for some reason everyone calls me Mick.”

  My hand moved to hers. The bar was now deserted. A moustached bartender wiped a glass with a white cloth. It could be anywhere on earth.

  “Lilyan,” she said. “Lilyan Tashman.”

  “Charmed,” I replied.

  “Enchantée,” she returned.

  “So your character likes jazz but you don’t?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I do, of course, but not as much. She’s a flapper, a real minx.”

  “That must be quite a stretch for you.”

  She narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her nose fetchingly. “Sauce. Buy me another drink and you can get away with that.”

  I bought her a drink and sat with her in our cozy nook, drawing in hints of her perfume. The low light favoured her features and I pegged her in her late twenties, early thirties. She was well put together and smiled ever so slightly as her eyes met mine—blue-green, I could now see, flecked with flaws. There was an amber spark as one facet refracted a mote of light. Lilyan opened her soft scarlet lips.