The Man Who Killed

by Fraser Nixon

  “Michael, what type of business are you in?”

  “Wholesale freight.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Export trade, mostly.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “This and that. What the market wants.”

  “How evasive,” she said.

  “Do you like to dance?” I asked.

  “I sing and dance for a living.”

  “I mean for your own amusement.”

  “From time to time.”

  “What’s your next stop?”

  “Detroit.”

  The minion poured another drink, and I purchased Sportsmans off a young girl walking past our table. Lilyan had slipped one shoe off and had her stockinged foot resting on a seat. I began to tingle.

  “There’s more to you than you’re letting on. You’re being disingenuous,” she said.

  “We’ve just met,” I said.

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “My amah taught me never to speak with strangers.”

  “What a thoughtful woman.”

  “My mother died when I was born,” I said.

  “How sad.”

  “So you’d think. Say, what’s that scent you’re wearing?” I asked.

  “Lavender.”

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Listen, Michael. Are you going to invite me up to your room now or later?”

  “Now, I suppose.”

  “Bring a bottle,” she said.

  I waved the hovering waiter over to settle the bill and ordered booze be sent up on my tab. I crushed a ten into his hand to grease the gears. Miss or Mistress or Madame Tashman gathered her things and walked to the lift without turning to see if I’d follow. I made haste to join her and we were pulled up to my floor by the machine. In the hallway she curled her arm through mine and leaned into me, her walk a trifle unsteady. Who knew how long she’d been at the bar before I arrived. I unlocked the door to my room and turned to kiss her. She responded, putting her arms around my neck, returning my embrace with sweet slow kisses. I felt her warmth and tasted her painted lips. We broke apart.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  She walked to the stuffed chair, trailing her fur over its shoulder, and curled up into the cushions like a little cat, her shoes kicked off to the floor.

  “Music?” she asked.

  I wrestled with the wireless to find some pleasant sounds. There was a knock at the door. My senses became alert. Perhaps it was the copy of Black Mask I’d been reading or just a general fear spooking me but in this part of the story the hero’s distracted by a conniving female and doesn’t keep his wits about him. It’s always a set-up, and the next thing he knows he wakes up tied to a chair, seeing stars. I took my revolver out of the dresser drawer and held a towel over it. Lilyan’s eyes widened but she sat perfectly still. I opened the door to a service cart loaded with iced Champagne and a pair of goblets. I signed for the goods and tipped the teenage porter a quarter-dollar in relief, then pulled the cart in and uncorked the wine.

  “Export trade, my foot,” Lilyan said. “Who are you really?”

  “I’m nobody,” I say.

  “You act like a gangster. All jumpy. That’s what I said to myself when I saw you downstairs.”

  “But you still approached me. What kind of dame are you? Are you on the make?”

  “Would I have kissed you like that if I was a working girl?”

  “Good point.”

  My hands poured wine and I passed her a glass. I tossed Jack’s hat across the room and made to sit on the bed. My life had become a series of encounters with people in taverns, movie houses, hotel lobbies, and at ball games. Don’t you have anyone of your own? Laura. No, to hell with her. Christ knew who she was with right now, frequent speculation. What had Jack said about seeing her at a dance? For that matter, where was Jack? The Mount Royal Club, the mayor’s house, a gambling den, or penthouse suite? His course was impossible to imagine. Same as mine. Who was this woman sitting opposite? What was I doing?

  Lilyan smiled and waggled her glass. When I came over with the bottle she reached up and pulled me to her. The lovely creature kissed me, and I kissed back. Softly she pushed me away to pull off her hat. I lifted her up while she peeled away her gloves. We locked together, swaying and turning with the music from the wireless, a low piano rag. She kissed me in the French fashion and stuttering black-and-white Nickelodeon images played out on the screen of my mind’s eye. Lilyan moved in just such a way as to reacquaint me with the erotic reality behind feeble half-remembered pornography.

  She anticipated me and somehow floated us elegantly to the bed and onto it, so easily, so smoothly, unfreighted with hesitations or fears. This was the modern age of love as finally revealed to me, with a modern woman who knew what it was she wanted. She had none of the inhibitions of others I’d known. Lilyan pulled herself back by her elbows and propped herself up on the bolster, looking at me with sleepy blue eyes, her hair a dark blond unpinned and falling around her face, her full bosom respiring and breathing deeply, her throat flushed hot and pink. That black ribbon with a charm on it tied around her supple, delicious neck.

  “Do you have a French letter?” she asked.

  “I grec,” I said.

  “Ha-ha.”

  “I confess I don’t normally carry a prophylactic on my person. I know I should. I was a medical man, after all.”

  “Were?” she asked.

  “Not anymore.”

  “And what are you now?”

  “I’m currently without portfolio.”

  “You’re strange,” she said. “But I like it.”

  “If you want I’ll go out and see if there’s a chemist’s or barbershop open. There must be somewhere.”

  “Why don’t you hand me my purse?” she interrupted.

  “You’ve done this before.”

  “Why not? It’s legal and it’s free.”

  Rummaging through her handbag Lilyan found a tin disc, a Merry Widow. A black bottle dropped to the floor and I picked it up.

  “What’s this?”

  “You’ll never believe it,” she said.

  “Try me.”

  “Belladonna.”

  “Nightshade? What on earth do you need that for?” I asked.

  “Trick of the trade. We put a little white make-up at the corners of our eyes and a few drops of the stuff in. Makes your peepers look bigger and brighter.”

  “You’ll go blind. It’s poison.”

  “So’s everything,” she laughed. “Come on.”

  My boots were off and I poured more cold Champagne. The radio played a peppy number by the Happiness Boys about a man and a canoe and a cherry phosphate and what was the girl’s name in the refrain?

  Laura. I froze solid.

  “What is it?” Lilyan asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She drank my proffered cup of cheer and coaxed another kiss, more deeply now. She was right. We were two taxpaying adults of voting age. Together, with eager fingers, we unbuttoned my shirtfront, unhooked her corsetry, her tresses loose and tangling between our lips as we kissed, our lips together, mouths open, her tongue darting hot and wet into me and then she slipped from her underclothes like a hand from a muff and I felt her warm powdered skin beneath my hands as I caressed her. Her fingers were toying with me. There were light brown freckles on her heavy, swollen breasts. Her warm breath, her wet lips, her tongue again, lavender and wine. She looked at me with kind, amused eyes. I was rusty, out of practice, but she guided me out of my clothes and under the covers, teasing me, laughing, whispering in my ear: “Where’s your gun, Michael?”

  The wireless played a tone and retreated to a sea roar. A shaded electric light burned over the dresser. Lilyan helped the preventative device onto me and we began to fuck. I didn’t care if it was going to cost me or not. I closed my eyes and got lost in her for as long as I could.

  “So this is Paris,” I said.

  She laughed softly a
nd sighed.

  AFTERWARDS, SHE TOLD ME about her life.

  “I’m from a small town in Illinois. Everything was peaches and cream growing up. We’re Episcopalians and I remember church socials and watermelon and cake on the Fourth of July. I knew I wanted to be an actress after we did the manger scene one Christmas when I was ten. I was the Virgin Mary, if you can believe it. Well, since then I’ve done everything short of murder to keep clear of the life my parents were preparing for me. We were quality people, respectable, you know? There was a sweet boy they wanted me to marry, he’s a dentist now, but I convinced them to let me go to a finishing school in Chicago first and live with my aunt. When I got there I was your standard moonstruck small-town girl milling around the stage door, desperately trying to get noticed. I sang, I danced, I did anything I could. After awhile my folks became suspicious and demanded I come home. Of course I couldn’t. For them an actress was little better than a prostitute and in those days, well, anyhow, maybe they were right. But I stuck with it, and eventually I started to get a few small parts and my name in reviews. Just Vaudeville turns, but I wanted to be a real actress, like Sarah Bernhardt or Lynn Fontanne, you know, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. I made a little money in a couple of revues and got by teaching singing and the piano to rich little boys and girls. But it was a hard life, oh boy. And the men, well, they thought the same thing as my parents, that we were all just roundheels. This was before the war. That changed everything. My little brother was killed in France and I think it broke my folks. Then I told them the truth, that I was going to try my luck in New York and that was it. They told me they never wanted to see me again. Oh, but I had stars in my eyes back then, I doubt I’d recognize myself now if I climbed into Mr. Wells’s time machine. I wish I could too, sometimes. Do you know New York? It’s no place at all to be broke and alone so I got married! He was a swell fellow, a songwriter and we lived in a little apartment and I went out for auditions and honestly I don’t know what happened. One play after another and parties and gossip and out-of-town revues and somehow ten years went by and here I am on the road again, babbling away. We’re divorced now and I don’t know how long I can hold down parts with all the young girls coming up to take the ingénue roles and soon enough I’ll be playing mothers and spinsters and then what?”

  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

  THE 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 penn
ies 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.