The Man Who Killed

by Fraser Nixon

  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.

  She looked grand in a plaid suit and skirt, wearing a Gloria Swanson hat and with some creamy silken stuff bubbling around her throat. She carried her handbag in one hand, and I’ll be damned, a feather duster in the other. The house dick targeted her. He moved the wet stump of his cigar from his mouth to a dirty box of sand. A toady held the lift open and as Lilyan swept along the detective moved to intercept. She stuffed the duster in his face and twirled it ’round. The dick’s hands went up and he pushed away, his piggish snout a rictus of disgust. Lilyan entered the lift. The uniformed cretin inside closed the door and cranked the lever while the dick sneezed sharply, once, twice, thrice, and reached out to steady himself on a wingback. I waited for the elevator to stop and noted the floor, then went and again asked at the front desk for Jack. The staff feigned ignorance, money sealing lips. I sidled around to the stairwell and climbed up to the sixth. When I reached it, panting, the hallway was empty. I couldn’t remember Jack’s room and so marked the doors one by one. Behind 618 came a familiar trickle of laughter. I waited five minutes, pacing back and forth, long enough to smoke my last Sportsman, then knocked.

  “Who is it?”

  “The Duke of Connaught,” I said.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Jack opened the door. Lilyan was spread out on the chair I’d slept in the other night. Jack stood in his undervest.

  “Thought so,” said Jack. “You know the hatred I have for that bastard.”

  “Fine way to speak of your Grand Master.”

  “So it’d appear. Come in.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt.”

  “Interrupt what? Look at her,” Jack said.

  I went into the room. Lilyan Tashman was glassy-eyed and had a shoe and stocking off.

  “I didn’t realize you two were familiar,” I said.

  “Friend of yours?” asked Jack, arching his eyebrows, all innocence. I smelled liquor wafting from him. He smiled expansively.

  “We struck up an acquaintance last night, but you know that damned well.”

  “How’d it go?”


  “Swimmingly. What’s she doing here?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Looking closer I noticed a glass ampoule, a length of cord, and a hypodermic.

  “You won’t be getting anything from her for awhile,” said Jack.

  Suddenly I was in thrall.

  “What is it?” I asked, eyes fixed on the vial.

  “I think you know,” he said.

  “You have any more?”

  “Wrong question.”

  The bastard. My mouth flooded with chalky saliva and my gastrointestinal tract squealed. It was desire, not for the woman, but for the companion racing through her veins.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

  “Ah, well, you see,” said Jack, “this young lady is what you’d call a friend of a friend. Yesterday you seemed down in the dumps so I sent her ’round your way.”

  “I’m touched, really. It’s a side I’ve never seen of you before, pimping.”

  “Goods satisfactory or money refunded.”

  “I’ll take a rebate, then. In kind.”

  “It’d do you no good,” said Jack.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Experience.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. When drunk he was foxy.

  “Come on, let’s go for a wet.”

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  I went and checked her pulse and breathing. She stirred and tried to focus on me. “Well if it isn’t Mr. Nobody,” she said, then her eyes rolled upward and she was gone into that world, feeling nothing but the warmth and glow of a false flame. I envied her. She’d be out for an hour or two. Her shoe and stocking had been removed so the injection could be made into her foot; as an actress Lilyan couldn’t mar her arms with evidence of the spike. I’d noticed nothing the night before, more fool me. I lifted the pale warmth of her leg and placed it on a quilted rest. Jealousy wouldn’t do—it merely fed Jack’s amusement.

  “What do you think?” he asked from the toilet.

  “How is it you know her?”

  “She moves in certain circles. You remember Bob, I’m sure. He’s one with the theatre folk as well as his painters and bootleggers. We were introduced when her revue came to town last week.”

  “And you fixed her up,” I said.

  “More or less. For a price.”

  Jack re-entered, wiping his hands on a towel, then pitching it to the floor. The room had a heavy musk to it, an animal’s lair.

  “I’m touched you considered my comfort,” I said.

  “You have no idea, old salt. Alors, let’s gargle.”

  In the lift I asked Jack if he’d gotten his suit and hat and he replied in the negative. He seemed complacent, unconcerned, and for a moment I entertained the thought he shared Lilyan’s vice.

  When the lift’s doors opened, the lobby buzzed. The fat house detective had pinned a man to the floor as photogs popped flashbulbs. We sidestepped the tumult to a service door and a warren of hallways that emptied into a back alley. Around the corner was a low dark bar. Inside Jack absented himself for another piss. Flat beer was wearing on my palate and I wanted an astringent. Fielding a discreet enquiry the bartender agreed to let me have a bottle for two dollars as long as it was kept beneath the table, for form’s sake. It was that kind of place. The bottle’s label claimed that the hooch was Haig & Haig, which I considered almost plausible until the liquor peeled a layer of plaque from my teeth. After two glasses I felt I was in a coffin ship scudding under a hard lee wind. The tavern helped reinforce the sensation: instead of electric globes there were old gas jets that quavered in some unstopped draught. Places like it were salted away all across the country, remnants of a different age. It captured an echo of the mean twilight of the nineteenth century, now overwhelmed by the clean chrome of the twentieth. The other patrons appeared to be navvies or breakermen muttering over their poisons, with Jack and I visitors from some future age of airplanes and the wireless telegraph.

  Jack returned at his ease and I said: “Sometimes I feel I was born in the wrong age.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s because we come from the edge of the world. Back there we were Adams with every day the day of Creation. Some parts of the bush had never been trodden by whiteman or Indian. Imagine that! Your footprint the first one in all of time. No trails, no history, no ruins or monuments. Now I feel like I’m stuck in a machine. There’re railways for the bloodstream, the telegraph for a nervous system, and hog rendering plants the stomach. I just don’t feel a proper part of the whole system, like there’s no place for me.”

  “Well man, it’s high time you get used to it,” Jack said. “It is a bloody machine, and there you’ve said it. If you’re not damned careful it’ll grind you up and feed you to some fat bastard as a Salisbury steak. That’s what they did to us in France. A good thing Kitchener crashed into the North Sea or someone was going to put a bullet in him down the line. Both him and Haig, that whoreson.”

  “Ha!” I laughed. “It’s his whiskey you’re drinking, seemingly.”

  “Pah!” Jack spat. “We ship the stuff south but I won’t drink the rot.”

  He sniffed suspiciously, picked the bottle up, and gazed at it, then laughed.

  “No it’s not. You almost had me there. If it was I’d black your eye. Never forgive the cunt for Passchendaele. If not for Currie I wouldn’t be talking with you here now. You know what? I saw him a few weeks back when they were laying a cornerstone on the campus. He was in his chancellor’s robes. Almost went up and shook the man’s hand.”

  “You could’ve asked him about those mess funds he embezzled when he was with the militia back in Victoria.”

  Jack laughed again. “Water under the bridge. Ah, fuck it. I’ll drink, but only with a toast. To Sir Arthur Currie: may he roast Douglas Haig’s balls on a spit in Valhalla.”

  We drank. Jack looked at me. Against my better judgment I admired him. He was near-faultless in clean linen and a trim dark suit, with a gleaming crimson cravat and cool blue eyes. Irritated, I fingered my collar, already grimed after a day. There was always something about Jack, a distinction, with his height, features, red hair, and sang-froid. His person was coupled with a strange mutability, the chameleon’s concinnity. Jack had no side to him. He possessed a taste that commanded each situation and never called attention to itself, was never garish or awkward. Whereas I was ill at ease wherever I went, overdressed at a dive, underdressed at high tea. The rustic clung to me in my wrinkled wool. I looked like I’d stepped out of a daguerreotype of Ulysses S. Grant in his creased day coat. Jack was a creature bred for this new age as I was not. He knew me better than any alive and still I couldn’t confide that shortcoming to him. I turned inward and worried at metaphoric scabs of resentments. Jack took another drink and began to wax expansive. In this mood I knew best to humour

  his vanity. It might lead to some answers.

  “Where’d you get the dope?” I asked.

  “Braced some Chinks for their deck. Same place I got the shooters, a fan tan parlour. Chinatown’s rotten with hop. There was a raid coming up and I wanted to snaffle a few things before the police scooped it all.”

  “How’d you manage it?” I asked, impressed despite my worser devils.

  “Sheer brazen cheek. It’s mostly a matter of confidence. Convince yourself of your own authority and others will share your delusion. People want to believe what they’re told. I learned that from the Pinkertons.”

  This was new to me.

  “You were an op?” I asked.

  “Aye.”

  Jack took another drink and filled me in. He’d answered an ad in San Francisco back in 1920 and with his service record they’d hired him on the spot. It’d been small potatoes at first: divorces, employee fraud, small-time shitwork.

  “‘We Never Sleep,’” I quoted.

  “Truer than you realize. There were times.”

  “When?”

  �
�Not supposed to talk about it. I was seconded to do some strikebreaking at the Anaconda. Don’t want to even think about that. That was pure poison. Poisonville, another op called it. This was in Butte, Montana. Too much axe-handle work for him, I reckon. No stomach for it. Later on he and I worked on one of the strangest cases the outfit ever came up against.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Someone stole a Ferris wheel.”

  As he spoke, my thoughts drifted back to morphine, and Lilyan Tashman. Jack switched tack: “There’s trouble ahead.”

  “Pardon?”

  “My masters aren’t pleased. I’ve been given a stern lecture. They don’t like my explanations or my progress and’re going to send someone in,” Jack said.

  “That’s not good.”

  “You ain’t whistling. They don’t trust me. They think that I have something to do with that cock-up in the woods, that maybe I pulled it over their eyes and pocketed the take. These are some close sons-of-bitches I’m dealing with. They’re not Bob’s Irish gang or Hebrews like the Bronfmans or Gurskys, these are Sicilians, the worst kind of Guinea. Chicago’s mostly Neapolitan, and that’s a world of difference. I’ve heard there’s another shipment due soon that’ll head upriver and be portaged somehow to Detroit, maybe for the Purple Gang. They don’t like the old route into New York anymore. Well I’m not point man and bear-leader for this show, and that means I’ve been crossed off the list. I was their man here as long as it went and now I’m out in the cold. Therefore time is, as they say, of the essence. I’ve learned that they’re going to make the transfer here in town because Montreal’s still neutral ground.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Brown. Remember him?” Jack asked.

  I did. The Scotsman at Customs.

  “Barbotte,” I said.

  “How’d you know that?” Jack fired, now sharp.

  “I’ve got eyes.”

  “Do you now? Well, I still own him. I bought all his markers and he’s mine, top to bottom. But he only goes so far looking the other way. The shipping schedule’s wired down from Quebec and this boat’s a known quantity. It hasn’t touched land and won’t do so until it gets here but they have to send a manifest ahead in territorial waters. Brown got his copy and gave it to me. The Hatteras Abyssal out of Rotterdam. It’s here they make the trade-off.”