by Fraser Nixon
“Is that normal?”
“Difficult to say. There’re ten to twenty ships docking here every day from all over the world. This one’s mine.”
“So what do you want to do? Hijack the booze?”
“No. Too difficult, too unwieldy.”
An understanding came.
“No,” I said. “No.”
“We have to,” said Jack.
“Christ.” The cash.
A tremor ran along my fingers and hand and transferred itself to the tumbler of whiskey as I raised it to my mouth. The spirit burned its way over my tongue and down my esophagus, with some catching in my throat. Jack offered me a cigaret and I shakily lit one. These were the same hands trained to operate on patients made pliant by the anaesthesiologist in the clean confines of an operating room. Thank the Lord I never got past unfeeling corpses. They were far more forgiving of mistakes, and the shakes. I saw my dissecting partner Smiler jabbing me with a scalpel and then pinching the severed optic nerve of an eyeball with a clamp, laughing as he swivelled it to look at me. Our professor chided us and tubthumped for Drs. Livingstone, Lister, and that excellent field vivisectionist Jack the Ripper, never mind Dr. Crippen.
“It takes it to their front doorstep,” Jack said.
“That’s what you want? Isn’t it enough that the cops are probably on our trail? Now you want to rob gangsters. It’s madness.”
“Better than knocking over movie houses,” Jack said.
“For movie houses you go to gaol. Gangsters’ll feed us to the ravens. Don’t you have any better idea?” I asked.
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Jesus, Mick. This is our chance. I mean, look at you. What are you going to do next? You want to sell insurance policies or deliver the Eaton’s catalogue? I for one am tired of taking orders.”
Jack was right. I was a good-for-nothing and not getting any better. Here was the kind of reckless, foolhardy proposal that great men accepted. It was a challenge. All of my scrimshanking would be forgiven by this dangerous test. I’d been on the line already, and they’d come for me after doing nothing more than riding shotgun on one of the Frenchman Charlie’s trucks. It was time to choose sides.
“They shot at us, killed my driver,” I said, convincing myself.
“And they’re coming for me,” said Jack. “I know it. Now Mick, you could walk away right now and leave me to my fate. I can take care of myself. They don’t know you from Murphy and that’s that. So.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Don’t take too long. This is it, this Saturday, and I need to work out a plan. Something simple. These pishers are damned suspicious but sometimes they overlook the obvious. I’ve got a couple of cute ideas.”
“Oke,” I said.
“Oke you’ll help me or what?”
“Oke.”
“Oke then,” Jack said.
He stood up and buttoned his coat.
“Let’s go check on that dollymop,” he said.
“If you insist.”
We left the hole in the wall. On this continent cheap buildings were thrown up in haste and razed soon after; it was a wonder anywhere remained extant. The dictate was bigger, newer, cheaper. In England one drank in taverns haunted by ghosts of Cavaliers raising bumpers to King Charles. Here you were lucky to stumble into a saloon in some boomtown that’d burned to the ground only twice before, coming up again each time like scrubweed in an architecture of crooked joists and warped beams. Foundations would be busted to aggregate and used to macadamize country roads. In parting from the bar, the bottle under my coat, I expected to never see it again.
The hotel was dead quiet when we returned and upstairs Lilyan Tashman slept in Jack’s bed, her clothes puddled on the floor. Jack took the Haig, filled glasses, and sat himself on the chair that held Lilyan’s scanties.
“Take a look at her, make sure she’s all right,” he said.
I checked her pulse and the dilation of her pupils. She was still well in the depths of a jag. Every one was different: sleep, wild energy, equipoise. Lilyan was gone away. Simply seeing her had me lusting for a taste.
“Let’s get some grub,” Jack said, inverting my appetite.
He called up room service and ordered roasted chicken, spinach greens, fried potatoes with mustard. We chewed away and after the meal I cleaned my Webley. It was a pretty tableau vivant, I thought, two criminals and a drugged moll. There was an odd sordid undertone to the scene as Jack took out a knife. He threw it in the air and caught the blade between his hands, an old trick from the mining camps.
“Once I knew a scout who could catch a knife between his lips,” he said.
“Practice makes perfect,” I said, and added: “Where’d you hide that bag of silver from Loew’s?”
“Somewhere safe,” he said.
“Does that bastard Bob know?”
“Oh, aye. You don’t care for him, do you?”
“Not half. Is he being brought in again?”
“Maybe.”
Something nagged at me.
“What’s his story, then?”
Jack told me how Bob held up the end for a fellow Irishman, a Yankee. Usually booze was brought in by fast boats to small coves on the New England seaboard and Bob was part of King Solomon’s gang but they were backed by a ward boss from Boston, Bob’s kinsman, a fellow by the name of Honey Fitz. Fitz was an old pol, once the Beantown mayor, then a representative thrown out of Congress. Bob was here in Montreal keeping an eye out for Fitz’s son-in-law, a banker with his finger in the bootlegging pie. He made payoffs, twisted arms, and kept a line open.
“Do you trust him?” I asked.
“Who, Bob?”
“Yes.”
“Not particularly. He can be useful.”
“Like me.”
“You sell yourself too short, Mick. You’ve got to exploit your talents better.”
“Perhaps.”
“I mean that. For instance, tell me how you managed to get out of school without a black mark. You said they knew you were dipping into the medicine.”
“It’s a matter of knowing where the bodies are buried,” I said.
Lilyan Tashman started clawing at the bedsheets. Our heads turned to her.
“We’d best be out of here,” I said.
“Easier said,” Jack went.
She began to thrash. There was nothing on hand to soothe her but towels. I dampened them at the sink and held the coolness to her sweating brow, then sponged her sleek, beautiful nude body, enveloped by her warm live smell. I’d never seen Laura in the altogether except for a stray stocking-top or the hint of décolletage. Laura was of a higher degree entirely, a paragon, Lilyan a slattern compared thereby. The theatre coarsened femininity, I thought, turned it into an exaggerated burlesque. Theda Bara as Cleopatra was covered in paint but beneath the cosmetics and away from the hot cesium lights womankind was a different story entire. We ministered to Lilyan as her convulsions waned. With other men this state would invite a rape. Gentlemen both, Jack and I struggled to dress her, now that she’d become a potential liability. In the end it was too much and we gave up with half her combinations twisted ’round her torso.
“I’m better at getting their clothes off,” Jack said.
He looked at me and I laughed. We drank more whiskey and waited for the drug to run its wicked course. Another day in the life. In less than an hour Jack and I were thoroughly drunk. When Lilyan finally came to she groggily gathered her dress and things.
“What’s the hurry, Mistress Scurry?” Jack mocked.
“No hurry,” she said in a faraway voice.
“Do you have a show tonight?” I slurred.
“I don’t know.”
“So this is Montreal,” I said.
“What?”
I lit one of Jack’s cigarets. He staggered off to the lavatory. Lilyan began the complicated process of buttoning eyelets and lacing stays, the difficulty compounded by her haziness. I
watched her and became stupidly aroused. Usually disrobing was the stimulant. This was a reverse striptease, if you please. The toilet flushed and Jack returned.
“Where’re you going?” he demanded.
“Nowhere,” Lilyan said.
Jack turned my way.
“Mick, meet me at the Five-Minute Lunch tomorrow at one.”
I stood, my stomach tightening with a nauseating jealousy. Jack opened the door and I exited, with one look of parting. His fly was still unbuttoned from pissing and Lilyan was on her knees in the middle of the bed looking up at him with a bovine unawareness mixed with resigned expectancy. I managed to make it to the fire escape stairwell before vomiting up everything I could.
WEDNESDAY
NEAR ELEVEN THE crenellated cells of my body screamed me awake. Today was rain and disgust. After drinking weak water from the tap I made my hasty toilet and went to meet Jack at the restaurant. The man was winding me up, testing me. My motives for continuing on this path were unclear. It wasn’t merely the sight of morphine last night, the money or the girl. I felt a dark awakening. For half an hour I waited at the Five-Minute, chewing over a Western sandwich, swilling muddy coffee, smoking fresh cigarets. Jack never showed.
The next block over three golden balls swaying above a pawnbroker’s dripped rain. I’d mislaid the stub for my father’s hunter during a move and so the timepiece was now lost forever, saving if I bought it back at face value from the Shylock. When I’d detrained in ’19 the Pater and I’d taken a ’cab to the courthouse square and then silently eaten Mulligatawny soup together in the dining room of the old Hotel Vancouver. He’d given me the ’watch, a Longines, and solemnly drank a glass of loganberry lemonade to my return. It was now six months since I’d last written him. Secretly I was waiting for him to die. That was, of course, if I didn’t first.
I turned up my collar and slogged back to the Wayside where I played Napoleon patience with a deck of cards from the bedside table. It was after losing seven games straight that I got the bright idea to count the pasteboards. Fifty-one, with the eight of spades missing.
Furious rain against my window woke me later that evening. Restlessness and hunger drove me from the room and into the wet. Outside the hotel an elderly couple huddled together at curb’s edge waiting to cross the street as motors splashed by. As the man’s foot descended into a puddle the woman said: “Don’t step in it, it might be Lon Chaney.”
Only two nights ago I’d seen The Trap and helped stick up the Loew’s. My cut of the cash I’d hidden on my person, a thick wad protected by the Webley I now gripped in my overcoat pocket. Chutes of water sluiced down from storefront eaves. Across Cathcart cantered the police: two mounted constables. The officers ignored me as I slouched along, thinking on Chaney and disguises. I pushed down my hat brim and became simply another anonymous pedestrian trying to stay dry. What had Jack said, though? The memorable telling detail, overwhelming accurate perception of identity. Something obvious and discardable: false eyepatch, scar, outlandish moustache, curious manner or limping gait. Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or that film where he’d been a crime boss with his legs amputated above the knee.
The most demented of Chaney’s pictures had been one where he’d played an evil ventriloquist who dressed as a grandmother and was in league with a circus strongman and a nasty midget disguised as a baby. The trio ran a store selling caged birds as a front for more larcenous activity. People came into the shop and Chaney the ventriloquist would throw his voice to make them think the birds could speak. The bird’s voices were drawn on the screen like speech balloons in the newspaper funny pages, Jiggs or the Katzenjammer Kids. The customers would purchase what they thought were talking birds, only to return complaining that they no longer spoke. Chaney, in his grandmother get-up, would then visit and case their houses. Later he’d burgle the homes, aided by the strongman and the midget, the lot of them refugees from some travelling carnival of tattooed women, sword-swallowers, wild men, and Siamese twins. The Unholy Three. I’d seen it at the Pantages, a long time ago. I had a confused memory of a complication with a girl and the requisite hero, an innocent charged with murder after the strongman and the midget killed a homeowner during one of their robberies. Remembered the midget disguised as a baby smoking a stogie and plotting with the circus strongman against Chaney. And the best part, the very best part of the whole shooting match, had been the grand finale. The crew escaped to a secret hideout with the girl as a prisoner when out of nowhere a gorilla showed up and killed the giant and midget. Chaney turned repentant and hawked joke books with his ventriloquist’s dummy at the courthouse before being sent to gaol. And here I was thinking my current circumstances were unlikely. My mind wheeling around, the pavement unsteady, I banged my shoulder into a passing Indian.
“Beg your pardon,” he said.
On the sidewalk someone had dropped a jar of preserved tomatoes and the mess resembled burst fetal masses. In order to offset their fees fellow students of mine at the hospital would perform illicit abortions and run stills for bathtub gin to sell across the border in Ontario. My morphine trading had been nearly amateur in comparison to those felonies, with the only difference being that I’d nearly been pinched. My only protection from an open scandal and possible arrest had been knowledge of the school’s immemorial practice: sincere imitation of those resourceful men, Burke and Hare of Edinburgh. Well, let them try to touch me, the bastards, I thought, and watched reflections in storefront windows to see if shapes followed me. With my weapon clenched in my fist I was the anarchist in Conrad’s Secret Agent holding his India rubber bulb wired to detonate. The bullet would burn a hole through my topcoat on its way out.
Behind the desk of the Wayside the pander handed me a message. I read: “Union Hall, nine o’clock. Hannay.”
Jack and his John Buchan turn again, The Thirty-Nine Steps. Wait. How’d he know where you’re staying? You told him you were at the Occidental under Smith and here you were at the Wayside under Magee. Dammit, another illustration of Jack and his methods. The bastard said he was with the Pinkertons, the unsleeping eye. Stay ahead of him from now on. He’s using you, trying to twist you in the wind. Stay awake, boyo.
A shiver wracked me, and I collected myself. Jack’s dispatch wasn’t coded and so must be a safe summons. It was nine now by the clock on the wall. The question posed: stay or go? Jack’s play with Lilyan failed to arouse in me refusal; I was deadening somehow and animated by a deeper impulse, a low concupiscence. It was all one. At the rank I hailed a ’cab and made a reluctant return to campus. Montreal was a graveyard of memories. My mouth suddenly parched and I thirsted after warm tea with lemon to soothe it.
The taxi dropped me at the Roddick Gates, each of the four clocks telling a different time. I walked alone in the dark under elms spattering rain down my neck. Ahead blazed the hall. A sign gave details:
Medical Students’ Union
A Discourse Upon Spiritualism and the Scientific Method
— MR. H. HOUDINI —
Commencing 8 PM
Something was afoot. At the door stood an unctuous pup I recognized from the pathology lab, a shifty little informer right at home amongst diseased tissue samples and eviscerated corpses: Lubie by name. Resentments erupted as crimson boils on his ugly phiz. Lubie’d been two years below me and had puffed himself up since, gatekeeper and tattletale, all rheumy eyes and dirty suit aswarm with bacteria.
“Ticket,” he grunted at me.
“How much?”
“Union member or guest only.”
“I was a member,” I said “Current Medical Union members only,” the blackguard said.
I was a step below him. Several options presented themselves to me: a quick punch to Lubie’s tiny testicle, the Webley’s barrel shoved into his gut, a tactical retreat. I turned to see if anyone was watching, and turned back to “Here’s his ticket.”
Jack handed the bastard a stub. Lubie snorted. As I climbed by I elbo
wed him hard in the kidney. Lubie grunted and doubled over. I felt a mite better.
A reedy voice could be heard in the hall beyond the reception. Jack and I went into the room. It was a swelter, the seats filled with heavy men in damp coats with hats on their knees, thick womenfolk wrapped up in drab shrouds. The lamps’ iron filaments flared with an uncertain electric current on a man behind a lectern onstage. Before we sat down Jack steered me out again and into a dirty water closet. He took out his small vial and spilled cocaine on the platinum cigaret case. In a gesture of conciliation for the previous evening he offered me the salt first. One sniff of the drug and a cold finger touched my hypothalamus. When we returned to the hall Jack and I sat near the rear. Nearby a clutch of sniggering students fooled in the corner and moved like drunks.
The man onstage spoke: “Inasmuch as notions of the possibility of communication with those who have passed from the terrestrial sphere have been studied using empirical methodology the results have unequivocally tended towards the uniformly negative. This would lead one to suppose that in our present age of scientific development the means have not yet been devised to establish whether such a removèd plane can be revealed by any rational process, or contrariwise, whether such a supposèd realm can be considered to verifiably exist.
“Notwithstanding the concentrated combined efforts of the most stringent scientific disciplines there continue to remain charlatans without number who, contrary to all received proofs, aver an ability to communicate with the loving departed. These same predators feed not only on the naiveté and credulity of those poor sufferers left behind, but do so for the basest pecuniary motives. They are wastrel wolves extracting a toll far dearer than money. These fiends tax the remaining hope and spirit of bereaved survivors. My own researches into and well-publicized exposures of fraudulent mediums and hoaxers have been legion. This chapter of my life is well-documented and I hope familiar to this learnèd audience.