by Fraser Nixon
Jack stubbed out his cigaret and leaned back on the bed. He reminded me there’d been a federal election last month; I’d been holed away at Memphremagog away from ’papers and the wireless. Mackenzie King and the Grits had been in a minority government with the Progressive party propping them up against Arthur Meighen and the Tories.
“Have you ever seen him in the flesh?” asked Jack.
“Who?”
“Precisely your reaction if you had. Rex King is the dullest egg in Christendom and you’d forget him five minutes after shaking his hand. In fact he’s the foxiest bastard outside a briar patch.”
As Minister of Customs our friend the Senator had been duly compensated for failing to curb irregularities at the port, Jack explained. No law in our country forbade the sale of liquor to the Americans despite their Prohibition. The risk only came when actually smuggling across the border. Bonded whiskey from Scotland arrived in Montreal earmarked for trans-shipment south to the States. All well and good, and no duties collected here for the Crown.
“However, most of the booze never made it out of the country,” Jack said.
“Where’d it go?”
“Dry counties in Ontario, mostly. All the profits, fewer risks. Unfortunately for the minister, someone got wise.”
The opposition Tories learned that Customs agents were being compromised and payoffs were going straight to the top. The scandal threatened to take down King’s government. Our prime minister thus took preventative action against his minister.
“And made him a Senator. Saints preserve us.”
“Better yet,” Jack continued, “King formed a blue-ribbon Royal Commission to investigate the Port of Montreal. Hearings were held and detectives sent in to investigate.”
“Meanwhile the world kept spinning and molasses flowed in January. I follow. Then what happened?”
Jack laid out the lineaments of a parliamentary donnybrook: Arthur Meighen and the Tories howling for scalps, the Progressives defecting from King’s government, King visiting Rideau Hall and tendering his resignation, the Governor General weighing in on the side of the Tories, more shenanigans in the House of Commons, a midnight vote, a crisis of the Constitution and, after a summer election, Mackenzie King back at the top, his enemies defeated. Meighen was put to pasture, the Governor General on a slow boat back to Blighty, and the Customs scandal ploughed under entirely.
“Now Rex King’s lecturing the Empire on Canada’s sovereignty in London and it’s business as usual in Sin City, as you see.”
“And your role in this farce?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“I was one of the detectives the Royal Commission sent to investigate smuggling at the port.”
I burst out laughing. Lamp standards on the street now burned a soft gold. I opened a window and smelled impending snow. Before a stoop a bent figure sharpened knives on a whirling stone, spitting sparks.
“Pinkertons,” Jack continued. “When King worked for the Rockefellers in the States he used the agency. I came recommended for this line of work.”
“Naturally, with your gifts.”
Did Jack hear the irony in my voice? If he did, he chose to ignore it. In front of the tavern across the street stood two men in black surcoats. Working for the government was how Jack had aligned himself with bootleggers, Charlie Trudeau, and the Senator. Fox guarding the henhouse. Jack divined my thoughts, his nasty habit.
“There was too much money to be made,” said Jack. “If not me then who? The Senator still got his cut and Charlie Trudeau ran the trucks. The difference was I started smuggling to the States for keeps, and I was dealing with Italians across the border. Another world. Long way from Soda Creek. Which leads me to ask you, Mick. Are you still with me tomorrow night?”
I looked at the shabby brick tenements across the way and tasted coalsmoke. A child screamed from one of the rooms below us. A deeper cold fell and I shut the window. The two men in black did not look up. Was I with him after this? We’d come mighty far together.
“Pardon me,” I said.
I went to the lavatory and had a good long gander at myself in the dim light. With a sliver of soap I washed and scrubbed my face and hands in the frigid water and slicked back my hair. Wild notions rose within: walk away this moment. Jack will be your ruin. Crime is punished. What would I do with myself? I had no job and wanted none, no friends save he, no family. I’d lost my love. In the vile darkness I pulled out the revolver and returned to the room. I could easily shoot him and then myself. Jack sat on the bed, his gun in his hand. He looked at me and smiled.
“I’ll need another bullet,” I said
“Knew you were true blue.”
“Alea iacta est.”
We killed the bottle. The men in front of the tavern moved away. There came over me a flush of heat and cold commingled, of past, present, and future aligning, a fuse slotted into place. I’d never experienced anything quite like it and was at last allowed to identify the sensation: surrender. This was my fate, tangled in a skein with Jack’s. I must follow the thread to its end, wherever it led. While Jack slept I spent a painful night upright in the chair, the Webley in my hand, waiting for the dawn.
FRIDAY
SOMETIME DURING THE long night it began to snow. I smoked the hours away and watched slow flakes fall from an iron sky. Near daybreak drays hauled wagons through the white. Plodders sloshed muddy footprints through the splodge and then came saltshakers, sandmen, and shovellers who cursed and huffed over heavy masses. By and by the sky unveiled blue and it became one of those sere eastern mornings I hated to admit I loved. By noon the city’s heat and friction would melt the snow to dirty gutter runnels. While watching Montreal light up I faded. A voice woke me.
“Friday.”
“Friday,” I repeated.
Jack’s eyes burned bloodshot and his face was raw, lip swollen. My poor body ached and itched, blood boiling from the rum and salt. The cardboard cigaret deck was crushed and empty, one bullet smoked for each regret. Jack sat Indian-style on the bed. On my sinister zygomatic ran a pulse of hot pain from the blow that’d knocked me out. The room stank of cordite, stale tobacco, and men, worse than a pool hall the morning after. Out the window fingers of ice weighed down telephone wires in the building’s shadow.
“So, what’s the interior of the Mount Royal Club like?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“You heard.”
“Clever brute,” Jack said.
His eyes glittered out from beneath lowered lids, a colder blue. My own were brown near black with the pupils pinholes in the iris, stinging and sullen.
“Hungry?” asked Jack.
“Not half.”
A gramophone wailed out Caruso from a downstairs room. I felt none too clean and in need of a cooking in the bath.
“Let’s move the motor elsewhere,” I suggested.
“Fine idea. We’ll need it later,” Jack said.
So Jack was determined to carry through his mad scheme. I noticed he hadn’t answered my question. We creaked to life, my mind pinwheeling, an ache near the crook of my arm where the needle’d bit through the skin back in the day. An observant coroner would see the scar there.
Together Jack and I shambled down to the street and walked to where we’d left the sedan. I circled the block to make sure it hadn’t been marked for a clipping. The Senator or Trudeau might’ve contacted the cops and given over our particulars, hoping the authorities were up to the task of taking us down. The force owned a fleet of five blue Frontenacs, and there were plenty more patrolmen on foot. The likelihood of our being rousted was low but we took meagre precautions nonetheless.
Jack suggested we leave the Auburn in a scrub lot on the back side of the mountain. I nixed the idea as obvious and with too many places for the police to stake us out, rifles at the ready. My notion was to scatter it as a leaf in the forest amongst other motors. Jack agreed, too tired to argue me, and we parked on a side street in east Westmount
. From there we hacked it back into town, Jack off to his hotel and I to mine after a stop at the tobacconist’s for twenty Forest and Streams. We agreed to meet in the Morgan’s toy department at one.
With some care I approached the ancient ’hop in the faded red velvet coat outside the Wayside and slipped him two dollars. No sir, no one has been nosing around the hotel asking questions about any of the guests lately and your room has been entered only by the chambermaid. A nancy behind the front desk handed me my key without any interest and I went up. In the lift a frost seeped through me, a premonition, but the room proved to be untouched. Before anything else I went to the toilet and urinated, then refilled the Webley’s empty chamber from the hidden box of cartridges. I sat down on the bed in a cold sweat.
What was I becoming? One virtue of the recent activity had been its usefulness as a distraction from contemplation. Now that I was alone in a quiet room doubt made its assault. I was a pathetic creature prey to the manipulation of others. None of the fine qualities grafted onto me by my education and upbringing had flourished; I was no one’s idea of a gentleman, with no rectitude, no finer sentiment. Mens sana in corpore sano, my arse. There was an infection working through me, corrupting my actions, turning me into an antigen in the body public. I felt the locus of an impending epidemic, society’s immune system battling what it saw as the wayward seed of a moral cancer. The Pater, Jack, Laura, her father Sir Dunphy, the Senator, Charlie Trudeau, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lilyan Tashman, and that dirty four-flusher Bob—they’d all die, I swore. I hadn’t lasted to take the Hippocratic Oath, worse luck for them. The Webley’s action was smooth, its weight heavy in my hand. With disgust I put it down, tore off my collar and shirt, and threw them into the hallway incinerator chute, then stripped, brushed my teeth, bathed, and roughly scoured my nakedness with a cheap towel. With care I fastened new cuffs to a freshly boiled chemise and snapped a soft collar ’round my neck, then lay full-length on the bed. From the street came the sound of a woman screaming obscenities in French.
A reverie manifested from the future: I was a clerk quietly rolling pennies for the Bank of British North America, courting the fair stenographer daughter of a lumberman back in Vancouver. She and I would walk past the arch in Stanley Park and look across the inlet to the pyramids of raw yellow sulphur beneath the mountains on the far shore. We were engaged, and in love, and the Pater would officiate at the wedding ceremony. All my efforts at that hellish cabin in ’Magog where I’d wrestled away my addiction to morphine were rewarded, my trespasses forgiven. I’d turned over a new leaf and settled down.
It was no use. The Pater’d sniff out the corruption oozing from my pores. He’d recognize his son for a wastrel, a thief, a drunk. Jack was the true prodigal. It’s the way of the striving Scotch-Irish: without a calling or a title or a bank account I was the worst of my class.
The only way I was headed back west was in a box. There were no further colonies to ship me off to and hide the family’s shame, except the North. Fancy that, me manning a Hudson’s Bay Company post on Frobisher Bay or the bank of the Great Slave Lake, the true ultima Thule of atonement and toil. No. Better off in the great Republic to the south, where I’d be snapped up in a trice, my villainy, covetousness, and hypocrisy rewarded and praised to the heavens. Look at Warren Harding, for Christ’s sake.
With deliberate care I re-counted every banknote by denomination in piles on the bedspread, a finite amount shrinking nickel by dime. Tonight that’d change, should Jack’s plan play out. Thinking on that, I smoked. Truly the essence of life was in this endless waiting for something to happen. All the interstices, the queuing for tickets, crowded bus trips, and painful midnight walks to empty rooms, all the moments that the mind wiped clean. Instead it crammed itself with detritus and reckoned up restaurant receipt totals. Unwanted snatches of popular songs reverberated. There’s no drama in the quintessence, the eternal wasted moments like this point in space and time. The Earth was in constant motion and Einstein could do the maths. Was it possible to walk it all back, unshoot the Senator’s thug and cradle Rex the dog? The poor bitch cowering in a corner. I closed my eyes to banish the image and unbidden Laura’s shape materialized. I felt a tumescence of arousal and touched my erection. Humiliated, I rubbed my eye sockets and felt every dendrite fray, raw nerves spitting electricity. I rolled my money together and pocketed the gun. Animal vigour seemed the only real activity, a pursuit of appetite. It was time to go.
With my Gladstone carry-all I left the hotel but kept the key, having paid for three more days. From there I repaired to an old haunt on Craig Street for an ale. It was dark as sin inside, comme d’hab, low and mean and right. My skin crawled and my hands shook as I lit a match. In the Star I again read about the progress of the bloody queen of Rumania and a poor bastard who’d been struck down by a streetcar at the corner of St. Mark and St. Catherine. Still nothing on bootleggers, the Loew’s robbery, Trudeau’s beating, or a shooting fracas on the Plateau. To nourish my frame I ordered a Horse’s Neck and followed it with another ale. The chatter in the bar quelled slowly and I looked in a mirror. I was pale and interesting from exhaustion. Jack’s powdered pep would perk me up. He was getting it from Smiler, I remembered, and my humour leached of blood. Smiler and I had trained in leechcraft at the Royal Victoria Hospital. There was a Leachtown off the River Jordan on Vancouver Island; failed panners swirled for stray grains of gold there. Great rigs with thick cables were strung up to hew the forests down with a tearing and a rending, saws biting through wood as huge firs crashed down. There came a sharp cracking and the bar’s windowpane showed a long white line. Someone had thrown a rock. The ’tender went outside to investigate and returned, shaking his head.
“Personne,” he said.
A seedy egg in the back began blethering about the mayor so I killed the ale and left a little silver. While hiking away with my lousy bag I passed a pair of bobbies in leather Ulsters on the sidewalk and did not blench. Was any of this even happening? Was I being watched, an unwitting actor in a complicated conspiracy involving Jack and the Senator, an unknowing tool of some secret group manipulating my activities for occult reasons? Yes. It seemed clear to me I was being used to satisfy certain prophecies of the British Israelites and the Round Table to raise the Red Hand in Holy Ireland. I would rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem with an archangel’s name and the caduceus of Mercury, then claim my crown. It was either that or sire the Moonchild and assist Bolsheviks in the service of Marx and worldwide revolution. My random crimes undermined capitalism and the bourgeoisie’s complacency. I was fated to destroy the Commonwealth and the League of Nations. Do it, Michael. Be stern and cold, wield sword and cross.
I needed sleep. For a very few confused minutes I was at St. Pancras Station in London, then a Christmas panto in the West End with a chum from Victoria. My head spun as I dropped my Gladstone off at Windsor Station, under the angel guiding a dead serviceman to heaven, same as the one in Winnipeg, same as the one in Vancouver. With that reminiscence I completed a wide circuit to Morgan’s department store. What I needed was hot tea and rest to rid associative thought of its power. One face in the crowd held the shadow of the ghost of the smile of a girl I’d seen on a tram outside Covent Garden years ago, another stranger could have been the long-lost brother of my old headmaster at the Normal School. This series of interplayed mental connections, this bastard combination of paramnesia and nostalgia, would lead me up the primrose path to the crack-up ward.
Passersby on the pavement buffeted me as I crossed in front of Christ Church. Most of the snow had vanished but the Morgan’s door openers had availed themselves of the occasion to swaddle in fur greatcoats and hats. To begin with I disdained the entranceway and walked around an entire city block clockwise in order to clear my brain and check dark reflections in store windows for any pursuers. A mangled veteran begged for alms. When I flipped a half-dollar into his cap the wretch raised a metal hook to his eye and wheezed: “Anybody want a duck?”
&nb
sp; As an officer and gentleman, second lieutenant in the Seventy-second Highlanders, I gave the victim another dollar to thank my lucky stars. But for the grace of God go you, Mick me lad, or Jack himself, a Duke of Connaught’s Own. The entire population was diseased or deformed in some way, within or without, including myself. My ailment needed a name related to its outward symptomology: the futile attempt of placing oneself within a comprehensive whole of variegated, pointless, randomized memory to find significance. I diagnosed myself with a terminal case of Mick’s Syndrome. Turning a precise ninety-degree angle onto City Councillors brought no greater clarity. Man had tried to impose a petty order by surveying straight lines, encoding secret equations in dead foundations. Below this system there reigned pure chaos, a blind worm chewing through space. By turning another corner I was satisfied and pushed through a revolving door into the great volume of the store.
Inside I was washed in the soft sea of the female. Perfume poured over me, a rich mixture: attar of rose and lavender, citron and orange and sweet talc powder. I closed my eyes and inspired and for a blessed moment was not cruel and cold and alone. I saw the temporary dream of crystal and chrome glittering as scent bottles and precious things sat ranged before fluttering women. Shopgirls wore smart navy frocks and waited on furred and feathered doyennes, the whole scene clean and bright, almost alien. Here was a high altar for that sisterhood of wealth, each movement part of a choreographed ritual conducted in discreet undertones. For a moment I smelled myself— sweat and tobacco and fear—and then my heart leapt as I saw Laura select something silver from a shelf. As a clerk passed the woman turned into another rich redhead and I breathed out. By God, this was civilization, why the mills ground fine and forges smelted hot. It was for them, to keep womanhood safe and soft and free from harm. I became covetous and wanted it, this world. I wanted it now.
As I took the staircase to the basement a large clock on the wall read one pip-emma on the dot, time for tiffin. In the toy department painted wooden imps hung smiling on hooks. To one side were train sets and baseball bats, on the other kewpie dolls and tea sets. Beyond a neatly stacked pile of Erector Sets and cowboy rifles Jack chatted up a pretty floorwalker. He touched her face and she flushed, embarrassed. I sent a loose hoop his way, my revolver in my pocket to play its own game in due time. The wooden circle hit Jack and fell spinning on the tiles. Jack turned to me.