by Fraser Nixon
“Wonder how that fellow you shot is doing?” Jack asked.
“The Senator’s jobbie? He deserved it. Like Bob.”
“Put your animus away for the evening,” Jack said.
“I said I would.”
“What you do after that’s no skin off mine.”
“Mighty white of you.”
“Ain’t it though? Here we are.”
We took a dekko along the pier, staying in motion so as not to draw attention. Jack narrated: “We’ll park there and wait. You’re in the motor and I’ll loiter with intent. Bob’ll be in another ’car. Four men are coming with the money. They’re making the trade onboard. We’ll hit them before they pull up to the gangplank.”
“What if the set-up’s different?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean last week we drove trucks to the border. Why’re they doing it here now?”
“Boats,” Jack said.
“And what’ll they have? Tommy guns or pistols or what?”
“That I don’t know,” said Jack.
“Christ.”
“What do you want? These operators have paid for the convenience. This isn’t a battleground like Chicago. Montreal’s been nice and quiet since Prohibition passed. Last week was an aberration. I was set up and now I’ve been cut out. Truthfully, I should be on the hook for the shipment lost but there’ve been no reprimands from Chicago, and do you know why? Because I was to be killed. I was crossed by my own masters for some damned reason and this is my payback. Now I’ve got the inside dope and aim to clean ’em out.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the consequences?”
“You’d better believe it,” Jack said.
“They pull up, and then what happens?”
“Damn the torpedoes.”
“What?”
“Full speed ahead.”
“You’re crazy. Ram them?”
“That’s right.”
“Not me,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because the damn things are full of petrol. They’ll explode.”
“If you’re yellow Bob can do it and you drive the getaway.”
“He’ll blow the works for sure. Fine, I’ll do it.”
“There’s the man.”
Jack smiled.
“What happens after I smash them?” I asked.
“I make the grab.”
“Then what?”
“You cover me and we hop in Bob’s sled.”
“Jesus. This is a really beautiful, well-conceived plan.”
“Ain’t it though?” asked Jack again, grinning that grin.
“Let’s get a drink and go over it again.”
“If we must,” said Jack.
“Believe me, we must.”
A long slog in silence took us back to relative civilization and we repaired to another saloon advertising sterilized glasses, ordering two filled up with beer.
“How much do you think this imbroglio’ll net us?” I asked.
“The run last week was smaller. This shipment’s about five times larger,” Jack said. “Say, twenty thousand.”
“It’s a damned complicated plot you’ve got us wound up in.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Jack said.
“Do you really think a bunch of boyos like us can take on this outfit?”
“Why the hell not?” asked Jack. “Who says a pack of lousy Italians are smarter than we? They’ve got the Black Hand but we’ve got the Brotherhood.”
“The Brotherhood? Are they in on this as well? Whose side are we on?”
“Our own,” Jack said.
“That’s reassuring.”
Jack put down his glass and became very still and serious. He pointed at me.
“Listen to me. What has anyone ever done for you? The King, the Brass Hats, the Archbishop of bloody Canterbury, that lot would’ve let you be chewed up into hamburger in France without a twinge of remorse, and all for a lie. Believe you me. Now those are the jokers I’d like to take on but they’ve got a little too much muscle for the moment. We’ll just have to wait for the global revolution. Meanwhile I want some elbow room, and that means money. We’re stealing from criminals, Mick. Worse comes to worst we get shot for our trouble. Tell me, what’s worth living for, eh?”
This was something to consider, but there was more. Jack said: “So we lived through the war. I’m not going to croak an old man in bed. It’s this or something else. What difference does it make?”
“That’s a damned convincing argument. You should have stood for the bar. A judge’d love that defence,” I said.
“To hell with it all,” Jack said, and drank.
I looked moodily into my sludgy glass, divining nothing. Perhaps Jack was a blind prophet. In the drinkery a deep burnt-oil smell pervaded and I drank more of the rotten stuff, choking it back.
“We’d better go and wind up that motor,” I said.
“Now you’re cooking with gas,” went my Tiresias.
ON DORCHESTER WE caught a ’cab and took it to the street where the Auburn sat parked. While walking to it I heard hot jazz in my head, as though a record was spinning within, like a movie house pianist accompanying my actions. Someday they’ll play recorded music at the cinema like a radio play and make a talking picture, with coloured film for verisimilitude. It’ll be closer to real life, like now. Look at the purple grease on the windscreen of the motor, the curled rusty leaves, the indigo sky. The music continued to play in my mind’s ear, as it were: “Hot Potato.” Jack got behind the wheel.
“Shame they can’t shoehorn a wireless into a ’car,” I said. “A body could listen to music while driving.”
“Distracting,” Jack said.
He motioned for the keys and we swung away. The evening sun crept down near the mountain. By taking side streets and quiet lanes we slotted the motor in an unmemorable siding. It was suppertime. Around the block at a dry-goods merchant we each purchased a bottle of medicinal ginger wine, neither Jack nor I in an aquabibulous frame of mind. The bottles held a nerve tonic and stomach settler. The storekeep uncorked one and its contents tasted of Angostura Bitters laced with rancid sugar. We left to tread down empty redolent alleyways leading away from the river, industry winding down at this hour in our obscure corner of the Empire.
What did we talk of? Jack reminisced and we laughed as the tonic made us merry. I put away my shallow resentments and entered the absurd spirit of the thing. The past was ephemeral and faintly ridiculous, a series of harebrained scrapes and foolish amours. As dusk thickened we evoked our lost world of the West: the taste of raw Walla Walla onions big as baseballs, pickled herring, and Indian candy from Ship’s Point on Vancouver Island where Cook had anchored near heaps of oyster shells. Finishing the medicine Jack dropped the corked empty bottle in the drink and the river’s current pulled it away to join flotsam clinging ’round a rowboat tied up near a small freighter. Ship’s rope groaned as Jack discreetly checked his weapon. I did likewise and spun the cylinder of my Mark IV. It was the same sidearm make I’d been issued with my pip. Jack stuck his in his belt under a buttoned jacket and unbelted overcoat. I kept mine safe in an outer pocket. Jack spat in the oily water. There wasn’t a soul about, though I heard a faint shouting from some streets behind us. My nine hundred dollars and change was safe upon me so I lit a cigaret and Jack’s with the same lucifer.
“Never three to a match,” Jack said. “First one the sniper spots, the second he aims, the third he fires.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“One of those bits of advice that travelled up and down the line. You heard it all: crucifixions in No Man’s Land, ghosts and the Angels of Mons. Dammit, though, it was impossible to tell truth from fiction there, the whole thing was too bloody unreal. Whole world went down the fucking rabbit hole and where it’s going now I don’t like to think.”
Jack looked at his ring awhile and then said: “There’ll be another war.”
“They’ll fight it with Zeppelins and heat-rays,” I said.
“Damn me I don’t know.”
“We’ll be gone before it starts anyhow.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jack said, and spat again.
That was him all over. One minute careless and blithe, then queerly sober. He checked his wristwatch.
“Waiting to go over was the worst of it,” he said, “waiting for the whistle.”
I yawned, cracking my temporomandibular joint loudly.
“No rest for the wicked,” continued Jack.
“Sleep in heaven,” I said.
“Or the other place.”
We completed a circuit and I looked into the dirty water. Gulls circled and dove. No river is the same river, so sayeth Heraclitus. The St. Lawrence poured towards the sea, thalassa, thalassa. Jack checked the time again.
“He’s late, the bastard.”
“Alors,” I said.
“Wait a minute.”
A ’car careened into the crossing near the jetty, the rendezvous between Duke and Nazareth by the train tracks. It was a fawn Oldsmobile that swerved to intersect with us. Jack held up his hand like a traffic cop and Bob braked to a clumsy halt. He rolled down the window and grinned sloppily.
“Goddammit man, you’re drunk,” Jack said.
“Ain’t you?” asked Bob.
“Get out and take some air.”
“Oke.”
Bob dismounted. To open my bottle of ginger wine I pushed the cork down its neck out of ugly necessity, then took a long swig of the restorative. I handed it to Jack, who pulled and passed the bottle to Bob. Bob looked at me a moment with no expression and I was dead certain he knew nothing of my attachment to Laura. I tamped down a panicky sort of anger. I didn’t like him, how he’d touched the love of my life. For the life I couldn’t figure why Jack wanted his help. Bob had caused that fracas in the whorehouse. He was unstable. I wanted to smash his pretty face in.
“Sláinte,” Bob said, passing the bottle back to me.
“Guid forder,” said I, and drank.
Dammitdammitgoddamnationchristinheavensaveus. Breathe. Maintain an outward mien of calm and spit away your corruption. George V is your liege and lord by the Orange Lodge and the Law of this Dominion, so fuck the Pope.
A ragged dog came out from behind a rubbish tip and coughed at us as we waited hidden in deep shadow. I made up my face into a rueful, close-lipped smile as the bottle did another round. When I went to light a fresh cigaret I found one burning in my hand. Time slowed with the universe, entropic. Birds flew southeasterly towards St. Helen’s Island. An old lamplighter came our way, the antique figure out of Cruikshank’s etchings for Dickens. His toil gave the streets a bluish tint as night fell completely. Jack handed me keys and nodded to Bob. The two drove the Olds to another position. I finished the wine and carefully placed the bottle on a rotten turnbuckle before walking to the Auburn, then made to check my pocketwatch before recalling how I’d failed to redeem it from hock. No matter. There was no music playing in my head now. I felt drained of life. As I sat behind the wheel I listened to my breath and the dull rhythm of my heartbeat. At least the medulla oblongata continued to function. Along my arm came the familiar ache.
Talk about slowness, those days strung out along the opaque dragon’s tail, lost in morphia. The endless dreams, the fading to lonely worlds, a glacial death often punctuated by restless strength and creative activity. That was the drug’s Janus effect, withering the body and feeding the mind. Nothing on earth had been worse than the panic I’d felt when my supply had been exhausted. Periodic opium raids in Chinatown had pushed me into a corner and the McGill beaks came ever so damned close to catching me out at the Royal Victoria red-handed.
The last visit to the hospital before brokering my departure from the school had been an off-chance of lax security. There were new locks on the door and Smiler was with Jacques Price, the pair dissecting a beggar in the downstairs morgue. Smiler and Price’s scalpelwork was no patch on my own, I was pleased to note. Jack and I’d butchered enough deer and moose in our youth to make us old hands at vivisection. Once the Pater had potted a bear out by Yale and brought most of it back to our house in the West End. He’d skinned it for a rug and I remembered finding a tin rubbish bin in the yard with its lid held down by a brick. Inside had been the animal’s head, alive with writhing white maggots stripping the flesh off the trophy. Later the amah’d boiled the skull clean and the Pater’d mounted it on a wall near my bedroom.
My childhood home had been a sort of emporium, the attic filled with books, charts, photoengravings, and testaments. In a trunk were my mother’s few surviving effects, her communion papers and a golden shamrock of the Apparition at Knock. My amah had died while I was in Victoria getting a baccalaureate, the house now another museum of a broken colonist family, near empty save for the Pater in his rocking chair.
Returning to the present and the automobile I found myself thirsty and yenned for a cup of tea. The old streetlamps cast an arctic glow. What’ll newspaper headlines read like tomorrow? This was a very serious crime we were on the verge of committing, a chancy undertaking. Illogically I trusted in Jack’s star. I’d play my part, was all, and do what was necessary. It’d been a long day already, the longest one yet. I closed my eyes.
And opened them again as a long white saloon car pulled in. From Jack’s sketchy form in the darkness came the Scout whistle. I started the Auburn and shifted into gear, the headlamps off, accelerating over the short distance to ramming speed. I saw startled clean-shaven faces staring my way as the machines collided. There was a crunch of tearing metal and I was thrown onto the wheel as I caved the saloon’s passenger side in. My chest burned as I pulled out the Webley and opened the door to step down onto the road. A neat job, Mick, I thought, as I pointed the barrel through the rear glass at a surprised middle-aged man in the back seat. Jack was shouting. There he was in front with his gun on the driver. The front passenger lay slumped over where the Auburn’s grille had met the wheelwell. A radiator hissed steam. Jack shouted something across the bonnet at the driver, who reached down. Jack fired. The man I was covering hunched and I pulled the trigger. Glass cracked and shattered and his head bucked forward. Jack came by the driver’s side while the last man put up his hands. Jack shot again and the cabin filled with black gore. He pulled the handle and a bloodied body with a ruined face fell out clutching a black leather case. Jack grabbed the satchel, his revolver smoking in his left fist. He turned to me and yelled: “Ankle!”
I looked up at the moored ship; the men on the deck were just starting to stir. It had been quick. We ran, hotfooting from the slaughter. Maybe half a minute had passed. Suddenly I was lucid, my body heaving as I followed after as fast as I could. We made it over slippery cobblestones to the idling Olds. Jack hauled open the rear left passenger door behind Bob.
“Go!” shouted Jack as we clambered in.
He threw the bag onto the front passenger seat. Bob engaged the gear and we were off, my heart screaming and ears roaring from the gunshots and the crash. My hand tingled as Bob veered crazily, fear making him stupider. He got the ’car under control as we turned up McGill.
“Shit,” he said.
A procession of torches and mounted policemen holding Union Jack banners blocked our way ahead, the Sons of England.
“Trafalgar Night,” shouted Jack. “Turn right!”
Bob swerved at the Customs House and now we were caught in the crooked warren of the Old Town, passing the firehouse and a small square with a thin rough obelisk at its centre. It was a rat run with the risk of getting trapped in an old byway behind a horse and wagon or running into an outriding constable from the parade. Bob was driving too fast.
“Slow down,” I said.
He turned to me with a vacant stare. The man was more than drunk, he was on dope. I could tell if anyone could.
“Slow down!” I said again.
Bob focused and came back to his senses. Jack was cle
nching his teeth and muttering, his gun still gripped in his hand. We rolled left through Place d’Armes and around the statue of Maisonneuve and an Iroquois brave covered in gullshit, tomahawk at the ready. From Notre-Dame bells rang the changes. What time was it? An arc onto St. Lawrence Main heading northerly and slowing when Bob’s arm suddenly swung around at me with a gun at its end. Before he could fire Jack’s right wrist came up in time. Bob shot through the roof and I was deafened. The Olds skidded and slewed as I clawed at the door latch and fell out, out of a moving Goddamned ’car. I landed hard on my side, rolling and losing my grip on the Webley. The machine pitched Jack out after me, turning an awkward somersault to hit his head on the pavement. My ears were screeching from the report as I watched Bob get away, the rear door flapping as he straightened the Olds’s route out and powered off. And with him, the money. I looked for pedestrians or bystanders or police but we were lucky, lost on a rough corner with only a scavenging rag-and-bone man lurking in a dark storefront with his pushcart, near Craig and a long way from cover as my mind scrambled for what to do.
Jack waved and shouted as he rose. He staggered to pick up his hat and trotted off blindly. I scooped up my weapon and followed, pain coursing through every fibre and furious, ready to kill again. Jack turned up an alley and I knew where we were, able now to make out what Jack’s mouth was shouting: “Chinatown.”
MY REFLECTION IN A PANE of glass amethyst from the glow of a neon sign. I was a lean monkey with a gun in his hand. For a moment I could picture myself many-armed and fierce as a Hindoo idol, wielding knives dripping blood. I ran through the little quartier chinois and in another window saw a heterogeneous collection of objects: a wooden Confucius painted vermilion, shadow puppets from the Dutch East Indies, a Moslem screen of a white-veiled man before a dazzling blue peacock, a green copper bust of Emperor Augustus, dominus et primus inter pares. I kept burning shoe leather trying to catch up with Jack and wondered how much the Celestials were charging for Caesar.