The Man Who Killed

by Fraser Nixon

  Ahead of me Jack stopped, looked back, and hustled down a grimy stone staircase to a subterranean entryway. He rapped a sequence. The door opened and Jack pushed in past a small Chinaman in his pajamas. Bitter opium smoke and sweat drifted as I followed. My sense of smell was strangely acute, perhaps compensating for my deafness. I also tasted cordite and petrol. Sounds came faintly to me as the ringing in my ears lessened in intensity. I heard Jack bark in his rough honking Cantonese: “Hem ga san puk gai.” Out of my way.

  He grabbed a skinny fellow by the neck and barked: “Kwan!”

  Jack pushed the Chinaman down a flight of wooden steps leading deeper underground. I roughed my way in and shouldered the door closed behind me. My vision adjusted to make out cat-eyes glittering in the light of burning spills for the pipes. We were a fearsome sight for drugged Orientals: a pair of armed gwai lo barbarians with big noses sniffing at the stink. In the gloom I thought I saw a white woman being ministered to. This sewer was a crypt and I wanted a better way out but had to follow Jack down. The scene was something out of a pulp journal, the dread den of the dragon. Its inhabitants didn’t put up much fight and I pushed them away like yellow scarecrows.

  A flickering electric bulb in the next room had the effect of turning everything into a staccato Zoetrope reel. Brass pots bubbled with a hellish brew while a wet Norway rat cowered by a sewer grating. Noise beyond led me out of the foul kitchen into a chamber with a stove and a table surrounded by fan tan players. A serene picture of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen faced me. Jack still held the skinny beggar by the scruff, then shouted loud enough for me to hear: “Police.”

  I came in and backed his play, growling: “Nobody breathe.”

  Jack shoved his captive to the ground and turned to me. There was a wildness to him, effect of shock and the blow to his head. He cocked his revolver and the gamblers sat still as hypnotized chickens. What was his intent?

  “I want Kwan,” he said, as though to answer.

  In the table’s centre was the black numbered square surrounded by money. The croupier had a downturned bowl in front of him. Jack stood still but seemed unbalanced: blood on his forehead, collar undone, coat torn. The gamblers let their cigarets burn. Six players sat ’round the table and the wretched coolie sprawled on the floor made seven. Jack reached over and lifted up the bowl. The croupier looked a dry stick with a thin beard. He betrayed nothing as the buttons spilled on the tabletop. Jack put the bowl on the man’s head, a terrible affront.

  “Kwan,” Jack said, almost politely.

  Still nothing. I was becoming nervous. We were trapped down here in an underground dead-end. The upstairs servants might’ve signalled for help and we’d be boxed in neatly. I held my gun at my side and was having trouble concentrating. The heavy odours and the stolid Chinese, with their blank faces and dark slitted eyes, unsettled me. One was holding a clay cup of tea. I felt like fainting. Jack hit the croupier a sickening blow to the head with his Webley. He shoved the counters off the table and gathered up the money.

  “Kwan,” he repeated.

  Jack stuck the barrel in the mug of a little shrimp wearing a collarless shirt. Clockwise he went from face to face. Jack’s mouth was open and spittle slavered off his jaw. He settled on a Fu Manchu type by me who lifted a bony hand. I saw light through long transparent fingernails and jabbed my gun in the gambler’s back. He twitched, then very slowly the victim moved a finger and pointed at the stove. Jack went to touch it and laughed. With a straining heave he pulled the stove away from the wall to reveal a gap with yet more stairs leading down.

  “Get that,” Jack said, pointing at a light. “I’m going in. Stay here and cover me.”

  I handed him the oil lamp. He crouched and went into the hole. I kept up a forbidding façade for the Chinamen but was outmatched by their studied impassivity. They were damned lucky to be here in Montreal. An act was passed by government a few years back against all Oriental immigration. No more Gold Mountain. In Vancouver I’d been a child when the Asiatic Exclusion League had smashed windows throughout Chinatown. Had they half a chance these characters would make me into chop suey as recompense.

  Jack’s voice came from somewhere far away and I shuffled to the hole.

  “Mick. Mick,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Come down. Watch your head.”

  I took the stairs backward with the circle of motionless watchers staring at me, statues in a tomb. I turned and another dozen steps brought me to a narrow way filled with rotting burlap. A light flickered ahead as I came to a room lined with shelves stacked with old fowling pieces, rusty pikes and swords, a set of measuring weights, pots of opium, and boxes labelled in Chinese. Jack stood in the middle with a laughing man wearing a real pig-tail.

  “Kwan here thinks it’s funny I took their money,” Jack said.

  “Very funny, very funny,” Kwan said.

  “Some joke,” I said.

  My eyes roamed this Aladdin’s cave and my heart stopped when I saw a familiar rectangle of black metal. Jack and Kwan bantered and Kwan handed Jack an automatic pistol, a Browning. While they were occupied haggling I sidled over to the object of interest and opened it up. My nerves thrilled and pain receded. I closed the box and turned back to the pair. Jack gave Kwan some money and they shook hands curiously. When I pocketed the black box I tipped over Jack’s oil lamp. It smashed to the ground and I jumped back as the oil spilled over sacks and wicker pots. Jack and Kwan turned as flames spread to the shelves. In the enclosed space the smoke started choking and the fire blocked the way back upstairs. Kwan swore and hopped over to a corner where he began scrabbling at the wall. Jack staggered in the poisonous smoke and I pulled him over to the Chinaman. Kwan found what he was looking for and the wall crumbled away. We shoved into a recess and to a ladder leading up. Jack yanked Kwan down from it and started pulling himself up. I followed suit and kicked at Kwan as he clawed at me. Jack pounded on a trapdoor above through the thickening smoke and finally cracked it open in a shower of rust and dirt. He pushed up and out and I came after into an alley crowded with rubbish bins and restaurant waste. Smoke poured from the secret shaft and we could hear a rising wail around the corner. Kwan’s head poked out the ground as we dragged ourselves to the alley mouth.

  “Du nu loh moa!” he screamed at me, then in English: “You son of bitch.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  He came at me but I pulled out my gun and pointed it at him. It was too much and I was exhausted.

  “Bugger off,” I said.

  He spat and stamped and slouched away, shaking his fist at me. Jack was laughing broadly, tears streaming down his face.

  “You’re a wonder, Mick, really you are. You truly have a gift.”

  I was now lightheaded from the dope smoke but had enough presence of mind to straighten up and help Jack walk away as machine guns started clattering.

  “Firecrackers,” Jack said.

  Jabbering Chinese ran about and one had already wrenched open a fire hydrant as others began a bucket brigade. More limped and scattered away from what would soon be a welter of firemen and police. Jack and I went along St. Urbain and turned left. In a few minutes we were on a quiet street behind St. Patrick’s, where D’Arcy McGee had lain in state after he’d been assassinated in Ottawa. And where was Louis Riel? Buried facedown with a stake through his heart for treason. Old Tomorrow had said, as I did now: “He shall hang though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.”

  From the neighbourhood came a rising howl of wolves roused by the fire engine and ruckus. My hearing had improved. The St. Patrick’s bell rang eight times. Only eight o’clock. It felt much later, the witching hour. Jack sat on the grass near an old wall. I stamped my feet to keep the blood moving. It was cold and I remembered I had nowhere to stay.

  “That was bloody marvellous, Mick,” said Jack, shaking his head.

  “It was an accident.”

  “Of course it was. You’ve a rare talent. The perfect capper to a hell of a n
ight.”

  “I agree.”

  “Now then, have you any money?” asked Jack.

  “Don’t tell me you’re skint again,” I said.

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Well then.”

  That son of a bitch Bob. It was the least I could do to give Jack two hundred dollars without asking where or how he’d lost his own stake. It meant I was down below seven hundred, but I held a hole card that’d make money irrelevant.

  “What’re you thinking?” I asked.

  “I was thinking how I’ve been nursing a viper at my breast this whole while. Dammit but I was napping.”

  “Bob?”

  “Aye. Now that Kwan’s buggered I’ve lost a line. What a balls-up. It’s going to take some time to straighten this mess out.”

  “I could use some rest myself,” I said disingenuously.

  “All right. We’ll split up for the time being. Were I you I’d change hotels.”

  “Easy enough.”

  “It’s Friday night. Check in a few days at the Hotel X for a message, name of Conrad.”

  “You want any help?” I asked.

  “Not just now. The money’s enough.”

  “What’re you going to do?” I asked.

  “Tace is Latin for candle, old man,” Jack said.

  “Well I won’t whisper. We’ve done it now. Murder.”

  Jack sized me up a moment.

  “There is that. The wheel spins.”

  He got to his feet.

  “Remember, the Hotel X,” he said.

  “Oke.”

  Jack shook his head and reeled off into the darkness. I walked until I came back to Bonaventure. In the station I read an advertisement on a board for the Hotel Boniface so I telephoned in advance for a room, then walked over to Windsor Station and picked up my bag. In the grill I ate a hasty sandwich, drank a coffee, and pocketed a spoon. The hotel was on Dorchester and en route I stopped at a night-owl chemist for an apparatus. At the Boniface I signed the book Thomas Scott, paid three days in advance and asked for a candle. Upstairs behind a locked door I cleaned my hands and face in hot water with soap. I lit the candle, took out the vial from the black metal box I’d stolen, and began. Carefully I tipped salts into a spoon. The colour of the grains told me it was indeed morphine, not heroin, a relief. I fitted together a new hypodermic needle from the drugstore and bound my arm tightly with a towel. The salt and water solution I heated in the spoon and when it was ready I filled the device, drew the mixture, and injected myself. Slowly I blew out the candle, felt pain withdraw, and soon was gone to another place far away.

  INTERREGNUM NARCOTICUM

  THERE WAS ENOUGH morphine in the vial to keep me from pressing concerns for a considerable length of time. My injuries receded, and I fell into a deep lassitude born from physical exhaustion. Betimes I slept behind a locked door, loaded revolver by my side. When I woke I made another injection and watched the sun move across the arch of the sky. Inward flooded a bliss, and later, fear.

  Through a blunted consciousness arrived concerns for my fate. Besides the transgressions I’d committed and the failure of my life, now the fatal substance had returned and clutched me in its grip. Soon all other considerations would dwindle and it’d be the drug alone that I’d seek, its peace. I looked at my wounds from the automobile collision and a purple bruise on my chest that described part of the wheel’s arc.

  Later the hotel room took on the dimensions of a prison cell. Unsettling fancies: a warrant out for my arrest, everything known to the world. Footsteps in the hallway were the police come to take me away. The wide-open brown eyes of the man in the saloon ’car stared at me as I pulled the trigger and plunged the hypodermic syringe home. A warm itch turned to a settled coolness and calm.

  I was a slave to Venus, a scorned acolyte. Babe Ruth beat Celeste the good-time girl from the whorehouse with his baseball bat. Laura melted into shadows in a palace on a mountain with a knave. Queen of Diamonds, Queen of Hearts, and I a deuce or trey or Fool. The lovers in the garden beneath the sun. Jack and the magician Houdini building the Tower. Laura my love, priestess of desire, a whore like all the rest. I should’ve forgiven her but I couldn’t. The devil in womankind’s cunning. Satan wasn’t a fallen angel lording it in heaven but a small voice whispering in a dirty alleyway: “Would you like to experience the ultimate pleasure?”

  Pain crept back and a forewarning of this stage lead me to the bathroom where I heaved, nauseated. I’d taken too much in haste. It was dawn or evening by the light; a chambermaid or sin-eater worked in the hallway. My instructions to the clerk: Do not disturb Room 34. When I opened the window I smelled pollen, as though spring had returned. The air was cold. From the far end of the world sounded the long low moan of a train’s whistle, the heartbreaking sound of remotest melancholy, a soul in the far country. You’ll join it, for you’ve killed a man.

  the sabbath. Saturday had vanished and a fickle rain fell. Now I rested cocooned from the world, a deadly chrysalis. What would I become? Nothing better, certainly. When was the last time you did a turn for your fellow man? Never a nickel to a beggar or a kind word for the stranger on the street. Instead you harboured fantasies of revenge. With the money you have it’d be better to end this; take a suite at the Ritz and cut your throat in the bath. Instead, I switched to my right arm for the next injection, then took especial care dressing. Freshly attired I went onto the street and into a swarming plague of gnats.

  I set a pace on Stanley and felt a new bloom of strength as I walked uphill. In need of retreat I followed the street into the park. Rain accompanied me up through the thinning cover of small trees, the mountain’s aroma deep and heavy, dead brown maple leaves heaped and mouldering in odd fastnesses. My eye picked out a reward in the gloaming, a straggling low creeper with small wild strawberries. Their taste was a quintessence, pure ruby sweetness that filled my mouth as I huffed and puffed up worn stone stairways to the gravel promenade road. Clopping downhill past me came a fine glistening sorrel steaming in the cold. Astride the beast rode a girl in a plum riding habit, an equestrienne who looked sidelong at me as she goaded her charge lightly with a little leather crop down the slope. As I continued up, bearing southwest, I felt the dim luminescence of the dusky city to my left and saw the spread of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce through the trees, the church spires of Charlevoix and St. Henri stretching to the Lachine Canal and beyond, almost to the rapids. The road to China. It was grand to feel the drug’s warmth and be alone above the coalsmoke and mire.

  Despite the cool night air and rain I perspired through my hatband as I turned north to Beaver Lake. The bowl of the hill was filled with a Scotch mist and a pair of lingering swans floated on the water, mingling with late season ducks. Above me a small solitary river gull circled, crying piteously. Beneath the bird sat a woman on a bench. We were the only two on the mountain and I abandoned my route up to the lookout. There was an old Anglo-Saxon riddle I remembered from a book in my father’s study and I said it, softly, to myself: “Ic ane geseah idese sittan.”

  My boot scuffed a stone on the path and the woman turned. She was pretty and dark, obviously French, with a severe part in her hair showing a white line of scalp. When she saw me her look turned from one of pleasure to disappointment, as though she’d been expecting someone else. I’d seen that expression before. Laura. The penny dropped and I felt incredibly cold of a sudden.

  “Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” I said.

  She looked at me and shook her head. Without breaking stride and with the feeling of being punched in the chest I turned towards the gates of the Protestant cemetery to walk amongst the obelisks, decapitated angels, and draped urns.

  Last winter I’d climbed to the top of the mountain in the dead of December and had been on the high rise as a burning orange sun dropped over the white wasteland. Land stretched north forever over Quebec province to Hudson Bay and the Northwest Territories. Then I’d been battered by the wind in my wool Navy jacket and stared into the orb as
it sank. Soon the fierce cold would return and freeze the ground to an iron-hard tundra once again. In anticipation the gravediggers had already excavated a few expectant holes at the corner of the cemetery by the road. I walked down and out through the Hebrew boneyard to the other side past Park, over the field to St. Urbain where trams jerked along. The hike had stimulated a thirst and I sought a beer parlour open on St. Lawrence Main in defiance of the Sabbath law. At a corner grocery store I bought an envelope, a leaf of paper, and a red penny stamp with the Prince of Wales’s face on it. This was dangerous territory, the frontier between English and French. Dark-eyed families in their Sunday best walked solemnly along the street to evening mass. I saw a priest, two nuns, and an elegant gentleman with the carriage of a seigneur of Nouvelle France pass by. These were Charlie Trudeau and the Senator’s tribesmen. For safety I ducked into a watering hole on the west side of the boulevard. While I wrote an Irishman in the corner sang: “Let Bacchus’s sons be not dismayed but join with me, each jovial blade. Come drink and sing and lend your aid to help me with the chorus...”

  I sealed the envelope flap and ducked out to put the note in a nearby mailbox. It’d be picked up in the morning and delivered with the afternoon post. When I got back the whole bar was in full throat, an Englishman, a pair of bohunks, the landlord, and finally myself joining with: “We’ll beat the bailiffs out of fun, we’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run, we are the boys no man dare dun if he regards a whole skin. Instead of spa we’ll drink brown ale and pay the reck’ning on the nail, no man for debt shall go to gaol from Garryowen in glory.”

  By the end and despite myself my eyes were teared up by this camaraderie. I thought of chums scattered across the country or dead, places I’d never see again or ever visit. The Englishman shyly bought me an ale and suggested we have a bit of fun, with a nervous wink. When he went to relieve himself I paid and slipped out.

  On the cold street I turned into myself again, an enemy of humanity. On a hidden piano someone practised a phrase from Mendelssohn over and over. Here on the sidewalk sprawled a poor young Hebress blowing soap bubbles that floated and disappeared over the tenements as a hard wind came gusting down from the north. People huddled into their overcoats against the gale. I skirted overflowing rubbish bins and the music prompted a memory of the recent past, the cathouse on Mountain with that bastard Bob plunking out “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” by Willie Eckstein and the Melody Kings on His Master’s Voice. The little dog sticking his face into the gramophone funnel, the Senator’s bitch Rex licking at itself, Celeste my whore and Lilyan Tashman with her stockings off and Laura, always Laura. Happiness in stolen moments with her and now I was apart and alone, anonymous, forgotten. Write your emergency testament on a clean white piece of foolscap and affix your signature, a holograph will. Leave Jack the Webley and case of shells.