The Man Who Killed

by Fraser Nixon

  The gun weighed my pocket down as I neared Chinatown. Would have to find what Jack had called the Hotel X. I understood that it was in the old quarter but couldn’t bear to see what I might’ve wrought at the gamblers’ hell so made a right instead, west on St. Catherine, away from any Oriental. In the darkness neon-lit storefronts painted me wild colours and I was a corpuscle in the metropolis’s bloodstream again, feeling the thrum of life as I shouldered through the crowd, my hat down and collar up, a figure modern and dangerous.

  Nowhere like Montreal, the city a raw and freezing compromise between enemies, a manqué Paris fused with a poor man’s New York. Often it felt Russian, a tsar’s whimsy like St. Petersburg, or Petrograd they called it now. The difference was we’d never storm the Hôtel de Ville and burn the Golden Book as the Bolsheviks had invaded the Winter Palace. No, our King wouldn’t allow it. We were the fair-haired child of Empire, run for profit by the Scotch, fingernails pared, shoes well-tied, clean behind the ears. What Kipling called “Our Lady of the Snows”: still, empty, cold. A worse wind whipped down St. Catherine slashing at my face, bringing with it the smell of scorched toast and engine oil. I was driven into the Turf and the moment I entered felt a delicious frisson as warmth melted me down, a pure moment of welcome.

  When the girl appeared I ordered a Western and coffee, suddenly famished. After eating, a postprandial cigaret burned as I stared through a liquid window at the world outside. Painted on the brick wall of the Bercy building up to the cornice were advertisements inciting citizens to purchase Darkie toothpaste, ivory hairbrushes, surgical trusses, ginger ale. The Dupuis Frères department store down the street offered a ruinous line of credit to the natives; between the company and vulture-priests in black soutanes the French-Canadians were picked clean to their last sou. For poor English the Eatons did the same. O Ogilvy’s, o mores!

  Time waited on my leisure. The waitress ripped off a bill, making me forty-five cents poorer with a dime to the girl for her pains. A dollar would yield four German marks and that would take you a good long way, with the Krauts paying reparations in gold and having the devil of a time of it. I could live like a king in Berlin these days for nothing at all. I tied my serviette in a knot and left it in the centre of the dirty plate as I went out. The faintest tinnitus from Bob’s pistol shot continued to ring in my left ear. My hands began to shake and I recognized that another hunger needed satiation. The city sent me cues that I translated from an obscure code: tattoo drumbeat of a boiler on a roof conspiring with the traffic standards’ syncopation, green, yellow, red. On the street figures watched me, signalling covertly to undercover police agents. I began to lose my sea legs and staggered, wanting more than anything another injection of morphine. Teeth chattered, sweat dripped along my spine. I’d left it too long and they’d never let me back in the hotel. The gods had been angered. I was jostled, pedestrians tripping me up and stepping on my toes, crowded here with greasy pavement underfoot. An antique figure in long grey beard and ragged buckskins lay sprawled in front of the Union Tobacconist at Phillips Square, a ratty fur cap on the ground in front of him. Seized with superstition and wanting to propitiate the Fates I peeled off a hundred dollars and dropped the notes in amongst the few tarnished coins. His eye caught mine: a silver flash, a sigil of knowing. The man was Isaac Laquedem come over on the boat with John Cabot to the end of the earth or Hy-Brasil. He’d planted the banner of St. Mark and been left behind, fated forever to wander the earth.

  Thoughts thus abstracted and with my hands stuffed in my pockets I stepped badly on the pediment of the statue in the square and went down. At the last instant I pulled them out in time to save my face and pearly whites. It happened too quickly. Now my hands were scraped and bloody. Like any idiot I looked around for a witness to my tumble. Out of the gloom a woman materialized and handed me a white mouchoir, a demimondaine alone away from the busy traffic, an angel, speaking very rapidly in a French I couldn’t quite catch. I embarrassedly thanked her and slunk off, staunching my wounds with the cotton cloth. She’d done something human, graceful, and selfless and I’d been too damned shamefaced to stop even a moment. The white light from a marquee lit the squalid scene and I saw the show’s title: So This Is Paris.

  Behind the glass I read part of a review aloud to myself: “Monte Blue displays his virile mannerisms as the suave but willing Dr. Girard who leaves his wife and braves a gaol sentence to follow a will-of-the-wisp flapper in the person of Madame Lalle, played by Lilyan Tashman as a complete little vixen with a bag of cosmopolitan wiles and constant verve.”

  Back in the hotel at last I wasted away, a knife blade on a whetstone, as I pushed the needle in. Next door a drunk sang psalms in a broken key.

  WHEN I RETURNED to life the first thing I did was reach for the dwindling vial of morphine powder. The needle entered me dully, blunted by overuse. I put pressure on and dressed the puncture with styptic. A black line had burned across the bedsheets where I’d passed out with a lit cigaret. I imagined waking on fire and realized that I had, burning for the drug. My head sank back into the dense, mossy pillow and I closed my eyes.

  Later there was the hullabaloo of a working day: shouts of men, grinding axles, the klaxon of an ambulance. Likely it was taking a poor beggar to a ward in the Royal Victoria and I diagnosed him from afar with hypoxia leading to coma and death, what Houdini braved upside-down in the Chinese Water Torture Cell. Could picture myself stretched out on the starched rough linen of a hospital bed listening to the din of the world, of milk carts clattering past and newspaper hawkers shouting headlines: “Queen of Rumania to arrive at Bonaventure Station Wednesday!” “Hurricanes in Cuba!” “End of the World Nigh!”

  Very soon I’d have to visit the selfsame dispensary should my present pattern of consumption be continued, to join specimens in the morgue and be flensed by the coroner. It was getting there that’d be the trouble. Danger lurked all about, Turks disguised as Ruskies in the pay of the Kuomintang wanting vengeance for the fire I’d started in Chinatown. You will need to tread warily, boyo. Remember the post and that you must find Jack’s hotel at some point. Prepare.

  With a tube of Ipana and a brush I scraped away whatever covered my teeth and tongue, the dentifrice stinging at my tender gums. I raggedly shaved my face. The hotel room seemed to have constricted even closer during the course of the night and now felt no larger than a coffin. The largest item in the space was the black metal box of morphine and next to it my Webley. I aligned my spinal column and dressed. Suddenly irresolute and fearful, I sat again and leafed through the magazines to read a thriller about a fat detective working for the Pinkertons. Jack and his game: it explained those missing years and the postcards we’d received from far outposts of America. Why had he joined them? What larger design did he pursue? So much was beyond me now that my concerns were restricted to the necessities of life: morphine, morphine, and money. I lit a cigaret and let my thoughts drift.

  Recently as this last summer I’d fancied I’d broken the habit, sitting on a dock with my feet in Lake ’Magog, watching the idle rich at play on their boats. At night light and music from dances at the Hermitage Club would carry across the water to my shack, where I plotted an abstract revenge on their class and its chief exemplar, Mademoiselle Laura Dunphy, her very lovely self. The sins of the one visited upon the many, wishing to string them all up on gibbets.

  Our last painful meeting had been on a day in April, near end of term. The weather’d been raw, windy, unpleasant. She’d smelled bourbon on my breath and recoiled from a kiss. How little she knew, thinking me a mere drunkard. I was already far, far worse.

  “Michael,” she’d said.

  “Yes?”

  “I must go now.”

  So cold. The thaw’d just broken the river proper, bringing seabirds inland above the melting ice. It was twilight and we stood in a crowd of people on Sherbrooke close to the university gates. We’d met for tea but she’d taken no more than half a cup and then the mob had hurried around u
s as she rested her gaze on me. It felt like scientific appraisal of what I was, no trace of feeling or passion. I hadn’t been able to meet her green eyes until the very end, catching a flicker of her distaste. What do you do when the woman you love doesn’t love you in return? Laura put her gloved hands in an ermine muff as some idiot jostled me from behind and by the time I turned back she’d joined the crowd and was gone. I stayed rooted to the spot sick and dead, a hollow tree waiting to be blown over. The cigaret burned my hand and brought me back to the hotel.

  I flicked the stub out the window onto Aqueduc. The fading evening glow, timorous grey snow patches in doorways, motorcar horns blaring and horse hooves striking stone and the fading pressure of her hand on my forearm where she’d touched me for the last time. I unbuttoned my shirtsleeve and slapped my forearm to raise a vein. It didn’t hurt. Nothing did.

  A euphoria grew and with it the most marvellous sensation, a play of association linking Venice with Vinland. I laughed weakly and began to sing a childish song as I sank underwater: “Il était un petit navire, il était un petit navire, qui n’avait ja-ja-jamais navigué, qui n’avait ja-ja-jamais navigué.”

  Don’t get seasick. Put something in your stomach, beans on toast or sardines and catsup. The thought alone caused my gorge to rise. I stood, shakily, and at the window watched an old lady in a blond wig fishing for treasure from a bin with a piece of hooked wire. She reminded me of the poor bloody panners of Williams Creek, still scratching away for gold forty years after the rush. The Pater’d succoured them with little more than the Good Book and a square meal now and again. My father wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone man like Billy Sunday. On the wireless I’d hear gospel charlatans from down South and the Foursquare Gospel of Aimee McPherson, who talked in tongues, built a temple in Los Angeles, and had been kidnapped last spring. The woman outside pulled up a piece of scrap and danced a jig. Shining iron pyrite, fool’s gold.

  Sparrows darted by on their way to hibernate. I turned to the mirror and saw Mr. Hyde—not as played by John Barrymore in the pictures but as a kind of ogre, dark and difficult to please. Bury me facedown with a stake in my heart, never to see the winter sunlight.

  I held a volume of anatomy in my grip and turned pages to the circulatory system, tracing the morphine’s route. Radiators in the room felt cool to the touch and I had no need of their heat as my own calidum innatum burned just fine. I ran a hand over my face and marvelled at my organism’s subtle construction, then chewed at a thumbnail. An itch along my leg prompted me to pull up a trouser cuff to reveal a line of insect bites, bedbugs, what you got when you lay down with dogs.

  I went downstairs, where a clerk knotted his brow at my question, then snapped his fingers, saying: “The Hotel X? But of course! The Exceptionale.”

  I thanked him and telephoned the hotel from a booth to learn that Mr. Conrad was not in fact in, but did I care to leave a message? I did not.

  Evening broadsheets gave me the latest on the queen of Rumania, a burlesque similar to when the Prince of Wales had visited the States. They’d fallen all over him and started sporting thickly knotted neckties and drinking brandy sodas. Amazing how Yankees tumbled for a blueblood in the Republic. Snobs in their own way, worse than the Imperial Court of the Japanese. Canadians were little better, a fault of the Empire. From Hong Kong to Salisbury, Calgary to Singapore we’d kowtow to our nobility. Wait until the Commonwealth falls to new masters, the Communists or Martians. They were coming, according to the ’paper. The red planet was closer than ever, in one way or another.

  It was strangely hot out, or perhaps my blood boiled. Sunshine fell on the north side of the street while high above a ’plane buzzed lazy circles over the city towards the aerodrome in St. Hubert. An organ grinder tortured a scabrous monkey, a Siwash begged for alms, and a pretty flower girl ignored me. There was a triple feature on at His Majesty’s: Greed, The Gigolo, and Suicide Sonata. An elegant French-Canadian couple, what the Parisians would call chic, walked a small Pekinese. Morphine tailed away and I thought of Jack. He’d better be dogging down that four-flushing double-crosser Bob. I didn’t want him doing anything else. Look him up in the morning. One of the wicked grey prison streetcars cut me off as I crossed the street; a mournful criminal looked at me on his way east.

  This time I took McTavish up and the stairs near Ravenscrag. It was near five when I broke through the elms and birches to an Indian path by a still cool pond, a mountain tarn. Here the maples trembled autumn golden and a zephyr dried my sweat. It was near the gloaming and I followed a track to the top. From the highest point I watched the river cringe away from my majesty and the city huddle up against me for warmth. I was the beacon on high, not that skeleton cross of Christ. At five o’clock as the sun set I stood still as a brazen statue, lodestone of the true north, and there was no one else on the face of the earth.

  WEDNESDAY

  TWO DAYS LATER I ran out of morphine. My hands quaked and blood sang in my ears, worse than any conceivable hang-over. Pressure mounted alongside the craving. When I ran out of cigarets I’d be forced into the open. Abandon yourself to fever and the black horses of nightmare; you’ll never wake. The prognosis is inescapable, boyo. Check yourself into a sanatorium under an assumed name.

  Shaking and bloody were my hands, covered in filth and microscopic vermin. I’d accidentally injected a pathogen through the needle’s point, Pasteurella pestis hidden resident on pollen spores from high Afghanistan or Burma, bacterial refugees of the Black Death. From the poppies it came though rendered opium to morphine and was now inside me. Check lymph nodes for buboes and watch for bloody sputum after coughing. Feel the creatures multiplying inside, a riot of animalcules. All sexual desire was now absent and in its place aching low pain and hunger. I’d been a fool, using up the last of the Chinaman’s deck. I should kill him. How? Blink. Every time I did, someone died. Next it would be me at the end of a rope. I needed to rediscover an instinct for self-preservation and accomplish something. Leave this room.

  Outside the birds watched me from bare trees. People got in my way, stepped on my heels, grimaced in my direction. A beggar with a goiter and crutches eyed me suspiciously as I walked past. A streetcar’s trolley pole jumped off the overhead wire and lost its electrical connection. The operator got out to replace the pole and, hauling at the dead cable, spat at me in blame.

  It’d been raining for some time, perhaps days. The wind was from the northwest with the first bite of real winter in it and found a way through my clothes to my skin where it nipped at the husbanded warmth therein. I shivered violently and thought how fitting that I was headed for the hospital. At this odd hour in the afternoon classes would be completed if the schedule hadn’t changed. I might be in luck, and made a blasphemous prayer to that effect.

  If I knew my man he’d be just where he always was. “Smiler” Smilovich. A pushy striving bastard, all side, his the first hand raised for every question, volunteering for every study. Vice-president of the Medical Students’ Union. I trusted he’d pulled extra duty at the hospital liaison office, where I hoped to find him. He’d either be there or ostentatiously walking the wards with a stethoscope and thermometer. Smiler was the source of Jack’s cocaine, it seemed. That being the case it was no stretch to determine Smiler could also supply my chosen nostrum. He had access to the dispensary and if the man wouldn’t accept my money I was prepared to use other measures.

  It was only last spring that I’d surrendered those keys myself. I remembered the faces of my reviewing board as I handed them over, with Dr. Meakins grave as Moses. Laughing at them when they threatened to expel me and turn my carcass over to the Sûreté du Québec. I’d made my play, alluding in no uncertain terms to the tale I might spin should I be prosecuted. A pretty piece of blackmail, and one that produced a stalemate, my freedom, and a franked transcript. Now I returned to the scene.

  I hurried under bare black elms through the campus’s gloomy Scotch ambience, indifferent grey limestone buildings flanking the quadra
ngle. On a small field to my left three Redmen ran football patterns in the mud. Lights were on at the Redpath Library and through the windows I saw students hunched over books. Laughing varsity-sweatered types passed by and two serious-looking Jews were deep in conversation about Trotsky. From Macdonald a clatter of engineering students in royal purple gave throat: “We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the engineers...”

  During orientation week medical students had their own ritual of hazing, a program that culminated in formaldehyde-and-seltzer cocktails down the throat whilst blindfolded in the morgue. The morning after my apprenticeship I’d woken on a gurney with a splitting head and both legs in drying plaster casts. Grandescunt aucta labore. By work all things increase and grow, my alma mater’s creed, my century’s religion.

  At University I crossed Pine to the Vic. Smiler’d been in the dressing room backstage at the Princess before Jack and I’d spoken with the Handcuff King. What had he and Price been up to? I skirted around to the private entrance and thence into a back hallway. Inside it was noxious with camphor, carbolic soap, and disinfectant. Underlying all was the sweetness of disease. The eastern wing was still and silent and I trod the scrubbed tiles with feigned confidence. A young nurse pushed a man in a wheelchair. The wet wool of my clothes gave off the odour of dog.