by Fraser Nixon
At the hotel I paid my outstanding bill and booked two more nights. The clerk confirmed that the Exceptionale was near the stock exchange. It was time to find Jack. I went to my room and fingered through the Gladstone, uncovering the tintype of Laura, which I put in my wallet amongst my Army papers.
I slept. For how long I wasn’t sure, but it was evening when I came to. I took more morphine and went out into the pouring rain. The clerk gave me directions but I quickly became lost in a strange corner of town. Streets lacked lamps and caged doors were locked; it became increasingly grim. I started to curse. Here you are bootless in a desolate city, an outcast and pariah, murderer, Raskolnikov and Count Dracula rolled into one. Near to abandoning my hunt I turned up a side street and saw the dimly rendered sign for the hotel. A meagre hope quickened and I pushed at the door.
By contrast with the nondescript façade, the interior was quiet and vast with muted lighting and a roaring fire in the grate. In the lobby were comfortable empty Chesterfields scattered here and there and folded newspapers on the sideboard. I walked in as though I owned the place. This had to be it.
“Any message for Conrad?” I asked a sleek blade behind the counter.
“A moment, if you please.”
He turned to the cubbyholes and picked out a folded piece of paper, which he handed over. I opened it to read: “News. Bar here nine nightly.”
“The time,” I asked the sharp.
The clerk irritably gestured at a clock. Quarter past. I noticed a door marked “Lobby Saloon,” stepped over, and was met by applause as I entered. A gent started playing the piano, “Rosy Cheeks.” Well-attired women and tuxedoed men buzzed in this hidden place. I’d never heard of it before. Jack drank at the bar, talking to the ’tender about South America. He was in a gay mood. I tapped his shoulder and he swivelled to me.
“Mick, me lad! Grand seeing you. Pull up a pew.”
Jack turned to the ’keep. “My man, do me the kindness of pouring this poor sinner whatever he wants on the good green earth.”
“Whiskey,” I said.
“Make it a triple, neat and Irish,” said Jack, “or this spudeater’ll turn savage before your very eyes. So boyo, how’re tricks? Long time no look-see.”
“I’m ducky,” I said.
The storm outside justified my ruined appearance. I looked over the toffs with their bespoke eveningwear and pink cocktails and bottled my rising wrath at their moneyed ease.
“What’s up?” I asked, and drank.
“This and that,” Jack said. “Tied up a few loose ends. Remember Martin?”
“Who?”
“The third driver, Charlie’s man. The one who got away.”
“Oke.”
“I dug him up and got his story. Had to push his teeth around a bit. He’s sound, as far as it goes.”
“So that donnybrook with Charlie and the Senator was for nothing.”
“Somewhat. The whole affair a mistake, as it happens.”
“Shocking.”
“Don’t give me that. If you knew half.”
“Try me,” I said.
“Bob. He’s the one sold out the shipment. That family of his got in bed with a Chicago mob that wants the whole market here. I’ll confess that I don’t know all the workings higher up. We’ll get it straight from the cheat’s lips when we track him down, that and the dough he stole from us.”
“Us.”
“Right-o. I’ll be after your help with this one.”
“Swell.”
Jack explained that in the last few days he’d been working on a meet-up to square things with the Senator and that Brown the Customs agent had feelers out at all the border crossings for anyone matching Bob’s description. As best as Jack could determine Bob had signed a hotel register last night at the Internationale, and therefore hadn’t left the country yet. Something was keeping him in Montreal. Our aim was to track him down and get back the satchel we’d hijacked on Friday.
“We’re back in the game,” Jack said. “You ready to play?”
“Alki,” I said.
“Skookum,” replied Jack, and winked.
We passed a few more hours getting drunk and fell in with a group of rich college kids up from New York for hooch and jazz. At one point I excused myself from the merry stupid crowd to use the gentlemen’s convenience. My intention was to make an injection but upon reflection and due to a state of utter inebriation the notion faced rejection. Perhaps my salvation lay in constant drunkenness. Ha, you joker you. Back at the bar people shouted. A long-legged girl in a short skirt danced on the piano with her eyes closed and I buttonholed Jack.
“Let’s take the vapours.”
Jack settled up and kissed one of the American beauties, starting a scuffle with her chaperone. Before it escalated the skirt fell off the piano and caused an uproar so Jack and I sloshed into the lobby, tight as owls.
“We’re up against it, lad, and no fooling,” Jack said. “We might need a ’car. Going to get a line on that Judas. It’s no laughing matter.”
“So you say.”
“What, you milky?”
“Never touch the stuff,” I said.
“Then let’s get cracking.”
Jack yanked me out onto the Rue Télégraphe. We were on our way. I wanted more than anything a pretty redhead with pale skin asleep in my bed next to me. We neared a hateful neighbourhood. Nearby were smelters and machine works where they fabricated locomotives. I tried to imagine what the area had looked like eighty years ago and what it would eighty hence but couldn’t. Tomorrow beckoned with malevolence, more electricity, dynamite, barbed wire.
On the sidewalk stood humans, shift workers at the plant and conspiring labour agitators, the hoi polloi. Were they my kinfolk? No more. I was now a breed apart with blood on my knife. Every single thing was under my control, Jack for once drunker than I. There was nothing to do but continue.
Jazz was in the air, coming from a bar. We stumbled to it and from an apartment above us I heard the machine-gun clatter of a typewriter, typewronger, a news-hawk burning the midnight oil, grinding out a story for the afternoon ’paper. Jack and I were the perpetrators of a string of crimes that had shocked Montreal, starting with a bootlegging run that’d ended in the death of two, armed robbery of a cinema, beatings and shootings on the Plateau, a deadly fire in Chinatown, and other, private crimes. The Lord alone knew what Jack had been up to and how many heads he’d cracked. Ahead of us a corner boy with fresh pulp and ink under his arm cried: “G’zette!”
We entered the saloon, a Negro club for Pullman porters and their ladies out for a night on the town. Eye whites glittered in the gloom and black faces glistened with sweat. It was hot as the jungle and onstage a fat darkie played piano. He pounded away, some crazy roll. We made it to the bar and held it up. Space was left us, the only whites in the house. Jack looked every inch the Pinkerton op, I an informer. He ordered whiskey and they refused payment so Jack let coins spill sloppily along the counter. It was good jazz and bad liquor. Presently a high yellow dame singer came out to join a tall bass player and squat drummer. She went to the front of the stage and the combo started in like a thunderstorm, the gal belting: “I just saw a maniac, maniac, maniac, wild and tearing his hair, jumping like a jumping jack, jumping jack, jumping jack, child you should’ve been there.”
“Nice tune,” grinned Jack.
The house started reeling and the Negroes got up to dance. I willed myself still. The booze tasted of petrol and burned going down. Jack bobbed his head and rapped his knuckles to the beat of the drums. We had a wide berth, an island of empty space around us. I caught stray suspicious glances.
The band really hopped and I downed more fuel. My uneasiness grew. If the cops raided the joint we’d be up to our necks. I also felt a gnawing, a craving. The drug.
“Let’s get out of this hole,” I said.
“Oke.”
Back in the night my sense of direction fled. A nasty wind had picked up and Jack was qu
iet now.
“This way,” I said.
He followed me down an alley in a direction. With a swede I lit a cigaret and passed it over. The hot tongue of my addiction licked at nerve endings and ran up my spinal column. I needed to fix that. Where? Our rambling took us past a factory and an office building covered in fire escapes. I could swear I saw a raccoon on a rubbish tip. At last we came onto a well-lighted square and with confusion I saw it was Place d’Armes. How’d we ended up here? Before us was the Bank of Montreal, a classical temple surmounted by Indians.
“Let’s go set a spell in the portico,” I said.
“Agreed.”
Jack reclined on the hard steps and I hid in a spot screened by wide columns. Jack looked at me and shook his head as I made up a shot. It went in, ice and heat, another withdrawal from the banking account of my life. What was my balance now? Probably overdrawn, paying negative interest. Jack hummed a tune. Something was not right, a numbness, an inability to feel my hands or feet. No. Bad sign. Very cold now.
“Jack.”
“What?”
“Help.”
“What?”
He turned to me.
“I’m sorry, I...”
“Jesus, Mick. What is it?”
“I took too much,” I said. “Help.”
SATURDAY
COBWEBS HANGING FROM the ceiling of an unknown room. I regarded them for some minutes, then managed to turn my head to look at my body. I lay in my combinations, with a cloth bound around my right foot. An ugly pain coursed up the leg and a terrible black dryness parched me. Jack came into the room, carrying a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
“You kicked the mirror over there somehow,” he said.
“Bad luck.”
He undressed the wound and poured alcohol on my foot. I winced. Jack laughed. The bastard took pleasure in my pain, repayment for playing nursemaid.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Somewhere else.”
“What time is it?”
“Ten,” he said. “Saturday morning.”
“Saturday?”
I’d been out for a full day.
“Thought you might go west on me,” Jack said. “I had to call in Jacques Price to look at you.”
“How’s he?”
“Scared. The school’s up in arms. Smiler’s disappeared.”
Jack re-tied the dressing.
“The police are looking for him. They dragged the river near to where the bridge is being built. Jacques said folks think he’s offed himself.”
“Did he?”
“No one knows. It could be suicide. He had a paper due and never turned it in.”
Jack looked at me queerly. I sat up.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Laura’s gone.”
He studied me.
“Where?”
“Another mystery. She’s been gone for days.”
“Same time as Smiler?”
“The day before.”
“Together?”
“That’s the question.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“You know what I think.”
I didn’t really. Had I revealed my guilt in my delirium? I was lucid enough right now and felt much improved, actually. If Jack suspected me he never let on. At last he said: “I think she’s run off with that Judas Bob.”
I almost laughed in his face. He went and sat in a chair by the broken mirror, looking exhausted. It occurred to me that he might be concerned for my well-being, or at the very least, his own hide.
“Jacques showed me how to fix you up a dose,” Jack said. “It’s no time to wean you off. I need you. How long’ve you been back on the spike?”
“Since Chinatown,” I said.
“Mick, Mick, Mick.”
“You don’t have to tell me, I know. But what’d you expect? Place temptation before me and I fall. Thus endeth the lesson.”
“Very well.”
Jack sighed and rubbed his eyes. He yawned.
“Price told me to get a little food in you. I took the liberty of having your suit sponged and pressed.”
My mind turned to my overcoat and the wad of cash sewn into its lining until my eyes spotted it hanging from a hook.
“What for?” I asked.
“We’ve an appointment,” he said.
“We do? Who with?”
“You’ll see.”
I sat up and felt the world turn several revolutions. My brow felt heated, my body clammy.
“What happened the other night?” I asked.
Jack informed me he’d manhandled my corpse into a ’cab after I’d collapsed and told the driver I was dead drunk. In this apartment he tipped me into a tub of cold water and first thing in the morning called Smiler at the Royal Victoria, then Jacques Price at the school. Price came and determined that my overdose wasn’t a serious one. On the table had been left a stopgap Jacques brought to help lower my needed dosage, a bottle of Browne’s Chlorodyne. I thanked Jack for his forbearance. It was a part of his nature I rarely recognized. On the other hand, none of this would’ve happened without his impetus. Prima causa Jack. At the back of my mind I wondered, though. Had I done this on purpose?
“You’re a downy one, you know that,” Jack said to me, smiling.
“The downiest.”
For a few more hours I lay prone and helpless, drinking my medicine to relieve fatigue. I experienced a slight lacrimation, tears for myself and my state. Jack went for a flask of soup and arrowroot biscuits. From outside came a droning airplane. After eating I tried my pins and was surprised to find strength. I took a Scotch bath, shaved, looked at the tender holes in my arm, then climbed into my suit and tie and was ready to go. Jack came and with a mock formality handed me back my Webley. I followed him out of the room and away from this, another run-down bolt-hole in another bad part of town, Charlevoix by the canal this time. We took a taxi to a café on St. Catherine. Jack ordered java, I a Sal Hepatica. Morphine had made me constipated and I needed a blow.
“What’s on the menu?” I asked.
“It’s the peace pipe,” Jack said. “Word from on high.”
“Sounds peachy.”
“Keep your eyes open and on me. I’m afraid it may be a trap,” he warned.
“Where?”
“Avalon.”
I buttoned myself up as we walked the last few blocks to Jack’s rendezvous. At Sherbrooke I watched men working atop an enormous apartment building, a great Caledonian chateau of limestone and shining copper like a CPR hotel. As it happened I was glad my suit’d been cleaned. We climbed steps to where a blackcoated ape stood with his hands over his groin. With a nod at Jack massive oaken doors opened to let my friend and myself into the Mount Royal Club.
The receiving room was quiet and august, all dark wood and polished tiles. We were in one of the Empire’s redoubts, all of a pattern wherever nabobs ruled: Cairo, Cape Town, Bombay, Rangoon, Shanghai, Vancouver, Dublin, London, Montreal. Each club was cut from a cloth, with portraits of racehorses on the walls, bound copies of Punch in the reading room, wog waiters in waistcoats ironing weeks-old copies of the Times. Ci-devant colonial administrators, remittance men, and third sons in old school ties sponged drinks at the bar and damned the natives. A muted grandfather clock sat ticking, set to Greenwich Mean Time. Over the fireplace hung a framed visage of the sovereign, Queen Mary an inch lower. A stern man in a hard white collar, silk tie, grey vest, black swallowtail, and gold-pinstriped trousers met us at reception, his shoes polished to a glossy jet. He resembled a sergeant promoted officer in the field. Jack appeared damned natty and I wasn’t shabby enough to be booted out. Standards, don’t you know. I resisted a fierce urge to pick my nose.
We signed the book and I noticed that Jack had given in at last and written Richard Hannay, his beau ideal. I amused myself by putting down Patrick Murphy, a true Mick’s handle amongst
these long-nosed Saxons. Jack moved in stride as we were escorted by the chamberlain past a massive globe of exotic wood, turning right down a corridor to a private room where a gross figure awaited us, a fat man spilling out of a leather chair. The Senator.
He was alone, neither of his thugs in sight. The club had stretched a point letting one Frenchman in; accommodating two roughnecks to boot wouldn’t be cricket. The Senator toyed with his fob chain. At its end was a gold triangle. He reached his hand to a burled wood box filled with cigars and selected one. I saw his ring and finally, finally I understood who was in charge. Some Brotherhood.
“Here we are,” Jack said.
“Alors, Mutt and Jeff, yes,” said the Senator.
He was alone until the terrier bitch popped onto his lap.
“How’s Rex?” asked Jack.
“As you see, she is well.”
“That’s not who I’m talking about.”
“Ah, oui.”
A mischievous spark burned in the Senator’s black eyes as he sucked wetly at the cigar. Jack walked over to the box, took a cylinder for himself, and sat down.
“He is, we will say, aware of your service,” said the Senator. “It is accomplished?”
“Last Friday,” said Jack.
“Very admirable. When do you expect it complete?”
“Bientôt. Keep your hair on. It takes a little time to work. No traces.”
I studied a marble Mercury on a table. Pieces fitted together.
“Then the threat, it is eliminated,” the Senator said.
“Yes,” said Jack, lighting up.
“Bien.”
“As for the other business, I apologize,” Jack said. “It was an error of judgment.”
“Mistakes, they happen.”
“Keep your eye on the ’papers,” Jack said.
“I will,” said the Senator. “Yes, I will.”
My morphine hunger returned as I drank in the rich cigar smoke filling the room. The Senator hadn’t lit his. A panel in the wall slid open to our left and the club’s majordomo appeared.