by Fraser Nixon
“Quiet. Breathe through your mouth. Don’t move.”
Jack pushed me down. He had a gun in each hand and we were hiding behind rubbish bins in a loading bay. A rotten stench filled my nostrils. I brushed a waxy brick wall and smelled my fingers: fat. We were behind a butcher shop or slaughterhouse amongst waste meat and filth. I could hear a slithering movement and a squeaking. Rats. My teeth were bared, my eyes staring insanely. My stomach roiled and turned. Don’t. Don’t spew, you’ll give us away. Jack cocked his head and froze. I didn’t dare move. For an agonizing lifetime we waited as the vermin scratched and scratched.
“Lost my gun,” I said at last.
“Here.”
Jack handed over his Webley. We waited for anything. I was parched and screaming for water. We waited for our pursuers, for whistles and shouts, motorcars, footsteps, horse hooves, dog howls. Nothing.
“It gets better and better,” Jack said to himself.
“We’ve got to keep moving,” I said hoarsely.
“They know where to find us.”
“The Senator sold us. Why?”
“Damned if I know. Town’s too hot now,” said Jack.
“Took them long enough.”
“They’ve got us. They’ll cordon off the area and set up patrols. There’ll be a uniform at every callbox and a flying squad ready in a trice. We’ve got to get off the island.”
“How? They’ll call the stations and blockade the bridges. Even if we grab a motor—”
“We’ve got to get off,” repeated Jack.
“No, let’s go to ground,” I whimpered.
Jack rounded on me.
“Where? If they knew we’d be at that dump they’ll have the jump on us wherever we bolt. Use your head.”
His venom put my back up. I tamped down my rage for the moment. “Follow me,” I said.
“Where? Gaol?”
“No. Never that.”
We crept to the alley mouth and argued over our bearings. I told Jack my notion. He thought it over a minute and shrugged.
“Could be worse. Not by much.”
It was touch and go. The most dangerous moment was crossing the wide, well-lit expanse of McGill Street from Griffintown into old Ville Marie. We passed the Customs House and prowled along to the river. Jack stuck by me as I worried our way along, stopping at every noise. We wouldn’t last a night plus the light of day on the run in this city, no friends and the police after us. It would end in a bloody fusillade. By pussyfooting it we came to our goal and fortune smiled on failure. It was there.
“Luck of the bloody Irish,” Jack said.
MY OLD COMRADE managed a tight grin as we stepped out from our concealed position to the deserted promenade between Alexandra and King Edward quays. I looked down at the rowboat I’d seen tied up by a freighter on Friday when we’d killed the moneymen.
“What was the boat called?” I asked.
“The Hatteras Abyssal.”
“Gone now,” I said.
“Back to Holland,” said Jack.
For the nonce there were no other large freighters moored nearby. Either chance or design, it didn’t matter. We coasted to the rusty ladder and Jack climbed down. I spied a nightwatchman or harbour patrolman walking towards us.
“Hurry,” I breathed.
I shoved the Webley in my belt and followed Jack onto the skiff. I wobbled into the stern.
“You row,” Jack said.
I untied us and pushed away. We were in a dark canyon between piers. With the oars I pivoted us around and out of the slack through an eddy of detritus and buoyant trash. We moved into the river proper and I pulled to place us beyond pistol range. I could see the watchman’s head but he never broke stride. My gun barrel bit into my crotch so I passed the gun to Jack. He lay low at the bow with his wrists steady on the rim, ready to fire. In five minutes we were well past the end of the pier and soon entered the wide, strong current of the St. Lawrence. Jack turned and I rested at the oars, letting the flow push us downriver. We gazed back at the dirty maroon incandescence of Montreal.
Headlamps blazed along the wharves. I heard police sirens, far away. We’d slipped the net. Black silhouettes of church spires and the mountain framed the night against the burning luminous city, stars high beyond, Orion rising. The shore retreated, diminishing as we were swept along. A massive steamship at Jacques Cartier Quay boomed its whistle and was echoed by a train pulling along the shore. We had a way to go to make our escape and Christ knew what was on the other side, wherever we ended up. Our skiff passed into the fast current in line with the clock tower at Victoria Quay. It was now past midnight.
“Meet me under the clock,” I said.
A reckless hilarity welled up in me. I saw Jack grin at the Vancouver expression, the timepiece at Birks under which everyone met. I sang: “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”
Past St. Helen’s Island and the looming foundations of the harbour bridge we struck land at the southern shore and ground up on the rocky shingle at Longueil. Jack jumped out and tugged the lead rope. I leapt after. We took heavy stones and staved in the rowboat, Cortés at Vera Cruz. Jack sat and took off his hat, then held his wristwatch to his ear.
“Stopped,” he said.
We climbed through the thin trees lining the riverbank to higher ground. I looked back at the city. Jack kept walking. I met him at a ditch angled away from the wind. We lay down in an empty field back to back for warmth, coats tightly buttoned. Orion hunted above us, our companion through the long watch.
HALLOWE’EN
THE GREY FIGURE stirred with the morning light. Frost had formed on the dying blades of grass and the ground was hard and cold.
“Dreamed I was ironing the carpet,” Jack said, rolling and levering himself upright. He swiped smut from the corners of his eyes, then dirt and leaves from coat and trousers. We were near a wire property fence and I sat with my back to a post studded with rusty nails. Earlier I’d taken breakfast: a shot of morphine.
“I dreamt I couldn’t sleep,” I said.
Jack laughed and stood to take account of himself, his billfold and lost cane, then pissed a steaming stream of urine in the growing sunshine. He buttoned, tucked in his shirt, smoothed his hair, replaced his hat, and jumped up and down to come alive, then checked the Browning and the Webley. Done, he walked to me and handed me my weapon.
“What now?” I asked.
“How much money do you have?”
“Six hundred or so,” I said.
“It’ll do. Want to tie up a few loose ends. Then we hit the road.”
“Oke.”
Jack put the pistol in his belt at the small of his back. He sorted through a sheaf of papers: stray banknotes, Brown’s gambling markers, lucky playing cards. I stood and shook like a dog before the day’s ramble. Jack vaulted the fence and I followed; our boots started crunching over field stubble. A bell for early mass slowly tolled in the bright, cold air. We walked towards its source.
At a crossroad east of the church stood a garish Crucifixion, the blood a startling red against the blue sky. Jesus was snow-white; his peeling paint lent the martyr a leprous cast. At the foot of the execution device someone had planted coloured cellophane flowers. We continued past Golgotha to Rome.
“Saint-Zotique,” Jack said, eyeing the clapboard. “Wonder who he is when he’s at home.”
Old women in black and bearded men congregated at the open doors. Atop a wagon hitched to a sad dray sat a dour moustached man and his enshawled wife with their seven silent children. Horses stood next to farming lorries and a collection of old Fords and Frontenacs. Abutting the church was a straggling orchard. Jack pulled tough little apples from tree boughs and we walked west, the sun warming our backs.
By degrees the sky lightened. Clouds thickened into pleasing discrete masses serene and in
different to us in the sparkling blue. There was the play of sun warming the earth and from bare branch to rose trellis before a tidy square house flitted a pair of tardy, ragged robins. Jack bit into an apple and spat.
“Sour as hell.”
We walked along the verge as the day came to life, touching our hats to ladies and nodding at men.
Half an hour more and we reached Longueil proper, a quartier of low buildings. I was exhausted, dampened by the drug and a fatal indifference. Minor traffic moved afoot on the macadamized roads past a closed bank, shuttered barbershop, the Knights of Columbus, a general store open for business despite the Sabbath. Jack pointed and said: “The Bell.”
The sign read “The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Local and Long-Distance Calls.” We entered the store. To clean my teeth I bought a spruce beer off the lackadaisical shop proprietor and eavesdropped on Jack in the booth.
“Trunk call to Montreal,” he shouted into the tube. “Hotel Montmartre.”
He winced as the connection clicked and screeched. Cross the river south and you were in another city, another world, French Canada.
“Bonjour, monsieur. Name’s Marlow, room something. Can’t remember. I checked in a few days ago. Marlow without an ‘e.’ By chance are there any messages for me?”
Jack closed his eyes and seemed to will himself still. I’d seen him like this at the races when his horse broke from the pack near the post. That gambler’s lust within him. Here was his long shot and he wanted it. I sipped the gentle beer and watched. A minute passed. He opened his eyes, that fierce blue.
“Parfait. Merci, monsieur.”
Jack rang off and grinned wickedly at me.
“Our bird’s in flight. We’ll bag him yet. Let’s go.”
“Where?” I asked.
“For a ride.”
Outside on the porch Jack oriented himself and then continued south to a cluster of irregular shacks between the highway and the freight tracks. He turned down an alleyway and we surprised brown rats skittering over a smoking mound of trash. Jack and I stepped over burnt vegetable waste, greasy crushed cans, and broken Coca-Cola bottles then through the slats of a fence bordering a decrepit house. Behind it sat a lorry with a jerrycan in its paybed. Jack touched the truck’s bonnet for warmth and shook his head. We went ’round an outhouse to the back porch and a screen door. Jack took out his Browning. All was still.
The door swung open creakily at his touch and we entered a dark, cluttered kitchen. Bedroom to the right, to the left a sitting room with a cold Quebec heater. Jack and I did a circuit. He found nothing in a wardrobe or under the stained mattress of the unmade bed. I spilled a glass jar of green-blue rusted pennies and Indian quarter-anna pieces on a table covered in scorch marks from forgotten cigarets. The icebox was bare and smelled of mould. The whole place was dirty, depressing. Jack pushed swollen copies of the Journal de Montréal off a seat in the living room and settled in.
“What’re we looking for?” I asked.
“Keys to that truck.”
“Whose is this dump?”
“Martin’s,” he said.
The third driver from our convoy all those eons ago. If, as it appeared, the Senator’d crossed us and sicced the police on Jack and myself, it seemed the least we could do was return the favour to his creature.
“We’ll settle his hash,” Jack said, crossing a leg and lighting a cigarette. My yen for the tobacco awoke flickerings of another, more substantial need. I swallowed and swallowed again.
“And your telephone call?”
“Brown came through. Bob and a woman crossed the border at one this morning. If I know my man they’re holed up in a hotel.”
“Where?”
“Plattsburgh.”
Jack smiled. I chewed my gum metronomically. Time passed. After awhile came the sound of heavy feet. Jack opened his eyes, yawned, and picked up his Browning. The front door opened inward and a burly man entered. He wore a stiff black wool suit and round hat. Jack waited. The man lumbered into the room, sniffed, and stopped at the sight of us.
“They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven or is he in hell? Comment ça va, Martin? J’espère que tu as pris ta confession avec le curé ce matin, connard. Assieds-toi. Now.”
The imperative was given with a vigorous flick of the pistol. Martin’s knees buckled at the anger in Jack’s voice. He put a hand to his mouth and I remembered that Jack’d beaten the teeth out of his skull only a week before. In this frame of mind my friend was ruthless. If he ever learned about Laura I could expect the same. Sensibly, Martin sat.
I picked up a pack of cards near my chair and flipped through them, an unusual antique deck with gilt edges. The queens were uncanny: clubs held a red flower, diamonds a mirror, hearts a bird, and spades a feathered fan. The ace of spades was worse, with a jester bearing a large spade on his back and beside him a puppy in a hat and a gnome holding a flail. Above all smiled a nasty sun surrounded by black stars. I shivered. That was my hunger. I went to the kitchen to prepare another syringe.
When I returned to the sitting room, Jack was speaking: “There’s no point. Donne-moi tes clefs.”
Martin pulled out a ring.
“Lentement,” Jack said. “There, on the table.”
Martin put the keys down.
“As-tu faim?” asked Jack.
“Non,” Martin said.
With the aid of my drug I could smell the driver, a sharp pungent note of fear. I kept my distance, alerted by Jack’s posture.
“No, I insist. You must be hungry. Le petit déjeuner,” Jack said. “Comme le serpent.”
He tossed Martin one of the sour little apples from beside the church. Martin reflexively grabbed at the fruit and there was a thunderclap. The driver dropped to the ground holding his stomach. I nearly leapt out of my clothes, notwithstanding my presentiment. Jack’s pistol smoked. He said: “If he lives Charlie Trudeau and the Senator can pay the doctor. If not, the gravedigger. Either way, it’s a message, COD.”
I looked at the body of the man, at Jack, back at the body, then down into my own hands. I felt a perfect accretion of nothing.
“Fitting,” I said, and flicked the card that was on top of the deck down onto Martin.
“What’s that?” asked Jack.
“It’s your card. Jack of diamonds. The laughing boy.”
We left Martin to his fate and climbed into the lorry. Jack punched the ignition and we drove through Chambly to the southeast. I lowered my window and breathed in the crisp air as the miles passed, small towns and telegraph poles one after another casting hard black shadows on the flat earth.
I slept, and when I woke Jack was singing: “I patronized the tables at the Monte Carlo hell ’til they hadn’t got a sou for a Christian or a Jew, so I quickly went to Paris for the charms of mademoiselle, who’s the lodestone of my heart. What can I do, when with twenty tongues she swears that she’ll be true?”
He saw me alert and said: “They crossed in a Graham-Paige roadster, Bob and Laura, I’m sure. Damn him: the money and the girl.”
“Sir Dunphy’ll be pleased,” I said, laughing inwardly.
“Well, he is hyas muckamuck.”
“Very hyas. Is he the one ordered you to shut up the magician?”
“That came from him through the tyee,” Jack said.
“What, the chief?”
“You bet.”
The prime minister. I’ll be damned. When he threatened one last astonishing revelation, Harry Houdini made the wrong enemy.
“How?” I asked. “How did you shut him up?”
Jack looked at me slantwise and smiled, raising one eyebrow. We rolled on in silence for a stretch.
“The glass of water, I suppose.”
“You’re a wonder, Mick. Alpha plus.”
; “And what was it?”
“Biological agent. The Germans cooked it up in the war. One of their subtler killers.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, William Lyon Mackenzie King.”
BY EARLY AFTERNOON we’d passed through St-Paul-de-l’Île-aux-Noix and Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel. I was hungry.
“Bob crossed at Champlain. Rousses-Point coming up,” said Jack.
“What do we say?”
“We’re going over for a load of potatoes. Odds are we’re waved through. If not, the devil take us.”
Our concerns were mooted by the border. Both sets of guards had abandoned their posts for an early supper. We drove through unchallenged. Thus it was on the medicine line between the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada this day. Jack made a right at a building where the Stars and Stripes flew. The country felt different, as it always did, in myriad small ways: street signs and mailboxes, the Piggly Wiggly, billboards for Burma-Shave. Another hour of driving down lonely roads brought us to the outskirts of Plattsburgh.
“All these one-horse towns,” I said.
Jack pulled over beside the tracks of the Rutland line behind an Episcopal church. The afternoon sky had grown overcast; rain was coming. We got out of the truck and Jack hoisted the jerrycan. He splashed petrol on the lorry and the near side of God’s house, stepped back, selected a Turk from his cigaret case, and scratched a Redbird vesta. I offered him a playing card from the shack in Longueil to light. He handed me his cigaret and threw the burning ace of hearts on the fluid. A wave of flame swept across the ground and with it warmth; Jack and I moved away from the mounting conflagration and headed for town. Jack’s cigaret tasted delicious.
Along our route hollowed jack o’ lanterns sat on porch steps. Three children carrying sacks passed, a ghost, a witch, a skeleton. From them that weird shrill cry: “Trick or treat!”