In the Skin of a Lion

by Michael Ondaatje

  Patrick sat on a bench and watched the tides of movement, felt the reverberations of trade. He spoke out his name and it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air of Union Station. No one turned. They were in the belly of a whale.

  When Ambrose Small, the millionaire, disappeared in 1919, it was discovered that the police had his Bertillon record. Between 1889 and 1923 the Bertillon identification system was used to locate criminals and missing persons. Bertillon’s method consisted of the measurement of certain parts of the body: the length of head, width of head, length of right ear, length of left foot, length of left middle finger, the length of left forearm. In homes and prisons and mortuaries all over North America limbs were measured and the results sent in to the Toronto police. During the fever of the case over 5,000 people claimed to be Ambrose Small. They claimed they had amnesia, were kidnapped in a brown sack, were disfigured, were hidden in geological holes in the Scarborough Bluffs, were stretched to longer than five foot six inches on racks, were overfed, had all their hair removed, had their memories wiped clean by certain foods, had their pigmentation altered, were turned into women, had the length of their right ear changed, were in the meantime hungry and penniless and would someone mail $500 to Nelson, B. C., or Wichita, Kansas, or Cornerbrook, Newfoundland.

  A woman in Hamilton saw Ambrose with his throat cut. She woke one morning to feel blood on the pillow, looked up and saw someone was sawing her neck, and she said I am Ambrose Small. Then she woke up again. Another had a vision that she was unlocking the safe at the Grand Opera House and saw a curled-up skeleton inside resting on documents.

  The press leapt upon every possibility.

  MYSTERY MAN OF NORTH RESEMBLES SMALL

  – Star, May 27, 1921

  Remains may be exhumed if further clues come to light.

  SKELETON FOUND IN WHITBY FIELD

  – Telegram, June 2, 1921

  “The possibility that it might be Ambrose Small occurred to me when we were digging it up,” Acting Chief Thomas reflected this evening.

  IOWA DETECTIVE IS CERTAIN HE HAS FOUND A.J. SMALL

  – Mail, August 16, 1921

  John Brophy, Head of Brophy Detective Agency, Iowa, who was ousted from his job as Assistant Chief of Police, claims to have a man under guard whom he has identified as A.J. Small. Brophy said he would produce Small when the Canadian authorities are ready to pay the reward offered.

  “The man is Small,” he said.

  The man was recovering from a pistol wound in the neck, concussion of the brain and minor injuries. Both his legs had been cut off near the knees.

  “I will tell you what Small told me after he had identified his own picture,” he said. “ ‘All I can remember is that there was a blow and then darkness, then terrible suffering. From then on I remembered nothing until I was brought here. I think I was in Omaha, that’s all.’ ”

  Between 1910 and 1919 Ambrose Small had been the jackal of Toronto’s business world. He was a manipulator of deals and property, working his way up from nothing into the world of theatre management. He bought Toronto’s Grand Opera House when he was twenty-eight years old, and then proceeded to buy theatres all over the province – in St. Catharines, Kingston, Arkona, Petrolia, Peterborough, and Paris, Ontario, until he held the whole web of theatre traffic in his outstretched arms. He built the Grand in London, Ontario – the largest theatre in North America, save for Shea’s Hippodrome. He owned ninety-six theatres. He became a gambler at the track, obsessed with greyhounds.

  He married Theresa Kormann, and in so doing alienated his sisters. His wife was a prohibitionist and Small offered her the theatre for one night a week and she put on temperance shows and nobody came. “Pass by the open doorway, ignore the foul saloon,” the chorus sang to a mostly empty auditorium. On other nights, performances of Ben-Hur and Naughty Miss Louise packed the theatre. In the Glen Road house, Small held appalling parties. Showgirls, live peacocks, staggered out drunk in the morning hours and strolled aimlessly home along the Rosedale streets – the chauffeurs of the rich following at a tactful distance in their car.

  In Paris, Ontario, he met an actress named Clara Dickens and she became his lover. She was twenty-one years old and Small was thirty-five and he charmed her with his variousness. He was a spinner. He was bare-knuckle capitalism. He was a hawk who hovered over the whole province, swooping down for the kill, buying up every field of wealth, and eating the profit in mid-air. He was a jackal. This is what the press called him and he laughed at them, spun a thread around his critics and bought them up. Either he owned people or they were his enemies. No compatriots. No prisoners. In the tenth century, he liked to say, the price of a greyhound or a hawk was the same as that for a man.

  Each morning he rose and walked to his offices at the Grand Theatre on Adelaide Street. He got there at least an hour before any of his staff and plotted out the day. This was the time he loved most, choreographing his schemes, theorizing on bids and counter-bids and interest rates and the breaking point of his adversaries. He pulled out an imported avocado pear, sliced it into thin green moons, and sat at his roll-top desk eating it and thinking. By the time his staff arrived he had worked out all possible scenarios at his empty desk. He went down to the barbershop, lay back, and was shaved and manicured. His day was over. The machine of Ambrose Small began to tick across the city.

  With his lover Clara Dickens he was gregarious, generous, charming. Seeing him once or twice a week she knew the best of Ambrose. She steered him away from his peacock parties. They went on excursions. He bought hotels, he bought houses under different names all over Ontario. “I’m a thief,” he’d say, “all thieves must plan their escape routes.” The names of the towns, his pseudonyms, slipped memorized into his brain, unrecorded anywhere else. He bought or consumed, it seemed to Clara, anything he alighted on.

  On December 16, 1919, Ambrose Small failed to keep an appointment. A million dollars had been taken from his bank account. He had either been murdered or was missing. His body, alive or dead, was never found.

  Most criminal investigations in the early part of the century were dignified and leisurely. Villains took their time, they took trains and ships. In 1910, Dr. Crippen’s arrest on board a liner, through the use of a radio-phone (while he was reading The Four Just Men), was thought by the public to be in bad taste. But there was something about the Ambrose Small case that created a feeling of open season. It was an opportunity for complaint about the state of the world; Small’s blatant capitalism had clarified the gulf between the rich and the starving.

  For the first year after Small’s disappearance the public watched the police try to solve the case. But when they failed, and when the family put up an $80,000 reward for the millionaire’s whereabouts, the public shouldered itself into the case. Now everyone looked for him. By 1921, one could be hired by a company at $4 a week as a ‘searcher’ and these individuals roamed the city and the smaller towns dragging suspicious strangers into police stations and having their measurements taken under the Bertillon process. The searchers resembled the press gangs of earlier centuries, and there were many rival organizations at work, investing in the project as if it were an oil field or a gold mine.

  In 1924, after working for a year at various jobs in Toronto, Patrick Lewis became a searcher. The organizations were still active. It did not matter that five years had passed. No body had been found to fit Small’s Bertillon chart and hordes of the otherwise unemployed were being hired. In these hard times any hope of a ‘gusher’ or ‘strike’ was worth pursuing. The search had turned the millionaire’s body into a rare coin, a piece of financial property.

  What held most interest for Patrick was the collection of letters the police had handed over to the family. Gradually he came into contact with Small’s two sisters who until then had found no one to take the letters seriously. Cranks, mediums, blackmail threats, the claims of kidnappers – the police and Small’s wife had scorned them all. Patrick was befriended by
the sisters at their house on Isabella Street. Clara Dickens knew him best, they told him. She was the rare lover. Talk to Briffa, said the sisters, he also thought she was the perfect woman for Ambrose – not Theresa, the wife, the saint.

  Patrick took the train to Paris, Ontario, and met the radio actress Clara Dickens. She stood in the hall beside her mother and said she would not speak about Ambrose Small. She claimed not to have seen him since he disappeared. He stood there watching her. She asked him to leave.

  In the books he read, women were rescued from runaway horses, from frozen pond accidents. Clara Dickens stood on the edge of the world of wealth. When she spoke to him she had been bending to one side as she attached an earring, gazing into the hall mirror, dismissing him, their eyes catching in the reflection. He was dazzled by her – her long white arms, the faint hair on the back of her neck – as if she without turning had fired a gun over her shoulder and mortally wounded him. The ‘rare lover,’ the ‘perfect woman.’

  And what else was she, apart from being the lover of Ambrose Small? Dressed up, about to go out, she had looked like a damsel fly, the sequins and gauze up to her neck. But there was something about the way she stood there, not turning around to talk to him properly.

  When he went back the next morning she opened the door, her sleeves rolled up, those arms covered with flour up to her elbows.

  – I thought you were rich, he said.

  – Why? Do you want me to hire you to find my beloved?

  All that evening and late into the morning hours Patrick tried to seduce Clara Dickens and then the next day when he was exhausted she seduced him. He was reading through the old news clippings about Ambrose in the Paris library when Clara arrived. He was almost asleep over the 1919 files, his cheek awkward on his shoulder as if someone had come up to him in the silence of the reading room and broken his neck. She strolled into the library dressed in white and stood in front of the bookshelves.

  – I’ll drive you back to the Arlington Hotel.

  Her voice wakened him. She turned a chair around so she could straddle it and she leaned forward, her elbows against its back. In her white dress she seemed the focus of all sunlight in the library. There was laughter and then tenseness on her face. Her long arm reached forward and picked up a clipping.

  – You think I am the line to him, don’t you? You think that he must have left his shadow on me.

  He couldn’t talk back against her beauty. He noticed a fragment of water under her eyelid, a sun tear she was unaware of.

  – Come. I’ll drive you back to the hotel.

  At that hour he did not think of seduction. He was exhausted by all their conversations the previous night on her porch overlooking Broadway Street. They had been outrageous and flamboyant in each other’s company, their arguments like duets. He normally took months to approach someone, and at the slightest rejection he would turn and never go back. But he argued just so they could remain together on that porch deep in moonlight, half-laughing at the other’s ploys. She wouldn’t let him kiss her or hold her standing up – didn’t want all of their bodies touching, that possibility.

  They had walked in rain beside the Grand River towards her car. A gift from Ambrose, no doubt, he thought to himself. He was so tired there was no sophistication or cunning in him that night. And she herself did not know how to deal with this sudden obsession for her. She had driven him slowly back to the Arlington Hotel and they sat in the car.

  – Tomorrow the library for me, he said.

  – I could come and join you.

  She clicked her tongue and jerked her head to the side suggestively.

  It was two in the morning. She sat half-facing him, her feet already out of their shoes, one knee pointed towards him by the gear-shift. She let him kiss her goodnight and he sat there for a moment gazing at her face patterned by streetlight.

  He got out and closed the door too energetically and realized after he had taken three steps how that had sounded. He turned back.

  – That wasn’t a slam.

  – I know.

  She was sitting there very alone, still, looking towards the seat he had left, her head down.

  – Goodnight.

  – Goodnight, Patrick.

  Now they stepped from the news library into bright sunlight and they got into her car, Patrick carrying his cardboard box of notes. Both of them were so tired they hardly spoke during the drive back to the hotel.

  His room when they got there was full of bright daylight and traffic noises came through the open window. They slept almost immediately, holding each other’s hands.

  When he woke, her eyes were studying him. Only her dark neck and face were visible. He felt awkward, having slept in his clothes.

  – Hello.

  – Sing to me, she murmured.

  – What?

  – I want it formal. Can you sing?

  She smiled and he moved across the bed to her softness.

  After they had made love he brought his pillow as close as he could for comfortable focus and gazed at her. When he woke she was gone, there was no answer on her telephone. He came back to the bed and inhaled whatever perfume there was left on the pillow.

  – Patrick, is that you?

  – Yes, Clara.

  – Doesn’t sound like you.

  – I was asleep.

  – I’m taking you somewhere. Pick up some booze.

  And a corkscrew. I’ve got the food. We should be away a few days.

  It was a winding road they drove on towards Paris Plains, past gorges and tobacco fields.

  – We’re going to my friend’s farmhouse.

  – Ambrose?

  – No, her name is Alice. I’ll tell you about her later.

  – You’ve got all the time in the damn world now.

  – Later.

  They entered a small farmhouse which had a woodstove in the kitchen. Bird feathers had been prised under the edges of wallpaper, here and there. In the front room there was a bed in an alcove, windows on three sides of it. A mat on the floor. There was hardly any furniture. It looked to him like the quarters of a monk. The friend was not to arrive for a couple of days, Clara said.

  Later that night they lay on the bed by the three windows, barely dressed. He liked to sleep separate, in his own world, but with her he kept waking, reaching to hold her flesh against him. During the night Clara turned slowly like something on the floor of the ocean. She would put more and more clothes on in the darkness. She was always cold at night, in this room of the sea.

  – You awake?

  – What time is it? she said.

  – Still night.

  – Ahh.

  – I love you. Were you ever in love? Apart from Ambrose.

  – Yeah.

  He was put off by her casual admission.

  – I fell in love with a guy named Stump Jones when I was sixteen.

  – Stump!

  – There was a problem with the name.

  – I’ll say.

  – Goodnight, Patrick, I’m sleepy.

  – Hey!

  He got up and strolled around the farmhouse happier and more at ease than he had ever been. She was already back in deep sleep, snoring, wearing one of his shirts to keep warm. A smile on her face. Clara the smirker. He wanted to get hold of Stump Jones and beat the hell out of him. Sixteen! Where had he been at sixteen? She had been Small’s lover, Stump’s lover, and who else? He found himself at this hour in the spell of her body, within the complex architecture of her past.

  He had been looking through the window for over ten minutes when he suddenly focused on a shadow on the glass and saw it was a tree frog. He lit the oil lamp and held it up to the creature. A pseudacris triseriata. Hello friend, he breathed towards the pale-green speckled body hanging against the pane.

  – Clara …

  – What is it?

  – Ambrose.

  Love was like childhood for him. It opened him up, he was silly and relaxed.

&nbs
p; –What!

  She was wide awake, watching him as if he were crazy.

  – Come here, I want you to see this.

  She looked at the window and then back at him, refusing to speak.

  – He wants you with all your clothes off.

  – It’s three in the morning, Patrick, you’re supposed to be asleep. You’re supposed to be searching for my beloved. (Beloved! He grinned.) Do you want to make love, is that it?

  – It’s a tree frog!

  – A tree frog in the moonlight is not rare.

  – Yes it is, they only come out during the day. He wants to consider your thorax, your abdomen.

  – Is this some kind of Bolshevik gesture?

  She unbuttoned the shirt, stood between him and the glass.

  – Tomorrow night he’ll probably bring his pals to see you. Some places call them bell frogs. When they get excited they make a sound like a bell. Sometimes they bark like dogs.

  She leaned forward and put her mouth to the green belly against the glass and kissed it.

  – Hello Ambrose, she whispered, how are you doing?

  Patrick put his arms around her and held her breasts.

  – Marry me, willya …

  He started barking.

  – One of these days, soon, I’ll go.

  – To join Ambrose.

  – Yes … I know he’s alive.

  – I have a fear I won’t see you again.

  – You talk on, Patrick, but you have no remorse.

  – A strange word. It suggests a turning around on yourself.

  – Don’t speak. Here …

  He met Ambrose in a dream. At the door he said, “There is this grey figure attached to my body, Patrick, I want you to cut it off me.” They were old friends. All Patrick had was a penknife. He unfolded the blade and made Ambrose move into the hall, underneath the one light near the iron elevators. It was easier to see what it was now. A grey peacock had been sewn onto his friend. Patrick began to cut it away.