The Man Who Killed (14 page)

She looked grand in a plaid suit and skirt, wearing a Gloria Swanson hat and with some creamy silken stuff bubbling around her throat. She carried her handbag in one hand, and I'll be damned, a feather duster in the other. The house dick targeted her. He moved the wet stump of his cigar from his mouth to a dirty box of sand. A toady held the lift open and as Lilyan swept along the detective moved to intercept. She stuffed the duster in his face and twirled it 'round. The dick's hands went up and he pushed away, his piggish snout a rictus of disgust. Lilyan entered the lift. The uniformed cretin inside closed the door and cranked the lever while the dick sneezed sharply, once, twice, thrice, and reached out to steady himself on a wingback. I waited for the elevator to stop and noted the floor, then went and again asked at the front desk for Jack. The staff feigned ignorance, money sealing lips. I sidled around to the stairwell and climbed up to the sixth. When I reached it, panting, the hallway was empty. I couldn't remember Jack's room and so marked the doors one by one. Behind 618 came a familiar trickle of laughter. I waited five minutes, pacing back and forth, long enough to smoke my last Sportsman, then knocked.

“Who is it?”

“The Duke of Connaught,” I said.

“Son of a bitch.”

Jack opened the door. Lilyan was spread out on the chair I'd slept in the other night. Jack stood in his undervest.

“Thought so,” said Jack. “You know the hatred I have for that bastard.”

“Fine way to speak of your Grand Master.”

“So it'd appear. Come in.”

“Don't let me interrupt.”

“Interrupt what? Look at her,” Jack said.

I went into the room. Lilyan Tashman was glassy-eyed and had a shoe and stocking off.

“I didn't realize you two were familiar,” I said.

“Friend of yours?” asked Jack, arching his eyebrows, all innocence. I smelled liquor wafting from him. He smiled expansively.

“We struck up an acquaintance last night, but you know that damned well.”

“How'd it go?”

“Swimmingly. What's she doing here?”

“See for yourself.”

Looking closer I noticed a glass ampoule, a length of cord, and a hypodermic.

“You won't be getting anything from her for awhile,” said Jack.

Suddenly I was in thrall.

“What is it?” I asked, eyes fixed on the vial.

“I think you know,” he said.

“You have any more?”

“Wrong question.”

The bastard. My mouth flooded with chalky saliva and my gastrointestinal tract squealed. It was desire, not for the woman, but for the companion racing through her veins.

“Where'd you get it?” I asked.

“Ah, well, you see,” said Jack, “this young lady is what you'd call a friend of a friend. Yesterday you seemed down in the dumps so I sent her 'round your way.”

“I'm touched, really. It's a side I've never seen of you before, pimping.”

“Goods satisfactory or money refunded.”

“I'll take a rebate, then. In kind.”

“It'd do you no good,” said Jack.

“How do you know that?”

“Experience.”

Jack's eyes narrowed. When drunk he was foxy.

“Come on, let's go for a wet.”

“What about her?” I asked.

“She'll be fine.”

I went and checked her pulse and breathing. She stirred and tried to focus on me. “Well if it isn't Mr. Nobody,” she said, then her eyes rolled upward and she was gone into that world, feeling nothing but the warmth and glow of a false flame. I envied her. She'd be out for an hour or two. Her shoe and stocking had been removed so the injection could be made into her foot; as an actress Lilyan couldn't mar her arms with evidence of the spike. I'd noticed nothing the night before, more fool me. I lifted the pale warmth of her leg and placed it on a quilted rest. Jealousy wouldn't do—it merely fed Jack's amusement.

“What do you think?” he asked from the toilet.

“How is it you know her?”

“She moves in certain circles. You remember Bob, I'm sure. He's one with the theatre folk as well as his painters and bootleggers. We were introduced when her revue came to town last week.”

“And you fixed her up,” I said.

“More or less. For a price.”

Jack re-entered, wiping his hands on a towel, then pitching it to the floor. The room had a heavy musk to it, an animal's lair.

“I'm touched you considered my comfort,” I said.

“You have no idea, old salt.
Alors,
let's gargle.”

In the lift I asked Jack if he'd gotten his suit and hat and he replied in the negative. He seemed complacent, unconcerned, and for a moment I entertained the thought he shared Lilyan's vice.

When the lift's doors opened, the lobby buzzed. The fat house detective had pinned a man to the floor as photogs popped flashbulbs. We sidestepped the tumult to a service door and a warren of hallways that emptied into a back alley. Around the corner was a low dark bar. Inside Jack absented himself for another piss. Flat beer was wearing on my palate and I wanted an astringent. Fielding a discreet enquiry the bartender agreed to let me have a bottle for two dollars as long as it was kept beneath the table, for form's sake. It was that kind of place. The bottle's label claimed that the hooch was Haig & Haig, which I considered almost plausible until the liquor peeled a layer of plaque from my teeth. After two glasses I felt I was in a coffin ship scudding under a hard lee wind. The tavern helped reinforce the sensation: instead of electric globes there were old gas jets that quavered in some unstopped draught. Places like it were salted away all across the country, remnants of a different age. It captured an echo of the mean twilight of the nineteenth century, now overwhelmed by the clean chrome of the twentieth. The other patrons appeared to be navvies or breakermen muttering over their poisons, with Jack and I visitors from some future age of airplanes and the wireless telegraph.

Jack returned at his ease and I said: “Sometimes I feel I was born in the wrong age.”

“How do you mean?”

“It's because we come from the edge of the world. Back there we were Adams with every day the day of Creation. Some parts of the bush had never been trodden by whiteman or Indian. Imagine that! Your footprint the first one in all of time. No trails, no history, no ruins or monuments. Now I feel like I'm stuck in a machine. There're railways for the bloodstream, the telegraph for a nervous system, and hog rendering plants the stomach. I just don't feel a proper part of the whole system, like there's no place for me.”

“Well man, it's high time you get used to it,” Jack said. “It is a bloody machine, and there you've said it. If you're not damned careful it'll grind you up and feed you to some fat bastard as a Salisbury steak. That's what they did to us in France. A good thing Kitchener crashed into the North Sea or someone was going to put a bullet in him down the line. Both him and Haig, that whoreson.”

“Ha!” I laughed. “It's his whiskey you're drinking, seemingly.”

“Pah!” Jack spat. “We ship the stuff south but I won't drink the rot.”

He sniffed suspiciously, picked the bottle up, and gazed at it, then laughed.

“No it's not. You almost had me there. If it was I'd black your eye. Never forgive the cunt for Passchendaele. If not for Currie I wouldn't be talking with you here now. You know what? I saw him a few weeks back when they were laying a cornerstone on the campus. He was in his chancellor's robes. Almost went up and shook the man's hand.”

“You could've asked him about those mess funds he embezzled when he was with the militia back in Victoria.”

Jack laughed again. “Water under the bridge. Ah, fuck it. I'll drink, but only with a toast. To Sir Arthur Currie: may he roast Douglas Haig's balls on a spit in Valhalla.”

We drank. Jack looked at me. Against my better judgment I admired him. He was near-faultless in clean linen and a trim dark suit, with a gleaming crimson cravat and cool blue eyes. Irritated, I fingered my collar, already grimed after a day. There was always something about Jack, a distinction, with his height, features, red hair, and sang-froid. His person was coupled with a strange mutability, the chameleon's concinnity. Jack had no side to him. He possessed a taste that commanded each situation and never called attention to itself, was never garish or awkward. Whereas I was ill at ease wherever I went, overdressed at a dive, underdressed at high tea. The rustic clung to me in my wrinkled wool. I looked like I'd stepped out of a daguerreotype of Ulysses S. Grant in his creased day coat. Jack was a creature bred for this new age as I was not. He knew me better than any alive and still I couldn't confide that shortcoming to him. I turned inward and worried at metaphoric scabs of resentments. Jack took another drink and began to wax expansive. In this mood I knew best to humour

his vanity. It might lead to some answers.

“Where'd you get the dope?” I asked.

“Braced some Chinks for their deck. Same place I got the shooters, a fan tan parlour. Chinatown's rotten with hop. There was a raid coming up and I wanted to snaffle a few things before the police scooped it all.”

“How'd you manage it?” I asked, impressed despite my worser devils.

“Sheer brazen cheek. It's mostly a matter of confidence. Convince yourself of your own authority and others will share your delusion. People want to believe what they're told. I learned that from the Pinkertons.”

This was new to me.

“You were an op?” I asked.

“Aye.”

Jack took another drink and filled me in. He'd answered an ad in San Francisco back in 1920 and with his service record they'd hired him on the spot. It'd been small potatoes at first: divorces, employee fraud, small-time shitwork.

“‘We Never Sleep,'” I quoted.

“Truer than you realize. There were times.”

“When?”

“Not supposed to talk about it. I was seconded to do some strikebreaking at the Anaconda. Don't want to even think about that. That was pure poison. Poisonville, another op called it. This was in Butte, Montana. Too much axe-handle work for him, I reckon. No stomach for it. Later on he and I worked on one of the strangest cases the outfit ever came up against.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Someone stole a Ferris wheel.”

As he spoke, my thoughts drifted back to morphine, and Lilyan Tashman. Jack switched tack: “There's trouble ahead.”

“Pardon?”

“My masters aren't pleased. I've been given a stern lecture. They don't like my explanations or my progress and're going to send someone in,” Jack said.

“That's not good.”

“You ain't whistling. They don't trust me. They think that I have something to do with that cock-up in the woods, that maybe I pulled it over their eyes and pocketed the take. These are some close sons-of-bitches I'm dealing with. They're not Bob's Irish gang or Hebrews like the Bronfmans or Gurskys, these are Sicilians, the worst kind of Guinea. Chicago's mostly Neapolitan, and that's a world of difference. I've heard there's another shipment due soon that'll head upriver and be portaged somehow to Detroit, maybe for the Purple Gang. They don't like the old route into New York anymore. Well I'm not point man and bear-leader for this show, and that means I've been crossed off the list. I was their man here as long as it went and now I'm out in the cold. Therefore time is, as they say, of the essence. I've learned that they're going to make the transfer here in town because Montreal's still neutral ground.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Brown. Remember him?” Jack asked.

I did. The Scotsman at Customs.

“Barbotte,” I said.

“How'd you know that?” Jack fired, now sharp.

“I've got eyes.”

“Do you now? Well, I still own him. I bought all his markers and he's mine, top to bottom. But he only goes so far looking the other way. The shipping schedule's wired down from Quebec and this boat's a known quantity. It hasn't touched land and won't do so until it gets here but they have to send a manifest ahead in territorial waters. Brown got his copy and gave it to me. The
Hatteras Abyssal
out of Rotterdam. It's here they make the trade-off.”

“Is that normal?”

“Difficult to say. There're ten to twenty ships docking here every day from all over the world. This one's mine.”

“So what do you want to do? Hijack the booze?”

“No. Too difficult, too unwieldy.”

An understanding came.

“No,” I said. “No.”

“We have to,” said Jack.

“Christ.” The cash.

A tremor ran along my fingers and hand and transferred itself to the tumbler of whiskey as I raised it to my mouth. The spirit burned its way over my tongue and down my esophagus, with some catching in my throat. Jack offered me a cigaret and I shakily lit one. These were the same hands trained to operate on patients made pliant by the anaesthesiologist in the clean confines of an operating room. Thank the Lord I never got past unfeeling corpses. They were far more forgiving of mistakes, and the shakes. I saw my dissecting partner Smiler jabbing me with a scalpel and then pinching the severed optic nerve of an eyeball with a clamp, laughing as he swivelled it to look at me. Our professor chided us and tubthumped for Drs. Livingstone, Lister, and that excellent field vivisectionist Jack the Ripper, never mind Dr. Crippen.