The Man Who Killed

heeled shoes, and long-looped paste pearl strands around lithe white necks. Jack began building a pyramid of crystal goblets, then uncorked the massive Jeroboam and with two hands poured its contents over the construction. Beside me the young blonde screwed a cigaret into her ebony holder. She was blue-eyed, her face made up into a pout, a tempting indifferent moue. It was rare I frequented whores, loath to catch syphilis. This time was different, somehow, Jack paying the piper and calling the tune, conducting a farce that might banish Laura from my thoughts. Always she’d played prude with me, during my failed courtship, but I’d suspected her nonetheless: she’d protested too much. Since last October, a good year ago, nearly anything might’ve happened. Who was she with at that dance Jack had mentioned? Where was she right now? I shook my head and looked over to my paid sympathizer. She looked back and blew smoke into my face.

Bob rose and revealed a talent besides painting and armed robbery, laying down jazz on the piano, singing out in a nice tenor: “I’ve got some good news honey, an invitation to the Darktown Ball. It’s a very swell affair, all the highbrows will be there. I’ll wear my high silk hat and my frock tailcoat, you wear your Paris gown and your new silk shawl. Ain’t no doubt about it babe, we’ll be the best dressed in the hall.”

Wine went ’round. A pair of the girls got up and turned a two-step together. The one next to me emptied her glass in a swallow. I leaned over to fetch some more, charging her goblet and then my own, following her lead by pouring it down my neck. Jack took down a pornographic engraving from the wall and placed it on his whore’s lap, the better to sniff cocaine from. My blonde went and joined them. Bob switched the player to a printed roll and the instrument churned out ridiculous hurdy-gurdy blather. Bob danced with the pair of trollops on the rug. My girl came back licking her lips.

“How much do you charge for a kiss?” I asked.

She eyed me, took a puff, and exhaled more smoke.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

A pause while she thought about it.

“Celeste,” she lied at last.

“Heavenly,” I said.

I lit a Consul. Jack handed over the picture frame and I took some of the drug. The divine Celeste regarded me dully. The print on my knees showed a scene from the Satyricon, or the Bible.

In my mind molecules began to break apart like Champagne bubbles. What was his name, the fellow who’d split the atom? A Cambridge man, from New Zealand. He’d taught at McGill for some time. Rutherford. All we needed was a calliope and a dancing bear to complete this circus with the pig-faced woman from county Cork to round it out. Science baffled! Zoologists stumped! A wonder to behold!

“Hey,” I shouted at Jack over the growing din. “The Midget King of Montreal has a son and heir. He’s showing himself and the bairn at His Majesty’s palace on Rachel, a nickel a gander. A toast!”

I raised my glass. Jack guffawed.

“I’ve seen him,” said Jack’s blonde.

“That so?”

The devil was on horseback in my bloodstream now. I drank more wine.

“The most darling little man,” said Jack’s blonde. “He’s a count or a baron, I think. And his wife’s from Europe.”

“The Midget Queen?” asked Jack.

“I believe so.”

Here Celeste turned and gave me a strangely sweet smile, one nearly genuine.

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” I asked her.

“A ghost?”

“Yeah. Been busy tonight?”

“I’ll say,” she said. “We had that fat baseballer in here.”

“Who, Babe Ruth?”

“Yeah, him. They almost had to call the cops on him he was so drunk. What a pig.”

“You ever been to Coney Island?”

“Where’s that?” she asked.

“Forget it. Where’re you from?”

“Not here, that’s for sure.”

“What was your name again?”

She sought it for a second, twirling her costume pearls.

“I told you. Celeste.”

“Right.”

“What’s yours?” she asked, brightening.

“Michael,” I said.

“And where’re you from?”

“Far west indeed.”

“You don’t say,” she said.

“I’m starving,” I said.

“So eat something,” she shrugged.

There was Brummagem trash on the plates, limp cheese on toasted crusts. Instead of food I chose drink. Jack started talking to his whore about a friend of his.

“He lost a hand at Wipers. The left. We met in the hospital after I was gassed. Bugger carved himself a new one from a piece of mahogany we scrounged from a church. Four fingers and a thumb, just like Captain Danjou.”

“Who?” asked the whore.

“Legion etrangere. Anyway, we went to a party in Belgravia somewhere after we got out and he held it over a lamp until it caught fire, and lit the candles on a birthday cake with it. That was a great night. He was a hell of a guy, for a Hasty Pee.”

Jack’s whore laughed.

“Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment,” Jack said.

“What happened to him?” asked Jack’s whore.

“He died. Survived the Western Front to die of ’flu home in Berlin, Ontario.”

There was one of those silences, Jack looking elsewhere. The brothel’s electric current throbbed and made the light filaments flicker. We were in a stroboscope, spinning around.

“Did you ever see that Charley Chase where his best man tricks him into thinking his fiancee has a wooden leg?” asked Jack’s whore.

Bob was with the two other girls and they lifted the Jeroboam and poured the lees into his yap.

“Your friend looks too young to have fought,” said Celeste.

“He lied his way in.”

“What about you?”

“I was on a troopship when they announced the Armistice, then I got ’flu myself. Almost croaked in hospital.”

I drank more wine. Celeste was beginning to get on my nerves. Things were becoming crookeder, my resentments hatching in the amniotic cocktail of Champagne and cocaine. Too much happening. From another room sounded louder music, perhaps a bunch of aldermen whooping it up. This whorehouse felt in-between, like a limbo. Criminals, prostitutes, burghers, divines, here until our indulgence was paid for. Soon our bottles would be bottom- up in their buckets of melted ice. Dead soldiers. I wondered what’d happened to Jack’s sharkspine stick. Bleaching bones in the sun. My own body one day hewn apart on the dissecting table, organs weighed and bottled in formaldehyde, the flesh sliced and boiled away. My scalp worn on an Iroquois war belt, finger bones strung on tendons to sound as they rattled together in a north wind outside the tepee, my knuckles used as dice by gambling savages. Bob and his whores were at the piano singing “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More.” Jack was talking to his blonde about Freud.

My eyes glazed over. The drug and wine were working me numb. If one places a small amount of cocaine on the tip of the penis it aids reduction of sensation and prolongs coitus. I thought about the filthy Irish hospital that’d nearly killed me and a streetwalker I’d picked up along the bank of the Liffey who’d almost given me a dose. There’d