venerable father be saying about we two now, I wonder?”
“There aren’t many passages in the Scriptures dealing with being turfed from a whorehouse,” I said.
“On the seventh day, no less.”
In our youth together Jack and I’d been abjured from turning a hand of a Sunday. It meant no baseball, no newspapers, not even a ride on a buggy or bicycle. Such were the joys of living in the household of a Presbyterian minister. The town had been entirely of my father’s temper, with Lord’s Day and blue laws that near enough shut Vancouver down ’til start of business Monday morning.
“Ach, lad, I’ll not have ye eyeing strumpets at the kinema,” said Jack, in a fair approximation of the Pater’s voice.
From a bottle on his dresser he poured me drink. I swallowed a combination of whiskey and thick salt.
“What is this?”
“Mongoose blood.”
“You jest.”
“Not at all.”
He sat on the bed across from me. Inevitably it’d been Jack who’d rebelled and challenged Jehovah. He vanished after lights out one Saturday evening and was not to be seen with the amah and myself in our pew for Sunday service. Instead Jack took his schooling on Skid Road amongst the loggers, Indians, and badmashes.
“Thinking on the time you stopped coming to the kirk,” I said.
“So was I. Won two hundred dollars playing fan tan that morning in a den on Pender.”
“The Pater preached the fourth commandment as his text.”
“Which one’s that again?” asked Jack. “Coveting asses?
I laughed and swallowed more of the awful cocktail.
“Let me see your arms,” Jack said I stood, shucked off my coat, and rolled up my sleeves. None of the marks were recent.
“Good. I want to make sure I can rely on you.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“In the morning. Get some rest.”
Perhaps Jack’s addition to the nightcap was a soporific. I faded away in my chair in fair imitation of death.
MONDAY
COFFEE CUPS CLATTERING on a tray woke me from an erotic reverie. My clothes were wrinkled and wet, a skin ready to be sloughed off. Muscles spasmed across my back, accompanied by a small hang-over. Jack was up and whistling, in the chips again. I had over a thousand dollars now when two days ago I’d been near my last buck. The Webley was on the table next to the coffee. I yawned, stretched, and asked the time.
“Time to call the tune,” Jack said.
“Did you slip me a Mickey Finn?” I asked.
“Now that’d be apt.”
“Chloral hydrate, I mean.”
“I know. Get up, Hippocrates.”
“I need a shave,” I said.
“Surely.”
I yawned again and took some coffee and a cigaret from a box by my chair. Having never made it to any cot I’d slept upright in third-class. Jack kept whistling “Annie Laurie.” I smoked and thought.
“What’s next?” I asked.
“You’ll see. Get ready.”
Less than an hour later the preliminaries were complete. I’d bathed and scrubbed my teeth with a cloth. Jack loaned me a spare suit and hat, both a mite large. My lips turned numb from bay rum the barber spilled on them. Ether would have been nicer, or morphine, bedamn. We left the Mount Royal and caught a streetcar east, turning northerly up St. Lawrence Main. It was a crisp autumn day, windy and fresh with great armadas of cloud invading the sky, a lively, peppery spice to the air. We stood holding the ’car’s straps, jangling along the boulevard.
“See the ’paper there?” Jack nudged.
A wizened gent held a folded section to his face. I managed to make out that Loew’s movie house had been robbed last night. Here I was in the news at last. Clip the article and mail it home to the Pater, for joy.
“I was right,” Jack said in my ear. “The Southerner is claiming seven thousand was taken. As though a week of rotten Vaudeville and an old flicker or two could net that much!”
I squinted. “What else does it say?”
“He can’t describe the thieves. Proves my point. The man doesn’t want us caught. He’d lose four grand from the insurance company and be up on charges himself. You hungry?”
I was and said so. We hopped off near Duluth and went into a Hebrew delicatessen for meat sandwiches, the sausage sticks called nash, and more coffee. Jack used the toilet and met me back outside. On the boulevard an ice cart trundled behind a woebegone nag and kids fooled around in the gutter. Women walked by, resembling Mennonites in their odd poke bonnets. We passed an old Gypsy crone wearing a necklace of gold coins, Franz Joseph thalers. The street whiffed of coalsmoke, piss, horse manure, and burnt toast, that smell often a harbinger of a cerebral stroke. Trepan me with a cranial saw per the dicta of Dr. Osler, my brain simply the enlarged stem of the spinal column. Remove the offending hemisphere.
We walked onto Fletcher’s Field past the Grenadiers’ redbrick armoury and onto a greensward. Park Avenue and the mountain were ahead, a skeleton scaffold of an unfinished cross stark against the western sky. Before us an angel posed on a column, her arm outstretched to salute us as we crossed the turf.
“So tell me,” I said.
Jack kept walking, hands in pockets, as he explained what happened. He’d gotten out by the skin of his teeth. The competition had been tipped off in advance. Jack was out five thousand dollars for failure to deliver. That was his reasoning behind the comedy at the theatre.
“It didn’t seem quite your style,” I said. The Webley was chafing me; I’d need a holster soon.
“Needs must when the devil drives.”
“So you only have what we took last night? Do you want my stake?” I asked.
There was true gratitude in my offer. I’d be up queer street if not for Jack, despite the danger he’d put me in.
“Thanks, boyo, but it’s not nearly enough. Hell, I bet on Dempsey to win in Philly last month.”
That was bad. The Manassa Mauler lost his belt to Gene Tunney in a decision. Now the money we’d stolen was to go to work as a grubstake. Jack needed to find out who sang the tune on him, and Loew’s would pay our way. Jack said that he’d always worked on the supposition that his higher-ups were the Chicago mob but in Plattsburgh he found out that the money and orders came out of New York.
“Plattsburgh?” I asked. “How’d you wind up there?”
“When the lights hit us my driver stepped on the accelerator and I shot our way through until we plowed into a tree. That did it for him, he was crushed. I got out and ran a circuit and came out behind one of their ’cars with a flunky behind the wheel. Put my iron to his neck and we got out of there. In Plattsburgh I learned who he was working for.”
I knew Jack had been seconded to an English military police unit after being gassed. They’d taught him things, seemingly. Interrogation.
“Did you kill him?” I asked.
“No, but I’d hate to pay his dentist’s bill.”
The flunky was working for a New York outfit, competitors of Jack’s connection. The rivals had been given a schedule and a map of our route and told to grab the shipment. The trucks and drivers for our convoy had been supplied by a Frenchman here in Montreal who owned a garage. It had to have been either him or our drivers who’d tipped off the opposition.
