The Man Who Killed

out the funnel of a phonograph player somewhere by Phoenix Park. I’d been let out of hospital at last, recovered from the ’flu, taking in the city’s sights: the post office still a ruin from the Easter Uprising, Parnell festooned with ivy, Nelson’s Column. A crowd stood near the Castle and listened to their sovereign, the first time his voice had ever sounded in public. Beside me a drunk punter blew a raspberry in derision and staggered off. The drunk was followed away by a sober man in an overcoat, Holy Ireland an island of informers, spies, Black and Tans, Republicans, myself in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and eighteen.

Before being demobbed I received my back pay and a wire transfer from the Pater. With a few pounds to spend I foolishly used them to travel up to the family’s old stomping grounds in the north, in January, most miserable of months. Belfast had been bad: grimy, stony, cold, soaked in inky rain. Londonderry was worse, to my mind, crowded, closed off. I visited a maiden greataunt and sat in a stuffy parlour drinking weak, milky tea in gloomy silence. She hadn’t taken to my colonial accent, notwithstanding my uniform and pip. Perhaps it’d been the Maple Leaf at my collar or the fact that I’d started smoking asthma cigarets to strengthen my lungs and asked her for a whiskey against the damp.

The visit was your true eye-opener, and I understood a little of the Pater and why he’d left the Old Country. For a spell I regretted he hadn’t lighted out for an American territory but the old man had always been loyal to the Crown and pink parts of the map. Upon reflection, my fate might’ve been worse and I could have been born near the tailings of Ballarat or Dawson just as easily as the panned-out wash of Williams Creek. Then my mind returned to its jumping-off point and the Service poem, with its strange things done ’neath the midnight sun. Purposeless speculation, I thought. Might’ve this, might’ve that. If the Pater had stayed in New Westminster instead of following his ministry upriver my mother might’ve lived. Every turn of the paddlewheel led the poor woman closer to her grave, to my life in Alexandria, to Jack. Mine was a makeshift story. The sound of a police siren brought me back to Montreal and I stepped on a man’s shoe at the corner of Guy. The stranger spat: “Connard!”

Taking that as a cue I got off the street and went to sit on a bench at Canada Place in wan sunlight. This city hated me. It was the same thing, the same damned streets, same rotten cafes and hotel rooms. Winter would worsen Montreal, make it even more petty and constricting. We weren’t a generous people, by and large. Ours was a second-hand country with second-hand sentiments for second-hand subjects. The sheer vastness of the land did us in. Canadians were wards with no true say in the world, under the control of the Colonial Office, Whitehall, Parliament, the Privy Council, the Court of St. James’s, the Crown on high. Maybe Borden had gotten us a seat at the table at Versailles and into the League of Nations but it was as though my countrymen were children wanting to dine with the grown-ups. We still jumped to attention at the red-tabbed brass’s trumpet call, the “Ready, Aye, Ready” ethos of Laurier and Meighen. One would think that that spirit had been ploughed under at Vimy, but it hadn’t, and now there were new pipers for us to follow, the banshee song of the south. It was ever thus, the Dominion pulled between paladins of Empire and plutocrats of the Republic, always in between and with no say in who ruled us. Canadians, it seemed, had inherited the worst characteristics of the English—snobbery, priggishness, supreme self-satisfaction, and purblind righteousness—and we’d combined them with the lowest Yankee traits: money hunger, small-town boosterism, false piety.

I was a welter of history with too much time on my hands. I picked myself up and walked back towards the main artery. Artery. The trembling one felt as morphine pulsed through the fibres on its royal road to the mind, there to soothe and unfold thought in all its textured variety. My use of the drug had never been emotional, leastways not at first. It had been an aesthetic addiction, a way to turn this brutal colonial city into a palace of memory and wonder, history and art. Here for example was Old Tomorrow in knickerbockers and robe, holding a scroll, the twin of his contemporary Disraeli. Across Dorchester stood a monument to Strathcona’s horse against the Boer. I read its lapidary inscription, so very fitting: Imperium et Libertas. For that we’d fought Fenians and Louis Riel, had sailed up the Nile with Garnet-Wolseley to save Chinese Gordon at Khartoum and battled Ruskies at Archangel. Empire and liberty had put me in the itching wool of a Seaforth Highlander and sent me off to follow Jack in France. Two years ago it’d nearly led us against the Turk at Chanak until Rex King had done something no prime minister ever had before: politely declined the invitation.

Stopping at a stand I picked up another ’paper, the afternoon Herald, to read in the lobby of the Mount Royal. Splashed across its front page was an expose of fraudulent spiritual mediums. A reporter had gone to a seance asking about an invented dead wife and from the seer received soothing messages from beyond the grave. The entire story had a phony wash to it. Betimes it clicked: Houdini was in town and this was manufactured publicity for his show. For an hour I lounged and read and watched a fat house detective with a short cigar stuck into his face lean against a column. The dick’s lazy gaze at last left me to take in a tall blonde sashaying unevenly across the lobby’s parquet. My ears pricked up when I heard her ask loudly for Mr. Standfast and I was just in time raising the ’paper to shield my face. It was the actress from the night before, Lilyan Tashman.

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.”