“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.
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
