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
“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.
“It takes it to their front doorstep,” Jack said.
“That’s what you want? Isn’t it enough that the cops are probably on our trail? Now you want to rob gangsters. It’s madness.”
“Better than knocking over movie houses,” Jack said.
“For movie houses you go to gaol. Gangsters’ll feed us to the ravens. Don’t you have any better idea?” I asked.
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Jesus, Mick. This is our chance. I mean, look at you. What are you going to do next? You want to sell insurance policies or deliver the Eaton’s catalogue? I for one am tired of taking orders.”
Jack was right. I was a good-for-nothing and not getting any better. Here was the kind of reckless, foolhardy proposal that great men accepted. It was a challenge. All of my scrimshanking would be forgiven by this dangerous test. I’d been on the line already, and they’d come for me after doing nothing more than riding shotgun on one of the Frenchman Charlie’s trucks. It was time to choose sides.
“They shot at us, killed my driver,” I said, convincing myself.
“And they’re coming for me,” said Jack. “I know it. Now Mick, you could walk away right now and leave me to my fate. I can take care of myself. They don’t know you from Murphy and that’s that. So.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Don’t take too long. This is it, this Saturday, and I need to work out a plan. Something simple. These pishers are damned suspicious but sometimes they overlook the obvious. I’ve got a couple of cute ideas.”
“Oke,” I said.
“Oke you’ll help me or what?”
“Oke.”
“Oke then,” Jack said.
He stood up and buttoned his coat.
“Let’s go check on that dollymop,” he said.
“If you insist.”
We left the hole in the wall. On this continent cheap buildings were thrown up in haste and razed soon after; it was a wonder anywhere remained extant. The dictate was bigger, newer, cheaper. In England one drank in taverns haunted by ghosts of Cavaliers raising bumpers to King Charles. Here you were lucky to stumble into a saloon in some boomtown that’d burned to the ground only twice before, coming up again each time like scrubweed in an architecture of crooked joists and warped beams. Foundations would be busted to aggregate and used to macadamize country roads. In parting from the bar, the bottle under my coat, I expected to never see it again.
The hotel was dead quiet when we returned and upstairs Lilyan Tashman slept in Jack’s bed, her clothes puddled on the floor. Jack took the Haig, filled glasses, and sat himself on the chair that held Lilyan’s scanties.
“Take a look at her, make sure she’s all right,” he said.
I checked her pulse and the dilation of her pupils. She was still well in the depths of a jag. Every one was different: sleep, wild energy, equipoise. Lilyan was gone away. Simply seeing her had me lusting for a taste.
“Let’s get some grub,” Jack said, inverting my appetite.
He called up room service and ordered roasted chicken, spinach greens, fried potatoes with mustard. We chewed away and after the meal I cleaned my Webley. It was a pretty tableau vivant, I thought, two criminals and a drugged moll. There was an odd sordid undertone to the scene as Jack took out a knife. He threw it in the air and caught the blade between his hands, an old trick from the mining camps.
“Once I knew a scout who could catch a knife between his lips,” he said.
“Practice makes perfect,” I said, and added: “Where’d you hide that bag of silver from Loew’s?”
“Somewhere safe,” he said.
“Does that bastard Bob know?”
“Oh, aye. You don’t care for him, do you?”
“Not half. Is he being brought in again?”
“Maybe.”
Something nagged at me.
“What’s his story, then?”
Jack told me how Bob held up the end for a fellow Irishman, a Yankee. Usually booze was brought in by fast boats to small coves on the New England seaboard and Bob was part of King Solomon’s gang but they were backed by a ward boss from Boston, Bob’s kinsman, a fellow by the name of Honey Fitz. Fitz was an old pol, once the Beantown mayor, then a representative thrown out of Congress. Bob was here in Montreal keeping an eye out for Fitz’s son-in-law, a banker with his finger in the bootlegging pie. He made payoffs, twisted arms, and kept a line open.
“Do you trust him?” I asked.
“Who, Bob?”
“Yes.”
“Not particularly. He can be useful.”
“Like me.”
