The Man Who Killed

“You sell yourself too short, Mick. You’ve got to exploit your talents better.”

“Perhaps.”

“I mean that. For instance, tell me how you managed to get out of school without a black mark. You said they knew you were dipping into the medicine.”

“It’s a matter of knowing where the bodies are buried,” I said.

Lilyan Tashman started clawing at the bedsheets. Our heads turned to her.

“We’d best be out of here,” I said.

“Easier said,” Jack went.

She began to thrash. There was nothing on hand to soothe her but towels. I dampened them at the sink and held the coolness to her sweating brow, then sponged her sleek, beautiful nude body, enveloped by her warm live smell. I’d never seen Laura in the altogether except for a stray stocking-top or the hint of decolletage. Laura was of a higher degree entirely, a paragon, Lilyan a slattern compared thereby. The theatre coarsened femininity, I thought, turned it into an exaggerated burlesque. Theda Bara as Cleopatra was covered in paint but beneath the cosmetics and away from the hot cesium lights womankind was a different story entire. We ministered to Lilyan as her convulsions waned. With other men this state would invite a rape. Gentlemen both, Jack and I struggled to dress her, now that she’d become a potential liability. In the end it was too much and we gave up with half her combinations twisted ’round her torso.

“I’m better at getting their clothes off,” Jack said.

He looked at me and I laughed. We drank more whiskey and waited for the drug to run its wicked course. Another day in the life. In less than an hour Jack and I were thoroughly drunk. When Lilyan finally came to she groggily gathered her dress and things.

“What’s the hurry, Mistress Scurry?” Jack mocked.

“No hurry,” she said in a faraway voice.

“Do you have a show tonight?” I slurred.

“I don’t know.”

“So this is Montreal,” I said.

“What?”

I lit one of Jack’s cigarets. He staggered off to the lavatory. Lilyan began the complicated process of buttoning eyelets and lacing stays, the difficulty compounded by her haziness. I watched her and became stupidly aroused. Usually disrobing was the stimulant. This was a reverse striptease, if you please. The toilet flushed and Jack returned.

“Where’re you going?” he demanded.

“Nowhere,” Lilyan said.

Jack turned my way.

“Mick, meet me at the Five-Minute Lunch tomorrow at one.”

I stood, my stomach tightening with a nauseating jealousy. Jack opened the door and I exited, with one look of parting. His fly was still unbuttoned from pissing and Lilyan was on her knees in the middle of the bed looking up at him with a bovine unawareness mixed with resigned expectancy. I managed to make it to the fire escape stairwell before vomiting up everything I could.

WEDNESDAY

NEAR ELEVEN THE crenellated cells of my body screamed me awake. Today was rain and disgust. After drinking weak water from the tap I made my hasty toilet and went to meet Jack at the restaurant. The man was winding me up, testing me. My motives for continuing on this path were unclear. It wasn’t merely the sight of morphine last night, the money or the girl. I felt a dark awakening. For half an hour I waited at the Five-Minute, chewing over a Western sandwich, swilling muddy coffee, smoking fresh cigarets. Jack never showed.

The next block over three golden balls swaying above a pawnbroker’s dripped rain. I’d mislaid the stub for my father’s hunter during a move and so the timepiece was now lost forever, saving if I bought it back at face value from the Shylock. When I’d detrained in ’19 the Pater and I’d taken a ’cab to the courthouse square and then silently eaten Mulligatawny soup together in the dining room of the old Hotel Vancouver. He’d given me the ’watch, a Longines, and solemnly drank a glass of loganberry lemonade to my return. It was now six months since I’d last written him. Secretly I was waiting for him to die. That was, of course, if I didn’t first.

I turned up my collar and slogged back to the Wayside where I played Napoleon patience with a deck of cards from the bedside table. It was after losing seven games straight that I got the bright idea to count the pasteboards. Fifty-one, with the eight of spades missing.

Furious rain against my window woke me later that evening. Restlessness and hunger drove me from the room and into the wet. Outside the hotel an elderly couple huddled together at curb’s edge waiting to cross the street as motors splashed by. As the man’s foot descended into a puddle the woman said: “Don’t step in it, it might be Lon Chaney.”

Only two nights ago I’d seen The Trap and helped stick up the Loew’s. My cut of the cash I’d hidden on my person, a thick wad protected by the Webley I now gripped in my overcoat pocket. Chutes of water sluiced down from storefront eaves. Across Cathcart cantered the police: two mounted constables. The officers ignored me as I slouched along, thinking on Chaney and disguises. I pushed down my hat brim and became simply another anonymous pedestrian trying to stay dry. What had Jack said, though? The memorable telling detail, overwhelming accurate perception of identity. Something obvious and discardable: false eyepatch, scar, outlandish moustache, curious manner or limping gait. Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or that film where he’d been a crime boss with his legs amputated above the knee.

The most demented of Chaney’s pictures had been one where he’d played an evil ventriloquist who dressed as a grandmother and was in league with a circus strongman and a nasty midget disguised as a baby. The trio ran a store selling caged birds as a front for more larcenous activity. People came into the shop and Chaney the ventriloquist would throw his voice to make them think the birds could speak. The bird’s voices were drawn on the screen like speech balloons in the newspaper funny pages, Jiggs or the Katzenjammer Kids. The customers would purchase what they thought were talking birds, only to return complaining that they no longer spoke. Chaney, in his grandmother get-up, would then visit and case their houses. Later he’d burgle the homes, aided by the strongman and the midget, the lot of them refugees from some travelling carnival of tattooed women, sword-swallowers, wild men, and Siamese twins. The Unholy Three. I’d seen it at the Pantages, a long time ago. I had a confused memory of a complication with a girl and the requisite hero, an innocent charged with murder after the strongman and the midget killed a homeowner during one of their robberies. Remembered the midget disguised as a baby smoking a stogie and plotting with the circus strongman against Chaney. And the best part, the very best part of the whole shooting match, had been the grand finale. The crew escaped to a secret hideout with the girl as a prisoner when out of nowhere a gorilla showed up and killed the giant and midget. Chaney turned repentant and hawked joke books with his ventriloquist’s dummy at the courthouse before being sent to gaol. And here I was thinking my current circumstances were unlikely. My mind wheeling around, the pavement unsteady, I banged my shoulder into a passing Indian.

“Beg your pardon,” he said.

On the sidewalk someone had dropped a jar of preserved tomatoes and the mess resembled burst fetal masses. In order to offset their fees fellow students of mine at the hospital would perform illicit abortions and run stills for bathtub gin to sell across the border in Ontario. My morphine trading had been nearly amateur in comparison to those felonies, with the only difference being that I’d nearly been pinched. My only protection from an open scandal and possible arrest had been knowledge of the school’s immemorial practice: sincere imitation of those resourceful men, Burke and Hare of Edinburgh. Well, let them try to touch me, the bastards, I thought, and watched reflections in storefront windows to see if shapes followed me. With my weapon clenched in my fist I was the anarchist in Conrad’s Secret Agent holding his India rubber bulb wired to detonate. The bullet would burn a hole through my topcoat on its way out.

Behind the desk of the Wayside the pander handed me a message. I read: “Union Hall, nine o’clock. Hannay.”