Jack leaned back.
“No. Bob met her through the theatre crowd. Laura cottoned on to the circle. Bored, I suppose. When I was at Victoria Hall for that dance she was with him. I didn’t know where you were or what’d happened, I swear. None of my business. This is. We need the third arm. Hold your nose and afterwards all bets are off. The trade is at the pier. We’re going to hit them before they board ship. The third’ll hang back as getaway while we go in for the goods. I’ve got it all worked out.”
“You’d better.”
“It will work or it won’t. Stakes are high but so’s the payoff. To the victor and all that.”
“Spare me.” I rose and went to the filthy toilet. Over the lavatory I read: “Get ready, the LORD is coming SOON. ‘Behold I come quickly and my reward is with me, to give to every man according as his work shall be.’” Below it was written: “If I had a girl and she was mine I’d paint her ass with iodine and on her belly I’d put a sign ‘Keep off the grass, the hole is mine.’”
At the basin I washed my hands and looked at the mirror. There was no one in it.
“Oke,” I said, back at the table.
“Christ but you’re a downy bird, Mick.”
He’d paid for our food and was sitting at his ease at the Formica.
“Tell me what was what with your man in the theatre there,” I said.
“I will, but later.”
“You afraid I’ll sing if I’m caught?”
“You can’t tell what you don’t know. And it’s not the cops I’m worried about but the other fellows. They’ll clip your ears for fun and games,” Jack said.
“That’s reassuring.”
“I know you’re up for it.”
“This’s all been some sort of challenge, hasn’t it? Why’re you doing it?”
Jack put his hands together and leaned in.
“What’re your plans for the future?”
“Unknown,” I said.
“Will you head back?”
“To the Pater’s? Not likely. Even with money I don’t want him sniffing at me. Without my medical degree I’m a dog.”
“Is that so?”
“Whereas you could show up at the door in chains and he’d open his arms.”
“Unlikely.”
“That’s what you think. The Sunday after you ran away and joined the colours he preached the Prodigal Son. He had a scrap-book hidden in his study. The pages were filled with clippings from the ’papers of every action your regiment was in.”
“Jesus, Mick, I didn’t know.”
There was a catch in Jack’s voice and I swore I caught a tear quickening in his eye.
“He’d forgive you everything,” I said.
“Not everything,” Jack muttered.
Now Jack was far away. Brightening, I said, “Well, you could be worse off. In me he sees my mother and hates me for it. Always has. You’re different. He chose you. He’d have left me on Skid Road if he’d been able to square it with the book and the kirk and the bloody Battle of the Boyne.”
“The Glorious Twelfth,” said Jack.
The Pater’d preached the Word to the hard men of the camps past Lillooet, men like the Wolf and Jack’s father, who’d disappeared prospecting up the wash one autumn, never to return. When my father’d found Jack he was near feral, shivering and begging for scraps from the Chinese camp cooks and cruel Indians, a cur kicked away from the fire. Indebted for his escape, Jack had played Christian soldier for the Pater, and my upright father prized his wildness and charm, whereas I’d only been a reminder of what my father had lost. I’d killed her by being born.
So I waited and watched as we grew up together down in Vancouver, watched Jack with the prettiest girls and fastest friends, real five-cent sports. My Scripture first was as naught to Jack’s second or third. I turned away from John Knox and my father and delved into different patterns of belief. Jack was the golden lad, ace cricketer and scapegrace, romantic and dashing where I was quiet and dark. He led our gang and stole bottles of wine from Italian greengrocers and horses from Siwashes in Chinatown, cursing in Cantonese as I’d learn to, in emulation of my captain. When alone and away from under Jack’s flag I’d be waylaid by jealous enemies from rival gangs and be given a good thumping, too small to fight back and too damn proud to run. That was the Irish in me, taking a beating and liking it. From my father there was little save silence when I’d return home bruised and cut. Only the amah cared, swabbing my cuts in iodine while jabbering in Chinook.
My father was born an Ulster Scot but my mother’d been a real dark colleen from down in the south and Catholic to boot. How they’d met and married the Lord only knew. For an amah I had a Carrier Indian, my mother’s servant and somehow kinswoman, the Holy Ghost and Old Ones meeting and mingling with Manitou and Raven. When my mother died the amah nursed me. From her I learned the twinned secret mythologies of two broken people. All his life my father’s creed had been reason, education, and light. The faith of my mother was tricky and dark. Somehow I’d been made in neither image and was reflected in the quicksilver of Jack: friend, tormentor, blood brother, the man who was going to get me killed one day. I crushed a cigaret out on a greasy plate.
“Better,” said Jack, patting his belly.
After the Royale we went to Jack’s hotel. He’d moved to the Queen’s on Peel and was registered as Jack Greenmantle. Up in his room he excused himself to defecate and I found a bottle of cognac on the sideboard. The alcohol stung and cleaned my teeth as I thought of Laura and Bob, that Yankee bastard. You’ll settle his hash tonight. He hadn’t seen me as I watched them in that upstairs bedroom. Only Laura, her eye meeting mine in the darkness. There’d been a telling in her gaze, a kind of triumph laced with something I couldn’t define. I took another swallow and it came: she’d been expecting someone else. Who? Jack yanked the chain in the jakes and came out buttoning his trousers.
“Yesterday’s news,” he said.
He sat down and laid out the night’s plans. Including Bob, the three of us were going to hit the competition before they ever set foot on the
“That’s what you said about the bootlegging and the picture house. And now look at us,” I said.
“It’s better this way,” said Jack. “I’m not Raffles the Gentleman Cracksman. Make a meticulous plan and it’ll go haywire. I want to be spontaneous, to improvise.”
“Christ, you’re like a stick-up poet.”
“There you’ve put it with a nicety,” Jack said.
“We were lucky before. This is pushing it.”
“Count your money and tell me about pushing it. How’d you get it, now? Did it come in the mail? You wouldn’t have the spondulicks if not for Yours Truly, Esquire.”
“I never asked for them. You volunteered me,” I said.
“Knowing you as I do. This is bootless, Mick.”
“Let’s go over the ground at least. Is that too much to be asking after?”
“Lead on.”
OUR STEPS TOOK US in the direction of the docks, the streets still radiating the day’s heat. I looked up at a spider’s web of tramway wires. Underfoot nubs on manhole covers had been worn flat by countless treads and the metal slipped. My coat hung heavy on me, steaming with the city. A motorcar nearby backfired and I flinched, my hand bouncing into my pocket. Jack laughed. Drunken late-season wasps crawled in the gutter outside a warehouse from whence the sickly reek of rotting fruit seeped forth. It might’ve been an alky-cooker distilling cheap fruit brandy. Minute quantities of wasp venom can trigger anaphylaxis in the allergic. Put a drop on a needle for the perfect crime. As far as I knew Jack had no natural nemesis. Mine was the lychee, a lesson learned in
