though I heard a faint shouting from some streets behind us. My nine hundred dollars and change was safe upon me so I lit a cigaret and Jack’s with the same lucifer.
“Never three to a match,” Jack said. “First one the sniper spots, the second he aims, the third he fires.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“One of those bits of advice that travelled up and down the line. You heard it all: crucifixions in No Man’s Land, ghosts and the Angels of Mons. Dammit, though, it was impossible to tell truth from fiction there, the whole thing was too bloody unreal. Whole world went down the fucking rabbit hole and where it’s going now I don’t like to think.”
Jack looked at his ring awhile and then said: “There’ll be another war.”
“They’ll fight it with Zeppelins and heat-rays,” I said.
“Damn me I don’t know.”
“We’ll be gone before it starts anyhow.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jack said, and spat again.
That was him all over. One minute careless and blithe, then queerly sober. He checked his wristwatch.
“Waiting to go over was the worst of it,” he said, “waiting for the whistle.”
I yawned, cracking my temporomandibular joint loudly.
“No rest for the wicked,” continued Jack.
“Sleep in heaven,” I said.
“Or the other place.”
We completed a circuit and I looked into the dirty water. Gulls circled and dove. No river is the same river, so sayeth Heraclitus. The St. Lawrence poured towards the sea, thalassa, thalassa. Jack checked the time again.
“He’s late, the bastard.”
“Wait a minute.”
A ’car careened into the crossing near the jetty, the rendezvous between Duke and Nazareth by the train tracks. It was a fawn Oldsmobile that swerved to intersect with us. Jack held up his hand like a traffic cop and Bob braked to a clumsy halt. He rolled down the window and grinned sloppily.
“Goddammit man, you’re drunk,” Jack said.
“Ain’t you?” asked Bob.
“Get out and take some air.”
“Oke.”
Bob dismounted. To open my bottle of ginger wine I pushed the cork down its neck out of ugly necessity, then took a long swig of the restorative. I handed it to Jack, who pulled and passed the bottle to Bob. Bob looked at me a moment with no expression and I was dead certain he knew nothing of my attachment to Laura. I tamped down a panicky sort of anger. I didn’t like him, how he’d touched the love of my life. For the life I couldn’t figure why Jack wanted his help. Bob had caused that fracas in the whorehouse. He was unstable. I wanted to smash his pretty face in.
Dammitdammitgoddamnationchristinheavensaveus. Breathe. Maintain an outward mien of calm and spit away your corruption. George V is your liege and lord by the Orange Lodge and the Law of this Dominion, so fuck the Pope.
A ragged dog came out from behind a rubbish tip and coughed at us as we waited hidden in deep shadow. I made up my face into a rueful, close-lipped smile as the bottle did another round. When I went to light a fresh cigaret I found one burning in my hand. Time slowed with the universe, entropic. Birds flew southeasterly towards St. Helen’s Island. An old lamplighter came our way, the antique figure out of Cruikshank’s etchings for Dickens. His toil gave the streets a bluish tint as night fell completely. Jack handed me keys and nodded to Bob. The two drove the Olds to another position. I finished the wine and carefully placed the bottle on a rotten turnbuckle before walking to the Auburn, then made to check my pocketwatch before recalling how I’d failed to redeem it from hock. No matter. There was no music playing in my head now. I felt drained of life. As I sat behind the wheel I listened to my breath and the dull rhythm of my heartbeat. At least the medulla oblongata continued to function. Along my arm came the familiar ache.
Talk about slowness, those days strung out along the opaque dragon’s tail, lost in morphia. The endless dreams, the fading to lonely worlds, a glacial death often punctuated by restless strength and creative activity. That was the drug’s Janus effect, withering the body and feeding the mind. Nothing on earth had been worse than the panic I’d felt when my supply had been exhausted. Periodic opium raids in Chinatown had pushed me into a corner and the McGill beaks came ever so damned close to catching me out at the Royal Victoria red-handed.
The last visit to the hospital before brokering my departure from the school had been an off-chance of lax security. There were new locks on the door and Smiler was with Jacques Price, the pair dissecting a beggar in the downstairs morgue. Smiler and Price’s scalpelwork was no patch on my own, I was pleased to note. Jack and I’d butchered enough deer and moose in our youth to make us old hands at vivisection. Once the Pater had potted a bear out by Yale and brought most of it back to our house in the West End. He’d skinned it for a rug and I remembered finding a tin rubbish bin in the yard with its lid held down by a brick. Inside had been the animal’s head, alive with writhing white maggots stripping the flesh off the trophy. Later the amah’d boiled the skull clean and the Pater’d mounted it on a wall near my bedroom.
My childhood home had been a sort of emporium, the attic filled with books, charts, photoengravings, and testaments. In a trunk were my mother’s few surviving effects, her communion papers and a golden shamrock of the Apparition at Knock. My amah had died while I was in Victoria getting a baccalaureate, the house now another museum of a broken colonist family, near empty save for the Pater in his rocking chair.
Returning to the present and the automobile I found myself thirsty and yenned for a cup of tea. The old streetlamps cast an arctic glow. What’ll newspaper headlines read like tomorrow? This was a very serious crime we were on the verge of committing, a chancy undertaking. Illogically I trusted in Jack’s star. I’d play my part, was all, and do what was necessary. It’d been a long day already, the longest one yet. I closed my eyes.
And opened them again as a long white saloon car pulled in. From Jack’s sketchy form in the darkness came the Scout whistle. I started the Auburn and shifted into gear, the headlamps off, accelerating over the short distance to ramming speed. I saw startled clean-shaven faces staring my way as the machines collided. There was a crunch of tearing metal and I was thrown onto the wheel as I caved the saloon’s passenger side in. My chest burned as I pulled out the Webley and opened the door to step down onto the road. A neat job, Mick, I thought, as I pointed the barrel through the rear glass at a surprised middle-aged man in the back seat. Jack was shouting. There he was in front with his gun on the driver. The front passenger lay slumped over where the Auburn’s grille had met the wheelwell. A radiator hissed steam. Jack shouted something across the bonnet at the driver, who reached down. Jack fired. The man I was covering hunched and I pulled the trigger. Glass cracked and shattered and his head bucked forward. Jack came by the driver’s side while the last man put up his hands. Jack shot again and the cabin filled with black gore. He pulled the handle and a bloodied body with a ruined face fell out clutching a black leather case. Jack grabbed the satchel, his revolver smoking in his left fist. He turned to me and yelled: “Ankle!”
I looked up at the moored ship; the men on the deck were just starting to stir. It had been quick. We ran, hotfooting from the slaughter. Maybe half a minute had passed. Suddenly I was lucid, my body heaving as I followed after as fast as I could. We made it over slippery cobblestones to the idling Olds. Jack hauled open the rear left passenger door behind Bob.
“Go!” shouted Jack as we clambered in.
He threw the bag onto the front passenger seat. Bob engaged the gear and we were off, my heart screaming and ears roaring from the gunshots and the crash. My hand tingled as Bob veered crazily, fear making him stupider. He got the ’car under control as we turned up McGill.
“Shit,” he said.
A procession of torches and mounted policemen holding Union Jack banners blocked our way ahead, the Sons of England.
“Trafalgar Night,” shouted Jack. “Turn right!”
Bob swerved at the Customs House and now we were caught in the crooked warren of the Old Town, passing
