The Man Who Killed

Behind the glass I read part of a review aloud to myself: “Monte Blue displays his virile mannerisms as the suave but willing Dr. Girard who leaves his wife and braves a gaol sentence to follow a will-of-the-wisp flapper in the person of Madame Lalle, played by Lilyan Tashman as a complete little vixen with a bag of cosmopolitan wiles and constant verve.”

Back in the hotel at last I wasted away, a knife blade on a whetstone, as I pushed the needle in. Next door a drunk sang psalms in a broken key.

WHEN I RETURNED to life the first thing I did was reach for the dwindling vial of morphine powder. The needle entered me dully, blunted by overuse. I put pressure on and dressed the puncture with styptic. A black line had burned across the bedsheets where I’d passed out with a lit cigaret. I imagined waking on fire and realized that I had, burning for the drug. My head sank back into the dense, mossy pillow and I closed my eyes.

Later there was the hullabaloo of a working day: shouts of men, grinding axles, the klaxon of an ambulance. Likely it was taking a poor beggar to a ward in the Royal Victoria and I diagnosed him from afar with hypoxia leading to coma and death, what Houdini braved upside-down in the Chinese Water Torture Cell. Could picture myself stretched out on the starched rough linen of a hospital bed listening to the din of the world, of milk carts clattering past and newspaper hawkers shouting headlines: “Queen of Rumania to arrive at Bonaventure Station Wednesday!” “Hurricanes in Cuba!” “End of the World Nigh!”

Very soon I’d have to visit the selfsame dispensary should my present pattern of consumption be continued, to join specimens in the morgue and be flensed by the coroner. It was getting there that’d be the trouble. Danger lurked all about, Turks disguised as Ruskies in the pay of the Kuomintang wanting vengeance for the fire I’d started in Chinatown. You will need to tread warily, boyo. Remember the post and that you must find Jack’s hotel at some point. Prepare.

With a tube of Ipana and a brush I scraped away whatever covered my teeth and tongue, the dentifrice stinging at my tender gums. I raggedly shaved my face. The hotel room seemed to have constricted even closer during the course of the night and now felt no larger than a coffin. The largest item in the space was the black metal box of morphine and next to it my Webley. I aligned my spinal column and dressed. Suddenly irresolute and fearful, I sat again and leafed through the magazines to read a thriller about a fat detective working for the Pinkertons. Jack and his game: it explained those missing years and the postcards we’d received from far outposts of America. Why had he joined them? What larger design did he pursue? So much was beyond me now that my concerns were restricted to the necessities of life: morphine, morphine, and money. I lit a cigaret and let my thoughts drift.

Recently as this last summer I’d fancied I’d broken the habit, sitting on a dock with my feet in Lake ’Magog, watching the idle rich at play on their boats. At night light and music from dances at the Hermitage Club would carry across the water to my shack, where I plotted an abstract revenge on their class and its chief exemplar, Mademoiselle Laura Dunphy, her very lovely self. The sins of the one visited upon the many, wishing to string them all up on gibbets.

Our last painful meeting had been on a day in April, near end of term. The weather’d been raw, windy, unpleasant. She’d smelled bourbon on my breath and recoiled from a kiss. How little she knew, thinking me a mere drunkard. I was already far, far worse.

“Michael,” she’d said.

“Yes?”

“I must go now.”

So cold. The thaw’d just broken the river proper, bringing seabirds inland above the melting ice. It was twilight and we stood in a crowd of people on Sherbrooke close to the university gates. We’d met for tea but she’d taken no more than half a cup and then the mob had hurried around us as she rested her gaze on me. It felt like scientific appraisal of what I was, no trace of feeling or passion. I hadn’t been able to meet her green eyes until the very end, catching a flicker of her distaste. What do you do when the woman you love doesn’t love you in return? Laura put her gloved hands in an ermine muff as some idiot jostled me from behind and by the time I turned back she’d joined the crowd and was gone. I stayed rooted to the spot sick and dead, a hollow tree waiting to be blown over. The cigaret burned my hand and brought me back to the hotel.

I flicked the stub out the window onto Aqueduc. The fading evening glow, timorous grey snow patches in doorways, motorcar horns blaring and horse hooves striking stone and the fading pressure of her hand on my forearm where she’d touched me for the last time. I unbuttoned my shirtsleeve and slapped my forearm to raise a vein. It didn’t hurt. Nothing did.

A euphoria grew and with it the most marvellous sensation, a play of association linking Venice with Vinland. I laughed weakly and began to sing a childish song as I sank underwater: “Il etait un petit navire, il etait un petit navire, qui n’avait ja-ja-jamais navigue, qui n’avait ja-ja-jamais navigue.”

Don’t get seasick. Put something in your stomach, beans on toast or sardines and catsup. The thought alone caused my gorge to rise. I stood, shakily, and at the window watched an old lady in a blond wig fishing for treasure from a bin with a piece of hooked wire. She reminded me of the poor bloody panners of Williams Creek, still scratching away for gold forty years after the rush. The Pater’d succoured them with little more than the Good Book and a square meal now and again. My father wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone man like Billy Sunday. On the wireless I’d hear gospel charlatans from down South and the Foursquare Gospel of Aimee McPherson, who talked in tongues, built a temple in Los Angeles, and had been kidnapped last spring. The woman outside pulled up a piece of scrap and danced a jig. Shining iron pyrite, fool’s gold.

Sparrows darted by on their way to hibernate. I turned to the mirror and saw Mr. Hyde—not as played by John Barrymore in the pictures but as a kind of ogre, dark and difficult to please. Bury me facedown with a stake in my heart, never to see the winter sunlight.

I held a volume of anatomy in my grip and turned pages to the circulatory system, tracing the morphine’s route. Radiators in the room felt cool to the touch and I had no need of their heat as my own calidum innatum burned just fine. I ran a hand over my face and marvelled at my organism’s subtle construction, then chewed at a thumbnail. An itch along my leg prompted me to pull up a trouser cuff to reveal a line of insect bites, bedbugs, what you got when you lay down with dogs.

I went downstairs, where a clerk knotted his brow at my question, then snapped his fingers, saying: “The Hotel X? But of course! The Exceptionale.”

I thanked him and telephoned the hotel from a booth to learn that Mr. Conrad was not in fact in, but did I care to leave a message? I did not.

Evening broadsheets gave me the latest on the queen of Rumania, a burlesque similar to when the Prince of Wales had visited the States. They’d fallen all over him and started sporting thickly knotted neckties and drinking brandy sodas. Amazing how Yankees tumbled for a blueblood in the Republic. Snobs in their own way, worse than the Imperial Court of the Japanese. Canadians were little better, a fault of the Empire. From Hong Kong to Salisbury, Calgary to Singapore we’d kowtow to our nobility. Wait until the Commonwealth falls to new masters, the Communists or Martians. They were coming, according to the ’paper. The red planet was closer than ever, in one way or another.

It was strangely hot out, or perhaps my blood boiled. Sunshine fell on the north side of the street while high above a ’plane buzzed lazy circles over the city towards the aerodrome in St. Hubert. An organ grinder tortured a scabrous monkey, a Siwash begged for alms, and a pretty flower girl ignored me. There was a triple feature on at His Majesty’s: Greed, The Gigolo, and Suicide Sonata. An elegant French-Canadian couple, what the Parisians would call chic, walked a small Pekinese. Morphine tailed away and I thought of Jack. He’d better be dogging down that four-flushing double-crosser Bob. I didn’t want him doing anything else. Look him up in the morning. One of the wicked grey prison streetcars cut me off as I crossed the street; a mournful criminal looked at me on his way east.

This time I took McTavish up and the stairs near Ravenscrag. It was near five when I broke through the elms and birches to an Indian path by a still cool pond, a mountain tarn. Here the maples trembled autumn golden and a zephyr dried my sweat. It was near the gloaming and I followed a track to the top. From the highest point I watched the river cringe away from my majesty and the city huddle up against me for warmth. I was the beacon on high, not that skeleton cross of Christ. At five o’clock as the sun set I stood still as a brazen statue, lodestone of the true north, and there was no one else on the face of the earth.