The Man Who Killed

WEDNESDAY

TWO DAYS LATER I ran out of morphine. My hands quaked and blood sang in my ears, worse than any conceivable hang-over. Pressure mounted alongside the craving. When I ran out of cigarets I’d be forced into the open. Abandon yourself to fever and the black horses of nightmare; you’ll never wake. The prognosis is inescapable, boyo. Check yourself into a sanatorium under an assumed name.

Shaking and bloody were my hands, covered in filth and microscopic vermin. I’d accidentally injected a pathogen through the needle’s point, Pasteurella pestis hidden resident on pollen spores from high Afghanistan or Burma, bacterial refugees of the Black Death. From the poppies it came though rendered opium to morphine and was now inside me. Check lymph nodes for buboes and watch for bloody sputum after coughing. Feel the creatures multiplying inside, a riot of animalcules. All sexual desire was now absent and in its place aching low pain and hunger. I’d been a fool, using up the last of the Chinaman’s deck. I should kill him. How? Blink. Every time I did, someone died. Next it would be me at the end of a rope. I needed to rediscover an instinct for self-preservation and accomplish something. Leave this room.

Outside the birds watched me from bare trees. People got in my way, stepped on my heels, grimaced in my direction. A beggar with a goiter and crutches eyed me suspiciously as I walked past. A streetcar’s trolley pole jumped off the overhead wire and lost its electrical connection. The operator got out to replace the pole and, hauling at the dead cable, spat at me in blame.

It’d been raining for some time, perhaps days. The wind was from the northwest with the first bite of real winter in it and found a way through my clothes to my skin where it nipped at the husbanded warmth therein. I shivered violently and thought how fitting that I was headed for the hospital. At this odd hour in the afternoon classes would be completed if the schedule hadn’t changed. I might be in luck, and made a blasphemous prayer to that effect.

If I knew my man he’d be just where he always was. “Smiler” Smilovich. A pushy striving bastard, all side, his the first hand raised for every question, volunteering for every study. Vice-president of the Medical Students’ Union. I trusted he’d pulled extra duty at the hospital liaison office, where I hoped to find him. He’d either be there or ostentatiously walking the wards with a stethoscope and thermometer. Smiler was the source of Jack’s cocaine, it seemed. That being the case it was no stretch to determine Smiler could also supply my chosen nostrum. He had access to the dispensary and if the man wouldn’t accept my money I was prepared to use other measures.

It was only last spring that I’d surrendered those keys myself. I remembered the faces of my reviewing board as I handed them over, with Dr. Meakins grave as Moses. Laughing at them when they threatened to expel me and turn my carcass over to the Surete du Quebec. I’d made my play, alluding in no uncertain terms to the tale I might spin should I be prosecuted. A pretty piece of blackmail, and one that produced a stalemate, my freedom, and a franked transcript. Now I returned to the scene.

I hurried under bare black elms through the campus’s gloomy Scotch ambience, indifferent grey limestone buildings flanking the quadrangle. On a small field to my left three Redmen ran football patterns in the mud. Lights were on at the Redpath Library and through the windows I saw students hunched over books. Laughing varsity- sweatered types passed by and two serious-looking Jews were deep in conversation about Trotsky. From Macdonald a clatter of engineering students in royal purple gave throat: “We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the engineers...”

During orientation week medical students had their own ritual of hazing, a program that culminated in formaldehyde-and-seltzer cocktails down the throat whilst blindfolded in the morgue. The morning after my apprenticeship I’d woken on a gurney with a splitting head and both legs in drying plaster casts. Grandescunt aucta labore. By work all things increase and grow, my alma mater’s creed, my century’s religion.

At University I crossed Pine to the Vic. Smiler’d been in the dressing room backstage at the Princess before Jack and I’d spoken with the Handcuff King. What had he and Price been up to? I skirted around to the private entrance and thence into a back hallway. Inside it was noxious with camphor, carbolic soap, and disinfectant. Underlying all was the sweetness of disease. The eastern wing was still and silent and I trod the scrubbed tiles with feigned confidence. A young nurse pushed a man in a wheelchair. The wet wool of my clothes gave off the odour of dog.

The next corridor was deserted. Turn right, turn right again, and right you are. A light burned behind the pebbled glass of a door that read “Resident Warden.” An interesting position to occupy, as I had, and unique to McGill and the Royal Victoria, as far as I knew. One’s duties were varied—assisting in the wards, a little human husbandry, liaison work with the faculty, and so forth. In reality the job had one specific, obscured function. My knowledge of what went on would be the lever to pry morphine from a cabinet.

Gingerly I turned a well-oiled knob and opened the door to a familiar figure behind a desk. Smiler wore a white laboratory coat and was furiously raking his hands through tonsured hair. He didn’t notice me and my first impression was of the room’s unusual disarray. Smiler was a prim, tidy bastard. He muttered to himself in an agitated fashion. As my presence made itself manifest Smiler’s wide eyes turned my way.

“Mick,” he whispered.

He was pale and frightened. Of me? Perhaps. So he should be.

“How, how’d you know? Who told you? Who else knows?”

“Knows what? Look at yourself in the mirror, man. You’re a wreck.”

“Oh God, what’m I going, what’re we going to do?” he moaned.

“Calm down, for one.”

Something was very wrong. At his best Smiler was no lion of courage, for all his bluff. He loosened his necktie and rubbed his face. Whatever had happened here presented me with the ideal opportunity. If Smiler was compromised my duty was to exploit the situation. Here was one apple he couldn’t polish away.

“It’s all over. My God, I’m ruined.”

He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” I said. “We’ll work it out. Tell me what happened.”

“Don’t you know? Why’re you here? Who sent you?”

“Listen, man. I know what goes on. Tell me. I can help.”

“Help,” Smiler said, in a faraway voice.

“Yes, help.”

I moved into his field of vision.

“What is it? Cops? What’d they find out?”

“No, no, no. No police, not yet, but they’ll be here. They’ll know. I knew it was bound to happen sometime but why’d it have to happen to me? Why me?”

Slowly and soothingly I spoke: “Smiler, tell me what it is and I’ll see what I can do. It’s me, Mick. Did I grass when I was kicked out? No. I know what goes on here but I never breathed a word. What happened? Did someone do something?”

The last query I barked sharply and Smiler started. His stammer jumped with fear. “It’s, it’s bad.”

“How bad?”

“Nothing can save me.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“I wasn’t even, I wasn’t even supposed to be here today. I’ve got a pharmacology paper due. Jacques couldn’t come in. I’m co-, co-, covering for him. He was supposed to be here for the, for the, for the...”

“Delivery?” I asked.

“Yes,” whispered Smiler.

So that was it. Several things could rattle a resident student: one was to inadvertently provide the cause of death. Opportunities for error were rife: in my second year a poor fellow had somehow managed to inject a large quantity of air into a hoyden’s vein and prompted a fatal embolism. Mistakes often happened. and for all its rigours the discipline of medicine was as prey as any others to pure bad luck. Second to that was being caught out with a stolen dead body. Worst was finding dead a person you knew. “Show me,” I said.

“No, Mick, I can’t,” protested Smiler weakly.

“Why not? I know what this’s about. Let’s have a look.”

“I can’t. My God, the police. The police. They’ll tell my parents, they’ll put me in gaol.”