“What, you milky?”
“Never touch the stuff,” I said.
“Then let’s get cracking.”
Jack yanked me out onto the Rue Telegraphe. We were on our way. I wanted more than anything a pretty redhead with pale skin asleep in my bed next to me. We neared a hateful neighbourhood. Nearby were smelters and machine works where they fabricated locomotives. I tried to imagine what the area had looked like eighty years ago and what it would eighty hence but couldn’t. Tomorrow beckoned with malevolence, more electricity, dynamite, barbed wire.
On the sidewalk stood humans, shift workers at the plant and conspiring labour agitators, the hoi polloi. Were they my kinfolk? No more. I was now a breed apart with blood on my knife. Every single thing was under my control, Jack for once drunker than I. There was nothing to do but continue.
Jazz was in the air, coming from a bar. We stumbled to it and from an apartment above us I heard the machine-gun clatter of a typewriter, typewronger, a news-hawk burning the midnight oil, grinding out a story for the afternoon ’paper. Jack and I were the perpetrators of a string of crimes that had shocked Montreal, starting with a bootlegging run that’d ended in the death of two, armed robbery of a cinema, beatings and shootings on the Plateau, a deadly fire in Chinatown, and other, private crimes. The Lord alone knew what Jack had been up to and how many heads he’d cracked. Ahead of us a corner boy with fresh pulp and ink under his arm cried:
We entered the saloon, a Negro club for Pullman porters and their ladies out for a night on the town. Eye whites glittered in the gloom and black faces glistened with sweat. It was hot as the jungle and onstage a fat darkie played piano. He pounded away, some crazy roll. We made it to the bar and held it up. Space was left us, the only whites in the house. Jack looked every inch the Pinkerton op, I an informer. He ordered whiskey and they refused payment so Jack let coins spill sloppily along the counter. It was good jazz and bad liquor. Presently a high yellow dame singer came out to join a tall bass player and squat drummer. She went to the front of the stage and the combo started in like a thunderstorm, the gal belting: “I just saw a maniac, maniac, maniac, wild and tearing his hair, jumping like a jumping jack, jumping jack, jumping jack, child you should’ve been there.”
“Nice tune,” grinned Jack.
The house started reeling and the Negroes got up to dance. I willed myself still. The booze tasted of petrol and burned going down. Jack bobbed his head and rapped his knuckles to the beat of the drums. We had a wide berth, an island of empty space around us. I caught stray suspicious glances.
The band really hopped and I downed more fuel. My uneasiness grew. If the cops raided the joint we’d be up to our necks. I also felt a gnawing, a craving. The drug.
“Let’s get out of this hole,” I said.
“Oke.”
Back in the night my sense of direction fled. A nasty wind had picked up and Jack was quiet now.
“This way,” I said.
He followed me down an alley in a direction. With a swede I lit a cigaret and passed it over. The hot tongue of my addiction licked at nerve endings and ran up my spinal column. I needed to fix that. Where? Our rambling took us past a factory and an office building covered in fire escapes. I could swear I saw a raccoon on a rubbish tip. At last we came onto a well-lighted square and with confusion I saw it was Place d’Armes. How’d we ended up here? Before us was the Bank of Montreal, a classical temple surmounted by Indians.
“Let’s go set a spell in the portico,” I said.
“Agreed.”
Jack reclined on the hard steps and I hid in a spot screened by wide columns. Jack looked at me and shook his head as I made up a shot. It went in, ice and heat, another withdrawal from the banking account of my life. What was my balance now? Probably overdrawn, paying negative interest. Jack hummed a tune. Something was not right, a numbness, an inability to feel my hands or feet. No. Bad sign. Very cold now.
“Jack.”
“What?”
“Help.”
“What?”
He turned to me.
“I’m sorry, I...”
“Jesus, Mick. What is it?”
“I took too much,” I said. “Help.”
SATURDAY
COBWEBS HANGING FROM the ceiling of an unknown room. I regarded them for some minutes, then managed to turn my head to look at my body. I lay in my combinations, with a cloth bound around my right foot. An ugly pain coursed up the leg and a terrible black dryness parched me. Jack came into the room, carrying a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
“You kicked the mirror over there somehow,” he said.
“Bad luck.”
He undressed the wound and poured alcohol on my foot. I winced. Jack laughed. The bastard took pleasure in my pain, repayment for playing nursemaid.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Somewhere else.”
“What time is it?”
“Ten,” he said. “Saturday morning.”
“Saturday?”
I’d been out for a full day.
“Thought you might go west on me,” Jack said. “I had to call in Jacques Price to look at you.”
“How’s he?”
“Scared. The school’s up in arms. Smiler’s disappeared.”
Jack re-tied the dressing.
“The police are looking for him. They dragged the river near to where the bridge is being built. Jacques said folks think he’s offed himself.”
“Did he?”
“No one knows. It could be suicide. He had a paper due and never turned it in.”
Jack looked at me queerly. I sat up.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Laura’s gone.”
He studied me.
“Where?”
“Another mystery. She’s been gone for days.”
“Same time as Smiler?”
“The day before.”
“Together?”
“That’s the question.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“You know what I think.”
I didn’t really. Had I revealed my guilt in my delirium? I was lucid enough right now and felt much improved, actually. If Jack suspected me he never let on. At last he said: “I think she’s run off with that Judas Bob.”
I almost laughed in his face. He went and sat in a chair by the broken mirror, looking exhausted. It occurred to me that he might be concerned for my well-being, or at the very least, his own hide.
