The Man Who Killed

“Jacques showed me how to fix you up a dose,” Jack said. “It’s no time to wean you off. I need you. How long’ve you been back on the spike?”

“Since Chinatown,” I said.

“Mick, Mick, Mick.”

“You don’t have to tell me, I know. But what’d you expect? Place temptation before me and I fall. Thus endeth the lesson.”

“Very well.”

Jack sighed and rubbed his eyes. He yawned.

“Price told me to get a little food in you. I took the liberty of having your suit sponged and pressed.”

My mind turned to my overcoat and the wad of cash sewn into its lining until my eyes spotted it hanging from a hook.

“What for?” I asked.

“We’ve an appointment,” he said.

“We do? Who with?”

“You’ll see.”

I sat up and felt the world turn several revolutions. My brow felt heated, my body clammy.

“What happened the other night?” I asked.

Jack informed me he’d manhandled my corpse into a ’cab after I’d collapsed and told the driver I was dead drunk. In this apartment he tipped me into a tub of cold water and first thing in the morning called Smiler at the Royal Victoria, then Jacques Price at the school. Price came and determined that my overdose wasn’t a serious one. On the table had been left a stopgap Jacques brought to help lower my needed dosage, a bottle of Browne’s Chlorodyne. I thanked Jack for his forbearance. It was a part of his nature I rarely recognized. On the other hand, none of this would’ve happened without his impetus. Prima causa Jack. At the back of my mind I wondered, though. Had I done this on purpose?

“You’re a downy one, you know that,” Jack said to me, smiling.

“The downiest.”

For a few more hours I lay prone and helpless, drinking my medicine to relieve fatigue. I experienced a slight lacrimation, tears for myself and my state. Jack went for a flask of soup and arrowroot biscuits. From outside came a droning airplane. After eating I tried my pins and was surprised to find strength. I took a Scotch bath, shaved, looked at the tender holes in my arm, then climbed into my suit and tie and was ready to go. Jack came and with a mock formality handed me back my Webley. I followed him out of the room and away from this, another run-down bolt-hole in another bad part of town, Charlevoix by the canal this time. We took a taxi to a cafe on St. Catherine. Jack ordered java, I a Sal Hepatica. Morphine had made me constipated and I needed a blow.

“What’s on the menu?” I asked.

“It’s the peace pipe,” Jack said. “Word from on high.”

“Sounds peachy.”

“Keep your eyes open and on me. I’m afraid it may be a trap,” he warned.

“Where?”

“Avalon.”

I buttoned myself up as we walked the last few blocks to Jack’s rendezvous. At Sherbrooke I watched men working atop an enormous apartment building, a great Caledonian chateau of limestone and shining copper like a CPR hotel. As it happened I was glad my suit’d been cleaned. We climbed steps to where a blackcoated ape stood with his hands over his groin. With a nod at Jack massive oaken doors opened to let my friend and myself into the Mount Royal Club.

The receiving room was quiet and august, all dark wood and polished tiles. We were in one of the Empire’s redoubts, all of a pattern wherever nabobs ruled: Cairo, Cape Town, Bombay, Rangoon, Shanghai, Vancouver, Dublin, London, Montreal. Each club was cut from a cloth, with portraits of racehorses on the walls, bound copies of Punch in the reading room, wog waiters in waistcoats ironing weeks-old copies of the Times. Ci-devant colonial administrators, remittance men, and third sons in old school ties sponged drinks at the bar and damned the natives. A muted grandfather clock sat ticking, set to Greenwich Mean Time. Over the fireplace hung a framed visage of the sovereign, Queen Mary an inch lower. A stern man in a hard white collar, silk tie, grey vest, black swallowtail, and gold-pinstriped trousers met us at reception, his shoes polished to a glossy jet. He resembled a sergeant promoted officer in the field. Jack appeared damned natty and I wasn’t shabby enough to be booted out. Standards, don’t you know. I resisted a fierce urge to pick my nose.

We signed the book and I noticed that Jack had given in at last and written Richard Hannay, his beau ideal. I amused myself by putting down Patrick Murphy, a true Mick’s handle amongst these long-nosed Saxons. Jack moved in stride as we were escorted by the chamberlain past a massive globe of exotic wood, turning right down a corridor to a private room where a gross figure awaited us, a fat man spilling out of a leather chair. The Senator.

He was alone, neither of his thugs in sight. The club had stretched a point letting one Frenchman in; accommodating two roughnecks to boot wouldn’t be cricket. The Senator toyed with his fob chain. At its end was a gold triangle. He reached his hand to a burled wood box filled with cigars and selected one. I saw his ring and finally, finally I understood who was in charge. Some Brotherhood.

“Here we are,” Jack said.

“Alors, Mutt and Jeff, yes,” said the Senator.

He was alone until the terrier bitch popped onto his lap.

“How’s Rex?” asked Jack.

“As you see, she is well.”

“That’s not who I’m talking about.”

“Ah, oui.”

A mischievous spark burned in the Senator’s black eyes as he sucked wetly at the cigar. Jack walked over to the box, took a cylinder for himself, and sat down.

“He is, we will say, aware of your service,” said the Senator. “It is accomplished?”

“Last Friday,” said Jack.

“Very admirable. When do you expect it complete?”

“Bientot. Keep your hair on. It takes a little time to work. No traces.”

I studied a marble Mercury on a table. Pieces fitted together.

“Then the threat, it is eliminated,” the Senator said.

“Yes,” said Jack, lighting up.

“Bien.”

“As for the other business, I apologize,” Jack said. “It was an error of judgment.”

“Mistakes, they happen.”

“Keep your eye on the ’papers,” Jack said.

“I will,” said the Senator. “Yes, I will.”

My morphine hunger returned as I drank in the rich cigar smoke filling the room. The Senator hadn’t lit his. A panel in the wall slid open to our left and the club’s majordomo appeared.

“You are wanted,” he sniffed.

Jack stood and looked at me, then imperceptibly shook his head. Through the opening I saw a sitting room with a tall striking man standing with his back to the fire. He wore a toothbrush moustache. With a shock I saw it was Laura’s father, Sir Dunphy.

“Then we’re square,” Jack said to the Senator.

The Senator smiled and closed his eyes. I didn’t like his crafty look at all. Jack turned to me and said: “Siu sam.” Look out.

The Senator stroked Rex. He spoke to me.

“Your friend, how well do you know him?”

“Depuis longtemps,” I said.

“He has done the world a service, I think.”

“Comment?”

“There are, how do you say, a people who wish to destroy this world. Cosmopolitans who want impurity.”