The Man Who Killed

incandescence of Montreal.

Headlamps blazed along the wharves. I heard police sirens, far away. We’d slipped the net. Black silhouettes of church spires and the mountain framed the night against the burning luminous city, stars high beyond, Orion rising. The shore retreated, diminishing as we were swept along. A massive steamship at Jacques Cartier Quay boomed its whistle and was echoed by a train pulling along the shore. We had a way to go to make our escape and Christ knew what was on the other side, wherever we ended up. Our skiff passed into the fast current in line with the clock tower at Victoria Quay. It was now past midnight.

“Meet me under the clock,” I said.

A reckless hilarity welled up in me. I saw Jack grin at the Vancouver expression, the timepiece at Birks under which everyone met. I sang: “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

Past St. Helen’s Island and the looming foundations of the harbour bridge we struck land at the southern shore and ground up on the rocky shingle at Longueil. Jack jumped out and tugged the lead rope. I leapt after. We took heavy stones and staved in the rowboat, Cortes at Vera Cruz. Jack sat and took off his hat, then held his wristwatch to his ear.

“Stopped,” he said.

We climbed through the thin trees lining the riverbank to higher ground. I looked back at the city. Jack kept walking. I met him at a ditch angled away from the wind. We lay down in an empty field back to back for warmth, coats tightly buttoned. Orion hunted above us, our companion through the long watch.

HALLOWE’EN

THE GREY FIGURE stirred with the morning light. Frost had formed on the dying blades of grass and the ground was hard and cold.

“Dreamed I was ironing the carpet,” Jack said, rolling and levering himself upright. He swiped smut from the corners of his eyes, then dirt and leaves from coat and trousers. We were near a wire property fence and I sat with my back to a post studded with rusty nails. Earlier I’d taken breakfast: a shot of morphine.

“I dreamt I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

Jack laughed and stood to take account of himself, his billfold and lost cane, then pissed a steaming stream of urine in the growing sunshine. He buttoned, tucked in his shirt, smoothed his hair, replaced his hat, and jumped up and down to come alive, then checked the Browning and the Webley. Done, he walked to me and handed me my weapon.

“What now?” I asked.

“How much money do you have?”

“Six hundred or so,” I said.

“It’ll do. Want to tie up a few loose ends. Then we hit the road.”

“Oke.”

Jack put the pistol in his belt at the small of his back. He sorted through a sheaf of papers: stray banknotes, Brown’s gambling markers, lucky playing cards. I stood and shook like a dog before the day’s ramble. Jack vaulted the fence and I followed; our boots started crunching over field stubble. A bell for early mass slowly tolled in the bright, cold air. We walked towards its source.

At a crossroad east of the church stood a garish Crucifixion, the blood a startling red against the blue sky. Jesus was snow-white; his peeling paint lent the martyr a leprous cast. At the foot of the execution device someone had planted coloured cellophane flowers. We continued past Golgotha to Rome.

“Saint-Zotique,” Jack said, eyeing the clapboard. “Wonder who he is when he’s at home.”

Old women in black and bearded men congregated at the open doors. Atop a wagon hitched to a sad dray sat a dour moustached man and his enshawled wife with their seven silent children. Horses stood next to farming lorries and a collection of old Fords and Frontenacs. Abutting the church was a straggling orchard. Jack pulled tough little apples from tree boughs and we walked west, the sun warming our backs.

By degrees the sky lightened. Clouds thickened into pleasing discrete masses serene and indifferent to us in the sparkling blue. There was the play of sun warming the earth and from bare branch to rose trellis before a tidy square house flitted a pair of tardy, ragged robins. Jack bit into an apple and spat.

“Sour as hell.”

We walked along the verge as the day came to life, touching our hats to ladies and nodding at men.

Half an hour more and we reached Longueil proper, a quartier of low buildings. I was exhausted, dampened by the drug and a fatal indifference. Minor traffic moved afoot on the macadamized roads past a closed bank, shuttered barbershop, the Knights of Columbus, a general store open for business despite the Sabbath. Jack pointed and said: “The Bell.”

The sign read “The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Local and Long-Distance Calls.” We entered the store. To clean my teeth I bought a spruce beer off the lackadaisical shop proprietor and eavesdropped on Jack in the booth.

“Trunk call to Montreal,” he shouted into the tube. “Hotel Montmartre.”

He winced as the connection clicked and screeched. Cross the river south and you were in another city, another world, French Canada.

“Bonjour, monsieur. Name’s Marlow, room something. Can’t remember. I checked in a few days ago. Marlow without an ‘e.’ By chance are there any messages for me?”

Jack closed his eyes and seemed to will himself still. I’d seen him like this at the races when his horse broke from the pack near the post. That gambler’s lust within him. Here was his long shot and he wanted it. I sipped the gentle beer and watched. A minute passed. He opened his eyes, that fierce blue.

“Parfait. Merci, monsieur.”

Jack rang off and grinned wickedly at me.

“Our bird’s in flight. We’ll bag him yet. Let’s go.”

“Where?” I asked.

“For a ride.”

Outside on the porch Jack oriented himself and then continued south to a cluster of irregular shacks between the highway and the freight tracks. He turned down an alleyway and we surprised brown rats skittering over a smoking mound of trash. Jack and I stepped over burnt vegetable waste, greasy crushed cans, and broken Coca- Cola bottles then through the slats of a fence bordering a decrepit house. Behind it sat a lorry with a jerrycan in its paybed. Jack touched the truck’s bonnet for warmth and shook his head. We went ’round an outhouse to the back porch and a screen door. Jack took out his Browning. All was still.

The door swung open creakily at his touch and we entered a dark, cluttered kitchen. Bedroom to the right, to the left a sitting room with a cold Quebec heater. Jack and I did a circuit. He found nothing in a wardrobe or under the stained mattress of the unmade bed. I spilled a glass jar of green-blue rusted pennies and Indian quarter-anna pieces on a table covered in scorch marks from forgotten cigarets. The icebox was bare and smelled of mould. The whole place was dirty, depressing. Jack pushed swollen copies of the Journal de Montreal off a seat in the living room and settled in.

“What’re we looking for?” I asked.

“Keys to that truck.”

“Whose is this dump?”

“Martin’s,” he said.

The third driver from our convoy all those eons ago. If, as it appeared, the Senator’d crossed us and sicced the police on Jack and myself, it seemed the least we could do was return the favour to his creature.

“We’ll settle his hash,” Jack said, crossing a leg and lighting a cigarette. My yen for the tobacco awoke flickerings of another, more substantial need. I swallowed and swallowed again.

“And your telephone call?”

“Brown came through. Bob and a woman crossed the border at one this morning. If I know my man they’re holed up in a hotel.”

“Where?”

“Plattsburgh.”