know what was asked. Brown took out a small change purse, picked inside it for a coin, and paid for a bock. He looked around and for an uncomfortable moment I thought he recognized me. Couldn’t be, as I’d been behind him when he had his little colloquy with Jack in the alley. I shammed some more with the bore.
“You’re not from here if the Pats are your team,” I said.
“No sir, I’m up from Toronto to visit my daughter Dorothy. She’s a typewriter at the O’Sullivan school.”
Brown finished his beer and left. I excused myself from the fascinating repartee and made a beeline to the bar. I put down a half-dollar.
“That fellow ask after anyone?” I asked the barkeep.
He took the coin and answered: “Yeah. A Godfrey.”
“Godfrey?”
“Yeah.”
“Any message for Sam from Pete?”
“Nope. None I know.”
Snookered. Jack hadn’t been here. I hurried out after Brown to see where he went. He was crossing the square in the direction of the Windsor Hotel. Jack must be using the Dominion as his letter drop. Shades of Junius and the coffee shops in the days of George III. Brown hadn’t received a message and neither had I. The little man quick-stepped it to Cypress and I followed, stalking in darkness. At first it looked as though he was headed for the Metropolitan newsstand but he turned into the doorway of a forbidding building. With entree to that particular address I learned the Scotsman’s vice. Not drink, as his purchase at the saloon had made clear. The building he’d gone into was a gambler’s hell, specializing in barbotte and chemin de fer. He’d be throwing the dice all night. As it was a private club I abandoned my pursuit. Unlike Jack I detested games of chance. My tastes were other. Nonetheless, I now knew how Jack and the bootleggers owned Brown. They’d probably bought up his debts. Did Brown know anything about the debacle in the woods? Had he been the one who tipped off the enemy? I had questions, but I didn’t half like the idea of being noticed skulking about. Besides, I was wrung out with the day’s events. I resolved to wait it out and try the Dominion again tomorrow.
Back in my hotel’s lobby the bored porter sat reading Oscar Wilde. I went up to my room and listened in the hallway before carefully opening the door, diagnosing myself with tachycardia, tenth occurrence of the day. The room was empty and very gradually my heartbeat slowed to normal again. I put the revolver under my pillow after checking the sturdy lock on the door, propping a chair once more under the knob. Nervous exhaustion kept me twitching in the bed for a spell. A flooding taste of caramel filled my mouth while my floating mind went through the procedure of preparing a shot of morphine, the precise and sinister ritual. Presently I faded away to the sounds of bawdy shouting and the snatches of drunken song, wood breaking, mirrors smashing, and the city tearing itself apart.
SUNDAY
PEALS FROM EVERY spire around downtown roused me. What had Mark Twain said about this city? Couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a church window. Morning bells are ringing. Sonnez les matines. Are you sleeping, Brother Jack, or mouldering in a shallow grave? Knowing him, Jack had slipped out from under and was in the arms of a tender dollymop. French church bells sounded different: ding dang
Outside was grey again, threatening rain. I put myself to rights and whistled downstairs, tossing my key to a new pimp at the desk. Hung-over wet-haired American businessmen booked out after weekend benders. Bought the ’paper off a boy outside and determined to eat at Windsor Station Grill, checking the scheduled departures just in case. The station was near my old digs. Beyond pulling up a pew there wasn’t much doing of a Sunday morning.
My landlady would herself be kneeling with the Paddies at St. Patrick’s right about now. I could chance ducking back into the rooming house for my remaining effects. I decided to risk it and so hiked over to Stanley and a file of nondescript row houses. I climbed the steps of the third from the end and tried the latch. It gave. I slipped in. The stand-up clock in the foyer ticked but its hands never moved, a distillation of the state of affairs at Miss Milligan’s. As there was no one stirring I took the stairs two at a time to my room. Someone had been in it, the bitch rummaging after I’d failed to show two nights running. I filled my Gladstone with books and linen, grabbed my overcoat and gloves, and was back outside in no time flat.
I took my bag to the station and ate ham and eggs at the grill. The morning
The best prospect of rooms to let was in lower Westmount, or perhaps I could go native on the east side amongst the Frogs. There I’d stick out, a square-headed peg amongst the peasantry. No, I wanted to remain near the train stations and the river. It was far too easy to get trapped on this island in the St. Lawrence.
The concourse at Windsor was crowded and noisy. I noticed no police presence save a sole bobby pacing along with his hands behind his back, nodding pleasantly at unattended women. On the board I considered prospective destinations, all uninviting: Ottawa, Kingston, Niagara Falls. I should head over to Bonaventure Station to locomotive south. Winter was coming. The Florida land boom had busted and I could tend the greens of a golf course rotting away into mangrove swamps and live off alligator meat, oranges, and malaria. Sail away to Havana and die. Too much to ask for on a mere hundred dollars. No, ninety-seven now. How much would be enough? Have to see.
I walked over to the waiting room. Inside, tramps warmed their feet at the stove, smoking sweeps from the floor. It was overhot and brutally close, so I turned around and checked my bag for the price of a dime. Exiting the station I nodded at the bronze Lord Mount Stephen, a statue everyone mistook for King George. It was the beard. This was George Stephen, father of the railroad west. He’d started his rise at a haberdasher’s back in Edinburgh, picking a pin up off the floor and tucking it behind his lapel for use later, impressing the bosses with his perfect thrift. From there to the Bank of Montreal and the CPR and now he was dead, his mansion converted into a private club for those who couldn’t cut the mustard with the reviewing board of the Mount Royal or St. James. You couldn’t turn around in this town without tripping over a striving clerk from the Old Country made nabob and knight in the New. The earthly paradise was a reading room where one could snooze over three-day-old copies of the
As if to illustrate my point St. George’s across the street disgorged its parishioners. Out came barons who’d traded the kirk for a well-carved Anglican pew. I saw Sir Rupert Irons, Holt, a few Molsons, and that fat bastard Huntley McQueen shaking hands with the reverend. Today’s sermon had no doubt been on how the rich could enter heaven by forging a needle out of Ontario steel large enough for a dromedary camel to stroll on through. These were the men to do it, our captains of industry, plutocrats in the Commonwealth’s service. Inside the church a plaque commemorated an Irishman killed in Quetta, India, due to a mishap playing polo, fondly remembered by his regiment here in Montreal. There was Empire for you, binding soldiers, financiers, priests, politicians, aristocrats, and its discontents. Myself.
An itch played in the palm of my hand. Money coming my way. I scratched a lucifer on the rough stone of the station to light a smoke. Ninety-seven dollars and change. Now what to do? Might ride a trolley across the island and back. Instead I remembered what I’d read in the ’paper yesterday and hied uptown to mooch in the little park beside the new Forum.
WHEN THE HOUR came ’round I dropped fifty cents for a seat in the stands at Atwater Park to see the ball game with Ruth and his ringers playing for both sides of two local all-star teams, a sort of Vaudeville turn. Assembling to watch, we were a good-sized crowd, it being the last time to enjoy outdoor sport before the weather turned completely. Before us was Ruth at home plate, warming up by blasting baseballs out of the park, one after
