THE MAN WHO KILLED
THE
MAN
WHO
KILLED
fraser nixon
Copyright © 2011 by Fraser Nixon
First U.S. edition 2012
11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1
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Douglas & McIntyre
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver bc Canada V5T 4S7
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives
Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-569-5 (pbk.) · ISBN 978-1-55365-788-0 (ebook)
Editing by John Burns
Cover design by Peter Cocking
Cover photograph by John Sherlock
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book
Contents
THE ASSERTION IS made that since Noah came out of the Ark, never have so many new and mysterious things been presented in a single evening’s performance as Houdini, the world famous magician and mystifyer will offer when he appears at the Princess Theatre for his engagement of one week beginning Monday evening. There will not be a dull moment in the whole entertainment, it is promised, and the mysteries will not only astonish and bewilder but they will enthuse as well, for the charm of newness applies to the entire programme.
Houdini’s production for his evening’s entertainment is something so new, so big, so compelling that one cannot possibly conceive in advance. It can truthfully be said that it is the most novel and wonderful entertainment ever presented within the realm of the theatre. It will sweep you off your feet and transport you to a land you never knew existed.
Montreal Herald, October 15, 1926
JACK WAS LATE. The silver hunter my father had given me was gone, pawned for fifty dollars a fortnight past, but the clock by the river read half past six. I fished into an inside coat pocket for my cigaret case, the next to go for the needful. Inside were three Forest and Streams. With a sparked vesta I lit one, smoked, waited, cursed Jack and his ways. A rat slouched along the stone walls by the pier. Porters sweated by. Stevedores pulled barrels down from loading cranes and trundled them about. River gulls circled and screamed over the septic stink. Ranked grain elevators nearly hid the tower clock; five more minutes passed. Five more after that’d be forty minutes I’d waited. Goddammit. With an invisible .22 I drew a bead on the rat’s head. Vermin were loaded with bacilli. No clean things around the harbour. My fingers dropped the smouldering fag end, adding it to the general filth. To my left a long freight train ground by, vomiting black coalsmoke from a bent funnel, the engine’s whistle howling agony. Automobiles in low gear whined and sounded their horns at slow horses straining at harness, dragging wagonloads uphill over cobblestones. Second-to-last cigaret. Let the matchwood burn to the quick and crush the charcoal under my boot. This is who I am. The sole still figure in the moil.
Jack had somehow found me at my digs. He’d left a telephone message with my bitch of a landlady. Whilst forking it over she’d given me the fish eye. I’d been skipping her revolting meals and walking the streets all hours, boring myself to death in the reading room of the Mechanics’ library, sneaking in after curfew only to slip back out before dawn. I was two weeks late on rent. Grudgingly she’d handed me Jack’s imperative only after I parted with my last ten dollars. She smelled money in his command, and the old baggage was probably correct. Jack always had the stuff or the wherewithal to get more. I counted on him.
Eastwards and directly towards me a steamer bore down, passing between the high cement uprights of the harbour bridge being built there by ants. Looked like an Empress, first link in the All-Red Route, Southampton–Montreal. Filled, no doubt, with brainless debutantes returning from the season in London and presentation at court. Lucky girls were rogered by dukes in leafy bowers on spreading estates, the unfortunate given pitying notices in the society pages of the Star and wed off to dull bankers
