low brick buildings, and urchins playing stickball. I strode along, looking for a corner store, a tavern, and a tram stop, in that precise order. It was short work to find all three on Sebastopol. At Lucky’s I bought a fifteen of Buckinghams for a pair of dimes and an afternoon Herald for two coppers. Across the street a tavern advertised clean glasses. It was well past the yardarm, near three in the afternoon, and for all my efforts and the miles I’d travelled I deserved a drink.
After quickly draining one Export I ordered another and went through the ’paper. The Tories were looking for a new leader. Prime Minister Mackenzie King was headed to the Imperial Conference in London. Edison believed that there was life after death. Relics from the Franklin Expedition had been discovered in the high Arctic, deep in the Northwest Territories. Babe Ruth would be in town tomorrow, tickets starting at four bits. Nothing about a gunfight in the woods along the American border. I doubted that the morning Star or Gazette had reported anything; it’d been far too late to meet their deadlines. The French afternoon ’paper was similarly uninformative, devoted almost entirely to a headless torso found in Repentigny.
No news was bad news. This pointed to the worst option: the ambush had been a business vendetta. Jack and myself were betrayed and I wasn’t safe, not by a long chalk. If he’d been snared they would murder him but first turn the screws. Names of colleagues and accomplices. Jack knew where I lived, how I moved about. I was a loose end. I’d be tied up in a shroud.
Unless Jack had been killed in the fusillade. I shuddered. He’d told me to give him a week on the outside if anything went wrong. A week was too long and ninety-odd dollars and change would leave me with only enough for a ticket out. No. The danger was real, and my mouth went dry.
The next beer came lukewarm. The ’tender gave me the evil eye. Turning to the fight pages I smoked, drank, and thought, feeling a total wreck. Split the difference and give Jack three days to resurrect himself. Three days underground. First order of importance: new lodgings. Felt myself nodding over my cups and killed the ale. When the barkeep came again I paid and asked for a spool of twine, which he foraged for with an ill grace. I went to the jakes and wrapped the Webley in newspaper and tied it so the package looked like meat from the butcher’s. I went out to the street.
Across the way a carbuncle of people waited for a streetcar and when the trolley crashed to a stop I joined them in getting on. We went over the canal and I jumped out at Peel. There was a bathhouse nearby with a tailor’s attached where I could have my suit mended while I made my toilette. After that I’d find a new place to stay. It wasn’t advisable to return to my old flop, considering. I’d only left behind several textbooks, a Gladstone bag with a change of clothes, and my overcoat. No, Goddammit, something else: a tintype of Laura and myself on College Street, hidden between the pages of The Mauve Decade.
We’d been walking down the sidewalk last year, early September, when a shill outside a camera shop snapped a photograph and handed me a card. I’d had no mementos of her. She’d never written me a letter, never compromised herself in any way. What’s to compromise? I’d asked, we haven’t done anything scandalous. Only ever with extreme reluctance would Laura meet me and only after continued persistence on my part. I didn’t see it then, how little she cared. I’d returned to the studio a few days later for the developed print.
In the photograph she wore a silvery sable fur and a cloche hat like Theda Bara. I was in my three-piece suit, since pawned, and spats. She’d turned to the camera with a look of withering contempt, an expression I’d get to know too damn well. By Thanksgiving it was all over between us, such as it’d been. Burned to the ground. As a solace I began my other pursuit at the hospital. Incredible what a mere year wrought. Who was responsible for my fate? I’d thought that I was myself, until I fell in love.
At the bathhouse they issued me a towel and the key for a locker. I undressed, stored the package with the gun, and had the porter send my suit, shirt, and collar next door. In the hot room a burly lazar slept and an old bird peered at a wilted Police Gazette through steamed-over spectacles. I sweated out every atom of cordite, cocaine, and booze and then went for a cold plunge. Refreshed, I prepared to leave; my suit came back in decent trim with a note apologizing for not being able to remove tree sap from an elbow. I tipped a quarter in gratitude that there hadn’t been any brain or bone in the wash.
SATURDAY NIGHT IN the metropolis. Neon signs came to life on St. Catherine Street, syncopating light and music, red, green, and blue splashing in time with hot jazz from gramophones. I floated along with a suppertime crowd in the direction of Phillips Square. A vendor roasted chestnuts. Morgan’s department store was closed. Pigeons landed and shat on the head of the Roi Pacificateur behind me. Taking it as an augury I ambled to the Hotel Edward VII.
Hanging in the lobby was a portrait of the dead Emperor in his admiral’s rig.
“Who’s that, the Kaiser?” I asked through my nose like a Yankee.
The clerk pulled a face as I forged a signature in the register and forked over a dollar for the night. I went up to the fourth floor and entered a clean, bare room. After the day’s efforts some rest was prescribed me. Propped a chair under the door handle, unwrapped the Webley, took off my boots, and stretched out on the bed, the gun at hand. After dozing and mumbling and fading away a sudden fastball struck the pillow next to my face. Hypnic jerk. I started up and rubbed my eyes clear, then went and doused my head in cold water. Quarter to nine by the clock on the dresser; for our King the time at Sandringham was set a half-hour earlier than Greenwich Mean for the pheasant shooting. Jack had said quarter past nine every evening at the Dominion and this was the first night.
By the time I returned to its dirty streets the city was really starting to enjoy itself. Past the railway terminal on Dorchester smoke rose from the wide cut in the earth where trains marshalled below the street, readying themselves to scream north through the tunnel under the mountain. Stopping at an Imperial Tobacconist I bought Juicy Fruit and chewed it, crackling bubbles between my molars. At right was the largest building in the Empire, more massive than St. Paul’s or Canterbury Cathedral, the wedding-cake Sun Insurance behemoth. It anchored Dominion Square and had next to it the small tavern where Jack said he’d leave word if anything went wrong. How little he’d known.
I pushed my way into the crowded saloon and stepped up to the bar. Men were jawing politics or sport. Next to me a chap with a tin of Puck at his elbow gobbed tobacco into a spittoon at his feet between freshening gulps of beer, a disgusting choreography. I added chewing gum to the bucket of brown slime, bought a quart of Export, and retired, my back to a wall where I could watch the door. From scarlet faces came shouted scraps of talk.
“Redmen’ll top the Argos one-legged this year...”
“Bennett can’t make more of a mess of Ottawa than that straw man Meighen...”
“Went to her sister’s and won’t come to the door when I call...”
“Fired six good men for jack shit...”
The whole panoply of masculine weltschmerz. My problems were deeper and deadlier. I leaned back, drank, and scanned the room, waiting, watching. Next to me an old cove wearing a ratty beard and with a dead wet hand-rolled in his yap mauled a ’paper. So as not to be too noticeably alone I offered him a Buckingham.
“Thanks, sonny.”
He was thumbing the sports pages so I chose that as a topic.
“Looks like the Canucks are trying to buy a championship this year,” I said.
The cove turned to me and I continued: “Too bad about Vezina dying. Least they’ve got Howie Morenz, for starters.”
He
