The Man Who Killed Read Free Page B

orders. Go forth and multiply, ye sons of Erin. Factories crowded by millworks and stables. There hung throughout a pall of brown coalsmoke and river stink, worse than St. Lawrence Main to the east. In Griffintown you had your shanty Irish landed from Cork and environs; the Main, by comparison, swarmed with Chosen from their own Pale of Settlement on the Ural Steppes. Both peoples crossed the water by way of an exodus, running either from the Famine and Major Boycott or the Tsar and his Cossacks to be jammed hugger-mugger in warrens and fresh misery. Micks and Kikes a pair of lost tribes here in the New World, same as the old one. Meanwhile stray cats loped down alleyways and skinny vicious curs growled at silent rats.
    Corner hawks loitered and sized up we two strolling pushovers. Jack’s easy carriage, boxer’s build, and damn-your-eyes air bought us a pass, despite his Beau Brummell attire. I balled fists in my pockets and thought of my fresh hundred-dollar stake. They’d roll you for a piece of string down this way. Jack whistled a song I couldn’t place. We were now near Wellington. A pair of drunks on a stoop fought over a bottle. Dark figures in recessed doorways grunted, copulating. I shuddered as dwarf streetlamps sputtered. Jack pushed open a door into a tavern. Smoke hung from the ceiling down to my celluloid collar. We were steadily watched by whiskered, simian faces as Jack made his way to a table near a smeared, greasy window. He jerked his head past the topers, their paws curled around quart bottles, and I went to the bar for two of Black Horse, two dimes all told, thank you very much. Back at the table Jack sat and watched an entranceway across the street.
    â€œLooks clean,” he said. “Shall we?”
    We took our untouched, corked bottles with us out again and across the road to a beat-up pile of dreary lodgings. Indoors was the smell of wet woollens left too long on the stove, stewed cabbage, damp, mould, cruelty, and mice. Jack led up three flights of stairs. I heard muffled curses behind one door, someone sobbing piteously behind another.
    On the topmost landing Jack took out an almost comically oversized key, like something out of a Vaudeville sketch, and used it to open a giant padlock on a numberless door. The security seemed needless. There was no electricity in the room, which was lit only by the pale glow from without. It was furnished with a chair, a basin on a dresser, an iron bedframe with sagging mattress, an ancient wardrobe, and a view out the window to the tavern we’d just been in. Jack took a long suspicious gander at the street below. Satisfied, he drew the curtain, lit a candle, and set it on the floor behind an accordion shade.
    â€œNever too careful.”
    I took the chair. Jack removed his coat despite the cold. I put my hat on my knee. Jack passed me a corkscrew to open the bottles. We hoisted silently and drank. There was a framed picture on the wall depicting a saint. Jack took it down and laid it on the dresser face-up. Then he pulled a small glass vial from his pocket and yanked a rubber stopper from its neck with his teeth. From it Jack poured white powder onto the glass, over a print of St. Veronica with her mouchoir. I got that old anxious feeling, a roiling loosening of my bowels. Cocaine was near enough morphine in the pharmacopoeia to evoke a buried desire.
    â€œWe’ve a long night ahead of us,” Jack said. “Need some pep. How’s that sound?”
    â€œNerve food, sure.”
    â€œChock full of vitamins.”
    He used a short tube to sniff some of the cocaine and passed the whole works to me. I took a noseful, tasted metal at the back of my throat, and touched the source of the flavour with my tongue. I drank some beer to wash it away. Jack offered a cigaret and we smoked.
    â€œIt’s like this,” he said. “Three trucks along the canal at midnight. Three drivers. I’m riding with the first, you with