The Man Who Killed by Fraser Nixon Page B

my temple. It was already past dusk. Oh, but the poor chambermaid who’d find this ruined body. There’d be another girl, a knock-kneed number in a sunny small town. I picked up the ’phone again for the front desk and ordered coffee, then leafed through the magazines in search of some truth. Instead of revelation I found tooth powder advertisements and cures for halitosis. There was nothing real, nothing like Laura in a black coat, black gloves on her elegant hands standing beneath a tree amongst the fallen chestnut leaves, her long hair blazing fire in the October evening light. Or had that been a painting in the Museum of Fine Arts?
    The coffee came but I sent it back down on the pretext it was stale. I started pacing, a kind of chattering voice chasing and echoing itself inside my skull. On the dresser was a wireless and I turned it on to the sound of a cat being strangled. The steel whisker went up and down the wire, picking up dance music, hymns, a snowfall warning for farmers, and then nothing but crackling. The empty skies were filling up with voices: Morse code, radio transmissions, unknown electrical rays. Airplane propellers drilled through the atmosphere. It was too much for one such as myself, raised in youth on the fixed verities to be found in Chums and the Boy’s Own Annual, tales of the Raj where cricket-playing adventurers always triumphed over dusky Arabs, the shaven-headed Bosche, and any stray Bengali tigers. It was a world with Kim astride the gun, Richard Hannay thwarting the Black Stone, and a sundowner under drowsy punka fans your just reward. We have got the Maxim gun and you have not. All of which had been torn apart one August morning in 1914, mowed down by ranks of machine guns and plowed under by percussion bombs.
    I resolved to walk and clear my head. I would hustle a game of billiards on the lower Main, see a moving-picture show, do anything but trawl through that sea of memory filled with lost loves, squandered hopes, wasted time, embarrassing drunken antics. I rode the lift down to the lobby and then, outside the saloon, hesitated.
    â€œBEG YOUR PARDON. Would you happen to have a light?”
    She was a little older than I, well made up and wearing a light fur and a black velvet ribbon with a charm tied high around her throat. I fumbled a vesta towards her face. She touched my hand as she lit her cigaret. A woman alone. I tried to picture myself as I must appear to her.
    â€œAre you from around here?” she asked coolly, regarding me from her perch at the bar.
    â€œEnough to know my way around,” I answered, scanning the room for its few denizens.
    â€œI see. Where are you from, originally?”
    â€œThat’s a very good question,” I smirked.
    She laughed and I saw the smallest touch of lipstick on a canine. The colour of her eyes was difficult to tell in the light.
    â€œWell then, how long is ‘enough’?”
    â€œTwo years,” I said. “Two years too many.”
    â€œDon’t you like Montreal?”
    â€œNot particularly,” I said.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œDo you know what it is? I can’t stand the way people complain about the weather here.”
    â€œIt gets pretty cold in the winter, doesn’t it?” she asked.
    I started to warm up.
    â€œYes, but they’ve known that for four hundred years. It isn’t as if it’s a surprise every autumn when the mercury drops. The ’papers are always full of it as though winter’s an unusual hardship or some blasted thing.”
    â€œPeople like to gripe,” she said. “It’s the way of human nature.”
    â€œLike I’m doing right now. Would you care for a drink?” I asked.
    â€œHow nice.”
    I snapped my fingers, showed the waiter part of my breadroll and beckoned him to follow us as we floated deeper into the room. The steward came and filled the lady’s glass, as though by telepathy. The power of money. The