To settle his jangled nerves, as well as to render the cramped armchair more tolerable, he smokes an opium-laced Parliament, hoping that none of his fellow scholars have travelled widely enough to place its odour. To mitigate the stresses of his hunt, Lomax secured a small brick of the drug from a Chinese bathhouse, and has been smoking a measured amount daily. He has yet to experience any of opium’s negative effects, and feels only a warm and predictable relief from the lightning in his back. Even still, he remains steadfast in his conviction to cease the practice the second he returns home to Saint John.
He must have drifted off because he wakes with a start to find the librarian standing over him. “No Everett Greenwood ever served in the Queen’s Own Rifles,” she says dispassionately. “Although I did pull a Harris Greenwood. From Kingston?” she adds, brandishing a manila file. “Perhaps a relation?”
Snatching the file from her hand, Lomax dimly recalls Blank’s outlandish assertion that Everett was related to the famously blind West Coast lumber tycoon. Though military terms are foreign to Lomax—Mr. Holt had a knack for securing draft exceptions for his friends—it appears Harris Greenwood enlisted voluntarily through the Kingston detachment and returned from Europe in 1919, after earning the Mons Star and the Canadian General Service Medal. The file states he was uninjured, with no record of his being blinded in combat. Then, paper-clipped to the rear of the folder, Lomax finds Harris Greenwood’s service photograph: a soldier with dark hair standing with chin raised and helmet clutched against his ribs—the very likeness of the man who escaped him back at the flophouse.
Lomax pockets the photograph and hops a train back to Toronto the next day, elated by this fresh development which he can use to appease Mr. Holt—only to discover that the lock to his suite now refuses his key. He rides the elevator down to the concierge, who politely informs him that his hotel account has been frozen at the request of Mr. Holt. “We require a cash deposit if you intend to remain with us this evening, sir,” the man adds. Lomax hands over the remaining bills in his wallet and is given a new key.
Back in his room, he tears open the topmost of Holt’s telegrams.
AS WARNED YR EXPENSE ACCNTS FROZEN STOP DETECT MCSORLEY OF CN POLICE NOW HNDLING SRCH STOP RETRN TO ST JHN IMMED TO AVOID FURTH DISCIPLN
Since Holt Steel built much of the CN railroad, Mr. Holt sits on its board of directors, and in the past he’s used a railroad detective named Art McSorley to run down any fugitives who’ve bolted from Saint John. Lomax knows McSorley to be a cunning, brutal man, and if he gets his hands on the baby and the journal first, it will be irrefutable proof of Lomax’s total incompetence. What Mr. Holt means by “FURTH DISCIPLN” isn’t clear, but it could involve some sort of harm being visited upon Lomax’s family. In Lomax’s experience, if Mr. Holt becomes sufficiently enraged, there’s no cruelty that is beneath him. So for the first time in his career, Lomax decides to disobey his employer. He won’t return to Saint John as instructed. Instead he’ll go to Vancouver, find Harris Greenwood, and wait for Everett to show up there. Detective McSorley surely has no idea about Everett’s powerful brother, and in Lomax’s experience it’s always easier to greet a fugitive at the place they’re headed than to catch them along the way. If Lomax can secure the child and the journal and return them to Mr. Holt before Detective McSorley, he might still be able to hold on to his job and his home.
But trips require money, so the next morning Lomax tramps downstairs and informs the concierge that he’s just returned from breakfast to find his room disturbed. When the man accompanies him back upstairs, they discover the dresser overturned and large, fist-sized holes driven into the plaster walls. Areas of the bathroom tile are shattered and a wide chip has been knocked from the sink.
“We are very sorry for this, Mr. Lomax!” the concierge says in shock. “Is anything missing?”
“Yes,” Lomax replies, after he checks the empty billfold tucked in the bedside drawer.
“What exactly, sir? I’ll prepare a report. Of course our hotel will reimburse you for your lost articles.”
“Four hundred dollars,” Lomax replies. “Cash.”
After completing the hotel’s forms and writing up an account of the incident, Lomax receives his money from the cashier’s desk that afternoon, and immediately wires two hundred to Lavern back in Saint John. The remaining sum is more than sufficient for a first-class berth to Vancouver.
JUDGMENT
FOR GOOD LUCK on their return voyage, Harris Greenwood secures for Feeney and himself the two very same cabins on the very same steamer, the Empress of Australia. During the daytime, the passage is pleasant: trade winds soft from the southwest, the flat ocean a deep blue-green that Feeney describes as “normally only found upon an artist’s palette.” In the evenings, however, the sea roughens, and Harris and his describer dine in the first-class lounge beside a baby grand bolted to the floor, while the maître d’ spritzes their crisp white tablecloth with water to keep their plates from skating around. They eat mostly in silence, like children sharing a conspiracy, as Harris takes great pains to discuss only business matters and to avoid smiling or laughing altogether. When Feeney reveals that a cabin boy gave him an odd look up on the observation deck during their third day at sea, Harris insists they henceforth take meals separately.
Still, Feeney sneaks across the hall into Harris’s cabin to perform a nightly poetry reading, his delicious cello-like voice sweetening the air as they recline in leather chairs. When the reading is over, Feeney dims the lamp and they lie parallel in the narrow, sea-lolled bunk, Harris riveted in place with fright. At Yale, he occasionally saved up his scholarship per diems to go off campus and visit one of many brothels with his fellow students. But never did he enjoy himself the way his classmates professed to. For the act’s duration, he worried that they’d passed a lesser woman off to him, some homely crone that any sighted patron would flatly refuse, and as a result, he was often unable to properly conclude these engagements.
But after many minutes of fighting to remind himself that no eyes are upon them—not God’s, not Baumgartner’s, not the loggers who’d stomped those two swampers to death—Harris draws Feeney against him. Eventually, he even allows himself to run his hands over Feeney’s shape to discover that, other than his curiously hairy calves and small paunch, his body is like his face: lithe and smooth-muscled as a seal.
At first, Harris sought to keep the incidents at the movie theatre walled off within him, as he had the “little hell” he’d always sensed was there. He could have easily blamed the indiscretion on the sake, the cultural disorientation, the stresses of deal making, or the eels and urchins they’d been eating. Yet how can he possibly discredit this unimpeachable joy he’s found in his describer’s company? So much like the joy his bird collection offered him in dribs and drabs over the years, except in this case compounded a hundredfold.
“You failed to mention in your interview, Mr. Feeney, that your teeth are quite crooked,” Harris says after they’ve been kissing for an hour, an act that he’s still not able to perform without an undertow of nausea.