St. Urbain's Horseman

FICTION
The Acrobats
(1954)
Son of a Smaller Hero
(1955)
A Choice of Enemies
(1957)
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
(1959)
The Incomparable Atuk
(1963)
Cocksure
(1968)
The Street
(1969)
St. Urbain's Horseman
(1971)
Joshua Then and Now
(1980)
Solomon Gursky Was Here
(1989)
Barney's Version
(1997)

FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
(1975)
Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur
(1987)
Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case
(1995)

HISTORY
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!:
Requiem for a Divided Country
(1992)
This Year in Jerusalem
(1994)

TRAVEL
Images of Spain
(1977)

ESSAYS
Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports
(1968)
Shovelling Trouble
(1972)
Notes on an Endangered Species and Others
(1974)
The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays
(1978)
Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album
(1984)
Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions
(1990)
Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions
(1998)
On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It
(2001)
Dispatches from the Sporting Life
(2002)

ANTHOLOGIES
The Best of Modern Humour
(1983)
Writers on World War II
(1991)

Defenceless under the night

Our world in a stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere
,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust
,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair
,

Show an affirming flame
.

W. H. AUDEN

S
OMETIMES JAKE WONDERED IF THE
DOKTOR
, GIVEN HIS
declining years, slept with his mouth open, slack, or was it (more characteristically, perhaps) always clamped shut? Doesn't matter. In any event, the Horseman would extract the gold fillings from the triangular cleft between his upper front teeth with pliers. Slowly, Jake thought, coming abruptly awake in a sweat. “He's come,” Jake proclaimed aloud.

Beside him, Nancy stirred.

“It's nothing,” Jake said softly. “Just the dream again. Go back to sleep.”

The
Doktor
was reputed to keep armed bodyguards, maybe four of them. Certainly he kept a weapon handy himself. Say a service revolver tucked under his pillow or an automatic rifle leaning against the wall in his villa with the barred windows off an unmarked road in the jungle, between Puerto San Vincente and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio López, on the Paraná River. Even that doesn't matter, Jake thought. St. Urbain's Horseman will take him by surprise, gaining the advantage.

Jake couldn't get back to sleep. So, careful not to disturb Nancy, he slid out of bed and into his dressing gown, sucking in his stomach to squeeze between the bed and the baby in the bassinet.

Once in his attic aerie, Jake glanced automatically at the wall clock that had been adjusted to show the time in Paraguay – the
Doktor's
time. It was 10:45 p.m. in Asunción.

Still yesterday.

Jake stood back and studied his desk, ostensibly such a mess, but to his initiated eye an ingeniously conceived system of booby traps. The second right-hand drawer, for instance, which seemed carelessly left open, was in fact precisely one and three quarter inches open. The airmail envelope, which appeared to be haphazardly thrown over his diary, had actually been laid there at an exact thirty-degree angle to his desk lamp. Or was it sixty degrees? Goddammit. The trouble with Jake's snares, so cunningly set for his mother the night before, was that the morning after he could never recall the crucial measurements and angles, and he was too indolent to keep a written record. Scrutinizing the second right-hand drawer again, it occurred to Jake that maybe last night he had set it at two and three quarter inches. Or was that the night before?

Four a.m. Jake drifted downstairs to the kitchen, where he fixed himself a gin and tonic and lit a Romeo y Julieta. The hall mirror caught him … Jake tugged at his cap. He shook his head, rejecting the catcher's signal, reared back on his left leg, kicked, and threw. No-Hit Hersh's garbage ball. Inimitable, unhitable. Wondrous Willie Mays swung and missed and the umpire hollered “Strike three.”
Gut gezukt
, Jake thought. And so much for Red Smith, who had put him down for trade bait.

There would be a three-hour wait at least for the morning papers, unless, Jake thought, I drive down to Fleet Street. Hell, no. Jake retired to the oak-paneled sitting room with yesterday's
Evening Standard
, pretending he had no idea what was on the back page, trying to sneak up on it by way of Londoner's Diary and “the page with the human touch.”

Nancy had ripped out the story with his photograph on the back page. For the children's sake. Capital Units, Jake read, was down another penny. So was M.&G. Modesty Blaise was in trouble again, but there were no tit pictures. India ink nipples. And in spite of himself, Jake began to feel horny. Should he wake Nancy? No; the baby robbed her of enough sleep. He began to scan the bookshelves, looking for something with an erotic passage, one of his Traveler's Companion Books maybe, before he remembered that whatever Harry hadn't stolen was now an exhibit in Courtroom Number One. Like his Y-front underwear.

Jake found a coin in his dressing gown pocket and tossed it, but it landed heads. Two out of three. Three out of five, then. He went into the kitchen and poured himself another drink. 4:15; a quarter past eleven in Toronto. If he were there now he would be shooting pool with cherished friends at Julie's, or be drinking in the Park Plaza Roof Bar, enjoying being at home. At ease in Canada. The homeland he had shed with such soaring enthusiasm twelve years earlier. Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self-apology, it had seemed. And no more.

Jake recalled standing with Luke at the ship's rail, afloat on champagne, euphoric, as Quebec City receded and they headed into the St. Lawrence and the sea.

“I say! I say! I say!” Jake had demanded, “what's beginning to happen in Toronto?”