In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [19]
The press leapt upon every possibility.
MYSTERY MAN OF NORTH RESEMBLES SMALL
– Star, May 27, 1921
Remains may be exhumed if further clues come to light.
SKELETON FOUND IN WHITBY FIELD
– Telegram, June 2, 1921
“The possibility that it might be Ambrose Small occurred to me when we were digging it up,” Acting Chief Thomas reflected this evening.
IOWA DETECTIVE IS CERTAIN HE HAS FOUND A.J. SMALL
– Mail, August 16, 1921
John Brophy, Head of Brophy Detective Agency, Iowa, who was ousted from his job as Assistant Chief of Police, claims to have a man under guard whom he has identified as A.J. Small. Brophy said he would produce Small when the Canadian authorities are ready to pay the reward offered
“The man is Small,” he said.
The man was recovering from a pistol wound in the neck, concussion of the brain and minor injuries. Both his legs had been cut off near the knees.
“I will tell you what Small told me after he had identified his own picture,” he said. “ ‘All I can remember is that there was a blow and then darkness, then terrible suffering. From then on I remembered nothing until I was brought here. I think I was in Omaha, that’s all.’ ”
Between 1910 and 1919 Ambrose Small had been the jackal of Toronto’s business world. He was a manipulator of deals and property, working his way up from nothing into the world of theatre management. He bought Toronto’s Grand Opera House when he was twenty-eight years old, and then proceeded to buy theatres all over the province – in St. Catharines, Kingston, Arkona, Petrolia, Peterborough, and Paris, Ontario, until he held the whole web of theatre traffic in his outstretched arms. He built the Grand in London, Ontario – the largest theatre in North America, save for Shea’s Hippodrome. He owned ninety-six theatres. He became a gambler at the track, obsessed with greyhounds.
He married Theresa Kormann, and in so doing alienated his sisters. His wife was a prohibitionist and Small offered her the theatre for one night a week and she put on temperance shows and nobody came. “Pass by the open doorway, ignore the foul saloon,” the chorus sang to a mostly empty auditorium. On other nights, performances of Ben-Hur and Naughty Miss Louise packed the theatre. In the Glen Road house, Small held appalling parties. Showgirls, live peacocks, staggered out drunk in the morning hours and strolled aimlessly home along the Rosedale streets – the chauffeurs of the rich following at a tactful distance in their car.
In Paris, Ontario, he met an actress named Clara Dickens and she became his lover. She was twenty-one years old and Small was thirty-five and he charmed her with his variousness. He was a spinner. He was bare-knuckle capitalism. He was a hawk who hovered over the whole province, swooping down for the kill, buying up every field of wealth, and eating the profit in mid-air. He was a jackal. This is what the press called him and he laughed at them, spun a thread around his critics and bought them up. Either he owned people or they were his enemies. No compatriots. No prisoners. In the tenth century, he liked to say, the price of a greyhound or a hawk was the same as that for a man.
Each morning he rose and walked to his offices at the Grand Theatre on Adelaide Street. He got there at least an hour before any of his staff and plotted out the day. This was the time he loved most, choreographing his schemes, theorizing on bids and counter-bids and interest rates and the breaking point of his adversaries. He pulled out an imported avocado pear, sliced it into thin green moons, and sat at his roll-top desk eating it and thinking. By the time his staff arrived he had worked out all possible scenarios at his empty desk. He went down to the barbershop, lay back, and was shaved and manicured. His day was over. The machine of Ambrose Small began to tick across the city.
With his lover Clara Dickens he was gregarious, generous, charming. Seeing him once or