In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [20]
On December 16, 1919, Ambrose Small failed to keep an appointment. A million dollars had been taken from his bank account. He had either been murdered or was missing. His body, alive or dead, was never found.
Most criminal investigations in the early part of the century were dignified and leisurely. Villains took their time, they took trains and ships. In 1910, Dr. Crippen’s arrest on board a liner, through the use of a radio-phone (while he was reading The Four Just Men), was thought by the public to be in bad taste. But there was something about the Ambrose Small case that created a feeling of open season. It was an opportunity for complaint about the state of the world; Small’s blatant capitalism had clarified the gulf between the rich and the starving.
For the first year after Small’s disappearance the public watched the police try to solve the case. But when they failed, and when the family put up an $80,000 reward for the millionaire’s whereabouts, the public shouldered itself into the case. Now everyone looked for him. By 1921, one could be hired by a company at $4 a week as a ‘searcher’ and these individuals roamed the city and the smaller towns dragging suspicious strangers into police stations and having their measurements taken under the Bertillon process. The searchers resembled the press gangs of earlier centuries, and there were many rival organizations at work, investing in the project as if it were an oil field or a gold mine.
In 1924, after working for a year at various jobs in Toronto, Patrick Lewis became a searcher. The organizations were still active. It did not matter that five years had passed. No body had been found to fit Small’s Bertillon chart and hordes of the otherwise unemployed were being hired. In these hard times any hope of a ‘gusher’ or ‘strike’ was worth pursuing. The search had turned the millionaire’s body into a rare coin, a piece of financial property.
What held most interest for Patrick was the collection of letters the police had handed over to the family. Gradually he came into contact with Small’s two sisters who until then had found no one to take the letters seriously. Cranks, mediums, blackmail threats, the claims of kidnappers – the police and Small’s wife had scorned them all. Patrick was befriended by the sisters at their house on Isabella Street. Clara Dickens knew him best, they told him. She was the rare lover. Talk to Briffa, said the sisters, he also thought she was the perfect woman for Ambrose – not Theresa, the wife, the saint.
Patrick took the train to Paris, Ontario, and met the radio actress Clara Dickens. She stood in the hall beside her mother and said she would not speak about Ambrose Small. She claimed not to have seen him since he disappeared. He stood there watching her. She asked him to leave.
In the books he read, women were rescued from runaway horses, from frozen pond accidents. Clara Dickens stood on the edge of the world of wealth. When she spoke to him she had been bending to one side as she attached an earring, gazing into the hall mirror, dismissing him, their eyes catching in the reflection. He was dazzled by her – her long white arms, the faint hair on the back of her neck – as if she without turning had fired a gun over her shoulder and mortally wounded him. The ‘rare lover,’ the ‘perfect woman.’
And what else was she, apart from being the lover of Ambrose Small? Dressed up, about to go out, she had looked like a damsel fly, the sequins and gauze up to her neck. But there was something about the way she stood there, not turning around to talk to him properly.
When he went back the next morning she opened the door,