The Favourite Game

They went downstairs and found the girls with the same group. It was a mistake, they knew instantly. Yvette stepped forward as if to tell Breavman something but one of the boys pulled her back.

‘You like the girls, eh?’ he said, the swaggerer of the party. His smile was triumphant rather than friendly.

‘Sure we like them. Anything wrong with that?’

‘Where you live, you?’

Breavman and Krantz knew what they wanted to hear. Westmount is a collection of large stone houses and lush trees arranged on the top of the mountain especially to humiliate the underprivileged.

‘Westmount,’ they said with one voice.

‘You have not the girls at Westmount, you?’

They had no chance to answer him. In the very last second before they fell backwards over the kneeling accomplices stationed behind them they detected a signalling of eyes. The ring-leader and a buddy stepped forward and shoved them. Breavman lost his balance and as he fell the stoolie behind him raised himself up to turn the fall into a flip. Breavman landed hard in a belly-flop, a couple of girls that he had crashed into squealing above him. He looked up to see Krantz on his feet, his left fist in someone’s face and his right cocked back ready to fly. He was about to get up when a fat boy decided he shouldn’t and dived at him.

‘Reste là, maudit juif!’

Breavman struggled under the blankets of flesh, not trying to defeat the fat boy but merely to get out from under him so he could do battle from a more honourable upright position. He managed to squeeze away. Where was Krantz?

There must have been twenty people fighting. Here and there he could see girls on their tiptoes as though in fear of mice, while boys wrestled on the floor between them.

He wheeled around, expecting an attack. The fat boy was smothering someone else. He threw his fist at a stranger. He was a drop in the wave of history, anonymous, exhilarated, free.

‘O, little friends, hoot, blooey, dark fighters, shazam, bloop!’ he shouted in his happiness.

Racing down the stairs were three bouncers of the management’s and what they feared most began to happen. The fighting spread to the dance floor. The band was blowing a loud dreamy tune but a disorganized noise could already be heard in opposition to the music.

Breavman waved his fist at everyone, hitting very few. The bouncers were in his immediate area, breaking up individual fights. At the far side of the hall the couples still danced closely and peacefully, but on Breavman’s side their rhythm was disintegrating into flailing arms, blind punches, lunges, and female squeals.

The bouncers pursued the disruption like compulsive housekeepers after an enormous spreading stain, jerking fighters apart by their collars and sweeping them aside as they followed the struggle deeper into the dance floor.

A man rushed onto the bandstand and shouted something to the bandleader, who looked around and shrugged his shoulders. The bright lights went on and the curious coloured walls disappeared. The music stopped.

Everyone woke up. A noise like a wail of national mourning rose up and at the same time fighting swept over the hall like released entropic molecules. To see the mass of dancers change to mass of fighters was like watching a huge highly organized animal succumb to muscular convulsions.

Krantz grabbed Breavman.

‘Mr. Breavman?’

‘Krantzstone, I presume.’

They headed for the front exit, which was already jammed with refugees. No one cared about his coat.

‘Don’t say it, Breavman.’

‘O.K. I won’t say it, Krantz.’

They got out just as the police arrived, about twenty of them in cars and the Black Maria. They entered with miraculous ease.

The boys waited in the front seat of the Lincoln. Krantz’s jacket was missing a lapel. The Palais D’Or began to empty of its victims.

‘Pity the guys in there, Breavman-and don’t say it,’ he added quickly when he saw Breavman put on his mystical face.

‘I won’t say it, Krantz, I won’t even whisper that I planned the whole thing from the balcony and executed it by the simple means of mass-hypnosis.’

‘You had to say it, eh?’

‘We were mocked, Krantz. We seized the pillars and brought down the temple of the Philistines.’

Krantz shifted into second with exaggerated weariness.

‘Go on, Breavman. You have to say it.’

26 (#ulink_db0e201d-5209-5562-963c-d5d92f9039ce)

He would love to have heard Hitler or Mussolini bellow from his marble balcony, to have seen partisans hang him upside down; to see the hockey crowds lynch the sports commissioner; to see the black or yellow hordes get even with the small outposts of their colonial enemies; to see the weeping country folk acclaim the strong-jawed road-builders; to see football fans rip down goal-posts; to have seen the panicking movieviewers stampede Montreal children in the famous fire; to see five hundred thousand snap into any salute at all; to see a countless array of Arabian behinds pointing west; to see the chalices on any altar tremble with the congregational Amen.

And this is where he would like to be:

in the marble balcony

the press-box

the projection-room

the reviewing stand

the minaret

the Holy of Holies

And in each case he wants to be surrounded by the best armed, squint-eyed, ruthless, loyal, tallest, leatherjacketed, technical brain-washed heavy police guard that money can buy.

27 (#ulink_4059eb1f-d310-5440-9e95-174836a1228a)

Is there anything more beautiful than a girl with a lute?

It wasn’t a lute. Heather, the Breavmans’ maid, attempted the ukulele. She came from Alberta, spoke with a twang, was always singing laments and trying to yodel.

The chords were too hard. Breavman held her hand and agreed that the strings were tearing her fingers to pieces. She knew all the cowboy stars and traded their autographs.

She was a husky, good-looking girl of twenty with high-coloured cheeks like a porcelain doll. Breavman chose her for his first victim of sleep.

A veritable Canadian peasant.

He tried to make the offer attractive.

‘You’ll feel wonderful when you wake up.’