In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online Page B

pink marble pillars that reached up into the rotunda. This train station was a palace, its niches and caverns an intimate city. He could be shaved, eat a meal, or have his shoes coloured.
    He saw a man with three suitcases, well-dressed, shouting out in another language. The man’s eyes burned through everyone who at first received his scream personally. But the phrases were for angels in the air to assist him or for demons to leave him. Two days later Patrick returned to pick up his luggage from a locker. He saw the man again, still unable to move from his safe zone, in a different suit, as if one step away was the quicksand of the new world.
    Patrick sat on a bench and watched the tides of movement, felt the reverberations of trade. He spoke out his name and it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air of Union Station. No one turned. They were in the belly of a whale.
    When Ambrose Small, the millionaire, disappeared in 1919, it was discovered that the police had his Bertillon record. Between 1889 and 1923 the Bertillon identification system was used to locate criminals and missing persons. Bertillon’s method consisted of the measurement of certain parts of the body: the length of head, width of head, length of right ear, length of left foot, length of left middle finger, the length of left forearm. In homes and prisons and mortuaries all over North America limbs were measured and the results sent in to the Toronto police. During the fever of the case over 5,000 people claimed to be Ambrose Small. They claimed they had amnesia, were kidnapped in a brown sack, were disfigured, were hidden in geological holes in the Scarborough Bluffs, were stretched to longer than five foot six inches on racks, were overfed, had all their hair removed, had their memories wiped clean by certain foods, had their pigmentation altered, were turned into women, had the length of their right ear changed, were in the meantime hungry and penniless and would someone mail $500 to Nelson, B. C., or Wichita, Kansas, or Cornerbrook, Newfoundland.
    A woman in Hamilton saw Ambrose with his throat cut. She woke one morning to feel blood on the pillow, looked up and saw someone was sawing her neck, and she said I am Ambrose Small. Then she woke up again. Another had a vision that shewas unlocking the safe at the Grand Opera House and saw a curled-up skeleton inside resting on documents.
    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,