Montreal Noir Read online

  “I just want to brew beer, man. I don’t want anything to do with crime, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, sighing. “I’ll look into it, all right? Don’t worry.”

  We gave each other a hug.

  * * *

  I walked out the back and into the alley. I lit up a smoke as I headed toward Ontario Street. Don’t worry! I thought. Shit.

  The noises of the city surrounded me as I made my way north—two cats screeched beneath a porch; an ambulance cried in the distance. Two forty-year-old hookers were out looking for their next fix. A bunch of kids were having a late lunch at La Pataterie, the way they always did. The smell of grease and potatoes filled the street. You had to watch your step as pigeons were busy pecking at a poutine on the sidewalk.

  Our bar was three blocks over, heading west. It was neither a dive bar nor a biker bar. It was a fancy place where the newly rich flocked to after they moved into the neighborhood.

  Eight years ago the city renovated that fancy plaza over on Valois Street. Shortly after that the first condos started popping up around it. We just happened to be the lucky owners of a commercial lot within walking distance of those condos.

  Our father had bought the place in ’86 when no one would have even pissed on it. He ran a shoe store out of it, and when the nineties came, he turned it into a Prill discount store, which was the kind of place you went to as a kid when your parents were on welfare. And there were a lot of welfare kids back then.

  Then the biker wars came and whoever had enough money to leave left. We stayed behind. The war wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be, but everybody was damn glad when the Hells won and the city passed anti-bunker laws. Not that we cared if the Hells ran the place or not; we just wanted the war to be over so we could live without the stigma of being from Hochelaga.

  A few years later, wealth came back to the city, for better or worse. Rents went up, vacant lands and factories got turned into condos, and the former factory workers were forced to leave the island or swim with the current. My brother and I were just driftwood. Nothing more. We were just driftwood that happened to float up with the tide as the rest of the trash drowned underneath it.

  We felt lucky about that.

  But running a discount store that no one but hipsters would walk into was not my brother’s idea of a future.

  When we opened our bar, we had a narrow window in the history of the neighborhood, where the dive-bar crowd was catered to by the bikers, and the newly rich were looking for a place to park their asses on a Saturday night. If they had built that plaza five blocks over, we would still be selling crap that was made in China. But we got lucky. College students, designers, accountants, artists, and lawyers who wouldn’t dare admit that they couldn’t afford Outremont anymore needed a place to drink just like the rest of us. My brother wanted to build that place.

  So we did. After an eight-month class at ITHQ, my brother was a certified microbrewer; six months of technical business school, and I was deemed fit to run a restaurant. We turned our father’s old discount store into a fancy microbrasserie, equipped with wooden tables, white stools, pretentious wall art, and even a stuffed beaver for the hipsters.

  Soon after opening, the Hells came to see us. We told them that what we cared about was brewing good-tasting beer, and that we didn’t think our bar was the right place for them to peddle drugs. The crowd we attracted wasn’t exactly the target market for the drug trade, with the notable exception of the lawyers, who knew better than to buy dope out of a bar in Hochelaga. We promised the Hells that if they didn’t sell drugs in our bar, no one would.

  These arrangements worked for the Hells under two conditions: one, that we didn’t sell the same beer that they did, which was no problem given our menu was elite brews only; and two, that none of our drink specials would come under $6.99. Those prices would separate the haves from the have-nots, and ensure that we didn’t steal the Hells’ clientele.

  This deal worked perfectly for the both of us, until now. Now some guy from way back when was fucking up our thing, and got the bikers to doubt our word.

  Fuck!

  * * *

  Julien was white trash the way you’d imagine white trash to be. He made a living stealing his mother’s welfare money, while also cashing in his own check at the same time. He and his mom had somehow scored a four-and-a-half in an SHDM project building, with a nice view of Notre-Dame Boulevard’s trucking lanes and the Lantic sugar mill. It was the kind of apartment you’d expect a guy like Julien to have. He worked the loopholes from generation to generation, and for a guy who could barely read, his maneuvering was rather impressive.

  Most of the time, Julien was inoffensive, and when he was, we let him be. He just had too much time on his hands. He mostly wasted his days in Davidson Park, playing cringeworthy songs on that shitty guitar of his, the one with a porn photo taped to the back of it. I remember when he first found that photo. He just walked into the corner store one day, didn’t even pay for the magazine. He started flipping through the pages right there in the store. When he found a chick that had tits big enough for him, he looked at the teller and said, “Hey, I like this one. I’ma take it, all right?” He tore out the page, put the magazine back in the rack, and walked out like it was a thing to do.

  As I said, Julien was too useless to make it, too stupid to get rid of. Until now.

  * * *

  I walked into my bar. The place was full for a Wednesday. Twenty people, maybe. The weather was cool, and we opened the bay windows up front. Customers were flipping through menus, discussing what kind of beer they were going to try next. There were couples in their thirties with money to spend, a few suits, a bunch of college students slumming it out in the safest way possible.

  “Hey, Richard,” the barmaid called to me. She was twenty-three and a part-time student who tried to run an independent art gallery with her tip money. I nodded in response and sat my ass on the last stool.

  Hey, Richard, I thought. My name felt like a name for another time, but at thirty-seven it wasn’t terribly uncommon. Nowadays kids had fucked-up names like Anne-Crystelle or Marie-Lianne. Take the barmaid’s name, for example: Sophie-Andrée. I always thought it sounded horrible, but she had an ass like you wouldn’t believe, and as a rule of thumb, a barmaid needed a fine ass more than a good-sounding name.

  “Give me a blonde, will you, dear?” I asked her.

  I watched her walk to the taps, checking out the curve of her thighs in her black dress, listening to the click of her boots as they smacked the tile. Her turtleneck ran soft and tight across her chest and down to her breasts. I liked the way she was leaning back on one leg; it popped out her calf, rounded up her ass.

  Wasn’t there that saying, Don’t fuck where you eat? Well, I was about to do exactly that. I was in for a shit night anyway. I was in for a shit day tomorrow. I was in for a shit week if you asked me. At this point, what the Hells would do to my brother and me was anybody’s game. We could lose our money. We could lose our bar, and therefore, I could lose what was left of my sex appeal. The forties were knocking on my door, but I was willing to go a few more rounds before I counted myself out.

  I made my move at closing time. I washed half her tables, picked up the empties, and asked about her tips. She said she did okay.

  “Anything good for a night out?” I asked.

  “Not really,” she replied. “Besides, I got bills to pay, just like everybody else.” She reached inside her purse. “Mind if I light up in here?”

  “It’s closed. Sure. How are classes?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed and glanced up.

  They never do. “How about a drink then?” I asked.

  She said, “Sure,” as she blew out some smoke.

  I walked next to her behind the bar. I poured her something old-school, a Fedora, a drink nobody knew about anymore. “Here. Taste this,” I said.

  She was leaning back against the bar, her short dark hair in line wit
h her sharp chin, the cup of her breast just a shadow in the dim light. I looked straight into her eyes. She looked back and frowned at me sideways. With the faintest pinch of the lips, she dared me to flirt. I smiled slightly. She took a sip and didn’t seem to like it. That was the plan.

  “Sugar and whiskey?” she said, wincing.

  “Don’t like it?”

  “Not really,” she admitted. I was one-for-one.

  “Maybe I’m an old fool, but I like it.”

  “Come on now! When was this drink invented? The twenties? You’re not old enough to drink this!” she joked. “You’re what? Thirty-five?”

  “Thirty-three,” I lied.

  “See?” she said, taking a drag of her cigarette. “You’re not that old.” I was two-for-two.

  “Then show me what you young mixologists are into these days.”

  She tapped her ashes on the counter, bowed her head sideways, and accepted the dare. “All right, let’s see what we can come up with.” She grabbed Taylor’s Velvet Falernum, added some green Chartreuse liqueur, pineapple juice, and lime. I already knew I was going to fucking hate it.

  I took a sip. “Not bad. Not bad.”

  “Right?”

  “What else have you got?”

  “Let me look.” She turned back to the bar and leaned beautifully on her back leg.

  Eyes on the prize, I thought. Eyes on the fucking prize.

  I started scrolling through the bar’s iTunes account. I wasn’t gonna fuck with her taste in Lady Gaga, and she wasn’t gonna fuck with mine in Pantera, so I started flipping through the songs, hoping to find an in-between. I glanced at her. She was already moving despite the silence in the bar, her loose leg stomping softly to the steady beat of a song she had in her head.

  It was my job now to figure out what that song was.

  The Killers? No—the Killers would make me seem old. The National? Maybe, but they were as exciting as watching fucking paint dry. Metric? I was gonna have to go with Metric. Metric was good fuck music no matter what anyone my age would say about it. “Gold Guns Girls” was too fast, but “Gimme Sympathy” was just right. I put in on. The first few notes filled the vast empty room.

  “I love this song,” she said as she looked at me. She put some ice into a glass. “Get hot,” she started signing. “Get closer to the flame . . .”

  I was three-for-three.

  She flipped a few bottles and handed me a glass of her concoction. At this point, I didn’t really care what was in it, so long as it had alcohol. She kept singing, then poured herself a glass. I’d had two beers earlier, and I knew she had done a few shots before last call with some guy who thought he’d get her home by getting her drunk. We were just tipsy enough; it was starting to be fun.

  On our fourth drink, Lana Del Rey started playing. I couldn’t have planned it any better. Lana Del Rey was the kind of music that kept you awake while dreaming about twenty-three-year-old girls named Sophie-Andrée, who’d fuck their bosses at the end of a shift.

  I approached her from behind, pressing myself against her back, locking my hands around her hips. She didn’t seem to mind so I dove in further. I smelled her hair, felt her smile as I started kissing the nook of her neck. She turned around, smiled, and started kissing back. I grabbed her thighs and lifted her dress. She pulled it higher to get comfortable.

  She wore black-laced Brazilian panties. Goddamn did she look good. It looked like a freaking heart at the bottom of her flat belly. A freaking heart around her ass, up to her thighs, and down inside her legs.

  I swear to God—it was the most beautiful sight in the entire fucking world.

  I kissed her again, lifted her, and sat her on the edge of the bar. I pushed myself against her. She moved her hair out of her face. I ran my hands inside her dress and down her back. I pulled her toward me. Then she forced me toward her. She grabbed my arms, scratched me, and kissed me. Then she looked at me and said, “I got condoms in my bag.”

  * * *

  The sex was good but I hadn’t slept; I probably wouldn’t have anyways. It was nine in the morning. I was having coffee and a cigarette on the way to my car.

  The meeting with the Hells was scheduled for ten. I needed to pick up Julien before that and drive all the way up to Rivière-des-Prairies, because when you’re in trouble with these kinds of guys, you walk the extra mile.

  Julien, being the idiot that he was, had no idea what kind of trouble he had gotten himself into. Maybe the Bloods had used him and his dumb wigger friend to poke around foreign territory. Because if Julien didn’t actually know any Bloods, why would the Hells take his word seriously?

  I found Julien at Davidson Park, where I had expected him to be. He was playing his fucking guitar in the shadow of the project buildings. No one else was there except two old drunks who lived in the homeless shelter down the street.

  “Hey, Richard!” he shouted, playing a god-awful riff that was so out of tune it could have been experimental rock. “I’ma play a song for you, Richard.”

  “It’s okay, Julien. I don’t need a song.”

  “Ahhh, come on!” he slurred. “Hey, did I ever show you my girl? Let me show you my girl.” He flipped the guitar and flashed a duct-taped photo of a young Filipina lying on a beach in paradise.

  “I don’t need to see your girl, either.”

  “Ah, come on, man! I’ma play you a song, all right?”

  “You know about drugs?”

  He stopped and looked at me in a snap. “Yeah! YEAH!” he said excitedly. “Ah shit, man! Ah shit! I knew it was coming. I fucking knew it was coming. Shit, man!”

  “You want to sell at the bar?” I asked.

  “Yeah, man! I’m your guy, man! You know? Anything you want I’ma keep it tight, you know? Shit’s gonna be tight.”

  “And that guy you know?”

  “Yeah! He’s a Blood, man! In Laval. A full-patch Blood, you know?”

  A full-patch Blood, I thought. What an idiot. “He’s serious about this? This Blood. He seriously wants to sell in Hochelaga?” I asked.

  “Yeah, man, he’s fucking taking over. He said he can get me anything I need. He can get me weed, he can get me fucking coke, some GHB for the ladies, some E if you need it, peanuts—anything, man. Sometimes he just gets me this bag of pills, man. I fucking pop them and I don’t even know what’s in them.”

  “How do you know this guy?”

  “We was just talking and he said that he had all this dope. I mean so fucking much of it he couldn’t even manage to sell it off, you know? So I told him to tell the other Bloods that I had my boy who had opened his bar not that long ago, you know? I got your back, man. I got your back, you know? That’s all me, baby.”

  God! I thought. He was in deeper than I had hoped. That painted me into a corner. If I didn’t take care of him, then I could appear to be compliant in his lunacy. And if the Bloods, and whoever was behind the Bloods, seemed hell-bent on taking a piece of Hochelaga, then they would come after me if they really wanted the territory. Julien or not, they would do it if they wanted to.

  But that territory belonged to the Hells until proven otherwise, so my only option was to bring this imbecile to them so they could deal with him. They could beat him, run down his wigger friend, run down their supplier. They could do whatever they wanted to him; I didn’t care. All I wanted was to brew good beer.

  “Get in the car,” I told him.

  “What for?”

  “You wanna sell? You got to talk to the boss.”

  “I thought you were the boss.”

  I looked at him. “We all work for somebody.”

  “Right. Let me just bring her back to my place,” he said, talking about his guitar. “It’ll only take a minute, man.”

  “Put her in the trunk,” I replied as I walked back to my car. He didn’t move. “In the trunk, Julien. And quit fucking around.”

  I didn’t like Rivière-des-Prairies, and not only because the borough had a bad reputation—I was from Ho
chelaga after all. No. I didn’t like RDP because I didn’t know RDP. I didn’t know whose house not to piss on when I walked home drunk at night. I didn’t know whose wife not to fuck or whose daughter not to stare at. I didn’t know whose car not to scratch or who to vote for in order to keep the ball rolling.

  That’s what made it dangerous for me.

  As dangerous as Hochelaga was back in the day, I knew how to deal with the danger, and that counted for a lot. I didn’t know anything about RDP except that some of Montreal’s most powerful criminals had homes there, as well as some of the city’s highest-ranking officials. This combination could explain a lot about the corruption in Montreal.

  We took 25 north, headed toward an address on Perras Boulevard. I only knew the name because it was the last exit before the toll bridge into Laval.

  Julien tried to play it cool, leaning his arm against the open window. He had old, dirty jeans on, and some Sons of Anarchy–type T-shirt. Such a goddamned fool, I thought. He looked so bad I felt like it might have been a mistake to bring him. Was I really bringing such a poor offering in order to appease the gods of crime? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t exactly back down now, could I?

  I put my shades on and lit up another smoke because I didn’t want to make conversation. I was about to sell out the biggest idiot in Hochelaga. What the fuck do you say to that?

  We found the small bakery in a dilapidated shopping center. There was a dry cleaner, a day care, and, at the edge of the parking lot, an old Italian bakery.

  We were welcomed by a bouncer dressed in all black: black boots, black pants, black jacket, black-framed sunglasses, and black-ink hand tattoos. He didn’t pat us down. He didn’t need to.

  A middle-aged Italian man wearing a white shirt with an unbuttoned collar and tan pinstriped pants sat at table, having a brisket with his coffee. “Welcome,” he said warmly.

  Julien sat down at his table. He leaned forward, arms resting against his knees, head bobbling for no apparent reason.

  “Would you like something to eat before we begin?” the Italian asked. “You won’t find anything like this in Hochelaga.”