Montreal Noir Read online

  Harold finished his espresso in one poised tilt of his head, wiped his mustache on a linen napkin, and pointed at Jimmy in a we-need-to-talk gesture. “No one has ever seen Rockatansky.”

  Jimmy heard caution in Harold’s voice. When Jimmy was on his meds, his temper was pretty much under control. But when he was free-ranging it, his reaction-proportion meter could be pretty off; last fall he had put one of his Ferraris through the window of the dealership. He had taken it in three times to replace a piece of trim that kept falling off. On the third visit they had tried to charge him nine hundred and sixty-nine bucks, saying that it wasn’t covered by the bumper-to-bumper that came with the car. Jimmy smiled over the counter at the service manager, then pointed at the phone. “Call the police,” he said.

  The service manager just stared at him.

  “Nine one one. Tell them that a customer just put a million-dollar car through your window.”

  The manager’s expression was still stuck on skeptical when Jimmy launched the Enzo through the wall of plate glass, scattering the salesmen and destroying two floor models.

  Jimmy stepped out of his car onto a floor frosted with broken glass. What was left of the carbon fiber nose section was embedded two feet into the sheetrock at the back of the showroom. “Better get out your Price Reduced! stickers, asshole,” he said. The police arrived three minutes after Harold, by which point the dealership had decided not to press charges. They replaced his Ferrari. Free of charge.

  And that had been over a car. This was a hit man hired to take out his father. The response had to be stepped up by orders of magnitude.

  Jimmy spotted the Range Rover idling by the wall in the courtyard below, the wipers thumping away in a perfectly timed beat. The city was hidden in the blizzard and Tiny Rockatansky was hidden in the city. Planning bad things.

  It was impossible to think of Rockatansky without getting melodramatic. People liked to say shit like, This guy is the deadliest assassin alive, or, That guy is the most notorious hit man who ever lived, but either allocation would be hyperbole.

  Rockatansky was a monster because he loved what he did. With him it was never business, it was always personal, and that made him infinitely more frightening.

  His resume was a who’s who of top-tier alpha male targets—from dictators in lost little banana republics to captains of industry and barons of crime. One of the tamer stories involved a former Dutch acquaintance—Mr. Van Dorman, the president of a shipping line—who stupidly refused to pay the second half on a job he had contracted. Rockatansky blew up the school where Van Dorman’s grandchildren went; three dozen five-year-olds lost their lives. The device was packed with leaflets stating Mr. Van Dorman should pay his bills to prevent bad things from happening. Six months later, his daughter and son were shot in their sleep. Four months after that, his wife was found dismembered in a parking lot, her driver and bodyguard burned alive in the trunk of the car. Two months on, Van Dorman was killed in his shower with an axe.

  And that was just one story; there were plenty more.

  Jimmy shook his head, thinking that if this wasn’t so fucking serious, it would be sad; a pair of hundred-year-old guys playing cat-and-mouse. Only the cat wasn’t playing. Which was sad on a whole new level.

  “I’m thinking I want to pull this guy’s teeth out one at a time then piss in his mouth.”

  “What’s first?” Harold asked.

  Jimmy didn’t have to think about it. There was only one piece of information they were missing. “I want to know where that money came from.”

  Harold was already shaking his head. “It’s not important who hired him, only that he’s here. What I sugg—”

  “Fuck that.” Jimmy paused and dropped his volume. Not everything needed to be shared with these people. “Look, just find this guy. Put one in his stomach and bring him to me in a hockey bag.”

  Harold smiled up at the roomful of stereotypes. “You heard the man, go find Rockatansky.”

  * * *

  Harold and Jimmy shared the backseat while Iggy worked the big English sport ute through the drifts. The snowfall had ramped up along with the wind and the streets looked like the stage for an intergalactic conspiracy film—all that was missing was O.J. Simpson in a silver spacesuit.

  Jimmy stared at the lawyer. “I have Tiny Rockatansky out there trying to find a chink in Poppa’s armor where he can put a spear.”

  Harold kept his face turned to the window, more of that perfect posture again. “I understand that you want to unleash the dogs of war, but wait to see what your father thinks.”

  “I know exactly what he’s going to think.”

  Harold kept his face turned to the snowbound terrain slipping by the tinted window. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  * * *

  Harold had already gone into the room to see the old man but Jimmy hung back, nodding at his cell phone. Once Harold was inside, Jimmy called an associate in Ottawa—someone who owed him a lot of money. Without a greeting he asked the person at the other end to find out where the money in Rockatansky’s account had come from. There was a pause followed by, “Of course.” Jimmy hung up, turned off the phone, removed the battery, and dropped it into his pocket. He straightened his jacket and walked into Poppa’s room.

  The old man looked like a patchwork cyborg Karloff but his knocks hadn’t come from the FX and makeup department; he had earned every scratch, dent, and stich honestly. Over the course of his not insignificant lifetime, fate or destiny or whatever other loose rubric one chose to classify happenstance under did its best to put him in the dirt. He had been visited by four car accidents, three shootings, two bombings, one poisoning, an attempted garroting, numerous cases of the clap, type-two diabetes, a heart attack, shingles, a fall in the shower, a bout of colon cancer, and, finally, a stroke. By this point one thing had become painfully clear to all concerned: you couldn’t kill Poppa, at least not with anything they’d tried so far. His refusal to display an expiration date had earned him the moniker of Old Man Bullseye in the Quebec press. But even the old man would have a hard time outrunning Rockatansky.

  Poppa was in his chair—the only one he would occupy for however many more breaths the Intel-controlled machinery could coax out of his taxed mortal coil. But calling the contraption a chair was akin to calling an aircraft carrier a boat. The mobile life-support system had helped him jump levels from latter-day-de-facto-crime-boss-Rasputin to hard-core-computerized Franken-Don. The doctors said that with the assistance of his new self-contained health station, he’d outlive the cockroaches in Keith Richards’s drug chest.

  An easy decade.

  Maybe two.

  Instead of the traditional wheelchair, the engineers had gone with an upright model based on Chuck Close’s famous device, supporting the old man in a manner that made his grandchildren think he resembled Han Solo on a bad carbonite trip. Most of the general components wouldn’t be available to anyone, corporate or government, for years. Some of the more specialized technology would likely never be available for mass consumption—it was simply too expensive. Being a billionaire helped knock down trade barriers and corporate secrets. And where money couldn’t do its evil little dance, Jimmy knew some people who could rob some people; anything was gettable.

  There was more onboard computing power than NASA’s latest communications satellite. Pulse and respiratory functions were priority one—his heart was wired to a dime-sized computer that regulated its beat and his lungs were fed a better dose of air than most city dwellers got to smell in a lifetime. The setup monitored all major nervous functions, sending real-time readings to the specialized server at the Jewish General Hospital, where they were used to remotely optimize his OS.

  The crown jewel in Poppa’s mechanized cocoon was the communications hardware. The stroke had pretty much wiped his organic motor-skill software clean, only leaving him the use of his eye muscles and two toes and two fingers on his left side. This diminished capacity was nonetheless a veritabl
e treasure trove of digits for the tailored apparatus. The Bowers and Wilkens speakers delivered Poppa’s end of conversation in a slightly baritone Stephen Hawking that the software tinted with a digitized version of his old voice. This unsetting byproduct had been achieved by sampling his speech from more than ninety-one hours of heavily redacted recordings from surveillance files in the CSIS vault; Harold had subpoenaed the tapes under a medical-emergency umbrella, citing their access as the only viable way to replicate some of the sick old man’s identity. The judge agreed; it was obvious Poppa was pretty much out of the food chain.

  It was not the first time someone had written the old bastard off.

  Poppa operated his speech program via eye movement and the good digits on his hand- and foot-controlled cell phone and Internet, respectively. He could carry on silent phone conversations with his fingertips and send e-mail with his toes while blinking out speech at the same time, a practice he had quickly mastered. Cell phone was piped into his head via Grado headphones and the Internet was displayed on a pair of glasses that functioned in much the same way as a combat pilot’s heads-up display. Transcripts of any part of his conversations—including e-mail and cell phone—were printed up and spit into a tray. The combined capabilities of Internet, e-mail, text, cell phone, and voice enabled the old man to exercise a twenty-first-century level of control over the financial empire he had inherited more than half a century ago—a classic example of the Stone Age meeting the Space Age.

  Allo Police had recently dubbed him Franken-Don. The Montreal Gazette had been less kind. But they were right. The old head of the family was gone and what was left in his place was a little unsettling.

  Jimmy stood between Poppa and the big windows, and even in this near-taxidermied state, his father still had massive presence, like a regal oil portrait. The old man’s hunting collection, glazed eyeballs and frozen expressions of carnage grinning off the exotic mounts, peppered the walls. The rictus grins were not dissimilar to the old man in many ways.

  Before the stroke, Poppa swore he never wanted to live like this—like a fucking space vegetable. Yet here he was—the only time he had stepped out of character in his life. Jimmy wasn’t sure if he saw his surrender to the Fates as his indomitable will to survive—no matter what the cost—or his failure to accept the inevitable. A newfound strength or a newfound weakness? Whatever the deep-rooted logic of the choice, he had trouble reconciling his old man’s life before the stroke with what he now saw before him.

  But even like this, Poppa could read situations with Wicca clairvoyance and his digitized voice cut through the perfunctory greeting Harold was still trying to hand out. “Why are you . . . here?”

  Jimmy stepped in front of the lawyer. “Tiny Rockatansky crossed the border at Champlain a little more than—” he dropped his eyes to his Rolex Daytona, “four and a half hours ago.”

  For a few seconds Jimmy thought the old man was blinking out a long response behind his glasses and he shifted on his feet to see past the yellow glare of the lenses. Poppa was staring at him with avian concentration, unblinking. His fingers were still; he wasn’t carrying on a phone conversation.

  Harold stepped forward. “Tiny Rockatansky is—”

  Jimmy put a hand on Harold’s chest, his fingers splayed out over the silk tie. “He fucking remembers who he is.” Jimmy was used to people thinking that Poppa was in some kind of vegetative state, even those who knew him, and it pissed him off. More underestimation at work.

  Harold stepped back and looked down at his tie, as if Jimmy carried cholera. “Of course.”

  After a few long moments, Poppa’s voice came back on in the controlled cadence of the computer. Jimmy knew that this probably should have come out as a yell but the software was not good at conveying emotion and, like e-mail, if you didn’t know Poppa cold it was easy to misinterpret the cadence. “What else . . . do you know?”

  This time Jimmy let the lawyer step up to the plate. “Ten mil went into Rockatansky’s account in Freemason’s in Nassau, eleven days ago.”

  Poppa’s eyes shuttered in a rapid staccato that the eye monitor translated into speech, delivering the old man’s favorite word with passionless precision: “Fuck.”

  Harold moved away from the window and stood in the shadow beneath a Cape Buffalo shoulder mount. His expression, like both the buffalo and the toxin-injected faces of the local Westmount hausfraus, never gave much away other than irritation.

  Jimmy nodded. “Yeah. Fuck. We need to know where that money came from.”

  Harold shook his head. “There’s only one person still alive who hates Poppa enough to pay twenty mil to put him down.”

  “Nikolai,” Poppa’s simulated voice said.

  The feud went back to the 1978 Stanley Cup Playoffs and a ticket scam that should have been shared. But wasn’t. At least the Habs won.

  There had been no bloodshed for a decade and change, and breaking the peace made no sense, at least not from any practical angle. Maybe Poppa would finally get that revenge he had been talking about for all these years.

  If Poppa could have shook his head, he would have. “We know . . . who’s responsible. There’s only one . . . course of action.” He paused and the only sound in the room was the gentle hum of his electronic life-support system. “Harold, could . . . you wait outside.” Even the software-imposed monotone could not present the statement as anything other than what it was—an order.

  Harold opened his mouth as if to protest, then closed it. “Sure, Poppa, whatever you say.”

  Harold left the room, stepping between a pair of men who took up several yards of well-tailored menace, and into the hallway. Jimmy locked the dead bolt and went back to the window, to the blizzard-caked city. “What do I do?”

  “If Rockatanksy isn’t . . . guaranteed the second half . . . of payment he . . . won’t complete the . . . job.” After a few metronomic pumps of the old man’s artificial lungs, he said, “You and I . . . spend a few minutes discussing . . . things. Then you walk out . . . of here and go to . . . war.”

  Another splendid view spilled out below him, rooftops and trees, all the way to Westmount Square, St. Henri beyond, and the river in the distance.

  Poppa had spent his life running this business—it had been his central obsession since inheriting the kingdom when his own father was shot down in front of the Ogilvy Christmas window all those years ago.

  “You will inherit . . . everything. What I need—”

  “Stop with—”

  “Don’t interrupt . . . me.”

  Jimmy put his hands in his pockets and listened.

  Poppa’s answering-machine voice continued: “With that comes . . . a great responsibility . . . I know you have . . . respect in this . . . town. With that comes . . . enemies. Enemies who will . . . want what you . . . have. Now that I’m in this—” he paused for a second and his eyes shifted to Jimmy; he looked at his son and tears welled up in his eyes, “computerized prison, they . . . think they can get . . . to me. Maybe they . . . can. But I don’t want you . . . inheriting a . . . a flaming ball of shit.”

  “Anything happens to you and I’ll burn this fucking town to the ground.”

  Poppa blinked out his response. “No . . . you won’t.”

  Jimmy was getting frustrated; he was warlord but his old man’s word was biblical. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You kill Nikolai Bushinsky . . . and his sons. Immediate . . . ly.”

  From the time Rockatansky had been spotted at the border, Jimmy knew the situation would get boiled down to two options—fight or flight. And the second had never really been on the table.

  The old man’s ATamp;T vocal delivery went on: “Rockatansky won’t . . . fulfill his contract if . . . his employer is . . . dead. But . . . even if . . . he does, you’ll have no . . . competition when I’m gone . . . Take out Nikolai and those . . . two retards he calls his sons . . . and the town is yours.”

  “Do we want to be subtle?”

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sp; His father paused again and for a few seconds the only sound was that of his lungs being inflated and deflated with computerized precision. He watched his son, and Jimmy was sure a smile had crept into his eyes somehow, a near-invisible flash of the man he had been.

  It took a few seconds for the old man to cycle up a response with his eyes. “Fuck . . . subtle. Do something . . . massive.”

  Like Guy Lafleur on the ice, his old man had that unnamable mystery sauce that you couldn’t rent, buy, learn, fake, or steal. “It’s Wednesday. Bushinsky and his two sons always eat at Joe Beef on Wednesday; Nikolai loves their pasta and lobster—there was an article about it in the Gazette.”

  Poppa’s eyes shifted over to him again and that smile Jimmy hadn’t seen in a long time was back in his eyes. “Perfect.”

  * * *

  The blizzard had let up and the streets were haphazardly plowed in what appeared to be a paranoid schizophrenic’s version of order. Notre Dame east of Atwater was relatively plowed but most of the locals had yet to dig their rigs out and there weren’t many parking places. Antennae stuck out of snowbanks like snorkels.

  The ersatz foodie crowd was thinner than usual; apparently the snow was too much of an obstacle to overcome in the search for the perfect Instagram photo. The Burgundy Lion was crammed with the usual crowd of mindless hipsters who made too much noise under the universal assumption of the uninventive that it made them more interesting. Outside the Lion, the bearded guys in rolled-up skinny jeans and Cowichan sweaters smoked imported cigarettes and drunkenly pontificated on the latest Mac product. Across the street, the heavy-hitting Joe Beef and Liverpool House had started to empty, the second-string service over and many of the diners heading home for the tail end of the Habs game.

  A big guy ignoring the weather smoked a cigarette in front of Joe Beef wearing nothing but a plaid shirt, jeans, a ball cap, and three days’ worth of stubble. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing an inkwork koi and he looked like an uber-hipster, assembled in the lab out of the parts of lesser hipsters. Nikolai Bushinsky came out behind him, thanked him for a splendid meal, and stumbled toward the snowbank. Bushinksy looked like what he was, an old-school mobster who had pretty much gone straight, in that he didn’t personally kill people anymore. He was flanked by Josef and Vlad—his sons. Josef was a heavy-lidded stereotype who would always look the part of a wannabe gangster trying to stay in character. Vlad was small, lithe, and sat in at the piano at a few jazz bars around town. Even to the casual observer it was obvious that they had spent the evening celebrating. They were all a little drunk, having put away seven bottles of good Burgundy, and scaling the snowbank to the waiting Town Car proved an exercise in swearing and the near loss of one Gucci horsebit loafer. Nikolai and Vlad got in back, Josef in the front with their driver, cursing his wet sock.