Montreal Noir Read online

  I felt myself come back to my senses, my anxiety dissipating. I began breathing freely again. My fear of dying or being unable to finish my novel vanished from my mind. I even felt like laughing as I realized how convinced I’d been that Mozart had stolen my inspiration. What idiocy! I lectured myself silently: I know what’s going on with you. You’re getting old and you’re afraid. Afraid to die without writing a great novel. Afraid that your readers will abandon you for a younger, more audacious, more talented writer . . .

  Mozart kept walking along, innocent, not suspecting he was the object of my scrutiny. I congratulated myself on my honest self-examination. I was pushing fifty and I clearly felt threatened by this young author; it was the way these things went. I simply had to learn to control myself. Remind myself that I was of an age to write a masterpiece, while he was of an age to commit novice mistakes. The thought made me smile, and I now felt for this Mozart. He would be flayed alive by critics, as we all are at one point or another, and his pride would make him pay dearly for it. I knew a thing or two about that.

  Even as the weather worsened, my mood improved. Tomorrow, everything would return to normal. I would go back to the café, sit at my usual table, and continue writing my masterpiece. I even wondered if I should run up and say a few words to Mozart before he disappeared down Rue Mont-Royal. I had been rude to him, after all. I was about to sprint ahead when I saw him turn right onto my street.

  I had never seen him on my block before. He’d never set foot there, I was sure of it. Why was he heading in that direction, today of all days? My heart pounded as I watched him from afar. I nearly fainted when I saw him stop in front of my apartment building. My hands were clammy and I felt short of breath. He hesitated, then stepped forward and rang my neighbor’s doorbell. I stood paralyzed, right in the middle of the sidewalk. At any moment, he could have turned his head and seen me. But the door seemed to open itself then, and he disappeared inside. In that moment I found my legs again, and ran until I reached my door. After a few attempts, I managed to insert my trembling key into the lock and turn it. As soon as I stepped inside, I closed and double-locked the door.

  I was overwhelmed by contradictory feelings. Mozart terrified, enraged, and thrilled me. I hadn’t felt so alive in a long time. Or so crazy, either. I was obsessing over a stranger. Some of my own characters had been locked up for less erratic behavior.

  I took a cold shower and holed up in my room. Like everywhere in my apartment, the space was cluttered with objects. In the bedroom’s case, books. The four walls were covered with books, and there was even a book motif painted on the wooden pillars of my bed. A writer in his nest. I turned off all the lights, except for a small lamp I always left on, a comforting presence in the dark. I’d had the good idea of taking a tranquilizer before my shower, and so when I rested my head on my pillow, I fell right to sleep.

  At first I felt a slow rocking sensation, nearly imperceptible, then an intense wave of vertigo that would have thrown me to the ground if I hadn’t gripped the edge of the bed until my knuckles turned white. What was this? What was happening to me? I wanted to scream; my mouth opened in horror, but no sound escaped. I was at the center of a universe that was splitting into innumerable fragments. Millions of particles spiraled around me. I felt hell’s funnel swallow me whole, but then I understood that it was me, with my mouth agape, inhaling the world. I was a black hole. An unfathomable void.

  Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Aaaaah!

  I screamed and screamed. Sitting straight up in my bed, covered in sweat from head to toe, I couldn’t get a grip. The world around me had returned to its original form, but the nightmare kept playing out in my mind. I felt as if I were imploding. My physical self was dissolving, being sucked up by my inner void. Soon there would be nothing left of me but a gelatinous puddle of ectoplasm on my bedsheets.

  I heard a loud, booming laugh through the wall separating my bedroom from my neighbor’s apartment. Panting, I listened carefully. My neighbor had never laughed like that, never made a sound that reached my apartment. I lived next door to a tiny woman, discreet as a shadow. And yet this laugh . . . Mozart’s face surfaced from the depths of my memory. I remembered now. He was at my neighbor’s. Was he the one with this grotesque laugh? What did he find so amusing? The idea that Mozart was laughing at my expense slowly took shape in my mind.

  Enough with this Mozart! I shook myself.

  But the poisonous thoughts had already begun to do their work. My anxiety gave way to a rising tide of bile that formed in my throat. A wave of rage came over me, so intense and powerful that even Mozart would have found it difficult to recognize me. I was in a state of complete self-defense. I would not let this man destroy my life.

  I got up and went to the kitchen, where I started digging through the cupboards in search of a flashlight. Once I’d found one, I crept close to the back door, intending to spy on my neighbor. The night was pitch black, and no light filtered through her kitchen window. I approached the French doors of the dining room that opened into the garden. Everything was black. No human activity was visible. My bare feet were freezing on my neighbor’s courtyard floor. I wore nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. I was starting to have serious doubts about the legitimacy of my expedition, when I saw a shadow looming at the back of the dining room. I heard Mozart’s delirious laugh once again. That was all it took. I charged at the door and knocked furiously until someone opened.

  A harsh light erupted from the dining room, and for a few seconds I couldn’t see anything at all. Then Mozart appeared in the doorway, pulling his bathrobe tight around himself, a terrified look on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, like a scared little mouse.

  He stumbled to the ground as I forced my way inside.

  I dashed toward the front of the apartment, where the living room and the bedroom were. Where was my neighbor? She had invited the devil in, she would have to get rid of him.

  “What are you looking for?” Mozart asked, standing up with difficulty.

  I wasn’t going to reward him with a response. Who did he think he was? He had invaded my life. I was now an occupied territory, and had the right to defend myself. I hadn’t spent all these years struggling to achieve modest literary status just to let some cocky young kid oust me without putting up a fight.

  “You’re not acting like yourself,” he said wearily, following me into the living room. “You’re worrying me.”

  We were strangers! How dare he judge my state of mind! And his head? Cocked on the side like a dog, questioning my presence in the house? Questioning my very existence!

  I leaped at him, my flashlight brandished in the air. I remember hearing my neighbor in that instance, but her screams only echoed those of Mozart’s as I hit him with the flashlight. He didn’t budge. His stillness enraged me even more, so I hit him again. And again.

  My neighbor kept screaming. “What are you doing? Stop!”

  The room began to spin. I didn’t understand why Mozart wasn’t falling under my blows. Then, suddenly, he exploded into a million pieces, just like in my nightmare. And I saw my neighbor gripping my arm. She wouldn’t let me go. I was afraid she would pull me away with her into the spiral.

  Then there was nothing.

  No sound. No image. Darkness. The great void.

  When the authorities arrived, they found my neighbor unconscious on the floor, and me lying motionless at her side, half-dressed, my bloody flashlight in hand. There was no trace of Mozart. Despite my pleas of innocence I was later declared unfit to stand trial and placed in an institution. Mozart had disappeared in the night; the authorities did not believe he even existed.

  But he did. And these words are my written testimony . . .

  * * *

  From far away, he heard the sound of someone clapping their hands. Who would dare to bother him while he was writing?

  “Are you still there?”

  He groaned.

  “You were telling me that it
started . . .”

  He raised his eyes.

  “. . . when you began writing your magnum opus.”

  He screamed.

  Two large male nurses grabbed him by the shoulders, and one stuck a needle in his arm. Before he lost consciousness, he heard the doctor say: “His hallucinations are almost constant now. I’m afraid his condition is irreversible. He will never leave this institution.”

  The older of the two nurses gripped the handles of the wheelchair and started pushing him out of the office.

  “What is he doing with his fingers?” asked the younger nurse who had just started working at the hospital.

  “He’s typing on an imaginary keyboard. He spends his days writing stories that will never see the light of day.”

  The nurse looked stunned. “Why?”

  “The man is a well-known novelist who has always struggled maintaining his sanity,” intervened the doctor. “He was my patient long before his collapse. I thought I could control his illness with medication, but . . .” he paused almost theatrically, “one night, in a moment of delirium, he broke into his neighbor’s home and attacked her. Luckily she survived; she said that he mistook her for someone else.”

  “What do you think pushed him over the edge?”

  “I think the lack of inspiration drove him crazy.”

  “I guess we can’t all be Shakespeares like you, doc!” The nurse pointed to the doctor’s crowded bookshelves.

  “Indeed, I’m fortunate to be able to pursue two careers successfully.”

  The young nurse approached the wall of books. “May I?”

  The man nodded.

  The nurse grabbed a book and read the blurb printed on the cover flap: “Claude Chopin took the literary landscape by storm, eliminating his predecessors along his path. Wow! Is that so, doc?”

  Dr. Chopin smiled. The critics had never been so right.

  The Sin Eaters

  by Melissa Yi

  Côte-des-Neiges

  I didn’t trust guys who were too good-looking.

  Strange, since I was sitting to the right of a rather fantastic-looking patient at that moment. He had carefully combed dirty-blond hair, high cheekbones, and very white skin. Beautiful, but he gave me the creeps. He was perched on the edge of the bed with his legs and hands crossed, gazing steadily at the plastic surgeon.

  Dr. Mendelson didn’t seem to notice anything. “This is Hope Sze,” he told the patient, waving at me. “She’s a resident doctor, but she won’t bother you.” He flipped through the patient’s chart, glancing at the before pictures, a big element in plastic surgery. “You’re healing well. Lift your chin up.”

  I was a first-year resident finishing my palliative care rotation, but I was spending a day on plastics at Montreal’s Samuel G. Wasserman Jewish Hospital, just for the heck of it. I didn’t get to see aesthetic patients very often, because they pay privately, and don’t want students descending upon them, but Dr. Mendelson said I could shadow him if I promised not to touch anyone, speak, or practically breathe. Dr. Mendelson was a gnome of a guy, with a deeply furrowed brow and a rumpled white lab coat. He was not exactly the kind of person you’d pick out of a lineup to perform plastic surgery.

  This patient’s before picture didn’t seem all that different than what he looked like now. He’d paid for cheek implants and Botox, even though he was twenty-two years old, only five years younger than I was. The implants did give a foxlike sharpness to his features. As I assessed his new cheeks, his green eyes fixated on me in an uncomfortable way.

  Dr. Mendelson took another picture and said, “Could you stand by the window? The light is better.”

  The patient posed with such alacrity that I figured he was either a model or a wannabe model. Dr. Mendelson snapped some frontal and side pictures, and the patient leaned forward to check his own image on the back of the SLR camera. “That’s the best one,” he said, pointing a thin, pale-skinned finger. He was glaring at the camera, which fit in with the fuck you image that most advertisements project nowadays. “Can I get a copy? You can e-mail it to me, or put it on Tumblr.” His voice was high and thin, not as striking as his appearance.

  I wondered what he did for money to afford plastic surgery at such a young age. Maybe it was just the bank of Mom and Dad. I wanted to ask him about his work, but since I was forbidden to speak, I glanced at his chart. His name was Raymond Pascal Gusarov. He was a Scorpio like me—not that it mattered—and we’d both recently had our birthdays. In fact—I took a quick look—he’d had surgery on his birthday, November 14, which seemed strange to me. Yay, I turned twenty-two. Better have someone cut my face open.

  I’ve never been a big fan of plastic surgery. I just hope my Asian genes will protect me from the ravages of time.

  “I don’t put patient photos online because of confidentiality,” said Dr. Mendelson, scribbling in the chart without looking up.

  “I want it,” said Raymond Pascal Gusarov, in a way that made me think he wasn’t used to being denied.

  Dr. Mendelson grunted. “I’ll have copies made and leave them with my secretary.”

  “At least 300 dpi, so I can use them,” said Raymond.

  “Only the best for you,” Dr. Mendelson replied indifferently. He held the door open. “You can pay the secretary for them when you pick them up.”

  Raymond cut ahead of me and offered the doctor his hand. “Thank you, Dr. Mendelson. I appreciate it.”

  Dr. Mendelson squinted at him. The light blinked off his glasses as he shook the patient’s hand. “My pleasure.” The doctor waved me through ahead of Raymond. I stepped up, because if the doctor’s asking you to do something, you can’t let a patient beat you to it. Twice.

  * * *

  The thought of Raymond Pascal Gusarov nagged at me for the rest of the day. I didn’t know why. Most of the aesthetic patients are trim, fit, and obviously very conscious of their appearance. When Dr. Mendelson asked a young mother if she weighed a hundred pounds, she sniffed and said, “Please! Ninety-five!”

  Raymond Pascal Gusarov’s fox face seemed to follow me home as I hurried down Côte-des-Neiges, past Saint Joseph’s Hospital. Even though I was surrounded by people spilling off the blue-and-white STCUM buses, groceries hooked on their arms, walking into businesses hung with tinsel and Christmas lights, I found myself checking over my shoulder, deliberately ignoring the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery as I turned right and huffed myself halfway up the hill to my apartment. My grandmother hates that my new address overlooks a graveyard, despite my fancy digs and twenty-four-hour security guard.

  I felt slightly better after I locked the door behind me. As soon as I kicked off my boots and dropped my backpack onto the hardwood floor, I googled Raymond Pascal Gusarov. He came up right away.

  The same green eyes stared out at me from a dozen different shots. Some of them were black-and-white, most of them color, nearly all of them professionally photographed. He looked younger in some of them, with a rounder face. Less fox, more chicken. But he never looked innocent.

  He was on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. He had a fan page on Facebook with only seventy-seven likes. Even from our brief encounter, I figured it would really bother Raymond Pascal Gusarov that he wasn’t more popular.

  I scrolled through his fan page. He frequently posted pictures and videos of himself, little messages that I didn’t want to think too much about, like: I’M DOWNTOWN, BITCHESS!!!! Cum & C me.

  My phone buzzed with a message from Ryan Wu: What’s up?

  I had to smile. Ryan had just given me the world’s most beautiful iPhone for my birthday. I couldn’t look at it or touch it without thinking of him, which was probably what he had in mind.

  I texted back: I’m looking something up.

  Work?

  Sort of. I didn’t want to text anything else, because I’d just caught my third murderer, and Ryan thought that I should hightail it out of Montreal and join him in dull but safe Ottawa.

  Ryan was calling no
w. I rolled my eyes before I tapped the green key to answer the phone. He knew me too well. “Hey, babe.”

  “Are you on another case?”

  “Not officially.”

  His voice tightened. “I thought you were going to avoid those.”

  I didn’t answer for a second.

  “Right?” said Ryan.

  “I’m just looking something up on the computer. I’m not getting strangled or anything like that.”

  “For once,” he muttered, which I chose to ignore. “What are you looking up?”

  I couldn’t tell him without breaking patient confidentiality, but Ryan is a computer whiz—he could be so useful on this. “Let’s say that I have someone that I want to look up online. How would I find more information?”

  “What have you got right now?”

  “Some Google images, his Facebook and Twitter accounts, plus a pretty website with some contact information.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It just feels fishy to me.”

  “You want me to do it?”

  “I can’t tell you his name.”

  “Okay. So what do you want to know?”

  “I want to know more about this guy. I want to know where he lives, and if he’s doing anything questionable.”

  I could practically feel him thinking through the phone. Ryan has a fairly massive brain, not to mention a long, lean runner’s build, and—don’t get me started. “You might try looking at the Exif,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The Exchangable Image File Format. I’ll send you some information about it. It not only stores the file format, it tells you the time, date, and GPS coordinates of where the picture was posted.”

  You mean you could Snapchat a naughty picture of yourself, and freaks could figure out where you lived? I ignored the niggling voice at the back of my head saying, Isn’t this an invasion of privacy? Are you violating the Hippocratic Oath? Huh, freak?