Montreal Noir Read online

  Raymonde Krazynski puts up more of a fight. As soon as the barrel of the gun presses into her soft, fat belly, she starts running at an astonishing speed for a bowlegged Ukrainian journalist. Her breath is ragged from emphysema, and she flails about like a shrew, screaming and stumbling over an orange tabby cat. Krazynski tries to crawl away, desperately grasping at the latch of the glass door that opens into the garden. She wants to live.

  It’s odd: someone who’s assassinated so many people through her journalistic slandering has such a sudden and scared impulse to survive.

  “Yes, but they were words! Just words!” cries Krazynski. “You can’t compare, please, I beg you, I was only doing my job—”

  The bullets shatter her skull and cardiac muscle—one can’t call what she had a heart. Behind Krazynski the glass door splinters into a thousand fragments. It’s pretty, all that red and gray on the snow. How delicate death is, in the end. On the paved curb of the cul-de-sac, the tabby cat watches as if waiting to be alone with its mistress’s corpse, to better devour her.

  Him

  The snow crackles beneath Géraldine’s red Converse. Her coat is unbuttoned, her lovely head covered with a fur chapka hat; she faces the cold like an enemy from whom one must hide any sign of fear.

  Géraldine and David duck beneath the yellow-and-black tape, weaving their way through a cluster of forensic technicians. Above the workers’ heads are clouds of gray mist rising like Native American smoke signals. The body is near the restaurant’s side entrance, between a dumpster, cement wall, and a mountain of hardened snow plowed to the edge of the parking lot. The sky is the same hazy pink as the froth on the lips of the corpse, drowning in its own blood.

  The first thought that comes to Géraldine’s mind is the crime scene’s vulnerability. The killer had to act in a matter of seconds or risk being caught.

  “A professional,” David says.

  “Or not,” Géraldine mutters.

  The corpse is laid out stiff on a slab of ice wearing an unbuttoned Armani blazer. The blood blooms over a lavender polo with its logo of a jockey in midswing. And then David sees what Géraldine is looking at now: the pants, unzipped, reveal boxers stained a deep red, suggesting a violence too intimate to be anything other than the work of a professional killer.

  “Guys are still wearing Ralph Lauren, then?”

  David nods. “Not so much in this part of the city.”

  Rue Ontario is Montreal’s epicenter of misery, a street that lacks even the audacity to be a bit ethnic or colorful, qualities that would at least put a multicultural sheen over its dejection. Rue Ontario has remained filthy and white after all these years, pallid as an old candle stump left in an abandoned church.

  Dr. Attila Mihalka approaches Géraldine and David, rubbing his hands together, beaming, icicles hanging from his long mustache. In theory, the forensic doctor is retired, but since his replacement is a wimp always teetering on the edge of burnout, the old Hungarian is back on the job, and he’s never been in such a good mood.

  Géraldine points at the corpse’s bloody boxers and asks: “Am I dreaming, Doc Attila, or was he . . . ?”

  “Castrated? You’re not dreaming, my dear. Three bullets point-blank from a hunting rifle, and a beautiful castration—shlang. No mercy. Reminds me of Budapest in ’58, except there they hung us by our feet.”

  “Castrated,” repeats Géraldine, dazed.

  The old Hungarian nods enthusiastically.

  “Did you find the . . . you know. His thing?” asks David.

  “The pièce de résistance is missing, but I can tell you one thing: whoever did this wasn’t messing around. You can see the serration of the blade in the flesh, like on a deer. If I end my career on this case, I’ll be happy.”

  Any minute and the old Hungarian will be jumping up and down, thinks David, who feels the toast he had for breakfast rising up his throat. Géraldine’s husky voice brings him out of his nausea.

  “Pre- or postmortem castration?”

  “Probably right after he was shot. It must have been agonizing because, you see, there was a lot of blood. It’s very vascular, a man’s . . .”

  Géraldine turns toward David. “What do you think it means?”

  David shakes his head, his face alarmingly pale. “I think it’ll help us find out who the victim is.”

  “What do we know apart from his bad taste in clothes?” asks Géraldine.

  “Nothing. No papers, no car keys, no cell phone. His pockets were empty; all that’s left is his money.”

  Géraldine raises a delicate eyebrow. “How much?”

  “One thousand in hundred-dollar bills.”

  Géraldine kneels down and leans over the waxy face, its mouth open in a final gasp before death. Here’s a man who believed that everything was owed to him, she thinks, even life. Then she looks up at David. “And what do you make of that?” she asks, pointing to the tattered bills.

  “I think he came here to buy someone’s silence. I think that when you wear suits like his, a thousand bucks is nothing, but for the murderer it’s a fortune. I think it wasn’t the first silence he’d bought, and I think—no, I’m sure—that this guy had no respect for the person he came here to see.”

  Géraldine nods in agreement. She likes it when she can detect a rare tremble of anger in David’s voice. In the Nyamata massacres that had taken her entire family, the gentle ones had been the first to die. It’s not good for a man to be incapable of anger.

  “Say, lovebirds, may I?” Attila’s voice brings them back to reality. The wind is glacial, and the doctor wants to leave with his castrated corpse.

  Géraldine stands up, extending a leather-gloved hand to David. “Where are the swimmers?”

  Attila the Hungarian strokes his mustache, and points his chin toward the Palace. “Eating.”

  Clearly, some people never lose their appetite, David thinks, hurrying at Géraldine’s red-sneakered heels.

  The Swimmers

  Spreading thick layers of butter onto their toast, bursting egg yolks with ferocious stabs of their forks, planting their knives in the flesh of sausages as if a man hadn’t just been murdered and castrated in the adjacent parking lot, they eat. They’re carnivores, assassins, ogres. Five girls and three boys, sedated by chlorine, high on endorphins and caffeine.

  I really must learn to swim, Géraldine thinks, impressed by their energy.

  “You’re the ones who found the body?” asks David.

  “It was Pat,” says a small blond girl, pointing to a man whose sweater hugs every muscle of his sculpted body.

  Géraldine pulls up a chair and sits down at the end of the table. “Would you like to tell me about it?”

  In a swift gesture, the man soaks up the last traces of his egg yolk with a piece of bread. Behind him, giant jars of skinned peppers recall the killing in the parking lot. “I’m always the first one out of the pool. I was getting ready to put my bag in my car when I saw the body.”

  Géraldine looks up at him, trying to read his face. Its lines are clean and sharp, as if sketched in chalk. The man takes advantage of the pause to swallow his mouthful of egg-soaked bread and wash it down with a gulp of coffee. There’s nothing calm about him. “Did you touch him?”

  “Yes. I felt for a pulse. I’m a first responder. I didn’t touch anywhere else. I got up and called 911. Your men arrived seven minutes and twenty-two seconds later.”

  Seven minutes, twenty-two seconds. “Are you always so precise with your timekeeping, monsieur?”

  The serious-faced man lets a thin smile curve his lips. “Pat Visconti. I’m a bus driver, I have a schedule to follow. I’m always on time.”

  “He’s an ironman,” adds one of the girls. “Pat has a stopwatch built in his ass.”

  Pat and his internal stopwatch grate on Géraldine’s nerves. She catches David looking at her, attentive as always. Sometimes it occurs to her that they’re too intimate, prisoners of a Kevlar cocoon that no one else can access. If they
weren’t protected by the fact that he’s married to an adorable woman and she’s plagued by a traumatic past, they’d be dumb enough to sabotage their alloy of steel and titanium with a love affair.

  Concentrate on the victim, Géraldine.

  “Can we get someone on the identification of the victim?”

  Géraldine feels someone touch her sleeve. A perfume of bleach and artificial musk invades her nostrils. And then a voice, gravelly from smoking: “I know him.”

  Cynthia

  It’s been thirty-two years since Cynthia started waitressing at the Palace. Her hair has gone from platinum blond to flamenco black to auburn. This morning, Cynthia is a redhead. She says her fox’s mane gives her courage. She needs it today.

  She’s never spoken of what she saw. It was so long ago, and the humiliation still stings when she thinks about it today. But now the man is dead, and a woman is willing to listen to her. And so, seated in a corner booth, meticulously tearing apart a paper napkin, Cynthia tells her story.

  She was twenty-three years old, raising a child by herself and working two shifts per day, serving up massive amounts of trans fats to already obese customers. One day a man sat down in her section, joined by a dark-haired, freckled little girl. The man was well known, preceded by his reputation and influence—all of Quebec watched Family Life on Thursday nights. He was the head honcho behind the popular sitcom that featured rambunctious cherub-faced children and parents overwhelmed by adulthood.

  Everyone knew the Family Life producer had grown up in poverty, had started from nothing, and had made it to the top through flair and determination. Family Life was the childhood he’d always wanted—it offered an innocent and candid vision of adolescence and spurned the resignation of adult life. You have to believe in your dreams, the man often repeated in interviews. His success was proof of it.

  The young waitress had never seen the darling little brunette before, but the child must have been full of promise for such an important man to want to take her to lunch. He’d ordered crêpes for the girl. For himself, eggs and bacon, but no butter on his toast.

  “If I want to have a chance with you, my dear Cynthia, I’ve got to watch my figure,” he teased her. Cynthia had blushed, she remembers, and hurried back with fresh coffee to top off his cup. He always left a big tip, and showed sincere interest in her; he flirted by acting as if he had no chance with her, when they both knew he had every chance in the world. Some mornings, Cynthia would forget that he was married with children, and daydream that they fell in love. All the other waitresses, jealous of the tips and attention from the famous man, would mock her adoration of him. All except Diane. But Diane was old, Diane was bitter.

  And then one morning, when Cynthia had forgotten to give him his confiture, she’d turned around and seen the man’s hand, a manicured hand, anchored by a fat gold signet ring, on the frail shoulder of the child. An ogre’s hand, a bear’s paw, so fat, so heavy, so implacable, resting there on its fragile prey, that all the blood in Cynthia’s heart turned to lead. A paternal hand, that’s all, the young waitress had tried to convince herself. He’s married, he has children, that’s all, no more, it can’t be that, this is the man who’s had every success and still comes to eat at the Palace, in my section, the famous man who hasn’t forgotten his roots, it’s me, me he’s making a play for, not her, a little girl . . .

  The man raised his head, he met Cynthia’s eyes for a moment, and his expression transformed, terrifying. It didn’t last long, only a few seconds, and the charming smile returned. He left a more generous tip than usual, and when she saw that extra bill, Cynthia knew. She’d seen correctly, and he was paying her to feign blindness.

  “He never came back to the Palace,” Cynthia now tells Géraldine, her eyes lowered, all the shame in the world on her tired shoulders. “It’s funny, you never would have thought he’d come back just to . . .” She pauses and looks into her lap. “Never mind.”

  To be shot down like a dog. Cynthia doesn’t say the words, and yet Géraldine hears them very clearly.

  “His name is Paul,” says Cynthia. “Paul Normand.”

  Valérie

  The first thing you notice about her is her cleavage, accentuated by a Donna Karan cashmere yoga top and the smattering of freckles covering her chest. Her face has been lifted and remodeled, cheeks tightened, lips plumped, wrinkles removed. But the cleavage doesn’t lie. Paul Normand’s wife has overindulged in the sun, her husband’s credit cards, and laziness. Above her balloon-like breasts are a thousand brown spots; even Valérie can’t cover up her aging skin.

  Her eyes, periwinkle blue, are like her life: vacant. The number you have dialed is not in service, and all the namastes in the world can’t slow the march of time, nor the ravages of a life so carelessly lived.

  Even with her senses dulled by white wine, even anaesthetized by all the chemicals that are supposed to make her less anxious, less depressive, but that really just allow her to bear her own passivity, Valérie must have seen something. You don’t spend three decades of your life with a pedophile and not once see him place his hand on the thin shoulder of a little girl in need of love and attention. Little girls in need of love and attention: there had been hundreds in his life. He’d devoured them like sweets, without a hint of remorse, right under the nose of his wife, who stood by and let him do it. Faced with the alternative—giving up the vacations he paid for in the Grenadines, and bringing charges that would make all those good times look like nothing but a constant stream of shit over the years—Valérie had never had an attack of conscience. She’d turned her head and swallowed more pink, yellow, and blue pills, enjoying the sun on the deck of the sailboat, forgetting everything in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, a cocktail in hand.

  And now she had the spots to show for it. All over her chest. Like the markings of a permanent shame.

  With Valérie, there’s no need for a weapon. It’s enough to press down on her throat with both thumbs until she stops breathing. She barely resists, complicit even in her own murder.

  Paul

  Géraldine jots the name down in her notebook: Paul Normand. Beside her, David hunches over his smartphone, already scouring the web. He’s shocked to discover the number of pages devoted to the impresario and his protégés.

  “And the little girl, the dark-haired child, she has a name?” Géraldine asks the copper-haired waitress.

  Cynthia stares at a couple in front of her and wonders how long they’ve been together. “I don’t know. He always called her sweetie. You’d have to watch the credits at the end of the show, they always list the names . . . Seems to me it was a boy’s name, a unisex name, Renée or Claude . . . Danielle perhaps?”

  Michelle

  She always knew the police would come and that it would be because of him. It was inevitable. That man couldn’t be content with a single victim. You only had to watch him eat, a meticulous ogre sucking the honey from each cell of the honeycomb before tossing it aside, empty. Even when he wasn’t hungry, Paul’s appetite had gotten the better of him. Money, power, and little girls’ asses: he was insatiable.

  Michelle didn’t have to know the names to be sure that there were others. She knew they existed. Somewhere in the nebula, they formed an army of phantom stars. One day, or perhaps one night, a thread would connect them, and their constellation would have a name. A constellation of ghosts.

  Yes, Michelle always knew the police would come. There had been periods in her life when this certainty had retreated, a she-wolf frightened by the sound of the hunter’s footsteps. But on very calm nights, holding her breath so as not to scare it away, Michelle could feel the fetid breath of certainty on her neck and, possessed by a sort of drunkenness, she had to fight the desire to get up in the middle of the night, drive to a police station, and report him.

  Paul Normand raped me. I was ten years old. And his greatest crime, the most disgusting, the most repulsive—much worse than his rancid cock—was that every time he made me beli
eve I was lucky to be chosen among all the others.

  It would be a relief to spit out his name, like when she sticks her fingers down her throat to make herself vomit. But once she’d emptied her stomach of all that bitterness, she would have to face the world and pay the consequences.

  All those who had never had their neck squeezed so tightly that black and yellow marks were left there for days—those who had never had their throat brutalized by the pounding of a cock that thrusts by force—who’d been spared from the soundtrack of a man panting and groaning as he came—they would feel entitled to judge her, to condemn her.

  Opportunist, liar, bitch, mercenary, careerist, calculating, profiteer, mytho-, nympho-, parano-, schizo-, manipulating, pathetic, sad, narcissistic, crazy, aggressive.

  At best, she would be deemed fragile. But this was the worst epithet in her line of work, where one could recover far more easily from accusations of nymphomania than of a fragility that would worry any investor.

  And so, Michelle had hoped that someone else would get up in the middle of the night, go into a police station, and beat the shit out of the silence, pounding it over and over again, right in the stomach. A single report would be enough for others to come out of the woodwork, and soon there would be a veritable stampede.

  Be patient.

  She always knew the police would come. She didn’t think it would happen today, in the middle of rehearsal with her troupe, the last run-through before their big show in Vegas. But she never thought she would make it there either, her name on the marquee of the Barroco: Directed by Michelle Sullivan.

  When her assistant leans close and whispers that two investigators want to speak with her, Michelle feels a wave of heat come over her and the familiar shudder of disgust travel down to the small of her back.

  Paul

  The police advance toward her, excusing themselves to the acrobats and dancers who move back to clear a path. How handsome they are, Michelle muses. He, a milky-white Pierrot; she, an ebony Colombine. She can’t resist the urge to magnify images, to dramatize them. It’s stronger than she is.