Montreal Noir Read online

  The kettle whistles just as footsteps begin to descend the worm-eaten staircase. The light steps of a child first, in ballet shoes. Then others, heavier, in Phentex slippers.

  David turns around at the same time as Géraldine. Before them is the small blond head of Raphaëlle, laughing, alive. And behind her, obese and dull-eyed, an overgrown child hidden behind layers of flesh and medicated lethargy, broken.

  Like every time she looks at her daughter, her little Victoria, Claudine wants to die. Her daughter who was so delicate, so sensitive, and whom she hadn’t defended, hadn’t protected, her daughter whom she’d left in the hands of Paul Normand because she was afraid of him, afraid of Roger, afraid of standing up to all the men who told her what to do, who told her to stay silent.

  “All my life I was afraid,” says Claudine, to no one in particular. “I don’t even know what I was afraid of. Of seeing the world as it was, I think, of not being strong enough to face reality. I was guilty, like everyone else; I went along with it because he paid us, because he dazzled us, because he was from our world and knew how to talk to us, because I believed it would lift us out of our misery, because my daughter wanted so much to be chosen to act on that show. My God how she wanted . . . We were always telling her she had to believe in her dreams. Cursed, shitty dreams.”

  Stunned by the violence of these last words, Raphaëlle clings to Victoria’s fat leg as the woman strokes her hair, puts a vagabond barrette carefully back in place. Géraldine sets the photo down, between portraits of a faded Jehane Benoit and a dashing Ricardo. Of the lovely little doe-eyed brunette in the white porcelain frame, nothing remains. Not the faintest glimmer in her eyes. Everything has been ravaged, lost. A shipwreck.

  “I was a bad mother. But today I paid my dues. Yes, I killed him. And then I killed his wife, the journalist, and my husband. I killed them all, and my turn will come. I’m not afraid anymore.” Claudine smiles at David and Géraldine, straightening her thin shoulders proudly. This small, frail, nondescript woman of sixty, whom everyone pushed aside without a thought, was capable of the worst.

  David turns toward Géraldine and detects no sign of distress on her smooth face. He’s not surprised. He sometimes wonders if his partner didn’t leave her soul behind in the massacre at Nyamata.

  “When I’m on the inside, and too weak to say it, you’ll tell the journalists.”

  “What’s that, Madame Lachance?” Géraldine asks in a calm voice.

  “You’ll tell them that my daughter, my Victoria, was a pretty little girl, such a pretty little girl.”

  Three Tshakapesh Dreams

  by Samuel Archibald

  Centre-Sud

  Translated from French by Donald Winkler

  Yeah, I remember the story, even if I don’t get to tell it very often.

  It happened after the war. They found the kid in the Frontenac Library bathroom with a needle sticking out of his arm. It was no surprise he’d been shooting up. Ontario Street’s known for its poets, whores, and druggies. Simon was all three. He often peddled his ass to pay for his dope, then when he got straight for a while, he gave poetry readings. Sometimes, like on that day, he went to the library and left his dogs tied to a bicycle rack at the door while he picked up books by Carole David or Patrice Desbiens. No one knew how long he’d been dead. No one knew what to do with his dogs. The medics brought out the body, with help from the Montreal police. They kept the dogs at the pound for a bit, in separate cages. There wasn’t much chance of them being adopted. They were two pit bulls full of fleas and with shitty pedigrees. After a week, the vet came to give them the needle too.

  That’s how families bite the dust in the Centre-Sud.

  * * *

  In those days, no one knew the Indian was a cop.

  It was Brisebois, his contact at the provincial police, who called him at home to tell him Simon was dead. The Indian asked if they were going to do an autopsy. Brisebois said everyone could see it was an overdose, but the Indian just laughed. Later, the Indian would tell me: “Simon may have had his faults, but he knew how to shoot up.”

  When you say the war around here, you don’t mean Iraq or Afghanistan. You mean the Great Quebec Biker War. You had to be in Montreal at the end of the 1990s to understand: Maurice “Mom” Boucher thinking he’s Joseph Stalin, the independents against the Hells Angels, about 160 dead, nearly 200 attempted murders, and bombs exploding all over the place. People stopped going out. It wasn’t Montreal anymore; it was Belfast. When the government and the police got fed up, they threw everyone inside.

  The Indian was too young to play a role in the 2001 deployment, he was still in Nicolet. His superiors posted him in Montreal afterward, undercover, so he could keep an eye on things in the city. He did little jobs around the neighborhood, like peddling stolen goods and driving taxis for escorts. He lived just below us, in Dan Quesnel’s triplex on Larivière Street. It was just by Saint-Eusèbe Church and the McDonald’s cigarette factory, where in spring and summer the dried tobacco smells so much like cinnamon buns that it’s been twenty years since I’ve eaten one of those damned buns.

  The Indian made Brisebois promise to at least check out the stash they’d found in Simon’s pockets.

  Brisebois called him back the next day to tell him they’d found coke and a bag of almost-pure heroin.

  * * *

  The Indian went to an AA meeting on Wednesday. People were used to seeing him there; being an alcoholic was part of his cover. He picked up a donut and listened as people spilled their guts until the cigarette break. Then he went to ask Keven Savoie if he knew where to find Kim. The guy told him that Kim barely came around anymore, but he could find her on Mondays and Thursdays at Walter Stewart Park. She played in a lesbian softball league.

  He caught up with Kim the next night, after her game. She played shortstop, really good hands. Kim was Simon’s oldest friend, but since she’d stopped using, she hadn’t seen him much. After getting herself clean, Kim started working for Stella, a sex workers organization. She handed out condoms and guidance to the girls in that part of town.

  Kim and the Indian sobbed in each other’s arms for ten minutes. Kim couldn’t tell him a lot, but she had the same thought that he did: there was something fishy about Simon dying from a heroin overdose. Smack, for him, was a rich kid’s drug, and he mainly shot coke. Besides, where would he have gotten pure heroin with half the country’s criminals behind bars?

  * * *

  In those days, the Indian called himself Dave Tshakapesh.

  He’d taken the name in memory of his grandfather, who had been a bush pilot for Hydro-Québec and for outfitters in the north. He’d married a Robertson from Pointe-Bleue and spent most of his life with the Innu, the Atikamekw, and the Cree. He knew lots of stories, which he’d told Dave years ago, when he was just a kid. Stories about Carcajou, the Wendigo, and especially Tshakapesh, the boy who succeeds in everything he undertakes.

  Tshakapesh was born prematurely, when the black bear devoured his father and his mother. It was his sister who found him, rolled into a ball in the uterus that had been ripped from his mother’s body. Tshakapesh’s sister brought the little creature back to camp, where he wormed his way out of the womb all by himself. Then he stood up and asked his sister to go and get his bow and arrows so that he could avenge his parents. Dave loved that idea: a baby born ready for war.

  When Simon died, Dave knew something terrible was going to happen. He’d dreamed that a giant bear was marching through the Centre-Sud, holding onto the big L-shaped tower of the Quebec police, the building all the kids on Ontario Street see when they look to the sky, the building everyone still calls by its old name: the Parthenais Prison.

  * * *

  The following afternoon, Dave went to see Big Derek.

  You don’t see Big Derek around here much anymore, but back then, he was kind of a celebrity. He trained for strongman competitions, and he had his picture in the paper along with Hugo Girard. In the crime world, he w
as known as the doorman at Sex Mania, the strip club at the corner of Ontario and Bercy. He was a pimp. He dealt dope to the strippers and collected debts for the Ontario Street loan sharks. People got really good at digging out money when Derek came to the door. He appeared to weigh three hundred pounds, he had tattoos up and down his arms, and he could pull a fire truck with his jaws. That fucker had muscles in places good Christians don’t even have skin.

  Derek lived in an old house that had been spared demolition when its working-class neighborhood was torn down. He’d bought it from a retired schoolteacher and immediately took down her crucifix and sacred hearts, replacing them with laminated Scarface and porn star posters. Mixing a Jack and Coke, he asked: “Did you go to the funeral?”

  Dave said no.

  Derek hadn’t gone either. At that point, the Indian had no intention of telling Derek he didn’t think Simon had done himself in. All he wanted to do was scout the territory and let Derek get smashed, so he would relax and tell too many stories. With his cocktail recipe, that wouldn’t take long. Derek made his Jack and Cokes Centre-Sud style: four ounces of Jack Daniel’s, slightly less Coca-Cola, and two lines of coke on the side. His cocaine left a strong taste of burnt rubber at the bottom of your throat, and it loosened the tongue.

  Derek talked to him for hours about the balance of power in Centre-Sud. On his nights off, he watched porn with the TV muted while sweeping the police frequencies with his scanner. He was the archivist for a kingdom of bums that went from Davidson to Saint-Denis Street, between Sherbrooke Street and the river.

  Before the Indian left, Derek said: “I always knew he’d come to a bad end. I hate the fucking bikers, but they’re right about one thing: you should never do the dope you’re selling.”

  Derek sniffed a line here and there, but you’d never find him in the bathroom with a needle sticking out of his arm. Still, he had no business preaching to anybody. His vice was pussy and everyone knew it. He screwed the girls at Sex Mania, he screwed the escorts he chauffeured, he even screwed the twenty-dollar whores strung out on crack who no sane guy would touch with rubber gloves. He was always up for a new hustle or some crazy deal, because he spent more on hookers than what the hookers brought in.

  * * *

  Yes, Derek and the kid knew each other.

  The summer before, some gangbangers from Saint-Michel robbed several freight trains and turned up at the Indian’s place with a box of samples. Fencing stolen goods was Dave’s number-one cover. These guys had emptied all the crates from a railcar stalled under the Rachel Street overpass. Not knowing what they were getting, they’d stolen twenty-five cases of luxury dildos—silicone brands that looked like old iMacs. Orange, pink, red, and mauve. Anal plugs, high-class battery-powered vibrators, clit ticklers—the works. Dave had a network for selling cigarettes and booze. Clothes too. He sold douchebag suits to the wannabe mobsters in Saint-Léonard, and ghetto getups to the wiggers in Hochelaga. But for dildos, Dave needed a whole other network. Simon and Derek were his best salesmen, each in his own department. Derek sold the toys to strippers, and Simon dealt here, there, and everywhere in the Gay Village. After that, Dave, Derek, and Simon kept on working together; they even went for a beer from time to time to honor the summer they’d rained down dildos on the town.

  * * *

  Dave got home that night thinking about all he’d learned, which wasn’t much. But he did learn one thing: according to Derek, Edmond-Louis Gingras was the interim drug boss in Hochelaga and the Centre-Sud. Gingras was an old hand who worked mainly with whores, for the Italians. He’d married into the Mafia—one of Rizzuto’s nieces. The Italians chose a perfect puppet to hold the fort while waiting for negotiations in prison to cough up the real boss. Derek believed that the power was going to Gingras’s head: “You’d think he wants to keep the job forever. Seems he’s even been doing a housecleaning in the neighborhood, checking out people who’ve been talking to the police. There’s a girl and a guy who’ve disappeared. When I heard about Simon, I even thought he might be a rat. But then I thought, no. Simon would never have snitched to the cops.”

  That night Dave went to bed with a heavy heart.

  Simon would never have talked to the police—neither would Derek—but they talked to him every day without knowing who he really was. The Indian followed his own strict rule: never ask someone for anything if you can make him do it without knowing it. He got information out of people by making them think he was their friend. He always told himself he was protecting them, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  During the night he had another dream.

  He dreamed he was Tshakapesh fighting the black bear. He had no knives and could only use his fists against the fearsome animal that was twice as tall as he was. It had a shark’s mouth, and its thick oily fur smelled of piss. He woke up in a sweat, reaching for his Glock. He remembered that his gun was at the station. He came knocking on the window of my room upstairs; he did that sometimes. He asked me if I knew anything about Edmond-Louis Gingras. I said yes, but I added that no one around here called him by that name. Because of his big fat ass and his big teats and the hair sticking out of his shirt collar, everyone called him Teddy Bear.

  That was when Dave Tshakapesh realized that he, too, had someone to avenge.

  * * *

  After that, Dave got on Gingras’s case.

  The job was almost too easy. Teddy Bear needed people. The provincial police had dismantled the Rock Machine in the fall of 2000, and in the spring of 2001 they’d moved on to the Hells. On March 26 alone they’d arrested twelve people, and not just guys who emptied ashtrays. Dons, deadbeats, crooked lawyers. A hell of a catch.

  It’s not often you can say this, but at the beginning of the 2000s there was a shortage of criminals in Montreal. The Indian was a bright guy, everyone knew that, so he got work pretty quickly. He didn’t have much trouble convincing his bosses to keep the pressure on. With the war freshly won, the cops knew perfectly well that crime was like nature: it abhors a vacuum. They didn’t want a new despot rearing his head to reign over the empire’s ruins. It took Dave one week to sell the idea of laying hands on Teddy Bear. Then he spent the summer cadging more and more jobs from Teddy Bear’s men, while supplying Brisebois with information at the same time. The police moved in after him and took photos of Teddy Bear’s dope stash, cash, and bungalows on the North Shore, where his guys had hydroponic grow ops.

  One night, Teddy Bear asked to see the Indian alone.

  Dave didn’t tip off his boss at the provincial police. He was afraid they’d want him to wear a wire. He went to have a beer with Teddy Bear in an Ontario Street bar. They took a booth at the back, and Dave figured out that the bar was probably owned by Teddy Bear when he saw him get up and draw two drafts without asking for anyone’s okay. He made his little bank-manager speech to Dave: he very much appreciated his work; he wondered if Dave was ready to get more involved.

  Dave asked him what he was thinking of, and Teddy Bear told him he was having a problem with someone—his friend, Big Derek.

  Big Derek had been playing the pimp behind his back for years. Now he was dealing too. Dave asked Teddy Bear if he was looking for a temporary or a permanent solution. Teddy Bear said permanent. That would set a good example, and they’d be able to place bets on how many shitheads it would take to shoulder that son of a bitch’s coffin.

  Dave pushed his luck a bit. He looked Teddy Bear straight in the eye and asked whether the kid’s OD in the spring had been meant as a warning for Derek. Teddy Bear hesitated for five seconds before answering: “Yes, but he’s a slow learner.”

  When Dave’s bosses found out he’d been asked to kill someone, they were royally pissed off, since he hadn’t recorded the conversation. Then they got used to the idea, and had a secret meeting on the other side of the city with their whole on-site team, Dave, and the government prosecutors. An undercover agent being asked to commit homicide—that was the breaking point. They looked at what they had, and one
of the prosecutors said: “Go. We can nab them with what we’ve got.”

  Dave went home and watched baseball on TV, alone in his living room, while drinking a beer in Simon’s honor. He went to bed late; he was keyed up, but his mind was at rest.

  At two in the morning, he awoke in a sweat. He’d had exactly the same dream as when he’d spoken to Derek in June—he was fighting the black bear with his naked hands. Dave didn’t like talking about his dreams much. They were very private for him. But he explained to me later that dreams don’t tell the future or the past. They tell you how to behave, and whether you’ve behaved the right way. For him, it was as clear as spring water: he’d acted in accordance with his second dream, so he shouldn’t have had to dream it all over again.

  Unless the ancestors were trying to tell him that he’d made a mistake.

  * * *

  Something about Simon’s story didn’t hold water.

  Dave got up and went to eat two eggs with bacon at Bercy’s. He gave Kim a call to ask her if there was anything new. She’d heard nothing, but earlier in the week she’d talked to another social worker at Stella. This friend had an escort client who did heroin on and off. She was a girl from the neighborhood who put out for tourists in the Old Montreal hotels during the Grand Prix. Her pimp had slapped her around because she’d started shooting up between her fingers. She couldn’t work anymore and was shit-scared of getting another beating, because she owed money to the guy who sold her the heroin. Dave asked Kim if she’d been able to get the name of the pusher.

  “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but it’s Big Derek,” she told him.

  Dave put the story together piece by piece: a hundred times over, he saw the expression on Teddy Bear’s face when he’d ask about Simon. Teddy Bear hadn’t hesitated because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to come clean, he hesitated because he had no idea what Dave was talking about. Teddy Bear didn’t have Simon killed. The asshole was just showing off.