Miss Montreal (17 page)

“
S
o what did the big man say to that?” Ryan asked.

“For the first ten seconds? Not a word,” I said. “He looked at his daughter, she looked at him. Then he said it had never come up. Didn’t say, ‘No, why would it,’ which is what I would have said.”

“But you’re not a born liar.”

We were having breakfast in a café on Mont-Royal that made great omelettes and better coffee than the Lorties had offered me.

“So you think the son’s adopted?”

“Let me tell you what happened when I left. I knew Luc was at the back, unloading boxes, so I went around to talk to him. He’s there with another guy, handing him cartons out of the back of a van. I can tell they’re QAQ flyers because there’s a sample taped to the outside of each box. He’s got earbuds in and he’s bobbing his head to something with a thrash kind of beat. I walk up to him and say,
‘Allô.’
He looks at me like I just walked down the ramp of a spaceship. Taking me in but not computing. I stick out my hand and say,
‘Bonjour.’
He ignores me and goes to get another box. I get in between him and his helper and say,
‘Tu est Luc Lortie?’
He shrugs. Says something I don’t quite get but his friend laughs. I say,
‘Je suis Jonah Geller.’
He says,
‘Pis?
’ ”

“Pee?” Ryan said.

“How he pronounced
puis
, which means ‘and,’ or in this context, ‘What’s your point?’ I tell him I’m a private investigator and I want to ask him about Sammy Adler. He says,
‘Qui?’
Like he’s never heard the name. I say, ‘Il
était journaliste qui écrit un article sur ton père.’
He laughs, his friend laughs. I think
article
was the wrong word or I pronounced it wrong.”

“Let me guess,” Ryan said, “Your hackles started to rise.”

“A little,” I admitted. “I mean, I was trying. So I say,
‘Est-ce que Monsieur Adler a parlé avec toi?’
He doesn’t answer. Just smirks, steps around me and hands the box to his friend.”

“And you wanted to lay them both out. Bing bang boom, Jonah Geller strikes again.”

“Wanted to, but didn’t. So he turns and pulls another box out of the van, and this time I step in close, almost pinning him up against the bumper. And I say to him,
‘C’est quoi le problème? J’ai quelques questions très simples pour toi. Ça prendrait deux minutes.’
He tries to step around me and I move with him. I want to say to him, ‘This will all go faster if you just answer,’ but I can’t put the words together. So I say it in English. I figure he has to understand a little at least. And he puts the box back and turns—I think he’s going to take a shot at me.”

“Tell me he did.”

“Sorry. But get this. He strikes the exact same pose his father strikes in their poster. And he does a pitch-perfect impression of Dad’s mid-Atlantic accent. Says to me, ‘Sorry, old chap, I don’t speak English as well as dear old Pa
-paw.’
I’m thunderstruck. He says, ‘I never met Mr. Adler and I have nothing further to say.’ And he picks up the box and chucks it at his friend.”

“Weird.”

“It was beyond weird, it was eerie. Except for the fact that Laurent is older and his voice is a little more gravelly, it was like listening to the same person.”

“Except he’s supposed to be slow on the uptake.”

“Exactly.”

“Still think he’s adopted?”

“Maybe he is, maybe they both are, I don’t know. It sounds like Sammy knew something, was asking around, but would it really make any waves? In today’s world, if Laurent and his wife couldn’t have kids, so what? Adopting is a positive thing, a contribution. Not something they’d have to hide.”

“He’s a politician,” Ryan said. “They all have something to hide.”

“But to kill over?”

“No, you’re right. Adoption would probably get him on
Oprah
, or whatever the local version is. Have all the daytime ladies weeping in their recliners.”

“Still must be hard for Luc,” I said. “The sister gets the looks, the brains, the seat at Daddy’s right hand, and he’s in the back alley humping boxes.”

My phone rang and I saw it was Bobby Ducharme.

“You owe me at least three cases of beer,” he said. “Twenty-four each.”

“For what?”

“First, I got you the unlisted home number of this adoption worker you mentioned. Marie-Josée Boily. And her address. What part of town you in now?”

“Mont-Royal just east of St-Hubert.”

“Then you’re not far. She’s on Chambord, which is maybe six, seven blocks east of St-Hubert, and judging by the street number, right around Laurier, which is only a few blocks north. Less than a five-minute drive.”

“Great.” I jotted the address down on a napkin.

“The second case is for the address of the import-export company I told you about, Homs. It’s on Boulevard de l’Acadie just north of the Metropolitan.”

He gave me the address, which I scribbled on the back of the napkin.

“That’s two,” I said.

“I also reached out to someone I know at the RCMP. He might know a thing or two about your Syrians.”

“What branch is he in?”

“Intelligence,” he said. “I think maybe Counterterrorism.”

It was just past eight-thirty and I thought Marie-Josée Boily might still be at home. As we drove toward her house, I used Ryan’s cellphone to call her. I knew she wouldn’t answer a call from mine, not with caller ID. Ryan’s phone had a blocked number that divulged neither his name nor the Toronto area code.

“Oui, allô?”

“Good morning,” I said. “This is Jonah Geller.”

“Maudit Christ
,” she said. “How did you get this number?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me why you’re ducking me.”

“I have no obligation to speak to you. In fact, my obligations are very much against it.”

“You were okay with it yesterday.”

“You put me in the spot and I didn’t want to be rude.”

“Standing me up wasn’t rude?”

“I had no choice.”

“Did anyone tell you not to talk to me?”

“You have no right to bother me like this. Now please excuse me,” she said. “I must leave for work.”

It was exactly what I was hoping she’d say, because we were just pulling up in front of her brownstone. We only had to wait three or four minutes before the second-floor door opened and a woman in a tan raincoat came down the wrought-iron stairs, holding onto the railing. I got out and said, “Good morning,” while she still had her head down.

She jumped back, clutching her purse to her body, then recognized my voice and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s you. Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“It’s not my nature.”

“I will call the police if you keep on harassing me.”

“This isn’t harassment, trust me.”

“Are you threatening me, then?”

“I’m asking you to keep your word. You said you would help. Just tell me what Sam Adler wanted.”

“If I do …”

“What?”

“You will leave me alone?”

“I promise.”

“And you won’t tell anyone?”

“No,” I said. “Including Laurent Lortie.”

Her jaw fell. “But if—”

“If what? If I already know he’s involved?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Now look,” she said. “I never mentioned his name. Or any names. It would be against the law for me to do that. All I am going to tell you is this: Sam Adler asked for my help in a
retrouvaille
—a reunification. He wanted to connect a birth mother with a child who had been adopted and needed help to approach this person.”

“What kind of help?”

“You can’t just walk up to someone in this province and say, ‘I know you are adopted, do you want to meet your first mother?’ That is against the law. You have to go through an agency like ours, that has the experience to handle it without causing trauma to the adopted person.”

“Sam knew the birth parents?”

“Apparently. I contacted the adopted person in question and as far as I was concerned, the matter was concluded. I did not hear from him again or from anyone connected with it. And that is all I have to say to you, now or at any other time. If you call me again, or wait outside my home like this, I will call the police, I promise.”

When I got back in the car, Ryan said, “Get anything out of her?”

“A couple of things. One, I’m sure it was Laurent Lortie who pressured her into missing yesterday’s meeting. Which leads to two: Sammy knew something about Lortie’s family that Lortie didn’t want made public.”

“The question being what.”

“Yes.”

“What next?”

“You won’t come.”

“Cops?” he said. “Mounties.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police local headquarters was in Westmount, far enough west that Boulevard René-Lévesque reverted to its original name, Dorchester Boulevard. Ryan went for coffee around the corner on Ste-Catherine and said he’d wait for my call.

Bobby’s contact was an officer named Aubrey Hamilton. Tall, slender, near but not past forty, with fine blond hair in a cut that made me think of a British civil servant. His office had a good-size window facing south; it was so brightly lit from the outside that he needed no lamps or overhead fixture.

“So,” he said, “what’s your interest in the Haddads?”

“It’s more like they took an interest in me.”

“Do tell.”

I did. I told Hamilton about being followed by Mohammed al-Haddad from Les Tapis Kabul and our subsequent bloody encounter at Marché Jean-Talon. He listened without taking any notes of any kind, which led me to wonder whether we were being recorded.

When I was done, Hamilton grinned and said, “You knocked him out?”

“Cold. Along with someone named Faisal, same last name.”

“One of his brothers.”

“How many does he have?”

“There’s four of them. Mohammed, Faisal, Omar and Sayeed. And knocking two out? That’s not going to go unanswered.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You want to know who you’re up against.”

“Always.”

“Okay. Before I get to Mohammed, let me go back a generation or two.” He stretched his back with his hands pressing in on his spine, then exhaled and sat back again, using the heel of his shoe to open a lower desk drawer so he could rest his foot on it. “Fucking back. I spend way too much time on my butt. Okay. You ever see
Lawrence of Arabia?”

“Sure.”

“Remember the tribal Arabs? The British would bribe them to blow up Ottoman train tracks. They were basically brigands and thieves. Hostage takers. Saboteurs. Badass warlord types who looted what they could and killed when they wanted to. Did very well for themselves as those things went.”

“But?”

“They’re Sunnis, not Alawites. Even though Sunnis make up three-quarters of the population in what’s now Syria, the regime that took power in 1970 is Alawite. Within a year of that, the Haddads took their cue to seek greener pastures elsewhere.”

“Why Montreal?”

“They needed an Arab community to exploit and Montreal’s was growing. It was mostly Lebanese here at the time, because of the French, but Salah figured he could lean on them.”

“Salah?”

“That’s the grandfather. Tough bastard. When he passed, his oldest son, Tariq, took over. And Mohammed is the oldest of Tariq’s four boys—he also has two daughters but they don’t
count when it comes to business—so Mohammed’s being groomed for the corner office. He’s actually not bad for third-generation. No softie, that’s for sure. More the bull-in-a-china-shop type. Very built, likes to show it off.”

“I still knocked him out.”

“Good quote for your tombstone.”

I couldn’t help liking the guy. “So they’re extortionists? That’s it?”

He shrugged. “When Salah stepped off the boat here, drugs, prostitution, gambling—they were all spoken for by the Italians. He did better sticking to his own thing, among his own people. Same with Tariq and now Mohammed. He and his brothers work up and down L’Acadie Boulevard, Côte-Vertu, Grande Allée in Brossard, leaning on the small businesses. Shaking down new immigrants. We think he’s also pulled a few kidnappings for ransom, usually an Arab businessman liquid with cash, someone he can scare with a hot iron.”

“So why is he on my ass?”

Hamilton shrugged. “No idea.”

“And what’s your interest in him? If all he’s doing is shaking down local businesses, the Montreal police would be handling it, not the RCMP.”

“You an expert on jurisdiction? Let’s just say we run our own gang investigations. Part of our mandate.”

“Bobby told me you’re Counterterrorism.”

“He spoke loosely. I’m just an intelligence officer.”

I thought of the crude flyer the Lorties had showed me and asked, “Ever heard of something called the Quebec Muslim Liberation Front?”

“Nope. Who are they?”

“Laurent Lortie—the head of Québec aux Québécois—received a threat from them.”

Again, he made no note of it, not on paper. “What kind of threat?”

“Death to racists.”

“Hmm. The platform he’s putting out there, I’m surprised he hasn’t had more. I’ll check it out. We done now?”

“One more question. Has Mohammed al-Haddad ever been investigated for murder?”

Hamilton sat forward at his desk and put his elbows on the surface. “Not to my knowledge. Should he?”

“A journalist named Sammy Adler was killed a few weeks ago.”

“Slammin’ Sammy? The columnist? Hell, I loved his stuff. What would Mohammed want with him?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“The way things work here,” Hamilton said, “is we gather intelligence. From dispensers just like you.”

“I told you what I know.”

“Not much that was new. Unless you have something that links Haddad to this murder.”

“Sammy was writing a story about the owners of the carpet store. It was supposed to be a fairly sympathetic profile, showing not all Afghans in Montreal are like that lunatic who burned his daughters. If Haddad is linked to them somehow, maybe Sammy found out something he shouldn’t have.”

“It could also mean nothing. They could be bringing in goods together.”

“What kind of goods?”