Miss Montreal (9 page)

Papers, however, were expensive and scarce and the bribe had depleted the family’s resources. They stayed in Kabul as resistance to the Soviets grew, as religious fervour began to grip the city in ways it hadn’t before. People shouting
“Allahu akhbar”
in the night, all night, in defiance of the ten-o’clock curfew and army patrols. Men growing out their beards and criticizing those who drank liquor or dressed in Western style. Veils, once scarce, became more common. Taliban rocket attacks became a daily event, targeting the bus station, markets and other crowded places. Everyone had a story about a friend, neighbour, classmate or kinsman killed.

Caught between the oppression of the Soviet occupation and the Islamism that had taken over the rural areas and was encircling Kabul, Abdul kept at it, pleading with contacts, scraping together funds, selling off jewels. The desperate government was conscripting boys as young as fourteen or fifteen and sending them to the front to fight the mujahedeen. Poorly trained, ill-equipped, many were killed within weeks. When he finally had their documents in hand, Abdul’s wife insisted on a last visit to the grave of her brother, who had been murdered
while the plotter Mohammad Daoud Khan had been in power. On a day in late March, right after the solstice that marks the Afghan new year, she was placing fresh daisies on the grave when a rocket shattered the peace of the graveyard and buried most of her while disinterring her brother.

The family arrived in Montreal two years later.

I
fell asleep before Ryan got back to the room, so it wasn’t until the next morning that I found out where he had gone.

“Point St. Charles,” he told me over breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. The Point is a poor neighbourhood south of the Ville-Marie Expressway, even further south than St-Henri, also poor and working-class. Churches abound in the Point, their domes and spires once brass, now green and streaked with pigeon shit.

“Why there?” I asked.

“Ancestral home of the Ryans,” he said. “It’s where my father was born and raised. And his father and grandfather. Right off the main drag, Centre Street. All the times I been here, I never had the urge to go. This time—maybe because of what happened with Cara—I needed to see it.”

“And?”

He reached into the pocket of his black linen jacket and pulled out an old photo of a strapping young man in a white T-shirt, a pack of cigarettes folded into one short sleeve, his hair
combed up like a young James Dean. “That’s him,” he said. “Early or mid-sixties, I’m guessing. A few years before he came to Hamilton and got himself killed.”

His father, Sid Ryan, a member of an Irish gang in Montreal, had met an untimely end trying to muscle in on the drug trade in Ontario, over which Johnny Papalia’s outfit then ruled.

“You know I never knew him,” Ryan said. “I was a month old when he was killed. The only family I ever knew was her side. I thought maybe if I saw where he grew up I’d feel some kind of connection.”

“Did you?”

He mopped up some egg yolk with a piece of toast and chewed it before answering. “Nothing. Whatever it was back then, it ain’t now. The address I had for him, the building burned down ten, fifteen years ago, one of the neighbours said.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was a stupid idea to begin with.”

“Why?”

“Because I got to get it through my thick fucking skull that I’m alone now. I got no wife anymore. I got a mother I’m not close to. And whatever I thought I was gonna find last night … I’m not. I got no roots here. No history. Wherever the Ryans are, whoever they are, it’s all smoke.”

“You have a son.”

“Who I’ll be lucky to see a couple times a month.”

“You said Cara would give you access.”

“That’s what she says now. Wait until the first time I piss her off.”

“You have me,” I said.

“Shut up.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

——

Bobby Ducharme was right on time, outside the hotel entrance at eight in a black Jetta.

“Sleep okay?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Good. Buckle up, ’cause I heard the traffic is bad going east.”

It wasn’t as bad as open warfare, but it wasn’t much better. Bobby took no prisoners in his conquest of Boulevard René-Lévesque. Tailgating, honking, swerving in and out of his lane, anything to gain a car-length’s advantage and beat an amber light before it turned red. We went past a giant Molson brewery and an equally big CBC complex.

“How do you want to handle this?” he asked. “If you’re more comfortable in English, you can ask me the questions and I can translate for you.”

“Let’s see how it goes. Maybe Paquette will speak English to me.”

“And if not?”

“I passed high school French.”

“Great. And if you have to ask for more than directions?”

Here’s the thing about learning French in Canada.

If you don’t live in Quebec, the main reason you learn it is so you can speak to your countrymen there, and they can speak to you. In this you are likely to fail miserably because they teach a neutral, international French in Ontario schools. My teachers were from France, Belgium, Switzerland and the francophone parts of Ontario. None came from Quebec. They spoke the kind of French that would help you get around Paris just fine. A lilting, musical French that enunciated every syllable like it was the last arcane wisp of the secret to eternal life. The French spoken in Quebec is rougher, faster, with its own pronunciation, rhythm and slang. The street version,
joual
, even more so. Never having learned it, never having lived there, I can pose a
question to a Québécois, but can’t always follow the answer. It’s like taking your Queen’s English to the East End of London, the heart of Texas or the outports of Newfoundland.

Detective Reynald Paquette’s French wasn’t as hard to follow, perhaps because he knew he was speaking to an outsider. He was around forty, with dark hair neatly trimmed and precisely parted on the left, in a crisp white shirt, blue striped tie and dark slacks. I couldn’t tell his size because he was sitting behind a desk, a matching jacket hanging on the back of his chair. He wore a wedding ring and a slim gold watch, which he looked at—it was eight-forty—and then he turned to me.

“
Alors
,” he said,
“vous êtes Monsieur Geller? L’enquêteur privé?”

“Oui.”

“Vos papiers?”

We were in a small office in the Crime Majeurs bureau on Sherbrooke Street East, probably as far east as I’d ever been in Montreal, far past the Olympic Stadium and the Botanical Garden. The room felt crowded with four men in it, none of us particularly small.

I gave Paquette my licence. He looked it over, made a note of the number, and handed it back to me. His partner, René Chênevert, showed no interest in it. I made him around thirty-seven or eight, six-two and a solid two hundred pounds. He wore a light grey suit with a faint white line through it, a dark grey shirt and matching tie. He leaned against the wall with one knee bent, arms crossed, either to bulk up his shoulders or just to show some general hostility. He squinted some, also attitudinal, I suppose, but I could still see he had blue eyes. No rings of any kind. A clunky chrome watch that could probably tell you twelve time zones while you stood on the ocean floor.

Paquette turned to Bobby and said, “
Toi là, t’es avec Globales?
”

That was the firm Bobby worked for, about the size of my former employer in Toronto, Beacon Security. He said,
“Oui
,” but pronounced it closer to
why
.

“Bon.”
Paquette had a black binder, thick with documents that had been punched and placed inside. He flipped it open and said, “Adler. Samuel Joseph.
Victime d’un homicide le 29 mai par une personne ou des personnes inconnues.”
He looked at his watch again and said,
“Nous sommes très occupés ici. Vous avez dix minutes. Posez vos questions.”

I wasn’t sure about the first part—probably that they were busy—but I got the second. Ten minutes. I had to think about how to phrase the question in French.
“Pouvez-vous confirmer que le location où le … le”
—couldn’t remember the word for body—“
où la victime a été trouvée n’est pas le même où il a été tué
.” All right. Not bad.

“Oui.”

“Est-ce que vous savez où il était tué?”

“Non.”

“Aucune … scène du crime?”

Chênevert snorted from his wall spot.

Okay, I’d pronounced something wrong there. Maybe said “scene of the cream.” But Paquette was civilized enough to answer.
“Non.”

“Vous avez pris toutes ses papiers importants et les autres choses de son appartement. Est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose là, un, un—
”

“All right, Mr. Geller,” Paquette said. “You’ve suffered enough. And so has the French language. Ask your questions in English.”

Chênevert came off the wall, his arms unfolded, his face reddening. “ ’
Xcuse
,” he said,
“j’travaille ici moi et le français est la langue officielle ici.”
Then he pointed at me and let out a stream of words that went over my head like a hail of bullets. The only words I was sure of were
maudit juif
, which is French for damned Jew. That much I remembered from Mordecai Richler.

Bobby said something so fast I didn’t get it—it wasn’t
trou de cul
but sounded almost like “on fire”—but Chênevert clearly did and he turned even redder. He said something back and
they both went on throwing the bait back and forth, their voices rising with each volley until Paquette bounced out of his chair, slashed the air with his arm and cut them both off, the word
Assez
—enough—ringing out above their snarls and insults. Both men were bigger than he was but they stopped their rutting-stag thing and broke eye contact. Paquette told Chênevert to go get a coffee. Bobby got back in his seat.

“Now you better get on with your questions,” Paquette said to me. “You have about seven minutes left.”

“After three weeks, there has to be something,” I said. “A man who lives in the Plateau doesn’t just wander out in the middle of the night and go all the way to Côte-Vertu to be happened upon by a random Muslim mob eager to kick a Jew to death. It had nothing to do with his daughter or ex-wife. So it has to do with his work. Would you agree?”

“I am not in a position to agree or disagree, at this point. We don’t know everything about his private life.”

“You’ve been through his finances, talked to his friends and family. You must be able to rule out some things.”

“What type of things should I rule out, Mr. Geller?”

“Gambling. Drugs. Reckless affairs.”

“Gambling and drugs do not fit the profile we have assembled. There are no fluctuations in his income and spending, other than some spikes related to his daughter. A trip to Orlando one year. California another. As for reckless affairs?” He shrugged. “Who can truly say?”

“A person who might have found a hair in the victim’s bed, one that did not fit its usual occupant.”

“We left one behind?”

“You did.”

“If we find someone who matches it, we’ll take the necessary steps. What else?”

“You have his phone records.”

“We do.”

“Anything unusual?”

“What would you consider unusual in a man’s phone habits?”

“Late-night calls.”

“They’re not unusual in my line of work.”

“If you’re going to hold me to ten minutes, can’t you just tell me something I can help with instead of volleying?”

“Ah, there we come to the point of the matter, which is the assumption that I am looking for your help here, which I am not. You have been given ten minutes—now five—for me to help you, which I think you’ll both agree I have been going out of my way to do, even doing so in English when I did not have to. Continue with your questions, if you still have any.”

“I want a copy of his phone records.”

“That would be a waste of our time and resources.”

“Fighting with Arthur Moscoe’s lawyers would waste a lot more.”

“All right. Fine. You’ll get your copy.”

“What have your forensics shown?”

“Be specific, please. Running down the full report would take you past your allotted time.”

“What was he hit with?”

“We don’t know, exactly.”

“Why not? Doesn’t every contact leave a trace?”

“You know Locard’s Theory? How reassuring. Well, it still holds true in this case. What left a trace, however, is the kind of material used in a duffel bag.”

“They put a bag over his head, then beat him?”

“So it seems.”

“So you have no splinters, fragments, to help identify the weapon.”

“No. They still left imprints on his skull, so we have working theories on what might have been used, including boots, but it has made the job more difficult.”

“Any nasal fractures?”

Paquette sat up and leaned his elbows on the desk. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Getting a bag over someone’s head and holding it there while he’s struggling and someone else is taking a swing with something? Not that easy, Detective. If it was me, the second the bag is over his head, boom, I’d break his nose, get him down on the ground and go to work with the boots and bats.”

“Really? That is how you would do it?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you were in Toronto May twenty-ninth?”

“Yes.”

“Too bad. All right, Mr. Geller, you earned this one. There were fractures to the nose and left orbital bone. Someone hit him very hard indeed, almost certainly right-handed. Probably knocked him out, but there were so many different brain injuries, it’s hard to tell.”

“Any idea how many assailants?”

“Only that there was more than one. There were two different types of shoe or boot involved.”

“Ask him about the police call,” Bobby said.

“Right. Do you know why the police were called to his apartment that night?”

Paquette thumbed through his binder until he found what looked—at least upside down—like an incident report.