A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller)

by Van Rooy, Michael

  I did math in the back of my head and decided that I’d left Devanter’s office forty minutes before. Forty minutes. So if he’d called the cops they’d have arrived already. Cops may be slow if you report a residential break-in or a loud party at 3:00 a.m. on Friday night/Saturday morning but they’re pretty fucking quick if you’re a millionaire reporting an armed gunman and assault and battery on a lawyer at noon on a Monday.

  This meant that Cornelius Devanter and Alastair Reynolds and Gwen, no last name, hadn’t called the cops. I leaned back on my heels and bit my lip while thinking.

  “Find what you wanted?” The woman was sitting back down at her desk.

  “You bet!” I packed the scope back into its bag. “Thank you so much.”

  She had a nice smile. “You’re welcome.”

  “I love the fact you’re not asking me all sorts of questions.”

  “Would you like me too?” She seemed genuinely interested in my response.

  I still couldn’t place the accent so I just shook my head and told her, “No. I’d just have to make up a lie.”

  “That’s what I thought. Have a good day.”

  “I will. You too.” And I left.

  #11

  I took my trusty telescope for a walk south, heading towards the Millennium Library, which sits in roughly the centre of the city. As I walked I saw posters on lampposts and walls for the Red River Exhibition and more for something called the Fringe Festival, which apparently involved plays. There were other posters for the Folk Fest, which involved music, and Folklorama, which involved many, many cultures.

  None of them seemed familiar and I wondered if they were unique to Winnipeg or if every city had them. Maybe I’d just never noticed stuff like that in my earlier life, being so involved in theft, drugs and general anarchy. I couldn’t really come up with an answer so I just kept moving and thought about other things.

  I love it in the movies when the hero needs to know something and he, or she, of course has immediate access to a newspaper reporter, a friendly snitch or a whore with a heart of gold—some kind of expert on any subject needed.

  In the real world reporters almost never tell you things because their jobs are to gather news, not to spread it around all indiscriminate like. And snitches require payment and are very, very, very unreliable. They also have the lifespan of some elements on the south side of the periodic table. That’s because bad guys don’t like snitches and snitches need to be around bad guys in order to make any kind of money at all. So snitches HAVE to be attached to bad guys and bad guys HAVE to crush them down whenever they can.

  And whores rarely, if ever, have hearts of gold. They are individuals who rent out their equipment for the pleasure of others so they see the worst of people at the worst of times. It makes them bitter, and rightly so. In other words, they may know but they will never, or almost never, tell.

  So I had to make myself an expert as needed. In stir I had read Ian Fleming’s original James Bond series and found a common thread where Bond’s boss would send him off to learn about various subjects as needed. If he needed to learn about gold, he would go to the Bank of England. If he needed to learn about diamonds, DeBeers would lend samples and a loupe. And if Bond needed to learn about guns, then Q, the quartermaster, would come and give an expert opinion.

  Unfortunately I did not have the Bank of England on my side, nor did I have good relations with DeBeers and I had no Quartermaster named Q. So I used libraries, lawyers and bartenders to learn about whatever was necessary. Libraries would fill in many answers through back issues of newspapers and magazines. Lawyers could tell you a lot more, if you asked them nicely, especially if you were their client. And bartenders, the right bartenders, could generally fill in everything else, and they liked to talk. Most of their life involved listening, so talking was a nice change.

  None of that was really an option, so I decided to head to the library, and five minutes’ walking got me there. On the fourth floor I went through the white pages looking for Devanter, Cornelius, Reynolds, Alastair and Goodson, Aubrey. I struck out on the last two but found that Devanter’s address matched the building downtown. Then I signed up for an Internet-enabled computer and used it to run searches on those names, plus variations. That got me a listing for Reynolds as a lawyer in a city law firm, apparently a partner in Reynolds and Lake. It also mentioned that he had written a piece for the University of Manitoba school newspaper back in the early nineties. The same search gave me eleven articles about Devanter in the Free Press, the Toronto-based conservative National Post news rag and something online called Canadian Business. Goodson showed up only once as a major donor for a museum that dedicated itself to aircraft and the history of flight in Canada.

  I marked down the dates and pages of the articles and checked out the business site to find that the article was basically a puff piece about how much Devanter was worth, over $100 million, and how much he donated to good causes. I logged off and went up to where the periodicals were kept and filled out the request forms, three at a time, as the librarian instructed me. When they came they were in microfiche and I went over to the nearest machine and started reading.

  Basically Devanter was a business man. A successful one. He had started with a small company building airplane components, mostly engine controls. That had been very successful. With that money he had diversified into other businesses, buying up a series of cheap hotels across the country and linking them together under one name. Then he’d staffed them with students just out of hotel management schools he ran in British Columbia. Later he had gotten a gigantic contract with the American government to build bits and pieces of unmanned drones used to blow up people in Afghanistan and Iraq early in the wars.

  But there were some controversies. According to a union press release, the components his company claimed to have made had in fact been made by another factory and shipped over to augment the stock—just before a buyout was attempted by a conglomerate from Luxembourg. The value of the company had thus been augmented considerably and Devanter had avoided the buyout offer (which had been “anaemic,” according to officials) and then borrowed against the factory and stock. Then he’d gone to work with that money buying this and that.

  And the drones he’d built hadn’t been terribly successful ones. However, they’d been backed by a fierce and senile United States senator from a state that started with a vowel. So the drones had kept flying even when they’d become famous for catastrophic engine and equipment failure.

  And the hotels he’d bought hadn’t been a chain, as the article had implied. Instead they had been seized by banks, mom and pop places that had failed in dribs and drabs over the years. The banks couldn’t dispose of them any other way so they’d been a cheap, fire-sale buy for Devanter. As for his hotel management school, it had gotten into some serious trouble with the Chinese government for overcharging students, but that problem had vanished when a certain official had been demoted for incompetence in Beijing. Over the next year most of the students had been hired by Devanter, not at terribly high wages, but they’d been happy enough to get the work.

  These days Devanter was mostly into real estate in and around the city. And he pumped a lot of money and attention into civic causes, enough to keep his name in prominent view. He built hotels, mini-malls and condos, and spent a lot of time organizing the demolition of older buildings. His interest in the police commission was well known, although no one seemed to know why.

  I did another search and got three articles about the commission which confused me even more.

  The commission was new. An idea the mayor’s office had arrived at after consultations with experts.

  One expert in the paper mentioned how strange this was because the mayor never listened to experts unless they agreed with him.

  The board was an elected one and there was one like it in every other city in Canada (except Montreal). It dealt with citizen complaints and budget issues and generally provided oversight to the
police force, basically ensuring that the police department was accountable to the public. In theory it helped build trust and respect.

  Another article pointed out that the commission concept did two bad things for the police: it removed control of its budget from a purely political process, and it allowed citizens a clear view into the operations of the force. The same article noted that the boards had no real ill effects for citizens.

  The commission was going into operation early in the next year and it had a board of six consisting of a president and five voting members. The president was elected from a cross-city election and each police district in the city elected one commission member as well.

  The police, through their union, were resisting the commission strongly and were regularly publishing articles about what a bad idea it was and how it would “tie” the hands of the police.

  They were unclear on what “tie” actually meant.

  The last thing I did was go online and find Reynolds’s article in the University of Manitoba newspaper. It was a brilliantly reasoned piece on the history of execution and the importance of returning to a system of capital punishment.

  It was titled, “Arthur Ellis, Where Are You?” Arthur Ellis had been the official name of the hangman in Canada back when we did that kind of thing, a pseudonym chosen to permit a degree of anonymity on behalf of the executioner. Reynolds started by listing the history of executions, going back to Babylonian times and reasoning that executions were part of what made a nation civilized. He talked about the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Italianate states, the French approach, the English and Scottish angle and the humane executions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  It was all shit but it was kind of fun to read.

  My own feelings on executions were somewhat more pragmatic: I had no desire for the state ever to have more power than it was willing to give the individual members who made up that state.

  Even Rome, that notoriously brutally beautiful civilization, had known enough that the carnifex was not allowed to live within city limits.

  And Reynolds wanted to bring him back? To give the power of life and death to a faceless and anonymous cypher?

  Back home the phone was ringing as I went in. I picked up and the voice on the other end of the line sounded furious as soon as I said hello.

  “Who is this?”

  The voice was frail, kind of reedy and petulant but I answered anyway. “Monty. I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Put Claire on!”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I will ask you the same thing you just asked me: who is this?”

  The voice sputtered and whined and finally hung up on me and I stared at the phone in bemusement before replacing it in the cradle.

  Lots of strange people out there.

  #12

  A message showed up with a couriered package the next day. It read, “I’m so very sorry about last night … I just lost my head. I hope this doesn’t change things between us, please consider this a sign of my contrition.”

  Claire looked at me and we both said, at the same time, “Weird.”

  I looked the paper over. It was strange stuff, coarse and uneven and quite discoloured. And the ink was odd too, a faded green that lay strangely on the page. Claire looked closely at it and then leaned back, stumped. “There are two almost cuts on the sides of each line of each letter with less ink between them.”

  She took the box in hand and shook it gently to hear something weighty shift within. She handed it to me and I looked it over but seemed like a normal box. Cardboard and heavy but just a little gift box like you’d buy from a bargain store.

  “So,” Claire said, “what’s in it?”

  I was paranoid but that was okay, former professional criminals have many good reasons to be paranoid. I opened the package slowly, feeling for resistance that would hint at a trigger wire or a friction fuse. I also listened for any clicks or buzzes that might indicate a firing pin being engaged. And while I did that I used my nose and sniffed for any interesting chemicals like nitrates, acids or petroleum products.

  Eventually though the box was opened safely and Claire and I ended up admiring the contents, a massy gold bracelet irregularly studded with a variety of small stones, lying on a bed of white cotton. I looked closely at the stones and saw white ones and reddish ones, grey ones and dark blue ones. They were arranged in no pattern I could recognize and the effect was quite beautiful.

  Claire picked it up. “Look at the gold; it’s made into mesh links.”

  “Like chain mail armour?”

  “Yes. Like the gloves my dad used.” Her dad had been a butcher and I remembered the gauntlets he’d worn, but I was thinking more of knights and dragons. Claire looked closely. “I think that,” she touched the dark blue stone, “is lapis lazuli.”

  “Really?”

  She shrugged and her breasts moved under her shirt. I never got tired of that. “I think. I never dealt with that stone much. The best comes from Afghanistan and Siberia.”

  Claire was running a curio and relic shop when I met her. I’d been shooting an ex-partner at the time and it had been love at first sight for me. As for Claire, she’d hated me but had gotten over it. After a few years.

  Okay. After many years.

  Anyhow, she’d had lots of experience with semi-precious stones, fossils and other strange items. So I believed her when she named a stone I had only heard about yet never seen.

  I touched the grey stone and felt a slightly greasy surface.

  “That’s an uncut diamond … I think.”

  “You’re not sure?” she said dryly.

  “It’s been a while,” I admitted. “I stole a half tray of them in Vancouver ten, maybe eleven years ago.”

  My mind drifted. I remembered the chaos of that day in the Chinatown shop. I remembered the smell of cordite as I dumped two rounds of #6 shot into the ceiling to get everyone’s attention. I remembered the howls of the customers and staff and the shrilling of the alarms.

  It had been a messy robbery but we’d gotten away with two trays of unset stones—diamonds, rubies and some emeralds. Also sixty grams of gold in tiny bars and a double handful of Bulova watches. I remembered the whole experience in snapshots. There was Jimmy Brunswick standing tall and walking the manager into the back room, he moving fast because of the long-barrelled .22 in his ear. And in the corner there was Jarrod Black cracking display cases with a roofing hammer and picking through the debris with inhuman precision.

  Two minutes later we were all in the car with Sally Leiter driving the speed limit. Behind us four army surplus smoke bombs spewed orange and filled the road with even more chaos and then we were gone. As we travelled Sally passed me a Steyr Mannlicher Classic carbine in .222 and I worked the bolt to put the first of four rounds into the breech and flicked the safety off. Sally laughed like a bell and I hoped and prayed that no cop would show and that no citizen would decide to play hero.

  Because if anyone did, I’d have to kill them, because I was the only decent shot in the car.

  And we’d gotten away clean with two million and change, which a Seattle fence had bought for a quarter mil. Which was $55,300 and change each after the expenses were covered.

  And I couldn’t remember where the money had gone.

  I vaguely remembered cocaine and whores in Quebec City and I remembered a meth-fuelled brawl in a strip club in Hull. I remembered a long poker game in a Kansas City steak house with a waitress bringing drinks and wearing only high heels and a smile. I remembered coming down from a heroin-fuelled lost weekend in Saskatoon on a farm rooftop with a teenage girl telling me she really, really loved me. I remembered believing her.

  Sally and Jimmy and Jarrod.

  All of them gone.

  Sally beaten to death when the love of her life turned septic in a suburb outside Quebec City.

  Jarrod pulled from a wrecked semi after a cigarette hijack near Victoria. The cop had been over-eager and had twi
sted while pulling and Jarrod had ended up a bag of dead meat from the neck down. That had lasted until he’d managed to chew through his tongue late one night in the hospital while the guard was pissing in the bathroom sink.

  And Jimmy, spiking on PCP and meth, had his face punched in by eleven rounds from a cop’s forty calibre in a Saskatoon back alley.

  I touched the stone again and shivered. “Yeah. It’s a diamond, and I think the white stone’s a pearl. I’ve never seen an irregular one like that though.”

  Claire touched it. “Well, it’s gorgeous.”

  “It is that. Let’s go to bed.”

  That night we fucked until I’d said goodbye again to all my ghosts. Claire seemed to understand.

  #13

  First thing the next morning Reynolds’s Lexus sedan pulled up out front and a red-headed woman got out. For a second I didn’t recognize her and then I realized she was Gwen, Devanter’s secretary/receptionist. She was wearing a brown leather coat and green slacks, and she carried a thin metal briefcase under one arm as she got out of the car. Then she took a deep breath and walked up the sidewalk to my house with a determined stride.

  I asked Claire to open the door and she did, saying warmly, “Yes?”

  Gwen’s voice was soft and calm. “I’m looking for Montgomery Haaviko.”

  “You’ve found him. Come in then.”

  She entered cautiously and I came towards her wiping my hands on a dish towel to imply I had been in the kitchen. I was in my robe, and Claire and I still smelled of sex. Gwen noticed and her nose wrinkled and she smiled.

  “Mr. Haaviko!”

  She offered her hand and I shook it and introduced her to Claire and she said, “Pleased” with far more warmth. Then she turned back to me, opened the briefcase and handed me a sheaf of stapled papers.

  “Let me guess. Alastair is suing me? And you got stuck serving the papers?”

  Gwen smiled. “No, it’s a contract. Space for you to sign. Mr. Devanter has already signed.”