Down with the Underdogs

by Ian Truman

  The look of her clothes and the quality of the nails couldn’t lie. The lady had been around, so I said, “As harsh as it may sound, I need to look like a guy you don’t fuck with.”

  She looked at me in the mirror, said, “No offence, but you already look like that.”

  “Then make sure it stays sharp,” was my answer.

  There was little else to say. A man’s ego can be a terrible thing to mess with.

  I took the Impala to Lacordaire all the way down to Notre-Dame. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt the change. I looked like a guy for the job now.

  I took the old road across the industrial wasteland of Hochelaga, the abandoned GE factory still a massive scar along the southern edge of the city. Pick-ups and fire trucks lined up across the street at Tim Hortons and the road to the port after that. Left and right as far as the eyes could see, the port of Montreal in all of its endless glory. From the refineries of Pointe-aux-Trembles to the old mill of Bickerdicke in Pointe-Saint-Charles.

  The massive silos of the Lantic sugar refinery appeared next and then the massive rail yards of the port and the freshly decorated metallic frame of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, sharp, against the steaming chimneys of the Molson brewery.

  I made my way across the construction nightmare and on to the Ville-Marie Expressway and then the construction nightmare of the Pointe.

  Part of me wasn’t quite sure just yet. There was this voice in the back of my thick skull that said to call in my chips, say, “Thanks, but no thanks. This life ain’t for me.” I wondered if I should sell the home, move the whole family to some shithole where life didn’t cost a thing and a shipping job was enough to buy all the necessary things of life. Trois-Rivières sounded like a plan sometimes. Patricia kept mentioning her mother still living there and how she could help with the kid. But Trois-Rivières was the last call of the poor and the desperate, and Trois-Rivières felt like the last place on earth for a guy named D’Arcy Keenan Kennedy.

  I didn’t want to be that guy. I wasn’t poor anymore. That little voice in the back of my head knew all of this was gonna cost me somewhere down the line, but I wasn’t poor anymore.

  Any trace of doubt faded once I hit Wellington. Those fucking towers and the cranes building them were constant reminders that we were fucked and I was just scraping by. Hatred caught up to me in a second. The mere sight of these, and I was back to being a pissed Irish kid.

  These guys had the real fucking money. Even as a PI for the Irish mob, I was a bottom feeder just the same. Every time I saw the massive sign of Bonaventure Station, I saw myself on that fucking bus to the South Shore at five in the morning, and I couldn’t hold back the resentment.

  I parked the car and made my way to my door. The small windows of my living room were open, and I could hear Patricia playing with the kid. I felt like I should turn back for a moment. I felt like I was going to mess up their moment and fuck up their happiness if I so much as walked into my home.

  Perhaps it was that my actions had had no consequences so far. That felt wrong to me. I wanted to get punched. I wanted a few bruises and a real warning. If nothing happened soon, that could only mean karma would catch up to me all at once, and it could only be bad.

  I hated that. I didn’t feel like I made that good of a father. It wasn’t in me yet, and I might never get there. I had plunged myself into work, and Patricia never gave me shit for it. I hated that, too. I wished she would have busted my balls, kicked my head, bashed my thick Irish skull with that unforgiving French character of hers, that I should fucking fly right with the kid and bother to be home for real once in a while.

  I was running around the city, breaking into people’s businesses, stealing their livelihood. I should have been home, pressing my wife against me, feeling the curve of her neck and her warmth. I should’ve got to know how my son laughed or figured out what made him giggle.

  Truth was I just didn’t know how to do it. I was just tense in the shoulders, and Patricia felt it as much as Liam did. It happened almost every day.

  She’d look at me and say, “Don’t worry. A lot of men have a hard time at that age. That’s why he needs his mom more right now,” she’d say as she freed the little critter from my grasp.

  I didn’t like the life I was setting up for him. I wanted more, better maybe. I wanted endless rows of suburban houses with fresh, new cars parked in front of every house. I wanted vast backyards, swimming pools, tennis courts and skateboarding injuries. I wanted him out of the South-West stabbings even if there probably would be no more memory of that era by the time he’d be ten.

  I wanted that, sure enough, but I actually liked working for the mob. I liked my job more than any other job I had ever had. The Catholic guilt always was kicking in, but the Catholic guilt always kicked in anyways, so why bother? The truth was that I didn’t really feel guilty, I just knew I was supposed to.

  I opened the door to my apartment. The place smelled like freshly cleaned floors with a faint trace of tomato sauce and maybe diaper somewhere in there. It smelled like family.

  Pat was in the living room, caught in a tickle fight with Liam. He was leaning on his back on a soft cushion with jungle patterns on it. He was trying to catch a toy she had in her hand, and when he’d reach up for a hit, she’d tickle him with her long hair, and he’d jerk and shout happily.

  Emma, the dog, was down from my mother and was sleeping on the couch, head rested on a cushion. She glanced at me, then scratched her ear with her back paw and went back to sleep.

  “Hey, you’re home,” Patricia said. Then she got back on her knees, sent a lock of hair behind her ear. I looked at her thighs, still thick and firm. I looked at her arms and her jawline, which was now sharp. She still had her curves, but she had lost a lot of weight.

  I was still in love with her, but I couldn’t tell her anymore. I was still in love with the way she always wore those loose shirts and her shoulder out in the open. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her anymore. We hadn’t had sex in a while. Probably too long for anyone to stay sane, but there was nothing to do about it.

  “Wow! Look at you,” she said and she seemed genuine about it.

  She looked good, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that. Why couldn’t I bring myself to tell her that? I didn’t have an answer. I should have said, “Thank you. You look good, too,” but instead I just said, “Comes with the job.”

  She raised an eyebrow. Oh, really. That woman would never give me any shit about the life I chose. She would never give me shit about anything at all.

  “I could get used to that,” she said.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  Chapter 12

  “Tam-Tams” hadn’t changed in decades. Hadn’t changed in probably fifty years since the first hippies walked up that hill and sat down to smoke a joint. Since then, thousands of kids had ended up gathering there every Sunday to get high on the lower part of Mont-Royal. The damn thing was more popular than church; that went without saying.

  Then there was the drum circle. Eighty hippies, maybe more sometimes, were gathered around the central monument. The angel statue at the top of it, overlooking Montreal to grant its blessing, with its wings spread out, hands reaching to the sky. I stood and stared at her. Tried not to think too much about the stink of patchouli and beer and weed overwhelming the otherwise fresh air of the mountain. She was the Montreal equivalent of the Maid of Erin back in Ireland. Felt like we could have shown her more respect.

  The crowed was as mixed as you could imagine it to be. Hippies in their twenties, hippies in their thirties, hipsters on their bikes with their “apricot” shirts, still drinking Pabst like it was 2010. Whites, blacks, browns, Asians, Latinos…you’d rarely find a more perfect mix of all the peoples of the world. McGill students standing ten feet away from Hochelaga white trash. You could say that about unity: this place fucking had it.

  People looked at me sideways as I made my way across the lawn t
owards the other side of the statue. My suit stood out, and I can’t say I hated it. People looked at me the way they looked at police, the way I looked at police. I smelled like a guy on a job. These people didn’t like guys on a job.

  Sean Cullens had forwarded me the kid’s Facebook account, so that meant I had ten million pictures to identify the guy. Selfies, group selfies, selfies on a date, in a crowd, tagged from TamTam’s hashtaged #bestpusherever #weed #grimskunkOG and such. One photo was from some security camera feed from who-the-fuck-knew where he had gotten that image and put it up there on his wall. That’s when I realized how little policing was actually done by the police because any idiot with two ounces of willpower could have built a case against the kid.

  I spotted him chilling by a bench about thirty yards inside the sparser woods of Mont-Royal. There were three guys standing there, shooting shit and looking like they were on their fifteen from the job.

  Farthest one was a black guy, tall, basketball figure, blue Adidas shorts with white stripes on them, black wife-beater and a small white blanket over his shoulder. A few black tattoos on his black skin, looking like a guy on his way to the NBA rather than prison. He didn’t strike me as too aggressive or dangerous. When I saw “UQAM” on his shorts, I knew the guy wouldn’t be a problem. He was on the French university’s basketball team, had places to be and maybe grants to cash in.

  The other guy I was more concerned about. White trash kid with cornrows and a Titans football jersey two sizes too big. He had skinny, famished cheeks, and his tiny arms dangled from the shirt. It was the kind of starved look you knew from the broken families who fed their kids baloney twice a day for life.

  Now that guy. That guy gave me one look, and I could tell he hated the fuck out of me right off the bat. I guessed that guy probably hated the fuck out of everyone right off the bat, but he had that Hochelaga vibe to him that felt legitimate. Hatred pouring through skin, rubbed against violence and abuse and hunger from daycare to whatever fucking high school he managed to sneak through before dropping out. He had that tension in his shoulders, head tilted forward just a little, as if he expected to get slapped any moment for the rest of his days.

  Verdun and the Pointe still had a few guys like this. I knew the type very well. He was going to respect the suit, or at least he was going to respect the stare I was throwing his way. I clenched my jaw as I sized him up, took in that one deep breath where you’re trying to process whether you’d be down for a fight or not. He looked back at me for a second. I gave the faintest indication I was there for Hervé, and we both decided we had better things to do.

  He gave his basketball buddy a tap in the belly with the back of his hand and signalled him it was time to go.

  Hervé looked like a total geek next to both of them. Small belly, a bit too fat, but not too much. Mostly boring if you asked me. He had square wire glasses and a Green Lantern T-shirt. He looked the part of a computer programming student. That guy would end up at some start-up one day and take home my mob salary coding the next app everyone would need.

  “You Hervé?”

  One glance my way and he got nervous. “Hey, yo.” He spoke with a Haitian accent, the way they seemed to emphasize the “I” a lot . “Avant tout, je veux dire que le gars est venu me voir, lui, man. Moi j’ai rien à voir la dedans au départ.”

  “Calme’ toi,” I replied with my thick Anglo accent. “J’suis pas icitte’ pour te basher.” I added, telling him I wasn’t there to hurt him.

  Gratefully, and like most people in the city would, he switched to English to avoid me further destroying La langue de Molière.

  “I mean, the guy, I don’t even know…”

  I told him we were taking this uphill. “Too many people around,” I said. We moved further inside the park sat ourselves alone near gravel path heading up the mountain.

  I started asking about Mesrine. Or at least the guy who was using Mesrine’s name.

  “Anything you need to know,” Hervé insisted.

  I took out a small note pad and a pen. I felt like an actual fucking detective for the first time in my life. Even when we had been looking for Cillian’s murdered, we only sorta kinda pieced things together. It was the first time I cared to write things down properly.

  “You’ve met him in person?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And it would be unrealistic to assume you took a photo or a selfie, right?”

  “Nah, man! We didn’t get to that.” He laughed.

  In a world where people took a photo of themselves every ten minutes, it was such a fucking pain in the ass that he didn’t get a picture of the guy.

  “Want me to text him and ask him to meet here? You could probably snatch him right there.”

  “I could,” I said, knowing I wasn’t going for that.

  “Then?”

  “That wouldn’t give me the whole picture of what’s going on. Nobody works alone, and I don’t want them to see me coming just yet.”

  “True. True. J’te feel, yo. All right!”

  “So let’s cover the basics,” I said. “He drove here or took the bus or a taxi?”

  “I saw his car, can’t tell if it’s his though.”

  “All right. What car was it?”

  “Audi, sporty one.”

  “Looked recent? Was there rust on the edges, some marks of past accidents, or was it waxed and shiny?”

  “Recent. Not like brand new or anything, but still.”

  “All right,” I said. I flipped through my phone looking for pictures of recent Audi models.

  “That one, front grid and everything,” he said. It was an S8 from a few years ago, 2013 from the looks of it. That was good news. Not too rare, not too frequent, either. I made a note of it.

  “Color?”

  “Gris,” he said in French.

  “Light grey? Dark grey?”

  “Light grey.”

  “How about the guy himself?”

  “I don’t know. Tall white guy. Some beard, looked a bit older than you.”

  “Any features I should be aware of?”

  “Like scars?”

  “If there were any.”

  “Nah, man, nothing. I can’t remember. Wouldn’t that be easier with a sketch artist or some shit?”

  “I’ll scout online before we get to that,” I told him. Truth was I didn’t know any fucking sketch artists. I wasn’t gonna walk up to a precinct and ask the receptionist if their sketch artists also did side gigs for the mob.

  “How about the accent? Is he from Montreal?”

  “No! Nah, man! No way! S’gars la y viens pas d’icitte.”

  “So France?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right. And the account he used to contact you guys?”

  “He changes those around every few days, but he’s always using the same templates. A bit stupid if you ask me.”

  “I’ll look him up and send you a link.”

  “Not to be rude, but I’d probably be better at that than you.”

  He was right about that. I wasn’t about to hand him my job, and took a more severe tone with the kid. He was getting a bit ahead of himself, and I needed to keep him in check now.

  “It’s not your job to handle him. It’s my job to handle him,” I said as coldly as possible.

  “Sorry, man. My bad. Mais, Yo! Je veux juste dire…”

  “It’s not your job to handle him,” I insisted. “It’s my job to handle him.”

  “All right. Okay. I mean, sure, yeah.”

  “He approached anyone else in the street gangs?” He didn’t seem to like that. He didn’t seem to like that at all and didn’t hesitate to let me know.

  “Heille! Tu-sais quoi? I’m sick of the media and everyone calling them ‘street gangs.’ What do you think blacks are doing, running around comme dans les Warriors? C’est vraiment con, man. It’s organized crime just like the Italians, like the mafia. The
Irish,” he insisted, looking at me.

  “All right, all right,” I tried to say.

  “Non. I’m sorry, mais laisse-moi finir,” he continued. “I need to get this off my chest. It’s like, the gangs have cars and houses and companies and cash, bling, jewellery, suppliers, producers, resellers. It’s a full-scale enterprise and they’re still called street gangs. Pourquoi tu-pense, hein? Why are they called street gangs?”

  I was gonna let him have it because part of me knew he was right.

  “You’re saying the criminal denomination of street gangs has racist undertones.”

  “Clairement, yo. J’veux dire. Tsé, les autres, the Italians, you guys, the Hells Angels. They’re called organized crime. And they’re all white, The Chinese are called organized crime, but the black, we get street gangs. Comme si on était toute des kids, man. Forty years since the Crips and we can’t get rise above street level? Voyons-donc!”

  “I didn’t come up with street gangs. The Bloods and the Crips did.”

  “Crips used to mean Community Response in Progress. They were Panthers who came down from Oakland to L.A. to help the blacks fight off the police. How did they come up with the name street gangs?”

  “All right. I don’t know.”

  “Reagan came up with the name. Reagan and his goons, man. Fucking learn your history.”

  “All right, all right. Reagan was a motherfucker to everyone, all right. He really was.” How the fuck this ended up with me getting my ass roasted, I didn’t know. “Listen. I’m not an asshole, and I ain’t no Protestant. I know for a fact that white people are crazy. I’ll be the first to admit to that. So, what would you have me say?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “You know, the way I see it, the only thing you give yourself with a name is a target on your back. People will come after you, the police, other crews, other organizations, petty criminals, some junkie at Berri or a drunk in the South-West. Give yourself a cool name, and they’ll come after you.”