Miss Montreal

by Howard Shrier

“We were east of there on De Bullion, probably the worst street in the whole area. And I had stories too. Who didn’t? Montreal was a special town in those years. It had everything Toronto didn’t have. The clubs, the nightlife, the colour. It was Havana North. All the great entertainers, strippers, boxers and wrestlers, hockey players, gangsters. Sammy loved those stories. He even moved to my old neighbourhood. He was paying thirteen hundred a month for a flat on Laval. I’d kid him—I’d say, ‘Sammy, when we lived in that neighbourhood, we paid thirty-five dollars a month, and the first bucket of coal was free.’ I’d tell him, ‘Write a book about those old days when Sammy Davis was dancing across the street from where Lili St. Cyr was stripping—and there was no question, Lili was the bigger star.’ Ah, the poor kid,” he sighed. “Poor, poor Sammy. No one should die like that, set upon by animals.”

  “No.”

  “You knew him, my daughter tells me.”

  “From summer camp,” I said. “For a few years.”

  “You liked him?”

  “I did.”

  “Because he was a quiet kid, you know. Loved to read, that one. Always with his nose in a book. You really remember him or you just saying you do?”

  “I really do.” I told him the story about the softball game, giving Sammy the nickname he used to the day he died. He was in tears when it ended, wiping them away with the backs of his hands.

  “I am so glad to hear that,” he heaved. “So glad. The better you knew him, the more connected you feel, the harder you’ll work to catch the bastards who killed him. It won’t just be a job for you.”

  “It never is,” I said.

  From Montreal Moment magazine, Montreal, March 31

  Say a prayer for PQ critic

  Slammin’ Sammy Adler

  Urban Affairs Columnist

  Okay, this one might be too weird even for me, and if you’re a regular reader, you know that must put it seriously beyond the fringe. And it is, nestled there comfortably in the lap of PQ agriculture critic André Simard, who is shocked and appalled by the fact that some Quebec consumers are unknowingly being sold halal meat that is not labelled as such.

  Oh no! Not that! Eating meat that is otherwise safe and humanely slaughtered, but over which an Arabic prayer has been said. And without being told. Rise up, people! Get on your feet and march!

  It’s one thing to avoid kosher products because you hate Jews, or boycott certain east-end shoe stores that openly sell Israeli sandals, but how can you show your bias against Muslims without a label?

  Mr. Simard, who is a veterinarian, said he would not knowingly buy halal meat because it doesn’t correspond to his values and convictions.

  Personally, I think a vet could better show his convictions by avoiding meat altogether, but I’m a carnivore too, so I won’t fire that barb.

  Look, I was raised in a kosher home where the only meat we ate came from animals that had had a two-thousand-year-old blessing said over them before their throats were cut. It didn’t seem to harm them—at least not the blessing part. And kosher chickens tasted better than their non-kosher counterparts, whether it was the blessing or the way they were raised and killed.

  Those words were muttered in Hebrew, these in Arabic. If there is a difference linguistically, it’s minute. Both spring from the same Semitic roots. If it’s cultural—well, most things are with the PQ, even agriculture, it would seem.

  Maybe it’s Mr. Simard who needs a prayer said over him as the fall election looms. Because I don’t think he has one.

  No one knows where this one is going, least of all me. The winds of change are blowing in Quebec, with new parties surging in the polls while older ones like the PQ—perhaps because their august members have time to waste on fringe protests like this—risk being left behind.

  My view? Let Mr. Simard go down in the fall and return to life as a meat-eating veterinarian. Let the rest of us go on being subverted. Of all the threats to life as we know it, this is one I can live with.

  TUESDAY, JUNE 21

  CHAPTER 03

  A warm summer rain was falling at seven the next morning. Not on me, though. I was smart enough to wait under the overhang outside 10 Hogarth. It was June 21st, the longest day of the year, but the whole landscape was dark, wet and grey, as it had been for days. Summer was starting somewhere but not here. At that hour it was quiet except for a crow boasting about something on a high wire and a streetcar grinding up Broadview.

  I shuddered slightly when I saw Ryan’s new car coming south. It was the same car we had rented in Boston three months ago, a midnight-blue Charger, only this one had the hemi-powered V8 engine he had wanted at the time. A few drops of rain hit my face as I loaded my suitcase and knapsack into the trunk. My leather shoulder bag, which had my laptop and tablet, went behind the front seat. I got into the front with a new silver Halliburton case very much like the one Ryan used to transport the tools of his dark trade. His had foam cut-outs that matched his .22 target pistol and its suppressor; the favourite of his Glocks, a G22 that carried only fifteen rounds, as opposed to the usual seventeen, but fired .40-calibre bullets that blew bigger holes in its target; the compact version of the Baby Eagle; an army-issue Beretta that’s his throwaway if needed; and the one I think of as his persuader, a chrome Smith & Wesson revolver with an eight-and-three-eighths barrel, long enough to churn butter or a man’s insides.

  Mine had different cut-outs, things I wanted to show Ryan on the long drive.

  He eyed the case on my lap and said, “I know you didn’t suddenly go gun crazy.”

  “Nope. Just some new toys.” Yes, they were legitimate investigative tools, but hoo boy, they were toys right out of a kid’s spy tale.

  He pulled out of the driveway and we headed up Broadview toward O’Connor and the turnoff to the Don Valley Parkway. “You have my interest,” he said.

  “With Jenn on leave,” I said, “I’ve had to do more work on my own. Pretty much all of it. No one to spell me off on surveillance.”

  “Colin can sit,” he said. “It’s what he does best.”

  “Nice.” Colin was in a wheelchair only because he’d been shot coming to my aid fifteen months ago. Being a colder specimen than me, Ryan never understands the guilt I live with.

  “He spells me from time to time, and he’s actually better at peeing in a car than I am. But I’m still on my own in most situations.”

  “So what’s in the case?”

  “Surveillance equipment. Some of the things they have now … I mean, why sit outside a guy’s house for twelve hours in the cold when you can plant one of these in his house or car?”

  I reached around for the case, set it on my lap and snapped open the latches. I took out my new sphere cam, barely the size of a Ping-Pong ball. “Records picture and sound. Motion activated, records thirty frames a second and has a two-gig memory card.”

  “Yeah? How many rounds does it fire? None? Then I’ll still take my toys over yours.”

  “Look at this. This one I love.” I slipped a gold-and-black pen out of a thin vinyl case. “I can record a hundred and forty hours of voice with this and when I’m done”—I pulled the top half of the pen out of the bottom—“there’s a USB key that fits right into my computer.”

  “Didn’t I see that on Modern Family? The kid with the curly hair has a spy pen? What?”

  I guess I was giving him my “You watch Modern Family?” look.

  “I was still living at home then,” he said.

  “This is the real thing. You are recorded and downloaded before you know it. Or … here. Remember the transponder they planted on me in Boston? The size of a deck of cards?”

  I took a small square unit out of a cardboard box and nestled it in my palm. Just half an inch thick, about the size of a book of matches. “See how much smaller they got in just a few months? Water resistant, shock resistant and motion activated. This not only traces a car. It locks into its GPS system and tells you everything—I mean, everything—about where it went,
where it stopped, how long it stopped. Everything but what you pay for gas.”

  We turned left off O’Connor onto the ramp that fed onto the Don Valley northbound. So did a lot of other cars, at least one of them so close to our rear, he almost nudged Ryan’s new bumper. I pitied the first person who damaged the new car. Gunplay would likely ensue.

  “What else you got in there?” he asked. “Looks like a big magnet.”

  I reached in and pulled out what indeed looked like a ten-inch magnet, shaped like half an oval. Only it came with a range of coloured springs I could mount between the two handles, each offering varying resistance. “Something else I’ve been using since Jenn’s been off.”

  I gripped the device and squeezed the springs until they were too tightly coiled to move further.

  “Grip strength,” he said. “How much you got on there?”

  “Up to ninety-seven pounds left-handed, ninety-five right.”

  “Is that any good?”

  “Average is sixty or seventy. The highest I’ve seen recorded anywhere was just over two hundred. So I’m above average but not threatening anyone’s record.”

  “What’s this got to do with Jenn being gone?”

  “Pressure points,” I said. “Shotokan karate teaches a lot of them and Krav Maga throws in a few more. I’m working on places in the neck, under the arm, the forearm—if I squeeze them hard enough, I can take a man down myself with minimal effort.”

  “So can I,” Ryan said. “Only mine don’t get up.”

  “Yeah, yeah. The guns. I know. Anyway, my neurologist told me I should still avoid blows to the head. Anything that could help me subdue someone without getting hit is a bonus.”

  “Just give them the old Mr. Spock neck pinch and they drop?”

  “They might not drop,” I said, “but the pain would make it hard for them to think straight.”

  “Must make you a better strangler. In theory.”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Maybe I’ll try it at the hotel.”

  After a period of silence, he looked over at me and said, “So how’s Jenn doing? Any idea when she’s coming back?”

  “It might be more a question of if than when.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Neither of us really knows what she went through,” I said. “It’s not like getting cut or bruised or breaking a bone.”

  “You did all that the first week I knew you.”

  Jesus, he was right. And plenty more had happened to me since then. But I was still doing what I had to do. “What I’m saying is, those injuries, you know how long you’re going to need to heal. You get stitches, a cast, a brace, a crutch. What does she get? How long will this take to heal? Like with my concussion, it might be weeks, maybe months before she’s back. If she comes back.”

  “Are you keeping in touch?”

  “Sort of. We’ve had to talk about insurance claims and medical expenses. We email each other maybe once a week.”

  “She ever mention me?” he asked.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “It’s cool. I was just wondering. Anyway, you ain’t got her, but you got me.”

  “Montreal may never be the same,” I said.

  It took a little over an hour to get past the eastern suburbs and bedroom communities, out in front of most of the big rattling semis. With little traffic and an open road, Ryan took the car up to his usual cruising speed. He never drove over the limit the cops tolerated, other than to pass—especially when he had guns in the car.

  We weren’t constant chatterers, either of us, and it was easy to stretch out the time in the capsule of his new car, just going with the rain and shitty driving conditions, the delays here and there when one truck lumbered into the left lane to slowly pass another.

  I had mixed feelings about being on the road with Ryan. If things got rough, there was no one I’d rather have watching my back. I just didn’t want them to get that rough again, not so soon. My head was still healing. My body was still purging the residues of the violence we’d encountered—and engineered—in Boston.

  “It was funny watching you pull up this morning,” I said. “In this car, this colour.”

  “Made you think of Boston?”

  “It did.”

  “I didn’t pick it to freak you out. But now I’m on my own, I wanted something new. A little muscle, a little style.”

  “Is this really it for you guys?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t me that walked out or even wanted to break up,” he said. “I told you, she gave me the boot. And the worst part? I seriously fucking tried. That’s what is so wrong with it. I understood her concerns about Carlo and his safety. I disassociated myself from the old life. Did I throw myself into the restaurant one hundred per cent? Maybe not, but you couldn’t tell it from the outside. I challenge anyone to say different. I challenge her to contradict it. I played the part, I acted it day and night. That’s what makes me so mad.”

  “Would you go back if you could?”

  He stared out the windshield, as the wipers cleared away the streaking rain.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d rather be with them than not, that’s the truth. But at a certain point it’s got to be better for Carlo if it settles one way or the other. If she’s gonna keep kicking me out every time shit happens, I should just stay out, support them the best I can and let us all get the fuck on with our lives. I’ll live close by, she’ll give me plenty of access to Carlo. And I won’t murder the guys she dates, long as they behave themselves around my kid.”

  “Did she ask you to leave because of the things you’ve done for me?”

  “First of all, she didn’t ask. She told. Second, while I’d love to blame you and not me, it would be a little too handy. It all came down to who we are right now, me and her. Who we grew up into. Who I was when I did what I did for a living. How that translates into who I am now.”

  I heard what he said, took it in, pondered a few different replies that could prove helpful, one or two that could get me shot if taken the wrong way, and finally leapt for the safety of a male refuge: “So what’s the car like with the hemi engine?”

  He seemed relieved I’d veered back to car talk.

  “The one we had in Boston,” he said, “was the basic SE model, had about 300 horsepower. This one has 470. That’s fucking ridiculous, it’s only thirty less than the turbo Porsche Cayenne, which I also tested. And quite liked. Power and luxury, what’s not to? But you know me, I don’t like to stand out too much, and a Porsche insignia in a rearview mirror? Fuck it. There’s way more Chargers on the road.”

  “What’s the top speed?”

  “I tried it one night on the 400, middle of the night, hit one-thirty—miles, not kilometres—but I had to ease off because I wasn’t alone on the road. If I was on the Autobahn, on a straightaway, no one else around me? I think it could top one-forty-five.”

  We were doing maybe a third of that now. But it was good to know we had speed to burn, in case we had to burn it.

  About halfway to Montreal, as you get to Kingston, walls of rust coloured stone rise up ten or fifteen feet in the air, once light pink but now darkened by years of seepage and exhaust. This is where crews had to blast through granite hillocks, part of the Canadian Shield, to make way for the road. In winter dazzling ice formations burst through the rock, forming long spouting cones like wizards’ white beards. Now it was just wet with the rain that was following us east.

  As the rocky walls fell away, and the roadside view returned to the usual flat green fields and poplars trembling in the rain. I told Ryan what I knew about Sammy: the uncoordinated lonely kid I remembered from Camp Arrowhead, and the more self-assured writer he had apparently become.

  “According to his grandfather,” I said, “plus his obituary and some other things I read about him, he was something of a local treasure in Montreal.”

  “Based on what?”

  “He had a weekly column in a magazine called Montreal Moment, w
hich looks like their version of NOW. He wrote under the name Slammin’ Sammy.”

  “The one you gave him.”

  “Yeah. I cracked up when I saw that.”

  “You have a plan? A starting point?”

  “We’ll look at his place, speak to the investigators.”

  “You’ll speak to them. I’m taking no part in that.”

  “Fine. Then there’s the editor of the magazine he wrote for, his ex-wife, neighbours. Something will catch our eye. A path will open and we’ll walk down it.”

  “You with your spy tools and hand-grip.”

  “And you with enough firepower to outfit a Western.”

  “You’re welcome. You buy this idea he was killed by Muslims?”

  “Getting the story filtered through the grandfather might or might not match what the cops actually have. But there is a lot of anti-Semitism in Muslim communities,” I said. “And more so in Quebec than Ontario. Firebombings of Jewish schools, that sort of thing.”

  “Well, Muslims, not Muslims, I don’t care either way,” he said. “You know me.”

  “You’ll abuse anyone.”

  “Only as needed. But here’s my take on them.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “No uh-oh needed, it’s very straight on. My people were immigrants, same as them. Or you, for that matter. My mother’s parents came here in the fifties, my father’s, the Irish side, back in the eighteen-eighties. And they had their problems fitting in but did they try to make everyone do everything their way and fucking gripe about the country that took them in? No. They tried to fit in, shut up and took their lumps, and tried to do better by their kids.”

  “When exactly did you ever shut up and take your lumps?”

  “I said them, not me. And I took plenty of lumps from my stepfather.”

  His late stepfather, he meant. The one who had supposedly taken his own life by shooting himself in the head. Twice.

  “What I’m saying,” he went on, “is it worked for my people, it worked for yours, and it would work for them if they’d shut the fuck up about religion and just fit in.”