Miss Montreal

by Howard Shrier

  I watched her walk to a gate behind the stage, manned by burly men in bright yellow jackets with “Sécurité” lettered on the back. I kept watching. Hoping to see Paquette materialize. He didn’t.

  “All right,” I said to Ryan and Mehrdad. “The press pen is at the front of the stage.”

  “We’re going to have to get through ten thousand people,” Ryan said.

  “I don’t care if it’s twenty thousand. Jenn is in there somewhere.”

  “Then let’s get moving. You,” he said to Kamal. “You’re the biggest. Get in front and start pushing.”

  Kamal hesitated until Mehrdad urged him forward with a nod. Ryan and I got behind him. Mehrdad and Rashid backed us up until we were a tight wedge and then we started pushing our way through the mass of people facing the stage. We were trying to create a perpendicular path, coming at them from the side. Stepping on feet. Making them step back. Elbowing their sides. Someone kicked me in the side of the leg. Someone else swore and clapped the back of my head. I kept pushing against Kamal’s broad back, making him go forward even when the wall of people didn’t want to give way. I wished I were taller, tall as one of the giant puppets I’d seen, able to see out over the crowd, spot Jenn’s shining blonde hair or Holly’s pile of curls. I wished my arms were long enough, strong enough, to sweep aside the people blocking our path. That I were Moses, able to part this sea and find a clear path forward.

  I put my arms on Kamal’s shoulders and drove with my legs.

  “Easy,” he shouted. The first indication that he spoke English.

  “I’ll take it easy if you keep moving. Use your legs. Come on, push.”

  I could smell my own sweat running down my sides. It was too hot, too close, too many people getting angry, pushing back. Someone threw a plastic cup at me and I felt ice and liquid run down my back. Ryan was grunting beside me, swearing under his breath. I wondered how far we had come. What if it were only a few feet? It felt like we’d been moving an hour. Sisyphus had it easy compared to us; he only had to push rocks up a hill. We were pushing people who didn’t want to be pushed. I felt another blow to my neck as someone cursed and struck out at me. I ignored it and kept my arms up, my head down. The music was getting louder as we got closer to the towers of speakers facing the crowd. I could feel drums and bass pounding up from the earth, resonating in my chest. I wished they’d turn the sound down, gag the singer, so I could shout out Jenn’s name. Hear her call mine if she saw me. I should have asked Holly exactly where the press pen was. With so many people around us, so many flags, we could be going right past it.

  Kamal stopped. He was panting and his shirt was soaked through with sweat.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  “You get in the front.”

  “We’re halfway,” I said. A look to my left showed we were at centre stage. I could see the band now, a singer with an electric guitar at a microphone, waving his hands over his head, getting the crowd to wave along. Which didn’t help us, since it made it harder to see where we were going. More hands slapped against me inadvertently. Someone’s long fingernail poked my right eye and it teared up. I blinked a dozen times, trying to clear it, then walked into a cloud of exhaled smoke. I put my hand on Kamal’s shoulder and trusted him to be my eyes.

  “Up ahead,” Ryan said. “I think I see a fence.”

  I wiped my eye and looked ahead. Had to close the blurred right and peer through the left. Inside a fenced-off area were cameras mounted on tripods. A mike boom held high above a techie’s head. We shifted direction slightly and kept pushing, Kamal grunting like he was dragging a plow through rock-hard earth. Sweat dripping off his chin.

  Seconds later, our forward movement stopped. We had hit the metal gate enclosing the press. Ryan shouldered his way in front of Kamal and we both bellied up to the gate and scanned the people inside the enclosure.

  “You see her?” I yelled.

  “No.”

  “Hang on.” I crouched down and stuck my head between his legs, took a deep breath and rose with him up on my shoulders. People behind us booed and yelled at us as we blocked their view. “Descends!” a hoarse voice yelled. “Get down.” Someone shoved me and I almost fell over but Kamal caught me and kept us upright. And smiled at me, flashes of gold in a few lower molars.

  “There,” Ryan said. “Jenn! Hey, Jenn!”

  “Can she hear you?” I panted.

  “No,” he said and then yelled, “Jenn! Jenn Raudsepp!”

  “Now?”

  “Fuck it,” he said. “We’re going over.”

  The fence was only chest high. I boosted him onto the other side and followed him over.

  “Thank you,” I said to Kamal, and to Rashid and Mehrdad behind him. They were sweating and breathing hard too.

  “We’ll go look for the van along Rosemont,” Mehrdad said. “If we see nothing by Viau, we’ll turn south. Check the back of the crowd.”

  “We’ll be right behind you,” I said. “As soon as I get my friends to a safe place.”

  “I see the crazy brother or his van, I call your cell.”

  I gave him the number and he and his boys started making their way through the crowd, this time away from the stage. People moved aside instinctively, less resistant to people who weren’t trying to usurp the space they’d fought so hard to get.

  “There she is,” Ryan said.

  I turned and saw Jenn and Holly: Jenn rapt as she watched the band on stage, no idea what was going on or what it had taken to come find her; Holly taking notes in a narrow reporter’s pad, flipping the page and scrawling away on a fresh one.

  We hadn’t taken a step before a man in a yellow Sécurité jacket blocked our path. He was over six feet and broad as a Douglas fir. He said something I couldn’t hear.

  I said, “What?”

  He leaned in closer and said, “I saw you climb the fence. This is for journalists only.”

  “We’ll be out in a minute.”

  “You have accreditation?”

  “My name is on a list.”

  “Then why did you come over the fence?”

  “We’re just picking up a friend.”

  “Out. Now.” He put a big hand on my chest and pushed.

  I had spent the last twenty minutes pushing and being pushed. I’d had more than enough. I kneed him in the balls and he doubled over and clutched his groin in the expected way and we moved quickly around him. A cameraman swore at me as I moved through his field of vision, ruining whatever shot he was taking. I left his balls unkicked.

  “Jenn!” I yelled, and this time we were close enough for her to hear me. She turned with a look of surprise, a what-are-you-doing-here look. I rushed up to her and said, “Your phone turned off?”

  She said into my ear, “Huh? No. Except—no, maybe it is, I forgot to charge it when I got in. Why?”

  Why. “We’re leaving,” I said.

  “What’s happening?”

  “The bomb, honey. It’s here. Holly!”

  She turned and gave me the same surprised look that Jenn had, a spotlight illuminating her tangle of red hair.

  “You’re early,” she said with a smile.

  “We have to go.”

  “I can’t. I’m covering this for—”

  “Holly, remember Luc Lortie? The brother who’s supposedly slow?”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s planted a bomb here. And it’s going to go off once Laurent gets up on that stage.”

  She pulled back and looked me in the eyes. “You’re serious,” she said. A statement, not a question. And could tell from my look back that I was.

  I turned around and saw the guard I had kneed getting to his feet. “Is there a faster way out of here than the way we just came?”

  “Yes,” she said, pointing to the far side of the press pen. “There’s the stage door to the left and an exit to the street.”

  “Then let’s exit. Now.”

  She shoved her notebook into her shoulder bag and le
d us out a break in the gate that opened onto the backstage area. I wished we’d seen it from the street—getting into the press pen by that route would have saved us a lot of time and energy. We passed through it and out another gate onto a paved path bordering the grounds of the Botanical Garden.

  “Don’t you have a cell?” I asked Holly.

  “I had my hands full taking notes and photos,” she said. “It was in the outside pocket of my purse.”

  I filled them both in and we strode quickly along the path. When we were at least a few hundred yards away, beyond what I judged to be the ring of any explosion, I pointed Jenn toward the street and said, “Take a taxi or the Metro, either one. Wait for us at the hotel.”

  “You’re not coming?” Jenn asked.

  “I need to find Luc.”

  “Let the police find him.”

  “I can’t just walk away.”

  “But you expect me to?”

  “I promised you nothing would happen.”

  “But it’s okay if it happens to you?”

  “Just go.”

  “Not unless you come.”

  “Does anyone give a shit if I come?” Ryan said.

  “I meant you too,” Jenn said.

  I pulled her close and kissed her hair. “Go. I’ll see you soon.”

  “No you won’t, you dumb shit.” She tried to blink back tears but they fell anyway.

  I turned to Ryan and said, “Take them out of here.”

  “I’m with you,” he said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “This is what you brought me here for, right? To have your back? Let’s find this punk and get his shit over with.”

  Behind us I heard a wave of applause as the singer on stage finished his number. Then a man with a voice made for radio took the mike and called out to the crowd and they roared as one.

  “Et maintenant,” I heard him say, followed by something that echoed through the park. I couldn’t catch the meaning. I strained to hear it but all I heard was disembodied words.

  And then the name Johnny Rivard.

  CHAPTER 22

  A bass drum started thumping a four-four beat. A guitar joined in charged with treble, a full-on country twang, followed by honky-tonk piano and bass. A rockabilly quartet, old-time, led by a singer old enough to believe in Laurent Lortie’s message and want to bring him up to speak to the great mass of people still packing the grounds.

  I was hoping like hell Lucienne had found her father and convinced him to stay off the stage.

  Ryan and I were on Boulevard Rosemont on the north side of the park, panting a little from a fast run up the long paved path bordering the gardens. We stayed at a jog, checking both sides of the street for Luc’s van. And what if we found it? I knew nothing about bombs. Certainly not how to disarm one. I didn’t think Ryan knew any more than I did. Guns were his thing.

  “There!” Ryan said, pointing at a white van parked on the north side. We jogged toward it but halfway could see it was a well-kept recent Sienna. We kept going, staying at a trot. I noticed the Sienna and most of the other cars had blue permit parking stickers in their windshields.

  “Bonsoir,” a man yelled onstage. “Bonne Fête tout le monde.”

  The crowd roared back at him as one.

  And then he launched into a song. Okay. He was doing at least one number before he called Laurent up to join him. Make it a long one, I thought. Make it “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” or “Whipping Post”—give us seventeen or eighteen minutes more to find the misfit boy and his bomb.

  I didn’t hear my phone ring but I felt it vibrate in my pocket.

  It was Reynald Paquette.

  “Where are you?” he shouted. I could hear the same music that was playing around us over the phone, so he was somewhere on the scene.

  “On Rosemont, going east. You?”

  “Approaching backstage. Waiting for the bomb technicians. If you see anything, don’t touch it. Don’t even approach it. Call me direct.”

  “Fine. Have you circulated Luc’s picture?”

  “As widely as I can. But the patrol officers, they have to stay at their posts, keep the crowd under control.”

  “There won’t be a crowd if a bomb goes off.”

  “Just remember what I said. You find something, don’t touch it. I’d rather see a robot camera blow up than a person.”

  “Even me?”

  “Don’t ask Chênevert that.”

  The first song ended and the crowd erupted in applause. I heard a chant go up: “Joh-nee! Joh-nee!” I looked right and saw people waving their flags, pumping their fists, lighting lighters. One man was bouncing a child on his shoulders, a boy no more than three or four, blond curls spilling out of a blue ball cap with a fleur-de-lys on the front. The father was holding the boy’s legs so he wouldn’t fall. The boy gripped his father’s shirt tightly with one hand and with the other held his hat firmly on his head.

  I waited to hear what was coming next. Play it again, Johnny. Fast or slow, sad or not, it doesn’t fucking matter. Play something so the crowd keeps on cheering, the boy keeps bouncing, his hat stays on his head.

  We were getting close to the back of the crowd. Still no white vans. The only van of any colour was a panel truck, the kind a baker or florist would use, and it was blue. It also had two parking tickets under the front right wiper. No resident permit. And a lot more interior space than a van: more than enough for a load of sacks and cylinders.

  “Hang on,” I said.

  We walked over to the truck and peered through the windows, Ryan on the street side, me on the sidewalk. The space to the rear had been covered over with a tarp. There was nothing personal of note in the front, other than a coffee cup. A pink rental agreement.

  I jumped a foot back when the truck’s parking lights flashed and its horn chirped and Luc Lortie laughed behind me.

  “Imagine if I had pressed the wrong button,” he said.

  He came out into view from beyond a tangled hedge about four car lengths east, a cellphone in one hand, his car fob in the other. Ryan took out his Glock but wisely didn’t extend it at Luc, not with so many people who might see it and run. Or try to.

  Luc smiled and said, “Point it, go ahead. I showed you already, your gun doesn’t scare me.”

  “I didn’t have this clear a shot last time,” Ryan said. “And you were trying to take my leg off.”

  “I can take more than that off now,” he said. “I can take it all, debone you both like chickens.”

  He held up the cellphone, his thumb obscuring one of the top buttons. “This activates the detonator. I’ve already dialled the number, all I have to do is press send. This truck will be gone, along with everyone within two hundred metres.”

  “Including you,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Do I look like I love my life so much? You presumably searched my cabin. Is it the home of a contented man?”

  “You don’t want to live to see your father succeed? And your sister?”

  “I’ll still know, even if I die.”

  “And what if Lucienne dies?” I said.

  “Why would she?”

  “Because she’s here. In the crowd, looking for you.”

  For the first time, he lost his cocky grin. “You’re lying. She is at Radio-Canada. It’s miles away.”

  “She’s here,” I said, holding up my phone. “And I can prove it.” Jesus, a war fought with cellphones, mine and his. One a detonator, one a reminder.

  “You call anyone and we die.”

  “I’m not calling, okay?” I brought up the photo I’d taken of Lucienne moments ago, and held it out in front of me.

  “I can’t see that,” he said. “It could be anything.”

  “Here.” I started walking toward him.

  “Stop!”

  “No tricks,” I said. I took one step at a time, as if the pavement beneath my feet were mined. When I got close enough to slide the phone in a straight line along the sidewalk, I knelt and did it.
It skittered to within a few feet.

  “Pick it up. Look at it.”

  He stared at the phone without moving.

  “Look at it. I won’t move.”

  He pocketed his keys, crouched down and picked up the phone and stared at the image of his beloved sister, lit from behind by blue strobes. Could he see the tears streaking her makeup, the agony straining her face?

  “You detonate the bomb, you’ll kill her too,” I said.

  “Why? Why did she come?”

  “To stop you. I told her about it and she wants you to stop.”

  “I can’t stop. I am what this family needs. Can’t she see that? For my father to lead this province, and for her to take over when he retires, it is up to me to act.”

  “She doesn’t want it to happen this way,” I said.

  “It won’t happen any other way! The sheep will keep on voting for the same stupid people. They need me to provide the spark.”

  “That’s not what Lucienne believes. She knows your father can succeed without this kind of violence.”

  “He can’t, I’m telling you. Without me, at best he’ll place third and be the swing player in a minority government. I’m the only one who can take him to the top.”

  “Not without killing your sister.”

  “Call her,” he said. “Tell her to get away. Do it now, or I swear I’ll—”

  “She won’t go. I already asked her and she stayed. And even if she left, everyone would know it was you who set off the bomb. The people would shun your family forever. The party would be destroyed. Think of Anders Breivik. You think his father could get elected in Norway? Ever?”

  “No one will know,” he said. “Not if you die with me.”

  “The police know,” I said. “They’re here looking for you.”

  “I don’t see them.”

  “You never do. But they’re here. I told them about the bomb. And about Sammy Adler. They know you killed him.”

  “For all the good it did,” he said. “There was supposed to be outrage. A beloved Jew writer killed by vicious Muslims. But the police never came out and said that’s how it happened. There wasn’t the outcry there should have been.”

  “There will be now,” I said. “But not the one you hoped for. Now do the right thing. For Lucienne.”