Open Season (Luc Vanier)

by Peter Kirby

  “You said that.”

  “Space for us to be together, but space to be alone too. Maybe a terrace, but a big one. Not a birdcage balcony.”

  “You know that nothing we’ve seen today fits that description. Damn, nothing we’ve seen in the last two months fits that description.”

  “I know.”

  The silence hung there. Vanier reached for the wine. Homemade or not, it was taking the edge off the condominium day. Finally, he asked, “What do you think of renting?”

  “Like giving it a try before we buy? And when I say ‘it’, I mean us, you and me. Is that what you’re saying, Luc?”

  “Maybe. We’ve both lived on our own for years, and living together is going to take some getting used to.”

  “I think you mean it’s going to take compromise.”

  “Well, compromise, if you want. But maybe if we rent for a year we’ll get a better sense of what we really want.”

  “Luc, just so we understand each other, there is no way on God’s earth that I’m moving into your place.”

  “I figured that out a long time ago.”

  “So we need to find neutral ground and rent for a while. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “Maybe we should think about it. As a first step.”

  She straightened up in the chair, backing away from the table, as though she was backing away from him.

  Vanier’s phone rang and he was tempted to heave it into the street, but Anjili nodded, giving permission.

  He put the phone to his ear. “Vanier.”

  It was Detective Sergeant Saint Jacques. He listened for a few minutes. “Okay. Maybe twenty minutes.” He clicked End. He opened his mouth to say something, but Anjili beat him to it.

  “Don’t tell me, Luc. You’ve got to go.”

  “It was Saint Jacques. There’s been a kidnapping. I …”

  “Go. Call me when you’re through.”

  Vanier bent down to kiss her on the lips and she returned the kiss, barely. Then raised her hand to hold his arm.

  “Luc. It’s been a long day. It’s your job, I understand. Call me, okay?”

  “I’ll call.”

  The cobblestone streets in the old town were picturesque, but hell to drive on, and Vanier’s Volvo shuddered from the punishment. He was crawling along slower than a horse and cart. He turned right on Saint-Paul and continued along the cobblestones until Saint-Laurent, back on tarmac. Up ahead, the street was closed off by a wooden barrier. He waved his badge out the window and a uniform lifted one end of the barrier to let him through. Farther up the street, he could see a knot of people and an arc light, as though they were shooting a movie.

  He drove on and parked up on the sidewalk, scanning the crowd for Saint Jacques. She looked up from her conversation with a woman and waved him over. She was finishing when he got there. “Thank you very much, madame. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.”

  Saint Jacques turned to Vanier and led him away from the crowd.

  “Kidnapping, sir. A woman. Two hours ago.”

  “Domestic?” asked Vanier. It was the obvious possibility. When a woman was grabbed off the street it was almost always an angry lover, father, or brother.

  “Could be. But witnesses say two men grabbed her and pushed her into the back of an SUV. So there were at least three people involved, including the driver. Probably rules out the jealous boyfriend.”

  “Could be a family dispute.”

  “Like an honour thing?”

  “It’s all the rage these days.”

  “A couple of the witnesses said she looked foreign.”

  “Foreign? Everyone looks foreign to Quebecers.”

  “One says Arab, the other Mexican.”

  “Any ID?”

  “Not yet. Our best chance is a guy she may or may not have been walking with. He was hit by the car door as it passed. He’s been taken to the Montreal General.”

  “Serious?”

  “He’ll survive. Apparently he was standing up and talking before the ambulance took him. We should be able to talk to him as soon as someone gets to the hospital.”

  “Any other witnesses? Besides the ethnologists?”

  “A bunch, but nothing strong. A big black SUV. It comes speeding along Saint-Paul. The driver’s door opens and smacks the guy to the ground. The woman starts screaming and is dragged into the car and they take off. Nobody got the licence plates. Depending on who you talk to, the SUV turned first left on Saint-Pierre or kept going along Saint-Paul and then north on McGill.”

  Vanier scanned the street as she talked. Rue Saint-Paul was one of the oldest streets in Montreal, dating back to the sixteen hundreds. It was narrow, with businesses, restaurants, and art galleries at street level, and lofts or businesses above. There were no CCTV cameras. Montreal was still far behind on tracking its citizens in public.

  “The owner of the restaurant identified the guy who was hit.”

  Vanier looked back to Saint Jacques.

  “He’s a lawyer. Roger Bélair. He’s a regular at Les Pyrénées. Bélair didn’t have a reservation but the owner says it’s common for him to just show up. Apparently, he always eats alone. So the owner couldn’t help with the woman.”

  Vanier had a flash of Anjili finishing her pizza without him. He’d have to make up for that if he didn’t want to be eating the rest of his meals alone.

  “We need to talk to Bélair. We’re going nowhere without the name of the victim. Are you about finished here?”

  “I was first on the scene, so I need to close it up.”

  “Okay. Have someone canvass all the residents of the lofts up there,” he said, gesturing to the upper floors of the surrounding buildings. “And anything on the street that was still open.”

  Vanier looked around and saw Detective Sergeant Laurent’s bald head towering over a group of people further up the street.

  “I’ll take Laurent to the hospital. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  Three

  They came for Katya at two in the morning. A man pounded on her door, told her to collect her things, she was leaving. In minutes she had put on an extra sweater and her coat, tossed her few belongings back into the suitcase. She followed the others down the staircase.

  A van was waiting, with two men inside. Katya and two other women climbed into the back through a haze of cigarette smoke. The van took off, and they drove through the deserted city, street after street of darkened factories, homes, and stores. The man in the passenger seat was talking quietly on a cellphone, pointing out directions to the driver. After fifteen minutes, he said something Katya couldn’t understand, and the driver killed the headlights, driving by the light of street lamps. Both men smoked non-stop, lighting each new cigarette from the last one.

  The van slowed at a steel gate; it slid open and they drove into a vast open yard filled with containers stacked three or four high. The driver navigated slowly through the tight lanes between the stacked containers waiting to be loaded onto ships. When he pulled up next to a darkened freighter, the man in the passenger seat turned to the women. “Quick. You hurry. And no talking.”

  The driver was already opening the side door, gesturing the women out. Katya was the first out. She stood on a dock clutching her suitcase, staring up at the looming structure resting in the water like a sleeping giant. Even in the darkness she could see the ship was rusting, its paint dull and peeling.

  The driver hustled them up the gangplank where two men waited. The younger of the two gestured them along the deck. As she followed him through a doorway into the ship, Katya looked back towards the gangplank and watched the driver pass a large envelope to the man on the gangplank. She hadn’t seen her passport since she had handed it over in Poltava. She hoped it was in the envelope.

  The younger man led the three women
down a metal staircase and along a corridor to a cramped cabin. It had a single bed, a dirty sofa and a table with four chairs. There was hardly room for the four of them. “In the day you stay here,” the man said. “At night you stay in here. I show you.”

  He pulled the sofa away from the wall and knelt down. After struggling for a few minutes pushing a penknife into a crack in the wall, he pulled a flap up and away to reveal a rectangular hole.

  “In here,” he said, pointing to the woman who was standing closest to the hole. “You first. There is a string for light inside. You pull.”

  The woman went down on her knees and crawled through. She disappeared. Then her head reappeared. “My bag. I need my bag.”

  “After I push the bags in.” He turned to Katya. “You next.”

  Katya went over to the hole, got down on her hands and knees and crawled through. It was pitch-black inside. She could sense the first woman waving her hands in the air to find the light string. The light clicked on as Katya was standing up. The room was tiny, perhaps six feet by four, with narrow bunk beds on either side. A windowless hole. The third woman crawled in and Katya sat on one of the lower bunks to make room for her. They watched the three suitcases being pushed in through the hole. The flap dropped into place and they heard he sofa being shoved back against the wall.

  One of the women reached out her hand to Katya. “Hi. I’m Alyona.”

  Before Katya could respond, a fist pounded the wall. “Silence. No speaking. Silence.”

  It sounded like he was standing in the hole with them. The wall was paper thin.

  Katya smiled back, mouthed Katya in an almost silent whisper. They turned to the other woman.

  “Natalka,” she whispered.

  The man pounded on the wall again. “Silence, I said. No talk.”

  Within an hour the ship began to move. Katya lay on the bed and calculated how far she had come, and how much farther she had to go. But this was the last stage. The next stop would be Canada. What would her family be like, she wondered, and how many children would she have to look after? She knew the family would be rich. Only rich people could afford a nanny to look after their children. And she was sure they would be kind; kind people, living with wonderful children in a large house in Canada.

  For the first two days, Katya was sick. On the third day she managed to keep down a thin chicken broth without vomiting, then she graduated to the stew that was the only other food on offer. The women spent their days in the small cabin, playing cards and talking. Their nights were spent in the box. They all agreed that calling it the hole was too depressing.

  “I have family,” Katya said. As soon as she had said it, she regretted it, like boasting of good health in a cancer ward. They had been playing cards for hours, using a mix of barely remembered rules and others made up on the fly. The other two stared at her, waiting for her to continue.

  “Not a family, exactly. A brother. Stephan. He’s younger than me. I promised to send for him when I get settled.”

  “It must be wonderful to have family,” said Alyona. “Even one person counts. It’s a gift.”

  Alyona had grown up in an orphanage. It was all she had ever known. They gave her everything: food, shelter, uniforms. And rules, more rules than she could ever need. No love, though. Love was not necessary.

  “A brother? So what kind of brother?” said Natalka.

  “He’s smart. I mean, he’s book-smart. He just has to read about a subject and he understands it. He wants to be an engineer. And he’s handsome.”

  Natalka shrugged. “And one day he will marry and forget all about his sister.”

  “Maybe not. Who can forget family?” Alyona said, putting a card down on the pile and picking up another.

  Natalka looked at her. “I have family too. If they were all in the same house together, I would burn it down. Forget family.”

  Katya wished she hadn’t started the conversation, but she couldn’t let it go. “Everyone’s different. There are good people and bad people. It’s the same everywhere. When you find a good person you should be happy. That’s all.”

  “Good luck finding a good person,” said Natalka.

  “And us? We’re not good?” Alyona teased her.

  “How do I know? Sure, you seem good now. But who knows? When things get tough everyone looks after themselves.” Natalka placed a card on the pile and picked up another one. She laid all her cards face up on the table. “I win.”

  There was nothing to win.

  Katya pulled the cards together and began shuffling them. “Again?”

  “No,” said Alyona. “I’ve had enough of cards.”

  Katya began playing solitaire. The others watched.

  “Okay,” said Natalka. “What’s the craziest thing you know about Canada?”

  They looked at her. “I heard that polar bears walk down the main streets. I saw a picture once, a polar bear wandering down the middle of the street.”

  Alyona scoffed. “That can’t be. There wouldn’t be any Canadians. They would all be eaten.”

  Katya let out a shriek, laughing. “Not necessarily. Maybe after a bear eats someone he rests for a few days. So to be safe, you only need to avoid the hungry bears.”

  “And how do you tell which ones are hungry?” Alyona said.

  “They look like men.” Natalka stood up and did an impression of a hulking bear-man walking down the street trying to grab a victim. When they had stopped laughing, Katya said, “I heard it’s so cold that dogs get stuck to fire hydrants when their pee freezes.”

  More shrieks. “Their owners have to snap them off!”

  They turned to Alyona. “I heard there are no orphanages. Every baby gets adopted. It’s crazy.”

  Finally, Katya broke the silence. “That’s not crazy. It should be normal.”

  Four

  Vanier pulled into a reserved space opposite the emergency-room entrance and put a cardboard card with “Police” written on it on the dashboard. It wasn’t official, just something he’d made himself. Vanier still thought of it as an experiment: sometimes it worked, other times it only seemed to encourage the tow-truck drivers. Laurent followed. “Where did you get the sign?”

  “Made it myself. Pretty good, no?”

  “It works?”

  “More often that you’d think.”

  They had to navigate the usual sad clot of smokers in front of the doorway. A guy in a wheelchair was sucking on a cigarette while his free hand steadied a drip stand. Two bags of liquid were attached to his arm with needles and tape. His bony white legs stuck out from the blue humiliation gown that hospitals force on patients.

  The emergency room was hot and crowded, like every emergency room in the province. When health care is a public service, you control costs by restricting access, and the cheapest way to do that is to make people wait. Even so, the system was buckling under the assault of baby boomers descending into decrepit old age. The people working in the hospitals had become survivors in lifeboats, beating off anyone trying to climb aboard. Whether you needed a knee operation, a new lung, or a consultation with a psychiatrist to deal with the voices in your head, you waited, and if you died while you were waiting, or ended up in jail because you did what the voices told you, there was always someone else to take your place.

  Emergency rooms were the entryway into the system, an earthly purgatory clogged with lost souls waiting for salvation, and the gatekeepers to salvation were the triage nurses. It used to be that you just walked up to a desk and talked to them. Now they huddled behind locked doors and thick glass windows with small holes to speak through.

  Vanier held his badge up to the window and bent down to speak through the hole.

  “Roger Bélair. He was admitted this evening. Where can we find him?”

  The nurse looked up without smiling, her face strained with fatigue. She
looked down and began slowly looking through papers as though she had lost something. Finally she gestured to the hallway to her left, half-standing to speak through the hole.

  “He should be on a bed in the hallway. He’s waiting for a room. But he’ll probably be discharged before one comes up.”

  Six beds were lined up end to end in the hallway, all of them occupied. Most of those bedridden were in various stages of unconsciousness, definitely the best way to spend time in an emergency room. One guy, was sitting up with his head leaned back against the iron rail, staring at the ceiling.

  “Let’s start with the guy who’s awake,” said Vanier. They walked up to the bed. “Mr. Bélair?”

  Bélair turned his head and winced. “Police?” It was less a question than a statement to himself. “I was hoping for a doctor. Can you get me some water?”

  Vanier looked back at Laurent.

  “Sure.” Laurent turned to walk away.

  “I’m Detective Inspector Vanier.” He pointed up the hallway at Laurent. “That’s Detective Sergeant Laurent. Quite the night you had. Can you tell me what happened? Start to finish?”

  Nobody looks good in a hospital bed. Bélair’s eyes were dark and puffy with blood, and he had a strip bandage over his nose. A drip tube was taped to one thin arm and his other arm was bandaged to his chest. Wisps of grey hair stuck to his head in disarray. He caught the look in Vanier’s eye.

  “I always wondered what being hit by a truck would feel like.”

  “It was an SUV, from what I heard. Don’t suppose there’s much difference.”

  “Yeah. It was an SUV. It hurts. It hurts everywhere.”

  “I can imagine. What happened?”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “I had a meeting with a new client for six o’clock. She called to say she was going to be late. She didn’t arrive till seven-thirty.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Sophia Luna. I did the checks.”

  “Checks?”

  “Yes. It’s a new rule of the Bar. It’s called the know-your-clients rule. You have to be certain who your client is. I think it has to do with money laundering or anti-terrorism, some bullshit like that. So every time I open a new file, I need to photocopy some ID. You know, to make sure they are who they say they are. So I got her name and address. I got a photocopy of her passport.”