Only one confessed to having been awake, an actor named Eric Thorn who’d been performing that night in Centaur Theatre’s revival of The Threepenny Opera. He lived in a top-floor flat two buildings over.
“The cast all went out for drinks after the show,” he said. “I got home around two, but I was too wired to sleep, so I was going over the opening number. I play the street singer, the one who sings ‘Mack the Knife,’ and I was still trying to find the right edge. A little before three, I heard knocking out front, and I went to the window. Saw a police car at the curb, a couple of cops at Sammy Adler’s door.”
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“Sure. He liked theatre, I liked his columns. We’d shoot the shit sometimes coming and going. Two Anglos, talking about how both our audiences were getting older and smaller. So many young people leave Montreal. At least the ones that come to English theatre.”
“What else did you see that night?”
“Well, I was a little worried at first, wondering what brought the police to Sammy’s door. But they left—I don’t know, about ten minutes after they got there and everything got quiet again, so I figured he was okay. But then …”
“What?”
“I thought I heard knocking again, maybe five minutes later. Not as loud, though. I went back to the window but there was nothing there. The street was dead quiet. No cop cars or anyone else.”
“Don’t suppose you looked out the back,” Ryan said.
“As a matter of fact, I did. I grow tomatoes and basil on the deck out there and the raccoons and squirrels get into it. Even people’s cats. I thought maybe the sound I’d heard was coming from there so I opened the back door and checked. But there were no animals. None I could see.”
“No one at Sammy’s back door?” I asked.
“I can’t see it from my balcony. I mean, not unless I stood at the rail and leaned all the way over. Which I didn’t.”
“Did you see a car in the laneway? A silver Lexus maybe?”
“No,” Eric said. “There was a van parked there, but no cars.”
“What kind of van?”
“I don’t know what make. Kind of old looking. Light grey or white.”
“Anything written on it? A company name?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Homs? H-o-m-s?”
“No,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it was blank.”
“All right,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
“No problem,” he said. “And if you’re around on the weekend, come see the show. You’d bring the average age down by ten years.”
“So Mohammed might have more than one vehicle,” Ryan said. “Makes perfect sense. A van for his business, with or without the name on it.”
“It definitely fits with the theory we have. The phony call to the police, the knock at the back door. Sammy lets his guard down, opens up and bam—he’s gone.”
We walked around to the laneway and opened the gate that led into a small yard the width of Sammy’s kitchen. Shaded by a large maple, there was no grass growing. The surface was flagstone, leading up to a small balcony with weathered paint, just big enough for a barbecue and two lawn chairs. I tried to picture everything that had happened that night: Mohammed al-Haddad, or men working for him, bundling Sammy into a waiting van, taking him to a dark, deserted place where they could beat him at their leisure.
The Homs office? Mehrdad’s storeroom? The warehouse in Brossard?
Looking at the back door, I could see small alarm contacts.
But they got you to disarm it, didn’t they?
We walked back into the laneway. The base of the fence was piled with trash: beverage cups, food wrappers, sheets of newspapers blown out of recycling bins, torn envelopes whose contents had been removed, a flyer for a singer called Coeur de Pirate, another for window and eavestrough cleaners, and one with a crude caricature of two figures I recognized: Laurent and Lucienne Lortie, stepping on the bleeding head of a Muslim woman in a headscarf.
There were a dozen good reasons why it could have been in that laneway.
And only one bad one.
FRIDAY, JUNE 24
CHAPTER 16
At eight o’clock the next morning, we parked at a meter outside the headquarters of Québec aux Québécois. We paid for an hour of parking and walked to the next intersection, turned north and doubled back through the lane behind Avenue du Mont-Royal. The smell of garbage was ripe in the muggy air, especially behind the restaurants. Almost like a body would smell.
Halfway down the lane, I saw the white van Luc had been unloading the day before.
We walked around the front of the van. I made a mental note of the licence plate and the make and model—a GMC Safari, boxy-looking, old enough to pre-date the redesign that made newer models more rounded.
“Got another transponder?” Ryan asked.
“No. They didn’t have a two-for-one special.”
I went to have a look through the back windows. There were two panes, one on each of the rear doors.
“Keep walking,” Ryan said. “Company’s coming.”
The back door of the QAQ office had just opened and Luc Lortie was coming out, followed by another man his age, also dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. The one who’d been helping him unload the cartons the day before.
I kept walking.
Ryan caught up with me and as soon as we were around the corner, we sprinted to the car. I was barely in my seat when he started his U-turn, ready to pick up the van when it exited the lane onto St-Hubert.
When you have a hemi-powered Charger, who needs a second transponder?
“We okay for gas?” I asked.
“Yeah, why?”
We were going north on Christophe-Colombe, a few car lengths behind the van, the elevated Metropolitan in sight up ahead. “In case he gets on the highway.”
“Let him,” Ryan said.
The van did get onto the highway and took it westbound as far as the 15 North, onto which it turned. This was the highway that led to the Laurentian Mountains, some forty miles away. It was easy to hang back and keep the van in sight; it didn’t seem able to muster any great speed. We knew we could catch up in a hurry if it exited anytime soon. We drove over a bridge that took us from the island of Montreal into Laval, past low-rise industrial parks that had pushed all semblance of flora away from the road. Traffic was light at first but filled in as we continued north, many of the cars pulling boats on trailers or carrying canoes on their rooftops. I guess not everyone was planning to attend the Fête Nationale celebrations in the city.
Whatever saints we hadn’t passed in the city were grouped along the highway as we continued north: Ste-Thérèse, St-Jérome, St-Janvier, Ste-Anne-des-Lacs. Ahead of us were ski hills, bare runs carved through abundant pines on which low grey clouds seemed trapped. We were approaching St-Sauveur when the van moved into the exit lane without signalling. We followed it up the ramp and onto an eastbound road that curved sharply down toward a secondary highway, the 117, which had once been the only road between Montreal and the Laurentians. There weren’t enough cars to provide much cover so Ryan had to stay well back. We went past the kind of businesses that cater to cottage country: fireplace installers, swimming pool sales, rentals of skis and snowmobiles for winter and Jet Skis for summer.
“He’s turning off,” I said.
“I see.”
The van took an eastbound road that started out paved. After about half a mile, it changed to gravel. In drier weather, the van would have kicked up dust that would have made it easier to follow at a distance. But there had been too much rain for that this week. There was thick forest on either side—maples, poplars, birch and conifers vying for light and space—with narrow lanes leading to cabins and cottages hidden by foliage. Some lanes were open, some fenced off with signs saying, “Privé.” Private. “Défense de passer.” No trespassing.
At least said they didn’t say trespassers would be shot.
&
nbsp; The road was hardly straight, so there were long moments when the van was out of sight. After one series of winding curves through thick forest we came to a long straightaway where we could see hundreds of yards ahead. No white van. No vehicles of any kind or colour.
“We lost him,” I said. “Shit.”
“Not so fast,” Ryan said. “There were only a few places he could have turned off.”
“And if we follow him down any of them, we’ll be easy to spot.”
“Not if we go in on foot.”
“Find a place to turn around. Maybe one of these lanes will have fresh tracks.”
We had to drive another hundred yards before we found a wide spot where Ryan could pull a three-point turn. Then we crept slowly back west. The first place Luc could have turned off, now on our left, was gated and padlocked. No way they could have stopped, unlocked it, driven in and closed up again in the brief time they were out of sight.
The next place, on the right, had no gate. Ryan stopped and I hopped out to take a look. There was a patch of mud that stretched from the edge of road at least a dozen strides in. No tire tracks. I got back in the car.
“You were right,” I said. “There’s only a few more places they could have gone in.”
“If we follow,” he said, “you’re not going in empty-handed.”
“I know, I know.”
“You can have the Baby Eagle again, or my spare Beretta.”
“Which matches my outfit?”
“If I had something pink—fuck!”
I looked ahead and saw the white van roaring up the road toward us, straddling the yellow line. Ryan wrenched the wheel to the right and the car kicked up a spray of gravel as it went off the road and into a shallow ditch between the roadbed and the trees. The side of my head smacked the window and Ryan almost fell out of his seat, held in place only by his belt. The van ground into the side of the car, metal scraping on metal, pushing us further off the road. I saw Luc Lortie at the wheel, his thick arms straight and stiff as he held the steering wheel at an angle, yelling something as they went past us, his words lost in the grinding roar.
I heard the squeal of brakes as the van came to a stop, and I twisted around to look out the rear window. Luc and the passenger were getting out. Luc had a tire iron in his hand. The passenger was dangling a crowbar.
The way we were tipped, I was trapped in my seat between the window and Ryan’s weight on my left arm. “They’re coming,” I said.
“Can you open your door?”
I tried the handle. It wouldn’t budge.
He reached over and undid his belt and slid even closer to me. He said, “Hang on,” and unlatched his door, turned his back to me and pushed with his feet. The door swung open and closed so quickly under its own weight that he had to pull his legs back before they got slammed. He tried it again with the same result. Then Luc’s face and shoulders filled the frame as he swung the tire iron, shattering the glass into fragments that fell in on us like a sudden burst of hail. His partner couldn’t get around to my side; he swung his crowbar and the back window broke. Luc shifted his iron in his hands and tried to gouge Ryan with the narrow end. He blocked it with his leg and howled as it dug into the flesh along his shin.
He leaned back against me and clawed his Glock out of the holster and fired out the open window. The gunfire roared through the interior of the car but Luc saw it coming and leaned away. And laughed. I felt a burn on my arm where the hot shell casing landed. I shook it off and turned to see the passenger running full speed back toward the van. Luc just backed away, almost taunting Ryan, like a fighter calling out an opponent, wanting him to come to the centre of the ring and fight.
Ryan grabbed the steering wheel to get some purchase, trying to lift his head and shoulders out. I saw blood seeping out of his torn pant leg.
The van engine revved; the passenger was now the driver. I heard him call something out in French; Luc just smirked.
“Hold this,” Ryan said, handing me the warm pistol. He got both hands on the wheel and pulled again. When he was clear of the broken window, he held out his hand and I returned the gun. I saw Luc hop in the passenger side of the van as its engine whined. Ryan’s finger slipped into the trigger guard and was about to fire when the driver slammed the van into reverse and tore along the side of the Charger again. Ryan had to fall back in to avoid getting his head and arm crushed. There was another screech of metal as the van lurched forward. By the time Ryan got back into shooting position, it was heading east, kicking up gravel as it sped away.
Ryan fired anyway. His first shot hit nothing. Same for the second one. He didn’t fire a third. The van was out of range and Ryan wasn’t one to waste bullets.
I’ve heard creative strings of profanity out of Ryan’s mouth before but nothing to compare to what he spewed when he finally got out of the car and examined its ruined side. No body part, male or female, was spared. No sexual act left out. Luc’s mother—birth and/or adopted—was targeted, as was his sister—all sisters—and several orders of nuns. It was like watching The Aristocrats on fast forward.
Then he lifted his pant leg to examine the bloody cut. “We catch up to him,” he said, “he’s gonna pray to every saint we passed on this road, and every one we saw in Montreal, that he has a fucking heart attack before I’m through killing him.”
We couldn’t get the car out of the ditch without a tow truck. And we couldn’t get cellphone reception on that stretch of country road. We were going to have to go on foot, maybe all the way back to the 117.
“Can you walk?” I asked him.
“Yes, I can fucking walk. It’s just a scratch.”
“Looks deeper than a scratch.”
“Anger is a terrific healer. A hell of a lot better than faith.”
So we walked west, keeping an eye out for any vehicles that might give us a ride. When we got to the next laneway, I checked it for tire tracks, and saw fresh ones deep in the mud, with bits of gravel on top of the impressions.
In we walked, past strawberry plants heavy with red berries, our shoes sinking into muddy ruts. Bugs swarmed around us in the humid air. Ryan pulled his Glock and kept it by his side.
“You think there’s more men here?” I whispered.
“I’m a city boy,” he said. “I don’t know what the fuck there is. Could be guard dogs. Could be bears, for all I know.”
Maybe Ryan was the smart one. If a bear came crashing out of the growth, he’d have a gun. I’d have karate and Krav Maga and a trove of Jewish lore.
The narrow lane curved down a hill and to the left and then widened into a clearing. There was a small A-frame cabin ahead, built of thick, dark timber with stripes of white mortar in between. It looked at least a century old, with sagging shutters beside the windows and a porch bowed in the centre. Behind it the clearing widened to reveal a sloping lawn that swept down to a weathered dock and boathouse. The roadside foliage had been so thick there’d been no hint of a lake down below, no glitter of blue between the pine and spruce. Amazing what you find when you walk down the right road.
The cabin had no alarm system we could see. Ryan used the butt end of his gun to break one of the old sash windows and we climbed inside. It was all one big room, with a kitchen on the right, a living room on the left and straight ahead a ladder leading up to a sleeping loft. Columns of dust swarmed in the light as we moved through. There was a tang of body odour in the air and a musty smell from a stained sofa that faced a stone fireplace across a scratched wood coffee table. Two ashtrays on the table were filled with cigarette butts—two different brands—and a few roaches burned down to their handmade cardboard filters.
A bookshelf against the wall behind the loft ladder was filled with books on politics and philosophy, all of them worn and well-read. There were French translations of Das Kapital and other Marxist writings. A rare copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook. Novels by Albert Camus, the plays of Jean Genet, essays by Sartre and Arthur Koestler. Biographies of the former Que
bec premier René Lévesque and Paul Rose, one of the leaders of the Front de Libération du Québec cell that kidnapped and murdered a cabinet minister during the 1970 October Crisis. A copy of Nègres blancs d’Amérique—White Niggers of America—in which Pierre Vallières famously compared the lot of the Québécois working class to that of African-Americans during segregation and called for armed revolution. I pulled it out of the shelf and fanned through its pages, many of which had passages underlined and notes scrawled in the margins. So did many of the other texts, including the Rose biography, The Anarchist’s Cookbook and a biography of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who claimed to have acted to protect his country against Muslim influence.
Up in the sleeping loft, there was a thin futon with twisted sheets, and a milk crate that served as a bedside table. On it was another ashtray, an English copy of Geert Wilders’s book Marked for Death, and a sheet of paper in which a rectangle had been drawn in pencil. In the lower left corner, a semicircle had been traced from the bottom line up to the middle of the left side. There were a few other markings—arrows and Xs along the top and left sides of the rectangle and what looked like sunbeams extending from a circle in the top of the middle of the frame.
I climbed down and showed it to Ryan: “What do you make of that?”
He studied it a moment and said, “A baseball field? The half circle is the infield and the rest …”
“The rest is the wrong shape,” I said. “A rectangle instead of a diamond.”
“We’re dealing with a dickhead. Maybe he’s too dumb to know the right shape. He was dumb enough to fuck with my car.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“Why?”
“We keep hearing he’s dumb. But if this is his place, and these books are all his, then Luc Lortie isn’t a dumb guy trying to act smart. He’s a smart guy trying to act dumb. Which goes against human nature.”
We looked through the kitchen, found nothing. There was no desk or any other place where he might have left some sort of writing behind, something to give us a clearer idea of who he was, what he thought, what he might be doing.
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