The Ambitious City

by Scott Thornley

  “Be discreet, but show the image to your friends. Tell them you’ve been promoted and you’re in the market for a—what is it again?”

  “An ’86 RZ500LC. Does that mean I’ve been promoted, sir?” Ryan swung around and looked doe-eyed at MacNeice.

  “I’ve got him, sir,” Ryan said a while later, sliding off to the side.

  MacNeice and the two detectives took their seats and Ryan moved the joystick forward. The biker was wearing the light jacket they’d seen on the young man in the emergency ward and had on a light-coloured bubble helmet. He drove in from the right, parking at the far end of the line of motorcycles.

  “As far as he can get from the camera,” Williams said.

  “That helmet white or silver, Ryan?” Vertesi asked.

  “Silver all the way, sir. So’s the visor.”

  Once again the licence plate was perpendicular to the lens. “He drives into the same area every time. Watch,” Ryan said as he tipped the joystick forward. The bike slid into the same spot, or the one beside it, five times. “Now here’s where it gets interesting.”

  Ryan had cut the departure footage together. In every sequence but one, the biker backed up and drove straight ahead out of the frame—the long way out of the lot, and the sure way to avoid the camera. “Last visit, day five, he does something different.” Backing out of the parking spot, he drove forward and turned left beyond the bike pen, towards the surveillance camera.

  “Boy’s got balls,” Williams said.

  “Stop the image just before he exits the bottom of the frame,” MacNeice said, pointing to the screen. Ryan moved the rider slowly downfield. “Right there, stop. Can you zoom in?”

  “Sure thing.” Ryan clicked the keyboard and with the joystick started a slow zoom.

  “Stop.” MacNeice looked at the young man in the bubble helmet. The visor was mirrored but exposed his face from the bottom of his nose down.

  “He’s smiling,” Vertesi said, shaking his head.

  “Yes, and at the camera.” MacNeice shook his head, disbelieving. “He’s been there five days and no one has even noticed. It’s like he’s been given a green light on Taaraa Ghosh.” MacNeice stared at the helmet; there was a highlight from the sun in the centre of it, just above the visor. “Can you blow up the helmet and reduce the glare of the sun?”

  Ryan nodded. The helmet soon filled the screen, the highlight even brighter. Ryan changed the exposure until the silver looked dark grey, almost black. Now in the highlight they could see four short lines—just like the ones that had been incised in Taaraa’s abdomen.

  “Print that.” As he glanced at Ryan, MacNeice caught sight of five empty paper cups stacked on the corner of his desk. “How long have you been here?”

  Before Ryan could answer, Williams said, “Long time, boss. He was here all night.”

  “Christ, Ryan, you’ve got to go home,” MacNeice said sharply.

  “Tried that, boss,” Williams responded for Ryan. “He’s takin’ the whole ‘race against time’ thing seriously.”

  “I can hear you, Detective Williams …” Ryan said without turning.

  “What’s that on your right monitor?” MacNeice asked.

  “I’m tracking the bike. I know every legit garage and chop shop in the region. I’ve put out a cool story about how I saw this beauty RZ500 and I want to make an offer on it if I can find it.”

  His ingenuity and technical agility made MacNeice smile. He stood watching as each screen scrolled or stitched together something that was distinct from the others. And at last he began to understand why Ryan called the Millennium Falcon a supercomputer. It wasn’t that MacNeice was a Luddite, wishing technical progress had ended with the radio and vinyl records. It was more that his thinking and his aesthetic—for want of a better word—was of another age, when one rejoiced in the beauty of the tangible, of things you could touch.

  “Got any nibbles yet?” MacNeice asked.

  “I’ve got a guy who says someone called about a crankcase for an RZ500 and he referred him to Yamaha. But Yamaha says he didn’t order it through them, and they offered to trace it for me with Yamaha Japan. They’ll get back to us tomorrow if they have a name and address.”

  “The oil leak.”

  “Right on. He’s got a problem he can’t fix without parts.”

  “None of them recognize the bike?”

  “No. For sure he’s his own mechanic.”

  23.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Turnbull called MacNeice from the coroner’s office. It turned out that, as he had guessed, the fragment from the drain was from the body of Sergeant Hughes. They’d failed to find DNA on the hedge trimmer but the cutting pattern matched. Junior had had way too much fun experimenting with a coconut, a plastic skull and a pig’s skull—all of which proved inconclusive. Finally he’d tried slicing bone from a donor corpse, and the saw marks were identical.

  MacNeice hung up the phone. Bikers and concrete companies. What was the connection? He got up, went over to the whiteboard and picked up a marker. Under the photos of Hughes, he erased the likely and then underlined murdered in the D2D barn, Cayuga.

  “Whoa, boss, that’s gonna have an impact on Swetsky’s investigation,” Williams said.

  “No doubt. Michael, where do the concrete suppliers get their material?”

  “Well, ABC-Grimsby has a huge quarry, and they supply Mancini as well—though Alberto Mancini didn’t mention that.”

  “And McNamara?”

  “The guy I spoke to at ABC said he thought they trucked theirs in from Orangeville.”

  “Further away, in other words.”

  “Yes, sure. But why is that important?”

  “Distance is time; time is money. McNamara was at a disadvantage,” MacNeice said, still staring at the photos of Hughes.

  “ABC and Mancini are both Italian,” Williams noted.

  “Yeah, but the same guy told me Mancini had tried to buy the quarry and was beat out at the last minute by ABC. He wouldn’t have been too happy about that,” Vertesi said, drumming the desk with the fingers of one hand.

  “It’s business. He lost, then did a side deal to get the material. But where was he getting it from before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But Italians and bikers? I don’t get the fit,” Williams said.

  “I do.” Ryan had been working so quietly for a while that the three detectives had almost forgotten he was sitting there. “Bikers are semi-legit muscle for hire. You see them at rock shows, moto-cross weekends, ATV races, wrestling matches—they provide ‘security.’ Even when they go civilian and wear suits, they’re still bikers and still only semi-legit.”

  “Yeah, but Italians use their own muscle,” Williams said, looking over at Vertesi for confirmation.

  “Not always,” Vertesi said.

  “Hiring an independent security contractor—probably off the books—isn’t a bad idea when three levels of government are focused on your business,” MacNeice said, turning back to the whiteboard.

  “But aren’t bikers incredibly territorial?” Williams was looking confused.

  “For sure,” Ryan said. “All it would take for sparks to really fly would be a rival biker gang, wearing their colours, showing up without permission.”

  “But Hughes wasn’t a biker. Or if he was, his wife didn’t know,” Vertesi said.

  “Who’s going to war? DeLillo with ABC, Mancini with McNamara, McNamara with ABC? I’m missing the plot here.” Williams wrote down the rival companies on a notepad, trying to figure out the logic. “They’re all suppliers to the mayor’s project, except DeLillo. McNamara’s costs are higher than ABC’s and Mancini’s, but does that justify a war?”

  “Possibly. We need confirmation that a biker gang operates out of Old Soldiers.” MacNeice studied the Photoshopped image of Bermuda Shorts without the hole in his forehead. “But first, Michael, I need you to go ask the Mancinis a few more questions.”

  Notably absent were the pleas
antries of his first visit. Vertesi was ushered into Alberto Mancini’s office by one of the desk clerks. Alberto didn’t offer his hand this time and waved Vertesi into one of the chairs in front of the desk; his son nodded from where he sat.

  Vertesi said, “I appreciate your seeing me again at such short notice.”

  “You have a job to do, Michael,” Alberto replied. “How can I help you?”

  “I understand Mancini Concrete has a contract with ABC-Grimsby. Is that correct?”

  “Si.”

  “And that you were one of the bidders for the Grimsby quarry before ABC came along and outbid you.”

  “I wouldn’t use the word outbid. I never saw the ABC bid.”

  “Are you suggesting ABC won it unfairly?”

  “Not at all, though others might.”

  “Can you explain yourself, sir?”

  “My father doesn’t have to explain anything to you,” Pat said, shifting in his chair to face Vertesi.

  “Please, Patrizio,” Alberto said, looking down at his hands. “We spoke before about optics and politics, Michael. Many people believe ABC won for those reasons.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I don’t care to waste my time with it. I wanted the Grimsby site so I would have access to raw materials. When we lost, I made a deal to buy the materials, so I now have what I wanted—access.”

  “Where were you buying them before?”

  “Orangeville, North Milton, Brampton.”

  “Further away.”

  “Si.”

  “Did McNamara try to make the same deal?”

  “You’d have to ask McNamara.”

  “Is there any connection between Mancini Concrete and a local motorcycle club named Damned Two Deuces?”

  “I don’t follow you, son.” Alberto’s hands lifted slightly before falling slowly back to the desk.

  “What the hell are you getting at?” Pat demanded, the scar on his chin appearing brighter and angrier.

  “I thought you might hire bikers to manage security. Here, for example.” Vertesi waved to include the whole business.

  “Why would Pa need bikers to protect us? This isn’t a cash business; there’s nothing here worth stealing.”

  Vertesi stayed focused on Alberto. “You’ve heard about the bikers who were found dead in Cayuga?”

  Alberto nodded.

  “We’ve now linked one of the bodies from the bay to the barn on that farm.”

  “Yeah, a concrete crime wave—you’re way outta line.” Pat’s voice was scornful.

  “Patrizio, that’s enough.” Alberto’s tone was firm, and his son sat back in the chair. “Michael, we don’t hire bikers. I don’t know any bikers, and no, we’ve never had a security problem.”

  He stood then, an Italian-Canadian patriarch secure in his position as a businessman and community leader. “If there are no further questions, I will go home to dinner.”

  He waited for Vertesi to stand too, and then accompanied him to the door. Pat Mancini stayed put and said nothing. Alberto shook Vertesi’s hand. “Give my regards to your parents.”

  Stepping out of the president’s office, Vertesi noticed that the four men at their desks all had their heads down, pretending to be hard at work. It was clear they’d heard Pat Mancini raise his voice.

  Outside on the wooden steps, Vertesi watched the trucks coming into the yard, kicking up dust as they rumbled past him to park side by side near the silos that in the morning would load them up again. He studied the lineup of cars and SUVs in the lot near the fence, their lines softened by concrete dust. Separated from them and covered by a canvas tarpaulin was another vehicle—low and sleek, with fat wheels—Pat Mancini’s car.

  He tried to remember when it was that Pat had left the NHL. Almost two years ago. What was it like to follow your glory days of hockey with a job in your father’s concrete yard, shaking dust off the tarp before you climb into your pretty car and cruise downtown?

  Still, not many hockey players could say they’d even been to the Big Show. Pat Mancini had. He’d gone in style and played well, and would be playing still if concussions of increasing severity hadn’t made that impossible. After the last one, a renowned neurologist had described his condition graphically in a widely reported interview: “It’s like taking a one-of-a-kind precision instrument, smacking it five times with a sledgehammer and then expecting it to remain precise. It won’t, and he won’t.”

  And so Pat Mancini had come home to Dundurn, welcomed back into the bosom of his family but exiled from the thing he did best.

  24.

  TO ANOTHER PERSON, a dog or even a fly on the wall, the young man in the black helmet might seem odd, lost in conversation with the mirror. But he was completely alone, and to him there was nothing unusual about his habit of addressing himself in the third person. Nor was it the slightest bit strange to him when the mirror spoke back.

  He enjoyed breathing inside the helmet; it made him feel invisible—not to be safe but to be dangerous, as if he were Darth Vader. It felt as if there was just him and what he could see—which was everything. Some people wanted a sound system installed in their helmet, but not Billie Dance. He enjoyed the filtered reality of the outside within the controlled world of the helmet. He could say whatever he wanted to say, call people names or laugh at them, and unless he was really loud—which was almost never—no one could hear him. The black helmet was the closest he’d come to realizing his childhood dream—born of hours of playing Dungeons and Dragons—of becoming a knight avenger, out to set things straight.

  The only thing he’d lacked before now was a cause worthy of a knight avenger. Well, the truth was, his cause had been there all along, waiting for him even before he was born.

  “The demographics of Canada,” he told the mirror, “which were sold to the world as evidence of our happy multicultural society, changed everything.”

  “Huh?” the mirror image asked.

  “It was like white people—who settled and tamed this country—stopped screwing to have kids in the 1960s, after the pill arrived.” Lifting off the helmet, he studied his face for a moment, admiring the smooth, creamy skin and shiny fair hair of an Anglo-Saxon. “They got fat and complacent; they wanted lots of things, and they wanted someone to clean up after them and do the dirty work. Well, not at first. At first,” he mused, looking down at his distorted reflection in the black bubble’s visor, “they just felt sorry for immigrants of colour, many of whom couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn to speak English—ever. Before long those immigrants had fucked themselves silly and had tons of kids, and the kids went to school to become somebody better than their parents, and then those kids fucked themselves silly to become somebody better than the white Canadians who had taken pity on them in the first place.”

  “That’s not right.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s truly fucked! It wasn’t until I found demographics …”

  “Numbers?”

  “Not the stuff you read in The Economist—the stuff that drives the stuff you read.”

  He had discovered the discipline of demographics in university. Billie Dance was a natural at it. His math scores were always off the charts—he could do division in his head when he was three. But school had always bored Billie, for lots of reasons.

  “Gimme one!”

  “Well, chess, for instance. Billie was in grade nine when he won the championship for the city, and he missed out on the provincial championships only because he got pneumonia. The absolute best, though, was when he humiliated the vice-principal, who’d been provincial junior champion when he was in grade twelve! He defeated him—crushed him—in three straight sets before the entire chess club … But then, that was only four people, and it’s not like those friendless fuckers were going to tell anyone.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Nothing. That was the most challenging thing about high school, and after that he never played chess again. But when he successfully defended his master�
�s thesis about the changing face of Canada, Billie made a breakthrough. He realized he could put demographics to work.”

  “How?”

  “Easy. It’s like cream.”

  “Cream rises to the top?”

  “Sort of. You just keep skimming the cream off the top, because when the best of these people succeed, they get put in charge of companies that fire white Canadians; they get into government and tell us what we can do or not do; they can afford the best houses anywhere they want, but mostly they create these places that don’t even look Canadian—you could be in India or Korea or China.”

  “And the numbers, the demographics?”

  “Track the past seven decades—I’ve done it—and look where we’re headed.”

  “Where?”

  “To a place where white people are in deep shit. Take Toronto. You’ve got 150,000 people moving in every year. In four years that’s a number bigger than the population of most Canadian cities. More than half of those people don’t speak English as their first language.

  We’re going to be like the English were in India, or Africa, except those weren’t their countries to begin with.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll be forced out, or wiped out. The only way we’ll start screwing again is through intermarriage, and then you know what we’ve got?”

  “What?”

  “Population demographics won’t matter anymore, because we’ll be one big, muddy grey/pink/brown/yellow blob.”

  “A blob.”

  “And the history books will be burned. Who needs that shit around about the days when whites ruled? Nobody!”

  “What about the Jews? Isn’t this where the Jews come in?”

  “That was the problem with Hitler and his band of freaks—they misidentified the problem. We are Jews! Don’t you get it?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “Well, go back to the Bible. Jesus—our guy—was a Jew. Ergo, we’re all descendants of Jews.”

  “So we’ve wasted centuries killing Jews.”