The Ambitious City

by Scott Thornley

  “I’m on my way to Cayuga; the media’s already there, waiting for a statement,” Wallace said, “so give me a statement.”

  MacNeice began at the beginning, told him all he knew and what he didn’t know—the long-range shooter, the basement tunnel—and said a cop had been shot in the leg but otherwise there were no other injuries to their side. Not wanting to get into it right then, he left out the details of his standoff with Paradis.

  “Okay, where can I find you after this?”

  “We’re interviewing the surviving biker upstairs. That’ll take some time.”

  “Aziz has that interview—she gonna make it?”

  “No, we’ll have to cancel.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll do it, and offer an exclusive on the biker slayings. That it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Wallace didn’t appear to be in a rage when he returned, but he was. In less than two and a half hours he’d been given three disturbing reports about the events at Cayuga, including the fact that MacNeice had almost got the American kid, a young cop, Williams and himself killed. He hauled MacNeice into an interview room, demanding to hear his version of the events. He didn’t sit down, so neither did MacNeice.

  MacNeice insisted that the standoff with Paradis was unavoidable given the circumstances, but that he had done his best to protect Hausman, the cop and his team.

  “So who killed him?”

  “Unidentified. I was about to fire when it happened. I assume it was revenge.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes—it was a spectacular shot. Paradis probably identified himself as the target the moment he fired into our officer’s leg.”

  “My opinion, Mac, is that you could have ended up dead, along with your whole team. I think it was pure luck that it didn’t turn out that way.”

  “Luck had a lot to do with it, I agree. But the risk I took was calculated.”

  “I saw that fucking tunnel. Tell me how we had Swetsky and his team out there for two weeks and they missed it.”

  “I would have missed that tunnel, and so would you. Short of tearing the place apart—which Swetsky had no authority to do—he wouldn’t have found it.”

  “Okay, fine. Look, to be honest with you, I’m really just wondering if you have a death wish.”

  “Actually, I don’t.” MacNeice said it as if he’d considered the point—and realized he had, more than once.

  “Well, there’s an officer nursing a leg wound in Dundurn General who thinks you might. He described you as ‘freaky cool, but freakin’ crazy.’ ”

  MacNeice shrugged.

  Wallace began pacing. “I’ve already been told what the headline is for tomorrow’s Standard. Interested?”

  MacNeice studied the Deputy Chief’s face, which seemed a lot calmer.

  “ ‘Mysterious Sniper Saves Six Lives.’ ” Wallace was nodding as if his head had come loose. “How d’ya like that?”

  “I don’t mind it—it’s true. And an alliteration like that isn’t something you see every day.”

  “You’re still saying you don’t know who the shooter was?” Wallace was leaning against the wall, his eyes levelled at MacNeice.

  “I am. Whoever it was got away clean. They had to be somewhere out by the road when they took the shot. Once the shooting started, we were too preoccupied to find out where the sniper was.”

  Wallace pushed himself off the wall and walked over to the two-way mirror. He looked at his reflection and groaned, rubbed his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair several times before he turned back to MacNeice. Pulling out the chair Langlois had used, Wallace sat down heavily. “Okay, tell me what you got out of that biker.”

  When MacNeice walked back into the cubicle, the detectives and Ryan all stopped what they were doing.

  “We cool?” Williams asked.

  “Yes.” He turned to Aziz. “Have you filled them in on the Langlois interview?”

  “I didn’t. First, I think you should see what Williams found behind the house.”

  Williams held up a plastic Baggie that at first looked empty. But then MacNeice noticed something round and solid weighing down its corner: a simple gold band—Gary Hughes’s wedding ring. “It was still on his finger, boss. Everything but his face and forearm flesh was there—hands and feet, and this too.” He picked up a larger bag and took out Hughes’s wallet and passport, then another, with another wallet and passport. “Luigi Vanucci, of Buffalo, New York,” he announced.

  In Hughes’s wallet there was twenty-three dollars; in Vanucci’s, two hundred sixty-five, in American currency. No Canadian—but then, they hadn’t come for the shopping.

  “Strange they didn’t boost the cash,” Williams said. “Maybe they’re superstitious about blood money.” From the wallet he pulled out a snapshot of Hughes with his family. It was difficult to look at—everyone smiling at the camera from a picnic table. All these artifacts had been shrink-wrapped together, then stuffed in a garbage bag and buried five feet under the vegetable garden. “The tomatoes above it were doing really well.”

  When MacNeice asked how he’d found it, Williams smiled. “I found a metal detector on top of some larger equipment in the barn.” He had gone looking behind the farmhouse and, in less than five minutes, the wedding ring triggered the detector. When he got back to the division, Williams had tried to find out if Vanucci had any family, without success. He scanned the driver’s licence and passport and sent them down to Buffalo Homicide.

  Vertesi had taken Wenzel back to the hotel with his new gear. He was feeling better and running up room service and movie rental charges.

  “Okay—Gérard Langlois. Fiza, take us through it.” MacNeice consulted his notebook and on the whiteboard wrote the names Langlois had given them—Quebec bikers—under the heading Jokers MC. He put a vertical line next to them and added Luigi Vanucci and Gary Hughes.

  He drew another line and printed D2D. Aziz described how the Jokers and D2D were partnering on security jobs across Ontario and Quebec, based on the notion that two clubs were stronger than one, but also to eliminate any conflict between them. Presumably it also gave them better odds in competing against the larger clubs.

  Langlois had started riding with Jokers MC six months after the first shoot-out at Cayuga, the one with the Old Soldiers in which Hughes and Luigi had been killed. He missed the second one because he’d gone home for his mother’s funeral in Dorval; he even provided the name of the funeral home in case MacNeice and Aziz didn’t believe him. He’d said Frédéric Paradis was ruthless and ambitious, the “grand marshal.” His leadership had begun long before the first shootout. Langlois remembered Bruni once telling him how he’d cut the face off an American and fed it to the pigs. When Langlois asked him why he’d done that, Bruni said the guy had killed four D2D bikers—it was un cadeau from Frédéric to D2D. Langlois believed the story and said that Frédéric would have had to order it; Bruni would never have done it on his own, because “that big bête didn’t have a brain.”

  “Can we believe this guy?” Vertesi asked.

  “Aziz told him what would happen if he didn’t cooperate. He’s tough but not stupid—he knows there are as many bikers inside the system as on the street,” MacNeice said. “The fact that Langlois survived the day’s events at the farm will immediately put him under suspicion. If he cooperates with us, we’ll at least give him a new identity and offer to relocate him.”

  When asked the whereabouts of the D2D bikers, he told them that, as far as he knew, there were five hiding in Montreal and the rest—another six or seven—had gone underground somewhere in Ontario or as far away as Vancouver. He had no idea who’d originally hired the Jokers or why, but when Aziz asked him why they came back to the farm, he stalled, said his English wasn’t very good—not true—then asked her to repeat the question.

  Finally he told them there was supposed to be a lot of money stored somewhere at the farm, and Frédéric needed it. No one else but Paradis knew where it wa
s hidden. Langlois doubted that the D2D crew knew anything about the cash stashed there—the relationship wasn’t that cosy.

  So Frédéric and his crew had been watching the farm and were about to go in when MacNeice’s team had arrived. Given that they had the element of surprise on their side, the bikers decided to risk it. They could see that the cop was falling asleep behind the wheel; Frédéric and Bruni handled him. The others had waited for half an hour in the tunnel; when they emerged, they saw the cop and Wenzel sitting in front of the barn and Frédéric smiling, pointing a gun at Wenzel’s head.

  Langlois, of course, claimed he had no intention of shooting anyone but that he had no doubt the other three would—especially Frédéric, whom he described somewhat loftily as a “sadiste classique.” Bruni was hopped up on steroids and energy drinks. “He said it was good that the second shot took out Bruni’s neck, because he would have kept coming after the first one,” Aziz said.

  “Amen to that,” Williams, said, wiping Cayuga dust off his shoes. As a result of the shooting, he’d spent two hours with Internal Affairs and was only now starting to breathe normally.

  “Assuming that was the end of the interview,” MacNeice said, and checked his watch. It was past eight and he was exhausted. “This is the end of me.” He stood up, grabbed his jacket and looked across at Aziz.

  “I’ll make sure Aziz gets to the hotel, boss,” Williams said. “I’ve already checked—there’s a cop assigned to sit outside her door.”

  —

  MacNeice drove out of the parking lot, merging with the late evening traffic gliding along Main Street. He didn’t turn any music on. As he approached the cottage, he saw a red Corvette parked in his driveway. Pulling in behind it, he could see through the tinted rear window that someone was in the driver’s seat. He checked the licence plate—PATMAN—before swinging his car back and around so that he ended up sitting three feet from the driver’s window.

  He lowered his own window and waited. In a few seconds, the darkened window slid down.

  “Pat Mancini,” MacNeice said.

  “You know me?” Mancini looked surprised.

  “Your plate’s a giveaway. What are you doing here, Patman?”

  “I watched Wallace on TV tonight, put one and one together and thought you’d be looking for me.”

  “Do I have a reason to?”

  “No, no. That’s why I’m here—”

  “It’s late, Pat. Let’s meet at the division tomorrow morning.”

  “No way, man. Nobody knows I’m up here, but they’d sure as hell know if I showed up at the cop shop.”

  “Who’d know?”

  “Oh yeah, like I’m going to fall for that shit …”

  “Back up your car and get out of here.”

  “I just want to talk to you.”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Fuck, man … Okay, look, I know your man Vertesi probably suspects me in this thing out at Cayuga, but I had nothin’ to do with it, okay?”

  “Fine, then you have nothing to worry about. Get going.”

  “Why are you such a hardass?”

  “Because it’s late, you’re at my home, parked on private property—my property. It’s time for you to get out of here.”

  “I can give you some shit on this, I can.”

  “If you’re serious, I’ll be at your office tomorrow morning before nine.”

  “I can’t talk there either, man—no fucking way.”

  “Because of your father?”

  “No, because of the guys inside, and out. This is a small business—I mean, the whole concrete industry is. People talk.”

  “What would they have to talk about?”

  “What I say to you can never come back to me, agreed?”

  “What have you got to tell me?”

  “I need your word, man. Don’t fuck with me—I need it.”

  “Pat, I’m not empowered to make deals.”

  “You gotta, or I’m outta here—and I mean gone.”

  “I promise you, I’ll do all I can to keep you out of it.”

  “Not good enough. I need your word.”

  MacNeice sighed. “You have my word.”

  Mancini looked around, peering into the night. “Can we talk inside?”

  “No one followed you here.”

  “Yeah, no shit, but they may have followed you.”

  “Get into my car and slouch down. We’ll go for a drive over the bridge.”

  As quickly as he could, Mancini slipped out of his car and into the passenger seat of the Chevy.

  As they headed north on Mountain Road, MacNeice asked him, “How did you know where I live?”

  “It wasn’t hard to find out. You have a gravel driveway—that gravel came from somewhere …”

  “All right, so I’m listening.”

  Mancini spoke in a slow monotone as if he’d rehearsed what he was going to say. He started from the beginning for him—which was hockey. When he was playing in the NHL, he had been sent down to Junior A for a while to help him focus on his game, out of the limelight. On game day at the local arena, he’d buy marijuana from one of the guys on security. That was in Montreal, and the Jokers controlled security at the rink. “When I heard the Deputy Chief announce the death of Frédéric Paridis, I knew I had to talk to someone,” Mancini said.

  As the Chevy climbed the Sky-High Bridge, Mancini told MacNeice that he and another player had begun scoring more than bud from the Jokers: the bikers owned a string of Ukrainian dancers who weren’t exactly dancers in the strictest sense.

  “Prostitutes, you mean, Pat?”

  “Yeah …”

  Those women would have been expensive, but when MacNeice asked him how much they cost, Mancini said, “That was the thing—Freddy didn’t want money. He said, ‘We’ll pick it up somewhere down the line, when you’re back on Broadway.’ So, you know, that was good, but Broadway didn’t last all that long and then I was out of hockey altogether.”

  “But you still owed Frédéric.”

  “Big time. And he had this motherfucker of a guy—like Lou Ferrigno without the weird speech thing, though this guy sounded like a girl. He bought it today too, I heard.”

  “He did. What did they want from you?”

  Frédéric wanted security jobs. He’d done a deal with D2D and had hookers and dope lines from Windsor to Quebec City, but they were always on the fringes of the large gangs. Frédéric was certain Pat Mancini could get them better connections.

  “Why would he think that?”

  “I dunno. Maybe ’cause I’m Italian and I went back to work in my pa’s concrete company.”

  “You mean you were bragging to him about being Italian?”

  At first Mancini denied it, but then he admitted Paradis had told him that once, when he was stoned, Mancini had been going on about his family’s mob connections. Mancini had no recollection of ever having done so. “I swear on my grandfather’s grave, I don’t think I would have—”

  “Even if you didn’t, Pat, he had you because you were too out of it to remember what you said.” Mancini was staring out the window over the dark horizon of the lake; the bridge lights caught the thin stream of a tear coursing down his face. “He was still supplying girls and grass?”

  “Yeah, quite a bit.”

  “What did you provide in return?”

  “Information. I thought I was giving him a line on solid security jobs, but I guess I told him about the concrete deal going down between ABC and my dad for the harbour project.”

  “You guess you told him?”

  “I told him.”

  He’d also told him about DeLillo and how they’d got beaten out of the deal and might be looking for a fight with ABC. MacNeice was waiting for it, but Mancini did not mention McNamara. When MacNeice asked him what else he was getting besides women and dope, Mancini said he had no interest in harder drugs and had even cut back on the grass. Women, however, were a serious addiction.

  “So you may
not have told him anything about mobs in the beginning, but to maintain a steady supply of ‘dancers,’ you fed him full of Mafia stories, right? And the Italian concrete business on both sides of the border, all with the idea that he could supply security?”

  “More or less.”

  “Who’d he work for?”

  “I swear we never got into that. We both agreed that the less I knew about what happened after I handed over the information, the better.”

  So Mancini had told stories about competing Italian families and left Paradis to draw his own conclusions—and he had. Mancini had no idea who Paradis was offering muscle to, including his own father, and he didn’t want to know.

  “So why come forward now, Pat, now that Frédéric’s dead?”

  “You think that fucking frog was working alone? No way. He’s got a brother for one—Joe. For all I know, his brother is nuttier than he was.”

  “Perfect. Joe and Fred Paradise, like names out of a Raymond Chandler novel.”

  “I don’t know who Raymond Chandler is, but I wouldn’t joke about that shit with him.”

  After Mancini had gone to work for his dad, Paradis would send the Ukrainian girls from Montreal on the train. They’d spend a day or two in Dundurn and then be back on the train again. In return, Mancini had provided enough truth along with his fantasy mob world that Paradis felt he was always on the edge of a major breakthrough—getting the nod to provide expensive muscle to the Mafia.

  “I was away when that OK Corral gunfight happened,” Mancini said. “I didn’t hear about that—not from Paradis, not in the news—until today. I’m shit-scared. I love the dancers … okay, I’m guilty of beautiful women, but not the rest of this shit. No way.” Mancini was watching the vehicles passing by, studying the occupants for any possible threat.

  “How much does your father know?”

  “Nothing. My dad would be sick if he knew what his favourite son was up to.” He insisted that Mancini Concrete was as straight as they come and that his father had worked hard to be the most stand-up guy in Dundurn.

  “Are you going to continue in the business?”

  “I don’t have any talent for concrete. I mean, I’m a hockey player—sorry, I was a hockey player. What do I know about concrete? The guys there see me for what I am: an ex-jock, and now Daddy’s boy.”