Bullets were entering the pool hall at a rate illegal in Canada; there were no firearms in the country smiled upon benignly by the forces of law enforcement that discharged rounds with such Yankee alacrity. The large front windows, painted remedially with a full set of racked balls, shattered in a perfect break. A few of the girlfriends in tow let loose screams, and Frenchie was barking orders to hit the floor as he dove into the shards of broken green lamp that had just been hanging over the now-darkened table.
Wayne went down onto the palms of his hands, rolling under the table that had been behind him. Flakes of chipped paint of all colours, solids and stripes, rained down onto the floor as he reached for the revolver he’d had tucked into the back of his waistband; the piece he’d learned to play without being distracted by, learning no longer to pay it any mind. He cocked the hammer as the rain of bullets slowed, then stopped, and took a deep breath. Once it had been more than two or three seconds between rounds, Wayne rolled out again and stood, both hands squeezing the gun, emptying six bullets uselessly out into the night.
As a car screeched unseen out of the parking lot, Wayne rushed to help those who hadn’t yet stood; he brushed the glass out of Frenchie’s hair, guided weeping girlfriends into the arms of their Riders. After three, then four, then five incredulous head counts, there were defiant whoops at the lack of casualties.
Wayne Brosh was grateful.
10
Angelique pulled into the dry, dusty lot at Rocky Point Park already feeling pissy at having been reminded that Rehanah’s was closed on Sundays. The chance of picking up the singular worthwhile goat roti west of—what, Toronto?—had loomed as the only possible silver lining to this day-off work trip into the suburbs, meeting with the man ConcernedCitizen12 seemed convinced was a gangland mastermind but on whom Angelique couldn’t otherwise seem to get a bead one way or the other. Even Cecil, when he’d been in Vancouver, would stop complaining when they’d make the trip out to Rehanah’s, besides occasional grumblings that Jamaican roti was better than Trini roti, but Angelique always thought those were pro forma. Owing to the quality of her product and the paucity of competition for it, Rehanah had never had to develop the solicitous, pandering Starbucks approach to customer service; she closed when the kitchen was empty, she took catering jobs in the middle of regular store hours, and to Angelique and Cecil’s unending delight, she steadfastly refused to serve full-spice dishes to anyone who hadn’t eaten there before and so didn’t know what they were in for.
Instead, Angelique smacked the taste of an unremarkable chicken taco salad from the sides of her mouth as she replaced her glasses with prescription shades, taking a quick look in the rearview mirror to see if she lived up to her hedcut. She shook her head in irritation, thinking of the friends who had invited her to join them at the Car-Free Street Festival in the city, whom she’d had to turn down, once again, despite realizing that she hadn’t seen them since spring.
The scanner had been alive last night, a summertime Saturday evening, leaving a great deal of writing to do for Monday. The downtown fireworks display hadn’t disappointed, or more accurately didn’t fail to disappoint—offering up the usual knife-wielding idiocy and brutish street-fighting, casual gay-bashing, and littering that seemed inevitable whenever the city turned its central urban beach into a nightclub for suburban kids. There’d been a higher than average number of auto thefts, suggesting that some people were anticipating Car-Free Day with Free-Car Night. There had been a hold-up at a beloved Burquitlam Greek restaurant, followed by another stilted email from ConcernedCitizen12 pointing the finger at Scott Clark and the Non-Aligned Movement; most significantly, there had been a miraculously fatality-free shooting at a Burnaby pool hall, Eclipse Billiards, crawling with Underground Riders and their associates, but since no one had been injured, let alone killed, it seemed reasonable to assume that the other shoe set dangling by the Tam and Miller killings had yet to drop.
The RCMP had held a press conference that morning, typically unthinkable on a Sunday, but the violence had now frothed over from typical, and the Vancouver suburbs seemed to be in something like a state of emergency. This wasn’t a private booze can or some gangster’s cash-washing strip club that had been shot up, but a public pool hall where the children of actual voters could have been playing.
The police had struck a note of avuncular consternation in their statement—not anger so much as disappointment—and concluded with a plea for information from anyone who might have any, which seemed unlikely even to them. The B-teams of various television newscasts, low-seniority reporters and videographers who could be forced to work on the Sabbath, gathered precious footage for evening broadcasts and embedded content for online stories. This was no way to spend a weekend.
A couple of kids ran in front of Angelique screaming, dousing each other with water.
“Logan! Olivia! Pay attention to your surroundings!” their father called after them, smiling apologetically at Angelique and shrugging his bright pink shoulders. Angelique smiled understandingly, offering absolution, when the young father squinted through his shades. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“Pam Grier,” Angelique said, which wasn’t entirely fair—he could very well be a Star subscriber, or have seen her on the local news—but that taco salad had left her feeling as cold and unloving as its iceberg lettuce.
Angelique was as mystified as anyone else as to why or how the peace between the Da Silvas and the UR had come apart. Broadly speaking, the bikers were retailers for the Mafia in central Canada, while the Da Silvas brought product in from the Hong Kong triads. Everyone sold a little of everything, but the peace had come through a broad, flexible understanding that coke from back east would be the Riders’ general focus, while heroin from the Far East—in exactly the opposite direction from back east—would be the staple for the Da Silvas. Everybody sold pot, but that was essentially limitless and local, and more or less legal, and since their southerly neighbours in Washington had decriminalized the drug, neutralizing the profitability of border-hopping, it wasn’t of the same competitive concern anymore.
Angelique had heard unconfirmed stories that the Da Silvas had discovered the joys of Mexican cocaine, or that cartel meth was performing its own Silicon Valley-style market disruption, bringing with it the creative destruction so beloved by believers in capitalist dynamism. But the Da Silva–UR peace had been so hard-won, had come after so many bodies and arrests and Angelique’s National Magazine Award, that it seemed unlikely that new, Mexican business wouldn’t just have been absorbed into the old arrangement.
There was another persistent rumour that felt too stupid not to have at least a kernel of truth to it: that, like a Kitsilano hippie commune of old, the gang truce had been undone by an episode of polyamory gone wrong. The story that Angelique had heard from multiple sources—and every time, she nearly lost her bottom mandible, so slack was her jaw from the sheer masculine idiocy of the tale—was that over the May long weekend at a Riders’ party in Kelowna, the now-deceased Wayson Tam had cooperatively fucked a becoming young stripper named Shannon with a full-patch Rider named Ashley “Meat Pete” Peters. Meat Pete, as suggested by his sobriquet, had made his first money in pornographic endeavours, specializing in hiring recent Lower Mainland film school graduates who knew their ways around lights, sets, and cameras, but who had emerged from their serious contemplations of Sofia Coppola and Wong Kar-wai to find that work wasn’t readily available, besides making crotch-shots for Meat Pete. Given his past artistic undertakings, Meat Pete was known as a particularly libertine partygoer, pursuing pleasure more fluidly than, say, Wayson Tam, who had apparently been initially put off by the ratio of the proposed threesome but had soon come around.
According to observers, the fun with Shannon had happened on a Friday, had seemed to be forgotten by Saturday, but drunkenly reasserted itself as a topic of conversation on Sunday afternoon, as Meat Pete—some would say defensively—began expounding upon the enormous size of Wayson
Tam’s contribution. Good-natured laughter ensued; a geographically inevitable reference to Ogopogo was made; Wayson had winced, though not bucked, at least at first, against the unoriginal and racially questionable nickname “Long Dong Tam.”
As the conversation continued, though, word had it that Wayson began chafing at the easy back-and-forth about sexual escapades that, whoever else they included, or however little contact there had been between them, had technically involved another man. By late Sunday night, Tam had smashed a bocce ball into the side of Meat Pete’s jaw, and though the story was too inconceivably moronic to be the cause of discord and disruption to a multi-million dollar industry, the timelines between the Victoria Day ménage à trois and the unravelling of the truce did line up.
Fucking idiots.
“Ms Bryan?”
There was a sweetness in Scott Clark’s voice that Angelique hadn’t noticed over the phone, and as she turned to see who had called her she suppressed a maternal gasp at the cuts, bruises, and scabs on his face.
“Scott?”
He nodded.
“Do you want something to drink or anything?” Scott asked her, pointing toward the concession.
“No, thank you,” Angelique said, for the first time finding the young man’s crush a little bit endearing, from underneath the lacerations. “Can I ask, what happened to you?”
Scott gently waved away her concern.
“It’s all in the game, I guess,” he answered, giggling a little bit, which seemed to make things even fishier. “What did you want to see me about?”
“I wanted to contact you for your side of the story about the shooting at your home, and your refusal to cooperate with police. I also wanted to get your thoughts about the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of an anonymous tip that I received about you.”
“Anonymous tip?” Scott asked, making a too-impressed face.
“I have to say, it seemed bogus to me.”
“What did it say?” he said, seriously now.
“Are you part of an organization called the Non-Aligned Movement?”
Scott bit his swollen lip.
“I can’t offer any comment on that.”
“So you don’t deny either the existence of the Non-Aligned Movement or your membership in it?”
“This is—is this for attribution? Is it, like, on the record?”
“It doesn’t have to be. We’re talking.”
Scott chewed his thumbnail, staring into the middle distance while Angelique wondered if she was wasting her weekend.
“Listen, as long as you don’t say it was me confirming anything?”
“I don’t like to do it, but with good enough reason I can cite an anonymous source.”
“The Non-Aligned Movement is real. I’m one of the founders.”
Angelique arched an eyebrow, making a note despite herself. None of it seemed right: the chubby thirty-something she’d never heard of as a player, this boy with a soft look whose name had never otherwise come up—and if he were for real, why did he want her to know? Was he using her as a megaphone? Making a name for the NAM?
“Who shot up your house?”
“Enemies.”
“Well …”
“Sorry?”
“I didn’t think it was friends.”
Scott smiled.
“What about the stick-up last night at the Greek restaurant?”
Scott nodded. “What about it?”
“I’ve heard rumours that that was the Non-Aligned Movement, too.”
“Yeah? Where’d you hear that?”
“Same source that brought the Non-Aligned Movement to my attention in the first place.”
“Hm,” Scott offered, nodding with a satisfied pout, pretending at distraction.
“Is that a yes? A no?” Angelique asked, growing impatient.
“Lots of stuff happens, I don’t know. It’s a big city.”
“Coquitlam?”
“Listen, I feel like I owe you an apology,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The other day, on the phone—it was really unprofessional of me to say what I did, I mean about your looks. I’m sure it, whatever, like, already sucks enough to be a woman in your line of work, and how people treat you, and I just didn’t want you to think that I don’t take you seriously as a journalist. I read you all the time. So, I’m sorry.”
“Okay. I accept your apology.”
“I think you’re great.”
“Okay.”
“As far as the guys who shot up my house, the guys who did this to my face, that’s part of the price of doing business. I like to keep a low profile.”
“Non-Aligned—is that in reference to the Da Silvas and the Underground Riders? That you’re freelancing?”
“Do you know Jawarharlal Nehru? Colonel Nasser? Josip Broz Tito?”
“Yes. Are we doing a twentieth-century world leaders quiz? Do you know, I don’t know … Maurice Bishop?”
Scott smiled. “The New Jewel Movement? Grenada.”
Angelique couldn’t suppress her surprised laugh. “Jesus, that’s impressive. What kind of gangster are you?”
Scott nodded his head.
“My mom told me about him. Look, whatever you’ve gotta write, I understand you have to write it. Even if it’s about Polis. Off the record, here, we’re not trying to take anything, anything, from the UR or the Da Silvas. Non-Aligned means no bosses, but it’s also supposed to mean no enemies. Maybe my house will be hit again. I’m not afraid. Although I get that it was probably scary for my neighbours.”
Scott turned his attention away from Angelique, watched a group of kids rolling down the side of a small hill. With every passing minute, Angelique was more confused about who Scott Clark was and what was going on. Who was the Non-Aligned Movement, and why hadn’t she heard of them before? And if they were really trying to strike out on their own, would this cute, bruised, chubby young white kid live out the year?
But she hadn’t specified that it was Polis that had been hit, had she?
“Do you have everything you need?” he asked.
“I never do,” she said. “Here’s my card, okay? You want to go on or off the record, reach out.”
Scott nodded, looking at the card for a second before pocketing it, giving a low wave, and wandering off away from the waterfront, toward the parking lot. Angelique watched him climb into a waiting car with an Asian guy at the wheel, who drove off as soon as Scott put on his seatbelt.
She turned back to look out at the water and the mountains, wondering if she had time to make it to Car-Free Day. The mystery of Scott Clark and the Non-Aligned Movement wasn’t about to come into focus this afternoon.
“I know where I know you from!” said the sunburned dad from behind her now, Logan on his shoulders and Olivia’s hand in his own. “You’re the crime lady, from TV!”
Angelique nodded solemnly, aware that the crime lady from TV would be spending the rest of her Sunday at the computer.
11
It was a strange thing to hold such a great deal of money between his fingers, and ultimately Scott couldn’t help himself from shuffling through the bills, child-like, just to feel the weight of it all in his hand. Five thousand dollars wasn’t that large a sum, in the scheme of things, but it was still by far the most cash that he had ever had his hands on all at once, and to begin with, anyway, it was impressive, even if after a while the cash lost part of its magic—the bills were like a word repeated until it made no sense, until it seemed almost hilariously arbitrary and contingent that any group of people would have arrived at such-and-such a term to indicate such-and-such a thing, or that a human society had ever seen fit to draw an equal sign between these little strips of paper-like coloured polymer on the one hand and, on the other, given quantities of everything and anything. Just like it could suddenly become crazy, after rolling the word around in your mouth enough times, to think that there could be a room in your house called a den—that you could sit in a d
en, that you could have a fight in a den, lose your virginity in the den; that English-speaking people had decided that a room in which you neither slept nor tended to entertain company, a room which allowed you to raise the price of a downtown condominium by twenty percent simply by expanding the square footage of a lightless storage space and applying the label, would henceforth be a den—it could just as abruptly seem completely unreal to think that an illustration of the Queen, with maybe some birds on the flipside or a portrait of a long-dead prime minister thinking serious thoughts about how to win World War II or keep Chinese people out of the country forever, could be traded for any good or service, legal or illegal, that you could think of: a muffin, a handjob, an artificial Christmas tree, diabetes medication, heroin.
“I read this book a little while ago,” said Josiah. “Kind of popular science, but also history. The guy explains how, basically, the whole reason why our kind of human—”
“Cro-Magnon?”
“Homo sapiens.”
“Isn’t that the same?
“I’m not sure; I always mix that up. Anyway, the point is, he was saying that the reason that we evolved and, like, lasted out over all the other types of humans, Neanderthals and whatever—that basically it came down to our cognitive ability to make stuff up. To agree on fictions and, essentially, shared, made-up values. He said with chimpanzees, it’s just brute force, how they organize themselves, but we can have societies because we can all agree to pretend that things are a certain way.”
“Except that I’m about to hand over this stack of imaginary money to a Neanderthal, or else he’s going to smash my head in with a rock.”
“Anyway, that’s what he said.” Josiah indicated the room, the house around them. “But it makes me think how—it’s wild, you know? We’re sitting inside over a million dollars right now. The money on the table would barely pay for one of the sconces in the hallway, and yet that biker is going to come in here, take the cash, and leave the rest of it standing.”
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