Property Values

by Charles Demers

  But now this wire story.

  Angelique still had the yearbook from Dr. Charles Best Secondary, Grad 2005, that the school’s librarian had reluctantly handed over when she’d asked to borrow it to check against the tip. And there it had been, plain as day. Was she losing it? Or was Scott Clark a bigger deal than she’d been able to sniff out? And why did she find herself personally disappointed that he might not be a decent guy?

  LONDON POLICE NAB “THE CANADIAN” AT CENTRE OF DRUG AND COUNTERFEIT SUIT RING

  LONDON—Police at New Scotland Yard have arrested Adnan abd-Husseini, 31, the man whom they believe to be the elusive figure known until now only as “The Canadian” among law enforcement officials. Mr abd-Husseini, son of Better Suited men’s fashion retailer CEO Farid abd-Husseini, is accused of being the distribution point in the United Kingdom not only for counterfeit Italian suits made in China, but also for vast amounts of heroin allegedly smuggled inside the suits themselves.

  “We will be pursuing a massive and multi-layered criminal conspiracy case with Mr abd-Husseini as the end point,” said Superintendent Liam Devon. “This marks an illicit international effort tying the maritime powers of organized crime from the triads in Hong Kong through the Camorra of Naples to the very sordid and malicious groups polluting our own British shores with their endeavours.”

  It is alleged that Mr abd-Husseini used his father’s network of men’s wear warehouses and even storefronts to receive counterfeit Hugo Boss, Armani, and other Italian suits produced and sold by merchants with links to powerful Hong Kong triads. The suits did pass through the port of Naples, which had for a time worked to obscure their point of origin. It is also alleged that, in Naples, each shipment was augmented with genuine Italian suits, which had been lined with heroin.

  Devon explained to reporters that a “shadow figure” known as “The Canadian” has long dogged Scotland Yard’s best detectives, and it is believed that Mr abd-Husseini’s Egyptian heritage is part of what kept him from being suspected as “The Canadian” for so long.

  “To a certain extent the joke was on us, I suppose, and well done,” conceded Superintendent Devon.

  The nickname likely derives from the fact that Mr abd-Husseini spent his formative years in Canada, first in Waterloo, Ontario, and then in Coquitlam. He graduated from Dr. Charles Best Secondary School in 2005, where, in his yearbook graduation caption, he cited an affiliation to the “Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)” along with reported NAM gang founder Scott Clark, whose Coquitlam home was recently targeted in a shooting. Mr Clark is not cooperating with police. The Non-Aligned Movement is also rumoured to have played a role in the armed robbery of a local Greek eatery, Polis, though no charges have been laid.

  —Global News Service Wire, with notes from Angelique Bryan

  15

  “He always wanted to watch Scarface, you remember that? It was always Scarface or New Jack City or The Godfather, Goodfellas, Carlito’s Way.”

  “So what?” said Scott.

  “So it makes sense now, in retrospect,” said Par with confidence.

  “Get out of here. That is so fucking dumb.”

  “What do you mean, fuck off? You remember! Whenever we were watching a movie—or, like, any time it was just one of us and Adnan, he always wanted to watch Scarface.”

  “We were fifteen-year-old boys, dude. Everybody always wanted to watch Scarface. You’re unnecessarily gilding the lily here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Speaking of unnecessary—that’s redundant,” said Joe.

  “What is?”

  “‘Unnecessarily gilding the lily.’”

  “But what do you mean by it?”

  “Why is it redundant?”

  “Because the whole essence of ‘gilding the lily’ is that there’s no need! It’s already redundant.”

  “But how am I even gilding the lily?”

  “Because you’re trying, retrospectively, to make it all make some kind of sense. Or like he was training up or something. It’s stupid. We were young, dumb boys—of course we were into gangster shit.”

  “It was different with Adnan. He was angry, dude.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, angry.”

  “He was, man, I’m telling you. Maybe he didn’t trust you with it—”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Because you wouldn’t know what it’s like!”

  “Oh, that’s bullshit. That’s bullshit.”

  “You remember when he snapped on that kid Nick Bonvino?”

  “Kept calling him ‘Andy.’”

  “Exactly. Man, I’m telling you—there was a streak in Adnan, a core.”

  “I don’t buy it, man. You’re inventing a more interesting story. What do you make of this psychobabble, Joe?”

  “I agree with Par that there were signs—”

  “See? Gilding the fucking lily. Blow me.”

  “But it wasn’t that he wanted to watch gangster movies all the time.”

  “So then what was it?”

  “What Adnan wanted more than anything was cash.”

  “That’s true.”

  “It’s always the Zack Morris types; they’re the ones who go in for whatever will get them there. Even in elementary school—I remember Adnan’s dad had a Costco membership, and he’d buy those big tubs of sour keys, gummy shit. He had it worked out to where he rode the exact line, like to the pennies, of undercutting Formosa Market across from the school, but still making a profit. Like, they sold their big sour keys for twenty-five cents, he’d sell them for twenty, twenty-two.”

  “So what? That’s just smart.”

  “Yeah, I mean—I’m no junior capitalist, but that’s just hustle, no?”

  “You don’t think that’s messed up? I’m talking he was ten, eleven years old. What kind of ten-year-old fantasizes about turning a thirteen-dollar tub of sour keys into fifteen dollars? I mean, wouldn’t you just want to eat it?”

  Pardeep and Scott shrugged their shoulders in a soft concession and pulled at the sand-coloured nachos under their sweaty layer of bright orange cheese.

  “This place fucking sucks,” said Scott. The others nodded.

  Each of them had wanted to discuss the seismic news of their lost NAM comrade, the social media phantom and drugs-plus-copyright-infringement kingpin of the United Kingdom, Adnan abd-Husseini, but none of them had felt comfortable going to Polis to do it over hummus or moussaka. Each had avoided confronting their unease directly; there was a collective sense that if they were to speak their reticence aloud, that would amount to an admission that the place had been lost to them, of their own idiotic volition, and that would be too much like losing a home; there was also the matter, now that Scott had been named in the newspaper, of avoiding baffled, heartbroken questions from his friend’s parents. Instead, Pardeep had somehow floated the idea of visiting a more properly suburban compound with chicken wings and big-screen TVs running sports-talk panel shows on mute; a place where the waitresses were each attractive in precisely the same inoffensive way and at which the steamed edamame were for some unguessable reason sprinkled with chilli powder.

  “You guys want anything else?” asked their young server politely and pertly, and it was a minor concern to each of the three men that they were now at least old enough to find her mildly unsettling.

  “I think we’re good, probably just the bill please, if you could,” said Josiah. The server nodded.

  “Sure—do you want these packed up?”

  “Old nachos?” asked Par.

  She nodded again, this time with less confidence. “Some people take them home.”

  “Yeah,” said Scott. “I’ll take them home.”

  The server nodded in modest triumph, redeemed, and took the plate back to the kitchen.

  “That feels like the right move for me now. That feels like where I’m at in my life. Reheating nachos. Maybe not even reheating.”

  “Just—just don’t eat them for bre
akfast, okay?” said Josiah, and the sincerity of it made Scott flush.

  “So, now that Adnan’s gangster number one,” Pardeep began, picking at his straw with his thumb, “I guess he sort of took you with him, huh?”

  Scott gave a joyless laugh, disgusted.

  “For that whole first few days, I couldn’t get her to run the story. All those emails from ConcernedCitizen12. Then we finally get the gorilla back in his cage and she outs me.”

  “Do you think this changes things with Mike?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Well, plus—the Da Silvas now,” said Pardeep, dropping his eyes, as he seemed to every time the subject turned to the brothers or Polis or his parents. “She basically said we did the stick-up at Polis on her blog.”

  “Well, we did.”

  “It wasn’t just her blog,” Scott said. “It was in the print edition too. I feel, like—I don’t know. I feel like my neighbours are looking at me differently now.”

  “But that’s what you wanted,” said Josiah, his voice with just enough flint to betray his resentment at having been pulled into it all. “You wanted them to think you were a big gangster so that no one would buy the house. Well, you did it.”

  “We did it,” said Pardeep.

  “Yeah, fine. You both did it.”

  “Neither of us fired a shot into the bar at Polis for no goddamn reason, Joe.”

  Josiah seethed for a second, looking at the two of them, then away, seeming to run several scenarios through his head at once. “Fuck you both,” he said, standing abruptly and storming away from the table.

  “Who wants second-chance nachos?” asked the server of those remaining, smilingly replacing the chips in the middle of the table, this time encased in a shell of Styrofoam.

  Pardeep and Scott walked out into the evening where a light, warm rain was falling on the parking lot. The rain was young enough that the mossy smell of summer dampness still hung in the air around it.

  “Can you give me a ride home?” Scott asked Pardeep.

  “When are you getting the window fixed?”

  “Look, I just need a ride home for tonight. If it’s a big deal, I can take the bus.”

  “No, I mean—that’s not what I meant. I was just curious.”

  The two friends rode in a resigned and uncomfortable silence through the relatively quiet, humid streets, Pardeep characteristically waiting until the last possible moment to turn on his windshield wipers and, though he’d been doing it that way since they’d learned to drive, tonight it drove Scott to nearly violent levels of frustration. He watched as the windshield filled with translucent spots growing increasingly Impressionistic until the scene looked like a nineteenth-century French interpretation of the roadscape with oils. Scott chewed the inside of his cheeks, but he thanked Pardeep when they got to his house.

  Walking across the damp grass of the yard, Scott stopped beside his mother’s hibiscus plant, ragged now but in full bloom, and soon he was kneeling, his legs getting wet beneath his shorts, and then he was crying. He touched the plant, trying desperately to feel that his mother was somehow present in it, forcing himself to the brink of believing in some sort of organic wholeness that could mean that she was, indeed, with him in some material way, by some Buddhist alchemy she would have rolled her eyes at in life but which would allow for her cells to be present in the living, physical plant that he held between his fingers, and as he fell short of believing he cried harder, his shoulders shaking, feeling almost suffocated by the permanence, the immutability and invariability of her not being there. It was such a stupid thought to have, but it was almost impossible to resist it regardless: why did death have to be all the time and forever? In a human world where everything else had gotten less harsh over time, where the punishments meted out had become more humane, why couldn’t death be more flexible? Why couldn’t there be short breaks?

  But it wasn’t true anyway that everything had gotten less harsh. It was a spurious premise. His mother—so acidly brilliant, so let down by the indifferent malice of everyone else—would have been the first to tell him that. He wiped his eyes with the heels of his palms. He raised himself to his feet, left the garden, and headed for the front door which he saw, now, had been busted in.

  Both Pardeep and Josiah, his lividness forgotten, were there in minutes; unable to go inside on his own, Scott had sat on the stairs in a rain that fell warm but quickly cooled in the folds of his shirt and the tops of his ankle-socks. When they got there, Scott found his courage, insisting on heading in first, and the men took turns rapidly flicking switches up and lurching into various rooms in the least vulnerable positions they could imagine—fists cocked, or else crouching. The dining room, with its dimmer switch, was an exercise in anxious terror.

  Fairly soon it was clear that no one was still in the house. But they had been, and they had been looking for something, because the drawers and shelves had been regurgitated onto the square footage. Scott ran, panicked, to his mother’s small jewellery box and found it safe in a drawer that had nevertheless been opened.

  “Fuck,” said Par, with as much anger as sadness, storming out of the living room and onto the front steps for air. Scott sidled up to where he’d been, next to Josiah.

  Scrawled across the now unframed Renoir print, sparkled by the glass that had once kept it safe, then been cracked, and now shattered irreparably, was the crude sentence “DS get PAID.”

  “The Da Silvas. Danny Da Silva, Nicky Da Silva,” said Josiah.

  “They want their money,” Scott said, then, grabbing a large kitchen knife for safety, though it hadn’t been sharpened since Bojana Clark was alive, he headed downstairs to the elliptical trainer, grunting as he lifted the base.

  It was still there: the two thousand dollars of Da Silva money that he hadn’t paid to Mike. That he hadn’t spent. That he had no notion at all of how to handle.

  What would Adnan do?

  16

  In her decades of work, across the half-dozen beats they’d had her on at various papers, it had only happened one other time, but it was a nauseous, unmistakable feeling: when, only after seeing it in print, reading it like somebody else would, Angelique could tell that she had gotten it wrong. Not because she’d jumped the gun, not because she had done anything incorrectly, not because she had projected past what she’d been able to confirm—but because the reality had been considerably more slippery than its constituent facts.

  The first time, which had taken angry years to get past—years full of self-disappointment and recrimination, cascading doubts and obsessive, compensatory over-checking on everything else that followed—had been when she was working for a local paper on Vancouver Island and a beloved, multi-term, small-town mayor had resigned from office after a successful battle with prostate cancer had, he told media, shifted his perspectives, his values, and left him thirsty for time at home, with his family. Nothing about the official story had made sense to Angelique, then a young reporter and even more stubbornly inclined to trust her instincts, to equate cynicism with wisdom, and she’d pored over every angle of the resignation, followed up with every possible player, anyone who might have had a different light on things, anyone who could make sense of why a man who’d won municipal elections with near-totalitarian margins, a man who wasn’t young but wasn’t really that old yet, who could still realistically be bandied around as a possible premier or federal cabinet member, would step away from the game. But again and again, that’s what everyone told her. The mayor had encouraged his family physician to speak freely with the press; his wife had spoken lovingly of her support for her husband’s decision; his long-time opponents gave gruff, you-gotta-give-him-this/you-gotta-give-him-that interviews saluting his public service. There was a contradiction between what Angelique knew and what she felt she knew, but at a certain point, the job dictates treating an instinct just like any other bit of irrational noise surrounding a story. Her profile on His Worship ran in the paper, and only when the newprint was st
aining her hands did she know with absolute certainty that it was wrong. Two days later, the mayor’s purple-faced mugshot, taken on a Hawaiian island where he’d been swerving down humid streets with the blood alcohol level of a disinfectant wipe while on holiday with a local news anchor, emerged online.

  What did Angelique know about Scott Clark? What didn’t she?

  A drive-by shooting—from a U-Haul truck, according to the neighbours. A stick-up at a Greek restaurant, owned by a Punjabi family, the Dhaliwals. A gang that had been extant since these youngish men had been in high school, but which no one had heard or talked about until now, when one of them had graduated to a massive, international criminal conspiracy overseas. What had gone on at that high school?

  Angelique poured herself a glass of kombucha from a half-finished bottle in the fridge. She sniffed to see if it was still good, but if kombucha stank to begin with, what would it smell like if it had gone off? Natalie, the only friend she still had from high school herself, had insisted that she start drinking it, with its probiotic goodness, to counteract the course of antibiotics she’d been given to rid herself of strep throat last year. “I don’t understand,” Angelique had said sincerely. “Are ‘biotics’ a good thing or a bad thing?” as Natalie had rolled her eyes and refused to answer—and kombucha had since mysteriously become a habit that she couldn’t really account for. She took the glass over to her home work desk, where somehow the Vancouver Star had stolen even a piece of the place she paid rent to call her own, and began flipping, again, through the pages of the Dr. Charles Best 2005 yearbook.