Scott Clark hadn’t been a popular kid, otherwise he would have been peppered more liberally throughout the yearbook. There were pretty girls, pimply athletes, and student council suck-up types whom Angelique seemed to come across again every four or five pages, but besides his graduation photo, Angelique couldn’t see Scott Clark. She tried the back of the book for an index, and sure enough, there he was—cited on page 28 (his grad photo) and page 231, just before the index itself, among advertisements from local small businesses congratulating the class of 2005, assuring them of the brightness of their futures, and begging them not to drink and drive. Angelique turned to page 231.
Polis Authentic Hellenic Restaurant
Congratulates the Graduates of 2005
FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS—MAKE BURQUITLAM PROUD!
The ad was written in pointed, ersatz-Athenian font, with columns framing the square. The writing was white text on black, and set in the middle was a black and white photo of the dining area at Polis with four multi-ethnic boys raising their glasses and smiling broadly. Angelique’s heart nearly stopped as she read the caption under the image:
“Holding Court”: Friends 4ever Adnan abd-Husseini, Josiah Kim, Scott Clark & future Polis owner Pardeep Dhaliwal
Barely able to breathe or to hear her own thoughts over the pulse in her ears, Angelique turned back to the graduation pictures and read the caption under Pardeep Dhaliwal’s: “14/1/13 Zindabad!” She furrowed her brow, flipping to Josiah Kim: “14-1-13 4 Life.”
Almost knocking over her kombucha, Angelique shot her hand forward to count through the alphabet. Fourteen, one, thirteen: N, A, M.
The so-called Non-Aligned Movement seemed to count, among its members, the son of the owners of the restaurant they’d held up. Gnawing the nail of her pinky finger, Angelique thought hard enough to squeeze coal into diamonds for a few minutes, then began calling U-Haul locations.
“Ma’am, we don’t give out that kind of information.”
“Right, I understand. In that case, is there a media liaison who could speak on the record to the Vancouver Star about the use of U-Haul property in a violent gun crime? Or would that be you as well?”
A truck, rented from the North Vancouver location on the day of the shooting, by Josiah Kim. Returned the next day.
Angelique laughed and pounded her fist against the newspaper, against the story she had written over the anguished protestations of her best instincts. Adnan abd-Husseini probably had nothing to do with anything; the only real deal in the group and he was flung as far back as the White Cliffs of Dover. She slapped the issue and smiled, tried to think of someone she could call to celebrate her brilliance with, the journalist’s nose that she had honed, but the time and energy it had taken to hone that nose meant that no friends leapt immediately to mind. She walked to the sink and poured out her kombucha. She filled another glass halfway with Canada Dry, then topped it with a dark rum. She raised it to the ghost of a reflection in the kitchen window, overlooking a busy Gastown street.
“Scott Clark, you chubby little cutie pie,” she said out loud. “You’re no gangster.”
17
“Can I please get a grande London Fog?”
“Decaf London Fog! Your name please?”
“Um, Scott.”
“Great.”
Scott considered taking the decaf. It was 3:27 p.m., right at the cusp of where the early afternoon becomes the late afternoon, and maybe a decaf was just as well. But he’d been so terrified by the visit that the Da Silva crew had paid to his house—he’d spent so many wired and shaky hours refilling the drawers and shelves—that he hadn’t fallen asleep until close to five, and so he wanted the drink that he wanted.
“Actually—sorry, that was just a regular London Fog. Like, caffeinated.”
“Oh! Sure thing,” said the pretty, smiling boy behind the counter.
“Great, thanks. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” he said, smiling even more beautifully. There; as it turned out, there were some benefits to being among the top ranks of the Vancouver gang hierarchy.
A minute or two later, after an Asian woman with an Irish accent called his name and gave him his drink, Scott sat down next to the window, looking out onto the parking lot of the smaller, satellite strip mall that was part of the larger galaxy of the Coquitlam Centre Mall. He smiled when he remembered the screaming match that his mother had had with a large, bald man who had taken a parking spot that a smaller, more timid man had clearly been waiting for. Having forgotten, or not caring, that he’d left his sunroof open, the large man had told Bojana to fuck off before sauntering into the shops swinging shoulder muscles that no one else could see. To Scott’s horrified delight—he was eleven—Bojana had cracked one of the dozen eggs she’d just purchased into the top of the aggressor’s car, winking at Scott and the smaller man.
“Can we talk for a minute?”
Scott couldn’t tell if he’d heard Mike first or seen him, since each sense impression had come with such a dizzying rush of panic that he’d lost his focus.
“Are you following me?”
Mike nodded, half apologetically, which caught Scott off guard. “From your place.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to show you the respect of not approaching you in your home again.”
“I’m worth respecting all of a sudden?”
Mike took his shades down from on top of his hat visor and put them over his eyes, staring out into the sunny parking lot.
“You lied to me.”
“What do you mean? About what?” Scott’s mind and body had entered a plane that was somehow both numb to panic and beset by it; these encounters with dangerous men never stopped being scary, even if part of him now stood outside of them.
“Listen, I’d like to talk to you.”
“So sit down.” Scott’s assertiveness came from a place of resignation, but he could tell that Mike was reading it as confidence, and that little inside joke with himself had the effect of lending Scott a sort of real, actual assurance.
“We can’t do it here. Walk with me?”
“Fuck no. I’m concussed, not stupid. We can talk right here.”
Mike raised his glasses back onto his hat in muted frustration.
“Listen, I promise you, I just want to talk. I need to run something by you. But this,” he said, indicating the inside of the Starbucks, “isn’t any good.”
“I’m not getting in a car.”
“We could just walk the aisles next door,” Mike said, jerking his head in the direction of the Save-On-Foods. Scott thought for a minute, then nodded, then stood. The sunglasses went back down.
As they entered the chill of the supermarket, Mike turned to Scott, indicating his face.
“Listen, about what you just said, the concussion.”
“I was exaggerating.”
“You doing okay?”
Scott squinted in confusion.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, taking a slurping sip of his London Fog. Mike looked away as he spoke again.
“Listen, I didn’t have to approach it in that way, and I apologize if I went about my business in, like, a fucked-up capacity.”
Scott nodded skeptically, surprised. “Fine.”
They walked in silence for a few feet down an aisle full of baking supplies.
“That Angelique Bryan, she airs everybody’s shit.”
“At the Star?” Scott said, as much out of a felt need to simply say something as anything else. Mike nodded.
“A few years back, some of the Da Silva guys were looking into taking her out. Checked her address and shit and everything.”
“That’s fucked up,” Scott said defensively. Mike agreed, but for different reasons.
“It’s stupid kid shit. Reporters are going to report, the idea is you make sure they don’t have anything to fucking print. I mean, I understand why they were pissed, but—”
“I think she’s brilliant and beautiful,” Scott said,
and it took several moments for the conversation to recover. They turned down the first of two frozen-food aisles, the blemishes and razor burn on Mike’s neck standing out under the neon.
“That shit in her last post, though,” he said. “About your work. To make a thing like that happen, that takes a lot of skill, diplomacy.”
Scott didn’t say anything; he seemed to squint his entire face as he tried to figure out what Mike could mean. Why would it take diplomacy or skill to stick up a restaurant? As he tried for angles that would unlock the mystery, Scott realized that Mike was talking about Adnan. But Mike had already taken Scott’s silent confusion for calculated reticence, and folded.
“Listen, I’m not trying to infringe on any of what you’ve got going on. I only bring it up to say that I admire it, that I underestimated you. Hong Kong, Naples—is that for real?”
Scott shrugged.
He was disturbed by how much he enjoyed being seen walking with Mike. Mike was an oaf and a low-life; he oozed a fog of shitbag machismo and more than likely racism, atavistic greed, and violence, but the fear he doubtless struck in the other shoppers reflected off Scott like the sun’s light bounces off the moon. Without meaning too, Scott had adopted the physical bearing of mob-movie tough guys, the useless nodding, the talking out of the side of one’s mouth, scratching his face with the nail of his thumb. It was all sickly thrilling.
“You know, I’m guessing that we’re into some shit with the Da Silvas right now. A lot of back and forth.”
“Miller and Tam?”
Now it was Mike’s turn to shrug. “All this shit has escalated more, and faster, than anybody thinks it should. Right now they’re holding two UR. One full-patch.”
“Jesus,” said Scott, feeling the thrill leave his body.
“Look, over there, Hong Kong—the Da Silvas work with those guys too, bringing shit in. They used to use our guys at the ports, actually.”
“Right. Okay?”
“What I’m thinking is, given the Non-Aligned are used to sitting down with everybody, making deals, I’d like you to put a feeler out for us. See if anybody on the other side wants to talk.”
“To the cops?” Scott asked, his voice cracking.
“What? No. Why the fuck would we want them to talk to the cops?”
“I don’t know. I—sorry.”
“To us, man. To us. Find out if any of those pieces of shit is interested in peace. Find out what they want—for us to get our boys back. And if there’s any appetite, I want you to facilitate.”
Scott offered another stunned silence that seemed like disciplined counsel-keeping.
“We’d make it all worth your time, obviously.”
Scott tried to speak, and couldn’t. Mike grew more desperate, pulling his shades up one more time.
“Just think about it, okay? Here.” He signalled for Scott to take his phone out of his pocket, then touched each of theirs together, AirDropping his contact information. “You think about it, and you call me. We can talk at the coffee shop.”
“Starbucks?”
“Fuck no. Calabria.”
Mike walked briskly away from Scott, and Scott watched as he picked up a foil-wrapped loaf of pre-made garlic bread, mimed it through the self-checkout and left without paying. Feeling his legs shaking underneath him, Scott put off walking for as long as he could, looking instead at his phone to see if he really and truly did now have the phone number of an Underground Rider, the same Underground Rider who had caved his head into the drywall of his own home. He noticed, instead, a missed call from Angelique Bryan’s number, followed by a text message.
Can we please talk? There are a few things I would like to follow up on.
Scott reached for his own sunglasses to put them over his own eyes, but he had left them in the car.
18
People had been living where what had lately been named the Fraser River met the ocean for over ten thousand years, and so it was fairly stupid to refer to Vancouver, as people often did, as young. Nevertheless, the SkyTrain was only two years older than Scott, and he’d always found that to be a little pathetic.
On a summer trip to Chicago with his family, Scott had been amazed at the ancient smells of the rocking, lumbering L train, whining under its age, and how much it had seen, with even a cloud of rubbery smoke rising up from underneath one of the cars in the middle of an afternoon ride; Scott hadn’t known anyone local to ask if that was normal.
Contrarily, the oldest line of Vancouver’s light-rail system dated to the mid-1980s; Tina Turner was already long-since broken up with Ike, making much worse music but leading a much happier life. And that Expo Line, named for the third-tier transportation-themed World’s Fair that the city had hosted—and where a young Peter Clark had met Bojana Trojanovic, working in the Yugoslavia Pavilion—had for years stood as the lone, pathetic rump of public rail transit in the metropolitan area. The Millennium Line reared up just a few years after the turn of the century that was its namesake, followed by extensions with sturdier, less immediately dated names, such as the Canada Line to Richmond, or the Coquitlam–Port Moody train named Evergreen, almost as parody.
Scott rode the Evergreen line now to meet Angelique downtown, on the waterfront. She had offered to come meet him, but momentarily having forgotten that the rear window of the Jetta still looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s, Scott had instead offered to come to her. It took three transfers to arrive at the beautiful spot on the water, where two different right-wing provincial governments had each built massive convention centres, separated only by about twenty-five years and maybe six hundred feet.
Scott came up out of the station. The first things he noticed, every time he was here, were the mountains, which were bluer than the green ones surrounding Coquitlam. In both sets of mountains, the trees had been sheared like a bad haircut, with houses climbing higher and higher up the sides of the slopes, but the houses he could see from here might be worth close to double the ones he could see from the suburbs. Then he saw Angelique. He waved weakly, smiling.
Now that she was so sure that he presented no danger, Angelique was free to see the almost-drunken crush written on this boy’s face, and for a second she nearly felt guilty about the care she’d taken to get ready. She had never been impervious to the fears of getting older, like anyone else, and she had never been able to stop herself from entertaining universal insecurities about the trajectory upon which she’d built her life so far, panicking that maybe she hadn’t gotten the best deal when she’d traded so much for her career, but Angelique had never had her friends’ anxieties about beauty. She felt fine, and when dates over the years had confirmed it, she’d never said “Really?” but always just “Thank you,” nodding and smiling with terrific ease, because she knew that it was right. And she had known that she left this chubby man-boy from the suburbs feeling tongue-tied, and it was possible that she had allowed that to colour the strategy of her preparations for their meeting, that she had allowed herself to smell so fucking good and to have those long, smooth brown arms uncovered by the bright blue, tight blue shirt that she had at least partially chosen for its potentially disorienting effects, to slow Scott’s thinking on his feet.
“Scott. Thank you for meeting me.”
“Any time.”
“There are a few things I’d like to follow up with you about, okay? Is there any place in particular where you’d be more comfortable speaking?”
“Why don’t we walk,” he said, indicating the Seawall, packed with tourists and cruise-ship passengers. She nodded her assent, then took out her recorder.
“Can we—I’d prefer to do this off the record until I know what this is about.”
“Okay.” Maybe Scott Clark was more self-possessed that she’d anticipated. They began walking slowly. Each of them slipped a pair of shades over their eyes. “Why did you rob your friend’s restaurant?”
Scott stopped for a second, but not for as long as she’d thought, or hoped, that he would.
“Who says I robbed my friend’s restaurant?”
“You more or less confirmed for me that you had been involved in the hold-up at Polis when last we spoke. Is that no longer something you stand by?”
Scott rubbed the bottom half of his face with his hand.
“And Polis belongs to your friend Pardeep’s parents, doesn’t it? In fact,”
Angelique was bluffing a bit now, moving out into conjecture based on the body language she was reading off Scott who, behind his sunglasses, was reeling. “Didn’t you spend a lot of time there as a teenager?”
Scott smiled now, feeling that if Angelique knew as much as she thought she did, she would know that he still ate there all the time. Or at least had, until last week.
“I don’t know any Pardeep.”
“Yes, you do,” Angelique said, her voice toughening. And now she lifted her shades into her thick, perfumed hair, and thrust her phone into Scott’s face, showing him the yearbook advertisement for Polis that he hadn’t thought about in years. “This is you and Pardeep and ‘The Canadian,’ Adnan abd-Husseini, whose notoriety you’re dining out on. And the Chinese guy is Josiah Kim, who rented the U-Haul truck from which the shots on your house were fired.”
Angelique searched his soft face for the response, for the confirmation of her victory, an acknowledgment of her prowess. But Scott only tightened his jaw, then smiled. If there was anything in his face, it was relief. But there wasn’t much of anything.
“He’s half Korean,” Scott said, then laughed softly through a bitten lip, and though Angelique had thought he was cute since the meeting at Rocky Point Park, she now got an idea, for the first time, of how, under certain circumstances, a woman could come around to having sex with him.
“You’re not in a gang. You lied to me.”
Scott shook his head, his face instantly serious in a way that Angelique found endearing; she spent so much of her time on this job profiling goons and sociopaths and men whose default-violent perspectives on the world did not exclude her, and his evident consideration of her feelings was, in that broader context, touching.
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