Property Values

by Charles Demers

  “We didn’t know about Adnan, you’re wrong. We weren’t trying to dine out on him. We found out about all that from your piece.”

  “What is going on?”

  “We’re off the record, right?”

  “For the time being, yes.”

  Scott looked again at the mountains. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “We staged the shooting at my house in order to drive down the property value.”

  Angelique laughed.

  “We got the idea from you.”

  She stopped. “Raven Place …” she said, putting it together.

  “The only spot in the Lower Mainland where nobody could sell a house. I’m in a position, right now, where I have to buy out my ex-father-in-law, and it means losing the only house I’ve ever lived in. A place my parents rented for years before they finally scraped together what they needed to buy it, the last place my mother ever lived. You ever lost someone close, Ms Bryan?”

  Angelique raised her shoulders, then nodded.

  “We were just trying to buy some time. It was stupid, and it caught the attention of some of the wrong people. One thing led to another. I don’t know.” Scott stopped to let a string of laughing Scandinavian cruise passengers snake their way between them. “You say I’m not in a gang, I’m not a gangster. I say my house isn’t worth a million and a half bucks. But if everybody acts like it is, then that becomes what’s real, doesn’t it?”

  “Are you in any danger right now?”

  Scott raised his eyebrows in a way that suggested that he didn’t know, and he laughed again, this time insecurely.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you go to the police?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “But there’s a possible way out of this for me, and maybe you can help me with it.”

  “Listen, Scott, I have ethical commitments to a certain—”

  “Angelique, stop,” he said, using her first name for the first time. “I would never ask you to do anything like that. I would have hoped, by now, that you’d realize how much respect I have for you.”

  She felt a heat in her cheeks and on the back of her neck. “Thank you.”

  “I’m just looking for some information that I can’t, like, ask anybody else for.”

  She nodded slowly, with skepticism.

  “In your opinion, the Underground Rider, Da Silva thing, the beef. Can it be fixed?”

  “What have you gotten into, Scott?”

  “Just—I need to know. What are they fighting over? Is it over real shit? Are they unmovable?”

  “From what I understand,” she answered tentatively, weighing the ethical risks of each phrase she spoke, “it had less to do with any real, material conflict and more to do with … personality. Some ill-conceived sexual adventures, then bad jokes turned violent.”

  “So everybody acted like idiots, showed their asses—and now everybody’s entrenched.”

  “More or less.”

  It seemed to Scott that Angelique didn’t yet know about the kidnapping. He wondered whether it or the Tam-Miller killings were insurmountable.

  “Somebody who wanted to fix it, to bring peace—they wouldn’t necessarily have to put anything on the table or have any power to change things in the real world. They’d just need to be able to provide a space where a bunch of meatheads could tuck their balls in for a few minutes and think like people.”

  Angelique laughed again, and Scott flushed, rushing to take off his glasses.

  “I’m really sorry, that was very crude. I don’t know—”

  “Boy, please. You know my beat, I’ve heard a lot worse.”

  “But do I have it about right?”

  She smiled. “You’ve seen a lot of movies, TV shows, and those guys are always smart. That’s not the way it is. These guys are stupid, violent young men who find themselves surrounded by a legal and financial environment where their worst qualities can be rewarded with money and, from all the other wrong people, respect. So that means … you never know. It’s like working with kids and animals. It can always go any way. But theoretically, what you’re asking—I would say the answer is yes.”

  “Even with the shootings.”

  Angelique tilted her head, considering the question, and once again Scott wanted to kiss her. Her eyes narrowed, and for a split second he felt a pang of guilt, thinking that she could tell what was going through his mind. Then he realized that she was processing his problem.

  “There’s a fantasy these guys have that they’re their own government. That’s the conventional wisdom about organized crime—that they enforce the rules for people who are outside the rules of the rest of society. But in my experience, in my opinion, that’s a myth. Have you read Hobbes?”

  “The war of all against all? No.”

  She smiled. “But you know about the war of all against all?”

  “Wikipedia sponging.”

  “That’s cute. Anyway, my point is that these guys, they step outside the rules, and that’s it. There are none. They make the rules up as they go along.”

  “This is why your columns are so conservative.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Sorry, no. I just mean—you know, you’re quite a lock-’em-up type in your columns, I mean. You have to admit, you’re pretty law and order, no?”

  “And so that makes me a conservative?”

  “Well, sort of? No?”

  “I see. Please, I’ve never understood this. Why do left-wing people have such a soft spot for these gangsters and crooks? For the people in our society who act more like capitalists than anybody else? Do you know anything about criminology, about a school of thought called ‘Left Realism’?” Scott shook his head. “Well, I suppose there are limits to sponging then, huh?” She jutted her chin at him and smiled, and Scott smiled, then felt the beginnings of an erection and flushed. He was desperately enjoying the conversation, but realized that he’d been put off track.

  “So with these guys—killings, kidnappings, that sort of thing … can they be moved past? Can it ever be water under the bridge?”

  “Sure. Or not. Some of them will view those things as the price of doing business in a volatile market. Sometimes money will exchange hands to smooth things over. Other guys will take those grudges to their graves. Sometimes to very early graves.”

  Scott nodded, then stared at Angelique for a long time before speaking.

  “You mentioned ethics earlier.”

  “Yes I did. I mention them a lot.”

  “Ethically, I would imagine, that even if you had a story—that if anybody were in a position where that story coming out at a certain time could result in them getting hurt, that ethically you could sit on that for a little while.”

  “For a little while, yes—if it meant keeping somebody safe who was otherwise going to get hurt.”

  “And then, ethically, you could tell the story that you had once the situation was no longer dangerous.”

  “This is Vancouver, Scott—the situation is always dangerous for somebody. Hell, even if it’s just an earthquake.”

  “I know. They keep saying it’s inevitable, but I can’t bring myself to worry about it. There’s just, I mean—there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Sure. There’s no preparing for them. We’ve built a whole city of million-dollar homes on land that everybody seems to think is going to rattle or liquefy at any point. But I was speaking metaphorically, Scott. Referring to more sociological concerns, less geological. We live in a strange place.”

  “Acts of God. My dad, he’s become a very religious man recently. I don’t see him all that much, but I think that in with the crazy stuff, there’s some good stuff he believes.”

  “My family is very religious, too.”

  “Like ‘blessed are the peacemakers.’ I’d say it’s pretty hard to argue with that.”

  “True. But somebody will always try.”

  19

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, Josiah took qu
ick, sidelong looks at Scott, worrying his tongue around his teeth and his teeth around his lips, then finally said what he’d been thinking.

  “Listen, when we get there—”

  “Yeah?” answered Scott.

  “I don’t think you should order a London Fog.”

  They drove down Hastings Street for a few minutes, past the driving range and a high school and a strip of storefronts and restaurants, before speaking again.

  “I wasn’t going to order a fucking London Fog anyway.”

  “Fine, fine. I’m sorry. I just—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just know that it’s a drink that you enjoy, and I don’t think that, in this context, it would be the best thing for you to order.”

  “Why, because it’s an effeminate drink?”

  Josiah shrugged, deflecting the awkward gender politics of the exchange. But Scott pushed forward.

  “So, like, somehow a cappuccino is macho? Frothed milk and coffee is for boys, frothed milk with tea is for girls? It’s fucking idiotic, Joe.”

  “It’s a scented tea, it’s flavoured. It’s perfumed.”

  “It’s oil of bergamot!”

  “Who’s Bergamot?”

  “Jesus Christ, it’s not a guy, it’s an orange.”

  “Hm,” Josiah said, watching the road.

  “If you want to get real specific, actually,” Scott continued, against Josiah’s unstated wishes and over the objections of his body language, “it’s a citrus fruit that basically helped the Mafia start in Sicily—shaking down the plantation owners and such.”

  “Great,” answered Josiah with restrained impatience. “Make sure to bring that up with the fellows at Espresso Calabria. That way, when you order a drink designed for undergraduates to sip while they watch Lena Dunham movies, the murderous thugs we’re sitting down with will know that you’re intimately acquainted with their origin story.”

  “Calabria’s not even in fucking Sicily, asshole!”

  “Fuck you, Scott!”

  Josiah jerked the car over into the parking lane, killing the ignition and trying, with deep breaths, to calm himself. Scott stared out the passenger window.

  “Just say it.”

  “Say. What.”

  “Just say that you blame me for all of this.”

  “Scott, what do you want me to say?”

  “I didn’t have any choice, Joe—”

  “Oh, bullshit. Bullshit, man. Scott, fuck. People, people all over the world, they move around. Some of them have to leave their whole countries, for Christ sake. They pick up, they start again elsewhere. It sucks, fine. At least you’d be getting a payout. Maybe it’s time to grow up.”

  Scott gulped for a response but couldn’t find one right away. “You think I’m just being selfish,” he finally said.

  Seeing the dent that he’d left, Josiah pulled back a bit but still seethed. “Scott, I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t sign up for this.”

  “But you’re my friend.”

  “For the time being, yes.”

  “Nice. And why are we friends, Josiah? What brought us together?”

  “Our families happened to live close to each other.”

  “That’s right. And you say it like that somehow makes it cheaper or something.”

  “That’s not what I meant at all—”

  “We’re not chess pieces, for Christ’s sake. You can’t just pick a person up and move them someplace else like the space they were in didn’t mean anything, didn’t make them. That house, that space—you think I want it for the money? That I want to own it?”

  “No.”

  “I just want to stay, fuck, where my memories are. Where the only people who know me or have ever loved me have ever gathered, ever been. Joe, if I lost that place, I wouldn’t have anything anymore, I wouldn’t be myself.”

  “And who are you now, Scott? A criminal? Taking beatings, doing stick-ups? You’ve turned our friendships into a criminal conspiracy. You’ve pulled me into something, pulled Par into something—”

  “Par came with me, like a friend does.”

  “Fine, you pulled me into something. You want to hang on to the past because it’s who you are, as though the act of clinging itself can’t do anything to change you.”

  “It’s my home, Joe.”

  “And who says it always has to be? Who says you get to have it forever?”

  “Christ, now you just sound like one of these right-wing developer assholes. You want me to ‘adjust my expectations’? Keep adjusting them down, further and further, more and more reasonable every goddamn inch east, every foot smaller? Till I’m living in some cell in a Japanese honeycomb hotel on some farm in Chilliwack?”

  “You’ve got a lot of balls, Scotty. You’re one man, all alone, in eighteen hundred square feet. How is that right?”

  “I never asked to be alone,” Scott said. “The alone part, I mean—that’s the whole thing, Josiah. The being alone is why I need it.”

  “I’ll have a double espresso, please.”

  Scott carried his drink to the table where Josiah was already sitting and took a sip. “I thought a place like this would have better coffee,” Josiah said.

  “He’s late.”

  Scott and Josiah watched the front door for signs of Mike, taking in the patchy Italiana of the café, its framed soccer shirts and sun-bleached regional flags. Hastings Street began life in the heart of Vancouver’s downtown as a stretch of almost impossible urbanity, but the further east it traveled, it shed the city for a lawn-care banality against which Espresso Calabria was almost invisible. Scott sipped at a tiny cup of black coffee for whose benefit it was no longer clear he was drinking, since Mike still hadn’t shown up, and none of the old men in the café seemed to be paying them any mind at all.

  “Scott,” Mike said, looming behind both of them, having emerged from a back door.

  “You’re late,” Scott said, and Josiah almost fainted when he did. Mike looked at his watch.

  “It’s five minutes, not even, buddy.”

  “You want to talk here, or should we walk?”

  “We should walk.”

  “Then let me finish my coffee,” Scott said, wincing through the rest of the acrid shot as he stood. Josiah stood too, rolling his shoulders in a mimetic approximation of Mike’s constant loosening and tightening of his muscles. The three men left through the back entrance, passing a pale group of elders playing cards and speaking to each other in Italian, then out into the lane.

  “I’ve thought about what you asked me,” Scott started.

  “Okay. Good.”

  “There’s a lot of moving pieces. They’ve got your guys, but they lost two of theirs, you know?”

  “You tell me who says any of that was ever cleared with—”

  “Don’t,” Scott said with an assurance that left Josiah with vertigo. “Don’t waste my time or yours. These are the facts on the ground. And I’m not going to waste the Da Silvas’ time with a bunch of denialist bullshit, either. They are going to want a tax for hitting Tam and Miller before you get your boys back, and they’ve got it coming. That’s my opinion. And if you’re asking me to mediate, that’s what I’m going to propose.”

  Josiah studied both of their faces, trying to sort out whether either of them, Mike or Scott, believed that his oldest friend was a gangster. They both seemed to buy it.

  “How much?” Mike asked with angry resignation.

  “We’ll—we’ll sort that out,” Scott answered, his eyes betraying their first lack of confidence, and Josiah realized that Scott had no sense of the value of either two lives taken or two released from captivity.

  “One hundred grand,” Josiah interjected, waiting for either of the other men to blanch. Did he guess right? He watched Mike work through the number and decided to press the advantage. “Plus a finder’s fee.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “No, that’s non-negotiable,” Scott said, emboldened by Josiah’s interve
ntion and coming to his defence. “That’s our fee for putting this together. Fifteen percent.”

  “Take it, or sort your own shit out with the Da Silvas. The rest of us will be happy to pick up the pieces.”

  Mike stared at Scott and Josiah, then stared down at the ground and took several long, irritated breaths in through his nose, though neither of them could detect his breathing them back out. He nodded, and they shook hands.

  On wobbling legs, Scott and Josiah made their way back through Espresso Calabria, out onto the street, and fell giggling into Josiah’s car.

  20

  “They called us East Indians, and my father always used to say, ‘East of what, goddamn it? East of Boundary Road?’ They called us East Indians because the others were called ‘Red’ Indians. The bastard angreji needed two different names, one for the people they stole the land from, the other for the people who worked it. You know ‘Coquitlam’? It’s not even a word. They fucked it from the locals.”

  “Kwikwetlem. It’s Stó:lō.”

  “See? Scotty knows. And Vancouver, that’s just English fucking up Dutch. Van something.”

  “Wait, does that mean ‘Burquitlam’ means something, too?”

  “No, Par.”

  “Jesus Christ almighty, who gave me a son this stupid? Robs his own fucking restaurant, and now Burquitlam.”

  “It’s just Burnaby and Coquitlam put together.”

  “Their travesty of Kwikwetlem, plus Robert Burnaby, another goddamn robber baron angreji thief. That’s what I’m saying. It’s all stolen.”

  The three men sat morally neutralized in the empty dining room of Polis, each having confessed to their sins, each having cancelled out the others’. Scott and Pardeep had robbed the restaurant, visited minor physical destruction upon it, but Gurdeep had been using it to wash dirty money, and now he was running down a list of the crimes of the British Empire as a way of putting their mutual larceny into perspective.

  Pardeep had never seen his father so confused as when they’d told him about the robbery, looking for a second as though he were going to rip the table from the wall, then just as quickly resigning, as though he were blaming himself. “But why didn’t you just come to me, ask me, beyta?”