8:17 pm rue Darling

by Bernard Emond

  The rain woke me. It was getting dark and the wind had picked up. Autumn was back. I had fallen asleep on the far side of Beaver Lake. By the time I ran to the bus stop I was shivering like a wet poodle locked out of the house in January. In the bus shelter there was a guy in his fifties who had seen better days. He was wearing a turquoise jogging outfit and he was slumped in the corner on a canvas sack. His hair was long and greasy and he was sucking on a bottle in a brown paper bag. I nodded to him; he nodded back. I couldn’t stop shivering, and after a moment he offered his brown paper bag to me, with a smile full of missing teeth.

  – Here. This’ll warm you up.

  Cutty Sark. The devil exists, and you never know where you’ll run into him. I grinned and said:

  – Life is good!

  – Nothing’s too good for the working class. Here. Tiens ...

  I took a deep breath.

  – Non. Merci. I’m on the wagon. I haven’t had a drop in seven months. But thanks all the same. I appreciate it.

  – Tabarnak, he said softly. That’s beautiful. That’s really beautiful. C’est très très beau ... But don’t you get bored?

  The million-dollar question. I don’t know an alcoholic who doesn’t miss it sometimes, the binges, the parties, the brawls. I don’t know an alcoholic who doesn’t find life more boring sober than when he drank. I smiled.

  – Oui, sometimes.

  He nodded his head.

  – Me, I’m never bored.

  Silence. My new friend looked at me.

  – Do you smoke?

  I took out my pack, but it was soaked. The cigarettes were falling apart, the matches were useless. I threw them outside.

  – Never mind, he said. God sees his little sparrow fall.

  He dug into his pocket and pulled out a green plastic garbage bag.

  – It’s new. You just gotta make a hole for your head.

  He handed it to me. The bus arrived. The Cutty Sark man didn’t move.

  – You staying here? I asked.

  – No reason to go anywhere else.

  – Thanks for the raincoat.

  I pointed to the paper bag.

  – Save some for tomorrow.

  – Don’t worry about me! And don’t forget: boredom is the mother of all vices.

  I gave him a thumbs-up on that point, and got on the bus.

  It was dark by the time I got home. I was chilled to the bone. I emptied my pockets, peeled off my wet clothes, and had a hot bath. Then I put on all the dry clothes I owned. It still wasn’t enough. I must have looked a fine sight when I opened the door to Angéla.

  – I got caught in the rain.

  – I know, I saw you come in. You didn’t come to the restaurant today, so I figured I must have pissed you off last night with my motherly advice.

  I made a vague gesture. She smiled.

  – I made spaghetti. If you don’t want me to think we’re fighting, you’d better come down and eat at my place.

  Anna Magnani! Suddenly it hit me – that’s who she reminded me of. Who could turn down an invitation to eat spaghetti with the great Anna Magnani?

  Angéla’s apartment was as clean as a whistle, everything in its place. A few books, a few posters, a TV, a brown velour sofa, and not much else. A temporary home. On one shelf there was a kind of shrine: some shells, a jar of sand, some postcards of the beach, and photos of two boys about 10 or 12 years old.

  – Yours?

  – Oui.

  It was a story as old as the world. She came from a small village on the Acadian peninsula. Her father was violent, her mother depressed, and at seventeen the only way out she could see was to get married. Her husband was a younger version of her father, a local guy who drank hard and hit hard. The day he started taking it out on the kids, she grabbed them and went to her sister’s place in Moncton. Angéla found a job as a waitress, got an apartment, and bravely held the fort. At night, when the children were in bed, she made herself a vodka and orange juice to relax. Then a second one, and a third. It became a nightly ritual: never before the kids went to bed, never more than three. She was a good mother, devoted to her children. She never went out. But gradually the ratio of vodka to orange juice changed. One night the bottle was empty and she went next door to a bar, just for one. She woke up at three in the morning in a motel room with a stranger beside her in bed. She hated herself for what she had done and managed to pull herself together for a while. Then something cracked inside her.

  She started drinking all night. The children would find her passed out on the kitchen floor in the morning. She started going out more, and sleeping around. She lost her job, totalled the car. The neighbours started talking. One night in July while she was out, her oldest son woke up hot and tried to open the bedroom window. The latch didn’t hold and the window slammed down, cutting off his fingertip. There was blood all over the place. His brother called 911. Angéla found a note from the ambulance crew when she got home and went straight to the hospital, drunk. Social services got involved. Her children were put in foster care. After that, it was a free-fall: coke, amphetamines, anything to get high, and twenty-dollar tricks to pay for it. One night she found a fellow hooker stabbed in an alley, her guts spilling out. Angéla realized she didn’t want to die, which is the basic qualification for joining AA. But Moncton was too small to start over. So she moved to Montreal where she could disappear into the crowd without fear of running into old friends and former johns. She was leading a nun’s life now, doing volunteer work at a women’s shelter when she wasn’t working at the restaurant or going to meetings. And she was still calling me “vous.”

  When I got back to my place, I stood in the dark for ages, looking out at my childhood home. I tried to put Angéla out of my mind. Clearly, she was worried about me, with the sixth sense of an alcoholic who smells trouble coming. But I didn’t want her AA solicitude. And I wasn’t interested in being her father figure or a substitute uncle. For want of anything better to do, I started making an inventory of things that had changed across the street. The lilac bushes must have died. The chain-link fence had been replaced with a wrought-iron one. The windows were new. The old enamelled tin plaque with the street address had been replaced with brass numbers. The solid-wood door had been replaced with a steel one. There was a crack in the front wall ... This was getting boring. I lit a cigarette and started tidying up, moving things around, opening and closing cupboards. That’s when I found the piece of paper with the address and phone number of a woman named Caron, the woman who’d claimed the body of the mystery man they’d found beside Madame National Bank.

  Boredom is the mother of all vices. He was dead right, my friend from the bus shelter. It was four days since the explosion and two people were still missing: the guy with the beard and my neighbour on the third floor. Four days was getting to be a long time. Were they in on some job together? And what about the woman with no face: what was she doing in the building when it blew up? And then, when I thought about it, that flunkey from the National Bank: he hadn’t slipped me ten brown ones for nothing.

  u

  The next morning I got back to work. I started with the landlord on Darling. He told me that my neighbour’s name was Karl Godin and that Karl worked at the Radio Shack on Ontario. The references Karl had given the landlord didn’t lead anywhere: one was a phone number in Val d’Or with no answer, the other number was out of service.

  The manager at the Radio Shack said Karl was a good employee, honest, dependable, and reserved. But he didn’t seem to have any friends. And a change had come over him lately. He’d become irritable and had started voicing his opinion about everything. He’d missed three days straight then appeared suddenly on a Friday afternoon, agitated. He’d bought three TV sets with his credit card and left. No one had seen him since.

  Clearly, something had happened to Karl. During the seven months I’d lived on Darling I’d never heard a peep from him. But the week before the explosion he’d started playing music full blast
and changing the CD every few minutes. I’d knocked on his door several times but he never answered. Then he started sticking little poems on his door, on yellow Post-it notes. Strange ... I asked the manager a few more questions but there wasn’t much more he could tell me. Karl’s employee file at human resources in Toronto was confidential. When you know how to get it, nothing is confidential, but that takes time and money. For now I decided to drop Karl. I figured he’d show up sooner or later.

  The coroner’s office had nothing new for me: still no ID for the woman with no face, and no one had shown up to claim Denise and little Josée. I turned to Madame Caron. I wracked my brains trying to think of a plausible way to introduce myself so I could ask her a few questions. It’s not hard to inquire about a dead neighbour or colleague: that usually doesn’t arouse much suspicion or anxiety. But for someone you don’t know from Eve or Adam, you’ve got to have a way in. I took a chance and dialled the woman’s number. It was in Laval.

  – Madame Caron? ... I’m a colleague of Lieutenant Gaston Geoffrion at Fire Investigation Services in Montreal. Did the lieutenant contact you? ... No? ... Well, he asked me to check some details with the relatives of the victims ... May I come and see you?

  She refused outright. She had nothing to say. She didn’t know what her husband was doing on Darling that night and she doubted she could help me with anything. Her voice was strange, weak and high-pitched, and she slurred her words, the way you do after you’ve been to the dentist. But her tone was sharp and she hung up without saying goodbye. OK. Fine. You can’t always bat a thousand. I went back to work.

  The Darling Tavern on Sainte-Catherine is a neighbourhood institution. For three generations it’s been an obligatory stop on the way to Bordeaux prison, a community college for petty crime. (For the big time, you’ve got to go to law school or the Hautes études commerciales.) The Darling Tavern is the scorched earth of booze joints: 25 feet by 40, brown walls, terrazzo floors, neon lights, a dozen tables, 48 chairs, a pool table, a peanut-vending machine, a few bags of potato chips clipped to a metal rack, and a Molson clock on the wall. It hasn’t changed since the Korean War. You want a meal? The pizza joint around the corner delivers. You don’t like Molson-O’Keefe-Labatt? Go somewhere else. You want a small glass of beer? They keep a few small glasses for fags, but don’t ask for a second: you should’ve ordered a big one first. The waiter doesn’t like walking for nothing.

  I ordered a 7-Up. Nothing like making a grand entrance. When the waiter returned I asked him:

  – Does François Gravel come in here sometimes?

  He looked at me like an entomologist studying a bug. I added:

  – The big guy, with the beard and the red Camaro.

  – Non.

  – I lived on Darling, the place that blew up. He was my neighbour. I’m looking for him.

  – Keep looking.

  – OK.

  I stood up and put a toonie on the table but before I could take a step towards the door a voice called out from the other end of the room.

  – Finish your 7-Up.

  He had a blond moustache and a leather vest with fringes, a Buffalo Bill of the east end. The only thing missing was the whip and the ten gallon hat. He punched in a number on his cell phone, had a brief conversation, and then he looked at me.

  – Someone is coming. It won’t be long. Give him another drink, Pierrot.

  Just so I’d get the message the cowboy moved to a table by the door and stuck his nose in a newspaper. I stared at my glass and wondered what hornet’s nest I’d just walked into. A quarter of an hour later a man walked in. Forties, denim vest, an eagle on his belt buckle, and cowboy boots. Theme of the day. But when I saw his eyes, any impulse I might have had to kid him about his outfit evaporated on the spot. This guy was dangerous.

  – I’ve seen you somewhere before.

  My picture in Le Journal de Montreal. I didn’t say a word.

  – What do you want with François Gravel?

  I winged it:

  – He was my downstairs neighbour, on Darling. The place that blew up. I lent him twenty bucks in the firemen’s bus. I just want it back.

  He looked me over. I looked like I could use twenty bucks.

  – You know him well?

  – Non. He was just a neighbour. We were in the bus, he didn’t have a penny to his name, he asked me if I could help him out, and I lent him some money. That’s all.

  – You don’t know where he is?

  – If I knew I wouldn’t be looking for him.

  He looked at the other cowboy with an exasperated expression and made as if he was going to leave. Then he swung back, grabbed me by the collar, and hauled me out of my chair.

  – If you see him, you come back and tell Pierrot. OK?

  – OK.

  – OK?! he shouted, shaking me.

  – OK! OK!

  He let go. End of conversation. He walked out. I looked at the guy with the moustache. He motioned for me to leave.

  One thing for sure, this wasn’t the major leagues. This was bottom-of-the-food-chain stuff, nothing to justify an assassination attempt or a bomb. The guy who had just pushed me around had probably fronted François for a coke deal, a couple of thousand max. François had probably taken advantage of the explosion to disappear. Or maybe he was just partying hard and had forgotten all about it. Either way, I wasn’t any further ahead.

  I went to the Bien Bon for a coffee. Lieutenant Geoffrion was there. It didn’t look like he was getting very far with his inquiries, either. He was bent over the classifieds in Le Journal de Montreal but he wasn’t reading. The Boomer was not in a good mood.

  – Still here, lieutenant?

  – I’ll be here next spring if it goes on like this.

  – Like what?

  – Someone broke into the site last night. How do they expect me to conduct a proper investigation if someone disturbs the evidence?

  – The fence isn’t locked?

  – Ben oui. But not good enough.

  – Any idea who it was?

  He didn’t answer. He had an idea. Probably the same as mine.

  u

  That night I dropped in to see Madame Kovacs again. She hadn’t noticed anything unusual across the street. Fair enough, she can’t be at her window 24 hours a day. When I left I went around the corner and down the alley so she couldn’t see me, then I walked the length of the plywood fence they’d put up at the back of the site. They’d done a half-assed job: it only took one kick to knock a plywood sheet loose and I scrambled through the gap into what was left of my old home. I pushed the plywood back into place and found a spot to hide near the foundation walls. It was a cold night. I’d gone to the Glaneuses earlier to buy a winter coat, but it wasn’t going to be enough. I had a small thermos of coffee, a supply of cigarettes, and a limited amount of patience.

  There are times when the sheer stupidity of something stares you in the face. I was sixty. My life was a mess. I had better things to do than freeze my balls off on a pile of bricks at one o’clock in the morning playing private detective. I could have been rereading Nana. Or painting my apartment. Or doing volunteer work at the Chic Resto Pop. Or, better yet, thinking seriously about how to win Angéla’s heart, or at least get into her pants. I was nursing that little fantasy, telling myself that twenty years difference in age is no obstacle to love, when a faint noise jolted me out of my reverie. I pricked up my ears. More little noises. A rat.

  Why on earth did I get mixed up in all this? What was I hoping to find, the meaning of life? Looking for reasons to go on living in the deaths of six complete strangers was pure masochism. We die however we die, that’s just the way it is, end of story. And we live as best we can. Badly, for the most part, but we get by with whatever we have, we do the best we can. We eat, we shit, we make love if we’re lucky, and we fall asleep. The next morning we get up and do it all over again. Until there is no next morning. And that’s that. There is no hidden meaning to discover. For all my tro
uble so far I still had only a few half-baked stories riddled with holes. They were depressing stories. And the rest didn’t exactly promise fun and games. I was chasing sirens again, asking questions for the sake of asking questions, following a trail just to have something to do. Anything so I wouldn’t come face to face with the mother of all vices. In the meantime, I was freezing, I was shivering like a leaf, as if death was closing in. Two hours had passed. A light snow had started falling. I gave myself a good talking to and got ready to leave. I was thirsty. Tomorrow, I’d go to a meeting and have a serious talk with a veteran. I was close to falling off the wagon. I could feel it.

  The plywood sheet opened with a bang and a man stepped through. It was too dark to see who he was. I shrunk into my hiding spot while he clambered down into the basement through a kind of tunnel under the rubble. He switched on a flash light: it left a halo behind him in the dust. My plan was going brilliantly. If I tried to follow him, he’d hear me. If I waited for him to come out I wouldn’t be able to see his face without him seeing mine. And what if it was a face I didn’t recognize? I couldn’t just go up to him and ask: