Mick, the janitor’s son, sent out word to his buddies. After midnight. The back lane. Bring who you know, if they’re big, tough, if they want some action. Fourteen said they’d be there. A few copped out, but the core group was augmented by strangers who got wind of the rumble. Fifteen young men and older adolescent boys waited in the lane. There to defend their turf, protect a friend, catch an adrenalin rush.
Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and two Latvian brothers up against Italian youths and a few French pals. The scenario they expected.
A half-hour after midnight, the opposing force congregated at the lane’s north end. Mick’s friends noticed they were outnumbered when they’d expected the advantage. A few worried. Too late to cop out now. They stood their ground as the other side sauntered toward them. Getting closer, the arrivals made noise. Rattled lumber against fences. Made hooting sounds, as if they were owls. Not that one of these city boys had ever heard or seen an owl. In unison, they sounded frightening.
Lights were being turned on in the duplexes and apartments.
People peered outside.
Neighbors were alerted.
The lane boys howled back to embolden themselves, but really, they wanted everyone who lived nearby to wake up, to help, to call for help, do something to keep the battle brief. They could engage, but they could not sustain the brawl for long.
‘Form a U-shape,’ Mick instructed his line of defenders. A general to his troops. ‘Surround them that way. Keep them in the middle.’
They formed a U.
One way to combat superior numbers.
A few more than twenty were coming at them.
Too many. Bad odds.
Insults were hurled in both directions regarding nationality and sexuality.
The sides roared together. First contact was erratic. The attackers had numerical advantage, except they were partially encircled. The sounds of combat grew raucous, the thudding, the taunts, the grunts. Alarmed cries were emitted by women on their balconies. Men shouted warnings. They dressed and came down their backstairs to stop this. High above the fray, the man Émile Cinq-Mars had designated as the Bombardier, a megaphone voice, bellowed profane encouragement.
‘Piss in their eyes, the motherfuckers!’
Also on high, Serge the Spitter readied himself should visiting punks attempt to mount the building’s spiral staircase. He looked nervous, though, a man ready to run.
‘Shit in their ears!’ the Bombardier instructed.
Mick did well with his first opponent. His punches landed. The other guy’s were deflected. They could scarcely see each other in the dark, but Mick’s fist connected with the other boy’s chin and a sharp elbow between the eyes convinced his attacker he’d not chosen his opponent well. He sprang to a different fight, making it a two-on-one. Mick leapt ahead to make a three-on-one more fair. He prospered in that punch-up until accosted from behind. In trouble then. Clasped by a much heavier boy, he could not fend against punches to his belly from a second assailant.
Overpowered from behind. Controlled. Panicky as he went to the pavement. Pinned.
Mick kicked and squirmed under a ton of weight. To no avail.
He shouted out.
Help arrived, an adult in the dark. Other adults were evening up the side. The marauding boys started to back away as the men pulled them off and a jeremiad of police sirens wailed through the night. Cops were close and coming fast. On the ground with an elephant on top of him, Mick held on for rescue and strained with all his might, heaving under his transgressor and wanting to cry out but not wanting to come undone. What blows he had absorbed scarcely affected him in the chaos – then the other boy was gone. On the run. More of a fast waddle in his case. Cop cars were coming up the lane from one end, blue-and-red cherries flashing and sirens echoing off the tenements. The marauders raced and hobbled away on foot toward the opposite end to escape.
His own father helped Mick to his feet. He tugged him toward their basement apartment. Mick was thoroughly bloodied. Once they were both safely inside, his dad had nothing to say. Neither rebuke nor criticism. The janitor washed blood from his son’s face.
They sat at the kitchen table and had a beer. The janitor had never had a beer with his son before. Mick dabbed his nose with a towel, and the scrape across his cheek where he’d landed on asphalt.
‘God and Jesus,’ the father said eventually.
‘Yeah,’ his son said.
‘You knew it was coming?’
‘Not so many guys. Was supposed to be a fair fight.’
‘What you fight about?’
‘Nothing,’ the boy said.
‘Nothing? That’s worth it, fight for nothing?’
‘Nothing much, Dad.’
‘What so important? Why so mad?’
A knock on the back door.
Uniformed officers wanted to talk to the boy.
‘He defend himself,’ the father pointed out. ‘He has a right. Who those boys?’
‘That’s a question we want to ask your son. Can you call him out here, please?’
‘Mick!’ the janitor shouted over his shoulder, not realizing the boy was only arm’s length away. ‘Come talk.’ To the officer, he asked, ‘You no arrest?’
‘If we catch the guys who ran, maybe. We want to know what happened first.’
Outside, at the scene of the battle, Mick told his story to a pair of uniformed officers. He kept his version brief. The cops went along with the premise that boys will be boys. There’d been no knives, dusters, rocks, no hammers or screwdrivers. Fists and a few pieces of lumber, but no bats. Little more than an inept wrestling match as far as they could tell. Injuries would heal. The kid with a broken nose was driven to the hospital in a squad car, otherwise the lads were sent home to tend to their cuts and bruises.
Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars was awakened from sleep. The night watch commander knew he’d been called to a certain address previously, so sent him again. The commander was short-handed. His best detective had been stripped from him and put on the dayshift. As retribution, he phoned Cinq-Mars after one o’clock in the morning.
Cinq-Mars could call Henri Casgrain to pitch in. They were supposed to work in pairs, but he’d been disruptive enough to his new partner’s routine, so didn’t bother him. The uniforms filled him in on an altercation where the robberies had occurred. Another night in Park Ex, they summed up, now that it was summer.
Cinq-Mars agreed they had the season right; otherwise, very little made sense. How did local boys know that outsiders were coming? Occasionally, fights were booked, but usually on neutral turf, not on one side’s home ground. Late at night in a lane was not something he’d heard before. What set it off? There had to be a spark beyond boys being boys. More importantly, what was the connection, if any, between recent criminal activity and this brawl?
The one to talk to, he was told, was the janitor’s kid.
‘Why him?’ Cinq-Mars asked a uniform.
‘I wouldn’t call him a ringleader.’
‘Sounds like you want to call him something.’
‘He seems to know more about it. Some kids had no clue why they were fighting.’
That also made no sense. ‘Names? Addresses?’
‘A few from this side got away. Everybody on the other side ran off. Those we spoke to, yeah, names and addresses. I’ll find the sheet for you.’
Cinq-Mars waited in the lane and gazed up at the apartment building where toasters had been stolen and a man knifed through the throat. Followed up by a roughhouse midnight brawl. He noticed something interesting and filed it away. Then he accepted the sheet from the returning officer and folded it to fit his jacket’s inner pocket.
The boy and his dad had gone to bed. His bedroom being in the rear of the apartment, Mick answered the knock on the back door.
‘You look beat up,’ Cinq-Mars said.
‘Sucker-punched.’
The boy was wearing the basketball jersey and sweatpants he slept in. ‘Mind getting dressed? I’d like to talk to you outside.’
‘No prob. Give me a minute.’
He did. In less time than that, Mick came outside.