JANUARY 1994
The delicatessen where Elodie works is a few blocks east of the record store, but with this insulting wind, it feels more like miles. When Véronique reaches Len’s, with its famous window display of brisket slabs and Black Forest cakes, she opens the door and is immediately welcomed by the smell of smoked meat.
Elodie looks up from where she’s reading behind the counter and waves.
“Sorry I’m late,” Véronique says. “There was a problem on the metro.”
Elodie is wearing the same beige uniform Len’s waitresses have been wearing for decades. Elodie once told her that nothing really changes here, which is why she likes it. In fact, the only thing that has ever changed is Len himself, who died in ’89 and was replaced by his son, Barry.
She pops her head into the back room, where her boss has a small office. “I’m taking lunch,” she tells him.
Véronique can hear a muffled response, and then Elodie grabs a big plastic menu and hands it to her. Usually there’s more of a lunch-hour bustle, but they have the place to themselves today. Véronique’s gotten in the habit of stopping by for a weekly smoked meat sandwich or a coffee before the start of her shift at the record store.
“What would you like?”
“Just coffee.”
“You sure? I can make you a smoked meat sandwich?”
“I’m fine. I’m not that hungry.”
Elodie pours a cup of coffee for Véronique and a Pepsi for herself. They sit at one of the booths.
“What’s happening with the criminal case?” Véronique asks her.
“I haven’t heard yet, but Bruno says nothing ever happens over the holidays.”
“How are you doing?”
“It’s definitely bringing up a lot of the old memories,” Elodie says.
“It’ll be worth it, though, won’t it? When you win your case?”
“If we win.”
“You will,” Véronique states. “How can you not? When the court hears all your stories? My God. They owe you.”
“They sure as hell do.” She pulls a pack of Du Mauriers out of her apron pocket and lights a cigarette. “I need more of these,” she says, holding up the pack. “I’m getting low.”
“I’m doing a run next week. I’ll bring you a few cartons.”
Elodie smiles appreciatively. This is exactly why Véronique smuggles—to help good, hardworking people like Elodie who can’t afford to pay what the government charges them for smokes.
“How’re you and James?” Elodie asks her.
“Good. Better.”
“You sure?”
“It’s been a lot better the last couple of months.”
Elodie cocks her head, waiting for more. She exhales a straight line of smoke above Véronique’s head.
“We were fighting a lot in the fall.”
“About?”
“About these,” Véronique says, holding up the pack of cigarettes.
Elodie nods, understanding immediately.
“He hates me smuggling,” Véronique confides. “He’s the reason I got the job at the record store.”
“But you’re still smuggling.”
“I told James I would stop as soon as my uncle finds someone to replace me.”
“Will you?”
“I don’t know,” Véronique admits. “It’s such good money, it’s easy. Plus, I can’t just shaft my uncle. He needs me. I don’t know what to do.”
“James worries about you, that’s why he wants you to stop.”
“He’s ashamed of me.”
“No,” Elodie says. “I know he worries. Even I worry about you. It’s dangerous what you do.”
“He wants me to go to school.”
“That sounds like a good plan.”
“It’s James’s plan,” she says. “Not mine. I mean, I have nothing against school, but it just hasn’t been necessary for me. I’m not sure it ever will be.”
“Meaning you plan to continue smuggling.”
“As long as I’m making good money, I plan to keep seizing the opportunities that come up,” she says, thinking about the record store. As far as everyone knows, she’s just a cashier there.
“James wants me to know exactly what I want to do with my life,” she goes on. “But I don’t think that way. All I know is that I want to feel excited by what I do. I want to feel passion, the way my father was passionate about the FLQ, or the way your mother is passionate about her seed store. I’m willing to wait for it.”
“How long?”
“My dad was in jail at my age, his life basically over. I’m just at the beginning of mine.”
“I love your optimism,” Elodie says. “Who says you need to have it all mapped out by your early twenties?”
“Your brother.”
“You know he just wants you to be happy.”
“Enough about my shit,” Véronique says, taking a small sip of coffee. It tastes awful, bitter and watery. There are grounds floating on the surface, which stick on her tongue. “James mentioned you also filed your civil complaint?”
Elodie nods, not looking especially enthused.
“Do you ever think about taking matters into your own hands?”
“You mean like revenge?”
“I guess. I just wonder if winning your lawsuits will be enough.”
“What’s the alternative? Buying a gun and murdering them all? I wouldn’t even know where to start. The nuns, the orderlies, the doctor who put me in St. Nazarius?”
Her uncle Camil probably knows someone who would gladly take out a few child abusers. She almost says, You could hire someone, but Elodie is from a different world. “This is probably the last thing you want to talk about.”
“It’s actually kind of cathartic. I’m so used to not talking about it.”
Véronique is always struck by Elodie’s pragmatism. She approaches her life without melodrama or mawkish grandstanding, never trying to call attention to herself. She’s managed to raise a child, find her birth mother, support herself, share her story, and now seek justice in a system that wants to keep her silent and oppressed, and she does all of it with her dignity intact.
“You can’t bury something that’s still alive,” Elodie says. “I’m just starting to figure that out now.”
“That’s how I feel about the October Crisis,” Véronique admits, thinking about her father’s legacy. “I can’t seem to get out from under its shadow.”
“Everyone has their own October,” Elodie says, swirling the ice cubes around in her glass of Pepsi. “No one comes through life without experiencing something that changes who they were going to be.”
“What about your daughter?”
“I’ve tried to shield Nancy from my past,” Elodie says. “I’m not sure I succeeded. A parent leaves a legacy no matter what. She’ll have her own October Crisis to deal with. I can’t see how she won’t.”
“Does she come back to visit often?”
“Not really. She likes adventure.”
“Where’s her father, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Probably dead,” Elodie says. “He was American, going off to Vietnam. He was spending his last weekend of freedom in Montreal. I never even knew his last name. He probably died over there.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“Most of them died,” she says. “I just assume he did, too. I’ve just tried to move forward, not be defined by my past.”
Véronique takes a sip of coffee, thinking about James’s article. “I don’t think you’re defined by your past, for what it’s worth.”
“You asked me if I ever think about revenge,” Elodie says. “I do secretly fantasize about smothering Sister Ignatia with a pillow or spitting in her face.” She laughs nervously, embarrassed. “But if I become the monster they believed me to be—or wanted me to be—then they’ve won.”
“Not if they’re dead.”
“Even if they’re dead. The only power I ever had was in not letting them destroy me. I mean, I’m still here, aren’t I? I got out and I made a life. I had a child. I’m not a terrible person.”
“You’re a beautiful person,” Véronique says. She hasn’t known Elodie very long, but she recognizes in her a kindred spirit, a surrogate big sister who understands her and never judges.
Elodie waves her hand in the air, shooing away the compliment. Véronique looks at her watch and frowns. “My shift starts in fifteen minutes.”
“Talk to James,” Elodie says. “Maybe he sees something in you that you don’t even see in yourself yet.”
Véronique considers Elodie’s parting words as she heads the few blocks over to Stanley Records. Maybe she doesn’t know who she is yet, but she knows she’s her father’s daughter. She will always be the woman Léo taught her to be, someone willing to cross the line when it’s justified.
She loves James, but if he can’t accept that about her, they won’t make it. This is what worries her most, even during this current truce. Eventually he’s going to figure out that her job at Stanley Records is a placation tactic, and that even if she were to give up smuggling, she will still and forever be a smuggler at the core. This is who she is.
When she arrives at work, the guy at the door greets her with a bored hello. It’s a shit job, sitting there all day on a stool, greeting people and checking their bags when the alarm goes off. And in turn, he does a shitty, lackadaisical job. It’s an empire run by teenagers, most of them lazy and uninterested. Someone scribbled Smells like teen shit on the bathroom wall, and it fits.
Stanley Records is an institution. It used to be a small record shop on Stanley Street when it first opened, but moved to this much bigger location in the late seventies. It’s essentially a massive warehouse—garishly bright with industrial carpeting and serviceable fixtures—with the best selection of music anywhere in the city. The kids who work here are mostly between sixteen and twenty-five years old, and generally they’re all into music.
She doesn’t really mind the job, especially now that she’s found a way to supplement her meager hourly wage. She’s a cashier, so she’s always busy, and the shifts tend to fly by. The music is good, she’s always on the cutting edge of what’s new, and her coworkers are okay—some more okay than others. Occasionally, famous people show up and everyone stops what they’re doing and there’s a festive vibe in the air. The other day, Weird Al Yankovic showed up to promote his Alapalooza album—he brought Dunkin’ Donuts for the staff—and when Iron Maiden dropped by in December, Bruce Dickinson gave her tickets to their show. (She sold them.) She can wear jeans to work and not comb her hair and mostly be herself, which is more than she can say for many other jobs of this ilk.
She walks through the security detection system and then downstairs to punch in for her shift. The break room is in the basement. There’s a microwave, a TV, a wall of lockers, and a high-school-cafeteria-style table, around which the employees smoke and eat fast food or warmed-up leftovers in Tupperware.
Roger is there, smoking while eating his poutine. Roger works upstairs in the warehouse. He has shaggy blond hair, piercings in his eyebrow, nose, and lip, and a tattoo of one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on his chest.
“Your food must taste like cigarettes,” she says, disgusted.
He shrugs.
“You have hockey tonight?” she asks, sitting down across from him.
“Yep.”
Someone else joins them—the beautiful Italian girl from International Music on the mezzanine—and Véronique turns toward the TV, where news is breaking on CNN about a figure skater being attacked by another figure skater.
Roger stubs out his cigarette in what’s left of his poutine, gets up from the table noisily—pushing his chair back, burping—and dumps the container in the trash. He doesn’t make eye contact with Véronique, doesn’t acknowledge her when he leaves the break room.
This is mainly for show. They have an understanding—act polite with each another, but not too friendly. They’re an unlikely pair—she’s beautiful, intelligent, seemingly untouchable in all ways, while Roger is crude, ugly, not very bright. No one would associate them together, which is exactly how she planned it. This way no one will ever suspect they’re business partners in a surprisingly lucrative CD-stealing operation.
She first got the idea when she saw Roger leaving the warehouse after work one day with a hockey bag over his shoulder. The warehouse is on the fourth floor, above the offices, with a freight elevator that goes directly down to the loading dock out back. No one checks the staff’s bags at the loading dock door. The warehouse guys load and unload the stock completely unsupervised.
The following week, she saw Roger walk through the store again with his hockey bag over his shoulder. She started to formulate a plan—both to challenge herself and to earn some extra cash. On a Friday night after work, Véronique joined the gang at the St. Regis pub for the usual gathering to bitch about their jobs, gossip about management, and mock the customers.
Someone asked me where to find the Traveling Blueberries. Some guy got pissed off when I removed the security box from his CD. He thought it was included in the price! She didn’t have to tell the shift manager I was “anti-English” just because I didn’t understand “Jeff Beck, Beck-Ola.”
After a while, when everyone was pretty drunk, a few of them started pulling CDs out of their backpacks and comparing what they’d stolen. The new Alice in Chains. Jean Leloup. The Beatles’ White Album.
Stealing music is like a rite of passage at Stan’s. Everyone does it. First of all, no one likes the owners, Maury and Rosalie Zimmerman. They’re much older, rich and aloof, and never interact with the staff. Maury is the son of the guy who opened Stanley Records, so he acts very self-important, like he’s some kind of legend. If he ever has anything to say to any of the employees—usually a critique of some sort—it’s relayed through the managers. The Zimmermans do not speak to anyone else other than to fire them or interrogate them when one of the tills doesn’t balance.
Also, the security is really lax. If the alarm goes off when someone is leaving at the end of their shift, a manager will give his or her backpack a half-assed search. But the alarm rarely goes off because everyone demagnetizes the CDs before stealing them. Even the managers steal. It’s part of the culture.
Véronique was never interested in stealing CDs. She had a much bigger vision. That night at the St. Regis, she recruited Roger into stealing an entire hockey bag full of CDs straight from the warehouse, which she would sell off. She proposed charging ten bucks a CD, and splitting the earnings evenly with Roger.
The first time they did it, it went off seamlessly. Roger loaded up his hockey bag with the CDs she thought Callahan would like—the Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo, Grateful Dead—and then he left work via the loading dock. Véronique had rented a locker at the Centre Eaton a few streets away, where he stashed the bag. She picked it up later, shoved it in her trunk, and drove to Ottawa the next day.
Callahan bought her entire stash, sold it all right away, and asked for more. He started to put in orders. Smashing Pumpkins, Indigo Girls, Natalie Merchant, Nirvana.
That was two months ago. Now they’re making more money than either of them thought possible at Stanley Records, and it couldn’t be easier. She’s able to give her parents CDs whenever she sees them, which makes them happy. James is happy. Everyone is happy. The best part is Véronique doesn’t feel like she’s fully conceded to James by taking a “real” job; it’s her way of compromising, staying true to herself while doing something to assuage him.
On the news, the injured figure skater is on the ground, swarmed by doctors. Her dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she’s wearing a lacy white figure skating outfit that looks like a doily. She’s clutching her leg and wailing. Apparently her chance of winning gold at the Olympics may now be in jeopardy.
Véronique gets up and goes upstairs for her shift. She’s in a good mood. The new Tribe Called Quest is playing, and her favorite manager is working tonight. After work, she’s going to pick up Roger’s hockey bag from the locker and dump it in her car, which is parked in an all-day lot on President Kennedy. James is taking her to see the Vilain Pingouin concert tonight and then tomorrow morning she heads to Ste. Barbe for a cigarette run, followed by a short trip to Ottawa the next day.
Money is rolling in; her relationship with James is in a calmer place. Occasionally, she experiences a pang of guilt about lying to him, which is usually followed by a deep-seated uncertainty about their future together, but she loves him and she wants to be with him. Some secrets and lies are necessary to keep the peace.