We started at the Commodore and met up with Leo. The restaurant owner recognized the sketch right away and told them that Lipless was one of “them.” He didn’t want to get too involved and backed away from giving the name, although both Myra and Gerry were convinced he knew. “Sometime,” Leo said slowly, “you must stop at the limit. Keep the mouth shut. But the guy is around. He came here a few times with Boswell, who the Gabriella woman know well. Why you want to know?”
Gerry came up with a suitably bland lie. “My son played soccer with him. He had an accident and is now on welfare. He said this guy owes him a lot of money for buying a car, and he can’t find him anywhere.” It was pretty cool how Gerry could lie on the spot. I understood Myra came by it honestly.
“These guys are bad news,” Leo warned. “They hang out on Rachel in the German pub. Stuttgart, I think. You can find him there. But be careful.”
By the end of the third month my mobility had increased dramatically, but so had my anger. The police had formally registered the case as a break and enter followed by egregious assault. Having finally defined the crime, they pretty much considered the case shut. Apparently cold cases are in vogue, or at least are often the preferred stalemate.
My home insurance paid for the Tissot watch I had lost, $500 in cash, and another $2,600 in property damage, all based on the thoughtful advice and personal audit by Mr. Banks. There was no police record of any suicide attempt, nor any connection made to my short-lived employment and subsequent dismissal at Gabriel-Jacops Enterprise, Inc.
Now, here is what happens when you finally recover from a serious head, face, and ribcage banging: you realize you are no longer the same person. Life is uncontrollably transformed and undergoes a catalytic conversion. A distance is ensured with those others who you have greeted twice a day or night every day for a decade. Those moments of slouching listless in low couches in eventless neighbourhoods, where nothing can be shared with casual acquaintances whose lives are spectacularly useless—all this comes to a dithering finale. Those pubs and restaurants, frequently visited, where butylated hydroxytoluene replaces buffered aspirin as solace, where intrepid fingers draped in transparent gloves mask the ineptitude of amateur fusion chefs to provide a clear-cut savoury flavour, where cooks boil or poach eggs on pasta and give it an Eritrean alias—that life is no longer of consequence. Those immaculate Saturday afternoons staring through finger-stained window panes, sipping coffee slowly, chewing day-old orange-peel-inserted muffins or unduly hard biscotti while reading unproductively—they, too, somehow fade in importance. They are over. You’ve been hit square on the jaw and the clock has started to tick and you better do something before they deliver the fatal blow. There is a choice: either go into hiding, seek another identity, and tuck yourself away like an invisible tortoise under a sunless rock; or plan a series of well-considered events, knocking off a merciless To Do list, one by one, while organizing life around the firm decision to win. In other words, my nerd life was over.
“It’s time to stick it to them,” said Myra, understanding my point. For her, too, it had become personal.
I agreed. I knew my days as a documentarian were over. I could not die as a madman. A suffering documentarian, who would follow a story, then lie down and die in ignominy. Gogol was transformative.
Within a few weeks of my jaw-aching epiphany, the following incident was widely reported in the Montreal police tabloids.
A man with a twisted-and-tucked lip had barely stepped out of the moonlit back door of the tavern on the corner of Rachel when he was approached squarely by a cop with a strange and uncouth beard. He showed him a police badge and in the helium alley light, it could have been a kid’s tin cop badge or a flat knuckle-duster in a leather holder. The young man, who reportedly had serious connections with the Montreal underworld, was told, “Just don’t say a word. Shut up and cooperate. Okay?” The fellow looked to the side and realized another older cop was positioned behind him. “What the fuck!” is all he could say before a sack—at least that’s what it seemed like, but in reality, it was an 817-brand basmati rice jute bag—was slipped over his head and a voice from behind in a distinctly guttural accent said “Say goot bye, now, you useless prig! Your days are numbered. Yes!” He meant to say prick, but it sounded like prig, which made the young thug feel mildly honourable and righteous.
Both cops wore long trench coats and, in some ways, did not seem to be in the greatest shape. The lamplight and the darkness of the alley made this entire operation, carried out at 2 a.m. on a Friday morning, somewhat bizarre. And, as we go along, we shall see that it became increasingly absurd and noteworthy. They handcuffed him, taped his mouth shut, put the basmati rice jute bag over his head, and bundled him into an unmarked van. The driver, according to the man’s later testimony, was a policewoman who chewed gum incessantly and noisily. Like “slap-chack-slap-chack-slap” sound and she would look in the rear view and say, “Shut the fuck up or I’ll blow yer dickhood away!” Slap-chack-slap-chack. The two men informed him they worked for the “Central Montreal Anti-Gang Squad” and flashed their badges intermittently. As stated earlier, one of the cops had an unknown accent, neither French nor English, and both wore nylons on their faces, facts which provided both confusion and grist for the tabloids. Could it be that this new and secret Montreal police tactical program had adopted a shadowy gangster visage in light of the repeated embarrassment they had faced while dealing with student protestors, who had exposed their identities all too easily?
Two days after being picked up, the near-delirious young thug had surrendered to the police after being abandoned, still handcuffed and with the bag on his head, in front of the Snowdon police station, near Décarie Boulevard. A journalist for the local weekly had been given all the details by an anonymous caller. The police, of course, vehemently denied any such squad, or that this was their operation, and claimed to be totally flummoxed. The gangster, however, was so terrified by the incident that he had confessed to a number of gang-style slayings and violent robberies on camera. He stated that during captivity he had made a videotaped confession about a recent break-in and attempted hit commissioned by a well-known Montreal business tycoon. When released, he stated, the tape would result in a contract on his life, so he wanted protection from the Crown and was willing to do anything to get it. The thug’s name was revealed as “Mathieu.”
In the months following that event, I enjoyed one of the best periods of my life. I listened to three-piece bands at various bars and lounges all over Quebec in the company of Gerry Banks, Myra, RK, and my grandmother. Gerry was a jazz fiend and followed the scene with radar scanners. He had a list of shows we had to catch taped to his dashboard, and we’d pile into his vehicle and head to remote bars in Quebec City, Knowlton, Gatineau Park, Alma, Mont Tremblant, and sometimes as far away as Chicoutimi and Jonquière. There was something very family about all this. We had picnics, we stayed in spas, and we took over lonesome bars in remote locations. I recovered very well, so much so that Nat’s absence was a distant thunder roll in the skies, one could say. The music ranged from covers of Thelonius (Blue Monk and Round Midnight), Nat King Cole, Sinatra, and Wes Montgomery, as well as stuff from Cole Porter and Kurt Weill. All this was noted down carefully along the margins of my diary. Yes, noted, but not only.
Icy, snowbound Quebec with towering pine trees and the frozen stillness of brooks in February lay sprawling outside, while inside we enjoyed the keyboard influences of Oliver Jones and Oscar Peterson. Their fond imitators tickled the ivory while we sat around wood fireplaces, ate Quebec lamb, and drank Australian Shiraz—or gulped down Jameson with ice on the side, RK’s favourite. His brogues—why had I never noticed this before?—had steel toes. Yes, he wore a trench coat and a fedora tilted belligerently. Some malice there.
Sometimes we sat outside in a hot tub, all five of us in the middle of a snowbound, deeply forested area. My grandmother, who had never worn a swimsuit before, snuggled up next to RK.
Myra, who was now consistently Myra and not Malia, had transformed into a devastatingly attractive commander of the posse. She was our leader as we stayed in inns, B&Bs, and ski chalets, listening to the music, drinking up a storm, and returning to Montreal planning our ultimate exculpation in the Trois-Pistoles Cold Case. I knew they did it for me.
There were, of course, unexpected complications. There were new procedures to follow, obstacles to overcome. But there was also a concerted and unflagging determination to connect the dots, to get at the full picture of what RK defined, if my memory is correct, as “the dirty, bloody, nefarious, murderous, cynical shenanigans of the rich and the powerful.” He’d light up a cigar, narrow his eyes, and a smile would spread at a crooked angle. Detailed planning mattered in such situations and I had a natural skill to go about it well.
RK died in his sleep, six months to the date after this unsolved incident involving the thug Mathieu was widely reported in the Montreal newspapers, leaving many questions unanswered. I had now been deprived of two comrades.