Miss Montreal (19 page)

We waited thirty minutes, ready to receive and record any conversations Mehrdad had. But he wasn’t speaking to anyone, not yet. Maybe he was seething inside, plotting my demise. Or leaning forward in a chair, his head in his hands, wondering how his plans had degenerated so badly.

Cars drove up to the plaza. People got out and entered the travel agency, the bank, the halal market. One woman went into the carpet store and came out fifteen minutes later with a brochure. If Mehrdad came out of the laneway behind the store, we’d see him feed out onto Côte-Vertu.

Nothing.

“Too bad you couldn’t tap his phone,” Ryan said. “Or hack into his email.”

“I’d need my guy Karl in Toronto for that,” I said. “Or
Jenn, if it wasn’t too heavily encrypted. She’s a lot better at that than I am.”

“You gonna call her, see if she spoke to the old man?”

“I don’t want to push her,” I said. “I’m just thankful she’s involved at all. If I haven’t heard anything by tonight, then maybe.”

“So what now? I’m getting overheated here.”

We had the windows halfway down but the engine was off and without air conditioning, it was stale and humid inside the car. I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty.

At ten-thirty-three, the sphere cam picked up Mehrdad’s voice. He was speaking English, as I’d hoped.

“Let me speak to Mohammed,” we heard him say. Then a pause of about thirty seconds. “It is me,” he said. “Mehrdad. He was here. The one you saw at the market. Him and his gunman.”
Pause
. “No, I didn’t, not a word. I swear to you. No, he thinks it is something else.”
Pause
. “Drugs is what he thinks. Heroin, the idiot.”
Pause
. “I didn’t say it, he did. He said it was easy to bring in drugs with our carpets and I didn’t tell him differently.”
Pause
. “I just told you, they had guns. Or one did. What was I supposed to do? Let him shoot me?”
Pause
. “Yes, he would have, believe me. He wanted to. You have to do something about them. Geller said the RCMP is interested in you. And maybe me.”
Pause
. “Whatever you decide. Otherwise I cannot meet you tomorrow night. If he finds out the truth, we will have very big problems.”
Pause
. “I don’t know which hotel. I will try to find out.”

Pause. Long pause. End of conversation.

We waited another fifteen minutes to see if Mehrdad made another phone call or left the store. He did neither.

“Let’s drive by Mohammed’s place,” I said. “See what it looks like in daylight.”

It was a two-storey building of white brick, part of a small industrial strip on L’Acadie Boulevard north of the elevated highway. We parked in the lot of a large market called Adonis,
whose windows advertised a large selection of products from the Middle East, along with posters for upcoming concerts by performers from Lebanon.

Ryan took the Baby Eagle out of his ankle holster and said, “Do me a favour. Stick this in your pocket just in case.”

“Does it have a safety?”

“On the slide, not the frame, which is the only thing I don’t like about it. But it’s a good piece otherwise.”

“The safety on now?”

“Pull the trigger and tell me.”

“Ryan …”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s on.”

I stuck the gun in the small of my back and pulled my shirttail over it. We got out and walked past the front of Les Importations Homs, the name of the company in gold lettering on the front door. No phone number to go with it. No web address. There was no point in walking in the front door. They knew our faces. Probably our names as well, and whether we liked our hotel bedspreads tucked in or not.

We kept walking past the building, past the next one and the one after that, all three built at the same time: same height, same white brick, same windows in dark brown frames. Same rusty discoloration where eavestroughs had leaked. At the far end of the third building, we turned down a driveway that led to a wide rear lane. We stayed close to the wall in case anyone was at an upper window.

We walked single file past the first building, which housed a clothing manufacturer. Its rear doors were open and two young men were rolling racks of raincoats directly from a loading dock into the back of a half-ton truck. The next building was closed up; nothing going in or out. I looked across the lane at the buildings backing onto the other side. There were fire escapes at their rears. As long as they didn’t belong to businesses that sold guard dogs, we might be able to scale one for a better look.

“Hey,” Ryan said.

“What?”

“There’s his car.” He pointed to a silver Lexus parked nose in at the rear door of the building. “Got your tracker with you?”

“Yes.” I’d pocketed it, hoping to stick it on Mehrdad’s car. But Mohammed’s seemed just as good a bet.

I did a Groucho walk alongside the building, then crouched beside the rear door on the left side and stuck the transponder onto the chassis, away from the muffler. I turned to give Ryan the thumbs-up.

Saw him pulling his gun.

I peered through the windows of the car and saw the back door of Homs swinging open; saw Mohammed exiting with his broken nose taped down and behind him his brother Faisal, wearing a neck brace. If he got to the driver’s side door, he’d stumble over me.

Ryan’s gun spat a bullet that hit the bricks right above Mohammed’s head. He jerked back in surprise, swivelling his head around to see where the shot had come from. A second bullet hit the glass of the open door and it shattered, crashing to the pavement in sheets and shards. Both men stumbled backwards into the building. A hand reached out and pulled the door shut. I yanked the Baby Eagle out of my waistband, thumbed off the safety and started backing up away from the car close to the wall, as low as I could get. I saw a hand come through the door where the glass had been, the hand gripping a gun. The muzzle flashed and the sound roared through the empty space around us; no suppressor on it. Ryan fired again. So did I, not trying to hit anyone, just letting them know we had more than one angle on them. The hand withdrew, giving me a chance to sprint for the alcove where Ryan stood.

I heard a door open in the building behind us, then heard it slam shut just as fast. I guess the sight of two men with guns convinced the person to stay out of whatever was going on.

“Time to go,” Ryan said.

“Right behind you.”

We backed out of the laneway, jogged around to the street and walked quickly up L’Acadie, watching the front of Homs to see if anyone came out that way. No one did. Two minutes later, we were in the car, driving south toward downtown. No one followed us this time. No cop pulled us over.

“When you fired,” Ryan said, “you weren’t trying to hit anyone, right?”

“No.”

“In which case you did good. Now we can follow this douchebag wherever he goes.”

“The beauty of it is we don’t have to,” I said. “We can keep our distance and the tracker will do it for us.”

“And take us to the meeting with the rug seller tomorrow.”

“Assuming that’s still on.”

“And that Mohammed takes his own car.”

“True.”

“So you really don’t think it’s heroin?”

“No.”

“Any other ideas what it might be?”

“I might have one.”

“You gonna share?”

“The intelligence officer I spoke to this morning told me something interesting about the Haddad family.”

“What?”

“Why they had to leave Syria.”

W
e had a late lunch at a Chinese noodle joint on St-Laurent, just north of Ste-Catherine. I had a large soup with barbecued duck and greens; Ryan went for Singapore noodles. Funny dishes to order with the day growing hotter and more humid, but we both inhaled them like we hadn’t eaten in days.

I guess browbeating people and threatening their lives is harder work than it seems.

In between slurps and lip-smacks, I told Ryan what I’d learned from Aubrey Hamilton about the Haddad family, how they’d left their home country to come to Montreal once the Alawite regime had taken hold. “After 1970, they didn’t like their chances,” I said.

“But Sunnis were still the majority, you said.”

“I guess it didn’t count for much.”

“And you think the situation there now, this uprising or whatever—they’re trying to get involved somehow?”

“I’m not sure what I think. Maybe I’m overthinking it, not believing what Mehrdad said about heroin.”

“For the record, I didn’t believe him either.”

“No?”

“It’s like, the second you mentioned it, he jumped at it like you’d thrown him a lifeline.”

“So I come back to my original question. What else are they hiding? What brings an Afghan and a Syrian together?”

“If it ain’t dope, gambling or girls,” he said, “my money is on guns. Big ones.”

“Which might be why the RCMP is watching them.”

“The Afghan could be bringing them in. That fucking country, there’s definitely no shortage. I know a guy who served over there, he said guns went missing from the Canadian army bases by the dozens. And not side arms neither. Assault rifles, I’m talking.”

“Mehrdad could be importing them with his rugs and selling them to Mohammed, who turns them around and sends them home.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to send them direct from Afghanistan to Syria? My geography isn’t shit hot, but they’re kind of in the same part of the world, no?”

“You’d have to go through Iran,” I said. “Which doesn’t necessarily support a regime change. And then Iraq, where the Americans would probably intercept them. It might actually be easier for one established company in good old Canada to bring them in and for another to ship them out.”

“I don’t think they were at the store,” Ryan said. “Gun oil has a particular smell.”

“Sharing a hotel room with you made that clear.”

“So this other warehouse Mehrdad talked about—where is it again?”

“Brossard.”

“Which is where?”

“The South Shore. Over the Champlain Bridge.”

We were walking back to the car when Holly Napier called. “I was wondering …,” she said.

“Yes?”

“If you wanted to meet tomorrow night.”

I thought about the meeting that Mehrdad and Mohammed might be keeping, that Ryan and I would be watching. Listening to. Maybe breaking in on.

“I might be working pretty late,” I said.

“So will I. I’m covering the concert at Parc Maisonneuve and I’ll be there at least until eleven.”

It sounded good, assuming I was still in one piece at night’s end.

“Did you have somewhere in mind?” I asked.

“My place.”

“Where’s that?”

“You know Westmount at all?”

“I was at RCMP headquarters today.”

“That’s what we’d call lower Westmount. Where I am is lowest Westmount, just above the expressway.”

“What street?”

“Stayner.”

I said, “Shit.”

“What?”

Stayner was a name I’d grown to hate in Boston: a world-class surgeon who turned out to be a no-class citizen.

“Nothing. Just a negative association.”

“Tell me about it when I see you. Maybe I can turn it positive. Say midnight if it’s not too late? Unless you want to find me at the concert.”

“Among a hundred thousand people?”

“I’ll be near the stage,” she said. “There’s a holding pen there for journalists. I can put your name on the accredited list.”

“That would be great.”

“The Fête always is.”

More than ever, I wished Jenn were with us. She’d have teased me the minute I hung up, noodged me, provoked me about making a date in the middle of a case.
“Someone’s
getting some tonight,” she’d
have cooed with a crooked grin. She’d have rhymed
Jonah
with
boner
or something equally juvenile because that’s what brothers and sisters do, and she is and always will be the sister I never had.

Ryan just looked at me when I got off the phone and said, “What now? Back to the hotel?”

“Let’s try Sammy’s again,” I said. “Ask if anyone saw a silver Lexus that night.”

It took us most of the late afternoon and evening to determine that none of Sammy’s neighbours whose windows faced onto the laneway at the rear had seen a Lexus the night he was killed, silver or otherwise. Most hadn’t seen anything at all; they’d been sleeping at that ungodly hour. His upstairs neighbours had been out of town that night and had nothing to add.

Only one confessed to having been awake, an actor named Eric Thorn who’d been performing that night in Centaur Theatre’s revival of
The Threepenny Opera
. He lived in a top-floor flat two buildings over.

“The cast all went out for drinks after the show,” he said. “I got home around two, but I was too wired to sleep, so I was going over the opening number. I play the street singer, the one who sings ‘Mack the Knife,’ and I was still trying to find the right edge. A little before three, I heard knocking out front, and I went to the window. Saw a police car at the curb, a couple of cops at Sammy Adler’s door.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Sure. He liked theatre, I liked his columns. We’d shoot the shit sometimes coming and going. Two Anglos, talking about how both our audiences were getting older and smaller. So many young people leave Montreal. At least the ones that come to English theatre.”

“What else did you see that night?”

“Well, I was a little worried at first, wondering what brought the police to Sammy’s door. But they left—I don’t
know, about ten minutes after they got there and everything got quiet again, so I figured he was okay. But then …”

“What?”

“I thought I heard knocking again, maybe five minutes later. Not as loud, though. I went back to the window but there was nothing there. The street was dead quiet. No cop cars or anyone else.”

“Don’t suppose you looked out the back,” Ryan said.

“As a matter of fact, I did. I grow tomatoes and basil on the deck out there and the raccoons and squirrels get into it. Even people’s cats. I thought maybe the sound I’d heard was coming from there so I opened the back door and checked. But there were no animals. None I could see.”