The Ambitious City (18 page)

“But aren’t bikers incredibly territorial?” Williams was looking confused.

“For sure,” Ryan said. “All it would take for sparks to really fly would be a rival biker gang, wearing their colours, showing up without permission.”

“But Hughes wasn’t a biker. Or if he was, his wife didn’t know,” Vertesi said.

“Who’s going to war? DeLillo with ABC, Mancini with McNamara, McNamara with ABC? I’m missing the plot here.” Williams wrote down the rival companies on a notepad, trying to figure out the logic. “They’re all suppliers to the mayor’s project, except DeLillo. McNamara’s costs are higher than ABC’s and Mancini’s, but does that justify a war?”

“Possibly. We need confirmation that a biker gang operates out of Old Soldiers.” MacNeice studied the Photoshopped image of Bermuda Shorts without the hole in his forehead. “But first, Michael, I need you to go ask the Mancinis a few more questions.”

Notably absent were the pleasantries of his first visit. Vertesi was ushered into Alberto Mancini’s office by one of the desk clerks. Alberto didn’t offer his hand this time and waved Vertesi into one of the chairs in front of the desk; his son nodded from where he sat.

Vertesi said, “I appreciate your seeing me again at such short notice.”

“You have a job to do, Michael,” Alberto replied. “How can I help you?”

“I understand Mancini Concrete has a contract with ABC-Grimsby. Is that correct?”

“
Si
.”

“And that you were one of the bidders for the Grimsby quarry before ABC came along and outbid you.”

“I wouldn’t use the word
outbid
. I never saw the ABC bid.”

“Are you suggesting ABC won it unfairly?”

“Not at all, though others might.”

“Can you explain yourself, sir?”

“My father doesn’t have to explain anything to you,” Pat said, shifting in his chair to face Vertesi.

“Please, Patrizio,” Alberto said, looking down at his hands. “We spoke before about optics and politics, Michael. Many people believe ABC won for those reasons.”

“And you don’t?”

“I don’t care to waste my time with it. I wanted the Grimsby site so I would have access to raw materials. When we lost, I made a deal to buy the materials, so I now have what I wanted—access.”

“Where were you buying them before?”

“Orangeville, North Milton, Brampton.”

“Further away.”

“
Si
.”

“Did McNamara try to make the same deal?”

“You’d have to ask McNamara.”

“Is there any connection between Mancini Concrete and a local motorcycle club named Damned Two Deuces?”

“I don’t follow you, son.” Alberto’s hands lifted slightly before falling slowly back to the desk.

“What the hell are you getting at?” Pat demanded, the scar on his chin appearing brighter and angrier.

“I thought you might hire bikers to manage security. Here, for example.” Vertesi waved to include the whole business.

“Why would Pa need bikers to protect us? This isn’t a cash business; there’s nothing here worth stealing.”

Vertesi stayed focused on Alberto. “You’ve heard about the bikers who were found dead in Cayuga?”

Alberto nodded.

“We’ve now linked one of the bodies from the bay to the barn on that farm.”

“Yeah, a concrete crime wave—you’re way outta line.” Pat’s voice was scornful.

“Patrizio, that’s enough.” Alberto’s tone was firm, and his son sat back in the chair. “Michael, we don’t hire bikers. I don’t know any bikers, and no, we’ve never had a security problem.”

He stood then, an Italian-Canadian patriarch secure in his position as a businessman and community leader. “If there are no further questions, I will go home to dinner.”

He waited for Vertesi to stand too, and then accompanied him to the door. Pat Mancini stayed put and said nothing. Alberto shook Vertesi’s hand. “Give my regards to your parents.”

Stepping out of the president’s office, Vertesi noticed that the four men at their desks all had their heads down, pretending to be hard at work. It was clear they’d heard Pat Mancini raise his voice.

Outside on the wooden steps, Vertesi watched the trucks coming into the yard, kicking up dust as they rumbled past him to park side by side near the silos that in the morning would load them up again. He studied the lineup of cars and SUVs in the lot near the fence, their lines softened by concrete dust. Separated from them and covered by a canvas tarpaulin was another vehicle—low and sleek, with fat wheels—Pat Mancini’s car.

He tried to remember when it was that Pat had left the NHL. Almost two years ago. What was it like to follow your glory days of hockey with a job in your father’s concrete yard, shaking dust off the tarp before you climb into your pretty car and cruise downtown?

Still, not many hockey players could say they’d even been to the Big Show. Pat Mancini had. He’d gone in style and played well, and would be playing still if concussions of increasing severity hadn’t made that impossible. After the last one, a renowned neurologist had described his condition graphically in a widely reported interview: “It’s like taking a one-of-a-kind precision
instrument, smacking it five times with a sledgehammer and then expecting it to remain precise. It won’t, and he won’t.”

And so Pat Mancini had come home to Dundurn, welcomed back into the bosom of his family but exiled from the thing he did best.

T
O ANOTHER PERSON
, a dog or even a fly on the wall, the young man in the black helmet might seem odd, lost in conversation with the mirror. But he was completely alone, and to him there was nothing unusual about his habit of addressing himself in the third person. Nor was it the slightest bit strange to him when the mirror spoke back.

He enjoyed breathing inside the helmet; it made him feel invisible—not to be safe but to be dangerous, as if he were Darth Vader. It felt as if there was just him and what he could see—which was everything. Some people wanted a sound system installed in their helmet, but not Billie Dance. He enjoyed the filtered reality of the outside within the controlled world of the helmet. He could say whatever he wanted to say, call people names or laugh at them, and unless he was really loud—which was almost never—no one could hear him. The black helmet was the closest he’d come to realizing his childhood dream—born of hours of playing Dungeons and Dragons—of becoming a knight avenger, out to set things straight.

The only thing he’d lacked before now was a cause worthy of a knight avenger. Well, the truth was, his cause had been there all along, waiting for him even before he was born.

“The demographics of Canada,” he told the mirror, “which were sold to the world as evidence of our happy multicultural society, changed everything.”

“Huh?” the mirror image asked.

“It was like white people—who settled and tamed this country—stopped screwing to have kids in the 1960s, after the pill arrived.” Lifting off the helmet, he studied his face for a moment, admiring the smooth, creamy skin and shiny fair hair of an Anglo-Saxon. “They got fat and complacent; they wanted lots of things, and they wanted someone to clean up after them and do the dirty work. Well, not at first. At first,” he mused, looking down at his distorted reflection in the black bubble’s visor, “they just felt sorry for immigrants of colour, many of whom couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn to speak English—ever. Before long those immigrants had fucked themselves silly and had tons of kids, and the kids went to school to become somebody better than their parents, and then those kids fucked themselves silly to become somebody better than the white Canadians who had taken pity on them in the first place.”

“That’s not right.”

“No, it’s not. It’s truly fucked! It wasn’t until I found demographics …”

“Numbers?”

“Not the stuff you read in
The Economist
—the stuff that drives the stuff you read.”

He had discovered the discipline of demographics in university. Billie Dance was a natural at it. His math scores were always off the charts—he could do division in his head when he was three. But school had always bored Billie, for lots of reasons.

“Gimme one!”

“Well, chess, for instance. Billie was in grade nine when he won the championship for the city, and he missed out on the provincial championships only because he got pneumonia. The absolute best, though, was when he humiliated the vice-principal, who’d been provincial junior champion when he was in grade twelve! He defeated him—crushed him—in three straight sets before the entire chess club … But then, that was only four people, and it’s not like those friendless fuckers were going to tell anyone.”

“Then what happened?”

“Nothing. That was the most challenging thing about high school, and after that he never played chess again. But when he successfully defended his master’s thesis about the changing face of Canada, Billie made a breakthrough. He realized he could put demographics to work.”

“How?”

“Easy. It’s like cream.”

“Cream rises to the top?”

“Sort of. You just keep skimming the cream off the top, because when the best of these people succeed, they get put in charge of companies that fire white Canadians; they get into government and tell us what we can do or not do; they can afford the best houses anywhere they want, but mostly they create these places that don’t even look Canadian—you could be in India or Korea or China.”

“And the numbers, the demographics?”

“Track the past seven decades—I’ve done it—and look where we’re headed.”

“Where?”

“To a place where white people are in deep shit. Take Toronto. You’ve got 150,000 people moving in every year. In four years that’s a number bigger than the population of most Canadian cities. More than half of those people don’t speak English as their first language.

We’re going to be like the English were in India, or Africa, except those weren’t their countries to begin with.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll be forced out, or wiped out. The only way we’ll start screwing again is through intermarriage, and then you know what we’ve got?”

“What?”

“Population demographics won’t matter anymore, because we’ll be one big, muddy grey/pink/brown/yellow blob.”

“A blob.”

“And the history books will be burned. Who needs that shit around about the days when whites ruled? Nobody!”

“What about the Jews? Isn’t this where the Jews come in?”

“That was the problem with Hitler and his band of freaks—they misidentified the problem.
We
are Jews! Don’t you get it?”

“Ah, no.”

“Well, go back to the Bible. Jesus—our guy—was a Jew. Ergo, we’re all descendants of Jews.”

“So we’ve wasted centuries killing Jews.”

“Yup, total waste of time. They are us. That’s a hyphen in
Judeo-Christian
, not a period.”

“Hitler had a cool logo, though.”

“Ours is cooler, not retro like the neo-Nazis’. Ours takes some intelligence to interpret, and that’s what’s missing with the neo-Nazis—they’re dumb as dirt. Now let’s get to work.”

“But shouldn’t we be building a following like the skinheads did?”

“No, no, no! We’re not white trash like them. The Knights Templar began with eight members, eight warrior monks. The order grew to number in the thousands because of their dedication to a code. Shit, just the rumour they were coming and whole towns would clear, like rats running from a fire. We have a code and we
have the dedication. People will follow us, but first we must point the way by deeds, not words.”

Billie pulled his black coveralls over his jeans and T-shirt, put on the black hiking boots and slipped on the backpack with the wide padded strap. Into its Velcro sheath he slid his long blade, securing the hilt just to the left of his ribcage. Finally, and somewhat ceremoniously, he donned the black helmet.

He stood quietly in front of the mirror with his hands at his sides, angling his head to the left and then to the right. He glanced up at the clock—6:14 p.m. “Time to skim some cream!”

His right hand moved so swiftly it was hard to distinguish the downward release of the knife from the upward backhand slash.

“Christ, you’re fast.”

“Christ, I am.”

“Let’s go hunting.”

“We will. Tonight. But first it’s research, the terra firma of demographics.” He put the knife back in the sheath and laid the backpack on the table.

“Skim some cream … you should do a T-shirt of that.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Remember when the nurse spotted you watching her and asked what you were doing? Let’s not make that mistake again.”

“I won’t.”

“Though it was cool the way you just smiled at her.”

“Yeah, it freaked her out. She knew I was coming for her—she just didn’t know when.”

“Weird that she didn’t call Security.”

“They don’t. Demographics, my friend. Most people think they must be mistaken, they’re imagining things, or they don’t want to cause trouble. Then there’s their worst fear …”

“What’s that?”

“They worry that if they’re wrong, it will be so embarrassing.

They don’t want to be humiliated, so they don’t do anything.”

“Human nature, you’re saying.”

“Human. Nature is something else.”

“Huh?”

“You fuck with a wolf, a bear, a hyena, a snake—they don’t hesitate or wonder or worry about making fools of themselves. No, this one is just human—pure and stupid simple.”

A
T
9:42
P.M.
, MacNeice was enjoying a grappa with Marcello when his BlackBerry rang. He looked at the screen, excused himself and stepped out the back door of the restaurant into the laneway. “I’d pretty much given up on hearing from you.”

Her voice was so soft MacNeice covered his other ear. “Mac, I’m coming.”

“Great! How soon can you get here? We need you now, not next week or two weeks from now.”

“I booked the 8:50 a.m. flight to Dundurn Regional for tomorrow morning.”

MacNeice laughed and said, “I’ll have you picked up and brought to Division. You’ll be with us all before lunch tomorrow. And just in case you said yes, Vertesi booked you a room at the Chelsea.”