M
arie showed Claire and me out and we started to walk hand in hand the six blocks back home. Out of curiosity I directed us along a different, slightly circuitous, route, along streets neither of us normally frequented. About halfway home we turned down a narrow, elm-lined street that was strangely dark. That didn’t slow me down much; being an ex-bad guy thug means I’m fairly confident I’m the most dangerous thing standing—at least most of the time.
Halfway down the block there were no street lights at all and sitting on the boulevard was a torn and battered chintz sofa covered in yellow floral pattern cloth. On the sofa was a Caucasian man in his early twenties with a gaunt face and deeply sunken eyes. His hands trembled in the cold and despite the weather he wore a HARD ROCK CAFÉ HONOLULU T-shirt and a pair of unlaced leather work boots—nothing else. From the nearest house came hard rock and too-much bass and glimmers of light from heavily blocked windows.
When we were close I pushed Claire a little behind me and,
when I was two yards away, the man stood up with his hands out to his sides: “Hey man, how much for your …”
He started to laugh somewhat hysterically and changed whatever it was he was going to say. “You got money? I need something real bad.”
I stopped and looked him over. “What do you need?”
“Coke man, snap-CRACK-and fucking pop!” He smiled and I saw teeth rotted black in the almost non-existent light.
He gestured towards the house the music was coming from and I turned slightly to look at a dilapidated brick two-storey house with an expanse of garbage-littered grass in front.
“Hey man, never mind.” His voice was shrill, but as I turned back to the half-naked man, he lowered his voice. Then he leaned towards me before saying something that made me blush: “I got a better idea. How much for …?”
I let him finish the question before shifting weight and kicking him squarely in the testicles. His eyes bulged out and closed and he collapsed face down slowly onto the sidewalk.
Claire looked at me with horror and I gestured with my chin at the house. “… and that, my fine and lovely wife, I believe is a crack house.”
She ignored me and started forward to kneel beside the man. “Why the hell did you kick him?”
I looked around the empty streets and saw no one running so I answered. “He said something very rude.”
“That’s no reason to …”
I told Claire what he had said and she stood up briskly, brushing her hands. “Well. Fine. He deserved it.”
“I felt so.” I took her arm again as we started away, and Claire accidentally-on-purpose managed to kick the semiconscious man hard in the top of the head.
About a hundred yards farther on Claire asked me why I thought it was a crack house.
When I answered I did it slowly, thinking my way through my opinion. “Actually we could more correctly call it a drug house, which is where one goes to buy drugs; crack or regular cocaine, crank or crystal meth, PCP or angel dust, OxyContin or hillbilly heroin and, of course, T’s and R’s, also know as Talwin and Ritalin. In other words, the heavy stuff as opposed to the lighter, fluffier drugs like ecstasy, GHB, cannabis, caffeine, and nicotine.”
Claire made a snorting noise and I kissed her fairly hard and then went on. “Now drug houses are similar to marijuana grow operations in several ways and can be easily identified from the outside. Both suffer from short-term visits from pedestrians and cars, increased vandalism in the area, and increased noise from fights. Both also have untidy exteriors.”
Claire leaned down to pick up a leaf which she idly examined. “I know about grow ops, the cops send us real estate workers warnings all the time to keep our eyes open.”
I nodded. “Sure; however, grow ops generally have residents in attendance for only brief periods of time, they don’t generally allow stoned assholes to hang around. Also, grow ops have garbage like plastic sheeting, bags, and piles of dirt thrown all about outside, none of which I saw back there.”
I made an encouraging noise and Claire kept talking. “And they have garages attached because that’s the best way to bring in the plants. And they cover the windows with paint to hide the lights because they are on all the time. And those windows end up covered with condensation, especially if they’re growing the grass hydroponically. And, lastly, the air around a grow op frequently is redolent of a skunk-like aroma, the fine bouquet of ripening cannabis sativa.”
I looked over at her and was impressed. She went on. “The cops tell us that there is even a nickname down in the lovely US of A for the grass from Winnipeg. They call it Winnipeg Wheelchair Weed because after one hoot you can’t walk.”
“Bravo! I didn’t know that. But that house isn’t a grow op.”
I stared out at the night and thought about how the building had looked. It was two stories high with blank brick walls covered in bold graffiti I could barely read. Graffiti that made me think of the warnings some poisonous snakes carried, black and red friend of Fred, or however it went for Coral snakes. ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ is what all those messages across the way boiled down to.
“Grow ops are one thing, that place is something different.”
Someone would have to do something about that place.
Claire respected my silence all the way home, by which point I was both sulking and jonesing. That was a nasty and extremely selfish combo every doper recognizes as being their main state of being.
Claire looked me over. “What are you thinking about?”
“Crime.”
“You’re sulking. Thinking about crime does not make you sulk; thinking about crime makes you wistful. So why are you sulking?”
“I’m being wistful about drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“Drugs. Being a former user I think about them sometimes.”
Claire didn’t miss a beat. “And you are thinking what regarding drugs?”
I took a deep breath, “I’m thinking about need … ready? Meth, crank, go, zip, cristy, black ice, ice, amp, blue belly, batak, batu kilat, bato, batu, billywhizz, blue funk, boo-ya, boorit cebuano, jib, cankinstein, chachacha, cricri, cube, debbie-tina and crissy, doo-my-lau, fetch, gear, gonzalles, jab, jenny crank program, chalk, jasmine, junk, magic, nazi dope, pieta, quick, quill, project propellant, scante, scooby snax, sha-bang, motivation, spinny, tadow, teena, tish, ugly dust, yaga, yama, and zoom.”
“Are you finished?”
“Yep.”
“Are you going to rationalize now that you’re fixating?”
“What’s to rationalize? Incans chewed coca leaves to survive at high altitudes, the German army used crystal meth to reduce hunger, the British passed out Benzedrine for soldiers on night watches, the Japanese gave their soldiers speed on their way to rape the shit out of Nanking, and the Americans pump up their pilots with dexamphetamines on their way to blow up Canadians in Afghanistan. It’s all the rage; it’s the relentless onslaught of civilization! No point in stopping or slowing. It’s progress!”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s only natural. Forget the brain damage, the psychosis, the weight loss, the panic attacks, the paranoia, the impotence, the facial sores, the bone rot, and the depression.”
“Why forget it?”
“’Cause it feels so good when you’re taking the shit. ’Cause you’re immortal, invulnerable, unstoppable when it’s in your bloodstream. ’Cause it’s the best shit in the world, ever.”
“Uh-huh. Want some?”
“Desperately.”
“Too bad. You can’t have any.”
The words hung there and I started to laugh and everything was better and we headed home.
Inside my house Elena Ramirez, a Winnipeg cop, was sitting at the dining room table cleaning her service pistol on top of a thick pile of old newspapers. At her feet her son, Jacob, an angelic and evil baby, was wrestling with my son Fred, a slightly less angelic fifteen-month-old baby. I think Fred was winning and then Jacob bit him and Fred howled, “’Eater!” and clocked him in the side of the head.
In the back of the house our dog Renfield began to make a godawful racket from where he was locked in the kitchen.
Elena looked up when we came in and finished running the bore-cleaning brush through the disassembled barrel. “Glad to see you guys. Did you have a nice time?”
Elena is West Indian, fairly squat and pretty. She always smells of cinnamon and was the first person in Winnipeg to point a gun at me when Claire and I had arrived that spring. Don’t get me wrong, Elena had every reason to point the gun at me, since I was in the process of being arrested for three murders, but that was then. Now I was her regular babysitter and she was just returning the favour.
Claire answered, “We had a great time, thanks.”
I separated the babies. “And did you search the house and find anything incriminating?”
Elena smiled and it lit up her face. “Tsk-tsk. Of course.”
I moved close to her. “Filthy pig!”
She smiled some more. Her hands flew and she finished reassembling her Smith & Wesson .40 calibre pistol before answering, “Felonious pervert!”
“Dirty, rotten copper!”
“Ne’er-do-well!”
That stopped me. “Ne’er-do-well?”
Elena picked up Jacob. “That’s what my granny used to call people like you.”
“Oh. You bringing over Jake tomorrow, same time?”
“You bet!”
“Claire will be handling them all tomorrow. I have a few things to do.”
Elena bounced Jacob in her arms and he gurgled. “That’s okay, he likes her more anyway.”
With that she left. Claire let our idiot mutt Renfield out into the back yard to pee on things. While she was doing that I put Fred to bed with a sippy cup (which he hated and threw at me) and then I went down to feed our pet mouse who was sitting in his dry aquarium by the dining room table surveying everything with mousish contempt. When Claire let the dog back in he proceeded to race over and jam twenty-four kilos of nose into my ass while baying loudly. I swatted him away and looked at the mouse who looked back with his small black eyes.
Claire linked her arm in mine. “We should really name it.”
“But what?”
The mouse was brown and white with a few small black patches and I considered him for a few seconds while I lowered a small chunk of carrot into his dish. Claire gave my arm a squeeze. “I know; we can call him Thor.”
“Thor?”
Her eyes narrowed and the mouse took the carrot and vanished into the cedar shavings we had covering the bottom of the aquarium. “What’s wrong with Thor?”
“Nothing. Just the other mice will make fun of him.”
Claire shrugged. “I can live with that.”
M
arie picked me up in a loaded Tacoma SUV battlestar masquerading as a car the next morning. Our first stop was at a Tim Horton’s drive-thru for large coffees and six old-style sour cream doughnuts. She was getting her change and I spoke up.
“Do not introduce me to your friends by my real name.”
“Why not?”
I ignored the question and explained that I wanted to be introduced as Seamus Fantomas. She stared at me until someone behind us in the line honked.
“Why?”
“I have no intention of letting anyone know my real name.” I took a bite out of the doughnut and went on. “Also, I’ve never used that particular alias before.”
She expressed outrage over my distrust. When she was finished talking I told her calmly and concisely that I didn’t trust anyone, anytime, anyway. She complained some more and I told her the whole issue was covered in the thieves’ mantra, which forced her to ask, “What’s the thieves’ mantra?”
“There is no honour amongst thieves and two can keep a secret if one is dead.” We were headed south down Pembina Highway and I caught her looking at me out of the corner of her eye.
“That’s kind of grim.”
I went on, “Also no one can tell something to the cops, RCMP, CSIS, FBI, Mossad, the KGB, MI5, or Homeland Security if they don’t know it in the first place.”
She glanced at me and made an amused noise in her throat so I went on, “And you should always consider the abilities of your opponents, what they are capable of doing. Not what they can do.”
She absorbed it silently with a slight smile and I looked at her with more respect. She could listen. After some doughnuts and coffee she asked me who Seamus Fantomas was. I told her that Seamus was Irish for James from the arch-enemy of Sherlock Holmes, James Mycroft. Fantomas was the name of a fictional surrealistic French terrorist from the early 1900’s.
She looked at me oddly after that. “Okay. You’re a strange man, you know that?”
“Yep to both.”
By the time we reached highway 12 heading towards the eastern corner of Manitoba I was feeling more than a little travel sick. Eventually she turned to the right and we vanished into a wall of verdant green. Although it was fall, most of the trees were pines of various types and still a deep and potent green. Shining through the green, however, were chalk-white birch trees that became frames around the other trees. Outside the air was crystal clear and cold and the sky was a pure and unrelenting blue.
I turned to Marie and spoke up, “Tell me about the route again.”
She drove badly and hit most of the bumps along the way, thinking of other things maybe. “What? Oh, the deliveries across the border. Actually …” She turned to me despite driving at 110 kilometres per hour down a poorly graded road, “… we haven’t made any deliveries yet. We’ve convinced the people on the other side set to do the pick up and we have ones on this side to make the deliveries. We just don’t have them working together yet.”
“Ah.” She hadn’t been completely honest with me. No big surprise. No one is ever honest with me; I’m working on getting used to it. I stopped thinking and stared at the trees and the granite rocks whipping by. After a little bit of time and considerable distance she turned again off the road. Now we were on a much narrower road with more of the skeletal poplar and birch trees reaching intertwining branches above the road. The idea of smuggling people didn’t really bother me; they were just bodies shifting back across imaginary and arbitrary lines scratched in the dirt. Despite the propaganda it just wasn’t such a big deal where people ended up. However, governments tended to take such things much more seriously, leading to things like arrest and imprisonment.
At the end of the road there was a sapphire expanse of water and two run-down shacks with split cedar shakes on the roofs. Past them was a wooden dock on floats stretching into the water. There was a tiny beach, but it was mostly grey rocks and pines, scrub oaks, and junipers growing up out of cracks in the rocks themselves. Scattered about on the rocks were eight or nine canoes of various sizes, some metal, some plastic, and even two of birch bark. Tied up to the dock itself were two heavy-duty dark green boats with big outboard engines. From where we were I could see that they were both full of nets and other crap.
The road went on for another twenty metres to a small parking lot between the buildings, but I asked Marie to stop. She did and asked, “Why?”
“Disguise time.”
How to make a scar: take a large/small quantity of scar wax (can be bought at any novelty shop or makeup place; it’s just wax and cotton for texture), mould it into a big, bejesus scar (the uglier the better). Can be stored in a baggie to keep it moist. Apply with spirit glue (also from a novelty shop). How to disguise yourself: apply scar on face (in my case from my right eye down to the corner of my mouth and then down my neck), now wear ugly baseball hat (from a team you don’t like, in my case the Yokohama BayStars with their stupid mascots Hossy and Hossiena dancing), and lastly, glasses (non-corrective ones from a pharmacy). If you wear glasses, use contact lenses.
I’d had all the materials at home, the remainders of a life of crime.
I’d been going through boxes Claire and I had brought from Edmonton and I’d been amazed by what I’d accumulated over the years. Things I’d stored with one friend or another. Items the cops had seized and returned. Clothing that looked like one thing and was another. Things I’d hidden, booby traps of addiction and behaviour the old me had left for the new one.
Some of it I threw away and some I kept; I kept the leather jacket with the cop bullet hole below the shoulder (stopped by a Kevlar vest). That was a memento. And I kept unopened tins of makeup in a hollowed-out book. I threw away a package of syringes and a dried-out stash of magic mushrooms I must have hidden while stoned years before. As I winnowed through the crap I’d gathered over the years I became less and less the thief I had been.
When I was all made up, I turned to Marie and made sure the two paper-wrapped rolls of quarters (my only weapons) were handy in my jean pockets. “Ready.”
“You don’t look like anyone.”
I answered patiently, “The essence of disguise is not to look like myself. Do I look like me?”
“No.”
“There you are then.”
I pulled on a pair of black leather racing gloves (I didn’t want to leave fingerprints) and Marie started to ask me questions. “So where should we …”
Before she could finish I interrupted, “Did you know that Manfred von Richthofen was murdered in Brazil? Beaten to death with iron rods by his daughter’s boyfriends.”
Marie glared at me suspiciously. “Who is …”
“Manfred was a naturalized Brazilian and an engineer. The grandson of Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, who shot down eighty Allied planes before being shot down by an Australian infantryman, a Canadian machine gunner, or a black and white beagle.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. Just something to think about.” She stared at me. When we were both out of the car she looked me over and repeated, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. I don’t want to start this off with preconceived notions. Just show me who you’re working with and what tools you have. Then show me the maps and by then I’ll know what to do.”
“Okay.”
“And think about the Richthofen thing. It might be important.”
She looked at me suspiciously and then led me towards the
nearest shack. It was on a sloping rock, so it was up on stilts to make it level. Leading to the door were three stairs, and then we were in a screened-in porch. Past that was the main room with three doors leading off of it. In the centre of the room were a new wooden table and six chairs. To one side of the table was a kitchenette with a wood-burning stove and an expensive double-door fridge in a dark brown colour. Up near the ceiling and circling the room were stuffed and mounted fish, birds, and small mammals. Around the table were three men drinking coffee and smoking a mixture of tailor-made and hand-rolled cigarettes in silence.
I took it all in.
The men looked up when Marie and I came in. As Marie introduced me I looked the men over and found myself unimpressed.
“Gentlemen, this is Seamus Fantomas. He will be helping us. I will let him introduce himself and describe his qualifications.”
When I spoke I raised my voice slightly and spoke through my nose.
“Gentlemen, nice to meet you all. I am a professional smuggler. I have smuggled American machine guns in the Bere in County Cork for the Republicans, Bulgarian cigarettes across the Adriatic to Bari, South African diamonds across the Namibian border and French champagne and cognac on the champagne run in Belgium.”
They looked at me uncomprehendingly as I went on, “I do not smuggle drugs, however; I disapprove of them; they’re immoral and lead to degeneracy.”
I smiled broadly and went on, “I look forward to working with you.”
The men looked at me with open mouths and I sat down
and Marie brought me a cup of coffee with a slight smile playing on her lips. I went on, as prissy as I could be, “So. Tell me about yourselves. And your plans.”