Montreal Noir

Journal of an Obsession by Johanne Seymour

Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef

Plateau Mont-Royal

I’ve always been afraid of the void: a black hole, an empty glass, a vacant heart, a blank page... I have no confidence in the metaphysical platitude that the universe is allergic to vacuums and needs to fill the holes. I fear emptiness more than death itself. In my case, that’s saying something.

Every inch of my apartment is taken up. Wherever my gaze falls, there’s something interesting to look at — paintings, books, side tables, lamps, empty wine bottles. I hoard so that I am never without.

I live on the ground floor of a building in the Plateau Mont-Royal. In the summer, my backyard abounds with all sorts of plants and wildflowers. In the winter, I keep the curtains closed.

I have mistresses, one for each day of the week, and a few I cultivate for special occasions. I have many friends who fill the quiet moments — men, women, even children. I’m only alone when I write, and even then I’m not so alone; I have my characters to keep me company.

I’ve managed to control my obsession.

Until now.

I write in a popular café in the neighborhood, not because it’s trendy, but because it’s always crammed with people. I go early in the morning, sit at my usual table in the back, and stay until late in the afternoon. The owners tolerate me because I’m fairly well-known — they think I attract customers.

On one such day, I ordered a large latte and settled down at my table. I scanned the room as I plugged my laptop charger into the wall outlet. As usual, the assorted species of bobos and hipsters lined up along the counter to order their morning fix, while lumbersexuals wolfed down huge breakfast sandwiches as if they were actually going to spend the day chopping wood. That’s the Plateau, for you — you’re an artist, even when you’re not. After I’d scanned the crowded café, I was ready to concentrate on my work. But then I saw him, the man who would lead me to my demise.

He was roughly fifteen years my junior, a handsome man, slender yet muscular, though I doubted he worked out much; he seemed naturally fit. He smiled at whoever would look at him, confident as he strode through the shop. I noticed he was carrying a laptop.

He sat down at a small table in front of the café. I wondered how he managed to find an available seat at this hour — the shop was swarming with customers. The barista, who normally stayed behind the counter at all costs, went over to the man and took his order, removing a small Reserved card from his table. I nearly choked on my coffee.

He took out his laptop and plugged it into the wall. Like me, he scanned the room before beginning his work. Who is he? I wondered. A lawyer? An architect? Is he answering e-mails? Playing around on Facebook or Twitter? One thing was for sure — he had a lot to write. The sound of his fingers clacking keys exasperated me. You’d have thought he was a keyboard virtuoso, the Mozart of word processing.

“Is everything all right, sir? Would you like a glass of water?”

I was sweating in streams, which is probably why the waitress stood before me, a concerned look on her face.

“No, no. I’m fine.”

“Can I get you anything?” she asked impatiently.

“Another latte?”

She turned and walked back behind the counter, but not before I glimpsed the disappointment on her face. Would she prefer I free up the table? My table? The one I had occupied every day since the café opened?

Panic stung my chest.

I tried to tell myself that my imagination was taking me for another ride, but I couldn’t help but think the worst. Would I have to find another café to write in? While in every other part of my life I’d set up escape routes, detours, emergency exits, here I felt totally unprepared.

“You okay?”

Mozart stood beside my table, staring at me. With a superhuman effort to not make eye contact, I said, “Yes, thank you. It’s nothing.”

I thought he’d go back to his spot at the front of the café, but he didn’t budge. I finally looked up at him.

“You don’t remember me?”

“No. I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sorry for anything. Why did I say that?

“Well, it’s true that there were a number of us taking your seminar.”

A writer!

“What can I do for you?” I asked. “I should warn you, I don’t read other people’s manuscripts.”

Mozart smiled. “Don’t worry. I just wanted to say hello.”

Then he went back to his table and started clacking away on his keyboard, as if his fingers had a life independent of his brain, or a direct connection to it.

The waitress set my second latte on the table.

“You sure you’re okay?” she asked. “Something to eat, perhaps?”

Determined not to abandon my post, I said, “I’ll have your lumberjack special.”

She turned and walked away, and again I felt that she’d prefer I gulp down my coffee and get out of there.

I couldn’t understand how I’d become persona non grata overnight. I’d never caused a scene at the café (well, once, but a long time ago), and my reputation maintained a pleasant status quo amongst my peers. So why did I suddenly feel like a leper?

I knew I was getting carried away. I attributed my state of mind to my usual paranoia, and tried to concentrate on my writing.

When I was starting out as a writer, I made a habit of rereading, each morning, whatever I’d written several days before. I thought of this as a kind of warm-up. And so I read over the twenty pages I had written in the last five days. A smile of satisfaction spread over my face. It was good. Very good. Excellent, even. Probably the best thing I’d ever written. My swan song.

The thought paralyzed me.

Was it a sign? Was I going to die? Was that what had colored this day from the very beginning? A presentiment of my imminent death? I shook myself out of it. I wouldn’t give into paranoia. Why couldn’t I write something exceptional without thinking I’d die because of it? I took a deep breath and read the pages once more. I was so moved that I could hardly believe I’d written these lines. Finally, I was writing the novel that would catapult me to fame, that would be my ticket to the hall of literary heroes, alongside Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, Kerouac...

I placed my fingertips on the keys, ready to hear myself make the inspired clacking sound. I waited for the word that would prompt the avalanche, the inspired thought that would break the dam. Seconds passed, then minutes. Nothing. Not a single idea. No matter how many times I reread those lines, my thoughts stopped with the final period. Then, emptiness. An infinite void. Brain death. The café had fallen silent. All that could be heard was the sound of Mozart’s fingers tapping away on his keyboard as if he were performing the “Minute Waltz.”

It was intolerable.

My fingers were frozen in a grotesque position above my laptop while his were flying over the keys, light, bouncing, inspired. But who was this Mozart? He’d stolen my barista, my status as shop master, and now he was keeping all the muses for himself! He chose this moment to close his computer, walk up to the cashier, pay, and leave the café.

I should have taken a deep breath and let him go. But what can I say? I was panicked. I was about to crank out the novel of my career until this nobody, this poor man’s Mozart, came and ran off with my inspiration. I packed up my things in a hurry, threw a few coins on the table, and left.

I didn’t know what I had in mind, going out after him. I’d acted without thinking, gripped by panic, a sudden impulse. What was I supposed to do now that I was out on the street? The wind had risen, and a fine, icy rain swept over the sidewalk of Rue Mont-Royal. The autumn, crueler than usual, was making us pay for the splendid summer we’d had.

Mozart had turned right after leaving the café. I decided to follow him. After all, he was headed in the direction of my apartment.

I was not dressed warmly enough, and shivered as the rain soaked through my clothes. The café was nearly ten blocks west from where I lived on Rue Marquette. It would be fifteen minutes or so before I was back in my warm apartment, which would be more than enough time to observe Mozart, if I didn’t die of pneumonia first.

I quickly noticed the similarities between us. We walked with the same long strides, collar raised, hugging our computers to our chests. And we shared that dumb superstition about avoiding sidewalk cracks, which gave a jolting quality to our gait. Long strides punctuated by quick, jerky steps.

I felt myself come back to my senses, my anxiety dissipating. I began breathing freely again. My fear of dying or being unable to finish my novel vanished from my mind. I even felt like laughing as I realized how convinced I’d been that Mozart had stolen my inspiration. What idiocy! I lectured myself silently: I know what’s going on with you. You’re getting old and you’re afraid. Afraid to die without writing a great novel. Afraid that your readers will abandon you for a younger, more audacious, more talented writer...

Mozart kept walking along, innocent, not suspecting he was the object of my scrutiny. I congratulated myself on my honest self-examination. I was pushing fifty and I clearly felt threatened by this young author; it was the way these things went. I simply had to learn to control myself. Remind myself that I was of an age to write a masterpiece, while he was of an age to commit novice mistakes. The thought made me smile, and I now felt for this Mozart. He would be flayed alive by critics, as we all are at one point or another, and his pride would make him pay dearly for it. I knew a thing or two about that.

Even as the weather worsened, my mood improved. Tomorrow, everything would return to normal. I would go back to the café, sit at my usual table, and continue writing my masterpiece. I even wondered if I should run up and say a few words to Mozart before he disappeared down Rue Mont-Royal. I had been rude to him, after all. I was about to sprint ahead when I saw him turn right onto my street.

I had never seen him on my block before. He’d never set foot there, I was sure of it. Why was he heading in that direction, today of all days? My heart pounded as I watched him from afar. I nearly fainted when I saw him stop in front of my apartment building. My hands were clammy and I felt short of breath. He hesitated, then stepped forward and rang my neighbor’s doorbell. I stood paralyzed, right in the middle of the sidewalk. At any moment, he could have turned his head and seen me. But the door seemed to open itself then, and he disappeared inside. In that moment I found my legs again, and ran until I reached my door. After a few attempts, I managed to insert my trembling key into the lock and turn it. As soon as I stepped inside, I closed and double-locked the door.

I was overwhelmed by contradictory feelings. Mozart terrified, enraged, and thrilled me. I hadn’t felt so alive in a long time. Or so crazy, either. I was obsessing over a stranger. Some of my own characters had been locked up for less erratic behavior.

I took a cold shower and holed up in my room. Like everywhere in my apartment, the space was cluttered with objects. In the bedroom’s case, books. The four walls were covered with books, and there was even a book motif painted on the wooden pillars of my bed. A writer in his nest. I turned off all the lights, except for a small lamp I always left on, a comforting presence in the dark. I’d had the good idea of taking a tranquilizer before my shower, and so when I rested my head on my pillow, I fell right to sleep.

At first I felt a slow rocking sensation, nearly imperceptible, then an intense wave of vertigo that would have thrown me to the ground if I hadn’t gripped the edge of the bed until my knuckles turned white. What was this? What was happening to me? I wanted to scream; my mouth opened in horror, but no sound escaped. I was at the center of a universe that was splitting into innumerable fragments. Millions of particles spiraled around me. I felt hell’s funnel swallow me whole, but then I understood that it was me, with my mouth agape, inhaling the world. I was a black hole. An unfathomable void.

Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Aaaaah!

I screamed and screamed. Sitting straight up in my bed, covered in sweat from head to toe, I couldn’t get a grip. The world around me had returned to its original form, but the nightmare kept playing out in my mind. I felt as if I were imploding. My physical self was dissolving, being sucked up by my inner void. Soon there would be nothing left of me but a gelatinous puddle of ectoplasm on my bedsheets.

I heard a loud, booming laugh through the wall separating my bedroom from my neighbor’s apartment. Panting, I listened carefully. My neighbor had never laughed like that, never made a sound that reached my apartment. I lived next door to a tiny woman, discreet as a shadow. And yet this laugh... Mozart’s face surfaced from the depths of my memory. I remembered now. He was at my neighbor’s. Was he the one with this grotesque laugh? What did he find so amusing? The idea that Mozart was laughing at my expense slowly took shape in my mind.

Enough with this Mozart! I shook myself.

But the poisonous thoughts had already begun to do their work. My anxiety gave way to a rising tide of bile that formed in my throat. A wave of rage came over me, so intense and powerful that even Mozart would have found it difficult to recognize me. I was in a state of complete self-defense. I would not let this man destroy my life.

I got up and went to the kitchen, where I started digging through the cupboards in search of a flashlight. Once I’d found one, I crept close to the back door, intending to spy on my neighbor. The night was pitch black, and no light filtered through her kitchen window. I approached the French doors of the dining room that opened into the garden. Everything was black. No human activity was visible. My bare feet were freezing on my neighbor’s courtyard floor. I wore nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. I was starting to have serious doubts about the legitimacy of my expedition, when I saw a shadow looming at the back of the dining room. I heard Mozart’s delirious laugh once again. That was all it took. I charged at the door and knocked furiously until someone opened.

A harsh light erupted from the dining room, and for a few seconds I couldn’t see anything at all. Then Mozart appeared in the doorway, pulling his bathrobe tight around himself, a terrified look on his face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, like a scared little mouse.

He stumbled to the ground as I forced my way inside.

I dashed toward the front of the apartment, where the living room and the bedroom were. Where was my neighbor? She had invited the devil in, she would have to get rid of him.

“What are you looking for?” Mozart asked, standing up with difficulty.

I wasn’t going to reward him with a response. Who did he think he was? He had invaded my life. I was now an occupied territory, and had the right to defend myself. I hadn’t spent all these years struggling to achieve modest literary status just to let some cocky young kid oust me without putting up a fight.

“You’re not acting like yourself,” he said wearily, following me into the living room. “You’re worrying me.”

We were strangers! How dare he judge my state of mind! And his head? Cocked on the side like a dog, questioning my presence in the house? Questioning my very existence!

I leaped at him, my flashlight brandished in the air. I remember hearing my neighbor in that instance, but her screams only echoed those of Mozart’s as I hit him with the flashlight. He didn’t budge. His stillness enraged me even more, so I hit him again. And again.

My neighbor kept screaming. “What are you doing? Stop!”

The room began to spin. I didn’t understand why Mozart wasn’t falling under my blows. Then, suddenly, he exploded into a million pieces, just like in my nightmare. And I saw my neighbor gripping my arm. She wouldn’t let me go. I was afraid she would pull me away with her into the spiral.

Then there was nothing.

No sound. No image. Darkness. The great void.

When the authorities arrived, they found my neighbor unconscious on the floor, and me lying motionless at her side, half-dressed, my bloody flashlight in hand. There was no trace of Mozart. Despite my pleas of innocence I was later declared unfit to stand trial and placed in an institution. Mozart had disappeared in the night; the authorities did not believe he even existed.

But he did. And these words are my written testimony...

From far away, he heard the sound of someone clapping their hands. Who would dare to bother him while he was writing?

“Are you still there?”

He groaned.

“You were telling me that it started...”

He raised his eyes.

“...when you began writing your magnum opus.”

He screamed.

Two large male nurses grabbed him by the shoulders, and one stuck a needle in his arm. Before he lost consciousness, he heard the doctor say: “His hallucinations are almost constant now. I’m afraid his condition is irreversible. He will never leave this institution.”

The older of the two nurses gripped the handles of the wheelchair and started pushing him out of the office.

“What is he doing with his fingers?” asked the younger nurse who had just started working at the hospital.

“He’s typing on an imaginary keyboard. He spends his days writing stories that will never see the light of day.”

The nurse looked stunned. “Why?”

“The man is a well-known novelist who has always struggled maintaining his sanity,” intervened the doctor. “He was my patient long before his collapse. I thought I could control his illness with medication, but...” he paused almost theatrically, “one night, in a moment of delirium, he broke into his neighbor’s home and attacked her. Luckily she survived; she said that he mistook her for someone else.”

“What do you think pushed him over the edge?”

“I think the lack of inspiration drove him crazy.”

“I guess we can’t all be Shakespeares like you, doc!” The nurse pointed to the doctor’s crowded bookshelves.

“Indeed, I’m fortunate to be able to pursue two careers successfully.”

The young nurse approached the wall of books. “May I?”

The man nodded.

The nurse grabbed a book and read the blurb printed on the cover flap: “Claude Chopin took the literary landscape by storm, eliminating his predecessors along his path. Wow! Is that so, doc?”

Dr. Chopin smiled. The critics had never been so right.

The Sin Eaters by Melissa Yi

Côte-des-Neiges

I didn’t trust guys who were too good-looking.

Strange, since I was sitting to the right of a rather fantastic-looking patient at that moment. He had carefully combed dirty-blond hair, high cheekbones, and very white skin. Beautiful, but he gave me the creeps. He was perched on the edge of the bed with his legs and hands crossed, gazing steadily at the plastic surgeon.

Dr. Mendelson didn’t seem to notice anything. “This is Hope Sze,” he told the patient, waving at me. “She’s a resident doctor, but she won’t bother you.” He flipped through the patient’s chart, glancing at the before pictures, a big element in plastic surgery. “You’re healing well. Lift your chin up.”

I was a first-year resident finishing my palliative care rotation, but I was spending a day on plastics at Montreal’s Samuel G. Wasserman Jewish Hospital, just for the heck of it. I didn’t get to see aesthetic patients very often, because they pay privately, and don’t want students descending upon them, but Dr. Mendelson said I could shadow him if I promised not to touch anyone, speak, or practically breathe. Dr. Mendelson was a gnome of a guy, with a deeply furrowed brow and a rumpled white lab coat. He was not exactly the kind of person you’d pick out of a lineup to perform plastic surgery.

This patient’s before picture didn’t seem all that different than what he looked like now. He’d paid for cheek implants and Botox, even though he was twenty-two years old, only five years younger than I was. The implants did give a foxlike sharpness to his features. As I assessed his new cheeks, his green eyes fixated on me in an uncomfortable way.

Dr. Mendelson took another picture and said, “Could you stand by the window? The light is better.”

The patient posed with such alacrity that I figured he was either a model or a wannabe model. Dr. Mendelson snapped some frontal and side pictures, and the patient leaned forward to check his own image on the back of the SLR camera. “That’s the best one,” he said, pointing a thin, pale-skinned finger. He was glaring at the camera, which fit in with the fuck you image that most advertisements project nowadays. “Can I get a copy? You can e-mail it to me, or put it on Tumblr.” His voice was high and thin, not as striking as his appearance.

I wondered what he did for money to afford plastic surgery at such a young age. Maybe it was just the bank of Mom and Dad. I wanted to ask him about his work, but since I was forbidden to speak, I glanced at his chart. His name was Raymond Pascal Gusarov. He was a Scorpio like me — not that it mattered — and we’d both recently had our birthdays. In fact — I took a quick look — he’d had surgery on his birthday, November 14, which seemed strange to me. Yay, I turned twenty-two. Better have someone cut my face open.

I’ve never been a big fan of plastic surgery. I just hope my Asian genes will protect me from the ravages of time.

“I don’t put patient photos online because of confidentiality,” said Dr. Mendelson, scribbling in the chart without looking up.

“I want it,” said Raymond Pascal Gusarov, in a way that made me think he wasn’t used to being denied.

Dr. Mendelson grunted. “I’ll have copies made and leave them with my secretary.”

“At least 300 dpi, so I can use them,” said Raymond.

“Only the best for you,” Dr. Mendelson replied indifferently. He held the door open. “You can pay the secretary for them when you pick them up.”

Raymond cut ahead of me and offered the doctor his hand. “Thank you, Dr. Mendelson. I appreciate it.”

Dr. Mendelson squinted at him. The light blinked off his glasses as he shook the patient’s hand. “My pleasure.” The doctor waved me through ahead of Raymond. I stepped up, because if the doctor’s asking you to do something, you can’t let a patient beat you to it. Twice.

The thought of Raymond Pascal Gusarov nagged at me for the rest of the day. I didn’t know why. Most of the aesthetic patients are trim, fit, and obviously very conscious of their appearance. When Dr. Mendelson asked a young mother if she weighed a hundred pounds, she sniffed and said, “Please! Ninety-five!”

Raymond Pascal Gusarov’s fox face seemed to follow me home as I hurried down Côte-des-Neiges, past Saint Joseph’s Hospital. Even though I was surrounded by people spilling off the blue-and-white STCUM buses, groceries hooked on their arms, walking into businesses hung with tinsel and Christmas lights, I found myself checking over my shoulder, deliberately ignoring the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery as I turned right and huffed myself halfway up the hill to my apartment. My grandmother hates that my new address overlooks a graveyard, despite my fancy digs and twenty-four-hour security guard.

I felt slightly better after I locked the door behind me. As soon as I kicked off my boots and dropped my backpack onto the hardwood floor, I googled Raymond Pascal Gusarov. He came up right away.

The same green eyes stared out at me from a dozen different shots. Some of them were black-and-white, most of them color, nearly all of them professionally photographed. He looked younger in some of them, with a rounder face. Less fox, more chicken. But he never looked innocent.

He was on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. He had a fan page on Facebook with only seventy-seven likes. Even from our brief encounter, I figured it would really bother Raymond Pascal Gusarov that he wasn’t more popular.

I scrolled through his fan page. He frequently posted pictures and videos of himself, little messages that I didn’t want to think too much about, like: I’M DOWNTOWN, BITCHESS!!!! Cum & C me.

My phone buzzed with a message from Ryan Wu: What’s up?

I had to smile. Ryan had just given me the world’s most beautiful iPhone for my birthday. I couldn’t look at it or touch it without thinking of him, which was probably what he had in mind.

I texted back: I’m looking something up.

Work?

Sort of. I didn’t want to text anything else, because I’d just caught my third murderer, and Ryan thought that I should hightail it out of Montreal and join him in dull but safe Ottawa.

Ryan was calling now. I rolled my eyes before I tapped the green key to answer the phone. He knew me too well. “Hey, babe.”

“Are you on another case?”

“Not officially.”

His voice tightened. “I thought you were going to avoid those.”

I didn’t answer for a second.

“Right?” said Ryan.

“I’m just looking something up on the computer. I’m not getting strangled or anything like that.”

“For once,” he muttered, which I chose to ignore. “What are you looking up?”

I couldn’t tell him without breaking patient confidentiality, but Ryan is a computer whiz — he could be so useful on this. “Let’s say that I have someone that I want to look up online. How would I find more information?”

“What have you got right now?”

“Some Google images, his Facebook and Twitter accounts, plus a pretty website with some contact information.”

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It just feels fishy to me.”

“You want me to do it?”

“I can’t tell you his name.”

“Okay. So what do you want to know?”

“I want to know more about this guy. I want to know where he lives, and if he’s doing anything questionable.”

I could practically feel him thinking through the phone. Ryan has a fairly massive brain, not to mention a long, lean runner’s build, and — don’t get me started. “You might try looking at the Exif,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The Exchangable Image File Format. I’ll send you some information about it. It not only stores the file format, it tells you the time, date, and GPS coordinates of where the picture was posted.”

You mean you could Snapchat a naughty picture of yourself, and freaks could figure out where you lived? I ignored the niggling voice at the back of my head saying, Isn’t this an invasion of privacy? Are you violating the Hippocratic Oath? Huh, freak?

Instead, I scanned and clicked the various articles Ryan sent me. “This isn’t illegal, though, right?”

He laughed. “How is information illegal?”

Oh, Ryan. He was so innocent sometimes. I told him I couldn’t wait to see him on Sunday, and hung up the phone.

Long-distance relationships officially suck.

I’ve never been a huge computer person. I like them, I use them, but I can’t make them sit up and purr the way Ryan does. So I was pretty excited when I started tracking down Raymond’s locations — mostly downtown and East Montreal, a few in the Plateau. Never Côte-des-Neiges where I lived. Phew. Because of its three hospitals and one university, my neighborhood’s got a lot of students and immigrants, as Mireille, another resident, put it.

I turned back to Raymond Pascal Gusarov’s social media accounts. I clicked on a few links he’d recommended, links that recommended other links, that recommended still more links, most of which were posts by users named TearsOfAClown and Heart’s Blood.

TearsOfAClown had posted pictures of gerbils, hamsters, and other fuzzy animals. Strange. I would’ve guessed that Raymond Pascal Gusarov didn’t love other living things as much as himself. Maybe I was totally wrong about him. Except TearsOfAClown started posting more photos. One hamster was clearly dead, its little body lying stiffly on its side.

In the next new photo, another hamster posed with a tiny chainsaw over the dead hamster.

My heart thudded. What the heck? Was this Photoshop? I couldn’t tell. I’ve got no skills like that.

In the third photo, the dead hamster was decapitated. Its small golden head was sitting on the ground, severed side down, eyes closed, while the chainsaw hamster stood above it, wearing a miniature face mask.

More photos. More decapitated hamsters. The murdering hamster seemed to wink as it held its little chainsaw aloft.

Some of those hamsters, I’m pretty sure, had been alive up until the moment their necks had been cut.

Oh. Em. Gee.

What could I do about this? I thought this guy was as nutballs as you could get, but could we arrest him for cruelty to animals?

So far, I’d only put away people who’d killed other people. I could call the Humane Society, of course, but what if he said the animals were already dead? What if he claimed it was art? I felt sick.

Before attending medical school, my undergraduate literature class had read “The Sin Eater” by Margaret Atwood. Atwood correlated modern doctors with eighteenth-century sin eaters, who used to consume food and drink placed on a deceased body, theoretically absorbing the dead’s sins so that he or she could ascend to heaven while the sin eater got a square meal. For a few days, I wandered around thinking, Atwood’s right; why am I applying to med school, anyway?

Finally, I decided, So what. Sins are interesting. I made my peace with it. But sometimes I wondered, especially when I ended up confronting this level of insanity, if I had made the wrong choice. Not only was I absorbing the sins of the sick, but I was actively seeking out deranged murderers.

I took a deep breath. My phone buzzed again. This time it was Dr. John Tucker: Yo yo yo, he wrote.

Hi, I wrote back. If I ever needed Tucker’s silliness, it was now. Even though talking to him on this phone vaguely seemed like cheating. Again, maybe that was Ryan’s point, since there was little love lost between him and Tucker.

What’s wrong?

Again, Tucker seemed to know me too well. How could he tell, through a text? I’m looking at something disturbing.

Ryan? JK.

I rolled my eyes, as if he could see me in my white-walled apartment.

Are you on another case?

Slowly, I tapped out my response: Maybe.

I’m coming over.

You are not. I need to think. Bye

I turned my phone to airplane mode, so that neither of my guys could distract me. I started googling animal cruelty in Montreal. Then I called the local Humane Society. They took my name and number, but when I said I was calling about photos online, I could feel the guy’s interest dimming. “Hamsters? In a picture? Okay.”

“I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I really think we should look into this.”

He sighed. “I would love to look into everything, Ms. Sze.” He pronounced it See, which was close enough. “But we just got a report of a guy beating his dog to death. We have to close down a puppy mill in another part of the city. And did you hear about le Berger de l’Étoile?”

I hadn’t.

He sighed again. He sounded pretty wrecked, so I just thanked him and hung up. Poor guy. It seemed like the animal welfare system was as underfunded as the Montreal medical system. Or worse.

I looked up le Berger de l’Étoile, which turned out to be a for-profit shelter that killed eighty to two hundred animals a day. Instead of hiring a veterinarian or an animal health care technician, a maintenance worker used the outmoded technique of intracardiac injections, ineptly. So the worker would have to inject up to twelve times, and even then, they’d basically throw the animals in the garbage, still alive.

I covered my eyes. I was heading down a rabbit hole here. I had to concentrate on Raymond Pascal Gusarov.

I Skyped Ryan, who picked up right away. I smiled at his blurry, pixelated webcam photo before I got down to business.

“Ry, I’ve got pictures, and I’m sending you the link. I need you to help me figure out if the pictures are real, who did them, and if we can sic the SPCA on him.” I figured I could bring Ryan into my private investigation because the pictures were public, and I didn’t know how to prove that they were from Raymond Pascal Gusarov.

“On it... Ugh,” he said, clicking away, and then choked on his coffee.

“Sorry, babe.” I hated to rope him into this too, making him into a sin eater when he could just work with nice, neat computers all day.

He waved my words away. “Let me see. Okay. I need an IP address... Okay, that’s interesting.”

“What?”

“His IP is 1.2.3.4. Obviously a fake. There’s nothing there.”

“He covered up his IP address?”

“Pretty much. Let me see what I can do.”

While he worked his techno-magic, I busied myself combing through what I assumed was Gusarov’s other alias, Heart’s Blood, where he wrote stories about screwing other guys, slitting their throats, and eating their hearts. Dear Lord. I rubbed my eyes.

Ryan said, “Holy crap. He’s using proxies here, bouncing from China to Sweden. Do you have a video?”

My heart was still pounding from Heart’s Blood. “Um, I’ll see if I can find one.”

“Never mind, I’m on it. Videos are nice because they take up more bandwidth. YouTube won’t give out an IP without a police warrant.”

I wondered how he knew that.

“I pinged some of my friends. One of them commented on the background for the flying hamster. See how there’s a streetlamp outside? It’s got an unusual shape.”

I squinted. It was especially blurry through Skype, but yes, one shot was of a hamster in a cape, in front of a window, with toothpicks through the eyes. I needed a drink of water. “How long’s it going to take you to find out more about this creep?”

“It takes as long as it takes, Hope. It’s not like TV.”

“Too bad,” I muttered.

Ryan’s face stilled. “He’s in Montreal. My friend found a match on Mapzest.”

“I know.”

“Is it that patient you were talking about?”

I didn’t answer, which was probably enough of an answer.

“Be careful, Hope.”

I heard a knock at my apartment door, and jumped. No one should be able to knock on my door since I moved into an apartment with a security guard.

I stifled a scream.

“Don’t answer it,” Ryan said.

“I won’t.” I was truly freaked out. Was it possible that while we searched for Raymond Pascal Gusarov, he was tracking us? Was that how he got money for plastic surgery, at the age of twenty-two? Was he some sort of hamster-killing, heart-eating computer genius?

His before and after pictures weren’t too impressive, but what if he’d started out as someone who looked very different?

“I’m going to stay on,” said Ryan. “If anyone breaks in, I’ll call the Montreal police.”

Virtual backup. Good. Better than no backup.

I’d put the chain on my door, but I called down to the security desk first. “Hi, this is Hope Sze, apartment 8828. Did you let someone in the building who came up to the eighth floor? I didn’t buzz anyone in.”

“A man got buzzed into the twenty-third floor.”

Shit. Of course, there was no stopping him from making his way to my apartment from another floor. Some idiot could have buzzed him in, and then Raymond Pascal Gusarov could decide, Nope, I’m heading over to kill the detective doctor instead. I’d gotten complacent, living in a prettier place. A killer is a killer is a killer.

“What did the man look like?”

“Caucasian, about five-nine, blond hair, slim build, jeans, navy jacket. Is there a problem? Do you need me to come upstairs?”

Someone knocked on the door again, harder this time. I squeaked.

The guard said, “I’ll need someone to man the front door. Let me call someone.”

While he did that, Raymond Pascal Gusarov could smash his way in.

“You want me to call the cops?” said Ryan.

A man spoke through the door: “Hope, I know you’re in there. Let me in.”

My heart seemed to pause for a moment. I recognized this voice, deep in my marrow. I unlocked my lips. “Tucker?”

“Are you okay? You weren’t answering your phone, so I got Mireille to let me in. What’s going on?”

I let my breath out slowly. He was talking loudly enough so that Ryan heard. “Is that Tucker?”

I nodded. “You don’t need to call the police. But you may need to beat some manners into him.”

“Will do,” said Ryan, his lips pressed into a grim line, visible through the webcam. He didn’t offer to hang up, and I didn’t ask him to. Tucker and I shouldn’t be doing anything that couldn’t be witnessed in public.

I looked through the keyhole, and sure enough, Tucker stared back at me. Even through the fishbowl of the keyhole lens, distorting the sharp planes of his face, I couldn’t help admiring his intelligent brown eyes and, yep, that stupid blond hair that he likes to spike with hair gel. “Are you alone?” I said through the door.

“No. I’m with you. There’s just this door between us.”

I undid the chain and swung the door open. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“You didn’t answer your phone or e-mail.”

“I was busy.”

He glanced behind me at my computer, and noticed Ryan. “I can see that. Hey, man.”

They nodded at each other.

I felt like stamping my feet. This was not the time for civility. I wanted to kick his ass, no matter how attractive he looked in his dark-wash jeans. He pulled off his jacket and threw it onto my futon, making himself at home. At least he didn’t try to kiss me hello on both cheeks in front of Ryan.

“When I say don’t come, Tucker—”

“You know that’s like waving a red flag in front of me. Strong like bull.”

“That’s a myth, about bulls and red flags,” I said. “They’re colorblind. They just don’t like the movement, especially when the matador is spearing them.”

“I know that,” Tucker responded, and added something in another language, which was another one of his quirks that I wasn’t going to respond to right now. “Talking about bulls is not the same thing as being in the bullring. What’s this case you got?”

I realized that I might be able to share some details about Gusarov with Tucker that I couldn’t give Ryan, since Ryan was a civilian. But Tucker couldn’t do any of the computer wizardry. I needed both of them.

Shoot.

I ran my hands through my hair in irritation. It lay shoulder length; I hadn’t had time to get a haircut. It was starting to get that blobby look. I caught Tucker watching me, a speculative cast to his face, his eyes arrested by the movement of my hands in my hair.

I lowered my arms and immediately glanced at Ryan, whose narrowed eyes shifted between Tucker and me.

I cleared my throat and explained, as best I could, that I’d met a creepy patient who was probably posting pictures of decapitated hamsters online, but the animal welfare groups in Montreal were overwhelmed and wouldn’t do anything about it.

“Dr. Hope to the rescue, champion of animals and small children,” said Tucker.

I wasn’t in the mood for sarcasm. “You have a problem with that? Leave.”

He seemed surprised. “No, I like animals. My family has a dog. And you know what they say is the hallmark of an antisocial personality: fire-setting, cruelty to animals, and bed-wetting. We’d better catch this guy before he hurts anyone else.”

“Hang on a second,” said Ryan. “Bed-wetting?”

I nodded. “I know it sounds weird, but when they researched sociopaths, they found that they had these three things in common. That’s just what the research shows. That and a lack of remorse. The average person does something wrong and feels bad. A sociopath might apologize because it’s politically expedient, but really, they don’t care.”

Ryan cracked his knuckles. It startled me, even though I couldn’t hear the noise as well through Skype. He hadn’t done that in years. I guess the stress of detective work was getting to him too. “Okay. Let’s get this nut.”

Music to my ears.

Ryan doubled down on the computer side. Tucker asked me a few more questions about the patient, and I remembered that he’d considered doing psychiatry before he decided on family medicine. That could come in handy.

“It sounds like he could have body dysmorphic disorder. It’s unusual for a man to get plastic surgery on his face at any age, let alone twenty-two,” Tucker said, his brow pleated in thought. I tried not to register how yummy he looked when he was thinking. What can I say? Intelligence is a turn-on, even though he was stating something fairly obvious. “Maybe he doesn’t like the way he looks. Maybe he’s trying to change himself.”

That was speculative, but I didn’t want to interrupt his chain of thought.

“Maybe he’s trying to hide himself.”

Now he was getting into woo-woo territory, so I was relieved when Ryan said, “Got him. He’s online right now, just posted another picture. He didn’t manage to cover his IP in time. He’s close to Saint Marc’s Hospital, on Cote-des-Neiges.”

I stiffened. Saint Joseph’s Hospital, the Jewish Hospital, and Saint Marc’s, the francophone children’s hospital, are all within a twenty-minute walk of each other. My old apartment, Mimosa Manor, was basically next door to Saint Marc’s, as well as the Université de Québec à Montréal. Fortunately, Saint Marc’s was now a forty-minute walk from my new apartment. I licked my lips. “Can you give me his address?”

“I can give you his router address.”

“Done.” I wrote down the numbers and letters on a sheet of paper, then held them up for him to read and double-check.

Ryan nodded. “Now what are you going to do?”

“For once, I’m calling the police.”

He sighed in relief. Even Tucker nodded. “I wouldn’t go near this guy if I could help it. Are you doing plastics again tomorrow?”

“No. It was a one-time thing.” I glanced at the IP address again. “Thanks, Ryan. I—” Yikes. I almost told him I loved him, right in front of Tucker, whose dark eyes silently bore into me. “I mean, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Ryan grinned at my slip-up — he knew exactly what I was about to say. “You’re calling the police right now, right?”

“Yup. Officer Visser. She’s cool.”

“You’ll call me back after you’re done?”

“Yeah. She’ll probably need to talk to you anyway, since you’re the brains behind the operation.”

Miracle of miracles, Officer Visser was on that night, but she wasn’t in the office. I tried to explain my investigation to one of her colleagues, who obviously wasn’t interested. He said he’d give Visser the message.

I was dejected. I wanted to move on this guy — now. I Skyped Ryan to update him, while pacing back and forth in front of the screen.

“You did all you could, right?” said Ryan.

“Sure.” I was thinking about that IP address. Could I use it to look up the guy? I know I said I’d never climb back into danger, but...

Ryan’s mouth clamped together. “Don’t go there.”

I nodded.

“I mean it, Hope. I’ll never help you again if you keep endangering yourself. This is enough. Right?” His tone changed, and I realized that he was looking at Tucker now.

Tucker nodded. “I’ll keep her on lockdown.”

“You will not,” I said, hands on my hips.

They both looked at me.

“You got a death wish?” said Ryan. “How many times do you have to run after killers, bare-handed?”

“I’m not. But I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

“Sure you can,” said Tucker, grabbing my hand a little too firmly.

Ryan watched us, eyebrows raised.

“Don’t worry,” I told Ryan. “I’m not going to screw Tucker while he’s holding me prisoner.”

“Pity,” said Tucker in a fake British accent that made me laugh.

“Maybe I’ll just hang out with you guys for a while,” said Ryan. “Tucker? You following hockey?”

Tucker grinned. “The Habs just killed Phoenix.”

Ryan scoffed. “I wouldn’t call 3–2 killing them. They had to go to overtime.”

“That’s part of their charm!”

I glanced between the two and said, in French, “T’es pas serieux.”

“Crazy like a Coyote!” said Tucker, which I didn’t understand at all, but it must have been a hockey reference, because Ryan responded, “Let’s see how they do with the Predators.”

While they talked about men with sticks, I tried to figure out what to do. The SPCA couldn’t help me. The police didn’t take me seriously. I only knew one other officer, Rivera, and he hated my guts. Now what?

I sat down at my computer to do more research. Surely I couldn’t be the only person disturbed by an animal abuser? What did other animal-saviors do?

Traditionally, they went to the media and tried to get the newspaper, radio, and TV outlets interested. But nowadays, it looked like they went online. I followed their lead and started a Facebook group. I needed a catchy title.

“What are you doing?” asked Tucker.

“Can’t talk. Working,” I said.

He read over my shoulder. “Help the Hamsters? What?”

“Have you got a better title?” I snapped.

“Sure. Headless Hamsters. Help Hammy.”

Of course, Ryan wanted to get in on the action and was not impressed. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I’m trying to do some detective work online. That way, I’m not risking my neck. I thought you guys would be thrilled.”

Ryan stared at me through the camera and repeated, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I can set up a Facebook group.”

“But then the killer can find you through your IP address. Haven’t you learned anything?”

A chill crept down my back. I stared back at him.

He shook his head and said, “I’ll do it.”

Throughout the next week, my dummy Facebook page received a lot of traffic. I was on my phone all the time, and not just researching articles. People wanted to join the Facebook group — IT folks, teenagers, whatever. I accepted them all, one at a time, before eventually making it an open group.

Then I got a private Facebook message. The subject was titled yr group, and the sender was Vladamir Kzurstan. The message read: catch me if you can.

I asked for Ryan’s advice. He called me and said, “This guy’s profile was made two hours ago. It looks like a setup.”

My Internet research was driving me crazy. I had to do something.

On my second-to-last day of my palliative care residency, I asked Dr. Huot if I could visit the plastic surgery unit one more time.

The doctor’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, my dear, are you thinking of changing specialities?”

“I’m just going for a visit.”

Dr. Huot touched my arm. “Of course, dear Hope.”

I rushed down Cote-des-Neiges to the Jewish Hospital. I had sins to eat.

I hurried to Dr. Mendelson’s office. I had no idea if I’d be able to find him, but luckily, I spotted his rumpled lab coat walking into his office.

I stopped at his secretary and told her I needed a few minutes with Dr. Mendelson.

“You’re not on the schedule today,” she said, staring at me over the wire rims of her glasses.

“I know. You’re right. But I need to talk to him about one of his patients.”

She sniffed. “I’ll check if he’ll see you. He’s a very busy man.”

Two crucial minutes later, I was sitting in his office. His degrees hung on the walls, and his desk was covered with old-fashioned books and journals, leaving barely enough room for his flat-screen computer monitor, keyboard, and tinfoil-wrapped sandwich. I thought I smelled liverwurst, which always struck me as something one wouldn’t eat willingly.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

Ask not what you can do for me. Ask what you can do for the hamsters, spun through my brain, but I wasn’t crazy enough to say it aloud.

“I think one of your patients is torturing animals, and maybe humans,” I blurted out.

He choked and coughed, spraying a few crumbs.

I explained my accusations to him, using my phone to show him the proof. His eyes shot up, and he only read a few sentences of Heart’s Blood’s posts before he looked at me. “This is a sick man, but what does this have to do with me?”

“It’s Raymond Pascal Gusarov, the guy with the cheekbones,” I said.

“That one,” he replied, sagging into his chair.

“What is it?”

“His credit card bounced. He never paid me for the surgery. I even had those photos made for him.”

“Is he coming for the photos?” I asked.

“I left him a message that he couldn’t have them until he paid for the surgery. He’ll probably never show up again. He has thirty days to pay.”

“If he doesn’t pay, could you mention it to the police instead of a collection agency?”

Dr. Mendelson stared at me like I was speaking Kurdish.

“You know Al Capone?” I asked.

He blinked in surprise.

“He was a gangster who’s probably most famous for ordering the Valentine’s Day Massacre. But they never caught him for that, anything else either, like bootlegging or prostitution. What they got him for, eventually, was tax evasion. I wonder if we could catch Raymond Pascal Gusarov the same way.”

Dr. Mendelson looked as if he’d rather stick leeches all over my face.

I licked my lips, but kept going: “You could report him to a collection agency too, of course, so that you could get your money back. But look, he just posted another photo now, see?” I held up my iPhone, but the doctor hardly glanced at the picture, which showed a hamster with an ice pick through its heart, pinned to the table, its little paws hanging in the air.

Dr. Mendelson looked at me coldly. “I’m not doing this for you.”

My heart dropped in my stomach.

“I’m doing it for someone else.” He picked up his phone and started making calls.

A month later, the police dropped by Raymond Pascal Gusarov’s apartment.

Through the door Gusarov yelled, “Fuck you, pigs.”

This did not endear him to the cops, especially when he started shouting, “You can’t come in here without a warrant. Go away!” Then the officers heard someone in the apartment scream.

The police obtained a warrant, lickety-split. Dr. Mendelson told me that the person in the apartment was a minor held against his will.

“It’s bad blood,” Dr. Mendelson muttered. He crossed his arms and stared out the window overlooking Cote-des-Neiges. We watched the cars stopped at the light and the people zigzagging on the sidewalk, carrying their briefcases and gift bags.

I thanked Dr. Mendelson and tiptoed out of his office, barely catching something he said in Yiddish. His secretary had come to usher me out, and just before I left their shining office, I asked her, “What did he say?”

She pressed her lips together, but after a moment she told me: “A shlekhter sholem iz beser vi a guter krig.”

“What does it mean?”

She glanced at the patient coming in behind me and said, “A bad peace is better than a good war. Good day, Dr. Sze.”

I turned to face the patient, a man whose gray hair and spotted hands belonged to someone in his sixties, but whose tight face seemed eerily younger. He smiled at me with gleaming white teeth.

Milk Teeth by Howard Shrier

Rue Rachel

Max understood animals. His mother had always kept at least one cat in their East End flat, to keep the mice and rats to a minimum. He knew the cats could be cruel at times, batting around a trapped mouse or spider with one paw while pinning a tail or leg with the other. But they’d also rub against the back of his leg when he fed them. One gray tabby, Faigie — named for a maiden aunt with a sad bristle of whiskers — would curl in his armpit when he was falling asleep and rest her head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat.

Before he was old enough to find a real paying job but was strong enough to bale hay, Max spent three summers at his uncle Willie’s farm near Shawbridge. Willie always had dogs roaming the property. One of them, Stella, took an immediate liking to Max. She was a blond Labrador mix, with huge swollen nipples up and down her chest. Max thought her eyes looked sad even when her tail wagged. Sometimes she would bare her fangs at the other dogs, snapping at their muzzles, asserting her place in the pack. Sometimes she’d let Max lay his head against her side in the tall grass behind the barn where he went to smoke cigarettes he filched from Willie’s pack.

After he joined the police, he befriended a cop in the mounted unit, Marcel Aubin. They sometimes met at the stables on Mount Royal before heading off to drink. Max would watch Marcel groom his horse, Cassius, and marvel at the muscles rippling under its gleaming chestnut coat. The horse’s eyes were darker than Stella’s, coal black. They gave nothing away, though Max thought he knew something about the horse, watching it snort and shake its head back and forth as Marcel worked the curry brush over his sides.

Cats, dogs, horses. These he understood. It was people that baffled him.

No animal could ever have done what was done to Irene Czerniak in the summer of 1951. However cruel a cat might be, whatever strength a horse possessed, however vicious a dog might become, none would have hurt Irene that way. A cat might have clawed her. A horse could have kicked her. A dog — gripped in a foaming rabid craze — might have ripped out her throat. But only a human could have beaten her so savagely. Once Irene’s body was finally found, after four agonizing days of searching, the pathologist, old Vaillancourt, had to append a second sheet to his report to list all the injuries inflicted upon her.

“It would have been easier to write what hadn’t been broken,” he told Max.

Hardly a bone had been left intact, he said. Her head had been pulped until it lacked structural integrity. Nearly every tooth had been cracked or knocked out.

Most of them were still her milk teeth.

Irene had just turned nine years old when she went missing from Avenue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville; she was a petite, dark-haired girl with two younger siblings. Her parents didn’t really start to worry until nightfall. Being the oldest, Irene was independent and often went to visit friends on surrounding streets, allowed to go as far east as La Fontaine Park, where she’d watch the swans and boaters in the man-made lake. She knew when she ought to be home and always returned on time. Until August 3.

On the morning of August 4, a missing persons report was filed at the Boulevard Saint-Laurent police station. Two detectives took statements from Irene’s parents while a dozen constables began canvassing the three-story buildings in her neighborhood: Laval, Rivard, and Drolet to the east; Rue de Bullion, Coloniale, and Saint-Dominique to the west. Under detective supervision, neighbors searched the laneways behind the houses. A police dog was given Irene’s scent from a pair of her pink socks, and moved through the lanes, sniffing the ground, straining against her leash.

Nothing. No one had seen the girl since five o’clock on Tuesday night, when she left the flat of her best friend, Sybil Grauman, a block east on Laval, saying she was going home to help her mother prepare supper.

It was eventually the smell that led them to her. After nearly four humid days with temperatures in the high eighties, Irene’s small body was found wedged into the crawl space under a shed at the rear of a three-story row house on Mentana, well outside the grid of streets they had been searching. The ground-floor tenant had not checked the rear, though a foul smell had been in the air the past two days. There were plenty of reasons why it might smell under a shed in a Montreal laneway — trash cans from three flats sat against the shed wall, and raccoons, squirrels, and skunks sometimes crawled under there to die. Once the tenant realized what he was looking at, a patrolman was on the scene in minutes. After the officer finished retching, he used the tenant’s telephone to call downtown.

A few minutes later, the commander of the homicide bureau, Honoré Bellechasse, called Max Handler into his office on the second floor of the municipal courthouse.

“They found her,” said Bellechasse.

Max had hoped someone else would get this call. Someone who hadn’t lost his own kid, his only son, along with his wife, in a fire. “You know Rene is still out,” he said. His partner, Rene Jamieson, was on medical leave, his left shin fractured by a bullet three weeks earlier. Wasn’t that reason enough to give the case to one of the other old couples on the squad?

“Take Marois.”

Max sighed. “No. I’ll work it myself.”

“Take Marois,” repeated Bellechasse. “The newsmen are going to be all over this and I don’t want anyone thinking I gave it the short stick.”

Max sighed again. Bellechasse peered down at some papers on his scarred wooden desk and didn’t look up again.

Marois was small, even by French Canadian standards, maybe five-six and 135 pounds. He had dark hair slicked back with Brylcreem and a pencil-thin mustache, his mouth a little sunken around his dentures.

“Boss says the parents are Hungarian,” Marois said.

“Yes.”

“You speak any of that? Boss says you speak a little of everything.”

“Maybe ten words,” Max said. “Hello. How are you. Goodbye. Like that.”

“Is that a Jew thing?”

“What?”

“To speak so many languages.”

“It’s a Saint Lawrence thing. I walked the beat there for six years.”

“It’s okay I ask you that? I don’t know any other Jews is why. You’re the only one on the force, right?”

“I’m the only detective, not the only cop.”

They rode in silence until Marois asked, “Do you know how to say I’m sorry? It’d be good to tell them that.”

“The detectives at Station 4 speak English and French,” Max said. Sajnálom, he thought to himself. Sajnálom.

They beat old Vaillancourt to the scene by a good quarter-hour. They were driving a 1946 Chevrolet sedan, while the pathologist had to lumber all the way north from Old Montreal in a ’42 Cadillac hearse that served as his mobile forensic lab, the back half weighed down with chemicals, tools, and portable lights.

Max showed his badge to the pale constable guarding Irene’s body, instructing him to bring out the tenant who had found her. “Get his story,” he said to Marois. “See if you catch anything wrong.”

While he waited for Vaillancourt, Max stood just inside the entry into the yard, as far from the body as he could. He smoked and scanned the yard slowly, from the property line to the shed. He looked side to side, up and down. Looked at the wrought-iron latch on the wooden gate, the semicircular line in the stone where the gate had been dragging of late.

He walked up and down the lane, looking at nothing, taking in everything. Once Vaillancourt arrived, Max would have to share the crime scene with him, his technicians, a photographer. He needed to be in it by himself as long as he could, just forming impressions, breathing in details. He was aware that people were watching him from their yards and balconies. They were going to have to canvass this area too, find out if anyone in these flats had a record of offenses against children. Somebody had to have seen something wrong. All it took was one. Maybe they wouldn’t have the whole story, but a detail, a snatch of it. Someone might remember who walked through the dark. The make of a car, the smell of tobacco, an unwashed body, the breath of an ogre.

After half an hour on the scene, old Vaillancourt gave Max a grim preliminary report. He made it clear how much violence had rained down on Irene.

Max couldn’t say offhand the number of dead bodies he had seen. Most of them stayed in his memory, which was considerable by both nature and training. He certainly remembered the first — a fifteen-year-old girl who drowned in the Lachine Canal back when he was a rookie patrolman. She got tangled in long weeds and only bobbed up when her body was bloated with gas.

Max had seen exactly nine dead children in his life, and could recall every detail about their crime scenes, autopsies, and investigations. Once he had caught the person responsible — and he had caught them all, six men and three women — he could tell you what they looked and smelled like; what they wore when they were caught and what they wore to court; the look in their eyes when they contradicted their own lie.

Irene Czerny had been in the hot, damp dirt long enough for significant decomposition, but not quite long enough to mask her youthful beauty. As Max gently felt Irene’s head and bones, noting to himself the fractures, Vaillancourt smoked a steady line of Player’s Plain, careful to flick his butts into the dirt and away from the body. Everybody was smoking to keep the smell out of their noses and give themselves something to look at besides the girl.

“I’m glad you’re leading this case,” Vaillancourt said, once the small body had been bagged and loaded into a morgue wagon. “You had to work harder than most to make homicide.”

“I guess,” Max said.

“When you find who did this, give him some of the pain he gave her.”

“Whatever I can.”

“Tell me about the guy who found her.”

Marois pulled a notebook from his breast pocket and thumbed it open to a page in the middle. “Roméo Leblanc, thirty-six, married, four kids ages two to eight. Works as a baker on Rue Saint-Hubert. Leaves his house at five in the morning. Works twelve-hour shifts.”

“So he’d get off at five o’clock at night, around the time she went missing. And he might have passed her street, depending on his route home.”

“I think he’s clean,” Marois said.

“Based on what?”

“He looked me in the eye. He shook my hand. He spoke in a steady voice. Besides, he has kids of his own.”

How did this man make homicide? Max wondered. Marois read crime scene details out of a notebook — Max had never carried a notebook in his entire career. If you couldn’t commit a scene to memory, couldn’t recall the details of an interrogation, what good were you?

Dead children. They could make a man fucking crazy.

Max left Marois at the scene to oversee the canvass and drove to Station 4, where Irene’s disappearance had first been reported. He talked to a detective named Dagenais, and went through the statements he and his team had taken from the parents and neighbors.

“The mother says she was a good kid, good head on her shoulders,” Dagenais said. “Swears she wouldn’t have run away.”

“And the father?” Max asked.

Dagenais shrugged. “Doesn’t speak a word of English or French. Been here since the end of the war and can’t be bothered, the dumb hunky.”

“He strike you as off?”

“A perv, you mean? Christ, I don’t know. He seemed broken up enough.”

“They always do,” Max said. “Even after they confess.”

“Talk to him yourself.”

“I’ll do that. What about the neighbors?”

“Not much help. One of them told us the guy upstairs from her had a thing for young girls but he had the best alibi money can buy.”

“He was in the can?”

“Yup. Drunk tank. Turns out the lady just doesn’t like the guy. He plays his radio loud at night.”

“Nothing else?”

“We got a call from a woman who said she saw a girl matching Irene’s description walking on Rue Rachel with a boy around the time she disappeared. Five fifteen or five thirty.”

“Rachel where?”

“Around Saint-Christophe.”

“That’s only two blocks from Mentana. Any description of the boy?”

“About Irene’s age, maybe a little younger. Shorter, anyway. Wore a brown-and-white checked cap. Curly brown hair poking out.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s all she could see.”

“You ask the mother about boys?”

“Of course. She said Irene didn’t play with the boys on the street. They mostly play hockey and stickball in the lane. She couldn’t think of anyone who matched that description.”

“I don’t think a kid her age could have hurt her like that. You got anything else?”

“Another neighbor said she saw a guy out on the street the morning Irene disappeared. Thin, pale, thirties. Gave her the creeps.”

“Why?”

“She wasn’t sure. Said he stood across the street doing nothing.”

“Nothing.”

“That’s what bothered her, she said. He was doing nothing.”

“But this was in the morning and she didn’t go missing until the afternoon.”

“Right.”

“Probably no connection.”

“That’s what we thought.”

“She’d never seen him before?”

“No.”

“You have her name?”

Dagenais thumbed through a spiral notebook and gave Max the woman’s name and address.

“All right. Ask your constables if they know anyone matching that description in the quarter.”

“Already did. Nothing.”

Sonja Czerny sat at her kitchen table, covering her eyes as if a bright light were searching her out — only her hands could keep her from being blinded. Her husband sat next to her, elbows on the table, head in his hands. Every few seconds, Sonja would take in a sharp breath and make a barking sound. Max wondered why the husband didn’t get up and comfort his wife. Put his hands on her shoulders, rub them when they shook.

He started with a few questions about Irene’s routine on summer days, the friends she hung around with, the places she went. All things he already knew from reading statements at Station 4.

Sonja answered all the questions. Her brown eyes reminded Max of Stella’s. They had the same sad, searching look. A few times she hesitated and looked at her husband, Tibor. He wore a white undershirt and green pants that were the bottom half of a workman’s uniform.

“Ask him if he saw her when he left for work Tuesday morning,” Max said. He didn’t care what the answer was. He just wanted Tibor to lift his head. He wanted to watch the man’s eyes move, hear the timbre of his voice as he spoke about his daughter.

“He says no, he did not see her,” Sonja said. “He must leave before seven.”

Max wanted to hear more. “Ask him if they spoke the night before.”

She put the question to her husband; his answer came back in a rasp. Tears ran from his eyes and choked his voice. Her own eyes welled up as she translated: “He says yes, they spoke about Nadja. She is the younger daughter and she and Irene had a fight on Monday and Irene slapped her. He told her she must not to do this, even when Nadja is starting the fight, because she is older and stronger.”

Max had seen and heard enough. In his mind the father was clean. “Please show me where she sleeps.” He’d almost said where she slept, but had caught himself just in time.

The two girls, Irene and Nadja, shared a small room at the rear of the flat, behind the kitchen. “This is maybe why they fighting sometimes,” Sonja said. “Our boy Paul gets a room for himself, but the girls must share.”

He stood in the room between two narrow beds, both with white chenille spreads, his hands in his pockets. On the wall above the beds was a cross to which Christ was nailed, his back arched in pain.

“Our other children were born here in Montreal,” Sonja said. “But my husband and Irene and me, we lived in Budapest during the war. Irene is maybe too young to remember how hard this was, but I remember. I remember how small she was, how little food we had, how much she cried. Before the war we lived with my parents, but my father was against collaborating with the Nazis, against withdrawing from the League of Nations. His contrary positions, they cost us everything. And when the Soviets invaded, were we rewarded? Of course not. We lost even more.”

She put a hand on her chest and shuddered. “Why I am telling you this, Mr. Handler, is because my little girl had a hard beginning to her life. I just didn’t want the end to be hard too.”

“Tell me about the man you saw,” Max said. “Where exactly was he?”

“Across the street, in front of 4120,” said Mrs. Peletz, the neighbor two buildings to the north, who spoke in a thick Yiddish accent. She was about fifty, with thick legs and gray hair pulled into a bun.

“Was he coming or going?”

“Just standing with his back against the telephone pole, smoking.”

“How long was he there?”

“I don’t know. I went to get the mail and he was there. That was maybe eleven. I went out again ten, fifteen minutes later to shake out a rug, and he was still there, still against the pole, smoking.”

“Looking at your side of the street or the houses behind him?”

“My side.”

“What made you notice him?” Max asked.

“Who just stands there? He doesn’t live on the street, he’s not talking to no one, there’s no bus that comes. Not even looking at a watch. Just smoking. Who does such a thing?”

“And that’s why you noticed him?”

“That, and because he was so pale. Most people, it’s summer, they have a little color. But not him. Like a ghost he was. I said to my husband, maybe he’s been someplace where there’s no sun. Maybe he just came from jail.”

Max made a mental note to check with Bordeaux Prison and Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary, see if they had released anyone in the last month or two with a record of offenses against children.

“How old a man was he, Mrs. Peletz?”

“Younger than you,” she said, “but not a boy. Maybe thirty?”

“You get a good look at his face? The color of his hair?”

“A hat he wore, with the brim pulled down,” she said. “I just know his face and arms were white.”

“He didn’t wear a jacket?”

“If he wore a jacket, would I have seen his arms?”

Max smiled. “I guess not.”

“Like china they were,” Mrs. Peletz said. “The kind they make from bone.”

Max squatted at the base of the light pole in front of 4120 Hôtel de Ville, which was the ground-floor flat in a brick building with silver-coated staircases winding up to the second and third floors. There were half a dozen cigarette butts on the ground, Player’s Plain and du Mauriers with filter tips.

He had just started up the walk to ring the bell when he saw a man in a second-floor window. Tall enough to fill the entire frame, gaunt looking, his neck and head bent at an odd angle. An unmistakable figure.

Max rang the bell to the flat. The lock disengaged and he went up a dark staircase that curved to the right. Waiting there was Jan Albrecht, better known to a generation of Montreal wrestling fans as Baron von Bismarck, the Killer Kraut. In a city that adored its hockey players, boxers, strippers, and singers, wrestlers were among the biggest stars. Even though the Baron was the most hated villain in town — a character who would cut, choke, stomp, and gouge his opponents, brushing aside referees to inflict maximum damage — Jan Albrecht was known as a gentleman outside the ring.

“Hello, sergeant,” Albrecht said, extending a massive hand. He was half a foot taller than Max, who stood six feet. His head was huge, with a jutting chin that ended in a bulb split by a cleft. “How are you?”

“I’m good, Jan. How about you?”

“I suppose I could complain,” the big man said, pointing at his bent neck with his left hand, “but I will spare you.”

“How long you been living here?”

“Since the accident. Rents downtown are high and my earnings are not what they used to be. It’s all right. I’m content here. What about you, sergeant? Do you still moonlight at the Forum? You were good security.”

“Too busy these days.”

To Max’s eyes, Albrecht didn’t look like he got much sun. But his skin was more gray than white, the color of a dead mouse. And his height and crooked figure would make him familiar to a neighbor.

“You’re here about the little girl?” Albrecht said.

“Yes.”

“She is dead then?”

“Yes.”

“A terrible thing.” Albrecht moved stiffly to one side and waved Max into a dim parlor. There was a faded chesterfield with gold and brown stripes and white antimacassars over the rear. A couple of wooden chairs on either side of a chipped wooden table. “You will take a coffee?”

“No thanks. I saw you in the window and wanted to ask if you noticed anyone hanging around the street the day the girl disappeared.”

“A constable already came by to ask. Regrettably, I saw no one.” Albrecht rubbed the side of his neck, pushing it even farther off center before releasing it with a snapping sound. He had broken it two years back in a bout against the great wrestler Yvon Robert. Albrecht had knocked Robert down, stunned him with a forearm to the throat, and then climbed onto the top rope for his signature finish, a thunderous elbow smash known as the Hammer of Hell. But as he jumped, the toe of his boot had gotten caught under the top rope and he landed on his head, shivered in a violent spasm, and didn’t move again for weeks.

“One of the neighbors saw a guy hanging out front that morning, smoking. Very pale,” Max said.

“I’m sorry, sergeant, I don’t think I saw any such fellow.”

“Well, if you remember anything, give me a call.”

“Of course. You sure you will not take a coffee?”

“No, thanks anyway.”

He heard a door slam at the rear of the flat. Then footsteps, and another door opening and closing.

“Someone else here I can ask?”

“Oh,” Albrecht said, “that’s just Billy.”

“Wild Billy?”

“Yes.”

“He lives with you?”

“We have both recently endured somewhat hard times,” Albrecht said.

“Call him out here,” Max said. “Maybe he saw something.”

Albrecht smiled. “Billy hardly looks out the window, as you might imagine.”

“Call him out anyway.”

“Of course.” He walked through the parlor to the corridor that led to the back of the flat and called, “Billy?”

He got no answer. He called again, louder.

A door opened and a voice that was both high-pitched and raspy shouted: “What! I’m drying myself off, for Christ’s sake.”

“We have company, Billy. Come out here a moment.”

“I’m bare-assed.”

“Put a robe on and come out. It’s Max Handler.”

“Who?”

“Sergeant Handler. He used to work security at the Forum.”

There was a pause and then Billy said, “Gimme a sec.”

Wild Billy Weaver emerged a moment later, all three and a half feet of him, waddling down the hall in a white satin robe with his name stitched over the breast in royal blue. He was rubbing his dark hair dry with a towel.

“Yeah, yeah, I remember you now. How’s it hanging, sarge?” Billy reached a hand up to where Max could shake it and squeezed harder than he needed to.

“Okay, Billy. You?”

“Just perfect, only I can’t get a decent payday and I can’t get laid unless I pay for it, even though I’m hung like a normal guy. Bigger, even. Plus I gotta live with this sad sack.” Billy stuck his head to one side, at the same sick angle as Albrecht’s, and gave Max a big grin. Max didn’t return it.

“I thought midget wrestling was catching on,” Max said.

“It’s starting to. But Sky Low Low and Little Beaver get the headline fights. I’m stuck on the undercards with Tiny Roe and Pee Wee James. If things don’t get better, I’ll have to take a job at the Midgets Palace, showing the tourists how us little-halves live.”

“At least you can still fight,” Albrecht said.

“Yeah, I still got that. So what brings you here, sarge? Who got killed?”

“Shush,” Albrecht said. “It’s about the little girl across the street.”

Billy put the towel down on the sofa. “They found her?”

Albrecht picked up the towel and shook his head at the dark wet spot it had left.

“This morning,” Max said. “We’re trying to pin down a guy seen around here the day she went missing. Pale guy standing out in the street smoking.”

Billy rubbed his chin like he was thinking deep. “Real pale? Like almost pink?”

“The neighbor said white.”

“’Cause I saw this one guy who’s beyond pale. He’s one of those guys that’s got no color at all. What do you call them, with the pink eyes and white hair?”

“Albino?”

“Right. Albino.”

“You never told me this,” Albrecht said.

“Do I tell you every damn thing? Anyway, that’s what this guy is. Albino. You see him in a club at night, he looks like a goddamn vampire.”

“What do you mean, club?” Max said. “You know him?”

“Sure, I know him. He’s a drummer, plays with Kenny Piper’s quintet.”

“What’s his name?”

“Eddie. Eddie Whelan.”

“You sure it was him?”

“I saw him, didn’t I?”

“The neighbor said he had a hat. She couldn’t see his face. How is it you saw him?”

“I just did. Maybe the hat was off for a minute.”

“When did you see him?”

“The day she disappeared, like you said.”

“What time?”

“In the morning.”

“What time in the morning?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t have my watch on.”

“What was he doing?” Max asked.

“Nothing. Just hanging around.”

“Why would he just hang around here?”

“The hell should I know? Maybe he was looking to buy a little tea.”

“From who?”

“I don’t know, I never touch the stuff.”

“Then why did you say—”

“’Cause he’s a smoke hound.”

“Someone around here sells it?”

“I don’t know. I only been staying here a few weeks. Right, Baron?”

“Yes,” Albrecht said. “A few weeks.”

“You sure it was Eddie Whelan you saw?”

“I guess so. He’s the only albino I know.”

“Guessing isn’t good enough, Billy,” Max said harshly. “Snatching and killing a nine-year-old girl is the most serious charge there is.”

“Then I’m sure, okay? It was Eddie Whelan, 110 percent.”

“He ever had this kind of trouble before?”

“How would I know? I never talk to the guy. I just know him because he looks so different.”

“You’re one to talk,” Albrecht said.

The Albatross Club was on Sainte-Catherine, the great glittering strip that cut across the heart of downtown Montreal. It wasn’t in the top rank of clubs; Sammy Davis Jr. and Oscar Peterson were never going to play there. But it was no dive. Kenny Piper’s quintet pumped out quality tunes, and if the drinks were watered down, it wasn’t with a hose.

A clutch of uniformed constables went around back and huddled by the door that opened onto the laneway. Max went in the front with Marois and two other plainclothes detectives. The band was on a raised stage in the back, playing “Cool Breeze,” Kenny Piper doing his best to imitate Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet part. Max brushed aside the maître d’, and walked past the long bar and through the tables on the dance floor, focusing in on the drummer, whose pallor was pronounced, even by nightclub standards. Marois was at his heels, the other detectives right behind him.

The albino, Eddie Whelan, looked like he had his eyes closed as he worked his snare and high hat. But as the four men approached the bandstand with their hats still on, no drinks in their hands, he leaped from his stool and ran through a slit in the black curtains behind him. Kenny Piper kept playing his horn a few measures but gave it up as the cops jumped onto the stage and followed the drummer through the dark passage.

They ran through a kitchen where pots steamed on gas burners and men in white aprons turned chops and steaks on a flame grill. Whelan knew his way better than they did and had a good ten steps on them when he hit the back door. Max lost sight of him, and then heard shouts from the alley.

Then a gunshot. Then another. Max pulled his Cobra .38 and had it up by his ear as he got to the door. He stopped, not wanting to run out into the middle of a firefight. He leaned slowly out and saw a trash can overturned outside the door. Just beyond the trash can lay Eddie Whelan, blood staining his bright yellow shirt. One round had hit him in the chest, the other in the throat. He had something in his outstretched hand.

“I thought he was pulling a gun,” a constable said. He looked almost as pale as Whelan and his forehead was shiny with sweat.

“You shot him?” Max asked.

“Yes sir.”

Max took a closer look at the object in Whelan’s hand. A syringe. He kneeled down by the body and slipped his hand into Whelan’s right pants pocket. Found a couple of singles and a book of matches. In the left was a folded square of paper. Max opened it and saw fine white powder nestled at the bottom.

Forget tea. Whelan was a junkie, not a smoke hound.

Old Vaillancourt had wanted whoever had killed the girl to taste some pain when Max caught him. If Whelan was the one, he hadn’t tasted enough.

Even in the best of times, Max struggled to sleep. Too often he’d lie awake missing Naomi and David, his dead wife and child. When he did fall asleep he dreamed of smoke and fire, of burning woods, of charred meat left on a forgotten stove.

At dawn he was walking the lane behind the house where Irene’s body had been found. No one else was out except an old woman tending to tomato plants staked in a small patch of earth. When she saw Max, she clutched her robe and moved quickly back into her kitchen.

He didn’t know why he was there. The crime scene had been processed. Irene’s autopsy was complete. Reports were waiting on his desk. He just didn’t want to be at the office yet. He wanted — needed — to be here where Irene had been dumped. Whelan’s miserable room on Rue Craig had been searched, but no trace of Irene had been found. She clearly hadn’t been killed there.

And who was to say Whelan was guilty of anything other than standing across the street from Irene’s house? Since when did junkies abduct and kill little girls? Max had known plenty of them when he worked for vice before the war. Most were only interested in finding heroin or finding money to buy heroin or finding a safe place to shoot up their heroin and ride out the nod.

Up and down the lane he walked, to the south end at Duluth, then past the crime scene up to Rachel. He walked two blocks to Saint-Christophe, where a girl who looked like Irene had been seen walking with a boy in a checked cap. Irene’s age or younger, according to the witness. But no boy could have had the strength to do this. Or the hatred of women, which was what usually fueled these crimes.

He walked back east along Rachel. One more time down the lane, he thought, and then he’d go to the office and start looking through the results of Marois’s canvass.

Then he stopped to stare at a three-story gray stone building on the north side of the street. It had double doors with etching in the glass. A worm started to crawl through his gut, one he had felt many times before. He stood motionless, hands at his sides, breathing deeply, the way he breathed when he needed to snatch a fleeting thought, hold it, force it into words. When the words came to him, words about the curly haired boy walking Irene through the neighborhood, he ran to his car, shot through the alley, and drove eleven blocks west without touching the brakes.

Jan Albrecht opened the door after three rings, wearing a long gray robe. His eyes were red and his long feet were bare and he was massaging his neck; it seemed more crooked than the day before.

“Sergeant, what’s wrong? It’s not even seven o’clock.”

“Something I need to ask you, Jan. Fast. When Billy goes out, does he ever wear a cap?”

“We all do,” Albrecht said — he pointed to a row of hooks behind him where a couple of fedoras hung at eye level.

“Not a hat,” Max said. “A cap.”

“I think he has one. Yes. A cap with a brim that snaps in the front.”

“What color?”

“I’m not sure. Brown, I think.”

“All brown? Or brown and white.”

“Brown and white, now that you mention it. In a checkered pattern.”

Max took out his Cobra and held it at his side. He looked Albrecht in the eye and said quietly, “Tell me you didn’t know.”

“Know what? I don’t—”

“About the girl. About Billy.”

“What are you saying? That Billy had something to do with that... that horrible thing?”

Max raised the gun and pointed it at Albrecht’s chest. It only had a two-inch barrel so if he was going to use it, he had to be close. “Say you didn’t know, Jan.”

“Of course I didn’t. I don’t. Billy wouldn’t—”

“He would, Jan. He did. Where is he?”

“Asleep.”

“Which room?”

“All the way at the back, behind the kitchen.”

Max lowered the gun and said, “All right. Take off.”

Albrecht swallowed hard. “Why don’t I stay? I can help you.”

“I don’t want help.”

“You want to kill him?”

“Get out of here, Jan. Now.”

“All right. Let me get my shoes.”

“The hell with your shoes. It’s not cold out.”

“Please don’t hurt him,” Albrecht said. “He’s so small.”

So small.

Small like a nine-year-old boy. Small like Irene. Shorter even. His hair had looked almost black the day before when it was wet, but now, asleep in his bed, it was brown and curly.

Max looked around the small room. Billy’s white robe hung on a hook screwed into the closet door. On another hook hung a brown-and-white newsboy’s cap. He stood at the side of the single bed and pressed the muzzle of the Cobra against Billy’s forehead and cocked the hammer. The sound of the rotating chamber woke the little man and he sat up, eyes wild. Max pushed his head back down with the gun.

“Ask me,” he said.

Billy licked his lips. “Ask you what?”

“Ask me what I’m doing here.”

“Okay,” Billy said. “What are you—”

Max drew the gun back and drove his left fist into Billy’s face. Billy’s head snapped back as blood spurted out of his broken nose. “Ask me again,” Max said.

Billy was gasping and swallowing like a landed fish. “I don’t—”

Max grabbed his hair and put the gun back against Billy’s head. “I said, ask me.”

“I’m choking!”

“Are you going to ask me?”

“Yes!” he gulped, blood dribbling over his lips and down his chin. “Please. Tell me why you’re here.”

“For Irene,” Max said. “I’m here for her.”

“Irene who?”

Max ground the gun barrel harder against the bony forehead. “Don’t you dare say that,” he whispered. “Don’t you fucking dare deny her fucking name.”

Billy looked down at his sheets. “The girl across the street?”

“I know this isn’t where you killed her. But it’s where you first saw her. Isn’t it?”

“Me? No.”

“You saying you never saw her? You lie to me, you twisted shit, I’ll kill you.”

“Don’t I have a right to a phone call?”

A small body wedged under a crawl space. An autopsy report that ran to two pages. Broken milk teeth.

“You have the right to get shot in your lying mouth. Now tell me what happened, Billy. You saw her out there on the street?”

Billy’s eyes tried to focus on Max but kept coming back to the gun. “Okay, sure. I saw her. We were neighbors for three weeks.”

“You go for a walk with her?”

“Never!”

“Someone saw you, Billy. Saw you walking with her in your brown-and-white cap. You know where?”

“It wasn’t me!”

“You’re lying again. Like you lied about Eddie Whelan. Spun us a bullshit story about him hanging around to take the heat off yourself. You know he’s dead, don’t you?”

“Whelan?”

“We went to bring him in and he tried to dump his needle and his junk and a nervous cop thought he was pulling a gun and put two rounds into him. Know what it sounded like?”

“No,” Billy said.

Max put his gun against Billy’s pillow, inches from his ear, and fired.

“Jesus!” Billy cried. He tried to get up but Max put his hand on his chest and kept him where he was. Feathers flew up in the air then settled back on the bed and floor.

“She saw you on Rachel,” Max said, “walking with Irene, heading east past Saint-Christophe. You know what’s there, don’t you?”

“What?”

“On the north side of Rachel, between Mentana and Boyer. Number 961.”

“961 Rachel?” Billy said softly. “The Midgets Palace?”

“Say it again.”

“The Midgets Palace.”

“You offered to take her there, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“What kid wouldn’t want to go? All that tiny furniture. Everything cut down to size. What did you say yesterday? They can see how the little-halves live?”

“I didn’t take her there!”

“I’m going to show your lying face to this witness,” Max said, “and she’s going to say, Yes, sergeant, that’s him, that’s the one who walked with her in the checkered cap. And I am going to take you into the basement of headquarters — no, into a dark laneway — and beat you to death the way you beat her. I’m going to break every bone and crack every tooth in your head. Slowly, Billy.”

“You can’t.”

“I’m six feet tall and almost two hundred pounds. Tell me again that I can’t.”

“But the law—”

“You think anyone will care about the law once they find out about you and Irene? They all loved that girl, Billy. The whole city has been following the story, searching for her, praying we’d find her alive. Your only hope is to tell me what happened and do it fast, before I get the urge to pull this trigger again. But not into the pillow. Into your knees. Or maybe that big shlong of yours. Isn’t it big, Billy? You told me yesterday, it’s bigger than other guys.”

“I was joking.”

“Only women don’t go for you. Just streetwalkers, that’s what you said. That’s why you hate them all.”

“I don’t hate anyone.”

“You wouldn’t have to pay Irene, would you? You could take her for free.”

Billy didn’t answer.

“I bet she thought you were cute,” Max said. “A grown man her size? I bet she thought you were harmless. But you’re not, are you?”

Nothing.

“I said, you’re not harmless, are you?” Max leaned in so close that his words left bits of spittle on the man’s cheeks.

“No,” Billy whispered.

“You’re strong. Strong as hell for a little guy. You can lift your own weight over your head. I’ve seen it. You picked up that wrestler, what’s his name — Tiny Roe? — you picked him up like nothing and spun him around and threw him right out of the ring. Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So a girl like Irene, you could have done anything you wanted.”

“But I didn’t want to.”

“Maybe not at first. You were nice to her at first, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Hear that? He said yes, the little bastard.

“A pretty little girl like that. I saw her picture in her house. I saw how pretty she was. I bet she smelled good. Did she smell good, Billy? Did she?”

“I guess.”

I’ve got you now, you lying piece of shit.

“You guess? You’d only know if you got real close. How close did you get? This close?” Max put his mouth against Billy’s bloody nose and bared his teeth, breathed out as if trying to fog a mirror.

“Please,” Billy said.

“Please what?”

“Let me up. Let me out of this bed.”

“Why? Am I too close?”

“Yes.”

“Were you this close to Irene?”

“I have to piss.”

“Tell me first how close you were, then I’ll let you up.”

“I need to piss.”

“Piss in your bed, it doesn’t matter. You’re never going to sleep in it again. You’re going to be dead or in jail by lunchtime.”

“Okay. If I tell you what happened, you gotta understand...”

“Understand what?”

“I just wanted...”

“What! Spit it out, Billy.”

“It’s like you said! After I moved in here, I saw her from the window sometimes. Saw her on the street. Once or twice I said hello to her and she said hello back. That’s all, nothing to it. But you could tell she was sweet. Some of the other kids made fun of me, but not her. And I guess she was curious about me. The other day...”

“The day she went missing?”

“Yeah. That day. She was walking home and I was walking home and we got to talking and she asked me — straight out, not mean — why I was the size I was. So we talked about it. I told her what it was like to be small and she asked me about the Midgets Palace. Got that? She asked me. She’d walked past there on her way to the park and she was curious about it, I didn’t offer to take her there or anywhere else.”

“But she asked and you said yes.”

“I had nothing else to do. No fights lined up, no social life to attend to. Jan just sits and reads most of the time. I’m going fucking nuts here. So we’re walking and she asks if everything is the right size for me where I live. I say no, everything at Jan’s is normal size. And she takes my hand and says she’s sorry. Okay? She takes my hand. This is important because I’ve never gone after kids, ever. Never even thought about sex with them, I swear. But there we are, walking together, holding hands, and for the first time in my life, I feel — Christ, I don’t know what I felt. But I wasn’t with a prostie. She wasn’t looking at me like a freak. It was like having a girlfriend. For once in my life, I was walking down the street with a normal girl.”

“A girl your size.”

“That’s right. A girl my size. So maybe I started to feel something I shouldn’t have. We stopped at Mentana, waiting to cross, and suddenly I wanted to kiss her. Just kiss her and hold her. I didn’t even want to fuck her, I don’t think. I mean, I had a hard-on, but I don’t think I would have done it to her. I just wanted to stand against her and hold her tight. Maybe just cum in my pants.”

Max felt his hand tighten around the grip of his .38.

“I told her we should go down the laneway for a minute. Told her there was a guy who kept rabbits in a hutch in his yard. Told her maybe the guy would let her take one home. And she got this beautiful look on her face, this big smile. Because what kid doesn’t love rabbits?”

Later that day, Max sat in the office of his commander, his hands trembling in his lap. He told Bellechasse everything that Billy had told him: how he had walked Irene down the lane and into a shed whose door was unlocked; how he had tried to kiss her and how she had pushed him away and spit on the ground; how he had hit her and kept hitting her long after her body had slumped to the concrete floor, pounding her with his powerful fists and kicking her until his volcanic rage had subsided.

When he was done, Max took a cigarette from a pack on Bellechasse’s desk. The commander slid a lighter across the surface. Max needed both hands to work it.

“The pathologist thinks she was probably unconscious after the first blow. I doubt she felt much pain,” Bellechasse said.

Max thought of Irene walking down the lane to find a rabbit to take home. “Tell me another one.”

Other People’s Secrets by Tess Fragoulis

Sherbrooke Street

As Catalina Thwaite stood before the black wooden doors of the stately town house on Sherbrooke Street, she decided her past and future would never meet. She pressed the button on the brass doorbell and ran her finger over Dr. Schmidt’s nameplate, wiping the print she’d left with the sleeve of her jacket. Her name would replace it soon enough. The stone lion’s head looming above the doorway seemed indifferent to such vicissitudes; it stared at its counterpart across the street — a frowning satyr with curled horns and a face sooted by the elements. The satyr was much more fearsome and discouraging than the empty-eyed lion. Just as well, thought Catalina. People seeking therapy had enough anxieties and neuroses without the added pressure of the devil snarling at them at the gate.

She rang the bell a second time, irritated that her lawyer’s office had yet to forward her a set of keys. She took a mental note of the first offense committed by Dr. Schmidt’s secretary, Mrs. Dubois, who had been given some time off after her employer’s sudden exit. During this time, Catalina had sorted out the paperwork and prepared for the transition into his practice. She’d left a message on Friday, asking Mrs. Dubois to come in on Monday morning at 9 a.m. sharp to begin sorting and reviving the temporarily dormant files. The old secretary was either late for their meeting — an intolerable quality to Catalina, who was pathologically punctual — or had not shown up at all, perhaps unable to digest the fact that the man she had assisted for thirty years was dead. This would surely have given the secretary intimations of her own mortality, or at least of the unlikelihood of her continued employment. Catalina considered dismissing Mrs. Dubois right away, but she had enough to do in the next few weeks without worrying about hiring a new secretary. No, it was better to keep the old dog around until things were settled and she was no longer of use. Then she could be put gently out of her misery.

As Catalina searched for her cell phone in her red leather briefcase — purchased the day before at Holt’s for too much money — Mrs. Dubois’s woeful voice crackled through the intercom.

“Dr. Schmidt’s office,” she said, then cleared her throat and tried again, her words wet, unsure: “I mean doctor’s office. I’m sorry. May I help you?”

Catalina rolled her eyes at the apathetic lion but swallowed her annoyance and assumed a professional if slightly imperious tone: “It’s Dr. Thwaite. Can you let me in, please?” she said, her t’s sharp as stickpins. She gripped the brass handle, and after a moment of silence, a long, deep buzz unlocked the door.

The first thing Catalina encountered in the sun-drenched entry hall was a Venetian mirror that framed her reflection with an orgy of gilded cherubs and rosettes. She smiled and smoothed away a strand of her otherwise meticulously styled hair. She had seen a hairdresser that morning for a cut and color, even though he had balked at the seven a.m. request. Catalina was not fond of the word no, and she knew that, for enough money, the hairdresser would have come to her room at the Ritz-Carlton at four a.m. if she’d so desired. She’d been up, after all, planning every detail of the day ahead. The deep chestnut shade suited her better than the various blonds and reds she’d favored for so many years, and along with the classic Vidal Sassoon inverted bob, she looked dignified and slightly untouchable. She cut quite the figure in her black-and-white houndstooth suit — both the trousers and jacket made for her by a London tailor the week before — and the aquamarine silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. The four-inch undulating heels of her Louboutins made her nearly six-three.

“Worth every penny,” she said to her reflection, pulling her shoulders back and jutting her chin forward with the air of someone mildly offended. Catalina knew that three-quarters of success depended on looking the part, on making an impression that inspired confidence and a bit of fear. But Mrs. Dubois was already afraid.

As her aquamarine heels clicked against the red marble tiles, adrenaline surged though her body. It was similar to what she felt when she ran along the trails of Mount Royal, pretending she was being hunted before turning into the hunter. Now she stopped herself from running up the staircase to the second floor, not wanting to spoil the moment she’d so thoroughly rehearsed in her imagination. She ascended slowly, solemnly, holding onto the polished wooden banister, primed for her grand entrance into the new and enviable life which had begun when Dr. Schmidt’s ended.

As Catalina walked into the office, Mrs. Dubois was slouched at her small desk, staring at her computer screen, which was playing an electronic-greeting-card version of Bach’s “Chorale.” It was the background music for the online condolence book of Paperman’s, the funeral home that had taken care of Dr. Schmidt’s remains. Mrs. Dubois was so absorbed in scrolling through the entries left by grieving friends and clients that she did not notice her new employer’s arrival, even though she’d just buzzed her in. The guest book was likely the reason it had taken so long. Catalina had consulted the wretched site several times in preparation for meeting Dr. Schmidt’s clients — the ones who had not already moved on to a new therapist, and the ones who would be encouraged to do so. She had not gone to the funeral, nor had she left a comment. Perhaps that was what Mrs. Dubois was looking for.

Catalina grimaced inwardly as she studied the woman in her brown loafers and matching slacks, topped with a pale-blue sweater set that Mrs. Dubois had either bought in a thrift shop or saved from her youth — she wasn’t sure which was worse. Her blond hair had the brassy and dried-out quality of box dye, and was teased into a rounded helmet and sprayed into place. She wore glasses too large for her face, with rectangular gold frames and thick lenses divided by the horizontal line of bifocals. A small gold crucifix hung around her neck and was her only piece of jewelry other than a wristwatch and plain wedding band. Catalina knew Mrs. Dubois had been widowed several years before, and imagined that coming to work and keeping the also-widowed Dr. Schmidt and his clients’ lives in order had become the woman’s raison d’être. Perhaps Mrs. Dubois had hoped that becoming indispensible in the office would get her promoted to something more meaningful than secretary. But despite being only a few years younger than Dr. Schmidt, she was not young enough to satisfy his tastes, neither while Mrs. Schmidt was alive nor after she had died. Mrs. Dubois’s sartorial choices had obviously not helped her case.

The waiting room was a decent size, with its twelve-foot ceilings and bay windows common to the older town houses in the neighborhood. But unlike the hallway with its art deco sconces, mermaid chandelier, and parquet de Versailles floor smelling faintly of lemon polish, it had a musty odor and was as drab as Mrs. Dubois. The walls were yellowed and grayed with age, stained by cigarette smoke from the years the vile habit was still permitted indoors. Neurotics and schizophrenics surely filled the now absent ashtray on the coffee table with du Mauriers smoked down to the filter; the burns in its wood veneer betrayed its former location. In its place was a metal bowl filled with wrapped candies that looked shriveled and unappealing. An assortment of outdated magazines littered the rest of the table’s surface: Paris Match, Chatelaine, and a tattered issue of Police Extra with a picture of a smug cop on the cover, the headline blaring, “Payé par les Hells!” Catalina thought she could smell stale smoke trapped in the brown fabric of the couch, though perhaps it was carried in Mrs. Dubois’s bouffant.

When the door clicked shut, the old woman finally looked up, her eyes glazed as a sleepwalker’s. She gave Catalina a wan smile, then burst into tears. “I’m so sorry,” she blubbered, and hunched over to dig through her brown bag for a tissue, though there was a box for clients sitting at the front edge of her desk. “I know it’s been a week, but until you walked in...”

Catalina moved toward the crying woman, towering over her as she laid her briefcase on the desk. With her fingernails, she extracted a tissue from the box and handed it to Mrs. Dubois, who dabbed at the dribbles of mascara that were pooling in her wrinkles. “There, there,” she whispered, hoping her voice conveyed sympathy. She stopped short of patting the woman’s hand, which looked greasy and was mottled with brown spots. “It must be very hard to move from denial to acceptance so quickly. You’ve skipped a few very important steps.” Mrs. Dubois tried to smile, though she was still leaking blackened tears. “Thank you for coming in on such short notice, Joan.” She bent over the secretary’s desk and gazed at her so intensely that Mrs. Dubois was compelled to lean back in her chair. “Dr. Schmidt said you were as dependable as an atomic clock.”

Mrs. Dubois winced when she heard his name, though Catalina pretended not to notice. She was not the woman’s therapist, after all, and was eager to avoid the questions that were swimming behind the woman’s watery eyes: Why did Dr. Schmidt do it when his prostrate treatments were going so well? How could she, who saw him daily — more than anyone else — not have noticed his depression? And how did Catalina, who she had never heard of until after his death, come to be named a curator in his professional will? Dr. Weintraub was listed as his first choice, but he had retired to the Cayman Islands years ago and was unlikely to come back to Montreal to settle his old friend’s affairs. Catalina knew this because Forrest had mentioned that he hoped to follow Dr. Weintraub’s example, though he preferred Bermuda, which he visited every other year during Christmas break.

Catalina’s answers were prepared, of course. Yes, Bermuda would have been a more fitting and gentler denouement to his long career, but neither lifespan nor will to live came with a guaranteed end date — something, perhaps, for Mrs. Dubois to mull over as well? And men manifested depression in different ways than women: irritability, violence, impulsivity. These were things she might not have readily noticed in the sterile environment of the office, no matter how well she thought she knew him. Not to mention there was an increased incidence, statistically speaking, of suicidal ideation among psychotherapists. But since Mrs. Dubois wouldn’t be around long enough for this first encounter to matter, Catalina didn’t bother comforting her with facts or philosophical musings, nor did she explain how she had come to fill Dr. Schmidt’s orthopedic shoes, which as she recalled were not that big. For the moment, she would just empathize and validate the woman’s feelings — it was what all the literature recommended.

“I can see how hard this has been on you, Joan,” Catalina said in her most compassionate tone. She handed the woman another tissue, and Mrs. Dubois wiped her tears, smudging mascara into her crow’s feet, then blowing her nose like a rusty trumpet.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman replied, trying to smile. “I didn’t expect to have such a reaction. I didn’t even cry at the memorial service. I guess there was no time to process it — he was at work one day and buried the next.” She waved her frail hands in a gesture of helplessness, then lifted her handbag onto her lap and retrieved a dented compact. “Look at me, I’m such a mess.” She worked haphazardly on the smudges around her eyes with the soggy tissue. “It’s a good thing that no clients are coming in today. There are dozens of messages and just as many referrals that were made before he... left us.” Her face began to collapse again; she managed to catch it, but not the quaver in her voice. From a drawer she retrieved two folders, which she handed to Catalina: the first was full of little pink callback slips, the second contained almost a dozen intake sheets, which provided basic information about each potential client — name, age, address, as well as a few lines summarizing the reason for the referral. Catalina placed the folder with the pink slips back onto the desk and slipped the second folder into her briefcase. Mrs. Dubois gave her a puzzled look.

“It will be at least a few more weeks before I can return any of these calls,” she explained, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “I’d like to spruce up the waiting room, give it a fresh start, and probably the rest of the office too.”

A mild panic flitted across the secretary’s face as she glanced at the sagging furniture and the fading posters hung with no apparent design on the walls. They illustrated Freud’s defense mechanisms — projection, sublimation, denial, reaction formation — with large-headed and frightened-looking characters who were sure to make clients uneasy.

“Feel free to take anything that holds sentimental value for you. I’m sure Dr. Schmidt would have wanted it that way.” This statement seemed to placate the secretary, as her only response was a quiet, “Thank you.”

“Now, if it’s not too much trouble, can you make a list of all the clients with active files? I’d like you to note who should be contacted by phone as well as who should receive the lawyer’s letter explaining what has occurred and what will happen next.” It was protocol to reach out to each client individually, and Catalina believed that you could get away with almost anything if you kept on top of the smaller tasks. From her briefcase she extracted a flash drive containing the lawyer’s letter and placed it before Mrs. Dubois. “Make sure everyone on the list gets a copy of the file labeled, Schmidt-death-notice.”

Mrs. Dubois plugged the flash drive into her computer and pulled up the document, which bore the letterhead of Dr. Schmidt’s attorney, Anthony Curtiss, and was signed by him as well, though Catalina had composed the message herself for expediency. The secretary pushed her glasses onto the bridge of her nose and silently read the letter.

Oddly, the letter perked Mrs. Dubois up a bit, though it might have been the prospect of filling the role of next-of-kin by informing the clients of the doctor’s passing. The office’s voice mail had announced that all sessions were cancelled until further notice, and a statement of Dr. Schmidt’s death had appeared in the Gazette and Le Devoir. There had been no reference to the cause of death, which was certain to be the first question everyone would ask, had Mrs. Dubois not already spilled the beans when she called to cancel their appointments.

“Would you like me to phone them since I already know them all?”

“No,” Catalina said firmly, “it would be better if they heard it from someone—” she paused as if to select her words, “—less involved.”

Mrs. Dubois looked somewhat sheepish as she nodded, but she picked up a pen and legal pad, eager to prove she was something more than a quivering sack of grief. “And by what criteria would you like me to select who gets called, Dr. Thwaite?”

“By who is most likely to become hysterical, naturally.”

Catalina did not indicate which clients would receive the phone call in addition to the letter. She had yet to decide what would be most interesting.

It took Mrs. Dubois all morning to compile the patient list and personalize and print the letters. Meanwhile, Catalina sequestered herself behind the dark wooden door that led to both Dr. Schmidt’s consultation room and study. Like the waiting area, the rooms were spacious, with large windows looking onto the street. The consultation room had the dark wainscoting of what was once a dining room or parlor before the town house had been cut up into office space — two other doctors had offices on the second floor. There was also a fireplace that no longer functioned; a fake log in need of dusting sat on its grate. The mantelpiece was made of the same dark walnut as the doors of the waiting room and study. A porcelain Ming reproduction vase holding dried flowers sat before a wood-framed mirror, and a green corduroy sofa was pushed up against the wall by the windows. This kept the distractions of the outside world away from clients, but afforded them to Dr. Schmidt. Catalina had to admit this was good planning — it went without saying that most of his long-term patients were going to be unbearably dull. (The hysterics would be called, she all at once decided.) A matching armchair sat facing the sofa with an end table next to it, an obvious cousin to the coffee table in the waiting room. A few files still lay upon it instead of being locked away in a file cabinet as professional standards and bylaws required. She wasn’t sure who was at fault for the lapse: Dr. Schmidt or Mrs. Dubois. She chose to condemn them both. She sat on neither the sofa nor chair; both looked lumpy and likely to shed a powder of grass-stain green on her lovely new suit. With amused contempt, she imagined the sofa being carried out with Mrs. Dubois stretched across it, complaining to the ghost of Dr. Schmidt about his successor.

Catalina picked up the wayward files and carried them into the adjoining study, tossing them onto Dr. Schmidt’s gray metal desk. She would instruct Mrs. Dubois to file them in the matching metal cabinet tucked away in a closet that also contained one of the doctor’s old hats and trench coats. All of his belongings looked utilitarian and tired. Perhaps they had all been new once, but their time had clearly passed. More likely they were hand-me-downs, just like the furniture in his apartment on Wood Avenue, which had been left untouched after his mother’s death — a dusty shrine of 1940s chinoiserie. Catalina had no such sympathies. The metal desk, the lugubrious sofa, and the faded brown rug would be thrown out immediately; she wouldn’t even bother donating them to charity. This would be her favor to whatever down-on-their-luck family might acquire them, giving them a chance to wait for something better to come along, something free of the accumulated dander and burdens of others.

She hesitated at the bathroom door, sniffing the air like a disdainful cat, but was pleasantly surprised to see a spotless claw-foot tub resting on a black-and-white tile floor, as well as a large pedestal sink with a shiny chrome faucet, and a modern toilet paired with a bidet. The bathroom was the only room that looked like it belonged to the town house, probably because someone other than Dr. Schmidt had chosen its fixtures. It smelled of flowery ammonia, evidence of a recent visit by the cleaning staff, who obviously took pride in buffing and polishing the one room in the office that showed the fruits of their labor. A striped bathrobe drooped on a hook behind the door, and the medicine cabinet contained Dr. Schmidt’s old razor, shaving brush, and an open canister of shaving soap that had specks of stubble trapped in its melted waves. There were also a few pill bottles: painkillers and vitamins, immunotherapy drugs for his cancer, along with a full bottle of the same sedatives that had dispatched him, which she slipped into her pocket. She would ask the cleaning staff to dispose of his remaining personal effects during their next rounds. From her inner pocket she extracted a yellow cotton handkerchief bearing the initials FS and, out of habit, wiped her fingerprints from the medicine cabinet.

While she was removing the traces of her inspection, she heard Mrs. Dubois’s feeble voice: “Hello? Sorry to disturb.”

The constant apologizing was starting to get on Catalina’s nerves — had she been truly sorry, she would not have come into the study without an invitation. No doubt the secretary’s territoriality, along with her grief and routine, meant she would be crossing boundaries all the time, which would not do. New locks would be the first order of business, this afternoon if possible: one for the main entrance, another for the door between the consultation room and the waiting room, and one for her study. This would not only prevent Mrs. Dubois and whoever replaced her from barging in, it would keep the crazies contained.

“Not a problem,” Catalina called out, stuffing the handkerchief into her pocket as she stepped out of the bathroom. The secretary was looking through the files on the desk, where Catalina’s briefcase lay perilously open.

“I’ll put these away for you.” Mrs. Dubois located the key to the file cabinet on her key ring, but didn’t apologize for leaving the files laying about. Catalina saved her reproach for a more profitable moment. “These are the clients he would have met with...” The woman sniffled and hugged the files to her bosom like a picture of a loved one, then quickly turned toward the closet to hide her latest wave of tears. She jiggled the lock on the file cabinet until it opened.

“I’ve yet to receive a set of keys from the lawyer’s office, Joan. Do you think you might leave me yours?”

Mrs. Dubois stopped what she was doing and gave Catalina a begrudging look.

“They’ll likely arrive sometime this afternoon, but I can’t be asked to wait around for them after you’ve gone for the day.” None of this was true. She’d arranged for the keys to be couriered to the hotel, and they were probably already waiting for her there, but this would take care of the invading secretary and free up her afternoon for something more pleasant than waiting for a locksmith. After tardiness, waiting was a close second on her list of dislikes, and when they coalesced, she could not be held responsible for her actions.

“Oh, that won’t be necessary. I have an extra set in my desk.” Mrs. Dubois scurried out of the study to get them, and Catalina picked up her briefcase and followed, closing the door behind her.

As Mrs. Dubois rifled through her desk, Catalina looked out the bay windows at the street below. The few people coming and going were well dressed, though not fashionable, and generally older. Women in skirt suits and designer dowager dresses were walking small, fluffy dogs or carrying large colorful bags with the names and emblems of stores frequented by the privileged class. A town car idled before a silver-haired man in a deep-blue suit — it would deliver him to his office or more likely to his mistress’s apartment, Catalina imagined. The man checked his cell phone several times, then handed the uniformed driver a small jewelry bag from Birks, which he placed on the front seat. No one seemed to be in any kind of hurry, which was unusual for Montreal. Catalina supposed men like him had enough money to hire others to hurry for them. Mrs. Dubois, on the other hand, was starting to seem frantic as she pulled out file folders, notebooks, and crumpled plastic bags from her desk drawers, desperate to find her extra set of keys so she would not have to hand over her own.

Then, as if finding a lost lottery ticket with the winning number, Mrs. Dubois held up the keys in triumph and gave a little cheer. “Here they are!” She jangled them in the air and huffed a sigh of relief.

“Brilliant,” Catalina said, taking them from the secretary and dropping them into her briefcase. “And the list?”

Mrs. Dubois handed over a few sheets of paper with names and phone numbers typed in columns, and the letter P handwritten next to the clients who would have to be called. As Catalina flipped through the list, mentally counting how many phone calls she’d have to make, she remembered a joke that she’d heard at a conference: How many hysterics does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, because they’re all afraid of the dark. She couldn’t recall who had told it, but she refrained from sharing it with Mrs. Dubois.

“I’ve also printed out copies of the letter and addressed the envelopes,” the woman said brightly. “Our regular courier is on his way — I could wait for him if you’d like to go for lunch.”

“That won’t be necessary.” From her briefcase, Catalina extracted a red leather card wallet and handed one of her newly minted business cards to the secretary. Dr. Catalina Thwaite was printed in raised, elegant black longhand on a thick and crisp white bond. The phone number beneath it belonged to an answering service she’d hired to create a barrier between herself and her clients. She knew that other therapists provided their clients with their cell phone numbers, or — God forbid — their home numbers. But Catalina had no interest in granting such unfettered access to anyone.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off and do something nice for yourself, Joan? And if you don’t hear from me in the next few days, give me a ring and I’ll tell you how I’m faring here. We can then discuss setting up some appointments — first with the referrals, then with the transfers who have not yet jumped ship.” Or off a building or bridge, she thought, but kept to herself, since she was sure the old woman wouldn’t find it funny. She would laugh about it after Mrs. Dubois left.

The secretary’s brow lifted, her eyes narrowed, and Catalina could tell she was displeased but knew enough to keep her tone neutral, her words measured. “Might it be a better idea to resume with old clients first? They have so much to process — losing Dr. Schmidt under such tragic circumstances, having their therapy cut off so abruptly.” This time her voice didn’t crack. She had been handling Dr. Schmidt’s clients for a long time, and in this she felt confident, perhaps even superior, in her judgment. She wore a self-possessed, almost smug expression as she awaited a reply.

“No,” Catalina said with no further explanation, and watched the old woman’s confidence slowly deflate. After a moment, Mrs. Dubois began to sweep the papers and other detritus on her desk back into the drawers with no thought of order. Slovenly, thought Catalina, though her face showed no distaste. Mrs. Dubois would soon cease to offend her senses altogether.

“If you’re sure there’s nothing else I can do...” She picked up her brown handbag and threw her keys in it.

“Nothing, nothing at all,” Catalina replied pleasantly, and escorted her to the door.

Through the bay windows she watched the old secretary shuffle up the street. Every few steps she looked over her shoulder, as if desperate for a last glimpse at her world before it disappeared.

“And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier,” Catalina recited in the empty office, grinning. Her favorite line from Whitman never failed to infuse her with equanimity and resolve. Death had always been lucky for her. She was not certain Dr. Schmidt felt the same when his time came, though Mrs. Dubois might feel fortunate to finally join him. She looked through the secretary’s desk, searching for an address. Tomorrow or the next day she would drop by her flat to settle the matter of her future at the practice once and for all, the bottle of Dr. Schmidt’s sedatives resting in her pocket like a love potion, like a sleeping snake.

Suitcase Man by Martin Michaud

Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef

Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery

An old man bows against the wind, making his way among the frozen headstones of the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery. A heavy suitcase dangles from his fist, leaves a trail of blood on the snow. The man’s eyebrows are white with frost, and his eyes shine with the conviction that drives those who have made grave decisions, carried out irreversible acts. When he finally reaches Florence’s headstone, he knows he’s come to the end of his journey, and he’s determined to watch his life leave him like a dark ship disappearing into the horizon.

Under the weight of his years, but especially his suffering, the old man’s knees buckle and cease to carry him. When he staggers and slumps forward, arms open, he looks as if he’s trying to grab ahold of the clouds rolling across the sky.

Then his body collapses, shooting crystalline snowflakes up into the air. The old man is named Arthur Zourek, but it’s been years since anyone has heard his name.

The smell of fast food filled the front seat of the patrol car, its windows frosted over. One of the policemen, whose name tag read Robitaille, shoved a handful of fries into his mouth and, chewing, said, “It’s terrible. You’d think my daughter walks around the house in lead boots! She had an exam at the university this morning. When I got up in the middle of the night to take a piss, she was still studying. Can you believe it? Every damn light in the apartment was on. Just like her mother. I spend my whole life turning off those friggin’ lights!”

Robitaille burst out laughing, shaking his head while his fingers closed down on his dripping hamburger. With his mouth full, he continued: “Me and Michèle, we haven’t fucked for weeks. The kids’ rooms are practically on top of ours. I think we’ll have to move. Now that Justine and her brother are older, we’ve got zero privacy. We need some more space or we’re gonna go crazy...” His greasy fingers stroked the ends of his graying mustache. “How ’bout your son? How old is he now, your little guy?”

The man who’d been absently listening to Robitaille’s grievances raised his head, worked his jaw for a moment, and fixed his green eyes on his partner. “Martin? Six months.”

Robitaille slurped up the last of his Coca-Cola through a straw. “And? How’s it going?”

“He’s so little, so fragile — it’s a miracle, life.” The young policeman looked out the window into the deserted Saint Joseph’s Oratory parking lot. The patrol car was parked in front of the lot, on Chemin Queen Mary. “You don’t want anything to happen to them. You want to protect them from anything that could harm them. From...” The cop’s eyes gleamed as he choked back tears.

Robitaille, who’d seen a thing or two in his day, suspected his partner was a tormented man, that an immense rift had torn through his childhood like a long and painful scar burned into flesh.

“You want to protect them from others. And from yourself.”

Robitaille noticed the rectangular plastic box his colleague held on his knees, containing a sandwich, carrots and celery sticks, a piece of cheese. He ate slowly, chewing each bite carefully as if he were savoring every flavor.

“Your wife packs your lunches, eh?” said Robitaille. “Enjoy it, son. It won’t last. Pretty soon she’ll start nagging you for not talking enough about your emotions, if she hasn’t already.”

The young policeman lowered his head, embarrassed at suddenly being the center of attention. Robitaille crumpled up the wax paper that had covered his hamburger, chewing the last bite. “Besides, it’s not as if you were much of a chatterbox to begin with.”

On the radio, they listened to a hockey match between the Canadiens and the Bruins. When the sportscaster announced a Boston goal, Robitaille banged his fist on the dashboard. “Goddamnit, Roy! Another fast one! Better trade him while he’s still worth something. We’ll never win the Cup with that moron in the net.” He turned the heat up all the way and sighed. “Thirty-three below. Shit, it’s freezing—”

He was interrupted by a crackling noise as the dispatcher’s voice came over the patrol radio: “Calling all units: Code 063 at 4565 Côte-des-Neiges.”

Robitaille turned to his partner. They were only a few blocks away. Without a moment’s hesitation, the green-eyed policeman grabbed the transmitter.

“Eleven three. We’re on our way.”

Robitaille started the engine and shot off at full speed, making the tires spin out on the ice. His partner turned on the siren and revolving lights. The two were silent as the patrol car hurtled through the night. Then Robitaille winced and said between his teeth, “An abused kid. Jesus. We’ve got a fucking shitty job, son.”

Victor Lessard said nothing, but his jaw tightened and his gaze hardened. Sinister phantoms danced before him.

The woman who’d made the call to 911 — a gray-haired, wrinkled twig wearing a floral dress — waited for the officers on her apartment’s second-floor landing.

Since Robitaille was breathless from climbing the stairs, it was Victor who asked, “What’s happened, madame?”

“I heard screams coming from the apartment upstairs,” she responded. “A child’s screams. I went out into the hallway, and that’s where I saw him. The upstairs neighbor, I mean. Coming down the stairs with his big suitcase, the one he’s always dragging around with him.”

“He lives alone?”

She nodded her small white head. “I’ve lived here fifteen years. He was here when I moved in. I’ve never seen anyone else go up those stairs. Except once.” Her wrinkled mouth puckered in a sneer of disgust. “A whore...”

Without reacting to her remark, Victor asked, “Do you know his name?”

She shook her head no. “But everyone on the block calls him Suitcase Man. He’s a scary one, that’s for sure.”

Robitaille, who had finally caught his breath, cut in: “And what exactly is the problem, madame?”

“Besides the screaming?” She fixed her owl’s eyes on the cop. “There was blood dripping from his suitcase.”

Victor walked up to the staircase, crouched in front of the first few steps, and brushed them with his fingertips. He stood, his index finger covered with blood, and followed the trail of drops up the stairs.

Breathless, his chest heaving, Arthur Zourek sits down in the snow and leans against Florence’s headstone. Reaching out his arm, he grabs the handle of his suitcase and pulls it to his chest, cradling it gently as the wind blows and blood spreads dark over the snow.

A melancholy smile crosses the old man’s face.

“My little princess suffered too much, Flo. I had to take her with me, I had no choice. You see, Flo — together for eternity. I’m coming to join you.”

He digs in the pocket of his jacket and takes out a half-empty bottle of pills. Twisting the top off, he brings it to his lips and swallows the remaining tablets. Then he hears shuffling behind him. He raises his eyes and makes out the silhouette of a young man leaning over him. Behind him, gnarled branches blown by the wind seem to reach out to grab him.

“Bonjour, Arthur. How are you today?”

The old man nods in greeting to the visitor, a man of around thirty, whose long black hair is flecked with snowflakes and blowing in the wind. “Salut, Jérôme. You should put on some clothes, you’ll catch a cold.”

The young man pulls the lapels of his jean jacket closed, a contemptuous smile curving his lips. “Perhaps you have a coat for me in there?”

Arthur Zourek hugs his suitcase even more tightly. “There’s nothing of interest to you in here,” he says in a sharp voice. “Nothing, you hear?”

Jérôme shrugs his shoulders and pulls a flask from his jacket pocket. He throws his head back and takes a long swig. “I have what I need to keep warm. You want some?”

Zourek shoots a disdainful look at the flask. “No. I don’t drink alcohol.”

The half-open door squeaked loudly as Robitaille gave it a push. The two policemen cautiously entered the Suitcase Man’s dark apartment.

“Police!” Victor called out.

Flashlights in one hand, pistols in the other, the men moved silently, each covering the other. Robitaille buried his nose in his forearm. A fetid odor of decaying matter and cat urine filled the room. “Oh god, it reeks in here.”

He turned on the living room light, and a mountain of random filth appeared: a soiled mattress, a lamp with a ratty shade, a cooler, a TV in a solid wood case, a teddy bear’s head on a stand, suitcases, dirty clothes, a turntable, records, an overturned sofa, dusty picture frames, and many stacks of newspapers.

Victor headed for the kitchen, where a pan of dried spaghetti sauce congealed on the stove. On the counter, fruit flies swarmed around rotten fruit and cartons of Chinese food. Garbage bags full of empty cans were piled in a corner, and bundles of old lottery tickets lay on the table.

A corkboard was fixed to the door of the pantry. Amid a jumble of papers, a few black-and-white photographs stood out. Victor examined them for a moment. In one of them, a little girl of six or seven wore a polka-dotted dress. Barefoot in the grass, she smiled timidly at the camera. In another, which looked to be from the same period, a man of around thirty stood with a young blond woman. An uneasy feeling came over Victor. The couple wore a look that was almost frightening.

Leaving the pantry to take a look around, Victor made his way down the hallway. Suddenly he recoiled, his heartbeat quickening. Bloody footprints were still wet on the wood floor. He thought he should alert Robitaille, who was inspecting the dining room, but he was unable to move, rooted to the spot by the force of his imagination.

What would he find at the end of this hallway?

Not a dead child. He wouldn’t be able to bear it.

After shaking off the thought, he followed the trail of footprints and traced them back to another room. The door was ajar. The hallway was dark, and for a moment everything seemed to sway before him. An irresistible force drew him forward. His eyes were glued to the strip of light showing under the doorframe, and his heart pounded wildly in his chest. He stepped up to the door and knocked loudly.

“Police!”

Not a sound. Victor lunged at the door and pushed his torso through the opening, pointing his pistol into the room, ready to fire at the slightest provocation. For a moment, he thought the room was empty — until he saw what was there on the floor.

It took a moment for the nausea to come over him. His gallery of phantoms had just come alive again, the one that had haunted him since that July day in 1976 when his father had savagely murdered his mother and his brother Raymond, before turning the gun on himself.

Victor swallowed. He felt an immense pressure in his chest. At his back, his partner’s voice startled him.

“Oh fuck. We’d better call backup.”

Robitaille’s eyes widened in horror as he saw what Victor had been staring at: on the ground, a kitchen knife bathed in a pool of blood, strewn with short hairs.

A message had been traced with fingers on the floor: Together for eternity.

Defying the cold, the howling wind and snow gusts bending the cemetery trees, the young man in the denim jacket slowly approaches Zourek, whose face is now livid.

“There was another disappearance, Arthur. Right next door to you. What a coincidence, eh?”

“Why are you telling me this, Jérôme? What are you trying to insinuate?”

The young man stares at him with eyes full of reproach. “You know very well why I’m telling you this. There were others after—”

“Nasty little liar! You think you can mess with me?”

“Why so aggressive? After all these years...”

Arthur Zourek’s vision begins to blur. “You took her from me... She was my life...”

Jérôme shakes his head. “You’ve never accepted the truth. I’m the one who should be angry.”

Zourek’s eyes open wide as he murmurs, “The bloodshed did me good. It calmed me.”

The young man clenches his fists. “What are you hiding in that suitcase, Arthur? Let me see.” Jérôme steps forward and fixes the old man with his sullen eyes. Before Zourek can react, the young man grabs the handle of the suitcase and yanks at it with all his strength. The old man clings to it with the force of his despair.

Suddenly the buckles give way and the lid of the suitcase opens, sending its contents flying through the air before falling silently on the snow, near the front of the headstone. Struggling against his fatigue, the old man crawls forward and retrieves a small, blood-soaked corpse. He hugs it to his chest, murmuring words of comfort.

As they continued to search the apartment, the policemen discovered another room, meticulously clean. A little girl’s room frozen in the 1950s. They’d also found, near the pool of blood, a photo album with a warped cover.

After donning latex gloves, Victor examined the photos. The album contained carefully organized newspaper clippings spanning four decades. The oldest one was from 1951, the most recent from December 1992. Victor skimmed through the clippings and quickly found a common theme: they were all related to the disappearances and murders of children in Montreal.

A stack of utility bills and invoices landed on the table. Victor looked up at his partner.

“I found those on the corkboard. Apparently, the tenant’s name is Arthur Zourek.”

“You checked with Central to see if he has a record?”

Robitaille nodded. “No record, but he was interrogated in relation to a murder in 1959. No charges made, though.”

Victor frowned. “You have any more details?”

“Files from before 1980 haven’t been computerized. They’re digging through the archives.”

Robitaille came up behind his partner and started to read over his shoulder.

The most recent newspaper clipping cited the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl in a park in Côte-des-Neiges.

“The last disappearance happened three weeks ago,” Victor said softly. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That we’re just around the corner from Jean-Brillant Park?”

The two policemen looked at each other.

“We should call major crimes,” said Robitaille.

Even though his partner had more seniority, Victor had gained a kind of authority over him. So Robitaille did not take offense when Victor said, “Call Ted Rutherford. Tell him you’re my partner and that we need his help.”

“You know Ted Rutherford? He’s a legend.”

Victor almost explained that Rutherford was the first officer to arrive at the scene of his family’s massacre, that the star investigator had been his inspiration to pursue police work. But instead, he bit his lip.

As Robitaille headed for the wall phone, Victor continued examining the newspaper clippings. He found the oldest ones and read them carefully, wondering what it all meant. Then his gaze fell on one of the bills that Robitaille had left on the table. An idea crossed his mind. And then it clicked.

Victor shot out of his chair and headed for the door. Robitaille, who’d been on hold the past few minutes, asked where he was going.

“Hang up. We’re leaving.”

Robitaille cupped his hand over the phone. “Why? Where are we going?”

Moving quickly, Victor answered without turning around: “Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery.”

The old man cradles the body against his coat, and screams over the roar of the wind. Flurries of snow swirl around the headstone. “You see what you’ve done, you little bastard? Leave us, now!”

Jérôme opens his mouth to reply, then thinks better of it. The two stare at each other for a long moment. The young man eventually winces, turns on his heels, and walks away. Before he vanishes into the snowdrift, the old man notices that the back of Jérôme’s head is covered in blood. And through his shattered cranium, brain matter glistens.

Arthur Zourek closes his eyes.

Bathed in the glare of revolving headlights, the policemen sat motionless in a contemplative silence. They’d easily found the spot and parked the patrol car a block away.

When they arrived at the cemetery, the snow on the ground was perfectly smooth; the wind had swept away any footprints around the headstone. An open suitcase lay a few meters from the grave. An empty bottle of pills, a girl’s clothing, and toys stained with blood were scattered in the snow like bizarre offerings.

Robitaille spoke after a long moment: “How’d you know about the cemetery?”

Lost in his thoughts, Victor took a moment to reply. “One of the bills you found was a statement from the cemetery, for the maintenance of Florence and Rosalie Zourek’s graves.”

Robitaille shook his head. “I mean, how’d you know he would come here?”

“I read the oldest newspaper clippings, the ones about the unsolved murder of little Rosalie Zourek, six years old.”

“The daughter of Arthur and Florence Zourek...”

Staring into the distance, Victor nodded. “Then I remembered the words together for eternity written next to the pool of blood. It made sense when I saw the bill. It was intuition, really.”

“And the pedophile who had his skull bashed in by a hammer in 1959? You think the old man killed him? Zourek was the only witness interrogated by the investigators.”

On their way to the cemetery, Central had given them the information from the archives about the murder of Jérôme Gaudreau, a thirty-five-year-old repeat offender convicted of sexual violence against minors. At the beginning of 1953, Gaudreau had been suspected of committing a series of child abductions. But he’d been released a few days later, after he was cleared due to insufficient evidence.

Victor shrugged his shoulders. “The abductions apparently continued after Gaudreau’s death.”

“Poor old man. To end like that...”

Victor nodded, choked up with emotion. His head was full of grisly images, disfigured by time, and he stared at Arthur Zourek’s frozen body, partially covering the headstone.

In his arms, the old man clutched a disemboweled cat. He held it as one holds a child. As he would have held his little Rosalie more than forty years earlier.