The Dark Root

21

Montreal's official Chinatown-the one the tourists photograph-is on rue de la Gauchetière, west of boulevard St-Laurent. It is not very large-a few short blocks of jam-packed restaurants, shops, association headquarters, Mah-Jongg parlors, and apartments, all as covered with colorful posters, signs, and neon advertisements as a newlywed with rice. The street, closed off as a pedestrian walkway, is filled with people, all in movement, and reverberating with the sounds of exotic language and blaring radios. Lacoste parked his unmarked car on St-Laurent, just beyond the ornate, pagoda-style gateway that arched over the street’s entrance, and shoved a few coins into the parking meter that stood guard across the sidewalk, close to the wall.

The three of us entered La Gauchetière, walking abreast, looking as out of place as three gunslingers on an urban movie set-except that only our host was actually armed, with an ankle-holstered.38 he’d strapped on before leaving the office. Despite the fact that I was convinced we had police all but stenciled across our backs, Lacoste seemed as upbeat as I imagined he’d be during a stroll in the park. He moved from one side of the street to the other as we walked, pointing out various landmarks-usually those that had featured raids or robberies, or which were hangouts for the local hoods.

“The criminals do not live here. They come here to work-to have meetings, to gamble, to extort the merchants, to run their operations from up there.” He swept his arm above us, encompassing the dozens of dark, blank windows that were perched above the street on the upper floors. “It is not a very big Chinatown, but it is like a rabbit’s home, filled with tunnels and stairs and rooms you cannot find.”

“How many of the merchants are extorted?”

Lacoste shrugged. “Everybody-maybe a couple are not, who are well connected, and that is true not just for this Chinatown, but for the others that the tourists don’t know, in Brossard, and Côte des Neiges, and Jean Talon. But the center remains here. See?” He gestured with his chin to a trio of young men in dark-leather clothes, wearing studied malevolent expressions. They were huddled together by a door, smoking cigarettes and murmuring among themselves.

“You know who they belong to?” I asked.

“No, but they probably know me, and they’ll be wondering who you are. That will make for some phone calls.”

He stopped in front of a worn wooden door with a brass plaque announcing the East Wind Trade Association. “This is where Da Wang does his business. Like to go up?”

Without waiting for an answer, he twisted the knob and pushed his way in. Immediately before us was a dark, narrow, dusty stairway. Climbing two steps at a time, Lacoste swept up to the second floor with the two of us in noisy pursuit. On the hundred-year-old landing, illuminated by a single bare bulb hanging from a wire, were three doors, two of them open to reveal groups of older men seated around rickety card tables, playing Mah-Jongg. Lacoste waved his badge at them and uttered something incomprehensible. None of them seemed to care. Aside from a couple of sideways glances, no one even looked at us. Lacoste opened the third door, which revealed a large, dark, empty, wooden-floored room. There was the quick shadow of someone outlined in a far door opposite, and then all was still and quiet and bereft of life. As abruptly as he’d entered the place, Lacoste turned on his heel, yelled a cheery “au ’voir” to the inattentive players, and led us back down into the street. The three young thugs had disappeared.

“You can see why we are only sometimes successful when we raid. Even with all the doors blocked with men, we find the building empty, when we know it was full ten minutes before.”

He looked up at the windows above us, even backing up into the street slightly to get a better view. They were as lifeless as before. “They are watching us now.” He shook his head and resumed walking.

“So how do you get your information?” I asked.

“People we arrest. Not because they talk to us, but because they brag. Their machismo is very big, and we use it to help us. Sometimes, if we can make them feel small, they tell us things to make themselves bigger. Sometimes they are lies, but if we get two stories that are the same, then we know we have something. We have tried other methods-wiretapping, intercepting their mail-but they change dialects and write in code. And putting one of our Asian officers undercover would be like killing him. It is not easy.”

“What about playing one race off the other?” Spinney asked. “Like the Vietnamese and the Chinese?”

Lacoste gave one of his trademark wide smiles, expanding his mustache to even greater lengths. “Ah-interesting question. Again, it is like with the Sicilians-you guys and us guys-it makes things easier for us policemen.” Then he shook his head sorrowfully. “But the Asians are more complex. The Chinese are very conscious of race, it is true-but they also think back to all the generations before. If you have any Chinese blood in you, even hundreds of years ago, then that makes you okay-sort of. Same thing if you marry into their families. Regardless of race, that can be very important.”

“So the Vietchin are acceptable?” I was thinking back to previous conversations I’d had on this subject, when I was hoping the race angle might help me identify how the players were aligning themselves.

“To do business with, yes. But that is all. To have Chinese blood does not make you Chinese…”

“It just makes you more trustworthy,” Spinney finished for him.

“Sometimes,” Lacoste agreed, “but they are trying new things. Last year, we had twenty home invasions of Asian homes, but they were done by blacks. We found out the Asians and the blacks were getting to know each other in prison, and starting to work together.”

“That ought to make every cop I know properly paranoid,” Spinney muttered.

I pulled the enlarged copy of the receipt we’d brought with us out of my jacket pocket and handed it to our host. “Do you know where this store is?”

He read it carefully. “Yes. It is in Brossard, on the south shore. That is one of our residential Chinatowns, where a lot of the rich people live. Da Wang lives there, too. Do you want to go?”

We returned to the car and he drove us through the center of town, heading toward the Champlain Bridge, giving us biographical tidbits about himself and pointing out the sights as he went. He was a remarkably cheerful man, a lifelong Montrealer, a dedicated believer in a “free” Québec, a happy father and husband. He spoke of his job as such, discussing its benefits and retirement package, and never once strayed into the routine war stories that all cops and firemen and emergency medical people seem to think is interesting conversation. Just as I’d been struck by his generosity with the pompous Antoine Schmitt, so now was I impressed by his self-deprecating urbanity. Considering the job we all shared, albeit from different angles, he was the gentleman of the three of us.

In that way, he reflected the city we were touring. As I looked out the window, watching the people and the constantly inconsistent architecture, I was struck not by an outright jaundiced image-like New York’s concrete jungle or LA’s smog-shrouded sprawl-but rather by a spirit of enterprise and determination, a combination of style and liveliness. Aside from the downtown skyscrapers and the idiosyncratic Mt. Royal, both of which seemed to leap unexpectedly from the earth, the rest of the city was less demonstrative, more sure of itself, content to be the conglomeration that it was-the Montreal Urban Community, consisting of some thirty-two separate entities, some so distinct unto themselves as to seem hundreds of miles apart.

Living in an environment where all the signs were in at least two languages and sometimes totally incomprehensible, where every race and culture seemed to have ample representation, and where two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old buildings shared the same sidewalk with glass and-steel modern icons, I could understand why this confederacy of two and a half million people yearned to be part of a nation unto itself. Caught between tradition-bound France, which was less than half its size, and a stiff-upper-lip Great Britain, this alienated province had good reason to feel restless.

Brossard, hanging off the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River, reflected none of this. As bland as the most boring American suburbia, it was a collection of two-story, residential, pod-like blocks, crisscrossed by shopping mall-decorated boulevards. The only immediately obvious distinction was that several of the malls were filled with Oriental businesses.

Lacoste pulled off Pelletier, the main drag, and drove us by block after block of undistinguished, pleasant homes. “Brossard has about seventy-five thousand people, from sixty-seven different ethnic groups. Ten thousand of those are Asians. Most of the Chinese are from Hong Kong.”

That comment reminded me of something he’d mentioned earlier. “Didn’t you say Da Wang came from China to San Francisco first?” I asked.

“Yes. That is where he began his business. But some ten years ago he came to Montreal, we think because of the bigger opportunities. Back then, our Chinatown was not much-and Da Wang is a persuasive man.”

“You mentioned earlier that there had been several attempts on his life here. Is there any evidence those attempts date back to things he might’ve done in San Francisco?”

Spinney gave me a quick look, but Lacoste shook his head. “We don’t know. It is possible. At the time, it fit that it was a gang problem local to Montreal-a power struggle-but of course, we have to guess at many of those things.”

A few more turns at the wheel put us suddenly in a neighborhood so oddly artificial, it made me think of a Hollywood prop room. But instead of dozens upon dozens of hats or cowboy boots or potted plastic plants, this entire area was filled with brand-new compact mansions, each only slightly different from its neighbor, parked right next to one another like limousines in a car lot. There was no visible room around any of them for lawns, swimming pools, swing sets, or even fences. They were pale pink, gray, white, and made of brick, rock, stone, or wood. Each looked chosen as from a catalogue of limited choices, and most of them appeared fresh from the box.

“These are in the three-hundred-thousand to a half-million-dollar range. Some of them are bought sight unseen by people in Hong Kong, just so they have somewhere to move in 1997.” Lacoste suddenly stopped the car and backed up. “See that license plate?”

We both looked at a late-model, Japanese luxury sports sedan. There were four 8s on the plate.

“Eight is a lucky number to the Chinese. The owner worked very hard to get a license like that.”

“Christ,” Spinney mused. “Looks like a trailer park, but with million-dollar trailers.”

Lacoste agreed. “They like being close together. That’s what makes them strong.”

“Is Da Wang’s house around here?” I asked.

Lacoste emphatically shook his head. “No, no. A few of these might be owned by triad people, but most belong to rich businessmen still in the old country. People like Da Wang do not live in houses like this. We find that the gangs like cars, sometimes clothes and pretty girls, but they don’t care where they live, and they like to live with lots of other people. La Cosa Nostra, they get a big mansion, much land, a fence, guard dogs. Asian criminals mostly do not like that. It would keep them apart from the people they need to survive. Da Wang lives in East Brossard, where there are lots of apartment buildings that look like motels.”

We’d left the ritzy neighborhood from Oz and returned to one of the main commercial strips. “There is your place-up there.” He pointed to a large gas-station/food-store combination, with flying-buttress roofs over the pumps and a steady stream of traffic filing through. He parked off to the side and we got out and crossed over to the store.

I handed Lacoste the receipt. He discreetly flashed his badge at one of the clerks, who abandoned his customer with a murmured apology and came over to us.

After a quick conversation, the clerk went back behind his counter and picked up a phone. Lacoste explained. “He has to call his boss. We may be lucky today.” He pointed to a camera that was mounted over the cash register. “There have been robberies here, so last year they put in those. They keep the tapes for a long time, he says.”

“How long?” I asked, even now doubtful we could get that lucky.

Lacoste spread his arms out expansively. “That, we will find out.”

Fifteen minutes later, a short, fat, blotchy-faced man arrived, irritable and out of breath. He led us into a small, windowless back room, one wall of which had several closed-circuit television screens mounted near the ceiling. On a counter beneath them was a large console with a touch-pad keyboard mounted on its surface. The man took the receipt from Lacoste, read the time and date, and punched some numbers onto the playback machine. The TV image directly above us suddenly went haywire, streaked by the effects of a tape in fast rewind. About four minutes later, the tape stopped, paused, and then suddenly came to life.

Before us was the same scene as before-the counter, the cash register, the back of a clerk in his smock-but we could tell from the reflections off the distant windows that it was night. We watched as a line of people took their turn in front of the camera.

“There,” I suddenly said, both stunned that such a long shot had paid off and unsure of what it meant.

The store owner hit a button and froze the image.

“Who is it?” Spinney asked about the middle-aged man standing alone with his wallet in his hand, a small pile of candy and soda spread out before him.

The image was made doubly odd in that it so closely matched what we had back in Brattleboro-on the tape I’d made of the traffic stop on the interstate. “His name’s Edward Diep.”