I leaned on the bar, and the bartender, a brunette – the only fully dressed woman in the room – came over and said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Pardon me?”
“Fred’s told me all about you. You’re that writer who runs his building.”
“How do you know Fred?”
“He’s my brother.”
Fred joined us. “Had to hit the can,” he said.
The woman left to serve a beer, and I asked, “Your sister works here?”
“Oh yeah, she does. And that’s my cousin up there.” He motioned to the diva onstage.
“Does your wife know about this place?” I asked.
Fred cackled. “I met her here,” he said, punching my arm. “And if she hadn’t given me my two boys, I’d bring her straight back. Jesus, she’s a pain in the ass.”
When Fred told me that he and some friends owned this place, I tried to mask my reassessment of him. His apartment building had been sitting empty for so long, in a neighbourhood where finding tenants was easy, that I should have realized it was a front.
We feasted on bags of salt-and-vinegar chips from behind the bar. Fred told me there was a girl he’d wanted me to meet, but she didn’t seem to be here tonight. I asked how the place worked, and he said the girls paid the bar $500 to come in for an evening. The bar provided clientele and helped organize visits for frats across the border. Each girl had a small room in the back, where she charged and did what she wanted. “You should give one a go,” he said.
“Nah, that’s cool,” I told him, as if I’d done it a thousand times.
On the way back to his house, the Volvo glided through the yellow pools beneath the streetlamps. Fred was in no rush. Criminals, I’d learned from experience, are lonely people.
“You’re a reliable guy,” Fred told me. “How would you like a job?”
“What kind of job?”
“Making deliveries. Packages. I’d give you the money for a car, but it would be your car, under your name – no connection to me.”
“And the packages?”
“You don’t ask. You’ll be well paid.”
“That’s okay,” I told him.
“Come on, man. It’s easy money. Good help is hard to find, believe you me.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
We arrived at his house, and I went downstairs to the guest bedroom. Shouting echoed in the floorboards. I fell asleep, woke briefly to the thudding of sex through the ceiling, and then closed my eyes again.
• • •
The row house reopened within a week. The owner next door had speedily built a concrete retaining wall and poured a new foundation. The fire department inspected the building, and one of the firemen told me that it was probably safe. “I wouldn’t let my daughter live here,” he said, “but I can’t prove there’s anything seriously wrong with the place.”
A building chained up and barricaded, even for a week, draws attention. There’d been a few break-ins while it was empty, a window pried open and syringes left on the floor. Even after we moved back in, the thefts continued. They were always small – CDs, whatever money was lying around. Someone tried to break into the basement apartment, leaving a screwdriver jammed between the door and the frame; a few days later, someone smashed the door down and stole a laptop and a jar of change. Unsolicited, Fred told the tenant that he had nothing to do with the burglary.
“I would move out if I were you,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to be caught asleep down there if a fire started.”
Fred kept offering me jobs. He finally admitted that the packages he wanted me to deliver contained heroin. “But so what?” he said. “People are going to do it anyway, and someone has to make money on it.” Then he said he’d pay me $100 twice a week if I took pictures of the construction progress inside the building next door.
“That would require breaking in,” I said.
He shrugged. “I guess that’s part of the job, eh?”
From Fred, I learned that my two homeless-looking neighbours were now enjoying the munificence of social services, getting treatment and counselling, and living in new apartments in a city housing complex. Though the nocturnal howler was content with his new home, the woman tried to move back, and Fred told her that, owing to structural problems in her apartment, she couldn’t. He changed the lock on her door. She had the home of hoarder, stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, newspapers, and folded grocery bags, and I saw him poking through them, as if searching for treasures.
“This is a real fire hazard,” he said.
Every few days, just before dark, I snuck into the construction site with my camera. The company was building quickly. Each time Fred dropped by, I gave him a CD burned with photos. He looked them over on my computer. He pointed to the material covering the wall next door.
“See that?” he said. “That’s not to code. That’s not fire-grade. This guy’s cutting corners on his luxury apartments. Shooting himself in the foot, if you ask me.”
The next time I showed him photos, he said, “See all the equipment right there?” He pointed to an image of some saws and drills left at the construction site at the end of the day. He called someone on his cell. In the morning, I watched the confused construction workers mill around the back of the building, looking for the tools, palms turned up in confusion. I told Fred I wouldn’t be taking photos anymore.
• • •
Summer at last flooded the city with heat, and Montréalers packed the streets wearing the garments they owned for those two sunlit months alone. I was close to finishing my book but wanted to live it, to be sure every emotion on every page was real. I couldn’t see it as complete, ready to be put into the world. If I just left, I thought, everything in my head would come into focus. Since the return to my apartment, the offers from Fred, and the break-ins, the criminality I thought I’d escaped as a kid had encased me like an odour – a rank, humid air.
One day, at the gym, I struck up a conversation with a young man who described himself as a weapons collector. When he found out I had a Vermont driver’s license, he asked me to run guns across the border so he could sell them. I called a friend and asked why people so often approached me about crime. “You have no knee-jerk reaction,” he said. “I’ve seen you. You talk to people about anything. You’re interested. You look like you would do it. It’s how you grew up. The things they’re saying are normal to you. You don’t even realize that most people would run away. Most people would sense the danger and never get in those conversations to begin with.”
When I was fifteen and crossed the continent to live with my father, I’d interrogated him for stories. I’d looked down on his life as a crooked fishmonger and forced him to conjure up his past. He’d rarely been caught for the crimes he so carefully planned. He claimed to have robbed more than fifty banks and fifty jewellery stores. I believed him. There are still five thousand bank robberies in the United States each year, mostly by serial robbers, and back then, in the golden age of heists, that number was even higher. But when he had been arrested, it was often because he’d done something reckless: punching out a pimp in a bar or driving like a maniac and making the police chase him for hours as he careened over medians and through parking lots.
There are many types of criminals: those who want to move up in the world fast, those