a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. the Murder and the Poet

(Ernst Kirchner, "Street Scene at Night" - 1926/7)

Montreal was a city stuck in the style of the late sixties and early seventies. Streets filled with salt stained bell-bottoms and polyester shirts. Nameless cafes and dingy diners willing to serve espresso or poutine at any hour of the night. It was the twenty-first century and students in dark-rimmed glasses were still discussing Vietnam like it was something that could be stopped.

Montreal was a cigarette stained city that Quintin Rhodes called home. He’d moved there from Hamilton, Ontario at sixteen, pulled by tales of European women and loose morals. He rented a small, shaby apartment in the Plateau, surrounded by Polish immigrants and existentialists. He found work in the back of an Irish pub on Crescent street. It was a popular place frequented by pool sharks and lonely girls from Boston.

At twenty Quintin began writing for an unread bi-weekly gazette. He’d inherited a column titled “Conversations in Montreal”, a record of random dialogues overheard in the city. Within four months Quintin revolutionized the column. Through his sharp ears and gritty approach “Conversations in Montreal” went from trivial declarations of love and pseudo-philosophical drivel to a hard-hitting column of scandal, criminal intent and murderous confessions. Quintin didn’t just wait for a good conversation to fall into his lap. He spent nights in elevator shafts, he stalked, lingered, placed wire-taps and microphones; whatever it took to catch the brief life of words at their most sinister.

After a year the gazette trippled its publication and Quintin became an underground myth; a ghost that haunted Montreal’s political elite, its hockey stars and minor celebrities. Watch what you say, people would joke, or Quintin Rhodes will get you. He was taken to court only once. An infuriated Minister of Education sued him for libel and slander over the publication of his supposed sex talk with a prostitute named Belle. At the trial Quintin produced everything – photographs, audio-recordings, motel receipts and even a Hungarian janitor named Tomas who testified on his behalf. The minister committed suicide, Belle got her own talk-show, and no one ever went after Quintin Rhodes again.

No one, that is, until October 31st when some oversized tricker-treater entered Quintin’s apartment and smashed his skull with the typewriter on his desk. At twenty-four, all that is left of Quintin Rhodes is a shattered skull, four hundred and sixty published conversations, and over five hundred more, unpublished and strewn like empty condom wrappers across his floor.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 2

(Ernst Kirchner, "Berlin Street Scene" - 1913)

The Montreal Police Department has two major shortcomings. The first is drugs. An intricate web of armed gangs control the traffic industry and the M.P.D. has made a policy of looking away. The second is mysterious anglophone murders. This particular case struck at the heart of the department’s language problem. It featured a kid from Hamilton found dead in a litter of incomprehensible text, who worked days at an anglo-gazette and nights in an Irish pub, and lived in a building full of immigrants and Concordia philosophy students. Anyone who knew anything was anglophone, or dead.

The two detectives, Jean Jacques and Jean Francois, did their best, stretched their English to its limits, but quickly accepted that the language barrier was insurmountable. The only statement they were able to take was from a francophone baker working in the rough vicinity of the crime, and he hadn’t seen or heard a thing. Jean Jacques and Jean Francois realized that if they were going to get anywhere in this English word puzzle, it would have to be by approaching it in a way that had nothing to do with language.

Where a couple of other Quebecois detectives may have hit a dead-end, Jean Jacques and Jean Francois resolved to make of it a challenge and an opportunity. They would distinguish themselves by taking a case that was so indisputably entangled in English verbs and adjectives, and they would turn it into something else, something non-linguistic, something visual, perhaps even mythic.

Jean Jacques dedicated all his energy to the spatial elements of the case – the desk, the angles of the scattered pages, the slant of the building, the shape of the Plateau, Montreal as an island. It was an intense and indepth study of the geography of the crime. In this way, he was convinced, he would come to understand the dynamics of the murder: how the room shifted and stirred in resposne to the bloody final swing, and most importantly, how predator and prey moved in relation to one another.

Jean Francois, on the other hand, decided to buy the subtitled DVD box-sets of C.S.I. – the original, Miami, and even C.S.I. New York. While his partner lay sprawled on the floor measuring distances and sketching diagrams, Jean Francois would step over him ever so carefully to collect and catalogue every strand of hair and skin molecule in the room.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 3

Three weeks into the investigation, without relying on a single strained sylable, Jean Jacques and Jean Francois both made the same startling revelation.

« Un ours! » Jean Jacques declared.

« Que est-ce que tu veux dire? »

« L’homme qui a tue l’ecrivain. Il bouge exactement comme un ours! »

Jean Jacques believed that based on the signs of dynamism in the room, they were looking for a killer who had mimicked the basic gestures and patterns of a bear (“un ours”). The lab results which Jean Francois had obtained that morning confirmed the peculiar theory. The room was covered in a strange synthetic fibre used primarily in the recreation of fur on high-quality black bear-suits. The simultaneous breakthrough was remarkable. It was a validation of their respective techniques, and a reason to keep pushing.

The puzzle pieces that began falling into place suggested a large, burly, possibly very hairy man who rented a bear costume for Halloween, tricked Quintin into opening his door, and then overpowered him in the course of a brutal and grizzly attack.

That night the two francophone detectives went out to a cheap Italian restaurant to celebrate their progress. Though they both got obnoxiously drunk, still they knew, this was only the beginning.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 4

(Ernst Kirchner, "Cafe in Davos" - 1928)

Mrs. Rhodes was unsatisfied. Every inquiry into the progress of the case ended in vague assurances and bad accents. This seemed to her, quite clearly, to be a murder over something that her son had written. Someone was needed to delve deep into Quintin’s body of work and interpret his articles to the point of finding the killer. She decided to hire a poet to discover the exact circumstances of her only son’s death. Only a poet would have the literary know-how to extract the meaning of what Quintin had recorded, and thereby determine who would go as far as murder to cover that meaning up.

The poet was a young man who lied to get the job. He was not really a poet, though he always wanted to be. Mrs. Rhodes hired him on the spot because he was unshaven and seemed desperate (her definition of a writer), and he was fidgety in a way that reminded her of Quintin. He listened to her instructions, accepted the check, put on his reading glasses and boarded an icy train to Montreal.

The phony poet arrived late and found a subteranean city hiding from winter. If he was going to be a poet, he decided, he should be cold and alone, so he walked the empty, snow covered streets heading north to Quintin’s apartment. On the way he took brief refuge in a convenience store to prepare the essential tools of the task at hand – Red Bull, cigarettes, number two pencils, a thick red marker, under the counter ritalin, a couple of lighters and a box of matches. He may not have been the brilliant, accomplished poet Mrs. Rhodes believed, but that did not mean he wouldn’t try. For even though he had never written a single poem in his life, this was not his first encounter with literary analysis.

He stepped into Quintin’s apartment to find the crime-scene still intact. He picked up one of the discarded pages on the floor and read the dialogue of a young couple in a sushi restaurant.
The phony poet spent the night sorting through the accumulated debris of Quintin’s articles. He began to realize the arduous task of discovering motive in the scattered dialogues. As he stood there, in the chaos of loose pages, the phony poet made a choice which he knew to be imperfect. He decided that the killer was somewhere on this floor. He knew this to be a hasty assumption for the following reasons:

1) It was possible that this was a murder of revenge, not a cover-up, and that the killer was actually a figure in one of the articles Quintin had already published.

2) It was possible that the killer had retrieved the paper on which he was implicated after having murdered Quintin.

3) It was possible that this murder had nothing to with anything Quintin had written at all.

Nonetheless, the phony poet made his choice that night.

There was no use wasting time and going mad in the realm of endless possibilities. He decided that after beating Quintin to death with his typewriter, the murderer was unable to sift through all this unpublished work and find that page on which he was implicated. In frustration of not being able to carry all the pages, or perhaps confident that it didn’t really matter (since there were so many!), the killer left them scattered on the floor. It wasn’t a perfect theory, but it was a start.

The phony poet ordered Chinese food and began to categorize the recorded dialogues according to a vague system of threachery. He read each page carefully and then asked himself: could this get you killed? If the answer was no, he placed the page to his left. If the answer was yes, he placed it to his right. And if the answer was maybe, he left the sheet in limbo between the two piles. As he did this he began to reconstruct the sounds of a city built of tiny intimacies. On their own, anywhere else, they would have flickered and died away. But joined together in the confines of Quintin’s bloody room, these forgotten dialogues found a more lasting quality. They achieved survival, if not permanence.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 5

(Ernst Kirchner, "Self-portrait as a Soldier" - 1919)

The next morning, at 7:29 am, Jean Jacques dropped like a soldier shot through the knees at the sight of his precious crime-scene. The mystery hidden in the angles of the scattered sheets had been neatly ordered into three distinct piles. The logic of the dance was gone. He found the furniture moved, strange red writing on the walls, and chinese take-out littered across the floor. Fifteen mintutes later, Jean Francois arrived with coffee and a baguette. He snapped the baguette in two and joined his wounded partner on the floor.

» Pourquoi!? » he demanded.

» Je ne sais pas. »

« Peut-etre que l ‘ours est revenu? »

But they both knew that wasn’t it. The imposed order, the strange red markings, the scent of soy-sauce and marijuana – no, this was not the work of the bear-like man; this was something else.

« Les Polonais? » Jean Francois suggested.

« Surement. »

The francophone detectives spent the entire day recreating the crime-scene and cursing the Polish neighbours. They washed the red writing on the walls, they used white-out to cover the notes etched onto Quintin’s sheets, they threw away the empty take-out boxes. All that was left was to re-un-order the furniture and re-scatter the sheets based on Jean Jacques’ painstaking diagrams. The clever detectives decided to take this opportunity to re-stage the movements of the crime.

A man sits at his desk and another pounds on the door. The door opens and the two men struggle. The intruder is powerful and pushes the other onto the bed. He confronts the stack of papers but the bear paws make it impossible to sift through the sheets. Enraged, he pulls out the chair and growls at Quintin, commands him to sit down. Quintin hunches over the desk. He’s nervous, or he’s stalling. Maybe he even begins to write something. The bear-like man loses patience. He lifts the typewriter and brings it down, quick and hard, onto Quintin’s head. The boy drops, dead on impact. The bear-like man panics, pushes the pages onto the floor. He gets desperate, falls on his paws and knees and searches for the page he needs. He can barely read a word through the makeshift eyes in his suit; but he doesn’t dare take it off. He tries to gather all the sheets into his big furry arms but it’s no use, they slip and they fall. He picks up the typewriter and thinks of taking it, but no, it’s not necessary. There’s no identifying marks, only the blood of a boy who’s dead. Through the walls he hears swearing in Polish, and the depressed shuffling of existentialists coming down the stairs. He takes one final look at what he’s done and races out of the room, out of the building, into the wilderness of the night.

Jean Jacques and Jean Francois re-enacted the scene again and again, at different speeds, switching roles, testing theories and making adjustments each time.

They left the room in the late-afternoon, as near as possible to the way it was the moment the bear-like man swung a typewriter and fled the scene. They knew that the room was all they had. The further the fragile pieces of the room slipped into some other disarray, the further they would find themselves removed from the truth.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 6

(Ersnt Kirchner, "Self-portrait with a Cat" - 1920)

The phony poet didn’t understand. This was no mere tampering with his investigation, this was obsession. Whoever did this went to great lengths to return the room to its former chaos and cover every determined footprint the poet had left.

He stood there, sent back into the meaninglessness of disorder, and tried to figure out how to add this piece to the puzzle he’d been asked to put together. All the progress he’d made had been lost, systematically wiped away, but something more important had been gained. For the first time in his brief literary career the phony poet felt validated. In fact, he decided, he was no longer a phony poet at all, but now a genuine artist who had been read, analyzed, and ultimately covered up. Someone had gone to the trouble of censoring the body of his work and that could only mean that it had meant something. He felt persecuted, misjudged, misinterpreted, stung, wounded, unappreciated; he felt like a real life poet. He spent the night re-ordering the loose pages, re-tracing his notes in the margins and rewriting his poems on the wall. He was possessed by a new found faith in the necessity of his calling. It was as if Quintin Rhodes were there, urging him on from the depths of his unfinished work.

The poet worked tirelessly, noted, cross-referenced, analyzed, over-analyzed, discovered illusions and allusions and subliminal signs that suggested an entire interconnected web of strange new symbols. The room was covered in language, and somewhere in that mess of meanings was the unquestionable truth. And as he continued to map the room, ever so faint he saw it, the portrait of a man that wanted Quintin dead.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 7

(Ernst Kirchner, "Konigstein Railway Station" - 1917)

Jean Jacques decided to move into the woods. He could visualize the steps and gestures of the attack, but it was still vague, obscured by some missing fact. A far more indepth and meticulous study of the movements of bears was needed to bring the shadows to light. He packed his camping gear and told Jean Francois he didn’t know how long he’d be gone. Jean Francois drove his partner to the bus station. They shook hands and nodded at the gate. Jean Francois lit a cigarette, his first in four months, and watched the bus pull away – an empty express to the outer rim of the Canadian wilderness.

Alone, Jean Francois lingered in the filthy corridors of the bus station. He watched the busses pull in and pull away. He ate a stale slice of pizza and smoked another cigarette, his second in four months. He busted a punk kid for jaywalking. Then another. Nothing helped. He drove home, got in his pijamas, and watched reruns of C.S.I. New York – the gloomiest of the three.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 8

At the funeral in Hamilton Mrs. Rhodes was disturbed by the amount of unfamiliar faces in the crowd. Quebec and Massachusettes liscence plates lined the streets outside. She had expected an intimate affair, but the funeral parlour was packed and there weren’t enough cheese and crackers in the hall downstairs. Despite his wandering she had clung to the idea that she knew her son. The only thing more painful than losing her only child was the thought that she had already lost him years before.

Was it possible that these strangers dressed in black had come to know her litte Q-tip better than she? She glanced around at the grizzled writers from the gazette, the existentialists in dark-rimmed glasses, the Polish families who had brough her a plastic bag full of pirogies, the girls from Boston in little black dresses, the old Irish bartenders from the pub on Crescent street. Who exactly were these people? Their mocking tears.

She wondered if Q-tip had made love to any of these girls. To all of them? Was he respected by his colleagues? Did the Polish mothers look after him and bake him cake for his birthday? Did the existentialists fill him with anti-Christian doubt? Did he find a father amongst the old Irish bartenders, someone to explain broken hearts and complicated drinks? It had been eight years since she had seen her son. He abandoned her at sixteen and now there was a cold certainty to his never coming back. The procession of strangers filed past her at the open casket. She clung to the bag of frozen pirogies as they offered their hands and bitter words of condolence.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. II - The Murderer and the Accomplice

(Ersnt Kirchner, "Self-portrait as a sick man" - 1918/20)

The poet had shut himself in Quintin’s apartment for the better part of four days. He was reminded of university, and especially of those nights barricaded in the computer lab of the 24h library. He had studied comparative literature for two years, and it was one of those last-minute writing sessions had caused him to snap and burn down the porter’s office. It was a fiery morning that one of his final paper’s was due. No one was injured, but over two hundred undergraduate essays were lost, up in flames, and the poet was expelled for life. He still remembered what it was like, shut-up in the same four walls, staring at the same lines of text and overdosing on ritalin and Tim Horton’s coffee.

The presures of textual analysis – confronted with someone else’s poetry and being expected not only to write something worthy and unique, but also something true. The poet shivered. It would be different this time. Only good coffee, he promised himself. Ease up on the ritalin and other random drugs. And no matter how desperate things would get, no matter how tense, he would not revert to purging by fire.

In the course of his analysis the poet had made many tiny breakthroughs, the most noteworthy of which was that Quintin Rhodes was not only a journalist recording the scandalous confessions of a dark city, he was also in the midst of writing a novel. This had been obscured by the fact that Quintin’s fiction took on many of the characteristics of his reporting, but it became apparent to the poet that there were dialogues that were not journalism, but rather attempts at story-telling in a journalistic style. Character types kept reappearing, themes were being developped, and there was the slow revelation of a symbolic layer which the pure reporting could not claim.

By the end of those ritalin and Red-bull inspired four days, the poet had suceeded in establishing which dialogues belonged to fact and which possessed the added allures and contrived subtleties of fiction. The poet became convinced that his task lay in finding the link between the two. Somewhere in that pile of conversations that could get you killed was a real life murderer. And somewhere in Quintin’s fiction lay the key to discovering his hidden identity.

Chapters 2-17 of part II can be acquired by contacting spcmnspff. Also, keep your eyes out for the claymation movie!

The Visitor's Call

(Marc Chagall, "Violiniste" - 1923/4)

Click, fire, and instant composure. In six years he still hadn't learned to roll his own. But neither of them minded. The yellow roller turned out each joint with assembly-line precision. It was their Friday night ritual to cover the work-week in smoke and ashes, and the little machine was part of it.

He dimmed the light and she lit the candle. They held the chopsticks, half-naked and careful, and took time with each maki piece. Dipping it in soy-sauce and then lifting it to their lips with an awkward grace. When the sushi was gone they struggled with the chopsticks to pick up the fallen bits of caviar. After a few strained minutes she gave in, and they took turns licking one another's fingertips.

"It taste's much better this way," he said.

"I'll never understand how something so small has so much taste," she said. "Where does it carry all that taste?"

He was wondering something similar. How something so small could cost so much.

"The mysteries of caviar," he said.

They left everything in the kitchen and walked through the dark corridor toward the bedroom. Through the walls, the sound of voices and feet shuffling down the hall. He watched them through the eyehole - strangers knocking at someone else's door.

Slow, sensual drum and base was playing on the laptop.

"It's dark out," she said. "It's strange how I never notice the moment it goes dark."

"The mysteries of night," he said.

He sat down at the laptop as raindrops began pitter-pattering at the window. He stroked his thumb gently across the touch-pad and brought the screen to life. An artificial glow filled the room.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I like this song," he said. "I want to see who plays it."

A sound, like the call of some high-pitched digital bird, cut through the drum and base as a messenger-box flashed onto the screen. Then another, and another.

"It's Mindy in Spain," he said. "Mindy's online in Spain."

His fingers danced wildly across the keys and left slight smudges of caviar.

"Do you have to talk to her now?" she asked.

"I'm just responding," he said. "She's all the way in Spain."

"Yes, but does it have to be now? I mean, right now?"

"It's just that she happens to be online right now," he said. "I'd hate for her to think we're ignoring her."

"Yes, I suppose," she said as she slipped on her jeans and t-shirt.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I feel a breeze," she said.

He closed the window and walked over to her in the glowing light.

"Don't be like that," he said. He helped her out of her clothes and they made love slowly, and she felt the night and the rain close in around them.

Then as they lay like autumn leaves strewn across the sheets the phone rang and he stood to answer it.

"It could be anyone," he said.

He returned after seven minutes. There was a half-lit cigarette in an ashtray on the bed, but she was gone. She'd noticed someone, a vague shadow, strolling and splashing in the puddles outside.