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.