“Merci,” she says.
The English guy in the fancy coat is oblivious. Either he didn’t hear or he doesn’t understand French. Léo smiles pleasantly at him.
When they sit down across from each other at one of the little tables, with their Big Macs and their French fries spread out on the brown tray, Véronique says, “You shouldn’t have burned his coat.”
“I wanted to punch him in the face, but I didn’t want to wind up back in jail.”
“Pa, I’m serious.”
“It was gabardine,” Léo says. “That coat must have cost a fortune.”
“You can’t just do things like that in the real world.”
“Did you hear how he spoke to her, Véro? Like she was some piece of garbage. That’s how rich Anglos treat us. That’s what they think of us. You think that’s okay?”
“No, but—”
“No. It’s not okay. He wasn’t just speaking to her that way. Do you understand? He was speaking to us that way. Me and you. I can’t believe how little has changed in this city since I went away. We’re still second-class citizens!”
“You could have told him to be more respectful,” Véronique says. “You still could have defended her.”
“Sure,” Léo says, chuckling. “That would have gone well. He would have laughed in my face and driven off in his BMW.”
“So instead you burned a hole in his coat?”
“It’s okay to stand up for what you believe in, Véro. I did it for that poor girl. What was her crime? She doesn’t speak English. This is her goddamn province!”
Véronique sweeps a handful of fries through a mound of ketchup.
“We have to stick together,” Léo goes on. “We have to stand up to assholes like him who think they own this province. They think they own us. Sometimes it’s okay to cross the line. Sometimes you have to cross the line.”
Obviously her father has crossed the line before, but he almost never speaks of his crime. It’s simply not discussed at home.
“The system is corrupt,” Léo continues. “It’s screwed up, my girl. Broken. I learned the hard way that if you want anything to change you have to operate outside the system.”
Véronique is trying to align her father’s actions—burning the coat—with his logic.
“You can’t politely effect change,” he says, waving his Big Mac around in the air. “It’s about agitation, retaliation.”
“But you didn’t teach him a lesson,” Véronique points out.
“Don’t you get it? You can’t teach bastards like him a lesson. Trust me. I tried. You can only retaliate.”
Véronique looks around the McDonald’s for the man with the cigarette burn in his coat. She doesn’t see him. She imagines him getting home, removing his coat, and hanging it up on one of those ornate antique coat-stands in his vestibule, and noticing the burn. Who will he blame?
“I rejected this system a long time ago,” Léo says, sinking his teeth into the soft sesame seed bun. “What is this pink sauce?”
“It’s the special sauce.”
“Listen, you can try to maneuver around inside the system if you want,” he says, with his mouth full. “But if you’re smart, Véronique, you’ll reject it, just like I did.”
He finishes chewing and nods his head approvingly. “Tabarnak,” he says. “This is a damn good burger.”
Part I
1992–1995
1
AUGUST 1992
Véronique slows the boat down, easily maneuvering it around a small island—purely by instinct, she can’t see a thing—and then speeds up again, heading straight for the marina. The boat roars and jerks nose up into the air, and then they’re slapping against the water at forty-five miles an hour again. There are islands and swamps all over the lake, but at night they’re almost invisible.
Pierre is at the back of the boat, crouched down with his shotgun between his legs, keeping a lookout for other boats. The lake is a dark void, indistinguishable from the sky, but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need daylight to see where she’s going. She knows the precise route from habit and intuition. She’s done it every night for the past four months.
The sky is matte black, the stars and moon obscured by a low-hanging fog. The lake is swarming with other boats, motorized cockroaches scurrying in all directions. Her hearing is on high alert, hyper-attuned to the noise. Out here on the lake, Véronique is blind. So much could go wrong—cops, thieves, crashes. It’s a miracle they survive night after night.
She pulls up to Billy’s Marina and turns off the boat. The marina is right near the Canada–US border, on an Indian reservation they call the Triangle that covers part of Ontario, Quebec, and New York State. Tug is already there, standing on the dock. His cap is pulled down low over his eyes, and his long black hair is loose, falling to the middle of his back. Normally it’s tied back in a braid. It looks freshly washed in the thin light of the dock lamp. Tug is tall and thick, intimidating. He barely looks up from under the rim of his cap as he helps them load twenty-four cases of cigarettes from his pickup truck onto their boat. No one speaks. Out of habit, Véronique keeps looking out to the lake, checking for other boats that may be lurking in the dark, waiting for them.
When they’re finished, Tug jumps on his speedboat and chaperones them out of the reservation, back into Quebec waters. Exactly seven minutes in, he holds up his arm, turns his boat around, and heads back to the marina. This is the scariest part, the moment her heart starts to hammer in her chest, pulsating through her life vest and camouflage jacket. She speeds the boat up to fifty-five miles an hour, knowing that any of the dark masses she can see idling on the water out of the corner of her eyes could be cops or potential thieves. She guns it all the way back to Ste. Barbe, holding her breath the entire way. They’ve got tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of contraband in their possession now, and they’re extremely vulnerable. Even Pierre—when she turns around to make sure he hasn’t fallen overboard—is serious and still, the gun gripped solidly between his prayer hands.
When they approach Camil’s dock and she can finally see his aluminum-sided house at the edge of the water, her breathing slowly starts to return to normal. Her heart rate settles down; her muscles unclench. They’ve made it through another night.
Camil starts unloading the cases, moving quickly in the dark. They’re used to working in the middle of the night; they’re comfortable in silence. They move with purpose and precision, a well-tuned machine.
It all started last summer when she was at their place for a barbecue and her cousin Pierre took her around back to the boathouse. He opened the door, and it was filled to the ceiling with cases of Du Maurier, Export, and Player’s. There was no room for the boat. The septic tank was in there, too, so the cigarettes had a foul smell.
“Holy shit!” she gasped, stepping inside.
“This is it, cousin. A new life.”
“What are you talking about? You’re selling cigarettes?”