Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [43]
ALLONS-Y EXPOS
GO FOR IT, EXPOS
His manner beyond reproach, the inspector allowed that the sentiment was admirable but, unfortunately, the sign was illegal, because the English lettering was the same size as the French, whereas the law clearly stated that the French must be twice the size of the English. It was past three p.m. when the inspector pronounced and a well-oiled John was already into his shouting mode. “When you can send in an inspector who is twice the size of us Anglophones,” he hollered, “we’ll take down the sign. Until then, it remains in place.”
“Are you le patron?”
“Fiche le camp. Espèce d’imbécile.”
Six months later John was in the news. He had failed to pay his provincial income tax for the past six years. An oversight. So he summoned reporters to Dink’s. “I am being persecuted,” he said, “because I am an Anglophone, a spokesman for my people who have been denied their constitutional rights. Rest assured I will not be intimidated or silenced. And I will survive. For, as Terence put it, fortis fortuna adiuvat. That’s spelt T, E, R, E, N, C, E, gentlemen.”
“But have you paid your taxes or not?” asked a reporter from Le Devoir.
“I refuse to countenance hostile questions put to me by politically motivated reporters from the Francophone press.”
Riding a surfeit of vodka and cranberry juice, his preferred tipple, John could be truly obnoxious, his favourite foil the harmless gay hairdresser he shouts at, denouncing him as a bowel-troweller or worse, infuriating Betty, our incomparable barmaid, as well as everybody else in the bar. Betty, born to her job, sees to it that nobody who is not a certified member of our group is ever seated at our end of the horseshoe-shaped bar. She fields unwanted phone calls with panache. If, for instance, Nate Gold’s wife calls, she will look directly at Nate for a sign, even as she calls out, “Is Nate Gold here?” She cashes cheques for Zack Keeler, among others, and hides them until she is assured they will not be returned NSF. When drink has rendered John too much to bear, she will take him gently by the arm, and say, “Your taxi is here.”
“But I didn’t order a …”
“Yes, you did. Didn’t he, Zack?”
John is certainly a scoundrel, but he is also an intelligent man and an original, a species this city is short of. Furthermore, I am permanently in his debt. Even though I’m sure he suspected I was guilty, he defended me with wizardry in court. He was there for me when only Miriam’s visits to the prison in St-Jérôme stood between me and a breakdown.
“Of course I believe you,” she had said then, “but I think you haven’t told me everything.”
To this day when the officer who was in charge of the investigation, Detective-Sergeant Sean O’Hearne, puts in an appearance at Dink’s, John does his utmost to humiliate him. “If you must impose yourself on the quality here, O’Hearne, you’re going to have to pay for your own drinks, now that you’ve retired.”
“If I were you, Maître Hughes hyphen McNoughton, I would mind my own business.”
“Ite, missa est, you viper. So do not trouble my client here. You can still be charged with harassment, you know.”
Raskolnikov has nothing on me. Or, put another way, to each suspect his own Inspector of Police Porfiry. O’Hearne continues to keep tabs on me, hoping for a deathbed confession.
Poor O’Hearne.
All of us who frequent Dink’s in the afternoon have suffered time’s depredations, but the years have been especially unkind to O’Hearne, now in his early seventies. Once he had been built square as a boxer, a stranger to flab, Warner Brothers tough, with a weakness for Borsalinos, kipper ties, and bespoke tailoring acquired on the arm. In days gone by, his mere presence in Dink