Bombs Away!

y Canada includes Quebec, the earnest federalist slogan goes. Okay. Sure thing. But only as long as my Montreal still gets to include the bald barber, the drunk accountant, the tranny taxi driver, and the Hasidic guy slipping into the strip bar mid-afternoon. These are the characters who give the city character, who help differentiate it from the Mr. Muffler sprawl that has washed over so much of the continent and that laps at the island’s very shores”“the people who make Montreal something of a Naples-on-the-St.-Lawrence, albeit one with a grid system, and who give people like me at least the illusion that it isn’t always about money and efficiency everywhere in North America.

And even if it’s hard to get away with celebrating mobsters, violence, and illegality unless you’re a rapper or a major Hollywood studio, it has to be said that Montreal’s crime has always given the city flavour, pizzazz, zip, that old je ne sais quoi. Not the dark, sick crime that feels as if it just slithered out of a James Ellroy novel, like the veteran cop in the news recently who lived in a tidy suburban house with his fellow-cop wife and who has been charged with sexually assaulting teenage girls in his off-hours. But the wackier stuff, the stuff that usually stems from greed and most often contains a good dose of unadulterated stupidity.

Commercial conflicts have been behind some of the best. Maybe it’s the absence of fluoride in the water or the fact that everyone can lay claim to being part of a persecuted minority, but what might lead to scowls and dirty looks elsewhere”“perhaps harsh words and a slashed tire if things got really ugly”“ends with bombs and Molotov cocktails in Montreal. The biker war was, of course, a classic of the genre. And one that went on and on, even though the efficacy of explosives was decidedly questionable as a tool of expansion and conquest in the bikers’ hands. If the detonating device actually worked and the dynamite wasn’t damp then, as often as not, the bomb-makers blew themselves up rather than their quarry. Still, that didn’t deter the boys from their toys that go boom.

Any number of other commercial disputes between less typically nasty types than the Hell’s Angels et al. have also ended in a bang, or more often a series of bangs. Way back when, the kosher butchers, vying for the rabbi’s seal of approval, shot and bombed each other with abandon. In the early 1990s, the city’s tow-truck drivers went at it for a few years for some obscure reason. A good handful of trucks, and a few drivers, got blown up. Not long after, it was the turn of a couple of those snack-truck guys who drive from construction site to construction site. In the same decade, there was a brief flurry of pet-store bombings”“someone, apparently, was selling bichon frises too cheap or looking to corner the guppy market.

After that, things seemed to get quiet. The economy picked up. Real estate went through the roof. That venerable Québécois institution, the crime tabloid, continued its decline, with Allô Police, the best of a bad bunch, finally getting whacked in 2004 after the indignity of an aborted makeover as Allô!, a celebrity rag. Montreal began looking a little more like everywhere else.

Then, last November, a glimmer of the old Montreal: my greengrocer was firebombed. It was a sorry sight on a crisp Tuesday morning: charred boxes of soy milk, blackened fruit and veg, shards of plate glass, racks of condiments and cans toppled. And Bala, the sweet, shy, always-smiling Sri Lankan owner”“who had bought the store just a few months earlier and who, from the first visit, wouldn’t let my children off the premises without a cookie or a handful of Smarties”“was looking as pale as a Tamil guy can get.

Several hours earlier, at 12:59 a.m. to be precise, two men had smashed the store’s glass door and tossed in Molotov cocktails one after the other. They made their getaways on bicycles. It being late Monday night, there wasn’t much action on the street but a taxi driver saw it all and called 911. Firemen put out the blaze before it threatened the two elderly couples living in the upstairs apartments. But the store, which Bala and his brother, Babu, had spent much of the preceding half year improving in small ways, was a writeoff.

“Insurance job” was the first cynical thought of many in the neighbourhood. It was a reflex born of the moribund 1980s and early 1990s, when commercial real estate stayed vacant for years, when it was hard even to give a building away, and when failing businesses seemed to get torched nightly. But it didn’t make sense this time. There was all the work the brothers had been doing. There were the lineups of loyal customers at the cash. There was the absence of “service interruption” or loss-of-revenue coverage in Bala’s insurance policy. Finally, there was Bala’s paleness and obvious shock.

The next theory to occur to many of us seemed just as far-fetched: Bob, the competition. Here, a bit of backstory is required.


efore Bob, before Bala and Babu, there was Harji’s and, a couple of storefronts north, Gary Nazar’s. The shops were, for the most part, interchangeable and, unless you were a regular customer, virtually indistinguishable. The best thing on offer at each was the conversation. Both were run by affable men who seemed to regard their stores as places of social interaction rather than commercial exchange. The quick, no-nonsense purchase of a pound of coffee or a bunch of bananas was out of the question: time had to be spent chatting.