Sweet Revenge

It is going to be a simple exchange: one that would save my life, avenge my honor, and bring down the most notorious mafia boss in the province. All it involves is handing out his precious black book and receiving new identity papers, a new car, and a bank account under my new name in the city of my destination, enough to live on comfortably away from the bastard for the rest of my life.

The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. I kept on telling myself: you must control yourself to be able to pull it off. My plan is straightforward: slip him a roofie when he comes home for his lunch and siesta, grab his small black notebook and discreetly meet the undercover policewoman at the hair salon where we set up rendezvous.

As noon approached, I was getting nervous. What if he doesn’t show up? What if something goes wrong? Despite my apprehensions, I managed to calm myself down. After all, Bruno is a creature of habit. Sure, he is suspicious as any mafia boss would be, but he trusts me. He probably thinks I am too dumb or too much of a coward to do anything to hurt him. He thinks he wore me down after years of abuse, that I’m pliant and non-threatening. I am his wife after all. “Married for life; from the church to the grave,” as he likes to say.

I am lucky that he is so suspicious of others but not of me. That’s why he doesn’t trust computers. “Hackers would never take me down,” he would say. Instead, he carries all his secrets in his small black notebook, firmly tucked into his inside pocket. That book has all his contacts, information on each of his hits and every one of his deals, and all sorts of incriminating bits that would make the Director of Public Prosecutions salivate and ensure a glorious legacy for the Quebec Minister of Justice.

At 12:30 pm, the phone rang. Bruno was running a tad late. I became nervous again. It wasn’t unusual for him to be sometimes late and to inform me about it, “to time the pasta right,” he would say, but there was so much riding on today that I couldn’t but feel alarmed by the delay.

Fortunately, fifteen minutes later, he was home. Nothing in his behavior was out of the ordinary. As usual, he expected me to wait on him hand and foot and I obediently obliged. As I served him the salad, I brought him the roofied red wine that I had poured in the kitchen. I sat and watched him eat since he never invites me to eat with him and generally expects me to be free to serve him.

He made it through the salad course and was moving on to the pasta course. He looked fine as he sat chewing in silence and showed no signs of distress. I began to worry. Why was he still OK? Why was it taking so long? When will it kick in? Did I use too little GHB? I felt the tension rise in me as I sat there staring into space, waiting.

When he finished his pasta, I cleared his plate and headed to the kitchen to bring his tiramisu and coffee. I heard him grunt and call out to me. I yelled back, “I’ll be right there,” but I took my time in the kitchen. I heard another grunt, and then a thud. By the time I went back to the dining room, he was passed out, collapsed on the table. I washed his wine glass and put it away, mostly out of precaution, and dashed to his jacket that he had thrown on the sofa on arrival. I heard another grunt; I stopped, looked back, but he was still solidly collapsed as I had last seen him. He is a big guy and I did not know how long the quantity that I had slipped him would affect him. It was meant to knock him out for a few hours, but you never know with these things. In any case, there was no time to waste. A quick search of his jacket produced the treasure trove of information the Director of Prosecutions was after. Eureka!

Within ten minutes, I was in my car heading to town. I parked a couple of blocks from the salon and walked the rest of the way. The salon was not too busy given that it was still lunchtime. I requested a shampoo and a curl. The dye job will have to wait until I was safely far from here. As I sat under the bonnet dryer with curlers in my hair, a woman came and sat beside me. She was holding a thick magazine that she opened as soon as she sat down. There, tucked within it was a large and well-stuffed manilla envelope. She looked at me and smiled. I recognized her as Sergeant Piccard.

“Hello Caroline,” she said, “here they are.”

“For both of us?”

“Yes, for both,” she said.

I smiled. I liked my new name, much better than boring Norma. She discreetly placed the envelope on the side table between our seats and I picked it up and slid it into my tote. In turn, I deposited Bruno’s small black notebook on the table, which she picked up right away. She whispered: “You’re the Blue Subaru Forester parked right up front.” Then she stood up and left.

A few minutes later, my hair was dry. As the hairdresser undid the curlers, I looked with great satisfaction at the bouncy curls that emerged. I paid in cash, picked up the keys to my new Subaru Forester from the bottom of the envelope, and stepped out of the salon feeling a bounce on my head and one in my step. I sat in the car, opened the envelope, and pulled out the new identification cards, Social Insurance cards, drivers’ licenses, passports, and credit cards. It was all there; so was a smaller fat envelope with a wad of cash in it, $20,000 to be exact. A note was tucked inside the envelope: “Until you reach your destination, use cash exclusively. It is much harder to trace. Also, get yourselves serious makeovers… there’s plenty of cash enclosed. Good Luck! Suzanne Piccard.” I was now Caroline Colbert. Rita, whose new name was Melinda Tremblay, was waiting for me by the playground area at Parc Westmount. I started the car and headed that way to pick her up. Bruno will not know what hit him: A probable indictment; hopefully considerable jail time; and losing his wife and his mistress all at once!