Michael Slade - Headhunter

Sergeant Barthelme listened to what Downtown had to say, then he hung up the phone and groaned.

Sergeant Barthelme did not in the least like what he had been told. For the Sergeant had been around long enough to remember only too well the public drubbing that the VPD had taken over their actions against certain pot-smoking hippies who had crowded Maple Tree Square in 1971.

Sergeant Barthelme remembered only too well the day of the Gastown Riot.

3:46 p.m.

The demonstration had started out disorganized but peaceful. It was disorganized largely because the crowd that slowly congealed in Robson Square was assembling spontaneously. It was true that in the earlier hours of the morning a loose coalition of feminist groups had met and by early afternoon were well on their way to setting up audio equipment on the back steps of the old courthouse, but the audience that finally collected was really nothing more than passersby through the square, most of them working women returning from lunch who began to realize that this issue was a little more important to them than punctuality at the office. By 3:09 there were more than 7,000 people in the square.

Several women carried printed posters that read Women Unite Against Violence Against Women. Every Man Is a Potential Rapist or, no beating around the bush. You Can't Rape a.38.

At 3:11 p.m. two women in their forties, both wearing tight blue jeans with knee-high leather boots, one sporting blue-dyed hair, hung a mural painted on cloth between two columns of Francis Rattenbury's old courthouse. The mural depicted a man with a physique like Arnold Schwartzenegger's, all rippling muscles, rock-hard torso, but without a head. Down in the lower left-hand corner of the mural was a reproduction of the Queen of Hearts from Disney's animated version of Alice In Wonderland. From the mouth of the Queen, in scarlet letters two feet high and enclosed in a dialogue bubble, were the words: off with his head!

By 3:15 p.m. the women collected in the square had started to chant the phrase.

Now if only this were a perfect world that's how matters would have remained. A ragged but peaceful citizen's group exercising its legal right of assembly.

But this is not a perfect world.

And perhaps that's why fate intervened and allowed two things to happen. Both coincidence.

The first coincidence lay in the fact that at this very same moment, some ten miles away in a suburban sports stadium, a group of 10,000 unemployed men, 99 percent of them drunk, had gathered to watch the Annual Blue Collar Soccer Convention. By now the playoffs were over and this was the final game. At this precise moment it was half time, and for some reason some wag who had read the morning papers began to yell his own chant that went something like this: "Headhunter four. Women zero! Headhunter four. Women zero!''

Within minutes the bleachers were filled with men who were filled with booze who then filled their lungs with air and picked up the chant:

“ Headhunter four! Women zero! Headhunter four! Women zero!"

The media on this day just happened to be broadcasting live from the game to those fans who got drunk too early and never got out the door. In the background of the broadcast a listener could hear the chant. And such a listener was a woman named Joan Thistlethwaite who at that moment was caught in the massive traffic jam to the right of Robson Square and who happened to tell one of the feminist organizers of the rally who passed by her driver's window about the content of the broadcast and what its message was.

Within one minute the woman had returned to the steps of the old courthouse, had seized the microphone from an octogenarian who had been part of the original Suffragette Movement, and had told the crowd. The crowd was not pleased. And to show its displeasure the group began to shout out a chant of retort. "Kill the Pigs.' Kill the Pigs! Kill the Pigs!"

It is likely, however, that even at 3:46 that afternoon disaster might have been averted. For the group in Robson Square, despite all the animosity now finding verbal vent, was still under control. And it very well might have stayed that way if only by a second coincidence Fernand Zirpoli had not decided to work the crowd.

Zirpoli was a small greasy man with crooked teeth and a fringe of straggly Einstein hair surrounding his balding pate. As a young man Zirpoli had misspent his youth in Rome by watching the gigolos cruise around those tourist spots most adored by North American women who had come to the Eternal City with stars in their eyes, softly sighing as the Latin lovers pinched their bottoms and any other soft parts of their bodies. Often Zirpoli looked back on those days with fond memory, wishing to God that he had never emigrated to Canada. Women here just did not seem to crave the same hot-blooded male attention. Zirpoli already had seven Criminal Code convictions for indecent assault on a female.

Unfortunately for him, he'd never make number eight.

His usual technique, the one with both the best results and the best defense if needed, was to find a tightly packed group of women and then to slowly move among them toward some imaginary destination, rubbing this breast or that buttock. Most of all, Zirpoli liked redheads. Particularly redheads in sweaters, just like that redhead standing over there.

Zirpoli was smitten.

He stepped back a pace or two — a very difficult maneuver given the number of people now cramming Robson Square — and approached her from behind. With force he bumped into her back, a squeaky-voiced "oops, sorry," escaping from his lips as both his hands circled her front to close on the mounds of her breasts. The woman lost her balance and pitched forward, her buttocks rubbing the man's groin as she went down on one knee.

' 'Kill the pigs! Kill the pigs!'' The crowd took up the chant again.

Zirpoli didn't notice. He was in ecstasy, his penis hard in his pants, his hands refusing to let go of the redhead in his grasp — refusing, that is, until the woman next to the two of them, who had had too much to drink at lunch and was caught up in the mood of the moment, bent down and removed her high-heeled shoe, also a difficult maneuver given the pack of the crowd, and screaming out "Kill the pigs!" herself, drove the spiked heel full force into Zirpoli's left eye.

His scream literally seemed to shatter the brittle autumn air.

As blood in a spurt mixed with ocular fluid fountained out from his mangled face, the Italian was mobbed and clawed and kicked even after he was dead.

An impact seemed to radiate out from the point of violence to the very edge of the crowd. Push turned to shove as people craned to see what was going on.

Then all hell appeared to break loose as order disintegrated.

And that was the moment that Sergeant Scott Barthelme ordered his Vancouver Police Mounted Squad in full riot gear to charge the crowd.

The squad hit the square at a gallop.

Within seconds the center and heart of the city was filled with cries of agony, the clatter of horse-hooves on stone, shouts and obscene hollers and the sound of wood on bone.

One woman, screaming, "No more violence!" pulled a policeman from his horse and kicked him in the groin. Four seconds later a riot club took out all her front teeth.

It was not until 4:30 p.m. that the Battle of Robson Square ended. And even then the police were kept busy galloping up and down the stairs of the open concourse, flushing out the remnants of those women not in the hospital, in jail or dispersed and fleeing throughout the city.

5:20 p.m.

They say that a man with virility problems will often reach for a gun.

If this is true then recent statistics tell us quite a lot. For in 1980 the comparative figures for handgun deaths within a number of countries were as follows: Japan, 48; Great Britain, 8; Canada, 52; Israel, 58; Sweden, 21; West Germany, 42; United States, 10,728.