by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

It's a scuffle on Charlevoix between a hooker, a pimp and a local. A black guy holds a white girl by her T-shirt in front of a ramshackle dépanneur not far from Wellington. The black man is short, but stocky. He's young, well-groomed in black slacks and a turtleneck. He pins the girl against his '80s Parisienne. The car is impeccable.

The girl is white, loaded with lipstick and sports a wide turquoise headband. She doesn't struggle or look at all upset. She looks like she feels she's being celebrated.

A feisty, scrawny white guy is frantically attacking the black guy. He's older, bald on top with long unruly hair. He sports faded jeans and unlaced sneakers. He's even shorter than the hooker. But he's fearless and unrelenting. He vigorously kicks the black guy from behind, at one point winding up so hard that he falls over.

"Hands off her," the white guy commands. "Don't touch the girl!"

A few minutes later cops break it up.

The vast majority of pedestrians in the Point are unremarkable - they push prams and tote grocery bags. It's a calm place. The train jobs have left. Lace-curtain Irish have moved west. Booze refugees moved a few blocks up-river to dry Verdun. In the '60s, city planners loaded the Point up with government-subsidized housing. There's a few nifty-looking homes, but poverty's forever entrenched, yet it's a sociable place full of outgoing, enigmatic folk.

In recent years crack whores have strolled the sidewalks at night under streetlights near Wellington and Charlevoix, a dim spot where the light barely reveals their shadowy prowl.

The hookers are cheap fun, but they're trouble and often addicted. One is famous for fearlessly robbing everybody, including those high up in the local streetwise pecking order.

Meanwhile, blacks have been moving into the area, attracted to the low rents. The Irish haven't exactly been huge admirers of the black community. Last year many grumbled about the black St. Patrick's Parade queen. The incursion of black street gang members has irritated locals who consider it their turf.

Suddenly, the smaller street squabbles accelerated into the land of no return. On April 1, three unidentified black males shot Alex Desmarais, 24, in the neck at Ash and Fafard. Then they shot Larry Koonek several times at Wellington and Charron just a few moments later. Koonek, in his 40s, had been shot previously and has survived again.

Locals laid items of tribute, including Irish flags, where Desmarais was killed.

Ash had been a quiet street, according to the mailman who delivers a lot of welfare cheques to sixplexes that sell for around $260,000 - cheap, and probably getting cheaper every day.

Since the murder, brows are furrowed and jaws are clenched. Near the bar at the underpass at Wellington and Sebastopol, a tough offers showdown stares at anybody who glances over for too long.

The locally entrenched toughs are close cousins of the West End Gang, the group best known for importing drugs through the Port. They're no sissies.

It's a gritty neighbourhood but unnatural death is still rare. Near where Desmarais was killed, a mournful mural of a kid in a cap peers over. The portrait laments the loss of a boy who drowned in the canal.

Are the Point guys planning to retaliate against the black gangs for the shooting?

Lips are tight. But to ask the question is to answer it.

It's as tense as a tightrope. Cop cruisers pass often. The streetwalkers are nowhere to be seen.

Montreal has gang wars, but always confined within ethnicities. French bikers, Italian mafia, black gangs have tended to kill, but mainly among themselves. A sustained battle between black and white gangs could be hideous.

Sunday night at 10:30. A full moon, like a shiny nickel, reflects down on rain-slicked Wellington. Four teenage boys are shooed out of a Chinese-run dépanneur after taunting an older French guy buying beer. The most talkative teen loiterer speculates that there will be no more deaths. "It's never happened before and now it's been three weeks and nothing else has happened, so it's over now."

One can only hope.

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