He persevered, cautiously, down a brief flight of stairs.
With each step, the darkness intensified.
At the base of the stairwell he lifted a latch, crossed the threshold, and let the heavy door swing shut behind him.
The latch clicked into place.
Total darkness.
He had landed in an unused coal cellar. The switch to oil in the 1950s left coal bins vacant, their walls and floors impregnated with decades of black dust. He kept his breathing shallow. He did not carry a flashlight; the glow would be extinguished if he did. The man had not anticipated stumbling into a vacant tomb.
No lighter. No matches.
Little air.
He tasted dust on his tongue.
In the utter blackness of the cellar, the man waited.
For someone. Something.
A sound. A light. A distraction. An appearance.
A specter, even. A ghoul.
He had arrived yet possessed no further directive.
He checked: his own hand, inches from his eyes, was invisible.
He was invisible, even to himself.
One hand gripped the other, assurance that he existed.
He felt taken in.
He had followed the instructions to the letter: proceed to the district in Montreal known as Park Extension – commonly referred to as Park Ex, as though the community’s best days were done. Locate the laneway betwixt rue de l’Épée on the east, Bloomfield Street on the west. Avenue d’Anvers and rue Jarry crossed north and south. Search for a high wood fence, faded green. One impossible to see over without standing on a rock. A pair of yellow slash marks, each the width and length of a thumb, knee-high on the gate, confirmed the location.
The twin dashes were tilted off the vertical. Close to parallel.
Not an X, yet they marked the spot.
Lift the gate’s rusty latch. Enter the small backyard. Avoid exterior stairs to the first and second floors. Instead, step through an unlocked door that led underground.
When he decided to count the experience as being a superior’s psychological ruse, he rallied. He would not succumb to panic. Nor bolt. He was being tested; he’d breeze through the challenge. He stiffened his spine. Prepared himself to endure. It took a while – three-and-a-half minutes, although it felt longer – before he realized that he was not alone.
He detected a breath in the room, not his own, and spoke into the darkness. ‘You’re here.’
‘You, too. Here,’ Captain Armand Touton replied, his voice a disembodied entity.
In locating the voice, the visitor discerned that the other man was seated. Slightly behind and to the right of him. Thinking of his inquisitor in a chair triggered an inexplicable creeping anxiety. For the first time in the black cavern, the man grew fearful.
Captain Touton took this first contact to extremes. He had labeled the concept a cockamamie idea, and the coal bin underscored his contempt for the project. He only went along with the notion after his countervailing arguments were dismissed. If he did not participate, somebody else would. A naive dimple-cheeks in charge might transform mere failure into catastrophe. Better if he ran the show.
Pax, his boss, the mystical romantic, agreed and insisted they push ahead. Forces of evil were aligning for a fight. He wanted a head start and a decent chance of coping, even if the plan was harebrained.
Obliged to listen to BS of that nature, Touton’s response was a protracted sigh, which got his feelings across, if not his point. He had survived his own fight against evil, a conflagration known as World War Two. He didn’t believe the battle anticipated by Pax would be more than a skirmish by comparison. Pax was a civilian, a bureaucrat, brilliant in his own way, a courtroom wizard, but what did he know of war? Of evil?
An ardent reformer, Pacifique ‘Pax’ Plante – commemorated as the Eliot Ness of the Montreal Police Service from the forties into the fifties, taking a page from Chicago of the thirties – stood a head below the mayor yet head-and-shoulders above the chief of police. The chief would not be informed of their gambit. Only a trusted few would be privy. Their operation had to be that strict. Pax insisted, and Touton did, too. Even the mayor, a valued confidant, was kept outside their inner circle, although Touton pointed out that too few were involved to form a circle.
‘Fine,’ Pax deadpanned. ‘We’ll be a straight line.’
The other person who helped form their straight line was the sacrificial lamb, the one ready and willing to be gutted and hung on a rack. The one willing to be bled dry. The one standing in the dark in a coal room. Full of ambition and, in this environment, as blind as a bat.
A fine young man, according to various accounts.
In time, all mayors decamped. Police chiefs, too. Some in disgrace. Men like Plante might die young. A slaughtered lamb, though, could be eternal. Even if its life proved short.
With luck, the lamb might escape bleeding out on a platter. One way to spare him that fate was to shock his senses first. Touton would meet the guy, assess his character, plumb his will, determine his chances of survival. Maybe coax him into changing his mind.
He’d been forewarned. The new man was a mule. Pax maintained, ‘He won’t be swayed by you, Armand. Imagine that.’
But Pax knew he’d try. Perhaps he was counting on Touton to do exactly that.
The meeting was set up between the police captain and the neophyte. Touton chose both the site and the terms of engagement. The young man’s name had not been revealed to him; not yet. He might be advised of it, eventually, but by then it would likely be an invention. He hoped the man wouldn’t be reduced to a code word, like ‘Apricot’ or ‘Lynx’. If a man was going to die on him, he’d prefer to inscribe a proper moniker on his gravestone. In his head, he took to calling him the guy, although he couldn’t bury him under that name either, and tried not to think of him as an innocent lamb being prepped for the slaughter.
His code name better not be ‘Lamb’ or ‘Easter’.
In a moment of honesty, Touton admitted that he wanted to meet the guy. Somebody willing to sacrifice his life without a specific cause might be worth looking at square-on. He’d make his own evaluation then. How much of the man was composed of courage and conviction? How much hellbent on self-destruction? What balance had he struck between those two prevalent and competing forces?
How long would it take for the man to be torn apart? Before his psyche – a shrink’s good word – was shattered?
He’d talk to him first, in the dark, both men distilled to their marrow as disembodied voices, before switching on the overhead and glaring into his eyes.
‘Is there no light?’ the invisible recruit inquired.
‘You want to live in darkness. That’s the idea, no?’
‘In a way. I guess so. Yeah.’
‘Make up your mind.’
‘It’s made up.’
‘I heard that, too.’
‘You want to know why.’
‘I don’t. Why should I?’ Touton baited him.
‘Really?’ the recruit asked, then inquired again, ‘There’s no light?’
‘Later, maybe. When you’re ready. If you’re ready.’
‘I’m ready. Sir.’
‘You are when I say so. Not until.’
No response.
He sounded well-spoken. That could be a problem.
‘Do you have good teeth?’ Touton asked him.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Are you deaf?’
‘I’m not. I have good teeth.’
‘A liability. What loser, Apricot, what upraised screwball has good teeth?’
‘You think somebody will check my teeth?’
‘First impressions, Apricot. You need to rely on them.’
‘My teeth?’
‘First impressions.’
‘That’s true. Why Apricot? Why call me that?’
‘Think about good teeth. What impression do they give? Like you wore braces. A rich boy’s teeth.’
‘What do you want me to do? Pull them out?’
He didn’t mind the sarcasm. He played along. ‘Slowly. Prolong the agony. You should know what pain is, how much you can endure. Or eat candy. Your choice.’ Plying a tooth out wasn’t the worst idea he’d heard, even in jest. At any rate, he was enjoying yanking the young man’s chain.
‘How serious are you?’ the recruit wanted to know.
‘Everything we say is serious. Eat candy. Take on more than one bad habit, Lynx. I read your weight, your height. That tells me you’re fit. As if you’re in training. As if you go to a gym, do sit-ups every morning. If so, quit. Get fat. You’re ex-military, I heard.’
‘Commando. Black Watch.’
‘I didn’t ask. Don’t reveal yourself. Action?’
‘The damn war ended first. Korea, I mean. Peacekeeping duty after that. No firefights. Risky at times. Bad people. Buddies got killed in front of me. That’s not why, in case you’re wondering. I don’t want the job to make up for a lack of action.’
‘I don’t want to know why, Lynx. Do you want to know why I don’t want to know why?’
‘Sure. Tell me.’
‘Because you don’t know why yourself.’
‘I think I do.’
‘That’s the problem. You only think you do. You’ve written it up in your head. You think you’ve got it figured out. You want to go deep underground, be a snitch inside the mob. Only, you won’t have nothing to do as a snitch for years and more years, because you’re going deep, so deep you’ll bury yourself in muck. Only when you can overturn the whole fucking applecart will you come up for air with the good stuff stored in your head. Names and numbers. Methods, bank accounts. Then the whole world comes crashing down around you, Lynx, because of you, Apricot, because you lived inside for years, let’s say for decades. And you want to tell me now why you want to do that in the years to come? I’m telling you, Easter Mutton, you don’t know why. Whatever you think the reason is, that’s not it.’
‘Really.’
‘Don’t be arrogant with me, kid. I’m not in the mood.’
‘Don’t call me “kid”. Sir. If you don’t mind.’
‘Easter Mutton is better? I mind. Find a wall. Rub your hand against it.’
‘What?’
‘Tone deaf, huh?’
‘I’m not deaf. I’ll do it.’
They both heard his hand being wiped along a wall.
‘Now rub the floor with your other hand.’
This time he didn’t object, he just did it.
‘Now your face.’
‘What?’
‘Deaf? Rub your face.’
‘Against the floor?’
‘With your hands.’
‘Blacken it, you mean?’
‘Blacken it. Be thorough. After you’ve done it once, do it again. Coal dust on your hands, from the floor, the walls, then onto your face. Every part of your face. Over and over again. Cover your nose. Your cheeks. Forehead. Your jaw. When I turn on the light to look at you, I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to ever recognize you. Blacken up. Do it. You think I’m not corrupt, but anyone can be corrupted. You do not want to be recognized. No one can know you. You’re invisible. Blacken up.’
Touton could hear him, scraping the walls, the floor, blackening his features.
‘What’s the point of turning on the light?’ the man asked. ‘You won’t recognize me if we stay in the dark.’
‘The time may come when you want me to recognize you, Lynx. Or I want to. I can do that by looking into your eyes and remembering them forever. Won’t notice you on the street, passing by. I don’t stare into people’s eyes as I stroll by. Do you? But if you ever want to be known, ask me to look into your eyes and remember the blackened face. Or, if I need to identify your corpse, I can peel back your eyelids and know it’s you. If I designate a surrogate – someday I might be dead – that man won’t know your eyes, but he’ll know a story I told him, and this is one story you won’t forget in your lifetime.’
‘That’s true,’ the man said.
‘Are you ready?’ Touton asked him. ‘For the light?’
‘Sure,’ the man said.
‘Really? Are you ready for your new life? Because your old one is over. Who you knew, what you knew, who you are – finished. If I turn on this light, you’re a new person, undercover. To go this deep, there is no you anymore. You’re done with your old self. That world has vanished. You don’t have family. You don’t have friends. You’re alone and forgotten. That’s for all time or until you come out, and if you do this the right way you’re not coming out until you’re an older guy who even you won’t recognize. So, no, I don’t want to know why because you don’t know why. There is no why anymore. There is only your new shitty self. You’re a punk now, a bag of shit on the make sniffing fresh manure. Don’t talk to me about why. Why isn’t good enough. Why will get you killed. There is only who you are and who you are has nothing to do with you. That guy’s dead and gone. Quit this bullshit right now or face the facts, Sonny Boy, Lemon Pop, Apricot, Lynx, whatever your code name is, because you may not be able to come out on your own ever again. It’ll be complicated.’
Touton gave his speech and waited for a reaction.
He didn’t get one.
Finally, the recruit said, ‘Now what?’
‘I turn on the light.’
‘Turn it on.’
The man blinked under the sudden brightness of the bare overhead bulb. Slowly, he grew accustomed to the light and returned Touton’s stare, although, given the light’s angle, he could scarcely see Touton’s eyes, while his own were exposed.
The two stared at one another. One memorized the other’s eyes. The other accepted that he was being observed down to his core.
The blackness absorbed light before it reached a wall. As though they floated in mid-air.
Touton said, ‘You’ll find a bucket in the corner behind you. Towel, cloth, soap, water. Clean up. Dry up. Then be on your way. I’m leaving now.’
‘How do we keep in touch?’
‘Don’t you get it yet? You’re out of touch now. You’re on your own.’
‘But someday.’
‘Someday is your problem.’
Touton stopped at the door. He turned. First, he said, ‘You’re an idiot.’ Then he said, ‘Good luck.’ He turned once more and departed.
The man cleaned up. Without a mirror, he was thorough. The water was warm. He was liberal with the soap. Any spots he missed he could attend to later. He left the way he’d come and walked down the lane. He had no idea that Captain Armand Touton was keeping an eye on him and followed his progress through binoculars. When he disappeared out of sight, Touton knew it would be a while before he vanished from his mind.
Back downtown, Touton dispatched a technician to collect the neophyte’s fingerprints from the coal dust. A set on file might come in handy someday, in making a positive ID on a corpse, perhaps. That way, a record-keeper wouldn’t be obliged to take his word for it based on the color of the man’s irises.