A detective opens his eyes.
Before dawn, an island city awakes. A phalanx of delivery vans lumber across aging bridges; others wheeze and rumble through tunnels. Ships navigate canals, avoiding the river’s more turbulent currents. In the dark by the water’s edge, a young woman sheds her clothing. She slides into the stream where it’s rapid, impervious to the cold. Drifts away. Her head bobs on the surface. Following a turn onto her back and a final glance at the stars and waning gibbous moon, she exhales a bubble of air. Goes under.
Her body will be recovered downstream, if not in days, then in several weeks’ time. No one has spotted the sorrow of a young person’s surrender to life’s travail.
The city neglects other lives regal in their essence. A man who dwells in quiet servitude to his hovel is kingly there as the sun pokes up. He shaves. The scratch of a razor across his whiskers invigorates: no one to admonish or correct him, no one to direct him, no one to say boo. Outside, chased by light, mice and rats retreat from the alley – literal and metaphorical rodents, both – and across the street, boxcars shunt and slam in the railway yard. Citizens rise early to spare themselves being blasted from their sleep.
Nearby, men in their outdoor slumber pull their clothing tighter. Adjust cardboard walls and roofs in a ditch. On the roadways, cabbies ease off their gas pedals. The only lull in the day diminishes their natural aggression. Bars closed their doors at three a.m.; by four, the busted and the broke, the brawlers, the beaten and the bored, the euphoric, the lonely, the rowdy, the half-asleep and the half-dead, the happy revelers and the blissfully inebriated have been delivered to their homes. Now it’s both too late and too early to drive anybody anywhere – a few prowl for that one fluke ride to the airport – and with nothing to do, drivers congregate in all-nighters over coffee. Not caring for the habits of breakfast, a few indulge in a slice of sky-high cheesecake with a glutinous strawberry glaze.
Cops arrive, too, nearing their shift’s end. Take a seat. Spread their limbs. Wrap their fingers around a mug. They’re too depleted to worry a glance at the worn hookers and pimps, the muggers and beggars. All are equally subdued. No one looks up as smatterings of crooks stumble into this café or that diner. After their overnight skirmishes, cops, thieves and stragglers blend together. Morning a truce. First light a line of demarcation, a demilitarized zone, between hunters and prey.
Elsewhere, a pack of burglars who have enjoyed a decent night converges in an empty parking lot to divvy loot and swill beer.
In his diminutive dwelling, gray light outside, Émile Cinq-Mars stirs. His first day on the job with a new rank: Sergeant-Detective. The thought is in his head the moment his eyes blink open. He’s not expecting whistles and cheers. Nor even a salute. The opposite, more likely. Casual ribbing. An upraised middle finger behind his back. Yet he’s keen to jumpstart this new chapter of his professional life and feels bolstered by subliminal adrenalin.
Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars. The sound of it feels right.
He, too, scrapes whiskers from his jaw, the blade of his razor in need of replacement.
Late in the month of May, the year is 1978.
Émile Cinq-Mars had been enjoying a tumultuous career as a young police officer. After tugging the robes on life as a priest, he had found himself wanting with respect to that calling – the calling itself insufficient. He’d then considered veterinary medicine. If he was not to minister among people, he’d do so among animals, pull a modern-day St Francis act. He’d forged his way toward that goal by following a course in what has become a defunct section, with a name that delights his peers whenever it’s mentioned: Animal Husbandry. A common refrain inquires, ‘Who was the bride if you were the husband, Cinq-Mars? A goat? A sow? Were you rampant in a hen house?’ The ribbing pounds down upon him whenever he fails to keep his past concealed, especially inside the police department, which is where he eventually landed.
In a sense, he combined the first two inclinations. He’d not be a priest yet remain a moral persuader in his community. Not a veterinarian, yet he’d keep animals of the two-legged sort in check.
Weaned to plough fields, bale hay and raise horses, the country lad became a big city cop. Any straw poll predicted a staid life. He was tall and strong. Muscle was a useful component for a beat cop. He did not exhibit any particular flair for the service, and his country roots marked him as susceptible to the degenerates and slick deceivers in the big bad metropolis. That he held to his religious background, at a time when any man in his right mind was fleeing the Church for the secular world, indicated that he’d be eclipsed by his skeptical peers as time scooted by.
A surprise, then, when things turned out differently.
He was mentored early on by the captain of the Night Patrol, one Armand Touton, a folk hero among the general population as a reformer and crusader. Together they made a key contribution to the defeat of the FLQ, the front de libération du Québec, a cynical, quasi-militant group that murdered a cabinet minister and kidnapped a British trade commissioner to advance their interests in a Quebec independent from Canada. That success bolstered his in-house profile. His immediate boss was allied with the key reformers in the city. The mayor, Jean Drapeau, and the crime-busting prosecutor, Pacifique ‘Pax’ Plante, also found the newbie worthy of inclusion in their cabal. Touton brought him onto the elite Night Patrol and elevated Émile Cinq-Mars to the rank of detective. That quick promotion caused him to be despised among cohorts, and not only by those benefitting in a material way from criminal gangs across the cityscape of Montreal. A cop who aligned with the reformers was advised to be prepared: to fit himself out with his coffin of choice.
Cinq-Mars served on Touton’s Night Patrol until that man retired and the Patrol was disbanded by the bureaucrats. Mayor Jean Drapeau was gone by then, and now Pax Plante was dead. The new brass did not want reformers with muscle in positions of authority. Older politicians who opposed them were defeated or in retreat. He was cast out to a suburb, a form of exile. He remained under wraps while rarely investigating anything more odious than minor felonies. To that end, he did his job.
Still, he managed to solve a few murder cases while officially investigating none.
Colleagues alleged that news of his impending promotion pointed to his old cronies. Others brayed that the rank of Sergeant-Detective was granted to keep him in line, to burden him with minutiae out in the boonies and out of everyone’s hair. The brass – half corrupt, the other half largely weary of the battle for oxygen – were now free to sic second-rate partners on him while enjoying a chuckle at his expense over their evening cocktails.
The detective heard the chatter. He knew the chorus. Which took no great feat of detection. Officers meant for him to listen in and get the message. He was not wanted.
A toasted bagel with cream cheese and thin slices of lox suited his mood for the morning. Strong coffee was preceded by an extra tall glass – a celebratory aspect – of orange juice.
Morning light edged onto his street. The sunniest of days in the offing.
The jangle of the telephone gave Émile Cinq-Mars a start. A loner, few people rang him. No one at this hour.
‘Bonjour?’ More a question than a greeting. His inflection implied that the unknown caller must have misdialed.
‘Sergeant-Detective.’ There, for the first time. From a superior’s mouth to his ear. His rank spoken aloud, suddenly official.
‘Captain Delacroix,’ Cinq-Mars answered in French. ‘Good morning.’
‘For you, maybe.’ While he and his boss remained a long way from being bosom pals, they had progressed a fair distance. He surmised that the captain’s respect and confidence had finally been earned. Captain Delacroix would never say so, yet Cinq-Mars harbored the suspicion that the captain had initiated the recommendation for promotion. If true, he was free to dismiss the cynicism of others who figured a fix had been on, or under, the table.
‘What’s up, Cap?’
‘Saving you a trip in,’ Delacroix announced. The streets being empty at this early hour, the trip in took six or seven minutes by car. Cinq-Mars could walk a shorter route in twenty.
‘Sure. Why?’ Had he been transferred? He’d been addressed by his rank; surely he hadn’t been demoted already.
‘The nightshift gave me a buzz, Cinq-Mars. I’m at home. They pulled down a case too complicated for their feeble minds.’
A lie. More likely, catching a case near the end of their shift meant overtime for that crew. The night captain was being protective of his budget, so asked the dayshift to take it.
‘OK,’ Cinq-Mars said, expecting more.
‘Burglary. How complicated can that be? Anyhow, it’s real close to you.’ He read out the address on rue de l’Épée. The man was right. Two blocks away. Closer than that as the crow flies. ‘Go straight there. Take it on.’
‘Done. Anything on my new partner? He’s supposed to be assigned today.’
‘If he shows up, I’ll send him over.’
‘Any idea who?’
‘Downtown’s choice. Whoever they want to pass off as landfill. I expect riffraff.’
‘That’s how I arrived,’ Cinq-Mars mentioned. He immediately regretted giving Delacroix that obvious an opening.
‘Need I say more?’
‘No, sir. I’ll check out the robbery.’
‘Plural,’ Captain Delacroix corrected him.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Not one robbery. There’s like a dozen or more.’
At the very least, his first case as a Sergeant-Detective held out a modicum of interest.