CHAPTER 3
1955
SURGING EAST ALONG STE. CATHERINE STREET, A MOB swelled. Thousands spilled from the Forum, where a game between les Canadiens and the Detroit Red Wings had been curtailed, initially by tomatoes thrown at Clarence Campbell, the National Hockey League’s president. Then stink bombs erupted on the ice. The stench and smoke ignited panic among a portion of the spectators while seeding rage in others. The most angry swarmed Montreal’s focal artery, smashing windows, looting shops and vandalizing buses. Hordes exercised their collective muscle by rocking police cruisers until they managed to roll a few upside down, then the mob burned the cars and cheered the flames.
A former war-crimes prosecutor in Germany, Campbell had brought down a stunningly stiff verdict. Maurice “Rocket” Richard had been suspended for the remainder of the season for swinging his stick three times across an opponent’s back. He’d also punched an official. The judgment effectively denied Richard the scoring title. More shocking, his suspension included the playoffs. Montrealers feared the edict would cost their team the championship they were favoured to win. Fans were livid. Once the stink bombs were tossed their rage knew no remorse. Rioters toppled phone booths, stomped on mailboxes and slashed tires. Hundreds cheered each petty misdemeanour as they followed the mischief-makers on foot.
Although it possessed no organizational apparatus, and slogans had yet to catch on, the burgeoning crowd seemed to know that it would find more interesting, more critical targets ahead.
A pair of cops patrolling the beat near the Forum were not the first to intervene—others had evicted the crowd from the building and bullied a few individuals outside—but, unaware of what had transpired, they were ill prepared for the impending rampage. Beer-bellied, with a florid complexion, the senior of the two put up a hand to block a group of forty raucous men and youths. He demanded that they get off the street and use the sidewalk. “That’s what it’s there for!” he castigated them, as one might a rascally pack of kids. The men hooted, then charged, and the officer felt both his knees snap before he was trampled underfoot.
His partner, youthful, more limber and less belligerent, escaped the crush by vaulting over the hood of a parked car and dashing across the sidewalk into a doorway, emerging to help his dazed and bloodied mentor back to his feet after the howling band had pressed on. The older man seemed to be under the impression that he still had a function to pursue, raising a hand to block the progress of the next throng, a gang of about six hundred men, reaching also for his missing pistol—confiscated by a rioter and now indiscriminately being fired in the air.
The junior officer guided his confused colleague away.
The first calculated intervention by authorities outside the building resulted in similar dismay. Fifteen officers ran down a side street and cut the mob off as it moved along Ste. Catherine, expecting that the presence of the uniform and the sight of fifteen truncheons would sober the drunks and bring order to the lives of the reckless. The gang failed to be impressed. Having ransacked a corner grocer, depositing the owner and his wife outside the premises while emptying his backroom, they demonstrated their commitment to the furor by hurling full and half-full beer bottles at the cops, and the blue line of fifteen men buckled and ran.
Their flight charged the atmosphere with conviction. To the men running rampant on the street, they now owned the city.
Bad news for Captain Armand Touton of the Night Patrol. After the sun went down, the city’s security rested upon his shoulders, but he had made a reasoned deduction. His detectives were not equipped for this type of operation and could offer no useful support beyond logistics and expertise. He did not find merit in hand-to-hand combat against the rioters.
“We have a choice,” he maintained to the officer in charge of the patrolmen. Many of his constables had reported in when an appeal went out over the radio. Others had trundled off to bed as soon as news of the riot was broadcast—so great their need for sleep that they disconnected their phones. Still others headed for the nearest neighbourhood tavern in order to miss the call from a station commander to return to work.
“Is that right?” Captain Réal LeClerc, in charge of police operations, asked him. “What choice would that be?”
“We can let the rioters break store windows, or we can let them break the noses of our men. I say we let the mob smash glass.”
LeClerc was visibly astonished. “Never expected that from you, Armand.”
A former commando and prisoner of war, Touton’s reputation as a tough guy had been earned and proven often. Months earlier, while driving home in the morning after a particularly hard night, he’d come across Captain LeClerc and his men surrounding a home in the East End. Officers squatted behind police cars and civilian automobiles, weapons drawn. Touton had dashed from his car, bent over, his head down, and crept alongside the uniforms until he found LeClerc. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“One man inside. Young punk with a gun. Already he took a shot at his own mother. He missed. His mom, his dad, they got out, but he’s a lunatic, his parents say. Sick in the head and body both.”
“If he’s inside, what are you doing outside?”
The captain had nothing to say to that, managing only a faint shrug.
“I’m going in,” Touton announced loudly. “Who’s coming with me?”
He looked around. None of LeClerc’s men made eye contact with him. This time, he was the one to shrug.
On his way into the lower level of the shabby two-storey crammed together with others identical to it, Touton reached down and gathered a handful of pebbles from the yard. He threw one of the stones ahead of him as he entered. No response. He walked in. He went up a short flight of sagging stairs that creaked underfoot. The first door was open. He chucked a stone inside, then listened to it rattle around and come to rest. Nothing. He went in.
He tossed a stone into the living room on his left and, when he heard no sound, stepped into the room, then moved towards the rear of the house into the adjoining dining room.
Tossing another stone earned him no reply.
At the doorway to every room, he lobbed a stone. At the last, he spotted the shadow of an arm come up. Then a pistol rose into view. Commando style, fast, fiercely, Touton struck first, his massive fist smashing into the youth’s face. A left uppercut to the chin snapped the lad’s head back. Blood spurted as the gunman bit through his tongue. Touton reeled at the unexpected horror that confronted him there, and he levelled the crazed gunman with another savage right hand.
Motionless, the young man’s body seethed with pustules. Foul secretions leaked across his back, and from his forehead down into his eyes. An effect, Touton would later have confirmed, of syphilis. The disease had already chewed up his mind. Touton called in LeClerc to clean up the mess and haul the diseased man away before he awoke in bad temper.
And yet this time, as the riot gained intensity and the crowd grew more brazen and violent, Touton was the one suggesting that the cops pull back, that the conflagration be permitted to run its course.
“Some guy wants to play with matches, douse him with a firehose. A thug wants to put the boots to a citizen, shoot off his left big toe. Later, you can claim it was an accidental discharge. A drunk wants to fire a pistol in the air, aim a warning shot past his right ear. If you miss and hit him between the eyes, too bad for that guy.”
LeClerc said no. Newspapers and radio journalists had heralded Touton for his courage against the syphilitic gunman while reviling LeClerc and the rest of the department as cowards. Now he was being presented with an opportunity to show the other man up. “These bums need to be taught a lesson. They can’t take over the streets on my watch.”
Pondering his options, Touton nodded. “Your choice. If you think you can teach a mob a lesson, be my guest. I’ll monitor the radio. Crooks will be going about their business tonight. My guys need to be ready for that.” He’d rather allocate his resources to protect critical targets, starting with the banks in the path of the mob’s eastward flow.
Officers in overcoats—collars up, hats low over their eyes to suggest to rioters that they were not cops at all, a shotgun tucked under each arm and multiple pistols visible in gun-belts slung over their shoulders—ought to be enough to keep looters from the banks’ doors. He also had people on phones, siphoning bank presidents out of their evening baths, demanding that they hire private security to pick up the slack deeper into the night. Touton dispatched detectives to hot spots as they flared up, for all ears—including those of criminals—were tuned to the radio. By now, the whole city knew about the riot. Furious men in every quarter were racing to join the melee, by car or on foot. Those who came by bus would smash out the windows of the coach and beat up the drivers as they disembarked. Sometimes burn the buses. As he had expected, petty crooks were taking advantage of the massive police deployment to knock over small businesses elsewhere in the city. He might not be able to chase down those guys tonight, but his men would nab a few in the act, and afterwards he’d be in a better position to sort through who had done what to whom and drag a few bad guys in.
Between bursts of information and the doling out of orders from his vehicle, Armand Touton kept tabs on the efforts of his colleague Réal LeClerc. The man was in charge of the uniforms, and had managed, despite the evening hour, to cobble together a small army. This proved fortunate, given that his actions had already helped the riot to escalate into all-out war.
A man of thirty-five, thin, agile, in jeans and a short leather coat, standing farther east along Ste. Catherine Street, anticipated the mob’s approach. Although of average height, his features were exceptionally striking, distinguished by a prominent, serrated nose and cheekbones like plump pears. The overall effect was a sculpted, even cunning look that barely masked a cherub’s propensity for mischief. Continents appeared to come together in his face, as though his ancestry combined native Indian with Asian, and the French of Normandy with a smattering of English aristocracy. A wealthy man’s son, he had studied law and been called to the bar, yet had taken no interest in a conventional career. Pierre Elliott Trudeau preferred the work he did these days editing a small intellectual magazine, Cité Libre, and had recently stepped away from a job as a legal advisor to a government agency. Hearing radio reports of the havoc, he left the comforts of his mother’s home, where he was visiting, to hail a taxi that dropped him off as close to downtown as the driver dared.
Cabs, the radio reported, were being overturned whenever cop cars weren’t handy. “That’s all right, what they’re doing,” the cabbie broadcast. “Me, I don’t mind. Burn the city, burn downtown. Go to Westmount, burn the English to the ground—know what I mean? But don’t burn my cab.”
“That’s where you draw the line?” Trudeau asked.
“That’s my line. I can’t go no closer than this.”
“Sure you can. Go a little closer.”
“My cab is my life to me!”
“That’s probably not as true as you think. Don’t worry, nobody’s burning cabs for a few more blocks.”
“You never know!”
“A little farther.”
Trudeau got out eventually and walked the last couple of blocks to a public square that appeared to be peaceful and quiet, although an unusual number of people were milling around, waiting. The anticipation in the air felt akin to the charge before an electrical storm. He was sitting up high on the backrest of a bench when he heard a dulcet male voice address him from behind.
“Pierre? I thought that might be you.”
In no mood to welcome company, he turned to see who had identified him. A step behind his left shoulder stood a soft-looking man in casual attire, his hands crossed over his tummy in the pose of a child waiting for an elder’s sanction to step forward. He wore large, floppy rubber boots, the tongues hanging out, jeans, a heavy wool sweater and a dusky jacket open down the front. He had on a small, black wool cap. Of similar height to Trudeau, the second man possessed a much bulkier build. Only twenty-eight, he appeared likely to become hefty in later years. Already his belly had to be cinched by his belt, and when he exerted himself he’d soon pant. Trudeau had first met him during the Asbestos miners’ strike a few years back—the skinny intellectual got into a fistfight, now a legendary battle, while the robust youth cheered him on—then later through the milieu of intellectuals around Cité Libre, where the corpulent fellow demonstrated a tenacious, if not a particularly original, intellect. In some circles, he became a formidable proponent of decisive political change as envisioned by the far left. Trudeau held reservations about the man—the two of them were incompatible politically—but on first impression conceded that he liked him. He’d detected a knack for astutely assessing personalities, and an ability to understand how others were likely to think. When the two of them rehashed a meeting that had gone badly, the man adroitly, and bravely, fingered those who lied. Finding him on the square, Trudeau dropped his automatic air of combativeness. “Father François,” Trudeau greeted him. “A surprise. How’s it going?”
“Fine, Pierre. Taking in the riot on a midnight stroll?”
On the bench seat, the marks of footprints in snow told that others had sat in a similar position to himself, on the backrest. “Father, are you blind? I’m sitting here, minding my own business.”
The young priest emitted a self-conscious chuckle and sat at the opposite end of the bench, on the icy seat portion. “I see the potential arsonist in you, Pierre. You’re in the mood to burn down a building. So don’t tell me you’re here as a neutral observer.”
“Observations are neutral? Since when? We see what we want to see, with the slant we prefer. What about you, Father? Packing snowballs with rocks inside? Burning cop cars?”
“Twenty-five minutes ago—like you, I was minding my own business—I was standing alongside a cop car when it burst into flames.”
“Spontaneous combustion?”
“Something like that.” The priest leaned forward. The night was not too cold for March, but his breath was visible under the streetlights. “I singed my jacket. My first thought: what happens if the gas tank explodes? I tried moving people away, but on a night like this, people have minds of their own. They insisted on encircling the car, cheering.”
“And you, incognito with no collar on. You could have said Mass.”
“I didn’t expect to be attending to my flock this evening.”
“Didn’t you?” Trudeau dug his hands into his pockets to warm them, not having bothered with gloves. “You usually listen to hockey games, Father?”
“At this time of year, of course. Not you?”
“Tonight, for the first time. But I expected tonight to be different—more than just a game.” Both men were distracted by a momentary roar from the approaching throng. “Sports fans,” Trudeau scoffed in the sardonic manner familiar to Father François Legault. “Their team scored a goal.”
“Another cop car’s been roasted,” the priest surmised.
“An English store window spontaneously shattered.”
The priest eyed the other man closely. While he had been irritated by Trudeau in some discussions before, a timbre to his manner on this night made Legault suspect that he might enjoy his company. “You’re not curious, Pierre? You’ll walk no closer?”
“They’ll be here soon enough.”
Father François looked around. In accompanying the mob down Ste. Catherine Street, he had usually contrived to stay ahead of the action, looking for those areas where the police might initiate a pitched battle. In one instance, he coaxed officers to retreat by pointing out to them the discrepancy in numbers. In another, he confronted the wounded on both sides of a fight while they awaited ambulances. “The French and the Catholic are fighting French Catholics. Does this make sense?” he inquired. Lacking confidence in his physical health, he had carried on to this square. Intermittent breathers kept his pulse regular.
“Why be confident, Pierre, of where they’ll go? It’s a mob. Without a destination. It could turn off anywhere, slide away in any direction.”
Across the street from Phillips Square, where they were sitting, a department store, Morgan’s, projected its wares in bright windows. Like Eaton’s a block away, the store was an emblem of English Canada. Clothing, furniture and cosmetics for the ladies, but the French were obliged to speak English if they expected to be served, and speak it well if they wished to be served politely. A French lady buying French perfume from France had to learn to say please, not s’il vous plaît.
“Why trouble myself by finding the riot,” Trudeau remarked, a nod indicating Morgan’s, “when I can sit here in a front-row seat and the riot will find me?”
“Then you’ll agree, Pierre, that this evening has nothing to do with hockey.”
“Hockey is the flashpoint. But there’s more to it. This mob will start selecting targets. When it does, it’ll discover its raison d’être.” Sirens wailed through the night. Above Ste. Catherine Street police cars, hook-and-ladder trucks and ambulances raced by. “Watch. Our rioters will educate themselves as they go. That’s already happened, or they would never have bypassed the National Hockey League offices.”
“They don’t know where the offices are.”
“Just as well.”
“I’m serious,” the priest reiterated. “Someone asked me if I knew where the league office was located. He had a brick in one hand, a beer in the other. I almost answered him before I thought better of it. I offered him a smoke.”
“Good of you.”
“I traded. A smoke for the brick.”
“Quick thinking.”
“It’s hard to get rid of a brick on a night like this. I stuffed it in a mailbox.”
Trudeau blew warm air into his hands. “Father, while this is not only about hockey, I don’t see that it has much to do with religion.”
“Now you’re insulting me. Even in this light I detect the devious twinkle in your eye. What does any of this have to do with the Privy Council, Pierre? You’re still employed by the government, no?” Feeling cold, as if the conversation had subdued his adrenaline, the priest stood and stomped his feet a moment. He finally did up the zipper on his jacket.
“I thought you knew. I’m out of work. I quit. But the Catholic Church, Father. Your boss is no mere boss. The Church is your calling.”
“The Catholic Church serves the people of Quebec, Pierre.”
“Arguable,” Trudeau murmured.
“Put it another way then. My flock is in torment. They’re rioting. Where else should I be? At home? In bed? Reading Cité Libre?”
A large pane of glass shattered, catching their attention.
“Somebody found your brick,” Trudeau said.
“They probably used the whole mailbox.” Both men smiled. “I agree with you—though, sadly. They’ll be here soon.”
“The police, too,” Trudeau noted. He glimpsed shadows forming on his right.
The priest also spotted the gathering forces. Trudeau, the crafty young fellow, had chosen a ringside seat for the fiercest battle of the night. As he had done before, in the midst of past debates, Father François made a mental note of the man’s acumen.
Getting to his feet, Pierre Trudeau hugged himself against the chill. The two men smiled, for both believed that their conversation on this special night had brought them together as possible, if unlikely, friends—closer than before. They stood side by side as sirens wailed louder, nearer, ever more plaintively, and the mob, too, increased its roar. In the chill of the chaotic March night, the men waited patiently for the riot, and history, to seek them out.
Captain Armand Touton took the call after the riot had been out of control awhile, the resources of his men stretched beyond their usual limit. Half the police presence was now involved in carting the injured to hospital and keeping roads open for emergency vehicles. In hospital corridors, civilians lined up alongside the same cops who had beaten them, and firemen were streaming in, taken out of action by rocks as often as by smoke inhalation.
The call was being transmitted to his vehicle over the two-way, relayed by a harried dispatcher at police headquarters who was also on the phone to another officer. The dispatcher sounded quite young, probably in her early twenties, a civilian fearful that the social order had come to an abrupt halt. She dreaded conveying messages between the two roaring lions.
“I have no time for a goddamned burglary!” Touton yelled back at her. “Tell him to take care of it himself! That’s what he’s paid to do!”
A delay ensued as his response was passed along.
The young woman’s sweet voice squeaked again. “Sir, Detective Sloan says that you’ve got time for this one. Over.”
“There’s a riot in progress! Ask that dumb sonofabitch if he’s opened a window lately! If he says yes, ask that dumb sonofabitch if he’s deaf in both ears or only blind in one eye!”
Another pause. “Sir, Detective Sloan says I’m to tell you in an angry voice that he’s calling from the NHL head office in the Sun Life Building. He says I’m supposed to say to you in an angry voice that he knows about the … I’m supposed to say it this way, sir … ‘the goddamned’—he made me say it that way, sir, he insisted on it—he knows about the … you know, goddamned … riot. Those aren’t my words. Over.”
This time, Touton took time to formulate a response. Both the Sun Life Building and the National Hockey League offices were supposed to have been guarded, and he had taken charge of that detail himself. Nobody had been allowed to stay in the building, for trouble had been expected, even before the throwing of the first tomato, as the building was an obvious potential target. A break-in would certainly reflect badly on his squad.
“I had guards posted at that site,” he said feebly.
In a moment, the young woman passed along his officer’s response. “Not enough. I was told to say that, sir. I mean, it’s not me saying ‘not enough,’ it’s Detective Sloan. Stand by, please, sir.”
Touton hung on. This was his city. A portion of its centre was now in flames. He could still hear the shouts of rioters, although they had moved on from his station, their exuberance echoing like sirens between the buildings all cheek by jowl, two and three storeys high. Smoke lingered in his nostrils, a reminder of that day on the beach at Dieppe, not so long ago, where he had bled, awaiting capture or death as he breathed in smoke and the terrible stench of the dead.
“Sir? Detective Sloan says to tell you that this is bigger than the riot. He just doesn’t want to explain why over the two-way. He has his reasons, he says. Over.”
With the front door of his vehicle open, Touton stood with a foot up, leaning one elbow on the roof and the other on the door. He clicked his microphone on. “Tell him it’s impossible to drive through the mess from here. I’m heading there on foot. It’ll take a while. Tell him it better be bigger than the riot or I’ll make him smaller than a cockroach. And you can say that to him in your usual sweet voice. You don’t have to sound angry at all. Now, ma chérie, don’t go off on a crying fit. You did just fine. Over and out.”
Touton stepped back from his car and slammed the door shut. A detective stepped close to him, but stayed away when he noticed the intensity in his eyes. “Get me a shotgun,” Touton ordered quietly, without emotion. When the officer returned with the weapon and a box of shells, he cracked the gun open and deposited two shells in the chambers. He left the shotgun open across his left arm and stuffed the box in his coat pocket. He doubted that he’d need the damn thing, but a mob was a mob, and that merited a degree of caution.
As he walked down Ste. Catherine Street, images of burned-out cars, smashed windows, spaghetti coils of firehose and the hollering, drunken kids hauling away stolen loot angered and saddened him in ways that hadn’t fully hit home when he was safely tucked behind the scene at his car. The litter impressed him. How all that debris could be scattered in such a short time was mystifying, as though every object that a rioter could pick up and hurl had been hoisted, smashed and thrown onto the street in pieces. He’d been through chaotic times before. After Dieppe, he was force-marched through Europe and put on display. Citizens stepped from their homes to throw vegetable peelings and human excrement in his face and upon the other prisoners. They hollered fevered insults. Firsthand he had witnessed a mob’s frenzy, and privately he was wondering if he urged caution for reasons that were not entirely professional—he did fear mobs, this one included, not for what they might do to him, but for the memories they invoked.
Armand Touton was unaware of the impact of his presence. He was walking down the very centre of the street, a shotgun crooked over one arm, his grey hat on, his charcoal coat flaring out with each immense stride. He was a man in a hurry. To everyone, he was obviously a cop—not only to those who recognized him as the city’s most famous police hero—and he was one cop who was not cowering. Respect was accorded to him. Boys who taunted unwary adults shut up as he went by. Men who had been throwing rocks and snowballs that contained ice and stones at firemen kept their arms at their sides. Before them strode a man on a mission, and it appeared to many that the folkloric hero was intent on single-handedly breaking up the riot. While the idea might be deemed laughable by anyone on the street who thought about it, no one stood in his path to prevent him from doing so, either.
Those who knew him only by reputation understood that this was his town, the night shift his time. Montreal was a night city. Its clubs and bars were infamous across the continent. Deprived Canadians thirsty for relief from dull social lives booked business meetings and stopovers every chance they got. Americans arrived for the shows and the gambling and the open prostitution. Hookers freely worked the trains coming into town. Over the years, the act he’d enjoyed the most had been Édith Piaf, who’d played the Sans Souci. He suspected that he’d never see her like again. In any case, the Sans Souci was now closed, the closure part of a trend. Yet only last week Touton had caught Vic Damone at the El Morocco. He loved Vic’s voice. He hadn’t had a chance to get back to the El this week to hear Milton Berle, but usually the comedians left him cold because his English just wasn’t quick enough. Another comedian, Red Skelton, was booked at the Tic Toc. Some of the guys had been talking about him, but he’d rather catch Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, coming soon to the Esquire Show Bar, or Sammy Davis Jr. who was booked for the Chez Paree. Last year, he had used his influence—one of only a few times, but the owner, a gambler and a hood named Harry Ship, owed him a big favour—to hear Frank Sinatra, also at the Paree.
He wondered if he’d ever see those big-name acts again: by morning, half his city might lie burned or smashed.
Touton liked to catch the stars, but he wasn’t much into the club life, the drinking and conviviality. He was never made welcome anyway. He preferred to go, listen, look around, check things out, see who was talking to whom, and leave. Too many cops went down the tubes spending their wages at the Algiers or the Samovar, or hobnobbing with the likes of Jack Dempsey or Rocky Marciano at Slitkin’s and Slotkin’s, although he’d done that, too—just once, on a dare. Marciano had been in town, and one of his cops had bet that Touton’s fists were bigger than the champ’s. The cop begged him to go down to the club the next night and measure his closed fist alongside the reigning heavyweight king’s. Both men settled for a tie, but the photographers enjoyed themselves, snapping the massive fists side by side on a table, then capturing the two heroes feinting punches. A front page showed Touton cracking a right hook across the champ’s jaw. The champ had been smiling. People wondered, though, and the tabloids asked the question, “Could Touton take out Marciano?”
“He’s undefeated,” the officer had quipped. “I’ve lost fights. Adolf had me on the ropes, remember?”
The Top Hat. The Copacabana. The Normandie Roof. The Bellevue Casino, where the cover was fifty cents and so was the beer. The Chez Maurice Danceland, where the young people hung out. The Black Sheep Room at Ruby Foo’s. So many acts and so much action, and the tough guys visited them all and hatched their schemes. Montreal was a night city, to the consternation of the Church and those who held to traditional values. Of Montreal, Mark Twain had said in the 1880s, “you can’t throw a brick without breaking a church window.” Now that same brick would bust the windows of bars.
Times change, but times remain the same, Touton believed. Montreal had always been a drinking city, and a brawling city, a city of vice and pleasure as well as one of piety. Ebb and flow. Amid the social strata stood the police, usually corrupt, on occasion righteous.
As captain of the Night Patrol, and an officer intricately linked to the new reformers, Touton was not usually welcomed into the clubs. He’d never be denied entry, either.
A municipal election had been held a year earlier. On that day, messages about disturbances burst over police radios about every twelve seconds. The day might not have been as bad as the one ten years earlier, when seventeen people were shot, but baseball bats and brass knuckles remained in vogue, and polling booths were dangerous places. Valorously, the reformers persevered this time, and won. Jean Drapeau, the diminutive lawyer who’d led a four-year investigation into city corruption, became mayor, and the man who once had been the head of the police morality squad, Pacifique “Pax” Plante, who had closed down the gambling dens and the bawdy houses only to be fired for his trouble, was brought back to the police department as its new director. This returned Touton to a safer position within the department, but now the club owners were being forced to abide by the 2 A.M. closing hour instead of dawn. They were obliged to evict the prostitutes from their premises, and were crying foul. Even the legendary stripper, Lili St. Cyr, who would vamp in her heart-shaped chastity belt before discovering the key, slipped away, drawn to a burgeoning desert oasis of sin and wickedness. Americans wanted to capture the Montreal business for themselves, and Las Vegas was the answer. The local club trade was bad and getting worse, and Touton suspected that many clients were on the streets tonight, their rage having little to do with hockey and not much to do with the complex politics of the day. They wanted to party, to revel in debauchery once again, and as the new administration was curtailing their fun, they wanted to smash anything that looked vaguely official.
Gambling dens were being shut down, and gambling had been the city’s second-largest industry behind the rag trade. After-hours speakeasies were cropping up, and they’d be the next to be rooted out and closed. One by one, the bawdy houses were bolting their doors, the women waving to their admirers at Windsor Station as they caught trains to New York. A few of the men who had enjoyed the pleasure of their company were now throwing rocks at cops and overturning police cruisers, forgetting that the cops had been the mainstays of the old regime and that reformers in the department, like Touton, whom they were leaving alone, belonged to an embattled minority.
The rioters had their frustrations. They were taking them out.
Times changed and times remained the same—yet these days something new stirred. A fresh influence had emerged to truly change the way things worked. People’s minds were being altered, and for that Touton credited television. Quebecers had only been kneeling before their sets since 1952, a mere three years, but already the impact was palpable. Fewer people came out to the clubs, and Touton had a hunch that TV would do more to close down the city’s nightlife than the 2 A.M. closing hour. But something else: through television, French-speaking Quebecers were seeing, for the first time, how English-speaking people lived on the rest of the continent, and that was an eye-popper. That was stunning. They saw that, in comparison, they were wretchedly poor and hard done by. As well, for the first time, opinions were being expressed over French-language television that ran counter to the dictates of the Church. Touton was all in favour of that. He had been to war. He had lived in a POW camp, then marched in a destitute column back to Germany in the depths of winter without shoes and with little clothing. The Germans did not feed their prisoners on that last march, but allowed them time in the evenings to scrounge for their own food. He knew what it was like to be a captive and a scavenger, knew what it was like to be saved on what was, in all probability, to have been his last day alive if not for the sudden appearance of an American tank. He didn’t need a priest to tell him what to think. The war had instilled that independence in him, and he believed that if more Quebecers had gone to war, and if the war hadn’t killed them, they’d understand that, too. And yet, now, thanks to television, thanks to entertainment rather than war, they were also advancing on the same principles he had attained. They were thinking for themselves. They were questioning authority. And perhaps, Touton considered as he mulled things over, this was why he had not favoured full combat against the rioters, because the riot was a reaction against their restraints, and the people had every right to be mad. They had every right to be furious.
They were poor.
Their lives were hard.
The damn English were always telling them what to do, and now they had suspended the Rocket! Their hero! What else did they have if not the Stanley Cup, and now the maudit anglais had conspired to deprive their team!
So windows were smashed. Debris was scattered. Stores were looted. Vehicles were vandalized and fires struck. Captain Armand Touton walked through the melee wondering how all this would unfold, this intoxicated rage, agitated all the while by a cantankerous officer who had insisted that somehow a burglary was more important than the social firestorm before their eyes.
Cops brought in horses.
The mob paused, retreated slightly, and formed a denser unit. Men shouted profanities at the cops or waved their fists or threw icy snowballs or hatched fresh manoeuvres. Nervously, a cautious contingent stepped to the rear, their enthusiasm tempered, while moving to the forefront were unionists, men who had battled cops previously in bloody confrontations. The combatants included men who’d hire themselves out at election time to wreck polling booths or stuff ballot boxes at knifepoint. Politicians and the papers called them goons. They’d fought cops often, sometimes with guns. Also among their number were the fearless young, their courage found in the tempest of the moment and in the unlimited supply of stolen beer being quaffed down.
Cops manning the line looked across at a few old adversaries they recognized.
The two groups stared one another down.
Waiting.
Anxious horses whinnied.
The cops had no special training with respect to riots, and the only additional equipment they were issued were truncheons. In the past, they had discerned that cops on horseback were able to turn back any crowd. But they were facing men who had fought against horses before, had been beaten back and fled, yet they always itched for an opportunity to try again, believing they could devise fresh tactics.
They could not.
When the cops charged, they charged. The men were pummelled and trampled. Their lines yielded and cracked, yet they had a good number of recruits this time, and the chaos of the scene pulled bystanders into the fray. Riders found themselves surrounded. The youngest of these were terrified. A few panicked, fear travelling through their saddles into the skins of the animals. The horses kicked with their forelegs and spun in circles and kicked with their hind legs as they’d been trained to do. Rioters fell and held their bloodied heads in their hands. Even so, one policeman on horseback was hauled down from behind. The horse bucked and galloped clear.
Other cops swung their truncheons into the mob, concentrating an attack to rescue the fallen rider, and the mob peeled back and cheered themselves and took up the fight elsewhere. Tear gas was fired, but most of the cops were not prepared for the fumes, and a swirl of wind might send the rioters running one minute, the cops the next. The gas then dipped in gusts perplexed by the compress of buildings, and the eyes of the horses went wild, the animals choked and they were ridden off.
Gas swirled skyward, caught in an updraft that lifted it above the huge, bright, blinking Pepsi-Cola sign.
A tired, bleeding cop, down on one knee awaiting rescue or an ambulance, unsnapped his holster and held a hand on the stock of his revolver. Photographed, the picture would serve as a symbol of the battle in the morning papers.
The mob threw stones and bricks they had loosed from the walls of English stores, and they tossed broken glass at the cops and in the path of horses, and they threw snowballs without any harmful ingredients, or harmful effect, as though this were merely a schoolyard donnybrook. The groups charged and retreated and charged again, and a cop swung his truncheon to get Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his friend, Father François Legault, off their bench.
“What’re you doing that for? I’m not bothering you,” Trudeau complained.
“Get the hell away from here!” the cop cried out and slammed his weapon down hard against the bench, damaging it. He was a man in his fifties with dirt on his face and a wide cut on his chin.
“You’re a Frenchman!” Father François shouted at him, as if that came as some sort of surprise.
“So?” the befuddled cop wanted to know.
“Yeah, so?” Trudeau wanted to know as well.
“Why are you striking another Frenchman?”
“Because he’s sitting on a bench here! I don’t want no goddamned spectators! Are you a goddamned reporter?”
“I’m a priest! You watch your language.”
“You’re a priest?” the cop asked him, shocked.
“He’s a priest,” Trudeau confirmed, as though his opinion should be trusted. “A Dominican, of course, but we can forgive him for that, no?”
“You Jesuit elitist,” Father François fired back at Trudeau, and chuckled.
“Just get off this bench here!” the cop tried again, not knowing what to make of these two nutcases. Then he capitulated somewhat. “You should go home, Father. We can take care of business here tonight. Tomorrow you can visit the hospitals.”
“You should go home, not me. Don’t bother with your business. Tomorrow you can go to confession.”
“What am I supposed to confess? That I’m doing my job?”
“That you were busting Catholic heads for your English bosses!”
“What English bosses?” the cop asked. “What’s he talking about? Is he really a priest?” He seemed on the verge of striking them both again, if only to stop their crazy chatter. “He talks like a communist!”
“He’s a communist priest. They exist now,” Trudeau explained.
“Wake up, man!” Father François yelled at him. “Wake up!”
“I’m awake,” the cop answered, confused. “Are you drunk, Father?”
“Are you?”
“I’m on duty!”
“Are you drunk on duty? Ask yourself this question.”
“You can’t be a communist priest. There’s no such thing. It’s impossible!”
“Why? Because Duplessis won’t allow it?”
“The Pope won’t allow it!”
“The Pope has problems with Dominicans, though,” Trudeau cut in. “They’re such a pain in the butt, you know? At least he’s not a Sulpician.”
“At least you’re not either.”
“Or a Franciscan.”
“What are you talking about?” the cop asked. He thought they might be making fun of him.
“The divisions and subdivisions. If you’re a communist, you might be a Trotskyite, or a Marxist-Leninist, or even a Maoist. If you’re a Catholic, well, the permutations are endless.”
“What’s he talking about?” the cop asked again.
“Anyway, Officer, it’s been nice talking to you. Don’t swing that thing at me again, all right? We’re moving back.”
“I’ll crack your head open if you don’t! If I find out you’re a reporter, I’ll smash your nose!”
“If you like, I’ll point out the reporters to you,” Father François offered, which won a chuckle from his new friend.
“You’d better move back, too, Officer,” Trudeau cautioned him. “We’re in the middle of the next charge. Give up the bench—it’s not worth bleeding over.”
“Not quite. He is. I’m merely an intellectual Jesuit Buddhist, with liberal underpinnings and a humanitarian bent. A little hedonism on the side.”
“You’re homosexuals!”
“I’m a priest! Watch what you say.”
“I’m also a lawyer,” Trudeau admitted, “but maybe I shouldn’t tempt you. I’m also a ladies’ man. But, like I said, maybe I shouldn’t tempt you.”
“Sorry, Father, but get out of here or I’ll forget that you’re a priest. I’ll bust your head! I’ll bust the lawyer’s head in half.”
“Officer,” Trudeau persisted, “look around you—you’re isolated. Get the hell out of here yourself.”
The officer did look around this time and realized that he was alone. The mob had spotted him, and the next charge met in the middle of the square around the bench he’d coveted, the officer flailing wildly at communists and homosexuals and unionists and intellectuals and reporters and lawyers and probably teachers and parents and superior officers and even hockey players who failed to score on crucial breakaways while other cops raced to his rescue and Trudeau and his new friend stepped back as the two forces clashed.
“This changes everything!” Father François yelled in Trudeau’s ear above the din. They were not alone in having a conversation, as behind each joust men on both sides argued and tried to figure out what was happening, or what should happen next, although their discussion was singular.
“We can agree on that,” Trudeau said.
“It’s the beginning of the revolution.”
“Actually, it’s the beginning of the riot. The riot is part of an ongoing social upheaval. To call it a revolution is to hijack the agenda for your own purposes. You should be ashamed of yourself, a priest.”
“I’m a Dominican. We promote new ideas, unlike Jesuit stick-in-the-muds.”
“We promote a more rigorous examination, Father.”
“So in the end you can clear your conscience for doing nothing.”
“Am I holding you back, Father? Do you want to throw a rotten egg?”
“The poor don’t have eggs to waste on policemen!”
“Pardon me?”
They were being jostled from behind and had to duck to the side against a building to avoid being pushed into the path of horses.
“Not even rotten ones. The poor don’t have eggs,” Father François repeated.
“Spare me the rhetoric, Father. Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“A rich young Jesuit from Outremont.”
“And you, a cozy priest.”
“You pulled your punch there, Pierre. You meant to say fat.”
“I meant to say what I said, Father.”
“Don’t call me cozy. I’m here, aren’t I? On the front lines.”
“The front lines are fifty feet away.”
“Close enough. I don’t have the heart for battle.”
“You’re a pacifist?”
“No, I just have a weak heart.”
The two men laughed then, and the fight in front of them dispersed in a torrent of snowballs from the young boys in the rear.
Amid imposing Doric columns, visitors are guided up broad stairs into the Sun Life Building. Scaled-down columns are repeated seventeen floors higher, the overall effect one of solidity and long-term prosperity, as if success can be measured as eternal. True to form, the Sun Life Assurance Company has enjoyed a long and eventful history in the province, its influence at times approximating that of the Church. The first institution Armand Touton had chosen to defend upon deducing that there might be trouble in the streets was the Sun Life, not because he favoured the place, but because it stood out as a likely flashpoint for French rage.
He accosted the first officer he came across guarding an entrance.
“I said to keep people out of here!”
“I did, sir.”
“Crooks got in!”
“Not through my door.”
“Young man, I bought a new stove recently. Electric. Turn it on, and like magic, the rings on the burner heat up. They get so hot they go red. You can boil water so fast you can turn your kitchen into a sauna in the wintertime. If I find out somebody got through your door, I’ll make you sit on that burner.”
“My door was locked, sir, and it’s still locked. I don’t have a key. You have to go down to the middle to get in.”
Touton tested the officer’s locked door, and confided, “That’s good news for your ass.”
“Yes, sir.”
Only a few cop cars were parked up and down the block, and across the street a number of officers had gathered around a statue to the Scottish poet, Robbie Burns. Touton didn’t have a spare minute to investigate how they got to goof off amid the uproar. Across the night sky he heard the sirens of emergency vehicles, marauders roaring and the flagrant honk of car horns in support of the riot.
Smoke from fires and tear gas fumes drifted across the square.
Touton also berated the cop on duty at the middle door, but again received no admission of guilt. “They didn’t come in this way, sir.”
“If I ask every cop on duty, will I get the same response?”
“I don’t know, sir. Maybe.”
“I suppose the crooks landed by helicopter.” He intended the remark to be both rhetorical and facetious.
“Something like that,” the young patrolman said. “I heard it was something like that, anyway.”
Touton shook his head as the officer unlocked the door for him. Sometimes young cops could be just so damned stupid they took his breath away.
Downstairs, another cop was waiting to guide him up. The elevator, smooth with a comforting guttural purr, possessed an elegance the policemen rarely experienced. The walls were mahogany and the fittings a gleaming, polished brass.
“Detective Sloan upstairs?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the patrolman said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” He doubted that young cops were becoming more stupid year by year, but on this particular night he seemed to be running into the dullest minds in the department.
“He’s gone back and forth so often, it’s hard to keep track. Sir, I think he’s upstairs, but I could be wrong.”
“Back and forth between where and where?”
“Between here and the park, sir.”
Touton guessed the cop was probably intimidated by his rank and reputation, as well as by his tone, so offered nothing more than rudimentary responses.
“You mean across the street? What’s in the park?”
“The dead man, sir.”
“What dead man?”
“What’s your name, Officer?”
The lad took a deep breath and wondered what he’d done to deserve this. “Miron, sir.”
“Miron, why is there a dead man in the park?”
“I don’t know, sir. I mean, he was murdered, I know that, but I don’t know why, sir.”
The elevator had reached their floor and the two men clambered out, Touton first. “You’re telling me there’s been a murder in the park? Detective Sloan is covering both cases?” Actually, when he thought about it for a moment, given that every cop was being stretched beyond the breaking point on this night, that seemed reasonable.
“I think it’s the same case, sir.”
“What?”
“Just what I heard.”
“The burglary in here—”
“—and the murder in the park, sir. Same case.”
They’d reached the door to the league offices. “All right, Miron. I want you to stick around and take care of my shotgun. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t shoot your foot off.”
“I’ll take the shells out, sir, if that’s all right.”
“All right. Here’s the rest of the ammo. If the rioters come up in that elevator, you have my permission to reload and blast away.”
“Yes, sir,” the young man said.
Touton shook his head in dismay. Then he thought he’d better say something. “I’m kidding.”
“Oh,” Miron said. “Okay. I got you.”
Touton stepped over glass and tried not to touch the cracked door to the modest office. A crowbar was on the floor. The foyer was surprisingly small, with insufficient room to swing a cat—or a hockey player his stick. Players had to come here for their disciplinary hearings, and Rocket Richard would have been here only a day ago to plead his case. Touton stepped through to the corridor that led to the warren of adjoining offices, and Detective Sloan spotted him.
“What’s up?” Touton asked.
“This is big,” Sloan said.
“It better be,” the senior officer let him know, but he could see the excitement in Sloan’s eyes and caught it in his tone of voice.
“All right, from the top, there’s been a break-in.”
“How’d they get in? We’ve got guards on every door.”
“Through the windows,” Sloan told him. At forty-seven, he was considerably older than Touton, but having neither his war record nor his success as a cop, he had become junior to him in rank. His hair was thinning. His face was pinched, as if by adversity. His complexion was pale, as though he rarely experienced sunlight. No matter the time of night, he always had such a smooth jaw that Touton doubted he could properly grow a beard, although he could use one, as his chin was weak.
Touton pushed the tip of his hat back, its usual angle when he was indoors, especially if he was mulling something over. “Are you telling me they flew in here? Because I’m willing to partner you up with that dumb patrolman I met downstairs. Oh … let me guess. You’re the one spreading the rumour they swooped in by helicopter.”
“Give me a break, Armand. Come on. We don’t have everything yet, but it sure looks like they got up on the roof somehow, then lowered themselves down to this level by ropes. We know they broke in through the windows—that’s a fact. They committed a burglary, took what they wanted and left by the windows also, but this time a few floors down. Then they dropped themselves to the ground by ropes when our guys weren’t looking.”
“Our guys weren’t looking. Of course not. What else did they have to do tonight to keep themselves occupied … twiddle their thumbs?”
“Armand, they were guarding the doors. They weren’t looking up. Who would? They were watching the street. Coming down, the crooks concealed themselves behind the columns. It’s ingenious. They almost made a clean break.”
“Almost?”
“Let me show you this first.” He led Touton down a narrow corridor, through an office where cops were murmuring amongst themselves, then into a small antechamber that housed the vault. The heavy steel door sagged open and the wall had been blackened from a blast. Touton took a closer look.
“They blew it open?”
“Dynamite. That crude.”
“Who heard this? And don’t say ‘nobody.’”
He already knew what the man would answer. The building had been emptied for security reasons. The walls were as thick as fortress ramparts. In none of the rooms he had just walked through had there been any windows, and there were none in this one.
“Nobody,” Sloan said.
“What did they get?” Touton asked him.
Rather than answer straight away, Sloan took a deep breath.
“What?” Touton tried to imagine what the dilemma could be. “The Rocket’s stick? A Howie Morenz puck? The Stanley Cup? What?”
“The Cartier Dagger.”
“What’s that?”
“You should know,” Sloan told him. “Not me.”
“Why should I know?”
“Because you’re French. Campbell’s coming over. He can tell you more about it.”
“Clarence Campbell? The mob will kill him if he’s spotted.”
“I told him that. He wanted to come anyway. So I sent a patrol car.”
“That’s good.” Touton shook his head. “If it was me I’d’ve put a bag over his head.”
“If it was me I’d just shoot him,” Sloan said. “But that’s another story.”
“Good point. I hope you sent a couple of guys we can trust.”
Both men smiled. Sloan showed him the smashed glass display case in which an invaluable antique knife resided most days. The case was a couple of feet long, and, like the panelling in the elevator, made of a bright mahogany with polished brass trim. The broken glass was thick and scattered in pieces on the floor.
“Usually, during the day, the case is kept in Campbell’s office. On display. Even then, it’s locked, and secured to the desk it’s on, and the desk weighs a ton.”
Touton was thinking about something else as he took to examining the heavy door blown partially off its hinges. “Usually, there’d be people up here, right? If not in this office, on the floor. If not on the floor, then in the building. Night shift workers. Cleaners. Lawyers preparing a case. People working overtime on a big project. That sort of thing.”
“That’s right.”
“So if this is some sort of big-time heist—”
“Which it is.”
“—then the bad guys took advantage of the riot to break in …”
“I believe that,” Sloan agreed.
“… then how did they know there’d be a riot?”
“I believe that, too,” Sloan contested, one step ahead of him.
“You believe what?” Sloan was making no sense.
“Somebody might have started the riot in order to steal the Cartier Dagger.”
This was news. Touton had assumed that, in the coming weeks, numerous commentators would be taking a stab at explaining the riot. The frustration of hockey fans, the fury of the French who felt victimized yet again by the English, the social upheaval of a nation wrestling with its postwar restraints, the wrath of the poor—the rationale would be discussed and debated, yet no one was likely to suggest that the entire matter had been a ploy to blow the doors off a vault.
Recovering, Touton said, “Tell me about the knife.”
“An old relic owned by Sun Life. It’s worth millions. For once, ‘priceless’ is a word that fits. Originally, it belonged to Jacques Cartier himself—some Indian gave it to him. It’s on loan to Campbell for his work at Nuremberg, but just on loan, because, like I said, it’s worth millions—or more. He can keep it here as long as he’s NHL president.”
“What’s in it for him?”
“He gets to look at it whenever he wants, I guess. It’s a handsome knife.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen it.”
“When? Where?” Touton drilled him.
“Tonight. Across the street in the park. The dagger is stuck in the heart of a murder victim. Up to the hilt, right through the breastplate. It’s still there right now.”
Touton looked at Sloan. His own excitement was rising, and he wanted to suppress it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said slowly.
“Come across with me. See for yourself.”
“Lead the way.” Touton pulled his hat lower, indicating that he was headed outside, but also that he meant business.
Before they could manage the foray, Clarence Campbell got off the elevator. He was still in the company of the three women with whom he had attended the game, one of whom had received more than her share of tomato splatter. Apparently, the three were not about to leave his side anytime soon, nor would they consent to being left alone by themselves. They were spinsters, and he was a bachelor in need of their care in this, his darkest hour.
The hockey league president held his fedora at his left side, his right hand in his coat pocket. A relaxed posture. Only wisps of hair covered his pate, and his face sagged into his jowls. He had a stout middle. He did not seem to be the sort of man to be keeping the company of three women, but one was his sister and all three were rather dowdy in the style of their day, despite wearing half-veils that hung from their hats, and earrings and bright lipstick. Their coats bulged beneath their waists from the fabric of their dresses and crinolines.
Campbell paused—stopping so suddenly that one of the three women inadvertently stepped into him while she fiddled with her purse. The sight of a shotgun-toting cop at the entrance to his office had shocked him. He took a breath, apologized to the lady who had bumped into him, and carried on.
“Is that really necessary?” he asked the man in blue.
“I’m holding it for someone, that’s all,” Miron replied, somewhat bashfully as he tipped his cap to the ladies present. “It’s not loaded, sir. I’m not planning to shoot anybody with it.”
“That’s heartening, Officer.” He stepped past the policeman and entered the crime scene just as Detective Sloan and Captain Touton emerged.
“Did you have to suspend him for the playoffs?” Sloan asked without thinking. “I mean, he’s the Rocket, for crying out loud.”
“Sloan,” Touton said, and the cop shut up. Then he said, “Mr. Campbell.”
“It’s good to see they have Montreal’s finest detective on the case, Captain Touton. The dagger is infinitely valuable. It goes beyond the probable millions it’s worth. An historic relic.”
“We’ve found the knife, sir,” Touton revealed.
“You have! Oh. That’s good news. What a relief. Where?”
“It’s across the street. In the park.”
“The crooks went to all this trouble just to toss it away in the park?”
“We’re still sorting it out. Do you know why anybody would do that?”
Campbell shifted his hat from one hand to the other as he shook his head. “Beats me. People steal things. That happens. But who steals something of value, then throws it away? I’m stumped.”
Touton nodded. “We’ll have to confiscate the knife for a time, sir. Material evidence.”
Campbell did not offer immediate compliance, and instead squared his shoulders. “I’d feel much more comfortable if I received the dagger back tonight, Captain.”
“That’s not possible, sir. Anyway, your vault’s been blown open. You can’t keep it safe.”
“I see. May I have a look inside? At the damage?”
Usually, Touton would keep civilians out, but this man was the president of the NHL and had been a war crimes prosecutor. In that latter sense, they had both fought the Germans, and had both worked on the right side of the law. “Go ahead, sir, only, please, don’t touch anything. I know it’s your office, but wait until the boys are done. They’re dusting for prints right now.”
“Thank you, Captain. Your fast work on the dagger is appreciated.”
“Lady Luck got us the knife back. Our investigation is only getting started. Now, sir, another matter, when you’re ready to leave—”
“Sir?”
“I’ll accept your escort, if that’s what you’re offering.” He smiled. “I have the safety of my ladies to consider. I won’t be walking around the streets of Montreal anytime soon. If I do, as we both know, I won’t get far.”
As though he’d been on slow simmer, Sloan barged in again. “Five games, for instance. That would’ve been a reasonable suspension—pretty severe. Five games would’ve taught the Rocket a lesson. I could live with that. But the playoffs—”
“Sloan,” Touton said quietly.
“If you went to a tavern to break up a fight, Detective,” Campbell argued back, “and you arrested a fellow who’d taken a baseball bat and smashed it three times across another man’s back, and you’d had to deal with his violence before, what sentence would you expect him to get? Jail time, or a tap on the left wrist?”
“That’s different,” Sloan complained. “This is hockey, not a public tavern.”
“If the Rocket had missed and hit the guy’s head, he’d have killed him. Or maybe he did miss … maybe he was hoping to hit the guy’s head. What sentence would he get for murdering a man on the ice? Or would you recommend that he be let off for that, too, that we just call it hockey?”
“That’s different.”
“Sloan,” Touton hissed.
“Why is it different?” Campbell pressed on. “If people go to a hockey game, or sit in a tavern, they don’t expect to see one man try to hack another man to bits.”
“It’s the Stanley Cup!”
“Sloan, out the door and shut up!” Touton burst out, rather more loudly than he had intended. The detective looked at his superior, then broke off and angrily strode back to the corridor. Touton was stepping around the women to join him when he turned to face Clarence Campbell. “Sorry about that. Like everybody else—”
“No problem, Captain. I understand it’s not a popular decision.”
“It’s your job, I suppose,” Touton sympathized. Then he shook his head, and added, “But I don’t know … the playoffs,” as he went out the door.
In the corridor, Touton shot Sloan a glance, but chose to speak to Miron first. “Come with us. Bring the shotgun.”
Sloan said, “What? Is the shotgun for me? Look, Armand, sorry about that in there. It just rots my socks, you know?”
“If you were investigating a murder scene, and you knew who the murder weapon belonged to, who would you suspect for the crime?”
Being older, Sloan was not usually put in the position of being tested, and he felt momentarily flummoxed. He particularly did not enjoy being dressed down in front of a uniform. “The guy whose weapon it was, of course, but—”
“So what’s different about this case?”
Sloan was still confused, even as he pushed the call button for the elevator.
“No, wait, you don’t think—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Clarence Campbell … he’s—”
“What? A Nuremberg prosecutor? A big-shot? League president? Therefore beyond suspicion? Okay. That’s fine. But it’s still his knife in the heart of the victim.”
“My God,” Sloan whispered as the elevator doors opened and the three men stepped in. “You don’t think—”
“I don’t, actually. I think his alibi is airtight. He’s been busy. Fourteen thousand people were trying to kick his butt. They were joined by another fifty thousand. I don’t see him getting here fast enough, although it would have been possible. I also don’t see him breaking through upper-storey windows or climbing down to the street by rope. That’s pretty funny, actually, when you think about it. On the other hand, he is under attack. Who knows how nimble that makes him? But my point has nothing to do with Clarence Campbell being a suspect or not.”
“What’s your point?”
“Your head’s not in the game. We have a pretty daring robbery here, don’t you think? Well planned, well executed, from what I’ve seen so far. All this to acquire a weapon that was then used to kill a man. Wake up, for God’s sake. You can’t be going off half-cocked about some dumb-assed suspension.”
Contrite, Sloan put his hands in his pants pockets and hung his head most of the way down. As they reached the main floor, he asked, “So you agree?”
“About what?”
“It was a dumb-assed suspension.”
“Totally.” Touton smiled as they headed outside. “Officer Miron.”
“Yes, sir?”
“If Detective Sloan brings up the Richard suspension again, or even mentions the name Rocket Richard—”
“Yes, sir?”
“Load two shells into the shotgun, peel his overcoat off his back and shoot it full of holes.”
“Ah, shoot his back, sir, or his coat?”
“His coat, for crying out loud. I’m not asking you to commit murder.”
“Yes, sir,” Miron agreed.
They were on their way down the outside stairs when Sloan thought to say, “Miron?”
“Yes, sir?” the young cop asked.
“You know he’s kidding, right?”
“It doesn’t matter,” the officer in uniform deadpanned. “Whether he’s kidding or not, I’ll do it anyway.”
Touton laughed under his breath as Sloan gave the young cop a second glance. He might have to alter his initial opinion on the young man in uniform.
With the street blocked off due to the riot, they didn’t have to look for traffic as they stepped off the curb and crossed to the park and a crowd of cops. Dominion Square occupied a short city block, a park with the usual complement of trees, open spaces and benches to provide a measure of rest amid the haste of the city. Grass showed through here and there, but snow had been ploughed into piles to keep the walkways clear, and these drifts, hard packed and dirty, would be the last to melt.
The Sun Life was a building associated particularly with the English, and to a degree the park possessed an English motif as well. The Frenchman Laurier, who had been one of the fledgling country’s early prime ministers, had a statue here, but another monument paid homage to the fallen heroes of the South African War, which held no interest at all among the French—and not much among the English, either, as it harked back to British colonial rule. The poet chosen to be honoured was Robbie Burns, a Scot who had never set foot in the country. On the steps below the Burns statue, the poet’s back to him, lay the sprawled, inert body of the murdered victim.
Cops had driven onto the walkways, and the area was lit by the headlights of their cars. Touton was quickly able to spot the coroner, Claude Racine. A small, wiry man, around fifty-five, with a salt-and-pepper moustache and greying temples, he was wearing a Montreal Canadiens jacket with Richard’s famous number 9 across the biceps, perhaps a deliberate ploy to manage his way through the crowds on this night. His trip to the crime scene had been slower than usual, given the ruckus in the streets.
“Claude,” Touton said, both to acknowledge the man’s presence and to announce his own.
“Armand.”
“What do we have here?”
“Go look for yourself. It’s not a pretty sight.”
Touton was about to do so when the coroner thought twice, put a hand to his chest and stopped him. “Wait.” He addressed Sloan. “Does he know yet?”
“Know what?” Sloan asked him back.
“Do you even know?”
Sloan was befuddled. “What am I supposed to know?”
“What is it, Claude?” Touton asked him gently, for something told him that matters in this place might be serious. All he could see from his current vantage point was the dead man’s boots.
“Prepare yourself, Armand. You’re not going to like it. He’s not your best friend or nothing like that, but you know the victim.”
Touton stepped around the coroner and moved cops aside to get a proper view of the corpse. He knelt down beside the dead man, and tipped his fedora back from his brow, his sadness palpable to all who could see his face. The coroner crouched next to him. The dead man was square-shouldered and square-jawed, with a boxer’s big chest and a drinker’s swollen paunch.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Roger Clément,” Touton acknowledged. “How do you know him?”
“Coincidence. We’ve been witnesses at the same trials a couple of times.”
“He wasn’t the accused?”
“A defence witness. Paid to lie. But I’m right? You’ve been friends?”
“Acquaintances. More or less. I’ve busted him a few times. We respected each other—that’s probably fair to say. He could punch, this guy. A strong man, but I never knew him to really hurt anybody. Even though he was hired to do so, from time to time.” Touton glanced over his shoulder at Sloan, standing behind him. “Do you know him?”
“No, sir. He has a record?”
Touton stood up. “He was still a decent guy. Shit. I’ll have to tell his family.”
“We could send someone,” Sloan suggested. “He’s only a hood, right?”
Touton was looking up at the highest level of the columns on the Sun Life.
“He was never only a hood. I just told you, he was a decent guy. It wouldn’t take much for me to have been him, or for him to have been me. We have the same physique, similar background. He’s a family man. To his family he was never a hood. He was a father, a husband. Make sure nobody gets to his house before me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He was also an ex-hockey player. He played for Chicago, and somebody else. New York, I think.”
They waited for him to lower his gaze, and when he didn’t, the other cops around him and the coroner also looked up at the Sun Life.
“He could have done it,” Touton stated. “He had the balls. The strength. He could have broken in and slid down by rope. But he never could have planned all that. Not Roger. He’s not that kind of thief. He would’ve been hired to carry it out.”
“Then he gets back down here and somebody kills him with what he stole,” Sloan pointed out. “Makes no sense, no matter how you cut it.”
“Unless somebody else stole the knife and he crossed paths with the thief in the dark. Still doesn’t make sense, though. To go to all that trouble to steal a million-dollar dagger, then to lose it in a guy’s heart.”
The coroner returned to the corpse and, with his gloved hands, tried to extract the knife from the body. The weapon did not slide free easily. He had to remove instruments from his bag and use them to slowly extract the weapon, working it loose with difficulty. Finally, the dagger slid up into his hands.
“I wish I could reward you with the crown of England, for pulling Excalibur from stone, Claude.”
“I’ll settle for a good night’s sleep. And a chance to hold this in my hands.”
“Interesting, though. Whoever implanted it might have had the same trouble getting it out. Then he might’ve had to take off before he succeeded.”
“That’s possible. Look at this thing.”
The handle was made of bear bone, the blade of stone. The cutting edge was serrated, not naturally, but had lost its edge over time and was quite jagged. The very tip of the knife had snapped off, Touton noticed.
“Look, the leading edge, the change of colour. I bet that piece is still in him.”
“I’ll be looking for it,” the coroner assured him. “Do you see the jagged edge? That’s what made it difficult to extract. It caught on the breastplate, a rib. The blade isn’t steel, after all. It’s soft. It’s only stone.”
The bone handle was partially wrapped with hide—very old, so that it was conceivable to think it was original. A remarkable aspect to the knife were the gold and diamonds embedded in the handle. They were not finely cut, but rough-hewn in a primitive fashion. The weapon was now centuries old.
“You’ll take care of this?” Touton asked him. “Don’t leave it lying around.”
The coroner nodded. “There’s a safe I can use, back at the office.”
“Probably it’s more secure with you than at the police station.”
“Definitely, I’d say.”
Touton grunted.
“All right, I’m going to bag the body now, Armand. Need anything else?”
He moved his chin slightly. “I could use that good night’s sleep you were talking about, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
In the distance, the wail of sirens and the roar of the mob still sounded. Closer to them, fire smoke drifted by and mingled with the exhaust fumes of their cars.
“This could go on for days,” the coroner concurred.
“The Rocket should talk,” Miron suggested.
“What?” Sloan asked him.
“The Rocket, he should get on the radio. Tell the people to calm down.”
“The Rocket! On the radio!” Sloan challenged him. “To save Campbell’s ass?”
“He should get on the radio,” Touton butted in, lending authority to the suggestion, “to save the city.”
The men nodded, understanding the gravity of the situation, when Miron disrupted their mood. “He mentioned the Rocket, sir. Do I get to shoot his coat?”
“You little shit!” Sloan burst out.
Touton glanced at the young cop. “Now you know you goaded him, Miron. That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But keep your ears open. You may get to shoot his coat yet.”
Sloan glowered at the young guy, then said, “Speaking of the radio, Captain, he has one on him. In his pocket. One of those fancy new transistors. The Regency TR-1.”
“Sophisticated. Imagine that, eh? A radio you don’t plug in. Damn thing costs fifty bucks, but I might buy one. Anything else?”
“A flashlight and a penknife, also in his coat pockets. A bit of putty. We picked up a woman’s kerchief that was lying beside him so it wouldn’t blow away. We can’t say if it belonged to him or just blew in.”
Touton shook his head, then nodded back at the Sun Life. “Look at that building. I don’t know what Fort Knox looks like, but it must be similar. Are you telling me he broke into that building with a transistor radio and a penknife?”
Sloan shrugged a little. “He also must have had several long stretches of rope and a few sticks of dynamite.”
“Dynamite, a kerchief and putty.” Touton blew out a gust of air.
The coroner bagged the knife and placed it in the glove box of his van, which he locked, then he locked the van. He came back for the body, which his assistants had bagged, and, while Touton questioned other cops on the scene, he loaded the corpse onto a gurney. The captain wanted to hear what the other cops had learned or guessed, if anything, and to know if any witnesses had stepped forward. This was a public park, one that was used at night, although, admittedly, the night had been exceptional. The cops confirmed what he’d expected: that the usual thrum of people had been drawn into the cacophony of the riot, and so far only one witness had turned up. That man had spotted a group of adult males, at least two of whom looked old, huddled over the victim. Suspiciously, aggressively, he said. He’d dashed away to call a cop. When the officer went to investigate, the men ran.
“The cop didn’t chase them?” Touton asked.
“He did, he says, but they vanished into the mob scene.”
Feeling glum, Touton went over to the coroner’s van and shut the driver’s-side door on him, giving it a slap as the vehicle departed. The coroner drove across the grass and snow, onto the sidewalk, then slowly dropped the van off the curb onto the street and headed south.
The captain of the Night Patrol turned back to the crime scene.
This one was perplexing. He knew that his men were seeing what they were meant to see. The acrobatic robbery, followed by a bold murder with a valuable, stolen weapon. But an aspect that had made the robbery work was the early preventative evacuation of the building due to the riot. Sloan had already made that connection. And another question—why would a thief lie dead, with the stolen prize lodged in his chest? That one was the real puzzle to anyone looking at this.
“Sir! Sir!” Miron called excitedly. Then, suddenly, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out two shells.
“What? Did Sloan mention Richard?”
Miron stooped to retrieve a shell that had fallen in the snow, and nodded in the direction the van travelled. Touton shot a glance that way. The coroner’s van had been cut off by a car at the intersection with Dorchester Boulevard. Both its front doors were flung open.
“Get down there! Go! Run!”
Touton ran, too, but the younger, lighter man who was free of war wounds dashed ahead of him. Spotting them on the move, Sloan and other cops came running. Touton could see a confrontation around the cars, a tussle, then heard a gunshot. Men leaped into a large, black Cadillac, and the car burned rubber, its tires squealing as the car vaulted away before its doors were closed. Still running, Touton caught sight of a coroner’s assistant bent over a body in front of the van, and he yelled at Miron, “Shoot! Fire that thing!”
The young man still had to load the shells. He stopped running to do so, then aimed and pressed both triggers. The right rear tail light popped and went dark, but the fleeing black Caddy continued off into the night.
The echo of the shotgun blast bounced off the Sun Life Building and, across the street, off Mary Queen of the World Cathedral. Touton raced towards the van. His longtime associate, the coroner, lay dead on the pavement. His head to one side, a bullet hole in his temple. Blood streamed down the back of his neck. An assistant held his hand and panted heavily, in shock. Another sat shivering in the front seat. Touton leapt to the second man. “What happened?”
Dazed, the man whispered, “The knife.” The glove box lay open. “I had to give it up. He’s dead?”
Sloan came running up.
“After them!” Touton shouted out. “Get cars! They’re in a black Caddy! Put it out on the radio!”
“Armand, there’s no one available.”
Touton looked at him and realized that what he said was true. Every cop on duty was fully engaged on this night. He spoke more calmly. “Get a couple of cars. Get after him. Put it on the air. Do whatever you can do. They killed Claude.”
Now the cops who had run up were sprinting back to their vehicles. Miron stayed behind and stood beside the captain over the dead man.
“I’ve got another family to talk to now,” Touton said. “What the hell is going on here?”
Miron was hoping he was not expected to answer. His body trembled. He was breathing deeply, his heart thumping in his chest. He had never fired a weapon in action before and was sorry that he had missed. He knew that a shotgun had to be aimed well in front of a moving target, but in the heat of the moment, with the Caddy accelerating, he failed. He stood beside the famous captain, beating himself up, having blown his first big opportunity to impress a superior.
Touton touched his elbow. “In a war, lots of guys, probably three-quarters, never discharge their weapon in battle. Too chickenshit. You did all right, kid. You hit the car. Took out the tail light. Good. That’ll help us trace it.”
At that moment, an ambulance under full siren raced down Dorchester, carrying wounded from the riot’s front lines. Touton watched it go, and wondered again what the hell was going on. His city was in chaos.
He wondered if, by morning, or in a day or two, it might not lie in ruins.