CHAPTER 11

1955

AN ESPECIALLY TRYING DAY, THANKS TO AN ILL-TIMED confluence of professional and domestic upsets, had failed to guide Detective Gaston Fleury towards much-needed restful slumber. August’s sweltering temperatures and close humidity didn’t help. Collapsed on his bed, under the warm breeze of a creaky fan, he lay there, helpless, tossing, contorted. Sweat slickened his skin.

Somehow, his wife was managing to ignore the heat. While she was lost to the world beside him, Fleury had been out of bed three times to attend to his son, Guy. The boy’s tonsils had been extracted and, home from the hospital just that afternoon, he was playing upon parental sympathy. As the clock slipped past 3 A.M., the policeman acknowledged that he would not be sleeping anytime soon. He’d be going to work in a surly mood, again, coaxed upright by caffeine. He propped himself higher on the pillows, partially sitting, to await morning and another day of blistering sun. In deference to the heat wave, he lay in the nude, on top of the sheets, his legs apart, even his fingers splayed to catch every possible particle of cooler air.

“The humidity,” Montrealers were found of saying. “It’s the humidity.” Only later would he recall that he had heard a few telltale nocturnal sounds. A car’s motor idling. A door being opened, then slammed. Footsteps hurrying along the sidewalk in one direction, then hurrying back. Tire squeals. In the city, such noises were irritating but commonplace, and had registered neither alarm nor curiosity in the tetchy detective from Policy.

The bomb blast, though, shot him out of bed.

He fell back as quickly, disoriented and stunned. Fleury was sliding off the damp sheets as the walls continued to convulse and the windows rattled. He braced himself to keep from catapulting onto the floor, and his wife glommed onto his wrist, awakening in a panic.

From his room, his son’s wail flared up.

He didn’t bother with clothes as he fled to the balcony to see what on earth had occurred. Wide open to the air, the door had admitted the full concussive blast. That noise. The impact. Had an apartment blown up? A gas leak?

Parked on the sidewalk two doors down, a vehicle had had its windows blown out, and its interior was now engulfed in flames. As bombs go, this had probably been a small one, although he’d never experienced a blast before. Glass littered the street and sidewalk, reflecting firelight, and he heard the fission of the blaze and worried that the gas tank would be next. He shouted to an old lady on her balcony fifteen feet from the car, “Go back! The gas tank!” She retreated instantly, either heeding his warning or propelled by the sight of a nude, skinny man madly exhorting her to flee. Fleury returned inside to put on clothes, then stopped, rushing back out again. He was looking at the car afire while a different neighbour on the next balcony stubbornly glared at his naked form.

A thought, bursting from the back of his mind, proved true—the burning car belonged to him. That was his Chevrolet! Lillian, his wife, having the presence of mind to first throw on a robe, joined him outside.

“It’s our car,” he said, still shocked. “They blew it up.”

“Who’s they?” she asked, stunned also. He seemed to know. “Why?”

Their son was calling for his dad. Both parents reacted and returned indoors, but Fleury headed straight for the phone. He put a call through to Armand Touton, captain of the Night Patrol.

“They blew up my car!” he shouted the moment the man answered.

Behind him, sheltering her son’s head against her thigh, his wife demanded again, angrily this time, “Who’s ‘they’?”

“Who’s this?” asked the brusque voice at the other end of the line.

“Captain Touton! It’s me! Gaston!”

Perhaps his excited expression had made his voice unrecognizable.

“Gaston who?” Touton asked.

“Fleury! Gaston Fleury! From Policy! Captain, it’s me!”

“Somebody blew up your car?” Touton asked.

“My Bel Air! It’s on fire! I need the fire department! Send the Night Patrol!”

Touton took charge then, jotting down the particulars and telling him to settle down and stay away from the windows.

“Why?” Fleury inquired.

“In case someone’s trying to kill you.”

Fleury dropped the phone and ran out to the balcony to usher his wife and child inside, for they’d wandered out to survey the commotion. He closed the door and heaved the drapes across it and the windows. Then he returned to the phone and heard Touton calling his name.

“I’m back,” he said. “I’m here.”

“Don’t do that to me again,” Touton told him, irritated that he had suddenly vanished from the line. “Now stay put and stay calm. I’ll be right over.”

Fleury felt the concussive surge of a second blast.

“What was that?” Touton demanded.

“The gas tank?” Fleury suggested.

Upon arriving at the scene, Touton confessed to being perplexed. This sort of thing did not happen. He knew of no organization or criminal who specialized in making bombs. Cops rarely were targeted for serious intimidation or violence.

Everyone knew why.

When cops were challenged in the heat of the moment—fired upon during a bank holdup, or shot at attempting to arrest a fugitive—the department reacted with deadly force. Anyone committing violence against an officer would be tracked down by every other cop, and, if he didn’t surrender upon first warning, shot dead.

Everyone understood the rules.

A cop posed for photographers over a slain suspect, a pool of blood seeping into a gutter. “Around here,” he said, “we don’t tolerate no monkey business.”

The comment made Captain Armand Touton wince. If cops tolerated anything, it was monkey business. The comment implied that minor as well as serious infractions would be answered by bullets. Such was the culture of the times. In Montreal, cops aided and abetted the crime syndicates, but when it came to dealing with freelance hoodlums, they meted out their own justice, and the tough guys knew it and accepted it as the code of the streets.

In this environment, that a cop had had his car blown apart established a precedent.

A chilling event.

“What’ve you been up to?” Touton asked the officer from Policy.

“Nothing!” Fleury objected. He assumed that the captain was questioning his integrity, asking if he’d played a few poker hands with the bad guys and lost. “Just … you know.”

“What do I know?”

“I’ve been investigating government cars.”

Touton grunted. “I thought you’d given that up months ago.”

“I don’t quit,” Fleury proclaimed.

The captain considered this. “Maybe you’re closer to something than you realize. We’ll track what you’ve been doing. Maybe your investigation’s made somebody nervous. Federal or provincial?”

“Both. And private—on the side.”

“Figures,” Touton grunted. “Why make it easy on ourselves? How’s your family doing?”

Fleury took a deep breath. “Lillian started out okay. Now she’s getting scared. My son started out scared, but now he’s just cranky.”

The captain nodded. “See to them. We’ll let the so-called experts go to work, but don’t expect much. Nobody knows nothing about bombers. This is something new. Something new is always difficult to trace.”

Fleury’s wife appeared on the front stoop. “Captain? Telephone.”

He took the call inside and a moment later was striding quickly out of the apartment, taking the stairs in awkward bounds.

“What’s wrong?” Fleury called to him from his balcony.

“They went after my house, too!”

“Who did?” Fleury’s wife wanted to know as Touton’s car raced off.

Cruisers had made it to Armand Touton’s flat ahead of him, and his heart beat high in his throat as he charged up the stairs. His wife was in the kitchen, dressed in a robe, surrounded by perspiring uniformed officers.

“Marie-Céleste!” Smiling up at him, she made a motion Touton misinterpreted. He thought she was going to faint, when in fact she was seeking his kiss. “My God! Easy! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Armand. A little shaken.”

“Is she all right?” he demanded to know of the officers.

They all answered at once, saying that his wife was unhurt. Finally, Marie-Céleste cupped his cheek to command his attention and told him, “Armand. I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Nobody’s been hurt. There’s no damage.”

Getting that one point straight, he was finally able to ask, “What happened?”

Vandals had smeared black paint across the front door to the triplex that contained his flat, then they’d pounded on the door and rung the bell until Marie-Céleste had awakened. The culprits ran off the moment she’d turned on the lights. She had called the police—Armand, at first, but he hadn’t been in. The first cops arriving on the scene were the ones to discover the artwork.

“Did they write any words? Any threats?” He was hoping that the act had been random—a bunch of kids, impatient for Halloween. He was hoping that the vandalism was unrelated to Fleury’s burnt-out Chevy.

“Sir, not really,” the senior of the uniforms in the kitchen said, “but there is something I want to show you.”

Touton followed him outside. Streetlights illuminated the white steel door well enough, but an officer passed the detective a flashlight. Not a great deal of time or imagination had been deployed to create the mess. Black paint only, arbitrarily slapped on with a three-inch brush. Nothing could be discerned from the design except to assume that there was no design.

“Look here,” the officer said. In his distracted state of mind, Touton couldn’t put his finger on what was unusual about the man. He was grey-haired, yet not old. Around forty, in decent physical shape. Touton’s initial impression told him he was probably a father and an honourable guy. As the man pointed to a spot on the door, he noticed the man’s wedding band, perhaps because he didn’t know what else he was meant to be observing. Then he noticed the spot being indicated. Small enough to be barely discernible, probably etched by a stick dipped in paint—a swastika.

Not for another moment would Touton think the act had been happenstance. This was indeed an attack directed upon his home.

“Thanks,” he murmured to the cop.

“Sure thing.”

Touton comprehended at that moment the odd aspect to the cop that he had missed: he was English. Among older cops, he knew a few detectives who were English, but he didn’t know any English cops who made a career on the beat.

He went back inside, and this time wrapped his wife in his arms and held her tightly. He dismissed the other officers from inside the premises and ordered two cars to patrol the neighbourhood to see what, if anything, moved. Touton assigned the senior English patrolman to guard his home until the end of his shift and commanded other officers to report back to their duty sergeant.

“You’re going back to work?” Marie-Céleste asked him once they were alone. She thought that he might make an exception on this one night.

He told her about Detective Fleury. “We got off lucky.”

“You were at work. Your car wasn’t here. That’s why we were luckier.”

“I have to stay on top of things. The homes of cops are being attacked. We can’t have that.”

“For sure. Go, Armand. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She was trying to be agreeable, but her lack of enthusiasm for his departure remained apparent.

“I’ll tuck you in,” he said. “Stay awhile. Until you sleep.”

“In this heat? After all this? I won’t be sleeping. I certainly don’t need tucking in. I’ll be lying on top of the sheets.”

Despite her protest, he saw her to bed, and kissed her good night before returning to work. The kiss was lovely. He wanted to stay.

In a drearier part of town, where hookers knelt to do their business in alleys next to pissing drunks, Detective Andrew Sloan was having to deal with a grisly mess. A murder victim had not died easily, having put up a fight. Judging by the bloodied Louisville Slugger left behind at the scene, a baseball bat had been the principal murder weapon, although punctures along the spine and through the man’s hand suggested that a thin spike had also been deployed—probably an ice pick. Electrical refrigeration was rapidly becoming universal, yet ice was still used in thousands of homes. The ice pick remained a common household utensil on the tougher streets.

“Know him well?” Sloan asked the beat cop, Lajolie, a surly character with a dark reputation. He usually came in from his shifts with his knuckles bloodied. He liked it that way, relished getting physical with garbage scroungers and young toughs. He wasn’t into talking to the riffraff much, preferring instead to shove guys into a wall to get them moving. Nobody suggested that he wasn’t a ballsy scraper, somebody to have on your side if negotiations got feisty. But some bad talk went on around him, that he preferred to work the Main because he made the whores pay a toll in kind. Others suggested that he seemed to spend more money than the average beat cop earned. So far, the department had let it go.

Lajolie shrugged. He didn’t like this detective. Sloan worked on the Night Patrol, and those guys were serious about cleaning up the city. A wacko squad. The way Lajolie looked at it, a dirty city was good for business. Besides, nobody trusted Armand Touton, the head of that bunch. He was a reformer, and reformers were suspected of selling their own kin down the St. Lawrence River.

The joke that went around the locker room suggested that the reformers even sold out their own, but at a discount.

“Don’t know him?” Sloan persisted. He couldn’t accept that Lajolie wasn’t on a first-name basis with everyone down here.

“I know him a bit. Used to be a doorman at the Copa. Doorman—call it what you want. Different name, same shit. He’s a leg-breaker. He’s got a record, but something’s odd in his story. In some strange way, it’s like he’s connected to the Church. Some people called him ‘The Bishop.’ He hasn’t caused any trouble in a while that we know about, but he hangs out with the same guys we spot around polling booths at election time. If he was voting, he wasn’t doing it only once.”

“He’s got a name?”

“Michel Vimont.”

“Seen him around lately?” Sloan asked.

“Not so much. One time. Outside some club. Leaning on a car. Some limo. I told him not to scratch the paint. He laughed. Said it was his new profession.”

“What profession?”

“Driver. Chauffeur. Different name, same job, you know what I mean?”

This time, Sloan wasn’t sure. “What do you mean?”

“Once a thug, always a thug. ‘Chauffeur,’ it’s another word for bodyguard … an arm-breaker.”

Sloan got it. “Who for?”

Lajolie shook his head. “Never waited around for the fat-ass to come out. Assholes who can’t drive their own cars, they’re all the same to me.”

“The limo … was it black?”

Lajolie thought the question was stupid. What did it matter? “Yeah. Black. Think so. Probably black. Just don’t bet the pay-cheque on that, okay?”

Sloan nudged his fedora higher on his head. “Okay,” he said. “Ask around. Work your contacts on the street. I’d like to know who his boss was. Keep on it until you find out.”

“You bet.”

The alley was a good place for muggings and murder. Garbage cans rattled around at night, fed by the greasy-spoon restaurants or knocked over by drunks. Roughhouse noise rarely alerted anyone. He’d canvass the neighbourhood, but finding a witness did not look promising. As well, the incident had occurred around closing time—the blood on the pavement hadn’t fully coagulated—so the street had been noisy, the pedestrians drunk—a good time for a bloody brawl to the death.

Sloan walked over to a second uniform—Lajolie’s partner for the night, a rookie by the name of Leduc who was filling in for the regular guy on his summer vacation. Just that short walk was messy, the slime of rotten vegetables underfoot and the stink of piss and vomit and cat spray. Old newsprint was stuck to the pavement, pressed down under organic compost that may have included human excrement as well as dog feces.

“Who the hell found the body way back here?”

“Blow-job Granny. We let her go.”

“Who?”

“She blows old guys for draft beer. Lajolie told me that anyway. She’s old. Seventy, maybe. Looks a hundred and two. Her johns must be totally smashed.”

“So she took some guy back here?”

“That’s the story. She had no reason to lie.”

“You let her go before she talked to a detective?”

“Lajolie says she won’t go far. She never does. She’s real loony, Detective. And a little disgusting. We didn’t exactly want her around.”

“What about the guy she was with?”

“Lost his cookies and beat it. Lajolie paid Granny a buck for giving us a call.”

“Okay. Is there a telephone around some place?”

Over the phone, Sloan was informed that his boss wasn’t available, that he’d gone off on a pursuit of his own. He then asked to have the victim’s record run down. “Michel Vimont, that’s the name.” He also wanted to know who the coroner was going to be, which was not usually his business, and when he wasn’t satisfied with the answer he requested a replacement.

“A fight on the Main got out of hand—what’s the big deal?” the dispatcher asked him.

Probably it was no big deal, he replied, but he had a hunch. He wanted a more experienced coroner. Sloan got his wish. He then asked to have a message delivered to Touton’s desk, a question: “Interested in a dead chauffeur?”

“That’s all it says?” the dispatcher asked, his curiosity piqued.

“Just say that. I’m going to see the body gets into the morgue truck, then beat it home. I’m bushed. Put the stiff’s rap sheet on my desk.”

Sometimes it took awhile to sweep a body off a street. The morgue guys were never too swift in the middle of the night. They usually stopped for a drink along the way. A coroner had to be fetched out of bed, and that could require more than one call to make sure he’d stayed awake. Then he might drop himself off at a strip club first, to acquire a taste for the evening air and to make the outing more worth his while. Dawn had arisen before Sloan finally departed the scene, and the soft light of morning had not improved the alley’s disposition. If anything, the space seemed to stink more once the detritus of city waste had become fully visible.

Light of day sprinkled gasoline on the fire of Armand Touton’s rage. By the time the Night Patrol convened the following evening, his emotions were in an uproar. His commentary to his fellow officers lacked his usual insouciance.

“If these motherfucks think they can … Mother of God, they better shit in their own soup … maudit càlice … we’re going to vomit down their throats and tape their mouths shut … make them blow puke out their nostrils, these fucks!”

He’d had a few drinks, which didn’t help, but a day of dwelling on the audacity of punks slathering paint on his stoop and awakening his wife from her slumber, not to mention blowing up Fleury’s Chevy, had him in a lather.

“Dynamite, that’s the word. Three sticks—three too many! I want to know where those sticks came from. Lean on every shit-eating dung hole in this town. I want to know where those sticks came from, who bought them off who for how much, and I want to know exactly how much change the motherfuck got back! I want to know every fucking detail about that transaction. This city is not going to rest until it comes across with that information. You got that? Does everybody in this room understand what we’re doing tonight?”

No one did. None of them had shaken down a city looking for information about dynamite, but no one would confess to their ignorance either, not with their leader in that mood.

“They made a mistake, the shit-eating skunks,” Touton confided in a quieter, intense voice. “Two mistakes, if you want to know the truth. They painted a swastika on my door, and that tells me they think they can hold my military career in disrepute. Do you understand what I’m saying? If they think they can fuck with me, they’ll shit their pants before I’m done with them! Second, they blew up Gaston Fleury’s Chevrolet. His fucking Bel Air. Know why that’s a mistake? Because it pins the two events together. It lets me know that they believe they can shit on my porch. They can’t shit on my porch! They can’t mess with my officers! Not with any one of you! They want to scare our wives? I’ll scare the dicks right off their balls! They want to mess with a policeman’s property? They’ll wish they were sleeping on a cot in Siberia before we’re done. You got me?” He scanned the roomful of still, scarcely breathing officers, daring any one of them to twitch. Then he spoke in a deep, growly voice. “Who sells dynamite in this town? Find that out for me. Who steals it? Who offers it up for sale? Who buys it? Pull out fingernails if you have to, but find that out.” After scowling over his crew, he finished by asking, “Any questions?”

Everyone had questions, but no one dared voice them, the exception being Detective Andrew Sloan, who raised his hand slowly.

“What?” Touton snarled at him.

The others in the room held their breath. They hadn’t wanted any questions. They wanted to get on the job, not because they were particularly enthusiastic about getting started, but because they wanted out from under the furious eyes of their leader. They immediately wished that Sloan had not raised his hand, and when he spoke off topic, the room, as one, wanted to shoot him.

“I had a murder last night,” he stated.

Touton glowered at him. “Deal with it. We got more important shit to scoop right now.”

“You didn’t get my message? This could be important in other ways.”

“Deal with it, I said! Don’t bother me with your little problems off the street!”

Sloan was surprisingly petulant. “Nobody got hurt,” he murmured.

“What?” Touton fired back at him. “What did you say?”

“I’ve got a chauffeur shot dead in an alley. You’ve got paint on your doorknob. I say my case is more important.”

Both men could feel the entire room silently groaning. Historically, Sloan was the one man willing to stand up to Armand Touton anytime the captain got wild. Touton had noticed the trait himself, and for that reason alone he valued his colleague, even though he made life difficult for him from time to time.

“Investigate,” Touton hammered back at him. “Report. Don’t bother me. You got that? Is that too much to ask? If it’s too much to ask, I can have you transferred to bicycle theft. I’m sure they could use your expertise.”

Warily, a few detectives chuckled. When Touton wanted to ridicule a member of his squad, he always used the same threat, which apparently he found amusing. They felt the need to laugh along.

“Some detective pissed somebody off,” Sloan objected, “so they blew up his car when he wasn’t in it. They knew he wasn’t in it. The car was empty, sitting by the curb in the middle of the night. It’s a big deal—I agree with you on that, it is a really big deal, but I’m just saying—”

“I don’t really care what you’re just saying—”

“No kidding. I think that’s my point.”

“Sloan.”

“What?” the detective asked.

“My office,” the captain replied. “Now.”

“Fine.”

That’s what he wanted anyway. A chance to have it out with Touton, and if that meant going toe to toe in private, so be it. Sloan followed about ten strides behind his boss as the captain departed the room and headed down the hall. The others in the room, finally free to broach their duties, were relieved, and a few were delighted that Touton had caught a sacrificial minnow to munch upon.

Back in his office, Touton was surprisingly conciliatory.

“What’s your problem?” he asked Sloan, having moderated his voice.

“You’re not seeing the forest for the trees,” Sloan said. Then he toned himself down also, adding, “As I see it.”

“So you like this chauffeur to be the limo driver the night the coroner was killed? The night Roger Clément went down?”

“He’s a punk limo driver. He’s dead. That’s all I know. But that’s enough to check him out, don’t you think? That’s all I’m saying.”

Touton sat down. “You are aware that we’re not officially investigating that case? Speaking about it out loud before the entire squad doesn’t help us at all. You’re aware of that, right?”

If he’d heard that, he’d forgotten. “Sorry,” Sloan said.

“So what’s the bee in your bonnet?”

Sloan had thought that this was going to be a tougher point to get across to his superior officer, and he wanted now to deliver his opinion with the appropriate emphasis. He realized that he might actually have preferred the opportunity to sting the captain in a verbal fight, something that might have given his point a heightened credibility. Unfortunately, he would have to stake out his position without the lustre of passionate engagement.

“Everybody’s going on about the car-bombing and the paint job on your door last night. Okay, I’ll concede that those are nasty things. But why would anyone do that? That’s what I keep asking myself. If the goal was intimidation, that’s one thing, but if we don’t actually know who did it, how is anyone being intimidated? Just because your door—”

“This is not about my door,” Touton said tersely. “This is about my wife being terrified.”

Sloan backtracked a little. He would have to compromise his attitude. “I understand. That’s bad, that people would target a man’s wife like that.” He breathed in deeply. “Armand. I have a theory, all right? Let me just spit it out.”

Touton nodded to give him at least slight encouragement.

“Everybody’s going on about those events, but maybe that’s the idea. Those things were distractions, maybe. If so, the bad guys sure as hell succeeded in what they’re doing—”

“Distractions?”

Sloan could feel Touton’s anger rising again. “Let’s say somebody wanted to kill another man, that that killing was involved in a case you were working on. The killers knew you’d take an interest and they wouldn’t want that. Absolutely, they would not want that. So they give you something else to think about instead, and that way they get to walk away from a murder without you ever taking notice.”

Touton leaned back in his chair. He was tired, fuelled by caffeine and alcohol, but what his detective was saying made sense. He leaned forward, checked information off a sheet, and wrote down an address for Sloan like a physician jotting a prescription. He tore the sheet off his pad.

Sloan accepted the paper and read it. “Who’s Carole Clément?”

“Roger’s wife,” Touton explained. “She called today. She was listening to the radio.”

“And …?”

“She heard your dead man’s name. She wants to talk about him. We’ll go see her together, all right? Keep it quiet. Meet me there, ten-thirty. I might be late.”

Sloan stood up. For a while that evening, he thought his boss was off his rocker. Now he realized that he was a step ahead of him, again. If the affairs of the previous evening were indeed a ploy, whether by accident or design, Touton had made it look as though he’d swallowed the bait whole. The performance in the squad room had been for show. Sloan understood that he had nearly screwed it up.

“Sloanie, take a meandering route to get there.”

“I will,” the detective promised. “I’ll be—what’s the word?—circumspect.” He paused on his way out. “So getting everybody to hunt down dynamite, that’s about the Sun Life as well, right? Or Fleury’s car and the Sun Life.”

Touton grunted, stood also, and the men went their separate ways.

Touton headed off on a quest for different quarry. He’d arranged an evening rendezvous with a Montreal psychiatrist, one who had inscribed his name on the infamous petition requesting sanctuary for a French war criminal. The man’s name was Camille Laurin. Carole Clément had labelled him as a man who hated strikes, and given that her husband had disrupted a few picket lines in his day, the possibility lingered that the two of them might have had recent contact.

The meeting was set up for the working-class north end of the city, close to where the physician conducted a private practice. Touton had argued for the odd hour as he was a late-night detective, and the doctor had grudgingly agreed. At the restaurant door, the captain slipped off his hat and checked his watch: 8:46 P.M. Civilized.

Surprisingly, the doctor had ordered a meal, so the hour could not have been disorienting for him, either. His pasta arrived at the same time Touton did, and the policeman asked the waitress for a coffee. Cops on the night shift congenially joked with one another that they bled caffeine, to pour them a cup of joe if they ever got shot—that way, they’d never bleed out. Close in age, the two men sat across from one another in a high-backed, red vinyl booth.

“The famous captain,” Dr. Laurin said, his voice annoyingly quiet, restrained. His handshake felt like holding a fillet of halibut. “I salute your achievements, sir.”

“Thanks, Doc. I’m afraid I don’t know about your work. I can’t—what’s the word?—reciprocate.”

“I maintain a modest practice—nothing fancy. How may I help you?”

Touton didn’t say so, but the question was a particularly good one. In truth, he had no idea.

The doctor had a way of lifting his chin that made him appear to be gazing down his nose. His hair was wavy and black, which emphasized the full height of a broad, impressive forehead. His eyes were unusually small.

“I guess my question is … psychological? Is that the word?”

“Psychological, yes.” Laurin seemed pleased, and reached for his cigarettes. Judging by the ashtray off to the side, already filling up, he was a chain-smoker. Nicotine stains were noticeable on the fingers of his right hand, so this smoke was neither a sudden nor nervous reaction. “Depending on the question, of course. Which is?” His smile was thin, and once the cigarette was lit his face remained implacable behind a veil of smoke.

Shifting around in his seat, as though the discussion had already ascended above his head, Touton suggested, “It’s the psychology I’m wondering about, Doctor—the way the mind works. Why are some people, do you think, left wingers, while others are right wingers? Psychologically speaking, I mean.”

In taverns across the city, drinkers with draft glasses barricaded in front of them might assume he was talking hockey. But Laurin knew what he meant.

“Why do some people live in the real world, while others dwell in a land of fantasy, dreaming utopian dreams? Is that what you really mean by your question? … A big issue, Captain. I’d be interested to learn how it pertains to police work.” He chose to stare high to his right, rather than upon his visitor. “Offhand, the answer is likely to be different in every case. But we can acknowledge that some minds have a predisposition to grasp the potential of the individual, the potential for the race, while other minds, regrettably, prefer to whine about insignificant matters.” His eyes met Touton’s again. “The universe of the left is based upon materialism. It’s a Marxist tenet. The chaos of the imagination, the divine promise of human experience, exquisite achievements of art, man’s cherished divinity … all these matters are lost on the left, which is primarily concerned with wages and with what can be acquired without being earned. The left wants to know what can be picked from the pockets of the enterprising and the visionary—then wasted.”

Touton nodded, as though in agreement. “I see. Do they—the unionists, let’s say—have a differing opinion? What would they say about you?”

“Does somebody care?” The restaurant lighting was bright, harsh. Along the counter, pies and cakes that might tempt a patron were on display, the shiny plates reflecting light repeated in a mirror running along one wall.

“If they know your politics—I have no idea of that myself. But if the unionists discussed your politics, how would they describe you, as a person, as a thinker?”

“As some kind of asshole, no doubt.” The doctor let the cigarette waft while he returned to his meal. Apparently, he was revelling in the conversation. “They see matters in shades of greed. Wealth must be divvied up, split into such tiny morsels that nothing is accomplished but the feeding of church mice for a minute or two while the elites are impoverished. Without compensation, the elites recoil from their enterprises—we have economic ruin, the collapse of social, economic and political structure. Justice is flummoxed. Chaos or tyranny result, and between the two, the masses inevitably choose tyranny. They’d rather be flogged than enlightened.” Laurin sipped his own steaming coffee, looking at his interrogator over the cup. “You smile, you’re amused, but history proves my opinion.”

Touton tempered his smile, regretting that he had given himself away.

“Yet I draw the rebuke of the left,” Dr. Laurin forged on, “who assume that I’m the tyrant for having an opinion, that I’m the one responsible for their measly wages, when all logic suggests that they are the cause of their own situation. You see, sir, I presume to express my opinion. I presume to have one. I do not allow my opinions to be subservient to the mob. I am not interested in public opinion. I am interested in thoughtful, reasoned, informed opinion, while the left, I’m afraid, detests both thought and reason. The left views thoughtful reason, or reasonable thought, as tyrannical, because its own so-called intellectualism cannot measure up alongside. What we saw a while ago, during the Richard riot—that constituted an expression of public opinion, did it not? Was it thoughtful? Reasonable? Of course not. Did it represent the left, the unions, the communists—were they involved? Were they enjoying themselves? Of course they were. You’d have to be an idiot not to agree, and the left, if I may say so, is largely populated by idiots.”

“I don’t know too many intellectuals myself. I don’t run in those circles.”

Laurin shrugged, as though to indicate that that was apparent.

“Pierre Elliott Trudeau … I’ve met him. Do you call him an idiot?”

The doctor’s smile was quick, although anything but sincere. “The biggest idiot of the lot,” he insisted, but he was also conceding, “who happens to be smart.”

Partially amused by the physician’s spree, Armand Touton also sensed that Dr. Laurin took licence to speak to him so freely from another source. This was not a typical splurge. The policeman suspected that he had been found out. In saying that he knew nothing of Laurin’s politics he had lied, and the doctor had probably caught that. For the moment, the psychiatrist in Dr. Laurin was not doing the talking. The person who usually kept his own counsel while allowing precious little of his thinking to emerge had been displaced by the man who enjoyed competitive discourse. The fellow was doing what he himself had attempted to do as a policeman, which was to bait the other man. This, then, was a game of cat and mouse, and Touton believed that, in Laurin’s mind, he was the mouse.

He wasn’t altogether sure that he wasn’t the mouse in his own mind, either.

The doctor was grinning at him, proud of himself to have turned the tables. The spiel had been intended to irk, to provoke an agitated reaction, and Touton knew that he wasn’t far from a sarcastic reply. He nodded, although he guessed that if he could see himself in a mirror, he’d judge his performance to be an implausible portrayal of thoughtfulness. He dared not look, for there was a mirror to his right. Instead, he chose to change the atmosphere in the room.

“Dr. Laurin, some time ago, you signed a petition asking the government to grant asylum to a reputed fascist criminal. Why did you do that?”

Laurin stopped eating and reached for his smoke, and through that haze squinted, keeping his small, black eyes on Touton.

When the man failed to respond further, the policeman exorcized a few inner rages and asked, “I suppose you were expressing a thoughtful, reasoned opinion.”

The doctor returned to his food. He concentrated on cutting up his lasagna and chewing behind the drifting smoke. He appeared to be waiting for an apology.

“Are you thinking about it, sir? Or are you choosing not to reply?”

“War,” Laurin declared, “stigmatizes societies with prejudice. These days, we’re asked to hate the Russians. During the war, we were expected to detest Germans, Italians, Japanese. Should I investigate my Italian gardener? See what he was up to while the battles raged?”

“Count Jacques Dugé de Bernonville never fought a day under his country’s flag. He tortured Resistance fighters, slaughtered his own people. A collaborator.”

Dr. Laurin was waving a hand in the air as though to dismiss the discussion as irrelevant. “Understand, many things have come out as time goes by. When I signed that petition, every detail was not known. De Bernonville’s detractors struck many of us as being hysterical. Some of us, I would say, were influenced by the personality of the man, which was quite jovial. We may not have been in possession of every fact. But allow me to add, neither may every fact have been at the disposal of his detractors. Certain aspects may yet remain concealed.”

“Concealed? He was a collaborator.”

“I know you suffered in the war, Captain. You’re not inclined to be sympathetic. But de Bernonville helped save France from the communists. If you had suffered under the Russians, you might be singing a different tune.”

What did Laurin know of war? If he had paid attention to the war at all, it had been from the safe side of the sea. “Would you sign that petition today?” Touton pressed.

“Why? Are you circulating a new one?” Laurin smiled in a way that did not include the other person in his humour.

“No, sir. I am asking you a question.”

Laurin shrugged. “A man has a right to keep his opinions to himself. I don’t see what any of this has to do with police affairs.”

“Do you know the name Roger Clément?”

Another indifferent shrug. “Should I?”

“He was a union buster.”

“Good man,” Laurin speculated. He moved his plate away and returned his attention to his cigarette and intermittently to his coffee.

“Do you know his wife, Carole Clément?”

“How is this related to police work?”

“Do you?”

“Rings a bell. I think I know several. I’ll have to check if she’s a patient, and if so, say no more.”

“This Carole Clément is not a patient.”

“You say, but you don’t know that for a fact, do you? Is she another union buster?”

“An organizer in the rag trade. After the death of her husband, I believe she quit. It’s hard enough eking out a living with her sewing machine.”

“Her husband was a union buster and she was an organizer? There’s a happy couple. I wouldn’t want to be invited to their dinner table.”

“They got along. Do you know Michel Vimont?”

“Who? No.”

Touton felt that this answer had been defensive, too quick, probably a lie. Laurin lit a new smoke off the old one.

“What’s this about, Captain? Do I look like a man who keeps the company of riffraff? Are you going to mention every criminal on file to see if I can help you somehow? What’s the purpose of this?”

“I didn’t say he was a criminal,” Touton pointed out. He lowered his head a little and touched his forehead lightly. This time, the posture of thoughtfulness was sincere, as he was trying to formulate a question in such a way that Dr. Laurin might feel trapped, feel under investigation without that actually being the case.

“Sir,” the detective began, “there’s a matter you can clarify for me. In regards to that petition—”

Laurin turned out the palm of his hand holding the cigarette. “Water under the bridge. No one was in possession of all the facts. The war was a long time ago—”

“Your devotion to Marshal Pétain, you mean? Not that long ago, really.”

“Excuse me? Devotion? My politics, which are beyond your comprehension, are none of your business, sir.”

“You supported the French fascists!”

“I will not respond to insinuations, to unfounded rumours. Do you have a question? Because I have to get going.”

“You’re not finished your meal.”

“Then you may leave first if you have no serious question.”

“This is my question, sir.”

Laurin inhaled angrily, as through drawing the smoke down to his toes.

“The petition,” Touton said, “no matter the circumstances or the times … the petition was not present on street corners for anyone to just walk by and sign. Certain people, the authors of that document, knew whom to contact, they knew—in advance—who the willing signatories might be. So my question is this, sir—” and Touton paused, both for effect, to keep his opponent in this discussion off balance and anxious, and also to move the talk to a new phase, “—are you, or are you not, a member of the Order of Jacques Cartier?”

The doctor was partially hidden behind his hands, which he held folded in front of his mouth as he smoked, his elbows on the table. He continued squinting in that irritating, insufferable manner, ostensibly from the smoke but also, Touton believed, because he understood that a line was being invisibly carved on the table between them.

“I know nothing of what you speak,” he said finally.

Perhaps he was being impetuous, but Touton felt agitated by Laurin’s responses. During the war, the man had probably mocked his comrades for fighting the Nazis. He asked the doctor, “Sir, did you murder, or cause to have murdered, Roger Clément?”

“This is a fucking outrage. I once had respect for you.”

“Did you murder, or cause to have murdered, Claude Racine, a coroner?”

“Unspeakable, sir. I’m leaving. Our discussion has concluded. Rest assured, a report to your superiors will be filed.”

“Did you murder, or cause to have murdered, Michel Vimont?”

Dr. Camille Laurin did not bother with a final reply. He marched straight to the cashier, paid his bill and, without looking back again, departed the restaurant. Touton gestured for another coffee, and he sat there awhile, feeling somewhat ashamed of himself. He checked his watch. He was meeting Detective Sloan soon, at Carole Clément’s house. In the meantime, a respite. He needed to pull himself together. Perhaps the events of the night before, the upset at his home, had put him off his oats. Definitely, he needed to calm down. Coffee might not do that for him, but this cup, his second, felt good, and he could not imagine leaving the restaurant without a third.

His activity would now be confirmed and revealed. His specific interest in the Order of Jacques Cartier stood exposed. If graffiti upon his door had been a decoy, meant to detract him from closely examining the death of a chauffeur, then the culprits now knew that the ploy hadn’t worked. His outing with Laurin had confirmed that, and calling out the Order by name would only alert, and probably incense, its members. Then again, if official word went through to his adversaries that his attention had not been deflected, that his visit to Laurin had revealed that he was closer to them than they thought, that he knew the name of the Order and what their business might be, and if they made a mistake and reacted, he would know he had found a conduit into their society. An entry point had been forged, through which water might seep, creating rot, through which fear might wick, creating fright and causing the occasional lapse in judgment. Just as well, perhaps, that he made that gaffe. To his enemies it might come across as confidence, even arrogance, sufficient to unnerve their precious, secret group.

Yet, in his heart he knew he’d made a mistake. He’d been unsteady, agitated by the disrespect shown to his own house.

Carole Clément served strong coffee to men who came around at night talking about nefarious matters, even if the air remained warm. In anticipation of their arrival, a pot was perking. Around the dinner hour, a thunderstorm eased the humidity considerably, and everyone felt more comfortable, although the expectation remained that the heat wave would continue and another storm, probably by the following afternoon, would roll across the city. Standing on her back porch, rapt, she watched the day go black and the storm excite itself with thunderclaps and lightning bolts and heat lightning over the rooftops as the whole of the western sky flashed. She missed her man. Missed his company at a time like this, when he could hold her and she’d enjoy the safe tuck of his body, feel calm and happy as another great storm tried to frighten her, failing. Now storms scared her. What if a tree fell on her roof? What if the power failed and she lost the contents of her fridge? What if a window blew out? How would she make ends meet then?

She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but the prospect of having two grown men in her house, as opposed to her only daughter or her daughter’s friends, comforted her. They were on their way, the coffee was perking—already she felt less alone and a little excited. Then the doorbell rang. She had to slow herself down to keep herself from scampering to the door.

She opened it to Captain Touton. The other detective, Sloan, was coming up the walk.

“How’ve you been?” Touton asked.

The inherent kindness of the question nudged her to the brink of tears.

“Excuse me,” she said, as though distracted by another matter, and fled to her kitchen to compose herself. She returned with a smile on her face, shoulders back, hips swinging as she walked in with the coffee mugs and fixings. “Sorry about that. I’m fine, Captain, how’ve you been keeping?”

Somehow he knew not to be disinterested. He told her about the affront to his home the night before, that he was doing well except that the heat and humidity were wearing him down. “Thank goodness I work nights, it’s cooler. But try to sleep through noon in this heat. Why do we live here? If we’re not boiling in the summer, we’re freezing our—”

He stopped short, but that made her laugh.

“I was going to say, before I got religion, that in the winter we freeze our butts off.”

“You were going to say nuts. And that’s only the half of it,” Carole agreed.

“How’s Anik?” Touton asked.

“She’s fine. She has the same complaints. It’s too hot, she tells me, about twenty-five times a day. Does that mean she plays in the shade, or has a nap when the sun is highest? Nope. Turns out it’s a plea for more ice cream.”

Detective Andrew Sloan grew impatient with the drift in the conversation. Just about the last thing he could tolerate was someone chatting about their kids. “You said, Madame Clément, that you knew the man who got killed last night?”

Touton put his coffee down and explained. “Detective Sloan is assigned to the case. He was on the scene last night. He told me that the dead man, this Michel Vimont, has been working as a chauffeur. Is he the man you know?”

“Michel? Yeah, he drives mob bosses around. Roger got him the job.”

“So they were friends.”

“Roger thought he was a lonely guy. He looked out for him.”

Nodding, Sloan took out his notebook. Her answer had given him hope. She seemed to be a knowledgeable witness, someone with an insider’s view. “They knew each other as associates, then, would you say?”

Madame Clément looked at the captain, wondering why he was not asking the questions. Resigned, she looked back at the detective. “They were pals.”

“You knew him as well.”

She curled a ringlet at the back of her neck over a finger. “Michel’s been here a few times, maybe two dozen times over the years. He wasn’t exactly sociable. Not like a lot of hoods. Roger’s friends—his ‘associates,’ if you want to call them that—they lived to drink and tell stories. Michel would rather go home after his work was done. Roger was one of the few guys who knew him away from work. He invited him over to listen to a game, shoot the breeze, have a beer.”

“So you liked him?” Touton assumed.

“Not so much. I could tolerate him. He never caused me any trouble and I can’t say that about all of Roger’s pals. Michel was too quiet for me. Spooky quiet. Maybe he was shy, maybe he had nothing to say, but all that silence, along with what I think he did for a living—I found him too scary. Sinister, in a way. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I always felt … I don’t know … as though he might not be a guy who could set limits. He could break out of that silence one day and go nuts, I had that feeling. If somebody wanted somebody rubbed out, he was the kind of guy who might get asked to do it.”

“Was he the kind of guy who’d agree to do it?”

“That I can’t say. Roger’s loud friends talked tough, they could act up, lose their temper in the blink of an eye. Among those guys, I always knew who had their limits, who would walk away if they were asked to do something they didn’t like. Michel … I don’t know how he’d respond.”

The officers nodded. Everything she said amounted to very little, a flurry of hearsay and unsubstantiated opinion, yet it was always good to know what people close to a murder victim thought about him.

“Do you know who he worked for yet?” Carole Clément put to the cops.

Touton looked across at Sloan, who said, “I’ve got my feelers on the street.”

“I’ll tell you right now if you want,” she said.

“Who?” Touton asked.

Sloan leaned forward, notebook in hand.

The woman looked from one cop to the other. “It’s a good thing you’re both sitting down,” she said.

“Who was it?” Sloan asked.

“The mayor.”

“Drapeau?” Touton was too startled to believe it.

“No … sorry. The old mayor. Camillien Houde.”

Now this was news. Mussolini’s champion in North America, and Roger Clément’s old bunkmate at the wartime internment camp in New Brunswick, had been the dead man’s employer.

“Roger got him the job,” she added. “It wasn’t full time. A job with some big hood, but anytime the old mayor needed a driver for a special occasion, Michel got sent. I guess the old mayor and the hood had a deal going, or the hood was doing it for old time’s sake, some old payoff.”

“I don’t recall the old mayor speaking up today,” Sloan mentioned, “to express his regrets.”

Touton smiled slightly. “When’s the funeral? He might show up there.”

“Monday morning,” Carole Clément said. “I’m going. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that men like Michel were my husband’s cronies, but I should believe it—get it fixed in my head. It’s a way to keep his memory in perspective. I’m a mother. I want to honour my husband’s memory, for myself, for my daughter, and that means being honest. The bad and the good both. So it’s important to go, for me.”

The police captain put his coffee aside and rubbed his hands together, leaning forward, both elbows on his knees. He seemed to be chewing something over. “Carole—” he began, then stopped. With his right hand, he scratched his left jaw, as if digging out a thought long buried in his subconscious. His brow was furled in concentration.

She offered a slight nod. She didn’t want to say it, but to hear another person speak her name helped wash away long days of loneliness.

“The funeral for this man is bound to be small. A man like that … a few old friends, that’s it. If I go, or Detective Sloan here, or any police officer, we’ll stick out like Rudolph’s red nose on Christmas Eve. No matter how we dress, we won’t be able to hide ourselves in that small crowd.” He paused, and felt Sloan’s eyes on him, for his partner had already caught the drift of this suggestion and probably had conceived of the longer-range impact. Perhaps Carole Clément also had an inkling of the chance about to be presented to her, for she was looking down at the carpet, as though afraid to look up. “If, on the other hand, you were to go—as you say, you’re going anyway—excuse me, Carole, but if you go to the funeral and be our eyes and ears, tell us who’s there, repeat what might get said—”

“You’re recruiting me? To be a stoolie?” she asked. Her tone was not friendly. “Just like you recruited my husband?” she accused.

Wringing his hands again, Touton thought about her question, then nodded affirmatively and without regret. “One of the good things your husband did in his life,” he declared, “was his work with the police department, doing what was right—”

“You forced him to work for you!” the widow objected.

“He was a stubborn man, your husband. A man of honour. That’s a tough combination for someone in my position to crack. Eventually, I cracked him by reminding him that he had a family to look after.”

The woman was staring at the floor again, which Captain Touton did not consider to be an outright rejection of his proposal.

“Carole, I’d say that my purpose is the same as yours when you invited us here tonight. We’re pursuing your husband’s killers. Our purpose is the same as yours when you take on the bosses on behalf of seamstresses. We’re pursuing the bosses, calling their decisions into question, you and me, and when they act as criminals, we’re hunting them down. That’s all.”

He gave her time to process his remarks, to make an informed decision. She stood before answering, and crossed the floor, then came back to her chair and sat again. When she spoke, she pulled her shoulders back. She lifted her chin. If she was going to do this work, she would do it as her husband had, with pride.

“One time,” she began, “Roger wanted to know where the phrase came from—stool pigeon. I helped him look it up. Turns out, somewhere, people would tie a pigeon to a stool, which would attract other pigeons, and then people would be able to either poison them all or shoot most of them.” She paused. When Touton and Sloan followed her glance, they saw that she was gazing upon a photograph of her husband. He was a young man in the snapshot, wearing his Chicago Blackhawks sweater. “He said that that was what he used to do when he was a hockey player. He’d step on the ice and the other team’s bad guy would be sent out to fight him. That way, the star players, the skilled players, they’d be left alone, because the bad guys were too busy fighting each other. ‘That’s why they kept me around,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t fight on skates very well, but I was willing to get the shit kicked out of me.’ He was using his body as a decoy, so the good players on his teams would be left alone. He knew it was a hell of a way to earn a living, but he was proud of it.”

“He had a right to be proud,” Sloan put in.

“Detective Sloan’s a fan,” Touton explained. “He loves his hockey.”

Carole Clément smiled slightly. “Like Roger. My husband, he took note that the pigeon they tied to the stool would also get blown away once the shotguns started firing. Or if they’d spread poisoned corn, he’d eat it and suffer and die, too. But in the end, he said that some poor bird had to do it if the people wanted the pigeons dead. I’ll be your poor bird, Captain Touton. Why not?”

Given her description, thanking her was difficult, but he got the words out. “Thanks,” the policeman said. “Sincerely.”

“I’m a unionist, don’t forget.”

The captain was confused. “Ah … I won’t forget that.”

“Being a unionist means I don’t work for nothing. Five dollars an hour, from when I leave home until I return. I get paid whether you approve of my work or not.”

Touton smiled. “What union worker makes five bucks an hour? I’ll pay you three, which is fair.”

“Hazard pay,” she argued back. “Plus, you’re not offering benefits. No pension, no unemployment insurance, no security, no vacation pay, no regular hours. Five’ll do, thanks.”

“Five it is,” Touton consented. He glanced over at Sloan, who was grinning to see his boss beaten down in a negotiation. “What’re you looking at?” he said. “Do you want to bargain with her?”

The three of them laughed, and the cops returned to the warm night air, hopeful that their expensive new recruit might prove invaluable.

The few who showed up for the funeral blamed the threat of a thunderstorm, a harbinger of cooler, drier air, for keeping people away. They were speaking well of the dead. Only six men, in addition to Carole Clément and her daughter, Anik, attended Michel Vimont’s funeral.

The service in the chapel of the funeral home was over in less than ten minutes, so that two of the men arriving late only had time to genuflect before the coffin was wheeled down the aisle and to cross themselves a second time as the body went by. So quick that, when invited to go out to the gravesite with the others, Carole accepted.

No one knew who she was, and could not believe that Vimont had had a secret girlfriend. “Are you his sister? His cousin? From his family?” No other option made sense. When she explained in the car that she was Roger Clément’s widow, the men welcomed her and made a fuss over Anik. Roger they had known, and liked. They had attended his funeral also, but that one had drawn a crowd, and she had been hidden behind sunglasses, her face a wreck. What a shame about Roger, they said. Michel? Well, nobody knew him. The quiet guys were the ones you had to worry about. Always, sooner or later, something goes wrong with those guys.

“He had enemies?”

Two men shrugged. The third in their vehicle nodded.

“Did Roger have enemies?”

None, they agreed. “Roger, he was a great guy, you know? The best.”

“And Michel? Roger used to bring him home for dinner, once in a while.”

“That’s Roger. You see? Looking after the lost souls.”

“That’s Michel,” the man in the front seat said. “A lost soul.”

The other men did the sign of the cross.

“I hope he had a good time at your house,” the man beside her said. He was English, and just finished playing an English rhyme game with Anik, which made her giggle: Paddy-cake, paddy-cake, baker’s man! “Because I never knew him to relax no place else.”

By the time they reached the cemetery, Carole confirmed that it was right for her to attend the funeral. She had not taken to the deceased, but she and her husband had probably spent as much social time with him as anyone alive.

As the thunderstorm was rapidly approaching, the priest had no plans to dawdle here, either. This one would be shipped to heaven—or environs—posthaste. The wind was kicking up his cloak and Carole’s and Anik’s dresses, and men kept their hats in their hands to keep them from blowing off. That allowed her a good look at the others. They all possessed the fake sobriety of hoods. No bosses stood here.

A man who had arrived at the site in the second car whispered with the English guy, and he came over. “Madame Clément,” he said. He looked Italian. He spoke French well, with an accent. “My name is Roméro. Me, I was a really good friend of your husband’s, may he rest in peace.”

She was thinking that when Roger was alive he’d be pleased to discover so many good friends.

“Me, I’m the bartender at the Copacabana. Been there for years. Roger, he used to come by sometimes. I remember, you came with him once or twice.”

She was impressed that he remembered. Roger had taken her there for a night out exactly twice.

“We’re going back to the club now. It’s not open daytimes, but we’ll go today, have a little wake. He didn’t have so many friends, but he deserves a send-off. Respectful like. Something better than what I seen so far. That priest, I can’t believe that guy. You’d think he had to get to the track before the first race, like he couldn’t wait to lose his money on that first bet.”

The priest had vanished, whisked away in the funeral director’s hearse.

“So I’m asking, would you like to come by? At night, it’s no place for your daughter, but in the daytime, she could run around—it’d be like a treat for her. She can break anything she wants, I don’t mind. We’ll have a drink, say goodbye to one of our own, proper like. Maybe some guys will get out of bed finally and come down.”

The man was around fifty, with thin hair that he slicked flat to his scalp. He hadn’t shaved, probably because he’d had to wake up earlier than usual. He had a broad chest, big neck and jowls, and for funerals he dressed well. His black suit might be typical of his day-to-day wear, Carole was guessing, but that was all right. She knew she didn’t make much of a fashion statement herself. She wanted to ask, “How can a girl on a spy mission refuse?” But instead, she said, “Maybe for an hour or so. It might be fun for Anik. I can’t afford to take her many places.”

“That’s good. I’m pleased to make the acquaintance of Roger’s wife. He has my respect. Did he ever mention me? Roméro?”

“To be honest, Roméro, I’m sorry, I don’t believe he did.”

“There you go! You see? That’s my man! That’s Roger! Very discreet, Roger was, you could trust that guy. He’s been dead, God rest his soul, all this time, and he still won’t rat a man out. They don’t make them like that anymore, you know, not like Roger. But why am I telling you? You know!”

Nodding, Carole felt happy and sad at the same moment. She collected Anik and started on the walk back to the cars. This time, she would travel in Roméro’s vehicle, which she thought was a nice enough car, which he drove himself, and all the way he chatted to Anik, and Carole liked that—she liked the way she was trusted here and aroused no suspicion.

The fun part was that Anik really did have a good time. Once she overcame her shyness and understood that she really could run around anywhere, except behind the bar, she had fun at the Copacabana. One hood or another was always pleased to try to catch her—failing always, her mother noted—and the little girl particularly enjoyed romping on the stage. Roméro put the stage lights on for her and plugged in the mike, and while she refused to sing a song as the men requested, she loved running by, stopping suddenly and making silly sounds. She then ran off, as if trying to hear the sounds she’d made.

The hoods each spoke to Carole in turn, and she accepted a beer despite the early-afternoon hour, and in a way the wake became one in honour of Roger, one that she had missed due to her shattered condition at the time. No one really wanted to talk about Michel Vimont, but they were glad to tell stories about Roger, and she was on her second beer before she noticed that the place had become more populated than the funeral home had been.

With the party in full swing, three well-dressed men entered and removed their hats and cast their eyes around. Each nodded to the other and one went outside, and when he returned, he stood in the company of a huge individual whom Carole and even Anik recognized immediately. Camillien Houde proved to be more imposing in real life than he had been in the newspaper photos or on the movie newsreels, and the legendary way in which he commanded the attention of a room held true in this company. Men lined up to shake his hand, and soon they were ordering more drinks for him than he could possibly consume in a day. Apparently, he was ailing somewhat. He was working his way through the well-wishers to a seat, where, huffing, he mopped his brow and accepted his first gin and tonic gladly. The rapidity with which he downed the glass had Carole changing her mind. Perhaps he really could make it through the alcohol ordered on his behalf. When he saw the woman in the room, then the little girl, he made discreet inquiries. Carole knew that he was asking about her, and out of a feigned politeness, she turned her head away.

In a moment, she felt a tap on the shoulder, and she was asked by Roméro if she’d like to bring her daughter to meet the mayor.

Houde bounced the wee one on his knee while Anik seemed mesmerized to be in the grasp of a man so vast. He was a giant, and terribly ugly, and Carole laughed to see her daughter look baby-sized again. She seemed so shy and sweet, as if being introduced to a mythical beast. They’d met once before, after the war, and Houde reminded her that he’d been a roommate of her husband’s in the internment camp, which she well knew, and together they told stories back and forth, Carole reciting her husband’s memories and Houde providing his own version of events. He shook his finger at her one time.

“What?” she asked.

“You mailed him his opinions! You gave him his politics! You’re the one!”

She nodded. “I was supposed to be imprisoned, did you know that? Roger went instead of me.”

A hush encircled the tables where they were speaking and the others were listening. Houde was gazing upon her with such solemn attention that he appeared as though he might cry. “Roger,” he said, “was a great man. We will miss him always. A round on the house!” he cried out, his first initiative to buy a drink. “We shall drink to Roger!”

Drink they did, to Roger. Carole was thinking as she sipped her beer, Are you here? Roger’s killer, are you here? Because if you’re here, I’ll find you out, then I’ll hang your balls from the top of the Sun Life Building for the pigeons to peck on.

She had sat across from many tough men in her day, bosses and steely-eyed foremen. She had stared them down and forced them to negotiate through the sheer will of her resolve. She knew what it meant to play your hand too soon. Observing her daughter on the ex-mayor’s knee, she knew that she had gained the confidence of an inner circle. She could hardly wait to tell Armand Touton of her good fortune, yet she did wait, staying on at the party, having dinner with a bunch of men after the mayor had left and they had pizzas delivered. After being driven home by Roméro, she waited until Anik was tucked in and had fallen asleep before she made the call. She dialled the number for the captain of the Night Patrol.

First he chastised her, warning her to never call him from her home again. Then he praised her, and told her that she was a brave woman, that Roger would be proud. Although she knew that that was true, she also knew that Roger would never have allowed any of this to happen. But he was gone now, things had changed, and the work she was doing had to be done. She had to find his killer.

“In the future, when I take my daughter with me,” she told Touton, “that’s an extra two bucks an hour.”

Touton consented, wondering if he now held the record for the youngest informant in the history of the force. He would never find that out, of course, as no one kept that kind of information on file.