CHAPTER 13

1958

THREE YEARS AFTER HER INTRODUCTION TO HER DEceased father’s erstwhile cronies at the Copacabana, where she babbled silly sayings into the microphone and ran off giggling—once, straight into the arms of the most flamboyant of Montreal’s former mayors—eleven-year-old Anik Clément was on her way to visit that illustrious, sage carnival of a man again.

She did so routinely.

Alive, her father segregated his family from his rough work. They lived away from the nightclub scene, and no high rollers hung out on their block. For a while after his death, her mom cut herself off from her father’s old pals, but that changed with the funeral for Michel Vimont. Anik never understood the sudden shift, but neither did she regret that her quiet home became a livelier place overnight. Men popped by to fix things. Or dropped in to crack open a six-pack and a monstrous bag of chips to shoot the breeze. Anik loved the chips, which were never allowed in her house otherwise. If her mom had nothing to do on a Friday night, she might make a phone call, and just like that she got to hang out in a crowd while a babysitter with a toothpick between his teeth and a revolver on his hip slouched down on the sofa in her home. He watched the black-and-white TV another of her gun-toting sitters had purchased. Anik didn’t dare sneak out on these guys, but as long as she hopped into bed the moment her mom was dropped off, she could stay up as late as she pleased.

She had to educate her sitters, though. One guy, when she was nine, asked if she wanted a beer. She told him that he shouldn’t offer young girls beer, that it was his job to make certain that she didn’t drink beer. That it was his job, even, to make sure that she got to bed at a decent hour.

He shrugged and swigged his Molson Ex. After a while, he asked, “So what’s a decent hour?”

She wasn’t sure how honest she should be. “It depends.”

“On what?” He was a thin man with a bald head and a waxed handlebar moustache he constantly shaped. He wore two gold bands through his left earlobe, unheard of at the time.

“On what’s on television. The Honeymooners starts soon. I should be allowed to watch that. Then I got homework because it’s a school night. After that, I should read a little. If a good show’s on—I like westerns—I could watch them, too, to keep you company. How late, I dunno for sure—midnight?”

Midnight, then, but no beer.

As a further bonus, Anik had places to go during the day whenever she was not in school and her mother busily sewed. The child was introduced to a world that stimulated her interests beyond the meagre poverty of her district. Carole Clément made certain that the men understood to not expose her daughter to anything shady, but they all pooh-poohed her concerns, reminding her that Anik was Roger’s little girl.

“You think I’m gonna risk crawling halfway to heaven—if I’m lucky enough to get that far—on my hands and knees, my knuckles all scraped and bloody, every inch of the way beggin’ my Lord and Saviour to gimme a half-assed chance here, only to find out I gotta answer to Roger ‘cause I did sumthin’ wrong to his kid? Lady, are you plain crazy or just nuts?”

After a time, she trusted Anik to their company. The men enjoyed protecting the fatherless child, taking care of their extended family on behalf of the one who’d been struck down. Apart from her sitters, Anik could depend upon half a dozen of her dad’s buddies to keep an eye peeled for her welfare, and among these, no one paid closer attention than the former mayor.

As she walked on her own to his house she was daydreaming and playing with her yo-yo. Working on her sleepers. She needed a new one, she believed, a Master’s Series, if she wanted to improve on a minute, but putting her old one away seemed wrong to her and probably unlucky. So she settled for the sixty seconds she could make hers sleep now. Bouncing along, she threw in a Walk the Dog and a Rock the Baby, tricks she could perform without concentrating, and waiting for a red light, she shyly demonstrated her latest moves for a little old lady who seemed nearsighted but quite enthralled. Saddle the Pony. Snake the Ladder. Anik smiled bashfully as the woman bent lower and closer to peer at her showing off, and she received an approving nod before stepping smartly across on the green.

Pat the Monkey—or, as she and her friends called it, Pat the Monkey’s Butt.

She took long, bobbing strides.

Anik had sprouted, becoming tall among her peers, skinny and lanky-looking, like a boy. She wore her hair cut similarly to a boy’s trim, a tad longer because she adored Elvis Presley’s hair. She had a D.A. like his at the back—a duck’s ass. Her mom didn’t allow her to go totally boyish on the cut. Close enough, though. Some of the men were calling her a tomboy, and they chuckled when they said it, loving the idea. “Eleven’s the perfect age,” the old mayor said. She didn’t know about that. She had big brown eyes and a sprinkle of freckles across her thin dewdrop nose. The first girl in her neighbourhood to routinely wear jeans, she was also the only one to wear a denim jacket on cool days. Her mom had made it for her. Walking to see the mayor, she wore a light-blue sleeveless blouse without a collar, the most feminine top she owned. He’d warned her, “Next year at this time, we’ll send a limo to pick you up. A Cadillac! Armed guards, we’ll need, to keep the boys away.”

She didn’t know about that, but guessed that next year would never arrive for the old mayor.

He adored her.

She loved him back. She was going to miss him.

Such a huge man! He made her laugh all the time. On her birthday and at Christmas, he gave her wonderful presents. She’d not been accustomed to that, except from her dad. At Easter, he planned hunts. She scoured his entire house to bring back chocolate eggs tucked under furnishings and collect them in a big bowl. All the while, the fat old mayor would help himself from the bowl, unwrapping and eating up the chocolates almost as quickly as she could gather them, so that she had to go faster, faster, racing around, and only when she had it filled up, despite his best efforts to maintain her pace, would he stop eating, his lips and fingers all smeared with gooey chocolate, and concede, “Yep, I think you’ve found more than I can eat. You whupped me, fair and square.”

She’d stumble home with the big bowl of chocolate Easter eggs in her arms.

Best of all, the old mayor would sometimes talk about her dad. He might say, “I used to go outside to watch him play on the river.” Anik would know that he was talking about the rink in the internment camp, because her mother had explained that to her, although the old mayor would hedge on that part of the story. Everything was large about him: his nose, his chin, the way his cheeks expanded as he smiled, which widened his big face, and his voice, immense, filled a room even when he spoke softly. The big voice caused everything he had to say sound more substantial. Especially if he was talking about her dad. “It wasn’t fair, him playing in that pickup game. He was better than the rest. In the NHL, okay, maybe he was no All-Star. He was a tough guy, not a skater, not a shooter, but on the river in that pickup game among the pris—” Everything he talked about felt so large that, if he inserted a gap into a story, the space felt cavernous. “On the river in that game, he skated circles around everybody. Scored a few goals, too. I always bet on his team, and me, I never bet dumb.”

Her mother had explained to her that the old mayor was dying. If she wanted to see him again, she’d better get cracking.

Yet Anik put off the visit. She was scared of that, someone dying.

She didn’t like it that her dad had died. That he’d been killed. She missed his presence in the house—the way his heavy shoes would tromp across the floor and the old, slumping house would rattle. She felt so safe then, and hadn’t felt safe since. She missed him tucking her in at night. Although she probably wouldn’t let it happen now, after he was gone Anik had missed being tickled. Her dad had been such a great tickler, which remained an easy thing to remember, and sometimes that worried her the most: that someday she wouldn’t remember everything important. She might forget him. One thing she wouldn’t forget, she knew, was the way he died. A dagger. Stuck in him. She could never get that thought out of her head and it made her feel sad whenever she dwelled on it. She imagined that her dad had felt very lonely, bleeding to death in the park. She liked to imagine that he died thinking of her, but that thought made her even sadder.

The old mayor kept her in stitches with his stories. If he died and stopped telling stories, her dad, she felt, might be further away. He might disappear.

She liked the old mayor’s stories about himself, too. He’d had dinner with the king and queen of England! He made the king laugh. Everyone in the banquet hall noticed and wondered what on earth the mayor of Montreal could be saying to cause the king to laugh so hard.

“He was sitting beside me, the king, back before the war,” Camillien Houde confided to the girl, “and he said to me, ‘Mr. Mayor, what are you reading?’ For always, my head was down, reading, even though we were at the dinner table. And I said, ‘Your Majesty’—that’s what you call a king, you know,” the old mayor explained to the girl, whispering. “‘Your Majesty,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to memorize this list. It’s a very important list. My advisors worked on it for a day and a half before they gave it to me. It’s all the things I’m not supposed to talk to you about.’ Then I said, ‘Here, Your Majesty, why don’t you take the list. If I talk about anything that’s on it, remind me to be quiet.’ I handed him my list, and the king, he just laughed and laughed. He loved my list! Do you know what?”

“What?” Anik would always ask, although she heard the story often.

“That’s what we talked about for the rest of the night. The items on my list. King George, he went down my forbidden list. One by one.”

She knew a man who had dined with a king. That made her feel that she, too, was special. Her father, she remembered, used to call her Princess. Hadn’t he? Or was it only the old mayor who called her that? Was she already forgetting?

As she approached the house on St. Hubert Street in the quartier east of the mountain known as the Plateau, she noticed a heightened level of activity. Comings and goings were common around the home of Camillien Houde, which was one reason she liked being there. She felt at times that she lived at the centre of the world, where all decisions were made, but today the number of vehicles and the solemn huddle of men in their trench coats and fedoras worried her. She slowed down. She’d been Walking the Dog, but the yo-yo spun out of control. She had to catch it and rewind the string after working a knot free.

Anik continued towards the house, yet her pace had slowed so much she was easily overtaken by her mother’s best friend, Father François, who clamped an arm around her shoulder, gave her a quick squeeze, and urged her to keep up as he dashed on ahead. He seemed to have an inkling of what troubled her.

“Not to worry. Nothing bad will happen today.”

“Why are you running?” Anik asked him, skipping a few steps to catch up. For a large, rather sloppy, man, the priest walked fast.

“Do you call this running? I’m walking briskly.” He swung his arms and marched along. Except for his stride, he looked like a priest today, wearing his black cassock. She rarely saw him on the street in a robe.

“Then why are you walking briskly?”

“That’s my business, young lady. I’m not telling you.”

“Walk by yourself, then.” She broke pace, deliberately dragging her heels.

Father François spun around. “I’m trying to lose weight. Or, shall we say, restrict how much I gain. There. Are you satisfied now?”

She had one more critical question to ask before skipping along beside him again. “Why are those people over there just standing?”

“Reporters do that. They stand around,” Father François explained, and he returned to his enforced gait. “How they do it yet remain thin is beyond me. They’re vultures, Anik. They wait for death so they can gnaw on the bones. Maybe that’s why they’re so thin. It’s their shabby vulture diets.”

He cast a glance over his shoulder. The girl appeared to be taking him seriously, so he abruptly changed his tone. He slowed down and clamped an arm around her again. “They want to be the first to praise him. When a man of his stature dies, everyone wants to say what a wonderful man he was. For a while, we forget the bad and talk only about the good.”

“Even you?” Anik assessed.

The priest shot her a glance. He considered her question alarmingly adult. “Even me,” he said. “We don’t speak poorly of the dead in case someone up above is listening while the man’s fate is being assessed. Once he’s found his place on the other side, what we say won’t matter. That’s the logic behind it all. Anik, for what it’s worth, I share such superstitions. I’m only too human. Come on, let’s go in.”

First, she wanted to know, “Is he sick today? Will he die?” She grabbed his wrist to keep him from going straight in. The gathering of the press—down the block, a television crew had set up its apparatus—made her apprehensive.

Father François caught the distress in her voice. “He’s a tired man,” he assured her quietly, “but nothing should be awful today. The end will come soon, the doctor says. Prepare yourself for that. You must. But I’ve spoken to him on the phone, he’s in good spirits. He’s himself. He’ll be his old self again once he sees you. For a man in his condition, a boost to the spirits is a good thing.”

She took a few steps with him before she asked, “Is that what I am? A boost?” She wondered at times why a man who had dined with a king ever bothered with her.

He hesitated. Sometimes the young grew up more quickly than he realized. “We’ll go in together, shall we?”

Camillien Houde was delighted to greet Anik, and equally content to spot the priest. As Father François entered the room, a bevy of older women hovered in attendance, a few at prayer, others in full throttle. They had come to attend to the mayor’s passing, and Houde was clearly bored by them while detesting the solemnity of their project.

“Ladies! Ladies!” he cried. “As you can plainly see, my spiritual advisor has arrived. Leave us now. A dying man must make time for his spiritual advisor.”

The flap of women in their rustling crinolines departed the death chamber. Anik was wondering if she should leave as well when a covert bob of Houde’s chin kept her in the room.

“Ah,” Houde sighed, once the three of them were alone together, “my spiritual advisor. What advice do you have for me today?”

From under his cassock, Father François pulled out a flask. “Mountain whiskey.”

“Oh, it’s my good friend Jack! Come to pay me a visit.” The old mayor ripped off the cap and helped himself to a long pull. “Aaahhh,” he said with exaggerated satisfaction. “That’s so good.”

A discreet knock on the door caught their attention. Anik opened up while the old mayor hid his bottle under the quilt. One of the little old ladies who’d been shooed outside had something to add. “We realized, after we were gone, that the young lady …” she let her voice trail off.

“She may stay,” Houde told her. If he’d had the strength, he would have dressed her down for being a busybody. Instead, he told a fib to get rid of her. “She’s in training. For the convent. It’s good for her to listen to a priest counsel the dying.”

The wee grey-headed woman nodded. With some misgiving she gazed at the girl with the yo-yo, who wore blue jeans and didn’t look anything like a novitiate. The woman told the old mayor, “You’re looking better, Mayor Houde. Your cheeks are flushed. You have your colour back!”

The old mayor shook his left forefinger at her. “Remember that! When your final days come. Always make time for your spiritual advisor.”

Father François crossed the floor and, smiling, closed the door on the woman.

“What do they want from me?” Houde carped. “If I close my eyes they mention it and do the sign of the cross. If my eyes blink open again, you should hear them gasp. They thank God, as if they’re present at a miracle. Father, if a failing heart and bad blood won’t kill me, the sight of those old biddies will.”

“We all have our crosses to bear,” Father François pointed out to him. “For you, it’s your popularity.”

“A priest who speaks the truth. You’re a rare find, Father. Where’s that flask?”

“In your right hand.”

Together they comprised an odd coupling—the aging, madcap politician and the youthful, opinionated priest. They were of similar shape, although the older man, taller when upright, was also significantly more rotund. The younger man might match his girth one day, but just as a comparable height was out of the question, so would he never command the attention of a room with the old man’s panache. People felt themselves aglow in the former mayor’s presence. What made the pair seem odd to others was their political disparity. While it was true that the mayor had initially made his reputation through make-work projects during the Great Depression, creating swimming pools and baths and viaducts that drove the city into bankruptcy while allowing working people to earn a living wage, he had not identified with the left. He had frequently cussed the communists whenever mocking them might charm a vote. His support for Mussolini and the Vichy regime in France attested to a far-right bent that seemed incompatible with his choice of the notorious socialist as his priest for his final days. When Houde had first called Father François to his sickbed, he was weakening but still his old self. He broached the subject with the priest, who expressed his reservations. “Why me?” the younger man asked.

They had met through Carole Clément, but neither man had had many dealings with the other.

“Some people, reaching the end, look around for an appropriate priest,” Houde had explained.

“What makes me appropriate?”

“Some people, they don’t know too many priests.”

“That’s true.” He remained skeptical. He really only knew Houde through his public image, although they shared some experiences of note. He suspected that the old mayor was Machiavellian at heart—that every decision he made contained hidden manipulations.

“Not true of me, Father. I know more priests than I can count. Anik will tell you I have dined with kings. Well, I’ve dined with bishops, too, and a cardinal. It’s her I asked, you know, to find me a good priest.”

Father François found himself increasingly confused. “She orchestrated this?”

“She will confirm it. Father, you may not agree, but I am a religious man. In my way. I need a priest to attend to me. The prelates I know are political men, the lot of them. How can I possibly say my last confession to men I’ve butted heads with throughout my career? We shared good times, a few laughs … once in a blue moon we came to a meeting of the minds. We also enjoyed our share of royal fights. They may keep my secrets, Father, but the sparkle in their eyes, that light, the sense of superiority that would shine upon me in my final hour as I admit to my follies—not to mention confess to my sins—that light would not represent the warm glow of heaven. Father, it might kill me before my heart fails. Besides …” he added.

“Besides?” Inwardly, he was agreeing that the man’s points made sense. As had happened with many political adversaries of the old mayor, he was being charmed, if not actually duped.

“You and I have seen some things in our time, together and apart, have we not, Father?”

Father François bowed his head, then looked up. “We have.”

“And you and I, we know what the other has seen.”

The priest wondered who was confessing here. “True,” he admitted.

The old mayor allowed that point to shine between them. Then whispered, as the priest bent nearer, “If I asked one of the old priests for a drop, could I trust him to open a flask for a dying man? Out of spite—and I hate to tell you this, but the bishops can be spiteful men, no less than me—they might deny me. They might refuse to sneak a bottle past my nurse, who’s a battle-axe and a Temperance Unionist!”

Houde made firm eye contact then, letting it be known that on this one matter he would not broach a compromise.

“I see,” Father François noted.

“I’m glad you do. Is it settled, then? All I ask, Father, is that when my time comes you don’t get yourself tossed in jail for some union crap.”

“If I do, sir, you’ll have the connections to get me out.”

The old mayor enjoyed a belly laugh, confident that he had chosen wisely.

Father François could decline, or suggest further alternatives, but a dying man was an obligation for a priest, and to say no, to suggest that the man was too rapacious for his blood, or too right-wing, or too amoral in general, struck him as unseemly, not to mention un-Christian. If he really wanted to recuse himself from the duty, he would have to own up to a dent in his own character, for secretly, Father François was interested in what the dying man might confess. Beyond what they had already shared in secret. As well, he knew where Houde was coming from. He uttered his own confessions, and among his peers were many priests with whom he would prefer to remain mute. Rather than acknowledge such a failing, he would see to this man’s spiritual needs at the hour of his death.

“How’s the young princess of Montreal?” Houde inquired in his failing voice.

Anik stepped towards the big brass bed where Houde was resting under a sheet and a beautiful patchwork quilt that contained azure and turquoise, with orange piping. She smiled shyly, pleased that he had spoken to her that way.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“You don’t look all right to me,” Houde judged. “You look like a puppy left out in the rain. Maybe that’s what you need for yourself—a puppy.”

The girl shrugged. She sat at the foot of the bed, as she so often did, and nervously bounced a little. She moved her yo-yo back and forth in her hands.

“Any new tricks?” the old mayor coaxed her.

Again she shrugged.

“The reporters outside,” Father François revealed to Houde, “upset her.”

“What did they say?” For a moment, the girl felt his spirit, his willingness to defend her.

“Anik is bothered that they’re here at all.”

The old mayor looked from the girl, back to the priest, then back to the girl again. Slowly, a wide grin began to grow on his visage. He winked at the child. “Come here, you,” he said.

When Anik moved up on the bed he pushed himself more upright, which required a considerable outlay of his remaining energy, and drew her close for a hug.

“Now listen up.” He held both his hands on her narrow shoulders. “I’m going to give those newspapermen something to write about. But I’m not just a cuddly old bear—I’m a mean one, too. Those newspaper boys will have to be patient. They’ll grow frustrated, they’ll be fed up and hungry, tired and plumb worn out before I give them what they’re looking for. It’ll rain on them. Several times! The sun will beat down hot. By the time I’m done, a few of them will wish that they were me and that I was one of them. So bear this in mind, Anik, my pet—us good guys, we don’t live to the schedule of the world. The world can wait upon the likes of me and you. Understood? The world can sit back and mind its manners until I’m good and ready. They’ll get what they came here for, but not a second too soon. Got that?”

Anik nodded and smiled with him, and when he tried to tickle her she laughed, although she could tell right away that he didn’t have much strength left, it was so easy to elude his grasp.

Driving, he inhaled the pungent smell of the street. A sweaty heat. The burnt rubber of fast cars. The oils of haughty, fragrant women who strolled along this boulevard with their suitors. He noticed the relaxed saunter of the ladies’ steps, the shimmer of their calves in nylons, the capricious personalities of their white or pastel dresses. Windows lowered, he caught the high timbre of sudden laughter and wished that he could join them, fling himself into whatever sport or seduction the night might bring. This evening confined him to a mission, and the frolic of a warm night in early September had to be ignored, for now.

He hadn’t enjoyed a good upper-class romp for a while. Lately, fun had been found in beer parlours and union halls, and in the cramped quarters of friends’ flats. Fun had taken serious turns—prolonged, animated discussions supplanting revelry, detailed strategies for strikes or political action displacing, for the moment, his dalliances. The days were tempestuous, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau welcomed the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” He wanted to be wholly immersed in the world, body, mind and—as he was, in private, a religious man—soul.

Jobs of any interest remained difficult to come by. Many believed that his law degree from Harvard went begging as he devoted himself to civil strife and writing for a journal that, in the overall scheme of things, had to be measured as insignificant. Frosh wrote on politics for startup journals, for heaven’s sake, not those who could, with a modicum of effort, be senior partners or professors. Yet the enterprise of a law firm could not satisfy his appetite for living, nor even for disputatious talk, and people were wrong that he could easily become a professor in Quebec. Three times he’d applied for a position at the Université de Montreal. Three times he had been rejected. The province’s premier, Maurice Duplessis, blocked each attempt—once through an intercession with the rector, once with a word to a dean, and once by putting in a call to the secretary general. In the premier’s eyes, Trudeau had studied in communist environments—in Paris and in London—therefore he was deemed unfit.

In the 1950s in Quebec, the heady freedoms of Paris and London were nowhere in evidence.

What to do? He was rich, smart and desired by women. For the time being, he followed his friends Pelletier and Marchand into battle against the regime of Duplessis—since he was being kicked around by the man, he might as well get in a few licks of his own. He also locked horns with American corporations who paid their workers more poorly than elsewhere on the continent. He skewered the political right and took on tough corporations with ideas and logical argument. Nobody could call it a job—it didn’t pay—but at least his interest in ideas and action was being stimulated. His choice of weapons—logic, intellectual confrontation—meant that many feared him even as he honed his skills.

By contrast, tonight offered no moment for either argument or agreement.

Tonight was destined for nothing more than a transaction. For him, the most obtuse imaginable.

A base affair. Decidedly illogical. Outside his customary domain.

Yet exciting. He had to admit. He was very excited.

I’m travelling as an emissary for the Catholic Church. He laughed as the notion leapt to mind. It wasn’t true, just a rationale. I’m travelling as an emissary for a rogue priest. Closer to the truth, yet equally amusing. A Dominican. For him, steeped as he was in Jesuit training, the alliance was an unlikely one. I’m a sucker for adventure.

He bored easily. Not only was boredom anathema to him, it was also highly dangerous. Boredom pushed him outside his beloved logic, provoked him to be rash. A whisper had been picked up in a conversation, a rumour, so distant it had travelled as a flicker from a far galaxy, passed along out of time from the ears of the upper classes to their lips to fresh ears, so that neither its source nor its veracity could be ascertained. The Cartier Dagger, the rumour whirled around, is up for sale.

Yet, how could a buyer make contact, when those who possessed the knife, if indeed they existed, craved anonymity? Anyone auctioning the treasure would be suspected of crimes more heinous than mundane possession of stolen property. Buyers had to act covertly. Possession of the dagger itself was a crime, and those who were selling were thieves and killers. The purchase was immoral. Pierre Elliott Trudeau argued such matters with Father François who, having gotten wind of the story about the knife, brought it to the attention of the rich man’s son. Apparently, he had wanted to gauge, perhaps pique, his interest.

They discussed the rumour at length. Both men agreed that they should be calling the police, and Trudeau knew whom to call in the department. But they held off. They chose to keep talking, and Father François was developing a different solution. A curious scheme. A proposition. “Purchase the Cartier Dagger yourself, Pierre, why not?” he whispered finally over cognac.

“You buy it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the only man I know who can afford it.”

“In your dreams, Father. It’ll cost millions. I’m not frivolous with money.”

“If it’s not sold to an honest Quebecer, like yourself, where does it go from here? London again? Paris? It can’t appear in the Louvre—it’s a murder weapon. To California, perhaps, or to some oil man in Dallas? If so, Quebec loses a measure of its heritage forever. Cartier! Champlain! Maisonneuve! Brulé! Radisson! This is our history. No different than if Egypt shipped a pyramid to New York City. Or if the Taj Mahal were reconstructed in Missouri.”

“Not quite the same thing,” Trudeau said.

“Pierre, if you acquire the dagger—unofficially, of course—the time may come in some future epoch when it can be restored to the populace, no? Enjoyed by a museum, let’s say. Or placed in a glass case, let’s say, in Notre Dame. Hey, now there’s an idea.”

“Don’t pretend you’re entertaining that thought for the first time,” Trudeau scoffed.

“Bad enough it should be in the hands of Sun Life or the National Hockey League,” the priest went on, ignoring him. “At least in those instances, it’s still here, within our borders. Pierre, it belongs to the whole of our family, not to the least worthy of our elements, never to the Order of Jacques Cartier. If they must sell, the people of Quebec must buy. But the people cannot acquire the dagger except—except—through secret philanthropy. That’s where you come in.”

“But how can we do this?” he argued against the priest’s spirited ardour.

“That’s also where you come in.”

Trudeau was flummoxed. “How do you mean?”

“You’re smart. I’m not as bright. I’m a priest. You’re not. This transaction is beneath my station in life, but you’re not even employed. A rich man’s folly, we’ll call it. Why not? Do it, Pierre. Think of something.”

“What rubbish.”

The challenge attracted him, he had to concede. Trudeau was also drawn to the project by the priest’s desire. How wonderful to do something unique for the people of Quebec, yet in secret, so that no one would find out for decades. As for the moral issues, which stood apparent to both of them, neither man was a stickler for the rules. Leaving the knife in the hands of killers and thieves—as some believed, in the hands of neo-fascists, the Order of Jacques Cartier—did not seem a wholly moral choice either. Father François had another astonishing reason to acquire the murder weapon.

“It’s said to hold properties. Those who have possessed it have known great adventures. Imagine, Pierre, someone such as yourself, in possession of the Jacques Cartier Dagger. What a formidable power that union might create.”

“You want me to be powerful?”

“The Church can offer the dagger safekeeping. Perhaps you’ll bequeath it to us in time. If spiritual properties are at play, perhaps the work of God will benefit.”

Magic, then. That, too. Though it belied his logic, and the faith of the Church, it did possess, as an enchanting fragrance of this night, its own seductive allure.

“You’re spiritual when it suits your purposes, Father,” Trudeau told his friend. “I’ve noticed that about you.”

“I’ve also noticed something, Pierre. Your Jesuit strain runs deep. You may keep your religion in your hip pocket, yet it’s there. It’s important to you.”

How deep did it run? He had canoed the routes of Radisson, who had carried the knife with him. The spirit of the man seeped into his being during those long hours under the sun, paddle in hand. Those beautiful, endless rivers north. That peace. Radisson had been brutalized by history, working for the British, the French, the Americans—whoever might favour him with a stake. He had allowed the dagger to pass through his hands, sometimes merely to please his wife. With it, his wife’s family had prospered. Not the fur trader. That history ran as deeply within Trudeau as did his Jesuit influences. The desire to possess the dagger, to hold the knife once held by Radisson, burned within him. If ever he found it, he would not let go.

He returned to the priest with a calculated scheme. “You heard of the sale from someone—an individual.”

Father François buried his hands in his cassock and placed them over his expansive tummy. “I attended a gathering. A lot of ears. Quite a few voices, too.”

Trudeau issued an expressive shrug. “Yet, you heard the story from one person in particular. It’s not a story that people announce to all and sundry.”

“One person, sure. I reiterate, Pierre, he only picked up the rumour from someone else.”

“We’ll rely on that. Everyone who has repeated the rumour picked it up from someone else. No one speaks too boldly, but confides what he’s heard to a few trusted ears. No one knows who initiated the remarks, therefore no one will be afraid to return comments back to their source.”

“Perhaps,” the priest acknowledged.

They were seated in the quiet of Trudeau’s father’s library. The house had always been a place for conversation, wine and great debates. From boyhood, when his father had suddenly become wealthy, Pierre Elliott had listened to the best minds of his city argue politics and war, the social contract, the future of the nation. Big ideas had surrounded him during his formative years, and the large canvas of those notions would be tackled in spirited, often inebriated discussion. This room, on the other hand, where mahogany bookcases rose to the ceiling, had been a place for quiet reflection. Trudeau had rarely spoken to his father within this room, and only of matters most solemn. At the age of fifteen he had lost him, a sudden, unexpected death. The pain of absorbing the news had never been extinguished. He now knew why the priest had invited himself over, rather than undertaking this conversation inside a rectory, for theirs was dangerous, subversive talk.

Elbows on his thighs, Trudeau leaned in more closely to his guest. “You must recall who spoke to you, who recited the rumour about the knife going on the black market. Go back. Say to that individual that you repeated the story to a friend, that he repeated it to a friend of his, and so on and so on, you don’t know how many times. Say this: that the last person contacted on that chain, an unknown, would like to bid for the Cartier Dagger. He is prepared to pay fair market value.”

“What on earth would be its fair market value?” the podgy man in the black cassock inquired.

“Less than its true value, I suppose. Ownership of the relic is dangerous. The market’s compressed. If someone is selling, it’s either because they need to get rid of it to save their skins, or they require funds. Which also serves to depress its value.”

The Dominican-trained priest nodded. For a man who could not hold down a regular job, his friend Trudeau showed business acumen. “Go on.”

“Tell the person who had spoken to you to do exactly as you have done. Go back to whoever told him the story initially. Pass the message that a buyer has surfaced.”

“Ask that everyone ask the next in line to pass along the message?”

“Exactly. No one will know where the chain ended, any more than anyone will discover where it began. If we’re lucky, someone will whisper in the ear of the man who possesses the dagger, or the man who started the rumour. That man will only nod and agree to pass along the message, knowing it will be to himself alone.”

The scheme seemed plausible, especially if they did not have to travel through too many links. Yet an obstacle remained. “How does the man with the knife, if he’s located, communicate back again to the other end of the chain?”

“The same way,” Trudeau postulated.

“It might be five people. It might be twenty … forty.”

“It might become a rumour mill. But communication is still possible. When the time comes to link opposite ends of a rumour mill … if and when we get there, we’ll figure it out. The point is, we have a chance.”

Captain Armand Touton preferred to visit Carole Clément in her home, although his presence could compromise her work as an informant. Yet meeting her outside the home was often difficult as she worked long hours at her sewing machine, and if they were spotted, the rendezvous would be even more awkward to explain. His going to her house gave her the option of saying he’d dropped by to update her on the investigation into her husband’s murder. Not that he had anything to update. More than three years had passed without tangible results. In any case, Touton took the preferred risk and used personal time to see her during the day.

“You’re getting too close to these people,” he told her.

She slaved away at her machine, pins between her lips with which she’d tack a pant cuff. “Is that a fact?” she asked, her mouth closed, voice muffled.

“You spend considerable time with them. Anik, too. You’re friends now.”

Carole removed the pins from her mouth. “That’s the idea, no? I get close. They learn to trust me.”

“What happens with all this trust? I haven’t heard any great information lately. You’re still on the payroll, remember?”

“I’m not in it for the money.” She kept her head down, her eyes on her work.

“Maybe. But you take the money and I’m in it for the results.”

“Feel free to shove the money up your ass, Captain. If you need help with that, let me know. Maybe your results will fit up there, too.”

“There’s no need to be vulgar,” he said, straightening.

“Who’s being vulgar here?” she wanted to know.

He had to think that through. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”

“Are you?” Her machine whirred, a pant leg was completed. She held up the garment for inspection, tossed it aside, then retrieved the next pair off the floor.

“Have you heard anything, to help us out, to justify the budget I spend?”

Pins were between her lips again. She waited until she had her hands free to remove them and speak. “Hypothetically,” she said, then put the pins back.

Touton’s concern was genuine. His own surveillance had demonstrated how cozy she’d become with gangsters. Other departments, not knowing of their connection to one another, pencilled her in as a gangster’s moll. “Go on.”

“Let’s say I got wind of a bank robbery,” she said in a garbled voice. This time, when she took the pins from her lips, she put them down. “What would happen?”

“I’d expect to hear about it.”

“I’d expect that if the police intervened, they’d make it look like a fluke, not as though they’d been tipped off.”

“You’ve been tipped on a robbery?”

“Several. A few have been carried out. I didn’t tell you about those.”

Touton wrung his hands, then placed them on his thighs. “Why not?”

“Hey, it’s basic. If everything I hear ends up being intercepted by the cops, what does that do to my credibility? I’m doing this to catch my husband’s killers, not to foil every little heist.”

“But you’re willing to tell me about one.”

“One. For now.”

“Why?”

“To keep you happy. I’m not in this for the money, but … I don’t say no to the extra bucks. They keep me going. So I’ll be good. I’ll give you something, Armand.”

Touton nodded. As informants went, Carole Clément was unique. She was in with the mob, yet she was not one of them herself. As such, she was not a stoolie who could be intimidated or threatened with incarceration. She actually had more power over him than he did over her, and he was unaccustomed to that. “All right,” he said. “Give me what you’ve got.”

“You’ll like this.” She stuck pins in a pant leg. “It’s coming down on your watch. The night shift.”

“Do the men involved babysit your daughter?”

“Actually—” she paused to give the machine a whirr. “—they don’t.”

“This is what bothers me.”

“You’re right, Captain. You should be bothered. The men I’m closest to get a free pass from me. If you put them in jail, I wouldn’t be close to the bad guys anymore, would I? But you’re not thinking about that. You’re just concerned that I’m willing to squeal on the guys I don’t like rather than on the guys I get along with. You think something’s wrong with that. Well, Captain, it’s a take-it-or-leave-it scenario, know what I mean?”

She had a point. Or several. She couldn’t really afford to put away the men who gave her access to the underworld. If she did, she’d lose her value.

“I’ll take it,” Touton confirmed.

She identified the bank in question, a big one downtown, and provided the date and method. The time would be after hours, as the crooks were planning to drill through a basement wall over the course of a weekend from the building next door. Three false alarms would sound in the downtown area just prior to the robbery, to reduce police capability. “You better respond to those alarms, Armand, otherwise they’ll know that you were tipped off. You’d better make it look like you ran into robbers by sheer luck as they were coming out of the building next door with their pockets full of loot.”

“Not to worry. Thanks, Carole.”

“‘Not to worry,’ he says.”

“I’ll take care of everything.”

“We’ll see. Now why don’t you piss off so I can get some real work done here?”

The odd pair put their plan into action. The priest had a drink with a businessman concerning ecclesiastical matters, and in the midst of the conversation revealed the curious, weighty concern on his mind. “The number of people involved so far,” he lied, for he knew that he and his friend Trudeau were the only ones, “is impossible to tell. Quite a few, I get that impression. But you told the story to me, and now I’m asking you to speak to whoever spoke to you about it in the first place. Just don’t mention my name. That’s how this works. No one should know the name of the second person down the line in either direction. Ask him not to mention yours. Then we’ll see what transpires.”

He departed the meeting muttering a prayer to himself, begging forgiveness for his deceit.

A segment of the community, rich men all, were delighted to be included in the gambit. Before long, the men’s clubs were abuzz with the news, and those who were not approached, or not so far, regretted being excluded from a privileged loop. From a friend, Pierre Trudeau learned that word was getting around. His pal had been contacted along the chain not once, but twice.

“How come?” Trudeau asked him.

“I heard the story twice, two weeks apart, from two different people. And after each time, I told a different colleague. And now, first one, then the other, has gotten back to me. So the story’s making the rounds. You’re not on the chain yourself?”

“Afraid not,” Trudeau said. He had been telling a number of lies during this excursion, and saw no reason to quit fibbing now.

He worried that the faddishness of the situation might ruin everything, and told the priest so. “More people are talking about it than should be talking about it.”

And yet, word trickled back through the serpentine chain. Let’s make a deal. How?

He sent a message in return, pretending that he was merely a relay. Everyone on the chain must maintain discipline and stop talking about this in public.

The message travelled more quietly, though not with pristine discretion.

A new and difficult query was returned. Now what?

A good question. People had puzzled over how the ends of the chain might meet without every link being aware of the encounter, and without the most curious among them, or all of them, discovering a way to listen in. The priest had the same question, and when the query came back to him through the human pipeline, he put it to his point man. “Well? Now what?”

“There’s a way,” Trudeau said.

He shipped a cryptic message through the pipeline. Select middleman. Known to you or unknown.

Whoever purported to be the opposite terminal sent back the news that he’d chosen a former head of the morality squad of the Montreal Police Department to be the middleman. The title sounded impressive, except that the man had held the position during an era when the job was sacrificial. His responsibility had been to posture as morality’s knight one day, then be blamed for police corruption a few months later, thereby taking the heat off the chief of police and the mayor.

“Do you think he’s known to the other party?” the priest wondered.

“Of course he’s known. Who would choose an impartial third party?”

The idea was both simple and tricky. Each of the men at the ends of the human chain would contact this third party, a man with the imposing name of Réal Guevremont, who would then establish a liaison between them without necessarily knowing to whom he was speaking. When Trudeau called him, from a phone booth on a street nowhere near his home, he told the man to refer to him as le Noir, the Black. Sure enough, hearing this, the other entity chose to be known as le Blanc, the White.

The chess match had begun.

They had reached their endgame, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau was driving to meet le Blanc’s representative. Elsewhere in the city, his friend Gérard Pelletier sat in a café, waiting to be picked up by another envoy from that team. Pierre would drive the man he picked up to a cache of money. Gérard would be taken to the knife. Phone calls would be exchanged, cash viewed and counted, the knife handed over. Gérard would be returned to his café. Safely there, the cash would be removed from its safe and the transaction concluded. Each side would be in control of one environment, and security of that environment remained each side’s particular responsibility. That was the idea they had agreed upon, although Trudeau intended to introduce a wrinkle. If all went well, the Cartier Dagger would soon know a different proprietor.

Le Blanc had chosen the Ritz-Carlton as the pickup point for his man, and Trudeau drove his borrowed Jaguar sports convertible, a former lover’s wheels, up to the front door. The car was sufficiently unique that his arrival would not be confused with that of any casual visitor, and the man from le Blanc was supposed to climb right in. No one did. Trudeau stepped out of the car to speak to the doorman, who wanted him to move along—speak to him cordially and slip him a ten-dollar bill. He continued to wait. Finally, a man emerged from the hotel and nodded. He paused while the doorman opened the door to the Jag, then crouched down and got in.

“What took you so long?” Trudeau asked. “You were supposed to be waiting.”

“I wasn’t expecting some guy I knew.”

Trudeau was merging with traffic. He stepped on the brakes. “We know each other?”

“You’re Trudeau. That union fuck.”

“So who are you?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

Cars were honking. Trudeau stayed put. “Maybe I do now.”

“Come on, drive. I’ll explain.”

Reluctantly, Trudeau slipped the car back into gear and escaped the curb. He darted into a faster lane, then cut across traffic and headed up the mountainside on Peel Street. “Fill me in,” he said.

“I seen you on TV. In the papers. In person one time. We were on different sides of the line.”

“A strike?”

“Don’t ask me which one. I’ve done a bunch.”

“I’ve done a few myself.”

He was a big man, this fellow in the passenger seat, legs cramped by the narrow enclosure. Thuggish, in a well-dressed way, with a bull neck, big fists and a diamond ring. Considerable pudginess to the face, as though swollen. Crew cut. Scars around the eyes and a misshapen ear indicated that he’d been a boxer when he was younger. If the two ever had a set-to, Trudeau, who was lean, yet athletic and had done a little street boxing in his youth, would be ridiculously overmatched. He’d expected as much. He and le Noir had to manage their way through this transaction with acumen, while the other side could rely upon brawn.

“So I called it in,” the man said.

“You called what in?”

“When you showed, I phoned my boss. Said I know this guy. I told him it was you. He told me to hang on. When he got back on the line, he said it made sense.”

“Why wouldn’t it make sense?”

“A union guy? Where do union guys get money?”

“I see your point. I’m not a regular union guy.”

“That’s what he said—my boss. You got money. Your old man made it for you. You’re an intellectual.”

The disdain apparent in his pronunciation of the word was unmistakable.

“I think, therefore I am.”

“Huh?”

“Right now, I’m thinking the deal’s off. It’s not good that you recognized me. I knew I was taking that risk, but—this is not a development I desire.”

He had turned before reaching the top of the hill, going east. Farther along, he’d head north and cross the mountain along Park Avenue.

“Aw, it don’t matter. So we know you. Big deal. You hide the dagger, nobody proves nothing, you know what I mean?”

Trudeau shrugged. “I don’t like rumours flying around.”

“‘The union’s got romantic ideas’—that’s what my boss said. That’s why you want the dagger.”

“For the union.” This was an interesting diversion. If one institution, a union, and not another, the Church, was considered the culprit, the plan might work.

“That’s right?”

“Not if you’re telling the whole world about it.”

“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“Sure you will.”

“You think I can’t keep quiet? My boss trusts me with this job for a reason.”

“You’re a stranger to me.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Tell me who your boss is. I need to know who’s selling the knife.”

“I won’t tell you that.”

“You know who I am. It’s only fair.”

“I’m not authorized.”

“You’re not—all right. Make a phone call. Get authorization. While you’re at it, tell them to send somebody in your place, somebody who doesn’t have to ask permission to take a leak.”

“Hey—it’s not that way!”

Going over the mountain, Trudeau sped up, seeing what the car could do. His passenger put one hand on the roof and the other on the door handle to steady himself as his jockey zipped from one lane to another and back again, scaring him.

“Come on, slow down,” the man said sheepishly.

“Tell me who you work for.”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“You’re not authorized, you’re not at liberty. You’re not good for much more than nothing, are you? Who owns the knife? Tell me. Go on. I won’t tell anyone. Just like you. Who am I going to tell anyway?”

“I don’t have permission.”

“Are you in Grade Two? That’s what I want to know. Who’s your teacher?”

“Slow down! Jesus!”

“What’s your problem?”

“God, this puny car. You could get squashed in it. Like a bug. Give me a Caddy. Weight. Steel!”

Trudeau slowed, then stopped, for a red light.

“You know who I am. I should know who you’re working for.”

“No way.”

“Then tell me your name.”

“No fucking way.”

As a young man, Pierre Elliott Trudeau had travelled the world. He had begun by retracing the canoe trips of Radisson and Groseilliers. At the start of World War II, when German submarines were reported in Quebec waters, he had walked around the Gaspé and been hassled by the police for potentially being a spy. After studying economics in England after the war, he departed Europe for home, but took the long way around, travelling east, hitchhiking and grabbing trains. He learned tricks in eastern Europe as the Iron Curtain was being lowered, moving through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, forging documents so that he could slip across borders. Every day meant encounters with soldiers and men out of uniform carrying weapons.

Through Turkey to Jordan. Israel had just proclaimed its independence, and Palestinian soldiers were on the roads. Determined, he had carried on from Amman to Jericho, and on to Jerusalem, passing through a crossfire on the city’s limits. Often he moved from the company of one priest to another, and one in Beirut had given him the name of a Dominican in Jerusalem. He was returning from a visit to him when he was arrested by Arab soldiers, initially for violating curfew, then for being an Israeli spy. He’d been imprisoned in the Antonia Tower, where Pontius Pilate had washed his hands of the man known as the Messiah.

The Dominican secured his initial release, but freedom was brief. Soldiers, still convinced of his villainy as a spy, shipped him back to the land known then as Transjordan. Repeatedly, they pointed out the ditches they were tempted to leave him in, sprung with bullet holes. Trudeau had learned to maintain a confident air, to show no fear. In Amman, he called upon the British Embassy to negotiate his release. When they did so, he continued wandering east.

In Iraq, he had crossed the desert of al-Hajar by train and disembarked at Ur, the ancient home of Abraham. He wandered alone amid the ruins, where he picked up tiles with Sumerian inscriptions dating back to the time of the great patriarch, artifacts he would never discard. The day was cool, the sun low on the horizon, the air fresh, welcoming. He walked to the ziggurat of Nanna, the best preserved of such temples from antiquity, and, upon reaching it, began the high, steep climb. Ziggurats had been built to house the gods, and in their time only the high priests of the prevailing cults gained entry. He could feel himself ascending to the heavens.

Abraham’s grandson’s dream. The lights of the angels ascending and descending upon a shape such as this. He could imagine grandson Jacob asleep upon his stone pillow, his vision as clear as desert stars.

At the top, he surveyed the view and felt the grace of time, the ancient world persevering to this moment. Then he noticed he was no longer alone, that he’d been spotted. A pair of desert ruffians had caught sight of the tourist and were climbing up after him, huffing and puffing along the way.

Drawing near, they made their interests known with an English word.

“Mon-ey!” one demanded.

The other man gestured for his watch.

Trudeau was not going to wait for them to catch their breath. He leapt towards the one who was bent over and the hardest pressed from the climb, seized his knife from his belt and jumped back.

They were not dismayed. “Everything … you … got. Give me.”

Trudeau was holding the weapon. With gestures and rudimentary words, he conveyed the suggestion that they at least descend the ziggurat. They could negotiate on the desert floor.

The ruffians complied, and Trudeau let them start off first. As soon as they were below him and he held that advantage, he shouted, “Come up and get me, you assholes!” and waved the knife.

At that moment, upon that ancient temple, he made his stand, deploying his guile. He began to recite the poems he knew by heart, which were considerable in number and often quite long. He began with Cocteau’s rant about antiquity. He rained the poems of the Western world down upon them, gesturing and slobbering at the mouth, and the thieves assumed that this youth was deranged, or at least capable of any vile act. The knife flashed in the setting sun, and the desert boys retreated, climbing down the walls of the temple without him.

Intemperate behaviour had saved him that day, which gave him a thought now. He suddenly burned rubber on Park Avenue. Turning the Jag to face the opposite direction, he stomped his foot to the floor. He raced rapidly through the gears, hitting a hundred and fifty miles an hour with nothing but narrow exits and sharp curves ahead of him.

“What the fuck are you doing!” his passenger cried out.

“This deal is off. You’ll take the blame.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

Ahead, a concrete median split the lanes of Park Avenue into streets that headed in different directions. Normally, cars slowed down to negotiate their way through the maze. Trudeau sped up.

“All right! Fuck! I’ll tell you. Slow down. Fuck!”

Trudeau jammed the brake pedal to the floor, jolting himself and his passenger forward. Before they stopped, he spun the wheel again and they were pointed north once more, southbound traffic heading right at them. He stepped on the gas again.

“Shit!”

“Will you tell me? Don’t lie.”

“I won’t lie! Shit!”

With no room for error he cut into the northbound traffic ahead of a concrete median, startling the driver of a beer truck who was also cavorting too quickly.

“Jesus!”

“What’s the problem?” Trudeau asked him calmly.

“What?”

“You seem nervous.”

“Fuck you.”

“So who do you work for?”

“Slow the fuck down, I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me first.”

“De Bernonville!”

Trudeau downshifted the Jag to a manageable, albeit still fast, speed. Three blocks later, they were again stopped at a red.

“You know him?” the passenger asked.

“That Nazi,” Trudeau scoffed.

“That’s what a union guy would say.”

“He’s in town?”

“He’s around.”

“He needs money?”

“Word on the street says so.”

“You don’t know him yourself?”

“I said hello once. Look. The word is, after last night, he’s desperate.”

“Last night?”

“You don’t listen to the news?”

Trudeau had. The night before, a bank heist had been interrupted by a number of drunken off-duty police officers who happened to be walking by. The thieves had broken in through the basement and blasted through to the vault. They were apprehended going out the front door of a building next to a bank when one of the cops recognized a man he had once put in jail, and realized simultaneously that it was night, the weekend, that offices were closed. What clinched it, a cop told a reporter, was that each man carried an overcoat slung over a forearm except that one guy carried two overcoats, one over each arm. He had snitched an extra coat from the manager’s office to conceal his extra load of money bags.

“All right,” Trudeau said. As the light turned green, he drove on with the relaxed ease of a Sunday driver. “Let’s get this deal done.”

A novice to this level of intrigue, Pierre Elliott Trudeau compensated for his lack of experience not only with wild antics, but also by hatching a scheme with careful attention to detail, in tandem with his considerable resources. Even his accomplice in this crime was impressed when he drove a long way across town and pulled up next to an amusement park. Belmont Park had been owned by Trudeau’s deceased father, and the family still maintained a substantial share. He produced a set of keys to a side entrance.

“We’re going in here?”

“Don’t you like having fun?”

Children screaming on the roller coaster and shouting from the top of the Ferris wheel pierced the evening air.

“What’s your name?” he asked the thug.

“I won’t tell you that.” The man looked at him as if to say he wasn’t as dumb as he looked.

“I need to call you something. If I want to know your identity I’ll look up pictures of former Golden Gloves heavyweights. That’ll tell me who you are.”

“It’s Barry,” the man conceded, trapped.

“Doesn’t sound too French to me.”

“English mom,” the man acknowledged.

“We have something in common, Barry.”

They walked from the side gate to a kind of bunker. Inside, they were met by a security guard who had obviously been napping, his head down on a desk, his rump comfortably ensconced in a swivel chair. He stood up quickly, trying to get the sleep out of his eyes. He addressed Trudeau as “sir.”

“We’re going straight through to the vault, Henri,” Trudeau informed him, and the security guard, in his white and navy blue uniform, a pistol in his belt’s holster, led the way.

Trudeau dialled the combination, pulled the heavy door open, flicked on a light switch and admitted Barry ahead of himself. The vault was a closet for critical paperwork now—contracts, leases on real estate holdings. These days, the money went elsewhere, but in a pinch this spot would do for a covert transaction. He advised the guard how to shut the door once they were inside.

“Turn the small handle only,” Trudeau told him.

“What does that do?” Barry asked.

“Closes the door. We won’t be able to open it from the inside. We’ll need the guard for that.”

“Wait a minute. How do we tell him to open up?”

“Phone him. I have the number. And there,” Trudeau nodded to a spot behind Barry’s back, “is the phone. Employees used to count receipts in here, all locked up. In the old days, we didn’t want thieves walking in, and we didn’t want employees walking out with their trousers or bras stuffed with cash.”

Barry looked around nervously. He clearly had a problem with the confined quarters. “I don’t want to suffocate in here. Is there air? How do we breathe?”

“I’m sure we can last twenty minutes or so, Barry. You’re right, though. Maybe less. You’re a big man. Big lungs. At least there’s a light. Let’s do this quickly. Shall I show you the money?”

The suitcase was cheap, with small metal clasps. He had found it in a pawnshop. The bills inside were crisp and neatly bundled, the denominations large, to lighten the load.

Barry whistled. All those thousand-dollar bills.

“One point five million. Take it or leave it.”

“That’s the deal. I’ll take it.”

Trudeau closed the suitcase and snapped the clasps in place. “First, we wait. I need the Cartier Dagger before you take this out of here.”

Barry shrugged his big shoulders. “I’ll phone it in. That’s the deal, right? I’ll tell my people we got the money.”

“That won’t be necessary. We changed the deal.”

“I didn’t change nothing.” Barry’s natural antagonism was subdued in the confined quarters.

“Not you,” Trudeau let him know. “My partner did. He’s coming here. We’re going to make the exchange right here in this vault.”

“This stinks. It was supposed to be separate places.”

“Too many ways to screw that up, to take advantage. The two venues shall be made one. It’s no skin off your nose, is it?”

“No, but—” the thug protested.

“What?”

“Can’t we wait outside?”

“Barry, relax. Shallow breathing, that’ll get us through this. Don’t excite yourself. I’m sitting down. I suggest you do the same. We’ll consume less air.”

Barry joined him on the floor. Telltale perspiration leaked from his brow. He waited quietly for ten minutes, carefully monitoring his breathing. Finally, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar, moving his fingers slowly, so as not to exert himself unduly. Then he asked, “What if nobody shows?”

“Good question.”

The response worried the pugilist. “How so?”

“If my contact can’t convince your people to come in here, you’ll be out of luck. They’ll fear a trap, of course—we expect that. But they’re carrying the Cartier Dagger. Pretty incriminating. So your people have two things on their side. One, our phone number—they can call you, find out from you that the money’s here, no cops are around, only one security guard. Two, my contact can walk in carrying the dagger—there’s nothing to incriminate your people except being in the pleasure of his company. That should put them at ease. We’ll see. If they don’t call soon …”

“We’ll have to get out of here.”

“I’ll leave first.”

“Excuse me?”

“To make sure my contact’s safe. Until I find that out, you’ll stay behind.”

“I’m not staying in here alone.”

“I won’t be keeping you company, Barry. When I leave, while the door’s open, you’ll get a burst of fresh air. In here by yourself, you can probably last a half an hour or so.”

“You shithead.”

“Don’t excite yourself. You breathe more air that way. I can’t emphasize it enough.”

Barry held his head in his hands, trying to calm himself, then thunked his scalp on the shelf above him as the phone rang and his body jerked involuntary.

“That’ll be for me,” Trudeau said, standing. He answered on the third ring.

Pelletier informed him that everything had gone as expected, that his party was outside, waiting to be admitted. Trudeau confirmed that, inside, everything was going according to plan. They exchanged password phrases to secretly indicate that all was well.

“French toast” was Pelletier’s phrase.

“Buddha’s smile,” Trudeau replied. “There’s been a change.”

Pelletier asked what that meant.

“Le Blanc tried to hold up a bank last night. It didn’t go over so well. If they had succeeded, they would have cancelled on me and kept the knife for themselves.”

“But we had a deal.”

“You see? I don’t like doing business that way.”

“So what’s changed?” Pelletier asked.

“Tell them what I just told you, about the bank. Then tell them that the price is down to one million even. I’m holding half a million back.”

“What?” Barry exclaimed. “You can’t do that!”

“Just watch me. I don’t need the silly thing. Le Blanc needs the million.”

He waited awhile, then spoke into the phone. “Gérard, how’s it going?”

“We have a few excited people out here. Calls are being made. Three lines busy and I hear a lot of shouting. Good thing you’re locked in a safe or you’d have a bloody nose by now.”

“You’re okay?”

“So far.”

The word came back five minutes later: a million and a quarter, or le Blanc walked. Trudeau consented to the compromise. He depleted the suitcase by $250,000 while Barry checked his math.

“Okay?” Trudeau asked.

“Adds up right to me,” Barry said. “For an intellectual, you’re a bastard, hey?”

Trudeau phoned the security guard inside the office, telling him to open the exterior door to admit Pelletier and one other person. Then he was to lead them to the vault and shut the door on all four of them while the transaction was processed.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau believed in the bold stroke, the decisive action. His father had imprinted the benefits of action on his young mind. Charles-Émile Trudeau had worked long hours and put together a chain of automobile service stations, selling them for a fortune prior to the crash of 1929 that plunged the world into the Great Depression. With his money he had purchased a gold mine, the Montreal Royals baseball team and the amusement park where Trudeau was conducting business. His purchases proved to be excellent shelters through the Depression, for people still found a way to watch baseball and still wanted to buy candy apples and take a thrilling ride to alleviate the misery of their days. And gold never lost its lustre. Camillien Houde visited the Trudeaus’ city house and mountain cottage, and while he was bankrupting the city to keep men working, the men who had those jobs visited the Trudeau family enterprises to spend their wages on a few hours of happiness. His father’s timing had been impeccable. His own was proving to be equally savvy. He knew he was waiting for something to happen that would give him something to do with his life, and he was willing to wait—not through any native patience, which he did not possess, but through a conviction that he was blessed by a mysterious quality of good timing, as if bred in the bones, a part of his nature. Sometimes he chose those words, and sometimes he admitted to himself that what he really meant was that God was guiding him. So what if it wasn’t logical? He believed it to be true.

“We get locked in here again?” Barry protested. Panic resided close to the surface of his skin.

“I hope you’re well paid for your services.”

“Not enough for this,” the thug admitted.

“Yeah? Are you ever paid well enough?”

“Probably not. I’d say no,” Barry agreed.

“There, you see, Barr? You’re a union man at heart. You just didn’t know it.”

The men entered the vault—Pelletier and the second thug representing le Blanc. The latter had a cat-like face and a nervous disposition. Pierre Elliott Trudeau demanded to see the Cartier Dagger. The thug had in mind to be shown the money first and to chew out this upper-crust phoney for beating down his boss on price, but he relented, surprising himself, and agreed to show the relic.

He opened the case.

Before Trudeau’s eyes, seemingly rather frail and homely, lay the stone-bladed dagger, the bone handle studded with diamonds and gold. He stretched out his hand to pick it up and the man stopped him, placing a thick restraining paw on his wrist, but Trudeau looked him in the eye, saying nothing, and the hand relaxed.

He picked up the dagger. He held it at arm’s length, then brought it close to his eyes. This was indeed an artifact, embedded with the power of Iroquois art and Quebec history, or so his senses told him. Gently, he returned it to the velvet-lined case—the thieves had taken good care of their prize—and shut it quietly.

“Take your money and go,” Trudeau said.

“I have to count it first.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You know who I am and where to find me. Take the money and get out. Your friend Barry’s on the verge of fainting. Guide him to fresh air.”

The thieves took their money and quickly departed. Pelletier and Trudeau remained behind, first in the vault, then in the office. They didn’t speak, although from time to time they exchanged smiles. When it seemed safe, in the company of the security guard they crossed to the amusement park’s new vault, where they deposited the small box and the extra quarter-million. Trudeau taped the box to make sure no employee could secretly tamper with it, left it in a locked case and made certain that the vault was secured behind them. Then the two departed Belmont Park in the Jag.

“So,” Gérard Pelletier asked his friend, “do you feel different, now that you have the dagger?”

He took the question to heart, digesting it. Then he replied, “I can do anything.”

“Then let’s do it. Don’t forget to bring me along for the ride, Pierre.”

Pierre Trudeau drove recklessly, earning the ire of other drivers, and turned the radio up full blast to diminish the angry honking of horns.

All this commotion could not be a good thing. Fear turned in her tummy. Anik wanted to flee, cry, shout out, be comforted. Everyone was too busy to notice her.

Outside, the usual slew of reporters appeared to be in a depressed mood. “Bored out of our tree,” as one scribe had lamented a day earlier. She could only guess what the English phrase might mean, and she found it funny. The reporters tried to befriend her, hoping that she might give them a tip on what was happening inside the old mayor’s house. Anik told them a few snippets, but usually she repeated whatever the nurse had said. “He’s resting comfortably.”

She sounded so sweet to them. She made their day.

Inside, she was immediately stricken. Older women were weeping. Nurses, generally younger, ran past her, searching for things—fresh water, fresh linen, a fresh pan. Nuns conferred with a doctor, and the doctor made a motion to the priest. Father François, who had himself just arrived—she’d seen him ahead of her—joined a closed, hushed circle. More nurses hurried by. A few older women wept.

No one was noticing her. No one had acknowledged her entry. Ignored, frightened, Anik stole inside the old mayor’s bedroom.

She wished he was in a hospital—a place where she’d not be admitted. She wanted him to comfort her, to tell her a story, to make this stop.

He gurgled in his sleep, waking himself. Camillien Houde opened his eyes and tried to focus on the young girl in his room.

“Anik,” he murmured. He tried to smile. “Am I in heaven?”

She rubbed a forearm that was covered in goose bumps, and felt herself trembling. This man’s dying! He might die this second! And she was struck by a thought both self-conscious and self-aware. She knew that she was both terrified and curious.

“Where’s my spiritual advisor?” he murmured. He was managing to keep one eye partially open, while the other one, quivering, closed.

The room smelled really bad. The stink came from the bed, and she knew what it was.

Sounds in the hall made her jerk around, and a second later the nurses arrived with a pan and sheets and water and shooed the girl away. Nuns came next, and one caught Anik by the shoulders and gave her a moderate shake. “Don’t be here! Who are you? You can’t be here.”

Father François stepped to her rescue. “I didn’t know you were here, Anik.”

“Is he going to die, Father?” she whispered.

The priest whispered in return. “We don’t like to say those words within earshot of those who are ailing.”

She spoke more quietly, although the old mayor couldn’t hear her anyway. “Is he going to?”

“We’ve spoken of this day many times.” He held her shoulders as the nun had done, but with infinite tenderness. “We must prepare ourselves.”

Nodding, she wiped away a few tears. But more tears flowed.

“When the women are done, I’m going to speak to Camillien. It’s time for his last rites, his last confession. If you wait in the living room, we’ll leave together, Anik. I’ll take you home.”

She managed another nod and moved towards the door.

The oldest nun went to the curtains, pulling them shut.

The mayor’s great bulk proved difficult for the nurses and the nun, and they beseeched the only male in the room to lend his brawn. They rolled the big man one way, pulled at the sheets and, with eight women heaving, heaving, they rolled him the other way. One set of sheets was opened and another condemned to a heap, all a stinking mess the priest endeavoured to ignore. In the end the dying man was made comfortable again, and the priest was left alone with him.

“Father,” Houde whispered.

“Do you wish to say your confession, my son? It’s time.”

“First,” the old mayor whispered.

The priest had to lean in closely to catch the softly spoken words.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Tell me. The dagger.”

The priest gazed upon him solemnly, staring into the one eye that battled to remain open. He knew now that this was why the Machiavellian had asked him to be his priest, to conduct a final transaction, a political job. “You did the right thing, Camillien. That young man you admire, the son of your old acquaintance, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, has taken possession. De Bernonville has his grubby hands on his money. Your own estate has been enhanced. The relic will remain here. In Quebec. In Montreal, where you know it belongs.”

The priest noted the frail nod of comprehension.

“Now, my son, it is time for your confession.”

Father François admired the manner in which the old sinner rallied his strength and spoke, quietly, with a true spirit of contrition. He did not need to coax him. The man had lined up his sins and knew the order in which they ought to be related. When he was done, he could see that the man had emptied his spirit, and now his life had dissipated as well.

The man’s hand trembled, trying to reach for his own. Father François took it. He had experienced the remarkable strength of newborn babes and felt a similar pressure on his fingers. The priest bent low to the old man’s lips.

He ended his confession as he had begun. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Then winked.

Father François gave him absolution. He offered the forgiveness of his Lord, although he knew that his own heart lacked that purity, that love. He administered the last rites, and the man’s eyelids quivered, first one, then the other, as though each moment required a fight.

The priest touched the old mayor before he left, surprised by the love within him that sprang for a political foe. Not a great and all-encompassing love, perhaps, yet love, mysterious and corroded, nonetheless. That final wink had conveyed great spirit. He left Houde in peace.

Momentarily, a nurse looked in on him, and fluffed his pillow and adjusted his pyjamas. Then she left the room as well, to allow him to sleep, perhaps to die.

Anik waited for several minutes before she crawled out from the closet, where she had crouched down during the commotion with the sheets. She looked at the old mayor dying. His breath gurgling. Then she got to her feet, opened the door, and walked past everyone and departed the house. A block away, well past the reporters who were calling to her, she began to run.

Tears flew off her cheeks like rain. Then they were gone, and she ran with fury only.

One hundred thousand people turned out for Camillien Houde’s funeral procession. Anik Clément declined to attend. Unable to comprehend the child’s insistence on remaining home, her mother assumed that her grief was too confusing, perhaps reminiscent of her father’s death. In some ways, she supposed, Anik was losing a second dad. Carole attended on her own, and was admitted to the funeral service itself. On the streets, it seemed that the entire city had turned out, sixteen people deep as the coffin drove by, the dignitaries in their finery, the working people in their scuffed shoes and proud, shabby jackets, all the men in hats, the women with their dark bonnets on and so many in black dresses as though they themselves had lost a spouse. The people believed that Montreal had lost a measure of its soul, and a sadness hung upon the city. An era was passing. Goodbye to the all-night clubs, to the dancing ladies, to the girls in fancy lace, and goodbye to the gambling dens where a man might dream of riches and taste the bitterness of further demise. Goodbye to the music palaces and the comedians and the farcical courts of law, where substitute madams paid paltry fines to judges they’d be seeing later in their chambers. Goodbye to the good times, goodbye to the wars and famines, goodbye to the old, weary days, and goodbye to Camillien Houde, the rascal. Goodbye to his comic voice and his broad smile, for he had been a man who could lift a people’s spirits even as he confounded them with his logic. He could make a man laugh while picking his pocket. He was a wise old cuss. One of the boys. A grand man and a straw man. Goodbye to all that.

The city mourned.

Four days after the funeral a gentleman showed up at Carole Clément’s house carrying a terrier puppy. A last gift from the old mayor. Anik took the animal into her arms and had her face licked, but she did not smile, did not laugh. She hugged the little critter, though, and dashed him through to her room.

Odd behaviour, her mother thought. Yet these were confusing, sad times in a young girl’s life.