CHAPTER 21
1968–69
CONSTABLE éMILE CINQ-MARS NEEDED TO TRAVEL BACK in time to retrace the events of the night an antique dagger was stolen from its safe. He arranged to speak to the investigating officer on the scene, Detective—now Precinct Captain—Andrew Sloan.
“Touton won’t let it go, will he?” Sloan muttered, shaking his head.
A blustery day.
Citing cabin fever, the sixty-year-old detective chose to conduct the interview outdoors. He and Cinq-Mars strolled down to the canal locks at Ste. Anne de Bellevue, where small craft could negotiate the roiling junction of two rivers. At intervals, pedestrians were permitted to cross on the locks’ gates to a small island park, and the two men traversed the walkway and gazed out at the rapids.
“Sometimes I forget that Montreal’s an island,” Cinq-Mars mentioned.
“Tell me about it,” Sloan grunted. “I used to love it. The stinking city. You wake up in the morning, sniff the night on your clothes. Puke an asshole upchucked down your cuffs. Smell a perpetrator’s garlic breath on your shirt. I craved clean air. Now I live off island, in the country. But you can’t win in this life. Mornings, I smell pig manure, or some shit like that.”
Cinq-Mars smiled, remembering those rural days himself. His own heart remained saddened. At least working a murder case gave him something more to do than mope over losing his girlfriend.
“I live close to pasture. Soon, I’ll pension off. It won’t be a big change.”
“You put in hard time downtown. You must’ve seen some things.”
“Curl your hair. I still go to the barber twice a month to straighten mine out.”
Only wisps of hair remained on top, the sides white. His skin possessed a ruddy complexion, toughened by wind and sun, as if he’d been a fisherman or farmer throughout his life. Capillaries lay visible and broken across his rosy cheeks.
Cinq-Mars appreciated the intimacy of the encounter. Sloan was no longer the hard-assed gumshoe his reputation had painted him to be. These days, he administered a small detachment. If a few young fellows came into town and drank too much, got into a brawl with knives, that would be his worst shift of the year. Better than the days when it would’ve been a typical start to any evening.
“I’ve heard stories.” The visiting cop rested his forearms upon a security bar above a steep embankment and watched the river flow. “A lot’s changed since then.”
Sloan put his hands in his trench coat and made it flap, warding off a chill. “What can I do for you, Detective? Since we’re talking about the good old days.”
“I’m not a detective, sir. I’m working for Captain Touton, and he’s got me busting my ass on my days off. That’s why I’m in civvies.”
“For Armand, being a cop is like being a priest. You never take the crucifix off your neck.”
“I’ve learned that. As I said, I’m looking into the murders of Roger Clément and the coroner, Claude Racine. Way back when.”
“Armand’s favourite hobby.” He decided to continue walking along the stone barricade that separated them from the river. Cinq-Mars ambled along after him.
“You were the first detective on the scene. How did you get called up to the hockey offices?”
“How? I don’t know. Somebody sent me a telegram.”
“Nobody was allowed in the building. So how did anybody find out there’d been a robbery?”
Sloan stopped walking, apparently lost in thought. “Detective, I’m not sure anybody has asked that question before.” He resumed his strolling.
“I’m not a detective,” Cinq-Mars reminded him again. “But it sounds good when you say it.”
“Sorry. I’ll call you Émile, since this is your day off. Jesus. How did I get called?” The captain stopped walking to pull his thoughts together. “Armand had given us sectors. He was expecting trouble. We all were. Senior detectives were each given a sector of downtown to watchdog. Not for the riot, so much. For any major crimes that occurred while the riot was going on, if one broke out. I remember now, it’s coming back to me.”
Cinq-Mars recalled listening to stories of the big city riot over the radio. The city had seemed so far away then, in flames. “So the Sun Life was empty.”
“That was our understanding. We went to the company and said, ‘Look, we can’t protect the NHL offices unless we seal the building.’ They were already shaking in their shoes, those guys, the bosses. If they could’ve evicted the National Hockey League at that point, they would’ve. So they cooperated.”
“This is all before the riot?”
“Yeah. We knew it was coming. The mayor’s office decided that if we planned too much, it would be like inviting the riot, in a way. Armand had a sense though. He was more worried than I’d seen him. He knew what guys were saying in the taverns. Maybe he got some orders, but mostly he made his own plans, on the quiet.”
“You admire him,” Cinq-Mars noted.
Grudgingly, the older cop nodded. “I stood up to him more than anybody. Maybe I did it at first because I was ticked off. Here’s this young guy passing me by—the first time it happens, it’s hard to take—but then I kept on doing it because I found out that he appreciated the input. He didn’t want only a squad of yes-men around him.” They had reached the tip of the small island, and now turned and began to walk back along the inner shore, towards the canal. “On some jobs, he’d cut me out of things. He wanted guys who’d do what they were told and not say a fucking word. Other jobs, he wanted me around, because he needed somebody who might make him think twice. He kept himself on the ball that way.”
Cinq-Mars was enjoying the nostalgic talk. Yet he had learned lessons that Armand Touton had imparted—convoluted conversations were fine, they helped oil the tongue, but his job required that he maintain the thread and guide the speaker back to the main point.
“What’s your recollection on the sequence of events that night?”
“It starts at Sun Life. The vault had an alarm on it. A local alarm would’ve rung in the hallways for nobody to hear, but there was also a remote. Downstairs, security guards saw the alarm go off on their board. Then it went dead, a sign that the line had been cut.”
“So they went upstairs,” Cinq-Mars surmised.
“Our guys wouldn’t let them. That caused a brouhaha, let me tell you. I got a call over my two-way, so I went over to intercede. To keep everybody happy, I went upstairs with security tagging along.”
“And?” The east gate was releasing water. A pair of small powerboats inside the lock, one a beautiful wooden Chris-Craft, gently lowered from the level of the Ottawa River to that of the St. Lawrence.
“We saw what we saw. The door to the NHL office smashed in. We were pretty shocked to see the safe blown open. We saw the busted case where the Cartier Dagger used to be, and it’s a good thing security was around, because they told me the importance of what was missing.”
“You didn’t know about the knife before that?”
“Why would I? I thought it was a French thing, but Armand, when I told him, he didn’t know about it, either. I guess you had to be a buff.”
Cinq-Mars looked at him quizzically.
“Like a history buff.”
Voices of the boaters arose from low in the lock, chatting away amiably.
“So, if you’re inside Sun Life, how did the murder in the park come to your attention?”
“A citizen—a student, I believe—spotted a man on the ground, and other men abusing him. Cops were hanging around Sun Life, so the witness ran up to them. But the cops weren’t allowed to leave their posts. We lost an opportunity there. Finally, a uniform checked things out, and that’s when the killers, assuming they were the killers, fled. Then things got interesting.”
“Only then?” Cinq-Mars said.
“I was called over. I was busy but it was my sector. I looked at the dead guy in the park, and had a thought, you know? So I asked a security guard what the stolen dagger looked like. He’d seen it on display. When he told me, my bowels felt loose. This is how come there’s no doubt about what scene I encountered first—because I brought the guard from Sun Life back across the street to identify the knife, which he did, and then he shocked the hell out of me, because he identified the dead man, too.”
A surprise. “How?”
“Said he was a hockey player, or used to be. The guard was a fan. He recognized him.” An expression crossed the younger cop’s face that Captain Sloan inquired about. “What’s wrong with that?”
Cinq-Mars gestured with his chin. “Roger Clément had been a hockey player, but not for almost twenty years. He’d changed over that time. Plus, he was dead, and you were outside at night in bad weather. People don’t look so good when they’re dead, and they’re never easy to recognize in the dark.”
Sloan couldn’t dispute the logic. “What’re you saying? The guard knew him?”
“Could’ve been an inside job right from the get-go.”
“Naw, they came down from the roof. They busted in through the window.”
“My job is to look at every aspect and see if anything was missed. You just told me that the guard might’ve known Roger Clément. I’ve been up on the roof of the Sun Life—”
“You’ve been on the fucking roof?”
“I don’t think they went down from there. I think they just made it look that way so nobody would think it was an inside job.”
“We didn’t think along those lines.”
“I’m not saying it happened that way. But I’ve been looking at it from a certain angle, and then you tell me about the guard. It starts to make sense.”
Sloan shook his head, impressed with the new guy’s smarts. Their route had brought them back to the point where they’d cross the canal again, but the lock was opening and they’d have to wait for the procedure to conclude.
“You’ll have to speak to that guard. No way will I remember his name.”
“He’s dead.”
Sloan took a step back to eye his colleague. “How do you know that? From what I told you, you don’t even know who he is.”
Cinq-Mars shrugged. He was showing off a little, but the man was a captain and he was an ambitious cop in only his second year on the force. “I’m going over the whole trail. I reinterviewed every guard who’d been on duty that night. Captain Touton has those records. He interviewed them all back then, so I knew which one had gone out to the park with you, and he’s dead.”
“Touton didn’t catch this, about the recognition thing?”
“Afraid not. But just because somebody recognized somebody, doesn’t mean they were working together. That’s only a guess on my part.”
“You asked me questions you already know the answers to. Jesus.”
“Everything requires corroboration. You know that. I want the facts lined up. I’m really looking to get a feel, you know? As to how things were back then.”
“I know cops. You want to spike some guy’s ass on a lamppost, Émile. Well, I’m glad my memory didn’t fail me. You got what you came here for.”
“I appreciate the talk, Captain.”
They watched the boats depart the lock. The crews were chilly, but the life seemed idyllic.
“Someday it happens,” Sloan said quietly, without being prompted. “You’re looking at sixty, see retirement ahead. You never pictured yourself sitting in a goddamn shack on a windy fucking field on a grey fucking day by the side of a fucking highway nobody drives down much anymore that smells of ripe pig stink. The wind howls right through the cracks of your shack, feels like it’s through your bones. You never knew that this is what you wanted, but you must’ve, because this is what you got. This is what you dreamed of. Clean air, minus the stink. But no city punks in gold chains, no creeps in Mercedes fucking Benzes. That’s beautiful. Retirement. Yippee. Nothing to fucking do except dream of slaughtering pigs. Or pig farmers. I don’t wish it on you, kid, but there it is. Good luck with your life.”
Cinq-Mars wasn’t sure what to say. “You’re not retired yet,” he reminded him.
“Six weeks. Hey, if you ever want to come out to my place and bust my balls, feel free. I’ll appreciate the diversion.” The man held out his hand, indicating that they were separating early. “I’m staying out awhile, breathe the air. You can find your own way back.”
Cinq-Mars eyed him closely. He didn’t look bad at all. All he had to go on was the man’s temperament. “Cancer?” he asked.
“Fucking prostate. Hey, you’re some detective.”
They shook, and when the gates of the lock closed again, Cinq-Mars walked across, then drove back to the city. Over the car radio he heard news of a bombing. The details were still coming in. A terrorist cell of the FLQ—Le Front de libération du Québec—was mounting a new campaign and threatening to become more violent. They’d been blowing up mailboxes. This time, a shoe store. With somebody in it.
Anik stirred. Roused herself sleepily.
Afternoon liaisons were often the best.
He’d be wired. She’d be sultry. Together, they’d be naughty.
The apartment belonged to neither of them. René had borrowed a key. That alone felt sexy—doing it in someone else’s place, in an unknown person’s bed. Another couple would come home to their room and probably think to change the sheets, yet echoes of her cries would continue to whisper in the walls, above the tinkle of her laughter and his wry, smoky chuckle. Knowing that he’d come from an important meeting, that another awaited, that felt sexy, too. She’d catch him on the evening news and calculate that two-and-a-half hours before her man stood before the phalanx of microphones he had knelt before her and kissed her thighs, moving to combat her desire with intimacy. The sex would linger over the airwaves, through her bones, her blood, her head, warming her desire again.
Did she love power? The thought vexed her from time to time. Maybe. That could be part of it. He was such a little guy after all, like a gnome—whenever she wanted to get his goat or take him down a peg she’d call him Napoleon. For a while her favourite had been “You stunted Napoleon,” which had evolved into “Well, if it isn’t Napoleon’s stunt double.” He never liked that one, so she stuck with it. And if she wanted to be objective about the overall picture, he was not good-looking, either. She’d say he smoked like a chimney, but what chimney smoked that much? Yet his head was always full of ideas and his body a chute of passion, and, as she got to know him better, a fester of doubts and frets also. He often experienced the weight of the nation on his shoulders, and always the weight of the enterprise. Was he making the right choices? Would they work? If they gained independence, would that work? What compromises would have to be negotiated, and how would the rest of Canada react, really? How would Trudeau counter his next move, and what would be his archrival’s next ploy? Could he win an election? Bourassa, the new premier, was a grasshopper of a man. Any thought that René couldn’t trounce him was inconceivable, yet his vision for the society was difficult to sell across the generations, difficult to project through each segment of the population. His people were inclined to be socialist, but his support, if he wanted to win, had to be broader than that, which meant compromise, and that meant disappointing the expectations of the faithful. He talked to Anik about these matters, and she gave back her counsel. She said he had to follow the pragmatic course. Victory would heal most wounds, she assured him, and he’d nod, he’d agree.
Anik herself hated that the right wingers were involved and carried so much clout within the party, men like Laurin and Parizeau, who were always a threat to René’s leadership and forever a pain in the butt. Creating a country was difficult labour, and it seemed most often that that was what they were doing, really, as they twisted and convulsed on borrowed beds, willing a country into being as other couples might lock together to create a child. She loved power, she had to admit it, but the thrill of revolution affected her more, the intoxicating imagination of it all, the sense of being on the cusp of history, of time, of causing the world to bend to your better judgments. So the two of them gyrated in a desire of limbs and blood-flow and irreconcilable lust to create a new land, afraid of success, fearful of failure.
Progress seemed minimal.
More problems supplanted any being resolved.
Still, they could take themselves to bed and believe they’d make it work, that here they could fabricate the new out of the furor of time and place and the long fortitude of their history. And she’d think, That’s why I’m sleeping with him. For when she was with him, it felt as though she could become an equal partner in creating a nation. When he was not around, that conviction floundered.
But oh, how he’d fume about Trudeau.
With Anik, more than to any other, he’d let his guard down and she’d see how he feared the man, how the prime minister intimidated him. René loved debate and discourse and adversarial confrontation. He was so adept at winning that in most contests he enjoyed the advantage of victory being a foregone conclusion. Observers waited for him to strike, and when the moment for his attack or his proper defence arrived, he’d be beautifully derisive or foul-mouthed, galvanized to his passionate core yet aided by a sense that he spoke out of the heart and suffering of his people. Admirers raved, delirious, forgetting points he may not have properly countered or contradictions of his own he had let drop. Yet he held no such advantage over Trudeau, whose freewheeling, off-the-cuff brilliance perfectly offset Lévesque’s folksy, foxy charm. Rather than holding the advantage of an anticipated victory, Lévesque could only debate Trudeau while expecting to lose. Anik could see it in his eyes. René had battled him too many times in too many smoky rooms back when they were friends not to twitch under that dire lack of confidence. As much as he might fret and pout and sneer there was not a bloody thing he could do about it.
René and Anik shared that secret between them, although it remained unspoken. All their grand plans might be for naught, as the breadth and wonder of their vision came affixed with paradox. Lévesque believed he could never defeat Trudeau, and if he could never defeat him, how could he expect to win? Anik had no answer. She could only hope to prop him up, hope that someday he might find his confidence. In that light, she had done her best to detract from Trudeau’s glow one time, explaining why the other man was so powerful and wielded such an intellectual aura and spiritual force. She told him, “He has the Cartier Dagger, you know.”
She had to explain to him how she knew.
They were in bed then, too. After she spoke, Lévesque placed his hands over his face and turned onto his back in an attitude of abject misery. In trying to demythologize Trudeau, she had inadvertently made him appear invincible. Lévesque writhed in physical agony. If Trudeau possessed the knife, it explained his swift, rather extraordinary ascent to power, not to mention his rampant popularity. What hope now for Napoleon’s stunt double? He was not only up against that scintillating intellect and high moral, near-religious, charismatic authority—that sun!—but now he was up against the neo-mythic power purported to be attached to those who possessed the dagger. What hope?
A quandary. Anyone who openly accused Trudeau of possessing the knife would be chastened by the slur of slander, dismissed for being petty and derided for believing in a paltry magic. Credibility lost would never be regained. He’d be lucky not to be laughed into extinction, and rightly so. Yet any man with sufficient superstitious tissue in his gullet to actually believe that the Cartier Dagger possessed mystical qualities that granted one person an advantage over others was doomed to self-defeat if he went up against the knife’s proprietor—and Lévesque guessed that that applied to him, too. He felt himself psychologically whipped.
“I’m sorry,” Anik said, trying to peel his hands off his face.
“I’m fucked,” he lamented.
Trudeau had been born rich, while Lévesque had been hatched poor. His foe was well educated and had travelled the world. Lévesque’s own learning was substandard, his travels routine. While Trudeau was brilliant, Lévesque was merely damn smart, full of quips and an arrogance worn as a thin disguise. Trudeau seduced more women than he did, although he didn’t do too badly. And Trudeau possessed the coveted dagger, whereas he had a knife at his throat, demanding that he deliver what he probably could not.
Now he stirred beside her, emerging from a post-coital nap dreamy-eyed and content, at least, with their shared time together. She kissed his forehead and drew his head down onto her shoulder as normally he might do with her. “Where are we?” he wondered.
“I don’t know. You better give the key back to the right person.” Above the bed’s headboard rose a wall of bare brick. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on a side wall stood crammed with books.
“Some writer’s pad,” Lévesque recalled. “Some hack. What time is it?”
“Sixty-five minutes to your next appointment. Senior citizens’ centre. Which means you can be late, as usual. Nobody will notice.”
On that news, he snuggled up closer to her. A hand idly came up under her breast, and he was leaning down to kiss the opposite nipple when the phone rang.
“Don’t bother.” He went for the nipple and she closed her eyes, thinking that, yes, she could go again. So could he. He didn’t have to be on for octogenarians. Most of them would only be there for the hors d’oeuvres anyway.
But the phone rang beyond the point when most callers would have quit, wrecking the couple’s mood. René answered angrily.
“What!”
“René. It’s me.” The man whose bed they were lying on.
“What’s up?” He listened a moment, then said, “Oh fuck.”
“What now?” Anik asked. His tone seemed ominous.
He hung up. “The fucking FLQ. They bombed a shoe store.”
“What? Nobody bombs a shoe store.”
“Nobody bombs mailboxes, either, except those pricks. They killed a salesgirl.”
“Oh my God.”
“She’s French. I don’t know if that makes it any worse. But she’s French.”
“Those damn fools.”
He put his hands over his eyes and rubbed his temples with his thumbs. In opting for independence, in keeping the issue on the front burner, he ran the risk of igniting passions. A few might scatter off beyond his control. This was supposed to be his job, to pull sentiment into one constructive enterprise, but could that be wholly possible? Knowing that he wasn’t to blame made it no easier.
“I better go,” he said. “The press will be hunting me down. I should make myself findable.”
She pulled his hands off his face. “The bombers. They’re attacking Trudeau. It’s not your fault.”
Lévesque nodded, sighed, indicated that he understood. Yet, while dressing, he mentioned, “Apparently, she was young. The salesgirl.” He shrugged, and felt to add, “Like you.”
Dark, this street she travelled, poorly illuminated by street lamps. People dozed in their beds, although a few lazed before the telltale blue glow of televisions. Sporadic insomniacs persevered. Anik was listening to her steps, taking an arcane pleasure in the rhythm of her heels and toes upon the pavement. She heard a car drive up behind her. Her skin tingled, a premonition of fear. She didn’t want to look. Young guys, probably, checking out her ass, too dim or too dumb to do more than stare before uttering some shrill remark as they sped off into the night, tires squealing, not knowing that their laughter failed to conceal a pathetic fright. To look back would only provoke them, so she marched on.
The car continued behind her.
This could be trouble. She should look at the driver. Confront her demons.
Anik shot him a glance.
A single driver. Not young. Middle-aged.
The car sped up, then slowed to draw alongside her. Parking was permitted on the opposite side of the street only, so the vehicle could hug the curb here, stay close.
She bent down as she walked. Looked in. Let her anger show.
Behind the steering wheel, Armand Touton smiled at her.
She stooped to peer through the open window on the passenger’s side as he came to a stop. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. Relieved, yet mystified. Angry now for a different reason. At least she wouldn’t have to battle a pervert.
“What does it look like?”
“You’re following me?”
“I’m keeping the streets safe,” Touton declared. “Hop in. I’ll give you a lift.”
Intuitively, she knew that the meeting was no accident, and although she was content to be walking, and the night was warm and quiet, she also knew that something was up. Opening the door, she crawled into the vehicle, bumping her knee against the police radio, then slammed the door shut behind her. Like a little girl, she slouched down in the seat. She had half a mind to kick her shoes off and stick her bare feet out the window.
“What’s up?”
“You heard about the shoe store?”
She nodded. “It’s terrible about the girl.”
“We checked her out—the victim. Nothing political in her life. She’s an innocent. Dead, blown apart, for what? I don’t know how these guys justify that.”
“I don’t either,” Anik murmured. But she did know. She’d overheard the discussions often. Innocents? There are no innocents. No one had the right to be a bystander. If you weren’t with the movement, or the cause, or the insurrection, you were against it. Innocence was merely a bourgeois disguise to protect the culpable. We’re all damned for our complicity. Condemned by the conceit of being born. She’d heard similar talk in bars and at house parties and on balconies in the city while holding a beer in one hand, passing a joint with the other. But she’d not repeat any of it to Touton. He was right. Only a damned fool or a butcher could justify killing a shopkeeper, no matter the cause.
“Mailboxes are bad enough. Nobody gets hurt from that. Except it’s not true. A postman finds a bomb, the army sends an expert to defuse it—boom! It goes off in his hands.”
Faint streetlights shone through the mirrored image of his face imprinted on the windshield.
“Can you imagine that? In his hands. Boom.”
She didn’t want to imagine it. A lot of people made fun of the FLQ planting bombs in mailboxes. So Canadian—polite bombers. They didn’t want to kill people, just blow up pieces of paper, and bills, to make a point. But that was a better idea than killing people, so why did people make fun? Weren’t they proving that they were not mad killers, but revolutionaries exploding an effective statement into the lives of citizens, into the government’s fearful mind? Their point? The very existence of the federal government, of federal mail, was sufficient to set them off.
Boom! Confetti all over the ground. Media coverage across the land.
But she knew what was coming.
“Mailboxes. Fine. Nobody gets hurt, except a soldier, but who gives a flying fart about him? His family? But who thinks about that? Someday, maybe a cop gets it. What’s one soldier, more or less? One less cop? Someday, a poor mailman. Shit. Never mind that the dead guys are fathers—don’t think twice about that, it serves them right for being in the army or the police or, heaven help them, the post office. Isn’t that what they say?”
“What who says?”
“People who plant these bombs.”
“You think I know who plants these bombs?”
Touton looked at her. “It’s inevitable, the people you hang out with. I’m going to drive you somewhere, Anik. I want to show you something tonight you haven’t seen before.”
“I don’t know any bombers.”
“I’m not saying you’re close to them. You may not know that you know them. But where you go, the rooms you’re in, the bars, you’ve shared the same space with them. I’ll guarantee you one thing.”
“What?” She was feeling grumpy.
“They know you.”
He took her down to the docks.
The shock of the grain elevators, defiant, tall in the moonlight, felt moody and forbidding. Bare lamps shone upon dark patches of pavement. Between widely dispersed lights, large, looming shadows deterred any errant trespasser, as if only marauders and deviants lurked here, while nearby, policemen pounded the noses of recalcitrant types. Not an ill-founded impression, as the docks remained home to rogues, and all manner of malfeasance had occurred here. And yet, from night to night, from moment to moment, a sense of industrial slumber remained more prevalent, as the thrum and cough of machines circulated air and fluids, as through the heart and lungs of a wheezing beast.
They breathed the still, expectant air.
The car’s tires thumped across the wooden crossings of railway tracks, then back onto paved road and a parking lot, cracked and lumpy from the heaves of winter frosts, intermittently patched but never properly repaired. The ride was jarring, and Anik held one hand against the ceiling of the car’s roof to keep herself pressed down into her seat. Touton slowed over a particularly coarse section of road—they might as well have been crossing a field—then turned around the corner of a shed and travelled towards the river’s edge. He drove out onto a pier above the St. Lawrence, the water swift and confused below them in a boil of eddies and whirlpools. He stopped and shut the engine down.
In the ensuing quiet the motor made small clicking sounds as it cooled.
Time passed in the afterglow of that near-silence by the whoosh of river.
Anik asked, “Why are we here?”
“I drove your dad down here. Right to this spot. The first time we met.”
“How come?”
Touton was gazing at her. From the distant lights along a shed’s roofline, and the moon’s glow reflecting on the windshield, she could make out his expression.
“I asked him to open the door,” he told her. “I had the car parked right on the edge. Right over the river. I asked him to open the door and step right out.”
“He wouldn’t do that.” She was feeling nervous. She knew that Touton had something to say outside the limits of her knowledge. Something about her dad.
“I pointed my pistol at his kneecap. He opened the door.”
She waited, listening to the river. She swallowed. “He really believed you’d shoot him?”
“He knew I would. I made him get out. I made him hang onto the open door while he dangled above the river. I wasn’t going to let him back in the car. I didn’t care how many days it took. He could either fall in the river—”
“My dad couldn’t swim,” Anik recalled.
“So he told me. He could either fall into the river—”
“—and drown.”
“—and drown—or he could come work for me.”
She had to mull that through. She felt so sad for her dad being put in that position. She wished he was still alive so that she could run into his arms, weeping, and he could hug her, and she could hug him right back.
“You’re a bastard, Captain Touton,” she said quietly.
“I am,” he agreed. “I never said otherwise and your dad knew it, too. Him and me, we were honest that way. But he understood me, your dad. I had a job to do.”
The story struck her as dark and disquieting. “You’re telling me my dad was a stool pigeon.”
“I never call him that. You won’t hear it out of my mouth. I’m saying your dad was a hero. All he cared about in this world was his wife and daughter. Everything else and everybody else, including me—including mayors and premiers, because he worked for them all—we could all go fly a kite in an electrical storm while standing in a puddle.”
Touton paused, and tapped the steering wheel a moment as though repeating Morse code from beyond the grave.
“But his family meant everything to him. So he worked for me, yeah, and he told me things that helped me in my job, but he didn’t do that because he was so afraid of falling in a river. He would’ve drowned if it wasn’t for you and your mom. He didn’t want to leave you two alone. But another reason he worked for me so well, is because he wanted to do good. He didn’t want his daughter growing up to find out that her old man was only a thug. He wanted her to grow up and find out that he worked on the side of the law, too, that he was trying to do something good in his life, with the cards he’d been dealt.”
Touton breathed easily and thought about lighting up a smoke, except that he only smoked other people’s. When they adopted their daughter, his wife wanted him to promise to never smoke again, but during that negotiation they settled on him refusing to buy another pack for himself.
“I guess now’s the time,” he told Anik, “for you to find that out. Your dad, he was proud of what he did, so don’t call him no stool pigeon. If I was you, I’d call him a hero. A man who did a tough job really well.”
Anik chose to climb out of the car. She walked down the pier a short distance, and hugged herself against the slight chill in the breeze. Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out her cigarettes. That brought Captain Touton over. He accepted her offer and pulled out a lighter to stoke both smokes.
“I should quit,” she said.
“We both should,” he said.
They stared out at the river surging below them. In daylight, pleasure boats took tourists on wild rides through the swirling swift currents. Anik had never been down to this spot and seen this view of the islands, the remnants of the World’s Fair of 1967, whose theme had been “Man and His World.” She stepped away from Touton to stand on the lip of the pier, looking straight down into the fleet river.
“Maybe I’ll jump,” she said. She thought, Man and his world.
“I don’t advise it.”
“It’ll be on your head, for what you did to my father.”
“I gave your father what he wanted—good work to do in life.”
“I bet.”
“It looks cold and fast and deep, doesn’t it? But it’s colder and faster and deeper than it looks.”
She took a step back, still keeping one foot on the rail.
“You would know,” she told him. “You’ve seen men wash away from here.”
“Maybe I have,” he said.
“What do you want from me?” she asked. “Spit it out.”
“Come work for me,” he said.
“What? As your stoolie?”
“I don’t ever use that word for good people doing good work—the right work.”
“Just like my dad, huh? Is that what you’re thinking?”
Touton shrugged. He inhaled smoke and held it deep in his lungs, then breathed out. “He did good work, your dad. That’s one thing.”
“He made sure I knew how to swim, you know.”
“Did he?”
“He didn’t want me to have the same weakness as him. He was afraid of the water. I can swim. I can jump in here with an even chance of swimming ashore somewhere downstream.”
“Sorel,” Touton said.
“What?” She knew the town, sixty miles downriver.
“That’s where most bodies wash up, the ones that get tossed in from here.”
“I’ll be swimming. I got an even chance.”
“You don’t want to jump,” he said.
“I don’t want to be your stoolie, either.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Anik. I’m not threatening you. This is a friendly conversation. I want to convince you that you can do something very positive with your life, that’s all.”
“It’ll be symbolic. My jumping. I’ll do it for my dad.”
“That’ll do no good.”
“I’m not here just to please you, Captain Touton.”
“Your dad wasn’t either. But he did good work for me.”
She stayed quiet awhile, looking downstream, following the movements of the current in the sporadic light.
“Anik?” Touton asked.
Finished with her smoke, she flicked the butt into the water. She watched the ember fall the long way down, to be extinguished on a wave.
“I don’t know any bombers,” she said.
“You might. Either you know them, or you know someone who knows them, or you know someone who knows someone who knows them. They can’t be any farther away from you than that.”
She nodded, as though to concede that that was likely. The city wasn’t so big, the huddle of radicals in the various political movements wasn’t that extensive.
“I know people who know people. But the people I know are my friends. Who trust me. They know I’d never sell them out. I don’t think my dad was selling out his friends. Thieves and punks, guys who worked with him, maybe. But not his friends. Besides, my star has fallen in radical circles. Lately, I’ve been hanging out in different company.”
He knew.
She turned, pulled by his silence.
“Are you trying to tell me that you want me to spy on René?”
Touton shook his head. “He’s not a bomber,” he said.
“No,” Anik emphasized, “he’s not.”
“I understand what you’re saying. You associate with the establishment now. But Anik, listen to me. Watch what you say when you’re with him.”
“Excuse me?”
Touton had smoked his cigarette down a lot lower than she had, and now tossed it into the St. Lawrence as well. Its light was extinguished long before it hit the water. Wearing a sports jacket, he hiked the collar up around his neck and also hugged himself. The river’s cool night air was giving him a chill, too, and he wished she’d get back in the car.
“Why does Mr. Lévesque always take you to other people’s apartments?”
Before she could answer that, she had to process the bulletin that Touton knew more about her private life than she revealed to anyone. She didn’t go around advertising that she was sleeping with the politician, but her closest friends and her mother knew. She never told anyone about the clandestine meetings in strangers’ bedrooms. The only people who knew about that part were the strangers who donated their homes, but few among them, if any, knew her.
“He lives in Quebec City,” she answered. “He has an apartment here, that’s true, but it’s always full of people coming by. Journalists are always at the door. We go to other people’s places because it’s private.”
Touton was shaking his head.
“What? You don’t believe me? You think he has another woman at his place?” She had thought that herself, so the idea was not outrageous.
“Maybe he does, but I don’t care. Lévesque doesn’t take you home because he suspects that his own bedroom might be bugged. He knows it’s a possibility.”
“By you?”
“Why should I care about him? The RCMP, different story. The federal government sees him as a separatist, a subversive, so they’ll try to bug his conversations. Your friend René knows that.”
She would have suspected as much herself. No big deal.
“What he doesn’t know,” Touton continued, “is that sometimes he uses an apartment that was offered by someone working for the Mounties. Such as the one you were at today when he got the call about the bomb.”
Anik spun, her mouth ajar. Aghast.
“That’s why I’m saying, be careful what you say around him. Especially when you think you’re alone in somebody’s apartment.”
“Mounties, you said?”
“I have friends who are Mounties. Sometimes I have access.”
She quickly reviewed what others might have overheard. She was not concerned about sensitive political discussions—there’d be nothing new in those talks for curious ears—but she was fearful that the sounds of their intimacy had compromised her privacy. “Oh God,” she said, thinking of a few moments during lovemaking. “Oh God.”
Touton stepped closer to her, and briefly touched her shoulder.
“You see, it works both ways. I can be helpful to you, too.”
She let him tug her back towards the car.
They got in.
Anik felt numb, displaced.
Touton started the engine, and as they moved away from the pier, the headlights scanned the walls of facing sheds. They saw two men moving slowly in tandem, not looking their way. “I should probably arrest them for trespassing,” the cop muttered idly to himself.
“Go ahead,” Anik told him. “I could use the company.”
They smiled at each other, culling some small pleasure from their brief aside, then Anik came back to reality and let her face drop into her hands. The knowledge of what she’d just learned burned through her.
“Come on,” Touton encouraged. “It’s not that bad.”
“No? Then how come I want to go back and jump in the river?”
Touton dropped Anik off at her mother’s house.
As she was climbing out of the car, he said, “Anik, do me one favour? Talk to your mom.”
She got out and closed the door, then hunched down and looked at him through the open window. “You want me … to talk to my mom … about what we talked about? Why?” Of all the matters he’d discussed with her that night, this was the most puzzling.
“Talk to her, all right?”
She declined to give her consent even to that, or to anything else, and slowly stepped across the sidewalk, stooping to open the latch on the low metal gate to her home. Knowing she was coming, Ranger was inside, frantically scratching at the door. “Sic him,” she wanted to say, but it would be no use. He wasn’t that kind of dog, and would only run up and deliriously lick Touton’s face.
Ranger was yapping in the backyard while her mother sewed.
Anik Clément didn’t awaken until 11 A.M., when she needed to rush to work. Three days a week, she pitched in at a restaurant to help quell the noon rush. She drank her morning coffee and munched on a toasted bagel, then told her mom about her night. As she got to the part where Touton had taken her down to the docks, her mom stopped the machine.
Touton wanted them to talk, she told her mother. “Why, Mom? I don’t get it.”
Carole went to the fridge and pulled out a beer.
Anik watched her pour the contents into a tall glass.
“Mom, it’s not even noon.”
Carole took a few swallows anyway. “Captain Touton wants you to know that you come from a family of liars.” Her mother’s tone felt ominous, and Anik waited, scared and hushed. “Your father, Anik, hasn’t been the only police informant in this household.”
Carole drank a little more, then began to tell her daughter stories. Anik knew she wouldn’t be going to work that day. But that was okay, because she wouldn’t need to lie when she called in sick.
Problems cropped up all through his schedule, and the prime minister was giving his office secretary fits by not allowing her to fully rearrange matters to her liking. A bomb going off in a store in Montreal the day before had that effect. Attention paid to the aftermath required cancellations and adjustments.
“We should put back your 11:15,” she advised him. A handsome woman in her sixties, she was capable of tangling with his advisors, most of whom were male, and holding her own against their bullying. Although the PM had an assistant who was her superior, she often took charge. “Since the gentleman is travelling, we might fit him in at four, if you come back from the House on time for a change.”
Not remembering who the 11:15 might be, Pierre Trudeau cheated a glance at the daily outline on his desk.
“He’s scheduled for forty-five minutes, Prime Minister. You’ll agree that that’s out of the question. Under the circumstances, he’ll understand were we to make that twenty-five, which is still being extreme, sir. I’d recommend ten.”
“Leave it as it is.”
“Sir, we just—”
“The slot and the length of time. I’ll see him.”
She did not exactly leave the office in a huff, yet whenever the prime minister declined to listen to basic reason, the heels of her shoes managed to thud more loudly on the thick, plush carpet, then echo more sharply as she walked across bare wood. An amazing skill, Trudeau believed. One that never failed to make him smile. What could he say? No explanation was possible concerning his 11:15.
When the time came, he rose to greet his new guest, coming out from behind the majesty of the prime minister’s desk. “Father François, how’re you doing? It’s good to see you again.”
“I’m fine, fine. Good to see you, Mr. Prime Minister. Kind of you to find the time. Especially, I would say, with all that’s going on.”
The secretary’s chin rose in agreement as she closed the door.
Trudeau bobbed his chin to indicate that the priest, who had arrived in his cassock, should be seated. He did not return to the far side of his desk, but joined him in the second chair in front of it, all smiles and warmth.
Yet he said, “Sadly, Father, the timing for our meeting is inopportune. I was hoping we’d have pleasant topics to discuss. I even planned to take you to lunch. We’ll have to postpone that, I’m sorry to say. I’ve rebooked. I know how you enjoy good food.”
“You never resist poking fun, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Not at all. A serious talk instead. Tell me, what’s the word on the street, among your radical pals?”
“My radical pals,” the priest repeated, and smiled slightly.
“Also, among the clergy, if you know any. I’ve never had the impression that you communicate with priests, though. What news, Father?”
Father François settled into the comfort of the guest chair and declared, “Thanks, Pierre, for asking. I’m fine. How have you been?”
With his hands on the arms of his chair, Trudeau put his head back and laughed. “Am I so rude? Are you my priest now, Father? Have you come to take the measure of my soul?”
“I may not be your priest, Mr. Prime Minister, but I am a priest, and we’re old friends. An odd pairing, perhaps, but we’ve been through some times together.”
“True enough,” Trudeau concurred. “You’re astute to call me on my lack of manners. Let’s begin again. I shall offer you coffee. I’d like one myself, actually.”
“In the old days, when we were putting together an issue of Cité Libre, we used to make it ourselves.”
“Before we grow too nostalgic, let’s remember that the coffee we made tasted like mouthwash.”
He laughed. “A couple of times, someone snapped pictures, and it seemed that every time they did I was holding a fist to my esophagus and wincing in pain. I think we considered it necessary—bad coffee for the intelligentsia. Somehow, it seemed appropriate. I bet the coffee in the prime minister’s office is outstanding, and I’d love a cup, thanks.”
Trudeau called through on the intercom to have it done. While they waited, the conversation turned to casual matters—who had been marrying whom, who was being hounded by scandal. The two were no longer young men with ambitions and moral authority over their elders. Both of them were now weighted by their decisions, which often could never be delineated as right or as wrong, only as being somewhat beneficial or not yet fully conceived. After the coffee had arrived and they were alone again, feeling more comfortable with each other amid the quaint trappings of power in which they found themselves, Father François chose to reply to the prime minister’s initial query.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” he said, for even their long-term friendship could not override the aura of power associated with this room, nor dismiss the importance of the position, “the times are not so good. The word on the street is worrisome. More and more, ordinary men are expressing a willingness to acquiesce to the violence. ‘Justice’ is a word bandied about these days to excuse any crime, even the brutal death of a shopkeeper.”
“Where’s the justice in that?”
“Sir, I’m not the radical I may once have thought myself to be. I cannot find a speck of justice in that. Violence begets violence, love begets love—all contrary positions I find wanting.”
Trudeau nodded, smiled a little and offered that telltale twinkle in his eye.
So invited, Father François inquired what he was thinking.
“I heard,” Trudeau confided, “that you’ve come under the influence of hippies and peaceniks.”
Father François did not take the remark as an insult, and smiled also. “So have you, in your own way, Mr. Prime Minister. I don’t think Trudeaumania would have occurred if the world hadn’t first gone half-cocked over the Beatles. If we didn’t have love-ins and sit-ins and Martin Luther King, we wouldn’t have Pierre Elliott Trudeau wearing a carnation in his lapel and seducing a nation. If there’s a man alive who has harnessed flower power, Mr. Prime Minister, that man is you.”
Trudeau deflected the comment, for whether the priest’s statement was meant to be complimentary or derogatory was difficult to ascertain. He turned his head and pursed his lips knowingly and permitted his eyebrows to dip and rise. His contorted expression scurried around, mouth and cheeks a busy potpourri of nonchalant opinion and indecipherable emotion that flummoxed his adversaries while titillating his friends. Unlike anyone in politics, he could win an argument—or bring to conclusion a great debate—merely by making a face.
“I appreciate the change, Father, that’s all I mean to say. You’re not siding with the bombers. In the old days, you might have.”
“You, too.”
Trudeau wasn’t going to accept that. He pulled a face again, but this time he was more direct with his comeback. “People might have thought so, I’ll grant you. But I’ve never sided with force over logic. Not ever.”
With a nod, the priest conceded the point and backed down. “You’re right about me, though. When I was younger, with revolution in the air—or at least, in the smoky air of our lofts and backrooms—violent upheaval seemed an inevitable adjunct to history. Now, it might still seem inevitable, but I can honestly say that I know the process to be a relic of history, one that should never have been allowed to escape the stone age.”
“Yet, the man on the street is accommodating violence.”
“The man on the street is undecided. That in itself is worrisome. But the man on the picket line, the union man, the man in the tavern, the man whose politics are suddenly moving from prehistoric worship of a king, and when there was no longer a French king, the Church, that man is accommodating the idea of violence. I would say the romance of violence.”
“Why romance?”
“Kids today,” Father François opined, “not to sound like an old fart, but, I guess I am one now—kids today believe that victory can be won through violence. Mao is telling them so, and some are listening.”
“Victory,” Trudeau scoffed. “We create new victories every day. As I said a while ago—the press loved this one—the universe is unfolding as it should.”
“The flower child in you, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Or the priest in me. Yet it’s true. We don’t hold the future as a vision in our heads, we create the future through our daily lives, one day and one idea at a time.”
“Some more so than others,” Father François said.
Trudeau looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Some of us are able to create the future a day and an idea at a time more than others are able to do.”
The prime minister leaned forward a touch, placing his palms down on the narrow armrests. “We’ve arrived at the nature of your grievance.”
“No one enters this office without one.”
Although he had run this conversation through in his head countless times already, the priest took a moment to consider his words. “Mr. Prime Minister …”
“Yes, Father?”
“I’ve had a visit from an officer of the law.”
“I see. I presume you understand that the Mounties sweep my office on a regular basis, searching for listening devices.”
“I would presume as much. The Russians have spies everywhere, we’re told.”
“Never mind the Russians, although they’re bad enough. The Americans worry me the most. Well, actually, do you know who worries me the most?”
Father François mouthed the words, The Mounties?
“Right you are.”
The priest nodded. He understood. “I intend, sir, to be circumspect. You will recall an implement.”
“An implement,” Trudeau repeated. “You’re referring to a certain farmer’s shovel?”
“Correct. An officer of the law visited me with respect to a farmer’s shovel.”
“Why you?”
“I have known a variety of people who have shown an interest in the shovel over time. Including yourself.”
“Me?” the prime minister inquired.
“That’s correct, sir. Not that anyone, to my knowledge, is pointing that finger. Rumours persist, on the other hand.”
“Rumours. Yes.” The PM eased back in his chair. “Apparently, I’m homosexual now. Have you heard that one?”
“Khrushchev’s your lover, I’ve been told.”
They both laughed. “Nikita’s not really my type. Others say I have a thing for Fidel. At least no one’s put me in bed with Reagan.”
“I’m glad, sir. Some people, however, have said that you have a passion for that farmer’s shovel. That story goes around and around.”
“Nothing I can do about it. That thought’s been on the Ferris wheel. What’s new?”
“A new detective is on the case. A young man. He paid me a visit.”
“Fresh legs.”
“A fresh mind, I’d say, sir. A bright young lad. Also of interest, I’ve learned that the deceased …” Father François paused to allow the PM a moment to catch the reference.
“The first?” the PM asked.
“Yes, sir. Among his, ah, other talents, shall we say—”
“What shall we say?”
“He also worked for the police.”
The PM nodded, comprehending. “That explains the unending enthusiasm.”
“Correct, sir, among other contributing factors of which we’ve always known.”
“Such as?”
“It’s a big case. Monumental, I’d say, in a policeman’s career.”
“Of course. Yes.” Trudeau tapped his fingers on his blotter. “Father, this is why you’ve come?”
“I’ve corollary interests, shall we say. A pair. Like bookends.”
Trudeau waited. Father François knew the truth, knew for a fact while others were left merely to speculate. Not that the priest could prove anything—it would be one man’s word against another’s—and the cleric was also culpable, as the entire affair had begun as his idea. Still, he was in the know, and so both trust and suspicion necessarily passed between the two old friends.
“Although I’m a priest, you know me to be a modern man, Mr. Prime Minister. Yet all of us, modern men in particular, are complex, often contradictory. We’re an odd species. I’m an advocate for logic, philosophy, theology, symbolism and even, to a guarded degree, magic.”
“Magic,” echoed Trudeau.
“You have accomplished so much, Pierre. Your success has done nothing to diminish, in my mind, the power of an icon.” He shrugged. “I’m in the Catholic Church—”
“Many have wondered how, given your ideas.”
Father François smiled, in a way that suggested cunning rather than a happy moment. “The power of an icon,” he said. “I have never promised what I am unable to deliver, but I have always been attached to a certain understanding, a willingness on my part, an accessibility granted to me by God and through my associations.”
“An accessibility.” Speaking in code took a toll on the prime minister’s famous impatience.
“Here I am, after all, seated in this august room.”
Trudeau nodded. Smiled. “No one enters this office without a grievance, Father, and no man enters this room without wanting something from me.”
“Where will it go, sir, when your work here is done?”
“Our farmer’s shovel?” The prime minister gazed across at his visitor. He was not sure yet if he was being judged, courted or threatened, and he realized he might never know that answer. “You have a suggestion?”
“In the past—at the pertinent time, shall we say—the Church was undeserving, in my opinion, of a good man’s philanthropy. But the Church has been dissected since then. Torn down. Its prestige and authority and a goodly measure of its wealth—locally, at least—stripped away. We’re becoming a different Church. We have a long way to go, and our worldly destination will perhaps forever remain unknown, other than the gates of heaven. So I’m suggesting to you that, given your own faith, given all that you have achieved, and deservedly so, that you might consider an act of philanthropy when that day, in a distant future, arrives.”
The man who bore the responsibilities of a nation in a time of increasing and vexatious tension mulled over the conversation. He kept wondering why the priest was making such a proposal now, wondered also if, in future, he shouldn’t accept the advice of his office secretary more readily. “Father, you mentioned bookends. You have another thought?”
“You asked what word I’ve heard amid the clergy. From within and without, Mr. Prime Minister, dark matters have come to my attention. Which, in truth, is what brings me here today.”
“Ah.” Now, perhaps, they would get somewhere.
“Our old cronies,” the priest began.
“Which ones?”
“I’m remembering the Russians, sir, and the Americans.”
The potential for hidden microphones, yes. The potential to be betrayed by your friends. Trudeau nodded to indicate that he understood, although he still didn’t know what was meant by “cronies.”
“As young men, we were aware of them. I’m being facetious. A certain order, sir, an adversarial force.”
The Order of Jacques Cartier. All right, he understood the reference now. He felt his skin tighten on his bones, as though an invisible hand was cinching him up.
“They persist, sir. They continue to look for a way to take advantage of the times. They would hope for chaos, revolution, an opportunity to contribute further to the chaos, in the hopes of creating a power vacuum that they might rise to properly fill. I’m here, sir, to make the point that our infamous shovel must be used to dig the proper field. The right trench. It cannot be passed around for any man to dig whatever well he chooses.”
Father François feared Trudeau might sell the knife, perhaps as a way of unloading a political liability, either now or in the future, to clean up his legacy. In the wrong hands, Cartier’s dagger—whether because it did possess an intriguing magical influence or merely due to its symbolic majesty—might readily encourage retrograde thinkers. The knife had been in the wrong hands when Trudeau had bought it, but it had been too hot for those in charge at that time to handle. Apparently, they had been disorganized then, in desperate need of money, or they had feared what they possessed, or who knows what chaos had existed within that tribe. Perhaps the ascent of an often-unemployed lecturer to the office of prime minister had opened their eyes to the relic’s potential properties. In any case, this secret band of adversaries knew to whom they had sold what they had sold, and now a fresh contingent of like-thinking foes wanted the knife back. Father François was here to issue fair warning, and to plead that its line of descent be carefully selected.
“If I respond, would you take the information somewhere?”
“Well, not to the Jesuits, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Neither to the Dominicans.”
“My Sulpician friends, on the other hand—”
“—might continue to be friends.”
With a slight bow of his head, the celebrant indicated that the PM understood his position.
Trudeau thought about it awhile. Possession of the dagger was a burden. While he could never proclaim its mystic power, he could not deny his extraordinary and improbable rise to power, and so would not dismiss its potential for magical properties, either.
“When that time comes,” he told Father François, “your proposition will be fairly considered, and at this moment stands in good stead.”
Gobbledygook. They were suggesting a transfer of power back to the Church once Trudeau’s political days were done—such was the perceived importance and vitality of the relic. The matter of its illegality, or of Trudeau’s questionable ownership, would never be broached between them. Yet Father François had also delivered a more important message—namely, to be circumspect. The array of forces aligning against him might be more diverse, and more concealed, and better organized, than those represented by idiot bombers.
“Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, for your time. You’ve been most kind.”
“Good to see you, Father. Someday, again, we might bump into each other on the streets of Montreal.”
“Hopefully in peaceful times.”
After the priest’s departure, the PM’s secretary reclaimed the room. “Well,” she recited, for she had probably been rehearsing her remarks the whole time she’d been gone, “may we return now to affairs of state?”
“I thought it was lunchtime?”
“Your luncheon will be with the commissioner of the RCMP, remember?”
“Ah. The commissioner. Good man. We’ll want to discuss that bombing.”
“Yes, Prime Minister, you may wish to discuss the bombing, if that does not conflict too much with chatting with your old friends.”
She was adjusting the curtains to admit more light, another of her habits that expressed annoyance.
Having spent hours alone during the day, taking a long hike with Ranger and napping in a park bundled in a bulky sweater under a warm sun, Anik Clément had returned home to sequester herself in her bedroom. She left for dinner at a fast-food restaurant, where she’d enjoyed silly banter with a pair of local characters in rags, then back to the house. She still did not speak to her mother. Finally, after she’d heard Carole depart the washroom and enter her own bedroom for the night, she came out from under the covers. She lit a candle in her room, watched the flame awhile, then changed into her pyjamas and crossed the hall to brush her teeth. Done, she tapped lightly on her mother’s bedroom door off the kitchen. Anik tiptoed inside and crawled in next to her mom, who was sitting up with the reading light on, a book in her lap.
They lay there, together like that, mother and daughter, silent.
Finally, Anik asked, “Why, Mom?”
She couldn’t hate her for life. She was her mother, and they were close.
“Two reasons,” Carole said. She’d prepared her explanation.
“The men who came to our house, my babysitters,” Anik interrupted. “Did you put them in jail?”
“If I thought somebody was a good guy, I gave him a pass. I wasn’t all business. Your babysitters got off scot-free.”
“Some of them went to jail.”
“Not on account of me.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“I’m not lying to you, Anik.”
“You’ve lied to me all this time, Mom. For God’s sake.”
She closed her book and put it aside. “If it was you, exactly when would you tell your daughter that you were a police informant?”
Anik didn’t think she’d ever be in such a position—that was the difference.
“Two reasons.”
“I’m listening.”
Carole took a breath. “Primarily, to help the police find who killed your father.”
Anik nodded. She liked that answer. “What else?”
“To make money.”
“Aw, Mom.”
Anik made a move to crawl back out of bed, but Carole restrained her with a gentle hand on her wrist. At that moment, Ranger joined them, but he was weary and he curled up at the foot of the bed.
“I was a woman who had to support a daughter after suddenly losing her husband. Back then, the union busters tried to prevent me from working. Do you understand? Life was hard, Anik. I wasn’t sending good men to jail. I was preventing crimes from being committed, seeing that the worst guys got sent up. A killer, once, and some mean guys. Some shithead was going to pull a bank job? Something would go wrong. Cops would accidentally bump into him. Armand was very good at that—he made everything appear like a fluke. Okay, okay, I was a snitch, but I was not a scab. I never squealed on the more decent guys. I just made life hard for the real bastards.”
Anik tried to process all that. “You always used to say that Dad had his rationale for doing what he did. He never really hurt people, he just knocked them around a bit. He never really interfered with elections, he just made people appreciate the vote more.”
Carole had to chuckle. She had often repeated the line herself, but she’d never not laughed.
“Yeah, and I didn’t put bad guys away. I only put the worst guys away. How’s that? I needed the money, Anik. And I needed, deep down inside me, I needed to know that I was helping to catch your dad’s killers. Talking about it now, I admit that there was something else.”
“What?” She was tired, and snuggled in closer to her mom. She had not done this in ten years, but she felt like sleeping with her for a night.
“I wanted a life. I didn’t want to just sew and get beat up on picket lines. I wanted a life. Hanging out with your daddy’s old pals, I got to live a little. Even—you’re a big girl now, right?—I even got to love a little. A teensy bit.”
Yeah, she’d sleep next to her that night. Had her mom done anything so different than what she was doing with René? She liked the life, the attractions, the action, the intrigue, the possibilities, even the dinners out and the dinners in. She adored the sex. The company. The conversations. She knew all along that she wasn’t making a life with him, that it was just exciting and temporary.
They lay together in silence. Carole reached across and turned off the lamp. Her daughter, it seemed, wasn’t going anywhere.
Minutes passed before Anik spoke out of the darkness. “Should I do it, Mom? Do you think?”
Carole sighed, and put her head back. She didn’t like any of this. The unanticipated problems, worries that seemed to leak out of your spleen and contaminate your bloodstream, tremors along your bones on the darkest nights, deceit an unhappy companion who never went home. She was on the verge of attempting an answer. Say no, don’t do it. The public demands are too great. Nobody wants bombs to go off. The personal cost is too high—the loneliness, the feeling that you have no centre, no core, no place within yourself where you can always go and be who you are for a few minutes. Those consequences were too grave. And yet, before Carole had mustered the resources to talk to her, Anik had fallen sound asleep beside her. Poor child. Why awaken her only to say that she might never be happy, that she might never be safe?
Carole edged down under the sheets herself, and although she did not expect that she’d sleep a wink, before long, before she had a chance to formulate too many frets, she nodded off, feeling her body borne upon waves. The sky was moiling and fiery in an epic dream, touching down upon a seashore of grievous confusion.
They slept together, mother, daughter and, at the foot of the bed, dog. Silent awhile. Still.