CHAPTER 23
1970
IN A BORROWED CAB, THEY DROVE UP WINDING STREETS along a rim of Mount Royal, through a community of mansions they hadn’t even known existed prior to beginning this operation.
We’ve tracked you down. On your mountain. You’re in our sights.
One man knocked.
Your friends call you Jasper.
They waited on the stoop.
The housekeeper answered. Politely, Jacques asked her to sign for a birthday gift. Yves carried the long, narrow box across his arms. Days earlier, James “Jasper” Cross had turned forty-nine.
Jacques forgot to hand her the receipt for her signature.
It begins.
Swiftly, he thrust it forward. He didn’t have a pen handy—part of the plan. He dropped his hand into a pocket to fish for one and pulled out a black .22-calibre Beretta pistol. He thrust the muzzle into the woman’s belly and pushed her inside as he entered.
She put her hands up and talked excitedly in Portuguese.
Yves followed him in and pulled on his gloves. He reached into the gift-box and retrieved his M1 rifle. Tossed the box on the floor.
Still on the street, Marc saw that they’d made it inside. His cue. He ran up from the street, trying to conceal his own sawed-off M1. A gardener across the avenue concerned him, so he kept the stunted rifle tight to his body as he went inside.
A little girl suddenly appeared in the front room, shocked by the entry of the men and calling to her mother, the housekeeper. The first unexpected occurrence. The second was a dog’s bark from upstairs.
“Pick her up,” Jacques told the woman. The Portuguese maid plucked her daughter off the floor and bound her into her arms. “Where’s Cross?”
The woman pointed upstairs.
The mansion had twenty-two rooms.
Upstairs, Jacques found a short, stout woman in bed and James Richard Cross padding around in his pyjamas. A Dalmatian leaped onto the bed, growling but seeking shelter in the covers. “We’re the FLQ,” Jacques told them. He pointed his black gun at the man. “Lie down on the floor.” He told the woman, “Control your dog or I’ll shoot it.”
She calmed the animal on the bed. Her eyes shone with fright.
Jacques signalled for the others to come up.
Yves pushed the maid and her child into the room ahead of his M1.
Face down on the floor, Cross asked, “What do you want?”
“Liberation,” Jacques told him.
“I can give you money.”
“Rich man, you can’t buy your way out of this one. Stand up. Get dressed.”
Each of the women held onto a smaller life, one a dog’s, the other a child’s.
Cross had a dressing room. A whole room for storing and putting on his clothes. That alone seemed reason enough for a revolution. Jacques watched him dress, and the two men emerged together.
“Say goodbye.”
Wearing grey slacks, a shirt and a green-checked jacket, Jasper Cross stepped shakily towards his wife and kissed her. He patted the head of his dog.
Then Yves handcuffed his wrists in front of him, tugging down the sleeves of the jacket to hide the cuffs. “Let’s go,” he said.
Jacques gave final orders to the others in the house. “Don’t call the police for an hour. If you do, we’ll kill your husband.”
On the way out, he tossed a raincoat over the man’s hands.
He held the pistol against Cross’s back as they led him down the walk to the taxi.
When it comes, people aren’t ready for the moment. When a man needs his boots and an iron constitution, he’s wearing bedroom slippers. He’s taken by surprise.
Through the upstairs window, Mrs. Cross waved wildly to the gardener across the street, who was raking leaves.
He stared up at her.
The men and Cross climbed into a taxi.
“Don’t make a sound, Jasper.”
He was pushed down onto the floorboards of the car’s back seat.
They changed cars at the Royal Victoria Hospital, getting into a Chrysler. A man being assisted from a taxi into another car would not be conspicuous around the hospital, where so many required assistance. With Cross on the floor of the Chrysler, Marc put a gas mask over the man’s face, the eyes blacked out. Then he straightened up and said, “Shit.”
“What?” Jacques asked him.
“Our masks.”
They all looked at each other.
“What about them?” asked the woman who’d been waiting for them and who was driving now.
They didn’t answer.
Then she understood.
Jacques explained it anyway. “We forgot to wear our masks.”
Gaston Fleury understood the question. He just couldn’t work his tongue around the answer. He had been disturbed by the answer in the past, putting it aside, letting it fall away from his consciousness. Why had he not pursued the discrepancies?
“Hard to say.”
Cinq-Mars continued to wait for a more satisfactory response.
“It was a long time ago.”
“Fifteen years,” Cinq-Mars said, but his tone suggested that this was not a lifetime. Men could remember important events that were fifteen years old without this jittery impairment. The young officer reviewed the facts for him again—for the fifth time, by his count. “Sir, you were looking into limousines owned and operated by the provincial, federal and municipal governments.”
“Right,” Fleury agreed. That was the easy part. Cinq-Mars had come to him and said he needed to ask more questions. A nuisance, these years later. Fleury had made captain, responsible for the Department of Research and Strategic Planning. He’d lost interest in Touton’s pet case, now passed along to Constable Cinq-Mars.
“You discovered that the logbooks for three levels of government showed discrepancies.”
“I did.”
“The discrepancies occurred because elected government officials and high-ranking civil servants used the cars in secret. For liaisons, we presume. To visit girlfriends.”
“Except for men who visited boyfriends. Those, too.”
Cinq-Mars nodded. His stomach remained tense. He loved asking questions, but interrogating a senior officer with whom he often worked felt odd. Risky. “The logbooks were commonly doctored. Actual trips didn’t match the records.”
“Hundred-mile trips, but only twenty showed on the odometer. Or the opposite. Everyone assumed nobody would ever check, so they were careless.” Fleury had been excited when he first penetrated the deception. “It had become routine. Almost everybody who had the right to use a limo used it to conceal his comings and goings. Which made investigating the cars next to impossible.”
“But knowing that logbooks, routinely, were improperly maintained …” Cinq-Mars let his voice fade away.
In a fog, Fleury acted as though he could not guess the next question, although it had already been posed four times.
“Sir, why did you not reinvestigate the entries for the night of the Richard riot, for the night of the murders, once you’d learned that the information was commonly doctored? At that point, why did you continue to take the entries at face value? Sir, it’s a simple question. There must be a simple answer. You must have made a decision not to pursue that particular line of inquiry.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I wish you would. Or try harder. It’s important, I think.”
They were back to the same impasse.
Fleury bowed his head a little, and was rubbing his chin, for he still seemed perplexed by something. Then he said, “I didn’t think it mattered so much.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you something, all right?”
“I’m listening,” Cinq-Mars said. This, at least, felt akin to progress.
“I got a phone call.”
“Back then.”
“Who called?”
“Anonymous.”
“What was said?”
Fleury breathed in deeply before continuing. “Next time, you’ll find your little boy in it.”
Cinq-Mars awaited further explanation, but none was forthcoming. “What did that mean?” he asked. They were getting to the bare bones now, yet he remained mystified by the line.
“My car had blown up.”
Cinq-Mars waited.
“I didn’t think it was all that important, what I was doing. I thought I was mostly being a nuisance. I was an accountant. I stopped investigating the limos but I didn’t know—I never knew—if that’s what had pissed people off. I didn’t think I was getting anywhere. But if I was, it wasn’t worth my only son.”
Cinq-Mars nodded solemnly, grasping this. “So first they blew your car up, then they sent you a warning to go along with it.”
“Pretty effective threat, if you ask me. I’m just an accountant, really. I’m not like a real detective.”
Cinq-Mars stood and crossed to the door as if departing, but he had no intention of leaving yet. “Captain, I appreciate that we’re speaking in confidence, and that you’re a captain and I’m a uniform. But it makes me wonder. Why tell me this? Why me? Because I asked?”
Fleury uttered a short little laugh, as if to dismiss the gravity of the confession. “You’re a priest, Cinq-Mars—at least, you wanted to be. You’ve got it in you, anyway. I’m a Catholic who just went to confession.”
“You’re kidding me now? Why?”
The new head of the Department of Research and Strategic Planning sighed and squirmed around in his chair. He loved his new leather swivel seat. “That’s not it. What I told you has been on my conscience. I did confess it to my priest, but I received no relief from my remorse. I had to confess it to a cop, don’t you think? Or it would be meaningless. So now I’ve done that, I got a load off.” He leaned back in his chair, a man teaching himself to relax. “Like you said, you asked the question. Time’s gone by. I don’t feel like escaping the answer anymore. You’re onto me anyway, right? I don’t want to make things hard for you, Cinq-Mars. You think it’s strange that I confessed to someone below my rank? Think about it. If I confess to anyone, it won’t be to a colleague with higher rank than me. You young Turks, you presume we’re corrupt anyway—you think we’re a bunch of fuck-ups and has-beens. So maybe I’m proving that point. But see, there’s nothing you can do to hurt me. You won’t be on a promotions committee with my name in front of you. By the time you get that high up in rank, I’ll either be planting roses in front of my retirement home or fertilizing them from six feet down.”
Cinq-Mars suddenly felt strangely alert, his fingertips tingling. The captain had been wrong about one thing. He had never thought that Fleury was corrupt, a has-been or a fuck-up, despite the friction between them. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
“This helps me,” Cinq-Mars told him. “I’m discovering where gaps exist. It helps to know where to keep looking.”
“It won’t help you so much,” Fleury predicted.
“Why not?”
“Do you think the old man doesn’t know? That he didn’t know back then?” Fleury had a cocky look on his face again, as though he was glad to always be one step ahead of the keen young cop. “Come on, the old man’s been around the block. Maybe he didn’t want to put my son at risk, either. After that, he kept the investigation going without my input.”
Cinq-Mars nodded. Complications persisted in the world. Hitches inevitably derived from the interplay of people’s natures, their foibles and fears, flaws and strengths of character, and in particular their envy and greed. None of that had surprised him in his move to the big city, but still he had to learn that he could never underestimate the intricacy of human interplay. Life was not only about avarice and power. Life was also about striving, and the disappointments and quiet failures that attended to the realm. These daily turnings did much to help the world revolve, to cause it to circle on itself and revisit again seemingly innocuous social exchanges.
A detective with a big, black moustache who was not wearing his jacket, his holster and pistol showing, rudely reached his hand inside the open door and rapped it twice.
“FLQ,” he said. “The director is calling us in.”
“Him or me? Or both?” Fleury asked.
“Senior officers to his desk on the double.”
“A bombing?” Cinq-Mars inquired. He was being excluded from the session, and so tried to snatch information on the fly.
“Kidnapping. A British diplomat, I heard.”
That sent a chill.
Before dashing out, Fleury paused long enough to exchange a nod with the junior officer. Their pact was sealed. Cinq-Mars had information to go on, but he was not to reveal its source.
Tied to a chair, at times blindfolded, at other times wearing blinkers that restricted his peripheral vision, James “Jasper” Cross listened to the radio. Communiqués from the group holding him, calling itself the Liberation Cell, were being broadcast. If certain people the cell had deemed to be political prisoners were not released, and if other demands concerning the governance of the land were not conceded, he would be executed. A deadline was aired.
The government, Cross’s captors believed, was doomed to negotiate. He was baffled by their optimism. He had once read, with only passing interest, that the FLQ had distributed a leaflet titled The FLQ Will Kill! He wished now that he’d never seen the article. He might die in this still, airless room. He felt bloated by impotence, and in his worst moments he panicked under the blindfold, desperate for light, air, release. He suffered imagining the pain inflicted upon his family. He could forgive his captors many things, but not the affliction they had brought to bear upon his loved ones.
“I’ve never harmed you.” He spoke to a mute presence he detected in his room in the morning.
A woman answered. She seemed to him the most callous among them. “You’re English. What harm could we inflict on you to pay us back for the conquest?”
“Actually,” he noted quietly, “I’m Irish.”
He could sense, or perhaps was hoping, that he had touched a nerve. The French had long had good relations with the Irish. Down through the centuries, the French had invited forsaken Irish into their homes and adopted orphaned Irish children as their own. Irish surnames had become prominent in Quebec society, and the Irish were generally viewed as confederates, having shared the experience of being colonized by the British.
“Then you’re a collaborator,” the woman declared. “You work for London. You’ve betrayed our people and your own.”
The admonishment felt severe, yet Jasper Cross was heartened. They had made a mistake! They’d snatched an Irishman. That slight sliver of a doubt might hold him in good stead if ever the value of his life was weighed, if a choice had to be made to determine whether he was to go free or die.
Over the radio from the other room, he learned that the government had declined to negotiate. He also learned that he was still alive. The hostage-takers, it was reported, had postponed their most recent deadline to kill him.
They had set another.
The radio in the other room informed him that he had eleven hours to live.
“Where’s Bourassa?”
A shrug. “New York.”
“Still? What’s he doing there anyway?”
Another shrug. “Farting around. He’s reachable. He sent a number.”
“Big of him.”
The prime minister had pulled his most trusted colleagues together: Marc Lalonde, his finance minister; Gérard Pelletier, his secretary of state; and his labour minister, Jean Marchand. Lalonde had not spoken, but addressed the prime minister now. “Pierre, we’ve learned of a meeting.”
“Tell me.”
“Ad hoc, in Montreal, of interested people to discuss the situation. It’s taking place at Ryan’s office.” Claude Ryan, the editor of Le Devoir. A leading intellectual and moral figure in the community. “Parizeau’s going.” A separatist politician of influence, and president of the executive council of the Parti Québécois.
“Not Lévesque?” Trudeau asked.
“Apparently not. It’s safe to assume that he’s an informed party.”
“How do we know this? I take it we’re not invited.”
“Someone on the guest list is keeping me apprised.”
“So we’re also an informed party at the meeting?”
Lalonde shook his head. “Our friend would be tossed out on his ear if anyone found out he was talking to us.”
Trudeau nodded, getting it. “Lévesque has representatives who keep him informed. We have a spy. I appreciate the dynamic. What’s the meeting about?”
“That’s not fully understood. Ryan is animating the talk, which is all right, but the list of those attending worries me.” Financiers, politicians, academics, journalists, businessmen—a gathering that cross-pollinated the powerful and the merely influential. “It’s been suggested,” Lalonde went on, “that the agenda will include a discussion on what to do.”
“Do?”
Lalonde was austere and cerebral. “If they conclude that Bourassa is unfit to govern, they may choose to govern on their own. It’s in the air. Everyone’s convinced he’s inept. Those who know him don’t believe he can handle this crisis.”
“Now it’s a ‘crisis.’ I thought it was a kidnapping.”
“Prime Minister—”
“I know what you’re saying.”
Trudeau took a moment to process what was being illustrated. “A palace coup? Already the FLQ has set itself up as a parallel government, presuming to dictate policy. Do these people at the meeting intend to do the same thing? How many governments can there be in Quebec at one time?”
“They haven’t met yet,” Lalonde pointed out to him.
“They might decide to become the government,” Pelletier considered. “It’s not out of the question. Fear that Bourassa can’t handle this mess is widespread.”
Trudeau made a few faces, mulling things over, then opined, “Give him time. He might rise to the challenge if he ever comes home. I think it’s possible.”
“Do you know what he’s doing in New York?” Pelletier asked. If Trudeau had a weakness, he valued ineffectual adversaries. Men who could not perform brilliantly in debate or before a scrum of reporters were his pawns, for he could manipulate them from dawn to dusk. Bourassa was neither a natural adversary nor an ally, but in this circumstance they would have to work in unison, as partners, though not as equals. Trudeau might miss the opportunity to guide the other man where he should be led, and do so through positive encouragement, rather than mockery or intellectual slight. “He’s hiding,” Pelletier said. “He’s in denial.”
“Shit.”
The news was all bad. If the powerful citizens of Quebec were discussing an overthrow of their own government to fill the vacuum left by a young, timid, and, for the time being, absent premier, then the political authority in Quebec really had become a vacuum. That gave the FLQ infinitely more power with their broadcast manifestos, their bombings, and now, a kidnapping.
“Banana-republic politics,” he muttered in disgust. “Gérard, what do we do?”
Pelletier stretched out his long legs. A person entered government for moments such as these, to make decisions that determined the viability of a nation. When they had first come to Ottawa, Trudeau had wanted to delay assuming responsibility until he learned the ropes. Pelletier and Marchand counselled him differently, reminding him that they had not fought an election to sit on their posteriors. Now, a short time later, they were in a political maelstrom beyond their imagining. Yet, this is what they had come here for, and this is how history would judge them—by how they handled pressure.
“When Bourassa calls, Prime Minister, befriend him. He lacks resolve. Show him your own. Permit him to lean on you. Coax him along. Offer comfort.”
“Jean?” Trudeau asked of Marchand.
“Sentiment is running against us. Further demonstrations in support of the FLQ are being organized. Public support gives those bastards their courage.”
“Who cares about their courage?” Lalonde asked.
Pelletier chose to answer. “The demonstrations are exhausting the police. They’re taken away from their primary task, which is to find the kidnappers. If this keeps up, the mayor and probably Bourassa will be asking for the army again.”
Trudeau had sent troops a year earlier, to defuse bombs in mailboxes and patrol streets. “If Bourassa asks, I’ll have no choice. I’ll have to accept the request. It’s the law.”
“Bourassa will ask,” Pelletier said. “Once he flies back from New York and realizes that he can’t avoid this, he’ll ask. In a crisis, a weak man loves an army.”
“As for what we do,” Marchand stated, finishing up, “we wait. See what develops. We can’t allow ourselves to be caught off-guard again. This is not merely a criminal act, a kidnapping. We have a developing crisis that involves a significant portion of the population.”
“Marc?” The prime minister polled the minister of finance a final time.
“Monitor what the people do and say after these power meetings. If they communicate with the outside world, we’ll closely examine the language. Their choice of words will show us the nature of their debates. They may have to debate whose side they’re on.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Prime Minister, I could not be more serious.”
Trudeau acknowledged the sentiment with a nod. The quality of leaders attending the meeting in Montreal promised a lively discussion. He was almost sorry to miss it.
“All right,” he summed up, and in so doing excused his counsellors for now, “we’ll carry on.”
Anik Clément lay in the arms of her lover. She could feel the tension rising through his bloodstream again, the strain of these dire days returning.
The telephone rang and his body jerked spasmodically, a compressed spring suddenly released.
“Easy,” she said.
Lévesque reached across and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?” Only one man had this number, and he wouldn’t be wasting his time with trivia. He listened, then said, “My God,” his voice grave.
Placing a hand on his back, Anik could feel adrenaline inflating him.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
He yanked his trousers on so quickly, he forgot he hadn’t yet donned his underwear, forcing him to start again.
“What’s happened?” Anik asked quietly.
“They’ve taken Laporte.”
“Who?”
“Laporte! Pierre Laporte! The minister of labour. They’ve taken him.”
“Taken? Kidnapped?”
“Right off his front lawn. On the South Shore.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Bourassa will want the army now. We’ve got to stop him.”
“How?”
“Political pressure. Public and private. You’ll see. He’ll bow. He better. I have to persuade the others. There’s to be a meeting.”
He was nearly out the door when he remembered that he alone had the keys to lock up this place. He tossed them to her. “Keep them on you. Figure out the exchange later.”
“Good luck,” she called.
“This is destiny. It’s no longer a matter of luck.”
If you say so, she was thinking, as he closed the door, but she didn’t believe him. His remark reflected his own combative energy, the primitive, involuntary pleasure he took in being thrust into the vortex of chaos. Everyone’s destiny was on the line, she knew, René’s, Trudeau’s, Bourassa’s, the FLQ’s. Perhaps her own. Somewhere in that mix luck would play a role. Then all these warring men would see what destiny’s project really had in store for them.
She didn’t know where her sympathies might be rooted. Adrenaline’s high, the rhythm of change, the intoxicating momentum that the radicals could feel and she sensed, too—amid all that it was hard to think straight. For a while she was one of them, but she listened to other voices, also. She believed that René could effect real change, without the violence or the shame of it, without the manic, male zeal for bloodletting. Those poor kidnapped men. Their fearful families. Resorting to snatching a Quebecer after the abduction of the Brit meant that one of their own had been taken now, all because some people didn’t agree with his politics. And before entering politics, Laporte had been a journalist, one of the brave ones who had stood up against Duplessis.
Her mother’s struggles seemed nobler. A woman who had defied the system and demanded simple rights and fair wages. She boycotted, frustrated, flummoxed, barricaded and interfered with the system, with the flow of goods and the easy acquiescence to greed and exploitation. But she did not knowingly imperil another life.
Revolutions put the violent in charge. The FLQ assumed that someday they’d win. “Nous vaincrons,” they told each other—we’ll conquer. They’d be in charge, but honestly, who ever asked them to lead? And why can’t anyone discuss this anymore? René was right—and for that matter, so was Trudeau. If your cause is just, if it’s viable, convince the people of its authenticity, carry the whole of the nation, or at least a majority of it, on your back and let them validate your opinion. Win or lose, let that be your legacy.
Change can’t happen, some said. But look. Archbishops were once the crown princes of Quebec. Now they were court jesters. Duplessis once controlled the press. Now the press was out of control. The bosses were once exclusively English, but many were French now, and the English were hitting the highway to Toronto. To effect change, you had to believe in it, and if you blew people up it was because you didn’t believe in it enough. All you had to do was be convinced of your stance and convince people to think accordingly.
Who would she fight for? Armand Touton had already called, wanting her to help him and the police. Her friends in the movement had called, wanting her to join them in demonstrations. René had called, wanting her to soothe him in his bed and listen to his troubles, even to counsel him. Everybody wanted a piece of her, while what she wanted was a piece of herself—a quiet, true, heartfelt portion so that she might truly examine her own desire.
This is what it was like, her mother had confided, towards the end of her father’s life. Everyone wanted a piece of him, too, and all he wanted was a piece of himself for his family. Anik hoped she’d fare better than him, and survive, not only for her own sake, but as homage to him.
She got out of bed, and dressed.
She knew that when she stepped outside, the streets would be animated and tense. She didn’t want to visit the bars where her friends would be overexcited and debating all this. She didn’t want to go home, where Armand Touton might find her. She just wished that she had somewhere to go, somewhere to be. And she wondered how Émile was doing, how he was making it through all this. As a junior cop, he must be on edge. Fortunately, she had stayed away from the demonstrations, or they’d probably have locked horns again by now.
Captain Touton knew that he was late, and despite having legitimate excuses, he would not be spared the jibes. He hobbled down the corridor within the RCMP’s Montreal headquarters as fast as he was able. Barely knocking, he entered the designated boardroom. Old friends, adversaries and a few recent acquaintances glanced up. One man headed for the coffeemaker as though the sight of Touton’s face indicated that he suffered a grim need for a cup.
This was a meeting of second-level cops, a slew of captains and lieutenants from the provincial police, the Mounties and his own municipal force. Catching the back of a chair and wheeling it around to sit in, Touton calculated quickly that he would not be the only late arrival.
To be expected. They were all run off their feet lately.
Still, wisecracks commenced. He would have to pay for his tardiness.
“Good of you to join us, Armand. I believe you know everyone. As you’re the captain of the Night Patrol, I hope we’re not getting you out of bed.”
A few men around the table chuckled.
“I was looking forward to seeing you guys in the daytime for a change,” the captain struck back. “I thought you might look half-human. I guess I was wrong.”
“Four hours of sleep a day—” a Mountie, who was probably secretly in love with his own handsome reflection, commenced to explain.
“Who gets four hours?” Touton interrupted. “Even my dog doesn’t get four hours anymore.”
He was winning now, and enjoying that.
“Anyway, us city cops, we look like hell because we work like hell. You Mounties, you look like hell because you just do. Maybe if you didn’t drink so much, maybe if you didn’t spend all your meal money on hookers, you might have better luck with the ladies, live better lives.”
“Mounties sleep with hookers, city cops sleep with homely wives, but in the Sûreté,” one of the provincial police officers bragged, “we get the honeys. That’s the difference between us.”
“The difference between us is that we sleep with women who are over sixteen,” Touton fired back. “You should try it sometime, if you’re man enough.”
While cops were smirking and hooting, Touton shot a glance around the room and realized he was the only one there without a moustache. These guys really did care about their appearance, and they cultivated a certain cop look. They looked terrible. Worn. Bedraggled. Overcaffeinated. Poorly fed. Sleep-deprived. A miserable lot.
Someone put a cup down in front of him. Touton took a sip, not bothering with cream or sugar. They were all motoring on coffee now, the stronger the better, and getting each other’s goat served as another survival tactic. A few laughs, and they might endure their endless shifts without falling asleep or coming unglued.
Then a Mountie brought them to order. “The brass has been compiling lists,” he announced, patting down his moustache. “Maoists, Trotskyites, radical separatists, union guys who make trouble during demonstrations, and so on.”
“What do you mean, and so on?” Touton asked.
“Guys like that.”
“Guys like what?”
“Excuse me?” The Mountie looked confused. He hadn’t expected questions.
“You said union guys and political guys, and guys like that. So who are guys like that?”
“Political guys, and guys like that. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know who guys like that are. You say ‘guys like that,’ and I think you mean everybody you want it to mean. I get nervous. So, anyway—what are these lists for again?”
Another officer tried to help his colleague. “Your mayor told us, Captain Touton, that he’s putting pressure on the prime minister to invoke the War Measures Act. So is Bourassa. If the War Measures Act goes through, then we can arrest whomever we want, whenever we want, and put that person away for just about as long as we want. So we’re compiling lists, to be ready, so we know who to go after when the time comes. We don’t want chaos. We want to be effective.”
Cops with infinite power. Politicians with even more. Touton wasn’t convinced that he relished either scenario. “That’s why I’m asking,” he stated, “who you mean by ‘guys like that.’ I don’t want to give orders to my men to go out and arrest radicals and ‘guys like that.’ Who knows who they’ll bring in? Anybody with long hair and a beard? Girls with cute behinds? It has to be clear.”
“I agree with you,” the older Mountie said. “It has to be clear. Sergeant Leduc is going to modify his statement to exclude phrases such as ‘and so on’ and ‘guys like that.’ From now on, he will be more precise in what he says.”
Touton didn’t know whether the older Mountie was politely calling him an asshole or was actually on his side and advising his colleague to do better. Either way, he had made progress, and words would have to mean what they were meant to mean in this room from this point forward.
“When does this War Measures Act take effect?” Touton wanted to know. “What will it mean?”
The more junior Mountie spoke up again. “We can make arrests without interference from lawyers, judges, the courts or the law. We become the law, essentially.”
“I was afraid of that,” Touton murmured.
Everyone needed to assess the development. They’d been cops long enough to know that they did not operate within a perfect system, and that their own guys were as imperfect as the public they endeavoured to protect.
“Know why this stinks?” an officer asked, and Touton turned to see that it was a man from his own force speaking, a captain like himself, seated at the far end of the table. This was the man who had brought him coffee.
“Why does it stink, André?” Touton inquired.
The man shook his head and said, “It feels like a fucking war, and that’s fine, but we’re not the fucking army.”
They remained still awhile, mute. Then the senior Mountie told them, “When the War Measures Act is declared, they’ll bring in the army to help.”
He’d been looking for a way out, an alternative political device to provide the necessary security to the citizens of Montreal and Quebec. Dramatic enough, sending in the army, and he was in favour of doing so, but in truth, he had no other option. The law demanded that if he received a formal request from a provincial justice minister for military support, he was legally compelled to provide it. The War Measures Act, which suspended civil liberties and gave extraordinary powers to the police, was a different matter, and the burden of that extreme tactic pressed upon his conscience.
Drapeau wanted him to do it—the mayor of Montreal.
Back from New York, Premier Bourassa begged him to do it, the man sounding as though he was at the end of a short, frayed tether. On the phone with him each day Trudeau did his best to calm him, yet the request remained persistent. Bourassa wanted civil rights suspended.
Around him, counsellors were convinced that the time had come for drastic action. A violent, clandestine group had set itself up as a parallel government, and with each passing day its popular support increased. Yet the War Measures Act seemed too cumbersome, too draconian, and invoking it might seem like a move made in panic. Like hunting quail with a bazooka. “Let’s see what the army can do,” he argued. “They’ll patrol the streets. Give the police a chance to investigate.”
The demonstrations grew. They became better organized.
The police made no headway and were seen to be botching the job.
Then on October 15, 1970, an elite group of persons held a meeting in Montreal. Out of that discussion, they signed a document published in Le Devoir. Trudeau read the columns of signatories, an impressive list. René Lévesque, the president of the Parti Québécois; the president of Desjardins Life Assurance; half a dozen union heads; Claude Ryan, the editor of Le Devoir, the most prestigious French newspaper in the country; Camille Laurin, the parliamentary secretary of the Parti Québécois; four professors from the upper echelon of academia, representing the major French universities. Together they proclaimed that, in light of “the atmosphere of semi-military rigidity that can be detected in Ottawa,” and having expressed the concern that “in certain non-Quebec quarters in particular, the terrible temptation of a policy for the worst, i.e., the illusion that a chaotic and thoroughly ravaged Quebec would be easier to control by whatever means,” they espoused the desire to elicit the support of the population to oblige the government of Quebec to negotiate. Trudeau was already in a rage at the mention of a ravaged Quebec, but he reached a feverish moment when he first read that the signatories were offering “our most urgent support in negotiating an exchange between hostages and political prisoners.”
In print.
Black and white.
An elite of Quebec society had referred to gunmen, bank robbers and bombers—each individual fairly tried and convicted according to the actions of the judiciary—as political prisoners.
Some of the rhetoric he recognized. The part leading up to “a chaotic and thoroughly ravaged Quebec” was pure Lévesque, his diction and rhythm as readily identified as the chip on his shoulder, and he hadn’t been at his best or most biting, either. Probably, Ryan had toned him down a tad. And Ryan had drafted the latter portion, he was sure, except that somebody had slipped him a mickey, then inserted the words “political prisoners.” He’d had to have been drugged or inebriated—what other explanation could there be?
He’d been browbeaten. That was it.
Trudeau’s rant over the letter had to be brief and short-lived, although he considered it more offensive than the FLQ manifestos, which insulted him and the intelligence of the society more directly. He telephoned Bourassa and Drapeau both, and asked if they were willing to commit to writing that they believed they were under an apprehension of insurrection.
They promptly committed their demands to him in writing.
Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, then sat by the window in his study. The same law that had landed Mayor Houde in an internment camp had been brought back. Back then, he had personally bellyached against it. Now, he had invoked it himself. The army, its soldiers, its weapons, its troop transports, its Jeeps, its tanks already were rumbling into Quebec and taking up positions on the street corners of Montreal. He felt alone that night, as the army moved under cover of darkness. He knew that, while others had insisted on the manoeuvre, the results of this escapade would forever attach to him.
He stepped across to his private and concealed safe. At knee level, it looked like any other cabinet. He opened the wooden doors, then the double combination lock on the steel door, and pulled out three thick black binders and placed them on the floor. He looked in. Then looked up. Trudeau crossed to the wall switch by the door to his office and dimmed the lights. Only the lamp on his desk shone now. The room was eerily quiet, save for the distant thrum of the building’s complex components. Then he clicked the lock on his door, and returned to the safe. He reached inside. The prime minister pulled out the Cartier Dagger and held it in both hands, gazing down upon the knife. Before the relic had come into his possession, the tip had been broken off, but since then only a few moose hairs had unravelled. If the dagger possessed special power, he wanted to receive it now. Winning elections was all very well, but the real test of a life in public service pertained to those irrevocable choices that defined a person’s stewardship, which in some way helped define your country and your time.
He stood still. Breathing. Waiting.
Pierre Trudeau held the knife as a man might hold a prayer in the core of his solitary heart.
Cross feared the worst—not merely death, but a lonely, shabby one. His captors possessed what he considered to be a naïve expectation of negotiation. They’d cheered the newspaper ads placed and signed by community leaders, demanding that the government negotiate. Perhaps this crazy place called Quebec behaved differently than the world he’d known. Where else on earth would union leaders and journalists, politicians and business executives exhort the prevailing power to cave in to terrorists? Only in Quebec, apparently. Individuals, even segments of the society, might choose surrender, but surely not leadership from the intelligentsia, business and labour.
But he was wrong.
He thought he heard trucks rumbling on the streets below, but they were on television. The military had been granted the authority to act. Which would probably cost him his life. The army had arrived, and his next deadline approached.
“You see?” carped the woman. She was pacing around his room. He could smell her cigarette and hear her deeply inhale. He despised her.
“What is it I see?” Blindfolded, he saw nothing.
“When the poor of Quebec lie sick and dying, do they send in the troops? When the workers have their skulls cracked by the bosses’ goons, do they send the army to defend them? When we sit in our shit, prisoners of misery, do they send soldiers? Never. Not for the nigger French.”
She stood behind his back and spoke into his ear, her spit touching him, making him flinch and lean his head away.
“But if one man is taken away from his home high up on the mountain, and if that man is a British trade commissioner, they send in the army. They want to destroy our cause, but their idiot fascist response will make us stronger. It’ll bring on the revolution. Before it does, Jasper Cross, we will shoot you through the mouth. Count on that.”
The men gave him water when he wanted, and let him urinate and defecate without delay whenever he made the request. The woman made him wait until the pain in his bladder was excruciating. Then she’d pull him up by the hair and shove him towards the bathroom door.
He was hoping that one of the men would bring him his lunch today, and escort him to the loo. He hoped it would not be that dreadful woman.
Few enjoyed the task they were given. Émile Cinq-Mars departed headquarters each night with a team of six in three squad cars. They were handed a short list of names and addresses. If they made an arrest, they took the suspect in, and if they did well they received a new set of names.
Cinq-Mars brought in a guy, an artist, who seemed relaxed about the matter, as he had expected any police crackdown to include him. He admitted to being an anarchist. “I kidnapped nobody,” he maintained. “I could never handle the extra mouth to feed. I have enough trouble scraping up food for my pets.” Apparently, he thought he would be questioned and released. When he learned that he was to be incarcerated for an indeterminate time, he panicked. “My budgies!” he cried out. “My cats, my goldfish. God,” he shouted, “you’ll kill them. Who’ll feed my animals?”
Cinq-Mars, who for a time had expected to become a veterinarian, wanted to help. He accepted the prisoner’s house key and agreed to find someone to care for the menagerie. Shortly after that conversation, still down at Sûreté du Québec headquarters, he encountered Father François hulking along the corridor.
“Father. What brings you here?”
“I haven’t been arrested yet, if that’s what you’re asking. Probably that’s imminent, or will you do it right now, mmm? What are you doing here, Émile?”
Cinq-Mars was surprised by the priest’s curt retort. “Working,” he answered.
“Arresting the innocent? You call that work? You cops should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“Father—you’re in an ornery mood. Look, it’s my job, and if you can’t understand that—”
“That’s what Nazi war criminals maintained, didn’t they? Following orders.”
“It’s not the same thing, Father.”
“Isn’t it?” The priest was not about to let him off the hook, but nor was Cinq-Mars going to cower from the man’s heckling. He didn’t like his duty, but that didn’t mean he’d knuckle under to someone’s ridicule. “How’s it different?”
“If I have to explain that to you, Father, then you’re not the political thinker I took you to be.”
Father François took a breath and calmed himself. “I’ve heard a few desperate stories tonight, Émile. I’m a little worked up.”
“I understand, Father. That’s what you’re doing? Visiting prisoners?”
“Somebody has to. They’re not allowed to see lawyers.”
“Frankly, I’m surprised they’re allowed to see you.”
“They’re not.” He spoke quietly for the first time. “I made people feel guilty enough that they let me in.”
“Good for you. You must be unhappy with your old friend right now.”
Father François was momentarily at a disadvantage. “Trudeau, you mean? No, I’m not happy with him.” He buttoned up his overcoat. “You’ll have to excuse me, Émile. I have people to see.”
“A moment, Father. I have a man inside. He has a number of pets and no one to care for them while he’s being held. He’s given me his house key, but—”
The cleric sighed. “Hand it over. I’ll talk to him, get his address. It won’t be me, but volunteers are being organized for this sort of thing.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“Any other such issues, Émile, get in touch. Maybe it’s a good thing that I know a cop. It’s good of you to be concerned.”
After the older man visited the prisoner, Cinq-Mars checked in with headquarters. He waited on the line for over ten minutes before Captain Touton could clear a moment to speak to him. “Kid, what’s up?”
“I’m at the SQ jail. Father François was in ahead of me. He has full access.”
“That’s not right. But does it matter? We don’t have to stick to every rule. Most of our arrests are arbitrary, God knows.”
“That’s not what I was thinking, sir.”
“Go on.”
“He knows every radical in town. He always has. He could easily be a courier between those locked up and those on the outside. You might want to tail him.”
Cinq-Mars listened to silence awhile.
“I suppose you want to be the one to tail him,” Touton said, his tone gruff. “I know it’s a rough job you guys are doing right now, but it has to be done.”
He was taken aback. Did Touton really think that this was a ploy to get himself onto another detail? “I thought it could be a lead, sir. You once told me yourself that you didn’t trust Father François.”
“Why should I?” Touton asked. “Look, like everybody else, I’m short of manpower, but when I get someone free, I’ll try to follow up your lead. It has merit.”
“Thank you, sir.” He hung up the phone in a rage. Everyone was working with a short fuse these days—he had to bear that in mind. The old man was probably going around the clock and he probably had to deal with officers jockeying for better duty. Success in a crisis stood out, so officers were looking to get the best roles for themselves, but he hadn’t been one of them and he was angry that Touton had thought that way.
Still, he said he might follow up on the idea. Maybe, by the end of his call, Touton was already reconsidering. That man could be annoying.
Outside, his squad had acquired a new list of names. Cinq-Mars glanced down it, then told them he still had another call to make. The men were holding hot coffees, so they were in no rush.
He fished another dime from his pocket and dialled.
The phone rang three times before being picked up. “Hello?”
“Anik. It’s me. Émile.”
“What a surprise.”
“It shouldn’t be,” he told her.
She was quiet a few moments, then said, “I’m on a list.”
“Not on mine, but your mother is. She’s on my arrest docket.”
“Shit.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“Hang on.”
He didn’t have to wait long.
“Émile! Good to hear from you after all this time.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Clément. I have bad news tonight though.”
“Anik tells me I’ve been listed. I’m impressed. You’d think that the authorities would have forgotten me by now.”
“Afraid not.”
“Anik’s disappointed. She wanted it to be her.”
“I can’t say that she’s not on someone else’s list. She’s just not on mine.”
“That probably disappoints her the most, Émile. What do you think we should do? Run like frightened rabbits? I’m not a good sprinter. I have nowhere to hide. Will you at least be gentle when you arrest me?”
“You should leave, ma’am.”
“Easier said than done, Émile. At a friend’s house I’d be endangering the friend. Anyway, most of my buddies are probably on a list, too. I’ve been through this before. I don’t think there’s much point—”
“Ma’am, you can go to my apartment. You’re welcome to stay there. You and Anik, both.”
She paused, then said, “That’s generous. Do you have room? We’ll be with Ranger, too.”
“Ranger, too. I’m just figuring this out as I talk, but I could move into your house, ma’am. Nobody gets arrested that way. You really don’t need to spend three or four weeks or months in jail right now. You won’t enjoy the experience, trust me.”
“Hang on a sec, Émile, okay?”
He could hear her discussing matters with Anik, who was next to come back on the line.
“Listen, Émile, it’s a good idea. Thanks. I don’t want Mom in jail. But if you walk in and out of this house all day wearing your uniform,” she continued, “you could cause us more trouble than this is worth.”
“Anik—” Cinq-Mars started to protest, but she already possessed the solution.
“So all four of us have to stay at your place. You included. We’ll just squeeze in and make the best of it.”
That suited him just fine.
“That’s what we’ll do,” he said, then let a bitterness slip. “As long as the fourth is Ranger and not René. I don’t want him sleeping over.”
Finally, she said, “How the hell did you know that?”
“You’re a watched woman. He’s a watched man.”
Neither of them understood why she said what she said next, but Anik apologized. “I’m sorry, Émile.” The words struck them both as odd. They remained mute awhile.
He broke the tension. He knew that he should apologize, but instead he said, “I’m not sure how to get my keys to you. You’ve got to pack and go now.”
“I still have a key,” she told him. “I remember where I left it, too.”
That surprised him.
“You two take the bed.”
Cinq-Mars still wasn’t ready to go back to work, although his cohorts were antsy now. He possessed prestige among their group, so he was able to coax them into waiting a while longer. Going back inside, he talked to the sergeant on duty.
“That priest who comes in here,” he said. The sergeant looked sleepy, done in, but he carried more rank than Cinq-Mars and put up a brave front.
“What about him?” the sergeant asked.
Cinq-Mars was interested in learning if his hunch was right, that Father François might be working the jail for reasons beyond the bounds of the purely pastoral.
Fewer men guarded him, he knew. One had been sent away. Perhaps two. The one who’d spoken kindly to him was gone. Punishment for letting him get free, when he’d flung himself at the window, cutting himself up. Or banishment for no longer having the stomach for this action. Whatever the cause, Pierre Laporte now had fewer captors, yet he believed that reduced his chances.
Those who were left behind were the more difficult individuals.
After the window, he’d pleaded for a doctor, a hospital.
They denied him.
Now two men, as far as he was able to discern, entered his room.
They were quiet. Saying nothing to one another. Nothing to him.
“What?” he said.
They did not reply.
“Water, please,” he said. Still they did not reply.
Then he pleaded, saying only, “S’il vous plait. Messieurs. Messieurs! S’il vous plait.”
And he felt the cord around his neck like a hangman’s noose around his soul as his whole body rebelled and fought to live. Great, horrendous bellows bore out of him as the cord squeezed tighter and his limbs, constrained and depleted, flailed as if set upon by an electric charge. He roared in his anguish and heard his attacker yell out also—once, twice, goading himself on, and before he called out a third time, the cord suddenly relaxed and was unwound and the feet of the two men rapidly retreated from the room. He was still alive, he believed. I’m alive!
His heart was smashing through his ribcage like a locomotive screaming through a night forest.
They had tried, and failed, to kill him.
Pierre Laporte felt alive and dead at the same time, all his body roaring, each atom, nerve ending, corpuscle, droplet of blood in his veins, roaring, all his bones and tendons a single collapsed scream as he listened with the power of ten wild animals for the footsteps to return or to stay gone.
He was still alive, but he could not breathe or think and dared not imagine anything. Dared not even hope, for hope was too painful for him now, too infested with the torment of this hour. He was still alive, yet he felt now the first inkling of a contagious despair.
Carole and Anik had changed the sheets, made up the bed and slept together, their terrier between them. They thought it might be fun, mother and daughter, living on the lam. Anik had second thoughts, though, once they were done. The room looked tidy, the bed neat and quietly expectant.
Her mother noticed. “What’s wrong?”
She screwed up her face. “Mmm. Nothing really. It’s a little weird, that’s all.”
“Sleeping with your mom is a little weird?”
“That’s a lot weird. But I’ve rolled around on this mattress before. That makes it a little weird.”
That’s when Carole said something she regretted even as the words were slipping across her lips. “Child, if we tramped around the city looking for a mattress you haven’t slept on, we might go sleepless awhile.”
Not since Anik was sixteen had her mother poked her nose into her sexual business. “Excuse me?”
“Sorry. Forget it.”
“You think I’m a whore?”
“Did I say that?”
“You implied it.”
“My mistake. I’m sorry. Forget it, all right?”
They couldn’t really forget it, and both fumed quietly to themselves. Carole pulled out a novel she’d brought from home and did her best to read, while Anik went to the living room and eventually flicked on the black-and-white TV. Regular programming had been interrupted to show the foot soldiers on the streets of Montreal. She watched for a while, but had to click it off.
She went back to see her mom.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to flip out.”
“I’m sorry, too. I was mean.”
Anik lay on her tummy with her feet up, the soles facing the ceiling, her head on her hands while her mom played with her hair. This was nice actually, being this close, under at least the illusion of exile.
“Talk to me, Anik,” Carole said eventually. The different environment and their tiff had had that effect, of breaking the mould of their routine interactions and drawing them closer to intimacy. “Tell me what’s happening with you.”
The daughter was quiet awhile, perhaps tempted to formulate her troubles and detail them, but eventually she only replied, “What do you mean?”
“You know. Why are you sleeping with an old man who smokes like a bus? Do you love him? If you do, then please explain to me why you’re so unhappy.”
“I’m not unhappy.”
“You’re not yourself.”
Mothers. You can’t live with them, but just when you most want them to disappear, you can’t live without them, either. Still, Anik wasn’t ready to talk.
“You told Émile that you were coming here because you didn’t want me to go to jail. Thank you very much. But I know what the inside of a jail looks like. I could survive another spell. I’m here because I don’t want you going to jail. If you’re not on a list right now, you know you will be soon.”
“Why? So they can interrogate me to find out what René’s thinking?”
Carole nodded. “Make fun. But probably people in high places would love to see you arrested just for spite. Then what will René do? Demand that his woman-child girlfriend be released?”
“I’m not a fucking child.” She wasn’t angry. Merely petulant.
“I know that. So does René, I presume. Do the newspapers? How do you think you’ll be portrayed? Anyway, René would have to keep his mouth shut, even pretend he doesn’t know you. You’re not the only girlfriend he has—only the youngest, I hope. He can’t publicly protect you.”
She put her head up and brushed her mother’s hand out of her hair. “How do you know how many girlfriends he has?”
Carole sighed and put her book down. This looked to be a night where things would get said. They were probably overdue.
“I heard you on the phone,” she told her daughter. “You were telling a friend that René has different love nests around the city so the media can’t keep tabs on him, or on you. Okay. I buy that. I do. But he also has love nests around the city so that one lover won’t walk in on him while he’s in bed with a different one. And I’ll lay odds it’s not only this city.”
Angry, Anik came up to her knees. “You don’t know that. You just think that because—”
“Has he ever invited you to Quebec City?”
Anik hesitated.
“Of course not. You’d only be in the way up there. He gives you some other reason, but who’re you kidding, child?”
Anik fell onto her side and did a pantomime of agony, writhing around, but came up, like a mermaid surfacing, beside her mom and gave her a squeeze. Her mom kissed her forehead and she snuggled in tighter.
“What to do what to do what to do,” she said.
“You know what to do, Anik. If you can leave a great boy like Émile—”
“Oh, stop it. You don’t get to choose my boyfriends for me—”
“It’s strictly hands-off, okay? But I’m saying, if you have the moxie to leave someone you like, who’s hurt by what you do, then it can’t be that difficult to leave a man who’ll give you one of his famous shrugs and his wicked little smile, then make a phone call to your replacement.”
“You’re such a bitch,” Anik complained, but not too hard.
“Hey, sweetie. I’m sure it’s been fun and educational. But when you’re done, don’t beat yourself up. Be the one who jumps ship first. Remember the phrase ‘women and children first.’ Stick to it. Don’t get hurt by some guy who combs his hair from all the way over on the other side of the moon.”
That made them both laugh. He had the worst haircut on earth.
“How’d you know I was with him, anyway? Oh, right. You eavesdrop on my phone calls.”
“My first clue? Your incredibly smoky clothes.”
They laughed, then Anik once again fell silent. “Are there any secrets?”
“In this town?” Carole put her arm around her daughter. They were having a good time now. “Apparently, only one. Make that two. Who kidnapped James Cross? And who kidnapped Pierre Laporte?”
Carole could feel, subtly, a tremor, a slight stiffening of her daughter’s spine and a flex to her biceps. She relaxed her hold.
“Or perhaps,” she whispered quietly, “there are no secrets at all.”
Finding two women and a dog in his bed upon his return home, Émile Cinq-Mars wiggled Anik’s big toe. She got up then, groggy a bit, and followed him out to the living room, still dressed except for shoes and socks. They did not know how to properly behave with one another, and at first stood awkwardly. Then Émile made a move and they held one another, perhaps as a measure of their old affection, or as ballast to the unsteady times they each endured.
They talked, then later slept in different rooms. In the morning, Cinq-Mars was awakened by a phone call, and he turned on his television. The sounds returned Anik to his living room to join him on the couch. By a fence that guarded a small airport on the outskirts of Montreal, off the island, the body of Pierre Laporte had been found in the trunk of an old car. On television, they watched the police arrive.
“Okay,” Anik said.
“Okay what?”
“It’s time to do something.”
After his shift that night, Émile Cinq-Mars strolled into Captain Touton’s office.
“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you out arresting men with beards?”
“I’m pulling double shifts, not triples. Sir. Let’s take a walk.”
Something in the young man’s demeanour commanded Touton’s attention. The two walked out into the dawn light together and strode silently in step for a block. Too many policemen were milling past them for Cinq-Mars to begin. Touton indicated that they should step onto the construction site at the end of the street, where they found a spot for themselves amid debris and stacks of building material. Now that it was his turn to declare himself, Cinq-Mars felt himself go reticent. He moved a few pebbles around with the toe of his shoe.
Waiting, Touton pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered him one.
“You’re buying your own now?”
“It’s the fucking crisis, all right? If you tell my wife, I’ll kill you dead. Now tell me what’s up.”
“Sad day,” Cinq-Mars said, stating the obvious. As a Canadian, he never expected to be living in a country where politicians were strangled to death and dumped in a car’s trunk. He had to think differently about his world.
“With Laporte dead, I fear for Cross,” Touton said. Something about the moment solicited his patience. He smoked, waited, glanced at the scaffolding.
“Anik might help us,” the young man said.
Touton nodded and flicked his cigarette. “What does she know?”
“Before she tells us that she needs some guarantees.”
“Like what?”
“Her mother’s name taken off an arrest warrant.”
“I didn’t know it was on one.”
“If her own name happens to be on a list, it should be removed as well.”
“Is that her demand or yours? Anyway, it can probably be arranged,” Touton told him.
“I don’t think the word ‘probably’ is useful at this point.”
Touton aggressively sucked on his smoke. “She’s bargaining with us? Cabinet ministers are being strangled and she wants to strike a deal? She should be introduced to the facts of life as they pertain to her right now.”
“She’s under a lot of stress herself, that’s my impression. She’s taking risks.”
Touton flexed his shoulders, trying to slough off the strain. “We’re working across different jurisdictions here. Nothing is easy anymore. I can’t make promises I might not be able to keep.”
“We can’t operate on ‘probably.’”
“If Anik knows something, she has to tell us. If I have to bring her in and strap her to a chair and zap her with a thousand volts, she’s going to tell us.”
“That won’t work,” Cinq-Mars maintained.
“I don’t care how stubborn she is.”
He knew the captain was serious, in his way, that he had to be careful. “It’s not a question of what she knows. It’s a question of what we can figure out together. She’s been talking to people. After a demonstration, she makes a few phone calls. She asks who was there, picks up the local gossip. Through a process of elimination, she’s been finding out who might be conspicuously missing.”
Touton was catching on. “People you expect to be there aren’t. Is it because they’re preoccupied by holding someone prisoner?”
“We need to run our arrest lists past her. Show film on the demonstrations, see who she can identify and so eliminate, then see who’s left. Also—”
“What?” Touton liked this line of inquiry. He could see that it at least held the potential to produce results, which was more than he could say for their other operations lately.
“She’s stubborn, as you know. She’s not sure whose side she’s on. Strapping her to a chair might have the wrong effect. She’ll choose a side and it won’t be ours. Besides, there’s no way in hell you’d harm her. On top of all that, she’s gone into hiding with her mom. You have to cooperate or you’ll never find her to talk to her.”
Touton’s expression conceded ground. “What do you need?”
“Complete arrest lists, with Carole Clément’s name removed, and Anik’s, if it’s on. But we need the full lists to check through them. Film on the demonstrations from every jurisdiction. I also need the tip of the Cartier Dagger, the piece that broke off in Roger Clément’s chest—”
“I need the tip of the knife.”
“Why?”
“She wants it.”
“Why?”
“She wants it. You possess it, don’t you?”
“It’s evidence. I’m protecting it. It wouldn’t be safe in police custody, not after all these years. So I keep it myself.”
“She knows that. But now she wants it.”
“I don’t understand—”
Cinq-Mars remained adamant, knowing how intransigent Anik had been on this one issue. “The tip of the knife had been in her father’s chest. If anyone should have possession of it for safekeeping, it’s her and her mom. There’s no use arguing. She wants the tip of the blade.”
Touton shrugged. Desperate times. People could make extreme requests at such moments and get what they wanted. He had to accede to her wishes. “All right,” he said. “What else?” He knew there had to be more.
“There’s two ways we can do this. You can give me a leave of absence—”
“What?”
“Or … you can temporarily promote me to detective so I can at least get paid. If you move me up, then you have to turn me loose. I can follow up on some things. That’ll include running down the information with Anik. Although I can do that in uniform, I’ll have to be in a suit for a few side investigations, and for those I’ll need a detective’s gold shield. I’m not looking for anything for my own sake—I don’t give a shit what you think. But I need that gold shield to do what has to be done, to talk to the people I have to talk to.”
He hated to do it, to press for a better position at a time when so many people were doing so for their own selfish reasons.
“Explain it to me,” Touton demanded.
“I can’t do that. But I’ll warn you about one thing. I might have to go up to Parliament Hill—and I won’t strut, and I won’t ask the prime minister to confess to anything, but it’s possible that he knows something, but doesn’t know that he knows. At least, he doesn’t have a clue that it might help us—”
“This is coming from Anik—”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s confidential. Look. I’m getting information we need. But it comes with a price. We both have to live with that.”
Reluctantly, Touton was willing to do so.
“What else does she want—anything?”
Cinq-Mars sighed. “Well, sir,” he began, then stopped and breathed in deeply.
“Come on. Out with it.”
“Well, sir, she wants the Cartier Dagger.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s her price. That’s why she wants the tip from you, so she can put it back together again, whole. She’s not being greedy about this. She’s not in it for the money—at least I don’t think so. For her, it has to do with her father’s legacy.”
“The Cartier Dagger.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But I don’t have it.”
“Trudeau does. That’s one reason why I have to go see him.”
Touton searched into his eyes and tried to discern the depths of this. “She’s trading,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Cinq-Mars agreed.
“Yes, sir.”
“—for the FLQ cells?”
“Yes, sir. She’s not sure that she can deliver. But if she can, she will. In that case, we have to deliver, too. She feels that the knife has to do with our people and that our people—look, do you want to hear this or not?” Touton had turned away, but now looked back at him. “According to Anik, Quebecers need to get something out of this beyond a few individuals being put in jail. If she’s going to inform on friends who have trusted her, she expects something in return, and what she wants is to make the past right. Maybe that’s just her conscience, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t waste a single breath trying to argue with her.”
“Yeah, and like you say, she’s in hiding. Will she give the knife to that fucker, Lévesque? Quebec becomes independent that way, that’s her idea?”
“Does the knife have power like that? Do you believe in magic like that?”
“Yeah. Well. All right. That’s true. If you believe in that shit.”
At their backs, a crane commenced raising materials skyward.
“I don’t know what she’s going to do with it, sir. It’s worth millions. She might sell it. But she has her ideals. She’s a complex girl. She wants the knife and if she can get the information we need—which she tells me she doesn’t have yet—she’ll trade. One for the other. The knife in exchange for bringing these murderers to justice, maybe. Maybe finding Cross for us. A life is at stake here, and we don’t have time to bicker about it.”
Touton stomped around. He didn’t like huge portions of this exchange. He especially didn’t know if Cinq-Mars was the right man for the job, to be in the middle of this affair. He might become overly sympathetic to the girl’s position, too inclined to take her side whatever her cause might be.
He turned back to face Cinq-Mars. “Desperate times,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Desperate measures.”
“That’s my thought, sir.”
“Have it your way. But deliver. If you don’t, you can kiss your career goodbye. Am I making myself pretty damn clear?”
“Pretty much. Sir,” Cinq-Mars objected, “there are no guarantees—”
“You don’t think so?” Touton asked him. He came in closer, breathing on his face. “You’re making me a guarantee. We can proceed on that basis, or you can French-kiss your ass goodbye. What’ll it be, kid? This is your Dieppe. You have to survive, and you have to deliver with zero time to think. Now, what are you going to do, Cinq-Mars? Tell me.”
Émile could not bear the rage in his boss’s eyes. Yet got the message. He crushed the smoke under the toe of his shoe. “Find me a gold shield,” he said.
“Here!” Touton barked, tearing his own from his front pocket. He pressed it into the younger man’s chest, and Cinq-Mars reached up and clasped his hand over it. “Now fucking deliver.”
Touton turned and strode back towards headquarters. Cinq-Mars remained behind on the job site, gazing at the superstructure in its skeletal form. He had an urge to climb through the maze like a kid, to ascend to the top and there—but he did not know what he could do there, what prayer or vow was in order, or how he could properly respond to a moment of such solitary anticipation and yearning.
Cinq-Mars hoped this would not become his Dieppe. Captain Touton, the resilient survivor, seemed to forget that the good guys had lost that battle, that on that beach they had seen their forces crushed.