Black Bird (16 page)

As the car gracefully made the turn, the premier heard the pop of the lighter and reached for it instinctively. He took his eyes off the road. His wife screamed; he dropped the lighter, shot his head back up and saw, too late, Hubert.

“Vive le Québec libre!” shouted Hubert, waving his arms. The speeding car was behind him. “Quebec au Québécois!” He bounded across the intersection, heading down Atwater.

The premier spun the wheel and stomped on the brakes. The car slid on the ice-covered street, now completely out of control.

The premier yelled, “Merde!” But it did no good.

With a sickening thud, and without even seeing it coming, Hubert met his destiny.

They got out of the car; the premier staggered a little while hunting for a cigarette in his coat. “Merde,” he said.

“Merde,” said his wife.

Behind them, lying on the Westmount side of Atwater Street, was a body. The premier and his wife stood nervously in the empty street trying to decide what to do. Finding himself too nervous, the premier got back into the car to smoke. His wife, clutching her fur coat, shuffled from foot to foot in her high heels, feet freezing in the sub-zero temperatures.

“Tabernac,” said the cop.

“Calice,” said his rookie partner.

The older cop sat the premier’s wife back in her car, beside her silent, smoking husband.

“Okay, don’t worry. It’s a routine thing, just an accident, right?”

The Péquiste premier turned his watery eyes on the cop, rubbed his face with his cigarette still in his hand. The hand shook like Mrs. Harrison’s.

The premier’s wife began to cry. “Calice … de ciboire … d’hostie.”

“We’ll fix it, don’t worry,” said the cop. He closed the door.

The rookie was coming over with a Breathalyzer.

“Criss. T’es-tu fou?” He grabbed it from the younger man’s hand. “You wanna be the guy who breathalyzes the premier?”

“What do you mean? It’s the law.”

“The law. I mean, everybody’s gonna think you’re Lee Harvey Oswald.”

“Oswald?”

“Yeah. And there’ll be plenty hankering to be Jack Ruby. Tabernac, you got a head like a puck, you kids today.”

“But we have to breathalyze somebody for the report.”

“For all the report there’s going to be you might as well breathalyze him,” said the older cop, pointing to the corpse.

The rookie looked puzzled. “I don’t think he can breathe.”

“We’ll give him a hand. Did you call an ambulance?”

“No. Sorry, I should have done that first. Calice.” He started running back to the patrol car.

“Aw, Criss de Criss.” The older man chased him, stopped him from making the call. “You got some things to learn for sure. No ambulance for this guy. Quick, now, we got a chance to clean up this mess if we act fast.”

“What are you talking about? There’s a dead guy out there.”

“Yeah, and there’s the maudit fucking premier sitting at the wheel of the car that hit him. You know what that means? That means unless we do something, you and me, right now, the whole goddamn Christ-fucked histoire du Quebec gets fucked up its own ass.”

“Are you serious?”

“You kids are something. You think anything’s changed since Duplessis died? Look, you and me gonna take our lunch break and use it wisely, and the
premier is gonna go home and sleep it off, and tomorrow we’re all gonna get up and start a new year just like we would have except for that bastard of a frozen turd out there. Then, in six or nine months, surprise, you and me get promoted. Okay? And if that’s not okay, you know what? The maudit idiot of a Quebec premier goes to jail, instead of a referendum we get another useless election, those tits the Liberals take over, your wife will leave you because you reported the accident and the maudits felquistes will send you a little box that blows up when you untie the string. How’s that? Okay?”

“Okay,” said the rookie. “You don’t have to yell at me. It’s not my fault.”

“Maudit wagon de Christ. I got to yell at somebody. I can’t go yell at the premier.” He slammed the car door but was calm by the time he returned to the premier and his wife. He leaned in the car window. They looked like stricken animals.

“Monsieur le premier, madame. Thanks for your co-operation, and we’re sorry to have detained you. We hope you’ll understand that under the circumstances … well, anyway, we won’t need you any more. Please drive carefully, and have a bonne année. Okay?”

The premier and his wife looked at one another, then back to the cop.

He sighed. “Good night. Go home. Forget it.”

Realization dawned on the premier. For the first time since he’d struck Hubert, something was happening that he understood. He stared at the old cop.
Not much older than the premier himself; same generation. The cop’s eyes were warm, friendly, knowing. Briefly, the premier wondered whether he could be trusted. Not his loyalty, but his competence.

The old cop smiled. “Don’t worry. When the snow melts, there’ll be nothing left behind.”

The premier nodded. He put the car in gear, lit another cigarette, removed his glove to shake the cop’s hand. “Je me souviens,” he said.

“What are we going to do with him?” asked the younger cop.

“We get rid of him.”

“Dump him in the river?”

“No. He’d get stuck under the ice. He might drift downstream, but he’d wash up somewhere, someday. I got a better idea. An old acquaintance.”

Aline and Marie had found something to talk about. Tourtière. They were filling individual little pies with meat and using cookie-cutter shapes to cut out bits of crust to lay on top. Both women remembered past Christmases, when their elders had done this for them; both were smiling and telling how wonderful their grandmother’s tourtières had been.

And then the police came knocking at the kitchen door.

Through the frosted panes of glass Marie could see the cops, and Hubert, looking pretty bad. Her knees went weak. How had they found him? Why had he led them to her? Of course they’d beaten him; that
would be obvious even without seeing his bloody, swollen face. Her heart pounded. She clutched at the kitchen counter to keep from falling. It was over. Jail. Even worse, Mother would find out Marie had made and planted the bomb that killed Angus.

Aline opened the door and drew back with a start when she realized the police were holding up a dead man.

“Where’s the old man?” asked the older cop.

Aline was speechless. What had these people to do with Grandfather? Who was this dead tramp they were bringing into her kitchen?

Uncle entered the kitchen, saw the cops. “Calice de ciboire d’hostie,” he said, and ran out.

“What’s the matter with you people?” yelled the older cop. “Where’s that maudit resurrection man? We got a New Year’s present here for him.”

Grace began screeching and fluttering in her cage.

Suddenly, Marie realized that Hubert was dead. She giggled. They weren’t here to arrest her, they were trying to get rid of the body. He hadn’t given her away. She felt almost giddy; being dragged from the depths of her despair was like standing up too fast.

In the great tradition of underground movements throughout history, Hubert had taken his licks and kept his mouth shut. He’d died to protect the rest of the cell. To protect her. She was still reeling under the blow of his death, but was now wrenched from the unsuspected and violent hatred that had burst into being with the thought that he’d betrayed her, to a shamefaced admiration for her
noble, fallen comrade. And an overwhelming feeling of release. The kitchen had never been so warm.

She fainted.

Grandfather and Dr. Hyde disliked one another intensely but had done business together for decades. Grandfather retained the distrust of all professions that had been beaten into him in childhood, through the priests, doctors, social workers and others who’d made it perfectly clear which end of the social scale he inhabited, and how much he owed to their kindness. He particularly disliked doctors, especially those to whom he was bound by economic necessity, and like anyone else he projected his self-loathing onto another when his own profit contradicted his sense of morality. He didn’t blame himself for desecrating graves; he blamed his customers for the use they made of the goods he sold them.

His acquaintance with what exactly was done with the wares he peddled formed his opinion of all doctors. “Vultures. Butchers. They’ll steal your kidneys while your back’s turned.” Or sometimes, if he was in a more expansive mood: “They plant ’em and I dig ’em up again.”

So when the police came knocking at the back door with a body to dispose of, he knew exactly where to take it.

What a great fortune this particular corpse was for him. It boded well for the New Year. He’d never had one in mid-winter before, so it was a financial boon. At the same time, Dr. Hyde would be as pleased to see it as Grandfather in this dry season, and as the law of supply and demand operates in all businesses, he’d pay a premium for it. But best of all, and incredibly, for once Grandfather got to play the benefactor, and smugly relished doing a favour for his enemies—the cops.

This was one good corpse.

For Dr. Hyde, as for many doctors, a youthful idealism—a desire to help those in need—had drawn him to medicine. Such an ambition could equally have led him to the Church, except for the uselessness of such an institution in the face of the death of God. It wasn’t so much that a dead God could not exist as that, even granting He did, a dead God was a God with no soul. It was an inescapable fact that since sometime in the nineteenth century, hospitals had been growing in number and size just as churches had conversely been shrinking. The century of Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx had proclaimed the ascendance of man through reason, and shunted aside mysticism and ritual, replacing them with technology and experimentation. The faith necessary for the foundation of the Church had been replaced by the demonstrable proof of science. Thus, the path to be tread by Samaritan ambition and megalomania was clearly marked.

Dr. Hyde’s early history was a simple cliché. He was a brilliant student and a tireless worker. He was liked and respected by his seniors, his juniors, his contemporaries—in short, he was a pillar of the community and a man clearly headed for Great Things. Honours and promotions came his way as naturally as patients. His reputation burgeoned into fame, his clients came to consist of the famous, and problems were brought to him even if they were outside his field.

He expanded his field. He’d begun with neurology, the study of the nervous system. But cases began showing up that were clearly the province of psychiatry. So he turned from dissecting, weighing, poking, mapping and patching to listening, soothing, prescribing, interpreting and imprinting. He was famous in both hard and soft sciences. He was an innovator in both and a radical experimenter in combining the two; he led his patients through therapy, and he had them hosed. He listened to their dreams, and he dosed them with barbiturates. He probed their pasts with hypnotism, and he probed their heads with electrodes.

Some got better, and for that he was lauded. Most got worse, but that was clearly not his fault.

He had studied medicine, chemistry, biology, psychology; he had mastered surgery, mesmerism, anatomy. And he knew, in his heart of hearts, that all this had done no good. He was as ignorant as he had been in the beginning, poor fool. He could not escape the feeling that despite all his maps and models, all the reproducible effects were meaningless
because none of them led to the seat of the soul. He could take apart a human brain or body, he could track the physical effects of emotions and thoughts on paper or film, but that wasn’t enough. The real knowledge of what constituted the fundamental spark was still hidden in darkness, and Dr. Hyde was very much afraid of that darkness. Because if he couldn’t find that brief illumination, that fleeting moment of Being inside any of his patients, he was afraid that he would never find it in himself. He was afraid it did not exist.

Dr. Hyde continued his experiments for years after his genuine interest had waned, only because his fear drove him to outrun his despair. He could easily dissect any number of creatures, and end up with a table full of dead meat. But if he started with a table full of parts, and managed to induce the same impulses and reactions natural to a living creature, would he end up with a living creature? If it lived, would it have a soul? It was the only way to put the question to rest. Was the soul a real component of a conscious being, or merely an after-effect of a certain material process?

At Ravenscrag, high on the side of Mount Royal, his private laboratories adjoined his mental hospital. Here he kept the results of his experiments, both when he had minor successes and when the failures were spectacular enough. He had a jar in which the hand of a hanged murderer still crawled up the side; he had a pair of lungs that had breathed by themselves for three days; he had a small brain that he suspected was still busy thinking.

These trophies were the result of his life’s devotion to the Great Work; and it seemed as if it would all die with him. For if he had no real success, if the breakthrough did not come, it would be impossible to make his findings public. This was a side of his practice that could only be revealed if he managed to establish some conclusive proof.