City of Ice (12 page)

“I’m sorry about your brother, Vassil. This must be hard on you,” Cinq-Mars began.

The boy glared at him without reply.

“You’re on your Christmas holidays, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Do you like your school?”

“It’s all right.”

“Vassil, what is it that you know? Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

“You must think my family is stupid,” the boy said, defiance brittle in his tone.

Cinq-Mars had not expected the attack. “I think no such thing. You have a fine family, that’s obvious. Why would you say such a thing?”

“You come in here. You say you’re paying your respects. All you really do is get us to tell you things.”

The detective made a gesture to suggest that he ought to be forgiven. “Sometimes, the policeman in me, it comes out even when I try to behave like everyone else.”

“Merry Xmas, M-Five,” Vassil Artinian spat out.

“Pardon?”

“My mother speaks no French. My father, very little.”

“But you do.”

“I go to school. M-Five. March Five. Cinq-Mars. That’s you. My brother—”

“Yes—”

“Once we were walking.”

“Yes?”

“He saw a copy of
Allô Police!
He picked it up to show me. He said, ‘Do you see this man? He gets the credit. But I am the one who makes him a hero.’ ”

“Was I the man in the picture, Vassil?”

“Yes, you. Cinq-Mars. My brother dies and you come here to pay your respects. My ass. My fucking ass.”

“I want to know who killed him, Vassil. Just like you do.”

“To save your own skin, I bet.”

“To see justice prevail, Vassil. That’s what your brother worked for. Justice. Can you help us, Vassil? Who did he work for? Who were his friends?”

“He worked for you,” the boy spat out. “That’s all he said. He said he couldn’t tell me more. He did dangerous work and you got the credit for catching criminals. That’s all I know.”

“Is it?”

“It’s all I have to know. Better you don’t come back here. If you do I’ll tell my father what I told you. You’ll see. He will break your neck. I won’t upset him today. My mother—” The boy’s voice broke. “Better you not come back here,” Vassil warned.

In the foyer, Cinq-Mars shook the hand of Mr. Artinian, the firm, powerful hand of a bricklayer, and stooped to accept the man’s embrace. The officers departed amid a flurry of condolences and thanks, and once again stood outside in the frigid air. The sun had set, the night was illuminated by streetlamps.

“Well?” Mathers asked.

“Well what?”

“Does the boy know anything?”

“Too much and too little,” Cinq-Mars told him. “Always a bad mix.”

At the foot of the stairs Cinq-Mars chose a chunk of ice by the side of the curb. He hurled it toward the nearest lamppost, and missed. He bent down to pick up another chunk.

“Now what?” Mathers wanted to know.

“Now? We go back to the station. Then we go home to our dinners and our wives. We try to sleep tonight. We try to get the sadness of these people out of our heads. To do that, we tell ourselves that we were not responsible for the death of their beloved son.” Cinq-Mars smoothed his chunk of ice into a rounder shape. This time his throw hit its target. The ice smashed across the post and flew off in shards.

“You’re not responsible, Émile. He provided you with information of his own accord.”

Cinq-Mars did not reply.

“How about we go get a drink first?” Mathers suggested.

“Maybe we better,” Cinq-Mars consented.

Monday, January 3

Concealing his squad car behind a snowbank, Émile Cinq-Mars parked in a space plowed for a driveway and shut the engine. Lieutenant-Detective Rémi Tremblay, looking absorbed and official, as usual, tucked in behind an electrician’s van on the opposite side of the road. A third unmarked car took up a position a few spaces behind him. André LaPierre’s cruiser found a spot beyond Garage Sampson. Observing radio silence, the squad waited.

Huddled together, the apartments on the street were uniformly squat, embattled, and quiet. Snow had been plowed since Cinq-Mars had last visited but not cleared away, and an overnight fall had added to the street’s woe. A few snow piles were mountainous, while the snowbanks that ran along the sidewalk had been gouged out to accommodate cars, the excess dumped onto the walk.

Finishing a walk-by in snow up to their knees, LaPierre and his partner came up to the car and struggled into the rear seat behind Cinq-Mars and Mathers.

“Looks good,” LaPierre reported. His smoke jumped between his lips. He leaned to one side to gain access to a pocket, his knees poking deep into the seat in front of him, jostling Mathers.

Cinq-Mars delivered the thumbs-up to his lieutenant, Tremblay, across the street. His longtime colleague and superior appeared out of place away from the battle station that was his desk. Flu and winter holidays had decimated his squad, and the lieutenant was pitching in. He nervously tugged an earlobe to acknowledge the signal.

“Hey, Pepsi!”
LaPierre called out. Immediately, he covered half his face in a handkerchief and uproariously blew, sounding like a ship’s horn.

The French had names for the English in Quebec, and the English had names for the French. The English were called
tête-carré,
or squareheads, a term that went back to headgear worn by the British military in another century. The term stuck because the French considered the English “square,” less spontaneous, more entrenched. They also called them
les maudits anglais
, “the bloody English,” and on the French tongue the words carried venom. The English ridiculed the French by naming them after food. With Pepsi the favored soft drink in the province, English youth would call their adversaries on the other side of the language barrier
Pepsi.
They’d shout
Mae West
at French girls after a chocolate-coated vanilla cake, or if they really wanted to be mean, they’d bray
pea soup
, another traditional French food. Cinq-Mars knew that he was not being flattered.

“Heard some news, Émile. You’re meddling in my affairs.”

“Your affairs? You mean with other women, André?” He watched the sergeant neatly fold the handkerchief. LaPierre’s body was not made for the backseat of a car. He was too bony and gangly, his neck too long. His cold, apparent in his watery eyes and red nostrils, was making him hostile. From the way he squinted Cinq-Mars could tell that the man’s sinuses remained plugged.

“They’d never go for you, my women, Émile. You remind them of a priest.”

Cinq-Mars was intrigued. “I’ve never met your women, André.”

“Don’t be so sure. I know for a fact you’ve arrested three of them.” LaPierre’s cheeks were concave, giving him an impoverished appearance, but despite his height and gangly movements he was not a skinny man, not anymore. Cinq-Mars had known him as a rookie—he’d looked like a pencil in a uniform then, his fair head an eraser. LaPierre’s skin appeared stretched over his face, as though he wore his bones closer to the surface than other men. The taut forehead, the sunken cheeks, the evident blue veins on his temples, the hollowed cavities for his eye sockets—LaPierre had always looked deprived, or famished, in some ill-defined way. He had an addict’s wasted look.

Forced to crack a grin, Cinq-Mars waited for the man’s charges to be laid.

“
Pepsi
, you’ve been interfering in my case.”

From behind the wheel, Cinq-Mars twisted around to examine his fellow officer more closely. “What’re you talking about?”

“You visited the Artinian family in their home, Émile. Interrogated the younger son.”

“André, pay attention. Bill and me, we found the body. We were paying our respects, that’s all.”

“You’re a kind soul, Émile. Your next promotion should be to sainthood. We’ll call you Saint Émile, the Patron Saint of Stoolies. You can tell us to say ten Hail Marys and cut the dicks off six perps.” His lips were sticky with phlegm.

“The boy misunderstood a few things,” Cinq-Mars explained.

“Like what?” LaPierre was filling the car with smoke.

“Cops show up around his house asking if his brother
was a drug addict. That you, André? I told him his brother was a good kid who worked with us. No harm in that. I’m just helping out the family.”

“You’re talking front-page news, Émile. I would’ve liked hearing it when the case opened up. How about you, Alain? If you were the IO on a homicide, wouldn’t you appreciate a colleague letting you know that the victim was his stoolie?”

Déguire merely chewed on his lower lip. He possessed the distant gaze of a man who was daydreaming, who’d rather be on vacation, or playing sports, than working. Given his muscular neck, his broad forehead, and the cavernous crease across his brow, Alain Déguire had the demeanor of a man who could head-butt a door into matchsticks. Cinq-Mars caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. The young man did not look ready to take sides with one superior officer over another.

“Nobody messes with a case of mine, Émile,” LaPierre carried on. “Maybe you’re the big cheese, maybe you’re caramel spread, but you’re interfering, withholding information.” With smallish ears, and that neck, bare pate, and height, the man’s bearing appeared remarkably giraffelike, so that in the car he looked as though he was being shipped to a zoo. If he crouched any lower his knees would be in his teeth. “I want to see you this afternoon. Feel free to tell me everything you know about my case. After that, stay the hell away. You—English—I’ll talk to you, too.”

Neither Cinq-Mars nor Mathers responded.

“Ah, yes”—LaPierre contemplated, smoking and hacking—“we’ll have a nice long chat. Send out for pigs’ knuckles maybe. A couple of beers. You got an ashtray back here, Émile? This car’s so clean it’s like a showroom. Smells nice, too. Doesn’t anybody ever bleed in your car? Nobody pukes back here, I bet. I got guys puking and bleeding in my car all the time, don’t I, Alain?”

“That’s right,” Detective Déguire acknowledged. The answer came by rote. Cinq-Mars had the impression that he’d respond the same way if he was called upon to confirm that the world was flat.

“Cinq-Mars—he keeps his hands clean,” LaPierre taunted. “Take today. This is his case. Who gets to do the dirty work? Me and you and half the department. I’m telling you, Émile, if somebody bleeds we’re taking him back in your car. I’m not waiting for an ambulance. It’s your car we’re taking.”

“Toss your butt out where it belongs.”

LaPierre did as he was told without comment. “Yes, Saint Émile, we’ll have a chat. Bring a rosary, Your Holiness, it’ll help pass the time.”

Uniforms with rifles crouched behind cars and burrowed behind snowbanks.

Cinq-Mars changed the subject. “Ever been on this street before, André?”

LaPierre peered around both of Mathers’s shoulders for a better view. “In my lifetime. Not lately. Why?”

“Tell him, Bill.”

Happy for the privilege, Mathers turned half around in his seat. The chubbiest of the four men in the car, he was probably also the most lithe, able to be comfortable while his body was contorted into a twist. “Garage Sampson is where your victim worked.”

“Who?”

“Hagop Artinian.”

At the end of the block, officers on foot were moving into position. Vans coming from the rear remained out of sight.

“You’re really up on your case, André.”

LaPierre snarled, “I had the flu. I was off sick. Not to mention I got fellow officers withholding information.”

“This should’ve been your bust,” Cinq-Mars baited him. “If you’d come down here, talked to his employer, his fellow workers, you’d’ve had it yourself.”

“What were you doing here, Émile? Paying your respects, I suppose.”

“As a matter of fact.”

Vans appeared in Cinq-Mars’s rearview mirror. Lieutenant Tremblay’s voice crackled over the radio. “Front line—ready and close. Go! Squad—on my mark.”

They watched as four vans stormed the drive in front of the whitewashed garage gleaming in the sunlight. Rifles up, uniforms leapt out and closed fast.

“Go!” Tremblay commanded over the two-way.

“East of Aldgate,” remarked Cinq-Mars with a sigh as he removed his pistol from its holster and checked the safety. He climbed out of the car and carried his gun in his hand with his hand in his pocket as he walked at a normal pace toward the garage.

“You ever going to tell me what that means?” Mathers asked him, catching up. He was trying to be calm, and sound brave, but the tension was apparent in his voice.

“You’re a detective. Figure it out.”

Plainclothes officers stepped out of their squad cars and briskly tramped through the snow. Uniforms guarded the garage doors while others rushed the interior. Cinq-Mars felt the bristles in his nostrils stiffen in the cold. By the time he made the short walk, the building was secure. Inside, secretaries sat wide-eyed and weepy, their hands on their heads. Cuffed mechanics lay bent across the hoods of automobiles. The owner, a burly, neckless man, had had his hands cuffed behind his back.

Mathers asked him his name.

“What’s it to you? Why you bastards come in like this?” His bushy eyebrows sloped low on each side of his face.

“Last name first,” said Mathers, pen poised.

“Kaplonski, all right? Walter.”

“We have a warrant to inspect the premises, Mr. Kaplonski.”

“Inspect. You want to look around my place, look around. You don’t need guns for that. I sue you for this one, you hear me?”

“The cars are stolen property, Mr. Kaplonski. We’re checking the numbers now, so why don’t you shut up?”

“This garage legitimate garage! Look, this car—transmission failure!”

“What about the Bimmer? Seven forty-iL. Brand spanking new. What’s wrong with this vehicle, sir?”

“The window. We take out glass to fix—”

“While you were at it you happened to remove the windshield VIN. By accident, I suppose.” Kaplonski released more invective, and Mathers warned him, “Sir, we’ll be down at Headquarters for a while, me and you—I suggest you don’t mention my mother again.”

Tremblay entered to inspect their progress. Like the two other top officers, Cinq-Mars and LaPierre, he was a tall man. The three had progressed in the department together, and some had suggested that their height had caused them to be noticed. In the early years on the force many had quipped that if they screwed up as cops, they could always play basketball. Tremblay came across as someone equally at home in a boardroom or on a squash court. He was considered a terror in both realms. He praised the effort. “Textbook. Quick and neat.” He had a tendency to sound professorial. “Book the works,” Tremblay instructed Cinq-Mars, who was standing idly by, his discriminating nose in the air as if tracing a telling scent. “Give us time to browse,” he whispered. “If the workers pan out, release them after. Worry them first. See what they give up.”