River City (23 page)
“But eighteen thousand members …” Touton put in.
“Exactly. Plus, the tacit support of the Church, even though, officially, they stand against secret organizations. Plus, members of the Jean-Baptiste Society. Plus, when Bouchard spoke, politicians, academics and journalists all created a storm against him. As I said, he was condemned from every corner of Quebec. Did you know, Captain, that while you were away, the majority of our people supported Pétain? That when France fell, we sided with the Germans, we praised their victory? De Gaulle sent an emissary, a woman, to raise money and support the cause of France. The poor lady found herself among Frenchmen who were unsympathetic. That talk about the Germans, the people here recited to her, as if they knew more about it than she did, amounted to nothing more than British propaganda! ‘But I’m part of the Resistance!’ she’d argue, and she explained that a week before she’d been planting bombs. ‘More British propaganda,’ she was told.”
“So my incarceration in Poland,” Touton put forward, “my march across Europe without boots in the dead of winter—”
“British propaganda,” Fleury informed him from his birdlike perch on the edge of his chair, and gave the captain a few moments to absorb this news.
Hard to fathom. Touton had stepped ashore from a landing craft, and over the next few minutes only he and two others would survive. Back home, a large portion of the people they were fighting and dying for actually supported the enemy. He’d heard rumours to that effect before, but after the Allied victory
nobody wanted to talk about whom they’d supported. Touton drank his beer with sadness. He felt alone despite the chatter of men around him.
He could hear them, these tavern voices, rehashing their bad days and going over last night’s game, and their talk would turn to the war across the sea. What did they say, these men with their beer bellies and families and jobs, while he ate his slice of black bread and scoop of foul porridge, his only food for the day? What did they say? Did they clink their glasses at the prospect of a German victory? Had they cheered the news from Dieppe, that the Canadians had had their asses kicked, that the infantry had been all but wiped out?
Eventually, the source of his new knowledge started in again. “Lionel Groulx, the intellectual, do you know him?” Touton shook his head. “Very influential. Well respected. He glorified Mussolini. He considered Italy and Germany to be among the most fortunate nations on earth because they were being led by strong men. By dictators. He prayed for a man like that to arise here. When Mussolini was killed, he railed against Italians for their ignorance. Now it’s true, sir, that when de Gaulle came back, he found support in Quebec again. Victory will do that, but I’m sure some of it was genuine. But the support for Marshal Pétain, for the collaborators, for the notion of a dictatorship, that did not disappear. It just went underground. I believe it exists to this day, inside a secret order to which many prominent citizens have pledged an oath.”
“The Order of Jacques Cartier,” Touton recited. “So it’s real, you believe?”
“Without a doubt, sir.”
Armand Touton polished off one glass and downed half of another, then erupted into a smile. “So,” he said, chuckling lightly, “we know the truth. A detective in Policy is still a detective!”
At that, the thin man beamed, and together the two hoisted their glasses, clinked and drank. In time, after polite discussion of the riot and of the coming campaign against speakeasies, Fleury announced that he had to head home and the two men split the bill. Touton was intent on his next task, one that he was not looking forward to. The time had come to pay his respects to the wife of the deceased coroner. In the end, he left two full glasses on the table—a sin in some quarters, but he was bent on rearranging his priorities.
On his way out, he muttered under his breath, “One for you, Roger, for the road. One for you, Claude. Drink up.”
Night found the city uneasy in its calm, yet at peace. Armand Touton juggled the assignments of three dozen detectives. Which crimes from the night before would have to be ignored, a consequence of the chaos? Which demanded an investigation? His men would be run mad covering assignments, and the quality of their work would suffer. Once they’d been dispatched to the streets, Touton succeeded in finagling a meeting with the director—not an easy accomplishment for most officers, but he and the boss had an understanding. Each man commonly made himself available to the other.
He found Pacifique Plante in his office, munching on a sandwich. The director had already enjoyed a dramatic career, despite being the most poorly qualified of men for the job. He’d never been a cop himself. Two events had brought him to power in 1946, but only temporarily. A grenade had been lobbed into a gambling den. Suddenly, public pressure intensified to do something about gambling. Then, just six days later, Harry Davis, the mob boss in charge of the gambling scene, was gunned down in his barber’s chair while having a trim. The public outcry over the violence grew shrill.
Although the mayor wanted to legalize gambling, the Church—the real authority in the province—condemned the pastime as evil. Protestations forced the mayor to retreat from his plans, and now the chief of police was on the hot seat to respond to the new crisis. The usual practice, to give matters time to calm down and fire the head of the morality squad, might yet work. In the previous ten years, the head of the squad had already been fired seven times. Usually, the move undercut any public outcry, everything went back to normal, and when the next chorus of disapproval occurred, the most recent head of the morality squad would be fired once more. This time, though, the matter was more complicated, as the one person who honestly did keep the peace, who made the crooks behave, the mobster Harry Davis, had been the one gunned down.
Now, no one was in charge of anything.
The police chief was approached by a diminutive lawyer, Pacifique “Pax” Plante, who had been working in the municipal court system, in what was identified as the Recorder’s Court. He asked if the chief was serious about eradicating gambling. The chief had no choice but to agree that he was, and to deliver a pompous speech. “Then hire me to lead the morality squad,” the twig of a lawyer proposed.
The chief was reluctant, for the man wasn’t one of his guys. On the other hand, bringing in an outsider would make it look like he really meant business, and the fact that the man had no police experience meant he was likely to fail. Once the mob boys got a hold of him and yanked him around on a chain, everything would go back to being normal and the public would be hushed until the next unfortunate incident.
“Fine,” the chief agreed. “But don’t come bawling to me if you get run over in traffic.”
Plante was a man on a mission. He revered Elliott Ness, and like Ness, who had taken on Al Capone and the Chicago mobs, he wanted to clean up his own time and place. He started by closing down the gambling dens, then went after the brothels. He did his job so well that the mayor had to get rid of him, and Plante was fired. Only when the reformers took power in 1954 was he returned to the police department—this time, having first abolished the title of chief, as its director.
Plante knew that corruption was not merely tolerated in his department but part of the natural order. In Armand Touton, he found a cop he could trust, someone with ideals, integrity and boundless courage. He made the young man a captain while he was still in his early thirties. As Touton stepped into his boss’s office, it hit him who had brought Detective Fleury onto the force: the cop from Policy physically resembled the director so closely that he could be his kid brother. He’d check, but if Fleury turned out to be the director’s man, he’d know that he had found another cop to trust.
“Armand, how’s it going?” Plante indicated that he should have a seat.
“Shit’s hit the fan,” Touton told him as he shifted his weight in the chair. He was wondering what it was about small guys that made them secretly so fierce.
“The riot?” Plante assumed.
“That, too.”
Plante finished chewing a bite of his egg sandwich, then said, “The coroner.”
Touton sketched the details of the two murders and the missing dagger, and summarized his meeting with Fleury. “He one of yours?”
Plante brushed crumbs from his fingers onto the paper wrapper, then smashing the wrapper into a ball he tossed expertly into a corner waste bin. “It’s my prerogative to hire him if I want to.”
“Actually, I was impressed.”
The director cleaned his teeth with his tongue. “He’s here to look after the books. I don’t know what he’s doing fiddling around with something like this.”
“Maybe he takes after you more than you realize.”
That notion seemed to please the director, and he offered a slight smile. “What do you need, Armand?”
“Two daytime track dogs.”
His boss surprised him by declining the request. “I’ll tell you why,” he said.
“Why?” Touton covered his shock, but he was shocked.
“If you’re going to examine something called the Order of Jacques Cartier, prepare yourself for where it could lead. This is not a job you can farm out. Handle the investigation yourself and play it close to your buttons. Understand? Nothing can be leaked to any sector of the department. So no, you can’t have two track dogs who’ll probably pass information to the same people you might find yourself pursuing. Do it on your own, Armand, or forget about it.”
He took the man’s point, but he still needed help. “I can’t work night and day. As it is, I work extra shifts and extra days—that’s almost routine.”
“Tell you what,” Plante considered, and offered a compromise. “We both know someone who’s trustworthy, who won’t arouse attention if he’s away from the office running errands for you.”
“Fleury,” Touton said.
“Not exactly a regulation track dog.”
“I’ll take him. I met a uniform last night, on site. Miron was his name. It’s normal for the captain of the Night Patrol to get a uniform to work a daytime detail—”
“All right. You can have him. Anything else?”
“Let me try to trace the car, at least, with day uniforms. That kind of detail can feed into other ongoing investigations. Anyway, it’s a murder case.”
“Don’t turn it into anything more. Not in public. That’s it?”
“I’m good, Pax. Thanks.”
“One more thing.” Plante poured himself a coffee from a thermos. With the riot, he was probably working around the clock, and already his eyes looked grey and old. “I don’t think I’ve ever said this to a cop before. This time, I think it’s warranted. I want it to sink inside that thick head of yours, Armand.”
“Sir?” He felt he was being reprimanded.
“You might find yourself tracking people who have resources and connections. Be careful. Never underestimate the power of power.”
“So you’ve heard of the Order.”
Pax Plante nodded. “Worrisome old rumours—the kind that stick.”
“How high do you think it goes?” Touton tested him.
“Higher,” the man said, and stared back at him.
“What do you mean?”
“No matter how high you go,” he said, and he paused to sip his steaming coffee, “remind yourself that you can probably still go higher.”
Both men gazed at one another. An impression of understanding passed between them, a puzzling acceptance that what might soon transpire could not be fathomed. Not dissimilar, it occurred to Touton in a trice, to glances shared among the men landing at Dieppe. Pax Plante and Armand Touton each sought to comprehend how time and circumstance had brought them to this moment, and whether they would each stand true if overtaken by dread.
Standing, Touton nodded solemnly, departed and quietly walked through police headquarters back to his office. All along the corridors, the word was being whispered that the city had remained quiet.
I
N THE COUNTRYSIDE NEAR CHAMPAGNE, FRANCE, HEAVY-SET, BALD,
white-whiskered Father Charles Lalemant passed his days amid a gallimaufry of memories, flowers and bees, augmenting a meagre pension through the production of honey. From time to time, whenever the local parish priest had cause to travel or perhaps took ill, as he was a frail man, Father Lalemant would accept the opportunity to partially replace him and again say mass. If the resident priest tarried awhile or his infirmity lingered, Lalemant would consent as well to hear confession and engage in administrative chores. Deferential to his age and position, his neighbours knew nothing of his background. They assumed that, somewhere in France, he had enjoyed a quiet parish and had faithfully passed his days in humble servitude to his Lord. On rare occasion—welcome hours for him, as he favoured company and conversation—he’d receive visitors from Paris or from towns farther afield, men or priests who had learned of his experiences and sought knowledge of his early days. For Father Lalemant, Jesuit and beekeeper, had not lived a docile life. Father Lalemant had preached among the Huron.
His neighbours would be shocked to know that, in his day, he had retrieved the bodies of his fellow priests from the stakes on which they’d been tortured and slain, and that in modest numbers—some would say unsuccessfully—he had converted warring Huron.
A story told about him, one he forever declined to repeat, maintained that he had, on one occasion, converted an Indian who had been torturing him, thus sparing both his own life and the immortal soul of the native.
News had arrived by dispatch a week earlier, so that Lalemant was not surprised when a horseman approached his cottage, which was painted the colour of a daffodil freshly in bloom. He put out an array of cheese upon the pear-wood table, sliced cooked bull’s liver and duck’s breast, and decanted a bottle of red wine into a jug before stepping outside to greet his guest.
The traveller, arriving all the way from the northwest seaport of La Rochelle, represented the Order of St. Sacrement, a secret society to which Lalemant himself adhered. Members held social and political position, they might be men of commerce or belong to the Church, but they were uniformly pious, and held in contempt Cardinal Richelieu’s policies of the day. As first minister, Richelieu conducted the European wars and sought the enrichment of France. Piety was a word he might speak on public occasion, but a personal discipline he had failed to undertake. Hence the need for a society, independent of Church and king, devoted to the propagation of the faith. The need for secrecy, a nuisance, had been determined by the cardinal’s spies, who were everywhere as he sought to consolidate power. Peacefully, diligently, members of the Order of St. Sacrement undertook what they considered to be the true work of France, to herald the spiritual sovereignty of their Lord.
