River City (74 page)

“—who got her information from a dead man and a priest sworn to secrecy. Oh, that’ll go over well on the witness stand. You’ll be up on charges for slander and false arrest—they’ll have a field day, those government lawyers. Turn the courthouse into a carnival. Know what? I’ll sell candy floss on the front steps, make my fortune that way.”

Cinq-Mars allowed the captain’s perspective on the situation to float in the room awhile, coming to rest upon his shoulders as sadly as grey city dust.

“You can answer now,” Fleury advised him.

The constable shifted nervously while trying to get his emotions in check. He didn’t want to burst out, all steam and bluster, although he could feel the heat rising inside him. “First,” he declared, “I wasn’t planning to march up there and I’m not the kind of person who struts.”

“Now he’s in a pique,” Fleury noted.

“Second,” Cinq-Mars pressed on, “I don’t intend to issue accusations. I’ll introduce the subject to the prime minister, listen to what he has to say. Third—” “Third!” Touton was enjoying the officer’s defence. “—I never said ‘left-wing radical'—”

“That’s true, you didn’t,” the captain acknowledged, still with that damned sparkle in his eye. “But she is, isn’t she?”

“And fourth—”

“Four already, how high is he going?” Fleury asked. Touton winked at him. “I never indicated to you that my informant is female.”

“Ah!” The ranking officer took time to make another adjustment. “You see my dilemma, though. I need to visualize your informant—it helps me to remember things as I get older. I make her out to be twenty-two, pretty, short brown hair, a cute nose and bright eyes, also brown. I imagine her as a left-wing radical. Maybe her mom’s a union agitator? Why deny my mental picture, when it’s so clear?”

The young cop recognized that he was growing dangerously annoyed, that he had to watch himself. “Picture him as male, sir. Forty-eight, let’s say. Give him a beer belly and bad breath. Snaky eyes. We might as well honour him with a name. Let’s call him … Alphonse, how’s that?”

Touton smacked his lips and rocked his head around skeptically. Wishing to take a slug of whiskey, he knew he ought to hold off, bear another night determined to be rough.

“I got a problem with that,” he said.

“I got my own problem with it,” contended Fleury.

Cinq-Mars muttered under his breath, “You would.”

“You got something against this Alphonse jerk with the stinky armpits?” the captain asked.

“I didn’t … discuss … his armpits,” Cinq-Mars rebelled.

Fleury clamped his hands together and leaned forward. “It’s obvious to me, sir, from the kind of information the kid’s been getting, that he’s sleeping with his informant.”

“There it is,” Touton agreed. “The nail on the head. That’s why I have a hard time picturing your ugly slob with the beer breath and the smelly feet, this Alphonse. Are you telling me you’re
that way
? Because I’m not your Father Confessor here, my son. About things like that, I want to know nothing.”

They had him again.

“That’s not what I’m saying, just like I never mentioned smelly feet. But nobody says I’m sleeping with her—him—
whoever
!”

“How do you acquire information of that nature? Gaston, do you know how?”

The diminutive accountant offered a thought. “Maybe we could refer to the boy’s informant as an animal. A critter from the barnyard. He comes from a farm. How about it, Cinq-Mars? Are you screwing a pig?”

Fleury had gone too far. The uniform was on his feet, ready to smack him around.

“Hey-hey-hey-hey!” Touton called out, progressively raising his voice until Cinq-Mars stopped short. “Kid, sit down. Detective Fleury is going to apologize to you for that remark.”

He sat back down, and Fleury said, “It’s good you defend your girlfriend’s honour. I apologize for any insult. I take it back.”

Thinking he could keep Anik out of the discussion had been foolish. “Apology accepted,” he muttered, although overall, he was feeling miserable.

“Kid,” confided the captain of the Night Patrol as he struggled up to a common posture, “here’s the point. Whoever your informant is—man, woman or critter—she smells nice, I bet. Can we agree on that? The stinky feet are out. The smelly armpits, we won’t mention them again. Are we agreed on that?”

Grudgingly, Émile nodded his consent.

“She smells nice?”

“She smells nice,” Cinq-Mars mumbled.

“Good. Now, this is what bothers me. You think the prime minister of Canada has something to say to you about stolen property. You’ve got an idea in your head that if you go up there, strutting or not—although I don’t know what’s so wrong about strutting—”

“Me neither,” Fleury interjected.

“—you seem to think that when you go up there for a conversation, Trudeau will say, ‘Officer, you’re right. It’ll ruin my career, cost me an election, I might get jail time, but it’s been on my conscience. Tonight, I’ll go on television to tell the nation I’m in possession of the Cartier Dagger. I’ll beg the people to forgive my damned eternal soul.’”

This time, Cinq-Mars was the one to shift around in his chair.

“You don’t like it that I quote the prime minister?” Touton asked.

“I don’t expect him to confess,” Cinq-Mars conceded.

“Good to hear. What do you expect?”

“I’m not sure … I …”

They waited, but he had nothing to add.

“Maybe you expect him to be careless with the knife after your conversation?” Touton pushed himself up to press his advantage. “He’ll carve the Christmas goose with it, show it off to his best friends. Or maybe he’ll let the media into the prime minister’s residence to film him
strutting
around with the knife between his teeth?” He took a deep breath and noticed the effect of his words on his protégé. “You’re grimacing, but obviously you don’t expect he’ll hide it more deeply. You don’t think—” Touton winced as he shifted his hips. “—that he might worry his career’s at stake? You don’t imagine he’ll sell it on the black market for what you or me make in fifty lifetimes? Because if you expect that, why would you propose this tactic?”

When he considered what he had been expecting, Cinq-Mars accepted that it had probably been as ludicrous: he wanted to defend Anik’s honour. He’d been told who possessed the knife that killed her father, and wanted to let that man know he was on the case. In a sense, he anticipated no further benefit than a chance to rattle the man who owned the relic, unnerve him a little. He now grasped that that would be an ineffectual exercise. Counterproductive, perhaps. He also realized, to his dismay, that he had not told the men in the room anything they hadn’t already known, or at least postulated. Perhaps he was confirming a rumour, but that confirmation had not advanced the investigation. A dead witness—Houde, the old mayor—and a close-mouthed priest did not open up avenues of exploration. For now, a prime minister with a secret could keep it.

Nodding, Cinq-Mars and Touton made eye contact. Both men gathered that the other’s awareness was up to speed.

Yet, as Cinq-Mars stood to leave, Touton asked the young man to stay put.

“This is what we’ll do with your information,” the captain suggested. “Alerting the most popular prime minister in history that we might know about his alleged secret possession does us no good. About the dead mayor, what can I say? He’s dead. I doubt that he’ll have much to say if we dig him up. So let’s take a closer look at the priest.”

“The priest?” Even Fleury was surprised.

“Father François is Anik’s mother’s priest. He’s Anik’s priest. He was Camillien Houde’s priest. He was a member of that
Cité Libre
crowd back in the fifties, which included …?”

“Pierre Trudeau,” Fleury caught on, finishing the other man’s conjecture.

“Kid, something in the way you worded it,” Touton noted. “You said your informant, the one who smells nice, told you the priest
comforted
the old mayor at the hour of his death. He told Houde that the transaction had been accomplished. This was not a priest listening to a confession, but a man involved in a conspiracy.”

Cinq-Mars chewed that over. “I found it curious. But my informant—” He exchanged a glance with Fleury. “—feels that the priest was conveying information, that he wasn’t personally involved.”

“Conveying information
is
involvement, Cinq-Mars. Who’d he been talking to? What did he know? Was he picking up his facts from deathbed confessions? I doubt it. Besides,” he concluded, “I’ve never liked him. Call me old-fashioned, but he’s political. Not like a real priest.”

“I’ll get on it,” Fleury stated.

“Let the young guy do the legwork,” Touton instructed, which clearly disappointed Fleury. As usual, he was anxious to slip out from behind his desk and his usual job assessing budgets. “He knows about priests. But he reports to you.” Opening a lower drawer, Touton fished around inside, then pulled out a bottle of rye. “Now, scram,” he told them. “Some of us have work to do.”

In the corridor, Fleury turned to his new charge. “What’s this about you and priests?”

“I don’t know how he knows.”

“He knows everything,” the detective declared. Cinq-Mars raised his eyebrows in doubt. “Now tell
me
what I don’t know.”

With a slight and self-conscious cock of his head, the young cop admitted, “I considered the priesthood. It’s what my father wanted. I got interested. But I don’t know how he knows. I’ve kept that to myself around here. I thought I had, anyway.”

Fleury shrugged. “Do you think he’d let you on our team without checking you out? He probably knows your shoe size, the colour of your mother’s eyes, the names engraved on your great-uncle’s tombstone back in France.”

“No,” Cinq-Mars said. He’d had enough games from this guy for one night.

“If I exaggerate, sue me. But we’re going against the flow, Cinq-Mars. What’s the one thing that you’ve got going for yourself that you haven’t figured out yet?”

He was expecting another dig.

“You’re not from around here,” Fleury told him. “You’re a small-town boy. Half-farmer. As it turns out, half-priest. That’s significant. It’s possible to believe that you haven’t been corrupted. It’s possible to imagine that you don’t have some dead uncle’s sister’s boyfriend’s cousin’s dad who’ll put the squeeze on you to protect the family name. You think we’re going after the prime minister on this one? That that’s tough? Maybe dig up the dirt on a few dead politicians? We could be going against the
people
—at least more than we care to count. We may be up against a few outstanding mythologies—are you following me on this? Do you have the brains? The balls? We might be setting ourselves up to provoke the grievances of an entire population, not just some big-shot next door or the guy up on Parliament Hill.”

Émile had to believe that his new boss was not putting him on this time.

“Not only did he check you out, Cinq-Mars, he put his faith in you. I would say his hope, too. He started with his faith in you, then checked you out. So far, you’ve passed muster.”

“Sounds contradictory,” Cinq-Mars noted. “Having faith in me, then checking me out.”

“Fuck you. Do you hear me, smart-ass? Fuck you. I saw you in there, the look in your eyes when he pulled out that bottle—”

Cinq-Mars pulled the identical expression a second time, barely disguising his judgmental condemnation, his head and eyes rolling back.

“Hey. If he needs a shot to pull him through
—hey!”

Cinq-Mars had begun to turn away completely. He rotated to face Fleury again. “Look, you’re my superior officer, but you don’t need to apologize for him and I don’t need to listen to this.”

“Maybe you do. That man in there, in the Second World War—”

“Everybody has an excuse.” He tried to walk away again, but Fleury caught his arm and came close, under his chin, speaking in a harsh, whispery voice.

“Wounded. Captured. Seventeen days with minimal medical attention. Force-marched. Operated on with no anaesthetic by a French doctor employed by the Germans. After the operation, during which Armand did not cry out—maybe he moaned a little, but he did not cry out—the doctor told him he was the bravest, strongest man he’d ever met, and shook his hand. Years later, he was force-marched back to Germany in the
winter
… in the
snow
… in
frigid temperatures—with no shoes.
Now, if he needs a shot today to handle the pain after being cut up by that doctor in butcher-like conditions, then you’d better hurry up and respect him for what he’s going through. You would’ve cried out, Cinq-Mars. You would’ve bawled like a baby. Any man would’ve.
Every
other man did. On that march, you would’ve curled up by the roadside, gone to sleep and died. Like so many did. That man in there did not. So if you want to pull a face because he’s having a drink, be prepared to fight me outside, because that’ll happen sooner rather than later.”

Cinq-Mars was looking at a man who had to be sixty to seventy pounds lighter than him and eight to ten inches shorter. A man with a desk job who had never done a day’s work on a farm in his life, and if he’d tried, he would not have survived. Any skirmish outside would be brief and one-sided, the younger man knew. Yet, graciously, he backed down.

“That won’t be necessary,” he told him. He was thinking he might have made it through that long winter’s march, although he was grateful for never having been tested that way. Fleury, he imagined, would never have seen the first dawn, but of these things, who really knew?

The older detective from Policy continued to glare at him. Then he issued a fractional smile, an admission, as if to say, “Thank God for that,” and walked off.

He was nearing the end of the corridor, about to turn the corner towards his office, when Cinq-Mars called after him. “Sir? What should I do now?” Without looking back, the smaller man commanded, “Follow me.” So he did.

Travelling up and over the eastern flank of Mount Royal on Park Avenue, Touton was driving through a light rain into breaking sunlight.

Parkland graced the rising slope to his left. Lower to his right, fields for baseball and football occupied a flat plateau, then yielded to congested communities that eventually, way in the distance, gave way to industrial territory dominated by oil refineries and rolling stock.