The Marble Mask (9 page)

And the occasional mountain.

As we drew abreast of Magog to our west and took the right fork where Route 55 hooks up with Route 10, we were struck by the enormity of Mount Orford, the area’s largest ski resort, made all the more impressive by its uniqueness amid the relatively flat terrain. Hulking like a sleeping monster, it was a reminder of the earth’s travails, and of the fire and ice that had made our planet habitable, if perhaps only briefly.

The final approach to Sherbrooke, by contrast, was subtlety itself. Apart from the snow-covered forested terrain’s being occasionally scored by high tension lines, there was no hint of the city until after Gary had turned off onto Route 410 and was just a few miles shy of downtown. Even then we saw only a vast, largely vacant industrial park to our right, with clusters of apartment buildings and shopping malls across from it. If the history lesson Paul Spraiger had given us was accurate, this introduction to Sherbrooke held true to its roots. It spoke of industry, of a worker’s town, of the interest of erstwhile pioneers to transform themselves into modern merchants.

And the final unveiling didn’t disappoint. As we topped the last hill and descended into the shallow valley that held the Magog River and the city in its crease, these values became clear. King Street Ouest, Sherbrooke’s major commercial east-west boulevard, was a string of fast-food restaurants, low-cost housing, motels, and—across the water slightly below and paralleling the road—a long, low vista of factory buildings, railroad lines, and petrochemical holding tanks, some of which loomed so large as to appear faintly menacing. As far as I could see, there was not a single building that didn’t speak of practical function. It all reminded me of what can happen after a flash flood sometimes, when the flotsam and debris is washed up on shore and then left behind by the receding water to dry, helter-skelter, in the sun.

Still, despite its lack of graceful architecture or picturesque antiquity, the city had a comfortable, lived-in feel to it. A place without pretension or misguided sense of purpose.

Gary Smith obviously didn’t agree. “Jesus—shades of New Jersey.”

Spraiger laughed. “It gets better downstream. All this is new—kind of a miracle mile. Downtown’s prettier. Twenty-five years ago, there wasn’t much here. Better pull into the right lane. Don Bosco Street is up ahead.”

“What’d you do?” Gary asked. “Memorize the map?”

“Kind of,” Paul answered without guile. “I used to live near here when I was a kid. That’s how I learned the language.”

We slowed at a traffic light just beyond a half-abandoned Days Inn parking lot.

“There it is,” Spraiger said, pointing through the windshield.

We turned into Don Bosco, which dead-ended at some railroad tracks at the bottom of a steep incline right at the river’s edge, and saw a large, flat-topped cement building surrounded by a white spiked fence, identified only by a small highway sign announcing, “Sûreté du Québec—Police.”

Gary Smith was sounding more depressed by the minute. “I thought these guys were supposed to be the Mounties of Québec. This doesn’t look like much.”

We drove through the open gates and pulled into a parking area directly opposite the building’s front door.

“You only wish we were rigged out like these guys,” I told him. “They’re provincial police, not the feds—but they damn near cover the earth. About four thousand officers. They do everything from bomb disposal to scuba work to helicopter surveillance to hostage negotiation, plus a lot more. They just don’t put on a flashy cover.”

We crossed the parking lot, climbed the stairs, and entered the lobby—a cold glass enclosure with two opposing windows revealing office workers going about their business. Before us was a locked door leading into the rest of the building.

Gary glanced around, hoping to catch the eye of one of the people behind glass. Paul crossed to a phone hanging on the wall with a sign beside it. “Here we go,” he said, picking it up and speaking with someone.

“Nice personal touch,” Gary muttered, a stranger in a strange place, feeling increasingly alienated.

Which was quickly alleviated by the rapid appearance of a small man in a dapper suit, wearing an infectious smile and the thick accent Gary had mimicked earlier. “You are the American police?” he asked, shaking hands all around. “I am Gilles Lacombe. Welcome to Québec.”

We followed him up several flights of cement stairs and down a corridor of cluttered offices. The room he ushered us into had narrow windows facing the river but didn’t actually have a view of it. Predictably in this town, I was beginning to learn, a metal warehouse stood in the way.

“Please. You should sit down. Would you like to have coffee?”

We all declined, and Lacombe joined us at a small round table across the room from what I assumed was his desk.

There was a folder before him, which he opened. He extracted a photograph from it and held it up. It was obviously old, in black and white, and it showed a man dressed as if he’d stepped out of a vintage movie. “Is this the man you call Jean Deschamps?”

I nodded. “That’s certainly the man I saw at the autopsy.”

Lacombe smiled, something he did frequently. “It is Jean Deschamps. You are right. This is the latest photograph we have of him.” He checked the back. “It says June, nineteen forty-six. Afterwards, we hear nothing more about him.”

“What did you think happened to him?” Gary Smith asked.

Lacombe’s eyes widened. “Ah. I cannot say. I was not even born then, but I have asked the questions, and we will talk soon with a man who will tell you. This,” he indicated the file, “is the first thing I did after you telephone me and say the name Deschamps. Right now, I can tell you about the Deschamps and what they are doing today, and maybe you can tell me about the body of Jean. Then later, we can talk to the retired man who knew Jean Deschamps.”

He suddenly got to his feet, looking down at us affably.

“But first, I would like to invite you to have lunch, no? You are hungry?”

I could see Gary getting ready to reject the invitation. “Wonderful,” I said quickly, grabbing Paul’s elbow and rising. “That’s very kind of you.”

Gary shut his mouth and joined us. “Yeah. Thanks.”

We all filed back downstairs to a rear door leading to a closed garage with only a few cars in it. Lacombe headed toward a new minivan.

As we followed him, I murmured to Smith, “Sorry. I figured it would help break the ice.”

He nodded several times, looking relieved. “No, no. That’s fine. Keep him happy. I’m a little out of my depth here.”

We piled into Lacombe’s van, and he backed us out into the parking area behind the building, confirming his status, to me at least, as one of the organization’s higher-ups. In fact, no formal introductions had been made, as they would’ve been back in the U.S., so I actually didn’t know our host’s rank or responsibilities.

Lacombe returned us to King Street, crossed it, and headed uphill toward the town’s modern northwest quadrant.

“You know Sherbrooke?” he asked.

I was once again riding shotgun in the front seat, watching buildings slide by that made me think they’d been collected at some American architectural lawn sale. “Paul does. He was giving us a history lesson a while ago, plus a bit about the Hell’s Angels.”

Lacombe laughed. “Yes, the Hell’s Angels. Very big. They are not actually in Sherbrooke but in Lennoxville. They have a house I should show you. It is like a fortress—cameras, barbed wire, dogs, bulletproof glass.”

“I thought things were calm around here,” Paul said, surprised.

Lacombe looked back at him. “You are right. But the Rock Machine—you know them? The Rock Machine has made them very nervous. They have been shooting and bombing the houses of the Angels in Montreal. Very bad people.”

As we topped the hill, I glanced back and got a more panoramic view than before. For the first time, I noticed, beyond the river, a tall hill with a huge, metal, Erector set-looking cross planted on top. And I could just make out to the left the tops of what seemed to be some much older buildings—the part of town Paul had mentioned earlier, and the first visible signs of a distinctly foreign influence.

I, too, had glanced at a map before we’d left. Sherbrooke was like a capital letter T lying on its right side, with the Magog River being the center leg and the cross being the north/south St. François River, connected to the Magog via a steep and narrow gorge—the source of the town’s hydroelectric power and the site of the original settlement. Unlike other communities, whose roots become less visible over time, Sherbrooke showed its origins as openly as the timeworn lines on a factory worker’s face.

Eventually, Lacombe brought us to a restaurant at the back of a sprawling, nearly empty shopping mall parking lot—a visual paradox I was to discover fit Sherbrooke like a glove. “I eat here always. Very cheap, but good.”

“Which part of town do the Angels control?” I asked him as we entered its doors.

“There is a street downtown called Wellington South. It is where are the bars, discos, cheap hotels, tattoo places,
et tout le reste.
That is where the Angels and the Deschamps work.”

In contrast to the outside, the restaurant was dark and friendly, with gentle piped-in music and booths and tables placed on various high and low platforms, breaking up the enormity of the place and injecting a sense of intimacy. We were shown a table high and toward the back, with fewer people, less noise, and an almost tree-house view of the floor below. The waitress and Lacombe were obviously old acquaintances.

For the next several minutes, Gilles Lacombe played host, translating our requests into a Québecois patois called
Joual
, which bore no resemblance I could detect to the French taught in our schools. For drinks, Paul, Gary, and I had water or Cokes. Lacombe had a beer, which I noticed caught Gary’s disapproval. Despite the short, forty-minute drive from the border to here, I was beginning to feel like we’d just landed in Europe—an unsettling but pleasant sensation.

No doubt harking back to our theorizing during the trip, Gary asked Lacombe, “Have the Deschamps and the Angels shared this area for long?”

The Sûreté man looked at him meditatively. “I would say the Angels are here about twenty-five years. The Deschamps, much longer. I don’t know about Jean, but he was a big shot already when he disappeared. At first, there was trouble. The Deschamps had everything and they didn’t like the competition. I was just a patrolman back then, but I remember. We would find bodies outside of the town. But I think that with time, like two boxers, they finally realized no one body could win, and the Angels, they are not going to go away. So there was a peace, and it has been there for many years.”

“What about you guys?” Gary asked as sandwiches arrived for the three of us—fat things made of French bread, which Gary eyed with suspicion—and soup and an odd bread, cheese, and pâté assortment for Lacombe, which looked to me like dollops of cat food. “You didn’t just watch this happen, did you?”

Lacombe shrugged away the bluntness of the question. “It was not as it is now. Sherbrooke had its police, we had a station here—only an outpost—Rock Forest and Lennoxville/Ascot had police, too. And the RCMP was there.” He hesitated, then smiled thinly. “Now, we are one big happy family. The Sûreté has a headquarters here, the Sherbrooke police joined the other two. We work well together.”

He was obviously being diplomatic. “We went through the same growing pains back home,” I said, hoping to soften Gary’s implied criticism. “Still are, here and there. People like to defend their territories, and the bad guys take advantage of it.”

The smile widened again and he relaxed. “Yes, that is it. Also, it is not so easy to fight them.” He looked at Paul Spraiger, who unlike Gary was utterly at home negotiating his food. “You study history, yes? Did you study the Algerian War in the 1950s and ’60s?”

Paul nodded enthusiastically. “Sure—what a mess.”

“Yes, yes. The French paratroopers would search the Muslim Kasbah for rebels. If they could catch one, they would torture him, but mostly they could only get two names from him. The Algerians, they keep information in triangles of three people, so that one could only betray two more. You understand?”

“And that’s what they did here?” Gary asked. “Both Angels and the Deschamps?”

Lacombe wiped his mouth on his napkin after taking another bite. “The Angels have become very big—about twenty-five people. The Deschamps, they are smaller, but they have deeper roots. They are about ten.”

“That’s all?” Gary blurted.

“No, no,” Lacombe continued, frustrated by his linguistic limitations. “That is what I was saying. Each one of them is like a
capitaine,
with his own people. All the
capitaines
know each other, but they do not know each other’s people. So for each Angel or Deschamps, maybe you have ten others working for them, maybe more. It is difficult for us to know.”

We all paused, contemplating the potential of what he’d just said. “And the Rock Machine is threatening to bust that wide open,” I finally commented.

“You see why we are interested in your old, frozen Jean Deschamps,” Gilles Lacombe said softly.

JACQUES CHAUVIN WAS SMALL, WRINKLED, AND AS
agile as a monkey. He looked at us warily from under bushy white eyebrows as he muttered a few quiet, rapid-fire questions at Gilles Lacombe in
Joual,
standing in the doorway as if choosing between fight and flight.

Lacombe made the introductions, followed by, “Jacques is the Sherbrooke policeman I spoke to you about. He knew Jean Deschamps and the others in the family back then.”

We resumed our places around Lacombe’s round table, Chauvin sitting so close to Lacombe their legs were almost touching.

“Jacques does not speak English,” Gilles explained, “so I’m afraid you have to listen to me. It will be very slow. I have tried this before. But is that okay?”

I glanced at Paul and nodded. He cleared his throat. “I could give it a shot, if you’d like. I speak a little French.”