by John Farrow
Getting to his feet, Pierre Trudeau hugged himself against the chill. The two men smiled, for both believed that their conversation on this special night had brought them together as possible, if unlikely, friends—closer than before. They stood side by side as sirens wailed louder, nearer, ever more plaintively, and the mob, too, increased its roar. In the chill of the chaotic March night, the men waited patiently for the riot, and history, to seek them out.
Captain Armand Touton took the call after the riot had been out of control awhile, the resources of his men stretched beyond their usual limit. Half the police presence was now involved in carting the injured to hospital and keeping roads open for emergency vehicles. In hospital corridors, civilians lined up alongside the same cops who had beaten them, and firemen were streaming in, taken out of action by rocks as often as by smoke inhalation.
The call was being transmitted to his vehicle over the two-way, relayed by a harried dispatcher at police headquarters who was also on the phone to another officer. The dispatcher sounded quite young, probably in her early twenties, a civilian fearful that the social order had come to an abrupt halt. She dreaded conveying messages between the two roaring lions.
“I have no time for a goddamned burglary!” Touton yelled back at her. “Tell him to take care of it himself! That’s what he’s paid to do!”
A delay ensued as his response was passed along.
The young woman’s sweet voice squeaked again. “Sir, Detective Sloan says that you’ve got time for this one. Over.”
“There’s a riot in progress! Ask that dumb sonofabitch if he’s opened a window lately! If he says yes, ask that dumb sonofabitch if he’s deaf in both ears or only blind in one eye!”
Another pause. “Sir, Detective Sloan says I’m to tell you in an angry voice that he’s calling from the NHL head office in the Sun Life Building. He says I’m supposed to say to you in an angry voice that he knows about the … I’m supposed to say it this way, sir … ‘the goddamned’—he made me say it that way, sir, he insisted on it—he knows about the … you know, goddamned … riot. Those aren’t my words. Over.”
This time, Touton took time to formulate a response. Both the Sun Life Building and the National Hockey League offices were supposed to have been guarded, and he had taken charge of that detail himself. Nobody had been allowed to stay in the building, for trouble had been expected, even before the throwing of the first tomato, as the building was an obvious potential target. A break-in would certainly reflect badly on his squad.
“I had guards posted at that site,” he said feebly.
In a moment, the young woman passed along his officer’s response. “Not enough. I was told to say that, sir. I mean, it’s not me saying ‘not enough,’ it’s Detective Sloan. Stand by, please, sir.”
Touton hung on. This was his city. A portion of its centre was now in flames. He could still hear the shouts of rioters, although they had moved on from his station, their exuberance echoing like sirens between the buildings all cheek by jowl, two and three storeys high. Smoke lingered in his nostrils, a reminder of that day on the beach at Dieppe, not so long ago, where he had bled, awaiting capture or death as he breathed in smoke and the terrible stench of the dead.
“Sir? Detective Sloan says to tell you that this is bigger than the riot. He just doesn’t want to explain why over the two-way. He has his reasons, he says. Over.”
With the front door of his vehicle open, Touton stood with a foot up, leaning one elbow on the roof and the other on the door. He clicked his microphone on. “Tell him it’s impossible to drive through the mess from here. I’m heading there on foot. It’ll take a while. Tell him it better be bigger than the riot or I’ll make him smaller than a cockroach. And you can say that to him in your usual sweet voice. You don’t have to sound angry at all. Now, ma chérie, don’t go off on a crying fit. You did just fine. Over and out.”
Touton stepped back from his car and slammed the door shut. A detective stepped close to him, but stayed away when he noticed the intensity in his eyes. “Get me a shotgun,” Touton ordered quietly, without emotion. When the officer returned with the weapon and a box of shells, he cracked the gun open and deposited two shells in the chambers. He left the shotgun open across his left arm and stuffed the box in his coat pocket. He doubted that he’d need the damn thing, but a mob was a mob, and that merited a degree of caution.
As he walked down Ste. Catherine Street, images of burned-out cars, smashed windows, spaghetti coils of firehose and the hollering, drunken kids hauling away stolen loot angered and saddened him in ways that hadn’t fully hit home when he was safely tucked behind the scene at his car. The litter impressed him. How all that debris could be scattered in such a short time was mystifying, as though every object that a rioter could pick up and hurl had been hoisted, smashed and thrown onto the street in pieces. He’d been through chaotic times before. After Dieppe, he was force-marched through Europe and put on display. Citizens stepped from their homes to throw vegetable peelings and human excrement in his face and upon the other prisoners. They hollered fevered insults. Firsthand he had witnessed a mob’s frenzy, and privately he was wondering if he urged caution for reasons that were not entirely professional—he did fear mobs, this one included, not for what they might do to him, but for the memories they invoked.
Armand Touton was unaware of the impact of his presence. He was walking down the very centre of the street, a shotgun crooked over one arm, his grey hat on, his charcoal coat flaring out with each immense stride. He was a man in a hurry. To everyone, he was obviously a cop—not only to those who recognized him as the city’s most famous police hero—and he was one cop who was not cowering. Respect was accorded to him. Boys who taunted unwary adults shut up as he went by. Men who had been throwing rocks and snowballs that contained ice and stones at firemen kept their arms at their sides. Before them strode a man on a mission, and it appeared to many that the folkloric hero was intent on single-handedly breaking up the riot. While the idea might be deemed laughable by anyone on the street who thought about it, no one stood in his path to prevent him from doing so, either.
Those who knew him only by reputation understood that this was his town, the night shift his time. Montreal was a night city. Its clubs and bars were infamous across the continent. Deprived Canadians thirsty for relief from dull social lives booked business meetings and stopovers every chance they got. Americans arrived for the shows and the gambling and the open prostitution. Hookers freely worked the trains coming into town. Over the years, the act he’d enjoyed the most had been Édith Piaf, who’d played the Sans Souci. He suspected that he’d never see her like again. In any case, the Sans Souci was now closed, the closure part of a trend. Yet only last week Touton had caught Vic Damone at the El Morocco. He loved Vic’s voice. He hadn’t had a chance to get back to the El this week to hear Milton Berle, but usually the comedians left him cold because his English just wasn’t quick enough. Another comedian, Red Skelton, was booked at the Tic Toc. Some of the guys had been talking about him, but he’d rather catch Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, coming soon to the Esquire Show Bar, or Sammy Davis Jr. who was booked for the Chez Paree. Last year, he had used his influence—one of only a few times, but the owner, a gambler and a hood named Harry Ship, owed him a big favour—to hear Frank Sinatra, also at the Paree.
He wondered if he’d ever see those big-name acts again: by morning, half his city might lie burned or smashed.
Touton liked to catch the stars, but he wasn’t much into the club life, the drinking and conviviality. He was never made welcome anyway. He preferred to go, listen, look around, check things out, see who was talking to whom, and leave. Too many cops went down the tubes spending their wages at the Algiers or the Samovar, or hobnobbing with the likes of Jack Dempsey or Rocky Marciano at Slitkin’s and Slotkin’s, although he’d done that, too—just once, on a dare. Marciano had been in town, and one of his cops had bet that Touton’s fists were bigger than the champ’s. The cop
begged him to go down to the club the next night and measure his closed fist alongside the reigning heavyweight king’s. Both men settled for a tie, but the photographers enjoyed themselves, snapping the massive fists side by side on a table, then capturing the two heroes feinting punches. A front page showed Touton cracking a right hook across the champ’s jaw. The champ had been smiling. People wondered, though, and the tabloids asked the question, “Could Touton take out Marciano?”
“He’s undefeated,” the officer had quipped. “I’ve lost fights. Adolf had me on the ropes, remember?”
The Top Hat. The Copacabana. The Normandie Roof. The Bellevue Casino, where the cover was fifty cents and so was the beer. The Chez Maurice Danceland, where the young people hung out. The Black Sheep Room at Ruby Foo’s. So many acts and so much action, and the tough guys visited them all and hatched their schemes. Montreal was a night city, to the consternation of the Church and those who held to traditional values. Of Montreal, Mark Twain had said in the 1880s, “you can’t throw a brick without breaking a church window.” Now that same brick would bust the windows of bars.
Times change, but times remain the same, Touton believed. Montreal had always been a drinking city, and a brawling city, a city of vice and pleasure as well as one of piety. Ebb and flow. Amid the social strata stood the police, usually corrupt, on occasion righteous.
As captain of the Night Patrol, and an officer intricately linked to the new reformers, Touton was not usually welcomed into the clubs. He’d never be denied entry, either.
A municipal election had been held a year earlier. On that day, messages about disturbances burst over police radios about every twelve seconds. The day might not have been as bad as the one ten years earlier, when seventeen people were shot, but baseball bats and brass knuckles remained in vogue, and polling booths were dangerous places. Valorously, the reformers persevered this time, and won. Jean Drapeau, the diminutive lawyer who’d led a four-year investigation into city corruption, became mayor, and the man who once had been the head of the police morality squad, Pacifique “Pax” Plante, who had closed down the gambling dens and the bawdy houses only to be fired for his trouble, was brought back to the police department as its new director. This returned Touton to a safer position within the department, but now the club owners were being forced to abide by the 2 A.M. closing hour instead of dawn. They were obliged to evict the prostitutes from their premises, and were crying foul. Even the legendary stripper, Lili St. Cyr, who would vamp in her heart-shaped chastity belt before discovering the key, slipped away, drawn to a burgeoning desert oasis of sin and wickedness. Americans wanted to capture the Montreal business for themselves, and Las Vegas was the answer. The local club trade was bad and getting worse, and Touton suspected that many clients were on the streets tonight, their rage having little to do with hockey and not much to do with the complex politics of the day. They wanted to party, to revel in debauchery once again, and as the new administration was curtailing their fun, they wanted to smash anything that looked vaguely official.
Gambling dens were being shut down, and gambling had been the city’s second-largest industry behind the rag trade. After-hours speakeasies were cropping up, and they’d be the next to be rooted out and closed. One by one, the bawdy houses were bolting their doors, the women waving to their admirers at Windsor Station as they caught trains to New York. A few of the men who had enjoyed the pleasure of their company were now throwing rocks at cops and overturning police cruisers, forgetting that the cops had been the mainstays of the old regime and that reformers in the department, like Touton, whom they were leaving alone, belonged to an embattled minority.
The rioters had their frustrations. They were taking them out.
Times changed and times remained the same—yet these days something new stirred. A fresh influence had emerged to truly change the way things worked. People’s minds were being altered, and for that Touton credited television. Quebecers had only been kneeling before their sets since 1952, a mere three years, but already the impact was palpable. Fewer people came out to the clubs, and Touton had a hunch that TV would do more to close down the city’s nightlife than the 2 a.m. closing hour. But something else: through television, French-speaking Quebecers were seeing, for the first time, how English-speaking people lived on the rest of the continent, and that was an eye-popper. That was stunning. They saw that, in comparison, they were wretchedly poor and hard done by. As well, for the first time, opinions were being expressed over French-language television that ran counter to the dictates of the Church. Touton was all in favour of that. He had been to war. He had lived in a POW camp, then marched in a destitute column back to Germany in the depths of winter without shoes and with little clothing. The Germans did not feed their prisoners on that last march, but allowed them time in the evenings to scrounge for their own food. He knew what it was like to be a captive and a scavenger, knew what it was like to be saved on what was, in all probability, to have been his last day alive if not for the sudden appearance of an American tank. He didn’t need a priest to tell him what to think. The war had instilled that independence in him, and he believed that if more Quebecers had gone to war, and if the war hadn’t killed them, they’d understand that, too. And yet, now, thanks to television, thanks to entertainment rather than war, they were also advancing on the same principles he had attained. They were thinking for themselves. They were questioning authority. And perhaps, Touton considered as he mulled things over, this was why he had not favoured full combat against the rioters, because the riot was a reaction against their restraints, and the people had every right to be mad. They had every right to be furious.
They were poor.
Their lives were hard.
The damn English were always telling them what to do, and now they had suspended the Rocket! Their hero! What else did they have if not the Stanley Cup, and now the maudit anglais had conspired to deprive their team!
So windows were smashed. Debris was scattered. Stores were looted. Vehicles were vandalized and fires struck. Captain Armand Touton walked through the melee wondering how all this would unfold, this intoxicated rage, agitated all the while by a cantankerous officer who had insisted that somehow a burglary was more important than the social firestorm before their eyes.
Cops brought in horses.
The mob paused, retreated slightly, and formed a denser unit. Men shouted profanities at the cops or waved their fists or threw icy snowballs or hatched fresh manoeuvres. Nervously, a cautious contingent stepped to the rear, their enthusiasm tempered, while moving to the forefront were unionists, men who had battled cops previously in bloody confrontations. The combatants included men who’d hire themselves out at election time to wreck polling booths or stuff ballot boxes at knifepoint. Politicians and the papers called them goons. They’d fought cops often, sometimes with guns. Also among their number were the fearless young, their courage found in the tempest of the moment and in the unlimited supply of stolen beer being quaffed down.
Cops manning the line looked across at a few old adversaries they recognized.
The two groups stared one another down.
Waiting.
Anxious horses whinnied.
The cops had no special training with respect to riots, and the only additional equipment they were issued were truncheons. In the past, they had discerned that cops on horseback were able to turn back any crowd. But they were facing men who had fought against horses before, had been beaten back and fled, yet they always itched for an opportunity to try again, believing they could devise fresh tactics.
They could not.
When the cops charged, they charged. The men were pummelled and trampled. Their lines yielded and cracked, yet they had a good number of recruits this time, and the chaos of the scene pulled bystanders into the fray. Riders found themselves surrounded. The youngest of these were terrified. A few panicked, fear travelling through their saddles into the skins of the animals. The horses kicked with their forelegs and spun
in circles and kicked with their hind legs as they’d been trained to do. Rioters fell and held their bloodied heads in their hands. Even so, one policeman on horseback was hauled down from behind. The horse bucked and galloped clear.
Other cops swung their truncheons into the mob, concentrating an attack to rescue the fallen rider, and the mob peeled back and cheered themselves and took up the fight elsewhere. Tear gas was fired, but most of the cops were not prepared for the fumes, and a swirl of wind might send the rioters running one minute, the cops the next. The gas then dipped in gusts perplexed by the compress of buildings, and the eyes of the horses went wild, the animals choked and they were ridden off.
Gas swirled skyward, caught in an updraft that lifted it above the huge, bright, blinking Pepsi-Cola sign.
A tired, bleeding cop, down on one knee awaiting rescue or an ambulance, unsnapped his holster and held a hand on the stock of his revolver. Photographed, the picture would serve as a symbol of the battle in the morning papers.
The mob threw stones and bricks they had loosed from the walls of English stores, and they tossed broken glass at the cops and in the path of horses, and they threw snowballs without any harmful ingredients, or harmful effect, as though this were merely a schoolyard donnybrook. The groups charged and retreated and charged again, and a cop swung his truncheon to get Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his friend, Father François Legault, off their bench.
“What’re you doing that for? I’m not bothering you,” Trudeau complained.
“Get the hell away from here!” the cop cried out and slammed his weapon down hard against the bench, damaging it. He was a man in his fifties with dirt on his face and a wide cut on his chin.
“You’re a Frenchman!” Father François shouted at him, as if that came as some sort of surprise.
“So?” the befuddled cop wanted to know.