River City

by John Farrow

  The house remained unlit, soundless.

  He could hear his own breathing.

  A streetlamp allowed him to read the sign in the door’s glass: padlock your ass. Meant for cops, it carried more than a single connotation. The first reference was to the Padlock Law, which had permitted the homes of communists and union sympathizers—and, by extension, Jews—to be barricaded by the police while the inhabitants were briefly away. The second referred to the police procedure of padlocking brothels and gambling dens after a raid. Everyone knew the scam. A brothel might have its broom closet bolted shut. One famous whorehouse had a door specially built on the street for the purpose. The door went nowhere—it opened onto a wall. After first alerting the madam, so that she could depart the premises and install her janitor to remain behind specifically to endure the arrest and pay the trivial fine, the police would ceremoniously snap a lock on the door to nowhere. In doing so, they discharged the letter of the law, while the spirit of the whorehouse remained cocky and the daily cash receipts continued unabated. The greatest inconvenience to most brothels might be to discover that their mops and buckets had been locked up, temporarily placed under house arrest.

  He rang the buzzer again. This time, a light inside snapped on. Then the porch light came on, and the curtain in the door’s glass was pulled aside an inch.

  He displayed his badge.

  A petite, attractive woman, although not at her best in nightdress and housecoat, applied a sliding chain lock and, once secured, opened the door a crack.

  “Mrs. Clément?”

  “Who wants to know at this fucking hour?”

  “May I come in?” Touton asked gently. “I’m Captain Armand Touton of the Montreal Police Department. I have news about Roger.”

  Clearly, the woman had been geared for a more confrontational tone from a police officer. She closed the door only to unlock the chain, then let it fall wide open. Turning her back, she led Touton into the living room, where she glared at him, arms crossed. Despite the severe posture, she appeared to be shivering. “So, you’re Touton,” she stated.

  A little voice piped up behind the policeman. “Mommy?”

  “Anik. Come here, honey.”

  Rubbing sleep from her eyes, a girl, about eight years old in pink Bambi pyjamas, moved towards her mother. She rested her head on the woman’s hip and wrapped her little arms around her, snuggling in as her mom held a hand around her shoulder. The child looked up at Touton with dark eyes.

  “Perhaps Anik should wait in her room,” Touton suggested, suddenly unsure of himself.

  “She stays.” She eyed him up and down. “What do you want?”

  “I have bad news.”

  “No,” she said. Her face, that quickly, went pale, and the woman stepped back and found the chair behind her. She managed to pull her olive-green housecoat more tightly around herself, then gathered the child closely to her side. “Did you kill him? Were you the one?”

  The cop was momentarily stunned. “No.” Then he realized that the question had probably been justified. “It had nothing to do with the police. But I’m sorry to report, Madame—”

  “No—”

  “That your husband is deceased.”

  She said “No” twice more, yet something in her manner indicated to Touton that she was not a woman to deny the truth for long. Her body began to quake. She had to heave to catch a breath. Her chin and lips quivered a moment before she tightly clamped her jaw. The child held on to her, and he could tell by the way the woman’s head slumped forward and the pain rose up in her eyes that this day had not been entirely unexpected. She had anticipated the moment. Knowing what her husband did for a living, that he took large risks, she had lain awake through many long nights, awaiting the sound of his footsteps and a key in the lock, her heart clamped tight with dread. Only after he had fumbled with his clothing in the dark and his weight had eased down beside her would her thorax begin to unclench. This time, his footsteps would not arrive on their ramshackle stoop. This time, her fears had been confirmed.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” the detective murmured.

  Madame Clément pushed her child away from herself gently to dab her eyes on the sleeve of her housecoat. She gazed upon her daughter, her eyes filling with tears again, her anguish apparent. At the sight of her mom in such distress, the girl also wept, although she did not know why. For her, “deceased” held no meaning.

  “Your papa …,” the woman said, then could go no further.

  Confused and distressed now, the daughter, Anik, placed her small head against her mom’s and held her tightly, as if to squeeze the tears and the obvious pain right out of her.

  Touton sat down opposite the mother and child. He had felt uncomfortable looming above them, unable to approach.

  “What happened?” the woman managed to ask. Her voice was barely audible.

  The captain of the Night Patrol explained what he could, letting her know that her husband had been stabbed and that the case would be given the full attention of the police. He described the murder weapon, but refrained from suggesting that Roger himself might have been the thief who took the knife from the Sun Life Building. He had no evidence of that, and this was not the time to be accusing her dead husband of criminal activity.

  Instead, he asked the most routine of investigative questions. “Do you know anyone, Madame, who might want to do such a thing to your husband?”

  She had further difficulty breathing a moment, but commenced to pull herself together. As she spoke, she absently combed her child’s hair with her fingers, an unconscious habit, and the girl faced Touton while sitting in the chair alongside her mom.

  “You, or any cop, that’s my first choice. Second choice, goons from this or that mob … take your pick. Politicians—municipal, provincial, federal—they’d be next on my list. You should investigate any businessman who has it in for unionists, even if he’s hired Roger to bust up strikes in the past. So, yeah, cops, goons, politicians, businessmen. More or less in that order. I don’t think the Church had anything against him, so I’ll rule out priests, but you never know, and working people were on his side. Every friend he’s ever had would die for him, so it was none of them. Does that narrow it down, Captain?”

  Touton knew a few things about Carole Clément. Roger had talked about her often, his love for her clearly impassioned and devoted. As well, the cop had culled information from her police record. She had been in jail for organizing strikes among seamstresses. The trade offered the lowest-paying jobs for women, in the most difficult conditions, and usually only immigrants took the work. The sweatshops were primitive, the labour physically debilitating, the threat of dismissal for the slightest fault ever-present. After she had become a mom, Carole had taken on piecework at home, partly to be close to her daughter, Roger had said, but also because no one in the industry would knowingly hire her. Friends had seen to it that she found work without the bosses being aware of who actually performed the labour.

  “Piecework’s no better,” Roger had told him. “You get paid for what you do dead perfect, not for your time. The bosses? They know a woman’s got to be home to look after her kids, that they don’t got options in life. The good part is, no boss is looking over her shoulder now, checking a stitch, or feeling up her tits—if anybody does that now, it’s me—but at the same time, she’s got to work fast and accurate or she won’t earn a dime. Rights? Hunh? What rights? Carole’s organizing pieceworkers now, but in secret. Everything’s secret or the work gets cut off. It’ll be one mean, long fight.”

  “As you know, Madame,” Touton spoke in a low, gentle voice, “your husband had a tough job. He made enemies. That’s what I’m asking about. Who carried a grudge? Anyone? Also, his business partners, shall we say, they might have gone against him. Was he worried about anything like that?”

  “You mean, was he worried that his business partners—what you call them—maybe found out he was a stool pigeon working for you? Yeah, he worried about
that. Did anybody find out? How would I know? The first clue for something like that would be Roger gets a knife stuck in his chest.” The words had come out defiantly, but once they were spoken she collapsed into tears. This time, the daughter was alert to a dire possibility. “Is Daddy coming?” she asked.

  Carole responded with tears and hugs, and Armand Touton steeled himself so that a surprising tremor wouldn’t trouble him as well. The daughter’s presence—prompting him to remember all that Roger had said about her—broke his heart.

  Eventually, he offered, “I admired your husband, Madame.”

  “You admired him,” she repeated back sarcastically.

  “I thought he was a fine man.”

  “A fine punk! A goon! A thug!” Carole shot back. “Are we talking about the same guy?”

  “He had a way of going about his job—”

  “He only beat up the assholes. You don’t have to tell me. I’ve heard that story before. It’s a crock of shit. He’s a liar, my husband. He makes up stories. He breaks some poor bastard’s nose and says the shit deserved it. But … he tried to get proper work. Who would let him? Would you let him? You didn’t want him off the streets. You didn’t want him going straight. You wanted him to stay with the bastards. He tried to work in factories—by noon, somebody would find out that he was Roger Clément, who once played a year with the Rangers, a few games over three years with the fucking Blackhawks.”

  “Mommy, don’t say that word,” Anik censored.

  “I know, sweetie. Mommy’s sorry.” She turned back to the detective. “Roger Clément, who spent most of his career in the penalty box. Roger Clément, who got beat up by the really tough guys on the other teams, but at least he kept swinging. Okay, so he was never a great fighter on skates. Off skates, in shoes, nobody could outpunch him.”

  “Except me, maybe,” Touton said. “We had that between us, him and me. We wondered who could take the other guy if it came down to it. Maybe I could outpunch him, but we never found that out. It’s one reason we were friends. We could both punch.”

  “Write it on his grave: ‘Here lies Roger Clément. He could punch.’” The woman wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Every time Roger got a factory job, every fucking time—oh sorry, sweetie, Mommy won’t say that bad word again. His first day on the job, no matter how hard he tried to get out of it, at lunch somebody wanted to take him on, try his luck. So what’s he going to do, lose? He’d fight the guy, then get fired, or fight the guy and get arrested, or fight the guy and six other guys would line up to try their luck. Every time, it ended up with him realizing that if he had to fight anyway, he might as well get paid for it without doing all the shit labour and being pushed around by bosses and foremen.”

  Repeatedly, the policeman turned his hat over in his hand. What she said was valid. When he’d worked on the railroad, and later in the army, his reputation as a man who could use his fists was frequently challenged. There was always somebody who wanted to prove his status false. He didn’t know if he could have taken Roger in a brawl. He had taken LeBrun, but he had always believed that that had been a lucky punch. And Roger had a soft middle. Between the two of them, the question was held in suspension—who could take the other guy out?—yet for both of them, the issue would only remain a curiosity. Neither man had an interest in that ultimate test.

  Only the rest of the world cared.

  “So he’s not been particularly worried lately? No new problems with his job?”

  “You’re so holier-than-thou, aren’t you?” Carole fired out.

  Touton was now glad that Anik was there. Her presence obliged her mother to mind her tongue. “Did Roger think that way? I don’t think he did.”

  “Roger was confused by a lot of people. Look who he’s working for.”

  “Roger,” Touton stated, “taught me that I had no right to look down on him. He worked for the mob, guys in the rackets, I worked for the police department.”

  “Who are also in the rackets,” Carole taunted him.

  “That was your husband’s point. As he used to tell me, with the gamblers and the pimps you knew what you were buying. With a cop, if you expect one thing, you could get something else.”

  “We don’t have a police department in this town,” the woman complained. “The strong arm of the law is nothing more than the strong arm of the mob.”

  “Some of us are trying to change all that. Roger was helping.”

  “Yeah, well, some of us dedicate our lives to changing the system.”

  “We’re making progress.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she told him. “My husband is dead.”

  Her little girl looked up at her. “Is Daddy dead, Mommy?”

  For a long time, the woman wept in the arms of her child, while the policeman stared at the floor.

  He did not leave before receiving assurances that she would contact a neighbour, to have someone be with her. And he vowed to pursue the case, to bring her husband’s killers to justice.

  “You don’t know where that might lead you,” she cautioned him.

  “I will take it where it leads me. That’s the promise I’m making here tonight. To you and your daughter. That’s a promise I’ll keep.”

  She pressed her lips tightly to stop them from quivering.

  At the door, with her child against her, she called the detective’s name before he stepped off the porch.

  Touton turned. He felt captured by the wide, dark eyes of the child.

  “Roger and me, we had an understanding. I wouldn’t ask him about his work and he wouldn’t tell me anything. But we always talked about finding a way out.”

  “I see.” The detective returned his hat to his head and pulled in his coat against the chill. The woman was shivering now in her grief.

  “Lately, he’s been talking. I don’t know how far things got. But he’s had some idea about a big score on his mind. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t discourage him. We needed to change our lives.”

  “Did he mention anything about this big score? Who he’s been seeing lately?”

  She shook her head, and Touton knew that he could believe her, that she was not withholding information. Perhaps she didn’t know that her husband had also been working for him in recent days.

  “Has he ever mentioned something called the Cartier Dagger to you?”

  Again, she shook her head.

  “Thank you, Madame. Please accept my condolences on your loss. I liked Roger a lot. Him and me, with twists of fate, we could have traded places.”

  “Detective.” Her new reality was taking hold, and through her heartache, practical matters had presented themselves. “I hope I won’t be reading in the papers that my husband was a police informant.”

  Touton gazed at her, then at Anik, and back at the mother.

  “No, Madame, you won’t be reading that. But I can’t control how the papers will describe him. He has a past.”

  “You understand, don’t you? It’s not possible. You can’t attend the funeral.”

  She desired to hold her head up over the next little while, and that would include holding her head high among the families of friends who had worked with Roger in nefarious activity. Touton nodded, sadly expressing his understanding. He felt a pang, for he realized that he had both wanted and expected to be paying his respects in a proper manner.

  His last image of the evening would remain the most haunting: the dark, doleful eyes of the child gazing at him. Questioning him. He drove home, knowing that he’d be awake early in the morning to confront a city in the midst of its devastation. Yet he was going to feel more troubled, he knew, by these two forlorn hearts.

  CHAPTER 6

  1608–09 ~ 1611 ~ 1628

  NEVER AN EXPLORER BOUND TO HIS SHIPS, ALTHOUGH HE CLAIMED great happiness at sea, Samuel de Champlain was foremost a soldier, a geographer and a diarist. An avid adventurer, he was also devoted to sitting still for hours, imagining or writing. He appreciated the birchbark canoe and valued secrets
discerned by a discourse with rivers, yet this daydreamer would become a political strategist whose actions determined the course of nations in the New World. To all appearances a peaceable man, on his own initiative he chose to commence the Indian wars.

  His predecessor, Jacques Cartier, on a third and final voyage, had failed to progress beyond the rapids at Montreal. Thwarted in a quest for diamonds and gold, the French abandoned the vast lands of forest and snow for decades. Among the Indians, stories of white men with beards and giant canoes would become half-forgotten rumours, myths passed along by batty elders that were difficult to decipher or believe when, after seventy years, the fabled French returned. Henri IV had been gazing upon the Cartier Dagger, ruminating over reports that the English had plans to explore, and perhaps annex, the New World. The Dutch, those villains, were also up to something, and the Spanish had ambitions brewing. Henri IV always had to second-guess the Spanish. So he chose to dispatch Champlain across the sea, and obliged him to introduce sixty families a year into New France to gain a proper foothold there. Champlain was also expected to explore and map the river system, initiate commerce, and, while he was there, pursue the search for the fabled swift route to the Orient.

  A man who had been at sea on his twentieth birthday, and now a handsome, charismatic sea captain in his thirties, Champlain conned the coastline north from the lands called Cape Cod and Maine before attempting an east coast community in the basin of an inlet off the Bay of Fundy, which he named Port Royale. Starvation and illness stymied that fledging effort, but like Cartier before him, he would grow more impressed by the spectacle and promise of the St. Lawrence River. In 1608, having forsaken the initial settlement, he established a second where the river narrowed at Cape Diamond, a place the Indians called Quebec.

  The following summer, in the company of two French and sixty Algonquin, Champlain canoed south up the River of the Iroquois to an immense waterway, where he proved to be more pragmatic than his forbearer at naming landmarks. An island in the St. Lawrence had cleverly been called Île Ste. Hélène, for he had landed there on that saint’s day. Yet he noted in his diary that naming the island after a saint was really a coy subterfuge, for he had had in mind, as he so often did, his bride back in France, the pretty twelve-year-old Hélène. Now appreciative of the majesty of a long and narrow body of water bounded by mountains on either side, he promptly named the lake Champlain. Unlike Cartier, he would not depend upon others to christen an impressive waterway after himself, and his party canoed the lake that bore his name, south toward the Iroquois settlement at Ticonderoga.