River City

by John Farrow

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I wanted to tell you in person.”

  “Thanks. I’m still disappointed.”

  “Will you drive me up to the Westmount Lookout?”

  Something more might be on the man’s mind, so Touton acquiesced.

  The road wound upward among the mansions of the rich. Near the top of one of Mount Royal’s multiple peaks, Summit Circle took in the views. They passed the old Van Horne mansion, built by the man who had constructed the first railway across the continent. The house was so large that, when it came time to be resold, it had been cut into two separate sections. Thirty feet of width was removed from the multiple storeys. Farther along, they arrived at the lookout, where lovers had parked and tourists scanned the city’s lights.

  “So you won’t work for me,” Touton repeated.

  “I have secret ambitions, Captain. If it ever came out that I was a stool pigeon for the cops, it could crush me.”

  “That sounds like the counsel of your friend Pelletier.”

  “That’s what impresses me about you, Captain. You’re astute. Do you know the name de Bernonville?”

  He did, although it wasn’t on the tip of his tongue. “He was in the papers. Years ago.” Then it came to him. “A collaborator with the Germans in France, no?”

  “That’s right. Tried in absentia in France and sentenced to death. He had tortured and killed his fellow countrymen in the Resistance. And Jews. After the war, he slipped through France and Spain and landed in New York. He came up to Quebec under an alias, disguised as a priest.”

  Touton nodded. “Someone found him out?”

  “Dozens of French collaborators found their way to Quebec after the war. They discovered they had friends here who would look after their welfare. But a few Resistance fighters emigrated here as well. Count Jacques Dugé de Bernonville was recognized, his exploits publicly recounted.”

  “He’d been well received here?” Good to know by whom.

  “With aplomb, Captain. Brought into Montreal society. After being recognized, he threw himself upon the mercy of Canada. He even admitted his deception but begged permission to stay. Canada investigated, and ordered him deported. But the outcry within Quebec was intense. His crimes were brought forward. Supporters declared that they constituted the propaganda of Jews and Freemasons. As if those two groups had ever consulted each other. They claimed he’d been following orders, that the rush to return him to France smacked of a communist plot. He managed a stay while his case was being reviewed, and he hung on for another three years. But his past crimes became indisputable, his support eroded, and eventually the count deciphered the writing on the wall. They say he escaped to Brazil, where he hooked up with another infamous man from the period, Klaus Barbie. Rumour has it that he doesn’t always stay away, that he makes return trips.”

  “Mmm,” Touton murmured. “You say that when he arrived here originally, he had a network of supporters in place?”

  “Ready and waiting, yes. This is where it gets interesting. In the course of the attempts to keep him here, a petition was signed. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen, students, academics from the University of Montreal, in particular, and politicians, including our Mayor Houde. The student society at the university also voted to keep the count. One hundred and forty-three names are on that petition.”

  “I’ll track down the petition, Mr. Trudeau.”

  “Call me Pierre.”

  “Call me Armand. I’ll take it from here. I want to thank you.”

  “Please understand, Armand, that this is not spying. I’m only directing you to a public document. Petitions to the federal government are never destroyed.”

  Touton started up the engine. He had names! Precious names! He wanted to get on this right away. “I get it. Where can I drop you?”

  “In this costume? Best if you take me straight home.”

  He had phoned ahead, and now drove up to visit the widow of Roger Clément. Having names in his pocket made him feel rich, although he was going to try them out first in this, the poorest of communities, and at the poorest door. A connection between the powerful and the desperately impoverished was one he would love to establish.

  Properly dressed this time in a simple grey smock, her hair pinned up, Carole Clément continued in mourning. Her daughter, Anik, remained pinned to her side, as if the life of one flowed through the other and sustained them both. Often, Madame Clément slid a hand over the girl’s skinny shoulder as unconsciously as another woman might wear a bracelet.

  “I’ve talked to officers in Homicide,” she told her visitor.

  “Roger was a friend of mine,” Touton explained. “The homicide detectives will do the best job they can with the resources they’ve been given. But I will pursue your husband’s killers to the end of my days, if necessary.”

  The woman let the words settle over the room, like dust motes drifting in the sunlight, becoming invisible as they moved into shadow. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she offered.

  Touton hesitated. He realized that he’d love a cup of coffee. His wife drank tea, Clarence Campbell preferred tea, he expected that the people on his list drank tea, although that was thoroughly illogical. Perhaps he should learn to also drink tea again. The widow had suffered greatly and he did not want to impose by requesting coffee, nor did he want to decline her simple offer of hospitality. “Thank you, Mrs. Clément. That would be nice,” he said.

  “What did you call my husband?” she asked him. “By what name?”

  “Roger.”

  “And what did he call you?”

  “Armand, usually. Sometimes he called me an—well, I can’t say in front of the little one.”

  She smiled, briefly. “All right then. Please, call me Carole. I hate calling someone according to their rank, so I shall call you Armand. It’s a small problem I have with authority—I don’t respect it.” When Touton acquiesced with a nod, she asked, “Perhaps you’d prefer a coffee?”

  He was never like this, never cautious to state a simple preference, but he checked himself once again. “Tea will be fine,” he reiterated.

  When it arrived, she asked what he took in it. He didn’t know. In the POW camp, he’d taken it clear because there was no choice. Drinking tea made from teabags already used repeatedly by British pilots turned him off the drink. He could smell and taste his confinement again as he brought the hot drink to his lips. In prison, tea tasted like incarceration, and he’d wished he could add a dollop of milk, a splash of hope. He drank only the warmth. Now tea tasted like a memory, and the coldness that inhabited this house also resided in him.

  “I have a list of names. Some of these men you may recognize from public life. I’m looking to find out if Roger ever mentioned any of these people—not from reading about them in the papers, but from personal experience, from his line of work.”

  She scanned the list of names. “Mayor Houde,” she said.

  Touton nodded. “He mentioned him to me … that he worked for him from time to time. Duplessis, as well. Any others?”

  “Who are all these men?”

  “They supported keeping that fascist in Canada, de Bernonville.”

  “The count,” Carole said.

  “That’s him.”

  “Yeah, it’s just like Houde to support him. He and Roger would argue politics in the internment camp. Houde would say one thing, and Roger would write to me and I’d suggest a counterargument, then he’d speak it and Houde would say something else. On it went. I felt that Roger was finally being educated in the ways of the world—and in other ways, too. But I worried that I was only easing my conscience to think that way. It’s because of me that he was there.”

  She had to busy herself with Anik a moment, as the child was growing restless. The compromise was to lift her up into her lap, and the girl placed her head against her mother’s shoulder. Her eyes never left the face of the man in the room.

  “They read poetry together, did you know?�
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  The policeman had to laugh. “I can’t imagine either man reading poetry.”

  “I couldn’t either. But they had to entertain themselves, do something with their evenings.” She grew wistful as a precious memory returned. She had difficulty, and the officer gave her time to regain composure. “After he returned, he’d entertain me—me and Anik—with his Scots poetry.”

  “Scots?” Something clicked.

  “The library in the prison was small. Nothing in French. Not much in English. So the mayor and Clément, with help from a Scottish guard, read Robbie Burns. He could quote long passages in a ridiculous accent. Remember, Anik?”

  The little girl nodded that she did, and Touton smiled even as he felt sadness for her well in his heart. He also had something to think about now.

  Although pedestrians had trundled past the statue over the years, few Montrealers knew what the Burns monument looked like, nor could they name its location. If the figure were pointed out to them, most citizens would be hard pressed to identify whom it commemorated. The edifice was a refuge for pigeons up high and for the weary and shade-seekers down below. Those who took the time to read the inscription would soon discard the information. Clément and Houde, on the other hand, would have reason to recall the landmark, as it brought them back to their evenings in the internment camp. If they had chosen to meet somewhere, one might well have said to the other, “I’ll meet you at the Burns monument.” There, under the boot of the poet, Roger Clément had been murdered.

  “Did he mention Duplessis in the weeks or months before his death?”

  Carole said no. “He became more quiet than usual. What was conspicuous to me is that he stopped talking about Duplessis and Houde in the weeks prior to his death. He just closed down on them. If they were in the news, if one of them had his picture in the paper, usually Roger would say something—something nasty about Duplessis—or remember a funny incident from the camp, about Houde. He liked Houde. But prior to his death? Nothing. He just turned away. Clammed up.”

  “Do other names on the list ring a bell?”

  Holding the paper in her left hand, she tapped it with her right index finger. “This name I know. I don’t think Roger did, though. A real right winger. He hated strikes. He used to write letters to the editor. He didn’t like my strikes in particular, maybe because so many seamstresses are immigrants. And women.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Dr. Camille Laurin. I’m not saying Roger had anything to do with him. Look, you should also know that Roger crossed paths with de Bernonville.”

  A surprise. “How so?”

  “Houde hired him to protect de Bernonville. Just for a couple of days. Straightforward bodyguard stuff.”

  Interesting.

  Touton sipped the last of the tea, the flavour so potent to him, so mixed with memory and tragedy, then reached across and took the child’s hand in his. The girl let her hand be held as she continued to stare at him. Holding the hand, he spoke to the mother. “Thank you for all this.”

  At that moment, the doorbell rang, and Carole Clément rose to answer it. Touton continued to hold the girl’s hand, then finally let go and stood to take his leave, smiling at her. She stared up without expression. A man had arrived, and, given the late hour, he wondered if the mourning widow had already found a new companion. He was a rather heavy man, in working clothes, the buttons of his shirt undone to the middle of his chest in consideration of the heat. He seemed out of breath. The fellow looked upon him with prompt suspicion. “Hello?”

  He held out his hand. “I’m with the police. Captain Armand Touton.”

  “Ah,” the man said, happy for the explanation. “I’m with the Church.”

  “This is Father François Legault,” Carole said.

  The little girl had run into the priest’s arms and he hoisted her up to his shoulders.

  “Then we are both working for the welfare of this family,” Touton said.

  “Let’s hope so,” the priest said.

  Touton took his leave. He expected the night air to have cooled, but this was not the case. He looked back briefly, then moved on. A priest without his collar. In the heat, after hours, not so surprising. Something about his demeanour, though, had seemed out of the ordinary. His attire had been anticlerical right down to his sneakers. Touton gathered that in the world in which Carole Clément moved, where she did not respect authority, such a priest might be of greater interest to her, and perhaps of more use.

  Touton wanted to make a final call that night before knuckling down to more pressing police affairs. He stopped by the flat where Pacifique Plante lived and interrupted the man’s evening. The two took a walk around the block in a middle-class section of the neighbourhood of Outremont. A little to the west, homes became ostentatious. A little to the east, immigrants lived in three-storey walk-ups, contending for scant space. The night was warm, but the two men still wore their hats, although from time to time they’d remove them to let the heat of their brows escape. Plante smoked.

  “Sir, I’ve read all the articles that Pelletier wrote on your behalf.”

  Plante asked, “Are you investigating me now?”

  “No, sir. But I will, if I need to.”

  The police director gazed at him, curious.

  “If something in my investigation comes back to you, I’ll investigate. You’ve told me to always think higher on this case, so I’m already thinking high. But I’m puzzled. When you and Pelletier wrote those articles, and when you and Mayor Drapeau conducted the inquiry—four years of exhaustive investigation—”

  “What’s troubling you, Armand?”

  “You never touched the old mayor. You left Houde alone. Don’t tell me he wasn’t involved. But you left him alone. I will investigate you if I need to. No one is outside my scope. But you allowed one person to remain outside your scope. Why?”

  The pair walked on in silence awhile. Plante was forming his words carefully, smoking and enjoying their easy pace. He was also waiting, Touton noticed, for others on the sidewalk to travel out of earshot before he’d confide an answer.

  “Not an easy decision,” he said at last. “Not my first choice, either. I was the one advocating that we attack him front and centre, make him our principal target. But Jean Drapeau was leading the investigation, and others on our team convinced me to let him off the hook. We were to attack everyone close to him and destroy their credibility. That way, Houde would be isolated. He’d have no choice but to retire, and if he didn’t, he’d be severely hobbled in an election.”

  “So it was political.”

  “You make it sound like a bad word, Armand. But we understood from the beginning that there could be no justice without a shift in power. We could create a power vacuum, but who would fill it? From the outset, we wanted not only to bring down Mayor Houde and his cronies, but also to replace that whole gang with ourselves. We had to do both.”

  Touton let that news settle. He was right, of course. Why cut away the corrupt forces only to depart, job done? The proper, tough course was to assume power, prove that a better path could be developed. That the newspaper articles and the public commission had all been part of a political strategy was still hard to digest. He was in league with smart men, and he was realizing that they were more devious than he’d understood.

  “You’re disappointed in me, Armand. Politics can be dirty, but we were only being smart, not dirty, and we kept everything above board. Our opponents could see what we were doing, but they couldn’t stop us. We gave Houde a free pass because he was popular. If we attacked him personally, the populace might have lost interest in our project. Houde might then have used his charismatic nature to reduce us to sewer water.” He took a long drag on his smoke. Above them, gnats circled the street lamps in the humid summer air. “Let’s face it, I’m not a charismatic character. The new mayor? On a good day, he looks like everyone’s foolish uncle. Even I tried to get him to shave off that silly moustache, but he’s stubborn.
The point is, we’re not the kind of people who win the popular vote thanks to our personalities. Instead, we showed Camillien Houde the writing on the wall. That allowed him to retire with his reputation relatively untarnished, although he still gets depressed about it. I mean, here’s a man who spent the war in an internment camp for activities deemed detrimental to the country, and when he was released at the end of the war, ten thousand people came out to meet his train! Not to lynch him, which would have made sense, but to cheer him on! After that, he roared right back into power. How could we hope to defeat such an individual?”

  They were turning a corner and had to step back as boys on bicycles flew by. Touton cast a policeman’s glance their way, knowing that if he were a beat cop he’d keep an eye on youths out long after a proper bedtime. He’d find out about their home life, check how they were doing in school, and if things were as bad as he expected, try to steer them into baseball and hockey. But he was a beat cop no more. He was also seeing Pax Plante’s point, appreciating the genius of the reformers’ scheme.

  “So you took apart his apparatus—”

  “We isolated him. Demoralized him. Retirement looked good to the man. That meant we never had to take him on directly.”

  “I may have to,” Touton revealed.

  The pair carried on in silence, and when they had completed the circle back to their starting point, the director spoke his last words of caution.

  “You’re a popular figure yourself, Armand. What they call a folk hero. But Houde, he’s a god. If you take him on, be convincing. Otherwise, don’t. If he feels under attack, he’ll make the populace feel that they are under attack, and he’ll use that impetus to march right back into power and chase us all out. Everything we’ve accomplished will be blunted. The crooks, the whorehouses, the gambling dens—the works—all will be back in business before the sun rises on his victory.”

  “You fear him that much?”

  “We haven’t proven ourselves yet. We’re hanging on by a thread, and we’ve got Duplessis plotting to get rid of us.”

  “I wondered why you didn’t touch him. That nagged at me. Now I know.”