River City

by John Farrow

  “Idiots,” Radisson murmured.

  “Maybe,” Des Gros acknowledged. “But if they weren’t lying here, dead, we’d be fighting Iroquois now. We’d be lying here dead soon enough.”

  They had to move on as a delay could imperil their lives. A party from Ville-Marie could be sent back later, with priests, to either bury the dead or transport the bodies home to the colony. They had no room in their canoes for brave dead young men and no time to bury them. Instead, they adjusted the bodies into respectful rows upon the ground and covered their heads to preserve their dignity awhile.

  Over their bodies, Groseilliers would stammer a prayer remembered from his days as a Jesuit servant.

  Radisson overturned the body of Adam Dollard des Ormeaux to drag it away. He discovered, under the lad’s belly, the Cartier Dagger. He recognized it, for he had seen it in the hands of Maisonneuve, though he had never been allowed to touch the artifact. He wondered what circumstance had brought the knife here, if these few weren’t merely thieves. But no, they had fought too hard to be thieves. They had not been hacked up, a sign of their vanquishers’ respect. He tucked the knife inside his deerskin jacket and dragged the fallen hero off.

  The contingent of one hundred canoes then completed its portage and paddled safely on towards Fort Perilous.

  Farther away, a runner located his Iroquois friends on the Richelieu River. He told of a great battle that would still be raging. During his trip, the fight had only grown in the mind of the runner, and the story he told was one of dreadful conditions and stark surprise. Hearing these facts, the chief decided to countermand the attack on Montreal, for he feared that their foray had been revealed, that an ambush awaited him as well, and he returned his forces to Lake Champlain.

  Through misfortune, then accident, folly and bravery, the colony once again was spared.

  Passing by Ville-Marie, the coureurs de bois were celebrated for their return and for the astonishing array of furs they were carrying. Then they told their sad news. Missing the young soldiers, the colonists had prepared themselves for such a report, yet they were much aggrieved. Maisonneuve pressed Radisson to tell him what he had seen, and the young man repeatedly told a tale of courage and much blood upon the stones. The Iroquois, Groseilliers had emphasized, were no longer on the river, and for that he believed they had the dead Frenchmen to thank.

  Radisson kept the Cartier Dagger to himself. He intended to return it, but only if he and his partner were properly paid for their furs. If they were robbed blind, like the last time, he would keep the knife as his reward.

  At Quebec, the sounds of one hundred cannon greeted the arrival of the hundred canoes, a grand sight. The people cheered, and a ship on the verge of returning empty to France delayed its departure. The sale in furs was brisk, and the woodsmen expected a handsome payout. They were enjoying a well-deserved beer in a local tavern, waiting for the final negotiation, when the new governor arrived with armed guards and asked to speak to Groseilliers.

  Pierre de Voyer d’Argenson congratulated him on his success, and spoke of the significant contribution he’d made to New France.

  “Thank you, Your Excellency.”

  “Nevertheless, Groseilliers, you did not seek permission to embark upon this expedition. You were trapping without a license. Sir, you are under arrest.”

  Radisson had to be restrained by friends as his partner was dragged off. After the shock, he was less surprised when he learned that his furs had been seized and his compensation established as a pittance. The moment Des Gros was released months later, the two men commenced plotting their next expedition. Within the plan, they embedded the seeds of their revenge.

  As Maisonneuve journeyed to a meeting with the bishop of Quebec, Laval, ostensibly to be introduced to the newly arrived lieutenant-governor of New France, the Marquis de Tracy, he felt trepidatious. The politics had changed once more, as New France had become a royal province. The news had been welcomed, for now the full participation of the mother country would come to the aid of the struggling communities. This required a further consolidation of power, and the bishop seemed to be holding sway over the new men in charge. Yet Laval and the others were being persistently thwarted in their ambition by the popularity and power of Maisonneuve. Those at Ville-Marie seemed to rule themselves with a sense of divine autonomy, as though to inflict a decision upon them demanded the consent of Maisonneuve, the pope, the king and God Himself. The trinity formed by the pope, the king, and God he could do nothing about, but Maisonneuve was a problem Bishop Laval might presume to master, and now he believed he had found the occasion.

  Laval spoke to him over brandy. “In 1652, you travelled back to France.”

  Maisonneuve nodded, remembering those days. The conversation with the new authority was going well, he thought. The new man, Tracy, was keen to understand the colony’s history. Laval and Maisonneuve were filling him in. “Desperate years. We needed fresh and able recruits or we might have succumbed.”

  “An ambitious undertaking. How did you finance that journey, I wonder?” Laval inquired.

  An innocent question. “More than a dozen years ago now, Your Excellency.”

  “Ah,” the bishop remarked, “may I refresh your brandy?”

  Maisonneuve smiled, although he was suddenly feeling leery. His senses were alert as he held out his glass for a refill.

  After he had poured the glass and returned to his seat, Laval eyed him closely. “You took twenty thousand livres from the hospital purse, did you not? I’ve checked the records. Why deny it?”

  Maisonneuve finally deduced that the conversation was a trap. He looked first at Tracy, to gauge his reaction, and deduced that the man had been expecting the question. “Your Grace, Madame de Bullion created the fund. Jeanne Mance and myself entered into an agreement to borrow the money against the promise of land. She approved the transaction.”

  “Paul,” Laval said, although they did not know one another well enough for him to address his guest by his Christian name, “you embezzled twenty thousand livres for your own purposes, for your enrichment, so that you could spend two years indulging yourself back in France. I understand. A life of hardship here. What could it hurt to eat and drink lavishly and comport yourself with the ladies?”

  “Meanwhile,” Tracy added, “the colony at Montreal struggled on in near-starvation. Now that I am lieutenant-governor of New France, it is my duty to call you to account.”

  “This is preposterous!” Maisonneuve forgot himself and jumped to his feet. “Madame de Bullion will attest to the agreement! As will Jeanne Mance! We did not keep records because our benefactor insisted on anonymity—”

  “Enough with these false stories!” Tracy stormed back at him, while Bishop Laval sipped his brandy. “You stole the money. You ought to confess for the sake of your own immortal soul! In any case, pending the judgment of God, the people shall be informed and you shall be removed from office. I have explained the circumstances to the king and he agrees. You are to be recalled to France.”

  “I will not go!”

  “You are a subject of your king, sir. You will follow his commands!”

  The two men glared at one another.

  “Or do I command my guards to ship you back in chains?” Tracy asked him.

  “You pompous ass!” Maisonneuve declared. He’d been outmanoeuvred for the moment. “I’ll go to France. But I will clear my name. And I will return.”

  He did not know that of these three vows, he’d manage only the first—that he would die, still trying to clear his name, in a country he now despised, dreaming of his island home on the St. Lawrence among the trees and the Iroquois.

  “A ship departs in three days for St. Malo,” Laval informed him. “You shall be a passenger on it. I bid you adieu. I wish you a bon voyage, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve.”

  Three days. He would never see Montreal again.

  CHAPTER 11

  1955

  AN ESPECIALLY TRYING DAY, THA
NKS TO AN ILL-TIMED CONFLUence of professional and domestic upsets, had failed to guide Detective Gaston Fleury towards much-needed restful slumber. August’s sweltering temperatures and close humidity didn’t help. Collapsed on his bed, under the warm breeze of a creaky fan, he lay there, helpless, tossing, contorted. Sweat slickened his skin.

  Somehow, his wife was managing to ignore the heat. While she was lost to the world beside him, Fleury had been out of bed three times to attend to his son, Guy. The boy’s tonsils had been extracted and, home from the hospital just that afternoon, he was playing upon parental sympathy. As the clock slipped past 3 A.M., the policeman acknowledged that he would not be sleeping anytime soon. He’d be going to work in a surly mood, again, coaxed upright by caffeine. He propped himself higher on the pillows, partially sitting, to await morning and another day of blistering sun. In deference to the heat wave, he lay in the nude, on top of the sheets, his legs apart, even his fingers splayed to catch every possible particle of cooler air.

  “The humidity,” Montrealers were found of saying. “It’s the humidity.” Only later would he recall that he had heard a few telltale nocturnal sounds. A car’s motor idling. A door being opened, then slammed. Footsteps hurrying along the sidewalk in one direction, then hurrying back. Tire squeals. In the city, such noises were irritating but commonplace, and had registered neither alarm nor curiosity in the tetchy detective from Policy.

  The bomb blast, though, shot him out of bed.

  He fell back as quickly, disoriented and stunned. Fleury was sliding off the damp sheets as the walls continued to convulse and the windows rattled. He braced himself to keep from catapulting onto the floor, and his wife glommed onto his wrist, awakening in a panic.

  From his room, his son’s wail flared up.

  He didn’t bother with clothes as he fled to the balcony to see what on earth had occurred. Wide open to the air, the door had admitted the full concussive blast. That noise. The impact. Had an apartment blown up? A gas leak?

  Parked on the sidewalk two doors down, a vehicle had had its windows blown out, and its interior was now engulfed in flames. As bombs go, this had probably been a small one, although he’d never experienced a blast before. Glass littered the street and sidewalk, reflecting firelight, and he heard the fission of the blaze and worried that the gas tank would be next. He shouted to an old lady on her balcony fifteen feet from the car, “Go back! The gas tank!” She retreated instantly, either heeding his warning or propelled by the sight of a nude, skinny man madly exhorting her to flee. Fleury returned inside to put on clothes, then stopped, rushing back out again. He was looking at the car afire while a different neighbour on the next balcony stubbornly glared at his naked form.

  A thought, bursting from the back of his mind, proved true—the burning car belonged to him. That was his Chevrolet! Lillian, his wife, having the presence of mind to first throw on a robe, joined him outside.

  “It’s our car,” he said, still shocked. “They blew it up.”

  “Who’s they?” she asked, stunned also. He seemed to know. “Why?”

  Their son was calling for his dad. Both parents reacted and returned indoors, but Fleury headed straight for the phone. He put a call through to Armand Touton, captain of the Night Patrol.

  “They blew up my car!” he shouted the moment the man answered.

  Behind him, sheltering her son’s head against her thigh, his wife demanded again, angrily this time, “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Who’s this?” asked the brusque voice at the other end of the line.

  “Captain Touton! It’s me! Gaston!”

  Perhaps his excited expression had made his voice unrecognizable.

  “Gaston who?” Touton asked.

  “Fleury! Gaston Fleury! From Policy! Captain, it’s me!”

  “Somebody blew up your car?” Touton asked.

  “My Bel Air! It’s on fire! I need the fire department! Send the Night Patrol!”

  Touton took charge then, jotting down the particulars and telling him to settle down and stay away from the windows.

  “Why?” Fleury inquired.

  “In case someone’s trying to kill you.”

  Fleury dropped the phone and ran out to the balcony to usher his wife and child inside, for they’d wandered out to survey the commotion. He closed the door and heaved the drapes across it and the windows. Then he returned to the phone and heard Touton calling his name.

  “I’m back,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “Don’t do that to me again,” Touton told him, irritated that he had suddenly vanished from the line. “Now stay put and stay calm. I’ll be right over.”

  Fleury felt the concussive surge of a second blast.

  “What was that?” Touton demanded.

  “The gas tank?” Fleury suggested.

  Upon arriving at the scene, Touton confessed to being perplexed. This sort of thing did not happen. He knew of no organization or criminal who specialized in making bombs. Cops rarely were targeted for serious intimidation or violence.

  Everyone knew why.

  When cops were challenged in the heat of the moment—fired upon during a bank holdup, or shot at attempting to arrest a fugitive—the department reacted with deadly force. Anyone committing violence against an officer would be tracked down by every other cop, and, if he didn’t surrender upon first warning, shot dead.

  Everyone understood the rules.

  A cop posed for photographers over a slain suspect, a pool of blood seeping into a gutter. “Around here,” he said, “we don’t tolerate no monkey business.”

  The comment made Captain Armand Touton wince. If cops tolerated anything, it was monkey business. The comment implied that minor as well as serious infractions would be answered by bullets. Such was the culture of the times. In Montreal, cops aided and abetted the crime syndicates, but when it came to dealing with freelance hoodlums, they meted out their own justice, and the tough guys knew it and accepted it as the code of the streets.

  In this environment, that a cop had had his car blown apart established a precedent.

  A chilling event.

  “What’ve you been up to?” Touton asked the officer from Policy.

  “Nothing!” Fleury objected. He assumed that the captain was questioning his integrity, asking if he’d played a few poker hands with the bad guys and lost. “Just … you know.”

  “What do I know?”

  “I’ve been investigating government cars.”

  Touton grunted. “I thought you’d given that up months ago.”

  “I don’t quit,” Fleury proclaimed.

  The captain considered this. “Maybe you’re closer to something than you realize. We’ll track what you’ve been doing. Maybe your investigation’s made somebody nervous. Federal or provincial?”

  “Both. And private—on the side.”

  “Figures,” Touton grunted. “Why make it easy on ourselves? How’s your family doing?”

  Fleury took a deep breath. “Lillian started out okay. Now she’s getting scared. My son started out scared, but now he’s just cranky.”

  The captain nodded. “See to them. We’ll let the so-called experts go to work, but don’t expect much. Nobody knows nothing about bombers. This is something new. Something new is always difficult to trace.”

  Fleury’s wife appeared on the front stoop. “Captain? Telephone.”

  He took the call inside and a moment later was striding quickly out of the apartment, taking the stairs in awkward bounds.

  “What’s wrong?” Fleury called to him from his balcony.

  “They went after my house, too!”

  “Who did?” Fleury’s wife wanted to know as Touton’s car raced off.

  Cruisers had made it to Armand Touton’s flat ahead of him, and his heart beat high in his throat as he charged up the stairs. His wife was in the kitchen, dressed in a robe, surrounded by perspiring uniformed officers.

  “Marie-Céleste!” Smiling up at him, she made a motion T
outon misinterpreted. He thought she was going to faint, when in fact she was seeking his kiss. “My God! Easy! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Armand. A little shaken.”

  “Is she all right?” he demanded to know of the officers.

  They all answered at once, saying that his wife was unhurt. Finally, Marie-Céleste cupped his cheek to command his attention and told him, “Armand. I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Nobody’s been hurt. There’s no damage.”

  Getting that one point straight, he was finally able to ask, “What happened?”

  Vandals had smeared black paint across the front door to the triplex that contained his flat, then they’d pounded on the door and rung the bell until Marie-Céleste had awakened. The culprits ran off the moment she’d turned on the lights. She had called the police—Armand, at first, but he hadn’t been in. The first cops arriving on the scene were the ones to discover the artwork.

  “Did they write any words? Any threats?” He was hoping that the act had been random—a bunch of kids, impatient for Halloween. He was hoping that the vandalism was unrelated to Fleury’s burnt-out Chevy.

  “Sir, not really,” the senior of the uniforms in the kitchen said, “but there is something I want to show you.”

  Touton followed him outside. Streetlights illuminated the white steel door well enough, but an officer passed the detective a flashlight. Not a great deal of time or imagination had been deployed to create the mess. Black paint only, arbitrarily slapped on with a three-inch brush. Nothing could be discerned from the design except to assume that there was no design.

  “Look here,” the officer said. In his distracted state of mind, Touton couldn’t put his finger on what was unusual about the man. He was grey-haired, yet not old. Around forty, in decent physical shape. Touton’s initial impression told him he was probably a father and an honourable guy. As the man pointed to a spot on the door, he noticed the man’s wedding band, perhaps because he didn’t know what else he was meant to be observing. Then he noticed the spot being indicated. Small enough to be barely discernible, probably etched by a stick dipped in paint—a swastika.