by John Farrow
“The world is moving on,” she pointed out to him.
“Does that mean the universe is, too? The world has never been known for its acumen, its spirituality, its commitment to truth, or wonder, or love, or grace. The world’s a wretched place. It’s murderous, it’s deceitful, arrogant and cunning. The world’s judgment does not fill me with great faith, Anik.”
She didn’t have conversations like these with other friends. Certainly not whenever they lolled around together on a bed. With others, she’d be more likely to talk revolution, and the heat of that expectation would lead them to smoke a joint. Cinq-Mars didn’t smoke joints.
“You’re weird,” she analyzed.
“You’re pretty,” he said.
“Ah, but does being pretty make me wicked? Have I not seduced a man of God? Therefore, I’m a sinful creature. Bound for hell on a freight.” “That’s you, all right.” She poked him in the ribs.
“I’m not passing judgment. What do I know? I’m just happy to be with you. Some things are ingrained, though. I can’t pretend they don’t affect me.” “But you’re willing to grapple with them?” “Apparently, I’m willing to grapple with you.” “Yeah. Then moan and sigh about it.” “That’s about the size of it.”
“Speaking about size.” She held his penis in her fingers, and he was certain she would say something lewd, so he steeled himself. She moved her lips to his ear. “I’m on the pill. How sinful is that for you?”
He was mortified. He just didn’t know how to express it. Anik anticipated his dilemma and, still kneading him as he was rising in her hand again, kissed him.
“This,” Émile Cinq-Mars told his new girlfriend, “is the case I’m working on.” “Impressive file. Big,” Anik Clément noted.
The pages had been three-hole punched and gathered in a black binder. “It’s the history of the Cartier Dagger—” “What?” Anik was astounded, frightened, amazed. “The dagger—” he began.
“—that killed my father,” she said. She was perplexed. “You’re investigating my father’s murder? Why you?”
“I’m not the only one. Captain Touton is bringing me onto the case so that the investigation will not end with his retirement. He wants the hunt for your father’s killers to carry on from one generation to the next. Continue on after that even, if necessary. But if Touton doesn’t bring the culprits to justice, then I will.”
She remained astonished. She had been struck by Touton’s faithfulness to the case previously, although always doubtful, lacking full confidence in any official. That his ardour extended beyond his life on the police force did stun her.
“So this file—this is the whole case so far?”
“No. I’m starting with the history of the dagger. I need to know it, backwards and forwards. It’s a place for me to begin—my entry point, let’s say.”
They were less naked. Cinq-Mars had donned underwear and an undershirt, having packed his suit and his other soiled clothes into a garbage bag for disposal. Anik had put on her underwear, but also wore one of Émile’s large T-shirts, which hung low on her thighs. They had slept, and woken up timid with one another despite the passion they’d known hours earlier. After showering again, separately this time, they had partially dressed. Then returned to the narrow bed.
“The history of the Cartier Dagger.”
“The history,” he said.
“A bunch of things I know, but not enough to fill the pages of this file.” Cinq-Mars flipped through the binder and detailed salient points of what was known or surmised of its early history. He highlighted the dagger’s movements, as far as researchers had been able to determine.
“It’s been an adventure. I can’t forget that the dagger was last seen—that it was used to kill your father. A story I like is how the knife came into the hands of the Sun Life Assurance Company.”
“Tell me.”
He lay on his stomach and went to the pages that gave him the story’s chronology. Anik slid over, onto his back, her weight on her knees and sometimes on a hand or an elbow, and on top of him she felt as light as a feather, for he was so large, she so small, and she loved the farmboy strength of him, those massive shoulders. She even adored the immensity of his nose, and had bitten it already and teased him about its prominence.
She hadn’t known Sarah Hanson’s story, and was interested to hear it, about how the Mohawks had handed the dagger to the Sulpicians, who made a gift of the relic to the brave, wise young woman living by the Ottawa River. She had later deployed the relic to make an impression on the governor of New France, to try to influence him to prevent the army, and the populace, from eating horses, a lobbying effort that had so rudely been rebuffed.
“He threatened to hang her? Jesus.”
“Then the history of the dagger takes an odd turn,” Cinq-Mars noted. “Not its first strange twist, I’ll admit, and not its first tenure of neglect either. But it stayed in the Hanson family for a couple of generations, and they stayed in the same house by the river. The known value of the heirloom decreased with Sarah’s death. Apparently, a family member had it appraised, as he was interested in cashing in on the diamonds and the gold, but the appraiser assayed the diamonds as being quartz and the yellow nubs as fool’s gold. Not true, and no assayer could possibly reach that conclusion, so it’s my guess that the man was either incompetent, which I think is unlikely, or he was really planning to rob a backwoods farmer who might not have a clue.”
“You’re a cop, so you figure people to be thieves,” she whispered in his ear.
“Am I that jaded already? I’m only a rookie cop. Come back and see me in a few years.”
“I might.”
They kissed awhile to commemorate that thought.
“Anyway, instead of buying the relic cheap, which is what I presume the jeweller was hoping to do, he lost out on it entirely. The family chose not to sell it at all, but to keep it as a family heirloom, since it was only a worthless piece of junk.”
“Gotcha,” Anik said, and kissed him again. “Then what?”
“It gets interesting. The English were dying of starvation in the Lake District.”
“Oh, the poor fucking English,” Anik piped up. “Hey. That’s not nice. They were dying.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, I’ve got nothing against dead Englishmen.” “And Englishwomen. And English children.” “Easy. I’m only teasing. Sort of.”
Cinq-Mars shifted and bucked her off him. He pinned her under him and kissed her, ceasing only when he discovered that she was poking him in the back.
“The story,” she insisted. He’d forgotten for a moment that she had a vested interest in the Cartier Dagger.
He readjusted himself and perused the papers. “Okay. So … the English were arriving in Montreal half-dead. To make a long story short, the bishop of Montreal gave them land by present-day Lake of Two Mountains, which is a widening of the Ottawa River. That’s where Sarah Hanson lived.”
“Why there?”
“Mainly because no parish church existed anywhere around, and because of that, no French would settle in the area.” “Makes sense.”
“In a nineteenth-century kind of way, yeah.”
“Then what?”
Was she in love? she wondered. Had this happened to her? Had she hooked up with the most unlikely of men—a cop, a practising Catholic, a moralist, a federalist politically—who was not only the most unlikely of men but the worst sort of man for her? His profession seemed almost to belie her family history. Her father had been a crook, a tough guy, a goon at times, although none of those descriptions suited her memory of the man. She preferred to think of him as a former hockey player who had gone to prison to cover her mom’s union activity. He had been a beautiful and loving and attentive dad—she still remembered that. No matter how she pictured him, though, goon or daddy, he was not a cop, and he had had a difficult time with cops. On the other hand, she knew that her dad had formed a friendship of sorts with Armand Touton, so perhaps he’d unde
rstand, if he were here now, that she was drawing close to this policeman.
And papa, she thought to herself, he’s on your case. He’ll catch your killers.
“The Church had no means to distribute land to the English. So the bishop made a deal with the Sun Life Assurance Company, and here things get interesting, historically speaking.”
They had to shift around a bit more. Anik supported her head in one hand with her elbow on the bed, while her boyfriend lay on his back and looked up at the ceiling. She loved the intensity in his eyes, the way he’d absorbed the tales of their history and made them so much a part of his mindset.
“An Englishman, if he wanted land, had to approach Sun Life Assurance on bended knee, and after a lifetime of paying insurance premiums, he might expect a payout for his heirs. A Frenchman had to beg the Church for land, and commit to a lifetime of piety that might get him into heaven. So the cultural divide between the English and French was written in stone.”
He might be a cop, she was telling her dad, but he’s not like any kind of cop you ever knew.
“That still doesn’t tell me what happened to the dagger,” Anik pointed out. “The English put in farms along the Ottawa, across the river from Mohawks and Sulpicians. On their side of the river, Sarah Hanson’s descendants would be their only pre-existing neighbours. One day, the Sun Life representative came out to visit the landowners, to collect their signatures on policies with his company.”
Anik was getting this, nodding. “Sun Life grants them land, then suggests, shall we say, that they sign up for life insurance. What the company gives the company takes back.”
“Exactly. If a man looks over his brood of sons and wonders where they will go when they’re grown, well, he realizes he had better be on the good side of the Sun Life. Every farmer took out a policy. Then the agent, riding home on his buggy, stopped by the Hanson-Sabourin family farm.”
“Don’t tell me.”
Émile kissed her first. He told himself to kiss her without regret, without shame. He was a Catholic, but their lovemaking was done for the day—that sin was behind him. He would have to deal with it later before his maker and his priest. Or perhaps he’d confess in some out-of-the-way parish where nobody knew him. But this kiss would be delivered with the fullness of his love and desire for her, and his clammy doubts and sticky second thoughts would be set aside like his suit of oil and grime. For this kiss, he would give wholly of himself, and he did.
“The agent,” he whispered, not stopping kissing her yet, “was the kind of salesman who’s a manipulator of human fears. He sold the family on the need for a policy, exactly like the ones their neighbours were acquiring.” His mouth moved up and down her neck. “If they didn’t take one out, their offspring would be poor when they died, he said, while all around them the offspring of the new arrivals would be made rich by life insurance.”
Anik was becoming as interested in the tale as she was with the fluctuations of his lips, and gently eased him away from her a few inches.
“The Hanson-Sabourin family agreed to take out a policy. But they didn’t have money to pay for the luxury. A member of the Sabourin-Hanson family brought out the Cartier Dagger and offered it in trade. The agent made a big scene about how he was being generous, but really he knew that he was robbing the family blind. He signed the policy and absconded with the knife. Sun Life had its most cherished possession. Some say it’s why the company became so powerful. After the Second World War, the artifact was loaned to the National Hockey League to commemorate the work its president had contributed at Nuremberg, and the league became all-powerful throughout Canada. Some say that’s why—because it possessed the knife. So, the question crops up: who owns it now?”
Anik lay back, prone beside him on the bed, gazing at the ceiling. After a minute, she said, “I know who.”
“You do?” Cinq-Mars propped himself up. “Trudeau.”
“That’s the rumour. But there’s no reason to believe it. Just because he’s become so powerful—”
“It’s not a rumour.” She faced him on her side. “I was in a closet when Camillien Houde said his final confession to his priest. I heard it then. Trudeau bought the knife.”
He examined her eyes for any trace of doubt or fabrication. “Then help me with this case.”
She nodded, then switched and shook her head. “I don’t know everything.”
“Is that why you’re a separatist—because Trudeau has the relic?”
“Don’t be silly. But it’s why I threw the first stone at him that night. It’s why I regret missing.”
They did not kiss again on the bed, yet remained facing one another. Cinq-Mars was disturbed—by his love for her, and by a new surge of eroticism that undercut his moral code. He figured he’d have to marry her. He was also troubled by being a policeman who had just discovered a treasure trove of information. Where did his allegiance lie—with the girl, or with his work?
Anik also wondered what he’d do. Love her, or love his investigation more? She had put him on the spot. He’d have a hard time figuring this one out. In the meantime, facing each other, gazing into the other’s eyes and longing to determine a place for themselves in the midst of their anarchic world, they’d wait and see. They were both aware that love and passion were involved, but so were certain intellectual convictions. That emotional tempest—electric, it felt, scintillating, inviting—sang between them.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER 18
1937
SHE KNEW EXACTLY WHAT THIS MEANT. ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF March, 1937, a day that turned her life “upside-down, inside-out and backwards, then way inside-out again,” Carole Bonsecours arrived home to discover that her front door had been shackled shut. A small pane in the door’s window was smashed. A heavy chain ran through it, and out a side window that had been left open a crack for fresh air. A padlock secured the links. Carole wanted to remain strong, but disbelief and torment got the better of her. In a full-blown rage, she kicked the door.
Then slumped down on her stoop.
This was real despair. She wept.
The premier, Duplessis, was cracking down on all those who offended him. Supported by the Church preaching against the red menace, he brought in the Padlock Law. Any communist or unionist, any Jew who might easily be presumed to be a communist or unionist, any unkind journalist or unfortunate jaywalker who also happened to be an immigrant and so was probably a communist sympathizer, a unionist or secretly a Jew, no matter whether he claimed otherwise, could arrive home to discover that he’d been permanently locked out of his house.
The law was now being applied to the woman who possessed the temerity to organize seamstresses, to poor Carole.
She noticed, recovering from her futile tears, that the men responsible for the sabotage were still standing around nearby and enjoying a smoke. A pair of them had had a good laugh as she kicked her house. They weren’t even policemen—mere thugs. That galled her. The small, wiry woman did what her instincts and courage demanded. She attacked.
“Whoa!” one man cried out, laughing, as she flailed away. The more pathetic her assault, the more angry she became, and she redoubled her efforts. He’d skip away like a prizefighter on the run and easily fended off her blows.
She wanted him to stop laughing. She whacked his arms and shoulders and reared back and tried to punch him in the nose, but these more serious attempts also went for naught. She lost her balance once, and he caught her and propped her up. She was so frustrated that the fight of her life had to be entirely under his control. If only she were a boy, or a very large man. If only she had a gun, she’d kill him.
She was crying, and she didn’t know for sure, but perhaps she was hysterical. He had quit laughing, and now was trying to calm her down. So she stopped her useless flailing and screamed bloody murder instead.
“This is my house! You can’t lock me out of my own house. Who do you think you are, you punk?”
The others behaved more badly, t
aunting her. At least this guy wanted her to calm down and spoke with basic human kindness.
But she couldn’t calm down.
“My father, you goat, left my mother this house when he died. I took care of this house since I was sixteen. My sick mother, she died—you asshole—in this house. Don’t tell me you got any right locking me out of my own house.”
All of it welled up. The hard life. Her father’s tragic death. Her mother’s long, sordid, crushing illness. The job that kept her exhausted and penniless, and the endless crusade to improve working conditions for women, which she could never cease because it had become her lifeline, kept her alive. That cause embodied the last dregs of her hope.
“You got no fucking right to do this.”
What had allowed her to persevere without succumbing had been ownership of this small, sad, sagging house. Through that gift by her father, and thanks to his life insurance policy, she had enjoyed a half-decent place to live, one that cost her next to nothing to maintain. The house gave her dignity, an advantage that other women in the rag trade could only envy.
“Give me the fucking key, you bastard. I want the key.”
Even the snakiest man was feeling less inclined to continue tormenting her. Neighbours were appearing on the sidewalk, including a few burly guys, and everybody knew that men could muster a wild ardour in a woman’s defence. If a few more showed up, the situation could worsen. The thugs now felt that their friend was doing the wise thing by trying to calm her down.
“Tough guy! Tough shit! So you can lock a woman out of her home, huh? Makes you feel big? Hardens you up? Like you got more than a hose between your legs? What did I ever do to you? You don’t even know me.”
One of the men, perhaps thinking that he was helping the situation, said something. All anyone heard was the word “communist.”
Carole Bonsecours turned on him with her venom throttled up. “You little pipsqueak shit. You think I’m a communist? Well, am I? Am I? Take a good look. Is this what you’re so afraid of? I’m half your size. You could snap my neck like a chicken’s, it wouldn’t be no different. Is this what you’re so afraid of? Is this why you wet your bed at night, praying to the Lord to keep you from being swallowed up by the big red monster? If I’m a communist, then I’m the one you’re so afraid of. I’m it. I’m the beast. So take a good look. Now tell me, what exactly are you so afraid of?”