River City

by John Farrow

  “GO HOME!”

  Before that rising chorus, the thugs and the scab bus departed. The women beat their fists upon the cars and the bus and cheered as the vehicles vanished down the road. For Carole, the day was a lovely victory.

  Roger, on the other hand, had some explaining to do to his bosses.

  The couple tried to find Roger a new profession. He tried factory work first. Men were eager to take on the guy with the fists, with the big reputation. He’d come home bleeding and feeling vilified. Nobody wanted the former hockey lug lifting cement bags or picking out the defects on an assembly line. They wanted him to take on challengers during the noon break, or to crack the boss’s nuts, or to come along with a bunch of the guys for a drink after work, and after that—you know how it is—they wanted him to work over this one guy who owed this other guy money from an unpaid bet that the first guy said he’d never made. They wouldn’t leave him alone, and sometimes Roger talked about it to Carole around the kitchen table.

  “When I was paid to use my fists, I never had to. I never hit nobody. Almost never. Hardly ever. I just showed up, and maybe I smashed some tables and chairs, or knocked out a window. I damaged the furniture. The worst I did—”

  “The worst you did was lock my front door.”

  “Right. But the next worst thing, this one guy had a toy train set. He had the Rocky Mountains in there and everything. A little postman delivering the mail, and milk trucks. He had bridges and rivers and a complete village, with tiny dogs and women in fancy clothes, everything just right. The train went around in a circle, into a tunnel for a while—it was really neat—then it came back out, blowing its teensy horn. Toot-toot! So anyways, I smashed his toy train set, and I think, afterwards, he’d've preferred it if I crushed his skull. Anyways, that was the next worst thing to locking your door. Okay, the occasional bloody nose—nothing big, you understand me? I intimidate, that’s the word for it. That’s all I do. I never hurt nobody unless a guy was stupid enough to take the first swing.”

  “Yeah. So? You’re not doing that anymore.” They were talking by candlelight and she gently caressed the back of his big right hand. His friends said his right hand could knock out a truck.

  “I’ve already beat up six guys from my factory. Look at my knuckles, they’re all cut, bloody. Tomorrow, there’s two tough guys coming over from the factory four blocks down to see if one of them can take me.”

  Carole sighed. He did have a problem. The good honest life of the workingman just wasn’t up to snuff. “You could lose,” she suggested. “Then maybe nobody will care about taking you on anymore.”

  He looked at her as though she’d lost her mind.

  “What?” she asked him.

  “You don’t understand,” he pointed out to her. “Losing means I end up half-dead. Or all dead.”

  She thought about that. Then the reality of his life occurred to her, why he was feeling so badly.

  “Roger, do you mean that, when you fight, you—” She didn’t want to say it.

  “Usually the other guy ends up in the hospital. Sometimes I knock a guy out with just one punch. He’s out cold, but at least that way he’s not a bloody mess.”

  Maybe he should go back to being a goon. Life was more peaceful that way.

  “I don’t like beating up all these guys,” he said. “I didn’t like it in hockey, I don’t like it now.”

  “Tell you what,” she said. Gently, she placed her fingers on his muscled forearm. “Go earn your living whatever way you know how. Something better will come along. For now, I’ll stay out of it.”

  “You have to tell me what picket lines you’re on.”

  “That’s a deal.”

  She didn’t like it though when he smashed up politicians’ offices. “Roger. He’s the good guy.” “What makes him so good?” She’d have to explain it.

  “Then he should hire me to smash up the other guy’s office.” “Roger, sweetie, that’s why he’s the good guy, because he doesn’t hire goons.” She was especially unhappy when he disrupted polling booths and frightened voters away.

  “Was that necessary?” “It’s my job.”

  “To destroy democracy? To stand in the way of the people? To not allow working men and women to exercise their right to vote? Roger, that’s wrong.” “But they’re voting the wrong way.”

  She’d have to explain it to him. “Even though I prefer that votes go one way and not another, I accept that people have the right to their own choice. That’s why we have a vote—so that everybody can decide who wins, not some pack of goons.”

  “I don’t decide who wins.”

  “Ah, honey, sweetie, actually, you do. You know nothing about politics, nothing about the issues, nothing about the politicians involved, yet you, sweetie, you and your two big fists and all your ballot-stuffing friends, you decide who wins. Now, do you think that’s right?”

  He didn’t know if it was right, but he thought better of himself somehow.

  “No, sweetie, that’s not the point.”

  “Anyways, what’s so wrong with ballot stuffing? Nobody gets hurt and we get the right result.”

  That’s when she realized that he was teasing her, and she smacked him on the bicep, then held her sore hand and winced. By the end of the discussion, as they did after so many others, they took one another to bed and enjoyed all that, too.

  CHAPTER 19

  1968

  AS A YOUNG BUCK DEMOBILIZED FROM THE ARMY AND INTENT ON becoming a cop, Armand Touton had tangled with a corrupt physician. He believed, twenty years on, that rather than invent varicose veins, the man should have displayed X-rays of his war wounds. He’d have paid the charlatan’s price back then, signed a blank cheque. Today he’d forfeit his pension to any quack offering a night’s relief.

  Due to the pain, the end of his career was approaching prematurely.

  Along the floor at the back of his desk, stacks of old reports formed a staunch barrier. No one could peer below the modesty skirt where he’d positioned worn-out seat cushions—flattened by time and the rotund posteriors of cops—on crates at various heights. Gingerly, he transferred his right foot from one level to another to ease his general discomfort, later bringing it back to the rung of a chair while elevating his left foot to enjoy, for minutes at a time, the pleasure of a fresh setting.

  Opposite him, Detective Fleury from Policy knew what the boss was doing, but never let on as the captain scrunched down to raise a foot higher or stretch it forward. Officer Cinq-Mars, sitting up straight in the chair on Fleury’s right flank, could not comprehend his superior officer’s bizarre posture. He seemed to be slumping down as any drunk might do who’d surpassed his upper limit, and having detected the scent of whiskey in the room, the young cop privately scorned the officer he otherwise so admired.

  Fleury took the whiskey to be medicinal.

  “If I hear you right,” Touton summarized, sliding lower, “you want to march up to Parliament Hill, strut into the prime minister’s office and take a seat—maybe straighten your tie, comb your hair, make yourself look presentable—then you want my permission to accuse the PM of being in possession of a murder weapon—”

  “Sir—” Constable Émile Cinq-Mars endeavoured to interrupt, cut short by a hand rising from the captain’s half-prone body.

  The man yawned before speaking again. “—because you had an anonymous ‘tip,’ you were saying, from a left-wing radical—”

  “I didn’t say—” Cinq-Mars began, only to be prevented from speaking further by that authoritative hand.

  “—who got her information from a dead man and a priest sworn to secrecy. Oh, that’ll go over well on the witness stand. You’ll be up on charges for slander and false arrest—they’ll have a field day, those government lawyers. Turn the courthouse into a carnival. Know what? I’ll sell candy floss on the front steps, make my fortune that way.”

  Cinq-Mars allowed the captain’s perspective on the situation to float in the room awhile, coming t
o rest upon his shoulders as sadly as grey city dust.

  “You can answer now,” Fleury advised him.

  The constable shifted nervously while trying to get his emotions in check. He didn’t want to burst out, all steam and bluster, although he could feel the heat rising inside him. “First,” he declared, “I wasn’t planning to march up there and I’m not the kind of person who struts.”

  “Now he’s in a pique,” Fleury noted.

  “Second,” Cinq-Mars pressed on, “I don’t intend to issue accusations. I’ll introduce the subject to the prime minister, listen to what he has to say. Third—” “Third!” Touton was enjoying the officer’s defence. “—I never said ‘left-wing radical'—”

  “That’s true, you didn’t,” the captain acknowledged, still with that damned sparkle in his eye. “But she is, isn’t she?”

  “And fourth—”

  “Four already, how high is he going?” Fleury asked. Touton winked at him. “I never indicated to you that my informant is female.”

  “Ah!” The ranking officer took time to make another adjustment. “You see my dilemma, though. I need to visualize your informant—it helps me to remember things as I get older. I make her out to be twenty-two, pretty, short brown hair, a cute nose and bright eyes, also brown. I imagine her as a left-wing radical. Maybe her mom’s a union agitator? Why deny my mental picture, when it’s so clear?”

  The young cop recognized that he was growing dangerously annoyed, that he had to watch himself. “Picture him as male, sir. Forty-eight, let’s say. Give him a beer belly and bad breath. Snaky eyes. We might as well honour him with a name. Let’s call him … Alphonse, how’s that?”

  Touton smacked his lips and rocked his head around skeptically. Wishing to take a slug of whiskey, he knew he ought to hold off, bear another night determined to be rough.

  “I got a problem with that,” he said.

  “I got my own problem with it,” contended Fleury.

  Cinq-Mars muttered under his breath, “You would.”

  “You got something against this Alphonse jerk with the stinky armpits?” the captain asked.

  “I didn’t … discuss … his armpits,” Cinq-Mars rebelled.

  Fleury clamped his hands together and leaned forward. “It’s obvious to me, sir, from the kind of information the kid’s been getting, that he’s sleeping with his informant.”

  “There it is,” Touton agreed. “The nail on the head. That’s why I have a hard time picturing your ugly slob with the beer breath and the smelly feet, this Alphonse. Are you telling me you’re that way? Because I’m not your Father Confessor here, my son. About things like that, I want to know nothing.”

  They had him again.

  “That’s not what I’m saying, just like I never mentioned smelly feet. But nobody says I’m sleeping with her—him—whoever!”

  “How do you acquire information of that nature? Gaston, do you know how?”

  The diminutive accountant offered a thought. “Maybe we could refer to the boy’s informant as an animal. A critter from the barnyard. He comes from a farm. How about it, Cinq-Mars? Are you screwing a pig?”

  Fleury had gone too far. The uniform was on his feet, ready to smack him around.

  “Hey-hey-hey-hey!” Touton called out, progressively raising his voice until Cinq-Mars stopped short. “Kid, sit down. Detective Fleury is going to apologize to you for that remark.”

  He sat back down, and Fleury said, “It’s good you defend your girlfriend’s honour. I apologize for any insult. I take it back.”

  Thinking he could keep Anik out of the discussion had been foolish. “Apology accepted,” he muttered, although overall, he was feeling miserable.

  “Kid,” confided the captain of the Night Patrol as he struggled up to a common posture, “here’s the point. Whoever your informant is—man, woman or critter—she smells nice, I bet. Can we agree on that? The stinky feet are out. The smelly armpits, we won’t mention them again. Are we agreed on that?”

  Grudgingly, Émile nodded his consent.

  “She smells nice?”

  “She smells nice,” Cinq-Mars mumbled.

  “Good. Now, this is what bothers me. You think the prime minister of Canada has something to say to you about stolen property. You’ve got an idea in your head that if you go up there, strutting or not—although I don’t know what’s so wrong about strutting—”

  “Me neither,” Fleury interjected.

  “—you seem to think that when you go up there for a conversation, Trudeau will say, ‘Officer, you’re right. It’ll ruin my career, cost me an election, I might get jail time, but it’s been on my conscience. Tonight, I’ll go on television to tell the nation I’m in possession of the Cartier Dagger. I’ll beg the people to forgive my damned eternal soul.’”

  This time, Cinq-Mars was the one to shift around in his chair.

  “You don’t like it that I quote the prime minister?” Touton asked.

  “I don’t expect him to confess,” Cinq-Mars conceded.

  “Good to hear. What do you expect?”

  “I’m not sure … I …”

  They waited, but he had nothing to add.

  “Maybe you expect him to be careless with the knife after your conversation?” Touton pushed himself up to press his advantage. “He’ll carve the Christmas goose with it, show it off to his best friends. Or maybe he’ll let the media into the prime minister’s residence to film him strutting around with the knife between his teeth?” He took a deep breath and noticed the effect of his words on his protégé. “You’re grimacing, but obviously you don’t expect he’ll hide it more deeply. You don’t think—” Touton winced as he shifted his hips. “—that he might worry his career’s at stake? You don’t imagine he’ll sell it on the black market for what you or me make in fifty lifetimes? Because if you expect that, why would you propose this tactic?”

  When he considered what he had been expecting, Cinq-Mars accepted that it had probably been as ludicrous: he wanted to defend Anik’s honour. He’d been told who possessed the knife that killed her father, and wanted to let that man know he was on the case. In a sense, he anticipated no further benefit than a chance to rattle the man who owned the relic, unnerve him a little. He now grasped that that would be an ineffectual exercise. Counterproductive, perhaps. He also realized, to his dismay, that he had not told the men in the room anything they hadn’t already known, or at least postulated. Perhaps he was confirming a rumour, but that confirmation had not advanced the investigation. A dead witness—Houde, the old mayor—and a close-mouthed priest did not open up avenues of exploration. For now, a prime minister with a secret could keep it.

  Nodding, Cinq-Mars and Touton made eye contact. Both men gathered that the other’s awareness was up to speed.

  Yet, as Cinq-Mars stood to leave, Touton asked the young man to stay put.

  “This is what we’ll do with your information,” the captain suggested. “Alerting the most popular prime minister in history that we might know about his alleged secret possession does us no good. About the dead mayor, what can I say? He’s dead. I doubt that he’ll have much to say if we dig him up. So let’s take a closer look at the priest.”

  “The priest?” Even Fleury was surprised.

  “Father François is Anik’s mother’s priest. He’s Anik’s priest. He was Camillien Houde’s priest. He was a member of that Cité Libre crowd back in the fifties, which included …?”

  “Pierre Trudeau,” Fleury caught on, finishing the other man’s conjecture.

  “Kid, something in the way you worded it,” Touton noted. “You said your informant, the one who smells nice, told you the priest comforted the old mayor at the hour of his death. He told Houde that the transaction had been accomplished. This was not a priest listening to a confession, but a man involved in a conspiracy.”

  Cinq-Mars chewed that over. “I found it curious. But my informant—” He exchanged a glance with Fleury. “—feels that the priest was conveyi
ng information, that he wasn’t personally involved.”

  “Conveying information is involvement, Cinq-Mars. Who’d he been talking to? What did he know? Was he picking up his facts from deathbed confessions? I doubt it. Besides,” he concluded, “I’ve never liked him. Call me old-fashioned, but he’s political. Not like a real priest.”

  “I’ll get on it,” Fleury stated.

  “Let the young guy do the legwork,” Touton instructed, which clearly disappointed Fleury. As usual, he was anxious to slip out from behind his desk and his usual job assessing budgets. “He knows about priests. But he reports to you.” Opening a lower drawer, Touton fished around inside, then pulled out a bottle of rye. “Now, scram,” he told them. “Some of us have work to do.”

  In the corridor, Fleury turned to his new charge. “What’s this about you and priests?”

  “I don’t know how he knows.”

  “He knows everything,” the detective declared. Cinq-Mars raised his eyebrows in doubt. “Now tell me what I don’t know.”

  With a slight and self-conscious cock of his head, the young cop admitted, “I considered the priesthood. It’s what my father wanted. I got interested. But I don’t know how he knows. I’ve kept that to myself around here. I thought I had, anyway.”

  Fleury shrugged. “Do you think he’d let you on our team without checking you out? He probably knows your shoe size, the colour of your mother’s eyes, the names engraved on your great-uncle’s tombstone back in France.”

  “No,” Cinq-Mars said. He’d had enough games from this guy for one night.

  “If I exaggerate, sue me. But we’re going against the flow, Cinq-Mars. What’s the one thing that you’ve got going for yourself that you haven’t figured out yet?”

  He was expecting another dig.

  “You’re not from around here,” Fleury told him. “You’re a small-town boy. Half-farmer. As it turns out, half-priest. That’s significant. It’s possible to believe that you haven’t been corrupted. It’s possible to imagine that you don’t have some dead uncle’s sister’s boyfriend’s cousin’s dad who’ll put the squeeze on you to protect the family name. You think we’re going after the prime minister on this one? That that’s tough? Maybe dig up the dirt on a few dead politicians? We could be going against the people—at least more than we care to count. We may be up against a few outstanding mythologies—are you following me on this? Do you have the brains? The balls? We might be setting ourselves up to provoke the grievances of an entire population, not just some big-shot next door or the guy up on Parliament Hill.”