River City

by John Farrow

  Roger Clément watched the big, jovial man arrive at the camp in New Brunswick, along the banks of the Saint John River. He’d heard that he was on his way, and arranged it so that he was among the first to greet him. “Mr. Mayor, remember me? I used to crack heads for you.”

  The mayor sized him up. “Yes. Roger, isn’t it? Roger Clément.” True to his reputation, he never forgot a name or a face.

  “Do you want to bunk in my cabin? It’s not so bad. We’ve fixed it up.”

  “Is it amicable? A good group of guys?”

  “We distill our own spirits.”

  “Lead the way, young man. Take my bags, will you?”

  So Camillien Houde, a poor man’s son who had become a big city’s mayor, became an inmate in a wartime interment camp while enjoying the services of his own valet. Some prisoners passed the time by plotting escape, a favourite plan being a hockey game, prisoners against the guards, on a day when the river froze before it was covered in snow. Some prisoners dreamed of outskating the guards on an endless breakaway to the sea. Houde could skate, but he had no intention of being a runaway in the wilderness, or living life on the lam. A man of his bulk and fame, where could he hide? Instead, he plotted his triumphant return. “You watch,” he told Roger, and shook a thick finger.

  “I’ll be back. Hell, son. We’ll both be back.”

  CHAPTER 21

  1968–69

  CONSTABLE ÉMILE CINQ-MARS NEEDED TO TRAVEL BACK IN TIME TO retrace the events of the night an antique dagger was stolen from its safe. He arranged to speak to the investigating officer on the scene, Detective—now Precinct Captain—Andrew Sloan.

  “Touton won’t let it go, will he?” Sloan muttered, shaking his head.

  A blustery day.

  Citing cabin fever, the sixty-year-old detective chose to conduct the interview outdoors. He and Cinq-Mars strolled down to the canal locks at Ste. Anne de Bellevue, where small craft could negotiate the roiling junction of two rivers. At intervals, pedestrians were permitted to cross on the locks’ gates to a small island park, and the two men traversed the walkway and gazed out at the rapids.

  “Sometimes I forget that Montreal’s an island,” Cinq-Mars mentioned.

  “Tell me about it,” Sloan grunted. “I used to love it. The stinking city. You wake up in the morning, sniff the night on your clothes. Puke an asshole upchucked down your cuffs. Smell a perpetrator’s garlic breath on your shirt. I craved clean air. Now I live off island, in the country. But you can’t win in this life. Mornings, I smell pig manure, or some shit like that.”

  Cinq-Mars smiled, remembering those rural days himself. His own heart remained saddened. At least working a murder case gave him something more to do than mope over losing his girlfriend.

  “I live close to pasture. Soon, I’ll pension off. It won’t be a big change.”

  “You put in hard time downtown. You must’ve seen some things.”

  “Curl your hair. I still go to the barber twice a month to straighten mine out.”

  Only wisps of hair remained on top, the sides white. His skin possessed a ruddy complexion, toughened by wind and sun, as if he’d been a fisherman or farmer throughout his life. Capillaries lay visible and broken across his rosy cheeks.

  Cinq-Mars appreciated the intimacy of the encounter. Sloan was no longer the hard-assed gumshoe his reputation had painted him to be. These days, he administered a small detachment. If a few young fellows came into town and drank too much, got into a brawl with knives, that would be his worst shift of the year. Better than the days when it would’ve been a typical start to any evening.

  “I’ve heard stories.” The visiting cop rested his forearms upon a security bar above a steep embankment and watched the river flow. “A lot’s changed since then.”

  Sloan put his hands in his trench coat and made it flap, warding off a chill. “What can I do for you, Detective? Since we’re talking about the good old days.”

  “I’m not a detective, sir. I’m working for Captain Touton, and he’s got me busting my ass on my days off. That’s why I’m in civvies.”

  “For Armand, being a cop is like being a priest. You never take the crucifix off your neck.”

  “I’ve learned that. As I said, I’m looking into the murders of Roger Clément and the coroner, Claude Racine. Way back when.”

  “Armand’s favourite hobby.” He decided to continue walking along the stone barricade that separated them from the river. Cinq-Mars ambled along after him.

  “You were the first detective on the scene. How did you get called up to the hockey offices?”

  “How? I don’t know. Somebody sent me a telegram.”

  “Nobody was allowed in the building. So how did anybody find out there’d been a robbery?”

  Sloan stopped walking, apparently lost in thought. “Detective, I’m not sure anybody has asked that question before.” He resumed his strolling.

  “I’m not a detective,” Cinq-Mars reminded him again. “But it sounds good when you say it.”

  “Sorry. I’ll call you Émile, since this is your day off. Jesus. How did I get called?” The captain stopped walking to pull his thoughts together. “Armand had given us sectors. He was expecting trouble. We all were. Senior detectives were each given a sector of downtown to watchdog. Not for the riot, so much. For any major crimes that occurred while the riot was going on, if one broke out. I remember now, it’s coming back to me.”

  Cinq-Mars recalled listening to stories of the big city riot over the radio. The city had seemed so far away then, in flames. “So the Sun Life was empty.”

  “That was our understanding. We went to the company and said, ‘Look, we can’t protect the NHL offices unless we seal the building.’ They were already shaking in their shoes, those guys, the bosses. If they could’ve evicted the National Hockey League at that point, they would’ve. So they cooperated.”

  “This is all before the riot?”

  “Yeah. We knew it was coming. The mayor’s office decided that if we planned too much, it would be like inviting the riot, in a way. Armand had a sense though. He was more worried than I’d seen him. He knew what guys were saying in the taverns. Maybe he got some orders, but mostly he made his own plans, on the quiet.”

  “You admire him,” Cinq-Mars noted.

  Grudgingly, the older cop nodded. “I stood up to him more than anybody. Maybe I did it at first because I was ticked off. Here’s this young guy passing me by—the first time it happens, it’s hard to take—but then I kept on doing it because I found out that he appreciated the input. He didn’t want only a squad of yes-men around him.” They had reached the tip of the small island, and now turned and began to walk back along the inner shore, towards the canal. “On some jobs, he’d cut me out of things. He wanted guys who’d do what they were told and not say a fucking word. Other jobs, he wanted me around, because he needed somebody who might make him think twice. He kept himself on the ball that way.”

  Cinq-Mars was enjoying the nostalgic talk. Yet he had learned lessons that Armand Touton had imparted—convoluted conversations were fine, they helped oil the tongue, but his job required that he maintain the thread and guide the speaker back to the main point.

  “What’s your recollection on the sequence of events that night?”

  “It starts at Sun Life. The vault had an alarm on it. A local alarm would’ve rung in the hallways for nobody to hear, but there was also a remote. Downstairs, security guards saw the alarm go off on their board. Then it went dead, a sign that the line had been cut.”

  “So they went upstairs,” Cinq-Mars surmised.

  “Our guys wouldn’t let them. That caused a brouhaha, let me tell you. I got a call over my two-way, so I went over to intercede. To keep everybody happy, I went upstairs with security tagging along.”

  “And?” The east gate was releasing water. A pair of small powerboats inside the lock, one a beautiful wooden Chris-Craft, gently lowered from the level of the Ottawa River to that of the St.
Lawrence.

  “We saw what we saw. The door to the NHL office smashed in. We were pretty shocked to see the safe blown open. We saw the busted case where the Cartier Dagger used to be, and it’s a good thing security was around, because they told me the importance of what was missing.”

  “You didn’t know about the knife before that?”

  “Why would I? I thought it was a French thing, but Armand, when I told him, he didn’t know about it, either. I guess you had to be a buff.” Cinq-Mars looked at him quizzically. “Like a history buff.”

  Voices of the boaters arose from low in the lock, chatting away amiably. “So, if you’re inside Sun Life, how did the murder in the park come to your attention?”

  “A citizen—a student, I believe—spotted a man on the ground, and other men abusing him. Cops were hanging around Sun Life, so the witness ran up to them. But the cops weren’t allowed to leave their posts. We lost an opportunity there. Finally, a uniform checked things out, and that’s when the killers, assuming they were the killers, fled. Then things got interesting.”

  “Only then?” Cinq-Mars said.

  “I was called over. I was busy but it was my sector. I looked at the dead guy in the park, and had a thought, you know? So I asked a security guard what the stolen dagger looked like. He’d seen it on display. When he told me, my bowels felt loose. This is how come there’s no doubt about what scene I encountered first—because I brought the guard from Sun Life back across the street to identify the knife, which he did, and then he shocked the hell out of me, because he identified the dead man, too.” A surprise. “How?”

  “Said he was a hockey player, or used to be. The guard was a fan. He recognized him.” An expression crossed the younger cop’s face that Captain Sloan inquired about. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Cinq-Mars gestured with his chin. “Roger Clément had been a hockey player, but not for almost twenty years. He’d changed over that time. Plus, he was dead, and you were outside at night in bad weather. People don’t look so good when they’re dead, and they’re never easy to recognize in the dark.”

  Sloan couldn’t dispute the logic. “What’re you saying? The guard knew him?”

  “Could’ve been an inside job right from the get-go.” “Naw, they came down from the roof. They busted in through the window.”

  “My job is to look at every aspect and see if anything was missed. You just told me that the guard might’ve known Roger Clément. I’ve been up on the roof of the Sun Life—”

  “You’ve been on the fucking roof?”

  “I don’t think they went down from there. I think they just made it look that way so nobody would think it was an inside job.” “We didn’t think along those lines.”

  “I’m not saying it happened that way. But I’ve been looking at it from a certain angle, and then you tell me about the guard. It starts to make sense.”

  Sloan shook his head, impressed with the new guy’s smarts. Their route had brought them back to the point where they’d cross the canal again, but the lock was opening and they’d have to wait for the procedure to conclude.

  “You’ll have to speak to that guard. No way will I remember his name.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Sloan took a step back to eye his colleague. “How do you know that? From what I told you, you don’t even know who he is.”

  Cinq-Mars shrugged. He was showing off a little, but the man was a captain and he was an ambitious cop in only his second year on the force. “I’m going over the whole trail. I reinterviewed every guard who’d been on duty that night. Captain Touton has those records. He interviewed them all back then, so I knew which one had gone out to the park with you, and he’s dead.”

  “Touton didn’t catch this, about the recognition thing?”

  “Afraid not. But just because somebody recognized somebody, doesn’t mean they were working together. That’s only a guess on my part.”

  “You asked me questions you already know the answers to. Jesus.”

  “Everything requires corroboration. You know that. I want the facts lined up. I’m really looking to get a feel, you know? As to how things were back then.”

  “I know cops. You want to spike some guy’s ass on a lamppost, Émile. Well, I’m glad my memory didn’t fail me. You got what you came here for.”

  “I appreciate the talk, Captain.”

  They watched the boats depart the lock. The crews were chilly, but the life seemed idyllic.

  “Someday it happens,” Sloan said quietly, without being prompted. “You’re looking at sixty, see retirement ahead. You never pictured yourself sitting in a goddamn shack on a windy fucking field on a grey fucking day by the side of a fucking highway nobody drives down much anymore that smells of ripe pig stink. The wind howls right through the cracks of your shack, feels like it’s through your bones. You never knew that this is what you wanted, but you must’ve, because this is what you got. This is what you dreamed of. Clean air, minus the stink. But no city punks in gold chains, no creeps in Mercedes fucking Benzes. That’s beautiful. Retirement. Yippee. Nothing to fucking do except dream of slaughtering pigs. Or pig farmers. I don’t wish it on you, kid, but there it is. Good luck with your life.”

  Cinq-Mars wasn’t sure what to say. “You’re not retired yet,” he reminded him.

  “Six weeks. Hey, if you ever want to come out to my place and bust my balls, feel free. I’ll appreciate the diversion.” The man held out his hand, indicating that they were separating early. “I’m staying out awhile, breathe the air. You can find your own way back.”

  Cinq-Mars eyed him closely. He didn’t look bad at all. All he had to go on was the man’s temperament. “Cancer?” he asked.

  “Fucking prostate. Hey, you’re some detective.”

  They shook, and when the gates of the lock closed again, Cinq-Mars walked across, then drove back to the city. Over the car radio he heard news of a bombing. The details were still coming in. A terrorist cell of the FLQ—Le Front de libération du Québec—was mounting a new campaign and threatening to become more violent. They’d been blowing up mailboxes. This time, a shoe store. With somebody in it.

  Anik stirred. Roused herself sleepily.

  Afternoon liaisons were often the best.

  He’d be wired. She’d be sultry. Together, they’d be naughty.

  The apartment belonged to neither of them. René had borrowed a key. That alone felt sexy—doing it in someone else’s place, in an unknown person’s bed. Another couple would come home to their room and probably think to change the sheets, yet echoes of her cries would continue to whisper in the walls, above the tinkle of her laughter and his wry, smoky chuckle. Knowing that he’d come from an important meeting, that another awaited, that felt sexy, too. She’d catch him on the evening news and calculate that two-and-a-half hours before her man stood before the phalanx of microphones he had knelt before her and kissed her thighs, moving to combat her desire with intimacy. The sex would linger over the airwaves, through her bones, her blood, her head, warming her desire again.

  Did she love power? The thought vexed her from time to time. Maybe. That could be part of it. He was such a little guy after all, like a gnome—whenever she wanted to get his goat or take him down a peg she’d call him Napoleon. For a while her favourite had been “You stunted Napoleon,” which had evolved into “Well, if it isn’t Napoleon’s stunt double.” He never liked that one, so she stuck with it. And if she wanted to be objective about the overall picture, he was not good-looking, either. She’d say he smoked like a chimney, but what chimney smoked that much? Yet his head was always full of ideas and his body a chute of passion, and, as she got to know him better, a fester of doubts and frets also. He often experienced the weight of the nation on his shoulders, and always the weight of the enterprise. Was he making the right choices? Would they work? If they gained independence, would that work? What compromises would have to be negotiated, and how would the rest of Canada react, really? How would Trudea
u counter his next move, and what would be his archrival’s next ploy? Could he win an election? Bourassa, the new premier, was a grasshopper of a man. Any thought that René couldn’t trounce him was inconceivable, yet his vision for the society was difficult to sell across the generations, difficult to project through each segment of the population. His people were inclined to be socialist, but his support, if he wanted to win, had to be broader than that, which meant compromise, and that meant disappointing the expectations of the faithful. He talked to Anik about these matters, and she gave back her counsel. She said he had to follow the pragmatic course. Victory would heal most wounds, she assured him, and he’d nod, he’d agree.

  Anik herself hated that the right wingers were involved and carried so much clout within the party, men like Laurin and Parizeau, who were always a threat to René's leadership and forever a pain in the butt. Creating a country was difficult labour, and it seemed most often that that was what they were doing, really, as they twisted and convulsed on borrowed beds, willing a country into being as other couples might lock together to create a child. She loved power, she had to admit it, but the thrill of revolution affected her more, the intoxicating imagination of it all, the sense of being on the cusp of history, of time, of causing the world to bend to your better judgments. So the two of them gyrated in a desire of limbs and blood-flow and irreconcilable lust to create a new land, afraid of success, fearful of failure.

  Progress seemed minimal.

  More problems supplanted any being resolved.

  Still, they could take themselves to bed and believe they’d make it work, that here they could fabricate the new out of the furor of time and place and the long fortitude of their history. And she’d think, That’s why I’m sleeping with him. For when she was with him, it felt as though she could become an equal partner in creating a nation. When he was not around, that conviction floundered.

  But oh, how he’d fume about Trudeau.