by John Farrow
With Anik, more than to any other, he’d let his guard down and she’d see how he feared the man, how the prime minister intimidated him. René loved debate and discourse and adversarial confrontation. He was so adept at winning that in most contests he enjoyed the advantage of victory being a foregone conclusion. Observers waited for him to strike, and when the moment for his attack or his proper defence arrived, he’d be beautifully derisive or foul-mouthed, galvanized to his passionate core yet aided by a sense that he spoke out of the heart and suffering of his people. Admirers raved, delirious, forgetting points he may not have properly countered or contradictions of his own he had let drop. Yet he held no such advantage over Trudeau, whose freewheeling, off-the-cuff brilliance perfectly offset Lévesque’s folksy, foxy charm. Rather than holding the advantage of an anticipated victory, Lévesque could only debate Trudeau while expecting to lose. Anik could see it in his eyes. René had battled him too many times in too many smoky rooms back when they were friends not to twitch under that dire lack of confidence. As much as he might fret and pout and sneer there was not a bloody thing he could do about it.
René and Anik shared that secret between them, although it remained unspoken. All their grand plans might be for naught, as the breadth and wonder of their vision came affixed with paradox. Lévesque believed he could never defeat Trudeau, and if he could never defeat him, how could he expect to win? Anik had no answer. She could only hope to prop him up, hope that someday he might find his confidence. In that light, she had done her best to detract from Trudeau’s glow one time, explaining why the other man was so powerful and wielded such an intellectual aura and spiritual force. She told him, “He has the Cartier Dagger, you know.”
She had to explain to him how she knew.
They were in bed then, too. After she spoke, Lévesque placed his hands over his face and turned onto his back in an attitude of abject misery. In trying to demythologize Trudeau, she had inadvertently made him appear invincible. Lévesque writhed in physical agony. If Trudeau possessed the knife, it explained his swift, rather extraordinary ascent to power, not to mention his rampant popularity. What hope now for Napoleon’s stunt double? He was not only up against that scintillating intellect and high moral, near-religious, charismatic authority—that sun!—but now he was up against the neo-mythic power purported to be attached to those who possessed the dagger. What hope?
A quandary. Anyone who openly accused Trudeau of possessing the knife would be chastened by the slur of slander, dismissed for being petty and derided for believing in a paltry magic. Credibility lost would never be regained. He’d be lucky not to be laughed into extinction, and rightly so. Yet any man with sufficient superstitious tissue in his gullet to actually believe that the Cartier Dagger possessed mystical qualities that granted one person an advantage over others was doomed to self-defeat if he went up against the knife’s proprietor—and Lévesque guessed that that applied to him, too. He felt himself psychologically whipped.
“I’m sorry,” Anik said, trying to peel his hands off his face.
“I’m fucked,” he lamented.
Trudeau had been born rich, while Lévesque had been hatched poor. His foe was well educated and had travelled the world. Lévesque’s own learning was substandard, his travels routine. While Trudeau was brilliant, Lévesque was merely damn smart, full of quips and an arrogance worn as a thin disguise. Trudeau seduced more women than he did, although he didn’t do too badly. And Trudeau possessed the coveted dagger, whereas he had a knife at his throat, demanding that he deliver what he probably could not.
Now he stirred beside her, emerging from a post-coital nap dreamy-eyed and content, at least, with their shared time together. She kissed his forehead and drew his head down onto her shoulder as normally he might do with her. “Where are we?” he wondered.
“I don’t know. You better give the key back to the right person.” Above the bed’s headboard rose a wall of bare brick. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on a side wall stood crammed with books.
“Some writer’s pad,” Lévesque recalled. “Some hack. What time is it?”
“Sixty-five minutes to your next appointment. Senior citizens’ centre. Which means you can be late, as usual. Nobody will notice.”
On that news, he snuggled up closer to her. A hand idly came up under her breast, and he was leaning down to kiss the opposite nipple when the phone rang.
“Don’t bother.” He went for the nipple and she closed her eyes, thinking that, yes, she could go again. So could he. He didn’t have to be on for octogenarians. Most of them would only be there for the hors d’oeuvres anyway.
The phone was connected to an answering machine. A disembodied voice interrupted them. “René. It’s me. Pick up.”
They didn’t know who “me” was, but presumed it to be the man whose bed they were lying on. Lévesque picked up. “Yeah?” He listened a moment.
“Oh fuck.”
“What now?” Anik asked. His tone seemed ominous.
He hung up. “The fucking FLQ. They bombed a shoe store.”
“What? Nobody bombs a shoe store.”
“Nobody bombs mailboxes, either, except those pricks. They killed a salesgirl.”
“Oh my God.”
“She’s French. I don’t know if that makes it any worse. But she’s French.” “Those damn fools.”
He put his hands over his eyes and rubbed his temples with his thumbs. In opting for independence, in keeping the issue on the front burner, he ran the risk of igniting passions. A few might scatter off beyond his control. This was supposed to be his job, to pull sentiment into one constructive enterprise, but could that be wholly possible? Knowing that he wasn’t to blame made it no easier.
“I better go,” he said. “The press will be hunting me down. I should make myself findable.”
She pulled his hands off his face. “The bombers. They’re attacking Trudeau. It’s not your fault.”
Lévesque nodded, sighed, indicated that he understood. Yet, while dressing, he mentioned, “Apparently, she was young. The salesgirl.” He shrugged, and felt to add, “Like you.”
Dark, this street she travelled, poorly illuminated by street lamps. People dozed in their beds, although a few lazed before the telltale blue glow of televisions. Sporadic insomniacs persevered. Anik was listening to her steps, taking an arcane pleasure in the rhythm of her heels and toes upon the pavement. She heard a car drive up behind her. Her skin tingled, a premonition of fear. She didn’t want to look. Young guys, probably, checking out her ass, too dim or too dumb to do more than stare before uttering some shrill remark as they sped off into the night, tires squealing, not knowing that their laughter failed to conceal a pathetic fright. To look back would only provoke them, so she marched on.
The car continued behind her.
This could be trouble. She should look at the driver. Confront her demons.
Anik shot him a glance.
A single driver. Not young. Middle-aged.
The car sped up, then slowed to draw alongside her. Parking was permitted on the opposite side of the street only, so the vehicle could hug the curb here, stay close.
She bent down as she walked. Looked in. Let her anger show.
Behind the steering wheel, Armand Touton smiled at her.
She stooped to peer through the open window on the passenger’s side as he came to a stop. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. Relieved, yet mystified. Angry now for a different reason. At least she wouldn’t have to battle a pervert.
“What does it look like?”
“You’re following me?”
“I’m keeping the streets safe,” Touton declared. “Hop in. I’ll give you a lift.”
Intuitively, she knew that the meeting was no accident, and although she was content to be walking, and the night was warm and quiet, she also knew that something was up. Opening the door, she crawled into the vehicle, bumping her knee against the police radio, then slammed the door shut behind her. Like a
little girl, she slouched down in the seat. She had half a mind to kick her shoes off and stick her bare feet out the window.
“What’s up?”
“You heard about the shoe store?”
She nodded. “It’s terrible about the girl.”
“We checked her out—the victim. Nothing political in her life. She’s an innocent. Dead, blown apart, for what? I don’t know how these guys justify that.”
“I don’t either,” Anik murmured. But she did know. She’d overheard the discussions often. Innocents? There are no innocents. No one had the right to be a bystander. If you weren’t with the movement, or the cause, or the insurrection, you were against it. Innocence was merely a bourgeois disguise to protect the culpable. We’re all damned for our complicity. Condemned by the conceit of being born. She’d heard similar talk in bars and at house parties and on balconies in the city while holding a beer in one hand, passing a joint with the other. But she’d not repeat any of it to Touton. He was right. Only a damned fool or a butcher could justify killing a shopkeeper, no matter the cause.
“Mailboxes are bad enough. Nobody gets hurt from that. Except it’s not true. A postman finds a bomb, the army sends an expert to defuse it—boom! It goes off in his hands.”
Faint streetlights shone through the mirrored image of his face imprinted on the windshield.
“Can you imagine that? In his hands. Boom.”
She didn’t want to imagine it. A lot of people made fun of the FLQ planting bombs in mailboxes. So Canadian—polite bombers. They didn’t want to kill people, just blow up pieces of paper, and bills, to make a point. But that was a better idea than killing people, so why did people make fun? Weren’t they proving that they were not mad killers, but revolutionaries exploding an effective statement into the lives of citizens, into the government’s fearful mind? Their point? The very existence of the federal government, of federal mail, was sufficient to set them off.
Boom! Confetti all over the ground. Media coverage across the land.
But she knew what was coming.
“Mailboxes. Fine. Nobody gets hurt, except a soldier, but who gives a flying fart about him? His family? But who thinks about that? Someday, maybe a cop gets it. What’s one soldier, more or less? One less cop? Someday, a poor mailman. Shit. Never mind that the dead guys are fathers—don’t think twice about that, it serves them right for being in the army or the police or, heaven help them, the post office. Isn’t that what they say?”
“What who says?”
“People who plant these bombs.”
“You think I know who plants these bombs?”
Touton looked at her. “It’s inevitable, the people you hang out with. I’m going to drive you somewhere, Anik. I want to show you something tonight you haven’t seen before.”
“I don’t know any bombers.”
“I’m not saying you’re close to them. You may not know that you know them. But where you go, the rooms you’re in, the bars, you’ve shared the same space with them. I’ll guarantee you one thing.”
“What?” She was feeling grumpy.
“They know you.”
He took her down to the docks.
The shock of the grain elevators, defiant, tall in the moonlight, felt moody and forbidding. Bare lamps shone upon dark patches of pavement. Between widely dispersed lights, large, looming shadows deterred any errant trespasser, as if only marauders and deviants lurked here, while nearby, policemen pounded the noses of recalcitrant types. Not an ill-founded impression, as the docks remained home to rogues, and all manner of malfeasance had occurred here. And yet, from night to night, from moment to moment, a sense of industrial slumber remained more prevalent, as the thrum and cough of machines circulated air and fluids, as through the heart and lungs of a wheezing beast.
They breathed the still, expectant air.
The car’s tires thumped across the wooden crossings of railway tracks, then back onto paved road and a parking lot, cracked and lumpy from the heaves of winter frosts, intermittently patched but never properly repaired. The ride was jarring, and Anik held one hand against the ceiling of the car’s roof to keep herself pressed down into her seat. Touton slowed over a particularly coarse section of road—they might as well have been crossing a field—then turned around the corner of a shed and travelled towards the river’s edge. He drove out onto a pier above the St. Lawrence, the water swift and confused below them in a boil of eddies and whirlpools. He stopped and shut the engine down.
In the ensuing quiet the motor made small clicking sounds as it cooled. Time passed in the afterglow of that near-silence by the whoosh of river. Anik asked, “Why are we here?”
“I drove your dad down here. Right to this spot. The first time we met.” “How come?”
Touton was gazing at her. From the distant lights along a shed’s roofline, and the moon’s glow reflecting on the windshield, she could make out his expression.
“I asked him to open the door,” he told her. “I had the car parked right on the edge. Right over the river. I asked him to open the door and step right out.”
“He wouldn’t do that.” She was feeling nervous. She knew that Touton had something to say outside the limits of her knowledge. Something about her dad.
“I pointed my pistol at his kneecap. He opened the door.” She waited, listening to the river. She swallowed. “He really believed you’d shoot him?”
“He knew I would. I made him get out. I made him hang onto the open door while he dangled above the river. I wasn’t going to let him back in the car. I didn’t care how many days it took. He could either fall in the river—”
“My dad couldn’t swim,” Anik recalled.
“So he told me. He could either fall into the river—”
“—and drown.”
“—and drown—or he could come work for me.”
She had to mull that through. She felt so sad for her dad being put in that position. She wished he was still alive so that she could run into his arms, weeping, and he could hug her, and she could hug him right back.
“You’re a bastard, Captain Touton,” she said quietly.
“I am,” he agreed. “I never said otherwise and your dad knew it, too. Him and me, we were honest that way. But he understood me, your dad. I had a job to do.”
The story struck her as dark and disquieting. “You’re telling me my dad was a stool pigeon.”
“I never call him that. You won’t hear it out of my mouth. I’m saying your dad was a hero. All he cared about in this world was his wife and daughter. Everything else and everybody else, including me—including mayors and premiers, because he worked for them all—we could all go fly a kite in an electrical storm while standing in a puddle.”
Touton paused, and tapped the steering wheel a moment as though repeating Morse code from beyond the grave.
“But his family meant everything to him. So he worked for me, yeah, and he told me things that helped me in my job, but he didn’t do that because he was so afraid of falling in a river. He would’ve drowned if it wasn’t for you and your mom. He didn’t want to leave you two alone. But another reason he worked for me so well, is because he wanted to do good. He didn’t want his daughter growing up to find out that her old man was only a thug. He wanted her to grow up and find out that he worked on the side of the law, too, that he was trying to do something good in his life, with the cards he’d been dealt.”
Touton breathed easily and thought about lighting up a smoke, except that he only smoked other people’s. When they adopted their daughter, his wife wanted him to promise to never smoke again, but during that negotiation they settled on him refusing to buy another pack for himself.
“I guess now’s the time,” he told Anik, “for you to find that out. Your dad, he was proud of what he did, so don’t call him no stool pigeon. If I was you, I’d call him a hero. A man who did a tough job really well.”
Anik chose to climb out of the car. She walked down the pier a short distance
, and hugged herself against the slight chill in the breeze. Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out her cigarettes. That brought Captain Touton over. He accepted her offer and pulled out a lighter to stoke both smokes.
“I should quit,” she said.
“We both should,” he said.
They stared out at the river surging below them. In daylight, pleasure boats took tourists on wild rides through the swirling swift currents. Anik had never been down to this spot and seen this view of the islands, the remnants of the World’s Fair of 1967, whose theme had been “Man and His World.” She stepped away from Touton to stand on the lip of the pier, looking straight down into the fleet river.
“Maybe I’ll jump,” she said. She thought, Man and his world.
“I don’t advise it.”
“It’ll be on your head, for what you did to my father.”
“I gave your father what he wanted—good work to do in life.”
“I bet.”
“It looks cold and fast and deep, doesn’t it? But it’s colder and faster and deeper than it looks.”
She took a step back, still keeping one foot on the rail.
“You would know,” she told him. “You’ve seen men wash away from here.”
“Maybe I have,” he said.
“What do you want from me?” she asked. “Spit it out.” “Come work for me,” he said. “What? As your stoolie?”
“I don’t ever use that word for good people doing good work—the right work.”
“Just like my dad, huh? Is that what you’re thinking?” Touton shrugged. He inhaled smoke and held it deep in his lungs, then breathed out. “He did good work, your dad. That’s one thing.” “He made sure I knew how to swim, you know.” “Did he?”
“He didn’t want me to have the same weakness as him. He was afraid of the water. I can swim. I can jump in here with an even chance of swimming ashore somewhere downstream.”
“Sorel,” Touton said.
“What?” She knew the town, sixty miles downriver.
“That’s where most bodies wash up, the ones that get tossed in from here.”
“I’ll be swimming. I got an even chance.”