by John Farrow
“You don’t want to jump,” he said.
“I don’t want to be your stoolie, either.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Anik. I’m not threatening you. This is a friendly conversation. I want to convince you that you can do something very positive with your life, that’s all.”
“It’ll be symbolic. My jumping. I’ll do it for my dad.”
“That’ll do no good.”
“I’m not here just to please you, Captain Touton.” “Your dad wasn’t either. But he did good work for me.” She stayed quiet awhile, looking downstream, following the movements of the current in the sporadic light. “Anik?” Touton asked.
Finished with her smoke, she flicked the butt into the water. She watched the ember fall the long way down, to be extinguished on a wave. “I don’t know any bombers,” she said.
“You might. Either you know them, or you know someone who knows them, or you know someone who knows someone who knows them. They can’t be any farther away from you than that.”
She nodded, as though to concede that that was likely. The city wasn’t so big, the huddle of radicals in the various political movements wasn’t that extensive.
“I know people who know people. But the people I know are my friends. Who trust me. They know I’d never sell them out. I don’t think my dad was selling out his friends. Thieves and punks, guys who worked with him, maybe. But not his friends. Besides, my star has fallen in radical circles. Lately, I’ve been hanging out in different company.”
He knew.
She turned, pulled by his silence.
“Are you trying to tell me that you want me to spy on René?” Touton shook his head. “He’s not a bomber,” he said. “No,” Anik emphasized, “he’s not.”
“I understand what you’re saying. You associate with the establishment now. But Anik, listen to me. Watch what you say when you’re with him.”
“Excuse me?”
Touton had smoked his cigarette down a lot lower than she had, and now tossed it into the St. Lawrence as well. Its light was extinguished long before it hit the water. Wearing a sports jacket, he hiked the collar up around his neck and also hugged himself. The river’s cool night air was giving him a chill, too, and he wished she’d get back in the car.
“Why does Mr. Lévesque always take you to other people’s apartments?”
Before she could answer that, she had to process the bulletin that Touton knew more about her private life than she revealed to anyone. She didn’t go around advertising that she was sleeping with the politician, but her closest friends and her mother knew. She never told anyone about the clandestine meetings in strangers’ bedrooms. The only people who knew about that part were the strangers who donated their homes, but few among them, if any, knew her.
“He lives in Quebec City,” she answered. “He has an apartment here, that’s true, but it’s always full of people coming by. Journalists are always at the door. We go to other people’s places because it’s private.”
Touton was shaking his head.
“What? You don’t believe me? You think he has another woman at his place?” She had thought that herself, so the idea was not outrageous.
“Maybe he does, but I don’t care. Lévesque doesn’t take you home because he suspects that his own bedroom might be bugged. He knows it’s a possibility.”
“By you?”
“Why should I care about him? The RCMP, different story. The federal government sees him as a separatist, a subversive, so they’ll try to bug his conversations. Your friend René knows that.”
She would have suspected as much herself. No big deal.
“What he doesn’t know,” Touton continued, “is that sometimes he uses an apartment that was offered by someone working for the Mounties. Such as the one you were at today when he got the call about the bomb.”
Anik spun, her mouth ajar. Aghast.
“That’s why I’m saying, be careful what you say around him. Especially when you think you’re alone in somebody’s apartment.”
“Mounties, you said?”
“I have friends who are Mounties. Sometimes I have access.”
She quickly reviewed what others might have overheard. She was not concerned about sensitive political discussions—there’d be nothing new in those talks for curious ears—but she was fearful that the sounds of their intimacy had compromised her privacy. “Oh God,” she said, thinking of a few moments during lovemaking. “Oh God.”
Touton stepped closer to her, and briefly touched her shoulder.
“You see, it works both ways. I can be helpful to you, too.”
She let him tug her back towards the car.
They got in.
Anik felt numb, displaced.
Touton started the engine, and as they moved away from the pier, the headlights scanned the walls of facing sheds. They saw two men moving slowly in tandem, not looking their way. “I should probably arrest them for trespassing,” the cop muttered idly to himself.
“Go ahead,” Anik told him. “I could use the company.”
They smiled at each other, culling some small pleasure from their brief aside, then Anik came back to reality and let her face drop into her hands. The knowledge of what she’d just learned burned through her.
“Come on,” Touton encouraged. “It’s not that bad.”
“No? Then how come I want to go back and jump in the river?”
Touton dropped Anik off at her mother’s house.
As she was climbing out of the car, he said, “Anik, do me one favour? Talk to your mom.”
She got out and closed the door, then hunched down and looked at him through the open window. “You want me … to talk to my mom … about what we talked about? Why?” Of all the matters he’d discussed with her that night, this was the most puzzling.
“Talk to her, all right?”
She declined to give her consent even to that, or to anything else, and slowly stepped across the sidewalk, stooping to open the latch on the low metal gate to her home. Knowing she was coming, Ranger was inside, frantically scratching at the door. “Sic him,” she wanted to say, but it would be no use. He wasn’t that kind of dog, and would only run up and deliriously lick Touton’s face.
Ranger was yapping in the backyard while her mother sewed.
Anik Clément didn’t awaken until 11 A.M., when she needed to rush to work. Three days a week, she pitched in at a restaurant to help quell the noon rush. She drank her morning coffee and munched on a toasted bagel, then told her mom about her night. As she got to the part where Touton had taken her down to the docks, her mom stopped the machine.
Touton wanted them to talk, she told her mother. “Why, Mom? I don’t get it.”
Carole went to the fridge and pulled out a beer. Anik watched her pour the contents into a tall glass. “Mom, it’s not even noon.”
Carole took a few swallows anyway. “Captain Touton wants you to know that you come from a family of liars.” Her mother’s tone felt ominous, and Anik waited, scared and hushed. “Your father, Anik, hasn’t been the only police informant in this household.”
Carole drank a little more, then began to tell her daughter stories. Anik knew she wouldn’t be going to work that day. But that was okay, because she wouldn’t need to lie when she called in sick.
Problems cropped up all through his schedule, and the prime minister was giving his office secretary fits by not allowing her to fully rearrange matters to her liking. A bomb going off in a store in Montreal the day before had that effect. Attention paid to the aftermath required cancellations and adjustments.
“We should put back your 11:15,” she advised him. A handsome woman in her sixties, she was capable of tangling with his advisors, most of whom were male, and holding her own against their bullying. Although the PM had an assistant who was her superior, she often took charge. “Since the gentleman is travelling, we might fit him in at four, if you come back from the House on time for a change.”
Not reme
mbering who the 11:15 might be, Pierre Trudeau cheated a glance at the daily outline on his desk.
“He’s scheduled for forty-five minutes, Prime Minister. You’ll agree that that’s out of the question. Under the circumstances, he’ll understand were we to make that twenty-five, which is still being extreme, sir. I’d recommend ten.”
“Leave it as it is.”
“Sir, we just—”
“The slot and the length of time. I’ll see him.”
She did not exactly leave the office in a huff, yet whenever the prime minister declined to listen to basic reason, the heels of her shoes managed to thud more loudly on the thick, plush carpet, then echo more sharply as she walked across bare wood. An amazing skill, Trudeau believed. One that never failed to make him smile. What could he say? No explanation was possible concerning his 11:15.
When the time came, he rose to greet his new guest, coming out from behind the majesty of the prime minister’s desk. “Father François, how’re you doing? It’s good to see you again.”
“I’m fine, fine. Good to see you, Mr. Prime Minister. Kind of you to find the time. Especially, I would say, with all that’s going on.”
The secretary’s chin rose in agreement as she closed the door.
Trudeau bobbed his chin to indicate that the priest, who had arrived in his cassock, should be seated. He did not return to the far side of his desk, but joined him in the second chair in front of it, all smiles and warmth.
Yet he said, “Sadly, Father, the timing for our meeting is inopportune. I was hoping we’d have pleasant topics to discuss. I even planned to take you to lunch. We’ll have to postpone that, I’m sorry to say. I’ve rebooked. I know how you enjoy good food.”
“You never resist poking fun, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Not at all. A serious talk instead. Tell me, what’s the word on the street, among your radical pals?”
“My radical pals,” the priest repeated, and smiled slightly.
“Also, among the clergy, if you know any. I’ve never had the impression that you communicate with priests, though. What news, Father?”
Father François settled into the comfort of the guest chair and declared, “Thanks, Pierre, for asking. I’m fine. How have you been?”
With his hands on the arms of his chair, Trudeau put his head back and laughed. “Am I so rude? Are you my priest now, Father? Have you come to take the measure of my soul?”
“I may not be your priest, Mr. Prime Minister, but I am a priest, and we’re old friends. An odd pairing, perhaps, but we’ve been through some times together.”
“True enough,” Trudeau concurred. “You’re astute to call me on my lack of manners. Let’s begin again. I shall offer you coffee. I’d like one myself, actually.”
“In the old days, when we were putting together an issue of Cité Libre, we used to make it ourselves.”
“Before we grow too nostalgic, let’s remember that the coffee we made tasted like mouthwash.”
He laughed. “A couple of times, someone snapped pictures, and it seemed that every time they did I was holding a fist to my esophagus and wincing in pain. I think we considered it necessary—bad coffee for the intelligentsia. Somehow, it seemed appropriate. I bet the coffee in the prime minister’s office is outstanding, and I’d love a cup, thanks.”
Trudeau called through on the intercom to have it done. While they waited, the conversation turned to casual matters—who had been marrying whom, who was being hounded by scandal. The two were no longer young men with ambitions and moral authority over their elders. Both of them were now weighted by their decisions, which often could never be delineated as right or as wrong, only as being somewhat beneficial or not yet fully conceived. After the coffee had arrived and they were alone again, feeling more comfortable with each other amid the quaint trappings of power in which they found themselves, Father François chose to reply to the prime minister’s initial query.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” he said, for even their long-term friendship could not override the aura of power associated with this room, nor dismiss the importance of the position, “the times are not so good. The word on the street is worrisome. More and more, ordinary men are expressing a willingness to acquiesce to the violence. ‘Justice’ is a word bandied about these days to excuse any crime, even the brutal death of a shopkeeper.”
“Where’s the justice in that?”
“Sir, I’m not the radical I may once have thought myself to be. I cannot find a speck of justice in that. Violence begets violence, love begets love—all contrary positions I find wanting.”
Trudeau nodded, smiled a little and offered that telltale twinkle in his eye.
So invited, Father François inquired what he was thinking.
“I heard,” Trudeau confided, “that you’ve come under the influence of hippies and peaceniks.”
Father François did not take the remark as an insult, and smiled also. “So have you, in your own way, Mr. Prime Minister. I don’t think Trudeaumania would have occurred if the world hadn’t first gone half-cocked over the Beatles. If we didn’t have love-ins and sit-ins and Martin Luther King, we wouldn’t have Pierre Elliott Trudeau wearing a carnation in his lapel and seducing a nation. If there’s a man alive who has harnessed flower power, Mr. Prime Minister, that man is you.”
Trudeau deflected the comment, for whether the priest’s statement was meant to be complimentary or derogatory was difficult to ascertain. He turned his head and pursed his lips knowingly and permitted his eyebrows to dip and rise. His contorted expression scurried around, mouth and cheeks a busy potpourri of nonchalant opinion and indecipherable emotion that flummoxed his adversaries while titillating his friends. Unlike anyone in politics, he could win an argument—or bring to conclusion a great debate—merely by making a face.
“I appreciate the change, Father, that’s all I mean to say. You’re not siding with the bombers. In the old days, you might have.”
“You, too.”
Trudeau wasn’t going to accept that. He pulled a face again, but this time he was more direct with his comeback. “People might have thought so, I’ll grant you. But I’ve never sided with force over logic. Not ever.”
With a nod, the priest conceded the point and backed down. “You’re right about me, though. When I was younger, with revolution in the air—or at least, in the smoky air of our lofts and backrooms—violent upheaval seemed an inevitable adjunct to history. Now, it might still seem inevitable, but I can honestly say that I know the process to be a relic of history, one that should never have been allowed to escape the stone age.”
“Yet, the man on the street is accommodating violence.”
“The man on the street is undecided. That in itself is worrisome. But the man on the picket line, the union man, the man in the tavern, the man whose politics are suddenly moving from prehistoric worship of a king, and when there was no longer a French king, the Church, that man is accommodating the idea of violence. I would say the romance of violence.”
“Why romance?”
“Kids today,” Father François opined, “not to sound like an old fart, but, I guess I am one now—kids today believe that victory can be won through violence. Mao is telling them so, and some are listening.”
“Victory,” Trudeau scoffed. “We create new victories every day. As I said a while ago—the press loved this one—the universe is unfolding as it should.”
“The flower child in you, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Or the priest in me. Yet it’s true. We don’t hold the future as a vision in our heads, we create the future through our daily lives, one day and one idea at a time.”
“Some more so than others,” Father François said. Trudeau looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Some of us are able to create the future a day and an idea at a time more than others are able to do.”
The prime minister leaned forward a touch, placing his palms down on the narrow armrests. “We’ve arrived at the nature
of your grievance.”
“Sir? My grievance?”
“No one enters this office without one.”
Although he had run this conversation through in his head countless times already, the priest took a moment to consider his words. “Mr. Prime Minister …”
“Yes, Father?”
“I’ve had a visit from an officer of the law.”
“I see. I presume you understand that the Mounties sweep my office on a regular basis, searching for listening devices.”
“I would presume as much. The Russians have spies everywhere, we’re told.”
“Never mind the Russians, although they’re bad enough. The Americans worry me the most. Well, actually, do you know who worries me the most?” Father François mouthed the words, The Mounties? “Right you are.”
The priest nodded. He understood. “I intend, sir, to be circumspect. You will recall an implement.”
“An implement,” Trudeau repeated. “You’re referring to a certain farmer’s shovel?”
“Correct. An officer of the law visited me with respect to a farmer’s shovel.”
“Why you?”
“I have known a variety of people who have shown an interest in the shovel over time. Including yourself.” “Me?” the prime minister inquired.
“That’s correct, sir. Not that anyone, to my knowledge, is pointing that finger. Rumours persist, on the other hand.”
“Rumours. Yes.” The PM eased back in his chair. “Apparently, I’m homosexual now. Have you heard that one?”
“Khrushchev’s your lover, I’ve been told.”
They both laughed. “Nikita’s not really my type. Others say I have a thing for Fidel. At least no one’s put me in bed with Reagan.”
“I’m glad, sir. Some people, however, have said that you have a passion for that farmer’s shovel. That story goes around and around.”
“Nothing I can do about it. That thought’s been on the Ferris wheel.
What’s new?”
“A new detective is on the case. A young man. He paid me a visit.” “Fresh legs.”
“A fresh mind, I’d say, sir. A bright young lad. Also of interest, I’ve learned that the deceased …” Father François paused to allow the PM a moment to catch the reference.