by John Farrow
“The first?” the PM asked.
“Yes, sir. Among his, ah, other talents, shall we say—”
“What shall we say?”
“He also worked for the police.”
The PM nodded, comprehending. “That explains the unending enthusiasm.” “Correct, sir, among other contributing factors of which we’ve always known.”
“Such as?”
“It’s a big case. Monumental, I’d say, in a policeman’s career.”
“Of course. Yes.” Trudeau tapped his fingers on his blotter. “Father, this is why you’ve come?”
“I’ve corollary interests, shall we say. A pair. Like bookends.”
Trudeau waited. Father François knew the truth, knew for a fact while others were left merely to speculate. Not that the priest could prove anything—it would be one man’s word against another’s—and the cleric was also culpable, as the entire affair had begun as his idea. Still, he was in the know, and so both trust and suspicion necessarily passed between the two old friends.
“Although I’m a priest, you know me to be a modern man, Mr. Prime Minister. Yet all of us, modern men in particular, are complex, often contradictory. We’re an odd species. I’m an advocate for logic, philosophy, theology, symbolism and even, to a guarded degree, magic.”
“Magic,” echoed Trudeau.
“You have accomplished so much, Pierre. Your success has done nothing to diminish, in my mind, the power of an icon.” He shrugged. “I’m in the Catholic Church—”
“Many have wondered how, given your ideas.”
Father François smiled, in a way that suggested cunning rather than a happy moment. “The power of an icon,” he said. “I have never promised what I am unable to deliver, but I have always been attached to a certain understanding, a willingness on my part, an accessibility granted to me by God and through my associations.”
“An accessibility.” Speaking in code took a toll on the prime minister’s famous impatience.
“Here I am, after all, seated in this august room.”
Trudeau nodded. Smiled. “No one enters this office without a grievance, Father, and no man enters this room without wanting something from me.”
“Where will it go, sir, when your work here is done?”
“Our farmer’s shovel?” The prime minister gazed across at his visitor. He was not sure yet if he was being judged, courted or threatened, and he realized he might never know that answer. “You have a suggestion?”
“In the past—at the pertinent time, shall we say—the Church was undeserving, in my opinion, of a good man’s philanthropy. But the Church has been dissected since then. Torn down. Its prestige and authority and a goodly measure of its wealth—locally, at least—stripped away. We’re becoming a different Church. We have a long way to go, and our worldly destination will perhaps forever remain unknown, other than the gates of heaven. So I’m suggesting to you that, given your own faith, given all that you have achieved, and deservedly so, that you might consider an act of philanthropy when that day, in a distant future, arrives.”
The man who bore the responsibilities of a nation in a time of increasing and vexatious tension mulled over the conversation. He kept wondering why the priest was making such a proposal now, wondered also if, in future, he shouldn’t accept the advice of his office secretary more readily. “Father, you mentioned bookends. You have another thought?”
“You asked what word I’ve heard amid the clergy. From within and without, Mr. Prime Minister, dark matters have come to my attention. Which, in truth, is what brings me here today.”
“Ah.” Now, perhaps, they would get somewhere.
“Our old cronies,” the priest began.
“Which ones?”
“I’m remembering the Russians, sir, and the Americans.”
The potential for hidden microphones, yes. The potential to be betrayed by your friends. Trudeau nodded to indicate that he understood, although he still didn’t know what was meant by “cronies.”
“As young men, we were aware of them. I’m being facetious. A certain order, sir, an adversarial force.”
The Order of Jacques Cartier. All right, he understood the reference now. He felt his skin tighten on his bones, as though an invisible hand was cinching him up.
“They persist, sir. They continue to look for a way to take advantage of the times. They would hope for chaos, revolution, an opportunity to contribute further to the chaos, in the hopes of creating a power vacuum that they might rise to properly fill. I’m here, sir, to make the point that our infamous shovel must be used to dig the proper field. The right trench. It cannot be passed around for any man to dig whatever well he chooses.”
Father François feared Trudeau might sell the knife, perhaps as a way of unloading a political liability, either now or in the future, to clean up his legacy. In the wrong hands, Cartier’s dagger—whether because it did possess an intriguing magical influence or merely due to its symbolic majesty—might readily encourage retrograde thinkers. The knife had been in the wrong hands when Trudeau had bought it, but it had been too hot for those in charge at that time to handle. Apparently, they had been disorganized then, in desperate need of money, or they had feared what they possessed, or who knows what chaos had existed within that tribe. Perhaps the ascent of an often-unemployed lecturer to the office of prime minister had opened their eyes to the relic’s potential properties. In any case, this secret band of adversaries knew to whom they had sold what they had sold, and now a fresh contingent of like-thinking foes wanted the knife back. Father François was here to issue fair warning, and to plead that its line of descent be carefully selected.
“If I respond, would you take the information somewhere?”
“Well, not to the Jesuits, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Neither to the Dominicans.”
“My Sulpician friends, on the other hand—”
“—might continue to be friends.”
With a slight bow of his head, the celebrant indicated that the PM understood his position.
Trudeau thought about it awhile. Possession of the dagger was a burden. While he could never proclaim its mystic power, he could not deny his extraordinary and improbable rise to power, and so would not dismiss its potential for magical properties, either.
“When that time comes,” he told Father François, “your proposition will be fairly considered, and at this moment stands in good stead.”
Gobbledygook. They were suggesting a transfer of power back to the Church once Trudeau’s political days were done—such was the perceived importance and vitality of the relic. The matter of its illegality, or of Trudeau’s questionable ownership, would never be broached between them. Yet Father François had also delivered a more important message—namely, to be circumspect. The array of forces aligning against him might be more diverse, and more concealed, and better organized, than those represented by idiot bombers.
“Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, for your time. You’ve been most kind.” “Good to see you, Father. Someday, again, we might bump into each other on the streets of Montreal.”
“Hopefully in peaceful times.”
After the priest’s departure, the PM’s secretary reclaimed the room. “Well,” she recited, for she had probably been rehearsing her remarks the whole time she’d been gone, “may we return now to affairs of state?”
“I thought it was lunchtime?”
“Your luncheon will be with the commissioner of the RCMP, remember?”
“Ah. The commissioner. Good man. We’ll want to discuss that bombing.”
“Yes, Prime Minister, you may wish to discuss the bombing, if that does not conflict too much with chatting with your old friends.”
She was adjusting the curtains to admit more light, another of her habits that expressed annoyance.
Having spent hours alone during the day, taking a long hike with Ranger and napping in a park bundled in a bulky sweater under a warm sun, Anik Clément had return
ed home to sequester herself in her bedroom. She left for dinner at a fast-food restaurant, where she’d enjoyed silly banter with a pair of local characters in rags, then back to the house. She still did not speak to her mother. Finally, after she’d heard Carole depart the washroom and enter her own bedroom for the night, she came out from under the covers. She lit a candle in her room, watched the flame awhile, then changed into her pyjamas and crossed the hall to brush her teeth. Done, she tapped lightly on her mother’s bedroom door off the kitchen. Anik tiptoed inside and crawled in next to her mom, who was sitting up with the reading light on, a book in her lap.
They lay there, together like that, mother and daughter, silent.
Finally, Anik asked, “Why, Mom?”
She couldn’t hate her for life. She was her mother, and they were close.
“Two reasons,” Carole said. She’d prepared her explanation.
“The men who came to our house, my babysitters,” Anik interrupted. “Did you put them in jail?”
“If I thought somebody was a good guy, I gave him a pass. I wasn’t all business. Your babysitters got off scot-free.”
“Some of them went to jail.”
“Not on account of me.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“I’m not lying to you, Anik.”
“You’ve lied to me all this time, Mom. For God’s sake.” She closed her book and put it aside. “If it was you, exactly when would you tell your daughter that you were a police informant?”
Anik didn’t think she’d ever be in such a position—that was the difference. “Why?” Anik asked again. “Two reasons.” “I’m listening.”
Carole took a breath. “Primarily, to help the police find who killed your father.”
Anik nodded. She liked that answer. “What else?”
“To make money.”
“Aw, Mom.”
Anik made a move to crawl back out of bed, but Carole restrained her with a gentle hand on her wrist. At that moment, Ranger joined them, but he was weary and he curled up at the foot of the bed.
“I was a woman who had to support a daughter after suddenly losing her husband. Back then, the union busters tried to prevent me from working. Do you understand? Life was hard, Anik. I wasn’t sending good men to jail. I was preventing crimes from being committed, seeing that the worst guys got sent up. A killer, once, and some mean guys. Some shithead was going to pull a bank job? Something would go wrong. Cops would accidentally bump into him. Armand was very good at that—he made everything appear like a fluke. Okay, okay, I was a snitch, but I was not a scab. I never squealed on the more decent guys. I just made life hard for the real bastards.”
Anik tried to process all that. “You always used to say that Dad had his rationale for doing what he did. He never really hurt people, he just knocked them around a bit. He never really interfered with elections, he just made people appreciate the vote more.”
Carole had to chuckle. She had often repeated the line herself, but she’d never not laughed.
“Yeah, and I didn’t put bad guys away. I only put the worst guys away. How’s that? I needed the money, Anik. And I needed, deep down inside me, I needed to know that I was helping to catch your dad’s killers. Talking about it now, I admit that there was something else.”
“What?” She was tired, and snuggled in closer to her mom. She had not done this in ten years, but she felt like sleeping with her for a night.
“I wanted a life. I didn’t want to just sew and get beat up on picket lines. I wanted a life. Hanging out with your daddy’s old pals, I got to live a little. Even—you’re a big girl now, right?—I even got to love a little. A teensy bit.”
Yeah, she’d sleep next to her that night. Had her mom done anything so different than what she was doing with René? She liked the life, the attractions, the action, the intrigue, the possibilities, even the dinners out and the dinners in. She adored the sex. The company. The conversations. She knew all along that she wasn’t making a life with him, that it was just exciting and temporary.
They lay together in silence. Carole reached across and turned off the lamp. Her daughter, it seemed, wasn’t going anywhere.
Minutes passed before Anik spoke out of the darkness. “Should I do it, Mom? Do you think?”
Carole sighed, and put her head back. She didn’t like any of this. The unanticipated problems, worries that seemed to leak out of your spleen and contaminate your bloodstream, tremors along your bones on the darkest nights, deceit an unhappy companion who never went home. She was on the verge of attempting an answer. Say no, don’t do it. The public demands are too great. Nobody wants bombs to go off. The personal cost is too high—the loneliness, the feeling that you have no centre, no core, no place within yourself where you can always go and be who you are for a few minutes. Those consequences were too grave. And yet, before Carole had mustered the resources to talk to her, Anik had fallen sound asleep beside her. Poor child. Why awaken her only to say that she might never be happy, that she might never be safe?
Carole edged down under the sheets herself, and although she did not expect that she’d sleep a wink, before long, before she had a chance to formulate too many frets, she nodded off, feeling her body borne upon waves. The sky was moiling and fiery in an epic dream, touching down upon a seashore of grievous confusion.
They slept together, mother, daughter and, at the foot of the bed, dog. Silent awhile. Still.
CHAPTER 22
1941–47
THE FUNERAL TRAIN MOVED SOUTH ALONG THE EASTERN SHORE of the St. Lawrence, ponderously rattling away from Kamouraska towards Quebec City. The land in that region proved exquisite for farming, flat and fertile, the air moist from the river in summer when the daylight hours were lengthy. At that moment, in November of 1941, upon the commencement of winter in a dreaded time of war, dusk fell early, and in the waning light, the flatlands were already white with snow. Ghostly sculptures of ice haunted the beaches, washed up amid tangles of driftwood.
For Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, the day had been a sad one, although not unexpected. He welcomed the final end to the slow agony of dying inflicted upon his true friend, and most important minister, Ernest Lapointe. The man had been his Quebec lieutenant, and without a notable replacement, his own political life might soon suffer. On the journey back to Quebec City, where a second train waited to return him to Ottawa, he mulled over the issue of his friend’s replacement, and consulted his advisors for their best thoughts.
Of these, Arthur Cardin was a political master and a superb campaigner. Undoubtedly, he was Lapointe’s equal, and in many ways his superior, a likely candidate for the very job they discussed. And yet, at the funeral, he had seemed frail to the prime minister, and never had he been well known in English Canada. King had worked long and effectively with him, yet on a personal level they had never clicked. Of these three liabilities, the issue of his health was the most pressing. In a time of war, King required energetic men.
The premier of Quebec, Adélard Godbout, the hero who had defeated Duplessis, also accompanied him on the train. Along with Cardinal Villeneuve, he led the province as a loyal and fierce backer of the Allied cause. Godbout remained adamant that conscription, should it ever be enacted, would be a crime, and yet, in King’s assessment, Godbout was his man. He ought to resign as premier and join King’s wartime cabinet in Ottawa. Even Cardin agreed with the prime minister on this choice, though he added in the same breath, “Why not Louis St. Laurent? In peacetime, I doubt you could pry him loose from his law practice. So many corporations depend on him. But in wartime? Men are willing in this circumstance to perform a public service. He’s sixty, but vigorous, well known, a significant orator, respected in Quebec—I’d consider St. Laurent, Prime Minister.”
“I am not only choosing my Quebec lieutenant. In all likelihood, I am also selecting my successor. If I choose St. Laurent and he leaves public service at war’s end, the party will be left rudderless.”
Returned to Ottawa, King learned that Godbout had refused him. An October by-election had been held to replace a member of the Quebec Legislative Assembly. Shockingly, Duplessis’s candidate had merged victorious in Saint Jean, a riding le Chef‘ had never won, a riding that had voted Liberal since Confederation. “I must remain where I am,” Godbout informed King. “To leave now would be to allow Duplessis to take hold again.”
While Mackenzie King consulted his best advisors and gave weight to their opinions, he also conferred with the dead—in particular, his deceased mom. Always he was attuned to instances of the other world communicating with this one. The name St. Laurent had been suggested to him while he’d been riding alongside the Fleuve Saint-Laurent. He had had a sense that the river itself had been speaking. And so, having lost out on Godbout, and having had his mother endorse his second choice, he selected St. Laurent.
Still, what would become of St. Laurent at war’s end? King was aging, and if St. Laurent departed, no one would be prepared to succeed him. Since 1880, the party alternated between English and French leaders, and upon his death or retirement, it would be Quebec’s turn. Without St. Laurent, who was ready?
The French, for all the grief they caused him, provided King with great solace, friendship and counsel. Lapointe, whom he’d buried with full pomp and splendour, had been his closest friend. Upon his deathbed, each man kissed the other’s cheeks and spoke of their undying regard for the other, secure in the knowledge that they would meet again beyond this world. When Cardinal Villeneuve visited, the cagey prelate reminded the prime minister that their souls were linked, that they shared the same system of beliefs. King had to reserve his most intricate political stratagems for dealing with Quebec. This was frustrating and maddening at times, but for him a separate Quebec could be accomplished only by tearing his heart out. And so, he sat dismayed one day, towards the end of the war, and gruffly dismissed his advisors, both those who worked among the living and those who interceded with the dead, to contemplate a sad document that had landed upon his desk.