River City

by John Farrow

  “It shouldn’t be,” he told her.

  She was quiet a few moments, then said, “I’m on a list.”

  “Not on mine, but your mother is. She’s on my arrest docket.”

  “Shit.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Hang on.”

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  “Émile! Good to hear from you after all this time.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Clément. I have bad news tonight though.”

  “Anik tells me I’ve been listed. I’m impressed. You’d think that the authorities would have forgotten me by now.”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Anik’s disappointed. She wanted it to be her.”

  “I can’t say that she’s not on someone else’s list. She’s just not on mine.”

  “That probably disappoints her the most, Émile. What do you think we should do? Run like frightened rabbits? I’m not a good sprinter. I have nowhere to hide. Will you at least be gentle when you arrest me?”

  “You should leave, ma’am.”

  “Easier said than done, Émile. At a friend’s house I’d be endangering the friend. Anyway, most of my buddies are probably on a list, too. I’ve been through this before. I don’t think there’s much point—”

  “Ma’am, you can go to my apartment. You’re welcome to stay there. You and Anik, both.”

  She paused, then said, “That’s generous. Do you have room? We’ll be with Ranger, too.”

  “Ranger, too. I’m just figuring this out as I talk, but I could move into your house, ma’am. Nobody gets arrested that way. You really don’t need to spend three or four weeks or months in jail right now. You won’t enjoy the experience, trust me.”

  “Hang on a sec, Émile, okay?”

  He could hear her discussing matters with Anik, who was next to come back on the line.

  “Listen, Émile, it’s a good idea. Thanks. I don’t want Mom in jail. But if you walk in and out of this house all day wearing your uniform,” she continued, “you could cause us more trouble than this is worth.”

  “Anik—” Cinq-Mars started to protest, but she already possessed the solution.

  “So all four of us have to stay at your place. You included. We’ll just squeeze in and make the best of it.” That suited him just fine.

  “That’s what we’ll do,” he said, then let a bitterness slip. “As long as the fourth is Ranger and not René. I don’t want him sleeping over.” Silence.

  Finally, she said, “How the hell did you know that?” “You’re a watched woman. He’s a watched man.”

  Neither of them understood why she said what she said next, but Anik apologized. “I’m sorry, Émile.” The words struck them both as odd. They remained mute awhile.

  He broke the tension. He knew that he should apologize, but instead he said, “I’m not sure how to get my keys to you. You’ve got to pack and go now.”

  “I still have a key,” she told him. “I remember where I left it, too.”

  That surprised him.

  “You two take the bed.”

  Cinq-Mars still wasn’t ready to go back to work, although his cohorts were antsy now. He possessed prestige among their group, so he was able to coax them into waiting a while longer. Going back inside, he talked to the sergeant on duty.

  “That priest who comes in here,” he said. The sergeant looked sleepy, done in, but he carried more rank than Cinq-Mars and put up a brave front. “What about him?” the sergeant asked.

  Cinq-Mars was interested in learning if his hunch was right, that Father François might be working the jail for reasons beyond the bounds of the purely pastoral.

  Fewer men guarded him, he knew. One had been sent away. Perhaps two. The one who’d spoken kindly to him was gone. Punishment for letting him get free, when he’d flung himself at the window, cutting himself up. Or banishment for no longer having the stomach for this action. Whatever the cause, Pierre Laporte now had fewer captors, yet he believed that reduced his chances.

  Those who were left behind were the more difficult individuals.

  After the window, he’d pleaded for a doctor, a hospital.

  They denied him.

  Now two men, as far as he was able to discern, entered his room. They were quiet. Saying nothing to one another. Nothing to him.

  “What?” he said.

  They did not reply.

  “Water, please,” he said. Still they did not reply.

  Then he pleaded, saying only, “S’il vous plait. Messieurs. Messieurs! S’il vous plait.”

  And he felt the cord around his neck like a hangman’s noose around his soul as his whole body rebelled and fought to live. Great, horrendous bellows bore out of him as the cord squeezed tighter and his limbs, constrained and depleted, flailed as if set upon by an electric charge. He roared in his anguish and heard his attacker yell out also—once, twice, goading himself on, and before he called out a third time, the cord suddenly relaxed and was unwound and the feet of the two men rapidly retreated from the room. He was still alive, he believed. I’m alive!

  His heart was smashing through his ribcage like a locomotive screaming through a night forest.

  They had tried, and failed, to kill him.

  Pierre Laporte felt alive and dead at the same time, all his body roaring, each atom, nerve ending, corpuscle, droplet of blood in his veins, roaring, all his bones and tendons a single collapsed scream as he listened with the power of ten wild animals for the footsteps to return or to stay gone.

  He was still alive, but he could not breathe or think and dared not imagine anything. Dared not even hope, for hope was too painful for him now, too infested with the torment of this hour. He was still alive, yet he felt now the first inkling of a contagious despair.

  Carole and Anik had changed the sheets, made up the bed and slept together, their terrier between them. They thought it might be fun, mother and daughter, living on the lam. Anik had second thoughts, though, once they were done. The room looked tidy, the bed neat and quietly expectant. Her mother noticed. “What’s wrong?”

  She screwed up her face. “Mmm. Nothing really. It’s a little weird, that’s all.” “Sleeping with your mom is a little weird?”

  “That’s a lot weird. But I’ve rolled around on this mattress before. That makes it a little weird.”

  That’s when Carole said something she regretted even as the words were slipping across her lips. “Child, if we tramped around the city looking for a mattress you haven’t slept on, we might go sleepless awhile.”

  Not since Anik was sixteen had her mother poked her nose into her sexual business. “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry. Forget it.”

  “You think I’m a whore?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You implied it.”

  “My mistake. I’m sorry. Forget it, all right?”

  They couldn’t really forget it, and both fumed quietly to themselves. Carole pulled out a novel she’d brought from home and did her best to read, while Anik went to the living room and eventually flicked on the black-and-white TV. Regular programming had been interrupted to show the foot soldiers on the streets of Montreal. She watched for a while, but had to click it off.

  She went back to see her mom.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to flip out.”

  “I’m sorry, too. I was mean.”

  Anik lay on her tummy with her feet up, the soles facing the ceiling, her head on her hands while her mom played with her hair. This was nice actually, being this close, under at least the illusion of exile.

  “Talk to me, Anik,” Carole said eventually. The different environment and their tiff had had that effect, of breaking the mould of their routine interactions and drawing them closer to intimacy. “Tell me what’s happening with you.”

  The daughter was quiet awhile, perhaps tempted to formulate her troubles and detail them, but eventually she only replied, “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Why ar
e you sleeping with an old man who smokes like a bus? Do you love him? If you do, then please explain to me why you’re so unhappy.”

  “I’m not unhappy.”

  “You’re not yourself.”

  Mothers. You can’t live with them, but just when you most want them to disappear, you can’t live without them, either. Still, Anik wasn’t ready to talk.

  “You told Émile that you were coming here because you didn’t want me to go to jail. Thank you very much. But I know what the inside of a jail looks like. I could survive another spell. I’m here because I don’t want you going to jail. If you’re not on a list right now, you know you will be soon.”

  “Why? So they can interrogate me to find out what René's thinking?”

  Carole nodded. “Make fun. But probably people in high places would love to see you arrested just for spite. Then what will René do? Demand that his woman-child girlfriend be released?”

  “I’m not a fucking child.” She wasn’t angry. Merely petulant.

  “I know that. So does René, I presume. Do the newspapers? How do you think you’ll be portrayed? Anyway, René would have to keep his mouth shut, even pretend he doesn’t know you. You’re not the only girlfriend he has—only the youngest, I hope. He can’t publicly protect you.”

  She put her head up and brushed her mother’s hand out of her hair. “How do you know how many girlfriends he has?”

  Carole sighed and put her book down. This looked to be a night where things would get said. They were probably overdue.

  “I heard you on the phone,” she told her daughter. “You were telling a friend that René has different love nests around the city so the media can’t keep tabs on him, or on you. Okay. I buy that. I do. But he also has love nests around the city so that one lover won’t walk in on him while he’s in bed with a different one. And I’ll lay odds it’s not only this city.”

  Angry, Anik came up to her knees. “You don’t know that. You just think that because—”

  “Has he ever invited you to Quebec City?” Anik hesitated.

  “Of course not. You’d only be in the way up there. He gives you some other reason, but who’re you kidding, child?”

  Anik fell onto her side and did a pantomime of agony, writhing around, but came up, like a mermaid surfacing, beside her mom and gave her a squeeze. Her mom kissed her forehead and she snuggled in tighter.

  “What to do what to do what to do,” she said.

  “You know what to do, Anik. If you can leave a great boy like Émile—”

  “Oh, stop it. You don’t get to choose my boyfriends for me—”

  “It’s strictly hands-off, okay? But I’m saying, if you have the moxie to leave someone you like, who’s hurt by what you do, then it can’t be that difficult to leave a man who’ll give you one of his famous shrugs and his wicked little smile, then make a phone call to your replacement.”

  “You’re such a bitch,” Anik complained, but not too hard.

  “Hey, sweetie. I’m sure it’s been fun and educational. But when you’re done, don’t beat yourself up. Be the one who jumps ship first. Remember the phrase ‘women and children first.’ Stick to it. Don’t get hurt by some guy who combs his hair from all the way over on the other side of the moon.”

  That made them both laugh. He had the worst haircut on earth.

  “How’d you know I was with him, anyway? Oh, right. You eavesdrop on my phone calls.”

  “My first clue? Your incredibly smoky clothes.”

  They laughed, then Anik once again fell silent. “Are there any secrets?”

  “In this town?” Carole put her arm around her daughter. They were having a good time now. “Apparently, only one. Make that two. Who kidnapped James Cross? And who kidnapped Pierre Laporte?”

  Carole could feel, subtly, a tremor, a slight stiffening of her daughter’s spine and a flex to her biceps. She relaxed her hold.

  “Or perhaps,” she whispered quietly, “there are no secrets at all.”

  Finding two women and a dog in his bed upon his return home, Émile Cinq-Mars wiggled Anik’s big toe. She got up then, groggy a bit, and followed him out to the living room, still dressed except for shoes and socks. They did not know how to properly behave with one another, and at first stood awkwardly. Then Émile made a move and they held one another, perhaps as a measure of their old affection, or as ballast to the unsteady times they each endured.

  They talked, then later slept in different rooms. In the morning, Cinq-Mars was awakened by a phone call, and he turned on his television. The sounds returned Anik to his living room to join him on the couch. By a fence that guarded a small airport on the outskirts of Montreal, off the island, the body of Pierre Laporte had been found in the trunk of an old car. On television, they watched the police arrive.

  “Okay,” Anik said.

  “Okay what?”

  “It’s time to do something.”

  After his shift that night, Émile Cinq-Mars strolled into Captain Touton’s office.

  “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you out arresting men with beards?”

  “I’m pulling double shifts, not triples. Sir. Let’s take a walk.”

  Something in the young man’s demeanour commanded Touton’s attention. The two walked out into the dawn light together and strode silently in step for a block. Too many policemen were milling past them for Cinq-Mars to begin. Touton indicated that they should step onto the construction site at the end of the street, where they found a spot for themselves amid debris and stacks of building material. Now that it was his turn to declare himself, Cinq-Mars felt himself go reticent. He moved a few pebbles around with the toe of his shoe.

  Waiting, Touton pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered him one. “You’re buying your own now?”

  “It’s the fucking crisis, all right? If you tell my wife, I’ll kill you dead. Now tell me what’s up.”

  “Sad day,” Cinq-Mars said, stating the obvious. As a Canadian, he never expected to be living in a country where politicians were strangled to death and dumped in a car’s trunk. He had to think differently about his world.

  “With Laporte dead, I fear for Cross,” Touton said. Something about the moment solicited his patience. He smoked, waited, glanced at the scaffolding.

  “Anik might help us,” the young man said.

  Touton nodded and flicked his cigarette. “What does she know?”

  “Before she tells us that she needs some guarantees.”

  “Like what?”

  “Her mother’s name taken off an arrest warrant.” “I didn’t know it was on one.”

  “If her own name happens to be on a list, it should be removed as well.” “Is that her demand or yours? Anyway, it can probably be arranged,” Touton told him.

  “I don’t think the word ‘probably’ is useful at this point.”

  Touton aggressively sucked on his smoke. “She’s bargaining with us? Cabinet ministers are being strangled and she wants to strike a deal? She should be introduced to the facts of life as they pertain to her right now.”

  “She’s under a lot of stress herself, that’s my impression. She’s taking risks.”

  Touton flexed his shoulders, trying to slough off the strain. “We’re working across different jurisdictions here. Nothing is easy anymore. I can’t make promises I might not be able to keep.”

  “We can’t operate on ‘probably.’”

  “If Anik knows something, she has to tell us. If I have to bring her in and strap her to a chair and zap her with a thousand volts, she’s going to tell us.” “That won’t work,” Cinq-Mars maintained. “I don’t care how stubborn she is.”

  He knew the captain was serious, in his way, that he had to be careful. “It’s not a question of what she knows. It’s a question of what we can figure out together. She’s been talking to people. After a demonstration, she makes a few phone calls. She asks who was there, picks up the local gossip. Through a process of elimination, she’s been finding out who
might be conspicuously missing.”

  Touton was catching on. “People you expect to be there aren’t. Is it because they’re preoccupied by holding someone prisoner?”

  “We need to run our arrest lists past her. Show film on the demonstrations, see who she can identify and so eliminate, then see who’s left. Also—”

  “What?” Touton liked this line of inquiry. He could see that it at least held the potential to produce results, which was more than he could say for their other operations lately.

  “She’s stubborn, as you know. She’s not sure whose side she’s on. Strapping her to a chair might have the wrong effect. She’ll choose a side and it won’t be ours. Besides, there’s no way in hell you’d harm her. On top of all that, she’s gone into hiding with her mom. You have to cooperate or you’ll never find her to talk to her.”

  Touton’s expression conceded ground. “What do you need?”

  “Complete arrest lists, with Carole Clément’s name removed, and Anik’s, if it’s on. But we need the full lists to check through them. Film on the demonstrations from every jurisdiction. I also need the tip of the Cartier Dagger, the piece that broke off in Roger Clément’s chest—”

  “What?”

  “I need the tip of the knife.”

  “Why?”

  “She wants it.”

  “Why?”

  “She wants it. You possess it, don’t you?”

  “It’s evidence. I’m protecting it. It wouldn’t be safe in police custody, not after all these years. So I keep it myself.”

  “She knows that. But now she wants it.” “I don’t understand—”

  Cinq-Mars remained adamant, knowing how intransigent Anik had been on this one issue. “The tip of the knife had been in her father’s chest. If anyone should have possession of it for safekeeping, it’s her and her mom. There’s no use arguing. She wants the tip of the blade.”

  Touton shrugged. Desperate times. People could make extreme requests at such moments and get what they wanted. He had to accede to her wishes. “All right,” he said. “What else?” He knew there had to be more.

  “There’s two ways we can do this. You can give me a leave of absence—”

  “What?”

  “Or … you can temporarily promote me to detective so I can at least get paid. If you move me up, then you have to turn me loose. I can follow up on some things. That’ll include running down the information with Anik. Although I can do that in uniform, I’ll have to be in a suit for a few side investigations, and for those I’ll need a detective’s gold shield. I’m not looking for anything for my own sake—I don’t give a shit what you think. But I need that gold shield to do what has to be done, to talk to the people I have to talk to.”