River City

by John Farrow

  Miguel cleared his throat. “If there is any mention of this in the papers, we will deny it and cause an international incident that will embarrass your government. If you do not agree,” and he indicated his own men, “we must die here. Many of you will die also, probably all of you if something explodes.”

  Touton looked around. None of his men budged. “Well,” he said, “we’re staying. And I don’t see any reporters around, do you?”

  “It has to be more official than that.”

  “I got this,” the Mountie who had talked to them earlier said, and he left the room. He was gone for seven minutes, and during that time the men just stared at one another, too fearful to blink, ready to shoot. Each man feared for his life and stared at the man across from him that he might soon kill.

  Then the Mountie returned.

  “What does Trudeau say?” Touton asked him.

  The Mountie raised an eyebrow. Then he said, “It’s been taken care of.” They waited, eye to eye.

  When the phone rang again, nobody jumped. Miguel answered it himself. “Si,” he said. Then he listened. Then he said, “Si,” and hung up.

  Miguel did not look at the policemen—not so much as a glance. He left the room, and his confederates followed. As each man arrived at the exit door, he set down his heavy weapon, then left.

  When they were gone, the Mountie said, “Gather ‘round.”

  The policemen—city cops and Mounties—formed a circle around him.

  “There’s enough explosive in this room to bring down a bridge. In a crowded place, thousands would die. There’s enough here to do that over and over again. Your country will never know to thank you, but I thank you. And now we’re duty bound to keep this among ourselves. It’s not going to be in the papers because there’d be more shit to pay than any of us can afford. Captain Touton was right. This comes down from Trudeau himself. If what we did here today gets leaked, I’ll arrest every last one of you, and if that doesn’t give us the one guy who talked, then you’re all fired. I don’t care who you are. I can, and I will, deliver on that promise. Plus, that’ll be only the beginning of your troubles. Captain Touton—thank you.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “If you don’t mind,” the Mountie said, “we’ll take care of this now.” “I don’t want to be around here.”

  Nobody said another word until they got outside, where Émile Cinq-Mars, who was both a religious man and someone who rarely swore outside of a hectic moment, calmly said, “Holy shit.”

  Touton exhaled a deep breath.

  Cinq-Mars looked at him. “Are we at war?”

  Touton was digging for his smokes. “If we are, we’re the only ones who know it. Fuck. This is what Trudeau’s talking on TV about—his ‘apprehended insurrection,’ he calls it, what he’s telling the people he can’t tell them about. Now he still can’t tell anybody, not unless Castro dies first.” He turned suddenly towards the others and barked a final command for this operation. “Everybody, out of here before somebody wonders what we’re doing. Cinq-Mars, come with me for a second.”

  They moved to a corner of the building, then a little farther to get out of the wind.

  “Here,” Touton said, and he handed the younger man an envelope. “The arrest lists you wanted. Both names were on it, both have been removed.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And here.” Another envelope emerged from the man’s coat pocket.

  “Don’t lose it.”

  He did not need to look inside to identify the contents. The envelope carried the weight of a dime. He could feel only a small, thin, hard fragment. The stone chip from the Cartier Dagger.

  “Thanks again.”

  “Stop fucking thanking me,” Touton told him, “and do something.”

  “Can’t you climb it?” she asked.

  “Not with all my stuff,” he said. “Fuck your stuff,” she said back. “What do you mean? I need my stuff.” “One camera. That’s all you need.”

  Paul had never thought so. He needed his tripod and light meters, assorted lenses and filters, his telephoto for sure, the zoom, a bag of film, the extra camera bags, a flash wand, light reflectors, his—

  “Just climb up the fucking tree and take the fucking pictures when somebody fucking shows up. Stop being such a prima-fucking-donna.”

  A radical idea. Paul climbed with a single camera around his neck. Anik waited nervously below.

  “Pssst!” she hissed.

  “What?” he asked, curled on a limb.

  “Toss me down a smoke.”

  “What,” the prime minister inquired, “do we have?” He sounded hopeful, yet wary.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t say ‘nothing.’ Whatever you say, don’t say ‘nothing.’” “Sir, we have very little so far.”

  “Why do people say I’m in power? The press should report, honestly, that I’m now the least powerful man in the country.”

  “Sir, the army has control of the streets—” the commissioner pointed out. “—and the kidnappers control me.” “You don’t mean that, sir.” He didn’t. That was true.

  “If I may say so, Mr. Prime Minister, we’re making progress on many fronts.”

  “Progress?”

  “We know a few of the kidnappers. Except for one, we can’t find them.”

  “And you call that progress.”

  “The police are drawing the net closer.”

  “If they don’t know where to look, how can they draw the net closer?” “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Who said we have time? A Quebec cabinet minister is dead, and where’s James Cross? You’re closing in, but you don’t know where in is. What if that cell or another cell kidnaps somebody else? What if Laporte’s killers strike again? For that reason alone, I can’t have the commissioner of the RCMP come into my office to tell me that matters are at a standstill.”

  His secretary rang through on the intercom. Someone had arrived to see him who was not on the agenda.

  “Who is it?”

  “A police detective from Montreal.”

  “Name?”

  “Émile Cinq-Mars. He says he wants to talk to you.” He’d heard that name before. Lately, he’d heard a lot of names. “Ask him to go through channels. Follow protocol, for heaven’s sake.” “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Take down the name of his superior officer before he leaves.”

  The prime minister returned his attention to the police commissioner. “What are your plans?”

  “Mr. Prime Minister, Laporte’s body, the car, the discovery of their hideout, then finding Lortie, that business. What was bungled was bungled, but each clue brings us a step closer.”

  “Cross was abducted by a different cell,” Trudeau reminded him.

  “A lead that concerns one cell may help with the other. We are working every lead to its limit.”

  The prime minister shook his head as the intercom lit up again. “He’s insisting, sir,” his secretary said. “Don’t we have a Mountie outside?”

  “We do.”

  “Ask the Mountie to escort him out. If he’d like a direct command from the commissioner, he’s with me now.” “Yes, sir.”

  The voice returned a moment later. “The Mountie is escorting him out, sir, and has acquired help to do so. The officer insists that he has something you must see before you make a final decision.”

  “I’ve made my final decision.”

  “You don’t have to see him. So he claims. Only what he has to show you.”

  A belligerent cop. Even the commissioner was smirking, to decry the lack of discipline in the more primitive forces.

  That name. He remembered. He’d heard it from Father François.

  The prime minister clicked the button to speak. “Hold on.” He looked at the commissioner and shrugged. “Go out and collect whatever it is I’m supposed to look at, will you?”

  “Sir—”

  “If it’s a waste of time, we’ll see tha
t the officer is disciplined.” “Yes, sir.”

  The top officer in the land accomplished the rather modest errand in short order, and returned with an ordinary business envelope marked fragile and folded to a third its size and sealed. Whatever lay inside felt weightless and small.

  “Curious. I wonder what it is.”

  The commissioner stood waiting to find that out himself. “How’d he strike you, this Cinq-Mars?”

  “Young,” was the commissioner’s first reaction. But he conceded, “Intelligent. It’s odd. He’s too young to have a gold shield. He says it was given to him by Captain Armand Touton in order to conduct a special line of inquiry on the FLQ. But he’s still a Montreal cop. You know what that means.”

  Trudeau ignored the slur. “We owe Touton for the Cubans.” “It’s curious, sir.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “We should call Touton and check him out.” “Intelligent-looking, you say? An odd description, Commissioner.”

  “Sir?”

  The prime minister used a letter opener carved by Inuit from a walrus tusk. He looked inside, but did not touch the object there. “What’s this?” he said, more to himself than to the man in the room. He continued to stare at it, perplexed initially by the seemingly innocuous contents. He picked it out and held it up to the light between his thumb and middle finger.

  From the opposite side of the desk, the commissioner squinted at the pale greyish chip.

  Then the prime minister deposited the object back into the envelope and punched the intercom button. “I’ll see him,” he said.

  “Sir,” the commissioner protested, “we should contact Touton.”

  “Don’t bother.” “What is it, sir?”

  “That will be all, Commissioner. Good luck. We’re counting on you.” “Yes, Prime Minister.”

  Feeling snubbed, the commissioner departed the room. “Should he come in with an escort?” his secretary was asking. “No,” Trudeau directed. “Send him in on his own.” “Sir, there are more people on your schedule. We have—” “Ask them to wait.”

  He got out from behind his desk to greet the mysterious and unknown police officer who had called upon him with the missing chip from the pointy end of the famous dagger. The last he’d heard of that missing chip, it had been lodged inside a poor bastard’s heart.

  The door was held open for him, and with his knees feeling somewhat slushy and his heart jumping an occasional beat, Émile Cinq-Mars entered. Silently, the door swished shut behind him, and that easily, after all the commotion and argument and pleading down the corridor, when he’d come within a hair of being given the bum’s rush, he stood quietly, alone, with the prime minister of Canada.

  “Officer Cinq-Mars,” Trudeau said in a tone that made his name sound like an accusation.

  “Sir,” the younger man commenced, and discovered his mouth dry. For some reason he’d been talking English in the outer office, and now stumbled as he reverted to French. “Thank you for seeing me.” He caught himself bowing slightly, not sure how to conduct himself.

  This was a time of crisis, the circumstances of the meeting unorthodox, so Trudeau had no patience for pleasantries. “I presume you know what this is,” he stated, holding up the envelope that Cinq-Mars had sent as his calling card. He wiggled it, as if jingling a bell.

  “I do, Mr. Prime Minister.” He ventured a few strides across the pale carpet, hoping he wasn’t tracking mud in behind him. His eyes shot around the room. “As do you.”

  “Do I?” Turning, Trudeau moved behind his desk to sit in his high-backed swivel chair, from where he observed the officer intently.

  Nervously, Cinq-Mars took in the room with a glance. The old mahogany woodwork impressed him, as did the lush carpet underfoot. Interior shutters had been folded back to reveal windows shaped like elongated spires, the sides closing at the apex like hands at prayer. Over a sofa hung a woven Inuit hanging—figures hunting walrus and tracking wolves. The igloos, Cinq-Mars noted, were a perfect decorative feature for a Canadian leader.

  “Have a seat,” the prime minister invited. Perhaps a command. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve neither the time nor the patience to digress. As you must know, the Montreal Police Department is not in anybody’s good graces these days.”

  “I thought that perhaps, after the incident with the Cubans—” He stopped as the prime minister scorched him with a look.

  “No incident occurred between Cubans and police in this land.” “My mistake, sir.”

  “So the poor performance of the Montreal police remains our only reference.”

  The department’s name had been sullied. Having found and searched the abandoned house where Laporte had been held captive, they’d located an address on Queen Mary Road. There, they discovered a female college student, who had answered the door, and, hiding behind a chair, Bernard Lortie, one of those wanted for the death of the Quebec labour minister. Montreal cops exulted in their coup. Lortie was willing to sing, was being mocked in the press for doing so, and they had the apartment to scour for clues. The cops were there for more than twenty-four hours, after which they kept a pair of detectives on the premises. Then the two officers went to dinner. When they returned, they discovered that a false wall had been opened in their absence. Through the wall was a compartment with benches, water and food. To further taunt the police, the men who’d been hiding there had smeared their fingerprints all over the freshly dusted apartment. The cops had screwed up by not bringing in dogs and not finding the fake wall, but even those glaring errors might have been forgiven by the other jurisdictions had they not screwed up more seriously again. Embarrassed, they failed to tell the Mounties and the SQ what had happened. While the perpetrators were clearly in Montreal, the Mounties were searching for them on the other side of the continent, continuing to do so because the embarrassed Montreal cops did not share their information. The department would have remained silent altogether were it not for an FLQ communiqué that blew the whistle on them and extolled the virtues of Bernard Lortie for not telling the police about the secret wall, and now no Mountie, and no prime minister, was willing to trust a Montreal cop again.

  “Why have you brought this to me?”

  “It’s connected to the crisis.”

  The answer appeared to take him aback, and Trudeau, setting the envelope down on the desk, rubbed under his lower lip with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He studied the man seated before him, then asked, “How does a sliver of stone relate?”

  “Sir, in seeing me, you have, in essence, if not explicitly, admitted—or shall I say, rather, indicated—that you know what this sliver of stone, as you call it, represents. What it means.”

  “Not true, Detective. This is merely the most curious calling card I’ve ever seen. And you told the commissioner outside that you’re Armand Touton’s man. That’s what got you in the door. Now, why don’t you tell me how this sliver of stone relates to the current crisis. But—before you do that, just so we’re clear—did Captain Touton send you?”

  Cinq-Mars cleared his throat before replying. “He knows that I’m here.”

  “Ah, but does he approve of your being here? You’ve not entered the room through the usual channels, Detective.”

  “It’s not an authorized visit. Captain Touton has made a conscious decision not to stand in my way, and—” Cinq-Mars said, then paused to take a breath before proceeding with his gambit, “—he did give me the tip of Cartier’s dagger—”

  Trudeau stared back at him. He spoke quietly. “Is that what this is?”

  Cinq-Mars paused again, perhaps to signal his distaste for the prime minister’s deception, for they did not need to confirm that detail. The prime minister possessed the knife, and the shape of the missing tip would be well embedded on his consciousness. “By giving me the chip, he facilitated this meeting. Let’s say that that’s something he and I understood between us.”

  The prime minister touched both forefingers to his lips. “How di
d you come upon this sliver?”

  “It’s evidence. The last known whereabouts of the Cartier Dagger was in the heart of a murder victim. The tip of the dagger remained behind when the knife was removed. It’s evidence. Captain Touton has been holding on to it all this time because he’s never given up on the case. Shall we conclude, sir, that my possession of this tidbit of evidence validates my presence here?”

  Rocking his head one way, then the other, Trudeau demonstrated that he was reluctant to concede the point. “The question still remains, Cinq-Mars. How does any of this relate to our present circumstances?”

  “It could lead to the beginning of a negotiation between the terrorists and the government for the release of James Cross.”

  A silence ensued. In the prime minister’s gaze Cinq-Mars detected a modest hope, a genuine willingness to seize any valiant straw that might save the day.

  “If you can begin a negotiation to bring an end to this fiasco, Cinq-Mars, then why have we not commenced that task already?”

  “We have. It starts here, with me and you.”

  “You’re representing the terrorists?”

  “I represent someone who is willing to lead us to the terrorists.” Another pause. The prime minister then spoke slowly, “Shall I not call the commissioner back into the room?”

  “Let’s keep this between me and you, sir, for now.” “In this room, I outrank you,” Trudeau noted.

  Cinq-Mars acknowledged that fact with a brief nod, then stood. He reached across the table, his movement deliberate, slow, and pressed the middle finger of his right hand upon the white envelope to slide it back across the desk towards himself. He then picked it up, visually checked that the chip remained inside, and returned the envelope to his jacket pocket once more. Then he sat down again.

  The prime minister observed him.

  “Explain this to me,” Trudeau asked. “For instance, why should I not have you arrested—or at least questioned—immediately? Someone can dream up a charge, I’m sure.”

  “Under the War Measures Act, no one will have to.”

  The prime minister smiled so slightly that it was difficult to determine if he had found the riposte amusing.