River City

by John Farrow

  Cinq-Mars encouraged him, tipping his glass. “That put you on the spot.”

  “It did. I had to grasp this matter quickly. If I did as they desired and brought it to the attention of the bishop, I’d risk allowing the conservative element within the Church to get their hands on it. It’s alleged to have properties, you know. The liberal element—we’re stronger now, but at the time we were an endangered species. So I concocted the scheme to get Trudeau interested in buying the knife. He had money, he was a risk taker, an adventurer—the illicit side of the bargain would not likely deter him.”

  “You gave it considerable thought,” Cinq-Mars praised.

  Father François ignored him, and in rhythm to his words, scratched his kneecap. “Unlike Houde and Laurin, he’d never been on the periphery of killing anybody. And I thought I could exploit his romantic weakness for the mythology of the knife, its cultural and historic properties, even for its purported magic. That was a hunch, but a good one. As well, he’s Catholic—more religious than he lets on—which was important to me. So a door opened, at least in my mind. I could imagine that someday he might bequeath the knife back to the Church, should the Church become more interesting to us all, more progressive. That was the best I could do under the circumstances.”

  “Speaking,” Cinq-Mars mused, “as you were a while back, of rotted socks—”

  The parish priest waited, his head dipped low and tilting forward, his body slumped well back in his chair with his hands knitted together again, resting upon the hillock of his bounteous belly.

  “—it must have rotted yours dealing with de Bernonville, to know that money Trudeau paid for the relic would support him.”

  Father François sighed, as though the burden remained with him. “Especially after that night in the park, him going off half-cocked like that, stabbing Roger—to see him benefit in any way, that was difficult to accept.”

  “Why did he do it, do you think, stab Roger? Go off half-cocked? Again, it’s the explanations I’m hungry for.” Cinq-Mars could not dwell upon the matter at the moment, but he noted to himself that he’d become quite an adroit liar. A good thing that he laboured as a cop, for he might have made a formidable miscreant. He had to hold his exuberance in check, pretend that he had already known what he had only just now discovered: de Bernonville killed Roger. I’ve solved it.

  The priest tossed up his hands briefly, as though to appeal to the realm of chaos for an answer. “The man’s a madman, a maniac. What did anybody expect? They thought he was a nice guy, a charmer, an entertaining fop? A dandy to invite up to the cottage for a barbecue and a swim? A bon vivant to deliver a bon mot over whiskey and cigars? What excuses did they make for the man? He liked to chat up the teenagers. About what? Methods of torture? I wanted to scream in Houde’s ear, even while he lay dying, ‘You idiot. He’s a Nazi! He tortured his own countrymen. He killed men himself. He sentenced others to the firing squad. He sent decent men and women, French Jews and Catholics alike, to graves, to concentration camps, into forced labour. What do you expect from a fiend like that? Witty conversation? What, exactly, did you expect?’”

  By the conclusion of his spiel, the heavy man was half-bounding out of his chair, the veins in his reddening temples more marked. He settled back then, and his guest had the impression that Father François had reminded himself to be calm, for he did not possess a constitution for intemperate outbursts.

  “Sometimes, in this land, we delude ourselves. That’s a great part of our heartbreak.”

  “In any land, I think,” Cinq-Mars considered. “We have a knack. A genius.”

  The policeman gave the priest time to collect himself. He had come to the rectory to undertake a subterfuge. So far, the matter was going well.

  “You ask why he killed Roger. A good question. One that’s unanswerable. Among ourselves, those who were there that night, we have tried to delve into his heart and mind. Why else did Houde ask that I become his priest as he lay dying, if not to discuss that night with me, alone, under the seal of secrecy? And me, the left winger. I’ve broken bread with Laurin, who puts on a good show now that he’s in the Parti Québécois. Really, in his heart, he sits to the political right of Genghis Khan’s hangman. What did we discuss? A priest who is meant to know the hearts of men, and Dr. Laurin, the psychiatrist, who is meant to know their minds? We discussed the heart and mind of Count Jacques Dugé de Bernonville.”

  The port gave him an excuse to pause, and this time they leaned across, at the priest’s instigation, to clink glasses. Both men drank to their own good health.

  “What did you surmise, the two of you?”

  “Laurin had his cockamamie notions, his usual psychobabble. This is what I intuit, Émile, and I trust this thought: de Bernonville was more like me than I care to admit.”

  “I don’t follow.” The thread was unexpected, for he’d be hard pressed to discern two lives more divergent than the Nazi’s and the rebel priest’s.

  For a few moments, it appeared as though Father François really didn’t care to admit to the similarities between himself and the count.

  Then he began. “In my youth, my politics took me further to the left than I care to acknowledge today. I believed in revolution, even that. I also believed that revolution was as inevitable as the next ice age. A matter of an interval, sluggish though it may be. But my politics then, Émile, are best summed up as idealistic. I was fiercely derisive of the status quo, conscious of every failing of whatever regime had assumed power—which was never difficult, not here in Quebec, under that megalomaniac’s consumptive gaze. But one tyrant is not necessarily the equal of another.”

  “Duplessis, say, compared to a Hitler.” Cinq-Mars felt the need to contribute.

  The priest shrugged. “Same birthday, those two—a year apart, but oceans apart politically, despite the natural sympathy of one for the other. Duplessis was a quaint potentate, no worse. In the fifties, we were learning more about the tyranny of Stalin, and that dashed a few lefty illusions. When I reflect upon how the young people we recently dispatched to Cuba think, I know that there but for fortune, go I.”

  “Really?” He was not surprised that Father François would vouch for them.

  “I might have been persuaded, in the right company, or the wrong company, to commit such acts. Trying to acquire the dagger—I assumed there’d be no violence. I could not imagine that two men would die. There I was, a naïve priest, involved in an illicit enterprise that came to a tragic end. Idealism walks on the wild side and gets crushed by the real world. Is that so different from the experience of those now in Cuba?”

  “Speaking as a policeman, they committed the more heinous crimes. Your crime, and it is a failing, has been to be a closed-mouthed witness.”

  “I don’t disagree with you. Yet there, but for fortune.”

  Cinq-Mars adjusted his weight in the chair and moved a hand down his jaw and neck in the midst of his contemplation. “But how,” he asked, “does that make you at all like the count? Are you suggesting that he was once an idealistic young Nazi, deserving our sympathy?”

  “He was never deserving of a sympathetic nod from a soul on this earth. God may find the capacity to love such people. Mortal men need not bother.” He chuckled mildly, making his large belly quake. “All right. So the socialist in me is talking, not the priest, but life is jam-packed with contradictions.”

  “I’ll forgive you, Father.”

  “Thank you, my son. And yet, I tell you, de Bernonville and I were more alike than I care to acknowledge. You see, the count recognized, as have I, belatedly, that those who aspired to one movement or another—my left, or the right of Houde and Laurin—were innocent in the ways of the world. This society’s eminent names, Abbé Lionel Groulx and Henri Bourassa, and that slew of followers and potentates, many of whom should’ve known better, all enchanted by the rise of some great leader to reshape their existence, to reconstitute their paltry lives as men—infantile! Philosophically, socially, psycholo
gically, politically—infantile! The count wanted to make that point. He’d grown weary of aimless discussion. What uprising could there be without action, without death, without carnage, without murder? And so, he murdered poor Roger, to deliver us from our innocence, to stain our lives and our souls for all time, to demonstrate the difference between our idle chatter and pathetic posturing and what it really meant to be a Nazi.”

  Cinq-Mars was finding knots amid the threads that were difficult to unravel. “Are you suggesting, Father, that we’d be better off if we all went around killing each other?” He was trying to lessen the other man’s earnestness.

  The priest didn’t seem to mind the question, initially. “According to de Bernonville, yes.” He wet his lips. “But the glory of our people, our greatest blessing, which is something that a man like him could never appreciate and would only seek to destroy, is that we’ve remained peaceful. Our penchant for rioting and outbursts aside—you know, for a Latin people, we’ve stayed within the bounds of decorum, don’t you think? Especially when you consider that we derive from rowdy stock, Émile. We’re not a nation of clockmakers. Of priests and nuns, perhaps, and of farmers, but our forefathers also explored every nook and cranny of this continent, long before the Americans knew it was there. Lewis and Clark go west, and who do they find? Indians and Frenchmen. They ask, ‘Where do we go?’ And a French guide says, ‘Follow the trail I marked.’ So no, my son. Guard your tone in the future or you’ll be served no more port—we should not go around killing each other. We’ve managed to do very little of that and must stay the course. For the sake of all humanity, I suggest it. At this point, if we can’t be peaceful, who can? Now, you’ll forgive me for preaching, but what has happened here, Émile, while hard won, has all been forming. We don’t know our way. Partially because we lie to ourselves, and defeat ourselves, and do not accomplish enough on our own, and partially because it’s all been so difficult and—I know, I know, the Church, despite its extraordinary history has also gotten in the way of our progress. And the English, well, I’m not one of those who blames them for everything, for that is infantile, but there’s so many more of them on this continent and they’ve only been forming, too, finding their way. Canadians would probably be Americans if not for our influence. So I say, Émile, let’s accomplish a whole lot more. Learn more and do more so we won’t always act out of weakness. We have driven down a few dark roads, but we have miraculously avoided the great tyranny of war. We can build on that. Let’s accomplish much, then, out of our potency, if a priest may use such a word, and out of our strength—the opposite of Laurin’s vision—we can decide how things will be with us. Soon enough we’ll know what to do with our rugged, cold, astounding homeland.”

  The priest had begun sermonizing, and respectfully, Émile assumed a meditative posture to reflect upon his words. He was impressed by the sense of time and long struggle, the wrestling with processes, and ideas, and one’s own conscience embedded in the man’s acquired wisdom. Experience, he thought, might be the word he was searching for. The priest had perhaps not accomplished so much in his time upon the earth, but he had been involved in many projects, and had examined the world, at least as it had been presented to him in his vicinity. Cinq-Mars admired that in the man.

  The young cop had taught himself—and his mentor, Touton, had underscored the lessons—to lose neither the objectives nor the threads of a conversation. He felt obliged to pull the priest back to the raw core of this discussion.

  “Father, you are both a material witness, and, arguably, an accomplice, in the death of Roger Clément. Would you not agree?”

  Reluctantly, the priest did. “We heard that de Bernonville has expired, although no one knows for sure. So I doubt that your investigation will result in a trial. If it comes to that, then yes, Émile. As the English say, the jig is up.”

  They sat in the gloom of the afternoon awhile and continued to sip port. As he stood to depart, Cinq-Mars thanked his host, then suggested that he owed him a few words of apology.

  “Why’s that, Émile? We only speak truth today. What apology is required?”

  “We’ve spoken truth, Father. But I’ve not been thoroughly forthcoming.”

  “How’s that?”

  His boots on, Cinq-Mars adjusted his coat over his shoulders and fixed the collar, which had gone inside out. From the pockets, he retrieved his hat and gloves.

  “Forgive me, Father, but I must tell you that Anik Clément was in the closet, and heard everything that passed between you and the late mayor.” “As you said,” Father François noted.

  “I asked Anik to tell me nothing of that conversation. To keep it between herself, you, Mayor Houde and God. That’s what she’s done.”

  The rotund man stepped back and cast his glance away to consider this report. When he returned to gaze upon the aspiring detective, a smile bent the corners of his lips. “So you have tricked me, Émile.”

  “I have, Father.”

  “But I don’t understand. How did you acquire a confidence, shall we say, in my guilt? You told me that I sold the knife.”

  “Trudeau let slip that part. He also told me that when he met you during the riot, you were physically exercised. Your coat was unbuttoned. To me, it sounded as though you might have been running. You’ve never been a jogger. What had occurred that night, I asked myself, to burn a fire under the seat of your pants?”

  The priest blew out a gust of air and smiled again. “I should be enraged. Instead, our talk today has left me strangely unburdened. I will deny it, of course, in a court of law,” he said, but he was enjoying the game now, “but you have proved yourself today, twice over, and require no forgiveness.”

  “Twice over, Father?” He pulled his wool cap onto his head and donned his gloves for the frigid burst of air soon to assail him.

  “You’ve succeeded in your work as a detective, Émile. You’ve succeeded also in the work of a priest, in allowing me to unburden myself after all these years. Thank you. But next time, I’ll be sharper. I shall not drink port with you so early in the day again.”

  The cat bolted past them once more, and again the policeman made the arrest, depositing Teilhard back from where he came. “I don’t think he’s too bright.”

  “Right you are. I would never allow a smart cat into my house. You’ve been the only exception, and look what’s happened here.”

  Cinq-Mars went on his way, hunching his shoulders to fend against an Arctic howl.

  CHAPTER 29

  1971

  TIME HAD PASSED, YET ÉMILE CINQ-MARS STILL NEEDED MORE TO bolster himself for his next planned encounter. He pored over files and notes, rehearsed set speeches, and did his best to anticipate any countervailing argument. He revisited witnesses to harangue them again with the same innocuous questions he asked previously, until he could detect them lapsing into the onset of comas. Gaston Fleury, the director of the Department of Research and Strategic Planning, threw him out of his office four times, although on the fifth attempt he examined the substantive details with him and gathered up the pertinent information. On the young cop’s third visit to interview Captain Sloan, he caught a glimpse of the the retired cop skipping out through the back door of his rural home, jumping into his pickup and driving off. He was a widower now, but his housekeeper, in for the afternoon, reported that she didn’t know what had gotten into him.

  “He was complaining about a tummy upset. I guess he’s gone to the doctor’s.”

  Instead, Cinq-Mars found the truck parked outside the local watering hole.

  An end to his period of preparation and procrastination had to be broached. He felt ready, and if that meant being prepared to kiss his career goodbye, so be it. What good was he as a cop, or as a man, if he was not willing to lay everything on the line? The time had come. But he still needed to think about things a little more, sift through further possibilities.

  Then, one day, he woke up early and knew that the time had come.

  Do or die.


  That night, wearing casual attire, including a much-loved leather bomber jacket, he knocked on the open door to his boss’s office and found him sitting with both feet up, his face a vaudevillian act of pained twitches.

  The captain’s shift had commenced ninety minutes earlier. Touton had dispatched his detectives, while Cinq-Mars had the night off.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he advised his mentor.

  “I’m working.”

  “You need a drink.”

  Touton reached for a lower drawer.

  “I don’t drink on the job,” Cinq-Mars reminded him.

  “You’re not on the job.”

  “You are.”

  “Cut me some slack, twerp. Special dispensation.” He pronounced the words as a cascade of syllables. Touton, it appeared, had already imbibed that evening.

  “Captain,” Cinq-Mars said.

  “What, laddie?”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “These walls have elephant’s ears.”

  He was all set to take him for whiskey or beer when the captain decided that he was famished, opting for pizza. The parlour was crowded, and they spent most of their time talking hockey. Did les Canadiens have enough to win the Cup? Few around town thought so, it wasn’t their year, but Touton had not given up hope. “They’ll pull it out, laddie.”

  “Will you quit with the ‘laddie’ stuff? Why are we speaking English anyway?” He had chosen a Hawaiian, which caused Touton to sneer.

  “Will you tell me why we’re here?” The captain had ordered extra pep-peroni with extra cheese.

  “Not in here, I won’t,” the young cop told him.

  “What a gripe. I suppose you want to join my squad again. I see guys like you every day. You’re a dime a dozen. Walking the beat’s too hard on your toes? We all walked the beat, laddie.”

  “Some walked less than others,” Cinq-Mars grumbled. “You got promoted pretty quickly.”