by Trevanian
Father Martin didn’t dare approach the young policeman. It chilled him to realize that LaPointe wanted God to appear in the flesh so he could smash His face with his fists.
After that night, LaPointe never came to church again. And over the years that followed, the priest saw him only in passing on the Main, until they happened to come together in the card games with David and Moishe. Because LaPointe never mentioned his wife, Father Martin didn’t dare to.
That was how LaPointe handled it. One great howl of sacrilegious rage; then silence and pain. He did not grieve for Lucille, because to grieve was to accept the fact of her death. There were a muddled, vertiginous few months after the funeral, then work began to absorb his energy, and the Main his ragged affection. Emotional scar tissue built up around the wound, preventing it from hurting. Preventing it, also, from healing.
“How come you never married, Claude?” David asks. “Maybe with all the nafka on the streets you never needed a woman of your own. Right?”
LaPointe shrugs and drinks down his wine.
“Not that there would be many working the street in this pig weather,” David continues. “Have you ever seen the snow hold off so long? Have you ever seen such ugly weather? Jesus Christ! Forgive me, Father, but I always swear in Catholic so if God overhears, He won’t understand what I’m saying. Anyway, what’s so bad about swearing? Is it a crime?”
“No,” Father Martin says quietly. “It’s a sin.”
Moishe glances up. “Yes, Martin. I like that distinction.” He presses his palms together and touches his lips with his forefingers. “I don’t know how many times I have considered this difference between crime and sin. I am sure that sin is worse than crime. But I’ve never been able to put my finger exactly on the difference.”
“Oh boy,” David says, rising and looking under a shelf for the schnapps bottle. “I should have problems that trivial.”
“For instance,” Moishe continues, ignoring David, “to throw an old woman out of her apartment because she cannot pay her rent is not a crime. But surely it is a sin. On the other hand, to steal a loaf of bread from a rich baker to feed your starving family is obviously a crime. But is it a sin?”
David has returned with half a bottle of schnapps and is pouring it around into the empty wine glasses. “Let me pose the central question here,” he insists. “Who cares?”
Father Martin flutters his fingers above his glass. “Just a little, thank you, David. Take this case, Moishe. Let us say your man with the starving family breaks into a grocery store and steals only the mushrooms, the caviar, the expensive delicacies. What do you have? Sin or crime?”
Moishe laughs. “What we have then is a priest with a subtle mind, my friend.”
“Who ever heard of such a thing?” David demands. “Tell me, Claude. You’re the expert on crime here. Who breaks into a grocery store and steals the mushrooms and the caviar only?”
“It happens,” LaPointe says. “Not exactly that, maybe. But things like that.”
“Who does it?” Moishe asks, pouring out more schnapps for himself. “And why?”
“Well…” LaPointe sniffs and rubs his cheek with his palm. He’d really rather be the listener, and this is a hard one to explain. “Well, let’s say a man has gone hungry often. And let’s say it doesn’t look like things are going to change. He’s hungry now, and he’ll be hungry again tomorrow, or next week. That man might break into a grocery and steal the best foods to have a big gorge—even if he doesn’t like the taste of mushrooms. Because… I can’t explain… because it will be something to remember. You know what I mean? Like the way people who can’t keep up with their debts go out and splurge for Christmas. What’s the difference? They’re going to be in debt all their lives. Why not have something to remember?”
Moishe nods reflectively. “I see exactly what you mean, Claude. And such a robbery is a crime.” He turns to Father Martin. “But a sin?”
Father Martin frowns and looks down. He isn’t sure. “Ye-e-s. Yes, I think it’s a sin. It’s perfectly understandable. You could sympathize with the man. But it’s a sin. There is nothing remarkable about a sin being understandable, forgivable.”
David is passing the bottle around again, but Martin puts his hand firmly over his glass. “No, thank you. I’m afraid it’s time for me to go. I suppose the world will have to wait until next Monday for us to sort out the difference between sin and crime.”
“No, wait. Wait.” Moishe prevents him from rising with a gesture. He has drunk his schnapps quickly, and his eyes are shiny. “I think we should pursue this while it’s on our minds. I have a way to approach the problem practically. Let’s each of us say what he considers to be the greatest sin or the greatest crime.”
“That’s easy,” David says. “The greatest crime in the world is for four alter kockers to talk philosophy when they could be playing cards. And the greatest sin is to bid when you have nothing in your hand but a lousy marriage.”
“Come on, now. Be serious.” Moishe takes up the almost empty schnapps bottle and shares it equally around, attempting to anchor his friends to the table with fresh drinks. He turns to the priest. “Martin? What in your view is the greatest sin?”
“Hm-m-m.” Father Martin blinks as he considers this. “Despair, I suppose.”
Moishe nods quickly. He is excited by the intellectual possibilities of the problem. “Despair. Yes. That’s a good one. Clearly a sin, but no kind of crime at all. Despair. A seed sin. A sin that supports other sins. Yes. Very good.”
David gulps down his drink and declares, “I’ll tell you the greatest crime!”
“Are you going to be serious?” Moishe asks. “Your playing the letz nobody needs.”
“But I am serious. Listen. The only crime is theft. Theft! Do you realize that a man spends more time in prison for grand larceny than for manslaughter? And what is murder to us but the theft of a man’s life? We punish it seriously only because it’s a theft that no one can make restitution for. And rape? Nothing but the theft of something a woman can use to make her living with, like prostitutes… and wives. It’s all theft! All we really worry about is our possessions, and all our laws are devoted to protecting our property. When the thief is bold and obvious, we make a law against him and send someone like Claude here to arrest him. But when the thief is more cowardly and subtle—a landlord, maybe, or a used-car salesman—we can’t make laws against him. After all, the men in Ottawa are the landlords and the used-car salesmen! We can’t threaten them with the law, so we tell them that what they are doing is sinful. We say that God is watching and will punish them. The law is a club brandished in the fist. Religion is a club held behind the back. There! Now tell me, is that talking serious or what?”
“It’s talking serious,” Moishe admits. “But it’s also talking shallow. However, for you it’s not a bad try.”
“Forget it, then!” David says, peeved. “What’s the use of all this talk anyway? It helps the world vi a toyten bankes.”
Moishe turns to LaPointe. “Claude?”
LaPointe shakes his head. “Leave me out of this. I don’t know anything about sin.”
“Ah!” David says. “The man who has known no sin! Dull life.”
“Well, crime then,” Moishe pursues. “What’s the greatest crime?”
LaPointe shrugs.
“Murder?” Father Martin suggests.
“No, not murder. Murder is seldom…” LaPointe searches for a word and ends up with a silly-sounding one. “Murder is seldom criminal. I mean… the murderer is not usually a criminal—not a professional. He’s usually a scared kid pulling a holdup with a cheap gun. Or a drunk who comes home and finds his wife in bed with someone. Sometimes a maniac. But not often a real criminal, if you see what I mean. What about you, Moishe?” LaPointe asks, wanting to shunt the questions away from himself. “What do you think is the greatest sin?”
Moishe is feeling the effects of the schnapps. He fixes his eyes on the tabletop, and he speak
s of something he very seldom mentions. “I thought a lot about crime, about sin, when I was in the camps. I saw great crimes—crimes so vast they lose all sense of human misery and can be expressed only in statistics. A man who has seen this finds it easy to shrug off a single beating outside a bar, or a theft, or one killing. The heart and the imagination, like the hands, can grow calluses, can become insensitive. That’s what it means to be brutalized. They brutalized us, and by that I don’t mean being beaten or tortured by brutes. No. I mean being beaten until you become a brute. Until, in fact, you become such an animal that you deserve to be beaten.” Moishe looks up and sees expressions of concern and close attention in the faces of his friends. Even David does not offer a flip remark. It always happens, when they drink a little more than usual, that Moishe gets tipsy first. The priest is abstemious, and the other two have thick bodies to absorb the alcohol. He feels foolish. He smiles wanly and shrugs. The shrug says: I’m sorry; let’s forget it.
But Father Martin wants to understand. “So you make the greatest sin the brutalizing of a fellow man? Is that it, Moishe?”
Moishe runs his fingers through his long, thin hair. “No, it is not that simple. Degree of sin is not based upon the act. It’s more complicated than that.” He is not sure he can say it neatly. Often Moishe brings the card talk around to some point he has rehearsed and rephrased again and again during his workday. But this evening it is not like that. When he speaks, he does so hesitantly, with pauses and searches for words. For once he is not sharing with his friends the results of thought; he is sharing the process.
“Yes, I suppose brutalizing could be one of the great sins. You see… how do I put this?… it isn’t the act that determines the degree of sin. And it isn’t the motive. It’s the effect. To my mind, it is much worse to chop down the last tree in the forest than to chop down the first. I think it is much worse to kill a good husband and father than to kill a sex maniac. In both cases the act and the motive could be identical, but the effect would be different.
“So, yes. Brutalizing a man could be a great sin, because a man who has become a brute can never love. And sins against love are the greatest sins, and deserve the greatest punishments. Theft is a crime, often a sin; but it only operates against money or goods. Murder is a crime, often a sin; but the degree of sin depends upon the value of the life, which might not be worth living, or which might have brought pain and misery to others. But love is always good. And sins against love are always the worst, because love is the only… the only especially human thing we have. So, rape is the greatest sin, greater than murder, because it is a sin against love. And I don’t only mean violent rape. In fact, violent rape is perhaps the least sinful kind of rape because the perpetrator is not always responsible for his acts. But the subtler kinds of rape are great sins. The businessman who makes getting a job dependent on having sex with him, he is a rapist. The man who takes a plain girl out for dinner and an expensive evening because he knows she will feel obliged to make love with him, he is a rapist. The young man who finds a girl starving for affection and who talks of love in order to get sex, he is a rapist. All these crimes against love. And without love… my God, without love… !” Moishe looks around helplessly, knowing he is making a fool of himself. He is perfectly motionless for a moment, then he chuckles and shakes his head. “This is too ridiculous, my friends. Four old men sitting in a back room and talking of love!”
“Three men,” David corrects, “and a priest. Come on! One last hand of cards! I feel the luck coming to me.”
LaPointe fetches a cloth and wipes the table.
David deals quickly, then picks up his hand, making little sounds of appreciation as he slips each card into place. “Now, my friends, we shall see who can play pinochle!”
The bidding goes rather high, but David prevails and names trump.
He goes set by four points.
LaPointe, Moishe, and Father Martin are grouped around the door of the shop, buttoning their overcoats against the cold wet wind that moans down the almost empty street. David lives in the apartment above the shop, so did not accompany them to the door. He said good night and began clearing things away for the next day’s business, all the while muttering about how nobody could win a game while schlepping a priest on his back.
As he shakes hands good night, Father Martin is shivering, and his eyes are damp with the cold. Moishe asks why he isn’t wearing a scarf, and he says he lost it somewhere, making a joke of being absent-minded. He says good night again and walks up the street, bending against the wind to protect his chest. LaPointe and Moishe walk together in the other direction, the wind pushing them along. They always walk together the three blocks before Moishe’s turnoff, sometimes chatting, sometimes in silence, depending upon their moods and the mood of the evening. Tonight they walk in silence because the mood of the evening has been uncommonly tense and… personal. It is just after eleven and, although their block is almost deserted, the action on the lower Main will be in full flow. LaPointe will make one last check, putting the street to bed before returning to his apartment. Once a beat cop…
Moishe chuckles to himself. “Agh, too much schnapps. I made a fool of myself, eh?”
LaPointe walks several steps before saying, “No.”
“Maybe it’s the weather,” Moishe jokes. “This pig weather is enough to wear anyone down. You know, it’s amazing how weather affects personalities. It’ll be better when the snow comes.”
LaPointe nods.
They cross the street and start down a block that is lit by saloon neon and animated by the sound of jukeboxes. A girl is walking on the other side of the street. She is young and unnaturally slim, her skinny legs bent as she teeters on ridiculous, fashionably thick clog soles. She wears no coat, and her short skirt reveals a parenthesis between her meager thighs. She is not more than seventeen, and very cold indeed.
“See that girl, Moishe?” LaPointe says. “Do you believe she is committing the greatest sin?”
Moishe glances at the girl as she passes a bar and looks in the window for prospects who don’t seem too drunk. He turns his eyes away and shakes his head. “No, Claude. It’s never the girls I blame. They are the victims. It would be like blaming the man who gets run over by a bus because, if he hadn’t been there, there wouldn’t have been an accident. No, I don’t blame them. I feel sorry for them.”
LaPointe nods. Prostitution is the least violent crime on the Main and, if it doesn’t involve rolling the mark and isn’t controlled by pimps protected by the heavies from the Italian Main, LaPointe habitually overlooks it. He feels particularly sorry for the whores who don’t have the money to work out of apartments or hotels—the young ones fresh in from the country, broke and cold, or the old ones who can only score drunks and who have to take it standing in a back alley, their skirts up, their asses pushed up against a cold brick wall. He feels pity for them, but disgust, too. Other crimes make him feel anger, fear, rage, helplessness; but this kind of scratch prostitution produces in him as much disgust as pity. Maybe that’s what Moishe means by a sin against love.
They stop at the corner and shake hands. “See you Monday,” Moishe says, turning and walking down his street.
LaPointe thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy overcoat and walks down the Main.
As he passes a deep-set doorway, a slight motion catches the tail of his eye. His hand closes down on the butt of his revolver.
“Step out here.”
At first there is no movement. Then a grinning, ferret-thin face appears around the corner. “Just keeping out of the wind, Lieutenant.”
LaPointe relaxes. “Got no kip tonight?” He speaks English because Dirtyshirt Red has no French.
“I’m okay, Lieutenant,” the bomme says, reaching under his collar to adjust the thickness of newspaper stuffed beneath his shirt to keep out the cold. “I sleep here lots of times. Nobody cares. I don’t bother nobody. I won’t get too cold.” Dirtyshirt Red grins slyly and shows LaPoi
nte a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. “It’s half full.”
“What are you going to do when the snow comes, Red? You got something lined up?” There are seven bommes whom LaPointe recognizes as living on the Main and having rights based on long residence. He takes care of them on their level, just as he takes care of the prostitutes on theirs, and the shopkeepers on theirs. There used to be eight recognized tramps, but old Jacob died last year. He was found frozen to death between stacks of granite slabs behind the monument-maker’s shop. He drank too much and crawled in to sleep it off. It snowed heavily that night.
“No, I don’t have anything lined up, Lieutenant. But I ain’t worried. Something will come along. That’s one thing you can say: I’ve always been lucky.”
LaPointe nods and walks on. He doesn’t like Dirtyshirt Red, a sneak thief, bully, and liar. But the bomme has been on the Main for many years, and he has his rights.
It is past midnight, and the street is beginning to dim and grow quiet. Thursday is a slow night on the Main. LaPointe decides to leave St. Laurent and check out the tributary streets to the east. He passes through the darkened Carre St. Louis, with its forgotten statue of the dying Cremazie:
Pour Mon Drapeau
Je Viens Ici Mourir
The fountain no longer works, and on the side of the empty basin someone has written in black spray paint: LOVE. Next to that there is a peace sign, dried rivulets of paint dripping down from it, like the blood that used to drip from the swastikas in anti-Nazi posters. And under the peace sign there is: FUCK YO …then the spray can ran out.