The Main

by Trevanian

  That would be young Americans who have come to Montreal to avoid the Vietnam draft. They have a special flair for spray paint. LaPointe is not fond of the young, bearded boys from the States who hang around dimly lit coffee bars filled with eerie music and odd-smelling incense, brandishing their battered guitars, singing in nasal groans, cadging drinks from sympathetic college girls, or practicing their more-tragic-than-thou stares into space. Most of them live off federal dole, cutting into funds already inadequate for the needs of the poor of east Montreal.

  But they will pass, and they are no real trouble, aside from the nuisance of marijuana and other kiddie shit. They bring yet another alien accent to the Main, with their hard “r’s” and their odd pronunciation of “out” and “house” and “about,” but LaPointe assumes he will get used to them, as he got used to all the others.

  In general, his feelings toward Americans are benevolent, for no better reason than that when he went on his brief honeymoon—now thirty-one years ago—he found the thoughtfulness of road signs in French as far south as Lake George Village; while in his own country, the French signs stopped abruptly at the Ontario border.

  At least these young draft avoiders are quiet. Not like the American businessmen from the convention quarters of the Expo site on Ile Ste. Helene. Those types are a real nuisance. They get drunk in their chrome-and-leatherette hotel bars, and small bands of them come up to the Main, seeking a little action, mistaking poverty for vice. They flash too much money and bargain childishly with the whores. As often as not they get rolled or punched up. Then LaPointe has to respond to complaints lodged with the Quartier General, has to listen to diatribes about tourism and its value to Montreal’s economy.

  Always turning toward the darkest streets, LaPointe picks his way through the tangle of back lanes until he comes out again onto the Main, quiet now and nearly closed up.

  As he passes the narrow alley that runs beside the Banque de Nova Scotia, he feels a slight rush of adrenalin in his stomach. Even after all these years, his nerves, quite independent of his conscious mind, take a systemic jolt whenever he passes that alley. It’s become automatic, and he is used to it. It was in that alley that he got hit; it was there that he sat awaiting death, expecting it. And once a man loses his sense of immortality, he never regains it.

  He had put the street to bed, like tonight; and he was on his way home. There was a tinkle of glass down the alley. A figure dropped down to the brick pavement from a window at the back of the bank. Three of them, running toward LaPointe. He fired into the air and called to them to stop. Two of them fired at once, two flashes of light, but he had no memory of the sound because a slug took him square in the chest and slammed him against the metal door of a garage. He slid down the door, sitting on one twisted foot, the other leg straight out in front of him. They fired again, and he heard the slug slap into the meat of his thigh. Holding his gun in both hands, he returned fire. One went down. Dead, he later learned. The other two ran.

  After the shots, there was no sound in the alley, save for the sigh of wind around the corner of the garage. He sat there, slipping in and out of consciousness, staring at his own foot, and thinking how silly he would look when they found him, one foot under his butt, the other straight out in front of him. A long time passed. A minute, perhaps. A very long time. He opened his eyes and saw a yellow cat crossing before him. Its tail was kinked from an ancient break. It stopped and looked at him, one forepaw poised, not touching the ground. Its eyes were wary, but frigid. It tested the ground with its paw. Then it walked on, indifferent.

  The wound in his chest felt cold. He put his hands over it to keep the wind out. His last conscious thought was a stupid, drunken one. Must keep the wind out. Mustn’t catch cold. Catch cold at this time of year, and you don’t get rid of it until spring.

  He knew he was going to die. He was absolutely sure. The fact was more sad than terrifying.

  He was four and a half weeks in the hospital. The leg wound was superficial, but the slug in his chest had grazed the aorta. The doctors said things about his being lucky to have the constitution of an habitant peasant. After leaving the hospital he had a period of recuperation, lounging around his apartment until he couldn’t stand it any longer. Even though he wasn’t technically back on active service yet, he began making rounds of the Main at night, putting the street to bed. Once a beat cop…

  Soon he was back in his office, doing his regular duties. He received his third commendation for bravery and, a year later, his second Police Medal. Down at the Quartier General, the myth of the indestructible LaPointe was even more firmly established.

  Indestructible maybe, but altered. Something subtle but significant had shifted in his perception. He had accepted the fact of his death so totally, had surrendered to it with such calm, that when he did not die, he felt unfinished, open-ended, off balance.

  For the first time since he had cauterized his emotions with hate after the death of his wife, he felt lonely, a loneliness expressed in a kind of melancholy gentleness toward the people of his patch, particularly toward the old, the children, the losers.

  It was shortly after he was hit in the alley that he met and began to play pinochle with Moishe, David, and Martin—his friends.

  Only one rectangle of dingy neon breaks the dark of Rue Lionais, a beer bar that is a hangout for loudmouths and toughs of the quartier. LaPointe mentally runs down a list of its usual clientele and decides to drop in. The barman greets him loudly and with a bogus grin. Knowing the loud greeting is a warning signal for the customers, LaPointe ignores the owner and looks about the dim, fuggy room. One man catches his eye, a dandy dresser with the thin, mobile face of a hustler. The dandy is sitting with a group of middle-aged toughs whose faces record a lot of cheap hooch and some battering. LaPointe stands in the arched entranceway and points at the dandy. When the man raises his eyebrows in a mask of surprise, LaPointe crooks his finger once.

  As the dandy rises, one of the toughs, a penny-and-nickle arm known as Lollipop, gets to his feet as if to protect his mate. LaPointe looks at the tough, his eyes calm and infinitely bored; he shake his head slowly. For a face-saving moment, the tough does not move. Then LaPointe points a stabbing finger toward their booth, and the tough sits down, grumbling to himself.

  The dandy flashes a broad smile as he approaches LaPointe. “Good to see you, Lieutenant. Now isn’t that coincidence? I was just telling—”

  “Cut the shit, Scheer. I ran into the Gimp on the street”

  “The Gimp?” Scheer frowns and blinks as he pretends to search his memory. “Gee, I don’t think I know anybody by—”

  “What day is this, Scheer?”

  “Pardon me? What day?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “It’s Thursday, Lieutenant.”

  “Day of the month.”

  “Ah… the ninth?”

  “All right, I want you to stay off the street until the ninth of next month. And I don’t want to see any of your girls working.”

  “Now look, Lieutenant! You don’t have any right! I’m not under arrest!”

  LaPointe’s eyes open with mock surprise. “Did I hear you say I don’t have any right?”

  “Well… what I meant was…”

  “I’m not interested in what you meant, Scheer. LaPointe is giving you a punishment. One month off the street. And if I see you around before that, I’m going to hurt you.”

  “Now, just a minute—”

  “Do you understand what I just said to you, asshole?” LaPointe reaches out with his broad stubby hand and pats the dandy’s cheek firmly enough to make his teeth click. “Do you understand?”

  The dandy’s eyes shine with repressed fury. “Yes. I understand.”

  “How long?”

  “A month.”

  “And who’s giving you the punishment?”

  Scheer’s jaw muscles work before he says bitterly, “Lieutenant LaPointe.”

  LaPointe tilts his head toward the door. �
��Now, get out.”

  “I’ll just tell the guys I’m going.”

  LaPointe closes his eyes and shakes his head slowly. “Out.”

  The dandy starts to say something, then thinks better of it and leaves the bar. LaPointe turns to follow him, but he stops and decides to visit the booth. By standing up aggressively, this Lollipop has challenged his control. That is dangerous, because if LaPointe ever lets these types build up enough courage, they could beat him to a pulp. His image must be kept high in the street because the shadow of his authority covers more ground than his actual presence can. He approaches the booth.

  The three toughs pretend not to see him coming. They stare down at their bottles of ale.

  “You. Lollipop,” LaPointe says. “Why did you stand up when I called your friend over?”

  The big man doesn’t look up. He sets his mouth in determined silence.

  “I think you were showing off, Lollipop,” LaPointe says quietly.

  The brute shrugs and looks away.

  LaPointe picks up the tough’s half-finished bottle of ale and pours it into his lap. “Now you sit there awhile. I wouldn’t want you going out into the street like that. People would think you pissed your pants.”

  As LaPointe leaves the bar, he hears two of the toughs laughing while the third growls angrily.

  That’s just fine, LaPointe thinks. It’s the kind of story that will get around.

  He turns up Avenue Esplanade toward his second-floor apartment in a row of bow-windowed buildings facing Parc Mont Royal. Above the park, a luminous cross stands atop the black bulk of the Mont. The wind gusts and flaps the tails of his overcoat. His legs are heavy as he mounts the long wooden stoop of number 4240.

  He closes the door of his apartment and flicks on the slack toggle switch. Two of the four bulbs are burnt out in the red-and-green imitation Tiffany lamp. He tugs off his overcoat and hangs it over the wooden umbrella stand. Then, by habit, he goes into the narrow kitchen and sets water to boil. The stove’s pilot light is blocked with ancient grease and has to be lit with a match. The circle of blue flame pops on and singes his fingers, as always. He snaps his hand back and swears without passion, as usual.

  While the water is heating, he goes into the bedroom and sits heavily on the bed. The only light is the upward-lancing beam of a streetlamp below his window, illuminating the ceiling and one wall but leaving the floor and the furniture in darkness. He grunts as he pulls off his shoes and wriggles his toes before stepping into his carpet slippers. He loosens his tie, pulls his shirt out from under his belt and scratches his stomach.

  By now the water will be boiling, so back he goes into the unlit kitchen, his slippers slapping against his heels. His coffee-maker is an old-fashioned pressure type, with a handle to force the water through the grounds. His cup is always on the counter, its bottom always wet because he never wipes it, just rinses it out and turns it upside down on the drainboard.

  Coffee cup in hand, he pads into the living room, where he settles into his overstuffed armchair by the bow window. Over the years, the springs and stuffing of the chair have shifted and bunched until it fits him perfectly. Holding the saucer under his chin in the way of workingclass men from Trois Rivieres, he sips noisily. Four long sips and the cup is empty, save for the thick dregs. He believes that his routine cup of coffee before bed helps him to sleep. He sets the cup aside and turns to look out of the window. Beyond the limp curtain is the park, and above the dark hump of Mont Royal, the sky is a smudged gray-black, dim with cityglow. Within the park’s iron fence, lamp-posts lay vague patterns of light along the footpath. The street is empty; the park is empty.

  He scrubs his matted hair with the palm of his hand and sighs, comfortable and half anesthetized by the platitudes of routine that comprise his life in the apartment. Sitting slumped like this, wearing slippers, his shirt over his belly, he does not look like the tough cop who has become something of a folk hero to young French Canadian policemen because of his personal, only coincidentally legal style of handling the Main, and because of his notorious indifference to administrators, regulations, and paper work. Rather, he looks like a middle-aged man whose powerful peasant body is beginning to sag. A man who has come to prefer peace to happiness; silence to music.

  He stares out the window, his mind almost empty, his face slack. He no longer really sees the apartment he and Lucille rented a week before their marriage. Since her death only a year later, he has changed nothing. The frumpy furniture in the catalogue styles of the thirties stands now where it ended up after a flurry of arrangement and rearrangement under Lucille’s energetic, but vacillating, inspiration. When at last it was done and things had ended up pretty much where they began, they sat together on the bright flowered sofa, her head on his shoulder, until very late at night. They made love for the first time there on the sofa, the night before their marriage.

  Of course, the apartment was to be only temporary. He would work hard and go to night school to learn English better. He would advance on the force, and they would save their money to buy a house, maybe up toward Laval, where there were other young couples from Trois Rivieres.

  Over the years, the gaudy flowers on the sofa have faded, more on the window end than the other, but it has happened so slowly that LaPointe has not noticed. The cushions are still plump, because no one ever sits on them.

  He blinks his eyes, and presses his thumb and forefinger into the sockets. Tired. With a sigh, he pushes himself out of the deep chair and carries his cup back to the kitchen, where he rinses it out and puts it on the drainboard for morning.

  Dressed only in his shorts, he shaves over the rust-stained washbasin in the small bathroom. He acquired the habit of shaving before going to bed during his year with Lucille. His thick, blue-black whiskers used to irritate her cheek. It was several months before she told him about it, and even then she made a joke of it. The fact that in the mornings he always appears at the Quartier General with cheeks blue with eight hours of growth has given rise to another popular myth concerning the Lieutenant: LaPointe owns a magic razor; he always has a one-day growth of beard. Never two days of growth, never clean-shaven.

  After scraping the whiskers off his flat cheeks, his straight razor making a dry rasping sound even with the grain, he rinses his mouth with water taken from the tap in cupped hands. He straightens up and leans, his elbows locked, on the basin, looking in the mirror. He finds himself staring at his thick chest with its heavy mat of graying hair. He can see the slight pulse of his heart under the ribs. He watches the little throb with uncertain fascination. It’s in there. Right there.

  That’s where he’s going to die. Right there.

  The very efficient young Jewish doctor with a cultured voice and a tone of mechanical sincerity had told him that he was lucky, in a way.

  Inoperable aneurism.

  Something like a balloon, the doctor explained, and too close to the heart, too distended for surgery. It was a miracle that he had survived the bullet that had grazed the artery in the first place. He was lucky, really. That scar tissue had held up pretty-well, it had given him no trouble for twelve years. Looked at that way, he was lucky.

  As he sat listening to the young doctor’s quiet, confident voice, LaPointe remembered the yellow cat with the kinked tail and one forepaw off the ground.

  The doctor had handled many situations like this; he prided himself on being good at this sort of thing. Keep it factual, keep it upbeat. Once the doctor permits a little hole in the dike of emotion, he can end up twenty minutes—even half an hour—behind in his appointments. “In cases like this, when a man doesn’t have any immediate family, I make it a habit to explain everything as clearly and truthfully as I can. To be frank, with a mature man, I don’t think a doctor has the right to withhold anything that might delay the patient’s attending to his personal affairs. You understand what I mean, M. Dupont?”

  LaPointe had given him a false name and had said he was retired from the army, where he had
received the wound in combat.

  “Now, your first question, quite naturally, is what kind of time do I have? It’s not possible to say, M. Dupont. You see, we doctors really don’t know everything.” He smiled at the admission. “It could come tomorrow. On the other hand, you could have six months. Even eight. Who knows? One thing is sure; it will happen like that.” The doctor snapped his fingers softly. “No pain. No warning. Really just about the best way to go.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Oh, yes. To be perfectly honest, M. Dupont, it’s the way I would like to go, when my time comes. In that respect, you’re really quite lucky.”

  There was a young receptionist with a fussy, cheerful manner and a modish uniform that swished when she moved. She made an appointment for the next week and gave LaPointe a printed reminder card. He never returned. What was the point?

  He walked the streets, displaced. It was September, Montreal’s beautiful month. Little girls chanted as they skipped rope; boys played tin-can hockey in the narrow streets, spending most of their energy arguing about who was cheating. He wanted to—expected to—feel something different, dramatic; but he did not, except that he kept getting tangled up in memories of his boyhood, memories so deep that he would look up and find that he had walked a long way without noticing it.

  Evening came, and he was back on the Main. Automatically, he chatted with shopkeepers, took coffee in the cafes, reaffirmed his presence in the tougher bars. Night came, and he strolled through back streets, occasionally checking the locks on doors.

  The next morning he woke, made coffee, carried down the garbage, and went to his office. Everything felt artificial; not because things were different, but because they were unchanged. He was stunned by the normalcy of it all; a little dazed by a significant absence, as a man going down a flight of stairs in the dark might be jolted by reaching the bottom when he thought there was another step to go.