The Main

by Trevanian

  It seems strange to Guttmann that the Lieutenant seems uninterested in the report. He opens the heavy brown interdepartmental envelope, unwinding the string around the plastic button fastener. “You’ll have to initial for receipt, sir.”

  “You initial it.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Initial it!” This initialing of routing envelopes is just another bit of the bureaucratic trash that trammels the ever-reorganizing department. LaPointe makes it a practice to ignore all such rules.

  What’s this? A blue memo card from the Commissioner’s office. Look at this formal crap:

  FROM: Commissioner Resnais

  TO: Claude LaPointe, Lieutenant

  SUBJECT: Morning of 21 November: appointment for

  MESSAGE: I’d like to see you when you get in.

  Resnais

  (dictated, but not signed)

  LaPointe knows what Resnais wants. It will be about the Dieudonne case. That weaselly little turd of a lawyer is threatening to lodge a 217 assault charge against LaPointe for slapping his client. We must protect the civil rights of the criminal! Oh, yes! And what about the old woman that Dieudonne shot through the throat? What about her, with her last breaths whistling and flapping moistly through the hole?

  LaPointe pushes the memo card aside with a growl.

  Guttmann glances up from the report on the kid they found in the alley. “Sir? Something wrong?”

  “Just read the report.” He must be tired this morning. Even this kid’s careful continental French annoys him. And he seems to take up so goddamned much room in the office! LaPointe hadn’t noticed last night how big the kid was. Six-two, six-three; weighs about 210. And his attempt to fit himself into as little space as possible behind that small table makes him seem even bigger and bulkier. This isn’t going to work out. He’ll have to turn him back over to Gaspard as soon as possible.

  LaPointe shoves the routine papers and memos away and rises to look out his office window toward the Hotel de Ville. There are scaffolds clinging to the sides of the Victorian hulk, and above the scaffolds the sandblasters have cleaned to a creamy white a facade that used to bear the comfortable patina of soot with water-run accents of dark gray. For months now, they have been sandblasting the building, and the roaring hiss has become a constant in LaPointe’s office, replacing the rumble of traffic as a base line for silence. It is not the noise that bothers LaPointe, it is the change. He liked the Hotel de Ville the way it was, with its stained and experienced exterior. They change everything. The law, rules of evidence, acceptable procedure in dealing with suspects. The world is getting more complicated. And younger. And all these new forms! This endless paper work that he has to peck out with two fingers, hunched over his ancient typewriter, growling and smashing at the keys when he makes an error…

  …It’s strange to think of her using his Mum. Putting his Mum under her arms. He supposes young girls don’t use Mum. They probably prefer those fancy sprays. He shrugs. Well, that’s just too bad. Mum is all he has. And if it’s not good enough for her…

  “No identification,” Guttmann says, mostly to himself.

  “What?”

  “The forensic lab report, sir. No identification of that man in the alley. And no make on the fingerprints.”

  “They checked with Ottawa?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hm-m.” The victim looked like the type who ought to have a record, if not for petty arrests, at least as an alien. No fingerprints. One possibility immediately occurs to LaPointe. The victim might have been an unregistered alien, one of those who slip into the country illegally. They are not uncommon on the Main; most of them are harmless enough, victims of the circular paradox of having no legal nationality, and therefore no passports and no means of legitimate immigration, therefore, no legal nationality. Several of the Jews who have been on the street for years are in this category, particularly those who came from camps in Europe just after the war. They cause no trouble; anyway, LaPointe knows about them, and that’s what counts.

  “What else is in the report?”

  “Not much, sir. A technical description of the wound… angle of entry and that sort of thing. They’re running down the clothing.”

  “I see.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “We?” LaPointe looks at the daunting pile of back work, of forms and memos and reports on his desk. “Tell me, Guttmann. When you were in college, did you learn to type?”

  Guttmann is silent for fully five seconds before saying, “Ah… yes, sir?” The rising note says it all. “You know, sir,” he adds quickly, “Sergeant Gaspard had me filling out reports for him when I was assigned as his Joan. It struck me that was a sort of perversion of the intention of the apprentice program.”

  “A what?”

  “A perversion of the… That was one of the reasons I was glad when he let me work with you.”

  “It was?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I see. Well, in that case, you start working on this junk on my desk. Whatever requires a signature, sign. Sign my name if you have to.”

  Guttmann’s face is glum. “What about Commissioner Resnais?” he asks, glad to have a little something to pique back with. “There was a memo about him wanting to see you.”

  “I’ll be down in Forensic Medicine, talking to Bouvier, if anyone calls.”

  “And what should I tell the Commissioner’s office, if they call?”

  “Tell them I’m perverting your intentions… that was it, wasn’t it?”

  As LaPointe steps out of the elevator on the basement level, he is met by a medley of odors that always brings the same incongruous image to his mind: a plaster statue of the Virgin, her bright blue eyes slightly strabismic through the fault of the artist, and a small chip out of her cheek. With this mental image always comes a leaden sensation in his arms and shoulders. The stale smells of the Forensic Medicine Department are linked to this odd sensation of weight in his arms by a long organic chain of association that he has never attempted to follow.

  The odor in these halls is an olio of chemicals, floor wax, paint cooking on hot radiators, dusty air, the sum of which is very like the smells of St. Joseph’s Home, where he was sent after the pneumonia took his mother. (In Trois Rivieres, it wasn’t pneumonia; it was the pneumonia. And it didn’t kill one’s mother; it took her.)

  The smells of St. Joseph’s: floor wax, hot radiators, wet hair, wet wool, brown soap, dust, and the acrid smell of ink, dried and caked on the sides of the inkwell.

  Inkwell. The splayed nib scrapes over the paper. You have to write it a hundred times, perfectly, without a blemish. That will teach you to daydream. Your mind slips away from the exercise for a second, and the point of the nib digs into the cheap paper on the upstroke. A splatter of ink makes you have to start all over again. It’s a good thing for you that Brother Benedict didn’t find the moue on you. You’d get something worse than a hundred lines for that. You’d get a tranche.

  Moue. You make moue by pressing bread into a small tin box and moistening it with a little water and spit. In a day or two, it begins to taste sweet. It is the standard confection of the boys at St. Joseph’s, and is munched surreptitiously during classes, or is traded for favors, or gambled in games of “fingers” in the dormitory after lights out, or given to the big boys to keep from being toughed up. Because the bread is stolen from the dinner line, moue is illegal in St. Joseph’s, and if you’re found with it on you, you get a tranche. You can pick up tranches for other sins too. For talking in line, for not knowing your lessons, for fighting, for sassing. If you haven’t worked off all your tranches by the end of the week, you don’t eat on Sunday.

  A tranche is a fifteen-minute slice of time spent in the small chapel the boys call the Glory Hole, where you kneel before the plaster Mary, your arms held straight out in cruciform, under the supervision of old Brother Jean who seems to have no other duties than to sit in the second row of the Glory Hole and record the boy
s’ punishments. You kneel there, arms straight out. And for five minutes it’s easy. By the end of the first fifteen minutes, your arms are like lead, your hands feel huge, and the muscles of your shoulders are trembling with effort. Maybe you shouldn’t try for your second tranche. Anything less than a full fifteen-minute slice doesn’t count at all. You can do as much as fourteen minutes before your arms collapse, and it’s as though you hadn’t even tried. Oh, to hell with it! Go for a second one. Get the goddamned thing over with. Halfway through the second tranche you know you’re not going to make it. You squeeze your eyes shut and grit your teeth. Everyone says that Brother Jean cheats, makes the second slice longer than the first. You ball up your fists and fight against the numbness in your shoulders. But inevitably the arms sag. “Up. Up,” says Brother Jean gently. With a sneer of pain, you pull your arms back up. You take deep breaths. You try to think of something other than the pain. You stare at the face of the plaster Virgin, so calm, so pure, with her slightly crossed eyes and her goddamned stupid chipped cheek! The hands fall, clapping to the sides of the legs, and you grunt with the sudden change in the timbre of the pain. Brother Jean’s voice is flat and soft. “LaPointe. One tranche.”

  Every time he steps off the elevator into the basement and breathes these particular odors, LaPointe’s arms feel heavy, for no reason he can think of.

  For a second, he attributes the sensation to his heart, his aneurism. He awaits the rest of it—the bubbles in his blood, the constriction, the exploding lights behind the eyes. When these do not come, he smiles at himself and shakes his head.

  The door to Dr. Bouvier’s office is open, and he is talking to one of his assistants while he examines a list on a clipboard, holding the board close to his right eye, huge behind a thick lens. His left eye is hidden behind a lens the color of nicotine. It must be an ugly eye, for he takes pains to prevent anyone from seeing it. He tells his assistant to make sure something is done by this afternoon, and the young man leaves. Bouvier scratches his scalp with the back of his pencil, then cocks his head toward the door. “Who’s that?” he demands.

  “LaPointe.”

  “Ah! Come in. For God’s sake, don’t hover. How about some coffee?”

  LaPointe sits in a scrofulous old leather chair beneath one of the high wire-screened windows that let a ghost of daylight into the basement rooms. Bouvier feels along the ledge behind him until he touches a cup. He puts his finger down into it and, finding it wet, deduces it is his. He feels for another, finds it, and brings it close to his right eye to be sure he has not butted cigarettes in it. His minimal standards of sanitation satisfied, he fills the cup and thrusts it in LaPointe’s direction.

  In his own way, Bouvier is as much an epic figure in the folklore of the department as LaPointe. He is famous, of course, for his coffee. Imaginations strain in efforts to account for the taste and texture of this ghastly brew. He is famous also for his desk, which is piled with letters, forms, memos, requisitions, and files to a height that is an offense to the law of gravity. Bouvier also possesses, both in legend and in fact, a remarkable memory for minute details of past cases, a memory that has developed proportionately as he descended toward blindness. By means of this memory, he is sometimes able to reveal a linking modus operandi between what appear to be unrelated events or cases. His “interesting little insights” have occasionally led to solutions, or to the discrediting of facile solutions already in hand. But these “interesting little insights” are not always welcome, because they sometimes reopen files everyone would rather leave closed.

  Like LaPointe, Bouvier is a bachelor, and he puts in a prodigious amount of time down in the bowels of the QG, where his duties have spread far beyond those normally assigned to a staff pathologist. His authority has expanded into each vacuum created by a departing man or a new reorganization, until, by his own admission, his domain is so wide that the department would collapse two days after he left.

  Not that he’s ever likely to leave. From medical school he went directly into the army, where he served through the Second World War. When he got out, money was tight and he took a temporary job with the police until he could set up in practice. Time passed, and his eyesight began to fail. He stayed on with the department because, as he used to say himself, a patient’s confidence might be eroded a bit if, as a brain surgeon, Bouvier had to begin by saying: “Now, sir, if you would please direct my hands toward your head.”

  He sits in the straight-backed kitchen chair behind his heaped-up desk, sniffing as he pushes up the glasses that continually slip down his stubby nose. He broke them a few years ago, and they are patched at the bridge with dirty adhesive tape. He intends to get new ones one of these days. “Well?” he asks, as LaPointe presses his refilled cup into his hand, “I assume you’re here on behalf of that kid who got reamed on your patch. Anything special about the case?”

  LaPointe shrugs. “I doubt it.”

  “Good. Because I don’t think you will close this one. If you took the time to read my report, written in crisp but lucid professional language, you would know that there were no fingerprints on record with Ottawa. And we all appreciate the heavy significance of that.”

  Bouvier reveals his bitterness at ending up a police pathologist by his sarcasm and cynicism, and by a style of speech that mixes swatches of erudition with vulgarity and gallows humor. To this he adds a jerky, non sequitur conversational tactic that dazzles many and impresses some.

  LaPointe long ago learned to handle the technique by simply waiting until Bouvier got around to the point.

  “Can you tell me anything that is not in the report?” LaPointe asks.

  “A great deal, of course. I could tell you things ranging through aesthetics, to thermodynamics, to conflicting theories concerning the functions of Stonehenge; but I suspect your interests are more restricted than that. Informational tunnel vision: an occupational hazard. All right, how about this? Your young man used hair spray, if that’s any help.”

  “None at all. Is the press release out?”

  “No, I’ve still got it here in my out-box.” Bouvier waves vaguely toward the heaped tabletop. By departmental practice, information concerning murder, suicide, or rape cases is not released to the newspapers until Bouvier has finished his examination and the next of kin are informed. “You want me to hold it?”

  “Yes. For a couple of days.” When pressure from newspapers or family allows, LaPointe likes to start his inquiries before the press release is out. He prefers to make the first mention of the crime, to watch for qualities of surprise or anticipation.

  “I could probably block it up here forever,” Bouvier says. “I doubt that anyone will be around inquiring after this one. Except maybe a woman claiming breach of promise, or a pregnancy suit, or both. He made love shortly before his death.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Bouvier sips his coffee, makes a face, and cocks his nicotine lens at the cup. “This is terrible. I think something’s fallen into the pot. I’ll have to empty it one of these days and take a look. On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know. Say, I hear you’ve broken down and taken on a Joan.”

  Three-quarters blind and never out of his den in the bowels of the building, Dr. Bouvier knows everything that is going on in the Quartier General. He makes a point of letting people know that he knows.

  “Gaspard sent his Joan over to me for a few days.”

  “Hm-m. I can’t help feeling sorry for the kid. He’s an interesting boy, too. Have you read his file?”

  “No. But I suppose you have.”

  “Of course. Did very well in college. Excellent grades. The offer of a scholarship to do graduate study in social work, but he chose instead to enter the force. Another instance of a strange demographic pattern I have observed. Year by year, the force is attracting a better class of young men. On the other hand, what with kids bungling their way through amateur holdups to get a fix, crime is attracting a lower class than it once did. It was simpler in o
ur day, when the men on both sides were of the same sociological, intellectual, and ethical molds. But what you really wanted to know was how I divined that the young man in the alley made love shortly before he was killed. Simple really. He failed to wash up afterwards, in direct contradiction to the sound paternal advice given in army VD films. I wonder if they ever consider how carefully they’re going to be examined after they get themselves gutted, or in some other way manage to shuffle their mortal coils off to Buffalo. I remember my mother always telling me to wear clean shorts, in case I got hit by a truck. For much of my youth I entertained the belief that clean shorts were a totemic protection against trucks—in much the same way that apples keep doctors away. When I think of the daring and dangerous things I used to do in the middle of heavy traffic to amuse my friends, all in the belief that I was invulnerable because I had just changed my shorts! So tell me, what are the gods up to these days? Is our anointed Commissioner Resnais still driving toward a brilliant future in politics, as he drives the rest of us toward dreams of regicide?”

  “Every day they dream up a new form, a new bit of paper work. We’ve got paper work coming out of our ears.”

  “Hm! Have you talked to your doctor about that? I just read in a medical journal about a man who drank molten iron and pissed out telephone wire. Something of an exhibitionist, I suspect. Even more to the point, we haven’t finished checking out your stiff’s clothing. The analysis of dust and lint and crap in pockets and cuffs isn’t quite done. I’ll contact you if anything comes up. Matter of fact, I’ll give the case a bit of thought. Might even come up with one of my ‘interesting little insights.’ “

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. And to prove that, how about another cup of coffee?”

  Guttmann is typing out an overdue report when LaPointe enters. He has taken the liberty of going through the Lieutenant’s desk and clearing out every forgotten or overlooked report and memo he could find. He tried to organize them into some kind of sequence at first, but now he is taking them in random order and bungling through as best he can.