The Main

by Trevanian

  “Manslaughter?”

  “There it is.” Resnais sits back in his high-backed desk chair and gives this time to sink in. “You see, Claude, even if I condoned your methods—and I don’t—the bottom line is this: they don’t work anymore. The charges don’t stick.”

  LaPointe is lost and angry. “But there was no other way to get him. There was no hard evidence without the gun.”

  “You keep missing the point.”

  LaPointe stares straight ahead, his eyes unfocused. “You’d better get word to Dieudonne that if he ever sets foot on the Main after he gets out…”

  “For Christ’s sake! Don’t you ever listen? Does a truck have to drive over you? You’ve embarrassed… the department long enough! I’ve worked like a son of a bitch to give this shop a good image in the city, and all it takes…! Look, Claude. I don’t like doing this, but I’d better lay it on the line for you. I know the reputation you have among the guys in the shop. You keep your patch cool, and I know that no other man, probably no team of men, could do what you do. But times have changed. And you haven’t changed with them.” Resnais fingers LaPointe’s personnel file. “Three recognitions for merit. Twice awarded the Police Medal. Twice wounded in the line of duty—once very seriously, as I recall. When we heard about that bullet grazing your heart, we kept an open line to the hospital all night long. Did you know that?”

  LaPointe is no longer looking at the Commissioner; his eyes are directed out the window. He speaks quietly. “Get on with it, Commissioner.”

  “All right. I’ll get on with it. This is the last time you embarrass this shop. If it happens one more time… if I have to go to bat for you one more time…” There is no need to finish the sentence.

  LaPointe draws his gaze back to the Commissioner’s face. He sighs and rises. “Is that all you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Resnais looks down at LaPointe’s file, his jaw tight. “Yes. That’s all.”

  The slam of the office door rattles the glass, and LaPointe brushes past Guttmann without a word. He sits heavily in his desk chair and stares vacantly at the Forensic Medicine report on that kid found in the alley. Instinct for self-preservation warns Guttmann to keep his head down over his typing and not say a word. For half an hour, the only sound in the room is the tapping of the typewriter and the hiss of the sandblasting across the street.

  Then LaPointe takes a deep breath and rubs his mat of hair with his palm. “Did I get a call from Dirtyshirt Red?”

  “No, sir. No calls at all.”

  “Hm-m.” LaPointe rises and comes to Guttmann’s little table, looking over his shoulder. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, it’s going fine, sir. It’s lots of fun. I’d rather type out reports than anything I can think of.”

  LaPointe turns away, grunting his disgust for all paper work and all who bother with it. Outside the window, the city is already growing dark under the heavy layers of stationary cloud. He tugs down his overcoat from the wooden rack.

  “I’m going up onto the Main. See what’s happening.”

  Guttmann nods, not lifting his eyes from the form he is retyping, for fear of losing his place again.

  “Well?”

  The younger man puts his finger on his place and looks up. “Well what, sir?”

  “Are you coming or not?”

  A minute later, the door is locked, the lights off, and the unfinished report is still wound into the machine.

  5

  By the time they cross Sherbrooke, the last greenish light is draining from sallow cloud layers over the city. Streetlights are already on, and the sidewalks are beginning to clog with pedestrians. A raw wind has come up, puffing in vagrant gusts around corners and carrying dust that is gritty between the teeth. The cold makes tears stand in Guttmann’s eyes, and the skin of his face feels tight, but it doesn’t seem to penetrate the Lieutenant’s shaggy overcoat hanging to his mid-calves. Guttmann would like to pace along more quickly to heat up the blood, but LaPointe’s step is measured, and his eyes scan the street from side to side, automatically searching out little evidences of trouble.

  As they pass a shop, LaPointe takes his hand from his pocket and lifts it in greeting. A bald little man with a green eyeshade waves back.

  Guttmann looks up at the sign overhead:

  S. Klein—Buttonholes

  “Buttonholes?” Guttmann asks. “This guy makes buttonholes? What kind of business is that?”

  LaPointe repeats one of the street’s ancient jokes. “It would be a wonderful business, if Mr. Klein didn’t have to provide the material.”

  Guttmann doesn’t quite get it. He has no way of knowing that no one on the Main quite gets that joke either, but they always repeat it because it has the sound of something witty.

  Each time they pass a bar, the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke greets them for a second before it is blown away by the raw wind. Halfway up St. Laurent, LaPointe turns in at a run-down bar called Chez Pete’s Place. It is fuggy and dark inside, and the proprietor doesn’t bother to look up from the girlie magazine in his lap when the policemen enter.

  Three men sit around a table in back, one a tall, boney tramp with a concave chest who has the shakes so badly that he is drinking his wine from a beer mug. The other two are arguing drunkenly across the table, pounding it sometimes, to the confused distress of the third.

  “Floyd Patterson wasn’t shit! He never… he couldn’t… he wasn’t shit, compared to Joe Louis.”

  “Ah, that’s your story! Floyd Patterson had a great left. He had what you call one of your world’s great lefts! He could hit… anything.”

  “Ah, he couldn’t… he couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag! I used to know a guy who told me that he wasn’t shit, compared to Joe Louis. You know… do you know what they used to call Joe Louis?”

  “I don’t care what they called him! I don’t give a big rat’s ass!”

  “They used to call Joe Louis… Gentleman Joe. Gentleman Joe! What do you think of that?”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why did they call him Gentleman Joe?”

  “Why? Why? Because… because that Floyd Patterson couldn’t punch worth shit, that’s why. Ask anybody!”

  LaPointe crosses to the group. “Has anyone seen Dirtyshirt Red today?”

  They look at one another, each hoping the question is directed to someone else.

  “You,” LaPointe says to a little man with a narrow forehead and a large, stubbly Adam’s apple.

  “No, Lieutenant. I ain’t seen him.”

  “He was in a couple hours ago,” the other volunteers. “He asked around about the Vet.” The name of this universally detested tramp brings grunts from several bommes at other tables. No one has any stomach for the Vet, with his uppity ways and his bragging.

  “And what did he find out?”

  “Not much, Lieutenant. We told him the Vet come in here late last night.”

  “How late?”

  The proprietor lifts his head from the skin magazine and listens.

  “Well?” LaPointe asks. “Was it after closing time?”

  One of the tramps glances toward the owner. He doesn’t want to get in trouble with the only bar that will let bommes come in. But nothing is as bad as getting in trouble with Lieutenant LaPointe. “Maybe a little after.”

  “Did he have money?”

  “Yeah. He had a wad! His pension check must of come. He bought two bottles.”

  “Two bottles,” another sneers. “And you know what that cheap bastard does? He gives one bottle to all of us to share, and he drinks the other all by hisself!”

  “Potlickin’ son of a bitch,” says another without heat.

  LaPointe crosses to the bar and speaks to the owner. “Did he seem to have money?”

  “I don’t sell on the cuff.”

  “Did he flash a roll?”

  “He wasn’t that drunk. Why? What did he do?”

  LaPointe looks at
the owner for a second. There is something disgusting about making your money off bommes. He reaches into his pocket and takes out some change. “Here. Give them a bottle.”

  The proprietor counts the change with his index finger. “Hey, this ain’t enough.”

  “It’s our treat. Yours and mine. We’re going fifty-fifty.”

  The arrangement does not please the owner, but he reaches under the bar and grudgingly gets out a bottle of muscatel. By the time it touches the counter, one of the bommes has come over and picked it up.

  “Hey, thanks, Lieutenant. I’ll tell Red you’re lookin’ for him.”

  “He knows.”

  They have been wandering for an hour and a half, threading through the narrow streets that branch out from the Main, LaPointe stopping occasionally to go into a bar or cafe, or to exchange a word with someone on the street Guttmann is beginning to think the Lieutenant has forgotten about the Vet and that young man stabbed in the alley last night. In fact, LaPointe is still on the lookout for Dirtyshirt Red and the Vet, but not to the exclusion of the rest of his duties. He never pursues only one thing at a time on his street, because if he did, all the other strings would get tangled, and he wouldn’t know what everyone was up to, or hoping for, or worried about.

  At this moment, LaPointe is talking with a fat woman with frizzy, bright orange hair. She leans out of a first-story window, her knobby elbows planted on the stone sill over which she has been shaking a dust mop in fine indifference to passers-by. From the tenor of their conversation, Guttmann takes it that she used to work the streets, and that she and LaPointe have a habit of exchanging bantering greetings on the basis of broad sexual baiting and suggestions on both sides that if they weren’t so busy, they would each show the other what real lovemaking is. The woman seems well informed on events on the Main. No, she hasn’t heard anything of the Vet, but she’ll keep her ears open. As for Dirtyshirt Red, yes, that sniping bastard’s been around, also looking for the Vet.

  Guttmann can’t believe she ever made a living selling herself. Her face is like an aged boxer’s, a swollen, pulpy look that is more accented than masked by thick rouge, a lipstick mouth larger than her real one, and long false eyelashes, one of which has come unstuck at the corner. As they walk on, he asks LaPointe about her.

  “Her pimp did that to her face with a Coke bottle,” LaPointe says.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got beat up and warned to stay off the Main.”

  “Who beat him up?”

  LaPointe shrugs.

  “So what did she do after that?”

  “Continued to work the street for a couple of years, until she got fat.”

  “Looking like that?”

  “She was still young. She had a good-looking body. She worked drunks mostly. Hooch and hard-ons blind a man. She’s a good sort. She does cleaning and scrubbing up for people. She takes care of Martin’s house.”

  “Martin?”

  “Father Martin. Local priest.”

  “She is the priest’s housekeeper?”

  “She’s a hard worker.”

  Guttmann shakes his head. “If you say so.”

  Back on St. Laurent, they are slowed by the last of the pedestrian tangle. Snakes of European children with bookbags on their backs chase one another to the discomfort of the crowd. Small knots of sober-faced Chinese kids walk quickly and without chatting. Workingmen in coveralls stand outside their shops, taking last deep drags from cigarettes before flicking them into the gutter and going back to put in their time. Young, loud-voiced girls from the dress factory walk three abreast, singing and enjoying making the crowd break for them. Old women waddle along, string bags of groceries banging against their ankles. Clerks and tailors, their fragile bodies padded by thick overcoats, thread diffidently through the crowd, attempting to avoid contact. Traffic snarls; voices accuse and complain. Neon, noise, loneliness.

  “Now that is something,” Guttmann says, looking up at a sign above a shop featuring women’s clothes:

  North American Discount Sample Dress Company

  The business is new, and it is located where a pizzeria used to be. The owners are greenhorns newly arrived on the Main. Older, established merchants refer to the shop as “the shmatteria.”

  “Shmatteria?” asks Guttmann.

  “Yes. It’s sort of a joke. You know… a pizzeria that sells shmattes?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  LaPointe frowns. That’s the second time this kid hasn’t gotten a street joke. You have to have affection for the street to get its jokes. “I thought you were Jewish,” he says grumpily.

  “Not in any real way. My grandfather was Jewish, but my father is a one-hundred-percent New World Canadian, complete with big handshake and a symbolic suntan he gets patched up twice a year in Florida. But what’s this about… how do you say it?”

  “Shmatteria. Forget it.”

  LaPointe does not remember that twenty-five years ago, when the now-established Jews first came to the Main, he did not know what a shmatte was either.

  They climb up a dark flight of stairs with loose metal strips originally meant to provide grips for snow-caked shoes, but now a hazard in themselves. They enter one of the second-floor lounges that overlook St. Laurent. It is still early for trade, and the place is almost empty. An old woman mumbles to herself as she desultorily swings a mop into a dark corner by the jukebox. The only other people in the place are the bartender and one customer, a heavily rouged woman in white silk slacks.

  LaPointe orders an Armagnac and sips it, looking down upon the street, where one-way northbound traffic is still heavy and the pedestrian flow is clogged. He has got off the street for a few minutes to give this most congested time of evening a chance to thin out. Friday night is noisy in the Main; there is a lot of drinking and laughter, some fighting, and the whores do good business. But there will be a quieter time between six and eight, when everyone seems to go home to change before coming back to chase after fun. Most people eat at home because it’s cheaper than restaurants, and they want to save their money to drink and dance.

  Guttmann sips his beer and glances back at the customer in conversation with the bartender. She seems both young and middle-aged at the same time, in a way Guttmann could not describe. A dark wig falls in long curls to the middle of her back. He particularly notices her hands, strong and expressive, despite the big dinner rings on every finger. There is something oddly attractive about those hands—competent. Periodically, the customer glances away from her talk and looks directly at Guttmann, her eyes frankly inquisitive without being coy.

  As they walk back down the long stairs to the street, Guttmann says, “Not really what you’d call a bird.”

  “What?” LaPointe asks, his mind elsewhere.

  “That barfly back there. Not exactly the chick type.”

  “No, I guess not. Women never go to that bar.”

  “Oh,” Guttmann says, as soon as he figures it out. He blushes slightly when he remembers the expressive, competent hands covered with dinner rings.

  It is nearing eight o’clock, and the pedestrian traffic is thickening again. Blocking the mouth of a narrow alley is a knife sharpener who plies his trade with close devotion. The stone wheel is rigged to his bicycle in such a way that the pedals can drive either the bicycle or the grinding stone. Sitting on the seat, with the rear wheel up on a rectangular stand, he pedals away, spinning his stone. The noise of the grinding and the arc of damp sparks attract the attention of passers-by, who glance once at him, then hurry on. The knife sharpener is tall and gaunt, and his oily hair, combed back in a stony pompadour, gives him the look of a Tartar. His nose is thin and hooked, and his eyes under their brooding brows concentrate on the knife he is working, on the spray of sparks he is making.

  He pedals so hard that his face is wet with sweat, despite the cold. His thin back rounded over his work, his knees pumping up and down, his attention absorbed by the knife and the sparks, he does not s
eem to see LaPointe approaching.

  “Well?” LaPointe says, knowing he has been noticed.

  The Grinder does not lift his head, but his eyes roll to the side and he looks at LaPointe from beneath hooking eyebrows. “Hello, Lieutenant.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “All right. It’s going all right.” Suddenly the Grinder reaches out and stops the wheel by grabbing it with his long fingers. Guttmann winces as he sees the edge of the stone cut the web of skin between the Grinder’s thumb and forefinger, but the old tramp doesn’t seem to feel the pain or notice the blood. “It’s coming, you know. It’s coming.”

  “The snow?” LaPointe asks.

  The Grinder nods gravely, his black eyes intense in their deep sockets. “And maybe sleet, Lieutenant. Maybe sleet! Nobody ever worries about it! Nobody thinks about it!” His eyebrows drop into a scowl of mistrust as he stares at Guttmann, his eyes burning. “You’ve never thought about it,” he accuses.

  “Ah… well, I…”

  “Who knows,” LaPointe says. “Maybe it won’t snow this year. After all, it didn’t snow last year, or the year before.”

  The Grinder’s eyes flick back and forth in confusion. “Didn’t it?”

  “Not a flake. Don’t you remember?”

  The Grinder frowns in a painful bout of concentration. “I… think… I remember. Yes. Yes, that’s right!” A sudden kick with his leg, and the wheel is spinning again. “That’s right. Not a flake!” He presses the knife to the stone and sparks spray out and fall on Guttmann’s shoes.

  LaPointe drops a dollar into the Grinder’s basket, and the two policemen turn back down the street.

  Guttmann squeezes between two pedestrians and catches up with LaPointe. “Did you notice that knife, Lieutenant? Sharpened down to a sliver.”

  LaPointe guesses what the young man is thinking. He thrusts out his lower lip and shakes his head. “No. He’s been on the Main for years. Used to be a roofer. Then one day when the slates were covered with snow, he took a bad fall. That’s why he fears the snow. People on the street give him a little something now and then. He’s too proud to beg like the other bommes, so they give him old knives to sharpen. They never get them back. He forgets who gave them to him, and he sharpens them until there’s nothing left.” LaPointe cuts across the street. “Come on. One more loop and we’ll call it a night.”