by John Farrow
“Do you get it now, Cinq-Mars?” the lieutenant baited him. “This is where it happens. We’re at the center of things. This is where you want to be. Come on!”
Cinq-Mars put the glasses down and followed him out to the corridor, where confusion reigned.
“What’s going on?” the lieutenant bellowed. He couldn’t believe that his men were still there.
“The elevators are stuck, sir.”
“Take the stairs!”
“They’ve been barricaded.”
“Oh, Christ! Call downstairs! Get people up here!” The lieutenant took note of Cinq-Mars then. “All right, Sergeant-Detective, so this isn’t our finest hour.” Furiously, he punched the elevator button as if that would do some good.
“Let’s hope there isn’t a second bomb, this one under our feet.” Émile Cinq-Mars spoke in a flat voice, conveying both calm and dread.
The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. He was trying not to look down at the floor. “You win some, you lose a few.”
“You said no glitches. No screwups. How could you promise that? The Angels knew you were here. So did the Rock Machine. The Machine just committed murder under your nose and they’ve stalled your access to the scene. They’re mocking you. That stranger you’re after? The Czar? He’s long gone. I saw him jump into a van, his cape held high. You never got a photo.”
“What do you want from me, Sergeant-Detective?” The crew cut Wolverine was digging for his smokes again. “Tell me what it takes to get you onboard. There’s got to be something we can do.”
“No, nothing. But thanks for the offer. I appreciate the flattery, but I’ve thought it over, Lieutenant. I’ve decided not to join your band of Wolverines. Call it a hunch. I feel I’m better off on my own.”
Policemen had arrived on the other side of the stairwell door, busily removing the steel bar wedged between the door and a concrete pillar, blocking the exit. Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars couldn’t help himself. He was shaking his head, and he sighed heavily, unable to conceal his disapproval, his disdain for failure. He detested bungled operations, and he really hated it when the bad guys had things go their own way.
ONE
STEEPLECHASE ARCH
1
Christmas Eve
The St. Lawrence River flows from west to east, out of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the industrial heartland cities of Chicago and Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Toronto, to the sea. The river is often a border between two countries, separating Canada from the United States—the province of Ontario from the state of New York—and serves the commerce of both nations. As it flows east it increasingly turns north, into the province of Quebec. Where the river bends up and begins to widen toward the Atlantic, it is joined by the waters of the Ottawa, and there divides around a city established upon an ancient volcanic island. At one time the volcano soared above the clouds. Over aeons it was worn away, rubbed down by nature’s relentless chafe. Glacial debris backfilled the crater, then ice, miles high, compressed it. Time eroded the lava crust, the river carried the dust away, and all that remained of the immense volcano was the hardened, tenacious core, the crater’s plug.
A faint replica of its former glory, the plug is called a mountain now. In English, Mount Royal. The city shares its name with this sweeping, imposing promontory that has steep escarpments on its south side. Montréal. Montreal. The mountain dominates the downtown skyline. Most of its surface is either park or cemetery. Lovers are drawn to the winding, wooded trails and the vistas, and the lonely wander there also, to be soothed and consoled. Families play on the slopes. In summer, barbecues sizzle. Tourists ride horse-drawn buggies to lookouts, for it’s rare to gaze upon a city from a natural precipice, to be above skyscrapers and traffic and pedestrians and noise while standing amid trees, rock, and birdsong. They come to the top to feel the thrum of a city from a height that confers a meditative moment, a sense of wisdom, perhaps, a lofty perspective.
Below them is a French city, primarily, and English, too, home to countless nationalities, mingling on the one hand, blending languages on the streets, but also carefully guarding their separateness, one culture from the other. They enjoy a city graced by the mountain’s beauty, made fortunate also by the river, the calm, powerful St. Lawrence, connecting the island to the world.
Rivers forge corridors through the surrounding territory, northeast to the ocean, west and southwest. An eastern tributary connects south to Lake Champlain, the great waterway of Vermont and New York State. A French trading post before the Mayflower landed, the first settlement had links to both the Canadian West and the lands that would become known as the American Colonies. So the city is steeped in the history of commerce. And yet, after the first post was abandoned by the French, written off as a business failure, the island became instead a center for saints and visionaries. The city was founded on the spiritual notion that, from here, all savages would be converted.
From the Prohibition era, when great whiskey fortunes were created by distilling and smuggling booze into New York for distribution throughout the States, through decades of traffic in heroin and cocaine, Montreal crime syndicates have positioned the city as a side door into New York. The border has always been an easy crossing. Nothing that guns and bribes and secret back roads can’t open. The city offered a retreat from pressure imposed by the FBI. Italian gangs were connected and related to the New York Mafia syndicates a mere six-hour drive south, where they did good business, especially in narcotics. From time to time they’d call for help to battle rival French gangs at home. The tactic was learned by both sides in these wars—always work internationally, maintain brotherhood with those across borders. The associations would prove profitable, and you never knew when you might need allies to wage a war at home.
Crime became entrenched, the proceeds lucrative, the turf wars never-ending, the combatants increasingly brutal. When the Mafia began losing its power in both Montreal and New York, new gangs arose, notably the Hell’s Angels. When they retreated to the Quebec countryside to rebuild after a tenacious police crackdown, another biker gang, the Rock Machine, secretly formed in their absence. That gang was cobbled together, in part, from Mafia remnants. When the Angels, reorganized and strong again, wanted back into Montreal, war ensued. Alliances were formed and tested. Russian gangs—thanks to liberal immigration laws more were operating out of Montreal than in New York and Miami combined—were asked to choose sides.
Bombs and chain saws became the weapons of choice.
Dynamite rocked peaceful neighborhoods.
On Sunday mornings, church bells pealed in every sector of the city, the bright, triumphant ringing of old, but all the savages had yet to be converted, and even among the penitents were citizens who aided and abetted, and in some cases worshiped, the criminals.
On the lower slope of the mountain in the quartier known as the student ghetto, three and a half months after the George Turner bump, Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars was seated behind the wheel of his unmarked car along Aylmer Street, next to a hydrant. Only a few people were outside in the cold, walking briskly toward shelter. The severe temperature had shunted everyone else indoors. Apartments here were of different sizes and styles, thwacked together in an architectural mishmash. Older, elegant three-story homes rubbed up against the new and garish. Tall, skinny buildings loomed over the squat and stunted. Private residences elbowed for a little breathing space between raucous rooming houses for students. In his car, Émile Cinq-Mars shivered, and fluttered his lips with impatience. His new partner had loped off for coffee ten minutes earlier and was now overdue.
“The English,” he muttered under his breath in English. “Pfffft!”
He swore aloud the moment he spotted the new man tilted into the wind carrying a cardboard tray. The young detective trudged along the sidewalk kicking up snow like a draft horse. He lumbered on, then bundled himself into the front seat and passed Cinq-Mars a styrofoam coffee cup.
“Idiot.” Hi
s pronunciation fell somewhere between English and French.
“What’d I do now?” Detective Bill Mathers wanted to know.
“Put a flashing light on your head. Pop a siren in your mouth.”
“Excuse me?”
“They told me you were a good detective.”
“Who told you that? I know I’m all right, but who told you?”
“Wear a sandwich board,” Cinq-Mars taunted him. “Write on it—Undercover cop on duty! Please do not disturb! Trust me, if the bad guys made themselves as obvious as the police we would not have crime.”
“You don’t want me bringing you coffee?”
“Bring me coffee. Don’t bring me coffee in a cardboard tray with steam rising out of it like a chimney. Who sits in a car all night with the engine off when it’s thirty below?” Cinq-Mars quizzed him. “Who else but us dumb cops, and guess what, Bill? The bad guys know that.”
Mathers warmed his hands on the cup before he removed the lid and blew across the surface. “Know what?”
“What?”
“If only cops freeze their tails off because the motor’s not running, let’s turn ours on. That would be less suspicious.”
“You’re an imbecile.”
“Wouldn’t that be less suspicious?”
“What’re we supposed to be doing in here, kissing?”
“Also less suspicious,” Mathers deadpanned.
The point was well taken. “You forget,” Cinq-Mars recovered. “We’re not here. We’re invisible. No motor. No heat. Just steam rising from our coffee cups.”
“I know what you’re after. You want to crack my nuts off.”
“You’re a better detective than I thought to figure that out so fast.”
Mathers chafed. “Suit yourself. This isn’t my first initiation. Odds are it won’t be my last.”
“Knock on wood,” Cinq-Mars advised him, which gave his junior officer pause. “It could be your last. Who’s to know?”
Having no wood handy, Mathers knocked three times upon his own cranium.
“Sounds hollow to me,” Cinq-Mars commented. Under the city that night, within the mountain, where track for the commuter train ran a tunnel through rock, a jury of homeless men was gathering for shelter from the wretchedness of winter. Although the tunnel was not a warm place, men found refuge there from the bitter winds and made fires from old newsprint they had gathered and soaked with snow to prolong the burning time. The tunnel had become their safe haven. The men entered after the last of the rush-hour trains had passed, the intermittent evening trains still to follow, and they would stay the night, to be awakened from their lair by the violent alarm of the morning’s initial locomotion.
On this Christmas Eve they were joined by Okinder Boyle, a junior columnist out to make a name for himself. His editor had wearied of his sage pieces on the homeless, so he needed to devise new ways to tell a familiar tale. You want to write about the homeless? You’re so fascinated? Give me the underbelly, Boyle. Back off the sop. God, I’m sick to death of your sop. Makes me want to puke. Your sop quotient got used up aeons ago.
Boyle had a talent for creating interesting sets, and he was certain as he entered the tunnel on Christmas Eve that he had found the ideal location for the holiday week. While the remains of turkeys were being picked over, he would give his readers an image of their city they hadn’t imagined. He knew nothing of the people there, precious little of their lives, but he had discovered a tunnel—a tunnel!—where the disinherited huddled against the cold and dodged morning trains on their retreat back to sunlight.
You want underbelly? he rehearsed his conversation with the grouch of a city editor who’d love to squash him like a sow bug. I’ll give you friggin’ underbelly. These people live—and he would delay his next word—under—and he would repeat it—under the mountain. They live inside rock.
For Christmas Eve Okinder Boyle joined the ranks of the homeless beneath the city, where trains ran riot and marauding winter winds took up a ghostly howl and paper fires choked the foul air with pungent warming smoke.
“I might as well tell you,” Bill Mathers said to his new senior partner, “I asked for this dance. I put in a request to ride with you.”
Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars embellished upon his usual grunting response. “I’m impressed, I suppose. How impressed am I, Bill?”
“Don’t give me such a hard time, Émile. You’ve done a lot. I’m letting you know I respect that. I asked to be your partner. Maybe I can learn from you.”
“Miracles have been known to happen,” Cinq-Mars concurred.
“What’d I ever do to you?” The young man possessed a round, cheerful, boyish face distinguished by large, brown, bovine eyes. He wore his hair with an exacting part along one side—as if he was a Mountie, Cinq-Mars considered with disdain. His new partner seemed as earnest as that crew cut lieutenant Mountie he’d met in the Wolverines at the time of the Turner bump. The junior detective was in his early thirties—looked younger—but Cinq-Mars guessed that he’d been behaving as a forty-year-old for the past decade, as if he had repudiated, and thereby forfeited, his youth. “Why are you giving me such a hard time, Émile?”
Cinq-Mars gazed down the street through the light fall of snow that had just commenced. He checked his side mirror again, more from nervous habit than concentration. The street remained remarkably quiet.
“My last partner spied on me,” the detective revealed. “You should go talk to him. This time I worked things with the brass so they wouldn’t dare stick me with another spy, but they’re not going to do me any favors either. They wanted me hooked up with deadwood, take me down a peg. So I looked over the deadwood, and guess what, Bill? I found you. I heard you’re a good cop. Steady. Unremarkable overall. Brass decided I deserved a squarehead. They figure you’ll be no earthly good to me. Considering the choices, I was happy enough to take you. Now get out,” Cinq-Mars instructed him, “prove them wrong. Clean off the rear window, or do you think I can see through snow?”
Mathers did what he was told without complaint, using the sleeve of his topcoat to clear a patch on the window. Falling in this temperature, the snow was so dry and weightless that he could just as easily have blown it away. Cinq-Mars had summed up his career as unremarkable overall, and he was pondering that assessment with gloominess. He had been chosen from among the deadwood. With that sort of praise he had no further need for criticism in his life. He knew that his advancement in the force was considered tokenism, a bone tossed to the English. English officers believed the best among them were held back in favor of those less capable, assuring that no English cop would shine. That was the theory. To suit the theory English cops had a tendency to act dumb around brass. He wondered if he had ever done that, unconsciously or inadvertently. He knew he was an ambitious cop. That’s why he was so excited to have been paired with the eminent and legendary Cinq-Mars.
Before climbing back in the car Mathers trained his own practiced eye up and down the block. He opened the door and clambered in.
“Start her up,” Mathers said. “Get around the corner. I’ve been made.”
Cinq-Mars turned the ignition over immediately. “Tell me.”
“Santa Claus. Straight behind.”
A man in a Santa Claus outfit carrying a sack of toys slung over one shoulder scaled a snowbank and came down the other side. He crossed the street and hurried to safely avoid an oncoming car. A line of traffic gently fishtailing on the slippery surface went by him and traveled past the detectives. Cinq-Mars asked, “Can you see him?”
“Sometimes.” Mathers added, “He’s going in.”
“Wait now.”
“He’s in.”
“Wait,” Cinq-Mars whispered. “You got the door?”
“Got it.”
“No mistake?”
“I got it, I said.”
“Let’s go,” Cinq-Mars ordered. “Lock your door. Don’t slam it. I’ll leave the motor running. The extra key’s in my right co
at pocket. Let’s take it nice and easy.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Mathers mentioned.
“What?”
“I might be your new partner but I’m no rookie.”
“Then don’t be so touchy. Let’s go.”
They opened and closed the car doors gently. Mathers followed as Cinq-Mars headed across the street at an angle away from their quarry and charged into an apartment building that was not the one entered by the pursued. Inside, Mathers asked, “What’re we doing here?”
“East of Aldgate,” Cinq-Mars told him and unclasped his side holster and removed the revolver.
“What does that mean?”
“Put your gun in your pocket. Carry it with the safety on but ready to fire. Now listen, Bill. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, but most of all, don’t shoot me.”
“You’re expecting trouble.”
“Always do. Don’t you?”
“Call for backup?”
“Is there some benefit to chaos I don’t know about? The more cops the better chance for a screwup.”
“You’re not following procedures, Émile,” Mathers criticized, but he was smiling.
Cinq-Mars blew air through his lips to signal that he dismissed the rules. “Let’s go.”
They vacated the foyer of that apartment building and strolled up the street to the rooming house where their prey had vanished.
“In first,” Cinq-Mars commanded. He was the one smiling now.
“What’re you grinning at?”
“Now you know why I took a squarehead to be my partner.”
“Do I?” Mathers asked.
“If somebody’s going to take a bullet for me, he might as well be English.”