by John Farrow
And yet, his head down on the desk, the squad room empty, the detective sensed that they were closing in on his source.
As for other matters, they had distance to cover. Jim Coates’s Russian—this so-called Czar—was unknown, he could be anywhere on the planet. André LaPierre had been feeling the pressure of his suspension. Gilles Beaubien was suffering from reduced responsibilities and increased department scrutiny. Women in the secretarial pool were under the eye of Tremblay’s investigation. A net was being cast—at sea, and in the dark, but a net.
He had greater freedom. That had to count for something.
The wait was proving to be interminable. Max Gitteridge had called. Gunfire in a bar had pulled him away from the care of his nightclub to the nurture of a client in lockup. The lawyer wanted to talk to Cinq-Mars about that shooting, but there was no reason why he should and Cinq-Mars assumed that Gitteridge was inventing an excuse to speak to him privately. But why? He was stuck waiting for the lawyer to show.
More coffee. He shouldn’t. His nerve endings were frayed, tingling. Then again, he had a long drive home ahead of him and the highway would be quiet. He should probably fill his thermos, keep himself primed for the trip. Sleep later on in a caffeine spin, perhaps, but sleep alive.
Cinq-Mars made the walk to the coffeemaker and remembered only when he arrived that he’d finished the dregs on his last trip. He fixed a fresh pot and returned to his cubicle and finally heard the man’s steps crossing the squad room floor. He had little use for Max Gitteridge. The system demanded that an accused have the right to counsel and a rigorous defense, but he was under no obligation to admire the defenders. Some trial attorneys were shysters, he understood that. But a few defense lawyers trod in dung up to their eyebrows. Confederates in crime with their clients, they rankled Cinq-Mars. Likely, they’d never be prosecuted. On the other hand, in Montreal, a number of lawyers who defended the bad guys had been discovering their life expectancy in sharp decline. One had been car-bombed, another shot in his office, another vanished with no known trace. In its own roundabout way, with an occasional sense of discrimination, frontier justice was being meted out.
Cinq-Mars knew Gitteridge by the sharp staccato of the taps on his heels. He stood up and watched him make his way around the squad desks to the cubicle, unaware that Cinq-Mars was peering over the divider. His head kept bobbing around, checking things out. What was curious to Cinq-Mars was that he looked less like a man interested in discovering information than a man worrying about who might have him in his sights.
“Evening, Max,” Cinq-Mars said boldly, and the little guy jumped a foot.
“Good evening, Émile,” Gitteridge said, his fright and testiness evident. “I bet you like to jump out at old ladies when they’re walking down the street.” He stood at the entrance to the policeman’s space, between the cubicle dividers. Most of the skeleton crew of detectives working nights were out on the streets. One lone typewriter clicked away.
“Mr. Gitteridge, my sympathies.”
“For what?”
“Losing a client.”
Gitteridge scratched his chin. “Kaplonski. That was a shame.”
“He’d have been better off incarcerated.”
“Hindsight is a great source of wisdom, Émile.”
Cinq-Mars offered a conciliatory smile. “It’s not like I didn’t warn him.”
“Did you?”
“I told him he might have it coming. What can I do for you, Counselor?”
Gitteridge stepped further into the room and deposited his briefcase along with his cashmere coat on a chair. He moved over to the window, loosened his tie, plunged his hands deep into his pockets. The lights of the squad room reflected back upon him. “I’ve got a client in lockup. A shooting.”
“Murder?” Cinq-Mars asked, wondering, What does this have to do with me?
“One victim’s too high to know he’s been shot. The other one’s hanging by a thread. I’m unhappy with the investigation, Émile. I’d like you to hear my client’s story. Judge for yourself.” Gitteridge looked at him then. He stared at him so hard that Cinq-Mars was compelled to meet his eyes. “You have a reputation for integrity, Detective. That can come in handy. Come upstairs to the lockup with me.”
Cinq-Mars analyzed the situation. The case had nothing to do with him. His integrity as an officer would be irrelevant to Gitteridge. The best that he could deduce was that the lawyer wanted to talk to him but not where they were standing.
The lawyer retrieved his belongings, and Cinq-Mars followed him out. They made their way down broad, high corridors painted an institutional two-tone—beige and what his wife called puke green. Each man was silent. They took the stairs the two flights to lockup. Near the top of their ascent their pace slowed, both panted, and Gitteridge indicated a bathroom. He held the door open. In the quiet of a latrine, in the nocturnal stillness, they’d converse.
The tiled room, recently mopped, stank of urine and cleansers. Gitteridge entered a stall and hung his briefcase on the hook and his winter coat over it and came out again, hands in his pockets, a grayness to the pallor of his skin. The overhead bulbs were bare, their light uncompromising. He strolled across to the frosted glass window and leaned down to breathe fresh air. Without a separate thermostat, the room became unbearably hot in winter, and the window was left open a notch even in arctic conditions. “Miserable fucking weather,” he mentioned.
“Might as well be Moscow,” Cinq-Mars agreed, enjoying the innuendo.
Gitteridge straightened up, his back to Cinq-Mars. “More like Siberia,” he concluded. Moving over to the sinks, he turned on a tap and watched the water flow, then leaned down and splashed his face. He kept the tap running as he dried himself on paper towels from a dispenser.
“You can turn that off,” Cinq-Mars advised.
“You never know,” Gitteridge warned.
“You’ve chosen well. You can turn it off.”
Gitteridge shut the tap. He remained standing with his hand on the faucet, leaned forward slightly, his head offset to one side.
“What I said at your desk is true.” The lawyer spoke in a hushed voice now, as though compensating for the echo in this chamber. “You’re a righteous cop. That can be useful in certain circumstances.”
“How so?” Cinq-Mars rested his weight against a sink.
Gitteridge straightened up. “Maybe a few things can be said to a righteous cop without the words traveling back to their origin. It might be possible for me to say a few things that will stay put. No other cop will hear about it. Not one.”
“That’s probably true,” Cinq-Mars agreed. “Some things don’t need to be repeated.”
“Has she told you yet?” the lawyer asked.
Cinq-Mars was sufficiently adept at both interrogation and negotiation that he was not about to be fazed by a ruse. “Has who told me what?” he asked back, without blinking.
Gitteridge smiled thinly.
If the lawyer wanted to tell him something, Cinq-Mars was listening. He was intrigued by the man’s motivation. He guessed that fear had inspired Gitteridge more than anything else.
“I don’t know if she got word out to you. Maybe she hasn’t had the chance. If she did she might have included my name. I’m here to tell you that this has nothing to do with me, Émile. I heard the information for the first time the same moment she did, and I’m here to tell you myself, in person, so you know that I’m not attached to this.”
Cinq-Mars waited. Then he said, “Let’s assume, for the benefit of this conversation, that when you refer to ‘she’ I don’t know who you’re talking about. Can we start there?”
“Naturally. But I’ll tell you how I know, so we’re free of bullshit. She contradicted her cover.”
If Gitteridge was studying him for a reaction, Cinq-Mars had none to provide. He waited.
“Malicious malalignment.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s the term for the problem with her legs. Troub
le for you is, I did a background check on her. Put a gumshoe on it. Even read her high school year-book. That gave me a picture, but you know, faces change. Hairstyles, hair colors, looks change. Heather Bantry, the real one, the real girl, was a sprinter. The real one never had this malicious malalignment thing.”
The young woman’s identity had been compromised. Cinq-Mars understood her life was now in peril. “Why tell me any of this, Counselor? What’s in it for you? Don’t you have interested parties to inform?”
Gitteridge rubbed his fingers across his jaw, then played with the ends of his loosened tie. He swallowed a couple of times. Gone was his usual smarmy cockiness, and it seemed as though he spoke more elegantly when he was scared than when he was trying to be threatening. “As you know, Émile, I have worked around ruthless men on occasion. That’s no secret. It’s my job. But it seems the world is changing. In the old days, there was a culture, an understanding. A person was allowed a life, a certain segregation between his personal and professional hours. These days, there’s a new way of doing things, it’s not so easy for some of us to adapt.”
This was getting too oblique for the detective’s liking. A new culture? Was he referring to Russians again?
The lawyer sighed heavily, then said, “Hagop Artinian.”
“Yes?” Cinq-Mars unconsciously held his breath.
“They found out he was one of yours. That’s why they suckered you into chasing down a false Santa Claus then hung the sign on the boy. They wanted you warned off.”
“I figured.”
“Artinian made some penetration, nothing too serious, but closer than anyone appreciated. You know what happened to him. You also know what happened to the person who, inadvertently, helped him get inside.”
Kaplonski.
“So?”
“Don’t play coy with me, Émile.”
“Mr. Gitteridge, we are playing coy with one another. That’s our theme song for the evening.”
The lawyer broke off looking at him and bent down and fussed with his tie again. He looked like a man trying to rearrange his life. “This girl, she’s made good penetration. Now I find out she was never a sprinter, that she could never have been a sprinter, that she has a bone deformity in her legs called malicious malalignment. She penetrated through me. She came into the organization through me. If I sell her out now, I’ll be given a pat on the back and turned into the next cherry pie. It’s the new way of doing things. It’s taking care of business in the new world order.”
Cinq-Mars let that settle. This was good news, extraordinary news. A mole had penetrated the network of the Hell’s Angels through their own lawyer, and now their lawyer was running scared. “What do you have to tell me?” he pressed.
Gitteridge drifted to another place as he idly fingered a button under his tie. Probably he had never crossed this line before, and once crossed he knew that nothing would be familiar on the other side. He snapped back, and reported at last, “There’s going to be a bump.”
“Who’s the target?” Cinq-Mars whispered.
“A cop. That’s all I heard. I don’t think your mole has picked up more than that, but you can ask her.”
They looked at each other and the radiator pipes rattled and the wind blew through the gap in the window. “Me?” Cinq-Mars asked quietly.
The lawyer shrugged.
“It won’t do you any good telling me if I’m the one who gets whacked.”
“Good point, Émile. If I had to guess, and I do, I’d say they won’t whack you. We both know why. The Wolverines have a big push on, a good budget. Knock you off, they’ll be on a rampage with public blessing and full powers and double the financing—for years. But I can’t say categorically that it’s not you either, or if it’s a good cop or a cop who works for them. Maybe they’ve found a way to manage it. Could be arbitrary. I don’t know. I do not know. If I did, probably I’d tell you. But there’s something else at play here.”
“What’s that?”
“The girl inside has heard about it. They’ll be watching. This could be nothing more than a test to find out if she snitches. If they see measures taken, Émile, or pick up a nuance within the department—something they’re good at—your girl goes boom. Protecting yourself, protecting anyone you think is a target, puts her in jeopardy.”
“They’ll follow through, test or no test?”
“I’d bet that way. It’s a different culture, Émile. I can’t say it won’t be you.”
“Date?”
“They tend not to rush things.”
“Location?”
“To be determined.”
“Most likely a bomb?”
“They prefer noise.”
“What else can you tell me?”
“Nothing. Émile, your girl has marked me down as an accessory. I’m not implicated here. I was present for the same conversation she overheard. I’ve come straight to you with what I know. They only want us to know a little, not a lot. Under the new system, everyone who works for them must prove he’s dirty.”
“Everyone?”
“No exceptions. I’ve told you what I’ve got. Émile, if the fact that you know gets into the wind, then it’s her or me who did the talking. If it’s her, I go down too, because I’m the one who carried her into the system. If it’s me, then she goes down with me, obvious reasons. Is your snitch aware of the consequences? I don’t think so. Walk slow, Émile.”
Gitteridge could be spreading manure to see if he’d stoop to sniff. He could be tilling the landscape to find out what weeds grew. Cinq-Mars had to step softly. “I don’t know about any girl,” he reiterated quietly.
The lawyer did not bother to reply.
“Your concerns in this matter have been duly noted, Mr. Gitteridge. I will do what’s in my power, should it come to that, to exonerate you of complicity in this affair. But now, you must do one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Give me the Russian.”
Arching an eyebrow, Gitteridge shook his head. “Do you want to hear something that’s truly astonishing? I do believe I would if I could. Why? Because he’s the one who’s upset the applecart. He’s the one changing the rules. In the old days it was understood that a lawyer was a lawyer, everyone agreed the lawyer should not be implicated, that he stayed above the fray, that’s how the system worked. These days, there’s only one interest that needs to be satisfied. And I can tell you that it’s not mine.”
“Give me something,” Cinq-Mars insisted.
“What can I say? His name is Sergei. He likes to call himself the Czar, because he heard that’s what the Wolverines call him. He’s tall, a big-shouldered guy, dark-haired, he’s got a scar under his chin—here—that follows the jawline.”
“I know all that,” Cinq-Mars told him.
Gitteridge eyed him sharply then. “How many points in a star?”
Clueless, Cinq-Mars returned his stern look. “How many?”
“You haven’t done your homework, Émile. You’re not up to speed. All right. I’ll give you this one. The answer is eight. Look for an eight-pointed star.”
“The tattoo,” Cinq-Mars said. He could tell that Gitteridge was impressed that he knew even that much. He silently thanked God for Jim Coates.
Gitteridge entered the stall again and retrieved his briefcase and overcoat. When he emerged, Cinq-Mars was slouching by the door.
“You go one way, Émile, I’ll go the other.”
“That’s how it’s always been, Counselor.”
“Good luck.”
“I could use a dose.”
Cinq-Mars gave Gitteridge time to clear the building, then returned to his cubicle. The station clock said one-ten. He put on his coat and jiggled keys in a palm. Starting his car promised to be an adventure. In these days of threats and bombs, he might be better off checking out a cruiser to take home. First, fill the thermos.
In the basement garage, Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars stepped up to his blue Taurus wagon,
put his key into the door lock. For the sake of that young woman, he couldn’t change his pattern. He had to remain consistent. He wondered if Steeplechase Arch would be in touch anytime soon. The man might discern that the plot to kill a cop was indeed a test, that the best way to pass it was to keep the information mute. Let someone die to preserve the integrity of the operation. It wasn’t as though the bastard hadn’t done that before, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t sacrificed one of his own. What would be the loss of a cop? Would Arch call? If he learned that the target was Cinq-Mars himself, would he risk informing him? “Thank God for Gitteridge,” the detective murmured as he inserted his key into the ignition. He was hardly able to believe that he had uttered those words.
THREE
THE EIGHT-POINTED STAR
14
Wednesday, January 19
2:12 A.M. The locksmith had dozed off in the backseat of Cinq-Mars’s cruiser. Now the ground fairly trembled. The machines’ cantankerous roaring drew closer. Before long, an armored division of snow removers crossed the Main, then St.-Urbain and Clark Streets, and Émile Cinq-Mars prepared to move.
He’d tucked the car high on l’Esplanade, a distance up from Mount Royal Avenue with a clear view across the park to the apartment. The fake Heather Bantry had yet to return home. Cinq-Mars raised his hand, circled a finger in the air to signal the young couple in the car behind him. The pair stepped out and strolled down to Mount Royal, romantic in the snow.
“Young love.” Mathers sniffed.
“What’s eating you?”
“They don’t even know each other.”
“They’re under orders,” Cinq-Mars pointed out.
“Looks like he’s feeling her up.”
“I suppose you want the duty?”
The couple dodged the monster blowers, gaily leapfrogged a snowbank plowed by graders, and strolled arm in arm to the apartment block. Mathers awakened the locksmith, and the three of them climbed out of the car and headed down also.