City of Ice

by John Farrow

  Sandra’s sudden burst of laughter startled them both.

  “What?”

  “Cool. I’ve never heard you use a word like cool before.”

  “I know the lingo.”

  “Yeah, like maybe twenty years behind the times, but that’s okay. It’s a surprise, that’s all.” She returned his affection by circling both arms around his waist and squeezing. “Go on.”

  “Like it or not, we’re not surprised by their presence, or by their behavior. Bikers have been chronic throughout the ages. They’re leftovers. They’re representative of our past, and it can be romantic to think about sloughing off our responsibilities and returning to a different time. There’s a Hell’s Angel who plays in the Quebec Symphony, so we think, ‘Hey, maybe these guys aren’t so bad, maybe they’re just misunderstood.’”

  “The romantic, sensitive rebel,” Sandra put in.

  “If we forget that a bomb is a bomb,” Cinq-Mars marched on, “that murder is murder. No misunderstanding there. But I was wondering, why are they invading Montreal again? We drove them out, years ago. We cracked the back of the Mafia as well, they’ve never returned to full force. Now the Angels live in the countryside and small towns and do well, their lives are comfortable, they’re unbelievably rich—filthy rich—they do good business and have smooth country roads to ride their Harleys on and the SQ pretty much leaves them alone. They wear fine clothes and are planning to open a chain of fast-food restaurants. Why do they want back into Montreal, where they’re forced to battle the Rock Machine with bombs and be hassled by cops? Then it hit me.”

  “What did, Émile?” She encouraged him with another hug.

  “A reporter, jokingly, asked the Angels where they stood on the matter of Quebec independence. They replied, everyone thought in jest, that the Angels preferred to see Canada stay together. But I tried to figure out why they would say that, why on earth would they think that way? They’d have the SQ in their pockets, the Mounties would be out of their hair. Then I caught it. They’re going national. They control the east coast already. Their puppet gangs rule the west. Their next move is to take back Montreal, then annihilate the Outlaws in Ontario.”

  Sandra nodded. “They’re expansionists. Nothing new among criminals.”

  “Except that they had retreated. What’s their motivation for the new moves? The Russians. They’re the ones saying to them, Take Canada, make a move on America, we’ve got Russia, the European Hell’s Angels are getting stronger, between us we’ll run crime through half the world. After that we’ll make treaties with the Asian gangs. The Angels want to be part of the bigger deal, because if they declined, if they said, Sorry, we’re content to be country squires for now, thanks very much, we like the quiet life, we’re thinking of planting apple trees and seeing if more of us can’t play in the symphony, they’d’ve been driven out, and the Russians would have helped with the big push. It’s crisis management, Sandra, it’s expand or be smashed.”

  A gray gelding nuzzled each of them in a quest for attention before skipping off again.

  “How bad is it, Émile?” Sandra asked her husband, her voice hushed.

  He had wrestled with the matter throughout the night, listening to the rains storm, beat on the windows, the roof, feeling the warm air of the thaw on his skin. Achieving resolution had restored a sense of freedom, liberated him from his timidity, his restraints. If he was going to lose his wife, he would do so because he had chosen to include her in his life, not exclude her. If he was going to wreck his marriage, he would do so on his terms, rather than be governed by fear and apprehension. If he was going to die, he would put right what needed to be put right. Overcoming fear was integral to his mission from here on in, and that process had to begin at home, or not begin at all.

  “Until now, I was afraid to let you know what was going on in my life because the news isn’t good.”

  “Right. I know how you go around sparing me bad news. You buy me a shotgun and enough shells to hold down the fort until the cavalry arrives. You ask me if I can shoot straight. That really convinces me that everything is peachy.” She had moved away from him, pacing. “What about now, Émile? Have you made an arrest? What’s changed?”

  “No arrest.”

  “What’s changed?”

  He sighed. He gazed back on the horses, as though they inspired courage. He turned to her. “Sandra, it’s bad. I can’t hide it from you anymore. Also, I’m not sure that I can go it alone anymore. I’m not entirely self-contained. I’m too old for this. I need you. I need to confide in you. I can’t tell you everything that’s going on without scaring both of us half to death, but I need to talk to somebody. I hope it’ll be you, Sandra. If you want to leave, I can’t blame you. I’ll understand. I’ll make it easy. But I hope you stay.”

  Sandra Lowndes studied her husband’s face before she also turned as though to consult the horses. She observed their grace and pleasure, their friskiness out on such a day in the middle of the most confining of winters. When she turned to face him again, she tucked her head into the small hollow just under the front of his shoulder. She loved that spot. How she loved that quiet spot.

  Before noon Mathers was traveling into the quiet residential community of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce west of downtown, driving up Mariette Avenue to Police Station 15. This was a nice suburb. Mathers could see himself living here in a year or two. The houses were duplexes in the Montreal style, the landlord living on the bottom floor, a tenant above. The homes were a good size, red brick, built in the thirties, when crafts-manship still meant something. Good mahogany in those homes. Stained glass on doors and front windows. Small yards, front and back, were covered in melting snow now, but Mathers imagined that his wife could putter in a flower garden in the summertime without it being too much work.

  The rains had come. The swift January thaw melted snowbanks into ponds.

  The parking lot to Station 15 had history. An unarmed black youth had been shot dead by a policeman there, a bad killing. Either it was a murder or the cop was too dumb to have been allowed to carry a weapon. He said it went off accidentally. Since the black kid was running away, that theory hadn’t impressed anyone.

  Even quiet neighborhoods had their troubles.

  The killing had shaken the city. Black immigration to Montreal from the Caribbean had been growing at a terrific rate, and there were those who resented the new arrivals. Many French considered themselves to be the oppressed people here. They were trying to create a society for themselves. The rallying cry of the independence-seeking government of the day and their avid supporters was Québec aux Québecois! Quebec for Quebeckers. They got away with it because the slogan was originally intended to mean no English, an attack against the powerful. But to many immigrants, who were the disadvantaged, the powerless, the chant seemed to be aimed squarely at them. For some, the death of the black youth had been a trial of the community. Who was the victim? The dead boy, or the French police officer who had lost his job? Mathers knew that the question should never have been put forward, but in some quarters, and around watercoolers in the department, it had been raised. That’s when he felt his separateness, that at a certain point he would always be defined by his colleagues as being English, for his opinion on such a matter was neither welcomed nor considered, he was one of les autres, the others, the English, he wouldn’t be able to understand, and worse than that he was probably out to get them, to make them look bad, he couldn’t be trusted.

  Mathers checked things out. There was something to be said for living in an English neighborhood. Among your own. He thought that he might like to try it sometime. If that’s how the cultures remained separate, then so be it. He knew the language, he worked among the French, he loved Montreal. But if he couldn’t be trusted, the hell with it, he’d live among the English. He couldn’t batter his head against a wall forever.

  At the entrance off the rear parking lot, Mathers flipped open his coat to flash his hip shield and asked to see Constable Normand
Lajeunesse. Directed to a second-floor office, he found the uniform lazily filing reports. Mathers knew that he was working for a task force on auto theft.

  He put the cop in his midtwenties. Watched him grudgingly move around the room, as if his assigned tasks could give him cancer. The story on Lajeunesse was that he had risen quickly in the force before tumbling with greater speed.

  “I’m not here about a car,” he told him when the man finally came over.

  “That’s what I do, cars.” He was thin, six-two, a strong-boned, intelligent face, and he was hostile.

  “I want to discuss Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars.” His partner had suggested this himself, a while back. The meeting was overdue, and Mathers sensed that it had become necessary.

  Lajeunesse looked at him as if warning lights blinked inside his head and sirens were rampant. “Sorry, who’d you say you were? Internal or—”

  “Bill Mathers. I’m partner to Émile these days.”

  The young officer was genuinely curious. “What do you want with me?”

  “Can we talk someplace? Take ten, Normand.”

  Lajeunesse led him to a small kitchen nook where they were alone. Mathers missed these suburban comforts at HQ, where he never put a sandwich down for fear cockroach guerrillas would whisk it away.

  “What’s up?” Lajeunesse asked him.

  “How did you find the experience?”

  “What experience?”

  “Being partner to Cinq-Mars.”

  The young man stretched his fingers taut, then relaxed them, as though releasing tension. He repeated the exercise twice more. “I don’t understand. What’re you investigating, Detective? Or should I ask, who?”

  They were seated in small plastic chairs at a flimsy white table, and Mathers was too tense, too anxious, for the environment. He stood and paced, a bear in a pen. He came back. “Things are going on,” he said. “I can’t tell you what. I see you here, doing paperwork, in uniform—it makes me wonder. You wore gold on your hip like me, you were partnered to the most cele-brated cop in town, like me. Maybe I don’t want my next job to be filing clerk.”

  Thinking it over, Lajeunesse deduced, “You’re the one with the gold shield. If you don’t know what went down, I’m not filling you in.”

  “Cinq-Mars said you spied on him.”

  That level of information truncated the young man’s rebellion, and he let himself snap back in his chair. He looked like a smoker. In this modern building he’d probably have to take himself outside.

  “I was told to spy on him. It was my job.”

  “For the department?”

  “You’d turn it down? Got me my shield. I was told Cinq-Mars was a bad cop, what did I know? Nobody liked him, I knew that much. They said if I helped put him away, my career would be in high spin. They promised nobody would know but me. So I was stupid. Shoot me—I believed them.”

  Mathers nodded. “This was Internal Affairs?”

  Lajeunesse blew that thought off and shook his head. “I wouldn’t sell out my worst enemy to Internal Affairs. Those guys can’t squat for shitting.”

  “Who then?”

  “Brass.”

  “High up?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Pipeline. No names, no ranks. Emissaries.”

  “How’d you know you were on a pipeline?”

  “Got me my shield, didn’t they?”

  “So what happened? Cinq-Mars finds you out, he can’t bust you down to the filing room.”

  Lajeunesse stretched out in his chair, his long legs traveling under the table and emerging out the other side, his arms stretched upward behind him. His body seemed tightly strung with a perpetual strain, and Mathers guessed that that had not always been the case.

  The lanky young man smiled a little. “Émile wouldn’t work that way even if he had the stripes. He found me out. Don’t ask me how. How does Émile know anything? He just knows. Probably he suspected all along. I flunked one of his tests maybe, so he laid a trap for me and I stepped in it. Émile told me, and I told the pipeline, we were busting a warehouse for cocaine. Cinq-Mars was going in without a warrant because he distrusted the courts, he was going in without backup because he distrusted cops. So the brass had him. Not for anything corrupt, like they told me he was, but they had enough of him to rein him in, take the shine off his badge.”

  Nodding, Mathers agreed, “He’s not airtight with procedures.”

  “When he wants to be, he is. Don’t assume otherwise,” Lajeunesse warned.

  “So what happened?” Mathers did his best to be comfortable in the sterile environment. Everything was white—the walls, the table, the cabinets, the chairs—as if they’d been hospitalized and the next item on the agenda was a lobotomy. He put his feet up on a chair.

  “Him and me, we bust the warehouse. I’m expecting more cops, to nail us for procedure. What we get is high-caliber semiautomatic rifle fire. My vest took a hit, the one Cinq-Mars forced me to wear. Knocked me on my ass. We’re pinned down and I figure we’ve bought it, that’s it over for both of us. There’s more fire. We’re toast. I’m shitting my pants and I mean for real. This is a war zone.”

  “How’d you get out alive?”

  “The new fire? Turns out it’s from our side. Cinq-Mars had half a dozen off-duty cops show up—city cops, SQ, Mounties—good old boys who just happened to be in the neighborhood, off duty but armed to the teeth. Figure that one. Their weapons just happened to include cruiser shotguns. We’re pinned on the floor and Cinq-Mars is saying to me, ‘East of Aldgate, Normand. East of it, baby.’ ”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “Nope. You?”

  Mathers did his best to think this through, but he was having trouble. “You walked into an ambush that Cinq-Mars had pegged ahead of time?”

  “Better get up to speed in a hurry, Detective,” Lajeunesse advised. “You never know what’s coming your way.”

  “I need help here.”

  Lajeunesse leaned into him. “I don’t know what you’re after, Detective. I don’t know who you’re asking for, if anybody. Maybe brass. Maybe yourself. Maybe you got your own pipeline, who knows? Whatever your situation, I suggest you get this and get it good.”

  Mathers put his feet back on the floor as a sign of his devotion to whatever the man might proffer. “I’m listening.”

  “Cinq-Mars—smart guy, right? Let me tell you how smart. Not only does he figure out that I’m leaking information upstairs, he also figures out that what I say goes no higher up the ladder. He figures out it doesn’t go anywhere on the ladder. There is no ladder. He figures out that my information goes from me, to my pipeline, to Mafia, to Hell’s Angels. Tic, tac, toe.”

  Mathers was breathing lightly now, as though a deeper breath might interrupt the flow of knowledge. “A trap,” he concluded. “To bump off you and Cinq-Mars.”

  Lajeunesse was staring into the detective’s eyes now and shaking his head, slowly. “They wouldn’t kill Cinq-Mars,” he said. “Who’d dare? Hell would bust loose. Back then, they don’t want Wolverines up their ass, although they have them now anyway.”

  Mathers listened, and wondered about a quiet voice murmuring inside him now, clamoring, wanting out.

  “You?” Mathers asked quietly.

  “Figure it out, Detective. I die, Cinq-Mars gets a message and my link to the brass dies with me. Cinq-Mars finds himself in deep shit for being in that warehouse with no warrant and no backup, a dead cop on his hands. It turns out he had a warrant in his hip pocket, of course, he had backup, too, but my pipeline didn’t know, I didn’t know, and the shooter sure as hell was unaware. There’s no investigation to talk about. The shooter got off fourteen rounds—that tells you he’s no innocent. He took one back at him in the eye. I had a bullet in my chest pocket. Cinq-Mars had his secret warrant, and the backup cops were an accident of fate. The whole thing went away. Except I got busted down to the rank of pencil, on suspicion of leaking news. I never deserved the rank of de
tective, now they’re saying, in the first place.”

  The detective took a moment to absorb the news, then stood to leave. “Did you tell Cinq-Mars who?” he asked.

  Lajeunesse just looked at him, sneering a little.

  “Tips,” Mathers prompted him. “Maybe not names, if you don’t have them, but leads. He could figure it out if you gave him leads. Cinq-Mars can carry a clue a long way.”

  “I never told him squat.”

  “Why not?”

  “That bullethole in my pocket was enough of a message for me. Didn’t faze Émile all that much, did it? But they weren’t shooting at him.”

  Mathers nodded, as though he sympathized. He knew that Cinq-Mars, with his quietly fierce nature, would not go along with this logic. “And now? You’ve been stuck in this hole for some time. You’re staying quiet?”

  Lajeunesse uttered a sour little laugh, rising as well. “Either you’re too naive for your own good, Detective, which I doubt somehow, or you’re here to find out how solid I am. If you’re representing the shits who lined me up, the deal holds. I told the emissaries, I die, I lose my job, letters get sent, the information, every detail I know, gets distributed. In the meantime, I’m solid.”

  Mathers shrugged. “So that’s how it is.”

  “That’s how it is.”

  “You know, I can see where you can’t tell me. You can’t trust me. But you could tell Cinq-Mars. Give him your leads. Ask him to keep quiet. At least he’ll know who he’s after. At least he can figure out who to watch out for.”

  Bill Mathers was tired from his late night, and he hadn’t been paying attention, but in the brief silence that ensued a thought raced up his spine and cranked his head higher. He only glanced at Lajeunesse. He required no further confirmation. Of course. That’s what this cop had done. He had told Cinq-Mars what he knew, and Cinq-Mars had resolutely and astutely protected him in order to spare the man his life. Having letters to send if he died or got fired was probably a notion hatched by Cinq-Mars himself, to keep him alive. Mathers recognized that if he gave any indication that he had figured this out Lajeunesse might panic. Cinq-Mars knows! Or he’s got good clues. He probably knows which cops he’s gunning for and who’s been gunning for him.