by John Farrow
“So if you’d smashed that guy up tonight—”
“That’s where things are strange,” the older cop responded, interrupting him. “Odd. He deserves a good smashing up, that bastard. What father wouldn’t do it if he could? But I promised my daughter I wouldn’t—one of her conditions to return home. Also, I promised my wife I wouldn’t lose my badge over this. I should tell you, though, I made a promise to myself, too. Maybe that’s the only vow that counts in the end. Maybe. I promised myself I wouldn’t be no animal.”
Cinq-Mars nodded, and breathed evenly in the confines of the office.
“I want you to know something, Cinq-Mars. Someday, you might hear about some lowlife being fished out of the river near Rimouski. I didn’t have nothing to do with that, even though it hasn’t happened yet.”
“You’re just able to predict things, is that it?” He was feeling his stomach clench again.
“I know what kind of fuck-up he is. I know the kind of place Rimouski is. They got bad guys there who defend their turf. I don’t expect that bag of shit to survive. I didn’t send him to Disneyland to live with Donald Motherfucking Duck. But even though it hasn’t happened yet, I didn’t have nothing to do with it. That’s all I’m saying. I introduced him to friends you don’t mess with, and if he’s a dumb enough shit to mess with them, that’s his lookout. It’s not on my head.”
Cinq-Mars thought about it awhile. “That true? You’re not involved?”
“If I put a rat in among a bunch of cats, I think I can predict how that’ll turn out, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Then what he does, how he gets through it, that’s just up to him.”
“So, you’re not some weenie marshmallow?” Touton asked his protégé.
“I believe in playing by the rules. I don’t see where you’re breaking any.”
Touton seemed grateful for the conversation. After a while, he said, “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to hit him just the one time, not more? That wasn’t even for me. That was just to make sure he’d pay attention.”
“I can imagine that was difficult, sir.” He felt that the captain needed to get off the subject, away from the obsession of his revenge. “How did you adopt your daughter, sir?” he asked. “Where did you find her?” Touton shook his head, saddened even by what was supposed to be a happier memory. “A bar fight. An innocent bystander got shot through his right eye. Dead instantly. One second, he’s hoisting a beer after work—the next, he’s lying on the floor in a pool of blood. So I accept the detail to tell the next of kin, right? I go home to his family. This ten-year-old kid opens the door, big smile on her face, expecting to see her daddy. My whole body just goes to mush. Right away, that breaks my heart. I ask if her mommy’s home. She says her mommy’s dead, and she’s looking around me to see if her dad’s coming. Turns out she never knew her mom on account of she died in childbirth. And her father—” and Touton’s voice went eerily quiet. “—who raised this girl on his own, and he’d done a great job … now her dad was dead, and he was all she’d ever had. Now I get to talk to her real father in my sleep and tell him that, somehow, I let his little girl go bad. Too many nights at work, I guess. Too many days asleep. She got into trouble. Ran with the wrong crowd. I tried. But I failed.”
The cop from the countryside had seen men weep at funerals, but quietly, somehow under a restraint. The man who sat across from him was suddenly overcome, and he waited for the emotional slurry to run its course.
“I wanted to kill that motherfucker. Understand me?” Touton burst out.
“He’s never going to forget that punch.”
The comment seemed to bolster the stricken man, and he pulled himself together, nodding, wiping away the last of his tears. He shook his head, sighed, made a gesture to indicate that this was one helluva night, and downed the whiskey from his mug in a single gulp.
Quietly, intently, Touton said, “You don’t mess around with Anik, Cinq-Mars. She’s like a daughter to me, too.”
The rookie smiled. “I think you should be more concerned that she’ll chew me up and spit me out like so many wooden nickels.”
The remark helped Touton to revive himself further, and he laughed a little, concurring with a constant bob of his head. “Yeah, she’s something,” he said.
For their next drink, they touched glasses—the clear plastic to the ceramic mug—and took them down in a couple of swallows.
“I’ve got twenty years in, kid. I can go another five. Don’t know about ten. I’ve only worked nights. A month can go by in the wintertime when I never see the sun. I’m strong still. But weary. I don’t know what it is. I’m tired. I want to find the people who killed Anik’s dad. It’s a personal crusade, I’ll admit that, but it’s a good one, it’s righteous. Are you on board, Cinq-Mars?” The question seemed a drunken one, as the young man believed he’d confirmed his reply already and had only been waiting around for his marching orders for weeks now. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Touton stretched, as though his crying jag had assailed his joints, made him sore. “Go home, kid. It all starts up again tomorrow. Maybe you’ll be needed, maybe not. We’ll play it by ear. But I will want you to go back through the suspects—see if we can’t make them sweat.”
“I won’t let you down, sir.”
“Hang on.” Touton stepped over to a stack of material on top of the low-level filing cabinets and moved a few items around. He pulled out a file sealed by a pair of thick elastic bands. “This is the history of the Cartier Dagger. Start here. Study it. It’s knowledge you should be walking around with.”
“Yes, sir. Thanks … sir?”
The older man had slumped back down into his chair again. “What’s your daughter’s name? You didn’t say.”
Touton nodded. He stared into his cup, getting his emotions under control. “Patti,” he said strongly. “Patti.”
They nodded rather than wish each other a good night, and Cinq-Mars departed the office, then the station, and headed home. The sun was almost rising, the false dawn portending a fine, bright day. Having planned a late-morning breakfast with Anik, he had a few hours to kill, so he chose to walk home. She’d appreciate his change of attire—a pair of jeans, which he’d purchased to please her, and a casual shirt. In the meantime he’d enjoy being on these streets as the city awoke to a new day. His boss cherished the city and felt responsible for its safety. Cinq-Mars felt that he was beginning to get that sense, that a mysterious notion of care and resolve was also forming inside him.
So ardent were their discussions, so intense their debates, that Anik sometimes forgot to eat or sleep. She’d find herself woozy on only a glass of beer and realize that, since her orange juice and toast for breakfast, she’d eaten nothing more than an apple and it was now eleven at night. They would change venues, pack away a few burgers in a pub with food, and the talk began again. Ideas were no longer the burning issues. What counted as time moved along were strategies.
Then, at some point in the night, music would spontaneously erupt. Young and old together, and this love for one another and passion for the cause, the harmony of spirit filled her and filled them with a joy for their work. For many, the excitement and bravado, the happiness and spontaneity of those nights could only properly end with a tumult of bodies, and lovers left the closing pubs arm in arm, or kissed against a telephone pole, or reached under one another’s clothing to stroke other mysteries. Even those not in love slept with one another, and they waltzed home together on the breeze of happy lust.
Anik would depart the last pub of the night in the company of her new friends, Pierre and Paul, Jean-Luc and Vincent, and she always knew that she could select any one of the four and he’d gladly take her back to his place. But, as she had told them often, “I’ve got something else going on.” They didn’t get that—that she could have a boyfriend they never met, who did not come out with her to talk about the future, to plot the next course of action. Yet Anik kept in step with mystery. She still refu
sed to join the party, which now made sense to everyone, as the future would surely know confrontation and rows with the police. She referred to union battles in recent decades as though she’d been there herself, although she would have been five years old for some contests, not yet alive for others. They visited her home once, and listened to her mother talk in the kitchen, her long commitment to social justice humbling their strident convictions. The boys wanted to be like Anik’s mother one day, sitting alone in a house with heroic memories to recount. Anik knew that her mom’s history made her their leader. But she had a different sense. They thought the political and economic powers of the day were fragile, easily toppled by any sustained demonstration of public will. She knew better. The government was resilient, with the capacity to be unforgiving. The capitalists were unyielding, with the capacity to be cruel and overpowering. All they had on their side was song and the heart’s blood of the people.
“Then we’ll spill our blood,” Paul said.
Vincent declared, “And we’ll sing.”
“We’ll sing a lot,” Pierre concurred. “We’ll see what that does.”
They laughed a lot. Anik was their leader, and she taught them to laugh at themselves. “If we’re too earnest, too serious, too one-sided, we’ll be defeated. We need to be flexible and visionary. We need to be smart. And if you really want to win, you have to be treacherous.”
That all seemed so true.
Yet she walked home alone, thinking of Émile. Why did she encourage him as her boyfriend? He was so lame in some ways. But he wasn’t lame as a person. He was full of life, really, and she didn’t mind his sweetness—she liked that. She could feel herself being swayed. But a cop—my God. Get serious. You can’t possibly ball a cop.
But she was thinking that she would, even that she should. She liked him, and while her ideas found a home among her radical buddies, her heart—if not her mind—always swung back towards the tall boy with the big nose and the huge determination. She had never been able to understand how her dad could have worked for the right wing, sacking the offices of the left, then come home to his left-wing wife, sweeping her into his arms. Her mom had so often tried to explain it to her from different angles. “He never really hurt anybody, that’s what he always said. He told me that the left was too soft, that he was toughening them up. Oh, Anik. He had his conflicts. He was never clear inside himself, that man. But we loved him anyway, didn’t we?”
She was not clear inside herself, she knew. Émile stood for the side she opposed, the established, the entrenched, while she represented an element in society he was bound to fight one day. Maybe it was love, and maybe that was what it had been with her father, too. A rambunctious man who made his living with his fists, and that was perfectly fine except that he fell in love with a girl who wanted to unionize the working poor. And so he had had to accommodate an alternative point of view.
Anik didn’t think she could accommodate a different point of view, but she was inclined to accommodate the guy. She liked him. She thought about him all the time. She even got cross with herself at times for liking him too much, but what could a poor girl do? And now, look. Her steps were not taking her home after a long night out with the gang. Her steps, her silly feet—who did they think they were, those stupid dogs?—indisputably guided her in another direction, to a place she’d never been. The address was safely tucked in a jacket pocket, down deep, where she clutched it in her fist. Émile’s apartment. Oh those silly feet! She could catch a breakfast somewhere, wait for him to come home. Surprise him. And while she was at it, she knew, carry on surprising herself.
Unaware that Anik Clément had commenced walking to his apartment in the dead of night, Constable Émile Cinq-Mars, on an uneventful beat, checked in with his sergeant by telephone. He kept the fingers of his right hand crossed. “I got a message from Captain Touton for you,” the man said, and the young patrolman pumped his fist with glee. “I’ll read you what it says here exactly. ‘Hurry back. Tonight’s the night.’ Does that mean something to you, Cinq-Mars? What’s up?”
“I can’t answer that.”
The hell with it. He took a cab back downtown from the north end, despite the cost of half a night’s wages.
He dressed in a rush, but this time he never had to ascend the stairs to the offices of the Night Patrol, nor did he have to wait for hours in an anteroom as lively as a morgue. Touton and other detectives hurried downstairs to fetch him. “Car’s waiting,” the boss called out. “Let’s go!”
He ran out to the parking lot and, with a gesture of his impressive chin, Touton directed him into an unmarked car with Detective Fleury. Touton got into another car closer to the exit gate.
“It’s a go,” Fleury told him as he and Cinq-Mars piled into the car. Thanks to the deodorant strip hanging from the mirror, the interior carried the scent of a pine forest. “Grab that pouch out of the back.”
As Cinq-Mars leaned over the bench seat to fetch a small black sack, Fleury stepped on the gas and they flew off in pursuit of the other vehicles in their convoy.
“Should I open it?”
“Open it! Jesus. We don’t have all night.”
Cinq-Mars knew how far they had to travel to South Central, under the Jacques Cartier Bridge. They had at least four minutes. “Keep your shirt on.”
“Mind who you’re talking to. Stuff the money into your pockets. Different pockets. Make it look like you got loot from a bank heist squeezing out your rectum.”
“How much is there?”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll lose it anyway. If you happen to win, don’t think you can keep it. I’ll frisk you when this operation ends.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Cinq-Mars didn’t like this guy so much. He seemed to be overcompensating for his life as an accountant and taking advantage of the fact that Touton wasn’t with them. He doubted that the guy would be so tough on him with the boss around.
“Get that money stuffed away.”
“I’m stuffing.”
“Now find the picture.”
“Excuse me?”
“The photograph in there. Take it out. Look at it.”
A separate pocket had its own zipper. Cinq-Mars fished out the snapshot and flicked on the overhead light slightly behind him. “This the guy?” he asked.
“That’s the mark. Memorize that face. He won’t be the only bald head standing around. I should have you go in there like a dumb-ass rookie and just screw it up, find the wrong guy. But we can’t afford to let that happen. We need this guy. We need you to make good contact, okay? This is our best opportunity, understand?”
They swung hard into a curve, and Cinq-Mars was thrown against the door, the tires squealing for mercy.
“Now find the map,” Fleury said. “We don’t have much time. Study the map.”
“Why didn’t you show me this weeks ago?” “Don’t get irritable with me, sap. Find the map!”
The schematic, which had been executed with a draftsman’s hand, detailed the rooms and their configurations. Superimposed on the sheet had been sketched the design for an escape hatch, ostensibly through a ventilation chamber that led to a modified laundry chute. Cinq-Mars was to make contact with their mark. When all hell broke loose in the room, he’d lead him through the crawl space and down the escape chute apparatus from the third-floor gambling den to the ground.
“What do I land on?” he asked.
“Cement, if I can arrange that on time. But the bad guys keep a bin with pillows and old mattresses in it. It’ll be mouldy smelling, but you shouldn’t break a leg. But go first. That way, if there’s a problem with the landing, you can fix it before the mark flies down.”
Cinq-Mars felt queasy about the arrangement. “Bit of an act of faith, don’t you think? Dropping down three floors?”
“Not faith. Balls. Either you got ‘em or you don’t. If you don’t, we’ll find that out tonight.”
“Fine for you to say. All you do is push a pencil.”
Fleury brak
ed sharply again, for no reason, then sped up. “Do you have that map memorized? On account of your griping, we’re losing time. You’ve got to get out of the car, Cinq-Mars, find the right door, take the freight elevator up three flights, find the right door again—both doors have three red dots alongside the top hinge. That’s what you look for.”
“Three red dots.”
“Can you handle that? When you’re challenged, say that Merlin sent you—” “You’re kidding me.” Plenty about this operation seemed half-baked to him, although he’d not step away from it. Put him in charge—when that day came—and a great deal of police procedural guff would vanish.
“Merlin. Stop interrupting. Make damn sure you don’t choose the wrong man.”
Fleury gave him the final details of the operation, then braked. “Get out,” he said.
“Good luck to you, too,” Cinq-Mars told him, and took a step out of the car.
“Come back here,” Fleury commanded.
“What now?”
“Leave your gun behind … your holster, your badge, your wallet. I want nothing in your pockets but cash.”
Cinq-Mars still had a ways to walk down the block, then he crossed the street. Other cars had peeled away without them, and now Fleury departed as well, to join the officers on the rooftop to prepare for their descent through a skylight. Cinq-Mars suddenly felt alone, somewhat fearful. He had to pretend to be someone he was not, to act a role and be convincing, or he’d botch the entire operation and, potentially, his career as a detective. Courage, he knew, was not the issue, but concealing his nervousness, feigning bravado, forgetting to be somebody else and suddenly reverting to his true nature—these things worried him. Thinking too much, that was an issue, too. Somehow he had to relax, and Émile Cinq-Mars took ten deep breaths to try to get himself under control.
