by John Farrow
The cop discovered that the man was surely dead. He shouted to fellow officers for help, and a few idled over. While waiting, not wanting to look at the corpse, the first he’d ever seen, he read the English words on the face of the monument, not certain of what they might mean.
it’s comin’ yet for a’ that
that man to man the world o’er
shall brithers be for a’ that
The lines didn’t look like any sort of English he knew.
His bowels, his chest, his legs threatened to implode. He was not supposed to exert himself, and Father François Legault did his best to slow down to a pace he might survive. His heart felt crushed. In their floppy boots, his feet keened in abysmal agony. He suspected that he might soon collapse.
Fear of facing his maker in this circumstance kept him alive, kept him running for his life.
What had he done? What had he done? What had he gotten himself into? You idiot. And not only himself, but Father Joe, too, the former archbishop. If he was caught—they’d check his files. They’d read the letters to Father Joe. His notes. Never had it occurred to him that he’d been incriminating himself—and Father Joe—through his correspondence, but any investigation into his rectory would surrender embarrassing details of their scheme.
His fingerprints. What could be done about his fingerprints? He’d been arrested so often on picket lines or at demonstrations, the cops would find a match. How could he explain this? He’d soon be up on murder charges.
Jogging down Ste. Catherine Street, finally stammering to a stop, he bent over, panting, even as his lungs threatened to tear at the seams. His heart felt like pure, compressed pain unleashed. Oh dear Lord. I need an alibi now. What he did not need was for people to see him on the run. Thank God he was not in his cassock. That would have been a sight. The fat priest in flight down the centre of a public riot. Catching his breath, Father François thanked God for that particular leniency. He had gone to the park in civilian clothes not only because they were his preferred proletarian dress, but because he had intended to commit a profane act—taking possession of stolen property. Now those clothes helped him blend in.
He took note of things, and stopped briefly to counsel the wounded, officers and rioters alike, to not beat up their fellow Quebecers. He knew that he was being an ass, yet they might remember him that way. Both sides told him to go … and engage in activity unbecoming for a priest. Noticing people milling around a burning car, he did his best to shoo them away, in case it exploded. He didn’t want them to kill themselves, but also, who knows, someone might remember him, confirm his innocent presence during the riot.
The grim sight returned to his mind’s eye. Roger Clément, dead. What would he say to his widow? To the poor child, the man’s daughter? He should have squelched the scheme from the outset, but his damn politics, his ambitions, his desire to effect real change—what had that gotten him but the death of a valiant soul, a man trying to do a good deed for his family, his people and his Church? Roger’s adventure had killed him, and his own adventure had made him an accomplice to the murder. Bad enough, but it might have been worse if those fascist bastards had made off with the knife. That it remained stuck in Roger’s heart indicated at least a measure of spiritual justice. The knife had refused to be abducted by men of that ilk.
So, truly, it must be magical.
But now it would incriminate him as the killer. A terrible magic, that.
He went on ahead, to calm down, to give his heart a moment’s ease, and to place a greater distance between himself and the scene of Roger’s murder. There, in a small park, sitting on a bench with his bum up on the ridge of the backrest, the priest spied his alibi. Father François came up behind the man, at first to confirm that he wasn’t seeing a mirage, then to speak to his colleague at sufficient length to dispel any doubt that he had been elsewhere that evening. He would have to be calm, complacent, not the sort of man who’d just fled the scene of a murder. “Pierre?” he spoke up. “I thought that might be you.”
Pierre Elliott Trudeau turned to him, as if annoyed, but in recognizing the man who approached him, his grimace vanished. He said, “Father François. A surprise. How’s it going?”
“Fine, Pierre. Taking in the riot on a midnight stroll?”
“Father, are you blind? I’m sitting here, minding my own business.”
Chuckling, the priest sat down at the opposite end of the bench, on the icy seat portion. He thought this was going well. “I see the potential arsonist in you, Pierre. You’re in the mood to burn down a building. So don’t tell me you’re here as a neutral observer.”
“Observations are neutral? Since when? We see what we want to see, with the slant we prefer. What about you, Father? Packing snowballs with rocks inside? Burning cop cars?”
“Twenty-five minutes ago—like you, I was minding my own business—I was standing alongside a cop car when it burst into flames.”
“Spontaneous combustion?”
“Something similar.” The priest leaned forward. “I singed my jacket.” He had—a month earlier, when he had put it down too close to an electric heater in a restaurant. “My first thought: what happens if the gas tank explodes? I tried moving people away, but on a night like this, people have minds of their own. They insisted on encircling the car, cheering.”
“And you, incognito with no collar on. You could have said Mass.”
“I didn’t expect to be attending to my flock this evening.”
“Didn’t you? You usually listen to hockey games, Father?”
“At this time of year, of course. Not you?”
“Tonight for the first time. But I expected tonight to be different—more than just a game.” Both men were distracted by a momentary roar from the approaching throng. “Sports fans,” Trudeau scoffed. “Their team scored a goal.”
“Another cop car’s been roasted,” the priest surmised.
“An English store window spontaneously shattered.”
The priest eyed the other man closely. He knew him from Cité Libre, but he’d never forget the time he fought Reggie Chartrand during the Asbestos strike. “You’re not curious, Pierre? You’ll walk no closer?”
“They’ll be here soon enough.”
Father François looked around. He wondered if they could not be friends. He knew that Pierre dismissed the harder edges of his political opinion, but he also gauged that he himself was beginning to turn away from those extremes. He did not like violence, and if you were going to be a revolutionary, you had to expect to see most, if not all, of your best friends die. Why had that never occurred to him before?
To his mind, this other man could be the brightest of the current crop of intellectuals in the city. Perhaps he could learn from him, try out a new direction in his life. “Why be confident, Pierre, of where they’ll go? It’s a mob.” The knife had refused to be lifted from Roger’s heart. Already a man of religious conviction, Father François felt himself on the verge of a deeper conversion. The knife—was it really possessed by magic, not merely lore, not merely historic and cultural significance? “Without a destination. It could turn off anywhere, slide away in any direction.”
“Why trouble myself by finding the riot,” Trudeau remarked, a nod indicating Morgan’s department store, “when I can sit here in a front-row seat and the riot will find me?”
“Then you’ll agree, Pierre, that this evening has nothing to do with hockey.” He, for one, had found God. Had he not?
“Hockey is the flashpoint. But there’s more to it. This mob will start selecting targets. When it does, it’ll discover its raison d'être. Watch. Our rioters will educate themselves as they go. That’s already happened, or they would never have bypassed the National Hockey League offices.”
“They don’t know where the offices are.”
“Just as well.”
“I’m serious,” the priest reiterated. “Someone asked me if I knew where the league office was located. He had a brick in one hand, a b
eer in the other. I almost answered him before I thought better of it. I offered him a smoke.”
“Good of you.”
“I traded. A smoke for the brick.” “Quick thinking.”
“It’s hard to get rid of a brick on a night like this. I stuffed it in a mailbox.”
The story, a lie, marked him as experienced in the riot, and his companion of the moment might remember it. But he began to relax into the conversation, moving from the world of treachery back to his safer precepts. He could share the experience of the night now with someone else, and he was grateful for that, even as his heart, arrhythmic with the memory of Roger’s ecstatic death, beat heavily.
They ran through the muddle and the maze, ran through the dancing teenagers and the car fires and the gauntlet of beer bottles flying over their heads and the spectacle of objects being tossed at store windows, followed by the cheers whenever a huge sheet of glass shattered. A nightmare scenario, and their running caused others to flee, as if they must know something others did not. They did. They knew they’d been complicit in a murder, and even the famous ex-mayor of Montreal ran.
Down Ste. Catherine Street they went, safe in the bosom of the mob, secure amid the tempest. When they turned off the main artery, it was to catch their breath, to gasp, bent over, clasping their bellies, and to look around, to see if they were being chased. They were not being chased. Yet each man felt himself pursued. The eminent young psychiatrist, Dr. Camille Laurin, had not signed on for any such activity, never murder, nothing so blatant and horrific, but his mind raced. He knew that he could not allow the charges to stand. He would not give himself up to face public rebuke. His medical practice and achievements, his political ambitions, his distinguished station in life, all would be lost by any suggestion that he’d participated in the terrible act, and so he ran.
Michel Mendelssohn Vimont also ran hard. After a difficult youth and a sampling of jail time, he followed the straight and narrow, within reason, yet knew that he worked among powerful men. If they needed a fall guy, he’d be the chosen one. The man with the peculiar middle name. He was the one to hang on a cross. The ex-con—snag him! Wasn’t he Clément’s good friend? Some grievance must have come between them. And so, knowing how the system worked, how the powerful could ally themselves against the weak, Vimont ran. He ran hard.
His heart ached for Roger.
The former mayor kept running, too. If he stopped, people would point at him and say, “It’s you! It’s Houde! Camillien!” The world would know that he’d been there, at least close by the scene, as they called it, of the crime. He had done this for his legacy, and now he was running for whatever remained of his life. He didn’t want anything now—no tributes, no consolations, no apologies from the electorate, no revenge. All he desired was exoneration from this crime, this killing. He did not want that death attached to his good name. He ran.
De Bernonville ran as well, mightily pleased with himself. He was pleased to be killing again. That guy Clément, he’d seen him in Asbestos, working for everybody and nobody. Working for himself, de Bernonville deduced, while everyone assumed him to be their lackey. He didn’t care whether Clément had something planned or what it might be. All of them were political dilettantes, safe in their privileged Quebec, whining about this or that. Who had it so good, really? They needed to be taught that life required action, and he was a man of action. He needed them to grasp what it meant to have blood on their hands. They wouldn’t be so pompous with him now. Now, when he said “Money,” they’d know that he meant money. Pay up. On the spot. To me. Their precious knife. They probably secretly wanted to keep it locked in some obscure vault, taking it out for an occasional covert banquet and to bow to its presence, then use it to slaughter a calf. They didn’t want to keep it now, did they? If they got it back they’d beg him to sell it, and quickly. They’d want to get rid of it, and that meant converting the relic into money. Brilliant, he thought, congratulating himself. Killing that guy was genius. Despite that one dire quirk of fate. How was he supposed to know the blade would get stuck in his breastplate?
What he had to do now was escape the police on this night, not get caught, and recover the knife. Unlike the others, he was already an unwanted citizen—on the run, an illegal alien, and officially an undesirable. So, first, he had to escape. He ran.
They had preconceived no meeting place, no destination, yet, exhausted and confused, they regrouped at the Caddy. As if each man, following the strains of his particular logic, had determined that they had yet to be together, that they had matters to resolve and restore.
Michel Vimont was the last to show up. Perhaps he only wanted the car, and was not pleased that the others had gathered.
“Good,” de Bernonville dispatched. “We have a set of keys.” Vimont unlocked the doors and they all trundled in. De Bernonville made his case immediately. “We have to go back. We have to get the knife.”
“Are you out of your mind? This man’s a lunatic.” Houde attested. “The place will be crawling with cops. The cops, Count, the cops have the knife! Not us, thanks to you. We had it in our hands. You killed my friend and now you’ve lost the knife. You shit!”
“Stay with the plan,” de Bernonville advised. “We came out tonight to get the knife. We’ll get it.”
“How do you propose we do that?” asked Laurin, either remarkably calm or in shock.
“Follow the knife. They’re only cops. By definition, that means they’re sloppy. They won’t expect anything to happen, and they’re all confused tonight—they have a lot going on. You’re right, Mr. Mayor, cops are on the scene. But people don’t get to see a dead man every day, they will swarm around, they’ll gawk. One of us will be there, pretending to just gawk.”
“Not me!” Houde shot in, still sulking. “Oh, you don’t mind. You live in some fucking jungle in Brazil with Eichmann and those Nazis. You don’t worry about what goes on up here. But I live here. I am known here. I am the mayor of Montreal, for God’s sake.”
“You used to be the mayor.”
“Fuck you, you fucker!”
“Take it easy.”
“You take it easy! You creep. You didn’t need to do that. I’m not a murderer like you.”
“Oh, but now you are,” de Bernonville corrected him. “Fuck you!”
“Okay. So we follow the knife,” Laurin interjected.
“Camille, don’t listen to the bastard,” Houde pressed him. “You saw what he did. He’s a fucking maniac.”
“My fingerprints are on that knife,” Laurin reminded him. “Oh God,” Houde moaned. “So are mine.”
“That’s what I wanted,” de Bernonville let them know. “A sense of liability. A commitment to the cause.”
Houde punched the dash and rocked in the front seat. He’d gotten into the front with Vimont because he couldn’t stand the idea of sitting beside de Bernonville. Now he wanted to be in the back to pummel him.
“Don’t listen to him, Camille. He’s a maniac asshole. You saw him.”
“We follow the knife,” Laurin repeated.
“We’ll see where that leads us,” de Bernonville directed them all. “Play it by ear. I’ve seen how cops work in this city—it’s the same as everywhere else. They’re slow. They’ll take their time. At some moment, somebody will think to do something with the murder weapon. We’ll be on hand to see that. Then we’ll act.”
“Act? What does it mean when you say ‘act'? Kill somebody?”
“I’m sure it won’t be necessary, Mr. Mayor. The appearance of force may be necessary, but—”
Houde spun around in his seat to address Laurin. “Do you hear what this guy is saying? Do you understand what he’s talking about?”
“No further violence, he’s saying.”
“That’s not what he’s talking about.”
“Mr. Mayor,” Laurin pointed out to him, speaking ever in a flat, emotionless voice, “my prints are on that knife. As are yours. If I am discovered, I will not be the only one.
”
That brought everyone in the car to a point of silence, and a choice hung in the balance.
Vimont understood his own stake in this now. “My prints are on it, too. And the cops have my prints on file.”
Houde cleared his throat. He whispered, “Will you sell us out, Michel?”
“To stay out of prison?” Vimont answered. He let them deduce the answer for themselves.
“All right,” Houde said. “We’ll check it out. If there’s an opportunity to seize the knife, then okay. But only if there is a clean, safe opportunity. There’s no point for us to go to prison.”
“If I go, you go,” Laurin stated flatly.
“There’s no need for that,” Houde pleaded, but he had no hope of convincing anyone.
An ambulance raced past them.
“It’ll be the same as when we were on foot. The cops are preoccupied with everything going on. Michel will drive us to our freedom. He’s a calm man, I can tell. A man of few words. I like that. A man of action. I misspoke before, sir, when you could not pull out the knife. I tried myself. It was impossible.”
Vimont listened to him, but did not speak. He did not turn his head around. His eyes moved between the rear-view mirror and the front windshield.
“So who goes? Into the park, I mean?” Laurin asked.
“Michel should go,” Houde suggested.
The driver turned his head slightly. Nothing more.
“We need Michel to be behind the wheel of this car,” de Bernonville said.
“Then you go,” Houde told him.
“If we have to go after someone, with Michel driving, I will have to be in the car. You never know. We might have to act quickly.”
“I can’t go,” Houde objected, fearing that the task might fall upon him. “I’ll be recognized. I can’t stand around in a crowd.”
“I’ll go,” Laurin offered.
“Yes,” de Bernonville agreed. “That’s best.”
They moved the car closer to Dominion Square and parked. Laurin got out and looked around, bundled himself up more tightly in his coat, then moved off into the park to investigate the commotion there, down by the Burns statue. Police cars had their lights on, and a crowd milled around.
