by Giles Blunt
“Next job I get, I want to be sure I’m actually helping people. No more of this keep-everybody-in-the-dark business for me. If that’s what Ottawa wants, they’re not going to have me to help them do it anymore.”
Cardinal thought Squier was actually going to salute, but he only adjusted the buttons on his overcoat and shook hands one last time.
“Keep fighting the good fight,” he said. And then he was gone.
Cardinal waited a few moments, then went down to Delorme’s room and knocked on the door. Delorme answered it, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, her hair still wet from the shower.
“What’s going on?” she said. “I thought we were going to meet later for dinner.”
“Calvin Squier, formerly of Canadian Security Intelligence, wants to kiss and make up.” Cardinal held up the videotape. “He came bearing gifts.”
“Great. What are we going to watch it on?”
They drove back to RCMP headquarters. Sergeant Ducharme had left for the day, and that turned out to be problematic. The young Mountie at the front desk wasn’t in a hurry to grant admittance to police officers from other provinces, not to mention other agencies. After consulting not one but two superior officers, he called Sergeant Ducharme at home and got the green light.
There was a lengthy search of empty offices. Cardinal and Delorme were finally set up in an interview room with a TV and VCR. The videotape was just under half an hour, and when it was done, Delorme turned to Cardinal and said, “Looks like your CSIS man came through for once.”
“I take back everything I said. Let’s go eat, and I’ll be happy to raise a glass to Calvin Squier.”
Twenty minutes later they were sitting in a booth in the Embassy Restaurant on Peel Street. Just as “hotel” was too grand a word for the Regent, so “restaurant” turned out to be too grand for the Embassy. Yes, it had tablecloths and banquettes. It had a hostess, and dim lights, and waitresses wearing slinky outfits, and a sign saying Please Wait to be Seated. But everything else about the place—from the menu to the vinyl upholstery to the coffin-size aquariums devoid of fish—screamed greasy spoon.
“What do you suppose happened to the goldfish?” Delorme said as they examined menus.
“Probably went to a better restaurant,” Cardinal said. “Are you okay with this or do you want to go somewhere else?”
“I’m tired and starving. Let’s stay here.”
“Do you know what you want? I’m going to have a steak.”
“I’m going to have the seafood special.”
“I’d be careful. It might be a lot of little goldfish.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to have plenty of beer with it.”
They ordered from a hostile young woman whose goals in life did not include waitressing. Cardinal was just glad she addressed them in English.
When the beers arrived, Cardinal took a sip of his Labatt’s and frowned at the bottle. “Tastes funny.”
“They make it different for the Quebec market.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because French Canadians have more subtle, sophisticated tastes.”
“Oh, sure. Famous for it.”
Delorme made a face at him. She had left her hair untied so that it fell in thick, curly waves to her shoulders, and she was wearing a red T-shirt that looked a lot better than any T-shirt has a right to look. There was a tiny black cat embroidered over her sternum.
When their food came, it turned out to be surprisingly good. Cardinal’s steak was tender, and cooked exactly medium-rare, the way he liked it. And the expression on Delorme’s face was a transparent register of delight.
“Seafood’s okay?”
“Okay? It’s wonderful.”
The good food cheered them up. As they ate, they talked about the ground they had covered that day and what they hoped to cover the next. They still had no clear motive for Shackley’s murder, but if luck turned out to be on their side the next day, one might emerge. After a while they moved on to more personal topics. Cardinal asked after a boyfriend Delorme had mentioned once or twice.
“Eric—wasn’t that his name? Sounded like a nice guy from what you told me.”
“Oh, yes, he was a very nice guy—except he thought he could screw everything in sight. Sometimes I can see why women become lesbians.”
There was a pause. Delorme looked away a moment, then leaned forward a little. “John, we’ve never talked about it since you nearly resigned last year, but I’m just asking as a friend: are you still getting pressure from Rick Bouchard and company?”
“A little.”
“I knew it. What’s going on?”
“He sent a card. He has my home address.”
“Your home? What are you going to do?”
“Bouchard still has some time to run on his sentence. I can always hope he screws up and gets a few years tacked on.”
“You can’t count on that, though.”
“Then there’s the blowhard factor. He’s been in prison twelve years. Is he really going to risk going back there by coming after me? Chances are it’s just jailhouse bravado.”
“I hope so. Let me know if I can do anything.”
“Thanks, Lise. Can we change the subject now?”
“What shall we talk about?”
“Tell me about your worst date ever.”
“Oh, that’s hard. There’s been so many.”
Delorme launched into a story about a blind date with a hot rodder that started out with a speeding ticket and ended with a flat tire in the pouring rain. Throughout dinner, Cardinal couldn’t help noticing how different Delorme was, off the job. She had a wonderfully expressive face. Around the station, she conducted herself with a brusque efficiency that kept people at arm’s length and was also tough to read. But now, after-hours and in another city, she let her guard down. Her gestures became more emphatic—eyes bulging as she described the ride with her hot rodder, voice dipping down to a doofus drawl as she recounted things he’d said. Cardinal was touched that she was revealing to him a side that was more emotional, more feminine and maybe, he thought, more French.
After the plates had been cleared away, the two of them sat quietly.
“You want another beer?” Cardinal said.
Delorme shrugged, breasts momentarily emphasized. She flagged the waitress across the room. “I’ll have another beer. And another Labatt’s for my father?”
When they got back to the hotel, one of the girls behind the front desk called them over. She spoke French.
“Ms. Delorme, I’m so sorry, but there has been a problem. A pipe has burst on the ground floor and flooded all the rooms. I’m afraid it won’t be possible for you to stay in that room.”
“That’s fine. Put me somewhere else.”
“That’s the problem. We are completely full. There are no other rooms.”
“Did you get that?” Delorme said to Cardinal.
“More or less.”
“I swear, next time I’m staying at the Queen Elizabeth.”
She turned back to the desk clerk, speaking once more in French. Cardinal didn’t catch all of it, but he noted with admiration that Delorme did not lose her temper or raise her voice, even when the bad news got worse.
She turned to Cardinal once more. “There’s a Holiday Inn about two kilometres from here. They’ll pay for me to stay there.”
“Are you sure you don’t have anything else?” Cardinal said to the receptionist. “Surely in the entire hotel …”
The girl’s reply was heavily accented. “Normally, yes, it would not be a problem. But tonight we have a high-school hockey team taking up an entire floor. I’m sorry.”
Cardinal’s heart went out to Delorme. Suddenly she was looking very small and tired.
“Why don’t you stay in my room?” he said. “I’ll go to the Holiday Inn.”
“No way. I’m not going to put you out.”
“Well, the other option is, we both stay in my room. It’s got two do
uble beds in it.”
Delorme shook her head.
“We can be grown-ups about it,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to jump you.”
“And have the whole department making jokes? No, thank you.”
“Who’s going to know? I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“I should go somewhere else.”
“It’s been a long day. You’re tired. And we want to make an early start in the morning. Stay in my room.”
“So help me, John, if you tell anyone—and I mean anyone—I will never speak to you again.”
Cardinal got into bed while Delorme was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. He wanted to call Catherine but felt too weird with Delorme around. He pulled out a paperback and forced himself to read a few pages.
When the bathroom door opened, he kept his gaze firmly on the book, but he could see out of the corner of his eye that Delorme was still dressed. He rolled onto his side, facing away, and then there was the sound of her undressing, the zipper of her jeans.
A deep sigh as she got into bed. The room was overheated; what would she be wearing under those covers?
Cardinal turned once more onto his back and wondered what to say. He certainly didn’t want to say anything too personal, anything that might be construed as provocative, but he didn’t feel like going back to the case, either. Was Delorme experiencing anything remotely similar? Was she wondering what to say? Imagining things?
As if by way of answer, Delorme turned her back to him and switched off her light.
Of course, that could be open to interpretation. Was she hoping he would make a move? Lovely, the way her hair spilled in curls on the pillow behind her, the rise of her hip beneath the covers.
She’d called him her father at dinner. Put me in my place, Cardinal thought, reminding him of the twelve-odd years between them. He switched off his own light and resolved not to think about her anymore.
It didn’t work, and he lay awake for a long time.
Delorme was up and fully dressed before the wake-up call roused Cardinal.
“I’ll be in the coffee shop,” she said, and then she was gone.
They drove out to the Eastern Townships and down the corduroy road that led to Sauvé’s place. The sun had come out, and a stiff wind blew off the surrounding farmland. The fields resembled a swamp, glinting like metal in the sunlight. Cardinal made a couple of calls on his cellphone to the British consulate. An intensely polite young woman said she would make the necessary inquiries and someone would call him back shortly.
“You okay?” Delorme asked at one point. “You seem a little grumpy.”
“Tired,” Cardinal said. “I didn’t sleep well.”
“Really? I slept fine.”
Cardinal wondered if she was trying to rub it in, her complete physical indifference to him. But more likely she was just stating a fact: physical attraction had not entered her head.
They pulled into Sauvé’s drive, blocking Sauvé himself, who was just backing out. He leaned on his horn, sending crows and blue jays flapping from the trees. When Cardinal didn’t move, Sauvé threw open his truck door and came lurching toward them. “I told you, I’ve got nothing to say to the Mounties, the Sûreté, or any other police. Now get the hell out of my driveway.”
“Mr. Sauvé, do you have a VCR? We brought one along in case you don’t.”
The interior of Sauvé’s house was in even worse shape than its owner. Plastic sheeting flapped at the windows in a vain attempt to keep the Quebec winter outside. One wall of the living room was nothing more than struts. Bits of drywall were strewn across the hallway. In the living room there was a lumpy sofa covered with a woollen blanket, where Cardinal and Delorme sat. Sauvé occupied an armchair that spewed stuffing from one arm. A black cat with bald patches prowled around his feet.
Sauvé had a Molson in his hand, and sat crookedly in the chair so that he could focus on the television with his good eye. The tape had been shot at night, from several different angles in a parking lot. It showed Sauvé getting out of his truck and unloading boxes labelled Department of Transport. Two men got out of a van and examined the boxes before handing him an envelope. Sauvé drove off while they were loading the boxes into their van. When the tape was over, Sauvé hurled his beer across the room, shattering it against a wall. The smell of hops filled the air, mixing with the smell of mildew.
“Certain parties are willing to forget this episode,” Cardinal said, “provided you co-operate with our investigation. And of course provided you cease and desist selling explosives to the French Self-Defence League.”
Sauvé rubbed the bristles on his cheeks. Three fingers were missing from his hand. His eye was a drill hole of pure anger. “Tell me something, Detective. Do you really imagine there’s a lot of difference between the Mounties and the people you put behind bars?”
“So far, I don’t know any Mounties who have fed their murder victims to the bears. But I lead a sheltered life.”
“Miles Shackley came up to Algonquin Bay a few days ago,” Delorme said. “We think you might know why.”
“Well, guess what, sister? I don’t. I haven’t seen Miles Shackley in over thirty years.”
“And yet he called you three weeks ago. Why would that be?”
“He was an old spook and he didn’t take well to retirement, okay? He was feeling nostalgic, calling old friends. Going over old ground. Trading war stories. Why shouldn’t he call me?”
“You worked together at the CAT Squad, correct?”
“Yes. And our assignment was to cultivate informers in the FLQ. So we did.”
“And the two of you worked with Lieutenant Fougère?”
“Not at first. I worked with Fougère after he fucked up. Oh, excuse me, was I speaking ill of the dead? I’m so sorry. Lieutenant Fougère came up with the brilliant idea of Operation Coquette. Mostly because he was screwing the coquette.”
“You’re referring to Simone Rouault now?”
“Yeah. Complete slut. Fougère recruits his girlfriend to infiltrate the FLQ and spends the first three months getting her to cozy up to a guy named Claude Hibert. Only one problem: Claude Hibert happened to be my informer.”
“He was already working for the CAT Squad?”
“He was my informer—from before I joined the CAT Squad. He’d been mine for eighteen months. Fougère and his putain wasted months. So me and Shackley had to take him in hand. Shackley was CIA and a really stand-up guy. One of the few people in the world you could actually count on. When we formed the combined anti-terrorist force, he volunteered to join. Didn’t have to. He had a cushy assignment in New York before that.
“And resourceful, this guy. Not like Fougère. Shackley came to us, he already had an agent in place. CIA rules were, he wasn’t supposed to share with us exactly who it was or where it was. He could share the goods, and rate them for likely accuracy, but the rest was strictly need-to-know.”
“But you needed to know, obviously. Otherwise you risked making the same mistake as Fougère.”
“Tell it to Langley. In the end it didn’t matter, because Shackley and Langley didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. He told me who his man on the spot was: an individual named Yves Grenelle.”
“Did Yves Grenelle kill Raoul Duquette?”
“Read your files. Daniel Lemoyne and Bernard Theroux killed Raoul Duquette. They confessed to it.”
Cardinal stood up. “All right. You’re clearly in a hurry to go back to prison. Selling explosives to a terrorist group, that should be good for at least another eight years. And of course, as an ex-cop you’ll be popular in the cell block.”
“I’m telling you the truth. Lemoyne and Theroux—”
“Everyone knows they confessed to killing Duquette. We also know there was such a thing as cell solidarity. That whoever got caught would take the fall, and whoever got away got away. Yves Grenelle got away, right?”
“Yeah, he got away. So what?”
“And he was Shack
ley’s agent, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, he was Shackley’s. So what?”
“And he killed Duquette. Didn’t he?”
“If he did, I had nothing to do with it.”
“But maybe Shackley did. Suddenly, in the middle of the October Crisis, the entire CAT Squad was hot to find Shackley. Why?”
“Maybe because he played a rough game. He didn’t pussyfoot around.”
“Meaning what? That Grenelle was more than an informer? He was a provocateur, wasn’t he. Just like Simone Rouault. Committing more crimes than he was stopping?”
“What if he was?”
“Well, if Detective Fougère had his girlfriend robbing oil companies and planting bombs, I imagine Miles Shackley’s man was capable of a lot more. Like killing Raoul Duquette.”
Sauvé shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“That couldn’t have been CIA policy. How’s it in their interest to foment insurrection in a friendly neighbour?”
“You’re right. The CIA would never do a thing like that. Any Chilean will tell you that. Or you could ask the grateful Guatemalans.”
“You’re saying that was their policy?”
“Jesus. They don’t grow them subtle in Ontario, do they? For the record, No, I do not think it was CIA policy to foment insurrection in Canada. Not official policy.”
“But?”
“No but. End of story.”
“How do you think that tape’s going to play on the six o’clock news? Shall we find out?”
“All right, for Christ’s sake! You’re asking me things I can’t possibly know! Unofficial CIA policy? Super-secret covert operations? How am I supposed to know? I was a Mountie, for Chrissake. If you want to know what I think, I’ll tell you that for free. But it’s only hearsay and guesswork, and the only reason I’m in a position to do that is because Shackley and I were tight. We got close because we were both black sheep and we both liked to get the job done.”
“Fine. We’re listening.”
Sauvé let out a deep sigh. He began to speak in a monotone, as if he had lectured on the subject many times. “The U.S. under Nixon was extremely irritated with Canada. First, we suggest they lift the embargo on Cuba. The Yanks are nuts on the subject of Cuba. Second, we take in Vietnam draft dodgers by the planeload—not guaranteed to win us love and understanding in Washington. Third, it’s the height of the Cold War, and Trudeau declares us a nuclear-free zone. Nuclear-free! It’s not as if we were maintaining a real army. The States spend billions on defence and they see us taking a free ride. And fourth, Trudeau’s hair is too long. You think I’m joking, but it’s Richard Milhous Nixon we’re talking about, Nature’s own Master of Paranoia.
