A Little More Free

by John McFetridge

  “There’s a lot piled on the first floor,” Bantey said, “it looks like they opened the door accidentally and set off the alarm before they’d loaded everything. They just grabbed what they could then and ran.”

  Miss McIntosh said, “How did they get in?”

  Bantey pointed up and said, “Looks like the skylight.”

  “But what about the alarm?”

  “It was turned off during the repairs.”

  “They knew that? Someone told them?”

  Bantey looked at the detectives and then back to Miss McIntosh and said, “I can’t imagine that, we think it might have been someone on the construction crew. If it had been someone from the museum, as unthinkable as that is, then they would have known about the alarm on the door.”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll have to figure out exactly what’s missing, come on.”

  Bantey and Miss McIntosh left then and Dougherty stepped up to the Night Patrol detectives and said, “C’est vrai ça, à propos de l’alarme?”

  The detective shrugged and said, “Maybe. But maybe they did get what they wanted and set off the alarm so it wouldn’t look like an inside job.”

  Dougherty said yeah and realized he wouldn’t have thought of that.

  Then one detective said, “Go outside and see how they got on the roof.”

  There were more cars by the loading dock then: Dougherty recognized a couple of reporters standing with Duclos and then he saw a van from CBC Radio setting up.

  Next to the museum was a church and in the lane between the two buildings Dougherty found a ladder, probably left by the construction crew, and was able to lean it against the building and climb up. On the roof he walked towards the skylight and saw something he recognized — the same boot picks his father used to climb poles to install telephones. Dougherty walked back to the edge of the building and saw that the big tree was close enough for a guy to have climbed and then jumped to the roof. Then he could have put down the ladder and all three would be up.

  Back at the skylight Dougherty realized it had been opened — not broken — and that a tarp was over part of it.

  He went back in and told the detectives what he’d found.

  A couple hours later Bantey and Miss McIntosh held a press conference on the front steps of the museum, a Beaux Arts building Dougherty had found out from a reporter, and they had a list of what had been stolen — eighteen paintings and thirty-nine pieces of jewellery and silver. The quick estimated value was about two million dollars. One of the paintings, which Bantey described as a “landscape oil, Evening Landscape with Cottages, by Rembrandt,” was valued at a million dollars.

  Dougherty was back at Station Ten a little after nine a.m. and told the desk sergeant he was checking out and he’d write up his reports later. It was Sunday morning and Dougherty was starting two days off before coming back for two weeks of day shifts.

  The desk sergeant said, “The reports have to be handed in by this time tomorrow morning,” and Dougherty said okay, but he’d still do them later.

  When he’d first started working shifts the older cop who was training Dougherty, Gauthier, had said that when going from nights to days, the thing to do was stay up all day after finishing an overnight and go to bed as late as possible. Gauthier had laughed saying, “When I was your age that was eleven o’clock or midnight. Now I make it to eight, I’m lucky.”

  So Dougherty had some breakfast and went home and did some laundry and in the afternoon drove across the Champlain Bridge to Greenfield Park for dinner with his parents. As he pulled off the main drag, Taschereau Boulevard, into the suburb, he saw the Burger Ranch was closed and he thought that was too bad. It had been a kind of California-style drive-in, one of the first places Dougherty had gone when he got his driver’s licence in his last year of high school. He didn’t know many of the other kids there — his parents had only recently moved into the red-brick duplex in the subdivision and he was finishing high school on the island of Montreal in Verdun, but he met a few people that night.

  Less than ten years ago and already it seemed like another era, a distant memory.

  As he drove up Patricia Street, Dougherty saw his little brother, Tommy, and some other boys playing road hockey and heard one of them shout, “Car,” as they pulled the nets to the curb to let him pass. He parked in front of the house on the corner, got out and heard one of the kids say, “All right, I’ll be goalie, I’ll be Tretiak,” and he thought, Shit, one game and the kids want to be the Russians. Wait till they lose the next seven.

  Going into the house, Dougherty realized it was Tommy being the Soviet goalie.

  The first thing his mother said, standing in the kitchen with a dish towel in her hand, was, “Those poor people.” She looked tired, her face drawn and her shoulders slumped.

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, it’s terrible.”

  “A fire like that is the worse.” Her French accent was heavier than usual, she was so upset.

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, it is,” and she said, “All those people.”

  Then Dougherty’s father came up the stairs from the basement, saying, “Son, maybe you can give me a hand,” and Dougherty said sure.

  In the unfinished workshop half of the basement Dougherty’s father had the vacuum cleaner taken apart, and he said, “If you could just hold this wire while I get the screw in.”

  He didn’t really need the help, of course, Dougherty knew that, and after a couple of minutes without either of them saying anything Dougherty realized that was the plan — a few minutes without talking.

  When the new wires were spliced in, Dougherty’s father thanked him and closed up the vacuum cleaner. Then he said, “You haven’t had a minute to yourself, have you?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “You get a drink with the other cops?”

  “We watched the game.”

  “That’s good.”

  Dougherty said yeah. He watched his father wind the cord and put the vacuum down beside the furnace and then he said, “I don’t know how I’m going to sleep when it’s dark.”

  His father said, “I know.”

  Neither one of them made a move to go upstairs. Dougherty wanted to say something but he couldn’t come up with anything, and then his father pulled his pack of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his shirt and held it out.

  Dougherty took the smoke, and they both lit up.

  Then his father said, “It never goes away. After a while it’s not the last thing you think about when the lights go out.”

  Dougherty said, “You saw a lot of guys killed, didn’t you?”

  “Well, D-Day, yeah.”

  Dougherty didn’t say anything and then his father said, “But before that, a few times. The Charlottetown, a Corvette I was on, sunk by a U-Boat.”

  “In the North Atlantic?”

  Dougherty’s father smiled and said, “No, just off Gaspé, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. We were only going from Quebec City to Sydney, Nova Scotia.” He paused for a moment and Dougherty waited — his father hardly ever talked about his experiences during the war and Dougherty realized he’d never really been interested before. He was a little ashamed of that but he just stood and waited, and finally his father said, “A torpedo hit us.”

  Dougherty had been expecting more and he looked a little surprised. His father said, “It was dark, we weren’t expecting it. Torpedo hit and the explosion lit up the sky.” His father shrugged a little and said, “Split the hull right down the middle. The ship just broke apart — guys were jumping off grabbing whatever they could.” He paused and motioned with his hands and then turned them palms up and said, “The rest of the convoy went after the U-Boat. Never did get it.”

  “How long were you in the water?”

  “A few hours, till the sun came up. It was a few more hours before we found o
ut we lost eight men.”

  Dougherty didn’t say anything, he just nodded and his father said, “Eight guys you knew, spent every minute with.”

  “Yeah.”

  “More after that, every time a convoy got hit, a few times in the North Atlantic.”

  “When I went into the Wagon Wheel,” Dougherty said, “I saw the bodies under the tables. They looked like they were passed out.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Dougherty said yeah. “Some of them, you know, looked a little like Cheryl.”

  “I don’t think she likes country music.”

  “Yeah, but …” and Dougherty realized it was a joke, a little gallows humour from his dad. Sure, his sister, Cheryl, twenty years old and still playing hippie music, still listening to Janis Joplin and Neil Young.

  But the fire could’ve been in the Laugh-In or the Yellow Door or any club. It could’ve been in one where Cheryl and her friends were hanging out — Dougherty knew that and his father knew that.

  Then Dougherty’s mother was calling them for dinner and he and his father looked at each other and didn’t say anything else, they just went upstairs. In the kitchen his mother said, “Édouard, vas chercher Tommy,” so Dougherty went out onto the front steps and saw the kids had stopped playing hockey and a couple were sitting on the curb and a couple of others were standing on the street holding their sticks like guitars, pretending to play.

  Dougherty called for Tommy and his little brother stood up, grabbed his stick and ran into the house. As soon as he got in he said, “Are you working the Forum tomorrow night?” and Dougherty said, “No, why?”

  “The Alice Cooper concert.”

  “You want to see that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  Tommy was past him and inside by then, shoes and coat off and sitting down at the kitchen table.

  Dougherty said, “Where’s Cheryl?” and his father gave him a look so he dropped it.

  During dinner Tommy told them he was going to buy the new Jethro Tull album, Thick as a Brick — he heard it at Timmy Keays’s house and it was better than Aqualung. Dougherty said, “Better than Aqualung?” and it took Tommy a couple of seconds to realize Dougherty was making a joke.

  Then Dougherty said, “Are you going to watch the game?”

  Tommy said, “You think the Soviets will win all eight?”

  Dougherty gave his father a kids today look, shook his head and motioned to Tommy.

  After dinner Tommy went into the basement, and a few minutes later his mother yelled at him to turn down the music, and Dougherty couldn’t tell if he did or if the next song was just a little softer.

  As soon as he could leave without looking like he was running off, Dougherty said he’d been up for over twenty-four hours and needed to get some sleep to start his day shifts and he left. It wasn’t quite nine and he knew there was no way he’d fall asleep when he got home, no matter how tired he was, but he didn’t know what to do so he stopped at the Fina station on Taschereau and got some gas and drove around.

  He drove for a few hours, expressways mostly, and bridges, the Champlain, Jacques-Cartier, Victoria. He drove until the sun was coming up and then went home and fell asleep for a few minutes at a time all day.

  Monday evening Dougherty went back to the Maidenhead tavern and watched Canada win the second game in the series 4–1 in Toronto. So much for either side winning eight games. Dougherty figured at least now it looked like it might be a series. Duclos had been right, the bubble had burst, the amateur Soviets were as good as the Canadian professionals, now they’d have to see who wanted it more, as the cliché went.

  When he left the Alexis Nihon plaza Dougherty walked across the street to the Forum and asked the cop by the loading dock how Alice Cooper was doing, and the guy said, “Y’a pas encore commencé.”

  Dougherty went inside and spoke to another cop who was standing in the hallway outside the dressing rooms who said, “Il regardait la partie,” and Dougherty said, “Guy wearing makeup, with that hair, wearing nylons and those boots? He’s got a snake around his neck and he’s watching the hockey game?”

  “Apparently he’s from Detroit.”

  Dougherty was thinking he’d grab a program or something for Tommy but he didn’t see anything like that. He tried to hang around to see a little of the show so he could at least tell his little brother what it was like but the noise was too much. Maybe it was the bad sound in the Forum, but it didn’t sound like music to Dougherty.

  School’s out, forever.

  Tuesday the funerals started for victims of the fire, and late in the afternoon Dougherty was sitting on a stool at a lunch counter on St. Matthew finishing a souvlaki and watching the small TV on a shelf above the cash.

  Pete Spirodakis was standing behind the counter, a white apron around his waist and a little paper hat on his head, and he was saying, “Can you believe this? And we’re next.”

  Dougherty said, “What do you mean?” On TV was the scene at the Olympic Village in Munich. Some Israeli athletes had been taken hostage and cops and military guys were everywhere.

  Pete said, “We’re the next Olympics, in ’76, this’ll be going on here.”

  “You don’t think it’ll be all over by then?”

  Pete laughed and said, “What, the Middle East? You’ve never been, have you?”

  “No.”

  “How’s it going in Ireland?” Pete said. “That all over now?”

  “I don’t know,” Dougherty said. “I’ve never been there, either.”

  “You gotta see more of the world.”

  “Not if it’s all like that.”

  Pete said, “It’s not like that all the time.” Then he looked up at the TV and said, “But you will be busy when that’s happening here.”

  “If I’m still here.”

  “Ha, you’ll still be on that stool — where do you have to go?”

  “That’s true.”

  Pete poured more coffee into Dougherty’s mug and then went back to looking at the TV. The screen showed what looked like an apartment building, a window on the second floor, a guy wearing a white undershirt talking to someone on the ground.

  Then a guy beside him in the window said something and was clubbed with the butt of a rifle.

  Pete said, “AK-47.”

  Now the TV cameras were showing a man on the balcony, wearing what looked like a homemade ski mask. He stood on the balcony for a minute, looked down over the edge and then went back inside.

  Dougherty said, “When did this happen?”

  “This morning,” Pete said. “They’ve been showing this all day.”

  An older guy came out of the kitchen then, shorter than Pete and wider, a fringe of hair around his bald spot, and he said something in Greek, waving his hands, and Pete said something in Greek and they went back and forth a bit. Then the older guy went back into the kitchen and Pete looked at Dougherty and said, “You’re lucky you don’t have to work with your father.”

  Dougherty said, “You like it,” and Pete smiled a little and said, “Sometimes, yeah.”

  Then as Pete went and got a big bag of sugar and filled up the glass jars with the silver tops and little flaps over the spouts, Dougherty watched the TV reporters — sports reporters because that’s who was covering the Olympics — explain that very soon the hostages and the kidnappers would be transported by helicopter to a nearby NATO air base where they’d get on a plane and travel to Cairo. The kidnappers had demanded the release of 234 prisoners being held in Israel and two members of the Red Army Faction being held in Germany, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.

  Dougherty lit a cigarette and dropped the match in the ashtray on the counter.

  Pete said, “You think they’re really going to let all the prisoners go?” and Dougherty said, “I don’t know.” />
  Then Pete said, “How many did the FLQ want released here, thirty?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Bank robbers mostly, weren’t they?”

  “Guy who made the bombs,” Dougherty said, “couple guys who killed the two clerks at the sporting goods store on Bleury.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember, they were robbing the place, shotguns and hunting rifles.”

  Dougherty watched the TV and Pete put a piece of pie down on the counter in front of him. Dougherty said, “Oh, no, that’s okay.” and Pete said, “On the house.”

  The two of them drank coffee and watched the TV until a reporter said that the German forces had attacked the kidnappers at the air base and freed all the hostages.

  Pete said, “All right, this calls for a celebration, where you going tonight?”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Oh, come on, you need to go out and get a drink. Where do you go, the Cock ’n’ Bull?”

  “No.”

  “They had their amateur night last night,” Pete said, “did you hear about it?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “Turned into a wake, you know, for the people at the Wagon Wheel, went on all night, some of them came in here this morning when I opened up.”

  Dougherty nodded but didn’t say anything and then Pete said, “The Clover Leaf?”

  “I don’t go to Irish bars.”

  “Not the John Bull? The Irish Lancer?”

  “Where’s the Irish Lancer?”

  “In the LaSalle Hotel, on …”

  Dougherty said, “Drummond.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Not tonight,” Dougherty said, “I’m going to get some sleep — I’m working in the morning.”

  Pete said, “Okay, but when I open my club, you’re coming.”

  On his way out the door Dougherty said, “You got it.”

  He had nowhere to go, really, so he walked up and down St. Catherine Street a couple times, and he did stop for a drink, but not at one of the Irish bars — he stopped at the Rymark, a tavern. It was quiet on Tuesday night, and Dougherty was surprised when one of the waiters climbed up on a chair and turned on the TV on the wall in the corner. There wasn’t a hockey game, Dougherty knew that, and he was pretty sure if the Expos were playing the game was over. Then he saw the scene on the TV was the Olympic Village again, and the guy from Wide World of Sports was talking. He was looking bad.