by John Farrow
“Demands,” he repeated.
“If you want everything to go smoothly, expect demands. What’s wrong with that?”
He was amenable, in theory.
They ate peaceably awhile and Émile poured wine for both of them again. She said, “Okay. I’ve thought it through.”
“So soon? You know your demands? Okay. Demand.”
Placing her elbows on the table, Sandra knitted her fingers. She looked demure, rather pleased with herself. “Demand number one. Two policemen dead must never become three policemen dead, or two policemen and one retired cop who ought to know better.”
The tension between them of late had dulled his sensitivities. He was finally getting the idea that she was not in a bad mood after all, nor was she mad at him. He cast his eyes over the meal again, the presentation, the candlelight, the fact that she had allowed the Chopin to stay on and filter through from the other room. He was off his game. He should have realized much sooner that things were going his way here.
“Okay,” he consented, and smiled more openly.
“Okay is not good enough. Promise.”
“All right. I promise.”
“And here’s the real kicker,” Sandra proposed. “You’re nobody’s employee. So you’re no longer bound to professional silence. This time around, keep me apprised of the investigation. As you never have before. If that means that from time to time you’re obliged to tolerate my input, you will do so. Now. Promise me.”
He had been drafting schemes to possibly place a salve on their marriage. Now he realized that, even though she had initiated the matter of splitting up, she might be doing exactly the same thing. She was saving them.
Émile told her, “I promise to tolerate you.”
Which won a smile. “Not exactly how I would put it, but I’ll accept that.” She scooped the last of her main course, mostly sauce, onto her spoon. “Guess what?” Her mood seemed downright flirtatious. “I made dessert.”
He was even allowed to kick his diet for an evening. Émile Cinq-Mars was counting this as a good day, with all the potential for a good night ahead of him.
EIGHT
Over the next few days, the region experienced dramatic fluctuations in temperature. Émile Cinq-Mars did little more than putter around the farm or study intermittent reports that Mathers sent over by courier. On a Thursday, the weather offered more of the same. A light rain fell through mid-morning and froze across the snowfields in the afternoon, creating a surface glaze by late evening as the thermometer seriously dipped. In the light of a waxing moon pastures glistened and sparkled. Reminiscent of old times, the former detective waited just off the road on what served as a tractor path in summer, the car radio tuned to a classical music station. He was allowing a latent affection for music to grow in his retirement, and he was now fond of educating himself. The clear night, however, brought in distant stations crackling over top of the one he desired, and the first selection on the program, Brahms, did not inspire him, so in the end he opted for quiet.
Which instigated a level of inspiration all on its own.
A barren road, particularly in winter. He had written the directions verbatim, yet a subliminal anxiety warned that he and the other man might have gotten their signals crossed. His counterpart was seven minutes late, so far, with still no sign, way down the road in either direction, of anyone’s headlights.
Émile restarted the car to generate warmth, blasting hot air for a minute, and turned on the coils under his posterior. In an idle mood, he wondered if heated car seats ever caught fire. He figured he’d smell the burn before his rump ignited. Closing his eyes, he made it a point not to fall asleep, sniffing the air for flaming upholstery to confirm that he hadn’t yet asphyxiated. Distant chicken-barn stink wafted by.
He turned the engine off again.
And wondered if over the years he hadn’t acquired a preference for discomfort on the job. At the very least, the chill kept him awake.
A car was sighted, seventeen minutes late. He guessed that only his guy was likely to be out there at this time of night, a presumption that proved correct as the vehicle first passed him, stopped, then backed up to pull in behind him. He was willing to get out, but the other fellow was quicker to emerge, coming around to the passenger side of his Jeep.
Captain Gabriel Borde, of the Sûreté du Québec, the SQ, rubbed his hands together, then slammed the door on their covert meeting.
“Fucking turn the heat on, Émile. I’m freezing my ass off in here.”
The division of police forces in Canada followed its own logic. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police held geographic sway across the land, performing the work Scotland Yard did in the U.K. or the FBI in the U.S., and yet, unlike their counterparts, the Mounties also did a great deal of local policing. Everything from highways to small towns to midsized cities came under their aegis, yielding to local police departments only as cities grew to a certain size. Some crimes crossed borders, and so demanded their involvement even if they initially occurred within another jurisdiction—the importation and the movement of illicit drugs, the policing of airports, serial murders across provincial boundaries—but generally their presence in big cities was minimal. Two provinces, Quebec and Ontario, elected to have their own provincial police departments. Ontario did so out of hubris, essentially, as the province once saw itself as wealthy and superior—although time was demonstrating that that self-imposed prominence could not be sustained. In Quebec, the choice was political, as federal police, visible and preeminent in a nationalist culture, smacked of being an occupying force. In its relationships with other police agencies then, the SQ waved the nationalist flag and approached all points of contact with a desire to protect, preserve, and assert itself, the people of Quebec, and the French language, even at the expense of collegiality and, if necessary, of justice. All of which pissed off Cinq-Mars.
Still, times and troubles arose when anyone wearing any color uniform—the blue of city cops, the red of the Mounties, the muddy military green of the SQ—conceded that private grievances and agendas needed to be set aside, as doom, or, what was considered worse, public disgrace, might otherwise result. Good people abounded in every agency. Enlightened officers maintained personal, private, and often secret contact with one another, as a means to achieve consensus on matters of mutual concern without anyone’s hierarchy finding out that the issues had been scrutinized and secretly negotiated by their own officers. Given his potential involvement in a case precipitated by the murder of two SQ officers, Cinq-Mars knew that it was not only expedient, but fundamentally necessary and wise, to call in an SQ colleague, in order for the two of them to bring each other up to speed and to short-circuit any potential, and most likely inevitable, antagonism.
“I just turned the heater off,” Cinq-Mars groused. “How hot do you want it?”
“Give me Miami Bench to sit on,” Borde ordained. “Or an island at the equator. Don’t give me this air-conditioning-in-February bullshit.”
“Fine. It’s on. Don’t blame me if you asphyxiate.”
“Modern cars, hey? They don’t kill you like they used to, Cinq-Mars. How the hell are you anyway? How’s your retirement going? Must be a bitch.”
“Why do you think that?”
“You’re investigating a quadruple murder. That’s my first clue.”
“What’s your second?”
“You called me to this meeting.”
He had to chuckle. “Right you are. Retirement’s a bore. So I called you.”
“First thing that happened is, the FBI got in touch. Don’t play dumb with me, Émile. That never works with you. What’s that about? FBI. Here? Why?”
Cinq-Mars started talking, and explained much of what he knew.
“Émile, we checked the attic.”
“Did you? With a dog?”
“No mutts. Somebody thought about it, but none were available. The nearest K-9 mutt was searching for some Alzheimer’s guy who wandered into the woods. He
thought he was Robin Hood. Horny bastard was looking for his Maid Marion. He took his clothes off before the dogs found him, frozen stiff, so to speak. They say his dick shriveled up as skinny as a snow pea. Maid Marion would not have been impressed. But look, we found out for ourselves that our guy hid in the attic. We know that. Nobody in the SQ believes in magic carpets, I don’t care what the papers say. Émile, we checked the fucking attic. We did it right away, too. I mean when the killer was still up there we did it. We checked up there again after he was gone, and that second time we found out where he had been hiding the first time, under the insulation. Okay, so you got me on that one. We were two days late. We didn’t look close enough. We let him get away. Shoot me, okay?”
“Gabriel, I’m impressed. You checked the attic.”
“But no sniffer mutts. Screwed that part up. Go ahead, spread the good word. Just remember, we got pig farms near here. A load of pig manure in your front yard, the stench stays on your skin for months. Your clothes? Burn them. Want me to drop a load of pig shit on your porch, Émile? Tell the world how we screwed up and after that you’ll want to go drown yourself in perfume.”
“Come on, Gabriel. Who would believe a rumor that the SQ screwed up?”
“Fly a kite. In a blizzard.”
“Anyway, I’m retired. The media doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
“Is that why you miss it so much?”
In a way, Borde was asking a question so many cops wanted answered. What’s up with retirement? Is it doable? Can you really walk away from the job and still feel that you have a life? Will it be all right when my time comes?
Cinq-Mars didn’t feel that any of his answers readily applied to anyone else. He said, “I don’t miss the media, no.”
“People, they always said you were in it for the fame. The attention anyway. I never believed that, Émile. Hell, I am in it for the fame, so I know the difference between me and you. You were in it for the money, don’t deny it now.”
They enjoyed another laugh. They both knew that Borde had never met a microphone he could resist. His penchant for PR probably made him less of a cop, but helped him rise to the top, and he was definitely a top cop now. A capable one, in Cinq-Mars’s view. Unlike older detectives he knew, Borde, who was no athlete, a little short for a cop and more than a little rotund, kept in shape. Despite his form, dominated by a stomach with some girth, he lifted weights, and people were surprised when they discovered him to be as strong as the proverbial ox. When Cinq-Mars inquired about that one time, over a couple of whiskies in downtown Montreal, the detective reflected back upon a night in uniform in his twenties when he’d been beaten up. Surfacing from that disgrace, Borde vowed to never let it happen again and promptly hit the gym. “You want irony?” he asked back then.
“From you? Sure,” Cinq-Mars said. “Hit me with some irony.”
“Never been in a fight since. Not one. And I’m a cop! Call me a liar, but that’s the truth.”
“I don’t think you’re lying. Why would I?”
“Something happened in the gym though. I found out that I was strong. My old man was strong, too. It’s in our genes. But still, you gotta work at it. A boy thinks that he can never measure up to his old man. For sure, that was me. Then I found out that maybe I could, with weights anyhow. I just had to be disciplined. I also found out that it got rid of a lot of tension, and anger sometimes, pumping iron. Did me a world of good, career-wise. Personal-wise, too. Yeah. Nothing like putting on some muscle to make you feel like God’s gift, you know?”
Like Cinq-Mars, he lived off the island of Montreal, also to the west, although in his case in one of the rapidly expanding residential communities and not on a farm. He was a family man who lived a simple life, and Cinq-Mars liked to see that in someone who wielded considerable power in his day job, and with whom he shared confidences. He would not go so far as to say that he trusted the man outright, because he knew that Borde endured pressures in his position which meant that he might not always mean what he said and he might not always do what he promised or even what he himself wanted to do. The captain was subject to compromise and contradiction when solicitations mounted from various sides. In dealing with him, any man had to keep that in mind, but in understanding the complexity of modern life for a man with some power—within those bounds—Cinq-Mars considered him a relatively straight-up guy. If he was going to be snowed by him, he believed, at least this guy would have a good reason to do so. Fair enough.
“Were you on the scene yourself?” he asked him.
“Day two. Not day one. I was up in Quebec City breaking bread with the government. How’s the wife?”
“She’s fine. Sandra sends her love.”
“She knows we’re meeting?”
Cinq-Mars laughed.
“What?”
“She says my quota for secrets ran out a long time ago. New rules. I keep her informed.”
“That true? I’m not going to retire if life’s like that.”
Cinq-Mars cut to the chase. “I’m heading to the Deep South, to investigate similar murders down there.”
“Deep South? You mean like Huntingdon?”
“Not southern Quebec!” Cinq-Mars chortled. “I mean New Orleans. The southern U.S.”
The SQ officer sat there with his mouth open a moment. “What, the FBI can’t do their own job now, they need you? What’s up with that?”
“I find it curious myself.”
The comment carried weight, a gravity they had to acknowledge in silence. Something was going on that passed beyond the bounds of the ordinary. And possibly, beyond the bounds of what might normally be construed as safe.
“Who do you got to watch your back for you in this Deep South? Eh, Émile?” Borde’s tone turned serious. “Think about it. The FBI is asking you to do their job. Does that sound right to you? Does it make any sense at all?”
“Gabriel, with your permission, I have to talk as you do for a second.”
“Talk as I do? What the fuck does that mean?”
“Your kind of language, if you don’t mind.”
“My language? Go ahead. What’s my language?” They were speaking only in French, so he really didn’t know what he meant.
“You’re the only Frenchman I know who swears only in English, even when you’re speaking French. You’re unique that way, Gabriel. But anyway. Me. Going down there. Working for the FBI for who knows what reason. There’s only one way to put this and I can only say it in your language.”
“Okay. Go ahead.”
“It’s fucking intriguing.”
Borde understood what he was saying, but remained cautious. “Okay. So that’s fine. Keep me informed. I’ll keep you informed. Don’t get your head blown off just because the case is fucking intriguing, all right? I don’t want to read about it in USA To-fucking-day. I’ll say all that in English if you want. Hell, for you, to keep you safe, I’ll swear in French if you want.”
Cinq-Mars appreciated the sentiment.
NINE
In a thick binder, a number of reports arrived at the farmhouse the following afternoon. Émile took care of the horses then sat down with a whiskey at hand to study the documents. He had reshoed a horse earlier that day and being bent over awkwardly out in the chill of the barn cost him. At such times, when the back started to protest, he knew what to do. Remain neither prone nor seated for too long, stop the pain with medication before it gained the advantage, and redouble his exercise regimen. So he performed his program then settled in for his reading in a good mood. The ache felt shoeing the horse proved beneficial, for bent over and grunting Sandra entered the barn and something snapped between them. They were both instantly reminded of the first time they set eyes on one another, when she was the one slumped over a horse’s shoe, scraping it clean of muck.
The memory refreshed them both.
Mathers had finally sent over FBI reports on the southern murders. Émile read them, ensconced on his sofa with his feet up at times, or seated
on a exercise ball, or standing, and periodically he switched the three positions to keep his back supple. Each time he changed positions he poured another splash into his glass. After showering, Sandra joined him, and, given her new status as a confidante on the case, she perused the reports as well.
By the time they were both finished, Cinq-Mars was gently bouncing on his ball, while she curled up against the plush cushions.
“So,” she invited him, “what does this tell you? What are you learning?”
He would rather take more time to process what he read, but this was a new regime and his marriage, apparently, remained at stake.
“What’s curious,” he speculated, “and I have to think about this a little more, is that the murders are less violent than they appear.”
“Murder’s not violent? Since when? These murders are violent, Émile.”
The correction was warranted.
“Yes, but … each murder is meant to appear to be the result of a rampage. As if by design. But the victims died early—well, relatively early, as these things go—during the event. On the surface, we see some sick aspects. Before the woman is killed, for instance, she probably finds out that her husband is dead. Most likely, she watched him die. That’s traumatic. Gruesome, I suppose. It’s cruel. Hard on the psyche. All the more so knowing that she’s likely to be next.”
“But you don’t consider it gruesome yourself?” Sandra spoke quietly. “I mean, you only suppose that it’s gruesome?” She had asked to be included in the investigation, but was no longer certain that she wanted to be. “You’re not that jaded, Émile. Surely not. Or should I be asking, how jaded are you?”
