by Trevanian
LaPointe sits at his desk and surveys the expanse of unlittered surface. “Now, that looks better,” he says.
Guttmann looks over the piles of paper work on his little table. “Did you find out anything from Dr. Bouvier, sir?”
“Only that you’re supposed to be a remarkable young man.”
“Remarkable in what way, sir?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I see. Oh, by the way, the Commissioner’s office called again. They’re pretty upset about your not coming right up when you got in.”
“Hm-m. Any call from Dirtyshirt Red?”
“Sir?”
“That bomme you met last night. The one who’s looking for the Vet.”
“No, sir. No call.”
“I don’t imagine the Vet will be out on the streets before dark anyway. He has drinking money. What time is it?”
“Just after one, sir.”
“Have you had lunch?”
“No, sir. I’ve been doing paper work.”
“Oh? Well, let’s go have lunch.”
“Sir? Do you realize that some of these reports are six months overdue?”
“What does that have to do with getting lunch?”
“Ah… nothing?”
They sit by the window of a small restaurant across Bonsecours Street from the Quartier General, finishing their coffee. The decor is a little frilly for its police clientele, and Guttmann looks particularly out of place, his considerable bulk threatening his spindly-legged chair.
“Sir?” Guttmann says out of a long silence. “There’s something I’ve been wondering about. Why do the older men on the force call us apprentices ‘Joans’?”
“Oh, that comes from long ago, when most of the force was French. They weren’t called ‘Joans’ really. They were called ‘jaunes.’ Over the years it got pronounced in English.”
“Jaunes? Yellows? Why yellows?”
“Because the apprentices are always kids, still wet behind the ears…”
Guttmann’s expression says he still doesn’t get it.
“…and yellow is the color of baby shit,” LaPointe explains.
Guttmann’s face is blank.
LaPointe shrugs. “I suppose it doesn’t really make much sense.”
“No, sir. Not much. Just more of the wiseass ragging the junior men have to put up with.”
“That bothers you, eh?”
“Sure. I mean… this isn’t the army. We don’t have to break a man’s spirit to get him to conform.”
“If you don’t like the force, why don’t you get out? Use that college education of yours.”
Guttmann looks quickly at the Lieutenant. “That’s another thing, sir. I guess I’m supposed to be sorry that I got a little education. But I’m afraid I just can’t cut it.” His ears are tingling with resentment.
LaPointe rubs his stubbly cheek with the palm of his hand. “You don’t have to cut it, son. Just so long as you can type. Come on, finish your coffee and let’s go.”
Leaving Guttmann waiting on the sidewalk, LaPointe returns to the restaurant and places a call from the booth at the back. Five times… six… seven… the phone rings, unanswered. He shrugs philosophically and sets the receiver back into its cradle. But just as he hangs up, he thinks he hears an answering click on the other end. He dials again quickly. This time the phone is answered on the first ring.
“Yes?”
“Hello. It’s me. Claude.”
“Yes?” She does not place the name.
“LaPointe. The man who owns the apartment.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She has nothing more to say.
“Is everything all right?”
“All right?”
“I mean… did you buy enough for breakfast and lunch?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
There is a silence.
She volunteers, “Did you call just now?”
“Yes.”
“I was in the bathroom. It stopped ringing just when I answered.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Oh. Well… why did you call?”
“I just wanted to know if you found everything you need.”
“Like what?”
“Like… did you buy a razor?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good.”
A short silence.
Then he says, “I won’t be back until eight or nine tonight.”
“And you want me out by then?”
“No. I mean, it’s up to you. It doesn’t matter.”
A short silence.
“Well? Should I go or stay?”
A longer silence.
“I’ll bring some groceries back with me. We can make supper there, if you want.”
“Can you cook?” she asks.
“Yes. Can’t you?”
“No. I can do eggs and mince and things like that.”
“Well, then, I’ll do the cooking.”
“Okay.”
“It’ll be late. Can you hold out that long?”
“What do you mean?”
“You won’t get too hungry?”
“No.”
“Well then. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Okay.”
LaPointe hangs up, feeling foolish. Why call when you have nothing to say? That’s stupid. He wonders what he’ll buy for supper.
The dumb twit can’t even cook.
The secretary’s skirt is so short that modesty makes her back up to file cabinets and squat to extract papers from the lower drawers.
LaPointe sits in a modern imitation-leather divan so deep and soft that it is difficult to rise from it. On a low coffee table are arranged a fine political balance of backdated Punch and Paris Match magazines, together with the latest issue of Canada Now. The walls of the Commissioner’s reception room are adorned with paintings that have the crude draftsmanship and flat perspective of fashionable Hudson Bay Indian primitive; and there is a saccharine portrait of an Indian girl with pigtails and melting brown comic-sad eyes too large for her face, after the style of an American husband-and-wife team of kitsch painters. The size of the eyes, their sadness, and the Oriental upturn of the corners make it look as though the girl’s mother plaited her braids too tightly.
Along with the popular Indian trash on the walls, there are several framed posters, examples of the newly established Public Relations Department. One shows a uniformed policeman and a middle-aged civilian male standing side by side, looking down at a happy child. The slogan reads: Crime Is Everybody’s Business. LaPointe wonders what crime the men are contemplating.
The leggy secretary squats again, her back to the file cabinet, to replace a folder. Her tight skirt makes her lose her balance for a second, and her knees separate, revealing her panties.
LaPointe nods to himself. That’s smart; to avoid showing your ass, you flash your crotch.
The door behind the secretary’s desk opens and Commissioner Resnais appears, hand already out, broad smile in place. He makes it a habit to greet senior men personally. He brought that back with him from a seminar in the States on personnel management tactics.
Make the men who work FOR you think they work WITH you.
“Claude, good to see you. Come on in.” Just the opposite of Sergeant Gaspard, Resnais uses LaPointe’s first name, but does not tutoyer him. The Commissioner’s alert black eyes reveal a tension that belies his facile camaraderie.
Resnais’ office is spacious, its furniture relentlessly modern. There is a thick carpet, and two of the walls are lined with books—and not only lawbooks. There are titles dealing with social issues, psychology, the history of Canada, problems of modern youth, communications, and the arts and crafts of Hudson Bay Indians. No civilian visitor could avoid being impressed by the implication of social concern and modern attitudes toward the causes and prevention of crime. No ordinary cop, this Commissioner. A liberal intellectual working in the trenches of quotidian law enforcement.
Nor i
s it easy to dismiss Resnais as a bogus political man. He has in fact read each of the books in his office. He in fact does his best to understand and respond to modern community needs. He does in fact see himself as a liberal; as a policeman by vocation, and a politician by necessity. Resnais is not the man to attract devotion and affection from those under him, but the majority of the force respect him, and many of the younger men admire him.
Like LaPointe, Resnais began by patrolling a beat. Then he went to night school; perfected his English; married into one of the reigning Anglo families of Montreal; took leaves of absence, without pay, to finish his college education; made a career of delicate cases involving people and events that required protection from the light of newspaper exposure. Finally, he became the first career policeman to occupy the traditionally civilian post of commissioner. For this reason, he thinks of himself as a cop’s cop. Few of the older men on the force share his view. True, he has been on the force for thirty years, but he was never a cop in the rough-and-tumble sense. He never shook information out of a pimp he despised. He never drank coffee at two in the morning out of a cracked mug, sleeplessness irritating his eyes, his overcoat stinking of wet wool. He never had to use the cover of a car door when returning fire.
LaPointe notices his personnel file on Resnais’ desk, otherwise bare save for a neat stack of pale blue memo cards, an open note pad, and two perfectly sharpened pencils.
Men who look busy are often only disorganized.
Resnais stations himself in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, the glare of the overcast skies making it difficult to look in his direction without squinting.
“Well, how have you been, Claude?”
LaPointe smiles at the accent. Resnais is really trilingual. He speaks continental French; perfect English, although with the growled “r” of the Francophone who has finally located that difficult consonant; and he can revert to a Joual as twangy as the next man’s when he is addressing a group from east Montreal, or speaking to senior French Canadian officers.
“I think I’ll make it through the winter, Commissioner.” LaPointe never uses his first name.
Resnais laughs. “I’m sure you will! Tough old son of a bitch like you? I’m sure you will!” There is something phony and condescending in his use of profanity, just like one of the guys. He clasps his hands behind his back and rocks up on his toes, a habit born of being rather short for a policeman. His body is thick, but he keeps in perfect trim by jogging with neighbors, swimming with members of his exclusive athletic club, and playing handball in the police league, for which he signs up just like any other cop, and where he accepts defeat at the hands of younger officers with laughing good grace. His expensive suits are closely cut, and he could pass for ten years younger than he is, despite the gleaming pate with its wreath of coal-black hair. Suntanning under lamps has given him a slightly purplish gleam. “Still living in the old place on Esplanade?” he asks offhandedly.
“Yes. Just like it says in my dossier,” LaPointe responds.
Resnais laughs heartily. “I can’t get away with anything with you, can I?” It is true that he makes a practice of looking over a man’s file just before seeing him, for the purpose of refreshing himself on an intimate detail or two—number of children and their sexes, the wife’s name, awards or medals. He drops these bits of information casually, as though he knows each man personally and holds in his memory details of his life. He once read somewhere that this was a trick used by a popular American general in the Second World War, and he adopted it as a good management tactic.
An employee gives of his TIME, a buddy gives of HIMSELF.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in LaPointe’s life to comment upon. No children, a wife long since dead, citations for merit and bravery all earned years ago. You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when you have to mention the street a man lives on.
“I don’t want to waste too much of your time, Commissioner,” LaPointe says, “So, if there’s something…” He raises his eyebrows.
Resnais does not like that. He prefers to control the timing and flow of conversation when it involves delicate personnel problems like this one. To do so is an axiom of Small Group and One-to-One Communication Technique.
If you’re not IN control, you’re UNDER control.
“I was expecting you this morning, Claude.”
“I was on a case.”
“I see.” The Commissioner again rocks onto his toes and squeezes his hands behind his back. Then he sits down in his high-backed desk chair and turns it so that he is looking not at LaPointe, but past him, out of the window. “Frankly, I’m afraid I have to give you what in the old days was called an ass-chewing.”
“We still call it that.”
“Right. Now look, Claude, we’re both old-timers…”
LaPointe shrugs.
“…and I don’t feel I have to pull any punches with you. I’ve been forced to talk to you about your methods before. Now, I’m not saying they’re inefficient. I know that sometimes going by the book means losing an arrest. But things have changed since we were young. Greater emphasis is placed today upon the protection of the individual than upon the protection of the society.” There seem to be invisible quotation marks around this last sentence. “I’m not calling these changes good, and I’m not calling them bad. They are facts of life. And facts of life that you continue to ignore.”
“You’re talking about the Dieudonne case?”
Resnais frowns. He doesn’t like being rushed. “That’s the case in point right now. But I’m talking about more than this one instance. This isn’t the first time you’ve gotten information by force. And it’s not the first time I’ve told you that this is not the way things happen in my department.” He instantly regrets having called it his department. Make every man feel a part of the organization.
He works best who works for himself.
“I don’t think you know the details of the case, Commissioner.”
“I assure you that I know the case. I’ve had every bit of it rammed down my throat by the public prosecutor!”
“The old woman was shot for seven dollars and some change! Not even enough for the punk to get a fix!”
“That’s not the point!” Resnais’ jaw tightens, and he continues with exaggerated control. “The point is this. You got information against Dieudonne by means of force and threat of force.”
“I knew he did it. But I couldn’t prove it without a confession.”
“How did you know he did it?”
“The word was out.”
“What, exactly, does that mean?”
“It means the word was out. It means that he’s a bragging son of a bitch who spills his guts when he takes on a load of shit.”
“You’re telling me he admitted to others that he killed the old woman… whatshername?”
“No. He bragged about having a gun and not being afraid to use it.”
“That’s hardly admission of murder.”
“No, but I know Dieudonne. I’ve known him since he was a wiseassed kid. I know what he’s capable of.”
“Believe it or not, your intuition does not constitute evidence.”
“The slugs from his gun matched up, didn’t they?”
“The slugs matched up, all right. But how did you get the gun in the first place?”
“He told me where he had buried it.”
“After you beat him up.”
“I slapped him twice.”
“And threatened to lock him up in a room and let him suffer a cold-turkey withdrawal! Christ, you didn’t even have any hard evidence to connect him with the old woman… whatshername!”
“Her name, goddamn it, was Mrs. Czopec! She was seventy-two years old! She lived in the basement of a building that doesn’t have plumbing. There’s a bit of sooty dirt in front of that building, and in spring she used to get free seed packets on boxes of food, and plant them and water them, and sometimes a few came up. But her basement window
was so low that she couldn’t see them. She and her husband were the first Czechs on my patch. He died four years ago, but he wasn’t a citizen, so she didn’t have much in benefits coming in. She clung to her purse when that asshole junkie tried to snatch it because the seven dollars was all the money she had to last to the end of the month. When I checked out her apartment, it turned out that she lived on rice. And there was evidence that toward the end of the month, she ate paper. Paper, Commissioner.”
“That’s not the point!”
LaPointe jumps up from his chair, “You’re right! That’s not the point. The point is that she had a right to live out her miserable life, planting her stupid flowers, eating her rice, spending half of every day in church where she couldn’t afford to light a candle! That’s the point! And that hophead son of a bitch shot her through the throat! That’s the point!”
Resnais lifts a denying palm. “Look, I’m not defending him, Claude…”
“Oh? You mean you aren’t going to tell me that he was underprivileged? Maybe his father never took him to a hockey game!”
Resnais is off balance. What’s wrong with LaPointe? It isn’t like him to get excited. He’s supposed to be the big professional, so coldblooded. Resnais expected chilly insubordination, but this passion is… unfair. To regain control of the situation, Resnais speaks flatly. “Dieudonne is getting off.”
LaPointe is stopped cold. He can’t believe it. “What?”
“That’s right. The public prosecutor met with his lawyers yesterday. They threatened to slap you with a two-seventeen assault, and the newspapers would love that! I have my—I have the department to think of, Claude.”
LaPointe sits down. “So you made a deal?”
“I don’t like that term. We did the best we could. The lawyers could probably have gotten the case thrown out, considering how you found the gun. Fortunately for us, they are responsible men who don’t want to see Dieudonne out on the street any more than we do.”
“What kind of deal?”
“The best we could get. Dieudonne pleads guilty to manslaughter; they forget the two-seventeen against you. There it is.”
