The Main

by Trevanian

  The Vet still hesitates. “All right. But he doesn’t have to come, does he?”“

  Guttmann presses back his hair, which the wind is standing on end. “I’ll wait here, Lieutenant.”

  LaPointe nods, then follows the Vet along the dim path.

  Guttmann watches the vague figures blend into the dark, then disappear as they pass close to the embankment. He catches a bit of motion later, out of the corner of his eye where peripheral night vision is better. He strains to see, but he loses them. After several minutes, he hears the distant clank and scraping of metal—a heavy sheet of metal, from the sound of it. He hugs his coat around him and tucks his chin into his collar.

  In about ten minutes he hears the crackle of dead, frozen stalks, then he sees them returning. The Vet’s body is stooped and slack; he seems deflated. For the fourth time that night, the bomme’s personality and manner have changed abruptly. The conditions of his life long ago ground away any pretensions of dignity, but there remains the husk of pride, and that has been damaged: the Lieutenant has seen his snug little kip. He passes Guttmann without a glance, and leads the policemen back through the field of frozen weeds, along the single unused track with its rusted rails, back over the pairs of glistening rails, to the base of the embankment, just below the wire fence and the light of the city.

  “We can find our way from here,” LaPointe tells the tramp.

  Without a word, the Vet turns and starts back the way they came.

  “Vet?” LaPointe calls.

  The bomme stops in his tracks, but he doesn’t turn to face them.

  “You know I won’t tell any of them about your kip, don’t you?”

  The Vet’s voice is listless. “Yeah.” He clutches the brim of his floppy hat against the wind and trudges back across the tracks.

  LaPointe looks after him for a second. “Come on,” he says. They scramble up the cinder embankment, over the wire fence, and soon they are back in the light, on the truncated street of warehouses. As Guttmann walks on, LaPointe stands for a moment and looks back over the shunt yard, a matte-black hole ripped out of the map of Montreal’s streets and city lights. His sense of reality is upset. Somehow this street with its warehouses and the noise and light of passing traffic down at the corner seems artificial, temporary. That dark, desolate freight yard with its faint paths crowded in by black frozen burrs, with its silence in the midst of the city’s noise, its dark in the midst of the city’s light—that was real. It was not pleasant, but it was real… and inevitable. It is what the whole city would be six months after man was gone. It is the seed of urban ruin.

  Oh, he’s just tired; feeling a little cafard. There is vertigo in his sense of reality because he’s been awake too long, because of the hard scramble up the cinder embankment, and because of the pleasant, terrifying tingle, this effervescence in his blood…

  Guttmann is cold, and he walks quickly toward the waiting police car with its dozing driver and its radio, against regulations, tuned to music. Then he realizes that LaPointe is not with him. He turns impatiently and sees the Lieutenant standing against the wire fence, his eyes closed. As Guttmann approaches, LaPointe opens his eyes and rubs his upper arms as though to restore circulation. Before Guttmann can ask what’s wrong, the Lieutenant growls, “Come on! Let’s not stand around here all night! It’s cold, for Christ’s sake!”

  They sit in a back booth, the only customers of the A-One Cafe. When they came in, LaPointe greeted the old Chinese owner: “How’s it going, Mr. A-One?”

  The Chinese cackled and responded, “Yes, you bet. That’s a good one!”

  Guttmann assumed the greeting and response were ancient and automatic, a ritual joke they have shared for years.

  Without asking what they wanted, the old man brought them two cups of coffee, thick and brackish, the lees from an afternoon pot. Then he returned to stand by the front window, motionless, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes focused on a mid-distance beyond his window.

  The naked bulb above his head produces an oblique angle of light which deepens the furrows and rivulets of his face. His eyes do not blink.

  LaPointe sits huddled in his coat, frowning meditatively as he slowly stirs his coffee, although he has not put sugar into it.

  On the wall beside Guttmann’s head is a gaudy embroidered hanging featuring a long-tailed bird resting on the branch of a tree bearing every kind of flower. And tacked up next to it is a picture of a very healthy girl in a swimsuit coyly considering the commitment involved in accepting the bottle of Coke thrust toward her by an aggressive male fist.

  Guttmann stifles a yawn so deep that it brings tears. “Not much business,” he says irrelevantly. “Wonder why he stays open all night.”

  LaPointe looks up as though he has forgotten the young man’s presence. “Oh, you don’t need much sleep when you’re old. He has no wife. It helps to shorten the nights, I suppose.”

  For the first time, Guttmann wonders if LaPointe has a wife. He cannot imagine it; cannot picture him taking a Sunday afternoon walk in some park, a middle-aged matron on his arm. Then the image starts to form in Guttmann’s mind of LaPointe in bed with a woman…

  “What is it?” LaPointe asks. “What are you smiling at?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Guttmann lies. “It’s just that… I don’t know what in hell I’m doing here. I don’t know why I didn’t take the car back to the Quartier General.” He pushes out a sigh and shakes his head at himself. “I must be getting dopey with lack of sleep.”

  LaPointe nods. “You’ve got what Gaspard calls ‘the sits.’ “

  “What?” Guttmann is thrown off track by the unexpected shift to English.

  “The sits. That’s when you’re so tired and numb-headed that you don’t have the energy to get up and go home.”

  “That’s what I’ve got all right. The sits. That’s a good name for it. I wish I were in bed right now.”

  LaPointe glances at him, a smile in his down-sloping eyes.

  “No,” Guttmann laughs. “She’s back in her own apartment by now. But maybe all is not lost. We have a date for tomorrow.”

  “We’re going to have to do some work tomorrow.”

  “But tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  LaPointe put his elbow on the table and his forehead in his palm. “That’s right. You see? Your college education wasn’t a waste after all. You know the days of the week. After Friday, Saturday. Come to think of it, tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “What?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Ah, it’s…” Guttmann tips his wrist toward the light. “Christ, it’s almost two.”

  “Want some more coffee?”

  “No, sir. After spending the day with you, I don’t think I’ll ever want another cup of coffee in my life.” Guttmann glances toward the motionless Chinese. “Is that all he does? Just stand there looking inscrutable?”

  “What does that mean? Inscrutable?”

  “Inscrutable means… hell, sir, I don’t know. My brain’s gone to sleep. It means… ah… of or pertaining to the inability to scrute? Je scrute, tu scrutes, il scrute… shit, I don’t know.” He sits back, and his eyes settle on the Chinese again. “He must be lonely.”

  LaPointe shrugs. “I doubt it. He’s past that.”

  This simple bit of human understanding from the Lieutenant disturbs Guttmann. He can’t peg LaPointe in his mind. Like most liberals, he assumes that all thinking men are liberals. On the one hand, LaPointe is the classic old-timer who rags his juniors, pokes fun at education, harasses and bullies the civilians—the prototypical tough cop. On the other hand, he is a friend to ex-whores with bashed-up faces, a paternal watchdog who chats with people on the street, knows the bums, understands his patch… seems to have affection for it. Pride, even. Guttmann knows better than to think that people are black or white. But he expects to find them gray shades, not alternately black then white. Lieutenant LaPointe: Your Friendly Neighborhood Fascist.

  “He should find some
old duffers to play pinochle with,” Guttmann says.

  “Who?”

  “The old Chinese who runs this place.”

  “Why pinochle?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what old farts do when they don’t know what else to do with themselves, isn’t it? Play pinochle? I mean…” Guttmann stops and closes his eyes. He slowly shakes his head. “No, don’t tell me. You play pinochle, don’t you, sir?”

  “Twice a week.”

  Guttmann hits his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I should have known. You know, sir, it just seems that fate doesn’t want us to hit it off.”

  “Don’t blame fate. It’s your big mouth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What have you got against pinochle?”

  “Believe it or not, I don’t have anything against pinochle. My grandfather used to play pinochle with his cronies late into the night sometimes.”

  “Your grandfather.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s mostly what I remember him doing; sitting with his friends until all hours. Playing. Pretending it mattered who won and who lost. I just came to associate it with lonely old men, I guess.”

  “I see.”

  “I have nothing against the game. I’m a pinochle player myself, sir. My grandfather taught me.”

  “Are you any good?”

  “Sir, excuse me. But doesn’t it strike you as odd that we are sitting in a Chinese all-night coffee shop at two in the morning talking about pinochle?”

  LaPointe laughs. The kid’s okay. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he says, taking from his overcoat pocket the wallet the Vet gave him, and emptying the contents onto the table. There is a scrap of paper with two girls’ names written in different hands, evidently by the girls themselves. First names only; not much help. There is a little booklet the size of a commemorative stamp, containing a dozen pictures of various sex positions and combinations: the kind of thing shown to objecting but giggling girls by a man who believes the myth that seeing the act automatically brings a woman to the point of panting necessity. In an accordion-pleated change pocket there are two contraceptives of the sort sold in vending machines in the toilets of cheap bars: guaranteed to afford maximum protection with minimum loss of sensation. Sold only for the prevention of disease. One of them features a “tickler”; the other is packed in a liquid lubricant. No money; the Vet got that. No driver’s license. The wallet is cheap imitation alligator, quite new. There is a card in one of the plastic windows with places for the owner to provide particulars. Childishly, the dead man had felt impelled to fill it in. LaPointe passes the wallet over to Guttmann, who reads the round, infantile printing:

  NAME

  Tony Green

  ADDRESS

  17 Mirabeau Street

  PHONE

  Apmt. 3B

  BLOOD TYPE

  Hot!!!!!!!!!!

  “So the victim’s name was Tony Green,” Guttmann says.

  “Probably not.” There is a businesslike, mechanical quality to LaPointe’s voice. “The printing is European. See the barred seven? The abbreviation for ‘apartment’ is wrong. That seems to give us a young alien. And the kid had a Latin look—probably Italian. But not a legal entrant, or his fingerprints would have been on file with Ottawa. He picked the name Tony Green for himself. If he runs true to form for Italian immigrants, his real name would be something like Antonio Verdi—something like that.”

  “Does the name mean anything to you? You know him?”

  LaPointe shakes his head. “No. But I know the house. It’s a run-down place near Marie-Anne and Clark. We’ll check it out tomorrow morning.”

  “What do you expect to turn there?”

  “Impossible to say. It’s a start. It’s all we have in hand.”

  “That, and the fact that the victim was a little hung up on sex. Oh, God!”

  “Why ‘Oh, God’?”

  “You know that girl I had to leave tonight? Well, I promised her we’d go out tomorrow morning. Take coffee up on the Mount. Maybe drop in at a gallery or two. Have dinner maybe. Now I’ll have to beg off again.”

  “Why do that? There’s no real point in your coming along with me tomorrow, if you don’t want to.”

  “Why do you say that, sir?”

  “Well… you know. All this business of the apprentice Joans learning the ropes from the old-timers is a lot of crap. Things don’t work that way. There’s no way in the world that you’re going to end up a street cop like me. You have education. You speak both languages well. You have ambition. No. You won’t end up in this kind of work. You’re the type who ends up in public relations, or handling ‘delicate’ cases. You’re the type who gets ahead.”

  Guttmann is a little stung. No one likes to be a “type.” “Is there anything wrong with that, sir? Anything wrong with wanting to get ahead?”

  “No, I suppose not.” LaPointe rubs his nose. “I’m just saying that what you might learn from me won’t be of much use to you. You could never work the way I work. You wouldn’t even want to. Look at how you got all steamed up about the way I handled that pimp, Scheer.”

  “I only mentioned that he has his rights.”

  “And the kids he bashes around? Their rights?”

  “There are laws to protect them.”

  “What if they’re too dumb to know about the laws? Or too scared to use them? A girl hits the city on a bus, coming from some farm or village, stupid and looking for a good time… excitement. And the first thing you know, she’s broke and scared and willing to sell her ass.” LaPointe isn’t thinking of Scheer’s girls at this moment.

  “All right,” Guttmann concedes. “So maybe something has to be done about men like Scheer. Stiffer laws, maybe. But not stopping him on the street and making an ass of him in front of people, for God’s sake.”

  LaPointe shakes his head. “You’ve got to hit people where they’re tender. Scheer is a strutting wiseass. Embarrass him in public and he’ll keep off the street for a while. It varies with the man. Some you threaten, some you hurt, some you embarrass.”

  Guttmann lifts his palms and looks about with round eyes, as though calling upon God to listen to this shit. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing, sir. Some you hurt, some you threaten, some you embarrass—what is that, a Nazi litany? Those are supposed to be tactics for keeping the peace?”

  “They didn’t tell you about that in college, I suppose.”

  “No, sir. They did not.”

  “And, of course, you’d play everything by the book.”

  “I’d try. Yes.” This is simply said; it is the truth. “And if the book was wrong, I’d do what I could to change it. That’s how it works in a democracy.”

  “I see. Well—by the book—the Vet was guilty of a crime, wasn’t he? He took money from this wallet. Would you put him inside? Let him scream for the rest of his life?”

  Guttmann is silent. He isn’t sure. No, probably not.

  “But that would be playing it by the book. And do you remember that fou who sharpens knives and worries about the snow? He’d make a great suspect for a knife murder. You almost sniffed him yourself. And do you know what would happen if you brought him in for questioning? He’d get confused and frightened, and in the end he would confess. Oh, yes. He’d confess to anything you wanted. And the Commissioner would be happy, and the newspapers would be happy, and you’d get promoted.”

  “Well… I didn’t know about him. I didn’t know he was…”

  “That’s the point, son! You don’t know. The book doesn’t know!”

  Guttmann’s ears are reddening. “But you know?”

  “That’s right! I know. After thirty years, I know! I know the difference between a harmless nut and a murderer. I know the difference between shit tracks on a man’s arm and the marks left by selling blood to stay alive!” With a guttural sound and a wave of his hand LaPointe dismisses the use of explaining anything to Guttmann’s type.

  Guttmann sits, silently pushing his spoon back
and forth between his fingers. He isn’t cowed. He speaks quietly, without looking up. “It’s fascism, sir.”

  “What?”

  “It’s fascism. The rule of a man, rather than the rule of law, is fascism. Even when the man has been around and thinks he knows what’s best… even if the man is trying to do good things… to be fair. It’s still fascism.”

  For a moment, LaPointe’s melancholy eyes rest on the young man, then he looks over his head to the gaudy Chinese hanging and the Coke advertisement.

  Guttmann expects a denial. Anger. An explanation.

  That’s not what comes. After a silence, LaPointe says, “Fascism, eh?” The tone indicates that he never thought of it that way. It indicates nothing more.

  Once again, Guttmann feels undercut, bypassed.

  LaPointe presses his eye sockets with his thumb and forefinger and sighs deeply. “Well, I think we’d better get some sleep. You can get the sits in your brain, as well as in your ass.” He sniffs and rubs his cheek with his knuckles.

  Guttmann delays their leaving. “Sir? May I ask you something?”

  “About fascism?”

  “No, sir. Back there in the freight yard. That bomme didn’t want me to come with you and see his kip. And later you said something to him about not telling the others. What was that all about?”

  LaPointe examines the young man’s face. Could you explain something like this to a kid who learned about people in a sociology class? Where would it fit in with his ideas about society and democracy? There is something punitive in LaPointe’s decision to tell him about it.

  “You remember Dirtyshirt Red last night? You remember how he had nothing good to say about the Vet? All the bommes on the Main sleep where they can: in doorways, in alleys, behind the tombstones in the monument-maker’s yard. And they all envy the nice snug private kip the Vet’s always bragging about. They hate him for having it. And that’s just the way the Vet wants it. He wants to be despised, hated, bad-mouthed. Because as long as the other tramps despise and reject him, he isn’t one of them; he’s something special. That make sense to you?”