A Deadly Divide

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “Why do I feel like you’re trying to tell me something?”

  “Is the Wolf Allegiance rally on your radar? They’re going to be at the park tonight.”

  Another set of uniformed officers passed between them to line up at the doors.

  “What do you think?” He didn’t sound offended, so Rachel decided she could push him a little further.

  “There are things we need to go over. I received a list from the dean’s office of incidents on campus and actions taken in response. I think there are leads there that need to be prioritized.”

  “Fair enough.” He took stock of the smoothly running operation. Clément had finished her call. She flicked her fingers at him in an imperious gesture. When Lemaire waggled his eyebrows at Rachel, she had to choke back a grin.

  “Looks like it’s time for this show pony to perform.”

  Rachel took stock of his impressively solid frame. “You’re hardly that, sir.”

  “Christian.”

  “Christian.” A little flare of excitement uncurled in Rachel’s stomach.

  Was she flirting with a senior officer of the Sûreté? She rather thought she was. And it wasn’t nearly as awkward as usual.

  “Let me finish this. Then if you want to talk, we can grab a drink on the way to the vigil. Sound good?”

  “Or something to eat instead. We didn’t break for lunch.”

  Lemaire gave her a wholly appreciative smile.

  “Fine,” he said. “An athlete needs to eat.”

  32

  Rachel plopped herself down on Gaffney’s desk, so she could discuss recent events with him and Benoit. Despite Isabelle Clément’s attempt to commandeer the stage, Lemaire spoke first, gravel-voiced and confident, able to convey the things the citizens of Saint-Isidore most needed at this moment—a sense of reassurance, and an overview of safety concerns that required the cooperation of the town. He made a strong statement in support of the targeted community, and he warned against any activity that would cause further grief to those who had lost their loved ones. The camera panned the people who had gathered to hear his statement. Rachel caught sight of the Lilies of Anjou, grouped together in their black coats.

  Made uneasy by the sight, she shoved off the desk and hurried outside, pushing through the crowd until she was close enough to be within earshot of the girls.

  Chloé was watching Lemaire with earnest, anxious concentration. It didn’t take much for Rachel to figure out what was going to happen next. Someone should have warned Chloé—someone like Rachel herself. Lemaire was already speaking. It was too late to take her aside.

  “It is with great sadness that we announce that although Youssef Soufiane was taken to the Hopital de l’Enfant-Jésus for treatment for his wounds, he passed away earlier this morning. The entire nation offers its condolences to his family in their time of grief.”

  The rest of his words were lost on Rachel. Chloé’s face had blanched. She collapsed in the arms of her friends.

  Rachel raced to her side, taking her weight in stride. There was an ambulance parked outside the station; a stretcher was summoned and Chloé was lifted inside, Rachel following behind.

  Chloé revived quickly, a look of blank confusion on her face, but when she saw Rachel she remembered.

  “Please say it isn’t true.” Tears streamed down her pale white cheeks.

  Rachel took her hand.

  “I’m so sorry, Chloé. It would do no good for me to lie.”

  “But he was doing better,” she whispered through dry lips. “He came through the surgery okay.”

  Rachel hesitated. Did Chloé need information or comfort? She opted for the latter.

  “He’s in a good place, now. Youssef is at peace.”

  Chloé chewed her lip, her eyes wide and full of disbelief.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because it’s what he believed. He was at the mosque, right? So he had faith there’d be something after all of this.” She waved vaguely at the scene in the parking lot.

  “But what if he did something wrong?”

  The wrenching pain in Chloé’s eyes was at odds with her little-girl voice. Rachel’s attention immediately sharpened. But she spoke calmly, so as not to frighten her.

  “Is there something you want to tell me, Chloe?”

  Chloé looked torn. She made a few false starts, but by the time she’d decided to speak something threw her off. Her friends were at the door to the ambulance, peering in. Réjeanne and another young woman Rachel hadn’t spoken to yet. Whereas before she’d thought of them as young women who refused to conform, staking out an identity for themselves, she now had a sense of menace. Even of danger, at the thought that Rachel might be threatening their friend.

  The unknown woman was holding Chloé’s other hand in a grip that seemed painful. Chloé didn’t protest. She seemed to welcome the strength of that grip.

  “Youssef,” was all she said.

  “We know.” The other girl turned to Rachel with a sniff. “Do you mind? We can look after our friend.”

  Look after her or prevent her from telling the police something they needed to know? Rachel wasn’t sure. She studied Réjeanne, who was watching them with a stillness that seemed unnatural, as if everything inside her was clenched. Could Réjeanne have returned to the church and pushed Rachel from the bench? Did that explain her stillness? Réjeanne gave the third girl a warning glance. She nodded back at Réjeanne, following her lead.

  “You were at the hospital last night,” Rachel said to the girl she didn’t know. “What’s your name?”

  “None of your business.”

  The third girl said it with a flat superiority, as if Rachel weren’t worth bothering with. But Rachel knew perfectly well who she was. She also had a piece of information she could use to make the girl speak—the girl who must be Émilie Péladeau. But she’d be giving Chloé away by doing so, and she needed Chloé on her side. Chloé had things to tell her; it was just a matter of time.

  She eased out of the ambulance with a smile at Chloé.

  “Wait!” Chloé swallowed thickly. “What about—what about the funeral? Do you know anything? Would I—will I be able to go?”

  She looked so young and wounded, a fragile wisp of a creature encircled by Réjeanne and Émilie, whose black-winged coats made them look like predatory birds. Again, Rachel wondered whether the Lilies were protecting Chloé or themselves.

  And Youssef’s funeral was such a delicate subject that Rachel couldn’t do it justice in the circumstances. She told Chloé to call her later, reminding her that she already had her number. When Chloé looked bewildered, Rachel gave her another card.

  “I’ll look into the funeral arrangements. Give me a call when you can.”

  She strode away, joining the group near Lemaire. When she looked back at the ambulance, Émilie had grabbed her card from Chloé and was shredding it into pieces.

  33

  “That went about as well as could be expected.”

  Lemaire had found a boulangerie off a side street that was still serving lunch. He was watching Rachel with evident amusement as she made short work of a set of sliders. Throughout their quickly snatched meal, he’d taken phone calls; then he brought Rachel up to speed. The mayor, the premier, other influential political figures, and members of the Sûreté were pressuring him for answers he wasn’t in a position to give.

  They made the right noises, they spoke about the nation as one family, but they seemed to have blinkers on about what had happened in Saint-Isidore. About what was still happening. Added to those pressures, Rachel knew Lemaire couldn’t be happy about the fact that she and Khattak had been dumped in his lap. She could tell that he was used to more deference than she employed when going over a case with Khattak. But he didn’t seem to mind the way she aired her questions without much regard for his rank.

  He asked her what was troubling her about the shooting.

  She took a stick of celery from the platter of v
egetables he had ordered and which she’d greeted with disbelief and jabbed it in the air to emphasize her point.

  “Three things. The firearms seem inexplicable to me. The handgun and the assault rifle. They don’t add up. They don’t make sense in the context of Saint-Isidore. Two, this Code of Conduct. I mean, why? What was the point of it—why was it necessary? Whose harebrained scheme was it to begin with? Three, I went through that list the dean gave me. Over a period of two years, it totals forty-seven incidents. I checked with Alizah—the log she and Amadou have been keeping actually totals four times that number of incidents. The dean’s list included only those they classified as noteworthy through some system of their own.” She bit off the end of the celery stalk. “That’s not the interesting part. What’s interesting is that despite this pattern of harassment, the dean’s office saw fit to do nothing in response. Absolutely nothing. So what are your thoughts on that?”

  Her brown eyes blazed with enthusiasm, with interest, with conviction—all of which was undercut by Lemaire’s response.

  “You think we’re a bunch of racists in Québec, don’t you?”

  Her cheeks flushed and the bitten-off celery stalk froze midair.

  Thrown off-balance, she tried to figure out what she’d said that had led him to arrive at his conclusion.

  “They seem like reasonable questions to me, sir.”

  The “sir” was back. Because his words had resurrected the need for formalities. This time he didn’t correct her.

  “Maybe there’s some truth to that. There’s fringe elements—no—” He held up a hand before she could interrupt. “Don’t quote that study back to me.”

  “What study?” she asked, bemused.

  “The one on Bill 62.”

  Rachel thought back quickly. After the Charter of Values had failed to pass in Québec, similar legislation had been introduced, namely Bill 62, under the heading of “religious neutrality.” Though the new legislation had succeeded where the Charter of Values had failed, civil liberties groups had successfully challenged the section of the bill that prohibited covering the face.

  Lemaire didn’t seem to find that conclusive.

  “The Charter may have been killed,” he said, “but its underpinnings never went away. That Bill 62 study told us that seventy-six percent of Québécois still favor banning the face veil, just as the bill prescribes. It’s sixty-eight percent in the rest of Canada, you know.”

  Rather than shying away from his conclusion, Rachel took the bit between her teeth.

  “But you know that very few Muslim women choose to wear the niqab. There’s not even a hundred of them in the entire province. Why did such a nonissue come to define the election in Québec?”

  Lemaire sighed. He must have known that no matter where she was headed with this, there was no getting around certain unpalatable truths. The sooner they cleared the air about it, the sooner they could get on with bringing a murderer to justice.

  “If you’re asking if this was dog-whistle politics, it was. The face veil is so different from what Québécois know—so alienating—that the issue became a lightning rod. Even among more liberal elements, there were those who weren’t able to accept it.”

  “But that suggests that someone who wears a face veil can’t be considered Québécois. If you extend that logic further, it might even suggest there’s no such thing as a Muslim Québécois.”

  The bold statement, stripped to its essence, seemed to hit Lemaire like a punch in the gut.

  Because it was exactly what the dog whistles were about.

  No one in political life had had the nerve to say as much quite as plainly. But in effect, that’s what the Code of Conduct—and the succeeding legislation—stood for. It was dressed up in language about religious neutrality and the values of Québec—it resisted encroachment; it spoke of erasure—but at heart it was a repudiation, of what was considered different … other … barbaric.

  Debates about the Muslim veil had created the specter of a foreign invasion—an intolerable usurpation delivered by the hands of a community who sought religious freedom.

  The language of Bill 62, of the Charter of Values, and of Saint-Isidore’s Code of Conduct suggested it applied to all communities equally. But its neutrality was a veneer. Its practical application was to exclude those in religious dress from joining in public life. In starker, more specific terms, the proposed legislation stripped a Muslim woman of her dignity and her choice.

  As Rachel watched Lemaire struggle to respond, her expression softened into sympathy. Maybe he’d never thought about these things before. Maybe he’d never had to.

  “What happened to bring about the Code of Conduct? Was there an incident that triggered it?”

  The question connected the various strands of the case, getting to root causes. She saw a new respect in his eyes as she asked it.

  “It was the university’s fault. They introduced a program recruiting students from North Africa—from the Maghreb: Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria. It was targeted to elite families and it brought an influx of money to the school in the guise of a cultural exchange. Citizens of these countries are educated in the French system.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad. A lot of universities rely on tuition raised from international students.”

  “The program wasn’t the problem. The issue was that the university did nothing to prepare the community for it. No outreach programs. No citizen exchanges—just a rather abrupt shift in demographics.”

  Rachel frowned at him. “But there’s a mosque here. There must have been a Muslim community in this town before the influx of students.”

  “It’s been significantly upgraded, and it’s become more visible in the minds of the people here.”

  “Are you saying that Muslims who live here should try to stay under the radar—that they should try to disguise who they are?”

  “I’m saying that that’s what the people of Saint-Isidore came to think. You see these incidents in the news—these attacks all over the world—they were afraid a terrorist attack might happen in their town. That these students would bring it here. You look at the owner of a remote little Québécois pâtisserie, and a woman in a black veil comes to his store to place an order, and what do you think he thinks?”

  “Saint-Isidore is hardly remote,” she objected. “We’re an hour and a half from Ottawa.”

  “It was too near in time to the attack on the Bataclan, to the mass murder in Marseilles. The people here did not have the language to express their concerns. They thought a change was in the wind, and not one for the better.”

  “Because they’d assigned collective guilt to a community where no one was guilty of a crime. The same way you arrested Amadou but let Père Étienne walk.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I didn’t say they were right. Only that they began to feel afraid.”

  “Someone made them afraid, you mean.”

  It was his turn to frown. “I don’t follow.”

  Rachel counted off on the tips of her fingers. “The Wolf Allegiance didn’t appear out of nowhere. Now they have chapters all over the province. You get from the Code of Conduct to a hate group to a shooting because someone is invested in making people angry.”

  Very mildly, he asked, “What makes you think the Wolf Allegiance is a hate group?”

  Rachel’s shock was plain on her open face.

  “What on earth makes you think they stand for anything else?”

  34

  Rachel had wrong-footed Lemaire twice now. He took another call, this time from Isabelle Clément. In the meantime, Rachel settled the bill, feeling anxious about the vigil. The outdoor vigil was such a bad idea that she wished there were a way to stop it. There was a simmering tension in the town—the shooting hadn’t calmed it; it had ratcheted it up a level. If she were Lemaire, responsible for the safety of the residents and under national scrutiny, she would consider a curfew. But she could only imagine the grandstanding that would follow
in its wake.

  We will not be cowed by a terrorist attack. We will stand up for our values.

  Or did those words only apply when the attack was carried out by extremists who proved in the end to be Muslim?

  Better not to ask Lemaire. She’d poked the bear and the bear seemed sensitive, maybe not unduly. She wondered if he realized that there might be a parallel between Muslims who were sensitive on the question of whether they fit into the national fabric and Québécois who were fighting to hold on to their heritage. No need for her to point that out. She was still waiting for answers to other more urgent questions.

  They followed a path along the creek bordered by green summer woodland, thick, richly scented, and innocent of the spreading scourge of hate. A place of safety, where Rachel felt like she could breathe.

  Lemaire told her his news.

  “Isabelle has been summoned to Montréal, though I told her to stay on call. She’ll be needed back here sooner than she thinks.”

  “What does she do, exactly? Besides answering questions on the premier’s behalf?”

  “She’s good under pressure. She used to be a defense attorney. That makes her an expert at spinning implausible explanations.”

  They shared the grins of two cops who were not particularly partial to those who represented criminal offenders.

  “Were criminals her only client base?”

  “No. She also had a knack for getting politicians out of a mess.”

  “What kind of mess?”

  “A member of parliament’s drunk-driving incident—a cyclist was killed, but thanks to Isabelle the MP wasn’t convicted. Then there was a group of councilmen who were caught making use of an escort service. Some minor things, some not so minor. But they all had one thing in common.”

  “What was that?”

  “They required crisis management. Isabelle is an expert at that.”

  They talked a little more about tracing the firearms. Lemaire had already connected with his colleagues in Vice. If guns had been delivered to Saint-Isidore, that meant there could be a delivery network that was operating beyond their knowledge. They needed to track it down if they had any hope of discovering who had bought the firearms. Even then it was a long shot.