River City (102 page)

He used a skeleton key to open it.

Perfect.

From a coat pocket, he pulled out his flashlight and briefly shone it around. Everything he needed was waiting for him. The operation was going smoothly. No night cleaners to worry about, no after-hours workaholics, no security guards on patrol. His equipment was ready, so he could take his time. He had rehearsed this manoeuvre in the dark. The lights could go out across the city and he’d not miss a well-practised move.

Inside the room where the safe was located, he closed the door and switched on the light. No windows. He could work in the light with impunity.

Three explosions would detonate, two attacking the hinges on the vault’s door, the third imploding the lock. One way or another, he’d crack the safe open.

Putty kept each dynamite stick in place, then he cut the fuses to equal lengths. He wiped the blade of his penknife clean on a thigh. He tidied his bit of mess, which he loaded onto a newspaper culled from a stack that he carried to the far reaches of the office. He dumped the entire concoction into a trash bin there. Who would notice? What bomber would ever be this meticulous, this neat?

Next, he got his lighter ready and tested it once. It worked.

He switched off the overhead, breathed deeply, and opened the door behind him. In the hallway, working with light rising from the city below and occasionally from his flashlight, he gathered up what he needed. With a great coil of rope under an arm, he worked his way back into the security room, lit the slow fuses and departed quickly.

In the corridor again, Roger ran to the exit, then down four more flights. Exiting the stairwell at that level, he moved to the window at the end of the corridor and opened it. There he knotted one end of his rope to the long stout radiator that rose to his thighs, then crawled onto the ledge. He didn’t like this part. He dared not look down. Already he could hear great roars from a crowd
that didn’t seem so distant anymore, and when he did look back, once, he saw the glow of fires illuminating the air above a block of Ste. Catherine Street. All around, he heard the choir of sirens. Cops and fire trucks, ambulances and more cops. He saw a quartet of police cruisers rush down Dorchester Boulevard, cherries flashing. He could see a lot from up there, and he just hoped that no one saw him.

He guided the rope out the window. While he was tempted to heave the whole thing out, he commenced lowering it down slowly, again for the sake of keeping it inconspicuous. He was glad he would not be climbing down.

Just then, the safe’s door was blown off its hinges.

Roger looked up. He felt the tremor through his toes. He hoped that the men on the first floor, the cops and security guards, didn’t feel it also—or if they did, were assuming it to be a trauma of the riot.

Quickly, he was back to his rope, releasing it more rapidly now. Done, he hopped back to the stairwell and ran up to the NHL offices. The closer he got, the louder he heard the ringing of an alarm. Oh, damn. An alarm. He hadn’t thought of that, and the sound was incessant as he scooted back inside the offices.

One alarm was inside, and another in the corridor, and both were hammers drilling a bell. With his penknife, he sliced both wires, and the alarms went silent. His heart seemed to stop with the cessation of the racket.

Roger exhaled. He knew it might not be the end of his troubles. He’d broken through alarms before, and often he could count on a remote sensor. Down below, cops and building security could well be mounting a charge to his floor.

He scampered through to the safe.

The room stank of foul burn. Smoke and dust drifted in the air. The door wobbled only partially upright, but he was able to create a space to pass through to the inside.

And there, within the dark and smoky cavity, unharmed, in the beam of his flashlight, lay the mahogany-and-glass case for the treasured artifact.

Diamonds on the handle appeared as eyes, watching him as he gazed upon the dagger.

The final item left for him in his kit was a crowbar. He had to crawl back out with the case to get it, then return to the security room so that he could close the door and switch on the light. Roger placed the case on the floor. He didn’t want to damage the knife, so he rapped the case cautiously, gradually increasing the strength of his blow. To no avail. He had only one option—he reared back with the bar and brought it down full force upon the thick glass. Which cracked. Three more blows and he retrieved the knife from the box.

There. He had it. Safely in his hands. The thing that all the fuss was about.

He didn’t expect much—a very old knife with a few diamonds embedded in a handle that contained nuggets of gold. Old. He’d assumed it would seem decrepit. He was astonished. The way the diamonds sparkled in the faint light of the room, wee winks, so that he was never certain if he had imagined or actually seen the quick refractions, and the tight weave of moose hair on the handle, and the chipped but elegantly carved blade—Roger was oddly moved, and he took time to get going again. Holding the knife, it did seem magical to him, its plainness but also the sombre patina of the instrument communicating a sense of time and strange, wayward desire, as if he held in his hands the vision of its creator. Suddenly, like a genie, he sprung free.

He wouldn’t mind keeping it himself, if that could be allowed.

Quickly, he wrapped the knife in the kerchief he’d brought along in his coat pocket, picked up his crowbar and headed out. He locked the door to the office again, then smashed the door open as if he was entering it for the first time. He tossed the crowbar on the floor. Checking that he had his flashlight and gloves, his transistor radio—which he’d soon be giving to his daughter, for he had no intention of returning it to its rightful owner—and the Cartier Dagger and the last of his rope coils, a small one, he headed back down the stairs. He still had police and security officers to elude, but an escape route had been predetermined that would be available to him—he really did love working with an insider, and he didn’t want to labour without one again. The building had three sets of elevators. One that ran between the first and seventh floors, another that ran between the eighth and fifteenth and a third that served the sixteenth to twenty-third floors. If cops were coming up after him, they’d be on that mid-level elevator. He could risk being on one himself, but wouldn’t. He’d use the stairs.

The distance seemed interminable, as he ran down, down and down. He concentrated on not falling, and despaired that his progress seemed minimal. Soon enough, he slowed, panted and exhorted his limbs not to seize up now.

Half the north wall of the Sun Life Building abutted its neighbour, a movie theatre that stretched south from Ste. Catherine Street. On the other half, an alley divided the building from a nondescript modern structure used primarily as a parking lot for rental cars. Roger Clément looked over the alley. He entered an office using his skeleton key and, according to plan, placed it in a particular drawer. His trail of evidence was intended to convince investigators that he dropped from the rooftop and slid down the outer face of the building in stages, that his final exit was really the shortest of his forays by rope. Cops would see the evidence on display for them while missing the invisible. All this to protect his insider from suspicion. He opened the side window.

Here, the building appeared impenetrable—the steel doors had stout locks and no windows. Consequently, no cops guarded the alley. The tricky part now was to close the window behind himself, as he had to dig his nails into the exterior woodwork to gain sufficient purchase. He tamped down a little putty for the window to sink into, catch and hold shut.

He now sat crouched on a small ledge, the drop too great to jump. No handholds were available on the way down over the marble base, but right at his feet stood a design filigree in cement. A lopsided oval, the size of a large sink, was bound on both sides by a pair of curved forms that ended as curlicues. The upper pair fell down over the oval and vaguely represented eyes, while at the bottom they had the appearance of claws. The effect created a highly stylized owl. Roger looped his last rope around the oval and an ear and descended about ten feet, then dropped two more feet onto the pavement.

He was down, he was outside, he was safe.

He then manipulated the rope to free his loop from the owl’s ear, and it fell beside him. Quickly, he hauled it down the alley and tossed it in a corner.

As he stepped onto the sidewalk, Roger noticed a change in the weather. He smelled the smoke of fires, heard the uproar of men in the delirium of a rampage. Through the park on the next street over, a rowdy gang had climbed up Peel Street from the poorer neighbourhoods, dancing down the centre line with no vehicle or cop to oppose them. Small clusters of young people moved through the park, howling at the moon and headed for the tumult on Ste. Catherine.

Sirens resounded from all directions and echoed off the buildings. On Dorchester Boulevard emergency vehicles sped past going both ways. Stray cars blared their horns.

Bedlam.

Roger stepped off the curb, headed for the park and Robbie Burns’s boot.

His confederates were waiting there. They had spread out in a row like pallbearers marshalled for a funeral. On the left, wrists crossed, chin held high in an attitude of superiority or condemnation—a meaningless pose, as it was his default expression—stood the count. Not since the Asbestos miners’ strike had Roger seen him, but instantly he recognized the posture and overall set of the man. He’d put on weight in Brazil, living amidst his Nazi cronies. What Roger had heard, through Michel Vimont—who’d heard it from Harry S. Montford, who’d heard it from Premier Duplessis himself—was that the French count had been treated like a lapdog by his German cohorts. He had no money and constantly begged at their heels. Skeptical of the rumour, Roger figured the count was too proud to ever admit to such a thing. He suspected that the idea probably originated with
le Chef.
The story went that de Bernonville wanted out of South America and would prefer the comfort of Quebec friends again, to stumble through his last days speaking French again rather than Portuguese. The idea of stealing the artifact originated with him. Since Asbestos, when he’d talked about the Cartier Dagger to the elite journalists there, he’d not forgotten about the knife, and remained intrigued by its worth and mythic authority. A man in his situation could benefit by owning a share in an object of such value, given its potential for lucre, or influence, or both.

So he contacted Duplessis, to entice him.

Le Chef
knew that the relic held no sway, except symbolically, and yet he believed in symbols. He counted himself as a symbol of the Quebec people, of their destiny. In that sense, the artifact was competitive to his own glory. But if those two suns were conjoined as one, the emblematic, metaphoric power of that union could enshrine him politically throughout his lifetime and continue to buff his legacy after he was gone. He might never be able to admit to being a holder of the dagger, but rumours could travel the countryside, and why would a man of his esteem stoop to refute them?

In daydreaming about the count’s enterprise, Duplessis knew with whom to discuss putting a plan into action. He dialled Roger Clément’s number.

The stakes were high. Duplessis did not speak only to Roger. He reasoned that the dagger’s value was too tempting for one thug on his own. Anyway, Roger would need help. So, the premier met covertly with Montford, a gangster not unaccustomed to elaborate, lucrative gambits.

On such an excursion, Montford would never be out waiting in a park—too risky for his style. He made sure that he had his own man there, choosing his driver, Michel Mendelssohn Vimont, who stood next to the count.

Roger knew Vimont’s weakness. The one thing he wanted out of all this was something he did not want—to go to jail. Whatever else occurred mattered little to Michel, as long as he did not wind up in the slammer. To that end, he had made a phone call, for advice, to his old friend and counsellor, Father Joe. The former archbishop, now living in British Columbia, contacted Father François in Montreal, putting him in touch with Michel Vimont. And for their end of the caper, to support the interest of the Church, Father François contacted Roger.

Roger was connected to nearly everyone and no one knew it. So he anticipated schemes within the larger scheme, and understood to be careful. He plotted a scheme of his own.

Next to de Bernonville and Vimont stood a third man Roger did not know, but presumed him to be Dr. Camille Laurin. He was not Roger’s insider at Sun Life, but he suspected that the doctor represented him. He represented somebody, that’s all he was allowed to know. Roger had no clue how the fourth man in the row fit into all this. Even in the ambient dark, under the canopy
of noise and confusion and smoke, no one who knew him could mistake the robust, egg-shaped bulk of Camillien Houde. The four men stood waiting.

Although he could not see him, Roger presumed that, around the front of the Robbie Burns statue, out of sight for now, Father François was waiting. As arranged. The outside player in his own scheme.

A fateful entourage.

“What news?” the count enquired as he drew close. “Mission accomplished,” he told them. “It’s nice to have a rooting section over here.”

“Let’s see the dagger,” Laurin said. “Not so fast,” Roger warned him.

The count took him up on that. “What’s the problem? Don’t you have it? Show us.”

“First, tell me what he’s doing here.” Roger nodded to his friend and former boss, Houde.

“Roger!” The old mayor put his head back and unleashed that big guffaw of his. He was convincing, for this was their ruse. Roger was not supposed to have known that Houde was part of all this, except that Houde had told him. “This is my town. Do you think I’d be left out on such an occasion? Come on, now. Show us the dagger.”

“Who brought you into this? I have a right to know.” For the sake of keeping the others in the dark about their alliance, he demonstrated petulance.