River City (107 page)

The woman was pacing, her clicky shoes tapping out a rhythm on the floor. “That’s how we’ll do it,” she said. “Television. They’ll have to show us who we’re talking to.”

“That’ll work,” someone said.

“No, it won’t,” another man said. “The power’s off. Anyway, we still won’t know who we’re talking to. We’ll be talking to some
guy.
That’s all. Some guy in a suit. We won’t know who he works for.”

“That’s true,” the woman conceded.

“Does it matter who we talk to?”

“I’m not talking to any goddamned Mountie. I’m a Quebecer. It’s humiliating! I’ll only talk to one of our own.”

“Mounties can be Quebecers, too.”

Now she was furious. “Don’t talk to me about those turncoat pricks. I’m not talking to a Mountie and that’s that. I’m not talking to one of Duplessis’s goons, either. That’s not a legitimate government of the people. A city cop. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the only
flic
who can negotiate for their side. You don’t like it? Go fuck yourself!”

“Calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to fucking calm down.” Cross could almost see that she was speaking through clenched teeth. “That Mountie shit said that to me.”

“Okay, look,” another man interceded. “She’s right. Mounties, they take training in negotiations. We don’t want to talk to somebody like that.”

“Make it some cop we’ve seen before. We’ve seen some guys on TV. Pick one of them. That way we know who it is.”

“What about Touton? We know what he looks like. It’s probably bullshit, but he’s got a reputation for integrity.”

The phone rang again and the woman picked up. She listened. “We changed our minds…. No, you’re wrong, I can do that…. Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t know you were dropping by tonight. Maybe we’re not fully prepared.” She waited a longer time before she spoke again, and when she did, her voice was low and threatening. “We’ve got James Cross in here, alive. We’re willing to kill him. Now, listen to me … NO! You listen to me right now. We don’t want SQ. All those old SQ guys were handpicked by Duplessis to be his thugs. We’ll negotiate with a city cop. Armand Touton, that’s our guy. Don’t call us back until he’s on the line. We want to see him on TV, so turn the fucking lights back on.”

They were pleased with that episode. They felt they’d won a round.

“Now what?” somebody asked. Cross strained to listen. He was confused for a while, as were his kidnappers, but he gathered that big searchlights now shone on the exterior walls of the building.

“Don’t worry about it,” somebody suggested. “It’s only for the TV cameras.”

“Are you kidding me?” the woman shot back. “It’s for the goddamned snipers.”

They caught the commentary of their demise on television.

The five sat on the kitchen floor as army sharpshooters took aim at their apartment bathed in bright lights. In the distance, a perimeter of spectators formed, and they saw for themselves that no one demanded their freedom. The atmosphere verged on the festive. People were having fun, sharing jokes, waiting and watching, and probably a portion hoped to witness a bloodbath—some kind of action. They wanted to be nearby if the kidnappers fell in a rage of bullets and dynamite.

They wanted
Bonnie and Clyde,
the movie, but just the ending.

A hail of bullets.

This could look like war.

Behind the barricade, a TV reporter conducted people-on-the-street interviews. A few people spoke of their sadness that “the boys” had been caught. “What about me?” Louise had demanded of the TV set, then laughed, although a twinge of bitterness could be detected in her complaint. In his room, Jasper Cross, bitter also, thought to himself,
Yeah? So what about you? Nobody’s sad that you’ve been caught,
and inwardly laughed at his private joke.

One wizened old guy said that the cops should blow up the house and be done with the nasty business. “What about James Cross?” the reporter asked, and in his darkened chamber, Cross thought,
Thank you, sir, for asking that question. At least there’s one journalist left with half a conscience.
The old geezer teetered, perhaps in a drunken stupor, and waved his hand at waist height as if polishing the hood of a car. He was fighting for his words, then concluded, “Blow them up!” The reporter moved on, guessing that the old guy didn’t really understand the question.

The phone kept ringing. They kept answering. The Mounties were right on what they said about that. They weren’t going to shoot James Cross just because the cops made a phone call, now, were they? So the Mounties won that one. They could always take their phone off the hook, but the cops said that
Captain Armand Touton was on his way. If that’s who they wanted to talk to, then he’d be the guy. But they had to be patient. Give him time to cross the city. He couldn’t fly, now, could he?

They knew how long it took to cross the city. He should have arrived by now.

“While we’re waiting,” the woman said, “you should be getting a plane ready for us. We need lots of fuel. If you won’t give us a plane, then pick out a coffin for your precious Mr. Cross. If you want, you can hear his preferences—what kind of wood and all that. I’ll get him to write you a list.” She hung up. Her voice sounded tired, her responses half-baked. Cross sensed her defeat. He presumed the Mounties could sense it, too. He didn’t know if that helped his situation, or not.

Then the Mounties called to say they should select an intermediary as well. Someone to be a runner between them and Touton.

“How come?”

“Because we’re cutting the phone line now.”

“Don’t—”

The line went dead.

Each of them took turns listening to the silence on the line. No dial tone. Like death.

“They’re punishing us,” one of the men said.

“For kidnapping Cross?”

“For cutting them out of the negotiations.”

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Cross called out.

“It’s the excitement,” somebody muttered.

“Keep your pants on,” the woman called through to him. “I’ll take you.”

One more humiliation before they were done with him.

She told him the news. “They’ve cut the phone line. We need an intermediary. A go-between, to talk to their go-between, whom we named for them. We got more go-betweens than we got hostages.” His piss flowed out of him while she listed all their troubles.

“You only have one hostage,” Cross reminded her. “Me.”

“That’s it. We got to take good care of you from now on.”

They threw a message out the window in a cardboard cylinder they took from a roll of paper towels. Mistaking it for a stick of dynamite, the nearest cops ran away. Inside the house, they had a good laugh over that. For an interval, a measure of their stress dissipated. The cops crept back and picked up the message, and seeing them so tentative and frightened was good for another laugh.

Captain Armand Touton waited outside in his car and once more leaned on the horn. This time, it had an effect. Émile Cinq-Mars dashed out the door of his second-floor apartment. Then braked on the stairs, scooted back up, locked the door properly, and scampered all the way down the stairs again. He went around to the side and got in the front passenger seat, surprised that it was just him and the boss.

Touton slapped a flashing magnetic cherry on his rooftop, and they were off at high speed.

He didn’t tell Cinq-Mars where they were going, and the young cop didn’t ask. Along the way, the junior officer asked him, “Why do you want me there, anyway?” “You’ve been watching the news?”

“Who hasn’t been?”

“I’ve been asked to do the negotiating.”

Cinq-Mars could not contain his surprise. “You? By the Mounties? Why?”

“Not Mounties,” Touton snapped. “Would that make sense?”

Cinq-Mars was confused. “I didn’t think so. Then who?”

“The terrorists. Who else?” He spoke as though he did not expect the young man to believe him.

He was still confused. “I didn’t know you knew them.”

The senior cop shrugged. “Neither did I. But they like my style.” He smiled. “A lawyer, his name’s Bernard Mergler, he’s the go-between, but I negotiate for our side.”

They carried on, fast, pell-mell, slowing for intersections, but barrelling through them the moment other cars caught his flashing light.

Cinq-Mars returned to his original question. “So why do you want me there?” “Somebody has to bring me coffee.” He honked at a bus and got it to move over. “Which reminds me.”

“What?”

“Give me back my badge. The next time you want to come out on the job with me, wear a uniform.”

Émile Cinq-Mars was a detective no more. But he was still a smart cop. He told Touton, “I’m not here to bring you coffee. I know what I’m here for.”

Touton kept driving, but looked over at him a few times. Eventually, he bent his head down and back up again, as though to concede the point unspoken between them. “I may need you to talk to Anik.”

“I know.”

The prime minister had chosen to watch the proceedings from his official residence at 24 Sussex Drive. Gérard Pelletier kept him company and interceded whenever the Justice Department called.

“We’re going to close this out,” Pelletier assured him, much relieved.

Television commentators were asking police officers how the discovery of the FLQ hideout had occurred. The cops talked, their lips were definitely moving, but they weren’t explaining much.

“How
did
this happen?” Pelletier inquired.

Trudeau didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Remember the Cartier Dagger?” Pelletier nodded. “That’s the price I paid.”

The secretary of state took in the news, observing his old friend for any untoward reaction, or any reaction at all. “Should I ask?”

Trudeau shook his head. “You won’t get an answer.”

They both watched the tube awhile. Then Pelletier noted, “Expensive, no?”

The prime minister dug a hand down the middle of his back to give himself a serious rub, working out the stresses there. Then he shrugged. “Not if this works.”

A while later, thinking politically, Pelletier posed another question. “If you can’t tell me the reason you’re letting them go, how will you explain it to the public?”

He delivered another of his famous shrugs. “The Brits put pressure on me to free their guy. In the end, I decided that his life was worth a lot more than the pleasure of incarcerating his kidnappers. If someone wants to know if I was negotiating with terrorists, I’ll just say that the British made me do it.”

“The Brits are tough. If they made you do it, then it had to be done.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

The old friends smiled. A few minutes later, evaluating everything, Pelletier assessed the situation with a positive nod. Fair enough. If it had been his decision, he’d probably do the same thing. Get the hostage back. Say good riddance to the rest. Nobody needed the kidnappers around being heroes in their prison cells, and Trudeau had already abolished the death penalty. Just get rid of them.

“This is a tough country to hold together,” he opined.

Trudeau looked over at him briefly, then back at the TV. Pelletier had always been a master of understatement.

Touton walked the long distance across the street. He remembered a day, years ago, when he flushed a syphilitic gunman from his home by tossing stones into one room after another until he showed himself. If the terrorists opened the door a crack for him, they first had to defuse the dynamite, then he could crash it down. He had the strength. His reflexes might be suspect, but if his legs performed to an old standard, he’d be on them so fast no shot would be fired. The kidnappers would be face down, their hands behind their necks, before they had a chance to blink. If they did blink, they’d be in handcuffs, wishing they’d never sipped mother’s milk.

Still, he had Cross to worry about. Something to keep in mind.

Anik telephoned after Cinq-Mars had gotten in touch through a clandestine exchange. Touton ordered everybody out of the command truck to talk to her. “Mounties might be listening,” he warned. “I can’t be sure.”

“Okay,” she said, “I get you.”

“I’m going over there, to talk to the kidnappers in person.”

“I’ll see you on TV,” she told him, and laughed a little. “I’m watching now.”

“I’ll try to remember to fix my tie.”

“Don’t wear your hat,” she advised him.

“My hat is my trademark.”

“That’s true. All right. Wear your hat.”

He exhaled. “I need to know something.”

“What?” Her voice was tentative, worried. She’d made a few tough decisions lately. She didn’t need to make another.

“Somebody you once knew—I’m saying it this way because the Mounties are listening—he wanted the object to go into the right hands. What he considered to be the right hands, anyway.”

“I believe that,” she said.

“Not the fascists, or the commies or the unions, not the Church or the government—but into what he considered to be the proper hands. He might’ve been right, he might’ve been wrong, it’s not for me to say. But he wasn’t looking to make a quick buck, even if he had some deals cooking. I think it’s fair to say that.”

“I don’t have any deals cooking,” she said.

“Because that might’ve been his downfall.”

“I’m looking to put the knife into the proper hands.”

“That’s what I’m asking, I guess. Because it’s fair to say it’s been in the wrong hands before. And for too long.”

She needed a moment to think. “I’m not taking it from the man who has it to give it to the man I used to be sleeping with, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“It’s a concern.”

“Those two have to fight it out on their own. They’re big boys. They have to get by without any props.”

“All right. I guess what I’m asking is—”

She waited for him to say it. When he didn’t, she provoked him. “What? You think I have my own FLQ cell now?”

“I want to know that you’ll look after the knife. That it’ll be your decision. Not somebody else’s. Just yours. You, I can trust. But if you’re being manipulated, or coerced, or influenced—”

“It’ll be me,” she said curtly.