River City (15 page)

He walked into the office of the civilian practitioner a second time, asked his question and received a firm price. “Fifty dollars a year. It’s not expensive. A buck a week. Not even.”

A lot of money for a working man in those days. “Every year?”

The doctor shrugged. “If you’re promoted, the treatments might become more costly for you. I’m just trying to give you a break. If I report that you have varicose veins, your days as an officer of the law are over.”

“I look at my legs every night. I still don’t see them.”

The man shrugged. “I do,” he said. “I’m the doctor.”

Touton returned to the military, where he was greeted by a phalanx of seventeen physicians. Each examined the war hero, and each signed a document proclaiming that not only did he not have varicose veins, he was exceptionally fit for a man who had endured ordeals fatal to most mortals. They allowed that his body had been compromised in the service of his country, but affirmed that he was returning to full health at a rapid pace. Furthermore, the seventeen physicians declared, they would join forces with the military bureaucracy to assure that any civilian doctor who declared otherwise would be both sued and brought before the College of Surgeons to have his licence revoked for both incompetence and graft.

That day, Touton became a cop for free. Every other policeman who joined the force that year was apparently suffering from varicose veins and would annually pay a physician a fee to adjust the medical record. The recruit had been initiated into a corrupt regime, borne into the culture as its enemy.

As a young cop in an openly dishonest department, Armand Touton took a risk, hitching his wagon to the political reformers of his day. In war and in captivity, he had learned to be true to himself—as a policeman he could do no less. In that period, Roger Clément, who was about seven years older than him, had been hiring out his fists at election time to anyone who needed a polling booth wrecked, or voters and scrutineers pummelled. One of the reformers, Jean Drapeau, had received police protection during his run for mayor, but the cop assigned to him was conveniently down the block buying a coffee when goons arrived to rough up the campaign workers and vandalize
the offices. Touton surveyed the damage, then took the absentee cop into a nearby alley and rather vigorously used his cap to thrash him until the officer told him who the visitors had been.

He then drove off to pick up Clément.

He tracked him to a tavern and sat down at a small circular table before a cluster of glasses, both full and empty. In the style of the day, drafts were rarely dropped one at a time, but in batches according to the patron’s level of thirst, often by the dozen. “We’re going for a ride.”

Clément checked his watch. “Naw. It’s my kid’s bedtime. I was heading home to tuck her in.”

“Too bad you didn’t think of that before trashing that campaign office.”

“What campaign office? You got proof?”

“I don’t need proof.”

“How come?”

“I told you,” Touton advised him, his voice flat and uncompromising, “I’m not arresting you. I’m not putting you on trial. We’re just going for a ride, me and you.”

“Yeah? Me, you and what army?” Clément’s friends were hanging close by.

Touton lowered his voice so that his warning remained between them. “If my pistol accidentally discharges at this moment, the bullet blows off your left little toe. I been in the war. Believe me, it hurts. I seen tough guys bawl because they lost their littlest toe.”

“Are you threatening me?” Clément carried weight, including in his neck and jowls, but his head seemed carved from granite. His jaw and chin might have been forged in a smelter. He had heard about Touton’s threat to shoot off people’s toes, but he also knew that the man hadn’t done it yet. On the other hand, no one had called his bluff yet, either.

“I’m just apologizing in advance in case there’s an accidental discharge. I’m sorry, I want to say, for the pain and the suffering that might cause you.”

Clément nodded. “You’re a big man behind that pistol and badge.”

“We should go a few rounds, but your friends here might interfere. I don’t have enough room in my squad car for everyone.”

“Yeah? You’d go with me?”

Touton sat back in the small wooden armchair. The chairs were comfortable, built to keep a patron happily sedentary through an evening. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you, but sure, I’d go with you.”

“So I’m curious. You took who? Bremen, Talbot … those guys I heard about.”

“Yeah, they wanted to try their luck. Both those guys I knocked out cold.”

“Me, too. I took them out.”

“Yeah?” Touton asked him, interested now. “Who else?”

“Lafarge … Gabriel Blais. Okay, those weren’t knockouts, but I took them. Bloodied them up.”

“Anton LeBrun?”

“I fought him,” Clément boasted. Immediately, he raised his beer glass to his lips.

“You take him?”

Clément shrugged. “We had a battle. It’s hard to say who won.”

A couple of friends chuckled. For them, the victor had been more apparent.

“I took LeBrun,” Touton told him.

“You did?”

“One punch.”

“Sucker punch, I bet,” Clément rallied.

“He gave me two good shots to the ribs, I fell to one knee, then I dropped him with a right uppercut. I hit him in a sweet spot, I’ll concede that much.”

Clément clucked his tongue. “He gave me two shots to the ribs. I couldn’t breathe after that. That’s how come he took me.”

“You’re brittle—that’s good to know. Now, what are we going to do here?”

The thug took another sip, and considered his options. “I’m serious,” he decided. “It’s my daughter’s bedtime. Let me give her a call at least.”

In the interest of making this easy, Touton let him do that. After the call, they went for a ride.

Touton drove out of the East End towards downtown along Notre Dame Street, past the shipyards, the locomotive maintenance facility and Molson’s brewery. After the war, the neighbourhood had swelled with working men who toiled in the tough places, where strength and fortitude were prerequisites to survival. The workers went home to small houses populated with streams
of children, and on the weekends the streets and lanes were shrill with their bawling and brawling, so that the men usually looked forward to the end of their leisure period and another week of hard labour.

“Where we going?” Clément asked the policeman.

“You’ll find out,” Touton told him.

“Who do you work for anyways?” the thug asked further along. He had a few scars from his travails. A thick one cut through his left eyebrow, matched by another just under the same eye. He must have looked a royal mess after that adventure. Those marks could have been caused by pucks or sticks, but the line beneath his right jaw suggested he’d been sliced by a stiletto, although again, it could have been the blade of a skate.

“I’m a cop,” Touton answered. “I work for the police department.”

“Yeah, right, tell me another one.”

The cop looked over at him. He had his reasons to let him sit up front. “I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind.”

The man shrugged. “Why not? You’re an officer of the law.”

“Who do you work for?”

“That I can’t say.”

“Why not?”

“We’d be in trouble then, wouldn’t we?”

“Let’s find out.”

“I work for my bosses and I don’t rat them out. That’s how I support my family. Hey. Where are we going?”

“You’re a tough nut,” Touton determined.

“Yeah. So?”

“There’s only one thing to do with a tough nut.”

“Yeah? What? Take him for a swim?” Clément asked.

“You’ve heard?”

“Yeah, I heard, all right? I ain’t going to talk just because … I’m not like those other guys. I ain’t going to talk. Forget about it. I don’t sing to cops. I just don’t.”

Touton turned and headed for the docks. Roger Clément had heard this story, that the policeman would park high above the river where the rapids
were fast, open the passenger-side door, and invite the poor sap in the car to either talk freely or step off the pier.

“You don’t understand,” Clément said, and for the first time, his voice sounded uneasy.

“What’s that?”

“I can’t swim.”

The cop quickly sucked in his breath and shook his head with mock compassion. “That kind of limits your options, doesn’t it? I don’t have a life jacket with me.”

“You don’t understand!” the thug shot back.

“What’s that?”

“I won’t talk. I can’t! It’s not in my nature!”

“Try me.”

“You’d piss your pants if I told you.”

“Tell me anyway. It’s my car. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“It’s not in my nature. That’s what everybody knows. That’s how I support my family. I’m no squealer. I don’t squeal. It’s how I earn my living.”

“You don’t squeal and you don’t swim. Jesus. We’re at a crossroads here. Have you ever been at a crossroads before? It could be interesting.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not laughing. Are you?”

The man didn’t say. He was holding onto the dash and the door as the car sped up and swooped over and around bumps and onto the timber pier, where it shook like a freight train on rough track. The cop was driving like a madman, and the passenger was already more afraid than he had been for a while, believing the car was nearly out of the crazy cop’s control, and with the river so near.

Worried the man might leap from the vehicle, Touton kept his speed up and drove with reckless intent. They reached the pier over the fast-moving water and he drove hard along the lip. A timber protected the edge, but he knew a place where a big ship had crashed hard and the bulwark had broken away. He scooted into the spot so that the first step out the passenger side of his car was into open air, then water, and he jammed on the brakes.

The thug had to fend himself off the dash. Before he had time to recover, Touton pressed his pistol against the man’s knee. “Out!” he commanded.

“You’ve got to understand this,” the man insisted, but he didn’t sound fearful or intimidated. He sounded resigned to the worst that this day might bring.

“No,
you
do. Open the door.” When the man did not respond, Touton jabbed him with his pistol and demanded again, fiercely this time, “Open the fucking door!”

“This is against the fucking law!” Clément shot back.

“What fucking law? What fucking town do you think you’re living in? It’s thanks to people like you there is no fucking law. Now open the fucking door!”

Clément opened it.

“Now step outside, Roger. You’ve got sixty miles to stay afloat before the current runs you into shore. Can you stay afloat that long?”

“I’m reaching into my pocket for my wallet,” Clément told him.

“I’ll shoot! Step outside or sing to me! Those are your two choices.”

“Go ahead and shoot. But I’m going to show you pictures of my daughter, Anik. Do you have children?”

“I don’t want to see a picture of your daughter!”

Clément shrugged again. “I don’t want you to shoot me in the leg. So there, we’re even. Here, look. Look at her. Isn’t she sweet?”

The girl in the photograph was indeed sweet, a bright smile with black hair in a pageboy bob. She had smiling dark eyes.

“I don’t care,” Touton declared. “Talk to me or step out of the car.”

“If I step out, I’ll die. Who cares? You won’t. All right, I understand that. You’re the tough guy. You convinced me already. But my daughter will care.” He kept the snapshot before Touton’s eyes. “Did you think of that? What will she do without me? I want to know. Tell me, what will she do without her papa? How will she live? My wife. Let me show you a picture of my wife.”

“I don’t want to see. Will you put the pictures away?”

“Just look at her.”

The two men looked at the woman together.

Touton toughened up. “If you want to see your wife and daughter again, talk to me. That’s all you have to do.” A cooler breeze was flowing in through
the open window next to him and through the open passenger door, but it was still a warm night.

Clément answered him with silence.

“Before you go for a swim, tell me something,” Touton asked, for he needed to be convincing in his menace. A cop could never back down in this situation, because the word would get around and he’d never have the upper hand again. “I looked at your rap sheet. How come you did time in that internment camp? What are you, a fascist? Communist? Spy? What?”

“I love my wife,” Clément told him.

“You’ve made that point already.”

“That’s why I did time.”

“They don’t put you in jail for that.”

“Yeah, they do,” Clément said. “In my case, they did. My wife, she’s a unionist. An agitator, they call her. A commie, they call her, but she’s only looking out for the working people, in particular for the seamstresses. I took the blame for something that came out of my house. Pamphlets. That’s all. Had to do with a strike at a munitions factory. It was considered unpatriotic, borderline treasonous, but you don’t know what they made those poor girls do. I’m talking to you about sexual favours. And worse—rape. So they went on strike, those girls did, and my wife, she supported them, because that’s what she does. She knows about strikes. So I did the time for her. I told them I printed the pamphlets. I was happy to do it. To me, it didn’t matter much. I don’t know what your camp was like—in my camp, I got to play hockey in the wintertime. All summer I played ball. The mayor—you know, Camillien Houde, the
ex-
mayor—he was in my camp, too, doing his time. At night, we talked politics, him and me.”

The mayor of Montreal had declared that the French should fight on the side of Mussolini. He’d also driven the city into bankruptcy by supporting the poor with work projects during the Great Depression, and fought against conscription, as did most Quebec politicians. What had finally done him in was his statement that he would disobey the law and not register for the draft, and he urged everyone else to defy the law as well, and for that he was rounded up and, without trial, dispatched to an internment camp, serving four years.