River City (17 page)

Eventually, he offered, “I admired your husband, Madame.”

“You admired him,” she repeated back sarcastically.

“I thought he was a fine man.”

“A fine punk! A goon! A thug!” Carole shot back. “Are we talking about the same guy?”

“He had a way of going about his job—”

“He only beat up the assholes. You don’t have to tell me. I’ve heard that story before. It’s a crock of shit. He’s a liar, my husband. He makes up stories. He breaks some poor bastard’s nose and says the shit deserved it. But … he tried to get proper work. Who would let him? Would
you
let him? You didn’t want him off the streets. You didn’t want him going straight. You wanted him to stay with the bastards. He tried to work in factories—by noon, somebody would find out that he was Roger Clément, who once played a year with the Rangers, a few games over three years with the fucking Blackhawks.”

“Mommy, don’t say that word,” Anik censored.

“I know, sweetie. Mommy’s sorry.” She turned back to the detective. “Roger Clément, who spent most of his career in the penalty box. Roger Clément, who got beat up by the really tough guys on the other teams, but at least he kept swinging. Okay, so he was never a great fighter on skates. Off skates, in shoes, nobody could outpunch him.”

“Except me, maybe,” Touton said. “We had that between us, him and me. We wondered who could take the other guy if it came down to it. Maybe I could outpunch him, but we never found that out. It’s one reason we were friends. We could both punch.”

“Write it on his grave: ‘Here lies Roger Clément. He could punch.’” The woman wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Every time Roger got a factory job, every fucking time—oh sorry, sweetie, Mommy won’t say that bad word again. His first day on the job, no matter how hard he tried to get out of it, at lunch somebody wanted to take him on, try his luck. So what’s he going to do, lose? He’d fight the guy, then get fired, or fight the guy and get arrested, or fight the guy and six other guys would line up to try their luck. Every time, it ended up with him realizing that if he had to fight anyway, he might as well get paid for it without doing all the shit labour and being pushed around by bosses and foremen.”

Repeatedly, the policeman turned his hat over in his hand. What she said was valid. When he’d worked on the railroad, and later in the army, his reputation as a man who could use his fists was frequently challenged. There was always somebody who wanted to prove his status false. He didn’t know if he could have taken Roger in a brawl. He had taken LeBrun, but he had
always believed that that had been a lucky punch. And Roger had a soft middle. Between the two of them, the question was held in suspension—who could take the other guy out?—yet for both of them, the issue would only remain a curiosity. Neither man had an interest in that ultimate test.

Only the rest of the world cared.

“So he’s not been particularly worried lately? No new problems with his job?”

“You’re so holier-than-thou, aren’t you?” Carole fired out.

Touton was now glad that Anik was there. Her presence obliged her mother to mind her tongue. “Did Roger think that way? I don’t think he did.”

“Roger was confused by a lot of people. Look who he’s working for.”

“Roger,” Touton stated, “taught me that I had no right to look down on him. He worked for the mob, guys in the rackets, I worked for the police department.”

“Who are also in the rackets,” Carole taunted him.

“That was your husband’s point. As he used to tell me, with the gamblers and the pimps you knew what you were buying. With a cop, if you expect one thing, you could get something else.”

“We don’t have a police department in this town,” the woman complained. “The strong arm of the law is nothing more than the strong arm of the mob.”

“Some of us are trying to change all that. Roger was helping.”

“Yeah, well, some of us dedicate our lives to changing the system.”

“We’re making progress.”

“Speak for yourself,” she told him. “My husband is dead.”

Her little girl looked up at her. “Is Daddy dead, Mommy?”

For a long time, the woman wept in the arms of her child, while the policeman stared at the floor.

He did not leave before receiving assurances that she would contact a neighbour, to have someone be with her. And he vowed to pursue the case, to bring her husband’s killers to justice.

“You don’t know where that might lead you,” she cautioned him.

“I will take it where it leads me. That’s the promise I’m making here tonight. To you and your daughter. That’s a promise I’ll keep.”

She pressed her lips tightly to stop them from quivering.

At the door, with her child against her, she called the detective’s name before he stepped off the porch.

Touton turned. He felt captured by the wide, dark eyes of the child.

“Roger and me, we had an understanding. I wouldn’t ask him about his work and he wouldn’t tell me anything. But we always talked about finding a way out.”

“I see.” The detective returned his hat to his head and pulled in his coat against the chill. The woman was shivering now in her grief.

“Lately, he’s been talking. I don’t know how far things got. But he’s had some idea about a big score on his mind. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t discourage him. We needed to change our lives.”

“Did he mention anything about this big score? Who he’s been seeing lately?”

She shook her head, and Touton knew that he could believe her, that she was not withholding information. Perhaps she didn’t know that her husband had also been working for him in recent days.

“Has he ever mentioned something called the Cartier Dagger to you?”

Again, she shook her head.

“Thank you, Madame. Please accept my condolences on your loss. I liked Roger a lot. Him and me, with twists of fate, we could have traded places.”

“Detective.” Her new reality was taking hold, and through her heartache, practical matters had presented themselves. “I hope I won’t be reading in the papers that my husband was a police informant.”

Touton gazed at her, then at Anik, and back at the mother.

“No, Madame, you won’t be reading that. But I can’t control how the papers will describe him. He has a past.”

“You understand, don’t you? It’s not possible. You can’t attend the funeral.”

She desired to hold her head up over the next little while, and that would include holding her head high among the families of friends who had worked with Roger in nefarious activity. Touton nodded, sadly expressing his understanding. He felt a pang, for he realized that he had both wanted and expected to be paying his respects in a proper manner.

His last image of the evening would remain the most haunting: the dark, doleful eyes of the child gazing at him. Questioning him. He drove home, knowing that he’d be awake early in the morning to confront a city in the midst of its devastation. Yet he was going to feel more troubled, he knew, by these two forlorn hearts.

CHAPTER 6
1608–09 ~ 1611 ~ 1628

N
EVER AN EXPLORER BOUND TO HIS SHIPS, ALTHOUGH HE CLAIMED
great happiness at sea, Samuel de Champlain was foremost a soldier, a geographer and a diarist. An avid adventurer, he was also devoted to sitting still for hours, imagining or writing. He appreciated the birchbark canoe and valued secrets discerned by a discourse with rivers, yet this daydreamer would become a political strategist whose actions determined the course of nations in the New World. To all appearances a peaceable man, on his own initiative he chose to commence the Indian wars.

His predecessor, Jacques Cartier, on a third and final voyage, had failed to progress beyond the rapids at Montreal. Thwarted in a quest for diamonds and gold, the French abandoned the vast lands of forest and snow for decades. Among the Indians, stories of white men with beards and giant canoes would become half-forgotten rumours, myths passed along by batty elders that were difficult to decipher or believe when, after seventy years, the fabled French returned. Henri IV had been gazing upon the Cartier Dagger, ruminating over reports that the English had plans to explore, and perhaps annex, the New World. The Dutch, those villains, were also up to something, and the Spanish had ambitions brewing. Henri IV always had to second-guess the Spanish. So he chose to dispatch Champlain across the sea, and obliged him to introduce sixty families a year into New France to gain a proper foothold there. Champlain was also expected to explore and map the river system, initiate commerce, and, while he was there, pursue the search for the fabled swift route to the Orient.

A man who had been at sea on his twentieth birthday, and now a handsome, charismatic sea captain in his thirties, Champlain conned the coastline north from the lands called Cape Cod and Maine before attempting an east coast community in the basin of an inlet off the Bay of Fundy, which he named Port Royale. Starvation and illness stymied that fledging effort, but like Cartier before him, he would grow more impressed by the spectacle and promise of the St. Lawrence River. In 1608, having forsaken the initial settlement, he established a second where the river narrowed at Cape Diamond, a place the Indians called Quebec.

The following summer, in the company of two French and sixty Algonquin, Champlain canoed south up the River of the Iroquois to an immense waterway, where he proved to be more pragmatic than his forbearer at naming landmarks. An island in the St. Lawrence had cleverly been called Île Ste. Hélène, for he had landed there on that saint’s day. Yet he noted in his diary that naming the island after a saint was really a coy subterfuge, for he had had in mind, as he so often did, his bride back in France, the pretty twelve-year-old Hélène. Now appreciative of the majesty of a long and narrow body of water bounded by mountains on either side, he promptly named the lake Champlain. Unlike Cartier, he would not depend upon others to christen an impressive waterway after himself, and his party canoed the lake that bore his name, south toward the Iroquois settlement at Ticonderoga.

Where they encountered more than two hundred warriors.

For Champlain, the New World had to exist not on the idle dreams of wealth promoted by Cartier, but on sound business practice. That meant trade with the Indians. The Algonquin had convinced him that they could not engage in trade while defending themselves against Iroquois raiders, for they and the Huron clearly feared the ferocious, adept fighters to the south. Needing a strategy, Champlain foresaw a dramatic way to win their favour. With a bold stroke, he could gain the allegiance of the Algonquin, the Montagnais and the Huron, bolstering their confidence and delivering them from constant attrition in fights with the Iroquois. In doing so, he’d establish trading partnerships that could last for generations. In effect, by declaring to the Iroquois that they had to remain far south, that any incursion north would be met by deadly
counterattack, he would establish trade with the northern natives and launch New France as a viable commercial entity independent of funding from any king reluctant to untie the drawstrings on his purse.

If the Dutch and the English were planning forays across the sea, it would be only a matter of time before they attempted colonies. He had to move quickly. He had already explored the lands of the Atlantic coast, but the river gave the French excellent inland access, where he could claim massive territory in the name of France. What he needed was military might, and that could only be achieved through a powerful alliance with loyal tribes.

Champlain spent considerable time just sitting, stewing, working out ideas. That he was creating the nascent border between future countries in the New World had occurred to him in a moment of visionary insight. The continent might not be too vast for France to claim, but to hold it all without greater help from the king seemed unlikely. And yet, using only limited resources, the opportunity was before him to create space for his own enterprise while decreeing to all opposing forces that they had to stay away. The New World could change quickly. Move quickly was his plan—stake a claim, and be properly allied.

He had enjoyed the hard paddle south. The surrounding mountains, the waters as clear as the king’s own crystal, invigorated him. Extraordinary physical specimens, the Algonquin paddled with great effort hour upon continuing hour, soundless and straining. As winds whipped down from mountains to the west, Champlain himself took up a paddle and did his best to keep up with their rhythm, until the labour exhausted him and the Indians carried on. Late in the afternoon, they made camp, a dapple of sunlight reddening through the leaves while he touched a quill into his ink and wrote in his diary. Soon he’d smell sweet venison roasting on the fire. The Indians were nervous, he knew, but he had promised them an impressive display of power wrought by their alliance, and as the days passed and they approached their destination, his heart quickened with the prospect of war.

Three French, sixty Algonquians. Two hundred Iroquois fighters.

When the scouts arrived with news of the band at Ticonderoga, Champlain smiled. Good. He had hoped to be outnumbered. He told his
less-confident new friends, “Tomorrow you will see our power. Together we shall attack.”

The French carried with them three harquebusiers.

In the morning, the raiders from the north amassed across a cornfield farmed by the Iroquois. Surprised by the incursion, the proprietors were not dismayed. They raised their voices in ecstatic war whoops and lifted their tomahawks to the enemy and armed their bows with deadly arrows. This would be a wondrous fight, the inferior band killed and scalped. This would be a momentous event for the Iroquois, one worth many stories.

Then the three harquebusiers fired.

Three Iroquois fell.

One man was struck in the eye, killed instantly. Another gurgled on his knees for breath, blood spurting from his throat. The third man moaned in his misery as blood erupted from his belly, the pain more than he could endure as a man. His own brother slit his throat to spare him further shame.