River City (26 page)
In surprise, the cardinal placed a hand upon his chest. “You do me greater honour than I deserve.”
“Not at all.”
In humility, Richelieu bent his head slightly. “Very well, then,” he concurred.
Once he had departed, Dauversière and Olier looked to Maisonneuve to explain the remarkable encounter.
“We have the king’s blessing, and carry with us tangible proof, Cartier’s dagger. Should we fail, we shall be remembered as religious zealots ill prepared for our undertaking. The king will have lost no treasure—merely a knife he does not value, sent back from whence it came. If we do not fail …”
Maisonneuve allowed his voice to trail off.
Close by, Jeanne Mance picked up his thought. “… If we do not fail, the king will claim a credit for our success. Such is the supremacy of his blessing, and the power of the Cartier Dagger.”
“The knife gave Richelieu his excuse to come here,” Maisonneuve noted, and frowned. “Really, it’s nothing more than a payment for the perpetuation of his name.”
Olier nodded. “Richelieu thinks of everything.”
“Which is what we must do,” Maisonneuve reminded them. “Come, let’s leave the cardinal to his politics. The rest of us must attend to lowly, practical affairs.”
In its case, he held the knife to his bosom. Whatever Richelieu’s cunning motive, he was glad to have received the dagger into his possession, his first contact with the New World, delivered now to the service of their endeavour.
Over the course of two days in 1642, May 17 and 18, the colonists landed on the island of Montreal, having wintered in grave discomfort at Quebec. Maisonneuve was the first to come ashore, bounding from his longboat and splashing through the water to fall upon his knees on the hallowed ground. They were alone, save for the ship’s crew, who followed them ashore, and the governor’s attendants. Each man and woman repeated Maisonneuve’s example and kissed the benevolent earth.
While the men worked diligently to unload their armaments and stores, tents, personal effects, seed bags and tools, three women, Jeanne Mance, Charlotte Barré and her mistress, Madame de la Peltrie, created an altar for evening
prayers. The decorations, cut from wildflowers and undergrowth, earned the awe of the company as the people gathered in the evening light. In glass jars, Jeanne Mance had collected fireflies, and as the first mass on the island was conducted, the little bugs from the New World shone radiant light from the altar. Each man and woman knew they were being welcomed by God.
That night, they slept in their tents. In the morning, they set about creating a new village, scarcely looking up as the ships that had carried them from across the sea departed, leaving them alone in the wilderness with the trees and the animals and the persistent rumours of war.
A
S A PRELIMINARY STEP IN HIS INVESTIGATION, CAPTAIN ARMAND
Touton asked his officers to examine all Cadillacs registered in the province of Quebec. A mainstay among the rich of New York or Beverly Hills, the make of vehicle was not so ubiquitous on his home turf that the task appeared either too daunting or costly. That the rich were accommodating surprised him, initially. They opened up their garage doors or sent his officers to their country estates to examine these emblems of extravagance. Soon enough, he realized that owners who chose to advertise their station in life by driving an ostentatious vehicle would rarely deny themselves an opportunity to show it off, not even to the police. Of those Touton interviewed personally, a dozen had offered to take him for a ride, and he could not stop another twenty drivers from turning the key to “listen to her purr.” He listened to Cadillacs purr. To Touton, one car sounded pretty much like any other, whereas proud Cadillac owners responded as though enraptured by an evening at the symphony.
“Named after a Frenchman,” a diminutive lady in her eighties informed him from the aerie of her Outremont home, high above her street. Touton was still puffing from the climb, as the front stairs were built into the side of a cliff. He wondered how she made it up and down more than once a week, and presumed she had an elevator that descended through rock to the garage. He hoped she had a chauffeur. He couldn’t imagine that, shrunken by age, she could see above the steering wheel.
“You’ve given your car a name?”
“No, silly.” Osteoporosis had made her feeble and stooped, although in his judgment the weight of jewellery around her neck didn’t help. This tiny woman was calling him silly. He liked that. He liked her. “The car. Cadillac. It’s named after Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, who founded Detroit. Did you know that?”
“I did not.”
“You should know the history of your people. He was one of us, a Frenchman. He called Detroit ‘Pontchartrain,’ at first. These days, you can find that name down in Louisiana. Cadillac went there after Detroit. He became the governor of French Louisiana in 1713. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You should.”
“Now I do.”
“Thanks to me.”
“Thanks to you. What colour is your car, Madame?”
“Black. All cars should be black. Or, as Henry Ford said of the Model T, the colour doesn’t matter as long as it’s black.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“What else don’t you know?”
Now that was a complicated question. A good one. He was thinking that she could have been a cop. “Do you have a chauffeur, Madame?”
“You think I’m too old to drive.” She seemed ready to spit.
“I just wondered if—”
“You think I’m too incompetent to drive.”
“—if someone besides yourself had access to your car.”
“Jim does.”
Touton gave her a look, inviting her to continue.
“That’s right. I have an English driver. But I call him Jim. Not James. Pretty good, don’t you think? An old French dame like me with an English driver. Turns the world on its ear, don’t you think?”
“I think you’re very capable of turning the world on its ear.”
She enjoyed that. She had a good laugh, although her voice was frail and the way her body quaked frightened the policeman, who feared she might lose
her balance. If he didn’t catch her, she could tumble down a hundred and one steps. She continued to laugh, and Touton kept an eye on her, ready to break her fall.
“Has the car been in any accidents? Has it suffered damage over the last couple of months?”
“You think I’m a hit-and-run driver? I’ll hit and run you! Listen, one tiny dent and I’ll wring Jim’s neck. I’ll call him James for that. That’s his name, after all. It’s on his licence.”
“Is James around?”
“James?”
“Jim.”
She thought that over, and her complexion turned paler. “Oh no, no. Jim’s dead. Who did you say you were again?”
“Ma’am, your chauffeur is dead?”
“Thoroughly. Poor lad. He was only seventy-three. Seventy-four in August, if he’d made it.”
“And your Cadillac?”
“It’s five or six. Sits in the garage. It hasn’t moved since last fall, since Jim passed on. I’m too old to drive, and besides that, I can’t reach the pedals. I suppose I’ll have to sell, but it seems a bother. Do you have a good job, young man?”
“I’m a policeman.”
“You were saying. What is it you wanted, dear?”
Cautiously, he took his leave. The walk down was as precarious as the climb up, and more strenuous on his thighs. Gazing back skyward, he saw that the lady was gazing down upon him from a window. Perched like an eagle in her nest, she waved, and he moved on.
Perhaps, he regretted, he should have asked about the Order of Jacques Cartier. She was rich enough to belong, and daffy enough to have talked about it, but he wasn’t going to climb those stairs again, not on his wounded knees.
As the process went along, he discovered that most times when he was denied prompt access to a vehicle, he had latched onto a bad guy.
“So your name is Marcello Gaspriani, is that right?”
“Maybe yes. Maybe no. What do you want with my car?” The man was short and almost fully bald, although he paid considerable attention to the wisps of hair that remained, tacking them into place with Brylcreem. He wore a suit and tie, and his neck bulged from a collar at least a size tight. The two men stood indoors in a parking garage, with Touton standing between him and his vehicle. Perspiration had formed at the Caddy owner’s temples. From time to time he mopped his brow with a handkerchief, and they’d only gotten started.
“I asked my question first, sir.”
“What do you guys want with my car?” He yelled. He was a yeller.
“We’re checking a few things out.” Two uniforms were examining opposite sides of the vehicle, which was pristine, with polished chrome hubcaps and gleaming side accents. The white car’s upholstery was a bright red leather.
“Tell your fookin’ guys to take their fookin’ grubby hands off my Cadillac right this fookin’ minute, and I mean right now.”
“We need to check whether it’s been painted recently.”
“It’s never been painted. Hey! Don’t chip my paint job! That’s original!”
“It’s never been black?”
“Are you insane? Look at me. Do I look like a man who drives a black car? I won’t drive no fookin’ hearse. I only drive white. Hey! Tell your fookin’ guys—”
“Easy, Mr. Gaspriani.” Touton planted his big mitt on the shorter man to restrain him. A uniform signalled across that they had their confirmation. This was not a suspect car. “We’re going now.”
“Yeah, you’re going? Wipe off your dirty pawprints first, before you go. I’ll get a rag for that.”
“Don’t bother. We won’t be wiping off any prints.”
“No? You got your own nerve, did you know that?”
“That makes two of us, then. Because you have yours, Mr. Gaspriani. Here you are, driving a big white Cadillac, owning a tiny ice cream parlour on 16th Avenue. Does that make sense to you? We’ll have to watch over you from now on. Keep an eye out. See what else you got going on.”
He raised a threatening finger. “Nobody’s informed you properly. I own that part of town, me. I’ll have my people talk to your superiors.”
“Do that, Mr. Gaspriani. Maybe they’ll have lunch.”
“It’s
Gasprianini. Gasprianini,
you asshole.”
“Yeah, I know. Don’t worry about it. When we send you away, we’ll be sure to do the paperwork properly. The press though … you can never count on those guys. For the workingman they got no respect. They’ll probably get it wrong.”
Two problems were working against Touton: time and bureaucracy. At least half the body shops in town were crooked for half their business, and another quarter were crooked for all their business. Somebody wanting a tail light fixed or even a quick paint job could have that done without much fuss, and long before a policeman had inspected the vehicle. As well, visiting these people was daytime work, and aside from being captain of the Night Patrol and well liked by his handpicked team, Touton was exceptionally unpopular with other captains and district commanders. In their eyes, he was a goddamned choirboy, a reformer who wanted to remove their legitimate right to tax the crooks for their sins, and if that weren’t bad enough he also wanted to take away their right to enjoy their own sins in the gambling dens and whorehouses of an open city. For him, cooperation with other departments on a daytime investigation would not come easily.
Making matters worse, Homicide justifiably claimed jurisdiction over the crimes, and didn’t appreciate him meddling in their progress. They were certainly not prepared to share information. Then again, he wasn’t prepared to divulge a smidgen of news either. As the police director had stated, he would have to do this pretty much on his own, and he’d have to keep everything under wraps.
Which made things almost impossible.
An advantage he did have was the zeal of Detective Gaston Fleury, the accountant from Policy. The gaunt man visited him one night while he was at his desk dispensing orders, although Touton was planning to put himself on the streets once that job was done.
“What’s up?” Touton asked. The visitor wore a grin on his face as if he’d swallowed not only the canary but a tropical rainforest.
“You forgot something,” he said.
“What’d I forget?” Detectives loved catching him on a detail.
“Government vehicles.”
“I didn’t forget.”
Fleury’s face fell. “You didn’t check them,” he protested. “They’re off the list.”
“First of all, if I did check them, they’d still be off the list. I don’t want the wrong people to know I checked government vehicles. They can’t appear on
any
list. But it’s true, I didn’t check them out. That’s because I couldn’t find a way to do it without the wrong people noticing. If the Order of Jacques Cartier has all these upper-level mucky-mucks as members who are in government, I can’t afford to tip them off that I’m looking into their affairs. Keep that in mind, Gaston.”
Fleury nodded to indicate that he would bear his counsel. He was secretly pleased that the captain had called him by his first name. He volunteered, “I know a way to check city cars without arousing suspicion.”
“You’ve thought about this.” Touton sat back, twirling a pencil in his fingers.
The accountant shrugged, to deflect credit. “I happened to be going by one day, that’s all.”
“By what?”
“The municipal garage. Where the limos get washed up and waxed. I was tempted, I got to tell you, to see if I could have my own car polished up. But I figured that would be some kind of graft.”
“That would be some kind of graft. A garage?”
“Municipal. We could find out who works there, maybe create a retainer for someone, pay a guy to check every tail light, see which ones have been damaged or repaired in the past, then check them out. Find out who was driving them when.”
This was actually proper police procedure, something he should have figured out on his own. Touton was impressed. “Only one thing wrong with that scenario. But I like it, don’t misunderstand me.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“No retainer. A retainer means a paper trail. Any money that passes hands has to be under the table. You’re an accountant. Figure that one out without landing in jail. The other thing that’s all wrong with your plan is your use of the word ‘we.’”