River City (40 page)
“That’s good. I’m pleased to make the acquaintance of Roger’s wife. He has my respect. Did he ever mention me? Roméro?”
“To be honest, Roméro, I’m sorry, I don’t believe he did.”
“There you go! You see? That’s my man! That’s Roger! Very discreet, Roger was, you could trust that guy. He’s been dead, God rest his soul, all this time, and he still won’t rat a man out. They don’t make them like that anymore, you know, not like Roger. But why am I telling you? You know!”
Nodding, Carole felt happy and sad at the same moment. She collected Anik and started on the walk back to the cars. This time, she would travel in Roméro’s vehicle, which she thought was a nice enough car, which he drove himself, and all the way he chatted to Anik, and Carole liked that—she liked the way she was trusted here and aroused no suspicion.
The fun part was that Anik really did have a good time. Once she overcame her shyness and understood that she really could run around anywhere, except behind the bar, she had fun at the Copacabana. One hood or another was always pleased to try to catch her—failing always, her mother noted—and the little girl particularly enjoyed romping on the stage. Roméro put the stage lights on for her and plugged in the mike, and while she refused to sing a song as the men requested, she loved running by, stopping suddenly and making silly sounds. She then ran off, as if trying to hear the sounds she’d made.
The hoods each spoke to Carole in turn, and she accepted a beer despite the early-afternoon hour, and in a way the wake became one in honour of Roger, one that she had missed due to her shattered condition at the time. No one really wanted to talk about Michel Vimont, but they were glad to tell stories about Roger, and she was on her second beer before she noticed that the place had become more populated than the funeral home had been.
With the party in full swing, three well-dressed men entered and removed their hats and cast their eyes around. Each nodded to the other and
one went outside, and when he returned, he stood in the company of a huge individual whom Carole and even Anik recognized immediately. Camillien Houde proved to be more imposing in real life than he had been in the newspaper photos or on the movie newsreels, and the legendary way in which he commanded the attention of a room held true in this company. Men lined up to shake his hand, and soon they were ordering more drinks for him than he could possibly consume in a day. Apparently, he was ailing somewhat. He was working his way through the well-wishers to a seat, where, huffing, he mopped his brow and accepted his first gin and tonic gladly. The rapidity with which he downed the glass had Carole changing her mind. Perhaps he really could make it through the alcohol ordered on his behalf. When he saw the woman in the room, then the little girl, he made discreet inquiries. Carole knew that he was asking about her, and out of a feigned politeness, she turned her head away.
In a moment, she felt a tap on the shoulder, and she was asked by Roméro if she’d like to bring her daughter to meet the mayor.
Houde bounced the wee one on his knee while Anik seemed mesmerized to be in the grasp of a man so vast. He was a giant, and terribly ugly, and Carole laughed to see her daughter look baby-sized again. She seemed so shy and sweet, as if being introduced to a mythical beast. They’d met once before, after the war, and Houde reminded her that he’d been a roommate of her husband’s in the internment camp, which she well knew, and together they told stories back and forth, Carole reciting her husband’s memories and Houde providing his own version of events. He shook his finger at her one time.
“What?” she asked.
“You mailed him his opinions! You gave him his politics! You’re the one!”
She nodded. “I was supposed to be imprisoned, did you know that? Roger went instead of me.”
A hush encircled the tables where they were speaking and the others were listening. Houde was gazing upon her with such solemn attention that he appeared as though he might cry. “Roger,” he said, “was a great man. We will miss him always. A round on the house!” he cried out, his first initiative to buy a drink. “We shall drink to Roger!”
Drink they did, to Roger. Carole was thinking as she sipped her beer,
Are you here? Roger’s killer, are you here? Because if you’re here, I’ll find you out, then I’ll hang your balls from the top of the Sun Life Building for the pigeons to peck on.
She had sat across from many tough men in her day, bosses and steely-eyed foremen. She had stared them down and forced them to negotiate through the sheer will of her resolve. She knew what it meant to play your hand too soon. Observing her daughter on the ex-mayor’s knee, she knew that she had gained the confidence of an inner circle. She could hardly wait to tell Armand Touton of her good fortune, yet she did wait, staying on at the party, having dinner with a bunch of men after the mayor had left and they had pizzas delivered. After being driven home by Roméro, she waited until Anik was tucked in and had fallen asleep before she made the call. She dialled the number for the captain of the Night Patrol.
First he chastised her, warning her to never call him from her home again. Then he praised her, and told her that she was a brave woman, that Roger would be proud. Although she knew that that was true, she also knew that Roger would never have allowed any of this to happen. But he was gone now, things had changed, and the work she was doing had to be done. She had to find his killer.
“In the future, when I take my daughter with me,” she told Touton, “that’s an extra two bucks an hour.”
Touton consented, wondering if he now held the record for the youngest informant in the history of the force. He would never find that out, of course, as no one kept that kind of information on file.
A
ND SO THE VOYAGE TO END HIS LONG SUFFERING COMMENCED.
Earlier journeys had begun with equally keen prospects, for on diverse occasions Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers had embarked upon grand quests to right their fortunes and defeat the improbable fates that ailed them. From the moment he’d laid claim to his manhood, the determination had been borne in Des Gros to locate the Northwest Passage—not the one fools sought to China, rather, the one to the Rupert and Nelson rivers, inside the Great Salt Bay where Cree gathered fur by the canoe-full. So rampant and consistent had been their misfortune that he finally quit, way back in 1682, and Radisson, always the honourable friend, agreed to relinquish the gambit also. Des Gros built a log cabin for himself near Trois-Rivières. Purchased a rooster and a dozen hens. Yet, even in that comparatively peaceful glen, adversity found him. A fox nabbed a few of the hens, and the fearful rooster ran off. On four consecutive mornings, he sat listening on his stoop to the cock crow, awakening the dawn with its lecherous screech from a woodland refuge before a fox got him as well, or mere hunger despoiled him.
“No more for us, that’s what we swore,” Radisson was recounting to a cabin boy, the first person in a while to take an interest in his tales. Shy in the beginning, the lad was drawn to the legendary figure. Now that the ship moved upon the waters and the days passed, grey and rainy, the waves rhythmic, the winds steady on the starboard quarter, the lad wanted to know the truth behind the fables he’d heard in London and Southampton, tales related
to Radisson and Des Gros. He believed every word that fell from the lips of this weathered, scarred man, his visage craggy and punitive under a rampage of overgrown beard and hair. He had been discovering that the truth eclipsed even the legends recited in their daring and raw adventure, and wished that he could live such a life as had this man, this Radisson.
The
Happy Return
plodded on, old timbers creaking, sails full and by.
“A sadder day,” Radisson reflected. Along the leeward rail they sat amidships, the frothy sea skimming past them, their feet comfortably wedged against the bulwarks to keep them safely onboard. “Aye,” he said, for he was speaking English to the lad somewhat as an Englishman might, although he blended the diction of soldiers and sailors and the language of various provinces. He further vexed his speech with accents both French and Iroquois. “The guv’ner hauled Des Gros to prison off, that wretched hour, stealing our furs after what we had done for him and his lot! Saved Ville-Marie! Saved New France! What we received in return was a
merci beaucoup
—and prison time. Our furs stolen out of our canoes. A wonder he left us our canoes, that man, that guv’ner!”
“I’d be so pissed!” the lad decried.
“I
was
so pissed!” Radisson concurred. “In more ways than one, and stayed that way—pissed!—for months. I would’ve stayed pissed longer, but money ran dry. Ah, lad, that was a sadder day.”
“What did you do after that?” The lad knew well that Radisson had never stayed put for long.
The
coureur de bois
sucked his pipe, savouring the smoke that helped to carry his mind back in time. “I waited for Des Gros to conclude his time in the stockade. When he got out, we hauled down to Boston. We talked to merchants, and Groseilliers, aye, he repeated one point, always whispering so when he spoke it, the Boston men had to cock an ear. He’d whisper that he had never told the French of our discovery. In his heart, he believed that the Boston men should be the ones to take advantage of the knowledge only we knew, if they’d but loan us a ship.”
“Did they?”
“The Boston men did, yes. They loaned us a ship, and it was our intention to sail north, to find the entrance to what we called the Great Salt Bay.
We had been there, from the south, by canoe. A hard paddle, lad, dangerous when we turned back. Iroquois marauding the rapids and anywhere we might portage. One time, we’d set out with a hundred canoes, but forty turned back, giving up—for the diligence required, lad, the courage, I would say, could not be found in the marrow of every man, in French or Huron or Cree. Now, we thought, what if we could fill the hold of a ship with the furs of a thousand canoes? That’s what we told the Boston men. Their ears tipped down, their greedy eyes preening up, and they loaned us a ship.”
“And you went there, didn’t you?” the boy asked, his hair tousled by the wind, his shyness gone, enveloped by the spirit of the tale. “Where we’re bound to? The Great Salt Bay?”
“Not that year,” Radisson recalled, bobbing his head. “Ice turned us back. Ice as tall as mountains, as broad as Ireland, but sailing just as ships do upon the sea, pushed by the wind and tide. We could sail around those mountains, we thought in our zeal, and so we did, only to come upon ice that locked the sea for as far as any man could see. We had to turn back that year. We were defeated then.”
“That’s too bad.” In his mind’s eye, the boy witnessed ice cast upon endless horizons, heaving, yawing, as a flow of lava upon the earth, mauling vessels.
“Defeated,” Radisson assured the youth, “but never fully disheartened. We knew—Groseilliers, now there’s a man, he knew for a certainty, he had the idea fixed in his head as definitely as the North Star lies fixed in the heavens, he knew that we might yet find a way through the ice. But we could tell, upon our return, that the Boston men were displeased with us, they were dispirited.” Radisson puffed upon his pipe, reflecting. He shrugged. “So we sailed, me and Des Gros, for England. That would be in 1665. Four years after that, we sailed from England, with two ships, for the Great Salt Sea.”
The wind whistled in the rigging, indicating a gale’s approach, half a day on.
“This time you made it?” the boy assumed.
“Des Gros made it aboard his ship, the
Nonsuch,
with that good Captain Henry Hudson. I did not. My vessel floundered. The
Eaglet,
she was called. A brave craft, but myself and all aboard were lucky to survive. We had to head back, so damaged we were. But the
Nonsuch,
stout and true like this
fair lass, weathered the storms and made the journey, and when she returned to England’s shore, I saw her from a distance. I held my spyglass upon the horizon every morning and each afternoon for an hour at a time. I spied the
Nonsuch,
lad, weighed down by beaver pelts to the brim! The hold packed tight to the brim!”
“You must have made a fortune!”
Radisson considered this, then shrugged, then shook his head. “Fortunes are not so easily earned. That is the one thing I will draw from my life, if nothing else. This journey, now,
this
journey will make my fortune. That is guaranteed! Back then, we were compensated, that is true. I will not judge it unfair. We had incurred the expense of two ships, with only one returned home filled with furs. Add on the king’s commission. The price of furs that year was paltry—I don’t know why. I would say I suffered a greater disappointment than our poor reward, to hear the name of Henry Hudson attached now to the Great Salt Bay, rather than the name Groseilliers! It had been his dream and purpose, his vision, and he got there with Hudson, but Hudson would never have arrived without Médard!” He shrugged again and smacked his lips regretfully. “That’s how it goes sometimes. Glory lands in the laps of others. All in all, we added enough to our wallets to know that a second journey from England would be worth the while. On that second voyage, my ship succeeded as well, and we sailed much deeper into the bay, all the way to the mouth of the Nelson River! That was the year that the Hudson’s Bay Company was formed, once we had made it through the Northwest Passage inside the bay, and there we conducted the first grand transaction for furs in the life of the company.”
“Blimey!” the boy complained. Bells had sounded.
Radisson smiled. “Your watch begins,” he noted. “We shall pick up the story again when time allows.”
Radisson lingered on the deck awhile, breathing the cool salt air, savouring the last of his pipe. When done, he knocked out the ashes and cleaned the bowl with care and ceremony, then deposited the pipe, still warm, in his pocket,
fastened the button and returned below. The air was not so foul as it would be by journey’s end, neither was it sweet-smelling, but damp and close, rife with human sweat. Radisson took to his hammock, located in the hold among the soldiers and sailors aboard, although he had been given the privilege of a segregated corner against a centre bulkhead, where the motion of the ship was least and the hatches that received air close by. He lay upon his back, his body swaying to the vessel’s gentle yaw as his thoughts fell to a lull.