River City (6 page)

They were poor.

Their lives were hard.

The damn English were always telling them what to do, and now they had suspended the Rocket! Their hero! What else did they have if not the Stanley Cup, and now the
maudit anglais
had conspired to deprive their team!

So windows were smashed. Debris was scattered. Stores were looted. Vehicles were vandalized and fires struck. Captain Armand Touton walked through the melee wondering how all this would unfold, this intoxicated rage, agitated all the while by a cantankerous officer who had insisted that somehow a burglary was more important than the social firestorm before their eyes.

Cops brought in horses.

The mob paused, retreated slightly, and formed a denser unit. Men shouted profanities at the cops or waved their fists or threw icy snowballs or hatched fresh manoeuvres. Nervously, a cautious contingent stepped to the rear, their enthusiasm tempered, while moving to the forefront were unionists, men who had battled cops previously in bloody confrontations. The combatants included men who’d hire themselves out at election time to wreck polling booths or stuff ballot boxes at knifepoint. Politicians and the papers called them goons. They’d fought cops often, sometimes with guns.
Also among their number were the fearless young, their courage found in the tempest of the moment and in the unlimited supply of stolen beer being quaffed down.

Cops manning the line looked across at a few old adversaries they recognized.

The two groups stared one another down.

Waiting.

Anxious horses whinnied.

The cops had no special training with respect to riots, and the only additional equipment they were issued were truncheons. In the past, they had discerned that cops on horseback were able to turn back any crowd. But they were facing men who had fought against horses before, had been beaten back and fled, yet they always itched for an opportunity to try again, believing they could devise fresh tactics.

They could not.

When the cops charged, they charged. The men were pummelled and trampled. Their lines yielded and cracked, yet they had a good number of recruits this time, and the chaos of the scene pulled bystanders into the fray. Riders found themselves surrounded. The youngest of these were terrified. A few panicked, fear travelling through their saddles into the skins of the animals. The horses kicked with their forelegs and spun in circles and kicked with their hind legs as they’d been trained to do. Rioters fell and held their bloodied heads in their hands. Even so, one policeman on horseback was hauled down from behind. The horse bucked and galloped clear.

Other cops swung their truncheons into the mob, concentrating an attack to rescue the fallen rider, and the mob peeled back and cheered themselves and took up the fight elsewhere. Tear gas was fired, but most of the cops were not prepared for the fumes, and a swirl of wind might send the rioters running one minute, the cops the next. The gas then dipped in gusts perplexed by the compress of buildings, and the eyes of the horses went wild, the animals choked and they were ridden off.

Gas swirled skyward, caught in an updraft that lifted it above the huge, bright, blinking Pepsi-Cola sign.

A tired, bleeding cop, down on one knee awaiting rescue or an ambulance, unsnapped his holster and held a hand on the stock of his revolver. Photographed, the picture would serve as a symbol of the battle in the morning papers.

The mob threw stones and bricks they had loosed from the walls of English stores, and they tossed broken glass at the cops and in the path of horses, and they threw snowballs without any harmful ingredients, or harmful effect, as though this were merely a schoolyard donnybrook. The groups charged and retreated and charged again, and a cop swung his truncheon to get Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his friend, Father François Legault, off their bench.

“What’re you doing that for? I’m not bothering you,” Trudeau complained.

“Get the hell away from here!” the cop cried out and slammed his weapon down hard against the bench, damaging it. He was a man in his fifties with dirt on his face and a wide cut on his chin.

“You’re a Frenchman!” Father François shouted at him, as if that came as some sort of surprise.

“So?” the befuddled cop wanted to know.

“Yeah, so?” Trudeau wanted to know as well.

“Why are you striking another Frenchman?”

“Because he’s sitting on a bench here! I don’t want no goddamned spectators! Are you a goddamned reporter?”

“I’m a priest! You watch your language.”

“You’re a priest?” the cop asked him, shocked.

“He’s a priest,” Trudeau confirmed, as though his opinion should be trusted. “A Dominican, of course, but we can forgive him for that, no?”

“You Jesuit elitist,” Father François fired back at Trudeau, and chuckled.

“Just get off this bench here!” the cop tried again, not knowing what to make of these two nutcases. Then he capitulated somewhat. “You should go home, Father. We can take care of business here tonight. Tomorrow you can visit the hospitals.”

“You
should go home, not me. Don’t bother with your business. Tomorrow you can go to confession.”

“What am I supposed to confess? That I’m doing my job?”

“That you were busting Catholic heads for your English bosses!”

“What English bosses?” the cop asked. “What’s he talking about? Is he really a priest?” He seemed on the verge of striking them both again, if only to stop their crazy chatter. “He talks like a communist!”

“He’s a communist priest. They exist now,” Trudeau explained.

“Wake up, man!” Father François yelled at him. “Wake up!”

“I’m awake,” the cop answered, confused. “Are you drunk, Father?”

“Are you?”

“I’m on duty!”

“Are you drunk on duty? Ask yourself this question.”

“You can’t be a communist priest. There’s no such thing. It’s
impossible!”

“Why? Because Duplessis won’t allow it?”

“The Pope won’t allow it!”

“The Pope has problems with Dominicans, though,” Trudeau cut in. “They’re such a pain in the butt, you know? At least he’s not a Sulpician.”

“At least you’re not either.”

“Or a Franciscan.”

“What are you talking about?” the cop asked. He thought they might be making fun of him.

“The divisions and subdivisions. If you’re a communist, you might be a Trotskyite, or a Marxist-Leninist, or even a Maoist. If you’re a Catholic, well, the permutations are endless.”

“What’s he talking about?” the cop asked again.

“Anyway, Officer, it’s been nice talking to you. Don’t swing that thing at me again, all right? We’re moving back.”

“I’ll crack your head open if you don’t! If I find out you’re a reporter, I’ll smash your nose!”

“If you like, I’ll point out the reporters to you,” Father François offered, which won a chuckle from his new friend.

“You’d better move back, too, Officer,” Trudeau cautioned him. “We’re in the middle of the next charge. Give up the bench—it’s not worth bleeding over.”

“You’re communists!”

“Not quite. He is. I’m merely an intellectual Jesuit Buddhist, with liberal underpinnings and a humanitarian bent. A little hedonism on the side.”

“You’re homosexuals!”

“I’m a priest! Watch what you say.”

“I’m also a lawyer,” Trudeau admitted, “but maybe I shouldn’t tempt you. I’m also a ladies’ man. But, like I said, maybe I shouldn’t tempt you.”

“Sorry, Father, but get out of here or I’ll forget that you’re a priest. I’ll bust your head! I’ll bust the lawyer’s head in half.”

“Officer,” Trudeau persisted, “look around you—you’re isolated. Get the hell out of here yourself.”

The officer did look around this time and realized that he was alone. The mob had spotted him, and the next charge met in the middle of the square around the bench he’d coveted, the officer flailing wildly at communists and homosexuals and unionists and intellectuals and reporters and lawyers and probably teachers and parents and superior officers and even hockey players who failed to score on crucial breakaways while other cops raced to his rescue and Trudeau and his new friend stepped back as the two forces clashed.

“This changes everything!” Father François yelled in Trudeau’s ear above the din. They were not alone in having a conversation, as behind each joust men on both sides argued and tried to figure out what was happening, or what should happen next, although their discussion was singular.

“We can agree on that,” Trudeau said.

“It’s the beginning of the revolution.”

“Actually, it’s the beginning of the riot. The riot is part of an ongoing social upheaval. To call it a revolution is to hijack the agenda for your own purposes. You should be ashamed of yourself, a priest.”

“I’m a Dominican. We promote new ideas, unlike Jesuit stick-in-the-muds.”

“We promote a more rigorous examination, Father.”

“So in the end you can clear your conscience for doing nothing.”

“Am I holding you back, Father? Do you want to throw a rotten egg?”

“The poor don’t have eggs to waste on policemen!”

“Pardon me?”

They were being jostled from behind and had to duck to the side against a building to avoid being pushed into the path of horses.

“Not even rotten ones. The poor don’t have eggs,” Father François repeated.

“Spare me the rhetoric, Father. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“A rich young Jesuit from Outremont.”

“And you, a cozy priest.”

“You pulled your punch there, Pierre. You meant to say fat.”

“I meant to say what I said, Father.”

“Don’t call me cozy. I’m here, aren’t I? On the front lines.”

“The front lines are fifty feet away.”

“Close enough. I don’t have the heart for battle.”

“You’re a pacifist?”

“No, I just have a weak heart.”

The two men laughed then, and the fight in front of them dispersed in a torrent of snowballs from the young boys in the rear.

Amid imposing Doric columns, visitors are guided up broad stairs into the Sun Life Building. Scaled-down columns are repeated seventeen floors higher, the overall effect one of solidity and long-term prosperity, as if success can be measured as eternal. True to form, the Sun Life Assurance Company has enjoyed a long and eventful history in the province, its influence at times approximating that of the Church. The first institution Armand Touton had chosen to defend upon deducing that there might be trouble in the streets was the Sun Life, not because he favoured the place, but because it stood out as a likely flashpoint for French rage.

He accosted the first officer he came across guarding an entrance.

“I said to keep people out of here!”

“I did, sir.”

“Crooks got in!”

“Not through my door.”

“Young man, I bought a new stove recently. Electric. Turn it on, and like magic, the rings on the burner heat up. They get so hot they go red. You can boil water so fast you can turn your kitchen into a sauna in the wintertime. If I find out somebody got through your door, I’ll make you sit on that burner.”

“My door was locked, sir, and it’s still locked. I don’t have a key. You have to go down to the middle to get in.”

Touton tested the officer’s locked door, and confided, “That’s good news for your ass.”

“Yes, sir.”

Only a few cop cars were parked up and down the block, and across the street a number of officers had gathered around a statue to the Scottish poet, Robbie Burns. Touton didn’t have a spare minute to investigate how they got to goof off amid the uproar. Across the night sky he heard the sirens of emergency vehicles, marauders roaring and the flagrant honk of car horns in support of the riot.

Smoke from fires and tear gas fumes drifted across the square.

Touton also berated the cop on duty at the middle door, but again received no admission of guilt. “They didn’t come in this way, sir.”

“If I ask every cop on duty, will I get the same response?”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe.”

“I suppose the crooks landed by helicopter.” He intended the remark to be both rhetorical and facetious.

“Something like that,” the young patrolman said. “I heard it was something like that, anyway.”

Touton shook his head as the officer unlocked the door for him. Sometimes young cops could be just so damned stupid they took his breath away.

Downstairs, another cop was waiting to guide him up. The elevator, smooth with a comforting guttural purr, possessed an elegance the policemen rarely experienced. The walls were mahogany and the fittings a gleaming, polished brass.

“Detective Sloan upstairs?”

“I don’t know, sir,” the patrolman said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” He doubted that young cops were
becoming more stupid year by year, but on this particular night he seemed to be running into the dullest minds in the department.

“He’s gone back and forth so often, it’s hard to keep track. Sir, I think he’s upstairs, but I could be wrong.”

“Back and forth between where and where?”

“Between here and the park, sir.”

Touton guessed the cop was probably intimidated by his rank and reputation, as well as by his tone, so offered nothing more than rudimentary responses.

“You mean across the street? What’s in the park?”

“The dead man, sir.”

“What dead man?”

“The one in the park, sir.”

“What’s your name, Officer?”

The lad took a deep breath and wondered what he’d done to deserve this. “Miron, sir.”

“Miron, why is there a dead man in the park?”

“I don’t know, sir. I mean, he was murdered, I know that, but I don’t know why, sir.”

The elevator had reached their floor and the two men clambered out, Touton first. “You’re telling me there’s been a murder in the park? Detective Sloan is covering both cases?” Actually, when he thought about it for a moment, given that every cop was being stretched beyond the breaking point on this night, that seemed reasonable.

“I think it’s the same case, sir.”

“What?”

“Just what I heard.”

“The burglary in here—”