River City (71 page)

The man shrugged. “I’m a hockey player. Played for the Blackhawks. Before I got hurt.”

“He got cut,” one of the other men said.

“You got cut. Now you’ve got nothing better to do than visit a seamstress and lock her out of her house because she wants to organize the impoverished women in her trade.” She put her hands on her hips. “Well, you’re no fucking player anymore, are you? You’re just a stupid,
stupid
thug who some day will be
fat.”

He didn’t say anything, although he made a gesture with his head that Carole did not comprehend. She turned to see what the other men were doing. They were getting into their cars and leaving.

“Go. Scram. Home to your nightmares about
communists.
Piss your pants, why don’t you? You can’t do anything else with your little weenies. Maybe the commies will lock you out of
your
house someday, then we’ll see how
you
like it.
Hey!
If that day comes, I hope they melt the keys.”

Two cars pulled away from the curb. Carole kicked at the fender of one. She shook a fist at her tormentors, and realized then that the other man, the one she’d been berating all this time, had remained behind.

For a split second, she wondered if she should not be terribly afraid, and then, inexplicably, she didn’t think so.

“Let’s go for a short walk,” the man said. “I want to talk to you.”

“Fuck you.”

“Take a short walk.”

“What for?”

“So we can talk about your problem. I got a solution. I’m carrying it with me.”

“Talk about it right here.” “I can’t do that, ma’am.”

“Why not?” Her question was less contemptuous than she had wanted it to be, more curious than she wished to admit.

“Because I’m standing out here in a public place with everybody watching. I can’t help you in a public place. Understand something, all right? I got a job to do here. It’s my job. But maybe I can help you in private, you get me?”

She felt swayed. She didn’t want to sway. The first rule when accosting an employer or a cop on a picket line: Never let them take you out of public view. Make them answer your questions so that everyone, including the press, hears the response. Yet she felt swayed. This brute of a thug, who wasn’t fat and possibly wasn’t stupid either, was looking at her with neither contempt nor acrimony.

Anyway, the press wasn’t around. “All right,” she said.

“All right.”

They walked to the end of the block in silence and turned the corner. Now she was growing more interested, because he hadn’t said a word. “If you’re going to kill me,” she said, “tell me first, all right?”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t pray much. I guess I could learn in a hurry.”

He smiled, and when he looked up, he saw that she was smiling, too.

They had reached the entrance to the lane that ran behind Carole’s home. Snow had melted in recent weeks, but the lane didn’t receive much sunlight, and it remained two feet deep here.

“Okay,” he said, stopping. From his pocket he extracted a key, which he extended to her. “This fits the lock on your back door. Go in and out that way. If you cut through the lock on the front door, somebody—not me, but that won’t matter—somebody will put a new one back on. Then they’ll lock the back door again as well. So for now, this is the way you can do it.”

“Do it?” she asked.

“Get back inside your house, but so my bosses don’t know.”

She accepted the key.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I guess you must be,” she said.

“I apologize,” he said.

“I heard you the first time,” Carole said. “You don’t have to go on about it.”

“Okay then,” he said. “All right.”

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Roger Clément. Yours?”

“Carole. You played for the Blackhawks, you said?”

“Before that, the Rangers. Briefly.”

“They’re both crummy teams,” she pointed out to him. He shrugged, and hung his head a little. Then looked away.

“I’m sorry you got cut, Roger.”

“I got hurt,” he blurted out. Then he shrugged again. “Then I got cut.”

“That’s rough.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. You know. About today.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“So. I gotta go, I guess.”

“I guess you gotta lock up more houses. I gotta go, too. At least I got a place to go to now. Thanks again for that.”

“Yeah. That’s good. Yeah.” “What?”

“I don’t know. Maybe—I was thinking, you know?”

“About what?” She waited. “Yeah? What about?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’d like to go out sometime. You know? I don’t know.”

“I don’t know if you don’t.”

“I was just asking. We could go out, I mean.”

“If I say no, will you lock me out of my house again?”

“I won’t—Carole, I won’t lock you out of your house no more.”

“Okay, then,” she said.

“Okay.” Then he dared to look her in the eye. “Okay what?” he asked her.

“Okay, I’ll go out with you. You mean, like, for a drink?”

“Ah. Yeah, or … I’ve been making some dough for these jobs—I mean, we could go for dinner. If you want, a movie, something like that.”

“Wow.”

“Wow?”

“Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone out for dinner.”

“Yeah? Do you wanna?”

“I guess so. It’s too bad it has to be because of these jobs, though. I feel sorry for the other people. Maybe you can help them out, too.”

He sighed. “Maybe. I don’t know yet. Maybe not.”

“Yeah.
Voo!
This is weird. Okay. What the hell. I’ll go out to dinner with you.”

“That’s great.”

“Ah—do you carry a gun, Roger?”

“Yeah. Not always. Sometimes, yeah.” He lifted one of his big shoulders and let it drop, as though to say that that’s what his life was like now. He had put down his hockey stick and picked up a gun.

“Don’t, okay?”

“Ah, pardon me?”

“Your gun. When we go out, you and me, don’t carry it with you.” “All right,” he said. “I won’t. I’ll do that. I won’t carry no gun.” Four months later, on a warm summer afternoon in the parish church just around the corner, Carole Bonsecours and Roger Clément were married.

A weekly luncheon with friends at the Mount Royal Club had been his habit for more than three decades, yet on this occasion Sir Herbert Holt chose to make an unusually flamboyant approach. Slowed by his years, the octogenarian had nonetheless made prodigious progress from his home on Stanley Street in central Montreal to his club, a few blocks west along Sherbrooke. Four soldiers, each with a long rifle slung over his shoulder, protected him. They marched in perfect formation, with Holt shuffling along in the middle. He mounted the forbidding stone stairs, one shaky step at a time, towards the impressive oak door. Once there, he commanded his escorts to stand guard at the entrance, a precipice with a full, clear view of the active street. He promised to have the kitchen prepare a warm bite for each man. Three could form a barricade, he advised, so that the fourth could eat without insulting the vision of members as they, too, chugged up the stairs for lunch or departed. In this way they could then take turns until each man had enjoyed an elegant sufficiency.

The foot soldiers thanked him.

Then the richest, most powerful man in Canada entered his club.

As it happened, a luncheon companion, Sir Edward Beatty, had been approaching from the east in time to witness his friend’s arrival, as had Sir Charles Gordon, puffing along about a block behind Sir Herbert. Sir Edward had to stall only a half-minute at the foot of the stairs for Sir Charles to join him, and the two climbed up together, arm in arm for their mutual stability. Inside, they found Sir Herbert at their regular table by the great bay window.

“Let me guess,” Sir Edward mused. In his late seventies and considerably less wealthy than Sir Herbert, his position and influence were such that he could rival his friend’s power. “You’ve turned off the electricity on a homicidal maniac.”

“He’s done it this time,” Sir Charles added with a wink. “He’s denied heat to the cathedral.”

“I’ve seen it published,” Sir Edward continued, “that our friend will turn off the heat on a woman in labour and not lose a moment’s rest.” A French daily had made expressly that claim.

“But not if she’s a proper Englishwoman,” Sir Charles countered, as though rising in his friend’s defence, but in fact quoting the same derogatory article.

“Right. If she’s an Englishwoman, he’ll switch off her power and let her freeze,” Sir Edward postulated as he pulled back his chair and examined it for dust motes before sitting. “His conscience, however, will cause him to toss and turn for an hour, until he falls into the deep sleep of the damned.”

“So the French say.” Taking his seat, Sir Charles flashed his serviette to open it fully, then let it glide down upon his amble lap.

“Newspapers may publish what they wish, and the people are free to believe them,” Sir Herbert Holt waded in. “I say if a woman cannot pay her electric bill, or her fuel bill, she ought not to be having babies. If she is in labour for perhaps the tenth or fourteenth time, then undoubtedly the Catholic Church put her up to it. Therefore, in my opinion, it is not the responsibility of Montreal Light, Heat and Power to comfort her with warmth or electricity. That charity lies at the footstools of the bishops. Let them pay if she cannot.”

“You’re a hard man, Sir Herbert,” Sir Charles stated, “with a calloused heart.” As president of the Bank of Montreal, he was known to possess a calloused heart
himself. Throughout the Great Depression he had foreclosed on thousands of families. Neither as rich nor as powerful as the other two, he had nonetheless become their most trusted ally.

“I am a businessman, Sir Charles.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Sir Edward responded.

“I’ll drink to anything,” Sir Charles acknowledged, “if only our bloody drinks would show up. What’s keeping our man?”

In their waning years, the men still ruled much of their visible world. Herbert Holt had come to Canada from Ireland, working as a young engineer on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. He had retained the gaunt, fit physique those days had imposed throughout his life. His particular responsibilities had included the prairie and mountain sections of track, a task in which the young man had exulted as a test of his rough-and-readiness. After the railway had been completed, he considered his next venture carefully. He was determined to gain wealth and advancement in the world. Banking soon became his vocation, and following a brief stint with a fledgling institution, he accepted the presidency of the Royal Bank of Canada. From that august pinnacle, he was able to secure executive positions for himself in numerous enterprises, such as Montreal Light, Heat and Power, Montreal Trust, the Sun Life Assurance Company, Ogilvie Flour Mills and the Dominion Textile Company. Montrealers could not get through a day without using his power or eating his food or wearing his clothes, while his influence held lunar sway across four continents. Though he sat on the boards of directors of more than three hundred corporations, when pressed, Sir Herbert could name but a few. Yet employees of these unknown enterprises were in the nasty habit of going out on strike from time to time—lately, more often than he could stomach—and whenever they did, death threats frequently ensued. They accumulated on his desk alongside invitations to balls and fundraising dinners, and as the threats intensified to both a feverish pitch and manic frequency, overwhelming the social obligations, he’d call upon his friends in the military to protect him, hence the armed guard on this occasion.

A dour man, severe in deportment, intimidating in his personal style, in his old age leaner than ever and scraggy behind a white frosting of beard, Sir
Herbert conveyed a puritanical nature and, both in his private and public lives, remained true to that bearing. He stepped away from his self-imposed bounds only for these luncheons, for his companions viewed life differently than a man of his ilk. He had long ago conceded that they had lived more interesting personal lives than his own, and had been rewarded with superior stories to relate. Indeed, in his dotage he had begun to live his life through these outlandish, often roguish, tales. His friends made him laugh, and he enjoyed a good chuckle more now than he’d ever done as a practical, ambitious youth, or as a middle-aged tycoon.

In this instance, the story told about him by Sir Charles held more than a wicked grain of truth, and did not cause him to laugh. Without hesitation, he
would
cut the power to anyone who had failed to pay a bill. Damn the Great Depression, damn the excuses. If the Church exhorted Catholic women to make babies to advance the population of Quebec and secure the political power of the French, then the Church could bloody well render payment for their unpaid bills. If not, the people could live in the dark and freeze in the cold—that was none of his concern. The French, he knew, would dance on his grave, delighted that he was finally wedged underground, and while he had acquired his wealth during an era void of income tax, they’d ignore that he had voluntarily taxed himself, siphoning significant funds to charities. He knew, if no others did, that he paid particular mind to charities that aided those he let freeze.

Business was business, and charity was charity. The two didn’t mix.

A different sort, Sir Edward Beatty had been the subject of whispers that his close friends knew to be true. Witness his support of the Shawbridge Boys’ Farm and Training School. Sir Edward, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, built a rail line onto the farm’s property. For a pleasurable weekend outing, he’d tuck himself away in his luxurious coach, then have it pulled north to the farm to deposit him on a private siding. There, he’d regale the delinquent boys from the slums with stories meant to encourage a change in their direction. A number of times, Sir Edward selected a young man for a junior position in one of his companies and indicated the sky as the lad’s limit. Several successful Montreal businessmen were indebted to him for being rescued from lives of crime and destitution. Although there were whispers.