River City (76 page)

Anik threw up her hands. “I’ve been telling you since like forever. The point of the exercise is independence. It’s not to find a leader. Quebecers are so infatuated with leaders. God! Now that we have a leader everyone’s happy, but we’re no closer to our goals.”

“But we are,” Pierre argued. “Lévesque’s a populist, he can rally the people. The movement has momentum now. We have that because we have a leader.”

She considered her position. Having qualms did not necessarily mean that she was right, and she had to remind herself of that. Her natural tendency to object, to go against the common sentiment, was not a perfect remedy for every ailment.

“Stop being so stubborn,” Vincent counselled her.

“Nothing’s changed,” she grumbled.

“Except that now we have a leader,” Jean-Luc insisted, his eyes shining.

Given that he was a political science student, Anik expected more from him. He was cerebral, unlike Paul, who felt his passions viscerally, who felt his love for his people in his bloodstream. For Jean-Luc, everything—the world, his aspirations, his politics—resided solely in his head.

Anik shook hers. “It’s fucked. We keep looking for a hero to rise above us.”

“What’re you objecting to?” Paul bristled.

“I met Lévesque once,” Anik told them.

Suddenly, they were very interested in her side of things.

“On a picket line. He’d gone down to support the garment workers. Me and my mom, we were on the line, too. He gave a quick speech.”

“How’d he do?” Jean-Luc asked. He envied her the experience, but worried that she’d disparage his hero.

“The seamstresses loved him. I had a problem though. I was wearing jeans. When nobody was looking, he ran his hand up the crack of my ass.”

“Lévesque!”

“At the most, I was seventeen. He was a lot older.”

The boys nodded solemnly, as though to commiserate with her and a sad experience. But Jean-Luc rethought his position. “René Lévesque,” he said, “ran his hand up the crack of Anik’s ass. I tell you, boys, that man is a leader of men. A minute ago, I respected him. Now I’m in awe.”

In time, with further ribbing, even Anik joined the laughter. She was thinking that it was true—Lévesque was different. Others listened and responded to him, and if he had wandering hands, he also had audacity. For the task ahead, that attribute might be useful.

They raised their glasses. “To independence!” Paul cried out.

They drank to their cause.

“To Anik’s ass!” toasted Pierre, and she belted him for that. Later, along with the entire bar, they sang deep into the night.

Father François had vestments to remove—a cloak, a shawl, an outer robe—which stripped him down to a second, more comfortable cassock for socializing. A helper appeared in his parlour, a matron who kept her grey hair knotted in a bun. She was taller than the priest, yet remarkably thin, and happily accepted the presence of an extra guest for lunch with aplomb. Her employer, as usual, had neglected to mention he had extended the invitation. The two men sat in matching armchairs angled slightly towards one another, a lamp and a serving-table between them in the warm, shadowy room.

Afternoon light fell through lace curtains upon an ochre carpet.

Initially, the discussion touched on Anik, for Constable Émile Cinq-Mars had received the invitation to the luncheon after Sunday Mass by mentioning her name. He now had to assure the inquisitive priest that he had not come to discuss a marriage, and suddenly he wondered if he should retreat and come back another time.

“You’re the new boyfriend, so I jumped to a happy conclusion, Émile. Perhaps on another occasion, you will make that announcement.” Hot soup
arrived, a cream of broccoli, bordered by a plate of sandwiches cut into quarters, the crusts removed. The helper tarried long enough to receive compliments from both men and collected the resident tabby before departing, as though disappearing into the woodwork.

Cinq-Mars thanked the priest for his hospitality. Rarely did he eat a homemade soup these days—only on trips home.

“Truth be told, the company’s appreciated,” Father François assured him. “Now tell me, Émile, what has brought you here if not the frightening prospect of marriage? Neither illness nor death, I trust.”

Bluntly, Cinq-Mars stated, “Anik’s father.” He placed the hot bowl on the table bedside him, the varnished wood protected by a cloth doily. He noticed a char mark. “His murder. I’m working the case.”

The older of the two stirred his soup slowly, absently, before gazing back at his young visitor. “I’d have thought that case in mothballs ages ago, or whatever it is policemen do with unsolved crimes. Roger Clément. My.”

While he allowed his own soup to cool, Cinq-Mars bit into another sandwich. The morsels were quite tasty despite the bread being stale by a day. He doubted that having a matron to run his kitchen helped the priest’s overt waistline. “It’s my understanding, Father, that the case will never be neglected.”

“Why should that be?” He rocked his head from side to side. “I suppose it has to do with Armand Touton, his friendship with Anik’s mom.”

Cinq-Mars feigned disinterest in his own response. “Also, his friendship with Roger Clément. That might have more to do with it. The fact that a coroner was killed remains important. Let’s not forget that the theft of the Cartier Dagger means a great deal to our society. Whatever the motivation, I’m being brought up to speed. The investigation will continue through the next generation.”

“The perseverance of the police department, Émile—admirable, I must say.”

“Father, could you fill me in on your relationship to the deceased?”

Both men caught the shift in conversation. The young man was no longer being received into the priest’s rectory as an act of hospitality. The priest was being questioned with respect to any involvement he may have had in heinous crimes.

Despite his inexperience, Cinq-Mars felt strangely confident, as though he had conducted such interviews for years. At one time in his life, he had expected to become a priest. Later, he had pursued an alternative ambition, to involve his love for horses in his life’s work and become a veterinarian. Few placements were available in those days, and no university accepted him. With that disappointment, he had seized upon a new vocation, and in proper time he would rise to the rank of detective. Embarking upon his interview with the priest, the sensation that overtook him was not awkwardness, or unease, but rather the shock of familiarity, as though he’d been doing this work for years. More powerfully, the overriding sensation had to do with finally performing the work he was meant to do—investigate crime—and out of that intersection with destiny, he felt his confidence flow.

“Father?” he asked. The man seemed to have dropped into a daydream.

“Roger, yes,” the priest acknowledged. “You must understand my hesitation. I am obliged to segregate my sacred relationships from my friendships, and memory can easily confound the two.”

“You’re saying, then, that you were friends,” Cinq-Mars stated. He sensed that the priest was stalling as he gathered himself.

“I suppose, yes. Like me, Carole Clément was active in union affairs, and in the rights and interests of the poor. We found ourselves on the same side of many issues. Through Carole, I got to know Roger, although that wasn’t as natural a process as one might suppose.”

“How so?” Peculiarly, once he had commenced his digression, Father François had failed to glance his way.

“His politics. I blame his wartime internment for that. Nobody’s ever accused Roger of being an intellectual. To be incubated with fascists, like Houde—”

“A strong term, Father,” Cinq-Mars pointed out to him.

The priest shrugged. “If you wish that I moderate my language, Émile, I’ll do so. If I were speaking from the pulpit, you’re right, I’d be more circumspect. But we’re only having lunch.”

The policeman nodded, encouraging the man to continue.

“Being from the left, I found Houde and Roger to be excessively right wing.”

“Yet Carole was on the left—”

“Far left,” the priest underscored. “She fought the tough battles. She was the one, remember, who was supposed to have been sent to that internment camp. Roger took the blame in her place.”

“Whereas her husband—”

“Broke up strikes. He bashed union men in the face.”

Cinq-Mars flexed his shoulders, as if accommodating the contradiction proved physically demanding. “So the woman on the left and the man on the right loved one another. They went home at night and made peace between themselves—is that the general consensus?”

“Perplexing, isn’t it?”

“Or, perhaps, that’s how Roger Clément wanted it to appear.” “Excuse me?”

Émile Cinq-Mars rarely drew attention to his imposing beak, but in this instance he was fraught by an itch and had no choice but to raise a hand to the bridge and offer it a good scrub. Then it required a second, gentler tweak between his forefinger and thumb. The moment passed with the priest feeling free to stare at the appendage, looking away sharply, somewhat embarrassed, once the rapid ablutions had concluded.

“I’ve met Anik’s mom,” the young man explained. “She’s formidable. Says what she thinks and does what she pleases. There’s no way she’d tolerate her husband walking around town aiding and abetting the enemy.”

Father François adjusted a crease in his cassock and nodded. He appeared to be evaluating what Cinq-Mars had said, giving the remarks their due, but he concluded his meditation by dismissing the young man’s point of view. “Roger was as wilful as her. The fact is, he aided and abetted the enemy.”

“He appeared to be doing so, yes.” Cinq-Mars held up a finger, and, finding that this was not a sufficiently distinctive gesture, stood as well. At six foot three, he had physical dominance over the seated cleric, and full command of the room. “And yet,” the younger man pointed out to the priest, lowering his voice as though including him in an intimacy, “the moment his wife might have gone to an internment camp, he confessed to being the perpetrator of the crime. Which was not a crime at all, we know, merely the dissemination
of ideas. You, for instance, might have been involved in printing a few of those leaflets. A number of political tracts came off Church duplicating machines, thanks to renegade priests. You were a student, involved in the same issues Carole was immersed in. No friend of hers rose up to take the heat when she was in trouble with the authorities. But her husband did, even though he didn’t think as she did, not politically.”

The priest uncrossed and re-crossed his legs. Cinq-Mars waited, watching. He liked this, being a cop. Ideas seemed to flow through him, and with those ideas, temptations. What lines should he cross? What pitfalls should he avoid? He knew that he had told the priest a few things. He had told him he knew more about him than he might have guessed. The priest was adjusting to his new role on the defensive.

Father François put his top leg down and crossed his ankles.

“She was his wife. That must have been the overriding concern. Love.”

“Yes, Father, but why does no one consider that perhaps Roger Clément only pretended to be working for the right? All along, he may have been a spy.”

“A spy?”

“An informant.” “For whom?”

Cinq-Mars raised that perceptive finger again. “For the left. Opposition persevered during Duplessis’s Great Darkness. Perhaps he might have been a fraudulent informant for the right, who plied Duplessis, and Houde, his roommate in the camp, with lies.”

Father François shook his head. “You possess an overactive imagination, Émile. I suppose it’ll come in handy in your work as an officer of the law.”

He recognized that he was being dismissed, and so Cinq-Mars chose to respond by crossing a line. “I can tell you what I do know for a fact, Father. Roger Clément was an informant for the police.”

“The police?” The priest seemed to take the news as being preposterous.

“Specifically, for Armand Touton. Now you know another reason why the captain has never dropped this case into the dustbin, why he never will. One of his own was killed that night, and he takes it personally.”

The priest had clearly undergone a sea change, comprehending now what had previously eluded him. “That’s why he stayed so close to Carole.

And to Anik.”

“Out of guilt, perhaps,” Cinq-Mars postulated. “Though the answer might be simpler. He’s close to the family out of concern for one of his own.”

“I see.”

Cinq-Mars seated himself again, and continued his meal.

“I’m going to invoke your confidentiality as a priest on this one,” he told him. “Over the years, the family has relied upon the good graces of the mob—Anik has entertained me with descriptions of her gun-toting babysitters. For safety reasons, we don’t want that relationship to change.”

“Of course. I’m wondering, Émile, why you are telling me this.”

A fair question. He had never lied to a priest before, and he was going to have to do so with only a modicum of preparation. He folded his hands between his thighs and looked up at his host. “We’re keeping the case alive. Time’s gone by. New tactics are required. Whatever you can provide for me, secretly or openly, will be appreciated. I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand that when Roger Clément was killed, it’s very possible that one of your own died that night.”

The man in the black robe nodded, before he caught himself. “My own?”

Cinq-Mars smiled. “Not one of your flock, exactly. One of your political brothers, someone so committed to the cause that he had been willing to live his life pretending to be what he was not.”

Now was the time for the priest to reveal what knowledge he possessed. Cinq-Mars already knew that he understood more than he had publicly stated, as Anik had overheard his talk with Houde on the old mayor’s deathbed. Touton had been right about that—the priest’s remarks had not been locked into a confession. Now was the time for the intellectual priest of the left to disseminate information, or be secretly revealed as an accomplice or culprit.

Father François nodded, somewhat earnestly, and remained mute.