River City (79 page)

“So they went upstairs,” Cinq-Mars surmised.

“Our guys wouldn’t let them. That caused a brouhaha, let me tell you. I got a call over my two-way, so I went over to intercede. To keep everybody happy, I went upstairs with security tagging along.”

“And?” The east gate was releasing water. A pair of small powerboats inside the lock, one a beautiful wooden Chris-Craft, gently lowered from the level of the Ottawa River to that of the St. Lawrence.

“We saw what we saw. The door to the NHL office smashed in. We were pretty shocked to see the safe blown open. We saw the busted case where the Cartier Dagger used to be, and it’s a good thing security was around, because they told me the importance of what was missing.”

“You didn’t know about the knife before that?”

“Why would I? I thought it was a French thing, but Armand, when I told him, he didn’t know about it, either. I guess you had to be a buff.” Cinq-Mars looked at him quizzically. “Like a history buff.”

Voices of the boaters arose from low in the lock, chatting away amiably. “So, if you’re inside Sun Life, how did the murder in the park come to your attention?”

“A citizen—a student, I believe—spotted a man on the ground, and other men abusing him. Cops were hanging around Sun Life, so the witness ran up to them. But the cops weren’t allowed to leave their posts. We lost an opportunity there. Finally, a uniform checked things out, and that’s when the killers, assuming they were the killers, fled. Then things got interesting.”

“Only then?” Cinq-Mars said.

“I was called over. I was busy but it was my sector. I looked at the dead
guy in the park, and had a thought, you know? So I asked a security guard what the stolen dagger looked like. He’d seen it on display. When he told me, my bowels felt loose. This is how come there’s no doubt about what scene I encountered first—because I brought the guard from Sun Life back across the street to identify the knife, which he did, and then he shocked the hell out of me, because he identified the dead man, too.” A surprise. “How?”

“Said he was a hockey player, or used to be. The guard was a fan. He recognized him.” An expression crossed the younger cop’s face that Captain Sloan inquired about. “What’s wrong with that?”

Cinq-Mars gestured with his chin. “Roger Clément had been a hockey player, but not for almost twenty years. He’d changed over that time. Plus, he was dead, and you were outside at night in bad weather. People don’t look so good when they’re dead, and they’re never easy to recognize in the dark.”

Sloan couldn’t dispute the logic. “What’re you saying? The guard knew him?”

“Could’ve been an inside job right from the get-go.” “Naw, they came down from the roof. They busted in through the window.”

“My job is to look at every aspect and see if anything was missed. You just told me that the guard might’ve known Roger Clément. I’ve been up on the roof of the Sun Life—”

“You’ve been on the fucking roof?”

“I don’t think they went down from there. I think they just made it look that way so nobody would think it was an inside job.” “We didn’t think along those lines.”

“I’m not saying it happened that way. But I’ve been looking at it from a certain angle, and then you tell me about the guard. It starts to make sense.”

Sloan shook his head, impressed with the new guy’s smarts. Their route had brought them back to the point where they’d cross the canal again, but the lock was opening and they’d have to wait for the procedure to conclude.

“You’ll have to speak to that guard. No way will I remember his name.”

“He’s dead.”

Sloan took a step back to eye his colleague. “How do you know that? From what I told you, you don’t even know who he is.”

Cinq-Mars shrugged. He was showing off a little, but the man was a captain and he was an ambitious cop in only his second year on the force. “I’m going over the whole trail. I reinterviewed every guard who’d been on duty that night. Captain Touton has those records. He interviewed them all back then, so I knew which one had gone out to the park with you, and he’s dead.”

“Touton didn’t catch this, about the recognition thing?”

“Afraid not. But just because somebody recognized somebody, doesn’t mean they were working together. That’s only a guess on my part.”

“You asked me questions you already know the answers to. Jesus.”

“Everything requires corroboration. You know that. I want the facts lined up. I’m really looking to get a feel, you know? As to how things were back then.”

“I know cops. You want to spike some guy’s ass on a lamppost, Émile. Well, I’m glad my memory didn’t fail me. You got what you came here for.”

“I appreciate the talk, Captain.”

They watched the boats depart the lock. The crews were chilly, but the life seemed idyllic.

“Someday it happens,” Sloan said quietly, without being prompted. “You’re looking at sixty, see retirement ahead. You never pictured yourself sitting in a goddamn shack on a windy fucking field on a grey fucking day by the side of a fucking highway nobody drives down much anymore that smells of ripe pig stink. The wind howls right through the cracks of your shack, feels like it’s through your bones. You never knew that this is what you wanted, but you must’ve, because this is what you got. This is what you dreamed of. Clean air, minus the stink. But no city punks in gold chains, no creeps in Mercedes fucking Benzes. That’s beautiful. Retirement. Yippee. Nothing to fucking do except dream of slaughtering pigs. Or pig farmers. I don’t wish it on you, kid, but there it is. Good luck with your life.”

Cinq-Mars wasn’t sure what to say. “You’re not retired yet,” he reminded him.

“Six weeks. Hey, if you ever want to come out to my place and bust my balls, feel free. I’ll appreciate the diversion.” The man held out his hand, indicating
that they were separating early. “I’m staying out awhile, breathe the air. You can find your own way back.”

Cinq-Mars eyed him closely. He didn’t look bad at all. All he had to go on was the man’s temperament. “Cancer?” he asked.

“Fucking prostate. Hey, you’re some detective.”

They shook, and when the gates of the lock closed again, Cinq-Mars walked across, then drove back to the city. Over the car radio he heard news of a bombing. The details were still coming in. A terrorist cell of the FLQ—Le Front de libération du Québec—was mounting a new campaign and threatening to become more violent. They’d been blowing up mailboxes. This time, a shoe store. With somebody in it.

Anik stirred. Roused herself sleepily.

Afternoon liaisons were often the best.

He’d be wired. She’d be sultry. Together, they’d be naughty.

The apartment belonged to neither of them. René had borrowed a key. That alone felt sexy—doing it in someone else’s place, in an unknown person’s bed. Another couple would come home to their room and probably think to change the sheets, yet echoes of her cries would continue to whisper in the walls, above the tinkle of her laughter and his wry, smoky chuckle. Knowing that he’d come from an important meeting, that another awaited, that felt sexy, too. She’d catch him on the evening news and calculate that two-and-a-half hours before her man stood before the phalanx of microphones he had knelt before her and kissed her thighs, moving to combat her desire with intimacy. The sex would linger over the airwaves, through her bones, her blood, her head, warming her desire again.

Did she love power? The thought vexed her from time to time. Maybe. That could be part of it. He was such a little guy after all, like a gnome—whenever she wanted to get his goat or take him down a peg she’d call him Napoleon. For a while her favourite had been “You stunted Napoleon,” which had evolved into “Well, if it isn’t Napoleon’s stunt double.” He never liked that one,
so she stuck with it. And if she wanted to be objective about the overall picture, he was not good-looking, either. She’d say he smoked like a chimney, but what chimney smoked that much? Yet his head was always full of ideas and his body a chute of passion, and, as she got to know him better, a fester of doubts and frets also. He often experienced the weight of the nation on his shoulders, and always the weight of the enterprise. Was he making the right choices? Would they work? If they gained independence, would that work? What compromises would have to be negotiated, and how would the rest of Canada react, really? How would Trudeau counter his next move, and what would be his archrival’s next ploy? Could he win an election? Bourassa, the new premier, was a grasshopper of a man. Any thought that René couldn’t trounce him was inconceivable, yet his vision for the society was difficult to sell across the generations, difficult to project through each segment of the population. His people were inclined to be socialist, but his support, if he wanted to win, had to be broader than that, which meant compromise, and that meant disappointing the expectations of the faithful. He talked to Anik about these matters, and she gave back her counsel. She said he had to follow the pragmatic course. Victory would heal most wounds, she assured him, and he’d nod, he’d agree.

Anik herself hated that the right wingers were involved and carried so much clout within the party, men like Laurin and Parizeau, who were always a threat to René's leadership and forever a pain in the butt. Creating a country was difficult labour, and it seemed most often that that was what they were doing, really, as they twisted and convulsed on borrowed beds, willing a country into being as other couples might lock together to create a child. She loved power, she had to admit it, but the thrill of revolution affected her more, the intoxicating imagination of it all, the sense of being on the cusp of history, of time, of causing the world to bend to your better judgments. So the two of them gyrated in a desire of limbs and blood-flow and irreconcilable lust to create a new land, afraid of success, fearful of failure.

Progress seemed minimal.

More problems supplanted any being resolved.

Still, they could take themselves to bed and believe they’d make it work, that here they could fabricate the new out of the furor of time and place and
the long fortitude of their history. And she’d think,
That’s why I’m sleeping with him.
For when she was with him, it felt as though she could become an equal partner in creating a nation. When he was not around, that conviction floundered.

But oh, how he’d fume about Trudeau.

With Anik, more than to any other, he’d let his guard down and she’d see how he feared the man, how the prime minister intimidated him. René loved debate and discourse and adversarial confrontation. He was so adept at winning that in most contests he enjoyed the advantage of victory being a foregone conclusion. Observers waited for him to strike, and when the moment for his attack or his proper defence arrived, he’d be beautifully derisive or foul-mouthed, galvanized to his passionate core yet aided by a sense that he spoke out of the heart and suffering of his people. Admirers raved, delirious, forgetting points he may not have properly countered or contradictions of his own he had let drop. Yet he held no such advantage over Trudeau, whose freewheeling, off-the-cuff brilliance perfectly offset Lévesque’s folksy, foxy charm. Rather than holding the advantage of an anticipated victory, Lévesque could only debate Trudeau while expecting to lose. Anik could see it in his eyes. René had battled him too many times in too many smoky rooms back when they were friends not to twitch under that dire lack of confidence. As much as he might fret and pout and sneer there was not a bloody thing he could do about it.

René and Anik shared that secret between them, although it remained unspoken. All their grand plans might be for naught, as the breadth and wonder of their vision came affixed with paradox. Lévesque believed he could never defeat Trudeau, and if he could never defeat him, how could he expect to win? Anik had no answer. She could only hope to prop him up, hope that someday he might find his confidence. In that light, she had done her best to detract from Trudeau’s glow one time, explaining why the other man was so powerful and wielded such an intellectual aura and spiritual force. She told him, “He has the Cartier Dagger, you know.”

She had to explain to him how she knew.

They were in bed then, too. After she spoke, Lévesque placed his hands over his face and turned onto his back in an attitude of abject misery. In trying
to demythologize Trudeau, she had inadvertently made him appear invincible. Lévesque writhed in physical agony. If Trudeau possessed the knife, it explained his swift, rather extraordinary ascent to power, not to mention his rampant popularity. What hope now for Napoleon’s stunt double? He was not only up against that scintillating intellect and high moral, near-religious, charismatic authority—that sun!—but now he was up against the neo-mythic power purported to be attached to those who possessed the dagger. What hope?

A quandary. Anyone who openly accused Trudeau of possessing the knife would be chastened by the slur of slander, dismissed for being petty and derided for believing in a paltry magic. Credibility lost would never be regained. He’d be lucky not to be laughed into extinction, and rightly so. Yet any man with sufficient superstitious tissue in his gullet to actually believe that the Cartier Dagger possessed mystical qualities that granted one person an advantage over others was doomed to self-defeat if he went up against the knife’s proprietor—and Lévesque guessed that that applied to him, too. He felt himself psychologically whipped.

“I’m sorry,” Anik said, trying to peel his hands off his face.

“I’m fucked,” he lamented.

Trudeau had been born rich, while Lévesque had been hatched poor. His foe was well educated and had travelled the world. Lévesque’s own learning was substandard, his travels routine. While Trudeau was brilliant, Lévesque was merely damn smart, full of quips and an arrogance worn as a thin disguise. Trudeau seduced more women than he did, although he didn’t do too badly. And Trudeau possessed the coveted dagger, whereas he had a knife at his throat, demanding that he deliver what he probably could not.

Now he stirred beside her, emerging from a post-coital nap dreamy-eyed and content, at least, with their shared time together. She kissed his forehead and drew his head down onto her shoulder as normally he might do with her. “Where are we?” he wondered.