River City (90 page)
“Yeah, and like you say, she’s in hiding. Will she give the knife to that fucker, Lévesque? Quebec becomes independent that way, that’s her idea?”
“Does the knife have power like that? Do you believe in magic like that?”
“Yeah. Well. All right. That’s true. If you believe in that shit.”
At their backs, a crane commenced raising materials skyward.
“I don’t know what she’s going to do with it, sir. It’s worth millions. She might sell it. But she has her ideals. She’s a complex girl. She wants the knife and if she can get the information we need—which she tells me she doesn’t
have yet—she’ll trade. One for the other. The knife in exchange for bringing these murderers to justice, maybe. Maybe finding Cross for us. A life is at stake here, and we don’t have time to bicker about it.”
Touton stomped around. He didn’t like huge portions of this exchange. He especially didn’t know if Cinq-Mars was the right man for the job, to be in the middle of this affair. He might become overly sympathetic to the girl’s position, too inclined to take her side whatever her cause might be.
He turned back to face Cinq-Mars. “Desperate times,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Desperate measures.” “That’s my thought, sir.”
“Have it your way. But deliver. If you don’t, you can kiss your career goodbye. Am I making myself pretty damn clear?”
“Pretty much. Sir,” Cinq-Mars objected, “there are no guarantees—”
“You don’t think so?” Touton asked him. He came in closer, breathing on his face. “You’re making me a guarantee. We can proceed on that basis, or you can French-kiss your ass goodbye. What’ll it be, kid? This is your Dieppe. You have to survive, and you have to deliver with zero time to think. Now, what are you going to do, Cinq-Mars? Tell me.”
Émile could not bear the rage in his boss’s eyes. Yet got the message. He crushed the smoke under the toe of his shoe. “Find me a gold shield,” he said.
“Here!” Touton barked, tearing his own from his front pocket. He pressed it into the younger man’s chest, and Cinq-Mars reached up and clasped his hand over it. “Now fucking deliver.”
Touton turned and strode back towards headquarters. Cinq-Mars remained behind on the job site, gazing at the superstructure in its skeletal form. He had an urge to climb through the maze like a kid, to ascend to the top and there—but he did not know what he could do there, what prayer or vow was in order, or how he could properly respond to a moment of such solitary anticipation and yearning.
Cinq-Mars hoped this would not become his Dieppe. Captain Touton, the resilient survivor, seemed to forget that the good guys had lost that battle, that on that beach they had seen their forces crushed.
A
S THOUGH QUEBEC HAD BEEN SEGREGATED FROM THE WORLD TO
determine its destiny in a vacuum, out from under the influence of foreign wars and tectonic political shifts abroad, Maurice Duplessis had emerged from his oxygen tent and the scullery of alcoholism to resume power as the premier of Quebec, while the oversized bon vivant Camillien Houde, stripped of real power and a figurehead only, was shunted back from an internment camp as the dapper, cane-twirling, jovial mayor of Montreal, his beloved sin city.
Whereas the world at war had merely nicked Quebec society, an issue as mundane as two cents would soon challenge the existing status quo and disrupt the social compact. Over a meagre two pennies, all hell broke loose.
The Church was proving to be a divided house. Talk of Cardinal Villeneuve becoming the next pope dissipated. He had supported the Allies, earning him the approbation of English-Canadians and Europeans alike, but sway over his own people had lessened. Time to recoup. Now that peace had been achieved, he determined that the Liberal Party no longer constituted the lesser evil.
In peacetime, he identified the Liberals as the party of the English, of Protestants, of Jews and immigrants, and contemplated that liberalism was a wave of the future the Church ought to avoid. Duplessis loved to sketch the Libs as communists in three-piece suits—“Look how they adore the colour red! It’s on all their banners.” Villeneuve allowed that the portraiture amounted to bogus electioneering, yet, similarly, he also knew that Duplessis was not the cartoonish goose-stepping fascist stencilled by his enemies. Although he
shared a similar appearance and a birthday with Hitler—Duplessis was his junior by exactly a year—the rogue premier was not cut from the same cloth. The cardinal correctly judged that
le Chef
conducted his government in the same way that he managed Church affairs, and in essence had adopted the administration of the Catholic Church in Quebec as his template. In labelling him a dictator, the premier’s detractors missed the more appropriate barb, one that might have defeated him. Duplessis was no dictator. In Quebec, he sat in the premier’s chair as a pontificate.
The legitimate pope, the one in Rome, decided that the Church in Quebec required a sharp change of direction. After Cardinal Villeneuve enabled Duplessis to win a second successive election in ‘47, he died, and under no circumstances did the papacy wish to elevate one of the cryptic, neo-fascist underlings in black robes vying for the position of archbishop of Montreal. Pope Pius XII had had no difficulty deducing that Mussolini and Hitler were unworthy of the accolades bestowed upon them by the likes of Henri Bourassa, the monk Lionel Groulx and other Quebec leaders. Needing an antidote, he ignored those within the fervent ranks looking to crack the fascist whip, and chose instead an outsider, Father Joseph Charbonneau.
The new arrival promptly turned everything the wrong way up. Villeneuve had espoused a haberdashery of pomp and colour, a multitude of robes for every occasion, fit to compete with any cardinal or pontificate. He wore chains and crosses and rings galore. Charbonneau preferred austere attire. He acquired an elegance to his bearing, although his grey cassock was often patched from wear. Being from Ontario, he championed the cause of the French in all of Canada, not Quebecers in particular, and he avowed to be an archbishop to all Montrealers, not only to Roman Catholics. He was inclined to think that the Church ought to be less materialistic, that it should renew itself by first reducing its own wealth. He argued that the state should be socially inclined. He posited his affirmation of a strong united Canada as more important than the strength of any of its components, including Quebec. And as a final indignant heresy, he flew the Union Jack above the archiepiscopal palace.
For some, the Church had fallen from its appointed heaven. For Duplessis, the Antichrist had shown his grim face upon his doorstep.
Other bishops found reason to plot and scheme, and refreshed their skills with respect to Machiavellian strategy.
If the Church was suffering cracks and schisms, unions fared no better. The internationals—regarded as merely American by most Canadians—saw cultural and linguistic differences as minor irritants to their movement. Quebec workers were torn. Some valued the assertive stance of the militant unions. Others believed that the federations ought to remain Catholic, to strike a balance for the sake of a segregated culture. The internationals, as Duplessis broadcast the message successfully, were run by rapacious Jewish lawyers and the sly devil’s own—namely, communists. That many had fallen to the grip of American racketeers never tweaked his interest.
The right wing, nebulous to some, proved rambunctious. Barely tarnished by defeat in Europe, the hope of the world for these men now resided within Quebec, to be signalled by the ascent of a new Quebec man who had yet to manifest himself, but whose appearance was presumed to be inevitable. As this soon-to-be-revealed eminence arose, business, academia and politics would claim a high plateau, and a great age for the world would ensue. Such rhetoric drove Duplessis to distraction. He believed that he was all the man that Quebec required, and that he was perched as far to the right of the centre aisle as any sane politician needed to nest. Yet Houde, in Montreal, quietly bused the theories around, knowing how they needled
le Chef,
knowing also that by championing such thinking, the support of the occult right stood squarely behind him. Those striving for the triumph of a zealous faction located a catalyst for their cause in the perceived persecution of a French migrant, one Count Jacques Dugé de Bernonville.
De Bernonville’s supporters argued that he had fought the predatory resistance in France and had faithfully dispatched Jews on trains into the hands of German justice, as any enlightened man might do. That he desired to settle in Canada seemed appropriate, even an honour for Quebecers, who brought him into their Montreal homes and north to their cottages as the most significant celebrity within their midst. Dire Canada, ruled by communist sympathizers, Liberal hoaxers and English drivel, sought to deport him back to France to face war crimes charges. The indignity of it all, that a man of such exemplary
achievement and character should be reduced to pleading for a place to hang his hat appalled the French elite, particularly those who composed the Order of Jacques Cartier and the Jean-Baptiste Society.
All these groups, the splintered Church and the fractured unions, the hostile elite and the vested interests of American business, the political leader who would not allow his authority to be questioned and a right-wing orthodoxy that viewed the government as morally impoverished, confronted a situation brewing in the small mining town of Asbestos, about sixty miles east of Montreal. There, twenty-one hundred of five thousand miners had gone out on strike. The workers wanted a fifteen-cent raise. The company proffered a dime. That nickel divided them, so workers manned the picket lines. Further negotiation brought the difference between the two groups down to a glum two cents. Duplessis, though, was not interested in having his authority countermanded—he had established an arbitration process to which the miners had not adhered. So he sent in the cops. The night they arrived, they couldn’t find anyone to arrest—the miners had departed their barricades and gone home—so the Riot Act was read aloud at dawn before surprised supplicants on the steps of the local church. The miners woke up to cops on their streets, just hanging around with submachine guns slung over their shoulders, smoking and acting tough. That night, the miners captured eleven of their visitors, bound them with their own handcuffs and scuffed them up, marched them through the streets and further tormented the officers in a church basement. Priests arriving on the scene, including Father François Legault, advised that the policemen had to be released if the miners desired the continued support of the Church and the archbishop of Montreal, the beloved Father Joe Charbonneau.
So the cops, none seriously harmed, were let go.
The next night, the police sought revenge. Trapped by the imposition of a curfew, a few miners sought refuge in the same church basement. Cops entered the building and hauled the miners out, beat them savagely, pummelled their faces beyond recognition and packed several off to police stations around the countryside for further beatings. When the victims emerged days later, they wobbled, so battered were their legs and bones.
The province of Quebec collapsed into crisis again. Charbonneau sided with the miners. Duplessis squealed on him to the pope.
The miners warred amongst themselves, particularly the members of the Catholic union against the internationals.
Bishops met in secret, whispering strategies. No one knew what about.
Quebec’s upstart intellectuals—Jean Marchand and René Lévesque among them, as well as Pierre Trudeau and Father François Legault—all lent a hand, and a strike in which management and labour found themselves two cents apart at the negotiating table continued for what seemed a violent eternity, but was actually a four-month standoff.
“It’s not about the two cents,” Marchand said to his younger pal.
“A principle,” Trudeau presumed. His first junket into a major dispute. He’d taken sides on political issues in the past, and supported one candidate over another in certain elections, but in those instances nothing more had been asked of him than an intellectual response, a position. This job required that he step into the homes of striking miners and teach them basic economics and the essentials of political action. He also listened to their perspective on the dispute, learning something of what it meant to be a miner of a material that damaged their health.
“It’s not even about principles,” Marchand instructed him. “This is about the dispersal of power in Quebec. Who has it, who will share it, who will seize it, who will inherit it.”
“A lot is at stake,” Trudeau determined.
“Everything,” Marchand advised, “is at stake.” This was his realm. A tough battle against a brutal corporate opponent, complicated by the harsh antilabour policies of an autocratic government. He was at home in this struggle, and he took up residence in Asbestos among the miners. “When so much is at stake, count on it to be a dirty fight.”
Trudeau, also, was loving it, for he was learning, although he never overcame the sensation that he was a salamander out of water, neither fish nor fowl. He bombed around on his motorcycle from home to home, teaching and learning.
The workers knew only that they were sacrificing a lot—half-starving most days—to gain or relinquish those two miserable cents an hour.
“It’s not about the two cents,” Trudeau tried to advise them.
“People around, they say you’re a millionaire’s kid,” a miner countered once. “But your papa’s gone, so now it’s you who’s got those millions of dollars in a bank just for yourself to spend.”
The young man could not deny it.
“So I guess it’s not about the two cents for you. For us, maybe it’s different.” He could neither deny that assertion nor the catalogue of implications.
On a Saturday night at the El—the fashionable El Morocco, where Lily St. Cyr performed her mesmerizing lock-and-key striptease and attracted lovers such as Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra and champion prizefighters—Roger Clément’s greater troubles began.