River City (92 page)

Disembarking, Roger quickly discovered another reason not to have Anik nearby. As he entered an expanded union local that had set up shop in a church basement, his daughter was abruptly thrust into his arms by a stranger. All at once, he had to cling to her and catch his balance. Told that the babysitter was on her way, but late, that Carole was at such-and-such a barricade and couldn’t leave, the woman impressed upon him that he could look after Anik from now on because she had children of her own to corral. Apparently, his arrival
had been expected. The woman addressing him dashed out the door before he could counter her decree—or receive directions to his wife’s fortifications.

Roger gathered up Anik and her things and played with her, at first on the floor of the strikers’ makeshift headquarters. She seemed glad to see him, relaxed, and not at all perturbed by the surrounding strife. She uttered a nickname for everyone who walked by—Nomo or Deeka or Manna or Moze. Later, still no babysitter, he left a message for his wife and took Anik back to his hotel room while he unpacked and got himself organized, then did what he could with a child in tow to learn the lay of the land.

Carole finally broke in on them, only to reveal that there would be no babysitter that day. “My regular burnt her foot. Don’t ask—it’s too complicated. I had a second babysitter on the way, but I’m afraid that’s you. I didn’t want to tell the other lady, or she might not have stayed, since we didn’t know for sure if you were coming. Roger! You showed up. Kiss me.”

“There’s no sitter?”

“I knew you were coming.”

“You left our child with a complete stranger—”

“Her husband’s in the union. She’s practically family.”

“Carole!”

“Hush-a. Anik was fine, wasn’t she? Besides, would you rather she was on the picket line? Roger! She could’ve been shot. How could you think such a thing?”

How he was getting shit for this confounded him. “That’s my point.” “Roger. Anik was fine. I believed you’d be here sooner or later. I had faith in you.”

“I don’t have time to babysit.”

“Sure you do. But don’t worry. We have real work for you, too. I’ll find someone for tomorrow besides the lady with the burnt foot. Lots of miners’ wives are pitching in.”

“I was coming anyway.”

“Couldn’t live without me, huh? That’s nice.” She kissed him. She looked sexy to him in her tight jeans, loose plaid shirt and yellow bandana, which kept her bangs out of her eyes but also pushed her hair up at the back. A bundle
of energy and taut passion. She seemed so lithe and mercurial to him, both strong and soft. He could just hug her and toss her on the bed if she weren’t doing six other things while talking, if she wasn’t preoccupied with saving the union.

Roger was quick enough not to push his foot down his gullet. “I missed you, too, Toots. Tons. But the reason I was coming anyway, I’m trying to say, is because I got hired to be here. I don’t mean by you or the monsignor—do you know, he wants me to call him Father Joe. How can I do that? I tried to call him ‘monsignor,’ but every time, the word stuck in my throat. I hope I don’t get to meet the pope ever. That’ll chew me up.”

Carole had stopped moving for the first time since coming into the room. She held leaflets and papers she’d been rifling through, and a press release she needed to edit, but she put everything down and placed a hand on her jutting hip. “Who,” she asked quietly, “has hired you?”

“Pretty much everybody,” Roger Clément admitted. “I’m going to make a good buck this month anyway.”

“Roger,” she said, and the mere mention of his name seemed to chastise him. “Whose side are you on now?”

He tried to look everywhere but into her eyes. But that could not be helped in the end. “Everybody’s,” he admitted.

Journalists crowded into a small ballroom in Montreal for a press conference called by the premier to discuss the strike. When any man asked a question he didn’t appreciate, Duplessis had him escorted out. One scribe was taken away because
le Chef
didn’t approve of how loosely he knotted his tie. Several others were selected for removal because they’d recently offended him in print. Two gentlemen of the press were banished because the newspaper they worked for had failed to pay proper homage. That fate awaited a reporter from
Le Devoir,
Pierre Laporte. Others were kicked out of the room because the premier had gotten the hang of throwing people out. Two other writers who asked questions about the strike were told that he would have them fired. No
one doubted that Duplessis would make good on the vow. After that, the only journalists who spoke were men who only ever praised him, and he never did take a question on the strike.

He intended, he swore, to preserve Quebec from outside contamination.

A compromise was worked out. Roger was willing to make himself available for babysitting chores and afford a bit of time to be an attentive husband, but he would not move into a miners’ billet with Carole. He’d stay at the hotel, graciously paid for by the archdiocese of Montreal. She was not welcome there, as he never knew when a brick might fly through his window or out-of-town cops might kick down the door. Besides, she was happy enough where she was living. Roger took a glance in. A beehive. Anik had other toddlers to play with, for the cottage had become both a communication centre and a nursery. Dozens of miners’ wives made soup for the barricades and coffee for the picket lines. They arranged medical supplies in case the centre suddenly became a hospital. Teenagers painted picket signs. “I’ll stay at the hotel.”

“You should stay—see how the other side lives.”

“What other side?” “Mine.”

“I’ve got a job to do.” “For the monsignor.” “For him, and for Duplessis, and—”

She tucked her hands under the lapels of his coat and pulled him in closer to her. “I know about those guys, but don’t forget the monsignor. You’re working for him, too. Which means, if you think about it, that you’re working for me.”

“I am?”

“Miners won’t take orders from a woman or from a priest. They need a tough guy to be in charge. The young ones are a wild bunch. We can’t have them taking potshots at cops with their hunting rifles. They need to know that if they screw up, they will answer to you.”

“Tell them they’ll get sent straight to hell,” Roger suggested, “since we’re working for Father Joe.”

“You should know. You’re going there yourself,” Carole teased. “But only for what you do in bed with me.”

That made him grin, and he felt better about many things, even as he returned to his room alone.

Journalists and out-of-town union guys were staying at the hotel. Not many sightseers were visiting Asbestos. Roger enlisted the help of the hotel night manager, who for five bucks put a name to the face of each man standing around the downstairs bar. Pierre Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier, Jean Marchand, René Lévesque, and Father François, who was billeted with the miners but who’d come over to the hotel for cocktail hour, were part of the mix. Roger took the boisterous, pugilistic-looking man in the corner to be Reggie Chartrand, the union guy. Among the barflies, only Chartrand and Marchand had chins that could take a punch. Marchand looked too distinguished to beat up, and anyway Roger liked the guy right off the bat—he didn’t put on airs. Chartrand seemed overly full of himself, and when he and Trudeau began playfully sparring, Roger was surprised that the skinny rich kid did okay against the former prizefighter. The union boss was even embarrassed by the rich kid, who was a little too quick for him, and tried to laugh him off. But Trudeau’s narrow chin—Roger clucked his tongue. He figured if he unloaded a haymaker on him, the fellow might never be called an intellectual again. In his battles, Roger preferred to minimize the damage done, so for this job that would mean a punch-up with Chartrand, the ex-middleweight. He’d meet him alone in an alley to satisfy Duplessis’s desire for carnage.

Assessing his foes, Roger quaffed a beer in a corner by himself. He noticed another gentleman glance into the room. The night manager had left, so couldn’t help him with the identification, but judging by the way the others had stopped talking to glare at him, he presumed that he had found his count.

The spiffily attired gentleman walked out of the hotel bar, and the hotel, onto the street. Roger padded after him. He could not allow a count to wander these treacherous streets alone at night, not when his safety constituted one of his jobs.

They had trundled into the archiepiscopal palace as chatty bishops, but as the meeting progressed, they turned sullen. They asked Monsignor Charbonneau to provide his rationale for supporting Jews and communists. The archbishop of Montreal asked if they knew what happened to men who breathed asbestos into their lungs day after day. Yes, one remarked. They provided for their families.

Unanimously, the bishops informed Charbonneau that, due to his support for the strike, the fabric of the Holy Church was being rent asunder. Perhaps never to be repaired. The people expected guidance, they maintained, not revolution.

“I support the just cause of the miners,” Charbonneau maintained. “Not revolution. But I support their right to a fair wage and to choose their own unions.”

“Your Grace, we have a Catholic Union.”

“The miners are free to associate with it, or not. They will choose, not the bishops.”

“What about Quebec?” he was asked. Charbonneau was distrusted for being a francophone from Ontario.

He answered, “What
about
Quebec?” The bishops left unhappy.

Monsignor Charbonneau—Father Joe to some—despaired. He felt himself alone against the world.

Probably, nobody cared. Roger surmised that no one in Asbestos had any reason to hurt the count. Miners had their own troubles—what did it matter to them that the guy was an old Nazi? No Jews were around. The cops were working for Duplessis, and the premier didn’t mind if ex-Nazis drifted through his province looking for a home. So no one cared that the count was checking out
the strike, perhaps taking note of police tactics or evaluating the conviction of communist sympathizers. Although Roger wondered why. He deduced after only a few minutes that his own purpose here was different than what Mayor Houde had suggested. He wasn’t the man’s bodyguard—he’d been sent along to keep the count company, to see that he wasn’t lonely, to be his friend.

That first night, he and de Bernonville walked all over that little town.

“Your name’s in the papers,” Roger mentioned.

“Journalists,” the man scoffed. “They have nothing better to do to occupy their pickled brains. A miner is bruised, they make it sound as though the sky has fallen. Miners live tough lives—of course they’re bruised. Besides, they beat each other up, for sport.”

“The government wants to deport you, they say,” Roger persisted.

“Journalists are the problem,” de Bernonville maintained. “I will have to persuade them to think differently. If they can understand my presence here, they will give me some peace. Governments never look for problems. If the problem about me goes away in the press, I won’t be deported.”

They had reached an edge of town and gazed across a rocky terrain. The moon was nearly full above them, which was good to see, or they might have mistaken the land stretching away from them as being a moonscape, stark and uninhabitable.

“That’s why you’re here,” Roger noted.

“I’m here because I’m here,” de Bernonville told him. The man was slightly above average in height, with excellent square shoulders but a plump face that might have foretold future girth. Perhaps he’d not been eating well, and had taken off weight below the neck only. An ascot camouflaged his neck, and a handkerchief was tucked into the breast pocket of his pinstriped suit. The count strolled along with the aid of a stick that had a heavy knob at one end and a pointed brass tip. A weapon, Roger considered. He carried himself as though cinched up, strapped in by a girdle.

“You want to make friends,” Roger supposed.

“I would like journalists to receive me more graciously into my new homeland than they have done to date. Where besides right here can I find so many of them in one place? If I can have a word with them, share a drink, a
few laughs, they might be persuaded to gaze more kindly upon my stay. If they stop writing about me, or change what they say, I can resolve this situation.”

Roger didn’t know how he was going to influence men so set against him. “Are you asking me to introduce you? I don’t know them myself.”

“Sooner or later, they’ll stop glowering at me and invite me to debate. When they do, I’ll shift the ground beneath their feet. I’ll charm them. If that doesn’t work, then you can do your job.”

“My
job?”

“Smash their faces in.”

“Whoa—journalists? Wait a minute. I didn’t sign on for that.”

De Bernonville patted him on the back. “I’m having fun with you, Roger. It won’t be necessary. The mere sight of you walking with me sends a message. That, together with my famous charm. I know how to handle these people. Before we’re done, we’ll be sharing our meals with them.”

Roger was skeptical of that. The bunch he’d seen at the bar were known to be a feisty breed, and not well disposed towards Nazis. De Bernonville had confidence that he could charm the birds out of the trees, but a journalist out of his convictions might be a more difficult task.

“Now, lead me back to the hotel, Roger. I’m lost in the dark out here. Tomorrow, we’ll work on this.”

Of his three tasks, two would seem to be a snap. Sooner or later, he could segregate an inebriated Reggie Chartrand from the pack and give him a quick going-over. As long as the man bled, he could exaggerate the damage to Duplessis, keeping him content. Guarding de Bernonville would seem to be easy, as well, as the count had not come here to berate miners or forestall a revolution. Given that his mission was to make friends and influence the province’s fifth estate, Roger could keep him safe. He doubted that the man could overcome the animosity among the intellectuals at the hotel bar, but they were unlikely to do more than sneer at him, and perhaps raise their voices in debate. The exception might be Chartrand, who was sufficiently volatile to resort to
his fists, but if he did so Roger could kill two birds with a single counterpunch. Overall, his most difficult task would be to do his duty for his wife and the Catholic Church. How could he marshal two thousand striking miners into a disciplined corps when each man, by dint of his labour, probably could match his physical prowess?