For the first time that evening, Cinq-Mars felt out of his depth. “I’m not sure what you’re saying. You told people he was working for you. We just didn’t know it was as a crook.”
“I told people he was working for me because I wanted to get him a pension. I failed in that.”
“I see.”
“You don’t have a clue what I’m telling you.”
“Okay. I don’t.”
Touton reached around into his pocket and produced his wallet. He dropped a few bills onto the table. Then he looked Émile in the eye. “We’re taking this outside.” The two walked out into the night air, and the captain of the Night Patrol put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “This way,” he said.
He led him over the tracks across the street, through a hole in the fence, towards a dock for steamships that plied the Great Lakes. The boats were lit up with activity. Ice was melting. Soon the season would begin in earnest. Crews were working to awaken vessels from their winter hibernation.
Both men placed their arms on a railing and looked over the water.
“Roger came to me. He said he had something to steal. I asked what. He said none of my business. But you know, we talked about it before, so I guessed. I asked him why it was none of my business, and he said he had powerful friends. So I asked, ‘Why are you telling me?’ He said because I had to back off and let him do his job. I said, ‘Job? That’s not a job.’ He said, ‘You know I have friends in high places.’”
Touton went quiet, and Cinq-Mars took out his cigarettes. He opened the pack and let his boss take one for himself, then the two lit up.
“What did you say to that?”
“I was quiet awhile.”
They were quiet awhile.
Touton smoked. Then he said, “I knew this was no ordinary conversation. Roger had never come to me before to say he was going to commit a crime. But you should understand, together we were cleaning up the city. By this time, he was really an undercover cop, as far as I was concerned, which is why I wanted to get him a pension. We took out the gambling dens and raided secret whorehouses. Some of those used underage girls and boys. When bank robbing became organized, we disrupted that, and when the shakedown artists got too tough, too big, we shook them down. Roger contributed.”
“So you owed him,” Cinq-Mars concluded.
“Not only that,” elaborated Touton, “I needed him to stay right where he was. To do that, he had to remain a thief. So I said to him, ‘What do you want from me?’”
“What did he say?”
“Roger asked me to do everything I could to stop him.” “What? Why would he ask you that?”
“Think about it.” Touton didn’t give him much time to come up with any answers. “The theft was going to go down on my turf, under my nose. So he wanted me to cover my ass by doing everything in my power to stop him. Also, by making it tough for him, it wouldn’t ever look as though we might be connected. This kept him safe—we thought—as well as me. I remember him telling me that I was going to take shit for what he did, so I’d better be able to show that I didn’t actually screw it up. So I asked him, ‘What if you fail?’ And he said to me, ‘There you go.’”
“There you go?”
“I didn’t know what he meant either. But I caught on. If he failed, he wanted a damn good excuse, and the only excuse that would work was that I had pulled out all the stops, that it wasn’t his fault. You see, he had some serious friends. If he screwed up, he had to demonstrate he wasn’t to blame. Tit for tat.”
Nodding, Cinq-Mars didn’t feel like smoking his cigarette down, so he tossed it into the dark water. Touton had taught him, so he knew how to keep the tangents of a conversation together. “You said that you had one limitation to deal with.”
“Two, really.” The senior cop gazed at the smouldering tip of his cigarette between puffs. When he inhaled, he drew the smoke more deeply into himself than usual, and held it longer, watched as the smoke he exhaled drifted up into the sky, then gazed at the red tip again. “He said he was going to tell me what he was going to steal. But that I could not know it.”
“Huh? What the heck did that mean?”
“I asked him the same question. He said I could defend the building it was in, but I could not defend the thing itself, because theoretically I should not have that knowledge. I had to find some other reason to defend the building, but the prize, that had to be left alone. So I said, ‘Just tell me what building it’s in.’ And he said the Sun Life, which I had already guessed. I told Roger, ‘I know what you’re going after.’ And he said, ‘You can’t be there.’ He said I could oversee everything, but on the night in question, I could not be the cop on duty.”
“In case something went wrong,” Cinq-Mars noted.
“I agreed for that reason. I told him I’d make the building so impenetrable he’d have to quit before he started. He just smiled, said we’d see about that.”
“Then how’d he do it?”
“An inside job.”
“Do you know who?”
“In a way.”
“Then what I am doing on this case if you’re not sharing information?”
“It was your job to prove what I suspect.”
“You mean I failed.”
“We all have. It’s part of being a cop.”
“Who do you think was the insider?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t.”
“I don’t get this.”
“You will.”
Now Cinq-Mars wanted another cigarette. Touton declined.
They walked away from the water, and crossing the tracks they saw a man strolling beneath a rising moon with a collie on a leash. Cinq-Mars felt
watched, followed, examined from the inside out. “Do you know him?” Cinq-Mars asked.
“Do you?”
“I feel like I should. My hair is standing up on the back of my neck.”
“Easy, laddie. You’ve got a long way to go until retirement.”
They squeezed back through the hole in the chain-link fence, then leaned back against it, as it was comfortable enough. Touton rocked against the wire, hands thrust deep in his pockets. His protégé put his shoulder against the chain and waited.
“Laurin was the key,” the captain said.
“Why him?”
“Why was he there? Except for de Bernonville, everybody represented someone else. Vimont was there for Montford, who was involved in exchange for favours from Duplessis. Houde was also there for Duplessis, as well as for himself. He expected to be remembered as one of the wild men of that night. The priest was there for the Church and for Father Joe. But why Laurin? He was there for Roger’s insider.”
“Who was?” “Can’t tell you.”
“And you know this, or suspect it, through what information?” “Can’t tell you that either. Think about it.”
The young cop looked back towards the water. Then, suddenly, it hit him.
“Father François knows. That’s why you wanted me to start questioning him, after I told you about Anik being in the closet.”
The old cop shrugged. “Look, I knew about the closet. Carole found out about some of it from her daughter, but she instructed Anik to stay mute. She taught her that it was sacred, what a dying man said to his priest. She wouldn’t let Anik tell her what she heard. We’re all old Catholics here, and some traditions never die, even among the radicals. But yeah, I never thought the priest would divulge anything, so I never went after him. Then again, he never seemed like a real priest to me. More socialist than spiritual. But I was wrong. He wouldn’t tell me, but he found a way to pitch in, as much as he could.”
“Now I get it,” Cinq-Mars said.
“Get what?”
“Why you brought me onto your team.” “Why? I ask myself that question every day.” “You met me with Anik.” “That was a night. You arresting her.”
“You noticed that we liked each other.” Cinq-Mars crushed his smoke under his shoe.
“If you got close to Anik, she might give you a name. Laurin represented the old fraternal sect—now extinct, one hopes—the Order of Jacques Cartier. He wasn’t a criminal, he was a psychiatrist and a politician. Someone of power sent him there, the same powerful interests who put Roger inside the Sun Life.”
“He worked inside the building, then, a CEO?”
“I checked them all. They’re mostly English. But a man of great power can get almost anything he wants. Including a set of keys, and help from others.” “So it could be anyone.”
“Or someone so well known that the mention of his name caused a child in a closet to weep.”
Instinctively, they both began walking towards the street. “You think so?” Cinq-Mars asked him.
“I think not. I did once. But you see, that’s why Roger was working for me. Sort of. He wanted to participate in a share of that knife. I wanted to find a way to get it into the hands of a soldier.”
“Not you?”
“Not me. That would be a criminal act I couldn’t duck. There were other heroes. Plenty of them. Together, I thought we might be able to do something. I didn’t count on so many other people thinking exactly the same way. I figured Roger could handle himself. And he could. But only to a point.”
They listened to their steps on the pavement.
“I might’ve come close once,” Touton revealed. “An old friend of mine, a restaurateur, Lu Lee, gave me a call one night. Someone had been whispering about the Cartier Dagger at his place. The guy had nasty things to say, too, about certain minorities. I got up there as fast as I could, but he was gone
before I arrived. The bastard paid cash. No paper trail. When I talked to Lu Lee, he made the customer sound like somebody high up inside the Order. Just the things he said. I hoped the man would go eat there again, but he never did. Lu Lee is no longer with us.”
Cinq-Mars cleared his throat before he made his admission. “I almost had the name. I could have had it.”
“Why didn’t you get it?”
“The priest in me. I chose to respect the last words of a dying man to his priest, so I let them go unspoken. Anik was going to tell me. But I stopped her.”
“So we just missed twice. We’re just Catholics. Maybe third time lucky.” They walked a bit, crossed after a car passed, and stepped onto the opposite sidewalk.
“You’re still more priest than cop,” Touton noted. He put a hand on the younger man’s near shoulder again, as he did when they left the bar. “That’s all right. We can use some of those.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t be. You made a decision. As a young man, I was a soldier. I went to hell, but that’s a part of me I won’t trade. You’re part priest. Never work against yourself, Émile.” He removed his hand. “I’m going to walk back to the station alone. I could use a little time on my own right now.”
They remained standing where they were.
Cinq-Mars didn’t know why, but he didn’t move and neither did his boss. “Unless you were planning to bust me,” Touton said. “No, sir.” He tried to smile, but failed somehow.
“If I was you, I’d bust my ass. I turned my face away to let that crime happen.” “I’m not you.”
“You’re too soft. You have to be hard in this life. Sometimes.”
“Since we’re on the subject, I’ll be hard. I wrote a report.”
He noticed the man’s shoulders rotate back. “To whom?”
“Nobody. As long as you give up your interest in acquiring the knife. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know. You’ve found out who has it now, but nobody can ever hear that information from you. Take it to your grave.”
The young man was not so soft after all. In a terse tone, Touton said, “Apologize, laddie, because that’s the first time you’ve insulted me tonight and I won’t have it.”
Cinq-Mars determined what was meant by those words, and what his answer ought to be. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“All right, then,” Armand Touton said, and he turned away, facing the direction that would return him to his office. He reconsidered, and asked for a smoke for the walk back. “I’ve fixed it for Carole Clément to get a pension. Just so you know. If you do bust me ever, wait for that to go through first.”
“Don’t go insulting
me
now. You’ve done so well all night.”
“So we’re even.”
“For my part, I just want you to understand the situation,” Cinq-Mars said.
“I heard you the first time. Listen, laddie, you think we lost this one? We let the leader of the Order slip free? Don’t be so sure. One thing I know, there’s always some dark figure walking his dog down the railway tracks, some man who makes your hair stand on end. Like when we close down the whorehouse and the pimps rise up instead. If we kept the whorehouses, I bet my daughter never would’ve found her way into one, and never would have come in contact with a pimp, and so never would’ve run away back to him.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Cinq-Mars said.
“So am I. But this is the thing, Émile. There’s always some dark figure. Doesn’t matter who we bust or what we do. There’s always a dark figure on a track.”
“With a dog.”
“Who makes your hair stand on end. The best we can do is keep him in the dark, don’t let him stand out in the light of day. That’s why I work the Night Patrol. To keep the day bright and sunny on these streets.” Touton extended his hand. “Good night, Émile.”
Cinq-Mars was surprised by the abrupt departure.
“Good night, boss.”
The two men parted company, one going back to work, the other heading home, even though initially he had to walk in the opposite direction to get there. That stroll took him over and through the grounds where the city
had begun, and in the quiet night he could sense that old wooden fort—stout still, its devout inhabitants dwelling under the dread of attack one moment, wrapped up in the ecstasy of their wild adventure the next. Fort Perilous had become a cosmopolitan enterprise. Recently, distant travellers had dropped by for a World’s Fair. Since then, after that grand party, the people had made it through the throbbing fever of rebellion. Yet they were still standing. The first of their people had prevailed against every onslaught, and taken the measure of every challenge. Some things did not change.
Cinq-Mars was happy to take a long way home, content to walk the streets of his city at night, through the old
quartier
that was feeling like a ghost town, the aged buildings as quiet as tombs. Then up the hill to the vibrancy of downtown, the sidewalks animated with lovers and wanderers, the scent of spring in the air, the bars spilling customers from their doors, drawing others in. He thought he’d head for a bar himself, but his legs kept moving, and he ambled all the way home.