Asylum (13 page)

From the early 1830s to 1996, thousands of First Nation, Inuit, and Métis children were forced to attend residential schools in an attempt to assimilate them into the dominant culture. Those children suffered abuses of the mind, body, emotions, and spirit that can be almost unimaginable. Over 150,000 children, some as young as four years old, attended the government-funded and church-run residential schools. It’s estimated that there are 80,000 residential school survivors alive today.

I shook my head. Couldn’t be that. What else? Notes about some court cases having to do, inexplicably, with aggravated battery. Notes about some hearings that had happened three months ago. Notes about gambling—I might come back to those, for Ivan’s sake.

I almost missed the file. I was looking for anything that connected to the Duplessis name, to asylums, to orphans, and it wasn’t there. What was, instead, was Largactil.

Largactil. The brand name under which, in Canada, chlorpromazine is sold.

I felt my pulse quicken as I opened the folder. File after file after file was there. Interviews. Dates. Names. But nothing, as far as I could see, that wasn’t already public knowledge.

Danielle had concentrated her research work on the administration of chlorpromazine in experimental usage. She had a lot of documentation from the United States, much of which had been obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by a colleague of hers at Fordham University. Other information seemed less public domain; Danielle, a careful researcher, had noted who had spoken with her, when, and how each interview had been arranged. Her sources seemed impeccable.

There were a few interviews with survivors of the asylums, but she hadn’t written much about them; it didn’t seem to be particularly interesting to her. Instead, she was focusing on the medical establishment—the doctors, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals—that used the asylums as steady sources of human guinea pigs. There were notes on the use of chlorpromazine in conjunction with cold-water shock therapy, electroshock therapy, and surgery. There were notes on the resultant deaths, and on the disposals of the bodies. Everything was meticulously documented.

I took a deep breath. Danielle, it seemed, was putting together a damning dossier.

For crimes against humanity.

CHAPTER TEN

“So who would want to make that dossier disappear?” Ivan wanted to know. “Crimes against humanity. Christ, Martine, that’s serious stuff.”

I’d made my obligatory appearance at police headquarters, where the focus was on a couple of loners who had gotten into trouble in the Sainte-Catherine area, one of them currently being held for assault and attempted rape. The director was pleased about that. “Progress, Madame LeDuc,” he said, nodding vigorously. “I think we will soon be able to say the scourge of Montréal is no more.”

All I could think of was that the director had been taking the same rhetoric class the mayor had.

I then went back to the Old City where I interrupted the mayor himself; he’d been talking with still another concerned citizen’s group about the possible pedestrian street, and he left the meeting gratefully: score one for Martine, I thought, as I brought him up to speed on the police inquiries. He even said good work. I nearly fainted.

For once, Ivan and I were home for dinner at the same time. He was pan-frying flounder, I was cooking green beans in garlic butter—neither of us thinks much about our cholesterol levels. “So who would want to make it disappear?” he asked.

I considered the question, pouring some of my glass of Pouilly Fumé into the beans as I did, then sipping more of it myself. “Anyone who was trying to disconnect the Duplessis affair from the drug experiments, I suppose,” I said slowly. “Remember, most of what was in the news, and most of what everybody knows, is that the Church was in cahoots with the province of Québec to get federal money. Both benefitted. They’re the only ones who’ve been sued, and it’s the province that’s been anteing up any restitution money, which, by the way, has been little and far between. Hope you noted the poker allusion,” I added.

“Duly noted,” said Ivan.

“I like slipping those in from time to time, just so you feel at home.” I sipped my wine, which sat on my tongue like the harbinger of a cold frost. Like the cold of a grave. I shivered and put the glass down.

Ivan pulled up a chair and sat at the big oak kitchen table, bringing his own wine with him. “Yeah, but Martine, when did this all happen? In the fifties and sixties? Who’s around anymore to even care? Most of the people involved are either dead themselves or in retirement homes.” He sighed. “I mean, giving restitution is noble. Don’t get me wrong. And it’s probably a good thing to show the world that we take justice seriously—even if it’s so far after the fact. But isn’t it a circus? Parading some senile person around who may not have a clue what’s happening, just for the sake of delayed justice. Taking them into the courtroom in a wheelchair. Look at the Allende trial. Look at those Nazis they brought to trial: one was wheeled into court in a hospital bed, for Christ’s sake. It was a circus.”

I was staring at him. “A necessary circus,” I said slowly. “You surprise me, Ivan.”

“Why?”

I raised my eyebrows. “You of all people? Don’t you
want
to see Nazis going to trial? Isn’t that sacrosanct for you? Never forget, and all that sort of thing?”

He flushed. “You’re saying that just because I’m Jewish.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Come on, Ivan. You’ve got a pretty big stake in this justice-is-justice-whenever-it-happens thing. Don’t you? Because your ancestors died in pogroms and concentration camps in Russia? Your family was almost wiped out during the Holocaust because someone else saw them as less than human. I’d think that you’d have it encoded in your DNA, some sort of desire for justice. Better late than never.”

He shook his head. He’s a pragmatist, Ivan. “People spend too much time looking back,” he said quietly. “It’s about making sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

I lost patience then. “How can we be sure it won’t happen again, if we don’t understand why it happened in the first place? If people get away with treating other people like objects, no matter where or when or for what reason, then it can always happen again, and it
will
always happen again!”

He looked at me soberly. “And is that what your Danielle was doing? Making sure that somebody didn’t get away with it?”

“Yes!” I was pretty sure, anyway; I just had to figure out who, and how. And what. And why the drug angle. Minor details. “This guy from McGill that Richard met in her office, he has to be part of it,” I said. “No way UQAM and McGill are going to collaborate on anything. It’s just not in their nature. They don’t speak the same language, literally
or
figuratively. So that has to be a link, a connection of some sort … I just don’t know how.”

“And you said that one of the original experimenters was from McGill, right?” Ivan got up and checked the flounder. It smelled heavenly. “Babe, how close are the green beans?”

I waved the question away as irrelevant. I was on a roll. “Exactly! Ewen—Ewen Something-or-other. The shrink, the guy with ties to the CIA. Listen, Ivan: that whole crew up at the Allan Institute, they were part of McGill: the institute was McGill’s psychiatric department. And McGill had to know they were doing CIA experiments there, too, but hey, funding is funding, isn’t it, and CIA money spends just as well as any other currency.”

He shook his head. “McGill’s a respected university, Martine,” he objected. “They weren’t going to jeopardize their reputation with something like this.”

“Why not? Who knew how bad it was? I mean, the sensory deprivation experiments, they were public, they had volunteers coming in to work with them. It was all aboveboard. No one needed to know about the rest.”

“The flounder’s done.”

“Wait, Ivan! Maybe there’s
still
a connection there and McGill doesn’t want it made public! Take it from me, that’s a great recipe for a public relations nightmare, if a Canadian university were
still
holding hands with an American intelligence agency. Maybe all of this is a big cover-up that’s continuing now. Maybe…”

Ivan shook his head. “McGill University and the Central Intelligence Agency? Nowadays?” His skepticism couldn’t have been clearer.

“I don’t know,” I conceded. “Maybe not anymore. But I’m going to find out.”

“Uh-huh. And those beans?”

“Maybe UQAM is in on it somehow,” I said slowly. “That’s not impossible, right? We already know McGill was in on it, and maybe—if anything—UQAM wanted to expose McGill’s involvement. That’s why Danielle was involved, why she was interested. There’s a long history tying universities to government agencies. At least I think there is.” I made a mental note to find out. “There has to be: it’s probably one of the ways that universities get their funding, and the government gets its results. I really think that we’re onto something with this.” I was feeling giddy with anticipation and Pouilly Fumé. If there was a conspiracy here—and I was starting to believe that there really was—I was going to get to the bottom of it. And bring justice down on those who deserved it. Martine LeDuc as Joan of Arc. Or Erin Brockovich. Heady stuff indeed.

And then I smelled something and was brought back down to earth with a thud. “Oh, damn, check the beans, will you, sweetheart?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The next morning there was an e-mail from Julian waiting for me at the office. “Confirmed that Annie Desmarchais was at Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu,” he wrote. “I’m still looking into Isabelle’s mom. Lunch at one to compare notes?”

I stared at the computer monitor, feeling as if someone had hit me in the stomach. Annie Desmarchais hadn’t merely been an orphan. Annie Desmarchais had lived for the first ten years of her life in one of the worst hellholes in the world; she had, if what I had been reading was true, been subjected to humiliation, to sexual abuse; she had spent her days scrubbing floors, doing laundry, cleaning kitchens; and that was only if the drugs she was injected with hadn’t made her too incapacitated to work. She had not been to school. She had not been exposed to any kind of culture.

Violette Sobel, I thought, had a hell of a lot of questions to answer.

I took the Métro up to Sherbrooke and walked the rest of the way to the Desmarchais mansion. I was dressed for the Pekinese this time, in jeans, sweater, and jacket: armor of sorts.

Again, Violette answered the door, though I had the sense of another presence hovering. “Madame LeDuc, how nice to see you again,” she said sweetly and insincerely, and opened the door. The Peke caught sight of me and growled. I narrowed my eyes and would have growled back if I’d dared.

This time, there was no exquisite coffee waiting. The front room was chilly and felt disused, and I shivered as I walked in. “I’m really not sure what else I can tell you,” Violette said, gesturing gracefully for me to be seated.

I looked around for the Pekinese, but he was nowhere in sight; probably lurking somewhere, waiting to attack. I had more important fish to fry. “Madame Sobel, you did not tell me where your sister had lived before your family adopted her.”

She sighed. “I thought I had made that clear to you,
madame
,” she said, a thread of irritation tracing through her voice. “As far as we were concerned, Annie had no life before she came to us. She was part of our family. We did not speak of any time when we were not together.”

“But she did,” I pointed out, “have a life. Ten years of it.”

She straightened her spine even more than it was already, and I remembered that she taught yoga. I simply couldn’t imagine it. “May I ask,
madame
, what is your point? Surely nothing that happened to my sister in her past had anything to do with her death. I am assured by the police that it was an instance of random violence.”

I sat and didn’t say anything. I just looked at her, willing myself to focus, hoping to make her uncomfortable. I’d heard that was how you did it: by just staying silent. Ivan had told me that most people get uncomfortable with silence. Ivan knew a lot about making people uncomfortable.

It didn’t seem to be working very well.

The Peke decided at that moment to make his appearance, slinking under Violette’s chair and glaring at me from the protection it afforded. I ignored him and he whined loudly. We both ignored him. Violette seemed completely prepared to outwait me. It was a pity, I thought, that Julian hadn’t given me lessons in interrogation techniques.

I finally gave in, and there was a gleam in her eye when I did. I was beginning to dislike this woman … and her little dog, too.

“
Madame
,” I said carefully, “Annie was in an insane asylum. How was it that your family selected someone from a hospital, rather than a school or orphanage?”

“She was an orphan,” she replied, her words measured. She, too, was treading carefully. “That is all that matters, surely? She was given a good home.”

“I’m sure she was,” I said. “But now she’s dead.”

She looked at me. The Peke looked at me. He whined again, and this time she made a small gesture and he jumped into her lap. Busying her hands in his hair, she cleared her throat. “As I’ve said, I think I told you everything I know.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

There was a frigid silence, and then her wrist moved infinitesimally; somewhere in the back of the house a bell rang. I had been correct about someone else being about; the door opened and a man, dressed in a dark suit, appeared silently. “Madame LeDuc is just leaving,” said Violette.

I stood up. Everyone’s eyes were on me. “Don’t you care?” I asked in desperation. “She was your sister! Don’t you want to know why she was murdered?”

“Show her out, please, Pierre,” she said, and her voice was tinged with frost. “As you have noted,
madame
, this is a house of grief. Please do not bother us again.”

As I was going through the door, the Pekinese snarled.