Asylum (23 page)

“Babe? What’s going on?”

“Not much,” I said, mystified that Ivan should be calling me. “Why?”

“You were supposed to be here at lunchtime to look at some security tapes.”

Oh,
merde
, yes. The people at Danielle’s funeral. I’d completely forgotten. “Oh, Ivan, I’m sorry. I got busy and—”

“Forgot,” he finished for me. “No big deal, but I’m heading downtown for a couple of meetings, so if you come now—”

“I probably won’t get to it today,
chéri
,” I said apologetically.

“All right then. No worries. I’ll see you tonight. Take care.”

“You, too,” I said automatically, already clicking off the smartphone. MacDougal had caught sight of me and was walking in my direction. My gut remembered the night in my office even if my head knew how safe I was here, and I felt it twist in fear. Standing next to him was making my skin crawl.

“Mrs. LeDuc,” he said, offering his hand.

I shook it firmly. “Professor MacDougal.”

He half turned, gesturing toward the bistro, people flowing in and out of the indoor serving area, others settling in at the tables grouped under the trees. “Perhaps something to drink? An
apéritif
?”

I’d already had a glass of beer I’d drunk far too quickly, and I needed my wits about me. “An espresso,” I agreed, and we found a small zinc table outside. Around us, voices in a babble of French and English, though mostly French. We did the pretend-you’re-looking-around-while-feeling-awkward thing that people who don’t know each other do when they’re first together, and I wondered for a moment where the little train was that took children around the
espace
. Only on weekends, I remembered.

A server appeared and the professor ordered for us in atrocious French, and once she’d left we finally looked at each other, as though her presence and the fact of ordering had made the meeting real; it gave us the signal to begin. “I want to know,” I said to him, “what you and Annie Desmarchais were talking about before she was murdered.”

“Of course you do.” He was unperturbed. “Aren’t we supposed to have some lubricating small-talk conversation first? Talk about the upcoming elections? Do you think the Parti Québécois stands a chance this time around? Or perhaps the weather—it’s been fine, but I hear there are clouds moving in for tomorrow.”

I stared at him, using my best you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. It worked. He sighed and crossed one leg elegantly over the other. He was wearing a pale gray suit with a white shirt and a red tie: academia meets big business. As, I suspected, he was about to tell me.

He didn’t disappoint. “We’re both aware of the MK-Ultra experiments at the Allan,” he said finally. I nodded. “I was not directly involved. I was in medical school before I knew anything about them, to be honest, and that was in the seventies. It was all over by then. But my advisor—my mentor in every possible way—worked at the Allan in those years.”

“So you cut him some slack.” Using the pronoun was a safe enough bet; I hadn’t yet heard a woman’s name associated with the project.

“Of course I didn’t,” MacDougal snapped. He stopped as the server—a young woman with the best complexion I’ve ever seen anywhere—put our coffees down. “
Non, merci, rien d’autre
,” I said impatiently when she asked if we wanted anything else. I just wanted her to go away.

MacDougal stirred sugar into his coffee. “There was no need for me to gloss over any of the project with Dr. Schmidt,” he said. “It was never presented to me as anything but good medicine, and it was a very long time before I was able to think for myself on that score.”

He sipped his coffee. I ignored mine. “What happened?” I asked.

“You must understand, the Allan was seen as one of the best places in the country to work,” he said. “A premier placement. I was honored to be taken on there. And of course, by the time I was there, the—excesses—had stopped.”

“Excesses?” I raised my eyebrows. “That’s a funny way of talking about torture. Or murder.”

“It wasn’t murder!”

“No?” I leaned forward, nearly across the small table. “What do you call it then, Professor?”

He put down his cup with a thump that made me jump. “Why don’t I just tell you what you need to know?” he asked. “I don’t appreciate the third degree, or the attitude. If you want information, then by God have the courtesy to ask for it without a layer of contempt.”

I leaned back, took a sip of coffee, and nodded. “You’re right,” I said, gesturing. “Go ahead.”

He drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Very well. I first saw the Allan in 1982. You have to understand, back then, it was legendary in the psychiatric community. I felt I was lucky to be there, and lucky to have the mentor I had. There were rumors, even then—but there are always rumors in hospitals. One even had Dr. Mengele himself escaping from Germany at the end of World War Two and continuing Nazi experimentation at the Allan. It was laughable.” He glanced at me. “I still don’t believe that particular bit of the story.” He paused. “But the rest … well, it’s credible.”

He dampened his lips before continuing. “Drugs were being used in a big way in the eighties,” he said. “ECT—electroshock therapy—had gone out of vogue, but the drugs were very cutting-edge.” There was some bitterness in his voice, now. “And Lansbury Pharmaceuticals was the major supplier. Whatever we wanted, they seemed to be able to get, sometimes at great rates, sometimes for free. And when you’re prescribing … well, you have to understand, and I don’t say this easily, but the truth is that doctors don’t know as much as the general populace gives them credit for knowing. Doing medicine is always a little hit-or-miss, some times more than others. What people don’t get is that the brain is a very complicated organ, and there’s a lot to be understood about it, even today. A lot that no one knows yet. So we learn by experimentation.”

Somehow I’d finished my coffee without being aware of drinking it. I brought the empty cup to my mouth and then set it down again. Still I didn’t say anything.

“The experimentation,” said Dr. MacDougal, “must, however, be rigorous, ethical, and conducted always with the patient’s permission and with their best interests in mind. A formula that I began to discover had not always been the Allan’s practice. It had particularly been lacking when there was American funding coming in. Consent was not always required. No: I lie—consent was never required. The Americans saw that sort of thing differently than we did.”

“The CIA,” I said.

He nodded. “The CIA. They gave us everything: money, expertise, they kept the government off our backs, no inspections … just left the doctors free to do whatever medicine they thought would be best. As long as the CIA got the results they wanted.” He sighed, rubbing his wrist, his eyes going past me, past the park, into some darkness I was only skirting the edge of. “And then the plug got pulled. When the Americans ended MK-Ultra, the psychiatry department started hurting for funding. There was panic. The Allan needed a knight in shining armor to rescue it and—lo and behold, as if by magic, one appeared. That was when Lansbury upped its part of the ante.” He glanced at me. “Don’t misunderstand: Lansbury was part of the Allan before the CIA ever was. But since the seventies, it’s been the major funding source. And I was grateful. So grateful, in fact, that I agreed to help them with PR campaigns.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know about the videos you did.”

“Yes,” he said bleakly. “I expect that you do. And I don’t know about you, Mrs. LeDuc, but I need something a little stronger than coffee just now.” He signaled for the server. “Will you share a bottle of cider with me?”

I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice.

He ordered the cider and then took in another deep breath. This couldn’t have been easy for him, and despite my anger, I found myself feeling sorry for him, too.

But not too much.

We didn’t say much of anything for a few moments. The server brought the cider and poured us each a glass before leaving again; MacDougal drank thirstily and then put his glass down; it made an odd sound on the zinc tabletop. “So there we were,” he said. “The Allan humming along, Lansbury money matching funds with the McGill money coming in, and everything was perfect. Then last year I happened to be attending a fundraiser and found that I was sitting beside Annie Desmarchais.”

Aha. I was wondering when we’d get to her.

“I didn’t know that much about MK-Ultra, to be perfectly honest,” MacDougal said. “But she did—and she told me. She told me about her own past, before she was adopted by the Desmarchais family, and how orphans had been reclassified by the Church so that the asylums could get the federal mental-health money.”

I hated to interrupt him, but I had to. “Was it really that much more money? I’ve never seen any figures. Were there enough children to justify it?”

He smiled bleakly. “It was,” he said softly, “a perfect storm of possibilities for abuse. You had a governmental system trying to save money, and turning orphans into psychiatric patients saved on education. You had nuns working ten- to twelve-hour days, day after day, without any kind of preparation for the task, each one of them responsible for between ten and twenty children. Boys were cared for by men hired out of the community—and we’re not talking urban Montréal here, the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu was out in a village back then, it didn’t become part of Montréal proper until later—so whomever they hired was also undereducated and underprepared.”

He took a swallow of cider. Thus reminded, I took a quick sip too, feeling the tartness on my tongue. He cleared his throat. “And, yes, to answer your question … Québec at the beginning of the last century was the cradle of the Western world, quite literally the cradle, with more births for a period of about thirty years than
anywhere else
in the western hemisphere. There was no birth control, and unwed mothers were shamed into giving their children to the Church; they were told that their own bad traits would rub off on their children otherwise. They thought they were saving the children.” He shook his head. “Like I said, a perfect storm for abuse. And abuse there was, tremendous abuse. All of that would have been terrible enough, all by itself.”

“And then there was MK-Ultra,” I said.

He nodded. “And then there was MK-Ultra.”

We both drank in silence for a moment. He wasn’t finished. “Annie told me she was one of the Duplessis orphans. She told me that she felt guilt, immense guilt, for not being able to go back and help every other child in that hellhole. And then she told me about the basement—that was where they did the experiments. Only on children with no family. Only on children no one would miss. I’d like to think that they believed they were working toward the greater good, trying to discover what might and might not help a patient.”

“It doesn’t matter what they believed,” I said.

He shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case, the point is that both the Allan and Lansbury were deeply involved in what happened in that basement for all those years. So you can imagine how deeply affected I was, how desperate to do something to make right what had happened, not that anyone ever could. Annie and I became, well, friends, of a sort. She was determined that it all should come to light, that McGill and Lansbury should both not only acknowledge the part they played in the situation, but that they should also provide financial compensation to the remaining living victims. I agreed to help. We needed a researcher, someone impartial, and so I enlisted the assistance of—”

“Danielle Leroux,” I said. I knew this part already, but seeing it fit so neatly into the jigsaw puzzle of information was powerful.

“Yes,” he said, and his gaze went unhappily around the immediate area, looking at the family seated next to us, the little boy blowing bubbles in his soda with his straw.

He knew, I thought. He knew that asking Danielle for help was ultimately the reason she died. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said suddenly. “You didn’t kill her.”

“I may as well have.”

I waved that away. He’d have to come to terms with it on his own. “What about the others?”

He didn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “I only know about Caroline Richards,” he said. “Annie had contacted her, asked her to help with her investigation, help get the word out. Who better than an investigative journalist? The CBC had done a series some time ago on the Duplessis orphans. Annie thought that Caroline could do something similar. Put it on public display, put pressure on the university and Lansbury to ante up. Caroline was excited about it—if she could’ve carried it off, it would have been a major coup for her. Awards. Who knows what.”

“Did you meet her?”

“Caroline? No, never. She met with Annie, and they were careful. Never at the foundation or the newspaper, always a different place, always careful.”

“Not careful enough.”

He looked at me. “I suppose not.”

I sighed and finished my cider, watched him refill my glass. I really didn’t need any more. “You know where this is all leading,” I said. “Someone, probably either at McGill or Lansbury—and my money’s on McGill—found out. They realized these women were the driving force behind the investigation. They wanted them dead and they were willing to do it in such a sensational way that no one would look beyond the how as to the why.”

“That’s my understanding of it as well.” He was staring into his glass.

“And you have no idea how Isabelle Hubert fits in?”

He shook his head. “I don’t. She seems to have moved in some powerful circles, however, and it’s possible…” His voice trailed off delicately.

Yes. It was possible. But I had something even better: I had the motive. “Her mother was at the asylum,” I said. “At the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. She went over the wall, ran away, managed to escape. She was just a teenager. Isabelle was doing genealogical research, she was finding out about her mother’s story. I expect that’s the connection you didn’t know about.” I blew out a sigh and stood up. “Thank you, Professor.”

He politely stood up with me. “You will continue to—er—pursue the matter?”