City of Ice (31 page)

What he loved about working with cows and horses in close proximity to vets was attempting to solve the riddles of animal illness. In one case, Cinq-Mars had discovered the contamination of well water that served a particular barn after becoming sick himself with similar symptoms. Aware that the young man had been thwarted in his first choice of career, the vet on duty had suggested that he become a detective. Spoken half in jest, the comment would weigh on the youth. He did not want to muck out barns all his life. A limited number of graduates were being hired into government bureaucracies dedicated to animal welfare, and in any case those positions had seemed tearfully boring to him. On the other hand, he did enjoy investigating things. Exploration kept his attention. He preferred work that was patently
interesting.
If a job could intrigue him for a good chunk of time, he was willing to endure whatever bouts of boredom came attached. The young Cinq-Mars suffered little ambition to accumulate wealth. He got a kick from figuring people out yet was himself aloof. Why not be a policeman? In due time, a detective? With the avidity of youth, Émile Cinq-Mars supposed that he might actually be good at the job.

Within days of the initial suggestion, he began to think of police work as his profession, his vocation. He
dispensed with any notion of being a small-town cop, although the countryside and its villages constituted his heritage. In such circumstances he’d be recognized and scrutinized, the goldfish in a bowl, made to wear a uniform throughout his career, a situation antithetical to being a crack investigator. He read Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Montreal was renowned, indeed legendary, for crime—that was where he would go. To a place he had never been. The city would become his London. He’d be a big-city cop, a Montreal cop, promoted one day to the rank of detective. He drove into the big city in a borrowed pickup and marveled as the humpback mountain, with the Oratory shimmering in the bright sunlight like a crown doffed to one side, then the sparkle of skyscrapers rose into view above the broad glacier plain. He crossed the Champlain Bridge and observed below the overpass the scoff of poor communities like a beckoning nod of destiny. In his blood and bones he felt his future here. Within minutes of first speaking to a recruitment officer, young Cinq-Mars impressed upon the man that he was not about to be denied.

And he was not.

What confounded Cinq-Mars, what wore him down at times, was the lack of professional pride exhibited by so many of his fellow officers. He kept up with professional training, attended conferences and symposia, making contact with officers from various jurisdictions, cities, and countries, on the off chance that one day he might want to call upon their services or expertise—as he had done during the past weekend with Raymond Rieser. Along the way he had attended innumerable lectures, and one stuck in his craw. An academic studying the behavior and makeup of policemen in several cities concluded that cops and crooks were more alike than first thought. Both were moths attracted to the flame of crime. They reveled in the
excitement, the rush of danger. Both were seduced by the need to be at the center of things, to be in the know. They hated to be on the outside looking in. Both groups had difficulty with routine. Both were aggressive. Both liked guns. Both were righteous. Both saw themselves as living outside society. As did crooks, cops viewed themselves as social misfits. Both groups were tribal and attracted to codes and rituals. The lecturer had suggested that criminals and policemen lived on flip sides of the same mattress. Policemen, by upbringing or fluke or circumstance, were more inclined to conform to the law than to break it, that was all. Some cops would probably have become crooks if they hadn’t been hired to enforce the rules. He went on to make the case that policemen must be wary of policemen. In a fellow officer lay the seeds for criminal behavior. Cinq-Mars was left with the impression that the lecturer considered criminals the more courageous of the two tribes, while the weaker band, lacking the guts to commit crime and more fearful of prison, wore the badge.

Following the talk—which enraged him—Cinq-Mars appreciated that he had come to police work through different weather than his fellow officers. He was not the man described in the lecture, he was not an opposite mask. He hated routine and liked to be in the know, nevertheless his choices in life had never been between robbing a bank and catching the thieves who did. He became aware that policemen often emerged from the same streets and circumstances as the crooks they chased down. From locker-room chats he gathered that a solid percentage of his cohorts had flirted with crime as kids. They’d been caught, or frightened, or turned around by a strong family connection. The ones who’d been hockey players unable to make the pros were more likely to relate memories of their fights on the ice than goals scored.
Cinq-Mars considered that some cops were effective because they thought like crooks, and his rage was gradually replaced by worry that he might fail at his profession because he did not suffer that requisite tarnish to his nature.

He’d gotten over the momentary loss of confidence, emerging with a heightened sense of his place within the department. He learned that he could teach himself to think like crooks by empathizing with them and, more important, by allowing the Roman Catholic in him to come to the fore. If he was a creature of God, and a man with a God-driven destiny, then surely what was intrinsic to him had specific, if undetermined, value. In time Émile Cinq-Mars grew to believe that, through maintaining what he saw as purity of purpose, his role was to be the conscience of the Police Department, to remind his fellow officers of the thin line they walked between civility and abuse, between discipline and disorder and, significantly, between justice and vengeance. Similarly, he reminded cops that crooks were the bad guys, in need of repair or incarceration, that cops were not supposed to be their own worst enemies. Overall, he ceded any pretense to being one of the boys in blue, and set himself apart.

As Cinq-Mars sipped his coffee, ruminating, Okinder Boyle fairly bounced through the door, offering up a morning eagerness that amused the older man. The journalist ordered a
chocolatine
, a croissant filled with a rich dark chocolate heated to dripping. Cinq-Mars feared the temptation about to be placed across from him.

“How’ve you been?”

“Good, Émile, thanks. How’s the world treating you?”

“Can’t complain.”

“No kidding. At your age, that’s hard to imagine.”

“Bear in mind, Okinder, who’s carrying a gun.”

“I forgot. Truth is, I hope I’m as well preserved as you are when I’m ninety-five—whoops, sorry, don’t shoot—fifty-five.”

“Fifty-six, but who’s counting?”

Boyle’s
chocolatine
arrived, and the young reporter bit into it lasciviously. He closed his eyes, chewed, and returned the pastry to the plate. Cinq-Mars observed an infinitesimal amount of chocolate dribble out from between his lips. “Detective, long story. Bear with me, all right? I’ve had a helluva weekend.”

“I’m all ears,” Cinq-Mars vowed, eyes on the chocolate.

Boyle reminded him of his Christmas Eve visit to the tunnel and his talk with the Banker. He discussed the visit from Carl Bantry’s daughter, Heather, who’d been bent on assuring that the tale about her father was printed.

“And then a few days ago I received a visit from another young woman, also claiming to be Heather Bantry, who directs me to
her
father, who is the
real
Carl Bantry who is living in a nursing home on the south shore, thank you kindly, not inside any damn tunnel.”

“Hold on. There are two Carls and two Heathers?”

“Exactly. Except that one father-daughter combination is real and the other one’s a CIA plant.”

“We are definitely jumping to conclusions here, Okinder. You’re not saying you have proof of that?”

Boyle was dusting the crumbs off his fingers and smiling mischievously. “Okay. Sheer speculation. But face facts. A group of men is planted in a tunnel to direct me to someone called the Banker, only he really isn’t that person and those men usually aren’t there. I’ve checked. The Railway Police go through the tunnel nightly. Nobody can make fires and live there. It just so happens that the Railway Police get a few
days off around Christmas. So these
actors
took over the tunnel
after
a seed had been sown in my head. They were very convincing. Anybody would’ve been taken in by them.” Boyle first wet his lips, then took a gulp of mud. “Now I find out there’s a real Heather and a real Carl Bantry. So I visit Carl on the south shore, where he’s minding his own business in a nursing home for dodo birds. He’s pretty sound. He tells me, and his daughter confirms, that his bills get paid by his former employer, by the bank.”

“And
is
the bank paying?”

“I inquired at the bank when I first did my story. They didn’t know his whereabouts. Their financial support is minimal. Their insurance company sends checks, which apparently get siphoned off by his wife. That part of the original story bears out. I checked back with the bank over the weekend. They weren’t overjoyed to hear from me, but there you go. As far as two executives are concerned, they are not supporting Carl Bantry in a nursing home. Why deny it? The information would only make them look good. I called back the nursing home. They don’t know who’s paying the bills. They receive direct deposits monthly.”

“Interesting.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You haven’t leapfrogged into the lap of the CIA, not yet.”

“I visit Carl Bantry in the nursing home Saturday morning. Same day—that evening, Saturday night—I get a visit from the original Heather, the fake one, trying to find out what I’d been doing there, how much I know, what I plan to write.
The fake Heather knows I visited the real Carl.
She has to admit that she’s not Heather Bantry, she has no choice, but she won’t tell me her real name. If I publish, she warns me, she’ll probably die, her death will be on my head, and—get this—the people who do her will be the same gentle
folks who broke Hagop Artinian’s neck.”

“Whoosh,”
Cinq-Mars exclaimed.

“Then she gets to play her final card. If I don’t believe her, she says, I can call up the famous Detective Émile Cinq-Mars, and he’ll convince me not to publish.”

“She said that?” He shook his head. “Still no CIA connection.”

“Hey, it’s come up before. I don’t find it such a stretch. The chick was trying to make me think she’s a cop. She wasn’t saying so flat out, but she’s letting the insinuation ride. She has to give herself some kind of connection, doesn’t she? She can’t exactly let on that she’s being run by the CIA. More news, Émile—I’ve seen the guy.”

“What guy?”

“The CIA guy.”

“What CIA guy? Who—when?—where?—how do you know?” Cinq-Mars didn’t know what he needed to hear first.

“Friday night, before my caper to the nursing home,
after
I’ve learned about the second Heather, I met Heather One, the fake, in a bar. Actually, I saw her walk through the bar I was in and look around. I followed. She did the same thing in another bar. After that she went into a third and met this older guy. Welldressed dude. They held hands, talked up close, looked into each other’s eyes, that sort of thing. So I went over and said hello.”

“You didn’t.”

“I’m not shy. I asked the fake Heather—when she’s over at my place the next night—who was the guy? She tries to pass him off as her stepfather. I call her on that. Since when do college girls hold hands across the table with their stepdads and look dewy-eyed at them? She admits it’s a story. Again, she offers no explanation. He’s the guy, Émile. He’s the one.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Midforties. Well-dressed. The threads jump out at you. Good-looking for a suit. What can I tell you?”

“How about the make of his car? How about the fake Heather Bantry’s phone number? No! You have a phone number?”

The reporter had a hit of java. “Tried it this morning. The chick answered. I hung up. Friday night after I talked to them, I followed them out from the bar. They walked through a building where I lost them, so I just headed back to the club scene to do what I planned to do all along. Drink and meet girls. What do I see? The two of them coming out of some
other
building. I mean, who walks through a bunch of different buildings for no reason except people who don’t want to be followed and who think they might be? They got into a car and were out of sight before I could catch up. All I saw was that the car was green.”

“Too bad.”

“But Saturday night, after the chick left my place, I slipped downstairs and caught a glimpse. Again, no plate number. It was dark, and the light over the plate was out. But the car was an Infiniti Q Forty-five. There aren’t many of those in town.”

Cinq-Mars was beaming. “Okinder Boyle. Good work!”

“Just call me Steeplechase B. Here’s the phone number.”

The reporter ripped off a small sheet from his pocket notepad and passed it across the table to Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars, who, as if it had been written in invisible ink and might momentarily vanish, committed the number to memory before stuffing it away. Speechless awhile, he finally managed to say, “Thanks, Okinder.” He cleared his throat. “Saturday night, probably just after the young woman was at your place, I received a call from the man in
the Q Forty-five. He pulled me away from a dinner party I had on. I don’t know who he is. We’ve had contact, but I don’t know him. He prevailed upon me to beg you not to publish.”

“I’ll consider myself persuaded. It’s the big story I’m after here.”

“Someday you’ll have it.” Cinq-Mars put his elbows on the table and rubbed his hands. “How were the pastries?”

Boyle laughed. “Come on, Émile. Splurge. Live a little for a change.”

“Maybe I will,” the detective intimated. “I may have something to celebrate.” He and his new friend grinned.

Detective Bill Mathers made his way along narrow, congested streets to the mechanic’s last known address. Spotting a mailman on his way up the walk, he decided against ringing the kid’s bell and waited as the man selected the appropriate key and entered. The postal worker held open the door for the loiterer, and the cop followed him to the cubbyhole of mailboxes. The man slung down his sack and started sorting.