Ice Lake (53 page)

“Lucy Gabriel’s at the monastery,” the detective declared. “I want to talk to her.”

Harvey continued to watch him steadily. Then he said, “Hang on,” and closed the door. When he opened it again he had thrown on an overcoat and boots. Harvey came outside with Cinq-Mars and they walked a short distance away from the house, then stopped and faced one another. The Indian said, “You’re asking me?”

“That’s right. I’m asking you to take me to Lucy.”

“I can’t just do that.”

“Why not? You went there after we talked today.”

“You had me tailed?” The way he stuck out his chin underscored his hostility.

“I had you tailed. You’re not going to trust me now?”

“That’s right. I’m not going to trust you now. But I didn’t before, not so much.”

“Remember Charlie Painchaud?”

“Yeah. Sure.” He hadn’t buttoned his coat, and he flapped it impatiently with his hands in his pockets.

“He’s dead.”

Roland Harvey first leaned into the news, as though he could not trust his hearing, then leaned back, absorbing its impact. He took a deep breath and shook his head. Then he asked Cinq-Mars, “What are you saying to me?”

The Montreal cop took a step forward. He whispered, “I’m telling you that Sergeant Painchaud of the SQ was beaten in his own house and shot to death. I’m reminding you that he was working on a case that concerned the abduction of an Indian woman. A woman, incidentally, who happens to be living in the Oka monastery under your auspices. I’m pointing out to you that the dead man lives close to Indian land and there will be shit to pay for this all around.”

“My people didn’t do it,” Harvey declared.

“You know what, Roland? That doesn’t surprise me. But that doesn’t mean that your people won’t be considered. He’s SQ, Roland. SQ. You know there’s no love lost between the SQ and your people. He lives near Indian land. He was working on an Indian case. He was worked over and shot in his own house. Don’t expect his colleagues to be reasonable about this. They’re going to kick doors down first and ask questions later. I doubt if they’ll need any particularly good excuse to kick down Indian doors, do you?”

“That’ll be too bad if they do,” Harvey warned defiantly. Again, he stuck his chin out as though to goad the other man into throwing the first punch.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Cinq-Mars replied. “It’ll be too bad if they do.”

Roland Harvey had to ponder the situation. He kept his hands in his pockets to protect them from the cold. He looked around at the woods awhile. “I can’t bring you to Lucy,” he said in the end.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have her permission. You’ve got to understand. Lucy is hiding out so she’s protected from people who kill people in their own homes—”

“—and from people who might splash acid around her face if they want her to talk?” Cinq-Mars asked.

Harvey looked in his eyes. “Yeah,” he said quietly, gravely, “from people like that.” He continued in that tone. “She also needs protection from interested parties.”

“From pharmaceutical executives who might wonder what she’s been doing lately, what she’s been saying. Is that what you mean?”

Roland Harvey nodded. “She also has to be protected from the police.”

“I expected as much,” Cinq-Mars told him. He looked up at the stars a moment, as though he needed help to construct his next proposal. “I was saying to you earlier today that I wanted to meet with Mohawk Warriors. Maybe your friends in the house are discussing that now, Roland? Maybe it’s on the agenda?”

The Peacekeeper continued to gaze at him steadily and said nothing.

“In any case, you could bring the same news to Lucy. Tell her that I want to meet her on a personal basis. Not as a cop. As somebody who wants to keep her safe. You can tell her something else. I want her to
stay in hiding. I think that’s a good idea right now.”

The officer cocked his head with curiosity. “You do.”

“Yes, I do. Charlie Painchaud was a friend of hers. Let her know that he’s dead. You can also tell her that Harry Hillier, one of her bosses, was the victim of a car-bombing tonight.”

The news was sounding increasingly dire to Harvey. “He’s dead too?”

“Oh yeah. He’s a cherry pie.”

The Indian exhaled a long breath. As he turned his face to the moonlight, Cinq-Mars could see the pock-marks on his skin and the fleshiness of his jowls.

“Take me to her,” Cinq-Mars pleaded.

The Mohawk shook his head, holding his ground. “I’ll talk to her. See what she says.”

Cinq-Mars lowered his head, nodding. He had made progress, and he would have to settle for that, for now. “You have my number? Do you know where I live? She’s mobile, Roland, she’s got her car.”

“She’s made a solemn vow to stay put.”

Roland Harvey was admitting to something with that remark, and Cinq-Mars looked up at him. He was saying that he was in charge of her, and admitting to it had been a concession, not a mistake. He was putting himself on the line. “Anytime,” Cinq-Mars urged him quietly, “day or night. I need to talk to her.”

The Peacekeeper nodded.

Cinq-Mars turned toward his car, as though by taking his leave he could change both his tone and the subject, and seal their professional relationship. “I like the scheme, Roland. The monks take Indian land for themselves. A century or so later, a new generation of religious man feels guilty about all that and seeks to make amends. Indians go to the monks and ask them to hide someone. The monks agree.”

Although his expression hardly changed at all, Cinq-Mars believed he detected an inner smile cross Roland Harvey’s face.

“Write them down for me,” the constable instructed, “your numbers and stuff. I’ll go see her, but I don’t want anybody tailing me this time. You’re not going inside the monastery without Lucy’s permission.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that, Roland.”

“Because my own people will be right behind me. I think you know what I mean by my own people.”

Everybody would have their armies on the road tonight.

“Be careful, Roland. There’s movement out there.”

The Indian nodded solemnly. “You too,” he said.

Starlight lit his way home. The clouds had moved east. The ride across the lake felt infused with an old, odd magic. The dance of the heavens, the soft fall of lights from homes along the shore and silvery moonlight across the snow. Another world, one that seemed far removed from danger. Cinq-Mars was not convinced, and twice after leaving the lake he stopped in a quiet spot and waited, checking that no cars were following him. Twice he doubled back, to verify his security. The roads on the south side of the lake proved to be clear, he was alone in the country under the moonlight, beneath the stars, skimming across bright, gleaming surfaces.

Sandra had left a light on in the kitchen. Turning the Pathfinder off and walking toward his front door, he heard his dog whining and scratching on the other side. As he opened the door, Sandra was coming down the stairs to meet him, having been alerted by the dog’s excitement.

“I’ll walk her,” Cinq-Mars said. They kissed.

“We both will,” Sandra offered, and she jogged upstairs to get dressed.

Outside, the couple played with their retriever awhile, chasing her off with showers of snow. She’d yelp and scamper away, only to bog down in the powder and desperately bound back to them. Finally she wearied of their nonsense and braced herself beneath the branches of a magnificent Great Eastern Pine to do her business. Then it was back to the comfort of the house.

And upstairs.

Cinq-Mars undressed his wife.

He supposed they were lucky. Her body remained an adventure to him. Familiar, yet also a surprise. He had been alone most of his adult life, and she was such a wonder to him, how she moved with him as he caressed her. There was weight to her flesh, and toil, and history. Tracing the contours of her skin with his fingers, his tongue, he revisited the years of her life, the times when he had not known her, making her laugh as a girl, or sigh with the ardour of a young woman in the early throes of passion. Sandra was a woman who had made her way, suffered setbacks, persevered, managed, struggled through, and when she turned under him on the bed, kissing him, drawing him down, she was his wife, here, now, in their home, in the middle of her life, anxious and content.

Sally lay at the foot of the bed, eyes open part of the time.

They moved together, intent now, and Sandra incited her husband with crude whispers, her mouth to his ear. She knew that the words were strange for him, for his priestly Catholic mind, but he responded with guttural fulmination and an increased tempo, and she laughed as she hugged him and squeezed and met his lunge with her hips, a lifetime’s experience as a rider put to strong, athletic use. At the penultimate moment they were both perplexed, bewitched, straddling laughter and joy and a sense of sheer fun with an underlying
and soon dominant need and lust and release. They broke the silence of their rural landscape, their outcry boisterous across the contours of fallen snow.

The couple nestled together awhile, then rearranged themselves to escape the cool breeze coming through the window, which was open a crack. They cuddled in a warmth of their own creation under the duvet. They might normally have tumbled into sleep, but the silvery, bright moonlight through the window, the eerie quiet, the particular joy of lovemaking on this night, and the anxiety of the day’s news kept them awake. They lay, spooned together, listening to one another breathe against the backdrop of the night.

The wind picked up. They felt the cold air on their noses.

Trees made cracking sounds as they swayed.

Sandra remembered to pop an Aspirin into her husband’s mouth.

As quickly as it came up, the wind ceased.

“I heard on the news about the policeman. Did you know him?”

“I’ve been working with him since Sunday.”

“Oh, Émile.”

“There was a bombing tonight, as well. That’s also my case.”

Gently, she reached behind her to touch his shoulder with her fingertips.

After a while, after she thought he had fallen asleep, Emile said, “I was standing outside Charlie’s house tonight. He’s the dead man. I found him. I was standing outside and I was thinking, it’s death. That’s my enemy these days. I’m fighting against death, and how crazy is that? Men have pills, drugs, that precipitate death, speed up the process of dying, because that might teach them something. My father is dying and I only want him to live longer. But I know, he knows, his life is over. Death. Death wins. Where in all this is life?”

She craned her neck, twisting her head around to kiss his shoulder with grave tenderness. After a while, she whispered, “Here.”

He bound her closer to him then, and tucked in one another’s embrace, they slept.

16
DARKLING STAR

The next day, Wednesday, February 16, 1999

Dawn found Emile Cinq-Mars invigorated, driving eastbound toward the city, connecting with the early commuter traffic that flowed from the rural communities on either side of the Quebec-Ontario border. Like him, his fellow drivers had chosen life in the countryside while holding down city jobs, and the price to be paid was late nights, early risings, and hard drives in the winter’s dark along snowy highways. Frustrated by the slow pace, Cinq-Mars dug out his red cherry flasher from under the passenger seat, leaning way over and bobbing up again to check on the traffic until he’d rooted it out. He ran the wire to the cigarette lighter, opened his side window, and plopped it on the rooftop of his Pathfinder, where it would be held in place by magnets. That gave him some driving room, and he sped on through to downtown Montreal.

He had a jag on. His sleep had been beneficial, and now he felt that he was ready to take command of this case.

At Police Headquarters he primed himself with coffee. He had no room to stomp around in his cubicle, but when he stepped outside to the squad room he bumped into people and desks. So he invaded the
lunch room and told the cops hanging around in there to get the hell out. By the time Bill Mathers arrived he was pacing, and taunting himself.

“Emile?” Mathers had had a bad night, beginning with his investigation of the car-bombing of Harry Hillier. When he had called his wife later, she’d been in a state, upset by the news that a cop had been beaten in his home and murdered.

Cinq-Mars stopped in his tracks, suddenly surprised to see him. “Bill.”

“What’s going on?”

“I have this case,” the older man said.

“What do you mean? What do you have?”

“Nothing. Nothing yet,” the senior cop admitted.

“You have this case, but you’ve got nothing. All right.” Mathers sat down, willing to give his partner the benefit of the doubt.