Miss Montreal (24 page)

The only option was to have the baby and give it up for adoption. Even this was not without its trials. To be pregnant and unmarried in Quebec in those days was to invite derision from all concerned. Most girls would be sent away to live with relatives once they started to show, usually somewhere in the country, away from the prying eyes and flapping lips of the neighbourhood. And once they gave birth, they had to give up the baby whether they wanted to or not. Adoptions were often forced on them. Sometimes they’d be told the babies had been stillborn. They never knew the warmth of the newborn at their breast. And neither did the infants. They’d be placed with Catholic agencies by the sisters who usually helped in the deliveries.

And sometimes, if the doctor knew of a good family that wanted a child, he would arrange a private adoption himself.

——

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “It’s Laurent. Not his kids. He’s the one who was adopted.”

“You mean this right-wing nut with all his anti-immigrant bullshit,” Ryan said, “his big Quebec for old-time Quebecers line, he’s got a Jewish father?”

“So it would seem.”

“Well if that ain’t a motive, what the fuck is?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I doubt very much that Arthur’s name ever went on the birth certificate. The social worker told me how strict the laws are around reunifications. Did Arthur tell you anything else?” I asked Jenn.

“Not really. What he told me was, he only really started thinking about it last year, after his wife died. As long as she was alive, he never allowed himself to pursue it. But once she was gone, he couldn’t help wondering what happened to this child he fathered. He didn’t even know if it was a boy or girl, or what had become of Micheline. He said he thought of hiring a private detective at one point, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Even if Micheline was still alive, he was hesitant to contact her after all these years. He said, ‘What if her life turned out badly? What if she’s dirt poor or lived a life of abuse, all because I didn’t have the courage to see things through?’ ”

“We have to assume Sammy found out somehow,” I said. “He knew the month and year of the birth. Knew the mother’s name. There must be archives he could have gone to, records he could consult. If she married, he could have tracked her down. Maybe convinced her to file a reunification request.”

“Which means we can find her too,” Jenn said. “I’m good at that kind of thing. I don’t mind getting dusty.”

“You might not have to,” I said. I had a sudden vision of the list of names and numbers on Sammy’s fridge, all beginning with the letter M. What if it didn’t stand for Monsieur?

What if it stood for Micheline?

——

It took nearly half an hour to drive to Sammy’s flat. Every street leading there was mobbed with people carrying Quebec flags, white fleurs-de-lys on blue backgrounds. Cars were honking, their passengers leaning out of windows, waving their flags, trying to high-five each other. Canada Day never seemed to create this level of excitement and participation, at least not outside officially sanctioned events. There was genuine electricity in the air.

Even the clouds seemed to have burned away. The late-afternoon sun was shining for the first time in a week, promising a perfect evening for the big concert in Parc Maisonneuve and whatever other events were planned.

When I got back to the hotel with Sammy’s list in hand, the three of us started calling the names on it, working three cellphones at a time, crossing off those that had no one named Micheline living there.

It was Ryan who hit the right house: M. Grenier. He handed me the phone while the man who answered walked off calling,
“Maman. Téléphone!’ ”

I waited about thirty seconds before footsteps sounded at the other end, starting off faint and getting only a little louder before someone picked up the handset and said in a light, breathy voice:
“Oui?”

“Madame Grenier?”

“Oui, c’est moi.”

“Micheline Grenier?”

“Oui, monsieur.”

“Est-ce que votre nom de fille était Mercier?”

“Qui êtes vous?”
she said.

“Un ami de Sam Adler.”

“Oh, mon Dieu
,” she breathed.
“Pauvre Monsieur Adlair.”

Poor Mr. Adler indeed.

S
he still lived in the house where she had been born, in a neighbourhood so far east the tendrils of gentrification had yet to curl around it. The streets were crowded and narrow, with two-storey houses that showed no outward signs of renovation. No expensive German casement windows or sanded, refinished doors. Most of the parked cars were older, showing rust and unrepaired damage. People sitting out on stoops to escape the heat of flats that had no air conditioning, eyeing the Jeep as I backed into a parking spot.

Jenn had come with me. She spoke better French than any of us and I thought her presence would serve the situation better than Ryan’s. She had also heard Arthur Moscoe’s story first-hand and might be able to prompt Micheline if her memory faltered.

A man answered the door. He looked to be in his late forties, with greying whiskers and thin hair and a paunch that hung over stained sweatpants. He held a bottle of Molson Export in one hand.

He turned and called,
“Maman!”
and walked away toward the kitchen at the rear.

What if she’s dirt poor
, Artie had wondered. Maybe she wasn’t quite that, but neither had she lived a life like his. Or that of her hidden son.

I knew that the woman who came to the door was eighty-two. Her face was deeply lined and spotted, her hair white and thin, but she carried herself well, if slowly, and when she smiled I saw the fine bones of her face, how lovely she must have been in her time. When she was Artie’s Miss Montreal. And there around her neck, in a crevice of tired, blemished skin, was the gold cross she had worn when Artie first laid eyes on her.

“Entrez, je vous en prie
,” she said, indicating we should come in.

“Merci
,” I said.

The ground-floor apartment was small, with a dropped ceiling that made it feel even smaller. In the parlour on the right were two old red leather chairs with brass studs and scuffed legs, as well as a couch that faced a small television on a wood-veneer stand. The coffee table had white lace doilies on it and there was a plate of chocolate-chip cookies laid out, along with a pot of tea and white china cups with gold edging around the rims. Propped up in a frame on the table was a black-and-white photo of a younger Micheline, maybe forty years old, next to a burly man with thick black hair combed into a pompadour. His arm was around her shoulder and he wore a heavy gold watch and a ring with a gold face about an inch square.

She pointed to the red chairs and Jenn and I sat. She lowered herself onto the couch, bracing herself on the bolstered arm, the soft cushion almost swallowing her thin body.

“
Mon mari
,” she said, pointing at the photo.
“Il est mort depuis vingt ans. Cancer du poumon.”
My husband. Dead for twenty years. Cancer of what—the lungs?

I wasn’t sure how to say sorry in this context.
Je regrette? J’ai des regrets
?

She saw me faltering and said, “Would it be better to continue in English? I don’t speak it like I used to, you know, but most of it is still there.”

“If that would be okay.”

“Let’s try. You want to ask about Mr. Adlair, yes?”

“Please.”

“So sad about him. I only met him a few times but he seemed very nice. Very
sympathique.”

“He was. How did he find you, do you know?”

She leaned forward and edged the plate of cookies closer to us. “It would not be so hard. I was not hiding, you know. I am living in the same house my parents owned. I moved back here after my husband died. Only my name changed and Mr. Adlair, he looked up marriage records from the early fifties and I suppose there were not that many Micheline Merciers to search through.”

“When was this?”

“A few months ago. It was still cold, I remember. Snowing. I do not drive and neither did he, so when we went to see Madame Boily, he had to pay for a taxi.”

“He convinced you to initiate a reunification?”

“It did not take much to convince me,” she said. “My husband was gone. My daughter has—I am not sure of the English word—
la schizophrénie
—and will never have children. My son, who lives here with me, he never got married neither. Doesn’t want children. It’s so different now from when I was a girl and everyone had big families. Five kids, ten. More than that in the country. Even fifteen was not unusual in my mother’s time because many did not survive. So when Mr. Adlair called me and asked if I wanted to contact my child, see if he would like to meet me, I took the chance. Took it very quickly.”

Jenn said, “He had no idea then who this child was?”

“Of course not. Neither one of us knew. So we made the application and a month or two later I was told, yes, my son would meet me.”

“Laurent Lortie,” I said.

“Yes. What a surprise that was. It was amazing to me what he had become. What a fine family had taken him in. It was a big relief to me to know that things had gone well for him. A big
success in business. Two kids of his own. And now the leader of a party in the election. It gave me a lot of pride.”

“You shared this with Mr. Adler?”

She looked down at the plate of cookies. “Maybe I should not have done that. The confidentiality, they say, is very important in these affairs. But without him, it would not have happened. I would not have taken the steps. So I told him. But that cannot be why he was killed.”

“Of course not,” I said. Nothing to gain by implying there was. “Tell me, what was Monsieur Lortie’s reaction when he found out who his father was?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I did not tell him that.”

“Why not?” Jenn asked.

“I had not spoken to Artie in—what, sixty years? His name never went on the certificate of birth. Without his permission, I did not think it would be right to involve him in that way.”

“Is it possible Mr. Adler told him?”

“Told Monsieur Lortie? Maybe. I know they met sometime later, because Mr. Adler wanted to write something about Laurent and his daughter. But I told him he should not write anything about me being Laurent’s mother. Not as long as I’m still alive.”

Jenn said, “Did you meet your grandchildren? Luc and Lucienne?”

“Only Lucienne,” she said. “Maybe one month ago, Laurent took me to lunch with her at the nice hotel on Rue Sherbrooke, the Ritz-Carlton. Luc was not able to attend.”

Not able? More likely, Laurent would have been embarrassed to take him to the Ritz.

“How did that go?” Jenn asked.

“So lovely,” she smiled. “All my life in Montreal, I never once went into a place like that. I’m going to always remember that day. They treat you so nice and the food is so good. I had the most wonderful salad with
—les artichauts
?”

“Artichokes,” Jenn said.

“Yes, and then poached cod with little baby squids. I would have had the steak but at my age, it does not agree with me so well. Or my teeth. I even had some wine, which my doctor doesn’t like me to take. A white Burgundy. I was embarrassed at how much it cost. More than the whole meal, I think. And I had two glasses.”

That was a week before Sammy died, I thought. What if the wine had loosened her tongue and something had slipped out about Artie? And if she hadn’t told Laurent who his father was, I was almost certain Sammy had. The irony of it, the inherent hypocrisy of the
pure laine
Québécois, supposedly from a faultless line of early settlers, fathered instead by a hustling Jewish kid from the poorest part of the ghetto. I thought about the article he’d written about the veterinarian opposed to eating halal meat. If that situation had raised his ire, this would have sent him into the state of high dudgeon Holly Napier had recalled with such fondness.

Laurent would not have wanted that published. Even if Sammy had told Micheline he wouldn’t write about it until she was dead, he could have written something without mentioning her name. He was who he was. Was it possible Laurent had had Sammy killed for it? He could have hired it out. Or he could have sent Luc. Strong, muscular Luc, who’d rushed Ryan’s car with a wild look in his eyes, smashed its window, gone after Ryan with a crowbar. Who practically laughed when a gun came out. I could picture him and his friend bundling Sammy out of his apartment with a sack over his head, barefoot, taking him somewhere—maybe to the cabin—and then beating him and dumping him in an Arab neighbourhood, a Magen David carved in his chest to throw blame on the Muslims he detested.

Then I didn’t want to picture it anymore.

Back at the hotel, we told Ryan about our visit to Micheline.

“And your client, Moscoe, he doesn’t know any of this?
Doesn’t know his long-lost son turned out to be a right-wing redneck?”

“He would have told me if he’d known,” I said.

“Well, I wouldn’t tell him now,” Ryan said. “Probably give him another heart attack.”

“Maybe that’s why Sammy didn’t tell him. Arthur lived through a lot of anti-Semitism in Montreal in the thirties and forties. He saw first-hand what ultra-nationalists were capable of.”

“But Sammy promised Micheline he wouldn’t write about it,” Jenn said. “Not while she was alive.”

“It doesn’t mean he never broached the subject with the Lorties,” I said.

“He’s moving,” Ryan said.

I said, “Who?”

“The Syrian. His car is heading south.” He was sitting at the desk where my laptop was open, pointing at the pulsing image being sent by my transponder.

Shit. I had forgotten about the planned meeting between Mehrdad and Mohammed. “We’re going to have to finish this later,” I said to Jenn.

“Where are you going?”

“A prior engagement.”

“To which I’m not invited?”

“To which you can’t come.”

“It’s dangerous?”

“I don’t think it’s going to be civil.”

“Okay,” she said. “Fine. I’m going to go downstairs and book a room.”