River City (106 page)

Cross felt his bones congeal.

His comrades, apparently, ran from the kitchen to see for themselves, but saw no one. But where had the children gone? They always played in the street—now they were absent, their voices silent. The captors couldn’t confirm seeing cops. But still, they were beginning to feel police around them. As if they could sniff them. Was this what paranoia felt like?
Flics,
gazing back at them through the bathroom mirror, listening devices embedded in their clocks and radios? Although they did not know that
flics
had taken up residence on the third floor of the building in which they lived, and across the street also, they could feel them everywhere, like stains on a wall, dust motes scurrying on the floor as they walked, as if the echoes of their own steps were being recorded and measured.

This is how it happened.

Anik Clément took a seat in the rear booth of a restaurant on Jean-Talon Street, in the Greek neighbourhood of Park Extension. Within eight minutes, she was joined by Émile Cinq-Mars. They had little to say, having recently chatted at length. Cinq-Mars dared to place his hands over hers, to comfort his former girlfriend, and she did not pull hers away. He broke the intimacy only when Captain Touton entered and peeled off his hat and overcoat, which he hung on the hook next to their booth.

“Crappy weather, eh? Only December. Just the beginning. It’s a sin to live in this climate,” he groused, then sat down. “So? How’s it going, Anik?”

She was reaching into her substantial handbag. “I have a couple of leads.”

“Leads?” Touton snapped back. “I was expecting more than leads. I was expecting you to take us straight to the kidnappers. Patrolmen are standing by.”

She looked up, both hands still in her handbag, and demonstrated that she would brook no guff from him tonight. “I could follow these leads myself, if you like, then take you by the hand to the kidnappers. Or, you could do your job and follow up the leads in a tenth the time it’ll take me. It’s up to you. Let me know by midnight. After that, I smash my glass slippers and go to sleep drunk.”

He studied her. That stubborn look. “All right,” he relented. “Show me your leads.”

“You’ve neglected the women,” she advised him. “Wherever there are men, there are women, even in a war. You’re right to have Jacques Lanctôt’s picture in the papers, but I take it you haven’t located his wife and son?”

“We’re looking.”

“She’s pregnant.”

“I see.” He nodded, taking that in, although he didn’t see how it was of any immediate use.

“Do you? Check out the birthing hospitals to see where she’s expected to deliver. Find the physician who’s treating her. But first, look at this.”

She placed a large black-and-white photograph down on the tabletop. Touton was staring at the snapshot of a young boy when the waitress came by. He ordered a coffee, and the other two indicated that they’d appreciate a refill.

“This is the son?” Touton asked.

“Boris, yep,” Anik told him. “Now check this out.”

The second photograph was of an older woman, somewhat rotund, wide in the hips, with an ample bosom and a shy moon face. Beside her, at her hip, stood the lad Boris.

“Who’s this? Somebody’s Ukrainian grandmother?”

“The babysitter. Look.”

The next snap showed a man entering a second-storey home by the back entrance.

“You showed me this before. It’s not the hideout?”

“This is where the babysitter lives. Boris is living with the babysitter. Among the women in my circle, she was known as a good sitter. So I put a photographer up a tree to guard her back door. Sometimes, Jacques goes to see her, we found out, but Suzanne, that’s his wife, she goes more often.”

“Which Jacques?”

“Lanctôt. Keep up, Armand.”

“So we can wait there for Jacques?”

“That might not happen again,” Anik cautioned him. “When he arrived this one time, in the picture, he had to talk his way in. I don’t think it’s a common visit, I’m saying. Put a tail on the babysitter. She takes the boy on excursions. Mostly to the local park. When she does, expect Suzanne to visit, at least once in a while. I guess she’s just too busy right now to look after the boy full time.”

“Busy? She’s a kidnapper?”

“I’d say no. But a courier? Probably. Does she go to the hideout? Likely.” Leads never got much better.

“Next thing. Like I said, you’ve neglected the women. You have Jacques Lanctôt’s face in the papers, but you don’t have his sister’s, Louise.” “His sister?” Touton hadn’t heard of a sister.

“You see? I know the women. Louise is Jacques Lanctôt’s sister and Jacques Cossette-Trudel’s girlfriend. I noticed that her name didn’t show up on the lists Émile gave me of people you’ve put in jail. Which makes no sense. I would have put her on the top ten of any list. She was radicalized years ago, she’s committed. More so than people you have behind bars. So where’s Louise? I think she’s married, actually, but in any case, she uses Cossette-Trudel’s last name.

We call him C.T.”

“Holy shit,” Touton sputtered out. This changed a few things. It helped.

“It’s about time I got a reaction out of you. Do you know the Taverne Boucheron, Captain?”

“Of course.” On rare occasions, he went there himself to enjoy a few glasses of draft. Back in the good old days, he’d followed more than one perp into the establishment to see what company he chose to keep.

“Stake it out.”

“Who and what am I looking for?”

“It’s a rendezvous point. C.T.'s favourite spot. Always was. Apparently, that hasn’t changed. Here.” One more photograph. Of Cossette-Trudel emerging from the Boucheron Tavern.

“Who does he meet there?”

“Sympathizers. Doctors. Lawyers. Pipefitters. Men with cash—the ones you haven’t rounded up yet. Couriers.”

This was gold. Touton couldn’t help but smile. He wanted to say that it felt like old times, meaning that part of this experience invoked those days when he had worked with her father and mother, but he thought he’d be better served keeping that opinion to himself.

“Thanks,” he said.

He could tell that she was a bit proud of herself, but the moment was not about satisfaction. She turned away, unable to be fully content with her work.

After downing their coffees, they were each set to depart in different directions. This time, Anik did meet the captain’s look. She held his gaze quite steadily. Then she turned, kissed Émile’s cheeks, and tore off.

They watched her go.

She was almost running by the time she went through the door, and she got her handbag jammed up. She wasn’t accustomed to carrying one, and had to free herself to get loose.

“Good work,” Touton told his protégé.

Cinq-Mars merely shook his head. Nothing accomplished here felt remotely related to police work. “You’ll keep her out of it?” he asked. “She doesn’t want any of this coming back on her. I’ve made that promise, that it won’t.”

Touton didn’t need to treat a young cop with such deference, but these were brutal times. He’d never lived through anything like it. They were engaged in the largest manhunt in human history, and today the two of them were on the brink of cracking it wide open. Yet neither man would ever receive credit. That was the price to be paid to broker this deal.

“We’ll pass along Anik’s tips to the Mounties.”

“How come?”

“For her security. This way, none of the people who break the case will know where the good juice came from. They’ll say it was from Montreal cops, and laugh—think we were too lazy to follow up on the leads ourselves, maybe too dumb to recognize their value. Our force will have to eat more shit. But Anik stays secure this way, and the job gets done, because a few of those Mounties do good work.”

“They might not listen to you. They might think a tip from a Montreal cop can’t be worth a plugged nickel.”

“First off, it won’t come from me. They’ll take me too seriously. Later on, they might mention that it came from me, and we don’t want that. So you tell them. You’ll look like a dumb lunk for not knowing you had a good tip. You aren’t worth mentioning because you’re too junior. Then I’ll follow up, to make sure the news gets checked out. Émile, we’re going to get these guys. We’ll put a stop to this.”

Nodding, Cinq-Mars pulled on his woollen overcoat. For close to sixty days, the city had been in torment. “That’s our job. It’s good to finally get it done.”

His captain clamped a hand over his near shoulder and gave it a good hard squeeze. Cinq-Mars could feel the man’s legendary strength in that grip, not all of it lost to the passage of time. “A case like this could make your career, set you for life. You don’t mind giving up the credit?”

He shrugged, then pointed to where Anik had gone. “Keep her safe. I mean it, Captain. That’s all the credit I need right there.”

Yves had been away, and was overdue. He strolled down the block with his usual loping stride, oblivious to the world, and rang the bell of their street-level apartment. Inside, the men detached the dynamite booby trap on the door and admitted him. “They didn’t stop you?”

“Who?”

“The
flics
! They’re all around us.” “You’re imagining things.”

They booby-trapped the door again. Later, the lights went out. After that, someone trespassing on their lawn tried to turn the water off to their building. Yves pointed his M1 at the intruder and told him to bugger off. The man scampered back to the other side of the street, fearing he might be shot in the ass.

So now it was official. They were under siege.

Then the phone rang. They were expecting the call. The woman answered and listened, then suddenly hung up.

“It’s not only the
flics.”
She spoke calmly, quietly. She’d been crying in her bed lately and getting angry at odd moments, but now she could not fake surprise or show emotion. “The army’s here, too.”

“What did he say?”

“'We have you surrounded.’”

They did not run to the windows to check. Instead, they seemed to observe a minute’s quiet, although the time could not have lasted that long. To Cross, the interval seemed endless. He detected a change in the atmosphere, a charge. Suddenly, he was the most powerful person in the apartment, no longer the weakest. Before they spotted cops, someone had gone to fetch him water and had left the door open. Blindfolded, he saw nothing, but he listened through his pores for any indication of news. Had the woman really mentioned cops? The army? Was something going on? Was he dreaming? Then he heard the boots of the heaviest man pound across the kitchen floor, towards the window. The venetian blinds rattled slightly as they were parted. Then they shook again, as if suddenly pushed back. Cross tried to see every sound he was hearing and visualize the silences.

The man said, “Shit.” In his inflection of the word, Cross registered sorrow.

The phone rang again, and they all jumped.

“Should we answer it?”

It buzzed a second time.

The woman answered again. “We have demands,” she said. She remained quiet.

“What the fuck’s he saying?”

“Wait!” She listened a little more. Then she hung up the phone.

“What did he say?” the man asked, quietly this time.

“He said they don’t want any more violence, nobody has to get hurt, we’ve all been through enough, it’s time to give up peacefully. The usual cop bullshit rhetoric. He asked for our demands.”

“Read the fucking manifesto!” one guy said, but his companions failed to goad him on. Manifestos read over the airwaves were hollow gestures now.

“What did you tell him?” one guy asked, and even Cross wanted to slap him awake.

“You were in the room, weren’t you?”

The phone rang again.

“I’m answering this time.”

“Why?”

“Why is it always you?”

The man who answered was the one who had gone to fetch Cross his water.

“Yeah?” he said, and listened. He put on a snide voice. “You don’t need to know who you’re talking to.” A moment later he repeated, “You don’t need to know that.” He still sounded as though he wanted to pick a fight, but the next time he spoke, he was subdued. “Yeah, so? That’s me. So?”

“Don’t tell him that,” the woman hissed at him.

The man suddenly shouted into the phone, “No, asshole! You listen to me. We want a plane to Cuba.”

“Holy shit,” another of their number said. This was feeling real to him.

“That’s right. We got Cross in here. We’re prepared to kill the fucker. A bullet between the eyes, maybe one in each eye. You want no more violence, get us a fucking plane.” He waited for a response. “Yes, he’s still fucking alive, do you want to talk to him?”

He walked straight to Cross, but the cord got stuck in the door. The woman yanked it free again.

“Tell them who you are,” he demanded, and thrust the phone against the side of his captive’s face.

“This is Jasper Cross,” he said. He realized suddenly that these were the first words he’d spoken in his own language in two months. He wanted to bawl. “I’m all right.”

The man stomped back to the kitchen. “Get us a plane or we’ll have a shootout. Cross goes down first, then a few cops.” Suddenly, he bellowed to one of his pals, “Get away from the fucking window! Do you want to get shot?”

“Give me the phone,” the woman demanded. Apparently, her colleague acquiesced, because she spoke next. “Who the fuck am I talking to?” A moment later, she spit out, “You don’t need to tell me about my fucking language, pig! I’ll say whatever the fuck I want. No,
you
calm down.” She took in the caller’s response and shot back, “Go fuck yourself, all right? I’m not talking to you. I’m not talking to any fucking Mountie…. No! I’m not going to put the other guy back on. You talk to me, only it won’t be you. You guys want to talk to me, put somebody on from the SQ or a city cop, then call me back. We’re not talking to Mounties in this house.”

She hung up.

Quietly, somebody said, “Fuck.”

Another man said, “Somebody calls back, says he’s SQ. How will you know? He could just be a Mountie saying he’s SQ.” “There’s TV cameras,” a man said.

“Get away from the fucking window. I’m not going to fucking tell you again.” Someone slammed a tabletop, then kicked a wall.