River City (112 page)

“You could probably use some time off yourself. Instead of interrogating me.”

Cinq-Mars cocked his head. “A harsh word,” he pointed out. He tried to not let his tone go grave. “I want to check a few facts, Father, as I’ve been doing for months, with respect to the Richard riot.”

Father François shook his head. “You’d think that man would give it up, once and for all.”

“Captain Touton? No, Father,” Cinq-Mars corrected him. “I’m here on my own. I’m the one obsessed by those old events now.”

“Then poor you. Too bad you can’t take a pill for such an ailment. So tell me, how may I help alleviate your wretched curse?”

“Father,” Cinq-Mars spoke quietly, his fingers lightly caressing the ears of Teilhard, “if you don’t mind, I’d like our tea to arrive, then I’d appreciate closing the doors, to assure our privacy.”

The priest clucked his tongue. “I have a wee problem with that scheme. My housekeeper. I tend to close the doors on her whenever I open the port. She’ll be arching an eyebrow for a fortnight.”

Cinq-Mars lifted the cat onto the floor, weary of the weight. “Then we’ll have to break open the port, so your punishment won’t be in vain.”

“A shrewd mind.” The priest nodded. “You’re unorthodox. I admire that.”

Ensconced, finally, to his liking, with even Teilhard dispatched from the room after the tea’s arrival, Cinq-Mars asked the cleric if he had anything to say about the night of the Richard riot.

“Say?” the priest asked. “You once aspired to the priesthood, but that old desire does not elevate you to be my Father Confessor.”

“She was in the closet, Father,” Cinq-Mars told him.

“Excuse me?” He hesitated before asking his next question. “Who was?” And hesitated again. “What closet?”

Cinq-Mars nodded, as though to relay that his host had managed to figure out the question, even if he wasn’t willing to admit to it. “Anik, Father. She was in the closet when you took Camillien Houde’s last confession. As the English say, ‘The jig is up.’”

The priest’s natural jocularity dissipated, and he sought momentary refuge in his tea. Cinq-Mars noted that his first concern, when next he spoke, was
for his office. “Émile, a privileged conversation. I have never repeated what was said back then, but more importantly, no one should. Not even Anik.” “She’s no more bound by your oath than I am.”

The padre’s head jerked back as if from an impact. “Both of you are bound by the moral issue here. The mayor’s confession was between himself and God—I was merely an intermediary.”

“I understand that, Father. Nonetheless, information has been obtained.”

The priest’s second concern, Cinq-Mars observed, was for Anik. “That poor child. We talked about the death of her father, Houde and me. And it was, in a word, grotesque.”

“I know,” Cinq-Mars told him.

They gazed at one another steadily.

The priest revealed, then, a third concern—this one for himself. “What she must think of me.”

The cop did not respond, but studied his hands.

Father François declared, “I think we’re past due for the port.”

“As you like,” Cinq-Mars concurred.

The tea was set aside, the port poured, and Cinq-Mars was content with his first sips, warming bones that still felt a chill from his trek through the cold.

“That’s better,” the priest surmised. “Now, what is it you’d like to know that you have not already gleaned from Anik’s wayward eavesdropping? Oh, that
child.”

Cinq-Mars carefully formed his question. “Her testimony gives me information, but not explanation. You were involved in the sale of the murder weapon, but why? How did that come about? Why would anyone ask you, of all people, to be an intermediary for that task?”

The large man shrugged and resorted briefly to his port. “The sellers found themselves in desperate straits. Their precious knife had become a liability. De Bernonville wanted only money. Houde desired his legacy enhanced, so that he might be seen as a great Quebec hero. How could that happen with two men dead? One, a friend of his. The other, a public servant. The knife not only had the power to incarcerate him again, it now had the power to pummel his legacy. Potentially, he might be remembered only as an accomplice to murder.”

The telephone rang, but Father François indicated that the housekeeper would answer.

“And the other one?” Cinq-Mars dared to ask. “What other one?”

He smiled. “Politics makes strange bedfellows, they say. That must be equally true of crime.”

“More so, I expect,” Father François admitted, and offered an affirmative guttural grunt.

A knock sounded against the door from the kitchen, and the housekeeper poked her head in. “Telephone, Father.”

“I am not to be disturbed, Madame Caron.”

“The port!” she called out, and almost stormed in. “At this time of day!”

“We are discussing a matter of the utmost gravity, Madame Caron. The
utmost—”
Father François paused on the word—“gravity.” After she had vanished once again, he confided, “Our code for death. Please depart with sombre visage.”

“Of course.”

Impossible to fathom now, Cinq-Mars was thinking, but his life might have gone this way. Were it not for the upheavals in Church and state, slipping into a priest’s cassock might have become his most natural and available endeavour. He, too, might have brokered his days negotiating the terms of his existence with housekeepers and cats. As the lives of priests went, Father François had not settled for the common routine, having chosen instead to be politically active and involved, perhaps, in criminal conspiracy. Yet he, too, had failed to evade the curse of the cassock, and slowly, steadily, succumbed to a lonely bachelorhood. Cinq-Mars felt relieved, and thanked God on the spot, that he might hope to avoid that destiny.

“Where were we?” Father François inquired.

Cinq-Mars did not want him to feel that their discussion was anything less than friendly. He lifted his wee crystal glass and declared, “I was sipping my port, Father. You’ll forgive me, but that’s where my concentration lies at the moment.”

The priest winked at him and raised his own. Finishing, he poured himself another, and held the bottle across for Cinq-Mars to stretch out and receive.

“The other fellow,” Father François embarked. “Camille Laurin, you mean? As Houde was keen on his legacy, so was Laurin dedicated to his political future. He no more wanted to be associated with a murder weapon than he wanted to contract leprosy. Of course he wanted to sell—everyone was desperate to sell. The problem was how. No one had experience pawning stolen artifacts. What they
did
know was that two men besides themselves had been involved in the heist—you don’t mind if I use that word? A fun word. Heist.”

“Go ahead. Now, when you say two other men, you’re referring to …?”

“Duplessis. Because he initiated the idea of stealing the knife. Roger was commissioned, shall we say, by him to swipe the knife. But nobody, not even Roger, wanted Duplessis to have it. I’m sure Carole Clément would have had his scalp had that occurred. When it came time to sell the knife, the premier might have presented himself as a potential buyer, except that he was notoriously poor, a pauper in his personal life. While he was a man of many marvels, no one figured that he could tap our tax money to purchase stolen property. Even if he could, it would have rotted Houde’s socks, not to mention Laurin’s, to see Duplessis acquire the knife. So he was out of the picture in the blink of an eye.”

“So that left the second man,” Cinq-Mars intimated.

“Me. Who represented the Catholic Church. Never mind that I didn’t really, and that Monsignor Charbonneau, whom I did represent, was poorer than Duplessis, and poorer than me. Which is saying something. Like
le Chef,
we were willing to receive the knife from Roger for free, but we did not have the means to purchase it ourselves. But the sellers were not aware of our circumstances. They figured that, since I was a priest, I was probably representing the Church that dreadful night in Dominion Square as we stood below the heels of the Scottish poet. My resources, then, might conceivably be the resources of the Church. Perhaps, it’s true that I guided them into thinking that way. Also, their culpability was already known to me, so I was a safe person to contact. So, they called. Would I like to buy the Cartier Dagger?”

Cinq-Mars encouraged him, tipping his glass. “That put you on the spot.”

“It did. I had to grasp this matter quickly. If I did as they desired and brought it to the attention of the bishop, I’d risk allowing the conservative element
within the Church to get their hands on it. It’s alleged to have properties, you know. The liberal element—we’re stronger now, but at the time we were an endangered species. So I concocted the scheme to get Trudeau interested in buying the knife. He had money, he was a risk taker, an adventurer—the illicit side of the bargain would not likely deter him.”

“You gave it considerable thought,” Cinq-Mars praised.

Father François ignored him, and in rhythm to his words, scratched his kneecap. “Unlike Houde and Laurin, he’d never been on the periphery of killing anybody. And I thought I could exploit his romantic weakness for the mythology of the knife, its cultural and historic properties, even for its purported magic. That was a hunch, but a good one. As well, he’s Catholic—more religious than he lets on—which was important to me. So a door opened, at least in my mind. I could imagine that someday he might bequeath the knife back to the Church, should the Church become more interesting to us all, more progressive. That was the best I could do under the circumstances.”

“Speaking,” Cinq-Mars mused, “as you were a while back, of rotted socks—”

The parish priest waited, his head dipped low and tilting forward, his body slumped well back in his chair with his hands knitted together again, resting upon the hillock of his bounteous belly.

“—it must have rotted yours dealing with de Bernonville, to know that money Trudeau paid for the relic would support him.”

Father François sighed, as though the burden remained with him. “Especially after that night in the park, him going off half-cocked like that, stabbing Roger—to see him benefit in any way, that was difficult to accept.”

“Why did he do it, do you think, stab Roger? Go off half-cocked? Again, it’s the explanations I’m hungry for.” Cinq-Mars could not dwell upon the matter at the moment, but he noted to himself that he’d become quite an adroit liar. A good thing that he laboured as a cop, for he might have made a formidable miscreant. He had to hold his exuberance in check, pretend that he had already known what he had only just now discovered:
de Bernonville killed Roger. I’ve solved it.

The priest tossed up his hands briefly, as though to appeal to the realm of chaos for an answer. “The man’s a madman, a maniac. What did anybody expect? They thought he was a nice guy, a charmer, an entertaining fop? A dandy to invite up to the cottage for a barbecue and a swim? A bon vivant to deliver a bon mot over whiskey and cigars? What excuses did they make for the man? He liked to chat up the teenagers. About what? Methods of torture? I wanted to scream in Houde’s ear, even while he lay dying, ‘You idiot. He’s a Nazi! He tortured his own countrymen. He killed men himself. He sentenced others to the firing squad. He sent decent men and women, French Jews and Catholics alike, to graves, to concentration camps, into forced labour. What do you expect from a fiend like that? Witty conversation? What, exactly, did you expect?’”

By the conclusion of his spiel, the heavy man was half-bounding out of his chair, the veins in his reddening temples more marked. He settled back then, and his guest had the impression that Father François had reminded himself to be calm, for he did not possess a constitution for intemperate outbursts.

“Sometimes, in this land, we delude ourselves. That’s a great part of our heartbreak.”

“In any land, I think,” Cinq-Mars considered. “We have a knack. A genius.”

The policeman gave the priest time to collect himself. He had come to the rectory to undertake a subterfuge. So far, the matter was going well.

“You ask why he killed Roger. A good question. One that’s unanswerable. Among ourselves, those who were there that night, we have tried to delve into his heart and mind. Why else did Houde ask that I become his priest as he lay dying, if not to discuss that night with me, alone, under the seal of secrecy? And me, the left winger. I’ve broken bread with Laurin, who puts on a good show now that he’s in the Parti Québécois. Really, in his heart, he sits to the political right of Genghis Khan’s hangman. What did we discuss? A priest who is meant to know the hearts of men, and Dr. Laurin, the psychiatrist, who is meant to know their minds? We discussed the heart and mind of Count Jacques Dugé de Bernonville.”

The port gave him an excuse to pause, and this time they leaned across, at the priest’s instigation, to clink glasses. Both men drank to their own good health.

“What did you surmise, the two of you?”

“Laurin had his cockamamie notions, his usual psychobabble. This is what I intuit, Émile, and I trust this thought: de Bernonville was more like me than I care to admit.”

“I don’t follow.” The thread was unexpected, for he’d be hard pressed to discern two lives more divergent than the Nazi’s and the rebel priest’s.

For a few moments, it appeared as though Father François really didn’t care to admit to the similarities between himself and the count.

Then he began. “In my youth, my politics took me further to the left than I care to acknowledge today. I believed in revolution, even that. I also believed that revolution was as inevitable as the next ice age. A matter of an interval, sluggish though it may be. But my politics then, Émile, are best summed up as
idealistic.
I was fiercely derisive of the status quo, conscious of every failing of whatever regime had assumed power—which was never difficult, not here in Quebec, under that megalomaniac’s consumptive gaze. But one tyrant is not necessarily the equal of another.”

“Duplessis, say, compared to a Hitler.” Cinq-Mars felt the need to contribute.