River City (22 page)

Rescue craft arrived after a few hours of the continuing carnage, but, in an infuriating repetition of the landing, stayed out in deeper water. He made a run for it, and was shot for the second time, high on the arm, yet he managed to swim to the craft, but there he helped the comrade ahead of him and was trampled under again. He was confused now. As though no time had passed, he was underwater again—was this a dream? nothing felt real—and when he bobbed to the surface again, the rescue craft had saved a few souls, but it had also moved on without him.

He kept diving to avoid the bullets.

Surfacing one time and spotting a British destroyer offshore, he chose to swim for it. Dying in the water or dying by a bullet on the beach seemed the only options. He swam three miles in the rolling waves and was making good progress. He could see rope ladders dangling over the side and other swimmers clamouring aboard. He would be safe. He would live. As he closed on the vessel, it ignited with explosives from stem to stern, and those on the ladders leaped back into the sea. Touton himself turned and swam back to shore.

Only after the war would he learn that the explosions were a ruse, a trick to make German aircraft believe the vessel had been hit and destroyed. A good ruse. Most swimmers returned to shore because they were convinced the ship would sink, and a few swimmers stopped swimming with the hopelessness of it all, and let themselves drown.

Touton choreographed his landing so that he’d have the protection of burned-out equipment and a litter of bodies as he crawled from the water and,
exhausted, collapsed on the beach. He suffered a third bullet wound, a flesh wound to the side, but he hardly felt it. He could hardly feel anything anymore. No fight was left in him. He knew that he had participated in a great defeat. What he had left to face was either death or capture.

That was chaos. That was excitement. And having survived all that and what came later, a gunman’s paltry bullets or the hostile rage of a gang would always fail to impress him, and certainly fail to keep him from his duty. Indeed, the one thing he could not tolerate was cowering behind cars or walls as if behind a fort of bodies, waiting for reinforcements. To hell with reinforcements. They could be an illusion or a complete waste of time. They could be an exploding ship. Instead, as a cop, he’d always attack. Attack, attack, attack. And somehow get through it, and survive.

In a foul mood, he thought
the hell with superior officers,
just as he’d said
the hell with generals
who led their men into unrelenting slaughters. He had decided back then that, if he were permitted to enjoy a future, he’d make his own choices. He was willing to put his life on the line, repeatedly and not always wisely, but no fat tub slumped behind a desk would have the privilege of doing so on his behalf. In the future, he would lead, and decline to be led by fools.

While he was waiting, starting on another cup, a plainclothes officer he did not know knocked on his office door and waited politely to be invited in.

“What?” Cops often dropped by, hoping they could be taken onto his squad, but he was fussy about who worked for him. “Who’re you?”

“Detective Fleury, sir.” The man looked intelligent. He could easily pass as an academic, perhaps an effect of the tiny, wire-rimmed glasses he wore. In an era of tough, physically imposing cops, the man’s lanky frame and pinched face struck Touton as odd. He was small. “You were asking about the Order of Jacques Cartier.”

The captain sat back in his chair, putting an elbow on the armrest as he touched the back of his jaw with two fingers. “You should not know that,” he advised his visitor.

“There’s a good reason why I do. If I may explain.” Oddly, the man did not hold his hands at his side, but crossed them over his chest, one folded in the other. The fingers seemed especially long and feminine.

“Have a seat, Detective.”

Doing so, the man demonstrated a peculiar habit of sitting on the very lip of the chair, as though he might pitch forward at any moment. The posture of his back was arrow straight, and he fastened his hands to his knees in a tight grip.

“What squad are you in?” Touton inquired.

Between clenched teeth, the man drew in a breath as though to suggest he was being asked a touchy question. “I’m not in any squad exactly.”

“Which department?”

“Policy.”

Despite himself, for he was usually respectful of strangers, Touton released a little laugh. “What do you do in Policy?”

“I
am
a real detective,” Fleury tried to assure him, but he was less confident of his bearings than a moment ago. Touton had jangled a nerve.

“That’s your rank, but what do you investigate in Policy?”

Fleury rocked his head from side to side, an indication that he was into many things. In the end, he conceded, “My work is administrative. I work on budgets. Assignments. The allocation of resources.”

“That’s important work.” He tried to be serious, without fully succeeding. “Somebody has to do it, right?”

“Somebody does. Isn’t it better if a detective does that sort of work?”

“As opposed to—”

“A civilian. An accountant, let’s say. I’m trained in accountancy—”

“Are you now?”

“I didn’t graduate—the war was on. I had my mother to look after—”

Touton laughed aloud. “Your mother! Ha.”

“Sir!” Fleury protested. “I am a detective. Maybe I don’t do the same work as you do—”

“Apparently not.”

“—but that is my rank.” With earnest conviction, he shook his head as he spoke. “I was brought into the department to be an administrator. To represent the interests of policemen on the beat and in the squads. I believe it’s important work.”

“Sorry, Fleury. I’m sure it’s important. But a detective who never gets to investigate anything, not ever … I’ve never met one before.”

“Nobody wants to talk to me …
until
he wants his pension benefits explained.”

“Pension benefits?” Actually, he was interested in the subject.

“Then
I’m in big demand. But that’s not all. Last summer, for instance, when you wanted two more detectives on your squad—”

“Yes?” He remembered that request, and had been expecting to raise holy hell if the issue had been decided against him.

“I’m the one who argued—successfully—on your behalf. Other squads wanted more detectives. They didn’t get them, did they? That was not an easy fight. But I fought. And won. You got both your detectives while other squads got none.”

Suddenly, Touton could see the virtue of a detective in the Policy branch. He could also see the virtue of being friendly with a man who understood budgets and could explain pension plans. “Thank you,” he said, and he meant it.

“You’re welcome.”

The captain scraped his chair across the floor an inch or two and reconfigured his body language. He slipped one leg over the other, set for a conversation. “So. You were going to tell me why you know my business.”

Although it was only by an inch, Fleury moved his posterior back in his seat. “I know nothing of your business, sir. I can assure you of that. But I left my name on the file, asking that anyone interested in the file contact me. The clerk called me to let me know of your inquiry.”

“What file?”

“The Order of Jacques Cartier. I know something about it.”

“How much do you know?”

“Sir? Well … everything and nothing, if you take my meaning.”

“I don’t.”

“More than anyone else on the outside.”

“Really.” Touton stuck a finger in his ear. “I bet you don’t get out much, do you?”

“Ah … no, sir. Not much.”

“If you’re a real detective, you’ll have a drink with me. I’m not on duty, so it’s no skin off my nose, but you, sir, you’ll be contravening the code of the Policy branch. You’ll probably cause a scandal. A superior might … I don’t know …
frown.
That would be devastating. What about it? Are you a real detective? Is that hair on your chest or bird shit? Will you have a drink with me?”

Fleury surprised him. He seemed nonplussed. “I enjoy my beer,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind one. Anyway, it’s my day off.”

“Your day off?” Touton was thoroughly flummoxed by the guy. “Then what are you doing here?”

Standing, the diminutive detective shrugged. “The riot. All detectives have been called in for extra duty. I presumed that that meant me, too.”

“Oh yeah,” Touton stated as he grabbed his hat and coat, “we’ll need to work out the budget for the riot, that’s for sure.”

“Actually,” Fleury agreed, “we will.”

Entering an out-of-the-way establishment on St. Antoine Street, the two men settled into hardy wooden chairs. Montreal taverns served only beer and refused admission to women. As a consequence, workingmen felt free to open their shirts down to their underwear to expel the heat from factories, and talk boisterously, routinely gushing in expletives. Crooks used the tavern to hatch their schemes, the politicos their strikes, and the workingman could address whatever worried him to sympathetic ears. In and out of season, everyone talked hockey.

Typically, the rooms were large, with a glut of round tables and scant decoration or adornment other than the portraits of hockey heroes hanging on the walls and the advertisements of a beer company. Each tavern could choose only one supplier for draft beer, a system that allowed for non-verbal communication between patron and waiter. As the pair were seating themselves close to one corner, Touton held up four fingers. The waiter nodded to confirm the order, and the men shed their winter clothing before speaking. The captain
took a long swig of the piss-yellow drink when it arrived, and released a satisfying sigh.

“The reason you know nothing about the Order of Jacques Cartier is because you were a soldier,” the detective from Policy informed him.

Touton looked across at Fleury and tried to moderate his response, for the smaller man appeared to be as crushable as a grasshopper. “You’re saying to me that soldiers are stupid?”

“No!” Fleury almost spilled his beer as he threw up his hands in his own defence. “I’m not. I’m saying the reason you don’t know about the Order is because the Order became famous here when you were over there, in the POW camp.”

Another surprise. “So it’s been around that long.”

“Pre-war. But the war helped the Order expand and gain influence.”

Draft glasses were small, and Touton quaffed down the remainder of his as if it were only a taste. The thin man’s story already had the earmarks of a longer tale, so he put up his fingers for four more.

“I like my beer, but I do have to be home for dinner,” Fleury protested. “I can’t arrive drunk. My wife would swat me.”

Touton looked at him as though he was gazing upon a Martian. He relented before levelling any insult. “We won’t count. Drink what you like, and I’ll drink what I like. Now walk me through this.”

Again teetering upon the lip of his chair, Detective Fleury leaned in. “If only I
could
walk you through it, sir. Nothing is clear. This is a secret society, circumspect in its affairs. It knows how to keep secrets. Rumour has it that even a man’s wife will not know of her husband’s involvement. Can you imagine such a thing?” A man’s failure to allow his wife to keep close tabs on him was obviously beyond Detective Fleury’s ken. “If it’s not improper, sir, may I ask where your interests lie in all of this?”

The captain gave him a brief summary of the break-in at NHL headquarters and the murders. At the mention of the Cartier Dagger, Touton noticed, Fleury’s eyes lit up.

“So this is a real group? They have members?” Touton encouraged him.

“At one point, it was reported in the Senate that they have eighteen thousand members.”

Meeting Fleury had led from one surprise to another, and now he’d been hit with two at once. He didn’t know which had shocked him more. So he inquired about both. “The Senate? Eighteen thousand?”

“In 1944,” the thin man explained, “you were still in Poland, I guess. Télesphore-Damien Bouchard, a senator, made his maiden speech in the Senate chamber. He rose to denounce the Order of Jacques Cartier. For his trouble, the senator was condemned in every corner of Quebec society—in every tavern also, I’m sure—and fired from his job as president of Hydro-Québec.”

To Touton’s mind, to be president of a government agency, a hydro company especially, lent credibility to the man’s opinion. More so than being a politically appointed senator. “Who fired him?” He would have thought that presidents could never be fired.

“The premier of Quebec,” Fleury snapped back.

“Duplessis?”

“Godbout, I think it was, in ‘44. Duplessis was out of office for a term.”

“Ah, I wasn’t around for that either. You miss a lot living behind barbed wire. So what did he say that got him fired?”

Fleury took a swig of his beer and wet his lips. He was excited to tell his story and Touton did not hold that against him. The general disposition of plainclothes cops was world-weariness, a seen-it-all, done-it-all attitude that Touton figured was nothing more than a prelude to inertia. The excitable nature of the pencil-pusher from Policy was a welcome change.

“The senator was speaking to a motion on education. A standard textbook was being proposed for Canadian history. Bouchard decried the interpretation of history as it was being applied in schools in Quebec. He considered the history to be a fabrication, a form of propaganda, its purpose subversive. Disrupt the Confederation, overthrow the democracy, that was the idea. Every ill any Quebecer had ever experienced was being blamed on the English, in the schools, and any benefit to being part of Canada was either ridiculed or ignored. At least, that’s what Bouchard said.”

Touton nodded. Fighting in the war had made him less than a hero to most Quebecers. People left him alone because they were afraid of him, but
many still held his war record against him. Thousands of Quebec men had fought bravely, and many had died. Yet the majority had stayed home.

“The Order of Jacques Cartier,” Fleury continued, satisfied that he was making an impression on a superior officer, “is anti-English, anti-Jewish. That’s not so surprising, maybe, here in Quebec, where most of the people who are anti-Jewish have never met a Jew, and being anti-English is considered to be part of the French soul. But Senator Bouchard went far beyond that. He implied that the Order of Jacques Cartier espoused dictatorship as the ideal form of government. In itself, who cares, right? Why worry about a few harebrained fascists talking gibberish?”