River City (49 page)

“Ladies! Ladies!” he cried. “As you can plainly see, my spiritual advisor has arrived. Leave us now. A dying man must make time for his spiritual advisor.”

The flap of women in their rustling crinolines departed the death chamber. Anik was wondering if she should leave as well when a covert bob of Houde’s chin kept her in the room.

“Ah,” Houde sighed, once the three of them were alone together, “my spiritual advisor. What advice do you have for me today?”

From under his cassock, Father François pulled out a flask. “Mountain whiskey.”

“Oh, it’s my good friend Jack! Come to pay me a visit.” The old mayor ripped off the cap and helped himself to a long pull. “Aaahhh,” he said with exaggerated satisfaction. “That’s so good.”

A discreet knock on the door caught their attention. Anik opened up while the old mayor hid his bottle under the quilt. One of the little old ladies who’d been shooed outside had something to add. “We realized, after we were gone, that the young lady …” she let her voice trail off.

“She may stay,” Houde told her. If he’d had the strength, he would have dressed her down for being a busybody. Instead, he told a fib to get rid of her. “She’s in training. For the convent. It’s good for her to listen to a priest counsel the dying.”

The wee grey-headed woman nodded. With some misgiving she gazed at the girl with the yo-yo, who wore blue jeans and didn’t look anything like a novitiate. The woman told the old mayor, “You’re looking better, Mayor Houde. Your cheeks are flushed. You have your colour back!”

The old mayor shook his left forefinger at her. “Remember that! When your final days come. Always make time for your spiritual advisor.”

Father François crossed the floor and, smiling, closed the door on the woman.

“What do they want from me?” Houde carped. “If I close my eyes they mention it and do the sign of the cross. If my eyes blink open again, you should hear them gasp. They thank God, as if they’re present at a miracle. Father, if a failing heart and bad blood won’t kill me, the sight of those old biddies will.”

“We all have our crosses to bear,” Father François pointed out to him. “For you, it’s your popularity.”

“A priest who speaks the truth. You’re a rare find, Father. Where’s that flask?”

“In your right hand.”

Together they comprised an odd coupling—the aging, madcap politician and the youthful, opinionated priest. They were of similar shape, although the older man, taller when upright, was also significantly more rotund. The younger man might match his girth one day, but just as a comparable height was out of the question, so would he never command the attention of a room with the old man’s panache. People felt themselves aglow in the former mayor’s presence. What made the pair seem odd to others was their political disparity. While it was true that the mayor had initially made his reputation through make-work projects during the Great Depression, creating swimming pools and baths and viaducts that drove the city into bankruptcy while allowing
working people to earn a living wage, he had not identified with the left. He had frequently cussed the communists whenever mocking them might charm a vote. His support for Mussolini and the Vichy regime in France attested to a far-right bent that seemed incompatible with his choice of the notorious socialist as his priest for his final days. When Houde had first called Father François to his sickbed, he was weakening but still his old self. He broached the subject with the priest, who expressed his reservations. “Why me?” the younger man asked.

They had met through Carole Clément, but neither man had had many dealings with the other.

“Some people, reaching the end, look around for an appropriate priest,” Houde had explained.

“What makes me appropriate?”

“Some people, they don’t know too many priests.”

“That’s true.” He remained skeptical. He really only knew Houde through his public image, although they shared some experiences of note. He suspected that the old mayor was Machiavellian at heart—that every decision he made contained hidden manipulations.

“Not true of me, Father. I know more priests than I can count. Anik will tell you I have dined with kings. Well, I’ve dined with bishops, too, and a cardinal. It’s her I asked, you know, to find me a good priest.”

Father François found himself increasingly confused. “She orchestrated this?”

“She will confirm it. Father, you may not agree, but I am a religious man. In my way. I need a priest to attend to me. The prelates I know are political men, the lot of them. How can I possibly say my last confession to men I’ve butted heads with throughout my career? We shared good times, a few laughs … once in a blue moon we came to a meeting of the minds. We also enjoyed our share of royal fights. They may keep my secrets, Father, but the sparkle in their eyes, that light, the sense of superiority that would shine upon me in my final hour as I admit to my follies—not to mention confess to my sins—that light would not represent the warm glow of heaven. Father, it might kill me before my heart fails. Besides …” he added.

“Besides?” Inwardly, he was agreeing that the man’s points made sense. As had happened with many political adversaries of the old mayor, he was being charmed, if not actually duped.

“You and I have seen some things in our time, together and apart, have we not, Father?”

Father François bowed his head, then looked up. “We have.”

“And you and I, we know what the other has seen.”

The priest wondered who was confessing here. “True,” he admitted.

The old mayor allowed that point to shine between them. Then whispered, as the priest bent nearer, “If I asked one of the old priests for a drop, could I trust him to open a flask for a dying man? Out of spite—and I hate to tell you this, but the bishops can be spiteful men, no less than me—they might deny me. They might refuse to sneak a bottle past my nurse, who’s a battle-axe and a Temperance Unionist!”

Houde made firm eye contact then, letting it be known that on this one matter he would not broach a compromise.

“I see,” Father François noted.

“I’m glad you do. Is it settled, then? All I ask, Father, is that when my time comes you don’t get yourself tossed in jail for some union crap.”

“If I do, sir, you’ll have the connections to get me out.”

The old mayor enjoyed a belly laugh, confident that he had chosen wisely.

Father François could decline, or suggest further alternatives, but a dying man was an obligation for a priest, and to say no, to suggest that the man was too rapacious for his blood, or too right-wing, or too amoral in general, struck him as unseemly, not to mention un-Christian. If he really wanted to recuse himself from the duty, he would have to own up to a dent in his own character, for secretly, Father François was interested in what the dying man might confess. Beyond what they had already shared in secret. As well, he knew where Houde was coming from. He uttered his own confessions, and among his peers were many priests with whom he would prefer to remain mute. Rather than acknowledge such a failing, he would see to this man’s spiritual needs at the hour of his death.

“How’s the young princess of Montreal?” Houde inquired in his failing voice.

Anik stepped towards the big brass bed where Houde was resting under a sheet and a beautiful patchwork quilt that contained azure and turquoise, with orange piping. She smiled shyly, pleased that he had spoken to her that way.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“You don’t look all right to me,” Houde judged. “You look like a puppy left out in the rain. Maybe that’s what you need for yourself—a puppy.”

The girl shrugged. She sat at the foot of the bed, as she so often did, and nervously bounced a little. She moved her yo-yo back and forth in her hands.

“Any new tricks?” the old mayor coaxed her.

Again she shrugged.

“The reporters outside,” Father François revealed to Houde, “upset her.” “What did they say?” For a moment, the girl felt his spirit, his willingness to defend her.

“Anik is bothered that they’re here at all.”

The old mayor looked from the girl, back to the priest, then back to the girl again. Slowly, a wide grin began to grow on his visage. He winked at the child. “Come here, you,” he said.

When Anik moved up on the bed he pushed himself more upright, which required a considerable outlay of his remaining energy, and drew her close for a hug.

“Now listen up.” He held both his hands on her narrow shoulders. “I’m going to give those newspapermen something to write about. But I’m not just a cuddly old bear—I’m a mean one, too. Those newspaper boys will have to be patient. They’ll grow frustrated, they’ll be fed up and hungry, tired and plumb worn out before I give them what they’re looking for. It’ll rain on them. Several times! The sun will beat down hot. By the time I’m done, a few of them will wish that they were me and that I was one of them. So bear this in mind, Anik, my pet—us good guys, we don’t live to the schedule of the world. The world can wait upon the likes of me and you. Understood? The world can sit back and mind its manners until I’m good and ready. They’ll get what they came here for, but not a second too soon. Got that?”

Anik nodded and smiled with him, and when he tried to tickle her she laughed, although she could tell right away that he didn’t have much strength left, it was so easy to elude his grasp.

Driving, he inhaled the pungent smell of the street. A sweaty heat. The burnt rubber of fast cars. The oils of haughty, fragrant women who strolled along this boulevard with their suitors. He noticed the relaxed saunter of the ladies’ steps, the shimmer of their calves in nylons, the capricious personalities of their white or pastel dresses. Windows lowered, he caught the high timbre of sudden laughter and wished that he could join them, fling himself into whatever sport or seduction the night might bring. This evening confined him to a mission, and the frolic of a warm night in early September had to be ignored, for now.

He hadn’t enjoyed a good upper-class romp for a while. Lately, fun had been found in beer parlours and union halls, and in the cramped quarters of friends’ flats. Fun had taken serious turns—prolonged, animated discussions supplanting revelry, detailed strategies for strikes or political action displacing, for the moment, his dalliances. The days were tempestuous, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau welcomed the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” He wanted to be wholly immersed in the world, body, mind and—as he was, in private, a religious man—soul.

Jobs of any interest remained difficult to come by. Many believed that his law degree from Harvard went begging as he devoted himself to civil strife and writing for a journal that, in the overall scheme of things, had to be measured as insignificant. Frosh wrote on politics for startup journals, for heaven’s sake, not those who could, with a modicum of effort, be senior partners or professors. Yet the enterprise of a law firm could not satisfy his appetite for living, nor even for disputatious talk, and people were wrong that he could easily become a professor in Quebec. Three times he’d applied for a position at the Université de Montreal. Three times he had been rejected. The province’s premier, Maurice Duplessis, blocked each attempt—once through an intercession with the rector, once with a word to a dean, and once by putting in a call to the secretary general. In the premier’s eyes, Trudeau had studied in communist environments—in Paris and in London—therefore he was deemed unfit.

In the 1950s in Quebec, the heady freedoms of Paris and London were nowhere in evidence.

What to do? He was rich, smart and desired by women. For the time being, he followed his friends Pelletier and Marchand into battle against the regime of Duplessis—since he was being kicked around by the man, he might as well get in a few licks of his own. He also locked horns with American corporations who paid their workers more poorly than elsewhere on the continent. He skewered the political right and took on tough corporations with ideas and logical argument. Nobody could call it a job—it didn’t pay—but at least his interest in ideas and action was being stimulated. His choice of weapons—logic, intellectual confrontation—meant that many feared him even as he honed his skills.

By contrast, tonight offered no moment for either argument or agreement.

Tonight was destined for nothing more than a transaction. For him, the most obtuse imaginable.

A base affair. Decidedly illogical. Outside his customary domain.

Yet
exciting.
He had to admit. He was very excited.

I’m travelling as an emissary for the Catholic Church.
He laughed as the notion leapt to mind. It wasn’t true, just a rationale.
I’m travelling as an emissary for a rogue priest.
Closer to the truth, yet equally amusing. A Dominican. For him, steeped as he was in Jesuit training, the alliance was an unlikely one.
I’m a sucker for adventure.

He bored easily. Not only was boredom anathema to him, it was also highly dangerous. Boredom pushed him outside his beloved logic, provoked him to be rash. A whisper had been picked up in a conversation, a rumour, so distant it had travelled as a flicker from a far galaxy, passed along out of time from the ears of the upper classes to their lips to fresh ears, so that neither its source nor its veracity could be ascertained.
The Cartier Dagger,
the rumour whirled around,
is up for sale.

Yet, how could a buyer make contact, when those who possessed the knife, if indeed they existed, craved anonymity? Anyone auctioning the treasure would be suspected of crimes more heinous than mundane possession
of stolen property. Buyers had to act covertly. Possession of the dagger itself was a crime, and those who were selling were thieves and killers. The purchase was immoral. Pierre Elliott Trudeau argued such matters with Father François who, having gotten wind of the story about the knife, brought it to the attention of the rich man’s son. Apparently, he had wanted to gauge, perhaps pique, his interest.

They discussed the rumour at length. Both men agreed that they should be calling the police, and Trudeau knew whom to call in the department. But they held off. They chose to keep talking, and Father François was developing a different solution. A curious scheme. A proposition. “Purchase the Cartier Dagger yourself, Pierre, why not?” he whispered finally over cognac.