Montreal, November

Evening on the Main, and the shops are closing. Display bins have been pulled back off the sidewalks; corrugated shutters clatter down over store windows. One or two lights are kept on as a deterrent to burglary; and empty cash registers are left ajar so that thieves won’t smash them open pointlessly.

The bars remain open, and the cafés; and loudspeaker cones over narrow music stalls splash swatches of noise over sidewalks congested with people, their necks pulled into collars, their shoulders tight against the dank cold. The young and the busy lose patience with the crawling, faceless Wad. They push and shoulder their way through, confusing the old, irritating the idle. The mood of the crowd is harried and brusque; tempers have been frayed by weeks of pig weather, with its layers of zinc cloud, moist and icy, pressing down on the city, delaying the onset of winter with its clean snows and taut blue skies. Everyone complains about the weather. It isn’t the cold that gets you, it’s the damp.

The swarm coagulates at street corners and where garbage cans have been stacked on the curb. The crowd surges and tangles, tight-packed but lonely. Tense faces, worried faces, vacant faces, all lit on one side by the garish neon of nosh bars, saloons, cafés.

In the window of a fish shop there is a glass tank, its sides green with algae. A lone carp glides back and forth in narcotized despair.

Schoolboys in thick coats and short pants, bookbags strapped to their backs, snake through the crowd, their faces pinched with cold and their legs blotchy red. A big kid punches a smaller one and darts ahead. In his attempt to catch up and retaliate, the small boy steps on a man’s foot. The man swears and cuffs him on the back of the head. The boy plunges on, tears of embarrassment and anger in his eyes.

Fed up with the jams and blockages, some people step out into the street and squeeze between illegally parked cars and the northbound traffic. Harassed truck drivers lean on their air horns and curse, and the braver offenders swear back and throw them the fig. The swearing, the shouting, the grumbling, the swatches of conversation are in French, Yiddish, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Hungarian, Greek—but the lingua franca is English. The Main is a district of immigrants, and greenhorns in Canada quickly learn that English, not French, is the language of success. Signs in the window of a bank attest to the cosmopolitan quality of the street:

“…so all the wise men and pilpulniks of Chelm get together to decide which is more important to their village, the sun or the moon. Finally they decide in favor of the moon. And why? Because the moon gives light during the night when, without it, they might fall into ditches and hurt themselves. While the sun, on the other hand, shines only during the day, when already it is light out. So who needs it!” David Mogolevski snorts with laughter at his own story, his thick body quaking, his growling basso filling the cramped little room behind the upholstery shop. His eyes sparkle as he looks from face to face, nodding and saying, “Eh? Eh?” soliciting appreciation.

Father Martin nods and grins. “Yes, that’s a good one, David.” He is eager to show that he likes the joke, but he has never known how to laugh. Whenever he tries out of politeness, he produces a bogus sound that embarrasses him.

David shakes his head and repeats, his eyes tearing with laughter, “The sun shines only during the day! So who needs it!”

Moishe Rappaport smiles over the top of his round glasses and nods support for his partner. He has heard each of David’s jokes a hundred times, but he still enjoys them. Most of all, he enjoys the generous vigor of David’s laughter; but sometimes he is tense when David starts off on one of his longer tales, because he knows the listener has probably already heard it, and may be unkind enough to say so. There is no danger of that with these pinochle friends; they always pretend never to have heard the stories before, although Moishe and David have been playing cards with the priest and the police lieutenant every Thursday and Monday night for thirteen years now.

The back room is cramped by stacks of old furniture, bolts of upholstery, and the loom on which Moishe makes fabrics for special customers. A space is cleared in the center under a naked light bulb, and a card table is set up. At some time during the night there will be a break, and they will eat sandwiches prepared by Moishe and drink the wine LaPointe brought.

Father Martin contributes only his presence and patience—and this last is no small offering, for he is always David’s partner.

Throughout the evening there is conversation. Moishe and Father Martin look forward to these opportunities to examine and debate life and love; justice and the law; the role of Man; the nature of Truth. They are both scholarly men to whom the coincidences of life denied outlets. David injects his jokes and a leavening cynicism, without which the philosophical ramblings of the other two would inflate and leave the earth.

LaPointe’s role is that of the listener.

For all four, these twice-weekly games have become oases in their routines, and they take them for granted. But if the games were to end, the vacuum would be profound.

Each would have to search his memory to recall how they got together in the first place; it seems they have always played cards on Thursdays and Mondays. In fact, Father Martin met David and Moishe while he was canvassing the Main for contributions toward the maintenance of his battered polyglot parish. But how that led to his playing cards with them he could not say. LaPointe entered the circle just as casually. One night on his way home after putting the street to bed, he saw a light in the back of the shop and tapped at the window to see if everything was all right. They were playing three-handed cutthroat. Maybe LaPointe was feeling lonely that night without knowing it In any event, he accepted their invitation to join the game.

They were all in their forties when first they started playing. LaPointe is fifty-three now; and Moishe must be just over sixty.

David rubs his thick hands together and leers at his friends. “Come, deal the cards! The luck has been against me tonight, but now I feel strong. The good Father and I are going to schneider you poor babies. Well? Why doesn’t somebody deal?”

“Because it’s your deal, David,” Moishe reminds him.

“Ah! That explains it. Okay, here we go!” David has a flashy way of dealing which often causes a card to turn over. Each time this occurs he says, “Oops! Sunny side up!” His own cards never happen to turn over. He sweeps in his hand with a grand gesture and begins arranging it, making little sounds of surprised appreciation designed to cow adversaries. “Hello, hello, hel-lo!” he says as he slips a good card into place and taps it home with his finger.

David’s heritage is rural and Slavic; he is a big man, unsubtle of feature and personality; gregarious, gruff, kind. When he is angry, he roars; when he feels done in by man or fate, he complains bitterly and at length; when he is pleased, he beams. The robust, life-embracing shtetl tradition dominates his nature. In business he is a formidable bargainer, but scrupulously honest. A deal is a deal, whichever way it turns. Although it is Moishe’s skill and craftsmanship that make their little enterprise popular with decorators from Westmont, the business would have failed a hundred times over without the vigor and acumen of David. His personality is perfectly reflected in the way he plays cards. He tends to overbid slightly, because he finds the game dull when someone else has named trump. When he is taking a run of sure tricks, he snaps each card down with a triumphant snort. When he goes set, he groans and slaps his forehead. He gets bored when Moishe and Father Martin delay the game with their meandering philosophical talks; but if he thinks of a good story, he will reach across the table and place his hand upon the cards to stop play while he holds forth.

Moishe, too, is revealed in his cardplaying. He collects his hand and arranges it carefully. Behind the round glasses, his eyes take an interior focus as he evaluates the cards. He could be the best player by far, if he were to concentrate on the game. But winning isn’t important to him. The gathering of friends, the talk, these are what matter. Occasionally, just occasionally, he takes a perverse delight in bearing down and applying his acute mind to the job of setting David, particularly if his friend has blustered a little too much that evening.

Slight, self-effacing, Moishe is the very opposite of his business partner. During the days he is to be found in the back room, tacks in his mouth, driving each one precisely into place with three taps of his hammer. Tap… TAP… tap. The first rap setting the point, the second neatly driving the tack home, the third for good measure. Or he will be working at his small loom, his agile fingers flying with precision. If he is in a repeat pattern requiring little attention, his expression seems to fade as his mind ranges elsewhere, on scenes of his youth, on hypothetical ethical problems, on imagined conversations with young people seeking guidance.

As a young man he lived in Germany in the comfortable old ghetto house where his great-grandfather had been born, a home that always smelled of good cooking and beeswax polish. They were a family of craftsmen in wood and fabric, but they admired learning, and the most revered of their relatives were those who had the gifts and devotion for Talmudic scholarship. As a boy he showed a penchant for study and that mental habit of seeing things simultaneously in their narrowest details and their broadest implications that marks the Talmudic scholar—a gift Moishe calls “intellectual peripheral vision.” His mother was proud of him and found frequent opportunities to mention to neighbor ladies that Moishe was up in his room studying again, instead of out playing and wasting his time. She would lift her hands helplessly and say that she didn’t know what she would do with that boy—all the time studying, learning, saying brilliant things. Maybe in the long run it would be better if he were a common ordinary boy, like the neighbors’ sons.

Moishe’s adoring sister used to bring up little things for him to eat when he was studying late. His father also supported his intellectual inclination, but he insisted that Moishe learn the family craft. As he used to say, “It doesn’t hurt a brilliant man to know a little something.”

When the Nazi repression began, the Rappaports did not flee. After all, they were Germans; the father had fought in the 1914 war, the grandfather in the Franco-Prussian; they had German friends and business associates. Germany, after all, was not a nation of animals.

Moishe alone survived. His parents died of malnutrition and disease in the ever-narrowing ghetto; and his sister, delicate, shy, unworldly, died in the camp.

He came to Montreal after two years in the anonymous cauldron of a displaced persons camp. Occasionally, and then only in casual illustration of some point of discussion, Moishe mentioned the concentration camp and the loss of his family. LaPointe never understood the tone of shame and culpability that crept into Moishe’s voice when he spoke of these experiences. He seemed ashamed of having undergone so dehumanizing a process; ashamed to have survived, when so many others did not.

Claude LaPointe sorts his cards into suits, taps the fan closed on the table, then spreads it again by pinching the cards between thumb and forefinger. He re-scans his hand, then closes it in front of him. He will not look at it again until after the bidding is over. He knows what he has, knows its value.

For the third time, Father Martin sorts his cards. The diamonds have a way of getting mixed up with the hearts. He pats the top of his thinning hair with his palm and looks at the cards mournfully; it is the kind of hand he dreads most. He doesn’t mind having terrible cards that no one could play well, and he rather enjoys having so strong a hand that not even he can misplay it. But these cards of middle power! Martin admits to being the worse cardplayer in North America. Should he fail to admit it, David would remind him.

When first he came to the Main, an idealistic young priest, Martin had affection for his church, nestled in a tight row of houses, literally a part of the street, a part of everyone’s life. But now he feels sorry for his church, and ashamed of it. Both sides have been denuded by the tearing down of row houses to make way for industrial expansion. Rubble fields flank it, exposing ugly surfaces never meant to be seen, revealing the outlines of houses that used to depend on the church for structural support, and used to defend it. And the projects he dreamed of never quite worked out; people kept changing before he could really get anything started. Now most of Father Martin’s flock are old Portuguese women who visit the church at all times of day, bent women with black shawls who light candles to prolong their prayers, then creep down the aisle on painful legs, their gnarled fingers gripping pew ends for support. Father Martin can speak only a few words of Portuguese. He can shrive, but he cannot console.

When he was a young man in seminary, he dared to dream of being a scholar, of writing incisive and illuminating apologetics that applied the principles of the faith to modern life and problems. He would sometimes wake up at night with a lucid perception of some knotty issue—a perception that was always just beyond the stretch of his memory the next morning. Although his mind teemed with ideas, he lacked the knack of setting his thoughts down clearly. Prior considerations and subsequent ramifications would invade his thinking and carry him off to the left or right of his main thesis, so he did not shine in seminary and was never considered for that post he so desired in a small college where he could study and write and teach. There was a joke in seminary: publish or parish.

But Father Martin’s mind still runs to ethics, to the nature of sin, to the proper uses of the gift of life; so, while being David’s bungling partner is mortifying, the conversations with Moishe make it worthwhile. And there is something right about that, too. A payment in humiliation for the opportunity to learn and to express oneself.

“Come on! Come on!” David says. “It’s your bid, Claude. Unless, of course, you and Moishe have decided to save face by throwing in your hands.”

“All right,” LaPointe says. “Fifteen.”

“Sixteen.” Father Martin says the word softly, then sucks air in through his teeth in an attempt to express the fact that he has a fair playing hand but no meld to speak of.

“Ah-ha!” David ejaculates.

Father Martin catches his breath. David is going to plunge after the bid, dragging the uncertain priest after him to a harrowingly narrow victory or a crushing defeat.

Moishe studies his cards, his gentle eyes seeming to pass over the number indifferently. He purses his lips and hums a soft ascending note. “Oh-h-h. Seventeen, I suppose.”

“Eighteen!” is David’s rapid reply.

Father Martin winces.

LaPointe taps the top of the face-down stack before him. “All right,” he says, “nineteen, then.”

“Pass,” says Father Martin dolefully.

“Pass,” says Moishe, looking at his partner slyly from behind his round glasses.

“Good!” David says. “Now let’s sort out the men from the sheep. Twenty-two!”

LaPointe shrugs and passes.

“Prepare to suffer, fools,” David says. He declares spades trump, but he has only a nine and a pinochle to meld.

Gingerly, apologetically, Father Martin produces a king and queen of hearts.

David stares at his partner, hurt and disbelief flooding his eyes. “That’s all?” he asks. “This is what you meld? One marriage?”

“I… I was bidding a playing band.”

LaPointe objects. “Why don’t you just show one another your hands and be done with it?”

Moishe sets down his cards and rises. “I’ll start the sandwiches.”

“Wait a minute!” David says. “Where are you going? The hand isn’t over!”

“You are going to play it out?” Moishe asks incredulously.

“Of course! Sit down!”

Moishe looks at LaPointe with operatic surprise. He spreads his arms and lifts his palms toward the ceiling.

Roaring out his aces in an aggressive style that scorns the effeminate trickery of the finesse, David takes the first four tricks. But when he tries to cross to his partner, he is cut off by LaPointe, who manages to finesse a ten from Father Martin, then sends the lead to Moishe, who finishes the assassination.

At one point, Father Martin plays a low club onto a diamond trick.

“What?” cried David. “You’re out of trump?”

“Aren’t clubs trump?”

David slumps over and softly bangs his forehead against the table top. “Why me?” he asks the oilcloth. “Why me?”

Too late, the lead returns to David, who slams down his last five cards, collecting impoverished and inadequate tricks.

He stares heavily at the tabletop for a few seconds, then he speaks in a low and controlled voice. “My dear Father Martin. I ask the following, not in anger, but in a spirit of humble curiosity. Please tell me. Why did you bid when you had nothing in your hand but SHIT!”

Moishe removes his glasses and lightly rubs the red dents on the bridge of his nose. “There was nothing Martin could have done to save you. You overbid your hand and you went set. That’s all there is to it.”

“Don’t tell me that! If he had come out with his ten earlier—”

“You would have won one more trick. Not enough to save you. You had two clubs left; I had the ace, Claude the ten. And if you had returned in diamonds—at that time you still had the queen—Martin would have had to trump it with his jack, and I would have overtrumped with the king.” Moishe continues to rub his nose.

David glares at him in silence before saying, “That’s wonderful. That is just wonderful!” The tension in David’s voice causes Martin to look over at him, his breathing suspended. “Listen to the big scholar, will you? If my jack of hearts has its fly unbuttoned, he remembers! But when it comes to accounts, suddenly he’s a luftmensh, too busy with philosophical problems to worry about business! Oh, yes! Taking care of the business is too commonplace for a man who spends all his time debating does an ant have a pupik! For your information, Moishe, I was talking to the priest! So butt out for once! Just butt out!”

David jumps up, knocking the table with his knees, and slams out of the room.

In the ensuing silence, Father Martin looks from Moishe to LaPointe, upset, confused. LaPointe draws a deep breath and begins desultorily to collect the cards. The moment David began his abuse, Moishe froze in mid-action; and now he replaces his glasses, threading each wire temple over its ear.

“Ah… listen,” he says quietly. “You must forgive David. He is in pain. He is grieving. Yesterday was the anniversary of Hannah’s death. He’s been like a balled-up fist all day.”

The others understand. David and Hannah had been children together, and they had married young. So close, so happy were they that they dared express their affection only through constant light bickering and quarreling, as if it were unlucky to be blatantly happy and in love in a world where others were sad and suffering. After they immigrated to Montreal, Hannah’s world was focused almost totally on her husband. She never learned French or English and shopped only in Jewish markets.

During the pinochle games, David used to talk about Hannah constantly; complaining, of course. Bragging about her in his negative way. Saying that no woman in the world was so fussy about her cooking, such a nuisance about his health. She was driving him crazy! Why did he put up with it?

Then, six years ago, Hannah died of cancer. Sick less than a month, and she died.

For weeks afterward, the card games were quiet and uncomfortable; David was distant, uncharacteristically polite and withdrawn, and no one dared console him. His eyes were hollow, his face scoured with grief. Sometimes they would have to remind him that it was his play, and he would snap out of his reverie and apologize for delaying the game. David apologizing! Then, one evening, he mentioned Hannah in the course of conversation, grumbling that she was a nag and a pest. And moreover she was fat. Zaftig young is fat old! I should have married a skinny woman. They’re cheaper to feed.

That was how he would handle it. He would continue complaining about her. That way, she wouldn’t be gone completely. He could go on loving her, and being exasperated beyond bearing by her. Occasionally the sour void of grief returned to make him desperate and mean for a day or two, but in general he could handle it now.

The complicated double way he thought of his wife was expressed precisely one night when he happened to say, “Should Hannah, alshasholm, suddenly return, cholilleh, she would have a fit!”

“So just pretend nothing happened when he comes back,” Moishe says. “And whatever you do, don’t try to cheer him up. A man must be allowed to grieve once in a while. If he avoids the pain of grieving, the sadness never gets purged. It lumps up inside of him, poisoning his life. Tears are a solvent.”

Father Martin shakes his head. “But a friend should offer consolation.”

“No, Martin. That would be the easy, the comfortable thing to do. But not the kindest thing. Just as David is not grieving for Hannah—people only grieve for themselves, for their loss—so we wouldn’t be consoling him for his own sake. We would be consoling him because his grief is awkward for us.”

LaPointe feels uncomfortable with all this talk of grief and consolation. Men shouldn’t need that sort of thing. And he is about to say so, when David appears in the doorway.

“Hey!” he says gruffly. “I went out to make the sandwiches, and I can’t find anything. What a mess!”

Moishe smiles as he rises. David has never made the sandwiches in his life. “You find some glasses for the wine. I’ll make the sandwiches, for a change.”

As David rummages about grumpily for the glasses, Moishe steps to a narrow table against the wall on which are arranged cold cuts and a loaf of rye bread. He cuts the bread rapidly, one stroke of the knife for each thin, perfect slice.

“It’s amazing how you do that, Moishe,” Father Martin says, eager to get the conversation rolling.

“Agh, that’s nothing,” David pronounces proudly. “Have you ever seen him cut fabric?” He spreads two fingers like scissors and makes a rapid gesture that narrowly misses Father Martin’s ear. “Psh-sh-sht! It’s a marvel to watch!”

Moishe chuckles to himself as he continues slicing. “I would call that a pretty modest accomplishment in life. I can just see my epitaph: ‘Boy! Could he cut cloth!’ “

“Yeah, yeah,” David says, fanning his hand in dismissal of Moishe’s modesty. “Still, think what a surgeon you would have made.”

Father Martin has a funny idea. “Yes, he’d make a great surgeon, if my appendix were made of damask!”

David turns and looks at him with heavy eyes. “What? What’s this about your appendix being damask?”

“No… I was just saying that… well, if Moishe were a surgeon…” Confused, Martin shrugs and drops it.

“I still don’t get it,” David says flatly. He is embarrassed about his recent loss of control, and Father Martin is going to feel the brunt of it.

“Well… it was just a joke,” Martin explains, deflated.

“Father,” David says, “let’s make a deal. You listen to confessions from old ladies too feeble to make interesting sins. I’ll tell the jokes. To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities.”

“Look who’s the communist,” Moishe says, trying to attract some of the fire away from Martin.

“Who said anything about being a communist?” David wants to know.

“Forget it. Did you manage to find the glasses?”

“What glasses? Oh. The glasses.”

Moishe puts a plate of sandwiches on the table, while David brings three thick-bottomed water glasses and a handleless coffee mug, which he gives to Father Martin. The wine is poured, and they toast life.

David drains his glass and pours another. “Tell me, Father, do you know the meaning of aroysgevorfeneh verter?”

Father Martin shakes his head.

“That’s Yiddish for ‘advice given to a priest about how to play pinochle.’ But that’s all right. I forgive you. I understand why you overbid.”

“I don’t believe I overbid…”

“The reason you overbid was because you had a marriage of hearts. And who can expect a priest to know the value of a marriage? Eh?”

Father Martin sighs. David always delights in little digs at celibacy.

“Now me!” David gestures broadly with his sandwich. “I know the value of a marriage. My wife Hannah was Ukrainian. Take my advice, Father. Never marry a Ukrainian. Nudzh, nudzh, nudzh! When she was born, she complained about the midwife slapping her on the ass, and she never got out of the habit. There is an old saying about Ukrainian women. It is said that they never die. Their bodies get smaller and smaller through wind erosion until there is nothing left but a complaining voice by the side of the fireplace. Me, I know the value of a marriage. I would have bid nothing!”

LaPointe laughs. “I’d like to see the hand you wouldn’t bid on.”

David laughs too. “Maybe so. Maybe so. Hey, tell me, Claude. How come you never married, eh?”

Father Martin glances uneasily at LaPointe.

The phone rings.

Half of the sound blends into the eddy of a dream; half is jagged and real, still echoing in the dark room.

The phone rings again.

He swings out of bed and gropes into the dark living room. The floor is icy.

The phone ri—

“Yes! LaPointe.”

“Sorry, Lieutenant.” The voice is young. “I hate to wake you up, but—”

“Never mind that. What’s wrong?”

“A man’s been killed on your patch.” The caller’s French is accurate, but it has a continental accent. He is an Anglophone Canadian.

“Murdered?” LaPointe asks. Stupid question. Would they call him for an automobile accident? He still isn’t fully awake.

“Yes, sir. Knifed.”

“Where?”

“Little alley near the corner of Rue Lozeau and St. Dominique. That’s just across from—”

“I know where it is. When?”

“Sir?”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. I just got here with Detective Sergeant Gaspard. We took an incoming from a patrol car. The Sergeant asked me to call you.”

“All right. Ten minutes.” LaPointe hangs up.

He dresses quickly, with fumbling hands. As he leaves he remembers to take the paper bag of garbage with him. He may not get back in time for the collection.

It is three-thirty, the coldest part of the night. Following the pattern of this pig weather, the overcast has lifted with the early hours of morning, taking with it the smell of city soot. The air is still and crystalline, and the exhaust from a patrol car parked halfway up the narrow alley shoots a long funnel of vapor out into the street. A revolving roof light skids shafts of red along the brick walls and over the chests and faces of the half-dozen policemen and detectives working around the corpse. Bursts of blue-white glare periodically fill the alley, freezing men in mid-gesture, as the forensic photographer takes shots from every angle. Two uniformed officers stand guard at the mouth of the alley, tears of cold in their eyes, their gloved fingers under their armpits for warmth.

Despite the cold and the hour, a small knot of rubbernecks has gathered at the mouth of the alley. They move about and stand on tiptoe to catch glimpses, and they talk to one another in hushed, confidential tones, instant friends by virtue of shared experience.

LaPointe crosses the street just as an ambulance pulls up. He stands for a time on the rim of the knot of onlookers, unobtrusively joining them. Some maniac killers, like some arsonists, like to blend with the crowd and experience the effects of their actions.

There is a street bomme in conversation with a small uncertain man whose chin is buried in a thick wrap of scarf. This latter looks out of place here, like a bank clerk, or an accountant. LaPointe lays his hands on the shoulder of the bomme.

“Oh, hi-ya, Lieutenant.”

“What are you doing up at this end of the street, Red?”

“It got too cold in that doorway. The wind shifted. It was better walking around.”

LaPointe looks into the tramp’s eyes. He is not lying. “All the same, stay around. Got any fric?”

“None I can spend.” Like most clochards, Dirtyshirt Red always keeps a dollar or two stashed back for really hard times.

“Here.” LaPointe gives him a quarter. “Get some coffee.” With a jerk of his head he indicates the all-night Roi des Frites joint across the street.

The clerk, or accountant, or pederast, moves away from the bomme. Anyone on talking terms with a policeman can’t be perfectly trustworthy.

LaPointe looks up and down the street. The air is so cold and clear that streetlights seem to glitter, and the corners of buildings a block away have sharp, neat edges, like theatrical sets. Everyone’s breath is vapor, twin jets when they exhale through their noses. From somewhere there comes the homey, yeasty smell of bread. The bakeries would be working at this hour, men stripped to the waist in hot back rooms, sweating with the heat of ovens.

As LaPointe turns back toward the alley, it starts. A light, rather pleasant tingle in his chest, as though his blood were carbonated. God damn it. A rippling fatigue drains his body and loosens his knees. A constriction swells in his chest, and little bands of pain arc across his upper arms. He leans against the brick wall and breathes deeply and slowly, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible. There are dark patches in his vision, and bright dots. The flashing red light atop the police car begins to blur.

“Lieutenant LaPointe?”

The chest constrictions start to ebb, and the stabs of pain in his arms become duller.

“Sir?”

Slowly, his body weight returns as the sense of floating deflates. He dares a deep breath taken in little sucks to test for pain.

“Lieutenant LaPointe?”

“What, for Christ’s sake!”

The young man recoils from the violence of the response. “My name’s Guttmann, sir.”

“That’s your problem.”

“I’m working with Detective Sergeant Gaspard.”

“That’s his problem.”

“I was the one who telephoned you.” The young officer-in-training’s voice is stiff with resentment at LaPointe’s uncalled-for sarcasm. “Sergeant Gaspard is down the alley. He asked me to keep an eye out for you.”

LaPointe grunts. “Well?”

“Sir?”

LaPointe settles his heavy melancholy eyes on the OIT. “You say Gaspard is waiting for me?”

“Yes, sir. Oh. Follow me, sir.”

LaPointe shakes his head in general criticism of young policemen as he follows Guttmann into the alley where a bareheaded photographer from the forensic lab is packing up the last of his equipment.

“That you, LaPointe?” Gaspard asks from the dark. Like a handful of the most senior men on the force, Gaspard tutoyers LaPointe, but he never uses his first name. In fact, most of them would have to search their memories to come up with his first name.

LaPointe lifts a hand in greeting, then drops the fist back into the pocket of his rumpled overcoat.

The forensic photographer tells Gaspard that he is going back to the Quartier Général with the film. He will get it into an early batch, and it will be developed by mid-morning. He sniffs back draining sinuses and grumbles, “Colder than a witch’s écu!”

“Titon,” Gaspard corrects absent-mindedly, as he shakes hands with LaPointe.

“We haven’t searched the body yet. We’ve been waiting for Flash Gordon here to take the class pictures.” Gaspard addresses the photographer. “Well? If you’re through, I’ll let my men move the bundle.”

The victim is a young male dressed in a trendy suit with belled trousers, a shirt with a high rolled collar, and shoes of patent leather. He had dropped to his knees when stabbed, then he had fallen forward. LaPointe has never seen a corpse in that posture: on its knees, its buttocks on its heels, its face pressed into the gravel, its arms stretched out with the palms down. It looks like a young priest serving High Mass, and showing off with excessive self-abasement.

LaPointe feels sorry for it A corpse can look ugly, or peaceful, or tortured; but it’s too bad to look silly. Unfair.

Guttmann and another detective turn the body over to examine the pockets for identification. A piece of gravel is embedded in the boy’s smooth cheek. Guttmann flicks it off, but a pink triangular dent remains.

LaPointe mutters to himself, “Heart.”

“What?” Gaspard asks, tapping out a cigarette.

“Must have been stabbed through the heart.” Without touching each of the logical steps, LaPointe’s experience told him that there were only two ways the body could have ended up in that comic posture. Either it had been stabbed in the heart and died instantly, or it had been stabbed in the stomach and had tried to cover up the cold hole. But there was no smell of excrement, and a man stabbed in the stomach almost always soils himself through sphincter convulsion. Therefore, heart.

To turn the body over, the detectives have to straighten it out first. They lift it from under its arms and pull it forward, unfolding it. When they lower it to the pavement, the young face touches the ground.

“Careful!” LaPointe says automatically.

Guttmann glances up, assuming he is being blamed for something. He already dislikes the bullying LaPointe. He doesn’t have much use for the old-time image of the tough cop who uses fists and wisetalk, rather than brains and understanding. He has heard about LaPointe of the Main from admiring young French Canadian cops, and the Lieutenant is true to Guttmann’s predicted stereotype.

Sergeant Gaspard pinches one of his ears to restore feeling to the lobe. “First time I’ve ever seen one kneeling like that. Looked like an altar boy.”

For a moment, LaPointe finds it odd that they had similar images of the body’s posture. But, after all, they share both age and cultural background. Neither of them is a confessing Catholic any longer, but they were brought up with a simple fundamentalist Catholicism that would define them forever, define them negatively, as a mold negatively defines a casting. They are non-Catholics, which is a very different thing from being a non-Protestant or a non-Jew.

The detectives go through the pockets routinely, one putting the findings into a clear plastic bag with a press seal, while Guttmann makes a list, tipping his note pad back awkwardly to catch the light from the street.

“That’s it?” Gaspard asks as Guttmann closes his notebook and blows on his numb fingers.

“Yes, sir. Not much. No wallet. No identification. Some small change, keys, a comb—that sort of thing.”

Gaspard nods and gestures to the ambulance attendants who are waiting with a wheeled stretcher. With professional adroitness and indifference, they turn the body onto the stretcher and roll it toward the back doors of the ambulance. The cart rattles over the uneven brick pavement, and one arm flops down, the dead hand palsied with the vibrations.

They will deliver it to the Forensic Medicine Department, where it will be fingerprinted and examined thoroughly, together with the clothes and articles found in the pockets. The prints will be telephoned to Ottawa, and by morning Dr. Bouvier, the department pathologist, should have a full report, including a make on the victim’s identity.

“Who found the body?” LaPointe asks Gaspard.

“Patrol car. Those two officers on guard.”

“Have you talked to them?”

“No, not yet. Did you recognize the stiff?” It is generally assumed that LaPointe knows by sight everyone who lives around the Main.

“No. Never saw him before.”

“Looked Portuguese.”

LaPointe thrusts out his lower lip and shrugs. “Or Italian. The clothes were more Italian.”

As they walk back to the mouth of the alley, the ambulance departs, squealing its tires unnecessarily. LaPointe stops before the uniformed men on guard. “Which of you found the body?”

“I did, Lieutenant LaPointe,” says the nearest one quickly. He has the rectangular face of a peasant, and his accent is Chiac. It is a misfortune to speak Chiac, because there is a tradition of dour stupidity associated with the half-swallowed sound; it is a hillbilly accent used by comics to enhance tired jokes.

“Come with us,” LaPointe says to the Chiac officer, and to his disappointed partner, “You can wait in the car. And turn that damned thing off.” He indicates the revolving red light.

LaPointe, Gaspard, Guttmann, and the Chiac officer cross the street to the Roi des Frites. The policeman left behind is glad to get out of the cold, but he envies his partner’s luck. He would give anything to take coffee with LaPointe. He could just see the faces of the guys in the locker room when he dropped casually, “Lieutenant LaPointe and I were having a coffee together, and he turns to me and says…” Someone would throw a towel at him and tell him he was full of shit up to his eyebrows.

Dirtyshirt Red rises when the policemen enter the bright interior of the all-night coffee place, but LaPointe motions him to sit down again. Quite automatically, he has already taken over the investigation, although Gaspard from homicide is technically in charge of it. It is an unspoken law in the department that what happens on the Main belongs to LaPointe. And who else would want it?

The four men sit at a back table, warming their palms on the thick earthenware cups. The Chiac officer is a little nervous—he wants to look good in front of Lieutenant LaPointe; even more, he doesn’t want to seem a boob in relation to this Anglo tagging along with Sergeant Gaspard.

“By the way, have you met my Joan?” Gaspard asks LaPointe.

“I met him.” LaPointe glances at the big-boned young man. Must be a bright lad. You only get into the OIT apprentice program if you are in the top 10 percent of your academy class, and then only after you have done a year of service and have the recommendation of your direct superior.

When LaPointe began on the force, there were almost no Anglo cops. The pay was too low; the job had too little prestige; and the French Canadians who made up the bulk of the department were not particularly kind to interlopers.

“He’s not a bad type, for a Roundhead,” Gaspard says, indicating his apprentice, and speaking as though he were not present. “And God knows it’s not hard to teach him. There’s nothing he already knows.”

The Chiac officer grins, and Guttmann tries to laugh it off.

Gaspard drinks off the last of his coffee and taps on the window to get the attention of the counterman for a refill. “Robbery, eh?” he says to LaPointe.

“I suppose so. No wallet. Only change in the pockets. But…”

Gaspard is an old-timer too. “I know what you mean. No signs of a fight.”

LaPointe nods. The victim was a big, strong-looking boy in his mid-twenties. Well built. Probably the kind who lifts weights while he looks darkly at himself in a mirror. If he had resisted the theft, there would have been signs of it. On the other hand, if he had simply handed over his wallet, why would the mugger knife him?

“Could be a nut case,” Gaspard suggests.

LaPointe shrugs.

“Christ, we need that sort of thing like the Pope needs a Wassermann,” Gaspard says. “Thank God there was a robbery.”

The Chiac patrolman has been listening, maintaining a serious expression and making every effort to participate intelligently. That is, he has been keeping his mouth shut and nodding with each statement made by the older men. But now his cold-mottled forehead wrinkles into a frown. Why is it fortunate that there was a robbery? He lacks the experience to sense that there was something not quite right about the killing… something about the position of the body that makes both LaPointe and Gaspard intuitively uncomfortable. If there had been no robbery, this might have been the start of something nasty. Like rape mutilations, motiveless stabbings are likely to erupt in patterns. You get a string of four or five before the maniac gets scared or, less often, caught. It’s the kind of thing the newspapers love.

“I’ll walk it around for a few days,” LaPointe says. “See what Bouvier’s report gives us. You don’t mind if I take it on, do you?” The question is only pro forma. LaPointe feels that all crime on his patch belongs to him by right, but he is careful of the feelings of the other senior men.

“Be my guest,” Gaspard says with a wave of his arm that indicates he is happy to be rid of the mess. “And if I ever get the clap, you can have that, too.”

“I’ll route the paper work through you, so we don’t upset the Masters.”

Gaspard nods. That is the way LaPointe usually works. It avoids direct run-ins with the administration. There is nothing official about LaPointe’s assignment to the Main. In fact, there is no organizational rubric that covers him. The administration slices crime horizontally into categories: theft, bunco, vice, homicide. LaPointe’s responsibility is a vertical one: all the crime on the Main. This assignment was never planned, never officially recognized, it just developed as a matter of chance and tradition; and there are those in authority who chafe at this rupture of the organizational chain. They consider it ridiculous that a full lieutenant spends his time crawling around the streets like a short timer. But they console themselves with the realization that LaPointe is an anachronism, a vestige of older, less efficient methods. He will be retiring before long; then they can repair the administrative breach.

LaPointe turns to the uniformed policeman. “You found the body?”

Caught off guard, and wanting to respond alertly, the Chiac cop gulps, “Yes, sir.”

There is a brief silence. Then LaPointe lifts his palms and opens his eyes wide as if to say, “Well?”

The young officer glances across at Guttmann as he tugs out his notebook. The leather folder has a little loop to hold a pen. It’s the kind of thing a parent or girlfriend might have given him when he graduated from the academy. He clears his throat. “We were cruising. My partner was driving slowly because I was checking license plates against the watch list of stolen cars—”

“What did you have for breakfast?” Gaspard asks.

“Pardon me, sir?” The Chiac officer’s ears redden.

“Get on with it, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes, sir. We passed the alley at… ah… well, let’s see. I wrote the note about ten minutes later, so that would put us at the alley at two-forty or two-forty-five. I saw a movement down the alley, but we had passed it by the time I told my partner to stop. He backed up and I got a glance of a man hopping down the alley. I jumped out and started to chase him, then I came across the body.”

“You gave pursuit?” LaPointe asks.

“Well… yes, sir. That is, after I discovered that the guy on the ground was dead, I ran to the end of the alley after the other one. But he had disappeared. The street was empty.”

“Description?”

“Not much, sir. Just caught a glimpse as he hopped away. Tallish. Thin. Well, not fat. Hard to tell. He had on a big shabby overcoat, sort of like…” The officer quickly looks away from LaPointe’s shapeless overcoat. “…you know. Just an old overcoat.”

LaPointe seems to be concentrating on a rivulet of condensed water running down the steamy window beside him. “Il a clopiné?” he asks without looking at the officer. “That’s twice you said the man ‘hopped’ off. Why do you choose that word?”

The young man shrugs. “I don’t know, sir. That’s what he seemed to do… sort of hobble off. But quick, you know?”

“And he was dressed shabbily?”

“I had that impression, sir. But it was dark, you know.”

LaPointe looks down at the tabletop as he taps his lips with his knuckle. Then he sniffs and sighs. “Tell me about his hat.”

“His hat?” The young officer’s eyebrows rise. “I don’t remember any…” His expression seems to spread. “Yes! His hat! A big floppy hat. Dark color. I don’t know how that could have slipped my mind. It was kind of like a cowboy hat, but the brim was floppy, you know?”

For the first time since they entered the Roi des Frites, Guttmann speaks up in his precise European French, the kind Canadians call “Parisian,” but which is really modeled on the French of Tours. “You know who the man is, don’t you, Lieutenant? The one who ran off?”

“Yes.”

Gaspard yawns and rubs his legs. “Well, there it is! You see, kid? You’re learning from me how to solve cases. Just talk people into committing their crimes on the Main, and turn them over to LaPointe. Nothing to it. It’s all in the wrist.” He speaks to LaPointe. “So it’s routine after all. The guy was stabbed for his money, and you know who…”

But LaPointe is shaking his head. It’s not that simple. “No. The man this officer saw running away is a street bomme. I know him. I don’t think he would kill.”

“How do you know that, sir?” Guttmann’s young face is intense and intelligent. “What I mean is… anyone can kill, given the right circumstances. People who would never steal might kill.”

With weary slowness, LaPointe turns his patient fatigued eyes on the Anglo.

“Ah…” Gaspard says, “did I mention that my Joan here had been to college?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Oh, yeah! He’s been through it all. Books, grades, long words, theories, raise your hand to go to the bathroom—one finger for pee-pee, two for ca-ca.” Gaspard turns to Guttmann, who takes a long-suffering breath. “One thing I’ve always wondered, kid,” Gaspard pursues. “Maybe you can tell me from all your education. How come a man grins when he’s shitting a particularly hard turd? I mean, it isn’t all that much fun, really.”

Guttmann ignores Gaspard; he looks directly at LaPointe. “But what I said is true, isn’t it? People who would never steal might kill, under the right circumstances?”

The kid’s eyes are frank and vulnerable and they shine with suppressed embarrassment and anger. After a second, LaPointe answers, “Yes. That’s true.”

Gaspard grunts as he stands and stretches his settled spine. “Okay, it’s your package, LaPointe. Me, I’m going home. I’ll collect the reports in the morning and send them over to you.” Then Gaspard gets an idea. “Hey! Want to do me a favor? How about taking my Joan here for a few days? Give him a chance to see how you do your dirty work. What do you say?”

The Chiac officer’s mouth opens. These goddamned Roundheads get all the luck.

LaPointe frowns. They never assign Joans to him, just as they never give him committee work. They know better.

“Come on,” Gaspard persists. “He can sort of be liaison between my shop and yours. Take him off my back for a few days. He cramps my style. How can I pick up a quick piece of ass with him hanging around all the time, taking notes?”

LaPointe shrugs. “All right. For a couple of days.”

“Great,” Gaspard says. As he buttons his overcoat up to the neck, he looks out the window. “Look at this goddamned weather, will you! It’s already socking in again. By dawn the clouds will be back. Have you ever seen the snow hold off so long? And every night it gets cold as a witch’s tit.”

LaPointe’s mind is elsewhere. He corrects Gaspard thoughtlessly. “écu. Cold as a witch’s écu.”

“You’re sure it’s not tit?”

“écu.”

Gaspard looks down at Guttmann. “You see, kid? You’re going to learn a lot with LaPointe. Okay, men, I’m off. Keep crime off the streets and in the home, where it belongs.”

The Chiac officer follows Gaspard out into the windy night. They get into the patrol car and drive off, leaving the street totally empty.

“Thanks, Lieutenant,” Guttmann says. “I hope you don’t feel railroaded into taking me on.”

But LaPointe has already crooked his finger at Dirtyshirt Red, who shuffles over to the table. “Sit down, Red.” LaPointe shifts to English because it’s Red’s only language, the language of success. “Have you seen the Vet tonight?”

Dirtyshirt Red makes a face. Over the years he has fostered a fine hatred for his fellow bomme, with all his blowing off about being a war hero, and always bragging about his great kip—a snug sleeping place he has hidden away somewhere. A comforting idea strikes Dirtyshirt Red.

“Is he in trouble, Lieutenant? He’s a badass, believe you me. I wouldn’t put nothin’ past him! What’s he done, Lieutenant?”

LaPointe settles his melancholy eyes on the bomme.

“Okay,” Red says quickly. “Sorry. Yeah, I seen him. Down Chez Pete’s Place, maybe ‘bout six, seven o’clock.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No. I left to go down to the Greek bakery and get some toppins promised me. I didn’t want that potlickin’ son of a bitch hanging around trying to horn in. He’s harder to shake than snot off a fingernail.”

“Listen, Red. I want to talk to the Vet. You ask around. He could be holed up somewhere because he probably got a lot of drinking money tonight.”

The thought of his fellow tramp coming into a bit of luck infuriates Dirtyshirt Red. “That wino son of a bitch, the potlickin’ splat of birdshit! Morviat! Fartbubble! Him and his snug pad off somewheres! I wouldn’t put nothin’ past him…”

Dirtyshirt Red continues his flow of bile, but it is lost on LaPointe, who is staring out the window where beads of condensation make double rubies of the taillights of predawn traffic. Trucks, mostly. Vegetables coming into market. He feels disconnected from events; a kind of generalized déjà vu. It’s all happened before. Some different kid, killed in some different way, found in some different place; and LaPointe sorting it out in some other café, looking out some other window at some other predawn street. It really doesn’t matter very much anymore. He’s tired.

Without seeming to, Guttmann has been examining LaPointe’s reflection in the window. He has, of course, heard tales about the Lieutenant, his control over the Main, his dry indifference to authorities within the department and to political influences without, improbable myths concerning his courage. Guttmann is intelligent enough to have discounted two-thirds of these epic fables as the confections of French officers seeking an ethnic hero against the Anglophonic authorities.

Physically, LaPointe satisfies Guttmann’s preconceptions: the wide face with its deep-set eyes that is practically a map of French Canada; the mat of graying hair that appears to have been combed with the fingers; and of course the famous rumpled overcoat. But there are aspects that Guttmann had not anticipated, things that contradict his caricature of the tough cop. There is a quality that might be called “distance”; a tendency to stay on the outer rim of things, withdrawn and almost daydreaming. Then too, there is something disturbing in LaPointe’s patient composure, in the softness of his husky voice, in the crinkling around his eyes that makes him seem… the only word that Guttmann can come up with is “paternal.” He recalls that the young French policemen sometimes refer to him as “Papa LaPointe,” not that anyone dares to call him that within his hearing.

“…and that potlickin’ cockroach—that gnat—tells everybody what a hero he was in the war! That pimple on a whore’s ass—that wart—tells everybody what a nice private kip he’s got! That son of a bitch gnat-wart tells—”

With the lift of a hand, LaPointe cuts short Dirtyshirt Red’s flow of hate, just as he is getting up steam. “That’s enough. You ask around for the Vet. If you locate him, call down to the QG. You know the number.” With a tip of his head, LaPointe dismisses the bomme, who shuffles to the door and out into the night.

Guttmann leans forward. “This Vet is the man with the floppy hat?”

LaPointe frowns at the young policeman, as though he has just become aware of his presence. “Why don’t you go home?”

“Sir?”

“There’s nothing more we can do tonight. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll see you at my office tomorrow.”

Guttmann reacts to the Lieutenant’s cool tone. “Listen, Lieutenant. I know that Gaspard sort of dumped me on you. If you’d rather not…” He shrugs.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Guttmann looks down at the Formica tabletop. He sucks a slow breath between his teeth. Being with LaPointe isn’t going to be much fun. “All right, sir. I’ll be there at eight.”

LaPointe yawns and scrubs his matted hair with his palm. “You’re going to have a hell of a wait. I’m tired. I won’t be in until ten or eleven.”

After Guttmann leaves, LaPointe sits looking through the window with unfocused eyes. He feels too tired and heavy to push himself up and trudge back to the cold apartment. But… he can’t sit here all night. He rises with a grunt.

Even before he opens his eyes, he knows it is late. Something in the quality of the sounds out in the street is wrong for getting-up time. He sits on the edge of his bed and groggily reaches for his bathrobe. It is not there. Only then does he remember the girl sleeping in his robe out in the living room.

He tiptoes through on his way to the kitchen, fully dressed, although he usually takes his coffee before dressing. He doesn’t want her to see him padding around in his underwear.

She lies on her side, curled up, the blankets so high that only her mop of frizzed hair is visible. From the line of her body beneath the blankets, he can tell that her hands are between her legs, the palms touching the sides of her thighs. He remembers sleeping like that when he was a kid.

His cup is on the drainboard, where it always is, but he has to rummage about in the cupboard to find another. He puts too little water in the kettle, underestimating the amount needed for two cups, but he decides not to boil more because the coffee already made will get cold. Pouring from one cup to another to make equal shares doesn’t work out well, and he loses about a quarter of a cup. He grumbles “Merde” with each accident or miscalculation. It’s really a nuisance having someone living with you. Staying with you, that is.

Because the cups are only half full, he has no difficulty balancing them as he carries them into the living room.

She is still asleep as he places the cups carefully on the table by the window. The worn springs of his chair clack; he grimaces and settles down more slowly. Maybe he shouldn’t wake her; she is sleeping so peacefully. But what’s the point of making coffee for two if you don’t give it to her? But, no. It’s best to let the poor kid sleep.

“Coffee?” he asks, his voice husky.

She doesn’t move.

All right. Let her sleep, then.

“Coffee?” he asks louder.

She half hums, half groans, and her head turns under the blankets.

Poor kid’s worn out. Let her sleep.

“Marie-Louise?”

A hand slips out and tugs the blanket from her cheek. Her eyelids flutter, then open. She blinks twice and frowns as she tries to remember the room. How did she get here?

“Your coffee will get cold,” he explains.

She looks at him Wearily, not recognizing him at first. “What?” she asks, her voice squeaky. “Oh… you.” She presses her eyes shut before opening them again. The puffiness of her black eye has gone down, and the purplish stain has faded toward green.

“Your coffee’s ready. But if you’d rather sleep, go ahead.”

“What?”

“I said… you can go back to sleep, if you want.”

She frowns dazedly. She can’t believe he woke her up to tell her that. She puts her hand over her eyes to shade them from the cold light as she recollects, then turns and looks at him, wondering what he is up to. He didn’t want it last night, so he’s probably after a little now.

But he’s just sitting there, sipping his coffee.

When she sits up, she notices that her robe is open to the nipples; she tugs it back around her. She accepts the cup he hands her and looks into it bleakly. “Do you have any milk?”

“No. Sorry.”

She sips the thick dark brew. “How about sugar?”

“No. I don’t keep sugar in the house. I don’t use it, and it attracts ants.”

She shrugs and drinks it anyway. At least it’s hot.

They don’t talk, and instead of looking at one another, they both look out the window at the park across the street. A woman is pushing a pram along the path while a spoiled child dangles from her free hand, twisting and whining. She gives it a good shake and a splat on the bottom that seems to improve its humor.

Marie-Louise can see the bench where he found her. It’s going to be cold and damp again today, and she won’t be able to make a score until dark, if then. Maybe he would let her stay. No, probably not. He’d be afraid she might steal something. Still, it’s worth a try.

“You feel better this morning?” she asks.

“Better?”

“If you don’t have to rush off, we could…” Palm up, her hand saws the air between them horizontally in an eloquent Joual gesture.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says.

“It won’t cost you. Just let me stay until dark.” She produces a childish imitation of a sexy leer that is something between the comic and the grotesque, with that black eye of hers. “I would be good to you.” When he does not respond, another thought occurs to her. “I’m all right,” she promises. “I mean… I’m healthy.”

He looks at her calmly for several seconds. Then he rises. “I have to go to work. Would you like more coffee?”

“No. No, thank you.”

“Don’t you like coffee?”

“Not really. Not without milk and sugar.”

“I’m sorry.”

She lifts her shoulders. “It’s not your fault.”

He pulls out his wallet. “Look…” He doesn’t know exactly how to say this. After all, it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other if she stays or goes. “Look, there’s a store around the corner. You can buy things for your breakfast. The… the stove works.” What a stupid thing to say. Of course the stove works.

She reaches up and takes the offered ten-dollar bill. This must mean she can stay until night.

He takes up his overcoat. “Okay. Good, then.” He goes to the door. “Oh, yes. You’ll need a key to get back in after your shopping. There’s one on the mantel.” It occurs to him that it must seem stupid to leave the extra key on the mantel, because you would have to be in the apartment to get it. And if you’re already in the apartment… But Lucille had always left it there, and he never misplaced his own key, so…

As he is leaving, she asks, “May I use your things?”

“My things?”

“Towel. Deodorant. Razor.”

Razor? Oh, of course. He has forgotten that women shave under their arms. “Certainly. No, wait a minute. I use a straight razor.”

“What’s that?”

“You know… just a… straight razor.”

“And you don’t want me using it?”

“I don’t think you can. Why don’t you buy yourself a razor? There’s enough money there.” He closes the door behind him and gets halfway down the stairs before something occurs to him.

“Marie-Louise?” He has opened the door again.

She looks up. She has been pawing through her shopping bag of clothes, planning to take this chance to wash out a few things and dry them in front of the gas heater before he comes back. She acts as though she’s been caught at something. “Yes?”

“The stove. The pilot light doesn’t work. You have to use a match.”

“Okay.”

He nods. “Good.”

By the time they cross Sherbrooke, the last greenish light is draining from sallow cloud layers over the city. Streetlights are already on, and the sidewalks are beginning to clog with pedestrians. A raw wind has come up, puffing in vagrant gusts around corners and carrying dust that is gritty between the teeth. The cold makes tears stand in Guttmann’s eyes, and the skin of his face feels tight, but it doesn’t seem to penetrate the Lieutenant’s shaggy overcoat hanging to his mid-calves. Guttmann would like to pace along more quickly to heat up the blood, but LaPointe’s step is measured, and his eyes scan the street from side to side, automatically searching out little evidences of trouble.

As they pass a shop, LaPointe takes his hand from his pocket and lifts it in greeting. A bald little man with a green eyeshade waves back.

Guttmann looks up at the sign overhead:

By the thermometer it is not so cold as last night, but that was a dry cold, crystallizing on surfaces, and this is a damp cold, the serrate edge of which penetrates to LaPointe’s chest as he walks down the deserted Main. He does not find a cruising taxi until Sherbrooke.

LaPointe’s footfalls clip hollowly along the empty, half-lit halls outside the magistrates’ courts. The sound is oddly loud and melancholy, without the covering envelope of noise that fills the building during the day.

The elevator doors open, and he walks down the brightly lit corridor of the Duty Office. There is sound and life here: the stuttering clack of a typewriter in clumsy hands; the hum of fluorescent lights; and somewhere a transistor radio plays popular music.

Guttmann steps into the hall at the sound of the elevator. He looks unkempt and haggard; more like a real cop, LaPointe thinks.

“Good morning, sir. He’s in here.” Guttmann’s tone is flat and unfriendly.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” LaPointe asks.

“Sir?”

“Your attitude, tone of voice. What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t know it showed, sir.”

“It shows. I warned you to cancel that date of yours.”

“I did, sir. She went to a film with a friend. But she dropped by later for a drink. We live in the same apartment building.”

“And the call got you out of bed?”

“Something like that.”

“At an awkward time?”

“As awkward as it gets, sir.”

LaPointe laughs. Guttmann recognizes the comic possibilities of the situation, but he doesn’t find this particular case funny.

LaPointe enters the Duty Office, Guttmann following. Joseph Michael “the Vet” Sinclair is sitting on a wooden bench against the wall. His long arms are wrapped around his legs, his face is pressed against his knees, and he still wears his ridiculous floppy-brimmed hat. He rocks himself back and forth in misery, humming or moaning one note over and over again. His grip on reality seems fragile. Occasionally he looks around the room, bewildered and frightened, and his teeth begin to chatter, his breath comes in canine sniffs, and he struggles against screaming.

LaPointe’s nostrils dilate with the stench of urine. Joseph Michael Sinclair has wet himself.

The symptoms resemble withdrawal. LaPointe has seen this once before. The Vet is a victim of claustrophobia. The Duty Office is a big room, so that isn’t what is eroding his sanity. It was the trip down in a police car and, even more, the thought of being locked up in a cell. The Vet is trapped in the classic terrible cycle facing the claustrophobic: he is almost mad with the fear of being shut up, and if he gives way to his madness, they will lock him up.

“Where did you pick him up?” LaPointe asks one of the officers getting coffee at the dispensing machine, a tough Polish old-timer who never bothered to take his sergeant’s examinations because he doesn’t want the hassle of responsibility. Although his French is thin and badly accented, he has always been accepted by the French Canadian cops as one of them, because he so obviously is not one of the others.

The coffee is hot, and the Polish cop winces as he changes the paper cup from hand to hand, looking for a place to set it down. His gestures are comically delicate, because the paper cup is fragile. He manages to balance it on a ledge and snaps his fingers violently. “Jesus H. Christ! We picked him up on St. Urbain, just south of Van Horne. Somebody named Red phoned in the tip. He gave us one hell of a chase. Took off across Van Horne, hopping like a gimpy rabbit! Right through the traffic! Cars and trucks hitting their brakes! Scared the shit out of the drivers. Their assholes must of bit chunks out of the car seats. And there I am, right after him, dancing and dodging through the traffic. Then your friend here climbs the fence and is halfway down the bank into the freight yard before I get to him. Look at that, will you?” He reaches around and tugs out the slack in the seat of his pants, showing a triangular rip. “Got that climbing the goddamned wire fence after the son of a bitch! Twenty-seven bucks shot in the ass!”

“Literally,” Guttmann says.

“What?” the Polish cop demands.

“Did he give you any trouble?” LaPointe asks.

“Any trouble? Wild as a cat crapping razor blades, that’s all! You wouldn’t know it to see him now, but it took both of us to get him into the car. Kick? Wriggle? Scream? You’da thought we were gang-banging the Mother Superior.”

LaPointe looks over at the miserable bomme whose eyes are now squeezed shut as he rocks back and forth, with each movement moaning a high, thin note that stops short in his throat. He is right on the limen of sanity.

“You didn’t give him anything to calm him down, did you?”

“No, Lieutenant. Your Joan told us not to. Anyway, it wasn’t necessary. As soon as we told him you were coming down, he settled right down. Just started moaning and rocking like that. A real nut case. Twenty-fucking-seven bucks! And not a month old!”

LaPointe crosses to the Vet and places his hand on his shoulder. “Hey?” He gives him a slight shake. “Hey, Vet?” The tramp does not look up; he is lost in the treacherous animal comfort of his rocking and moaning. His own motion and his own sound surround and protect him. He doesn’t want penetrations from the outside.

LaPointe has seen men go inside themselves like this before. He is afraid he’ll lose the Vet if he doesn’t bring him out right now. He takes off the wide-brimmed hat and lifts up the head by the hair. “Hey!”

The bomme tries to pull away, but LaPointe holds the hair tighter. “Vet? Vet!” The smell of urine is strong.

The Vet’s vague humid eyes focus slowly on LaPointe’s face. The slack, unshaven cheeks quiver. As he opens his mouth to speak, a bubble of thick spit forms between the lips and bursts with the first word.

“Lieutenant?” It is a pitiful, mendicant whine. “Don’t let them lock me up. You know what I mean? I can’t be locked up! I can’t! I… I… I… I… I…” With each repetition, the voice rises a note as the Vet plunges toward panic.

LaPointe snatches the greasy hair. He mustn’t lose him. “Vet! No one’s going to lock you up!”

“No, you don’t! I can’t go inside! I can’t!”

“Listen to me!”

“No! No! No!”

LaPointe slaps the tramp’s cheek hard.

The Vet catches his breath and holds it, his cheeks bulging, his eyes wide open and staring up obliquely at the Lieutenant.

“Now listen,” LaPointe says more quietly. “Just listen,” he says softly. “All right?”

The Vet lets his breath escape slowly and remains silent, but his eyes still stare, and there are rapid little pupillary contractions.

LaPointe speaks very slowly and clearly. “No one is going to lock you up. Do you understand that? No one is going to put you inside.”

The bomme’s squinting left eye twitches as he struggles to comprehend. As understanding comes, his body, so long rigid, droops with fatigue; his jaw slackens; his breathing slows; and the bloodshot eyes roll up as though in sleep.

LaPointe releases the hair, and the tramp’s chin drops back into his chest. LaPointe lays his hand protectively on the nape of the Vet’s neck as he turns to Guttmann. “Get some coffee down him.”

Guttmann looks around for a coffeepot.

“The machine!” LaPointe says with exasperation, pointing to the coin-operated dispenser.

The two uniformed cops leave the Duty Office, the Polish old-timer fiddling with the back of his pants to see if he can hide the triangular rip, and his partner assuring him that nobody wants to look at his ass.

LaPointe leans against the wall and presses down his hair with his palm. “After you get a few cups of coffee down him,” he tells Guttmann, “dunk his head in cold water and clean him up a little. Then bring him to my office.”

Guttmann fumbles in his pocket as he looks with distaste at the heap of rags stinking of stale wine and urine. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t seem to have a dime.”

“The machine takes quarters.”

“I don’t have any change at all.”

With infinite patience, LaPointe produces a quarter from the depths of his overcoat pocket and holds it up between thumb and forefinger. “Here. This is called a quarter. It makes vending machines work. It also makes telephones work. What would you do if you had to make an emergency call from a public phone and you had no change on you?”

“I just threw on my clothes and came over when they called. I didn’t even—”

“Always carry change for the phone. It could save somebody’s life.”

Guttmann takes the quarter. “All right, sir. Thanks for the advice.”

“That wasn’t advice.”

Guttmann shoves the quarter into the slot brusquely. What the hell is bugging the Lieutenant? After all, he wasn’t the one who was called away from a night with a bird to come down and wet-nurse a drunk who has pissed his pants!

As he starts to leave the Duty Office for his own floor above, LaPointe pauses at the door. He sniffs and rubs his cheek. He is shaven on only one side. “Look. I’m sorry, I… I’m tired, that’s all.”

“Yes, sir. We’re probably all tired.”

“Did you say it was your first time with that young lady of yours?”

“First for sure. And probably last.” Guttmann is still angry and stung.

“Well, I hope not.”

“Yes, sir. Me too.”

“Hey?”

He does not move.

“Hey?”

“Ugh!” LaPointe wakes with a start, blinking his eyes against the watery light coming through the window. It is another gray day with low skies and diffused, shadowless brightness. He squeezes his eyes shut again before finally opening them. His back is stiff from sleeping on the narrow sofa, and his feet stick out from below the overcoat he has used as a blanket. “What time is it?” he asks.

“A little before eleven.”

He nods heavily, still drugged with sleep. He sits up and scratches his head, grinning stupidly. These last two nights have taken their toll—his joints are stiff and his head cobwebby.

“I’ve got water boiling,” she says. “I was going to make some coffee, but I don’t know how to work your pot.”

“Yes. It’s an old-fashioned kind. Just a minute. Give me a chance to wake up. I’ll do it.” He yawns deeply. His overcoat covers him from the waist down, but his thick chest is exposed. He rubs the graying hair vigorously because it itches. “Tabernouche!” he grunts.

“Hard night?” she asks.

“Long, anyway.”

She is wearing Lucille’s pink quilted dressing gown again, but she has been up long enough to brush out her hair and put on eye make-up. There is a slight smell of gas in the room. She must have had some difficulty lighting the gas fire.

In his sleep, his penis has come out of the fly of his undershorts. He manages to tuck it back in with the same gesture as that with which he pulls up his overcoat and puts it on in place of a robe. Barefooted, he goes into the kitchen to make coffee.

She laughs half a dozen ascending notes, then stops short.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing. You look funny with your bare legs coming out of the bottom of your overcoat.”

He looks down. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

While he is pressing hot water through the fine grounds, it occurs to him that only one thing triggers her peculiar, interrupted laugh: people looking ridiculous. She laughed at her black eye, at him with soap on his cheek, at herself wearing Lucille’s coat, and now at him again. It’s a cruel sense of humor, one that doesn’t even spare herself as a possible victim.

He gives her a cup of coffee and carries one with him to the bathroom, where he washes up and dresses.

Later, he fries eggs and toasts bread over the gas ring, and they take their breakfast in the living room, she coiled up on the sofa, her plate balanced on the arm, he in his chair.

“Why did you sleep out here?” she asks.

“Oh… I didn’t want to disturb you,” he explains, partially.

“Yeah, but why didn’t you use the blankets I used last night?”

“I didn’t really mean to sleep. I was just going to rest. But I dozed off.”

“Yeah, but then why did you take your clothes off?”

“Why don’t you just eat your eggs?”

“Okay.” She spoons egg onto a bit of toast and eats it that way. “Where did you go last night?” she asks.

“Just work.”

“You said you work with the police. You work in an office?”

“Sometimes. Mostly I work on the streets.”

That seems to amuse her. “Yeah. Me too. You enjoy being a cop?”

He tucks down the corners of his mouth and shrugs. He never thought of it that way. When she changes the subject immediately, he assumes she isn’t really interested anyway.

“Don’t you get bored living here?” she asks. “No magazines. No television.”

He looks around the frumpy room with its 1930’s furniture. Yes, he imagines it would be dull for a young girl. True, there are no magazines, but he has some books, a full set of Zola, whom he discovered by chance twenty years ago, and whom he reads over and over, going down the row of novels by turn, then starting again. He finds the people and events surprisingly like those on his patch, despite the funny, florid language. But he doesn’t imagine she would care to read his Zolas. She probably reads slowly, maybe even mouths the words.

Well, if she’s bored, then she’ll probably leave soon. No reason for her to stay, really.

“Ah… why don’t we go out tonight?” he offers. “Have dinner.”

“And go dancing?”

He smiles and shakes his head. “I told you I don’t dance.”

This disappoints her. But she is resourceful when it comes to getting her way with men. “I know! Why don’t we go to a whisky à go-go after dinner. People can dance by themselves there.”

He doesn’t care much for the thought of sitting in one of those cramped, noisy places with youngsters hopping all around him. But, if it would please her…

She presses her tongue against her teeth and decides to gamble on pushing this thing to her advantage. “I… I really don’t have the right clothes to go out,” she says, not looking up from her cup. “I only have what I could sneak out in the shopping bag.”

His eyes crinkle as he looks at her. He knows exactly what she’s up to. He doesn’t mind giving her money to buy clothes, if that’s what she wants, but he doesn’t like her thinking he’s a dumb mark.

He sets down his cup and crosses to the large veneered chest. He has a habit of putting his housekeeping money into the top drawer every payday, and taking out what he needs through the month. He knows it’s a bad habit, but it saves time. And who would dare to steal from Claude LaPointe? He is surprised at how many twenties have accumulated, crumpled up in the drawer; must be five or six hundred dollars’ worth. Ever since the mortgage on the house was paid off, he has more money than he needs. He takes out seven twenties and flattens them with his hand. “Here. I’ll be working today. You can go out and buy yourself a dress.”

She takes the bills and counts them. Maybe he doesn’t know how much a dress costs. So much the better for her.

“There’s enough there to buy yourself a coat too,” he says.

“Oh? All right.” Before falling asleep last night, she thought about asking him for money, but she didn’t know quite how to go about it. After all, they hadn’t screwed. He didn’t owe her.

While she sits looking out the window, thinking about the dress and coat, LaPointe examines her face. The green eye shadow she uses disguises what is left of her black eye. It’s a nice pert face. Not pretty, but the kind you want to hold between your palms. It occurs to him that he has never kissed her.

“Marie-Louise?” he says quietly.

She turns to him, her eyebrows raised interrogatively.

He looks down at the park, colorless under yeasty skies. “Let’s make a deal, Marie-Louise. For me, I like having you here, having you around. I suppose we’ll make love eventually, and I’ll enjoy that. I mean… well, naturally, I’ll enjoy that. Okay. That’s for me. For you, I suppose being here is better than sitting out your nights in some park or bus station. But… you find it dull here. And sooner or later you’ll go off somewhere. Fine. I’ll probably be tired of having you around by then. You can have money to buy some clothes. If you need other things, I don’t mind giving you money. But I’m not a mark, and I wouldn’t like you to think of me as one. So don’t try to con me, and don’t bullshit me. That wouldn’t be fair, and it would make me angry. Is it a deal?”

Marie-Louise looks steadily at him, trying to understand what he’s up to. She’s not used to this kind of frankness, and she doesn’t feel comfortable with it. She really wishes they had screwed and he had paid his money. That’s neat. That’s easy to understand. She feels as if she’s being accused of something, or trapped into something.

“I knew there was money in that drawer,” she says defensively. “I was looking around last night, and I found it.”

“But you didn’t take it and run off. Why not?”

She shrugs. She doesn’t know why not. She’s not a thief, that’s all. Maybe she should have taken it. Maybe she will, someday. Anyway, she doesn’t like this conversation. “Look, I better get going. Or did you want to come shopping with me?”

“No, I have work—” LaPointe hears a car door slam down in the street. He half rises from his chair and peers down from the second-story window. Guttmann has just gotten out of a little yellow sports car and is looking along the row for the house number.

LaPointe tugs his overcoat on rapidly. He doesn’t want Guttmann to see Marie-Louise and ask questions or, worse yet, pointedly avoid asking questions. The sleeve of his suit coat slips from his grasp, and he has to fish up through the arm of the overcoat to tug it down. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you this evening.”

“Okay.”

“What time will you be through shopping?”

“I don’t know.”

“Five? Five-thirty?”

“Okay.”

As he clumps down the narrow stairs he grumbles to himself. She’s too passive. There’s nothing to her. Want some coffee? Okay. Even though she doesn’t like coffee. Shall we eat at five? Okay. Do you want to stay with me? Okay. Do you want to leave? Okay. Shall we make love? Okay. How about screwing out on the hall landing? Okay.

She doesn’t care. Nothing matters to her.

Guttmann has his ringer on the buzzer when the front door opens with a jerk and LaPointe steps out.

“Morning, sir.”

LaPointe buttons up his overcoat against the damp chill. “Your car?” he asks, indicating with a thrust of his chin the new little yellow sports model.

“Yes, sir,” Guttmann says with a touch of pride, turning to descend the steps.

“Hm-m!” Obviously the Lieutenant doesn’t approve of sports cars.

But Guttmann is in too good a mood to care about LaPointe’s prejudices. “That’s to say, the car belongs to me and the bank. Mostly the bank. I think I own the ashtray and one of the headlights.” His buoyancy is a result of a rare piece of good luck. When he called the girl this morning to tell her he would have to cancel their date, she beat him to it, telling him she had one hell of a head cold, and she wanted to sleep in to see if she could shake it off. He managed to sound disappointed, and he arranged to look in on her that evening.

LaPointe finds the tiny car difficult to get into, and he grunts as he slams the door on his coattail and has to open it again. In fact, he feels silly, riding around in a little yellow automobile. He would rather walk. Give him a chance to check on the street. Guttmann, for all that he is bigger than LaPointe, slips in quite easily. With a popping baritone roar, the car starts up and pulls away from the curb.

LaPointe cranes his neck to see if Marie-Louise is watching from the window. She is not.

They find a parking space on Clark, only half a block up from the rooming house. Opening the door, LaPointe scrapes it against the high curb; Guttmann closes his eyes and winces. LaPointe mutters something about stupid toy cars as he squeezes out and angrily slams the door behind him. Because it is Saturday, the street is full of kids, and one of them has paused in his game of “ledgey” to remark aloud that old men shouldn’t ride around in little cars. LaPointe raises the back of his hand to him, but the boy just stares in sassy defiance as he wipes his nose gravely on the sleeve of a stretched-out sweater. LaPointe cannot repress a grin. A typical pugnacious French Canadian kid. A ‘tit coq.

The rooming house is like others around the Main. Dull brick in need of paint; dirty windows with limp curtains of grayish fabric that hangs as though it is damp; a fly-specked card in the window of first floor front advertising rooms to let. This doesn’t necessarily mean there is a vacancy. The concierge is probably too lazy to put the card in and take it out each time a short-time vagrant comes or goes. LaPointe climbs the wooden stoop and twists the old-fashioned bell, which rattles dully, broken. When there is no answer, he bangs on the door. Guttmann has joined him on the landing, looking back nervously at the small group of ragged kids that has gathered around his car. LaPointe bangs more violently, making the window rattle.

Almost immediately the door is snatched open by a slovenly woman who pushes back a lock of lank gray hair and snaps, “Hey! What the hell’s wrong with you? You want to break down the door?” Her lower lip is swollen and cracked where someone hit her recently.

“Police,” LaPointe says, not bothering to show identification.

She looks from LaPointe to Guttmann quickly, then stands back from the doorway. They enter a hall that smells of Lysol and boiled cabbage. The woman’s attitude has changed from anger to tense uncertainty. “What do you want?” she asks, touching two fingers gingerly to the split lip.

The tentative tone of the question gives LaPointe his cue. She’s frightened about something. He doesn’t know what it is, and he doesn’t care, but he’ll push it a little to give her a scare and make her cooperative. “Routine questions,” he says. “But not here in the hall.”

She shrugs and enters her apartment, not inviting them to come in, but leaving the door open behind her. LaPointe follows and looks around as Guttmann, a little nervous, smiles politely and closes the door behind him. Without a warrant, you’re supposed to await an invitation before entering a home.

The small room is crowded with junk furniture, and hot from an oversized electric heater she uses because it doesn’t cost her anything. It just goes on the landlord’s monthly bill. She keeps the place too hot because otherwise she’d feel she was losing money. LaPointe knows her type, knows how to handle her. He unbuttons his overcoat and turns to the woman just as she is glancing nervously out the window. She is expecting someone; someone she hopes will not come while the police are there. She adjusts the curtain, as though that is why she went to the window in the first place. “What do you want?” she asks sullenly.

For a moment, LaPointe does not answer. He looks levelly at her, draws a deep, bored breath and says, “You know perfectly well. I don’t have time to play games with you.”

Guttmann glances at him, confused.

“Look,” the woman says. “Arnaud doesn’t live here anymore. I don’t know where he is. He moved out a month ago, the lazy son of a bitch.”

“That’s your story,” LaPointe says, tossing a pillow out of the only comfortable chair and sitting down.

“It’s the truth! Do you think I’d lie for him?” She touches her split lip. “The bastard gave me this!”

LaPointe glances at the fresh bruise. “A month ago?”

“Yes… no. I met him on the street yesterday.”

“And he said good morning, and hit you in the mouth?”

The woman shrugs and turns away.

LaPointe watches her in silence.

She glances quickly toward the window, but does not dare to go and look out.

LaPointe sighs aloud. “Come on. I don’t have all day.”

For another minute, she remains tight-lipped. Then she gives in, shrugging, then letting her shoulders drop heavily. “Look, officer. The TV was a present. It doesn’t even work good. He gave it to me, like he gave me this fat lip, and once the clap, the no-good bastard!”

So that’s it. LaPointe turns to Guttmann, who is still hovering near the door. “Take down the serial number of the TV.”

The young man squats behind the set and tries to find the number. He doesn’t know why in hell he is doing this, and he feels like an ass.

“You know what it means if the set turns out to be stolen?” LaPointe asks the woman.

“If Arnaud stole it, that’s his ass. I don’t know anything about it”

LaPointe laughs. “Oh, the judge is sure to believe that.” That’s enough, LaPointe thinks. She’s scared and ready to cooperate now. “Sit down. Let’s forget the TV for now. I want to know about one of your roomers. Tony Green.”

Confused by the change of topic, but relieved to have the questioning veer away from herself, the concierge instantly becomes confidential and friendly. ‘Tony Green? Honest, officer—”

“Lieutenant.” It always surprises LaPointe to find people on the Main who don’t know of him.

“Honest, Lieutenant, there’s no one by that name staying here. Of course, they don’t always give their right names.”

“Good-looking kid. Young. Mid-twenties. Probably Italian. Stayed out all night last night.”

“Oh! Verdini!” She makes a wide gesture and her lips flap with a puff of breath. “It’s nothing when he stays out all night! It’s women with him. He’s all the time after it. Chases every plotte and guidoune on the street. Sometimes they even come here looking for him. Sometimes he has them in his room, even though it’s against the rules. Once there were two of them up there at the same time! The neighbors complained about all the grunting and groaning.” She laughs and winks. “His thing is always up. He wears those tight pants, and I can always see it bulging there. What’s wrong? What’s he done? Is he in trouble?”

“Give me the names of the women who came here.”

She shrugs contemptuously and tucks down the corners of her mouth. The gesture opens the crack in her lip, and she licks it to keep it from stinging. “I couldn’t be bothered trying to remember them. They were all sorts. Young, old, fat, skinny. A couple no more than kids. He’s a real sauteux de clôtures. He puts it into all kinds.”

“And you?”

“Oh, a couple of times we passed on the stairs and he ran his hand up under my dress. But it never went further. I think he was afraid of—”

“Afraid of this Arnaud you haven’t seen in a month?”

She shrugs, annoyed with herself at her slip.

“All right. How long has this Verdini lived here?”

“Two months maybe. I can look at the rent book if you want.”

“Not now. Give me the names of the women who came here.”

“Like I told you, I don’t know most of them. Just stuff dragged in off the street.”

“But you recognized some of them.”

She looks away uncomfortably. “I don’t want to get anybody into trouble.”

“I see.” LaPointe sits back and makes himself comfortable. “You know, I have a feeling that if I wait here for half an hour, I may be lucky enough to meet your Arnaud. It’ll be a touching scene, you two getting together after a month. He’ll think I waited around because you told me about the TV. That will make him angry, but I’m sure he’s the understanding type.” LaPointe’s expressionless eyes settle on the concierge.

For a time she is silent as she meditatively torments her cracked lip with the tip of her finger. At last she says, “I think I recognized three of them.”

LaPointe nods to Guttmann, who opens his notebook.

The concierge gives the name of a French Canadian chippy whom LaPointe knows. She doesn’t know the name of the second woman, but she gives the address of a Portuguese family that lives around the corner.

“And the third?” LaPointe asks.

“I don’t know her name either. It’s that woman who runs the cheap restaurant just past Rue de Bullion. The place that—”

“I know the place. You’re telling me that she came here?”

“Once, yes. Not to get herself stuffed, of course. After all, she’s a butch.”

Yes, LaPointe knows that. That is why he was surprised.

“They had a fight,” the concierge continues. “You could hear her bellowing all the way down here. Then she slammed out of the place.”

“And you don’t know any of the other people who visited this Verdini?”

“No. Just plottes. Oh… and his cousin, of course.”

“His cousin?”

“Yes. The guy who rented the room in the first place. Verdini didn’t speak much English and almost no French at all. His cousin rented the room for him.”

“Let’s hear about this cousin.”

“I don’t remember his name. I think he mentioned it, but I don’t remember. He gave me an address too, in case there were any problems. Like I said, this Verdini didn’t speak much English.” She is growing more tense. Time is running out against Arnaud’s return.

“What was the address?”

“I didn’t pay any attention. I got other things to do with my time than worry about the bums who live here.”

“You didn’t write it down?”

“I couldn’t be bothered. I remember it was somewhere over the hill, if that’s any help.”

By “over the hill” she means the Italian stretch of the Main, between the drab little park in Carré Vallières at the top of the rise and the railroad bridge past Van Horne.

“How often did you see this cousin?”

“Only once. When he rented the room. Oh, and another time, about a week ago. They had a row and—hey! Chocolate!”

“What?”

“No… not chocolate. That’s not it. For a second there I thought I remembered the cousin’s name. It was right on the tip of my tongue. Something to do with chocolate.”

“Chocolate?”

“No, not that. But something like it. Cocoa? No, that’s not it. It’s gone now. Something to do with chocolate.” She cannot help drifting to the window and peeking through the curtains.

LaPointe rises. “All right. That’s all for now. If that ‘chocolate’ name comes back to you, telephone me.” He gives her his card. “And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll be back. And I’ll talk to Arnaud about it.”

She takes the card without looking at it. “What’s the wop kid done? Some girl knocked up?”

“That’s not your affair. You just worry about the TV set.”

“Honest to God, Lieutenant—”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

On the way to his apartment, LaPointe passes the headquarters of the First Regiment of the Grenadier Guards of Canada. Two young soldiers with automatic rifles slung across their combat fatigues pace up and down before the gate, their breath streaming from their nostrils in widening jets of vapor, and their noses and ears red with the cold. They are watching a little group of hippies across the street. Three boys and two girls are loading clothes and cardboard boxes into a battered, flower-painted VW van, moving from a place where they haven’t paid their rent to a place where they won’t. A meaty girl who is above the social subterfuges of make-up and hair-washing is doing most of the work, while another girl sits on a box, staring ahead and nodding in tempo with some inner melody. The three boys stand about, their hands in their pockets, their faces somber and pinched with the cold. They have fled from establishment conformity, taking identical routes toward individuality. They could have been stamped from the same mold, all long-legged and thin-chested, their shoulders round and huddled against the cold.

By contrast, the guards keep their shoulders unnaturally square and their chests boldly out. LaPointe assumes that once the hippies have driven away, the guards will relax and round their shoulders against the wind. He smiles to himself.

Before mounting the wooden stairs, LaPointe looks up at the windows of his apartment. No lights. She must still be out shopping.

The static cold of the apartment is more chilling than the wind, so he immediately lights the gas heater, then sets water to boil, thinking to have a nice hot cup of coffee waiting for her when she comes back.

The water comes to a boil, and she has still not returned. He empties the kettle, refills it, and replaces it on the gas ring. As though putting on the water is a kind of sympathetic magic that will bring her home to the coffee.

It doesn’t work.

He sits in his armchair and looks across the deserted park, drab in the winter overcast. Perhaps she’s left for good. Why shouldn’t she? She owes him nothing. Maybe she has met somebody… a young man who knows how to dance. That would be best, really. After all, she can’t go on living with him indefinitely. In fact, he doesn’t want her to. Not really. She’d be a pain in the neck. Then too, someday soon…

Without thinking, he slips his hand up to his chest, as he has come to do by habit each time he thinks of his aneurism… that stretched balloon. He feels the regular heartbeat. Normal. Nothing odd in it. Yes, he decides. It would be best if she’s found somebody else to live with. It would be ghastly for her to wake up some morning and find him beside her, dead. Maybe cold to the touch.

Or what if he were to have an attack while they were making love?

Good, then. That’s just fine. She has found a young man on the street. Somebody kind. It’s better that way.

He grunts out of the chair and goes into the kitchen to take off the kettle before the water boils away. He will enjoy a quiet, peaceful night. He will take off his shoes, put on his robe, and sit by the window, listening to the hiss of the gas fire and reading one of his Zola novels for the third or fourth time. He never tires of reading around and around his battered set of Zola. Years ago, he bought the imitation-leather books from an old man who ran a secondhand bookstore, a narrow slot of a shop created by roofing over an alley between two buildings on the Main. The old man never did much business, and buying the books was a way of helping him out without embarrassing him.

For several years the books sat unread on the top of his bedroom chest. Then one evening, for lack of something to do, he opened one and scanned it over. Within a year he had read them all. It wasn’t until the first time through that he realized there was a sort of order to some of them: heroines of one book were the daughters of heroines of another, and so on. Thereafter he always read them in order. His favorite novel is L’Assommoir, in which he was able to predict, in his first reading, the inevitable descent of the characters from hope to alcoholism to death. The books feel good in his hand, and have a friendly smell. It is the 1906 Edition Populaire Illustrée des Oeuvres Complètes de Entile Zola, with drawings of substantial heroines, their round arms uplifted in supplication and round eyes raised to heaven, the line of dialogue beneath never lacking in exclamation points. Such men as appear in the plates stand back, amongst the dripping shadows, and look mercilessly down on the fallen heroines. The men are not individuals; they are part of the environment of poverty, despair, and exploitation to which futile hope gives edge.

The novels are populated by people who, if they spoke in Joual dialect and knew about modern things, could be living on the Main. It seems to LaPointe that you have to know the street, to have known the parents of the young chippies back when they were young lovers, in order to enjoy or even understand Zola.

Yes, he’ll put on his robe and read for a while. Then he’ll go to bed. He is looking for his robe when he notices in the corner of the bedroom Marie-Louise’s shopping bag with its burden of odds and ends.

She will be back after all. The shopping bag is a hostage. He returns to the living room feeling less tired. She will surely be back within half an hour.

She is not. Evening imperceptibly deepens the sky to dusty slate as details down in the park retire into gloom. The novel is still on his lap, but it is too dark to read. The gas fire hisses, its orange-nippled ceramic elements an insubstantial glow, the room’s only light. Twice, when cars stop outside, he rises to look down from the window. And once he starts up with the realization that the kettle must be burning. Then he remembers that he took it off long ago.

The air becomes hot and thick with the oxygen-robbing gas heater, which he knows he should turn down, but he is too tired and heavy to feel like moving.

As always, his daydreams stray to his wife… and his girls. It is late evening in their home in Laval. Lucille is doing dishes in the kitchen fixed up with modern appliances he has seen in store windows on the Main. Logs are burning in the fireplace, and he is fussing with them more than they need, because he enjoys poking at wood fires. He goes up to the girls’ room—they are young again, and they are disobeying orders to get right to sleep. He finds them jumping on the bed, their long flannel nightgowns billowing out and entangling them when they land in a heap. He kisses them good night and teases them by scrubbing his whiskery cheek against their powdery ones. They complain and struggle and laugh. Lucille calls up that it is late and the girls need their sleep. He answers that they are already asleep, and the girls put their hands over their mouths to suppress giggles. He tucks them in with a final kiss, and they want a story and he says no, and they want the light left on and he says no, and they want a glass of water and he says no, and he turns out the light and leaves them and goes back down the stairs—he must get around to fixing the one that squeaks. He knows every detail of the house, the layout of the rooms, the wallpaper, the pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe that record the growth of the girls. But he never pictures a bedroom for Lucille and him. After all, Lucille is dead. No… gone. To the house in Laval. He wakes with a sweaty throat and a wet mouth, and with a confused feeling that something is going on. Then he hears the sound of a key in the lock. The door opens with a slant of pale yellow light from the naked hall bulb, and Marie-Louise enters.

“My God, it’s hot in here! What are you doing, sitting in the dark?”

As he gropes out of sleepiness, she finds the switch and turns on the lights. She is loaded down with parcels, which she dumps on the sofa, then holds her hands out to the gas fire. “Boy, it’s cold tonight. Well? What do you think of it? Cute, eh?” She turns around to model an ankle-length cloth coat of burnt orange. “It was on sale. Well?”

She walks a couple of steps and does a comic little turn, parodying the models she has seen on television. She doesn’t bother to conceal her limp, and LaPointe notices it as though for the first time. The detail had dropped from his mind. “It’s… ah… fine,” he says dopily. “Very nice.” He wonders what time it is.

She hugs herself and rubs her upper arms vigorously. “Boy, it’s the kind of cold that goes right through you. I was hoping you might have some hot coffee ready.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It didn’t occur to me.”

He is uneasy about the babbling quality of her speech. She’s trying to say everything at once, as though she has something to hide and doesn’t want to leave him space to question her. She says it’s too hot in the room, yet she warms herself at the heater. Something’s wrong.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” she asks lightly.

“Taking a nap.” He looks at the mantel clock. Eight-thirty. “You’ve been shopping all this time?”

“Yes,” she says with the inhaled Joual affirmative that means either yes or no.

“Take a cab home?”

She pauses for a second, her back to him. “No. I walked.” Her hollow tone tells him there is something in the way of a confession coming. He wishes he hadn’t asked.

“No cabs?” he asks, affording her a facile excuse.

She sits on the sofa and looks directly at him for the first time. She might as well get it over with. “No money,” she says. “I’m sorry, but I spent all you gave me. I got other things besides the coat and dress.”

That is the confession? He smiles at himself, aware that he has been acting and thinking like a kid. “It doesn’t matter,” he says.

She turns her head slightly to the side and looks at him uncertainly out of the sides of her eyes. “Really?”

He laughs. “Really.”

“Hey! Look at what I got!” Instantly she is up from the sofa, tearing open bags. “And I shopped around for bargains, too. I didn’t waste money. Oh, did you see these?” She parts her long cloth coat and shows him thick-soled boots that go to the knee. They are a wet red plastic that clashes with the burnt orange of the coat. She rips open a bag and draws out a long dress that looks as though it were made of patchwork. She holds it up to herself by the shoulders and kicks out at the hem. “What do you think?”

“Nice. It looks… warm.”

“Warm? Oh, I suppose so. The girl told me it’s the in thing. Oh, and I got a skirt.” She opens her coat again to show him the mini she is wearing. “And I got this blouse. There was another one I really liked. You know, one of those frilled collars like you see on old-time movies on TV? You know the kind I mean?”

“Yes,” he lies.

“But they didn’t have my size. And I got… let’s see… oh, a sweater! And… I guess that’s about it. No! I got some panties and things… there must have been something else. Oh, the coat! That’s what cost the most. And I guess that’s it!” She plunks down on the sofa amongst the clothes and ravished bags, her hands pressed between her knees, her elation suddenly evaporated. “You don’t like them, do you?” she says.

“What? No, sure. I mean… they’re fine.”

“It’s all the money, isn’t it?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You know, we don’t have to go out to dinner tonight like you promised. We could just stay home. That would save money.”

He wakes to dazzling sunlight streaming through the bedroom window, and to a heavy block of pain lodged behind his eyes. Ouzo.

The sunlight is unexpected after three weeks of leaden skies. It might mark the end of the pig weather, or it might be nothing more than one of those occasional wind shifts that bring diamond-hard winter cold for a few hours, like the night that Italian kid was found in the alley.

He puffs out a little breath and is not surprised to see it make a shallow cone of vapor. It will be sparkling and frigid out in the park. He slips out of bed, trying not to let cold air in to disturb Marie-Louise. When he bends forward to fish around for his slippers, he discovers the clot of ouzo pain behind his eyes is loose and jagged-edged. One eye closes involuntarily with the ache of it.

He pads into the living room muttering to himself: an ouzo hangover. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Giddiness overwhelms him briefly as he stoops down to light the gas fire The last time he had a hangover like this was from drinking caribou, that most lethal of all liquids, with an old friend from Trois Rivières. But that was years and years ago.

As the bathtub fills, he cups his hands and drinks tap water from the sink. So desiccated is he that the water seems never to reach his stomach, being absorbed by parched tissue on its way down. He almost gags trying to swallow several aspirin with water from cupped hands. In the tub, his eyes closed, he sits a long time with steam rising all about him. The water and the heat and the aspirin combine to melt some of the ouzo out of his system; the nausea retreats, but the headache persists. Why did he drink so much? Why did he want to get drunk? He thinks about the love he and Marie-Louise made last night. It was good, and very gentle, particularly that long time he held her, between lovemakings. He believes it was good for her too. She wouldn’t have faked all that. Why should she?

He did not shave last night before bed, as is his custom, but he doesn’t dare try just now. He would probably cut his throat with the straight razor, shaky as he is.

While he makes coffee, he suddenly feels guilty about Marie-Louise. My God. If he feels this bad, what will she feel like? Poor kid.

The poor kid chatters with animation as she sits on the sofa, curled up in Lucille’s pink robe. He answers in monosyllables, turning his head to look at her; it hurts when he moves his eyes.

“What was that licorice stuff we drank?” she asks. “It was good.”

“Ouzo,” he mutters.

“What?”

“Ouzo!”

“Hey, what’s wrong? Are you mad about something?”

“No.”

“You’re sure you’re not mad? I mean, you seem…”

“I’m fine.”

“Say… you’re not sick, are you?”

“Sick? Me?” He manages a chuckle.

“I just thought… I mean, you told me to watch out for that… what’s it called again?”

“Ou-zo. Look, I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

She looks at him sideways with a childish leer. “I don’t blame you. You have a right to feel tired.”

He smiles wanly. He cannot quite forgive her for being so healthy and buoyant, but she does look pretty with the sunlight in her hair like that.

She goes into the bedroom to find her hairbrush. When she returns, she is humming one of the Greek songs, doing a little sliding step and dipping down, then snapping her head up on the rise. One of his eyes closes involuntarily with the snap of her head. She plunks down on the sofa and begins to brush her hair. “Hey, we’ll have to go out for breakfast. I told you that I didn’t buy any groceries. I spent all the money on clothes. Where will we go?”

“I’m not particularly hungry; are you?”

“Hm-m! I could eat a horse! And look what a beautiful day it is!”

The glitter of the park stings his eyes. But yes, it is a beautiful day. Perhaps a walk in the cold air would help.

Guttmann has arranged the overdue reports in stacks on the little table serving as a desk, leaving just enough room for his typewriter. He has finally made some order and sense out of the mess LaPointe dumped on him; there is a stack for this week’s reports, one for last week’s, one for the week before, and so on. But largest of all is the pile he mentally calls the Whatever-the-Hell-This –Is bunch.

The hissing roar of sandblasting across the street vibrates the cheap ripply glass of the window, causing Guttmann to look up. His eyes meet LaPointe’s, which are fixed on him with a frown. Guttmann smiles and nods automatically and returns to his work. But a couple of minutes later he can still feel the Lieutenant’s eyes on him, so he looks up again.

“Sir?”

“Is that all you know of that song?”

“What song, sir?”

“The song you keep humming over and over! You keep humming the same little bit!”

“I didn’t realize I was humming.”

“Well, I realize it. And it’s sending me up the goddamned wall!”

“Sorry, sir.”

LaPointe’s grunt suggests that “Sorry” isn’t enough. Ever since he came in this morning, he has been emitting dark vibrations and making little murmurs and growls of short temper each time he loses his place in the routine work on his desk. He stands up abruptly, pushing back his swivel chair with the backs of his knees. There is an indented line of white in the plaster from years of the chair banging against it. His thumbs hooked in the back of his belt, he looks out over the Hôtel de Ville, its façade latticed with scaffolding. This morning the noise of the stone-cleaning grates directly upon his nerve ends, like cold air on a bad tooth. And those monotonous zinc clouds!

Guttmann’s typewriter clacks on in the rapid, one-word bursts of the experienced bad typist. His memory touches the two nights and a day he has just spent with the girl who lives in his apartment building. He passed Saturday evening in her flat, helping her doctor a head cold. She wore a thick terrycloth robe that did nothing good for her appearance, and she had bouts of sneezing that left her limp and miserable, her face pale and her eyes brimming with tears. But her sense of humor held up, and she found this to be a ridiculous way for them to pass their first date. She got a little high on the hot toddies he made for her, and so did he, because he insisted on keeping her company by drinking one for each of hers. When he looked over her books and records, he discovered that their tastes were absolutely opposite, but their levels of appreciation about the same.

Around midnight, she kicked him out, telling him that she wanted to get a good night’s sleep to fight off the cold. He suggested some light exercise might do her a world of good. She laughed and told him she didn’t want him to catch her cold. He said he was willing to pay that price, but she said no.

Next morning, he telephoned her from bed. Her cold had broken and she felt well enough to go out. They passed the day visiting galleries and making jokes about the modern junk-art on display. He spent more than he could afford on dinner, and later, in his apartment, they talked about all sorts of things. They seldom agreed on details, but they found similar things funny and the same things important. After they had made love, they lay on their right sides, she coiled in against him, her bottom in his lap. She slept, breathing softly, while he lay awake for a time, sensing the subtle thrill of waves of gentleness emitting from him and enveloping her. A remarkable girl. Not only fun to talk with and great in bed, but really… remarkable…

LaPointe turns from the window and looks flatly at Guttmann, who catches the movement and glances up with his habitual smile, which fades as he realizes he has been humming again.

“Sorry.”

LaPointe nods curtly.

“By the way, sir, I ran the name Antonio Verdini and the alias Tony Green through ID. They haven’t called back yet.”

“They won’t have anything.”

“Maybe not, but I thought I should run it through anyway.”

LaPointe sits again before his paper work. “Just like it says in the book,” he mutters.

“Yes, sir,” Guttmann says, more than a little tired of LaPointe’s cafard this morning, “just like it says in the book.” The book also says that reports of investigations must be turned in within forty-eight hours, and some of this crap on Guttmann’s desk is weeks late, and almost all of it is incomplete, a couple of scribbled notes that are almost indecipherable. But Guttmann decides against mentioning that.

LaPointe makes a guttural sound and pushes aside a departmental form packet: green copy, yellow copy, blue copy, pink fucking copy…

“I’m going down to Bouvier’s shop for a cup of coffee, if anyone wants me. You keep up the good work.” He dumps all his unfinished work into Guttmann’s in-box.

“Thank you, sir.”

The telephone rings, catching LaPointe at the door. Guttmann answers, rather hoping it is something that will annoy the Lieutenant. He listens awhile, then puts his palm over the mouthpiece. “It’s the desk. There’s a guy down there asking to speak to you. It’s about the Green stabbing.”

“What’s his name?”

Guttmann takes his hand away and repeats the question. “It’s someone who knows you. A Mr. W–.”

He mentions the name of the wealthiest of the old Anglo families in Montreal. “Is that the Mr. W–?”

LaPointe nods.

Guttmann raises his eyebrows in mock surprise. “I didn’t know you had Connections in Important Places, sir.”

“Yes, well… Tell you what. While I’m down with Bouvier, you interview Mr. W–. Tell him you’re my assistant and I have every confidence in you. He won’t know you’re lying.”

“But, sir…”

“You’re here to get experience, aren’t you? No better way to learn to swim than by jumping off the dock.”

LaPointe leaves, closing the door behind him.

Guttmann clears his throat before saying into the phone, “Send Mr. W–up, will you?”

The evening of pinochle has gone well—for David.

As usual he dominated play, and as usual he overbid his hand, but the luck of the cards allowed Guttmann to bail him out more times than not, and as partners they won devastatingly.

After a particularly good—and lucky—hand, David asked the young man, “Tell me, have you ever thought of becoming a priest?”

Guttmann admitted that the idea seldom crossed his mind.

“That’s good. It would ruin your game.”

On one occasion, when not even luck was enough to save David from his wild overbidding, he treated Guttmann to one of his grousing tirades about how difficult it was, even for a pinochle maven like himself, to schlep a partner who couldn’t pull his own weight. Unlike Father Martin, Guttmann did not permit himself to be martyred to David’s peculiar and personal view of sportsmanship. He countered with broad sarcasm, mentioning that the Lieutenant had rightly described David as a gentle and understanding partner.

But David’s thick skin is impervious to such attacks. He thrust out his lower lip and nodded absently, accepting that as an accurate enough description of his character.

For his part, Moishe was slow in warming to the young intruder into their game, despite Guttmann’s genuine interest in the fabric Moishe had on the loom at that moment. He had been looking forward to one of his rambling philosophic chats with Martin.

Still, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, he made a venture toward drawing Guttmann out during their break for sandwiches and wine. “You went to university, right? What did you major in?”

It occurs to LaPointe that he never asked that question. He wasn’t all that interested.

“Well, nothing really for the first two years. I changed my major three or four times. I was more looking for professors than for fields.”

“That sounds intelligent,” Moishe says.

“Finally, I settled down and took the sequence in criminology and penology.”

“And what sorts of things does one study under those headings?”

David butts in. “How to steal, naturally. Theft for fun and profit. Theft and the Polish Question.”

“Why don’t you shut up for a while?” Moishe suggests. “Your mouth could use the rest.”

David spreads his face in offended innocence and draws back, then he winks at LaPointe. He has been riding Moishe all night, piquing him here and there, ridiculing his play, when he knew perfectly well that all the cards were against him. But he is a little surprised when his gentle partner snaps back like this.

“So?” Moishe asks Guttmann. “What did you study?”

Guttmann shrugs off the value of his studies, a little embarrassed about them in the presence of LaPointe. “Oh, a little sociology, some psychology as related to the criminal and criminal motives—that sort of thing.”

“No literature? No theology?”

“Some literature, sure. No theology. Would you pass the mustard, please?”

“Here you are. You know, it’s interesting you should have studied criminal motives and all this. Just lately I have been thinking about crime and sin… the relationships, the differences.”

“Oh boy,” David puts in. “Here we go again! Listen! About crime it’s all right to think. It’s a citizen’s duty. But about sin? Moishe, my old friend, AK’s like us shouldn’t think about sin. It’s too late. Our chances have passed us by.”

Guttmann laughs. “No, I’m afraid I never think about things like that, Mr. Rappaport.”

“You don’t?” Moishe asks gloomily, his hopes for a good talk crumbling. “That’s strange. When I was a young man thinking was a popular pastime.”

“Things change,” David says.

“Does that mean they improve?” Moishe asks.

Guttmann glances at his watch. “Hey, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to be going. I have a date, and I’m already late.”

“A date?” David asks. “It’s after eleven. What can you do so late?”

“We’ll think of something.” As soon as he makes this adolescent single-entendre remark, Guttmann feels he has been disloyal to his girl.

Moishe rises. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

“That isn’t necessary, sir.”

“You’re already late for your date. And you’re not familiar with the streets around here. So don’t argue. Get your coat.”

As they leave, Moishe has already begun with “…when you stop to think about it, the differences between sin and crime are greater than the similarities. Take, for instance, the matter of guilt…”

As the door closes behind them, David looks at LaPointe and shakes his head. “Oh, that Moishe. Sin, crime, love, duty, the law, the good, the bad… he’s interested in everything that’s so big it doesn’t really matter. A scholar! But in practical things…” His lips flap with a puff of air. “That reminds me of something I wanted to talk to you about, Claude. A matter of law.”

“I’m not a lawyer.”

“I know, I know. But you know something about the law. This may come as a surprise to you, but I am not immortal. I could die. At my age, you have to think about such things. So tell me. What do I have to do to make sure the business goes to Moishe if he should, cholilleh, outlive me?”

LaPointe shrugs. “I don’t know. Isn’t all that handled in your partnership agreement?”

“Well… that’s the problem. Actually, Moishe and I aren’t partners. In the legal sense, I mean. And I have a nephew. I’d hate to see him come along and screw Moishe out of the business. And, believe me, he’s capable of it. Of working for a living, he’s not capable. But of screwing someone out of something? Of that he is capable.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean, you and Moishe aren’t partners? I thought he started the business, then later took you on as a partner.”

“That’s right. But you know Moishe. He’s not interested in the business end of business. A beautiful person, but in business a luftmensh. So over the years, he sold out to me so that he wouldn’t have to be bothered with taxes and records and all that.”

“And you’re afraid that if you die—”

“—cholilleh—”

“—he might not get the business? Well, David, I told you I’m no lawyer. But it seems to me that all you have to do is make out a will.”

David sighs deeply. “Yes, I was afraid of that. I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. I’m not a superstitious man, don’t get me wrong. But in my opinion a man is just asking for it, if he makes out his will while he’s still alive. It’s like saying to God, Okay. I’m ready whenever you are. And speaking personally for myself, I’m not ready. If a truck should run over me—okay, that’s that. But I’m not going to stand in the middle of the street shouting, Hey! Truck-drivers! I’m ready!”

Two days pass; Guttmann has returned to Detective Sergeant Gaspard to finish out his tour as a Joan. When no new leads open on the Green case, there is talk down in homicide of closing down the investigation.

Pig weather continues to depress spirits and abrade tempers, and a popular rumor circulates on the Main to the effect that Russian and American atomic testing has done irremediable damage to the polar icecap, and the weather will never return to normal.

LaPointe’s time and attention is soaked up by typical problems of the Main. Mr. Rothmann’s butcher shop is broken into; the newspaper vendor on the corner of Rue Roy is held up for eight dollars and thirty-five cents; and the construction force demolishing a block of row houses to make way for a high-rise parking facility arrives on the site one morning to find that extensive vandalism has ruined work and tools. On a scabby brick wall, the posse of vandals has painted:

A clammy mist settles over Carré St. Louis, sweating the statue of Cremazie, sogging litter in the pond, varnishing the gnarled roots that convulse over a surface too cindery and hard-packed to penetrate. Between stunted, leafless trees, there are weathered park benches, all bearing carved graffiti in which vulgar, romantic, and eponymous impulses overlay and defeat one another.

Once a square of town houses around a pleasant park, Carré St. Louis has run to ruin and has been invaded by jangling, alien styles. To the west is a great Victorian pile, its capricious projections and niches bound together by a broad sign all along the front: young Chinese men’s Christian association. Even the lack of repainting for many years and the hanging mist that broods over the park does not mute its garish, three-foot-high Chinese characters of red and gold. The top of the square is dominated by a grotesquerie, a crenelated castle in old gray stone and new green paint, the home of the Millwright’s Union.

What in hell is a millwright, LaPointe wonders. A man who makes mills? No, that can’t be right. He glances at his watch: quarter after eleven; Guttmann is late.

Only to the east of the park is the integrity of the row houses preserved; and even there it is bogus. Behind the façades, the fashionable and artsy have gutted and renovated. Soon this bit of the Main will be undermined and pried loose from the cultural mosaic. The new inhabitants will have the political leverage to get the trees trimmed, the fountain running, the spray-paint peace symbol cleaned off the side of the pool. There will be grass and shrubs and new benches, and there will be an ironwork fence around the park to which residents will have keys.

LaPointe grunts his disgust and looks around to see Guttmann crossing the park with long strides, anxious about being late.

“I couldn’t find a parking place,” he explains as he approaches. When LaPointe doesn’t respond, he continues with, “I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

The Lieutenant blocks the small talk. “You know this square?”

“No, sir.” Guttmann looks around. “God, there are a lot of houses. Where do we begin?”

“Let’s take a little stroll around.”

Guttmann walks beside LaPointe, their slow steps crunching the gravel of the central spine path, as they scan the buildings on both sides.

Guttmann continues along in silence, until it occurs to him to ask, “Sir? What is a millwright?”

LaPointe glances at him sideways with a fatigued expression that says, Don’t you know anything?

They cross over from the park and walk down the east side of the square, down the row of renovated buildings. LaPointe walks with the long slow steps of the beat-pounder, his fists deep in his overcoat pockets, looking up at each doorway in turn.

“What are we looking for, sir?”

“No idea.”

“It’s sort of a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? It occurred to me on the way over that if one of those lines on the map was just a few degrees off, the woman could live blocks away from here.”

“Hm-m. If she still lives here. If it’s one woman. If…”

LaPointe’s pace slows slightly as he looks up at the next door. Then he walks on a little more quickly.

“If what, sir?”

“Come on. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

From horizon to horizon the sky is streaming southward over the city. The membrane of layer-inversion has ruptured, and the pig weather is rushing through the gap, wisps and flags of torn cloud scudding beneath the higher roiling mass, all swept before a persistent north wind down off the Laurentians. Children look up at the tide of yeasty froth and have the giddying sensation that the sky is still, and the earth is rushing north.

The wind has held through the night, and by evening there will be snow. Tomorrow, taut skies of ardent blue will scintillate over snow drifts in the parks. At last it is over, this pig weather.

LaPointe stands at the window of his office, watching the sky flee south. The door opens behind him and Guttmann’s head appears. “I got it, sir.”

“Good. Come in. What are you carrying there?”

“Sir? Oh, just a cup of coffee.”

“For me?”

“Ah… yes?”

“Good. Pass it over. Aren’t you having any?”

“I guess not, sir. I’ve been drinking too much coffee lately.”

“Hm-m. What did you find out?”

“I did what you told me; I checked with McGill and found that Mlle. Montjean attended on a full scholarship.”

“I see.” This is only part of the answer LaPointe is looking for. As he walked through back streets of the Main toward his apartment last night, he was pestered with the question of how a girl from the streets, a chippy’s daughter, managed to get the schooling that transformed her into a sophisticated, if bent and tormented, young woman. If she had been Jewish or Chinese, he would understand, but the French Canadian culture does not contain this instinctive awe for education. “How did she come by the scholarship?”

“Well, she was an intelligent student. Did well in entrance tests. Super IQ. And to a certain degree, the scholarship was a foregone conclusion.”

“How come?”

“She attended Ste. Catherine’s Academy. I remember the Ste. Kate girls from when I was in college. They’re prepped specifically for the entrance exams. Most of them get scholarships. Not that that’s any saving of money for their parents. It costs more to send a girl to Ste. Kate’s than to any university in the world.”

“I see.”

“You want me to check out Ste. Catherine’s?”

“No, I’ll do it.” LaPointe wads up the coffee cup and misses the wastebasket with it.

Guttmann pulls his old bentwood chair from the wall and sits on it backwards, his chin on his arms. “How did it go last night? Did it turn out to be true that she never met the American, MacHenry?”

“No. She met him.” LaPointe involuntarily lays his hand over the five-year diary he has been scanning with a feeling of reluctance, invasion.

“Then why did she deny it?”

“He gave her a phony name. She probably read about his death in the papers without knowing who it was.”

“How about that? She’s quite a… quite a woman, isn’t she?”

“In what way?”

“Well, you know. The way she’s got it all together. Her business, her life. All under control. I admire that. And the way she talks about sex—frank, healthy, not coy, not embarrassed. She’s got it all put together.”

“You’d make a great social worker, son; the way you can size people up at a glance.”

“We’ll have a chance to find out about that.” Guttmann rubs the tip of his nose with his thumb knuckle. “I’ve… ah… sent in my resignation, effective in two months.” He glances up to see what effect this news has on the Lieutenant None.

“Jeanne and I talked it over all last night. We’ve decided that I’m not cut out to be a cop.”

“Does that mean you’ve got too much of something? Or too little?”

“Both, I guess. If I’m going to help people, me, I want to do it from their side of the fence.”

LaPointe smiles at the “me, I” construction. His French was better when they met… but more bogus. “From the way you talk it sounds like you and your Jeanne are getting married.”

“You know, that’s a funny thing, sir. We’ve never actually talked about marriage. We’ve talked about how children should be brought up. We’ve talked about how when you design a house you should put the bathroom above the kitchen to save on plumbing. But never actually about marriage. And now it’s sort of too late to propose to her. We’ve sort of passed that moment and gone on to bigger things.” Guttmann smiles comfortably and shakes his head over the way their romance is going. People in love always imagine they’re interesting. He rises from his chair. “Well, sir. I’ve got to get going. I report this afternoon out at St. Jean de Dieu. I’ll be doing my last two months on the east side.”

“Be careful. It can be rough for a Roundhead out there.”

Guttmann tucks down the corners of his mouth and shrugs. “After being around you, maybe I can pass.” If the chair weren’t in the way, he might shake hands with the Lieutenant.

But the chair is in the way.

“Well, see you around, sir.”

LaPointe nods. “Yes, see you around.”

A few minutes after Guttmann leaves, it occurs to LaPointe that he never learned the kid’s first name.