12

   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:


182 People Used to Live Here

   On the Rothmann break-in, nothing was stolen and the only damage was to the doorframe and lock. Probably some street tramp or shelterless American draft avoider trying to get out of the damp cold of night. Once again, LaPointe advises Mr. Rothmann to install special police locks, and once again Mr. Rothmann argues that the police ought to pay for them. After all, he’s a taxpayer, isn’t he?
   The holdup of the newspaper vendor is a different matter. LaPointe presses it to a quick finish because he realizes that someone might have been killed. Not the victim; the holdup man.
   The paper seller could only give a description of the thief’s shoes and legs, and of the gun. Tennis shoes, bell-bottom jeans. A kid. And a black gun with a tiny hole in the barrel. The tiny hole meant the weapon was one of those exact-replica waterguns the Montreal police have made repeated complaints about, to no avail. After all, the people who sell them to kids are taxpayers, aren’t they? It’s a free country, isn’t it?
   LaPointe makes two telephone calls and talks with four people on the street. The word is out: the Lieutenant wants this kid, and he wants him right now. If he doesn’t have him by noon, the street is going to become a hard place to live on.
   Two and a half hours later, LaPointe is sitting in the cramped kitchen of a basement flat with the thief and his parents. The father admits he doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with these goddamned kids these days. The mother says she works her fingers to the bone, never sees anything but these four walls, and what thanks does it get you? You carry them under your heart for nine months, you feed them, you send them to Mass, and what does it get you?
   The kid sits at the kitchen table, picking at the oilcloth. His eyes lowered, he answers LaPointe’s questions in a reluctant monotone. Once he makes the mistake of sassing.
   In two steps, LaPointe crosses the room and snatches the kid up by the collar of his imitation-leather jacket. “What do you think happens if a cop chases you and you flash that goddamned water pistol? Hein? You could be killed for eight lousy bucks!”
   There is fear in the kid’s eyes; defiance too.
   LaPointe drops him back into his chair. What’s the use?
   It’s a first offense. The Lieutenant can make arrangements, can find a job for the kid swabbing out some restaurant on the Main. The boy will pay the newspaper vendor back. He will have no record. But next time…
   As he leaves, he hears the mother whining about carrying a child under her heart for nine months, and what thanks does she get? Heartache! Nothing but heartache!
   There will be a next time.
   About the vandalism at the building site, LaPointe does nothing, although this is not the first time it has happened. He goes through the motions, but he does nothing. His sympathy is with the people who are losing their homes and being shipped out to glass-and-cement suburban slums high-rising from muddy “green zones” dotted with emaciated twigs of one-year-old trees tied by rags to supporting sticks.
   Corners, whole blocks of row houses are being torn down to make room for commercial buildings. Narrow streets of three-story Victorian brick with lead-sheeted mansard roofs are falling prey to the need to centralize small industry and commerce without threatening land values and the quality of life in the better neighborhoods. The residents of the Main are too poor, too ignorant, too weak politically to protect themselves from the paternal tyranny of city planning committees. The Main is a slum, anyway. Bad plumbing; rats and roaches; inadequate playgrounds. Relocating the immigrants is really for their own good; it helps to break up the language and culture nodes that delay their assimilation into New Montreal: Chicago on the St. Lawrence.
   Although LaPointe knows that this blind striking out at the construction sites will change nothing, that the little people of the Main must lose their battle and ultimately their identity, he understands their need to protest, to break something.
   More subtle than these dramatic attacks on the Main are the constant erosions from all points on its perimeter. Individuals and organizations have discovered that protecting what is left of old Montreal can be a profitable activity. Under the pretext of preservation, rows of homes are bought up and gutted, leaving only “quaint” shells. Good plumbing and central heating are installed, rooms enlarged, and residences are created for affluent and swinging young lawyers, pairs of career girls, braces of interior decorators. It is fashionable to surprise friends by saying you live on the Main. But these people don’t live on the Main; they play house on the Main.
   LaPointe sees it all happening. In his bitterest moods he feels that this bubble in his chest is consonant with the rest of it; there wouldn’t be much point in surviving the Main.

   When he arrives at the office Thursday morning, his temper is ragged. He has picked up word that Scheer is bragging about being back on the street before long. Obviously, the Commissioner has reported to his political acquaintance.
   After scanning the Morning Report, he paws about in the three days’ worth of back paper work that has accumulated since Guttmann’s departure. Then he comes across a memo from Dr. Bouvier asking him to drop down to Forensic Medicine when he has a free moment.
   As always, the smells of wax, chemicals, heat, and dust in the basement hall trigger memories of St. Joseph’s: moue, tranches, the Glory Hole, Our Lady of the Chipped Cheek…
   When LaPointe enters his office, Bouvier is just drawing a cup of coffee from his urn, his finger crooked into the cup to tell when it is nearly full.
   “That you, Claude? Come in and be impressed by one of my flashes of insight, this particular one focused on the case of one Antonio Verdini—alias Green—discovered one night in an alley, his body having acquired a biologically superfluous, and even detrimental, orifice.”
   LaPointe grunts, in no mood for Bouvier’s florid style.
   “My ingenious filing system”—Bouvier waves toward his high-heaped desk—”has produced the interesting fact that our Mr. Green’s uncommon appetite for ventilation was shared by”—he cocks his head in LaPointe’s direction and pauses for effect—”the victims of two other unsolved murder cases.”
   “Oh?”
   “Somehow I had expected more than ‘oh?’.”
   “Which cases, then?”
   “Men known to the department, and therefore to God, as H-49854 and H-50567, but to their intimates as MacHenry, John Albert, and Pearson, Michael X. This X indicates that his parents gave him no middle name, doubtless in a spirit of orthographic economy.” Bouvier holds the two files out to LaPointe and stares proudly at him with one huge eye and one nicotine-colored blank. The Lieutenant scans rapidly, then reads more closely. These are Bouvier’s personal files, fuller than the official records because they include clippings from newspapers, relevant additional information, and certain scribbled notes in his large, tangled hand.
   One file is six years old, the other two and a half. Both stabbings; both males; both without signs of robbery; both at night on deserted streets.
   “Well?” Bouvier gloats.
   “Could be coincidences.”
   “There’s a limit to antichance. Notice that both happened on the edges of what you call your patch—although I hear there is some difference of opinion between you and the Risen Cream as to the extent of that realm, and of its monarch’s authority.”
   “What’s all this business here?” LaPointe puts one report on Bouvier’s desk, keeping his finger on a passage scribbled in the doctor’s hand.
   Pressing the bridge of his broken glasses to hold them in place, Bouvier leans over, his face close to the page. “Ah! Technical description of the wound. Angle of entry of the weapon.”
   “Identical in all three cases?”
   “No. Not quite.”
   “Well, then?”
   “That’s where you discern the touch of genius in me! The angles of entry are not identical. They vary. They vary in direct proportion to the heights of the three men. If you insist on playing the game of coincidence, you have to accept that there were three killers of identical height, and who held a knife in the identical way, and all three of whom were most gifted in the use of a knife. And if you want to stack up coincidences with the abandon of a Victorian novelist, how’s this? Pearson, Michael X., made love shortly before his death. Once again, that nasty habit of failing to wash up. A professor at McGill, too! You’d think he’d know better. The other fellow, MacHenry, John Albert, was an American up here on business. There is every reason to believe that he also made love shortly before contributing his personal dust to the Universal Dust. He washed up within an hour of his death. Not a full bath; just the crotch area. There’s the American businessman for you! Time is money.”
   “Can I take these with me?” LaPointe asks rhetorically, already on his way out with the reports.
   “But make sure you bring them back. I can’t stand having my files in disorder!” Bouvier calls after him.

   Read and reread, Bouvier’s dossiers rest on LaPointe’s desk, covering the unfinished paper work. He links his fingers over his head and leans back in his swivel chair to look at the large-scale city plan of Montreal tacked up on his wall, finger-smudged only in the area of the Main. His eye picks up the places where the three men were found—stabbed, but not robbed. The Green kid… there. In that alley almost in the center of the Main district. The American businessman… there. On a narrow street off Chateaubriand between Rue Roy and Rue Bousquet, on what LaPointe would call the outer edge of his patch. And that professor from McGill… there. Well outside the Main, on Milton Street between Lorne and Shuter, normally a busy area, but probably deserted at… what was it?… estimated time of death: between 0200 and 0400 hours.
   Probably the same killer. Probably the same woman. Jealousy? Over a period of six years? Hardly what you would call a flash of jealous anger. One woman. One killer. Perhaps the woman was the killer. And… what kind of woman could unite a Canadian professor, an American businessman, and an illegal Italian alien with sperm on his brain?
   The freshest of these old cases is thirty months old. All traces would be healed over by now.
   He sighs and puts the files into a thick interdepartmental envelope to send them over to Gaspard in homicide. LaPointe can picture Gaspard’s anger when he discovers he has inherited a set of killings with a sex link. Just the kind of thing the newspapers salivate over. Unknown Knife Slayer Stalks… Police Baffled…

   All the while he is eating in a cheap café, unaware of what is on his plate, all the while he walks slowly through the Main, putting the street to bed, LaPointe carries the details of the two files in the back of his mind, turning over the sparse references to personal life, looking for bits that match up with what he knows about Tony Green. But nothing. No links. He is standing outside his apartment on Esplanade, looking up at the dark windows of his second-story flat, when he decides to return to the Quartier Général and muck around with late paper work, rather than face a night alone with his coffee and his Zola.
   “What in hell are you doing here?”
   “Jesus Christ! You startled me, sir.”
   “You leave something behind?”
   Guttmann has been sitting at LaPointe’s desk, his mind floating in a debris of problems and daydreams. “No. I just remembered that you have a map of the city on your wall, and I still had my key, so…”
   “So?”
   “It’s about that packet of files you left for Sergeant Gaspard.”
   With a jerk of his thumb, LaPointe evicts Guttmann from his swivel chair and occupies it himself. “I’ll bet he was happy to find three closed cases suddenly reopened.”
   “Oh, yes, sir. He could hardly contain his delight. He was particularly colorful on the subject of Dr. Bouvier. He said he needed that kind of help about as much as starving Pakistanis need Red Cross packages filled with menus.”
   “Hm-m. But that still doesn’t explain what you’re doing in my office.”
   Guttmann goes to the wall map and points out light pencil lines he has drawn on it. “I got this weird idea in the middle of the night.”
   LaPointe is puddling about in his paper work. “Joans aren’t supposed to have ideas. It ruins their typing,” he says without looking up.
   “As it turned out, it wasn’t much of an idea.”
   “No kidding? Let’s hear it.”
   Guttmann shrugs his shoulders, not eager to share his foolishness. “Oh, it was just grade-school geometry. It occurred to me that we know where each of the three men was killed, and we know where each was going at the time. So, if we extended the lines back on the map…”
   LaPointe laughs. “The lines would meet on the doorstep of the killer?”
   “Something like that. Or if not at the doorstep of the killer, at least on the doorstep of the woman they all made love with. I assume it was one woman, don’t you?”
   “Either that or a whorehouse.”
   “Well, either way, it would be one dwelling.”
   LaPointe looks up at the map on which Guttmann’s three lines enclose a vast triangle including the east half of the Main district and a corner of Parc Fontaine. “Well, you’ve narrowed it down to eastern Canada.”
   Guttmann realizes how stupid his idea sounds when said aloud. “It was just a wild shot. I knew that any two lines would have to meet somewhere. And I hoped that the third would zap right in there.”
   “I see.” LaPointe moves aside the files Guttmann brought along with him and picks up a splay of unfinished reports. He wants the kid to see he came here to do some work. Not because he was lonely. Not because his bed was too big.
   “Can I get you a cup of coffee, sir?”
   “If you’re getting one for yourself.”
   While Guttmann is at the machine down the hall, LaPointe’s eyes wander back to the wall map. He makes a nasal puff of derision at the idea that things get solved by geometry and deduction. What you need is an informer, a lot of pressure, a fist.
   With a brimming paper cup in each hand, Guttmann has some trouble with the door; he slops some and burns his fingers. “Goddamn it!” He gives the door a kick.
   LaPointe glances up. This kid is usually so controlled, so polite. As Guttmann sits in his old chair against the wall, his long legs stretched out in front of him, LaPointe sips his coffee.
   “What’s your problem?”
   “Sir?”

   “Trouble with this girl of yours?”
   “No, that isn’t it. That’s turning out to be a really fine thing.”
   “Oh? How long have you known her? A week?”
   “How long does it take?”
   LaPointe nods. That is true. He had been sure he wanted to spend his life with Lucille after knowing her for two hours. Of course, it was a year before they had the money to get married.
   “No, it isn’t the girl,” Guttmann continues, looking into his coffee. “It’s the force. I’m thinking pretty seriously about quitting.” He had wanted to talk to LaPointe about this that evening after they’d been at the go-go joint, but there hadn’t been an opportunity. He looks up to see how the Lieutenant is taking the news.
   There is no response at all from LaPointe. Perhaps a slight shrug. He never gives advice in this kind of situation; he doesn’t want the responsibility.
   There is an uncomfortable, interrogative quality to the silence, so LaPointe looks up at the wall map for something to fill it. “What’s that northwest-southeast line supposed to be?”
   Guttmann understands. The Lieutenant doesn’t want to talk about it. Well… “Ah, let me see. Well, that X is the alley where we found Green.”
   “I know that.”
   “And the circle is his apartment—the rooming house with the concierge with the broken lip? So I just drew a line between them and continued it on southeast to see where it would lead. Just an approximation. It cuts through the middles of blocks and such, but it must have been the general direction he came from.”
   “Yes, but he wasn’t going back to his rooming house.”
   “Sir?”
   “He was going to the Happy Hour Whisky à Go-Go, remember? He had a date with that dancer’s retarded kid.”
   Guttmann looks at the map more closely and frowns. “Yeah. That’s right!” He takes out his pencil and crosses to the map. Freehand, he sketches in the revised line, and the vast triangle is reduced by a considerable wedge. “That narrows it down a lot.”
   “Sure. To maybe thirty square blocks and six or eight thousand people. Just for the hell of it, let’s take a look at the other lines. What’s the one running roughly east-west?”
   “That’s the McGill professor. The X is where his body was found; the circle is his office on the campus.”
   “How do you know he was going to his office?”
   “Assumption. His apartment was up north. Why would he walk west unless he was going to the campus? Maybe to do some late work. Grade papers, something like that.”
   “All right. Assume it. Now, what about the other line? The north-south one?”
   “That’s the American. His body was found right… here. And his hotel was downtown, right… ah… here. So I just extended the line back.”
   “But he wouldn’t have walked south.”
   “Sure he would. That was the direction to his hotel, and also the best direction to go to find taxis.”
   “What about his car?”
   “Sir?”
   “Look in the report. There was something about a rented car. It was found three days later, after the rental agency placed a complaint. Don’t you remember? The car was ticketed for overparking. Bouvier made some wiseassed note about the bad luck of getting a parking ticket the same night you get killed.”
   Guttmann taps his forehead with his knuckle. “Yes! I forgot about that.”
   “Don’t worry about it. One line out of three isn’t bad. For a Joan.”
   “Where was the car parked?”
   “It’s in the report. Somewhere a few blocks from where they found the body.”
   Guttmann takes up the folder on MacHenry, John Albert, and leafs quickly through it. He misses what he’s looking for and has to flip back. The major reason Dr. Bouvier is able to come up with his little “insights” from time to time is his cross-indexing of information. In the standard departmental files, the murder of MacHenry, the report of the car-rental agency, and the traffic report of the ticketed car would be in separate places; in fact in separate departments. But in Dr. Bouvier’s files, they are together. “Here it is!” Guttmann says. “Let’s see… the rental car… recovered by the agency from police garage… ah! It was parked near the corner of Rue Mentana and Rue Napoléon. Let’s see what that gives us.” He goes to the map again and sketches the new line. Then he turns back to LaPointe. “Now, how about that, Lieutenant?”
   The three lines fail to intersect by a triangle half the size of a fingernail. And the center of that triangle is Carré St. Louis, a rundown little park on the edge of the Main.
   LaPointe rises and approaches the map. “Could be coincidence.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “We would be looking for a woman somewhere around Carré St. Louis who has made love three times in the past six years. It’s just possible that more than one would fit that description.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Murders aren’t solved by drawing lines on maps, you know.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Hm-m.”
   Guttmann lets the silence extend awhile before offering, “I’ll bet Sergeant Gaspard would let me go with you. I’ve just about finished his paper work too.”
   LaPointe taps the pale green rectangle of the square with his thick forefinger. It has been about a week since he wandered through there on his rounds. The night of the Green killing, come to think of it. He pictures the statue of the dying Cremazie.


Pour Mon Drapeau
Je Viens Ici Mourir

   The empty pond, its bottom littered. The peace symbol dripping rivulets of paint, like a bleeding swastika. The word love, but the spray can ran out while they were adding fuck yo…
   LaPointe nods. “All right. Tomorrow morning well take a walk around there.” He returns to his desk and finishes his cooling coffee, crushing the cup and tossing it toward the wastebasket. “What does she think about it?”
   “Sir?”
   “Your girl. What does she think about your decision to leave the department?”
   Taken off balance, Guttmann shrugs and wanders back to his chair. “Oh, she wants me to do what I want to do. Maybe… maybe I shouldn’t have joined up in the first place. I came out of school with the idea that I could do something… useful. Social work, maybe. I don’t know. I knew how people felt about the police, particularly the young, and I thought… Anyway, I realize now I wasn’t cut out to be a cop. Maybe I’ve always known it. Being with you these few days has sort of pushed me over the edge, you know what I mean? I just don’t have the stomach for it. I don’t want everyone I meet to hate me, or fear me. I don’t want to live in a world populated by tramps and losers and whores and punks and junkies. It’s just… not for me. I’d never be good at it. And nobody likes to be a failure. I’ve talked it all over with Jeanne; she understands.”
   “Jeanne?”
   “The girl in my building.”
   “She’s canadienne, this girl of yours?”
   “Didn’t I mention that?”
   “No.”
   “Well, she is.”
   “Hm-m. You’ve got better taste than I thought. Are you going to drink that coffee?”
   “No. Here. You know, this idea about the map was really sort of an excuse to come down here and think things over.”
   “And now you’ve decided?”
   “Pretty much.”
   Guttmann sits in silence. LaPointe drinks the coffee as he looks at the wall map with half-closed eyes, then he scrubs his hair with his hand. “Well, I’d better call it a day.”
   “Can I drop you off, sir?”
   “In that toy car of yours?”
   “It’s the only car I’ve got.”
   LaPointe seems to consider this for a moment. “All right. You can drop me off.”
   Guttmann feels like saying, Thank you very much, sir.
   But he does not.

13

   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.”

   They take coffee in a little place two blocks east of the square, in one of those self-conscious bohemian cafés frequented by the young. At this time of day it is empty, save for an intense couple in the far corner, a bearded boy who appears to be staggering under the impulse to communicate, a skinny girl in round glasses who is straining to understand. They work very hard at avoiding artifice.
   The waitress is a young slattern who tugs a snarl out of her hair with her fingers as she repeats Guttmann’s order for two cappuccini. Back at the coffee machine, she stares indifferently out a front window hung with glass beads as she lets steam hiss into the coffee. For once they are in an atmosphere in which Guttmann is more at home than LaPointe, who looks across the table and shakes his head at the young policeman. “You talk about God being on the side of drunks, fools, and kids. I didn’t expect anything to come of your silly game of drawing lines on a map. Not one chance in a thousand.”
   “Has something come of it?”
   “I’m afraid so. Chances are our woman works, or did work, at that school.”
   “School, sir?”
   “Seventh building from the end of that renovated row. There was a placard on the door—brass. It’s a school of sorts. One of those places that teaches French and English to foreigners in a hurry.”
   Guttmann’s expression widens. “And Green was learning English!”
   LaPointe nods.
   “But wait a minute. What about the American?”
   “Could have been learning French. Maybe he wanted to set up a business in Quebec.”
   “And the McGill professor?”
   “I don’t know. We’ll have to see how he fits in. If he does.”
   “But wait a minute, sir. Even if the school is the contact point, maybe it isn’t a teacher. Could be one of the students.”
   “Over a period of six years?”
   “All right. A teacher, then. So what do we do now?”
   “We go talk to somebody. See if we can find out which teacher is ours.” LaPointe rises.
   “Aren’t you going to finish your coffee, sir?”
   “This swill? Just tip the greasy kid and let’s get out of here.”
   Considering the slop and dregs he has had to drink with the Lieutenant in Chinese, Greek, and Portuguese cafés, Guttmann doubts that it is the quality of the coffee LaPointe is rejecting.

   “…so, out of a total faculty of thirteen, that would make a full-time equivalency of nine or nine and a half, considering that some of my teachers are only part-time, and some are university students training in our techniques of one-to-one intensive language assimilation.” Mlle. Montjean lights her cigarette from a marble-and-gold lighter, takes a deep drag, and tilts her head back to jet the uninhaled smoke upward, away from her guests. Then she lightly touches the tip of her tongue between thumb and forefinger, as though to pluck off a bit of tobacco, a residual gesture from some earlier time when she smoked unfiltered cigarettes.
   Many things about her put Guttmann in mind of a fashion model: the meticulous, underrolled coiffure, that bounces with her quick, energetic gestures; the assured, almost rehearsed moves and turns; the long slim arms and legs; the perfectly tailored suit that is both functional and feminine. And, like a model, she appears to be aware of herself at every moment, as though she were seeing herself from the outside. Guttmann finds her voice particularly pleasing in its combining of great precision of pronunciation with a low, warm note just above husky. She laughs in exactly the same key as that in which she speaks.
   “I suppose that seems quite a large faculty for a little school like ours, Lieutenant, but we specialize in intensive training with a low student-to-teacher ratio. We submerge the student in a linguistic culture. The student who is learning French, for instance, doesn’t hear a word of English for six hours a day, and he even takes lunch with instructors and other students in a French restaurant. And at night, if he wishes, the student will be taken to French nightclubs, cinema, theatre—all in the company of an instructor. We concentrate on the music of the language, you might say. The student learns to hum in French, even before he learns the words to the song. Our methods were pioneered at McGill, and indeed some of our student teachers are graduate students from there.” Mlle. Montjean suddenly stops and laughs. “I must be sounding like our promotional material.”
   “A little,” LaPointe says. “You have a connection with McGill then?”
   “No formal connection. Some of their students get experience and credit by working with us. Oh!” She butts her cigarette hurriedly. “Excuse me just a moment, won’t you.” She leaves the “conversation island,” consisting of deeply padded white leather “comfort forms” around a kidney-shaped, glass-topped coffee table, the whole sunken two steps below the floor level. She goes quickly to her desk overlooking Carré St. Louis, and there she presses the button of a concealed tape recorder and speaks conversationally: “Maggie, remind me tomorrow to get in touch with Dr. Moreland. Subject: Evaluation Procedures for Part-time Students.” She releases the button and smiles across at the policemen. “I would have forgotten that completely if I hadn’t happened to mention it to you. I’ve got a brain like a sieve.”
   This is a social lie and an obvious one. Mlle. Montjean runs her specialized and very expensive school with such great efficiency that she appears to have free time for people who drop in unexpectedly. Even policemen.
   The school occupies a double building: the façades of two former homes have been gutted and renovated to contain “conversation foyers,” “learning environments,” and audio-visual support systems on the first two floors, while the mansard-roofed third story houses Mlle. Montjean’s living and working quarters. Guttmann is impressed by the way she has folded into her large living room the equipment necessary for running her business. Files are concealed within Victorian court cupboards; her hi-fi system is tied in with her dictation instruments; her business telephones are ceramic French “coffee-grinder” models; her desk is an inlaid feminine escritoire; the “conversation island” would serve equally well for staff meetings or a romantic tète-à-tète. The walls and ceiling are white stucco with attic beams revealed and varnished, and this neutral background helps to blend the improbable, but not offensive, mélange of modern, Victorian, and antique furniture.
   In theory it ought not work, this mixture of furniture styles, the stucco walls and dark beams, the Persian carpets, the modern and classical prints on the walls. But any feeling of discord and jumble is avoided by the sense that everything has been selected by one person of firm personality and taste. All the elements are aligned by one coign of vantage, one articulation of preference.
   LaPointe doesn’t like the place.
   “I haven’t offered you a drink, have I?” she says, shaking her head as though to imply she would forget it if it weren’t attached. “What do you take before lunch? Dubonnet?”
   Guttmann says Dubonnet would be fine.
   “Lieutenant?” she asks.
   “Nothing, thank you.” After being shown up to the office apartment by a fussy man of uncertain function, LaPointe presented his identification card and introduced a question about the faculty of the school. Graciously, indeed overwhelmingly, Mlle. Montjean took up the cue, describing her business with a glibness that had a quality of rote. Even the asides and pauses to light a cigarette seemed considered, rehearsed. She said more than he wanted to know, as though attempting to drown questions with answers.
   LaPointe sits back and lets Guttmann be the focus for her talk. This kind of woman—educated, capable, confident of her attraction and gifts—is alien to LaPointe’s experience.
   Of one thing he is sure; she is hiding something.
   “Are you sure I can’t tempt you, Lieutenant? I have everything.” She gestures toward a bar at the end of the room, near a wide marble fireplace.
   “Say, that’s a real bar,” Guttmann says in surprise. “That’s fantastic.” He rises and goes with her as she crosses to pour out the drinks. It is indeed a real bar, complete with back bar and beveled mirrors, a brass rail, copper fittings, and even a spittoon.
   “I like to believe my guests will treat that as a mere decoration,” she says, indicating the spittoon.
   “Where did you get a turn-of-the-century bar like this?” Guttmann asks.
   “Oh, they were tearing down one of those little places up on the Main, and I just bought it.” She grins mischievously. “The workmen had a hell of a time getting it up here. The walnut top is one piece. They had to bring it in through the window.”
   Guttmann tries the bar on for size, putting his stomach against the polished wood and his foot up on the rail. “Fits just fine. I’ll bet the neighbors wondered what you were up to here. I mean, a whole bar. Come on!”
   “That never occurred to me. I should have had my bed brought in through the window, too. That would really have given them something to gossip about. It’s one of those big circular waterbeds.” She laughs lightly. Guttmann realizes she is a very attractive woman.
   LaPointe’s patience with this social nonsense is thin. He rises from the deep cushions of the “conversation island” and joins them at the bar. “I would like a little Armagnac after all, Mlle. Montjean. And I would like to know something about Antonio Verdini, alias Tony Green.”
   She does not pause in pouring out the Dubonnet, but her voice is unmodulated when she responds, “And I would like to know what you’re doing here. Why you’re interested in my school. And why you’re asking these questions.” She looks up and smiles at LaPointe. “Armagnac, did you say?”
   “Please. Do you mind the questions?”
   “I’m not sure.” She takes down the Armagnac bottle and looks at it thoughtfully. “Tell me, Lieutenant LaPointe. Would my lawyer be unhappy with me, if I were to answer your questions without his being here?”
   “Possibly. How did you know my name?”
   “You showed me your identification when you came in.”
   “You barely glanced at it.” There is another thing he does not mention. By habit he holds out his identification card with his thumb over his name. He’s been a cop for a long time

   She sets the bottle down and looks directly at him, her eyes shifting from one of his to the other. Then she slowly raises both arms until her palms are level with her ears. In a deep, graveled voice she says, “You got me, Lieutenant. I give up. But don’t tell Rocky and the rest of the mob that I ratted.”
   Both she and Guttmann laugh. A glance from LaPointe, and she is laughing alone as she pours out the Armagnac. “Say when.”
   “That’s fine. Now, how do you know my name?”
   “Don’t be so modest. Everyone on the Main knows Lieutenant LaPointe.”
   “You know the Main?”
   “I grew up there. Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant. There’s no way in the world you could remember me. I left when I was just a kid. Thirteen years old. But I remember you. Of course that was twenty years ago, and you weren’t a lieutenant, and your hair was all black, and you were slimmer. But I remember you.” There is something harder than amusement in the glitter of her eyes. Then she turns to Guttmann. “What do you think of that? What do you think of a woman giving away her age like that? Here I go admitting that I’m thirty-three, when I know perfectly that I could pass for thirty-two any day… if the light wasn’t too strong.”
   “So you come from the street?” LaPointe says, unconvinced.
   “Oh, yes, sir. From the deepest depths of the street. My mother was a hooker.” She has learned to say that with the same offhandedness as one might use to mention that her mother was a blonde, or a liberal. She evidently likes to drop bombs. But she laughs almost immediately. “Hey, what do you say, gang. Shall we drink at the bar, or go sit in a booth?”
   When they have returned to the “conversation island,” Mlle. Montjean assumes her most businesslike voice. She tells LaPointe that she wants to know exactly why he is here, asking questions. When she knows that, she will decide whether or not to answer without the advice of counsel.
   “Have you any reason to think you might be in trouble?” he asks.
   But she is not taking sucker bait like that. She smiles as she sips her aperitif.
   LaPointe is not comfortable with her elusive blend of caution and practiced charm. She is so unlike the girls on his patch, though she claims to be one of them. He dislikes being kept off balance by her constant changes of verbal personality. She was the urbane vamp at first, completely castrating the policeman in Guttmann. Then there was that clowning “gun moll” routine under the guise of which she had admitted to being caught off base… but to nothing more. LaPointe fears that when he hits her with the fact that Green is dead, her control will be so high that it will mask any surprise she might feel. In that way, she could seem guilty without being so. She might even confuse him by being frank and honest. She is the type for whom honesty is also a ploy.
   “So,” LaPointe says, looking around at the costly things decorating the apartment, “you’re from the Main, are you?”
   “From is the active word, Lieutenant. I’ve spent my whole life being from the Main.”
   “Montjean? You say your mother was a hooker named Montjean?”
   “No, I didn’t say that, Lieutenant. Naturally, I have changed my name.”
   “From?”
   Mlle. Montjean smiles. “Can I offer you another Armagnac? I’m afraid it will have to be a quick one; I have a working lunch coming up. We’re involved in something that might interest you, Lieutenant. We’re developing an intensive course in Joual. You’d be surprised at the number of people who want to learn the Canadian usages and accents. Salesmen, mostly, and politicians. The kinds of people who make their living by being trusted. Like policemen.”
   LaPointe finishes his drink and sets the tulip glass carefully on the glass tabletop. “This Antonio Verdini I mentioned…?”
   “Yes?” She lifts her eyebrows lazily.
   “He’s dead. Stabbed in an alley up on the Main.”
   She looks levelly at LaPointe, not a flutter in her eyelids. After a moment, her gaze falls to the marble-and-gold cigarette lighter, and she stares at it, motionless. Then she takes a cigarette from a carved teak box, lights it, tilts back her head with a bounce of her hair, and jets the uninhaled smoke over the heads of her guests. She delicately plucks an imaginary bit of tobacco from the tip of her tongue.
   “Oh?” she asks.
   “Presumably you were lovers,” LaPointe says matter-of-factly, ignoring Guttmann’s quick glance.
   Mlle. Montjean shrugs. “We screwed, if that’s what you mean.” More of that precious bomb-dropping, a kind of counter-attack against LaPointe’s ballistic use of Green’s death. Her control had been excellent throughout her long pause… but there was the pause.
   “Our information says that he was learning English here,” LaPointe continues. “I assume that’s right?”
   “Yes. One of our Italian-speaking instructors was guiding him through an intensive course in English.”
   “And that’s how you met him?”
   “That’s how I met him, Lieutenant. Tell me, do I need a lawyer now?”
   “Did you kill him?”
   “No.”
   “Then you probably don’t need a lawyer. Unless you intend to withhold information, or refuse to assist us in our inquiry.”
   She taps the ash from her cigarette unnecessarily, gaining time to think. Her control is still good, but for the first time she is troubled.
   “You’re thinking about the others, of course,” LaPointe says.
   “What others?”
   LaPointe bends on her that melancholy patience he assumes during examination when he lacks the information necessary to lead the conversation.
   “All right, Lieutenant. I’ll cooperate. But let me ask you something first. Does this have to get into the papers?”
   “Not necessarily.”
   “You see, my school is rather special—expensive, elite. Scandal would ruin it. And it’s everything I’ve worked for. It represents ten years of work. What’s more, it represents the ten thousand miles I’ve managed to walk away from the Main. You understand what I’m saying?”
   “I understand. Tell me about the others.”
   “Well, it couldn’t be a coincidence. Mike was killed the same way: stabbed in the street.”
   “Mike?”
   “Michael Pearson. Dr. Michael Pearson. He used to run the Language Learning Center at McGill.”
   “And you were lovers?”
   She smiles thinly. “You do run to circumlocution, don’t you?”
   “And what about the other one. The American?”
   Her eyes open with confusion. “What other one?”
   “The American. Ah…” He looks to Guttmann.
   “John Albert MacHenry,” Guttmann fills in quickly.
   Mlle. Montjean glances from one to the other. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t think I ever met anyone by that name. I can assure you that I never… screwed… your Mr. MacHenry.” She reaches over and squeezes LaPointe’s arm. “That’s just my homey way of saying we were not lovers, Lieutenant.”
   “You seem sure of that, Mlle. Montjean. Do you keep a list?”
   Her smile is fixed and her eyes perfectly cold. “As a matter of fact, I do. At least, I keep a diary. And it’s a fairly long list, if you will forgive my bragging. I enjoy keeping count. My analyst tells me that it’s rather typical behavior in cases like mine. He tells me the reason I use so many men is because I detest them, and by scoring them one after the other I deny them any individuality. He talks like that, my analyst. Like a textbook. And can you guess when he told me all this crap? In bed. After I had scored him too. Later, he sat right there where you’re sitting and told me how he understood my need to screw even him. A typical gesture of rejection, he told me. And when I mentioned that he wasn’t much of a lay, he tried to laugh it off. But I know I got to him.” She grins. “The phony bastard.”
   “The point of all that being that you don’t know this American, this MacHenry?”
   “Precisely. Oh, I’ve had my share of Americans, of course. One should have an American at least once a quarter. It makes Canadians look so good by comparison. And at least once a year, one should have an Englishman. Partially to make even the Americans look good, and partially as penance. Did you know that making love with a Brit shortens one’s time in purgatory?” The intercom on her desk buzzes; Mlle. Montjean butts out her cigarette and rises, flattening her skirt with her palms. “That will be my luncheon appointment. I assume I’m free to go to it?”
   LaPointe rises. “Yes. But we have more to talk about.”
   She has crossed to her desk and is taking up a folder of material pertaining to her working lunch. She glances at her calendar. “I’m tied up all afternoon. Are you free tonight, Lieutenant?”
   “Yes.”
   “Say nine o’clock? Here?”
   She shakes hands with Guttmann, then offers her hand to LaPointe. “You really don’t remember me, do you, Lieutenant?”
   “I’m afraid not. Should I?”
   Still holding his hand, she smiles a montage of amusement and sadness. “We’ll talk about it tonight. Armagnac, isn’t it?”
   She shows them to the door.

   By nine o’clock it is dark in the little park of Carré St. Louis. For the first time in weeks, the wind is from the north and steady. If it remains in that quarter, it will bring the cleansing snow. But its immediate effect is to hone the edge of the damp cold. LaPointe has to fold in the flap of his collar against his throat as he cuts across the deserted park, picking his way carefully over the root-veined path because the dappled light from distant streetlights serves more to confuse than to illuminate.
   Suddenly he stops. Save for the hiss of wind through gnarled branches, there is no sound. But he has a tingling in the back of his neck, as though someone were watching him. He looks around through the zebra dapple of black trees and shadows interlaced with the silver of streetlights bordering the park. There is nothing to be seen.
   He continues across toward Mlle. Montjean’s school, where there are lights behind drawn shades on the first and third floors; probably late students learning French or English in a hurry. His knock is answered by the fussy man he met earlier. Mlle. Montjean is not in, but she is due any minute; she has left instructions that the Lieutenant is to be shown up to her apartment. The nervous man looks LaPointe over, his lips pursed critically. It isn’t his business who Mlle. Montjean’s friends are. He doesn’t care what his employer does on her own time. But there are limits. A policeman, really. Oh, well, he’ll show him up anyway.
   Three lamps light the apartment, pooling three distinct areas. There is a porcelain lamp on the escritoire by the windows overlooking the square; a dim hanging lamp picks out the sunken “conversation island”; and beyond that, over the bar, is a glass ball confected of bits of colored glass and lit from within. The room is centrally heated, the dwindling fire in the fireplace largely decorative. LaPointe takes off his overcoat and makes himself at home to the extent of putting two kiln-dried, steam-cleaned logs on the fire and poking at the embers. He enjoys fiddling with open fires, and he often pictures himself in his daydream home in Laval, turning logs or pushing in burnt-off ends. The bark has begun to crackle and flutter with blue flame when Mlle. Montjean enters, her coat already off, her fur hat in her hand.
   “Sorry, Lieutenant. But you know how these things are.” She does not mention what things. “Oh, good. I’m glad you’ve tended the fire. I was afraid it would die out; and I set it especially for you.” She ducks under the bar flap and begins to pour out two Armagnacs, light from the ball of glass shining in her carefully done hair. When LaPointe sits on a bar stool across from her, he realizes that she has been drinking fairly heavily, not beyond control, but perhaps a little beyond caring.
   “I hope you didn’t have anything big on tonight,” she says.
   “Nothing very big. A pinochle game I had to postpone, that’s all.”
   “Hey, wow, Lieutenant.” She makes two clicking sounds at the side of her cheek. “Pinochle! You really know how to get it on.” She lifts her glass. “Salut?”
   “Salut.”
   She finishes half her drink and sets it down on the bar. “That word ‘salut’ reminds me of a proof we recently had that our aural-oral system of language learning is not without its flaws. We had an Arab student here—a nephew of one of those oil pirates—and he was being preened to take over the world, or learn to surrender in six languages, or whatever the fuck they do. Dumb as a stick! But they were giving him all sorts of special tutoring at McGill—I think his uncle bribed them by buying an atomic laboratory for them, or half of South America, or something like that… I mean, he was really stupid. He was so dumb he’d have difficulty making the faculty of a polytechnic in Britain, or getting his Ph.D. in journalism in the States… That line would get a laugh in an academic crowd.”
   “Would it?”
   “You’re not much of an audience, LaPointe. And now I don’t even remember what that story was supposed to illustrate.”
   “Maybe nothing. Maybe you’re just playing for time.”
   “Yes, maybe. How about another drink?”
   “I still have this one.”
   “I think I’ll have another.” She brings it around the bar and sits beside him. “I had the weirdest experience just now. I was crossing the park, and there was someone there, in the shadows.”
   “Someone you know?”
   “That’s just it. I had the feeling I knew him, but… I can’t explain it I didn’t see him, really. Just sort of a shadow. But I had this eerie feeling that he wanted to talk to me.”
   “But he didn’t?”
   “No.”
   “Then what frightened you?”
   She laughs. “Nothing. I was just scared. I warned you it was a weird experience. Am I babbling, or is it my imagination?”
   “It’s not your imagination. This afternoon you said you knew me. Tell me about that.”
   As she speaks, she deals with her glass, not with him. “Oh, I was just a kid. You never really noticed me. But for years, you’ve been… important in my life.” She puffs out a little laugh of self-derision. “Now that sounds heavy, doesn’t it? I don’t mean you’ve been important in the sense that I think of you often, because I don’t. But I think of you at… serious times. It must be embarrassing to have a stranger tell you that she has a rather special vision of you. Is it?”
   He lifts his glass and tips his head. “Yes.”
   “You think I’m drunk?”
   He balances his thumb against his little finger. “A little.”
   “Drunk and disorderly,” she says in a distant tone. “I charge you, young woman, with being drunk, and with having a disorderly life—a disorderly mind.”
   “I doubt that. I think you have a very orderly mind. A very clever one.”
   “Clever? Yes. Neatly arranged? Yes. But disorderly nevertheless. The front shelves of my mind are all neatly stacked and efficiently arranged. But back in the stacks there is a stew of disorder, chaos, and do you know what else?”
   “No. What?”
   “Just a pinch of self-pity.”
   They both laugh.
   “Now how about another drink?” She goes around the bar to refill her glass.
   “No, thanks… all right. Yes. And tell me, with that self-pity you talk about, is there some hate?”
   “Tons and tons, Lieutenant. But…” She points at him quickly, as though she just caught him slipping a card from his sleeve. “But not enough to kill.” She laughs drily. “You know something, sir? I have a feeling we may spend a lot of this night talking about two different things.”
   “Not all of it.”
   “A threat?”
   He shrugs. “So, tons and tons of hate. Do you hate me for not remembering you?”
   “N-n-no. No, I don’t blame or hate you. You were a central figure, a star actor on the Mam. I had an aisle seat near the back. I spent my time staring at the one actor, so naturally I remember him. You—if you ever bothered to look out at the audience—wouldn’t see them as individuals. No, not hate. Take two parts disappointment, mix in one part resentment, one part dented vanity, dilute with years of indifference, and that’s what I feel. Not hate.”
   “You said your mother was a hooker on the street. What was her name?”
   She laughs without anything being funny. “Her name was Dery.”
   LaPointe’s memory rolls and brings up an image of twenty years ago. Yo-Yo Dery, a kind of whore you don’t see around anymore. Loud, life-embracing, fun to be with, she would sometimes go with factory workers who didn’t have much money, and for free, if they were good mecs and she liked them. Carefree and mischievous, she earned a reputation as a clown and a hellcat when, right in the middle of the dance floor of a crowded cabaret (the place where the Happy Hour Whisky à Go-Go now is), she settled a dispute with another hooker who claimed that Yo-Yo’s red hair was dyed. She lifted her skirt, dropped her drawers, and proved that her red hair was natural.
   “You remember her, don’t you,” Mlle. Montjean says, seeing his eye read the past.
   “Yes. I remember her.”
   “But not me?”
   Yes, come to think of it. Yo-Yo had a daughter. He talked to her once or twice in Yo-Yo’s flat. After Lucille’s death, when the need to make love got annoying, he went with street girls occasionally, always paying his way, although as a cop he could have got it free. Yo-Yo and he made love three or four times over the years. Yes, that’s right. Yo-Yo had a little girl. A shy little girl.
   Then he recalls how Yo-Yo died. She killed herself. She sent the kid to stay with a neighbor, and she killed herself. It astonished everybody on the Main. Yo-Yo Dery? The one who’s always laughing? No! The one who proved she was a redhead? Suicide? But why?
   LaPointe made the break-in. Rags stuffed in the crack under the door. He had to shatter a window with a beer bottle. Yo-Yo had slipped sideways onto the kitchen floor, her cheek resting on the bristles of a broom. There were cards laid out on the table. She had turned on the gas, and started playing solitaire.
   Funny how details come back. There was a black queen on a black king. She had been cheating.
   But what became of the kid? Vaguely, he recalls something about a neighbor keeping the girl until the social workers came around.
   “Do you remember why they called her Yo-Yo?” Mlle. Montjean asks, almost dreamily.
   He remembers. Like a Yo-Yo, up and down, up and down.
   Mlle. Montjean turns the stem of her tulip glass, revolving it between her thumb and finger. “She was good to me, you know that? Presents. Clothes. We went to the park every Sunday when it wasn’t too cold. She really tried to be good to me.”
   “That would be like her.”

   “Oh, sure. The good-hearted whore. A real Robert Service type. In a way, I always knew what she did for a living, even when I was four or five. That is… there were always men around the flat, and they left money. What I didn’t know at that age was that it wasn’t the same in everyone else’s house. But when I was old enough to go to school, the other kids straightened me out soon enough. They used to chant at me: ‘Redhead, Redhead’—I can still hear those two singsong notes, like a French ambulance. I didn’t understand why they chanted that, and why they giggled. My hair has always been brown. You see. I didn’t know about Yo-Yo’s epic proof in the dance hall. But all the other kids did.”
   This is not what LaPointe came here to listen to, and he doesn’t want the burden of problems he did not cause and cannot help. “Oh, well,” he says, making a gesture toward the expensive apartment, “you’ve come a long way from all that.”
   She looks at him sideways through her shoulder-length, rolled-under hair. “You sound like my analyst,” she accuses.
   “The one you take to bed?”
   “The one I screw,” she corrects. “What is it? Why are you shaking your head?”
   “It must be the fashion to use the ugliest words for making love. I met a girl just recently who found the nicer words funny, and couldn’t help laughing at them.”
   “I say screw because I mean screw. It’s the mot juste. When I’m with a man, we don’t ‘go to bed,’ and we certainly don’t ‘make love.’ We screw. And what’s more, they don’t screw me. I screw them.”
   “As in, Screw you, mister!”
   Mlle. Montjean laughs. “Now you really sound like my analyst. How about another Armagnac?”
   “No, thanks.”
   She carries her glass to the divan before the fireplace, where she sits staring silently for a short time before beginning to speak, more to herself than to him. “It’s funny, but I never despised the men Yo-Yo brought home—mostly good mecs, laughing, a little drunk, clumsy. Yo-Yo used to come in to tuck me in and kiss me good night. Then she’d close the door slowly because the hinges creaked. She had a way of waving to me with her fingertips, just before the door closed. I remember the light on the wall, a big trapezoid of yellow getting narrower until the door clicked shut, and there was only a thin line of light from the crack. Her bedroom was next to mine. I could hear her laughing. And I could hear the men. The squeak of the bedsprings. And the men grunting. They always seemed to grunt when they came.” She looks over at LaPointe out of the corner of her eye and she half smiles. “You never grunted, Lieutenant. I’ll say that much for you.”
   He lifts his empty glass in acceptance of the compliment, and immediately feels the stupidity of the gesture. “And you didn’t resent me?”
   “Because you screwed Yo-Yo? Hey, notice the difference? Men screwed Yo-Yo; I screw men. Deep significance there. Or maybe shallow. Or maybe none at all. No, I didn’t resent you, Lieutenant! Goodness gracious, no! I could hardly have resented you.”
   “Why not?”
   “Because you were my father,” she says atonally. Then, “Hey, want another drink?”

   LaPointe takes the shot in silence and doesn’t speak until she has crossed to the bar and is refilling her glass. “That was cute. That ‘want another drink?’ part was particularly cute.”
   “Yeah, but kind of hokey.”
   “Of course you know that I was not…”
   “Don’t panic, Lieutenant. I know perfectly well that I don’t owe the Gift of Life to any squirt from you—grunted or ungrunted. My father was Anonymous.” She has a bit of trouble saying the word; the drink is beginning to close down on her. “You know the famous poet, Anonymous. He’s in all the collections—mostly toward the front. Hey? Aren’t you just dying to know how come you’re my father?”
   She stands behind the bar, leaning over her glass, the ball of colored light tinting her hair, her face in the shadow. LaPointe is unable to see the expression in her unlit eyes. At a certain point, he turns away and watches the fire dwindle.
   She uses a clowning, melodramatic style behind which she can hide, and occasionally her voice broadly italicizes words to prove she isn’t taken in by the sentimentality that hurts.
   “You see, children, it all began when I was very, very young and suffering from a case of innocence. I overheard Yo-Yo talking to some hooker she had up to the apartment for drinks. The subject was one Officer LaPointe, our beat cop, blue of uniform and blue of eye. Some yahoo had given Yo-Yo trouble, and the brave LaPointe had duly bashed him. You remember the incident?”
   He shakes his head. In those days, that was not so uncommon an event that he would be likely to remember it.
   “Well, bash you did, sir. You Protected My Mother. And the next Sunday, when she was taking me for a walk in the park, she pointed your apartment out to me. This Was the House of the Man Who Protected My Mother. And there were other times when she had good things to say about you. I didn’t know then that she was praising you for paying for your nookie when, as a cop, you didn’t have to.
   “Well, sir, it was about that time that I went off to school and discovered that other kids had daddies. Before that, I had never thought about it. Living alone with Yo-Yo was simply how one lived. I neither had a daddy nor lacked one. Then the teasing about being a redhead began. And little boys wanted me to go behind the bushes and pull down my pants to show them my red hair. I couldn’t understand. You see, I didn’t have any hair, let alone red.
   “So life went along, and went along, and went along. Then when I was about ten or eleven, the Great Myth began. One day after school, I was crying with anger and frustration and there was a ring of kids around me, chanting ‘Redhead, wet to bed… Redhead, wet to bed!’ And I screamed at them to cut it out, or else! Or else what, one of them asked, logically enough. And another asked why I didn’t run home and tell my father on them. And everyone laughed—we have to save the children, Lieutenant; they’re our hope for the future—so I suddenly blurted out that I would too tell my father, if they didn’t leave me alone! And they said I didn’t have a father. And I said that I did too! Sergeant LaPointe was my father! And he would bash any son of a bitch who gave me trouble!”
   There is a thud and a tinkle of glass, then silence.
   “Oops. I have knocked over my glass in my efforts to decorate my fable with… whatever. How graceless of me.”
   LaPointe keeps his eyes on the fire. It would be unfair to look at her just then. He hears her walking behind the bar, the crisp crunch of glass under her shoes. He hears the squeak of the cork in the Armagnac bottle. When she speaks again, she has assumed a gruff, comic tone.
   “Well, sir, that was the winter when I had a father… or, to be more exact, a daddy. You screwed Yo-Yo two times that winter, and both times I was awake when you came to the flat, and you chatted nonsense with me before she put me to bed. Your uniform smelled like wool, which wasn’t so strange, considering the fact that it was made of wool. But it smelled good to me… like my blanket. Like the blanket I pressed against my nose when I sucked my thumb. At ten, I still sucked my thumb. But I’ve given that up in favor of cigarettes. Thumb-sucking causes lung cancer.
   “And every day that winter, on my way home from school, I made a big loop out of my way so I could pass your apartment on Esplanade. I used to stand there, sometimes in the snow—grab the image of a little girl standing in the snow! Doesn’t it just rip you up?—and I would look up at the windows of your apartment on the third floor. By the way, your apartment is on the third floor, isn’t it?”
   “Yes,” he lies.
   “I knew it. Infallible instinct. I knew you would live on the top floor, looking out over the world. Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if all those afternoons I had been looking up at the wrong apartment? Wouldn’t that be an ironic blast?”
   He nods.
   After a silence, she puffs out a sigh. “Thank God that’s out of me! Pal, you have no idea what a zonker it was when you walked in here this afternoon. Talk about ghosts! I didn’t really have an appointment tonight. I was walking up on the Main—the first time in years. I dropped in at a bar or two and had Armagnac, because that was your drink. And I walked around the old streets, over past your apartment, trying to decide if I should unload all this crap on you. And finally I decided that I wouldn’t. I decided to keep it to myself. Sic transit all claims to being mistress of my fate.”
   LaPointe has nothing to say.
   “Well!” She brings him an Armagnac he doesn’t want and sits on the divan beside him. “Presumably you didn’t come here to hear all this psychological vomit. What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”
   It isn’t an easy change to make, and LaPointe sips his drink slowly before he begins. “There have been three men killed… probably by the same person.”
   “And a neurotic man-hater seems a likely suspect?”
   He ignores this. “Two of them trace to you. When was the last time you saw Antonio Verdini?”
   “I checked that little fact in my diary. I thought you might ask. By the way, I’ll let you read my diary if you want. I suppose you’ll want the names of the men I’ve screwed. In case the killer was one of them. Maybe jealousy, or something like that. Although I can’t imagine why any of them would be jealous. After all, my door’s been open to just about anyone who knocked. I view my body as something of a public convenience.”
   LaPointe doesn’t want to get mired again in her self-pity; he holds to the line of questioning. “When was the last time you and Verdini made love?”
   “A week ago tonight. He didn’t leave until about midnight. It was a longish number. He was showing off his endurance, which, by the way, was something—”
   “All right.” LaPointe cuts her off. He doesn’t care about that. “That checks. He was killed that night, shortly after he left here.”
   “Hey… maybe I can put you on to something. He might have been just boasting, but he said he had to leave early because he was going to screw some dancer… no. No, a dancer’s kid. That was it.”
   “I know about that. He never got there.”
   “Too bad for the kid. He was a good plumber.”
   LaPointe regards her flatly. “Why don’t we just stick to the questions and answers, Mlle. Montjean?”
   “My hearty attitude toward sex doesn’t impress you, Lieutenant?”
   “It impresses me. But it doesn’t convince me.”
   “Hey! Wow! The wisdom of the streets! Mind if I take a note on that?”
   “Do you want your ass spanked?”
   “Whatever turns you on, Daddy!” she snaps back. She’s an experienced emotional in-fighter.
   He settles his patient, fatigued eyes on her for a moment before continuing. “All right. Now, this professor at McGill. Tell me about him.”
   She chuckles. “You hold your cool pretty well, LaPointe. Of course, you’ve got the advantage of being sober. And you’ve got another edge. Indifference is a mighty weapon.”
   “Let’s just hear about the McGill professor.”
   “Mike Pearson? He was in charge of the Language Learning Center. That’s where I got my idea of setting up this school. The high-saturation methods we use here were developed by Pearson. I took my M.A. under him… literally.”
   “Meaning that you and he—”
   “Whenever we got a chance. Even while I was a student. The first time was on his desk. He got semen on papers he was grading. Do you know the root of the word ‘seminar’? He was my first conquest. Think of it, Lieutenant! I was a virgin until I was twenty-four. A technical virgin, that is. Before that, I was what you might call manually self-sufficient. My analyst has given me some textbook crap about protracted virginity being common in cases of sexually traumatic events in childhood. He went on to say that it was typical that the first man should be a teacher—a father figure, an authority figure. Like a cop, I guess. That anus of an analyst always plays doctor after we’ve screwed. It’s his way of taking an ethical shower. Think of it! A virgin at twenty-four! But I’ve made up for it since.”
   “Would your diary tell me the last time you and this Pearson were together?”
   “I can tell you that myself. Mike’s stabbing was in the papers. He was killed not twenty minutes after leaving here.”
   “Why didn’t you inform the police?”
   “Well, what was the point of getting involved? Mike was married. Why did the wife have to know where he spent his last night? I didn’t dream his getting killed had anything to do with me. I thought he was mugged, or something like that.”
   “And that’s why you didn’t inform the police? Consideration for the wife?”
   “All right, there was the reputation of the school too. It would have been messy PR. Say! Wait a minute! Why wasn’t there anything in the papers about Tony’s death?”
   “There was.”
   “I didn’t see it.”
   “His name wasn’t mentioned. We didn’t know it at the time. But I wonder if you would have called us, if you had known about the Verdini stabbing.”
   She has emptied her glass, and now she reaches automatically for his untouched one. He frowns, afraid she will get too drunk before the questioning is over. “Yes, I think I would have. Not out of civic duty, or any of that shit. But because I would have been scared, like I’ve been scared all afternoon, ever since you told me about it.” She grins, the alcohol rising in her. “You see? That proves I didn’t kill them. If I were the killer, I wouldn’t be scared.”
   “No. But you might tell me you were.”
   “Ah-ha! The foxy mind of the fuzz! But you can take my word for it, Lieutenant. I don’t go around stabbing men. I make them stab me.” She wobbles her head in a blurred nod. “And there, Sigmund, you have a flash of revelation.”
   LaPointe has opened his notebook. “You say you don’t know anything about the third man? The American named MacHenry?”
   She shakes her head profoundly. “Nope. You see, there are some men in Montreal whom I have not yet screwed. But I’ll get around to them. Never fear.”
   “I don’t want you to drink anymore.”
   She looks at him incredulously. “What… did… you… say?”
   “I don’t want you to drink anymore until the questioning is over.”
   “You don’t want…! Well, fuck you, Lieutenant!” She glares at him, then, in the wash of anger and drunkenness, her manner trembles and dissolves. “Or… better yet… fuck me, Lieutenant. Why don’t you screw me, LaPointe? I want to be screwed, for a change.”
   “Come on, cut it out.”
   “No, really! Making it with you may be just what I need. A psychic watershed. The final daddy!” She slides over to him and searches his eyes. There is a knowing leer in her expression, curiously confounded with the pleading of a child. Her hand closes over his leg and penis. He lifts her hand away by the wrist and stands up.
   “You’re drunk, Mlle. Montjean.”
   “And you’re a coward, Lieutenant… Whateveryournameis! I’ll admit I’m drunk, if you’ll admit you’re a coward. A deal?”
   LaPointe reaches into his inside coat pocket and takes out a photograph he picked up from Dr. Bouvier that afternoon. He holds it out to her. “This man.”
   She waves it away with a broad, vague gesture. She is hurt, embarrassed, drunk.
   “It may not be a good likeness. It’s a post-mortem shot. Would it help you to place the man if I told you he was killed about two and a half years ago?”
   Like a petulant child forced to perform a chore, she snatches the photograph and looks at it.
   The shock doesn’t shatter her; it voids her. All spirit leaks out of her. She wants to drop the photograph, but she can’t let go of it. LaPointe has to reach out and take it back.
   As she puts her barriers back together, she saws her lower lip lightly between her teeth. A very deep breath is let out slowly between pursed lips.
   “But his name wasn’t MacHenry. It was Davidson. Cliff Davidson.”
   “Perhaps that was the name he told you.”
   “You mean he didn’t even give me his right name?”
   “Evidently not.”
   “The son of a bitch.” More soft wonder in this than anger.
   “Why son of a bitch?”
   She closes her eyes and shakes her head heavily. She is tired, worn out, sick of all this.
   “Why son of a bitch?” he repeats.

   She rises slowly and goes to the bar—to get distance, not a drink. She leans her elbows on the polished walnut and stares at the array of bottles in the back bar, shining in the many colors of the glass ball light. Her back to him, she speaks in a drone. “Clifford Davidson was the giddying and grand romance in my life, officer. We were betrothed, each unto each. He came up to Canada to set up some kind of manufacturing operation in Quebec City, and he came here to learn Joual. He already spoke fair French, but he was one of your smarter cookies. He knew it would be a tremendous in for him if he, an American, could speak Joual French. The canadien workers and businessmen would eat it up.”
   “And you met him.”
   “And I met him. Yes. An exchange of glances, a brush of hands, a comparison of favorite composers, a matching up of plumbing. Love.”
   “Go on.”
   “Go on? Whither? Quo vadis, pater? Want to know a secret? That Latin I drop every once in a while? That’s just an affection. It’s all I got out of Ste. Catherine’s Academy: a little Latin I no longer remember, and the grooming injunction that all proper girls keep their knees together, which advice I have long ignored. My knees have become absolute strangers. There’s always some man coming between them. And how is that for an earthy little pun?”
   “You and this Davidson fell in love. Go on.”
   “Ah, yes! Back to the interrogation. Right you go, Lieutenant! Well, let’s see. Cliff and I had a glorious month together in gay, cosmopolitan Montreal. As I recall, marriage was mentioned. Then one day… poof! He disappeared like that fabled poofbird that flies in ever-smaller circles until it disappears up its own anus… poof!”
   “Can you tell me the last time you saw him?”
   “For that we shall need the trusty diary.” She descends from the bar stool uncertainly and crosses to her desk, not unsteadily, but much too steadily. “Voilà. My gallery of rogues.” She brandishes the diary for LaPointe to see. “Ah-ha. I see you have been nipping at the Armagnac, Lieutenant. You’re having a little trouble staying in focus, aren’t you, you sly old dog.” With large gestures she pages through the book. “No, not him. No, not him either… although he wasn’t bad. My, my, that was a night to set the waterbed a-sloshing! Come out of that book, Cliff Davidson. I know you’re in there! Ah! Now let’s see. The last night. Hm-m-m. I see it was a night of plans. And of love. And also… the night of September the eighteenth.”
   LaPointe glances at his notebook and closes it.
   “That was the night he was stabbed?” she asks.
   “Yes.”
   “Fancy that. Three men make love to me and end up stabbed. And to think that some guys worry about VD! I assume he was married? This MacHenry-Davidson?”
   “Yes.”
   “A little wifey tucked away in Albany or somewhere. How quaint. You’ve got to hand it to these Americans. They’re fantastic businessmen.”
   “Oh?”
   “Oh, yes! Fantastic. Naturally, I never charged him for his language lessons.”
   LaPointe is silent for a time before asking, “May I take the diary with me?”
   “Take the goddamned thing!” she screams, and she hurls it across the room at him.
   It flutters open in the air and falls to the rug not halfway to him. Feckless display.
   He leaves it lying on the rug. He’ll get it as he goes.
   When she has calmed down, she says dully, “That was a stupid thing to do.”
   “True.”
   “I’m sorry. Come on, have a nightcap with me. Proof of paternal forgiveness?”
   “All right.”
   They sit side by side at the bar, sipping their drinks in silence, both looking ahead at the back bar. She sighs and asks, “Tell me truthfully. Aren’t you a little sorry for me?”
   “Yes, I am.”
   “Yeah. Me too. And I’m sorry for Tony. And I’m sorry for Mike. I’m even sorry for poor old Yo-Yo.”
   “Do you always call her that?”
   “Didn’t everybody?”
   “I never did.”
   “You wouldn’t,” she says bitterly.
   “You never call her Mother?”
   She lays her hand on his shoulder and rests her cheek against her knuckles, letting him support her. “Never out loud. Never when I’m sober. You want to know something, Lieutenant? I hate you. I really hate you for not being… there.”
   She feels him nod.
   “Now, you’re sure…” She yawns deeply. “…you’re absolutely sure you don’t want to screw me?”
   His eyes crinkle. “Yes, I’m sure.”
   “That’s good. Because I’m really sleepy.” She takes her cheek from his shoulder and stands up. “I think I’ll go to bed. If you’ve finished with your questions, that is.”
   LaPointe rises and collects his overcoat. “If I have more questions, I’ll come back.” He picks up the diary from the floor of the “conversation island,” and she accompanies him to the door.
   “This memory trip back to the Main has been heavy, Lieutenant. Heavy and rough. I sure hope I never see you again.”
   “For your sake, I hope it works out that way.”
   “You still think I might have killed those men?”
   He shrugs as he tugs on his overcoat.
   “LaPointe? Will you kiss me good night? You don’t have to tuck me in.”
   He kisses her on the forehead, their only contact his hands on her shoulders.
   “Very chaste indeed,” she says. “And now you’re off. Quo vadis, pater?”
   “What does that mean?”
   “Just some of that phony Latin I told you about.”
   “I see. Well, good night, Mlle. Montjean.”
   “Good night, Lieutenant LaPointe.”

14

   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.

   “Lieutenant LaPointe?” Sister Marie-Thérèse enters the waiting room with a crisp rustle of her blue habit. She shakes hands firmly, realizing that uncertain pressures are vulnerable to interpretation. “You surprise me, Lieutenant. I expected an army officer.” She smiles at him interrogatively, with the poise that is the signature of Ste. Catherine girls.
   “I’m police, Sister.”
   “Ah.” Meaning nothing.
   As LaPointe explains that he is interested in one of their ex-students, Sister Marie-Thérèse listens politely, her face a mask of bland benevolence framed by a wide-winged wimple of perfect whiteness.
   “I see,” she says when he has finished. “Well, of course Ste. Catherine’s is always eager to be a good citizen of Montreal, but I am afraid. Lieutenant, that our rules forbid any disclosure of our students’ affairs. I am sure you understand.” Her manner is gentle, her intention adamant.
   “It isn’t the young lady we’re interested in. Not directly.”
   “Nevertheless…” She shows her palms, revealing herself to be helpless in the face of absolute rules.
   “I considered getting a warrant, Sister. But since there were no criminal charges against the young lady, I thought it might be better to avoid what the newspapers might consider a nasty business.”
   The smile does not desert the nun’s lips, but she lowers her eyes and blinks once. There are no wrinkles in her dry, almost powdery forehead. The face shows no signs of age, and none of youth.
   “Still,” LaPointe says, taking up his overcoat, “I understand your position. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
   She lifts a hand toward his arm, but she does not touch him. “You say that Mlle. Montjean is not implicated in anything… unpleasant?”
   “I said that she was not facing criminal charges.”
   “I see. Well, perhaps Ste. Catherine’s could serve her best by cooperating with you. Will you follow me, please, Lieutenant?”
   As they pass along a dark-paneled hall, he walks through air set in motion by the nun’s habit, and he picks up a faint scent of soap and bread. He wonders if there is a Glory Hole here, and little girls working off punishment tranches by holding out their arms until their shoulders throb. He supposes not. Punishment at Ste. Catherine’s would be a subtler matter, modern, kindly, and epulotic. Theirs would be a beautifully appointed little chapel, and their Virgin would not have a chip out of her cheek, would not be cross-eyed.
   Two teen-aged girls dash around a corner, but arrest their run with comic abruptness when they see Sister Marie-Thérèse, and assume a sedate walk, side by side in their identical blue uniforms with SCA embroidered on bibs that bulge slightly with developing, unexplained breasts. In passing, they mutter, “Good morning, Sister.” The nun nods her head, her expression neutral. But as the girls pass LaPointe they make identical tight-jawed grimaces and suck air in through their lower teeth. They’ll get it later for running in the halls. Young ladies do not run. Not at Ste. Catherine’s.
   The Sister opens a tall oak door and stands aside to allow LaPointe to enter her office first. She does not close the door after them. As principal, she often has to meet male parents without the company of another nun, but never in rooms with closed doors.
   The whole atmosphere of Ste. Catherine’s Academy vibrates with sex unperformed.
   With a businesslike rustle of her long skirts, she passes behind her desk and opens a middle file drawer. “You say Mlle. Montjean came to us twenty years ago?”
   “About that. I don’t know the exact date.”
   “That would be before I held my present position.” She looks up from leafing through the files. “Although it certainly would not be before I came here.” A careful denial that she is claiming youth. “In fact, Lieutenant, I am a Ste. Catherine girl myself.”
   “Oh?”
   “Yes. Except for my girlhood and my years at university, I have lived all my life here. I was a teacher long before they made me principal.” A slight accent on “made.” An elevation to which she had not aspired, and for which she was unworthy. “It’s odd that I don’t remember a Mlle. Montjean.”
   Of course. He had forgot. “Her name was Dery when she was here.”
   “Dery? Claire Dery?” The tone suggests it is impossible that Claire Dery could be in trouble with the police.
   “Her first name may have been Claire.”
   Sister Marie-Thérèse’s fingers stop moving through the file folders. “You don’t know her first name, Lieutenant?”
   “No.”
   “I see.” She does not see. She lifts out a file but does not offer it. “Now, what exactly is the information you require?”
   “General background.”
   Her knuckles whiten as she grips the file more tightly. She has a right to know, after all. A duty to know. It’s her responsibility to the school. Personally, she has no curiosity about scandal.
   LaPointe settles his melancholy eyes on her face.
   She compresses her lips.
   He starts to rise.
   “Perhaps you would like to read through the file yourself.” She thrusts it toward him. “But it cannot leave the school, you understand.”
   The folder is bound with brown cord, and it opens automatically to the page of greatest interest to Ste. Catherine’s. The information LaPointe seeks is there, in the record of fees and payments.
   “…I was sure you saw me last night in Carré St. Louis.”
   “No, I didn’t.”
   “But you stopped suddenly and turned around, as though you had seen me.”
   “Oh, yes, I remember. I just had one of those feelings that someone was watching me.”
   “But she saw me. When she was crossing the park, I am sure she saw me.”
   “She mentioned that she saw someone. But she didn’t recognize you.”
   “How could she? We have never met.”
   They sit diagonally opposite one another in comfortably dilapidated chairs in the bow window niche of a second-floor apartment in a brick row house on Rue de Bullion, two streets off the Main. Below them, the street is filled with a greenish gloaming, the last light of day captured and held close to the surface of the ground, causing objects in the street to be clearer than are rooftops and chimney pots. As they talk, the light leaks away; the gray clouds tumbling swiftly over the city darken and disappear; and the room behind them gradually recedes into gloom.
   LaPointe has never been in the apartment before, but he has the impression that it is tidy, and characterless. They don’t look at one another; their eyes wander over the scene beyond the window, where, across the street to the left, a billboard featuring a mindless smiling girl in a short tartan skirt enjoins people to smoke EXPRESS “A.” Directly beneath them is a vacant lot strewn with broken bricks from houses being torn down to make way for a factory. There is a painted message of protest on the naked brick wall: 17 people lived here. The protest will do no good; history is against the people.
   In the vacant lot, half a dozen children play a game involving running and falling down, playing dead. An older girl stands against the denuded side of the next house to be demolished, watching the kids play. Her posture is grave. She is too old to run and fall down dead; she is still too young to go with men to the bars. She watches the kids, half wanting to be one of them again, half ready to be something else, to go somewhere else.
   “Will you take something, Claude? A glass of schnapps maybe?”
   “Please.”
   Moishe rises from the chair and goes into the gloom of the living room. “I’ve been waiting for you here all day. Once you traced your way to Claire…” He lifts a glass in each hand, a gesture expressive of inevitability. “I suppose you went to Ste. Catherine’s Academy?”
   “Yes.”
   “And of course you found my name in the records of payment.”
   “Yes.”
   Moishe gives a glass to LaPointe and sits down before lifting his drink. “Peace, Claude.”
   “Peace.”
   They sip their schnapps in silence. One of the kids down in the vacant lot has turned his ankle on a broken brick and is down on the hard-packed dirt. The others gather around him. The girl still stands apart.
   “I’m crazy, of course,” Moishe says at last.
   LaPointe shrugs his shoulders.

  “Oh, yes. Crazy. Crazy is not a medical term, Claude; it’s a social term. I am not insane, but I am crazy. Society has systems and rules that it relies on for protection, for comfort… for camouflage. If somebody acts against the rules, society admits of only two possibilities. Either the outsider has acted for gain, or he has not acted for gain. If he has acted for gain, he is a criminal. If he has broken their rules with no thought of gain, he is crazy. The criminal they understand; his motives are their motives, even if his tactics are a little more… brusque. The crazy man they do not understand. Him they fear. Him they lock up, seal off. Whether they are locking him in, or locking themselves out—that’s a matter of point of view.” Moishe draws a long sigh, then he chuckles. “David would shake his head, eh? Even now, even at the end, Moishe the luftmensh looks for philosophy where there is only narrative. Poor David! What will he do without the pinochle games?”
   LaPointe doesn’t respond.
   “I’ve caused you a lot of trouble, haven’t I, Claude? I’m sorry. I tried to confess twice; I tried to save you the trouble. I went to your apartment Sunday for that purpose, but that young girl was there, and I could hardly… Then again after the game, when we were in the Russian café. I wanted to tell you; I wanted to explain; but it’s so complicated. I only got as far as mentioning my sister. You remember?”
   “I remember.”
   “She was very pretty, my sister.” Moishe’s voice is hushed and husky. “Delicate. Almost painfully shy. She would blush at anything. Once I asked her why she was so shy in company. She said she was embarrassed. Embarrassed at what, I asked. At my blushing, she said. Claude, that is shy. To be shy about being shy, that’s shy. She… they put her into a special barracks in the camp. It was… this barracks was for the use of…”
   “You don’t have to tell me all this, Moishe.”
   “I know. But some things I want to tell you. Some things I want to explain… to say out loud for once. In classic drama, when a man has stepped on the inevitable treadmill of fate, he has no right to escape, to avoid punishment. But he does have a right to explain, to complain. Oedipus does not have the right to make a deal with the gods, but he has a right to bitch.” Moishe sips his schnapps. “When the word reached me through the camp grapevine that my sister was in the special barracks, do you know what my first reaction was? It was: oh, no! Not her! She’s too shy!”
   LaPointe closes his eyes. He is tired to the marrow.
   After a pause, Moishe continues. “She had red hair, my sister. Did you know that redheaded people blush more than others? They do. They do.”
   LaPointe looks over at his friend. The finger-stained round glasses are circles of bright gray reflecting the boiling sky. The eyes are invisible. “And Yo-Yo Dery had red hair too.”
   “Yes. Exactly. What a policeman you would have made.”
   “You went with Yo-Yo?”
   “Only once. In all my life, that was my only experience with a woman. Think of that, Claude. I am sixty-two years old, and I have had only one physical experience with a woman. Of course, in my youth I was studious… very religious. Then in early manhood other things absorbed my attention. Politics. Philosophy. Oh, there were one or two girls who attracted me. And a couple of times one thing led to another and I was very close to it. But something always went wrong. A stranger happening along the path. No place to go. Once, in a field, a sudden rainstorm…
   “Then there were the years in the camp. And after that, I was here, trying to start up my little business. Oh, I don’t know. Something happens to you in the camps. First you lose your self-respect, then your appetites, eventually your mind. By clever forensics and selective forgetfulness, one can regain his self-respect. But when the appetites are gone…? And the mind…?
   “So, with one thing and another, I end up a sixty-two-year-old man with only one experience of love. And it really was an experience of love, Claude. Not on her part, of course. But on mine.”
   “But you couldn’t have been Claire Montjean’s father. You weren’t even in Canada—”
   “No, no. By the time I met Françoise, she was experienced enough to avoid having children.”
   “Françoise was Yo-Yo’s real name?”
   Moishe nods, his light-filled glasses blinking. “I hated that nickname. Naturally.”
   “And you only made love once?”
   “Once only. And that by accident, really. I used to see her pass the shop. With men usually. Always laughing. I knew all about her; the whole street knew. But there was the red hair… and something about her eyes. She reminded me of my sister. That seems funny, doesn’t it? Someone like Françoise—hearty, loud, always having fun—reminding me of a girl so shy she blushed because she blushed? Sounds ridiculous. But not really. There was something very fragile in Françoise. Something inside her was broken. The noise she chose to make when it hurt was… laughter. But the pain was there, for those who would see it. I suppose that’s why she killed herself at last.
   “And the men, Claude! The men who used her like a public toilet! The men for whom she was nothing but friction and heat and a little lubrication! None of them bothered to see her pain. One after the other, they used her. They queued up. As though she were… in a special barracks. They sinned against love, these men. Society has no laws concerning crimes against love. Justice cries out against it, but the Law is silent on the matter.”
   “Are you talking about the mother now, or about the daughter?”
   “What? What? Both, I guess. Yes… both.”
   “You said you made love to… Françoise by accident?”
   “Not by intent, anyway. I used to see her walking by the shopwindow—that was back when David was only my employee, before we became partners—and she was always so pert and energetic, always a smile for everybody. You remember, don’t you? You went with her yourself, I believe.”
   “Yes, I did. But—”
   “Please. I’m not accusing. You were not like the others. There is a gentleness in you. Pain and gentleness. I’m not accusing. I’m only saying that you had a chance to know how full of life she was, how kind.”
   “Yes.”
   “So, well. One summer evening I was standing in front of the shop, taking the air. There was not so much work as there is now. We had not been ‘discovered’ by the interior decorators. I was standing there, and she came by. Alone for once. Somehow, I could tell she was feeling blue… had the cafard. I said, Good evening. She stopped. We talked about this and that… about nothing. It was one of those long, soft evenings that make you feel good, but a little melancholy, like sometimes wine does. Somehow I got the courage to ask her to take supper with me at a restaurant. I said it in a joking way, to make it easy for her to say no. But she accepted, just like that. So we had supper together. We talked, and we drank a bottle of wine. She told me about being a child on the Main. About men taking her to bed when she was only fifteen. She joked about it, of course, but she wasn’t joking. And after supper, I walked her home. A warm evening, couples strolling. And all this time, I wasn’t thinking about going to bed with her. I couldn’t think of that. After all, she reminded me of my sister.
   “When we got to her place, she invited me up. I didn’t want to go home early on such an evening, to sit here alone and look out this window, so I accepted. And when we got into her apartment, she kissed her little girl good night, and she went into her bedroom and started undressing. Just like that. She undressed with the door open, and all the time she continued to chat with me about this and that. She had been sad that night, she had needed to talk; and now she was offering me what she had in return for giving her dinner and listening to her stories. How could I reject her?
   “No! No!” Moishe’s hands grip the arms of his chair. “This is no time for lying to myself. Maybe not wanting to reject her had something to do with it, but not much. She was undressed and I was looking at her body… her red hair. And I wanted her. She had told me stories about sleeping with men to get enough money for food, and now she was willing to sleep with me for giving her a dinner. I wanted to prove to her that I was not like those other men! I wanted to leave her alone! As a gesture of love. But she was nude, and it had been a gentle evening with wine, and… I wanted her…
   “And… one week later… she committed suicide.”
   “But, Moishe…”
   “Oh, I know! I know, Claude! It had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t that important in her life. A coincidence; I know that. But I felt I had to do something. I had failed to show that I was not like the other men. And now I had to do something, to show that I had affection. Then I thought of the daughter.”
   “So you arranged to have the girl taken into Ste. Catherine’s. How did you find the money?”
   “That’s when I began to sell out the business to David. Bit by bit, as she needed money for school, for clothes, for vacations, I arranged for a summer in Europe, and later for a loan to start her language school.”
   “And all this time you never talked to the girl? Never let her know what you were doing for her?”
   “That wouldn’t have been right. I wanted to do something. A gesture of love. If I had accepted the daughter’s gratitude, even affection maybe, then it would not have been a pure gesture of love. It would have been payment for value received. It was a sort of game—staying in the background, looking after her, taking pride in her accomplishments. And she has turned out to be a wonderful woman. Hasn’t she, Claude?”
   LaPointe’s voice has become fogged over. He clears his throat. “Yes.”
   “When you think of it, it’s ironic that you have met her, while I have not But I know what a wonderful woman she has become. Look what she is doing for others! A school to teach people how to communicate. What could be more important? And she is a loving person. A little too loving, I’m afraid. Men take advantage of her. Oh, I know that she has had many lovers. I know. I have kept an eye on her. In my day, or yours, to have lovers would have been the mark of a bad girl. But it’s different now. Young people aren’t afraid to express their love. Still… still… there are some men who take a girl’s body without loving her. These people sin. They defile.
   “I used to go to Carré St. Louis often at night and keep an eye on her. I came to recognize the men. When I could, I checked up on the ones who visited often. That was a game too, checking up on them. It’s amazing how much you can find out by asking a little question here, a little question there. Especially if you look like me—mild, unassuming. Most of the men were all right. Not good enough for her, maybe. But that’s how a father always thinks. But some of them… some of them were sinning against her. Taking her love. Taking advantage of her gentleness, of her need for love. The first one was that university professor. A teacher! A teacher taking advantage of an innocent student fresh from convent school! Think of that. And a married man! Would you believe it, Claude, I saw him come to her school again and again for more than a year before it occurred to me that he was taking her love… her body. Inexperienced as I am, I thought he was interested in her school!
   “Then there was that American. He had a wife in the United States. And from the first day, he was lying to her. Did you know that he used a false name with her?”
   “Yes, I learned that.”
   “And finally there was this Antonio Verdini. When I found out about his reputation on the Main…”
   “He was a bad one.”
   “An animal! Worse! Animals don’t pretend. Animals don’t rape. That’s what it is, you know, when a man takes the body of a woman without feeling gentleness or love for her. Rape. Those three men raped her!”
   The room is quite dark now; a ghost of gloaming still haunts the vacant lot where children play at falling down dead, and the lone girl watches soberly.
   On the billboard, the woman in a short tartan skirt smiles provocatively. She’ll give you everything she has, if you will smoke EXPRESS “A.”
   While Moishe sits unmoving, calming his fury, LaPointe’s mind is flooded with scraps and fragments. He recalls Moishe’s wonderful skill with a knife when cutting fabric. David once said what a surgeon he would have made, and Father Martin made a weak joke about appendices being made of damask. LaPointe remembers the long discussions about sin and crime, and about sins against love. Moishe was trying to explain. Then a terribly unkind image leaks into LaPointe’s mind. He wonders if, when he made love to Yo-Yo, Moishe grunted.
   “Tell me about her,” Moishe says quietly.
   It takes LaPointe a second to find the track. “About Mlle. Montjean?”
   “Yes. One of my daydreams has always been that I meet her somehow and we spend a few hours talking about this and that… not revealing anything to her, of course, but finding out how she thinks, what values she holds, her plans, hopes, outlook, Weltanschauung.” Moishe smiles wanly. “It doesn’t look as though that will happen now. So why don’t you tell me about her. She’s an intelligent girl, eh?”
   “Yes, she seems to be. She speaks Latin.”
   “And did you find her sensitive… open to people?”
   “Yes.”
   “I knew she would be! I knew she would take that quality from her mother. And happy? Is she happy?”
   LaPointe realizes what trash it would make of all that Moishe has done, if the girl is not happy.
   “Yes,” LaPointe says. “She’s happy. Why shouldn’t she be? She has everything she could want. Education. Success. You’ve given her everything.”
   “That’s good. That’s good.” The sky is dark and is no longer reflected in Moishe’s glasses. His eyes soften. “She is happy.” For a time he warms himself with that thought. Then he sighs and lifts his head, as though waking. “Don’t worry about it, Claude.”
   “About what?”
   “This business, it must be awkward for you. Painful. After all, we are friends. But you won’t have to arrest me. I will handle everything. A thousand times when I was in the camp, I cursed myself for letting them take me. I regretted that I hadn’t killed my body before they could degrade and soil my mind. So, after I got out, I managed to purchase some… medicine. You would be surprised how many people who have survived the camps have—hidden somewhere—such medicine. Not that they intend to use it. No, they hope and expect that they will never have to use it. But it is a great comfort to know it is there. To know that you will never again have to surrender yourself to indignities.
   “I shall take this medicine soon. You won’t have the embarrassment of having to arrest me.”
   After a silence, LaPointe asks, “Do you want me to stay with you?”
   Moishe is tempted. It would be a comfort. But: “No, Claude. You just go do your rounds of the Main. Put the street to bed like a good beat cop. I’ll sit here awhile. Maybe have another glass of schnapps. There’s only a little left. Why should it go to waste?”
   LaPointe sets down his empty glass and rises. He doesn’t dare follow his impulse to touch Moishe. Moishe has it under control now. Sentiment might hurt him. LaPointe presses his fists deep into his overcoat pockets, grinding his knuckles against his revolver.
   “What will become of her?” Moishe asks.
   LaPointe follows his glance down to the adolescent girl standing alone with her back against the scabby brick wall. “What becomes of them, Claude?”
   LaPointe leaves the room, softly closing the door behind him.

   It is snowing on the Main, and the shops are closing; metal grids clatter down over display windows, doors are locked, one or two lights are left on in the back as deterrents to theft.
   The sidewalks are thick with people, pressing, tangling, fluxing, their necks pulled into collars, their eyes squinting against the snow. At street corners and narrow places there are blockages in the pedestrian swarm, and they are pressed unwillingly against one another, threading or shouldering their way through the nuisance of these faceless and unimportant others, the wad.
   Plump snowflakes the size of communion wafers slant through the garish neon of nosh bars, fish shops, saloons, cafés. People try to protect their packages from being soaked through; women put newspaper tents over their hair; those wearing glasses tilt their heads down so they can see over the top. Friends meet at bus stops and grumble: the goddamned snow; won’t be able to get to work tomorrow. It was too good to last, the pig weather.
   Snow crosshatches through the headlights of trucks grinding past the deserted park of Carré Vallières, at the top of the rise that separates the lower Main from the Italian Main. LaPointe sits on a bench, alone in the barren triangle of sooty dirt and stunted trees he has always associated with his retirement. Huddled in his great shapeless coat, the dark and the snow insulating and protecting him, the Lieutenant weeps.
   The scar tissue over his emotions has ruptured, and his grief is pouring out. He does not sob; the tears simply flow from his eyes, and his face is wet with them.
   LaPointe is grieving. For his grandfather, for Lucille, for Moishe. But principally… for himself. For himself.
   For himself he grieves that his grandfather left him without support and comfort. For himself he grieves that Lucille died and took his ability to love with her. For himself he grieves the loss of Moishe, his last friend. At last, he pities the poor old bastard that he is, with this bubble in his chest that is going to take him away from a life he never quite got around to living. He is sorry for the poor old bastard who never had the courage to grieve his losses, and to survive them.
   He slumps in the soporific pleasure of it. It feels so good to let the pressure leak away, to surrender finally. He knows, of course, that his life and force are draining out with the grief. His strength has always come from his bitterness, his reserve, his indifference. When the weeping is finished, he will be empty… and old.
   But it feels so good to let go. Just… to let it all go.

   At first the snow melts as it touches the sidewalk outside Chez Pete’s Place, but as the slush builds up, it begins to insulate, and the large flakes remain longer before they decompose.
   Inside, a dejected group of bommes sit around the center table, drinking their wine slowly so they won’t have to buy another bottle before the proprietor makes them go out into the weather. Dirtyshirt Red glowers with disgust at two men sitting at a back table. He sneers to the ragged man sitting beside him, drinking a double red from a beer mug.
   “Wouldn’t ya know it? The only guy who’ll drink with that potlickin’ blowhard son of a bitch is a nut case!”
   His mate glances over at the table and growls agreement with any slander against the Vet, that stuck-up shit-licker with his cozy kip off somewhere.
   At the back table, a bottle of muscatel between them, sit the Vet and the Knife Grinder. They are together because they had enough money between them to buy the bottle. They have seen one another on the Main, of course, but they have never talked before.
   “It’s beginning,” the Knife Grinder says, staring at the floor. “The snow. I warned everyone that it was coming, but no one would listen.”
   “Can you believe it?” the Vet answers. “They just caved it in! These goddamned kids come when I wasn’t there, and they caved it in. Just for the hell of it.”
   “People fall in the snow, you know,” the Knife Grinder responds. “They slip off roofs! Happens alla time, but nobody cares!”
   The Vet nods. “They come and dragged off the roof. Then they caved in the sides. No reason. Just for the hell of it”
   The Knife Grinder squints hard and tries to remember. “There was somebody… somebody important. And he told me there wouldn’t be any snow this year. But he was lying!”
   “What can you do?” the Vet asks. “I’ll never find another one. They just… caved it in, you know? Just for fun.”
   They are both staring at the same spot on the floor. A kind of sharing.

   In close to buildings, where pedestrian feet have not ground it to slush, the snow has built up to a depth of three inches. The wind is still strong, and it blows flakes almost horizontally across the window of Le Shalom Restaurant and Coffee Shop. Inside, where damp coats steam and puddles of melt-water make the tiles dangerous, the Chinese waitress barks orders to the long-suffering Greek cook, and tells customers to hold their water; has she got more than two hands?
   Two girls sit in a booth near the counter. They are giggling and excited because a romance is beginning. One girl pushes the other with her elbow and says, “Ask him.” The other presses her hand over her mouth and shakes her head, her eyes sparkling. “Not me. You ask him!” She dares a quick look at the two grinning Hungarian boys in the next booth. “Go on!” the first girl insists, stifling her giggle. “No, you ask him!”
   The Chinese waitress has found time to grab a cigarette. She mutters to herself, “For Christ’s sake, somebody ask him!”

   Four young women from the garment factory walk briskly down St. Laurent, laughing and kidding one another about boyfriends. One tries to catch a snowflake on her tongue; another starts a bawdy folk song about a lute player who will fix your spinet for you like it’s never been fixed before, if you have a fresh new écu to give him for the lesson. They link arms and walk four abreast with long energetic strides as they sing at the top of their voices. They overtake an old Chasidic Jew with peyiss, his shtreimel level on his head, his long black overcoat collecting snowflakes. Playfully, they split, two on each side, and link arms with the startled man who is pulled along at a pace alien to his dignified step. “Buy us a drink, father! What do you say?” one of them shouts, and the others laugh. The old man stops, and the girls continue on, linking up four abreast again, their butts tweaking merrily along. He shakes his head, confused but not displeased. Youth. Youth. He looks up to check the street sign, as he always does before turning down toward the house he has lived in for twenty-two years.

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

   The long wooden stoop of LaPointe’s apartment building is blanketed with six inches of untrodden snow. He holds the rail and half pulls himself up each step, tired, empty. Because his head is down, he sees first her feet, then her battered shopping bag.
   “Hello,” she says.
   He passes her without a word and opens the front door. She follows him into the vestibule, lit only by a fifteen-watt bulb. He leans against the banister and looks at her, his eyes hooded.
   She shrugs, her lips compressed in a flat half grin. The expression says, Well, here I am. That’s the way it goes.
   LaPointe rubs his whiskered cheek. What’s the use of this? He doesn’t need this. He is empty at last, and at peace. He wants to finish it off easily, cocooned in his routine, his chair by the window, his coffee, his Zola. It’s not as though she would stay. The first time she finds a handsome Greek boy to buy her ouzo and dance with her, she’ll be gone again. And probably she’ll come sniffing back when he gets tired of her. What is she after all? A stupid twit the age of his daughters, the age of his wife. And worst of all, he would have to tell her about this thing in his chest. It wouldn’t be fair to let her wake up some morning and reach over to touch him. And find him…
   No, it’s better not to want anything, need anything. There’s no point in opening yourself up to hurt. It’s stupid. Stupid.

   “How about a cup of coffee?” he asked.