3

   The phone rings.
   Half of the sound blends into the eddy of a dream; half is jagged and real, still echoing in the dark room.
   The phone rings again.
   He swings out of bed and gropes into the dark living room. The floor is icy.
   The phone ri—
   “Yes! LaPointe.”
   “Sorry, Lieutenant.” The voice is young. “I hate to wake you up, but—”
   “Never mind that. What’s wrong?”
   “A man’s been killed on your patch.” The caller’s French is accurate, but it has a continental accent. He is an Anglophone Canadian.
   “Murdered?” LaPointe asks. Stupid question. Would they call him for an automobile accident? He still isn’t fully awake.
   “Yes, sir. Knifed.”
   “Where?”
   “Little alley near the corner of Rue Lozeau and St. Dominique. That’s just across from—”
   “I know where it is. When?”
   “Sir?”
   “When did it happen?”
   “I don’t know. I just got here with Detective Sergeant Gaspard. We took an incoming from a patrol car. The Sergeant asked me to call you.”
   “All right. Ten minutes.” LaPointe hangs up.
   He dresses quickly, with fumbling hands. As he leaves he remembers to take the paper bag of garbage with him. He may not get back in time for the collection.
   It is three-thirty, the coldest part of the night. Following the pattern of this pig weather, the overcast has lifted with the early hours of morning, taking with it the smell of city soot. The air is still and crystalline, and the exhaust from a patrol car parked halfway up the narrow alley shoots a long funnel of vapor out into the street. A revolving roof light skids shafts of red along the brick walls and over the chests and faces of the half-dozen policemen and detectives working around the corpse. Bursts of blue-white glare periodically fill the alley, freezing men in mid-gesture, as the forensic photographer takes shots from every angle. Two uniformed officers stand guard at the mouth of the alley, tears of cold in their eyes, their gloved fingers under their armpits for warmth.
   Despite the cold and the hour, a small knot of rubbernecks has gathered at the mouth of the alley. They move about and stand on tiptoe to catch glimpses, and they talk to one another in hushed, confidential tones, instant friends by virtue of shared experience.
   LaPointe crosses the street just as an ambulance pulls up. He stands for a time on the rim of the knot of onlookers, unobtrusively joining them. Some maniac killers, like some arsonists, like to blend with the crowd and experience the effects of their actions.
   There is a street bomme in conversation with a small uncertain man whose chin is buried in a thick wrap of scarf. This latter looks out of place here, like a bank clerk, or an accountant. LaPointe lays his hands on the shoulder of the bomme.
   “Oh, hi-ya, Lieutenant.”
   “What are you doing up at this end of the street, Red?”
   “It got too cold in that doorway. The wind shifted. It was better walking around.”
   LaPointe looks into the tramp’s eyes. He is not lying. “All the same, stay around. Got any fric?”
   “None I can spend.” Like most clochards, Dirtyshirt Red always keeps a dollar or two stashed back for really hard times.
   “Here.” LaPointe gives him a quarter. “Get some coffee.” With a jerk of his head he indicates the all-night Roi des Frites joint across the street.
   The clerk, or accountant, or pederast, moves away from the bomme. Anyone on talking terms with a policeman can’t be perfectly trustworthy.
   LaPointe looks up and down the street. The air is so cold and clear that streetlights seem to glitter, and the corners of buildings a block away have sharp, neat edges, like theatrical sets. Everyone’s breath is vapor, twin jets when they exhale through their noses. From somewhere there comes the homey, yeasty smell of bread. The bakeries would be working at this hour, men stripped to the waist in hot back rooms, sweating with the heat of ovens.
   As LaPointe turns back toward the alley, it starts. A light, rather pleasant tingle in his chest, as though his blood were carbonated. God damn it. A rippling fatigue drains his body and loosens his knees. A constriction swells in his chest, and little bands of pain arc across his upper arms. He leans against the brick wall and breathes deeply and slowly, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible. There are dark patches in his vision, and bright dots. The flashing red light atop the police car begins to blur.
   “Lieutenant LaPointe?”
   The chest constrictions start to ebb, and the stabs of pain in his arms become duller.
   “Sir?”
   Slowly, his body weight returns as the sense of floating deflates. He dares a deep breath taken in little sucks to test for pain.
   “Lieutenant LaPointe?”
   “What, for Christ’s sake!”
   The young man recoils from the violence of the response. “My name’s Guttmann, sir.”
   “That’s your problem.”
   “I’m working with Detective Sergeant Gaspard.”
   “That’s his problem.”
   “I was the one who telephoned you.” The young officer-in-training’s voice is stiff with resentment at LaPointe’s uncalled-for sarcasm. “Sergeant Gaspard is down the alley. He asked me to keep an eye out for you.”
   LaPointe grunts. “Well?”
   “Sir?”
   LaPointe settles his heavy melancholy eyes on the OIT. “You say Gaspard is waiting for me?”
   “Yes, sir. Oh. Follow me, sir.”
   LaPointe shakes his head in general criticism of young policemen as he follows Guttmann into the alley where a bareheaded photographer from the forensic lab is packing up the last of his equipment.
   “That you, LaPointe?” Gaspard asks from the dark. Like a handful of the most senior men on the force, Gaspard tutoyers LaPointe, but he never uses his first name. In fact, most of them would have to search their memories to come up with his first name.
   LaPointe lifts a hand in greeting, then drops the fist back into the pocket of his rumpled overcoat.
   The forensic photographer tells Gaspard that he is going back to the Quartier Général with the film. He will get it into an early batch, and it will be developed by mid-morning. He sniffs back draining sinuses and grumbles, “Colder than a witch’s écu!”
   “Titon,” Gaspard corrects absent-mindedly, as he shakes hands with LaPointe.
   “We haven’t searched the body yet. We’ve been waiting for Flash Gordon here to take the class pictures.” Gaspard addresses the photographer. “Well? If you’re through, I’ll let my men move the bundle.”
   The victim is a young male dressed in a trendy suit with belled trousers, a shirt with a high rolled collar, and shoes of patent leather. He had dropped to his knees when stabbed, then he had fallen forward. LaPointe has never seen a corpse in that posture: on its knees, its buttocks on its heels, its face pressed into the gravel, its arms stretched out with the palms down. It looks like a young priest serving High Mass, and showing off with excessive self-abasement.
   LaPointe feels sorry for it A corpse can look ugly, or peaceful, or tortured; but it’s too bad to look silly. Unfair.
   Guttmann and another detective turn the body over to examine the pockets for identification. A piece of gravel is embedded in the boy’s smooth cheek. Guttmann flicks it off, but a pink triangular dent remains.
   LaPointe mutters to himself, “Heart.”
   “What?” Gaspard asks, tapping out a cigarette.
   “Must have been stabbed through the heart.” Without touching each of the logical steps, LaPointe’s experience told him that there were only two ways the body could have ended up in that comic posture. Either it had been stabbed in the heart and died instantly, or it had been stabbed in the stomach and had tried to cover up the cold hole. But there was no smell of excrement, and a man stabbed in the stomach almost always soils himself through sphincter convulsion. Therefore, heart.
   To turn the body over, the detectives have to straighten it out first. They lift it from under its arms and pull it forward, unfolding it. When they lower it to the pavement, the young face touches the ground.
   “Careful!” LaPointe says automatically.
   Guttmann glances up, assuming he is being blamed for something. He already dislikes the bullying LaPointe. He doesn’t have much use for the old-time image of the tough cop who uses fists and wisetalk, rather than brains and understanding. He has heard about LaPointe of the Main from admiring young French Canadian cops, and the Lieutenant is true to Guttmann’s predicted stereotype.
   Sergeant Gaspard pinches one of his ears to restore feeling to the lobe. “First time I’ve ever seen one kneeling like that. Looked like an altar boy.”
   For a moment, LaPointe finds it odd that they had similar images of the body’s posture. But, after all, they share both age and cultural background. Neither of them is a confessing Catholic any longer, but they were brought up with a simple fundamentalist Catholicism that would define them forever, define them negatively, as a mold negatively defines a casting. They are non-Catholics, which is a very different thing from being a non-Protestant or a non-Jew.
   The detectives go through the pockets routinely, one putting the findings into a clear plastic bag with a press seal, while Guttmann makes a list, tipping his note pad back awkwardly to catch the light from the street.
   “That’s it?” Gaspard asks as Guttmann closes his notebook and blows on his numb fingers.
   “Yes, sir. Not much. No wallet. No identification. Some small change, keys, a comb—that sort of thing.”
   Gaspard nods and gestures to the ambulance attendants who are waiting with a wheeled stretcher. With professional adroitness and indifference, they turn the body onto the stretcher and roll it toward the back doors of the ambulance. The cart rattles over the uneven brick pavement, and one arm flops down, the dead hand palsied with the vibrations.
   They will deliver it to the Forensic Medicine Department, where it will be fingerprinted and examined thoroughly, together with the clothes and articles found in the pockets. The prints will be telephoned to Ottawa, and by morning Dr. Bouvier, the department pathologist, should have a full report, including a make on the victim’s identity.
   “Who found the body?” LaPointe asks Gaspard.
   “Patrol car. Those two officers on guard.”
   “Have you talked to them?”
   “No, not yet. Did you recognize the stiff?” It is generally assumed that LaPointe knows by sight everyone who lives around the Main.
   “No. Never saw him before.”
   “Looked Portuguese.”
   LaPointe thrusts out his lower lip and shrugs. “Or Italian. The clothes were more Italian.”
   As they walk back to the mouth of the alley, the ambulance departs, squealing its tires unnecessarily. LaPointe stops before the uniformed men on guard. “Which of you found the body?”
   “I did, Lieutenant LaPointe,” says the nearest one quickly. He has the rectangular face of a peasant, and his accent is Chiac. It is a misfortune to speak Chiac, because there is a tradition of dour stupidity associated with the half-swallowed sound; it is a hillbilly accent used by comics to enhance tired jokes.
   “Come with us,” LaPointe says to the Chiac officer, and to his disappointed partner, “You can wait in the car. And turn that damned thing off.” He indicates the revolving red light.
   LaPointe, Gaspard, Guttmann, and the Chiac officer cross the street to the Roi des Frites. The policeman left behind is glad to get out of the cold, but he envies his partner’s luck. He would give anything to take coffee with LaPointe. He could just see the faces of the guys in the locker room when he dropped casually, “Lieutenant LaPointe and I were having a coffee together, and he turns to me and says…” Someone would throw a towel at him and tell him he was full of shit up to his eyebrows.
   Dirtyshirt Red rises when the policemen enter the bright interior of the all-night coffee place, but LaPointe motions him to sit down again. Quite automatically, he has already taken over the investigation, although Gaspard from homicide is technically in charge of it. It is an unspoken law in the department that what happens on the Main belongs to LaPointe. And who else would want it?
   The four men sit at a back table, warming their palms on the thick earthenware cups. The Chiac officer is a little nervous—he wants to look good in front of Lieutenant LaPointe; even more, he doesn’t want to seem a boob in relation to this Anglo tagging along with Sergeant Gaspard.
   “By the way, have you met my Joan?” Gaspard asks LaPointe.
   “I met him.” LaPointe glances at the big-boned young man. Must be a bright lad. You only get into the OIT apprentice program if you are in the top 10 percent of your academy class, and then only after you have done a year of service and have the recommendation of your direct superior.
   When LaPointe began on the force, there were almost no Anglo cops. The pay was too low; the job had too little prestige; and the French Canadians who made up the bulk of the department were not particularly kind to interlopers.
   “He’s not a bad type, for a Roundhead,” Gaspard says, indicating his apprentice, and speaking as though he were not present. “And God knows it’s not hard to teach him. There’s nothing he already knows.”
   The Chiac officer grins, and Guttmann tries to laugh it off.
   Gaspard drinks off the last of his coffee and taps on the window to get the attention of the counterman for a refill. “Robbery, eh?” he says to LaPointe.
   “I suppose so. No wallet. Only change in the pockets. But…”
   Gaspard is an old-timer too. “I know what you mean. No signs of a fight.”
   LaPointe nods. The victim was a big, strong-looking boy in his mid-twenties. Well built. Probably the kind who lifts weights while he looks darkly at himself in a mirror. If he had resisted the theft, there would have been signs of it. On the other hand, if he had simply handed over his wallet, why would the mugger knife him?
   “Could be a nut case,” Gaspard suggests.
   LaPointe shrugs.
   “Christ, we need that sort of thing like the Pope needs a Wassermann,” Gaspard says. “Thank God there was a robbery.”
   The Chiac patrolman has been listening, maintaining a serious expression and making every effort to participate intelligently. That is, he has been keeping his mouth shut and nodding with each statement made by the older men. But now his cold-mottled forehead wrinkles into a frown. Why is it fortunate that there was a robbery? He lacks the experience to sense that there was something not quite right about the killing… something about the position of the body that makes both LaPointe and Gaspard intuitively uncomfortable. If there had been no robbery, this might have been the start of something nasty. Like rape mutilations, motiveless stabbings are likely to erupt in patterns. You get a string of four or five before the maniac gets scared or, less often, caught. It’s the kind of thing the newspapers love.
   “I’ll walk it around for a few days,” LaPointe says. “See what Bouvier’s report gives us. You don’t mind if I take it on, do you?” The question is only pro forma. LaPointe feels that all crime on his patch belongs to him by right, but he is careful of the feelings of the other senior men.
   “Be my guest,” Gaspard says with a wave of his arm that indicates he is happy to be rid of the mess. “And if I ever get the clap, you can have that, too.”
   “I’ll route the paper work through you, so we don’t upset the Masters.”
   Gaspard nods. That is the way LaPointe usually works. It avoids direct run-ins with the administration. There is nothing official about LaPointe’s assignment to the Main. In fact, there is no organizational rubric that covers him. The administration slices crime horizontally into categories: theft, bunco, vice, homicide. LaPointe’s responsibility is a vertical one: all the crime on the Main. This assignment was never planned, never officially recognized, it just developed as a matter of chance and tradition; and there are those in authority who chafe at this rupture of the organizational chain. They consider it ridiculous that a full lieutenant spends his time crawling around the streets like a short timer. But they console themselves with the realization that LaPointe is an anachronism, a vestige of older, less efficient methods. He will be retiring before long; then they can repair the administrative breach.
   LaPointe turns to the uniformed policeman. “You found the body?”
   Caught off guard, and wanting to respond alertly, the Chiac cop gulps, “Yes, sir.”
   There is a brief silence. Then LaPointe lifts his palms and opens his eyes wide as if to say, “Well?”
   The young officer glances across at Guttmann as he tugs out his notebook. The leather folder has a little loop to hold a pen. It’s the kind of thing a parent or girlfriend might have given him when he graduated from the academy. He clears his throat. “We were cruising. My partner was driving slowly because I was checking license plates against the watch list of stolen cars—”
   “What did you have for breakfast?” Gaspard asks.
   “Pardon me, sir?” The Chiac officer’s ears redden.
   “Get on with it, for Christ’s sake.”
   “Yes, sir. We passed the alley at… ah… well, let’s see. I wrote the note about ten minutes later, so that would put us at the alley at two-forty or two-forty-five. I saw a movement down the alley, but we had passed it by the time I told my partner to stop. He backed up and I got a glance of a man hopping down the alley. I jumped out and started to chase him, then I came across the body.”
   “You gave pursuit?” LaPointe asks.
   “Well… yes, sir. That is, after I discovered that the guy on the ground was dead, I ran to the end of the alley after the other one. But he had disappeared. The street was empty.”
   “Description?”
   “Not much, sir. Just caught a glimpse as he hopped away. Tallish. Thin. Well, not fat. Hard to tell. He had on a big shabby overcoat, sort of like…” The officer quickly looks away from LaPointe’s shapeless overcoat. “…you know. Just an old overcoat.”
   LaPointe seems to be concentrating on a rivulet of condensed water running down the steamy window beside him. “Il a clopiné?” he asks without looking at the officer. “That’s twice you said the man ‘hopped’ off. Why do you choose that word?”
   The young man shrugs. “I don’t know, sir. That’s what he seemed to do… sort of hobble off. But quick, you know?”
   “And he was dressed shabbily?”
   “I had that impression, sir. But it was dark, you know.”
   LaPointe looks down at the tabletop as he taps his lips with his knuckle. Then he sniffs and sighs. “Tell me about his hat.”
   “His hat?” The young officer’s eyebrows rise. “I don’t remember any…” His expression seems to spread. “Yes! His hat! A big floppy hat. Dark color. I don’t know how that could have slipped my mind. It was kind of like a cowboy hat, but the brim was floppy, you know?”
   For the first time since they entered the Roi des Frites, Guttmann speaks up in his precise European French, the kind Canadians call “Parisian,” but which is really modeled on the French of Tours. “You know who the man is, don’t you, Lieutenant? The one who ran off?”
   “Yes.”
   Gaspard yawns and rubs his legs. “Well, there it is! You see, kid? You’re learning from me how to solve cases. Just talk people into committing their crimes on the Main, and turn them over to LaPointe. Nothing to it. It’s all in the wrist.” He speaks to LaPointe. “So it’s routine after all. The guy was stabbed for his money, and you know who…”
   But LaPointe is shaking his head. It’s not that simple. “No. The man this officer saw running away is a street bomme. I know him. I don’t think he would kill.”
   “How do you know that, sir?” Guttmann’s young face is intense and intelligent. “What I mean is… anyone can kill, given the right circumstances. People who would never steal might kill.”
   With weary slowness, LaPointe turns his patient fatigued eyes on the Anglo.
   “Ah…” Gaspard says, “did I mention that my Joan here had been to college?”
   “No, you didn’t.”
   “Oh, yeah! He’s been through it all. Books, grades, long words, theories, raise your hand to go to the bathroom—one finger for pee-pee, two for ca-ca.” Gaspard turns to Guttmann, who takes a long-suffering breath. “One thing I’ve always wondered, kid,” Gaspard pursues. “Maybe you can tell me from all your education. How come a man grins when he’s shitting a particularly hard turd? I mean, it isn’t all that much fun, really.”
   Guttmann ignores Gaspard; he looks directly at LaPointe. “But what I said is true, isn’t it? People who would never steal might kill, under the right circumstances?”
   The kid’s eyes are frank and vulnerable and they shine with suppressed embarrassment and anger. After a second, LaPointe answers, “Yes. That’s true.”
   Gaspard grunts as he stands and stretches his settled spine. “Okay, it’s your package, LaPointe. Me, I’m going home. I’ll collect the reports in the morning and send them over to you.” Then Gaspard gets an idea. “Hey! Want to do me a favor? How about taking my Joan here for a few days? Give him a chance to see how you do your dirty work. What do you say?”
   The Chiac officer’s mouth opens. These goddamned Roundheads get all the luck.
   LaPointe frowns. They never assign Joans to him, just as they never give him committee work. They know better.
   “Come on,” Gaspard persists. “He can sort of be liaison between my shop and yours. Take him off my back for a few days. He cramps my style. How can I pick up a quick piece of ass with him hanging around all the time, taking notes?”
   LaPointe shrugs. “All right. For a couple of days.”
   “Great,” Gaspard says. As he buttons his overcoat up to the neck, he looks out the window. “Look at this goddamned weather, will you! It’s already socking in again. By dawn the clouds will be back. Have you ever seen the snow hold off so long? And every night it gets cold as a witch’s tit.”
   LaPointe’s mind is elsewhere. He corrects Gaspard thoughtlessly. “écu. Cold as a witch’s écu.”
   “You’re sure it’s not tit?”
   “écu.”
   Gaspard looks down at Guttmann. “You see, kid? You’re going to learn a lot with LaPointe. Okay, men, I’m off. Keep crime off the streets and in the home, where it belongs.”
   The Chiac officer follows Gaspard out into the windy night. They get into the patrol car and drive off, leaving the street totally empty.
   “Thanks, Lieutenant,” Guttmann says. “I hope you don’t feel railroaded into taking me on.”
   But LaPointe has already crooked his finger at Dirtyshirt Red, who shuffles over to the table. “Sit down, Red.” LaPointe shifts to English because it’s Red’s only language, the language of success. “Have you seen the Vet tonight?”
   Dirtyshirt Red makes a face. Over the years he has fostered a fine hatred for his fellow bomme, with all his blowing off about being a war hero, and always bragging about his great kip—a snug sleeping place he has hidden away somewhere. A comforting idea strikes Dirtyshirt Red.
   “Is he in trouble, Lieutenant? He’s a badass, believe you me. I wouldn’t put nothin’ past him! What’s he done, Lieutenant?”
   LaPointe settles his melancholy eyes on the bomme.
   “Okay,” Red says quickly. “Sorry. Yeah, I seen him. Down Chez Pete’s Place, maybe ‘bout six, seven o’clock.”
   “And you haven’t seen him since?”
   “No. I left to go down to the Greek bakery and get some toppins promised me. I didn’t want that potlickin’ son of a bitch hanging around trying to horn in. He’s harder to shake than snot off a fingernail.”
   “Listen, Red. I want to talk to the Vet. You ask around. He could be holed up somewhere because he probably got a lot of drinking money tonight.”
   The thought of his fellow tramp coming into a bit of luck infuriates Dirtyshirt Red. “That wino son of a bitch, the potlickin’ splat of birdshit! Morviat! Fartbubble! Him and his snug pad off somewheres! I wouldn’t put nothin’ past him…”
   Dirtyshirt Red continues his flow of bile, but it is lost on LaPointe, who is staring out the window where beads of condensation make double rubies of the taillights of predawn traffic. Trucks, mostly. Vegetables coming into market. He feels disconnected from events; a kind of generalized déjà vu. It’s all happened before. Some different kid, killed in some different way, found in some different place; and LaPointe sorting it out in some other café, looking out some other window at some other predawn street. It really doesn’t matter very much anymore. He’s tired.
   Without seeming to, Guttmann has been examining LaPointe’s reflection in the window. He has, of course, heard tales about the Lieutenant, his control over the Main, his dry indifference to authorities within the department and to political influences without, improbable myths concerning his courage. Guttmann is intelligent enough to have discounted two-thirds of these epic fables as the confections of French officers seeking an ethnic hero against the Anglophonic authorities.
   Physically, LaPointe satisfies Guttmann’s preconceptions: the wide face with its deep-set eyes that is practically a map of French Canada; the mat of graying hair that appears to have been combed with the fingers; and of course the famous rumpled overcoat. But there are aspects that Guttmann had not anticipated, things that contradict his caricature of the tough cop. There is a quality that might be called “distance”; a tendency to stay on the outer rim of things, withdrawn and almost daydreaming. Then too, there is something disturbing in LaPointe’s patient composure, in the softness of his husky voice, in the crinkling around his eyes that makes him seem… the only word that Guttmann can come up with is “paternal.” He recalls that the young French policemen sometimes refer to him as “Papa LaPointe,” not that anyone dares to call him that within his hearing.
   “…and that potlickin’ cockroach—that gnat—tells everybody what a hero he was in the war! That pimple on a whore’s ass—that wart—tells everybody what a nice private kip he’s got! That son of a bitch gnat-wart tells—”
   With the lift of a hand, LaPointe cuts short Dirtyshirt Red’s flow of hate, just as he is getting up steam. “That’s enough. You ask around for the Vet. If you locate him, call down to the QG. You know the number.” With a tip of his head, LaPointe dismisses the bomme, who shuffles to the door and out into the night.
   Guttmann leans forward. “This Vet is the man with the floppy hat?”
   LaPointe frowns at the young policeman, as though he has just become aware of his presence. “Why don’t you go home?”
   “Sir?”

  “There’s nothing more we can do tonight. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll see you at my office tomorrow.”
   Guttmann reacts to the Lieutenant’s cool tone. “Listen, Lieutenant. I know that Gaspard sort of dumped me on you. If you’d rather not…” He shrugs.
   “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
   Guttmann looks down at the Formica tabletop. He sucks a slow breath between his teeth. Being with LaPointe isn’t going to be much fun. “All right, sir. I’ll be there at eight.”
   LaPointe yawns and scrubs his matted hair with his palm. “You’re going to have a hell of a wait. I’m tired. I won’t be in until ten or eleven.”
   After Guttmann leaves, LaPointe sits looking through the window with unfocused eyes. He feels too tired and heavy to push himself up and trudge back to the cold apartment. But… he can’t sit here all night. He rises with a grunt.

   Because the streets are otherwise empty, LaPointe notices a couple standing on a corner. They are embracing, and the man has enclosed her in his overcoat. They press together and sway. It’s four-thirty in the morning and cold, and their only shelter is his overcoat. LaPointe glances away, unwilling to intrude on their privacy.

   When he turns the corner of Avenue Esplanade, the wind flexes his collar. Litter and dust swirl in miniature whirlwinds beside iron-railed basement wells. LaPointe’s body needs oxygen; each breath has the quality of a sigh.
   A slight movement in the park catches his eye. A shadow on one of the benches at the twilight rim of a lamplight pool. Someone sitting there. At the foot of his long wooden stoop, he turns and looks again. The person has not moved. It is a woman, or a child. The shadow is so thin it doesn’t seem that she is wearing a coat. LaPointe climbs a step or two, then he turns back, crosses the street, and enters the park through a creaking iron gate.
   Though she should be able to hear the gravel crunching under his approaching feet, the young girl does not move. She sits with her knees up, her heels against her buttocks, arms wrapped around her legs, face pressed into her long paisley granny gown. Beside her, placed so as to block some of the wind, is a shopping bag with loop handles. It is not until LaPointe’s shadow almost touches her that she looks up, startled. Her face is thin and pale, and her left eye is pinched into a squint by a bruise, the bluish stain of which spreads to her cheekbone.
   “Are you all right?” he asks in English. The granny gown makes him assume she is Anglo; he associates the new, the modern, the trendy with the Anglo culture.
   She does not answer. Her expression is a mixture of defiance and helplessness.
   “Where do you live?” he asks.
   Her chin still on her knees, she looks at him with steady, untrusting eyes. Her jaw takes on a hard line because she is clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering. Then she squints at him appraisingly. “You want to take me home with you?” she asks in Joual French, her voice flat; perhaps with fatigue, perhaps with indifference.
   “No. I want to know where you live.” He doesn’t mean to sound hard and professional, but he is tired, and her direct, dispassionate proposition took him unawares.
   “It’s none of your business.”
   Her sass is a little irritating, but she’s right; it’s no business of his. Kids like this drift onto the Main every day. Flotsam. Losers. They’re no business of his, until they get into trouble. After all, he can’t take care of them all. He shrugs and turns away.
   “Hey?”
   He turns back.
   “Well? Are you going to take me home with you, or not?” There is nothing coquettish in her tone. She is broke and has no place to sleep; but she does have an écu. It’s a matter of barter.
   LaPointe sighs and scratches his hairline. She appears to be in her early twenties, younger than LaPointe’s daydream children. It’s late and he’s tired, and this girl is nothing to him. A skinny kid with a gamine face spoiled by that silly-looking black eye, and anything but attractive in the oversized man’s cardigan that is her only protection against the wind. The backs of her hands are mottled with cold and purple in the fluorescent streetlight.
   Not attractive, probably dumb; a loser. But what if she turned up as a rape statistic in the Morning Report?
   “All right,” he says. “Come on.” Even as he says it, he regrets it. The last thing he needs is a scruffy kid cluttering up his apartment.
   She makes a movement as though to rise, then she looks at him sideways. He is an old man to her, and she knows all about old men. “I don’t do anything… special,” she warns him matter-of-factly.
   He feels a sudden flash of anger. She’s younger than his daughters, for Christ’s sake! “Are you coming?” he asks impatiently.
   There is only a brief pause before she shrugs with protective indifference, rises, and takes up her shopping bag. They walk side by side toward the gate. At first he thinks she is stiff with the cold and with sitting all huddled up. Then he realizes that she has a limp; one leg is shorter than the other, and the shopping bag scrapes against her knee as she walks.
   He opens his apartment door and reaches around to turn on the red-and-green overhead lamp, then he steps aside and she precedes him into the small living room. Because the putty has rotted out of the big bow windows, they rattle in the wind, and the apartment is colder than the hallway.
   As soon as he closes the door, he feels awkward. The room seems cramped, too small for two people. Without taking off his overcoat, he bends down and lights the gas in the fireplace. He squats there, holding down the lever until the limp blue flames begin to make the porcelain nipples glow orange.
   Oddly, she is more at ease than he. She crosses to the window and looks down at the park bench where she was sitting a few minutes ago. She rubs her upper arms, but she prefers not to join him near the fire. She doesn’t want to seem to need anything that’s his.
   With a grunt, LaPointe stands up from the gas fire. “There. It’ll be warm soon. You want some coffee?”
   She turns down the corners of her mouth and shrugs.
   “Does that mean you want coffee, or not?”
   “It means I don’t give a shit one way or the other. If you want to give me coffee, I’ll drink it. If not…” Again she shrugs and squeeks a little air through tight lips.
   He can’t help smiling to himself. She thinks she’s so goddamned tough. And that shrug of hers is so downriver.
   The French Canadian’s vocabulary of shrugs is infinite in nuance and paraverbal articulation. He can shrug by lifting his shoulders, or by depressing them. He shrugs by glancing aside, or by squinting. By turning over his hands, or simply lifting his thumbs. By sliding his lower lip forward, or by tucking down the corners of his mouth. By closing his eyes, or by spreading his face. By splaying his fingers; by pushing his tongue against his teeth; by tightening his neck muscles; by raising one eyebrow, or both; by widening his eyes; by cocking his head. And by all combinations and permutations of these. Each shrug means a different thing; each combination means more than two different things at the same time. But in all the shrugs, his fundamental attitude toward the role of fate and the feebleness of Man is revealed.
   LaPointe smiles at her tough little shrug, a smile of recognition. While he is in the kitchen putting the kettle on, she moves over to the mantel, pretending to be interested in the photographs arranged in standing frames. In this way she can soak up warmth from the gas fire without appearing to need or want it. As soon as he returns, she steps away as nonchalantly as possible.
   “Who’s that?” she asks, indicating the photographs.
   “My wife.”
   Her swollen eye almost closes as she squints at him in disbelief. The woman in the photos must be twenty-five or thirty years younger than this guy. And you only have to look around this dump to know no woman lives here. But if he wants to pretend he has a wife, it’s no skin off her ass.
   He realizes the room is still cold, and he feels awkward to be wearing a big warm overcoat while she has nothing but that oversized cardigan. He tugs off the coat and drops it over a chair. It occurs to him to give her his bathrobe, so he goes into the bedroom to find it, then he steps into the bathroom and starts running hot water in the deep tub with its claw feet. He notices how messy the bathroom is. He is swishing dried whiskers out of the basin when he realizes that the coffee water must have dripped through by now, so he starts back, forgetting the robe and having to go back for it.
   Christ, it’s complicated having a guest in your house! Who needs it?
   “Here,” he says grumpily. “Put this on.” She regards the old wool robe with caution, then she shrugs and slips it on. Enveloped in it, she looks even smaller and thinner than before, and clownlike, with that frizzy dustmop of a hairstyle that the kids wear these days. A clown with a black eye. A child-whore with a street vocabulary in which foutre and fourrer do most of the work of faire, and with everything she owns in a shopping bag.
   LaPointe is in the kitchen, pouring out the coffee and adding a little water from the kettle because it is strong and she is only a kid, when he hears her laugh. It’s a vigorous laugh, lasting only six or eight notes, then stopping abruptly, still on the ascent, like the cry of a gamebird hit on the rise.
   When he steps into the living room, carrying her cup, she is standing before the mirror that hangs on the back of the door; her face is neutral and bland; there is no trace of the laugh in her eyes. He asks, “What is it? What’s wrong? Is it the robe?”
   “No.” She accepts the coffee. “It’s my eye. It’s the first time I’ve seen it.”
   “You find it funny, your eye?”
   “Why not?” She brings her cup over to the sofa and sits, her short leg tucked up under her buttock. She has a habit of sitting that way. She finds it comfortable. It has nothing to do with her limp. Not really.
   He sits in his overstuffed chair opposite as she sips the hot coffee, looking into the cup as a child does. That laugh of hers, so total and so brief, has made him feel more comfortable with her. Most girls would have expressed horror or self-pity to see their faces marred. “Who hit you?” he asks.
   She shrugs and blows a puff of air in a typically Canadian gesture of indifference. “A man.”
   “Why?”
   “He promised me I could spend the night, but afterward he changed his mind.”
   “And you raised hell?”
   “Sure. Wouldn’t you?”
   He leans his head back and smiles. “It’s a little hard to imagine being in the situation.”
   She stops in mid-sip and sets the cup down, looking at him levelly. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
   “Nothing.”
   “Why’d you say it then?”
   “Forget it. You’re from out of town, aren’t you?”
   She is suddenly wary. “How’d you know that?”
   “You have a downriver accent. I was born in Trois Rivières myself.”
   “So?” She picks up her cup again and sips, watching him closely, wondering if he’s trying to get something for nothing with all this friendly talk.
   He makes a sudden movement forward, remembering the bath he is running.
   Her cup rattles as she jerks back and lifts an arm to protect herself.
   Then he realizes the tub won’t be half full yet. Water runs slowly through the old pipes. He sits back in his chair. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
   “You didn’t startle me! I’m not afraid of you!” She is angry to have cowered so automatically after her swaggering talk.
   Is this the same kid who just now was laughing at herself in the mirror? Pauvre gamine. Tough; sassy; vulnerable; scared. “I thought the tub might be overflowing. That’s why I jumped up. I’m drawing a bath for you.”
   “I don’t want any goddamned bath!”
   “It will warm you up.”
   “I’m not even sure I want to stay here.”
   “Then finish your coffee and go.”
   “I don’t even want your fucking coffee!” She stares at him, her narrow chin jutting out in defiance. Nobody bosses her around.
   He closes his eyes and sighs deeply. “Go on. Take your bath,” he says quietly.
   In fact, the thought of a deep hot bath… All right. She would take a bath. To spite him.
   Steam billows out when she opens the bathroom door. The water is so hot that she has to get in bit by bit, dipping her butt tentatively before daring to lower herself down. Her arms seem to float in the water above her small breasts. The heat makes her sleepy.
   When she comes back into the living room, dressed only in his robe, he is sitting in the armchair, his chin down and his eyes closed. Heat from the gas burner has built up in the room, and she feels heavy and very drowsy. Might as well get it over with and get some sleep.
   “Are you ready?” she asks. “If you’re not, I can help you.” She lets the front of the robe hang open. That ought to get him started.
   He blinks away the deep daydream about his daughters and the Laval house, and turns his head to look at her. She’s so thin that there are hollows in her pelvis. The black tangle of hair at the écu has a wiry look. One knee is slightly bent to keep the weight on both feet. The breasts are so small that there is a flat of chestbone between them.
   “Cover yourself up,” he says. “You’ll catch cold.”
   “Now just a minute,” she says warily. “I told you in the park that I don’t do anything special—”
   “I know!”
   She takes his anger as proof that he had hoped for some kind of old man’s perversion.
   He stands up. “Look, I’m tired. I’m going to bed. You sleep here.” While she was in the bath, he had made up the sofa, taking one of the pillows from his bed and pulling down two Hudson Bay blankets from the shelf in the closet. They smelled a little of dust, but there is nothing as warm as a Hudson Bay. There is no sheet. He owns only four, and he hasn’t picked up his laundry yet this week. He thought of giving her his, but they are not clean. Nothing in the apartment is prepared for visitors. Since Lucille’s death, there have never been any.
   She slowly closes the robe. So he really hadn’t meant for them to sleep together at all. Maybe it’s the leg. Maybe he doesn’t like the thought of screwing a cripple. She’s met others like that. Well, to hell with him. She doesn’t care.
   While he is rinsing out the cup and emptying the coffee-maker in the kitchen, she makes herself comfortable on the sofa and pulls the heavy blankets over her. Only when the delicious weight is pressing on her does she realize how tired she is. It almost hurts her bones to relax.
   On his way to the bedroom, he turns off the gas. “You don’t need it while you’re sleeping. It’s bad for the lungs.”
   Who the hell does he think he is? Her father?
   When he turns off the overhead light, the windows that seemed black become gray with the first damp light of dawn. He pauses at the bedroom door. “What’s your name, by the way?”
   Sleepiness already rising in the dry wick of her fatigue, she mutters, “Marie-Louise.”
   “Well… good night then, Marie-Louise.”
   She hums, half annoyed by the fact that he keeps talking. It doesn’t occur to her to ask his name.

4

   Even before he opens his eyes, he knows it is late. Something in the quality of the sounds out in the street is wrong for getting-up time. He sits on the edge of his bed and groggily reaches for his bathrobe. It is not there. Only then does he remember the girl sleeping in his robe out in the living room.
   He tiptoes through on his way to the kitchen, fully dressed, although he usually takes his coffee before dressing. He doesn’t want her to see him padding around in his underwear.
   She lies on her side, curled up, the blankets so high that only her mop of frizzed hair is visible. From the line of her body beneath the blankets, he can tell that her hands are between her legs, the palms touching the sides of her thighs. He remembers sleeping like that when he was a kid.
   His cup is on the drainboard, where it always is, but he has to rummage about in the cupboard to find another. He puts too little water in the kettle, underestimating the amount needed for two cups, but he decides not to boil more because the coffee already made will get cold. Pouring from one cup to another to make equal shares doesn’t work out well, and he loses about a quarter of a cup. He grumbles “Merde” with each accident or miscalculation. It’s really a nuisance having someone living with you. Staying with you, that is.
   Because the cups are only half full, he has no difficulty balancing them as he carries them into the living room.
   She is still asleep as he places the cups carefully on the table by the window. The worn springs of his chair clack; he grimaces and settles down more slowly. Maybe he shouldn’t wake her; she is sleeping so peacefully. But what’s the point of making coffee for two if you don’t give it to her? But, no. It’s best to let the poor kid sleep.
   “Coffee?” he asks, his voice husky.
   She doesn’t move.
   All right. Let her sleep, then.
   “Coffee?” he asks louder.
   She half hums, half groans, and her head turns under the blankets.
   Poor kid’s worn out. Let her sleep.
   “Marie-Louise?”
   A hand slips out and tugs the blanket from her cheek. Her eyelids flutter, then open. She blinks twice and frowns as she tries to remember the room. How did she get here?
   “Your coffee will get cold,” he explains.
   She looks at him Wearily, not recognizing him at first. “What?” she asks, her voice squeaky. “Oh… you.” She presses her eyes shut before opening them again. The puffiness of her black eye has gone down, and the purplish stain has faded toward green.
   “Your coffee’s ready. But if you’d rather sleep, go ahead.”
   “What?”
   “I said… you can go back to sleep, if you want.”
   She frowns dazedly. She can’t believe he woke her up to tell her that. She puts her hand over her eyes to shade them from the cold light as she recollects, then turns and looks at him, wondering what he is up to. He didn’t want it last night, so he’s probably after a little now.
   But he’s just sitting there, sipping his coffee.
   When she sits up, she notices that her robe is open to the nipples; she tugs it back around her. She accepts the cup he hands her and looks into it bleakly. “Do you have any milk?”
   “No. Sorry.”
   She sips the thick dark brew. “How about sugar?”
   “No. I don’t keep sugar in the house. I don’t use it, and it attracts ants.”
   She shrugs and drinks it anyway. At least it’s hot.
   They don’t talk, and instead of looking at one another, they both look out the window at the park across the street. A woman is pushing a pram along the path while a spoiled child dangles from her free hand, twisting and whining. She gives it a good shake and a splat on the bottom that seems to improve its humor.
   Marie-Louise can see the bench where he found her. It’s going to be cold and damp again today, and she won’t be able to make a score until dark, if then. Maybe he would let her stay. No, probably not. He’d be afraid she might steal something. Still, it’s worth a try.
   “You feel better this morning?” she asks.
   “Better?”
   “If you don’t have to rush off, we could…” Palm up, her hand saws the air between them horizontally in an eloquent Joual gesture.
   “Don’t worry about it,” he says.
   “It won’t cost you. Just let me stay until dark.” She produces a childish imitation of a sexy leer that is something between the comic and the grotesque, with that black eye of hers. “I would be good to you.” When he does not respond, another thought occurs to her. “I’m all right,” she promises. “I mean… I’m healthy.”
   He looks at her calmly for several seconds. Then he rises. “I have to go to work. Would you like more coffee?”
   “No. No, thank you.”
   “Don’t you like coffee?”
   “Not really. Not without milk and sugar.”
   “I’m sorry.”
   She lifts her shoulders. “It’s not your fault.”
   He pulls out his wallet. “Look…” He doesn’t know exactly how to say this. After all, it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other if she stays or goes. “Look, there’s a store around the corner. You can buy things for your breakfast. The… the stove works.” What a stupid thing to say. Of course the stove works.
   She reaches up and takes the offered ten-dollar bill. This must mean she can stay until night.
   He takes up his overcoat. “Okay. Good, then.” He goes to the door. “Oh, yes. You’ll need a key to get back in after your shopping. There’s one on the mantel.” It occurs to him that it must seem stupid to leave the extra key on the mantel, because you would have to be in the apartment to get it. And if you’re already in the apartment… But Lucille had always left it there, and he never misplaced his own key, so…
   As he is leaving, she asks, “May I use your things?”
   “My things?”
   “Towel. Deodorant. Razor.”
   Razor? Oh, of course. He has forgotten that women shave under their arms. “Certainly. No, wait a minute. I use a straight razor.”
   “What’s that?”
   “You know… just a… straight razor.”
   “And you don’t want me using it?”
   “I don’t think you can. Why don’t you buy yourself a razor? There’s enough money there.” He closes the door behind him and gets halfway down the stairs before something occurs to him.
   “Marie-Louise?” He has opened the door again.
   She looks up. She has been pawing through her shopping bag of clothes, planning to take this chance to wash out a few things and dry them in front of the gas heater before he comes back. She acts as though she’s been caught at something. “Yes?”
   “The stove. The pilot light doesn’t work. You have to use a match.”
   “Okay.”
   He nods. “Good.”

   When he arrives at the Quartier Général, the workday is in full swing. The halls outside the magistrate’s courts are crowded with people standing around or waiting on benches of dark wood, worn light in places by the legs and buttocks of the bored, or the nervous. One harassed woman has three children with her, separated in age by only the minimal gestation period. She hasn’t made up that day; perhaps she has given up making up. The youngest of her kids clings to her skirt and whimpers. Her tension suddenly cracking, she screams at it to shut up. For an instant the child freezes, its eyes round. Then its face crumples and it howls. The mother hugs and rocks it, sorry for both of them. Two young men lounge against a window frame, their slouching postures meant to convey that they are not impressed by this building, these courts, this law. But each time the door to the courtroom opens, they glance over with expectation and fear. There are a few whores, victims of a street sweep somewhere. One is telling a story animatedly; another is scratching under her bra with her thumb. A girl in her late teens, advanced pregnancy dominating her skinny body, chews nervously on a strand of hair. An old man rocks back and forth in misery, rubbing his palms against the tops of his legs. It’s his last son; his last boy. Youngish lawyers in flowing, dusty black robes and starched collars crossed at the throat, their smooth foreheads puckered into self-important frowns, stalk through the crowd with long strides calculated to give the impression that they are on important business and have no time to waste.
   LaPointe scans automatically for faces he might recognize, then steps into one of the big, rickety elevators. Two young detectives mumble greetings; he nods and grunts. He gets out on the second floor and goes down the gray corridor, past old radiators that thud and hiss with steam, past identical doors with ripple-glass windows. His key doesn’t seem to work in his lock. He mutters angrily, then the door opens in his hand. It wasn’t locked in the first place.
   “Good morning, sir.”
   Oh, shit, yes. Gaspard’s Joan. LaPointe has forgotten all about him. What was his name? Guttmann? LaPointe notices that Guttmann has already moved in and made himself at home at a little table and a straight-backed chair in the corner. He hums a kind of greeting as he hangs his overcoat on the wooden coat tree. He sits heavily in his swivel chair and begins to paw around through his in-box.
   “Sir?”
   “Hm-m.”
   “Sergeant Gaspard’s report is on your desk, along with the report he forwarded from the forensic lab.”
   “Have you read it?”
   “No, sir. It’s addressed to you.”
   LaPointe is following his habit of scanning the Morning Report first thing in his office. “Read it,” he says without looking up.
   It seems strange to Guttmann that the Lieutenant seems uninterested in the report. He opens the heavy brown interdepartmental envelope, unwinding the string around the plastic button fastener. “You’ll have to initial for receipt, sir.”
   “You initial it.”
   “But, sir—”
   “Initial it!” This initialing of routing envelopes is just another bit of the bureaucratic trash that trammels the ever-reorganizing department. LaPointe makes it a practice to ignore all such rules.
   What’s this? A blue memo card from the Commissioner’s office. Look at this formal crap:

   FROM: Commissioner Resnais
   TO: Claude LaPointe, Lieutenant
   SUBJECT: Morning of 21 November: appointment for
   MESSAGE: I’d like to see you when you get in.
   Resnais
   (dictated, but not signed)

   LaPointe knows what Resnais wants. It will be about the Dieudonné case. That weaselly little turd of a lawyer is threatening to lodge a 217 assault charge against LaPointe for slapping his client. We must protect the civil rights of the criminal! Oh, yes! And what about the old woman that Dieudonné shot through the throat? What about her, with her last breaths whistling and flapping moistly through the hole?
   LaPointe pushes the memo card aside with a growl.
   Guttmann glances up from the report on the kid they found in the alley. “Sir? Something wrong?”
   “Just read the report.” He must be tired this morning. Even this kid’s careful continental French annoys him. And he seems to take up so goddamned much room in the office! LaPointe hadn’t noticed last night how big the kid was. Six-two, six-three; weighs about 210. And his attempt to fit himself into as little space as possible behind that small table makes him seem even bigger and bulkier. This isn’t going to work out. He’ll have to turn him back over to Gaspard as soon as possible.
   LaPointe shoves the routine papers and memos away and rises to look out his office window toward the Hôtel de Ville. There are scaffolds clinging to the sides of the Victorian hulk, and above the scaffolds the sandblasters have cleaned to a creamy white a façade that used to bear the comfortable patina of soot with water-run accents of dark gray. For months now, they have been sandblasting the building, and the roaring hiss has become a constant in LaPointe’s office, replacing the rumble of traffic as a base line for silence. It is not the noise that bothers LaPointe, it is the change. He liked the Hôtel de Ville the way it was, with its stained and experienced exterior. They change everything. The law, rules of evidence, acceptable procedure in dealing with suspects. The world is getting more complicated. And younger. And all these new forms! This endless paper work that he has to peck out with two fingers, hunched over his ancient typewriter, growling and smashing at the keys when he makes an error…
   …It’s strange to think of her using his Mum. Putting his Mum under her arms. He supposes young girls don’t use Mum. They probably prefer those fancy sprays. He shrugs. Well, that’s just too bad. Mum is all he has. And if it’s not good enough for her…
   “No identification,” Guttmann says, mostly to himself.
   “What?”
   “The forensic lab report, sir. No identification of that man in the alley. And no make on the fingerprints.”
   “They checked with Ottawa?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “Hm-m.” The victim looked like the type who ought to have a record, if not for petty arrests, at least as an alien. No fingerprints. One possibility immediately occurs to LaPointe. The victim might have been an unregistered alien, one of those who slip into the country illegally. They are not uncommon on the Main; most of them are harmless enough, victims of the circular paradox of having no legal nationality, and therefore no passports and no means of legitimate immigration, therefore, no legal nationality. Several of the Jews who have been on the street for years are in this category, particularly those who came from camps in Europe just after the war. They cause no trouble; anyway, LaPointe knows about them, and that’s what counts.
   “What else is in the report?”
   “Not much, sir. A technical description of the wound… angle of entry and that sort of thing. They’re running down the clothing.”
   “I see.”
   “So what do we do now?”
   “We?” LaPointe looks at the daunting pile of back work, of forms and memos and reports on his desk. “Tell me, Guttmann. When you were in college, did you learn to type?”
   Guttmann is silent for fully five seconds before saying, “Ah… yes, sir?” The rising note says it all. “You know, sir,” he adds quickly, “Sergeant Gaspard had me filling out reports for him when I was assigned as his Joan. It struck me that was a sort of perversion of the intention of the apprentice program.”
   “A what?”
   “A perversion of the… That was one of the reasons I was glad when he let me work with you.”
   “It was?”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “I see. Well, in that case, you start working on this junk on my desk. Whatever requires a signature, sign. Sign my name if you have to.”
   Guttmann’s face is glum. “What about Commissioner Resnais?” he asks, glad to have a little something to pique back with. “There was a memo about him wanting to see you.”
   “I’ll be down in Forensic Medicine, talking to Bouvier, if anyone calls.”
   “And what should I tell the Commissioner’s office, if they call?”
   “Tell them I’m perverting your intentions… that was it, wasn’t it?”

   As LaPointe steps out of the elevator on the basement level, he is met by a medley of odors that always brings the same incongruous image to his mind: a plaster statue of the Virgin, her bright blue eyes slightly strabismic through the fault of the artist, and a small chip out of her cheek. With this mental image always comes a leaden sensation in his arms and shoulders. The stale smells of the Forensic Medicine Department are linked to this odd sensation of weight in his arms by a long organic chain of association that he has never attempted to follow.
   The odor in these halls is an olio of chemicals, floor wax, paint cooking on hot radiators, dusty air, the sum of which is very like the smells of St. Joseph’s Home, where he was sent after the pneumonia took his mother. (In Trois Rivières, it wasn’t pneumonia; it was the pneumonia. And it didn’t kill one’s mother; it took her.)
   The smells of St. Joseph’s: floor wax, hot radiators, wet hair, wet wool, brown soap, dust, and the acrid smell of ink, dried and caked on the sides of the inkwell.
   Inkwell. The splayed nib scrapes over the paper. You have to write it a hundred times, perfectly, without a blemish. That will teach you to daydream. Your mind slips away from the exercise for a second, and the point of the nib digs into the cheap paper on the upstroke. A splatter of ink makes you have to start all over again. It’s a good thing for you that Brother Benedict didn’t find the moue on you. You’d get something worse than a hundred lines for that. You’d get a tranche.
   Moue. You make moue by pressing bread into a small tin box and moistening it with a little water and spit. In a day or two, it begins to taste sweet. It is the standard confection of the boys at St. Joseph’s, and is munched surreptitiously during classes, or is traded for favors, or gambled in games of “fingers” in the dormitory after lights out, or given to the big boys to keep from being toughed up. Because the bread is stolen from the dinner line, moue is illegal in St. Joseph’s, and if you’re found with it on you, you get a tranche. You can pick up tranches for other sins too. For talking in line, for not knowing your lessons, for fighting, for sassing. If you haven’t worked off all your tranches by the end of the week, you don’t eat on Sunday.
   A tranche is a fifteen-minute slice of time spent in the small chapel the boys call the Glory Hole, where you kneel before the plaster Mary, your arms held straight out in cruciform, under the supervision of old Brother Jean who seems to have no other duties than to sit in the second row of the Glory Hole and record the boys’ punishments. You kneel there, arms straight out. And for five minutes it’s easy. By the end of the first fifteen minutes, your arms are like lead, your hands feel huge, and the muscles of your shoulders are trembling with effort. Maybe you shouldn’t try for your second tranche. Anything less than a full fifteen-minute slice doesn’t count at all. You can do as much as fourteen minutes before your arms collapse, and it’s as though you hadn’t even tried. Oh, to hell with it! Go for a second one. Get the goddamned thing over with. Halfway through the second tranche you know you’re not going to make it. You squeeze your eyes shut and grit your teeth. Everyone says that Brother Jean cheats, makes the second slice longer than the first. You ball up your fists and fight against the numbness in your shoulders. But inevitably the arms sag. “Up. Up,” says Brother Jean gently. With a sneer of pain, you pull your arms back up. You take deep breaths. You try to think of something other than the pain. You stare at the face of the plaster Virgin, so calm, so pure, with her slightly crossed eyes and her goddamned stupid chipped cheek! The hands fall, clapping to the sides of the legs, and you grunt with the sudden change in the timbre of the pain. Brother Jean’s voice is flat and soft. “LaPointe. One tranche.”
   Every time he steps off the elevator into the basement and breathes these particular odors, LaPointe’s arms feel heavy, for no reason he can think of.
   For a second, he attributes the sensation to his heart, his aneurism. He awaits the rest of it—the bubbles in his blood, the constriction, the exploding lights behind the eyes. When these do not come, he smiles at himself and shakes his head.
   The door to Dr. Bouvier’s office is open, and he is talking to one of his assistants while he examines a list on a clipboard, holding the board close to his right eye, huge behind a thick lens. His left eye is hidden behind a lens the color of nicotine. It must be an ugly eye, for he takes pains to prevent anyone from seeing it. He tells his assistant to make sure something is done by this afternoon, and the young man leaves. Bouvier scratches his scalp with the back of his pencil, then cocks his head toward the door. “Who’s that?” he demands.
   “LaPointe.”
   “Ah! Come in. For God’s sake, don’t hover. How about some coffee?”
   LaPointe sits in a scrofulous old leather chair beneath one of the high wire-screened windows that let a ghost of daylight into the basement rooms. Bouvier feels along the ledge behind him until he touches a cup. He puts his finger down into it and, finding it wet, deduces it is his. He feels for another, finds it, and brings it close to his right eye to be sure he has not butted cigarettes in it. His minimal standards of sanitation satisfied, he fills the cup and thrusts it in LaPointe’s direction.
   In his own way, Bouvier is as much an epic figure in the folklore of the department as LaPointe. He is famous, of course, for his coffee. Imaginations strain in efforts to account for the taste and texture of this ghastly brew. He is famous also for his desk, which is piled with letters, forms, memos, requisitions, and files to a height that is an offense to the law of gravity. Bouvier also possesses, both in legend and in fact, a remarkable memory for minute details of past cases, a memory that has developed proportionately as he descended toward blindness. By means of this memory, he is sometimes able to reveal a linking modus operandi between what appear to be unrelated events or cases. His “interesting little insights” have occasionally led to solutions, or to the discrediting of facile solutions already in hand. But these “interesting little insights” are not always welcome, because they sometimes reopen files everyone would rather leave closed.
   Like LaPointe, Bouvier is a bachelor, and he puts in a prodigious amount of time down in the bowels of the QG, where his duties have spread far beyond those normally assigned to a staff pathologist. His authority has expanded into each vacuum created by a departing man or a new reorganization, until, by his own admission, his domain is so wide that the department would collapse two days after he left.
   Not that he’s ever likely to leave. From medical school he went directly into the army, where he served through the Second World War. When he got out, money was tight and he took a temporary job with the police until he could set up in practice. Time passed, and his eyesight began to fail. He stayed on with the department because, as he used to say himself, a patient’s confidence might be eroded a bit if, as a brain surgeon, Bouvier had to begin by saying: “Now, sir, if you would please direct my hands toward your head.”
   He sits in the straight-backed kitchen chair behind his heaped-up desk, sniffing as he pushes up the glasses that continually slip down his stubby nose. He broke them a few years ago, and they are patched at the bridge with dirty adhesive tape. He intends to get new ones one of these days. “Well?” he asks, as LaPointe presses his refilled cup into his hand, “I assume you’re here on behalf of that kid who got reamed on your patch. Anything special about the case?”
   LaPointe shrugs. “I doubt it.”
   “Good. Because I don’t think you will close this one. If you took the time to read my report, written in crisp but lucid professional language, you would know that there were no fingerprints on record with Ottawa. And we all appreciate the heavy significance of that.”
   Bouvier reveals his bitterness at ending up a police pathologist by his sarcasm and cynicism, and by a style of speech that mixes swatches of erudition with vulgarity and gallows humor. To this he adds a jerky, non sequitur conversational tactic that dazzles many and impresses some.
   LaPointe long ago learned to handle the technique by simply waiting until Bouvier got around to the point.
   “Can you tell me anything that is not in the report?” LaPointe asks.
   “A great deal, of course. I could tell you things ranging through aesthetics, to thermodynamics, to conflicting theories concerning the functions of Stonehenge; but I suspect your interests are more restricted than that. Informational tunnel vision: an occupational hazard. All right, how about this? Your young man used hair spray, if that’s any help.”
   “None at all. Is the press release out?”
   “No, I’ve still got it here in my out-box.” Bouvier waves vaguely toward the heaped tabletop. By departmental practice, information concerning murder, suicide, or rape cases is not released to the newspapers until Bouvier has finished his examination and the next of kin are informed. “You want me to hold it?”
   “Yes. For a couple of days.” When pressure from newspapers or family allows, LaPointe likes to start his inquiries before the press release is out. He prefers to make the first mention of the crime, to watch for qualities of surprise or anticipation.
   “I could probably block it up here forever,” Bouvier says. “I doubt that anyone will be around inquiring after this one. Except maybe a woman claiming breach of promise, or a pregnancy suit, or both. He made love shortly before his death.”
   “How do you know that?”

   Bouvier sips his coffee, makes a face, and cocks his nicotine lens at the cup. “This is terrible. I think something’s fallen into the pot. I’ll have to empty it one of these days and take a look. On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know. Say, I hear you’ve broken down and taken on a Joan.”
   Three-quarters blind and never out of his den in the bowels of the building, Dr. Bouvier knows everything that is going on in the Quartier Général. He makes a point of letting people know that he knows.
   “Gaspard sent his Joan over to me for a few days.”
   “Hm-m. I can’t help feeling sorry for the kid. He’s an interesting boy, too. Have you read his file?”
   “No. But I suppose you have.”
   “Of course. Did very well in college. Excellent grades. The offer of a scholarship to do graduate study in social work, but he chose instead to enter the force. Another instance of a strange demographic pattern I have observed. Year by year, the force is attracting a better class of young men. On the other hand, what with kids bungling their way through amateur holdups to get a fix, crime is attracting a lower class than it once did. It was simpler in our day, when the men on both sides were of the same sociological, intellectual, and ethical molds. But what you really wanted to know was how I divined that the young man in the alley made love shortly before he was killed. Simple really. He failed to wash up afterwards, in direct contradiction to the sound paternal advice given in army VD films. I wonder if they ever consider how carefully they’re going to be examined after they get themselves gutted, or in some other way manage to shuffle their mortal coils off to Buffalo. I remember my mother always telling me to wear clean shorts, in case I got hit by a truck. For much of my youth I entertained the belief that clean shorts were a totemic protection against trucks—in much the same way that apples keep doctors away. When I think of the daring and dangerous things I used to do in the middle of heavy traffic to amuse my friends, all in the belief that I was invulnerable because I had just changed my shorts! So tell me, what are the gods up to these days? Is our anointed Commissioner Resnais still driving toward a brilliant future in politics, as he drives the rest of us toward dreams of regicide?”
   “Every day they dream up a new form, a new bit of paper work. We’ve got paper work coming out of our ears.”
   “Hm! Have you talked to your doctor about that? I just read in a medical journal about a man who drank molten iron and pissed out telephone wire. Something of an exhibitionist, I suspect. Even more to the point, we haven’t finished checking out your stiff’s clothing. The analysis of dust and lint and crap in pockets and cuffs isn’t quite done. I’ll contact you if anything comes up. Matter of fact, I’ll give the case a bit of thought. Might even come up with one of my ‘interesting little insights.’ “
   “Don’t do me any favors.”
   “Wouldn’t dream of it. And to prove that, how about another cup of coffee?”

   Guttmann is typing out an overdue report when LaPointe enters. He has taken the liberty of going through the Lieutenant’s desk and clearing out every forgotten or overlooked report and memo he could find. He tried to organize them into some kind of sequence at first, but now he is taking them in random order and bungling through as best he can.
   LaPointe sits at his desk and surveys the expanse of unlittered surface. “Now, that looks better,” he says.
   Guttmann looks over the piles of paper work on his little table. “Did you find out anything from Dr. Bouvier, sir?”
   “Only that you’re supposed to be a remarkable young man.”
   “Remarkable in what way, sir?”
   “I don’t remember.”
   “I see. Oh, by the way, the Commissioner’s office called again. They’re pretty upset about your not coming right up when you got in.”
   “Hm-m. Any call from Dirtyshirt Red?”
   “Sir?”
   “That bomme you met last night. The one who’s looking for the Vet.”
   “No, sir. No call.”
   “I don’t imagine the Vet will be out on the streets before dark anyway. He has drinking money. What time is it?”
   “Just after one, sir.”
   “Have you had lunch?”
   “No, sir. I’ve been doing paper work.”
   “Oh? Well, let’s go have lunch.”
   “Sir? Do you realize that some of these reports are six months overdue?”
   “What does that have to do with getting lunch?”
   “Ah… nothing?”

   They sit by the window of a small restaurant across Bonsecours Street from the Quartier Général, finishing their coffee. The decor is a little frilly for its police clientele, and Guttmann looks particularly out of place, his considerable bulk threatening his spindly-legged chair.
   “Sir?” Guttmann says out of a long silence. “There’s something I’ve been wondering about. Why do the older men on the force call us apprentices ‘Joans’?”
   “Oh, that comes from long ago, when most of the force was French. They weren’t called ‘Joans’ really. They were called ‘jaunes.’ Over the years it got pronounced in English.”
   “Jaunes? Yellows? Why yellows?”
   “Because the apprentices are always kids, still wet behind the ears…”
   Guttmann’s expression says he still doesn’t get it.
   “…and yellow is the color of baby shit,” LaPointe explains.
   Guttmann’s face is blank.
   LaPointe shrugs. “I suppose it doesn’t really make much sense.”
   “No, sir. Not much. Just more of the wiseass ragging the junior men have to put up with.”
   “That bothers you, eh?”
   “Sure. I mean… this isn’t the army. We don’t have to break a man’s spirit to get him to conform.”
   “If you don’t like the force, why don’t you get out? Use that college education of yours.”
   Guttmann looks quickly at the Lieutenant. “That’s another thing, sir. I guess I’m supposed to be sorry that I got a little education. But I’m afraid I just can’t cut it.” His ears are tingling with resentment.
   LaPointe rubs his stubbly cheek with the palm of his hand. “You don’t have to cut it, son. Just so long as you can type. Come on, finish your coffee and let’s go.”
   Leaving Guttmann waiting on the sidewalk, LaPointe returns to the restaurant and places a call from the booth at the back. Five times… six… seven… the phone rings, unanswered. He shrugs philosophically and sets the receiver back into its cradle. But just as he hangs up, he thinks he hears an answering click on the other end. He dials again quickly. This time the phone is answered on the first ring.
   “Yes?”
   “Hello. It’s me. Claude.”
   “Yes?” She does not place the name.
   “LaPointe. The man who owns the apartment.”
   “Oh. Yeah.” She has nothing more to say.
   “Is everything all right?”
   “All right?”
   “I mean… did you buy enough for breakfast and lunch?”
   “Yes.”
   “Good.”
   There is a silence.
   She volunteers, “Did you call just now?”
   “Yes.”
   “I was in the bathroom. It stopped ringing just when I answered.”
   “Yes, I know.”
   “Oh. Well… why did you call?”
   “I just wanted to know if you found everything you need.”
   “Like what?”
   “Like… did you buy a razor?”
   “Yes.”
   “That’s good.”
   A short silence.
   Then he says, “I won’t be back until eight or nine tonight.”
   “And you want me out by then?”
   “No. I mean, it’s up to you. It doesn’t matter.”
   A short silence.
   “Well? Should I go or stay?”
   A longer silence.
   “I’ll bring some groceries back with me. We can make supper there, if you want.”
   “Can you cook?” she asks.
   “Yes. Can’t you?”
   “No. I can do eggs and mince and things like that.”
   “Well, then, I’ll do the cooking.”
   “Okay.”
   “It’ll be late. Can you hold out that long?”
   “What do you mean?”
   “You won’t get too hungry?”
   “No.”
   “Well then. I’ll see you tonight.”
   “Okay.”
   LaPointe hangs up, feeling foolish. Why call when you have nothing to say? That’s stupid. He wonders what he’ll buy for supper.
   The dumb twit can’t even cook.

   The secretary’s skirt is so short that modesty makes her back up to file cabinets and squat to extract papers from the lower drawers.
   LaPointe sits in a modern imitation-leather divan so deep and soft that it is difficult to rise from it. On a low coffee table are arranged a fine political balance of backdated Punch and Paris Match magazines, together with the latest issue of Canada Now. The walls of the Commissioner’s reception room are adorned with paintings that have the crude draftsmanship and flat perspective of fashionable Hudson Bay Indian primitive; and there is a saccharine portrait of an Indian girl with pigtails and melting brown comic-sad eyes too large for her face, after the style of an American husband-and-wife team of kitsch painters. The size of the eyes, their sadness, and the Oriental upturn of the corners make it look as though the girl’s mother plaited her braids too tightly.
   Along with the popular Indian trash on the walls, there are several framed posters, examples of the newly established Public Relations Department. One shows a uniformed policeman and a middle-aged civilian male standing side by side, looking down at a happy child. The slogan reads: Crime Is Everybody’s Business. LaPointe wonders what crime the men are contemplating.
   The leggy secretary squats again, her back to the file cabinet, to replace a folder. Her tight skirt makes her lose her balance for a second, and her knees separate, revealing her panties.
   LaPointe nods to himself. That’s smart; to avoid showing your ass, you flash your crotch.
   The door behind the secretary’s desk opens and Commissioner Resnais appears, hand already out, broad smile in place. He makes it a habit to greet senior men personally. He brought that back with him from a seminar in the States on personnel management tactics.
   Make the men who work FOR you think they work WITH you.
   “Claude, good to see you. Come on in.” Just the opposite of Sergeant Gaspard, Resnais uses LaPointe’s first name, but does not tutoyer him. The Commissioner’s alert black eyes reveal a tension that belies his facile camaraderie.
   Resnais’ office is spacious, its furniture relentlessly modern. There is a thick carpet, and two of the walls are lined with books—and not only lawbooks. There are titles dealing with social issues, psychology, the history of Canada, problems of modern youth, communications, and the arts and crafts of Hudson Bay Indians. No civilian visitor could avoid being impressed by the implication of social concern and modern attitudes toward the causes and prevention of crime. No ordinary cop, this Commissioner. A liberal intellectual working in the trenches of quotidian law enforcement.
   Nor is it easy to dismiss Resnais as a bogus political man. He has in fact read each of the books in his office. He in fact does his best to understand and respond to modern community needs. He does in fact see himself as a liberal; as a policeman by vocation, and a politician by necessity. Resnais is not the man to attract devotion and affection from those under him, but the majority of the force respect him, and many of the younger men admire him.
   Like LaPointe, Resnais began by patrolling a beat. Then he went to night school; perfected his English; married into one of the reigning Anglo families of Montreal; took leaves of absence, without pay, to finish his college education; made a career of delicate cases involving people and events that required protection from the light of newspaper exposure. Finally, he became the first career policeman to occupy the traditionally civilian post of commissioner. For this reason, he thinks of himself as a cop’s cop. Few of the older men on the force share his view. True, he has been on the force for thirty years, but he was never a cop in the rough-and-tumble sense. He never shook information out of a pimp he despised. He never drank coffee at two in the morning out of a cracked mug, sleeplessness irritating his eyes, his overcoat stinking of wet wool. He never had to use the cover of a car door when returning fire.
   LaPointe notices his personnel file on Resnais’ desk, otherwise bare save for a neat stack of pale blue memo cards, an open note pad, and two perfectly sharpened pencils.
   Men who look busy are often only disorganized.
   Resnais stations himself in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, the glare of the overcast skies making it difficult to look in his direction without squinting.
   “Well, how have you been, Claude?”
   LaPointe smiles at the accent. Resnais is really trilingual. He speaks continental French; perfect English, although with the growled “r” of the Francophone who has finally located that difficult consonant; and he can revert to a Joual as twangy as the next man’s when he is addressing a group from east Montreal, or speaking to senior French Canadian officers.
   “I think I’ll make it through the winter, Commissioner.” LaPointe never uses his first name.
   Resnais laughs. “I’m sure you will! Tough old son of a bitch like you? I’m sure you will!” There is something phony and condescending in his use of profanity, just like one of the guys. He clasps his hands behind his back and rocks up on his toes, a habit born of being rather short for a policeman. His body is thick, but he keeps in perfect trim by jogging with neighbors, swimming with members of his exclusive athletic club, and playing handball in the police league, for which he signs up just like any other cop, and where he accepts defeat at the hands of younger officers with laughing good grace. His expensive suits are closely cut, and he could pass for ten years younger than he is, despite the gleaming pate with its wreath of coal-black hair. Suntanning under lamps has given him a slightly purplish gleam. “Still living in the old place on Esplanade?” he asks offhandedly.
   “Yes. Just like it says in my dossier,” LaPointe responds.
   Resnais laughs heartily. “I can’t get away with anything with you, can I?” It is true that he makes a practice of looking over a man’s file just before seeing him, for the purpose of refreshing himself on an intimate detail or two—number of children and their sexes, the wife’s name, awards or medals. He drops these bits of information casually, as though he knows each man personally and holds in his memory details of his life. He once read somewhere that this was a trick used by a popular American general in the Second World War, and he adopted it as a good management tactic.
   An employee gives of his TIME, a buddy gives of HIMSELF.
   Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in LaPointe’s life to comment upon. No children, a wife long since dead, citations for merit and bravery all earned years ago. You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when you have to mention the street a man lives on.
   “I don’t want to waste too much of your time, Commissioner,” LaPointe says, “So, if there’s something…” He raises his eyebrows.
   Resnais does not like that. He prefers to control the timing and flow of conversation when it involves delicate personnel problems like this one. To do so is an axiom of Small Group and One-to-One Communication Technique.
   If you’re not IN control, you’re UNDER control.
   “I was expecting you this morning, Claude.”
   “I was on a case.”

   “I see.” The Commissioner again rocks onto his toes and squeezes his hands behind his back. Then he sits down in his high-backed desk chair and turns it so that he is looking not at LaPointe, but past him, out of the window. “Frankly, I’m afraid I have to give you what in the old days was called an ass-chewing.”
   “We still call it that.”
   “Right. Now look, Claude, we’re both old-timers…”
   LaPointe shrugs.
   “…and I don’t feel I have to pull any punches with you. I’ve been forced to talk to you about your methods before. Now, I’m not saying they’re inefficient. I know that sometimes going by the book means losing an arrest. But things have changed since we were young. Greater emphasis is placed today upon the protection of the individual than upon the protection of the society.” There seem to be invisible quotation marks around this last sentence. “I’m not calling these changes good, and I’m not calling them bad. They are facts of life. And facts of life that you continue to ignore.”
   “You’re talking about the Dieudonné case?”
   Resnais frowns. He doesn’t like being rushed. “That’s the case in point right now. But I’m talking about more than this one instance. This isn’t the first time you’ve gotten information by force. And it’s not the first time I’ve told you that this is not the way things happen in my department.” He instantly regrets having called it his department. Make every man feel a part of the organization.
   He works best who works for himself.
   “I don’t think you know the details of the case, Commissioner.”
   “I assure you that I know the case. I’ve had every bit of it rammed down my throat by the public prosecutor!”
   “The old woman was shot for seven dollars and some change! Not even enough for the punk to get a fix!”
   “That’s not the point!” Resnais’ jaw tightens, and he continues with exaggerated control. “The point is this. You got information against Dieudonné by means of force and threat of force.”
   “I knew he did it. But I couldn’t prove it without a confession.”
   “How did you know he did it?”
   “The word was out.”
   “What, exactly, does that mean?”
   “It means the word was out. It means that he’s a bragging son of a bitch who spills his guts when he takes on a load of shit.”
   “You’re telling me he admitted to others that he killed the old woman… whatshername?”
   “No. He bragged about having a gun and not being afraid to use it.”
   “That’s hardly admission of murder.”
   “No, but I know Dieudonné. I’ve known him since he was a wiseassed kid. I know what he’s capable of.”
   “Believe it or not, your intuition does not constitute evidence.”
   “The slugs from his gun matched up, didn’t they?”
   “The slugs matched up, all right. But how did you get the gun in the first place?”
   “He told me where he had buried it.”
   “After you beat him up.”
   “I slapped him twice.”
   “And threatened to lock him up in a room and let him suffer a cold-turkey withdrawal! Christ, you didn’t even have any hard evidence to connect him with the old woman… whatshername!”
   “Her name, goddamn it, was Mrs. Czopec! She was seventy-two years old! She lived in the basement of a building that doesn’t have plumbing. There’s a bit of sooty dirt in front of that building, and in spring she used to get free seed packets on boxes of food, and plant them and water them, and sometimes a few came up. But her basement window was so low that she couldn’t see them. She and her husband were the first Czechs on my patch. He died four years ago, but he wasn’t a citizen, so she didn’t have much in benefits coming in. She clung to her purse when that asshole junkie tried to snatch it because the seven dollars was all the money she had to last to the end of the month. When I checked out her apartment, it turned out that she lived on rice. And there was evidence that toward the end of the month, she ate paper. Paper, Commissioner.”
   “That’s not the point!”
   LaPointe jumps up from his chair, “You’re right! That’s not the point. The point is that she had a right to live out her miserable life, planting her stupid flowers, eating her rice, spending half of every day in church where she couldn’t afford to light a candle! That’s the point! And that hophead son of a bitch shot her through the throat! That’s the point!”
   Resnais lifts a denying palm. “Look, I’m not defending him, Claude…”
   “Oh? You mean you aren’t going to tell me that he was underprivileged? Maybe his father never took him to a hockey game!”
   Resnais is off balance. What’s wrong with LaPointe? It isn’t like him to get excited. He’s supposed to be the big professional, so coldblooded. Resnais expected chilly insubordination, but this passion is… unfair. To regain control of the situation, Resnais speaks flatly. “Dieudonné is getting off.”
   LaPointe is stopped cold. He can’t believe it. “What?”
   “That’s right. The public prosecutor met with his lawyers yesterday. They threatened to slap you with a two-seventeen assault, and the newspapers would love that! I have my—I have the department to think of, Claude.”
   LaPointe sits down. “So you made a deal?”
   “I don’t like that term. We did the best we could. The lawyers could probably have gotten the case thrown out, considering how you found the gun. Fortunately for us, they are responsible men who don’t want to see Dieudonné out on the street any more than we do.”
   “What kind of deal?”
   “The best we could get. Dieudonné pleads guilty to manslaughter; they forget the two-seventeen against you. There it is.”
   “Manslaughter?”
   “There it is.” Resnais sits back in his high-backed desk chair and gives this time to sink in. “You see, Claude, even if I condoned your methods—and I don’t—the bottom line is this: they don’t work anymore. The charges don’t stick.”
   LaPointe is lost and angry. “But there was no other way to get him. There was no hard evidence without the gun.”
   “You keep missing the point.”
   LaPointe stares straight ahead, his eyes unfocused. “You’d better get word to Dieudonné that if he ever sets foot on the Main after he gets out…”
   “For Christ’s sake! Don’t you ever listen? Does a truck have to drive over you? You’ve embarrassed… the department long enough! I’ve worked like a son of a bitch to give this shop a good image in the city, and all it takes…! Look, Claude. I don’t like doing this, but I’d better lay it on the line for you. I know the reputation you have among the guys in the shop. You keep your patch cool, and I know that no other man, probably no team of men, could do what you do. But times have changed. And you haven’t changed with them.” Resnais fingers LaPointe’s personnel file. “Three recognitions for merit. Twice awarded the Police Medal. Twice wounded in the line of duty—once very seriously, as I recall. When we heard about that bullet grazing your heart, we kept an open line to the hospital all night long. Did you know that?”
   LaPointe is no longer looking at the Commissioner; his eyes are directed out the window. He speaks quietly. “Get on with it, Commissioner.”
   “All right. I’ll get on with it. This is the last time you embarrass this shop. If it happens one more time… if I have to go to bat for you one more time…” There is no need to finish the sentence.
   LaPointe draws his gaze back to the Commissioner’s face. He sighs and rises. “Is that all you wanted to talk to me about?”
   Resnais looks down at LaPointe’s file, his jaw tight. “Yes. That’s all.”

   The slam of the office door rattles the glass, and LaPointe brushes past Guttmann without a word. He sits heavily in his desk chair and stares vacantly at the Forensic Medicine report on that kid found in the alley. Instinct for self-preservation warns Guttmann to keep his head down over his typing and not say a word. For half an hour, the only sound in the room is the tapping of the typewriter and the hiss of the sandblasting across the street.
   Then LaPointe takes a deep breath and rubs his mat of hair with his palm. “Did I get a call from Dirtyshirt Red?”
   “No, sir. No calls at all.”
   “Hm-m.” LaPointe rises and comes to Guttmann’s little table, looking over his shoulder. “How’s it going?”
   “Oh, it’s going fine, sir. It’s lots of fun. I’d rather type out reports than anything I can think of.”
   LaPointe turns away, grunting his disgust for all paper work and all who bother with it. Outside the window, the city is already growing dark under the heavy layers of stationary cloud. He tugs down his overcoat from the wooden rack.
   “I’m going up onto the Main. See what’s happening.”
   Guttmann nods, not lifting his eyes from the form he is retyping, for fear of losing his place again.
   “Well?”
   The younger man puts his finger on his place and looks up. “Well what, sir?”
   “Are you coming or not?”
   A minute later, the door is locked, the lights off, and the unfinished report is still wound into the machine

5

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


S. Klein—Buttonholes

   “Buttonholes?” Guttmann asks. “This guy makes buttonholes? What kind of business is that?”
   LaPointe repeats one of the street’s ancient jokes. “It would be a wonderful business, if Mr. Klein didn’t have to provide the material.”
   Guttmann doesn’t quite get it. He has no way of knowing that no one on the Main quite gets that joke either, but they always repeat it because it has the sound of something witty.
   Each time they pass a bar, the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke greets them for a second before it is blown away by the raw wind. Halfway up St. Laurent, LaPointe turns in at a run-down bar called Chez Pete’s Place. It is fuggy and dark inside, and the proprietor doesn’t bother to look up from the girlie magazine in his lap when the policemen enter.
   Three men sit around a table in back, one a tall, boney tramp with a concave chest who has the shakes so badly that he is drinking his wine from a beer mug. The other two are arguing drunkenly across the table, pounding it sometimes, to the confused distress of the third.
   “Floyd Patterson wasn’t shit! He never… he couldn’t… he wasn’t shit, compared to Joe Louis.”
   “Ah, that’s your story! Floyd Patterson had a great left. He had what you call one of your world’s great lefts! He could hit… anything.”
   “Ah, he couldn’t… he couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag! I used to know a guy who told me that he wasn’t shit, compared to Joe Louis. You know… do you know what they used to call Joe Louis?”
   “I don’t care what they called him! I don’t give a big rat’s ass!”
   “They used to call Joe Louis… Gentleman Joe. Gentleman Joe! What do you think of that?”
   “Why?”
   “What?”
   “Why did they call him Gentleman Joe?”
   “Why? Why? Because… because that Floyd Patterson couldn’t punch worth shit, that’s why. Ask anybody!”
   LaPointe crosses to the group. “Has anyone seen Dirtyshirt Red today?”
   They look at one another, each hoping the question is directed to someone else.
   “You,” LaPointe says to a little man with a narrow forehead and a large, stubbly Adam’s apple.
   “No, Lieutenant. I ain’t seen him.”
   “He was in a couple hours ago,” the other volunteers. “He asked around about the Vet.” The name of this universally detested tramp brings grunts from several bommes at other tables. No one has any stomach for the Vet, with his uppity ways and his bragging.
   “And what did he find out?”
   “Not much, Lieutenant. We told him the Vet come in here late last night.”
   “How late?”
   The proprietor lifts his head from the skin magazine and listens.
   “Well?” LaPointe asks. “Was it after closing time?”
   One of the tramps glances toward the owner. He doesn’t want to get in trouble with the only bar that will let bommes come in. But nothing is as bad as getting in trouble with Lieutenant LaPointe. “Maybe a little after.”
   “Did he have money?”
   “Yeah. He had a wad! His pension check must of come. He bought two bottles.”
   “Two bottles,” another sneers. “And you know what that cheap bastard does? He gives one bottle to all of us to share, and he drinks the other all by hisself!”
   “Potlickin’ son of a bitch,” says another without heat.
   LaPointe crosses to the bar and speaks to the owner. “Did he seem to have money?”
   “I don’t sell on the cuff.”
   “Did he flash a roll?”
   “He wasn’t that drunk. Why? What did he do?”
   LaPointe looks at the owner for a second. There is something disgusting about making your money off bommes. He reaches into his pocket and takes out some change. “Here. Give them a bottle.”
   The proprietor counts the change with his index finger. “Hey, this ain’t enough.”
   “It’s our treat. Yours and mine. We’re going fifty-fifty.”
   The arrangement does not please the owner, but he reaches under the bar and grudgingly gets out a bottle of muscatel. By the time it touches the counter, one of the bommes has come over and picked it up.
   “Hey, thanks, Lieutenant. I’ll tell Red you’re lookin’ for him.”
   “He knows.”

   They have been wandering for an hour and a half, threading through the narrow streets that branch out from the Main, LaPointe stopping occasionally to go into a bar or café, or to exchange a word with someone on the street Guttmann is beginning to think the Lieutenant has forgotten about the Vet and that young man stabbed in the alley last night. In fact, LaPointe is still on the lookout for Dirtyshirt Red and the Vet, but not to the exclusion of the rest of his duties. He never pursues only one thing at a time on his street, because if he did, all the other strings would get tangled, and he wouldn’t know what everyone was up to, or hoping for, or worried about.
   At this moment, LaPointe is talking with a fat woman with frizzy, bright orange hair. She leans out of a first-story window, her knobby elbows planted on the stone sill over which she has been shaking a dust mop in fine indifference to passers-by. From the tenor of their conversation, Guttmann takes it that she used to work the streets, and that she and LaPointe have a habit of exchanging bantering greetings on the basis of broad sexual baiting and suggestions on both sides that if they weren’t so busy, they would each show the other what real lovemaking is. The woman seems well informed on events on the Main. No, she hasn’t heard anything of the Vet, but she’ll keep her ears open. As for Dirtyshirt Red, yes, that sniping bastard’s been around, also looking for the Vet.
   Guttmann can’t believe she ever made a living selling herself. Her face is like an aged boxer’s, a swollen, pulpy look that is more accented than masked by thick rouge, a lipstick mouth larger than her real one, and long false eyelashes, one of which has come unstuck at the corner. As they walk on, he asks LaPointe about her.
   “Her pimp did that to her face with a Coke bottle,” LaPointe says.
   “What happened to him?”
   “He got beat up and warned to stay off the Main.”
   “Who beat him up?”
   LaPointe shrugs.
   “So what did she do after that?”
   “Continued to work the street for a couple of years, until she got fat.”
   “Looking like that?”
   “She was still young. She had a good-looking body. She worked drunks mostly. Hooch and hard-ons blind a man. She’s a good sort. She does cleaning and scrubbing up for people. She takes care of Martin’s house.”
   “Martin?”
   “Father Martin. Local priest.”
   “She is the priest’s housekeeper?”
   “She’s a hard worker.”
   Guttmann shakes his head. “If you say so.”
   Back on St. Laurent, they are slowed by the last of the pedestrian tangle. Snakes of European children with bookbags on their backs chase one another to the discomfort of the crowd. Small knots of sober-faced Chinese kids walk quickly and without chatting. Workingmen in coveralls stand outside their shops, taking last deep drags from cigarettes before flicking them into the gutter and going back to put in their time. Young, loud-voiced girls from the dress factory walk three abreast, singing and enjoying making the crowd break for them. Old women waddle along, string bags of groceries banging against their ankles. Clerks and tailors, their fragile bodies padded by thick overcoats, thread diffidently through the crowd, attempting to avoid contact. Traffic snarls; voices accuse and complain. Neon, noise, loneliness.
   “Now that is something,” Guttmann says, looking up at a sign above a shop featuring women’s clothes:


North American Discount Sample Dress Company

   The business is new, and it is located where a pizzeria used to be. The owners are greenhorns newly arrived on the Main. Older, established merchants refer to the shop as “the shmatteria.”
   “Shmatteria?” asks Guttmann.
   “Yes. It’s sort of a joke. You know… a pizzeria that sells shmattes?”
   “I don’t get it.”
   LaPointe frowns. That’s the second time this kid hasn’t gotten a street joke. You have to have affection for the street to get its jokes. “I thought you were Jewish,” he says grumpily.
   “Not in any real way. My grandfather was Jewish, but my father is a one-hundred-percent New World Canadian, complete with big handshake and a symbolic suntan he gets patched up twice a year in Florida. But what’s this about… how do you say it?”
   “Shmatteria. Forget it.”
   LaPointe does not remember that twenty-five years ago, when the now-established Jews first came to the Main, he did not know what a shmatte was either.
   They climb up a dark flight of stairs with loose metal strips originally meant to provide grips for snow-caked shoes, but now a hazard in themselves. They enter one of the second-floor lounges that overlook St. Laurent. It is still early for trade, and the place is almost empty. An old woman mumbles to herself as she desultorily swings a mop into a dark corner by the jukebox. The only other people in the place are the bartender and one customer, a heavily rouged woman in white silk slacks.
   LaPointe orders an Armagnac and sips it, looking down upon the street, where one-way northbound traffic is still heavy and the pedestrian flow is clogged. He has got off the street for a few minutes to give this most congested time of evening a chance to thin out. Friday night is noisy in the Main; there is a lot of drinking and laughter, some fighting, and the whores do good business. But there will be a quieter time between six and eight, when everyone seems to go home to change before coming back to chase after fun. Most people eat at home because it’s cheaper than restaurants, and they want to save their money to drink and dance.
   Guttmann sips his beer and glances back at the customer in conversation with the bartender. She seems both young and middle-aged at the same time, in a way Guttmann could not describe. A dark wig falls in long curls to the middle of her back. He particularly notices her hands, strong and expressive, despite the big dinner rings on every finger. There is something oddly attractive about those hands—competent. Periodically, the customer glances away from her talk and looks directly at Guttmann, her eyes frankly inquisitive without being coy.
   As they walk back down the long stairs to the street, Guttmann says, “Not really what you’d call a bird.”
   “What?” LaPointe asks, his mind elsewhere.
   “That barfly back there. Not exactly the chick type.”
   “No, I guess not. Women never go to that bar.”
   “Oh,” Guttmann says, as soon as he figures it out. He blushes slightly when he remembers the expressive, competent hands covered with dinner rings.
   It is nearing eight o’clock, and the pedestrian traffic is thickening again. Blocking the mouth of a narrow alley is a knife sharpener who plies his trade with close devotion. The stone wheel is rigged to his bicycle in such a way that the pedals can drive either the bicycle or the grinding stone. Sitting on the seat, with the rear wheel up on a rectangular stand, he pedals away, spinning his stone. The noise of the grinding and the arc of damp sparks attract the attention of passers-by, who glance once at him, then hurry on. The knife sharpener is tall and gaunt, and his oily hair, combed back in a stony pompadour, gives him the look of a Tartar. His nose is thin and hooked, and his eyes under their brooding brows concentrate on the knife he is working, on the spray of sparks he is making.
   He pedals so hard that his face is wet with sweat, despite the cold. His thin back rounded over his work, his knees pumping up and down, his attention absorbed by the knife and the sparks, he does not seem to see LaPointe approaching.
   “Well?” LaPointe says, knowing he has been noticed.
   The Grinder does not lift his head, but his eyes roll to the side and he looks at LaPointe from beneath hooking eyebrows. “Hello, Lieutenant.”
   “How’s it going?”
   “All right. It’s going all right.” Suddenly the Grinder reaches out and stops the wheel by grabbing it with his long fingers. Guttmann winces as he sees the edge of the stone cut the web of skin between the Grinder’s thumb and forefinger, but the old tramp doesn’t seem to feel the pain or notice the blood. “It’s coming, you know. It’s coming.”
   “The snow?” LaPointe asks.
   The Grinder nods gravely, his black eyes intense in their deep sockets. “And maybe sleet, Lieutenant. Maybe sleet! Nobody ever worries about it! Nobody thinks about it!” His eyebrows drop into a scowl of mistrust as he stares at Guttmann, his eyes burning. “You’ve never thought about it,” he accuses.
   “Ah… well, I…”
   “Who knows,” LaPointe says. “Maybe it won’t snow this year. After all, it didn’t snow last year, or the year before.”
   The Grinder’s eyes flick back and forth in confusion. “Didn’t it?”
   “Not a flake. Don’t you remember?”
   The Grinder frowns in a painful bout of concentration. “I… think… I remember. Yes. Yes, that’s right!” A sudden kick with his leg, and the wheel is spinning again. “That’s right. Not a flake!” He presses the knife to the stone and sparks spray out and fall on Guttmann’s shoes.
   LaPointe drops a dollar into the Grinder’s basket, and the two policemen turn back down the street.
   Guttmann squeezes between two pedestrians and catches up with LaPointe. “Did you notice that knife, Lieutenant? Sharpened down to a sliver.”
   LaPointe guesses what the young man is thinking. He thrusts out his lower lip and shakes his head. “No. He’s been on the Main for years. Used to be a roofer. Then one day when the slates were covered with snow, he took a bad fall. That’s why he fears the snow. People on the street give him a little something now and then. He’s too proud to beg like the other bommes, so they give him old knives to sharpen. They never get them back. He forgets who gave them to him, and he sharpens them until there’s nothing left.” LaPointe cuts across the street. “Come on. One more loop and we’ll call it a night.”
   “Got a heavy date?” Guttmann asks.
   LaPointe stops and turns to him. “Why do you ask that?”
   “Ah… I don’t know. I just thought… Friday night and all. I mean, I’ve got a date tonight myself.”
   “That’s wonderful.” LaPointe turns and continues his beat crawl, occasionally making little detours into the networks of side streets. He tests the locks on iron railings. He taps on the steamy window of a Portuguese grocery and waves at the old man. He stops to watch two men carrying a trunk down a long wooden stoop, until it becomes clear that they are helping a young couple move out, to the accompaniment of howls and profanity from a burly hag who seems to think the couple owe her money.
   They are walking on an almost empty side street when a man half a block ahead turns and starts to cross the street quickly.
   “Scheer!” LaPointe shouts. Several people stop and look, startled. Then they walk on hurriedly. The man has frozen in his tracks, but there is a kinesthetic energy in his posture, as though he would run… if he dared. LaPointe raises a hand and beckons with the forefinger. Reluctantly, Scheer crosses back and approaches the Lieutenant. In the forced swagger of his walk, and in his mod clothes, he is very much the dandy.
   “What did I tell you when I saw you in that bar last night, Scheer?”
   “Oh, come on, Lieutenant…” There is an oily purr to his voice.
   “All right,” LaPointe says with bored fatigue. “Get on that wall.”
   With a long-suffering sigh, Scheer turns to the tenement wall and spread-eagles against it. He knows how to do it; he’s done it before. He tries to avoid letting his clothes touch the dirty brick.
   Guttmann stands by, unsure what to do, as LaPointe kicks out one of Scheer’s feet to broaden the spread, then runs a rapid pat down. “All right. Off the wall. Take off your overcoat.”
   “Listen, Lieutenant…”
   “Off!”
   Three children emerge from nowhere to watch, as Scheer tugs his overcoat off and folds it carefully before holding it out to LaPointe, each movement defiantly slow.
   LaPointe chucks the coat onto the stoop. “Now empty your pockets.”
   Scheer does so and holds out the comb, change, wallet, and bits of paper to LaPointe.
   “Drop all that trash down into the basement well there,” LaPointe orders.
   His mouth tight with hate, Scheer lets his belongings fall into the well fenced off by a wrought-iron railing. The wallet makes a splat because the bottom of the well is covered with an inch of sooty water.
   “Now take out your shoelaces and give them to me.”
   By now the onlookers have grown to a dozen, two of them girls in their twenties who giggle as Scheer hops to maintain balance while tugging the laces out of the last pair of grommets. Petulantly, he hands them to LaPointe.
   The Lieutenant puts them into his pocket. “All right, Scheer. After I leave, you can climb down and get your rubbish. I’ll keep the shoelaces. It’s for your own good. I wouldn’t want you to get despondent over being embarrassed in public and try to hang yourself with them.”
   “Tell me! Tell me, Lieutenant! What have I ever done to you?”
   “You’re on the street. I told you to stay off it. I wasn’t giving you a vacation, asshole. It was a punishment.”
   “I know my rights! Who are you, God or something? You don’t own the fucking street!” He would never have gone that far if there hadn’t been the pressure of the crowd and the need to save face.
   LaPointe’s eyes crinkle in a melancholy smile, and he nods slowly. Then his hand flashes out and his slap sends Scheer spinning along the railing. One of the loose shoes comes off.
   LaPointe turns and strolls up the street, followed after a moment by the stunned and confused Guttmann.
   “What was all that about, Lieutenant?” Guttmann asks. “Who is that guy?”
   “No one. A pimp. I ordered him off the street.”
   “But… if he’s done something, why don’t you pick him up?”
   “I have. Several times. But his lawyers always get him off.”
   “Yes, but…” Guttmann looks over his shoulder at the small knot of people around the pimp, who is just climbing out of the dirty basement well. The girls laugh as he tries to walk with his loose shoes flopping. He takes them off and carries them, walking tenderly in his stocking feet.
   “But, sir… isn’t that harassment?”
   LaPointe stops and looks at the young officer appraisingly, his glance shifting from eye to eye. “Yes. It’s harassment.”
   They walk on.

   Guttmann sits alone in a small Greek café on Rue Cerat, cramped in a space that would be adequate for a man of average size. The place has only two oilcloth-covered tables crowded against the window, across from a glass-fronted display case containing cheese, oil, and olives for sale. A fly-specked sign on the wall says:


7-UP—Ca Ravigote

   While LaPointe is telephoning from a booth attached to the outside of the café, Guttmann is trying to work out a problem in his mind. He knows what he has to do, but he doesn’t know how to do it. He has been withdrawn since the incident with Scheer half an hour before. Everything he believes in, everything he has learned, combine to make LaPointe’s treatment of that pimp intolerable. Guttmann cannot accept the concept of the policeman as judge—much less as executioner—and he knows what he would have to do should Scheer bring a complaint against the Lieutenant. Further, his sense of fair play demands that he warn LaPointe of his decision, and that will not be easy.
   When the Lieutenant returns from the telephone booth a girl of eighteen or nineteen comes from the back room to serve them little cups of strong coffee, her eyes always averted with a shyness that advertises her awareness of men and of her own sexual attractiveness. She has long black lashes and the comfortable beauty of a Madonna.
   “How’s your mother?” LaPointe asks.
   “Fine. She’s in back. Want me to call her?”
   “No. I’ll see her next time I drop by.”
   The girl lets her damp brown eyes settle briefly on Guttmann, who smiles and nods. She glances away sidewards, lowers her eyes, and returns to the back room.
   “Pretty girl,” Guttmann says. “Pity she’s so shy.”
   LaPointe grunts noncommittally. Years ago, the mother was a streetwalker on the Main. She was a lusty, laughing woman always in good spirits, always with a coarse joke to tell, pushing her elbow into your ribs with the punch line. When, every month or two, LaPointe felt the need for a woman, she was usually the one he went with.
   Then suddenly she was off the street. She had got pregnant; by a lover, of course, not a customer. With the birth of the child, she changed completely. She began to dress less flashily; she looked for work; she started attending church. She didn’t often laugh, but she smiled a lot. And she devoted herself to her baby girl, like a child playing dolls. She borrowed a little money from LaPointe, who also countersigned her note, and she put a down payment on this back-street café. At five dollars a week, she paid LaPointe back, never missing a payment except around Christmas, when she was buying presents for her girl.
   They never made love again, but he made it a habit to drop in occasionally during quiet times. They used to sit together by the window and talk while they drank cups of thick Greek coffee. He would listen as she went on about her daughter. It was amazing what that child could do. Talk. Run. And draw? An artist! The mother had plans. The girl would go to university and become a fashion designer. Have you ever seen her drawings? How can I tell you? Taste? You wouldn’t believe it. Never pink and red together.
   While in high school, this girl became pregnant. At first the mother couldn’t understand… couldn’t believe it. Then she was crazy with fury. She would kill that boy! She had an acrimonious shout-down with the boy and his parents. No, the boy would not marry her. And here’s why…
   The next time LaPointe dropped in, the woman had changed. She was lifeless, dull, vacant. They took coffee together in the empty café, the woman looking out the window as she talked, her voice flat and tired. The girl had a reputation in high school for being a hot box. She made love with anybody, any time, anywhere—down in the boiler room, once in the boys’ lavatory. Everybody knew about it. She was a slut. She wasn’t even a whore! She gave it away!
   LaPointe tried to comfort her. She’ll get married one of these days. Everything will be all right.
   No. It was a punishment from God. He’s punishing me for being a whore.
   “Good-looking girl,” Guttmann says. “Pity she’s so shy.”
   “Yes,” LaPointe says. “A pity.” He swirls his cup to suspend the thick coffee dust and finishes it off, sucking it through a cube of sugar pressed against the roof of his mouth. “Look, I just called in to the QG to have them pick up the Vet.”
   “Lieutenant…?”

   “We can’t wait forever for Dirtyshirt Red. When they find him, they’ll call you. When they do, get down there immediately. If he’s not too drunk to talk, call me and I’ll come down.”
   “You told them to call me?”
   “Sure. You’re here to get experience, aren’t you?”
   “Well, yes, but…”
   “But what?”
   “I have a date tonight. I told you.”
   “That’s too bad.”
   Guttmann takes a deep breath. “Lieutenant?”
   “Yes?”
   “About that pimp back there?”
   “Scheer? What about him?”
   “Well, if I’m going to be working with you…”
   “I wouldn’t say you’re working with me. It’s more like you’re following me around.”
   “Okay. Whatever. But I’m here, and I feel I have to be straight with you.” Guttmann feels awkward looking into LaPointe’s hooded, paternal eyes. He’s sure he’s going to end up making an ass of himself.
   “If you have something to say, say it,” LaPointe orders.
   “All right. About the pimp. It’s not right to harass a civilian like that. It’s not legal. He has rights, whoever he is, whatever he’s done. Harassment is the kind of stuff that gives the force a bad name.”
   “I’m sure the Commissioner would agree with you.”
   “That doesn’t make me wrong.”
   “It goes a ways.”
   Guttmann nods and looks down. “You’re not going to give me a chance to say what I want to say, are you? You’re making it as hard as possible.”
   “I’ll say it for you if you want. You’re going to tell me that if this asshole brings charges against me, you feel that you would have to corroborate. Right?”
   Guttmann forces himself not to look away from LaPointe’s eyes with their expression of tired amusement. He knows what the Lieutenant is thinking: he’s young. When he gets some experience under his belt, he’ll come around. But Guttmann is sure he will never come around. He would quit the force before that happened. “That’s right,” he says, no quaver at all in his voice. “I’d have to corroborate.”
   LaPointe nods. “I told you he was a pimp, didn’t I?”
   “Yes, sir. But that’s not the point.”
   That was what Resnais kept saying: that’s not the point.
   “Besides,” Guttmann continues, “there are lots of women working the streets. You don’t seem to hassle them.”
   “That’s different. They’re pros. And they’re adults.”
   Guttmann’s eyes flicker at this last. “You mean Scheer uses…”
   “That’s right. Kids. Junk-hungry kids. And if I deny him the use of the street, he can’t run his kids.”
   “Why don’t you take him in?”
   “I have taken him in. I told you. It doesn’t do any good. He walks back out again the same day. Pimping is hard to prove, unless the girls give evidence. And they’re afraid to. He’s promised that if they talk, they’ll get their faces messed up.”
   Guttmann tips up his cup and looks into the dark sludge at the bottom. Still… even with a pimp who runs kids… a cop can’t be a judge and executioner. Principles don’t change, even when the case in hand makes it tough to maintain them.
   LaPointe examines the young man’s earnest, troubled face. “What do you think of the Main?” he asks, lifting the pressure by changing the subject.
   Guttmann looks up. “Sir?”
   “My patch. What do you think of it? You must realize that I’ve been dragging you around, giving you the grand tour.”
   “I don’t know what I think of it. It’s… interesting.”
   “Interesting?” LaPointe looks out the window, watching the passers-by. “Yes, I suppose so. Of course, you get a warped idea of the street when you walk it as a cop. You see mostly the hustlers, the fous, the toughs, the whores, the bommes. You get what Gaspard calls a turd’s-eye view. Ninety percent of the people up here are no worse than anywhere else. Poorer, maybe. Dumber. Weaker. But not worse.” LaPointe rubs his hair with his palm and sits back in his chair. “You know… a funny thing happened eight or ten years ago. I was doing the street, and I happened to be walking behind a man—must have been seventy years old—a man who moved in a funny way. It’s hard to explain; I felt I knew him, but I didn’t, of course. It wasn’t how he looked at things; it was what he looked at. You know what I mean?”
   “Yes, sir,” lies Guttmann.
   “Well, he stopped off for coffee, and I sat down next to him. We started talking, and it turned out that he was a retired cop from New York. That was what I had recognized without knowing it—his beatwalker’s way of looking at things only an old cop would look at: door locks, shoes, telephone booths with broken panes, that sort of thing. He had come up here because his granddaughter was marrying a Canadian and the wedding was in Montreal. He got tired of sitting around making small talk with people he didn’t know, so he wandered off, and he ended up on the Main. He told me that he felt a real pang, walking these streets. It reminded him of New York in the twenties—the different languages, the small shops, workers and hoods and chippies and housewives and kids all mixed up on the same street but not afraid of one another. He said it used to be like that in New York when the immigrants were still coming in. But it isn’t like that anymore. It’s a closed-up frightened city at night. Not even the cops walk around alone. We’re about thirty years behind New York in that way. And as long as I’m on the Main, we are never going to catch up.”
   Guttmann imagines that all this has something to do with the harassment of that pimp, but he doesn’t see just how.
   “Okay,” LaPointe says, stretching his back. “So if Scheer makes a complaint, you’ll back him up.”
   “Yes, sir. I would have to.”
   LaPointe nods. “I suppose you would. Well, I have some grocery shopping to do. You’d better get home and get something to eat. Chances are they’ll pick up the Vet tonight, and we may be up late.”
   LaPointe rises and tugs on his overcoat, while Guttmann sits there feeling—not defeated exactly in this business of Scheer, but undercut, bypassed.
   “What’s wrong?” LaPointe asks, looking down at him.
   “Oh… I was just thinking about this date I’ve got for tonight. I hate to break it, because it’s the first time we’ve been out together.”
   “Oh, she’ll understand. Make up some lie. Tell her you’re a cop.”

   LaPointe braces one of the grocery bags against the wall of the hall and gropes in his pocket for his key. Then it occurs to him that he ought to knock. There is no answer. He taps again. No response.
   His first sensation is a sinking in his stomach, like a fast down elevator stopping. Almost immediately, the feeling retreats and something safer replaces it: ironic self-amusement. He smiles at himself—dumb old man—and shakes his head as he inserts his key in the slack lock and pushes the door open.
   The lights are on. And she is there.
   She is wearing Lucille’s pink quilted dressing gown, which she must have gotten from the closet where Lucille’s things still hang.
   Lucille’s dressing gown.
   She is sitting on the sofa, one foot tucked up under her butt, sewing something, the threaded needle poised in the air. Her mouth is slightly open, her eyes alert.
   “Oh, it’s you,” she says. “I didn’t answer because I thought it might be the landlord. I mean… he might not like the idea of your having a girl in your apartment.”
   “I see.” He carries the groceries into the narrow kitchen. She sets her sewing down and follows him.
   “Here,” he says. “Unwrap the cheese and let the air get to it.”
   “Okay. I’ve been walking around quietly so no one would hear me.”
   “You don’t have to worry about that. Just set the cheese on a plate.”
   “Which plate?”
   “Any one. It doesn’t matter.”
   “Doesn’t the landlord care if you have girls up here?”
   LaPointe laughs. “I am the landlord.” This is true, although he never thinks of himself as a landlord. Seven years after Lucille’s death, he heard that the building was going to be sold. He was used to living there, and he could not quite grasp what it would mean to move away from their home, Lucille’s and his—what that would imply. Because there was nothing to spend it on, he had saved a little money, so he arranged a long-term mortgage and bought the building. Just two years ago, he made the last payment. He had become so used to making out the mortgage check each month that he was surprised when it was returned to him with the notification that the mortgage was paid off. The other tenants—there are three—do not know he owns the building, because he arranged to have the bank receive their rents and credit them to his debt. He did this out of a kind of shame. His concept of “the landlord” was fashioned in the slums of Trois Rivières, and he doesn’t care for the thought of being one himself.
   Marie-Louise sits at the kitchen table, her elbow on the oilcloth, her chin in her hand, watching him tear up the lettuce for their salad. He has planned a simple meal: steak, salad, bread, wine. And cheese for dessert.
   “It’s funny seeing a man cook,” she says. “Do you always cook for yourself?”
   “I eat in restaurants, mostly. On Sundays I cook. I enjoy it for a change.”
   “Hm-m.” She doesn’t know what to make of it. She never met anybody who enjoyed cooking. God knows her mother didn’t. It occurs to her that this old guy might be a queer. Maybe that’s why he didn’t make love to her last night. “What kind of work do you do?”
   “I’m with the police.” He says this with a shrug meant to shunt away any fear she might have of the police.
   “Oh.” She’s not very interested in what he does.
   He puts the salad bowl on the table before her. “Here. Make yourself useful. Mix this.” The skillet is smoking, and the steaks hiss and sizzle as he drops them in. “What did you do today?” he asks, his voice strained because he is standing tiptoe, looking in the cupboard for an extra plate and glass.
   “Nothing. I just sat around. Mended some things. And I took another bath. Is that all right?”
   “Of course. No, you don’t stir a salad. You toss it. Like this. See?”
   “What difference does it make?” There is annoyance in her voice. She could never do anything right in her mother’s kitchen either.
   “It’s the way it’s done, that’s all. Here, let’s see.” He lifts her chin with his palm. “Ah. That eye is looking better. Swelling’s gone.” She is not a pretty girl, but her face is alert and expressive. “Well.” He takes his hand away and turns to cut the bread. “So you sat around and mended all day?”
   “I went out shopping. Made breakfast. I borrowed that coat from your closet when I went out. It was cold. But I put it back again.”
   “Did it fit?”
   “Not bad. You should have seen the man at the grocery look at me!” She laughs, remembering what she looked like in that coat. Her laughter is enthusiastic and vulgar. As before, it stops suddenly in mid-rise and is gone.
   “Why did he look at you?” LaPointe asks, smiling along with her infectious laughter.
   “I guess I looked funny in an old woman’s coat.”
   He pauses and frowns, not understanding. She must mean an old-fashioned coat. It is not an old woman’s coat; it was a young woman’s coat. He attends to the steaks.
   “There isn’t much to do around here,” she says frankly. “You don’t have any magazines. You don’t have TV.”
   “I have a radio.”
   “I tried it. It doesn’t work.”
   “You have to jiggle the knob.”
   “Why don’t you get it fixed?”
   “Why bother? I know how to jiggle the knob. Okay, let’s eat. I think everything’s ready.”
   She eats rapidly, like a hungry child, but twice she remembers her manners and tells him it’s good. And she drinks her wine too fast.
   “I’ll do the dishes,” she offers afterwards. “That’s something I know how to do.”
   “You don’t have to.” But the thought of her puttering around in the kitchen is pleasant. “All right, if you want to. I’ll make the coffee while you’re washing up.”
   There isn’t really enough room for two in the narrow kitchen, and three times they touch shoulders. Each time, he says, “Excuse me.”

   “…so I thought I might as well try Montreal. I mean, I had to go somewhere, so why not here? I was hoping I could get a job… maybe as a cocktail waitress. They make lots of money, you know. I had a girlfriend who wrote me about the tips.”
   “But you didn’t find anything?”
   She is curled up on the sofa, Lucille’s pink quilted robe around her; he sits in his comfortable old chair. She shakes her head and looks away from him, toward the hissing gas fire. “No, I didn’t. I tried everywhere for a couple of weeks, until I ran out of money. But the cocktail bars didn’t want a cripple. And my boobs are small.” She says this last matter-of-factly. She knows how it is in the world. Yet there is some wistfulness in it, or fatigue.
   “So you started working the street.”
   She shrugs. “It was sort of an accident, really. I mean, I never thought of screwing for money. Of course, I had screwed men before. Back home. But just friends and guys who took me out on dates. Just for fun.”
   “Don’t use that word.” LaPointe knows that no daughter of his would ever use that word.
   Marie-Louise cocks her head thoughtfully, trying to think back to the offending word. With her head cocked and her frizzy mop of hair, she has the look of a Raggedy Ann doll. “Screw?” she asks, uncertain. “What should I say?”
   “I don’t know. Making love. Something like that.”
   She grins, her elastic face impish. “That sounds funny. Making love. It sounds like the movies.”
   “But still…”
   “Okay. Well, I never thought of… doing it… for money. I guess I didn’t think anyone would pay for it.”
   LaPointe shakes his head. Doing it sounds worse yet.
   “Well, I stayed with some people for a while. All people of my age, sort of living together in this big old house. But then I had a fight with the guy who sort of ran everything, and I moved to a room. Then I ran out of money and they kicked me out. They kept most of my clothes and my suitcase. That’s why I don’t have a coat. Anyway, I was kicked out, and I was just walking around. Scared, sort of, and trying to think of what to do… where I could go. See, it was cold. Well, I ended up at the bus station and I sat around most of the night, trying to look like I was waiting for a bus, so they wouldn’t kick me out. But this guard kept eyeing me. I only had that shopping bag for my clothes, so I guess he knew I wasn’t really waiting for a bus. And then this guy comes up to me and just straight out asks me. Just like that. He said he would give me ten dollars. He was sort of…” She decides not to say that.
   “Sort of what?”
   “Well… he wasn’t young. Anyway, he brought me to his apartment. He came in his pants while he was feeling me up. But he paid anyway.”
   “That was good of him.”
   “Yeah,” she agrees with a frankness that undercuts his irony. “It was sort of good of him, wasn’t it? I didn’t know that at the time, because I hadn’t been around, and I thought everyone was like him. Nice, you know. He let me stay the night; and the next morning he bought me breakfast. Most of the others weren’t like that. They try to cheat you out of your money. Or they say you can spend the night, but when they’ve had all they want, they kick you out. And if you make a fuss, sometimes they try to beat you up. Some of them really get a kick out of beating you up.” She touches her eye with her fingertips. The swelling is gone, but a faint green stain remains. “You know what you have to do?” she confides seriously. “You have to get your money before he starts. A girl I went around with for a while told me that. And she was right.”
   “That was how long ago? When this old man picked you up?”
   She thinks back. “Six weeks. Two months, maybe.”
   “And since then you’ve been getting along by selling yourself?”
   She grins. That sounds even funnier than making love. “It’s not so bad, you know? Guys take me to bars and I eat in restaurants. And I go dancing.” She tucks her short leg up under her. “You might not think it, but I can dance real well. It’s funny, but I can dance better than I can walk, you know what I mean? I like dancing more than anything. Do you dance?”
   “No.”
   “Why not?”
   “I don’t know how.”
   She laughs. “Everyone knows how! There’s nothing to know. You just sort of… you know… move.”
   “It sounds like you had nothing but fun on the streets.”
   “You say that like you don’t believe it. But it’s true. Most of the time I had fun. Except when they got rough. Or when they wanted me to do… funny things. I don’t know why, but I’m just not ready for that. The thought makes me gag, you know? Hey, what’s wrong?”
   He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
   “Does it bother you when I talk about it?”
   “Nothing. Never mind.”
   “Some guys like it. I mean, they like you to talk about it. It gets them going.”
   “Forget it!”

  She ducks involuntarily and lifts her arms as though to fend off a slap. Her father used to slap her. When the adrenalin of sudden fright drains off, it is followed by offense and anger. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” she demands.
   He takes a deep breath. “Nothing. I’m sorry. It’s just…”
   Her voice is stiff with petulance. “Well, Jesus Christ, you’d think a cop would be used to that sort of thing.”
   “Yes, of course, but…” He rolls his hand. ‘Tell me. How old are you?”
   She readjusts herself on the sofa, but she doesn’t relax. “Twenty-two. And you?”
   “Fifty-two. No, three.” He wants to return to the calm of their earlier conversation, so he explains unnecessarily, “I just had a birthday last month, but I always forget about it.”
   She cannot imagine anyone forgetting a birthday, but she supposes it’s different when you’re old. He is acting nice again. Her instinct tells her that he is genuinely sorry for frightening her. This would be the time to take advantage of his regret and make some arrangements.
   “Can I stay here again tonight?”
   “Of course. You can stay longer, if you want.”
   Push it now. “How much longer?”
   He shrugs. “I don’t know. How long do you want to stay?”
   “Would we… make love?” She cannot help saying these last words with a comic, melodramatic tone.
   He doesn’t answer.
   “Don’t you like women?”
   He smiles. “No, it isn’t that.”
   “Well, why do you want me to stay, if you don’t want to sleep with me?”
   LaPointe looks down at the park, where a tracery of black branches intersects the yellow globes of the streetlamps. This Marie-Louise is the same age as Lucille—the Lucille of his memory—and she speaks with the same downriver accent. And she wears the same robe. But she is younger than the daughters he daydreams about, the daughters who are sometimes still little girls, but more often grown women with children of their own. Come to think of it, the daughters of his daydreams are sometimes older than Lucille. Lucille never ages, always looks the same. It never before occurred to him that the daughters are older than their mother. That’s crazy.
   “What’s wrong?” she asks.
   “I’ll tell you what. I’ll look around and see if I can find you a job.”
   “In a cocktail bar?”
   “I can’t promise that. Maybe as a waitress in a restaurant.”
   She wrinkles her nose. That doesn’t appeal to her at all. She has seen lots of waitresses, running around and being shouted at during rush times, or standing, tired and bored, and staring out of windows when the place is empty. And the uniforms always look frumpy. If it weren’t for this damned pig weather, and if the men never tried to beat you up, she’d rather go on like she is than be a waitress.
   “I’ll try to find you a job,” he says. “Meanwhile you can stay here, if you want.”
   “And we’ll sleep together?” She wants to get the conditions straight at the beginning. It is something like making sure you get your money in advance.
   He turns from the window and settles his eyes on her. “Do you really want to?”
   She shrugs a “why not?” Then she discovers a loose thread on the sleeve of the dressing gown. She tries to break it off.
   He clears his throat and rubs his cheek with his knuckles. “I need a shave.” He rises. “Would you like another coffee before we go to bed?”
   She looks up at him through her mop of hair, the errant thread between her teeth. “Okay,” she says, nipping off the thread and spitting out the bit.

   He is shaving when the phone rings.
   He has to wipe the lather from his cheek before putting the receiver to his ear. “LaPointe.”
   Guttmann’s voice sounds tired. “I just got down here.”
   “Down where?”
   “The Quartier Général. They called me at my apartment. They’ve picked up your Sinclair, and he’s giving them one hell of a time.”
   “Sinclair?”
   “Joseph Michael Sinclair. That’s the real name of your bum, the Vet. He’s in a bad way. Raving. Screaming. They’re talking about giving him a sedative, but I told them to hold off in case you wanted to question him tonight.”
   “No, not tonight. Tomorrow will do.”
   “I don’t know, sir…”
   “Of course you don’t know. That’s part of being a Joan.”
   “What I was going to say was, this guy’s a real case. It’s taking two men to hold him down. He keeps screaming that he can’t go into a cell. Something about being a claustrophobic.”
   “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
   “Just thought you ought to know.”
   LaPointe’s shoulders slump, and he lets out a long nasal sigh. “All right. You talk to the Vet. Tell him nobody’s going to lock him up. Tell him I’ll be down in a little while. He knows me.”
   “Yes, sir. Oh, and sir? Terribly sorry to disturb you at home.”
   What? Sarcasm from a Joan? LaPointe grunts and hangs up.
   Marie-Louise is mending the paisley granny dress she was wearing when he found her in the park. She looks up questioningly when he enters the living room.
   “I have to go downtown. What are you smiling at?”
   “You’ve got soap on one side of your face.”
   “Oh.” He wipes it off.
   As he tugs on his overcoat, he remembers the coffee water steaming away on the stove. “Shall I make you a cup before I go?”
   She shakes her head. “I don’t really like coffee all that much.”
   “Why do you always drink it then?”
   She shrugs. She doesn’t know. She takes what’s offered.

6

   By the thermometer it is not so cold as last night, but that was a dry cold, crystallizing on surfaces, and this is a damp cold, the serrate edge of which penetrates to LaPointe’s chest as he walks down the deserted Main. He does not find a cruising taxi until Sherbrooke.
   LaPointe’s footfalls clip hollowly along the empty, half-lit halls outside the magistrates’ courts. The sound is oddly loud and melancholy, without the covering envelope of noise that fills the building during the day.
   The elevator doors open, and he walks down the brightly lit corridor of the Duty Office. There is sound and life here: the stuttering clack of a typewriter in clumsy hands; the hum of fluorescent lights; and somewhere a transistor radio plays popular music.
   Guttmann steps into the hall at the sound of the elevator. He looks unkempt and haggard; more like a real cop, LaPointe thinks.
   “Good morning, sir. He’s in here.” Guttmann’s tone is flat and unfriendly.
   “What the hell’s wrong with you?” LaPointe asks.
   “Sir?”
   “Your attitude, tone of voice. What’s wrong?”
   “I didn’t know it showed, sir.”
   “It shows. I warned you to cancel that date of yours.”
   “I did, sir. She went to a film with a friend. But she dropped by later for a drink. We live in the same apartment building.”
   “And the call got you out of bed?”
   “Something like that.”
   “At an awkward time?”
   “As awkward as it gets, sir.”
   LaPointe laughs. Guttmann recognizes the comic possibilities of the situation, but he doesn’t find this particular case funny.
   LaPointe enters the Duty Office, Guttmann following. Joseph Michael “the Vet” Sinclair is sitting on a wooden bench against the wall. His long arms are wrapped around his legs, his face is pressed against his knees, and he still wears his ridiculous floppy-brimmed hat. He rocks himself back and forth in misery, humming or moaning one note over and over again. His grip on reality seems fragile. Occasionally he looks around the room, bewildered and frightened, and his teeth begin to chatter, his breath comes in canine sniffs, and he struggles against screaming.
   LaPointe’s nostrils dilate with the stench of urine. Joseph Michael Sinclair has wet himself.
   The symptoms resemble withdrawal. LaPointe has seen this once before. The Vet is a victim of claustrophobia. The Duty Office is a big room, so that isn’t what is eroding his sanity. It was the trip down in a police car and, even more, the thought of being locked up in a cell. The Vet is trapped in the classic terrible cycle facing the claustrophobic: he is almost mad with the fear of being shut up, and if he gives way to his madness, they will lock him up.
   “Where did you pick him up?” LaPointe asks one of the officers getting coffee at the dispensing machine, a tough Polish old-timer who never bothered to take his sergeant’s examinations because he doesn’t want the hassle of responsibility. Although his French is thin and badly accented, he has always been accepted by the French Canadian cops as one of them, because he so obviously is not one of the others.
   The coffee is hot, and the Polish cop winces as he changes the paper cup from hand to hand, looking for a place to set it down. His gestures are comically delicate, because the paper cup is fragile. He manages to balance it on a ledge and snaps his fingers violently. “Jesus H. Christ! We picked him up on St. Urbain, just south of Van Horne. Somebody named Red phoned in the tip. He gave us one hell of a chase. Took off across Van Horne, hopping like a gimpy rabbit! Right through the traffic! Cars and trucks hitting their brakes! Scared the shit out of the drivers. Their assholes must of bit chunks out of the car seats. And there I am, right after him, dancing and dodging through the traffic. Then your friend here climbs the fence and is halfway down the bank into the freight yard before I get to him. Look at that, will you?” He reaches around and tugs out the slack in the seat of his pants, showing a triangular rip. “Got that climbing the goddamned wire fence after the son of a bitch! Twenty-seven bucks shot in the ass!”
   “Literally,” Guttmann says.
   “What?” the Polish cop demands.
   “Did he give you any trouble?” LaPointe asks.
   “Any trouble? Wild as a cat crapping razor blades, that’s all! You wouldn’t know it to see him now, but it took both of us to get him into the car. Kick? Wriggle? Scream? You’da thought we were gang-banging the Mother Superior.”
   LaPointe looks over at the miserable bomme whose eyes are now squeezed shut as he rocks back and forth, with each movement moaning a high, thin note that stops short in his throat. He is right on the limen of sanity.
   “You didn’t give him anything to calm him down, did you?”
   “No, Lieutenant. Your Joan told us not to. Anyway, it wasn’t necessary. As soon as we told him you were coming down, he settled right down. Just started moaning and rocking like that. A real nut case. Twenty-fucking-seven bucks! And not a month old!”
   LaPointe crosses to the Vet and places his hand on his shoulder. “Hey?” He gives him a slight shake. “Hey, Vet?” The tramp does not look up; he is lost in the treacherous animal comfort of his rocking and moaning. His own motion and his own sound surround and protect him. He doesn’t want penetrations from the outside.
   LaPointe has seen men go inside themselves like this before. He is afraid he’ll lose the Vet if he doesn’t bring him out right now. He takes off the wide-brimmed hat and lifts up the head by the hair. “Hey!”
   The bomme tries to pull away, but LaPointe holds the hair tighter. “Vet? Vet!” The smell of urine is strong.
   The Vet’s vague humid eyes focus slowly on LaPointe’s face. The slack, unshaven cheeks quiver. As he opens his mouth to speak, a bubble of thick spit forms between the lips and bursts with the first word.
   “Lieutenant?” It is a pitiful, mendicant whine. “Don’t let them lock me up. You know what I mean? I can’t be locked up! I can’t! I… I… I… I… I…” With each repetition, the voice rises a note as the Vet plunges toward panic.
   LaPointe snatches the greasy hair. He mustn’t lose him. “Vet! No one’s going to lock you up!”
   “No, you don’t! I can’t go inside! I can’t!”
   “Listen to me!”
   “No! No! No!”
   LaPointe slaps the tramp’s cheek hard.
   The Vet catches his breath and holds it, his cheeks bulging, his eyes wide open and staring up obliquely at the Lieutenant.
   “Now listen,” LaPointe says more quietly. “Just listen,” he says softly. “All right?”
   The Vet lets his breath escape slowly and remains silent, but his eyes still stare, and there are rapid little pupillary contractions.
   LaPointe speaks very slowly and clearly. “No one is going to lock you up. Do you understand that? No one is going to put you inside.”
   The bomme’s squinting left eye twitches as he struggles to comprehend. As understanding comes, his body, so long rigid, droops with fatigue; his jaw slackens; his breathing slows; and the bloodshot eyes roll up as though in sleep.
   LaPointe releases the hair, and the tramp’s chin drops back into his chest. LaPointe lays his hand protectively on the nape of the Vet’s neck as he turns to Guttmann. “Get some coffee down him.”
   Guttmann looks around for a coffeepot.
   “The machine!” LaPointe says with exasperation, pointing to the coin-operated dispenser.
   The two uniformed cops leave the Duty Office, the Polish old-timer fiddling with the back of his pants to see if he can hide the triangular rip, and his partner assuring him that nobody wants to look at his ass.
   LaPointe leans against the wall and presses down his hair with his palm. “After you get a few cups of coffee down him,” he tells Guttmann, “dunk his head in cold water and clean him up a little. Then bring him to my office.”
   Guttmann fumbles in his pocket as he looks with distaste at the heap of rags stinking of stale wine and urine. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t seem to have a dime.”
   “The machine takes quarters.”
   “I don’t have any change at all.”
   With infinite patience, LaPointe produces a quarter from the depths of his overcoat pocket and holds it up between thumb and forefinger. “Here. This is called a quarter. It makes vending machines work. It also makes telephones work. What would you do if you had to make an emergency call from a public phone and you had no change on you?”
   “I just threw on my clothes and came over when they called. I didn’t even—”
   “Always carry change for the phone. It could save somebody’s life.”
   Guttmann takes the quarter. “All right, sir. Thanks for the advice.”
   “That wasn’t advice.”
   Guttmann shoves the quarter into the slot brusquely. What the hell is bugging the Lieutenant? After all, he wasn’t the one who was called away from a night with a bird to come down and wet-nurse a drunk who has pissed his pants!
   As he starts to leave the Duty Office for his own floor above, LaPointe pauses at the door. He sniffs and rubs his cheek. He is shaven on only one side. “Look. I’m sorry, I… I’m tired, that’s all.”
   “Yes, sir. We’re probably all tired.”
   “Did you say it was your first time with that young lady of yours?”
   “First for sure. And probably last.” Guttmann is still angry and stung.
   “Well, I hope not.”
   “Yes, sir. Me too.”

   It is fully half an hour before the door to LaPointe’s office opens and Guttmann enters, bringing the Vet along by the arm. The old bomme looks pale and sick, but sober. Sober enough, at least. The shapeless old overcoat has been left behind, along with the wide-brimmed hat, and the collar and front of his shirt are wet from the dunking Guttmann has given him in a washbowl of the men’s room. The hair is wet and dripping, and it has been raked back with fingers that left greasy black ropes. There is a small bruise over the eyebrow, half covered by a hank of hair plastered on the forehead.
   “You hit him?” LaPointe asks.
   “No, sir. He clipped his head on the edge of the washbowl.”
   “Do you have any idea what a lawyer would make of that? A lot more than harassment.” LaPointe turns his attention to the bomme. “Okay, sit down, Vet.”
   The old tramp obeys sullenly. Now that his first panic is over, something of his haughty sassiness returns, and he attempts to appear indifferent and superior, despite the stink of urine that moves with him.
   “Feeling better?” LaPointe asks.
   The Vet does not answer. He lifts his head and looks unsteadily at LaPointe down his thin, bent nose. The intended disdain is diluted by an uncontrollable wobbling of the head.
   LaPointe has never liked the Vet. He pities him, but the Vet is one of those men toward whom feelings of pity are always mixed with contempt, even disgust.
   “Got a smoke?” the Vet asks.
   “No.” Once the Vet begins to feel safe, he’ll be impossible to deal with. It’s best to keep him from getting too confident. “I told you we weren’t going to put you inside,” LaPointe says, leaning back in his chair. “I’d better be straight with you. It’s not really settled yet. You may be locked up, and you may not.”
   With almost comic abruptness, the tramp’s composure shatters. His eyes flicker like a rodent’s, and his breath starts to come in short gasps. “I can’t go into a cell, Lieutenant. I thought you understood! I was wounded in the army.”
   “I’m not interested in that.”
   “No, wait! I was captured! A prisoner of war! For four years I was locked up! You know what I mean? I couldn’t stand it. One day… one day, I began to scream. And I couldn’t stop. You know what I mean? I knew I was screaming. I could hear myself. And I wanted to stop, but I didn’t know how! You know what I mean? That’s why I can’t go to jail!”
   “All right. Calm down.”
   The Vet is eager to obey, to put himself in LaPointe’s good graces. He stops talking, shutting his teeth tight. But he cannot halt the humming moan. He begins to rock in his chair. Mustn’t let the moan out. Mustn’t start screaming.
   Guttmann clears his throat. “Lieutenant?”
   “Hm-m?”
   “I think he may be a user. There’s a fresh mark on his arm, and a couple of old tracks.”
   “No, he’s not a user, are you, Vet? Between pension checks, he sells his blood illegally for wine money. That’s right, isn’t it, Vet?”
   The bomme nods vigorously, still keeping his teeth clenched. He wants to be cooperative, but he doesn’t dare speak. He’s afraid to open his mouth. Afraid he’ll start screaming, and they will put him into a room. Like the English army doctors did after he was liberated from prison camp. They put him into a room because he kept screaming. He was screaming because they locked him in a room!
   The Vet breathes nasally, in short puffs, humming with each exhalation. The hum strokes his need to scream just enough to keep it within control, like lightly rubbing a mosquito bite that you mustn’t scratch for fear of infection.
   “Take it easy, Vet. Answer every question truthfully, and I’ll make sure you get back on the street. All right?”
   The tramp nods. With great effort, he forces his breathing to slow. Then he carefully unclenches his teeth. “I’ll do… whatever… anything.”
   “Good. Now, last night you took a wallet from a man in an alley.”
   The Vet bobs his head once.
   “I don’t care about the money. You can keep it.”
   The Vet forces himself to speak. “Money… gone.”
   “You drank it up?”
   He nods once.
   “It’s the wallet I want. If you can give me the wallet, you’re free to go.”
   The Vet opens his mouth wide and takes three rapid, shallow breaths. “I have it! I have it!”
   “But not on you.”
   “No.”
   “Where?”
   “I can get it.”
   “Good. I’ll come along with you.”
   The Vet doesn’t want this. His eyes flick about the room. “No. I’ll bring it to you. I promise.”
   “That’s not good enough, Vet. You’d promise anything right now. I’ll go with you.”
   The Vet’s upper lip spreads flat over his teeth and his nostrils dilate. “I can’t!” He begins to sob.
   LaPointe scrubs his hair and sighs. “Is it your kip? You don’t want me to find out where it is?”
   The bomme nods vigorously.
   “I’m sorry. But there’s nothing for it. It’s late, and I’m tired. Either we go right now to get the wallet, or you start ten days of a vag charge.”
   The tramp looks at Guttmann, his eyes pleading for intervention. The young man frowns and stares at the floor.
   LaPointe stands up. “Okay, that’s it. I don’t have time to fool around with you.”
   “All right!” The Vet jumps to his feet and shouts into LaPointe’s face. “All right! All right!”
   LaPointe puts his hands on the tramp’s shoulders and presses him back into his chair. “Take it easy.” He turns to Guttmann. “Go down and check us out a car and driver.”
   Before leaving, Guttmann glances again at the Vet, who has retreated into the comfort of rocking and humming.

   No sooner has the police car carried them three blocks from the Quartier Général and the threat of being locked up than the Vet’s whimpering dread evaporates and he reverts to his cocky, egoistic self. He does not deign to talk to Guttmann, who sits beside him because LaPointe got in front to avoid the alkaline smell of urine. Instead, he leans forward and talks to the Lieutenant’s back, explaining what happened in a loud voice because the windows of the car are open to avoid an onset of claustrophobia, and the bitter wind whistles through the car.
   “I was just coming down the street, Lieutenant, when I happened to look up the alley and see this mark. He was kneeling down… low, you know? With his forehead on the bricks. I figures he’s a drunk or maybe high on something. Maybe he’s sick, I says to myself. I got first-aid training in the army. You can make a tourniquet with your belt. Did you know that? Sure. Easy as pie, if you know how. This riffraff on the street don’t know anything. They never been in the army. They don’t know shit from Shinola. Well, I walks up the alley. He don’t move. There’s nobody around. It’s real cold and everybody’s off the Main. Now, I wasn’t thinking of rolling him or nothing. Honest to God, Lieutenant. I just thought he might be sick or something. Need a tourniquet, maybe. When I get close to him, I could see he was real well-dressed. He looks funny. I mean, you know, ridiculous. Kneeling there with his ass in the air. Then I notice his wallet’s half out of his pocket. So… I just… took it. I mean, if I didn’t take it, one of those street tramps was sure to. So why not? First come, first served; that’s what we used to say in the army.”
   “You didn’t know he was dead?”
   “Honest to God, I didn’t. There wasn’t any blood or anything.”
   That is true. The bleeding was largely internal.
   “So, anyway, it comes to me that I might as well lift his poke. Share the wealth, like we used to say in the army. So I reach over and pull it out. It comes out hard, what with him squatting over like that and the ass of his pants so tight, you know. And just as I got it, all of a sudden this cop car stops down to the end of the alley, and this cop shouts at me!” The Vet’s breath begins to shorten as he relives his fear. “So I takes off! I was a-scared he might run me in! I can’t be locked up, Lieutenant! If I’m in a closed place, I start to scream. You know what I mean? You know what I mean?”
   “All right! Take it easy.”
   “Did I tell you that the army doctors kept me locked up after they liberated the camp?”
   “You mentioned it. Where are we going?”
   “Just straight up the Main. Up to Van Horne. I’ll show you when we get there. Yeah, the army doctors kept me locked up in a hospital ward especially for fruitcakes. They didn’t understand. I might have been there forever. But then this young doctor—Captain Ferguson, his name was—he says why don’t they give me a chance on the outside. See how it would work. Well, I got out, and I stopped screaming just like that. They warned me not to get a job where I was cooped up, and I never did. I didn’t have to. I’m a ninety percent disability. Ninety percent! That’s a lot, ain’t it? Hey, you got a cigarette?”
   “No.”
   The driver twists to get a pack out of his pocket. “Give him one of mine, Lieutenant. We sure could use the smell of smoke in here.”
   As they near the intersection of Van Horne and St. Laurent, LaPointe becomes curious about this famous snug kip the Vet has always boasted about. It is generally known on the street that the Vet drinks up his pension check within two weeks and has to sell blood to keep alive after that. Like other tramps, winos, addicts, and hippie types in extremis, he lies about how long it has been since he gave blood, as he lies about diseases he has had. There is always a need for his uncommon type—another source of his endless bragging. Whenever he gets money, he buys a couple of bottles, but he never drinks much on the Main. He brings it off with him to his hideaway.
   Following the Vet’s directions, they turn left on Van Horne. The tramp’s voice softens toward confidentiality as he speaks to LaPointe. “You can tell him to stop here at the corner. Just you come with me, Lieutenant. I don’t want anyone else to come. Okay? Okay?”
   “I’ll leave the driver here. The young man is attached to me.”
   Guttmann glances over, uncertain whether or not LaPointe is sending him up.
   The car pulls over to the curb, and LaPointe instructs the driver to wait for them.
   An unlit side street of storage companies and warehouses ends abruptly at a woven wire fence that screens off a little-used freight shunt yard, the tracks of which glow dimly down in a black depression below and beyond the fence. LaPointe and Guttmann follow the Vet down the steep embankment, glissading dangerously over cinders, braking to prevent a headlong run that would precipitate them into the darkness below.
   At the base of the slope, the Vet begins to cut across the tracks with the kind of familiarity that does not require light. LaPointe tells him to wait a minute, and he closes his eyes to speed up the dilation of his pupils. The smudgy dark gray cityglow has the effect of moonlight through mist, obscuring details, yet providing too much light to permit the eyes to adjust to the dark. Eventually, however, LaPointe can make out the parallel sets of rails and the glisten of tar on the ties. He tells the Vet to go on, but more slowly. He feels uncomfortable and out of his element, walking through this broken ground of cinder and weeds that is neither city terrain nor country, but a starved and sooty wasteland that the city has not occupied and the country cannot reclaim.
   They cross over half a dozen sets of rails, then turn west, parallel to the tracks. Soon rust mutes the shine of the rails, and ragged black weeds indicate that they are in an unused wing of the shunt yard. One by one, the pairs of tracks end against heavy metal bumpers, until they are following the last along a wide curve close to a dark embankment. Without warning, the Vet turns aside and scrambles down a slope and along a faint trail through dead burrs, and stunted, hollow-stalked weeds brittle with the frost. Wind swirls in this declivity of the freight yard, one minute pushing LaPointe’s overcoat from behind, and the next pressing against his chest and leaking in through the collar. The only sounds are the moan of the wind and the harsh rustle of their passage over frosted ground and through the weeds. They are isolated in this vast island of silence and dark in the midst of the city. All around them, but at a distance, the lights of traffic crawl in long double rows. A huge beer sign half a mile away at the far end of the freight yard flashes red-yellow-white, red-yellow-white. And from somewhere afar comes the wailing of an ambulance siren.
   The Vet’s pace slackens and he stops. “It’s right over there, Lieutenant.” He points toward the cliff, looming black against the dark gray of the cityglow sky. “I’ll go get the wallet for you.”
   LaPointe peers through the gloom, but he can see no shelter, no shack.
   “I’ll go with you,” he decides.
   “I won’t run off. Honest.”
   “Come on, come on! It’s cold. Let’s get it over with.”
   The Vet still hesitates. “All right. But he doesn’t have to come, does he?”“
   Guttmann presses back his hair, which the wind is standing on end. “I’ll wait here, Lieutenant.”
   LaPointe nods, then follows the Vet along the dim path.
   Guttmann watches the vague figures blend into the dark, then disappear as they pass close to the embankment. He catches a bit of motion later, out of the corner of his eye where peripheral night vision is better. He strains to see, but he loses them. After several minutes, he hears the distant clank and scraping of metal—a heavy sheet of metal, from the sound of it. He hugs his coat around him and tucks his chin into his collar.
   In about ten minutes he hears the crackle of dead, frozen stalks, then he sees them returning. The Vet’s body is stooped and slack; he seems deflated. For the fourth time that night, the bomme’s personality and manner have changed abruptly. The conditions of his life long ago ground away any pretensions of dignity, but there remains the husk of pride, and that has been damaged: the Lieutenant has seen his snug little kip. He passes Guttmann without a glance, and leads the policemen back through the field of frozen weeds, along the single unused track with its rusted rails, back over the pairs of glistening rails, to the base of the embankment, just below the wire fence and the light of the city.
   “We can find our way from here,” LaPointe tells the tramp.
   Without a word, the Vet turns and starts back the way they came.
   “Vet?” LaPointe calls.
   The bomme stops in his tracks, but he doesn’t turn to face them.
   “You know I won’t tell any of them about your kip, don’t you?”
   The Vet’s voice is listless. “Yeah.” He clutches the brim of his floppy hat against the wind and trudges back across the tracks.
   LaPointe looks after him for a second. “Come on,” he says. They scramble up the cinder embankment, over the wire fence, and soon they are back in the light, on the truncated street of warehouses. As Guttmann walks on, LaPointe stands for a moment and looks back over the shunt yard, a matte-black hole ripped out of the map of Montreal’s streets and city lights. His sense of reality is upset. Somehow this street with its warehouses and the noise and light of passing traffic down at the corner seems artificial, temporary. That dark, desolate freight yard with its faint paths crowded in by black frozen burrs, with its silence in the midst of the city’s noise, its dark in the midst of the city’s light—that was real. It was not pleasant, but it was real… and inevitable. It is what the whole city would be six months after man was gone. It is the seed of urban ruin.
   Oh, he’s just tired; feeling a little cafard. There is vertigo in his sense of reality because he’s been awake too long, because of the hard scramble up the cinder embankment, and because of the pleasant, terrifying tingle, this effervescence in his blood…
   Guttmann is cold, and he walks quickly toward the waiting police car with its dozing driver and its radio, against regulations, tuned to music. Then he realizes that LaPointe is not with him. He turns impatiently and sees the Lieutenant standing against the wire fence, his eyes closed. As Guttmann approaches, LaPointe opens his eyes and rubs his upper arms as though to restore circulation. Before Guttmann can ask what’s wrong, the Lieutenant growls, “Come on! Let’s not stand around here all night! It’s cold, for Christ’s sake!”

   They sit in a back booth, the only customers of the A-One Café. When they came in, LaPointe greeted the old Chinese owner: “How’s it going, Mr. A-One?”
   The Chinese cackled and responded, “Yes, you bet. That’s a good one!”
   Guttmann assumed the greeting and response were ancient and automatic, a ritual joke they have shared for years.
   Without asking what they wanted, the old man brought them two cups of coffee, thick and brackish, the lees from an afternoon pot. Then he returned to stand by the front window, motionless, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes focused on a mid-distance beyond his window.
   The naked bulb above his head produces an oblique angle of light which deepens the furrows and rivulets of his face. His eyes do not blink.
   LaPointe sits huddled in his coat, frowning meditatively as he slowly stirs his coffee, although he has not put sugar into it.
   On the wall beside Guttmann’s head is a gaudy embroidered hanging featuring a long-tailed bird resting on the branch of a tree bearing every kind of flower. And tacked up next to it is a picture of a very healthy girl in a swimsuit coyly considering the commitment involved in accepting the bottle of Coke thrust toward her by an aggressive male fist.
   Guttmann stifles a yawn so deep that it brings tears. “Not much business,” he says irrelevantly. “Wonder why he stays open all night.”
   LaPointe looks up as though he has forgotten the young man’s presence. “Oh, you don’t need much sleep when you’re old. He has no wife. It helps to shorten the nights, I suppose.”
   For the first time, Guttmann wonders if LaPointe has a wife. He cannot imagine it; cannot picture him taking a Sunday afternoon walk in some park, a middle-aged matron on his arm. Then the image starts to form in Guttmann’s mind of LaPointe in bed with a woman…
   “What is it?” LaPointe asks. “What are you smiling at?”
   “Oh, nothing,” Guttmann lies. “It’s just that… I don’t know what in hell I’m doing here. I don’t know why I didn’t take the car back to the Quartier Général.” He pushes out a sigh and shakes his head at himself. “I must be getting dopey with lack of sleep.”
   LaPointe nods. “You’ve got what Gaspard calls ‘the sits.’ “
   “What?” Guttmann is thrown off track by the unexpected shift to English.
   “The sits. That’s when you’re so tired and numb-headed that you don’t have the energy to get up and go home.”
   “That’s what I’ve got all right. The sits. That’s a good name for it. I wish I were in bed right now.”
   LaPointe glances at him, a smile in his down-sloping eyes.
   “No,” Guttmann laughs. “She’s back in her own apartment by now. But maybe all is not lost. We have a date for tomorrow.”
   “We’re going to have to do some work tomorrow.”
   “But tomorrow’s Saturday.”
   LaPointe put his elbow on the table and his forehead in his palm. “That’s right. You see? Your college education wasn’t a waste after all. You know the days of the week. After Friday, Saturday. Come to think of it, tomorrow’s Sunday.”
   “What?”
   “What time is it?”
   “Ah, it’s…” Guttmann tips his wrist toward the light. “Christ, it’s almost two.”
   “Want some more coffee?”
   “No, sir. After spending the day with you, I don’t think I’ll ever want another cup of coffee in my life.” Guttmann glances toward the motionless Chinese. “Is that all he does? Just stand there looking inscrutable?”
   “What does that mean? Inscrutable?”
   “Inscrutable means… hell, sir, I don’t know. My brain’s gone to sleep. It means… ah… of or pertaining to the inability to scrute? Je scrute, tu scrutes, il scrute… shit, I don’t know.” He sits back, and his eyes settle on the Chinese again. “He must be lonely.”
   LaPointe shrugs. “I doubt it. He’s past that.”
   This simple bit of human understanding from the Lieutenant disturbs Guttmann. He can’t peg LaPointe in his mind. Like most liberals, he assumes that all thinking men are liberals. On the one hand, LaPointe is the classic old-timer who rags his juniors, pokes fun at education, harasses and bullies the civilians—the prototypical tough cop. On the other hand, he is a friend to ex-whores with bashed-up faces, a paternal watchdog who chats with people on the street, knows the bums, understands his patch… seems to have affection for it. Pride, even. Guttmann knows better than to think that people are black or white. But he expects to find them gray shades, not alternately black then white. Lieutenant LaPointe: Your Friendly Neighborhood Fascist.
   “He should find some old duffers to play pinochle with,” Guttmann says.
   “Who?”
   “The old Chinese who runs this place.”
   “Why pinochle?”
   “I don’t know. That’s what old farts do when they don’t know what else to do with themselves, isn’t it? Play pinochle? I mean…” Guttmann stops and closes his eyes. He slowly shakes his head. “No, don’t tell me. You play pinochle, don’t you, sir?”
   “Twice a week.”
   Guttmann hits his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I should have known. You know, sir, it just seems that fate doesn’t want us to hit it off.”
   “Don’t blame fate. It’s your big mouth.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “What have you got against pinochle?”
   “Believe it or not, I don’t have anything against pinochle. My grandfather used to play pinochle with his cronies late into the night sometimes.”
   “Your grandfather.”
   “Yes, sir. That’s mostly what I remember him doing; sitting with his friends until all hours. Playing. Pretending it mattered who won and who lost. I just came to associate it with lonely old men, I guess.”
   “I see.”
   “I have nothing against the game. I’m a pinochle player myself, sir. My grandfather taught me.”
   “Are you any good?”