“Sir, excuse me. But doesn’t it strike you as odd that we are sitting in a Chinese all-night coffee shop at two in the morning talking about pinochle?”
   LaPointe laughs. The kid’s okay. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he says, taking from his overcoat pocket the wallet the Vet gave him, and emptying the contents onto the table. There is a scrap of paper with two girls’ names written in different hands, evidently by the girls themselves. First names only; not much help. There is a little booklet the size of a commemorative stamp, containing a dozen pictures of various sex positions and combinations: the kind of thing shown to objecting but giggling girls by a man who believes the myth that seeing the act automatically brings a woman to the point of panting necessity. In an accordion-pleated change pocket there are two contraceptives of the sort sold in vending machines in the toilets of cheap bars: guaranteed to afford maximum protection with minimum loss of sensation. Sold only for the prevention of disease. One of them features a “tickler”; the other is packed in a liquid lubricant. No money; the Vet got that. No driver’s license. The wallet is cheap imitation alligator, quite new. There is a card in one of the plastic windows with places for the owner to provide particulars. Childishly, the dead man had felt impelled to fill it in. LaPointe passes the wallet over to Guttmann, who reads the round, infantile printing:


   NAME
   Tony Green

   ADDRESS
   17 Mirabeau Street

   PHONE
   Apmt. 3B

   BLOOD TYPE
   Hot!!!!!!!!!!
   “So the victim’s name was Tony Green,” Guttmann says.
   “Probably not.” There is a businesslike, mechanical quality to LaPointe’s voice. “The printing is European. See the barred seven? The abbreviation for ‘apartment’ is wrong. That seems to give us a young alien. And the kid had a Latin look—probably Italian. But not a legal entrant, or his fingerprints would have been on file with Ottawa. He picked the name Tony Green for himself. If he runs true to form for Italian immigrants, his real name would be something like Antonio Verdi—something like that.”
   “Does the name mean anything to you? You know him?”
   LaPointe shakes his head. “No. But I know the house. It’s a run-down place near Marie-Anne and Clark. We’ll check it out tomorrow morning.”
   “What do you expect to turn there?”
   “Impossible to say. It’s a start. It’s all we have in hand.”
   “That, and the fact that the victim was a little hung up on sex. Oh, God!”
   “Why ‘Oh, God’?”
   “You know that girl I had to leave tonight? Well, I promised her we’d go out tomorrow morning. Take coffee up on the Mount. Maybe drop in at a gallery or two. Have dinner maybe. Now I’ll have to beg off again.”
   “Why do that? There’s no real point in your coming along with me tomorrow, if you don’t want to.”
   “Why do you say that, sir?”
   “Well… you know. All this business of the apprentice Joans learning the ropes from the old-timers is a lot of crap. Things don’t work that way. There’s no way in the world that you’re going to end up a street cop like me. You have education. You speak both languages well. You have ambition. No. You won’t end up in this kind of work. You’re the type who ends up in public relations, or handling ‘delicate’ cases. You’re the type who gets ahead.”
   Guttmann is a little stung. No one likes to be a “type.” “Is there anything wrong with that, sir? Anything wrong with wanting to get ahead?”
   “No, I suppose not.” LaPointe rubs his nose. “I’m just saying that what you might learn from me won’t be of much use to you. You could never work the way I work. You wouldn’t even want to. Look at how you got all steamed up about the way I handled that pimp, Scheer.”
   “I only mentioned that he has his rights.”
   “And the kids he bashes around? Their rights?”
   “There are laws to protect them.”
   “What if they’re too dumb to know about the laws? Or too scared to use them? A girl hits the city on a bus, coming from some farm or village, stupid and looking for a good time… excitement. And the first thing you know, she’s broke and scared and willing to sell her ass.” LaPointe isn’t thinking of Scheer’s girls at this moment.
   “All right,” Guttmann concedes. “So maybe something has to be done about men like Scheer. Stiffer laws, maybe. But not stopping him on the street and making an ass of him in front of people, for God’s sake.”
   LaPointe shakes his head. “You’ve got to hit people where they’re tender. Scheer is a strutting wiseass. Embarrass him in public and he’ll keep off the street for a while. It varies with the man. Some you threaten, some you hurt, some you embarrass.”
   Guttmann lifts his palms and looks about with round eyes, as though calling upon God to listen to this shit. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing, sir. Some you hurt, some you threaten, some you embarrass—what is that, a Nazi litany? Those are supposed to be tactics for keeping the peace?”
   “They didn’t tell you about that in college, I suppose.”
   “No, sir. They did not.”
   “And, of course, you’d play everything by the book.”
   “I’d try. Yes.” This is simply said; it is the truth. “And if the book was wrong, I’d do what I could to change it. That’s how it works in a democracy.”
   “I see. Well—by the book—the Vet was guilty of a crime, wasn’t he? He took money from this wallet. Would you put him inside? Let him scream for the rest of his life?”
   Guttmann is silent. He isn’t sure. No, probably not.
   “But that would be playing it by the book. And do you remember that fou who sharpens knives and worries about the snow? He’d make a great suspect for a knife murder. You almost sniffed him yourself. And do you know what would happen if you brought him in for questioning? He’d get confused and frightened, and in the end he would confess. Oh, yes. He’d confess to anything you wanted. And the Commissioner would be happy, and the newspapers would be happy, and you’d get promoted.”
   “Well… I didn’t know about him. I didn’t know he was…”
   “That’s the point, son! You don’t know. The book doesn’t know!”
   Guttmann’s ears are reddening. “But you know?”
   “That’s right! I know. After thirty years, I know! I know the difference between a harmless nut and a murderer. I know the difference between shit tracks on a man’s arm and the marks left by selling blood to stay alive!” With a guttural sound and a wave of his hand LaPointe dismisses the use of explaining anything to Guttmann’s type.
   Guttmann sits, silently pushing his spoon back and forth between his fingers. He isn’t cowed. He speaks quietly, without looking up. “It’s fascism, sir.”
   “What?”
   “It’s fascism. The rule of a man, rather than the rule of law, is fascism. Even when the man has been around and thinks he knows what’s best… even if the man is trying to do good things… to be fair. It’s still fascism.”
   For a moment, LaPointe’s melancholy eyes rest on the young man, then he looks over his head to the gaudy Chinese hanging and the Coke advertisement.
   Guttmann expects a denial. Anger. An explanation.
   That’s not what comes. After a silence, LaPointe says, “Fascism, eh?” The tone indicates that he never thought of it that way. It indicates nothing more.
   Once again, Guttmann feels undercut, bypassed.
   LaPointe presses his eye sockets with his thumb and forefinger and sighs deeply. “Well, I think we’d better get some sleep. You can get the sits in your brain, as well as in your ass.” He sniffs and rubs his cheek with his knuckles.
   Guttmann delays their leaving. “Sir? May I ask you something?”
   “About fascism?”
   “No, sir. Back there in the freight yard. That bomme didn’t want me to come with you and see his kip. And later you said something to him about not telling the others. What was that all about?”
   LaPointe examines the young man’s face. Could you explain something like this to a kid who learned about people in a sociology class? Where would it fit in with his ideas about society and democracy? There is something punitive in LaPointe’s decision to tell him about it.
   “You remember Dirtyshirt Red last night? You remember how he had nothing good to say about the Vet? All the bommes on the Main sleep where they can: in doorways, in alleys, behind the tombstones in the monument-maker’s yard. And they all envy the nice snug private kip the Vet’s always bragging about. They hate him for having it. And that’s just the way the Vet wants it. He wants to be despised, hated, bad-mouthed. Because as long as the other tramps despise and reject him, he isn’t one of them; he’s something special. That make sense to you?”
   Guttmann nods.
   “Well—” LaPointe’s voice is husky with fatigue, and he speaks quietly. “After we left you back there on the path, I followed him along a trail I could barely see. But there wasn’t anything around. No shack, no hut, nothing. Then the Vet went behind a patch of bush and bent over. I could hear a scrape of metal. He was sliding back a sheet of corrugated roofing that covered a pit in the ground. I went over to the edge of it as he jumped down, sort of skidding on the muddy sides of the hole. It was about eight feet deep, and the bottom was covered with wads of rag and burlap sacking that squished with seep water when he walked around. He had a few boxes down there, to sit on, to use as a table, to stash stuff in. He fumbled around in one of these boxes and found the wallet. It was all he could do to get out of the pit again. The sides were slimy, and he slipped back twice and swore a lot. He finally got out and handed over the wallet. Then he slid the sheet of metal back over the hole. When he stood up and looked at me… I don’t know how to explain it… there was sort of two things in his eyes at the same time. Shame and anger. He was ashamed to live in a slimy hole. And he was angry that somebody knew about it. We talked about it for a while. He was proud of himself. I know that sounds nuts, but it’s how it was. He was ashamed of his hole, but proud of having figured it all out. I guess you could say he was proud of having made his hole, but ashamed of needing it. Something like that, anyway.
   “One night a few years ago, he was drunk and looking for a place to hide, where the police wouldn’t run him in for D and D. He found this cave-in hidden away among some bushes. Later on he thought about it, and he got a bright idea. He went back there at night with a spade he pinched somewhere, and he worked on the hole. He made it deeper and made the sides vertical. And whenever the sides crumble from him scrambling in and out, he works on it again. So his hole is always getting bigger. Rain gets in, and water seeps up from the slime, so he keeps adding rags and bags he picks up here and there. It’s a clever little trap he’s made for himself.”
   “Trap, sir?”
   “That’s what it is. That’s how he uses it. He’s afraid of being picked up drunk and put in a cell and left to scream. So every time he thinks he’s got enough wine inside him to be dangerous, he buys another bottle and brings it back to his kip. Down there in the hole, he can drink until he’s wild and raving. He’s safe down there. Even when he’s sober, it’s hard for him to climb up those slimy sides. When he’s drunk, it’s impossible. He traps himself down there to save himself from being arrested and put inside. Of course, he’s a claustrophobic, so sometimes he gets panicky down there. When his brain’s soggy with wine, he thinks the walls are caving in on him. And he’s terrified that a big rain might fill his pit with water when he’s too drunk to get out. It’s bad down there, you know. When he’s drunk, he can’t get out to shit or piss, so it’s… bad down there.”
   “Jesus Christ,” Guttmann says quietly.
   “Yeah. He lives in a small hole in the ground because he’s a claustrophobic.”
   “Jesus Christ.”
   LaPointe leans back in the booth and presses his mat of cropped hair hard with the palm of his hand. “And what do you do if you have to live in a slimy, stinking hole? You brag about it, of course. You make the other bommes despise you. And envy you.”
   Guttmann shakes his head slowly, his mouth agape, his eyes squeezed in pity and disgust. LaPointe’s punitive intent in telling him about this has been effective.
   “Tell you what,” LaPointe says. “Don’t come by to pick me up tomorrow until around noon. I need some sleep.”

   Without turning on the lights, he closes the door behind him and hangs his overcoat on the wooden rack. He flinches when the revolver in his pocket thuds against the wall; he doesn’t want to wake her.
   There is a crackling hiss in the room, and the crescent dial of the old Emerson glows dim orange. The station has gone off the air. Why didn’t she turn the radio off? Ah. He forgot to tell her that you also have to jiggle the knob to turn it off. Then why didn’t she pull out the plug? Dumb twit.
   The ceiling of the bedroom is illuminated by the streetlamp beneath the window, and he can make out Marie-Louise’s form in the bed, although she is below the shadow line. She sleeps on her side, her hands under her cheek, palms together, and her legs are in a kind of running position that takes up most of the bed.
   He undresses noiselessly, teetering for a moment in precarious balance as he pulls off his pants. When he aligns the creases to fold the pants over the back of a chair, some change falls out of his pocket, and he grimaces at the sound and swears between his teeth. He tiptoes around to the other side of the bed and lifts the blankets, trying to slip in without waking her. If he curves his body just right, there is enough room to lie next to her without touching her. For five long minutes he remains there, feeling the warmth that radiates from her, but it is impossible to sleep when the slightest movement would either touch her or make him fall out of bed. Anyway, he feels ridiculous, sneaking into bed with her. He rises carefully, but the springs clack loudly in the silent room.
   …at first the creaking bed had made Lucille tense. But later she used to giggle silently at the thought of imagined neighbors listening beyond the wall, shocked at such carryings-on…
   At the noise, Marie-Louise moans in confused irritation. “What’s the matter?” she asks in a blurred, muffled voice. “What do you want?”
   He lays his hand lightly on her mop of frizzy hair. “Nothing.”

7

   “Hey?”
   He does not move.
   “Hey?”
   “Ugh!” LaPointe wakes with a start, blinking his eyes against the watery light coming through the window. It is another gray day with low skies and diffused, shadowless brightness. He squeezes his eyes shut again before finally opening them. His back is stiff from sleeping on the narrow sofa, and his feet stick out from below the overcoat he has used as a blanket. “What time is it?” he asks.
   “A little before eleven.”
   He nods heavily, still drugged with sleep. He sits up and scratches his head, grinning stupidly. These last two nights have taken their toll—his joints are stiff and his head cobwebby.
   “I’ve got water boiling,” she says. “I was going to make some coffee, but I don’t know how to work your pot.”
   “Yes. It’s an old-fashioned kind. Just a minute. Give me a chance to wake up. I’ll do it.” He yawns deeply. His overcoat covers him from the waist down, but his thick chest is exposed. He rubs the graying hair vigorously because it itches. “Tabernouche!” he grunts.
   “Hard night?” she asks.
   “Long, anyway.”
   She is wearing Lucille’s pink quilted dressing gown again, but she has been up long enough to brush out her hair and put on eye make-up. There is a slight smell of gas in the room. She must have had some difficulty lighting the gas fire.
   In his sleep, his penis has come out of the fly of his undershorts. He manages to tuck it back in with the same gesture as that with which he pulls up his overcoat and puts it on in place of a robe. Barefooted, he goes into the kitchen to make coffee.
   She laughs half a dozen ascending notes, then stops short.
   “What’s wrong?”
   “Oh, nothing. You look funny with your bare legs coming out of the bottom of your overcoat.”
   He looks down. “Yes, I suppose I do.”
   While he is pressing hot water through the fine grounds, it occurs to him that only one thing triggers her peculiar, interrupted laugh: people looking ridiculous. She laughed at her black eye, at him with soap on his cheek, at herself wearing Lucille’s coat, and now at him again. It’s a cruel sense of humor, one that doesn’t even spare herself as a possible victim.
   He gives her a cup of coffee and carries one with him to the bathroom, where he washes up and dresses.
   Later, he fries eggs and toasts bread over the gas ring, and they take their breakfast in the living room, she coiled up on the sofa, her plate balanced on the arm, he in his chair.
   “Why did you sleep out here?” she asks.
   “Oh… I didn’t want to disturb you,” he explains, partially.
   “Yeah, but why didn’t you use the blankets I used last night?”
   “I didn’t really mean to sleep. I was just going to rest. But I dozed off.”
   “Yeah, but then why did you take your clothes off?”
   “Why don’t you just eat your eggs?”
   “Okay.” She spoons egg onto a bit of toast and eats it that way. “Where did you go last night?” she asks.
   “Just work.”
   “You said you work with the police. You work in an office?”
   “Sometimes. Mostly I work on the streets.”
   That seems to amuse her. “Yeah. Me too. You enjoy being a cop?”
   He tucks down the corners of his mouth and shrugs. He never thought of it that way. When she changes the subject immediately, he assumes she isn’t really interested anyway.
   “Don’t you get bored living here?” she asks. “No magazines. No television.”
   He looks around the frumpy room with its 1930’s furniture. Yes, he imagines it would be dull for a young girl. True, there are no magazines, but he has some books, a full set of Zola, whom he discovered by chance twenty years ago, and whom he reads over and over, going down the row of novels by turn, then starting again. He finds the people and events surprisingly like those on his patch, despite the funny, florid language. But he doesn’t imagine she would care to read his Zolas. She probably reads slowly, maybe even mouths the words.
   Well, if she’s bored, then she’ll probably leave soon. No reason for her to stay, really.
   “Ah… why don’t we go out tonight?” he offers. “Have dinner.”
   “And go dancing?”
   He smiles and shakes his head. “I told you I don’t dance.”
   This disappoints her. But she is resourceful when it comes to getting her way with men. “I know! Why don’t we go to a whisky à go-go after dinner. People can dance by themselves there.”
   He doesn’t care much for the thought of sitting in one of those cramped, noisy places with youngsters hopping all around him. But, if it would please her…
   She presses her tongue against her teeth and decides to gamble on pushing this thing to her advantage. “I… I really don’t have the right clothes to go out,” she says, not looking up from her cup. “I only have what I could sneak out in the shopping bag.”
   His eyes crinkle as he looks at her. He knows exactly what she’s up to. He doesn’t mind giving her money to buy clothes, if that’s what she wants, but he doesn’t like her thinking he’s a dumb mark.
   He sets down his cup and crosses to the large veneered chest. He has a habit of putting his housekeeping money into the top drawer every payday, and taking out what he needs through the month. He knows it’s a bad habit, but it saves time. And who would dare to steal from Claude LaPointe? He is surprised at how many twenties have accumulated, crumpled up in the drawer; must be five or six hundred dollars’ worth. Ever since the mortgage on the house was paid off, he has more money than he needs. He takes out seven twenties and flattens them with his hand. “Here. I’ll be working today. You can go out and buy yourself a dress.”
   She takes the bills and counts them. Maybe he doesn’t know how much a dress costs. So much the better for her.
   “There’s enough there to buy yourself a coat too,” he says.
   “Oh? All right.” Before falling asleep last night, she thought about asking him for money, but she didn’t know quite how to go about it. After all, they hadn’t screwed. He didn’t owe her.
   While she sits looking out the window, thinking about the dress and coat, LaPointe examines her face. The green eye shadow she uses disguises what is left of her black eye. It’s a nice pert face. Not pretty, but the kind you want to hold between your palms. It occurs to him that he has never kissed her.
   “Marie-Louise?” he says quietly.
   She turns to him, her eyebrows raised interrogatively.
   He looks down at the park, colorless under yeasty skies. “Let’s make a deal, Marie-Louise. For me, I like having you here, having you around. I suppose we’ll make love eventually, and I’ll enjoy that. I mean… well, naturally, I’ll enjoy that. Okay. That’s for me. For you, I suppose being here is better than sitting out your nights in some park or bus station. But… you find it dull here. And sooner or later you’ll go off somewhere. Fine. I’ll probably be tired of having you around by then. You can have money to buy some clothes. If you need other things, I don’t mind giving you money. But I’m not a mark, and I wouldn’t like you to think of me as one. So don’t try to con me, and don’t bullshit me. That wouldn’t be fair, and it would make me angry. Is it a deal?”
   Marie-Louise looks steadily at him, trying to understand what he’s up to. She’s not used to this kind of frankness, and she doesn’t feel comfortable with it. She really wishes they had screwed and he had paid his money. That’s neat. That’s easy to understand. She feels as if she’s being accused of something, or trapped into something.
   “I knew there was money in that drawer,” she says defensively. “I was looking around last night, and I found it.”
   “But you didn’t take it and run off. Why not?”
   She shrugs. She doesn’t know why not. She’s not a thief, that’s all. Maybe she should have taken it. Maybe she will, someday. Anyway, she doesn’t like this conversation. “Look, I better get going. Or did you want to come shopping with me?”
   “No, I have work—” LaPointe hears a car door slam down in the street. He half rises from his chair and peers down from the second-story window. Guttmann has just gotten out of a little yellow sports car and is looking along the row for the house number.
   LaPointe tugs his overcoat on rapidly. He doesn’t want Guttmann to see Marie-Louise and ask questions or, worse yet, pointedly avoid asking questions. The sleeve of his suit coat slips from his grasp, and he has to fish up through the arm of the overcoat to tug it down. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you this evening.”
   “Okay.”
   “What time will you be through shopping?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “Five? Five-thirty?”
   “Okay.”
   As he clumps down the narrow stairs he grumbles to himself. She’s too passive. There’s nothing to her. Want some coffee? Okay. Even though she doesn’t like coffee. Shall we eat at five? Okay. Do you want to stay with me? Okay. Do you want to leave? Okay. Shall we make love? Okay. How about screwing out on the hall landing? Okay.
   She doesn’t care. Nothing matters to her.
   Guttmann has his ringer on the buzzer when the front door opens with a jerk and LaPointe steps out.
   “Morning, sir.”
   LaPointe buttons up his overcoat against the damp chill. “Your car?” he asks, indicating with a thrust of his chin the new little yellow sports model.
   “Yes, sir,” Guttmann says with a touch of pride, turning to descend the steps.
   “Hm-m!” Obviously the Lieutenant doesn’t approve of sports cars.
   But Guttmann is in too good a mood to care about LaPointe’s prejudices. “That’s to say, the car belongs to me and the bank. Mostly the bank. I think I own the ashtray and one of the headlights.” His buoyancy is a result of a rare piece of good luck. When he called the girl this morning to tell her he would have to cancel their date, she beat him to it, telling him she had one hell of a head cold, and she wanted to sleep in to see if she could shake it off. He managed to sound disappointed, and he arranged to look in on her that evening.
   LaPointe finds the tiny car difficult to get into, and he grunts as he slams the door on his coattail and has to open it again. In fact, he feels silly, riding around in a little yellow automobile. He would rather walk. Give him a chance to check on the street. Guttmann, for all that he is bigger than LaPointe, slips in quite easily. With a popping baritone roar, the car starts up and pulls away from the curb.
   LaPointe cranes his neck to see if Marie-Louise is watching from the window. She is not.
   They find a parking space on Clark, only half a block up from the rooming house. Opening the door, LaPointe scrapes it against the high curb; Guttmann closes his eyes and winces. LaPointe mutters something about stupid toy cars as he squeezes out and angrily slams the door behind him. Because it is Saturday, the street is full of kids, and one of them has paused in his game of “ledgey” to remark aloud that old men shouldn’t ride around in little cars. LaPointe raises the back of his hand to him, but the boy just stares in sassy defiance as he wipes his nose gravely on the sleeve of a stretched-out sweater. LaPointe cannot repress a grin. A typical pugnacious French Canadian kid. A ‘tit coq.
   The rooming house is like others around the Main. Dull brick in need of paint; dirty windows with limp curtains of grayish fabric that hangs as though it is damp; a fly-specked card in the window of first floor front advertising rooms to let. This doesn’t necessarily mean there is a vacancy. The concierge is probably too lazy to put the card in and take it out each time a short-time vagrant comes or goes. LaPointe climbs the wooden stoop and twists the old-fashioned bell, which rattles dully, broken. When there is no answer, he bangs on the door. Guttmann has joined him on the landing, looking back nervously at the small group of ragged kids that has gathered around his car. LaPointe bangs more violently, making the window rattle.
   Almost immediately the door is snatched open by a slovenly woman who pushes back a lock of lank gray hair and snaps, “Hey! What the hell’s wrong with you? You want to break down the door?” Her lower lip is swollen and cracked where someone hit her recently.
   “Police,” LaPointe says, not bothering to show identification.
   She looks from LaPointe to Guttmann quickly, then stands back from the doorway. They enter a hall that smells of Lysol and boiled cabbage. The woman’s attitude has changed from anger to tense uncertainty. “What do you want?” she asks, touching two fingers gingerly to the split lip.
   The tentative tone of the question gives LaPointe his cue. She’s frightened about something. He doesn’t know what it is, and he doesn’t care, but he’ll push it a little to give her a scare and make her cooperative. “Routine questions,” he says. “But not here in the hall.”
   She shrugs and enters her apartment, not inviting them to come in, but leaving the door open behind her. LaPointe follows and looks around as Guttmann, a little nervous, smiles politely and closes the door behind him. Without a warrant, you’re supposed to await an invitation before entering a home.
   The small room is crowded with junk furniture, and hot from an oversized electric heater she uses because it doesn’t cost her anything. It just goes on the landlord’s monthly bill. She keeps the place too hot because otherwise she’d feel she was losing money. LaPointe knows her type, knows how to handle her. He unbuttons his overcoat and turns to the woman just as she is glancing nervously out the window. She is expecting someone; someone she hopes will not come while the police are there. She adjusts the curtain, as though that is why she went to the window in the first place. “What do you want?” she asks sullenly.
   For a moment, LaPointe does not answer. He looks levelly at her, draws a deep, bored breath and says, “You know perfectly well. I don’t have time to play games with you.”
   Guttmann glances at him, confused.
   “Look,” the woman says. “Arnaud doesn’t live here anymore. I don’t know where he is. He moved out a month ago, the lazy son of a bitch.”
   “That’s your story,” LaPointe says, tossing a pillow out of the only comfortable chair and sitting down.
   “It’s the truth! Do you think I’d lie for him?” She touches her split lip. “The bastard gave me this!”
   LaPointe glances at the fresh bruise. “A month ago?”
   “Yes… no. I met him on the street yesterday.”
   “And he said good morning, and hit you in the mouth?”
   The woman shrugs and turns away.
   LaPointe watches her in silence.
   She glances quickly toward the window, but does not dare to go and look out.
   LaPointe sighs aloud. “Come on. I don’t have all day.”
   For another minute, she remains tight-lipped. Then she gives in, shrugging, then letting her shoulders drop heavily. “Look, officer. The TV was a present. It doesn’t even work good. He gave it to me, like he gave me this fat lip, and once the clap, the no-good bastard!”
   So that’s it. LaPointe turns to Guttmann, who is still hovering near the door. “Take down the serial number of the TV.”
   The young man squats behind the set and tries to find the number. He doesn’t know why in hell he is doing this, and he feels like an ass.
   “You know what it means if the set turns out to be stolen?” LaPointe asks the woman.
   “If Arnaud stole it, that’s his ass. I don’t know anything about it”
   LaPointe laughs. “Oh, the judge is sure to believe that.” That’s enough, LaPointe thinks. She’s scared and ready to cooperate now. “Sit down. Let’s forget the TV for now. I want to know about one of your roomers. Tony Green.”
   Confused by the change of topic, but relieved to have the questioning veer away from herself, the concierge instantly becomes confidential and friendly. ‘Tony Green? Honest, officer—”
   “Lieutenant.” It always surprises LaPointe to find people on the Main who don’t know of him.
   “Honest, Lieutenant, there’s no one by that name staying here. Of course, they don’t always give their right names.”
   “Good-looking kid. Young. Mid-twenties. Probably Italian. Stayed out all night last night.”
   “Oh! Verdini!” She makes a wide gesture and her lips flap with a puff of breath. “It’s nothing when he stays out all night! It’s women with him. He’s all the time after it. Chases every plotte and guidoune on the street. Sometimes they even come here looking for him. Sometimes he has them in his room, even though it’s against the rules. Once there were two of them up there at the same time! The neighbors complained about all the grunting and groaning.” She laughs and winks. “His thing is always up. He wears those tight pants, and I can always see it bulging there. What’s wrong? What’s he done? Is he in trouble?”
   “Give me the names of the women who came here.”
   She shrugs contemptuously and tucks down the corners of her mouth. The gesture opens the crack in her lip, and she licks it to keep it from stinging. “I couldn’t be bothered trying to remember them. They were all sorts. Young, old, fat, skinny. A couple no more than kids. He’s a real sauteux de clôtures. He puts it into all kinds.”
   “And you?”
   “Oh, a couple of times we passed on the stairs and he ran his hand up under my dress. But it never went further. I think he was afraid of—”
   “Afraid of this Arnaud you haven’t seen in a month?”
   She shrugs, annoyed with herself at her slip.
   “All right. How long has this Verdini lived here?”
   “Two months maybe. I can look at the rent book if you want.”
   “Not now. Give me the names of the women who came here.”
   “Like I told you, I don’t know most of them. Just stuff dragged in off the street.”
   “But you recognized some of them.”
   She looks away uncomfortably. “I don’t want to get anybody into trouble.”
   “I see.” LaPointe sits back and makes himself comfortable. “You know, I have a feeling that if I wait here for half an hour, I may be lucky enough to meet your Arnaud. It’ll be a touching scene, you two getting together after a month. He’ll think I waited around because you told me about the TV. That will make him angry, but I’m sure he’s the understanding type.” LaPointe’s expressionless eyes settle on the concierge.
   For a time she is silent as she meditatively torments her cracked lip with the tip of her finger. At last she says, “I think I recognized three of them.”
   LaPointe nods to Guttmann, who opens his notebook.
   The concierge gives the name of a French Canadian chippy whom LaPointe knows. She doesn’t know the name of the second woman, but she gives the address of a Portuguese family that lives around the corner.
   “And the third?” LaPointe asks.
   “I don’t know her name either. It’s that woman who runs the cheap restaurant just past Rue de Bullion. The place that—”
   “I know the place. You’re telling me that she came here?”
   “Once, yes. Not to get herself stuffed, of course. After all, she’s a butch.”
   Yes, LaPointe knows that. That is why he was surprised.
   “They had a fight,” the concierge continues. “You could hear her bellowing all the way down here. Then she slammed out of the place.”
   “And you don’t know any of the other people who visited this Verdini?”
   “No. Just plottes. Oh… and his cousin, of course.”
   “His cousin?”
   “Yes. The guy who rented the room in the first place. Verdini didn’t speak much English and almost no French at all. His cousin rented the room for him.”
   “Let’s hear about this cousin.”
   “I don’t remember his name. I think he mentioned it, but I don’t remember. He gave me an address too, in case there were any problems. Like I said, this Verdini didn’t speak much English.” She is growing more tense. Time is running out against Arnaud’s return.
   “What was the address?”
   “I didn’t pay any attention. I got other things to do with my time than worry about the bums who live here.”
   “You didn’t write it down?”
   “I couldn’t be bothered. I remember it was somewhere over the hill, if that’s any help.”
   By “over the hill” she means the Italian stretch of the Main, between the drab little park in Carré Vallières at the top of the rise and the railroad bridge past Van Horne.
   “How often did you see this cousin?”
   “Only once. When he rented the room. Oh, and another time, about a week ago. They had a row and—hey! Chocolate!”
   “What?”
   “No… not chocolate. That’s not it. For a second there I thought I remembered the cousin’s name. It was right on the tip of my tongue. Something to do with chocolate.”
   “Chocolate?”
   “No, not that. But something like it. Cocoa? No, that’s not it. It’s gone now. Something to do with chocolate.” She cannot help drifting to the window and peeking through the curtains.
   LaPointe rises. “All right. That’s all for now. If that ‘chocolate’ name comes back to you, telephone me.” He gives her his card. “And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll be back. And I’ll talk to Arnaud about it.”
   She takes the card without looking at it. “What’s the wop kid done? Some girl knocked up?”
   “That’s not your affair. You just worry about the TV set.”
   “Honest to God, Lieutenant—”
   “I don’t want to hear about it.”

   They sit in the yellow sports car. LaPointe appears to be deep in thought, and Guttmann doesn’t know where to go first.
   “Sir?”
   “Hm-m?”
   “What’s a plotte?” Guttmann’s school French does not cover Joual street terms.
   “Sort of a whore.”
   “And a guidoune?”
   “Same kind of thing. Only amateur. Goes for drinks.”
   Guttmann says the words over in his mind, to fix them. “And a… sauteux de… what was it?”
   “A sauteux de clôtures. It’s an old-fashioned term. The concierge probably comes from downriver. It means a… sort of a man who runs after women, but there’s a sense that he chases young women more than others. Something like a cherry-picker. Hell, I don’t know! It means what it means!”
   “You know, sir? Joual seems to have more words for aspects of sex than either English or French-French.”
   LaPointe shrugs. “Naturally. People talk about what’s important to them. Someone once told me that Eskimos have lots of words for snow. French-French has lots of words for ‘talk.’ And English has lots of—ah, there she goes!”
   “What?”
   “That’s what I’ve been waiting for. The concierge just took the To Let’ sign out of the window. She was trying to get at it all the time we were there. It’s a warning to her Arnaud to stay away. I’d bet anything it’ll be put back as soon as we drive away.”
   Guttmann shakes his head. “Even though he bashes her in the mouth.”
   “That’s love for you, son. The love that rhymes with ‘forever’ in all the songs. Come on, let’s go.”

   They run down the two leads given them by the concierge. The first girl they catch coming out of her apartment as they drive up. LaPointe meets her at the bottom of the stoop and draws her aside to talk, while Guttmann stands by feeling useless. The girl doesn’t know anything, not even his name. Just Tony. They met in a bar, had a couple of drinks, and went up to his room. No, she hadn’t charged him for it. He was just a good-looking guy, and they had a little fun together.
   LaPointe gets back into the car. Not much there. But at least he learned that Tony Green’s English was not all that bad. Obviously he had been taking lessons during the two months he stayed at the rooming house.
   Guttmann is even more out of it at the second girl’s house. Not a girl, really; a Portuguese woman in her thirties with two kids running around the place and a mother in a black dress who doesn’t speak a word of French, but who hovers near the door of an adjoining bedroom, visible only to the standing Guttmann. From time to time, the mother smiles at Guttmann, and he smiles back out of politeness. The timing of the old woman’s smile is uncanny in conjunction with the daughter’s confession. She seems to punctuate each sexual admission with a nod and a grin. Guttmann is put in mind of his deepest secret dread when he was a kid: that his mother could read his thoughts.
   The young woman is scared, and she talks to LaPointe in a low, rapid voice, glancing frequently toward her mother’s room, not wanting her to hear, even though she doesn’t have two words of French. Just having her mother listen to the incomprehensible noise that carries this kind of confession is daunting.
   Her husband left her two years ago. A person has to have some fun in life. The mother nods and grins. Yes, she met Tony Green at a cabaret where she went with a girlfriend to dance. Yes, she did go to his room. The mother nods. No, not alone. She is embarrassed. Yes, the other woman, her friend, was with them. Yes, all three together in the same bed. The mother grins and nods; Guttmann smiles back. It wasn’t her idea—all three in the same bed—but that’s the way this Tony wanted it. And he was such a good-looking boy. After all, a person has to have some fun in life. It’s rough, being left with two kids to bring up all by yourself, and a mother who is just about useless. The mother nods. It’s rough, working eight hours a day, six days a week. The oldest girl goes to convent school. Uniforms. Books. It all costs money. So you have to work six days a week, eight hours a day. And nobody’s getting any younger. It’s a sin, sure, but a person has to have some fun. The mother smiles and nods.
   LaPointe slides into the car beside Guttmann, and for a while sits in silence while he seems to sort through what the women have told him.
   Guttmann can’t help being impressed by LaPointe’s manner as he talked to this woman and that girl in the street. At first they were afraid because he was a cop, but soon they seemed to be chatting away, almost enjoying unburdening themselves to someone who understood, like a priest. LaPointe asked very few questions, but he had a way of nodding and rolling his hand that requested them to go on… And what next?… And then? The Lieutenant’s attitude was very different from his tough, bullying manner with the concierge. Guttmann remembers him saying something about using different tactics with different people: some you threaten, some you hit, some you embarrass.
   And some you understand? Is understanding a tactic too?
   “Let’s go have a cup of coffee,” LaPointe says.
   “That’s a wonderful idea, sir.” Guttmann’s stomach is still sour with all the coffee he drank yesterday. “I was hoping we’d have a chance to get some coffee.”

  The Le Shalom Restaurant is bustling with customers from the small garment shops of the district: young women with only half an hour off push and crowd to get carry-out orders; boisterous forts from the loading docks push sandwiches into their mouths and ogle the girls; intense young Jewish men in suits lean over their plates, talking business. There are few older Jews because most of them are first generation and still keep Shabbes.
   Even though it’s afternoon, most of the orders involve breakfast foods, because many of the people only had time for a quick cup of coffee that morning. And besides, eggs are the best food you can buy for the money. This area of Mont Royal Street is the center of the garment service industry, where labor from undereducated French Canadian girls is cheap. There are no big important companies in the district, but dozens of small, second-story operations that receive specialty orders from the bigger houses.


Worldwide Tucking & Hemstitching
Nathan Z. Pearl, President

   Two telephones behind the serving counter ring constantly. While three distraught girls hustle raggedly to clear and serve the tables, most of the real work is done by one middle-aged woman behind the counter. She does all the checks, serves the whole counter, answers all phone orders, keeps short orders rolling, argues and jokes with the customers, and wages a long-running feud with the harassed Greek cook.
   To a customer: This your quarter? No? Must be for the coffee. Couldn’t be a tip. Who around here would tip a quarter? To the cook: Two meat sandwiches. And lean for once! Where’s my three orders of eggs? Like hell I didn’t! What use are you? To a customer: Look, darling, keep your shirt on. I got only two hands, right? To the phone: Restaurant? Two Danish? Right. Coffee. One double cream. Right. One no sugar. What’s the matter? Someone getting fat up there? Hold on one second, darling…To a customer: What’s your problem, honey? Here, give me that. Look, it’s added up right. Nine, sixteen, twenty-five and carry the two makes fourteen, carry the one makes two. Check it yourself. And do me a favor, eh? If I ever ask you to help me with my income tax—refuse. Back to the phone: Okay, that was two-Danish two-coffee one-double-cream one-no-sugar… and? One toast, right. One ginger ale? C’est tout? It’ll be right up. What’s that? Look, darling, if I took time to read back all the orders, I’d never get anything done. Trust me. To a customer: Here’s your eggs, honey. Enjoy. To a customer: Just hold your horses, will you? Everyone’s in a hurry. You’re something special? To the cook: Well? You got those grilled cheese? What grilled cheese? Useless! Get out of my way! To the phone: Restaurant? Just give me your order, darling. We’ll exchange cute talk some other time. Yes. Yes. I got it. You want that with the toast or instead of? Right. To a customer: Look, there’s people standing. If you want to talk, go hire a hall. To LaPointe: Here we go, Lieutenant. Lean, like you like it. So who’s the good-looking kid? Don’t tell me he’s a cop too! He looks too nice to be a cop. To a customer: I’m coming already! Take it easy; you’ll live longer—To herself: Not that anybody cares how long you live.
   The woman behind the counter is Chinese. She learned her English in Montreal.
   The high level of noise and babble in the restaurant insulates any given conversation, so LaPointe and Guttmann are able to talk as they eat their plump hot meat sandwiches and drink their coffee.
   “He’s turning out to be a real nice kid,” Guttmann says, “our poor helpless victim in the alley.”
   LaPointe shrugs. Whether or not this Tony Green was a type who deserved being stabbed is not the question. What’s more important is that someone was sassy enough to do it on LaPointe’s patch.
   “Well, there’s one thing we can rule out,” Guttmann says, sipping his milky coffee after turning the cup so as to avoid the faint lipstick stain on the rim. “We can rule out the possibility of Antonio Verdini being a priest in civilian clothes.”
   LaPointe snorts in agreement. Although he remembered a case in which…
   “Do you feel we’re getting anywhere, sir?”
   “It’s hard to say. Most murders go unsolved, you know. Chances are we’ll learn a lot about this Tony Green. Little by little, each door leading to another. We tipped the Vet because he has a funny hop to his walk. From him we got the wallet. The wallet brought us to the rooming house, where we learned a little about him, got a couple of short leads. From the girls we learned a little more. We’ll keep pushing along, following the leads. Another door will lead us to another door. Then suddenly we’ll probably come up against a wall. The last room will have no door. With a type like that—rubbers with ticklers, two women at a time, ‘blood type: hot!’—anybody might have put him away. Maybe he got rough with some little agace-pissette who decided at the last moment that she didn’t want to lose her josepheté after all, and maybe he slapped her around a little, and maybe her brother caught up with him in that alley, maybe… ah, it could be anybody.”
   “Yes, sir. There’s also the possibility that we’ve already touched the killer. I mean, it could be the Vet. You don’t seem to suspect him, but he did take the wallet, and he’s not the most stable type in the world. Or, if Green was playing around with that concierge, her boyfriend Arnaud might have put him away. I mean, we have reason to suspect he’s no confirmed pacifist.” Guttmann finishes his sandwich and pushes aside the plate with its last few greasy patates frites.
   “You know, you’re right there,” LaPointe says. “At some point or other in this business, the chances are we’ll touch the killer. But we probably won’t know it. We’ll probably touch him, pass over him, maybe come back and touch him again. Or her. That doesn’t mean we’ll ever get evidence in hand. But you never know. If we keep pressing, we might get him, even blind. He might get jumpy and do something dumb. Or we might flush out an informer. That’s why we have to go through the motions. Right up until we hit the blank wall.”
   “What do we do now?”
   “Well, you go home and see if you can make up with that girl of yours. I’m going to have a talk with someone. I’ll see you Monday at the office.”
   “You’re going to question that woman who runs a restaurant? The lesbian the concierge mentioned?”
   LaPointe nods.
   “I’d like to come along. Who knows, I might learn something.”
   “You think that’s possible? No. I know her. I’ve known her since she was a kid on the street. She’ll talk to me.”
   “But not if I was around?”
   “Not as openly.”
   “Because I’m a callow and inexperienced youth?”
   “Probably. Whatever callow means.”

   As LaPointe turns off the Main, he passes a brownstone that has been converted into a shul by members of one of the more rigid Jewish sects—the ones with side-locks—he can never remember its name. A voice calls to him, and he turns to see a familiar figure on the Main, walking slowly and with dignity, his shtreimel perfectly level on his head. LaPointe walks back and asks what the matter is. Their janitor is home sick with a cold, and they need a Shabbes goy to turn on the lights. LaPointe is glad to be of help, and the old Chasidic gentleman thanks him politely, but not excessively, because after all the Lieutenant is a public servant and everyone pays taxes. Too much thanks would give the appearance of artificial humility, and too humble is half proud.

   He turns the corner of a side street to face a stream of damp wind as he walks toward La Jolie France Bar-B-Q, the café nearest the Italian boy’s rooming house. It is the kind of place that does all its business at mealtimes, mostly from single workingmen who take their meals there at a weekly rate. So the place is empty when he enters, meeting a wall of pleasant heat after the penetrating cold. Almost immediately, the steamy windows and the thick smell of hot grease from patates frites make him open his overcoat and tug it off. He has his pick of tables, all of which are still littered with dishes and crumbs and slops. He sits instead at the counter, which is clean, if wet with recent wiping. Behind the counter a plump young girl with vacant eyes rinses out a glass in a sink of water that is not perfectly clear. She looks up and smiles, but her voice is vague, as though she is thinking of something else. “You want?” she asks absently.
   Just then a short, sinewy woman with her hair dyed orange-red and a Gauloise dangling from the corner of her mouth bursts through the back swinging door, hefting a ten-gallon can of milk on her hip. “I’ll take care of the Lieutenant, honey. You get the dishes off the tables.” With a grunt and a deft swing, she hoists the heavy can into place in the milk dispenser, then she threads its white umbilical cord down through the hole in the bottom. “What can I do for you, LaPointe?” she asks, not stopping her work, nor taking the cigarette from her mouth.
   “Just a cup of coffee, Carrot.”
   “A cup of coffee it is.” She takes up a butcher knife and with a quick slice cuts off the end of the white tube. It bleeds a few drops of milk onto the stainless-steel tray. “Aren’t you glad that wasn’t your bizoune?” she asks, tossing the knife into the oily water and taking down a coffee mug from the stack. “Not that you’d really miss it all that much at your age. Black with sugar, isn’t it?”
   “That’s right.”
   “There you go.” The mug slides easily over the wet counter. “Come to think of it, even if you don’t chase the buns anymore, you were probably a pretty good botte in your day. God knows you’re coldblooded enough.” She leans against the counter as she speaks, one fist on a flat hip, the smoke of her fat French cigarette curling up into her eyes, which are habitually squinted against the sting of it. She is one of the few people who tutoyer LaPointe. She tutoyers all men.
   “She’s new, isn’t she?” LaPointe asks, nodding toward the plump girl who is lymphatically stacking dishes while gazing out the window.
   “No, she’s used. Goddamned well used!” Carrot laughs, then a stream of raw smoke gets into her lungs and she coughs—a dry wheezing cough, but she does not take the cigarette from her lips. “New to you, maybe. She’s been around for about a year. But then, I haven’t seen you around here since I had that last bit of trouble. That makes a fellow wonder if your coming around means she’s in trouble.” She watches him, one eye squinted more than the other.
   He stirs the unwanted coffee. “Are you in trouble, Carrot?”
   “Trouble? Me? No-o-o. A middle-aged lesbian with rotten lungs, a bad business, a heavy mortgage, two shots in prison on her record, and the laziest bitch in North America working for her? In trouble? No way. I won’t be in trouble until they stop making henna. Then I’m in trouble. That’s the problem with being nothing but a pretty face!” She laughs hoarsely, then her dry cough breaks up the rising thread of gray cigarette smoke and puffs it toward LaPointe.
   He doesn’t look up from his coffee. “There was a good-looking Italian boy named Verdini, or Green. You went to his place.”
   “So?”
   “You had a fight.”
   “Just words. I didn’t hit him.”
   “No threats?”
   She shrugs. “Who remembers, when you’re mad. I probably told him I’d cut off his hose if he didn’t stop sniffing around my girl. I don’t remember exactly. You mean the son of a bitch reported me?”
   “No. He didn’t report you.”
   “Well, that’s a good thing for him. Whatever I said, it must have scared him good. He hasn’t been back here since. Do you know what that son of a bitch wanted? He used to come in here once in a while. He sized up the situation. I mean… just look at her. Look at me. You don’t have to be a genius to size up the situation. So, while I’m waiting on the counter, this asshole is singing the apple to my girl. Well, he’s a pretty boy, and she owns all the patents on stupid, so pretty soon she’s ga-ga. But it isn’t just her he wants. He thought it would be a kick to have us both at the same time! Sort of a round robin! He talked the dumb bitch into asking me if I’d be interested. Can you believe that? He gave her his address and told her we could drop in anytime. I dropped in, all right! I went over there and dropped on him like a ton of shit off a rooftop! Hey, what’s all this about? If he didn’t report me, why are you asking about him?”
   “He’s dead. Cut.”
   She reaches up slowly and takes the cigarette from the corner of her mouth. It sticks to the lower lip and tugs off a bit of skin. She touches the bleeding spot with the tip of her tongue, then daubs at it with the knuckle of her forefinger. Her eyes never leave LaPointe’s. After a silence, she says simply, “Not me.”
   He shrugs. “It’s happened before, Carrot. Twice. And both times because someone was after one of your girls.”
   “Yeah, but Jesus Christ, I only beat them up! I didn’t kill them! And I did my time for it, didn’t I?”
   “Carrot, you have to realize that with your record…”
   “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. But I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t shit you, LaPointe. I didn’t shit you either of those other times, did I?”
   “But it wasn’t a matter of murder then. And there were witnesses, so it wouldn’t have done you any good to shit me.”
   Carrot nods. That’s true.
   The plump girl comes back to the counter carrying only four plates and a couple of spoons. She hasn’t heard the conversation. She hasn’t been paying attention. She has been humming a popular song, repeating certain passages until she thinks they sound right.
   “That’s good, honey,” Carrot says maternally. “Now go get the rest of the dishes.”
   The girl stares at her vacantly, then, catching her breath as though she suddenly understands, she turns back and begins to clear the next table.
   Carrot’s face softens as she watches the girl, and LaPointe remembers her as a kid, a fresh-mouthed tomboy in knickers, flipping war cards against a wall—gory cards with pictures of the Sino-Japanese war. She was loud and impish, and she had the most vulgar tongue in her gang. The hair she rucked up into her cap used to be genuinely red. LaPointe recalls the time she smashed her toe when she and her gang were pushing a car off its jack for the hell of it. They brought her to the hospital in a police car. She didn’t cry once. She dug her fingernails into LaPointe’s hand, but she didn’t cry. Any boy of her age would have wailed, but she didn’t dare. She was never a girl; just the skinniest of the boys.
   After a silence, LaPointe asks, “You figure she’s worth it?”
   “What do you mean?” Carrot lights another Gauloise and sucks in the first long, rasping drag, then she lets it dangle forgotten between her lips.
   “A dummy like that? Is she worth the trouble you’re in now?”
   “Nobody says she’s a genius. And talking to her is like talking to yourself… but with dumber answers.”
   “So?”
   “What can I say? She’s fantastic in the rack. The best botte I ever had. She just stares up at the ceiling, squeezing those big tits of hers, and she comes and comes and comes. There’s no end to it. And all the time she’s squirming all over the bed. You have to hang on and ride her, like fighting a crocodile. It makes you feel great, you know what I mean? Proud of yourself. Makes you feel you’re the best lover in the world.”
   LaPointe looks over at the bovine, languid girl shuffling aimlessly to the third table. “And you would kill to keep her?”
   Carrot is silent for a time. “I don’t know, LaPointe. I really don’t. Maybe. Depends on how mad I got. But I didn’t kill that wop son of a bitch, and that’s the good Lord’s own truth. Don’t you believe me?”
   “Do you have an alibi?”
   “I don’t know. That depends on what time the bastard got himself cut.”
   That’s a good answer, LaPointe thinks. Or a smart one. “He was killed night before last. A little after midnight.”
   Carrot thinks for only a second. “I was right here.”
   “With the girl?”
   “Yeah. That is, I was watching television. She was up in bed.”
   “You were alone, then?”
   “Sure.”
   “And the girl was asleep? That means she can’t swear you didn’t go out.”
   “But I was right here, I tell you! I was sitting right in that chair with my feet up on that other one. Last customer was out of here about eleven. I cleaned up a little. Then I switched on the TV. I wasn’t sleepy. Too much coffee, I guess.”
   “Why didn’t you go up to bed with her?”
   Carrot shrugs. “She’s flying the flag just now. She doesn’t like it when she’s flying the flag. She’s just a kid, after all.”
   “What did you watch?”
   “What?”
   “On TV. What did you watch?”
   “Ah… let’s see. It’s hard to remember. I mean, you don’t really watch TV. Not like a movie. You just sort of stare at it. Let’s see. Oh, yeah! There was a film on the English channel, so I changed over to the French channel.”
   “And?”
   “And… shit, I don’t remember. I’d been working all day. This place opens at seven in the morning, you know. I think I might have dropped off, sitting there with my feet up. Wait a minute. Yes, that’s right. I did drop off. I remember because when I woke up it was cold. I’d turned off the stove to save fuel, and…” Her voice trails off, and she turns away to look out the window at the empty street, somber and cold in the zinc overcast. A little girl runs by, screeching with mock fright as a boy chases her. The girl lets herself be caught, and the boy hits her hard on the arm by way of caress. Carrot inhales a stream of blue smoke through her nose. “It doesn’t sound too good, does it, LaPointe?” Her voice is flat and tired. “First I tell you I was watching TV. Then when you ask me what was on, I tell you I fell asleep.”
   “Maybe it was all that coffee you drank.”
   She glances at him with a gray smile. “Yeah. Right. Coffee sure knocks you out.” She shakes her head. Then she draws a deep breath. “What about your coffee, pal? Can I warm it up for you?”
   LaPointe doesn’t want more coffee, but he doesn’t want to refuse her. He drinks the last of the tepid cup, then pushes it over to her.
   While pouring the coffee, her back to him, she asks with the unconvincing bravado of a teen-age tough, “Am I your only suspect?”
   “No. But you’re the best.”
   She nods. “Well, that’s what counts. Be best at whatever you do.” She turns and grins at him, a faded imitation of the sassy grin she had when she was a kid on the street. “Where do we go from here?”
   “Not downtown, if that’s what you mean. Not now, anyway.”
   “You’re saying you believe me?”
   “I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying I don’t know. You’re capable of killing, with that temper of yours. On the other hand, I’ve known you for twenty-eight years, ever since I was a cop on the beat and you were a kid always getting into trouble. You were always wild and snotty, but you weren’t stupid. With a day and a half to think up an alibi, I can’t believe you’d come up with a silly story like that. Unless…”
   “Unless what?”
   “Unless a couple of things. Unless you thought we’d never trace the victim to here. Unless you’re being doubly crafty. Unless you’re covering for someone.” LaPointe shrugs. He’ll see. Little by little, he’ll keep opening doors that lead into rooms that have doors that lead into rooms. And maybe, instead of running into that blank wall, one of the doors will lead him back to La Jolie France Bar-B-Q. “Tell me, Carrot. This Italian kid, did he have any friends among your customers?”
   She gives him his coffee. “No, not friends. The only reason he ate here sometimes was because some of the guys talk Italian, and his English wasn’t all that good. But he always had money, and a couple of my regulars went bar crawling with him once or twice. I heard them groaning about it the next morning, so sick they couldn’t keep, anything but coffee down.”
   “What bars?”
   “Shit, I don’t know.”
   “Talk to your customers tomorrow. Find out what you can about him.”
   “I’m closed on Sundays.”
   “Monday then. I want to know what bars he went to. Who he knew.”
   “Okay.”
   “By the way, does chocolate mean anything to you?”
   “What kind of question is that? I can take it or leave it alone.”
   “Chocolate. As a name. Can you think of anybody with a name like chocolate or cocoa or anything like that?”
   “Ah… wasn’t there somebody who used to be on TV with Sid Caesar?”
   “No, someone around here. Someone this Tony Green knew.”
   “Search me.”
   “Forget it, then.” LaPointe swivels on his counter stool and looks at the plump girl. She has given up clearing the tables, or maybe she has forgotten what she was supposed to be doing, and she stands with her forehead against the far window, staring vacantly into the street and making a haze of vapor on the glass with her breath. She notices the haze and begins to draw X’s in it with her little finger, totally involved in the activity. LaPointe cannot help picturing her squirming all over the bed, kneading her own breasts. He stands up to leave. “Okay, Carrot. You call me if you find out anything about this kid’s bars or friends. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll be back.”
   “And maybe you’ll be back anyway, right?”
   “Yes, maybe.” He buttons up his overcoat and goes to the door.
   “Hey, LaPointe?”
   He turns back.
   “The coffee? That’s fifteen cents.”

8

   On the way to his apartment, LaPointe passes the headquarters of the First Regiment of the Grenadier Guards of Canada. Two young soldiers with automatic rifles slung across their combat fatigues pace up and down before the gate, their breath streaming from their nostrils in widening jets of vapor, and their noses and ears red with the cold. They are watching a little group of hippies across the street. Three boys and two girls are loading clothes and cardboard boxes into a battered, flower-painted VW van, moving from a place where they haven’t paid their rent to a place where they won’t. A meaty girl who is above the social subterfuges of make-up and hair-washing is doing most of the work, while another girl sits on a box, staring ahead and nodding in tempo with some inner melody. The three boys stand about, their hands in their pockets, their faces somber and pinched with the cold. They have fled from establishment conformity, taking identical routes toward individuality. They could have been stamped from the same mold, all long-legged and thin-chested, their shoulders round and huddled against the cold.
   By contrast, the guards keep their shoulders unnaturally square and their chests boldly out. LaPointe assumes that once the hippies have driven away, the guards will relax and round their shoulders against the wind. He smiles to himself.
   Before mounting the wooden stairs, LaPointe looks up at the windows of his apartment. No lights. She must still be out shopping.
   The static cold of the apartment is more chilling than the wind, so he immediately lights the gas heater, then sets water to boil, thinking to have a nice hot cup of coffee waiting for her when she comes back.
   The water comes to a boil, and she has still not returned. He empties the kettle, refills it, and replaces it on the gas ring. As though putting on the water is a kind of sympathetic magic that will bring her home to the coffee.
   It doesn’t work.
   He sits in his armchair and looks across the deserted park, drab in the winter overcast. Perhaps she’s left for good. Why shouldn’t she? She owes him nothing. Maybe she has met somebody… a young man who knows how to dance. That would be best, really. After all, she can’t go on living with him indefinitely. In fact, he doesn’t want her to. Not really. She’d be a pain in the neck. Then too, someday soon…
   Without thinking, he slips his hand up to his chest, as he has come to do by habit each time he thinks of his aneurism… that stretched balloon. He feels the regular heartbeat. Normal. Nothing odd in it. Yes, he decides. It would be best if she’s found somebody else to live with. It would be ghastly for her to wake up some morning and find him beside her, dead. Maybe cold to the touch.
   Or what if he were to have an attack while they were making love?
   Good, then. That’s just fine. She has found a young man on the street. Somebody kind. It’s better that way.
   He grunts out of the chair and goes into the kitchen to take off the kettle before the water boils away. He will enjoy a quiet, peaceful night. He will take off his shoes, put on his robe, and sit by the window, listening to the hiss of the gas fire and reading one of his Zola novels for the third or fourth time. He never tires of reading around and around his battered set of Zola. Years ago, he bought the imitation-leather books from an old man who ran a secondhand bookstore, a narrow slot of a shop created by roofing over an alley between two buildings on the Main. The old man never did much business, and buying the books was a way of helping him out without embarrassing him.
   For several years the books sat unread on the top of his bedroom chest. Then one evening, for lack of something to do, he opened one and scanned it over. Within a year he had read them all. It wasn’t until the first time through that he realized there was a sort of order to some of them: heroines of one book were the daughters of heroines of another, and so on. Thereafter he always read them in order. His favorite novel is L’Assommoir, in which he was able to predict, in his first reading, the inevitable descent of the characters from hope to alcoholism to death. The books feel good in his hand, and have a friendly smell. It is the 1906 Edition Populaire Illustrée des Oeuvres Complètes de Entile Zola, with drawings of substantial heroines, their round arms uplifted in supplication and round eyes raised to heaven, the line of dialogue beneath never lacking in exclamation points. Such men as appear in the plates stand back, amongst the dripping shadows, and look mercilessly down on the fallen heroines. The men are not individuals; they are part of the environment of poverty, despair, and exploitation to which futile hope gives edge.
   The novels are populated by people who, if they spoke in Joual dialect and knew about modern things, could be living on the Main. It seems to LaPointe that you have to know the street, to have known the parents of the young chippies back when they were young lovers, in order to enjoy or even understand Zola.
   Yes, he’ll put on his robe and read for a while. Then he’ll go to bed. He is looking for his robe when he notices in the corner of the bedroom Marie-Louise’s shopping bag with its burden of odds and ends.
   She will be back after all. The shopping bag is a hostage. He returns to the living room feeling less tired. She will surely be back within half an hour.
   She is not. Evening imperceptibly deepens the sky to dusty slate as details down in the park retire into gloom. The novel is still on his lap, but it is too dark to read. The gas fire hisses, its orange-nippled ceramic elements an insubstantial glow, the room’s only light. Twice, when cars stop outside, he rises to look down from the window. And once he starts up with the realization that the kettle must be burning. Then he remembers that he took it off long ago.
   The air becomes hot and thick with the oxygen-robbing gas heater, which he knows he should turn down, but he is too tired and heavy to feel like moving.
   As always, his daydreams stray to his wife… and his girls. It is late evening in their home in Laval. Lucille is doing dishes in the kitchen fixed up with modern appliances he has seen in store windows on the Main. Logs are burning in the fireplace, and he is fussing with them more than they need, because he enjoys poking at wood fires. He goes up to the girls’ room—they are young again, and they are disobeying orders to get right to sleep. He finds them jumping on the bed, their long flannel nightgowns billowing out and entangling them when they land in a heap. He kisses them good night and teases them by scrubbing his whiskery cheek against their powdery ones. They complain and struggle and laugh. Lucille calls up that it is late and the girls need their sleep. He answers that they are already asleep, and the girls put their hands over their mouths to suppress giggles. He tucks them in with a final kiss, and they want a story and he says no, and they want the light left on and he says no, and they want a glass of water and he says no, and he turns out the light and leaves them and goes back down the stairs—he must get around to fixing the one that squeaks. He knows every detail of the house, the layout of the rooms, the wallpaper, the pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe that record the growth of the girls. But he never pictures a bedroom for Lucille and him. After all, Lucille is dead. No… gone. To the house in Laval. He wakes with a sweaty throat and a wet mouth, and with a confused feeling that something is going on. Then he hears the sound of a key in the lock. The door opens with a slant of pale yellow light from the naked hall bulb, and Marie-Louise enters.
   “My God, it’s hot in here! What are you doing, sitting in the dark?”
   As he gropes out of sleepiness, she finds the switch and turns on the lights. She is loaded down with parcels, which she dumps on the sofa, then holds her hands out to the gas fire. “Boy, it’s cold tonight. Well? What do you think of it? Cute, eh?” She turns around to model an ankle-length cloth coat of burnt orange. “It was on sale. Well?”
   She walks a couple of steps and does a comic little turn, parodying the models she has seen on television. She doesn’t bother to conceal her limp, and LaPointe notices it as though for the first time. The detail had dropped from his mind. “It’s… ah… fine,” he says dopily. “Very nice.” He wonders what time it is.
   She hugs herself and rubs her upper arms vigorously. “Boy, it’s the kind of cold that goes right through you. I was hoping you might have some hot coffee ready.”
   “I’m sorry,” he says. “It didn’t occur to me.”
   He is uneasy about the babbling quality of her speech. She’s trying to say everything at once, as though she has something to hide and doesn’t want to leave him space to question her. She says it’s too hot in the room, yet she warms herself at the heater. Something’s wrong.
   “What have you been doing with yourself?” she asks lightly.
   “Taking a nap.” He looks at the mantel clock. Eight-thirty. “You’ve been shopping all this time?”
   “Yes,” she says with the inhaled Joual affirmative that means either yes or no.
   “Take a cab home?”
   She pauses for a second, her back to him. “No. I walked.” Her hollow tone tells him there is something in the way of a confession coming. He wishes he hadn’t asked.
   “No cabs?” he asks, affording her a facile excuse.
   She sits on the sofa and looks directly at him for the first time. She might as well get it over with. “No money,” she says. “I’m sorry, but I spent all you gave me. I got other things besides the coat and dress.”
   That is the confession? He smiles at himself, aware that he has been acting and thinking like a kid. “It doesn’t matter,” he says.
   She turns her head slightly to the side and looks at him uncertainly out of the sides of her eyes. “Really?”
   He laughs. “Really.”
   “Hey! Look at what I got!” Instantly she is up from the sofa, tearing open bags. “And I shopped around for bargains, too. I didn’t waste money. Oh, did you see these?” She parts her long cloth coat and shows him thick-soled boots that go to the knee. They are a wet red plastic that clashes with the burnt orange of the coat. She rips open a bag and draws out a long dress that looks as though it were made of patchwork. She holds it up to herself by the shoulders and kicks out at the hem. “What do you think?”
   “Nice. It looks… warm.”
   “Warm? Oh, I suppose so. The girl told me it’s the in thing. Oh, and I got a skirt.” She opens her coat again to show him the mini she is wearing. “And I got this blouse. There was another one I really liked. You know, one of those frilled collars like you see on old-time movies on TV? You know the kind I mean?”
   “Yes,” he lies.
   “But they didn’t have my size. And I got… let’s see… oh, a sweater! And… I guess that’s about it. No! I got some panties and things… there must have been something else. Oh, the coat! That’s what cost the most. And I guess that’s it!” She plunks down on the sofa amongst the clothes and ravished bags, her hands pressed between her knees, her elation suddenly evaporated. “You don’t like them, do you?” she says.
   “What? No, sure. I mean… they’re fine.”
   “It’s all the money, isn’t it?”
   “Don’t worry about it.”
   “You know, we don’t have to go out to dinner tonight like you promised. We could just stay home. That would save money.”

   There is a quality of pimpish insinuation in the way the proprietor of the Greek restaurant finds them a secluded table, in the way he keeps refilling her glass with raisin wine, in the way he grins and nods to the Lieutenant from behind her chair. LaPointe resents this, but Marie-Louise seems to be enjoying the special attention, so he lets it go.
   Greek food is alien to her, but she eats with relish, unfolding the cooked grape leaves to get at the rice and lamb within. She doesn’t eat the leaves, considering them to be only wrappings.
   A candle set in red glass lights her face from a low angle that would be unkind to an older woman, but it only accents her animation as she recounts her shopping trip, or comments on the other patrons of the restaurant. He has chosen to sit with his back to the room so she can have the amusement of looking at the people and the pleasure of having the people look at her. It is a deliberate and uncommon gesture on the part of a man who normally keeps his back to walls and rooms open before him.
   She doesn’t really like the Greek wine, but she drinks too much of it. By the time the meal is over, she is laughing a little too loudly.
   He enjoys watching the uncensored play of expression over her face. She has not yet developed a mask. She is perfectly capable of lying, but not yet of dissimulating. She is capable of wheedling, but not yet of treachery. She is vulgar, but not yet hardened. She is still young and vulnerable. He, on the other hand, is old and… tough.
   As they finish their coffee—that Turkish coffee with thick dregs that Greeks think is Greek—she hums along with jukebox music coming from the floor above the restaurant.
   “What’s up there?” she asks, looking toward the stairs.
   “A bar of sorts.”
   “With dancing?”
   He shrugs. “Oh, there’s a dance floor…” He really feels like going home.
   “Could we dance there?”
   “I don’t dance.”
   “Didn’t you ever? Even when you were young?”
   He smiles. “No. Not even then.”
   “How old are you anyway?”
   “Fifty-three. I told you before.”
   “No, you didn’t.”
   “I did. You forgot.”
   “You’re older than my father. Do you realize that? You are older than my father.” She seems to think that is remarkable.
   It is so obvious a tactic that it would be unkind not to let it work. So they climb the stairs and enter a large dark room with a bar lit by colored bulbs behind ripple glass and a jukebox that glows with lights of ever-changing hues. They take one of the booths along the wall. The only other people there are the barmaid and a group of four young Greek boys at the next booth but one, sharing a bottle of ouzo that has been iced until it leaves wet rings on the tabletop. One of the boys leaves the booth and goes to the bar, where he lightheartedly sings the apple to the barmaid. She is wearing a short dress, and her thighs are so thick that her black hose squeaks with friction when she walks to serve the tables.
   “What would you like?” LaPointe asks.
   “What are they having?” She indicates the group of young men.
   “Ouzo.”
   “Would I like that?”
   “Probably.”
   “Do you like it?”
   “No.”
   She feels there is a mild dig in that, so she orders ouzo defiantly. He has an Armagnac.
   While the barmaid squeaks away to fetch the drinks, Marie-Louise rises and goes to the jukebox to examine its selections, slightly bending the knee of her good leg to make her limp imperceptible. LaPointe knows she doesn’t care if he notices it, so the caution must be for the young Greek boys. As she leans over the jukebox, its colored light is caught in the frizzy mop of her hair, and she looks very attractive. Her bottom is round and tight under the new mini-skirt. He is proud of her. And the Greek boys do not fail to notice her and exchange appreciative looks.
   She is the same age as his imaginary daughters sometimes are. She is the same age as his real wife always is. He feels two things simultaneously: he is proud of his attractive daughter, jealous of his attractive wife. Stupid.
   There is some playful nudging among the Greek boys, and one of them—the boldest, or the clown—gets up and joins her, leaning close to study the record offerings. He puts a coin into the slot and gestures to her to make a selection. She smiles thanks and pushes two buttons. When he asks her to dance, she accepts without even looking at LaPointe. The music is modern and loud, and they dance without touching. Despite the jerky, primitive movements of the dance, she seems strong and controlled and graceful, and the dancing completely camouflages her limp. It is easy to see why she enjoys it so much.
   The record stops without ending, like all modern music, a fade-out concealing its inability to resolve, and the dance is over. The young man says something to her, and she shakes her head, but she smiles. They return, each to his own table. As he passes, the Greek boy salutes LaPointe with a sassy little wave.
   Marie-Louise slides into the booth a little out of breath and exuberant. “He’s a good dancer.”
   “How can you tell?” LaPointe asks.
   “Oh, the drinks are here. Well, ‘bottoms up.’ “ She speaks the toast in English so accented that the second word sounds like “zeup.” “Hey, this is good. Like licorice candy. But hot.” She finishes it off. “May I have another one?”
   “Sure. But it might make you sick.”
   She thrusts out her lower lip and shrugs.
   He signals the waitress.
   A party of older men clatters up the stairs, half drunk from celebrating a wedding. They drag out the tables from two booths and put them together, collecting chairs from everywhere. One man slaps his hand on the table and clamors for ouzo, and they are served two ice-cold bottles and a tray of glasses. One rises and proposes a toast to the father of the bride, who is the drunkest and happiest of the lot. The toaster is long-winded and somewhat incoherent; the others complain that they will never get a chance to drink, and finally they shout him down and slap back the first glasses.
   One of the young men has put money into the jukebox. As the music starts he saunters toward LaPointe’s booth.
   “You don’t mind, do you?” Marie-Louise asks.
   He shakes his head.
   The proprietor comes up from the restaurant to check on things. When he notices the boy dancing with Marie-Louise, he frowns and crosses to the booth with the three young men. There is a short conversation during which one of the boys stretches his neck to take a look at LaPointe. As he passes the booth to offer insincere congratulations to the father of the bride, the proprietor nods and winks conspiratorially at the Lieutenant. He has taken care of everything. The young men won’t be horning in on his girl again.
   Marie-Louise finishes her ouzo and wants a third. For some minutes she sits, swaying her shoulders in tempo to a melody she is humming. She doesn’t understand why the boys don’t play more records and ask her to dance.
   LaPointe is about to suggest that they go home, when one of the wedding party rises and navigates an arcing course to the jukebox. He pushes in a coin with operatic thoroughness, then presses first one button, then another. In a moment there comes the first twanging note of a stately traditional song. The old man lifts his arms slowly; his head is turned to one side and his eyes are closed; his fingers snap crisply to every second beat of the music.
   The boys in the booth groan over the old-fashioned selection.
   The old man looks directly at them, his eyes smiling and clever, and he slowly shuffles toward them, snapping his fingers and dipping gracefully with every third step.
   “No way!” says one of the boys. “Forget it!”
   But the old man advances confidently. These kids may be modern and may speak English, but their blood is Greek, and he will win.
   Three other members of the wedding party are now on the dance floor, their arms around one another’s shoulders, the outside two snapping then: fingers to the compelling tempo, and dipping with each third step. Too drunk to walk perfectly, they dance with balance, grace, and authority.
   There is a friendly scuffle in the young men’s booth and one of them is pushed out onto the floor. With peevish reservation, he begins to snap his fingers mechanically, making it perfectly clear that this old-country shit is not for him. But the old man dances directly in front of him, looking him steadily in the eye and insisting silently on their common heritage. And when he puts his arm around the boy’s shoulders, the peevishness evaporates and he falls into step. After all, he is a man.
   The tempo of the music increases relentlessly. The five link up. Two other old men join the end of the line, one of them brandishing an ouzo bottle in his free hand. It is two steps to the side, then a strong dip forward. Marie-Louise watches with fascination. She is surprised when she notices that LaPointe is clapping his hands in time with the music, then she sees that the men at the double table are clapping also. When she starts to rise to join the dancing, LaPointe shakes his head.
   “It’s a men’s dance.”
   “Oh, they won’t mind.”
   He shrugs. Perhaps they won’t. After all, she is not a Greek girl. In fact, they part to make a place for her in the line, and from the first step she is native to the simple, inevitable dance. She adds to it a flair of her own, dipping very low and bowing her head almost to the floor, then whipping it back as she snaps up again.
   With this the other three young men run out to join the dance.
   When the music ends, there are yelps of joy and everyone applauds his own performance. Instantly another coin is in the machine. LaPointe is recognized, and an envoy of two old men come to invite him to join the larger table. He signals for a bottle of ouzo as his contribution and brings his glass along. The instant he sits down, the glass is filled to overflowing with ouzo. He had not finished the Armagnac, and the mixture is ugly, so he downs it quickly to be rid of it. And his glass is instantly filled again.
   Because she is Greek, the barmaid does not join the dancing, but she sits at the common table between two old men, one of whom complains drunkenly that nobody let him finish the toast he had rehearsed all day long. The other occasionally slips his hand between her legs where the thick thighs touch. She laughs and rolls her eyes, sometimes slapping the hand away and sometimes giving it a hard squeeze with her thighs that makes the old man whoop with naughty pleasure.
   After the fourth or fifth dance, Marie-Louise is exhausted, and she sits one out, pulling up a chair across from LaPointe, between one of the boys and an old man. The old man is very drunk and insists on telling her a very important story that he cannot quite remember. She listens and laughs, despite the fact that he speaks only Greek. LaPointe knows that the boy has his hand in her lap under the table. His extravagant nonchalance gives him away.
   An hour and a half later, Marie-Louise is dancing with one of the boys, while one of the old men clings to LaPointe, his hand gripping the nape of his neck, and explains that all cops are bastards, except of course LaPointe, who is a good man… so good that he is almost Greek. Not quite, but almost.
   By the end of the night, the table is awash with water that has condensed from the icy bottles, and with spilled ouzo.

   When he finds the problem of getting his key into the lock both fascinating and amusing, LaPointe realizes that he is drunk for the first time in years. Drunk on ouzo. A sick drunk. Stupid.
   It is hot in the room because he forgot to turn the fire off when they left. He does it now, while she slips through to the bathroom, humming one of the Greek songs and occasionally snapping her fingers.
   “Did you have a good time?” she calls when he comes into the bedroom and sits heavily on the bed. She is on the toilet, with the door wide open, talking to him without embarrassment while she pisses.
   She doesn’t wait for his answer. “I had a great time!” she says. “Best time of my life. I wish you could dance. Can we go there again?” As he tugs off his shoes, she wipes herself and stands up, shaking down her skirt as the toilet flushes.
   LaPointe, drunk, is touched by the marital intimacy of it. It is as if they had been together for years. She must like me, he thinks. She must feel safe with me, if she doesn’t mind pissing in my presence.
   Now he knows he is drunk. He laughs at himself. Come on, LaPointe! Is that an act of love? A gesture of confidence? Pissing in your presence? With sodden seriousness, he confirms that, yes, it is. How long was it after your marriage before Lucille lost her embarrassment with you? She didn’t even like to brush her teeth in your presence at first.
   But… it could be something other than confidence, this pissing while chatting. It could be indifference.
   Who cares?
   Stupid, stupid. Drunk on ouzo. And you shouldn’t drink with that aneur… anor… whateverthehell it is!
   She undresses quickly, leaving things where they fall, and slips under the covers. The sheets are cold and she shudders as her naked legs touch them. “Hurry up. Get into bed. Make me warm.”
   He turns off the light before taking off his pants, then he gets in beside her. She clings to him, putting her leg over his for warmth. Soon their body heat warms the bed enough that one dares to move a leg to virgin parts of the sheet. She slips her knee between his legs and turns over, half upon him. The streetlight beneath the window makes her face visible in the dark. “What’s wrong?” she asks, running her hand over his chest. She laughs at him. “Hey, I’m not your daughter, after all.”
   What? What put that into her head? What’s wrong with her?
   They make love.

9

   He wakes to dazzling sunlight streaming through the bedroom window, and to a heavy block of pain lodged behind his eyes. Ouzo.
   The sunlight is unexpected after three weeks of leaden skies. It might mark the end of the pig weather, or it might be nothing more than one of those occasional wind shifts that bring diamond-hard winter cold for a few hours, like the night that Italian kid was found in the alley.
   He puffs out a little breath and is not surprised to see it make a shallow cone of vapor. It will be sparkling and frigid out in the park. He slips out of bed, trying not to let cold air in to disturb Marie-Louise. When he bends forward to fish around for his slippers, he discovers the clot of ouzo pain behind his eyes is loose and jagged-edged. One eye closes involuntarily with the ache of it.
   He pads into the living room muttering to himself: an ouzo hangover. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Giddiness overwhelms him briefly as he stoops down to light the gas fire The last time he had a hangover like this was from drinking caribou, that most lethal of all liquids, with an old friend from Trois Rivières. But that was years and years ago.
   As the bathtub fills, he cups his hands and drinks tap water from the sink. So desiccated is he that the water seems never to reach his stomach, being absorbed by parched tissue on its way down. He almost gags trying to swallow several aspirin with water from cupped hands. In the tub, his eyes closed, he sits a long time with steam rising all about him. The water and the heat and the aspirin combine to melt some of the ouzo out of his system; the nausea retreats, but the headache persists. Why did he drink so much? Why did he want to get drunk? He thinks about the love he and Marie-Louise made last night. It was good, and very gentle, particularly that long time he held her, between lovemakings. He believes it was good for her too. She wouldn’t have faked all that. Why should she?
   He did not shave last night before bed, as is his custom, but he doesn’t dare try just now. He would probably cut his throat with the straight razor, shaky as he is.
   While he makes coffee, he suddenly feels guilty about Marie-Louise. My God. If he feels this bad, what will she feel like? Poor kid.
   The poor kid chatters with animation as she sits on the sofa, curled up in Lucille’s pink robe. He answers in monosyllables, turning his head to look at her; it hurts when he moves his eyes.
   “What was that licorice stuff we drank?” she asks. “It was good.”
   “Ouzo,” he mutters.
   “What?”
   “Ouzo!”
   “Hey, what’s wrong? Are you mad about something?”
   “No.”
   “You’re sure you’re not mad? I mean, you seem…”
   “I’m fine.”
   “Say… you’re not sick, are you?”
   “Sick? Me?” He manages a chuckle.
   “I just thought… I mean, you told me to watch out for that… what’s it called again?”
   “Ou-zo. Look, I’m fine. Just a little tired.”
   She looks at him sideways with a childish leer. “I don’t blame you. You have a right to feel tired.”
   He smiles wanly. He cannot quite forgive her for being so healthy and buoyant, but she does look pretty with the sunlight in her hair like that.
   She goes into the bedroom to find her hairbrush. When she returns, she is humming one of the Greek songs, doing a little sliding step and dipping down, then snapping her head up on the rise. One of his eyes closes involuntarily with the snap of her head. She plunks down on the sofa and begins to brush her hair. “Hey, we’ll have to go out for breakfast. I told you that I didn’t buy any groceries. I spent all the money on clothes. Where will we go?”
   “I’m not particularly hungry; are you?”
   “Hm-m! I could eat a horse! And look what a beautiful day it is!”
   The glitter of the park stings his eyes. But yes, it is a beautiful day. Perhaps a walk in the cold air would help.

   With few places open on a Sunday morning, they take breakfast in one of the variété shops common to this quartier, although slowly disappearing with the invasion of large cut-rate establishments. Such shops sell oddments and orts: candy, bagels, teddy bears, Chap Stick, ginger ale, jigsaw puzzles, aspirin, newspapers, cigarettes, contraceptives, kites, everything but what you need at any given moment. Its window is piled with dusty, fly-specked articles that are never sold and never rearranged. In the jumble, knitted snow caps and suntan lotion rest side by side, one or the other always out of season, except in spring, when they both are.
   The proprietor moves a stack of newspapers to the floor to make room for them at the short, cracked marble counter. He has a reputation in the district for being a “type,” and he works at maintaining it. Although his counter service is usually limited to stale, thick coffee in the winter and soft drinks in summer, he can accommodate light orders, if he happens to have cheese or eggs in the refrigerator of his living space behind the shop. They ask for eggs, toast, and coffee, which the proprietor fixes up on his stove in the back room, all the while singing to himself and maintaining an animated conversation in English, his voice raised, from the other room.
   “Is it sunny enough for you, Lieutenant? But I’d bet you a million bucks it won’t last. If it don’t snow tonight, then tomorrow will be the same as yesterday—shitbrindle clouds and no sun.” He sticks his head out through the curtain. “Sorry, lady.” He disappears back and calls, “Hey, do you want these sunny side up?


Keep your sunny side up, up…


   Hey, you remember that one, Lieutenant? Oh-oh! I broke one. How about having them scrambled? They’re better for you that way, anyway. Egg whites ain’t good for your heart. I read that somewhere.


My heart is a hobo,
Loves to go out berry picking,
Hates to hear alarm clocks ticking.


   You’ve got to remember that one, Lieutenant. Bing Crosby.” He comes from the back room, carefully balancing two plates, which he sets down on the cracked counter. “There you go! Two orders of scrambled. Enjoy. Yeah, Bing Crosby sang that in one of his films. I think he was a priest. Say, do you remember Bobby Breen, Lieutenant?


There’s a rainbow on the river…


   That was a great movie. He sang that sitting on a hay wagon. You know, that ain’t easy, singing while you’re on a hay wagon. Yeah, Bobby Breen and Shirley Temple. Wonder whatever became of Shirley Temple. They don’t make movies like that any more. All this violence shit. Sorry, lady. Hey! You don’t have any forks! No wonder you ain’t eating. Here! Geez! I’d forget my ass if it wasn’t tied on. Sorry, lady. Here’s your coffee. Hey, did you read this morning about that guy getting stabbed in an alley just off the Main? How about that? It’s getting so you can’t take a walk around the block anymore without getting stabbed by some son of a bitch. Sorry, lady. Things ain’t what they used to be. Right, Lieutenant? And the prices these days!


The moon belongs to everyone
The best things in life are free…


   Don’t you believe it! What can you get free these days? Advice. Cancer maybe. It’s a miracle a man can stay in business with the prices. Everybody out to fuck his neighbor… oh, lady, I am sorry! Geez, I’m really sorry.”

   As they walk slowly along a gravel path through the park, her hand in the crook of his arm, she asks, “What was that mec jabbering about?”
   “Oh, nothing. It never occurred to him that you don’t speak English.”
   The crisp air has cleared LaPointe’s headache away, and the little food has settled his stomach. The thin wintery sunshine warms the back of his coat pleasantly, but he can feel a sudden ten– or fifteen-degree drop in temperature when he steps into a shadow. The touch of this sun, dazzling but insubstantial, reminds him of whiter mornings on his grandparents’ farm, the soil of which was so rocky and poor that the family joke said the only things that grew there were potholes, which one could split into quarters and sell to the big farmers to be driven into the ground as post holes. All the LaPointes, aunts, cousins, in-laws, came to the farm for Christmas. And there were a lot of LaPointes, because they were Catholic and part Indian, and you can’t lock the door of a teepee. The children slept three or four to a bed, and sometimes the smaller ones were put across the bottom to fit more in. Claude LaPointe and his cousins fought and played games and pinched under the covers, but if anyone cried out with joy or pain, then the parents would stop their pinochle games downstairs and shout up that someone was going to get his ass smacked if he didn’t cut it out and go to sleep! And all the kids held their breath and tried not to laugh, and they all sputtered out at once. One of the cousins thought it was funny to spit into the air through a gap in his teeth, and when the others hid under the blankets, he would fart.
   On Christmas morning they were allowed into the parlor, musty-smelling but very clean because it was kept closed, except for Sundays, or when the priest visited, or when someone had died and was laid out in a casket supported on two saw horses hidden under a big white silk sheet rented from the undertaker.
   The parlor was open, too, for Christmas. Kids opening presents on the floor. Christmas tree weeping needles onto a sheet. A pallid winter sun coming in the window, its beam capturing floating motes of dust.
   The smell of mustiness in the parlor… and the heavy, sickening smell of flowers. And Grandpapa. Grandpapa…
   Whenever a random image or sound on the Main triggers his memory in such a way as to carry him back to his grandfather, he always pulls himself back from the brink, away from dangerous memories. Of all the family, he had loved Grandpapa most… needed him most. But he had not been able to kiss him goodbye. He had not even been able to cry.
   “…still mad?”
   “What?” LaPointe asks, surfacing from reverie. They have rounded the park and are approaching the gate across from his apartment.
   “Are you still mad?” Marie-Louise asks again. “You haven’t said a word.”
   “No,” he laughs. “I’m not mad. Just thinking.”
   “About what?”
   “Nothing. About being a kid. About my grandfather.”
   “Your grandfather! Tabernouche!”
   That is a coincidence. He hasn’t heard anyone but himself use that old-fashioned expletive since the death of his mother. “You think I’m too old to have grandparents?”
   “Everyone has grandparents. But, my God, they must have been dead for ages.”
   “Yes. For ages. You know something? I wasn’t mad at you this morning. I was sick.”
   “You?”
   “Yes.”
   She considers this for a while. “That’s funny.”
   “I suppose so.”
   “Hey, what do you want to do? Let’s go somewhere, do something. Okay?”
   “I don’t really feel like going anywhere.”
   “Oh? What do you usually do on Sundays?”
   “When I’m not working, I sit around in the apartment. Read. Listen to music on the radio. Cook supper for myself. Does that sound dull?”
   She shrugs and hums a descending note that means: yes, sort of. Then she squeezes his arm. “I know why you’re leading me back to the apartment. You didn’t get enough last night, did you?”
   He frowns. He wishes she wouldn’t talk like a bar slut. He can hardly direct her to the apartment after she has said something like that, so they leave the park and stroll through back streets between Esplanade and the Main. This day of sunshine after weeks of pig weather has brought out the old people and the babies, making it seem almost like summer. In winter, the population of the Main seems to contract at its extremities; the old and the very young stay indoors. But in summer, there are babies in prams, or toddlers in harnesses, their leashes tied to stoop railings, while old, frail-chested men in panama hats walk carefully from porch to porch. And on the Main merchants stand in their open doorways, occasionally stepping out onto the sidewalk and looking up and down the street wistfully, wondering where all the shoppers could be on such a fine day. If one stops and looks in the window, the owner will silently appear beside him, seeming to examine the merchandise with admiration, then he will drift toward the door, as though the magnetism of his body can draw the customer after him.
   The weight of her arm through his is pleasant, and whenever they cross a street, he presses it against his side, as though to conduct her safely across. They walk slowly down the Main, window-shopping, and sometimes he exchanges a word or two with people on the street. He notices that she automatically bends her knee to disguise her limp when a youngish man approaches, though she doesn’t bother when they are alone.
   Around noon they take lunch at a small café, then they go back to the apartment.

   For the past hour, Marie-Louise has puttered about, taking a bath, washing her hair, rinsing out some underclothes, trying on various combinations of the clothes she bought yesterday. She does not do domestic chores; the coffee cups go unwashed, the bed unmade. She has tuned the radio to a rock station which serves an unending stream of clatter and grunting, each bit introduced by a disc jockey who babbles with obvious delight in his own sound.
   LaPointe finds the music abrasive, but he takes general pleasure in her busy presence. For a time he sits in his chair, reading the Sunday paper, but skipping the do-it-yourself column, which he finds less interesting than it used to be. Later, the paper slides from his lap as he dozes in the afternoon sunlight.
   The burr of the doorbell wakes him with a snap. Who in hell? He looks out the window, but cannot see the caller standing under the entranceway. The only cars parked in the street are recognizable as those of neighbors. The doorbell burrs again.
   “Yes?” he calls loudly into the old speaking tube. He has used it so seldom that he doubts its functioning.
   “Claude?” the tinny membrane asks.
   “Moishe?”
   “Yes, Moishe.”
   LaPointe is confused. Moishe has never visited him before. None of the cardplayers has ever been here. How will he explain Marie-Louise?
   “Claude?”
   “Yes, come in. Come up. I’m on the second floor.”
   LaPointe turns away from the speaking tube to look over the room, then turns back and says, “Moishe? I’ll come down…” But it is too late. Moishe has already started up the stairs.
   Marie-Louise enters from the bedroom, wearing Lucille’s quilted robe. “What is it?”
   “Nothing,” he says grumpily. “Just a friend.”
   “Do you want me to stay in the bedroom?”
   “Ah, no.” He might have suggested it if she hadn’t, but when he hears it on her lips, he realizes how childish the idea is. “Turn the radio off, will you?”
   There is a knock at the door, and at the same time the rock music roars as Marie-Louise turns the knob the wrong way.
   “Sorry!”
   “Forget it.” He opens the door.
   Moishe stands in the doorway, smiling uneasily. “What happened? You dropped something?”
   “No, just the radio. Come in.”
   “Thank you.” He takes off his hat as he enters. “Mademoiselle?”
   Marie-Louise is standing by the radio, a towel turbaned around her newly washed hair.
   LaPointe introduces them, telling Moishe that she is from Trois Rivières also, as if that explained something.
   Moishe shakes hands with her, smiling and making a slight European bow.
   “Well,” LaPointe says with too much energy. “Ah… come sit down.” He gestures Moishe to the sofa. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
   “No, no, thank you. I can only stay a moment. I was on my way to the shop, and I thought I would drop by. I telephoned earlier, but you didn’t answer.”
   “We took a walk.”
   “Ah, I don’t blame you. A beautiful day, eh, mademoiselle? Particularly after all this pig weather we appreciate it. The feast and famine principle.”
   She nods without understanding.
   “Why did you phone?” LaPointe realizes this sounds unfriendly. He is off balance because of the girl.
   “Oh, yes! About the game tomorrow night. The good priest called and said he wouldn’t be able to make it. He’s down with a cold, maybe a little flu. And I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to play three-handed cutthroat.”
   On the rare occasions when one of them cannot make the game, the others play cutthroat, but it isn’t nearly so much fun. LaPointe is usually the absent one, working on a case, or dead tired after a series of late nights.
   “What about David?” LaPointe asks. “Does he want to play?”
   “Ah, you know David. He always wants to play. He says that without the burden of Martin he will show us how the game is really played!”
   “All right, then let’s play. Teach him a lesson.”
   “Good.” Moishe smiles at Marie-Louise. “All this talk about pinochle must be dull for you, mademoiselle.”
   She shrugs. She really hasn’t been paying any attention. She has been engrossed in gnawing at a broken bit of thumbnail. For the first time, LaPointe notices that she bites her fingernails. And that her toenails are painted a garish red. He wishes she had gone into the bedroom after all.
   “You realize, Claude, this is the first time I have ever visited you?”
   “Yes, I know,” he answers too quickly.
   There is a short silence.
   “I’m not surprised that Martin is ill,” Moishe says. “He looked a little pallid the other night.”
   “I didn’t notice it.” LaPointe cannot think of anything to say to his friend. There is no reason why he should have to explain Marie-Louise to him. It’s none of his business. Still… “You’re sure you won’t have some coffee?”
   Moishe protects his chest with the backs of his hands. “No, no. Thank you. I must get back to the shop.” He rises. “I’m a little behind in work. David is better at finding work than I am at doing it. See you tomorrow night then, Claude. Delighted to make your acquaintance, mademoiselle.” He shakes hands at the door and starts down the staircase.
   Even before Moishe has reached the front door, Marie-Louise says, “He’s funny.”
   “In what way funny?”
   “I don’t know. He’s polite and nice. That little bow of his. And calling me mademoiselle. And he has a funny accent. Is he a friend of yours?”
   LaPointe is looking out the window at Moishe descending the front stoop. “Yes, he’s a friend.”
   “Too bad he has to work on Sundays.”
   “He’s Jewish. Sunday is not his Sabbath. He never works on Saturdays.”
   Marie-Louise comes to the window and looks down at Moishe, who is walking down the street. “He’s Jewish? Gee, he seemed very nice.”
   LaPointe laughs. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
   “I don’t know. From what the nuns used to say about Jews… You know, I don’t think I ever met a Jew in person before. Unless some of the men…” She shrugs and goes back to the gas fire, where she kneels and scrubs her hair with her fingers to dry it. The side closest to the fire dries quickly and springs back into its frizzy mop. “Let’s go somewhere,” she says, still scrubbing her hair.
   “You bored?”
   “Sure. Aren’t you?”
   “No.”
   “You ought to get a TV.”
   “I don’t need one.”
   “Look, I think I’ll go out, if you don’t want to.” She turns her head to dry the other side. “You want to screw before I go?” She continues scrubbing her hair.
   She doesn’t notice that he is silent for several seconds before he says a definite “No.”
   “Okay. I don’t blame you. You worked hard last night. You know, it was real good for me. I was…” She decides not to finish that.
   “You were surprised?” he pursues.
   “No, not exactly. Older men can be real good. They don’t usually blow off too quickly, you know what I mean?”
   “Jesus Christ!”
   She looks up at him, startled and bewildered. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
   “Nothing! Forget it.”
   But her eyes are angry. “You know, I get sick and tired of it, the way you always get mad when I talk about… making love.” Her tone mocks the euphemism. “You know what’s wrong with you? You’re just pissed because someone else a fait sauter ma cerise before you could get at it! That’s what’s wrong with you!” She rises and limps strongly into the bedroom, where he can hear her getting dressed.
   Twice she speaks to him from the other room. Once repeating what she thought was wrong with him, and once grumbling about anybody who didn’t even have a goddamned TV in his pad…
   He answers neither time. He sits looking out over the park, where the sun is already paling as the skies become milky again with overcast.
   When she comes back into the living room, she is wearing the long patchwork dress she bought yesterday. As she puts on her new coat, she asks coldly, “Well? Coming with me?”
   “Do you have your key?” He is still looking out the window.
   “What?”
   “You’ll need your key to get back in. Do you have it?”
   “Yes! I’ve got it!” She slams the door.
   He watches her from the window, feeling angry with himself. What’s wrong with him? Why is he fooling around with a kid like this anyway, like a silly old fringalet? There’s only one thing to do; he’s got to find her a job and get her the hell out of his apartment.
   Marie-Louise walks huffily down the street, not bothering to flex her knee to conceal the limp, because she knows he’s probably looking down at her and will feel sorry for her. She is angry about not getting her own way, but at the same time she is worried about spoiling a good thing. It’s dull and boring, that frumpy apartment, but it’s shelter. He lets her have money. He doesn’t ask much of her. Shouldn’t ruin a good thing until you’ve got something better. She recalls how the young Greek boy played the tripoteux with her under the table last night. Perhaps the old man noticed. Maybe that’s why he’s so irritable.
   Anyway, she’ll let him stew about it for a while, then she’ll come back to the apartment. He’ll be glad enough to see her. They don’t get all the young stuff they want, these old guys.
   Maybe she’ll walk over to the Greek restaurant. See if anyone’s around.

   Beyond the window, evening has set in, fringing the layers of yeasty cloud. The morning’s sunlight was a trick after all, a joke.
   The gas fire hisses, and he dozes. He remembers the watery sunlight in the park. It reminded him of Sunday mornings in the parlor of his grandparents’ farmhouse. Floating motes of dust trapped in slanting rays of sun. The smell of mustiness… and the heavy, sickening smell of flowers.
   Grandpapa…
   A bright winter day with sun streaming in the parlor window, and Grandpapa, thin and insubstantial in the box. All the children had to walk in a line past the coffin. The smell of flowers was thick, sweet. Claude LaPointe’s shirt was borrowed, and too small; the tight collar gagged him. The children had been told to take turns looking down into dead Grandpapa’s face. The little ones had to stand tiptoe to see over the edge of the coffin, but they did not dare to touch it for balance. You were supposed to kiss Grandpapa goodbye.
   Claude didn’t want to. He couldn’t. He was afraid. But the grownups were in no mood for argument. There were already tensions and angers about who should get what from the farm, and everyone seemed to think that one uncle was grabbing more than his share. And who would take care of Grandmama?
   Grandmama didn’t cry. She sat in the kitchen on a wooden chair and rocked back and forth. She wrapped her long thin arms around herself and rocked and rocked.
   Claude told his mother in confidence that he was afraid he would be sick if he kissed dead Grandpapa.
   “Go on now! What’s wrong with you? Don’t you love your Grandpapa?”
   Love him? More than anybody. Claude used to daydream about Grandpapa taking him away from the streets to the farm. Grandpapa never knew about the daydreams; Claude was only one of the press of cousins who used to line up to mutter “Joyous Christmas, Grandpapa.”
   “Stop it! Stop it right now!” Mother’s whisper was tense and angry. “Go kiss your grandfather.”
   The smooth dusty face was almost white on the side touched by a beam of winter sun. And his cheeks had never been so rosy when he was alive. He smelled like Mother’s make-up. He used to smell like tobacco and leather and sweat. Claude closed his eyes tight and leaned over. He made a peck. He missed, but he pretended he had kissed Grandpapa. To avoid hearing the grownups’ tight, muttered arguments about furniture and photographs and Grandmama, he went into the summer kitchen with the other kids, who by turns were making shuddering faces and scrubbing their lips hard with the backs of their hands. Claude scrubbed his lips too, so everyone would think he had really kissed Grandpapa, but as he did it he knew he was being a traitor to the living Grandpapa, whom he had never kissed because they were both physically reticent types.
   The fat cousin who used to fart under the covers whispered a joke about the make-up, and the girl cousins giggled. His face blank, Claude turned from the window and hit his cousin in the mouth with his fist. Although the cousin was two years older and bigger, he had no chance; Claude was bashing him with all the force of his rage, and fear, and shame, and loss.
   Some grownups pulled Claude off the bleeding and howling cousin, and he was shaken around and sent upstairs to be dealt with later, after the priest left.
   He sat on the edge of the bed in the grandparents’ room. He had never been there before, and it seemed foreign and unfriendly, but he was glad to be alone so he could cry without the others seeing. No tears came. He waited. He opened his mouth and panted out sharp little breaths, hoping to start the crying he needed so badly. No tears would come. A hot ball of something sour in his stomach, but no tears. Others who loved Grandpapa less than Claude could cry. They could afford to let Grandpapa be dead, because they had other people. But Claude…
   When they came up to punish him, Claude was lost in a daydream about Grandpapa coming to Trois Rivières and taking him away to live on the farm.
   That was how he handled it.

   It is after midnight. LaPointe has been in bed for over an hour, slipping in and out of light sleep, when he hears the lock turn in the front door. It closes softly, and Marie-Louise tries to tiptoe into the bedroom, but she bumps into something. She suppresses a giggle. There is movement and the rustle of clothes being taken off. She slips in beside him, and cold air comes in with her. He does not move, does not open his eyes. Soon her breathing becomes regular and shallow. She sleepily presses against his back for warmth, her knees cold against the backs of his legs.
   He can smell the licorice of ouzo on her breath, and the smell of man’s sweat on her.

   …he can’t breathe…
   …he wakes with a start. His face is wet.
   He can’t understand it. Why are his eyes wet?
   He falls back to sleep, and next morning he does not remember the dream.

10

   Guttmann has arranged the overdue reports in stacks on the little table serving as a desk, leaving just enough room for his typewriter. He has finally made some order and sense out of the mess LaPointe dumped on him; there is a stack for this week’s reports, one for last week’s, one for the week before, and so on. But largest of all is the pile he mentally calls the Whatever-the-Hell-This –Is bunch.
   The hissing roar of sandblasting across the street vibrates the cheap ripply glass of the window, causing Guttmann to look up. His eyes meet LaPointe’s, which are fixed on him with a frown. Guttmann smiles and nods automatically and returns to his work. But a couple of minutes later he can still feel the Lieutenant’s eyes on him, so he looks up again.
   “Sir?”
   “Is that all you know of that song?”
   “What song, sir?”
   “The song you keep humming over and over! You keep humming the same little bit!”
   “I didn’t realize I was humming.”
   “Well, I realize it. And it’s sending me up the goddamned wall!”
   “Sorry, sir.”
   LaPointe’s grunt suggests that “Sorry” isn’t enough. Ever since he came in this morning, he has been emitting dark vibrations and making little murmurs and growls of short temper each time he loses his place in the routine work on his desk. He stands up abruptly, pushing back his swivel chair with the backs of his knees. There is an indented line of white in the plaster from years of the chair banging against it. His thumbs hooked in the back of his belt, he looks out over the Hôtel de Ville, its façade latticed with scaffolding. This morning the noise of the stone-cleaning grates directly upon his nerve ends, like cold air on a bad tooth. And those monotonous zinc clouds!
   Guttmann’s typewriter clacks on in the rapid, one-word bursts of the experienced bad typist. His memory touches the two nights and a day he has just spent with the girl who lives in his apartment building. He passed Saturday evening in her flat, helping her doctor a head cold. She wore a thick terrycloth robe that did nothing good for her appearance, and she had bouts of sneezing that left her limp and miserable, her face pale and her eyes brimming with tears. But her sense of humor held up, and she found this to be a ridiculous way for them to pass their first date. She got a little high on the hot toddies he made for her, and so did he, because he insisted on keeping her company by drinking one for each of hers. When he looked over her books and records, he discovered that their tastes were absolutely opposite, but their levels of appreciation about the same.
   Around midnight, she kicked him out, telling him that she wanted to get a good night’s sleep to fight off the cold. He suggested some light exercise might do her a world of good. She laughed and told him she didn’t want him to catch her cold. He said he was willing to pay that price, but she said no.
   Next morning, he telephoned her from bed. Her cold had broken and she felt well enough to go out. They passed the day visiting galleries and making jokes about the modern junk-art on display. He spent more than he could afford on dinner, and later, in his apartment, they talked about all sorts of things. They seldom agreed on details, but they found similar things funny and the same things important. After they had made love, they lay on their right sides, she coiled in against him, her bottom in his lap. She slept, breathing softly, while he lay awake for a time, sensing the subtle thrill of waves of gentleness emitting from him and enveloping her. A remarkable girl. Not only fun to talk with and great in bed, but really… remarkable…
   LaPointe turns from the window and looks flatly at Guttmann, who catches the movement and glances up with his habitual smile, which fades as he realizes he has been humming again.
   “Sorry.”
   LaPointe nods curtly.
   “By the way, sir, I ran the name Antonio Verdini and the alias Tony Green through ID. They haven’t called back yet.”
   “They won’t have anything.”
   “Maybe not, but I thought I should run it through anyway.”
   LaPointe sits again before his paper work. “Just like it says in the book,” he mutters.
   “Yes, sir,” Guttmann says, more than a little tired of LaPointe’s cafard this morning, “just like it says in the book.” The book also says that reports of investigations must be turned in within forty-eight hours, and some of this crap on Guttmann’s desk is weeks late, and almost all of it is incomplete, a couple of scribbled notes that are almost indecipherable. But Guttmann decides against mentioning that.
   LaPointe makes a guttural sound and pushes aside a departmental form packet: green copy, yellow copy, blue copy, pink fucking copy…
   “I’m going down to Bouvier’s shop for a cup of coffee, if anyone wants me. You keep up the good work.” He dumps all his unfinished work into Guttmann’s in-box.
   “Thank you, sir.”
   The telephone rings, catching LaPointe at the door. Guttmann answers, rather hoping it is something that will annoy the Lieutenant. He listens awhile, then puts his palm over the mouthpiece. “It’s the desk. There’s a guy down there asking to speak to you. It’s about the Green stabbing.”
   “What’s his name?”
   Guttmann takes his hand away and repeats the question. “It’s someone who knows you. A Mr. W–.”
   He mentions the name of the wealthiest of the old Anglo families in Montreal. “Is that the Mr. W–?”
   LaPointe nods.
   Guttmann raises his eyebrows in mock surprise. “I didn’t know you had Connections in Important Places, sir.”
   “Yes, well… Tell you what. While I’m down with Bouvier, you interview Mr. W–. Tell him you’re my assistant and I have every confidence in you. He won’t know you’re lying.”
   “But, sir…”
   “You’re here to get experience, aren’t you? No better way to learn to swim than by jumping off the dock.”
   LaPointe leaves, closing the door behind him.
   Guttmann clears his throat before saying into the phone, “Send Mr. W–up, will you?”

   “Another cup, Claude?” Dr. Bouvier asks, catching a folder that is slipping from the tip of his high-heaped desk, holding it close to his clear lens to read the title, then tucking it back in toward the bottom.
   “No, I don’t think I could handle another.” Bouvier laughs ritually and pushes his glasses back up to the bridge of his stubby nose. But they slip down immediately because the dirty adhesive tape with which they are repaired is loose again. He must get them fixed someday. “Did you see the report I sent up on your stabbing? We ran his clothes through the lab and the result was zero.”
   “I didn’t see the report. But I’m not surprised.”
   “If you didn’t come down here to talk about the report, then what? You just come down to improve your mind? Or is the weather getting you down? One of my young men was complaining about the weather this morning, grousing about the way it keeps threatening snow without delivering. He said he wished it would either shit or get off the pot. Now, there’s a daunting image for the bareheaded pedestrian. I warned the lad about the dangers of indiscriminate personification, but I doubt that he took it to heart. All right, let’s talk then. I suppose you’re pissed about that stabbing of yours getting into the papers so soon. I’m sorry about that; but the leak didn’t come from this office. Someone up in the Commissioner’s shop released it.”
   “Those assholes.”
   “Penetrating evaluation, if something of an anatomic synecdoche. But come on, it’s not so grave. Just a couple of column inches. No photograph. No details. You still have the advantage of surprise as you walk your way through the case. By the way, how’s that stroll coming along?”
   LaPointe shrugs. “Nothing much. The victim’s turning out to be a real turd, the kind anyone might have wanted to kill.”
   “I see. You have assholes for bosses and a turd for a victim. There’s a certain consistency in that. I hear your Joan ran a name and an alias through ID this morning. Your victim?” Bouvier points his face toward LaPointe, one eye hidden behind the nicotine lens, the other huge and distorted. He is showing off a bit, proving he knows everything that goes on.
   “Yes, that’s the victim.”
   “Hm-m. An Italian kid with an Anglo alias. No record of fingerprints. Not a legal immigrant. What does that give us? A sailor who jumped ship?”
   “I doubt it.”
   “Yes. The hands were wrong. No calluses. Any leads to a skill or a craft?”
   “No.” LaPointe’s head rises just as Bouvier’s eye is opening wide. They have the same thought at the same moment.
   It is Bouvier who expresses it. “Do you think your victim was being laundered?”
   “Possible.”
   There are a couple of small-timers up on the Italian Main who make their money by “laundering” men for the American organized-crime market. A young man who gets into trouble in Calabria or Sicily can be smuggled into Canada, usually on a Greek ship, and brought into Montreal, where he blends into the polyglot population of the Main while he learns a little English, and while the laundryman makes sure the Italian authorities are not on his tail. These “clean” men are slipped across the border to the States, where they are valuable as enforcers and hit men. Like a clean gun that the police cannot trace through registration, these laundered men have no records, no acquaintances, no fingerprints. And should they become awkward or dangerous to their employers, there is no one to avenge, even to question, their deaths.
   It is possible that the good-looking kid who called himself Tony Green was in the process of being laundered when he met his death in that alley.
   Dr. Bouvier takes off his glasses, turning his back so that LaPointe doesn’t see the eye normally covered by the nicotine lens. He flexes the broken bridge and slips them back on, pinching the skin of his nose to make them stay up better. “All right. Who’s active in the laundry business up on your patch?”
   Old man Rovelli died six months ago. That leaves Canducci—Alfredo (Candy Al) Canducci.
   “Chocolate,” LaPointe says to himself.
   “What?”
   “Chocolate. As in candy. As in Candy Al.”
   “I assume that makes some subtle sense?”
   “The kid had a ‘cousin’ who rented his room for him. The concierge thought the name had something to do with chocolate.”
   “And you make that Candy Al Canducci. Interesting. And possible. I’ll tell you what—I’ll put in a little time on the case. Maybe your friendly family pathologist can come up with one of his ‘interesting little insights.’ Not that my genius is always appreciated by you street men. I remember once dropping a fresh possibility onto your colleague, Gaspard, when he was satisfied that he had already wrapped up a case. He described my assistance as being as welcome as a fart in a bathysphere. You want some more coffee?”
   “No.”

   Guttmann has made slight rearrangements to receive Mr. Matthew St. John W–. He has moved his chair over to LaPointe’s desk, and has seated himself in the Lieutenant’s swivel chair. He rises to greet Mr. W–, who looks around the room with some uncertainty.
   “Lieutenant LaPointe isn’t here?”
   “I’m sorry, sir. He’s not available just now. I’m his assistant. Perhaps I could help?”
   Mr. W–looks exactly like his photographs in the society section of the Sunday papers—a slim face with fragile bones and veins close to the surface, full head of white hair combed severely back, revealing a high forehead over pale eyes. His dark blue suit is meticulously tailored, and there is not a smudge on the high shine of his narrow, pointed black shoes.
   “I had hoped to see Lieutenant LaPointe.” His voice is thin and slightly nasal, and its tone is chilly. He surveys the young policeman thoughtfully. He hesitates.
   Not wanting to lose him, Guttmann waves a hand at the chair opposite him and says in as offhanded a voice as possible, “I believe you had some assistance to offer in the Green case, sir?”
   Mr. W–frowns, the wrinkles very shallow in his pallid forehead. “The Green case?” he asks.
   Guttmann’s jaw tightens. He is glad LaPointe isn’t there. The victim’s name was not mentioned in the newspaper. But the only thing to do is brave it out. “Yes, sir. The young man found in the alley was named Green.”
   Mr. W–looks toward the corner of the room, his eyes hooded with thought. “Green,” he says, testing the sound. He sighs as he sits on the straight-backed chair, lifting his trousers an inch by the creases. “You know,” he says distantly, “I never knew that his name was Green. Green.”
   Instantly, Guttmann wishes he had somebody with him, a witness or a stenographer.
   But Mr. W–has anticipated his thoughts.
   “Don’t worry, young man. I will repeat anything I say to you. What happens to me is not important. What does matter is that everything be handled as quietly as possible. My family… I know I could rely on Lieutenant LaPointe to be discreet. But…” Mr. W–smiles politely, indicating that he is sorry, but he has no reason to trust a young man he does not know.
   “I wouldn’t do anything without consulting the Lieutenant.”
   “Good. Good.” And Mr. W–seems willing to let the conversation rest there. A thin, polite smile on his lips, he looks past Guttmann’s head to the damp, metallic skies beyond the window.
   “You… ah… you say you didn’t know his name was Green?” Guttmann prompts, making every effort to keep the excitement he feels from leaking into his voice.
   Mr. W–shakes his head slightly. “No, I didn’t. That must seem odd to you.” He laughs a little sniff of self-ridicule. “In fact, it seems odd to me… now. But you know how these things are. The social moment when you should have exchanged names somehow passes with the thing undone, and later it seems foolish, even impolite, to ask the other person his name. Has that ever happened to you?”
   “Sir?” Guttmann is surprised to find the conversational ball suddenly in his court. “Ah, yes, I know exactly what you mean.”
   Mr. W–investigates Guttmann’s face carefully.
   “Yes. You have the look of someone who’s capable of understanding.”
   Guttmann clears his throat. “Did you know this Green well?”
   “Well enough. Well enough. He was… that is to say, he died before we…” Mr. W–sighs, closes his eyes, and presses his fingers into the shallow sockets. “Explanations always seem so bizarre, so inadequate. You see, Green knew about the White Plot and the Ring of Seven.”
   “Sir?”
   “I’d better begin at the beginning. Do you remember the nursery rhyme ‘As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives’? Of course, you probably never considered the significance of the repeated sevens—the warning passed to the Christian world about the Ring of the Seven and the Jewish White Plot. Not many people have troubled to study the rhyme, to unravel its implications.”
   “I see.”
   “That poor young Mr. Green stumbled upon the meaning. And now he’s dead. Stabbed in an alley. Tell me, was there a bakery near where he was found?”
   Guttmann glances toward the door, trying to think up something he has to go do. “Ah… yes, I suppose so. The district has lots of bakeries.”
   Mr. W–smiles and nods with self-satisfaction.
   “I knew it. It’s all tied up with the White Plague.”
   Guttmann nods. “Tied up with the White Plague, is it?”
   “Ah! So Lieutenant LaPointe has told you about that, has he? Yes, the White Plague is their name for the steady poisoning of the gentile with white foods—flour, bread, sugar, Cream of Wheat…”
   “Cream of Wheat?”
   “That surprises you, doesn’t it? I can’t blame you. There was a time when we hoped against hope that Cream of Wheat wasn’t in on it. But certain evidence has come into our hands. I mustn’t tell you more than you need to know. There’s no point in endangering you needlessly.”
   Guttmann leans back in the swivel chair, links his fingers, and puts his palms on the top of his head. His eyes droop, as though with fatigue.
   Mr. W–glances quickly toward the door to make sure no one is listening, then he leans forward and speaks with a confidential rush of words. “You see, the Ring of Seven is directed from Ottawa by the Zionist lobby there. I began to collect evidence against them seven years ago—note the significance of that figure—but only recently has the scope of their plot become…”

   Guttmann is silent as he drives LaPointe up the Main in his yellow sports car. It is eleven in the morning and the street is congested with off-loading grocery and goods trucks, and with pedestrians who flow out into the street to bypass blocked sidewalks. It is necessary to crawl along and stop frequently. From time to time Guttmann glances at the Lieutenant, and he is sure there are crinkles of amusement around his eyes. But Guttmann is damned if he will give him the satisfaction of bringing it up first.
   So it is LaPointe who has to ask, “Did you get a confession out of Mr. W–?”
   “Very nearly, sir. Yes.”
   “Did you learn about Cream of Wheat?”
   “What, sir? In what connection would he mention Cream of Wheat?”
   “Well, he usually…” LaPointe laughs and nods. “You almost got me, son. You heard about Cream of Wheat, all right!” He laughs again.
   “You might have warned me, sir.”
   “Nobody warned me the first time. I was sure I had a walk-in confession.”
   Guttmann pictures LaPointe being sucked in, leaning forward to catch each word, just as he had done. He has to laugh too. “I suppose this Mr. W–is harmless enough.”
   “Look out for that kid!”
   “I saw him! Jesus Christ, sir.”
   “Sorry. Yes, he’s harmless enough, I suppose. There was a delicate case some years ago. Your Mr. W–and a young man were picked up in a public bathroom. The kid was Jewish. Because of W–’s family, the thing was hushed up, and they were both back out on the street before morning. But the fear of scandal did something to the old man.”
   “And ever since then he comes in each time there’s a murder in the papers?”
   “Not every murder. Only when the victim is a young male. And only if it’s a stabbing.”
   “Christ, talk about sophomore psychology.”
   “That truck’s backing out!”
   “I see him, sir. Are you sure you’re comfortable?”
   “What do you mean?”
   “It must be hard to drive from over there.”
   “Come on, come on! Let’s get going!”
   Guttmann waits for the truck to clear, then eases forward. “Yes, that’s real sophomore psychology stuff. The need to confess; the stabbing image.”
   “What are you talking about?”
   “Oh, nothing, sir.” It seems odd to Guttmann that LaPointe should know so much about human reactions and the human condition, but at the same time be so uneducated. He doubts that the Lieutenant could define words like “id” and “fugue.” He probably recognizes the functioning of these forces and devices without having any names for them.
   The worst of the traffic tangle behind them, they continue north on St. Laurent, cresting the hill at the barren little park of Carré Vallières, squeezed in between the Main and St. Dominique. It is a meager little triangle of sooty dirt, no grass, six or seven stunted trees. There are three benches of weathered wood once painted green, where old men play draughts in the summer, and in autumn huddle in their overcoats and stare ahead, or vacantly watch passers-by. For no reason he knows, LaPointe has always associated his retirement with this little square. He pictures himself sitting on one of those benches for an hour or two—always in winter, always with snow on the ground and bright sunshine. The roar of traffic up the Main passes close to the bench he has picked out for himself, and the smell of diesel fumes never leaves the air. From the top of the little rise he will be able to keep an eye on his street, even in retirement.
   Once past the park and St. Joseph Street, they are on the Italian Main, where the street loses its cosmopolitan character. Unlike the lower Main, LaPointe’s real patch, the quality of the Italian Main is not porous and ever-changing, with languages and people slowly permutating through the arrival and absorption of new tides of immigrants. The upper Main has been Italian for as long as anyone can remember, and its people do not move away to blend into the amorphous Canadian mass. The street and the people remain Italian.
   At a signal from LaPointe, Guttmann pulls over and parks before a dingy little restaurant bearing the sign:

Repas Pasto

   They get out and cross the street, turning down Rue Dante, past a barbershop, empty save for the owner who is enthroned in one of his leather chairs, reading the paper with the air of a man completely at his ease, a man who knows he will not be interrupted by customers. Stuck in the window are sun-faded pictures of vapid young men advertising passé hairstyles. One grins from beneath a flattop, and another sports that long-sided fashion that used to be called a “duck’s ass.” In fact, as LaPointe knows, the only customers are the barber’s relatives, who get their hair cut for free. The place is a numbers drop.
   At the intersection of a narrow street, LaPointe turns down toward a small bar halfway between Rue Dante and St. Zotique. It occurs to Guttmann that in this Franco-Italian district there is something particularly appropriate about a bar being situated halfway between streets named Dante and St. Zotique. He mentions this to LaPointe, and asks if the Lieutenant ever thought of it as a kind of cultural metaphor.
   “What?”
   “Nothing, sir. Just a thought.”
   The interior of the bar is overwarm from a large oil heater, its orange flame dimly billowing behind a mica window. The woman behind the bar is overblown, her chubby arms clattering with plastic bracelets, her high-piled hairdo an unnatural blue-black, her eye make-up and lipstick florid, and the deep V of her spangled blouse revealing the slopes of flaccid breasts that get most of their shape from the encasing fabric. She completes a languid yawn before asking the men what they will have.
   LaPointe orders a glass of red, and Guttmann, tugging off his overcoat in the excessive heat, asks for the same thing, although he does not particularly care for wine outside meals.
   From the back room, beyond a gaudy floral curtain, comes the click of pool balls followed by a curse in Italian and laughter from the other players.
   “Who’s your friend, Lieutenant?” the barmaid asks as she pours the wine and bestows upon Guttmann a carnivorous leer.
   “Is Candy Al back there?” LaPointe asks.
   “Where else would he be this time of day?”
   “Tell him I want to talk to him.”
   “That won’t be the best news he’s had all week.” Brushing close by Guttmann, the barmaid goes into the back room, walking with her knees slightly bent to make her broad ass swing invitingly.
   “It looks like you’ve scored,” LaPointe says as he sets his empty glass back on the bar. He always drinks off a coup de rouge at one go, like the workers of his home city.
   “That’s wonderful,” Guttmann says. “Do you think I’m her first love?”
   “One of the first this morning.”
   LaPointe knows this bar well. It serves two very different kinds of clients. Old Italian men in cloth caps often sit in pairs at the oilcloth-covered tables, talking quietly and drinking the harsh red. When they order, they hold the barmaid by her hip. It is an automatic gesture meaning nothing specific, and the right to hold the barmaid’s hip goes, by immutable tradition, to the one who is paying for the drinks.
   In summer, the back door is always open, and old men play at bowls on the tarmac alley where there is a thick covering of sand for this purpose. Every twenty minutes or so, a girl brings out a tray of glasses filled with wine. She collects the cork beer coasters from under empty glasses and stacks them at the end of the bar as a count of the wine drunk. The games are played for wine, and very seriously, with slow dignity and with much criticism and praise. Sometimes tipsy old men steal one or two of the coasters and put them into their pockets, not to avoid paying for the wine, but so that the barmaid will have to come looking for them, and when she does, they get a grab of her ass.
   In contrast to these good people, the ones who hang out in the poolroom with its jukebox are the young toughs of the neighborhood, who squander their days gambling borrowed money and lying to one another about their sexual conquests and their knife fights. Candy Al Canducci reigns over these wise-cracking punks, who admire his flashy expensive clothes and flashy cheap women. Someday, they too…
   He occasionally lends them money, or buys rounds of drinks. In return they serve him as flunkies, doing little errands, or standing around looking tough when he makes a personal visit to one of the bars dominated by another boss.
   The whole thing is a cut-rate imitation of heavier Family action in north and east Montreal, but it has its share of violence. Occasionally there are border disputes over numbers territories, and there will be a week or two of conflict, single members of one gang beaten up by five or six men from another, with faces and testicles the special targets of pointy-toed shoes. Sometimes there is a nighttime scuffle in a back alley, silent except for panting and the scrape of shoes, and a nasal grunt when the knife goes in.
   LaPointe always knows what is happening, but he lets it go so long as no one is involved but themselves. The two things he does not permit are murder and drugs, the one because it gets into the papers and makes his patch look bad, the other just because he does not permit it. If there is a murder, he has a little chat with the bosses, and in the end some informer gives him the killer. It’s a tacit understanding they have. Every once in a while, one of the bosses will feel he can stand up to LaPointe. Then things start to go badly for him. His boys begin to get picked up for every minor charge in the book; the police start to hit his numbers drops one after the other; small amounts of narcotics turn up every time LaPointe searches an apartment. The coterie of young toughs around the recalcitrant boss begins to thin out, and each of the bosses knows that with the first sign of weakness his brothers will turn on him and devour his territory. Even the proudest ends with having a little chat with LaPointe, and with turning over the killer he has been sheltering, or pulling back from his little tentative into drugs. Of course, there is the usual tough talk about LaPointe waking up some morning dead, but this is just face-saving. The bosses don’t really want him gone. The next cop might not let them settle things among themselves, and they might not be able to trust his word, as they can always trust LaPointe’s.
   While there are these unspoken agreements, there is no protection. From time to time, one of the bosses makes a mistake. And when he does, LaPointe puts him away. They expect nothing else; LaPointe is like Fate—always there, always waiting. The bosses are all Catholics, and this sense of hovering punishment satisfies their need for retribution. The older ones take an odd pride in their cop and in his dogged honesty. You cant buy LaPointe. You can come to an understanding with him, but you can’t buy him.
   For his part, LaPointe has no delusions about his control on the Italian Main. This is not the Mafia he faces. The Mafia, with its American connections and trade union base, operates in north and east Montreal, where it occasionally becomes visible through sordid shootouts in the Naugahyde-and-chrome bars they infest. It isn’t so much LaPointe’s presence that prevents the organization from moving onto the Main as it is the district’s own character. The Main is too poor to be worth the pain the old cop would give them.
   At forty, Candy Al Canducci is the youngest of the local petty bosses; he is flashy in a “B” movie way, wise-mouthed, self-conscious, pushy; he lacks the Old-World dignity of the older bosses, most of whom are good family men who care about their children and take care of the unemployed and aged on their blocks. They’re all thieves; but Candy Al is also a punk.
   The barmaid’s plastic bracelets clatter as she bats the gaudy curtain aside and comes back into the bar. “He doesn’t want to see you, Lieutenant. Says he’s busy. In conference.”
   There has been a silence in the back room for the past minute or two, and now there is suppressed laughter with this phrase “in conference.”
   The barmaid leans against the counter and plants a fist on her hip. She looks steadily at Guttmann as she toys with the crucifix around her neck, tickling her breasts by dragging the cross in and out of the cleavage.
   “In conference, eh?” LaPointe asks. “Oh, I see. Well, at least give me another red.”
   There is a snicker from the back room, and the click of pool balls begins again.
   As the barmaid takes her time going around to pour the wine, LaPointe tugs off his overcoat and drops it over a chair. Without waiting for the drink, he slaps the floral curtain aside and enters the poolroom. Guttmann takes a breath and follows him.
   The hanging lamp over the pool table makes a high wainscoting of light that decapitates the half-dozen young men standing around the table. They draw back to the walls as LaPointe enters. One of them puts his hand in his pocket. A knife, probably, but mostly a sassy gesture. And one young tough pats the back of his hair into place, as though preparing for a photograph. Guttmann sets his broad body in the doorway as he notices that there is no other exit from the room. He feels a trickle of sweat under his shoulder holster. Seven against two; not much room for movement.
   Candy Al Canducci continues playing, pretending not to have noticed the policemen enter. The coat of his closely cut suit hangs open, and his broad paisley tie brushes the green felt as he lines up a shot with taunting care. His pants are so tight that the outlines of his girdle-underwear can be seen.
   LaPointe notices that he has changed from looking over a rather difficult shot that would have left him with good position to taking a dogmeat ball hanging on the rim of the pocket. He smiles to himself. Candy Al’s cheap sense of theatrics will not permit him to punctuate some bit of lip with a missed shot.
   “Let’s have a talk, Canducci,” LaPointe says, ignoring the ring of young men.
   Candy Al brushes the chalk from his fingers before lifting the sharp crease of one trouser leg to squat and line up the straight-in shot. “You want to talk, Canuck? All right, talk. Me, I’m playing pool.” He doesn’t look up to say this, but continues to examine his shot.
   LaPointe shakes his head gravely. “That’s too bad.”
   “What’s too bad?”
   “The way you’re putting yourself in a hard place, Canducci. You’re showing off for these asshole punks. First thing you know, you’ll be forced to say something stupid. And then I’ll have to spank you.”
   “Spank me? Ho-ho. You?” He rolls an in-cupped hand and looks around his coterie as if to say, Listen to this crap, will you? He draws back the cue to make his shot.
   LaPointe reaches out and sweeps the object ball into its pocket. “Game’s over.”
   For the first time, Canducci looks up into LaPointe’s eyes. He detests the crinkling smile in them. He walks slowly around the end of the table to face the cop. There is an inward pressure from the ring of punks, and Guttmann glances around to pick out the first two he’d have to drop to keep them off his arms. Canducci’s heart is thumping under his yellow silk shirt, as much from anger as from fear. LaPointe was right; if it hadn’t been for the audience, he would never have taken this tone; now he has no choice but to play it out.
   He stops before LaPointe, tapping the shaft of his cue into his palm. “You know what, Canuck? You take a lot of risks, for an old man.”
   LaPointe speaks over his shoulder to Guttmann. “There’s something for you to learn here, son. This Canducci here and his punks are dangerous men.” His eyes do not leave Candy Al’s, and they are still crinkled in a smile.
   “Better believe it, cop.”
   “Oh, you’re dangerous, all right. Because you’re cowards, and cowards are always dangerous when they’re in a pack.”
   Canducci pushes his face toward LaPointe’s. “You got a wise mouth, you know that?”
   LaPointe closes his eyes and shakes his head sadly. “Canducci, Canducci… what can I tell you?” He lifts his palms in a fatalistic shrug.
   The next happens so quickly that Guttmann remembers only blurred fragments of motion and the sound of scuffling feet. LaPointe suddenly reaches out with one of the lifted hands, grabbing the dandy by the face and driving him back against the wall in two quick steps. Canducci’s head cracks against a pinup of a nude. LaPointe’s broad hand masks the face, the palm against the mouth and the fingers splayed across the eyes.
   “Freeze!” he barks. “One move, and he loses his eyes!”
   To make his point, he presses slightly with his fingertips, and Canducci produces a terrified squeal that is half-muffled by the heel of LaPointe’s hand. LaPointe can feel saliva from the twisted mouth against his palm.
   “Everyone sit on the floor,” LaPointe commands. “Out away from the wall! Sit on your hands, palms up! I want the legs out in front of you! Do what I say, or this asshole will be selling pencils on the street!” Again a slight pressure on the eyes; again a squeal.
   The punks exchange glances, no one wanting to be the first to obey. Then Guttmann, with a gesture that surprises LaPointe, grabs one by the arm and slams him up against the wall. The tough sits down with almost comic celerity, and the others follow.
   “Sit up straight!” LaPointe orders. “And keep those hands under your asses! I want to hear knuckles crunch!”
   This is a trick he learned from an old cop, now dead. When men are sitting on their hands, not only is any quick movement impossible, but they are embarrassed and humbled almost instantly, producing a sense of defeat and the desirable passivity of the prisoner mentality. It is a particularly useful device when you are badly outnumbered.
   No one speaks, and for a full minute LaPointe continues to press Canducci’s head against the wall, his fingers splayed over the face and eyes. Guttmann doesn’t understand the delay. He looks over at the Lieutenant, whose head is hanging down and whose body appears oddly limp. “Sir?” he says uneasily.
   LaPointe takes two deep breaths and swallows. The worst of it is over. The vertigo has passed. He straightens up, grabs Canducci’s broad paisley tie, and snatches him away from the wall, propelling him ahead toward the gaudy curtain. One more push on the shoulder and Candy Al stumbles into the barroom. LaPointe turns back to the six young men on the floor. “You watch them,” he tells Guttmann. “If one of them moves a muscle, slap his face until his ears ring.” LaPointe knows exactly what threat would most sting cocky Italian boys.
   When he pushes aside the curtain and enters the bar, he finds Candy Al sitting at a table, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. “The Commissioner’s going to hear about this,” he says without much assurance. “It’s a free country! You cops ain’t the bosses of everything!”
   LaPointe picks up his glass of red from the bar and sips it slowly, not setting down the glass until he feels recovered from the swimming dizziness and the constriction in his chest and upper arms that caught him unawares a minute ago. When the last of the effervescence has fizzed out of his blood, he leans back against the bar and looks down at Canducci, who is carefully touching the edge of his handkerchief to the corner of his eye, then examining the damp spot with tender concern.
   “You got your finger in my eye! I wear contacts! That could be dangerous for a guy that wears contacts! Fucking cops.” Alone out here without his gang, he reverts to the whining petty thief, alternating between playing it as the movie tough and simpering piteously.
   “We’re going to talk about a friend of yours,” LaPointe says, sitting in the chair opposite Canducci.
   “I don’t have any friends!”
   “That’s truer than you know, shithead. The name is Antonio Verdini, alias Tony Green.”
   “Never heard of him.”
   “You rented a room for him. The concierge has given evidence.”
   “Well, this concierge has her head up her ass! I tell you I never met… whatever you said his name is.”
   “Was.”
   “What?”
   “Was. Not is. He’s dead. Stabbed in an alley.”
   The handkerchief is up to Canducci’s eyes, so LaPointe misses the effect of the drop. After a short silence, the Italian says, “So, what’s that to me?”
   “Maybe twenty years. Stabbing is the kind of action your people go in for. The Commissioner is on my ass for an arrest. With your record, you’re dogmeat. And I don’t really care if you did it or not. I’ll be satisfied just to get you off the street.”
   “I didn’t kill the son of a bitch! I didn’t even know he was dead until you told me. Anyway, I got an alibi.”
   “Oh? For what time?”
   “You name it, cop! You name it, and I got an alibi for it.” Candy Al dabs at his eyes again. “I think I got a busted blood vessel or something. You’re gonna pay for that. Like they say in the lotteries, un jour ce sera ton tour.”
   LaPointe reaches across the table and pats Canducci’s cheek three times, the last tap not gentle. “Are you threatening me?”
   Candy Al jerks his head away petulantly. “Where you get off slapping people around? You never heard of police brutality?”
   “You’ll have twenty years to make your complaint.”
   “I told you, all my time is covered.”
   “By them?” LaPointe tips his head toward the poolroom.
   “Yeah. That’s right. By them.”
   LaPointe dismisses them with a sharp puff of air. “How long do you think one of those kids, sitting back there with his ass in his hands, could stand up to interrogation by me?”
   Canducci’s eyes flicker; LaPointe’s point is made. “I’m telling you I didn’t kill this guy!”
   “You mean you had him killed?”
   “Shit, I don’t even know this Verdini!”
   “But at least you remember his name now.”
   There is a pause. Canducci considers his situation.
   “I don’t talk to cops. I think you’re holding an empty bag. You got a witness? You got fingerprints? You got the knife? If you had any lever on me, we wouldn’t be sitting here. We’d be downtown. You’re empty, cop!” Canducci says this last loudly, to be overheard by the boys in the back. He wants them to see how he treats cops.
   Candy Al’s reasoning is correct, so LaPointe has to take another tack. He shifts in his chair and looks out the window past Canducci’s head. For a moment he seems to be absorbed in watching two kids playing in the street, coatless despite the cold. “I hear you’ve got something going with your boys back there,” he says absently.
   “What do you mean? What you talking?”
   “I’m talking about the rumor that you keep your boys around for pleasure. That you pay them to use you like a woman.” LaPointe shrugs. “Your flashy clothes, your silks, you wear a girdle… it’s easy to see how a rumor like that could spread.”
   Canducci’s face bloats with outrage. “Who’s saying this? Give me a name! I’ll sink my fingernails into his forehead and snatch his fucking face off!”
   LaPointe lifts a hand. “Take it easy. The rumor hasn’t started yet.”
   Canducci is confused. “What the hell you talking about?”
   “But by tomorrow night, everyone on the street will be saying that you take it like a woman. I only have to drop a hint here, a wink there.”
   “Bullshit! Nobody would believe you! I got a doll on my arm every night.”
   “A smart cover-up. But always a different girl. They never hang around. Maybe because you can’t satisfy them.”
   “Agh, I get tired of them. I need a little variety.”
   “That’s your story. The other bosses would grab up a rumor like that in a second. They’d have big laughs over it. So Candy Al is a fif! Some punk would paint words on your car. Pretty soon your boys would drift away, because they don’t want people saying they’re queers. You’d be alone. People would talk behind their hands when you walked by. They’d whistle at you from across the street.” Every touch is calculated to make the proud Italian wince.
   His mind racing, Canducci glares at LaPointe for a full minute. Yes. A rumor like that would spread like clap in a nunnery. They’d love it, those shitheads over on Marconi Street. His jaw tightens and he looks down at the floor. “You’d do that? You’d spread a rumor like that about a man?”
   LaPointe snaps his fingers softly. “Like that.”
   Candy Al glances toward the poolroom and lowers his voice. He speaks quickly to get it over with. “All right. This Verdini? A friend asked me to find a room for him because his English ain’t too good. I found the room. And that’s it. That’s all I know. If he got himself killed, that’s tough shit. I got nothing to do with it.”
   “What’s this friend’s name?”
   “I don’t remember. I got lots of friends.”
   “Just a minute ago you told me you didn’t have any friends.”
   “Agh!”
   LaPointe lets the silence sit on Canducci.
   “Look! I’m giving it to you straight, Lieutenant!”
   “Lieutenant? What happened to Canuck?”
   Canducci shrugs, lifting his hands and dipping his head. “Agh, I was just pissed. People say things when they’re pissed.”
   “I see. I want you to say the word ‘wop’ for me.”
   “Ah, come on!”
   “Say it.”
   Canducci turns his head and stares at the wall. “Wop,” he says softly.
   “Good. Now keep talking about this kid.”
   “I already told you everything I know!”
   After a moment of silence, LaPointe sighs and rises. “Have it your way, Canducci. But tell me one thing. Those boys back there? Which one’s best?”
   “That ain’t funny!”
   “Your friends will think so.” LaPointe slaps his hand on the bar to summon the barmaid, who disappeared when she heard how things were going in the poolroom. She has been around enough to know that it is not wise to witness Candy Al’s defeats. She comes from the back room, tugging down her skirt, which is so tight across the hips that it continually rides up.
   “What do I owe you?” LaPointe asks.
   “Just a minute,” Canducci says, raising his hand. “What’s your rush? Sit down, why don’t you?”
   The barmaid looks from one to the other, then returns to the back room.
   LaPointe sits down. “That’s better. But let’s cut the bullshit. I don’t have the time. I’ll start the story for you. This Green was brought into the country illegally. You were laundering him. You found him a room on the lower Main, away from this district where the immigration authorities might look for him if the Italian officials had sent out a want bulletin. You kept him in walking-around money. You probably arranged for him to learn a little English, because that’s part of the laundering process. Now you take it from there.”
   Canducci looks at LaPointe for a moment. “I’m not admitting any of that, you know.”
   “Of course not. But let’s pretend it’s true.”

   “Okay. Just pretending what you say is true… This kid was a sort of distant cousin to me. The same village in Calabria. He was supposed to be a smart kid, and tough. But he gets into a little trouble back in the old country. So next thing you know he’s here, and I’ve promised to find some kind of work for him. As a favor.”
   LaPointe smiles at the obliquity.
   “Okay. So I get him a room, and I get him started learning some English. But I don’t see him often. That wouldn’t be smart, you dig? But all the time this bastard’s needing money. I give him a lot, but he always needs more. He blows it on the holes. I never seen such a crotch hound. I warn him that he’s beginning to get a reputation about all the squack he’s stabbing, and what the super don’t need right now is a reputation. He goes after all kinds. Even old women. He’s sort of weird that way, you know? So the only time I visit him is to tell him he shouldn’t draw attention to himself. I tell him to take it easy with the holes. But he don’t listen, and he asks me for more money. Five will get nine it was a woman that put the knife into him.”
   “Go on.”
   “Go on to what? That’s all! I warn him, but he don’t listen. And you walk in here this morning and tell me he’s got himself reamed. He should of listened.”
   “You don’t sound too sorry for your cousin.”
   “I should be sorry for myself! I’m out a lot of scratch! And for what?”
   “Call it a business risk. Okay, give me the names of some of his women.”
   “Who knows names? Shit, he was on the make day and night. Drag a net down the Main and you’ll come up with half a dozen he’s rammed. But I can tell you this. He went for weird action. Two at a time. Old women. Gimps. Kids. That sort of thing.”
   “You said something about his taking English lessons? Who was he taking them from?”
   “No idea. I give him a list of ads from the papers. I let him pick for himself. The less I know about what these guys are doing, the better for me.”
   “What else do you want to tell me?”
   “There’s nothing else to tell. And listen—” Canducci points a chubby white finger at LaPointe—”there ain’t no witnesses here. Anything I might have said, I would deny in court. Right?”
   LaPointe nods, his eyes never leaving Candy Al’s as he weighs and evaluates the story he just heard. “It could be the way you say. It could also be that the kid got too dangerous for you, drawing attention to himself and always asking you for money. It could be you decided to cut your losses.”
   “My word of honor!”
   LaPointe’s lower eyelids droop. “Well, if I have your word of honor… what else could I want?” He rises and begins to tug on his overcoat. “If I decide I need more from you, I’ll be by. And if you try to leave town, I’ll take that as a confession.”
   Canducci dabs at his eyes once more, then folds his mauve handkerchief carefully into his breast pocket and pats it into place. “It’s a crying goddamned shame, you know that?”
   “What is?”
   “That way this kid gets me into trouble. That’s what you get for trying to help a relative.”
   After LaPointe and Guttmann leave the bar, Canducci sits for a time, thinking about how he will play it. He takes several bills from his wallet. As he saunters into the poolroom where his boys are standing around sheepishly, working their hands to restore circulation, he tucks the money back into the wallet with a flourish. “Sorry about that, boys. My fault. I got a little behind in my payments. These penny-and-nickel cops don’t like it when they don’t get their payoff on time. Okay, rack ‘em up.”

   They are the only customers in the A-One Café. After serving them the one-plate lunch, the old Chinese has returned to his station by the window where, his eyes empty, he looks out on the sooty brick warehouses across the street.
   “Well?” LaPointe asks. “How do you like it?”
   Guttmann pushes his plate aside and shakes his head. “What was it called?”
   “I don’t think it has a name.”
   “I’m not surprised.”
   There is a certain pride in the Lieutenant’s voice when he says, “It’s the worst food in Montreal, maybe in all of Canada. That’s why you can always come here to talk. There’s never anyone else here to disturb you.”
   “Hm-m!” Guttmann notices that his grunt sounded just like the Lieutenant’s grumpy responses.
   During the meal, LaPointe has filled him in on what he learned from Candy Al, together with a description of the operation known as laundering.
   “And you think this Canducci might have killed Green, or had him killed?”
   “It’s possible.”
   Guttmann shakes his head. “With every lead, we turn another suspect. It’s worse than not having any suspects. We’ve got that tramp, the Vet. Then we’ve got that guy Arnaud, the concierge’s friend. Now Canducci, or one of his punks. And it seems that it might have been almost any woman on the Main who isn’t under ten or over ninety. And what about the woman you talked to alone? The lesbian who runs a café. Is she a viable?”
   Is she a viable? Precisely the kind of space-age jargon that LaPointe detests. But he answers. “I suppose. She had reason, and opportunity. And she’s capable of it.”
   “What does that give us now? Four possibles?”
   “Don’t forget your Mr. W–. You came close to wringing a confession out of him.”
   Guttmann feels a flush at the nape of his neck. “Yes, sir. That’s right.”
   LaPointe chuckles. “I’m not ragging you, kid.”
   “Oh? Is that so, sir?”
   “No, you’re thinking all right. You’re thinking like a good cop. But don’t forget that this Green was a turd. Just about everybody he touched would have some reason for wanting him dead. It’s not all that surprising that we find a suspect behind every door. But pretty soon it will be over.”
   “Over? In what way over?”
   “The leads are starting to thin out. The talk with Canducci didn’t turn another name or address.”
   “The leads could be thinning out because we’ve already touched the killer. And passed him by.”
   “I haven’t passed anybody by yet. And there’s still the possibility that Carrot will come up with a name or two, maybe a bar he used to go to.”
   “Carrot?”
   “The lesbian.”
   “But she’s a suspect herself.”
   “All the more reason for her to help us… if she’s innocent, that is. But I wouldn’t bet on closing this case. I have a feeling that pretty soon we’re going to open the last door, and find that blank wall.”
   “And you don’t particularly care?”
   “Not particularly. Not now that we know the sort of kid the victim was.”
   Guttmann shakes his head. “I can’t buy that.”
   “I know you can’t But I’ve got other things to do besides chase around after shadows. I’ve got the whole neighborhood to look after.”
   “Tell me something, Lieutenant. If this Green were a nice kid, say a kid who grew up on the Main, wouldn’t you try harder?”
   “Probably. But a case like this is hard to sort out. When you’re tracking a kid like this Green, you meet nothing but dirty types. Almost everyone you meet is guilty. The question is, what are they guilty of?”
   “Guilty until proven innocent?”
   “Lawyers being what they are, probably guilty even then.”
   “I hope I never think like that”
   “Stay on the street for a few years. You will. By the way, you didn’t do too badly back in Canducci’s bar. We walked in without a warrant, slapped people around, and you handled yourself like a cop. What happened to all this business about civil rights and going by the book?”
   Guttmann lifts his hands and lets them drop back onto the table. You can’t discuss things with LaPointe. He always cuts both ways. But Guttmann realizes that he has a point. When he handled that tight moment when the boys were resisting the order to sit on their hands, he had felt… competent. There is a danger in being around LaPointe too long. Things get less clear; right and wrong start to blend in at the edges.
   When he looks up, Guttmann sees a crinkling around LaPointe’s eyes. “What is it?”
   “I was just thinking about your Mr. W–.”
   “Honest to God, I’d give a lot if you’d get off that, sir.”
   “No, I wasn’t going to rag you. It just occurred to me that if Mr. W–ever did kill somebody, all he’d have to do would be to wait until it got into the papers, then come to us with a confession involving Jewish plots and Cream of Wheat We’d toss him right out”
   “That’s a comforting thought.”
   “Oh. By the way, didn’t you say something the other night about playing pinochle?”
   “Sir?”
   “Didn’t you tell me you used to play pinochle with your grandfather?”
   “Ah… yes, sir.”
   “Want to play tonight?”
   “Pinochle?”
   “That’s what we’re talking about.”
   “Wait a minute. I’m sorry, but this just came out of nowhere, sir. You’re asking me to play pinochle with you tonight?”
   “With me and a couple of friends. The man who usually plays with us is sick. And cutthroat isn’t much fun.”
   Guttmann senses that this offer is a gesture of acceptance. He can’t remember anyone in the department having bragged about spending off time with the Lieutenant. And he is free tonight. The girl in his building takes classes on Monday nights and doesn’t get back until eleven.
   “Yes, sir. I’d like to play. But it’s been a while, you know.”
   “Don’t worry about it. Nothing but three old farts. But just in case you’re a little rusty, I’ll arrange for you to be partners with a very gentle and understanding man. A man named David Mogolevski.”

11

   The evening of pinochle has gone well—for David.
   As usual he dominated play, and as usual he overbid his hand, but the luck of the cards allowed Guttmann to bail him out more times than not, and as partners they won devastatingly.
   After a particularly good—and lucky—hand, David asked the young man, “Tell me, have you ever thought of becoming a priest?”
   Guttmann admitted that the idea seldom crossed his mind.
   “That’s good. It would ruin your game.”
   On one occasion, when not even luck was enough to save David from his wild overbidding, he treated Guttmann to one of his grousing tirades about how difficult it was, even for a pinochle maven like himself, to schlep a partner who couldn’t pull his own weight. Unlike Father Martin, Guttmann did not permit himself to be martyred to David’s peculiar and personal view of sportsmanship. He countered with broad sarcasm, mentioning that the Lieutenant had rightly described David as a gentle and understanding partner.
   But David’s thick skin is impervious to such attacks. He thrust out his lower lip and nodded absently, accepting that as an accurate enough description of his character.
   For his part, Moishe was slow in warming to the young intruder into their game, despite Guttmann’s genuine interest in the fabric Moishe had on the loom at that moment. He had been looking forward to one of his rambling philosophic chats with Martin.
   Still, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, he made a venture toward drawing Guttmann out during their break for sandwiches and wine. “You went to university, right? What did you major in?”
   It occurs to LaPointe that he never asked that question. He wasn’t all that interested.
   “Well, nothing really for the first two years. I changed my major three or four times. I was more looking for professors than for fields.”
   “That sounds intelligent,” Moishe says.
   “Finally, I settled down and took the sequence in criminology and penology.”
   “And what sorts of things does one study under those headings?”
   David butts in. “How to steal, naturally. Theft for fun and profit. Theft and the Polish Question.”
   “Why don’t you shut up for a while?” Moishe suggests. “Your mouth could use the rest.”
   David spreads his face in offended innocence and draws back, then he winks at LaPointe. He has been riding Moishe all night, piquing him here and there, ridiculing his play, when he knew perfectly well that all the cards were against him. But he is a little surprised when his gentle partner snaps back like this.
   “So?” Moishe asks Guttmann. “What did you study?”
   Guttmann shrugs off the value of his studies, a little embarrassed about them in the presence of LaPointe. “Oh, a little sociology, some psychology as related to the criminal and criminal motives—that sort of thing.”
   “No literature? No theology?”
   “Some literature, sure. No theology. Would you pass the mustard, please?”
   “Here you are. You know, it’s interesting you should have studied criminal motives and all this. Just lately I have been thinking about crime and sin… the relationships, the differences.”
   “Oh boy,” David puts in. “Here we go again! Listen! About crime it’s all right to think. It’s a citizen’s duty. But about sin? Moishe, my old friend, AK’s like us shouldn’t think about sin. It’s too late. Our chances have passed us by.”
   Guttmann laughs. “No, I’m afraid I never think about things like that, Mr. Rappaport.”
   “You don’t?” Moishe asks gloomily, his hopes for a good talk crumbling. “That’s strange. When I was a young man thinking was a popular pastime.”
   “Things change,” David says.
   “Does that mean they improve?” Moishe asks.
   Guttmann glances at his watch. “Hey, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to be going. I have a date, and I’m already late.”
   “A date?” David asks. “It’s after eleven. What can you do so late?”
   “We’ll think of something.” As soon as he makes this adolescent single-entendre remark, Guttmann feels he has been disloyal to his girl.
   Moishe rises. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
   “That isn’t necessary, sir.”
   “You’re already late for your date. And you’re not familiar with the streets around here. So don’t argue. Get your coat.”
   As they leave, Moishe has already begun with “…when you stop to think about it, the differences between sin and crime are greater than the similarities. Take, for instance, the matter of guilt…”
   As the door closes behind them, David looks at LaPointe and shakes his head. “Oh, that Moishe. Sin, crime, love, duty, the law, the good, the bad… he’s interested in everything that’s so big it doesn’t really matter. A scholar! But in practical things…” His lips flap with a puff of air. “That reminds me of something I wanted to talk to you about, Claude. A matter of law.”
   “I’m not a lawyer.”
   “I know, I know. But you know something about the law. This may come as a surprise to you, but I am not immortal. I could die. At my age, you have to think about such things. So tell me. What do I have to do to make sure the business goes to Moishe if he should, cholilleh, outlive me?”
   LaPointe shrugs. “I don’t know. Isn’t all that handled in your partnership agreement?”
   “Well… that’s the problem. Actually, Moishe and I aren’t partners. In the legal sense, I mean. And I have a nephew. I’d hate to see him come along and screw Moishe out of the business. And, believe me, he’s capable of it. Of working for a living, he’s not capable. But of screwing someone out of something? Of that he is capable.”
   “I don’t understand. What do you mean, you and Moishe aren’t partners? I thought he started the business, then later took you on as a partner.”
   “That’s right. But you know Moishe. He’s not interested in the business end of business. A beautiful person, but in business a luftmensh. So over the years, he sold out to me so that he wouldn’t have to be bothered with taxes and records and all that.”
   “And you’re afraid that if you die—”
   “—cholilleh—”
   “—he might not get the business? Well, David, I told you I’m no lawyer. But it seems to me that all you have to do is make out a will.”
   David sighs deeply. “Yes, I was afraid of that. I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. I’m not a superstitious man, don’t get me wrong. But in my opinion a man is just asking for it, if he makes out his will while he’s still alive. It’s like saying to God, Okay. I’m ready whenever you are. And speaking personally for myself, I’m not ready. If a truck should run over me—okay, that’s that. But I’m not going to stand in the middle of the street shouting, Hey! Truck-drivers! I’m ready!”

   As LaPointe steps out onto the blustery street, turning up the collar of his overcoat, he meets Moishe, returning from seeing Guttmann to his car. They fall into step and walk along together, as they usually do after games.
   “That’s a nice young man, Claude.”
   “He’s all right, I suppose. What did you talk about?”
   “You.”
   LaPointe laughs. “Me as a crime? Or me as a sin?”
   “Neither one, exactly. We talked about his university studies; how much the things he learned turned out to reflect the real world.”
   “How did I fit into that?”
   “You were the classic example of how the things he learned were not like it is in the real world. The things you do and believe are the opposite of everything he wants to do with his life, of everything he believes in. But, oddly enough, he admires you.”
   “Hm-m! I didn’t think he liked me all that much.”
   “I didn’t say he likes you. He admires you. He thinks you’re the best of your kind.”
   “But he can live without the kind.”
   “That’s about it.”
   They have reached the corner where they usually part with a handshake. But tonight Moishe asks, “Are you in a hurry to go home, Claude?”
   LaPointe realizes that Moishe is still hungry for talk; the short walk with Guttmann couldn’t have made up for his usual ramblings with Father Martin. For himself, LaPointe has no desire to get to his apartment. He has known all day what he will find there.
   “How about a glass of tea?” Moishe suggests.
   “Sure.”
   They go across the street to a Russian café where tea is served in glasses set in metal holders. Their table is by the window, and they watch late passers-by in the comfortable silence of old friends who no longer have to talk to impress one another, or to define themselves.
   “You know,” Moishe says idly, “I’m afraid I frightened him off, your young colleague. With a young girl on his mind, the last thing in the world he needed was a long-winded talk about sin and crime.” He smiles and shakes his head at himself. “Being a bore is bad enough. Knowing you’re boring but going ahead anyway, that’s worse.”
   “Hm-m. I could see you had something stored up.”
   Moishe fixes his friend with a sidelong look. “What do you mean, I had something stored up?”
   “Oh, you know. All through the game you were sending out little feelers; but Father Martin wasn’t there to take you up. You know, I sometimes think you work out what you’re going to say during the day, while you’re cutting away on your fabric. Then you drop these ideas casually during the pinochle game, like they just popped into your head. And poor Martin is fishing around for his first thoughts, while you have everything carefully thought out.”
   “Guilty! And being guilty I don’t mind so much as being transparent!” He laughs. “What chance does the criminal have against you, tell me that.”
   LaPointe shrugs. “Oh, they manage to muddle along all right.”
   Moishe nods. “Muddle along. System M: the big Muddle. The major organization principle of all governments. She seemed like a nice girl.”
   LaPointe frowns. “What?”
   “That girl I met in your apartment yesterday. She seemed nice.”
   LaPointe looks at his friend. “Why do you say that? You know perfectly well she didn’t seem nice. She seemed like a street girl, which is all she is.”
   “Yes, but…” Moishe shrugs and turns his attention to the street. After a silence, he says, “Yes, you’re right. She did seem like a street girl. But all girls of her age seem nice to me. I know better, but… My sister was just her age when we went into the camp. She was very lovely, my sister. Very shy. She never… she didn’t survive the camp.” He stares out the window for a while. Then he says quietly, “I’m not even sure I did. Entirely. You know what I mean?”
   LaPointe cannot know what he means; he doesn’t answer.
   “I guess that’s why I imagine that all girls of her age are nice… are vulnerable. That’s funny. Girls of her age! If she had lived, my sister would be in her early fifties now. I can’t picture that. I get older, but she remains twenty in my mind. You know what I mean?”
   LaPointe knows exactly what he means; he doesn’t answer.
   Moishe closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Ach, I don’t think I’m up to stumbling around in these parts of my memory. Better to let these things rest. They have been well grieved.”
   “Well grieved? That’s a funny thing to say.”
   “Why funny, Claude? You think grief is shameful?”
   LaPointe shrugs. “I don’t think about it at all.”
   “That’s odd. Of course grief is good! The greatest proof that God is not just playing cruel games with us is that He gave us the ability to grieve, and to forget. When one is wounded—I don’t mean physically—forgetfulness cauterizes and heals it over, but there would be rancor and hate and bitterness trapped under the scar. Grief is how you drain the wound, so it doesn’t poison you. You understand what I mean?”
   LaPointe lifts his palms. “No, Moishe. I don’t. I’m sorry… but I’m not Father Martin. This kind of talk…”
   “But Claude, this isn’t philosophy! Okay, maybe I say things too fancy, too preciously, but what I’m talking about isn’t abstract. It’s everyday life. It’s… obvious!”
   “Not to me. I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say grief is good. It has nothing to do with me.” LaPointe realizes that his tone is unfriendly, that he is closing the door to the chat Moishe seems to need. But this talk about grief makes him uncomfortable.
   Behind his round glasses, Moishe’s eyes read LaPointe’s face. “I see. Well… at least allow me to pay for the tea. That way, I won’t regret having bored you. Regret! There’s a little trio often confused: Grief, Remorse, Regret! Grief is the gift of the gods; Remorse is the whip of the gods; and Regret…? Regret is nothing. It’s what you say in a letter when you can’t fill an order in time.”
   LaPointe looks out the window. He hopes Father Martin will get well soon.
   They shake hands on the sidewalk in front of the Russian café, and LaPointe decides to take one last walk down the Main before turning in. He has to put his street to bed.

   Even before switching on the green-and-red lamp, he senses in the temperature of the room, in the smell of the still air, the emptiness.
   Of course, he knew she would be gone when he came back tonight. He knew it as he lay in bed beside her, smelling the ouzo she had drunk. He knew it as he tried to get back to sleep after that dream… what was it? Something about water?
   He makes coffee and brings the cup to his armchair. The streetlamps down in the park spill damp yellow light onto the gravel paths. Sometimes it seems the snow will never come.
   The silence in the room is dense, irritating. LaPointe tells himself that it’s just as well Marie-Louise is gone. She was becoming a nuisance, with that silly, brief laugh of hers. He sniffs derision at himself and reaches for one of his Zolas, not caring which one. He opens the volume at random and begins to read. He has read them through and through, and it no longer matters where he begins or ends. Before long, he is looking through the page, his eyes no longer moving.
   Images, some faded, some crisp, project themselves onto his memory in a sequence of their own. A thread of the past comes unraveled, and he tugs it with gentle attention, pulling out people and moments woven so deep into the fabric of the past that they seemed forgotten. The mood of his daydream is not sadness or regret; it is curiosity. Once he has recalled and dealt with a moment or a face, it does not return to his memory. He examines the fragment, then lets it fall from him. He seldom remembers the same thing twice. There isn’t time.
   Some of the images come from his real life: Trois Rivières, playing in the street as a kid, his grandfather, St. Joseph’s Home, Lucille, the yellow alley cat with the crooked tail, one paw lifted tentatively from the ground.
   Other memories, no less vivid, come from his elaborate fantasy of living in the house in Laval with Lucille and the girls. These images are richest in detail: his workshop in the garage with nails up to hold the tools, and black-painted outlines to show which tool goes where. The girls’ First Holy Communions, all in white with gifts of silver rosaries and photographs posed for reluctantly and stiffly. He sees the youngest girl—the tomboy, the imp—with her scuffed knee just visible under the thin white communion stocking…
   He sniffs and rises. His rinsed-out cup is placed on the drainboard, where it always goes. He cleans the pressure maker and puts it where he always puts it. Then he goes into the bathroom to shave, as he always does, before going to bed. As he swishes down the black whiskers, he notices several long hairs in the bowl. She must have washed her hair before leaving. And she didn’t rinse it out carefully. Sloppy twit.
   He is sitting on the edge of his bed, pulling off his shoes, when something occurs to him. He pads into the living room and opens the drawer in which he keeps his house money, uncounted and wadded up. There is a bunch of twenties there, some tens. He does not know how much there was in the first place. Perhaps she took some. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she left some.
   He lies on his back in the middle of the bed, looking up at the ceiling glowing from the streetlamp outside the window.
   He never realized before how big this bed is.

   Guttmann is tapping away on the portable typewriter when LaPointe enters with a grunt of greeting as he hangs his overcoat on the wooden rack.
   “I’m beginning to see daylight at the end of the tunnel, sir.”
   “What are you talking about?”
   “These reports.”
   “Ah. Good boy. You’ve got a future in the department. That’s the important thing—the paper work.” LaPointe picks up a yellow telephone memo from his desk. “What’s this?”
   “You got a call. I took the message.”
   “Hm-m.” The call was from Carrot. She questioned her clients who went bar crawling with Tony Green; there seemed to be only one place he frequented regularly, the Happy Hour Whisky à Go-Go on Rachel Street. LaPointe knows the place, just one block off the Main. He decides to drop in on his way home that evening. The leads are thinning out; this is the last live one.
   “Anything else?” he asks.
   “You got a call from upstairs. The Commissioner wants to see you.”
   “That’s wonderful.” He sits at his desk and glances over the Morning Report: several car thefts, two muggings, somebody shot in a bar in east Montreal, another mugging, a runaway teen-ager… all routine. Nothing interesting, nothing from the Main.
   He starts to make out his duty sheet for yesterday. What did he do yesterday? What can you write down? Drank coffee with Bouvier? Talked to Candy Al Canducci? Walked around the streets? Played pinochle? Took a glass of tea with Moishe? Went home to find the bed bigger than I remembered? He turns the green form over and looks at the three-quarters of a page left blank for “Remarks and Suggestions.” He suppresses an urge to write: Why don’t you shove this form up your ass?
   LaPointe is feeling uncertain this morning, and diminished. He had a major crise while brushing his teeth. First the fizzing blood, then tight bands of jagged pain gripped his chest and upper arms. He felt himself falling forward into a gray mist in which lights exploded. When it passed, he was on his knees, his forehead on the toilet seat. As he continued brushing his teeth, he joked with himself: I guess you better get a lighter toothbrush, LaPointe.
   “Tomorrow’s my last day,” Guttmann says.
   “What?”
   “Wednesday I go back to working with Sergeant Gaspard.”
   “Oh?” It is a noncommittal sound. He has enjoyed showing off his patch and his people to the kid; he has even enjoyed Guttmann’s way of braving out his scorn for the shiny new college ideas. But it wouldn’t do to seem to miss the boy.
   “How did it go last night?” he asks, making conversation to avoid the goddamned paper work.
   “Go, sir? Oh, with Jeanne?”
   “If that’s her name.”
   Guttmann smiles in memory. “Well, I got there late, of course. And at first she didn’t believe me when I told her I was playing pinochle with three men in the back room of an upholstery shop. It sounded phony to me even while I was saying it.”
   “Does it matter what she thinks?”
   Guttmann considers this for a second. “Yes, it does. She’s a nice person.”
   “Ah, I see. Not just a girl. Not just a lay.”
   “That’s the way it started, of course. And God knows I’m not knocking that part of it. But there’s more. We sort of fit together. It’s hard to explain, because I don’t mean that we always agree. Matter of fact, we almost never agree. It’s kind of like a mold and a coin, if you know what I mean. They’re exact opposites, and they fit together perfectly.” There is a slight shift in his tone, and he is now thinking out the relationship aloud, rather than talking to LaPointe. “She’s the only person I’ve ever known who… I mean, I don’t have to be set up and ready when I talk to her. I just say what I feel like saying, and it doesn’t bother me if it comes out wrong, or stupid-sounding. You know what I mean, sir?”
   “How did you meet her?”
   Guttmann doesn’t understand why LaPointe is interested, but he enjoys the uncommon friendly tone of the chat. He has no way of knowing that his leaving tomorrow is what allows the Lieutenant to relax with him, because he won’t have to deal with him further. “Well, I told you she lives in my apartment building. We met in the basement.”
   “Sounds romantic.”
   Guttmann laughs. “Yeah. There’s a bunch of coin-operated washing machines down there. It was late at night, and we were alone, waiting for our washing to get done, so we started talking.”
   “About what?”
   “I don’t remember. Soap, maybe. Hell, I don’t know.”
   “Is she pretty?”
   “Pretty? Well, yes, I guess so. I mean, obviously I find her attractive. That first night in the basement, I wasn’t thinking of much other than getting her into bed. But pretty isn’t what she is mostly. If I had to pick one thing about her, it would be her nutty sense of humor.”
   LaPointe sniffs and shakes his head. “That sounds dangerous. I remember when I was a kid on the force, I went on a couple of blind dates set up by friends. And whenever they described my girl as ‘a good talker’ or ‘a kid with a great sense of humor,’ that always meant she was a dog. What I usually wanted at the time was a pig, not a dog.”
   For a second, Guttmann tries to picture the Lieutenant as a young cop going on blind dates. The image won’t come into focus.
   “I know what you mean,” he says. “But you know what’s even worse than that?”
   “What?”
   “When the guy who’s set you up can’t think of anything to say but that your girl has nice hands. That’s when you’re really in trouble!”
   LaPointe is laughing in agreement when the phone rings. It is the Commissioner’s office, and the young lady demanding that LaPointe come up immediately has a snotty, impatient tone.

   After announcing on the intercom that Lieutenant LaPointe is in the outer office, the secretary with the impeding miniskirt sets busily to work, occasionally glancing accusingly at the Lieutenant. When she arrived at the office at eight that morning, the Commissioner was already at work.
   The man who isn’t a step AHEAD is a step BEHIND.
   Resnais’ mood was angry and tense, and everyone in the office was made to feel its sting. The secretary blames LaPointe for her boss’s mood.
   For the first time, Resnais doesn’t come out of his office to greet LaPointe with his bogus handshake and smile. Three clipped words over the intercom request that he be sent in.
   When LaPointe enters, Resnais is standing with his back to the window, rocking up on his toes. The gray light of the overcast day glints off the purplish suntan on his head, and there is a lighter tone to his sunlamped bronze around the ears, indicating that his haircut is fresh.
   “I sent for you at eight this morning, LaPointe.” His tone is crisp.
   “Yes. I saw the memo.”
   “And?”
   “I just got in.”
   “In this shop, we start at eight in the morning.”
   “I get off the street at one or two in the morning. What time do you usually get home, Commissioner?”
   “That’s none of your goddamned onions.” Even angry, Resnais does not forget to use idioms common to the social level of his French Canadian men. “But I didn’t call you up here to chew your ass about coming in late.” He has decided to use vulgar expressions to get through to LaPointe.
   “Do you mind if I sit down?”
   “What? Oh, yes. Go ahead.” Resnais sits in his high-backed chair, designed by osteopaths to reduce fatigue. He takes a deep breath and blows it out. Might as well get right to it.
   The surgeon who cuts slowly does no kindness to his patient.
   He glances at his note pad, open on the immaculate desk beside two sharpened pencils and a stack of blue memo cards. “I assume you know a certain Scheer, Anton P.”
   “Scheer? Yes, I know him. He’s a pimp and a pissou.”
   “He’s also a citizen!”
   “You’re not telling me that Scheer had the balls to complain about me.”
   “No official complaint has been lodged—and won’t be, if I can help it. I warned you about your methods just a couple of days ago. Did you think I was just talking out of my ass?”
   LaPointe shrugs.
   Resnais looks at his notes. “You ordered him off the street. You denied him the use of a public thoroughfare. Who in hell do you think you are, LaPointe?”
   “It was a punishment.”
   “The police don’t punish! The courts punish. But it wasn’t enough that you ordered him off the streets, you publicly degraded him, making him take off his clothes and climb into a basement well, with the possible risk of injury. Furthermore, you did this before witnesses—a crowd of witnesses including young women who laughed at him. Public degradation.”
   “Only his shoelaces.”
   “What?”
   “I only ordered him to take off his shoelaces.”
   “My report says clothes.”
   “Your report is wrong.”
   Resnais takes one of the pencils and makes the correction. He has no doubt at all of LaPointe’s honesty. But that is not the point. “It says here that there was another policeman involved. I want his name.”
   “He just happened to be walking with me. He had no part in it.”
   LaPointe’s matter-of-fact tone irritates Resnais. He slaps the top of his desk. “I won’t fucking well have it! I’ve worked too goddamned hard to build a good community image for this shop! And I don’t care if you’re the hero of every wet-nosed kid on the force, LaPointe. I won’t have that image ruined!”
   Anger is a bad weapon, but a great tool.
   LaPointe looks at Resnais with the expression of bored patience he assumes when questioning suspects. When the Commissioner has calmed down, he says, “If Scheer didn’t lodge a complaint, how do you know about this?”
   “That’s not your affair.”
   “Some of his friends got to you, right? Ward bosses?”
   It is Resnais’ habit to play it straight with his men. “All right. That’s correct. A man in municipal politics brought it to my attention. He knows how I’ve worked to maintain good press for the force. And he didn’t want to make this public if he didn’t have to.”
   “Bullshit.”
   “I don’t need insubordination from you.”
   “Tell me something. Why do you imagine your friend interfered on this pimp’s behalf?”
   “The man is not my friend. I know him only at the athletic club. But he’s a politically potent man who can help the force… or hurt it.” Resnais smiles bitterly. “I suppose that sounds like ass-kissing to you.”
   LaPointe shrugs.
   Resnais stares at him for a long moment. “What are you trying to tell me?”
   “Put it together. Scheer is not the run-of-the-mill pimp. He specializes in very young girls. Either your… friend… is a client, or he’s open to blackmail. Why else would he help a turd like Scheer?”
   Resnais considers this for a moment. Then he makes some notes on his pad. Above all, he is a good cop. “You might be right. I’ll have that looked into. But nothing alters the fact that you have exposed the department to bad public opinion with your gangster methods. Have you ever thought of them that way? As gangster methods?”
   LaPointe has not. But he doesn’t care about that. “So you intend to tell your political friend that you gave me a sound ass-chewing and everything will be fine from now on?”
   “I will tell him that I privately reprimanded you.”
   “And he’ll pass the word on to Scheer?”
   “I suppose so.”
   “And Scheer will come back out onto the street, sassy-assed and ready to start business again.” LaPointe shakes his head slowly. “No, that’s not the way it’s going to happen, Commissioner. Not on my patch.”
   “Your patch! LaPointe of the Main! I’m sick up to here of hearing about it. You may think of yourself as the cop of the street, but you’re not the whole force, LaPointe. And that run-down warren of slums is not Montreal!”
   LaPointe stares at Resnais. Run-down warren!
   For a second, Resnais has the feeling that LaPointe is going to hit him. He knows he went too far, talking about the Main like that. But he has no intention of backing down. “You were telling me that this Scheer wouldn’t be allowed to start up business again. What do you think you’re going to do, Claude?” It’s “Claude” now. Resnais is shifting his forensic line.
   LaPointe rises and goes to Resnais’ window. He never noticed that the Commissioner looks out on the Hôtel de Ville too, on the scaffolding and sandblasting. It doesn’t seem right that they should share the same view. “Well, Commissioner. You can go ahead and tell your friend that you gave me a ‘private reprimand.’ But you’d better also tell him that if his pimp sets foot on my patch, I’ll hurt him.”
   “I am giving you a direct order to stop your harassment of this citizen.”
   There is a long silence, during which LaPointe continues to look out the window as though he has not heard.
   Resnais pushes his pencils back and forth with his forefinger. Finally, he speaks with a quiet, flat tone. “Well. This is the attitude I expected from you. You don’t leave me any alternative. Discharging you will make a real gibelotte for me. I won’t bullshit you by pretending it’s going to be easy. The men will put up a hell of a stink. I won’t come out of it smelling like a rose, and the force won’t come out of it without bruises. So I’m going to rely on your loyalty to the force to make it easier. Because, you see, Claude, I’ve come to a decision. One way or another, you’re out.”
   LaPointe leans slightly forward as though to see something down in the street that interests him more than the Commissioner’s talk.
   “Look at it this way, Claude. You came on the force when you were twenty-one. You’ve got thirty-two years of service. You can retire on full pay. Now, I’m not asking you to retire right now, this morning. I’d be content if you’d send in a letter of resignation effective, say, in six months. That way no one would relate your leaving to any trouble between us. You would save face, and I wouldn’t have the mess of petitions and letters to the papers from the kids. Make up an excuse. Say it’s for reasons of health—whatever you want. For my part, I’ll see to it you’re promoted to captain just before you go. That’ll mean you retire on captain’s pay.”
   Resnais swivels in his posture chair to face LaPointe, who is still looking out the window, unmoving. “One way or another, Claude, you’re going. If I have to, I’ll retire you under the ‘good of the department’ clause. I warned you to sort yourself out, but you wouldn’t listen. You just don’t seem to be able to change with the changing times.” Resnais turns back to his desk. “I’m not denying that it would go easier on me if you would turn in your resignation voluntarily, but I don’t expect you to do it for me. There’s never been any love lost between us. You’ve always resented my drive and success. But there’s no point going into that now. I’m asking you to resign quietly for the good of the department, and I honestly believe that you care about the force, in your own way.” There is just the right balance between regret and firmness in his voice. Resnais evaluates the effect of the sound as he speaks, and he is pleased with it.
   LaPointe takes a deep breath, like a man coming out of a daydream. “Is that all, Commissioner?”
   “Yes. I expect your resignation on my desk within the week.”
   LaPointe sniffs and smiles to himself. He would lose nothing by turning in a resignation effective in six months. He doesn’t have six months left.
   By the time LaPointe has his hand on the doorknob, Resnais is already looking over his appointment calendar. He is a little behind.
   The man who enslaves his minutes liberates his hours.
   “Phillipe?” LaPointe says quietly.
   Resnais looks up in surprise. This is the first time in the thirty years they have been on the force together that LaPointe has called him by his first name.
   LaPointe’s right fist is in the air. Slowly, he extends the middle finger.

   When he gets back to his office, LaPointe finds Detective Sergeant Gaspard sitting on the edge of his desk, a half-empty paper cup of coffee in his hand.
   “What’s going on?” LaPointe asks, dropping into his swivel chair and turning it so he can look out the window.
   “Nothing much. I was just trying to pump the kid here; see if he is learning the gamique under you.”
   “And?”
   “Well, he’s at least learned enough to keep his mouth shut. When I asked him how you were coming on the Green case, he said you’d tell me what you wanted me to know.”
   “Good boy,” LaPointe says.
   Guttmann doesn’t look up from his typing for fear of losing his place, but he nods in agreement with the compliment.
   “Well?” Gaspard asks. “I don’t want to seem nosy, but it is technically my case, and I haven’t had a word from you for a couple of days. And I want to be ready, if this case is what Resnais le Grand wanted to see you about.”
   Already the rumor has been around the department that Resnais was in a furious mood when he called in LaPointe.
   “No, it wasn’t about that,” LaPointe says.
   Gaspard’s raised eyebrows indicate that he is more than willing to hear what it was all about, but instead LaPointe turns back from the window and gives him a quick rundown of progress so far.
   “So you figure the kid was being laundered, eh?”
   “I’m sure of it.”
   “And if he was such a big time sauteux de clôtures as you say, almost anyone might have put that knife into him—some jealous squack, somebody’s lover, somebody’s brother—almost anyone.”
   “That’s it.”
   “You on to anything?”
   “We’ve got suspects falling out of the trees. But most of the leads have healed up now. I’ve got something I’m looking into tonight; a bar the kid used to go to.”
   “You expect to turn something there?”
   “Not much. Probably twenty more suspects.”
   “Hungh! Well, keep up the good work. And do your best to bring this one in, will you? I could use another letter of merit. So how’s our Joan getting on? Is he as much a pain in the ass to you as he was to me?”
   LaPointe shrugs. He has no intention of complimenting the kid in his presence. “Why do you ask? You want him back today?”
   “No, not if you can stand to have him a while longer. He cramps my romantic form, hanging around all the time.” Gaspard drains the cup, wads it up in his hand, and misses the wastebasket “Okay, if that’s all you’ve got to tell me about our case, I’ll get back to keeping the city safe for the tourists. Just look at that kid type, will you? Now that’s what I call style!”
   Guttmann growls as Gaspard leaves with a laugh.
   LaPointe feels a slight nausea from the ebb of angry adrenalin after his session with the Commissioner. The air in his office is warm and has an already-breathed taste. He wants to get out of here, go where he feels comfortable and alive. “Look, I’m going up on the Main. See what’s going on.”
   “You want me to go with you?”
   “No. I lose you tomorrow, and I want this paper work caught up.”
   “Oh.” Guttmann does not try to conceal his deflation.
   LaPointe tugs on his overcoat. “I’m just going to make the rounds. Talk to people. This Green thing has taken up too much of my time. I’m getting out of touch.” He looks down at the young man behind the stacks of reports. “What do you have on for this evening around seven? A date to wash clothes?”
   “No, sir.”
   “All right. Meet me at the Happy Hour Whisky à Go-Go on Rachel Street. It’s our last lead. You might as well see this thing through.”
   Before it lost its cabaret license, the Happy Hour Whisky à Go-Go was a popular dance hall where girls from the garment shops and men from the loading docks could pick one another up, dance a little, ogle, drink, make arrangements for later on. It was a huge, noisy barn with a turning ball of mirrored surfaces depending from the ceiling, sliding globs of colored light around the walls, over the dancers, and into the orchestra, the amplified instruments of which made the floor vibrate. But once too often, the owner had been careless about letting underage girls in and about making sure his bouncers stopped fights before they got to the bottle-throwing stage, so now dancing is not permitted, and the patronage has shrunk to a handful of people sitting around the U-shaped bar, a glowing island in a vastness of dark, unused space.
   At the prow of the bar is a drum stage four feet in diameter on which a go-go dancer slowly grinds her ass, her tempo in no way associated with the beat of the whining, repetitive rock music provided by a turntable behind the bar. The dancer is not young, and she is fat. Bored and dull-eyed, she undulates mechanically, her great bare breasts sloshing about as she slips her thumbs in and out of the pouch of her G-string, tugging it away from her écu and letting it snap back in a routine ritual of provocation. Blue and orange lights glow dimly through the bottles of the back bar, producing most of the illumination, save for a strong narrow beam at the cash register. Ultraviolet lamps around the dancing drum cause the dancer’s G-string to glow bright green. She has also applied phosphorescent paint to her nipples, and they glow green too. Standing just inside the door, far from the bar, LaPointe looks over the customers until he picks out Guttmann. From that distance, the back-lit figure of the dancer is almost invisible, save for the phosphorescent triangle of her crotch and the circles of her nipples. As she grinds away, she looks like a man with a goatee, chewing and rolling his eyes.
   LaPointe climbs up on a stool beside Guttmann and orders an Armagnac. “What are you drinking?” he asks Guttmann.
   “Ouzo.”
   “Why ouzo?”
   Guttmann shrugs. “Because it’s a Greek bar, I guess.”
   “Good thing it isn’t an Arab bar. You’d be drinking camel piss.” LaPointe looks along the curve of customers, A couple of young men with nothing to do; a virile-looking woman in a cloth coat sitting directly in front of the dancer, staring up with cold fascination and tickling her upper lip with her finger; two soldiers already a little drunk; an old Greek staring disconsolately into his glass; a neatly dressed man in his fifties, suit and tie, a briefcase up on the bar, watching the play of the thumbs in and out of the G-string, his starched collar picking up the ultraviolet light and glowing greenish. All in all, the typical flotsam of outsiders and losers one finds in this kind of bar in the early evenings, or in rundown movie houses in the afternoons.
   The fat dancer turns her head as she jiggles from foot to foot and nods once to LaPointe. He does not nod back.
   Sitting behind the bar, at the base of the drum, is a girl who attends to the jury-rigged turntable and amplifier. She is fearful of not doing her job right, so she stares at the turning disc, holding her breath, poised to lift the needle and move it to the next selection when the song runs out. She counts the bands to the one she must hit next, mouthing the numbers to herself. Occasionally she lifts her face to look up at the fat dancer. Her eyes brim with admiration and wonder. The lights, the color, and everyone watching. Show business! She appears to be fifteen or sixteen, but her face has no age. It is the bland oval of a seriously retarded child, and its permanent expression is a calm void over which, from time to time, comes a ripple of confusion and doubt.
   The tune is nearing its end, and the girl is straining her concentration in preparation for changing the needle without making that horrible rasping noise. The dancer looks down at her and shakes her head. The girl doesn’t know what this signal means! She is confused and frightened. She freezes! After an undulating hiss, the record goes on to the next band—the wrong band! The girl snatches her hands away from the machine, recoiling from all responsibility. But the dancer is already coming down from the drum, her great breasts flopping with the last awkward step. She growls at the girl and lifts the needle from the record herself. Then she walks along behind the bar to a back room. In a minute she emerges, wearing clacking bedroom slippers and a gossamer tent of a dressing gown through which the brown, pimpled cymbals of her nipples are visible.
   She slides onto the stool next to Guttmann, her sweaty cheek squeaking on the plastic. She smells of sweat and cologne.
   “Want to buy me a drink, gunner?” she asks Guttmann.
   LaPointe leans forward and speaks across the young man. “He’s not a mark. He’s with me.”
   “Sorry, Lieutenant. I mean, how was I to know? You didn’t come in together.”
   With a tip of his head, LaPointe orders her to follow as he takes up his Armagnac and walks away from the bar to a table with bentwood chairs inverted on it. He has three chairs down by the time the woman and Guttmann arrive. The table is small, and Guttmann cannot easily move his knee away from hers. She presses her leg against his to let him know she knows.
   “What’s the trouble now, Lieutenant?” The tone indicates that she has had run-ins with LaPointe before. She can’t imagine why, but the Lieutenant has never liked her. Not even in the old days, when she was working the streets.
   LaPointe wastes no time with her. “There’s a kid who comes in here. Young, Italian, doesn’t have much English. Good-looking. Probably calls himself Tony Green.”
   “He’s in trouble?”
   LaPointe stares at her dully. He asks questions; he doesn’t answer them.
   “Okay, I know the kid you mean,” she says quickly, sensing his no-nonsense mood.
   “Well?” he says. He has no specific questions, so he makes her do the talking.
   “What can I tell you? I don’t know much about him. He started coming in here a couple of months ago, sort of regular, you know. At first he can’t say diddly shit in English, but now he can talk pretty good. Sometimes he comes alone, sometimes with a couple of pals…” Willing though she is, she runs out of things to say.
   “Go on.”
   “What can I say? Ah… he usually drinks Strega, if that’s any use. Just another cock hanging out. He ain’t been in for the last few nights.”
   “He’s dead.”
   “No shit?” she asks, only mildly interested. “Well, that explains it, then.”
   “Explains what?”
   “Well… we had a little appointment set up for last Thursday night. And he didn’t show.”
   “That was the night he was killed.”
   “Just my luck. Now I’m out the fifty bucks.”
   “He was going to pay you fifty bucks?” LaPointe asks incredulously. “What for? Six months’ worth?”
   “No, he didn’t want me. He had me the first night or so he was here. He’s big on back-door stuff. But he didn’t seem interested in a second helping.”
   “If not you, who then?”
   She lifts her chin toward the bar. “He wanted to screw the kid that helps me with the music.”
   Guttmann glances at LaPointe. “Christ,” he says. “A moronic kid?”
   “Now wait a minute!” the dancer protests quickly. “You can’t hang anything on me. The kid’s nineteen. She’s got consent. Ask the Lieutenant. She’s nineteen, ain’t she?”
   “Yes, she’s nineteen. With the mind of a seven-year-old.”
   “There you are! And anyway, she seems to like it. She never complains. Just stares off into space all the time it’s going on. Look, I got to get back to my public. That butch in the front will pull her goddamned lip off if I’m late. Look, I’d tell you if I knew anything about the Italian kid. You know that, Lieutenant. Shit, the last thing I need is more trouble. But like I said, he was just another cock hanging out for a little fonne. Hey, did you notice that civilian in the suit? Now, there’s a weirdo for you. You know what he’s doing under the bar?”
   “Sacre le camp,” LaPointe orders.
   The dancer tucks down the corners of her mouth and shrugs, making a little farting noise of indifference with her mouth. Then she leaves for the back room, from which she soon appears without the slippers and dressing robe to clamber up onto the drum and stand, bored and impatient, while the retarded girl tries to set the needle down silently. She fails, and there is a screech before the whining music begins. The dancer darts a punitive glance at her, then begins to jiggle from foot to foot, running her thumbs around the belt of her G-string and in and out of the pouch.
   The sting of the reprimand slides quickly from the girl’s smooth mind, and soon she is lost in rapt fascination, looking up at the woman dancing in the blue and orange light, all eyes on her. Show business.
   Guttmann finishes his ouzo at a gulp. “I hate to admit it, but I’m beginning to agree with you.”
   “You’d better watch that.”
   “This Green was real shit.”
   “Yes. Come on. Let’s go.”
   At the door, LaPointe looks back at the dimly lit bar, small in the cavern of the unused dance floor. The man with the goatee is chewing and rolling his eyes.
   They walk side by side down Rachel toward the Main, toward the luminous cross that advertises Christianity from the crest of Mont Royal.
   “It’s still early,” Guttmann says. “You want a cup of coffee?”
   That’s a switch, and LaPointe senses that the young man wants to talk, but he feels too fed up, too tired of it all. “No, thanks. I’ll just go home. I’m tired.”
   They walk on in silence.
   “That Green…” Guttmann mutters.
   “What?”
   “I mean, come on. That’s too sick.”
   “No sicker than that dancer.”
   “Sir?”
   “The girl is her daughter.”
   Guttmann walks on mechanically, staring ahead, his fists clenched in his overcoat pockets. They cross over St. Laurent, where LaPointe stops to say goodbye. “You have a date with your girl tonight?” he asks.
   “Yes, sir. Nothing big. We’re just going to sit around and talk about things.”
   “Like the future?”
   “That sort of thing. Will you tell me something, Lieutenant? Does anyone survive a career as a cop and still feel anything but disgust for people?”
   “A few do.”
   “You?”
   LaPointe examines the boy’s earnest, pained face. “See you in the morning.”
   “Sure.”