Part Six.
Tsuru no Sugomori

Etchebar

   Hel parked the Vol vo in the deserted square of etchebar and got out heavily, forgetting to close the door behind him, neglecting to give the car its ritual bash. He drew a long breath and pushed it out slowly, then he walked up the curving road toward his château.
   From behind half-closed shutters women of the village watched him and admonished their children not to play in the square until M. Hel was gone. It had been eight days since M. Hel had gone into the mountains with Le Cagot, and those terrible men in uniform had descended on the village and done dreadful things to the château. No one had seen M. Hel since then; it had been rumored that he was dead. Now he was returning to his demolished home, but no one dared to greet him. In this ancient high mountain village, primitive instincts prevailed; everyone knew it was unwise to associate with the unfortunate, lest the misfortune be contagious. After all, was it not God’s will that this terrible thing happen? Was not the outlander being punished for living with an Oriental woman, possibly without the sanction of marriage. And who could know what other things God was punishing him for? Oh yes, one could feel pity—one was required by the church to feel pity—but it would be unwise to consort with those whom God punishes. One must be compassionate, but not to the extent of personal risk.
   As he walked up the long allée, Hel could not see what they had done to his home; the sweeping pines screened it from view. But from the bottom of the terrace, the extent of the damage was clear. The central block and the east wing were gone, the walls blown away and rubble thrown in all directions, blocks of granite and marble lying partially buried in the scarred lawn as much as fifty meters away; a low jagged wall rimmed the gaping cellars, deep in shadow and dank with seep water from underground springs. Most of the west wing still stood, the rooms open to the weather where the connecting walls had been ripped away. It had been burned out; floors had caved in, and charred beams dangled, broken, into the spaces below. The glass had been blown from every window and porte-fenêtre, and above them were wide daggers of soot where flames had roared out. The smell of burned oak was carried on a soft wind that fluttered shreds of drapery.
   There was no sound other than the sibilance of the wind through the pines as he picked his way through the rubble to investigate the standing walls of the west wing. At three places he found holes drilled into the granite blocks. The charges they had placed had failed to go off; and they had contented themselves with the destruction of the fire.
   It was the Japanese garden that pained him most. Obviously, the raiders had been instructed to take special pains with the garden. They had used flame throwers. The sounding stream wound through charred stubble and, even after a week, its surface carried an oily residue. The bathing house and its surrounding bamboo grove were gone, but already a few shoots of bamboo, that most tenacious grass, were pushing through the blackened ground.
   The tatami ’d dependency and its attached gun room had been spared, save that the rice-paper doors were blown in by the concussion. These fragile structures had bent before the storm and had survived.
   As he walked across the ravished garden, his shoes kicked up puffs of fine black ash. He sat heavily on the sill of the tatami ’d room, his legs dangling over the edge. It was odd and somehow touching that tea utensils were still set out on the low lacquered table.
   He was sitting, his head bent in deep fatigue, when he felt the approach of Pierre.
   The old man’s voice was moist with regret. “Oh, M’sieur! Oh! M’sieur! See what they have done to us! Poor Madame. You have seen her? She is well?”
   For the past four days, Hel had been at the hospital in Oloron, leaving Hana’s side only when ordered to by the doctors.
   Pierre’s rheumy eyes drooped with compassion as he realized his patron’s physical state. “But look at you, M’sieur!” A bandage was wrapped under Hel’s chin and over his head, to hold the jaw in place while it mended; bruises on his face were still plum colored; inside his shirt, his upper arm was wrapped tightly to his chest to prevent movement of the shoulder, and both his hands were bandaged from the wrists to the second knuckle.
   “You don’t look so good yourself, Pierre,” he said, his voice muffled and dental.
   Pierre shrugged. “Oh, I shall be all right. But see, our hands are the same!” He lifted his hands, revealing wraps of gauze covering the gel on his burned palms. He had a bruise over one eyebrow.
   Hel noticed a dark stain down the front of Pierre’s unbuttoned shirt. Obviously, a glass of wine had slipped from between the awkward paddles at the ends of his wrists. “How did you hurt your head?”
   “It was the bandits, M’sieur. One of them struck me with a rifle butt when I was trying to stop them.”
   “Tell me what happened.”
   “Oh, M’sieur! It was too terrible!”
   “Just tell me about it. Be calm, and tell me.”
   “Perhaps we could go to the gate house? I shall offer you a little glass, and maybe I will have one myself. Then I shall tell you.”
   “All right.”
   As they walked to Pierre’s gate house, the old gardener suggested that M. Hel stay with him, for the bandits had spared his little home.
   Hel sat in a deep chair with broken springs from which litter had been thrown by Pierre to make a space for his guest. The old man had drunk from the bottle, an easier thing to hold, and was now staring out over the valley from the small window of his second-floor living quarters.
   “I was working, M’sieur. Attending to a thousand things. Madame had called down to Tardets for a car to take her to where the airplanes land, and I was waiting for it to arrive. I heard a buzzing from far out over the mountains. The sound grew louder. They came like huge flying insects, skimming over the hills, close to the earth.”
   “What came?”
   “The bandits! In autogiros!”
   “In helicopters?”
   “Yes. Two of them. With a great noise, they landed in the park, and the ugly machines vomited men out. The men all had guns. They were dressed in mottled green clothes, with orange berets. They shouted to one another as they ran toward the château. I called after them, telling them to go away. The women of the kitchen screamed and fled toward the village. I ran after, the bandits, threatening to tell M’sieur Hel on them if they did not go at once. One of them hit me with his gun, and I fell down. Great noise! Explosions! And all the time the two great autogiros sat on the lawn, their wings turning around and around. When I could stand, I ran toward the château. I was willing to fight them, M’sieur. I was willing to fight them!”
   “I know.”
   “Yes, but they were by then running back toward their machines. I was knocked down again! When I got to the château… Oh, M’sieur! All gone! Smoke and flame everywhere! Everything! Everything! Then, M’sieur…Oh, God in mercy! I saw Madame at the window of the burning part. All around her, flame, I rushed in. Fiery things were falling all about me. When I got to her, she was just standing there. She could not find her way out! The windows had burst in upon her, and the glass… Oh, M’sieur, the glass!” Pierre had been struggling to contain his tears. He snatched off his beret and covered his face with it. There was a diagonal line across his forehead separating white skin from his deeply weatherbeaten face. Not for forty years had his beret been off while he was outdoors. He scrubbed his eyes with his beret, snorted loudly, and put it on again. “I took Madame and brought her out. The way was blocked by burning things. I had to pull them away with my hands. But I got out! I got her out! But the glass!…” Pierre broke down; he gulped as tears flowed from his nostrils.
   Hel rose and took the old man in his arms. “You were brave, Pierre.”
   “But I am the patron when you are not here! And I failed to stop them!”
   “You did all a man could do.”
   “I tried to fight them!”
   “I know.”
   “And Madame? She will be well?”
   “She will live.”
   “And her eyes?”
   Hel looked away from Pierre as he drew a slow breath and let it out in a long jet. For a time he did not speak. Then, clearing his throat, he said, “We have work to do, Pierre.”
   “But, M’sieur. What work? The château is gone!”
   “We shall clean up and repair what is left. I’ll need your help to hire the men and to guide them in their work.”
   Pierre shook his head. He had failed to protect the château. He was not to be trusted.
   “I want you to find men. Clear the rubble. Seal the west wing from the weather. Repair what must be repaired to get us through the winter. And next spring, we shall start to build again.”
   “But, M’sieur! It will take forever to rebuild the château!”
   “I didn’t say we would ever finish, Pierre.”
   Pierre considered this. “All right,” he said, “all right. Oh, you have mail, M’sieur. A letter and a package. They are here somewhere.” He rummaged about the chaos of bottomless chairs, empty boxes, and refuse of no description with which he had furnished his home. “Ah! Here they are. Just where I put them for safekeeping.”
   Both the package and letter were from Maurice de Lhandes. While Pierre fortified himself with another draw at the bottle, Hel read Maurice’s note:
   My Dear Friend:
   I wadded up and threw away my first epistolary effort because it began with a phrase so melodramatic as to bring laughter to me and, I feared, embarrassment to you. And yet, I can find no other way to say what I want to say. So here is that sophomoric first phrase:
   When you read this, Nicholai, I shall be dead.
   (Pause here for my ghostly laughter and your compassionate embarrassment.)
   There are many reasons I might cite for my close feelings for you, but these three will do. First: Like me, you have always given the governments and the companies reason for fear and concern. Second:
   You were the last person, other than Estelle, to whom I spoke during my life. And third: Not only did you never make a point of my physical peculiarity, you also never overlooked it, or brutalized my sensibilities by talking about it man to man.
   I am sending you a gift (which you have probably already opened, greedy pig). It is something that may one day be of benefit to you. Do you remember my telling you that I had something on the United States of America? Something so dramatic that it would make the Statue of Liberty fall back and offer you whatever orifice you choose to use? Well, here it is.
   I have sent you only the photocopy; I have destroyed the originals. But the enemy will not know that I have destroyed them, and the enemy does not know that I am dead. (Remarkable how peculiar it is to write that in the present tense!)
   They will have no way to know that the originals are not in my possession in the button-down mode; so, with a little histrionic skill on your part, you should be able to manipulate them as you will.
   As you know, native intelligence has always saved me from the foolishness of believing in life after death. But there can be nuisance value after death—and that thought pleases me.
   Please visit Estelle from time to time, and, make her feel desirable. And give my love to your magnificent Oriental.
   With all amicable sentiments,
   PS. Did I mention the other night during dinner that the morels did not have enough lemon juice? I should have.
   Hel broke the string on the package and scanned the contents. Affidavits, photographs, records, all revealing the persons and governmental organizations involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and with the cover-up of certain aspects of that assassination. Particularly interesting were statements from a person identified as the Umbrella Man, from another called the Man on the Fire Escape, and a third, the Knoll Commando.
   Hel nodded. Very strong leverage indeed.


* * *

   After a simple meal of sausage, bread, and onion washed down with raw red wine in Pierre’s littered room, they took a walk together over the grounds, staying well away from the painful scar of the château. Evening was falling, wisps of salmon and mauve clouds piling up against the mountains.
   Hel mentioned that he would be gone for several days, and they could begin the work of repair when he returned.
   “You would trust me to do it, M’sieur? After how I have failed you?” Pierre was feeling self-pitying. He had decided that he might have protected the Madame better if he had been totally sober.
   Hel changed the subject. “What can we expect for weather tomorrow, Pierre?”
   The old man glanced listlessly at the sky, and he shrugged. “I don’t know, M’sieur. To tell you the truth, I cannot really read the weather. I only pretend, to make myself seem important.”
   “But, Pierre, your predictions are unfailing. I rely on them, and they have served me well.”
   Pierre frowned, trying to remember. “Is this so, M’sieur?”
   “I wouldn’t dare go into the mountains without your advice.”
   “Is this so?”
   “I am’ convinced that it is a matter of wisdom, and age, and Basque blood. I may achieve the age in time, even the wisdom. But the Basque blood…” Hel sighed and struck at a shrub they were passing.
   Pierre was silent for a time as he pondered this. Finally he said, “You know? I think that what you say is true, M’sieur. It is a gift, probably. Even I believe it is the signs in the sky, but in reality it is a gift—a skill that only my people enjoy. For instance, you see how the sheep of the sky have russet fleeces? Now, it is important to know that the moon is in a descending phase, and that birds were swooping low this morning. From this, I can tell with certainty that…”

The Church at Alos

   Father Xavier’s head was bent, his fingers pressed against his temple, his hand partially masking the dim features of the old woman on the other side of the confessional’s wicker screen. It was an attitude of compassionate understanding that permitted him to think his own thoughts while the penitent droned on, recalling and admitting every little lapse, hoping to convince God, by the tiresome pettiness of her sins, that she was innocent of any significant wrongdoing. She had reached the point of confessing the sins of others—of asking forgiveness for not having been strong enough to prevent her husband from drinking, for having listened to the damning gossip of Madame Ibar, her neighbor, for permitting her son to miss Mass and join the hunt for boar instead.
   Automatically humming an ascending interrogative note at each pause. Father Xavier’s mind was dealing with the problem of superstition. At Mass that morning, the itinerate priest had made use of an ancient superstition to gain their attention and to underline his message of faith and revolution. He himself was too well educated to believe in the primitive fears that characterize the faith of the mountain Basque; but as a soldier of Christ, he felt it his duty to grasp each weapon that came to hand and to strike a blow for the Church Militant. He knew the superstition that a clock striking during the Sagara (the elevation of the Host) was an infallible sign of imminent death. Setting a clock low beside the altar where he could see it, he had timed the Sagara to coincide with its striking of the hour. There had been an audible gasp in the congregation, followed by a profound silence. And taking his theme from the omen of impending death, he had told them it meant the death of repression against the Basque people, and the death of ungodly influences within the revolutionary movement. He had been satisfied with the effect, manifest in part by several invitations to take supper and to pass the night in the homes of local peasants, and in part by an uncommonly large turnout for evening confession—even several men, although only old men, to be sure.
   Would this last woman never end her catalogue of trivial omissions? Evening was setting in, deepening the gloom of the ancient church, and he was feeling the pangs of hunger. Just before this self-pitying chatterbox had squeezed her bulk into the confessional, he had peeked out and discovered that she was the last of the penitents. He breathed a sigh and cut into her stream of petty flaws, calling her his daughter and telling her that Christ understood and forgave, and giving her a penance of many prayers, so she would feel important.
   When she left the box, he sat back to give her time to leave the church. Undue haste in getting to a free dinner with wine would be unseemly. He was preparing to rise, when the curtain hissed and another penitent slipped into the shadows of the confessional.
   Father Xavier sighed with impatience.
   A very soft voice said, “You have only seconds to pray, Father.”
   The priest strained to see through the screen into the shadows of the confessional, then he gasped. It was a figure with a bandage around its head, like the cloth tied under the chins of the dead to keep their mouths from gaping! A ghost?
   Father Xavier, too well educated for superstition, pressed back away from the screen and held his crucifix before him. “Begone! I! Abi!”
   The soft voice said, “Remember Beñat Le Cagot.”
   “Who are you? What—”
   The wicker screen split, and the point of Le Cagot’s makila plunged between the priest’s ribs, piercing his heart and pinning him to the wall of the confessional.
   Never again would it be possible to shake the villager’s faith in the superstition of the Sagara, for it had proved itself. And in the months that followed, a new and colorful thread was woven into the folk myth of Le Cagot—he who had mysteriously vanished into the mountains, but who was rumored to appear suddenly whenever Basque freedom fighters needed him most. With a vengeful will of its own, Le Cagot’s makila had flown to the village of Alos and punished the perfidious priest who had informed on him.

New York

   As he stood in the plush private elevator, mercifully without Musak, Hel moved his jaw gingerly from side to side. In the eight days he had been setting up this meeting, his body had mended well. The jaw was still stiff, but did not require the undignified gauze sling; his hands were tender, but the bandages were gone, as were the last yellowish traces of bruise on his forehead.
   The elevator stopped and the door opened directly into an outer office, where a secretary rose and greeted him with an empty smile. “Mr. Hel? The Chairman will be with you soon. The other gentleman is waiting inside. Would you care to join him?” The secretary was a handsome young man with a silk shirt open to the middle of his chest and tight trousers of a soft fabric that revealed the bulge of his penis. He conducted Hel to an inner reception room decorated like the parlor of a comfortable rural home: overstuffed chairs in floral prints, lace curtains, a low tea table, two Lincoln rockers, bric-a-brac in a glass-front étagère, framed photographs of three generations of family on an upright piano.
   The gentleman who rose from the plump sofa had Semitic features, but an Oxford accent. “Mr. Hel? I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I am Mr. Able, and I represent OPEC interests in such matters as these.” There was an extra pressure to his handshake that hinted at his sexual orientation. “Do sit down, Mr. Hel. The Chairman will be with us soon. Something came up at the last moment, and she was called away briefly.”
   Hel selected the least distasteful chair. “She?”
   Mr. Able laughed musically. “Ah, you did not know that the Chairman was a woman?”
   “No, I didn’t. Why isn’t she called the Chairwoman, or one of those ugly locutions with which Americans salve their social consciences at the sacrifice of euphony: chairperson, mailperson, freshperson—that sort of thing?”
   “Ah, you will find the Chairman unbound by conventions. Having become one of the most powerful people in the world, she does not have to seek recognition; and achieving equality would, for her, be a great step down.” Mr. Able smiled and tilted his head coquettishly. “You know, Mr. Hel, I learned a great deal about you before Ma summoned me to this meeting.”
   “Ma?”
   “Everyone close to the Chairman calls her Ma. Sort of a family joke. Head of the Mother Company, don’t you see?”
   “I do see, yes.”
   The door to the outer office opened, and a muscular young man with a magnificent suntan and curly golden hair entered carrying a tray.
   “Just set it down here,” Mr. Able told him. Then to Hel he said, “Ma will doubtless ask me to pour.”
   The handsome beachboy left after setting out the tea things, thick, cheap china in a blue-willow pattern.
   Mr. Able noticed Hel’s glance at the china. “I know what you’re thinking. Ma prefers things to be what she calls ‘homey.’ I learned about your colorful background, Mr. Hel, at a briefing session a while ago. Of course I never expected to meet you—not after Mr. Diamond’s report of your death. Please believe that I regret what the Mother Company special police did to your home. I consider it unpardonable barbarism.”
   “Do you?” Hel was impatient with the delay, and he had no desire to pass the time chatting with this Arab. He rose and crossed to the piano with its row of family photographs.
   At this moment, the door to the inner office opened, and the Chairman entered.
   Mr. Able rose quickly to his feet. “Mrs. Perkins, may I introduce Nicholai Hel?”
   She took Hel’s hand and pressed it warmly between her plump, stubby fingers. “Land sakes, Mr. Hel, you just couldn’t know how I have looked forward to meeting you.” Mrs. Perkins was a chubby woman in her mid-fifties. Clear maternal eyes, neck concealed beneath layers of chin, gray hair done up in a bun, with wisps that had escaped the net chignon, pigeon-breasted, plump forearms with deeply dimpled elbows, wearing a silk dress of purple paisley. “I see that you’re looking at my family. My pride and joy, I always call them. That’s my grandson there. Rascally little fella. And this is Mr. Perkins. Wonderful man. Cordon-bleu cook and just a magician with flowers.” She smiled at her photographs and shook her head with proprietary affection. “Well, maybe we should turn to our business. Do you like tea, Mr. Hel?” She lowered herself into a Lincoln rocker with a puff of sigh. “I don’t know what I’d do without my tea.”
   “Have you looked at the information I forwarded to you, Mrs. Perkins?” He lifted his hand to Mr. Able, indicating that he would forego a cup of tea made from tea bags.
   The Chairman leaned forward and placed her hand on Hel’s arm. “Why don’t you just call me Ma? Everyone does.”
   “Have you looked at the information, Mrs. Perkins?”
   The warm smile disappeared from her face and her voice became almost metallic. “I have.”
   “You will recall that I made a precondition to our talk your promise that Mr. Diamond be kept ignorant of the fact that I am alive.”
   “I accepted that precondition.” She glanced quickly at Mr. Able. “The contents of Mr. Hel’s communication are eyes-only for me. You’ll have to follow my lead in this.”
   “Certainly, Ma.”
   “And?” Hel asked.
   “I won’t pretend that you do not have us in a tight spot, Mr. Hel. For a variety of reasons, we would not care to have things upset just now, when our Congress is dismantling that Cracker’s energy bill. If I understand the situation correctly, we would be ill-advised to take counteraction against you, as that would precipitate the information into the European press. It is currently in the hands of an individual whom Fat Boy identifies as the Gnome. Is that correct?”
   “Yes.”
   “So it’s all a matter of price, Mr. Hel. What is your price?”
   “Several things. First, you have taken some land in Wyoming from me. I want it back.”
   The Chairman waved a pudgy hand at so trivial a matter.
   “And I shall require that your subsidiaries stop all strip-mining in a radius of three hundred miles from my land.”
   Mrs. Perkins’s jaw worked with controlled anger, her cold eyes fixed on Hel. Then she blinked twice and said, “All right.”
   “Second, there is money of mine taken from my Swiss account.”
   “Of course. Of course. Is that all?”
   “No. I recognize that you could undo any of these actions at will. So I shall have to leave this leverage information on line for an indefinite period. If you offend me in any way, the button will be released.”
   “I see. Fat Boy informs me that this Gnome person is in poor health.”
   “I have heard that rumor.”
   “You realize that if he should die, your protection is gone?”
   “Not exactly, Mrs. Perkins. Not only would he have to die, but your people would have to be sure he was dead. And I happen to know that you have never located him and don’t have even an idea of his physical appearance. I suspect that you will intensify your search for the Gnome, but I’m gambling that he is hidden away where you will never find him.”
   “We shall see. You have no further demands upon us?”
   “I have further demands. Your people destroyed my home. It may not be possible to repair it, as there no longer are craftsmen of the quality that built it. But I intend to try.”
   “How much?”
   “Four million.”
   “No house is worth four million dollars!”
   “It’s now five million.”
   “My dear boy, I started my professional career with less than a quarter of that, and if you think—”
   “Six million.”
   Mrs. Perkins’s mouth snapped shut. There was absolute silence, as Mr. Able nervously directed his glance away from the pair looking at one another across the tea table, one with a cold fixed stare, the other with lids half-lowered over smiling green eyes.
   Mrs. Perkins drew a slow, calming breath. “Very well. But that, I suggest, had better be the last of your demands.”
   “In point of fact, it is not.”
   “Your price has reached its market maximum. There is a limit to the degree to which what is good for the Mother Company is good for America.”
   “I believe, Mrs. Perkins, that you’ll be pleased by my last demand. If your Mr. Diamond had done his work competently, if he had not allowed personal enmity for me to interfere with his judgment, you would not now be facing this predicament. My last demand is this: I want Diamond. And I want the CIA gunny named Starr, and that PLO goatherd you call Mr. Haman. Don’t think of it as additional payment. I am rendering you a service—meting out punishment for incompetence.”
   “And that is your last demand?”
   “That is my last demand.”
   The Chairman turned to Mr. Able. “How have your people taken the death of the Septembrists in that plane accident?”
   “Thus far, they believe it was just that, an accident. We have not informed them that it was an assassination. We were awaiting your instructions, Ma.”
   “I see. This Mr. Haman… he is related to the leader of the PLO movement, I believe.”
   “That is true, Ma.”
   “How will his death go down?”
   Mr. Able considered this for a moment. “We may have to make concessions again. But I believe it can be handled.”
   Mrs. Perkins turned again to Hel. She stared at him for several seconds. “Done.”
   He nodded. “Here is how it will be set up. You will show Diamond the information now in your hands concerning the Kennedy assassination. You will tell him you have a line on the Gnome, and you can trust no one but him to kill the Gnome and secure the originals. He will realize how dangerous it would be to have other eyes than his see this material. You will instruct Diamond to go to the Spanish Basque village of Oñate. He will be contacted by a guide who will take them into the mountains, where they will find the Gnome. I shall take it from there. One other thing… and this is most important. I want all three of them to be well armed when they go into the mountains.”
   “Did you get that?” she asked Mr. Able, her eyes never leaving Hel’s face.
   “Yes, Ma.”
   She nodded. Then her stern expression dissolved and she smiled, wagging a finger at Hel. “You’re quite a fellow, young man. A real horse trader. You would have gone a long way in the commercial world. You’ve got the makings of a real fine businessman.”
   “I’ll overlook that insult.”
   Mrs. Perkins laughed, her wattles jiggling. “I’d love to have a good long gabfest with you, son, but there are folks waiting for me in another office. We’ve got a problem with some kids demonstrating against one of our atomic-power plants. Young people just aren’t what they used to be, but I love them all the same, the little devils.” She pushed herself out of the rocker. “Lord, isn’t it true what they say: woman’s work is never done.”

Gouffre Field/Col. Pierre St. Martin

   In addition to being exasperated and physically worn, Diamond was stung with the feeling that he looked foolish, stumbling through this blinding fog, clinging obediently to a length of rope tied to the waist of his guide whose ghostly figure he could only occasionally make out, not ten feet ahead. A rope around Diamond’s waist strung back into the brilliant mist, where its knotted end was grasped by Starr; and the Texan in turn was linked to the PLO trainee Haman, who complained each time they rested for a moment, sitting on the damp boulders of the high col. The Arab was not used to hours of heavy exercise; his new climbing boots were chafing his ankles, and the muscles of his forearm were throbbing with the strain of his white-knuckled grip on the line that linked him to the others, terrified of losing contact and being alone and blind in this barren terrain. This was not at all what he had had in mind when he had postured before the mirror of his room in Oñate two days earlier, cutting a romantic figure with his mountain clothes and boots, a heavy Magnum in the holster at his side. He had even practiced drawing the weapon as quickly as he could, admiring the hard-eyed professional in the mirror. He recalled how excited he had been in that mountain meadow a month before, emptying his gun into the jerking body of that Jewess after Starr had killed her.
   As annoying as any physical discomfort to Diamond was the wiry old guide’s constant humming and singing as he led them slowly along, skirting the rims of countless deep pits filled with dense vapor, the danger of which the guide had made evident through extravagant mime not untouched with gallows humor as he opened his mouth and eyes wide and nailed his arms about in imitation of a man falling to his death, then pressed his palms together in prayer and rolled his impish eyes upward. Not only did the nasal whine of the Basque songs erode Diamond’s patience, but the voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, because of the peculiar underwater effect of a whiteout.
   Diamond had tried to ask the guide how much longer they would be groping through this soup, how much farther it was to where the Gnome was hiding out. But the only response was a grin and a nod. When they were turned over to the guide in the mountains by a Spanish Basque who had contacted them in the village, Diamond had asked if he could speak English, and the little old man had grinned and said, “A lee-tle bit.” When, some time later, Diamond had asked how long it would be before they arrived at their destination, the guide had answered, “A lee-tle bit.” That was an odd-enough response to cause Diamond to ask the guide his name. “A lee-tle bit.”
   Oh, fine! Just wonderful!
   Diamond understood why the Chairman had sent him to deal with this matter personally. Trusting him with information so inflammable as this was a mark of special confidence, and particularly welcome after a certain coolness in Ma’s communications after those Septembrists had died in that midair explosion. But they had been two days in the mountains now, linked up like children playing blind man’s bluff, bungling forward through this blinding whiteout that filled their eyes with stinging light. They had passed a cold and uncomfortable night sleeping on the stony ground after a supper of hard bread, a greasy sausage that burned the mouth, and harsh wine from some kind of squirt bag that Diamond could not manage. How much longer could it be before they got to the Gnome’s hiding place? If only this stupid peasant would stop his chanting!
   At that moment, he did. Diamond almost bumped into the grinning guide, who had stopped in the middle of a rock-strewn little plateau through which they had been picking their way, avoiding the dangerous gouffres on all sides.
   When Starr and Haman joined them, the guide mimed that they must stay there, while he went ahead for some purpose or other.
   “How long will you be gone?” Diamond asked, accenting each word slowly, as though that would help.
   “A lee-tle bit,” the guide answered, and he disappeared into the thick cloud. A moment later, the guide’s voice seemed to come from all directions at once. “Just make yourselves comfortable, my friends.”
   “That shithead speaks American after all,” Starr said.
   “What the hell’s going on?”
   Diamond shook his head, uneasy with the total silence around them.
   Minutes passed, and the sense of abandonment and danger was strong enough to hush even the complaining Arab. Starr took out his revolver and cocked it.
   Seeming to come from both near and far, Nicholai Hel’s voice was characteristically soft. “Have you figured it out yet, Diamond?”
   They strained to peer through the dazzling light.
   Nothing.
   “Jesus H. Christ!” Starr whispered.
   Haman began to whimper.
   Not ten meters from them, Hel stood invisible in the brilliant whiteout. His head was cocked to the side as he concentrated to distinguish the three quite different energy patterns emanating from them. His proximity sense read panic in all three, but of varying qualities. The Arab was falling apart. Starr was on the verge of firing wildly into the blinding vapor. Diamond was struggling for self-control.
   “Spread out,” Starr whispered. He was the professional.
   Hel felt Starr moving around to the left, as the Arab went to his hands and knees and crawled toward the right, feeling before him for the rim of a deep gouffre he could not see. Diamond stood riveted.
   Hel cocked back the double hammers of each of the shotgun pistols the Dutch industrialist had given him years before. Starr’s projecting aura was closing in from the left. Hel gripped the handle as tightly as he could, aimed for the center of the Texan’s aura, and squeezed the trigger.
   The roar of two shotgun shells firing at once was deafening. The blast pattern of eighteen ball bearings blew a puffing hole through the mist, and for an instant Hel saw Starr flying backward, his arms wide, his feet off the ground, his chest and face splattered. Immediately, the whiteout closed in and healed the hole in the mist.
   Hel let the pistol drop from his stunned hand. The pain of the wrenching kick throbbed to his elbow.
   His ears ringing with the blast, the Arab began to whimper. Every fiber of him yearned to flee, but in which direction? He knelt, frozen on his hands and knees as a dark-brown stain grew at the crotch of his khaki trousers. Keeping as low to the ground as he could, he inched forward, straining to see through the dazzling fog. A boulder took form before him, its gray ghost shape becoming solid only a foot before he touched it He hugged the rock for comfort, sobbing silently.
   Hel’s voice was soft and close. “Run, goatherd.”
   The Arab gasped and leaped away. His last scream was a prolonged, fading one, as he stumbled into the mouth of a deep gouffre and landed with a liquid crunch far below.
   As the echoing rattle of dislodged stones faded away, Hel leaned back against the boulder and drew a slow deep breath, the second shotgun pistol dangling from his hand. He directed his concentration toward Diamond, still crouching motionless out there in the mist, ahead of him and slightly to the left.
   After the Arab’s sudden scream, silence rang in Diamond’s ears. He breathed shallowly through his mouth, so as to make no sound, his eyes darting back and forth over the curtain of blinding cloud, his skin tingling with anticipation of pain.
   A ten-second eternity passed, then he heard Hel’s prison-hushed voice. “Well? Isn’t this what you had in mind, Diamond? You’re living out the machismo fantasies of the corporation man. The cowboy face to face with the yojimbo. Is it fun?”
   Diamond turned his head from side to side, trying desperately to identify the direction from which the voice came. No good! All directions seemed right.
   “Let me help you, Diamond. You are now approximately eight meters from me.”
   Which direction? Which direction?
   “You might as well get a shot off, Diamond. You might be lucky.”
   Mustn’t speak! He’ll fire at my voice!
   Diamond held his heavy Magnum in both fists and fired into the fog. Again to the left, then to the right, then farther to the left. “You son of a bitch!” he cried, still firing. “You son of a bitch!”
   Twice the hammer clicked on spent brass.
   “Son of a bitch.” With effort, Diamond lowered his pistol while his whole upper body shook with emotion and desperation.
   Hel touched his earlobe with the tip of his finger. It was sticky and it stung. A chip of rock from a near stray had nicked it. He raised his second shotgun pistol and leveled it at the place in the whiteout from which the rapid pulses of panicked aura emanated.
   Then he paused and lowered the gun. Why bother?
   This unexpected whiteout had converted the catharsis of revenge he had planned into a mechanical slaughter of stymied beasts. There was no satisfaction in this, no measurement in terms of skill and courage. Knowing they would be three, and well armed, Hel had brought only the two pistols with him, limiting himself to only two shots. He had hoped this might make a contest of it.
   But this? And that emotionally shattered merchant out there in the fog? He was too loathsome for even punishment.
   Hel started to move away from his boulder noiselessly, leaving Diamond to shudder, alone and frightened in the whiteout, expecting death to roar through him at any instant.
   Then Hel stopped. He remembered that Diamond was a servant of the Mother Company, a corporate lackey. Hel thought of offshore oil rigs contaminating the sea, of strip-mining over virgin land, of oil pipelines through tundra, of atomic-energy plants built over the protests of those who would ultimately suffer contamination. He recalled the adage: Who must do the hard things? He who can. With a deep sigh, and with disgust souring the back of his throat, he turned and raised his arm.
   Diamond’s maniac scream was sandwiched between the gun’s roar and its echo. Through a billowing hole in the fog, Hel glimpsed the spattered body twisting in the air as it was blown back into the wall of vapor.

Château d’Etchebar

   Hana’s posture was maximally submissive; her only weapons in the game were voluptuous sounds and the rippling vaginal contractions at which she was so expert. Hel had the advantage of distraction, his endurance aided by the task of controlling movement very strictly, as their position was complicated and arcane, and a slight error could do them physical hurt. Despite the advantage, it was he who was driven to muttering.
   “You devil!” between clenched teeth.
   Instantly she was sure he had broken, she pressed outward and joined him in climax, her joy expressed aloud and enthusiastically.
   After some minutes of grateful nestling, he smiled and shook his head. “It would appear I lose again.”
   “So it would appear.” She laughed impishly.


* * *

   Hana sat at the doorway of the tatami ’d room, facing the charred ruin of the garden, her kimono puddled about her hips, bare above the waist to receive the kneading and stroking that had been set as the prize in this game. Hel knelt behind her, dragging his fingertips up her spine and scurrying waves of tingle up the nape of her neck, into the roots of her hair.
   His eyes defocused, all muscles of his face relaxed, he permitted his mind to wander in melancholy joy and autumnal peace. He had made a final decision the night before, and he had been rewarded for it.
   He had passed hours kneeling alone in the gun room, reviewing the lay of the stones on the board. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the Mother Company would rupture his gossamer armor. Either their relentless investigations would reveal de Lhandes to be dead, or the facts concerning Kennedy’s death would eventually come out. And then they would come after him.
   He could struggle, cut off many arms of the faceless corporate hydra, but ultimately they would get him. And probably with something as impersonal as a bomb, or as ironic as a stray slug. Where was the dignity in that? The shibumi?
   At last, the cranes were confined to their nest. He would live in peace and affection with Hana until they came after him. Then he would withdraw from the game. Voluntarily. By his own hand.
   Almost immediately after coming to this understanding of the state of the game and the sole path to dignity, Hel felt years of accumulated disgust and hate melt from him. Once severed from the future, the past becomes an insignificant parade of trivial events, no longer organic, no longer potent or painful.
   He had an impulse to account for his life, to examine the fragments he had carried along with him. Late into the night, with the warm Southwind moaning in the eaves, he knelt before the lacquered table on which were two things: the Gô bowls Kishikawa-san had given him, and the yellowed letter of official regret, its creases furry with opening and folding, that he had carried away from Shimbashi Station because it was all that was left of the dignified old man who had died in the night.
   Through all the years he had wandered adrift in the West, he had carried with him three spiritual sea anchors: the Gô bowls that symbolized his affection for his foster father, the faded letter that symbolized the Japanese spirit, and his garden—not the garden they had destroyed, but the idea of garden in Hel’s mind of which that plot had been an imperfect statement. With these three things, he felt fortunate and very rich.
   His newly liberated mind drifted from wisp of idea to wisp of memory, and soon—quite naturally—he found himself in the triangular meadow, one with the yellow sunlight and the grass.
   Home… after so many years of wandering.
   “Nikko?”
   “Hm-m-m?”
   She snuggled her back against his bare chest. He pressed her to him and kissed her hair. “Nikko, are you sure you didn’t let me win?”
   “Why would I do that?”
   “Because you’re a very strange person. And rather nice.”
   “I did not let you win. And to prove it to you, next time we’ll wager the maximum penalty.”
   She laughed softly. “I thought of a pun—a pun in English.”
   “Oh?”
   “I should have said: You’re on.”
   “Oh, that is terrible.” He hugged her from behind, cupping her breasts in his hands.
   “The one good thing about all of this is your garden, Nikko. I am glad they spared it. After the years of love and work you invested, it would have broken my heart if they had harmed your garden.”
   “I know.”
   There was no point in telling her the garden was gone.
   It was time now to take the tea he had prepared for them.

The Main

Rodney Whitaker

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The Main
by Trevanian

   To Tony Godwin, on behalf of the writers he helped

1

   Montreal, November
   Evening on the Main, and the shops are closing. Display bins have been pulled back off the sidewalks; corrugated shutters clatter down over store windows. One or two lights are kept on as a deterrent to burglary; and empty cash registers are left ajar so that thieves won’t smash them open pointlessly.
   The bars remain open, and the cafés; and loudspeaker cones over narrow music stalls splash swatches of noise over sidewalks congested with people, their necks pulled into collars, their shoulders tight against the dank cold. The young and the busy lose patience with the crawling, faceless Wad. They push and shoulder their way through, confusing the old, irritating the idle. The mood of the crowd is harried and brusque; tempers have been frayed by weeks of pig weather, with its layers of zinc cloud, moist and icy, pressing down on the city, delaying the onset of winter with its clean snows and taut blue skies. Everyone complains about the weather. It isn’t the cold that gets you, it’s the damp.
   The swarm coagulates at street corners and where garbage cans have been stacked on the curb. The crowd surges and tangles, tight-packed but lonely. Tense faces, worried faces, vacant faces, all lit on one side by the garish neon of nosh bars, saloons, cafés.
   In the window of a fish shop there is a glass tank, its sides green with algae. A lone carp glides back and forth in narcotized despair.
   Schoolboys in thick coats and short pants, bookbags strapped to their backs, snake through the crowd, their faces pinched with cold and their legs blotchy red. A big kid punches a smaller one and darts ahead. In his attempt to catch up and retaliate, the small boy steps on a man’s foot. The man swears and cuffs him on the back of the head. The boy plunges on, tears of embarrassment and anger in his eyes.
   Fed up with the jams and blockages, some people step out into the street and squeeze between illegally parked cars and the northbound traffic. Harassed truck drivers lean on their air horns and curse, and the braver offenders swear back and throw them the fig. The swearing, the shouting, the grumbling, the swatches of conversation are in French, Yiddish, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Hungarian, Greek—but the lingua franca is English. The Main is a district of immigrants, and greenhorns in Canada quickly learn that English, not French, is the language of success. Signs in the window of a bank attest to the cosmopolitan quality of the street:


Hablamos Espanol
Omi Oymen Eaahnika
Parliamo Italiano
Wir Sprechen Deutsch
Falamos Portugues

   And there is a worn street joke: “I wonder who in that bank can speak all those languages?”
   “The customers.”

   Commerce is fluid on the Main, and friable. Again and again, shops open in a flurry of brave plans and hopes; frequently they fail, and a new man with different plans and the same hopes start business in the same shop. There is not always time to change the sign. Retail and wholesale fabrics are featured in a store above which the metal placard reads: PAINTS.
   Some shops never change their proprietors, but their lines of goods shift constantly, in search of a profitable coincidence between the wants of the customer and the availability of wholesale bargains. In time, the shopkeepers give up chasing phantom success, and the waves of change subside, leaving behind a random flotsam of wares marking high tides in wholesale deals and low tides in customer interest. Within four walls you can buy camping gear and berets, batteries and yard goods, postcards and layettes, some slightly damaged or soiled, all at amazing discounts. Such shops are known only by the names of their owners; there is no other way to describe them.
   And there are stores that find the task of going out of business so complicated that they have been at it for years.

   The newspaper seller stands beside his wooden kiosk, his hands kept warm under his canvas change belt. He rocks from foot to foot as he jiggles his coins rhythmically. He never looks up at the passers-by. He makes change to hands, not to faces. He mutters his half of an unending conversation, and he nods, agreeing with himself.

   Two people press into a doorway and talk in low voices. She looks over his shoulder with quick worried glances. His voice has the singsong of persuasion through erosion.
   “Come on, what do you say?”
   “Gee, I don’t know. I don’t think I better.”
   “What you scared of? I’ll be careful.”
   “Oh, I better be getting home.”
   “For crying out loud, you do it for the other guys!”
   “Yeah, but…”
   “Come on. My place is just around the corner.”
   “Well… no, I better not”
   “Oh, for crying out loud! Go home then! Who wants you?”

   An old Chasidic Jew with peyiss, shtreimel level on his head, long black coat scrupulously brushed, returns home from work, maintaining a dignified pace through the press of the crowd. Although others push and hurry, he does not At the same time, he avoids seeming too humble, for, as the saying has it, “too humble is half proud.” So he walks without rushing, but also without dawdling. A gentle and moderate man.
   Always he checks the street sign before turning off toward his flat in a low brick building up a side street. This although he has lived on that street for twenty-two years. Prudence can’t hurt.

   “The Main” designates both a street and a district. In its narrowest definition, the Main is Boulevard St. Laurent, once the dividing line between French and English Montreal, the street itself French in essence and articulation. An impoverished and noisy street of small shops and low rents, it naturally became the first stop for waves of immigrants entering Canada, with whose arrival “the Main” broadened its meaning to include dependent networks of back streets to the west and east of the St. Laurent spine. Each succeeding national tide entered the Main bewildered, frightened, hopeful. Each successive group clustered together for protection against suspicion and prejudice, concentrating in cultural ghettos of a few blocks’ extent.
   They found jobs, opened shops, had children; some succeeded, some failed; and they in turn regarded the next wave of immigrants with suspicion and prejudice.
   The boundary between French and English Montreal thickened into a no man’s land where neither language predominated, and eventually the Main became a third strand in the fiber of the city, a zone of its own consisting of mixed but unblended cultures. The immigrants who did well, and most of the children, moved away to English-speaking west Montreal. But the old stayed, those who had spent their toil and money on the education of children who are now a little embarrassed by them. The old stayed; and the losers; and the lost.

   Two young men sit in a steamy café, looking out onto the street through a window cleared of mist by a quick palm swipe. One is Portuguese, the other Italian; they speak a melange of Joual slang and mispronounced English. Both wear trendy suits of uncomfortable cut and unserviceable fabric. The Portuguese’s suit is gaudy and cheap; the Italian’s is gaudy and expensive.
   “Hey, hey!” says the Portuguese. “What you think of that? Not bad, eh?”
   The Italian leans over the table and catches a quick glimpse of a girl clopping past the café in a mini, platform boots, and a bunny jacket. “Not so bad! Beau pétard, hein?”
   “And what you think of those foufounes?”
   “I could make her cry. I take one of those in each hand, eh? Eh?” In robust mime, the Italian holds one in each hand and moves them on his lap. “She would really cry, I’m tell you that.” He glances up at the clock above the counter. “Hey, I got to go.”
   “You got something hot waiting for you?”
   “Ain’t I always got something hot waiting?”
   “Lucky son of a bitch.”
   The Italian grins and runs a comb through his hair, patting down the sides with his palm. Yeah, maybe he’s lucky. He’s lucky to have the looks. But it takes talent, too. Not everybody’s got the talent.
   In just over five hours, he will be kneeling in an alley off Rue Lozeau, his face pressed against the gravel. He will be dead.

   There is a sudden block in the flow of pedestrians. Someone has vomited on the sidewalk. Chunks of white in a sauce of ochre. People veer to avoid it but there is a comma of smear where a heel skidded.

   A cripple plunges down the Main against the flow of pedestrian traffic. Each foot slaps flat upon the pavement as he jerks his torso from side to side with excessive, erratic energy. He lurches forward, then plants a foot to prevent himself from falling. A lurch, a twist, the slack flap of a foot. He is young, his face abnormally bland, his head too large. A harelip contorts his mouth into something between a grin and a sneer. His eyes are huge behind thick iron-rimmed glasses which are twisted on his face so that one eye looks through the bottom of its lens, while the other pupil is bisected by the top of its lens. Coiled back against his chest is a withered, useless hand in a pale blue glove. An incongruous curved pipe is clenched between his teeth, and he sucks it moistly. Sweet aromatic smoke pours over his shoulder and disintegrates in the eddies of his lurching motion.
   Pedestrians are startled out of their involute thoughts to see him barging toward them through the crowd. They move aside to make room, eager to avoid contact. Eyes are averted; there is something frightening and disgusting about the Gimp, who drives ahead in his determined, angry way. The human flood breaks at his prow, then blends back in his wake, and people forget him immediately he has passed. They have their own problems, their own plans; each is isolated in and insulated by the alien crowd.

   Chez Pete’s Place is a bar for the street bommes; it is the only place that admits them, and their presence precludes any other clientele. Painted plywood has replaced glass in the window, so it is always night inside. The fat proprietor sits slumped behind the bar, his watery eyes fixed on a skin magazine in his lap. Around a table in the back sits a knot of ragged old men, their hands so filthy that the skin shines and crinkles. They are sharing a half-gallon bottle of wine, and one of the bommes, Dirtyshirt Red, is spiking his wine with whisky from a pint bottle screwed up in a brown paper bag. He doesn’t offer to share the whisky, and the others know better than to ask.
   “Look at that stuck-up son of a bitch, won’t ya?” Dirtyshirt Red says, lifting his chin toward a tall, gaunt tramp sitting alone at a small table in the corner, out of the light, his concentration on his glass of wine.
   “Potlickin’ bastard thinks he’s too good to sit with the rest of us,” Red pursues. “Thinks his shit don’t stink, but his farts give him away!”
   The other tramps laugh ritually. Ridiculing the Vet is an old pastime for all of them. No one feels sorry for the Vet; he brings it on himself by bragging about a nice snug kip he’s got somewhere off the Main. No matter how cold it is, or how hard up a guy is, the Vet never offers to share his kip; he won’t even let anybody know where it is.
   “Hey, what you dreamin’ about, Vet? Thinking about what a hero you was in the war?”
   The Vet’s broad-brimmed floppy hat tilts up as he raises his head slowly and looks toward the table of jeering bommes. His eyebrows arch and his nostrils dilate in a caricature of superiority, then his musings return to his wine glass.
   “Oh, yeah! Big hero he was! Captured by the Germans, he was. Left by the Limeys at Dunkirk ‘cause they didn’t want him stinkin’ up their boats. And you know what big hero thing he done when he was in prison camp? He lined his ass with ground glass so the Germans would get castrated when they cornholed him! Big hero! That’s why he walks funny! He claims he was wounded in the war, but I heard different!”
   There are snickers and nudgings around the table, but the Vet does not deign to respond. Perhaps he no longer hears.

   Lieutenant Claude LaPointe crosses Sherbrooke, leaving the somber mass of the Monastère du Bon Pasteur behind. His pace slows to the measured rhythm of the beat-walker. The Main has been his patch for thirty-two years, since the Depression was at its nadir and frightened people treated one another with humanity, even in Montreal, the most impolite city in the world.
   LaPointe presses his fists deep into the pockets of his shapeless overcoat to tug the collar tighter down onto his neck. Over the years, that rumpled overcoat has become something of a uniform for him, known by everybody who works on the Main, or who works the Main. Young detectives down at the Quartier Général make jokes about it, saying he sleeps in it at night, and in the summer uses it as a laundry bag. Feelings differ about the man in the overcoat; some recognize a friend and protector, others see a repressive enemy. It depends upon what you do for a living; and even more it depends on how LaPointe feels about you.
   When he was young on the street, the Main was French and he its French cop. As the foreigners began to arrive in numbers, there was coolness and distance between them and LaPointe. He could not understand what they wanted, what they were saying, how they did things; and for their part they brought with them a deep distrust of authority and police. But with the wearing of time, the newcomers became a part of the street, and LaPointe became their cop: their protector, sometimes their punisher.
   As he walks slowly up the street, LaPointe passes a bakery that is something of a symbol of the change the years have brought to the Main. Thirty-odd years ago, when the Main was French, the bakery was:


Patisserie St. Laurent

   Ten years later, in response to the relentless pressure of English, one word was added to permit the French to use the first two-thirds of the sign and the Anglos the last two-thirds:


Patisserie St. Laurent Bakery

   Now there are different breads in the window, breads with odd shapes and glazes. And the women waiting in line gossip in alien sounds. Now the sign reads:


Patisserie St. laurent Bakery
Aptoπωλeion

   The throng is thinning out as people arrive at destinations, or give up trying. LaPointe continues north, uphill, his step heavy and slow, his professional glance wandering from detail to detail. The lock on that metal grating over the store window wants replacing. He’ll remind Mr. Capeck about it tomorrow. The man standing in that doorway… it’s all right. Only a bomme. The streetlight is out in the alley behind Le Kit-Kat, a porno theatre. He’ll report that. Men who get overexcited in the porno house use that alley; and sometimes rollers use it too.
   Deep in his pocket, LaPointe’s left hand lies lightly over the butt of his stub.38. In summer he carries it in a holster behind his hip, so he can keep his jacket open. In winter he leaves it loose in his left overcoat pocket, so his right hand is free. The pistol is so much a part of him that he releases it automatically when he reaches for something, and takes it up again when his hand returns to his pocket. The weight of it wears out the lining, and at least once each whiter he has to sew it up. He is clumsy with a needle, so the pocket becomes steadily shallower. Every few years he has to have the lining replaced.
   In more than thirty years on this street of voluble and passionate people, a street on which poverty and greed and despair find expression in petty crime, LaPointe has fired his weapon only seven times. He is proud of that.
   A harried child, her eyes down as she gnaws nervously at her lip, bumps into LaPointe and mutters “Excuse me” without looking up, her voice carrying a note of distress. She is late getting home. Her parents will be angry; they will scold her because they love her. The Lieutenant knows the girl and the parents. They want her to become a nurse, and they make her study long hours because she is not good at schoolwork. The girl tries, but she does not have the ability. For her training, for her future, her parents have suffered years of scrimping and self-denial. She is everything to them: their future, their pride, their excuse.
   The girl spends a lot of time wishing she were dead.
   As he passes Rue Guilbault, LaPointe glances down and sees two young men idling by the stoop of a brownstone. They wear black plastic jackets, and one swings back and forth from the railing. They chantent la pomme to a girl of fourteen who sits on the stoop, her elbows resting on the step above, her meager breasts pressed against a thin sweater. She taunts and laughs, and they sniff around like pubescent puppies. LaPointe knows the house. That would be the youngest Da Costa girl. Like her sisters, she will probably be selling ass on the street within two years. Mama Da Costa’s dream of the girls following their aunt into the convent is beginning to fade.
   LaPointe is walking behind two men who speak a strained English. They are discussing business, and how it’s easy for the rich to get richer. One maintains that it’s a matter of percentages; if you know the percentages, you’re set. The other agrees, but he complains that you’ve got to be rich to find out what the percentages are.
   They step apart gingerly to avoid colliding with the cripple who lurches toward them, his pipe smoke trailing a smear in the red neon of a two-for-one bar.
   LaPointe stands in the middle of the sidewalk. The cripple stumbles to a stop and wavers before the policeman.
   “Say-hey, Lieutenant. How’s it going?” The Gimp’s speech is blurred by the affliction that has damaged his centers of control. His mother was diseased at the time of his birth. He speaks with the alto, adenoidal whine of a boxer who has been hit on the windpipe too often.
   LaPointe looks at the cripple with fatigued patience. “What are you doing at this end of the street, Gimp?”
   “Nothing, Lieutenant. Say-hey, I’m just taking a walk, that’s all. Boy, you know, this pig weather is really hanging on, ain’t it, Lieutenant? I never seen anything like…”
   LaPointe is shaking his head, so the Gimp gives up his attempt to hide in small talk. Taking one hand from his overcoat pocket, the Lieutenant points toward a narrow passage between two buildings, out of the flow of the crowd. The cripple grimaces, but follows him.
   “All right, Gimp. What are you carrying?”
   “Hey, nothin’, Lieutenant. Honest! I promised you, didn’t I?”
   LaPointe reaches out; in his attempt to step back, the cripple stumbles against the brick wall. “Hey, please! We need the money! Mama’s going to be pissed at me if I don’t bring back any money!”
   “Do you want to go back inside?”
   “No! Hey, have a heart, Lieutenant!” the cripple whines. “Mama’ll be pissed. We need the money. What kind of work can a guy like me get? Eh?”
   “Where’s it stashed?”
   “I tol’ you! I ain’t carrying…” The Gimp’s eyes moisten with tears. His body slumps in defeat. “It’s in a tube,” he admits sullenly.
   LaPointe sighs. “Go up the alley and get it out. Put it inside your glove and give it to me.” LaPointe has no intention of handling the tube.
   The cripple moans and whimpers, but he turns and lurches up the alley a few steps until he is in the dark. LaPointe turns his back and watches the passing pedestrians. An old man steps toward the mouth of the recess to take a piss, then he sees LaPointe and changes his mind. The cripple comes back, clutching one glove in his withered hand. LaPointe takes it and puts it into his pocket. “All right, now where did this shit come from, and where were you bringing it?”
   “Say-hey, I cant tell you that, Lieutenant! Mama’ll beat me up for sure! And those guys she knows, they’ll beat me up!” His eyes, bisected by the rims of his glasses, roll stupidly. LaPointe does not repeat his question. Following his habit in interrogation, he simply sighs and settles his melancholy eyes on the grotesque.
   “Honest to God, Lieutenant, I can’t tell you! I don’t dare!”
   “I’d better call for a car.”
   “Hey, no! Don’t put me back inside. Those tough guys inside like to use me ‘cause I’m a cripple.”
   LaPointe looks out over the crowd with weary patience. He gives the Gimp time to think it over.
   “…Okay, Lieutenant…”
   In a self-pitying whimper, the cripple explains that the stuff came from people his mother knows, tough guys from somewhere out on the east end of town. It was to be delivered to a pimp named Scheer. The Lieutenant knows this Scheer and has been waiting for a chance to run him off the Main. He has not been able to put a real case together, so he has had to content himself with maintaining constant harassing pressure. For a moment he considers going after Scheer with the Gimp’s testimony, then he abandons the thought, realizing what a glib defense lawyer would do to this half-wit in the witness box.
   “All right,” LaPointe says. “Now listen to me. And tell your mother what I say. I don’t want you on my patch anymore. You have one month to find someplace to go. You understand?”
   “But, say-hey, Lieutenant? Where’ll we go? All my friends are here!”
   LaPointe shrugs. “Just tell your mother. One month.”
   “Okay. I’ll tell her. But I hate to piss her off. I mean, after all… she’s my mother.”

   LaPointe sits at the counter of a café, his shoulders slumped, his eyes indifferently scanning the passersby beyond the window.
   A small white radio on a shelf by the counterman’s ear is insisting that
   Everybody digs the Montreal Rock
   Oh, yes! Oh, yes!
   Oh, yes! O-o-h YES!
   Everybody digs the Montreal Rock!

   LaPointe sighs and digs into his pocket to pay for the coffee. As he rises he notices a sign above the counterman’s head. “That’s wrong,” he says. “It’s misspelled.”
   The counterman gives a sizzling hamburger a definitive slap with his spatula and turns to examine the sign.


Appl Pie—30¢

   He shrugs. “Yeah, I know. I complained, and the painter cut his price.”
   “Samuel?” LaPointe asks, referring to the old man who does most of the sign painting on this part of the Main.
   “Yes.” The counterman uses the inhaled oui typical of Joual.
   LaPointe smiles to himself. Old Samuel always makes fancy signs with underlinings and ornate swirls and exclamation points, all at no extra cost. He is given to setting things off with quotation marks, inadvertently raising doubts in the customer’s mind, as in:


“Fresh” Fish Daily

   He is also an independent artist who spells words the way he pronounces them. The counterman is lucky the sign doesn’t read: Epp’l Pie.

   Not fifty paces off the Main, down Rue Napoléon, the bustle and press are gone and the noise is reduced to an ambient baritone rumble. The narrow old street is lit by widely spaced streetlamps and occasional dusty shopwindows. Children play around the stoops of three-story brick row houses. Above the roofline, diffused city-light glows in the damp, sooty air. Each house depends on the others for support. They have not collapsed because each wants to fall in a different direction, and there isn’t enough room.
   It is after eight o’clock and cold, but the children will play until the fourth or fifth two-toned call of an exasperated mother brings them toe-dragging up the stoops and off to sleep, probably on a sofa in a front room, or in a cot blocking a hallway, covered with wool blankets that are gummy to the touch—bingo blankets that absorb body warmth without retaining it.
   LaPointe leans against the railing of a deserted stoop, holding on tightly as the tingle rises in his chest It is a familiar feeling by now, an oddly pleasant sensation in the middle of his chest and upper arms, as though there were carbonated water in his veins. Sometimes pain follows the tingling. His blood fizzes in his chest; he looks up at the light-smeared sky and breathes slowly, expecting to find a little flash of pain at the end of each breath, and relieved not to.
   Little kids a few stoops away are playing rond-rond, and at the end of each minor-key chant they all fall giggling to the sidewalk. The English-speaking kids play the same game with different words—about a ring of roses. All the children of Europe preserve in their atavistic memory the scar of the Black Death. They reel to simulate the dizziness; they make sounds like the symptomatic sneezing; they sing of bouquets of posies to ward off the miasma of the Plague. Then, giggling, they all fall down.
   When LaPointe was a kid in Trois Rivières, he used to play in the streets at night, too. In summer, all the grownups would sit out on the stoops because it was stifling indoors. The men wore only undershirts and drank ale from the bottle. And old lady Tarbieau… LaPointe remembers old lady Tarbieau, who lived across the street and who used to tend everybody’s onions. She always pretended to care about people’s problems in order to find out what they were. LaPointe’s mother didn’t like old lady Tarbieau. The only off-color thing he ever heard his mother say was in response to Mme. Tarbieau’s nosiness. One night when all the block was out on the stoops, old lady Tarbieau called across the street, “Mme. LaPointe? Didn’t I see the rent man coming out of your house today? It’s only the middle of the month. I always thought you paid your rent the same way I do.” And LaPointe’s mother answered, “No, Mme. Tarbieau. I don’t pay my rent the same way you do. I pay in money.”
   Poor Mme. Tarbieau, already aged when LaPointe was a boy. He hasn’t thought of her for years. He pictures the old busybody in his mind, and realizes that this is probably the first time anybody has remembered her for a quarter of a century. And probably this will be the last time any human memory will hold her. In that case, she is gone… really gone.
   The tingle in his arms and chest has passed, so he pushes his fists further into his pockets and walks on toward the liquor store, in and out of the cones of streetlight, where kids dart from stoop to stoop, like starlings on a summer evening.
   One summer, the summer after his father left home never to come back, LaPointe discovered that playing with the other kids around the stoops had become dull and pointless. In the long evenings, he used to walk alone on the street, looking up at the moon through newly hung electric wires. The moon would follow him, sliding along over the weaving wires. He would turn quickly and go up the street, and the moon followed. He would stop suddenly, then go again, but the moon was never tricked. Once, when he had been running, then stopping, running and stopping, all the time looking up and getting a little dizzy, he was startled to find himself standing only inches from the Crazy Woman who lived down the block. She grinned, then laughed a wheezing note. She pointed a finger at him and said he was a fou, like her, and they would sizzle in hell side by side.
   He ran away. But for the rest of the week he had nightmares. He was terrified at the thought of going crazy. Maybe he was already crazy. How do you know if you’re crazy? If you’re crazy, you’re too crazy to know you’re crazy. What does “crazy” mean? Say the word again and again, and the sense dries out, leaving only a husk of sound. And you hear yourself saying a meaningless noise over and over again.
   That was the last summer he played on the streets. The following winter his mother died of influenza. Grandpapa and Grandmama were already dead. He went to St. Joseph’s Home. And from the Home, he went into the police.
   LaPointe squeezes his eyes closed and pulls himself out of it. He has found himself daydreaming like this a lot of late, remembering old lost things, unimportant things triggered by some little sound or sight on the Main.
   He smiles at himself. Now, that is crazy.

   The middle-aged Greek counterman looks up and smiles as LaPointe enters the deserted liquor store. He has been expecting the Lieutenant, and he reaches up for the bottle of red LaPointe always brings along to his twice-weekly games of pinochle.
   “Everything going well?” LaPointe asks as he pays for the wine.
   The counterman gulps air and growls, “Oh, fine, Lieutenant.” He gulps again. “Theo wrote. Got the letter—” Another gulp. “—this morning.”
   “How’s he doing?”
   “Fine. He’s up for parole soon.”

   It was too bad that LaPointe had to put the son inside for theft so shortly after the father had an operation for throat cancer. But that’s the way it goes; that is his job. “That’s good,” he says. “I’m glad he’s getting parole.”
   The counterman nods. For him, as for others in the quarter, LaPointe is the law; the good and the bad of it. He will never forget the evening seven years ago when the Lieutenant walked in to buy his usual Thursday night bottle of wine. A young man with slick hair had been loitering in the store, carefully looking over the labels of exotic aperitifs and liqueurs. LaPointe paid for his wine and, in the same movement of putting his change into his pocket, he drew out his gun.
   “Put your hands on top of your head,” LaPointe said quietly to the young man.
   The boy’s eyes darted toward the door, but LaPointe shook his head slowly. “Never,” he said.
   The young man put his hands on top of his head, and LaPointe snatched him by his collar and bent him over the counter. Two swift movements under the boy’s jacket, and LaPointe came up with a cheap automatic. While they waited for the arrival of a police car, the boy sat on the floor in a corner, cowed and foolish, his hands still on top of his head. Customers came and went. They glanced uneasily toward the boy and LaPointe, and they carefully avoided coming near them, but not one question was asked, not one comment made. They ordered their wine in subdued voices, then they left.
   There had been several hold-ups in the neighborhood that winter, and the old man who ran the cleaners down the street had been shot in the stomach.
   It never occurred to anyone to wonder how LaPointe knew the boy was pumping up his courage for a hold-up. He was the law on the Main, and he knew everything. Actually, LaPointe had known nothing until the moment he stepped into the shop and passed by the boy. It was the tense nonchalance he instantly recognized. The Indian blood in LaPointe smelled fear.
   The Greek counterman is comforted to know that LaPointe is always out there in the street somewhere. And yet… this is the same man who arrested his son Theo for auto theft and sent him to prison for three years. The good of the law, and the bad. But it could have been worse. LaPointe had put in a good word for Theo.

   The Lieutenant continues north on the Main, the bottle of wine, twisted up in a brown paper bag, heavy in his overcoat pocket. He passes a closed shop and automatically checks the padlock on the accordion steel grid covering its window. Once a beat cop…
   But LaPointe had better get moving along. He doesn’t want to be late for his pinochle game.

2

   “…so all the wise men and pilpulniks of Chelm get together to decide which is more important to their village, the sun or the moon. Finally they decide in favor of the moon. And why? Because the moon gives light during the night when, without it, they might fall into ditches and hurt themselves. While the sun, on the other hand, shines only during the day, when already it is light out. So who needs it!” David Mogolevski snorts with laughter at his own story, his thick body quaking, his growling basso filling the cramped little room behind the upholstery shop. His eyes sparkle as he looks from face to face, nodding and saying, “Eh? Eh?” soliciting appreciation.
   Father Martin nods and grins. “Yes, that’s a good one, David.” He is eager to show that he likes the joke, but he has never known how to laugh. Whenever he tries out of politeness, he produces a bogus sound that embarrasses him.
   David shakes his head and repeats, his eyes tearing with laughter, “The sun shines only during the day! So who needs it!”
   Moishe Rappaport smiles over the top of his round glasses and nods support for his partner. He has heard each of David’s jokes a hundred times, but he still enjoys them. Most of all, he enjoys the generous vigor of David’s laughter; but sometimes he is tense when David starts off on one of his longer tales, because he knows the listener has probably already heard it, and may be unkind enough to say so. There is no danger of that with these pinochle friends; they always pretend never to have heard the stories before, although Moishe and David have been playing cards with the priest and the police lieutenant every Thursday and Monday night for thirteen years now.
   The back room is cramped by stacks of old furniture, bolts of upholstery, and the loom on which Moishe makes fabrics for special customers. A space is cleared in the center under a naked light bulb, and a card table is set up. At some time during the night there will be a break, and they will eat sandwiches prepared by Moishe and drink the wine LaPointe brought.
   Father Martin contributes only his presence and patience—and this last is no small offering, for he is always David’s partner.
   Throughout the evening there is conversation. Moishe and Father Martin look forward to these opportunities to examine and debate life and love; justice and the law; the role of Man; the nature of Truth. They are both scholarly men to whom the coincidences of life denied outlets. David injects his jokes and a leavening cynicism, without which the philosophical ramblings of the other two would inflate and leave the earth.
   LaPointe’s role is that of the listener.
   For all four, these twice-weekly games have become oases in their routines, and they take them for granted. But if the games were to end, the vacuum would be profound.
   Each would have to search his memory to recall how they got together in the first place; it seems they have always played cards on Thursdays and Mondays. In fact, Father Martin met David and Moishe while he was canvassing the Main for contributions toward the maintenance of his battered polyglot parish. But how that led to his playing cards with them he could not say. LaPointe entered the circle just as casually. One night on his way home after putting the street to bed, he saw a light in the back of the shop and tapped at the window to see if everything was all right. They were playing three-handed cutthroat. Maybe LaPointe was feeling lonely that night without knowing it In any event, he accepted their invitation to join the game.
   They were all in their forties when first they started playing. LaPointe is fifty-three now; and Moishe must be just over sixty.
   David rubs his thick hands together and leers at his friends. “Come, deal the cards! The luck has been against me tonight, but now I feel strong. The good Father and I are going to schneider you poor babies. Well? Why doesn’t somebody deal?”
   “Because it’s your deal, David,” Moishe reminds him.
   “Ah! That explains it. Okay, here we go!” David has a flashy way of dealing which often causes a card to turn over. Each time this occurs he says, “Oops! Sunny side up!” His own cards never happen to turn over. He sweeps in his hand with a grand gesture and begins arranging it, making little sounds of surprised appreciation designed to cow adversaries. “Hello, hello, hel-lo!” he says as he slips a good card into place and taps it home with his finger.
   David’s heritage is rural and Slavic; he is a big man, unsubtle of feature and personality; gregarious, gruff, kind. When he is angry, he roars; when he feels done in by man or fate, he complains bitterly and at length; when he is pleased, he beams. The robust, life-embracing shtetl tradition dominates his nature. In business he is a formidable bargainer, but scrupulously honest. A deal is a deal, whichever way it turns. Although it is Moishe’s skill and craftsmanship that make their little enterprise popular with decorators from Westmont, the business would have failed a hundred times over without the vigor and acumen of David. His personality is perfectly reflected in the way he plays cards. He tends to overbid slightly, because he finds the game dull when someone else has named trump. When he is taking a run of sure tricks, he snaps each card down with a triumphant snort. When he goes set, he groans and slaps his forehead. He gets bored when Moishe and Father Martin delay the game with their meandering philosophical talks; but if he thinks of a good story, he will reach across the table and place his hand upon the cards to stop play while he holds forth.
   Moishe, too, is revealed in his cardplaying. He collects his hand and arranges it carefully. Behind the round glasses, his eyes take an interior focus as he evaluates the cards. He could be the best player by far, if he were to concentrate on the game. But winning isn’t important to him. The gathering of friends, the talk, these are what matter. Occasionally, just occasionally, he takes a perverse delight in bearing down and applying his acute mind to the job of setting David, particularly if his friend has blustered a little too much that evening.
   Slight, self-effacing, Moishe is the very opposite of his business partner. During the days he is to be found in the back room, tacks in his mouth, driving each one precisely into place with three taps of his hammer. Tap… TAP… tap. The first rap setting the point, the second neatly driving the tack home, the third for good measure. Or he will be working at his small loom, his agile fingers flying with precision. If he is in a repeat pattern requiring little attention, his expression seems to fade as his mind ranges elsewhere, on scenes of his youth, on hypothetical ethical problems, on imagined conversations with young people seeking guidance.
   As a young man he lived in Germany in the comfortable old ghetto house where his great-grandfather had been born, a home that always smelled of good cooking and beeswax polish. They were a family of craftsmen in wood and fabric, but they admired learning, and the most revered of their relatives were those who had the gifts and devotion for Talmudic scholarship. As a boy he showed a penchant for study and that mental habit of seeing things simultaneously in their narrowest details and their broadest implications that marks the Talmudic scholar—a gift Moishe calls “intellectual peripheral vision.” His mother was proud of him and found frequent opportunities to mention to neighbor ladies that Moishe was up in his room studying again, instead of out playing and wasting his time. She would lift her hands helplessly and say that she didn’t know what she would do with that boy—all the time studying, learning, saying brilliant things. Maybe in the long run it would be better if he were a common ordinary boy, like the neighbors’ sons.
   Moishe’s adoring sister used to bring up little things for him to eat when he was studying late. His father also supported his intellectual inclination, but he insisted that Moishe learn the family craft. As he used to say, “It doesn’t hurt a brilliant man to know a little something.”
   When the Nazi repression began, the Rappaports did not flee. After all, they were Germans; the father had fought in the 1914 war, the grandfather in the Franco-Prussian; they had German friends and business associates. Germany, after all, was not a nation of animals.
   Moishe alone survived. His parents died of malnutrition and disease in the ever-narrowing ghetto; and his sister, delicate, shy, unworldly, died in the camp.
   He came to Montreal after two years in the anonymous cauldron of a displaced persons camp. Occasionally, and then only in casual illustration of some point of discussion, Moishe mentioned the concentration camp and the loss of his family. LaPointe never understood the tone of shame and culpability that crept into Moishe’s voice when he spoke of these experiences. He seemed ashamed of having undergone so dehumanizing a process; ashamed to have survived, when so many others did not.
   Claude LaPointe sorts his cards into suits, taps the fan closed on the table, then spreads it again by pinching the cards between thumb and forefinger. He re-scans his hand, then closes it in front of him. He will not look at it again until after the bidding is over. He knows what he has, knows its value.
   For the third time, Father Martin sorts his cards. The diamonds have a way of getting mixed up with the hearts. He pats the top of his thinning hair with his palm and looks at the cards mournfully; it is the kind of hand he dreads most. He doesn’t mind having terrible cards that no one could play well, and he rather enjoys having so strong a hand that not even he can misplay it. But these cards of middle power! Martin admits to being the worse cardplayer in North America. Should he fail to admit it, David would remind him.
   When first he came to the Main, an idealistic young priest, Martin had affection for his church, nestled in a tight row of houses, literally a part of the street, a part of everyone’s life. But now he feels sorry for his church, and ashamed of it. Both sides have been denuded by the tearing down of row houses to make way for industrial expansion. Rubble fields flank it, exposing ugly surfaces never meant to be seen, revealing the outlines of houses that used to depend on the church for structural support, and used to defend it. And the projects he dreamed of never quite worked out; people kept changing before he could really get anything started. Now most of Father Martin’s flock are old Portuguese women who visit the church at all times of day, bent women with black shawls who light candles to prolong their prayers, then creep down the aisle on painful legs, their gnarled fingers gripping pew ends for support. Father Martin can speak only a few words of Portuguese. He can shrive, but he cannot console.
   When he was a young man in seminary, he dared to dream of being a scholar, of writing incisive and illuminating apologetics that applied the principles of the faith to modern life and problems. He would sometimes wake up at night with a lucid perception of some knotty issue—a perception that was always just beyond the stretch of his memory the next morning. Although his mind teemed with ideas, he lacked the knack of setting his thoughts down clearly. Prior considerations and subsequent ramifications would invade his thinking and carry him off to the left or right of his main thesis, so he did not shine in seminary and was never considered for that post he so desired in a small college where he could study and write and teach. There was a joke in seminary: publish or parish.
   But Father Martin’s mind still runs to ethics, to the nature of sin, to the proper uses of the gift of life; so, while being David’s bungling partner is mortifying, the conversations with Moishe make it worthwhile. And there is something right about that, too. A payment in humiliation for the opportunity to learn and to express oneself.
   “Come on! Come on!” David says. “It’s your bid, Claude. Unless, of course, you and Moishe have decided to save face by throwing in your hands.”
   “All right,” LaPointe says. “Fifteen.”
   “Sixteen.” Father Martin says the word softly, then sucks air in through his teeth in an attempt to express the fact that he has a fair playing hand but no meld to speak of.
   “Ah-ha!” David ejaculates.
   Father Martin catches his breath. David is going to plunge after the bid, dragging the uncertain priest after him to a harrowingly narrow victory or a crushing defeat.
   Moishe studies his cards, his gentle eyes seeming to pass over the number indifferently. He purses his lips and hums a soft ascending note. “Oh-h-h. Seventeen, I suppose.”
   “Eighteen!” is David’s rapid reply.
   Father Martin winces.
   LaPointe taps the top of the face-down stack before him. “All right,” he says, “nineteen, then.”
   “Pass,” says Father Martin dolefully.
   “Pass,” says Moishe, looking at his partner slyly from behind his round glasses.
   “Good!” David says. “Now let’s sort out the men from the sheep. Twenty-two!”
   LaPointe shrugs and passes.
   “Prepare to suffer, fools,” David says. He declares spades trump, but he has only a nine and a pinochle to meld.
   Gingerly, apologetically, Father Martin produces a king and queen of hearts.
   David stares at his partner, hurt and disbelief flooding his eyes. “That’s all?” he asks. “This is what you meld? One marriage?”
   “I… I was bidding a playing band.”
   LaPointe objects. “Why don’t you just show one another your hands and be done with it?”
   Moishe sets down his cards and rises. “I’ll start the sandwiches.”
   “Wait a minute!” David says. “Where are you going? The hand isn’t over!”
   “You are going to play it out?” Moishe asks incredulously.
   “Of course! Sit down!”
   Moishe looks at LaPointe with operatic surprise. He spreads his arms and lifts his palms toward the ceiling.
   Roaring out his aces in an aggressive style that scorns the effeminate trickery of the finesse, David takes the first four tricks. But when he tries to cross to his partner, he is cut off by LaPointe, who manages to finesse a ten from Father Martin, then sends the lead to Moishe, who finishes the assassination.
   At one point, Father Martin plays a low club onto a diamond trick.
   “What?” cried David. “You’re out of trump?”
   “Aren’t clubs trump?”
   David slumps over and softly bangs his forehead against the table top. “Why me?” he asks the oilcloth. “Why me?”
   Too late, the lead returns to David, who slams down his last five cards, collecting impoverished and inadequate tricks.
   He stares heavily at the tabletop for a few seconds, then he speaks in a low and controlled voice. “My dear Father Martin. I ask the following, not in anger, but in a spirit of humble curiosity. Please tell me. Why did you bid when you had nothing in your hand but SHIT!”
   Moishe removes his glasses and lightly rubs the red dents on the bridge of his nose. “There was nothing Martin could have done to save you. You overbid your hand and you went set. That’s all there is to it.”
   “Don’t tell me that! If he had come out with his ten earlier—”
   “You would have won one more trick. Not enough to save you. You had two clubs left; I had the ace, Claude the ten. And if you had returned in diamonds—at that time you still had the queen—Martin would have had to trump it with his jack, and I would have overtrumped with the king.” Moishe continues to rub his nose.
   David glares at him in silence before saying, “That’s wonderful. That is just wonderful!” The tension in David’s voice causes Martin to look over at him, his breathing suspended. “Listen to the big scholar, will you? If my jack of hearts has its fly unbuttoned, he remembers! But when it comes to accounts, suddenly he’s a luftmensh, too busy with philosophical problems to worry about business! Oh, yes! Taking care of the business is too commonplace for a man who spends all his time debating does an ant have a pupik! For your information, Moishe, I was talking to the priest! So butt out for once! Just butt out!”
   David jumps up, knocking the table with his knees, and slams out of the room.
   In the ensuing silence, Father Martin looks from Moishe to LaPointe, upset, confused. LaPointe draws a deep breath and begins desultorily to collect the cards. The moment David began his abuse, Moishe froze in mid-action; and now he replaces his glasses, threading each wire temple over its ear.
   “Ah… listen,” he says quietly. “You must forgive David. He is in pain. He is grieving. Yesterday was the anniversary of Hannah’s death. He’s been like a balled-up fist all day.”
   The others understand. David and Hannah had been children together, and they had married young. So close, so happy were they that they dared express their affection only through constant light bickering and quarreling, as if it were unlucky to be blatantly happy and in love in a world where others were sad and suffering. After they immigrated to Montreal, Hannah’s world was focused almost totally on her husband. She never learned French or English and shopped only in Jewish markets.
   During the pinochle games, David used to talk about Hannah constantly; complaining, of course. Bragging about her in his negative way. Saying that no woman in the world was so fussy about her cooking, such a nuisance about his health. She was driving him crazy! Why did he put up with it?
   Then, six years ago, Hannah died of cancer. Sick less than a month, and she died.
   For weeks afterward, the card games were quiet and uncomfortable; David was distant, uncharacteristically polite and withdrawn, and no one dared console him. His eyes were hollow, his face scoured with grief. Sometimes they would have to remind him that it was his play, and he would snap out of his reverie and apologize for delaying the game. David apologizing! Then, one evening, he mentioned Hannah in the course of conversation, grumbling that she was a nag and a pest. And moreover she was fat. Zaftig young is fat old! I should have married a skinny woman. They’re cheaper to feed.
   That was how he would handle it. He would continue complaining about her. That way, she wouldn’t be gone completely. He could go on loving her, and being exasperated beyond bearing by her. Occasionally the sour void of grief returned to make him desperate and mean for a day or two, but in general he could handle it now.
   The complicated double way he thought of his wife was expressed precisely one night when he happened to say, “Should Hannah, alshasholm, suddenly return, cholilleh, she would have a fit!”
   “So just pretend nothing happened when he comes back,” Moishe says. “And whatever you do, don’t try to cheer him up. A man must be allowed to grieve once in a while. If he avoids the pain of grieving, the sadness never gets purged. It lumps up inside of him, poisoning his life. Tears are a solvent.”
   Father Martin shakes his head. “But a friend should offer consolation.”
   “No, Martin. That would be the easy, the comfortable thing to do. But not the kindest thing. Just as David is not grieving for Hannah—people only grieve for themselves, for their loss—so we wouldn’t be consoling him for his own sake. We would be consoling him because his grief is awkward for us.”
   LaPointe feels uncomfortable with all this talk of grief and consolation. Men shouldn’t need that sort of thing. And he is about to say so, when David appears in the doorway.
   “Hey!” he says gruffly. “I went out to make the sandwiches, and I can’t find anything. What a mess!”
   Moishe smiles as he rises. David has never made the sandwiches in his life. “You find some glasses for the wine. I’ll make the sandwiches, for a change.”
   As David rummages about grumpily for the glasses, Moishe steps to a narrow table against the wall on which are arranged cold cuts and a loaf of rye bread. He cuts the bread rapidly, one stroke of the knife for each thin, perfect slice.
   “It’s amazing how you do that, Moishe,” Father Martin says, eager to get the conversation rolling.
   “Agh, that’s nothing,” David pronounces proudly. “Have you ever seen him cut fabric?” He spreads two fingers like scissors and makes a rapid gesture that narrowly misses Father Martin’s ear. “Psh-sh-sht! It’s a marvel to watch!”
   Moishe chuckles to himself as he continues slicing. “I would call that a pretty modest accomplishment in life. I can just see my epitaph: ‘Boy! Could he cut cloth!’ “
   “Yeah, yeah,” David says, fanning his hand in dismissal of Moishe’s modesty. “Still, think what a surgeon you would have made.”
   Father Martin has a funny idea. “Yes, he’d make a great surgeon, if my appendix were made of damask!”
   David turns and looks at him with heavy eyes. “What? What’s this about your appendix being damask?”
   “No… I was just saying that… well, if Moishe were a surgeon…” Confused, Martin shrugs and drops it.
   “I still don’t get it,” David says flatly. He is embarrassed about his recent loss of control, and Father Martin is going to feel the brunt of it.
   “Well… it was just a joke,” Martin explains, deflated.
   “Father,” David says, “let’s make a deal. You listen to confessions from old ladies too feeble to make interesting sins. I’ll tell the jokes. To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities.”
   “Look who’s the communist,” Moishe says, trying to attract some of the fire away from Martin.
   “Who said anything about being a communist?” David wants to know.
   “Forget it. Did you manage to find the glasses?”
   “What glasses? Oh. The glasses.”
   Moishe puts a plate of sandwiches on the table, while David brings three thick-bottomed water glasses and a handleless coffee mug, which he gives to Father Martin. The wine is poured, and they toast life.
   David drains his glass and pours another. “Tell me, Father, do you know the meaning of aroysgevorfeneh verter?”
   Father Martin shakes his head.
   “That’s Yiddish for ‘advice given to a priest about how to play pinochle.’ But that’s all right. I forgive you. I understand why you overbid.”
   “I don’t believe I overbid…”
   “The reason you overbid was because you had a marriage of hearts. And who can expect a priest to know the value of a marriage? Eh?”
   Father Martin sighs. David always delights in little digs at celibacy.
   “Now me!” David gestures broadly with his sandwich. “I know the value of a marriage. My wife Hannah was Ukrainian. Take my advice, Father. Never marry a Ukrainian. Nudzh, nudzh, nudzh! When she was born, she complained about the midwife slapping her on the ass, and she never got out of the habit. There is an old saying about Ukrainian women. It is said that they never die. Their bodies get smaller and smaller through wind erosion until there is nothing left but a complaining voice by the side of the fireplace. Me, I know the value of a marriage. I would have bid nothing!”
   LaPointe laughs. “I’d like to see the hand you wouldn’t bid on.”
   David laughs too. “Maybe so. Maybe so. Hey, tell me, Claude. How come you never married, eh?”
   Father Martin glances uneasily at LaPointe.

   When Martin was a young priest on the Main, he had known LaPointe’s wife. He was her confessor; he was with her when she died. And later, after the funeral, he happened upon LaPointe, standing in the empty church. It was after midnight, and the big uniformed cop stood alone in the middle of the center aisle. He was sobbing. Not from grief; from fury. God had taken from him the only thing he loved, and after only a year of marriage. More urbane men might have lost their faith in God; but not LaPointe. He was fresh from downriver, and his Trifluvian belief was too fundamental, too natural. God was a palpable being to him, the flesh-and-blood man on the cross. He still believed in God. And he hated His guts! In his agony he shouted out in the echoing church, “You son of a bitch! Rotten son of a bitch!”
   Father Martin didn’t dare approach the young policeman. It chilled him to realize that LaPointe wanted God to appear in the flesh so he could smash His face with his fists.
   After that night, LaPointe never came to church again. And over the years that followed, the priest saw him only in passing on the Main, until they happened to come together in the card games with David and Moishe. Because LaPointe never mentioned his wife, Father Martin didn’t dare to.
   That was how LaPointe handled it. One great howl of sacrilegious rage; then silence and pain. He did not grieve for Lucille, because to grieve was to accept the fact of her death. There were a muddled, vertiginous few months after the funeral, then work began to absorb his energy, and the Main his ragged affection. Emotional scar tissue built up around the wound, preventing it from hurting. Preventing it, also, from healing.
   “How come you never married, Claude?” David asks. “Maybe with all the nafka on the streets you never needed a woman of your own. Right?”
   LaPointe shrugs and drinks down his wine.
   “Not that there would be many working the street in this pig weather,” David continues. “Have you ever seen the snow hold off so long? Have you ever seen such ugly weather? Jesus Christ! Forgive me, Father, but I always swear in Catholic so if God overhears, He won’t understand what I’m saying. Anyway, what’s so bad about swearing? Is it a crime?”
   “No,” Father Martin says quietly. “It’s a sin.”
   Moishe glances up. “Yes, Martin. I like that distinction.” He presses his palms together and touches his lips with his forefingers. “I don’t know how many times I have considered this difference between crime and sin. I am sure that sin is worse than crime. But I’ve never been able to put my finger exactly on the difference.”
   “Oh boy,” David says, rising and looking under a shelf for the schnapps bottle. “I should have problems that trivial.”
   “For instance,” Moishe continues, ignoring David, “to throw an old woman out of her apartment because she cannot pay her rent is not a crime. But surely it is a sin. On the other hand, to steal a loaf of bread from a rich baker to feed your starving family is obviously a crime. But is it a sin?”
   David has returned with half a bottle of schnapps and is pouring it around into the empty wine glasses. “Let me pose the central question here,” he insists. “Who cares?”
   Father Martin flutters his fingers above his glass. “Just a little, thank you, David. Take this case, Moishe. Let us say your man with the starving family breaks into a grocery store and steals only the mushrooms, the caviar, the expensive delicacies. What do you have? Sin or crime?”
   Moishe laughs. “What we have then is a priest with a subtle mind, my friend.”
   “Who ever heard of such a thing?” David demands. “Tell me, Claude. You’re the expert on crime here. Who breaks into a grocery store and steals the mushrooms and the caviar only?”
   “It happens,” LaPointe says. “Not exactly that, maybe. But things like that.”
   “Who does it?” Moishe asks, pouring out more schnapps for himself. “And why?”
   “Well…” LaPointe sniffs and rubs his cheek with his palm. He’d really rather be the listener, and this is a hard one to explain. “Well, let’s say a man has gone hungry often. And let’s say it doesn’t look like things are going to change. He’s hungry now, and he’ll be hungry again tomorrow, or next week. That man might break into a grocery and steal the best foods to have a big gorge—even if he doesn’t like the taste of mushrooms. Because… I can’t explain… because it will be something to remember. You know what I mean? Like the way people who can’t keep up with their debts go out and splurge for Christmas. What’s the difference? They’re going to be in debt all their lives. Why not have something to remember?”
   Moishe nods reflectively. “I see exactly what you mean, Claude. And such a robbery is a crime.” He turns to Father Martin. “But a sin?”
   Father Martin frowns and looks down. He isn’t sure. “Ye-e-s. Yes, I think it’s a sin. It’s perfectly understandable. You could sympathize with the man. But it’s a sin. There is nothing remarkable about a sin being understandable, forgivable.”
   David is passing the bottle around again, but Martin puts his hand firmly over his glass. “No, thank you. I’m afraid it’s time for me to go. I suppose the world will have to wait until next Monday for us to sort out the difference between sin and crime.”
   “No, wait. Wait.” Moishe prevents him from rising with a gesture. He has drunk his schnapps quickly, and his eyes are shiny. “I think we should pursue this while it’s on our minds. I have a way to approach the problem practically. Let’s each of us say what he considers to be the greatest sin or the greatest crime.”
   “That’s easy,” David says. “The greatest crime in the world is for four alter kockers to talk philosophy when they could be playing cards. And the greatest sin is to bid when you have nothing in your hand but a lousy marriage.”
   “Come on, now. Be serious.” Moishe takes up the almost empty schnapps bottle and shares it equally around, attempting to anchor his friends to the table with fresh drinks. He turns to the priest. “Martin? What in your view is the greatest sin?”
   “Hm-m-m.” Father Martin blinks as he considers this. “Despair, I suppose.”
   Moishe nods quickly. He is excited by the intellectual possibilities of the problem. “Despair. Yes. That’s a good one. Clearly a sin, but no kind of crime at all. Despair. A seed sin. A sin that supports other sins. Yes. Very good.”
   David gulps down his drink and declares, “I’ll tell you the greatest crime!”
   “Are you going to be serious?” Moishe asks. “Your playing the letz nobody needs.”
   “But I am serious. Listen. The only crime is theft. Theft! Do you realize that a man spends more time in prison for grand larceny than for manslaughter? And what is murder to us but the theft of a man’s life? We punish it seriously only because it’s a theft that no one can make restitution for. And rape? Nothing but the theft of something a woman can use to make her living with, like prostitutes… and wives. It’s all theft! All we really worry about is our possessions, and all our laws are devoted to protecting our property. When the thief is bold and obvious, we make a law against him and send someone like Claude here to arrest him. But when the thief is more cowardly and subtle—a landlord, maybe, or a used-car salesman—we can’t make laws against him. After all, the men in Ottawa are the landlords and the used-car salesmen! We can’t threaten them with the law, so we tell them that what they are doing is sinful. We say that God is watching and will punish them. The law is a club brandished in the fist. Religion is a club held behind the back. There! Now tell me, is that talking serious or what?”
   “It’s talking serious,” Moishe admits. “But it’s also talking shallow. However, for you it’s not a bad try.”
   “Forget it, then!” David says, peeved. “What’s the use of all this talk anyway? It helps the world vi a toyten bankes.”
   Moishe turns to LaPointe. “Claude?”
   LaPointe shakes his head. “Leave me out of this. I don’t know anything about sin.”
   “Ah!” David says. “The man who has known no sin! Dull life.”
   “Well, crime then,” Moishe pursues. “What’s the greatest crime?”
   LaPointe shrugs.
   “Murder?” Father Martin suggests.
   “No, not murder. Murder is seldom…” LaPointe searches for a word and ends up with a silly-sounding one. “Murder is seldom criminal. I mean… the murderer is not usually a criminal—not a professional. He’s usually a scared kid pulling a holdup with a cheap gun. Or a drunk who comes home and finds his wife in bed with someone. Sometimes a maniac. But not often a real criminal, if you see what I mean. What about you, Moishe?” LaPointe asks, wanting to shunt the questions away from himself. “What do you think is the greatest sin?”
   Moishe is feeling the effects of the schnapps. He fixes his eyes on the tabletop, and he speaks of something he very seldom mentions. “I thought a lot about crime, about sin, when I was in the camps. I saw great crimes—crimes so vast they lose all sense of human misery and can be expressed only in statistics. A man who has seen this finds it easy to shrug off a single beating outside a bar, or a theft, or one killing. The heart and the imagination, like the hands, can grow calluses, can become insensitive. That’s what it means to be brutalized. They brutalized us, and by that I don’t mean being beaten or tortured by brutes. No. I mean being beaten until you become a brute. Until, in fact, you become such an animal that you deserve to be beaten.” Moishe looks up and sees expressions of concern and close attention in the faces of his friends. Even David does not offer a flip remark. It always happens, when they drink a little more than usual, that Moishe gets tipsy first. The priest is abstemious, and the other two have thick bodies to absorb the alcohol. He feels foolish. He smiles wanly and shrugs. The shrug says: I’m sorry; let’s forget it.
   But Father Martin wants to understand. “So you make the greatest sin the brutalizing of a fellow man? Is that it, Moishe?”
   Moishe runs his fingers through his long, thin hair. “No, it is not that simple. Degree of sin is not based upon the act. It’s more complicated than that.” He is not sure he can say it neatly. Often Moishe brings the card talk around to some point he has rehearsed and rephrased again and again during his workday. But this evening it is not like that. When he speaks, he does so hesitantly, with pauses and searches for words. For once he is not sharing with his friends the results of thought; he is sharing the process.
   “Yes, I suppose brutalizing could be one of the great sins. You see… how do I put this?… it isn’t the act that determines the degree of sin. And it isn’t the motive. It’s the effect. To my mind, it is much worse to chop down the last tree in the forest than to chop down the first. I think it is much worse to kill a good husband and father than to kill a sex maniac. In both cases the act and the motive could be identical, but the effect would be different.
   “So, yes. Brutalizing a man could be a great sin, because a man who has become a brute can never love. And sins against love are the greatest sins, and deserve the greatest punishments. Theft is a crime, often a sin; but it only operates against money or goods. Murder is a crime, often a sin; but the degree of sin depends upon the value of the life, which might not be worth living, or which might have brought pain and misery to others. But love is always good. And sins against love are always the worst, because love is the only… the only especially human thing we have. So, rape is the greatest sin, greater than murder, because it is a sin against love. And I don’t only mean violent rape. In fact, violent rape is perhaps the least sinful kind of rape because the perpetrator is not always responsible for his acts. But the subtler kinds of rape are great sins. The businessman who makes getting a job dependent on having sex with him, he is a rapist. The man who takes a plain girl out for dinner and an expensive evening because he knows she will feel obliged to make love with him, he is a rapist. The young man who finds a girl starving for affection and who talks of love in order to get sex, he is a rapist. All these crimes against love. And without love… my God, without love… !” Moishe looks around helplessly, knowing he is making a fool of himself. He is perfectly motionless for a moment, then he chuckles and shakes his head. “This is too ridiculous, my friends. Four old men sitting in a back room and talking of love!”
   “Three men,” David corrects, “and a priest. Come on! One last hand of cards! I feel the luck coming to me.”
   LaPointe fetches a cloth and wipes the table.
   David deals quickly, then picks up his hand, making little sounds of appreciation as he slips each card into place. “Now, my friends, we shall see who can play pinochle!”
   The bidding goes rather high, but David prevails and names trump.
   He goes set by four points.

   LaPointe, Moishe, and Father Martin are grouped around the door of the shop, buttoning their overcoats against the cold wet wind that moans down the almost empty street. David lives in the apartment above the shop, so did not accompany them to the door. He said good night and began clearing things away for the next day’s business, all the while muttering about how nobody could win a game while schlepping a priest on his back.
   As he shakes hands good night, Father Martin is shivering, and his eyes are damp with the cold. Moishe asks why he isn’t wearing a scarf, and he says he lost it somewhere, making a joke of being absent-minded. He says good night again and walks up the street, bending against the wind to protect his chest. LaPointe and Moishe walk together in the other direction, the wind pushing them along. They always walk together the three blocks before Moishe’s turnoff, sometimes chatting, sometimes in silence, depending upon their moods and the mood of the evening. Tonight they walk in silence because the mood of the evening has been uncommonly tense and… personal. It is just after eleven and, although their block is almost deserted, the action on the lower Main will be in full flow. LaPointe will make one last check, putting the street to bed before returning to his apartment. Once a beat cop…
   Moishe chuckles to himself. “Agh, too much schnapps. I made a fool of myself, eh?”
   LaPointe walks several steps before saying, “No.”
   “Maybe it’s the weather,” Moishe jokes. “This pig weather is enough to wear anyone down. You know, it’s amazing how weather affects personalities. It’ll be better when the snow comes.”

  LaPointe nods.
   They cross the street and start down a block that is lit by saloon neon and animated by the sound of jukeboxes. A girl is walking on the other side of the street. She is young and unnaturally slim, her skinny legs bent as she teeters on ridiculous, fashionably thick clog soles. She wears no coat, and her short skirt reveals a parenthesis between her meager thighs. She is not more than seventeen, and very cold indeed.
   “See that girl, Moishe?” LaPointe says. “Do you believe she is committing the greatest sin?”
   Moishe glances at the girl as she passes a bar and looks in the window for prospects who don’t seem too drunk. He turns his eyes away and shakes his head. “No, Claude. It’s never the girls I blame. They are the victims. It would be like blaming the man who gets run over by a bus because, if he hadn’t been there, there wouldn’t have been an accident. No, I don’t blame them. I feel sorry for them.”
   LaPointe nods. Prostitution is the least violent crime on the Main and, if it doesn’t involve rolling the mark and isn’t controlled by pimps protected by the heavies from the Italian Main, LaPointe habitually overlooks it. He feels particularly sorry for the whores who don’t have the money to work out of apartments or hotels—the young ones fresh in from the country, broke and cold, or the old ones who can only score drunks and who have to take it standing in a back alley, their skirts up, their asses pushed up against a cold brick wall. He feels pity for them, but disgust, too. Other crimes make him feel anger, fear, rage, helplessness; but this kind of scratch prostitution produces in him as much disgust as pity. Maybe that’s what Moishe means by a sin against love.
   They stop at the corner and shake hands. “See you Monday,” Moishe says, turning and walking down his street.
   LaPointe thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy overcoat and walks down the Main.
   As he passes a deep-set doorway, a slight motion catches the tail of his eye. His hand closes down on the butt of his revolver.
   “Step out here.”
   At first there is no movement. Then a grinning, ferret-thin face appears around the corner. “Just keeping out of the wind, Lieutenant.”
   LaPointe relaxes. “Got no kip tonight?” He speaks English because Dirtyshirt Red has no French.
   “I’m okay, Lieutenant,” the bomme says, reaching under his collar to adjust the thickness of newspaper stuffed beneath his shirt to keep out the cold. “I sleep here lots of times. Nobody cares. I don’t bother nobody. I won’t get too cold.” Dirtyshirt Red grins slyly and shows LaPointe a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. “It’s half full.”
   “What are you going to do when the snow comes, Red? You got something lined up?” There are seven bommes whom LaPointe recognizes as living on the Main and having rights based on long residence. He takes care of them on their level, just as he takes care of the prostitutes on theirs, and the shopkeepers on theirs. There used to be eight recognized tramps, but old Jacob died last year. He was found frozen to death between stacks of granite slabs behind the monument-maker’s shop. He drank too much and crawled in to sleep it off. It snowed heavily that night.
   “No, I don’t have anything lined up, Lieutenant. But I ain’t worried. Something will come along. That’s one thing you can say: I’ve always been lucky.”
   LaPointe nods and walks on. He doesn’t like Dirtyshirt Red, a sneak thief, bully, and liar. But the bomme has been on the Main for many years, and he has his rights.
   It is past midnight, and the street is beginning to dim and grow quiet. Thursday is a slow night on the Main. LaPointe decides to leave St. Laurent and check out the tributary streets to the east. He passes through the darkened Carré St. Louis, with its forgotten statue of the dying Cremazie:


Pour Mon Drapeau
Je Viens Ici Mourir

   The fountain no longer works, and on the side of the empty basin someone has written in black spray paint: LOVE. Next to that there is a peace sign, dried rivulets of paint dripping down from it, like the blood that used to drip from the swastikas in anti-Nazi posters. And under the peace sign there is: FUCK YO …then the spray can ran out.
   That would be young Americans who have come to Montreal to avoid the Vietnam draft. They have a special flair for spray paint. LaPointe is not fond of the young, bearded boys from the States who hang around dimly lit coffee bars filled with eerie music and odd-smelling incense, brandishing their battered guitars, singing in nasal groans, cadging drinks from sympathetic college girls, or practicing their more-tragic-than-thou stares into space. Most of them live off federal dole, cutting into funds already inadequate for the needs of the poor of east Montreal.
   But they will pass, and they are no real trouble, aside from the nuisance of marijuana and other kiddie shit. They bring yet another alien accent to the Main, with their hard “r’s” and their odd pronunciation of “out” and “house” and “about,” but LaPointe assumes he will get used to them, as he got used to all the others.
   In general, his feelings toward Americans are benevolent, for no better reason than that when he went on his brief honeymoon—now thirty-one years ago—he found the thoughtfulness of road signs in French as far south as Lake George Village; while in his own country, the French signs stopped abruptly at the Ontario border.
   At least these young draft avoiders are quiet. Not like the American businessmen from the convention quarters of the Expo site on Ile Ste. Hélène. Those types are a real nuisance. They get drunk in their chrome-and-leatherette hotel bars, and small bands of them come up to the Main, seeking a little action, mistaking poverty for vice. They flash too much money and bargain childishly with the whores. As often as not they get rolled or punched up. Then LaPointe has to respond to complaints lodged with the Quartier Général, has to listen to diatribes about tourism and its value to Montreal’s economy.
   Always turning toward the darkest streets, LaPointe picks his way through the tangle of back lanes until he comes out again onto the Main, quiet now and nearly closed up.
   As he passes the narrow alley that runs beside the Banque de Nova Scotia, he feels a slight rush of adrenalin in his stomach. Even after all these years, his nerves, quite independent of his conscious mind, take a systemic jolt whenever he passes that alley. It’s become automatic, and he is used to it. It was in that alley that he got hit; it was there that he sat awaiting death, expecting it. And once a man loses his sense of immortality, he never regains it.
   He had put the street to bed, like tonight; and he was on his way home. There was a tinkle of glass down the alley. A figure dropped down to the brick pavement from a window at the back of the bank. Three of them, running toward LaPointe. He fired into the air and called to them to stop. Two of them fired at once, two flashes of light, but he had no memory of the sound because a slug took him square in the chest and slammed him against the metal door of a garage. He slid down the door, sitting on one twisted foot, the other leg straight out in front of him. They fired again, and he heard the slug slap into the meat of his thigh. Holding his gun in both hands, he returned fire. One went down. Dead, he later learned. The other two ran.
   After the shots, there was no sound in the alley, save for the sigh of wind around the corner of the garage. He sat there, slipping in and out of consciousness, staring at his own foot, and thinking how silly he would look when they found him, one foot under his butt, the other straight out in front of him. A long time passed. A minute, perhaps. A very long time. He opened his eyes and saw a yellow cat crossing before him. Its tail was kinked from an ancient break. It stopped and looked at him, one forepaw poised, not touching the ground. Its eyes were wary, but frigid. It tested the ground with its paw. Then it walked on, indifferent.
   The wound in his chest felt cold. He put his hands over it to keep the wind out. His last conscious thought was a stupid, drunken one. Must keep the wind out. Mustn’t catch cold. Catch cold at this time of year, and you don’t get rid of it until spring.
   He knew he was going to die. He was absolutely sure. The fact was more sad than terrifying.
   He was four and a half weeks in the hospital. The leg wound was superficial, but the slug in his chest had grazed the aorta. The doctors said things about his being lucky to have the constitution of an habitant peasant. After leaving the hospital he had a period of recuperation, lounging around his apartment until he couldn’t stand it any longer. Even though he wasn’t technically back on active service yet, he began making rounds of the Main at night, putting the street to bed. Once a beat cop…
   Soon he was back in his office, doing his regular duties. He received his third commendation for bravery and, a year later, his second Police Medal. Down at the Quartier Général, the myth of the indestructible LaPointe was even more firmly established.
   Indestructible maybe, but altered. Something subtle but significant had shifted in his perception. He had accepted the fact of his death so totally, had surrendered to it with such calm, that when he did not die, he felt unfinished, open-ended, off balance.
   For the first time since he had cauterized his emotions with hate after the death of his wife, he felt lonely, a loneliness expressed in a kind of melancholy gentleness toward the people of his patch, particularly toward the old, the children, the losers.
   It was shortly after he was hit in the alley that he met and began to play pinochle with Moishe, David, and Martin—his friends.

   Only one rectangle of dingy neon breaks the dark of Rue Lionais, a beer bar that is a hangout for loudmouths and toughs of the quartier. LaPointe mentally runs down a list of its usual clientele and decides to drop in. The barman greets him loudly and with a bogus grin. Knowing the loud greeting is a warning signal for the customers, LaPointe ignores the owner and looks about the dim, fuggy room. One man catches his eye, a dandy dresser with the thin, mobile face of a hustler. The dandy is sitting with a group of middle-aged toughs whose faces record a lot of cheap hooch and some battering. LaPointe stands in the arched entranceway and points at the dandy. When the man raises his eyebrows in a mask of surprise, LaPointe crooks his finger once.
   As the dandy rises, one of the toughs, a penny-and-nickle arm known as Lollipop, gets to his feet as if to protect his mate. LaPointe looks at the tough, his eyes calm and infinitely bored; he shake his head slowly. For a face-saving moment, the tough does not move. Then LaPointe points a stabbing finger toward their booth, and the tough sits down, grumbling to himself.
   The dandy flashes a broad smile as he approaches LaPointe. “Good to see you, Lieutenant. Now isn’t that coincidence? I was just telling—”
   “Cut the shit, Scheer. I ran into the Gimp on the street”
   “The Gimp?” Scheer frowns and blinks as he pretends to search his memory. “Gee, I don’t think I know anybody by—”
   “What day is this, Scheer?”
   “Pardon me? What day?”
   “I’m busy.”
   “It’s Thursday, Lieutenant.”
   “Day of the month.”
   “Ah… the ninth?”
   “All right, I want you to stay off the street until the ninth of next month. And I don’t want to see any of your girls working.”
   “Now look, Lieutenant! You don’t have any right! I’m not under arrest!”
   LaPointe’s eyes open with mock surprise. “Did I hear you say I don’t have any right?”
   “Well… what I meant was…”
   “I’m not interested in what you meant, Scheer. LaPointe is giving you a punishment. One month off the street. And if I see you around before that, I’m going to hurt you.”
   “Now, just a minute—”
   “Do you understand what I just said to you, asshole?” LaPointe reaches out with his broad stubby hand and pats the dandy’s cheek firmly enough to make his teeth click. “Do you understand?”
   The dandy’s eyes shine with repressed fury. “Yes. I understand.”
   “How long?”
   “A month.”
   “And who’s giving you the punishment?”
   Scheer’s jaw muscles work before he says bitterly, “Lieutenant LaPointe.”
   LaPointe tilts his head toward the door. “Now, get out.”
   “I’ll just tell the guys I’m going.”
   LaPointe closes his eyes and shakes his head slowly. “Out.”
   The dandy starts to say something, then thinks better of it and leaves the bar. LaPointe turns to follow him, but he stops and decides to visit the booth. By standing up aggressively, this Lollipop has challenged his control. That is dangerous, because if LaPointe ever lets these types build up enough courage, they could beat him to a pulp. His image must be kept high in the street because the shadow of his authority covers more ground than his actual presence can. He approaches the booth.
   The three toughs pretend not to see him coming. They stare down at their bottles of ale.
   “You. Lollipop,” LaPointe says. “Why did you stand up when I called your friend over?”
   The big man doesn’t look up. He sets his mouth in determined silence.
   “I think you were showing off, Lollipop,” LaPointe says quietly.
   The brute shrugs and looks away.
   LaPointe picks up the tough’s half-finished bottle of ale and pours it into his lap. “Now you sit there awhile. I wouldn’t want you going out into the street like that. People would think you pissed your pants.”
   As LaPointe leaves the bar, he hears two of the toughs laughing while the third growls angrily.
   That’s just fine, LaPointe thinks. It’s the kind of story that will get around.

   He turns up Avenue Esplanade toward his second-floor apartment in a row of bow-windowed buildings facing Parc Mont Royal. Above the park, a luminous cross stands atop the black bulk of the Mont. The wind gusts and flaps the tails of his overcoat. His legs are heavy as he mounts the long wooden stoop of number 4240.
   He closes the door of his apartment and flicks on the slack toggle switch. Two of the four bulbs are burnt out in the red-and-green imitation Tiffany lamp. He tugs off his overcoat and hangs it over the wooden umbrella stand. Then, by habit, he goes into the narrow kitchen and sets water to boil. The stove’s pilot light is blocked with ancient grease and has to be lit with a match. The circle of blue flame pops on and singes his fingers, as always. He snaps his hand back and swears without passion, as usual.
   While the water is heating, he goes into the bedroom and sits heavily on the bed. The only light is the upward-lancing beam of a streetlamp below his window, illuminating the ceiling and one wall but leaving the floor and the furniture in darkness. He grunts as he pulls off his shoes and wriggles his toes before stepping into his carpet slippers. He loosens his tie, pulls his shirt out from under his belt and scratches his stomach.
   By now the water will be boiling, so back he goes into the unlit kitchen, his slippers slapping against his heels. His coffee-maker is an old-fashioned pressure type, with a handle to force the water through the grounds. His cup is always on the counter, its bottom always wet because he never wipes it, just rinses it out and turns it upside down on the drainboard.
   Coffee cup in hand, he pads into the living room, where he settles into his overstuffed armchair by the bow window. Over the years, the springs and stuffing of the chair have shifted and bunched until it fits him perfectly. Holding the saucer under his chin in the way of workingclass men from Trois Rivières, he sips noisily. Four long sips and the cup is empty, save for the thick dregs. He believes that his routine cup of coffee before bed helps him to sleep. He sets the cup aside and turns to look out of the window. Beyond the limp curtain is the park, and above the dark hump of Mont Royal, the sky is a smudged gray-black, dim with cityglow. Within the park’s iron fence, lamp-posts lay vague patterns of light along the footpath. The street is empty; the park is empty.
   He scrubs his matted hair with the palm of his hand and sighs, comfortable and half anesthetized by the platitudes of routine that comprise his life in the apartment. Sitting slumped like this, wearing slippers, his shirt over his belly, he does not look like the tough cop who has become something of a folk hero to young French Canadian policemen because of his personal, only coincidentally legal style of handling the Main, and because of his notorious indifference to administrators, regulations, and paper work. Rather, he looks like a middle-aged man whose powerful peasant body is beginning to sag. A man who has come to prefer peace to happiness; silence to music.
   He stares out the window, his mind almost empty, his face slack. He no longer really sees the apartment he and Lucille rented a week before their marriage. Since her death only a year later, he has changed nothing. The frumpy furniture in the catalogue styles of the thirties stands now where it ended up after a flurry of arrangement and rearrangement under Lucille’s energetic, but vacillating, inspiration. When at last it was done and things had ended up pretty much where they began, they sat together on the bright flowered sofa, her head on his shoulder, until very late at night. They made love for the first time there on the sofa, the night before their marriage.
   Of course, the apartment was to be only temporary. He would work hard and go to night school to learn English better. He would advance on the force, and they would save their money to buy a house, maybe up toward Laval, where there were other young couples from Trois Rivières.
   Over the years, the gaudy flowers on the sofa have faded, more on the window end than the other, but it has happened so slowly that LaPointe has not noticed. The cushions are still plump, because no one ever sits on them.
   He blinks his eyes, and presses his thumb and forefinger into the sockets. Tired. With a sigh, he pushes himself out of the deep chair and carries his cup back to the kitchen, where he rinses it out and puts it on the drainboard for morning.
   Dressed only in his shorts, he shaves over the rust-stained washbasin in the small bathroom. He acquired the habit of shaving before going to bed during his year with Lucille. His thick, blue-black whiskers used to irritate her cheek. It was several months before she told him about it, and even then she made a joke of it. The fact that in the mornings he always appears at the Quartier Général with cheeks blue with eight hours of growth has given rise to another popular myth concerning the Lieutenant: LaPointe owns a magic razor; he always has a one-day growth of beard. Never two days of growth, never clean-shaven.
   After scraping the whiskers off his flat cheeks, his straight razor making a dry rasping sound even with the grain, he rinses his mouth with water taken from the tap in cupped hands. He straightens up and leans, his elbows locked, on the basin, looking in the mirror. He finds himself staring at his thick chest with its heavy mat of graying hair. He can see the slight pulse of his heart under the ribs. He watches the little throb with uncertain fascination. It’s in there. Right there.
   That’s where he’s going to die. Right there.
   The very efficient young Jewish doctor with a cultured voice and a tone of mechanical sincerity had told him that he was lucky, in a way.
   Inoperable aneurism.
   Something like a balloon, the doctor explained, and too close to the heart, too distended for surgery. It was a miracle that he had survived the bullet that had grazed the artery in the first place. He was lucky, really. That scar tissue had held up pretty-well, it had given him no trouble for twelve years. Looked at that way, he was lucky.
   As he sat listening to the young doctor’s quiet, confident voice, LaPointe remembered the yellow cat with the kinked tail and one forepaw off the ground.
   The doctor had handled many situations like this; he prided himself on being good at this sort of thing. Keep it factual, keep it upbeat. Once the doctor permits a little hole in the dike of emotion, he can end up twenty minutes—even half an hour—behind in his appointments. “In cases like this, when a man doesn’t have any immediate family, I make it a habit to explain everything as clearly and truthfully as I can. To be frank, with a mature man, I don’t think a doctor has the right to withhold anything that might delay the patient’s attending to his personal affairs. You understand what I mean, M. Dupont?”
   LaPointe had given him a false name and had said he was retired from the army, where he had received the wound in combat.
   “Now, your first question, quite naturally, is what kind of time do I have? It’s not possible to say, M. Dupont. You see, we doctors really don’t know everything.” He smiled at the admission. “It could come tomorrow. On the other hand, you could have six months. Even eight. Who knows? One thing is sure; it will happen like that.” The doctor snapped his fingers softly. “No pain. No warning. Really just about the best way to go.”
   “Is that right?”
   “Oh, yes. To be perfectly honest, M. Dupont, it’s the way I would like to go, when my time comes. In that respect, you’re really quite lucky.”
   There was a young receptionist with a fussy, cheerful manner and a modish uniform that swished when she moved. She made an appointment for the next week and gave LaPointe a printed reminder card. He never returned. What was the point?
   He walked the streets, displaced. It was September, Montreal’s beautiful month. Little girls chanted as they skipped rope; boys played tin-can hockey in the narrow streets, spending most of their energy arguing about who was cheating. He wanted to—expected to—feel something different, dramatic; but he did not, except that he kept getting tangled up in memories of his boyhood, memories so deep that he would look up and find that he had walked a long way without noticing it.
   Evening came, and he was back on the Main. Automatically, he chatted with shopkeepers, took coffee in the cafés, reaffirmed his presence in the tougher bars. Night came, and he strolled through back streets, occasionally checking the locks on doors.
   The next morning he woke, made coffee, carried down the garbage, and went to his office. Everything felt artificial; not because things were different, but because they were unchanged. He was stunned by the normalcy of it all; a little dazed by a significant absence, as a man going down a flight of stairs in the dark might be jolted by reaching the bottom when he thought there was another step to go.
   And yet, he had guessed what was wrong before he went to the doctor. For a couple of months there had been that effervescence in his blood, that constriction in his upper arms and chest, those jagged little pains at the tops and bottoms of breaths.
   In the middle of that first morning, there was one outburst of rage. He was pecking away at an overdue report, looking up the spelling of a word, when suddenly he ripped the page from his dictionary and threw the book against the wall. What the fucking use is a fucking dictionary! How can you look up the spelling of a fucking word when you don’t know how to spell the fucking thing?
   He sat behind his desk, stiff and silent, his fingers interlaced and the knuckles white with pressure. His eyes stung with the unfairness of it. But he couldn’t push through to feeling sorry for himself. He could not grieve for himself. After all, he had not grieved for Lucille.
   He insulated himself from his impending death by accepting it only as a fact. Not a real fact, like the coming of autumn; more like… the number of feet in a mile. You don’t do anything about the number of feet in a mile. You don’t complain about it. It’s just a fact.
   With great patience, he mended the torn page in his dictionary with transparent tape.
   LaPointe pulls the string of the bathroom ceiling light and goes into the bedroom. The springs creak as he settles down on his back and looks up at the ceiling, glowing dimly from the streetlamp outside.
   His breathing deepens and he finds himself vaguely considering the problem of worn-out water hosing. Last Sunday he spent a lazy morning sitting in his chair by the window, reading La Presse. There was a do-it-yourself article describing things you could make around the house with old water hosing. He has a house; a fantasy house in Laval, where he lives with Lucille and the two girls. Whenever he passes shops that have garden tools, he daydreams about working in his garden. Several years ago he put in a flagstone patio from the plans in a special section of the paper devoted to Fifteen Things You Can Do to Improve the Value of Your House. That patio figures often in his reveries just before sleep. He and Lucille are having lemonade under a sun umbrella he once saw in a hardware store window—Clearance!!! Up to 2/3 Off!!! The girls are off somewhere, and they have the house to themselves for a change. Sometimes, in his imaginings, his girls are kids, sometimes teen-agers, and sometimes already married with children of their own. During the first years after Lucille’s death, the number and sex of their children shifted around, but it finally settled on two girls, three years apart. A pretty one, and a smart one. Not that the pretty one is what you would call a dummy, but…
   He turns over in bed, ready to sleep now. The springs creak. Even when it was new, the bed had clacked and creaked. At first, the noise made Lucille tense and apprehensive. But later, she used to giggle silently at the thought of imagined neighbors listening beyond the wall, shocked at such carryings-on…