City of Ice (37 page)

“Cats and dogs live in our homes because they know how to control their bowels. If horses and pigs and goats and lizards and elephants and hippos could handle their personal hygiene, we’d have domesticated them aeons ago. Giraffes in the living room, rhinos in
the kitchen. Gazelles in our backyards if we could afford the real estate.”

“Think so?”

“Absolutely!” He raised a hand to emphasize his point. “One of the earliest myths of our culture is of Noah saving animals from mass extinction. I consider the myth to be embedded in our genetic code, because that’s why we
are.
”

“Exactly what vitamins are you taking these days, Émile? I want a complete breakdown of your prescription list.” Feeling happy again herself, she was delighted that it was so easy to arouse a smile from his usually dour, priestly visage.

“I’ve been thinking, Sandra, about the history of life. On earth it’s been marked by catastrophe. The mind of nature has a long memory. Nature has never forgotten the Permian period, for instance—a mass extinction that came on fast. We nearly lost the planet. Ninety percent of ocean species, gone. Seventy percent of reptile and amphibian families, thirty percent of insect species, vanished. I think nature said, ‘Holy cow, that was a close one!’ ”

“Nature didn’t have cows back then.”

Cinq-Mars had to check himself before he took her meaning, and there it was again, an unmistakable upturning around the edges of his mouth.

“All right, so nature said, ‘Jumping leaping lizards!’ Do you want me to go on?”

“Don’t stop.”

He nodded, thinking, finding his place in the scheme of things, working his way back through the musings that had interfered with last night’s rest. “Okay, so nature sees itself come close to being annihilated, and it thinks, ‘What we need are robust creatures for land. Let’s create dinosaurs. To support complete domination by the dinosaurs, we’ll create plant life and animal life for their consumption. Let’s
hope they’re tough enough to endure whatever comes next.’ They weren’t, as things turned out. So after the dinosaurs journeyed off into that good night, nature made another choice. This time it banked on brain-power. But brains had to be placed within a tough species, a competitive, aggressive, strong-willed species, because the earth is no place for wimps. So humankind evolved, developed with the express purpose of endlessly enhancing its mental capacity so that the species could care for the planet, so that we could anticipate natural and interstellar catastrophes. We are who we are because of why we are. We have lived with dogs in our dwellings since the Stone Age. We ride horses. We have deified the cat. Meanwhile, Hell’s Angels exist because down through the ages we required and acquired their traits—the barbarian interest in expansion, the aggression. Ultimately, they may still be with us because they’re an archaic remnant of ourselves we haven’t wholly solved. That’s why we create so many troubles for ourselves, why we war, to develop our sense of survival, to enhance our ability to solve problems, to heighten our belief in what is right and what is wrong, to propel our technology forward, to make us capable of crisis management for what must surely lie ahead.”

Sandra stared at him awhile before she coughed with apparent significance. “Excuse me, sir. But it sounds as though you’re making excuses for the excesses and horrors of the species. Humankind has delivered the world to the brink of destruction—men, especially, I might add—not cats and dogs.”

“To the brink but not over the brink, that’s my point. We are who we are because of why we are. It’s our role to learn to manage annihilations and extinctions. We’re here so that nature can have a mind with which to keep itself company—an organism with which it communicates. We’re here as crisis managers
to preserve not merely our own species—which was the problem with dinosaurs, their inability to manage the environment—but our companion species also. Everything we do trains us for that calling. Whether it’s engineering or theology, war making or economics, literature or crop dusting, everything we do and have done ultimately revolves around learning to lovingly manage the world and avoid catastrophe. We’re babes in the woods, in terms of our time on earth, we’re in kindergarten. We’ve got a long way to go. Together we’re just one complex Noah building an ark.”

“Which means what, Émile? Will you honor the Hell’s Angels for being ruthless? Will you refuse to arrest them?”

Cinq-Mars moved over slightly and dropped an arm around her shoulders, tugged her closer to him. “No,” he conceded, again with a smile, acknowledging that she had not been as serious as he might have preferred. “But they started me thinking. I was wondering why people bother to romanticize them. It’s been a long time since they were postwar rebels, a bunch of bomber pilots looking to revive past glories. Now they’re drug runners and murderers on wheels who wear sports shirts and pressed pants, unless they’re putting on a show specifically calculated to induce fear. Even people who fear them also tend to think they’re cool.”

Sandra’s sudden burst of laughter startled them both.

“What?”

“Cool. I’ve never heard you use a word like cool before.”

“I know the lingo.”

“Yeah, like maybe twenty years behind the times, but that’s okay. It’s a surprise, that’s all.” She returned his affection by circling both arms around his waist and squeezing. “Go on.”

“Like it or not, we’re not surprised by their presence, or by their behavior. Bikers have been chronic throughout the ages. They’re leftovers. They’re representative of our past, and it can be romantic to think about sloughing off our responsibilities and returning to a different time. There’s a Hell’s Angel who plays in the Quebec Symphony, so we think, ‘Hey, maybe these guys aren’t so bad, maybe they’re just misunderstood.’”

“The romantic, sensitive rebel,” Sandra put in.

“If we forget that a bomb is a bomb,” Cinq-Mars marched on, “that murder is murder. No misunderstanding there. But I was wondering, why are they invading Montreal again? We drove them out, years ago. We cracked the back of the Mafia as well, they’ve never returned to full force. Now the Angels live in the countryside and small towns and do well, their lives are comfortable, they’re unbelievably rich—filthy rich—they do good business and have smooth country roads to ride their Harleys on and the SQ pretty much leaves them alone. They wear fine clothes and are planning to open a chain of fast-food restaurants. Why do they want back into Montreal, where they’re forced to battle the Rock Machine with bombs and be hassled by cops? Then it hit me.”

“What did, Émile?” She encouraged him with another hug.

“A reporter, jokingly, asked the Angels where they stood on the matter of Quebec independence. They replied, everyone thought in jest, that the Angels preferred to see Canada stay together. But I tried to figure out why they would say that, why on earth would they think that way? They’d have the SQ in their pockets, the Mounties would be out of their hair. Then I caught it. They’re going national. They control the east coast already. Their puppet gangs rule the
west. Their next move is to take back Montreal, then annihilate the Outlaws in Ontario.”

Sandra nodded. “They’re expansionists. Nothing new among criminals.”

“Except that they had retreated. What’s their motivation for the new moves? The Russians. They’re the ones saying to them, Take Canada, make a move on America, we’ve got Russia, the European Hell’s Angels are getting stronger, between us we’ll run crime through half the world. After that we’ll make treaties with the Asian gangs. The Angels want to be part of the bigger deal, because if they declined, if they said, Sorry, we’re content to be country squires for now, thanks very much, we like the quiet life, we’re thinking of planting apple trees and seeing if more of us can’t play in the symphony, they’d’ve been driven out, and the Russians would have helped with the big push. It’s crisis management, Sandra, it’s expand or be smashed.”

A gray gelding nuzzled each of them in a quest for attention before skipping off again.

“How bad is it, Émile?” Sandra asked her husband, her voice hushed.

He had wrestled with the matter throughout the night, listening to the rains storm, beat on the windows, the roof, feeling the warm air of the thaw on his skin. Achieving resolution had restored a sense of freedom, liberated him from his timidity, his restraints. If he was going to lose his wife, he would do so because he had chosen to include her in his life, not exclude her. If he was going to wreck his marriage, he would do so on his terms, rather than be governed by fear and apprehension. If he was going to die, he would put right what needed to be put right. Overcoming fear was integral to his mission from here on in, and that process had to begin at home, or not begin at all.

“Until now, I was afraid to let you know what was going on in my life because the news isn’t good.”

“Right. I know how you go around sparing me bad news. You buy me a shotgun and enough shells to hold down the fort until the cavalry arrives. You ask me if I can shoot straight. That really convinces me that everything is peachy.” She had moved away from him, pacing. “What about now, Émile? Have you made an arrest? What’s changed?”

“No arrest.”

“What’s changed?”

He sighed. He gazed back on the horses, as though they inspired courage. He turned to her. “Sandra, it’s bad. I can’t hide it from you anymore. Also, I’m not sure that I can go it alone anymore. I’m not entirely self-contained. I’m too old for this. I need you. I need to confide in you. I can’t tell you everything that’s going on without scaring both of us half to death, but I need to talk to somebody. I hope it’ll be you, Sandra. If you want to leave, I can’t blame you. I’ll understand. I’ll make it easy. But I hope you stay.”

Sandra Lowndes studied her husband’s face before she also turned as though to consult the horses. She observed their grace and pleasure, their friskiness out on such a day in the middle of the most confining of winters. When she turned to face him again, she tucked her head into the small hollow just under the front of his shoulder. She loved that spot. How she loved that quiet spot.

Before noon Mathers was traveling into the quiet residential community of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce west of downtown, driving up Mariette Avenue to Police Station 15. This was a nice suburb. Mathers could see himself living here in a year or two. The houses were duplexes in the Montreal style, the landlord living on the bottom floor, a tenant above. The homes were a
good size, red brick, built in the thirties, when crafts-manship still meant something. Good mahogany in those homes. Stained glass on doors and front windows. Small yards, front and back, were covered in melting snow now, but Mathers imagined that his wife could putter in a flower garden in the summertime without it being too much work.

The rains had come. The swift January thaw melted snowbanks into ponds.

The parking lot to Station 15 had history. An unarmed black youth had been shot dead by a policeman there, a bad killing. Either it was a murder or the cop was too dumb to have been allowed to carry a weapon. He said it went off accidentally. Since the black kid was running away, that theory hadn’t impressed anyone.

Even quiet neighborhoods had their troubles.

The killing had shaken the city. Black immigration to Montreal from the Caribbean had been growing at a terrific rate, and there were those who resented the new arrivals. Many French considered themselves to be the oppressed people here. They were trying to create a society for themselves. The rallying cry of the independence-seeking government of the day and their avid supporters was
Québec aux Québecois!
Quebec for Quebeckers. They got away with it because the slogan was originally intended to mean no English, an attack against the powerful. But to many immigrants, who were the disadvantaged, the powerless, the chant seemed to be aimed squarely at them. For some, the death of the black youth had been a trial of the community. Who was the victim? The dead boy, or the French police officer who had lost his job? Mathers knew that the question should never have been put forward, but in some quarters, and around watercoolers in the department, it had been raised. That’s when he felt his separateness, that at a certain point he
would always be defined by his colleagues as being English, for his opinion on such a matter was neither welcomed nor considered, he was one of
les autres,
the others, the English, he wouldn’t be able to understand, and worse than that he was probably out to get them, to make them look bad, he couldn’t be trusted.

Mathers checked things out. There was something to be said for living in an English neighborhood. Among your own. He thought that he might like to try it sometime. If that’s how the cultures remained separate, then so be it. He knew the language, he worked among the French, he loved Montreal. But if he couldn’t be trusted, the hell with it, he’d live among the English. He couldn’t batter his head against a wall forever.

At the entrance off the rear parking lot, Mathers flipped open his coat to flash his hip shield and asked to see Constable Normand Lajeunesse. Directed to a second-floor office, he found the uniform lazily filing reports. Mathers knew that he was working for a task force on auto theft.

He put the cop in his midtwenties. Watched him grudgingly move around the room, as if his assigned tasks could give him cancer. The story on Lajeunesse was that he had risen quickly in the force before tumbling with greater speed.

“I’m not here about a car,” he told him when the man finally came over.

“That’s what I do, cars.” He was thin, six-two, a strong-boned, intelligent face, and he was hostile.

“I want to discuss Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars.” His partner had suggested this himself, a while back. The meeting was overdue, and Mathers sensed that it had become necessary.

Lajeunesse looked at him as if warning lights blinked inside his head and sirens were rampant. “Sorry, who’d you say you were? Internal or—”

“Bill Mathers. I’m partner to Émile these days.”

The young officer was genuinely curious. “What do you want with me?”