City of Ice (38 page)

“Can we talk someplace? Take ten, Normand.”

Lajeunesse led him to a small kitchen nook where they were alone. Mathers missed these suburban comforts at HQ, where he never put a sandwich down for fear cockroach guerrillas would whisk it away.

“What’s up?” Lajeunesse asked him.

“How did you find the experience?”

“What experience?”

“Being partner to Cinq-Mars.”

The young man stretched his fingers taut, then relaxed them, as though releasing tension. He repeated the exercise twice more. “I don’t understand. What’re you investigating, Detective? Or should I ask, who?”

They were seated in small plastic chairs at a flimsy white table, and Mathers was too tense, too anxious, for the environment. He stood and paced, a bear in a pen. He came back. “Things are going on,” he said. “I can’t tell you what. I see you here, doing paperwork, in uniform—it makes me wonder. You wore gold on your hip like me, you were partnered to the most cele-brated cop in town, like me. Maybe I don’t want my next job to be filing clerk.”

Thinking it over, Lajeunesse deduced, “You’re the one with the gold shield. If you don’t know what went down, I’m not filling you in.”

“Cinq-Mars said you spied on him.”

That level of information truncated the young man’s rebellion, and he let himself snap back in his chair. He looked like a smoker. In this modern building he’d probably have to take himself outside.

“I was
told
to spy on him. It was my job.”

“For the department?”

“You’d turn it down? Got me my shield. I was told Cinq-Mars was a bad cop, what did I know? Nobody
liked him, I knew that much. They said if I helped put him away, my career would be in high spin. They promised nobody would know but me. So I was stupid. Shoot me—I believed them.”

Mathers nodded. “This was Internal Affairs?”

Lajeunesse blew that thought off and shook his head. “I wouldn’t sell out my worst enemy to Internal Affairs. Those guys can’t squat for shitting.”

“Who then?”

“Brass.”

“High up?”

He shook his head slowly. “Pipeline. No names, no ranks. Emissaries.”

“How’d you know you were on a pipeline?”

“Got me my shield, didn’t they?”

“So what happened? Cinq-Mars finds you out, he can’t bust you down to the filing room.”

Lajeunesse stretched out in his chair, his long legs traveling under the table and emerging out the other side, his arms stretched upward behind him. His body seemed tightly strung with a perpetual strain, and Mathers guessed that that had not always been the case.

The lanky young man smiled a little. “Émile wouldn’t work that way even if he had the stripes. He found me out. Don’t ask me how. How does Émile know anything? He just knows. Probably he suspected all along. I flunked one of his tests maybe, so he laid a trap for me and I stepped in it. Émile told me, and I told the pipeline, we were busting a warehouse for cocaine. Cinq-Mars was going in without a warrant because he distrusted the courts, he was going in without backup because he distrusted cops. So the brass had him. Not for anything corrupt, like they told me he was, but they had enough of him to rein him in, take the shine off his badge.”

Nodding, Mathers agreed, “He’s not airtight with procedures.”

“When he wants to be, he is. Don’t assume otherwise,” Lajeunesse warned.

“So what happened?” Mathers did his best to be comfortable in the sterile environment. Everything was white—the walls, the table, the cabinets, the chairs—as if they’d been hospitalized and the next item on the agenda was a lobotomy. He put his feet up on a chair.

“Him and me, we bust the warehouse. I’m expecting more cops, to nail us for procedure. What we get is high-caliber semiautomatic rifle fire. My vest took a hit, the one Cinq-Mars forced me to wear. Knocked me on my ass. We’re pinned down and I figure we’ve bought it, that’s it over for both of us. There’s more fire. We’re toast. I’m shitting my pants and I mean for real. This is a war zone.”

“How’d you get out alive?”

“The new fire? Turns out it’s from our side. Cinq-Mars had half a dozen off-duty cops show up—city cops, SQ, Mounties—good old boys who just happened to be in the neighborhood, off duty but armed to the teeth. Figure that one. Their weapons just happened to include cruiser shotguns. We’re pinned on the floor and Cinq-Mars is saying to me, ‘East of Aldgate, Normand. East of it, baby.’ ”

“Do you know what that means?”

“Nope. You?”

Mathers did his best to think this through, but he was having trouble. “You walked into an ambush that Cinq-Mars had pegged ahead of time?”

“Better get up to speed in a hurry, Detective,” Lajeunesse advised. “You never know what’s coming your way.”

“I need help here.”

Lajeunesse leaned into him. “I don’t know what you’re after, Detective. I don’t know who you’re asking for, if anybody. Maybe brass. Maybe yourself. Maybe you got your own pipeline, who knows?
Whatever your situation, I suggest you get this and get it good.”

Mathers put his feet back on the floor as a sign of his devotion to whatever the man might proffer. “I’m listening.”

“Cinq-Mars—smart guy, right? Let me tell you how smart. Not only does he figure out that I’m leaking information upstairs, he also figures out that what I say goes no higher up the ladder. He figures out it doesn’t go anywhere on the ladder. There is no ladder. He figures out that my information goes from me, to my pipeline, to Mafia, to Hell’s Angels. Tic, tac, toe.”

Mathers was breathing lightly now, as though a deeper breath might interrupt the flow of knowledge. “A trap,” he concluded. “To bump off you and Cinq-Mars.”

Lajeunesse was staring into the detective’s eyes now and shaking his head, slowly. “They wouldn’t kill Cinq-Mars,” he said. “Who’d dare? Hell would bust loose. Back then, they don’t want Wolverines up their ass, although they have them now anyway.”

Mathers listened, and wondered about a quiet voice murmuring inside him now, clamoring, wanting out.

“You?” Mathers asked quietly.

“Figure it out, Detective. I die, Cinq-Mars gets a message and my link to the brass dies with me. Cinq-Mars finds himself in deep shit for being in that warehouse with no warrant and no backup, a dead cop on his hands. It turns out he had a warrant in his hip pocket, of course, he had backup, too, but my pipeline didn’t know, I didn’t know, and the shooter sure as hell was unaware. There’s no investigation to talk about. The shooter got off fourteen rounds—that tells you he’s no innocent. He took one back at him in the eye. I had a bullet in my chest pocket. Cinq-Mars had his secret warrant, and the backup cops were an accident of fate. The whole thing went away. Except I got
busted down to the rank of pencil, on suspicion of leaking news. I never deserved the rank of detective, now they’re saying, in the first place.”

The detective took a moment to absorb the news, then stood to leave. “Did you tell Cinq-Mars who?” he asked.

Lajeunesse just looked at him, sneering a little.

“Tips,” Mathers prompted him. “Maybe not names, if you don’t have them, but leads. He could figure it out if you gave him leads. Cinq-Mars can carry a clue a long way.”

“I never told him squat.”

“Why not?”

“That bullethole in my pocket was enough of a message for me. Didn’t faze Émile all that much, did it? But they weren’t shooting at him.”

Mathers nodded, as though he sympathized. He knew that Cinq-Mars, with his quietly fierce nature, would not go along with this logic. “And now? You’ve been stuck in this hole for some time. You’re staying quiet?”

Lajeunesse uttered a sour little laugh, rising as well. “Either you’re too naive for your own good, Detective, which I doubt somehow, or you’re here to find out how solid I am. If you’re representing the shits who lined me up, the deal holds. I told the emissaries, I die, I lose my job, letters get sent, the information, every detail I know, gets distributed. In the meantime, I’m solid.”

Mathers shrugged. “So that’s how it is.”

“That’s how it is.”

“You know, I can see where you can’t tell me. You can’t trust me. But you could tell Cinq-Mars. Give him your leads. Ask him to keep quiet. At least he’ll know who he’s after. At least he can figure out who to watch out for.”

Bill Mathers was tired from his late night, and he
hadn’t been paying attention, but in the brief silence that ensued a thought raced up his spine and cranked his head higher. He only glanced at Lajeunesse. He required no further confirmation. Of course. That’s what this cop had done. He had told Cinq-Mars what he knew, and Cinq-Mars had resolutely and astutely protected him in order to spare the man his life. Having letters to send if he died or got fired was probably a notion hatched by Cinq-Mars himself, to keep him alive. Mathers recognized that if he gave any indication that he had figured this out Lajeunesse might panic.
Cinq-Mars knows! Or he’s got good clues. He probably knows which cops he’s gunning for and who’s been gunning for him.

Mathers moved quickly to change the subject. “Listen. There’s a car I’ve been trying to run down. I’ve got the make, no VIN, and the plate number. But we enter this into our computer system, we draw a false record. I’ll give you the plate number. Maybe you can work on it, on the side. Get down to Motor Vehicle Records, snoop around. You don’t have to. I’ll never mention it again unless you do. Report back to Cinq-Mars if you want, you know he’s not dirty. If you can help us, that’d be great. If not, I understand.”

Mathers wrote out the information, tore off the sheet from his notepad, and passed it across to Lajeunesse. The man regarded the number.

“At least it’s police work,” Mathers told him.

Lajeunesse concurred. “Thanks,” he said.

Outside, Mathers sidestepped puddles getting back to his car. He had work to do that afternoon. Police work. He had bad guys to chase down, perps to apprehend, victims to interview. He’d go through the motions, although his heart wouldn’t be in it. Today, the work he loved had been eclipsed. Forces were at play that scared the Jockeys off him. Now he knew why Cinq-Mars was always so damn secretive, so
infernally cautious. Cinq-Mars knew that the enemy was everywhere.

The enemy thrived on the outside and, as he had been trying to get his new partner to appreciate, the enemy dwelled within.

Thursday, January 20, after midnight

As night descended upon his pastures of melting snow, Émile Cinq-Mars was consumed by an itchiness, a readiness. He remained calm, napped intermittently, and visited the horses. When Sandra went up to bed, he kissed her good night and sliced off a piece of pumpkin pie for the road. He needed to drive city streets by night. How could he chase down nocturnal prey by daylight? Getting up before the crack was a questionable virtue when criminals were hitting the sack at that hour. The time had come to move when they moved, to be awake and in the vicinity whenever they broke loose.

He needed, now, to be a cop like André LaPierre.

Water was everywhere, in puddles and pools. Intersections were lakes. The wipers were hard-pressed to keep up with the spray from other vehicles. Cinq-Mars drove on, preoccupied, intent.

In the city, he drove through downtown, neon lights reflecting off the wet black streets, and he turned up Jeanne Mance, then onto Park Avenue as it crossed the eastern slope of the mountain. On his left, facing east, the lighted cross hung above the city as if suspended in the darkness in midair. Cinq-Mars ascended the mountain and parked in the high lot on
the eastern ridge, a man alone among lovers swarming over one another in their bucket seats.

From here one could ascend a path to the cross, not a pleasant walk in this rain or on the slippery footing precipitated by the thaw. In any case the cross was best viewed from a distance, when it was not seen as a disgruntled mesh of steel and lightbulbs. The mountain had always claimed the spiritual heart of the city, and the active spiritual forces of each era always claimed the mountain. The early Iroquois farmed the southern flank. When the leader of the first European settlement—who was aptly named de Maisonneuve,
of the new house
—prayed for the retreat of floodwaters, he prophesied that the community would be spared if a cross was erected upon the highest point of the mountain. De Maisonneuve shouldered a cross upon his back and lugged it up the hill, no easy task through the thick woods, and the waters obligingly receded. He did hold a strange notion of what constituted the highest peak, choosing instead a mere promontory, but vows made in crisis were usually compromised, even Cinq-Mars knew that.

Neither did the modern cross rest upon the highest mark, standing instead upon ground that provided the best sight lines to the eastern, and Catholic, district of Montreal. The cross sloughed off the business whirl of downtown, and the English suburbs to the west, the lightbulbs shining instead upon those who, for a time, had professed reverence for the Church.

The mountain attracted and divided, magnetized and sequestered. On one side, huddled against a sharp slope, the English-speaking university of McGill. On its opposite, gentler haunch, Université de Montréal, French-speaking. Off its satellite hill was the wealthy, largely English city of Westmount, while on the
other
flank lay Outremont, equally affluent but French. The mountain provided a sprawl of cemeteries, English and
French and Jewish, as though the height shortened the journey upward to heaven and brought those who visited nearer the realm of their departed.

Émile Cinq-Mars felt, at that moment, nearer the realm of the departed. A squall went through, and the windshield wipers thrashed time. He deeply wished he still smoked, would have crumbled at that moment if a cigarette had been offered. Before him the vast eastern stretch of the city glittered, winter white, all the way out to the oil refineries and the tip of the island. He felt the city’s thrum, the rain’s insistent throttle, the relentless rhythm of time. The mountain on which he stood was ancient, although what remained was merely the hole in the volcano, enduring for aeons, becoming the landmark that drew people to its slope, a city born. High up, quiet in his car, Cinq-Mars drew nurture from the beloved mountain, which had been his first view of the city. He was like the mountain himself. He was the plug. The section that did not wear down. The rock that remained after the lava shell was torn away. He would be the last, the very last, to erode. He remained.