The Drowned Man Page 12

  “He was held under brutal conditions for fifty-nine days before being released. There was no real reason for taking Cross, since he personally had done nothing to offend the nationalists. But, you see, he was a symbol of British oppression and his abduction ensured the Feds would get involved. It has recently come to light that the FLQ planned to abduct the consuls of Israel and the United States as well. Peter, I don’t know what role your Scotland Yard played in the crisis but those are not the secret services I would have chosen to offend.”

  Peter smiled to signal that his companion had hit the mark. The discussion remained genial but Peter was growing concerned about the professor’s vodka intake.

  Pascal continued. “The FLQ then took a Quebec cabinet minister hostage, Pierre Laporte. The Feds and the Provincial Government declared the War Measures Act in force and martial law was imposed, though the Federal Government refused to call it that. Suddenly there were tanks in the streets of Montreal.”

  Renaud paused and Peter noticed a decline in his confident voice. Peter knew the bare bones of the rest of the story, at least the official one. The FLQ operatives murdered the cabinet minister and left him in the boot of a sedan on a side street. They eventually released Cross in exchange for the government allowing a few of the kidnappers to find asylum in Cuba. Peter had met some of the Yard officers who debriefed the trade commissioner; he had been lucky to survive. The police and army detained hundreds of FLQ members and sympathizers. It was a sad tale in which all the players overreacted.

  The professor suddenly fell silent and leaned back in his chair. Peter sensed a decline in the man’s spirits. The Russian, though he was standing on the far side of the shadowy room, seemed to notice it too and he took the opportunity to bring over coffee — to replace the flow of vodka.

  “Pascal, were you living in Montreal at the time?” Peter said.

  Pascal sat back. “I was only a first-year student in Quebec City way back then. Not everyone was sympathetic to the kidnappers. I stayed where I was and watched it all on television.”

  The follow-up question was so obvious that Peter did not dare pose it: If he had skipped the crisis in Montreal, how did his conversion come about?

  Another pause followed. The professor leaned forward. A tear emerged on his cheek. He looped his right index finger through the handle of the coffee cup, as if to steady himself, and he stared blearily at Peter. The Russian, watching from afar, looked concerned.

  “The Anglos like to say that no one was injured when the troops took over Montreal. They detained four hundred people without warrant but at least no one was shot or killed, they always said. It isn’t true, Peter. My sister was killed.”

  “My God, Pascal. What the hell happened?”

  “Not by a bullet,” Renaud continued, as if his dinner companion hadn’t spoken. “She was protesting with the UQAM students in the streets, not very far from here, and she got too close to an armoured vehicle, not a tank but what do you call it?”

  “An armoured personnel carrier?”

  “Yes. Used by all fascist governments for crowd control. The crowds hadn’t been violent. My sister never attacked anyone. Anyway, I did not take it well. I was studying politics at the time, a traditional Québécois obsession, but I immediately moved to Montreal and changed my studies to history.” Renaud looked up and tried to smile. “And that is how I ended up here with you, Peter.”

  Peter knew when to stop pressing a witness. He wanted to ask so much more about Pascal’s sister but the man was drunk and mired in his despondency.

  Changing angles, he asked in a quiet voice, “Where is the liberation movement headed now?”

  “There have been referendums. There is a separatist representation in the Canadian parliament and the provincial Parti Québécois occasionally gains power inside the province. I don’t know. There are two theories regarding our recent history.”

  Renaud recovered and fell into his lecturer’s cadence. “One is the grand theory hinging on trauma, the belief that progress is only made by upheaval. The strategy here is to win a referendum and declare sovereignty. The second is the theory of evolution, though Darwin would never recognize it in its present state. Quebec will gradually, inevitably gain more powers and move towards independence, negotiating its way out.”

  “Which theory do you belong to?”

  “I believe in the theory of exhaustion, Peter. Canada will get tired of Quebec. There will be an accretion of powers — agrandissement is a word the French like — taking over areas of legislative jurisdiction. It started with economic powers during the Quiet Revolution, then culture and language. The final break will eventually be seen as inevitable. Did you know that, in French, ‘inévitable’ also can mean ‘nécessaire’?”

  Peter was reluctant to say goodbye, knowing that he would likely never meet Renaud again. And so he skipped the farewell. He paid the bill; the Russian took the other side of the professor and they shuffled up the stairs to the street, where a cab was already waiting. Renaud fell asleep at once in the back seat. The restaurateur gave the driver an address and granted Peter a moment to lean into the passenger window and say to his friend, though he might not have heard, “Thanks for everything Pascal. I’ll be in touch.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Peter wasn’t psychic but this time the blinking red light on the bedside phone could only mean Nicola Hilfgott. He called up the message and deleted it without listening to the end. It was past 6 p.m. and he had planned to nap until eleven o’clock, then get up, shower, and be downstairs on time to meet Deroche. At that moment, his mobile chimed.

  “Peter? It’s Maddy. I’m so glad I reached you.”

  “Is everything all right? It can’t even be sunrise yet where you are.”

  “I’m at home. Leeds. And Jasper’s fine.”

  “She is?”

  “She misses you. We just came back from our pre-dawn walk. Listen, shall I pick you up tomorrow?”

  “It’ll actually be the following day, I leave tomorrow night my time and get in early, about 5:30 a.m.”

  “It’s okay. Can we talk now?”

  Peter luxuriated in her voice. Maddy represented youth and impulse and a connection to home. There was something else there too: she chased away the cobwebs from his old brain.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Peter, I’ve been doing some snooping. Only on the internet. Well, one or two phone calls. I think I’ve figured out where Alice Nahri’s from.”

  “Does she Google any better this time?” he said.

  “No. I tried every permutation of her name, augmented by ‘India’ and ‘Bihar.’ She simply refuses to pop up anywhere. There are ‘Nahri’ surnames in Bihar — Lordy, there are a hundred million people in that one jurisdiction and that may be one avenue you could pursue.”

  Peter had contacts in the Indian State Police, and Bartleben surely had more. Peter also had an old friend he could call directly in the Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian spy agency.

  She continued. “Often, British passports for Indian-born British nationals list the capital of the province where the applicant is from. The convention makes sense: birth registrations are centralized that way. Therefore, it was no surprise that Alice Ida Nahri was listed with Patna as her birth city. Patna is the provincial capital but she could easily have been born somewhere else. And I think I know where.”

  Peter knew to be patient. He imagined Jasper sitting on Maddy and Michael’s kitchen rug, listening contentedly.

  “All right, where was she born?”

  “Trivia time, Peter. What famous person was born in Motihari, India?”

  He indulged her. “Kipling?” He knew it wasn’t Kipling.

  “Orwell.”

  His brain spun out what he knew about George Orwell. Born in India but became a policeman in Burma for a time. Died young — forty-eight? forty-nine?
Every schoolboy read his novels and he did write an approving article about Kipling. He also wrote “Decline of the English Murder.”

  “Tell me,” he said. He was terrifically amused by his daughter-in-law, happy that she was so happy.

  “I Googled every major city in Bihar and came across several Nahris in the directory for the city of Motihari, which is up near the border of Nepal. Every website for Motihari boasts about its connection to George Orwell’s birthplace. He was born Eric Blair, his father being Richard Blair, who worked in the Opium Department of the Government of India. Orwell’s mother’s maiden name was Ida Mabel Limouzin; Orwell also had a younger sister named Avril.”

  Trying not to sound impatient, Peter interrupted. “Dear, is there a connection between Alice Nahri and George Orwell?”

  “Alice’s middle name is Ida, just like Orwell’s mother. It’s a lead, at least. And Alice isn’t far from Avril. By the way, Orwell’s mother moved back to England when he was just a toddler. Henley-on-Thames.”

  “Oxfordshire.”

  “Yup. The husband joined her a while later. Avril was born in Henley. There you go.”

  “That’s not quite enough,” Peter said.

  “It’s a start. British mother, probably a governess, impressed by the only local British celebrity, clings to a famous name.”

  “Keep looking. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Peter?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve opened a file. It’s sitting here on the kitchen table. It contains over a hundred pages of research.”

  “Now I’m in trouble.”

  At five minutes to twelve, Peter was waiting in front of the Bonaventure. He had waved off the standing taxi and refused the doorman’s offer of directions. He felt foolish standing there alone and it was still possible that he would reject Deroche’s great adventure and refuse to get in the surveillance car.

  Why had he accepted? From what Peter had seen, he might be getting in the car with a crazy man; he wasn’t fond of obsessive-compulsive cops. He couldn’t say that he was excited: he had endured many stakeouts, and they mixed tedium with too much coffee. And he had only agreed to “touch base” with the Sûreté on Frank Counter’s behalf. Midnight stakeouts were beyond the call of this duty.

  Peter shivered against a gust of wind and sank his hands into the deep pockets of his coat. It was the letters. The letters and the girl. There’s irony for you, he thought. Deroche had shown no interest in either, and probably thought that the Booth documents and Alice Nahri didn’t exist. But Peter wanted to know what the inspector had learned from interviewing Leander Greenwell, the book dealer, on the night of the crime. It could be the key to learning why anyone would kill to get the letters.

  Deroche arrived in front of the hotel at midnight sharp and hardly waited for Peter to open the door before saying, “Welcome to the Rizzuto tour, Chief Inspector.”

  “You might as well call me Peter.”

  “Call me Sylvain.”

  The tour began at once, Deroche’s personal story intertwining with the saga of the Rizzutos as they swept through urban and suburban neighbourhoods at wild speeds. Deroche offered his philosophy without any prompting from Peter: he loved his hometown, and every day fought to protect it, but a policeman with ambition needed a career strategy, and organized crime quickly became his focus. His hatred of the mob and his commitment to anti-mob tactics — always willing to stay up all night on a stakeout — had won him notice. Montreal was an old city. The Montreal Calabrian-Sicilian gang had been around less than seventy years, the Rizzuto family less than fifty. They were arrivistes, in Deroche’s view, cancers to be excised.

  The inspector had been born and raised in Point St. Charles. He had avoided cultural politics. Like Chicago, New York, or Boston, in Montreal your neighbourhood defined your youth but what turned you into a cosmopolitan adult was transcendence of the parochial and the tribal, he believed. For him, maturity for a Montrealer was achieved by giving loyalty to the city as a whole and suppressing neighbourhood affiliations. The mafia operated all across the town and respected few boundaries. He would do the same. Whoever was eradicating the Rizzutos was taking down opposing soldiers at will, often in public. Deroche wanted Peter to see the crime scenes in order to understand how abhorrent he found their heedless vendettas.

  The black unmarked Chevy Malibu whirled out of the Square Mile and into a neighbourhood north of the core in only a few minutes. They soon emerged into an upscale streetscape, brightly lit, with large treed lots and mansions to match. Unlike traditional Westmount, this was a freshly built enclave for the nouveau riche, including local mafia, apparently. Deroche slowed to touring speed as they passed a particularly garish house.

  “The Rizzutos have run organized crime in Montreal for three decades. Loan sharking, drug trafficking and especially protection money. They have been very successful in infiltrating the construction industry. The mafia competes in the narcotics trade with the biker gangs, in particular the Hells Angels and, until recently, the Rock Machine. Think of them as three generations of management: old Nicolo, the founder of the dynasty, Vito, his son and successor, and Nicolo, Junior. That’s the patriarchal home you’re looking at.”

  Where are we headed next? Peter thought as Deroche hit the accelerator. He idly wondered how many guns Deroche had in the Malibu. Deroche’s driving called back the residue of vodka in his system and made him queasy. The inspector pulled away and they hurtled through more neighbourhoods, until Peter was completely confused about their location.

  Deroche slowed down again unpredictably and jerked to a stop across the street from a small café, indistinguishable from a dozen others in a neighbourhood that possessed a distinctly Italian flavour.

  “By the mid-seventies, Vic Cotroni, the boss of Montreal’s drug trade, was having legal troubles, not to mention he was ageing, and the question hung in the air. Who would take over the Montreal mob? There were two rivals to succeed Cotroni. Paolo Violi was his top lieutenant. He’d managed the gang when Cotroni went to jail for a couple of years. Vito Rizzuto had ambitions himself and he was not without supporters, even though he was Sicilian. You can guess how this all got settled.”

  Peter played the willing acolyte. “A gang war?”

  “Exactly. The bar across there? Used to be called the Reggio Bar. Coffee and ice cream. Violi liked to call himself the ‘ice cream king’ and ‘the godfather of Saint-Léonard.’ This was the seventies, remember, when The Godfather was popular. But Paolo was no Marlon Brando. A shotgun blew him apart one night in 1978 inside that bar. No one was convicted of the hit. Vito Rizzuto’s power in the city grew. Cotroni expired from cancer in ’84.”

  They sped off again into the maze of streets. With the punctuation of each instalment by another headlong slalom through the city, Peter was becoming dizzy. The inspector lurched to a stop before an all-night American-style diner. Two men sat in a booth by the plate glass window but otherwise the diner appeared to be empty.

  Deroche turned off the engine. “Peter, we should be getting in place soon.”

  Peter looked at the nondescript restaurant. If the inspector was in a hurry to position them for the evening stakeout, why were they visiting the diner? They entered and took the booth farthest from the two men, whom Peter sized up as an alcoholic and his sponsor.

  Old fluorescents created a parchment glow in the diner. In this glare Deroche’s face appeared older, the stress of long nights imprinted on his sallow cheeks. They knew him in the café and the waitress looked up as he signalled for his usual. The price paid by Inspector Deroche, Peter comprehended, the universal price of all zealots, was loneliness.

  Deroche sat back against the corner of the booth. “It all came to shit for the Rizzutos in 2004. The RCMP and the Sûreté went after them with Opération Colisée and a hundred agents, while the Americans double-teamed them with RICO charges and prosecutions fo
r murder in New York State. Some of the killings they investigated were mob hits allegedly committed by Vito Rizzuto in NYC years before. We nailed them with everything we had. Threw the book at them, is that the expression?”

  “Why, yes,” Peter said, startled. He was always careful about patronizing any of the Montrealers he met and he was deeply impressed by the self-assuredness of the Québécois. He did his best to speak French whenever he could, yet he still did not fully grasp the sensitivities of bilingualism. Deroche was beyond fluent in both languages. Peter began to think that the key to the excitable inspector lay in this domain: he was the opposite of the pure laine Québécois, proud to occupy both worlds. He loved his community in all its diversity, and the city-wide infection of the gangs was his filter for surveying the state of his city. Peter decided to cut the inspector some slack.

  The waitress brought bacon and eggs, but only to Deroche. Peter was still full from his Russian dinner and he nibbled on a bagel. The woman left a carafe of coffee on the table. Deroche continued his story, checking his BlackBerry as he narrated.

  “Opération Colisée resulted in arrest warrants for both Vito and old Nick. First, we and the Americans collared Vito on racketeering charges, including conspiracy to commit the murder of two New York gangsters, and he was extradited two years later. He lost all his appeals and now he’s incarcerated in the maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado.”

  “The Supermax?” Peter said, surprised.