Before he was old enough to find a real paying job but was strong enough to bale hay, Max spent three summers at his uncle Willie’s farm near Shawbridge. Willie always had dogs roaming the property. One of them, Stella, took an immediate liking to Max. She was a blond Labrador mix, with huge swollen nipples up and down her chest. Max thought her eyes looked sad even when her tail wagged. Sometimes she would bare her fangs at the other dogs, snapping at their muzzles, asserting her place in the pack. Sometimes she’d let Max lay his head against her side in the tall grass behind the barn where he went to smoke cigarettes he filched from Willie’s pack.
After he joined the police, he befriended a cop in the mounted unit, Marcel Aubin. They sometimes met at the stables on Mount Royal before heading off to drink. Max would watch Marcel groom his horse, Cassius, and marvel at the muscles rippling under its gleaming chestnut coat. The horse’s eyes were darker than Stella’s, coal black. They gave nothing away, though Max thought he knew something about the horse, watching it snort and shake its head back and forth as Marcel worked the curry brush over his sides.
Cats, dogs, horses. These he understood. It was people that baffled him.
No animal could ever have done what was done to Irene Czerniak in the summer of 1951. However cruel a cat might be, whatever strength a horse possessed, however vicious a dog might become, none would have hurt Irene that way. A cat might have clawed her. A horse could have kicked her. A dog — gripped in a foaming rabid craze — might have ripped out her throat. But only a human could have beaten her so savagely. Once Irene’s body was finally found, after four agonizing days of searching, the pathologist, old Vaillancourt, had to append a second sheet to his report to list all the injuries inflicted upon her.
“It would have been easier to write what hadn’t been broken,” he told Max.
Hardly a bone had been left intact, he said. Her head had been pulped until it lacked structural integrity. Nearly every tooth had been cracked or knocked out.
Most of them were still her milk teeth.
Irene had just turned nine years old when she went missing from Avenue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville; she was a petite, dark-haired girl with two younger siblings. Her parents didn’t really start to worry until nightfall. Being the oldest, Irene was independent and often went to visit friends on surrounding streets, allowed to go as far east as La Fontaine Park, where she’d watch the swans and boaters in the man-made lake. She knew when she ought to be home and always returned on time. Until August 3.
On the morning of August 4, a missing persons report was filed at the Boulevard Saint-Laurent police station. Two detectives took statements from Irene’s parents while a dozen constables began canvassing the three-story buildings in her neighborhood: Laval, Rivard, and Drolet to the east; Rue de Bullion, Coloniale, and Saint-Dominique to the west. Under detective supervision, neighbors searched the laneways behind the houses. A police dog was given Irene’s scent from a pair of her pink socks, and moved through the lanes, sniffing the ground, straining against her leash.
Nothing. No one had seen the girl since five o’clock on Tuesday night, when she left the flat of her best friend, Sybil Grauman, a block east on Laval, saying she was going home to help her mother prepare supper.
It was eventually the smell that led them to her. After nearly four humid days with temperatures in the high eighties, Irene’s small body was found wedged into the crawl space under a shed at the rear of a three-story row house on Mentana, well outside the grid of streets they had been searching. The ground-floor tenant had not checked the rear, though a foul smell had been in the air the past two days. There were plenty of reasons why it might smell under a shed in a Montreal laneway — trash cans from three flats sat against the shed wall, and raccoons, squirrels, and skunks sometimes crawled under there to die. Once the tenant realized what he was looking at, a patrolman was on the scene in minutes. After the officer finished retching, he used the tenant’s telephone to call downtown.
A few minutes later, the commander of the homicide bureau, Honoré Bellechasse, called Max Handler into his office on the second floor of the municipal courthouse.
“They found her,” said Bellechasse.
Max had hoped someone else would get this call. Someone who hadn’t lost his own kid, his only son, along with his wife, in a fire. “You know Rene is still out,” he said. His partner, Rene Jamieson, was on medical leave, his left shin fractured by a bullet three weeks earlier. Wasn’t that reason enough to give the case to one of the other old couples on the squad?
“Take Marois.”
Max sighed. “No. I’ll work it myself.”
“Take Marois,” repeated Bellechasse. “The newsmen are going to be all over this and I don’t want anyone thinking I gave it the short stick.”
Max sighed again. Bellechasse peered down at some papers on his scarred wooden desk and didn’t look up again.
Marois was small, even by French Canadian standards, maybe five-six and 135 pounds. He had dark hair slicked back with Brylcreem and a pencil-thin mustache, his mouth a little sunken around his dentures.
“Boss says the parents are Hungarian,” Marois said.
“Yes.”
“You speak any of that? Boss says you speak a little of everything.”
“Maybe ten words,” Max said. “Hello. How are you. Goodbye. Like that.”
“Is that a Jew thing?”
“What?”
“To speak so many languages.”
“It’s a Saint Lawrence thing. I walked the beat there for six years.”
“It’s okay I ask you that? I don’t know any other Jews is why. You’re the only one on the force, right?”
“I’m the only detective, not the only cop.”
They rode in silence until Marois asked, “Do you know how to say I’m sorry? It’d be good to tell them that.”
“The detectives at Station 4 speak English and French,” Max said. Sajnálom, he thought to himself. Sajnálom.
They beat old Vaillancourt to the scene by a good quarter-hour. They were driving a 1946 Chevrolet sedan, while the pathologist had to lumber all the way north from Old Montreal in a ’42 Cadillac hearse that served as his mobile forensic lab, the back half weighed down with chemicals, tools, and portable lights.
Max showed his badge to the pale constable guarding Irene’s body, instructing him to bring out the tenant who had found her. “Get his story,” he said to Marois. “See if you catch anything wrong.”
While he waited for Vaillancourt, Max stood just inside the entry into the yard, as far from the body as he could. He smoked and scanned the yard slowly, from the property line to the shed. He looked side to side, up and down. Looked at the wrought-iron latch on the wooden gate, the semicircular line in the stone where the gate had been dragging of late.
He walked up and down the lane, looking at nothing, taking in everything. Once Vaillancourt arrived, Max would have to share the crime scene with him, his technicians, a photographer. He needed to be in it by himself as long as he could, just forming impressions, breathing in details. He was aware that people were watching him from their yards and balconies. They were going to have to canvass this area too, find out if anyone in these flats had a record of offenses against children. Somebody had to have seen something wrong. All it took was one. Maybe they wouldn’t have the whole story, but a detail, a snatch of it. Someone might remember who walked through the dark. The make of a car, the smell of tobacco, an unwashed body, the breath of an ogre.