The sting of the reprimand slides quickly from the girl’s smooth mind, and soon she is lost in rapt fascination, looking up at the woman dancing in the blue and orange light, all eyes on her. Show business.
Guttmann finishes his ouzo at a gulp. “I hate to admit it, but I’m beginning to agree with you.”
“You’d better watch that.”
“This Green was real shit.”
“Yes. Come on. Let’s go.”
At the door, LaPointe looks back at the dimly lit bar, small in the cavern of the unused dance floor. The man with the goatee is chewing and rolling his eyes.
They walk side by side down Rachel toward the Main, toward the luminous cross that advertises Christianity from the crest of Mont Royal.
“It’s still early,” Guttmann says. “You want a cup of coffee?”
That’s a switch, and LaPointe senses that the young man wants to talk, but he feels too fed up, too tired of it all. “No, thanks. I’ll just go home. I’m tired.”
They walk on in silence.
“That Green…” Guttmann mutters.
“What?”
“I mean, come on. That’s too sick.”
“No sicker than that dancer.”
“Sir?”
“The girl is her daughter.”
Guttmann walks on mechanically, staring ahead, his fists clenched in his overcoat pockets. They cross over St. Laurent, where LaPointe stops to say goodbye. “You have a date with your girl tonight?” he asks.
“Yes, sir. Nothing big. We’re just going to sit around and talk about things.”
“Like the future?”
“That sort of thing. Will you tell me something, Lieutenant? Does anyone survive a career as a cop and still feel anything but disgust for people?”
“A few do.”
“You?”
LaPointe examines the boy’s earnest, pained face. “See you in the morning.”
“Sure.”
12
Two days pass; Guttmann has returned to Detective Sergeant Gaspard to finish out his tour as a Joan. When no new leads open on the Green case, there is talk down in homicide of closing down the investigation.
Pig weather continues to depress spirits and abrade tempers, and a popular rumor circulates on the Main to the effect that Russian and American atomic testing has done irremediable damage to the polar icecap, and the weather will never return to normal.
LaPointe’s time and attention is soaked up by typical problems of the Main. Mr. Rothmann’s butcher shop is broken into; the newspaper vendor on the corner of Rue Roy is held up for eight dollars and thirty-five cents; and the construction force demolishing a block of row houses to make way for a high-rise parking facility arrives on the site one morning to find that extensive vandalism has ruined work and tools. On a scabby brick wall, the posse of vandals has painted:
On the Rothmann break-in, nothing was stolen and the only damage was to the doorframe and lock. Probably some street tramp or shelterless American draft avoider trying to get out of the damp cold of night. Once again, LaPointe advises Mr. Rothmann to install special police locks, and once again Mr. Rothmann argues that the police ought to pay for them. After all, he’s a taxpayer, isn’t he?
The holdup of the newspaper vendor is a different matter. LaPointe presses it to a quick finish because he realizes that someone might have been killed. Not the victim; the holdup man.
The paper seller could only give a description of the thief’s shoes and legs, and of the gun. Tennis shoes, bell-bottom jeans. A kid. And a black gun with a tiny hole in the barrel. The tiny hole meant the weapon was one of those exact-replica waterguns the Montreal police have made repeated complaints about, to no avail. After all, the people who sell them to kids are taxpayers, aren’t they? It’s a free country, isn’t it?
LaPointe makes two telephone calls and talks with four people on the street. The word is out: the Lieutenant wants this kid, and he wants him right now. If he doesn’t have him by noon, the street is going to become a hard place to live on.
Two and a half hours later, LaPointe is sitting in the cramped kitchen of a basement flat with the thief and his parents. The father admits he doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with these goddamned kids these days. The mother says she works her fingers to the bone, never sees anything but these four walls, and what thanks does it get you? You carry them under your heart for nine months, you feed them, you send them to Mass, and what does it get you?
The kid sits at the kitchen table, picking at the oilcloth. His eyes lowered, he answers LaPointe’s questions in a reluctant monotone. Once he makes the mistake of sassing.
In two steps, LaPointe crosses the room and snatches the kid up by the collar of his imitation-leather jacket. “What do you think happens if a cop chases you and you flash that goddamned water pistol? Hein? You could be killed for eight lousy bucks!”
There is fear in the kid’s eyes; defiance too.
LaPointe drops him back into his chair. What’s the use?
It’s a first offense. The Lieutenant can make arrangements, can find a job for the kid swabbing out some restaurant on the Main. The boy will pay the newspaper vendor back. He will have no record. But next time…
As he leaves, he hears the mother whining about carrying a child under her heart for nine months, and what thanks does she get? Heartache! Nothing but heartache!
There will be a next time.
About the vandalism at the building site, LaPointe does nothing, although this is not the first time it has happened. He goes through the motions, but he does nothing. His sympathy is with the people who are losing their homes and being shipped out to glass-and-cement suburban slums high-rising from muddy “green zones” dotted with emaciated twigs of one-year-old trees tied by rags to supporting sticks.
Corners, whole blocks of row houses are being torn down to make room for commercial buildings. Narrow streets of three-story Victorian brick with lead-sheeted mansard roofs are falling prey to the need to centralize small industry and commerce without threatening land values and the quality of life in the better neighborhoods. The residents of the Main are too poor, too ignorant, too weak politically to protect themselves from the paternal tyranny of city planning committees. The Main is a slum, anyway. Bad plumbing; rats and roaches; inadequate playgrounds. Relocating the immigrants is really for their own good; it helps to break up the language and culture nodes that delay their assimilation into New Montreaclass="underline" Chicago on the St. Lawrence.
Although LaPointe knows that this blind striking out at the construction sites will change nothing, that the little people of the Main must lose their battle and ultimately their identity, he understands their need to protest, to break something.
More subtle than these dramatic attacks on the Main are the constant erosions from all points on its perimeter. Individuals and organizations have discovered that protecting what is left of old Montreal can be a profitable activity. Under the pretext of preservation, rows of homes are bought up and gutted, leaving only “quaint” shells. Good plumbing and central heating are installed, rooms enlarged, and residences are created for affluent and swinging young lawyers, pairs of career girls, braces of interior decorators. It is fashionable to surprise friends by saying you live on the Main. But these people don’t live on the Main; they play house on the Main.
LaPointe sees it all happening. In his bitterest moods he feels that this bubble in his chest is consonant with the rest of it; there wouldn’t be much point in surviving the Main.