“Sir?”
“Your girl. What does she think about your decision to leave the department?”
Taken off balance, Guttmann shrugs and wanders back to his chair. “Oh, she wants me to do what I want to do. Maybe… maybe I shouldn’t have joined up in the first place. I came out of school with the idea that I could do something… useful. Social work, maybe. I don’t know. I knew how people felt about the police, particularly the young, and I thought… Anyway, I realize now I wasn’t cut out to be a cop. Maybe I’ve always known it. Being with you these few days has sort of pushed me over the edge, you know what I mean? I just don’t have the stomach for it. I don’t want everyone I meet to hate me, or fear me. I don’t want to live in a world populated by tramps and losers and whores and punks and junkies. It’s just… not for me. I’d never be good at it. And nobody likes to be a failure. I’ve talked it all over with Jeanne; she understands.”
“Jeanne?”
“The girl in my building.”
“She’s canadienne, this girl of yours?”
“Didn’t I mention that?”
“No.”
“Well, she is.”
“Hm-m. You’ve got better taste than I thought. Are you going to drink that coffee?”
“No. Here. You know, this idea about the map was really sort of an excuse to come down here and think things over.”
“And now you’ve decided?”
“Pretty much.”
Guttmann sits in silence. LaPointe drinks the coffee as he looks at the wall map with half-closed eyes, then he scrubs his hair with his hand. “Well, I’d better call it a day.”
“Can I drop you off, sir?”
“In that toy car of yours?”
“It’s the only car I’ve got.”
LaPointe seems to consider this for a moment. “All right. You can drop me off.”
Guttmann feels like saying, Thank you very much, sir.
But he does not.
13
A clammy mist settles over Carré St. Louis, sweating the statue of Cremazie, sogging litter in the pond, varnishing the gnarled roots that convulse over a surface too cindery and hard-packed to penetrate. Between stunted, leafless trees, there are weathered park benches, all bearing carved graffiti in which vulgar, romantic, and eponymous impulses overlay and defeat one another.
Once a square of town houses around a pleasant park, Carré St. Louis has run to ruin and has been invaded by jangling, alien styles. To the west is a great Victorian pile, its capricious projections and niches bound together by a broad sign all along the front: young Chinese men’s Christian association. Even the lack of repainting for many years and the hanging mist that broods over the park does not mute its garish, three-foot-high Chinese characters of red and gold. The top of the square is dominated by a grotesquerie, a crenelated castle in old gray stone and new green paint, the home of the Millwright’s Union.
What in hell is a millwright, LaPointe wonders. A man who makes mills? No, that can’t be right. He glances at his watch: quarter after eleven; Guttmann is late.
Only to the east of the park is the integrity of the row houses preserved; and even there it is bogus. Behind the façades, the fashionable and artsy have gutted and renovated. Soon this bit of the Main will be undermined and pried loose from the cultural mosaic. The new inhabitants will have the political leverage to get the trees trimmed, the fountain running, the spray-paint peace symbol cleaned off the side of the pool. There will be grass and shrubs and new benches, and there will be an ironwork fence around the park to which residents will have keys.
LaPointe grunts his disgust and looks around to see Guttmann crossing the park with long strides, anxious about being late.
“I couldn’t find a parking place,” he explains as he approaches. When LaPointe doesn’t respond, he continues with, “I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”
The Lieutenant blocks the small talk. “You know this square?”
“No, sir.” Guttmann looks around. “God, there are a lot of houses. Where do we begin?”
“Let’s take a little stroll around.”
Guttmann walks beside LaPointe, their slow steps crunching the gravel of the central spine path, as they scan the buildings on both sides.
Guttmann continues along in silence, until it occurs to him to ask, “Sir? What is a millwright?”
LaPointe glances at him sideways with a fatigued expression that says, Don’t you know anything?
They cross over from the park and walk down the east side of the square, down the row of renovated buildings. LaPointe walks with the long slow steps of the beat-pounder, his fists deep in his overcoat pockets, looking up at each doorway in turn.
“What are we looking for, sir?”
“No idea.”
“It’s sort of a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? It occurred to me on the way over that if one of those lines on the map was just a few degrees off, the woman could live blocks away from here.”
“Hm-m. If she still lives here. If it’s one woman. If…”
LaPointe’s pace slows slightly as he looks up at the next door. Then he walks on a little more quickly.
“If what, sir?”
“Come on. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
They take coffee in a little place two blocks east of the square, in one of those self-conscious bohemian cafés frequented by the young. At this time of day it is empty, save for an intense couple in the far corner, a bearded boy who appears to be staggering under the impulse to communicate, a skinny girl in round glasses who is straining to understand. They work very hard at avoiding artifice.
The waitress is a young slattern who tugs a snarl out of her hair with her fingers as she repeats Guttmann’s order for two cappuccini. Back at the coffee machine, she stares indifferently out a front window hung with glass beads as she lets steam hiss into the coffee. For once they are in an atmosphere in which Guttmann is more at home than LaPointe, who looks across the table and shakes his head at the young policeman. “You talk about God being on the side of drunks, fools, and kids. I didn’t expect anything to come of your silly game of drawing lines on a map. Not one chance in a thousand.”
“Has something come of it?”
“I’m afraid so. Chances are our woman works, or did work, at that school.”
“School, sir?”
“Seventh building from the end of that renovated row. There was a placard on the door—brass. It’s a school of sorts. One of those places that teaches French and English to foreigners in a hurry.”
Guttmann’s expression widens. “And Green was learning English!”
LaPointe nods.
“But wait a minute. What about the American?”
“Could have been learning French. Maybe he wanted to set up a business in Quebec.”
“And the McGill professor?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see how he fits in. If he does.”
“But wait a minute, sir. Even if the school is the contact point, maybe it isn’t a teacher. Could be one of the students.”
“Over a period of six years?”
“All right. A teacher, then. So what do we do now?”
“We go talk to somebody. See if we can find out which teacher is ours.” LaPointe rises.
“Aren’t you going to finish your coffee, sir?”
“This swill? Just tip the greasy kid and let’s get out of here.”
Considering the slop and dregs he has had to drink with the Lieutenant in Chinese, Greek, and Portuguese cafés, Guttmann doubts that it is the quality of the coffee LaPointe is rejecting.
“…so, out of a total faculty of thirteen, that would make a full-time equivalency of nine or nine and a half, considering that some of my teachers are only part-time, and some are university students training in our techniques of one-to-one intensive language assimilation.” Mlle. Montjean lights her cigarette from a marble-and-gold lighter, takes a deep drag, and tilts her head back to jet the uninhaled smoke upward, away from her guests. Then she lightly touches the tip of her tongue between thumb and forefinger, as though to pluck off a bit of tobacco, a residual gesture from some earlier time when she smoked unfiltered cigarettes.