The Main

1

Montreal, November

Evening on the Main, and the shops are closing. Display bins have been pulled back off the sidewalks; corrugated shutters clatter down over store windows. One or two lights are kept on as a deterrent to burglary; and empty cash registers are left ajar so that thieves won’t smash them open pointlessly.

The bars remain open, and the cafés; and loudspeaker cones over narrow music stalls splash swatches of noise over sidewalks congested with people, their necks pulled into collars, their shoulders tight against the dank cold. The young and the busy lose patience with the crawling, faceless Wad. They push and shoulder their way through, confusing the old, irritating the idle. The mood of the crowd is harried and brusque; tempers have been frayed by weeks of pig weather, with its layers of zinc cloud, moist and icy, pressing down on the city, delaying the onset of winter with its clean snows and taut blue skies. Everyone complains about the weather. It isn’t the cold that gets you, it’s the damp.

The swarm coagulates at street corners and where garbage cans have been stacked on the curb. The crowd surges and tangles, tight-packed but lonely. Tense faces, worried faces, vacant faces, all lit on one side by the garish neon of nosh bars, saloons, cafés.

In the window of a fish shop there is a glass tank, its sides green with algae. A lone carp glides back and forth in narcotized despair.

Schoolboys in thick coats and short pants, bookbags strapped to their backs, snake through the crowd, their faces pinched with cold and their legs blotchy red. A big kid punches a smaller one and darts ahead. In his attempt to catch up and retaliate, the small boy steps on a man’s foot. The man swears and cuffs him on the back of the head. The boy plunges on, tears of embarrassment and anger in his eyes.

Fed up with the jams and blockages, some people step out into the street and squeeze between illegally parked cars and the northbound traffic. Harassed truck drivers lean on their air horns and curse, and the braver offenders swear back and throw them the fig. The swearing, the shouting, the grumbling, the swatches of conversation are in French, Yiddish, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Hungarian, Greek—but the lingua franca is English. The Main is a district of immigrants, and greenhorns in Canada quickly learn that English, not French, is the language of success. Signs in the window of a bank attest to the cosmopolitan quality of the street:

And there is a worn street joke: “I wonder who in that bank can speak all those languages?”

“The customers.”

Commerce is fluid on the Main, and friable. Again and again, shops open in a flurry of brave plans and hopes; frequently they fail, and a new man with different plans and the same hopes start business in the same shop. There is not always time to change the sign. Retail and wholesale fabrics are featured in a store above which the metal placard reads: PAINTS.

Some shops never change their proprietors, but their lines of goods shift constantly, in search of a profitable coincidence between the wants of the customer and the availability of wholesale bargains. In time, the shopkeepers give up chasing phantom success, and the waves of change subside, leaving behind a random flotsam of wares marking high tides in wholesale deals and low tides in customer interest. Within four walls you can buy camping gear and berets, batteries and yard goods, postcards and layettes, some slightly damaged or soiled, all at amazing discounts. Such shops are known only by the names of their owners; there is no other way to describe them.

And there are stores that find the task of going out of business so complicated that they have been at it for years.

The newspaper seller stands beside his wooden kiosk, his hands kept warm under his canvas change belt. He rocks from foot to foot as he jiggles his coins rhythmically. He never looks up at the passers-by. He makes change to hands, not to faces. He mutters his half of an unending conversation, and he nods, agreeing with himself.

Two people press into a doorway and talk in low voices. She looks over his shoulder with quick worried glances. His voice has the singsong of persuasion through erosion.

“Come on, what do you say?”

“Gee, I don’t know. I don’t think I better.”

“What you scared of? I’ll be careful.”

“Oh, I better be getting home.”

“For crying out loud, you do it for the other guys!”

“Yeah, but…”

“Come on. My place is just around the corner.”

“Well… no, I better not”

“Oh, for crying out loud! Go home then! Who wants you?”

An old Chasidic Jew with peyiss, shtreimel level on his head, long black coat scrupulously brushed, returns home from work, maintaining a dignified pace through the press of the crowd. Although others push and hurry, he does not At the same time, he avoids seeming too humble, for, as the saying has it, “too humble is half proud.” So he walks without rushing, but also without dawdling. A gentle and moderate man.

Always he checks the street sign before turning off toward his flat in a low brick building up a side street. This although he has lived on that street for twenty-two years. Prudence can’t hurt.

“The Main” designates both a street and a district. In its narrowest definition, the Main is Boulevard St. Laurent, once the dividing line between French and English Montreal, the street itself French in essence and articulation. An impoverished and noisy street of small shops and low rents, it naturally became the first stop for waves of immigrants entering Canada, with whose arrival “the Main” broadened its meaning to include dependent networks of back streets to the west and east of the St. Laurent spine. Each succeeding national tide entered the Main bewildered, frightened, hopeful. Each successive group clustered together for protection against suspicion and prejudice, concentrating in cultural ghettos of a few blocks’ extent.

They found jobs, opened shops, had children; some succeeded, some failed; and they in turn regarded the next wave of immigrants with suspicion and prejudice.

The boundary between French and English Montreal thickened into a no man’s land where neither language predominated, and eventually the Main became a third strand in the fiber of the city, a zone of its own consisting of mixed but unblended cultures. The immigrants who did well, and most of the children, moved away to English-speaking west Montreal. But the old stayed, those who had spent their toil and money on the education of children who are now a little embarrassed by them. The old stayed; and the losers; and the lost.

Two young men sit in a steamy café, looking out onto the street through a window cleared of mist by a quick palm swipe. One is Portuguese, the other Italian; they speak a melange of Joual slang and mispronounced English. Both wear trendy suits of uncomfortable cut and unserviceable fabric. The Portuguese’s suit is gaudy and cheap; the Italian’s is gaudy and expensive.

“Hey, hey!” says the Portuguese. “What you think of that? Not bad, eh?”

The Italian leans over the table and catches a quick glimpse of a girl clopping past the café in a mini, platform boots, and a bunny jacket. “Not so bad! Beau pétard, hein?”

“And what you think of those foufounes?”

“I could make her cry. I take one of those in each hand, eh? Eh?” In robust mime, the Italian holds one in each hand and moves them on his lap. “She would really cry, I’m tell you that.” He glances up at the clock above the counter. “Hey, I got to go.”

“You got something hot waiting for you?”

“Ain’t I always got something hot waiting?”

“Lucky son of a bitch.”

The Italian grins and runs a comb through his hair, patting down the sides with his palm. Yeah, maybe he’s lucky. He’s lucky to have the looks. But it takes talent, too. Not everybody’s got the talent.

In just over five hours, he will be kneeling in an alley off Rue Lozeau, his face pressed against the gravel. He will be dead.

There is a sudden block in the flow of pedestrians. Someone has vomited on the sidewalk. Chunks of white in a sauce of ochre. People veer to avoid it but there is a comma of smear where a heel skidded.

A cripple plunges down the Main against the flow of pedestrian traffic. Each foot slaps flat upon the pavement as he jerks his torso from side to side with excessive, erratic energy. He lurches forward, then plants a foot to prevent himself from falling. A lurch, a twist, the slack flap of a foot. He is young, his face abnormally bland, his head too large. A harelip contorts his mouth into something between a grin and a sneer. His eyes are huge behind thick iron-rimmed glasses which are twisted on his face so that one eye looks through the bottom of its lens, while the other pupil is bisected by the top of its lens. Coiled back against his chest is a withered, useless hand in a pale blue glove. An incongruous curved pipe is clenched between his teeth, and he sucks it moistly. Sweet aromatic smoke pours over his shoulder and disintegrates in the eddies of his lurching motion.

Pedestrians are startled out of their involute thoughts to see him barging toward them through the crowd. They move aside to make room, eager to avoid contact. Eyes are averted; there is something frightening and disgusting about the Gimp, who drives ahead in his determined, angry way. The human flood breaks at his prow, then blends back in his wake, and people forget him immediately he has passed. They have their own problems, their own plans; each is isolated in and insulated by the alien crowd.

Chez Pete’s Place is a bar for the street bommes; it is the only place that admits them, and their presence precludes any other clientele. Painted plywood has replaced glass in the window, so it is always night inside. The fat proprietor sits slumped behind the bar, his watery eyes fixed on a skin magazine in his lap. Around a table in the back sits a knot of ragged old men, their hands so filthy that the skin shines and crinkles. They are sharing a half-gallon bottle of wine, and one of the bommes, Dirtyshirt Red, is spiking his wine with whisky from a pint bottle screwed up in a brown paper bag. He doesn’t offer to share the whisky, and the others know better than to ask.

“Look at that stuck-up son of a bitch, won’t ya?” Dirtyshirt Red says, lifting his chin toward a tall, gaunt tramp sitting alone at a small table in the corner, out of the light, his concentration on his glass of wine.

“Potlickin’ bastard thinks he’s too good to sit with the rest of us,” Red pursues. “Thinks his shit don’t stink, but his farts give him away!”

The other tramps laugh ritually. Ridiculing the Vet is an old pastime for all of them. No one feels sorry for the Vet; he brings it on himself by bragging about a nice snug kip he’s got somewhere off the Main. No matter how cold it is, or how hard up a guy is, the Vet never offers to share his kip; he won’t even let anybody know where it is.

“Hey, what you dreamin’ about, Vet? Thinking about what a hero you was in the war?”

The Vet’s broad-brimmed floppy hat tilts up as he raises his head slowly and looks toward the table of jeering bommes. His eyebrows arch and his nostrils dilate in a caricature of superiority, then his musings return to his wine glass.

“Oh, yeah! Big hero he was! Captured by the Germans, he was. Left by the Limeys at Dunkirk ‘cause they didn’t want him stinkin’ up their boats. And you know what big hero thing he done when he was in prison camp? He lined his ass with ground glass so the Germans would get castrated when they cornholed him! Big hero! That’s why he walks funny! He claims he was wounded in the war, but I heard different!”

There are snickers and nudgings around the table, but the Vet does not deign to respond. Perhaps he no longer hears.

Lieutenant Claude LaPointe crosses Sherbrooke, leaving the somber mass of the Monastère du Bon Pasteur behind. His pace slows to the measured rhythm of the beat-walker. The Main has been his patch for thirty-two years, since the Depression was at its nadir and frightened people treated one another with humanity, even in Montreal, the most impolite city in the world.

LaPointe presses his fists deep into the pockets of his shapeless overcoat to tug the collar tighter down onto his neck. Over the years, that rumpled overcoat has become something of a uniform for him, known by everybody who works on the Main, or who works the Main. Young detectives down at the Quartier Général make jokes about it, saying he sleeps in it at night, and in the summer uses it as a laundry bag. Feelings differ about the man in the overcoat; some recognize a friend and protector, others see a repressive enemy. It depends upon what you do for a living; and even more it depends on how LaPointe feels about you.

When he was young on the street, the Main was French and he its French cop. As the foreigners began to arrive in numbers, there was coolness and distance between them and LaPointe. He could not understand what they wanted, what they were saying, how they did things; and for their part they brought with them a deep distrust of authority and police. But with the wearing of time, the newcomers became a part of the street, and LaPointe became their cop: their protector, sometimes their punisher.

As he walks slowly up the street, LaPointe passes a bakery that is something of a symbol of the change the years have brought to the Main. Thirty-odd years ago, when the Main was French, the bakery was:

Ten years later, in response to the relentless pressure of English, one word was added to permit the French to use the first two-thirds of the sign and the Anglos the last two-thirds:

Now there are different breads in the window, breads with odd shapes and glazes. And the women waiting in line gossip in alien sounds. Now the sign reads:

The throng is thinning out as people arrive at destinations, or give up trying. LaPointe continues north, uphill, his step heavy and slow, his professional glance wandering from detail to detail. The lock on that metal grating over the store window wants replacing. He’ll remind Mr. Capeck about it tomorrow. The man standing in that doorway… it’s all right. Only a bomme. The streetlight is out in the alley behind Le Kit-Kat, a porno theatre. He’ll report that. Men who get overexcited in the porno house use that alley; and sometimes rollers use it too.

Deep in his pocket, LaPointe’s left hand lies lightly over the butt of his stub.38. In summer he carries it in a holster behind his hip, so he can keep his jacket open. In winter he leaves it loose in his left overcoat pocket, so his right hand is free. The pistol is so much a part of him that he releases it automatically when he reaches for something, and takes it up again when his hand returns to his pocket. The weight of it wears out the lining, and at least once each whiter he has to sew it up. He is clumsy with a needle, so the pocket becomes steadily shallower. Every few years he has to have the lining replaced.

In more than thirty years on this street of voluble and passionate people, a street on which poverty and greed and despair find expression in petty crime, LaPointe has fired his weapon only seven times. He is proud of that.

A harried child, her eyes down as she gnaws nervously at her lip, bumps into LaPointe and mutters “Excuse me” without looking up, her voice carrying a note of distress. She is late getting home. Her parents will be angry; they will scold her because they love her. The Lieutenant knows the girl and the parents. They want her to become a nurse, and they make her study long hours because she is not good at schoolwork. The girl tries, but she does not have the ability. For her training, for her future, her parents have suffered years of scrimping and self-denial. She is everything to them: their future, their pride, their excuse.

The girl spends a lot of time wishing she were dead.

As he passes Rue Guilbault, LaPointe glances down and sees two young men idling by the stoop of a brownstone. They wear black plastic jackets, and one swings back and forth from the railing. They chantent la pomme to a girl of fourteen who sits on the stoop, her elbows resting on the step above, her meager breasts pressed against a thin sweater. She taunts and laughs, and they sniff around like pubescent puppies. LaPointe knows the house. That would be the youngest Da Costa girl. Like her sisters, she will probably be selling ass on the street within two years. Mama Da Costa’s dream of the girls following their aunt into the convent is beginning to fade.

LaPointe is walking behind two men who speak a strained English. They are discussing business, and how it’s easy for the rich to get richer. One maintains that it’s a matter of percentages; if you know the percentages, you’re set. The other agrees, but he complains that you’ve got to be rich to find out what the percentages are.

They step apart gingerly to avoid colliding with the cripple who lurches toward them, his pipe smoke trailing a smear in the red neon of a two-for-one bar.

LaPointe stands in the middle of the sidewalk. The cripple stumbles to a stop and wavers before the policeman.

“Say-hey, Lieutenant. How’s it going?” The Gimp’s speech is blurred by the affliction that has damaged his centers of control. His mother was diseased at the time of his birth. He speaks with the alto, adenoidal whine of a boxer who has been hit on the windpipe too often.

LaPointe looks at the cripple with fatigued patience. “What are you doing at this end of the street, Gimp?”

“Nothing, Lieutenant. Say-hey, I’m just taking a walk, that’s all. Boy, you know, this pig weather is really hanging on, ain’t it, Lieutenant? I never seen anything like…”

LaPointe is shaking his head, so the Gimp gives up his attempt to hide in small talk. Taking one hand from his overcoat pocket, the Lieutenant points toward a narrow passage between two buildings, out of the flow of the crowd. The cripple grimaces, but follows him.

“All right, Gimp. What are you carrying?”

“Hey, nothin’, Lieutenant. Honest! I promised you, didn’t I?”

LaPointe reaches out; in his attempt to step back, the cripple stumbles against the brick wall. “Hey, please! We need the money! Mama’s going to be pissed at me if I don’t bring back any money!”

“Do you want to go back inside?”

“No! Hey, have a heart, Lieutenant!” the cripple whines. “Mama’ll be pissed. We need the money. What kind of work can a guy like me get? Eh?”

“Where’s it stashed?”

“I tol’ you! I ain’t carrying…” The Gimp’s eyes moisten with tears. His body slumps in defeat. “It’s in a tube,” he admits sullenly.

LaPointe sighs. “Go up the alley and get it out. Put it inside your glove and give it to me.” LaPointe has no intention of handling the tube.

The cripple moans and whimpers, but he turns and lurches up the alley a few steps until he is in the dark. LaPointe turns his back and watches the passing pedestrians. An old man steps toward the mouth of the recess to take a piss, then he sees LaPointe and changes his mind. The cripple comes back, clutching one glove in his withered hand. LaPointe takes it and puts it into his pocket. “All right, now where did this shit come from, and where were you bringing it?”

“Say-hey, I cant tell you that, Lieutenant! Mama’ll beat me up for sure! And those guys she knows, they’ll beat me up!” His eyes, bisected by the rims of his glasses, roll stupidly. LaPointe does not repeat his question. Following his habit in interrogation, he simply sighs and settles his melancholy eyes on the grotesque.

“Honest to God, Lieutenant, I can’t tell you! I don’t dare!”

“I’d better call for a car.”

“Hey, no! Don’t put me back inside. Those tough guys inside like to use me ‘cause I’m a cripple.”

LaPointe looks out over the crowd with weary patience. He gives the Gimp time to think it over.

“…Okay, Lieutenant…”

In a self-pitying whimper, the cripple explains that the stuff came from people his mother knows, tough guys from somewhere out on the east end of town. It was to be delivered to a pimp named Scheer. The Lieutenant knows this Scheer and has been waiting for a chance to run him off the Main. He has not been able to put a real case together, so he has had to content himself with maintaining constant harassing pressure. For a moment he considers going after Scheer with the Gimp’s testimony, then he abandons the thought, realizing what a glib defense lawyer would do to this half-wit in the witness box.

“All right,” LaPointe says. “Now listen to me. And tell your mother what I say. I don’t want you on my patch anymore. You have one month to find someplace to go. You understand?”

“But, say-hey, Lieutenant? Where’ll we go? All my friends are here!”

LaPointe shrugs. “Just tell your mother. One month.”

“Okay. I’ll tell her. But I hate to piss her off. I mean, after all… she’s my mother.”

LaPointe sits at the counter of a café, his shoulders slumped, his eyes indifferently scanning the passersby beyond the window.

A small white radio on a shelf by the counterman’s ear is insisting that

Everybody digs the Montreal Rock

Oh, yes! Oh, yes!

Oh, yes! O-o-h YES!

Everybody digs the Montreal Rock!

LaPointe sighs and digs into his pocket to pay for the coffee. As he rises he notices a sign above the counterman’s head. “That’s wrong,” he says. “It’s misspelled.”

The counterman gives a sizzling hamburger a definitive slap with his spatula and turns to examine the sign.

He shrugs. “Yeah, I know. I complained, and the painter cut his price.”

“Samuel?” LaPointe asks, referring to the old man who does most of the sign painting on this part of the Main.

“Yes.” The counterman uses the inhaled oui typical of Joual.

LaPointe smiles to himself. Old Samuel always makes fancy signs with underlinings and ornate swirls and exclamation points, all at no extra cost. He is given to setting things off with quotation marks, inadvertently raising doubts in the customer’s mind, as in:

He is also an independent artist who spells words the way he pronounces them. The counterman is lucky the sign doesn’t read: Epp’l Pie.

Not fifty paces off the Main, down Rue Napoléon, the bustle and press are gone and the noise is reduced to an ambient baritone rumble. The narrow old street is lit by widely spaced streetlamps and occasional dusty shopwindows. Children play around the stoops of three-story brick row houses. Above the roofline, diffused city-light glows in the damp, sooty air. Each house depends on the others for support. They have not collapsed because each wants to fall in a different direction, and there isn’t enough room.

It is after eight o’clock and cold, but the children will play until the fourth or fifth two-toned call of an exasperated mother brings them toe-dragging up the stoops and off to sleep, probably on a sofa in a front room, or in a cot blocking a hallway, covered with wool blankets that are gummy to the touch—bingo blankets that absorb body warmth without retaining it.

LaPointe leans against the railing of a deserted stoop, holding on tightly as the tingle rises in his chest It is a familiar feeling by now, an oddly pleasant sensation in the middle of his chest and upper arms, as though there were carbonated water in his veins. Sometimes pain follows the tingling. His blood fizzes in his chest; he looks up at the light-smeared sky and breathes slowly, expecting to find a little flash of pain at the end of each breath, and relieved not to.

Little kids a few stoops away are playing rond-rond, and at the end of each minor-key chant they all fall giggling to the sidewalk. The English-speaking kids play the same game with different words—about a ring of roses. All the children of Europe preserve in their atavistic memory the scar of the Black Death. They reel to simulate the dizziness; they make sounds like the symptomatic sneezing; they sing of bouquets of posies to ward off the miasma of the Plague. Then, giggling, they all fall down.

When LaPointe was a kid in Trois Rivières, he used to play in the streets at night, too. In summer, all the grownups would sit out on the stoops because it was stifling indoors. The men wore only undershirts and drank ale from the bottle. And old lady Tarbieau… LaPointe remembers old lady Tarbieau, who lived across the street and who used to tend everybody’s onions. She always pretended to care about people’s problems in order to find out what they were. LaPointe’s mother didn’t like old lady Tarbieau. The only off-color thing he ever heard his mother say was in response to Mme. Tarbieau’s nosiness. One night when all the block was out on the stoops, old lady Tarbieau called across the street, “Mme. LaPointe? Didn’t I see the rent man coming out of your house today? It’s only the middle of the month. I always thought you paid your rent the same way I do.” And LaPointe’s mother answered, “No, Mme. Tarbieau. I don’t pay my rent the same way you do. I pay in money.”

Poor Mme. Tarbieau, already aged when LaPointe was a boy. He hasn’t thought of her for years. He pictures the old busybody in his mind, and realizes that this is probably the first time anybody has remembered her for a quarter of a century. And probably this will be the last time any human memory will hold her. In that case, she is gone… really gone.

The tingle in his arms and chest has passed, so he pushes his fists further into his pockets and walks on toward the liquor store, in and out of the cones of streetlight, where kids dart from stoop to stoop, like starlings on a summer evening.

One summer, the summer after his father left home never to come back, LaPointe discovered that playing with the other kids around the stoops had become dull and pointless. In the long evenings, he used to walk alone on the street, looking up at the moon through newly hung electric wires. The moon would follow him, sliding along over the weaving wires. He would turn quickly and go up the street, and the moon followed. He would stop suddenly, then go again, but the moon was never tricked. Once, when he had been running, then stopping, running and stopping, all the time looking up and getting a little dizzy, he was startled to find himself standing only inches from the Crazy Woman who lived down the block. She grinned, then laughed a wheezing note. She pointed a finger at him and said he was a fou, like her, and they would sizzle in hell side by side.

He ran away. But for the rest of the week he had nightmares. He was terrified at the thought of going crazy. Maybe he was already crazy. How do you know if you’re crazy? If you’re crazy, you’re too crazy to know you’re crazy. What does “crazy” mean? Say the word again and again, and the sense dries out, leaving only a husk of sound. And you hear yourself saying a meaningless noise over and over again.

That was the last summer he played on the streets. The following winter his mother died of influenza. Grandpapa and Grandmama were already dead. He went to St. Joseph’s Home. And from the Home, he went into the police.

LaPointe squeezes his eyes closed and pulls himself out of it. He has found himself daydreaming like this a lot of late, remembering old lost things, unimportant things triggered by some little sound or sight on the Main.

He smiles at himself. Now, that is crazy.

The middle-aged Greek counterman looks up and smiles as LaPointe enters the deserted liquor store. He has been expecting the Lieutenant, and he reaches up for the bottle of red LaPointe always brings along to his twice-weekly games of pinochle.

“Everything going well?” LaPointe asks as he pays for the wine.

The counterman gulps air and growls, “Oh, fine, Lieutenant.” He gulps again. “Theo wrote. Got the letter—” Another gulp. “—this morning.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Fine. He’s up for parole soon.”

It was too bad that LaPointe had to put the son inside for theft so shortly after the father had an operation for throat cancer. But that’s the way it goes; that is his job. “That’s good,” he says. “I’m glad he’s getting parole.”

The counterman nods. For him, as for others in the quarter, LaPointe is the law; the good and the bad of it. He will never forget the evening seven years ago when the Lieutenant walked in to buy his usual Thursday night bottle of wine. A young man with slick hair had been loitering in the store, carefully looking over the labels of exotic aperitifs and liqueurs. LaPointe paid for his wine and, in the same movement of putting his change into his pocket, he drew out his gun.

“Put your hands on top of your head,” LaPointe said quietly to the young man.

The boy’s eyes darted toward the door, but LaPointe shook his head slowly. “Never,” he said.

The young man put his hands on top of his head, and LaPointe snatched him by his collar and bent him over the counter. Two swift movements under the boy’s jacket, and LaPointe came up with a cheap automatic. While they waited for the arrival of a police car, the boy sat on the floor in a corner, cowed and foolish, his hands still on top of his head. Customers came and went. They glanced uneasily toward the boy and LaPointe, and they carefully avoided coming near them, but not one question was asked, not one comment made. They ordered their wine in subdued voices, then they left.

There had been several hold-ups in the neighborhood that winter, and the old man who ran the cleaners down the street had been shot in the stomach.

It never occurred to anyone to wonder how LaPointe knew the boy was pumping up his courage for a hold-up. He was the law on the Main, and he knew everything. Actually, LaPointe had known nothing until the moment he stepped into the shop and passed by the boy. It was the tense nonchalance he instantly recognized. The Indian blood in LaPointe smelled fear.

The Greek counterman is comforted to know that LaPointe is always out there in the street somewhere. And yet… this is the same man who arrested his son Theo for auto theft and sent him to prison for three years. The good of the law, and the bad. But it could have been worse. LaPointe had put in a good word for Theo.

The Lieutenant continues north on the Main, the bottle of wine, twisted up in a brown paper bag, heavy in his overcoat pocket. He passes a closed shop and automatically checks the padlock on the accordion steel grid covering its window. Once a beat cop…

But LaPointe had better get moving along. He doesn’t want to be late for his pinochle game.