The Main

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.

Many things about her put Guttmann in mind of a fashion model: the meticulous, underrolled coiffure, that bounces with her quick, energetic gestures; the assured, almost rehearsed moves and turns; the long slim arms and legs; the perfectly tailored suit that is both functional and feminine. And, like a model, she appears to be aware of herself at every moment, as though she were seeing herself from the outside. Guttmann finds her voice particularly pleasing in its combining of great precision of pronunciation with a low, warm note just above husky. She laughs in exactly the same key as that in which she speaks.

“I suppose that seems quite a large faculty for a little school like ours, Lieutenant, but we specialize in intensive training with a low student-to-teacher ratio. We submerge the student in a linguistic culture. The student who is learning French, for instance, doesn’t hear a word of English for six hours a day, and he even takes lunch with instructors and other students in a French restaurant. And at night, if he wishes, the student will be taken to French nightclubs, cinema, theatre—all in the company of an instructor. We concentrate on the music of the language, you might say. The student learns to hum in French, even before he learns the words to the song. Our methods were pioneered at McGill, and indeed some of our student teachers are graduate students from there.” Mlle. Montjean suddenly stops and laughs. “I must be sounding like our promotional material.”

“A little,” LaPointe says. “You have a connection with McGill then?”

“No formal connection. Some of their students get experience and credit by working with us. Oh!” She butts her cigarette hurriedly. “Excuse me just a moment, won’t you.” She leaves the “conversation island,” consisting of deeply padded white leather “comfort forms” around a kidney-shaped, glass-topped coffee table, the whole sunken two steps below the floor level. She goes quickly to her desk overlooking Carré St. Louis, and there she presses the button of a concealed tape recorder and speaks conversationally: “Maggie, remind me tomorrow to get in touch with Dr. Moreland. Subject: Evaluation Procedures for Part-time Students.” She releases the button and smiles across at the policemen. “I would have forgotten that completely if I hadn’t happened to mention it to you. I’ve got a brain like a sieve.”

This is a social lie and an obvious one. Mlle. Montjean runs her specialized and very expensive school with such great efficiency that she appears to have free time for people who drop in unexpectedly. Even policemen.

The school occupies a double building: the façades of two former homes have been gutted and renovated to contain “conversation foyers,” “learning environments,” and audio-visual support systems on the first two floors, while the mansard-roofed third story houses Mlle. Montjean’s living and working quarters. Guttmann is impressed by the way she has folded into her large living room the equipment necessary for running her business. Files are concealed within Victorian court cupboards; her hi-fi system is tied in with her dictation instruments; her business telephones are ceramic French “coffee-grinder” models; her desk is an inlaid feminine escritoire; the “conversation island” would serve equally well for staff meetings or a romantic tète-à-tète. The walls and ceiling are white stucco with attic beams revealed and varnished, and this neutral background helps to blend the improbable, but not offensive, mélange of modern, Victorian, and antique furniture.

In theory it ought not work, this mixture of furniture styles, the stucco walls and dark beams, the Persian carpets, the modern and classical prints on the walls. But any feeling of discord and jumble is avoided by the sense that everything has been selected by one person of firm personality and taste. All the elements are aligned by one coign of vantage, one articulation of preference.

LaPointe doesn’t like the place.

“I haven’t offered you a drink, have I?” she says, shaking her head as though to imply she would forget it if it weren’t attached. “What do you take before lunch? Dubonnet?”

Guttmann says Dubonnet would be fine.

“Lieutenant?” she asks.

“Nothing, thank you.” After being shown up to the office apartment by a fussy man of uncertain function, LaPointe presented his identification card and introduced a question about the faculty of the school. Graciously, indeed overwhelmingly, Mlle. Montjean took up the cue, describing her business with a glibness that had a quality of rote. Even the asides and pauses to light a cigarette seemed considered, rehearsed. She said more than he wanted to know, as though attempting to drown questions with answers.

LaPointe sits back and lets Guttmann be the focus for her talk. This kind of woman—educated, capable, confident of her attraction and gifts—is alien to LaPointe’s experience.

Of one thing he is sure; she is hiding something.

“Are you sure I can’t tempt you, Lieutenant? I have everything.” She gestures toward a bar at the end of the room, near a wide marble fireplace.

“Say, that’s a real bar,” Guttmann says in surprise. “That’s fantastic.” He rises and goes with her as she crosses to pour out the drinks. It is indeed a real bar, complete with back bar and beveled mirrors, a brass rail, copper fittings, and even a spittoon.

“I like to believe my guests will treat that as a mere decoration,” she says, indicating the spittoon.

“Where did you get a turn-of-the-century bar like this?” Guttmann asks.

“Oh, they were tearing down one of those little places up on the Main, and I just bought it.” She grins mischievously. “The workmen had a hell of a time getting it up here. The walnut top is one piece. They had to bring it in through the window.”

Guttmann tries the bar on for size, putting his stomach against the polished wood and his foot up on the rail. “Fits just fine. I’ll bet the neighbors wondered what you were up to here. I mean, a whole bar. Come on!”

“That never occurred to me. I should have had my bed brought in through the window, too. That would really have given them something to gossip about. It’s one of those big circular waterbeds.” She laughs lightly. Guttmann realizes she is a very attractive woman.

LaPointe’s patience with this social nonsense is thin. He rises from the deep cushions of the “conversation island” and joins them at the bar. “I would like a little Armagnac after all, Mlle. Montjean. And I would like to know something about Antonio Verdini, alias Tony Green.”

She does not pause in pouring out the Dubonnet, but her voice is unmodulated when she responds, “And I would like to know what you’re doing here. Why you’re interested in my school. And why you’re asking these questions.” She looks up and smiles at LaPointe. “Armagnac, did you say?”

“Please. Do you mind the questions?”

“I’m not sure.” She takes down the Armagnac bottle and looks at it thoughtfully. “Tell me, Lieutenant LaPointe. Would my lawyer be unhappy with me, if I were to answer your questions without his being here?”

“Possibly. How did you know my name?”

“You showed me your identification when you came in.”

“You barely glanced at it.” There is another thing he does not mention. By habit he holds out his identification card with his thumb over his name. He’s been a cop for a long time.

She sets the bottle down and looks directly at him, her eyes shifting from one of his to the other. Then she slowly raises both arms until her palms are level with her ears. In a deep, graveled voice she says, “You got me, Lieutenant. I give up. But don’t tell Rocky and the rest of the mob that I ratted.”

Both she and Guttmann laugh. A glance from LaPointe, and she is laughing alone as she pours out the Armagnac. “Say when.”

“That’s fine. Now, how do you know my name?”

“Don’t be so modest. Everyone on the Main knows Lieutenant LaPointe.”

“You know the Main?”

“I grew up there. Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant. There’s no way in the world you could remember me. I left when I was just a kid. Thirteen years old. But I remember you. Of course that was twenty years ago, and you weren’t a lieutenant, and your hair was all black, and you were slimmer. But I remember you.” There is something harder than amusement in the glitter of her eyes. Then she turns to Guttmann. “What do you think of that? What do you think of a woman giving away her age like that? Here I go admitting that I’m thirty-three, when I know perfectly that I could pass for thirty-two any day… if the light wasn’t too strong.”

“So you come from the street?” LaPointe says, unconvinced.

“Oh, yes, sir. From the deepest depths of the street. My mother was a hooker.” She has learned to say that with the same offhandedness as one might use to mention that her mother was a blonde, or a liberal. She evidently likes to drop bombs. But she laughs almost immediately. “Hey, what do you say, gang. Shall we drink at the bar, or go sit in a booth?”

When they have returned to the “conversation island,” Mlle. Montjean assumes her most businesslike voice. She tells LaPointe that she wants to know exactly why he is here, asking questions. When she knows that, she will decide whether or not to answer without the advice of counsel.

“Have you any reason to think you might be in trouble?” he asks.

But she is not taking sucker bait like that. She smiles as she sips her aperitif.

LaPointe is not comfortable with her elusive blend of caution and practiced charm. She is so unlike the girls on his patch, though she claims to be one of them. He dislikes being kept off balance by her constant changes of verbal personality. She was the urbane vamp at first, completely castrating the policeman in Guttmann. Then there was that clowning “gun moll” routine under the guise of which she had admitted to being caught off base… but to nothing more. LaPointe fears that when he hits her with the fact that Green is dead, her control will be so high that it will mask any surprise she might feel. In that way, she could seem guilty without being so. She might even confuse him by being frank and honest. She is the type for whom honesty is also a ploy.

“So,” LaPointe says, looking around at the costly things decorating the apartment, “you’re from the Main, are you?”

“From is the active word, Lieutenant. I’ve spent my whole life being from the Main.”

“Montjean? You say your mother was a hooker named Montjean?”

“No, I didn’t say that, Lieutenant. Naturally, I have changed my name.”

“From?”

Mlle. Montjean smiles. “Can I offer you another Armagnac? I’m afraid it will have to be a quick one; I have a working lunch coming up. We’re involved in something that might interest you, Lieutenant. We’re developing an intensive course in Joual. You’d be surprised at the number of people who want to learn the Canadian usages and accents. Salesmen, mostly, and politicians. The kinds of people who make their living by being trusted. Like policemen.”

LaPointe finishes his drink and sets the tulip glass carefully on the glass tabletop. “This Antonio Verdini I mentioned…?”

“Yes?” She lifts her eyebrows lazily.

“He’s dead. Stabbed in an alley up on the Main.”

She looks levelly at LaPointe, not a flutter in her eyelids. After a moment, her gaze falls to the marble-and-gold cigarette lighter, and she stares at it, motionless. Then she takes a cigarette from a carved teak box, lights it, tilts back her head with a bounce of her hair, and jets the uninhaled smoke over the heads of her guests. She delicately plucks an imaginary bit of tobacco from the tip of her tongue.

“Oh?” she asks.

“Presumably you were lovers,” LaPointe says matter-of-factly, ignoring Guttmann’s quick glance.

Mlle. Montjean shrugs. “We screwed, if that’s what you mean.” More of that precious bomb-dropping, a kind of counter-attack against LaPointe’s ballistic use of Green’s death. Her control had been excellent throughout her long pause… but there was the pause.

“Our information says that he was learning English here,” LaPointe continues. “I assume that’s right?”

“Yes. One of our Italian-speaking instructors was guiding him through an intensive course in English.”

“And that’s how you met him?”

“That’s how I met him, Lieutenant. Tell me, do I need a lawyer now?”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“Then you probably don’t need a lawyer. Unless you intend to withhold information, or refuse to assist us in our inquiry.”

She taps the ash from her cigarette unnecessarily, gaining time to think. Her control is still good, but for the first time she is troubled.

“You’re thinking about the others, of course,” LaPointe says.

“What others?”

LaPointe bends on her that melancholy patience he assumes during examination when he lacks the information necessary to lead the conversation.

“All right, Lieutenant. I’ll cooperate. But let me ask you something first. Does this have to get into the papers?”

“Not necessarily.”

“You see, my school is rather special—expensive, elite. Scandal would ruin it. And it’s everything I’ve worked for. It represents ten years of work. What’s more, it represents the ten thousand miles I’ve managed to walk away from the Main. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand. Tell me about the others.”

“Well, it couldn’t be a coincidence. Mike was killed the same way: stabbed in the street.”

“Mike?”

“Michael Pearson. Dr. Michael Pearson. He used to run the Language Learning Center at McGill.”

“And you were lovers?”

She smiles thinly. “You do run to circumlocution, don’t you?”

“And what about the other one. The American?”

Her eyes open with confusion. “What other one?”

“The American. Ah…” He looks to Guttmann.

“John Albert MacHenry,” Guttmann fills in quickly.

Mlle. Montjean glances from one to the other. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t think I ever met anyone by that name. I can assure you that I never… screwed… your Mr. MacHenry.” She reaches over and squeezes LaPointe’s arm. “That’s just my homey way of saying we were not lovers, Lieutenant.”

“You seem sure of that, Mlle. Montjean. Do you keep a list?”

Her smile is fixed and her eyes perfectly cold. “As a matter of fact, I do. At least, I keep a diary. And it’s a fairly long list, if you will forgive my bragging. I enjoy keeping count. My analyst tells me that it’s rather typical behavior in cases like mine. He tells me the reason I use so many men is because I detest them, and by scoring them one after the other I deny them any individuality. He talks like that, my analyst. Like a textbook. And can you guess when he told me all this crap? In bed. After I had scored him too. Later, he sat right there where you’re sitting and told me how he understood my need to screw even him. A typical gesture of rejection, he told me. And when I mentioned that he wasn’t much of a lay, he tried to laugh it off. But I know I got to him.” She grins. “The phony bastard.”

“The point of all that being that you don’t know this American, this MacHenry?”

“Precisely. Oh, I’ve had my share of Americans, of course. One should have an American at least once a quarter. It makes Canadians look so good by comparison. And at least once a year, one should have an Englishman. Partially to make even the Americans look good, and partially as penance. Did you know that making love with a Brit shortens one’s time in purgatory?” The intercom on her desk buzzes; Mlle. Montjean butts out her cigarette and rises, flattening her skirt with her palms. “That will be my luncheon appointment. I assume I’m free to go to it?”

LaPointe rises. “Yes. But we have more to talk about.”

She has crossed to her desk and is taking up a folder of material pertaining to her working lunch. She glances at her calendar. “I’m tied up all afternoon. Are you free tonight, Lieutenant?”

“Yes.”

“Say nine o’clock? Here?”

She shakes hands with Guttmann, then offers her hand to LaPointe. “You really don’t remember me, do you, Lieutenant?”

“I’m afraid not. Should I?”

Still holding his hand, she smiles a montage of amusement and sadness. “We’ll talk about it tonight. Armagnac, isn’t it?”

She shows them to the door.

By nine o’clock it is dark in the little park of Carré St. Louis. For the first time in weeks, the wind is from the north and steady. If it remains in that quarter, it will bring the cleansing snow. But its immediate effect is to hone the edge of the damp cold. LaPointe has to fold in the flap of his collar against his throat as he cuts across the deserted park, picking his way carefully over the root-veined path because the dappled light from distant streetlights serves more to confuse than to illuminate.

Suddenly he stops. Save for the hiss of wind through gnarled branches, there is no sound. But he has a tingling in the back of his neck, as though someone were watching him. He looks around through the zebra dapple of black trees and shadows interlaced with the silver of streetlights bordering the park. There is nothing to be seen.

He continues across toward Mlle. Montjean’s school, where there are lights behind drawn shades on the first and third floors; probably late students learning French or English in a hurry. His knock is answered by the fussy man he met earlier. Mlle. Montjean is not in, but she is due any minute; she has left instructions that the Lieutenant is to be shown up to her apartment. The nervous man looks LaPointe over, his lips pursed critically. It isn’t his business who Mlle. Montjean’s friends are. He doesn’t care what his employer does on her own time. But there are limits. A policeman, really. Oh, well, he’ll show him up anyway.

Three lamps light the apartment, pooling three distinct areas. There is a porcelain lamp on the escritoire by the windows overlooking the square; a dim hanging lamp picks out the sunken “conversation island”; and beyond that, over the bar, is a glass ball confected of bits of colored glass and lit from within. The room is centrally heated, the dwindling fire in the fireplace largely decorative. LaPointe takes off his overcoat and makes himself at home to the extent of putting two kiln-dried, steam-cleaned logs on the fire and poking at the embers. He enjoys fiddling with open fires, and he often pictures himself in his daydream home in Laval, turning logs or pushing in burnt-off ends. The bark has begun to crackle and flutter with blue flame when Mlle. Montjean enters, her coat already off, her fur hat in her hand.

“Sorry, Lieutenant. But you know how these things are.” She does not mention what things. “Oh, good. I’m glad you’ve tended the fire. I was afraid it would die out; and I set it especially for you.” She ducks under the bar flap and begins to pour out two Armagnacs, light from the ball of glass shining in her carefully done hair. When LaPointe sits on a bar stool across from her, he realizes that she has been drinking fairly heavily, not beyond control, but perhaps a little beyond caring.

“I hope you didn’t have anything big on tonight,” she says.

“Nothing very big. A pinochle game I had to postpone, that’s all.”

“Hey, wow, Lieutenant.” She makes two clicking sounds at the side of her cheek. “Pinochle! You really know how to get it on.” She lifts her glass. “Salut?”

“Salut.”

She finishes half her drink and sets it down on the bar. “That word ‘salut’ reminds me of a proof we recently had that our aural-oral system of language learning is not without its flaws. We had an Arab student here—a nephew of one of those oil pirates—and he was being preened to take over the world, or learn to surrender in six languages, or whatever the fuck they do. Dumb as a stick! But they were giving him all sorts of special tutoring at McGill—I think his uncle bribed them by buying an atomic laboratory for them, or half of South America, or something like that… I mean, he was really stupid. He was so dumb he’d have difficulty making the faculty of a polytechnic in Britain, or getting his Ph.D. in journalism in the States… That line would get a laugh in an academic crowd.”

“Would it?”

“You’re not much of an audience, LaPointe. And now I don’t even remember what that story was supposed to illustrate.”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe you’re just playing for time.”

“Yes, maybe. How about another drink?”

“I still have this one.”

“I think I’ll have another.” She brings it around the bar and sits beside him. “I had the weirdest experience just now. I was crossing the park, and there was someone there, in the shadows.”

“Someone you know?”

“That’s just it. I had the feeling I knew him, but… I can’t explain it I didn’t see him, really. Just sort of a shadow. But I had this eerie feeling that he wanted to talk to me.”

“But he didn’t?”

“No.”

“Then what frightened you?”

She laughs. “Nothing. I was just scared. I warned you it was a weird experience. Am I babbling, or is it my imagination?”

“It’s not your imagination. This afternoon you said you knew me. Tell me about that.”

As she speaks, she deals with her glass, not with him. “Oh, I was just a kid. You never really noticed me. But for years, you’ve been… important in my life.” She puffs out a little laugh of self-derision. “Now that sounds heavy, doesn’t it? I don’t mean you’ve been important in the sense that I think of you often, because I don’t. But I think of you at… serious times. It must be embarrassing to have a stranger tell you that she has a rather special vision of you. Is it?”

He lifts his glass and tips his head. “Yes.”

“You think I’m drunk?”

He balances his thumb against his little finger. “A little.”

“Drunk and disorderly,” she says in a distant tone. “I charge you, young woman, with being drunk, and with having a disorderly life—a disorderly mind.”

“I doubt that. I think you have a very orderly mind. A very clever one.”

“Clever? Yes. Neatly arranged? Yes. But disorderly nevertheless. The front shelves of my mind are all neatly stacked and efficiently arranged. But back in the stacks there is a stew of disorder, chaos, and do you know what else?”

“No. What?”

“Just a pinch of self-pity.”

They both laugh.

“Now how about another drink?” She goes around the bar to refill her glass.

“No, thanks… all right. Yes. And tell me, with that self-pity you talk about, is there some hate?”

“Tons and tons, Lieutenant. But…” She points at him quickly, as though she just caught him slipping a card from his sleeve. “But not enough to kill.” She laughs drily. “You know something, sir? I have a feeling we may spend a lot of this night talking about two different things.”

“Not all of it.”

“A threat?”

He shrugs. “So, tons and tons of hate. Do you hate me for not remembering you?”

“N-n-no. No, I don’t blame or hate you. You were a central figure, a star actor on the Mam. I had an aisle seat near the back. I spent my time staring at the one actor, so naturally I remember him. You—if you ever bothered to look out at the audience—wouldn’t see them as individuals. No, not hate. Take two parts disappointment, mix in one part resentment, one part dented vanity, dilute with years of indifference, and that’s what I feel. Not hate.”

“You said your mother was a hooker on the street. What was her name?”

She laughs without anything being funny. “Her name was Dery.”

LaPointe’s memory rolls and brings up an image of twenty years ago. Yo-Yo Dery, a kind of whore you don’t see around anymore. Loud, life-embracing, fun to be with, she would sometimes go with factory workers who didn’t have much money, and for free, if they were good mecs and she liked them. Carefree and mischievous, she earned a reputation as a clown and a hellcat when, right in the middle of the dance floor of a crowded cabaret (the place where the Happy Hour Whisky à Go-Go now is), she settled a dispute with another hooker who claimed that Yo-Yo’s red hair was dyed. She lifted her skirt, dropped her drawers, and proved that her red hair was natural.

“You remember her, don’t you,” Mlle. Montjean says, seeing his eye read the past.

“Yes. I remember her.”

“But not me?”

Yes, come to think of it. Yo-Yo had a daughter. He talked to her once or twice in Yo-Yo’s flat. After Lucille’s death, when the need to make love got annoying, he went with street girls occasionally, always paying his way, although as a cop he could have got it free. Yo-Yo and he made love three or four times over the years. Yes, that’s right. Yo-Yo had a little girl. A shy little girl.

Then he recalls how Yo-Yo died. She killed herself. She sent the kid to stay with a neighbor, and she killed herself. It astonished everybody on the Main. Yo-Yo Dery? The one who’s always laughing? No! The one who proved she was a redhead? Suicide? But why?

LaPointe made the break-in. Rags stuffed in the crack under the door. He had to shatter a window with a beer bottle. Yo-Yo had slipped sideways onto the kitchen floor, her cheek resting on the bristles of a broom. There were cards laid out on the table. She had turned on the gas, and started playing solitaire.

Funny how details come back. There was a black queen on a black king. She had been cheating.

But what became of the kid? Vaguely, he recalls something about a neighbor keeping the girl until the social workers came around.

“Do you remember why they called her Yo-Yo?” Mlle. Montjean asks, almost dreamily.

He remembers. Like a Yo-Yo, up and down, up and down.

Mlle. Montjean turns the stem of her tulip glass, revolving it between her thumb and finger. “She was good to me, you know that? Presents. Clothes. We went to the park every Sunday when it wasn’t too cold. She really tried to be good to me.”

“That would be like her.”

“Oh, sure. The good-hearted whore. A real Robert Service type. In a way, I always knew what she did for a living, even when I was four or five. That is… there were always men around the flat, and they left money. What I didn’t know at that age was that it wasn’t the same in everyone else’s house. But when I was old enough to go to school, the other kids straightened me out soon enough. They used to chant at me: ‘Redhead, Redhead’—I can still hear those two singsong notes, like a French ambulance. I didn’t understand why they chanted that, and why they giggled. My hair has always been brown. You see. I didn’t know about Yo-Yo’s epic proof in the dance hall. But all the other kids did.”

This is not what LaPointe came here to listen to, and he doesn’t want the burden of problems he did not cause and cannot help. “Oh, well,” he says, making a gesture toward the expensive apartment, “you’ve come a long way from all that.”

She looks at him sideways through her shoulder-length, rolled-under hair. “You sound like my analyst,” she accuses.

“The one you take to bed?”

“The one I screw,” she corrects. “What is it? Why are you shaking your head?”

“It must be the fashion to use the ugliest words for making love. I met a girl just recently who found the nicer words funny, and couldn’t help laughing at them.”

“I say screw because I mean screw. It’s the mot juste. When I’m with a man, we don’t ‘go to bed,’ and we certainly don’t ‘make love.’ We screw. And what’s more, they don’t screw me. I screw them.”

“As in, Screw you, mister!”

Mlle. Montjean laughs. “Now you really sound like my analyst. How about another Armagnac?”

“No, thanks.”

She carries her glass to the divan before the fireplace, where she sits staring silently for a short time before beginning to speak, more to herself than to him. “It’s funny, but I never despised the men Yo-Yo brought home—mostly good mecs, laughing, a little drunk, clumsy. Yo-Yo used to come in to tuck me in and kiss me good night. Then she’d close the door slowly because the hinges creaked. She had a way of waving to me with her fingertips, just before the door closed. I remember the light on the wall, a big trapezoid of yellow getting narrower until the door clicked shut, and there was only a thin line of light from the crack. Her bedroom was next to mine. I could hear her laughing. And I could hear the men. The squeak of the bedsprings. And the men grunting. They always seemed to grunt when they came.” She looks over at LaPointe out of the corner of her eye and she half smiles. “You never grunted, Lieutenant. I’ll say that much for you.”

He lifts his empty glass in acceptance of the compliment, and immediately feels the stupidity of the gesture. “And you didn’t resent me?”

“Because you screwed Yo-Yo? Hey, notice the difference? Men screwed Yo-Yo; I screw men. Deep significance there. Or maybe shallow. Or maybe none at all. No, I didn’t resent you, Lieutenant! Goodness gracious, no! I could hardly have resented you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you were my father,” she says atonally. Then, “Hey, want another drink?”

LaPointe takes the shot in silence and doesn’t speak until she has crossed to the bar and is refilling her glass. “That was cute. That ‘want another drink?’ part was particularly cute.”

“Yeah, but kind of hokey.”

“Of course you know that I was not…”

“Don’t panic, Lieutenant. I know perfectly well that I don’t owe the Gift of Life to any squirt from you—grunted or ungrunted. My father was Anonymous.” She has a bit of trouble saying the word; the drink is beginning to close down on her. “You know the famous poet, Anonymous. He’s in all the collections—mostly toward the front. Hey? Aren’t you just dying to know how come you’re my father?”

She stands behind the bar, leaning over her glass, the ball of colored light tinting her hair, her face in the shadow. LaPointe is unable to see the expression in her unlit eyes. At a certain point, he turns away and watches the fire dwindle.

She uses a clowning, melodramatic style behind which she can hide, and occasionally her voice broadly italicizes words to prove she isn’t taken in by the sentimentality that hurts.

“You see, children, it all began when I was very, very young and suffering from a case of innocence. I overheard Yo-Yo talking to some hooker she had up to the apartment for drinks. The subject was one Officer LaPointe, our beat cop, blue of uniform and blue of eye. Some yahoo had given Yo-Yo trouble, and the brave LaPointe had duly bashed him. You remember the incident?”

He shakes his head. In those days, that was not so uncommon an event that he would be likely to remember it.

“Well, bash you did, sir. You Protected My Mother. And the next Sunday, when she was taking me for a walk in the park, she pointed your apartment out to me. This Was the House of the Man Who Protected My Mother. And there were other times when she had good things to say about you. I didn’t know then that she was praising you for paying for your nookie when, as a cop, you didn’t have to.

“Well, sir, it was about that time that I went off to school and discovered that other kids had daddies. Before that, I had never thought about it. Living alone with Yo-Yo was simply how one lived. I neither had a daddy nor lacked one. Then the teasing about being a redhead began. And little boys wanted me to go behind the bushes and pull down my pants to show them my red hair. I couldn’t understand. You see, I didn’t have any hair, let alone red.

“So life went along, and went along, and went along. Then when I was about ten or eleven, the Great Myth began. One day after school, I was crying with anger and frustration and there was a ring of kids around me, chanting ‘Redhead, wet to bed… Redhead, wet to bed!’ And I screamed at them to cut it out, or else! Or else what, one of them asked, logically enough. And another asked why I didn’t run home and tell my father on them. And everyone laughed—we have to save the children, Lieutenant; they’re our hope for the future—so I suddenly blurted out that I would too tell my father, if they didn’t leave me alone! And they said I didn’t have a father. And I said that I did too! Sergeant LaPointe was my father! And he would bash any son of a bitch who gave me trouble!”

There is a thud and a tinkle of glass, then silence.

“Oops. I have knocked over my glass in my efforts to decorate my fable with… whatever. How graceless of me.”

LaPointe keeps his eyes on the fire. It would be unfair to look at her just then. He hears her walking behind the bar, the crisp crunch of glass under her shoes. He hears the squeak of the cork in the Armagnac bottle. When she speaks again, she has assumed a gruff, comic tone.

“Well, sir, that was the winter when I had a father… or, to be more exact, a daddy. You screwed Yo-Yo two times that winter, and both times I was awake when you came to the flat, and you chatted nonsense with me before she put me to bed. Your uniform smelled like wool, which wasn’t so strange, considering the fact that it was made of wool. But it smelled good to me… like my blanket. Like the blanket I pressed against my nose when I sucked my thumb. At ten, I still sucked my thumb. But I’ve given that up in favor of cigarettes. Thumb-sucking causes lung cancer.

“And every day that winter, on my way home from school, I made a big loop out of my way so I could pass your apartment on Esplanade. I used to stand there, sometimes in the snow—grab the image of a little girl standing in the snow! Doesn’t it just rip you up?—and I would look up at the windows of your apartment on the third floor. By the way, your apartment is on the third floor, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he lies.

“I knew it. Infallible instinct. I knew you would live on the top floor, looking out over the world. Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if all those afternoons I had been looking up at the wrong apartment? Wouldn’t that be an ironic blast?”

He nods.

After a silence, she puffs out a sigh. “Thank God that’s out of me! Pal, you have no idea what a zonker it was when you walked in here this afternoon. Talk about ghosts! I didn’t really have an appointment tonight. I was walking up on the Main—the first time in years. I dropped in at a bar or two and had Armagnac, because that was your drink. And I walked around the old streets, over past your apartment, trying to decide if I should unload all this crap on you. And finally I decided that I wouldn’t. I decided to keep it to myself. Sic transit all claims to being mistress of my fate.”

LaPointe has nothing to say.

“Well!” She brings him an Armagnac he doesn’t want and sits on the divan beside him. “Presumably you didn’t come here to hear all this psychological vomit. What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

It isn’t an easy change to make, and LaPointe sips his drink slowly before he begins. “There have been three men killed… probably by the same person.”

“And a neurotic man-hater seems a likely suspect?”

He ignores this. “Two of them trace to you. When was the last time you saw Antonio Verdini?”

“I checked that little fact in my diary. I thought you might ask. By the way, I’ll let you read my diary if you want. I suppose you’ll want the names of the men I’ve screwed. In case the killer was one of them. Maybe jealousy, or something like that. Although I can’t imagine why any of them would be jealous. After all, my door’s been open to just about anyone who knocked. I view my body as something of a public convenience.”

LaPointe doesn’t want to get mired again in her self-pity; he holds to the line of questioning. “When was the last time you and Verdini made love?”

“A week ago tonight. He didn’t leave until about midnight. It was a longish number. He was showing off his endurance, which, by the way, was something—”

“All right.” LaPointe cuts her off. He doesn’t care about that. “That checks. He was killed that night, shortly after he left here.”

“Hey… maybe I can put you on to something. He might have been just boasting, but he said he had to leave early because he was going to screw some dancer… no. No, a dancer’s kid. That was it.”

“I know about that. He never got there.”

“Too bad for the kid. He was a good plumber.”

LaPointe regards her flatly. “Why don’t we just stick to the questions and answers, Mlle. Montjean?”

“My hearty attitude toward sex doesn’t impress you, Lieutenant?”

“It impresses me. But it doesn’t convince me.”

“Hey! Wow! The wisdom of the streets! Mind if I take a note on that?”

“Do you want your ass spanked?”

“Whatever turns you on, Daddy!” she snaps back. She’s an experienced emotional in-fighter.

He settles his patient, fatigued eyes on her for a moment before continuing. “All right. Now, this professor at McGill. Tell me about him.”

She chuckles. “You hold your cool pretty well, LaPointe. Of course, you’ve got the advantage of being sober. And you’ve got another edge. Indifference is a mighty weapon.”

“Let’s just hear about the McGill professor.”

“Mike Pearson? He was in charge of the Language Learning Center. That’s where I got my idea of setting up this school. The high-saturation methods we use here were developed by Pearson. I took my M.A. under him… literally.”

“Meaning that you and he—”

“Whenever we got a chance. Even while I was a student. The first time was on his desk. He got semen on papers he was grading. Do you know the root of the word ‘seminar’? He was my first conquest. Think of it, Lieutenant! I was a virgin until I was twenty-four. A technical virgin, that is. Before that, I was what you might call manually self-sufficient. My analyst has given me some textbook crap about protracted virginity being common in cases of sexually traumatic events in childhood. He went on to say that it was typical that the first man should be a teacher—a father figure, an authority figure. Like a cop, I guess. That anus of an analyst always plays doctor after we’ve screwed. It’s his way of taking an ethical shower. Think of it! A virgin at twenty-four! But I’ve made up for it since.”

“Would your diary tell me the last time you and this Pearson were together?”

“I can tell you that myself. Mike’s stabbing was in the papers. He was killed not twenty minutes after leaving here.”

“Why didn’t you inform the police?”

“Well, what was the point of getting involved? Mike was married. Why did the wife have to know where he spent his last night? I didn’t dream his getting killed had anything to do with me. I thought he was mugged, or something like that.”

“And that’s why you didn’t inform the police? Consideration for the wife?”

“All right, there was the reputation of the school too. It would have been messy PR. Say! Wait a minute! Why wasn’t there anything in the papers about Tony’s death?”

“There was.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“His name wasn’t mentioned. We didn’t know it at the time. But I wonder if you would have called us, if you had known about the Verdini stabbing.”

She has emptied her glass, and now she reaches automatically for his untouched one. He frowns, afraid she will get too drunk before the questioning is over. “Yes, I think I would have. Not out of civic duty, or any of that shit. But because I would have been scared, like I’ve been scared all afternoon, ever since you told me about it.” She grins, the alcohol rising in her. “You see? That proves I didn’t kill them. If I were the killer, I wouldn’t be scared.”

“No. But you might tell me you were.”

“Ah-ha! The foxy mind of the fuzz! But you can take my word for it, Lieutenant. I don’t go around stabbing men. I make them stab me.” She wobbles her head in a blurred nod. “And there, Sigmund, you have a flash of revelation.”

LaPointe has opened his notebook. “You say you don’t know anything about the third man? The American named MacHenry?”

She shakes her head profoundly. “Nope. You see, there are some men in Montreal whom I have not yet screwed. But I’ll get around to them. Never fear.”

“I don’t want you to drink anymore.”

She looks at him incredulously. “What… did… you… say?”

“I don’t want you to drink anymore until the questioning is over.”

“You don’t want…! Well, fuck you, Lieutenant!” She glares at him, then, in the wash of anger and drunkenness, her manner trembles and dissolves. “Or… better yet… fuck me, Lieutenant. Why don’t you screw me, LaPointe? I want to be screwed, for a change.”

“Come on, cut it out.”

“No, really! Making it with you may be just what I need. A psychic watershed. The final daddy!” She slides over to him and searches his eyes. There is a knowing leer in her expression, curiously confounded with the pleading of a child. Her hand closes over his leg and penis. He lifts her hand away by the wrist and stands up.

“You’re drunk, Mlle. Montjean.”

“And you’re a coward, Lieutenant… Whateveryournameis! I’ll admit I’m drunk, if you’ll admit you’re a coward. A deal?”

LaPointe reaches into his inside coat pocket and takes out a photograph he picked up from Dr. Bouvier that afternoon. He holds it out to her. “This man.”

She waves it away with a broad, vague gesture. She is hurt, embarrassed, drunk.

“It may not be a good likeness. It’s a post-mortem shot. Would it help you to place the man if I told you he was killed about two and a half years ago?”

Like a petulant child forced to perform a chore, she snatches the photograph and looks at it.

The shock doesn’t shatter her; it voids her. All spirit leaks out of her. She wants to drop the photograph, but she can’t let go of it. LaPointe has to reach out and take it back.

As she puts her barriers back together, she saws her lower lip lightly between her teeth. A very deep breath is let out slowly between pursed lips.

“But his name wasn’t MacHenry. It was Davidson. Cliff Davidson.”

“Perhaps that was the name he told you.”

“You mean he didn’t even give me his right name?”

“Evidently not.”

“The son of a bitch.” More soft wonder in this than anger.

“Why son of a bitch?”

She closes her eyes and shakes her head heavily. She is tired, worn out, sick of all this.

“Why son of a bitch?” he repeats.

She rises slowly and goes to the bar—to get distance, not a drink. She leans her elbows on the polished walnut and stares at the array of bottles in the back bar, shining in the many colors of the glass ball light. Her back to him, she speaks in a drone. “Clifford Davidson was the giddying and grand romance in my life, officer. We were betrothed, each unto each. He came up to Canada to set up some kind of manufacturing operation in Quebec City, and he came here to learn Joual. He already spoke fair French, but he was one of your smarter cookies. He knew it would be a tremendous in for him if he, an American, could speak Joual French. The canadien workers and businessmen would eat it up.”

“And you met him.”

“And I met him. Yes. An exchange of glances, a brush of hands, a comparison of favorite composers, a matching up of plumbing. Love.”

“Go on.”

“Go on? Whither? Quo vadis, pater? Want to know a secret? That Latin I drop every once in a while? That’s just an affection. It’s all I got out of Ste. Catherine’s Academy: a little Latin I no longer remember, and the grooming injunction that all proper girls keep their knees together, which advice I have long ignored. My knees have become absolute strangers. There’s always some man coming between them. And how is that for an earthy little pun?”

“You and this Davidson fell in love. Go on.”

“Ah, yes! Back to the interrogation. Right you go, Lieutenant! Well, let’s see. Cliff and I had a glorious month together in gay, cosmopolitan Montreal. As I recall, marriage was mentioned. Then one day… poof! He disappeared like that fabled poofbird that flies in ever-smaller circles until it disappears up its own anus… poof!”

“Can you tell me the last time you saw him?”

“For that we shall need the trusty diary.” She descends from the bar stool uncertainly and crosses to her desk, not unsteadily, but much too steadily. “Voilà. My gallery of rogues.” She brandishes the diary for LaPointe to see. “Ah-ha. I see you have been nipping at the Armagnac, Lieutenant. You’re having a little trouble staying in focus, aren’t you, you sly old dog.” With large gestures she pages through the book. “No, not him. No, not him either… although he wasn’t bad. My, my, that was a night to set the waterbed a-sloshing! Come out of that book, Cliff Davidson. I know you’re in there! Ah! Now let’s see. The last night. Hm-m-m. I see it was a night of plans. And of love. And also… the night of September the eighteenth.”

LaPointe glances at his notebook and closes it.

“That was the night he was stabbed?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Fancy that. Three men make love to me and end up stabbed. And to think that some guys worry about VD! I assume he was married? This MacHenry-Davidson?”

“Yes.”

“A little wifey tucked away in Albany or somewhere. How quaint. You’ve got to hand it to these Americans. They’re fantastic businessmen.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, yes! Fantastic. Naturally, I never charged him for his language lessons.”

LaPointe is silent for a time before asking, “May I take the diary with me?”

“Take the goddamned thing!” she screams, and she hurls it across the room at him.

It flutters open in the air and falls to the rug not halfway to him. Feckless display.

He leaves it lying on the rug. He’ll get it as he goes.

When she has calmed down, she says dully, “That was a stupid thing to do.”

“True.”

“I’m sorry. Come on, have a nightcap with me. Proof of paternal forgiveness?”

“All right.”

They sit side by side at the bar, sipping their drinks in silence, both looking ahead at the back bar. She sighs and asks, “Tell me truthfully. Aren’t you a little sorry for me?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Yeah. Me too. And I’m sorry for Tony. And I’m sorry for Mike. I’m even sorry for poor old Yo-Yo.”

“Do you always call her that?”

“Didn’t everybody?”

“I never did.”

“You wouldn’t,” she says bitterly.

“You never call her Mother?”

She lays her hand on his shoulder and rests her cheek against her knuckles, letting him support her. “Never out loud. Never when I’m sober. You want to know something, Lieutenant? I hate you. I really hate you for not being… there.”

She feels him nod.

“Now, you’re sure…” She yawns deeply. “…you’re absolutely sure you don’t want to screw me?”

His eyes crinkle. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“That’s good. Because I’m really sleepy.” She takes her cheek from his shoulder and stands up. “I think I’ll go to bed. If you’ve finished with your questions, that is.”

LaPointe rises and collects his overcoat. “If I have more questions, I’ll come back.” He picks up the diary from the floor of the “conversation island,” and she accompanies him to the door.

“This memory trip back to the Main has been heavy, Lieutenant. Heavy and rough. I sure hope I never see you again.”

“For your sake, I hope it works out that way.”

“You still think I might have killed those men?”

He shrugs as he tugs on his overcoat.

“LaPointe? Will you kiss me good night? You don’t have to tuck me in.”

He kisses her on the forehead, their only contact his hands on her shoulders.

“Very chaste indeed,” she says. “And now you’re off. Quo vadis, pater?”

“What does that mean?”

“Just some of that phony Latin I told you about.”

“I see. Well, good night, Mlle. Montjean.”

“Good night, Lieutenant LaPointe.”