The Main

6

By the thermometer it is not so cold as last night, but that was a dry cold, crystallizing on surfaces, and this is a damp cold, the serrate edge of which penetrates to LaPointe’s chest as he walks down the deserted Main. He does not find a cruising taxi until Sherbrooke.

LaPointe’s footfalls clip hollowly along the empty, half-lit halls outside the magistrates’ courts. The sound is oddly loud and melancholy, without the covering envelope of noise that fills the building during the day.

The elevator doors open, and he walks down the brightly lit corridor of the Duty Office. There is sound and life here: the stuttering clack of a typewriter in clumsy hands; the hum of fluorescent lights; and somewhere a transistor radio plays popular music.

Guttmann steps into the hall at the sound of the elevator. He looks unkempt and haggard; more like a real cop, LaPointe thinks.

“Good morning, sir. He’s in here.” Guttmann’s tone is flat and unfriendly.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” LaPointe asks.

“Sir?”

“Your attitude, tone of voice. What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t know it showed, sir.”

“It shows. I warned you to cancel that date of yours.”

“I did, sir. She went to a film with a friend. But she dropped by later for a drink. We live in the same apartment building.”

“And the call got you out of bed?”

“Something like that.”

“At an awkward time?”

“As awkward as it gets, sir.”

LaPointe laughs. Guttmann recognizes the comic possibilities of the situation, but he doesn’t find this particular case funny.

LaPointe enters the Duty Office, Guttmann following. Joseph Michael “the Vet” Sinclair is sitting on a wooden bench against the wall. His long arms are wrapped around his legs, his face is pressed against his knees, and he still wears his ridiculous floppy-brimmed hat. He rocks himself back and forth in misery, humming or moaning one note over and over again. His grip on reality seems fragile. Occasionally he looks around the room, bewildered and frightened, and his teeth begin to chatter, his breath comes in canine sniffs, and he struggles against screaming.

LaPointe’s nostrils dilate with the stench of urine. Joseph Michael Sinclair has wet himself.

The symptoms resemble withdrawal. LaPointe has seen this once before. The Vet is a victim of claustrophobia. The Duty Office is a big room, so that isn’t what is eroding his sanity. It was the trip down in a police car and, even more, the thought of being locked up in a cell. The Vet is trapped in the classic terrible cycle facing the claustrophobic: he is almost mad with the fear of being shut up, and if he gives way to his madness, they will lock him up.

“Where did you pick him up?” LaPointe asks one of the officers getting coffee at the dispensing machine, a tough Polish old-timer who never bothered to take his sergeant’s examinations because he doesn’t want the hassle of responsibility. Although his French is thin and badly accented, he has always been accepted by the French Canadian cops as one of them, because he so obviously is not one of the others.

The coffee is hot, and the Polish cop winces as he changes the paper cup from hand to hand, looking for a place to set it down. His gestures are comically delicate, because the paper cup is fragile. He manages to balance it on a ledge and snaps his fingers violently. “Jesus H. Christ! We picked him up on St. Urbain, just south of Van Horne. Somebody named Red phoned in the tip. He gave us one hell of a chase. Took off across Van Horne, hopping like a gimpy rabbit! Right through the traffic! Cars and trucks hitting their brakes! Scared the shit out of the drivers. Their assholes must of bit chunks out of the car seats. And there I am, right after him, dancing and dodging through the traffic. Then your friend here climbs the fence and is halfway down the bank into the freight yard before I get to him. Look at that, will you?” He reaches around and tugs out the slack in the seat of his pants, showing a triangular rip. “Got that climbing the goddamned wire fence after the son of a bitch! Twenty-seven bucks shot in the ass!”

“Literally,” Guttmann says.

“What?” the Polish cop demands.

“Did he give you any trouble?” LaPointe asks.

“Any trouble? Wild as a cat crapping razor blades, that’s all! You wouldn’t know it to see him now, but it took both of us to get him into the car. Kick? Wriggle? Scream? You’da thought we were gang-banging the Mother Superior.”

LaPointe looks over at the miserable bomme whose eyes are now squeezed shut as he rocks back and forth, with each movement moaning a high, thin note that stops short in his throat. He is right on the limen of sanity.

“You didn’t give him anything to calm him down, did you?”

“No, Lieutenant. Your Joan told us not to. Anyway, it wasn’t necessary. As soon as we told him you were coming down, he settled right down. Just started moaning and rocking like that. A real nut case. Twenty-fucking-seven bucks! And not a month old!”

LaPointe crosses to the Vet and places his hand on his shoulder. “Hey?” He gives him a slight shake. “Hey, Vet?” The tramp does not look up; he is lost in the treacherous animal comfort of his rocking and moaning. His own motion and his own sound surround and protect him. He doesn’t want penetrations from the outside.

LaPointe has seen men go inside themselves like this before. He is afraid he’ll lose the Vet if he doesn’t bring him out right now. He takes off the wide-brimmed hat and lifts up the head by the hair. “Hey!”

The bomme tries to pull away, but LaPointe holds the hair tighter. “Vet? Vet!” The smell of urine is strong.

The Vet’s vague humid eyes focus slowly on LaPointe’s face. The slack, unshaven cheeks quiver. As he opens his mouth to speak, a bubble of thick spit forms between the lips and bursts with the first word.

“Lieutenant?” It is a pitiful, mendicant whine. “Don’t let them lock me up. You know what I mean? I can’t be locked up! I can’t! I… I… I… I… I…” With each repetition, the voice rises a note as the Vet plunges toward panic.

LaPointe snatches the greasy hair. He mustn’t lose him. “Vet! No one’s going to lock you up!”

“No, you don’t! I can’t go inside! I can’t!”

“Listen to me!”

“No! No! No!”

LaPointe slaps the tramp’s cheek hard.

The Vet catches his breath and holds it, his cheeks bulging, his eyes wide open and staring up obliquely at the Lieutenant.

“Now listen,” LaPointe says more quietly. “Just listen,” he says softly. “All right?”

The Vet lets his breath escape slowly and remains silent, but his eyes still stare, and there are rapid little pupillary contractions.

LaPointe speaks very slowly and clearly. “No one is going to lock you up. Do you understand that? No one is going to put you inside.”

The bomme’s squinting left eye twitches as he struggles to comprehend. As understanding comes, his body, so long rigid, droops with fatigue; his jaw slackens; his breathing slows; and the bloodshot eyes roll up as though in sleep.

LaPointe releases the hair, and the tramp’s chin drops back into his chest. LaPointe lays his hand protectively on the nape of the Vet’s neck as he turns to Guttmann. “Get some coffee down him.”

Guttmann looks around for a coffeepot.

“The machine!” LaPointe says with exasperation, pointing to the coin-operated dispenser.

The two uniformed cops leave the Duty Office, the Polish old-timer fiddling with the back of his pants to see if he can hide the triangular rip, and his partner assuring him that nobody wants to look at his ass.

LaPointe leans against the wall and presses down his hair with his palm. “After you get a few cups of coffee down him,” he tells Guttmann, “dunk his head in cold water and clean him up a little. Then bring him to my office.”

Guttmann fumbles in his pocket as he looks with distaste at the heap of rags stinking of stale wine and urine. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t seem to have a dime.”

“The machine takes quarters.”

“I don’t have any change at all.”

With infinite patience, LaPointe produces a quarter from the depths of his overcoat pocket and holds it up between thumb and forefinger. “Here. This is called a quarter. It makes vending machines work. It also makes telephones work. What would you do if you had to make an emergency call from a public phone and you had no change on you?”

“I just threw on my clothes and came over when they called. I didn’t even—”

“Always carry change for the phone. It could save somebody’s life.”

Guttmann takes the quarter. “All right, sir. Thanks for the advice.”

“That wasn’t advice.”

Guttmann shoves the quarter into the slot brusquely. What the hell is bugging the Lieutenant? After all, he wasn’t the one who was called away from a night with a bird to come down and wet-nurse a drunk who has pissed his pants!

As he starts to leave the Duty Office for his own floor above, LaPointe pauses at the door. He sniffs and rubs his cheek. He is shaven on only one side. “Look. I’m sorry, I… I’m tired, that’s all.”

“Yes, sir. We’re probably all tired.”

“Did you say it was your first time with that young lady of yours?”

“First for sure. And probably last.” Guttmann is still angry and stung.

“Well, I hope not.”

“Yes, sir. Me too.”

It is fully half an hour before the door to LaPointe’s office opens and Guttmann enters, bringing the Vet along by the arm. The old bomme looks pale and sick, but sober. Sober enough, at least. The shapeless old overcoat has been left behind, along with the wide-brimmed hat, and the collar and front of his shirt are wet from the dunking Guttmann has given him in a washbowl of the men’s room. The hair is wet and dripping, and it has been raked back with fingers that left greasy black ropes. There is a small bruise over the eyebrow, half covered by a hank of hair plastered on the forehead.

“You hit him?” LaPointe asks.

“No, sir. He clipped his head on the edge of the washbowl.”

“Do you have any idea what a lawyer would make of that? A lot more than harassment.” LaPointe turns his attention to the bomme. “Okay, sit down, Vet.”

The old tramp obeys sullenly. Now that his first panic is over, something of his haughty sassiness returns, and he attempts to appear indifferent and superior, despite the stink of urine that moves with him.

“Feeling better?” LaPointe asks.

The Vet does not answer. He lifts his head and looks unsteadily at LaPointe down his thin, bent nose. The intended disdain is diluted by an uncontrollable wobbling of the head.

LaPointe has never liked the Vet. He pities him, but the Vet is one of those men toward whom feelings of pity are always mixed with contempt, even disgust.

“Got a smoke?” the Vet asks.

“No.” Once the Vet begins to feel safe, he’ll be impossible to deal with. It’s best to keep him from getting too confident. “I told you we weren’t going to put you inside,” LaPointe says, leaning back in his chair. “I’d better be straight with you. It’s not really settled yet. You may be locked up, and you may not.”

With almost comic abruptness, the tramp’s composure shatters. His eyes flicker like a rodent’s, and his breath starts to come in short gasps. “I can’t go into a cell, Lieutenant. I thought you understood! I was wounded in the army.”

“I’m not interested in that.”

“No, wait! I was captured! A prisoner of war! For four years I was locked up! You know what I mean? I couldn’t stand it. One day… one day, I began to scream. And I couldn’t stop. You know what I mean? I knew I was screaming. I could hear myself. And I wanted to stop, but I didn’t know how! You know what I mean? That’s why I can’t go to jail!”

“All right. Calm down.”

The Vet is eager to obey, to put himself in LaPointe’s good graces. He stops talking, shutting his teeth tight. But he cannot halt the humming moan. He begins to rock in his chair. Mustn’t let the moan out. Mustn’t start screaming.

Guttmann clears his throat. “Lieutenant?”

“Hm-m?”

“I think he may be a user. There’s a fresh mark on his arm, and a couple of old tracks.”

“No, he’s not a user, are you, Vet? Between pension checks, he sells his blood illegally for wine money. That’s right, isn’t it, Vet?”

The bomme nods vigorously, still keeping his teeth clenched. He wants to be cooperative, but he doesn’t dare speak. He’s afraid to open his mouth. Afraid he’ll start screaming, and they will put him into a room. Like the English army doctors did after he was liberated from prison camp. They put him into a room because he kept screaming. He was screaming because they locked him in a room!

The Vet breathes nasally, in short puffs, humming with each exhalation. The hum strokes his need to scream just enough to keep it within control, like lightly rubbing a mosquito bite that you mustn’t scratch for fear of infection.

“Take it easy, Vet. Answer every question truthfully, and I’ll make sure you get back on the street. All right?”

The tramp nods. With great effort, he forces his breathing to slow. Then he carefully unclenches his teeth. “I’ll do… whatever… anything.”

“Good. Now, last night you took a wallet from a man in an alley.”

The Vet bobs his head once.

“I don’t care about the money. You can keep it.”

The Vet forces himself to speak. “Money… gone.”

“You drank it up?”

He nods once.

“It’s the wallet I want. If you can give me the wallet, you’re free to go.”

The Vet opens his mouth wide and takes three rapid, shallow breaths. “I have it! I have it!”

“But not on you.”

“No.”

“Where?”

“I can get it.”

“Good. I’ll come along with you.”

The Vet doesn’t want this. His eyes flick about the room. “No. I’ll bring it to you. I promise.”

“That’s not good enough, Vet. You’d promise anything right now. I’ll go with you.”

The Vet’s upper lip spreads flat over his teeth and his nostrils dilate. “I can’t!” He begins to sob.

LaPointe scrubs his hair and sighs. “Is it your kip? You don’t want me to find out where it is?”

The bomme nods vigorously.

“I’m sorry. But there’s nothing for it. It’s late, and I’m tired. Either we go right now to get the wallet, or you start ten days of a vag charge.”

The tramp looks at Guttmann, his eyes pleading for intervention. The young man frowns and stares at the floor.

LaPointe stands up. “Okay, that’s it. I don’t have time to fool around with you.”

“All right!” The Vet jumps to his feet and shouts into LaPointe’s face. “All right! All right!”

LaPointe puts his hands on the tramp’s shoulders and presses him back into his chair. “Take it easy.” He turns to Guttmann. “Go down and check us out a car and driver.”

Before leaving, Guttmann glances again at the Vet, who has retreated into the comfort of rocking and humming.

No sooner has the police car carried them three blocks from the Quartier Général and the threat of being locked up than the Vet’s whimpering dread evaporates and he reverts to his cocky, egoistic self. He does not deign to talk to Guttmann, who sits beside him because LaPointe got in front to avoid the alkaline smell of urine. Instead, he leans forward and talks to the Lieutenant’s back, explaining what happened in a loud voice because the windows of the car are open to avoid an onset of claustrophobia, and the bitter wind whistles through the car.

“I was just coming down the street, Lieutenant, when I happened to look up the alley and see this mark. He was kneeling down… low, you know? With his forehead on the bricks. I figures he’s a drunk or maybe high on something. Maybe he’s sick, I says to myself. I got first-aid training in the army. You can make a tourniquet with your belt. Did you know that? Sure. Easy as pie, if you know how. This riffraff on the street don’t know anything. They never been in the army. They don’t know shit from Shinola. Well, I walks up the alley. He don’t move. There’s nobody around. It’s real cold and everybody’s off the Main. Now, I wasn’t thinking of rolling him or nothing. Honest to God, Lieutenant. I just thought he might be sick or something. Need a tourniquet, maybe. When I get close to him, I could see he was real well-dressed. He looks funny. I mean, you know, ridiculous. Kneeling there with his ass in the air. Then I notice his wallet’s half out of his pocket. So… I just… took it. I mean, if I didn’t take it, one of those street tramps was sure to. So why not? First come, first served; that’s what we used to say in the army.”

“You didn’t know he was dead?”

“Honest to God, I didn’t. There wasn’t any blood or anything.”

That is true. The bleeding was largely internal.

“So, anyway, it comes to me that I might as well lift his poke. Share the wealth, like we used to say in the army. So I reach over and pull it out. It comes out hard, what with him squatting over like that and the ass of his pants so tight, you know. And just as I got it, all of a sudden this cop car stops down to the end of the alley, and this cop shouts at me!” The Vet’s breath begins to shorten as he relives his fear. “So I takes off! I was a-scared he might run me in! I can’t be locked up, Lieutenant! If I’m in a closed place, I start to scream. You know what I mean? You know what I mean?”

“All right! Take it easy.”

“Did I tell you that the army doctors kept me locked up after they liberated the camp?”

“You mentioned it. Where are we going?”

“Just straight up the Main. Up to Van Horne. I’ll show you when we get there. Yeah, the army doctors kept me locked up in a hospital ward especially for fruitcakes. They didn’t understand. I might have been there forever. But then this young doctor—Captain Ferguson, his name was—he says why don’t they give me a chance on the outside. See how it would work. Well, I got out, and I stopped screaming just like that. They warned me not to get a job where I was cooped up, and I never did. I didn’t have to. I’m a ninety percent disability. Ninety percent! That’s a lot, ain’t it? Hey, you got a cigarette?”

“No.”

The driver twists to get a pack out of his pocket. “Give him one of mine, Lieutenant. We sure could use the smell of smoke in here.”

As they near the intersection of Van Horne and St. Laurent, LaPointe becomes curious about this famous snug kip the Vet has always boasted about. It is generally known on the street that the Vet drinks up his pension check within two weeks and has to sell blood to keep alive after that. Like other tramps, winos, addicts, and hippie types in extremis, he lies about how long it has been since he gave blood, as he lies about diseases he has had. There is always a need for his uncommon type—another source of his endless bragging. Whenever he gets money, he buys a couple of bottles, but he never drinks much on the Main. He brings it off with him to his hideaway.

Following the Vet’s directions, they turn left on Van Horne. The tramp’s voice softens toward confidentiality as he speaks to LaPointe. “You can tell him to stop here at the corner. Just you come with me, Lieutenant. I don’t want anyone else to come. Okay? Okay?”

“I’ll leave the driver here. The young man is attached to me.”

Guttmann glances over, uncertain whether or not LaPointe is sending him up.

The car pulls over to the curb, and LaPointe instructs the driver to wait for them.

An unlit side street of storage companies and warehouses ends abruptly at a woven wire fence that screens off a little-used freight shunt yard, the tracks of which glow dimly down in a black depression below and beyond the fence. LaPointe and Guttmann follow the Vet down the steep embankment, glissading dangerously over cinders, braking to prevent a headlong run that would precipitate them into the darkness below.

At the base of the slope, the Vet begins to cut across the tracks with the kind of familiarity that does not require light. LaPointe tells him to wait a minute, and he closes his eyes to speed up the dilation of his pupils. The smudgy dark gray cityglow has the effect of moonlight through mist, obscuring details, yet providing too much light to permit the eyes to adjust to the dark. Eventually, however, LaPointe can make out the parallel sets of rails and the glisten of tar on the ties. He tells the Vet to go on, but more slowly. He feels uncomfortable and out of his element, walking through this broken ground of cinder and weeds that is neither city terrain nor country, but a starved and sooty wasteland that the city has not occupied and the country cannot reclaim.

They cross over half a dozen sets of rails, then turn west, parallel to the tracks. Soon rust mutes the shine of the rails, and ragged black weeds indicate that they are in an unused wing of the shunt yard. One by one, the pairs of tracks end against heavy metal bumpers, until they are following the last along a wide curve close to a dark embankment. Without warning, the Vet turns aside and scrambles down a slope and along a faint trail through dead burrs, and stunted, hollow-stalked weeds brittle with the frost. Wind swirls in this declivity of the freight yard, one minute pushing LaPointe’s overcoat from behind, and the next pressing against his chest and leaking in through the collar. The only sounds are the moan of the wind and the harsh rustle of their passage over frosted ground and through the weeds. They are isolated in this vast island of silence and dark in the midst of the city. All around them, but at a distance, the lights of traffic crawl in long double rows. A huge beer sign half a mile away at the far end of the freight yard flashes red-yellow-white, red-yellow-white. And from somewhere afar comes the wailing of an ambulance siren.

The Vet’s pace slackens and he stops. “It’s right over there, Lieutenant.” He points toward the cliff, looming black against the dark gray of the cityglow sky. “I’ll go get the wallet for you.”

LaPointe peers through the gloom, but he can see no shelter, no shack.

“I’ll go with you,” he decides.

“I won’t run off. Honest.”

“Come on, come on! It’s cold. Let’s get it over with.”

The Vet still hesitates. “All right. But he doesn’t have to come, does he?”“

Guttmann presses back his hair, which the wind is standing on end. “I’ll wait here, Lieutenant.”

LaPointe nods, then follows the Vet along the dim path.

Guttmann watches the vague figures blend into the dark, then disappear as they pass close to the embankment. He catches a bit of motion later, out of the corner of his eye where peripheral night vision is better. He strains to see, but he loses them. After several minutes, he hears the distant clank and scraping of metal—a heavy sheet of metal, from the sound of it. He hugs his coat around him and tucks his chin into his collar.

In about ten minutes he hears the crackle of dead, frozen stalks, then he sees them returning. The Vet’s body is stooped and slack; he seems deflated. For the fourth time that night, the bomme’s personality and manner have changed abruptly. The conditions of his life long ago ground away any pretensions of dignity, but there remains the husk of pride, and that has been damaged: the Lieutenant has seen his snug little kip. He passes Guttmann without a glance, and leads the policemen back through the field of frozen weeds, along the single unused track with its rusted rails, back over the pairs of glistening rails, to the base of the embankment, just below the wire fence and the light of the city.

“We can find our way from here,” LaPointe tells the tramp.

Without a word, the Vet turns and starts back the way they came.

“Vet?” LaPointe calls.

The bomme stops in his tracks, but he doesn’t turn to face them.

“You know I won’t tell any of them about your kip, don’t you?”

The Vet’s voice is listless. “Yeah.” He clutches the brim of his floppy hat against the wind and trudges back across the tracks.

LaPointe looks after him for a second. “Come on,” he says. They scramble up the cinder embankment, over the wire fence, and soon they are back in the light, on the truncated street of warehouses. As Guttmann walks on, LaPointe stands for a moment and looks back over the shunt yard, a matte-black hole ripped out of the map of Montreal’s streets and city lights. His sense of reality is upset. Somehow this street with its warehouses and the noise and light of passing traffic down at the corner seems artificial, temporary. That dark, desolate freight yard with its faint paths crowded in by black frozen burrs, with its silence in the midst of the city’s noise, its dark in the midst of the city’s light—that was real. It was not pleasant, but it was real… and inevitable. It is what the whole city would be six months after man was gone. It is the seed of urban ruin.

Oh, he’s just tired; feeling a little cafard. There is vertigo in his sense of reality because he’s been awake too long, because of the hard scramble up the cinder embankment, and because of the pleasant, terrifying tingle, this effervescence in his blood…

Guttmann is cold, and he walks quickly toward the waiting police car with its dozing driver and its radio, against regulations, tuned to music. Then he realizes that LaPointe is not with him. He turns impatiently and sees the Lieutenant standing against the wire fence, his eyes closed. As Guttmann approaches, LaPointe opens his eyes and rubs his upper arms as though to restore circulation. Before Guttmann can ask what’s wrong, the Lieutenant growls, “Come on! Let’s not stand around here all night! It’s cold, for Christ’s sake!”

They sit in a back booth, the only customers of the A-One Café. When they came in, LaPointe greeted the old Chinese owner: “How’s it going, Mr. A-One?”

The Chinese cackled and responded, “Yes, you bet. That’s a good one!”

Guttmann assumed the greeting and response were ancient and automatic, a ritual joke they have shared for years.

Without asking what they wanted, the old man brought them two cups of coffee, thick and brackish, the lees from an afternoon pot. Then he returned to stand by the front window, motionless, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes focused on a mid-distance beyond his window.

The naked bulb above his head produces an oblique angle of light which deepens the furrows and rivulets of his face. His eyes do not blink.

LaPointe sits huddled in his coat, frowning meditatively as he slowly stirs his coffee, although he has not put sugar into it.

On the wall beside Guttmann’s head is a gaudy embroidered hanging featuring a long-tailed bird resting on the branch of a tree bearing every kind of flower. And tacked up next to it is a picture of a very healthy girl in a swimsuit coyly considering the commitment involved in accepting the bottle of Coke thrust toward her by an aggressive male fist.

Guttmann stifles a yawn so deep that it brings tears. “Not much business,” he says irrelevantly. “Wonder why he stays open all night.”

LaPointe looks up as though he has forgotten the young man’s presence. “Oh, you don’t need much sleep when you’re old. He has no wife. It helps to shorten the nights, I suppose.”

For the first time, Guttmann wonders if LaPointe has a wife. He cannot imagine it; cannot picture him taking a Sunday afternoon walk in some park, a middle-aged matron on his arm. Then the image starts to form in Guttmann’s mind of LaPointe in bed with a woman…

“What is it?” LaPointe asks. “What are you smiling at?”

“Oh, nothing,” Guttmann lies. “It’s just that… I don’t know what in hell I’m doing here. I don’t know why I didn’t take the car back to the Quartier Général.” He pushes out a sigh and shakes his head at himself. “I must be getting dopey with lack of sleep.”

LaPointe nods. “You’ve got what Gaspard calls ‘the sits.’ “

“What?” Guttmann is thrown off track by the unexpected shift to English.

“The sits. That’s when you’re so tired and numb-headed that you don’t have the energy to get up and go home.”

“That’s what I’ve got all right. The sits. That’s a good name for it. I wish I were in bed right now.”

LaPointe glances at him, a smile in his down-sloping eyes.

“No,” Guttmann laughs. “She’s back in her own apartment by now. But maybe all is not lost. We have a date for tomorrow.”

“We’re going to have to do some work tomorrow.”

“But tomorrow’s Saturday.”

LaPointe put his elbow on the table and his forehead in his palm. “That’s right. You see? Your college education wasn’t a waste after all. You know the days of the week. After Friday, Saturday. Come to think of it, tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“What?”

“What time is it?”

“Ah, it’s…” Guttmann tips his wrist toward the light. “Christ, it’s almost two.”

“Want some more coffee?”

“No, sir. After spending the day with you, I don’t think I’ll ever want another cup of coffee in my life.” Guttmann glances toward the motionless Chinese. “Is that all he does? Just stand there looking inscrutable?”

“What does that mean? Inscrutable?”

“Inscrutable means… hell, sir, I don’t know. My brain’s gone to sleep. It means… ah… of or pertaining to the inability to scrute? Je scrute, tu scrutes, il scrute… shit, I don’t know.” He sits back, and his eyes settle on the Chinese again. “He must be lonely.”

LaPointe shrugs. “I doubt it. He’s past that.”

This simple bit of human understanding from the Lieutenant disturbs Guttmann. He can’t peg LaPointe in his mind. Like most liberals, he assumes that all thinking men are liberals. On the one hand, LaPointe is the classic old-timer who rags his juniors, pokes fun at education, harasses and bullies the civilians—the prototypical tough cop. On the other hand, he is a friend to ex-whores with bashed-up faces, a paternal watchdog who chats with people on the street, knows the bums, understands his patch… seems to have affection for it. Pride, even. Guttmann knows better than to think that people are black or white. But he expects to find them gray shades, not alternately black then white. Lieutenant LaPointe: Your Friendly Neighborhood Fascist.

“He should find some old duffers to play pinochle with,” Guttmann says.

“Who?”

“The old Chinese who runs this place.”

“Why pinochle?”

“I don’t know. That’s what old farts do when they don’t know what else to do with themselves, isn’t it? Play pinochle? I mean…” Guttmann stops and closes his eyes. He slowly shakes his head. “No, don’t tell me. You play pinochle, don’t you, sir?”

“Twice a week.”

Guttmann hits his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I should have known. You know, sir, it just seems that fate doesn’t want us to hit it off.”

“Don’t blame fate. It’s your big mouth.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What have you got against pinochle?”

“Believe it or not, I don’t have anything against pinochle. My grandfather used to play pinochle with his cronies late into the night sometimes.”

“Your grandfather.”

“Yes, sir. That’s mostly what I remember him doing; sitting with his friends until all hours. Playing. Pretending it mattered who won and who lost. I just came to associate it with lonely old men, I guess.”

“I see.”

“I have nothing against the game. I’m a pinochle player myself, sir. My grandfather taught me.”

“Are you any good?”

“Sir, excuse me. But doesn’t it strike you as odd that we are sitting in a Chinese all-night coffee shop at two in the morning talking about pinochle?”

LaPointe laughs. The kid’s okay. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he says, taking from his overcoat pocket the wallet the Vet gave him, and emptying the contents onto the table. There is a scrap of paper with two girls’ names written in different hands, evidently by the girls themselves. First names only; not much help. There is a little booklet the size of a commemorative stamp, containing a dozen pictures of various sex positions and combinations: the kind of thing shown to objecting but giggling girls by a man who believes the myth that seeing the act automatically brings a woman to the point of panting necessity. In an accordion-pleated change pocket there are two contraceptives of the sort sold in vending machines in the toilets of cheap bars: guaranteed to afford maximum protection with minimum loss of sensation. Sold only for the prevention of disease. One of them features a “tickler”; the other is packed in a liquid lubricant. No money; the Vet got that. No driver’s license. The wallet is cheap imitation alligator, quite new. There is a card in one of the plastic windows with places for the owner to provide particulars. Childishly, the dead man had felt impelled to fill it in. LaPointe passes the wallet over to Guttmann, who reads the round, infantile printing:

NAME

Tony Green

ADDRESS

17 Mirabeau Street

PHONE

Apmt. 3B

BLOOD TYPE

Hot!!!!!!!!!!

“So the victim’s name was Tony Green,” Guttmann says.

“Probably not.” There is a businesslike, mechanical quality to LaPointe’s voice. “The printing is European. See the barred seven? The abbreviation for ‘apartment’ is wrong. That seems to give us a young alien. And the kid had a Latin look—probably Italian. But not a legal entrant, or his fingerprints would have been on file with Ottawa. He picked the name Tony Green for himself. If he runs true to form for Italian immigrants, his real name would be something like Antonio Verdi—something like that.”

“Does the name mean anything to you? You know him?”

LaPointe shakes his head. “No. But I know the house. It’s a run-down place near Marie-Anne and Clark. We’ll check it out tomorrow morning.”

“What do you expect to turn there?”

“Impossible to say. It’s a start. It’s all we have in hand.”

“That, and the fact that the victim was a little hung up on sex. Oh, God!”

“Why ‘Oh, God’?”

“You know that girl I had to leave tonight? Well, I promised her we’d go out tomorrow morning. Take coffee up on the Mount. Maybe drop in at a gallery or two. Have dinner maybe. Now I’ll have to beg off again.”

“Why do that? There’s no real point in your coming along with me tomorrow, if you don’t want to.”

“Why do you say that, sir?”

“Well… you know. All this business of the apprentice Joans learning the ropes from the old-timers is a lot of crap. Things don’t work that way. There’s no way in the world that you’re going to end up a street cop like me. You have education. You speak both languages well. You have ambition. No. You won’t end up in this kind of work. You’re the type who ends up in public relations, or handling ‘delicate’ cases. You’re the type who gets ahead.”

Guttmann is a little stung. No one likes to be a “type.” “Is there anything wrong with that, sir? Anything wrong with wanting to get ahead?”

“No, I suppose not.” LaPointe rubs his nose. “I’m just saying that what you might learn from me won’t be of much use to you. You could never work the way I work. You wouldn’t even want to. Look at how you got all steamed up about the way I handled that pimp, Scheer.”

“I only mentioned that he has his rights.”

“And the kids he bashes around? Their rights?”

“There are laws to protect them.”

“What if they’re too dumb to know about the laws? Or too scared to use them? A girl hits the city on a bus, coming from some farm or village, stupid and looking for a good time… excitement. And the first thing you know, she’s broke and scared and willing to sell her ass.” LaPointe isn’t thinking of Scheer’s girls at this moment.

“All right,” Guttmann concedes. “So maybe something has to be done about men like Scheer. Stiffer laws, maybe. But not stopping him on the street and making an ass of him in front of people, for God’s sake.”

LaPointe shakes his head. “You’ve got to hit people where they’re tender. Scheer is a strutting wiseass. Embarrass him in public and he’ll keep off the street for a while. It varies with the man. Some you threaten, some you hurt, some you embarrass.”

Guttmann lifts his palms and looks about with round eyes, as though calling upon God to listen to this shit. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing, sir. Some you hurt, some you threaten, some you embarrass—what is that, a Nazi litany? Those are supposed to be tactics for keeping the peace?”

“They didn’t tell you about that in college, I suppose.”

“No, sir. They did not.”

“And, of course, you’d play everything by the book.”

“I’d try. Yes.” This is simply said; it is the truth. “And if the book was wrong, I’d do what I could to change it. That’s how it works in a democracy.”

“I see. Well—by the book—the Vet was guilty of a crime, wasn’t he? He took money from this wallet. Would you put him inside? Let him scream for the rest of his life?”

Guttmann is silent. He isn’t sure. No, probably not.

“But that would be playing it by the book. And do you remember that fou who sharpens knives and worries about the snow? He’d make a great suspect for a knife murder. You almost sniffed him yourself. And do you know what would happen if you brought him in for questioning? He’d get confused and frightened, and in the end he would confess. Oh, yes. He’d confess to anything you wanted. And the Commissioner would be happy, and the newspapers would be happy, and you’d get promoted.”

“Well… I didn’t know about him. I didn’t know he was…”

“That’s the point, son! You don’t know. The book doesn’t know!”

Guttmann’s ears are reddening. “But you know?”

“That’s right! I know. After thirty years, I know! I know the difference between a harmless nut and a murderer. I know the difference between shit tracks on a man’s arm and the marks left by selling blood to stay alive!” With a guttural sound and a wave of his hand LaPointe dismisses the use of explaining anything to Guttmann’s type.

Guttmann sits, silently pushing his spoon back and forth between his fingers. He isn’t cowed. He speaks quietly, without looking up. “It’s fascism, sir.”

“What?”

“It’s fascism. The rule of a man, rather than the rule of law, is fascism. Even when the man has been around and thinks he knows what’s best… even if the man is trying to do good things… to be fair. It’s still fascism.”

For a moment, LaPointe’s melancholy eyes rest on the young man, then he looks over his head to the gaudy Chinese hanging and the Coke advertisement.

Guttmann expects a denial. Anger. An explanation.

That’s not what comes. After a silence, LaPointe says, “Fascism, eh?” The tone indicates that he never thought of it that way. It indicates nothing more.

Once again, Guttmann feels undercut, bypassed.

LaPointe presses his eye sockets with his thumb and forefinger and sighs deeply. “Well, I think we’d better get some sleep. You can get the sits in your brain, as well as in your ass.” He sniffs and rubs his cheek with his knuckles.

Guttmann delays their leaving. “Sir? May I ask you something?”

“About fascism?”

“No, sir. Back there in the freight yard. That bomme didn’t want me to come with you and see his kip. And later you said something to him about not telling the others. What was that all about?”

LaPointe examines the young man’s face. Could you explain something like this to a kid who learned about people in a sociology class? Where would it fit in with his ideas about society and democracy? There is something punitive in LaPointe’s decision to tell him about it.

“You remember Dirtyshirt Red last night? You remember how he had nothing good to say about the Vet? All the bommes on the Main sleep where they can: in doorways, in alleys, behind the tombstones in the monument-maker’s yard. And they all envy the nice snug private kip the Vet’s always bragging about. They hate him for having it. And that’s just the way the Vet wants it. He wants to be despised, hated, bad-mouthed. Because as long as the other tramps despise and reject him, he isn’t one of them; he’s something special. That make sense to you?”

Guttmann nods.

“Well—” LaPointe’s voice is husky with fatigue, and he speaks quietly. “After we left you back there on the path, I followed him along a trail I could barely see. But there wasn’t anything around. No shack, no hut, nothing. Then the Vet went behind a patch of bush and bent over. I could hear a scrape of metal. He was sliding back a sheet of corrugated roofing that covered a pit in the ground. I went over to the edge of it as he jumped down, sort of skidding on the muddy sides of the hole. It was about eight feet deep, and the bottom was covered with wads of rag and burlap sacking that squished with seep water when he walked around. He had a few boxes down there, to sit on, to use as a table, to stash stuff in. He fumbled around in one of these boxes and found the wallet. It was all he could do to get out of the pit again. The sides were slimy, and he slipped back twice and swore a lot. He finally got out and handed over the wallet. Then he slid the sheet of metal back over the hole. When he stood up and looked at me… I don’t know how to explain it… there was sort of two things in his eyes at the same time. Shame and anger. He was ashamed to live in a slimy hole. And he was angry that somebody knew about it. We talked about it for a while. He was proud of himself. I know that sounds nuts, but it’s how it was. He was ashamed of his hole, but proud of having figured it all out. I guess you could say he was proud of having made his hole, but ashamed of needing it. Something like that, anyway.

“One night a few years ago, he was drunk and looking for a place to hide, where the police wouldn’t run him in for D and D. He found this cave-in hidden away among some bushes. Later on he thought about it, and he got a bright idea. He went back there at night with a spade he pinched somewhere, and he worked on the hole. He made it deeper and made the sides vertical. And whenever the sides crumble from him scrambling in and out, he works on it again. So his hole is always getting bigger. Rain gets in, and water seeps up from the slime, so he keeps adding rags and bags he picks up here and there. It’s a clever little trap he’s made for himself.”

“Trap, sir?”

“That’s what it is. That’s how he uses it. He’s afraid of being picked up drunk and put in a cell and left to scream. So every time he thinks he’s got enough wine inside him to be dangerous, he buys another bottle and brings it back to his kip. Down there in the hole, he can drink until he’s wild and raving. He’s safe down there. Even when he’s sober, it’s hard for him to climb up those slimy sides. When he’s drunk, it’s impossible. He traps himself down there to save himself from being arrested and put inside. Of course, he’s a claustrophobic, so sometimes he gets panicky down there. When his brain’s soggy with wine, he thinks the walls are caving in on him. And he’s terrified that a big rain might fill his pit with water when he’s too drunk to get out. It’s bad down there, you know. When he’s drunk, he can’t get out to shit or piss, so it’s… bad down there.”

“Jesus Christ,” Guttmann says quietly.

“Yeah. He lives in a small hole in the ground because he’s a claustrophobic.”

“Jesus Christ.”

LaPointe leans back in the booth and presses his mat of cropped hair hard with the palm of his hand. “And what do you do if you have to live in a slimy, stinking hole? You brag about it, of course. You make the other bommes despise you. And envy you.”

Guttmann shakes his head slowly, his mouth agape, his eyes squeezed in pity and disgust. LaPointe’s punitive intent in telling him about this has been effective.

“Tell you what,” LaPointe says. “Don’t come by to pick me up tomorrow until around noon. I need some sleep.”

Without turning on the lights, he closes the door behind him and hangs his overcoat on the wooden rack. He flinches when the revolver in his pocket thuds against the wall; he doesn’t want to wake her.

There is a crackling hiss in the room, and the crescent dial of the old Emerson glows dim orange. The station has gone off the air. Why didn’t she turn the radio off? Ah. He forgot to tell her that you also have to jiggle the knob to turn it off. Then why didn’t she pull out the plug? Dumb twit.

The ceiling of the bedroom is illuminated by the streetlamp beneath the window, and he can make out Marie-Louise’s form in the bed, although she is below the shadow line. She sleeps on her side, her hands under her cheek, palms together, and her legs are in a kind of running position that takes up most of the bed.

He undresses noiselessly, teetering for a moment in precarious balance as he pulls off his pants. When he aligns the creases to fold the pants over the back of a chair, some change falls out of his pocket, and he grimaces at the sound and swears between his teeth. He tiptoes around to the other side of the bed and lifts the blankets, trying to slip in without waking her. If he curves his body just right, there is enough room to lie next to her without touching her. For five long minutes he remains there, feeling the warmth that radiates from her, but it is impossible to sleep when the slightest movement would either touch her or make him fall out of bed. Anyway, he feels ridiculous, sneaking into bed with her. He rises carefully, but the springs clack loudly in the silent room.

…at first the creaking bed had made Lucille tense. But later she used to giggle silently at the thought of imagined neighbors listening beyond the wall, shocked at such carryings-on…

At the noise, Marie-Louise moans in confused irritation. “What’s the matter?” she asks in a blurred, muffled voice. “What do you want?”

He lays his hand lightly on her mop of frizzy hair. “Nothing.”