River City Read online

  Although it possessed no organizational apparatus, and slogans had yet to catch on, the burgeoning crowd seemed to know that it would find more interesting, more critical targets ahead.

  A pair of cops patrolling the beat near the Forum were not the first to intervene—others had evicted the crowd from the building and bullied a few individuals outside—but, unaware of what had transpired, they were ill prepared for the impending rampage. Beer-bellied, with a florid complexion, the senior of the two put up a hand to block a group of forty raucous men and youths. He demanded that they get off the street and use the sidewalk. “That’s what it’s there for!” he castigated them, as one might a rascally pack of kids. The men hooted, then charged, and the officer felt both his knees snap before he was trampled underfoot.

  His partner, youthful, more limber and less belligerent, escaped the crush by vaulting over the hood of a parked car and dashing across the sidewalk into a doorway, emerging to help his dazed and bloodied mentor back to his feet after the howling band had pressed on. The older man seemed to be under the impression that he still had a function to pursue, raising a hand to block the progress of the next throng, a gang of about six hundred men, reaching also for his missing pistol—confiscated by a rioter and now indiscriminately being fired in the air.

  The junior officer guided his confused colleague away.

  The first calculated intervention by authorities outside the building resulted in similar dismay. Fifteen officers ran down a side street and cut the mob off as it moved along Ste. Catherine, expecting that the presence of the uniform and the sight of fifteen truncheons would sober the drunks and bring order to the lives of the reckless. The gang failed to be impressed. Having ransacked a corner grocer, depositing the owner and his wife outside the premises while emptying his backroom, they demonstrated their commitment to the furor by hurling full and half-full beer bottles at the cops, and the blue line of fifteen men buckled and ran.

  Their flight charged the atmosphere with conviction. To the men running rampant on the street, they now owned the city.

  Bad news for Captain Armand Touton of the Night Patrol. After the sun went down, the city’s security rested upon his shoulders, but he had made a reasoned deduction. His detectives were not equipped for this type of operation and could offer no useful support beyond logistics and expertise. He did not find merit in hand-to-hand combat against the rioters.

  “We have a choice,” he maintained to the officer in charge of the patrolmen. Many of his constables had reported in when an appeal went out over the radio. Others had trundled off to bed as soon as news of the riot was broadcast—so great their need for sleep that they disconnected their phones. Still others headed for the nearest neighbourhood tavern in order to miss the call from a station commander to return to work.

  “Is that right?” Captain Réal LeClerc, in charge of police operations, asked him. “What choice would that be?”

  “We can let the rioters break store windows, or we can let them break the noses of our men. I say we let the mob smash glass.”

  LeClerc was visibly astonished. “Never expected that from you, Armand.”

  A former commando and prisoner of war, Touton’s reputation as a tough guy had been earned and proven often. Months earlier, while driving home in the morning after a particularly hard night, he’d come across Captain LeClerc and his men surrounding a home in the East End. Officers squatted behind police cars and civilian automobiles, weapons drawn. Touton had dashed from his car, bent over, his head down, and crept alongside the uniforms until he found LeClerc. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “One man inside. Young punk with a gun. Already he took a shot at his own mother. He missed. His mom, his dad, they got out, but he’s a lunatic, his parents say. Sick in the head and body both.”

  “If he’s inside, what are you doing outside?”

  The captain had nothing to say to that, managing only a faint shrug.

  “I’m going in,” Touton announced loudly. “Who’s coming with me?”

  He looked around. None of LeClerc’s men made eye contact with him. This time, he was the one to shrug.

  On his way into the lower level of the shabby two-storey crammed together with others identical to it, Touton reached down and gathered a handful of pebbles from the yard. He threw one of the stones ahead of him as he entered. No response. He walked in. He went up a short flight of sagging stairs that creaked underfoot. The first door was open. He chucked a stone inside, then listened to it rattle around and come to rest. Nothing. He went in.

  He tossed a stone into the living room on his left and, when he heard no sound, stepped into the room, then moved towards the rear of the house into the adjoining dining room.

  Tossing another stone earned him no reply.

  At the doorway to every room, he lobbed a stone. At the last, he spotted the shadow of an arm come up. Then a pistol rose into view. Commando style, fast, fiercely, Touton struck first, his massive fist smashing into the youth’s face. A left uppercut to the chin snapped the lad’s head back. Blood spurted as the gunman bit through his tongue. Touton reeled at the unexpected horror that confronted him there, and he levelled the crazed gunman with another savage right hand.

  Motionless, the young man’s body seethed with pustules. Foul secretions leaked across his back, and from his forehead down into his eyes. An effect, Touton would later have confirmed, of syphilis. The disease had already chewed up his mind. Touton called in LeClerc to clean up the mess and haul the diseased man away before he awoke in bad temper.

  And yet this time, as the riot gained intensity and the crowd grew more brazen and violent, Touton was the one suggesting that the cops pull back, that the conflagration be permitted to run its course.

  “Some guy wants to play with matches, douse him with a firehose. A thug wants to put the boots to a citizen, shoot off his left big toe. Later, you can claim it was an accidental discharge. A drunk wants to fire a pistol in the air, aim a warning shot past his right ear. If you miss and hit him between the eyes, too bad for that guy.”

  LeClerc said no. Newspapers and radio journalists had heralded Touton for his courage against the syphilitic gunman while reviling LeClerc and the rest of the department as cowards. Now he was being presented with an opportunity to show the other man up. “These bums need to be taught a lesson. They can’t take over the streets on my watch.”

  Pondering his options, Touton nodded. “Your choice. If you think you can teach a mob a lesson, be my guest. I’ll monitor the radio. Crooks will be going about their business tonight. My guys need to be ready for that.” He’d rather allocate his resources to protect critical targets, starting with the banks in the path of the mob’s eastward flow.

  Officers in overcoats—collars up, hats low over their eyes to suggest to rioters that they were not cops at all, a shotgun tucked under each arm and multiple pistols visible in gun-belts slung over their shoulders—ought to be enough to keep looters from the banks’ doors. He also had people on phones, siphoning bank presidents out of their evening baths, demanding that they hire private security to pick up the slack deeper into the night. Touton dispatched detectives to hot spots as they flared up, for all ears—including those of criminals—were tuned to the radio. By now, the whole city knew about the riot. Furious men in every quarter were racing to join the melee, by car or on foot. Those who came by bus would smash out the windows of the coach and beat up the drivers as they disembarked. Sometimes burn the buses. As he had expected, petty crooks were taking advantage of the massive police deployment to knock over small businesses elsewhere in the city. He might not be able to chase down those guys tonight, but his men would nab a few in the act, and afterwards he’d be in a better position to sort through who had done what to whom and drag a few bad guys in.

  Between bursts of information and the doling out of orders from his vehicle, Armand Touton kept tabs on the efforts of his colleague Réal LeClerc. The man was in charge of the uniforms, and had m
anaged, despite the evening hour, to cobble together a small army. This proved fortunate, given that his actions had already helped the riot to escalate into all-out war.

  A man of thirty-five, thin, agile, in jeans and a short leather coat, standing farther east along Ste. Catherine Street, anticipated the mob’s approach. Although of average height, his features were exceptionally striking, distinguished by a prominent, serrated nose and cheekbones like plump pears. The overall effect was a sculpted, even cunning look that barely masked a cherub’s propensity for mischief. Continents appeared to come together in his face, as though his ancestry combined native Indian with Asian, and the French of Normandy with a smattering of English aristocracy. A wealthy man’s son, he had studied law and been called to the bar, yet had taken no interest in a conventional career. Pierre Elliott Trudeau preferred the work he did these days editing a small intellectual magazine, Cité Libre, and had recently stepped away from a job as a legal advisor to a government agency. Hearing radio reports of the havoc, he left the comforts of his mother’s home, where he was visiting, to hail a taxi that dropped him off as close to downtown as the driver dared.

  Cabs, the radio reported, were being overturned whenever cop cars weren’t handy. “That’s all right, what they’re doing,” the cabbie broadcast. “Me, I don’t mind. Burn the city, burn downtown. Go to Westmount, burn the English to the ground—know what I mean? But don’t burn my cab.”

  “That’s where you draw the line?” Trudeau asked.

  “That’s my line. I can’t go no closer than this.”

  “Sure you can. Go a little closer.”

  “My cab is my life to me!”

  “That’s probably not as true as you think. Don’t worry, nobody’s burning cabs for a few more blocks.”

  “You never know!”

  “A little farther.”

  Trudeau got out eventually and walked the last couple of blocks to a public square that appeared to be peaceful and quiet, although an unusual number of people were milling around, waiting. The anticipation in the air felt akin to the charge before an electrical storm. He was sitting up high on the backrest of a bench when he heard a dulcet male voice address him from behind.

  “Pierre? I thought that might be you.”

  In no mood to welcome company, he turned to see who had identified him. A step behind his left shoulder stood a soft-looking man in casual attire, his hands crossed over his tummy in the pose of a child waiting for an elder’s sanction to step forward. He wore large, floppy rubber boots, the tongues hanging out, jeans, a heavy wool sweater and a dusky jacket open down the front. He had on a small, black wool cap. Of similar height to Trudeau, the second man possessed a much bulkier build. Only twenty-eight, he appeared likely to become hefty in later years. Already his belly had to be cinched by his belt, and when he exerted himself he’d soon pant. Trudeau had first met him during the Asbestos miners’ strike a few years back—the skinny intellectual got into a fistfight, now a legendary battle, while the robust youth cheered him on—then later through the milieu of intellectuals around Cité Libre, where the corpulent fellow demonstrated a tenacious, if not a particularly original, intellect. In some circles, he became a formidable proponent of decisive political change as envisioned by the far left. Trudeau held reservations about the man—the two of them were incompatible politically—but on first impression conceded that he liked him. He’d detected a knack for astutely assessing personalities, and an ability to understand how others were likely to think. When the two of them rehashed a meeting that had gone badly, the man adroitly, and bravely, fingered those who lied. Finding him on the square, Trudeau dropped his automatic air of combativeness.

  “Father François,” Trudeau greeted him. “A surprise. How’s it going?”

  “Fine, Pierre. Taking in the riot on a midnight stroll?”

  On the bench seat, the marks of footprints in snow told that others had sat in a similar position to himself, on the backrest. “Father, are you blind? I’m sitting here, minding my own business.”

  The young priest emitted a self-conscious chuckle and sat at the opposite end of the bench, on the icy seat portion. “I see the potential arsonist in you, Pierre. You’re in the mood to burn down a building. So don’t tell me you’re here as a neutral observer.”

  “Observations are neutral? Since when? We see what we want to see, with the slant we prefer. What about you, Father? Packing snowballs with rocks inside? Burning cop cars?”

  “Twenty-five minutes ago—like you, I was minding my own business—I was standing alongside a cop car when it burst into flames.”

  “Spontaneous combustion?”

  “Something like that.” The priest leaned forward. The night was not too cold for March, but his breath was visible under the streetlights. “I singed my jacket. My first thought: what happens if the gas tank explodes? I tried moving people away, but on a night like this, people have minds of their own. They insisted on encircling the car, cheering.”

  “And you, incognito with no collar on. You could have said Mass.”

  “I didn’t expect to be attending to my flock this evening.”

  “Didn’t you?” Trudeau dug his hands into his pockets to warm them, not having bothered with gloves. “You usually listen to hockey games, Father?”

  “At this time of year, of course. Not you?”

  “Tonight, for the first time. But I expected tonight to be different—more than just a game.” Both men were distracted by a momentary roar from the approaching throng. “Sports fans,” Trudeau scoffed in the sardonic manner familiar to Father François Legault. “Their team scored a goal.”

  “Another cop car’s been roasted,” the priest surmised.

  “An English store window spontaneously shattered.”

  The priest eyed the other man closely. While he had been irritated by Trudeau in some discussions before, a timbre to his manner on this night made Legault suspect that he might enjoy his company. “You’re not curious, Pierre? You’ll walk no closer?”

  “They’ll be here soon enough.”

  Father François looked around. In accompanying the mob down Ste. Catherine Street, he had usually contrived to stay ahead of the action, looking for those areas where the police might initiate a pitched battle. In one instance, he coaxed officers to retreat by pointing out to them the discrepancy in numbers. In another, he confronted the wounded on both sides of a fight while they awaited ambulances. “The French and the Catholic are fighting French Catholics. Does this make sense?” he inquired. Lacking confidence in his physical health, he had carried on to this square. Intermittent breathers kept his pulse regular.

  “Why be confident, Pierre, of where they’ll go? It’s a mob. Without a destination. It could turn off anywhere, slide away in any direction.”

  Across the street from Phillips Square, where they were sitting, a department store, Morgan’s, projected its wares in bright windows. Like Eaton’s a block away, the store was an emblem of English Canada. Clothing, furniture and cosmetics for the ladies, but the French were obliged to speak English if they expected to be served, and speak it well if they wished to be served politely. A French lady buying French perfume from France had to learn to say please, not s’il vous plaît.

  “Why trouble myself by finding the riot,” Trudeau remarked, a nod indicating Morgan’s, “when I can sit here in a front-row seat and the riot will find me?”

  “Then you’ll agree, Pierre, that this evening has nothing to do with hockey.”

  “Hockey is the flashpoint. But there’s more to it. This mob will start selecting targets. When it does, it’ll discover its raison d’être.” Sirens wailed through the night. Above Ste. Catherine Street police cars, hook-and-ladder trucks and ambulances raced by. “Watch. Our rioters will educate themselves as they go. That’s already happened, or they would never have bypassed the National Hockey League offices.”

  “They don’t know where the offices are.”

  “Just as well.” />
  “I’m serious,” the priest reiterated. “Someone asked me if I knew where the league office was located. He had a brick in one hand, a beer in the other. I almost answered him before I thought better of it. I offered him a smoke.”

  “Good of you.”

  “I traded. A smoke for the brick.”

  “Quick thinking.”

  “It’s hard to get rid of a brick on a night like this. I stuffed it in a mailbox.”

  Trudeau blew warm air into his hands. “Father, while this is not only about hockey, I don’t see that it has much to do with religion.”

  “Now you’re insulting me. Even in this light I detect the devious twinkle in your eye. What does any of this have to do with the Privy Council, Pierre? You’re still employed by the government, no?” Feeling cold, as if the conversation had subdued his adrenaline, the priest stood and stomped his feet a moment. He finally did up the zipper on his jacket.

  “I thought you knew. I’m out of work. I quit. But the Catholic Church, Father. Your boss is no mere boss. The Church is your calling.”

  “The Catholic Church serves the people of Quebec, Pierre.”

  “Arguable,” Trudeau murmured.

  “Put it another way then. My flock is in torment. They’re rioting. Where else should I be? At home? In bed? Reading Cité Libre?”

  A large pane of glass shattered, catching their attention.

  “Somebody found your brick,” Trudeau said.

  “They probably used the whole mailbox.” Both men smiled. “I agree with you—though, sadly. They’ll be here soon.”

  “The police, too,” Trudeau noted. He glimpsed shadows forming on his right.

  The priest also spotted the gathering forces. Trudeau, the crafty young fellow, had chosen a ringside seat for the fiercest battle of the night. As he had done before, in the midst of past debates, Father François made a mental note of the man’s acumen.