LaPointe wastes no time with her. “There’s a kid who comes in here. Young, Italian, doesn’t have much English. Good-looking. Probably calls himself Tony Green.”

“He’s in trouble?”

LaPointe stares at her dully. He asks questions; he doesn’t answer them.

“Okay, I know the kid you mean,” she says quickly, sensing his no-nonsense mood.

“Well?” he says. He has no specific questions, so he makes her do the talking.

“What can I tell you? I don’t know much about him. He started coming in here a couple of months ago, sort of regular, you know. At first he can’t say diddly shit in English, but now he can talk pretty good. Sometimes he comes alone, sometimes with a couple of pals…” Willing though she is, she runs out of things to say.

“Go on.”

“What can I say? Ah… he usually drinks Strega, if that’s any use. Just another cock hanging out. He ain’t been in for the last few nights.”

“He’s dead.”

“No shit?” she asks, only mildly interested. “Well, that explains it, then.”

“Explains what?”

“Well… we had a little appointment set up for last Thursday night. And he didn’t show.”

“That was the night he was killed.”

“Just my luck. Now I’m out the fifty bucks.”

“He was going to pay you fifty bucks?” LaPointe asks incredulously. “What for? Six months’ worth?”

“No, he didn’t want me. He had me the first night or so he was here. He’s big on back-door stuff. But he didn’t seem interested in a second helping.”

“If not you, who then?”

She lifts her chin toward the bar. “He wanted to screw the kid that helps me with the music.”

Guttmann glances at LaPointe. “Christ,” he says. “A moronic kid?”

“Now wait a minute!” the dancer protests quickly. “You can’t hang anything on me. The kid’s nineteen. She’s got consent. Ask the Lieutenant. She’s nineteen, ain’t she?”

“Yes, she’s nineteen. With the mind of a seven-year-old.”

“There you are! And anyway, she seems to like it. She never complains. Just stares off into space all the time it’s going on. Look, I got to get back to my public. That butch in the front will pull her goddamned lip off if I’m late. Look, I’d tell you if I knew anything about the Italian kid. You know that, Lieutenant. Shit, the last thing I need is more trouble. But like I said, he was just another cock hanging out for a little fonne. Hey, did you notice that civilian in the suit? Now, there’s a weirdo for you. You know what he’s doing under the bar?”

“Sacre le camp,” LaPointe orders.

The dancer tucks down the corners of her mouth and shrugs, making a little farting noise of indifference with her mouth. Then she leaves for the back room, from which she soon appears without the slippers and dressing robe to clamber up onto the drum and stand, bored and impatient, while the retarded girl tries to set the needle down silently. She fails, and there is a screech before the whining music begins. The dancer darts a punitive glance at her, then begins to jiggle from foot to foot, running her thumbs around the belt of her G-string and in and out of the pouch.

The sting of the reprimand slides quickly from the girl’s smooth mind, and soon she is lost in rapt fascination, looking up at the woman dancing in the blue and orange light, all eyes on her. Show business.

Guttmann finishes his ouzo at a gulp. “I hate to admit it, but I’m beginning to agree with you.”

“You’d better watch that.”

“This Green was real shit.”

“Yes. Come on. Let’s go.”

At the door, LaPointe looks back at the dimly lit bar, small in the cavern of the unused dance floor. The man with the goatee is chewing and rolling his eyes.

They walk side by side down Rachel toward the Main, toward the luminous cross that advertises Christianity from the crest of Mont Royal.

“It’s still early,” Guttmann says. “You want a cup of coffee?”

That’s a switch, and LaPointe senses that the young man wants to talk, but he feels too fed up, too tired of it all. “No, thanks. I’ll just go home. I’m tired.”

They walk on in silence.

“That Green…” Guttmann mutters.

“What?”

“I mean, come on. That’s too sick.”

“No sicker than that dancer.”

“Sir?”

“The girl is her daughter.”

Guttmann walks on mechanically, staring ahead, his fists clenched in his overcoat pockets. They cross over St. Laurent, where LaPointe stops to say goodbye. “You have a date with your girl tonight?” he asks.

“Yes, sir. Nothing big. We’re just going to sit around and talk about things.”

“Like the future?”

“That sort of thing. Will you tell me something, Lieutenant? Does anyone survive a career as a cop and still feel anything but disgust for people?”

“A few do.”

“You?”

LaPointe examines the boy’s earnest, pained face. “See you in the morning.”

“Sure.”

12

Two days pass; Guttmann has returned to Detective Sergeant Gaspard to finish out his tour as a Joan. When no new leads open on the Green case, there is talk down in homicide of closing down the investigation.

Pig weather continues to depress spirits and abrade tempers, and a popular rumor circulates on the Main to the effect that Russian and American atomic testing has done irremediable damage to the polar icecap, and the weather will never return to normal.

LaPointe’s time and attention is soaked up by typical problems of the Main. Mr. Rothmann’s butcher shop is broken into; the newspaper vendor on the corner of Rue Roy is held up for eight dollars and thirty-five cents; and the construction force demolishing a block of row houses to make way for a high-rise parking facility arrives on the site one morning to find that extensive vandalism has ruined work and tools. On a scabby brick wall, the posse of vandals has painted:

On the Rothmann break-in, nothing was stolen and the only damage was to the doorframe and lock. Probably some street tramp or shelterless American draft avoider trying to get out of the damp cold of night. Once again, LaPointe advises Mr. Rothmann to install special police locks, and once again Mr. Rothmann argues that the police ought to pay for them. After all, he’s a taxpayer, isn’t he?

The holdup of the newspaper vendor is a different matter. LaPointe presses it to a quick finish because he realizes that someone might have been killed. Not the victim; the holdup man.

The paper seller could only give a description of the thief’s shoes and legs, and of the gun. Tennis shoes, bell-bottom jeans. A kid. And a black gun with a tiny hole in the barrel. The tiny hole meant the weapon was one of those exact-replica waterguns the Montreal police have made repeated complaints about, to no avail. After all, the people who sell them to kids are taxpayers, aren’t they? It’s a free country, isn’t it?

LaPointe makes two telephone calls and talks with four people on the street. The word is out: the Lieutenant wants this kid, and he wants him right now. If he doesn’t have him by noon, the street is going to become a hard place to live on.

Two and a half hours later, LaPointe is sitting in the cramped kitchen of a basement flat with the thief and his parents. The father admits he doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with these goddamned kids these days. The mother says she works her fingers to the bone, never sees anything but these four walls, and what thanks does it get you? You carry them under your heart for nine months, you feed them, you send them to Mass, and what does it get you?

The kid sits at the kitchen table, picking at the oilcloth. His eyes lowered, he answers LaPointe’s questions in a reluctant monotone. Once he makes the mistake of sassing.