The Main

Guttmann is silent for fully five seconds before saying, “Ah… yes, sir?” The rising note says it all. “You know, sir,” he adds quickly, “Sergeant Gaspard had me filling out reports for him when I was assigned as his Joan. It struck me that was a sort of perversion of the intention of the apprentice program.”

“A what?”

“A perversion of the… That was one of the reasons I was glad when he let me work with you.”

“It was?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see. Well, in that case, you start working on this junk on my desk. Whatever requires a signature, sign. Sign my name if you have to.”

Guttmann’s face is glum. “What about Commissioner Resnais?” he asks, glad to have a little something to pique back with. “There was a memo about him wanting to see you.”

“I’ll be down in Forensic Medicine, talking to Bouvier, if anyone calls.”

“And what should I tell the Commissioner’s office, if they call?”

“Tell them I’m perverting your intentions… that was it, wasn’t it?”

As LaPointe steps out of the elevator on the basement level, he is met by a medley of odors that always brings the same incongruous image to his mind: a plaster statue of the Virgin, her bright blue eyes slightly strabismic through the fault of the artist, and a small chip out of her cheek. With this mental image always comes a leaden sensation in his arms and shoulders. The stale smells of the Forensic Medicine Department are linked to this odd sensation of weight in his arms by a long organic chain of association that he has never attempted to follow.

The odor in these halls is an olio of chemicals, floor wax, paint cooking on hot radiators, dusty air, the sum of which is very like the smells of St. Joseph’s Home, where he was sent after the pneumonia took his mother. (In Trois Rivieres, it wasn’t pneumonia; it was the pneumonia. And it didn’t kill one’s mother; it took her.)

The smells of St. Joseph’s: floor wax, hot radiators, wet hair, wet wool, brown soap, dust, and the acrid smell of ink, dried and caked on the sides of the inkwell.

Inkwell. The splayed nib scrapes over the paper. You have to write it a hundred times, perfectly, without a blemish. That will teach you to daydream. Your mind slips away from the exercise for a second, and the point of the nib digs into the cheap paper on the upstroke. A splatter of ink makes you have to start all over again. It’s a good thing for you that Brother Benedict didn’t find the moue on you. You’d get something worse than a hundred lines for that. You’d get a tranche.

Moue. You make moue by pressing bread into a small tin box and moistening it with a little water and spit. In a day or two, it begins to taste sweet. It is the standard confection of the boys at St. Joseph’s, and is munched surreptitiously during classes, or is traded for favors, or gambled in games of “fingers” in the dormitory after lights out, or given to the big boys to keep from being toughed up. Because the bread is stolen from the dinner line, moue is illegal in St. Joseph’s, and if you’re found with it on you, you get a tranche. You can pick up tranches for other sins too. For talking in line, for not knowing your lessons, for fighting, for sassing. If you haven’t worked off all your tranches by the end of the week, you don’t eat on Sunday.

A tranche is a fifteen-minute slice of time spent in the small chapel the boys call the Glory Hole, where you kneel before the plaster Mary, your arms held straight out in cruciform, under the supervision of old Brother Jean who seems to have no other duties than to sit in the second row of the Glory Hole and record the boys’ punishments. You kneel there, arms straight out. And for five minutes it’s easy. By the end of the first fifteen minutes, your arms are like lead, your hands feel huge, and the muscles of your shoulders are trembling with effort. Maybe you shouldn’t try for your second tranche. Anything less than a full fifteen-minute slice doesn’t count at all. You can do as much as fourteen minutes before your arms collapse, and it’s as though you hadn’t even tried. Oh, to hell with it! Go for a second one. Get the goddamned thing over with. Halfway through the second tranche you know you’re not going to make it. You squeeze your eyes shut and grit your teeth. Everyone says that Brother Jean cheats, makes the second slice longer than the first. You ball up your fists and fight against the numbness in your shoulders. But inevitably the arms sag. “Up. Up,” says Brother Jean gently. With a sneer of pain, you pull your arms back up. You take deep breaths. You try to think of something other than the pain. You stare at the face of the plaster Virgin, so calm, so pure, with her slightly crossed eyes and her goddamned stupid chipped cheek! The hands fall, clapping to the sides of the legs, and you grunt with the sudden change in the timbre of the pain. Brother Jean’s voice is flat and soft. “LaPointe. One tranche.”

Every time he steps off the elevator into the basement and breathes these particular odors, LaPointe’s arms feel heavy, for no reason he can think of.

For a second, he attributes the sensation to his heart, his aneurism. He awaits the rest of it—the bubbles in his blood, the constriction, the exploding lights behind the eyes. When these do not come, he smiles at himself and shakes his head.

The door to Dr. Bouvier’s office is open, and he is talking to one of his assistants while he examines a list on a clipboard, holding the board close to his right eye, huge behind a thick lens. His left eye is hidden behind a lens the color of nicotine. It must be an ugly eye, for he takes pains to prevent anyone from seeing it. He tells his assistant to make sure something is done by this afternoon, and the young man leaves. Bouvier scratches his scalp with the back of his pencil, then cocks his head toward the door. “Who’s that?” he demands.

“LaPointe.”

“Ah! Come in. For God’s sake, don’t hover. How about some coffee?”

LaPointe sits in a scrofulous old leather chair beneath one of the high wire-screened windows that let a ghost of daylight into the basement rooms. Bouvier feels along the ledge behind him until he touches a cup. He puts his finger down into it and, finding it wet, deduces it is his. He feels for another, finds it, and brings it close to his right eye to be sure he has not butted cigarettes in it. His minimal standards of sanitation satisfied, he fills the cup and thrusts it in LaPointe’s direction.

In his own way, Bouvier is as much an epic figure in the folklore of the department as LaPointe. He is famous, of course, for his coffee. Imaginations strain in efforts to account for the taste and texture of this ghastly brew. He is famous also for his desk, which is piled with letters, forms, memos, requisitions, and files to a height that is an offense to the law of gravity. Bouvier also possesses, both in legend and in fact, a remarkable memory for minute details of past cases, a memory that has developed proportionately as he descended toward blindness. By means of this memory, he is sometimes able to reveal a linking modus operandi between what appear to be unrelated events or cases. His “interesting little insights” have occasionally led to solutions, or to the discrediting of facile solutions already in hand. But these “interesting little insights” are not always welcome, because they sometimes reopen files everyone would rather leave closed.

Like LaPointe, Bouvier is a bachelor, and he puts in a prodigious amount of time down in the bowels of the QG, where his duties have spread far beyond those normally assigned to a staff pathologist. His authority has expanded into each vacuum created by a departing man or a new reorganization, until, by his own admission, his domain is so wide that the department would collapse two days after he left.

Not that he’s ever likely to leave. From medical school he went directly into the army, where he served through the Second World War. When he got out, money was tight and he took a temporary job with the police until he could set up in practice. Time passed, and his eyesight began to fail. He stayed on with the department because, as he used to say himself, a patient’s confidence might be eroded a bit if, as a brain surgeon, Bouvier had to begin by saying: “Now, sir, if you would please direct my hands toward your head.”

He sits in the straight-backed kitchen chair behind his heaped-up desk, sniffing as he pushes up the glasses that continually slip down his stubby nose. He broke them a few years ago, and they are patched at the bridge with dirty adhesive tape. He intends to get new ones one of these days. “Well?” he asks, as LaPointe presses his refilled cup into his hand, “I assume you’re here on behalf of that kid who got reamed on your patch. Anything special about the case?”

LaPointe shrugs. “I doubt it.”