The Main

Guttmann takes a deep breath. “Lieutenant?”

“Yes?”

“About that pimp back there?”

“Scheer? What about him?”

“Well, if I’m going to be working with you…”

“I wouldn’t say you’re working with me. It’s more like you’re following me around.”

“Okay. Whatever. But I’m here, and I feel I have to be straight with you.” Guttmann feels awkward looking into LaPointe’s hooded, paternal eyes. He’s sure he’s going to end up making an ass of himself.

“If you have something to say, say it,” LaPointe orders.

“All right. About the pimp. It’s not right to harass a civilian like that. It’s not legal. He has rights, whoever he is, whatever he’s done. Harassment is the kind of stuff that gives the force a bad name.”

“I’m sure the Commissioner would agree with you.”

“That doesn’t make me wrong.”

“It goes a ways.”

Guttmann nods and looks down. “You’re not going to give me a chance to say what I want to say, are you? You’re making it as hard as possible.”

“I’ll say it for you if you want. You’re going to tell me that if this asshole brings charges against me, you feel that you would have to corroborate. Right?”

Guttmann forces himself not to look away from LaPointe’s eyes with their expression of tired amusement. He knows what the Lieutenant is thinking: he’s young. When he gets some experience under his belt, he’ll come around. But Guttmann is sure he will never come around. He would quit the force before that happened. “That’s right,” he says, no quaver at all in his voice. “I’d have to corroborate.”

LaPointe nods. “I told you he was a pimp, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir. But that’s not the point.”

That was what Resnais kept saying: that’s not the point.

“Besides,” Guttmann continues, “there are lots of women working the streets. You don’t seem to hassle them.”

“That’s different. They’re pros. And they’re adults.”

Guttmann’s eyes flicker at this last. “You mean Scheer uses…”

“That’s right. Kids. Junk-hungry kids. And if I deny him the use of the street, he can’t run his kids.”

“Why don’t you take him in?”

“I have taken him in. I told you. It doesn’t do any good. He walks back out again the same day. Pimping is hard to prove, unless the girls give evidence. And they’re afraid to. He’s promised that if they talk, they’ll get their faces messed up.”

Guttmann tips up his cup and looks into the dark sludge at the bottom. Still… even with a pimp who runs kids… a cop can’t be a judge and executioner. Principles don’t change, even when the case in hand makes it tough to maintain them.

LaPointe examines the young man’s earnest, troubled face. “What do you think of the Main?” he asks, lifting the pressure by changing the subject.

Guttmann looks up. “Sir?”

“My patch. What do you think of it? You must realize that I’ve been dragging you around, giving you the grand tour.”

“I don’t know what I think of it. It’s… interesting.”

“Interesting?” LaPointe looks out the window, watching the passers-by. “Yes, I suppose so. Of course, you get a warped idea of the street when you walk it as a cop. You see mostly the hustlers, the fous, the toughs, the whores, the bommes. You get what Gaspard calls a turd’s-eye view. Ninety percent of the people up here are no worse than anywhere else. Poorer, maybe. Dumber. Weaker. But not worse.” LaPointe rubs his hair with his palm and sits back in his chair. “You know… a funny thing happened eight or ten years ago. I was doing the street, and I happened to be walking behind a man—must have been seventy years old—a man who moved in a funny way. It’s hard to explain; I felt I knew him, but I didn’t, of course. It wasn’t how he looked at things; it was what he looked at. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” lies Guttmann.

“Well, he stopped off for coffee, and I sat down next to him. We started talking, and it turned out that he was a retired cop from New York. That was what I had recognized without knowing it— his beatwalker’s way of looking at things only an old cop would look at: door locks, shoes, telephone booths with broken panes, that sort of thing. He had come up here because his granddaughter was marrying a Canadian and the wedding was in Montreal. He got tired of sitting around making small talk with people he didn’t know, so he wandered off, and he ended up on the Main. He told me that he felt a real pang, walking these streets. It reminded him of New York in the twenties—the different languages, the small shops, workers and hoods and chippies and housewives and kids all mixed up on the same street but not afraid of one another. He said it used to be like that in New York when the immigrants were still coming in. But it isn’t like that anymore. It’s a closed-up frightened city at night. Not even the cops walk around alone. We’re about thirty years behind New York in that way. And as long as I’m on the Main, we are never going to catch up.”

Guttmann imagines that all this has something to do with the harassment of that pimp, but he doesn’t see just how.

“Okay,” LaPointe says, stretching his back. “So if Scheer makes a complaint, you’ll back him up.”

“Yes, sir. I would have to.”

LaPointe nods. “I suppose you would. Well, I have some grocery shopping to do. You’d better get home and get something to eat. Chances are they’ll pick up the Vet tonight, and we may be up late.”

LaPointe rises and tugs on his overcoat, while Guttmann sits there feeling—not defeated exactly in this business of Scheer, but undercut, bypassed.

“What’s wrong?” LaPointe asks, looking down at him.

“Oh… I was just thinking about this date I’ve got for tonight. I hate to break it, because it’s the first time we’ve been out together.”

“Oh, she’ll understand. Make up some lie. Tell her you’re a cop.”

LaPointe braces one of the grocery bags against the wall of the hall and gropes in his pocket for his key. Then it occurs to him that he ought to knock. There is no answer. He taps again. No response.

His first sensation is a sinking in his stomach, like a fast down elevator stopping. Almost immediately, the feeling retreats and something safer replaces it: ironic self-amusement. He smiles at himself—dumb old man—and shakes his head as he inserts his key in the slack lock and pushes the door open.

The lights are on. And she is there.

She is wearing Lucille’s pink quilted dressing gown, which she must have gotten from the closet where Lucille’s things still hang.

Lucille’s dressing gown.

She is sitting on the sofa, one foot tucked up under her butt, sewing something, the threaded needle poised in the air. Her mouth is slightly open, her eyes alert.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says. “I didn’t answer because I thought it might be the landlord. I mean… he might not like the idea of your having a girl in your apartment.”

“I see.” He carries the groceries into the narrow kitchen. She sets her sewing down and follows him.

“Here,” he says. “Unwrap the cheese and let the air get to it.”

“Okay. I’ve been walking around quietly so no one would hear me.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. Just set the cheese on a plate.”

“Which plate?”

“Any one. It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t the landlord care if you have girls up here?”

LaPointe laughs. “I am the landlord.” This is true, although he never thinks of himself as a landlord. Seven years after Lucille’s death, he heard that the building was going to be sold. He was