The Main

green paint, the home of the Millwright’s Union.

What in hell is a millwright, LaPointe wonders. A man who makes mills? No, that can’t be right. He glances at his watch: quarter after eleven; Guttmann is late.

Only to the east of the park is the integrity of the row houses preserved; and even there it is bogus. Behind the facades, the fashionable and artsy have gutted and renovated. Soon this bit of the Main will be undermined and pried loose from the cultural mosaic. The new inhabitants will have the political leverage to get the trees trimmed, the fountain running, the spray-paint peace symbol cleaned off the side of the pool. There will be grass and shrubs and new benches, and there will be an ironwork fence around the park to which residents will have keys.

LaPointe grunts his disgust and looks around to see Guttmann crossing the park with long strides, anxious about being late.

“I couldn’t find a parking place,” he explains as he approaches. When LaPointe doesn’t respond, he continues with, “I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

The Lieutenant blocks the small talk. “You know this square?”

“No, sir.” Guttmann looks around. “God, there are a lot of houses. Where do we begin?”

“Let’s take a little stroll around.”

Guttmann walks beside LaPointe, their slow steps crunching the gravel of the central spine path, as they scan the buildings on both sides.

Guttmann continues along in silence, until it occurs to him to ask, “Sir? What is a millwright?”

LaPointe glances at him sideways with a fatigued expression that says, Don’t you know anything?

They cross over from the park and walk down the east side of the square, down the row of renovated buildings. LaPointe walks with the long slow steps of the beat-pounder, his fists deep in his overcoat pockets, looking up at each doorway in turn.

“What are we looking for, sir?”

“No idea.”

“It’s sort of a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? It occurred to me on the way over that if one of those lines on the map was just a few degrees off, the woman could live blocks away from here.”

“Hm-m. If she still lives here. If it’s one woman. If…”

LaPointe’s pace slows slightly as he looks up at the next door. Then he walks on a little more quickly.

“If what, sir?”

“Come on. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

They take coffee in a little place two blocks east of the square, in one of those self-conscious bohemian cafes frequented by the young. At this time of day it is empty, save for an intense couple in the far corner, a bearded boy who appears to be staggering under the impulse to communicate, a skinny girl in round glasses who is straining to understand. They work very hard at avoiding artifice.

The waitress is a young slattern who tugs a snarl out of her hair with her fingers as she repeats Guttmann’s order for two cappuccini. Back at the coffee machine, she stares indifferently out a front window hung with glass beads as she lets steam hiss into the coffee. For once they are in an atmosphere in which Guttmann is more at home than LaPointe, who looks across the table and shakes his head at the young policeman. “You talk about God being on the side of drunks, fools, and kids. I didn’t expect anything to come of your silly game of drawing lines on a map. Not one chance in a thousand.”

“Has something come of it?”

“I’m afraid so. Chances are our woman works, or did work, at that school.”

“School, sir?”

“Seventh building from the end of that renovated row. There was a placard on the door—brass. It’s a school of sorts. One of those places that teaches French and English to foreigners in a hurry.”

Guttmann’s expression widens. “And Green was learning English!”

LaPointe nods.

“But wait a minute. What about the American?”

“Could have been learning French. Maybe he wanted to set up a business in Quebec.”

“And the McGill professor?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to see how he fits in. If he does.”

“But wait a minute, sir. Even if the school is the contact point, maybe it isn’t a teacher. Could be one of the students.”

“Over a period of six years?”

“All right. A teacher, then. So what do we do now?”

“We go talk to somebody. See if we can find out which teacher is ours.” LaPointe rises.

“Aren’t you going to finish your coffee, sir?”

“This swill? Just tip the greasy kid and let’s get out of here.”

Considering the slop and dregs he has had to drink with the Lieutenant in Chinese, Greek, and Portuguese cafes, Guttmann doubts that it is the quality of the coffee LaPointe is rejecting.

“…so, out of a total faculty of thirteen, that would make a full-time equivalency of nine or nine and a half, considering that some of my teachers are only part-time, and some are university students training in our techniques of one-to-one intensive language assimilation.” Mlle. Montjean lights her cigarette from a marble-and- gold lighter, takes a deep drag, and tilts her head back to jet the uninhaled smoke upward, away from her guests. Then she lightly touches the tip of her tongue between thumb and forefinger, as though to pluck off a bit of tobacco, a residual gesture from some earlier time when she smoked unfiltered cigarettes.

Many things about her put Guttmann in mind of a fashion model: the meticulous, underrolled coiffure, that bounces with her quick, energetic gestures; the assured, almost rehearsed moves and turns; the long slim arms and legs; the perfectly tailored suit that is both functional and feminine. And, like a model, she appears to be aware of herself at every moment, as though she were seeing herself from the outside. Guttmann finds her voice particularly pleasing in its combining of great precision of pronunciation with a low, warm note just above husky. She laughs in exactly the same key as that in which she speaks.

“I suppose that seems quite a large faculty for a little school like ours, Lieutenant, but we specialize in intensive training with a low student-to-teacher ratio. We submerge the student in a linguistic culture. The student who is learning French, for instance, doesn’t hear a word of English for six hours a day, and he even takes lunch with instructors and other students in a French restaurant. And at night, if he wishes, the student will be taken to French nightclubs, cinema, theatre—all in the company of an instructor. We concentrate on the music of the language, you might say. The student learns to hum in French, even before he learns the words to the song. Our methods were pioneered at McGill, and indeed some of our student teachers are graduate students from there.” Mlle. Montjean suddenly stops and laughs. “I must be sounding like our promotional material.”

“A little,” LaPointe says. “You have a connection with McGill then?”

“No formal connection. Some of their students get experience and credit by working with us. Oh!” She butts her cigarette hurriedly. “Excuse me just a moment, won’t you.” She leaves the “conversation island,” consisting of deeply padded white leather “comfort forms” around a kidney-shaped, glass-topped coffee table, the whole sunken two steps below the floor level. She goes quickly to her desk overlooking Carre St. Louis, and there she presses the button of a concealed tape recorder and speaks conversationally: “Maggie, remind me tomorrow to get in touch with Dr. Moreland. Subject: Evaluation Procedures for Part-time Students.” She releases the button and smiles across at the policemen. “I would have forgotten that completely if I hadn’t happened to mention it to you. I’ve got a brain like a sieve.”

This is a social lie and an obvious one. Mlle. Montjean runs her specialized and very expensive school with such great efficiency that she appears to have free time for people who drop in unexpectedly. Even policemen.

The school occupies a double building: the facades of two former homes have been gutted and renovated to contain “conversation foyers,” “learning environments,” and audio-visual support systems on the first two floors, while the mansard-roofed third story houses Mlle. Montjean’s living and working quarters. Guttmann is impressed by