The Canadian Bomber Contract, page 1
The Canadian Bomber Contract
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
Chapter 1
Summer twilight is an unhurried thing in Montreal. I was leaning back against the headboard of the wide bed, naked except for the sheet, when Francine La Roche brought me another shot of rye. When I had knocked the drink down, the tiny French-Canadian girl took the tray back to the kitchen of my eighteenth-floor apartment and returned to sit on the end of the bed, sipping from an aluminum mug.
Francine, also naked, was a petite Venus with dark hair which hung almost to her waist. She could not have weighed a hundred pounds, had dark eyes to match the hair, and a wide generous mouth. She was not a pretty girl but an insouciant one. Her hands were weathered, because she worked ten hours a day as a maid in the luxury apartment hotel. She was aware that her hands were older than the rest of her body and tried to hide them when we were together.
“More spruce beer?” I inquired. And when she nodded, I said “Gak!” and grimaced. The gamin face came alive; she smiled like a cat. The trouble with spruce beer, a nonalcoholic tipple, is that it tastes just like spruce smells.
I had been in residence in the high Montreal apartment for nearly three weeks, often while Francine was cleaning it. Thus it had been impossible to avoid her shapely, diminutive figure in the white miniskirted uniform. She was aware of my regard and moved around the apartment humming and dusting in bent postures which made things even more difficult for me. Finally, one day, she leaned over too far, too near me, and I had cupped her buttocks with both hands.
Straightening, she had inquired “M’sieu?” and I had lifted her a foot off the floor, until the dark eyes were level with mine. Holding her so, I kissed the wide mouth gently, assuring her that although I was old enough to be her husband we would soon have great affection for each other. Especially after the babies started coming … Then I lowered her to the floor again.
The little maid explained haltingly that she “had not all the English.” She was smiling slightly, and I knew that she had been married and divorced. I assured her that only a few English phrases were really necessary and that we could work on those in bed. But when I attempted to lead her there, she broke away, laughing. I lifted her from the floor again and held her at eye level, until she promised to return when her work was over. Or, more literally, she might come back, if I would behave …
I took a solemn oath that I would behave like no other man she had ever met, and Francine said “Pouf!” and pushed her cleaning cart, which was nearly as tall as she was, into the hall. She did return at six, told me not to touch her, and, peeling off her white uniform, got under the shower. I was waiting in the sitting room when the water was shut off, and she called to me.
It seemed that she could not soap her back adequately, so would I … I shucked out of my dressing gown, kicked off my slippers, and had soon worked up a formidable lather along the sweet curve. That worked out so well that we shampooed the dark tresses, and I became busily engaged in areas which she assured me were already clean.
So it had begun. Francine was good company out of bed, too, and we went to Parc Jarry to see the Expos get clobbered by the St. Louis Cardinals. Principally because Expo Manager Mauch let his bitter memories take over and insisted on pitching to Richie Allen, the Card first baseman. At ringside in Centre Paul-Sauve we saw Paduano, the young welter who beat Marcel Cerdan Jr. on points at Madison Square Garden, get a decisive boxing lesson from ancient Tommy Cook of Liverpool, even though he was awarded a stinking hometowner decision.
I was much older than my pocket Venus and should have been ashamed of myself but wasn’t. Francine was having a lovely time, going first class, and wearing the dresses and accouterments I bought her with the usual Quebecois flair. We were accustomed to each other; she was beating poverty, and I was beating Portnoy’s Complaint. We meant nothing to each other, but I smiled at the sight of the tiny girl at the end of my bed. Sipping at her atrocious spruce beer, hugging her small, perfectly shaped legs.
“Ma petite,” I suggested, “you will catch a chill down there. Come up with me.”
Francine smiled. Although shadows were beginning to lengthen across Montreal, it was still well over eighty degrees outside. When I nudged her with my big toe, she leaned over to set the aluminum mug on the dresser and turned to bite my thigh. A thing like that can have serious consequences, and I was anticipating them when the phone in the sitting room began to ring.
“Drat!” I said. Pulled her up by the armpits and kissed her thoroughly. Then, draping the sheet around my hips with a lungyi tie, I went into the other room and lifted the receiver.
“Yes?”
“This is M’sieu Gerald Pemberton?” asked a pleasant male voice with a French accent,
“Correct.”
“You are a salesman of industrial medical kits, sold only Wholesale from Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the United States?”
“Also correct,” I answered. But I began to tighten up; the tone of my caller was too flippant. As if to underline the point, something was said in French, too rapid for me to follow, and there was laughter at the other end of the line.
“And the agreeable Madame La Roche is naked in your bed, isn’t it so?”
I didn’t answer that one, and my amiable caller went on. “Do not take offense, m’sieu. It is a fine thing when two cultures come so close together. Are you still on?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Listen carefully. Twenty-three days ago you crossed into Canada at Windsor. You rented a car there and drove directly to Montreal. For a salesman, you are very desultory. In three weeks you have visited no one who could possibly be a customer for industrial medical kits.”
The voice hardened.
“You have visited the office, such as it is, of Logos, the underground newspaper on St. Laurent. All of its draft dodger editors from the United States refused to talk to you, because they thought you were le fuzz, either FBI or the Montreal Technical Squad. Isn’t that true?”
“I’m listening,” I said. “You made the call.”
“True. You have talked to the police reporter of the Gazette about Montreal’s connecton with the Buffalo, New York, family of the Mafia in tavernes, nightclubs, and government-operated liquor stores. You had a long conversation with Claude Vigne, public prosecutor of Montreal, about the drug problems in this city. You discussed with him the LeDain Report and the probable sources and entry cities for drugs into Canada.”
I didn’t answer, and the French-accented voice continued.
“Ten days ago, after midnight, you prowled the Jules Massé residence in Duvernay. The next morning the Montreal special squad raided it and found one hundred pounds of seventy percent dynamite and fifty-eight thousand dollars in bank notes. Their serial numbers matched those taken in a recent robbery of the University of Montreal’s Caisse Populaire.”
“I seem to have been fairly busy,” I commented.
“Indeed you have, m’sieu. But let us complete the record. You have made numerous inquiries about the FLQ, the separatist movement in Quebec Province. And even interested yourself in the new terrorist group, the Union for the Armed Liberation of Quebec, which has members from Iraq, Iran, Algeria, France, and Britain. On nine visits to the McGill University library you have withdrawn newspapers, magazines, and books relating to the manufacture and statistical density of bombings in the Province of Quebec.”
Francine came to the bedroom doorway with a towel knotted around her hips. I waved her back. “Are you through?”
“Almost,” came the hard voice. “Yesterday a bomb was discovered in Dollard Street by a garbage man. A bundle of twenty sticks of sixty percent nitro with a time bomb attached. He called the police. Sgt. Robert Cartier, wearing ear protectors, advanced behind a steel shield and defused the device with a probe stick. You were standing a few feet behind Sergeant Cartier while he was clipping the wires.”
“You have remarkable coverage,” I said, “but—”
“Shut up. Go out on the balcony to your living room. Since you are so interested in bombs, we will show you one. On the corner directly below your apartment you will see a blue mail van. Watch it. Do not hang up the phone. Watch the van.”
I put the receiver down, not hanging it up, and walked out onto the balcony. From that high eyrie in the late twilight I had a view of the lakes in the park opposite, their fountains spurting, and ducks seeking handouts at the shoreline. To the right, eighteen floors below me, was the ancient red-brick turreted building which housed the district police and fire station. Across from it in the other corner were the Parc Coffee Shop, the Nettoyeur (tailor-dry-cleaning shop still open), and a taverne. Around the corner, an ice cream parlor, and across the street from it a cabstand with a revolving orange sign.
The large blue postal van was parked before the ice cream parlor. Francine started out to join me on the balcony, but I shoved her back into the apartment and told her to get dressed. To the southwest, blooming with lights like enormous honeycombs, were the towering columns of downtown Montreal, seen over a fading maze of red-brick buildings with cupolas, balconies, and pastel-painted fronts.
“It is something bad?” whispered Francine, hurrying into her clothes.
“I think so,” I said and was watching when the mail van below me was ripped apart.
It exploded with flame, racked by three separate charges. I had been prepared for that, warned about it, but still felt sick when the door on the driv
The van had been ripped apart, but its sections were still burning. Sirens wailed and fire engine bells clanged, which seemed silly, because they only had to cross the street. Foam poured from the nozzles of the fire engines, and soon the van’s parts were only blackened, smoking ruins. The man burned alive lay still and blackened against the curb.
I returned to the telephone. “All right,” I said.
“M’sieu,” said the pleasant voice, “you have twelve hours to get out of Montreal and twenty-four hours to get out of Canada. If you do not, that apartment of yours will be blown completely out of the building with you in it. While you sleep. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said and hung up. Francine was still dressing, and on the way out I handed her a hundred-dollar bill, U.S. currency. Saying that I would call her at home, later, and telling her to forget about the apartment and me. That I would use the name Jacques. She nodded, put the banknote on the top of the toilet, and was leaning down to fit her perfect small breasts into the brassiere, in that ancient feminine bend, when she began to vomit without warning. I dampened a towel, washed her mouth off, and kissed her goodbye.
I walked out of the apartment with nothing, not even a toothbrush. Taking the elevator down to 2SS, the subbasement swimming pool level, I pushed open the truck delivery door and walked down the alley to the next corner. From there it was two blocks to where I had left the rented car in a private parking lot not connected with the apartment.
The two-door Chevrolet started promptly, and I had driven it a block and a half toward Rue Mount Royal East, when the car lurched suddenly to the left. I could not control it; the wheel spun uselessly when I tried to correct its direction. Something below me exploded, and loosened parts began to shower down like a metal rain.
The Montreal householders who were sitting in the deepening gloom in their tiny gardens or on oval balconies began to rise as the car, now uncontrollable, struck the left curb. They were shouting, pointing, and when I saw flames erupting from the rear of the car, I bailed out and left it gouging rubber against the curb.
I abandoned it on the run and turned the next left-hand corner at my absolute maximum speed. Halfway down the block I heard the gas tanks explode with what I knew was another shower of metal parts. As I went haring down into the metro entrance and caught a downward escalator, I was hoping that none of the spectators had been maimed.
The pneumatic doors of the metro were sighing closed, but I risked an arm in holding them open and sank down on a seat in the subway train. Going to the Man and His World Exposition on St. Helen’s Island. My hands were shaking badly, but I had nowhere to put them. I could not stop their shaking and shoved them between my knees. Tried to trap them there. But that didn’t help; it just made me shake all over.
Chapter 2
Before this trip to Canada it had always seemed to me that Manila was the most violent city in the world. And I have had some experience of danger after having been a contract agent for nearly a decade and a half. As a minor brigand skulking in international back alleys, I knew violence firsthand as a part of my job. I was paid for being a stopper.
Once, many years ago, I had been sitting in the lobby of the Manila Hotel, reading a newspaper, when a fire fight erupted without warning; the man sitting next to me had been shot dead. Neither of us had been involved, but his reflexes were slower than mine, and so he sagged into a bloody mess on the floor. While old Joe (I am styled Joseph Liam Gall by the few people who know my right name) was long since on the deck and elbowing his way behind the potted palms.
On another trip through Manila I had been staying at the Town House and reading in bed, when a shotgun duel started in the driveway below my room. As before, my reaction had been automatic; almost simultaneous with the blasts ripping through my windows I was rolling off the bed and under it. On both these occasions I had just happened to be on the perimeter of the violence, not involved in its causes.
Montreal, Canada, after only a few weeks was rapidly revising that earlier estimate. In this beautiful island city with its imaginative architecture and lovely parks, sudden death, maimings, bombings, and stabbings seemed endemic, like religion or sports enthusiasm in other large cities. Montreal, principally French in its origins, was a noisy, brawling city. Wailing sirens and clanging fire bells were a continuous sound, and all those police cars and fire engines were not racing to free a treed cat. They were screaming along to counter arson, bombing, and sudden death.
And yet the city government in Montreal was so diligent that it soon scrubbed off the bomb scorches, repaired the sooty ravages of arson, and, if a building was completely demolished, they cleared the area swiftly and turned it into a small park with wonderfully kept borders of flowers. As I sat on the immaculate metro underground train with its clean stations whisking by, it seemed to me that in Manila you could very easily get killed by accident.
In Montreal, on the other hand, any of several violence-prone groups would kill you deliberately, and the nearer you got to downtown the more your danger of an early demise increased. But, having been gunned or stabbed or bombed, you would not be allowed to bleed long. Not on public property. You would be whisked away, and something cultural would be erected where you had gasped your last. Even the parking lots in Montreal were concealed by stylish pastel panels.
At the Berri-Montigny station I got off the underground train and called Sgt. Bob Cartier from a pay phone of ultramodern design. I asked if he could meet me at the vaporetto station just beyond the Tibetan Exhibit at the Exposition.
“You mean right away, my friend?” he asked. “I am supposed to check over a bombed-out mail van where the cochons burned a driver to death—”
“I know, Robert,” I said. “I was advised of it by phone several minutes before it happened. And was watching from the balcony of my apartment. Then I was warned out of town and out of Canada. When I went down to get my rent-a-car, it had been wired and blew up underneath me. I got out just before the gasoline tank exploded.”
“All right,” said Sergeant Cartier. “I have a report on that, too. But a low priority. Two gunmen were killed in the Côte de Neiges a few minutes ago. I will be at the vaporetto station in twenty minutes.”
That meant he would come by helicopter. I asked him to bring his telephone-attaché case, and he said “right” and hung up. Going to the lower level of the metro station, I caught another train to the Exposition site. There at the row of turnstiles I bought a single admission ticket for $2.50 and passed under the massed flagpoles from which whipped the standards and flags of all the world’s nations.
Catching the long-ride overhead express, I watched the huge fair blooming with lights below the track. When the minirail train stopped near the Nepal and Tibetan Exhibits, I got off and walked down the stairs to the gondola station, where the vaporettos were. They weren’t really steam driven but had smooth inboard propulsion, so that the young drivers could seem picturesque without effort.
Cartier wasn’t in sight, so I sat down on a bench and found that my hands had stopped shaking enough for me to light a cigarette. Watching the crowds saunter by, I reviewed what I knew about Sergeant Robert Cartier.
He was an unusual man, very possibly the bravest, or at least the steadiest, man I had ever met. For seven years he had been in charge of Montreal’s Technical Squad, for which read bomb squad. In his middle thirties Cartier was a sturdy, polite man with curly hair, who in the seven years of his tenure had dismantled or deliberately exploded more bombs than anybody except the War Two experts in London. He had a squad of carefully selected and trained men and a strange-looking square vehicle with a detonation chamber in it—a blast-shielded steel curtain on wheels with a probing and defusing device sticking through it and a dozen sets of specially designed ear coverings.
He also had a dark-haired wife named Pierrette, who claimed to be able to tune out his dangerous missions as part of routine work but who had still lost twin girls by miscarriage in her eighth month of pregnancy.
