“It isn’t the young lady we’re interested in. Not directly.”
“Nevertheless…” She shows her palms, revealing herself to be helpless in the face of absolute rules.
“I considered getting a warrant, Sister. But since there were no criminal charges against the young lady, I thought it might be better to avoid what the newspapers might consider a nasty business.”
The smile does not desert the nun’s lips, but she lowers her eyes and blinks once. There are no wrinkles in her dry, almost powdery forehead. The face shows no signs of age, and none of youth.
“Still,” LaPointe says, taking up his overcoat, “I understand your position. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
She lifts a hand toward his arm, but she does not touch him. “You say that Mlle. Montjean is not implicated in anything… unpleasant?”
“I said that she was not facing criminal charges.”
“I see. Well, perhaps Ste. Catherine’s could serve her best by cooperating with you. Will you follow me, please, Lieutenant?”
As they pass along a dark-paneled hall, he walks through air set in motion by the nun’s habit, and he picks up a faint scent of soap and bread. He wonders if there is a Glory Hole here, and little girls working off punishment tranches by holding out their arms until their shoulders throb. He supposes not. Punishment at Ste. Catherine’s would be a subtler matter, modern, kindly, and epulotic. Theirs would be a beautifully appointed little chapel, and their Virgin would not have a chip out of her cheek, would not be cross-eyed.
Two teen-aged girls dash around a corner, but arrest their run with comic abruptness when they see Sister Marie-Thérèse, and assume a sedate walk, side by side in their identical blue uniforms with SCA embroidered on bibs that bulge slightly with developing, unexplained breasts. In passing, they mutter, “Good morning, Sister.” The nun nods her head, her expression neutral. But as the girls pass LaPointe they make identical tight-jawed grimaces and suck air in through their lower teeth. They’ll get it later for running in the halls. Young ladies do not run. Not at Ste. Catherine’s.
The Sister opens a tall oak door and stands aside to allow LaPointe to enter her office first. She does not close the door after them. As principal, she often has to meet male parents without the company of another nun, but never in rooms with closed doors.
The whole atmosphere of Ste. Catherine’s Academy vibrates with sex unperformed.
With a businesslike rustle of her long skirts, she passes behind her desk and opens a middle file drawer. “You say Mlle. Montjean came to us twenty years ago?”
“About that. I don’t know the exact date.”
“That would be before I held my present position.” She looks up from leafing through the files. “Although it certainly would not be before I came here.” A careful denial that she is claiming youth. “In fact, Lieutenant, I am a Ste. Catherine girl myself.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Except for my girlhood and my years at university, I have lived all my life here. I was a teacher long before they made me principal.” A slight accent on “made.” An elevation to which she had not aspired, and for which she was unworthy. “It’s odd that I don’t remember a Mlle. Montjean.”
Of course. He had forgot. “Her name was Dery when she was here.”
“Dery? Claire Dery?” The tone suggests it is impossible that Claire Dery could be in trouble with the police.
“Her first name may have been Claire.”
Sister Marie-Thérèse’s fingers stop moving through the file folders. “You don’t know her first name, Lieutenant?”
“No.”
“I see.” She does not see. She lifts out a file but does not offer it. “Now, what exactly is the information you require?”
“General background.”
Her knuckles whiten as she grips the file more tightly. She has a right to know, after all. A duty to know. It’s her responsibility to the school. Personally, she has no curiosity about scandal.
LaPointe settles his melancholy eyes on her face.
She compresses her lips.
He starts to rise.
“Perhaps you would like to read through the file yourself.” She thrusts it toward him. “But it cannot leave the school, you understand.”
The folder is bound with brown cord, and it opens automatically to the page of greatest interest to Ste. Catherine’s. The information LaPointe seeks is there, in the record of fees and payments.
“…I was sure you saw me last night in Carré St. Louis.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But you stopped suddenly and turned around, as though you had seen me.”
“Oh, yes, I remember. I just had one of those feelings that someone was watching me.”
“But she saw me. When she was crossing the park, I am sure she saw me.”
“She mentioned that she saw someone. But she didn’t recognize you.”
“How could she? We have never met.”
They sit diagonally opposite one another in comfortably dilapidated chairs in the bow window niche of a second-floor apartment in a brick row house on Rue de Bullion, two streets off the Main. Below them, the street is filled with a greenish gloaming, the last light of day captured and held close to the surface of the ground, causing objects in the street to be clearer than are rooftops and chimney pots. As they talk, the light leaks away; the gray clouds tumbling swiftly over the city darken and disappear; and the room behind them gradually recedes into gloom.
LaPointe has never been in the apartment before, but he has the impression that it is tidy, and characterless. They don’t look at one another; their eyes wander over the scene beyond the window, where, across the street to the left, a billboard featuring a mindless smiling girl in a short tartan skirt enjoins people to smoke EXPRESS “A.” Directly beneath them is a vacant lot strewn with broken bricks from houses being torn down to make way for a factory. There is a painted message of protest on the naked brick walclass="underline" 17 people lived here. The protest will do no good; history is against the people.
In the vacant lot, half a dozen children play a game involving running and falling down, playing dead. An older girl stands against the denuded side of the next house to be demolished, watching the kids play. Her posture is grave. She is too old to run and fall down dead; she is still too young to go with men to the bars. She watches the kids, half wanting to be one of them again, half ready to be something else, to go somewhere else.
“Will you take something, Claude? A glass of schnapps maybe?”
“Please.”
Moishe rises from the chair and goes into the gloom of the living room. “I’ve been waiting for you here all day. Once you traced your way to Claire…” He lifts a glass in each hand, a gesture expressive of inevitability. “I suppose you went to Ste. Catherine’s Academy?”
“Yes.”
“And of course you found my name in the records of payment.”
“Yes.”
Moishe gives a glass to LaPointe and sits down before lifting his drink. “Peace, Claude.”
“Peace.”
They sip their schnapps in silence. One of the kids down in the vacant lot has turned his ankle on a broken brick and is down on the hard-packed dirt. The others gather around him. The girl still stands apart.
“I’m crazy, of course,” Moishe says at last.
LaPointe shrugs his shoulders.
“Oh, yes. Crazy. Crazy is not a medical term, Claude; it’s a social term. I am not insane, but I am crazy. Society has systems and rules that it relies on for protection, for comfort… for camouflage. If somebody acts against the rules, society admits of only two possibilities. Either the outsider has acted for gain, or he has not acted for gain. If he has acted for gain, he is a criminal. If he has broken their rules with no thought of gain, he is crazy. The criminal they understand; his motives are their motives, even if his tactics are a little more… brusque. The crazy man they do not understand. Him they fear. Him they lock up, seal off. Whether they are locking him in, or locking themselves out—that’s a matter of point of view.” Moishe draws a long sigh, then he chuckles. “David would shake his head, eh? Even now, even at the end, Moishe the luftmensh looks for philosophy where there is only narrative. Poor David! What will he do without the pinochle games?”