They cross over half a dozen sets of rails, then turn west, parallel to the tracks. Soon rust mutes the shine of the rails, and ragged black weeds indicate that they are in an unused wing of the shunt yard. One by one, the pairs of tracks end against heavy metal bumpers, until they are following the last along a wide curve close to a dark embankment. Without warning, the Vet turns aside and scrambles down a slope and along a faint trail through dead burrs, and stunted, hollow-stalked weeds brittle with the frost. Wind swirls in this declivity of the freight yard, one minute pushing LaPointe’s overcoat from behind, and the next pressing against his chest and leaking in through the collar. The only sounds are the moan of the wind and the harsh rustle of their passage over frosted ground and through the weeds. They are isolated in this vast island of silence and dark in the midst of the city. All around them, but at a distance, the lights of traffic crawl in long double rows. A huge beer sign half a mile away at the far end of the freight yard flashes red-yellow-white, red-yellow-white. And from somewhere afar comes the wailing of an ambulance siren.
The Vet’s pace slackens and he stops. “It’s right over there, Lieutenant.” He points toward the cliff, looming black against the dark gray of the cityglow sky. “I’ll go get the wallet for you.”
LaPointe peers through the gloom, but he can see no shelter, no shack.
“I’ll go with you,” he decides.
“I won’t run off. Honest.”
“Come on, come on! It’s cold. Let’s get it over with.”
The Vet still hesitates. “All right. But he doesn’t have to come, does he?”“
Guttmann presses back his hair, which the wind is standing on end. “I’ll wait here, Lieutenant.”
LaPointe nods, then follows the Vet along the dim path.
Guttmann watches the vague figures blend into the dark, then disappear as they pass close to the embankment. He catches a bit of motion later, out of the corner of his eye where peripheral night vision is better. He strains to see, but he loses them. After several minutes, he hears the distant clank and scraping of metal—a heavy sheet of metal, from the sound of it. He hugs his coat around him and tucks his chin into his collar.
In about ten minutes he hears the crackle of dead, frozen stalks, then he sees them returning. The Vet’s body is stooped and slack; he seems deflated. For the fourth time that night, the bomme’s personality and manner have changed abruptly. The conditions of his life long ago ground away any pretensions of dignity, but there remains the husk of pride, and that has been damaged: the Lieutenant has seen his snug little kip. He passes Guttmann without a glance, and leads the policemen back through the field of frozen weeds, along the single unused track with its rusted rails, back over the pairs of glistening rails, to the base of the embankment, just below the wire fence and the light of the city.
“We can find our way from here,” LaPointe tells the tramp.
Without a word, the Vet turns and starts back the way they came.
“Vet?” LaPointe calls.
The bomme stops in his tracks, but he doesn’t turn to face them.
“You know I won’t tell any of them about your kip, don’t you?”
The Vet’s voice is listless. “Yeah.” He clutches the brim of his floppy hat against the wind and trudges back across the tracks.
LaPointe looks after him for a second. “Come on,” he says. They scramble up the cinder embankment, over the wire fence, and soon they are back in the light, on the truncated street of warehouses. As Guttmann walks on, LaPointe stands for a moment and looks back over the shunt yard, a matte-black hole ripped out of the map of Montreal’s streets and city lights. His sense of reality is upset. Somehow this street with its warehouses and the noise and light of passing traffic down at the corner seems artificial, temporary. That dark, desolate freight yard with its faint paths crowded in by black frozen burrs, with its silence in the midst of the city’s noise, its dark in the midst of the city’s light—that was real. It was not pleasant, but it was real… and inevitable. It is what the whole city would be six months after man was gone. It is the seed of urban ruin.
Oh, he’s just tired; feeling a little cafard. There is vertigo in his sense of reality because he’s been awake too long, because of the hard scramble up the cinder embankment, and because of the pleasant, terrifying tingle, this effervescence in his blood…
Guttmann is cold, and he walks quickly toward the waiting police car with its dozing driver and its radio, against regulations, tuned to music. Then he realizes that LaPointe is not with him. He turns impatiently and sees the Lieutenant standing against the wire fence, his eyes closed. As Guttmann approaches, LaPointe opens his eyes and rubs his upper arms as though to restore circulation. Before Guttmann can ask what’s wrong, the Lieutenant growls, “Come on! Let’s not stand around here all night! It’s cold, for Christ’s sake!”
They sit in a back booth, the only customers of the A-One Café. When they came in, LaPointe greeted the old Chinese owner: “How’s it going, Mr. A-One?”
The Chinese cackled and responded, “Yes, you bet. That’s a good one!”
Guttmann assumed the greeting and response were ancient and automatic, a ritual joke they have shared for years.
Without asking what they wanted, the old man brought them two cups of coffee, thick and brackish, the lees from an afternoon pot. Then he returned to stand by the front window, motionless, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes focused on a mid-distance beyond his window.
The naked bulb above his head produces an oblique angle of light which deepens the furrows and rivulets of his face. His eyes do not blink.
LaPointe sits huddled in his coat, frowning meditatively as he slowly stirs his coffee, although he has not put sugar into it.
On the wall beside Guttmann’s head is a gaudy embroidered hanging featuring a long-tailed bird resting on the branch of a tree bearing every kind of flower. And tacked up next to it is a picture of a very healthy girl in a swimsuit coyly considering the commitment involved in accepting the bottle of Coke thrust toward her by an aggressive male fist.
Guttmann stifles a yawn so deep that it brings tears. “Not much business,” he says irrelevantly. “Wonder why he stays open all night.”
LaPointe looks up as though he has forgotten the young man’s presence. “Oh, you don’t need much sleep when you’re old. He has no wife. It helps to shorten the nights, I suppose.”
For the first time, Guttmann wonders if LaPointe has a wife. He cannot imagine it; cannot picture him taking a Sunday afternoon walk in some park, a middle-aged matron on his arm. Then the image starts to form in Guttmann’s mind of LaPointe in bed with a woman…
“What is it?” LaPointe asks. “What are you smiling at?”
“Oh, nothing,” Guttmann lies. “It’s just that… I don’t know what in hell I’m doing here. I don’t know why I didn’t take the car back to the Quartier Général.” He pushes out a sigh and shakes his head at himself. “I must be getting dopey with lack of sleep.”
LaPointe nods. “You’ve got what Gaspard calls ‘the sits.’ “
“What?” Guttmann is thrown off track by the unexpected shift to English.
“The sits. That’s when you’re so tired and numb-headed that you don’t have the energy to get up and go home.”
“That’s what I’ve got all right. The sits. That’s a good name for it. I wish I were in bed right now.”