Eventually, Lacombe brought us to a restaurant at the back of a sprawling, nearly empty shopping mall parking lot-a visual paradox I was to discover fit Sherbrooke like a glove. “I eat here always. Very cheap, but good.”
“Which part of town do the Angels control?” I asked him as we entered its doors.
“There is a street downtown called Wellington South. It is where are the bars, discos, cheap hotels, tattoo places, et tout le reste. That is where the Angels and the Deschamps work.”
In contrast to the outside, the restaurant was dark and friendly, with gentle piped-in music and booths and tables placed on various high and low platforms, breaking up the enormity of the place and injecting a sense of intimacy. We were shown a table high and toward the back, with fewer people, less noise, and an almost tree-house view of the floor below. The waitress and Lacombe were obviously old acquaintances.
For the next several minutes, Gilles Lacombe played host, translating our requests into a Québecois patois called Joual, which bore no resemblance I could detect to the French taught in our schools. For drinks, Paul, Gary, and I had water or Cokes. Lacombe had a beer, which I noticed caught Gary’s disapproval. Despite the short, forty-minute drive from the border to here, I was beginning to feel like we’d just landed in Europe-an unsettling but pleasant sensation.
No doubt harking back to our theorizing during the trip, Gary asked Lacombe, “Have the Deschamps and the Angels shared this area for long?”
The Sûreté man looked at him meditatively. “I would say the Angels are here about twenty-five years. The Deschamps, much longer. I don’t know about Jean, but he was a big shot already when he disappeared. At first, there was trouble. The Deschamps had everything and they didn’t like the competition. I was just a patrolman back then, but I remember. We would find bodies outside of the town. But I think that with time, like two boxers, they finally realized no one body could win, and the Angels, they are not going to go away. So there was a peace, and it has been there for many years.”
“What about you guys?” Gary asked as sandwiches arrived for the three of us-fat things made of French bread, which Gary eyed with suspicion-and soup and an odd bread, cheese, and pâté assortment for Lacombe, which looked to me like dollops of cat food. “You didn’t just watch this happen, did you?”
Lacombe shrugged away the bluntness of the question. “It was not as it is now. Sherbrooke had its police, we had a station here-only an outpost-Rock Forest and Lennoxville/Ascot had police, too. And the RCMP was there.” He hesitated, then smiled thinly. “Now, we are one big happy family. The Sûreté has a headquarters here, the Sherbrooke police joined the other two. We work well together.”
He was obviously being diplomatic. “We went through the same growing pains back home,” I said, hoping to soften Gary’s implied criticism. “Still are, here and there. People like to defend their territories, and the bad guys take advantage of it.”
The smile widened again and he relaxed. “Yes, that is it. Also, it is not so easy to fight them.” He looked at Paul Spraiger, who unlike Gary was utterly at home negotiating his food. “You study history, yes? Did you study the Algerian War in the 1950s and ’60s?”
Paul nodded enthusiastically. “Sure-what a mess.”
“Yes, yes. The French paratroopers would search the Muslim Kasbah for rebels. If they could catch one, they would torture him, but mostly they could only get two names from him. The Algerians, they keep information in triangles of three people, so that one could only betray two more. You understand?”
“And that’s what they did here?” Gary asked. “Both Angels and the Deschamps?”
Lacombe wiped his mouth on his napkin after taking another bite. “The Angels have become very big-about twenty-five people. The Deschamps, they are smaller, but they have deeper roots. They are about ten.”
“That’s all?” Gary blurted.
“No, no,” Lacombe continued, frustrated by his linguistic limitations. “That is what I was saying. Each one of them is like a capitaine, with his own people. All the capitaines know each other, but they do not know each other’s people. So for each Angel or Deschamps, maybe you have ten others working for them, maybe more. It is difficult for us to know.”
We all paused, contemplating the potential of what he’d just said. “And the Rock Machine is threatening to bust that wide open,” I finally commented.
“You see why we are interested in your old, frozen Jean Deschamps,” Gilles Lacombe said softly.
Chapter 8
Jacques Chauvin was small, wrinkled, and as agile as a monkey. He looked at us warily from under bushy white eyebrows as he muttered a few quiet, rapid-fire questions at Gilles Lacombe in Joual, standing in the doorway as if choosing between fight and flight.
Lacombe made the introductions, followed by, “Jacques is the Sherbrooke policeman I spoke to you about. He knew Jean Deschamps and the others in the family back then.”
We resumed our places around Lacombe’s round table, Chauvin sitting so close to Lacombe their legs were almost touching.
“Jacques does not speak English,” Gilles explained, “so I’m afraid you have to listen to me. It will be very slow. I have tried this before. But is that okay?”
I glanced at Paul and nodded. He cleared his throat. “I could give it a shot, if you’d like. I speak a little French.”
Lacombe smiled broadly and winked at us. “Ah. You were keeping a secret on us.”
“I doubt that,” I answered, “given how well you speak English. But if you ever get stumped or would like to speak in French to us, I’m sure Paul wouldn’t mind helping out.”
Lacombe waved his hand dismissively, as I’d thought he would. “No, no. It is no problem. I need to have practice. So,” he then added with emphasis, “let us go into Jacques’s brain. I think it would be good if I translate into French for him and Paul can then translate into English for you. Okay?”
I glanced at Gary Smith, who was in fact our team leader, but he merely nodded at me to continue. “Mr. Chauvin,” I began, “we really need as much information as possible at this point. Could you start by giving us a little history about the Deschamps family?”
Chauvin listened carefully to Lacombe and responded through Paul. “They go way back. I don’t know where they come from originally, but it was Jean who made them what they are today. As a young man, he smuggled booze into the U.S. during Prohibition. It was a big business all over Canada, of course, but it was particularly good just south of here, since the RCMP didn’t cover this part of the border too well. I don’t know why-maybe because this area was pretty wild and far from places like Montreal, given the bad roads. But Jean had a knack for it, too. He was ambitious, clever, and very, very nasty. Most people in that business just did it to make ends meet. Jean was out to create an empire. He started by carrying bottles across on his back, all by himself, then moved on to cars, then trucks. He even had some of them rigged with smoke pots, to blind whoever was giving chase. Very soon, he had almost every member of his family involved, and he was expanding from pure smuggling into warehousing, importing illegal goods, loan sharking, murder. As the twenties got wilder, he began supplying drugs through contacts he established in the Orient-the South American supply line didn’t exist back then, and Canada was still considered part of the British Empire, as was Hong Kong. One big tribe where contraband was concerned.
“Anyway, by the Depression, Deschamps was sitting on a pot of money but with nowhere to hide it. If he ever had any, those might be called his tough years, since not only was the economy bad, but the authorities had finally taken an interest in him and were making things difficult. But he made up for it with a vengeance during the Second World War. That’s when he became respectable, producing goods for the war effort, sacrificing all for king and country, including putting two sons into uniform, one of whom was killed. In fact, he turned a big pile of illegal cash into a really big fortune, buying up factories and controlling the flow of materials. By the end, he was one of the region’s heroes and would have qualified for a knighthood if he hadn’t been a crook-and hadn’t created a new rebel image as an independent, damn-the-British, free Québecois.