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  Ivan started to say something but I was already halfway across the room. The three suits were blending in well, on the whole, without getting too far from one another. They were all in their mid-forties: the one closest to me had an acne-scarred face and eyes that never seemed to stay still. The other two were slightly older, slightly more florid; one of them was engaged in conversation with a familiar-looking woman. Ah, yes: the landlady; she’d let Julian and me into Danielle’s apartment.

  Fools rush in, I thought, mentally blessing myself with the sign of the cross. I had a feeling I was going to need all the help I could get. I went over to acne-face with my hand outstretched. “Good heavens, it’s Christian!” I exclaimed in French. “What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were a friend of Danielle’s!”

  He wasn’t flustered in the least. “You have me confused with someone else,” he said, his voice flat, his accent American, his French surprisingly accurate.

  I frowned, and raised my voice ever so slightly. “But I’m sure of it! We met at the party at the consulate!” I managed a flirtatious giggle. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember me, Christian!”

  Now he was looking slightly uncomfortable. “You’re mistaken,” he said, glancing at me and then away.

  “Hard to believe. We had such a good time that night. Of course, if you’d rather pretend you don’t know me…” My voice trailed off and I glanced around with a rueful smile. Several people gave uneasy smiles back, no doubt wondering if I planned to make a scene.

  Good: I was hoping he was wondering the same thing.

  One of his colleagues drifted over. “Is there a problem?” he asked in English, his smile pleasant, his eyes hard.

  Before Acne-Face could respond, I had turned to the new arrival. “I am so sure that Christian and I met,” I said, my English as heavily accented as I could manage. “Were you at the party at the consulate, too?”

  He looked blandly from Acne-Face to me. “I don’t believe we’ve ever met.” Another American accent. “Will you excuse us, Miss–er—?”

  “LeDuc,” I said automatically, then mentally kicked myself. I was way too naïve to be playing this game. Lying was not second nature.

  He nodded, clearly filing the name away for future reference, while I mentally used up every swear word I knew. “Excuse us, Miss LeDuc,” he said pleasantly and led Acne-Face away.

  Ivan was at my elbow. “That went well,” he remarked. “Remind me to change the locks when we get home.”

  “Merde,” I said miserably. “I had a chance there—”

  “To find out what?” he asked. “We have files on them at the casino, babe. I’ll bet the police do too. We can find out anything you need without making yourself a target.”

  “Maybe he’ll forget,” I said hopefully.

  “And maybe you’ll win the World Series of Poker. Anyway, onward and upward. Hey look, your boss is here.”

  And indeed he was, the mayor looking distinguished in a dark suit, his wife elegant in her usual designer clothes. Their son was with them, a twenty-something with a gargantuan ego who was attending UQAM and playing in a local rock band with an improbable name. Patrick, that was his name.

  I waited until the trio had gone through the motions by the coffin and murmured the required platitudes to the family, and then I drifted over. “Monsieur le maire,” I said pleasantly. “How thoughtful of you to be here.”

  “Ah, Madame LeDuc,” he said. “So sad, of course. La pauvre petite. Good news about the arrest, though, a fitting end to a sad chapter in the city’s history.”

  “Indeed,” I said noncommittally, and offered my hand to his wife. “Madame Boulanger.”

  Estelle Boulanger received me as the wife of a landowner might have noticed a tenant-farmer. “Madame LeDuc,” she said, her hand limp in mine, her gaze fixed somewhere just slightly over my head. Patrick, their son, offered me a sneer. I concluded that he didn’t want to shake hands. “Bonsoir, Patrick.”

  He turned to his father. “I’m getting something to eat,” he said, and walked away. Big loss. I cleared my throat. “Monsieur, do you know the gentlemen over there—”

  But they were gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I slept fitfully, dreaming about endless corridors and doctors with bleeding scalpels in their hands.

  Ivan was doing his usual routine of reading e-mails and news from his tablet over breakfast, but I caught him sneaking glances at me. “What is it?” I exclaimed at last, impatient.

  He mumbled something incoherent and went back to staring at the screen, and a few moments later he was stealing glances again. “Oh, I give up,” I muttered, and left early for the office.

  Theoretically, my job was done. There had been an arrest: the homeless man they’d arrested was going to a preliminary hearing; I didn’t have to keep playing go-between. But until I was officially told to, I wasn’t about to stop. I’d just stop meeting with the director of police, which wasn’t going to exactly ruin my day. Nor his, come to think of it.

  Richard was out for the funeral and Chantal had a toothache. “Go ahead.” I waved her away and called downstairs to get someone out of the secretarial pool to help. I called Julian, who didn’t answer—there was a surprise. I was beginning to think he’d left the planet altogether.

  I dealt with e-mails for a while and got myself a second coffee before leafing through my notebook again. Julian called in. “Hey, there, what’s up?”

  “Where the hell are you?” I asked crossly.

  “Nice to talk to you, too, Martine,” he said cheerfully. “I’m on my way to Danielle’s funeral, actually.”

  “Watch for three middle-aged Americans in fancy suits,” I said, forgetting for a moment that I was mad at him. “They were at the wake last night. Ivan says they’re connected in some way; Connected with a capital C, that is.”

  “In what way? And what’s their interest in Danielle?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe something, maybe nothing, who knows. I’m waiting for a call from Ottawa and then I’m heading over to the casino—Ivan says he’ll get security there to let me look at their files.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “How does Ivan know them?”

  I sighed. “The thing about a casino is that nothing’s private. There are cameras everywhere, and files open on the most amazing people. Or so I gather.” I shrugged. “Confidentiality’s a big thing, too.”

  “Meet me afterward, then,” he said. “We’ll compare notes.” There was a pause, and I heard him swearing at someone and informing them that they could not drive. I deduced that he was in traffic, probably weaving in and out of it in his TT. I was beginning to think that he wasn’t going to live long enough to finish this investigation. “Listen, Martine, meet me over in the Plateau, okay? Two o’clock at McKibbins?”

  “Fine,” I said, and hung up. Almost immediately the phone rang again.

  “Mrs. LeDuc? Christopher MacDougal here.”

  My stomach turned over slowly. “Hello, Professor,” I said.

  “I’d like to clear up a misunderstanding. Detective Fletcher seems to think that I had ulterior motives in coming to see you in your office the other night.”

  Well, at least Julian had done something about that. “What do you want?” I asked. And then, as another thought struck me, “I’d have thought you’d be on your way to Danielle Leroux’s funeral now. Apparently you knew her quite well.”

  There was a slight pause. “We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot here. I have a suspicion that we’re on the same side.”

  “People on my side don’t turn out lights and creep down corridors trying to break into offices at night,” I said. “I don’t think I have anything to say to you.”

  “Perhaps not. But I would very much like to talk to you, Mrs. LeDuc. It could be—mutually beneficial.”

  I gave up. The problem was that he was right. “Fine. In a public place. In the daytime.”

  “Absolutely. Today?”

  “I�
�ll be on the Plateau this afternoon,” I said. “Meet me in the Parc Lafontaine at four o’clock, all right? In front of the bistro.” I disconnected before he had the chance to respond.

  Who was this guy, anyway?

  I’d had three cups of coffee and was wondering when the hell the secretarial pool was going to send someone so that I could go to the bathroom when the call finally came through. “Mrs. Martine LeDuc?”

  “Yes, this is she,” I said, adding automatically, “Who is this?”

  A discreet cough. “Mrs. Maréchal assured me there would be no need to give you a name.”

  “Right,” I said, quickly opening the notebook to a new page and searching frantically with one hand for a pen. “I’m sorry. Elodie said that you could help me?”

  “You are interested in the MK-Ultra work,” he said. The name was new to me. I wrote it down. “Whatever you can tell me would be helpful.”

  “Very well. The work conducted in the Québec asylums during the 1940s, the 1950s, and particularly in the 1960s, through the Allan Memorial Institute, was done for Section Nine of the Canadian government,” he said, his voice pedantic. “They were associated with the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. Mrs. Maréchal seems to think that there is a connection with some murders you are investigating in Montréal.”

  “There may be,” I said slowly. This was sounding like a spy novel now. Section Nine? “What can you tell me—um—sir?”

  There was another pause, during which I heard him lighting a cigarette. “We were contacted in 1949 by an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States,” he explained. “Several of our universities were doing pharmaceutical research, McGill among them. The thinking at the time was that it was necessary for a truth serum to be developed.” He cleared his throat. “You have to remember that at the time we were very concerned about espionage and how to conduct the Cold War. By 1952 the United States was alarmed enough to institute official congressional hearings, driven by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Here in Canada, I regret to say, we shared many of the same priorities.” Yeah, that was just the sort of thing that Duplessis would get on board with: right-wing paranoid thinking.

  He’d paused to inhale on his cigarette again. I seized on the one new menu item. “A truth serum?”

  “It began with just that,” he said. “But there were a number of other ideas being circulated—in the strictest privacy, you understand. Ultra-classified.”

  He cleared his throat, and then finally came to some internal decision and said it. “There was a question as to how far drugs could go in controlling a person’s behavior while at the same time keeping that person unaware of what he was doing.”

  There was a moment of silence, spinning out taut and fine between us. I thought for a moment that I was going to throw up. I could hear echoes of Elizabeth Romfield’s voice. I had been ready to write her off as a complete nutter, with her thinly veiled accusation of the CIA being behind the second Kennedy assassination. “Please tell me,” I said, as steadily as I could, “precisely what you mean.”

  He was lighting another cigarette. Good thing I’d gotten to him before the cancer did. “As I said, the CIA program was called MK-Ultra. We never had an equivalent program. There was no need: we just piggybacked off theirs. Ewen Cameron, an American, came up to supervise the experiments.” He paused. “It was felt that the work should be done outside of the United States, for a number of reasons which are probably obvious. So Ewen used to commute up to Montréal from his home in Vermont.” He cleared his throat. “Dr. Cameron believed that he could erase existing memories and replace the erased memories with ones suggested to his patients, completely rebuilding their psyches. In other words, he could create a different person.”

  I was struggling to breathe. This had happened. Here. In Montréal. My beloved city. “How was this supposed to help with the Cold War issue?” I asked.

  “My dear young lady,” the disembodied voice said, “it was believed in certain circles that people could be programmed to do whatever one wished them to do. And then, if necessary, they could be reprogrammed to forget anything that had happened. The possibilities for any agency relying on secrecy, undercover work, and assassination—well, they’re endless.”

  I closed my eyes, but that didn’t blur the images his words had evoked. “Oh, God,” I murmured.

  “God,” he said, “had nothing to do with it at all.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  There was a lot of e-mail in my in box, and I didn’t feel like going through it. Doing a fast triage, I found an address I didn’t know, and before chucking it, decided to check the contents: it was a photograph, an old one in black and white, of a group of people standing in front of another nineteenth-century institutional building, facing the camera.

  The accompanying text was unsigned:

  This is a photo of Doctors Ewen Cameron and Heinz Lehmann standing with a group of other doctors outside the Miséricorde hospital in Montréal in 1959. This was a hospital for unwed mothers and also an orphanage. At the time Lehmann was directing the research institute of the Allan Memorial. What are two McGill psychiatrists doing in a group photo on the steps of this hospital? What legitimate reason would they have to be there?

  What a really good question. One I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know the answer to.

  I checked the e-mail address, but it was a free Gmail account; anyone can be anyone they want to be with web-based e-mail accounts. I sighed and squinted at the page. Was this my anonymous friend in Ottawa?

  Suddenly I just needed to be out of the office. I was feeling restless and, besides, I always think more clearly when I’m moving. I got my car out of the underground garage and set the GPS to Rue Hochelaga.

  It was time to see exactly what it was we’d been talking about.

  The buildings that were once the infamous Cité de St.-Jean-de-Dieu orphanage/mental hospital/child abattoir were now sanitized and operating efficiently—and presumably correctly—as the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Mental Health Hospital, with some long-term facilities located in adjoining buildings. I’d already read everything online that I could about it and just wanted to take a look myself.

  What struck me first was that it was a very long drive to get out there from downtown, and all the way I kept thinking: if it seems long now, it must have seemed even longer sixty or seventy years ago, when these children were being brought out here. It would have been all farmland, then, even though it was officially part of the city.

  The place seemed somehow distant—isolated and apart, even now; I couldn’t imagine what it had felt like then. It’s as far east as you can go, and it feels very much like you have left Montréal—and indeed all of civilization—behind.

  As, in fact, they had.

  No one was around looking at me curiously, and so I drove in slowly, taking in the imposing façade, gray stone, with—and why was I shocked?—the inscription still in large letters over the entrance: Hôpital Cité de St.-Jean-de-Dieu.

  I’d have thought they’d have gotten rid of the words. As though they’d have wanted to hide it, hide the past, hide the pain.

  I took a deep breath. I parked the car and walked around slowly, awed and more than a little amazed by the sheer size of the place. Building after building, all of them with five or six floors, and all of them, sixty years ago, filled with the demented, the schizophrenic, the bipolar … the orphans. And the nuns.

  I took another deep breath and released it slowly. Breathe, Martine. It was such a jarring bit of cognitive dissonance: I’d gone to a convent school myself. I had learned to read and write—and think—from nuns, and I loved and admired them so much that for a period of more than a year I seriously contemplated joining the order, becoming a soeur grise, one of the Gray Sisters, teaching others as they had taught me. There had been nothing there but love and caring and generosity. Discipline, yes; but discipline in moderation. And never cruelty. If anything, I’d escaped my home life to the peace and
calm of the convent school with relief. I loved the sisters, and I had never, not for one moment, doubted that they loved me. Had so much changed in—what? Twenty years? From what it had been?

  And, I wondered, how could these women have sold off those children’s bodies to the medical school for ten dollars each? How could they have stood by—or, worse, taken part—when it came to experiments such as sterilization, lobotomies, electroshock, drugs, ice water, straitjackets, isolation?

  It was beyond understanding. I stood there and felt the wind tugging at my skirt and jacket and looked away from the imposing gray stone buildings, out across the road, my eyes tearing from the wind and the connection I was suddenly feeling with the past. There wasn’t much to see. Somewhere out there had been the farm, also run by the nuns, which had supplied meat and vegetables to the asylum.

  I imagined myself standing there as a child, a little girl, seeing my new world for the first time, and an immediate feeling of panic closed in. I started breathing faster, feeling like I couldn’t get enough air. I would have been small and frail and surrounded by miles and miles of nothingness, only this tremendous building at my back ready to swallow and devour me, only the piggery for escape, the place where the bodies that didn’t go to medical schools had been buried. In 1960, there was nothing else out here. No one to help me. No one to save me.

  I swung back to look at the hospital again, and noticed the small building off to the side where a garderie—child care—was apparently being run. A large cheerful giraffe was holding a sign. “Attention à nos enfants,” it said. Watch out for our children.

  The irony of that sign was the last straw. I got back in my car and peeled out of there, but I didn’t leave alone: the images came flooding after me. Why so many orphans? Mothers dying in childbirth, unwed mothers shamed into giving their children to the Church, large families unable to feed every mouth, even in such a Catholic area and time it seemed impossible that there were so many unclaimed children. Hundreds of them.