The Delicate Storm

by Giles Blunt

  “It’s La Belle Province, late 1960s. We’ve got strikes left and right: the cab drivers, the students, even the cops, they go on strike. Some of the demonstrators, they get out of hand and heads get broken, one or two individuals get killed. Out of this anarchy rises a group known as the Front de libération du Québec, or FLQ for short. The FLQ starts putting bombs in mailboxes in Montreal and Quebec City. What do they want? They want Quebec to separate from Canada and become its own country.

  “Other organizations want the same thing. The Parti Québécois, for example. The difference is that the PQ aim to do it through the democratic process. The FLQ don’t give a damn about the democratic process. They want their own country now, and they’re going to get it by violence.

  “So, bombs start going off. Mostly they’re small, and mostly no one gets hurt. But cases of dynamite keep getting stolen from construction sites around the city. In fact, a lot of the dynamite came from the construction of Expo 67, which was supposed to celebrate a hundred years of Canadian nationhood. Some people, they thought this showed the FLQ had a sense of humour. What it really showed was that some of the FLQ worked in construction.

  “Anyway, they start putting bombs in mailboxes. Some in Quebec City, some in Ottawa, but mostly they put them in mailboxes on the charming streets of Westmount, home of the wealthier Anglos in Montreal. Also the home of yours truly: RCMP C Division.” He waved a hand at the window, where sparse flakes of snow drifted over the green slope of Mount Royal.

  “But then people start getting killed or maimed. One of the men on our bomb squad had both his hands blown off trying to defuse a bomb. And a security guard died at a building the FLQ thought was empty. Champions of the working class, they call themselves, but I don’t think the security guard’s widow would agree. Anyway, by now we’re going all out to catch these bastards.

  “October fifth, 1970. The home of British trade consul Stuart Hawthorne. Doorbell rings, the maid answers. There’s a man at the door with a long package. ‘Birthday present for Mr. Hawthorne,’ he says. The maid moves to open the door and suddenly four men are in the hallway, the box is open and a machine gun is pointing in her face. They drag Mr. Hawthorne out of the bathroom where he’s shaving, and less than five minutes later he’s blindfolded in the back seat of a car.

  “Communiqués are sent, demands are made. The so-called Liberation cell of the FLQ has a lot of demands, but the biggest ones are freedom for twenty-three so-called political prisoners, $500,000 in what they refer to as a voluntary tax, and safe conduct to Cuba for the kidnappers and the freed prisoners. Anything less will result in the execution of Mr. Hawthorne.”

  “Why did they kidnap someone from another country?” Cardinal asked. “Why not go for someone closer to home?”

  “That’s exactly what other members in the FLQ asked themselves. The federal government is still putting together its kidnap task force when another cell strikes, the Chénier cell. This time they kidnap Raoul Duquette, provincial minister of education.

  “The government stalls for time. I was with the Security Service back then, and we set up a Combined Anti-Terrorist Squad—the CAT Squad—made up of Mounties, the Quebec provincial police and the Montreal police. Within forty-eight hours we knew who the kidnappers were. What we didn’t know was where they were. I was convinced then and I’m convinced today that if we’d had another couple of days, we could’ve found them. But people were panicking.

  “The federal government—Pierre Trudeau—is ready to call in the army. Literally. All he needs is a letter from the mayor of Montreal and the premier of Quebec asking for help dealing with an ‘apprehended insurrection.’ Those are the actual words required by the War Measures Act. Well, he has a minister dictate the letters and, sure enough, they have the signatures two hours later. That night, October sixteenth, 1970, at midnight, he declares war measures in force.

  “Suddenly we don’t need warrants anymore. We don’t have to lay charges for thirty days. We round up everybody—and I mean everybody—from cab drivers to nightclub singers. Anybody who ever said anything nice about separation. We lock ’em up and we ask ’em who they know.

  “The embarrassing truth is, they don’t know anybody. Of the 540 people we rounded up, only thirty were charged with anything, and only a dozen were convicted, mostly for stupid weapons offences. We did not find any huge cache of arms, we did not find any gigantic network of terrorists.”

  “Suspending civil rights?” Delorme said. “The Americans didn’t even do that after September eleventh. For immigrants, maybe, but not for citizens.”

  “You’re right,” Ducharme said. “The Trudeau government wanted to send a message to the terrorists that violent acts would cost them far more than they could possibly be worth. The Chénier cell understood it differently. They understood it to mean that all the negotiations of the past few days had been completely phony. They gave their answer the next day: they murdered Raoul Duquette.”

  “But you got the diplomat out,” Cardinal said. “Stuart Hawthorne?”

  “We got Hawthorne out. It took two months, but we got him out alive. His kidnappers went to Cuba, then to Paris, and eventually most of them came back here and served some time—not much—and then settled down.

  “The people who killed Duquette were caught and sent to prison. Unfortunately, we couldn’t prove which one of them did the actual killing, so they only did twelve years.

  “Which brings us to your photograph.”

  Ducharme held up the group photograph Cardinal had found in Shackley’s files.

  “The one on the left with the curly hair is Daniel Lemoyne, leader of the Chenier cell. The young man in front is Bernard Theroux. In his initial confession he said that he held Duquette down while Lemoyne strangled him. He later recanted this confession, and his lawyer got it thrown out of court.”

  “What about the young woman?” Cardinal said. “She looks like a teenager.”

  “She must have been a fringe member, if she was a member at all. I don’t have anything on her yet. Same with the other young man, the bearded one in the striped shirt. I know the faces of the major players by heart, but these two …”

  “They’re not members of the Chénier cell?”

  “I don’t think so. Not that I recall. I’m sorry. Normally, we’d be able to come up with that information right away, but this was long before the age of computerization here, and the files are in transit back from Ottawa. CSIS grabbed them a while back. It’s like the Kennedy assassination, you know—every five years some wiseacre decides it’s time to revisit the October Crisis. We should have everything back in a day or two, and then you’ll get your IDs.”

  “It’s hard to believe this stuff,” Delorme said. “It seems so crazy now.”

  “Really?” Sergeant Ducharme said. “Just in the past year we’ve had the French Self-Defence League putting bombs in front of coffee shops and restaurants because they have signs in English. Passions run high, even today.”

  “And the other photograph?” Cardinal pointed to a picture of Miles Shackley circa 1970. Musgrave had sent it to him and to Ducharme. When Cardinal had asked how he got hold of it, Musgrave had said, “I’m a Mountie, Cardinal. I have superhuman powers.”

  “Miles Shackley was an American who worked here around the time of the crisis. We had a few CIA people working with us on the CAT Squad. Well, don’t look like that, it was perfectly natural. They had the Black Panthers and the Weathermen to deal with, and terrorism was becoming an international problem. It would have been stupid not to have them involved.

  “Personally, I didn’t care for Shackley. Not that it mattered—I was very low on the totem pole. He was working with Lieutenant Fougère and Corporal Sauvé. Fougère died a few years ago, unfortunately, but no doubt you’ll be talking to Sauvé. They were the top guys, the three of them, and they got along fine. I don’t remember anything else about Shackley, and the file is of course with the others, but I hope to have it back in a few days.” />
  “What was Shackley’s function in the CAT Squad?” Cardinal said.

  “Liaison, probably. Maybe more, but I don’t know. He would have given us help tracing financing, tracing connections between various groups. Oh, and I believe he was following a particular Black Panther who was hiding out up here. The FLQ were getting guns from the Panthers in return for sheltering them when they came up here on the run.”

  “And Musgrave told us about the phone numbers,” Cardinal said.

  “Yes, the phone numbers. Now, there it gets interesting.”

  Compared to what was happening in Algonquin Bay, Montreal and environs were enjoying a normal winter. The snow looked about three feet deep, and at corners and intersections it was heaped so high that Cardinal had to nose the car out into the intersection to see what was coming down the street.

  But it was getting warmer here too. The branches hung heavy and the icicles dripped, and as Cardinal drove along Highway 10 toward the Eastern Townships, the light snow turned to drizzle. The damp painted the trunks of the trees deep black, so that the landscape, once he was beyond the city limits, was at once both wintry and misty, the blacks and whites stark. The sky was so dark it gave the day a feel of twilight, even though Cardinal had just finished lunch.

  He and Delorme had divided the work between them: Delorme had headed into town to talk to a former FLQ member, and Cardinal was on his way to interview Robert Sauvé, former second-in-command of the CAT Squad. Sauvé’s was the first number Shackley had called from New York, and he had called it several times.

  “Here’s what you have to know about Sauvé,” Sergeant Ducharme had said. “A few years after the October Crisis, on June thirteenth, 1973, to be exact, about three-thirty in the morning, the citizens of Westmount were woken up by a loud blast. A bomb had gone off outside the home of one Joseph P. Felstein, founder of Felstein supermarkets. Blew out windows along the entire street.

  “Police arrive and find a hole in the ground, still smoking, and a trail of blood leading them to a car parked half a block away. Slumped in the front seat they find a guy with his hands torn up, half his face blown away and his guts hanging out.

  “They take him to hospital and the guy goes into surgery. For a while it looks like he isn’t going to make it, but call it a miracle of Montreal medicine—the guy lives. Of course his jaw is wired up, fingers are missing, his left eye is gone, but he’s alive. Unfortunately, he isn’t talking. Won’t even tell anyone his name.

  “It doesn’t take the Montreal police long to find out. The car was a rental, but they trace it to Corporal Robert Sauvé of the Combined Anti-Terrorist Squad. You remember when the Mounties got hauled on the carpet by the Keable Commission? We burnt a barn the FLQ was using for meetings, we raided René Lévesque’s offices for mailing lists, planted illegal wiretaps. Very bad boys, the Keable Commission said.”

  “I remember,” Cardinal said. “It was on the news every night for months.”

  “Corporal Robert Sauvé was the reason it happened. If it hadn’t been for him, the Mounties would still be running the Security Service in this country. CSIS would never have been invented. For weeks Sauvé doesn’t say anything. The Montreal cops charge him with everything they can think of and still he doesn’t co-operate.

  “The judge didn’t like his attitude. He was found guilty on all counts and the judge handed him twelve years. Twelve years for blowing himself up and breaking a few windows. Suddenly Sauvé finds his voice.

  “‘Twelve years,’ he says. ‘Twelve years, and nobody got hurt except me. I did far worse things when I was in the anti-terrorist squad. Far worse.’ And that’s what started the ball rolling. The end result of all the investigations and commissions was the creation of CSIS. A lot of good men lost their jobs. Alan Musgrave, for one.”

  “Musgrave’s father?” Delorme said.

  “Alan got the boot. It didn’t help his drinking problem, and six months later he killed himself. Broke my heart, that did.”

  “Jesus,” Cardinal said. “No wonder Musgrave can’t stand CSIS.”

  “There’s lots of reasons to be upset with CSIS, but that’s a pretty good one.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Cardinal said. “Why did Sauvé blow up the department-store guy?”

  “They can’t be sure, because the son of a bitch, he never co-operated. They think it was a freelance job he did for the mob. The Cotroni family controlled a rival chain of grocery stores and they wanted to send a message. Sauvé was the messenger.”

  “A pretty drastic career change,” Delorme said. “How do you go from working for the RCMP to working for the Mafia?”

  “You’ll have to ask Mr. Sauvé.”

  Sauvé’s connection to the Mafia made Cardinal wonder if there wouldn’t turn out to be a link to Leon Petrucci. Somehow he just couldn’t see a small-time mobster known mostly for his grip on Algonquin Bay’s coin-operated soft drink machines suddenly ordering the murder of an American and a doctor. Nevertheless, he decided to keep an open mind on the matter.

  He turned off the highway and followed a side road past increasingly desperate-looking farms for several miles. Then a crooked sign pointed the way to Seguinville, which turned out not to be a ville at all but a crossroads. A light drizzle fell across deserted fields. Sauvé’s place was another two miles down the jagged—and barely plowed—road that zigzagged off to the north.

  The house itself was all but hidden behind a stand of birches interwoven with tangled brush. It appeared to be a two-storey structure from the road, but on pulling into the appalling driveway, Cardinal saw that half of the upper storey had fallen away. In summer, it would look even worse; winter had softened the broken edges of the walls with hillocks of snow.

  A pickup truck, much dented, was parked in front of a skeletal barn, the last standing wall of which consisted of a rusted sign advertising Laurentide ale. Beyond this, a boat was balanced on a hoist, its prow and bridge rounded with snow. It was not the type of boat one commonly saw in a driveway or backyard, not a pleasure craft. It was a tugboat, seventy years old at least, and yet it was tilted skyward as if breasting the waves of an invisible river. Cardinal wouldn’t have trusted the seams on land, never mind the St. Lawrence.

  Robert Sauvé himself was out of the house and in the driveway before Cardinal had even stepped out of the car. The former corporal held a twelve-gauge shotgun at gut level. Even from this distance the left half of his face had a caved-in look, just like his house. One eye squinted at Cardinal, and the other—the glass one—maintained an unsettling calm. He didn’t have a beard, but it had been many days since his face had seen a razor. He said one word, and it was a challenge, not a greeting. “Bonjour.”

  “Sorry,” Cardinal said in French. “My French is not great. Do you speak English?”

  The former corporal didn’t answer. Cardinal was wishing Delorme was there. He tried English.

  “Would you mind pointing that thing away for a minute?”

  The shotgun stayed where it was.

  Cardinal tried French again. “Listen. I’m not here to make trouble. I’m an Ontario policeman working on an Ontario …” He couldn’t remember the word for “case” and settled for “business.” I’m working on an Ontario business. Sure, that’ll work wonders.

  “You RCMP?” The words were heavily accented, but at least they were English.

  “Algonquin Bay. Local,” Cardinal said, keeping his hands well away from his body. “You want to see the badge? I’ll have to reach into my back pocket.”

  “Very slow.”

  Cardinal reached back and extracted the ID folder from his pocket. He held it out in front of him, and Sauvé took two steps forward, squinting at it with his one good eye.

  “What’s an Ontario cop want with me?” The left side of Sauvé’s mouth stayed frozen. His voice sounded unused, but perhaps it was just the English that was rusty.

  “I’ve got a dead American on my hands, an ex-CIA employee named Miles Shackley, who
was in Quebec about thirty years ago. Nineteen seventy, to be exact. He was active during the October Crisis, and we think his murder may have something to do with that. We also know he was recently in contact with you.”

  “So? An ex-CIA employee phones an ex-RCMP employee, it’s not illegal.”

  “I need to know what he wanted. Can we go in out of the cold for a few minutes, Mr. Sauvé?” Cardinal rubbed his hands together briskly. “I’m not used to these Quebec winters, and it’s a little damp out here.”

  “It’s not cold,” Sauvé said, not moving.

  “You worked on the CAT Squad. And you worked with Shackley.”

  “I worked with a lot of CIA people. The day Hawthorne got kidnap, they were coming out of the walls. Thirty or forty of them at headquarters alone.”

  “What was Miles Shackley’s function on the CAT Squad?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Take your time.”

  “I don’t need time.” Sauvé turned his back and limped toward his ruin of a house.

  “Mr. Sauvé, wait. I need your help.”

  Sauvé didn’t even turn around.

  “Don’t you remember what it’s like? Being neck deep in a case that isn’t going anywhere? I’m looking for one little break that could make all the difference.”

  Now Sauvé turned with great difficulty and faced him again. “I talked to every commission in the country. I told them everything I knew. And still I spent twelve years of my life in prison. A former Mountie. What kind of treatment do you think I got there? You think I have any affection for law enforcement?”

  “I have nothing to do with the people who put you away. I’m just trying to break a case in a small Ontario city.”

  Sauvé hauled himself up the sagging steps of the porch. As he bent to open the door, his teeth gleamed in the light. It might have been because of his disfigurement, the skin pulled tight across the reconstructed jaw, but Cardinal suspected that former Corporal Robert Sauvé was laughing.