October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  The first chicken delivery man, the one who came on the Saturday, was the one named Rénald Massicotte. Feeling a bit dizzy, Sam riffled through the rest of the envelope’s contents without finding any more references to the Massicottes. The trail ended there.

  In the Montreal telephone book, he found five G. Massicottes.

  The Chinese corner store down the street sold single cigarettes. Sam found a quarter under a pile of bills on his desk, put on his coat, and went out into the winter night to buy a smoke. But first he pretended to examine the hunting and fishing magazines on the newsstand, letting his eye slide over to the shelf containing Club and International, the designers of which apparently had their own idea, and he stopped thinking about the difference between what the chef at Baby Barbecue thought was a sandwich and what was actually a sandwich.

  He smoked the cigarette as he walked back to his apartment and arrived slightly out of breath.

  In bed, he thought again about all those super babes with their silicone breasts as round as saucers, and masturbated, which helped him fall asleep.

  But he didn’t sleep for long. He got up an hour and a half before dawn and made a pot of coffee. At ten, after having drunk the whole pot, he dialled the first of the five numbers and hit the bull’s eye on the first try.

  He explained who he was to Massicotte. A university professor and, he added, a writer. He was interested in a brief bit of dialogue that Massicotte had published a decade earlier in Statut particulier, and could they perhaps grab a coffee together in a café somewhere?

  “Sure,” replied the former detective lieutenant.

  “That was too easy,” Samuel said to himself as he hung up.

  He was sitting in the Taverne Fameux, near the glassed-in bay window, looking out at the mixture of artists, pseudo-artists, para-artists, and semi-artists, or perhaps just the young and cool, and the usual figures of the quarter, the characters who kept coming back, people who’d slipped through the cracks in the social services, all being swept along by the current toward the corner of avenue Mont-Royal and Saint-Denis. Then he turned to the sports pages, which occupied his attention for a few minutes until a series of raps on the window made him look up.

  It was a short, stubby woman. He remembered her name: Marie-Québec. Her parents were hippies, which explained the name, but when he thought about it, it was no worse than naming someone Charles de Gaulle or Pierre Mendès France. Marie-Québec had been one of the few women to take part in the small group that had sat at Chevalier Branlequeue’s feet, at least at first, a sort of Octobeerist hanger-on. But at the White Horse, and later at Lavigueur’s, the talk had become sharper and the stakes higher, a kind of I’m-the-king-of-the-castle competition, with the discourse as the castle and everyone using their oratorical strengths to keep everyone else out of it. The loudmouths dominated, and Marie-Québec, who was the self-effacing kind, didn’t hang around for long. He remembered the last time he’d seen her, sidling along rue Ontario, almost invisible except to him and the inevitable drivers who cruised the corner for hookers and stopped when they saw any vaguely feminine shape. He might well have forgotten her this time, too, except that after tapping on the window and continuing on her way, she did a one-eighty and pushed open the door of the restaurant.

  Samuel had once read a novel in which the author took particular pains to inform the reader that the woollen skirt worn by his heroine was of a pale aquamarine colour, with corn-yellow panels and a large knotted belt. You won’t find that kind of thing here. Simply put, Marie-Québec was dressed like any twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old woman of the time, that is, in the fringe between two millennia. She wasn’t tall. Her skin was dark. Let’s say she had the eyes and cheekbones of an Indian. At first glance there wasn’t anything remarkable about her. The way she walked did not cause men’s heads to turn when they passed her on the street. Her neckline, visible beneath her unbuttoned winter coat, did not remind him of the foothills of the Rockies.

  Standing beside his table (she had asked point-blank if he was expecting someone and he had said yes without thinking), she told him she had a part in a Camus play, The Just, being put on by the Loblaw’s Happy Times Theatre in Maldoror, a town in the Abitibi region, where she was from, she explained. “Two of the actors live in Montreal,” she said, “so the rehearsals are being held here, a bit like when one person speaks English the whole group ends up speaking English.”

  At that moment, a man in his early sixties, wearing a Mackinaw jacket and sporting a very full moustache came through the door, pausing just inside and scanning the restaurant.

  “I think that’s my friend,” Samuel said.

  She gave him an excuse-me smile but didn’t move.

  “Would you like to have a beer later, say four o’clock?” he heard himself ask her, speaking quickly, even breathlessly, as though he’d been running after a moving train.

  “Where?”

  “At the Quai des Brumes? The Barbare? Wait, I have an idea: at Lavigueur’s, on rue Ontario.”

  Massicotte was the kind of police officer who had flourished during the 1970s. The cool cop, pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. He was the cop equivalent of the with-it priest. He’d even studied sociology at UQAM, and the police department paid for him to get his master’s in the legal aspects of environmental protection. Which, it has to be said, makes him stink to high heaven of an undercover cop.

  A few years before his retirement, he served as president of the Police Officers’ Brotherhood, an organization whose main function was to protect trigger-happy and overzealous cops from suffering the legal consequences of their actions.

  “You know, I’m writing a novel, too …” Massicotte said as an opening gambit.

  Samuel offered him a coffee but he opted for a beer. They hadn’t exchanged three sentences before the beer was two-thirds empty. And now Sam understood why it had been so easy for him to arrange this interview. A budding novelist! They existed even among cops? He was probably looking around for a publisher, like everyone else.

  “Your own version of the events, is it?” Nihilo asked.

  “Events? What events? No, it’s a story of redemption. An alcoholic police officer infiltrates a criminal organization formed by a biker gang who’s gone in with the Russian mafia. Do you know any publishers?”

  “If I find you one, will you talk to me about the October Crisis?”

  “About the …”

  Samuel nodded. Massicotte shook his empty bottle at the waitress, who brought him another beer. Watching the former CATS officer drink beer on his tab, Sam found a whole new meaning for the phrase “the long arm of the law.”

  “I’m tired of talking about that,” Massicotte said after chugging half the beer and putting it back on the table. “What exactly do you want to know?”

  “Okay, why don’t we start with the guy who delivered the barbecue chicken to rue Collins? You’re cousins, right?”

  This produced a surprising result: Massicotte didn’t say a word. For a long time nothing came out of his mouth, not the slightest sound.

  Then: “I have a witness.”

  “What’s that? What did you say?”

  “A witness. Call Mr. Brien, in Gaspé.”

  “Mr. Brien? You mean the famous lawyer? The FLQ lawyer?”

  “The same. He’ll confirm everything.”

  “Confirm what, exactly?”

  “The story I am about to tell you.”

  “Great, that’s all I ask. But how do you know Brien?”

  “I ran into him in court, you know? Our paths crossed. We talked a bit.”

  “And what do you need a witness for, if I may ask?”

  “It’s just a figure of speech.”

  Massicotte stopped and took another swig of Labatt’s 50. A long chug. He’d already finished three-quarters of his second bottle.

  “Brien,” he went on, “was at the courthouse the morning those three kids who kidnapped the American consul were brought in. We’d nabbe
d them in June in a cabin somewhere up near Saint-Colomban. I was in charge of the investigation …”

  He stopped again and burped, then, as an afterthought, covered his mouth with his closed fist. He grimaced, rubbed his stomach with his free hand.

  “Brien was their defence lawyer. That’s why I was at the courthouse on the morning of October fifth. There’s no doubt about the date, because it was just after the opening of the trial, the same day we found out that the British Trade Commissioner had been kidnapped …”

  “You were in court that day?”

  “Yes. And suddenly there was this fucking asshole in the courtroom who took a kind of hammer, something like a judge’s gavel, out of his coat pocket and started creating a disturbance with it, banging it on things, making a ruckus, and the judge had no choice but to throw him out. I sent one of my men out to make sure he left, and that’s when I found out that the fucking asshole in question was my cousin, Rénald. Obviously, I hadn’t recognized him. I hadn’t seen him for so long I had no idea what he looked like …”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “The trial was open to the public.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “He had a personal interest in it. He didn’t know the accused. Or anyone else in the FLQ. We made sure of that.”

  “So, you’re telling me …”

  “Yup.”

  “ … the guy who was at the trial on the fifth of October, the trial of the three FLQ members …”

  “Yup.”

  “ … was the same guy who delivered chicken to their buddies on the South Shore five days later? Was that pure coincidence?”

  “Call Mr. Brien. He’s in the Gaspé. Tell him you’ve spoken to me.”

  “Mr. Brien. Your witness.”

  “Like I said.”

  “You’re damn right I’ll call him.”

  Massicotte raised his empty bottle and looked around for the waitress.

  “It’s not that I’m not having a good time,” he said, “but could you tell me your name again?”

  “Nihilo, Samuel. I’ve got your phone number. Speaking of which, do you have a number for Rénald?”

  “For who?”

  “Your cousin.”

  “Guess what? I haven’t the slightest idea where he is. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was dead.”

  “Huh. Not under tragic circumstances, I hope?”

  “An angel passed over Montreal.”

  With that, the former antiterrorist cop stood up. “Thanks for the beer,” he said.

  “Maybe we can do it again sometime.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Maybe at your book launch?”

  “The book has nothing to do with the October Crisis,” Massicotte said. And turning on his heel, he left the restaurant.

  “I believe you!”

  After paying the tab, Samuel walked out of the Fameux feeling elated.

  He turned west on Mont-Royal with the idea of spending some time in the journalism archives housed in the old Aegidius-Côté Building, at the corner of Laval. A commotion drew his attention, and he turned to look down a narrow alley, where he saw Gilbert Massicotte sitting at the wheel of his car, having just backed up into a hydro pole. Two young police officers, big, burly, and belligerent, were talking to him, their patrol cruiser parked in front of his car with all its lights flashing.

  Samuel could see that they wanted him to take a Breathalyzer test and that the retired sergeant was refusing to do so. He was trying to explain to them, more or less coherently but loudly, that he had had almost nothing to drink and that an accident can happen to anyone and that he was “the former president of the Police Officers’ Brotherhood, which fought for your hard-earned rights, you ignorant, dribbling idiots, what the fuck’s your problem?” One of the younger officers grabbed him by the arm and lifted him out of the driver’s seat, pulled him out the door, pushed him brusquely ahead, and shoved him up against the side of the cruiser. After that he sent the sergeant face-first into a snowbank, whereupon his colleague knelt on him, putting all his weight into it. The sociology graduate squealed like a pig.

  “You should have stuck to the two-beer defence,” Samuel murmured, but no one heard him.

  “Call towing!” shouted the officer squatting on their suspect.

  Then he plunked his one-hundred-and-ten kilo body containing zero trans-fat directly onto Massicotte’s face.

  THE HOLE

  THE BEIGE STATION WAGON STOPPED. Gode pushed a corner of his sleeping bag back and risked a peek through the window. The first thing he saw was the top half of a police uniform and an officer in three-quarter profile, his face cut off by the top of the hatchback. At almost the same time, he saw that the flashing light atop the patrol car parked a bit farther down had been turned off. Slowly he lowered the sleeping bag over his face.

  “Don’t move, guys.”

  They stopped breathing.

  There was a whirring sound, like that of a winch, and the front of the car began to lift with a slow, steady movement.

  “Tow truck,” René whispered under his breath.

  The car tipped up as though trying to pour them feet-first onto the diner’s frozen parking lot. It was at about a forty-five-degree angle. They clutched the blankets and sleeping bags to keep them from sliding off, and Gode moved his right leg a bit to feel the metallic rigidity of the rifle. He inched his arm out until it touched the butt. The winching noise stopped. He thought about what he would say to the cop when he smashed the back window open with his boot. He took his hands out of the sleeping bag. Don’t even touch the rifle. Go to sleep.

  Abrupt exclamations, see-you-laters, car doors slamming shut, motors starting. The station wagon, still at an angle, started swinging, its thin metal sides jolting amid a clanking of chains and couplings. They were on the move once more.

  Marcel and Ginette, the future Mrs. Corps, had been taken to the cabin by the bearded young separatist. This time they had brought their friend Saint-Laurent with them and a box of provisions. Above their heads, between the leafless maple branches, the sky was an unidentifiable colour.

  Ginette would remember what she saw for the rest of her life: three men, filthy and frightened, forced to live underground in the middle of a forest, like hunted animals.

  Marcel Duquet told them that they couldn’t stay there. “You’ll freeze like rats,” he said. And they agreed with him.

  The thin veil covering the moon meant snow.

  Two days later, Duquet woke up in the house he rented in Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu and looked out the window at a blizzard. He couldn’t see the sky or the ground. He was in his late thirties, but he looked older. Thick moustache, thinning hair, a nice-guy look. His fingers hooked around his coffee mug like the talons of a bird of prey, he watched the snow piling up on the banks lining the access road. The window shook under the wind’s ululating assault. There was nothing around the solid old farmhouse to provide shelter from it. The wind blew horizontally across the landscape, up from the St. Lawrence Valley, shaking the wisps of corn stalks left standing in the fields.

  Marcel looked at Ginette.

  “We can’t leave them out there …”

  Ginette agreed. The children were with Coco’s mother in L’Acadie.

  “The other thing I worry about,” Duquet added, “is that they’ll be shot like rabbits.”

  They’d left the station wagon at the edge of the woods. Leaning into the wind and the driving snow now mixed with pellets of freezing rain, the five of them came out of the woods with their teeth chattering. Marcel got in, his woollen toque with its pompom pulled down over his head. The road was covered with fresh snow, and the only other visible mark on it was the bluish double track made earlier by their car when they came in. The engine started, the heater was set at high. Sitting in the passenger seat, Ginette listened to the radio and smoked a cigarette.

  The station wagon became stuck while Marcel was trying to turn it around, and the tires spun on
the ice. The heavy, wet snow, packed by the spinning tires, also turned into ice. Duquet went down the list of every ecclesiastical swear word he knew, then shrugged his shoulders.

  “Someone has to get out and push,” he said.

  The three men, who had already wrapped themselves in blankets in the back of the wagon, found themselves outside again, pressing against the fenders of the car as huge wet snowflakes settled on their eyelashes. Crystals sparkled in the air and fell about them like tracer bullets through a thick cottony fog. The car leapt forward, and Gode fell full length in the slush. There was laughter and another string of church-related expletives.

  Gode stank like an old wet dog on their return journey. He calmed himself down, glad to be finally moving, even though it was down a road covered in ten centimetres of wet snow. He covered his head with the edge of the sleeping bag and closed his eyes.

  Later, when the tow truck took over and the jolts became more regular, Gode’s head had knocked when they went over a bump. On the autoroute, somewhere between Bois-Francs and the old Patriot Road, the snowstorm had turned into freezing rain.

  Duquet’s house in Saint-Marc boasted an enormous central stone chimney that drew so well it made the split cherry logs roar and crackle. Unaccustomed to the warmth, Jean-Paul Lafleur sat in a sofa chair sipping gin from a glass; he had refused to let anyone put even a single ice cube into it. There was a limit to how much cold he could take, and he had reached it.

  Jean-Paul slipped into a fond reverie that took him back to the previous summer, when he and a few others had helped Coco build his boat. Twenty-six years old, built like a brick shithouse, head full of ideas, some of which weren’t entirely idiotic, he had the tranquil air of someone born to be a leader of men.

  At Cardinal’s place in L’Acadie he’d gone to the fridge to get a beer or, even better, a cold Kik Cola, and Ginette had come up behind him, turned him around, and pressed her body against his on the fridge door. At thirty-five, she had reached the peak of her sexuality. He could tell she was aching for it and for him, wanting to be taken like a whore against some alley wall, her hormones in orbit after a couple of beers. With all the young helpers hanging around the cottage, Coco couldn’t keep track of who was doing what and he didn’t always keep an eye on Ginette, who was horny as a bitch in heat. You only had to look at the noses and ears and eyes of their kids to see that what she had inside her wasn’t so much a womb as a box of Cracker Jacks, a different surprise each time.