October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  Jean-Paul had let her go on with her flirting for a while before breaking away and joining the others. But later on he regretted it, not hard to believe, and the next time she tried it, on the Île aux Fesses, between the handrails of the new boat’s reptilian ferro-concrete skeleton, he didn’t make the same mistake. He rose to the challenge, gave in to temptation for a bit of the old rough-and-tumble. And now that same Ginette was sitting listlessly on the sofa on the other side of the fireplace from his chair, her breasts pressing against her woollen pullover.

  “Jean-Paul,” she said quietly, turning her glass of gin in the glow from the flames, “what are you in all this for? Love?”

  “What’s love got to do with anything?” he asked, half-jokingly.

  “At least tell me you weren’t the ones who …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “ … who killed Lavoie.”

  “And why couldn’t it have been us?”

  “Because it wouldn’t have been safe, you could never have pulled off a thing like that. We’re not talking about holding up a dépanneur, for Christ’s sake. Everyone knows you’re in the FLQ!”

  Jean-Paul was about to reply when a shout from Marcel cut him off:

  “Police!”

  An unmarked car with its lights turned off had burst into the front yard, which had turned into a skating rink, and braked hard, causing the car to skid around like a top. When it stopped, a man got out, and as soon as his feet touched the ice he did the splits, his legs formed a perfect ninety-degree angle before coming sharply together like the point of a compass, then he spun around about a metre in the air and came to rest as he fell heavily to the ice. He lay there for a full minute without moving.

  In a way, it was kind of like the police. At least it was piglike. It was Coco Cardinal.

  While Gode got out the 12-gauge, the others listened to Coco’s careful footsteps coming up the ice-covered porch stairs. Followed by an impatient tattoo of loud knocks on the door.

  “Open up! I know the Lafleurs are in there …”

  Everyone looked at one another, then Marcel opened the door.

  It was Cardinal, all right, no doubt about that. Dripping wet in his midnight-blue quilted coat and fur hat. A coat of ice encased the zipper slide on his chest, which dangled with the rhythm of his movements. Cardinal seemed to use his imposing bulk to shove Duquet out of the way without even touching him. He advanced into the room, his rubber boots clip-clopping across the floor, paying no heed to the chain of small lakes they left behind.

  He was beside himself with agitation. Breathing like a racehorse, he marched up to Jean-Paul.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “News travels fast … How did you know we were here?”

  “None of your business. But they’re expecting you in the States …”

  Maybe he was high on coke. Something seemed to have spooked him, but it wasn’t Jean-Paul.

  “Calm down, Coco. Why shouldn’t we stay here, as long as you keep your mouth shut?”

  “You have to leave for the States,” Coco said again, sounding stunned. “If you don’t, you’ll be shot … Can’t you understand that?”

  “We’ll have to discuss it,” replied Jean-Paul, looking at his two companions.

  Coco turned to Ginette.

  “Come outside, I want to talk to you …”

  “Suppose I don’t want to go outside?”

  Coco raised his hand, but Jean-Paul moved between them, followed by Marcel, who was brandishing a poker.

  “What the fuck …”

  “Coco, you are so totally uncool.”

  “It’s all right,” said Ginette. “I’ll talk to him.” Her hand lingered on Marcel’s arm momentarily as she passed in front of him, then she turned and followed her husband outside.

  Standing before the flames from the yellow birch log, Gode drained his gin and turned to his friends.

  “It’s always the same, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s the history of Quebec. It always comes down to same goddamned question: Go to the United States, or stay here … ?”

  Coco pulled a small Ziploc bag from his coat pocket and stuck a short straw up his hairy nostril. He took a deep snort directly from the bag. The flesh on his face underwent a series of malarial vibrations and palpitations like brief seismic shocks. He filled his lungs and exhaled loudly.

  “Ginette,” he said, “you have to help me convince them …”

  “Why the States? Why are you so keen on them going there?”

  “Because they can’t stay here …”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’ll go badly. I know how it will end: two or three passes with a machine gun. And anyway, you ask too many questions …”

  “It would help if I knew what you were talking about …”

  “They won’t get out of this alive,” Coco predicted in a low voice. “Gigi?”

  “What?”

  “Find some way to get them to go to sleep, okay?”

  “Excuse me? Exactly how am I supposed to do that?”

  “The Lafleurs. If they won’t cross the border, then we have to find some way to get them to go to sleep, and we’ll bring them across ourselves. It’s the only way.”

  “You poor dumb Coco. What do you think I’m going to do, put some kind of drug in their gin? Don’t you think I’m a little old to be playing a spy in some James Bond film?”

  “Gigi?”

  “What now?”

  “I want you to come home.”

  “No, that’s out of the question.”

  “Your place is with your children. Don’t you think you’ve whored around long enough?”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “The mother of my children is not going to stay here and expose herself to a hail of gunfire. It’s not right! It’s going to get too dangerous here, Gigi. Come on …”

  He grabbed her by the arm and she struggled with him, pushed him away.

  “Jesus Christ! If I have to …”

  But his feet went out from under him, once again they flew up into the air, and he fell heavily on his back with a dull thud. The impact of his body on the porch seemed to shake the whole house to its very foundations. He stayed down, an elaborate string of curses issuing from his mouth, his face twisted by spasms, and his eyes blinking against the freezing rain.

  “Ginette, if I have to smash your …”

  “You’re not in any condition to try anything like that.”

  “I can’t get up,” cried the Fat Cop.

  Ginette stood looking down at him.

  “If I stay here, Coco, what can you do about it?”

  “What do you think I’ll do? I’ll go to Parthenais and pocket the hundred and fifty thousand buck reward.”

  He tried to get to his feet, but he was as helpless as a giant cockroach flipped on its back. She could have crushed his skull with a few kicks of her boot.

  Duquet turned and hit the side of the fireplace with the poker as hard as he could. But the fireplace had been there for a hundred years and the stones it was made from were a lot older than that; it would take more than a whack from Marcel Duquet to change what couldn’t be changed.

  “Marcel, calm down …”

  Duquet was still holding the poker, which had a pronounced curve to it. He held it in both hands, like a baseball bat. Ginette watched him, impressed.

  “If he ever lays a hand on you …”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t tell me that son of a bitch found some way to make you feel sorry for him again?”

  “I can see through him pretty easily, Marcel, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “Guys, I don’t know what’s stopping me from …”

  “I told you, I’ll be fine, okay?”

  “Where’d he go?” asked René.

  “He’s on the porch, trying to crawl over to a bench. It’ll take two of you to help me lift him up.”

  “W
hy?”

  “He hurt his back when he fell. If we don’t hurry, we’ll have to break the ice off him in order to talk to him. But once we get him in the car, everything will go much better.”

  “Tell him we have no intention of leaving,” said Jean-Paul.

  “You guys be careful.”

  She began picking up her things and stuffing them into a bag. As she moved toward the door, Jean-Paul followed her with his eyes.

  That woman has had my cock in her mouth, he thought. That creates a bond between us.

  In Marcel’s kitchen there was a large stove, a L’Islet, made in Montmagny, with gas burners and, above them, several compartments for keeping pies warm. A real piece of furniture. Every morning, Gode crumpled up newspapers and put them in the firebox with some kindling and struck a match. He read the headlines as they went up in smoke:

  AUTOPSY REPORT PUTS END TO HORRIFIC RUMOURS

  THE HOUSE WHERE PAUL LAVOIE SUFFERED HIS LAST AGONY

  NEIGHBOURS SUSPICIOUS BUT DID NOTHING

  He found some buckwheat flour in a cupboard and made biscuits the way his father used to in the bush in Villebois, on top of the woodstove. He let a pat of butter melt on the dough, then rolled it up like a cigar. No need for maple syrup.

  Up there, in the North, Gode’s father would tear off a sheet of newspaper and use it to wipe the stove top before making the pancakes, as though the ink on the paper were the only cleanser they needed.

  The basement was divided in half, with a kitchenette and the furnace room on one side and a kind of family room on the other, furnished with a card table, a TV, a sofa, a bar, a pool table, a stereo, which was a Marantz, and a green shag carpet.

  Jean-Paul let out a cry, and René turned just in time to catch a can of Kik Cola that had been tossed across the room at him like a hand grenade. When he opened it, it nearly exploded.

  “How did Coco know we were here?” Gode asked.

  René took a long drink and burped.

  “From Saint-Laurent?”

  “Coco has feelers out everywhere,” Jean-Paul said, going behind the bar. “The question is, what’ll he do with the hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

  The other two laughed.

  “Seriously. You don’t think he’ll turn us in?”

  They looked at each other.

  René was drawing blueprints on a sheet of paper with a large carpenter’s pencil. Off to one side, Gode was fiddling with the radio dial.

  “Why did the Lafleur brothers and Richard Godefroid travel to Texas at the beginning of October?” said the announcer. “Who is the mysterious Pierre? These are some of the questions that were asked yesterday at the coroner’s inquest into the death of Paul Lavoie, and which were raised again this morning at the …”

  They couldn’t get away from themselves. They were everywhere.

  Behind the house was a barn, and beyond that, fields of corn stretched to where the farm ended at a narrow fencerow of trees. Between the barn and the house was a pond. In the summers it was home to tadpoles and bullfrogs and occasionally a pair of wild ducks, blacks or blue-winged teals. Muskrats traced their peaceful Vs across its surface in the evenings. Once, Marcel saw a painted turtle sunning itself on a half-submerged log.

  They started digging between the house and the pond. They worked at night, breaking up the frozen earth with a pickaxe, working like moles in the snow and the mud and the meltwater that ran into the trench. It was back-breaking labour. They dug from sunset to morning, always two at a time, the third resting in the house by the front window, keeping watch.

  As Gode dug in the dark, all kinds of thoughts passed through his head. He thought about a novel he’d read about the Spanish Civil War, in which prisoners were forced to dig their own graves. The epitome of power that one human being can exercise over another is to force him to dig a hole six feet deep before shooting him in the head with a pistol, or cutting him down with a machine gun, or running over him with a truck to save bullets.

  And those prisoners in that Eisenstein film, ¡Que viva Mexico!, who were also made to dig holes in the desert sand, then were buried in them with only their heads exposed, their wild eyes that seemed to jump out of their sockets when they saw the horses being made to gallop toward them. Their skulls exploded like pumpkins.

  Gode didn’t want to dig any more. Perhaps any man who burrows into the earth is creating his own grave? But they kept on, Gode, the Lafleur brothers, kept on digging, as blackened and stained as coal miners, too tired to wash before going to sleep, cleaning off the worst of it in the morning.

  Cardinal returned once, to make fun of them. They looked up to see his bloated, blank face hovering over the edge of the hole, like a rising moon. One arm in a sling. A broken elbow or something.

  “What are you looking for, guys? Buried treasure?”

  “Worms. For fishing. Can’t you see?”

  “You’d be better digging in the manure pile.”

  “Each to his own,” remarked Jean-Paul.

  Gode stopped digging, slightly out of breath.

  “If you really want to know, we’re building a cottage.”

  “Where? In China?”

  “Exactly. Chairman Mao’s our new trip.”

  “Yesterday I talked to a guy in the Black Liberation Front.”

  “Like I said, we’re all Maoists here.”

  “Well, you can do what you like.”

  “That’s right.”

  The trench they dug was a metre wide, two metres deep, and about six metres long. It ran out from the wall of the house. At the end of it, they enlarged and deepened it to make a room, two metres by three. At the house end, they knocked a hole in the foundation wall with a sledgehammer, then made a floor with cement from the basement between the wall and the furnace.

  Marcel couldn’t take it. He’d been living somewhere else for a week. On one of his visits, René came up and handed him a sheet of paper. He glanced at it and decided to take the afternoon off. According to his calculations, he would have to make at least two trips to the lumberyard.

  They propped up the sides of the excavation along its entire length with wooden beams, to which they nailed two-by-fours and chipboard panels to complete the framing. Then they built a roof and floor in the main room, which ran continuously with water. Finally, they covered their work with some of the dirt they’d dug out of the hole and spread the rest around the yard as best they could. Their well-supported trench was now a tunnel. To get to it, they went into the basement and squeezed behind the furnace, lifted a concrete slab identical to those that formed the base of the furnace. They ran an electric extension cord into the tunnel, camouflaging it carefully, and installed a lighting system and a heater. The tunnel entrance was about thirty by fifty centimetres. They had to slide in feet-first, then shuffle on their backs until they cleared the hole in the foundation wall, where the tunnel proper began. From there, they could crawl on their hands and knees until they reached the subterranean chamber.

  It was December, early afternoon. Outside the air was cold, still, and bright. They had slept, as usual, in sleeping bags on the rug in the common room. They had finished the hiding hole the previous night and planned to use it only in emergencies. A bolt-hole for creatures in desperate straits. Gode made coffee and turned on the radio. Then stopped dead, his empty coffee cup in his hand. He tumbled down the stairs and turned on the TV. It was December 3, 1970. A special report was being broadcast over the airwaves of the CBC.

  “Hey, guys! Come and see this …”

  They spent the entire day in front of the television. They saw a cordon of soldiers in helmets carrying rifles that stretched across the screen and down a street lined with three-storey brick buildings. A bit farther down, the street was blocked by a bus. Army helicopters crisscrossed the sky throughout the area.

  The camera followed a uniformed soldier carrying a rifle over his shoulder, bayonette fixed, courteously escorting a citizen who lived in the quarter to the corner of the
next street. The newscaster explained that the authorities had ordered the evacuation of the entire sector. Armed forces were supervising the combined operations. The cordon of soldiers that kept the curious away stretched along several blocks of houses and disappeared into the distance.

  “Holy fuck! I’ve never seen so many soldiers! I don’t think the Germans had that many when they invaded Russia.”

  “Rue de la Compagnie-de-Jésus. That’s in the north end.”

  The CBC camera kept returning to the façade of an ordinary-looking brick apartment block: main entrance surrounded by a projecting portico surmounted by a rectangular awning. The apartments inside would all open onto a central corridor, and those on the street side had doors that gave onto balconies with cast-iron staircases leading up to them. The balcony of Apartment 1 was over the door of the garage, which had been converted to a kind of sub-basement with access from the inside.

  Since their co-conspirators in Rebellion Cell had respected the rule of autonomy and the strict separation of operations, Gode and the Lafleurs were discovering, at the same time as millions of other television viewers, the hiding place in which John Travers had been kept for two long months. Someone had scrawled the letters FLQ on the windows of the ground-floor apartment with a can of spray paint.

  After a while, they saw a grey Chrysler emerge quickly from the garage, back onto the rue de la Compagnie-de-Jésus, bang one of its fenders against a low concrete wall, come to a stop for a moment, as though suspended on a thread of time, while an escort formed in front of and behind it. Negotiations had taken place. The journalist on the scene was Claude-Jean Devirieux, whose usual impish voice and thin, weasel’s face encased in a huge pair of earphones lent the event an air of pomp and circumstance as he conjectured about the destination of the kidnappers. The word “Cuba” was bandied about.