October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “According to one version, they went to buy arms. Others say it was to make contacts. Set up financing for future operations. Someone even suggested they went to avoid getting mixed up in the kidnappings and to establish an alibi. And do you know what their poor old mother told the coroner? That they had creditors up their asses (she didn’t phrase it like that), and they went to the States to start new lives …”

  “She may have been right about the creditors. Coco had taught them a trick or two. Credit cards, travellers’ cheques. And loans. When you have no intention of paying anything back, being in debt can be a kind of business plan. They’d been maxed out for two years.”

  “Yes, and when their real names were no good any more, Coco got them false identification papers. I know about all that, Madame. But what I’d like to know is why Coco was so keen on sending the guys in the Chevalier Cell to the United States in November 1970.”

  “That …”

  “At least one other person, you see, had urged Gode and the Lafleurs to cross the border that autumn. Bernard Saint-Laurent. The man who’d smuggled them out of Montreal and hid them in a sugar cabin in the woods. Funny little bird. A pure product of the Company of Young Canadians, who worked as a cover for the federal government’s spies in the Quebec community movement. Saint-Laurent, the famous mole who’d been thrown out of a Parti québécois meeting in 1971. Some writers make him part of Colonel Bob Lapierre’s organization. Lapierre was the eminence gris of the Liberal Party …”

  “You’re losing me here.”

  “Too bad. Just when the trap was getting interesting. Do you know what Saint-Laurent did after the October Crisis? He opened a restaurant in Old Montreal and called it Le Chat Huant, which means great horned owl but it’s a word we never use in Quebec. But in Vendée, there’s chouan, which in Quebec is corrupted to chouayen, which we call the Chouan canayen, and which we also use to mean ‘counter-revolutionary.’”

  “Don’t you think you might be pushing the cork in a bit far?”

  “Maybe. But when you don’t have a corkscrew, sometimes pushing the cork in is the only way to open the bottle.”

  “You want to know if Coco knew Saint-Laurent, is that it?”

  “It sounds like we’re talking about French haute couture.”

  “Very funny. But the truth is, I don’t know anything. Not a thing.”

  “Tell me about the boat …”

  “Why? The boat has nothing to do with what you’re interested in.”

  “I can still go fishing. You never know what’s going to bite. If the boat is too small, I’ll throw it back in, promise.”

  “He wanted to make it with his own hands. Sail it around the world … His dream.”

  “Was it really a schooner?”

  “A two-master, yes. With a ferro-concrete hull. A fairly revolutionary technique at the time. He bought some land beside the St. Lawrence in Acadia …”

  “At Île aux Fesses.”

  “That’s what it was called. It had a couple of summer cottages on it, up on stilts. He built the boat in a hangar. Which was just a roof over his floating shack.”

  “Godefroid and the Lafleurs helped him?”

  “They may have. Why?”

  “On October 18, 1970, only a few hours after the body of Paul Lavoie was discovered, the police undertook a large-scale operation code-named Operation Rabbits, in the area of Île aux Fesses: army helicopters, combing the woods, road blocks, searching all the cottages and surrounding fields. Apparently they came up empty-handed.”

  “During the raids connected with the War Measures Act, Coco was arrested. You knew that, didn’t you?

  “Yes. What happened to the boat?”

  “No idea.”

  “And Coco. What did he die of, exactly?”

  “An overdose.”

  “An overdose of what, Madame Corps?”

  “He ended up snorting himself to death.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes, and I was the mother of his children. The water under his beautiful big boat …”

  “Your lover gets his head crushed under a tractor. And your husband dies of an overdose. More and more interesting. I didn’t know about the overdose …”

  “You can’t tell me you find his death suspicious.”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything. Why weren’t you a witness at the trial?”

  “Because I was afraid. Everyone told me I should go into hiding … But when Marcel’s trial came up, I tried anyway. I went to the police in Pathenais to ask them if they wanted to take my statement. They told me I’d made the trip for nothing: they didn’t need a statement from me. Later, when the case went to appellate court, I went to see his lawyer, Maître Brien, and practically begged him to call me as a witness for the defence. I could testify to something important: Marcel had been against killing Lavoie. He’d agreed to hide the guys in order to avoid a bloodbath until he could hand them over safe and sound to Justice …”

  “I guess that’s one way to look at it. So what did Maître Brien have to say?”

  “He took down my phone number. But he never called me back …”

  GODE’S TRIAL,

  SPRING 1971

  MAY WAS A MILD MONTH. In his cell on the fourth floor of the Parthenais Prison, Gode was allowed to see the few rays of spring sunlight filtering in through his iron bars. It was there that he ate and slept, slept and ate.

  When he looked north, he could see De Lorimier Park, people playing baseball, couples walking hand in hand, a church. The Lavigueur Tavern.

  One day, he was told he had a visit from his lawyer.

  At the time of the October Crisis, Maître Brien had acted as the negotiator on behalf of the kidnappers before the authorities. Charges of sedition that had been levied against him had been dropped in February. When he’d been liberated with a caution, the Crown launched an appeal, and a charge of obstructing federal agents still hung over his head. Meanwhile, unable to practise, it was simply as legal counsel that he’d been authorized to see his client.

  In January, several weeks after the departure of the soldiers, the coroner had detained René Lafleur, Jean-Paul Lafleur, Richard Godefroid, and Benoit Desrosiers for criminal responsibility in the death of Paul Lavoie. The basis for the charge was an unsigned confession attributed to Richard Godefroid describing an attempted escape by Lavoie, the serious injuries that had been inflicted on him, and the way in which he and the Lafleur brothers had, the next day, strangled him in cold blood using a silver chain that the victim had worn around his neck. The officers who’d interrogated the witnesses appeared in court to swear, with their hands on the Bible, that the statement had been given voluntarily on the night of the arrest of the three men, but that Godefroid had later refused to sign it.

  The sound of automatic doors being unlocked. Footsteps in the corridor. Brien.

  “What the hell’s all this about a confession, for Christ’s sake?”

  His arrogance was untamed by his time behind bars, his thick hair was still wild and cut short. Upon his release, Maître Brien had gone back to the few comforts of life that remained to him: his motorcycle, illicit substances, and young women. He was his old, cocky self.

  “I don’t know,” Gode replied. “I was expecting to get beaten up but goddamn it, he started talking to me! And while he was talking, the other one went and got me a coffee. Good coffee, too, and hot. I’d just spent three days freezing my ass off in that rat hole. The first thing I knew, I was telling them the story of my life.”

  “Never tell them anything. Never!”

  “They asked me if I had a lawyer. I said yes. That’s how I found out that you were in prison, too.”

  “Yeah, when I interviewed your pal Jean-Paul, they didn’t have to go far to get me. They took me out of my cell and brought me to his. It was convenient.”

  Maître Brien didn’t appear to be in a good mood. He kept pacing back and forth in front of Gode, who watched him as he sat on his cot.


  “I didn’t even sign their damned confession. It was just a story I told them.”

  “You didn’t sign it, but you added corrections to it in your own handwriting! The Crown sees that as a form of admission. Would you kindly tell me what the hell you were thinking?”

  “There were mistakes in it!”

  The lawyer gently massaged his temples with the tips of his fingers.

  “Jesus Christ … They really pulled a fast one on you, my friend. Do you want me to find you a good lawyer?”

  “You’re my lawyer. I’ll defend myself …”

  His look was that of the Musketeer at the Bar.

  “But I’m going to need some books.”

  Jean-Paul had been the first to go to the chopping block in January. For security reasons, a room in the police headquarters building had been converted into a courtroom. Little-known fact, the suspects were therefore detained and tried in the same building, on rue Parthenais. It had its practical side. Jean-Paul, conducting his own defence, completely politicized his trial, which therefore degenerated into a judicial guerrilla war that concluded with his rapid expulsion from the courtroom and a first in the history of Canadian jurisprudence: a defendant conducting his own defence in absentia. “He’s going to need an imagination …” the judge remarked in a memorable aside.

  The public prosecutor could build his case in peace, with the help of an interminable line of cops assigned by the Crown. By mid-March, at the end of a trial tainted by numerous irregularities, Lafleur was found guilty of the murder of Paul Lavoie and sentenced to life imprisonment. The prosecution’s summation of the case lasted ten minutes.

  From their appearance before the coroner at the beginning of the year, the FLQers had waged a fierce battle, the burden of which had been insults aimed at the magistrate. By May, the cup had gone to René, who had scored twice at the coroner’s inquest. Jean-Paul and Gode shared second place with one goal each, but Gode won on points because of the way he’d taken advantage of current events to score his goal: when he advised Coroner Bourdages to “eat a bucket of shit,” only the most awake among the journalists noted that his words were a light paraphrase of the famous apostrophe that the prime minister of Canada had delivered to the unemployed workers in Rouyn-Noranda.

  At the beginning of his trial, in the spring, Richard Godefroid shattered his comrade’s record with a fully acknowledged grand slam: four contempts-of-court in less than two hours. His hair was shorter, he’d shaved his beard, and he wore an almost presentable moustache. Maître Goulet, Maître Brien’s assistant, acted as second counsel for the defence.

  Gode moved forward and seemed about to step out of the defendant’s box.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Judge Morel demanded of him.

  “I’m just going to sit beside my counsel. Since I am conducting my own defence, I need …”

  “Get back to your place.”

  “Well then, I’ll need a table to write on.”

  “Permission refused.”

  “But how am I supposed to take notes?”

  “You can write on your knee.”

  “Maybe when they’re as old as yours are, Judge, they’ll make a good writing table, but I’m not there yet. Talk about a goddamned fair trial, for —”

  “Sir, what you have just said is called contempt of court. And I am warning you that I have no intention of tolerating the slightest attempt on your part to turn this court into a personal stage or a public arena. Enough legal badgering, do you understand me?”

  “Ten out of ten, Your Honour. We’ll stay well within the letter of the law …”

  Gode hadn’t been idle in his cell. He’d amassed an impressive stack of paper covered with his grade-school handwriting, with its deep, rounded Os in lead pencil. He read aloud his request that the trial declare its jurisdiction invalid in this case because it was unconstitutional. He traced his request back to the battle between Wolfe and Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, to 1867 and the Constitution imposed by the railway barons, passing en route through the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act of 1774, the American War of Independence, the Constitution Act of 1791, the 1837 Rebellion, and the 1840 Act of Union, concluding his argument with the illegality of the said Court of the Queen’s Bench since its legitimacy was based on Articles 99 to 101 of the British North America Act, which had been illegally imposed on Quebec by a foreign power following an armed conflict.

  The judge waited for an opportunity to interrupt him. When Gode seemed about to bring the dispute over the borders of Labrador into play, he jumped in.

  “You express yourself with an astonishing facility, sir, but you have a tendency to drift into side issues. To the point, if you please!”

  “And you are an old whore representing a repressive power established by force of arms. I am the one who’s been wronged here, and I’m fighting to liberate my country from those holding its people captive.”

  “You are in contempt of court. Please take note of that, clerk.”

  Gode went on to talk about justice, a dubious term in a province that had the highest unemployment rate in the country, whose French-Canadian citizens trailed behind all others in education and led all others in heart disease and infant malnutrition. He switched to the Gaspésie, where fishermen were exploited from father to son by a pack of inverted Robin Hoods who stole from the poor and gave to the rich.

  “You digress, you digress …”

  “It’s better to be off topic than to be off my rocker, like the Fathers of Confederation.”

  “Your request is denied, sir.”

  “For fuck’s sake!”

  “Strike three!” cried the judge, waving his gavel in the air. “Clerk …”

  But Gode returned to his attack during the jury selection process. This time, his request for annulment was based on the notion that said process violated his right to be tried by a jury of his peers, a right guaranteed by the Magna Carta, which had been signed by King John at Runnymede in 1215, and ratified by his successors, up to and including Queen Elizabeth II. Far from being his peers, any jury in Quebec would be selected from among a small group of privileged citizens representing only 20 percent of Quebec society, because women (50 percent of the population) and male small-landowners (30 percent) were excluded from jury duty, which meant, in effect, that his case would be heard by a jury constituting only businessmen. Furthermore, according to the Canadian Bill of Human Rights, it was discriminatory to establish distinctions among citizens based on race or financial status, which is exactly what the Quebec Jury Law did. To bolster his argument, Gode cited the case of Drybones vs. Curouk and Article 538 of the Criminal Code, adding for good measure the commentary of Judge Lagarde.

  Judge Morel listened with his mouth hanging open.

  “Hmm. I congratulate you on the quality of your presentation, but I find no cause for objection under the terms of Article 538. Request denied.”

  “Thank you, future Senator Lemor.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you’re doing your job.”

  “And what name did you call me?”

  “Lemor. It’s an anagram of your name.”

  “I don’t quite see why you would place yourself in contempt of court for … for that.”

  “No big deal, I was just helping you out. What I wanted to say was: Fuck you!”

  “Clerk, did you get that?”

  Chin in hand, Gode’s face expressed astonishment as he watched the long line of witnesses called to the bar. A significant number of them came from the ranks of the Mounted Police, most of them young men in their early thirties. Others were from the Montreal Police and the Quebec Provincial Police. Apart from the pathologist, whose questioning was purely pro forma and who gave the curious impression of having been caught in a wind storm, the witnesses were all police officers. Standing at the bar, masters of all they surveyed, they identified one court exhibit after another: the two modified M1 rifles (barrels shortened
to five inches, sawn off, and fitted with sight extensions, for a total length of between twenty-two and thirty-two inches, as described in the doleful voice of the ballistics expert); cartridge clips, with a total capacity of thirty bullets each; cartridges, brand name Norma, soft-point lead tips, in one of the guns; in the other, Hirtenberger bullets with coated tips; two pairs of handcuffs purchased at an army surplus store; bills for same; a bill for the purchase of a military-type folding shovel; two rolls of tape; a chain of the type used for dogs’ leashes; wigs; one khaki ski mask with holes for the eyes; one plastic false nose and eyeglasses; raincoats, brand names Wellington and London Fog; a rifle, Winchester Model 840; a 12-gauge sawn-off shotgun; cartridges for same, brand name Imperial, filled with No. 5 lead pellets; one sweater, stained with blood, that belonged to Jean-Paul; one blanket belonging to Mrs. Lafleur.

  Then came photographs of items the experts had fingerprinted during the investigation and did not appear in court: a jar of jam; a jar of mustard; another of mayonnaise; a bag of sliced bread; a cardboard chicken box from Baby Barbecue.

  Scraps of paper and fragments of communications found at the scene, with their truncated messages forming indecipherable puzzles as far as the public was concerned: Lima. Ditch. Cell. Rebel. Communiqué 1. No concessions. Ten-hour limit.

  And typewriters. The old Underwood. The Remington with the smashed keyboard.

  “State your name, age, and profession.”

  “Rénald Massicotte, forty-two. I deliver chicken for Baby Barbecue.”

  “Would you please tell the court, Mr. Massicotte, what you were doing on October 10, last fall, between the hours of eleven-thirty and one o’clock in the afternoon?”

  “Sure. I was delivering chicken. Why?”

  “What kind of chicken?”

  “Club sandwiches … Three club sandwiches.”

  “That was all?”

  “No. There were also six Pepsis in the order.”

  “Tell us a bit about Baby Barbecue, Mr. Massicotte.”

  “It’s the biggest.”

  “The biggest what?”

  “The biggest chicken outlet on the South Shore. On a weekend a good delivery person can make maybe fifty deliveries. A good ten, fifteen bucks in tips, maybe even twenty. On weekdays it’s almost as good. Maybe thirty deliveries.”