“Good. And now, describe for us what happened when you arrived at 140 rue Collins, in Saint-Hubert.”
“I parked in front of the house and I didn’t even have time to open the car door when someone came out of the house.”
“What happened then?”
“He came right out to the street to get the order. I stayed in the car and rolled down my window.”
“Does this sort of thing happen often? That a customer comes out to the car like that?”
“No, it’s pretty rare.”
“How rare, Mr. Massicotte?”
“I’d say it happens maybe once every two hundred deliveries. No more than that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Massicotte. Your Honour, I have no more questions.”
Judge Morel turned to Gode, who seemed to have become prey to an erotic reverie in the defendant’s box.
“Does the defence wish to cross-examine the witness?”
As though half-asleep, Gode swiped at a fly in front of his face.
“Nope, future Senator Lemor.”
Since the denial of his last request for a reduced charge, he had hardly opened his yap.
Near the open doors of the courtroom, a uniformed officer lightly nudged a journalist who was standing, arms and legs spread apart, notebook in one hand and morning paper in the other. A bit farther on, a group of young longhairs in bell-bottoms were talking and smoking. Off to one side stood a man with a gentle look, a high, pale forehead as shiny as a dome of ice, and a long, thoughtful face. He seemed to be in his forties. He was wearing a suit and cardigan and a tie. His hands, humbly held up before his chest, clasped the brim of an old-fashioned hat. Captain Leclerc, in civilian clothes, nodded to him from a distance and moved obliquely in his direction, passing close as though surprised to find the man in his path, even though their meeting was no accident. He held out his hand.
“Chevalier. How’s it going?”
“Very well, Captain. And you?”
“A bit overworked these days, but not bad, not bad …”
“I assume you’re working in close collaboration with the Crown in this business, no?”
“We usually do in cases like this. Why do you ask?”
“Well, a trial like this must be expensive. The least the Crown could do, it seems to me, is to not waste its witnesses.”
“Tell me what’s going on inside that head of yours, Chevalier.”
“That chicken delivery boy who was up there this morning, no one asked him if he was able to identify his customer. No one even asked him the question! I was a bit surprised by that …”
“The prosecutor must have asked him that before and already knew the answer … The Crown has the right to prepare its witnesses, as does the defence.”
“Maybe so. But if I were a juror and I was told that a certain event happens only once in every two hundred deliveries, I’d be inclined to think that such an event would have a good chance of leaving some trace, some memory. And I’d be curious as to why …”
The captain narrowed his eyes. A shadow divided his forehead in two like a vertical curtain, and he looked attentively at his interlocutor.
“To make his case, Maître Grosleau only needs to show that the occupants of the house acted in a suspicious manner that day. And the delivery boy must not have been able to identify the customer, otherwise the Crown would have jumped all over it, don’t you think?”
“Maybe, but I do know one thing for sure: on the tenth of October, at noon, the occupants of the bungalow on rue Collins had no hostage inside. They didn’t take action until six hours later. So where was the risk? What difference could it possibly have made if the delivery boy came to the door or if someone went out to meet him at the curb? They were safe, as long as they hadn’t left their machine guns lying about on the dining table or their handcuffs on the kitchen counter. And even then, going out to meet the chicken man in his little red car would only make him think there was something odd about it.”
The captain nodded slowly, as if he were dreaming, surprised and consternated.
“Where are you going with this?”
“I don’t know yet. But there’s something somewhere that doesn’t add up.”
“All I’m doing is investigating a man’s death. I’m not interested in politics.”
“Of course,” said Chevalier, letting his eyes drift around the sixth floor of the vast polygon on rue Parthenais. “It must be handy, having the courtroom right here, with the prison cells and police headquarters all in one building. One-stop shopping, in a way …”
“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, isn’t that what some writer said?”
“Monsieur Chevalier, at the time that Richard Godefroid was working for you during the electoral campaign, he was already involved in criminal activities. My question to you is: Did you know about it?”
Chevalier Branlequeue had told the court, at Maître Grosleau’s request, about his mediation on December 27 in the Valley of the Patriots, the night Gode gave himself up. He clearly saw the trap that was being laid for him, more from malice than anything else, by the Crown prosecutor.
“All I can say is that I had the greatest respect for his idealism. I still do. But at Saint-Marc, I was acting without idealism. I was simply following the instructions I’d been given.”
“Given to you by whom, exactly?”
“I never found out who I was representing. Perhaps that was a professional lapse. Or perhaps it’s the story of my life.”
“Do you sympathize with the accused?”
“As I just said, I respect his ideals. And he has discovered that his ideals have been betrayed. It was the twisted electoral tricks of the political machine that drove him from idealism to action. When the group began to radicalize, last summer, he tried to keep his distance from it, up to a certain point. But he found what went on around him too depressing. He’s a sensitive person. He wanted reality to allow him to dream. He’s neither a weak innocent nor a dangerous idealist …”
“When we need a psychological evaluation, we’ll let you know.”
“You asked me a question, I tried to reply. Richard Godefroid gave democracy a chance, but it was the underworld that took him.”
“Watch your language, sir …”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing, Maître Grosleau.”
“Good.” The prosecutor smiled. “No more questions, Your Honour.”
Judge Morel must have wanted a cup of coffee.
“Ahem. Maître Gode … Excuse me, I mean Mr. Godefroid. Have you prepared a cross-examination for this witness?”
Over the previous few days, Gode had listened to exactly 190 witnesses, almost all of them police officers, without opening his mouth once except to yawn. He had been the caboose on the train and the Crown prosecutor was the locomotive, the police were the cars, and the pieces of evidence were the cargo. And so now, in response to this purely routine question from the judge, he was seen to gravely nod his head, place both his hands on the railing of the defendant’s box, get slowly to his feet, and turn even more slowly toward the witness box. Silence reigned in the courtroom.
“Yeah, Seigneur. I am going to do exactly that … cross-examine the witness.”
“He’s all yours.”
Now, thought Branlequeue, he’s going to get even with me for what I said about his poems.
Gode would have very much liked to be able to step toward his former professor and walk around him, hands behind his back, giving him an occasional sharp look, like an uppercut, like they do in the movies, but the combination of roles did not extend to allowing him to leave the defendant’s stand.
“Do you know anything, Monsieur Chevalier, about the unsigned ‘confession’ that has been attributed to me?”
“I’ve read excerpts in the newspapers.”
“And what did you think about them?”
“Ask a specific question,” intervened the judge.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, back off
…” Godefroid retorted.
Chevalier looked at the judge, who shrugged his shoulders.
“I can give you my opinion as an editor,” he said. “It’s total fiction.”
The judge silenced the brouhaha that arose from the public benches with a bunching of his Jupiterian eyebrows.
“I said, confine yourself to precise questions. And that goes for replies, too!”
“Monsieur Chevalier,” Gode began again, “do you recall the words that were exchanged on the morning of December 28 in the living room of the house in Saint-Marc?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember a promise you made on that occasion?”
“Yes.”
Gode turned his back.
“I have no further questions, Your Honour.”
After ten days and nearly two hundred witnesses, the Crown had constructed a proof that was now closing in around Gode. He found himself encased in a solid version of the story that had a worldly vision. When it was his turn to counter the steamroller, he called a single witness. The name Marie-France Bellechasse was met by a perplexed and interrogative silence.
She had already refused to be a witness at the coroner’s inquest, arguing that she could not, neither in her soul nor in her conscience, participate in a judiciary process that persisted, against all human reason, in denying a woman the fundamental right to judge her peers, no matter their sex, as a member of a legally constituted jury. The coroner had admired the logic of her reasoning before sticking her with a charge of contempt of court and sentencing her to a month in prison.
When she advanced toward the witness stand, a tall, well-built blonde, her long hair in curls, dressed in light blue jeans and a dark green worker’s shirt, unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, over a green sweater, and workboots, the whole outfit fitting her perfectly, even graciously, a respectful murmur rippled through the room.
Gode turned his eyes toward the spectators as if to say, Okay, agreed, a man has been killed. But are you seeing the same thing I see? And suddenly it was as if he had sung, In the month of May the girls are so pretty …
“Your witness, sir.”
Gode turned toward the magistrate.
“If you say so, Your Honour.”
Then he clung to the railing with both hands and appeared to be concentrating.
“What do you do for a living, Mademoiselle Bellechasse?”
“I study law. At the University of Montreal.”
She spoke with aplomb, her voice resting somewhere between vulgarity and a somewhat softened melodiousness.
“And I live with my parents, but I think you already know that …”
Embarrassed laughter from the public. Gode resumed his questioning.
“And you want to be, what, a lawyer?”
“Yes, a lawyer.”
“And in the meantime, you have been accused of being involved in the events of October, and I am acting as a lawyer. Life is strange, sometimes. So tell me, what do you make of our great legal system?”
“It’s short on women.”
“I’ll say. Especially in prison …”
“Monsieur Godefroid,” the judge drawled, “you’re getting nowhere with these questions.”
“Right. Okay. So, what were you doing on the day of Paul Lavoie’s death, October seventeenth, at around six o’clock in the evening?”
“Making spaghetti.”
“Ah. The kind that has … meatballs, an onion, some vine-ripened tomatoes, a bit of garlic …”
“And a glass of white wine and a sprig of thyme. Yes, that kind.”
“I see. And … if you don’t mind my asking, what is it that gives it its delicate taste?”
“For seasoning, I use coarse salt and add a teaspoon of mild paprika, and some cayenne pepper, just a tiny bit on the tip of a knife.”
“For spaghetti and meatballs?” asked the judge.
“Yes, Your Honour. The secret with any spaghetti bolognese, which is a meat sauce, is to mix in different meats. For mine I use ground beef with a bit of veal chop, some lamb or mutton shoulder, and of course some pork loin.”
“That sounds absolutely delicious. Thank you. My wife makes it with just ground beef, carrots, celery, garlic, and a large white onion. And a bay leaf. Then she adds a spoonful of sugar to cut the acidity.”
“When her garlic is nice and golden and the onion is soft, tell her to deglaze the pan with some white wine. Makes all the difference.”
“I will. You may proceed.”
By now, not only was Gode dizzy with desire, but his stomach was rumbling like the inside of an empty cathedral.
“In prison,” he said, “we have something else other than bolognese on the menu, but it isn’t spaghetti … Anyway, let’s go back to the night of the seventeenth. It was a Saturday. Six o’clock. You were making spaghetti. Was Jean-Paul Lafleur there?”
“Yes.”
“We’re talking about apartment six, in the building at 3730 Queen-Mary Road, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Who else was there?”
“My friend Nicole Toutant and my brother Guy. We split the rent.”
“How long had Jean-Paul Lafleur been there?”
“Since the night before.”
“And he spent the whole of the seventeenth in the apartment?”
“Yes.”
“So, you have just stated that Jean-Paul Lafleur did not move from the apartment on Queen-Mary Road the entire day of the seventeenth, is that correct?”
“I was there the whole day, and he was there the whole time. Yes.”
Gode was no longer looking at Marie-France. He was facing the twelve businessmen who, the next day, after a good night’s sleep and two hours of deliberation, would get up and declare him guilty of premeditated murder. Gode looked calmly at the twelve good consciences that hung on the faces of these salesmen.
“I’ll stop there,” he said. “I’ve proven what I had to prove.”
In his summation, Maître Grosleau reminded the jury that by the terms of Article 21 of the Criminal Code, they were not obliged to identify the precise way in which the person had perpetrated the fatal act as such. But he did not completely succeed in dissipating the unfortunate impression that the judicial apparatus had already sent Jean-Paul Lafleur, a troublemaker nonetheless provided with a perfectly valid alibi, to prison for the next twenty-five years.
The defence strategy employed by Richard Godefroid, which at first glance seemed incomprehensible, ended up making the jury feel uneasy. First he had reminded Chevalier of his promise to “speak on our behalf every time you get a chance, be our voice ,” and he had then established the innocence of his close friend, Jean-Paul Lafleur. After that, his own trial seemed to have been of absolutely no interest to him.
When it was time for him to deliver his plea, Gode remained seated, his mouth sewn shut. Later, he modified his indifference to the point of applauding when his sentence was handed down: life imprisonment.
THE GHOST OF KAGANOMA
SAM OPENED HIS EYES. FOR a brief moment he wondered where he was. But yes. He was upstairs in the big house shaped like the hull of a Spanish galleon, full of hidden recesses and obscure creakings, and engulfed in darkness at the heart of a forest at four o’clock in the morning. He could hear Marie-Québec breathing beside him. After a moment, he realized that she, too, was lying awake with her eyes wide open.
“You’re not asleep?”
“No.” A pause. “I heard something downstairs …”
Samuel listened.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Someone’s there, down there, downstairs …”
“Hmm.”
She had gone from hearing “something” to hearing “someone,” and the change was not lost on Nihilo.
The classic scenario left him with no choice. The shotgun was in the next room, where he had set up his office. It was leaning against the wall at the foot of the wardrobe, first door on the right. Moving on tiptoe
, he grabbed two cartridges from the box on the table and slipped them into the double barrel. Pellets big enough for Canada geese. He made no sound except for the slight click when he closed the weapon. He crept along the hall as silent as a wolf and as naked as Adam.
And then he heard it, too.
Something had moved in the kitchen.
Motionless in the shadow of the staircase, the shotgun cocked and held in both hands, he searched the silence. Through the window, the faintest hint of dawn.
Slowly he made his way to the bottom of the stairs, holding his breath, and with a single motion pivoted and pointed the rifle in front of him.
And saw the cat, who without paying him the slightest attention, was batting at a masked shrew with its paw. The shrew slid along the tiled floor like a curling stone. The cat’s tail swept dreamily over the squares in the silent dawn.
Noune then flipped its prey straight up into the air and seemed to juggle with it for a couple of dance steps. When the shrew fell to the floor, she grabbed it with her teeth and dropped it at the centre of the ring for the beginning of the next round.
Samuel leaned the shotgun against the wall and went to the woodbox. He picked out a log and tightened his grip on it as he returned to the kitchen. One knee on the floor, one swift blow, and the masked shrew, at four centimetres the smallest mammal in that part of the continent except for the microscopic pygmy shrew, was put out of its misery.
The cat examined the pulpy mass with a mournful eye, reached out a paw, nudged at the lifeless object, then lost all interest in the game.
“What were you doing?”
“I was helping Noune kill a mouse. That was the noise you heard.”
Marie-Québec made no reply.
“You don’t look all that convinced.”
Still she said nothing.
They tried to go back to sleep, but the day was too far advanced.
This all took place in 1999, the summer in which they allowed themselves to go for several weeks in a row without thinking, moving only to the rhythm of the wavelets of blue silence on their lovers’ bodies. It was the summer of Perfect Days. They had a way of pronouncing those words when evening came that made it clear they had capital letters. Glasses of wine on the pebbled lakeshore. Marie-Québec wrapped in a beach towel adorned with toucans and red macaws. The sun in their faces, setting gloriously into a postcard-purple image of 250 square kilometres of uninhabited forest, still wild, barely touched, dense as sheepskin.
October 1970 Page 20
