October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “So I suppose you’re going duck hunting, are you?” he said to Lancelot.

  “How did you guess?”

  “In the middle of February?”

  “No, rabbits …”

  With the shotgun in his left hand, the officer opened his holster with his right and ordered Lancelot to place both hands flat on the side of the vehicle, keeping them in plain sight, and to spread his feet. His colleague came around waving the sheet of paper.

  “Looks like he might be a journalist or something …”

  With his fingers freezing on the cold van, Lancelot endured the other’s hands on his sides.

  “What does this mean, ‘Golan’?”

  “It’s a plateau, like this one …”

  “A plateau where?”

  “Under your feet. I’m talking about the Mount Royal plateau. Golan Heights is in Syria, but for the past three years the Zionist state has been occupying it illegally.”

  “What the fuck’s he talking about?”

  “I don’t know, but he can explain it down at the station.”

  MOSSAD

  AFTER SPENDING THE NIGHT IN jail, Lancelot weighed his options and called Maître Brien, who hurried down and in no time obtained his release with a caution. Brien assured him he could have been charged with possessing an illegal firearm. They went drinking in Old Montreal to celebrate.

  The next day, the list from the glove compartment landed on the desk of Detective Lieutenant Gilbert Massicotte, head of CATS, who examined it with interest. It took him thirty minutes to connect the word “Golan” with the Israeli consul.

  “Good God, it looks like the bastards were cooking up a kidnapping,” he said to himself.

  It was a good thing he’d tipped off the Montreal Police about Lancelot and his rented Econoline van.

  By the time he could procure a warrant to bring him in for questioning, the cockroach had had time to disappear back into the woodwork. He was already well known to the police; he had a kind of gift for being recognized, and his dossier with the antiterrorist squad was a thick one. Arrested in 1963 for throwing Molotov cocktails, he’d been photographed at many demonstrations since then, and by the winter of 1970 had achieved the status of a wanted revolutionary. The plot against the Israeli consul catapulted him from Robin Hood to Punchinello among the secret police. Surveillance teams were put on his trail, and he was soon reported to be hanging around with several local members of the Mossad, the benchmark in the terrorist profession.

  MARCH

  THAT SPRING IT WAS COCO Cardinal who found them in their bungalow on rue Collins, in Saint-Hubert. Gode and the Lafleurs knew him from their days in the RIN. Jean-Paul had convinced his girlfriend at the time, the beautiful Lou Ballester, to pretend they were married, and they signed the lease as Jean-Paul Hamel, a university professor with no references, and his young wife. The scene: two parallel streets not quite a kilometre in length, dropped as if from the sky into the middle of flat fields peppered with woodlots, fencerows, and overgrown rubbish heaps.

  There was the full range of habitations, from rundown cottages to typical suburban ranch houses, with mobile homes somewhere in the middle. The bungalow Jean-Paul rented bore the street number 140. You entered through a foyer with the living room to the left, the kitchen on the right, and a second door facing northwest, toward the neighbouring house. A short hall led to the bathroom and the two bedrooms. A garage had been added beneath an extension of the roof.

  With help from René and other members of the group, they spent a weekend repainting the place. Then they bought furniture on credit from Woolco. They had no intention of paying for it. For a long time, systematic and perpetual indebtedness had been the principal mode of financing their activities.

  A few hundred metres from them was Savannah Road, and a bit beyond that was the beginning of the airport. It was a military base. The main headquarters, which accommodated the mobile force, was less than a kilometre to the south. The airfield and hangars were visible from the bungalow’s bedrooms.

  While Lou and Jean-Paul whiled away a grey afternoon in March by making love on a mattress on the floor of one of the rooms, jeeps came and went in the distance, like beetles filing across the dirty snow.

  MILAN, SUMMER 1970

  THE VILLAGE HAD BEEN FOUNDED by the Scots, but bore the name of an Italian city. The main street led straight to the church, which stood on one of the Appalachian spurs that undulated all the way south to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Beyond the church, the road passed in front of the school, went through a wooded area and debouched into hilly countryside consisting of fields, most of them lying fallow, and stands of dark woods. At the end of this road was a farmhouse made of wood and covered in cedar shingles. The barn was farther back, its ancient boards turned as brown as animal fur with age. To the west, in clear weather, one could see smoke rising from the mill in East Angus. And to the south, the face of Mount Mégantic seemed both distant and yet near enough to touch, like certain islands.

  In May, birdsong, warm wind in the hair, clusters of trilliums and dog’s-tooth violets in the understorey. Nests. Marie-France had never been so happy, Gode never in such good spirits. As far as the village was concerned, they were a couple of hippies who spent all their time naked, taking drugs, and holding sexual orgies with a bunch of their like-minded friends.

  In fact they spent their afternoons repairing the buildings and mending the fences that Brutal, their lascivious mountain goat, butted down at will, and discussing plots, compost, and couples.

  And the People’s Prison.

  Marie-France had seen the drawings on a sheet of paper left lying around: a rectangle representing the tow truck destined to be buried at the bottom of the field, to be used as a cell.

  René had asked Nicole to sneak a bottle of chloroform home from the hospital where she worked, because even though he’d be put to sleep at the beginning, a man waking up in the trunk of a car could struggle, and that would be a problem.

  Officially, they were raising goats.

  THE PART

  IN APRIL 1970, LITTLE ALBERT, thirty-six years of age, became premier of Quebec. It looked as though a hairdresser followed him everywhere he went. His hair always in a mess, Ti-Poil, as he was called, had been defeated in his own riding and had to content himself with a caucus of only seven members, even though his Indépendantiste Party had received 23 percent of the popular vote. Chevalier Branlequeue, who’d run as an independent indépendantiste in the riding of Taillon, received three thousand votes. Richard Godefroid and the Lafleur brothers, willing to give democracy one last chance, had put up posters and gone door to door and made phone calls for him, turning his electoral committee into a kind of progressive Trojan Horse, a last attempt to legally bring about change. It ended in pure defeat. In Boucher, Paul Lavoie, the unfortunate rival of Vézina for the party leadership, had slipped in like a knife through butter.

  In their little local office that smelled of stale pizza, felt-tipped pens, and cigarette smoke, Gode and Chevalier were the last to stay to watch the large, snowy, black-and-white TV screen showing the election results. They watched Little Albert give his victory speech in a voice whose pathetic rises and falls sounded like the bleatings of a goat.

  “The mob wins again,” Gode said dully.

  “Don’t go there,” Chevalier replied.

  They were drinking Molson’s and savouring the bittersweet taste of catastrophe.

  “Go where?”

  “Hiding your head …”

  “You know damned well what I’m talking about. On the ground, the election workers for the Liberal Party were lent to them by the construction mafia, and they did their campaigning with baseball bats and crowbars! Even the Parti Québécois were obliged to toe the line and align themselves with the mob just to be able to hold meetings. And if any of that had disgusted Bourgault enough to make him pull out of the race, you wouldn’t have needed to run to uphold the honour of the Indépendantiste forces, isn�
�t that true?”

  “Twenty-three percent of the popular vote, Gode … You don’t seem to have grasped the significance of that! Four short years ago the RIN weren’t even in the running. Twenty-three percent in 1970 means 34 percent 4 years from now, 45 percent in 8 years. That means coming to power …”

  “Eight years of baseball bats, that’s too long. You can go on having faith in the system if it turns you on, but in eight years there won’t be a single piece of the country big enough to plant your Kébek flag in. The Holy Trinity will have taken over the rest.”

  “The Holy Trinity?”

  “The Mafia, the Liberal Party, and the Americans. You know what I mean.”

  “You know what, Gode? Working to liberate a country is like pissing on a fire when you’re facing the wind. The best thing you can hope for is that you don’t put out the flames …”

  “Yeah, well, Chevalier, I know what I have to do next.”

  JEAN-CLAUDE

  GOES TO QUEBEC CITY

  (PART II)

  I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU are. Really no idea. I’m telling you this because when I’m alone in my car like this, it never fails: I start going over it all in my mind, the events of that autumn, certain details in particular, they all come flooding back to haunt me, and as soon that happens I take out my little tape recorder and put it up to my lips and try to imagine who you are, you out there somewhere in the future, and this whole story, assuming that it even holds any interest for you, must seem unbelievably complicated. So. We were at Monday, a little before six in the morning, October 1973. Somewhere on Highway 20 between Montreal and Quebec City, about to cross the Richelieu River on, you’ll never guess, the Paul-Lavoie Bridge. Rebaptized two years before. An ordinary piece of highway construction; cement is a safe way to preserve a person’s memory. I’d say that that’s the main difference between politics and organized crime: the Mafia buries its victims in cement, the government, only the names of its victims. And now, I need to explain a few small things to you. Again. What I would like … Wait a minute. What I would most like you to understand is why Little Albert, after only two years in office, is going to call an unexpected election, perhaps this autumn, and to campaign on the backs of the separatists, instead of against the mob. And why he is going to win.

  In the run for the party leadership, you will recall, poor little Paul Lavoie was lambasted by the electoral machine run by Colonel Lapierre, Uncle Bob, who grabbed Albert Vézina by the seat of his pants and set him down on the throne. In the meantime, Lavoie, flat as a pancake, was completely washed up. His coffers were empty. He owed $175,000. And Vézina had no reason to wait until he’d returned to financial health before calling an election. The election took place in April 1970. Lavoie could have bowed out. Everyone would have understood. But he was a determined little scrapper, and he decided to stick it out and carry on the fight within the party. Oh, he’d rally around the newly elected chief, no doubt about that. He’d hasten to assure him publicly of his loyalty. He’d swear on a stack of Bibles that he would place his experience at the disposal of the victor: Dear Albert, let me be your right arm … Ah-ha! Lavoie was in no hurry, and he was no fool. He had three-quarters of the delegates on his side and he wasn’t yet fifty years old. Vézina was the outsider, tangled up in his diplomas, dressed to the nines. And Lavoie was still green enough that it was worth his while to wait to see if the tree was going to break or bend. Bend over, Albert …

  Lavoie ran again in his old riding, but now he knew what he had to do to win it. He had to get rid of any weak-kneed supporters, no more choirboys in his organization, no sir. The leadership struggle had taught him a thing or two, or rather had confirmed in capital letters what he’d always known: in order to hold on to your sword in politics, you need to be willing to have dirty hands. He was a man who had always had debts, the hazardous combination of a spendthrift temperament and the provider of a growing family. He loved ostentatious watches, gold or silver chains, those little signs of material comfort that he could unobtrusively wear in public. He had the mentality of the parvenu, if you like, but in the 1960s all of Quebec was like that. After having passed his bar exams, Lavoie wanted to see some action, but his skill with a pen diverted him from his high ambition and landed him at the Devoir. Where, falling victim to a kind of economic civil war, he was condemned to grab any passing devil by the tail. Financially speaking, being a correspondent with the Devoir placed you somewhere between a Biafran native and a minor colonial civil servant.

  Parachuted into the position of parliamentary correspondent in the Old Capital, our friend discovered he had a certain genius for augmenting his income. On one hand, he denounced the weakest of the scandalistas (the “assholierthanthous,” as he famously neologized) that rose from the practice of power, and he learned how to operate this marvellous machine for making money that is to any politician what mud is to a pig. He perfected the art of situating himself as a go-between between the politicians with whom he rubbed shoulders on a daily basis in the corridors of the Assembly and around the high tables on the Grande-Allée, and the businessmen of his acquaintance. Understand me well: the commissions he received for his good offices, he needed them! Suits to buy, mouths to feed, the whole nine yards. Everyone knew the Liberal Party existed only to stay in power and allow the greatest possible number of friends of the regime to fill their pockets and their bellies up to their eyeballs. So when people gave him the sign, their boy Lavoie didn’t hesitate for a second. Renounced his quasi Maurrasian nationalism, gave up his Basque beret and leapt on the train of the Quiet Revolution. The train of progress and big money, of elevated ideas and under-the-table payoffs. And I’m going to be very clear on one point: if you think Albert Vézina, with his first-class airs, was, from this point of view, more proper (or cleaner) than his future rival for the party leadership, you’re sticking your finger so far into your eye you’ll be able to scratch between your shoulder blades. When you join the Liberal Party, you become what the Liberal Party tells you to become, and when the last trumpet hath sounded, money hath no smell, not even if it comes from a baron of tainted meat who wants to increase your chances for the leadership.

  Speaking of the daily paper on the rue Saint-Sacrifice, I’d like to read you something that was in it this morning. Yes, you who are sleeping in the future, who perhaps are driving down this very Highway 20 and crossing the Paul-Lavoie Bridge to overlook, in its happily amnesiac way, the Richelieu River and its Chemin des Patriotes. Perhaps you are on your way, on this marvellous October day, the sky pure and cold, to hunt woodcocks in the farm woods around Saint-Glinglin. There, I’ve slowed down, I’m pulling onto the service lane, I’ve put on my four-ways for extra safety, and now I’m getting my good old Devoir from my briefcase. The guy who signed the article is a first-class shit-shoveller and we love him for it — except when the shit’s on the tips of our own shoes from stepping in it, obviously. And if, way off in the future, you’ve never heard of the second Lavoie Affair, well, open your barn doors wide, that’s my friendly advice to you.

  RCMP REPORTS INCRIMINATE PAUL LAVOIE

  That’s the title of one of them. Now, I’m going to read you an excerpt from the police report that is quoted extensively in all four articles, no less, that have to do with this affair: this one appeared under the byline of the (admittedly) courageous Louis-Georges Laflèche:

  On April 2, 1970, we were informed that a meeting was going to take place that day at 6 o’clock in the evening in the apartment of Jean-Claude Marcel, secretary to Paul Lavoie, between Lavoie and Giuseppe Scarpino F.P.S. 354448 and Luigi Temperio F.P.S. 348015. A certain Louis-Gilles Gauthier would also be present at this meeting.

  According to information received, the apartment was situated in a building on boulevard Saint-Joseph East, in Montreal. Apartment number 4.

  A check was made of the building at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East, and no name appeared on the list of apartments for number 4. It was later established that the apartment in questi
on was situated on the top floor of the building.

  That same day, at 5:40 p.m., in the presence of Corporal Maurice Vachon, regimental number 3347, we observed a v.a. 1970 Oldsmobile, colour grey, Quebec licence plate 5P-2024, registered under the name of Paul Lavoie, park across the boulevard from 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East, in Montreal. The v.a. was driven by an unidentified man. Mr. Lavoie got out and went inside the building situated at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East.

  At 6:00 p.m. we observed Louis-Gilles Gauthier enter the building at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East. Photographs of the subject were taken.

  At 6:10 p.m., we observed a v.a. Cadillac, colour dark blue, roof black vinyl, Quebec licence plate 2M-9898, registered in the name of Giuseppe Scarpino. The latter, accompanied by Luigi Temperio, interred [sic] the building situated at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East. Photos of the subjects were taken.

  At 6:50 p.m., we observed Paul Lavoie leaving the building at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East. He was alone. He got into the Oldsmobile and drove away.

  Surveillance was terminated at 7:00 p.m.

  Factual note: It has been verified that a telephone was installed in apartment number 4 on 30-03-70 and was terminated on 30-04-70.

  That’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re in power and you try to stick bats in the spokes of investigators of good faith (there are some). Somewhere in town, a journalist wakes up with an anonymous manilla envelope shoved through his mail slot. And now I’m going to start the car and merge with the traffic, otherwise I might draw attention to myself. Standing between the ditch and my car, both feet on the shoulder, one door open like the door of a shitter as if I were taking a piss in the open air, it might look like a normal thing, but it’s not normal for me. I mean, for me to whip it out on the side of the road? My wife would say it lacks class. There, I’m back on the highway, left signal light flashing, exiting the service lane — get it? La voie de service?