October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  A nurse came in the door without warning. She was a kind of sympathetic shrew. If she would rather have been down in the street soliciting motorists with union slogans, she hid it well.

  Samuel let go of the patient’s hand and, once again, felt silly.

  Chevalier murmured his own version of a song by Charlebois: “If I had the essential services of an angel / I would go to Quebec …”

  “He’s going to have to get hisself some rest …” the nurse said as she arranged the pillows behind Chevalier’s back. She spoke with a strong English accent.

  “Himself,” Nihilo corrected under his breath.

  “We can go on talking,” the sick man said, arching his back under the nurse’s hands. “Georgina’s as silent as the tomb,” he added, grimacing.

  “And he runs on like a leaky facet,” the nurse shot back.

  “You mean faucet.”

  “I promised Georgina I wouldn’t cross the picket line when I leave here … I think I’ll be leaving by another exit, though, don’t you, Georgina?”

  “Would you please stop talking …”

  The nurse began refilling the intravenous bag that was dripping solution into Chevalier’s arm.

  “So what do you think, was there a kind of pact of silence?” Samuel asked Chevalier, now suddenly eager to end the conversation. “They were covering for a comrade … ?”

  “They could well have been. But we still don’t know the answer to the most interesting question: Who was Pierre Chevrier working for?”

  “You should read the nice book that your friend brung you,” said Georgina.

  “I would, nurse, but with all these drugs you pump into me, I’d be lucky to finish a single sentence … When I think that I promised myself I’d read Remembrance of Things Past again before I died: For a long time I used to squeeze my head early, as the constipated man said. He-he-he.”

  Chevalier regarded Samuel from the cottony depths of a strong dose of morphine.

  “Don’t forget … the four Ps.”

  “Paper-pasta-potatoes-pain,” the nurse recited.

  Sam smiled, his chest tightening.

  “Take this sheet of paper,” Chevalier said. “Take it …”

  He took it. Chevalier was a voice, a whisper.

  Nurse Georgina helped Branlequeue lie back. She had the same physique as Chevalier’s wife. And, to ease his final moments, an English accent to rub it in.

  After passing Mont-Laurier, Sam Nihilo’s Mazda or Colt or Corolla was surrounded by the archaic chain of the oldest mountains on Earth. Two weeks before, they’d given him a magical display of colour. But now all the leaves had fallen.

  INQUEST

  AS SOON AS I GOT to Montreal I headed straight to the Fameux, no doubt for sentimental reasons. Then I spent the night in a small, European-style hotel a few steps from there, bathroom down the hall, window overlooking Place Gérald-Godin. The Fameux was a good observation post during Indian summer, at the heart of a satisfying concentration of cool young couples, artistic mothers yoked to baby strollers, French passing through, French entrenched, odd characters, self-caricatures, talents of all genres, from builders of doomed bridges to punctilious, semi-planetary superstars.

  I was sitting near the window, in the same booth I was in when Marie-Québec had appeared to me the winter before. The restaurant was straight out of Michel Tremblay: forty-something waitresses who called you “honey” and a faunal mixture of cultural nobodies, young bums and bummettes from good families, clones of Shirley Théroux straight from the taxidermist’s, and Madame Balcon rushing from the pawnshop to the Dollarama.

  Justin Francœur, formerly of the FLQ’s Rebellion Cell, had just got up, shaken my hand, and left the restaurant, leaving behind a meniscus of pale coffee at the bottom of his cup on its white ceramic saucer. I didn’t know what to make of him. He’d been quick to do his revolutionary mea culpa after the October Discomfort, publicly calling his former accomplices “manipulative assholes.” And he’d included himself in the phrase. Somewhere between Cuba and Paris he’d been converted to Maoism. Then he’d seen his former comrade-in-arms and the mother of his children, Élise, take the populist path brightly illuminated by the burning bras of feminism.

  During our talk, Francœur had constantly oscillated between a desire to exchange confidences between two troubled souls, and episodes of name-calling and cautious introversion. I could accept that he’d found listening devices in his telephone after his return from exile. But what to make of the three attempts on his life in Paris? Put them in a little file labelled Paranoia or in a drawer marked Megalomania? Did he really expect me to believe that professionals had messed up three times in their mission to liquidate this charming, bespectacled intellectual? From what I knew, the secret service of any country would consider Francœur a liability.

  When I’d mentioned James Engineering, he shot back spontaneously:

  “You mean the company in Houston that sold arms and was a front for the CIA?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that James Engineering.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know anything about it … But one thing I never understood was why the money that was seized in Saint-Colomban, the money we got from the university holdup, was later returned to us.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t say any more. But you know, the Travers abduction was really a kind of super publicity stunt, in the end.”

  “A publicity stunt? Are you kidding me?”

  “That’s how I see it. They left the financing to the guys on the South Shore. The gang of Jean-Paul’s represented a new direction … paramilitary, I’d say. If you’re going to go there, I suggest you to make copies of everything and put them in a safe place, because your nosing around could start a fire.”

  I looked at him with interest.

  “Really?”

  “Really. Let me tell you a story. While we were hiding Travers, in the north end of the city, something bizarre happened. One afternoon, I went out to catch the bus and I ran into my brother at the corner of the street, quite by accident. I thought he was in France. I asked him what he was doing there, and he sort of shrugged off the question. We went for a beer in a kind of strip bar called the Wick. I still remember the name. At one point, I got up to take a piss, and when I came back I was feeling kind of woozy. Years later, I found out he was working for the French secret service. Goddamnit, he’d put something in my beer …”

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re making fun of me?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Francœur finished his coffee. Shortly after that, he left the restaurant.

  *

  Nihilo spent the afternoon a few streets west, in the National Archives’ microfiche collection, browsing through the periodical section. After a few hours of putting up with the white noise from the antique photocopy-scanners rescued from the scrap heap, he read a story about rue Collins published the morning of the discovery of the hiding place of the assassins of Paul Lavoie, on October 19, 1970. One detail in the piece leapt to his attention.

  According to the first statements given to journalists, the bungalow next to the terrorists’ hideout had also been occupied by individuals known to the police. Neighbourhood witnesses said the apartment had been vacated a month previously, but a few hours before the macabre discovery of Lavoie’s body a half-mile away, neighbours had seen a familiar car parked in front of the house and a man loading things into it, then driving off.

  This story was repeated in most of the papers, sometimes in the form of a CP wire-service report. In La Petite Vie, an abundantly illustrated popular daily that never backed away from wild speculation, they even put a name to the leasee of the neighbouring house: Lancelot.

  Strangely enough, in the editions of the next few days, the story of this second house disappeared, pfft!, as though it had evaporated into thin air. It was never mentioned again.

  There was nothing next to the two lo
ts on the southeast side of the street but a vacant lot, and so this neighbouring house at 150 rue Collins was obviously the one for which the famous search warrant had been issued, where police officers had searched not twenty feet from where Lavoie’s kidnappers were hiding. It made him wonder if the police had found someone on the premises after all, and if so, whom?

  Samuel had read up to November 1970, following the trail of Pierre Chevrier, known as le Chevreuil, in accounts of the coroner’s inquest. As the afternoon wore on, he lost the trail and was about to give up when, on November 24, he found this succinct and unsigned item in the Montréal-Matin:

  FLQ MEMBER HANGS SELF IN LONDON

  If the Standard-Tribune of London can be believed, a young French-Canadian, Luc Goupil, described as a sympathizer of the Front de Liberation du Québec (FLQ) hanged himself on the weekend in his cell in Reading Gaol, in England.

  Still according to the article in this London newspaper, this young man of 25 hanged himself from the bars of his cell with the aid of his shirt at the very moment when Scotland Yard was preparing to question him about recent activities of the FLQ, in particular those involving Jean Lancelot, suspected of being one of the key figures responsible for the kidnapping of British diplomat John Travers …

  The name Luc Goupil vaguely rang a bell. Samuel put a quarter in the metal slot of the prehistoric and probably condemned apparatus and made a photocopy of the article, which he slipped into his briefcase. Then he left for his next meeting.

  “The police can make mistakes just like anyone else. But it looks like that never crossed your mind.”

  So, here we are. I had the famous Lancelot seated across from me with a pint of beer. He’d agreed to meet with me at the Quai des Brumes. I wondered who he meant by “your,” and then I remembered that he’d already had a run-in with Chevalier Branlequeue. In his eyes, Chevalier was at best a delirious innocent in the final stages of a terminal case of conspiraciitis. At Chevalier’s death, on Lancelot Standing, his regular program on Radio-Trashcan, the former FLQer badmouthed the former writer without even waiting for the coffin lid to be lowered: “Your poor, flogged horse is dead, and good riddance, sausage meat!” he’d cried at the end of his editorial.

  The man I saw above the foam looked like a sensualist from the Renaissance period, a subtle mixture of fat and refinement. Above the raised eyebrows, the bald pate and grey tonsure were those of a minor civil servant. But the full lips and puffy, reptilian eyes told a different story. There was logic in his rise from impoverished street urchin to grizzled rebel, idealist at seventeen, sybarite at fifty-five. His journey had taken him down blind alleys and right turns, but it had ended up with deputy seats and chauffeured limousines with the fleur-de-lys flying from the hood ornament. If Marie-Québec was ever looking for a fifty-something actor to play Casanova, I made a mental note that, despite the repulsion that the character inspired, I’d recommend Lancelot.

  “I’ve thought about that,” I replied to him.

  When our beers came, I asked him about that neighbouring house. I knew that Lancelot had spent at least part of the summer of 1970 hiding out on rue Collins. His reaction was immediate and categorical:

  “They weren’t FLQ, the people living there. We didn’t know who the hell they were. We didn’t know any of our neighbours.”

  “Okay, let’s agree on that. But when questioned by the police, other neighbours confused the occupants of the second house with photographs they were shown of the suspects from 140. Later, the police noted the error and the trail was dropped …”

  “Sure. Do you have a problem with that?”

  I took a mouthful of beer and glanced over at the bar. A few tavern philosophers were seated there, adherents to the allures of mad doctors like A. A. Painchaud, purveyor of rare books and used cassettes. And a few good musicians as well, unknown, depressed, uncontracted, sometimes all three at the same time. Lancelot was already a member of the local nomenklatura, thanks to his history as an impenitent kidnapper, and he was enjoying his second life as an on-air rebutter (he preferred the neologism to “debater”). His latest scandal had been unleashed when he’d called the Governor General the “Queen’s bum-boy.” It had not only thrust him to the foreground of the news, it had also brought him to the attention of the younger generation of bloggers, Web surfers, and cultists who’d been born after the October Crisis. But here at the Quai des Brumes, no one was paying him the slightest attention. But even if Jean-Paul II had walked into the bar, sat down, and ordered a large Black Label with a shooter of Jack Daniel’s, it would have been accepted as the most natural thing in the world. I took up my questioning:

  “Let’s agree that the police made a mistake. What intrigues me, though, is that at least one element in the story of the neighbouring house, of this supposed false trail, corresponds to reality.”

  Lancelot raised his eyebrows and waited for me to continue. So I continued:

  “The house had been abandoned for a month. Yes, because what happened on rue Collins a month before the third week in October? Richard Godefroid and the Lafleur brothers went on a trip to the United States, that’s what. And the so-called young kids who lived next door vacated the premises at exactly the same time. Simple coincidence?”

  He looked at me. I could see him thinking.

  “Whatever it was, it wasn’t anyone in the cell who rented that house. I never set foot in it. I was in the north end of the city. And let me tell you something, mister mystery lover: you are going to be disappointed. The guys in the Chevalier Cell were under a lot of pressure. Our action had caught them unawares. They improvised a kidnapping and the thing blew up in their faces. That’s the whole story right there.”

  “I was twenty years old then, too, Lancelot. I marched with the ML on the first of May, I participated in an anti-Reagan demo in front of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, and watched Salvadoran exiles try to use a Bic lighter to set fire to the Star-Spangled Banner. The lighter was out of butane and the television cameramen took the time to wait until the flag began to burn. I have one question: how could anyone who was twenty years old decide to kidnap someone?”

  “Have you ever been hit with a billy stick?”

  “No.”

  “There’s your answer. In 1968, in Saint-Jean, mounted police had truncheons that were four feet long, made of hardwood. Two or three hits with that and kidnapping a fucking British diplomat was suddenly a good idea. These days at demonstrations, you get about five cops for every demonstrator. A revolutionary act for these little world-changers would be a billiard ball tossed through a window. In those days they let foreigners come in to sweep the streets, now they take the broom handle and shove it up the ass of political rectitude, and for every individual who complains there’s someone else who takes a rifle and shoots fourteen women without thinking twice about it! Without thinking period! Me, I’m not ashamed of belonging to a generation that wanted to change the world and who almost managed to do it …”

  “You don’t have to talk like I’m a SHIT-FM listener.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot I was on the Island — sorry, I meant the You-land — of Montreal! You’re all a bunch of sheep!”

  “How can I get in touch with François Langlais?”

  “I heard he’s opened an old-folks’ home somewhere out in the Saint-Alphonse-Rodriquez area.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest. He’s a weird guy. You don’t hear a word from him for ages, then all of a sudden he opens up and says something outrageous.”

  “That’s interesting. Other people describe him as intelligent and extremely articulate. So which one is the real Langlais?”

  Lancelot hunched his shoulders like a guy who’s already halfway out the door. Then he gave me his opinion of Justin Francœur:

  “Son of a top-level civil servant, spitting image of his fucking bourgeois father, dipped his ladle into leftist politics like it was a pot of chicken noodle soup. I took him along with us so my lit
tle sister would have someone to play with. Submachine guns gave him a hard-on, not the grateful arms of the working class. And with that, my good friend …”

  He jumped to his feet and put on his six-hundred-dollar suede jacket with a single motion.

  “See you later!”

  “Luc Goupil,” I said, without looking up at him.

  “What?”

  He stopped in mid-stride on his way to the door. He didn’t turn or move an inch.

  “You knew Luc Goupil,” I went on. “When you were that serious seventeen-year-old and throwing Molotov cocktails at the system. You two were arrested at the same time. You were compared to each other. And years later, while you were holding a certain English gentleman hostage in Montreal, he knotted his shirt and succeeded in hanging himself in a British prison, under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Talk about a stroke of luck …”

  Lancelot said nothing. Then he turned and looked at me.

  “I’ve got some advice for you,” he said, “but you already know what it is.”

  “I’d like to hear it anyway. Coming from you …”

  “Stop this. Don’t go there. This is not for you.”

  He made a vague gesture with his hand. Then he made a somewhat nonchalant exit and slipped between my fingers.

  THE BOAT (2)

  COCO CARDINAL DREAMED OF HIS schooner in the area around Miscou Island, in Acadia, while on a belated honeymoon with Ginette Dufour. Now she’d made the sails and he was building the boat on the bank of the Acadia River, on a piece of land he owned on the Île aux Fesses, a dozen or so miles south of Montreal. The Patriot would be a twenty-metre schooner with a ferro-concrete hull. Thirty-five tonnes’ displacement, a draught of eight feet, a teak deck, four twin cabins, two heads, and a wardroom big enough to hold ten people. And the deck would be big enough to hold two lifeboats: one inflatable and one made of fibreglass.

  As well as the sails normally found on a two-master, Coco planned to rig a topsail to the foremast. The method of naval construction he chose — ferro-cement, an armature of steel rods supporting a coating of concrete — was the method of choice for first-time boat builders, and incidentally gave them an appreciation of the amount of work that had gone into building the great pyramids of the Pharaohs. For the amateur boat builder who wanted a craft longer than twenty-five metres, it was the easiest and least costly technique; in other words, the most accessible. And it required no specialized tools.