October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  Justin’s eyelids became heavier and heavier. He saw a human form approach his side of the car, and when he lowered the window a travelling salesman leaned in toward him. It’s the Sandman, Justin thought, and when he looked down at the salesman’s hand, it was held out toward him with nothing in it but a handful of golden sand, a small placard stuck in the middle that read MADE IN JAPAN. Then the roar of a Harley broke the silence that had descended around the stationary Chevrolet, and the two men woke with a start.

  Shortly after that, Maître Brien, perched on his motorcycle, made his entrance onto the panoramic parking spot. No helmet. Long hair kept down by a scarf knotted Apache style around his head, wearing a deerskin vest, fringes flying in the wind, and with a beautiful hippie chick riding behind him.

  “Wait for me here,” said Jean-Paul, getting out of the car.

  Justin watched them discussing something for about fifteen minutes, standing at the edge of the cliff and paying no attention either to the girl beside the guardrail who remained sitting with the Harley’s saddle between her long legs, or to him, at the wheel of the parked car. He eyed the girl through the windshield. Brown hair, all legs, braless and buxom under her Indian blouse. She seemed royally unconcerned with his existence, kept her head turned toward the fog-enveloped sea, not moving except occasionally to shake a stray strand of hair from her field of vision. She displayed the patient passivity of an angel. A woman on the fringes of danger, enjoying every minute of it. He wanted to jump her so badly he wanted to cry.

  Still talking, the lawyer went over to sit at one of the picnic tables and took out a pocket mirror and a razor blade and had himself a snort. Then he handed Jean-Paul a large brown padded envelope. They broke up shortly after that, Brien returning to sit astride his motorcycle and Jean-Paul getting back into the car with his envelope. The two men watched the lawyer give a gallant slap to the thigh of his passenger, then start the Harley with a kick of his boot heel.

  “I thought he’d be pissed with me,” Jean-Paul said.

  “Oh yeah? What for?”

  “For getting him up so early. It’s not his style. But I wanted us to meet undisturbed.”

  “And?”

  Justin watched the motorcycle move off in the distance, the girl on the back, her arms wrapped around Mario Brien’s body, her long hair streaming out behind her in the wind, like the train of a dress.

  “Looks like I worried for nothing,” Jean-Paul said after a while. “He wasn’t sleeping.”

  “Ah.”

  “If you ask me, that’s probably what they’re going back to do now.”

  “Ah-ha. And what are we going to do?”

  Jean-Paul found himself a comfortable position in the car seat.

  “We’re going back to Montreal.”

  Jean-Paul slept until Newport. When he opened his eyes, the car had slowed down to a walking pace, then drew to a complete stop. Lafleur sat up and saw some kids by the side of the road, brandishing little wooden sailboats and running to catch up with the car.

  “Kids selling sailboats!” murmured Jean-Paul. “We must be in Newport.”

  He lowered his window, took one of the boats, gave it a glance, and handed it to Justin. About fifty centimetres long, carved entirely by hand and all in wood. The sails were made of birchbark.

  “How much do they want for it?” Francœur asked.

  The shouts of the little band rose from the roadside.

  “I can’t understand a word they’re saying …”

  “They’re speaking Paspayan, that’s why. It’s a local dialect.”

  Jean-Paul exchanged a few words with the kids.

  “Too expensive. Give them a fiver and they’ll take it.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t you see how much work’s gone into this thing?”

  “I know, but they always ask too much, just in case. They think we’re American tourists.”

  “You think they can’t see our Quebec plates?”

  “You’re right. They’re a bunch of fucking thieves … Five bucks is too good for the little bastards.”

  “Well, at least you know it’s not made in Japan. The sum of work in one of these boats. How many hours, do you think?”

  “The sum of work? What’s that, some kind of Marxist shit?”

  Justin had taken two twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and was holding them between his fingers. Jean-Paul took one of them and dangled it out of his window. The gamins pounced on it like a bunch of starved fledgling birds on a piece of bread.

  Francœur started the car, the model boat resting on the back seat.

  “Did you see how they were dressed? Bare feet on that gravel? It’s like we’re in the Third World.”

  “I could show you villages up in the mountains behind here that would give you more than just an impression. It pretty much is the Third World. We’re in Robin Hood land here. The Kingdom of Cod.”

  They were quiet for a while, following the curve of Baie-des-Chaleurs, watching flashes of sunlight on the indentations in the cliffs.

  “You see, Jean-Paul, you can’t denounce the fish-processing plant that steals from them and the forest companies that make them sleep in school buses and the mine that sends them digging deep into the earth, and then refuse to pay child labour its true worth. That’s called a contradiction.”

  “You’re beginning to make me sick with all your phrases that are only found in books.”

  “What’s in the envelope? It looks heavy …”

  “None of your business.”

  “Oh, I get it. I’m stuck driving a nonstop round trip from Montreal to Percé, and I have to keep my mouth shut.”

  “I don’t know you well enough yet.”

  They retreated to silence and, shortly afterward, Jean-Paul fell asleep. Not much later, Justin almost joined him, but jerked the wheel just in time to bring the nose of the Chevy back between the lines on the bridge spanning the Cascapédia. Suddenly awake, Jean-Paul looked around with a lost air. They stopped at the first hotel they came to and took a room: Chez Guité, in Maria. Jean-Paul paid cash while Justin stretched his legs on the shore.

  The tide was out, the sound of waves seemed far off, the air smelled of seaweed. The wet stone pillars of a dismantled wharf poked out of the water to the east like the backbone of a large fossilized dinosaur. Clusters of mussels attached to bunches of sea-wrack and the shells of crabs, turned over and cleaned out by gulls, littered the pebbled beach.

  He found Jean-Paul stretched out on one of the beds, fully clothed. The TV was on, tuned to a local program of indescribable boredom. This was followed by Kraft Cinema, showing A Fistful of Dollars, sliced up to make room for ads for mayonnaise and some substance that passed for cheese.

  Justin took the car along the seafront to buy takeout club sandwiches and fries from a restaurant called the Barli-Coo.

  “You know what?” he said when he got back. “The guys at the restaurant say that the biggest salmon in the world come from this area. From the Cascapédia, all along here. Jackie Kennedy fishes here. It belongs to some Americans. It’s people like that that we have to get rid of.”

  Jean-Paul said nothing. His mouth was full. Justin felt encouraged to follow up on his thoughts.

  “Our comrades have been caught in Saint-Colomban, and the farm in Milan is known to the police. No more People’s Prison. The network is completely busted up. All we have left is the house on rue Collins. It’s going to take a lot of money to rebuild a solid organization. You’re so desperate that you have to listen to me … Now, imagine holding Jackie Kennedy prisoner in one of these fishing lodges, way up in the mountains, somewhere between New Richmond and Sainte-Anne-des-Monts. How much do you think Daddy Onassis would pay to get her back? Ten million? Twenty?”

  “I don’t think they’re still together.”

  “Oh …”

  “We’d have to find out first, in any case.”

  Justin Francœur barely
finished the last bite of his club sandwich before falling asleep. When he woke up, Lafleur was snoring in the bed beside his. The sound was rhythmic and also very strong.

  Francœur wanted to see the sea again, so he tiptoed to the door. Before getting there, his eyes fell on the brown envelope lying on the end table. He didn’t hesitate for a second. He went over to it, picked it up, hefted it in his hands, squeezed it. Then, without making a sound, he undid the metal clip that kept it shut, all the while keeping an eye on the sleeping mound slowly rising and falling with the ample oscillations of deep sleep. He felt the contents of the envelope before pulling them out: a wad of twenty-dollar bills. There were more inside. Several thousands of dollars worth …

  Easily enough to finance two or three kidnappings.

  OPERATION DELIVERANCE

  RENÉ LAFLEUR AND MAURICE CORBO, a.k.a. Le Corbeau were hanging out by a stand of pines on the Nun’s Island golf course. At thirty-seven, Le Corbeau was typical of the people being drawn to the ranks of the FLQ. He’d been caught distributing Marxist tracts on the armed forces base in Valcartier, kicked out of the army at the age of eighteen for comportment issues, and earmarked, in the eyes of some, as a “card-carrying Commie.” At the moment, Momo was training his field glasses on a foursome driving in their direction on two golf carts.

  “Here come the desert commandoes,” Corbeau joked.

  René, who was sitting cross-legged on the grass, looked up from his notebook.

  “Is one of them a big guy?” he asked.

  “They’re all obese.”

  “One about half-bald?”

  “They’re all half-bald. But they’re wearing hats.”

  “And I’ll bet they’re all in their mid-fifties.”

  “Bingo.”

  “The only difference among them is the number of shots it takes them to put the little ball in the little hole.”

  René had barely finished his sentence when the whistle of a brand-new Spalding split the air and a ball hit the turf literally under his nose before bouncing once and rolling until it came to a stop at the edge of the woods. Le Corbeau instinctively ducked, an old reflex from his army days. Before he and René could exchange a single word, a ring-billed gull that had been cruising over a nearby water hazard flew over and, after making a low-altitude sweep, landed a few feet from the ball, hopped closer to it, considered it from a number of angles, and ended up deciding it was an egg that had fallen from a great height and should be returned to its nest.

  He had to make several attempts before he managed to pick the egg up in his beak. But when he had it, he flew off with it and disappeared.

  Another ball plopped directly into the water hazard. Then the golf carts showed up. One of them was heading toward the stand of pines at about fifteen miles an hour.

  “Let’s get out of here!” said Le Corbeau.

  “To bring my family origins into the picture like that, it’s just reviving the old notion of class structure, and I, for one, warn you that I won’t stand for any such Leninist bullshit in my own Renault, no, Madame!”

  “Excuse me, our Renault.”

  Just as Justin was opening his mouth to reply to his wife, they saw a long black car pass them and disappear around a curve. A flat calm fell over them like a crust of greenery on Redpath Crescent, which looped among the rich homes arranged up the side of the mountain.

  “Who was that?”

  “How would I know? You were talking nonstop …”

  “I didn’t see what house he came out of. It could have been Hite or it could have been Travers …”

  “You were supposed to be keeping an eye on the Travers house, and me on Hite’s.”

  “Yeah, but now what do we do?”

  “We fuck off.”

  Lancelot indicated the Île-des-Sœurs with the end of a broomstick broken in two and used as a magic wand. He was in an apartment in Saint-Henri, empty of furniture and situated across the street from the Auction Hotel. On the wall in front of him was pinned a chart on which a list of names, the abscissa of hours of departure and arrival, indications of place and habits had been written in black felt-tip pen on a piece of white cardboard one metre by two. A battered map of the city measuring sixty by fifty centimetres was pinned beside it.

  On the Île-des-Sœurs alone there were forty names. We were planning on sticking up those who played golf, and I can tell you that that would represent quite a packet. Our idea of nabbing four in a single swoop of the golf course and stuffing them into a milk truck at six in the morning was a pretty good one. It would give us lots of time before the alarm was sounded. But since the People’s Prison was no longer in the picture, the problem was that we had nowhere to keep them. The question of space limited us to a single hostage, two at the most.

  “In any case, we have to take an American,” Jean-Paul said quietly. “The other thing is, we have to forget about the Île-des-Sœurs. The access road is too easy to block off. If anything went wrong, we’d be the ones who were trapped.”

  Lancelot turned toward Pierre Chevrier, who was thinking.

  “If it were up to me,” Chevrier said, “I’d take an English. You know why?”

  He jumped to his feet, took the pointer from Lancelot’s hand, and pointed at the chart.

  “Look. It’s as clear as a page of music. Travers is the real deal. He plays bridge. He’s as punctual as an Englishman in a mystery novel. The commercial attaché John Travers leaves his office at five o’clock sharp. I’ll bet he eats crumpets with his tea. Impossible to mess it up with him.”

  “Yes, but we’re not writing a mystery novel. We’re planning a kidnapping.”

  “A kidnapping that carries a message,” Jean-Paul said loudly.

  “That Quebec is not a colonial state?”

  “Yeah, yeah … what do you call economic domination?”

  “What do you suggest, J.-P.?”

  “We go for both of them. We take an American and an Englishman. That way, we’ll cover the whole territory of our alienation.”

  “Jesus, you sure do talk the talk.”

  “Larry Hite,” Pierre said, tapping the list with his half of the broomstick. “He lives on the same crescent as Travers. Across the street from him.”

  Richard Godefroid walked east on the north side of rue Ontario. He stopped to examine some hubcaps artfully arranged in the window of Father Scrap, turned his head, and saw his man forty metres behind him. The man had stopped, too, also feigning an interest in a storefront. Now that he knew he’d spotted the man, a childish pride came over him. He thought he’d be better to attribute his success to the stupidity of the other man, to his carelessness and lack of precaution, than to any calculated intelligence on his own part. He turned from the scrap shop and walked quickly on, thinking he would give his tail a ride.

  By nightfall, he was still walking. His man had long ago taken off his jacket. During the day, Gode had amused himself by sometimes slowing down or even doing an about-face to vary the distance between himself and his shadow. They both used these occasions to study each other. At certain times, their movements seemed to be choreographed like those of two duellers with pistols in Leone. Gode sized up his adversary. The poor guy was dragging around at least a dozen more years than Gode was. They both smoked, so they were equal in that. It would be a fair fight.

  He had just crossed Pie-IX and the sun was low on his back when he stopped at exactly the spot where, six years later, they would build the Olympic Stadium. He walked along the slope, more like a slight incline, that went down to Sherbrooke, glancing over his shoulder like a bicycle racer who had just started a sprint and was watching his most dangerous rivals gathering into a column behind him. With a ridiculous sense of gratification, Gode saw the plainclothes cop try to catch up with him then give up, glued to the spot. He hurried west through the Botanical Gardens and reached the large, wooded Maisonneuve Park, which was almost a forest. Then he started running; he was free.

  PEACE

  MARIE-
FRANCE WAS WAITING FOR HIM at the entrance to the cemetery at the corner of Côte-des-Neiges and Decelles. She’d moved into the area in July, into an apartment between the Café Campus and St. Joseph’s Oratory, on Queen-Mary Road across from the wax museum.

  She was beautiful, radiant in her light summer dress. He noted that she offered him her cheek rather than her lips to kiss, that she was holding herself back as though she were waiting for an explanation. She’d started her law course in September.

  They walked among tombstones and epitaphs with the names and numbers under which lay Ryans, Gurskys, Burnsides, Handkes, Thatchers, Tavarones, Yanacopouloses, Szaabos, Mors, Eglis, Apostolskas … with here and there among them a few French-Canadian surnames whose roots had long ago entwined with those of their neighbours.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” Godefroid announced. “I’ve quit the gang.”

  She’d been paying him so little mind that now she looked at him carefully, standing in the middle of the path.

  “Quit?”

  “Operation Deliverance. I’m out of it.”

  “I’m having a hard time believing you.”

  “Maybe, but it’s the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth.”

  If Marie-France had been cruel, she would have taken the time to savour her lover’s humiliation. But fundamentally she was not a cruel person.

  “I’m deeply moved, Gode.”

  “Well …”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I thought of … maybe going back to the Gaspé. Hitchhike. Camp. But not to Percé! I want to put all that behind me …”

  She didn’t help him out. She watched him tie himself up in knots with an almost innocent enjoyment. She was honestly interested in what he had to say, but her concern was hidden behind her broad smile, which also held a trace of commiseration.

  “What about you?” he finally asked her.

  “Me? Florida … I’m leaving on a forty-eight-footer for Key West next week. For the whole month of August.”

  “To …”

  “A nice couple in their fifties. Someone I don’t know. With a friend of theirs. I answered an ad in a travel magazine. We’re going to do the Caribbean, take our time. I’ll learn my knots.”