October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “So, what happened to Francis Braffort?”

  LA COURNEUVE, PARIS SUBURB,

  MARCH 1971

  The woman was tall and blonde. Her mouth was dry and her heart was pounding. She stared at the man in front of her, who had just paused in what he was saying to lower his head toward his plate and raise a small forkful of couscous to his mouth. If he noticed the cool, dark figure in the left corner of his field of vision, it was too late for him to do anything about it. Nor did he have time to analyze the brusque movement executed by the figure as it took its right hand from its jacket pocket and raised its arm. He didn’t turn his head in the man’s direction. The first low-calibre bullet ricocheted off his frontal bone and embedded itself in the ceiling, from which a few bits of plaster fell onto his couscous like fine snowflakes. Blood suddenly covered the eater’s face and, as his forehead became adorned with a bright-red split, he leaned forward and vomited onto his plate. The man at the next table moved the .22-calibre pistol, which was equipped with a silencer, closer to the victim’s left ear and squeezed the trigger. The man fell heavily to his right, tipping over the chair as he went. Convulsions shook his body and his hands tried to grasp the ungraspable. The other man quickly jumped to his feet and, leaning over the victim, fired a third round point-blank into his forehead.

  The woman had stood up, remaining on her side of the table. The killer looked up and saw her.

  “They’re coming … Hurry!”

  He was already running.

  While listening to Fred, Sam remembered being at Chevalier’s funeral in la Pérade. If Branlequeue’s son hadn’t asked him to take charge of the archival chaos in the old professor’s office at the university, the story of the chicken deliveries would never have come to the surface and he would not then be sitting here in Baby Barbecue listening to Falardeau, a writer who, like him, had wandered into the secret catacombs of history. For Fred, the road that had brought him back to Chevalier’s original assignment had been a television program.

  “Hey, Fred! Yoo-hoo! You and me, we’ve got a master’s in literature. We ought to be describing masterpieces translated from twenty-eight languages and the juicy love stories on which readers pounce, most of whom, or so we’re told, are women …”

  “I know that.”

  “Good. So who killed Francis Braffort?”

  “Madwar, alias Daniel Prince. The RCMP used him to infiltrate the FLQ in 1968, along with his friend Brossard, the future Zadig. Their mission was to create a cell that would act as a Trojan Horse for the secret police. Nothing could have been easier. Anyone could join the FLQ, get involved … All you had to do was get hold of a few sticks of dynamite. And when thanks to them the group they’d successfully penetrated was blown apart by the police a year later, the Security Service had other projects for our two boys. They got them into Cuba, via New York, and eventually to Algeria. With return trips back and forth to London, Paris, Zurich … eventually they ended up in Jordan. At one point, Zadig even went behind the Iron Curtain, to Hungary …”

  “You learned all this from declassified documents?”

  “Of course not. But the need to talk is a powerful engine. I developed a few good contacts in the Mounted Police. The old guard, the guys who retired. The ones who missed the good old days like nobody’s business. I discovered that those guys, when you give them a chance, are not completely immune to the desire to blow their own horns. Because they won their dirty little war, after all. But we couldn’t go on air with off-the-record interviews. My sources refused to be filmed even with their faces distorted and their voices altered. After a certain point, the project was dropped. Except I didn’t drop it. I was like a hunting dog on a fresh scent. I continued on my own …”

  “Is there a connection between the Braffort business and Lavoie? Was Francis Braffort …”

  “The real assassin of Lavoie? My informants in the Mounties never encouraged me to go in that direction. Of course, they weren’t obliged to tell me everything. And I wasn’t obliged to swallow everything that came out of their cake holes, either. In my view, Braffort knew a little too much about the counter-FLQ measures and those two maggots in Algeria …”

  “Algeria again. Does that surprise me?”

  “I certainly hope not.”

  “Counter-FLQ. That was the Foreign Delegation?”

  “Yeah. Nothing less than the brainchild of Western secret services to infiltrate terrorist organizations in the Middle East.”

  “I think I’m going to need a beer,” Samuel said, looking around.

  “A cold beer? After eating?”

  “What else should a couple of ex-Octobeerists do when they meet?”

  “It’s against my principles, but you’re right. Let’s have a cold one.”

  “In remembrance of all those hectolitres of amber, blond, and red …”

  “Those were good times,” said Fred after the first mouthful.

  “We drank like fish.”

  “We did.”

  “Was that all it was, do you think? An excuse to drink, nothing else?”

  “You want to know if we were dedicated Octobeerists? We were a circle of friends, drunk most of the time …”

  “A conspiracy think-tank, all the same. I didn’t see you at Chevalier’s funeral …”

  “My girlfriend was about to have a baby and … You know how it was with the Octobeerists and women …”

  “But did it never occur to you that Chevalier was way out in left field, right from the start?”

  “And that I was wasting my time going out to Saint-Hubert, measuring the distance between the bungalow’s garage and the parking lot and Hangar Number 12? That’s what my girlfriend thinks.”

  “Look, Pierre Chevrier, le Chevreuil, he’s the key. In the Sun article, the anonymous informants talked about a liaison between the fedayeen and the FLQ, remember that?”

  “Yes. And I see two possible explanations for that. Either their connection to the October kidnappings is an invention concocted to enhance the legend of Zadig and Madwar and facilitate their infiltration into the Palestine resistance movement, or the link existed and le Chevreuil was in touch with those guys.”

  “I’m still thirsty … What do you mean by the legend of Zadig and Madwar?”

  “I meant it in the sense that the secret service uses it. Legend, from legere, to read: a secret agent’s cover story is 90 percent words. Sartre said that existentialism is humanism. Myself, I would add that Octobeerism is a hermeneutic. And now, tell me about Pierre.”

  “I made a list of all the contradictions in the police statements on this subject. The cops appear to have been walking on eggshells with their big boots on whenever the subject of Pierre came up. Like in René Lafleur’s kidnapping trial, for instance …”

  MONTREAL COURT HOUSE,

  SEPTEMBER 1972

  Officer Rossignol was standing in the witness box. A court clerk handed him a black-and-white negative, which he took between his thumb and index finger, looked at briefly, and said he recognized the grey Chrysler photographed from the roof of a neighbouring house as it exited the garage.

  “Do you recognize the man at the wheel?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Yeah. It’s Maurice Corbo.”

  “And beside him?”

  Rossignol hesitated.

  “If you mean Langlais, I don’t know him.”

  An angel passed through the courtroom. The Crown prosecutor and the judge exchanged glances, barely fluttering their eyelids.

  “Oh, well, if you don’t recognize him …” said the prosecutor, scolding him in a friendly way.

  The police officer cut him off:

  “If that’s Langlais, it’s news to me. I do not recognize the individual in this photograph.”

  “Well, at least that’s clear.” The prosecutor smiled and shrugged.

  “Next question,” said the judge.

  “The police brain is a powerful and little understood organ,” remarked Fred.

 
; “I agree. What are you doing?”

  Fred’s briefcase was in fact a computer case, from which he was extricating his laptop. He shoved aside plates piled with chicken bones, cartilage, bits of yellowed, gelatinous skin floating in coagulating fat and Baby Barbecue sauce, licked his fingers, and opened his machine.

  “Let’s see what I’ve got on Pierre Chevrier. It isn’t much, as far as I can remember.”

  Fred tapped a few keys and waited. His search engine sniffed its way through a forest of notes and came up with a single paragraph, like a spaniel sent to fetch a partridge. Fred read the passage, then looked up at Sam.

  “He went to North Africa.”

  For a second, they didn’t speak.

  “Algeria?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t prove anything.”

  “No. It could just be a coincidence. One of many. But if I find he was on the RCMP payroll, my friend, that would put the cat among the pigeons, don’t you think? What else do you have on le Chevreuil?”

  “Luc Goupil met with a Pierre in London,” Fred said after awhile.

  “Goupil? Wait …”

  Fred shut down his laptop. He spoke quickly.

  “While researching Braffort, in France, I came across the story of Luc Goupil, the guy who hanged himself in …”

  “I know who he was. But what did he have to do with … ?”

  Fred closed the cover of his computer and finished his beer.

  “It would take too long to explain all that now …”

  “I’m in no hurry, Fred. You got time for another beer?”

  “No thanks, I’m driving. Anyway, the days of getting gloriously pissed in the middle of the afternoon are long gone. That’s what ‘good old days’ means — they were good, but they’re gone. When you look ahead, what do you see?”

  “At first glance I see myself as the father of a family. Looking closer, I see someone trying to kill time until time kills him.”

  “I don’t have much more on Goupil, Sam. He’s just another rabbit I started …”

  In the parking lot they tried to arrange a time when they could get together again. It was if they knew that after this meeting they’d once again be swallowed up, Fred by his family and Sam by the great northern forest.

  Around them spread a slice of America that provided a good idea of what the human soul looked like once it was paved and cemented from end to end, then lit up with billboards showing images of the female body. They could have been in Blainville or Dallas or Fort Lauderdale, in the airless, winking periphery of any communally administrated hell on the continent. What really frightened Nihilo about boulevard Taschereau was the atmosphere of aggressive normality that this architectural and commercial nightmare tended to confer on the devastating sadness of absolute and utter ugliness.

  “Fred,” he said, “I need you to tell me something. What you have on Zadig and Madwar, you’re sure about it?”

  “Solid as concrete, Sam. On that point my humans are categorical.”

  “Your what?”

  “My humans. Human sources.”

  Is that how it begins, Sam wondered. You start to talk like them, and then what? You become like them?

  “Until our next cold one, then, Fred.”

  “You can twist my arm, old buddy. I’ll try to untangle myself from the conjugal web … And Sam? From now on I’m concentrating on Travers and you’re looking into Lavoie. What do you say to that?”

  “Done.”

  They shook hands. Bye-bye, Baby.

  On the Champlain Bridge, Sam found himself casting frequent glances at his rear-view mirror. But there was no one on his tail.

  On the Champlain Bridge, at a certain point I shot over the crest. Suddenly there was Big Guy Dumont, front man for Éditions ______________, watching me from the height of an immense billboard that he’d been paid to appear on, totally naked, stretched out on a queen-sized bed under a velour sheet looking like a sultan and smiling like a cat who’d just swallowed a canary. I felt a pang of sympathy for the poor commuters who had to sit looking at this horrific vision five mornings a week.

  “Here’s your BLT, honey …”

  “Thank you, uh, thanks a lot!”

  After my meal, I got up and dropped a quarter into the slot of a pay phone on the wall of the Fameux. I’d been trying in vain for two days to call Marie-Québec. It was as though the ghost of Kaganoma had been hanging up on me. After four rings, surprise! A new message.

  … I feel compelled to sit at my table, I just want to write and write more. And it’s always, always like this, I don’t allow myself to get up, I feel like I’m devouring my own life, that for the honey I give to God knows who, you out there in the void, I have to steal it from my most beautiful flowers, I have to tear them up and stomp on their roots. Please leave a message.

  I hung up. Trigorin.

  When I got back to my table by the bay window, I scribbled a few notes in my book. Since lunch at Baby Barbecue, my brain had been seething. This time I contented myself with one or two reflections on the role played by distance in the jealousy that was consuming me. I suspected it occupied the same place in my love life that time occupied in my research. It separated me from the object of my desire. The goal was the same: a quest for the unattainable, which, coming up against the impossibility of knowing, transformed itself into an unappeasable suffering. The woman I loved was perhaps at that very moment fucking a hockey player in full uniform, or a rock band, six hundred and fifty kilometres from here, as the crow flies, while I, on the corner of Saint-Denis and Mont-Royal, was sitting in a bay window, busily unreeling a string of words on a page, like a trained dog, with a view to writing an essay that I knew I would never write.

  And so I did as it says to do in the song. I jumped into my car.

  North of La Vérendrye Park I saw a great grey owl perched in a dead tree beside the road. I braked and got out of the car. Peat bogs, hundred-year-old spruces two metres tall, the gentle golden tamaracks. Not another vehicle in sight, the silence seeming to extend for thousands of kilometres. Through flurries of snow that were turning the sky a dull grey, I watched the spectral apparition in my binoculars. What must a day seem like to this bird? Time must seem to wind itself up within the large facial discs through which its yellow eyes registered the dance of snowflakes, this stretch of highway, the observing man and his observant eyes, the heaviness under his wings, the roar of the wind, balancing each image and each sound against their equivalent in silence. Before history, its shouting and its bombs, the raptor’s indifference was whole and impenetrable.

  Two hundred kilometres farther north, just before Maldoror became visible on the horizon, its smoke plume erased by the blizzard, I turned onto the road to Kaganoma. Snow already covered the ground. Before I even got out of the car I knew the house was empty. Gusting snow was slowly burying it. A single light had been left on, in my study on the second floor, as if the ghost were expecting me. I wasn’t sure I was glad to be back. I remained standing in the snow without moving. Wet flakes landed on my eyelashes like kisses. And then I saw them.

  The huge, round footprints of a lynx, clearly discernable in the fresh snow. I smiled. They were headed toward the house.

  SAINT-HUBERT MILITARY

  BASE, SUMMER 1966

  “CANADA’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE KIND of military operation necessitated by zones of high-intensity conflict,” droned the general, tapping out the rhythm of his words on the headquarters’ map with his baton, “must be limited to the deployment of the 4th Brigade of Engineers, at the moment stationed in Germany, with sufficient tactical air support. The rest of our Armed Forces are going to need to rapidly reorganize and be given the flexibility necessary to intervene in a vast repertoire of possible conflicts. Which means that our Armed Forces must, among other things, concentrate on the problems of revolutionary agitation, terrorism, and urban guerilla warfare. It must prepare itself to withstand a prolonged anti-insurrectionist war …”

  Durin
g the Question Period that followed, a member of Parliament from Quebec who had listened attentively to General Bédard’s talk, asked with a perplexed, not to say slightly disconcerted, air: “General, if I understand you rightly, you’re proposing that we increase the effectiveness of our military component in areas of low conflict …”

  “Exactly,” said the general.

  “Except that your model, it seems to me, suggests just the opposite: that the importance of the military component must diminish, and that of the civil engineering section be increased, until the intensity of the conflict decreases … isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. And that’s why I’m the first to recognize that the Armed Forces cannot operate to their highest potential in situations of low-intensity conflict. Hear me: the groups best placed to pacifically solve most of these types of conflicts are civil organizations — governments, police, and so on — that may or may not require military assistance. I insist on this point: in the lower half of the spectrum of applied force, the role of our troops is to support organisms implicated in the search for a solution. This seems to me to be absolutely essential. And that’s why we need to develop a structure dedicated to being able to coordinate police, civil, and military actions on a large scale. The basis of this structure already exists in Canada: you no doubt understand that I’m talking about our three levels of government. In other words, the law can be modified in such a way that the military can act as agents of peace having as their mission to assist legally constituted authorities. I’m glad you raised this question.”

  The Honourable J. D. Sheppard, P.C. member for Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, had removed his earphone, which had practically disappeared into his ear, and was scraping the inside of his ear cavity with his little finger. He interrupted this operation to raise his hand.