October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  Sitting across from him, René Lafleur was trying to coax reception from a small transistor radio. All he could get was gospel, laundry soap, Coca-Cola, fried chicken, and the Bible. A lot more fried chicken. Then the results of a baseball game. The swan song of America.

  “How do you know all that?” asked Jean-Paul, peering into the ham sandwich he’d been trying to chew.

  “My father had his family tree traced at one point. There were Godefroids who married Chippewa women and went into the fur trade in Wisconsin. I learned about it as a kid. We always called Route 66 the Chippewa Way.”

  Jean-Paul looked up from his sandwich and watched his mother, the family matriarch, who was walking along the river some distance away with their younger sister. The pair passed an old man who was shredding a cream doughnut and tossing the pieces to some resident mallards. Mother and daughter had accompanied them to Texas. It didn’t seem reasonable at first, but when they’d been stopped at a roadblock by the state police in Pennsylvania, the presence of an elderly woman and a young girl in the back seat seemed to have given them a bit of status, and they’d been allowed to pass. If nothing else, family life was a good cover.

  Two picnic tables down, a man in a checked jacket was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. Jean-Paul chewed his ham sandwich. He thought about what they had in the cooler. Canned ham. Hard-boiled eggs. Pickles. Mayonnaise. One tomato. Kraft “cheese.” Kik Cola. Sliced bread. “Go Weston, young man …” A real Québécoise mother, they had, a nourisher through and through.

  When their mother and sister rejoined them, René, still hunched over his tinny transistor radio, managed to find a news station. He raised a hand and turned up the volume. Silence surrounded the table.

  … kidnapped by four gunmen this morning in Montreal. The kidnapping has since been claimed by the Front of Liberation of Québec, a group promoting terrorism and armed struggle in their fight for the creation of an independent French-speaking state in eastern Canada.

  “They’re still talking about only one kidnapping. The Englishman …”

  “They only took Travers.”

  “That doesn’t bode well… .” said Jean-Paul, absorbed in his thoughts.

  He looked up and saw his mother gathering the plastic utensils and paper plates, putting the lid on the mayonnaise jar, returning the eggs to a jar of vinegar, rewrapping the Kraft slices and the sliced tomato. As if she had already figured out what was what.

  “We can’t let them go through this on their own,” grumbled Jean-Paul. “They’ll spill the whole can of beans.”

  He looked around. Gode and René waited for him to continue.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he said.

  When the car with René at the wheel threw up a few grains of gravel as it left the parking lot, the smoker two tables down threw his butt on the grass, folded his newspaper, and walked to a car parked under the trees. He opened the passenger door and got in beside the old man who’d been feeding the ducks, who, sitting behind the wheel, was speaking into a radio transmitter.

  SAINT-LAMBERT,

  OCTOBER 10, 6:18 P.M.

  THE CITY OF TORONTO, IN Ontario, is located about five hundred kilometres southwest of Montreal. As far as a Québécois is concerned, the geographical location of the Queen City might as well be somewhere between Kirghizistan and Tajikistan. Paul Lavoie had never set foot in it. The government’s deputy premier, a Liberal of the old school, forty-nine years old, was in charge of the state of Quebec when Petit Albert was away selling off our rivers, lands, and forests to Bechtel of San Francisco, or to the money-grabbers on Wall Street. Lavoie was looking forward to going to Toronto in November. He had tickets for the Grey Cup and was taking his nephew.

  He had just heard his colleague in Justice addressing John Travers’s kidnappers on television, saying the government would not negotiate with criminals. A very loud no! Perfect. He’d reserved a table at a restaurant and was waiting for his wife, who was in the bathroom getting ready to go: she was taking longer and longer making herself look less and less young. Paul Lavoie was heading into his unexpected rendezvous with history in this thirty-sixth year, wearing olive green pants with yellow stripes, varnished crocodile-leather shoes, and mismatched socks. But his shirt (sport) and jacket (checkered) didn’t look that bad. He wasn’t wearing a tie.

  He went out onto the porch to get some fresh air and almost immediately was thrown an oval leather ball by his nephew. “Go, Alouettes, go!” the boy shouted. Lavoie had been looking after his nephew since the death of his brother; the boy and his mother lived in the bungalow next door. With a quick movement of his arm, he returned the ball to the youngster and jogged down the stairs and along the path. He made a short curve in his leather crocs to take the pass from his nephew, which spiralled toward him and hit him square in the chest with almost perfect precision. YES!!!! He no longer wanted the Justice portfolio, no longer cared if he became premier, he was Peter Dalla, the Alouettes’ linebacker and star receiver.

  Then, while his fingers felt for the best grip along the seams of the ball and he took a few short steps backward, he became Sam Etcheverry, the former quarterback and current coach, Sam the Rifle, old eagle-eye, looking for an open receiver way up in the end zone. Watch him. Lavoie takes off his jacket like the working-class stiff he never was, he is no longer the politico who prefers to rely on contacts rather than hard work, finagling overtime, handing out surreptitious envelopes and dubious loans that paid good dividends with enough patience to let them mature; look at him — this is not the arm of the former journalist, the Maurrassien in a beret, the man of the pen — no, the man with the football rotates in on himself, turns, puts the ball in the air and on a trajectory that describes a perfect ellipse in the dark blue sky when the sun emerges to spill over Montreal from the other side of Ontario.

  “Catch it, Moses!” He means Moses Denson, of course. He means Junior Ah You and the big Sonny Wade, Terry Evanshen and his twenty years of misery, twenty years of Edmonton, of Hamilton, of Winnipeg, twenty years of Russ Jackson — except this year Ottawa will not carry him off to paradise, no, because Lavoie sprints for the long bomb, his nephew pumps for the pass, his arm goes back, his grip is on the last strings of the ball, and Lavoie pivots calmly without losing the count, the missile flies through a sky of perfect, intense blue, he stretches his arms out for it, it’s October, he fans out his hands, spreads his fingers, anticipates the slap of leather on skin, but when the ball arrives it comes in like a flopping, leaden-winged duck and slips out of his grasp, lands on the sidewalk, bounces crazily into the street, and rolls away. Straight under the wheels of a Chevrolet that has come swiftly down the street and braked, tires screeching, beside the sidewalk. The doors open like the wing casings of a beetle that has fallen from the sky. And …

  “I am SSSSSSSSam,” Lavoie mutely mouths. “The Rifle.”

  Then he sees the machine guns, and behind them two men in long raincoats with strange haircuts. He automatically raises his hands. One of the men shouts at him. Something.

  Lavoie hesitates, turns his head, and looks toward the house. He sees his wife standing with her handbag in the entrance. Finally ready to go.

  TELEPHONE

  CAREENING OUT OF A SIDE street, the Chevrolet braked sharply with a loud screeching of tires. When René pressed down on the brake pedal, Gode, sitting in the back seat, was propelled forward, his knee coming into contact with a mass of known but still complex consistency, neither soft nor hard, but which still gave a little, then resisted, emitting a sort of sigh or groan. René could feel it moving under him.

  “Shut up!”

  “Let’s go!”

  He opened the door, disengaged his knee, and jumped out into the street. Slammed the door as he turned, catching in the corner of his eye the image of a dark spot formed by the raincoat between the seats. Then the door shut heavily. The car had already turned right and was moving south along boulevard Taschereau.

  Disoriented for a moment, Gode s
tood still, getting his bearings. The orange ball of the sun was low on the horizon, and the late afternoon light advanced over the river, the unreal green phosphorescence of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge. Still bothered by the unwelcome intimacy of the contact of his knee with the back of the man stretched out on the floor of the car, he started looking for a taxi.

  Marie-France and Nicole watched the news of the abduction of the Minister of Public Works on television. Journalists clustered on the lawns and in the street, before a large, bungalow-style house with a steep roof, in a residential district on the South Shore. There were neighbours, gawkers, camera crews, microphones, cameras, flash bulbs, electric cables, police guarding the entrance, people going in, coming out, escorting family members, political colleagues, close friends, the family doctor with his nerve pills. They saw Paul Lavoie’s old mother, wide-eyed and deflated, looking like a shot barn owl, uniformed officers with orders to treat those closest to the victim with respect, inspectors in raincoats coming and going and more of them arriving all the time, Saturday night, madness.

  Close-up of the metal plaque screwed to the wall beside the door:

  PAUL LAVOIE, BARRISTER

  The phone rang. It was Gode. The last they’d heard, he was in the States.

  “I’m in the area …”

  “You can come over if you want,” said Marie-France.

  The women were living at 3730 Queen-Mary Road, on the mountain, apartment number 6. Marie-France unlocked the door remotely. His footsteps on the stairs. She was in front of him, watched him pass her without looking up or meeting her eyes and go into the living room. He sat down in front of the television.

  “Has anyone claimed responsibility?”

  “No. But you must know who it is, right?”

  “Me? No …” he said, nodding his head without taking his eyes off the screen.

  Nicole asked him where René was.

  “Dunno. If I see him, I’ll tell him to give you a call.”

  Sometime later, Gode left to make a phone call.

  “Why not call from here?”

  He shrugged.

  “I need some fresh air.”

  Then, after patting his pockets:

  “I’m out of cigarettes … I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  VEGAS

  WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG, CHEVALIER Branlequeue was at home, watching Maître Brien stoking the crowd at the Paul-Sauvé Arena in the east end of Montreal. The excitement of the masses. Practised rhetoric before three thousand jubilant sympathizers of the independence movement. We will prevail.

  It was the fifteenth, five days after the kidnapping. The Chevaliers were living in a small house on a street in Chambly, next to a pet store and across from a butcher’s. Éléonore had an important administrative position at the hospital and they were starting to find their feet, financially. The oldest child had his own room, his furniture arranged to accommodate his stamp collection. Branlequeue had organized his Placard in a room that looked like a real office. The colour television had made its appearance in a living room furnished on credit from Bélanger’s. The old camp cot was beside the wall in the office, among piles of books and manuscripts associated with Top Flight Editions, and Chevalier Branlequeue was spending his nights on it more and more often, his head filled with words and phrases, his vision blurred, his bronchial passages clogged, his stomach irritated by sleep-inducing whisky.

  Within two years, the little family would move to the Domaine des Salicaires, near the river. In four, the eldest, Martial, would pack up his things and move on to make his own life. And a year had passed and the father had been living in this room full time, by virtue of an unwritten pact making his and Éléonore’s physical separation official. The new regime gave Chevalier the peaceful and rebarbative impression of seeing his love life dissolve before him, neutralized from now until his death. He’d dispensed with his conjugal duties three years ago, at the age of forty-four, never dared to hit on his students. No dipping of the paintbrush. Vénus, was lanky, twenty, and studious. She hadn’t yet found her Sapphic leanings and was taking piano lessons. The youngest, Pacifique left politics to hopeless degenerates over twenty, drank Black Label, and smoked pot and Afghan hash and listened to Led Zep. And La Gros Éléonore, Éléonore, the former marble beauty shaped by some sculptor’s hammer, had become a bitter old woman, already cast in rough stone at the tender age of thirty.

  But for now, the crisis created by the first abduction, ten days earlier, continued to fester, and Maître Brien was making his remarks on the ten o’clock news. “FLQ! FLQ! FLQ!” the crowd at the Paul-Sauvé Arena was chanting. And then the telephone rang.

  “Chevalier Branlequeue?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Bonnard, Raoul.”

  He’d recognized the voice, a baritone impossible to mistake for any other, with its deep, throaty residue of late nights, scotch whisky, and cigars, and its ineffable, slightly humorous hint of the crooner imprinted at the base end. They had crossed paths from time to time, through their work. Given Chevalier’s existence as poet–publisher and his nocturnal life in the bars, the two had several points of intersection. The role of poet laureate he had been obliged to assume after the appearance of Elucubrations had ratcheted him into the larger family of artists. But aside from these accidental encounters, during which only a few words had been exchanged, neither of them knew much about the other that wasn’t general knowledge.

  “What can I do for you, Raoul?”

  “Have you been watching the news?”

  Chevalier turned so that the TV was in his field of vision. The camera was panning the crowd across the screen, men, women, professors, students, militants, national thinkers, tavern philosophers, versifiers and vilifiers, raised fists, Mackinaw shirts, small, round eyeglasses, long hair. FLQ. We will prevail.

  “Yes,” he said after a moment.

  “What do you think of it?”

  What Chevalier thought was that Maître Brien was playing a dangerous game. Two days earlier, accused of obstructing justice, he’d still been cooling his heels in the Parthenais Prison. The day after the Paul Lavoie kidnapping, after the weak response manifested by the Vézina government, the Rebellion Cell had designated the lawyer, in a communiqué, as their official negotiator with the authorities. The negotiations were now stalled. Little Albert had just issued an ultimatum giving the terrorists six hours to accept safe conduct to the country of their choice, and what was Brien doing? Jumping up to the microphone in an arena full of separatists, taking centre stage with the crowd at his feet crying for blood in a veritable boiling of revolutionary fervour. Chevalier didn’t much like what he was seeing.

  He opened his mouth to reply, then hesitated.

  “I’d be curious to know why my thoughts are of interest to you, Raoul.”

  “And I’ll tell you, Chevalier. I may have only a grade six education, but I haven’t done too badly in the school of life. And what I am going to propose to you is that we get together and discuss all this in a quiet spot. A serious conversation, between men. I might even say civilized.”

  “Just the two of us, Raoul?”

  “No.”

  Both of them allowed a moment to pass in which they each seemed to be listening to the long chain of telephone poles, hearing the silence that cut through their conversation like a beast on the road and that suddenly filled the autumn night between them like a living thing, fugitive, insensate, and obscure.

  “I have a friend who would like to meet you, Chevalier …”

  “What kind of friend, Raoul?”

  “Someone from the nightclubs.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you, here, Raoul … What exactly is it you want?”

  “What would you say if I dropped by to pick you up in ten minutes?”

  “To go where?”

  “To Vegas, does that mean anything to you?”

  “The Vegas Sports Palace, on boulevard Taschereau?”

  “That’s
the place.”

  “And you want to take me there to do what after eleven o’clock at night? Play shuffleboard?

  “No. Just have you meet someone. It might give you some ideas for your next book, you never know.”

  “Tell me one thing, Raoul. Is there a risk of this blowing up in my face?”

  “I wouldn’t put your safety at risk, Chevalier. You have my word on that.”

  “Lots of people say that …”

  “Yes, but where we’re going, my word is sacrosanct.”

  He’d put on his heavy cardigan and was standing at the front door when Éléonore emerged from the bedroom in her housecoat, her mop of hair piled up on her head, looking ghastly. Hallowe’en’s come early, thought her husband.

  “Would you mind telling me where you’re going, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Urgent business at the Vegas. Nothing serious.”

  “Where did you say?”

  “The Palace, my dear. A little poker to get back what I’ve lost. The house, you, the kids. Everything will be on the table tonight.”

  “Good Lord!”

  Bonnard picked him up at the door. He was wearing a powder-blue suit, with a Panama hat screwed on his head. His car was a yellow Buick Riviera from a time when its four carburetors alone could justify the installation of one of those solitary donkeys you see nodding their black heads along the highways of Kansas and Oklahoma. They drove north along rue Chambly, turned left at the old shopping plaza onto the former rue Coteau-Rouge, now more respectfully called boulevard Sainte-Foy. Here, where packs of feral dogs and street toughs had at one time pretty much held reign, new laws had created a grid of long streets bordered by comfortable, single-family houses. Gone were the outdoor toilets, the cesspools open to the skies, and the tarpaper shacks! Gone the water-carriers from the better neighbourhoods of yesteryear, who sold water for five cents a bucket. A huge American-style suburb had opened its arms, and the feral dogs had been replaced by police cruisers whose sirens now bayed to the full moon, but less often. Finally, the previous year, Longueuil the bourgeosie had legally achieved social chlorination by voting to annex with its turbulent neighbour, about which no one spoke any longer.