October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  I needed to pour a lot of Calvados to refill the glasses this time. The neck of the bottle had a tendency to swing back and forth. My voice had become foggy, my tone kind of pasty, full of bitterness. The ghost didn’t seem to notice that he was drunk, or feeling better. Unable to drown the sadness at the bottom of the well of memory, he emptied his glass as quickly as I refilled it, as though his despair was nothing but a kind of politeness.

  “You were the perfect scapegoat,” I told him. “Drafted into your defence corps, a martyr for made-to-measure Canadian unity …”

  I grabbed the still three-quarters-full bottle by its neck and began pacing about the kitchen. The dawn was carving a path through the window.

  “The false alarm, Lavoie … Do you remember that?”

  He shook his head, eyes half-closed, his expression dead, a milky white infused with galaxies of burst blood vessels. His chin rested on his bloodstained chest.

  “Remember … Wednesday, October 14, 1970. They’d been holding you hostage for four days in that room, chained to a bed, handcuffed. At first, you thought the authorities were negotiating, but the positive signs were still far off and nothing was happening. The previous night, one of your captors had been picked up by the police and hadn’t come back. And there was a suspicious car that kept passing the house. Each time it passed, it slowed down and the occupants looked intently at the front of the house where you were being kept prisoner. And what happened then, how could you forget?”

  While I was speaking to him, Lavoie’s breathing had turned into a pitiful groaning that sank into a barely audible moan. But I went on:

  “Then the alarm went off, there was the sound of fighting in the bungalow. Your kidnappers decided to save their skins and, in the meantime, to use yours as a shield. They cut off two pieces of an old mop handle and made them look like sticks of dynamite by wrapping them in brown paper and coating them in butter to make them look more realistic. They attached an alarm clock to them for a detonator and enough electric cord to make it look real, then they placed the sticks in a pack and strapped it around your chest. Then they dragged you out to face the door, propped up between the guy holding the detonator and another who held the barrel of his M1 against your head, and you sat there waiting for the first boot or battering ram to hit the door, the rush …”

  “Aaaaaugh,” said the ghost.

  “I’ve thought a lot about you at that moment, the longest moment of your life. You were like the young Dostoyevsky facing his firing squad. Time stretched out interminably, as though each second had become an ellipsoid precipitated by eternity. What did you think about? In one sense, you were privileged. The dead don’t always get to have a dress rehearsal …”

  Without being aware of it I’d put down the empty bottle and picked up the shotgun while I’d been talking. It was loaded. I pointed it in the approximate direction of the front door.

  “Watch out, Mr. Minister! Any second now, the firefight is going to start, the clock is ticking … The dry blast of detonators, bullets whizzing through your guts! Your captors are trembling like hell and they have their fingers on the triggers. Your heart is pounding, you’re saying your prayers, your life has become nothing but a simple exchange, like currency. And …”

  “Noooooo!”

  “And nothing. Nothing happens. One of the guys finally gets up and goes to the window, and what does he see? A police raid is, in fact, taking place, but they’re raiding the house next door! Who lives there? Kids with long hair, according to Richard Godefroid. For some reason they hadn’t been heard from for a while. Five days later, neighbours will tell the police that the house next door had been empty for a month. How do you explain that, eh? Hey!”

  The ectoplasm had leapt to his feet and was charging at me, a howl on his lips. Without thinking I pivoted ninety degrees and fired from the hip. Loud, heavy detonation. I thought the house was falling down around my head. The ghost brushed past me in the hallway, I felt his breath on my face, coming from the glacial blackness of vast amounts of nothingness. I fired again, point blank. I saw him run toward the window, jump, pass through the glass, and run off in long strides into the morning’s half-light, like Big Chief at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  *

  In Kaganoma, hearing a rifle blast was not unusual. During the hunting season, the deep silence was often broken by sudden bursts of 12-gauge shotguns and .30-06s, followed by the return of the deep silence. Powder burns on the four walls was a little harder to explain. But making a living as a writer and being a hermit in the process of losing his mind in the deep woods went a long way to explaining many things, and maybe even would serve as an excuse.

  The first blast passed above the kitchen table and carved a hole in the north-facing window about the size of a fist. The second went through the wall below the stairs, making a nice clean round hole in the drywall, but not doing much other damage. After blinking a few times in the rush of cold air coming through the window, and staring stupidly at the empty Calvados bottle, Samuel cut a square of cardboard from a box of books and taped it to the glass. The thermometer was registering thirty-eight degrees below zero, Celsius.

  “Can I speak to Mr. Guy Dumont, please?”

  “What about?”

  “About getting an assignment. Any assignment.”

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Big. It’s Sam. You wouldn’t by any chance have a story about a young singer who was abused by her father and uncles and manager you wanted me to write, would you?”

  “The same old Sam, still hard up. You sound terrible. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle, don’t worry. Come on, Big Guy, for the insignificant sum of five thousand smackers I would do just about anything except shine shoes. Fix the commas in a six-hundred-page history of federal-provincial relations. I need to suffer and be redeemed.”

  “And I don’t like the idea of the business I founded being mistaken for a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia. But as it happens I do have a manuscript that might interest you. I think it might be just up your alley …”

  “I’m on the financial ropes and you’re offering me a job that’s right up my alley? No kidding, Big, I’m touched. Does it have a title?”

  “Wait, let me see … Ah, yes, The Traverse.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No, it also has a subtitle: The Story of My Captivity, by John Travers.”

  In splendid isolation, in front of my computer in the middle of the forest, I was hyperlinked, my brain had become a nanoplot, lit up under a celestial sphere and sprinkled with infinite numerical permutations. My head was being bombarded with a million frequencies, satellite waves, and information packets. Each hauled a trailer full of fragments of the world it had plunged into, like roots in its patch of earth. I sent out my lines, watched the word tapped into the search engine disappear into the immensity, like a fisherman with his first pre-sonar hunched over the dark sea. Blocks of sound in a saturated void:

  François Langlais:

  François Langlais, alias Pierre Chevrier. Born 1947. Member of a Quebec terrorist organization named Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ), responsible for many bombing attempts and kidnappings committed during the 1960s and 70s.

  Arrested for carrying an illegal weapon in France at the end of the 1960s, sentenced to two years in prison. He became familiar with ways of making bombs and conducting kidnappings that would later serve him well in Quebec.

  In the summer of 1970, Langlais travelled with other Quebec terrorists to Jordan, to receive commando training in a camp run by the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPFLP). At the same time, the FLQ announced that they were planning to launch a selective assassination campaign in Quebec.

  Langlais was a member of the Rebellion Cell that kidnapped and held hostage the British commercial attaché John Travers the next October, thereby unleashing a political crisis unprecedented in the annals of Quebec history. On October 10, the Chevalier Cell al
so went into action, kidnapping and later assassinating the number-two man in the provincial government, Paul Lavoie. The hoped-for uprising not taking place, Langlais and other members of the Rebellion Cell negotiated the life of their hostage in exchange for safe conduct to Cuba.

  After a twelve-year exile in Cuba and France, François Langlais returned to Quebec and was immediately arrested, subjected to a trial, and sentenced to two years less a day for his participation in the kidnapping of John Travers. He would be out on parole less than a month later.

  At first reading, two or three elements in the Wikipedia entry didn’t add up. First, the story of his arrest for carrying an illegal weapon was news to me. Did he invent it, and if so, where did it come from? My request for information addressed to the Prefect of Police at the Prefecture of Paris was, by all evidence, quickly relegated to the bottom of one of those forgotten stacks that make up that hexagonal labyrinth’s charm.

  The Wikipedia entry for le Chevreuil rehashed the well-known article from the Sun from November 25, about a possible link between the FLQ’s Pierre and the international terrorists Zadig and Madwar, even suggesting that they had been to the same training camp in Jordan. Otherwise, how else to explain that the first kidnapping plot, which was nipped in the bud in February, had been aimed at the Israeli consul in Montreal?

  These questions continued to spin around in my head for days on end. A visitor would have been able to follow my trail by looking at the brown, wet spots on the floor left by my too-full cup of coffee that was always overflowing. I didn’t shave for weeks. The mirror reflected the eyes of an idiot staring into the dimly glowing distance somewhere above my head while my unbrushed hair shot flashes of static electricity into the bad light. The telephone never rang. The world shrank from my door. I knew that I was on the right track, but that was all I knew.

  I had followed the debate about the fallibility of the online encyclopedia with interest. A fascinating project except for its principal flaw: the autoregulation of the system. One way of dealing with the problem was to remember that there’s no smoke without some form of combustion. No effect without its cause. That in our thermodynamic universe, absolute disinterest is an illusion. A causal chain, a root of sense, attaches the most illusory hoax to reality. Conclusion: a pure lie is an impossibility. Arrested for carrying an illegal weapon in France at the end of the 1960s, sentenced to two years in prison. It was then that he became familiar with ways of making bombs and conducting kidnappings that would later serve him well in Quebec. A truth hidden in the chaos of stories? Or a simple bit of gossip? These sentences had been tapped out on a keyboard by some anonymous contributor, someone who must have had a reason for doing so, that was what interested me. Where did the truth end and the legend begin?

  When Noune jumped onto my desk to rub against my shoulder or cheek, she sometimes stepped on the keys of my computer keyboard, and what she typed probably made as much sense as anything I typed. When I stuffed another wild cherry log into the stove, the nails in the walls contracted with a sharp snap in the glacial night, and it was as if I were hearing music in my brain.

  The night was getting on. I had gone back to sit in my office with a cup of anemic coffin varnish and reread the Wikipedia article for the dozenth time, when suddenly something leapt to my eyes.

  The keywords that appeared at the top of the Web page read as follows: article, discussion, modify, history. I clicked history.

  I discovered that the online encyclopedia gave access to the timeline of corrections, additions, crossings out, rewritings, and various other textual interventions that were normally eliminated by editorial work. It gave access to the history, not only of the subject of the article, but also of the article itself.

  Fascinated, I worked backward down the chain of changes, jumping from one version to the next, following in reverse the thread of a series of modifications, mostly minor, but exhibiting a logical and fateful progression. It was as if, before my very eyes, the text opened like a flower to reveal the secret at its core, a sort of semantic buried bone that, exposed little by little to the light of day, eventually became the only thing visible. I then read the following curious notice:

  François Langlais learned the art of terrorism in a camp for Palestinian commandos. Then he participated in numerous secret operations in Quebec during the 1970s. The Langlais family eventually moved to Alberta, Canada’s oil-producing province, where it continued its struggle for Quebec independence. Today, a new generation of Langlais (including, among others, Dan Langlais and Ray Langlais) has emerged in the west of the country. It actively supports the FLQ and other radical groups linked, according to Canadian and American secret services, to the Islamic terrorist movement (Jihad).

  This time the joke seemed obvious: the struggle for Quebec independence taken up in Alberta by a third generation, with Al-Qaida lurking in the background? Whatever!

  It was a wink and a nudge, a joke among friends.

  I read the entry again and again. It was quite frankly hilarious. The sun would rise another day, I would sleep through another night. Then I jumped.

  I grabbed a pen and the first piece of paper that came to hand, and wrote the following words:

  Dan Langlais = Daniel

  Ray Langlais = Raymond

  = Raymond Brossard and Daniel Prince = Zadig and Madwar

  The next thing I knew I was standing in the snow, my eyes raised to the sky and its millions of stars. I played with drawing lines between them, making constellations, some familiar, others pure inventions. And in the frozen silence, all combinations were possible. To the east, the band of dark blue swelled behind the contrasting silhouettes of the evergreens. Not a sound could be heard, except for the vibrations from deep space that seemed to emanate from things themselves, from deaf life on a wild winter night at the edge of a northern lake.

  They won’t catch me firing a 12-gauge shotgun in the house again, no sir. I was no fool, I wasn’t going to prove them right. Before throwing myself on the bed, I decided that if anyone in this vast universe wanted to play me for a fool, he would have to pay dearly for it.

  RENÉ LAFLEUR VERSUS

  THE QUEEN

  “ … THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, and nothing but the truth. Say: I swear.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah what?”

  “I swear.”

  “Your witness, Maître Grosleau.”

  “Mr. Massicotte … If I understand alright, your actual profession is …”

  “Er, social coordinator.”

  “And …”

  “And I deliver chicken in my spare time. I worked two years for Baby Barbecue.”

  “Good. You are how old?”

  “Er …”

  “What year were you born?”

  “Do I have to answer that?”

  Sitting at the back of the courtroom, in the last row of seats, Chevalier looked up from his open notebook.

  “It’s not as if this were your first time in court, Mr. Massicotte,” the prosecutor said quietly. “The court already has this information. I’m only asking you to confirm it. Just to break the ice, if that’s all right with you.”

  “I’m thirty-six.”

  “How old?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  In the section of the courtroom reserved for the press, the reporters remained impassive. But at the back of the spectators’ section, his high creased forehead clearly visible at the end of the row, Citizen Branlequeue was scribbling away in his notebook.

  In the defendant’s box, René Lafleur, his eyes half-closed, was imagining himself balancing his canoe while casting a Mepps fly, a Black Fury No. 3, beyond a bed of water lilies that bordered the channel between the islands in Boucherville. Around him, light and reflections played on the water, pure Monet, and René, a practical man, was happy just feeling the all-embracing warmth of the sun on his skin, the gentle rocking of the wavelets that rippled in the channel like a muted echo of the river through a wall of vegetation.
A sudden pressure, the rod bends, the feeling of moving weight at the end of it, the empearled line, taut, vibrating … the large-mouth bass must weigh a kilo, it strikes, leads with its nose, and leaps out of the water.

  René remembers these things, the crunching of snowshoes on the deep, fine, dry snow of January; the clucking of autumn grouse under cranberry and hawthorn shrubs; the resinous smell borne on the breeze of a June day on a lake full of trout; and the freshness of the atomized, iridescent water suspended above the chaotic rocks in a northern rapids. In prison, such memories had helped him keep himself together.

  It was 1973, and things had changed in the two years since his older brother, who had been found guilty of first-degree murder after a hasty trial, had been sent to a maximum security federal prison. Jean-Paul had defended himself, Gode had not. In the end, it hadn’t made a bit of difference: the authorities had put the death of Lavoie on their backs and they had accepted it. As for Ben Desrosiers, who had not been directly involved in the assassination, he had been given twenty years for his part in the kidnapping.

  In 1973, things worked differently, mostly because the flamboyant Maître Brien was out of prison. He had been acquitted on a charge of seditious conspiracy and had returned to the bar and re-established his practice. He had triumphed over the harassment of the judicial authorities, crossed the desert of administrative obstacles inflicted by the bar association, and was once again a force to be reckoned with.

  Another difference since 1971: René was being tried in Montreal’s municipal courthouse, not in a room in the headquarters of the QPP. The special trial on rue Parthenais was now a curiosity of history.

  Maître Brien had explained to his client that the evidence against him was weak. A neighbour who claimed to have seen him at the wheel of a white Chevrolet on rue Collins sometime during the week in question. And experts had found his fingerprints on a box of chicken. “I’ll beat that evidence raw,” the lawyer had promised him.