October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  I knew what she was going to ask me.

  “Gode … Are you ever going to tell me why you’re mixed up in all this?”

  “The less you know, the better.”

  Her eyes went from me to the bedroom, where Jean-Paul was snoring like a fighter jet.

  “He scares me …”

  “Jean-Paul? Come on.”

  “I’m telling you, he scares me. Tomorrow, you’ve got to tell him he has to leave, okay?”

  “I can’t do that. He’s wanted by the police. If he goes, I go with him.”

  “If you get my brother mixed up in this business, I’ll …”

  “You’ll what, Marie-France?”

  We looked at one another. We had come to a certain pass.

  “If he keeps his mouth shut,” I said, “there won’t be a problem. And that goes for you, too.”

  Down the hall, in the girls’ room, the two lovebirds were screwing as if there were no tomorrow, and no doubt they were right. Marie-France came and lay down beside me on the sofa and let me put my arms around her, but that was all. Nothing else to do but listen to the two sex maniacs in the next room groaning and sighing, and the mattress shrieking as if it were being torn apart.

  Two hours later, Marie-France woke me up by shaking the morning newspaper in front of my face. My portrait and that of René were there beside Jean-Paul’s on the wanted poster. The reward for any information leading to our arrest was fixed at $75,000. The kidnappers of Travers were worth another $75,000.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, but I already knew the answer.

  “I’ve rented a room in town … I can’t go on living here.”

  I was completely sure she wouldn’t denounce us. But that didn’t stop me, when she went through the door, from feeling well and truly fucked.

  THE CHESS GAME

  THE MORNING PIERRE LEARNED OF Ben’s arrest, Travers turned his back on him, sitting on a hard, wooden straight-backed chair beside a card table on which was the previous day’s copy of the Montreal Sun and a chess board. The hostage was wearing a white shirt with the collar unbuttoned and a charcoal-grey woollen vest. His hood had been lifted so that he could read. Its dark material framed his face and encircled his neck and shoulders like a chador. The TV in the far corner was on, but the sound was turned down so that it was nothing but a flickering square of contrasting light and darkness. The single window was boarded up with a sheet of plywood nailed in place. In the middle of the room, a pillow without a slip and a grey woollen blanket had been thrown over a mattress on the floor. A white sheet pinned to one wall and bolts screwed into the floor completed the room’s decor. The diplomat was reading an Agatha Christie in French: Murder on the Orient Express, a pocket edition. Seated behind him, on the floor, his back propped against the wall beside the television, Pierre was holding his M1 by the barrel. The sawn-off stock trailed down to the floor. His face was uncovered.

  “What’s so funny this morning?” asked the hostage, in broken French, addressing Pierre without turning to look at him, as he had been instructed to do.

  The British accent gave his quite passable French a kind of distinction. He liked to talk.

  “The news,” Pierre replied. “The police have found the apartment where our friends were hiding out, up on the mountain. But they only succeeded in arresting one of them. The three others were in a closet with a false wall, and they stayed in it until the next night. When the cops guarding the apartment left for dinner, our guys quietly came out of their hidey-hole, slipped out the back door, and grabbed a taxi! Arsène Lupin couldn’t have done a better job,” le Chevreuil concluded, laughing.

  He had lived in England and spoke excellent English, but this was Montreal, and he wanted to mark his territory.

  “The police aren’t exactly brilliant,” observed Travers. “Didn’t they … leave someone behind to keep an eye on the premises?”

  Pierre took a moment to think before replying.

  “No … why would they? What are you insinuating?”

  “Nothing. I’m just saying it wasn’t very wise of them, that’s all.”

  “It sounds like you’ve got something in mind, Travers.”

  The hostage smiled to himself.

  “I think you have something in mind. What happened to your friends?”

  “Someone helped them out. They’re in a sugar cabin somewhere.”

  “A … Sorry,” Travers said, “I didn’t catch that word … a what?”

  “A sugar cabin. You know, sugar, as in ‘sugar off.’” He was suddenly annoyed, for some reason. He improved his mood by toying with the back of Travers’s cowled neck with the barrel of his M1.

  The hostage isn’t exactly smiling, but he almost is. A glimmer shines in the back of his deep-set eyes. He’s sitting on a case of dynamite, at least that’s what it says on it. His torso is sharply silhouetted against the whiteness of the sheet in the background. The box beneath him is empty.

  “I feel like I’m in showbiz,” he says in his most arch tone.

  “You are,” Lancelot assures him, clicking the camera’s shutter.

  Élise absently aims the assault weapon at the aging body visible through the steam running down the shower curtain. The door to the bathroom is open behind her.

  Elsewhere in the apartment, Corbeau is watching television, Lancelot is typing a communiqué on the typewriter, Pierre, curled up in the fetid folds of an old sofa chair, is trying to concentrate on the issue of L’Express that contains the famous interview in which Jean-Paul talks about the FLQ.

  Sometimes Nick Mansell comes and leaves with the latest communiqué. He takes care of distribution, and usually is careful to avoid the crowded apartment.

  Suddenly the sound of running water stops, and Élise turns away slowly from the curtain that is briskly pulled aside by the hostage; she sees him dripping, nude. She notes the greying hair, the glistening drops of water caught in his pubic bush. Travers makes no effort to cover himself.

  Without looking at him, she tosses him a terry-cloth towel, her eyes staring at her own blushing image in the fogged-over mirror. She is twenty-five. She likes to say she’s getting wrinkles. She wants to have children, later, but in the meantime is aiming, almost point blank, the barrel of an M1 assault rifle at a man who is naked, virile, and unarmed.

  Travers, the towel wrapped around his shoulders, is still displaying his virility. He has the beginnings of an erection. Now he slowly dries his ribs.

  “Would you mind covering your privates?” she asks drily.

  “My what? My soldiers?”

  “Come on, Travers! Dry your tired, drooping pizzle and get dressed. Let’s get out of here.”

  The hostage vigorously rubs the towel between his legs and upper thighs.

  “How do you say … in French, to dip one’s wick? It’s been six weeks now that I haven’t dipped my wick. Well, you know, even at my age …” He jiggles his penis and calls out like a young moose in rut: “Come on, I’m so horny! I’m hot to trot, baby …”

  “Stop it!” Élise cries, shaking the machine gun back and forth as though trying to brush the steam aside.

  Travers doesn’t stop. He’s as cool and controlled as a talk-show host.

  “You have … what, a problem? With me? Or is it your husband who’s the problem? Is he still … what’s the word? Elsewhere?”

  “He’s out buying newspapers.”

  “That’s what he told you.”

  “Get dressed, you old pervert! You sleazebag!”

  “You want to be like a man, do the same thing men do for your revolution, but if you were a man, Élise, you wouldn’t have a problem looking at me, so why …”

  “Mind your own business and I’ll mind mine, okay?”

  “And what would your business be, miss? Doing the dishes?”

  When Lancelot finally sticks his nose in the bathroom, he sees his sister shoving the barrel of her automatic deep into the diplomat’s hirsute belly. Travers is bent double, awkwardly t
rying to protect himself with the aid of his towel.

  “Stop it! Can’t you see he’s just playing with your head?”

  Pierre is walking down Saint-Catherine. He stops in a convenience store, buys cigarettes. Newspapers. He leaves, looking to the left and to the right. Goes into a tavern. He orders a draft, then a second. Over his glass, he surreptitiously watches the other clients. Scrutinizes the regulars, looking for an overlooked detail.

  Shoes a little too polished on that one.

  He knows they’re here, all around him. They’re toying with him.

  The sales rep eating pork tongue and a pickled egg, washing it down with a Dow.

  The man whose moist lips are pursed but no air is coming out of them.

  The one who comes up to you and offers to sell you some baseball tickets.

  He leaves. No one follows him. He takes the subway. The Orange Line toward Henri-Bourassa. In the car, he relaxes his surveillance, closes his eyes. Almost dozes.

  Not even in moments when his lucidity seems to give way to delusions of persecution can he convince himself that each of the nine other people in the car is a policeman in civilian clothing, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s watch team. That, however, is in fact the case.

  Lancelot waved the Montréal-Matin practically in his face.

  FLQ MEMBER HANGS SELF IN LONDON

  If the London Standard Tribune is to be believed, a young French-Canadian, Luc Goupil, described as a sympathizer with the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ), hanged himself last weekend in a prison cell in Reading, England.

  According to the article in this London newspaper, the young man of twenty-five hanged himself from the bars of his cell with the aid of his shirt just as the police at Scotland Yard were preparing to interrogate him about recent FLQ activities, in particular those of Jean Lancelot, suspected of being one of the principals responsible for the kidnapping of British diplomat John Travers …

  Pierre looked up from the newspaper.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Lancelot pulled up a chair and, sitting across from him, examined him attentively.

  “They killed him,” Pierre said, slowly shaking his head.

  “We don’t know that. Listen, it’s not as if we’re talking about a model of mental stability.”

  “They killed him,” Pierre repeated.

  He stood up. Headed for the door in a state of shock.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a walk. I need some air. I feel like I’m choking …”

  That night, he dreams he is climbing up a scaffold. The gallows have been erected in the middle of Hyde Park. A large but indistinct crowd has gathered around it. The hangman pulling the hood over his head is Karl Marx. While he places the noose around his neck, the maid who helps him grabs the condemned man’s sex and yanks it like a lever, as though his penis controls the opening of the trap, and the floor disappears from under his feet and he plunges, crying and gasping, into wakefulness.

  He stares up at the ceiling.

  The sound of the trap door in his dream exists in reality, but is coming from above rather than from under his feet, as though someone is slowly pushing a piece of heavy furniture across the floor of the upstairs apartment.

  At four o’clock in the morning.

  Footsteps, the creaking of joists. Then, nothing.

  Pierre remembers meeting the tenants of the apartment above theirs on the stairs, a couple, both tiny, is all he recalls of them.

  Then he thinks of himself as a child, a good Catholic, a cherubic server at mass in Quebec, kneeling before Cardinal Léger. He does not want to think about Goupil, with his angel’s voice, like an androgynous Mick Jagger. Where are his guardian angels now? Protect me. Did he ever believe? Monsters under his bed, the terror of the dark?

  The apartment above has again fallen silent. And Pierre is no longer a schoolboy. He tries to figure out what has changed. He knows.

  The guardian angels and the devils are working together now.

  John Travers, apparently well rested, was waiting for him in front of chessboard, across from the empty chair.

  Chevreuil sat down. He was wearing his hood. Travers let him have white. After a moment’s thought, he moved a pawn.

  “I could ask you what’s making you so … upset? Is that the right word? Yesterday …”

  “One of our friends is dead,” replied Pierre.

  “Oh. Was it … an accident?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Chevrier shot a feverish look at the hostage through the slits in his hood.

  Travers silently considered his opponent for a moment, then picked up the detective novel he’d left on the table. He’d finished it the night before.

  “Have you read this?”

  “Murder on the Orient Express,” Pierre read on the cover. “I’ve read it, but I forget how it ends.”

  He shrugged and moved a knight.

  “The victim, you will recall, died on a train, killed by twelve stabs of a knife …”

  “Now that you mention it …”

  “In the end,” said Travers, studying the chessboard square by square and then the eyes of his adversary through the holes in the hood, “we learn that the murder victim had been a kidnapper … a man who had kidnapped a girl and demanded a ransom for her, years ago. But when the ransom was paid, he reneged on his promise to release the girl, you see …”

  Pierre nodded without saying a word.

  “And so, later, he changed his identity and disappeared, but friends of the girl’s parents, you understand … these friends track him down and organize an act of vengeance. They’re all on the train, travelling under false identities, and they have him trapped.”

  Pierre looked at Travers. It was his turn to play.

  “There were twelve of them. They passed the knife one to the other, and each one took his or her turn plunging it into the kidnapper’s body. Twelve stabs … It’s a good book,” Travers added, and with a determined air he advanced his bishop and left it without protection among the opposing pawns.

  “You know what a gambit is, right?” he said.

  He’s trying to draw me into his territory, Pierre thought. His mouth was dry, he didn’t know why.

  “In French, Travers. Speak to me in French, okay?”

  “You know what a gambit is? What is it?”

  Pierre made no reply. He studied Travers’s position on the board.

  “A sacrifice,” Travers explained. “One piece sacrificed to gain a positional advantage …”

  “I see that,” said Pierre, and under the attentive eye of Her Majesty’s commercial attaché, he gobbled the proffered bishop and quickly stood up.

  “I have to go to the toilet.”

  Travers calmly handed him the latest edition of the Sun and smiled with a knowing look.

  “Need something to read?”

  Before the questioning look from his guard, the Englishman added:

  “Lots of people here in the apartment. I can understand that … Waiting for the right time, a quiet time, for the big moment.”

  “I’ve already got all the reading material I need,” Pierre said coldly.

  “Here,” said John Travers, holding his gaze. “Have a look at the Sun.”

  Pierre took the paper and turned on his heels. He handed his M1 to Corbeau, so the latter could keep an eye on the hostage during his absence.

  His pants down around his knees, Pierre quickly scanned the first page. Then, on page three, his eyes fell on the following headline:

  KEY PERSON IN CUSTODY

  TWO FLQ CELLS MET SECRETLY NOV. 3

  He read the entire article, quickly, then read it again. And again. He then focused his attention on the last paragraph.

  “While both groups each kidnapped a hostage, one group is definitely against the death penalty — for anyone — for themselves as well as for their hostage,” the source added.

  And, deep down in his guts, something let go.

>   FESTIVAL

  THE LITTLE CAMP RESEMBLED A battlefield when he opened his eyes. Zero dead, zero wounded. But two bodies found in a strange state. He scratched his pubic hair; there was a fine crust of dried sperm and vaginal mucus. Candles disposed here and there about the room had totally melted down: solid, liquid, solid again, like his penis.

  In the grey light of early dawn, Samuel saw a field mouse exploring the remains of their vegetable fried rice. Laundry had been hung up to dry from the ceiling joists. He raised an arm, let his hand slowly descend and settle onto the delicate fold in the curve formed by Marie-Québec’s side through the insulating material of the sleeping bag.

  In the middle of February, in the subpolar night of the great spruce forest, all it had taken the night before was two or three cherry logs to raise the mercury forty degrees inside the cabin and transform it into a sauna. The stove standing guard on the square of sheet metal screwed to the floor knew only two temperatures: too hot and too cold. They had put out their plates, turned over their wine glasses, and taken off their clothes as though they had suddenly caught fire, but their garments weren’t as hot as their skin had been as they searched for and found each other under the blankets. Large animals required large remedies.

  “What are you doing?” Marie-Québec asked.

  Samuel, in woollen underwear and worn T-shirt, was sipping his first coffee, looking out the window. Through the dirty pane of glass he could make out the tracks of the big cat he’d seen the night before, in the deep snow at the edge of the forest, beside the little lake called Laurendeau on the topo map of the area, and which they had reached by climbing on snowshoes up the stream at the head of the Kaganoma to this minuscule hunt camp. All around them was lynx country. And the camp, according to the ancient laws of forest hospitality, belonged for the moment to whoever heated it up.

  Sam shoved another log into the stove and returned to nestle himself against her warm, naked body under the mound of sleeping bags.