October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “I can’t take your hand. I hope you understand …”

  He turned, raised the pillow, and held it against his chest and face, then threw himself head-first at the window, passing soundlessly through it and disappearing on the other side into the blinding whiteness of fresh snow that covered the countryside. Then I smelled smoke, and heard, finally, the crackling and snapping of flames in the stairway. The smoke detector started drilling into my cranium.

  “No …”

  I charged into my office and began hauling out bankers’ boxes and chucking them out the window, like ballast thrown overboard so that my house would go up in flames. Folders flew out one after another, the whole history in separate pieces, the puzzle of all these words and all these names that corresponded to lives, some of which had been lived in the vast unknown of the real: General Bédard, Uncle Bob, Madame Corps, Zadig and Madwar, Chevreuil, Gode, Lancelot, la Bellechasse, Maître Brien, Corbeau, Machinegun Martinek, the chicken delivery guy, the Fat Cop …

  Even Chevalier Branlequeue. Goodbye and good sailing!

  Finally I grabbed my laptop and threw it into the snow, five metres down.

  When I left the office, the stairwell was already breathing red flames and pumping them up to the second floor, and the heat was cooking my right shoulder. I went back into the bedroom, threw a housecoat over my shoulders and, seeing the terrified cat, chased it under the bed and went after it into a nest of dust bunnies. I threw it out the window, following after it through the broken glass, to land in a stand of young saplings that settled me gently to the ground on boughs cushioned with fresh snow.

  On my road above the house, I met firemen wearing gas masks and fireproof suits that made them look as though they were going off to wage chemical warfare against Saddam Hussein. Three huge, fluorescent-yellow trucks were coming up the road with difficulty between the rows of spruce. Someone tossed a blanket over my shoulders and it slid down onto the ground without my lifting a finger to stop it. A female police officer spoke to me and couldn’t seem to make head or tail of my explanations. It wasn’t complicated, in any case. I looked for the cat, it was there, somewhere in the snowy whiteness. And Paul Lavoie, have you seen him? The cabinet minister assassinated in 1970? If you did, you weren’t even born yet.

  To continue along the road as though I had somewhere important to get to but hard to make sense of was probably a mistake. I didn’t turn around when she called out something that sounded like: Freeze!, which was funny, given the temperature and what I was wearing. I started to tell her that maybe she’d seen too many cop shows on television, and then I just gave up.

  That was how I left Kaganoma Lake, strapped to a stretcher, with 50,000 volts in my chest.

  *

  Sam plunged the blackened camping kettle into the deep snow, tamped it down with his bare hand, thinking that they’d probably never get used to this strange thing, snow. And with another sweeping gesture, as though scooping a fish into a hand-held net, he returned to the cabin and placed the kettle on the woodstove.

  Around the head of the lake, where the spruce and Jack pines had never known a saw, the countryside resembled what the first trappers must have seen as they hacked a portage route with their axes after ascending the Ottawa River, and the Kinojévis met them as they broke out of the woods on their snowshoes: an infinite expanse of intense white, fringed by a dark circle of evergreens weighed down by piles of sculptured snow under a sickly sun. Caw, caw, a coal-black crow passed by in a deep blue sky.

  While waiting for the snow to melt, he sat at the old pink Formica table and flipped through the cabin’s guest book: a simple notebook with a stiff cover left for the use of visitors on the trail:

  It’s beautiful, but the trees aren’t very big. And no trace of the great moose in these swamps. Frankly, if you’re looking for big game, it’s much better in the Ngorongoro crater, where at least there were some gnus (www.ngorongoro.com), or even in the Canadian Rockies, with all their wapitis that seem to be posing for photographs.

  The bugs were a real pain (we mean the insect kind, obviously, ha ha ha) …

  They were probably from France.

  When he was being held for observation in the hospital after being tasered (according to the local police report, Officer Kathy Drolet had zapped him with all those volts and secured him to the stretcher to protect him from himself when he put himself at risk of serious exposure) and they asked him if he wanted someone to be notified, Marie-Québec’s name was the only one that came to the tip of his tongue. She dropped everything. And instead of bringing flowers, she showed up with Three Yellow Roses, the collection of stories by Raymond Carver. It was the kind of thing one doesn’t forget.

  After his night of observation, Sam went to live with her, in her three-and-a-half beside the foundry, where they spent three days in bed, making love, eating pizza, and watching the ten o’clock news and uncut movies on the Télé-Québec channel.

  Remembering all this, he began to feel himself getting hard again. He took off his T-shirt and shorts and got back into bed.

  “Mmmmh.” She opened her eyes. “Why don’t we just stay here?”

  “You mean …”

  “Tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow, or the day after that.”

  “And what would we live on?”

  “Porcupines. And beaver stew, essentially. When I was small, I went with my father on his trapline and it was me who had to finish off the ones who were wounded. Say yes, Sam …”

  “But it isn’t our cabin …”

  “No, but no one uses it except for two weeks a year, during the hunting season. It’s ours for the rest of the time. Fifty weeks a year. And for the two other weeks …”

  “We could go to Mexico.”

  Marie-Québec looked at him. Wide awake, now.

  “Are you serious? About Mexico, I mean?”

  “More serious than that. We could spend the winter down there.”

  “Using what for money?”

  “Big Dumont owes me a cheque.”

  The water in the kettle began whistling gently.

  “No automatic coffee maker,” Sam declared.

  “No. No desk lamp, vacuum cleaner, Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door, laser printers, or toasters.”

  “No neighbours playing music in their kitchen. No telemarketers. No problems with the shower head.”

  The air in the cabin was redolent of warmth, steam, wet wool, wood smoke, sex, and the Nicaraguan coffee they’d ground the night before.

  Marie-Québec was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her eye on Sam’s erection, the nipples on her small breasts jutting up into the smoky air like rifle targets.

  He took her in his arms, picked her up, and she guided him inside her, they fused their two bodies together, he held her thighs in his hands and she, thus impaled, wrapped her arms around his neck, and he turned around and headed to the door.

  “Sam, what are you … No!”

  “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

  “Stop!”

  When he opened the door, the thick warmth of the cabin met the wall of cold air. A low of minus twenty Celsius, in which their interlaced, tropical bodies began instantly to steam. All this naked whiteness. They disappeared into the field of light and the silent cry of a spruce grouse.

  AT THE AIGLE FIN, OR J.C.

  IN QUEBEC AT LAST

  NO KIDDING, I’M ALWAYS MOVED when I see Quebec City springing up on the horizon, the Old Capital perched on its headland, beside the great river, whose actual shores are Autoroutes 20 and 40. Call me sentimental if you like, but to know that the only parliamentary assembly devoted in principle to the defence of the rights of the French-Canadian nation is found in this city gives me goosebumps. Not you?

  I can hear you asking me why I don’t vote for separatism, or even why didn’t I run for the Parti Québécois in the by-election in Vautrin? I can tell you why: I don’t like René Lévesque. He’s sexually obsessed. And I don’t like Bourg
ault, either. He’s a queer. I’m speaking in confidence here, alone with my tape recorder, at the wheel of my car. So, you see, I can speak frankly.

  The Parti Québécois could have been an honest offspring of the Liberal Party, if there could ever be such a thing. I mean: part of the family, one that left home after an unfortunate dispute about lineage. But Bourgault’s RIN was the Trojan Horse by means of which street disorder and radicalism infiltrated into the heart of democratic structures. The PQ is its dissolute son. The support of the unions and popular groups made it a gangrened left leg of egalitarian ideology. Whereas I, at the heart of the good old Quebec Liberal Party, at least had the possibility of contributing to internal change, even within the Pouvoir-Power machine. Yes, I did.

  I won’t describe Quebec City to you. I haven’t come here as a tourist. Down there is the Legislature, where from now on I have a desk waiting for me in the back benches, on the majority side, last row. Among the purebreds. Under the wheels of my Buick is the Grande-Allée. The Aigle Fin, do you know it? It’s the name of the restaurant where we go. But I’m a good half-hour early, so let me suggest I leave my car near the Saint-Louis gate, and you follow me, okay? And I’ll tell you a story while my steps lead us along the old route, down rue Sainte-Anne, rue du Fort, rue Saint-Louis, Dufferin Terrace, the wooden steps on the cliff, the cannons aimed to the south and the great brother enemy, out onto the Plains of Abraham, the classic loop, as if I were an old mare carrying a mini-tape recorder instead of a sack of oats. I could even take you for a ride in my calêche.

  It was three years ago, at the Aigle Fin on Grande-Allée. Paul Lavoie asked me to have lunch with him. I was his political attaché. The justice portfolio had eluded him, and he’d consoled himself with that of labour and immigration. An old-school nationalist, he would willingly have accommodated himself to dictatorship if it meant a chair at the caudillo. That day, October 6, 1970, in the absence of our premier, who was down south selling our great northern rivers to the sharks on Wall Street, Lavoie was in command, his tie already loosened, flipping through the newspaper headlines at his usual table in the back when I joined him.

  The Aigle Fin is a chic version of those coffee houses and cafés in which the main decorative elements are old fishing nets studded with balsa-wood floats and desiccated starfish. At the Aigle, the whole divider between the room at the back and the corridor leading to the toilets consisted of lobster tanks in excellent condition, with dark green, taxidermied crustaceans holding their tails and claws in menacing poses against an inky blue backdrop. Despite this clear inducement, the upper-level civil servants and parliamentarians who frequented this famous establishment in the capital choose, more often than not, to go with the large T-bone steak, a pound of carefully weighed meat hung on a bone strong enough to knock out an army of Redcoats and served with baked potatoes. It was particularly true of the political generation to which my patron belonged, nurtured as he was on the traditional meat-potato-veg inherited from our pemmican-gumming ancestors. That day, my boss hardly glanced at the open menu in front of him before ordering the famous Moose Jaw beef.

  He was a bon vivant, a congenial fellow, as they say, all red-cheeked. At night, at home, he no doubt drank milk and ate those little Vachon cakes, but at lunchtime he washed down his steak with a bottle or two of beer like a true man of the people.

  We talked about the specialist doctors’ strike. The kidnapping of the British commercial attaché the previous evening was not yet the very big deal it was soon to become. Travers was a diplomat and was therefore the federal government’s responsibility. The Québécois were smiling smugly behind their hands. What’s it to do with us? Not much …

  When we talked about the kidnapping that day, Lavoie said to me:

  “If the FLQ boys allow him to write, he has a chance of getting out of it …”

  I asked him what he meant by that. He leaned toward me with a sly smile:

  “What would you do, if you were in his shoes?”

  “The grave,” I said without thinking. “I mean, I would remain quiet.”

  My response disappointed him, I could tell.

  “Let’s try to put ourselves in his position. He has fallen into the hands of a band of young idiots who have given the government forty-eight hours to accept their conditions, or else they will take care of him. They seem serious. If he thinks about it, he’ll realize that the only chance of being rescued quickly is to help the police find him. So, find some way to get a message out to the authorities …”

  “Yes, of course, but one of the kidnappers’ conditions is that that police stop searching for him.”

  “Surely Travers isn’t stupid enough to believe that the police are going to stop looking for him! He’s no fool. He knows full well that the government can’t negotiate …”

  “Really?”

  He leaned back in his chair and lowered his eyes. His fingers instinctively went to the knot in his tie.

  “No government of a civilized, democratic country would negotiate with terrorists. Travers’s only chance is for the police to find where he’s being held as quickly as possible. And so, if I were him and my kidnappers gave me a chance to write a letter, I’d bury a coded message in it somehow. It seems to me to go without saying.”

  “I don’t know. If you’re caught, you’re as good as dead!”

  “Maybe, but a death that, at least, will have occurred on the field of battle, using the only weapons you had at your disposal, namely the words you write on a sheet of paper. Better than waiting to be strangled like a chicken.”

  “You think they’ll …”

  He patted his lips with his napkin.

  “No, Jean-Claude. They’re good little boys from Quebec. They wouldn’t hurt a flea …”

  That was our conversation, essentially, to the best of my recollection.

  The next Saturday, I was in my living room drinking a gin and tonic, sitting in front of the television, half-listening to my wife calling from the kitchen to ask me if I wanted stew for supper — Irish stew, potatoes, carrots, cubes of lamb, onion, and not much else, a good, hearty, autumn meal even better the second day — when the telephone rang. I got up to answer it and learned that my boss had just been nabbed by the FLQ in front of his house. I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty. Then I looked out the window. It was getting dark. It wasn’t more than a half-hour since the televised press conference given by the justice minister explaining the government’s position (no concessions to terrorists). The news came like a blow to the forehead. I hung up and went to make myself another gin and tonic.

  I can’t tell you what a horror the next few days were. Nights tossing in my bed like a capon on a spit, days lived in a fog. But this story isn’t about me.

  The next day (Sunday), after an anonymous phone call to a radio station, a communiqué was found in a trash bin in the centre of the city. A new terrorist cell claimed responsibility for Saturday night’s strike. The financial Chevalier Cell was named after François-Marie-Something-or-Other, Chevalier de Lorimier, a patriot who was hanged in Pied-de-Courant in 1839. The cell gave the government until ten o’clock that night to respond to the FLQ’s requests — the famous seven conditions, including the release of all political prisoners and the payment of a $500,000 ransom in gold ingots. Failure to meet these demands would result in the hostage, rebaptized the Minister of Unemployment and Assimilation, being executed at the end of the period of grace.

  A bit later, a second communiqué was found in a bus shelter. This one had been written by hand. “The least hesitation on the part of the authorities,” the kidnappers had written, “will [be] fatal to the minister.” And: “We’ve already made a huge concession by promising to return him safe and sound. Do not ask more of us than that.”

  Jesus Christ, I thought.

  Attached to the communiqué was a letter from Lavoie to his wife, which was made public. He’d dated it October 12, 1970, 7 a.m. (a slight error on his part: it was only the eleventh). “Wha
t’s important is that the authorities budge,” my boss confided to his wife.

  That same magnificent Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend, toward the end of the afternoon, another garbage can, a new communiqué. This one was typewritten. It reiterated the ultimatum and its deadline: ten o’clock that night. “No more paternalism, no more maybes, no more promises,” warned the Chevalier Cell. “We know what we want and where we’re going and we are determined to get there.”

  A handwritten letter from Lavoie to the premier, Albert Vézina, accompanied this message, along with a dozen credit cards from the hostage’s wallet intended to prove the authenticity of the communication. Honestly, even I was astonished at how many credit cards he carried around with him.

  Lavoie’s letter to the premier was a bald appeal for negotiations. “We are,” he wrote, “in the presence of a well organized escalation that will only end with the liberation of the political prisoners. After me, there will be a third, then a fourth and a twelfth.

  “My very dear Albert,” he went on, “what follows is very, very important: you must order the immediate cessation of all police searches. Their continuance will be my death sentence. On the other hand, if the liberation and departure of the political prisoners are brought to a good end, I am certain that my personal safety will be guaranteed. We are very close to a solution, I can feel it, since there is no real animosity between my kidnappers and I. My fate now collates with theirs. It is up to you to insure my swift return to Parliament Hill in support of you, like the faithful right arm that I promised you I would be. Your decision: my life or my death. I am counting on you, and thank you.

  “Warm regards,

  “Paul Lavoie.”

  Described as “pathetic” by the media, this apostrophe to the premier caused high emotion in political circles as well as with the general population. Here was Little Albert’s right-hand man, until then a fierce defender of the intransigent position the federal government had taken on terrorism, suddenly becoming a turncoat, apparently cracking after little more than a day in the hands of his kidnappers! It didn’t sit well.