October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  But more than anything, he was aware that he was fighting the empire of Colonel Lapierre.

  He stopped.

  “May I have more tea, please?”

  “Certainly.”

  Gode shouted out to Ben, who made his way to the kitchen.

  “What do you do when you’re not kidnapping people?” Lavoie asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you have a hobby?”

  “Snowshoeing in winter. In summer I fish, when I can … and a bit of hunting, for small game.”

  “Have you ever fished salmon?”

  “Are you crazy? That’s for big shots, like you.”

  “I’ve never been a fan of fishing, myself. I’m a golfer, really.”

  “What a stupid sport. Running after a tiny ball.”

  After having slipped his hood over his head, Desrosiers brought in a rose-patterned cup of steaming tea.

  “I’m hungry,” Lavoie said, accepting the cup.

  “Too bad, there isn’t much left to eat.”

  “Why don’t you go to a grocer’s?”

  “Because it’s not a good time to go out. They’re arresting everyone.”

  “But we have to eat. Why not order something?”

  Godefroid and Ben looked at each other.

  “I’m hungrier than a rabid dog,” Ben said.

  “I’d go for some fried chicken,” Lavoie added.

  “Sure, a nice club sandwich wouldn’t hurt …”

  “There were three twenty-dollar bills in my wallet. Have you spent it all?”

  “There’s a twenty left,” Ben announced, looking at his comrade. “Not as dangerous this way, eh?”

  René had joined them. Gode suddenly felt the weight of his weariness. Of accumulated tension, of the too rare hours of restless sleep. The army had practically set up outside their door, and they were all at the end of their ropes.

  “Me,” René added, “I’d go for a nice chicken breast …”

  He was already looking for a notepad to take down everyone’s orders.

  “A carton of cigarettes, too, don’t forget the carton, okay?”

  “The last meal,” Gode thought to himself. He turned toward Lavoie.

  “We’re going to pick the order up at the end of the road, just in case you had any ideas.”

  Lavoie slapped the Underwood’s carriage return back into position.

  “I’m not done yet.”

  The small red car from Baby Barbecue’s restaurant hadn’t even turned its motor off before René ran out of the house and made his way to the street. He paid, leaving a tip for the delivery man, who watched him walk back in with a brown paper bag that contained the chicken boxes.

  He came back into the house, bringing with him the warm odour of perfectly roasted chicken, and walked into the kitchen, Gode at his heels. Two entire chickens, three club sandwiches, a carton of Export “A”: they’d pinched every penny out of that twenty-dollar bill. Something for everyone. Just as Gode, after taking the boxes out of the bag, was opening the containers to take an inventory of his goodies, Ben walked into the kitchen to take the hostage his meal. Gode threw him a look. He was about to say something, but it slipped his mind. For a moment. Just a moment.

  “I don’t hear the …”

  There came the noise of broken glass, right there, in the room, inside the horror show.

  BEN

  “HE DID WHAT?”

  Ben turned toward Jean-Paul.

  “He jumped through the window. He couldn’t jump out the lower half. Two sheets of glass and a screen. So he tried the upper half, holding a pillow in front of him. But he got stuck …”

  “Ah, shit …”

  “He cut himself. He was bleeding like a pig. Gode ran out of the house and picked up the pillow that had fallen on the other side, in the grass. I tore a sheet and started to wrap his wounds, he had one on his hand, another on the wrist of his other arm. He was bleeding all over the place. His bandages were soaked faster than we could tie them. He asked us to take him to a hospital. I grabbed a piece of rope and made him a tourniquet. And another on the other side. He told me to tighten it, he said it didn’t hurt. He was white as a sheet.

  “We brought him into the living room. He was bleeding a bit less. I think he must’ve lost half a pint at least. I washed his wounds with water and soap. Then I made him new bandages. He was still bleeding a little.

  “I told Gode and René that we had to either free him or find someone to take him to a hospital. And they told me to come here and tell you what happened. That you would know what to do …”

  “You can start by calming down.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To call my brother.”

  “Why don’t you call from here?”

  “Never know, line might be tapped …”

  It had been four days now since Jean-Paul had decided to lay low in Lison’s apartment, his friend from Montreal, in the South Central neighbourhood of the city, and maybe his nerves were playing tricks on him. But for a while now he’d been noticing unfamiliar movements in the area. So he’d redoubled his vigilance.

  “Do you think you were followed here?”

  “Do I think … no,” Ben replied. “Where are you going?”

  “To find a phone booth, I told you.”

  “You really think Lison’s might be tapped?”

  “You never know.”

  “What about the rue Collins telephone, then?”

  Jean-Paul stopped in the doorway.

  “Cut your bullshit, okay?”

  The night was cold and clear in the alley. A cry rang out in the shadows next to him, making him jump. Like a child crying. A shiver.

  Come here, he thought, my little Moses of the alleyways, perhaps you’re the one fate has chosen to lead the chosen people of Quebec out of bondage and through the American desert. Jean-Paul tiptoed toward the sound.

  Near an overturned garbage can, two alley cats faced each other. Jean-Paul, fascinated, watched the ritual of intimidation, the psychological confrontation. One of the cats was wearing a collar. Suddenly, it leaped up and tried to flee. The other cat jumped him from behind and the two beasts ended up rolling at Jean-Paul’s feet, a whirling mass of flesh and fur torn by claws and whistling spittle. The coward ended up leaping out of the battle, stomach against the ground, and Lafleur watched him clamber up a telephone pole.

  “You’re done for, now …”

  He shouldn’t have backed off, he thought, and left to find a phone booth.

  ECCE LYNX

  GODE MOVES THROUGH THE NORTHERN savanna. Before him stretch sparse rows of black spruce, twelve feet high, all the way to the horizon. In this country, when you unleash a dog he becomes a wolf. And it’s a lynx Gode sees before him now, walking toward him in the silence and whiteness of the snow, on its large padded paws. He won’t attack me, he thinks, unable to move, as though paralyzed while the lynx comes so close he brushes up against him like a cat, then climbs a nearby tree and jumps on him, wraps himself around Gode’s neck and shoulders like a heavy purring fur collar emitting a warm, suffocating, throbbing heat. “He’s eating my brain,” Gode has time to think, in his dream.

  When he opens his eyes, Gode’s head is buried under the sleeping bag and he’s breathing with difficulty. He emerges from the bag and takes a deep breath of the cold October night air, flowing into his room through the broken window. And as the lynx’s purring is transformed into the staccato growl of a helicopter overhead, it all comes back to him. He isn’t in the northern grasslands, but in some bungalow on the South Shore, near a street named Savane, with a hostage who had inflicted serious injuries on himself while trying to escape. That’s the truth of it. That’s the here and now.

  He finds René fighting off sleep on the living-room couch. In front of him, Paul Lavoie sits on a chair, white as a sheet, his eyes closed, his chin against his chest, seemingly unconscious. On his forearms and hands, makeshift bandages crusted with ha
lf-coagulated blood. He wears the wool sweater Ben put on him instead of his old shirt, which was drenched in blood.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “As you can see.”

  “We can’t leave him this way …”

  “No. We’re going to have to make a decision.”

  The previous night they’d heard Little Albert on television, justifying the imposition of martial law by the necessity of stopping the FLQ advancing to the fourth stage of its plan: selective assassinations.

  Selective assassinations! Gode and René had shaken their heads in disbelief.

  Then the premier had renewed his single and ultimate concession to the terrorists. Safe conduct to a country of their choice.

  “We have to kill him,” René said, after a tense silence.

  Gode grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall and held it out to him.

  “You wanna blow his head off? Be my guest …”

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist, for Christ’s sake.” René rubbed his eyes. “We can’t just shoot him here. The neighbours will hear …”

  “We don’t have neighbours anymore! Don’t you remember? They got thrown in jail by the cops!”

  “Next door. But what about behind the house … ?”

  “There’s no one there. You haven’t noticed?

  “We have to end it,” René said again, examining the hostage prostrated on the chair. “But not with a gun, it’s too risky. We should have cobbled together some sort of silencer …”

  “Do you have another idea?”

  “Sure. We get him in the car while it’s still dark, we go to the end of the road and then keep going, driving right through the field, up to the trees over there. Then we stop, we get him out of the car, we shoot him with the M1 in the heart and leave him there.”

  “And I’ve got another idea. We free him. We let him go … Or we leave him here and get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible.”

  Suddenly, Lavoie moved his head and let out a muted wail, without opening his eyes. Frozen stiff, they stayed there a long moment, without moving, watching his reactions.

  “Do you think he heard us?”

  “I don’t know. Go rest a bit. I’ll look after him.”

  René stopped in the room’s doorway and said without turning: “He saw us without our masks on. He’ll be able to identify us now.”

  “Just go and get some rest.”

  Saturday morning. The military base seems quiet, from a distance. Gode sits before the old Underwood on the card table. A sheet of blank paper in the platen. He’s had an idea for a new communiqué, addressed directly to the people. They could attach it to the first pages of Lavoie’s confession. But he looks at the keys and nothing comes out. Total block. And it’s as if they’d won.

  The hostage sits without moving, as still as a wax statue. Gode stands in front of the chair on which he is collapsed. Gode nervously wrings his hands, then lifts them up to his face to look at them. He needs gloves. He thinks back to his dream and turns away to sit back down in front of the typewriter. He tries to remember a poem he’d written in grade seven. The time the teacher (in jail now, from what he’d heard) had read his homework in front of the entire class. He could only remember the two words of the title, now, which he types with two fingers. ECCE LYNX

  “How much do you want?”

  Gode gives a violent start. Lavoie has opened his eyes, and looks at him.

  “Tell me how much you want,” the hostage insists.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’ll give you money if you let me go. It can be taken care of easily. I could get the sum together right away, if you let me make a phone call. You don’t need to be afraid, I won’t give you up. You have my word of honour.”

  “Your word? Whose honour? The Scarpinos’?”

  Godefroid sneers. He doesn’t know whether he should find this spectacle revolting or simply sad. A cruel smile comes to his lips. The hostage in front of him has become the enemy once again.

  “We know where your money comes from! You should be ashamed. After a week here, you still haven’t understood anything. As if we … we acted for our personal gain!”

  “One hundred thousand … No, I’ll give you a hundred and fifty thousand bucks.”

  “Stop it. Shut up.”

  “I could find two hundred and fifty. Maybe even five hundred thousand, but it would take a bit longer …”

  “You really are a desperate case. I pity you.”

  “Pity,” Lavoie repeated like an echo, as if the word were a buoy. “Pity. Please, I beg of you, let me go, okay?”

  And he begins to cry. Gode gets up, disgusted, his heart upended.

  “I’m going to go and make you a nice cup of tea. A strong one … It’ll make you feel better.”

  Lavoie nods his head. He closes his eyes again, his head falls back to his chest. He seems, once again, to fall into a profound apathy.

  Gode leaves him there, crumpled in his chair, and walks to the kitchen. While the cold water streams from the tap into the kettle and the burner begins to redden, he hears sirens in the distance.

  Talk about a fucking shit show. The kettle began to whistle, but I could still hear the siren coming closer and closer, as if the two sounds were becoming one, the whistling steam and the screaming siren, somewhere along avenue Savane, coming closer and closer, and I’d forgotten something and left the kettle on and heard the door to the back room open and the sound of someone running into the living room, and before I understood what was happening I ran out of the kitchen in time to see Lavoie running toward the front door, head down like a running back rushing through enemy lines, and I jumped like a linebacker and tackled him as he stepped in front of me, and he fell to the ground and began to yell, spread-eagled on the floor, and I saw René come into my field of vision on the right and fall over both Lavoie and me, trying to hold him down, unable to move but I couldn’t either and he was still yelling and yelling as if he wanted to drown out the goddamned siren that was now on our street, somewhere above me Ben took him by the shirt and twisted his collar and I heard Lavoie croaking, fall almost into silence, a gasp not a roar, René was tightening and tightening and so was I, “shut up, shut up,” René moaned and I held on for a long time while Lavoie, his body, struggled under me, and there was a jolt, like an earthquake, that lifted all three of us as if a wave had screamed through his blood, I’m holding him in my arms and his life is fleeing but not him, and there’s no longer the voice, and then under my chest it still moved, but like a fish, a last trickle of life that couldn’t stop, and the body keeps on, you feel him going, his salt water, his movement, his air is gone, gone nowhere, always waiting, the nerves, the goddamned nerves, shut up, you’ll stop. Shut up I told you, I said did you hear me.

  ZOPILOTE

  THE SUN WAS ALREADY WARM by the time he opened his eyes. In the distance he could see the waves mounting into their frilly skirts before crashing on the naked beach. A glass jam jar lay on its side next to him, empty, like a shipwreck dragged to shore by the night’s current. He grabbed it, examined it, brought it up to his nose. Mescal.

  Looking around, he saw no one. Marie-Québec must’ve got bored waiting alone at the Mono Azul.

  Leaning on an elbow, Nihilo managed to drag himself up. He took off his clothes and lumbered into the sea. Back on shore, he shook the water off himself like a dog. He then began the trek back to the village, following the curve of the beach.

  Richard Godefroid was sipping a cup of black coffee under a palm frond roof. Without thinking much about it, Sam had been walking in his direction. However, a few metres from the palapa, he hesitated for a moment, until Gode, with a simple hand gesture and without ever turning his head, invited him over. There was no small talk.

  After a few moments, Gode said:

  “I can’t believe I actually told you all that …”

  “Right, but there’s still something I don’t understand. Why did you leave you
r car in a field, right next to the military base?”

  Godefroid lit himself a Montana. His hair hurt, his face was grey. He’d aged ten years. Sam also ordered a café negro, as well as a glass of orange juice, and, after thinking about it, a bottle of water. Gode thought the orange juice was a good idea.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Of course!”

  “We wanted them to find the car easily, as quickly as possible. We thought that maybe it wasn’t too late …”

  “What?”

  “You’d seen a lot of dead bodies when you were twenty years old, eh? Well, neither had we. When we got off him, his nose was bleeding. We couldn’t understand what had just happened. We didn’t really feel like touching him, you know? He had this wool sweater up around his chin and it was only later we realized that, in the commotion, René had garroted him with the chain he had around his neck. Poor Lavoie. His medal of the baby Jesus didn’t seem to have helped him much … When it happened we panicked, and we thought that maybe he’d just fallen into a coma. And that if someone found him quickly enough, there might still be time to save him.”

  Gode took a sip of water from Sam’s bottle, then lit another cigarette.

  “But the soldiers didn’t move an inch. The car spent an eternity in the field next to the hangar. We’d even left the key in the ignition, but someone took it out at some point. They decided to wait for a journalist to find it, in time for the ten o’clock news … You see, that was the idea of the 22nd Royal Dieppe Cell. The message was supposed to be that the soldiers had left him to die.”

  “But he was already dead when you left him there!”

  “Maybe. But we couldn’t know that yet … It was only when the autopsy report came out publicly that we understood what had actually happened.”

  Sam pressed his face in his hands. With the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, he poked his eyeball as if he wanted to reach the nerve behind it and follow it up to his brain. They killed him, but didn’t even know he was dead.