October 1970 (10 page)

“Don't worry about me. I'll be fine.”

“Don't tell me that son of a bitch found some way to make you feel sorry for him again?”

“I can see through him pretty easily, Marcel, if that's what's worrying you.”

“Guys, I don't know what's stopping me from
 . . .
”

“I told you, I'll be fine, okay?”

“Where'd he go?” asked René.

“He's on the porch, trying to crawl over to a bench. It'll take two of you to help me lift him up.”

“Why?”

“He hurt his back when he fell. If we don't hurry, we'll have to break the ice off him in order to talk to him. But once we get him in the car, everything will go much better.”

“Tell him we have no intention of leaving,” said Jean-Paul.

“You guys be careful.”

She began picking up her things and stuffing them into a bag. As she moved toward the door, Jean-Paul followed her with his eyes.

That woman has had my cock in her mouth
, he thought. That creates a bond between us.

In Marcel's kitchen there was a large stove, a L'Islet, made in Montmagny, with gas burners and, above them, several compartments for keeping pies warm. A real piece of furniture. Every morning, Gode crumpled up newspapers and put them in the firebox with some kindling and struck a match. He read the headlines as they went up in smoke:

AUTOPSY REPORT PUTS END TO HORRIFIC RUMOURS

THE HOUSE WHERE PAUL LAVOIE SUFFERED HIS LAST AGONY

NEIGHBOURS SUSPICIOUS BUT DID NOTHING

He found some buckwheat flour in a cupboard and made biscuits the way his father used to in the bush in Villebois, on top of the woodstove. He let a pat of butter melt on the dough, then rolled it up like a cigar. No need for maple syrup.

Up there, in the North, Gode's father would tear off a sheet of newspaper and use it to wipe the stove top before making the pancakes, as though the ink on the paper were the only cleanser they needed.

The basement was divided in half, with a kitchenette and the furnace room on one side and a kind of family room on the other, furnished with a card table, a TV, a sofa, a bar, a pool table, a stereo, which was a Marantz, and a green shag carpet.

Jean-Paul let out a cry, and René turned just in time to catch a can of Kik Cola that had been tossed across the room at him like a hand grenade. When he opened it, it nearly exploded.

“How did Coco know we were here?” Gode asked.

René took a long drink and burped.

“From Saint-Laurent?”

“Coco has feelers out everywhere,” Jean-Paul said, going behind the bar. “The question is, what'll he do with the hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

The other two laughed.

“Seriously. You don't think he'll turn us in?”

They looked at each other.

René was drawing blueprints on a sheet of paper with a large carpenter's pencil. Off to one side, Gode was fiddling with the radio dial.

“Why did the Lafleur brothers and Richard Godefroid travel to Texas at the beginning of October?
”
said the announcer. “Who is the mysterious Pierre? These are some of the questions that were asked yesterday at the coroner's inquest into the death of Paul Lavoie, and which were raised again this morning at the
 . . .
”

They couldn't get away from themselves. They were everywhere.

Behind the house was a barn, and beyond that, fields of corn stretched to where the farm ended at a narrow fencerow of trees. Between the barn and the house was a pond. In the summers it was home to tadpoles and bullfrogs and occasionally a pair of wild ducks, blacks or blue-winged teals. Muskrats traced their peaceful Vs across its surface in the evenings. Once, Marcel saw a painted turtle sunning itself on a half-submerged log.

They started digging between the house and the pond. They worked at night, breaking up the frozen earth with a pickaxe, working like moles in the snow and the mud and the meltwater that ran into the trench. It was back-breaking labour. They dug from sunset to morning, always two at a time, the third resting in the house by the front window, keeping watch.

As Gode dug in the dark, all kinds of thoughts passed through his head. He thought about a novel he'd read about the Spanish Civil War, in which prisoners were forced to dig their own graves. The epitome of power that one human being can exercise over another is to force him to dig a hole six feet deep before shooting him in the head with a pistol, or cutting him down with a machine gun, or running over him with a truck to save bullets.

And those prisoners in that Eisenstein film,
¡Que viva Mexico!
, who were also made to dig holes in the desert sand, then were buried in them with only their heads exposed, their wild eyes that seemed to jump out of their sockets when they saw the horses being made to gallop toward them. Their skulls exploded like pumpkins.

Gode didn't want to dig any more. Perhaps any man who burrows into the earth is creating his own grave? But they kept on, Gode, the Lafleur brothers, kept on digging, as blackened and stained as coal miners, too tired to wash before going to sleep, cleaning off the worst of it in the morning.

Cardinal returned once, to make fun of them. They looked up to see his bloated, blank face hovering over the edge of the hole, like a rising moon. One arm in a sling. A broken elbow or something.

“What are you looking for, guys? Buried treasure?”

“Worms. For fishing. Can't you see?”

“You'd be better digging in the manure pile.”

“Each to his own,” remarked Jean-Paul.

Gode stopped digging, slightly out of breath.

“If you really want to know, we're building a cottage.”

“Where? In China?”

“Exactly. Chairman Mao's our new trip.”

“Yesterday I talked to a guy in the Black Liberation Front.”

“Like I said, we're all Maoists here.”

“Well, you can do what you like.”

“That's right.”

The trench they dug was a metre wide, two metres deep, and about six metres long. It ran out from the wall of the house. At the end of it, they enlarged and deepened it to make a room, two metres by three. At the house end, they knocked a hole in the foundation wall with a sledgehammer, then made a floor with cement from the basement between the wall and the furnace.

Marcel couldn't take it. He'd been living somewhere else for a week. On one of his visits, René came up and handed him a sheet of paper. He glanced at it and decided to take the afternoon off. According to his calculations, he would have to make at least two trips to the lumberyard.

They propped up the sides of the excavation along its entire length with wooden beams, to which they nailed two-by-fours and chipboard panels to complete the framing. Then they built a roof and floor in the main room, which ran continuously with water. Finally, they covered their work with some of the dirt they'd dug out of the hole and spread the rest around the yard as best they could. Their well-supported trench was now a tunnel. To get to it, they went into the basement and squeezed behind the furnace, lifted a concrete slab identical to those that formed the base of the furnace. They ran an electric extension cord into the tunnel, camouflaging it carefully, and installed a lighting system and a heater. The tunnel entrance was about thirty by fifty centimetres. They had to slide in feet-first, then shuffle on their backs until they cleared the hole in the foundation wall, where the tunnel proper began. From there, they could crawl on their hands and knees until they reached the subterranean chamber.

It was December, early afternoon. Outside the air was cold, still, and bright. They had slept, as usual, in sleeping bags on the rug in the common room. They had finished the hiding hole the previous night and planned to use it only in emergencies. A bolt-hole for creatures in desperate straits. Gode made coffee and turned on the radio. Then stopped dead, his empty coffee cup in his hand. He tumbled down the stairs and turned on the TV. It was December 3, 1970. A special report was being broadcast over the airwaves of the CBC.

“Hey, guys! Come and see this
 . . .
”

They spent the entire day in front of the television. They saw a cordon of soldiers in helmets carrying rifles that stretched across the screen and down a street lined with three-storey brick buildings. A bit farther down, the street was blocked by a bus. Army helicopters criss-crossed the sky throughout the area.

The camera followed a uniformed soldier carrying a rifle over his shoulder, bayonette fixed, courteously escorting a citizen who lived in the quarter to the corner of the next street. The newscaster explained that the authorities had ordered the evacuation of the entire sector. Armed forces were supervising the combined operations. The cordon of soldiers that kept the curious away stretched along several blocks of houses and disappeared into the distance.

“Holy fuck! I've never seen so many soldiers! I don't think the Germans had that many when they invaded Russia.”

“Rue de la Compagnie-de-Jésus. That's in the north end.”

The CBC camera kept returning to the façade of an ordinary-looking brick apartment block: main entrance surrounded by a projecting portico surmounted by a rectangular awning. The apartments inside would all open onto a central corridor, and those on the street side had doors that gave onto balconies with cast-iron staircases leading up to them. The balcony of Apartment 1 was over the door of the garage, which had been converted to a kind of sub-basement with access from the inside.

Since their co-conspirators in Rebellion Cell had respected the rule of autonomy and the strict separation of operations, Gode and the Lafleurs were discovering, at the same time as millions of other television viewers, the hiding place in which John Travers had been kept for two long months. Someone had scrawled the letters
FLQ
on the windows of the ground-floor apartment with a can of spray paint.

After a while, they saw a grey Chrysler emerge quickly from the garage, back onto the rue de la Compagnie-de-Jésus, bang one of its fenders against a low concrete wall, come to a stop for a moment, as though suspended on a thread of time, while an escort formed in front of and behind it. Negotiations had taken place. The journalist on the scene was Claude-Jean Devirieux, whose usual impish voice and thin, weasel's face encased in a huge pair of earphones lent the event an air of pomp and circumstance as he conjectured about the destination of the kidnappers. The word “Cuba” was bandied about.

Then, at the centre of a cavalcade of police motorcycles, a convoy consisting of the grey Chrysler, several unmarked police cars, and patrol cars with their lights flashing, began to move. Corbeau was at the wheel of the Chrysler. The lawyer who'd negotiated the release of the hostage was riding shotgun. Between them, in glasses and long hair, was Pierre, also known as le Chevreuil. Lancelot was behind the hostage. In Saint-Marc, emotion and irritation were running high.

“They'll be working on their tans in Cuba while we spend the winter buried like moles,” René commented.

“I'd say more like ondatras,” Godefroid corrected. “That trench with a chamber at the end of it looks more like an ondatra's bank-lodge.”

“What the hell's an ondatra?”

“A muskrat.”

“Then why didn't you just say muskrat?”

“Because ondatra is the Indian word for it and I've always wanted to say ondatra. You can fuck your hat if you don't like it.”

“You mean my muskrat hat?”

“Okay, you two, give it a rest
 . . .
” Jean-Paul said without taking his eyes off the screen.

“So Pierrot's going to Cuba. Unbelievable
 . . .
” said Gode, shaking his head.

“For now, it may look like they got the best deal. We'll see if they find it so funny having a coconut palm for a Christmas tree.”

René climbed the basement stairs, stopping at the top.

“Anyone want a beer?”

“Yeah.”

“Jean-Paul?”

“A Kik for me. With rum in it
 . . .
”

“One Kik with
 . . .
”

“Yeah. It's called a Cuba Libre.”

Marcel placed the bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the table beside the paper bag holding four large bottles of beer.

“Merry Christmas, guys!”

“Hey, great! Compliments of the Colonel
 . . .
”

They'd been in a good mood all day. They'd ticked off their fifth week in Duquet's house in Saint-Marc. The first two they'd spent building the hideout. Then they spent a few days discussing organization and finances. The next holdup. Duquet had found them an abandoned scout camp beside Lake Brompton. The access road was closed in winter. They would wait for spring to move their stuff in.

The army had finally pulled out of their area. It wasn't needed after the Big Show in Montreal, when they'd rounded up the Rebellion Cell. And it was probably better if the silencing of their heavy boots didn't coincide with the repeal of the War Measures Act and its replacement by a piece of legislation that vastly extended the powers of the regular police. The new law received Royal Assent the very day that an armed-forces Yukon carried Lancelot and his buddies to Castro's island. Apparently, the whole operation was a well-oiled machine.

Richard Godefroid and the Lafleur brothers were preparing for their next move when the winter solstice fell. Darkness from four o'clock on. The side road was blocked by snowbanks that looked like huge frozen pillows. The fields everywhere were covered in snow. And now Christmas, and the memories of reunited families. The three moles took to brooding.

But now, thanks to Marcel, they had woken up to the sight of a bucket of Colonel Sanders and four large Molsons.

“Too good for Baby,” René said, licking his greasy fingers.