October 1970 (2 page)

SAM, AUTUMN 2000

THAT MORNING, AFTER FALLING BACK
to sleep, Sam dream
s of Marie-Québec. He was in the big house on Lake Kaganoma, deep in the forest fifty kilometres from Maldoror. They were on a white-sand beach somewhere, he could feel the pounding of the sea, and Marie-Québec walked in front of him, her back to him. She was moving away, not looking around but aware of his presence, moving away, her walk, almost formal, hardly swaying her hips, more from discretion than modesty, as though she were ashamed of her ass, which she was. As though her ass's fleshy abundance didn't exist in this world, which it did, and so she walked as though she wanted to tuck it between her legs, the way one tucks one's head between one's shoulders. That was how she went through life, too, the way she was passing through his dream, like a minor character who crosses a stage without realizing that she was playing a key role.

In the dream, Samuel was naked. Chevalier Branlequeue was in it, too, looking out to sea in a meditative pose, standing on one leg, like a hunter, with his other foot drawing the number four. He was holding a book up to the level of his eyes.

“Look,” Marie-Québec said, “he's laying eggs.”

What a stupid dream
, he says to himself, opening his eyes.

When he goes to the window, the evergreen bush, tall black pines rooted in a thin layer of topsoil, and the pale, leafless birches are lightly powdered with an immaculate, fluffy blanket of snow that also covers the ground to a depth of some twenty centimetres, reflecting its violent white light into the room, which is welcome in October.

Sam Nihilo, who has registered forty clicks on the old odometer, is at the age when his dreams begin to look like emergency rooms. No girlfriend at the moment, and a writing career spinning its wheels. To keep his head above water he's had to get off his high horse and accept assignments handed to him by Big Guy Dumont, a man no one wants to know. Before starting Éditions ________, Dumont sold remaindered books in bars in Montreal's Latin Quarter,
step right up, ladies and gents
. Since then he has never stopped climbing; even now he'd climb anything that moved. He would have sold vacuum cleaners, but books were easier to lug around.

Around the large house, which is covered in brown CanExel siding, is a relatively unspoiled lake, a little more than a kilometre wide and something like a dozen long. Lake Kaganoma, about a hundred kilometres north of the imaginary line that divides civilized Canada from the rest of the country. The eastern shoreline has been broken up into hundred-metre lots that accommodate cabins and a few year-round residences. Across the lake, there's two hundred and fifty square kilometres of more or less virgin bush, the main function of which seems to be to catch the sun when it falls from the sky.

Once again Samuel has spent most of the night sweating blood in his study, and then remembers that he has a plane to catch today. Fortunately, security at the Maldoror airport is fairly slack. If worse came to worst, he could always run to the end of the runway and stick out his thumb.

He drags himself downstairs to the kitchen in jockeys and a T-shirt, where he fills a coffee carafe with cold water, dumps the water into the automatic coffee maker's reservoir, and then drops the carafe directly onto his foot. From there it bounces onto the ceramic-tile floor and explodes. As he wipes up the spill, he notices splotches of blood on the tiles.

He dabs the blood from his foot with an Enviro-Plus paper towel. Enviro-Plus paper towels employ sponge-pocket technology for maximum absorption, yet contain zero fibres from the planet's old-growth forests. The pale lips of the gash on his foot are in the vague shape of a cross. The wound is clean, deep, and precision-cut, with a sort of flap formed by a strip of skin and flesh that can be opened and closed at will. Sam sees it as an all-you-can-eat buffet for flesh-eating bacteria and their little microbial friends. He takes it to the shower, where he becomes engrossed in the contemplation of his feet, watching the pink water being flushed out by the flow. Then he washes the wound with soap, dries himself, and applies a gauze pad smeared with disinfectant cream. He affixes the bandage to his foot, which he has propped up on the toilet seat cover. Then he goes back to the kitchen — where he has a visitor
 . . .

Paul Lavoie's ghost has pulled a chair up to the kitchen table. His left wrist and the thumb and palm of his right hand are roughly bandaged and stained with dried blood. The thin, blood-filled crease made by the wire around his neck is clearly visible. He sports a streak of grape jelly under each nostril, under both corners of his mouth, and in the folds of his ears. His face is blue.

The visitor lowers his head, rests his chin on his chest, half-closes his eyes. His hands are encrusted with blood. They rest on his thighs, palms up, as though he were offering his wrapped stigmata to the owner of the premises. His chest rises and falls slowly. He is sobbing silently. Sam goes about picking up the crumpled, blood-stained paper towels that he left strewn about the kitchen floor. He doesn't let his visitant bother him.

“It's the blood that brought you, isn't it?” he asks, looking at the paper towel in his hand. “You're like those corpses in the
Odyssey,
in the House of Hades. You look a bit peaked, wouldn't you say? But don't expect me to go out and slit the throat of a goat in order to give you your colour back
 . . .
”

“You're leaving me
 . . .
” murmurs the ghost.

“No, I'm not. I have to make a short trip to France. I have an Air Canada flight at ten o'clock, you-know-who is driving me to the airport. Sorry, but no one in my situation would turn his nose up at a ticket to Paris
 . . .
”

“Yes, but the problem, you see, is that the longer you take writing your goddamned book, the longer I'm condemned to sitting around on my thumbs! Believe me, this is a lot worse than purgatory,” the visitor adds in that whingeing voice of his, the one he always uses when he haunts the lake house.

“Oh? Why's that? No golf courses up here?”

Sam calmly considers the apparition, which reminds him of strawberry jam spread on burnt toast.

“Among other things,” the phantom says politely.

“Sitting on your thumbs in your condition can't be all that comfortable,” Nihilo observes.

“Let me go
 . . .
”

“Then go, for Christ's sake, go!” he says angrily. “What are you waiting for? Me to get the rifle?”

When he looks again, the chair that the former Liberal minister was occupying has been taken by Noune, the cat he has had for the past two years. Noune is playing with a mouse, no, not a mouse, a shrew, a masked shrew. The cat is sitting back on its haunches, its teeth and claws bared, boxing at nothing, like a diminutive kangaroo. With a swipe of its right paw, which has the power of a slapshot by Guy Lafleur, Noune sends the thing spinning under the stove.

When the game resumes, Sam goes to the woodbox, selects a length of birch log, goes back, and, holding the log like a tomahawk, whacks away at the shrew's upper body. This necessitates another paper towel.
Those sponge pockets work miracles
. Then he reheats his coffee in the microwave. The thick, oily residue at the bottom of the cup makes him think of the Athabasca River tar sands as he goes back upstairs to pack his bags.

Sam drives a grey Toyota Corolla that rolled out of the factory in 1989, but it could just as easily have been a green Mazda Protegé or a red Colt as it takes him to the Maldoror airport, a distance of thirty or so kilometres, give or take. He's learned to leave himself twenty minutes for the trip to Maldo, the Hub of the Northwest.

The lake road runs north-south, along the ridge of an esker (a natural filter for potable water composed of several hundred metres of sand and gravel), more or less parallel with the lake's shoreline, which remains mostly hidden behind a thick stand of boreal forest. It winds its way through a series of undulations lined with black spruce, Scots pine, and sickly birch whose leaves, half-eaten by insect larvae, started turning red in the middle of August.

The snow that fell during the night makes the glare on the road almost painful. When the sun comes out between the clouds, which look like two chunks of lead threaded onto a fishing line, Nihilo can make out the bird tracks along the pristine roadside. Ahead of him, a vast cluster of Scots pines descends toward a peat bog. A bit farther along, the dirt road crosses a log bridge over the bog's drainage outlet. Spruce grouse forage in the tall grass on either side of the road, poking up with the regularity of cuckoos in Swiss clocks, and the car startles two or three of them, which then perch in some bare pines by the roadside. Sam keeps a .410-gauge shotgun in a pouch under the back window and has more than once got himself a free dinner with it, but he doesn't see himself trying to go through customs at Charles de Gaulle with a brace of grouse in his underwear.

He slows the car, rolls down his window, and keeps the vehicle moving at a walking pace. In the snow, he sees the large round paw prints of a lynx and follows them with his eyes to a point under a pine where a flurry of dark feathers are scattered in a circle. He smiles: the mark of a successful hunter. He looks briefly into the forest, into the thick underbrush, at the play of blue-tinted shadows between the spruce trunks, into clearings cauterized by the cold. Behind him, the slanted rays of the autumn sun beat down beneath the nearly black trees.

MADAME CORPS
AND THE SNOW

THE BEACH LOOKS LIKE A
marble floo
r: fine white sand, well compacted, smooth. The tall concrete rectangles that overlook it form a kind of colony of giant vases around the circumference of the bay, the hotels, condos, and casinos give the impression of having been carved out of the same material. They have an incandescent glow, like the purest chalk bathed in light reflected off the sea.

The sea is nearly invisible, as if the horizon has pulled it toward itself like a carpet. The line of it can just be made out in the distance, under a fine golden fog. To get to it, Sam would have to walk across this porcelain Sahara, and he prefers not to. The beach is too white. Walking on it would only dirty it. He's happy admiring it from afar, from the height of a concrete promenade.

And Madame Corps couldn't look more French in her cream-coloured suit and charming red silk scarf.

Corps is her real name, too. A patronymic fairly common in France, where she — let's call her Ginette, and use her maiden name: Dufour — has remade her life. In Quebec, where her last name was Cardinal-Dufour, she'd been the legitimate wife of Jacques Cardinal, alias the Fat Cop, and the mother of his children. She was also the mistress of Marcel Duquet, the militant separatist, well known on the South Shore, who was condemned to eight years in prison for having aided and abetted the assassins of Minister Lavoie when they were fleeing the country in the fall of 1970.

Thirty years ago, as Madame Cardinal-Dufour, she enjoyed quite a reputation for being, shall we say, hot. A heroine of the sexual revolution. In fact, she more or less
was
the revolution, a kind of Odette de Crécy from Longueuil. Today she lives in France, in one of most exclusive coastal resort towns, in a chic condo she shares with Monsieur Albert Corps, chaser of sedate widows' petticoats, her chauvinistic husband.

Coffee on the terrace of the Sables-d'Olonne. Two cigarettes already stubbed out in an ashtray shaped like a Coquilles Saint-Jacques shell. Madame Corps buys packs of menthols and transfers the cigarettes into a gold-plated case. She uses a cigarette holder that looks like it might be made out of ivory. Small wrinkles radiate from her lips, which she soaks in barley water or something. It's still not polite to ask a woman her age, but Madame Dufour's offspring numbered four in 1970. Say she's somewhere between sixty and sixty-five and give her whatever hair colour you want.

From the terrace he could watch the passing parade: girls, sports cars, mothers pushing baby carriages, tourists dragging suitcases on wheels.

“You didn't cross the Atlantic just to see me.” It's the first thing she's said to him.

Samuel smiles. “I don't have that kind of money,” he says. “But in Quebec even a second-rate writer gets a lot of invitations. To sit on a jury for an obscure prize for short stories, for example, from anywhere in the French-speaking world, including those with tall, thin Africans. And if the jury meets in La Rochelle, the old slave port and supplier of fine French women for the colonies, not a hundred kilometres from here, then all the better!”

“You don't look like a writer,” she says. “In France, writers look like writers. They dress like writers. I suppose you might be mistaken for a musician
 . . .
”

“So I'm often told. But I'll have you know that I don't look like a regular at the Sables-d'Olonne, either. No smoking jacket. Which makes it hard for someone who's supposed to be here squandering the family fortune at the roulette table.”

“That's because when you think casino, you think Françoise Sagan, when in reality casinos are full of a bunch of retired suburbanites from Baltimore on a group tour. I haven't read your books. I've never heard of you. How did you find me?”

“I found a Jacques Cardinal in the phone book, called the number, and talked to his son, who didn't want to know anything about anything. All he would tell me was that he'd burned all the bridges before his father croaked and that the last time he saw the old man he was snorting a line of coke. Then he let me squeeze your number out of him.”

“That man spread a lot of bad around. Coco, I mean. What are you writing? A book about the Lavoie Affair?”

“I'm trying to.”

“And
 . . .
do you mind if I ask why?”

“I had a professor at university. He's dead now. He wanted to know what happened. He started a kind of
 . . .
club. It would take too long to explain it to you. Anyway, it's your story I want to hear.”

“Too late. No one's interested anymore.”

“Like the song says, if there's only one left, let it be me.”

“You're wasting your time.”

“Maybe. But I'm not all that interested in making a living. Two or three more wasted hours won't make much difference
 . . .
”

“What do you want to know?”

“Jacques Cardinal. A defrocked cop, formerly in the Montreal Police Force's morality squad, quietly let go after he was caught taking bribes from the mob, according to one version. In the 1960s he was mixed up in anything that involved the separatist movement and the patriot groups, from the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale
to the Parti Québécois, including the Front de Libération Populaire, the Phalange, the Comité Indépendance-Socialisme, the Intellectuels et ouvriers patriotes de Québec, and the FLQ. I'm wondering, Madame Corps, what was your husband living on during all that time?”

“Fraud.”

“With a wife and four kids to look after? I'm just curious, is all.”

“Before we go any further, let me tell you something, and it's really just to do you a favour: they kidnapped him, they hid him, and they killed him. That's all there is to know, that's the whole truth of the Lavoie Affair. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors, the wild imaginings of overworked brains. Are you a conspiracy theorist?”

“I'm more of a skeptic. Maybe, when it comes down to it, I'm a reluctant theorist. I hold on to my critical faculties. I believe in coincidences, but not in an accumulation of them.”

“For example?”

“The fact that your former lover somehow managed to drive a tractor over his own head shortly after giving an interview to a journalist from
60 Minutes
. And also the routine checks. The cops are so visible in this story that it gets a bit hard to take. Like the time you went to the cabin in the sugar bush with Duquet to pick up the fugitives, do you remember that?”

“Vaguely.”

“November 1970. The ‘biggest manhunt in Canadian history' was underway. And one fine day you get behind the wheel of a station wagon, Duquet follows you in a tow truck, you put the fugitives in the wagon, and then you pretend the car breaks down and Duquet gives you a tow. A cop stops you to see what's going on
 . . .
and he ends up giving you an escort! Without suspecting for a second, apparently, that the three most wanted men in the country are a few feet from him. If Duquet was trying to draw as much attention to himself as possible, he couldn't have come up with a better plan. Why the tow truck?”

“I seem to recall that it was snowing. A real dump. You're forgetting the snow, Samuel
 . . .
”

“No, Madame, I am not forgetting the snow. I never forget the snow. I'm coming to that.”

“I've never liked it. Snow
 . . .
”

“Where I live, there's still snow under the spruce trees in July.”

“And you like that? Really?”

“Snow?”

“Snow.”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Good. Well
 . . .
Can I buy you a drink?”