October 1970 (26 page)

THE FIRST HOLDUP

THE POLICE TOOK THEIR TIME
getting there. Kilometres of Gaspésian winter and mountains and bad roads separated them from Cloridorme, a village squeezed between the flanks of the Chic-Chocs and the open sea. The alarm had been going off for a good five minutes by the time they ran out into the ice-cold air, balaclavas over their heads for masks. Attracted by the alarm, people had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the credit union to gawk at them as if they were some kind of alien life form. Embarrassed, Ben tried not to point the shotgun in their direction. Gode's feet slid on the icy street as soon as he began to run, and he went down, holding the brown paper shopping bag full of money against his chest. On his knees in the snow, he tried to stuff the small and large notes back into the bag, but it was torn. He got up and ran, cradling the bag in his arm like a football, cursing under his breath as the money kept slipping out and flying onto the snow behind him. The car took off as soon as they reached it. The last thing Gode saw when he looked back in the rear-view mirror was the village diminishing behind him at full speed and people on their knees in the snow, gathering up the money.

PIERRE

LOOKING UP FROM HIS BEER
in the Berri-de-Montigny Tavern, Gode saw François come in from the bus station. He was wearing a London Fog raincoat, his feet stuck in galoshes, and he was carrying a suitcase. Now his best friend was sitting across from him with a glass of beer, and it was like they were picking up a discussion they'd started maybe two years earlier, in the Flore or the Mabillon or the Rostand. Except that now they were talking less about literature and more about revolution. His big, soft eyes lit up behind his Coke-bottle lenses. Langlais wore his hair longer and was calling himself Pierre Chevrier. He'd kicked around Paris and London for a while before travelling to Switzerland, Spain, Morocco, Algeria. Luc Goupil, the pretty boy from Old Navy, had introduced him to other exiled FLQ members. Some of them were busy getting a foreign delegation together that would get training in Algiers. Others were in Cuba. Pierre had met up with the group from the Fisherman's Hut at the exact moment when they'd decided to get away from the Gaspé winter and establish a base of operations closer to Montreal. It was the beginning of 1970
 . . .

“Call me Pierre,” François said every time Gode called him François. He'd always been tight with words, and now more than ever looked like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. The Little Genius.

“I've got a book for you,” he said suddenly, and leaned over to rifle through the dirty laundry and magazines crammed into his suitcase.

“I think my suitcase was searched at the airport,” he said.

“Oh, yeah? Why do you think that?”

“It took a hell of a long time for me to get it. Don't you ever feel like you're being watched?”

Gode shrugged his shoulders. Pierre shoved some malodorous socks aside, brought out
The Urban Guerilla Manual
by Carlos Marighella. He put it on the table.

Gode raised two fingers to the waiter.

GOLAN

THE ISRAELI CONSUL IN MONTREAL
was named Moshe (or Moïse) Golan. Three years after the Six Day War, having that name was a bit like a French diplomat being called Clovis Alsace-Lorraine.

The rented Econoline van was pulled over at the curb on Saint-Denis, across from the Carré Saint-Louis. Behind it, the flashing light on top of the patrol car shot splashes of bright red light on the park benches on which poets had once declaimed.

“I need you to get out of your vehicle and unlock the rear door,” the cop said after glancing at the driver's licence. He was standing beside the door.

“Why?” asked Lancelot.

“Because. I want to see what you've got in there.”

“But why did you stop me?”

“Your left-turn signal light is burned out.”

“You're supposed to give me forty-eight hours.”

“I said get out and unlock the door.”

“This is an abuse of power,” Lancelot shouted, to gain time. They knew what they were looking for, he thought. And they know who I am
 . . .

Having complied with the officer's request, he watched as the cop bent the top of his body into the Econoline's storage space while his partner examined certain documents in the glove compartment. The partner soon found a sheet of paper on which had been pencilled a series of telephone numbers and radio-station call numbers. The names of known journalists were written in parentheses, and the word “Golan” was written in capital letters at the top of the page.

The first officer had just seen the wicker basket about the size of a coffin, big enough at any rate to hold a man. He knew an illegal weapon when he saw one, and he took a marked interest in the sawn-off 12-gauge Remington shotgun, first making sure that the thing wasn't loaded.

“So I suppose you're going duck hunting, are you?” he said to Lancelot.

“How did you guess?”

“In the middle of February?”

“No, rabbits
 . . .
”

With the shotgun in his left hand, the officer opened his holster with his right and ordered Lancelot to place both hands flat on the side of the vehicle, keeping them in plain sight, and to spread his feet. His colleague came around waving the sheet of paper.

“Looks like he might be a journalist or something
 . . .
”

With his fingers freezing on the cold van, Lancelot endured the other's hands on his sides.

“What does this mean, ‘Golan'?”

“It's a plateau, like this one
 . . .
”

“A plateau where?”

“Under your feet. I'm talking about the Mount Royal plateau. Golan Heights is in Syria, but for the past three years the Zionist state has been occupying it illegally.”

“What the fuck's he talking about?”

“I don't know, but he can explain it down at the station.”

MOSSAD

AFTER SPENDING THE NIGHT IN
jail, Lancelot weighed his options and called
Maître
Brien, who hurried down and in no time obtained his release with a caution. Brien assured him he could have been charged with possessing an illegal firearm. They went drinking in Old Montreal to celebrate.

The next day, the list from the glove compartment landed on the desk of Detective Lieutenant Gilbert Massicotte, head of CATS, who examined it with interest. It took him thirty minutes to connect the word “Golan” with the Israeli consul.

“Good God, it looks like the bastards were cooking up a kidnapping,” he said to himself.

It was a good thing he'd tipped off the Montreal Police about Lancelot and his rented Econoline van.

By the time he could procure a warrant to bring him in for questioning, the cockroach had had time to disappear back into the woodwork. He was already well known to the police; he had a kind of gift for being recognized, and his dossier with the antiterrorist squad was a thick one. Arrested in 1963 for throwing Molotov cocktails, he'd been photographed at many demonstrations since then, and by the winter of 1970 had achieved the status of a wanted revolutionary. The plot against the Israeli consul catapulted him from Robin Hood to Punchinello among the secret police. Surveillance teams were put on his trail, and he was soon reported to be hanging around with several local members of the Mossad,
the
benchmark in the terrorist profession.

MARCH

THAT SPRING IT WAS
COCO
Cardinal who found them in their bungalow on rue Collins, in Saint-Hubert. Gode and the Lafleurs knew him from their days in the RIN. Jean-Paul had convinced his girlfriend at the time, the beautiful Lou Ballester, to pretend they were married, and they signed the lease as Jean-Paul Hamel, a university professor with no references, and his young wife. The scene: two parallel streets not quite a kilometre in length, dropped as if from the sky into the middle of flat fields peppered with woodlots, fencerows, and overgrown rubbish heaps.

There was the full range of habitations, from rundown cottages to typical suburban ranch houses, with mobile homes somewhere in the middle. The bungalow Jean-Paul rented bore the street number 140. You entered through a foyer with the living room to the left, the kitchen on the right, and a second door facing northwest, toward the neighbouring house. A short hall led to the bathroom and the two bedrooms. A garage had been added beneath an extension of the roof.

With help from René and other members of the group, they spent a weekend repainting the place. Then they bought furniture on credit from Woolco. They had no intention of paying for it. For a long time, systematic and perpetual indebtedness had been the principal mode of financing their activities.

A few hundred metres from them was Savannah Road, and a bit beyond that was the beginning of the airport. It was a military base. The main headquarters, which accommodated the mobile force, was less than a kilometre to the south. The airfield and hangars were visible from the bungalow's bedrooms.

While Lou and Jean-Paul whiled away a grey afternoon in March by making love on a mattress on the floor of one of the rooms, jeeps came and went in the distance, like beetles filing across the dirty snow.

MILAN, SUMMER 1970

THE VILLAGE HAD BEEN FOUNDED
by the Scots, but bore the name of an Italian city. The main street led straight to the church, which stood on one of the Appalachian spurs that undulated all the way south to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Beyond the church, the road passed in front of the school, went through a wooded area and debouched into hilly countryside consisting of fields, most of them lying fallow, and stands of dark woods. At the end of this road was a farmhouse made of wood and covered in cedar shingles. The barn was farther back, its ancient boards turned as brown as animal fur with age. To the west, in clear weather, one could see smoke rising from the mill in East Angus. And to the south, the face of Mount Mégantic seemed both distant and yet near enough to touch, like certain islands.

In May, birdsong, warm wind in the hair, clusters of trilliums and dog's-tooth violets in the understorey. Nests. Marie-France had never been so happy, Gode never in such good spirits. As far as the village was concerned, they were a couple of hippies who spent all their time naked, taking drugs, and holding sexual orgies with a bunch of their like-minded friends.

In fact they spent their afternoons repairing the buildings and mending the fences that Brutal, their lascivious mountain goat, butted down at will, and discussing plots, compost, and couples.

And the People's Prison.

Marie-France had seen the drawings on a sheet of paper left lying around: a rectangle representing the tow truck destined to be buried at the bottom of the field, to be used as a cell.

René had asked Nicole to sneak a bottle of chloroform home from the hospital where she worked, because even though he'd be put to sleep at the beginning, a man waking up in the trunk of a car could struggle, and that would be a problem.

Officially, they were raising goats.

THE PART

IN APRIL 1970, LITTLE ALBERT,
thirty-six years of age, became premier of Quebec. It looked as though a hairdresser followed him everywhere he went. His hair always in a mess, Ti-Poil, as he was called, had been defeated in his own riding and had to content himself with a caucus of only seven members, even though his Indépendantiste Party had received 23 percent of the popular vote. Chevalier Branlequeue, who'd run as an independent indépendantiste in the riding of Taillon, received three thousand votes. Richard Godefroid and the Lafleur brothers, willing to give democracy one last chance, had put up posters and gone door to door and made phone calls for him, turning his electoral committee into a kind of progressive Trojan Horse, a last attempt to legally bring about change. It ended in pure defeat. In Boucher, Paul Lavoie, the unfortunate rival of Vézina for the party leadership, had slipped in like a knife through butter.

In their little local office that smelled of stale pizza, felt-tipped pens, and cigarette smoke, Gode and Chevalier were the last to stay to watch the large, snowy, black-and-white TV screen showing the election results. They watched Little Albert give his victory speech in a voice whose pathetic rises and falls sounded like the bleatings of a goat.

“The mob wins again,” Gode said dully.

“Don't go there,” Chevalier replied.

They were drinking Molson's and savouring the bittersweet taste of catastrophe.

“Go where?”

“Hiding your head
 . . .
”

“You know damned well what I'm talking about. On the ground, the election workers for the Liberal Party were lent to them by the construction mafia, and they did their campaigning with baseball bats and crowbars! Even the Parti Québécois were obliged to toe the line and align themselves with the mob just to be able to hold meetings. And if any of that had disgusted Bourgault enough to make him pull out of the race, you wouldn't have needed to run to uphold the honour of the Indépendantiste forces, isn't that true?”

“Twenty-three percent of the popular vote, Gode
 . . .
You don't seem to have grasped the significance of that! Four short years ago the RIN weren't even in the running. Twenty-three percent in 1970 means 34 percent 4 years from now, 45 percent in 8 years. That means coming to power
 . . .
”

“Eight years of baseball bats, that's too long. You can go on having faith in the system if it turns you on, but in eight years there won't be a single piece of the country big enough to plant your Kébek flag in. The Holy Trinity will have taken over the rest.”

“The Holy Trinity?”

“The Mafia, the Liberal Party, and the Americans. You know what I mean.”

“You know what, Gode? Working to liberate a country is like pissing on a fire when you're facing the wind. The best thing you can hope for is that you don't put out the flames
 . . .
”

“Yeah, well, Chevalier, I know what I have to do next.”