October 1970 (27 page)

JEAN-CLAUDE
GOES TO QUEBEC CITY
(PART II)

I DON'T KNOW WHO YOU
are. Really no idea. I'm telling you this because when I'm alone in my car like this, it never fails: I start going over it all in my mind, the events of that autumn, certain details in particular, they all come flooding back to haunt me, and as soon that happens I take out my little tape recorder and put it up to my lips and try to imagine who you are, you out there somewhere in the future, and this whole story, assuming that it even holds any interest for you, must seem unbelievably complicated. So. We were at Monday, a little before six in the morning, October 1973. Somewhere on Highway 20 between Montreal and Quebec City, about to cross the Richelieu River on, you'll never guess, the Paul-Lavoie Bridge. Rebaptized two years before. An ordinary piece of highway construction; cement is a safe way to preserve a person's memory. I'd say that that's the main difference between politics and organized crime: the Mafia buries its victims in cement, the government, only the names of its victims. And now, I need to explain a few small things to you. Again. What I would like
 . . .
Wait a minute. What I would most like you to understand is why Little Albert, after only two years in office, is going to call an unexpected election, perhaps this autumn, and to campaign on the backs of the separatists, instead of against the mob. And why he is going to win.

In the run for the party leadership, you will recall, poor little Paul Lavoie was lambasted by the electoral machine run by Colonel Lapierre, Uncle Bob, who grabbed Albert Vézina by the seat of his pants and set him down on the throne. In the meantime, Lavoie, flat as a pancake, was completely washed up. His coffers were empty. He owed $175,000. And Vézina had no reason to wait until he'd returned to financial health before calling an election. The election took place in April 1970. Lavoie could have bowed out. Everyone would have understood. But he was a determined little scrapper, and he decided to stick it out and carry on the fight within the party. Oh, he'd rally around the newly elected chief, no doubt about that. He'd hasten to assure him publicly of his loyalty. He'd swear on a stack of Bibles that he would place his experience at the disposal of the victor: Dear Albert, let me be your right arm
 . . .
Ah-ha! Lavoie was in no hurry, and he was no fool. He had three-quarters of the delegates on his side and he wasn't yet fifty years old. Vézina was the outsider, tangled up in his diplomas, dressed to the nines. And Lavoie was still green enough that it was worth his while to wait to see if the tree was going to break or bend.
Bend over
,
Albert
 . . .

Lavoie ran again in his old riding, but now he knew what he had to do to win it. He had to get rid of any weak-kneed supporters, no more choirboys in his organization, no sir. The leadership struggle had taught him a thing or two, or rather had confirmed in capital letters what he'd always known: in order to hold on to your sword in politics, you need to be willing to have dirty hands. He was a man who had always had debts, the hazardous combination of a spendthrift temperament and the provider of a growing family. He loved ostentatious watches, gold or silver chains, those little signs of material comfort that he could unobtrusively wear in public. He had the mentality of the parvenu, if you like, but in the 1960s all of Quebec was like that. After having passed his bar exams, Lavoie wanted to see some action, but his skill with a pen diverted him from his high ambition and landed him at the
Devoir
. Where, falling victim to a kind of economic civil war, he was condemned to grab any passing devil by the tail. Financially speaking, being a correspondent with the
Devoir
placed you somewhere between a Biafran native and a minor colonial civil servant.

Parachuted into the position of parliamentary correspondent in the Old Capital, our friend discovered he had a certain genius for augmenting his income. On one hand, he denounced the weakest of the scandalistas (the “assholierthanthous,” as he famously neologized) that rose from the practice of power, and he learned how to operate this marvellous machine for making money that is to any politician what mud is to a pig. He perfected the art of situating himself as a go-between between the politicians with whom he rubbed shoulders on a daily basis in the corridors of the Assembly and around the high tables on the Grande-Allée, and the businessmen of his acquaintance. Understand me well: the commissions he received for his good offices, he needed them! Suits to buy, mouths to feed, the whole nine yards. Everyone knew the Liberal Party existed only to stay in power and allow the greatest possible number of friends of the regime to fill their pockets and their bellies up to their eyeballs. So when people gave him the sign, their boy Lavoie didn't hesitate for a second. Renounced his quasi Maurrasian nationalism, gave up his Basque beret and leapt on the train of the Quiet Revolution. The train of progress and big money, of elevated ideas and under-the-table payoffs. And I'm going to be very clear on one point: if you think Albert Vézina, with his first-class airs, was, from this point of view, more proper (or cleaner) than his future rival for the party leadership, you're sticking your finger so far into your eye you'll be able to scratch between your shoulder blades. When you join the Liberal Party, you become what the Liberal Party tells you to become, and when the last trumpet hath sounded, money hath no smell, not even if it comes from a baron of tainted meat who wants to increase your chances for the leadership.

Speaking of the daily paper on the rue Saint-Sacrifice, I'd like to read you something that was in it this morning. Yes, you who are sleeping in the future, who perhaps are driving down this very Highway 20 and crossing the Paul-Lavoie Bridge to overlook, in its happily amnesiac way, the Richelieu River and its Chemin des Patriotes. Perhaps you are on your way, on this marvellous October day, the sky pure and cold, to hunt woodcocks in the farm woods around Saint-Glinglin. There, I've slowed down, I'm pulling onto the service lane, I've put on my four-ways for extra safety, and now I'm getting my good old
Devoir
from my briefcase. The guy who signed the article is a first-class shit-shoveller and we love him for it — except when the shit's on the tips of our own shoes from stepping in it, obviously. And if, way off in the future, you've never heard of the second Lavoie Affair, well, open your barn doors wide, that's my friendly advice to you.

RCMP REPORTS INCRIMINATE PAUL LAVOIE

That's the title of one of them. Now, I'm going to read you an excerpt from the police report that is quoted extensively in all four articles, no less, that have to do with this affair: this one appeared under the byline of the (admittedly) courageous Louis-Georges Laflèche:

On April 2, 1970, we were informed that a meeting was going to take place that day at 6 o'clock in the evening in the apartment of Jean-Claude Marcel, secretary to Paul Lavoie, between Lavoie and Giuseppe Scarpino F.P.S. 354448 and Luigi Temperio F.P.S. 348015. A certain Louis-Gilles Gauthier would also be present at this meeting.

According to information received, the apartment was situated in a building on boulevard Saint-Joseph East, in Montreal. Apartment number 4.

A check was made of the building at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East, and no name appeared on the list of apartments for number 4. It was later established that the apartment in question was situated on the top floor of the building.

That same day, at 5:40 p.m., in the presence of Corporal Maurice Vachon, regimental number 3347, we observed a v.a. 1970 Oldsmobile, colour grey, Quebec licence plate 5P-2024, registered under the name of Paul Lavoie, park across the boulevard from 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East, in Montreal. The v.a. was driven by an unidentified man. Mr. Lavoie got out and went inside the building situated at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East.

At 6:00 p.m. we observed Louis-Gilles Gauthier enter the building at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East. Photographs of the subject were taken.

At 6:10 p.m., we observed a v.a. Cadillac, colour dark blue, roof black vinyl, Quebec licence plate 2M-9898, registered in the name of Giuseppe Scarpino. The latter, accompanied by Luigi Temperio, interred [sic] the building situated at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East. Photos of the subjects were taken.

At 6:50 p.m., we observed Paul Lavoie leaving the building at 5145 boulevard Saint-Joseph East. He was alone. He got into the Oldsmobile and drove away.

Surveillance was terminated at 7:00 p.m.

Factual note: It has been verified that a telephone was installed in apartment number 4 on 30-03-70 and was terminated on 30-04-70.

That's the kind of thing that happens when you're in power and you try to stick bats in the spokes of investigators of good faith (there are some). Somewhere in town, a journalist wakes up with an anonymous manilla envelope shoved through his mail slot. And now I'm going to start the car and merge with the traffic, otherwise I might draw attention to myself. Standing between the ditch and my car, both feet on the shoulder, one door open like the door of a shitter as if I were taking a piss in the open air, it might look like a normal thing, but it's not normal for me. I mean, for me to whip it out on the side of the road? My wife would say it lacks class. There, I'm back on the highway, left signal light flashing, exiting the service lane — get it?
La voie de service
?

I hope you know that what you just heard, you out there in the future, that piece from the
Devoir
I read at the steering wheel of my stopped car is a bomb. You do? No? But perhaps by the time you're hearing this it is all common knowledge. If so, so much the better for you, but now, in 1973, in Quebec, not Sicily, it's hot shit! An apartment that has a phone installed one month before the elections and then has it removed the day after the votes are counted, okay, so far no big deal. They were in an election campaign and soliciting funds. That two big names from the Scarpino family and a Liberal member and ex-candidate for the party leadership were there at the same time, what can I say? It isn't exactly the kind of thing you'd want to become public knowledge. Scarpino controls the entire North American distribution of heroin, and his organization serves as the link between the Corsican clan in Marseille and the big New York families. The only problem for Paul Lavoie, and it wasn't his fault, was that he was dealing with two gentlemen who were at the centre of a wiretap operation set up by the RCMP as part of their Operation Plain, a huge international investigation into the trafficking of heroin. The contact between us and the Scarpinos was through Gauthier, a supporter who owned a tavern in Saint-Léonard and a good friend of mine, who was chief treasurer for the Lavoie campaign.

The day after the psychological triumph of the wallet that was the Liberal victory, when Little Albert was busy constructing his cabinet, he was told of the dubious connections of his new right arm. Either he received a visit from some higher-ups in the civil service or else he was put in the picture by his special adviser, Uncle Bob himself, who knew everyone from the head of state to the lowest echelons of the public service. Uncle Bob, who wagging tongues were saying had access to the collection of tapes gathered by the intelligence services of the Quebec Provincial Police, and who had only to snap his fingers to have at his disposal any relevant hardware belonging to military intelligence. Papa Boss and Big Brother all rolled up into one person, imagine it
 . . .
The result? Paul Lavoie, whose secret financial backers expected to be made Minister of Justice, found himself relegated to the sidelines once again, given the portfolio of Public Works as a kind of consolation prize. What was worse, now Uncle Bob had him by the short and curlies. So why wasn't he simply kicked out of the cabinet altogether? Because Lavoie would have taken half the party with him. He still had too much support to be confronted head-on. The scandal would have blown the whole party to smithereens, and most of the shit would have fallen on the premier's well-coifed head.

But behind the scenes, the confrontation went on. I know that at one point Lavoie went to Vézina and told him, regarding the special counsellor: “It's him or me
 . . .
” Ha! Vézina gave him the usual runaround, and before my unfortunate patron could cut a path through the bullshit, Uncle Bob, the Shakespearian character hiding behind the arras, had once again consolidated his power.

And once Paul Lavoie was no longer around to defend himself, people began opening the floodgates and covering him with all the crud that rose to the surface. And we, his friends, stood there without saying a word while he was stabbed in the back again, forced to watch the shit-spraying in silence, because if we didn't, the whole apple cart would have tipped over. In politics, there's nothing better than a scapegoat with his mouth full of dirt. And just between you and me, it wasn't the Mafia who pulled off this coup. At bottom, the business between Lavoie and Uncle Bob Lapierre was a war of succession. And if, boys and girls from the distant future, you wonder how I'm doing, I'd say that J.-C. Marcel isn't doing too badly, thank you for asking. I was elected in a supplementary by-election at the beginning of autumn. I'm the new member of the National Assembly for the riding of Vautrin, and the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Revenue. It's not exactly the red carpet, but with a bit of luck that will follow. All is well. I don't regret my choices. I've sworn allegiance to Uncle Bob.

THE FOUR PS

WITH LA VÉRENDRYE PARK DISPLAYING
its melancholic golden tamaracks around him, and the fall rocking in from the far side of October, Sam, at the wheel, remembered his last meeting with Chevalier Branlequeue, the previous year, toward the end.

In the mid-1990s, as Branlequeue was sliding quietly toward retirement as professor of creative writing at UQAM, like Tolstoy deserting the conjugal foyer late in his life, he abandoned La Grosse Éleonore and took a tiny apartment on rue Saint-André, in Montreal's South Central district, a two-minute walk from the university and smack in the middle of the Gay Village. He freely confessed that he aspired to nothing more than to minister to the humblest of the humble and signed on as a volunteer in the care of AIDS victims in their terminal phase. It was unexpected, a late-blooming and a very touching return to the rejection of that homosexuality he'd been carefully keeping under wraps, but which must have continued to exist in a state of pure latency. Desire he'd never had the courage to acknowledge, that he'd let desiccate like a skeleton in the closet of his books, the author of
Elucubrations
(Didace-Beauchemin Prize, 1970), disowned by wife and children and eyed with growing suspicion by his university brotherhood, as well as by his two true adopted families, literature and politics, he was now going to sublimate himself in a twilight homage to adepts being decimated by AIDS.

His kidneys gave out first. Nihilo, who under Branlequeue's tutelage had started his master's in creative writing, visited him during his dialysis. They discussed books almost as though nothing had changed, but Sam watched as Chevalier's body emptied and refilled with blood and felt like one of those shades who buttonholed Ulysses at the mouth of the Underworld.

Next it was his lungs. The doctors took a huge chunk out of him, but the cancer had metastasized to his liver. These were organs that, once transformed into killers, weren't known to take their sweet time about it.

“You should have come yesterday,” Chevalier told him with a weak smile. They were in his room in the Palliative Care Unit of Nôtre-Dame Hospital. “You'd have run into someone who would have interested you, even here.”

Samuel, standing beside the bed, had just handed him a paperback of
Le Survenant
, which he'd bought earlier in The Exchange, on rue Saint-Denis. The beautiful cover on the new French-Canadian Library edition showed a man with his back turned, standing on a point of land, one hand deep in his pocket, collar turned up, a small bag thrown over his shoulder. In front of him flowed a river, and farther off a shore and island, a cluster of trees casting dark blue shadows on the green water. Chevalier had taken a moment to hold the book in his hands and turn its pages, his eyes shining.

Sam was privately shocked by Chevalier's thinness. His colour was a kind of ash yellow. He'd always spoken, even in class, in soft, luminous tones, but now using his own feeble voice seemed to tire him out. They could hear car horns sounded by drivers on Sherbrooke Street, demonstrating their support for the nurses on strike, who were picketing in front of the old hospital entrance and whose angry signs were held up and shaken in their faces as they passed. From the hospital-room window, they could see the irregular, phallic shape of the obelisk raised in memory of Charles de Gaulle at the edge of Park La Fontaine, the same park in which, thirty years before, mounted police had charged and beaten the crowds assembled along the parade route up Saint-Jean.

“Oh, yes?” Sam asked. “Who was here?”

“Richard Godefroid
 . . .
Do you want to sit down?”

Sam shook his head, as though taking a chair was getting too close to the position held by the man in the bed. He preferred to stay on his feet.

“Godefroid was here?”

“Yes. Why, are you surprised?”

“You publicly called him a liar. I thought he was nursing a grudge against you.”

Chevalier smiled.

“To him, I'm still the old twenty-five-year-old prof who read his work to the class.”

“And
 . . .
what did you two talk about?”

Chevalier's eyes continued to smile.

“What do you think we talked about?”

“October? The Lavoie Affair? No, I guess not
 . . .
”

“It wasn't the time to talk about that. But still, he didn't come here to talk about the weather. I told myself he wouldn't dare continue to deceive his old mentor on his death bed. So I asked him a question, just one: why did he go to Dallas? Why Texas, one week before the Lavoie kidnapping? But he gave me his old song-and-dance about financing themselves by pretending to have lost some travellers' cheques
 . . .
‘Go tell it to the marines,' I said, and he just laughed and shrugged his shoulders. But do you know what? As he was leaving, standing in the doorway over there, he stopped. He kept his eyes down. He knew it would probably be the last thing he ever said to me. We both knew it. And he said: ‘You were right
 . . .
' I waited for him to go on, and he said: ‘About my poems
 . . .
They really were crap.'”

So that's how it ends, Nihilo thought. Alone in a bed that doesn't belong to you, wearing a skimpy johnny-shirt that's as thin as paper, with your insides being devoured by your own cells that want to know nothing about you.

And, in Chevalier's case, abandoned by everyone but a handful of the faithful: students, minor writers, more or less unknown poets, a few profs, all of them very much alive and caught up in their own activities: full schedules, necessary vices, amorous trysts, tennis matches, weekends up north, conferences at the University of Ithaca on textual genetics in the works of Joyce, articles to write about the time Hubert Aquin spent in the library in Buffalo. So much to do, so many pretexts for spending less and less time in the Palliative Care Unit of Nôtre-Dame Hospital, their hearts shorn of pity and affection. Chevalier's bedside table was notably less encumbered than the ideological benches of the nation. Illness was approaching like a high-speed train, and the tunnel was opening up before him all too quickly.

Toward the end, he continued to write his famous letters to editors, poking at the clay feet of our statues, discrediting our great heroes. His feverish missives were aimed at everything from the huge cars driven by the bigwigs of the left-right nationalist movement, to the private jet flown by the Kid-caïds in Québec Inc. He'd never been good at the art of making friends, but in these latter years Chevalier perfected, often to the point of no return, the ability to turn his back on the world. And when reproached for shitting in his own nest, he replied that he didn't have a nest, he had a goal.

If he'd been content to rest on his laurels for his work in the prisons that October, even though it meant making his patriotic skin crawl every fifteen years — the years of the referendums on sovereignty — he probably would still have had some visitors. And even without accepting the epic (which is to say, heroic) version of the October Crisis, in which the terrorists were collected and recycled as productive and enlightened members of society, just like the cops and their political masters, and limiting himself to denouncing the duplicity of the federal government and the wheeling and dealing of the War Measures Act over a pint of local beer or a glass of Chardonnay, as most of his colleagues did. But Chevalier needed more than that. He couldn't stop trying to understand what had
really happened
.

It occurred to me to wonder if La Grosse Éléonore didn't see him the same way that Marie-Québec had regarded me, those last few months in Kaganoma. Not like a fool, exactly, at least not yet, but as someone who was in the process of crossing to the other side, passing through a border that was supposed to be kept reassuringly clear and watertight, like the line that separates the world of reality from that of the novel. In fact, it's not so much a border as a grey area between multiple possibilities. Above it lies a parallel universe, a world in which every step forward is simultaneously a step back, where the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa and Hitler and the little extraterrestrials found at Roswell in 1947 are all alive and hanging around the same cloning factory in an extinct volcanic crater on an island in the South Pacific.

Chevalier's problem had become mine: we both lived in an age of so many plot-seers and conspiracy theorists that any Machiavellian notion we might entertain was automatically reduced to a permanent caricature of itself, discrediting any sustained attempt to reflect a little on the theme of political manipulation. The incessant communicational bombardment of the Web had erased the last permanent markers for distinguishing between the ridiculous and the serious.

Chevalier would die before reaching his Promised Land, but in any case his tribe had dispersed and no one had the slightest confidence that the Promised Land even existed.

“Have you had any news from your confrère, Falardeau?” came the nasal voice from the bed.

Sam replied that he hadn't seen Falardeau for a long time, but he'd heard that Fred was living in a bedroom community on the South Shore and worked as a researcher for a television station. He'd seen his name in the credits for
L'Enquêteux
, the new documentary series on Télé-Québec. Sam wondered what Fred's reaction would be to seeing Chevalier in this condition, nothing but skin and bones under the thin johnny-shirt.

Chevalier smiled at him.

“You were my two best
 . . .
”

His old professor took his hand. Sam gave it to him but refrained from shaking it, as though his existed outside himself. The sick man feebly held his left hand as he spoke. Nihilo suddenly found the situation ridiculous. Then he found ridiculous his finding anything ridiculous concerning this dying man. He tightened his grip, enclosing Branlequeue's hand firmly in his own.

“Sometimes, Sam, it seems to me that the light of fact comes to us from a long way off, like light from dead stars. And that we are swimming in a sea of arbitrariness when we call on facts to give us a plausible explanation
. . . .
Maybe the explanations we're looking for can never be anything but approximations, mere outlines that we fill in with meaning, like constellations: we draw dogs and huntsmen and dippers on places where there is nothing but eternal ice and extinct suns.”

Samuel took his hand more firmly in his own. There was a pause, and then Chevalier went on:

“We know from the coroner's inquest that someone in the Lafleur cell made three calls to a firm in Houston, James Engineering, during the summer of 1970. It was confirmed that that enterprise had offices in Laval from February 1970 to March the following year, apparently without having landed a single contract. But there the trail ends. Disappears in petrol smoke somewhere on the gulf coast of Mexico. The CIA is like God in the Old Testament. Either you believe in Him or you don't. But if you do, it's everywhere
 . . .
But Texas is too far, too violent, for me. Which means we have no choice: we have to go back to rue Collins.”

“Yes.”

Chevalier took a sheet of paper from his bedside table. He had scribbled some notes on it.

“What's this?”

“My theory of the four Ps. Let me explain
 . . .
”

“What are the four Ps?”

Chevalier read:

Pieces of chicken

Prosecutions

Pierre

Police warrants

“There's something funny about the guys who delivered the chicken,” he said, looking up at Sam. “Something doesn't add up about those deliveries
 . . .
I followed the trials closely. I went to Jean-Paul's and his brother's, I was even a witness at Richard Godefroid's. Have I ever told you about Captain Claude Leclerc?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“He was the head of QPP's homicide squad. Not long after Gode's trial was over, I heard through the grapevine that Leclerc had given up his commission. From what I understood, he slammed the door but didn't let it make any noise. I wanted to talk to him, but he never returned any of my phone calls
 . . .

“Then, at René's trial, the lawyer Brien saved his client's ass, and do you know how? By systematically stuffing the jury's head with two main points: one, the Crown had not succeeded in proving beyond a reasonable doubt that René Lafleur had been to 140 rue Collins during the week in question; and two, François Langlais, alias Pierre Chevrier, probably went to that address while Paul Lavoie was still being held hostage there
 . . .
”

“What?”

“Which brings us to the third P: Pierre.”

Sam gave a faint but happy smile at seeing his old professor waving his sheet of paper as he spoke, whipping the air with it. Beware, you enemies of the truth! He was just getting warmed up. His final course
 . . .

“Listen to this: a police officer told me that the night before the departure of the Rebellion Cell to Cuba, the Montreal police had traced the ownership of the kidnappers' car to a certain Pierre Chevrier, and from there connected it to François Langlais and the FLQ. But officially, it wasn't until a whole week later that the law enforcement agency identified ‘a mysterious Pierre Chevrier.' Alias Pierre Guité. Alias Pierre Bousquet. The man changed identities more often than he changed shirts. Have you learned anything new about this guy?”

“Nothing that you don't already know, Chevalier. You gave me an assignment, but I'm sorry, I deserve to get a big fat zero
 . . .
”

“It's the final exam that counts, Sam.”

“Tell me about the final P.”

“Ah, the police warrant. In his famous interview in
Temps-Presse
, Gode said that while the members of the cell were holding Paul Lavoie, the police obtained a warrant to search the house right next door to theirs. Desrosiers told the coroner the same thing, and so I'm inclined to believe it. But when the police finally discovered their hideout, after the cell had abandoned it, no one said a word about having searched the house next door. Nobody said: ‘Goddamnit, five days ago we were this close.'
 . . .
It was as though the search had never taken place.”