October 1970 (32 page)

BABY

EARLY IN 1971, WITH NO
fanfare, with a simple order-in-council from the municipality of Saint-Hubert, rue Collins was renamed rue Braffort. The pretext, it seemed, had something to do with the influx of curiosity-seekers who spent their Sunday afternoon drives taking a look at the house in which the vice-premier of Quebec had been assassinated. Apparently Braffort was the name of a farmer in the area. By an absolutely stupefying coincidence, however, a few weeks after the toponymic adjustment, it was also the name of a member of the FLQ who was shot three times in the head with a .22 calibre pistol in a suburb of Paris.

Sam got off the 10 and, leaving the river behind him, turned onto the frightful urban horror called boulevard Taschereau. Then he took the 112 east to La Savane Road, passing the exits to the airport, hangars, and fields, passing rue Nelson, finally turning onto rue Braffort.

The Lavoie Affair, he was thinking, was rooted, like the JFK Affair, in one of those subconscious layers of conspiracy thinking that refused to recognize coincidence, and in which the inevitable, mysterious plot thickened and thickened until the final narrative sucked in facts, links, relationships of cause and effect, partial and total accident, and kneaded the dough into a single, dark but brilliant ball, the yeast for which was provided by an intellectual virtuosity cultivated to the point of paranoid omniscience.

On one level, the name change had had its desired effect: the former rue Collins had definitely ceased to be a tourist attraction. Two parallel and isolated streets surrounded by vacant fields, Nelson and Braffort were the stump ends of a suburban hodgepodge of summer cottages converted into bungalows and low-end split-levels rubbing shoulders with down-at-heel mobile homes. At the field bordering the airport, Braffort ended in a pile of gravel and a pair of concrete blocks, beyond which it was reduced to two muddy ruts heading northwest, which eventually disappeared into a woodlot of aspens surrounded by ploughed fields.

But if the purpose of the name change was to discourage the curious from coming and sticking their noses into things, as Sam Nihilo and his friend, Fred Falardeau, were doing now, then the city councillors had apparently missed their target.

Samuel was a bit early, but he hadn't been there five minutes before he saw Fred's sedan approaching along la Savane. The next minute, his old drinking buddy from university had joined him on the exact spot where the Chevrolet containing the body of Paul Lavoie had been found nearly thirty years before. They hadn't seen each other in years. They shook hands on the grounds of the former Wander Aviation, in the shadow of Hangar Number 12.

Within minutes, Fred, a thigh hiked on the front fender of his car, began gesticulating, his tone becoming imperial without his being aware of it, his index finger pointing to the scene that they had dredged up from the depths of their memories. A pale October sun shone down on their heads.

“Two things, Sam. In the famous interview in
Temps-Presse
, Richard Godefroid supposedly placed the body in the trunk and got rid of the car at the end of rue Collins. As you can see, that clearly didn't happen: when they got to the end of rue Collins, they turned right and drove a good two hundred metres toward the military base. Why didn't they go in the other direction? At the other end of rue Collins, they would have been in fields and woods and completely out of sight, the perfect spot to abandon an old car with an incriminating package in the trunk. Coming this way, taking the risk of being met by a military patrol, doesn't make any sense.”

Fred punctuated his words by slapping the hood of his car with the flat of his hand.

“Second. Godefroid explained their little ‘promenade' of two hundred metres with an absurd lie: he said they put the car in drive and let it roll by itself onto base property. The problem with that is that it doesn't explain how it was eventually found inside a fenced-in parking lot. Or why the car keys were gone when the first journalist arrived on the scene
 . . .
Are you following me?”

“Fred, not only am I following you, but your powers of synthesis are impressing me as much as they ever did!”

Fred patted his stomach.

“I'm a bit hungry. You know what we should do?”

“No, what?”

“Go get us some chicken.”

And where else would they go but to Baby Barbecue on boulevard Taschereau, in Longueuil? And order half-thawed fries with some kind of thin brown gravy on them, and the inevitable coleslaw soaked in dressing, all of it washed down with a good Pepsi.

What had Fred been up to? He was writing, of course. How could someone like him not be a writer? But with one mouth to feed already and another Falardeau offspring on the way, he needed to find something to get the pot boiling. A few months earlier, he'd begun looking into the Braffort business for
L'Enquêteux
, the premier TV show on Télé-Québec. The unresolved murder in Paris of Francis Braffort, a few months after the October Crisis, was generally attributed to a settling of accounts within the FLQ. Braffort had been the brains behind the terrorist movement, and often its main mouthpiece. And so, in an unexpected way, Fred's path had once again crossed that of the two Algerians, Zadig and Madwar.

“Do you remember that article in the
Montreal Sun
?”

“I do. It was the Rosetta stone of the Octobeerists.”

“Chevalier gave each of us an assignment: he asked you to follow the Chevrier trail while I dug into the business of the two fedayeen.”

“Yeah. And we couldn't have known it at the time, but that was the last meeting of the Octos!”

“Did you ever get anywhere with the famous Pierre Chevrier? Tell me something about him
 . . .
”

Samuel scrunched his brows and looked at his friend. Physically, Fred was still the almost identical twin of James Joyce, which meant that getting total, undefended openness or even an unguarded smile from him was as remote as integrity and lack of appetite would be in a suburban mayor. Sam hadn't thought their old unacknowledged rivalry would come back so quickly. Fred, good old Fred, was hiding a tiny sliver of a smile behind his chicken thigh that was too innocent for his liking.

Sam returned his smile.

“You go first. Tell me about Zadig and Madwar
 . . .
”

Wincing, Fred acknowledged Sam's cautious ruse.

“Ah, the same old Sam. Look at us. You'd think we were a couple of spies in a thriller movie. It's the same old game, isn't it: use the little you know like bait to tease out a bigger piece of the puzzle. Okay, let's go. I'll give you Madwar and Zadig, you give me Pierre. You're getting two for the price of one, though, you dog.”

“Agreed that we're a long way from Joyce. We're a long way from Hubert Aquin.”

“No, we aren't. We're engaged in an exercise of invention and fabrication, intrigue and history. Even exceptionally creative people launch their little fictions into the world. The difference is that when it works, nobody calls what we do a bestseller. They call it history.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About disinformation as a fine art. At a certain level, what you find are not two sides shooting at each other, but a war between two texts. I'm talking about the dispatch that leaves a foreign information service's office, arrives by telex at a press agency, and appears in your morning newspaper the next day, and gradually works its way up to becoming the official version. In the Braffort Affair, the settling of accounts within the FLQ was the cover story. I know as many people who believe that he was eliminated by the secret service as are convinced that an FLQ commando raid was responsible. It's the tied match that sits well with the information community. So much so that the trail is entirely covered up
 . . .
”

“So, what happened to Francis Braffort?”

LA COURNEUVE, PARIS SUBURB,
MARCH 1971

The woman was tall and blonde. Her mouth was dry and her heart was pounding. She stared at the man in front of her, who had just paused in what he was saying to lower his head toward his plate and raise a small forkful of couscous to his mouth. If he noticed the cool, dark figure in the left corner of his field of vision, it was too late for him to do anything about it. Nor did he have time to analyze the brusque movement executed by the figure as it took its right hand from its jacket pocket and raised its arm. He didn't turn his head in the man's direction. The first low-calibre bullet ricocheted off his frontal bone and embedded itself in the ceiling, from which a few bits of plaster fell onto his couscous like fine snowflakes. Blood suddenly covered the eater's face and, as his forehead became adorned with a bright-red split, he leaned forward and vomited onto his plate. The man at the next table moved the .22-calibre pistol, which was equipped with a silencer, closer to the victim's left ear and squeezed the trigger. The man fell heavily to his right, tipping over the chair as he went. Convulsions shook his body and his hands tried to grasp the ungraspable. The other man quickly jumped to his feet and, leaning over the victim, fired a third round point-blank into his forehead.

The woman had stood up, remaining on her side of the table. The killer looked up and saw her.

“They're coming
 . . .
Hurry!”

He was already running.

While listening to Fred, Sam remembered being at Chevalier's funeral in la Pérade. If Branlequeue's son hadn't asked him to take charge of the archival chaos in the old professor's office at the university, the story of the chicken deliveries would never have come to the surface and he would not then be sitting here in Baby Barbecue listening to Falardeau, a writer who, like him, had wandered into the secret catacombs of history. For Fred, the road that had brought him back to Chevalier's original assignment had been a television program.

“Hey, Fred! Yoo-hoo! You and me, we've got a master's in literature. We ought to be describing masterpieces translated from twenty-eight languages and the juicy love stories on which readers pounce, most of whom, or so we're told, are women
 . . .
”

“I know that.”

“Good. So who killed Francis Braffort?”

“Madwar, alias Daniel Prince. The RCMP used him to infiltrate the FLQ in 1968, along with his friend Brossard, the future Zadig. Their mission was to create a cell that would act as a Trojan Horse for the secret police. Nothing could have been easier. Anyone could join the FLQ, get involved
 . . .
All you had to do was get hold of a few sticks of dynamite. And when thanks to them the group they'd successfully penetrated was blown apart by the police a year later, the Security Service had other projects for our two boys. They got them into Cuba, via New York, and eventually to Algeria. With return trips back and forth to London, Paris, Zurich
 . . .
eventually they ended up in Jordan. At one point, Zadig even went behind the Iron Curtain, to Hungary
 . . .
”

“You learned all this from declassified documents?”

“Of course not. But the need to talk is a powerful engine. I developed a few good contacts in the Mounted Police. The old guard, the guys who retired. The ones who missed the good old days like nobody's business. I discovered that those guys, when you give them a chance, are not completely immune to the desire to blow their own horns. Because they won their dirty little war, after all. But we couldn't go on air with off-the-record interviews. My sources refused to be filmed even with their faces distorted and their voices altered. After a certain point, the project was dropped. Except I didn't drop it. I was like a hunting dog on a fresh scent. I continued on my own
 . . .
”

“Is there a connection between the Braffort business and Lavoie? Was Francis Braffort
 . . .
”

“The real assassin of Lavoie? My informants in the Mounties never encouraged me to go in that direction. Of course, they weren't obliged to tell me everything. And I wasn't obliged to swallow everything that came out of their cake holes, either. In my view, Braffort knew a little too much about the counter-FLQ measures and those two maggots in Algeria
 . . .
”

“Algeria again. Does that surprise me?”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Counter-FLQ. That was the Foreign Delegation?”

“Yeah. Nothing less than the brainchild of Western secret services to infiltrate terrorist organizations in the Middle East.”

“I think I'm going to need a beer,” Samuel said, looking around.

“A cold beer? After eating?”

“What else should a couple of ex-Octobeerists do when they meet?”

“It's against my principles, but you're right. Let's have a cold one.”

“In remembrance of all those hectolitres of amber, blond, and red
 . . .
”

“Those were good times,” said Fred after the first mouthful.

“We drank like fish.”

“We did.”

“Was that all it was, do you think? An excuse to drink, nothing else?”

“You want to know if we were dedicated Octobeerists? We were a circle of friends, drunk most of the time
 . . .
”

“A conspiracy think-tank, all the same. I didn't see you at Chevalier's funeral
 . . .
”

“My girlfriend was about to have a baby and
 . . .
You know how it was with the Octobeerists and women
 . . .
”

“But did it never occur to you that Chevalier was way out in left field, right from the start?”

“And that I was wasting my time going out to Saint-Hubert, measuring the distance between the bungalow's garage and the parking lot and Hangar Number 12? That's what my girlfriend thinks.”