October 1970 (33 page)

“Look, Pierre Chevrier, le Chevreuil, he's the key. In the
Sun
article, the anonymous informants talked about a liaison between the fedayeen and the FLQ, remember that?”

“Yes. And I see two possible explanations for that. Either their connection to the October kidnappings is an invention concocted to enhance the legend of Zadig and Madwar and facilitate their infiltration into the Palestine resistance movement, or the link existed and le Chevreuil was in touch with those guys.”

“I'm still thirsty
 . . .
What do you mean by the legend of Zadig and Madwar?”

“I meant it in the sense that the secret service uses it. Legend, from
legere
, to read: a secret agent's cover story is 90 percent words. Sartre said that existentialism is humanism. Myself, I would add that Octobeerism is a hermeneutic. And now, tell me about Pierre.”

“I made a list of all the contradictions in the police statements on this subject. The cops appear to have been walking on eggshells with their big boots on whenever the subject of Pierre came up. Like in René Lafleur's kidnapping trial, for instance
 . . .
”

MONTREAL COURT HOUSE,
SEPTEMBER 1972

Officer Rossignol was standing in the witness box. A court clerk handed him a black-and-white negative, which he took between his thumb and index finger, looked at briefly, and said he recognized the grey Chrysler photographed from the roof of a neighbouring house as it exited the garage.

“Do you recognize the man at the wheel?” asked the prosecutor.

“Yeah. It's Maurice Corbo.”

“And beside him?”

Rossignol hesitated.

“If you mean Langlais, I don't know him.”

An angel passed through the courtroom. The Crown prosecutor and the judge exchanged glances, barely fluttering their eyelids.

“Oh, well, if you don't recognize him
 . . .
” said the prosecutor, scolding him in a friendly way.

The police officer cut him off:

“If that's Langlais, it's news to me. I do not recognize the individual in this photograph.”

“Well, at least that's clear.” The prosecutor smiled and shrugged.

“Next question,” said the judge.

“The police brain is a powerful and little understood organ,” remarked Fred.

“I agree. What are you doing?”

Fred's briefcase was in fact a computer case, from which he was extricating his laptop. He shoved aside plates piled with chicken bones, cartilage, bits of yellowed, gelatinous skin floating in coagulating fat and Baby Barbecue sauce, licked his fingers, and opened his machine.

“Let's see what I've got on Pierre Chevrier. It isn't much, as far as I can remember.”

Fred tapped a few keys and waited. His search engine sniffed its way through a forest of notes and came up with a single paragraph, like a spaniel sent to fetch a partridge. Fred read the passage, then looked up at Sam.

“He went to North Africa.”

For a second, they didn't speak.

“Algeria?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, but that doesn't prove anything.”

“No. It could just be a coincidence. One of many. But if I find he was on the RCMP payroll, my friend, that would put the cat among the pigeons, don't you think? What else do you have on le Chevreuil?”

“Luc Goupil met with a Pierre in London,” Fred said after awhile.

“Goupil? Wait
 . . .
”

Fred shut down his laptop. He spoke quickly.

“While researching Braffort, in France, I came across the story of Luc Goupil, the guy who hanged himself in
 . . .
”

“I know who he was. But what did he have to do with
 . . .
?”

Fred closed the cover of his computer and finished his beer.

“It would take too long to explain all that now
 . . .
”

“I'm in no hurry, Fred. You got time for another beer?”

“No thanks, I'm driving. Anyway, the days of getting gloriously pissed in the middle of the afternoon are long gone. That's what ‘good old days' means — they were good, but they're gone. When you look ahead, what do you see?”

“At first glance I see myself as the father of a family. Looking closer, I see someone trying to kill time until time kills him.”

“I don't have much more on Goupil, Sam. He's just another rabbit I started
 . . .
”

In the parking lot they tried to arrange a time when they could get together again. It was if they knew that after this meeting they'd once again be swallowed up, Fred by his family and Sam by the great northern forest.

Around them spread a slice of America that provided a good idea of what the human soul looked like once it was paved and cemented from end to end, then lit up with billboards showing images of the female body. They could have been in Blainville or Dallas or Fort Lauderdale, in the airless, winking periphery of any communally administrated hell on the continent. What really frightened Nihilo about boulevard Taschereau was the atmosphere of aggressive normality that this architectural and commercial nightmare tended to confer on the devastating sadness of absolute and utter ugliness.

“Fred,” he said, “I need you to tell me something. What you have on Zadig and Madwar, you're sure about it?”

“Solid as concrete, Sam. On that point my humans are categorical.”

“Your what?”

“My humans. Human sources.”

Is that how it begins, Sam wondered. You start to talk like them, and then what? You become like them?

“Until our next cold one, then, Fred.”

“You can twist my arm, old buddy. I'll try to untangle myself from the conjugal web
 . . .
And Sam? From now on I'm concentrating on Travers and you're looking into Lavoie. What do you say to that?”

“Done.”

They shook hands. Bye-bye, Baby.

On the Champlain Bridge, Sam found himself casting frequent glances at his rear-view mirror. But there was no one on his tail.

On the Champlain Bridge, at a certain point I shot over the crest. Suddenly there was Big Guy Dumont, front man for Éditions ______________, watching me from the height of an immense billboard that he'd been paid to appear on, totally naked, stretched out on a queen-sized bed under a velour sheet looking like a sultan and smiling like a cat who'd just swallowed a canary. I felt a pang of sympathy for the poor commuters who had to sit looking at this horrific vision five mornings a week.

“Here's your BLT, honey
 . . .
”

“Thank you, uh, thanks a lot!”

After my meal, I got up and dropped a quarter into the slot of a pay phone on the wall of the Fameux. I'd been trying in vain for two days to call Marie-Québec. It was as though the ghost of Kaganoma had been hanging up on me. After four rings, surprise! A new message.

. . .
I feel compelled to sit at my table, I just want to write and write more. And it's always, always like this, I don't allow myself to get up, I feel like I'm devouring my own life, that for the honey I give to God knows who, you out there in the void, I have to steal it from my most beautiful flowers, I have to tear them up and stomp on their roots. Please leave a message
.

I hung up. Trigorin.

When I got back to my table by the bay window, I scribbled a few notes in my book. Since lunch at Baby Barbecue, my brain had been seething. This time I contented myself with one or two reflections on the role played by distance in the jealousy that was consuming me. I suspected it occupied the same place in my love life that time occupied in my research. It separated me from the object of my desire. The goal was the same: a quest for the unattainable, which, coming up against the impossibility of knowing, transformed itself into an unappeasable suffering. The woman I loved was perhaps at that very moment fucking a hockey player in full uniform, or a rock band, six hundred and fifty kilometres from here, as the crow flies, while I, on the corner of Saint-Denis and Mont-Royal, was sitting in a bay window, busily unreeling a string of words on a page, like a trained dog, with a view to writing an essay that I knew I would never write.

And so I did as it says to do in the song. I jumped into my car.

North of La Vérendrye Park I saw a great grey owl perched in a dead tree beside the road. I braked and got out of the car. Peat bogs, hundred-year-old spruces two metres tall, the gentle golden tamaracks. Not another vehicle in sight, the silence seeming to extend for thousands of kilometres. Through flurries of snow that were turning the sky a dull grey, I watched the spectral apparition in my binoculars. What must a day seem like to this bird? Time must seem to wind itself up within the large facial discs through which its yellow eyes registered the dance of snowflakes, this stretch of highway, the observing man and his observant eyes, the heaviness under his wings, the roar of the wind, balancing each image and each sound against their equivalent in silence. Before history, its shouting and its bombs, the raptor's indifference was whole and impenetrable.

Two hundred kilometres farther north, just before Maldoror became visible on the horizon, its smoke plume erased by the blizzard, I turned onto the road to Kaganoma. Snow already covered the ground. Before I even got out of the car I knew the house was empty. Gusting snow was slowly burying it. A single light had been left on, in my study on the second floor, as if the ghost were expecting me. I wasn't sure I was glad to be back. I remained standing in the snow without moving. Wet flakes landed on my eyelashes like kisses. And then I saw them.

The huge, round footprints of a lynx, clearly discernable in the fresh snow. I smiled. They were headed toward the house.

SAINT-HUBERT MILITARY
BASE, SUMMER 1966

“CANADA'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE KIND
of military operati
on necessitated by zones of high-intensity conflict,” droned the general, tapping out the rhythm of his words on the headquarters' map with his baton, “must be limited to the deployment of the 4th Brigade of Engineers, at the moment stationed in Germany, with sufficient tactical air support. The rest of our Armed Forces are going to need to rapidly reorganize and be given the flexibility necessary to intervene in a vast repertoire of possible conflicts. Which means that our Armed Forces must, among other things, concentrate on the problems of revolutionary agitation, terrorism, and urban guerilla warfare. It must prepare itself to withstand a prolonged anti-insurrectionist war
 . . .
”

During the Question Period that followed, a member of Parliament from Quebec who had listened attentively to General Bédard's talk, asked with a perplexed, not to say slightly disconcerted, air: “General, if I understand you rightly, you're proposing that we increase the effectiveness of our military component in areas of low conflict
 . . .
”

“Exactly,” said the general.

“Except that your model, it seems to me, suggests just the opposite: that the importance of the military component must diminish, and that of the civil engineering section be increased, until the intensity of the conflict decreases
 . . .
isn't that right?”

“Yes. And that's why I'm the first to recognize that the Armed Forces cannot operate to their highest potential in situations of low-intensity conflict. Hear me: the groups best placed to pacifically solve most of these types of conflicts are civil organizations — governments, police, and so on — that may or may not require military assistance. I insist on this point: in the lower half of the spectrum of applied force, the role of our troops is to support organisms implicated in the search for a solution. This seems to me to be absolutely essential. And that's why we need to develop a structure dedicated to being able to coordinate police, civil, and military actions on a large scale. The basis of this structure already exists in Canada: you no doubt understand that I'm talking about our three levels of government. In other words, the law can be modified in such a way that the military can act as agents of peace having as their mission to assist legally constituted authorities. I'm glad you raised this question.”

The Honourable J. D. Sheppard, P.C. member for Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan, had removed his earphone, which had practically disappeared into his ear, and was scraping the inside of his ear cavity with his little finger. He interrupted this operation to raise his hand.

“You mentioned levels of government
 . . .
Last week, I read in the paper that the police had nabbed two separatists who were getting ready to steal a cache of arms from a military post in Montreal. Now, am I completely out in left field here, or if, when you speak of social agitation, and recycling the Canadian army into an anti-guerilla organization, you're
 . . .
”

The general thrust his square jaw forward.

“Putting Quebec in our sights? That's what you were about to say, is it not?”

“Well, er
 . . .
”

The general smiled. Everyone smiled except for Sheppard. What a bumpkin.

“It's three hours later in Regina,” sighed the Honourable Jay Vaugirard, District of Joliette, chin in hand. “Appetizer time,” he said to himself.

“Mr. Minister,” said General Bédard, still smiling, “I'm going to have our documents office send you the last few issues of
The Masses
, a small, clandestine journal that I don't think is distributed in Saskatchewan. In it, I'm sure you'll be surprised to learn that at this very moment, as we speak, there is in Montreal a paramilitary organization whose goal is to replace our democratic government with a socialist state much like the ones they have in Cuba and Moscow.”

The general looked at his watch. Almost time for dinner. He cleared his throat.

“To sum up, gentlemen, on the matter of our internal field of operations, we must be sure to apply all available forces to achieve maximum effect. Remember that the enemy operates on the lower part of our level of intensity in conflicts, where its efforts don't habitually meet any but feeble opposition and can take advantage of a disproportionate amount of publicity. And therefore, while the atomic weapons of our allies continue to prevent the outbreak of a total world war between the West and the Soviet powers, we are going to prevent, by the imposition of forces far superior in numbers, equipment and logistics, strikes, demonstrations, disruptions of order, riots, homemade bombs, Molotov cocktails, that can easily degenerate into more serious conflicts. Allow me, in summing up, to leave you with what I call my Mugger Theory. The best way to protect yourself from a mugger isn't to take out your knife and confront him with it on equal terms. It's to corner him at the end of an alley, point a dozen machine guns at him and tell him to drop his knife. And that, gentlemen, is exactly what we intend to do with these young thugs. When the time comes, we'll know how to provoke the right occasion. We'll bring them along to precisely where we want them, and then, after we've surrounded them with our squadrons, we'll provoke them to bring out their knives. And then, and only then, will we engage them
 . . .
”

The Minister of Defence was one of those who went up to General Bédard during the discussions that followed, armed with transcripts of the Commander of Mobile Forces' talk, and walked with him toward the mess hall.

“A simply remarkable presentation, my dear sir
 . . .
”

“Bah. Let's just say I'm doing my best to attract the attention of our political men to certain realities.”

“Remarkable, simply remarkable,” echoed the Honourable Peter Dryden.

“Not for me to say,” replied the Commander of Mobile Forces, with a shrug of his shoulders.

Three weeks later, General Jean-B. Bédard received his fourth star. At the same time, he was promoted to Chief of Staff Major General, the first French-Canadian to have risen to the highest rank in the Canadian military. From then on, he had the Armed Forces in the palm of his hand.