October 1970 (36 page)

Chevalier arranged his face as though to say,
Yes, it's not funny, I agree
.

“And what they done ain't good for business, neither. There's cops all over the place. They come in here, they look around. Do you see anyone in here? It's been like this ever since the FLQ took that English guy. And our own MLA, as good a guy as you could wish for. Another family man
 . . .
No, business is bad when something like this happens. Everything falls off. It's like a friggin' morgue in here.”

“If it's any consolation, the militants aren't having it very easy, either.”

“Yeah, but the organization I work for, they don't get mixed up in politics
 . . .
”

Chevalier raised an eyebrow.

“When you blocked the election of the Parti Québécois in Tailon, that wasn't politics, you think?”

Bonnard was taken with a sudden fit of coughing. He closed his fist over his mouth. Temperio seemed genuinely surprised. Chevalier raised his glass to his lips and didn't back down.

“Which election was that?”

“The last one. The one in which the mob infiltrated the PQ meetings.”

“Oh, yeah, maybe, but I ain't the mob, okay? What you said there makes it sound like I control all the muscle on the South Shore. But that ain't the case, the way things has fallen out
 . . .
”

Temperio nodded his head with a tolerant, preoccupied air.

“Is the FLQ looking for trouble?” he asked Chevalier.

“The FLQ?”

Chevalier glanced over at Bonnard, who remained impassive behind his fat Havana cigar. He was beginning to understand why he was here.

“Mr. Temperio, I have absolutely no contact with the men who have done this.”

The Italian lightly shrugged his shoulders.

“If you can say that, it's because you know who these people are. You know them
 . . .
”

“No!”

Temperio turned to Bonnard. Understanding that his assistance was required, Raoul brushed the ash off his cigar, taking his time to think about what he would say.

“Mr. Temperio here,” he said in his famous, meat-grinder voice, “only wants things to go back to normal, you understand. He wants to help. You are a publisher, you've published work by separatists, you have contacts in that world.”

Between puffs, Bonnard cast Chevalier a shrewd, intense look.

“Mr. Temperio didn't care for the allusion, in one of the texts he heard on television the other night, to ‘the Mafia fixing the elections.' And he thinks that, with your help, his message can be conveyed to the right people.”

Chevalier reflected.

“I think I'm beginning to understand where you're coming from,” he said after a moment. “Because of my name, you've convinced yourselves that I must be behind the fanatical cell called Chevalier. The police think the same thing. They came to my house twice last week to question me and they didn't find Paul Lavoie in my clothes closet. Do you think that if I really was the head of the FLQ, those guys would be stupid enough to use my name on one of their secret cells? I don't know who they are, but I can say that they know their history. Their Chevalier was a lawyer in 1838, the De Lorimier who was hanged in Pied-du-Courant.”

Bonnard and Temperio exchanged glances.

“I don't know nothing about that,” the Scarpinos' man said after a moment. “Whether you're the head of something or the head of nothing, it don't matter. But maybe you know someone, maybe you know the head of this Chevalier Cell or whoever it is who's got the Englishman, and maybe you can say something to them, you know, something that they'll pay attention to.”

“Don Luigi, you're not listening to me
 . . .
”

“Like I said, maybe there's someone who's looking after the hostages, and maybe there's someone else who writes the stuff for the television. And maybe you, mister publisher, maybe you know the people who write the stuff and you can give them the message I just told you.”

“I don't know who it was who wrote the Manifesto, Mr. Temperio. But it's true that I would have been glad to have seen it published as a pamphlet.”

“Okay, I got a question for mister publisher here. That paper they read on television, what did he think of it?”

“You really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“Two hundred years on our knees can be hard on a language.”

Temperio seemed to think about it, then spread out his hand upside down.

“Come on, don't shovel me any of that bullshit
 . . .
”

“I think you mean
joual
, don't you?”

Bonnard leaned forward and tapped the end of his cigar with the tip of his index finger, dropped the ash into an ashtray shaped like a roulette wheel, then took the bottle of scotch and refilled all three glasses.

“It ain't smart to talk about the Family like that,” Temperio said in a level voice. “The FLQ, they should think about that. They should consider that they got a lot of people in prison that we could take an interest in. It would be good if someone could mention that to the right person.”

“And what person would that be, Mr. Temperio?”

“The person who's writing things.”

As they walked past the bar on their way to the door, the man who'd been sleeping on the counter raised his head. It was Jacques Cardinal, old Coco. The Vegas, an oasis for drifters from the South Shore, was his unofficial political headquarters.

“Well, well,” said Chevalier. “If it isn't a bum.”

“Well, well,” said Coco. “If it ain't a intellectual.”

“One do what one can.”

Big Coco was almost dead drunk. When he moved his body, the imitation whale-penis skin covering the top of the barstool squeaked under his fat ass.

Chevalier looked behind him. Temperio had not moved from his chair at the corner table.

“You know whatsa diffrence b'tween you 'n' me, Chevalier?”

Coco had taken out his fixings and was laying a line on the bar. Branlequeue watched him, fascinated. Bonnard, standing a bit farther off, had his hands in his pockets.

“No, Coco. Why don't you tell me?”

“The diffrence's that I'm a real patriot, but you, you're a goddamned communist.”

He snorted the coke, exhaled, and smiled. A tic developed at the corners of this mouth. His carcass flopped on the counter, shaking as though with inaudible laughter.

Chevalier glanced at Bonnard, who shrugged his shoulders and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.

“Yes, you're a true patriot,” Branlequeue said, taking the ball on the bounce. “A man of the right. Maybe you're right, at that, Coco. Maybe nationalism is nothing but a mask that the left borrowed in order to make a revolution
 . . .
”

“Ah, don't start with your big words.”

Chevalier placed his mouth close to the big man's ear and, separating each syllable, said: “The-id-e-o-lo-gy of de-col-on-i-za-tion! Does that mean anything to you?”

“Thass enough, I said!”

“In any other country in the world,” Chevalier said, “when a man of the right wants to start a workers' revolution, do you know what they call him, Coco? They call him an
agent provocateur
 . . .
”

Cardinal jumped up off his barstool, waving his arms in the air. Chevalier stepped sharply back, his hands raised to his face in an attempt to protect himself.

The Fat Cop charged at him with his head lowered, swinging his fists in front of him as though trying to spread branches out of his way. He was blocked by Bonnard, who only partly managed to intercept him. He stayed on course, pushing back the crooner in his powder-blue suit the way an offensive half-back thrusts himself through to the opposition's zone with a defensive blocker on his back. Chevalier raised himself on tiptoe gracefully, like a toreador. All he lacked was a cape.

Then Cardinal shoved Bonnard off and grabbed a chair, which he threw, spinning around in a circle like a disco ball in the general direction of the place where Branlequeue had been. Then he grabbed another chair and raised it over his head and advanced
 . . .

It wasn't a good idea to break up property belonging to Mr. Temperio.

The Riviera slid along slowly without a sound, majestically, as if in a parade, passing the architectural and landscaped nightmares on boulevard Taschereau. Raoul put his hands gently on the wheel as though his palms were caressing the sides of a woman with whom he was dancing the cha-cha-cha.

“Poor Coco
 . . .
”

“Bah. It wasn't as though he wasn't asking for it.”

“Do you know, Raoul, your little friends in there, I'm glad the government hasn't exposed them. Keeping them in the mix is like having a fifth ace up its sleeve.”

“What do you mean?”

“As undercover agents to do their dirty work for them, get the radicals all stirred up. Then the police or the army steps in to restore order. In some countries that's the way it works. The extreme right has to be good for something
 . . .
”

“You've got more imagination than I have.”

They remained silent for a moment. Bonnard kept looking in his rear-view mirror.

“They've been there since we left the Palace,” he said quietly.

Chevalier turned around. Two large yellow eyes. Raoul slowed down but the distance between them and the car behind them remained the same.

“Do you really think
 . . .
?”

“When you hang around with the Scarpinos, you get used to it. But he could just as easily be following you. Or keeping an eye on the current affairs of our Sicilian friends. Or it could be politics.
Your guess is as good as mine
, as they say. How would you say that in French, Chevalier?”

“You've caught me off-guard, Raoul.”

“So where do you want me to drop you? Your place?”

“You're joking, aren't you? Where else would I be going?”

“And anyway, you've got nothing to tell them, right?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

Bonnard remained silent.

When they reached rue Chambly, the phantom car was still behind them. Bonnard passed Chevalier's house and dropped him off at a corner farther down the street. The poet–publisher had turned and was walking down the sidewalk when he heard his name being called. He looked around and saw that Bonnard had rolled down his window.

“Hey, Chevalier! Do you know why wops wear those pointy-toed shoes?”

“Yes, I do. Good night, Raoul.”

LUSTUKRU

IN HIS DREAM, THE GREAT
Lustukru would disa
ppear with his three children. He was like a figure in the old engravings, with a large pointed hat, a sad, serious face, and a chin as sharp as an ice pick. He burst in through the door and the night came with him, he opened his already-full pack, silenced the cries of the children by telling them a story that was always different, then he shoved them in the sack and threw it over his shoulder before resuming his rounds. In the dream, Chevalier was unable to move, his feet stuck to the floor. His legs weighed a ton as he watched the Great Lustukru go back out through the door, taking all the children who couldn't sleep,
lalala, lalala. Lalalalalalalala, lala
.

“Take me instead of them!” Chevalier Branlequeue shouted out in his dream. The Great Lustukru stopped to listen. “Take me instead!” he heard himself cry. The Great Lustukru turned and began coming toward him. He looked a lot like the literary critic Jean-Étier Blet. Lustukru untied the cord that closed his sack and Chevalier saw its black opening, as black as a cave, at the bottom of which lurked all his fears from his earliest days. The Great Lustukru, pulling the sack down like a butterfly net, shoved it over Chevalier's head and shoulders, down his sides
 . . .
Chevalier was fighting with his bedsheets when he opened his eyes.

Éléonore, in the deep hollow beside him on the bed, woke up. Someone was trying to break down the front door.

The sound of heavy boots, the window being smashed by rifle butts. The wooden door, split down the middle from top to bottom, sagged on its hinges. Armed men everywhere, police, uniformed and in civilian dress, coming in and going out. There must have been a dozen of them. Chevalier came out of the master bedroom in his flannel pyjamas and made his way half-blind toward where he remembered having left his glasses the night before, beside the irreverent manuscript of a young separatist poet who had stolen Lorca's muse.
Nonosse of Blood
, it was called.

His progress was interrupted by the feel of a cold object pressed against his sternum between two buttons of his pyjama top. He looked down and saw the barrel of a machine gun and, holding the machine gun, a police constable leaning lightly on the gun's stock, pressing the barrel into his rib cage and pushing him back against the wall.

“What are you—?”

“You're under arrest. Hands on your head, please, sir.”

Branlequeue half-raised his hands and held them immobilized in the air.

“Do you have a warrant?”

“We don't need one. Not anymore. I told you to put your hands on your head.”

He obeyed. Somewhere deep down inside, he felt no surprise as he heard the order, with a mute understanding but filled with defiance: at last the mask has been removed. Éléonore appeared at their bedroom door and was greeted by a machine gun aimed in her direction.

“Holy Mother of God!”

In the kitchen, detectives were using their feet to sift through the contents of the garbage pail they'd overturned. One of them, examining the contents of a container of flour from the cupboard, emptied it on the floor and was immediately enveloped in a white cloud that made him sneeze, then sniff. Then he did the same thing with the container of first-class Colombian cocoa. Another had taken a brick of ice cream from the freezer and was looking at it suspiciously. After a close inspection, he stabbed it several times with a butter knife to make sure there were no sticks of dynamite hidden inside it.

“They're insane,” Éléonore decided aloud, in an amazed, almost calm voice.

Held against a wall in their night clothes, an automatic weapon trained on them, Éléonore and her husband saw their three children being herded down the stairs by men carrying machine guns. They were in a line, their eyes still swollen with sleep. Pacifique was holding his Winnie-the-Pooh bear against his chest. The clock on the wall read ten minutes to six a.m.

The children were lined up against the wall beside them. The family together at last. The oldest, Martial, put his fist to his mouth and yawned, prodigiously interested in what was going on around him.

“Dad, what do they want?”

“I don't know, son. I'll ask them.”

He turned toward their guard:

“Officer, I'm not asking for myself, you understand, but I do think you owe an explanation to my son, who is right here.”

The guard was young, fresh-faced, with a thin moustache that made him look like a twelve-year-old nervously aiming a gun. He was fighting this appearance of weakness by holding himself as rigid as a fence post and systematically avoiding meeting the eyes of his prisoners. When Chevalier questioned him, he blushed like a schoolgirl.

“Officer?” Chevalier tried again with the same ultra-polite tone. “My older boy here would like it if you could answer his question.”

The young cop adjusted his cap, his eyes fixed on the wall in front of him. He succeeded in keeping his trap shut.

A considerable noise was coming from the Placard, Chevalier's office. The police were bringing out garbage bags full of material. Everything: typewriter, masses of papers, magazines, books, manuscripts, files, illustrations, pamphlets, address books. One of the detectives stopped in front of the telephone table, took the phone book, and stuffed it in his green bag and kept on going, sack over his shoulder. Chevalier watched him leave.

“Are you being paid by the pound?”

“Shut the fuck up!”

But Chevalier was beginning to have an idea. The idea was strong enough to allow him to stare down the uniformed whippersnapper who was holding his family captive and who, without a word, got out of his way.

Advancing like an automaton, Branlequeue crossed the room, still as blind as a bat without his glasses, and stopped at the door to his office. He could hear what was going on inside clearly: two officers throwing things with a vaguely disgusted air into a pile of papers about a metre high, then shoving it in huge armloads into black plastic bags. One of them was a member of the antiterrorist squad, Detective Lieutenant Gilbert Massicotte, of the Montreal police. He looked up and saw Chevalier.

“What's up?” he asked in a fairly good imitation of the comedian Ti-Zoune Guimond, complete with gestures.

Chevalier swallowed.

“Er
 . . .
that's the manuscript of the second volume of
Elucubrations
you're tossing about
 . . .
” He stopped, unable to go on.

Massicotte looked down at the pile of paper. He looked like someone had just stopped him from pulling up a weed in order to give him its scientific name.

“The book is almost finished,” Chevalier added in a thin voice.

“I know who you are,” Lieutenant Massicotte shot at him. “You've won some kind of prize. I'm a writer, too, did you know that? But I hate Quebec literature. Jean-Étier Blet's right, there's nothing here that comes anywhere close to the
Meditations
of Martine, er, I mean
 . . .
”

“Lamartine, yes,” Chevalier nodded, forcing himself to remain calm and telling himself that the police aren't always the animals they appear to be, but they usually are. “And Hugo,” he added, “who wrote his
Contemplations
, and Rimbaud with his
Illuminations
 . . .
and me. All I'm asking, sir, is that you stop this thievery and leave my
Elucubrations
alone, all right?”

“You do your job, and let us do ours,” said the detective lieutenant philosophically.

An officer came and gently but firmly took the writer by the sleeve of his pyjamas and escorted him back into the hall. There, Chevalier's attention turned to a policeman who, arms full, was coming down the stairs from the second floor and the two children's bedrooms. The author of
Elucubrations
ignored the weapon trained on him and went to the bottom of the stairs.

“What are you carting off this time?”

“Evidence,” muttered the officer, looking down at the teetering pile of school notebooks and binders and trying to stabilize them with his chin.

“No, wait a minute,” said Chevalier. “That's my son's stamp collection.”

“We'll let the experts tell us what it is, if you don't mind, sir. This is all going straight to the lab. 'Scuse me, if I can just get past
 . . .
”

Chevalier stepped aside, this time truly overwhelmed by what was happening.

A corpulent inspector carrying a raincoat and hat was suddenly standing in front of him.

“You. You're coming with us.”

“No, sir, I'm not. Unless you have a warrant, I'm not budging from my house
 . . .
”

The policeman gave him his best smile. It was full of well-brushed but nicotine-stained teeth, and his breath stank like a sewer.

“We don't need a warrant. We're done with warrants. There's a special law that was just voted in in Ottawa.”

PROVINCE OF QUEBEC (CANADA),
OCTOBER 16, 1970

One week earlier, the Canadian Military had been placed on alert. Under cover of routine exercises, troops had been moved to Camp Bouchard, north of Montreal. On October 12, units from the 2nd Combat Division, stationed in Petawawa, Ontario, were sent to Ottawa, ostensibly to guard public buildings in the capital. On the 15th, two Hercules troop transports were readied to fly from the air force base at Namao, near Edmonton. Originally planned for the 14th, then put back twenty-four hours while the Quebec Minister of Justice came up with reasons for the transfer of soldiers and political allies, the invasion was ready to begin.

At noon, the solicitor general of Quebec, who had more or less fallen apart at the seams after the kidnapping of his colleague, signed the famous official letter conferring legal status to the military occupation. General Bédard's successor as the head of Mobile Forces was warned by a telephone call to his headquarters in Saint-Hubert. The reading of the intervention request was accomplished, as the law required. Then an airplane left Quebec with the missive and flew toward Ottawa. Five minutes later, like clockwork, the new chief of the Armed Forces unleashed Operation Touchdown.

Four Hercules aircraft lifted off in the space of half an hour from the Ancienne-Lorette airport near Quebec City, each carrying three hundred soldiers in full battle fatigues. Others left from Namao, heading toward Montreal. Helicopters left the base at Saint-Hubert to go to Camp Bouchard, where they picked up infantry belonging to the second battalion of the 22nd Regiment, then returned to fly over the city at low altitude.

At the same time, a military convoy of four hundred vehicles left the base at Valcartier, north of the capital, and spread out toward the main cities. In Montreal, soldiers appeared in front of city hall and the courthouse. In sections of the city where the upper crust lived, more soldiers guarded the residences of political figures and other public citizens.

Soon, nearly six hundred soldiers equipped with field materiel had been deployed in the streets of the French-Canadian metropolis. On rue Parthenais, Quebec Provincial Police headquarters were cordoned off by military troops ready for warfare, weapons at the ready. Behind the cordon, in the parking lot converted into a de facto aerodrome, a continuous coming and going of helicopters was kept up.

Seen from the street, the Parthenais Prison, as it was called from then on, formed a vertiginous, coal-black rectangle that seemed poised to crush the surrounding workers' quarter. The Division of Civil Emergency Situations, under the command of the Mobile Forces of the Canadian Army, created the year before, had for the past several days been quartered there to ensure the logistics of Touchdown. Theoretically under orders from the civil authority, the Canadian Forces, on the morning of the 16th, had the situation well in hand.

Less than two hours before, the Governor General of Canada had affixed his seal to an old law that, foreseeing the immediate suspension of civil liberties and rights, had been quickly resuscitated by the prime minister's clique and voted on in the middle of the night. The Governor General's proclamation said:

Be it now known that, on and with the knowledge of our Privy Counsel for Canada, We proclaim and declare by virtue of this Our present proclamation that a state of apprehended insurrection exists and has existed since October 15
.

The ink on the Royal Proclamation hadn't even dried when the three principal police forces in Quebec were thrown into action.

* * *

Youths, the elderly, sitting shoulder to shoulder along the wall, passed cigarettes to one another. One of them closed his eyes — he was perched on one of two exposed toilets stuck in the floor, pants rolled down to his knees. He had not chosen the best morning to be nabbed by the police.

“Over here, Chevalier!”

“He knows a lot of people in here.”

His political family. Union leaders, doctors, professors, workers, militants, members of popular fronts, poets, journalists, taxi drivers, candidates for municipal office, adolescents, defrocked priests.

Tons of documents had been seized.

“They took my Felix Leclerc albums,” said a bemused Doctor Charron, warmly shaking Chevalier's hand.

“Me, too,” another chimed in. “They took a book on Cubist painting! Cubist equals Cuba, I suppose. Something to think about
 . . .
”
1

The police list also consisted of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Fanon, several books whose titles included the word “China,” posters of Che Guevara, Quebec flags, decorative swords, and hunting rifles.

They moved aside to make room for Chevalier. They wanted him to tell them his story. During the preceding hours, most of these men had gone through an ordeal identical to his: escorted by two agents through the garage of the Parthenais building, brought before a long table where four civilians were seated. Next they were taken to the seventh floor, forced to empty their pockets, the contents of which were then slipped into an envelope with their name written on the front, searched from head to toe, brought into a large room secured by bars and containing six prisoners and no chairs, two toilets, one sink. Then they were taken to be weighed, measured, made to press their fingers on an ink pad and have their fingerprints taken on four different-coloured sheets of paper, photographed face-on and in profile, escorted down a corridor and then through an airlock consisting of two grilled doors, activated by an officious guard protected behind a glass wall. They were guided down an aisle bordered by two ranges of cells; those on the left were pierced by only one window while those on the right were grilled. Conducted to a door marked S26 at the end of a corridor, on the right, ordered to cross the threshold of this door by the police officer accompanying them, locked in a large room in which there were already some forty people, lying on the floor or sitting with their backs to the wall, eyes raised to the newcomer.