October 1970 (38 page)

“Listen, I don't give a shit about Travers. He's a goddamned Englishman! He'll come out of this with not so much as a hair out of place, wait and see. No, it's Lavoie I'm worried about
 . . .
”

Branlequeue turned and continued his walk. Farther down, he stopped before the overflowing flesh of Coco Cardinal, enthroned like a pasha on the toilet in his tiny mousetrap of a cell, his pants down around his ankles.

“Well, if it ain't the Tommycod King,” muttered Chevalier.

Coco's face, adorned with two eyes like black butter, a lip split down to his chin, three broken or missing teeth, and a goose egg on his left temple, split into a large, nauseating smile. Chevalier shivered with distaste, as though he were looking into the eyes of a shark or the mouth of a stingray. Cold horror rose from deep within him.

He wanted to distance himself as fast as he could, but he heard himself being called.

“Hey, poet!”

Chevalier turned and looked away as the Fat Cop, apparently impervious to any notion of modesty, wiped his huge backside with evil delectation.

“They didn't go out with crowbars, those guys at the Vegas, eh?” Chevalier said when Coco had finished.

“When I get out of here I'm going back there with a can of gasoline,” Cardinal announced, pulling up his pants and walking over to the bars.

Chevalier resisted the urge to run off down the hall.

“Something I still don't understand, Coco, is how you've made a living since you were in the police.”

“I fuck. The system.”

“Credit cards?”

“Among other things.”

“And is that what pays for the sailboat on the Île aux Fesses?”

Coco's eyes, rimmed by huge black circles like those of a raccoon, narrowed and remained fixed on Chevalier, though Coco continued to smile.

“But that isn't why they put you in here, is it, Coco? Credit cards have nothing to do with this business
 . . .
”

“No. I'm here because I'm a patriot, a real one
 . . .
Not like you.”

Chevalier then committed the error of turning his head for a fraction of a second. By the time he sensed the danger, it was too late. Coco reached out and grabbed Chevalier by the collar and pulled him against the bars of his cell. He held him there while methodically punching his face with his other hand.

“Oh, nice shiner!” said the canteen man.

He was pushing his little cart between the rows of cells. Chevalier had filled out his order form that afternoon: he wanted a pen, paper, chewing gum, and tobacco.

Chevalier smiled painfully.

“Lucky for me you've also rounded up a couple of doctors,” he said. “Meanwhile, I'll take some of your aspirins, if you have any.”

The canteen man scrupulously examined the order form.

“The question isn't whether or not I have them. It's whether or not you've ordered them.”

“Ah, never mind! Paper, ballpoint, cigarettes. I don't need anything else.”

Chevalier was beginning to believe that he'd never see the second part of
Elucubrations
again. He knew only that this iceberg of words, with its death and mammoth metaphors, would one day be considered the mythic tip of his writings. During the years he had worked on his great book, he was ceaselessly caught between the need to earn a living, the reality of having a family to support, and the need to steal more time from his other obligations and ministries. He had known radicals, some of whom had actually advanced to action, who had been arrested and imprisoned. He had sometimes thought of prison as a safe harbour, situated outside of time, an oasis of enforced peace in the midst of the normal harassments of ordinary existence. The privation of liberty seemed a lesser evil, a minimal concession in exchange for the formidable removal of social responsibility, necessary to the work of genius. Why weren't more universal literary masterpieces written in prisons? he wondered. Free bed, board, and laundry, and time stretching ahead as far as the eye could see. To write and avoid going crazy
 . . .
And above all, above all, to have absolutely nothing else to do. Wasn't that the ideal situation? The recluse any ambitious creator dreamed of?

With the pad of paper in front of him on the metal sheet that served as a table, pen poised between thumb, index, and middle fingers, he stared with feverish intensity and a slightly astonished air into the void of the empty page. It was like staring into his empty life in a prison cell, and he knew it. Nothing came, absolutely nothing.

The next day, LAM255 woke to the sound of funereal music coming from the radio. He knew immediately what it meant.

Through the slow, serene weft of Handel's
Largo
, he could hear the hoarse shouts of two chess players separated by three cells.

“Little Albert on G4 takes Mountie on F3!”

Laughter mingled with one or two pleasantries. The bishops were called Vézinas because, like the premier of Quebec, they moved only on the bias. A Little Albert was a pawn. An Ottawa was a rook. The king and queen were called PET and Beth.

Chevalier Branlequeue sat in a corner of his cell, his back to the bars.

“Garneau
 . . .
”

“Yes, Chevalier?”

“Lavoie's dead.”

“What? Why do you say that?”

“They killed him. Why else would the radio be playing Handel?”

That afternoon, Chevalier tried to write something once more. Still nothing came. It was as though they had won.

GHOSTS

THIS IS THE STORY OF
a guy (me) who wakes up i
n a big house full of nooks and crannies stuck in the middle of nowhere, in the heart of a boreal forest, at four o'clock in the morning. Lake Kaganoma. It's winter, it's 40 below, and Marie-Québec is gone for good. Her empty space in the cold bed mutilates my side, yanks out my Adam's rib. And as if that weren't enough,
he
is back. I can hear him thrashing around downstairs, in the kitchen.

Naked as a dew worm, draped in invisible sweat that raised goosebumps in the cold air of the bedroom, I got up and fetched the shotgun from the closet in my office. Slid a couple of Imperial shells into the barrel (buckshot, or Poly-Kor long-range specials). Then, creeping on lynx paws, I went downstairs.

He was sitting at the table. His hands were badly sliced up and the marks on his neck where he'd been strangled were clearly visible. Blue in the face, ribbons of dried blood under his nostrils and in his ears. I recognized the sweater he was wearing as the one Mrs. Lafleur described at the coroner's inquest, knitted by her own hands for her husband, and which the kidnappers had slipped on their wounded hostage after having taken off the shirt that was soaked in fresh blood. He was breathing noisily. I sighed.

“You know, I've always known it was you who was the ghost of Kaganoma
 . . .
”

“Take me to a hospital
 . . .
”

I shook my head.

“It's not in my power. And I can't fix you up, either.”

I leaned the shotgun against the wall and pulled a chair up to the table. He seemed as if he wanted to talk. But first, I went over and stoked the embers in the airtight woodstove, then put on my old Mackinaw with the red and black checks that was hanging on a hook by the door.

“I know why you're here, Lavoie,” I said to the ghost when I sat down. “You're stuck in purgatory. And history's purgatory isn't like God's. It's names that languish there, not souls. And while you wait to join the heroes and martyrs in the local pantheon, or maybe go back below with the traitors to their country and the dirty rotten souls damned for eternity, you are forced to use the old tried-and-true methods for making us mortals remember you. You send your terrestrial appearance to visit me, I find myself in my kitchen talking to a fake ectoplasm. You could say I'm your last hope
 . . .
”

He nodded gravely.

I got up and grabbed the bottle of d'Auge Calvados that was sitting on the counter. I poured both of us three fingers in glasses decorated with images of playing cards, and handed him his. Jack of Spades.

“Take it. It'll put some colour in your cheeks
 . . .
”

With his sliced-up hand, he took the glass I'd offered him and tossed back the alcohol, and I did the same. The Calvados tasted of old orchard, lightning-struck wood, and apples fallen onto yellowed grass and dead leaves pecked at by partridges. October.

I refilled the glasses.

“At the moment, I'm trying to track down the elusive Chevreuil, the famous Pierre. A single certitude about him and I'll be saved. And you can help me, I think, Lavoie
 . . .
”

A low groan.

“Take me to the hospital
 . . .
”

I filled the glasses a third time and raised mine in a toast:

“To your health, Mr. Minister.”

His only response was a deep sigh, then he tossed back his Calvados like it was a cup of chamomile tea.

“You see, I need to know if Pierre Chevrier, alias Le Chevreuil, went to 140 rue Collins while you were being held there. I know you can't tell me. That I have to discover the truth by my own means. And you, you're here to remind me of my duty to history and to stop me from killing myself. But let me tell you something: those who are moving heaven and earth to erase you from the land of the living, and who have covered their tracks well, aren't exactly the two of spades. You have been sacrificed, Lavoie, but for what? What is certain is that Quebec has abandoned you. That your own political family has let you down, and that Canada has taken a pass on you. And if it's true that you were, as some have said, sacrificed to the strategic interests of the Atlantic Alliance, then the West has also hung you out to dry. And so, rather than raise their little finger and send a bunch of hired killers in to rescue you, your friends in the Scarpino family said: thumb's down. Everyone washed their hands of you.”

I needed to pour a lot of Calvados to refill the glasses this time. The neck of the bottle had a tendency to swing back and forth. My voice had become foggy, my tone kind of pasty, full of bitterness. The ghost didn't seem to notice that he was drunk, or feeling better. Unable to drown the sadness at the bottom of the well of memory, he emptied his glass as quickly as I refilled it, as though his despair was nothing but a kind of politeness.

“You were the perfect scapegoat,” I told him. “Drafted into your defence corps, a martyr for made-to-measure Canadian unity
 . . .
”

I grabbed the still three-quarters-full bottle by its neck and began pacing about the kitchen. The dawn was carving a path through the window.

“The false alarm, Lavoie
 . . .
Do you remember that?”

He shook his head, eyes half-closed, his expression dead, a milky white infused with galaxies of burst blood vessels. His chin rested on his bloodstained chest.

“Remember
 . . .
Wednesday, October 14, 1970. They'd been holding you hostage for four days in that room, chained to a bed, handcuffed. At first, you thought the authorities were negotiating, but the positive signs were still far off and nothing was happening. The previous night, one of your captors had been picked up by the police and hadn't come back. And there was a suspicious car that kept passing the house. Each time it passed, it slowed down and the occupants looked intently at the front of the house where you were being kept prisoner. And what happened then, how could you forget?”

While I was speaking to him, Lavoie's breathing had turned into a pitiful groaning that sank into a barely audible moan. But I went on:

“Then the alarm went off, there was the sound of fighting in the bungalow. Your kidnappers decided to save their skins and, in the meantime, to use yours as a shield. They cut off two pieces of an old mop handle and made them look like sticks of dynamite by wrapping them in brown paper and coating them in butter to make them look more realistic. They attached an alarm clock to them for a detonator and enough electric cord to make it look real, then they placed the sticks in a pack and strapped it around your chest. Then they dragged you out to face the door, propped up between the guy holding the detonator and another who held the barrel of his M1 against your head, and you sat there waiting for the first boot or battering ram to hit the door, the rush
 . . .
”

“
Aaaaaugh
,” said the ghost.

“I've thought a lot about you at that moment, the longest moment of your life. You were like the young Dostoyevsky facing his firing squad. Time stretched out interminably, as though each second had become an ellipsoid precipitated by eternity. What did you think about? In one sense, you were privileged. The dead don't always get to have a dress rehearsal
 . . .
”

Without being aware of it I'd put down the empty bottle and picked up the shotgun while I'd been talking. It was loaded. I pointed it in the approximate direction of the front door.

“Watch out, Mr. Minister! Any second now, the firefight is going to start, the clock is ticking
 . . .
The dry blast of detonators, bullets whizzing through your guts! Your captors are trembling like hell and they have their fingers on the triggers. Your heart is pounding, you're saying your prayers, your life has become nothing but a simple exchange, like currency. And
 . . .
”

“
Noooooo!
”

“And nothing. Nothing happens. One of the guys finally gets up and goes to the window, and what does he see? A police raid is, in fact, taking place, but they're raiding the house next door! Who lives there? Kids with long hair, according to Richard Godefroid. For some reason they hadn't been heard from for a while. Five days later, neighbours will tell the police that the house next door had been empty for a month. How do you explain that, eh? Hey!”

The ectoplasm had leapt to his feet and was charging at me, a howl on his lips. Without thinking I pivoted ninety degrees and fired from the hip. Loud, heavy detonation. I thought the house was falling down around my head. The ghost brushed past me in the hallway, I felt his breath on my face, coming from the glacial blackness of vast amounts of nothingness. I fired again, point blank. I saw him run toward the window, jump, pass through the glass, and run off in long strides into the morning's half-light, like Big Chief at the end of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
.

* * *

In Kaganoma, hearing a rifle blast was not unusual. During the hunting season, the deep silence was often broken by sudden bursts of 12-gauge shotguns and .30-06s, followed by the return of the deep silence. Powder burns on the four walls was a little harder to explain. But making a living as a writer and being a hermit in the process of losing his mind in the deep woods went a long way to explaining many things, and maybe even would serve as an excuse.

The first blast passed above the kitchen table and carved a hole in the north-facing window about the size of a fist. The second went through the wall below the stairs, making a nice clean round hole in the drywall, but not doing much other damage. After blinking a few times in the rush of cold air coming through the window, and staring stupidly at the empty Calvados bottle, Samuel cut a square of cardboard from a box of books and taped it to the glass. The thermometer was registering thirty-eight degrees below zero, Celsius.

“Can I speak to Mr. Guy Dumont, please?”

“What about?”

“About getting an assignment. Any assignment.”

“Yes?”

“Hello, Big. It's Sam. You wouldn't by any chance have a story about a young singer who was abused by her father and uncles and manager you wanted me to write, would you?”

“The same old Sam, still hard up. You sound terrible. What's wrong?”

“Nothing I can't handle, don't worry. Come on, Big Guy, for the insignificant sum of five thousand smackers I would do just about anything except shine shoes. Fix the commas in a six-hundred-page history of federal-provincial relations. I need to suffer and be redeemed.”

“And I don't like the idea of the business I founded being mistaken for a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia. But as it happens I do have a manuscript that might interest you. I think it might be just up your alley
 . . .
”

“I'm on the financial ropes and you're offering me a job that's right up my alley? No kidding, Big, I'm touched. Does it have a title?”

“Wait, let me see
 . . .
Ah, yes,
The Traverse
.”

“That's all?”

“No, it also has a subtitle:
The Story of My Captivity
, by John Travers.”

In splendid isolation, in front of my computer in the middle of the forest, I was hyperlinked, my brain had become a nanoplot, lit up under a celestial sphere and sprinkled with infinite numerical permutations. My head was being bombarded with a million frequencies, satellite waves, and information packets. Each hauled a trailer full of fragments of the world it had plunged into, like roots in its patch of earth. I sent out my lines, watched the word tapped into the search engine disappear into the immensity, like a fisherman with his first pre-sonar hunched over the dark sea. Blocks of sound in a saturated void:

François Langlais:

François Langlais, alias Pierre Chevrier. Born 1947. Member of a Quebec terrorist organization named Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ), responsible for many bombing attempts and kidnappings committed during the 1960s and 70s.

Arrested for carrying an illegal weapon in France at the end of the 1960s, sentenced to two years in prison. He became familiar with ways of making bombs and conducting kidnappings that would later serve him well in Quebec.

In the summer of 1970, Langlais travelled with other Quebec terrorists to Jordan, to receive commando training in a camp run by the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPFLP). At the same time, the FLQ announced that they were planning to launch a selective assassination campaign in Quebec.

Langlais was a member of the Rebellion Cell that kidnapped and held hostage the British commercial attaché John Travers the next October, thereby unleashing a political crisis unprecedented in the annals of Quebec history. On October 10, the Chevalier Cell also went into action, kidnapping and later assassinating the number-two man in the provincial government, Paul Lavoie. The hoped-for uprising not taking place, Langlais and other members of the Rebellion Cell negotiated the life of their hostage in exchange for safe conduct to Cuba.

After a twelve-year exile in Cuba and France, François Langlais returned to Quebec and was immediately arrested, subjected to a trial, and sentenced to two years less a day for his participation in the kidnapping of John Travers. He would be out on parole less than a month later.

At first reading, two or three elements in the Wikipedia entry didn't add up. First, the story of his arrest for carrying an illegal weapon was news to me. Did he invent it, and if so, where did it come from? My request for information addressed to the Prefect of Police at the Prefecture of Paris was, by all evidence, quickly relegated to the bottom of one of those forgotten stacks that make up that hexagonal labyrinth's charm.

The Wikipedia entry for le Chevreuil rehashed the well-known article from the
Sun
from November 25, about a possible link between the FLQ's Pierre and the international terrorists Zadig and Madwar, even suggesting that they had been to the same training camp in Jordan. Otherwise, how else to explain that the first kidnapping plot, which was nipped in the bud in February, had been aimed at the Israeli consul in Montreal?