October 1970 (50 page)

BEN

“HE DID WHAT?”

Ben turned toward Jean-Paul.

“He jumped through the window. He couldn't jump out the lower half. Two sheets of glass and a screen. So he tried the upper half, holding a pillow in front of him. But he got stuck
 . . .
”

“Ah, shit
 . . .
”

“He cut himself. He was bleeding like a pig. Gode ran out of the house and picked up the pillow that had fallen on the other side, in the grass. I tore a sheet and started to wrap his wounds, he had one on his hand, another on the wrist of his other arm. He was bleeding all over the place. His bandages were soaked faster than we could tie them. He asked us to take him to a hospital. I grabbed a piece of rope and made him a tourniquet. And another on the other side. He told me to tighten it, he said it didn't hurt. He was white as a sheet.

“We brought him into the living room. He was bleeding a bit less. I think he must've lost half a pint at least. I washed his wounds with water and soap. Then I made him new bandages. He was still bleeding a little.

“I told Gode and René that we had to either free him or find someone to take him to a hospital. And they told me to come here and tell you what happened. That you would know what to do
 . . .
”

“You can start by calming down.”

“Where are you going?”

“To call my brother.”

“Why don't you call from here?”

“Never know, line might be tapped
 . . .
”

It had been four days now since Jean-Paul had decided to lay low in Lison's apartment, his friend from Montreal, in the South Central neighbourhood of the city, and maybe his nerves were playing tricks on him. But for a while now he'd been noticing unfamiliar movements in the area. So he'd redoubled his vigilance.

“Do you think you were followed here?”

“Do I think
 . . .
no,” Ben replied. “Where are you going?”

“To find a phone booth, I told you.”

“You really think Lison's might be tapped?”

“You never know.”

“What about the rue Collins telephone, then?”

Jean-Paul stopped in the doorway.

“Cut your bullshit, okay?”

The night was cold and clear in the alley. A cry rang out in the shadows next to him, making him jump. Like a child crying. A shiver.

Come here
, he thought,
my little Moses of the alleyways, perhaps you're the one fate has chosen to lead the chosen people of Quebec out of bondage and through the American desert
. Jean-Paul tiptoed toward the sound.

Near an overturned garbage can, two alley cats faced each other. Jean-Paul, fascinated, watched the ritual of intimidation, the psychological confrontation. One of the cats was wearing a collar. Suddenly, it leaped up and tried to flee. The other cat jumped him from behind and the two beasts ended up rolling at Jean-Paul's feet, a whirling mass of flesh and fur torn by claws and whistling spittle. The coward ended up leaping out of the battle, stomach against the ground, and Lafleur watched him clamber up a telephone pole.

“You're done for, now
 . . .
”

He shouldn't have backed off, he thought, and left to find a phone booth.

ECCE LYNX

GODE MOVES THROUGH THE NORTHERN
savanna. Before him stretch sparse rows of black spruce, twelve feet high, all the way to the horizon. In this country, when you unleash a dog he becomes a wolf. And it's a lynx Gode sees before him now, walking toward him in the silence and whiteness of the snow, on its large padded paws.
He won't attack me
, he thinks, unable to move, as though paralyzed while the lynx comes so close he brushes up against him like a cat, then climbs a nearby tree and jumps on him, wraps himself around Gode's neck and shoulders like a heavy purring fur collar emitting a warm, suffocating, throbbing heat. “He's eating my brain,” Gode has time to think, in his dream.

When he opens his eyes, Gode's head is buried under the sleeping bag and he's breathing with difficulty. He emerges from the bag and takes a deep breath of the cold October night air, flowing into his room through the broken window. And as the lynx's purring is transformed into the staccato growl of a helicopter overhead, it all comes back to him. He isn't in the northern grasslands, but in some bungalow on the South Shore, near a street named Savane, with a hostage who had inflicted serious injuries on himself while trying to escape. That's the truth of it. That's the here and now.

He finds René fighting off sleep on the living-room couch. In front of him, Paul Lavoie sits on a chair, white as a sheet, his eyes closed, his chin against his chest, seemingly unconscious. On his forearms and hands, makeshift bandages crusted with half-coagulated blood. He wears the wool sweater Ben put on him instead of his old shirt, which was drenched in blood.

“How's he doing?”

“As you can see.”

“We can't leave him this way
 . . .
”

“No. We're going to have to make a decision.”

The previous night they'd heard Little Albert on television, justifying the imposition of martial law by the necessity of stopping the FLQ advancing to the fourth stage of its plan: selective assassinations.

Selective assassinations! Gode and René had shaken their heads in disbelief.

Then the premier had renewed his single and ultimate concession to the terrorists. Safe conduct to a country of their choice.

“We have to kill him,” René said, after a tense silence.

Gode grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall and held it out to him.

“You wanna blow his head off? Be my guest
 . . .
”

“Don't get your panties in a twist, for Christ's sake.” René rubbed his eyes. “We can't just shoot him here. The neighbours will hear
 . . .
”

“We don't have neighbours anymore! Don't you remember? They got thrown in jail by the cops!”

“Next door. But what about behind the house
 . . .
?”

“There's no one there. You haven't noticed?

“We have to end it,” René said again, examining the hostage prostrated on the chair. “But not with a gun, it's too risky. We should have cobbled together some sort of silencer
 . . .
”

“Do you have another idea?”

“Sure. We get him in the car while it's still dark, we go to the end of the road and then keep going, driving right through the field, up to the trees over there. Then we stop, we get him out of the car, we shoot him with the M1 in the heart and leave him there.”

“And I've got another idea. We free him. We let him go
 . . .
Or we leave him here and get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible.”

Suddenly, Lavoie moved his head and let out a muted wail, without opening his eyes. Frozen stiff, they stayed there a long moment, without moving, watching his reactions.

“Do you think he heard us?”

“I don't know. Go rest a bit. I'll look after him.”

René stopped in the room's doorway and said without turning: “He saw us without our masks on. He'll be able to identify us now.”

“Just go and get some rest.”

Saturday morning. The military base seems quiet, from a distance. Gode sits before the old Underwood on the card table. A sheet of blank paper in the platen. He's had an idea for a new communiqué, addressed directly to the people. They could attach it to the first pages of Lavoie's confession. But he looks at the keys and nothing comes out. Total block. And it's as if they'd won.

The hostage sits without moving, as still as a wax statue. Gode stands in front of the chair on which he is collapsed. Gode nervously wrings his hands, then lifts them up to his face to look at them. He needs gloves. He thinks back to his dream and turns away to sit back down in front of the typewriter. He tries to remember a poem he'd written in grade seven. The time the teacher (in jail now, from what he'd heard) had read his homework in front of the entire class. He could only remember the two words of the title, now, which he types with two fingers.
ECCE LYNX

“How much do you want?”

Gode gives a violent start. Lavoie has opened his eyes, and looks at him.

“Tell me how much you want,” the hostage insists.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“I'll give you money if you let me go. It can be taken care of easily. I could get the sum together right away, if you let me make a phone call. You don't need to be afraid, I won't give you up. You have my word of honour.”

“Your word? Whose honour? The Scarpinos'?”

Godefroid sneers. He doesn't know whether he should find this spectacle revolting or simply sad. A cruel smile comes to his lips. The hostage in front of him has become the enemy once again.

“We know where your money comes from! You should be ashamed. After a week here, you still haven't understood anything. As if we
 . . .
we acted for our personal gain!”

“One hundred thousand
 . . .
No, I'll give you a hundred and fifty thousand bucks.”

“Stop it. Shut up.”

“I could find two hundred and fifty. Maybe even five hundred thousand, but it would take a bit longer
 . . .
”

“You really are a desperate case. I pity you.”

“Pity,” Lavoie repeated like an echo, as if the word were a buoy. “Pity. Please, I beg of you, let me go, okay?”

And he begins to cry. Gode gets up, disgusted, his heart upended.

“I'm going to go and make you a nice cup of tea. A strong one
 . . .
It'll make you feel better.”

Lavoie nods his head. He closes his eyes again, his head falls back to his chest. He seems, once again, to fall into a profound apathy.

Gode leaves him there, crumpled in his chair, and walks to the kitchen. While the cold water streams from the tap into the kettle and the burner begins to redden, he hears sirens in the distance.

Talk about a fucking shit show. The kettle began to whistle, but I could still hear the siren coming closer and closer, as if the two sounds were becoming one, the whistling steam and the screaming siren, somewhere along avenue Savane, coming closer and closer, and I'd forgotten something and left the kettle on and heard the door to the back room open and the sound of someone running into the living room, and before I understood what was happening I ran out of the kitchen in time to see Lavoie running toward the front door, head down like a running back rushing through enemy lines, and I jumped like a linebacker and tackled him as he stepped in front of me, and he fell to the ground and began to yell, spread-eagled on the floor, and I saw René come into my field of vision on the right and fall over both Lavoie and me, trying to hold him down, unable to move but I couldn't either and he was still yelling and yelling as if he wanted to drown out the goddamned siren that was now on our street, somewhere above me Ben took him by the shirt and twisted his collar and I heard Lavoie croaking, fall almost into silence, a gasp not a roar, René was tightening and tightening and so was I, “shut up, shut up,” René moaned and I held on for a long time while Lavoie, his body, struggled under me, and there was a jolt, like an earthquake, that lifted all three of us as if a wave had screamed through his blood, I'm holding him in my arms and his life is fleeing but not him, and there's no longer the voice, and then under my chest it still moved, but like a fish, a last trickle of life that couldn't stop, and the body keeps on, you feel him going, his salt water, his movement, his air is gone, gone nowhere, always waiting, the nerves, the goddamned nerves,
shut up
,
you'll stop
.
Shut up I told you, I said did you hear me.

ZOPILOTE

THE SUN WAS ALREADY WARM
by the time he opened his eyes. In the distance he could see the waves mounting into their frilly skirts before crashing on the naked beach. A glass jam jar lay on its side next to him, empty, like a shipwreck dragged to shore by the night's current. He grabbed it, examined it, brought it up to his nose. Mescal.

Looking around, he saw no one. Marie-Québec must've got bored waiting alone at the Mono Azul.

Leaning on an elbow, Nihilo managed to drag himself up. He took off his clothes and lumbered into the sea. Back on shore, he shook the water off himself like a dog. He then began the trek back to the village, following the curve of the beach.

Richard Godefroid was sipping a cup of black coffee under a palm frond roof. Without thinking much about it, Sam had been walking in his direction. However, a few metres from the
palapa
, he hesitated for a moment, until Gode, with a simple hand gesture and without ever turning his head, invited him over. There was no small talk.

After a few moments, Gode said:

“I can't believe I actually told you all that
 . . .
”

“Right, but there's still something I don't understand. Why did you leave your car in a field, right next to the military base?”

Godefroid lit himself a Montana. His hair hurt, his face was grey. He'd aged ten years. Sam also ordered a
café negro
, as well as a glass of orange juice, and, after thinking about it, a bottle of water. Gode thought the orange juice was a good idea.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course!”

“We wanted them to find the car easily, as quickly as possible. We thought that maybe it wasn't too late
 . . .
”

“What?”

“You'd seen a lot of dead bodies when you were twenty years old, eh? Well, neither had we. When we got off him, his nose was bleeding. We couldn't understand what had just happened. We didn't really feel like touching him, you know? He had this wool sweater up around his chin and it was only later we realized that, in the commotion, René had garroted him with the chain he had around his neck. Poor Lavoie. His medal of the baby Jesus didn't seem to have helped him much
 . . .
When it happened we panicked, and we thought that maybe he'd just fallen into a coma. And that if someone found him quickly enough, there might still be time to save him.”

Gode took a sip of water from Sam's bottle, then lit another cigarette.

“But the soldiers didn't move an inch. The car spent an eternity in the field next to the hangar. We'd even left the key in the ignition, but someone took it out at some point. They decided to wait for a journalist to find it, in time for the ten o'clock news
 . . .
You see, that was the idea of the 22nd Royal Dieppe Cell. The message was supposed to be that the soldiers had left him to die.”

“But he was already dead when you left him there!”

“Maybe. But we couldn't know that yet
 . . .
It was only when the autopsy report came out publicly that we understood what had actually happened.”

Sam pressed his face in his hands. With the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, he poked his eyeball as if he wanted to reach the nerve behind it and follow it up to his brain. They killed him, but didn't even know he was dead.

They'd decided to claim responsibility for his execution as a political gesture. Later they'd understood that they had actually killed him, but it'd been an accident. They'd intended to kill him, then were unable to go through with it, and Lavoie had forced their hand. An accident so stupid that it assuredly could have no meaning in the grand scheme of things. And that's why they'd agreed to claim responsibility for the murder. An absurd story.

Gode decided that the only way to survive the day was to drink a beer, here, right now. He offered to buy one for Sam, who accepted. But only one. Afterward he'd leave the old FLQer alone and would go look for Marie-Québec.

“One last question: Lavoie's confession. What happened to it?”

“No idea. We left Queen-Mary in such a hurry. Later, the whole security box issue came out in the coroner's inquest, and so we never got a chance to get it back. I guess the detectives got their hands on it at some point.”

Sam was ready to put this whole story behind him. He had, in a way, found a solution to the puzzle. There was no secret plot. The Octobeerist thesis would finally be put to rest along with the other strange conspiracy theories, buried in the more suspect parts of reality. He thought back, now, to the first meeting, at Lavigueur's on rue Ontario. To Chevalier Branlequeue's not-quite-but-almost-state funeral. And to his haunted, partly burned house on the shore of Lake Kaganoma. An emptiness as great as the Pacific Ocean threatened to engulf his hangover. He felt like an orphan.

They ordered a few sweet rolls with chicken to calm their empty stomachs. Sam watched the two bottles of Dos Equis land on the table. He examined one of the labels. XX.

Grabbing one of the rolls from the basket, he thought:
pollo
.

“
Pan
-pasta-potatoes-pastries,” he said out loud.

“What's that?”

“The four Ps.”

Gode shrugged. Sam was thinking:
pollo-Pedro-proceso-pesquisa
: pieces of chicken, Pierre, prosecution, police warrant.

He took a swig of lager and slowly brought the bottle down.

“We haven't talked about the second house yet.”

“What second house?”

“The neighbours'. The one the cops raided that week. You remember Martinek, the big guy?”

“Do I remember him
 . . .
Of course I remember him! Just the thought of falling into his hands was enough to make me want to piss myself.”

“Machinegun Martinek. In his briefing on the morning they discovered your hideout, he told journalists that the house next door had also sheltered FLQ members. But that according to the neighbours it had been empty for a month. Curiously, we never heard anything more about that second house
 . . .
”

“They probably just made a mistake.”

“That's what I thought as well. But there's something strange about it. In his briefing, he'd given a detail that fit with the rest of the story: the fact that the owners had left the month before. Around the same time that the Lafleur brothers and you left for Texas. That's quite a coincidence. The other thing that bothers me is that if the police raided 150 rue Collins during Lavoie's captivity, and they found some young kids, why did they pretend that it'd been abandoned for a month?”

“Must've been another house
 . . .
”

“Impossible. Two lots down on the other side are empty fields. According to Martinek, the neighbours saw some sort of van parked in front of the next-door house the night Lavoie died, and someone loading materials in the back. Another funny coincidence, wouldn't you say?”

“And where exactly are you going with this?”

“I'm trying to say that there must've been another player on Collins during Paul Lavoie's abduction. Your friend François Langlais, a.k.a Pierre Chevalier
 . . .
”

“Bullshit. Pierre didn't come to the house once that week.”

“Let's say he didn't. He didn't go to 140 Collins. But he was at 150, right next door
 . . .
”

“No! Pierre was in the other end of Montreal, with Lancelot and the others! We had no relationship whatsoever to whoever was renting next door. What you're saying makes no sense! We didn't even know who lived there! I really don't understand what sort of reason you'd have to falsify the truth like that. And, come to think of it, where did you even get that information? Why are you looking at me like that?”

The cops. The information came from the cops. And suddenly I began to understand. I saw the entire plan unravel before my eyes. It had been right there the whole time. When I'd picked up the phone to talk with Gilbert Massicotte, the retired CATS man, I already had the answer without even knowing it. His cousin, a chicken delivery man, who'd polished the character of the pro-FLQ rebel at the trial, was, of course, a cop and always had been. The small car from Baby's Barbecue had been intercepted somewhere between the rotisserie and rue Collins, and a man from the surveillance team had replaced the delivery boy. That was standard procedure when CATS installed surveillance posts around a suspicious location, that and tapping the phone. Because, of course, the phone had been tapped. That's what they'd done in Saint-Colomban in June. And Saint-Colomban had brought them straight to rue Collins. The early September meeting that had been so crucial had been under surveillance. The antiterrorist squad had the October kidnappers under surveillance all along. I looked at Gode.

“That's where they were,” I said.

“Where? Who?”

“The cops. They were next door.”

Despite the intense surprise painted on his features, I went on:

“And once they'd started, it would have been foolish not to install a surveillance team in the house behind yours, as well, from which they could look directly into the room in which Lavoie was being held. They probably used your little trip to Texas to do a few renovations to the bungalow. In October, the place must've been absolutely full of microphones. That explains the materials that were loaded into a van or pickup the day of Lavoie's death. CATS had its electronic arsenal to uninstall and lug out of there.”

As I spoke, the scenario was taking on a life of its own, questions that had remained mysteries were being answered one after the other, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Details I'd set aside as unimportant now showed the way and began to construct a larger story, finally, a coherent and logical whole.

Quite a story. But the cops' cover story had ultimately led to the secret being exposed, the small story made up to convince journalists and offer them a ready answer to their questions as to the suspicious behaviour neighbours had witnessed that week. The police fabrication had been placed like a seal over their story. And it was so prodigiously secret that as I spoke, my own words startled and shook me to my core, because to speak them, to give the story meaning, I was making it real, giving it body. Describing the truth.

Gode listened to me, saying nothing. He'd forgotten about his beer and his pack of Montanas on the table.

“The house next door was an observation post. Why raid it? To mess around with your nerves. Crank up the pressure. Somewhere up in the ranks the decision was made to sacrifice Lavoie. They aren't idiots. They knew what impact his death would have on public opinion, the anger and disgust of the ‘public.' You'd publicly threatened to kill him; there was only one logical conclusion. And they, they simply contented themselves with looking over your shoulder. They pretty much contracted their dirty work to you. The hostage was going to crack, the kidnappers panic, or maybe both
 . . .
It starts Tuesday with the clear and open tail on Jean-Paul. An open tail doesn't try to make itself circumspect, Gode, it's two cops on a street corner making no effort to stay hidden. Or ghost cars filled with zombies driving slowly in front of your door. Do you really think they'd let themselves be seen like that? It was a show, nothing else. And the siren that pushed Lavoie to try to flee the house was probably part of it
 . . .
”

There was a long silence. Gode waited, as if to make sure I'd really finished. Then, slowly, he got up and, without a word, turned his back on me and walked down the beach. Old and grey and wrinkled, as if cracked by the unrelenting Mexican sun, he dragged himself, head hung low, like some large beast hit in the vital organs returning to the deep from which it came. He stopped, facing out over the sea. From where I sat on the terrace, I could follow the rhythm of his deep breathing by the movement of his shoulders.

He began walking into the water, in his shorts and T-shirt, feet bare. The waves ate up the horizon before crashing toward him with their concave, threatening maws. With water almost past his thighs, a wave hit him, throwing him head over heels.

Despite myself I jumped to my feet.

“Gode!”

He'd disappeared, buried under a roaring mountain of crumbled foam. After two or three seconds, I saw a foot pop out. He wouldn't be the first to be pulled out to sea, knocked out or simply made an exhausted prisoner of the current. Before I knew it, I was running full speed to the water. “Hold on! I'm coming!”

I dove in and began to paddle in the muddy foam while stones as large as baseballs were dragged out to sea by the undercurrent, strafing my legs. I reached Gode just as he was getting back to his feet. He saw me and threw a right hook, missing my face by at least ten centimetres. Thrown off balance at the precise moment a three-metre-high wave was rising to crash down on us, he jumped on me, grabbing me by the throat, and we rolled to the ground on the thin sheet of water that was being pulled back by the oncoming wave. I felt the pressure of his nails and thumb on the cartilage of my neck. Then, a green and white noise. We were picked up into the air, flipped and shaken up as if in an amusement park. And during the whole time we tumbled about in the sea, I held on to the only surfboard I could, this fifty-something, hungover man being thrown every which way, who wouldn't let go of my neck even as the waves tossed us around like sticks.

The ten or twelve seconds that followed made me feel like a sock in a washing machine. I woke up after the cycle was done with a broken arm, eyes and throat burned by salt, and at least a kilogram of salt and sand in my shorts. Between me and the sun, Marie-Québec shone down on me.

Farther down, Gode was on his hands and knees, puking up a mixture of salt water, refried beans, and mescal-flavoured bile.