October 1970 (52 page)

Langlais smiled. Fred continued: “A terrorist group preparing a violent action is, for secret services, a bit like a breakaway in a cycling race: the best way to avoid surprises is to place a man in the midst of it. In the Rebellion Cell, you might not have been the only one. Lancelot had his share of questions, and nobody would be surprised if we find out that Mansell was the CIA's man. In any case, there was at least one other agent that autumn in the Jesuit's apartment: the hostage. We now know that Travers was cozy with MI5. At the time, we took it for granted that Soviet embassies were full of KGB agents, and we went around acting as if we believed democracies behaved differently. Now, suppose that after having foiled a couple of kidnapping plots, the boss of the Combatants in CATS, after having linked up with the RCMP's security service and military intelligence, had said: ‘Next time, let's give them a bit of time to threaten the established order. Of course we'll arrest them, but all in good time. Better yet: let's help them. We'll give them the hostage
 . . .
”

“Yes. A trap, and a good one, from the start. Travers's kidnapping went through without a hitch. Lavoie's kidnapping wasn't predicted at first, but his death was an unhoped for boon, one that multiplied the psychological effect a thousand times over. But it might have also slightly worried your contacts in London. A regular diplomat could have been sacrificed, but Travers was a
buddy
and you know what?
Buddies
are sacred. What if those crazies hurt him in the end? Trudeau might have had his political reasons to let the crisis degenerate, but they probably weren't appreciated by the British. Suddenly their confidence in you and your little friends wasn't as strong. But they had you under close enough watch to know that you read all the papers, and, hey, what a surprise, they were well connected through the media
 . . .
”

Fred picks up the
Sun
article and waves it at the other man defiantly.

“When I came back from London, I was convinced that Luc Goupil had been brutally assassinated while incarcerated. It's almost by chance that I reread the article about the meeting on the fourth of November, and then everything became clear. It was as if I were reading with another part of my brain. Everything that had been muddled fell into place. I understood the emphasis the article put on the detention and the frankly strange allusions to the death penalty at the end. The article was a coded warning, which pointed toward a man hanged in his cell
 . . .
”

Frederic stops, out of breath. He notices that his left leg is shaking from thigh to foot. He places his hand on his knee and squeezes it, then looks Langlais in the eye.

“The text was difficult to understand because it was written for a single man. Someone who knew what those people are, as you say,
capable
of.
Because he knew all about the killers
 . . .
”

The sheet of paper is now shaking in Fred's hand. He places it down on the table and slaps his hand on it. If this keeps up, he won't have enough hands to stop himself from shaking. He takes a deep breath and adds:

“If you read this article correctly, you'll find proof that at least one man among Travers's kidnappers was a secret agent, and thus that the entire kidnapping was a hoax. Perhaps one of the most elaborate traps in the history of police provocation
 . . .
”

Langlais stares at Fred's hand on the photocopy.

“And you invented a father with Alzheimer's,” the director of Deer Park finally says, “to tell me this story?”

“Yup,” Fred replies.

“And now, what are you going to do about it?”

“My father?”

“No, the story
 . . .
”

“Ah. Not much. I'm neither a historian nor a journalist. What I do is closer to hermeneutics than anything else: I interpret texts. From a documentary point of view, I'm not sure my story wouldn't crumble under pressure
 . . .
”

“I understand.”

“The best thing would be to write a novel. But, you know, I've got two kids, a girlfriend, a dog, a cat, and all the rest.”

“Good luck,” Langlais tells him, offering his hand.

They're standing on the balcony-terrace of the residence, flooded in afternoon light and birdsong. On a chaise longue, further off, an old man in a bathrobe is working on a crossword. Frederic shakes the offered hand.

“If everything I said were true, would you tell me?”

“No,” the director answers, and smiles.

At the forest edge, at the bottom of the hilly field, where fresh new grass is growing, Frederic finally sees one.

A deer.

He brakes, turns his warning lights on, and backs up, stopping on the shoulder. He looks again, and the animal is there, observing him, against a background of greens and browns, ears alert, aware of every sound, the movement of the breeze. Just as Fred is about to open the door, the animal stomps the ground three times with his hoof as a warning then bounds off, undulating toward the woods. Fugitive elegance, white tail in the wind, deer in flight, regaining the woods, the shadows, the brush. The cover.

THE DEATH OF COCO

THE SMALL FARM IS FALLING
apart, the fields around it lyi
ng fallow, asters and goldenrod growing up to the windowsills. Fat Coco will never be a farmer, any more than he'll be a global navigator. The writing is on the wall, and in the long line of pure Colombian that he straightens on the table with a Gillette razor blade. Dirty pizza boxes and empty beer bottles jam up the kitchen in the small house bought with a suitcase full of cash. On the table, between the large metal Drum tobacco tin and the bag of Humpty Dumpty chips, is a torn envelope and, next to it, a letter from Commissioner Lavergne, the special investigator assigned by the Parti Québécois government to shed light on the events of October, demanding that he testify. Coco's line of coke starts around eight centimetres from the bottom of the page and drags on toward the edge of the dirty green melamine table, a good ten centimetres long. Cardinal sniffs it all in one go, with a morbid concentration and a touch of the soft quivering of resigned pleasure. He's put on some weight, greying at the temples. His face has less character, a dirty T-shirt covers his belly. His heart pounds, his eyes float in old memories of things that once were but are no more.

If it weren't for the patchy beard, the double chin would not have looked out of place on a Vatican banker's face.

There's a tractor in the yard, an old Massey Ferguson that hasn't seen action for a long time. Next to the tractor, a car has been parked, a real boat. A Lincoln Continental Mark II in mint condition, a true collector's item, looking like it just drove off the assembly line, same as the one of his youth. Except it's black.

BERNARD SAINT-LAURENT

THE MOST FAMOUS GARBAGE COLLECTOR
in print media,
L. G. Laflèche, was looking at a young man who had introduced himself as Bernard Saint-Laurent. He was intrigued. Officially an activist in the PQ, Saint-Laurent had, before his own eyes, picked up the phone and conversed with Colonel Bob Lapierre, a key player in the Liberal Party. There'd been a question of an assignment, and the Colonel had promised to call him back.

Looking satisfied, Saint-Laurent, who'd been the one to ask for a meeting with Laflèche, had hung up with a smile. The newsroom was buzzing around them. So Saint-Laurent was one of the Colonel's agents? Laflèche was wary, sensing a trap.

The journalist ran a hand through his hair.

“I don't get it, what are you playing at?”

140 RUE COLLINS

THE RCMP GUYS TOOK CARE
of the logistics. They we
re the experts. The others, like Bobby, were there to keep an eye out for trouble and avoid unpleasant surprises. They had placed men on each side of the street, as well as on the neighbouring street, Savane, where it intersected with Collins, and even farther down on both sides of the road. They'd joked about dressing up an agent as a cow and placing him in the field. But the small street was quiet, or as Bobby said: “Dead as a doornail.” When he quit yammering for no reason on his walkie-talkie and looked up, he saw, on the other side of the street, through the living-room window, the uninhabited house. In early September, it had been used as a surveillance post by the Combatants, so they could keep an eye out for the scumbags' meetings. And now they were in the house next door, the same sort of people. If the infection kept spreading, it would take over the entire neighbourhood.

He looked up, trying to understand what the man across the street was doing, standing on the kitchen table, head toward the ceiling. Maybe he could learn something instead of standing there doing nothing. He saw the man drill a hole in the ceiling, stick his hand in the opening, and place a microphone. Then, he got off the stepladder, moved it a little, and made another hole, passed the wire though the ceiling into another hole in the hall, and continued on this way to the bathroom. Once there, the RCMP man drilled a hole in the skylight and passed the wire right through it to connect to, Bobby guessed, the transmitter. Then he would probably pass the antenna through the skylight, to ensure a good signal to the house next door, but Bobby couldn't be sure since his line of sight, limited by the bathroom door, only gave him a view of the stepladder, with two feet sticking out. Another man was covering the wires with masking tape before plastering over every hole, leaving no trace of them being there. Bobby had been looking at this work for a while now, thinking the man did his job well.
Anything that needs to be done,
he thought,
needs to be done well
. It was like having his father's voice in his head.

TEXAS

AFTER DROPPING JEAN-PAUL OFF AT
t
he edge of town, near the motel where he was to meet with his contact, and then driving Ms. Lafleur and their youngest daughter to the mall, Gode and René drove to Dealey Plaza, where, it was said, time had stopped on a certain day in November 1963. They parked the car a bit farther off and sat on the grass of the most famous knoll in the universe to smoke a cigarette. Elm Street faced them. The Texas School Book Depository was a bit higher up, the pergola at their back, the fence to their right, the viaduct and train tracks below them.

“He was farther away than I thought,” René said, looking up at the sixth floor of the book depository.

“He could have shot him straight on, when the limousine was coming down Houston Street and practically stopped as it turned
 . . .
Why wait until it drove past him?”

“He was a sharpshooter.”

“He was not, not for a goddamn second.”

“Maybe there were other shooters. But we'll never know.”

“No, but the proof of the conspiracy isn't here, it's at Dealey Plaza. The proof of the conspiracy is Jack Ruby. He's the guy who tries to make the pigeon disappear. The proof is the cover-up, you see?'

“Sounds like you've thought about this before
 . . .
”

“Maybe I have. Is there really a single person on the planet who believes that Ruby shot Oswald for the First Lady's pretty eyes?”

“I don't know, but it gets me thinking: remember what Jean-Paul told us about Jackie?”

“No, what?”

“He said that this one summer, Francoeur tried to convince him to kidnap Jackie Kennedy as she was fishing on the Cascapédia, in the Gaspésie.”

“Really?”

FREELANCING?

WHEN MILES MARTINEK, REDUCED BY
age, k
nees blown and needing to hold himself up with crutches, showed him his collection of firearms, a couple of pieces in particular impressed Nihilo: the .30-30 Centenary Winchester, with a lever action mechanism and silver incrustations; and the .410 handgun with sawn-off barrels. And, most of all, the walking stick–carbine, that wouldn't have looked out of place in a James Bond flick.

“What calibre?” Samuel asked him.

“Oh, that
 . . .
A special calibre. Don't look for another like it, you won't find it. Comes from the States. Back when I used to freelance for the CIA
 . . .
”

“When you used to what?”

MAÎTRE
MARIO BRIEN (1942–2008)

SAM EXPECTED TO MEET A
bunc
h of greying FLQers at the lawyer's funeral, but he certainly didn't think he'd end up, once the ceremonies had ended, nursing a beer with Gilbert Massicotte, the former member of the antiterrorist squad. What was he doing there?

“You know, you meet in court. Shoot the shit a bit.”

“Are you telling me that Brien was a CATS source?”

Massicotte's smile brought out the wrinkles on his face, which had been carved all the deeper during his recent battle with cancer.

“Shoot the shit, that's all I said
 . . .
”

“Sure. But when you think about it, Brien, may the Devil keep his soul, clearly knew the shifty role your cousin Rénald played, the supposed chicken delivery man. In reality, he hid an infiltration mission. Wasn't for nothing that you told me to call him
 . . .
”

“Rénald was an actual chicken delivery man who got caught up in the story by chance.”

“Sure. Of course he was.”

“I'm telling you.”

“Have you ever,” Samuel asked, “heard of unemployed people setting forest fires up north?”

“Yes, no, maybe. Why?”

“Because I've been trying for the longest time to understand how the money that was seized at Saint-Colomban, you know, from the holdup at the university, how that money ended up in the pockets of kidnappers in the summer of 1970. As if the cops had placed it back in circulation
 . . .
”

“And why would we have done that?”

“Because you need criminals. Without them you're nothing. You'd never have the opportunity to show your worth. And when you know about them already, it makes it easier to know exactly who you're supposed to arrest. So, from your point of view, known criminals should be encouraged, no?”

“Well, goddamn, aren't you a clever little monkey
 . . .
”