October 1970 (8 page)

Not that she thought of complaining. The squad had been a bad influence on him, but its effect receded with time. The new Jacques was free to spend some quality time at home. He looked after the youngest child, told stories to the older one. He cooked, an apron stretched around his ample girth. She became pregnant with their third child. They had no television, and so he spent his evenings after dinner reading books he'd borrowed from the library. The big
Reader's Digest Atlas of the World
reawakened his dreams of travelling. He memorized the names of all the seas and sailed them in his imagination: Azov, Marmara, Barents, Aral, Aegean, Oman, Kara.

They were living beyond the business section of town, where well-nourished rats scuttled through the breeze-blocks. The end of their street opened onto a field. The only thing Ginette had brought to the marriage was the Lincoln Continental Mark II, and it was now worth a small fortune, but Coco would rather be run over by a Volkswagen until he was dead before he would sell that car. When creditors outnumbered the mouths he had to feed, Coco began looking around for a connection or two.

He could usually be found in the Vegas Sports Palace on boulevard Taschereau, on the South Shore. The establishment belonged to Luigi Temperio, right-hand to the Montreal Mafia boss Giuseppe Scarpino, who was related to the Bonanno family in New York. Coco's police contacts gave him access to some new friends. He started coming home late again, went back to drinking and chewing amphetamines like they were those candies threaded onto necklaces they sold at Labelle's in Coteau-Rouge when he was a kid. When deliveries from Labelle's Self Service Store had been made in a horse and wagon. The milk truck had also been drawn by a horse. And the chip truck
 . . .

And for running water, for running water, there had been that little wagon.

But today he drove around in a Lincoln Continental, while princes of darkness paid for his cognac.

Coco felt he had the soul of a patriot. He joined the separatist group Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale. Impatient for action, factions within this movement tinkered with bombs that rattled the symbols of power as well as the walls of barracks. Radical separatist groups formed, expanded, and disappeared faster than it took to name them, and history was made. Coco participated in meetings of the Comité indépendance-socialisme started by Francis Braffort, where he also met members of the Intellectuels et ouvriers patriotes de Québec, a workers' party founded by two former police officers. It was bizarre, two cops putting together a Marxist group, but in those days anything could happen.

One evening, Richard Kimball showed up at the apartment.

Kimball was a twenty-one-year-old from northern Michigan, Marquette, or somewhere around there. He had left the States out of idealism, so that he wouldn't have to do what was expected of him, which would have meant letting himself be eaten alive by insects and, if possible, killing a few Vietnamese. A draft dodger. He was a strange case. Kimball told Coco that in 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson opened the United States pavilion at Expo 67, he'd hidden in a tree on Île Sainte-Hélène and taken a potshot, not at the president but at the young fellow whose job it had been to raise the American flag during the ceremony. He later told Coco that the protocol office and the secret service had had the bright idea of having the flag raised by a Boy Scout, because they were convinced that no potential assassin would shoot at a child. Kimball added that the kid wore a bulletproof vest when he raised the goddamned Star-Spangled Banner. Those were the kinds of stories Kimball told.

Sometimes Coco believed him, sometimes he didn't. There were some things he could do without knowing.

Kimball was blond, gifted with a winning smile, and had a dangerous sense of humour. He apparently considered his rural accent from the Upper Peninsula to be a superior form of speech, and everyone around him had to bow down to it in the interest of maintaining good relations between civilized peoples. Ginette took an immediate dislike to him. He brought girls over. He lived on avenue Mont-Royal, in a huge five-and-a-half-room apartment. When he showed up, Coco and Ginette's place filled with smoke and a mental fog that lasted until the next morning. The first time Kimball brought Lucie, she climbed up on the table and took her clothes off. Someone took photos. Then Richard carried her into the bedroom, laid her down on the bed, and went to work on her. The other guests talked among themselves, while Coco, who had a ringside seat next to the bedroom, didn't dare stand up.

One morning, after watching Coco swallow a couple of bennies with a glass of water from the kitchen tap, Kimball took from the pocket of his vest a mirror like the one Ginette used to powder her face, a razor blade, one edge of which was covered with tape, and a plastic bag containing maybe a gram of cocaine. He poured some of the cocaine on the mirror, spread it out, and worked it with the razor blade. Coco's eyes never left Kimball's hands; he watched with the rapt attention of one observing a sacred ritual.

Kimball scraped the cocaine into two parallel lines, each about five centimetres long.

“This is the good stuff,” he said.

“How
 . . .
how good is it?” asked Coco.

In the bright morning light that filled the kitchen, Kimball looked at Coco as though he'd never really bothered to look at him until then. He smiled.

“Too good for you,” he said.

One night after Coco took a swing at Ginette, Lucie brought her into the bathroom while Kimball turned a blind eye, muttering that as a matter of principle he never interfered in Canadian domestic affairs. Lucie pressed a wet facecloth to Ginette's black eye and promised to help her with the children as soon as the men went out.

“How old are you?” Ginette asked her.

“I just turned eighteen.”

“I don't understand what you see in a guy like that.”

Lucie smiled.

“And I don't understand what you see in a guy like your husband.”

Ginette felt herself turning bright red.

“What does Kimball live on?”

“He works for a company. That's all I know, and it's best if you don't ask questions.”

“But seriously, aren't you afraid of him?”

She seemed to think about it.

“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

They left the building by a side door that gave onto the alley and took the spiral, wrought-iron staircase down to street level. Kimball's Z-28 was parked in the gravelled backyard.

“Come take a look,” Lucie said.

She opened the trunk and pulled back a blanket. Ginette knew nothing about weapons. In the weak light from a neighbouring balcony she saw barrels, gunstocks, triggers, cartridge clips, an entire arsenal jammed into the back of the trunk, against a row of boxes.

“Do you know what's in those boxes? Look at what's written on them.”

DANGER EXPLOSIVES

Kimball was driving around with cases of dynamite in the back of his Camaro.

The front doorbell rang. A little girl was crying in one of the bedrooms. Ginette opened the door, still holding the butcher's knife she'd been thinking of using to slit her wrists. From the door, water could be heard running in the bathtub. She found herself looking at two police officers.

They told her that the neighbours had called the division because of some noise and asked her if everything was all right. The one who'd spoken kept his eyes on the knife. Ginette assured them as best she could. As they were turning to leave, she felt she had to say something and told them she was going to murder her husband.

They thought she was joking. They asked her a few questions then advised her to put the knife away.

That night she slept soundly. The bathtub overflowed.

The sex was good. Household Finance had them by the short and curlies. Coco would disappear, phone her and tell her to have supper ready, then not show up. One night she saw the Lincoln drive by the building without stopping; she threw her coat over her shoulders and found the car parked in the field at the end of the street with her husband at the wheel and Lucie, looking a bit embarrassed, with her T-shirt rolled up above her breasts. Ginette swore it was the last time. She became depressed. A doctor came and gave her some injections. According to him, all she needed was some peace and quiet.

Then Coco tried to kill her. In a rage, he started breaking everything in the kitchen, split open bags of flour and flung their contents everywhere. He grabbed his wife by her hair and forced her to the floor. She fought him off until the neighbours broke down the door. Coco chased them off, throwing anything at them that came to hand, including their four-slice toaster.

When he turned back to her, he was holding the toaster cord in his hands, a strange smile on his lips. He looked at her coldly, still moving toward her.

“Are you afraid of me?”

She couldn't speak, her voice had given out. Someone pounded on the door. The police.

Coco knew them.

“Hey, Coco, what's the score?”

“He's trying to kill me,” Ginette told them.

She did, in fact, have two or three bruises that were hard to explain.

“She's crazy,” Coco assured them. “I was just roughing her up a bit.”

“All the same,” said one of the patrolmen, “you should be careful.”

“What'll you do if we leave you here with her?” asked the other one.

“Finish the job,” said Coco.

They had to admire his honesty, but they took him in anyway. They didn't use the cuffs. The next day the hardware-store owner went to the apartment without calling first and left with his daughter and the children.

But guess what. She went back to him. Rolled up her sleeves, went back to work. Sex. Reconciliation. Barbecued chicken from St.-Hubert every Sunday. Little notes left on the table in the morning, almost poems. Her sister took the kids for a week. They drove to New Brunswick with a little camping stove in the car and fifty-three dollars in their pocket. Two footloose lovers. Coco had always wanted to see boats. They slept in the car. He'd stopped driving like a suicidal maniac, had become quite the charmer. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other around his wife, the Mark II turning heads all the way from Mont-Joli to Shippagan. They crossed the gulf of the Baie-des-Chaleurs on the bridge to Campbellton then followed the coastline. Small, dun-coloured villages, a few pulp and paper mills. Across the water were the red cliffs of Miguasha. At night they ate lobster on picnic tables. Walked on the pebbled beaches holding hands. Coco talked to fishermen on the wharves. Got himself invited onto their boats. Learned about knots and currents, the secrets the horizon held. Long-lined a two-hundred-pound halibut. Bouncing over the waves, the smell erasing everything, a new start from square one. On clear days they could see the Gaspé coast.

It was dark when they pulled into Shippagan, at the very tip of the Acadian peninsula. Coco drove right out onto the beach and they made love on the same back seat as the first time. “I love you, wife of mine,” he said to her. Said it again. Then collapsed into tears. Ginette couldn't stop herself either. She'd never been so happy.

That night she dreamed of whales ridden by sailors wearing pea jackets and sou'westers, sitting in submersibles attached to the whales' backs, and when they left port they glided between a myriad of islands on the surface of blue-green waters, infused with light, like a gold lamé dress studded with diamonds stretching over the whole world. And the whales talked to one another as they swam with the same slow, peaceful, oscillating motion as the majestic swaying of elephants carrying tiger hunters in India that she had seen in a
National Geographic
special on TV. Or sometimes they dove and swam playfully like otters, without worrying about the boats tied to their backs.

As the first glimmer of light filtered through the grey crack of dawn, Ginette opened her eyes and sat up in the grip of a strange sensation. It didn't take her long to figure out why. The Lincoln was completely surrounded by water.

“Jacques! Wake up
 . . .
”

He slowly emerged from sleep and looked around the car in amazement. The sea was halfway up the doors.

“One day, Ginette, you'll see
 . . .
I'll have it. My boat. One day
 . . .
”

They returned to Montreal with little more than a can of beans between them, the genetic make-up for a fourth child conserved in a safe place. They were three hundred metres from their apartment and they had enough money for gas to get there.

CHICKEN

SAM PICKED UP THE LARGE
yellow envelop
e marked
CHICKEN AFFAIR
from his desk. Tidiness had never been Chevalier's strong suit. The orderly filing cabinet, the cardboard folders with their contents, subjects, and reference numbers clearly visible on little tabs sticking up from their tops weren't for him. He'd been more the stack-of-newspaper-clippings type, aficionado of the random page covered with illegible scribbles, folded in four and stuffed into an envelope like the one Samuel was holding in his hands at that moment.

Thick and worn though it was and stuck among stacks of what seemed at first to be uninteresting paperwork, the envelope had attracted its share of attention at UQAM. Maybe it was because of its title, written on the flap in ballpoint: a reference to the famous chicken ordered from a local rotisserie by the kidnappers of Paul Lavoie during his time of captivity — it had, after all, become part of the folklore of the October Crisis. When the pencil-pushers at the BN weren't looking, Sam had slipped the file into his briefcase. There would be plenty of time later to send the whole thing on to the Fonds Chevalier Branlequeue at National Archives.

Nihilo was a bachelor. He lived alone in a condo in a renovated building in a section of the city that seemed to have slid downhill from the Plateau to the South-Central, between Sherbrooke and Ontario streets. His neighbours were students and gays, one of whom was dying of AIDS, a Chinese family, and a man with Down's syndrome.

That night he reheated a plate of pasta with puttanesca sauce, a concoction of black olives and anchovies prepared according to an old recipe developed by whores in Naples, and ate it while watching a nature documentary on Télé-Québec. He learned that during the mating session, male rhinoceroses spurted literally buckets of semen in a more or less continuous ejaculation that could last for several hours without losing their erections, because their penises were covered with tiny hooks similar to the barbs on fish hooks.

When he finished eating, he took his glass of wine into his office and sat down again in front of the yellow envelope.

For Chevalier, the death of the labour minister, Paul Lavoie, at the hands of the FLQ kidnappers was the apotheosis of the October Crisis. That bloody death caused a spectacular
volte-face
in public opinion: the event dramatized the separatists' cause and projected them onto the world stage. At first it had elicited a certain sympathy from the populist left that hadn't been there before. Socialism and separatism had been seen as two separate options. But with Lavoie's murder, the kidnappers became regarded as unscrupulous killers, ready to do anything to get what they wanted. Quebec citizens found that act of pure barbarism so repellant that they turned against the separatists and accepted the presence of the soldiers as a necessary evil.

Chevalier always maintained that, thanks to a federal cabinet document leaked to a reporter at the
Globe and Mail
, it was known that the government in Ottawa had, as early as the spring of 1970, formed a special committee charged with studying the ways in which the War Measures Act could be applied in Quebec. In other words, the suspension of civil rights and calling the army in were far from being a spontaneous show of support on the part of a strong central government. The call for help from a local power overcome by events was actually part of a plan, part of a long-term plan.

Chevalier Branlequeue did not believe that the FLQ had assassinated Paul Lavoie, since they had no interest in doing so. According to the official story, when the authorities refused to agree to the terrorists' demands to free political prisoners, their response was to execute one of their hostages in cold blood. Others held to a different theory: that Lavoie had died as the result of an accident. Chevalier was of the opinion that strangling a man required a certain amount of premeditation. “Who profited from the crime?” he kept asking, before adding, with an almost imperceptible wink, “as Karl Marx used to say
 . . .
”

The Lavoie case lacked neither conspiracy theorists nor suspects. For some, the hostage had been liquidated by a commando in the Canadian Army; for others, it was accomplished by a double agent controlled by the RCMP's Security Services; still others had organized crime stepping in. The fact that responsibility for the execution had been claimed by a new terrorist cell baptized Royal 22nd Dieppe, and that the car containing the body had been found in a parking lot beside a military airport, barely a grenade's throw from the headquarters of the Mobile Forces, had merely served to deepen the mystery.

And as Branlequeue pointed out, there was no need for the police to look outside the membership of the FLQ to find plenty of lost souls capable of carrying out the dirty deed.

Those were the Years of the Chicken in Montreal. Every Sunday night, the streets of Montreal and Laval teemed with little yellow Volkswagens that had illuminated St.-Hubert BBQ signs on top of them. On the South Shore, Baby Barbecue ruled the roost. Its delivery people drove Datsuns the colour of a turgescent coxcomb.

In the envelope, Nihilo found a bundle of newspaper clippings dating from the coroner's inquest in November 1970. It was in these that one of the members of the Chevalier Cell (the recurrence of the name Chevalier was pure coincidence), a certain Ben Desrosiers, arrested the night before, first alluded to the business of the chicken.

Samuel also found an account of the chicken episode written by Chevalier himself, on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, lined and crumpled. He quickly read the cursive script, written in Branlequeue's elegant if affected handwriting:

According to what the guardians of Lavoie themselves said, they hadn't thought of going to the grocery store before going into action, and quickly found themselves short of provisions. Fed up with eating canned [sic] spaghetti, their leader, who was in a good mood that day, suggested they order some chicken, and he would pay for it out of his own pocket. He gave them twenty dollars. In a long interview given to
Temps-Presse
when he got out of prison, Richard Godefroid said when the chicken breasts in question arrived, “they all more or less devoured them
 . . .
”

On another sheet of paper (this one torn from a notepad) were extracts of notes taken by Chevalier during Jean-Paul Lafleur's murder trial in the winter of 1971. Among other things, they recounted that at the inquest, expert witnesses called upon to comment on the photos taken at the scene of the crime testified that they had discovered, among the boxes of takeout chicken littering the kitchen, pieces of “unconsumed meat.” This sheet was attached, by a no. 1 paperclip, to a photocopy of a police report; years later an excerpt was reproduced in the report of a specially designated investigator assigned to the case by the government. Dated the end of October, the report outlined the various avenues of investigation followed by the antiterrorist squad and offered theories on the significance of certain evidence found at the scene of the murder.
While investigating the suspect house,
read report SAT-904-35E, in characteristic constabulary prose,
the investigators state that several chickens and other foodstuffs were found intact, not having been eaten, which led them to conclude that something very important had killed the suspects' appetite.

In the margin, in red ink, Chevalier had written:

Come on, guys
 . . .
Did you eat the chicken or didn't you?

Digging deeper into the affair, Chevalier discovered that there had been two deliveries of barbecued chicken to rue Collins during that fateful week, the first taking place
before
Lavoie was kidnapped. In their depositions, the drivers, named respectively Rénald Massicotte and Henri Dubé, both stated they arrived at 140 rue Collins on the 10th and 16th of October, respectively, between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., so sometime around noon. On a sheet of paper, Chevalier reproduced the details of the bills presented in evidence at the trial.

Bill no. 10079. 10/10/70. Three club sandwiches. Six Pepsis.

Bill no. 12232. 16/10/70. Three club sandwiches. Two whole chickens. One pack of cigarettes, brand Export “A.”

Samuel got up and poured himself a glass of wine. As far as he could see, everything up to this point was more or less old hat. During their meetings at the Cheval Blanc or Chez Lavigueur, the Octobeerists had had ample opportunities to ponder the pluses and minuses of the October barbecue.

But the notes written in pencil on the next page were something new:

One is a chicken, the other a chicken delivery man: the story of the Massicotte cousins
 . . .

Attached to this sheet by another paperclip was a photocopy of an article that had appeared in
Statut particulier,
in the Fall 1990 issue, on the twentieth anniversary of the October Crisis. The text, a kind of playlet imbued with the vague literary pretensions found in most radio dramas, bore the signature of Gilbert Massicotte, who, according to his biographical note, was a retired detective from the antiterrorist squad of the Montreal Police. The antiterrorist squad had been integrated into the Combined Anti-Terrorist Squad (CATS) in 1970; it was the joint organization that combined the expertise of the Montreal police, the Quebec Provincial Police, and the RCMP. The officers assigned to CATS had baptized themselves “the Combatants.”

The first chicken delivery man, the one who came on the Saturday, was the one named Rénald Massicotte. Feeling a bit dizzy, Sam riffled through the rest of the envelope's contents without finding any more references to the Massicottes. The trail ended there.

In the Montreal telephone book, he found five G. Massicottes.

The Chinese corner store down the street sold single cigarettes. Sam found a quarter under a pile of bills on his desk, put on his coat, and went out into the winter night to buy a smoke. But first he pretended to examine the hunting and fishing magazines on the newsstand, letting his eye slide over to the shelf containing
Club
and
International
, the designers of which apparently had their own idea, and he stopped thinking about the difference between what the chef at Baby Barbecue thought was a sandwich and what was actually a sandwich.

He smoked the cigarette as he walked back to his apartment and arrived slightly out of breath.

In bed, he thought again about all those super babes with their silicone breasts as round as saucers, and masturbated, which helped him fall asleep.

But he didn't sleep for long. He got up an hour and a half before dawn and made a pot of coffee. At ten, after having drunk the whole pot, he dialled the first of the five numbers and hit the bull's eye on the first try.

He explained who he was to Massicotte. A university professor and, he added, a writer. He was interested in a brief bit of dialogue that Massicotte had published a decade earlier in
Statut particulier
, and could they perhaps grab a coffee together in a café somewhere?

“Sure,” replied the former detective lieutenant.

“That was too easy,” Samuel said to himself as he hung up.

He was sitting in the Taverne Fameux, near the glassed-in bay window, looking out at the mixture of artists, pseudo-artists, para-artists, and semi-artists, or perhaps just the young and cool, and the usual figures of the quarter, the characters who kept coming back, people who'd slipped through the cracks in the social services, all being swept along by the current toward the corner of avenue Mont-Royal and Saint-Denis. Then he turned to the sports pages, which occupied his attention for a few minutes until a series of raps on the window made him look up.

It was a short, stubby woman. He remembered her name: Marie-Québec. Her parents were hippies, which explained the name, but when he thought about it, it was no worse than naming someone Charles de Gaulle or Pierre Mendès France. Marie-Québec had been one of the few women to take part in the small group that had sat at Chevalier Branlequeue's feet, at least at first, a sort of Octobeerist hanger-on. But at the White Horse, and later at Lavigueur's, the talk had become sharper and the stakes higher, a kind of I'm-the-king-of-the-castle competition, with the discourse as the castle and everyone using their oratorical strengths to keep everyone else out of it. The loudmouths dominated, and Marie-Québec, who was the self-effacing kind, didn't hang around for long. He remembered the last time he'd seen her, sidling along rue Ontario, almost invisible except to him and the inevitable drivers who cruised the corner for hookers and stopped when they saw any vaguely feminine shape. He might well have forgotten her this time, too, except that after tapping on the window and continuing on her way, she did a one-eighty and pushed open the door of the restaurant.

Samuel had once read a novel in which the author took particular pains to inform the reader that the woollen skirt worn by his heroine was of a pale aquamarine colour, with corn-yellow panels and a large knotted belt. You won't find that kind of thing here. Simply put, Marie-Québec was dressed like any twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old woman of the time, that is, in the fringe between two millennia. She wasn't tall. Her skin was dark. Let's say she had the eyes and cheekbones of an Indian. At first glance there wasn't anything remarkable about her. The way she walked did not cause men's heads to turn when they passed her on the street. Her neckline, visible beneath her unbuttoned winter coat, did not remind him of the foothills of the Rockies.