by John Farrow
“Four hours of sleep a day—” a Mountie, who was probably secretly in love with his own handsome reflection, commenced to explain.
“Who gets four hours?” Touton interrupted. “Even my dog doesn’t get four hours anymore.”
He was winning now, and enjoying that.
“Anyway, us city cops, we look like hell because we work like hell. You Mounties, you look like hell because you just do. Maybe if you didn’t drink so much, maybe if you didn’t spend all your meal money on hookers, you might have better luck with the ladies, live better lives.”
“Mounties sleep with hookers, city cops sleep with homely wives, but in the Sûreté,” one of the provincial police officers bragged, “we get the honeys. That’s the difference between us.”
“The difference between us is that we sleep with women who are over sixteen,” Touton fired back. “You should try it sometime, if you’re man enough.”
While cops were smirking and hooting, Touton shot a glance around the room and realized he was the only one there without a moustache. These guys really did care about their appearance, and they cultivated a certain cop look. They looked terrible. Worn. Bedraggled. Overcaffeinated. Poorly fed. Sleep-deprived. A miserable lot.
Someone put a cup down in front of him. Touton took a sip, not bothering with cream or sugar. They were all motoring on coffee now, the stronger the better, and getting each other’s goat served as another survival tactic. A few laughs, and they might endure their endless shifts without falling asleep or coming unglued.
Then a Mountie brought them to order. “The brass has been compiling lists,” he announced, patting down his moustache. “Maoists, Trotskyites, radical separatists, union guys who make trouble during demonstrations, and so on.”
“What do you mean, and so on?” Touton asked.
“Guys like that.”
“Guys like what?”
“Excuse me?” The Mountie looked confused. He hadn’t expected questions.
“You said union guys and political guys, and guys like that. So who are guys like that?”
“Political guys, and guys like that. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know who guys like that are. You say ‘guys like that,’ and I think you mean everybody you want it to mean. I get nervous. So, anyway—what are these lists for again?”
Another officer tried to help his colleague. “Your mayor told us, Captain Touton, that he’s putting pressure on the prime minister to invoke the War Measures Act. So is Bourassa. If the War Measures Act goes through, then we can arrest whomever we want, whenever we want, and put that person away for just about as long as we want. So we’re compiling lists, to be ready, so we know who to go after when the time comes. We don’t want chaos. We want to be effective.”
Cops with infinite power. Politicians with even more. Touton wasn’t convinced that he relished either scenario. “That’s why I’m asking,” he stated, “who you mean by ‘guys like that.’ I don’t want to give orders to my men to go out and arrest radicals and ‘guys like that.’ Who knows who they’ll bring in? Anybody with long hair and a beard? Girls with cute behinds? It has to be clear.”
“I agree with you,” the older Mountie said. “It has to be clear. Sergeant Leduc is going to modify his statement to exclude phrases such as ‘and so on’ and ‘guys like that.’ From now on, he will be more precise in what he says.”
Touton didn’t know whether the older Mountie was politely calling him an asshole or was actually on his side and advising his colleague to do better. Either way, he had made progress, and words would have to mean what they were meant to mean in this room from this point forward.
“When does this War Measures Act take effect?” Touton wanted to know.
“What will it mean?”
The more junior Mountie spoke up again. “We can make arrests without interference from lawyers, judges, the courts or the law. We become the law, essentially.”
“I was afraid of that,” Touton murmured.
Everyone needed to assess the development. They’d been cops long enough to know that they did not operate within a perfect system, and that their own guys were as imperfect as the public they endeavoured to protect.
“Know why this stinks?” an officer asked, and Touton turned to see that it was a man from his own force speaking, a captain like himself, seated at the far end of the table. This was the man who had brought him coffee.
“Why does it stink, André?” Touton inquired.
The man shook his head and said, “It feels like a fucking war, and that’s fine, but we’re not the fucking army.”
They remained still awhile, mute. Then the senior Mountie told them, “When the War Measures Act is declared, they’ll bring in the army to help.”
He’d been looking for a way out, an alternative political device to provide the necessary security to the citizens of Montreal and Quebec. Dramatic enough, sending in the army, and he was in favour of doing so, but in truth, he had no other option. The law demanded that if he received a formal request from a provincial justice minister for military support, he was legally compelled to provide it. The War Measures Act, which suspended civil liberties and gave extraordinary powers to the police, was a different matter, and the burden of that extreme tactic pressed upon his conscience.
Drapeau wanted him to do it—the mayor of Montreal.
Back from New York, Premier Bourassa begged him to do it, the man sounding as though he was at the end of a short, frayed tether. On the phone with him each day Trudeau did his best to calm him, yet the request remained persistent. Bourassa wanted civil rights suspended.
Around him, counsellors were convinced that the time had come for drastic action. A violent, clandestine group had set itself up as a parallel government, and with each passing day its popular support increased. Yet the War Measures Act seemed too cumbersome, too draconian, and invoking it might seem like a move made in panic. Like hunting quail with a bazooka. “Let’s see what the army can do,” he argued. “They’ll patrol the streets. Give the police a chance to investigate.”
The demonstrations grew. They became better organized.
The police made no headway and were seen to be botching the job.
Then on October 15, 1970, an elite group of persons held a meeting in Montreal. Out of that discussion, they signed a document published in Le Devoir. Trudeau read the columns of signatories, an impressive list. René Lévesque, the president of the Parti Québécois; the president of Desjardins Life Assurance; half a dozen union heads; Claude Ryan, the editor of Le Devoir, the most prestigious French newspaper in the country; Camille Laurin, the parliamentary secretary of the Parti Québécois; four professors from the upper echelon of academia, representing the major French universities. Together they proclaimed that, in light of “the atmosphere of semi-military rigidity that can be detected in Ottawa,” and having expressed the concern that “in certain non-Quebec quarters in particular, the terrible temptation of a policy for the worst, i.e., the illusion that a chaotic and thoroughly ravaged Quebec would be easier to control by whatever means,” they espoused the desire to elicit the support of the population to oblige the government of Quebec to negotiate. Trudeau was already in a rage at the mention of a ravaged Quebec, but he reached a feverish moment when he first read that the signatories were offering “our most urgent support in negotiating an exchange between hostages and political prisoners.”
In print.
Black and white.
An elite of Quebec society had referred to gunmen, bank robbers and bombers—each individual fairly tried and convicted according to the actions of the judiciary—as political prisoners.
Some of the rhetoric he recognized. The part leading up to “a chaotic and thoroughly ravaged Quebec” was pure Lévesque, his diction and rhythm as readily identified as the chip on his shoulder, and he hadn’t been at his best or most biting, either. Probably, Ryan had toned him down a tad. And Ryan had drafted the latter portion, he was sure, ex
cept that somebody had slipped him a mickey, then inserted the words “political prisoners.” He’d had to have been drugged or inebriated—what other explanation could there be? He’d been browbeaten. That was it.
Trudeau’s rant over the letter had to be brief and short-lived, although he considered it more offensive than the FLQ manifestos, which insulted him and the intelligence of the society more directly. He telephoned Bourassa and Drapeau both, and asked if they were willing to commit to writing that they believed they were under an apprehension of insurrection.
They promptly committed their demands to him in writing.
Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, then sat by the window in his study. The same law that had landed Mayor Houde in an internment camp had been brought back. Back then, he had personally bellyached against it. Now, he had invoked it himself. The army, its soldiers, its weapons, its troop transports, its Jeeps, its tanks already were rumbling into Quebec and taking up positions on the street corners of Montreal. He felt alone that night, as the army moved under cover of darkness. He knew that, while others had insisted on the manoeuvre, the results of this escapade would forever attach to him.
He stepped across to his private and concealed safe. At knee level, it looked like any other cabinet. He opened the wooden doors, then the double combination lock on the steel door, and pulled out three thick black binders and placed them on the floor. He looked in. Then looked up. Trudeau crossed to the wall switch by the door to his office and dimmed the lights. Only the lamp on his desk shone now. The room was eerily quiet, save for the distant thrum of the building’s complex components. Then he clicked the lock on his door, and returned to the safe. He reached inside. The prime minister pulled out the Cartier Dagger and held it in both hands, gazing down upon the knife. Before the relic had come into his possession, the tip had been broken off, but since then only a few moose hairs had unravelled. If the dagger possessed special power, he wanted to receive it now. Winning elections was all very well, but the real test of a life in public service pertained to those irrevocable choices that defined a person’s stewardship, which in some way helped define your country and your time.
He stood still. Breathing. Waiting.
Pierre Trudeau held the knife as a man might hold a prayer in the core of his solitary heart.
Cross feared the worst—not merely death, but a lonely, shabby one. His captors possessed what he considered to be a naïve expectation of negotiation. They’d cheered the newspaper ads placed and signed by community leaders, demanding that the government negotiate. Perhaps this crazy place called Quebec behaved differently than the world he’d known. Where else on earth would union leaders and journalists, politicians and business executives exhort the prevailing power to cave in to terrorists? Only in Quebec, apparently. Individuals, even segments of the society, might choose surrender, but surely not leadership from the intelligentsia, business and labour. But he was wrong.
He thought he heard trucks rumbling on the streets below, but they were on television. The military had been granted the authority to act. Which would probably cost him his life. The army had arrived, and his next deadline approached.
“You see?” carped the woman. She was pacing around his room. He could smell her cigarette and hear her deeply inhale. He despised her. “What is it I see?” Blindfolded, he saw nothing.
“When the poor of Quebec lie sick and dying, do they send in the troops? When the workers have their skulls cracked by the bosses’ goons, do they send the army to defend them? When we sit in our shit, prisoners of misery, do they send soldiers? Never. Not for the nigger French.”
She stood behind his back and spoke into his ear, her spit touching him, making him flinch and lean his head away.
“But if one man is taken away from his home high up on the mountain, and if that man is a British trade commissioner, they send in the army. They want to destroy our cause, but their idiot fascist response will make us stronger. It’ll bring on the revolution. Before it does, Jasper Cross, we will shoot you through the mouth. Count on that.”
The men gave him water when he wanted, and let him urinate and defecate without delay whenever he made the request. The woman made him wait until the pain in his bladder was excruciating. Then she’d pull him up by the hair and shove him towards the bathroom door.
He was hoping that one of the men would bring him his lunch today, and escort him to the loo. He hoped it would not be that dreadful woman.
Few enjoyed the task they were given. Émile Cinq-Mars departed headquarters each night with a team of six in three squad cars. They were handed a short list of names and addresses. If they made an arrest, they took the suspect in, and if they did well they received a new set of names.
Cinq-Mars brought in a guy, an artist, who seemed relaxed about the matter, as he had expected any police crackdown to include him. He admitted to being an anarchist. “I kidnapped nobody,” he maintained. “I could never handle the extra mouth to feed. I have enough trouble scraping up food for my pets.” Apparently, he thought he would be questioned and released. When he learned that he was to be incarcerated for an indeterminate time, he panicked. “My budgies!” he cried out. “My cats, my goldfish. God,” he shouted, “you’ll kill them. Who’ll feed my animals?”
Cinq-Mars, who for a time had expected to become a veterinarian, wanted to help. He accepted the prisoner’s house key and agreed to find someone to care for the menagerie. Shortly after that conversation, still down at Sûreté du Québec headquarters, he encountered Father François hulking along the corridor.
“Father. What brings you here?”
“I haven’t been arrested yet, if that’s what you’re asking. Probably that’s imminent, or will you do it right now, mmm? What are you doing here, Émile?”
Cinq-Mars was surprised by the priest’s curt retort. “Working,” he answered.
“Arresting the innocent? You call that work? You cops should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“Father—you’re in an ornery mood. Look, it’s my job, and if you can’t understand that—”
“That’s what Nazi war criminals maintained, didn’t they? Following orders.” “It’s not the same thing, Father.”
“Isn’t it?” The priest was not about to let him off the hook, but nor was Cinq-Mars going to cower from the man’s heckling. He didn’t like his duty, but that didn’t mean he’d knuckle under to someone’s ridicule. “How’s it different?”
“If I have to explain that to you, Father, then you’re not the political thinker I took you to be.”
Father François took a breath and calmed himself. “I’ve heard a few desperate stories tonight, Émile. I’m a little worked up.”
“I understand, Father. That’s what you’re doing? Visiting prisoners?”
“Somebody has to. They’re not allowed to see lawyers.”
“Frankly, I’m surprised they’re allowed to see you.”
“They’re not.” He spoke quietly for the first time. “I made people feel guilty enough that they let me in.”
“Good for you. You must be unhappy with your old friend right now.”
Father François was momentarily at a disadvantage. “Trudeau, you mean? No, I’m not happy with him.” He buttoned up his overcoat. “You’ll have to excuse me, Émile. I have people to see.”
“A moment, Father. I have a man inside. He has a number of pets and no one to care for them while he’s being held. He’s given me his house key, but—”
The cleric sighed. “Hand it over. I’ll talk to him, get his address. It won’t be me, but volunteers are being organized for this sort of thing.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“Any other such issues, Émile, get in touch. Maybe it’s a good thing that I know a cop. It’s good of you to be concerned.”
After the older man visited the prisoner, Cinq-Mars checked in with headquarters. He waited on the line for over ten minutes before Captain Touton could clear a moment to speak to him. “Kid, wh
at’s up?”
“I’m at the SQ jail. Father François was in ahead of me. He has full access.” “That’s not right. But does it matter? We don’t have to stick to every rule. Most of our arrests are arbitrary, God knows.” “That’s not what I was thinking, sir.”
“Go on.”
“He knows every radical in town. He always has. He could easily be a courier between those locked up and those on the outside. You might want to tail him.”
Cinq-Mars listened to silence awhile.
“I suppose you want to be the one to tail him,” Touton said, his tone gruff. “I know it’s a rough job you guys are doing right now, but it has to be done.”
He was taken aback. Did Touton really think that this was a ploy to get himself onto another detail? “I thought it could be a lead, sir. You once told me yourself that you didn’t trust Father François.”
“Why should I?” Touton asked. “Look, like everybody else, I’m short of manpower, but when I get someone free, I’ll try to follow up your lead. It has merit.”
“Thank you, sir.” He hung up the phone in a rage. Everyone was working with a short fuse these days—he had to bear that in mind. The old man was probably going around the clock and he probably had to deal with officers jockeying for better duty. Success in a crisis stood out, so officers were looking to get the best roles for themselves, but he hadn’t been one of them and he was angry that Touton had thought that way.
Still, he said he might follow up on the idea. Maybe, by the end of his call, Touton was already reconsidering. That man could be annoying.
Outside, his squad had acquired a new list of names. Cinq-Mars glanced down it, then told them he still had another call to make. The men were holding hot coffees, so they were in no rush.
He fished another dime from his pocket and dialled.
The phone rang three times before being picked up. “Hello?”
“Anik. It’s me. Émile.”
“What a surprise.”