River City

by John Farrow

  When the signal came, it arrived in a fury, with Laurin walking back briskly, clearly agitated, at least for him, then catapulting himself into the limousine again. “It’s in the coroner’s van. In the glove box. The van is leaving on its own.” He slapped the back of the front seat, behind Houde’s head.

  “Step on it!” de Bernonville shouted out. “Go! Now!”

  “What are we doing?” Houde demanded as the car raced forward. He was pushed against the dash when Vimont braked, blocking the path of the departing van. De Bernonville was immediately out of the car, waving casually at the driver, as though he required urgent information. He went around to the passenger side and Claude Racine, the coroner, rolled down his window.

  De Bernonville shot him. Point-blank. The other two guys in the van were screaming as he flung open the door and fought to find the glove box. He opened it. He warned the driver not to move. “I just want the knife. You don’t have to die.” Then the glove box fell open, and the knife was his again. As he moved away from the van, the coroner’s body slumped onto the pavement.

  The limo was already moving before de Bernonville got back in, and Laurin had to open the door for him and slide over quickly to the opposite side to give him room. The count grasped the door and had one foot in as the car took off. He had to fight to hang on, but he pulled himself inside, helped by Laurin, and the car vaulted forward. He was not complaining about the difficult entry when he yelled at Vimont to “Go! Go! GO!”

  Vimont’s foot hit the floor. The tires squealed. They heard glass shattering and the blast of a shotgun.

  “Oh my God!” the old mayor cried out. “They’re shooting. Get us out of here!”

  The car careened into the chaos of the night.

  One more negotiation remained. Who would possess the knife when they split up?

  De Bernonville volunteered. Houde pointed out to him that that meant the knife would be in Brazil by dawn. “So you take it,” the count suggested.

  “So you can kill me in my sleep?” That idea didn’t appeal to Houde either. Apparently the fugitive from Brazil was staying over in his apartment. “I’m sorry, but I’m kicking you out. I don’t want a killer sleeping on my couch.”

  “Mr. Mayor—”

  “No! Get a hotel room. I’m sure Michel can bring you where they won’t ask for ID if you pay cash. They’ll even give you a girl. I’ll give you the fucking cash.”

  “I don’t want to be where I’m not wanted. But the knife comes with me.” “I’ll take the knife,” offered Laurin.

  “If you do, I want to sleep on your couch,” de Bernonville countered.

  “And I’ll sleep in the spare room. You must have one,” Houde said.

  “I have a safe deposit box,” Laurin stated. “I’ll have it in there by two minutes after ten tomorrow morning. If someone wants to sleep in my apartment, and walk me to the bank, you’re free to do so.”

  “I’ll do that,” de Bernonville consented.

  “Not you,” the doctor told him.

  “Why not me?”

  Laurin only looked across at him.

  “If you don’t trust me, I don’t trust you.”

  “Dr. Laurin will take it to the bank,” Michel Vimont announced.

  “Oh, yeah?” de Bernonville mocked him. “Who are you, the pope now?”

  They heard a click. Vimont raised his hand and aimed a pistol at the count’s glistening forehead.

  Vimont addressed them once again. “We can all go over to the doctor’s house. Right, Doctor? We’ll walk him down to the bank in the morning. That way we will know, if the knife gets stolen, who stole it. There can only be one person, and that one person will be the doctor.”

  They nodded.

  “I get you,” de Bernonville said. “Do you have enough beds, Doctor?”

  Vimont answered instead. “Don’t be stupid,” he said, still aiming his gun. “Who’s gonna sleep?”

  Houde acknowledged that it sounded like a good plan. At least two men in this car carried weapons, which surprised him. He wondered if he should have thought of that and carried one, too. Roger had never suggested it, but he couldn’t chastise him for that now.

  “We’re agreed,” Laurin said. “Now, will you put the gun down, Michel?”

  “The count’s gotta give me his first.”

  That seemed less equitable to everyone, yet no one argued. De Bernonville knew he was up against a man with experience, and handed over his pistol. “Will you kill us all?” he asked. “When we get to the doctor’s house?”

  “That’s the difference between me and you,” Vimont told him. Then he drove on, out of the alley in which they were hiding onto the street, hoping the cops were too busy to notice a limo with a black-eyed tail light.

  CHAPTER 27

  1970

  THEY’D BECOME CAPTIVES OF THEIR OWN CONSPIRACY.

  Interminable nights. Days passed as a bellyache. Barricaded within an apartment devoid of charm in bland North End Montreal, on nondescript Avenue des Récollets—working-class without the patina of age, modern, bereft of style—the James Cross kidnappers were fearful of anything that twitched beyond their booby-trapped doors. Their sole entertainment derived from listening to neighbourhood children play, and switching channels, hoping to hear news of themselves.

  Soon, winter would bind the kids indoors.

  And they weren’t on the tube anymore. Outings were restricted to foraging at a corner dépanneur or running errands to pick up packets of cash scrounged by sympathizers. Supporters they’d relied upon for money had been rounded up in the random sweeps, so they developed a second tier of contacts. Risky. Their nerves were shot, their collective will sunk.

  Walls inched closer. The ceiling crept down as they slept.

  Fresh and stale sweat mingled in their airless rooms.

  In her bed at night, the lone woman perpetually wept.

  They had each craved the publicity their grand gambit created, and had come to depend upon their anonymous notoriety. Now the press had been muffled by the War Measures Act, and attempts to garner more attention—letters dictated for the hostage to write, criticisms of the government—ceded no intended result. On most days, nary a soul, it seemed, nor the soulless government, gave a hoot.

  Their morale slumped deeper into depression as none of the three predictable consequences to their actions—capture, killing James Cross, or being slaughtered in a shootout—interested them.

  The man Cross had come to depend upon—the others called him Jacques whenever they forgot themselves and mentioned a name, which had become more common of late—had been infuriated by Laporte’s murder. That gave Cross a paltry hope. The kidnappers lost their course of action, their impetus. Now they prepared for capture. Would capture mean jail? A shootout to the death? Or a flight into exile?

  Polls charted the growing support for the federal government and Pierre Trudeau. How could this be? Off shopping, the woman overheard a stranger remark that the FLQ ought to be machine-gunned against a wall. The cashier suggested burial alive. In line, the anonymous kidnapper smiled at the suggestion, as though she tacitly agreed. I am buried alive already. Nobody wanted a second murder, unless it was a member of the FLQ swinging at the end of a taut, gristly rope. Everyone wanted the crisis at an end, the soldiers off the streets, the FLQ vanquished from their lives. For the kidnappers, their dreams of revolution ended. Their beloved Front de Libération du Québec, that imposing title, had been reduced to another pack of absurd, irresponsible boys in the public’s craven mind. They once yearned to emulate the experience of Algiers, at least as they saw the revolt there portrayed in a movie called The Battle of Algiers, yet experience had demonstrated that Quebec was not North Africa, that their revolution would never become the movie they once imagined.

  From the lonely well of his room, Cross listened to his captors’ whispers. They spoke in hushed tones, often bitterly now. Where once they professed conviction and resolve, now they bickered amongst themselves, tryin
g to sort a way out. They were coming undone, unglued, which did not bode well for him. He presumed that, aside from their primary reluctance to kill him, he was kept alive because he constituted their ticket to freedom—their escape hatch. When the police came, which they now believed was inevitable, they’d trade his life for passage to Cuba. He was all they had left. No more dreams or ideals, no revolution. Just Jasper Cross, their prisoner, and Cuba, their hope.

  In recent days, discussions concerned only escape. On a foray for supplies, one of their number returned with groceries and beer, but he also popped into a travel agent. He showed them a flyer. Initially, his comrades were furious about the detour. If they couldn’t go out themselves, they didn’t want him gallivanting around town like a tourist, or an ordinary citizen. And yet, Cross overheard them comment one by one on Cuba’s white sand beaches and the pink open-air haciendas in the publicity shots. They were dreaming of another place, another life. Their hope in the future shifting.

  Cross thought them mad. A government that would not negotiate when it did not know where they were would not negotiate once it had them surrounded. But he left them to their reveries. He was done trying to talk sense in this house.

  The potential manner of his death disturbed him the most. He dreaded Laporte’s experience—strangulation by wire. The indignity, the horror of losing his life in the vile grip of a lesser man’s hands made him squirm against his restraints, and when he despaired, tears moistened the back of his blindfold.

  He thought he’d silently cried himself dry, but he hadn’t.

  He would prefer, when the time came, to be shot. Once, he had been on the brink of saying so. “If you need to kill me, then please, shoot me.” He rehearsed the plea in his head and nearly uttered the words aloud. Surely, he could appeal to their humanity to grant this one frail mercy. At the last moment, he successfully resisted the impulse. Saying those words gave his captors a convoluted permission to kill him. That satisfaction, that approval, that willingness to assuage their guilt by allowing them to bequeath his final request—he’d deny it to them. Even if it meant that, in the end, he endured the terrible agony of the wire.

  The thought caused him to soak his sheets at night.

  So be it. He’d die badly, if necessary. He’d not give them any hint that he condoned their actions against him. He would hate them—the woman who had made his ordeal so unbearable and the others equally, forever, whether his life was long or short. He might die, but he was not willing to surrender.

  Always a struggle, though.

  His worst moment had come after Laporte was butchered. The national television network, the CBC, reported that his own body had also been located. He was watching TV and the announcer, listening to a report through an earplug, told the world James Cross was dead. Then advised that the report was inaccurate. Then declared that, no, he was dead after all. Cross knew his wife would be listening to that broadcast, that her heart would wail as her mourning took hold.

  Another terrible moment followed, when the letter dictated to him by his captors and written in response to the broadcast had been analyzed by reporters, also on television. He had deliberately misspelled a few words, tricking his French captors with his English, and the journalists had deduced—in public, on television—that he was trying to get a message out. The Cross message, they pronounced, had indicated, if nothing else, that the words were not his own, but those of his oppressors.

  Who did those reporters think they were talking to? Did they not know that the FLQ had ears? That they fastened their eyes to every broadcast? The FLQ is listening, you pricks. They’re watching. They’re sitting right beside me. Damn you! The ignominy of that betrayal. His captors hauled him back to his room and denied him television privileges. For a few days, no one talked to him and they fed him less. The woman came into his room at night and woke him with a stiff shove to his chest. She berated him until her husband dragged her back to bed, then he returned to apologize. “It’s the stress,” he said. Stress? Stress? Do you want to talk about stress? Have a chat with my wife. Left alone, he felt so helplessly betrayed by those reporters that his body reeled from an internal, dull, wretched nausea.

  A glimmering despair.

  How despicable could this world be? Those damned reporters. Why did he have to suffer for their wanton stupidity? He fell into a more egregious tangent. Are reporters working on behalf of the terrorists, tipping them off deliberately? Is the whole nation conspiring against me? That worry provoked a new, untapped wellspring of anguish.

  Lately, his captors were sensing that the end was near. He’d been bound up and either blinkered or blindfolded for almost sixty days. Perhaps they craved the finish, too. His imprisonment had become their own. He had noticed an incremental improvement in the household’s food rations. Cross doubted that they had tapped a fresh supply of cash, money being a constant irritation among them. Instead, they were burning through their resources more quickly, spending more on beer, as if they no longer counted on a lengthy siege. As it happened, one was out shopping and two others were preparing breakfast when a fourth, Cross guessed, had peeked around a back curtain.

  “Flics,” he whispered.

  Cops.

  Cross felt his bones congeal.

  His comrades, apparently, ran from the kitchen to see for themselves, but saw no one. But where had the children gone? They always played in the street—now they were absent, their voices silent. The captors couldn’t confirm seeing cops. But still, they were beginning to feel police around them. As if they could sniff them. Was this what paranoia felt like? Flics, gazing back at them through the bathroom mirror, listening devices embedded in their clocks and radios? Although they did not know that flics had taken up residence on the third floor of the building in which they lived, and across the street also, they could feel them everywhere, like stains on a wall, dust motes scurrying on the floor as they walked, as if the echoes of their own steps were being recorded and measured.

  This is how it happened.

  Anik Clément took a seat in the rear booth of a restaurant on Jean-Talon Street, in the Greek neighbourhood of Park Extension. Within eight minutes, she was joined by Émile Cinq-Mars. They had little to say, having recently chatted at length. Cinq-Mars dared to place his hands over hers, to comfort his former girlfriend, and she did not pull hers away. He broke the intimacy only when Captain Touton entered and peeled off his hat and overcoat, which he hung on the hook next to their booth.

  “Crappy weather, eh? Only December. Just the beginning. It’s a sin to live in this climate,” he groused, then sat down. “So? How’s it going, Anik?”

  She was reaching into her substantial handbag. “I have a couple of leads.”

  “Leads?” Touton snapped back. “I was expecting more than leads. I was expecting you to take us straight to the kidnappers. Patrolmen are standing by.”

  She looked up, both hands still in her handbag, and demonstrated that she would brook no guff from him tonight. “I could follow these leads myself, if you like, then take you by the hand to the kidnappers. Or, you could do your job and follow up the leads in a tenth the time it’ll take me. It’s up to you. Let me know by midnight. After that, I smash my glass slippers and go to sleep drunk.”

  He studied her. That stubborn look. “All right,” he relented. “Show me your leads.”

  “You’ve neglected the women,” she advised him. “Wherever there are men, there are women, even in a war. You’re right to have Jacques Lanctôt’s picture in the papers, but I take it you haven’t located his wife and son?”

  “We’re looking.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “I see.” He nodded, taking that in, although he didn’t see how it was of any immediate use.

  “Do you? Check out the birthing hospitals to see where she’s expected to deliver. Find the physician who’s treating her. But first, look at this.”

  She placed a large black-and-white photograph down on the tabletop. Touton was starin
g at the snapshot of a young boy when the waitress came by. He ordered a coffee, and the other two indicated that they’d appreciate a refill.

  “This is the son?” Touton asked.

  “Boris, yep,” Anik told him. “Now check this out.”

  The second photograph was of an older woman, somewhat rotund, wide in the hips, with an ample bosom and a shy moon face. Beside her, at her hip, stood the lad Boris.

  “Who’s this? Somebody’s Ukrainian grandmother?”

  “The babysitter. Look.”

  The next snap showed a man entering a second-storey home by the back entrance.

  “You showed me this before. It’s not the hideout?”

  “This is where the babysitter lives. Boris is living with the babysitter. Among the women in my circle, she was known as a good sitter. So I put a photographer up a tree to guard her back door. Sometimes, Jacques goes to see her, we found out, but Suzanne, that’s his wife, she goes more often.”

  “Which Jacques?”

  “Lanctôt. Keep up, Armand.”

  “So we can wait there for Jacques?”

  “That might not happen again,” Anik cautioned him. “When he arrived this one time, in the picture, he had to talk his way in. I don’t think it’s a common visit, I’m saying. Put a tail on the babysitter. She takes the boy on excursions. Mostly to the local park. When she does, expect Suzanne to visit, at least once in a while. I guess she’s just too busy right now to look after the boy full time.”

  “Busy? She’s a kidnapper?”

  “I’d say no. But a courier? Probably. Does she go to the hideout? Likely.” Leads never got much better.

  “Next thing. Like I said, you’ve neglected the women. You have Jacques Lanctôt’s face in the papers, but you don’t have his sister’s, Louise.” “His sister?” Touton hadn’t heard of a sister.

  “You see? I know the women. Louise is Jacques Lanctôt’s sister and Jacques Cossette-Trudel’s girlfriend. I noticed that her name didn’t show up on the lists Émile gave me of people you’ve put in jail. Which makes no sense. I would have put her on the top ten of any list. She was radicalized years ago, she’s committed. More so than people you have behind bars. So where’s Louise? I think she’s married, actually, but in any case, she uses Cossette-Trudel’s last name.