The Delicate Storm

by Giles Blunt

  “He knew by now I was crazy about him—I was doing all this as much for him as for Quebec. I loved him totally. And he began the evening by saying—already at the aperitif stage—saying how much he adored me. He was holding my hand and looking into my eyes. All I could see was adoration there. In fact, do you know, I actually thought he was going to propose to me. Hah!”

  The exclamation turned into a cough that shook the frail frame. Then the cough became a wheeze. Kleenex was searched for. Drink replenished. Cigarette lit.

  “We had our dinner. A magnificent dinner: lobster bisque followed by beef chateaubriand. Champagne, of course. And afterwards, Armagnac. To this day I believe it is the best meal I’ve ever had. And afterwards, over the brandy, Jean-Paul takes my hand. His face is very serious and I know he’s going to say something that will change my life. ‘This is hard for me to say, Simone,’ he says. ‘You’ve done so much already. Why, really, you’re risking your life every day. But, Simone, we need to know just how far you would go to protect your ideals.’

  “‘But you’ve seen how far,’ I said. ‘You’re seeing how far. What do you want me to do? Kill someone?’

  “He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says, and there’s a tremor in his voice.

  “By now I was frightened. I didn’t know what he was going to say—but my stomach did, because it was starting to turn over. Suddenly the lobster bisque didn’t seem like such a good idea. My heart stopped beating. I broke out into a sweat. I put my glass on the table. I couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘You want me to fuck someone,’ I said.

  “‘We don’t want you to do anything you feel would be too much,’ he said very quickly. ‘Use your own judgment, of course. But we feel Hibert has gone as far as he is going to go, and we need something to break the, uh, stalemate.’

  “I couldn’t look at him. I just leaned forward, kind of rocking back and forth, hugging myself.

  “‘Are you all right?’ he asks me. Can you imagine? Was I all right? He repeated it I don’t know how many times. Was I all right? Was I all right? My God. He could ask me that? Was I all right?

  “I told him I was fine.

  “‘You’ll do it?’

  “‘If you want me to.’ I looked him in the eye when I said it. I wanted to see how he looked when I said it.

  “‘It’s not what I want,’” he said. “‘It couldn’t be farther from what I want, Simone. You know that. But in this line of work we don’t get to pick and choose.’

  “‘I will do it,’ I said again—very firmly, as if I was speaking to a deaf person. ‘I will do it. If that is what you want. Do you want me to do it?’

  “He nodded his head. Now it was he who could not look me in the eye. You see, if he could ask me to do such a thing, then there was no reason not to do it. Clearly, I meant nothing to him. From that moment on, I didn’t care what I did, who I slept with. I had nothing to lose.”

  “But you could have walked away,” Delorme said. “They couldn’t have forced you to do it.”

  “After what Jean-Paul said to me, I wanted to die. Really, death held no terror for me anymore. And staying undercover in the FLQ seemed like an efficient way to commit suicide. So next time Hibert and I were alone, we slept together—and then I no longer felt like dying, I felt dead. I was completely numb.

  “I tried to hurt Jean-Paul when I reported back to him. Told him what an extraordinary lover Hibert was, how well endowed, how considerate. None of it true, by the way.

  “Jean-Paul didn’t even blink. ‘Just stick with the relevant facts, Simone,’ he said.

  “As a tactic, sleeping with Hibert turned out to be a good move. Hibert was now in the position of either worrying that he was sleeping with an informer or trusting me completely. He decided to trust me, and a week later I had a stack of letterhead and three cases of dynamite.

  “With the letterhead, I put out communiqués, inventing cell names as I went along. I would announce ‘a major blow’ to come, for example, and then we would set the dynamite. The high point of my career came when I had eight recruits at one time in my apartment. We’re typing up communiqués in one room and two of them are making a bomb in my bathtub.”

  Cardinal stirred. “You’re telling me the Mounties and the Montreal police let you manufacture bombs in your apartment? I don’t believe that.”

  “They doctored the explosives so they would be inert. Sometimes they would substitute their own dynamite after we’d planted it—that’s if they wanted the explosion to actually happen. Other times they would just let us set a dud. For example, they let us blow up a section of track on the CPR, but they replaced our dud with a small charge that did very little damage. That way, I could keep my credibility. They arrested four guys after that one.”

  “All people you recruited?”

  “All my recruits, yes. They got four years.”

  Cardinal looked at Delorme, but Delorme was just staring at Simone Rouault, eyebrows in the air.

  “Don’t look at me like that. You think they were so innocent? These were people who, if they had joined a real cell, would have killed people. We took them out of action before they could do any damage. Listen, I put twenty-seven people in prison, and probably not more than three were FLQ before I met them. And I probably did all of them a favour.”

  Oh yes, Cardinal thought, we all have to tell ourselves lies sometimes. God knows he had told himself more than a few in his time. He pulled out the photograph of Shackley again. “Do you recognize this man?”

  “Shackley,” she said without hesitation. “His name was Miles Shackley. He worked with Jean-Paul. I met him quite a few times. He was American, so I assumed he was CIA, though I was too polite to ask. They were supposed to be partners, but Shackley always behaved as if he was Jean-Paul’s instructor. He did have more experience, and I had the impression that he had his own informer very well situated in one of the FLQ cells. An extremely cold man, like a machine, he practically clicked when he walked. I didn’t like him at all. When he got shipped out, I didn’t miss him one bit.”

  “Shipped out?” Cardinal said.

  “One night he was supposed to be having dinner with Jean-Paul and me. When Jean-Paul showed up alone, I asked where Shackley was, and he said, ‘I don’t think we’ll be seeing Miles Shackley anymore.’ He’d had some kind of political blow-up with the higher-ups.”

  “When was this, exactly?”

  “August seventeenth, 1970. I remember because that day the FLQ set off four bombs around the city. A man was killed—a security guard—and police were everywhere. For the first time there was the feeling of crisis in the air.”

  “And did you ever see Shackley again?”

  “Never. I know the CAT Squad was looking for him after Hawthorne was kidnapped. Well, looking for him is not the word—they were ransacking the entire city for him. I was under strict instructions to have nothing to do with him. If he contacted me in any way, I was to call headquarters immediately. I don’t know what he did, but they wanted him as badly as they wanted the FLQ.”

  “And what about these people? Can you identify them?”

  Rouault put her glass down and took the photograph in trembling fingers. “Oh my,” she said. “That’s Madeleine. Madeleine Ferrier. Oh, I was so fond of her. She was the only felquiste I did like. She was so young. Eighteen, I think, not more than nineteen. I never reported her name to anyone. Surveillants would notice her, of course, and Jean-Paul would ask, but always I would tell him, she’s no one, she’s someone’s cousin, she makes them lunch. And really, her involvement was not much more than that. She was crazy about Yves Grenelle and was clearly in the terror game only to be near him. She hung on his every word. But she was just a kid. She never carried explosives, guns or anything like that. Poor Madeleine. To think she would’ve been fifty by now.”

  “Would’ve been? She died?”

  “She didn’t die. She was murdered. After the Hawthorne kidnappers were caught, she received a minor sentence for aiding and a
betting—not because of anything I said—and did six months in jail. Then she totally reformed. Went to university, became a teacher and did well for herself. She moved to Ontario twelve years ago. We weren’t close, but we stayed in touch over the years. I liked her so much, she was the only one I would ever have considered telling the truth about myself, but I didn’t have the heart. Anyway, she called to say she was moving to Ontario, I forget where, and the next thing I knew, she was dead. The killer was never caught, as far as I know.”

  “Do you remember where she was killed?”

  “I don’t know, someplace up north. Ontario, you have to love it.”

  “And you said she had a thing for Yves Grenelle?”

  “Yes. That’s Grenelle there.” A crooked finger hovered over the youth laughing at the edge of the frame. The thick, curly hair and a beard gave him the look of a B-movie bandido.

  “How much did you see of Grenelle after your first escapade?”

  “Not much. He kept close with Lemoyne and Theroux, people who were in it from the beginning. I’m telling you, he wanted to run the country of Quebec, once it was liberated from the clutches of Pierre Trudeau. He moved up in the ranks very quickly.”

  “Did you ever hear that he killed the minister? Raoul Duquette?”

  “He was certainly capable of it: violent, angry, hungry for action and power. Absolutely, he could have done it. But Daniel Lemoyne and Bernard Theroux confessed to that crime. That’s Lemoyne there.” The bony finger hovered over the heavier young man on the other side of the photograph. “He and Grenelle were great friends, I believe. I was always amazed that Grenelle was not captured with him and Theroux. I heard he fled to Paris.”

  She bent her head and there was a silence. Cardinal and Delorme looked at each other, waiting. Cardinal thought Ms. Rouault was trying to remember something, or perhaps grieving for her long-lost love. But then there came a soft fluttering noise and he realized she was snoring.

  Delorme said quietly, “I think we’re done here, no?”

  Cardinal reached over and stubbed out the cigarette and removed the champagne glass from the old fingers. The bottle on the floor was empty.

  22

  CARDINAL AND DELORME DROVE to the Regent Hotel and went to their separate rooms, Delorme on the ground floor, Cardinal on the third. When the rattle-trap of an elevator took too long to come, he ducked into a damp stairwell.

  All Cardinal wanted to do now was have a shower and a nap before dinner, but he had no sooner taken off his shoes than there was a knock at the door. He opened it, and Calvin Squier grinned at him like a long-lost fraternity brother.

  “John, listen. Before you say anything, let me apologize. I know I caused you major problems up north, and I just want you to know that—”

  Cardinal shut the door.

  “John, I’m here to help you.”

  Cardinal spoke to the door. “Why is it every time you help me I end up in the shit?”

  “No, really, this time I’m on your side a hundred percent. And I can’t believe, after your interviews today, that you aren’t going to need the information I have. Besides which, something’s changed that I need to tell you about.”

  Cardinal swung the door open. “How do you know I had interviews?”

  “I can’t talk out here in the hall.”

  Cardinal stood aside and Squier squeezed by, unbuttoning his overcoat.

  “Leave it on,” Cardinal said. “You’re not staying. And anyway, how’d you find me here? I suppose you have me bugged, too.”

  Squier looked hurt. “Of course not. See, what you refuse to accept is that I trust you, even though you don’t trust me.” He held up his hands to ward off accusations. “I know, I know. I caused you problems. That’s why I’m here. To make up for it any way I can.”

  “You can start by telling me who called Simone Rouault and tried to shut her up.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me, I guarantee you that.”

  “French Canadian. An older man. He claimed to be calling from CSIS. You can see that from where I stand, that’s very easy to believe.”

  “It could have been one of the Ottawa brass. I’ve no way of knowing for sure. See, that’s the big change I have to tell you about: I quit.”

  “You quit?”

  “You heard me. Calvin Squier and CSIS are now separate and apart.”

  “I’m sure you’ll both be happier.”

  Squier sat down on the nearest bed. He gave a deep sigh, as if a wave of despair washed over him.

  “John, there comes a time in every man’s life where he’s just got to suck it up and do the right thing. The truth is, I have not been happy about the way CSIS has been handling this matter from the beginning. I try to be a good soldier, to do my job and not ask too many questions, but when it comes to out-and-out hampering an ongoing murder investigation, well, that’s where I draw the line.”

  “Uh-huh. And what brought on this change of heart?”

  “Well, it was when you arrested me, I guess. That’s when the scales dropped from my eyes. I work—worked—for an important organization and I wanted to believe my superiors were behaving ethically. But it’s amazing how being handcuffed face-down on the pavement can make you rethink your position. It just suddenly struck home that I was working for people who don’t give a damn about little things like truth and justice.”

  “—And the American way?”

  “Well, now you’re making fun of me, and probably I deserve it. But you know what I’m saying. I joined CSIS because I believe in certain things. And I’ve come to realize my superiors don’t share those beliefs. See, you’re not the only one they’ve been keeping in the dark. They wouldn’t even let me see the records on Shackley. Why was he Code Red in the first place, I wanted to know. No one would clue me in, and they wouldn’t release the file—assuming it still exists. And that’s why we’ve parted ways.”

  “And you’ve come here to apologize.”

  “And to help out, if I can.”

  “Apology accepted, Squier. Goodbye.” Cardinal opened the door again.

  “Wait, John. Let me finish what I came here to do and then I’ll get out of your hair. You saw Sauvé today. I’m sure the former corporal wasn’t much help to you.”

  “You didn’t follow me there,” Cardinal said, shutting the door again. “Nobody did.”

  “No, but you have a logical mind, and Sauvé is the logical place to start. He didn’t say diddly, right? Like interviewing a monument, I bet.”

  “More or less.”

  Squier made a note on his palmtop. “Fine. We’ll get back to Sauvé. Bet you didn’t get anywhere with Theroux either.”

  “We talked to the wife,” Cardinal said. “She turned out to be very helpful.”

  “Really? Did she tell you her husband didn’t kill Raoul Duquette?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Look at the file, John. She’s been saying that ever since Theroux was sentenced.”

  “Not publicly. She says Yves Grenelle murdered him.”

  “Well, she wouldn’t get far with that. Publicly, nobody’s heard of Grenelle. And anybody on the CAT Squad would tell you it was unlikely in the extreme. Yves Grenelle was all hat and no cattle. He was not a member of the Chénier cell; he wasn’t a member of the Liberation cell. At best, he was liaison between the two. Don’t take my word for it; look him up in the file.”

  “Simone Rouault didn’t have any trouble believing Yves Grenelle could have killed Duquette. As far as she knew, he was a violent thug who wanted to rule the world—Quebec at least.”

  “You talked to Simone Rouault too. Man, you should see the stuff CSIS has on her. That woman deserves a medal. Do you know how many people she put in jail?”

  “She claims twenty-seven.”

  “That’s all she knows about. She was kept in the dark about a lot of things.”

  “She certainly was,” Cardinal said, remembering the look on her face as she recalled Lieutenant Fougère.
>
  “Great woman, no doubt, but not in a position to say who did or did not kill Raoul Duquette.”

  “She did know Miles Shackley, though.”

  “Of course she did. He and Fougère were very tight, and Fougère was running her. But Rouault was a low-level informant, John—effective, but low-level.”

  “They had higher-level informants? Are you going to tell me Daniel Lemoyne was working for the CIA?”

  Squier grinned. “That old chestnut.”

  “As far as I can tell, Simone Rouault was the best informer the Mounties ever had.”

  “My point is, she can only help you so far. Lieutenant Fougère is dead, and Lemoyne and Theroux won’t talk.”

  “The person I really need to talk to is Yves Grenelle.”

  “Yves Grenelle dropped off the planet in 1970 and has never been heard from since. Work with what you have. Sauvé’s the guy. He was on the cat Squad. Heck, he was almost running the cat Squad. And despite his criminal tendencies, he knows everything there is to know about the FLQ.”

  “Unfortunately, he is also a sphinx.”

  “Show him this.” Squier reached into his satchel and pulled out a manila envelope, folded in half.

  Cardinal took it and opened it. “A videotape?”

  “I took it as a little parting gift from CSIS. Unlike them, I don’t happen to believe that when an American citizen gets killed on our soil, nothing should be done about it. Maybe this will make up for some of the trouble we caused you. Anyway, once he gets a look at that, I think you’ll find our former Mountie and jailbird a lot more co-operative.”

  Squier stood up. “I’m glad I got to work with you, John. You know, I’m going to be taking some time off now, to consider my options. And I’m going to be giving some serious thought to joining the police. And that’s entirely because of your influence.”

  “I’ll never forgive myself.”