Then, at the centre of a cavalcade of police motorcycles, a convoy consisting of the grey Chrysler, several unmarked police cars, and patrol cars with their lights flashing, began to move. Corbeau was at the wheel of the Chrysler. The lawyer who’d negotiated the release of the hostage was riding shotgun. Between them, in glasses and long hair, was Pierre, also known as le Chevreuil. Lancelot was behind the hostage. In Saint-Marc, emotion and irritation were running high.
“They’ll be working on their tans in Cuba while we spend the winter buried like moles,” René commented.
“I’d say more like ondatras,” Godefroid corrected. “That trench with a chamber at the end of it looks more like an ondatra’s bank-lodge.”
“What the hell’s an ondatra?”
“A muskrat.”
“Then why didn’t you just say muskrat?”
“Because ondatra is the Indian word for it and I’ve always wanted to say ondatra. You can fuck your hat if you don’t like it.”
“You mean my muskrat hat?”
“Okay, you two, give it a rest …” Jean-Paul said without taking his eyes off the screen.
“So Pierrot’s going to Cuba. Unbelievable …” said Gode, shaking his head.
“For now, it may look like they got the best deal. We’ll see if they find it so funny having a coconut palm for a Christmas tree.”
René climbed the basement stairs, stopping at the top.
“Anyone want a beer?”
“Yeah.”
“Jean-Paul?”
“A Kik for me. With rum in it …”
“One Kik with …”
“Yeah. It’s called a Cuba Libre.”
Marcel placed the bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the table beside the paper bag holding four large bottles of beer.
“Merry Christmas, guys!”
“Hey, great! Compliments of the Colonel …”
They’d been in a good mood all day. They’d ticked off their fifth week in Duquet’s house in Saint-Marc. The first two they’d spent building the hideout. Then they spent a few days discussing organization and finances. The next holdup. Duquet had found them an abandoned scout camp beside Lake Brompton. The access road was closed in winter. They would wait for spring to move their stuff in.
The army had finally pulled out of their area. It wasn’t needed after the Big Show in Montreal, when they’d rounded up the Rebellion Cell. And it was probably better if the silencing of their heavy boots didn’t coincide with the repeal of the War Measures Act and its replacement by a piece of legislation that vastly extended the powers of the regular police. The new law received Royal Assent the very day that an armed-forces Yukon carried Lancelot and his buddies to Castro’s island. Apparently, the whole operation was a well-oiled machine.
Richard Godefroid and the Lafleur brothers were preparing for their next move when the winter solstice fell. Darkness from four o’clock on. The side road was blocked by snowbanks that looked like huge frozen pillows. The fields everywhere were covered in snow. And now Christmas, and the memories of reunited families. The three moles took to brooding.
But now, thanks to Marcel, they had woken up to the sight of a bucket of Colonel Sanders and four large Molsons.
“Too good for Baby,” René said, licking his greasy fingers.
His remark was greeted with silence, which didn’t mean it had fallen on deaf ears. Duquet got up from his chair and produced four large cigars.
“Merry Christmas, guys!”
Gode felt a lump in his throat.
“Marcel, you’re …”
“A real …”
“Good … guy.”
“Are they Havanas, at least?”
The first police search took place the next day.
JEAN-CLAUDE GOES TO
QUEBEC (FALL, 1973)
MY NAME IS JEAN-CLAUDE MARCEL. My role in these events was small, one you will no doubt soon forget. At least I don’t pretend to be someone I wasn’t. It’s been almost a year since we got together in Albert Vézina’s basement in Outremont — Little Albert, as we already called him. In another time, that was the name of a popular book, a kind of almanac or encyclopedia… . By “we” I mean a handful of politicos, small fish in a big pond, who thought that every informal meeting was the beginning of a revolution. Every month for almost a year: meetings. Without his being aware of it, the Old Lion had shown that it was time for him to step down: he’d passed out, completely drunk, in the middle of an executive meeting. It couldn’t have been a big surprise to anyone — no one fell off his or her chair when it happened — because for months the whiff of gin had begun to spread beyond his circle of intimates. His laboured speech, his flushed cheeks that had once earned him the title of the Handsomest Man in Quebec, and the network of red veins on his big schnozz, had become the talk of the town up and down the Grande-Allée. From the day he collapsed in front of his dumbfounded ministers, though, his handlers were no longer able to maintain a wall of silence around him, and the corridors of power began to ring with the sound of knives being sharpened. Which is what we were doing that night in January 1969, three or four unknowns who found ourselves having monthly meetings in Vézina’s basement in Outremont, his little band of supporters. Vézina was our man. He was the logical choice to replace the Old Lion: a graduate of Jean-de-Brébeuf College; a Ford Foundation scholar; degrees from Oxford and Harvard; a master’s in political economics and another in international law and corporate finance. The guy may not have been a heartthrob, but he had done all right for himself in the skirt department, too. His wife wasn’t exactly the queen of the ball either, but she came with one of those bonuses that made “going to bed” rhyme with “hitting the jackpot”: she was an Allard from Saint-Romuald, the daughter of the local Onassis, a shipowner opposed to flags of convenience, a maker and defender of governments, the owner of naval dockyards that received lucrative contacts from the Department of National Defence. He sat on one of the largest fortunes in the country. He was old French-Canadian money in all its splendour. As you can imagine, he welcomed a specialist in corporate finance into the family with open arms. And so our little Tuesday-night gatherings were suddenly blessed with a new member. Tall, held himself stiff as a steel girder in his sensible suit, lantern jawed, grey hair kept in a brush cut, a man past his mid-forties. His name was Bob Lapierre, alias Uncle Bob, the Party secretary. Sorry: Colonel Bob Lapierre. Wounded in the field of battle during the Second World War, at least so they said. Which would explain his stiffness, anyway. Others spoke highly of his work in army intelligence, which, if true, would mean he was still in the Reserves at the time. In any case, just looking at him made us want to salute him, right? According to some, his war wound had made him a veritable workhorse. His reputation was that he slept four hours a night and spent the rest of the time shouting at people. It seems he also liked to go salmon fishing in the Gaspésie, treated himself to trips to Acapulco, and was passionate about plants: he was flower power, a man who cultivated his own garden, you get the idea. Frankly, I can’t see the Colonel with a watering can in his hand, but that’s what was being bruited about around the high tables on the Grande-Allée. Anyway, there he is that night, in the flesh, or more accurately in the bone, a new arrival among us. He never says a word all night. He listens. You can cut the tension with a knife. The meeting ends and he still hasn’t said a thing. He hasn’t even taken notes, at least not on paper. So what was Uncle Bob doing there? Checking out Vézina’s team, evaluating his chances? Spying for another candidate? Or did the Old Lion send him? Rumour had it that like four-fifths of the caucus, Uncle Bob supported Paul Lavoie. We had our answer a month later: it wasn’t the distinguished and proper Allard daughter who stood in our way, it was Uncle Bob. Arms crossed, he literally blocked the doorway when the bell rang, his face rigid and closed, grey eyes cold as ice, a gleam of steel in his look, his mouth an expressionless slit. I’ll never forget the phrase he uttered then: You three, I don’t want to see you around here again. G
et lost… . And you won’t believe this, but that’s exactly what we did! And don’t bother coming back, the Colonel shouted at our backs, practically making us shit ourselves. But we already knew what was what. We’d been aware of who we were dealing with. We knew the man, the Lapierre method. We’d been in the front row when he crushed René Lévesque and his future separatists at the Liberal Party convention in 1967. The tone of that conference was established well in advance, when the Lévesque delegates discovered that they were unable to reserve rooms in the Château Frontenac; the federalist faction was installed there and had to be kept under observation and away from any separatist contamination. “We’re fully booked,” they were told when they called, after their names had been checked on a list of black sheep provided by Uncle Bob (whose other nickname was Papa Boss). His men were all over the floor of the Convention Centre that weekend, walkie-talkies clasped to their ears, waiting for the slightest informal discussion, the tiniest rumour, shifting agents from room to room, infiltrating one committee after another, all to keep the balance weighed to the proper side. After that, Lévesque, who knew which way the wind was blowing, dragged his feet to the microphone like a lamb to the slaughter. He delivered his speech and hurried to the exit, through the great doors of history that opened before him. He passed Vézina on the way, and Vézina remained seated, staring into the middle distance like someone trying to see a wasp buzzing a few inches from his nose and waiting for it to fly off before breathing normally. A member of Lévesque’s faithful saw Vézina sitting there and called to him — “Albert! Come on!” — and made as though to help him get to his feet. But Little Albert did not stand. He had already seen the writing on the wall. He’d wanted to be premier since he was fifteen years old, and now, twenty years later, when he had to choose between being head of a provincial government or the finance minister of an independent state, he made his choice without the slightest hesitation. And we saw the result in Outremont: Uncle Bob Lapierre had risen in Little Albert’s ranks and taken charge of his campaign. Which meant that Vézina had been given the Old Lion’s blessing and the entire party machine to back him up. The rest of us who had climbed the steps of Vézina’s house in Outremont quickly got the message and made our peace with it. But not me. After a long, sleepless night I decided to scurry off like a rabbit at the sight of the shotgun, telling myself I would sell my skin more dearly than that. My wife, you know what wives are like, advised me to get out of politics altogether and concentrate on making a decent living for my family. By “decent living” she meant working nine to five. Generally speaking, women don’t appreciate any emotion that can’t be expressed with roses and chocolates. As though agonizing until dawn over the wording of a speech, high on nicotine and coffee and the exaltation of seeing the vision that was in your brain being transferred into words on paper, was just so much time stolen from the great, cuckolding novel of love. Speaking of which, why do you think “cupidity” and “Cupid” have the same root? But I digress … Apart from the steamroller, there were two candidates: Denis Müller, minister of justice, workaholic, expert at sending out frenzied cavalry charges to disperse any and all demonstrations, described by pollsters as the candidate most liked by the majority of citizens concerned with law and order. And Paul Lavoie, a man of the earth, tireless weaver of lines of connection, former editor of Le Devoir. Despite what for mere mortals would have been a handicap — having had his name connected with several infamous corruption scandals — or perhaps for that very reason, Lavoie was able to count on support from the most influential members at the heart of the party from the very beginning. I never did like Müller. Colleagues had heard him speak privately about the possibility of sending in police to end the strike in Shawinigan with a few bursts from their machine guns, to deliver a message to the rest. I aligned myself with Lavoie’s organization. And what I found was a totally devastated candidate. He and Lapierre had known each other in that 100 percent Canuck freemasonry known as the Order of Jacques-Cartier, yes, the old Family Compact. Lavoie’s ambitions had been obvious for a long time. What I didn’t know, personally, was that Colonel Lapierre had promised to put at his service the all-powerful electoral juggernaut that was under his control. So Uncle Bob’s going over to Little Albert’s camp had been, in effect, a betrayal. Day by day, Lavoie proved to be leadership potential with neither a campaign nor a manager to run it. I rolled up my sleeves and took on the job, and my first move was to set up the Circle of Friends of Paul Lavoie in preparation for a counterattack. But between you and me, by letting me go after the Colonel, Little Albert pulled off the trade-off of the century. We learned through the grapevine that Lapierre had gone to the U.S. to learn the new politics, that a scientific poll conducted by an American firm could convince the Liberal establishment that Vézina was the right man for the job: young, numbers coming out his ears. The response from the big shots to disturbances on the street and threats from bearded anarchists. Focus on the economy as a remedy for chronic insecurity among the poor, that was Vézina. A total android. They got him a hairdresser and gave him a Kennedy-style campaign, a virile Irish smile, the whole enchilada. What can I say? They pulverized us. We weren’t even in the same league. Uncle Bob got hold of one of the early computers and used his position as party secretary to compile the first complete, systematic list of members in the province and used it to get first crack at the postal services. The other two candidates got access to it when he was finished, but by then the budget was used up and they had to pay for their own postage! Uncle Bob liked adding insult to injury. While the very mention of the name of Vézina’s father-in-law, Allard, was an open-sesame on the purse strings of the Rhodesian clique of barons of finance and the newer industrial upstarts that made up the local elite of the business world, Little Albert’s rivals saw that the traditional backers of the FLQ dramatically turned off the taps. Lavoie was a man who ran up debts, who quickly got in over his head. More precisely, $175,000 before you could say Bob’s your uncle. The race was over. Three days before the leadership convention, I was with Paul in his house in Saint-Lambert, helping him rewrite his opening speech. We were sitting around the kitchen table, sleeves rolled up, papers spread out among empty cups and overflowing ashtrays. Suddenly the doorbell rings. He gets up and goes to answer it and finds himself facing a bailiff who’d come to seize his furniture. The creditor in question was the printer who was claiming $10,000 for printing his campaign material. The print shop belonged to the Orford Clarion, and the Orford Clarion, it turned out, was owned by a media empire in the making, the owner of which was someone named Durivage, a man who had interests in the form of a daughter-in-law and a packet of policies connected to the Allards of Saint-Romuald. Okay. It would take more than that to wipe Paul Lavoie’s name off the slate, but when he handed me the affidavit that day hoping that I would run my eye over it and find some way to raise the $10,000 in a hurry, I heard him curse between clenched teeth: “This is the Colonel’s doing!” But there was more than simple rage in his voice; there was admiration there as well.
THE ASSEMBLY
THE LAVIGUEUR TAVERN ON RUE Ontario was an institution. The perfect place to wait out a bout of insomnia while checking out couples of a certain age, prudently entwining on the dance floor to the sound of an orchestra typical of Montreal’s east end: a gay man playing saccharine chords on a Hammond organ, a man with a huge moustache and a Hawaiian shirt scraping his brushes over a snare drum as if scrubbing out a pot, and an aging crooner in a tight-fitting leather vest and a cowboy hat who specializes in transforming old Johnny Farago tunes into treacle. The waiter, six feet tall, built like a former NFL linebacker, took in the patrons with equanimity mixed with sullen friendliness, whether they were students, avant-garde artists, or penniless intellectuals who came in mainly for a change of scenery but who sometimes tipped with suspicious generosity, as if to apologize for not belonging to the ordinary world.
The establishment’s four walls displayed a collection of unbelievably bad art: por
traits of cultural giants from a long-gone era who had witnessed the closing down of the cabarets, the red-light district, and the Empire of the Night at about the same time as the rise of TV. At Lavigueur’s, after having shaken the salt shaker like a censor over your glass of draft, you sipped it under the converging gaze of a company of legends straight from the forgotten nightspots of the 1950s, the western bars of the East End and the studios of Channel 10: Michèle Richard, Ti-Gusse and Ti-Mousse, Léo Rivest, La Poune, Oscar Thiffault, Jacques “Patof” Desrosiers, Paolo Noël, Marcel Martel and his daughter Renée, Bobby Hachey, and Willie Lamothe, Olivier “Ti-Zoune” Guimond, flanked, even in this fake resurrection, by his straight man with the flesh-eating grin, Denis Drouin, the real crook of the collection. There was Raoul Bonnard with his thick mug as deeply grooved as a winter tire. All of them were immortalized by the primitive brushwork of the same untalented hack, up there between two humming female singers, two dirty jokes, and two below-the-belt one-liners.
You could ponder for a long time the size of the tabs that these canvases represented, given in payment while the artist waited for his next UI cheque. Could it be that this permanent exhibition, a sort of Pantheon of the Poor, had replaced the old autographed photographs of local punch-drunk boxers, of Rocket Richard and Jackie Robinson, who once played for the Montreal Royals, a farm team for the Dodgers, in the park next to the tavern? They were the immortals of a nation that had forgotten how to amuse itself. Guardians in charge of watching over this lugubrious collection of horse-piss drinkers and compulsively drugged players of electronic strawberry-banana-kiwi combos that formed Chez Lavigueur’s faithful clientele.
In the mid-1980s, the small band of university types who migrated here once a week after Branlequeue’s lectures on Hubert Aquin and the Revolution had, as the weeks went on, successfully passed all the stages of tacit acceptance necessary to be admitted to the inner circle of the tavern’s largely proletariat clientele. These sessions took place on Tuesdays. They arrived on foot, passing en route such monuments to popular patrimony as the scrap man, the treasure-hunter, the Panet Tavern, placed like obstacles on the course to middle-classism. Not to mention the sawn-off hookers hanging out on every street corner.
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