October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “What time it is, no. What time it might be, yes.”

  Chevalier had to admire the classical education that could impart such linguistic exactitude. Grosleau represented the Crown in the coroner’s inquest into the Lavoie Affair.

  “I took the liberty of waking you,” added the man at the other end of the line, “because your presence, so I am informed, is required in the Valley of the Patriots.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “In Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu. Where the three sparrows that everyone has been looking for have been found hiding like rats at the end of a kind of tunnel. Corporal Huet is there.”

  “I see. But why is my presence required?”

  “They’ve asked for you … They are in the midst of negotiations, as I understand it. They have been attempting to agree on a mediator, and it seems your name has been put on the table. You are the government’s concession to the FLQ, Chevalier. And they need to make it, because yours is going to be the only name that will come up.”

  “Mr. Grosleau, you’re an intelligent man, surely you’re not going to drag up that business of …”

  “Of a supposed link between the author of Elucubrations and the Chevalier Cell? Come on, you have the right to a family name. Not even the police think the Lafleur brothers would be low enough to compromise you so callously. We know our Quebec history. We know that Chevalier de Lorimier was the notary with the hemp tie. Are you reassured?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “But we also know that you had at least two of these dangerous terrorists in your class at Saint-Ernest. And that, when you were running as an independent in the 1970 elections, we know whose campaign they worked on.”

  “You are well informed.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “I’d be lying if I said it did.”

  “I don’t have the authority to force you to go.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’re the one they want, Chevalier … The train of history has been set in motion and it’s stopping at your station. The lives of three men hang in the balance, not to mention that as a writer you’d be a damned fool to pass up this opportunity! They’re surrounded. It’s all over. And they want to give themselves up with honour and dignity, which is where you come in, my friend.”

  “Saint Marc,” said Chevalier. “Is that the port next to …”

  “Take a cab to the Parthenais Prison. We’ll put a driver at your disposal. Can I count on you? Not a word to anyone?”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “Good. Oh, and, er, Chevalier …”

  “What?”

  “Don’t forget to get a receipt for the cab.”

  He’d published Elucubrations the previous spring. Despite obvious references to Lamartine, Hugo, and Rimbaud, the book was neither a collection of poems nor a novel nor an essay, but contained elements of all three genres, appearing in the form of an epic divided into a series of stanzas, like the poems of Homer. He blended in historical material as if the book were so much soup in a pot. The Rebellion of 1837–38 was his Trojan War, and Madeleine de Verchères his Helen.

  When critics criticized his title for, as they believed, making light of his topic, Chevalier referred them to his dear Monsieur Littré: Noun. Feminine. 1. Nightwork, the cost of such work. 2. A work requiring great effort and long nights. He presented us with his Elucubrations.

  Take that!

  His real name was Laurent Chevalier. Chevalier Branlequeue was the pen name under which he had published his book, and the sobriquet had stuck. He didn’t know it yet, but his book would represent a turning point in his career. The bulk of the second part of the manuscript for Elucubrations had taken off in October, and he was still working on it. And at the start of the year, during the worst of the parody of a trial that placed Richard Godefroid and Jean-Paul Lafleur in the shadow of the gibbet, Branlequeue, who had been awarded the Didace-Beauchemin Prize for Elucubrations, took advantage of this recognition and the media attention that came with it to ring the conspiracy-theory bell on the events of October.

  “The Lavoie Affair,” as Premier Albert Vézina would call it a few years later when speaking to a group of journalists close to the sources of power, “is our Kennedy mystery …” And it was Chevalier Branlequeue who was the first to sow that theoretical seed in the fertile soil of October 1970. The Didace-Beauchemin reception, with twenty years still to go in his after-lecture drinking bouts in the Faculty of Farts and Unopened Letters (another Branlequeueism), was the founding act of the Octobeerists.

  “So, you gonna beat the shit out of those FLQ fuckers?”

  The taxi driver thinks I’m a cop, Branlequeue thought.

  The announcement of his destination had been followed by a heavy silence filled with innuendo.

  “I can’t say,” replied Chevalier, both because he had to play the game, but also because he really didn’t know.

  “If it was up to me, I’d line the fuckers up against a wall and shoot the whole lot of them.”

  Chevalier was aware that this man was speaking for the silent majority, that he was expressing a widely held opinion. When the body of Paul Lavoie was recovered, police stations around the province were inundated with calls from people who had jumped to the phone to denounce a neighbour or a friend or a brother-in-law, most of whom had been guilty of nothing more than having hair a bit longer than the norm. And it wasn’t only for the $150,000 reward. Hatred of longhairs, of threats to established order, had reached a fever pitch that coincided with the military presence in the streets. Even normally right-thinking people felt the threat. A publisher friend of Chevalier’s, a man from France, spoke openly to him about a “purge.” He recognized the mood.

  From the Jacques-Cartier Bridge he could see the brightly lit city smoking under the snow. Chevalier thought of the nights of his youth, the book launches, the poems written at dawn on the corners of restaurant tables and read to the room while standing on a chair. Of the little politico-cultural world of the metropolis, now bludgeoned by the October Crisis. The luckiest ones had been thrown into prison early and released after a few days into the arms of a sympathetic Left, with a certificate of good revolutionary conduct that would follow them to the grave. The others did what they could. Two and a half months later, they could say to themselves: the deployment of troops in this beloved city was like siccing a vicious dog on militants and intellectuals of all stripes.

  These days, Chevalier spent his time reading, correcting, and editing the work of people he knew, resented, or envied, to the detriment of his own writing. His children ate up the rest of his time. He had to believe that he’d done his best to be a good father, the best he knew how. At night, instead of shutting himself up in his office and pecking away at a manuscript while smoking Sweet Caps and sipping two fingers of scotch, he’d plunked himself down in front of the TV with the family and crammed his head full of beer commercials and the jokes of Marcel Gamache like a normal human, secretly disgusted with himself, the magnificent loser.

  Most nights, but not tonight … The Parthenais Prison that welcomed the poet-publisher this night at the end of 1970 was no longer the heavily armed Bastille it had been in mid-October. Once he paid off the taxi driver, he walked into the prison as if into a mill.

  “You came in by the main gate,” the guard said, recognizing him.

  “True. No more need for handcuffs. Now when they call for me I come running … wagging my tail behind me!”

  He laughed heartily.

  Behind his grille, the guard was reading a comic, paying no more attention to Chevalier than a receptionist at a resort in the off-season.

  “You should put a ‘Vacancy’ sign on the door,” the visitor joked.

  “No kidding. Or we could organize a raid on someone, to fill up the cells.”

  “Really? What about the five hundred you rounded up in the fall?”

  “Ah, that was different. We had our checklist, eh? Like those birdologists have.”
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  “Ornithologists.”

  “Whatever. Where did you learn to roll your Rs like that?”

  “From an old priest. I’m from Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade.”

  “Where they catch them little fish?”

  “The same.”

  “I went there with my brother-in-law one time. We caught eight hundred fish in one night.”

  “Even better than the War Measures Act.”

  The driver was waiting for him in the car, a burly, plainclothes inspector from the homicide squad who had came to take him the rest of the way. Not the talkative type, he stayed behind his bulletproof window and asked Chevalier to show some ID. Chevalier patted his pockets and then spread his arms to show that he didn’t have a single piece of identification on him.

  “I’m Chevalier Branlequeue,” he said, “the author of Elucubrations. At your service, but only so far …”

  “Elucu … what?”

  “Never mind.”

  On the autoroute, where there was nothing to block the wind, icy gusts sent serpentine drifts of powdery snow across the pavement, from one lane to the other.

  “My mother used to say snow like that was ‘as deep as a dog.’”

  Until then the driver had been content to stare ahead at the road, only occasionally glancing furtively at his passenger without unclenching his teeth.

  “As a dog?”

  “Yes, deep as a dog.”

  The officer looked at him briefly as though to make sure he wasn’t being made fun of.

  “It’s just an expression.”

  When they turned onto 223 North, the driver breezed through a red light that swung alone above the deserted intersection. He’d also ignored the lights and stop signs that had come up between the prison and the autoroute. From time to time, the radio in the unmarked vehicle began to crackle. Once or twice he palmed the transmitter and gave their position. A short-barrelled automatic rifle lay between them on the seat.

  Chevalier made a fresh attempt at conversation.

  “You’ll probably laugh at me for saying this,” he said, “but I can’t think of a single illegal thing I’ve done in my entire life. I’ve been a totally boring model citizen.”

  “You mean that light? I’ve got the right to go through them, and I’m the one who’s driving. So you’re still okay.”

  “Too bad.”

  A quick glance from the officer, followed by more silence. Then:

  “You may be a model citizen, but you were jailed anyway, on October 16.”

  “Yes, but that was different. In that case, it was my arrest that was illegal.”

  “We could debate that.”

  “No, come on. Dragged out into the street, handcuffs on my wrists, you have to admit it would be crazy to debate that.”

  “I bet you’ve kept a couple of trout over the limit. Slowed down too late in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. Declared your golf bag stolen and forgot to withdraw the insurance claim when your wife found the bag at the back of your closet. Innocence is like health: it only exists until there’s proof that it doesn’t.”

  “No. I don’t fish for trout: give me pan-fried tommycod any day. I don’t have a driver’s licence, and as for golf, I’ve never played it in my life. See what I mean?”

  Apparently the officer saw nothing at all.

  They were close to Saint-Marc. They were in a white-out. To their right, the river tumbled between woods and fields. Snow blew up onto the road over the guardrails, and the cop had to let up on the gas because of the drifting.

  “So, what was Lavoie’s crime?” Branlequeue asked after a moment’s silence.

  “You won’t get me going down that road.”

  “Maybe not, but his death is your business. If it isn’t, what do we have? An army that invades a province without evidence of a single corpse? That would make everyone look bad. You need a death. Having a body changes everything. The feds finally have their martyr, and his friends in the party in power who didn’t raise a little finger to save him can give him a national funeral.”

  “You won’t get me going down that road.”

  “All right. What would you say to a battlefield instead?”

  “I don’t see it coming to that.”

  Chevalier pointed out a road less obliterated by drifting snow.

  “We’ll see the sign announcing the ferry pretty soon. In summer it takes three minutes to get across to Saint-Charles. Where our boys were cut to ribbons by the Redcoats under General Wetherall in 1837. As soon as they were charged by a regiment of Royal Scots, and saw their bayonets glinting in the sun, most of them took off. But a good many continued to snipe away at the soldiers, and others tried to surrender, and they were all massacred. What history doesn’t tell us is if the Scots were accompanied by bagpipes …”

  “If there’d been bagpipes, the whole lot of them would have been scurrying for the woods.”

  Chevalier tried to make out the river through the snowstorm.

  “I’m trying to see the church where Wetherall’s men lit their huge bonfire after the victory. They celebrated long into the night, with the bodies of their enemy stacked up in front of the altar. Dozens and dozens of corpses piled up to the foot of the cross like so much cordwood. Maybe twenty survivors were kept overnight in the sacristy. The guard who watched them described the scene: they knelt in the dark, lit by a single candle, silently praying while the Goddamns laughed and sang in the next room. The officers ate well that night: roast chicken, fried bacon, pancakes, baked potatoes, plain bread. The English came back to the church in the morning to get rid of the corpses. They discovered that pigs had somehow got into the building and were eating the frozen bodies.”

  “So what’d they do?” the inspector asked after a pause.

  “What do you think they did? They shot the pigs, too.”

  Leaning forward, the inspector strained his eyes to make out the road through the maelstrom of whirling snowflakes that dimmed the light from his headlights.

  “Eaten by pigs,” he murmured, thinking about it.

  Chevalier turned toward him.

  “Yes, pigs ate them.”

  The inspector stared straight ahead.

  “But I don’t see it coming to that.”

  They arrived at Saint-Marc.

  A solid farmhouse was flanked by a covered shed at one end that acted as a garage and, at the other, by a monumental fieldstone chimney that loomed over them as they waded through the snow that covered the driveway. To his great surprise, Chevalier had counted only two other cars on the road. Apparently the military police had been called off.

  They were welcomed at the kitchen door by Corporal Huet and Captain Claude Leclerc, head of the homicide squad. Huet and Leclerc stood on either side of Marcel Duquet, who was visibly nervous. No fire burned in the woodstove. Below them, the furnace made its usual noise. Handshakes, the stomping of boots. Captain Leclerc described the situation briefly:

  “They’re downstairs. We have to make them come out.”

  “How many men do you have here, Captain?” asked Branlequeue.

  “Just the three of us,” Leclerc replied.

  “So there’s no one downstairs keeping an eye on them?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t seem to be very afraid of them, then.”

  “No, that’s true,” said the captain.

  “Strange. I’d have thought the whole sector would be sealed off. I imagined coming through cordons of soldiers to get here. You’ve changed tactics?”

  “Don’t read too much into it, Chevalier,” the captain said patiently. “What you saw going down in north Montreal, when they surrounded the Lancelot Cell, that was the Armed Forces’ and the Mounties’ show. Up here, we’re investigating a murder, that’s all. We’re not playing politics.”

  “So, in other words, now that the English are out of the country, we can go back to doing things our own way, is that it?”

  “Think what you like. Come on, I’ll show you where th
ey are.”

  The first time the provincial police had arrived, on Christmas Day, they came in four or five cars and contented themselves with searching the house from top to bottom. The three sparrows stayed holed up in their burrow, kneeling in fifteen millimetres of ice water and smoking cigarette after cigarette. After a few hours, the police left.

  The second time, the police tapped on walls and ceilings and tore into the walls of closets and partitions with picks and crowbars. They smashed chairs and gutted mattresses. While all this was going on, two officers took Duquet for a car ride into the deserted countryside. Near a small stand of trees, they made him kneel in the snow at the edge of the woods and threatened to put a bullet in his head if he didn’t tell them where the three men were hiding. Duquet swore at them copiously, then clamped his teeth and brayed like a calf, but told them nothing.

  The next day, Corporal Huet turned up alone at the wheel of an unmarked car. He took Duquet for another ride. Marcel was almost beginning to get used to it. This time, Huet parked at the end of a dead-end road. In front of them, the snow-covered fields stretched to the horizon, marked here and there by sugar bushes as regularly as in a geometrical pattern. The wind howled around the vague shapes of buildings in the snowfields.

  “Marcel,” the corporal said quietly, “we know they’re in there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  While the corporal thought about it, he saw a snowy owl perched on a fence post a hundred feet away.

  “We tapped your phone line, my friend. You don’t believe me? When you talked to your mistress about your ‘cousins,’ you must have thought we were imbeciles.”

  Huet cast another glance at the immaculate raptor, immobile on its post. From this close he could make out the owl’s cold, yellow eyes. The corporal had excellent vision. At training camp, he’d regularly placed nineteen of twenty shots in the bull’s eye.

  “And that’s not all, Marcel, my boy. One night when you were out, the boys took a look around your house, and they noticed that even with all the lights off the disc on your hydro meter kept going around. And the furnace works on propane. See what I’m getting at?”