October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  In the spring of 1970, Cardinal had been acting as a sort of coach for the organization Jean-Paul and his friends were trying to put together. He was the man you went to if you needed a used revolver. It was Coco who showed them how to saw off not only the barrel of a shotgun, but also the butt of an M1 rifle to make it as easy to handle as a pistol. It was also he who told them that the M1, a .30-calibre assault weapon sold in all good sporting goods stores, could be converted into a machine gun by the removal of a single spring.

  Under Coco’s patronage, the fraudulent financing system of the Lafleur-Lancelot network picked up steam. Preparing for a revolution was, they discovered, an all-consuming enterprise. Holdups weren’t enough. Coco did business with a forger of genius who worked undercover in Montreal East. Cloned credit cards, illicit driver’s licences, artfully retouched passports, false birth certificates: all impeccable work, discretion guaranteed. The Fat Cop had connections with all the useful trades. But Coco also had his nose in the powder up to his eyeballs, and this goddamned cement boat, to which everyone had to lend a hand, was not part of the bargain.

  In May, the militants in Lancelot’s entourage found that Jean-Paul was beginning to weaken. The time to make a grand statement, they said, had arrived. Some twenty members of the network met for a strategic planning session at a rest stop on Highway 40, between Montreal and Trois-Rivières. The spot overlooked the sandbars and flood plain of Lake St. Pierre, and they could easily survey their surroundings and spot any potential followers. Gode swept the horizon with his binoculars: not a cop in sight. Nothing but pintails, green-winged teals, northern shovellers, black ducks, and huge, noisy rafts of Canada geese.

  That day, a first cell was formed and left the rest stop with the mandate to kidnap the American consul. A few days later, its members rented a cottage in Saint-Colomban, in the Lower Laurentians.

  Sitting on a case of Labatt 50s on the Île aux Fesses, Coco took a long swig as he watched ducks swim past on the river. Beside him, Jean-Paul sipped a small can of cold Kik. The openwork skeleton of the schooner was reflected in the brown water at their feet, bearing a striking resemblance to the rib cage of a diplodocus in a natural history museum.

  “Yesterday,” Coco said, chuckling, “I saw a pig floating downstream with only its chest and feet sticking up out of the water …”

  Jean-Paul had come to show him the green Chevrolet with a vinyl roof that he’d bought that day. The driver’s licence he’d used was a fake, and Pierre had forged a signature on the registration. Cardinal had barely glanced at the vehicle parked under the trees above where they were sitting. After giving it a brief inspection, he started to laugh.

  “Now I’ve seen everything …”

  He’d slapped his thighs.

  “They sold you a taxi. If this odometer showed the real mileage, it’d have the equivalent of about fifteen trips from Montreal to Vancouver and back on it. They really saw you coming, J.-P.”

  Coco took a snort off the vinyl top of the Chev.

  Now they were back sitting beside the river, Coco on his case of beer, Lafleur on the grass.

  “What you really need, Jean-Paul, are weapons …”

  “Yeah.”

  “Enough to equip a militia …”

  “Call it what you want. But a serious organization, with a solid structure, base camps, able to defend itself against attacks.”

  “I think I’ve found someone who could help you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where?”

  “Houston … But they have offices in Laval.”

  “And they do what, these guys?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Jean-Paul drained another Kik Cola.

  “Who cares? Anyway, I don’t need help from Uncle Sam.”

  After a moment, Coco fished a wallet flat as a buckwheat pancake from his back pocket and took a card from it, which he handed to Jean-Paul.

  ROBERT NILE

  JAMES ENGINEERING

  There was an address on boulevard Saint-Elzéar in Laval, and a telephone number.

  “What kind of engineering?”

  “Electronics. Doesn’t it say on the card?”

  “No.”

  A black duck swam slowly in front of them, followed by four ducklings pedalling in its wake. A skunk or rat must have eaten the rest of the eggs.

  “Hey, Coco?”

  “What?”

  “What’s your link with the Americans? The CIA?”

  Coco squeezed out a laugh.

  “You don’t want to know. All you want are some weapons.”

  “Yeah, right, they furnish us with arms and then we use them to kidnap their consul. You think they’ll thank us for that?”

  “They won’t give a fuck. And I’ll tell you why. Maybe they don’t like communists too much, but they respect people who fight for what they believe in. They understand that. They’ve been there …”

  “There’s a few people in Guatemala I bet would like to hear that.”

  “Don’t lay your goddamned geopolitical trip on me, man. Selling guns is just business …”

  Cardinal stopped and drained his beer. Then he raised his right arm, stretched it back, and threw the empty bottle into the middle of a raft of black ducks, where it caused an indescribable hullabaloo.

  “Jesus, Coco!”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I really think you don’t give a shit about anything.”

  “I didn’t hurt them. They’re just ducks.”

  The mother continued to squawk while the young ones slapped their wings on the water and scattered off in all directions.

  “Look, Jean-Paul, you need weapons. You don’t have the means to buy AK-47s on the market. Let me introduce you to a few good people.”

  “But why Houston?”

  “Because that’s where they’re based. They supply a few anti-Castro groups … people like that.”

  “Oh, I see. And where do they get these weapons from?”

  “From our own military bases, where do you think?” Coco said, laughing softly. “Weapons and electronic equipment stolen from our good little soldier-boys over the past seven years. Where do you think they end up? Don’t look at me like that. You know what I mean: storerooms emptied in broad daylight, real professional work. It’s not like your friends in the FLQ could have pulled it off.”

  “You’re telling me I’m naïve, is that it?”

  “You’ve got a few things to learn.”

  “Okay. I’ll buy myself a bazooka and I’ll blast a few American fishing boats off the Cascapédia, how would you like that?”

  “You can kill as many Kennedys as you want, but spare the higher-ups in the army and you won’t have any problems.”

  “I’d just like to know one thing: what’s the deal … ?”

  “Talk to Bob Nile. Ask him.”

  “Hello, Houston? Can you hear me?”

  “Fucking comedian.”

  “I don’t need you guys. Is that clear?”

  “What you need is to be snivelling enough for two. You can’t be afraid to play in these guys’ court. Because any way you look at it, they’re there. We’re stuck with them.”

  Coco took another deep drink and burped. Jean-Paul thought. Then he shrugged.

  “I’d just like to know what game he’s playing, this engineer of yours. Robert Nile and company.”

  “Call him and see.”

  They watched a large great blue heron skimming just above the waves, stomach filled with a plump-thighed bullfrog and a five-spined stickleback.

  “And Jean-Paul …”

  “What, Coco?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that the Americans would like nothing better?”

  “Nothing better than what?”

  “Than to stick it to that socialist fag who’s running the show in Ottawa.”

  FINANCES

  IN MAY 1970, AT AROUND ten one morning, Mr. Ron Lamoureux, a man in his fifties, Second World War vet, sufferer of what was not y
et called post-traumatic stress disorder (“The bombing made him a bit loony, is all”), was standing near a window in the Queen Mary hospital for former combatants, his back to the street, thinking about the uninspired adaptation of Madame Bovary he’d seen the night before at the Jean-Talon cinema, when the window behind him suddenly blew out. At the same time, a deafening roar shook the structure of the building around him and even the air he was breathing. The next thing he knew he was lying on his stomach on the floor, convinced he was back on Omaha Beach on D-Day, at Courselles-sur-Mer, to be exact. Even before making the slightest move to shake off the splinters of glass and the flakes of plaster that covered him, he realized that his sphincter had opened. “Mommy,” he said, very distinctly.

  Two kilometres away and exactly fifteen minutes later, in the parking lot of a building belonging to one of the Canadian branches of General Electric (the American industrial giant), a powerful explosive transformed the lovingly souped-up Camaro of Ti-Guy Porlier, a Gaspésian exiled to Verdun, into a mass of twisted metal. For Ti-Guy, his car was his life. He raced it on weekends. The murmur that issued from its exhaust practically made him come in his pants. That of a Formula-1 literally made him faint. When he left the building with a few other employees to check out the damage and saw the smoking wreckage of his car in the parking lot, he simply said, “No …”

  At the same moment, three hoods armed with machine guns burst into the Credit Union of the General Association of Students of the University of Montreal (GASUM), situated partway up the mountain on boulevard Édouard-Montpetit. They lined up the employees and clients with their faces turned toward the wall and their hands behind their heads, then threw $58,000 into a cloth bag and got the hell out of there.

  Shortly afterward, three hooded gunmen showed up at a branch of the Canadian Imperial Bank at the corner of boulevard Saint-Laurent and rue Saint-Viateur. They made off with a cool $51,000.

  At almost the same time, the Montreal-North Franco-Canadian Credit Union was hit by, you guessed it, three masked gunmen wearing nylon stockings over their heads. This time, however, Detective Sergeant Miles Martinek had been warned by an informant the previous night and had set up an ambush for the holdup men. In the midst of the prolonged gunfight that ensued, the hoodlums tried to get away by shoving a hostage out ahead of them, a twenty-nine-year-old blonde pretty cashier. Not in the least deterred, Martinek leapt from behind a nearby parked car and laid out one of the thieves with the Thompson machine gun he always used on important occasions. He’d got hold of this beauty during a raid on a gangster hideout. The two other thieves dropped everything — weapons, hostage — and, stepping instinctively away from their fallen comrade, who was pissing blood, raised their hands. Martinek later posed for the Police Gazette photographer who, alerted by a helpful phone call, had been listening in that day on the police radio band. In the photo, we see Miles Martinek, one knee raised, bald head glistening like a full moon, leaning on his rifle like a bwana who’d just shot himself a buffalo. With his free hand, he was picking a pile of bloodstained banknotes from a large pool of blood.

  Only the holdup at the university and the two bombs set off as diversions were eventually traced to the FLQ. The two other robberies staged at the same time were put down to simple coincidence, just another day at the office in the holdup capital of North America.

  Meanwhile, on the mountain, the holdup men evaporated into the woods that surrounded the university. The cash they’d made off with put a serious crimp in the golf season of Mr. Tim Burroughs, the United States consul in Montreal. The neighbouring cemetery resounded with the song of small birds.

  VISIT

  IN THE TEMPERATE LATITUDES OF North America, the countryside is at its greenest in the days leading up to the summer solstice. The fields are green. The woods are green. The understory is strewn with green. The light is green. The mountains are green. The lakes are green with the reflection of all this greenery.

  It was on this infinite green palette that, leaving the preparations leading up to the Saint-Jean-Baptist Day celebrations, one, two, three, four police cars showed up in the village of Milan, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. In the unmarked car at the front of this convoy, Detective Sergeant Miles “Machine Gun” Martinek rode armed with his inseparable Thompson. He had come from Montreal especially to lead the detachment of Quebec Provincial Police stationed in Lac-Mégantic.

  The cars braked, raising clouds of dust; the officers jumped out, ready to charge; Martinek advanced with long, purposeful strides, his machine gun at his hip pointed majestically skyward like a thermonuclear warhead. Two days before the national celebrations, he approached the small farmhouse as though it were a ruined castle filled with fanatical warriors ready to die for their cause.

  Inside, Jean-Paul Lafleur and his brother René, Lancelot, and Lou Ballester had no intention of dying for their cause, at least not then. They ran for shelter and disappeared into the attic. Richard Godefroid, with Marie-France and Momo Corbo — a communist taxi driver — welcomed the visitors at the front door. Lancelot’s wife, Sylvie, was a few paces behind them, a child hiding behind her skirts.

  “You’ve come to celebrate Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day with us, have you? Well, come on in: we’ve got lots of beer and plenty of people who know how to sing.”

  “Get out of my way, or I’ll rip off your arm and beat you with the bloody end …”

  The police pretended to be ferocious, but they were merely paying a courtesy visit. They appeared to swallow whole the fake names furnished to them by those in the kitchen and refrained from pushing their enquiries further. When they went upstairs and came within a hair’s breadth of Lancelot, crouched in the attic and officially on the run, they went back down without breaking anything. Then they took up their tough talk again.

  “You know why we’re here?” one of them said. “Because your little friends in Saint-Colomban got themselves busted. And Martinek always finds a way to make people talk who don’t want to talk …”

  “We’ll be back,” Martinek predicted in a sinister tone.

  Before leaving, the officers decided to look around the barn and the buildings.

  “You should cut the grass,” one of them called without looking back at the house. With his right foot, he kicked the head off a wild daisy.

  That’s when Gode, from his vantage point on the porch, saw Brutal, the goat, lying in wait at the edge of the ditch. He checked to see that Corbeau had seen it, too. The latter slowly raised a finger to his lips, which wasn’t necessary since both men understood each other perfectly. Gode turned back to look toward the grassy ditch. Behind the goat, he now saw clots of dried mud flying in the air, kicked up by the virile caress of a split hoof.

  The goat’s rage sent up clumps of grass from the edge of the ditch, and then he charged, head down. The next instant, Sergeant Martinek dropped his machine gun and took off with his legs around his neck. From the porch, Gode and Corbeau saw him cross in front of the house, running, running, like Francis Macomber in the Hemingway story being chased by the lion. Behind him came the stinking goat, hot on his heels. A car door slammed and there came a loud BOING! that must have been heard all the way to the top of Mégantic Mountain. Brutal charged the cars twice more before making a dignified retreat. That winter, Lionel Arcan, the man who owned the body shop in Lac-Mégantic, had his trip to Florida paid for by the Quebec Provincial Police.

  SHORT TRIP

  THE CHIC-CHOC MOUNTAINS ROSE ABOVE the sparkling sea. The Chevrolet clung to their flanks with Justin at the wheel. Jean-Paul was in the passenger seat, and Ti-Ben Desrosiers, whom they’d picked up drunk in Old Montreal before leaving, was snoring like a pig on the back seat.

  “At his age,” said Jean-Paul, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, “you don’t think about anything but fucking, eating, and sleeping.”

  “You forgot one important thing: shitting,” said Justin Francœur, with a hearty smile.

  The slight smile he drew from Jean-Paul i
n return was a small but important victory. He hadn’t been lucky enough to have had a worker for a father, as his passenger had. His father had been from Outremont and was a top-level civil servant in Pierre Trudeau’s government. Francœur was Lancelot’s brother-in-law and a newcomer to the group, in genuine revolt against his father. Although he lived and slept revolution, for the moment had to content himself with being a chauffeur for the elder Lafleur. A Lafleur, moreover, who was more distant than ever, preoccupied as he was by the raid in Saint-Colomban, and then the discovery of the farmhouse in Milan by the police two days later. His whole political organization was on the verge of collapse.

  They dropped Ben off in Gaspé, went in for a coffee themselves, then drove on through Percé to the top of Aurore, where they pulled over onto the gravelled terrain of a rest stop, marked by a row of wooden guard rails painted white. They parked a short distance from the kiosk. Picnic tables were lined up in the open air. There was no one else around.

  Francœur had been at the wheel all night. He shut the motor off and leaned the back of his head against the headrest. Jean-Paul, who’d been dozing, opened his eyes and looked around. He winced, a hand raised above his eyes to ward off the sun, which, although low in the sky above the sea, still shone into the car.

  “Wow.”

  From where they sat they could see only the top of the famous rock emerging from a cloud bank that looked as thick as whipping cream. Farther out, Île Bonaventure was a lump in the fog that lay between the earth and the horizon.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost six,” Justin replied.

  Jean-Paul leaned back against the door for a last short nap.