October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  They’d decided to claim responsibility for his execution as a political gesture. Later they’d understood that they had actually killed him, but it’d been an accident. They’d intended to kill him, then were unable to go through with it, and Lavoie had forced their hand. An accident so stupid that it assuredly could have no meaning in the grand scheme of things. And that’s why they’d agreed to claim responsibility for the murder. An absurd story.

  Gode decided that the only way to survive the day was to drink a beer, here, right now. He offered to buy one for Sam, who accepted. But only one. Afterward he’d leave the old FLQer alone and would go look for Marie-Québec.

  “One last question: Lavoie’s confession. What happened to it?”

  “No idea. We left Queen-Mary in such a hurry. Later, the whole security box issue came out in the coroner’s inquest, and so we never got a chance to get it back. I guess the detectives got their hands on it at some point.”

  Sam was ready to put this whole story behind him. He had, in a way, found a solution to the puzzle. There was no secret plot. The Octobeerist thesis would finally be put to rest along with the other strange conspiracy theories, buried in the more suspect parts of reality. He thought back, now, to the first meeting, at Lavigueur’s on rue Ontario. To Chevalier Branlequeue’s not-quite-but-almost-state funeral. And to his haunted, partly burned house on the shore of Lake Kaganoma. An emptiness as great as the Pacific Ocean threatened to engulf his hangover. He felt like an orphan.

  They ordered a few sweet rolls with chicken to calm their empty stomachs. Sam watched the two bottles of Dos Equis land on the table. He examined one of the labels. XX.

  Grabbing one of the rolls from the basket, he thought: pollo.

  “Pan-pasta-potatoes-pastries,” he said out loud.

  “What’s that?”

  “The four Ps.”

  Gode shrugged. Sam was thinking: pollo-Pedro-proceso-pesquisa: pieces of chicken, Pierre, prosecution, police warrant.

  He took a swig of lager and slowly brought the bottle down.

  “We haven’t talked about the second house yet.”

  “What second house?”

  “The neighbours’. The one the cops raided that week. You remember Martinek, the big guy?”

  “Do I remember him … Of course I remember him! Just the thought of falling into his hands was enough to make me want to piss myself.”

  “Machinegun Martinek. In his briefing on the morning they discovered your hideout, he told journalists that the house next door had also sheltered FLQ members. But that according to the neighbours it had been empty for a month. Curiously, we never heard anything more about that second house …”

  “They probably just made a mistake.”

  “That’s what I thought as well. But there’s something strange about it. In his briefing, he’d given a detail that fit with the rest of the story: the fact that the owners had left the month before. Around the same time that the Lafleur brothers and you left for Texas. That’s quite a coincidence. The other thing that bothers me is that if the police raided 150 rue Collins during Lavoie’s captivity, and they found some young kids, why did they pretend that it’d been abandoned for a month?”

  “Must’ve been another house …”

  “Impossible. Two lots down on the other side are empty fields. According to Martinek, the neighbours saw some sort of van parked in front of the next-door house the night Lavoie died, and someone loading materials in the back. Another funny coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  “And where exactly are you going with this?”

  “I’m trying to say that there must’ve been another player on Collins during Paul Lavoie’s abduction. Your friend François Langlais, a.k.a Pierre Chevalier …”

  “Bullshit. Pierre didn’t come to the house once that week.”

  “Let’s say he didn’t. He didn’t go to 140 Collins. But he was at 150, right next door …”

  “No! Pierre was in the other end of Montreal, with Lancelot and the others! We had no relationship whatsoever to whoever was renting next door. What you’re saying makes no sense! We didn’t even know who lived there! I really don’t understand what sort of reason you’d have to falsify the truth like that. And, come to think of it, where did you even get that information? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  The cops. The information came from the cops. And suddenly I began to understand. I saw the entire plan unravel before my eyes. It had been right there the whole time. When I’d picked up the phone to talk with Gilbert Massicotte, the retired CATS man, I already had the answer without even knowing it. His cousin, a chicken delivery man, who’d polished the character of the pro-FLQ rebel at the trial, was, of course, a cop and always had been. The small car from Baby’s Barbecue had been intercepted somewhere between the rotisserie and rue Collins, and a man from the surveillance team had replaced the delivery boy. That was standard procedure when CATS installed surveillance posts around a suspicious location, that and tapping the phone. Because, of course, the phone had been tapped. That’s what they’d done in Saint-Colomban in June. And Saint-Colomban had brought them straight to rue Collins. The early September meeting that had been so crucial had been under surveillance. The antiterrorist squad had the October kidnappers under surveillance all along. I looked at Gode.

  “That’s where they were,” I said.

  “Where? Who?”

  “The cops. They were next door.”

  Despite the intense surprise painted on his features, I went on:

  “And once they’d started, it would have been foolish not to install a surveillance team in the house behind yours, as well, from which they could look directly into the room in which Lavoie was being held. They probably used your little trip to Texas to do a few renovations to the bungalow. In October, the place must’ve been absolutely full of microphones. That explains the materials that were loaded into a van or pickup the day of Lavoie’s death. CATS had its electronic arsenal to uninstall and lug out of there.”

  As I spoke, the scenario was taking on a life of its own, questions that had remained mysteries were being answered one after the other, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Details I’d set aside as unimportant now showed the way and began to construct a larger story, finally, a coherent and logical whole.

  Quite a story. But the cops’ cover story had ultimately led to the secret being exposed, the small story made up to convince journalists and offer them a ready answer to their questions as to the suspicious behaviour neighbours had witnessed that week. The police fabrication had been placed like a seal over their story. And it was so prodigiously secret that as I spoke, my own words startled and shook me to my core, because to speak them, to give the story meaning, I was making it real, giving it body. Describing the truth.

  Gode listened to me, saying nothing. He’d forgotten about his beer and his pack of Montanas on the table.

  “The house next door was an observation post. Why raid it? To mess around with your nerves. Crank up the pressure. Somewhere up in the ranks the decision was made to sacrifice Lavoie. They aren’t idiots. They knew what impact his death would have on public opinion, the anger and disgust of the ‘public.’ You’d publicly threatened to kill him; there was only one logical conclusion. And they, they simply contented themselves with looking over your shoulder. They pretty much contracted their dirty work to you. The hostage was going to crack, the kidnappers panic, or maybe both … It starts Tuesday with the clear and open tail on Jean-Paul. An open tail doesn’t try to make itself circumspect, Gode, it’s two cops on a street corner making no effort to stay hidden. Or ghost cars filled with zombies driving slowly in front of your door. Do you really think they’d let themselves be seen like that? It was a show, nothing else. And the siren that pushed Lavoie to try to flee the house was probably part of it …”

  There was a long silence. Gode waited, as if to make sure I’d really finished. Then, slowly, he got up and, without a word, turned his back
on me and walked down the beach. Old and grey and wrinkled, as if cracked by the unrelenting Mexican sun, he dragged himself, head hung low, like some large beast hit in the vital organs returning to the deep from which it came. He stopped, facing out over the sea. From where I sat on the terrace, I could follow the rhythm of his deep breathing by the movement of his shoulders.

  He began walking into the water, in his shorts and T-shirt, feet bare. The waves ate up the horizon before crashing toward him with their concave, threatening maws. With water almost past his thighs, a wave hit him, throwing him head over heels.

  Despite myself I jumped to my feet.

  “Gode!”

  He’d disappeared, buried under a roaring mountain of crumbled foam. After two or three seconds, I saw a foot pop out. He wouldn’t be the first to be pulled out to sea, knocked out or simply made an exhausted prisoner of the current. Before I knew it, I was running full speed to the water. “Hold on! I’m coming!”

  I dove in and began to paddle in the muddy foam while stones as large as baseballs were dragged out to sea by the undercurrent, strafing my legs. I reached Gode just as he was getting back to his feet. He saw me and threw a right hook, missing my face by at least ten centimetres. Thrown off balance at the precise moment a three-metre-high wave was rising to crash down on us, he jumped on me, grabbing me by the throat, and we rolled to the ground on the thin sheet of water that was being pulled back by the oncoming wave. I felt the pressure of his nails and thumb on the cartilage of my neck. Then, a green and white noise. We were picked up into the air, flipped and shaken up as if in an amusement park. And during the whole time we tumbled about in the sea, I held on to the only surfboard I could, this fifty-something, hungover man being thrown every which way, who wouldn’t let go of my neck even as the waves tossed us around like sticks.

  The ten or twelve seconds that followed made me feel like a sock in a washing machine. I woke up after the cycle was done with a broken arm, eyes and throat burned by salt, and at least a kilogram of salt and sand in my shorts. Between me and the sun, Marie-Québec shone down on me.

  Farther down, Gode was on his hands and knees, puking up a mixture of salt water, refried beans, and mescal-flavoured bile.

  *

  A gathering had formed on the beach. Locals, a few tourists, commenting on the nature of the human forms spat out by the savage sea. More gringos who hadn’t been careful. A tourist from Saint-George-de-Beauce was explaining to his neighbour, an ageless freak from Limoilou, that the village took its name, Zopilote (“vulture” in Spanish), from the number of bodies that, year after year, were washed up on its beaches.

  “We need to get him to a hospital,” Marie-Québec was saying to whoever would listen. She then looked down at Sam, sitting very pale in the sand and holding up his left arm. “How do you say hospital? And arm?”

  “Brazo,” Sam answered, weakly, from the depths of his concussion.

  Marie-Québec was pointing to the unmoving arm against Sam’s stomach, “de su esposo, brazo, brazo.” All the gawkers continued to talk with enthusiasm around her, but no one moved an inch.

  “Hospital,” Nihilo said.

  “¿Donde esta el hospital?”

  “Aqui no hay,” a young and very brown Mexican kid with a large smile informed her.

  “¡Fuego!” someone yelled behind them.

  All eyes looked in the direction of the upraised arm. The village was burning.

  The fire had started when a simple brasero had been overturned in a kitchen. By the time the flames reached the low-hanging extremities of the palm fronds that made do as a roof, it was already too late. The improvised firemen, throwing shovelful after shovelful of sand on the flames, suddenly saw them increase in intensity and begin to roar above the palapas. The wind finished the job.

  “No hay bomberos tampoco,” the young Mexican said, nodding his head, his smile all the larger.

  Explosions began ringing out, likely caused by propane tanks.

  The villagers began carrying their possessions to the beach: furniture, dishes, children’s toys, family mementos, and piles of clothing and blankets, were all thrown on the sand, with their owners running back to their burning homes to try to save what could still be rescued.

  Sam dragged himself to an icebox a bit farther off, opened it with his uninjured arm, and grabbed a bag of half-melted ice, which he applied to his broken forearm. He then made himself a cushion out of a rolled hammock and leaned back against it. At the top of the beach, the village was besieged by flames that jumped from one roof to another following the wind’s whims, with great belches of heavy black smoke and storms of sparks.

  In front of Sam, a human chain had formed. Every old container that could be found — from kitchen sink to chamber pot — circulated hand to hand, arm to arm. At the far end of the chain, he could see Marie-Québec, in the sea up to her stomach with her short dress riding high on her hips, busily filling the containers with water that the excited children brought her. Then, swaying in the undertow, she passed them to the outstretched hands that passed them to their neighbours. It was pathetic. It was magnificent.

  Samuel watched her tear an overflowing bucket of water from the sea and toss it to the next man. Sam followed the bucket with his eyes, climbing up the line. A man reached for the handle, grabbed it with two hands, and passed the bucket to the next man with an ample swing of his torso. He turned to watch the next container when he saw him, eyes raised toward him, only fifteen steps away. For one whole second, they stared at each other.

  Sam nodded, and Gode turned his eyes away.

  MME CORPS AND

  THE FLOWERS

  “CAN I ASK YOU A question, Samuel?”

  “Sure, go ahead …”

  “If Marcel Duquet’s death wasn’t an accident, who killed him?”

  “That’s what I was hoping to learn from you.”

  “But I thought it was Lavoie’s death that interested you …”

  “One murder brings about another. It’s a link in a chain. While I was investigating the Lavoie Affair, I became interested in the kind of people whose job it is to fake a tractor accident and make it look real. When their work has been done well, you get a few paragraphs underneath the fold. They’re anonymous artists, the unknowns of history … For them, killing is only the beginning.”

  “That has nothing to do with the truth. Your mind was made up long before you came here.”

  “Maybe. In fact, the only merit in my interpretation is that it’s more probable than the official version. More real … In the end, it’s my fiction against theirs.”

  “I’d like to hear your explanation for Marcel’s death, and the next pastis is on me.”

  “If we keep up like this, I’ll be round as a button.”

  “Your mastery of French slang is remarkable.”

  “Thanks. My friend Fred gave me the Dictionary of French Bistro Slang. He wanted to come to Paris, too. Fred is convinced that intelligence agents (or spies, if you prefer) sometimes kill as a means of communication. The body is the message, you see?”

  “I understand, but do I believe it? That’s a whole other story. Life isn’t a spy novel, Samuel.”

  “Maybe not, but you don’t need a romantic imagination to face reality as it is …”

  “Tell me …”

  “The simplest reason for eliminating Marcel Duquet was because he had a big mouth and had begun to open it in front of journalists. He might have been in the know about what we pretty much have to call the American angle … In my mind, it was Coco who was the principal contact between the Chevalier Cell and the Americans. It’s hard to say what Marcel knew for sure. In any case, his strange tractor accident sent a very clear message to those in the big house, still doing their time. Texas was off-limits. Mum’s the word. Coco furnished fake IDs for the FLQ, but who helped Coco? We now know that Montreal’s CIA satellite office, located on avenue Mont-Royal in 1970, had a resident forger with his own studio. All that’s missing is a line
between Île aux Fesses and the Plateau. A line of coke, probably. Why are you smiling?”

  “Because of l’Île au Fesses. Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Not any more. She left me a year ago.”

  “You can replace her.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, at first.”

  “Why did she leave?”

  “The month of October must have taken up too much space in my life.”

  “Go back to her, Samuel …”

  “What?”

  “I see something in your eyes, I hear it in your voice. You love her?”

  “You’ll have to excuse me. I think I’ll have this drink in a train compartment …”

  Samuel stands up. The beach looks like a marble floor: fine, smooth, white sand. And Mme. Corps couldn’t be more French, with her cream-coloured pantsuit and her coquettish pink scarf. He offers her his hand.

  “Thank you. You’ve been quite generous with your time.”

  She takes the offered hand, tightens her grip. Doesn’t let go.

  “Forget this foolish investigation and go find her, you hear me?”

  “Madame …”

  “That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  “Okay. Thanks for everything.”

  “You’ll have to come to the house next time …”

  “Why not? It could be fun.”

  “When you’re in Paris, you’ll come, eh? We’ll pick you up at the station, and my husband will prepare his famous rabbit in mustard sauce. You’ll like him, Samuel. He’s a cultivated man, full of kindness, and politics hold no secrets for him. I let myself be spoiled. I was married too young, but I had a second chance and have never looked back. I don’t miss Quebec, I never think about it. My first marriage, with that dearest fattest husband and his gang of cops, bidasses and bad men, all that is far, far away now.”

  Sam looks at Ms. Corps, one foot still on the terrace.