Fearful of exhausting the resources of his audiences by being too generous with the treasures of his eloquence, Father Raphaël wanted to enlarge his “mission territory.” He thought of pushing a front as far as Moncton and Shediac, in New Brunswick, and even spoke of making an incursion into what was left of French Ontario, where he had been told that the people’s fervour could be of a rare intensity. But the way had to be prepared first, a delicate and difficult task, and the subject of his assiduous reflections.
Since the beginning of his travels, Charles had been back in Montreal only three times, each time for a brief, two-day respite. One of these holidays had coincided with his twenty-first birthday. Céline made him a gift of a pretty knitted sweater, into the folds of which she had hidden a framed photograph of herself.
“So you won’t forget me,” she said with a smile that managed to combine both an entreaty and a warning.
“How could I ever forget such an adorable little squirrel as you?” Charles had replied, and he had pressed his lips to hers and held her in his arms with such suave tenderness it had almost taken her breath away.
Each time he returned, Céline welcomed him happily and, to all appearances, without rancour, and spent the greater part of her time with him. She was even allowed to spend the two nights at his apartment, a new privilege that her status as the forsaken lover had earned her, it seemed, without too much difficulty. Steve and Blonblon pretty much left the two alone to, as Steve put it, “make up for lost time.”
Fernand was not quite so considerate. One Saturday afternoon he more or less summoned Charles to dinner at the Fafard house, partly out of curiosity, partly because of his affection for the young man, and partly out of nervousness at seeing his daughter associating with someone who might be in the process of becoming a crackpot preacher.
By the middle of the meal, however, he was reassured about Charles’s mental state, although he was also somewhat shocked at the cynicism with which the young man regarded his new job.
“Doesn’t it make you feel bad, seeing all those poor people emptying their pockets just to listen to a bunch of fairy tales?”
“What would you have me do, Fernand? I have to believe they need to hear them. No one is forcing them to come to the meetings. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.”
“All the same! I think the police should look into it… I took a gander at that Heavens Pilgrims pamphlet you gave me earlier on … I could have written it in my sleep. It wasn’t worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell. A piece of trash. A waste of trees. In other words — and I don’t mean to interfere — I think it’s high time you got as far from that jackass as you can before he ends up in the Bordeaux jail.”
Lucie put her hand on his arm to quiet him down. “I think Charles more or less gets your point. We can talk about something else now.”
As if on cue, Boff padded into the kitchen to launch a new attack on his master. Charles’s return had rejuvenated him. He’d changed from being a taciturn, apathetic, and often grumpy old dog into a young, delirious puppy who didn’t know what to do with all this happiness. Delighted, Charles would welcome him each time on his knees with an infinite show of patience, cuddling the dog endlessly to Boff’s untiring delight.
“He’s heartbroken every time you go away,” Lucie said sadly. “It’s getting hard to look after him, I must say. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s somewhere else you could keep him.”
“Thank you so much for doing it,” Charles said, giving her his most seductive smile.
That night, Céline, curled up against him after giving him a long, passionate kiss, murmured into Charles’s ear, “I wish you loved me as much as that dog loves you.”
“You want a slave, do you?” Charles said. “Well, that’s what I am, my little squirrel. You can do anything you want with me.”
She didn’t reply, but gave him a long, thoughtful look. Handsome as he is, she thought, how many women could he have slept with in the two months he’s been on the road?
Father Raphaël maintained that his destiny in the world had been revealed to him one night when he was eighteen years old, while he’d been hitchhiking in Austria with a friend. To be precise, the light was shown to him in a youth hostel in the tiny city of Gadatz-Katapunkt. It didn’t come in the form of an apparition, no celestial voice had boomed down on him, there had been no spectacular phenomena of that nature. He had simply undergone a profound internal experience, a sort of sublime transport that had taken him more or less out of reality for three days, during which time he had not needed to drink or eat, much to his friend’s consternation. His friend had wanted to call a doctor.
It wasn’t the fact of this mystical experience that intrigued Charles — he heard it often enough over the two months — but rather the place where it had occurred. Intrigued by the name of the city, which made him think vaguely of some kind of German rock band, he’d asked Father Raphaël to write it down on a piece of paper. Then one day when he found himself in Quebec City, seated at a table in a café on rue Saint-Jean after having driven Marcel-Édouard to the train station (his two companions were now taking turns going on the road with Charles and the preacher), he had the idea of going to the municipal library to look the place up on a map, to see where in Austria this bizarrely named city was located.
After two hours of searching, and despite the friendly assistance of a librarian, he had not succeeded in finding the slightest trace of a city called Gadatz-Katapunkt anywhere on the face of the earth.
In fact, the city didn’t exist.
By itself, the fact was of no importance whatsoever. But a conclusion Charles drew from the fact was of grave significance: Father Raphaël was a practical joker who was carelessly making fun of people, a man who had no compunction about making up childish, crude untruths for the simple pleasure of misleading his listeners — and Charles had been one of his victims!
When Charles had asked him to write down the name of the city, the preacher had done so with an impudent calm, as though totally unconcerned with what his assistant might think of him if he discovered his little fraud.
Another conclusion was consequent upon this small discovery: Father Raphaël clearly did not belong in the category of the sincerely religious, obsessed by mystical transports, but was rather just another professional manipulator; in fact, a crook, perhaps even worse than that. Fernand, in his naïve impetuosity, and without ever having laid eyes on the man, had been right.
After a while, another question arose in Charles’s mind, one that had no direct link with the first: what exactly was the relationship between Marcel-Édouard and Maxime and the preacher? The two companions had known Father Raphaël for a long time, and must have been aware of his true nature. But neither of them had ever made the slightest allusion to it in front of Charles. From their friendly, detached behaviour, one would assume they held the preacher in profound respect. They always spoke of him with admiration and obeyed his every whim with studious devotion. They were, then, his accomplices. But what was the nature of their complicity? he wondered. From the first day he had met them until now, he had never been able to form a precise idea of it. On the surface, they had the same relationship with the man as Charles himself had, and Father Raphaël had hardly ever shown a preference for either one of his three young helpers.
Every now and then either Maxime or Marcel-Édouard would disappear for a few hours without giving any reason for his absence; they would often come back looking haggard, as though they had been out moving mountains, or else they would return in the state of feverish exaltation usually associated with cocaine addicts; however, the two young men always professed an absolute horror of drugs of all kinds. “Only God can give true bliss,” they said gravely. “All else leads to damnation.” Intrigued, Charles questioned them several times about these furtive, unexplained disappearances, but got nothing but dismissive laughter and shrugged shoulders for his trouble, and he began to notice that his curiosity annoyed F
ather Raphaël. “I’ll find out somehow,” he promised himself. “I’ll keep my eyes well peeled. The little cats will have to come out of the bag sometime.”
One day he asked Marcel-Édouard if he had a girlfriend.
“It’s not time for me to have one yet, buddy-boy,” the man had replied with a casual smile.
They were almost the exact words with which José Coïmbro had replied to the same question. But the silent, efficient, wary Marcel-Édouard had little else in common with poor, pathetic José.
Charles was soon going to get answers to all his questions, and under some very surprising circumstances.
On the evening of November the 1st, 1987, René Lévesque was felled by a heart attack in his apartment on Île-des-Soeurs. His death sent a violent Shockwave through the province, which since the 1980 referendum had slid into the kind of numbness that often precedes death. Everyone felt as though they had lost their father. The expression was used constantly. Even the politician’s most mortal enemies, who were no doubt secretly relieved at his removal, seemed to have been sincerely moved by his death.
That evening Charles was in a restaurant in Trois-Rivières, in the company of a female journalist who was trying to get him to tell her something unusual about Father Raphaël; the young woman would have preferred to meet the preacher, but he had had to be somewhere else.
When he heard about Lévesque’s death on the radio, Charles hurried to a telephone and called Fernand.
“What are we going to do now that he’s gone?” asked the hardware-store owner, devastated, forgetting that his idol had actually been out of politics for several years.
Charles remembered with extraordinary clarity the surprise visit the politician had paid to the hardware store during the 1980 referendum campaign. He could still feel the firm handshake the premier had given him while looking deeply and attentively into his eyes, which left the impression to anyone who was the object of his attention that his face and the words he spoke would be forever engraved in the politician’s memory.
When Charles left the journalist, who had received an urgent message on her pager, he ran to the hotel and asked the preacher for permission to leave immediately for Montreal, since Fernand had asked him to go with him to pay his last respects to the chief of the independantistes — as tens of thousands of other Quebeckers would be doing over the next few days.
He found Father Raphaël alone, in a dressing gown, and more than a little annoyed at Charles’s impromptu visit. He had heard about Lévesque’s death (indeed, who in Quebec had not?). When he had listened to Charles’s request, he gave a mocking smile and refused outright, adding that he didn’t understand why everyone was shedding tears over the disappearance of a man who, to all intents and purposes, had been dead for some time.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Charles, shocked.
But the preacher brushed his question aside.
“I’m sorry, but you have to stay. Tomorrow is Maxime’s day off and I need you here.”
Furious, Charles went to his room, packed his bags, and took the next bus to Montreal. He was fully aware that his impetuosity would probably cost him his job. Well, so be it! He didn’t want to work for a faith healer anyway, certainly not for one who had such a low opinion of his political idol.
Two days later, Charles received a telephone call from Maxime.
“Father Raphaël wants to see you.”
“If it’s just to fire me, he can do that over the phone. It’ll save me the cost of a bus ticket.”
“He wants to see you,” was all Maxime replied, enigmatically.
Intrigued and succumbing to a secret desire to keep his job, Charles returned that night to Trois-Rivières. Father Raphaël and his two assistants received him cordially, as though nothing had happened.
“I guess we’ll have to count you among the bull-headed,” Father Raphaël said, laughing. “Well, what was it like? What happened? Quite a commotion, eh? It’s all anyone is talking about. There’s a lot there to think about, I see.”
And Charles described the atmosphere that reigned in Montreal.
Marcel-Édouard and Maxime, although smiling broadly, kept looking at each other in surprise at their boss’s reaction. Charles didn’t understand it either, but he recounted in great detail the small and large events he had attended, all the while feeling his resentment and mistrust for the preacher growing within him; as subsequent events would show, his feelings for the man were not ill-founded.
On the morning of December the 10th, God’s Messenger and his team arrived in Sorel. It would be one of the last assemblies of the year before the frenetic shopping that preceded Christmas.
Normally the meeting would have taken place in the Pentecostal church, a venerable neo-Gothic building facing Royal Square park, but a petty quarrel between the pastor of the church and Father Raphaël resurfaced, and the former refused to collaborate and launched a campaign against the preacher. They had to resort to the conference centre at the Auberge de la Rive, on rue Sainte-Anne, which looked out over the river, and was therefore considerably more expensive than the church would have been. Father Raphaël was consequently not in a good mood. He told Charles, as the press attaché, to do whatever was necessary to attract a minimum of eight hundred people to the meeting, if he wanted to see the Kingdom of God expand and their own operation make a profit.
And so Charles found himself sitting in a local radio station in front of a large, thick-lipped, apathetic man whose pate was surmounted by a ridiculous halo of lifeless hair and whose cheeks were flabby and sallow (the previous evening, an overdose of scotch had put his liver to the test, and today his mood was the worse for it).
With Styrofoam cup in hand, he listened to Charles for a minute, took a noisy sip of his coffee, and then stopped him with a gesture.
“I don’t want to hear it from you, kid, you’re not going to interest my listeners one bit. It’s Father Raphaël I want to see. If he can’t be bothered coming down here himself, then good day to you both.”
Charles phoned the preacher, who, breaking his usual routine, agreed to an interview. Half an hour later he walked into the studio and spoke during the interview with such eloquence that one of the technicians behind the glass partition broke down and cried.
“Now that was a great show,” the fat-lipped station manager declared with satisfaction. “You can come back any time you want, Father — there’ll always be a microphone waiting for you here.”
Next, Charles betook himself to the offices of the local newspaper, The Two Shores, and then to the VOX television station, where he came up against a major obstacle: the director had not included a time slot for spiritual programming in his schedule; after nearly talking himself hoarse, Charles finally managed to get a short interview for his boss (who had suddenly become very accessible) early the next morning.
After that he began making the rounds of all the businesses in town, asking permission to put small announcements of the religious assembly in their store windows. Things went great guns everywhere except at the Éphrem Valiquette hardware store, an old, dilapidated building that seemed to have been gripped by the kind of listlessness that preceded either a closing of the doors or else bankruptcy.
By two o’clock, satisfied that he had done all he could for the day, and famished and numb with cold to boot — Sorel was shivering under a sharp cold spell that presaged a snowstorm — he went into the Omythos Restaurant, on rue Roy. The owner kindly allowed him to post his notice in the window, and also filled his stomach with a solid meal of souvlaki, roasted potatoes, Greek salad, and vegetable rice. The delightful sensation of being perfectly stuffed inspired him to go for a short walk, and he decided to make a tour of the Royal Square, one of the most charming spots in the town.
After sauntering through the park for a few minutes, taking huge gulps of frigid air, he stopped before a curious monument erected to the memory of one Dorimène Desjardins, wife of Alphonse Desjardins, the illustrious founder of t
he credit union. Stuck on a block of granite, a bronze bust crowned with an imposing coiffure gazed fixedly up into the sky with a haughty smile on its lips; slightly lower down, affixed to the granite, were two small, bronze hands, which made Charles immediately think of an axe murderer; still lower down was an inscription informing passersby that
WITHOUT HER, THE DESJARDINS CREDIT UNION WOULD PROBABLY NOT EXIST.
How many committee meetings, behind-the-scenes negotiations, compromises, and manipulations were implied by that perfidious word “probably,” Charles wondered, which called the whole meaning of the monument into question? Charles nodded to the bust, smiled, and continued on his way, whistling.
He then saw Maxime walking slowly across the other end of the park, hands in his pockets, unaffected, it seemed, by the cold. Charles had been thinking of him during dinner, wondering what he could have been doing all day, since the first meeting wasn’t to take place until two days later and the setting up of the hall was being taken care of by the hotel. He waved his hand and called.
“Hey, I was just looking for you,” Maxime called back.
He turned towards Charles without changing his slow pace, then, bestowing upon him the curiously ironic and sickly sweet look that he had been giving Charles for some time, he said, “You’ve had a phone call from Montreal.”
“From whom?”
“Don’t remember … Lucie somebody, I think.”
Charles left the young man standing there and hurried back to his car, which was parked near the park. If Lucie had gone to the trouble of phoning him in the middle of the day, something serious must have happened. A few minutes later he was in the hotel, out of breath.
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