Hitler's Boat

by Pierre Turgeon

  That is why I ended up at the Talbot guesthouse with nothing in my hands, nothing in my pockets, except for a capsule allegedly filled with cyanide that was most likely filled with cod oil.

  Winston Churchill dressed like a duchess and wearing a wig, was driving the royal British stagecoach for the high coachman’s seat. He was smoking a cigar that his made-up lips smeared with red. In the cabin, we could not see the monarch, but a mound of gold bars that were stacked all the way up to the luggage rack and that made the axels bend. Churchill whipped the two horses that were pulling him towards the Citadelle, Lord Durham’s old residence where the new masters of the Western Empire now lived, during the Quebec Conference.

  The crash of the hooves echoed on the Saint-Denis gate’s arches, and then in the maze of steep alleys that led up to the top of Cap Diamant. Here had ended the story of my people as well as the one of Sleeping Beauty when a traitor delivered the secret of our fortifications to Wolfe’s soldiers. Under the equine masks of the draft animals, I suddenly recognized the faces of my father and my grandfather who were neighing in pain under the whip and seemed to be imploring me to free them from their humiliating zoomorphism.

  When I awoke, I threw myself under the shower, scalding myself since the cold water faucet turned without results, drank a coffee, diluted to one hundredth of the “Turkish kaffee” I had been accustomed to drinking in Teuton, and then I read in the newspapers that the censors were allowing the announcement of the beginning of the Quebec Conference. In two days, Mrs. Talbot would be requesting payment for the first week. I went to the bank, coming up with an inheritance story in order to change the one-dollar bills that were too big and hadn’t been used since 1935 and that the idiots from Abwehr had given me.

  Despite the unbelievable failures, the plan of the lords’ race seemed to still roll on the bumpy and windy road that History was still following in the part of the country: the night before, I had received the expected visit from our informant, Captain Dansereau of the Quebec Police, the same one who had warned me four years earlier of my imminent arrest. He was ensuring the security of the Quebec Conference, under the supervision of the Royal Mounted Police.

  “In two days, Churchill and Roosevelt will be visiting the Plains of Abraham,” he told me as he devoured the raw ground meat he had been exclusively feeding on. A little piece of meat stuck on his lower lip, and his frowning forehead made him look like a carnivorous bull. Secretly a Nazi, he commanded an anti-communist and anti-scab squadron. “You won’t have a chance to make it out alive,” he added with a suspicious glare.

  “We’ll see. But a good soldier has to obey without criticizing his chiefs,” I answered.

  He raised his beer and growled: “As you say!”

  In the guesthouse’s yard, extenuated, sprawled on a deckchair in my swimming trunks, with the sun licking me with its honey tongue, the branches the wind was swaying, the soft whisper of the chicks; there was no room for desperation in the warm air of this Sunday morning. Mrs. Talbot had left me alone to go to High Mass for the “Saints-Martyrs-Canadiens.” I held a cold beer between my naked thighs. The radio was describing a baseball game between the Saint-Sauveur Chevaliers and the Trois-Rivières Royaux.

  Germany seemed so far away: its smell of powder, of burnt bodies, of dust lifted by the tanks’ tracks, its command cries, its DCA detonations, all that was vanishing with the smell of roses, the soft chiming of a carriage bell going up the hill, the horn of a solitary car, and that bang of a car door coming from the little street, heels in the entrance hall and then on the terrace pavement. My mother was moving towards me, moving in the widow’s gown she had worn the day of my father’s death.

  I did not expect her so quickly after my call. “André?” she asked, stopping as I observed her over the magazine I finally put down. She muffled a cry by biting her right hand gloved in lace. True stare, as with each time sadness was threatening my reason. I rose, to dominate her with my stature, and handed her my beer, which she took and emptied with her head thrown back and a hand on her hip.

  “You really came back here in a submarine? That’s your style. Are you still angry? You still think that I killed your father by cheating on him.”

  She weighed the bottle and threw it against the garden wall. “P’tit Christ! Come here!” Arms dangling, I let her hold me tightly against her chest. Her perfume, her hair. “And the ball is… out!” I freed myself from her embrace and turned the radio off.

  She said she admires the raging and wrathful energy of my speeches even if they keep repeating the poisoned candy of the ancestral defeats. How could I have joined these obscurantist fascists? It was my father’s fault because he brought me up in a circle of hatred. She had thought about it a lot. He would tell me that my people were pitiful. He was ashamed of it, of its way of expressing itself, or rather, of its total lack of expression. These people, like rocks, said nothing. And in that, cornered by logic. I had to differentiate myself from my clan. Condemned to treason.

  “I didn’t betray my country. I found allies against its enemies.”

  “What country? Quebec? It’s a simple province. You have betrayed all of humanity. Yours. Mine. And not even for thirty deniers.” She slapped him with the Abwehr’s fake one-dollar note.

  “My dearest mom, I whispered. I bet that when I die, you’ll arrange for no one to know I ever existed.” “What did you come to do?”

  “Kill Churchill and Roosevelt.” Cruel, yes. My father had committed suicide due to lack of stories to tell. I was not going to let my rage turn against me.

  She burst into laughter. But her eyes were piercing through me. What if I were telling the truth? With me, you could always fear the worst. She took a few steps around the garden, asking me how Lizbeth was doing while I picked a yellow carnation for her. Parents have, behind their mortal faces, the power of ancient gods. My mother: warm and soft perfumes, and a brush smoothing her red hair.

  “You’re having fun scaring me.” It was at that moment that Fagl came into the pension, bending down to pass through the front door and walking down the hall leading to the yard. He was wearing, as agreed upon, the Polish Home aviation uniform, the blue of which suited him better than the usual black of Heydrich’s SD. He was German born in the region of Dantzig, so he spoke impeccable Polish. He gave me a military salute and asked me in English where he could find Mrs. Talbot. “I have a lodging coupon,” he said while waving a document, at the same time that he questioned me with his eyes he was looking at my mother. I told him to wait in the living room. The lodger would be back from church soon.

  “You and that man are pretending not to know each other. Why?” my mother asked once he had left. “He’s a killer. One of the most efficient of poor Heydrich, who the Czechs assassinated last year in Prague. Three thousand executions in retaliation. It was him, Fagl, who organized them. He was sent to me because the Germans don’t have confidence that I’ll accomplish my mission alone.”

  She had gone white. “Shut up!”

  “Oh! There’s no chance he’ll understand! He does not speak French. That’s his weakness. Wait here!”

  I went to join Fagl, who was as tense as the springs of a trap ready to snap shut. Short blond curls, pug nose, low forehead, big hands. “Wo ist Roosevelt?” Straight to the point. He was carrying our dismantled assault rifles in his leather bag. Admiral Canaris had split the work between the two of us. Me: Churchill, him: Roosevelt. The security service’s reply would only allow us two simultaneous shots, and not consecutive.

  I told him I did not know Roosevelt’s schedule yet. “Who is that woman?” “No one. A friend of the lodger’s. I have to accompany her back home.” “Schnell!” I brought him to my room where he collapsed on the bed. His journey from Germany must have been rough.

  In the taxi, I did not dare speak to my mother. I asked the driver to take us in front of Chateau Frontenac’s terrace. The wind was gentle. Wolfe’s fleet had sailed up between Orleans Island and the North Shore. Three t
housand cannon balls a day fell on the besieged city. The churches were burning with the wounded on their stretchers.

  I had never seen this many people here. The place was crawling with journalists speaking twenty different languages: high-ranking Americans, British and Canadians. Rumor had it that the previous evening, Churchill had ordered a “pig-knuckle stew” and that he almost died from indigestion. The ascetic Roosevelt had been content with eating some Oka cheese.

  I saw a few colleagues from Montreal. Completely hidden under my slanted felt hat, in the band of which I had put a press card, and with MacArthur style sunglasses, I walked among them without being recognized. Officers greeted my mother, who walked beside me without grabbing onto my outstretched arm.

  I confessed to her what had been bothering me earlier. “Mom, I was wrong. We can’t expect anything from the Germans. Except worse than the English.”

  “I thank you. It’s so nice for your mother to hear that!” she answered me with a smile, a hand on her green wide-rimmed felt hat to stop it from flying off.

  “I really don’t want to assassinate Churchill. But unless I go back to Berlin with other tangible results, I won’t have any other choice but to take action, even if I die trying. Otherwise they’ll execute Lizbeth. So I am asking you to talk to Perceval. Ask him to get me a copy of the plans for the European invasion. Real or fake, it doesn’t matter. But I want them to have the GQG seal on each page. You hear me?”

  Since she continued to walk without speaking, I tucked in my chin and without loosening my lips I yelled: “Death to Churchill! Vive le Québec libre!” A few people turned around, perplexed. But the arrival of two coaches full of American correspondents in front of the hotel’s carriage entrance diverted the general attention. Big clouds hid the sun, gusts of wind shook the maples; in fifteen minutes, the weather had cooled down quite a few degrees.

  “Free the mayor of Montreal! Down with the conscription!” This time, there was a murmur in the crowd. A few gazes stayed on us, but I remained unshakable, concentrating all my energy in my jaw. Who in this crowd was thinking of Camillien Houde, prisoner of an Ontarian concentration camp in Petawawa? The bald and portly midget had been picked up on the stairs of Montreal’s city hall, who, to keep his composure, had begun to sing “Alouette, gentille, alouette,” chorus that the anti-conscription mayor still has the leisure to sing during the forced labors, he whom his jailors call the “gros pois” (the “Big Pea”).

  The moment I filled my lungs with air to yell another slogan, my mother said, “Stop, you win. I’ll see what I can do.”

  I smiled. I swiped the winnings with my only card. The fear of scandal, especially here in front of American journalists who would not let themselves be muzzled by censors: “French Canadian nationalist disturbs Quebec Conference.”

  “If you can get the minutes of the conference, come to the tribune with a green envelope.”

  “And the other?”

  “Fagl? I’ll take care of him.” She did not know that Fagl’s mission was to leave my body to create dissension among the Allies. A Canadian seems to have killed the Heads of State! A politically stronger act than a murder committed by a German agent.

  “I have one last request to ask of you,” I added. “I would like to see Christophe.” She bit her lower lip in hesitation, and then nodded her head, adding, “He’s your son after all. Swear to me you won’t involve him in this affair and I’ll leave him to you for an hour when Perceval is gone.”

  My brother had tried to erase me from Christophe’s existence, to turn me into an imaginary character, into a birth certificate mistake. It had become vital that I show myself.

  Virginia asked me to wait on the balcony. Through the partially opened curtain I glanced at my son’s empty room. There was a painting of a windmill in front of the sea. Christophe must have fallen asleep contemplating it, imagining that stormy waves would not stop it, that a miraculous force moved its arms and that its eyes could pierce the thick fog.

  Maybe he was searching for the ship in his dreams- the ship that had carried his fake mother, two years ago. His boat traveled through time and he was waiting for the torpedo that had been launched by the mean Nazi submariner, the explosion of the Charlottetown, and the cries of terror. His ardor doubled, but he always arrived too late- debris, a layer of oil, but no one. Mommy! He screamed while crying, standing up in his boat that rolled dangerously.

  Then he would run to the living room. His grandmother was knitting a sweater; Captain Perceval was moving black pins over a map of Europe to show the retreat of the German troops. During these great imaginary maneuvers, he would rail against von Chénier, the traitor of Radio-Berlin that he listened to every Wednesday on the shortwave radio, who would motivate them in French, with a slight Quebec accent, to rebel against the British occupation.

  “Christophe, this is your uncle. I’m entrusting you to him,” Virginia said as she moved towards the balcony with a four-year-old cherub with golden locks who was hugging her skirt.

  “How you look like your mother!” I told my child before gathering him up in my arms and to go back to the taxi that was waiting on the street. I smiled as I put him down in the backseat.

  “To the museum!” I ordered the taxi driver. He turned left on Buade Street and he sped up on Grande Allée, which was to the right of the Parliament. He turned sharply to the left on a paved road that led to the Plains of Abraham, rather deserted in the middle of the afternoon, and parked in front of the Doric colonnade.

  On August 10th 1943, my son was following me in the museum, through the sun-filled rooms, where stuffed bears bared their teeth and claws over a wax Algonquin kneeling in the dusty air of the display case. We went up the marble staircase, up to the last floor. I waited to be alone with him and then, through a hidden door; I reached the flat and tar-covered pebble roof. From there, the sight could go from the purple dales of the Laurentian Chain to the north, to the Chateau Frontenac, whose dungeon resembled the rear forecastle of a galleon, the Cap Diamant, pointing towards the estuary, to the opposite shore of the Saint-Lawrence, thin black and steep stripe between the pure sky and the sparkling river. Christophe was squeezing my hand.

  “You see that city with the walls? It’s cold, cold even in summer. We have been freezing and dying there for two centuries. At school, you will be told that it is our homeland. But it is nothing. A homeland is a father speaking in his child’s ear. You don’t have a father anymore, it seems, and I have lost my son. Do you know how they took our country away?”

  At the far end of the plain, which stretched over two kilometers, I pointed to an indentation in the trees that opened on Anse-aux-Foulons, the spot where Wolfe’s army landed in 1759. The sheer cliff dove into the Saint-Lawrence that the French cannons of the time were still aiming at.

  Here, the traitor Vignol had let the Scottish battalions climb up; they had deployed behind their delicate and red headed general, absolutely determined to destroy New France. Enraged by the mocking sound of bagpipes, Montcalm had ordered his troops to leave the ramparts. They marched in a disorderly fashion, with cries to give themselves courage. The English, on the other hand, were only counting on their silent discipline and the constant barrage of their infantry squares.

  “We prefer to forget,” I told my son, “but the winners, they remember. In a few days, they’ll visit the Wolfe column, erected to their past glory.”

  I heard the whipping flags that surrounded the stage down below, where Churchill and Roosevelt would receive the salute from the Citadelle’s guard and would continue to discuss their plans to invade Europe, a subject they had not agreed upon by the beginning of August. From my observation point, it was about half a kilometer, which the bullets from my Mauser equipped with a telescopic lens could easily cross. I was already imagining Churchill’s silhouette. If my mother did not bring the documents, von Chénier would have reason over Lord Durham, proving we had a history that could violently collide with that of the world. I brought Christ
ophe back at four on the dot, just as I had promised Virginia.

  The same evening, Dansereau called me to give me the time of the official visit of the next day’s visit to the Plains. Fagl and I left the Talbot guesthouse to set ourselves up on the museum’s roof. The visitors were expected the next day at ten in the morning. The area would not be sealed off before dawn. I had already seen Fagl in action. He was a surprising beast of speed and ruse. I assembled my Mauser. We had a night of gin and fusing stars, of terror and eve. He showed me a photograph of his fiancée: Bavarian suspenders over an ample nude chest. He pissed in the middle of the roof in an air duct.

  It was not him who killed, but rather it was a dog that bit his gut and forced him to act. He was calming the beast; he was stroking it. With a weapon of this quality, he only had to rub the trigger with his index. Fagl cried as he thought about his victim. “Oh my god, what suffering factories pour down here,” he said as he hit his stomach, he shook as if racked by an epileptic fit. He was searching for peace in final spasms of the ones he killed.

  As I kept watch, my blanket wrapped around my shoulders as he slept a few hours. One bullet makes a difference in history. I would still be hated in a thousand years.

  There was already a lot of activity around the stage. A grenadier brass band was rehearsing God Save the King. A few policemen were setting up fences in front of the bystanders drawn in by the preparations that remained a mystery to them as censors forbade the newspapers from reporting Churchill and Roosevelt’s movements.

  “They will be here soon,” said Fagl. A long line of cars was approaching with honking, preceded by several Jeeps. The passers-by stopped, some waved their tricolor flags, or the Union Jack. We lay flat on our stomachs, hidden behind the Doric pediment. The cars stopped and he came out. My victim. Churchill. Never saw so much ferocity on a face before. Apoplectic. Consumed by rage. Coming from the depths of history. Conqueror, builder of empires. The other, Roosevelt, dull. His shoulders drooped under his black tweed cape.