Black Rock

by John McFetridge

  “That’s it?”

  “Then there was the usual stuff probably dictated by the kidnappers, you know, how he’s sure they will keep their word and release him once all the political prisoners get to Cuba or Algeria or wherever. Then he says, ‘Thank you for saving my life and that of Mr. Laporte.’ That’s it.”

  Logan was looking at the house and said, “Shit, they must be going crazy in there.”

  And Dougherty was thinking, Shit, I’m going crazy out here, standing around doing nothing.

  Gagnon said, “Maybe the negotiator will get something.”

  “What negotiator?”

  “The government named a negotiator,” Logan said, “some lawyer namd Demers.”

  “Who’s he supposed to negotiate with?”

  “The FLQ lawyer, Lemieux.”

  “Didn’t he get arrested?”

  “Don’t they tell you anything?” Logan said and held up his hand. “Of course not, what am I thinking. Yeah, Lemieux was arrested but Demers is meeting with him in his jail cell.”

  Dougherty said, “Shit. That sounds like a publicity stunt.”

  “Everything they do is a publicity stunt.”

  Dougherty looked at the house. “Tell that to them.”

  chapter

  thirty-two

  “Well, he’s fucking right, they are bandits.”

  “Every one of them. They can’t be seriously thinking of letting them out of jail.”

  “Sending them to Cuba.”

  “Or Algeria, they’ll just come right back, start robbing banks again.”

  Dougherty was leaning against Delisle’s desk and staying out of the conversation — all these cops talking about Pierre Trudeau’s speech. Not really a speech, he’d been walking into the Parliament Buildings and a bunch of reporters started yelling questions at him, so Trudeau, being Trudeau, stopped to talk to them. Prime Minister of the country, two men kidnapped and he was toying with reporters.

  Some of it had been on TV but Dougherty hadn’t seen it, so he’d read the story in the paper, the headline, “An angry Trudeau is interviewed: ‘Weak-kneed bleeding hearts hit.’” But it wasn’t really an interview, either. One of the reporters had said something about all these “men with guns around here,” and Trudeau took over, saying, “What’s your worry?” and “Have they pushed you around?” and the reporter said, “They’ve pushed around friends of mine,” and Trudeau said, “Yeah? What were your friends doing?” He was still smiling then, playing with the reporters, but then he was the one who got serious first.

  Some combat troops had been called out to Ottawa to show the flag around Parliament; that’s what the reporter said he was worried about. But he didn’t have much of an answer when Trudeau asked him what his position was, would he give in to blackmail? And it just got worse after that, Trudeau easily backing the guy into a corner and the guy saying, “Well, I don’t know.”

  Then Trudeau told reporters they shouldn’t use the term “political prisoners.” “They’ve been tried before the courts and condemned to prison terms, you should stop calling them political prisoners. They’re outlaws, they’re criminal prisoners.”

  Dougherty was looking over at all the cops in the room, thinking there probably wasn’t a single one of them who’d supported Trudeau before, but they sure agreed with him now. And they agreed with him when he said we had to get rid of people who are trying to run the government by kidnapping and blackmail.

  A reporter finally asked Trudeau how far he would go, and the prime minister said, “Just watch me,” and then he said it again, that it was only weak-kneed bleeding hearts who were afraid to take these measures.

  Delisle was talking then, trying to get everyone’s attention, but no one listened until he said “a fingerprint on the communiqué from Laporte’s kidnappers,” and then they all looked up. “A guy name Paul Rose. We know him.”

  There was a lot of grumbling in the room then, and Delisle held up his hands and said, “You’ll all be picking people up today — the detectives have the assignments.”

  One of the older uniform cops said, “Hey Delisle, is the army coming here?”

  “No. The federal government can’t send in the army. Bourassa has to ask for it.”

  “Come on, he does what he’s told. Have we asked for it?”

  “No.”

  The meeting was already breaking up into smaller groups, a half-dozen detectives taking three or four uniforms each.

  Boisjoli waved Dougherty over and said, “Come with me.”

  “I’m up at Redpath,” Dougherty said. “A squirrel might run on the lawn.”

  “The night shift is staying,” the detective said. “They can sleep in their cars in the day as easily as in the night. We’re going to St. Henri, come on.”

  “Back to St. Henri?” Dougherty said, and Boisjoli said, “That’s right.”

  “Now we can get rid of all these commies.”

  They spent the morning rousting people out of bed in row houses in St. Henri. The first time one of the long-haired guys called him a “jack-booted thug,” Dougherty said, “I’m wearing shoes,” but after a while he was starting to feel the part and not liking it very much.

  After lunch Boisjoli told him they got a call and they drove fast to Place Bonaventure and met the bomb squad, Vachon and Meloche.

  Vachon said, “The call said it was here. It didn’t say if it was in the hotel or the mall or the exhibition place. It could be anywhere.”

  Boisjoli said, “Another communiqué?” and Meloche said, “Maybe, but it could also be a bomb, be careful.”

  “This is crazy,” one of the cops said, and Vachon said, “Yes, of course it is.”

  They split up and searched.

  Half an hour later, Vachon found it in a garbage can in the hotel lobby. By the time Dougherty got there he saw a few reporters were there, too, and he stepped up to Logan and said, “You got here fast.”

  “We got here before you did.” He motioned to one of the other reporters and told him, “He found it.”

  Dougherty helped move the hotel staff and other people out of the lobby, and then stood by the door with the other cops and some reporters.

  They watched Vachon, by himself in the lobby, take the blue Expo 67 flight bag out of the garbage can and slowly pull the zipper. When he reached in and pulled out an alarm clock and said, “No bomb,” Dougherty could feel everyone in the place let out breath.

  “It doesn’t look like a communiqué,” Vachon said. He held up a white envelope.

  The senior guy at the scene, Boisjoli, said, “Give it here,” and he opened it. It was a single typewritten page in English. Boisjoli said, “It’s for the FLQ lawyer. It says: ‘To Robert Lemieux, a real dirty bastard.’”

  Some of the cops laughed, but Dougherty looked at Logan and saw the reporter writing in his notebook. “This isn’t going to be good,” he said, and Logan said, “But it’s going to be good for the paper.”

  Boisjoli read some more, a little about how Lemieux worked for dirty anarchists and accepted stolen money for his fees, and then he read, “If anything happens to Mr. Cross, we shall come and slaughter you and yours. If any prisoner is released and leaves the country, we will kill members of their family. This is no joke.”

  “Siboire.”

  “It’s signed ‘The Canadian Vigilantes,’” Boisjoli said.

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “Well,” Boisjoli said, “we should warn Lemieux anyway.”

  As people were filing out, Dougherty looked at Logan. “Are you going to report this?”

  “It’s news.”

  “But it’s probably bullshit.”

  Logan said, “It’s interesting they didn’t mention Laporte.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe they’re Irish. Did you know Cros
s is Irish?”

  Dougherty said, “But he’s the British Trade Commissioner.”

  “Yeah, but he’s from Belfast, Irish Protestant.”

  “So? This is still bullshit.”

  “Haven’t you been following the news in Ireland? They’re killing people every day — they make these FLQ guys look like amateurs. They could be here, or they could have family here.”

  “We’ve never heard anything about that.”

  “Maybe you’re hearing it now. Anyway,” Logan said, “this’ll probably get buried on page six, there’s so many other stories.”

  “And they’re all bullshit,” Dougherty said.

  Logan flipped through his notebook. “The result of terrorism is that people are ready after a time for any police madness to restore peace.” Then he looked at Dougherty and asked, “That what you’re doing?”

  “You want a comment from me?”

  “How about this?” He looked back at the notebook. “In Germany in 1932 extremists claiming to act for the workers led the country towards anarchy and that brought Hitler.”

  “Who said that?”

  Logan was walking away then, saying, “They all want to be Che but they all end up being Stalin.”

  Dougherty followed him through the lobby and went back to work thinking, Commies and Hitler, right here in Montreal.

  And now the Irish, was it possible? Like Dougherty, the Higgins brothers and Danny Buckley and most of the other guys in the Point were Irish, but could any of them be connected to anybody in Ireland?

  Then Dougherty realized, Sure, why not?

  This was as bad as it could get. And then on Saturday it got a lot worse.

  chapter

  thirty-three

  The Paul Sauvé Arena was packed, three thousand people all chanting, “F-L-Q! F-L-Q!”

  Dougherty stood by one of the back doors with a few other cops, keeping the peace.

  The speeches went on for hours, all the bigwigs onstage fired up. It was like a tent revival meeting.

  The lawyer, Robert Lemieux, out of jail now and not looking too worried about the Irish, gave a rousing speech, real fire and brimstone, and then one of the union leaders, Michel Chartrand, gave a speech and the crowd chanted, “Le Québec aux Québécois! Le Québec aux Québécois! Le Québec aux Québécois!”

  One of the cops said to Dougherty, “So, when we get our police union, you don’t get to join, Dog-eh-dee,” and he laughed. Another cop said, “No, Dog-eh-dee is half French, half of him gets to join,” then the other cop said, “What about Mancini, he’s Italian,” and they looked at the young cop and then motioned “out” with their thumbs. “You gotta go, kid.”

  One of the older cops said, “Ce n’est pas drôle,” and Dougherty agreed it wasn’t funny, but knew better than to get into it.

  The speeches went on for another couple of hours, all of them demanding that the government release the “political prisoners” and one of them calling the kidnappings a huge victory, no matter the outcome, because they meant the beginning of popular power.

  “And the end of us.”

  Dougherty looked at the older cop. “Come on, even in the communist paradise they need cops, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck is going on. All the students went on strike today, did you hear? All the universities and the colleges, shut down.” The older cop was looking lost.

  Dougherty said, “They’re just kids; they like the excitement.”

  “Ce n’est pas un jeu.”

  “I know,” Dougherty said, “it’s not a game.”

  The rally finally ended with more chanting: “Le Québec aux Québécois!”

  When Dougherty got to Station Ten at six thirty the next morning Detective Boisjoli was already there and called him over to his desk. He started in right away. “This Buckley in the Point — how well you know him?”

  “I know him okay. What’s going on?”

  “Looks like you were right — he’s one of the guys hijacked the truck, the cigarettes.”

  “You got him?”

  “We got a guy owns a bar, says he bought some of the smokes.”

  “From Buckley?”

  “Maybe, he won’t say.” Boisjoli shrugged and picked up a pack of cigarettes from his desk and got one out. “We were talking to him about the people in his bar, the connections to this other thing,” and he lit his cigarette and waved the match around and Dougherty realized he meant the kidnappings. “And he offered up the smokes.”

  “We’re going to pick these guys up?”

  Boisjoli shook his head. “This guy won’t identify anybody. But look, it’s a lot of smokes — they got to be keeping them somewhere. Maybe you can find out where.”

  “Me?”

  Boisjoli looked around the room and then at Dougherty and shrugged.

  Dougherty said, “Okay,” and he was thinking of ways he could do it, running into Buck-Buck, buying more hash, asking about cigarettes, just working it into the conversation.

  “If you can, you can,” Boisjoli said. Then he put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and went back to the papers on his desk. “If not, don’t worry about it.”

  “Sure, I’ll do it.”

  Then Sergeant Delisle said, “Dougherty, take Gagnon and get down to HQ. They need more bodies.”

  “When you get a chance,” Boisjoli said.

  On the drive down the hill to Old Montreal, Gagnon said, “Bourassa made another offer. Calls this one the final offer.”

  “What is it?”

  “He says they will speed up parole for five of the prisoners.”

  “He call them political prisoners?”

  “I don’t know. And he said safe passage to the country of their choice for the kidnappers.”

  Dougherty said, “Tabarnak,” and Gagnon said, “I know. He says they have six hours.”

  They spent the morning taking prisoners from the cells in the basement to the interrogation rooms on the third floor and back.

  Then when Dougherty came back from lunch, a couple of steamed hot dogs and fries, the desk sergeant said, “Get over to the Nelson — you know it?”

  The hotel was only a couple of blocks away and when he got there Dougherty saw a crowd had spilled out onto the cobblestone street of Place Jacques Cartier, yelling and waving fists in the air.

  Dougherty joined in with the other cops pushing people back, grabbing them and tossing them aside until a couple of cops made their way out with a man walking between them. The mob was shouting at the guy the cops were dragging out, and Dougherty and a few other uniforms got between them and the crowd. They took the guy up the street towards St. James and the crowd stayed where it was. When they were a block away the guy said, “Bloody hell,” and he was smiling.

  “What happened?” Dougherty said.

  One of the cops said, “Lemieux quit.”

  They were walking back towards police HQ on Bonsecours Street.

  “Who quit?”

  “The FLQ lawyer.”

  Dougherty remembered him then from the night before at the Paul Sauvé. Then he looked at the guy they’d pulled out of the crowd and said, “What’s your story?”

  The guy was still smiling. “I asked him to give a statement in English. I’m with Reuters.”

  “So what happened?”

  The guy had a British accent. “They didn’t like that, mate.”

  Back at HQ, the Reuters guy said, “Well, now I’ve got a story,” and went off to write it.

  Dougherty spent the rest of the day taking guys back and forth from the cells to the third floor until he got relieved a little after eleven. He went home and changed, then drove down the hill to the Point.

  He parked his Mustang in the lot behind the Arawana Tavern and was on his way in when he saw the Linco
ln cruise by on Wellington.

  Fuck.

  He ran back, jumped in his Mustang and sprayed gravel onto Bridge Street and around the corner.

  There was no goddamned way this could be a coincidence. Again.

  Dougherty cruised to the intersection, but he couldn’t see the car. It had either turned right and headed over the Victoria Bridge or gone straight, through the Wellington Tunnel towards downtown.

  Fuck.

  He floored it into the tunnel.

  Out the other end, the street was deserted.

  It was possible the Lincoln got that far ahead of him, but it didn’t seem likely.

  He jumped the median and went back through the tunnel. It had one lane of traffic in each direction and a couple of streetcar tracks down the middle that weren’t used anymore.

  Out the other side, he ran the red light, screeching around the corner and racing towards the bridge, but when he bumped onto the metal slats of the roadway he could see all the way to the South Shore and there was no Lincoln. No cars at all.

  Dougherty had to drive all the way across the bridge then and turn around in St. Lambert, and he was still shaking when he got back onto the pavement. As he drove up Bridge Street past the Autostade he realized the Lincoln could have taken Mill Street. He’d lost it before he’d even gotten into his own car.

  But that had to be it. A white Lincoln with a black roof.

  It must have some connection with the Point.

  Dougherty decided then to spend every off-duty minute he could in the neighbourhood until he saw the car again.

  Driving up the hill towards his apartment, Dougherty heard the news on the radio that Bourassa had formally requested emergency powers, and there was the prime minister’s voice saying, “The government is acting to make clear to kidnappers, revolutionaries and assassins that, in this country, laws are made and changed by the elected representatives of all Canadians — not by a handful of self-selected dictators. Those who gain power by terror, rule by terror. The government is acting, therefore, to protect your life and liberty.”

  The War Measures Act was invoked.

  At dawn the next day, Hercules aircraft started landing at St. Hubert air force base and long lines of camouflage-green trucks started crossing the bridges into Montreal.