October 1970 (14 page)

“All right. What would you say to a battlefield instead?”

“I don't see it coming to that.”

Chevalier pointed out a road less obliterated by drifting snow.

“We'll see the sign announcing the ferry pretty soon. In summer it takes three minutes to get across to Saint-Charles. Where our boys were cut to ribbons by the Redcoats under General Wetherall in 1837. As soon as they were charged by a regiment of Royal Scots, and saw their bayonets glinting in the sun, most of them took off. But a good many continued to snipe away at the soldiers, and others tried to surrender, and they were all massacred. What history doesn't tell us is if the Scots were accompanied by bagpipes
 . . .
”

“If there'd been bagpipes, the whole lot of them would have been scurrying for the woods.”

Chevalier tried to make out the river through the snowstorm.

“I'm trying to see the church where Wetherall's men lit their huge bonfire after the victory. They celebrated long into the night, with the bodies of their enemy stacked up in front of the altar. Dozens and dozens of corpses piled up to the foot of the cross like so much cordwood. Maybe twenty survivors were kept overnight in the sacristy. The guard who watched them described the scene: they knelt in the dark, lit by a single candle, silently praying while the
Goddamns
laughed and sang in the next room. The officers ate well that night: roast chicken, fried bacon, pancakes, baked potatoes, plain bread. The English came back to the church in the morning to get rid of the corpses. They discovered that pigs had somehow got into the building and were eating the frozen bodies.”

“So what'd they do?” the inspector asked after a pause.

“What do you think they did? They shot the pigs, too.”

Leaning forward, the inspector strained his eyes to make out the road through the maelstrom of whirling snowflakes that dimmed the light from his headlights.

“Eaten by pigs,” he murmured, thinking about it.

Chevalier turned toward him.

“Yes, pigs ate them.”

The inspector stared straight ahead.

“But I don't see it coming to that.”

They arrived at Saint-Marc.

A solid farmhouse was flanked by a covered shed at one end that acted as a garage and, at the other, by a monumental fieldstone chimney that loomed over them as they waded through the snow that covered the driveway. To his great surprise, Chevalier had counted only two other cars on the road. Apparently the military police had been called off.

They were welcomed at the kitchen door by Corporal Huet and Captain Claude Leclerc, head of the homicide squad. Huet and Leclerc stood on either side of Marcel Duquet, who was visibly nervous. No fire burned in the woodstove. Below them, the furnace made its usual noise. Handshakes, the stomping of boots. Captain Leclerc described the situation briefly:

“They're downstairs. We have to make them come out.”

“How many men do you have here, Captain?” asked Branlequeue.

“Just the three of us,” Leclerc replied.

“So there's no one downstairs keeping an eye on them?”

“No.”

“You don't seem to be very afraid of them, then.”

“No, that's true,” said the captain.

“Strange. I'd have thought the whole sector would be sealed off. I imagined coming through cordons of soldiers to get here. You've changed tactics?”

“Don't read too much into it, Chevalier,” the captain said patiently. “What you saw going down in north Montreal, when they surrounded the Lancelot Cell, that was the Armed Forces' and the Mounties' show. Up here, we're investigating a murder, that's all. We're not playing politics.”

“So, in other words, now that the English are out of the country, we can go back to doing things our own way, is that it?”

“Think what you like. Come on, I'll show you where they are.”

The first time the provincial police had arrived, on Christmas Day, they came in four or five cars and contented themselves with searching the house from top to bottom. The three sparrows stayed holed up in their burrow, kneeling in fifteen millimetres of ice water and smoking cigarette after cigarette. After a few hours, the police left.

The second time, the police tapped on walls and ceilings and tore into the walls of closets and partitions with picks and crowbars. They smashed chairs and gutted mattresses. While all this was going on, two officers took Duquet for a car ride into the deserted countryside. Near a small stand of trees, they made him kneel in the snow at the edge of the woods and threatened to put a bullet in his head if he didn't tell them where the three men were hiding. Duquet swore at them copiously, then clamped his teeth and brayed like a calf, but told them nothing.

The next day, Corporal Huet turned up alone at the wheel of an unmarked car. He took Duquet for another ride. Marcel was almost beginning to get used to it. This time, Huet parked at the end of a dead-end road. In front of them, the snow-covered fields stretched to the horizon, marked here and there by sugar bushes as regularly as in a geometrical pattern. The wind howled around the vague shapes of buildings in the snowfields.

“Marcel,” the corporal said quietly, “we know they're in there.”

“How do you know that?”

While the corporal thought about it, he saw a snowy owl perched on a fence post a hundred feet away.

“We tapped your phone line, my friend. You don't believe me? When you talked to your mistress about your ‘cousins,' you must have thought we were imbeciles.”

Huet cast another glance at the immaculate raptor, immobile on its post. From this close he could make out the owl's cold, yellow eyes. The corporal had excellent vision. At training camp, he'd regularly placed nineteen of twenty shots in the bull's eye.

“And that's not all, Marcel, my boy. One night when you were out, the boys took a look around your house, and they noticed that even with all the lights off the disc on your hydro meter kept going around. And the furnace works on propane. See what I'm getting at?”

Marcel said yes, he understood.

“I did it to protect them,” he said.

“What do they have in the way of weapons?”

“Just an old sawed-off shotgun.”

“Any dynamite?”

“No, no.”

“Good.”

“I'm afraid they might shoot themselves
 . . .
”

“Everything will be all right, Marcel, you'll see. You and me, we're going to speak to them calmly.”

As he started the car, out of the corner of his eye Corporal Huet saw the snowy owl leave its perch and glide into the air, lifted by its momentum over the infinite plain of sparkling whiteness under the pale nugget of the sun. Half a kilometre off, the adventuresome vole returning to its nest in the snow under a cluster of wild grape vines never knew what hit it.

When Jean-Paul Lafleur crawled out of his den like a bear along the passage between the furnace and the sub-basement wall, Chevalier thought he couldn't be more than twenty years old. His voice was hoarse from shouting loud enough to be heard through the cement blocks. While he'd been killing himself trying to convince the three that it was safe to come out, the house had been filling with cops. There were at least a dozen of them coming and going, moving from room to room, armed with machine guns. The cold floors reverberated with the sound of their boots.

Gode and the Lafleur brothers were handcuffed as soon as they came out of the secret passage. Jean-Paul turned to Duquet.

“How did they find us?”

“They heard you coughing,” Marcel said and looked away, embarrassed.

Captain Leclerc was waiting for Branlequeue at the bottom of the basement stairs.

“Do you want to speak them?”

Chevalier looked at him, caught off guard.

“Of course, but
 . . .
”

“But what, Chevalier?”

“Why are you doing me such a favour?”

The captain seemed to think about it.

“Who says I'm doing it for your sake?”

A tired smile spread over Chevalier's face.

“Okay, tell me the truth, Captain. Is my presence here tonight meant to demonstrate that your men are not beating these three dangerous terrorists up with billy clubs?”

It was the captain's turn to smile.

“Beating people up with billy sticks is Martinek's method. He'll no doubt turn up here before too long. As for me, what I think is that there's already been one death too many in this affair. Another reason to treat these people humanely.”

“When you say one death too many, you're implying that that death could have been avoided?

Leclerc paused on the lower step of the stairs.

“Come on. We'll go into the living room.”

Many years later, Chevalier Branlequeue would once again ask himself how Corporal Huet and Captain Leclerc were able to keep journalists out of that neck of the woods, engulfed in snowbanks behind Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu. It was a surreal scene: the living room full of police officers waiting, their patience bordering on angelic, considering the circumstances. And he, too, in the middle of the room, on a chair, chatting calmly with the three men, two of whom were on the sofa facing him and the other on a chair a bit farther off. The oldest of the three was giving him, despite the handcuffs shackling his wrists, an accelerated course in radical political action. That an episode precipitating an unprecedented national crisis, receiving media coverage the likes of which had never before been seen, could lead to this strange intimacy, without a single member of the press present, and that it was he, a poet, editor, former political prisoner, and an ex-candidate for an independent Quebec, who found himself caught up in the events, gathering the first proposals of the three most wanted criminals in the country, was something that would never cease to astonish him.

“We wanted to speed up history,” Jean-Paul declared. “And history will be our judge. All I can say is that the Chevalier Cell did not act selfishly. It's our self-abnegation that distinguishes us from governments and gangsters, who amount to the same thing. If we'd blown up a Brinks truck instead of kidnapping a minister, there never would have been an October Crisis.”

“But it's going to be harder now to distinguish yourselves from them, now that you have blood on your hands,” remarked Chevalier.

“Lavoie's death is another story. It wasn't good politics, killing Lavoie. It's obvious that Paul Lavoie was a lot more useful to the FLQ alive than dead. But to be honest, the death of a construction worker makes me feel a lot worse than that of a Liberal minister, and I won't shed a single goddamned tear for him and his kind. But we have to stick to politics. What's certain is that by calling in the army and stirring up the baser instincts of the population, power has finally shown its true face. But we're ready to take responsibility for the violence that took place. We'll pay the price.”

He started to say something, but Marcel Duquet chose that moment to cause a fuss.

“Stay outside, you dirty dog! Outside!”

One of the police officers tried to calm him down, while the other turned to the great, hulking brute in civilian clothing who had just appeared at the door to the living room. Small moustache, glasses, Mackinaw jacket, tweed cap.

“Ah, Martinek! What good wind blew you here?” asked Captain Leclerc, with a sidelong glance at Chevalier.

The colossus rolled his huge eyes and shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what was unfolding in the living room. In a way, he looked like a habitant come to spend a quiet night in the country. He'd even forgotten to bring his machine gun.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he said in English.

“Everything's under control, Martinek,” the captain assured him.

Still shaking his head, Martinek turned his back, and it was like a panel of the wall had turned and taken several steps down the hall.

Without speaking, Leclerc looked questioningly at his prisoners.

“We're fighting for the same things you are,” Jean-Paul said, addressing Chevalier, “except we're using different methods. That's all we have to say.”

“All we ask of you,” his brother added, “is that you speak on our behalf every chance you get. We need you to be our voice
 . . .
”

Chevalier said he would. He was overcome by emotion. He turned to Richard Godefroid, who had not as yet spoken and who was shivering, his hands shoved between his thighs.

“Gode
 . . .
”

“Chevalier
 . . .
I'm as frozen as a side of beef in Matagami. Can't someone get that furnace going?”

Dawn crept into the room. Captain Leclerc stepped forward.

“We're going to have to go now.”

ELDORADO

AT THE NORTH END OF
the park he saw
vultures circling, and then a few crows and a large harrier rising up from a wolf carcass stretched out on the side of the road. The wolf had been flattened by traffic like an ordinary groundhog.

The forest had taken on the features that remained consistent from here to the Arctic Circle. The only variation would be the size of the trees, which would continue to diminish with monotonous and predictable regularity for another two thousand kilometres. The forest was dominated by conifers, and wherever streams created a bed of moss and humus, the drowned areas formed by beavers made a gap in the woods, the austere, dried-out trunks of trees poked up from the forest floor. Low mountains sprouting from the spinal column of the continent seemed content to spread peacefully along the horizon.

After climbing a series of hills covered with a mixed forest of black and white spruce and paper birch, with the occasional white pine that had survived the nineteenth century, the Nihilomobile tipped down into lowlands.

It cruised among huge reservoirs with innumerable bays bristling with black trunks that looked like fence posts coated with tar. The horizon vanished. Everywhere there were lakes. Sam found himself in a picnicking mood, so he stopped, took off his clothes, dove head first into one of these lakes, dried himself off as best he could, and continued driving north. After a while, muskeg and its immense peat bogs, covered with thick spongy cushions spiked with spindly tamaracks, lined both sides of the road. A bald eagle flying six hundred metres up watched him pass, its wings spread out to catch a thermal, its head as white and dazzling as a snowball thrown by the sun. If it could read, from that distance the bird could have made out the numbers on Nihilo's licence plate.

Ahead of him, the continental plateau tilted toward Hudson Bay.

He paid thirty-five dollars for a room in a motel on the outskirts of town, TV but no cable. He fell onto the bed without undressing and slept until late afternoon. When he woke up, he lay for a long time without moving, scraping his memory for an image or a thought that would correspond even vaguely with where he was. The roar of tractor-trailers opened huge corridors in the silence and brought him to some semblance of reality. One of them drove him from the bed to the window.

It was early May. Across the highway, on the flank of a hill, was another motel, possibly even more dubious looking than the one he was in, but crammed to the rafters. It looked like a rubbish heap in the middle of a huge parking lot. Beside it, a neon sign for an equally decrepit gas station rose above the roadside, but one of the letters had burned out, so that it said -
HELL
. Farther down the road, a car cemetery was surrounded by a wall from which sheets of rusted corrugated metal hung like the hem of a dress. The whole scene was set in a yellowed wasteland strewn with dead machinery and trembling aspens. The grizzled nudity of it would have made a great advertisement for antidepressants.

He took a shower. The floor sloped noticeably toward the bathroom door. The shower stall made him think of a hamster cage without the bars, and the mysteries of the crude plumbing gave the impression that he was in some remote Siberian laboratory, the subject of an experiment conducted by a pharmaceutical company studying the effects of sudden, extreme temperature swings on the human psychology. He could have used the single towel to sand a hardwood floor.

Apart from that, everything seemed fine.

Maldoror. He drove between two rows of car and truck dealerships to the shores of the small lake, Lake Makwa, and stumbled onto the main street almost by accident. He found what he was looking for on the door of a Pizza Delight and decided to go in for a bite to eat. The weather was still too cold to eat on the terrace, which was deserted. The sign taped to the door showed a bomb exploding — it was reproduced from a single frame of a cartoon strip, a kind of bowling pin with a fuse sticking out of it. On each star given off by the explosion was a photograph of one of the actors in the play, with their names underneath. The predominant colours were red and black.

Sam washed his two slices of Neapolitan pizza down with a glass of red wine, thinking how lucky he was to be on his own in an unknown town with a reason for being there. He paid, left, found the theatre, and bought his ticket.

Saturday night in Maldoror. Family dinners at the Cage aux Sports. Couples, groups of friends, chicken wings. And me, the stranger, elbows on the bar, writing it all down in this notebook, drinking beer between two slam dunks and a wicked backhand. You can't look anywhere without seeing a TV screen, bathing suits, numbers, floats, balls, bats, clubs, logos and jerseys in the colours of rival teams. Or hunting trophies on the walls: caribou, deer, bears, grouse. Or fishing: northern pike, lake trout, Arctic char. Or trapping: beaver, otter, and even, perched on a narrow, artificial ledge, its startled face about as lifelike as an old shoe, a lynx. The dark mahogany wall panelling also holds a great horned owl wearing a baseball cap, and a red-shouldered hawk.

More convinced than ever that the ex-cop Massicotte had made a huge mistake by trying to put me off the scent by dodging my question with his story without beginning or end. I've compared my notes on the Chicken Affair with those taken by Chevalier Branlequeue in the early 1970s. The author of
Elucubrations
had been right there, attended all the court proceedings. On Saturday, the Baby Barbecue rotisserie had had no fewer than fifteen delivery men on the go. And among those fifteen guys it so happened that the one who made the delivery to Lavoie's future kidnappers was the same one who, five days earlier, was in court following the trial of his clients' accomplices! The thread was a bit obvious. If he'd wanted to get rid of me, all Massicotte had to do was deny that there was any family link between him and this Rénald guy, and that would have been that! Did he think I'd check into it? Putting me off with his long, dragged-out story succeeded only in arousing my curiosity
 . . .

Yeah, except that the hypothesis that the second cousin was, as Branlequeue believed, a police undercover agent doesn't explain why Rénald delivered his club sandwiches to the occupants of the bungalow on rue Collins several hours
before
the kidnapping took place
 . . .
Think about that.

Maldoror rose from the mud in the Abitibi gold-rush days of the 1930s. Barely a single human lifespan separates us from that gloomy, copper-bearing agglomeration of a frontier town whose wooden storefronts on its single street welcomed wagonloads of call girls and poor devils belonging to two dozen different nationalities, from Russians of all stripes to American Negroes, all ready to go at the rock with their bare hands until they'd dug themselves to China if they had to. A crowd as varied in gullibility as it was in depth, exploitable as hell, while on the face of it the town continued to grow, a crazy, gluttonous pyramid whose base rested on gold dust and nuggets.

Today, the rutted mud on the main street was gone, buried, like everything else, under the usual amount of concrete and asphalt. But enough vestiges of the former Babylonian mushroom remained to be shaken like a rattle in the ears of tourists. The thirst for gold had been recycled into a more plebian greed, its dangers and prestige traded in for an industrial incinerator that swallowed old computers and spat out leather. The call girls were long gone, replaced by down-market escort services, home-video stores, high-speed Internet connections, and an immoderate love of horsepower. The old ways of burning gas couldn't hold a candle to the $2,000 Toro snowblowers that filled in the gaps left by the hookers.

If someone took all the internal combustion engines off the streets and out of the parking lots and driveways of Maldoror, there wouldn't be much left to look at. Its wind pump, its lake, its hospital, its naked, brownish-pink hills covered in graffiti, its foundry chimneys. At any hour of the day you could fit its visible pedestrian street traffic into a delivery van. As for architecture, it had always owed much of its inspiration to the unbridled Western film. The result, American to the hilt, was a typical strut-your-stuff decor with a bit of Soviet realism thrown in by the foundry and the old workers' quarter, where dilapidated white stucco houses were sinking into a cocktail of toxic tailings.

SKURATOV —
Listen. I arranged this meeting with the Grand Duchess so that tomorrow we can publish it in the newspapers. It'll
be an exact transcript except for one thing. It will contain your confession and repentance. Your comrades will think you've betrayed them.

KALYAYEV —
They'll never believe it
.

SKURATOV —
I'll withdraw the article if you'll make a confession. You must decide tonight.

KALYAYEV —
They'll never believe it
.

SKURATOV —
Why not? Have they never done anything wrong?

KALYAYEV —
You don't know their love
.

SKURATOV —
Maybe not. But I know that no one can believe in brotherly love for a whole night without a moment of weakness. I await that moment. There's no hurry. I'm a patient man.

The theatre was a former cinema. Sam perched on a stool with his elbows on the bar that had been set up at the back of the theatre. Emma Magy had been right: here, sitting behind everyone, he was in his element. Unobserved, looking over the backs and the necks of the audience, he watched Dora go through her lines. Then he gauged the reactions of the audience. A play by Camus in May, Marie-Québec had explained, was a calculated risk. In Maldoror, audiences were used to laughing first and thinking later. They went to plays to show off their artistic sensibilities, like their good clothes, and they were more accustomed to summer-theatre farces. There were always two or three laughers in a crowd, educated by television and the sort of crude humour you get at fifty-dollar stand-up comedy shows. They laughed at the first somewhat ambiguous lines, sucking a joke from them like juice from a lemon. Here, going to the theatre and laughing your head off were natural synonyms, like coughing when you had a cold.

In the minds of these admirers of contemporary, unhistoric farce, confusion was no doubt encouraged by certain choices the director made when mounting
The Just
— for example, refusing to use costumes that identified the time of the action. Tsarist Russia as it was seen in the Loblaws Happy Times Theatre seemed pretty similar to Quebec in the 1960s; all it would have taken would be to alter a line here and there and dress the Grand Duke up like the Lieutenant Governor. Dora wore a man's sweater and a pair of work boots. Around her, the men were wearing jeans, T-shirts, and mackinaws.

Sam went back the next day, and the next, and the next. He loved the play. He loved Dora. He thought she was great. Magnificent. He vanished after the curtain call and went back to his motel room, where he drank beer from cans and watched the news on television. He did not try to go and see her in her dressing room after the performance. Didn't try to contact her. And Dora couldn't see him from the stage. Marie-Québec didn't know that Sam was in Maldoror. He simply went back and sat in the same place every night.

DORA —
Do you love me in solitude, tenderly, without egotism? Would you love me if I were unjust?

KALYAYEV —
If you were unjust and I could love you, then it wouldn't be you that I loved.

DORA —
That's no answer. Tell me this, would you love me if I wasn't in the Organization?

KALYAYEV —
Where would you be, then?

DORA —
I remember when I was a student. I laughed. I was pretty. I spent hours going for walks and dreaming. Would you love me if I were light-headed and carefree?

KALYAYEV —
I am dying to say I would.

DORA —
Yes, say it, my love, if you think it, if it's true. Say yes, never mind about justice, never mind misery and all the people in chains. Say yes, I beg you, forget the suffering of children, forget those who are hanged, or whipped to death
 . . .

KALYAYEV —
Shut up, Dora
.

During the day, he drove out of town, through aspen woods where soft, luminescent green buds were just beginning to open. The forest edge was sprinkled with houses set well back from the road, one in every three of them sporting a For Sale sign. He would park the car at a trailhead and go exploring, stopping to listen to wood thrushes and warblers, walking on, and finding himself surrounded by hunt camps, beaver dams, bear scat, raised blinds set up to look out over marshlands. Once, in an old burn, he found morels.

Another time he stumbled onto an old abandoned mine site, in an area of peat bogs filled with black water, like open-pit oil wells. He stopped for a moment by the gutted carcass of a metal tank, half-eaten by rust, half-buried in gravel that spread to the edge of the surrounding muskeg.

Concrete foundations rose from the ground like monstrous molars busily chewing on the trunks of poplar trees. A signpost riddled with bullet holes. Silence.

He returned to his car and followed a road that ran for some twenty kilometres through stands of mature conifers and zones of reforestation beside lakes that formed a chain stretching down to the south. The broken pavement finally disappeared altogether, as though swallowed by sand and gravel from a hundred-metre-thick esker, along the top of which the car made its way like a flea along the spine of a dog. He saw a lot of rabbits. Black spruce, Jack pine. A hand-painted For Sale sign near the end of the road, stuck in the shadowy forest.

He turned up the access road and found himself above an inclined, brush-covered plain, at the centre of which was a large brown house, all angles and squares. It looked almost sinister, with the huge lake behind it and the distant, wild shore. As he sat there contemplating the scene, he saw a crow flying low above the trees, carrying a long, dry stick crosswise in its beak.