October 1970 (40 page)

“Like the court jester,” Chevalier said, hiding a smile behind his cup of coffee.

At the window, the wind could be heard whistling through the clumps of reeds and shrubs at the edge of the yard. The red-winged blackbirds, perched on their bulrush stems, flashed their bright red wing patches like adolescents on motorbikes. Dissonant and imperious, their strident calls filled the air.

Chevalier folded his arms and leaned back in his chair.

“Massicotte, the chicken delivery man, is a Crown witness, so what rhyme or reason did he have to ham it up like that?”

“He's one of ours, Chevalier. A patriot. Haven't you figured that out yet?”

“Some patriot. Two years ago, at another trial, he gave his age as forty-two. And now he's down to thirty-six. Is it normal for a deliverer of chicken to lie like an actress when asked about his age? Or maybe Baby Barbecue's famous recipe, with thirty-three spices, is the new fountain of youth?”

“He's a strange one, I'll give you that. But his testimony has been the most useful one yet, from my point of view.”

“But he was at the point of identifying his client. Did he perjure himself?”

The silence that followed was pierced by the sharp, disagreeable notes of the blackbirds and cowbirds defending their territories, black kamikaze jabberers dive-bombing invading crows.

“Don't you find that bizarre? The guy's a witness for the prosecution, and he clams up? So, who did he see?”

It was Brien's turn to lean back in his chair.

“Sorry, old boy. Professional ethics.”

“You mean yours or his?”

“Very funny. But I've just had an idea, Chevalier. If I get René Lafleur acquitted, will you stop treating me publicly like a puppet of the system?”

“You'll never get him acquitted.”

“How much do you want to bet?”

“I can't afford to bet. But this is a circus, not a trial.”

Maître
Brien tipped his head back and drank directly from his flask. Then he poured another drop into his coffee, replaced the cork, sighed with satisfaction, and returned the flask to his pocket.

“You'll see. In the meantime, stop pissing people off with your damned conspiracy theories in the Saturday papers, okay?”

If
Maî
tre
Brien, known as the Maestro to his friends, had been programmed to live for a thousand years, there's no doubt he would still be talking about how the trial of René Lafleur was his finest hour in the year 2942. But he was destined to die peacefully, if that word can be applied to dying in his sleep at the age of sixty-six, to be discovered lifeless in his house on the shore of the Gaspé, on the living-room sofa, where his girlfriend of the moment, an ex-pole dancer and rodeo champion, had sent him to contemplate his sins for the night. He had exiled his practice to this county seat a few years previously and had almost been forgotten. Being away from the public eye had never been his desire, however, and he had resurfaced from time to time as an aging rebel who one fine morning would get back on his 750-cc bike with its extensions to the exhaust system, the better to blast away at political rectitude. In his later years, not having any terrorists to defend, he had made himself the champion of bands of motorcycle cops cheated by their Swiss bankers.

Dying on a sofa was appropriate. He had slept with 1,743 women, snorted four kilograms of cocaine up his nose, poured 430,000 ounces of beer down his throat, as well as 7,200 litres of gin, cognac, and brandy and, for the past several years, a good half a cubic metre of pills. A cerebral embolism took him.

At times, the cross-examinations and sword fights between the rival lawyers took on the aspect of a street brawl. In the end,
Maître
Brien trounced
Maître
Grosleau, gave him a vigorous public thrashing. It wasn't a pretty sight. Years later, when he was watching a sports program and saw Mohammed Ali, in a ring in Kinshasa, allow himself to be taken to the ropes to absorb punches from his adversary, and then grapple with him bodily before suddenly ringing his opponent's bell with a right hook that came out of nowhere, Chevalier thought of the defence lawyer for René Lafleur. Like Ali,
Maître
Brien was a master at the art of trash talk.

As for René's fingerprints on the box of chicken, the Maestro threw them in the face of the experts during cross-examination. He had noticed a slight difference between the chicken box given as evidence in the courtroom and that shown in the official photographs.

“What happened to the flap?” he asked a specialist who'd come to testify.

“I don't know. I must have torn it off. Maybe it was dirty
 . . .
”

“Good thinking. Except that in the photograph, this one, it isn't dirty at all, and the shadow has disappeared.”

“It's because the flap was covered in powder.”

“Powder?” murmured the defence counsel, his nostril twitching despite himself.

“Yeah, the powder we used to take fingerprints. The carton was greasy and the powder stuck to it.”

“Don't give me any bullshit about fingerprint powder! In the photograph, we see two flaps on the Baby Barbecue box, but one of those flaps is missing on the box in evidence. Why?”

“You're being very technical today,”
Maître
Grosleau said, casting a sly glance at his rival's notoriously active member above the American Standard stall in the row of urinals during the break.

“In that regard, I belong to the old school,” agreed Mario, reining in his engine. “A photo is not reality. To seem is not to be, that is the question these days, my dear sir.”

“But we're talking about one and the same goddamned chicken box, and you know it,” fumed
Maître
Grosleau.

“Fine. Then prove it,”
Maître
Brien said carelessly, turning his back on the lawyer to pat his curly locks in the mirror above the sinks.

“The defence's only strategy,”
Maître
Raymond Grosleau intoned, addressing the jury, “has been to try to cast doubt on the fact that the accused was actually in the premises at 140 rue Collins, in Saint-Hubert, between the tenth and seventeenth of October 1970. My esteemed colleague for the defence has used all of his considerable talents to make you believe that there is a distinct possibility that someone other than the accused (and other than his two accomplices, who have already been found guilty of murder), for example, a member of another cell, was called in as reinforcement at the last minute. Perhaps he did this when the affair had started to take a wrong turn, and the member of the other cell committed the fatal act in his stead. My eminent colleague has pushed this insinuation so far as to actually ask this court to send a commission of enquiry to Cuba, in order to, and I quote, ‘shed more light on the interpenetration [sic] of the Rebellion and Chevalier cells during the October Crisis.'

“But if it were someone else who, pardon the expression, did the deed
 . . .
and if this person is now living outside the country, let us say in a totalitarian system, and is now therefore beyond the reach of our laws, not subject to Canadian justice, and without any hope of ever setting foot in this country again, then why not give us his or her name? Why refuse to denounce whoever it is if such an accusation can do no harm, someone to whom such an accusation cannot prevent him or her from continuing to warm themselves on the beaches of Cuba, in their socialist workers' paradise and under the pleasant protection of a Soviet nuclear umbrella, when such an accusation could contribute in a very decisive manner here, today, in whitewashing the man who is before you of any accusation and helping him to avoid a sentence of life imprisonment?”

“Because we're not informers,” growled René Lafleur from behind his month-old beard.

The judge called a return to order, and the prosecutor repeated that René Lafleur's fingerprints had been taken from a jar of mustard, a can of Le Sieur number 3 peas, a can of tobacco, and a bag of candies that had been purchased in anticipation of Hallowe'en.

“It's true that these objects may have been in the house before October 10, which was why he insisted to the end on the fact that the prints of the young man in question were also taken from one of the boxes from the Rotisserie Baby Barbecue delivered to the address in question during the fateful week.”

Maître
Brien's summation lasted two full days, and if the duel between him and
Maître
Grosleau could evoke the Ali–Foreman fight of 1974 in Zaire, this latest piece of the anthology, impossible to reproduce here, was like the famous fifth round, during which the aspirant, after having warded off the worst blows from his opponent, suddenly burst off the ropes to deliver a series of direct hits with both gloves that succeeded in making Foreman's face look like half a battered watermelon floating like a cork on the surface of a tormented sea.

Brien began by spreading open the chicken box on the back of his hand. “The public prosecutor,” he said, “tried to prove that this box, produced in evidence in this court, came from rue Collins. The investigators could easily,” he postulated, “have procured it from a chicken deliverer sympathetic to the Crown
 . . .

“As for the young man that the neighbour saw at the wheel of the white Chevy, he had medium-long hair. However, a witness came into this court and certified that in October 1970 the younger of the Lafleur brothers was clean-cut. Who was it, in fact, who sported a ‘mod' haircut that autumn? Whose hair completely hid his ears in the photos of the Chrysler following behind a moving phalanx of police cars on the day that Travers was freed? François Langlais, that's who. And who signed the ownership papers for the white Chevy under an assumed name? François Langlais. To which FLQ member were the following two connections traced: a link with the white Chevy and a mod haircut? François Langlais. And who, according to what we know, assured the liaison between the Chevalier and Rebellion cells? François Langlais. In each case, the same man!”

Toward the end of his summation, the Maestro insisted at great length on the right of the accused to remain silent. In Canadian law, he reminded the jury, no trial has the authority to exact an oath from an accused person except in the case of a trial for treason. “But René Lafleur is not a traitor. He's a patriot. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, two days ago my eminent colleague for the prosecution terminated his summation by telling you that the accused has not proven that he didn't kill. The least I can say to that is that is one strange conception of burden of proof! But I'll leave you now to judge for yourselves
 . . .
”

René took his mother in his arms. Everyone pressed around him. Chevalier saw a young hippie trying to flirt with the judge, whom she said to anyone who would listen that she found attractive in his wig. For one moment, Branlequeue's gaze met that of
Maître
Brien, and in his eyes he still saw the sombre intensity of battle. The lawyer for the FLQ gave him a defiant and satisfied wink, as much as to say:

“You owe me a beer, my friend.”

CHEVREUIL

A GLADIATOR ARMED WITH A
net and trident, a
retriarius, stared out into the silent shadows with lifeless, gleaming eyes. Farther down, skulls lit by indirect lighting grinned immobile. Farther still, past the entrance to the catacombs, beside the first cross planted in the old rock bristling with blue-flag irises from the Gaspé, the man from Saint-Malo was talking to the great Chief Donnacona. In other dark rooms, the colonial pomp of Frontenac's little court, monographs on the Native Peoples of Cataraqui, the Sieur de Maisonneuve, and the good Jeanne Mance were displayed. There had been so many others who had taken possession of this land and repelled the evil Iroquois and the bloody English, lost Quebec, then Montreal, and resisted the advances of Benjamin Franklin and the incursions of New England generals.

Across from the wax museum there were three old-style apartment buildings. The street was variously called the Chemin de la Reine-Maire, Queen Mary Road, or just Chemin Queen Mary by the people of Montreal. In the living room of apartment number six, in the building situated at 3730, François Langlais, Richard Godefroid, Jean-Paul Lafleur, and Benoit Desrosiers were sitting quietly. Dawn had arrived; it was November 4, 1970. They had been talking all night, keeping their voices low for the most part, because the walls have ears. Between them, separating and reuniting them in the brotherhood of blood, was the Minister of Labour, Paul Lavoie, as thin and pale for his date with history as one of the statues in the miserable pantheon created from the ends of candles in the well-appointed museum across the road. The others occupying the apartment were either asleep or pretending to be.

Gode looked at Pierre Chevrier, whom he'd known since childhood as François, the Little Genius of grade seven, and who was now as pale and haggard as the rest of them. For an instant he saw him again in his choir-boy robes, serving mass for Father Gamache, the curate with the Mohawk. More than a few megawatts had flowed under the bridge since those days.

“Amen to that,” said Jean-Paul. “Lavoie played his hand and lost. His bluff came back to kick him in the ass. I'm not going to cry over spilt milk. What I'm more concerned about is what's happening now. We're going to need your help, Pierre. We're spinning our wheels, here.”

“They're spinning their wheels up in Montreal North, too,” replied le Chevreuil.

“Maybe, but up there they've still got their bargaining chip.”

“Lancelot doesn't want to know about you guys. He says you've fucked everything up.”

“Yeah? And who's dropped the ball, eh, Pierre?”

Pierre lowered his eyes, a boy from the South Shore like them. He remained silent.

“You, they're not searching for you, no one suspects you. You can walk around, you're free to come and go where you want. Ask Lancelot if he can take us.”

“He won't want to.”

“Then find us another place to hide. And we need more money. We're broke. We can't stay here.”

“I'll see what I can do
 . . .
”

Passing in front of Gode, Pierre nodded and, without looking at him, said:

“He played you like a group of school kids
 . . .
”

“Who? You mean Lavoie?”

“Not so loud,” said Jean-Paul. “We're not going there again. It happened. And we can't do anything about it now. What's important is to get our stories straight, to all say the same thing
 . . .
Listen to me, you guys: it's the government who killed him.”

They all looked at him.

“That's our story. It was after hearing Vézina nail the last nails in the lid of his coffin, on Friday afternoon on television, that he tried to throw himself out the window and cut himself to shreds like that. It was an act of desperation. Everything that happened after was caused by that one act. That's what we tell them. It's the government who condemned him to death. Does anyone here have a problem with that?”

His gaze made the rounds. No one objected. “So it's settled.”

The dawn filtered in through the curtains. The television had been on the whole time. The head of the Great Chief of the End of Emissions was searching for Indians in the snow.

In the subway car, his left hand clutching the metal pole, Pierre idly scrutinized the faces of the people around him. The too-blonde woman with the lined yellowed face, the one with the frizzy brown hair carrying the Adidas bag. Waitress? Security guard? Was she going on shift? Was he going home to sleep? What did all these people do in life? Whose job was written all over their face?

He'd once read a story about a fox who escaped from some dogs by running into the middle of a flock of sheep, jumping onto the back of one of them, and clinging to its wool and thereby evading his pursuers. At seven o'clock in the morning on a weekday, at the Berri-de-Montigny subway station, there were plenty of Saint-Jean-Baptiste sheep about, but the similarity ended there. Because Pierre's problem, as he headed back to the north end of the city, was that some of the dogs sometimes behaved like foxes, English foxes or not, and were wandering into the flock themselves.

The worker in the plaid shirt, green work pants and workboots, who was reading his
Montréal-Matin.
Too obvious, that newspaper trick
. The accountant with his moustache and double-thick lenses, in his late thirties, greying hair well-combed, attaché case resting on his knees.
Maybe
.

He casually turned his head a quarter turn and became interested in a young man in a purple windbreaker and black serge pants, short-cropped brown hair, face a bit red, hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket. You couldn't find a more ordinary-looking guy. But no bag, no briefcase, nothing in his hands and God knew what was in his pockets. Where was he going, and to do what? Their eyes met briefly and Pierre had the impression that the other man reacted to the visual invasion of his territory, was confronting him without either smiling or looking away. He turned his own eyes and furtively looked at a young woman wearing tight-fitting clothes, an Indian blouse, green velour bell-bottoms, candy-pink high-heeled boots. A hippie, maybe.
Yes, maybe
.

They could be bearded, wearing bracelets, they could have bad breath, big boobs, a lunch pail. They could be old and decrepit, they could have dandruff, long hair, a ponytail, half their face could be disfigured by scars from an accident involving hot grease or acid, the skin as red as raw steak. That's how you can recognize a professional: you can't.

And he, the former aficionado of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin, was now involved in his own living novel. The genial bloodhound and the master of disguises. The one who hides himself, the one who searches for the hidden. Rarely both at the same time. But this morning, in the subway car full of workers and students, he felt the long, sleepless night in his body, he felt like a man of forty, and this time the roles were reversed. He was the one who was searching, and they were the ones who were hidden.

“Okay,” he said to himself, “let's try to spot at least one before Henri-Bourassa
 . . .
”

The others, Jean-Paul, Gode, Lancelot, all committed the same mistake; they looked for cops who looked like cops. Plainclothes police, inspectors in suits. Not him. Because le Chevreuil
knew
.

On the down escalator in the Henri-Bourassa station, he noticed that the young man in the windbreaker was following closely behind him. Nothing unusual there, everyone was going down. This was the terminus. Casting a glance over his shoulder, he again met the fellow's eye looking up at him. Hands still shoved into his jacket pockets, half a dozen steps back. The man took his time before looking away.

Pierre went to stand in line for the bus and, from the corner of his eye, verified that the young man had done the same thing. Standing there, hands in his pockets, three people behind him. For a moment Pierre's heart beat harder. He advanced toward the bus's open door, then abruptly left the line and walked quickly away and joined the line for the bus headed in the opposite direction. This time the man in the purple windbreaker waited a good five seconds, then calmly walked over and stood behind him.

Now le Chevreuil was certain. His mind worked at lightning speed.

He turned brusquely and met the man's eyes. Without the least attempt at dissembling, the man returned his look and accompanied it with a barely perceptible nod of his head. Then the shadow of a smile appeared on his face.

Finally Pierre understood: an open tail.

He turned on his heels, resisted the impulse to break into a run, and hurried off, taking long strides, and jumped into the first taxi he came to without looking around. He slammed the door.

“1345 rue de la Compagnie-de-Jésus,” he told the driver.