October 1970 (44 page)

“Sam, what are you
 . . .
No!”

“That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.”

“Stop!”

When he opened the door, the thick warmth of the cabin met the wall of cold air. A low of minus twenty Celsius, in which their interlaced, tropical bodies began instantly to steam. All this naked whiteness. They disappeared into the field of light and the silent cry of a spruce grouse.

AT THE AIGLE FIN, OR J.C.
IN QUEBEC AT LAST

NO KIDDING, I'M ALWAYS MOVED
when I see Quebec City sprin
ging up on the horizon, the Old Capital perched on its headland, beside the great river, whose actual shores are Autoroutes 20 and 40. Call me sentimental if you like, but to know that the only parliamentary assembly devoted in principle to the defence of the rights of the French-Canadian nation is found in this city gives me goosebumps. Not you?

I can hear you asking me why I don't vote for separatism, or even why didn't I run for the Parti Québécois in the by-election in Vautrin? I can tell you why: I don't like René Lévesque. He's sexually obsessed. And I don't like Bourgault, either. He's a queer. I'm speaking in confidence here, alone with my tape recorder, at the wheel of my car. So, you see, I can speak frankly.

The Parti Québécois could have been an honest offspring of the Liberal Party, if there could ever be such a thing. I mean: part of the family, one that left home after an unfortunate dispute about lineage. But Bourgault's RIN was the Trojan Horse by means of which street disorder and radicalism infiltrated into the heart of democratic structures. The PQ is its dissolute son. The support of the unions and popular groups made it a gangrened left leg of egalitarian ideology. Whereas I, at the heart of the good old Quebec Liberal Party, at least had the possibility of contributing to internal change, even within the Pouvoir-Power machine. Yes, I did.

I won't describe Quebec City to you. I haven't come here as a tourist. Down there is the Legislature, where from now on I have a desk waiting for me in the back benches, on the majority side, last row. Among the purebreds. Under the wheels of my Buick is the Grande-Allée. The Aigle Fin, do you know it? It's the name of the restaurant where we go. But I'm a good half-hour early, so let me suggest I leave my car near the Saint-Louis gate, and you follow me, okay? And I'll tell you a story while my steps lead us along the old route, down rue Sainte-Anne, rue du Fort, rue Saint-Louis, Dufferin Terrace, the wooden steps on the cliff, the cannons aimed to the south and the great brother enemy, out onto the Plains of Abraham, the classic loop, as if I were an old mare carrying a mini-tape recorder instead of a sack of oats. I could even take you for a ride in my
calêche
.

It was three years ago, at the Aigle Fin on Grande-Allée. Paul Lavoie asked me to have lunch with him. I was his political attaché. The justice portfolio had eluded him, and he'd consoled himself with that of labour and immigration. An old-school nationalist, he would willingly have accommodated himself to dictatorship if it meant a chair at the
caudillo
. That day, October 6, 1970, in the absence of our premier, who was down south selling our great northern rivers to the sharks on Wall Street, Lavoie was in command, his tie already loosened, flipping through the newspaper headlines at his usual table in the back when I joined him.

The Aigle Fin is a chic version of those coffee houses and cafés in which the main decorative elements are old fishing nets studded with balsa-wood floats and desiccated starfish. At the Aigle, the whole divider between the room at the back and the corridor leading to the toilets consisted of lobster tanks in excellent condition, with dark green, taxidermied crustaceans holding their tails and claws in menacing poses against an inky blue backdrop. Despite this clear inducement, the upper-level civil servants and parliamentarians who frequented this famous establishment in the capital choose, more often than not, to go with the large T-bone steak, a pound of carefully weighed meat hung on a bone strong enough to knock out an army of Redcoats and served with baked potatoes. It was particularly true of the political generation to which my patron belonged, nurtured as he was on the traditional meat-potato-veg inherited from our pemmican-gumming ancestors. That day, my boss hardly glanced at the open menu in front of him before ordering the famous Moose Jaw beef.

He was a bon vivant, a congenial fellow, as they say, all red-cheeked. At night, at home, he no doubt drank milk and ate those little Vachon cakes, but at lunchtime he washed down his steak with a bottle or two of beer like a true man of the people.

We talked about the specialist doctors' strike. The kidnapping of the British commercial attaché the previous evening was not yet the very big deal it was soon to become. Travers was a diplomat and was therefore the federal government's responsibility. The Québécois were smiling smugly behind their hands.
What's it to do with us? Not much
 . . .

When we talked about the kidnapping that day, Lavoie said to me:

“If the FLQ boys allow him to write, he has a chance of getting out of it
 . . .
”

I asked him what he meant by that. He leaned toward me with a sly smile:

“What would you do, if you were in his shoes?”

“The grave,” I said without thinking. “I mean, I would remain quiet.”

My response disappointed him, I could tell.

“Let's try to put ourselves in his position. He has fallen into the hands of a band of young idiots who have given the government forty-eight hours to accept their conditions, or else they will take care of him. They seem serious. If he thinks about it, he'll realize that the only chance of being rescued quickly is to help the police find him. So, find some way to get a message out to the authorities
 . . .
”

“Yes, of course, but one of the kidnappers' conditions is that that police stop searching for him.”

“Surely Travers isn't stupid enough to believe that the police are going to stop looking for him! He's no fool. He knows full well that the government can't negotiate
 . . .
”

“Really?”

He leaned back in his chair and lowered his eyes. His fingers instinctively went to the knot in his tie.

“No government of a civilized, democratic country would negotiate with terrorists. Travers's only chance is for the police to find where he's being held as quickly as possible. And so, if I were him and my kidnappers gave me a chance to write a letter, I'd bury a coded message in it somehow. It seems to me to go without saying.”

“I don't know. If you're caught, you're as good as dead!”

“Maybe, but a death that, at least, will have occurred on the field of battle, using the only weapons you had at your disposal, namely the words you write on a sheet of paper. Better than waiting to be strangled like a chicken.”

“You think they'll
 . . .
”

He patted his lips with his napkin.

“No, Jean-Claude. They're good little boys from Quebec. They wouldn't hurt a flea
 . . .
”

That was our conversation, essentially, to the best of my recollection.

The next Saturday, I was in my living room drinking a gin and tonic, sitting in front of the television, half-listening to my wife calling from the kitchen to ask me if I wanted stew for supper — Irish stew, potatoes, carrots, cubes of lamb, onion, and not much else, a good, hearty, autumn meal even better the second day — when the telephone rang. I got up to answer it and learned that my boss had just been nabbed by the FLQ in front of his house. I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty. Then I looked out the window. It was getting dark. It wasn't more than a half-hour since the televised press conference given by the justice minister explaining the government's position (no concessions to terrorists). The news came like a blow to the forehead. I hung up and went to make myself another gin and tonic.

I can't tell you what a horror the next few days were. Nights tossing in my bed like a capon on a spit, days lived in a fog. But this story isn't about me.

The next day (Sunday), after an anonymous phone call to a radio station, a communiqué was found in a trash bin in the centre of the city. A new terrorist cell claimed responsibility for Saturday night's strike. The financial Chevalier Cell was named after François-Marie-Something-or-Other, Chevalier de Lorimier, a patriot who was hanged in Pied-de-Courant in 1839. The cell gave the government until ten o'clock that night to respond to the FLQ's requests — the famous seven conditions, including the release of all political prisoners and the payment of a $500,000 ransom in gold ingots. Failure to meet these demands would result in the hostage, rebaptized the Minister of Unemployment and Assimilation, being executed at the end of the period of grace.

A bit later, a second communiqué was found in a bus shelter. This one had been written by hand. “The least hesitation on the part of the authorities,” the kidnappers had written, “will [be] fatal to the minister.” And: “We've already made a huge concession by promising to return him safe and sound. Do not ask more of us than that.”

Jesus Christ
, I thought.

Attached to the communiqué was a letter from Lavoie to his wife, which was made public. He'd dated it October 12, 1970, 7 a.m. (a slight error on his part: it was only the eleventh). “What's important is that the authorities budge,” my boss confided to his wife.

That same magnificent Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend, toward the end of the afternoon, another garbage can, a new communiqué. This one was typewritten. It reiterated the ultimatum and its deadline: ten o'clock that night. “No more paternalism, no more maybes, no more promises,” warned the Chevalier Cell. “We know what we want and where we're going and we are determined to get there.”

A handwritten letter from Lavoie to the premier, Albert Vézina, accompanied this message, along with a dozen credit cards from the hostage's wallet intended to prove the authenticity of the communication. Honestly, even I was astonished at how many credit cards he carried around with him.

Lavoie's letter to the premier was a bald appeal for negotiations.
“We are,”
he wrote,
“in the presence of a well organized escalation that will only end with the liberation of the political prisoners. After me, there will be a third, then a fourth and a twelfth.

“My very dear Albert,”
he went on,
“what follows is very, very important: you must order the immediate cessation of all police searches. Their continuance will be my death sentence. On the other hand, if the liberation and departure of the political prisoners are brought to a good end, I am certain that my personal safety will be guaranteed. We are very close to a solution, I can feel it, since there is no real animosity between my kidnappers and I. My fate now collates with theirs. It is up to you to insure my swift return to Parliament Hill in support of you, like the faithful right arm that I promised you I would be. Your decision: my life or my death. I am counting on you, and thank you.

“Warm regards,

“Paul Lavoie.”

Described as “pathetic” by the media, this apostrophe to the premier caused high emotion in political circles as well as with the general population. Here was Little Albert's right-hand man, until then a fierce defender of the intransigent position the federal government had taken on terrorism, suddenly becoming a turncoat, apparently cracking after little more than a day in the hands of his kidnappers! It didn't sit well.

From surprise we passed on to fear, and from fear to panic, and from panic to paranoia. Events accelerated:

• October 11, Little Albert makes the bizarre decision to place his entire cabinet under high security in a hotel in downtown Montreal. The provincial government was, de facto, under siege;
  
• Sunday night, a little before ten o'clock, Vézina reads a solemn declaration on television containing his dramatic response to the kidnappers' demands. Half of his listeners believe he has just opened the door to negotiations with the FLQ, the other half are convinced they heard him categorically refuse to give in to demands from terrorists. As usual, Little Albert has managed to cross the Rubicon without getting his feet wet;
  
• October 12, in a new communiqué, the Chevalier Cell designates
  Maître
  Brien as its negotiator. Only one small problem: the lawyer is in prison;
  
• October 13,
  Maître
  Brien is released from prison;
  
• October 13, evening, negotiations break down over the question of preliminary guarantees, all talks broken off, a stalemate, etc.;
  
• October 14, a group of Paul Lavoie's golfing buddies publicly call for an acceleration in the process of liberating the hostages;
  
• October 14, evening, rumours of war
   . . .
  ;
  
• October 15, the first troop movements are ordered.
  

I resolved to do everything in my power to save my friend and boss. I went to find
Maître
Brien in Old Montreal. It was late in the evening, sometime around nine o'clock. The Ministerial Council had just issued a communiqué in which the government rejected every condition of the FLQ except one: it offered the kidnappers an airplane that would take them to a country of their choice, and gave them six hours to decide. Yes, you read right: six hours.

I found
Maître
Brien downstairs at the Brown Hotel, in the old quarter, where he was giving a particularly well attended and fiery press conference. Amid a forest of microphones and bottles of Labatt 50s, he stood above the heads of two dangerous ideologues who had no business being at large: Vallières and Gagnon.

While I listened from the doorway, an anglophone journalist who was being physically thrown out of the hotel practically toppled over me. Then
Maître
Brien swept past and jumped onto his motorcycle. I ran out into the street.

“I'm Jean-Claude Marcel, Lavoie's political attaché. We need to talk
 . . .
”

He motioned for me to get on. As though it was the most natural thing in the world!

“I don't have a helmet
 . . .
”