The Medusa Project

Étienne’s hands were trembling. He’d come to rely on their steadiness, his ability to control them. He was a heart surgeon, after all. And now he’d lost his composure like a stupid schoolgirl.

His hands had let him down.

. . .

Paul Antiphon says hello.

That was it. Nothing really, a trifle. And the Pole had trifled with him before. So why did it strike a chord this time? Perhaps it was the surgical precision with which he threw out the name. There was a Paul Antiphon, at least there had been (although the chance of his saying hello was negligible). Clearly the Pole just threw out the remark to see his reaction. He had a name, but at this point it was just a jumble of sounds. Madrn needed Étienne to translate. Madrn needed Étienne to make sense of the sounds.

They’d seen each other on and off for years, perhaps ever since Étienne had come to Toronto. There was something quite unlikable about this fellow, something mostly about the eyes. Small eyes, dark but not pleasantly so, placed too close together, lending the journalist an air of imbecility. They said Madrn had escaped his country through a daring midnight flight in a handmade hot air balloon; they said that, for a time, he’d worked for the Polish branch of the KGB, building up the confidence of the state as all the while he plotted his escape. None of this played in his favour. Étienne did not trust this cultivated air of mystery. A man with something to hide does not advertise.

“We should talk sometime, hmm? We should get together and talk about the old times in Quebec City. I’ll bet you have some stories to tell . . .”

Étienne arched his eyebrows and smiled, feigning fond remembrance of those Quebec summers.

“I’m a very busy man, Mr. Madrn,” he said, in a perfectly modulated tone. But his hands — his hands were trembling and trembled still as he rode the subway home.

. . .

“Let’s talk, hmm?” he says. His French is a tad too cultivated. “We can talk, comrade, can’t we?”

He could smell jet fuel now, they must be near the airport, must be heading east.

He takes that to be a good sign.

The van brakes sharply, sending Madrn sliding forward to the front of the box. He can taste blood in his mouth and feels his lip with his tongue. He is cut, all right. But it is nothing.

He tries to peek out of one of the air holes to get a sense of where he might be. They were the first thing he’d noticed, the air holes. That meant they wanted to keep him alive.

He can see nothing outside his box. They are on the highway, that is clear. The road is too straight; they are moving too fast. He’d drifted in and out of sleep a couple of times, so it is impossible for him to tell how long they’ve been driving. But it is still dark. That is a good sign. They couldn’t have gone too far, and it would be light soon.

. . .

In 1959, Maurice Duplessis, Quebec’s autocratic premier, died after sixteen unbroken years in office. A Jew-hating, anti-union, anti-communist despot, Duplessis clung to his position by graft, patronage, and the support of a corrupt clergy that, in comparison, made him seem saintly. But he made the trains run on time, as the Italians say: the province’s schools and roads doubled in number; hospital beds tripled; electricity was brought to even the most remote corner of Quebec. Besides, he was not so out of place. He came from an age where people still believed in gods, still entrusted themselves to marble men. People then were comfortable with demi-despots.

Within a year of Duplessis’s death, the Liberal party slunk into power in Quebec, and the province became acquainted with an enlightened mix of young intellectuals — Quebec nationalists of a sort — and older, devoted federalists, who rejected the tyranny of Duplessis and the church, in that order. Étienne had known many of this second group personally, not that they would admit it now. After the war, they’d opened their homes to him, they’d sought his opinion of the Liberation, which they spoke of with more disdain than he could muster, Laurentia, the Terror (which they humourlessly parodied in their own vision of the Duplessis years as La Grande Noirceur, the Great Darkness) and the politics of Rome. As nationalists, they shared to a degree Étienne did not an ideological sympathy with fascism and, in particular, National Socialism of the Vichy variety. Looked at in its most charitable light, ultranationalism seemed the perfect antidote to the ills inherent in internationalism. These Quebec nationalists could never understand that for Étienne collaboration (a term, by the way, Étienne was comfortable with, although they would never use it) had been perfectly pragmatic. His uncle, a provincial mayor, had had friends in Vichy; Étienne’s conversion was a matter of course, and, if not a pre-requisite to survival, it certainly offered the family a level of comfort and security scarce in those times.

No one mentioned Vichy anymore. The war years had been swallowed whole. Étienne was forgotten too, more or less, which suited him fine. Not long ago, he’d run into one of the action français men, a federal cabinet minister, at a fundraiser for the new clinic. Once they had regularly drunk together at the Kerhulu. Now they shook hands as impervious strangers — statues — and chit-chatted about sports. Their eyes twinkled a little, of course, although at this point in their lives, laughter was beyond either of them. Their joke, and quarrel, was with history, and there it would remain.

“Quebec City? I also spent some time there, after the war,” the minister said. He wore a silver chain around his neck that held a small medallion depicting St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers.

“Yes. After the war.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“A long time.”

“You were a student too?”

“I was an . . . émigré.”

“Ah, yes. A long time.”

For a split second they stood frozen, partially impressed with their own shadow play and partially afraid to go on lest they say something they might regret. They shook hands and parted, but the exchange was not lost on Anna. Exchanges never were.

“Who was that?”

“A cabinet minister, I think.”

“You didn’t know him?”

“No.”

“You seemed to know him quite well.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. There was something in your manner. It seemed familiar.”

“We might have met before, at Laval. We could not be certain.”

Anna knew there was more to the story — there was always more. But she did not push it. She never did. She was the perfect wife. An afterthought.

. . .

Étienne saw another statue at the fundraiser, posing by the artist’s rendering of the new Toronto Cardiology Clinic, talking to Dr. Blair, chairman of the hospital board, and that slithering journalist Madrn, holding on to her champagne glass with one hand while girlishly tracing a line in the condensation with a free finger. She may have been flirting with one of the men, or both. It had been twenty-five years. Predictably, Thérèse’s wonderful, youthful voluptuousness had lost the battle to time and gravity. She was still pretty, he supposed. Handsome. But the size . . .

Étienne ducked into the atrium. He did not want to see her, or rather, he did not want her to know that she had been seen by him. It would be embarrassing for both of them. He’d aged well enough: slim for fifty, greying in a distinguished way, like an actor or an existential philosopher. But Thérèse would no doubt be self-conscious about her weight; how could she not? He would be looking at her through the eyes of youth, and she would feel naked and ashamed for having transformed, in an instant of sorts, into a very old, very large woman. Étienne positioned himself behind a potted palm and peeked again. Had he really been in love with her? Had she really been as beautiful as he remembered? They’d been together only months or weeks and made love eight or nine times. But Étienne had revisited each encounter a thousand times. Could he ever go back to it?

“Tell me, who is that woman there, talking to Blair?” Étienne had grabbed Shulman’s elbow. The intern apologized for not having his glasses and strained to see.

“That’s what’s-her-name, the alderwoman.”

“Alderwoman?”

“Yes, I think.”

“Thérèse?”

“Yes. That’s it. Her husband’s a writer or something. Lefty, you know — a socialist.”

Shulman said something else to continue the conversation, but Étienne had moved on. A kind of panic had seized him, and he decided that he and his wife should leave at once. Anna was standing where he’d left her, talking to the reeve about flowers. A passionless man, the reeve had ensnared Anna in a Gregorian monotone that barely subsided as Étienne took his wife’s arm and led her in the general direction of the door.

“We really must be going . . . tremendous event . . . the clinic . . .”

Étienne tried to think of some triviality to add but could not. So he smiled and nodded, implying something deeper.

Anna came quietly. Parties she could take or leave. If her husband was ready to go, she was ready to go with him. She was so uncomplicated, this sturdy Upper Canadian.

Then the statue appeared again, placed now by the doorway, talking loudly to the director, who was holding her coat. The sleeve was inside out, and had tangled. The slack muscle and fat of Thérèse’s arm had bound with the fabric somehow and pinned one arm behind her back. She did not stop talking. This was the last thing Étienne wanted — to come face- to-face with this former lover at the doorway, his wife in tow. It would have been too horrible, too awkward. They would have to be introduced and coyly remember each other, then Thérèse would see Anna, already so much younger than Étienne, and start to feel self-conscious, and that, that would be enough to let everyone know (the director, Anna) that he and Thérèse had once slept together. It was an embarrassment they could all do without.

“Drink, my dear?” He piloted Anna toward the bar counter, and not a moment too soon, as he heard the director calling his name from behind.

“Dr. du Chatelait? Doctor?”

“I thought you wanted to leave.” Anna was perplexed.

“No, my dear. I was merely saving you from that awful drone.”

“He can go on.”

“He certainly can, my dear. He certainly can.”

Étienne signalled the bartender with one finger, then called for two gin and tonics. They’d barely started their drinks when he had the curious thought of making Thérèse his lover again. He smiled a little, and Anna, thinking he was smiling at her in that adoring way husbands sometimes did in laundry commercials, smiled back. It was a private joke, of course: Thérèse did nothing for him. Anna was vastly more attractive, not to mention Dr. Cole. An occasional affair was one thing a wife could always forgive. But to cheat on Dr. Cole . . . to cheat on his mistress? It seemed almost too wicked to contemplate.

. . .

Every negotiation is a shared lie that starts when one party tells the other, “I will not negotiate.” Every negotiation, every marriage vow, every death begins this way.

How did they know? No doubt someone in the RCMP had ratted him out. It was never a good idea to make deals with the cops, it was never a good idea to make deals with anyone. But life was a series of deals and deals within deals, with new ones coming up always to replace the broken promises and lies. That was the nature of his business: survival. Information was Madrn’s currency, and it required considerable investment to keep him going.

That he’d double-crossed the Front — the FLQ — well, it was expected of him. Now they would want something in return. Madrn was ready to negotiate.

The van turned sharply, sending Madrn and his box skidding across the floor. The crate jammed into the side panel, smashing Madrn’s ring finger. He swore quickly in Polish, realizing that this was the first time he had spoken his mother tongue in — what? — four years?

“You should be a little more careful,” he said, good naturedly. He could tell now they were off the highway. The road was bumpier and had many curves. He folded his arms across his chest as the crate skidded around this way and that. “Maybe I should drive,” he said, laughing to stress that his remark was a joke. He wanted to show them he was a good guy. He wanted to show them that he was on their side.

. . .

So he saw an old lover at a party, and now he was upset. It would be easy enough to dismiss the queasy feeling as Étienne’s vanity, the dilemma of the middle-aged man who did not wish to acknowledge that time was conquering even him. But there were more practical concerns. After his arrival from France, Étienne hadn’t just flirted with fascism, he embraced it whole-heartedly; they’d set up house together. Not out of a driving political sense, although that grew with time, but mostly because it so very much pleased the people around him. The students, the politicos, the priests (particularly the priests — Abbé Groulx even paid him the honour of a visit) all wanted to meet the elegant young man with the curious accent, almost Swiss, and the intimate ties with Vichy. They treated him as a true relic, a fingernail of Christ, and let’s be clear: he was only twenty-five. It went to his head, of course it did. Thérèse was intimately tied to that moment of his life, and here lay the root of his greatest worry. While he was largely protected from the others, who cowered with him behind the same veil of secrecy, there were no guarantees with this woman. She had been attracted to him because he was handsome and silent and young and foreign and seemed to be a man of rank within the intelligent circles of Quebec City. But she herself had no political interest at the time and therefore was invulnerable today. Étienne could not say the same. If word of his past escaped, everything from his good name (bought and paid for from a Parisian passport forger) to his surgical practice to his Rosedale home, everything he’d struggled to acquire in the years since he’d come to Toronto could dissolve. He’d seen it happen before his very eyes. Himmel was head of cardiology when Étienne first arrived at the clinic back in 1958. Within a year, stories began to circulate about Himmel’s activities during the war, eventually publicly confirmed by a woman who’d been his acquaintance in Austria. To hear Himmel tell it, he’d been some office functionary for the Nazi Party in Vienna, “collecting names for lists.” But the clinic, which depended heavily on the benevolence of the local Jewish community, could not tolerate the whisper of such scandal. A Nazi among us? Himmel lost his post and almost went bankrupt fighting the extradition case launched by overzealous immigration officials. Last Étienne heard, this doctor — a gifted surgeon, really — was working the night shift at a local asylum, dispensing tranquilizers and carrying the bedpans of lunatics.

It would be foolish to think that things had changed very much in ten years. Certainly the hair was fashionably longer, the clothing looser, and a vine of joyless sexual and moral liberation had crept through the garden of society, but Étienne would not to be fooled. Thérèse was to be wooed and seduced and thus her silence bought. It was a different sort of veil from his own but cut from the same cloth. This silence could be won.

But how to win her body?

. . .

One of Étienne’s pet theories was that, while the fastest route to a man’s heart was through his stomach (emotionally speaking, of course, although some of his experiments with less invasive surgical techniques suggested that the adage might have genuine medical applications), the fastest way to a woman’s heart was through her husband’s chequebook. The meeting was easy to arrange. A writer was always looking for commissions, and when Shulman, under Étienne’s auspices, suggested that the board approach the alderwoman’s husband to write a series of promotional articles on the cardiology clinic, the members immediately recognized the political and public relations benefits.

Lunch was at the Royal York. The writer came prepared. He opened his clipboard, clicked his pen and adjusted his tie in a manner that led Étienne to suspect he was not accustomed to wearing one.

“It’s quite a coincidence, really. I’ve only just finished an article on heart disease for Readers’ Digest.” His name was Wonnacott, and he was a likeable enough sort. A little dull, perhaps. But in another time and place, Étienne and he might have been friends, if there were no worthier company around. “I think the world of cardiology is about to explode — if you’ll excuse a bad joke. And as I understand it, you folks here in Toronto are leading the advance guard . . .”

He needn’t try so hard. The job was already his. But Étienne said nothing, it wasn’t his place, and Dr. Baird of the board let the writer go on, contributing the odd encouraging interjection here and there. Perhaps even the writer knew that no one was interested in him.

The idea was simple enough. The Globe was a long-time supporter of the clinic. They had agreed to run a special eight-page insert to promote the clinic and its activities. Dr. Baird had even cooked up a title: “Heart to Heart.”

“Of course, there could be some travel involved.” It was the first time Étienne had spoken since the introductions.

“Of course.”

“A couple of weekenders: Ottawa, New York.”

“The Mayo Clinic?”

“Exactly. My office will make the arrangements. I’ll have Shulman set it up.”

“Of course.”

“Excellent.”

“Excellent.”

The subject of money was tactfully broached, with Baird offering a sizable retainer with per diem. And there it was, before the coffee had even arrived, the husband was bought and paid for. The wife would soon follow.

. . .

Let us permit Étienne to indulge in a little fantasy. He has taken the train to Marseilles — it could have been yesterday (like any good fantasy, this one seamlessly blends past, present and future) — and, by chance, found himself alone in a compartment with Thérèse and her doddering grandmother. Of course, as far as he knew, Thérèse had never actually been to France, let alone Marseilles. But at seventeen, her chubby beauty and unsophisticated charm — a gorgeous, uninhibited hedgehog — would not have been out of place in the south. Of course, the grandmother would fall asleep some time into the trip, leaving the two teenagers virtually alone. They would have barely spoken up to this point, and both would be pretending to be engrossed in their reading material, when Thérèse would subtly shift her leg, offering Étienne a glimpse of her school-white panties. Of course, it could have been an accident, there was no way of knowing for sure, but Étienne found that if he moved in his seat just so, he could find a spot where a triangle of panties was in full view, and, with a slight tilt of his head, he could make out the line of her brassiere peeking through an undone button. And so they would continue for the rest of the train ride, Thérèse shifting ever so slightly (a small, planetary motion) and Étienne adjusting himself accordingly. Occasionally, her hand would brush up against herself here or there, seemingly signalling her desire, but nothing definitive. That was the attraction for him: the uncertainty, the endless erotic possibility of the uncertain.

In truth, she’d been twenty or so when they’d met and he twenty-five, already a veteran of the sexual wars. But where he was reserved in his advance, she went on the attack (they did meet on a train, a train from Montreal, and she did wordlessly seduce him across a crowded compartment in a manner not dissimilar to his fantasy) as only colonial Catholic girls — convinced they were protected by God and society — could do. She’d come to Quebec City that summer to stay with her widowed aunt (a vivacious teacher in her early thirties; Étienne had made a play for her too) but wound up spending most of her time — sleeping, eating, drinking and making love — in Étienne’s bedroom. There were tears when she left to go back to her parents, but not too many. Pleasure was the only stake; that they were doomed from the start only sweetened the pot. Still, Étienne preferred the Marseilles fantasy, the endless tease in a train that would never reach its destination, to the real-life memory. He tried to imagine how things would work out with his newly rediscovered Thérèse and what sort of effect this would have on his fantasies. Would the experience of the present erase the memory of his non-existent past? And how would it all transpire? Perhaps he would telephone her when her husband was away (the telephone was the perfect tool of seduction for Étienne: no eye contact, no body language, every nuance of intent packed into the voice), suggest they go for a drink or a walk in the park (she’d been something of an exhibitionist, and on one occasion had pleased him forcefully in the grassy moat surrounding the Citadel as dozens of tourists wandered close by). Perhaps he could arrange an accidental encounter (women were pushovers when they believed fate was involved); this might take some doing, but it was easy enough to imagine them running into one another on the subway. The symmetry was appealing.

The How was one thing, the How Could He was another. It wasn’t Anna; she barely concerned herself in his affairs beyond the usual social and domestic duties. As long as the social order wasn’t challenged, Anna, the good old Canadian, remained docile. But Dr. Cole — Sondra really, but he loved the pretentiousness of her full title, and it underscored that she was a professional, a New Woman in the New World — she kept him on a short leash and seemed to know everyone in the city. He had to be discrete, or word would get back to his mistress. Of course, discretion was just what he wanted. Discretion turned him on. The other part of the equation, though, was difficult to work through. How could he bring himself to kiss her? How could he bring himself to make love to a woman so old and so . . . expansive? It may seem a vanity, but he was certain of his powers of seduction, particularly in this case. He was well kept, again for his age, sophisticated and successful — these things mattered more than almost anything to a woman. But most of all, he would represent for Thérèse that moment in time when she had been so much more than she is now (in being much less), when she had been (and this is critical) an object of desire. Here lay the key to the whole seduction. Whereas in a man’s fantasy, the woman was the subject of desire (the subject, that is, of erotic fulfillment), in her own mind, she needed to feel like a sexual object. Not in the utilitarian sense, something to be used and discarded (that came afterwards), but almost in an iconographical sense: something greater than what it was; something steeped in meaning; something venerated and desired, but always with the understanding that while it could be approached, it could never be fully possessed. There was something mythic about this kind of love — about seduction. Something very Greek. So, from that point of view, the seduction was easy. But what about him? How could he do it? How could he love her again? How could he make love to her again?

. . .

He almost blew it. Sunday morning, and Anna had asked him to walk along Lakeshore. The weather was unusually temperate for this time of year, and Étienne thought nothing of it. Of course, just past the public pool (still open this late in the season), who should the fates decree would walk towards them but Thérèse and her husband with a young child, no more than a toddler, whom Étienne concluded must be their grandson. Étienne considered leading Anna off the pathway down toward the water, on the pretext of looking for birds. But the writer had already seen them. An encounter was unavoidable.

“We have to stop meeting like this. People are starting to talk.”

“Mr. Wonnacott, how good to see you. I was just telling my wife about your work. Anna, this is the author I was telling you about. He’s going to be helping the clinic . . .”

Introductions were made all round, and when it came time for Thérèse to shake his hand she played the scene perfectly. Barely a flash of recognition in her eyes, but when he permitted his hand to linger a moment in hers, she did not repel it. He could feel the warmth transferring between them. And that was it. A moment of doting upon the child (whose particulars were never fully explained), some pleasant “good afternoons,” and the meeting was terminated. It could not have lasted more than three minutes. But Étienne believed he’d turned what might have been a small disaster to his advantage. He’d definitely made a connection with Thérèse, reinforced by their spontaneous pact of secrecy. Perhaps she’d been embarrassed — no doubt she had — but kept it to herself well. Another woman might have been flustered, which would have aroused suspicions in the husband, even a dullard such as this. But she conceded nothing. She was better at this than Étienne ever expected. So potential disaster was turned into gain. The gods had brought them together and tickled her interest. The next time they met, she would be ready.

. . .

It was not who he thought. When the receptionist told him there was a writer in his office, he expected to find Wonnacott waiting there. But it was that journalist. The Pole. Madrn.

“Just a few questions, monsieur le docteur. If I may . . .”

He always had just a few questions. He’d always bring up names: Georges-Benoit Montel; Raymond Chouinard; Abbé Pierre Gravel. Antiphon.

“I’m just trying to put together the facts, monsieur le docteur. There are so many missing pieces to the puzzle, yes?”

You’d think Madrn (a dissident himself with a dubious past who still courted extremists of both the right and the left) would let well enough alone. He had been one of the first people in Canada to write about Oswald Mosely’s Blackshirts and had also interviewed key members of the FLQ and even introduced them to visiting celebrity radicals and rock stars. When Pierre Valliers showed up at John and Yoko’s Bed-In for Peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Madrn was there, slouching in the background.

Mostly, Étienne had been able to keep Madrn at bay. The journalist had approached him several times with an interest in doing an article or book or something on the roots of French Canadian radicalism. Étienne demurred: he’d been a student only; he knew nothing of radical politics; having spent only a few years in Quebec, he had very little to add along the lines of cultural or social observations. Once, at a party for the Belgian consul, Madrn tried to bait Étienne into confessing . . . something or another. That he’d been a fascist or had befriended fascists or spoken to someone who knew a fascist, Étienne was never sure. The consul himself came to Étienne’s defence, saying that he knew of the doctor’s family, that they’d comported themselves during the war no less nobly than his own (the consul, a charter member of the Fellowship of the Veil, was being perfectly truthful). The Pole was playing the odds. He knew that every man, and certainly any man who’d safely come out of Europe in the last thirty years, had a shadow in his past, and he took it as a personal affront whenever anyone tried to keep his private business private.

“It was a long time ago, sir. I’m sure it’s a time many would rather forget.”

“And you, monsieur le docteur? Would you rather forget? Hmm?”

“I, Mr. Madrn, I have nothing worth remembering.”

. . .

These are the facts as Étienne did not remember them, exactly as they were never reported to that journalist. In July of 1940, mere weeks after the aging Marshall Pétain had signed the armistice agreement (not out of cowardice or a particular fondness for Hitler and his politics, as some maintained, but because he very rightly perceived that capitulation under the Nazis would be vastly more palatable than defeat), Étienne and his family moved from Rhône, that ancient Roman city where his father had worked as a general physician, to Verrière, where his uncle was mayor and where his father was granted an administrative post with the local hospital council. Here, Étienne (nee Paul André Emmanuel Étienne Boussat-Antiphon; he’d added du Chatelait, rather uncleverly, because it was his grandmother’s maiden name) began his internship, having already completed his formal studies. Here, at his uncle’s insistence, he also took nominal membership in the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism and, after that, the Legionnaire Security Service, pledging to fight democracy, Jews and the Resistance, in that order. Eventually, he was pressed into service of the Franc-Garde of the French Militia, a fervently anti-Gaullist organization whose main objective seemed to be the systematic denunciation of every French man, woman and child who was not a militia member (and many who were). Étienne satisfied the mandate by providing key militia officials with an endless supply of names taken from the hospital death rolls. That they were dead only enhanced Étienne’s status; the militia appeared to be carrying out its mandate to a degree of efficiency rarely seen in France. In the waning hours of the war, as the Allied victory seemed imminent, Étienne’s father sent him to Spain with a small collection of gold and a large assortment of false documents. While being tried in absentia for crimes against the state and sentenced to ten years of national disgrace, Étienne obtained a six-month student visa for Canada (that this twenty-year-old man had a high school student visa seemed not to disturb the immigration officials), and, following a ten-day voyage on a Cunard freighter, he landed in Montreal. He left immediately for Quebec City, where his uncle assured him he would find men not unsympathetic to the Cause. What that cause was, Étienne wasn’t sure. But he hoped most emphatically that it had something to do with allowing him to get on with his life.

. . .

So you can see that Étienne’s world was full of statues, which is perhaps why he found himself thinking of Medusa. A painting at the provincial gallery set this train of thought in motion, an avant-garde artist’s depiction of the gorgon myth, an ugly head — nostrils splayed, asymmetrical eyes, wrinkled and hirsute skin, full, chapped lips, her hair a nest of serpents — set upon the beautiful body of young woman. She was surrounded by onlookers who, captured by either her hideousness or her beauty, had turned into marble statues in the Classic, Grecian style. Étienne had stood transfixed, considering the detail of each snake, and smiled when he recognized that Medusa, at least for a moment, had turned him to stone as well. He thought of Thérèse, for numerous reasons (most of them quite obvious), and returned to that image over and over again whenever she entered his mind. In fact, he began to think of her as Medusa, mentally transplanting her head onto the body the artist had rendered, and in his internal conversation he referred to Thérèse directly as Medusa. He even began to call the planned seduction the Medusa Project: his own little joke.

. . .

There were improprieties. In fact, Madrn’s next article would expose a lot of them. Laporte’s unseemly connections, for one. He had strong ties to organized crime in Montreal, and there were some, including prominent FLQ supporters, who believed that the Laporte kidnapping was actually the work of professional hit men. Perhaps they were even working with the tacit approval of Bourassa and the police. How else could you explain the fact that the kidnappers had managed to walk away — in broad daylight — with the deputy premier of the province, snatch him right from under the noses of the police and army? Even given the legendary ineptitude of Quebec’s police force, this was a little too hard to believe. In allowing Laporte to be kidnapped, Bourassa had rid himself of a man who was at once a dangerous political rival and a potential embarrassment to his government.

“We should talk, comrade. I mean it. I have a lot of information. It could be useful.”

The driver did not respond. None of the men did. There were at least two kidnappers, Madrn believed, probably four. That’s the way the FLQ operated: safety in numbers. They were just young guys really, punks, mostly politically unsophisticated, in the game for the thrill of it, the danger, the righteousness, the brotherhood. They bombed and kidnapped like other young men gang-banged.

“For instance, do you know about Operation Essay? Hmm? This is no accidental occurrence, my friends, this ‘crisis.’ The government — Trudeau — has been planning this for months. A secret plan with the army and the cops. You guys think you’re in the driver’s seat, my friends. You’re not. You’re playing into their hands, I can tell you that right now . . .”

He hadn’t seen their faces, hadn’t seen anything of them, in fact. When he felt the pistol on his neck, he’d gone without question. He raised his hands and said, “Just tell me what to do, boys.” At first, he thought — he hoped — that they would simply ask him to interview them, to get their side of the story out, and that they were merely going to extraordinary lengths to protect their identities and locations. But when they pushed him towards the box and directed him to get into it — well, that’s when he knew he was in trouble.

Madrn pressed his lips to the holes and sucked in some fresh air. The van smelled new, a rental, no doubt. The air inside the box — a storage trunk or maybe a packing crate — was mouldy, with a more pleasant undertone of wood. Cedar, he thought. Yes, cedar.

“I also have a line on some guns, my friends. Kalashnikovs. Almost new. I can get them for you for a song . . .”

. . .

Not long after his visit to the gallery, Étienne received a package from Madrn. It arrived by regular post; Anna brought the unsealed envelope to him in his study. Inside was a draft manuscript for an article the journalist was writing for a leading English-language Quebec daily, an article that more or less accurately detailed, among other things, Étienne’s flight from Europe and his rise within the rightist circles of New France. A typed note invited the doctor to correct any errors and craft, if he so desired, his own rebuttal. It ended with a short, handwritten addendum, underlined for emphasis. “We should talk!” Étienne read the article once, then, after cancelling a ten o’clock appointment, read it again. His first impulse was to write a stinging letter to the editor, defending himself and demanding, in advance of publication, an unequivocal retraction. His second impulse was to call a lawyer friend with intimate knowledge of Étienne’s circumstances. His third impulse was to call a cabinet minister or two and ask them to apply the kind of pressure that could get a story like this killed. In the end, he read the article again; there was something about Madrn’s prose that appealed to him. Emotionless, motionless, almost hypnotic, not charged, as Étienne would have expected, with political rhetoric or intent. The result was that Étienne came across as a calculating fiend, coldly detached from the events of the time, seeking only to protect and further himself. Was he really such a monster?

Étienne picked up the note and scrutinized it. The handwritten message was curious. Why should they talk? Was there something Madrn wanted to say that could not be entrusted to a note? Did he want, Étienne speculated, to offer a deal? Perhaps this was part of a primitive blackmail scheme, his present (as was always the case in blackmail) held hostage by the past? He could hear his wife puttering in the sitting room next door and wondered how the revelations would affect her. She could surprise him but didn’t do it often. The story would no doubt devastate her. And now Étienne put the note down and, slumping deep into his chair, dropped his head into his hands. He thought again, almost speaking the words aloud: Am I really this monster?

. . .

Étienne had grown up in the age of statues. In Rhône there were gods and statues everywhere. But now he lived in an age of radio, of television, of journalists and Marxists. Of politics. One couldn’t even trust one’s mistress anymore. Étienne could no longer tell who was having whom: was Sondra his mistress, or was he hers?

And now they were having lunch again, and she was playing the role of conciliator. Étienne was upset about the package he’d received. He left the precise details of the package vague and would only say that, despite the outward appearances of civility, his was a cutthroat profession.

Sondra ran her hand through her long hair, streaked with grey. She wasn’t that old, really, thirty-four or thirty-five, he guessed (he’d never asked — a gentleman didn’t — although he was certain she would tell him if he did), and could easily have coloured it. Most women of her age would.

“It’s like anything. There’s is only so much room at the top, there is always someone circling around to take your place. Anyway, enough of this business.” But this business did not leave his mind, and he came back to it several times over lunch and later, back in her apartment. They’d made love in the usual manner, after coffee and the radio news, on the bed in the spare room (neither of them felt comfortable doing it in her bed, with its ghosts and shadows). He’d only just finished when he rolled off and said, “You know, this business — it will kill her.”

“Kill who?”

“Anna. It will kill her. She always likes everything to be the same. She never wants anything to change. Of course, things change all the time, everything changes around her . . .”

His voice trailed off, and Sondra pulled the yellow sheet up to her neck. Étienne stood and picked up his shorts, which he’d neatly folded over the back of the armchair at the foot of the bed. He thought of how much more comfortable chairs were these days, less decorative and more utilitarian than when he was a boy. When he’d been growing up, his mother had chairs that no one was allowed to sit in. Étienne dressed in silence. These silences were beginning to define his life.

. . .

Madrn tried a different tack.

“Look, if it’s money you’re after, I can provide you with what you want. I’m not a rich man by any means, but I have some . . . resources.”

What these men failed to realize was that Madrn had been a hostage his entire life. Born in a country that did not exist, surrounded by invaders who looked like him, talked like him, ate like him, stank like him. And the secret was . . . the secret was that once you become a captor, you also become a hostage.

“I’m just thinking out loud, of course, but what’s in my mind is some sort of negotiable commodity. I’m thinking specifically of heroin right now, but that can all be discussed. The point is, I’m willing to swing a deal. But you have to tell me what you want.”

In Poland, everything had been a negotiation. He’d negotiated his way out of the army and into the polytechnic institute, he’d negotiated himself in and out of bed, he’d negotiated for an ounce of caviar and for a loaf of bread. Once he’d traded cigarettes for toilet paper, only to trade it back again for more cigarettes. The What was never significant, it was what the What did for you that mattered. A man with something to trade has status, and that alone makes him a hostage.

“Do you know how I got to this country? I invented myself. That’s right, comrades. I gave myself a mother and a father, I gave myself a wife and three small children. I bought my freedom on their backs, my little invented wife and our make-believe brats. They were my collateral. My money-back guarantee.”

Nothing. Silence still.

“Maybe you just want your freedom, a one-way ticket out of here? Where do you want to go? Cuba? Algeria? Hollywood? Just tell me. Getting you there — the documents, the contacts — that’s the easy part. It’s making up your fucking mind. That’s the difficulty.”

. . .

It’s funny how the world works. The gods at play. Étienne had called on the alderwoman because of the Pole and his blackmail scheme. He thought that maybe, somehow (to be honest, the details were not worked out yet), Thérèse could help him. She had a lot of sway in this town and at the very least could be counted on to vouch for him. She’d suggested on the phone that he come over to her apartment to speak directly, although she prefaced that remark by explaining that her husband was out of town on business unrelated (she was emphatic on this point) to the series of articles for the cardiology clinic. Of course. The articles. He’d forgotten the Medusa Project. And now here she was, providing the perfect entrée for him. He did not let it slip.

“Well, I have some general thoughts about the articles that maybe I could discuss with you, in general terms. I’d like your feedback, and I’m sure your husband would appreciate it as well.”

He arrived, like any experienced seducer, under the cover of daylight. Thérèse met him at the door. She wore a billowy brown caftan which, although it did not conceal her size, did not accentuate it either. She led Étienne to the sitting area, chatting in a very animated away about the latest news on the radio: first the British trade consul, now the Deputy Premier of Quebec — both taken hostage by masked gunmen. A French Canadian terrorist group calling itself the FLQ had claimed responsibility.

“It’s impossible to believe. Something like this happening here, in our country.”

Étienne, who had not heard the news before, agreed. Things like this did not happen in Canada. Then he began, in as indirect a way as possible, to talk about Madrn’s article. But Thérèse would have none of it; she kept dragging the conversation back to the present.

“We were in Montreal only last month, Gerald and I. There was something . . . the atmosphere was . . . tense.”

“I haven’t been to Montreal in years. Decades perhaps.”

Still, Thérèse played it cool. She never gave the slightest inkling that she had known Étienne before. Yet there was something intimate in her body language. The way she tilted her head when she spoke to him, the way she held his gaze for a moment before quickly diverting her eyes. She was at once inviting him and pushing him away. So Étienne decided to seize the initiative. He stood abruptly to take his leave, and when, as if on cue, Thérèse protested that they hadn’t even begun to talk about the clinic articles, Étienne boldly invited her to dinner that night to finish their discussion. By now she was blushing, he was certain of that. On an impulse, he took her hand and murmured some ancient nothings that perhaps he’d offered to her before, years ago, in a Spartan bedroom at the top of a Quebec City rooming house.

“You speak French.” She seemed genuinely surprised.

“I am French.”

“How quaint.” Thérèse rolled her tongue through her mouth. Étienne could see the saliva sticking to her palate. “I was once French too.”

She smiled, and Étienne noticed for the first time how her teeth had yellowed and cracked. She squeezed his hand and whispered a place and time where they could meet for dinner. Then she stepped back from the door, raised her eyes in a manner that she must have imagined coquettish and wished him a good afternoon. At that moment he understood. She had absolutely no recollection of their shared past, that she wasn’t just cleverly faking ignorance but joylessly revelling in it, and, as he glanced at her one last time before the door closed, he realized that the woman who was already old and large in his eyes had become older and larger. He noticed too that his hands were trembling again.

. . .

The box landed upside down on a layer of thin ice. Madrn immediately felt the cold, the sour air freezing the inside of his nose. Perhaps the force of the blow had knocked him out briefly (he’d fallen, God knows, twenty feet, twenty-five maybe), but in any case, he was certainly dazed. When he became aware again, he realized that the water had begun to seep in through the air holes, and the box was filling up. Being upside down meant that his head would be the first thing to go under. He kicked and kicked again, which only freed the box from the ice and plunged him deeper into the river. In his panic, Madrn made no attempt to hold his breath. The cold water flooded his nose and his lungs, and he was certainly dead before the boxed settled on the bottom of the St. Lawrence. It was still night. The driver looked down from the bridge, flicked the dying bud of a cigarette onto the ice below. She noticed her hand; it had already stopped trembling. Anna hesitated, then wondered what she was still doing there. Étienne would be waiting for her, wondering where she was. She went back to the van. She was happy. The world — her world — was no longer different. Madrn’s manuscript lay on the passenger seat. She picked it up and held it for a moment. She’d thought of dumping it with the journalist, but that could have been risky. Instead, she would stop at her mother’s on the way home, burn it in her fireplace. She started the ignition and pushed forward. New snow was already falling on the dirt road, covering her tracks. Although it was still dark, it would be morning soon, it would be morning and nothing would be different. Madrn was dead and she was free again.