SEPTEMBER 1995
“It happened very fast,” Léo says, his eyes welling. “We made the decision and we acted. After we did it, we were all numb, in shock.”
James hasn’t moved or breathed in hours. Hasn’t touched his coffee or asked a single question.
“All I remember thinking is how fragile life is.”
James cringes. Sure, life is fragile when you choke the last breath out of someone. “Who did it?” he asks Léo. “I know he was choked with his chain. But who actually did it? None of you has ever said.”
“We all did it.”
“That’s not possible,” James argues. “There’s been speculation that Paul wasn’t even there when Laporte was murdered, and also rumors that he confessed on tape to strangling him. Why keep the details to yourself after all these years? You’re a free man.”
“It was all of us together,” Léo insists. “I don’t remember the details, who did what. We were all there. We all acted together.”
James sighs. Why doesn’t he just come clean? Either take credit for himself or set Véronique free of the burden she carries of having a murderer for a father. If he didn’t actually do it, why not exonerate himself? Why won’t any of them tell the truth after all this time?
“It wasn’t an accident,” Léo says. “I can tell you that. The media thought maybe it was, or that’s the story they told to make us look incompetent. But we made the decision to kill him and we did. Sometimes I can’t believe we did it. I couldn’t believe it then, I still can’t. But it happened.”
“What was it like? Watching another man die?”
“You’re numb. I was . . . It’s impossible to describe. It’s surreal. You have to shut a part of yourself down. You act on instinct. We just kept moving after we did it. We had to keep moving, stay busy, so we wouldn’t think about what we’d done. We weren’t violent guys.”
James has to suppress his anger. He tries not to react, bites his tongue.
“Anyway, that’s it,” Léo continues. “We wrapped his body in a blanket. We carried him out. We were gentle with him. I don’t know why. Guilt, I guess. It wasn’t personal. We put the body in the trunk of the Chevrolet, and one of the guys drove to the airport and left the car there. We took off to the Townships. We had a friend in the country. We hid in the crawl space of his farmhouse until they found us.”
“In a tunnel, I read?”
Léo nods. “I’ve never talked about this to anyone before,” he says. “Not a word.
“Why now?”
“For my daughter. She asked me to.”
“That’s it?”
Léo shrugs. “Maybe part of me hopes to make people understand why we did it.”
“Do you regret it? Or at least how it turned out?”
“I don’t regret any of it,” he says. “I acted on my convictions. It was a tough decision, but it was sincere.”
“Not a youthful transgression?”
“What we did was for our people—the workers, the exploited, the long-suffering French slaves in Quebec. It was for a cause I still believe in today. You’re too young to really understand. You’ll never know what it was like for us back then.”
“So you’d do it again?”
“I would,” he responds, not missing a beat. “We may have been idealists, but we were not misguided.”
“You don’t regret going to prison?” James presses. “Missing out on your daughter’s life?”
“I didn’t enjoy prison,” he says sharply. “They strip you of all your dignity. They systematically destroy your spirit. You’ve never seen poor treatment until you’ve been inside a jail. They treated us like we were animals. Obviously I would have rather watched my daughter grow up, but I did what I had to do.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Ask me after the referendum.”
“I’ve seen the footage of your arrest,” James says. “You looked into the camera and said you’d done it for Véronique.”
“I did.”
“You mean you killed Pierre Laporte for her?”
“No, of course not that.”
“What then?”
“The political act. It was for her and her generation—for all of you—so you’d have a better future. Violence happened to be a part of it.”
“Part of it? A man lost his life.”
“It was necessary. The federal government forced our hand. Laporte was a casualty of war.”
“But there was no war.”
“There was indeed a war, M. Phénix. Your father knew it. It’s sad that you don’t.”
“How do you think Véronique feels about what you did?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“Looking back with the perspective of twenty-five years, do you think you advanced the cause enough to warrant the murder of an innocent man?”
“I think so,” he says. “The October Crisis paved the way for the Parti Québécois victory in ’76 and the ’80 referendum, and now this referendum. It had to start somewhere.”
“A lot of separatists would disagree that the FLQ had anything to do with the PQ’s success.”
“Sure they would, because it’s easy to distance yourself from the dirty work, even though you benefitted from it. The ones who denounced us, you don’t think they were secretly overjoyed about what we accomplished for them? Someone had to break ground. Violence was required.”
“You don’t sound at all remorseful.”
“Remorse is complicated. Why don’t you ask your former prime minister Pierre Trudeau if he’s remorseful? He is as much to blame for Laporte’s death as we are, if not more.”
“You can’t be serious,” James says, shaking his head in frustration. He wants Léo to feel remorseful, to say he’s sorry for what he did. For personal reasons—not just for this story—he needs Léo to be a decent human being.
“Trudeau could have saved Laporte’s life!” Léo shouts, his face turning dark red. “He just had to meet our very reasonable demands. Instead, he called in the troops and declared war. He sentenced that man to death. You don’t think he bears any responsibility?”
“He was just trying to protect the people,” James says. “The FLQ was a threat to society.”
“Trudeau was protecting his pride. Nothing else.”
James takes a breath. Gives Léo a minute to calm down.
“So, what’s next for Léo Fortin?”
“Everything depends on this referendum result.”
“Your old friend from the RIN recently said it would be a very dangerous situation if the Anglos and “the ethnics” hold back the will of the Francophone majority. Was he threatening more violence?”
“I don’t know what he meant by that.”
“Your daughter is a passionate supporter of Quebec independence,” James says. “Would you advocate violence for her if the outcome doesn’t go your way?”
“Not if it means she winds up in jail. Jail is the worst place on earth.”
“Worse than a coffin?”
“I think so.”
“You still haven’t said how you killed him.”
Léo is quiet.
“Was it like they said?” James presses. “You choked him with the cross around his neck?”
Still nothing.
“Was it you, Léo? Or was it one of the others?”
“We acted as one.”
He sees now where Véronique gets her stubbornness. The Fortins are nothing if not dogged.