MADAME CORPS
AND THE SNOW

THE BEACH LOOKS LIKE A marble floor: fine white sand, well compacted, smooth. The tall concrete rectangles that overlook it form a kind of colony of giant vases around the circumference of the bay, the hotels, condos, and casinos give the impression of having been carved out of the same material. They have an incandescent glow, like the purest chalk bathed in light reflected off the sea.

The sea is nearly invisible, as if the horizon has pulled it toward itself like a carpet. The line of it can just be made out in the distance, under a fine golden fog. To get to it, Sam would have to walk across this porcelain Sahara, and he prefers not to. The beach is too white. Walking on it would only dirty it. He’s happy admiring it from afar, from the height of a concrete promenade.

And Madame Corps couldn’t look more French in her cream-coloured suit and charming red silk scarf.

Corps is her real name, too. A patronymic fairly common in France, where she — let’s call her Ginette, and use her maiden name: Dufour — has remade her life. In Quebec, where her last name was Cardinal-Dufour, she’d been the legitimate wife of Jacques Cardinal, alias the Fat Cop, and the mother of his children. She was also the mistress of Marcel Duquet, the militant separatist, well known on the South Shore, who was condemned to eight years in prison for having aided and abetted the assassins of Minister Lavoie when they were fleeing the country in the fall of 1970.

Thirty years ago, as Madame Cardinal-Dufour, she enjoyed quite a reputation for being, shall we say, hot. A heroine of the sexual revolution. In fact, she more or less was the revolution, a kind of Odette de Crécy from Longueuil. Today she lives in France, in one of most exclusive coastal resort towns, in a chic condo she shares with Monsieur Albert Corps, chaser of sedate widows’ petticoats, her chauvinistic husband.

Coffee on the terrace of the Sables-d’Olonne. Two cigarettes already stubbed out in an ashtray shaped like a Coquilles Saint-Jacques shell. Madame Corps buys packs of menthols and transfers the cigarettes into a gold-plated case. She uses a cigarette holder that looks like it might be made out of ivory. Small wrinkles radiate from her lips, which she soaks in barley water or something. It’s still not polite to ask a woman her age, but Madame Dufour’s offspring numbered four in 1970. Say she’s somewhere between sixty and sixty-five and give her whatever hair colour you want.

From the terrace he could watch the passing parade: girls, sports cars, mothers pushing baby carriages, tourists dragging suitcases on wheels.

“You didn’t cross the Atlantic just to see me.” It’s the first thing she’s said to him.

Samuel smiles. “I don’t have that kind of money,” he says. “But in Quebec even a second-rate writer gets a lot of invitations. To sit on a jury for an obscure prize for short stories, for example, from anywhere in the French-speaking world, including those with tall, thin Africans. And if the jury meets in La Rochelle, the old slave port and supplier of fine French women for the colonies, not a hundred kilometres from here, then all the better!”

“You don’t look like a writer,” she says. “In France, writers look like writers. They dress like writers. I suppose you might be mistaken for a musician . . .”

“So I’m often told. But I’ll have you know that I don’t look like a regular at the Sables-d’Olonne, either. No smoking jacket. Which makes it hard for someone who’s supposed to be here squandering the family fortune at the roulette table.”

“That’s because when you think casino, you think Françoise Sagan, when in reality casinos are full of a bunch of retired suburbanites from Baltimore on a group tour. I haven’t read your books. I’ve never heard of you. How did you find me?”

“I found a Jacques Cardinal in the phone book, called the number, and talked to his son, who didn’t want to know anything about anything. All he would tell me was that he’d burned all the bridges before his father croaked and that the last time he saw the old man he was snorting a line of coke. Then he let me squeeze your number out of him.”

“That man spread a lot of bad around. Coco, I mean. What are you writing? A book about the Lavoie Affair?”

“I’m trying to.”

“And . . . do you mind if I ask why?”

“I had a professor at university. He’s dead now. He wanted to know what happened. He started a kind of . . . club. It would take too long to explain it to you. Anyway, it’s your story I want to hear.”

“Too late. No one’s interested anymore.”

“Like the song says, if there’s only one left, let it be me.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

“Maybe. But I’m not all that interested in making a living. Two or three more wasted hours won’t make much difference . . .”

“What do you want to know?”

“Jacques Cardinal. A defrocked cop, formerly in the Montreal Police Force’s morality squad, quietly let go after he was caught taking bribes from the mob, according to one version. In the 1960s he was mixed up in anything that involved the separatist movement and the patriot groups, from the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale to the Parti Québécois, including the Front de Libération Populaire, the Phalange, the Comité Indépendance-Socialisme, the Intellectuels et ouvriers patriotes de Québec, and the FLQ. I’m wondering, Madame Corps, what was your husband living on during all that time?”

“Fraud.”

“With a wife and four kids to look after? I’m just curious, is all.”

“Before we go any further, let me tell you something, and it’s really just to do you a favour: they kidnapped him, they hid him, and they killed him. That’s all there is to know, that’s the whole truth of the Lavoie Affair. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors, the wild imaginings of overworked brains. Are you a conspiracy theorist?”

“I’m more of a skeptic. Maybe, when it comes down to it, I’m a reluctant theorist. I hold on to my critical faculties. I believe in coincidences, but not in an accumulation of them.”

“For example?”

“The fact that your former lover somehow managed to drive a tractor over his own head shortly after giving an interview to a journalist from 60 Minutes. And also the routine checks. The cops are so visible in this story that it gets a bit hard to take. Like the time you went to the cabin in the sugar bush with Duquet to pick up the fugitives, do you remember that?”

“Vaguely.”

“November 1970. The ‘biggest manhunt in Canadian history’ was underway. And one fine day you get behind the wheel of a station wagon, Duquet follows you in a tow truck, you put the fugitives in the wagon, and then you pretend the car breaks down and Duquet gives you a tow. A cop stops you to see what’s going on . . . and he ends up giving you an escort! Without suspecting for a second, apparently, that the three most wanted men in the country are a few feet from him. If Duquet was trying to draw as much attention to himself as possible, he couldn’t have come up with a better plan. Why the tow truck?”

“I seem to recall that it was snowing. A real dump. You’re forgetting the snow, Samuel . . .”

“No, Madame, I am not forgetting the snow. I never forget the snow. I’m coming to that.”

“I’ve never liked it. Snow . . .”

“Where I live, there’s still snow under the spruce trees in July.”

“And you like that? Really?”

“Snow?”

“Snow.”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Good. Well . . . Can I buy you a drink?”