CHICKEN

SAM PICKED UP THE LARGE yellow envelope marked CHICKEN AFFAIR from his desk. Tidiness had never been Chevalier’s strong suit. The orderly filing cabinet, the cardboard folders with their contents, subjects, and reference numbers clearly visible on little tabs sticking up from their tops weren’t for him. He’d been more the stack-of-newspaper-clippings type, aficionado of the random page covered with illegible scribbles, folded in four and stuffed into an envelope like the one Samuel was holding in his hands at that moment.

Thick and worn though it was and stuck among stacks of what seemed at first to be uninteresting paperwork, the envelope had attracted its share of attention at UQAM. Maybe it was because of its title, written on the flap in ballpoint: a reference to the famous chicken ordered from a local rotisserie by the kidnappers of Paul Lavoie during his time of captivity — it had, after all, become part of the folklore of the October Crisis. When the pencil-pushers at the BN weren’t looking, Sam had slipped the file into his briefcase. There would be plenty of time later to send the whole thing on to the Fonds Chevalier Branlequeue at National Archives.

Nihilo was a bachelor. He lived alone in a condo in a renovated building in a section of the city that seemed to have slid downhill from the Plateau to the South-Central, between Sherbrooke and Ontario streets. His neighbours were students and gays, one of whom was dying of AIDS, a Chinese family, and a man with Down’s syndrome.

That night he reheated a plate of pasta with puttanesca sauce, a concoction of black olives and anchovies prepared according to an old recipe developed by whores in Naples, and ate it while watching a nature documentary on Télé-Québec. He learned that during the mating session, male rhinoceroses spurted literally buckets of semen in a more or less continuous ejaculation that could last for several hours without losing their erections, because their penises were covered with tiny hooks similar to the barbs on fish hooks.

When he finished eating, he took his glass of wine into his office and sat down again in front of the yellow envelope.

For Chevalier, the death of the labour minister, Paul Lavoie, at the hands of the FLQ kidnappers was the apotheosis of the October Crisis. That bloody death caused a spectacular volte-face in public opinion: the event dramatized the separatists’ cause and projected them onto the world stage. At first it had elicited a certain sympathy from the populist left that hadn’t been there before. Socialism and separatism had been seen as two separate options. But with Lavoie’s murder, the kidnappers became regarded as unscrupulous killers, ready to do anything to get what they wanted. Quebec citizens found that act of pure barbarism so repellant that they turned against the separatists and accepted the presence of the soldiers as a necessary evil.

Chevalier always maintained that, thanks to a federal cabinet document leaked to a reporter at the Globe and Mail, it was known that the government in Ottawa had, as early as the spring of 1970, formed a special committee charged with studying the ways in which the War Measures Act could be applied in Quebec. In other words, the suspension of civil rights and calling the army in were far from being a spontaneous show of support on the part of a strong central government. The call for help from a local power overcome by events was actually part of a plan, part of a long-term plan.

Chevalier Branlequeue did not believe that the FLQ had assassinated Paul Lavoie, since they had no interest in doing so. According to the official story, when the authorities refused to agree to the terrorists’ demands to free political prisoners, their response was to execute one of their hostages in cold blood. Others held to a different theory: that Lavoie had died as the result of an accident. Chevalier was of the opinion that strangling a man required a certain amount of premeditation. “Who profited from the crime?” he kept asking, before adding, with an almost imperceptible wink, “as Karl Marx used to say . . .”

The Lavoie case lacked neither conspiracy theorists nor suspects. For some, the hostage had been liquidated by a commando in the Canadian Army; for others, it was accomplished by a double agent controlled by the RCMP’s Security Services; still others had organized crime stepping in. The fact that responsibility for the execution had been claimed by a new terrorist cell baptized Royal 22nd Dieppe, and that the car containing the body had been found in a parking lot beside a military airport, barely a grenade’s throw from the headquarters of the Mobile Forces, had merely served to deepen the mystery.

And as Branlequeue pointed out, there was no need for the police to look outside the membership of the FLQ to find plenty of lost souls capable of carrying out the dirty deed.

Those were the Years of the Chicken in Montreal. Every Sunday night, the streets of Montreal and Laval teemed with little yellow Volkswagens that had illuminated St.-Hubert BBQ signs on top of them. On the South Shore, Baby Barbecue ruled the roost. Its delivery people drove Datsuns the colour of a turgescent coxcomb.

In the envelope, Nihilo found a bundle of newspaper clippings dating from the coroner’s inquest in November 1970. It was in these that one of the members of the Chevalier Cell (the recurrence of the name Chevalier was pure coincidence), a certain Ben Desrosiers, arrested the night before, first alluded to the business of the chicken.

Samuel also found an account of the chicken episode written by Chevalier himself, on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, lined and crumpled. He quickly read the cursive script, written in Branlequeue’s elegant if affected handwriting:

According to what the guardians of Lavoie themselves said, they hadn’t thought of going to the grocery store before going into action, and quickly found themselves short of provisions. Fed up with eating canned [sic] spaghetti, their leader, who was in a good mood that day, suggested they order some chicken, and he would pay for it out of his own pocket. He gave them twenty dollars. In a long interview given to Temps-Presse when he got out of prison, Richard Godefroid said when the chicken breasts in question arrived, “they all more or less devoured them . . .”

On another sheet of paper (this one torn from a notepad) were extracts of notes taken by Chevalier during Jean-Paul Lafleur’s murder trial in the winter of 1971. Among other things, they recounted that at the inquest, expert witnesses called upon to comment on the photos taken at the scene of the crime testified that they had discovered, among the boxes of takeout chicken littering the kitchen, pieces of “unconsumed meat.” This sheet was attached, by a no. 1 paperclip, to a photocopy of a police report; years later an excerpt was reproduced in the report of a specially designated investigator assigned to the case by the government. Dated the end of October, the report outlined the various avenues of investigation followed by the antiterrorist squad and offered theories on the significance of certain evidence found at the scene of the murder. While investigating the suspect house, read report SAT-904-35E, in characteristic constabulary prose, the investigators state that several chickens and other foodstuffs were found intact, not having been eaten, which led them to conclude that something very important had killed the suspects’ appetite.

In the margin, in red ink, Chevalier had written:

Come on, guys . . . Did you eat the chicken or didn’t you?

Digging deeper into the affair, Chevalier discovered that there had been two deliveries of barbecued chicken to rue Collins during that fateful week, the first taking place before Lavoie was kidnapped. In their depositions, the drivers, named respectively Rénald Massicotte and Henri Dubé, both stated they arrived at 140 rue Collins on the 10th and 16th of October, respectively, between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., so sometime around noon. On a sheet of paper, Chevalier reproduced the details of the bills presented in evidence at the trial.

Bill no. 10079. 10/10/70. Three club sandwiches. Six Pepsis.

3 x 1.60	=	$4.80
6 x 0.15	=	$0.90
Tax	=	$0.46
Total	=	$6.16

Bill no. 12232. 16/10/70. Three club sandwiches. Two whole chickens. One pack of cigarettes, brand Export “A.”

3 x 1.60	=	$4.80
2 x 3.50	=	$7.00
1 x 4.85	=	$4.85
Tax		$0.95
Total		$17.60

Samuel got up and poured himself a glass of wine. As far as he could see, everything up to this point was more or less old hat. During their meetings at the Cheval Blanc or Chez Lavigueur, the Octobeerists had had ample opportunities to ponder the pluses and minuses of the October barbecue.

But the notes written in pencil on the next page were something new:

One is a chicken, the other a chicken delivery man: the story of the Massicotte cousins . . .

Attached to this sheet by another paperclip was a photocopy of an article that had appeared in Statut particulier, in the Fall 1990 issue, on the twentieth anniversary of the October Crisis. The text, a kind of playlet imbued with the vague literary pretensions found in most radio dramas, bore the signature of Gilbert Massicotte, who, according to his biographical note, was a retired detective from the antiterrorist squad of the Montreal Police. The antiterrorist squad had been integrated into the Combined Anti-Terrorist Squad (CATS) in 1970; it was the joint organization that combined the expertise of the Montreal police, the Quebec Provincial Police, and the RCMP. The officers assigned to CATS had baptized themselves “the Combatants.”

The first chicken delivery man, the one who came on the Saturday, was the one named Rénald Massicotte. Feeling a bit dizzy, Sam riffled through the rest of the envelope’s contents without finding any more references to the Massicottes. The trail ended there.

In the Montreal telephone book, he found five G. Massicottes.

The Chinese corner store down the street sold single cigarettes. Sam found a quarter under a pile of bills on his desk, put on his coat, and went out into the winter night to buy a smoke. But first he pretended to examine the hunting and fishing magazines on the newsstand, letting his eye slide over to the shelf containing Club and International, the designers of which apparently had their own idea, and he stopped thinking about the difference between what the chef at Baby Barbecue thought was a sandwich and what was actually a sandwich.

He smoked the cigarette as he walked back to his apartment and arrived slightly out of breath.

In bed, he thought again about all those super babes with their silicone breasts as round as saucers, and masturbated, which helped him fall asleep.

But he didn’t sleep for long. He got up an hour and a half before dawn and made a pot of coffee. At ten, after having drunk the whole pot, he dialled the first of the five numbers and hit the bull’s eye on the first try.

He explained who he was to Massicotte. A university professor and, he added, a writer. He was interested in a brief bit of dialogue that Massicotte had published a decade earlier in Statut particulier, and could they perhaps grab a coffee together in a café somewhere?

“Sure,” replied the former detective lieutenant.

“That was too easy,” Samuel said to himself as he hung up.

He was sitting in the Taverne Fameux, near the glassed-in bay window, looking out at the mixture of artists, pseudo-artists, para-artists, and semi-artists, or perhaps just the young and cool, and the usual figures of the quarter, the characters who kept coming back, people who’d slipped through the cracks in the social services, all being swept along by the current toward the corner of avenue Mont-Royal and Saint-Denis. Then he turned to the sports pages, which occupied his attention for a few minutes until a series of raps on the window made him look up.

It was a short, stubby woman. He remembered her name: Marie-Québec. Her parents were hippies, which explained the name, but when he thought about it, it was no worse than naming someone Charles de Gaulle or Pierre Mendès France. Marie-Québec had been one of the few women to take part in the small group that had sat at Chevalier Branlequeue’s feet, at least at first, a sort of Octobeerist hanger-on. But at the White Horse, and later at Lavigueur’s, the talk had become sharper and the stakes higher, a kind of I’m-the-king-of-the-castle competition, with the discourse as the castle and everyone using their oratorical strengths to keep everyone else out of it. The loudmouths dominated, and Marie-Québec, who was the self-effacing kind, didn’t hang around for long. He remembered the last time he’d seen her, sidling along rue Ontario, almost invisible except to him and the inevitable drivers who cruised the corner for hookers and stopped when they saw any vaguely feminine shape. He might well have forgotten her this time, too, except that after tapping on the window and continuing on her way, she did a one-eighty and pushed open the door of the restaurant.

Samuel had once read a novel in which the author took particular pains to inform the reader that the woollen skirt worn by his heroine was of a pale aquamarine colour, with corn-yellow panels and a large knotted belt. You won’t find that kind of thing here. Simply put, Marie-Québec was dressed like any twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old woman of the time, that is, in the fringe between two millennia. She wasn’t tall. Her skin was dark. Let’s say she had the eyes and cheekbones of an Indian. At first glance there wasn’t anything remarkable about her. The way she walked did not cause men’s heads to turn when they passed her on the street. Her neckline, visible beneath her unbuttoned winter coat, did not remind him of the foothills of the Rockies.

Standing beside his table (she had asked point-blank if he was expecting someone and he had said yes without thinking), she told him she had a part in a Camus play, The Just, being put on by the Loblaw’s Happy Times Theatre in Maldoror, a town in the Abitibi region, where she was from, she explained. “Two of the actors live in Montreal,” she said, “so the rehearsals are being held here, a bit like when one person speaks English the whole group ends up speaking English.”

At that moment, a man in his early sixties, wearing a Mackinaw jacket and sporting a very full moustache came through the door, pausing just inside and scanning the restaurant.

“I think that’s my friend,” Samuel said.

She gave him an excuse-me smile but didn’t move.

“Would you like to have a beer later, say four o’clock?” he heard himself ask her, speaking quickly, even breathlessly, as though he’d been running after a moving train.

“Where?”

“At the Quai des Brumes? The Barbare? Wait, I have an idea: at Lavigueur’s, on rue Ontario.”

Massicotte was the kind of police officer who had flourished during the 1970s. The cool cop, pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. He was the cop equivalent of the with-it priest. He’d even studied sociology at UQAM, and the police department paid for him to get his master’s in the legal aspects of environmental protection. Which, it has to be said, makes him stink to high heaven of an undercover cop.

A few years before his retirement, he served as president of the Police Officers’ Brotherhood, an organization whose main function was to protect trigger-happy and overzealous cops from suffering the legal consequences of their actions.

“You know, I’m writing a novel, too . . .” Massicotte said as an opening gambit.

Samuel offered him a coffee but he opted for a beer. They hadn’t exchanged three sentences before the beer was two-thirds empty. And now Sam understood why it had been so easy for him to arrange this interview. A budding novelist! They existed even among cops? He was probably looking around for a publisher, like everyone else.

“Your own version of the events, is it?” Nihilo asked.

“Events? What events? No, it’s a story of redemption. An alcoholic police officer infiltrates a criminal organization formed by a biker gang who’s gone in with the Russian mafia. Do you know any publishers?”

“If I find you one, will you talk to me about the October Crisis?”

“About the . . .”

Samuel nodded. Massicotte shook his empty bottle at the waitress, who brought him another beer. Watching the former CATS officer drink beer on his tab, Sam found a whole new meaning for the phrase “the long arm of the law.”

“I’m tired of talking about that,” Massicotte said after chugging half the beer and putting it back on the table. “What exactly do you want to know?”

“Okay, why don’t we start with the guy who delivered the barbecue chicken to rue Collins? You’re cousins, right?”

This produced a surprising result: Massicotte didn’t say a word. For a long time nothing came out of his mouth, not the slightest sound.

Then: “I have a witness.”

“What’s that? What did you say?”

“A witness. Call Mr. Brien, in Gaspé.”

“Mr. Brien? You mean the famous lawyer? The FLQ lawyer?”

“The same. He’ll confirm everything.”

“Confirm what, exactly?”

“The story I am about to tell you.”

“Great, that’s all I ask. But how do you know Brien?”

“I ran into him in court, you know? Our paths crossed. We talked a bit.”

“And what do you need a witness for, if I may ask?”

“It’s just a figure of speech.”

Massicotte stopped and took another swig of Labatt’s 50. A long chug. He’d already finished three-quarters of his second bottle.

“Brien,” he went on, “was at the courthouse the morning those three kids who kidnapped the American consul were brought in. We’d nabbed them in June in a cabin somewhere up near Saint-Colomban. I was in charge of the investigation . . .”

He stopped again and burped, then, as an afterthought, covered his mouth with his closed fist. He grimaced, rubbed his stomach with his free hand.

“Brien was their defence lawyer. That’s why I was at the courthouse on the morning of October fifth. There’s no doubt about the date, because it was just after the opening of the trial, the same day we found out that the British Trade Commissioner had been kidnapped . . .”

“You were in court that day?”

“Yes. And suddenly there was this fucking asshole in the courtroom who took a kind of hammer, something like a judge’s gavel, out of his coat pocket and started creating a disturbance with it, banging it on things, making a ruckus, and the judge had no choice but to throw him out. I sent one of my men out to make sure he left, and that’s when I found out that the fucking asshole in question was my cousin, Rénald. Obviously, I hadn’t recognized him. I hadn’t seen him for so long I had no idea what he looked like . . .”

“What was he doing there?”

“The trial was open to the public.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“He had a personal interest in it. He didn’t know the accused. Or anyone else in the FLQ. We made sure of that.”

“So, you’re telling me . . .”

“Yup.”

“ . . . the guy who was at the trial on the fifth of October, the trial of the three FLQ members . . .”

“Yup.”

“ . . . was the same guy who delivered chicken to their buddies on the South Shore five days later? Was that pure coincidence?”

“Call Mr. Brien. He’s in the Gaspé. Tell him you’ve spoken to me.”

“Mr. Brien. Your witness.”

“Like I said.”

“You’re damn right I’ll call him.”

Massicotte raised his empty bottle and looked around for the waitress.

“It’s not that I’m not having a good time,” he said, “but could you tell me your name again?”

“Nihilo, Samuel. I’ve got your phone number. Speaking of which, do you have a number for Rénald?”

“For who?”

“Your cousin.”

“Guess what? I haven’t the slightest idea where he is. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was dead.”

“Huh. Not under tragic circumstances, I hope?”

“An angel passed over Montreal.”

With that, the former antiterrorist cop stood up. “Thanks for the beer,” he said.

“Maybe we can do it again sometime.”

“I doubt it.”

“Maybe at your book launch?”

“The book has nothing to do with the October Crisis,” Massicotte said. And turning on his heel, he left the restaurant.

“I believe you!”

After paying the tab, Samuel walked out of the Fameux feeling elated.

He turned west on Mont-Royal with the idea of spending some time in the journalism archives housed in the old Aegidius-Côté Building, at the corner of Laval. A commotion drew his attention, and he turned to look down a narrow alley, where he saw Gilbert Massicotte sitting at the wheel of his car, having just backed up into a hydro pole. Two young police officers, big, burly, and belligerent, were talking to him, their patrol cruiser parked in front of his car with all its lights flashing.

Samuel could see that they wanted him to take a Breathalyzer test and that the retired sergeant was refusing to do so. He was trying to explain to them, more or less coherently but loudly, that he had had almost nothing to drink and that an accident can happen to anyone and that he was “the former president of the Police Officers’ Brotherhood, which fought for your hard-earned rights, you ignorant, dribbling idiots, what the fuck’s your problem?” One of the younger officers grabbed him by the arm and lifted him out of the driver’s seat, pulled him out the door, pushed him brusquely ahead, and shoved him up against the side of the cruiser. After that he sent the sergeant face-first into a snowbank, whereupon his colleague knelt on him, putting all his weight into it. The sociology graduate squealed like a pig.

“You should have stuck to the two-beer defence,” Samuel murmured, but no one heard him.

“Call towing!” shouted the officer squatting on their suspect.

Then he plunked his one-hundred-and-ten kilo body containing zero trans-fat directly onto Massicotte’s face.