THE HOLE

THE BEIGE STATION WAGON STOPPED. Gode pushed a corner of his sleeping bag back and risked a peek through the window. The first thing he saw was the top half of a police uniform and an officer in three-quarter profile, his face cut off by the top of the hatchback. At almost the same time, he saw that the flashing light atop the patrol car parked a bit farther down had been turned off. Slowly he lowered the sleeping bag over his face.

“Don’t move, guys.”

They stopped breathing.

There was a whirring sound, like that of a winch, and the front of the car began to lift with a slow, steady movement.

“Tow truck,” René whispered under his breath.

The car tipped up as though trying to pour them feet-first onto the diner’s frozen parking lot. It was at about a forty-five-degree angle. They clutched the blankets and sleeping bags to keep them from sliding off, and Gode moved his right leg a bit to feel the metallic rigidity of the rifle. He inched his arm out until it touched the butt. The winching noise stopped. He thought about what he would say to the cop when he smashed the back window open with his boot. He took his hands out of the sleeping bag. Don’t even touch the rifle. Go to sleep.

Abrupt exclamations, see-you-laters, car doors slamming shut, motors starting. The station wagon, still at an angle, started swinging, its thin metal sides jolting amid a clanking of chains and couplings. They were on the move once more.

Marcel and Ginette, the future Mrs. Corps, had been taken to the cabin by the bearded young separatist. This time they had brought their friend Saint-Laurent with them and a box of provisions. Above their heads, between the leafless maple branches, the sky was an unidentifiable colour.

Ginette would remember what she saw for the rest of her life: three men, filthy and frightened, forced to live underground in the middle of a forest, like hunted animals.

Marcel Duquet told them that they couldn’t stay there. “You’ll freeze like rats,” he said. And they agreed with him.

The thin veil covering the moon meant snow.

Two days later, Duquet woke up in the house he rented in Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu and looked out the window at a blizzard. He couldn’t see the sky or the ground. He was in his late thirties, but he looked older. Thick moustache, thinning hair, a nice-guy look. His fingers hooked around his coffee mug like the talons of a bird of prey, he watched the snow piling up on the banks lining the access road. The window shook under the wind’s ululating assault. There was nothing around the solid old farmhouse to provide shelter from it. The wind blew horizontally across the landscape, up from the St. Lawrence Valley, shaking the wisps of corn stalks left standing in the fields.

Marcel looked at Ginette.

“We can’t leave them out there . . .”

Ginette agreed. The children were with Coco’s mother in L’Acadie.

“The other thing I worry about,” Duquet added, “is that they’ll be shot like rabbits.”

They’d left the station wagon at the edge of the woods. Leaning into the wind and the driving snow now mixed with pellets of freezing rain, the five of them came out of the woods with their teeth chattering. Marcel got in, his woollen toque with its pompom pulled down over his head. The road was covered with fresh snow, and the only other visible mark on it was the bluish double track made earlier by their car when they came in. The engine started, the heater was set at high. Sitting in the passenger seat, Ginette listened to the radio and smoked a cigarette.

The station wagon became stuck while Marcel was trying to turn it around, and the tires spun on the ice. The heavy, wet snow, packed by the spinning tires, also turned into ice. Duquet went down the list of every ecclesiastical swear word he knew, then shrugged his shoulders.

“Someone has to get out and push,” he said.

The three men, who had already wrapped themselves in blankets in the back of the wagon, found themselves outside again, pressing against the fenders of the car as huge wet snowflakes settled on their eyelashes. Crystals sparkled in the air and fell about them like tracer bullets through a thick cottony fog. The car leapt forward, and Gode fell full length in the slush. There was laughter and another string of church-related expletives.

Gode stank like an old wet dog on their return journey. He calmed himself down, glad to be finally moving, even though it was down a road covered in ten centimetres of wet snow. He covered his head with the edge of the sleeping bag and closed his eyes.

Later, when the tow truck took over and the jolts became more regular, Gode’s head had knocked when they went over a bump. On the autoroute, somewhere between Bois-Francs and the old Patriot Road, the snowstorm had turned into freezing rain.

Duquet’s house in Saint-Marc boasted an enormous central stone chimney that drew so well it made the split cherry logs roar and crackle. Unaccustomed to the warmth, Jean-Paul Lafleur sat in a sofa chair sipping gin from a glass; he had refused to let anyone put even a single ice cube into it. There was a limit to how much cold he could take, and he had reached it.

Jean-Paul slipped into a fond reverie that took him back to the previous summer, when he and a few others had helped Coco build his boat. Twenty-six years old, built like a brick shithouse, head full of ideas, some of which weren’t entirely idiotic, he had the tranquil air of someone born to be a leader of men.

At Cardinal’s place in L’Acadie he’d gone to the fridge to get a beer or, even better, a cold Kik Cola, and Ginette had come up behind him, turned him around, and pressed her body against his on the fridge door. At thirty-five, she had reached the peak of her sexuality. He could tell she was aching for it and for him, wanting to be taken like a whore against some alley wall, her hormones in orbit after a couple of beers. With all the young helpers hanging around the cottage, Coco couldn’t keep track of who was doing what and he didn’t always keep an eye on Ginette, who was horny as a bitch in heat. You only had to look at the noses and ears and eyes of their kids to see that what she had inside her wasn’t so much a womb as a box of Cracker Jacks, a different surprise each time.

Jean-Paul had let her go on with her flirting for a while before breaking away and joining the others. But later on he regretted it, not hard to believe, and the next time she tried it, on the Île aux Fesses, between the handrails of the new boat’s reptilian ferro-concrete skeleton, he didn’t make the same mistake. He rose to the challenge, gave in to temptation for a bit of the old rough-and-tumble. And now that same Ginette was sitting listlessly on the sofa on the other side of the fireplace from his chair, her breasts pressing against her woollen pullover.

“Jean-Paul,” she said quietly, turning her glass of gin in the glow from the flames, “what are you in all this for? Love?”

“What’s love got to do with anything?” he asked, half-jokingly.

“At least tell me you weren’t the ones who . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“ . . . who killed Lavoie.”

“And why couldn’t it have been us?”

“Because it wouldn’t have been safe, you could never have pulled off a thing like that. We’re not talking about holding up a dépanneur, for Christ’s sake. Everyone knows you’re in the FLQ!”

Jean-Paul was about to reply when a shout from Marcel cut him off:

“Police!”

An unmarked car with its lights turned off had burst into the front yard, which had turned into a skating rink, and braked hard, causing the car to skid around like a top. When it stopped, a man got out, and as soon as his feet touched the ice he did the splits, his legs formed a perfect ninety-degree angle before coming sharply together like the point of a compass, then he spun around about a metre in the air and came to rest as he fell heavily to the ice. He lay there for a full minute without moving.

In a way, it was kind of like the police. At least it was piglike. It was Coco Cardinal.

While Gode got out the 12-gauge, the others listened to Coco’s careful footsteps coming up the ice-covered porch stairs. Followed by an impatient tattoo of loud knocks on the door.

“Open up! I know the Lafleurs are in there . . .”

Everyone looked at one another, then Marcel opened the door.

It was Cardinal, all right, no doubt about that. Dripping wet in his midnight-blue quilted coat and fur hat. A coat of ice encased the zipper slide on his chest, which dangled with the rhythm of his movements. Cardinal seemed to use his imposing bulk to shove Duquet out of the way without even touching him. He advanced into the room, his rubber boots clip-clopping across the floor, paying no heed to the chain of small lakes they left behind.

He was beside himself with agitation. Breathing like a racehorse, he marched up to Jean-Paul.

“What are you doing here?”

“News travels fast . . . How did you know we were here?”

“None of your business. But they’re expecting you in the States . . .”

Maybe he was high on coke. Something seemed to have spooked him, but it wasn’t Jean-Paul.

“Calm down, Coco. Why shouldn’t we stay here, as long as you keep your mouth shut?”

“You have to leave for the States,” Coco said again, sounding stunned. “If you don’t, you’ll be shot . . . Can’t you understand that?”

“We’ll have to discuss it,” replied Jean-Paul, looking at his two companions.

Coco turned to Ginette.

“Come outside, I want to talk to you . . .”

“Suppose I don’t want to go outside?”

Coco raised his hand, but Jean-Paul moved between them, followed by Marcel, who was brandishing a poker.

“What the fuck . . .”

“Coco, you are so totally uncool.”

“It’s all right,” said Ginette. “I’ll talk to him.” Her hand lingered on Marcel’s arm momentarily as she passed in front of him, then she turned and followed her husband outside.

Standing before the flames from the yellow birch log, Gode drained his gin and turned to his friends.

“It’s always the same, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s the history of Quebec. It always comes down to same goddamned question: Go to the United States, or stay here . . . ?”

Coco pulled a small Ziploc bag from his coat pocket and stuck a short straw up his hairy nostril. He took a deep snort directly from the bag. The flesh on his face underwent a series of malarial vibrations and palpitations like brief seismic shocks. He filled his lungs and exhaled loudly.

“Ginette,” he said, “you have to help me convince them . . .”

“Why the States? Why are you so keen on them going there?”

“Because they can’t stay here . . .”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll go badly. I know how it will end: two or three passes with a machine gun. And anyway, you ask too many questions . . .”

“It would help if I knew what you were talking about . . .”

“They won’t get out of this alive,” Coco predicted in a low voice. “Gigi?”

“What?”

“Find some way to get them to go to sleep, okay?”

“Excuse me? Exactly how am I supposed to do that?”

“The Lafleurs. If they won’t cross the border, then we have to find some way to get them to go to sleep, and we’ll bring them across ourselves. It’s the only way.”

“You poor dumb Coco. What do you think I’m going to do, put some kind of drug in their gin? Don’t you think I’m a little old to be playing a spy in some James Bond film?”

“Gigi?”

“What now?”

“I want you to come home.”

“No, that’s out of the question.”

“Your place is with your children. Don’t you think you’ve whored around long enough?”

“No, I don’t!”

“The mother of my children is not going to stay here and expose herself to a hail of gunfire. It’s not right! It’s going to get too dangerous here, Gigi. Come on . . .”

He grabbed her by the arm and she struggled with him, pushed him away.

“Jesus Christ! If I have to . . .”

But his feet went out from under him, once again they flew up into the air, and he fell heavily on his back with a dull thud. The impact of his body on the porch seemed to shake the whole house to its very foundations. He stayed down, an elaborate string of curses issuing from his mouth, his face twisted by spasms, and his eyes blinking against the freezing rain.

“Ginette, if I have to smash your . . .”

“You’re not in any condition to try anything like that.”

“I can’t get up,” cried the Fat Cop.

Ginette stood looking down at him.

“If I stay here, Coco, what can you do about it?”

“What do you think I’ll do? I’ll go to Parthenais and pocket the hundred and fifty thousand buck reward.”

He tried to get to his feet, but he was as helpless as a giant cockroach flipped on its back. She could have crushed his skull with a few kicks of her boot.

Duquet turned and hit the side of the fireplace with the poker as hard as he could. But the fireplace had been there for a hundred years and the stones it was made from were a lot older than that; it would take more than a whack from Marcel Duquet to change what couldn’t be changed.

“Marcel, calm down . . .”

Duquet was still holding the poker, which had a pronounced curve to it. He held it in both hands, like a baseball bat. Ginette watched him, impressed.

“If he ever lays a hand on you . . .”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t tell me that son of a bitch found some way to make you feel sorry for him again?”

“I can see through him pretty easily, Marcel, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“Guys, I don’t know what’s stopping me from . . .”

“I told you, I’ll be fine, okay?”

“Where’d he go?” asked René.

“He’s on the porch, trying to crawl over to a bench. It’ll take two of you to help me lift him up.”

“Why?”

“He hurt his back when he fell. If we don’t hurry, we’ll have to break the ice off him in order to talk to him. But once we get him in the car, everything will go much better.”

“Tell him we have no intention of leaving,” said Jean-Paul.

“You guys be careful.”

She began picking up her things and stuffing them into a bag. As she moved toward the door, Jean-Paul followed her with his eyes.

That woman has had my cock in her mouth, he thought. That creates a bond between us.

In Marcel’s kitchen there was a large stove, a L’Islet, made in Montmagny, with gas burners and, above them, several compartments for keeping pies warm. A real piece of furniture. Every morning, Gode crumpled up newspapers and put them in the firebox with some kindling and struck a match. He read the headlines as they went up in smoke:

AUTOPSY REPORT PUTS END TO HORRIFIC RUMOURS

THE HOUSE WHERE PAUL LAVOIE SUFFERED HIS LAST AGONY

NEIGHBOURS SUSPICIOUS BUT DID NOTHING

He found some buckwheat flour in a cupboard and made biscuits the way his father used to in the bush in Villebois, on top of the woodstove. He let a pat of butter melt on the dough, then rolled it up like a cigar. No need for maple syrup.

Up there, in the North, Gode’s father would tear off a sheet of newspaper and use it to wipe the stove top before making the pancakes, as though the ink on the paper were the only cleanser they needed.

The basement was divided in half, with a kitchenette and the furnace room on one side and a kind of family room on the other, furnished with a card table, a TV, a sofa, a bar, a pool table, a stereo, which was a Marantz, and a green shag carpet.

Jean-Paul let out a cry, and René turned just in time to catch a can of Kik Cola that had been tossed across the room at him like a hand grenade. When he opened it, it nearly exploded.

“How did Coco know we were here?” Gode asked.

René took a long drink and burped.

“From Saint-Laurent?”

“Coco has feelers out everywhere,” Jean-Paul said, going behind the bar. “The question is, what’ll he do with the hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

The other two laughed.

“Seriously. You don’t think he’ll turn us in?”

They looked at each other.

René was drawing blueprints on a sheet of paper with a large carpenter’s pencil. Off to one side, Gode was fiddling with the radio dial.

“Why did the Lafleur brothers and Richard Godefroid travel to Texas at the beginning of October?” said the announcer. “Who is the mysterious Pierre? These are some of the questions that were asked yesterday at the coroner’s inquest into the death of Paul Lavoie, and which were raised again this morning at the . . .”

They couldn’t get away from themselves. They were everywhere.

Behind the house was a barn, and beyond that, fields of corn stretched to where the farm ended at a narrow fencerow of trees. Between the barn and the house was a pond. In the summers it was home to tadpoles and bullfrogs and occasionally a pair of wild ducks, blacks or blue-winged teals. Muskrats traced their peaceful Vs across its surface in the evenings. Once, Marcel saw a painted turtle sunning itself on a half-submerged log.

They started digging between the house and the pond. They worked at night, breaking up the frozen earth with a pickaxe, working like moles in the snow and the mud and the meltwater that ran into the trench. It was back-breaking labour. They dug from sunset to morning, always two at a time, the third resting in the house by the front window, keeping watch.

As Gode dug in the dark, all kinds of thoughts passed through his head. He thought about a novel he’d read about the Spanish Civil War, in which prisoners were forced to dig their own graves. The epitome of power that one human being can exercise over another is to force him to dig a hole six feet deep before shooting him in the head with a pistol, or cutting him down with a machine gun, or running over him with a truck to save bullets.

And those prisoners in that Eisenstein film, ¡Que viva Mexico!, who were also made to dig holes in the desert sand, then were buried in them with only their heads exposed, their wild eyes that seemed to jump out of their sockets when they saw the horses being made to gallop toward them. Their skulls exploded like pumpkins.

Gode didn’t want to dig any more. Perhaps any man who burrows into the earth is creating his own grave? But they kept on, Gode, the Lafleur brothers, kept on digging, as blackened and stained as coal miners, too tired to wash before going to sleep, cleaning off the worst of it in the morning.

Cardinal returned once, to make fun of them. They looked up to see his bloated, blank face hovering over the edge of the hole, like a rising moon. One arm in a sling. A broken elbow or something.

“What are you looking for, guys? Buried treasure?”

“Worms. For fishing. Can’t you see?”

“You’d be better digging in the manure pile.”

“Each to his own,” remarked Jean-Paul.

Gode stopped digging, slightly out of breath.

“If you really want to know, we’re building a cottage.”

“Where? In China?”

“Exactly. Chairman Mao’s our new trip.”

“Yesterday I talked to a guy in the Black Liberation Front.”

“Like I said, we’re all Maoists here.”

“Well, you can do what you like.”

“That’s right.”

The trench they dug was a metre wide, two metres deep, and about six metres long. It ran out from the wall of the house. At the end of it, they enlarged and deepened it to make a room, two metres by three. At the house end, they knocked a hole in the foundation wall with a sledgehammer, then made a floor with cement from the basement between the wall and the furnace.

Marcel couldn’t take it. He’d been living somewhere else for a week. On one of his visits, René came up and handed him a sheet of paper. He glanced at it and decided to take the afternoon off. According to his calculations, he would have to make at least two trips to the lumberyard.

They propped up the sides of the excavation along its entire length with wooden beams, to which they nailed two-by-fours and chipboard panels to complete the framing. Then they built a roof and floor in the main room, which ran continuously with water. Finally, they covered their work with some of the dirt they’d dug out of the hole and spread the rest around the yard as best they could. Their well-supported trench was now a tunnel. To get to it, they went into the basement and squeezed behind the furnace, lifted a concrete slab identical to those that formed the base of the furnace. They ran an electric extension cord into the tunnel, camouflaging it carefully, and installed a lighting system and a heater. The tunnel entrance was about thirty by fifty centimetres. They had to slide in feet-first, then shuffle on their backs until they cleared the hole in the foundation wall, where the tunnel proper began. From there, they could crawl on their hands and knees until they reached the subterranean chamber.

It was December, early afternoon. Outside the air was cold, still, and bright. They had slept, as usual, in sleeping bags on the rug in the common room. They had finished the hiding hole the previous night and planned to use it only in emergencies. A bolt-hole for creatures in desperate straits. Gode made coffee and turned on the radio. Then stopped dead, his empty coffee cup in his hand. He tumbled down the stairs and turned on the TV. It was December 3, 1970. A special report was being broadcast over the airwaves of the CBC.

“Hey, guys! Come and see this . . .”

They spent the entire day in front of the television. They saw a cordon of soldiers in helmets carrying rifles that stretched across the screen and down a street lined with three-storey brick buildings. A bit farther down, the street was blocked by a bus. Army helicopters criss-crossed the sky throughout the area.

The camera followed a uniformed soldier carrying a rifle over his shoulder, bayonette fixed, courteously escorting a citizen who lived in the quarter to the corner of the next street. The newscaster explained that the authorities had ordered the evacuation of the entire sector. Armed forces were supervising the combined operations. The cordon of soldiers that kept the curious away stretched along several blocks of houses and disappeared into the distance.

“Holy fuck! I’ve never seen so many soldiers! I don’t think the Germans had that many when they invaded Russia.”

“Rue de la Compagnie-de-Jésus. That’s in the north end.”

The CBC camera kept returning to the façade of an ordinary-looking brick apartment block: main entrance surrounded by a projecting portico surmounted by a rectangular awning. The apartments inside would all open onto a central corridor, and those on the street side had doors that gave onto balconies with cast-iron staircases leading up to them. The balcony of Apartment 1 was over the door of the garage, which had been converted to a kind of sub-basement with access from the inside.

Since their co-conspirators in Rebellion Cell had respected the rule of autonomy and the strict separation of operations, Gode and the Lafleurs were discovering, at the same time as millions of other television viewers, the hiding place in which John Travers had been kept for two long months. Someone had scrawled the letters FLQ on the windows of the ground-floor apartment with a can of spray paint.

After a while, they saw a grey Chrysler emerge quickly from the garage, back onto the rue de la Compagnie-de-Jésus, bang one of its fenders against a low concrete wall, come to a stop for a moment, as though suspended on a thread of time, while an escort formed in front of and behind it. Negotiations had taken place. The journalist on the scene was Claude-Jean Devirieux, whose usual impish voice and thin, weasel’s face encased in a huge pair of earphones lent the event an air of pomp and circumstance as he conjectured about the destination of the kidnappers. The word “Cuba” was bandied about.

Then, at the centre of a cavalcade of police motorcycles, a convoy consisting of the grey Chrysler, several unmarked police cars, and patrol cars with their lights flashing, began to move. Corbeau was at the wheel of the Chrysler. The lawyer who’d negotiated the release of the hostage was riding shotgun. Between them, in glasses and long hair, was Pierre, also known as le Chevreuil. Lancelot was behind the hostage. In Saint-Marc, emotion and irritation were running high.

“They’ll be working on their tans in Cuba while we spend the winter buried like moles,” René commented.

“I’d say more like ondatras,” Godefroid corrected. “That trench with a chamber at the end of it looks more like an ondatra’s bank-lodge.”

“What the hell’s an ondatra?”

“A muskrat.”

“Then why didn’t you just say muskrat?”

“Because ondatra is the Indian word for it and I’ve always wanted to say ondatra. You can fuck your hat if you don’t like it.”

“You mean my muskrat hat?”

“Okay, you two, give it a rest . . .” Jean-Paul said without taking his eyes off the screen.

“So Pierrot’s going to Cuba. Unbelievable . . .” said Gode, shaking his head.

“For now, it may look like they got the best deal. We’ll see if they find it so funny having a coconut palm for a Christmas tree.”

René climbed the basement stairs, stopping at the top.

“Anyone want a beer?”

“Yeah.”

“Jean-Paul?”

“A Kik for me. With rum in it . . .”

“One Kik with . . .”

“Yeah. It’s called a Cuba Libre.”

Marcel placed the bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the table beside the paper bag holding four large bottles of beer.

“Merry Christmas, guys!”

“Hey, great! Compliments of the Colonel . . .”

They’d been in a good mood all day. They’d ticked off their fifth week in Duquet’s house in Saint-Marc. The first two they’d spent building the hideout. Then they spent a few days discussing organization and finances. The next holdup. Duquet had found them an abandoned scout camp beside Lake Brompton. The access road was closed in winter. They would wait for spring to move their stuff in.

The army had finally pulled out of their area. It wasn’t needed after the Big Show in Montreal, when they’d rounded up the Rebellion Cell. And it was probably better if the silencing of their heavy boots didn’t coincide with the repeal of the War Measures Act and its replacement by a piece of legislation that vastly extended the powers of the regular police. The new law received Royal Assent the very day that an armed-forces Yukon carried Lancelot and his buddies to Castro’s island. Apparently, the whole operation was a well-oiled machine.

Richard Godefroid and the Lafleur brothers were preparing for their next move when the winter solstice fell. Darkness from four o’clock on. The side road was blocked by snowbanks that looked like huge frozen pillows. The fields everywhere were covered in snow. And now Christmas, and the memories of reunited families. The three moles took to brooding.

But now, thanks to Marcel, they had woken up to the sight of a bucket of Colonel Sanders and four large Molsons.

“Too good for Baby,” René said, licking his greasy fingers.

His remark was greeted with silence, which didn’t mean it had fallen on deaf ears. Duquet got up from his chair and produced four large cigars.

“Merry Christmas, guys!”

Gode felt a lump in his throat.

“Marcel, you’re . . .”

“A real . . .”

“Good . . . guy.”

“Are they Havanas, at least?”

The first police search took place the next day.