WITH MADAME CORPS

“IN YOUR ESTIMATION, WHY DID Godefroid and the Lafleur brothers go to Texas a week before kidnapping Paul Lavoie?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Samuel.”

“According to one version, they went to buy arms. Others say it was to make contacts. Set up financing for future operations. Someone even suggested they went to avoid getting mixed up in the kidnappings and to establish an alibi. And do you know what their poor old mother told the coroner? That they had creditors up their asses (she didn’t phrase it like that), and they went to the States to start new lives . . .”

“She may have been right about the creditors. Coco had taught them a trick or two. Credit cards, travellers’ cheques. And loans. When you have no intention of paying anything back, being in debt can be a kind of business plan. They’d been maxed out for two years.”

“Yes, and when their real names were no good any more, Coco got them false identification papers. I know about all that, Madame. But what I’d like to know is why Coco was so keen on sending the guys in the Chevalier Cell to the United States in November 1970.”

“That . . .”

“At least one other person, you see, had urged Gode and the Lafleurs to cross the border that autumn. Bernard Saint-Laurent. The man who’d smuggled them out of Montreal and hid them in a sugar cabin in the woods. Funny little bird. A pure product of the Company of Young Canadians, who worked as a cover for the federal government’s spies in the Quebec community movement. Saint-Laurent, the famous mole who’d been thrown out of a Parti québécois meeting in 1971. Some writers make him part of Colonel Bob Lapierre’s organization. Lapierre was the eminence gris of the Liberal Party . . .”

“You’re losing me here.”

“Too bad. Just when the trap was getting interesting. Do you know what Saint-Laurent did after the October Crisis? He opened a restaurant in Old Montreal and called it Le Chat Huant, which means great horned owl but it’s a word we never use in Quebec. But in Vendée, there’s chouan, which in Quebec is corrupted to chouayen, which we call the Chouan canayen, and which we also use to mean ‘counter-revolutionary.’”

“Don’t you think you might be pushing the cork in a bit far?”

“Maybe. But when you don’t have a corkscrew, sometimes pushing the cork in is the only way to open the bottle.”

“You want to know if Coco knew Saint-Laurent, is that it?”

“It sounds like we’re talking about French haute couture.”

“Very funny. But the truth is, I don’t know anything. Not a thing.”

“Tell me about the boat . . .”

“Why? The boat has nothing to do with what you’re interested in.”

“I can still go fishing. You never know what’s going to bite. If the boat is too small, I’ll throw it back in, promise.”

“He wanted to make it with his own hands. Sail it around the world . . . His dream.”

“Was it really a schooner?”

“A two-master, yes. With a ferro-concrete hull. A fairly revolutionary technique at the time. He bought some land beside the St. Lawrence in Acadia . . .”

“At Île aux Fesses.”

“That’s what it was called. It had a couple of summer cottages on it, up on stilts. He built the boat in a hangar. Which was just a roof over his floating shack.”

“Godefroid and the Lafleurs helped him?”

“They may have. Why?”

“On October 18, 1970, only a few hours after the body of Paul Lavoie was discovered, the police undertook a large-scale operation code-named Operation Rabbits, in the area of Île aux Fesses: army helicopters, combing the woods, road blocks, searching all the cottages and surrounding fields. Apparently they came up empty-handed.”

“During the raids connected with the War Measures Act, Coco was arrested. You knew that, didn’t you?

“Yes. What happened to the boat?”

“No idea.”

“And Coco. What did he die of, exactly?”

“An overdose.”

“An overdose of what, Madame Corps?”

“He ended up snorting himself to death.”

“I see.”

“Yes, and I was the mother of his children. The water under his beautiful big boat . . .”

“Your lover gets his head crushed under a tractor. And your husband dies of an overdose. More and more interesting. I didn’t know about the overdose . . .”

“You can’t tell me you find his death suspicious.”

“I’m not going to tell you anything. Why weren’t you a witness at the trial?”

“Because I was afraid. Everyone told me I should go into hiding . . . But when Marcel’s trial came up, I tried anyway. I went to the police in Pathenais to ask them if they wanted to take my statement. They told me I’d made the trip for nothing: they didn’t need a statement from me. Later, when the case went to appellate court, I went to see his lawyer, Maître Brien, and practically begged him to call me as a witness for the defence. I could testify to something important: Marcel had been against killing Lavoie. He’d agreed to hide the guys in order to avoid a bloodbath until he could hand them over safe and sound to Justice . . .”

“I guess that’s one way to look at it. So what did Maître Brien have to say?”

“He took down my phone number. But he never called me back . . .”