MARCH

THAT SPRING IT WAS COCO Cardinal who found them in their bungalow on rue Collins, in Saint-Hubert. Gode and the Lafleurs knew him from their days in the RIN. Jean-Paul had convinced his girlfriend at the time, the beautiful Lou Ballester, to pretend they were married, and they signed the lease as Jean-Paul Hamel, a university professor with no references, and his young wife. The scene: two parallel streets not quite a kilometre in length, dropped as if from the sky into the middle of flat fields peppered with woodlots, fencerows, and overgrown rubbish heaps.

There was the full range of habitations, from rundown cottages to typical suburban ranch houses, with mobile homes somewhere in the middle. The bungalow Jean-Paul rented bore the street number 140. You entered through a foyer with the living room to the left, the kitchen on the right, and a second door facing northwest, toward the neighbouring house. A short hall led to the bathroom and the two bedrooms. A garage had been added beneath an extension of the roof.

With help from René and other members of the group, they spent a weekend repainting the place. Then they bought furniture on credit from Woolco. They had no intention of paying for it. For a long time, systematic and perpetual indebtedness had been the principal mode of financing their activities.

A few hundred metres from them was Savannah Road, and a bit beyond that was the beginning of the airport. It was a military base. The main headquarters, which accommodated the mobile force, was less than a kilometre to the south. The airfield and hangars were visible from the bungalow’s bedrooms.

While Lou and Jean-Paul whiled away a grey afternoon in March by making love on a mattress on the floor of one of the rooms, jeeps came and went in the distance, like beetles filing across the dirty snow.