THE BOAT (2)
COCO CARDINAL DREAMED OF HIS schooner in the area around Miscou Island, in Acadia, while on a belated honeymoon with Ginette Dufour. Now she’d made the sails and he was building the boat on the bank of the Acadia River, on a piece of land he owned on the Île aux Fesses, a dozen or so miles south of Montreal. The Patriot would be a twenty-metre schooner with a ferro-concrete hull. Thirty-five tonnes’ displacement, a draught of eight feet, a teak deck, four twin cabins, two heads, and a wardroom big enough to hold ten people. And the deck would be big enough to hold two lifeboats: one inflatable and one made of fibreglass.
As well as the sails normally found on a two-master, Coco planned to rig a topsail to the foremast. The method of naval construction he chose — ferro-cement, an armature of steel rods supporting a coating of concrete — was the method of choice for first-time boat builders, and incidentally gave them an appreciation of the amount of work that had gone into building the great pyramids of the Pharaohs. For the amateur boat builder who wanted a craft longer than twenty-five metres, it was the easiest and least costly technique; in other words, the most accessible. And it required no specialized tools.
In the spring of 1970, Cardinal had been acting as a sort of coach for the organization Jean-Paul and his friends were trying to put together. He was the man you went to if you needed a used revolver. It was Coco who showed them how to saw off not only the barrel of a shotgun, but also the butt of an M1 rifle to make it as easy to handle as a pistol. It was also he who told them that the M1, a .30-calibre assault weapon sold in all good sporting goods stores, could be converted into a machine gun by the removal of a single spring.
Under Coco’s patronage, the fraudulent financing system of the Lafleur-Lancelot network picked up steam. Preparing for a revolution was, they discovered, an all-consuming enterprise. Holdups weren’t enough. Coco did business with a forger of genius who worked undercover in Montreal East. Cloned credit cards, illicit driver’s licences, artfully retouched passports, false birth certificates: all impeccable work, discretion guaranteed. The Fat Cop had connections with all the useful trades. But Coco also had his nose in the powder up to his eyeballs, and this goddamned cement boat, to which everyone had to lend a hand, was not part of the bargain.
In May, the militants in Lancelot’s entourage found that Jean-Paul was beginning to weaken. The time to make a grand statement, they said, had arrived. Some twenty members of the network met for a strategic planning session at a rest stop on Highway 40, between Montreal and Trois-Rivières. The spot overlooked the sandbars and flood plain of Lake St. Pierre, and they could easily survey their surroundings and spot any potential followers. Gode swept the horizon with his binoculars: not a cop in sight. Nothing but pintails, green-winged teals, northern shovellers, black ducks, and huge, noisy rafts of Canada geese.
That day, a first cell was formed and left the rest stop with the mandate to kidnap the American consul. A few days later, its members rented a cottage in Saint-Colomban, in the Lower Laurentians.
Sitting on a case of Labatt 50s on the Île aux Fesses, Coco took a long swig as he watched ducks swim past on the river. Beside him, Jean-Paul sipped a small can of cold Kik. The openwork skeleton of the schooner was reflected in the brown water at their feet, bearing a striking resemblance to the rib cage of a diplodocus in a natural history museum.
“Yesterday,” Coco said, chuckling, “I saw a pig floating downstream with only its chest and feet sticking up out of the water . . .”
Jean-Paul had come to show him the green Chevrolet with a vinyl roof that he’d bought that day. The driver’s licence he’d used was a fake, and Pierre had forged a signature on the registration. Cardinal had barely glanced at the vehicle parked under the trees above where they were sitting. After giving it a brief inspection, he started to laugh.
“Now I’ve seen everything . . .”
He’d slapped his thighs.
“They sold you a taxi. If this odometer showed the real mileage, it’d have the equivalent of about fifteen trips from Montreal to Vancouver and back on it. They really saw you coming, J.-P.”
Coco took a snort off the vinyl top of the Chev.
Now they were back sitting beside the river, Coco on his case of beer, Lafleur on the grass.
“What you really need, Jean-Paul, are weapons . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Enough to equip a militia . . .”
“Call it what you want. But a serious organization, with a solid structure, base camps, able to defend itself against attacks.”
“I think I’ve found someone who could help you.”
“Oh, yeah? Where?”
“Houston . . . But they have offices in Laval.”
“And they do what, these guys?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Jean-Paul drained another Kik Cola.
“Who cares? Anyway, I don’t need help from Uncle Sam.”
After a moment, Coco fished a wallet flat as a buckwheat pancake from his back pocket and took a card from it, which he handed to Jean-Paul.
ROBERT NILE
JAMES ENGINEERING
There was an address on boulevard Saint-Elzéar in Laval, and a telephone number.
“What kind of engineering?”
“Electronics. Doesn’t it say on the card?”
“No.”
A black duck swam slowly in front of them, followed by four ducklings pedalling in its wake. A skunk or rat must have eaten the rest of the eggs.
“Hey, Coco?”
“What?”
“What’s your link with the Americans? The CIA?”
Coco squeezed out a laugh.
“You don’t want to know. All you want are some weapons.”
“Yeah, right, they furnish us with arms and then we use them to kidnap their consul. You think they’ll thank us for that?”
“They won’t give a fuck. And I’ll tell you why. Maybe they don’t like communists too much, but they respect people who fight for what they believe in. They understand that. They’ve been there . . .”
“There’s a few people in Guatemala I bet would like to hear that.”
“Don’t lay your goddamned geopolitical trip on me, man. Selling guns is just business . . .”
Cardinal stopped and drained his beer. Then he raised his right arm, stretched it back, and threw the empty bottle into the middle of a raft of black ducks, where it caused an indescribable hullabaloo.
“Jesus, Coco!”
“What?”
“Sometimes I really think you don’t give a shit about anything.”
“I didn’t hurt them. They’re just ducks.”
The mother continued to squawk while the young ones slapped their wings on the water and scattered off in all directions.
“Look, Jean-Paul, you need weapons. You don’t have the means to buy AK-47s on the market. Let me introduce you to a few good people.”
“But why Houston?”
“Because that’s where they’re based. They supply a few anti-Castro groups . . . people like that.”
“Oh, I see. And where do they get these weapons from?”
“From our own military bases, where do you think?” Coco said, laughing softly. “Weapons and electronic equipment stolen from our good little soldier-boys over the past seven years. Where do you think they end up? Don’t look at me like that. You know what I mean: storerooms emptied in broad daylight, real professional work. It’s not like your friends in the FLQ could have pulled it off.”
“You’re telling me I’m naïve, is that it?”
“You’ve got a few things to learn.”
“Okay. I’ll buy myself a bazooka and I’ll blast a few American fishing boats off the Cascapédia, how would you like that?”
“You can kill as many Kennedys as you want, but spare the higher-ups in the army and you won’t have any problems.”
“I’d just like to know one thing: what’s the deal . . . ?”
“Talk to Bob Nile. Ask him.”
“Hello, Houston? Can you hear me?”
“Fucking comedian.”
“I don’t need you guys. Is that clear?”
“What you need is to be snivelling enough for two. You can’t be afraid to play in these guys’ court. Because any way you look at it, they’re there. We’re stuck with them.”
Coco took another deep drink and burped. Jean-Paul thought. Then he shrugged.
“I’d just like to know what game he’s playing, this engineer of yours. Robert Nile and company.”
“Call him and see.”
They watched a large great blue heron skimming just above the waves, stomach filled with a plump-thighed bullfrog and a five-spined stickleback.
“And Jean-Paul . . .”
“What, Coco?”
“Did it ever occur to you that the Americans would like nothing better?”
“Nothing better than what?”
“Than to stick it to that socialist fag who’s running the show in Ottawa.”