RUE COLLINS

THE DISCUSSION TOOK PLACE IN the living room, where there was enough Export “A” smoke to muffle the arguments coming from both sides of the room.

The Lafleur brothers were there, and Lancelot, Gode, Élise, Justin, Ben, Le Corbeau, Pierre. And Sylvie, Lancelot’s wife, her long legs descending from a miniskirt that covered about as much as a beer-bottle cap. Their two-year-old toddler ran around between everyone’s legs with a plastic toy machine gun. Someone had made some spaghetti sauce. There was beer in the fridge, but not enough to cause a flood. Le Corbeau was the only one to make the trip to the kitchen with any regularity.

Since they’d been obliged to abandon the farm in Milan, with its future Prison of the People, they’d holed up in the bungalow on rue Collins, which had become, at the end of the summer of 1970, a sort of headquarters. Tonight, they were discussing the two targets of their operation: Hite, the American, and Travers, the Brit. Taking them both wasn’t impossible, but it would seriously complicate the operation. No one considered this plan for action to be premature more than Jean-Paul. His proposal was to continue with the reorganization of the group and to concentrate on long-term preparations: hideouts, vehicles, backup, money, weapons. Élise, whose younger brother had been one of those arrested in Saint-Colomban, tossed the first salvo.

“It’s easy to see that you’ve never had a brother in prison . . .”

“But it’s going to take more than a hostage to made the government give in. And as of now, we have no place to hide them . . . Even this place is getting too hot.”

“Yeah, like sometimes you can even smell the heat,” laughed le Corbeau. He was in a good position to know, having had to shake off a tail on his way to rue Collins several times.

“We’re not dumb enough to bring a hostage to a house already known to the police,” Lancelot put in. “We’ll have to rent an apartment.”

“An apartment? You mean a place with neighbours? What if the hostage cries out, what do you do then?”

“I’d shut him up. It’s not complicated.”

“We’d need to be in better shape to do something like that. It’s going to take more money, better hiding places, more vehicles. The police know about the ones we have. We’ll need machine guns. I have a contact in the States that can supply us with guns . . .”

Lancelot was pacing nervously back and forth in the room. He stopped in front of Jean-Paul, who’d been watching him from the divan, sitting up on his haunches. Lancelot gave him a malevolent smile.

“Nelson . . .” he said.

“Nelson? What Nelson?”

“Robert Nelson, in 1838. He came across the border from Vermont and claimed Lower Canada for the Republic. The Americans had promised him weapons to arm the locals, les Frères Chasseurs. The cases of rifles never arrived, and he went back across the border with his tail between his legs. You remind me of him . . .”

Lancelot was now talking to everyone in the room, and Jean-Paul, though annoyed, calmly watched him take over the meeting.

“The Tupameros have just succeeded in taking four hostages, and their manifesto has been read in the National Assembly!”

“But they had to kill one of their hostages. And they didn’t succeed in getting any political prisoners out of jail.”

Lancelot looked Jean-Paul up and down.

“They killed a CIA agent. Four bullets to the chest, that’s all he was worth. But look at Brazil. There the authorities negotiated: forty political prisoners for one ambassador. And twelve in Bolivia . . . Why wouldn’t it work here?”

The discussion went on all night. With Élise, who tried to slip a word in edgewise into the cockfight, and Justin, who was forced to play the role of mediator with about the same success as a Blue Helmet in the Congo, and René, who always took the side of his brother, and le Corbeau, who kept getting drunker and drunker and only opened his mouth to burp, and Ben, who got hungry and was eating cold spaghetti in the kitchen, and Chevrier, who never said a word and who, behind his thick glasses, looked more than ever like a deer caught in the headlights.

Every once in a while Gode would stand up and take a look out the window. The area was very quiet. The fields. The small houses. Not even a cat could be seen moving about.

Then Lancelot took out the Manifesto. He waved it in the air, like Thomas Jefferson with the Constitution, or as if it was the word of God.

“We worked on this together. We corrected this together. And now the whole world will hear us speak. Who’s ready to start Operation Deliverance with me?”

“We’ll put it to a vote,” Jean-Paul said, unperturbed, as though he hadn’t noticed that Lancelot had just pulled the rug out from under his feet.

Lancelot swept the room with his eyes.

“Who’s for?”

Élise, his sister, raised her hand resolutely. Her brother-in-law followed suit. Then le Corbeau, after hesitating, making it look like he had no choice. Sylvie and her two-year-old abstained, for humanitarian reasons.

“One, two, three, four . . .” Jean-Paul counted with satisfaction. “Okay, who’s against?”

As expected, the former gang from the Fisherman’s Hut voted in a bloc: René, Gode, Ben. Finally, Jean-Paul raised his huge paw.

“Two, three, four . . . Someone’s missing.”

Everyone looked around for Pierre. He’d gone to take a leak.

For Jean-Paul, it was in the bag. He was already breathing easier. Pierre, alias François Langlais, was one of the guys from the South Shore, like the others. A man of few words, which was fine: they only needed one, no more. One single word from him now could prevent this whole thing from slipping downhill. They would then be able to concentrate on long-term preparations, maybe spend two or three years rebuilding the organization, consolidating their secret network, developing connections with regions like the Gaspésie and start up a few others. Create a national structure.

On the other side of the wall they could hear the toilet flushing. Pierre was now standing in the middle of the living room.

“Are you in favour of going ahead with the kidnappings, or are you against? What do you say, frère chasseur?”

“I say we should get our asses in gear.”