FOREST PARK, ST. LOUIS,
MISSOURI, AFTERNOON
OF OCTOBER 5

SITTING CROSS-WISE ON THE BENCH of a picnic table, Gode looked up at the Gateway Arch whose straight, clean lines and full arc soared above the trees in the park that overlooked the banks of the Mississippi.

“What you see there,” he said, “is the Gateway to the West. Everything on the other side of that arch was once called Louisiana, and it stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Napoleon — talk about a raw deal — sold them the whole territory for a song. But what they don’t tell you in the history books is that a hundred years ago, St. Louis was as French as you and me. It was French Métis who got Lewis and Clark across the Rockies.”

Sitting across from him, René Lafleur was trying to coax reception from a small transistor radio. All he could get was gospel, laundry soap, Coca-Cola, fried chicken, and the Bible. A lot more fried chicken. Then the results of a baseball game. The swan song of America.

“How do you know all that?” asked Jean-Paul, peering into the ham sandwich he’d been trying to chew.

“My father had his family tree traced at one point. There were Godefroids who married Chippewa women and went into the fur trade in Wisconsin. I learned about it as a kid. We always called Route 66 the Chippewa Way.”

Jean-Paul looked up from his sandwich and watched his mother, the family matriarch, who was walking along the river some distance away with their younger sister. The pair passed an old man who was shredding a cream doughnut and tossing the pieces to some resident mallards. Mother and daughter had accompanied them to Texas. It didn’t seem reasonable at first, but when they’d been stopped at a roadblock by the state police in Pennsylvania, the presence of an elderly woman and a young girl in the back seat seemed to have given them a bit of status, and they’d been allowed to pass. If nothing else, family life was a good cover.

Two picnic tables down, a man in a checked jacket was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. Jean-Paul chewed his ham sandwich. He thought about what they had in the cooler. Canned ham. Hard-boiled eggs. Pickles. Mayonnaise. One tomato. Kraft “cheese.” Kik Cola. Sliced bread. “Go Weston, young man . . .” A real Québécoise mother, they had, a nourisher through and through.

When their mother and sister rejoined them, René, still hunched over his tinny transistor radio, managed to find a news station. He raised a hand and turned up the volume. Silence surrounded the table.

. . . kidnapped by four gunmen this morning in Montreal. The kidnapping has since been claimed by the Front of Liberation of Québec, a group promoting terrorism and armed struggle in their fight for the creation of an independent French-speaking state in eastern Canada.

“They’re still talking about only one kidnapping. The Englishman . . .”

“They only took Travers.”

“That doesn’t bode well. . . .” said Jean-Paul, absorbed in his thoughts.

He looked up and saw his mother gathering the plastic utensils and paper plates, putting the lid on the mayonnaise jar, returning the eggs to a jar of vinegar, rewrapping the Kraft slices and the sliced tomato. As if she had already figured out what was what.

“We can’t let them go through this on their own,” grumbled Jean-Paul. “They’ll spill the whole can of beans.”

He looked around. Gode and René waited for him to continue.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said.

When the car with René at the wheel threw up a few grains of gravel as it left the parking lot, the smoker two tables down threw his butt on the grass, folded his newspaper, and walked to a car parked under the trees. He opened the passenger door and got in beside the old man who’d been feeding the ducks, who, sitting behind the wheel, was speaking into a radio transmitter.