VEGAS

WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG, CHEVALIER Branlequeue was at home, watching Maître Brien stoking the crowd at the Paul-Sauvé Arena in the east end of Montreal. The excitement of the masses. Practised rhetoric before three thousand jubilant sympathizers of the independence movement. We will prevail.

It was the fifteenth, five days after the kidnapping. The Chevaliers were living in a small house on a street in Chambly, next to a pet store and across from a butcher’s. Éléonore had an important administrative position at the hospital and they were starting to find their feet, financially. The oldest child had his own room, his furniture arranged to accommodate his stamp collection. Branlequeue had organized his Placard in a room that looked like a real office. The colour television had made its appearance in a living room furnished on credit from Bélanger’s. The old camp cot was beside the wall in the office, among piles of books and manuscripts associated with Top Flight Editions, and Chevalier Branlequeue was spending his nights on it more and more often, his head filled with words and phrases, his vision blurred, his bronchial passages clogged, his stomach irritated by sleep-inducing whisky.

Within two years, the little family would move to the Domaine des Salicaires, near the river. In four, the eldest, Martial, would pack up his things and move on to make his own life. And a year had passed and the father had been living in this room full time, by virtue of an unwritten pact making his and Éléonore’s physical separation official. The new regime gave Chevalier the peaceful and rebarbative impression of seeing his love life dissolve before him, neutralized from now until his death. He’d dispensed with his conjugal duties three years ago, at the age of forty-four, never dared to hit on his students. No dipping of the paintbrush. Vénus, was lanky, twenty, and studious. She hadn’t yet found her Sapphic leanings and was taking piano lessons. The youngest, Pacifique left politics to hopeless degenerates over twenty, drank Black Label, and smoked pot and Afghan hash and listened to Led Zep. And La Gros Éléonore, Éléonore, the former marble beauty shaped by some sculptor’s hammer, had become a bitter old woman, already cast in rough stone at the tender age of thirty.

But for now, the crisis created by the first abduction, ten days earlier, continued to fester, and Maître Brien was making his remarks on the ten o’clock news. “FLQ! FLQ! FLQ!” the crowd at the Paul-Sauvé Arena was chanting. And then the telephone rang.

“Chevalier Branlequeue?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Bonnard, Raoul.”

He’d recognized the voice, a baritone impossible to mistake for any other, with its deep, throaty residue of late nights, scotch whisky, and cigars, and its ineffable, slightly humorous hint of the crooner imprinted at the base end. They had crossed paths from time to time, through their work. Given Chevalier’s existence as poet–publisher and his nocturnal life in the bars, the two had several points of intersection. The role of poet laureate he had been obliged to assume after the appearance of Elucubrations had ratcheted him into the larger family of artists. But aside from these accidental encounters, during which only a few words had been exchanged, neither of them knew much about the other that wasn’t general knowledge.

“What can I do for you, Raoul?”

“Have you been watching the news?”

Chevalier turned so that the TV was in his field of vision. The camera was panning the crowd across the screen, men, women, professors, students, militants, national thinkers, tavern philosophers, versifiers and vilifiers, raised fists, Mackinaw shirts, small, round eyeglasses, long hair. FLQ. We will prevail.

“Yes,” he said after a moment.

“What do you think of it?”

What Chevalier thought was that Maître Brien was playing a dangerous game. Two days earlier, accused of obstructing justice, he’d still been cooling his heels in the Parthenais Prison. The day after the Paul Lavoie kidnapping, after the weak response manifested by the Vézina government, the Rebellion Cell had designated the lawyer, in a communiqué, as their official negotiator with the authorities. The negotiations were now stalled. Little Albert had just issued an ultimatum giving the terrorists six hours to accept safe conduct to the country of their choice, and what was Brien doing? Jumping up to the microphone in an arena full of separatists, taking centre stage with the crowd at his feet crying for blood in a veritable boiling of revolutionary fervour. Chevalier didn’t much like what he was seeing.

He opened his mouth to reply, then hesitated.

“I’d be curious to know why my thoughts are of interest to you, Raoul.”

“And I’ll tell you, Chevalier. I may have only a grade six education, but I haven’t done too badly in the school of life. And what I am going to propose to you is that we get together and discuss all this in a quiet spot. A serious conversation, between men. I might even say civilized.”

“Just the two of us, Raoul?”

“No.”

Both of them allowed a moment to pass in which they each seemed to be listening to the long chain of telephone poles, hearing the silence that cut through their conversation like a beast on the road and that suddenly filled the autumn night between them like a living thing, fugitive, insensate, and obscure.

“I have a friend who would like to meet you, Chevalier . . .”

“What kind of friend, Raoul?”

“Someone from the nightclubs.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you, here, Raoul . . . What exactly is it you want?”

“What would you say if I dropped by to pick you up in ten minutes?”

“To go where?”

“To Vegas, does that mean anything to you?”

“The Vegas Sports Palace, on boulevard Taschereau?”

“That’s the place.”

“And you want to take me there to do what after eleven o’clock at night? Play shuffleboard?

“No. Just have you meet someone. It might give you some ideas for your next book, you never know.”

“Tell me one thing, Raoul. Is there a risk of this blowing up in my face?”

“I wouldn’t put your safety at risk, Chevalier. You have my word on that.”

“Lots of people say that . . .”

“Yes, but where we’re going, my word is sacrosanct.”

He’d put on his heavy cardigan and was standing at the front door when Éléonore emerged from the bedroom in her housecoat, her mop of hair piled up on her head, looking ghastly. Hallowe’en’s come early, thought her husband.

“Would you mind telling me where you’re going, for heaven’s sake?”

“Urgent business at the Vegas. Nothing serious.”

“Where did you say?”

“The Palace, my dear. A little poker to get back what I’ve lost. The house, you, the kids. Everything will be on the table tonight.”

“Good Lord!”

Bonnard picked him up at the door. He was wearing a powder-blue suit, with a Panama hat screwed on his head. His car was a yellow Buick Riviera from a time when its four carburetors alone could justify the installation of one of those solitary donkeys you see nodding their black heads along the highways of Kansas and Oklahoma. They drove north along rue Chambly, turned left at the old shopping plaza onto the former rue Coteau-Rouge, now more respectfully called boulevard Sainte-Foy. Here, where packs of feral dogs and street toughs had at one time pretty much held reign, new laws had created a grid of long streets bordered by comfortable, single-family houses. Gone were the outdoor toilets, the cesspools open to the skies, and the tarpaper shacks! Gone the water-carriers from the better neighbourhoods of yesteryear, who sold water for five cents a bucket. A huge American-style suburb had opened its arms, and the feral dogs had been replaced by police cruisers whose sirens now bayed to the full moon, but less often. Finally, the previous year, Longueuil the bourgeosie had legally achieved social chlorination by voting to annex with its turbulent neighbour, about which no one spoke any longer.

“Are you from around here?” Bonnard asked.

As soon as the yellow Riviera had melted into the night, they’d stopped addressing each other formally, as though the intimacy of the passenger compartment, their nocturnal escapade into the glass and concrete American desert, had brought them more naturally together, made them accomplices.

“No. I landed a post here as a teacher at Saint-Ernest. Rent was a lot cheaper on the South Shore. Then I got mixed up in politics and the good Brothers gave me the holy heave-ho. I’m still out.”

Bonnard lit a cigar.

“I grew up here,” he said. “My first church was in the henhouse. I remember wearing boots on the bus and carrying our shoes in bags because of the mud. We’d take off our rubber boots and put our shoes on when we got into Montreal. My grade one class was in a pool hall. Which maybe explains a few things. During the war, my father lived in Montreal with my mother and worked in a factory that made airplanes for the Allies. After work, he took the bus from the south end of Montreal and got off in the middle of a field. He and a few others would walk about a mile carrying lumber and other building supplies on his back to work on his house. Around eleven or midnight, he’d walk the mile back the other way, freezing his ass off in winter, snow up to his knees, and get the bus and then the streetcar and get home to bed at two in the morning, if he was lucky, and sleep until five. Then he’d get up and go through the whole thing all over again. You’ve got to wonder when they found the time to make little Raoul. Whatever you think of me, I am that man’s son. And I’m on prime time on Channel 10.”

Chevalier coughed.

“Is my cigar bothering you?”

“Yes, but I’ll survive.”

“What did you think of that epistle they read on television the other day, on the CBC?”

“The FLQ Manifesto? It made me laugh. I was expecting ideology, a political tract. Instead, what we got was pure fiction, Madame in her kitchen and Monsieur in the tavern down at the corner. It was a joual document, their Manifesto. Gibberish. The other thing I thought was that ours must be the first modern society in the world in which the prime minister of the country is mocked as a pansy on national television. A fine moment.”

“It’s because of all the rumours going around . . . Someone who’s only slightly in the party, like me, hears all the dirt. Can you tell me why there are so many fags in Quebec?”

The author of Elucubrations remained silent.

“Anyway, I wouldn’t want to be in Little Albert’s shoes,” Bonnard added. “By the way, Chevalier, how was the pizza invented?”

“No idea.”

“A wop was taking out the garbage and the bottom fell out of the pail.”

Luigi Temperio was a short man with a balding head and long, bushy sideburns, deeply sunken eyes, a flattened nose, and a tragic mouth. His mask of the serious clown gave him something of a Louis de Funès look, only much less comic. Temperio was the Scarpinos’ man on the South Shore, a faithful lieutenant and manager of the Vegas Sports Palace. Chevalier tried to think of which Molière play he belonged in. Bonnard made the introductions.

“Mr. Temperio, this is Chevalier Branlequeue. That’s what he calls himself and there’s not much I can do about it. Chevalier, Mr. Luigi Temperio.”

“So you’re in showbiz, too, eh?” Temperio asked, holding out his hand. “Like, as a writer, I mean . . .”

Chevalier forced a smile and took the outstretched hand.

“Me? No, I keep away from that scene, my dear sir. As much as possible, at any rate. When I began writing, it was all sonnets and alexandrines. Nothing very good. Then I wrote a book . . .”

“He’s a great poet,” Raoul Bonnard said, in the tone he might have used to announce that it looked like rain.

“Mr. Chevalier, can I offer you something to drink?”

“I wouldn’t turn down a scotch,” said the Dante of the South Shore, having decided to play the game.

From the outside, the Vegas was indistinguishable from the American, aggressive artificiality and commercial architecture that marked the rest of boulevard Taschereau. The most remarkable thing about it was its huge paved parking lot. Inside: tables, chairs, a bar, a mirror, framed photographs (some of them autographed) of sports and music-hall stars, a stage big enough to hold a full orchestra. Nothing much out of the ordinary. To divine any secrets it might hold would require admission to the area behind the stage.

The previous year, the government had legalized games of chance and conferred the management of its first lottery on an agency of the Crown. It was rumoured in some quarters that organized crime was waiting for its slice of the pie. Vast and well stocked but almost empty, the Vegas seemed to be living in expectation of the snap of the fingers that would transform it into a casino. It stood beside the boulevard like a woman of questionable virtue who was eager to sell her ass to the first customer who came by.

“It ain’t right what they done to that man,” Temperio said, opening and closing his hand rapidly, as though flapping it.

They were sitting at a table in the corner. The only other figure in the place was at the far end of the bar, a large morose drunk who appeared to be napping, perched on a barstool with his forehead resting on his arm. Chevalier took a cigarette from the silver case that had materialized in Bonnard’s thick, sausage-fingered hand.

“A married man,” Temperio went on, “a man with a family, with a mother, and sisters, a wife, kids, a dead brother and a sister-in-law who he’s taking care of and a little nephew, like they’re his own family . . .”

Chevalier arranged his face as though to say, Yes, it’s not funny, I agree.

“And what they done ain’t good for business, neither. There’s cops all over the place. They come in here, they look around. Do you see anyone in here? It’s been like this ever since the FLQ took that English guy. And our own MLA, as good a guy as you could wish for. Another family man . . . No, business is bad when something like this happens. Everything falls off. It’s like a friggin’ morgue in here.”

“If it’s any consolation, the militants aren’t having it very easy, either.”

“Yeah, but the organization I work for, they don’t get mixed up in politics . . .”

Chevalier raised an eyebrow.

“When you blocked the election of the Parti Québécois in Tailon, that wasn’t politics, you think?”

Bonnard was taken with a sudden fit of coughing. He closed his fist over his mouth. Temperio seemed genuinely surprised. Chevalier raised his glass to his lips and didn’t back down.

“Which election was that?”

“The last one. The one in which the mob infiltrated the PQ meetings.”

“Oh, yeah, maybe, but I ain’t the mob, okay? What you said there makes it sound like I control all the muscle on the South Shore. But that ain’t the case, the way things has fallen out . . .”

Temperio nodded his head with a tolerant, preoccupied air.

“Is the FLQ looking for trouble?” he asked Chevalier.

“The FLQ?”

Chevalier glanced over at Bonnard, who remained impassive behind his fat Havana cigar. He was beginning to understand why he was here.

“Mr. Temperio, I have absolutely no contact with the men who have done this.”

The Italian lightly shrugged his shoulders.

“If you can say that, it’s because you know who these people are. You know them . . .”

“No!”

Temperio turned to Bonnard. Understanding that his assistance was required, Raoul brushed the ash off his cigar, taking his time to think about what he would say.

“Mr. Temperio here,” he said in his famous, meat-grinder voice, “only wants things to go back to normal, you understand. He wants to help. You are a publisher, you’ve published work by separatists, you have contacts in that world.”

Between puffs, Bonnard cast Chevalier a shrewd, intense look.

“Mr. Temperio didn’t care for the allusion, in one of the texts he heard on television the other night, to ‘the Mafia fixing the elections.’ And he thinks that, with your help, his message can be conveyed to the right people.”

Chevalier reflected.

“I think I’m beginning to understand where you’re coming from,” he said after a moment. “Because of my name, you’ve convinced yourselves that I must be behind the fanatical cell called Chevalier. The police think the same thing. They came to my house twice last week to question me and they didn’t find Paul Lavoie in my clothes closet. Do you think that if I really was the head of the FLQ, those guys would be stupid enough to use my name on one of their secret cells? I don’t know who they are, but I can say that they know their history. Their Chevalier was a lawyer in 1838, the De Lorimier who was hanged in Pied-du-Courant.”

Bonnard and Temperio exchanged glances.

“I don’t know nothing about that,” the Scarpinos’ man said after a moment. “Whether you’re the head of something or the head of nothing, it don’t matter. But maybe you know someone, maybe you know the head of this Chevalier Cell or whoever it is who’s got the Englishman, and maybe you can say something to them, you know, something that they’ll pay attention to.”

“Don Luigi, you’re not listening to me . . .”

“Like I said, maybe there’s someone who’s looking after the hostages, and maybe there’s someone else who writes the stuff for the television. And maybe you, mister publisher, maybe you know the people who write the stuff and you can give them the message I just told you.”

“I don’t know who it was who wrote the Manifesto, Mr. Temperio. But it’s true that I would have been glad to have seen it published as a pamphlet.”

“Okay, I got a question for mister publisher here. That paper they read on television, what did he think of it?”

“You really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“Two hundred years on our knees can be hard on a language.”

Temperio seemed to think about it, then spread out his hand upside down.

“Come on, don’t shovel me any of that bullshit . . .”

“I think you mean joual, don’t you?”

Bonnard leaned forward and tapped the end of his cigar with the tip of his index finger, dropped the ash into an ashtray shaped like a roulette wheel, then took the bottle of scotch and refilled all three glasses.

“It ain’t smart to talk about the Family like that,” Temperio said in a level voice. “The FLQ, they should think about that. They should consider that they got a lot of people in prison that we could take an interest in. It would be good if someone could mention that to the right person.”

“And what person would that be, Mr. Temperio?”

“The person who’s writing things.”

As they walked past the bar on their way to the door, the man who’d been sleeping on the counter raised his head. It was Jacques Cardinal, old Coco. The Vegas, an oasis for drifters from the South Shore, was his unofficial political headquarters.

“Well, well,” said Chevalier. “If it isn’t a bum.”

“Well, well,” said Coco. “If it ain’t a intellectual.”

“One do what one can.”

Big Coco was almost dead drunk. When he moved his body, the imitation whale-penis skin covering the top of the barstool squeaked under his fat ass.

Chevalier looked behind him. Temperio had not moved from his chair at the corner table.

“You know whatsa diffrence b’tween you ’n’ me, Chevalier?”

Coco had taken out his fixings and was laying a line on the bar. Branlequeue watched him, fascinated. Bonnard, standing a bit farther off, had his hands in his pockets.

“No, Coco. Why don’t you tell me?”

“The diffrence’s that I’m a real patriot, but you, you’re a goddamned communist.”

He snorted the coke, exhaled, and smiled. A tic developed at the corners of this mouth. His carcass flopped on the counter, shaking as though with inaudible laughter.

Chevalier glanced at Bonnard, who shrugged his shoulders and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.

“Yes, you’re a true patriot,” Branlequeue said, taking the ball on the bounce. “A man of the right. Maybe you’re right, at that, Coco. Maybe nationalism is nothing but a mask that the left borrowed in order to make a revolution . . .”

“Ah, don’t start with your big words.”

Chevalier placed his mouth close to the big man’s ear and, separating each syllable, said: “The-id-e-o-lo-gy of de-col-on-i-za-tion! Does that mean anything to you?”

“Thass enough, I said!”

“In any other country in the world,” Chevalier said, “when a man of the right wants to start a workers’ revolution, do you know what they call him, Coco? They call him an agent provocateur . . .”

Cardinal jumped up off his barstool, waving his arms in the air. Chevalier stepped sharply back, his hands raised to his face in an attempt to protect himself.

The Fat Cop charged at him with his head lowered, swinging his fists in front of him as though trying to spread branches out of his way. He was blocked by Bonnard, who only partly managed to intercept him. He stayed on course, pushing back the crooner in his powder-blue suit the way an offensive half-back thrusts himself through to the opposition’s zone with a defensive blocker on his back. Chevalier raised himself on tiptoe gracefully, like a toreador. All he lacked was a cape.

Then Cardinal shoved Bonnard off and grabbed a chair, which he threw, spinning around in a circle like a disco ball in the general direction of the place where Branlequeue had been. Then he grabbed another chair and raised it over his head and advanced . . .

It wasn’t a good idea to break up property belonging to Mr. Temperio.

The Riviera slid along slowly without a sound, majestically, as if in a parade, passing the architectural and landscaped nightmares on boulevard Taschereau. Raoul put his hands gently on the wheel as though his palms were caressing the sides of a woman with whom he was dancing the cha-cha-cha.

“Poor Coco . . .”

“Bah. It wasn’t as though he wasn’t asking for it.”

“Do you know, Raoul, your little friends in there, I’m glad the government hasn’t exposed them. Keeping them in the mix is like having a fifth ace up its sleeve.”

“What do you mean?”

“As undercover agents to do their dirty work for them, get the radicals all stirred up. Then the police or the army steps in to restore order. In some countries that’s the way it works. The extreme right has to be good for something . . .”

“You’ve got more imagination than I have.”

They remained silent for a moment. Bonnard kept looking in his rear-view mirror.

“They’ve been there since we left the Palace,” he said quietly.

Chevalier turned around. Two large yellow eyes. Raoul slowed down but the distance between them and the car behind them remained the same.

“Do you really think . . . ?”

“When you hang around with the Scarpinos, you get used to it. But he could just as easily be following you. Or keeping an eye on the current affairs of our Sicilian friends. Or it could be politics. Your guess is as good as mine, as they say. How would you say that in French, Chevalier?”

“You’ve caught me off-guard, Raoul.”

“So where do you want me to drop you? Your place?”

“You’re joking, aren’t you? Where else would I be going?”

“And anyway, you’ve got nothing to tell them, right?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

Bonnard remained silent.

When they reached rue Chambly, the phantom car was still behind them. Bonnard passed Chevalier’s house and dropped him off at a corner farther down the street. The poet–publisher had turned and was walking down the sidewalk when he heard his name being called. He looked around and saw that Bonnard had rolled down his window.

“Hey, Chevalier! Do you know why wops wear those pointy-toed shoes?”

“Yes, I do. Good night, Raoul.”