FALSE WALL

ON SATURDAY THE SEVENTEENTH, I’D promised Marie-France we’d go dancing at the Café Campus or in Old Montreal. Instead, René and I turned up at suppertime looking like a couple of ghosts who hadn’t slept for two days. Jean-Paul had been crashing there since the previous night. René had blood on his pants and he asked Bellechasse, Marie-France’s younger brother and roommate, if he could borrow a pair of his. “What for?” asked the brother-in-law (ex-brother-in-law, actually). “Because mine are dirty.” The other looked down, saw the dark stains, and asked René, as a joke, if he’d stuck a pig or something, and René said no, he’d been on a hunting trip and could Bellechasse lend him a pair of pants? Because he’d made a mess of his.

As it turned out, it was a waste of time, because when Nicole and René disappeared into the bedroom soon after that, I found some pants that, clean or not, were bunched up in a pile in the corner. It had been at least three weeks since the two lovebirds had seen each other, so it wasn’t a surprise, my friends. As far as my situation went, I was still doing penance. Jean-Paul was in the kitchen, editing a communiqué. I went into the living room and lay down on the sofa to watch Hockey Night in Canada, as exhausted as an old dead rat. I could hardly keep my eyes open, in there by myself, listening to Nicole moaning over René Lecavalier’s play-by-play.

I opened my eyes with a start and there it was: the Chevrolet, Hangar 12, the fence, the police cars, cameras flashing. It was like a nightmare that started up again every time you wake up.

“They found it,” said Marie-France. There was no more noise coming from Nicole and René in the back bedroom. Just the voice of the reporter on the black-and-white TV in the living room. Marie-France looked at me oddly and said that responsibility for the murder had been claimed by a new FLQ cell.

I looked surprised. I was surprised. I looked at Jean-Paul.

“It’s the Dieppe Royal 22nd Cell,” he said, without taking his eyes off the screen.

In Sunday’s papers there was a photo of Jean-Paul, wanted in connection with the kidnapping and murder of Paul Lavoie. That night, the television made the same announcement, making him out to be a killer and a danger to the public.

“Not a very good photograph,” commented the danger in question. He held the newspaper up at eye level as though it were a pocket mirror. “I’m usually a lot better looking than that, don’t you think?”

The Tuesday before, he’d had his face rearranged by the police when they picked him up in a raid, and so his joke didn’t go over so well. He told the women that the pigs had brought him to the station to ask him a few questions and had given him a pretty rough going over. All the rest of that day, I could feel Marie-France’s accusatory looks sliding over me like sulphuric acid down the back of a duck.

On Monday, Marie-France went back to her courses at the University of Montreal. With the imposition of the War Measures Act, her studies had been suspended. Now her profs had begun teaching again, and the students stood on campus gaping at the army helicopters.

She came back in the middle of the afternoon, rang the bell the number of times we’d agreed on, six, and we unlocked the door from the top of the stairs. She had just run into her brother on the stairs.

“He told me he was going out to buy wood . . . What’s that all about?”

René was unrolling a rug in the hallway. He looked up.

“We’re doing some renovations.”

“Hey, where did that old rug come from?”

“It was in Nicole’s parents’ shed. It’ll cut down on the noise, so we don’t disturb the neighbours.”

“It’s a disgusting colour.”

Bellechasse, the ex-brother-in-law. A young prick, thin as a rail, hair falling down over his eyes. Said he wanted in on the action. Any action would do. He came from Saint-Profond, in the Bois-Francs region, and had stopped off at the Fisherman’s Hut for the festival at Manseau, all the best drugs on his resumé. Barely able to put one foot in front of the other without help, but ready to try anything, so why not revolution. He was the one who delivered the communiqués that Jean-Paul continued to write, to all the phone booths and trash bins in Centre-Ville. On the run.

The large closet beside the front door of the apartment suddenly fascinated René. Especially its depth. He measured it and came up with his project. That night, the ex-brother-in-law came back to the apartment with six large sheets of plywood and boards cut to the right length, according to instructions given to him by René.

The Renovator got to work the next day. Using the plywood, he built a false wall for the back of the closet, plastered the joints, then covered it with wallpaper. The sheet was removable from the bottom left, and so it was actually a kind of door. With hooks screwed at the four corners, he could pull it closed from the inside. The false bottom was impossible to detect from the hallway, and even from inside the closet. On the other side, René installed two large tables for an office or to serve as beds.

“The wallpaper is a disgusting colour,” said Marie-France.

“What did you do with Lavoie’s confession?” I asked René.

“Nicole went out and opened a safety deposit box at the bank, and it’s in there: as security.”

“We aren’t going to send it to the papers?”

“Not right away. In any case, they’d never publish it. They’ll say it’s a fake . . .”

“But it has to get out. There must be some way.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. Jean-Paul says we should wait. Let the dust settle for a bit.”

According to the papers, the only thing we didn’t do to Lavoie was cut off his cock and shove it down his throat. Jean-Paul said to me:

“You should write a communiqué to explain what happened . . .”

“Why me?”

“Because you were there, with René. And you’re also the one who makes the fewest errors. So . . .”

So I wrote communiqué number seven to explain that we never tortured Lavoie, and that his wounds had been self-inflicted when he tried to escape.

The next day, we watched the state funeral on television. Saw the security measures, cordons of soldiers surrounding the hearse, helicopters circling the cathedral steeple, and sharpshooters posted on all the roofs. Little Albert climbed out of his limousine, like the star student in a class of penitents.

The following day Nicole’s friends came to the apartment and we tried out our hiding place. Not great in the comfort department, but we could stay seated in it, lie down for a bit, drink water, piss in a pot, smoke cigarettes. René had even put in an air vent, which also gave us a bit of light.

No justice. Nicole and René continued to send each other to seventh heaven at least four times a day. It was the only sound we heard. After the hockey game on Saturday night, I slept on the sofa in the living room. Marie-France’s brother slept at his girlfriend’s most of the time, and Jean-Paul took his room. When I think of how much hay the journalists would make with numerous scenes of the apartment that fall, turning it into a kind of theatre! For me it wasn’t complicated, it was my nest.

That morning — about five o’clock — I bumped into Marie-France in the kitchen. She couldn’t sleep, either, and was warming some milk. I pulled up a chair. She was naked under a plaid jacket she’d taken from a coat hook in the hall. Her hair tumbled wildly on her forehead and over her eyes, and caressed her cheeks. Under the table, I was as hard as a humpbacked whale.

I knew what she was going to ask me.

“Gode . . . Are you ever going to tell me why you’re mixed up in all this?”

“The less you know, the better.”

Her eyes went from me to the bedroom, where Jean-Paul was snoring like a fighter jet.

“He scares me . . .”

“Jean-Paul? Come on.”

“I’m telling you, he scares me. Tomorrow, you’ve got to tell him he has to leave, okay?”

“I can’t do that. He’s wanted by the police. If he goes, I go with him.”

“If you get my brother mixed up in this business, I’ll . . .”

“You’ll what, Marie-France?”

We looked at one another. We had come to a certain pass.

“If he keeps his mouth shut,” I said, “there won’t be a problem. And that goes for you, too.”

Down the hall, in the girls’ room, the two lovebirds were screwing as if there were no tomorrow, and no doubt they were right. Marie-France came and lay down beside me on the sofa and let me put my arms around her, but that was all. Nothing else to do but listen to the two sex maniacs in the next room groaning and sighing, and the mattress shrieking as if it were being torn apart.

Two hours later, Marie-France woke me up by shaking the morning newspaper in front of my face. My portrait and that of René were there beside Jean-Paul’s on the wanted poster. The reward for any information leading to our arrest was fixed at $75,000. The kidnappers of Travers were worth another $75,000.

“Where are you going?” I asked, but I already knew the answer.

“I’ve rented a room in town . . . I can’t go on living here.”

I was completely sure she wouldn’t denounce us. But that didn’t stop me, when she went through the door, from feeling well and truly fucked.