PAUL LAVOIE’S
CONFESSION

“YOUR LITTLE ALBERT, HE GOT us good, eh? He pretends to be willing to negotiate, just to buy himself some time, and now look what’s happening . . .”

Both Gode and René wore masks as they spoke to the hostage, Gode next to the bed and René looking outside with his binoculars. He saw the long column of covered military trucks streaming from the northeast before trundling down avenue Savane, only a few metres from the house. Helicopters continually flying over the neighbourhood. Lavoie was on the bed, eyes covered. Listening to the radio that morning, he’d heard the federal government’s declaration of the War Measures Act at the same time his kidnappers had. Seizures and arrests without warrants had been taking place all morning.

“They’ve abandoned you. They’re leaving you to your fate.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

“Maybe not, but I’ve got unfinished business with you. You’ve got to see things as they are, Mr. Lavoie. Your party has decided to sacrifice you. As for me, all that’s important now is to find a way to get you out of here . . .”

Lavoie smiled sadly.

“That shouldn’t be too hard. Just untie me and let me walk out.”

“We can’t do that. You’re the Minister of Labour, you must know all about bargaining positions. Try to see things from our angle. The only victory we’ve had since the beginning of this whole story was the reading of our manifesto on the CBC. And even then, they weren’t taking us seriously. No, what we need is a text that’s really going to hit hard. Something to make this entire government crumble: The Confessions of Paul Lavoie.”

René brought the binoculars down. Lavoie said nothing. He was waiting for Gode to continue. The room was as silent as a crypt.

“Since they’ve decided you’re as good as dead,” said Gode, “as a bargaining chip, you’re worth nothing to us now. But you can still make them pay for giving you up, because you know what’s going on, you know their filth. Old-fashioned politics, the old boys’ club, dirty elections, and big money. Vézina simply a puppet in the hands of Ottawa, itself a Muppet for big American interests. Brown envelopes, contracts, private clubs, Scarpino, all of it. You yourself, when you were a journalist at the Devoir, you saw what was happening, and maybe even blew the whistle on a scandal or two. But all that was before you found yourself on the other side of the fence. Then Vézina arrived. We traded a village accountant for a technocrat, but nothing else changed. The establishment put its man in place and walked away with everyone’s money. Listen to me, Lavoie: you know enough to implode his goddamned government! And we’re going to help you do it . . . They think that with their soldiers in the street they’re going to turn the people’s affection against the FLQ, but we’re going to convince them otherwise, one by one, as they’re sitting there in front of their TVs. We’re going to give them red meat. Names, dates. Special Edition: the Travers-Lavoie Affair, the Bomb.”

“They’re going to say you forced a confession out of me. That you’ve invented it all.”

“Let us take care of that end, okay?”

“If I do this, they’ll never let me walk out of here alive.”

René turned from the window and stepped toward the bed.

“Maybe. But if you don’t do it, it’s the Chevalier Cell that won’t let you get out of here alive.”

Gode was keeping an eye on the hostage, whose blindfold and handcuffs had now been taken off. He was writing, like Proust and Françoise Sagan before him, sitting at the head of the bed, a notepad on his knees.

Lavoie looked up from his writing and, for just a moment, thought he’d seen movement in the window of the bungalow that he could see from his room, the one on the next street. Without moving, he strained for a few seconds to hear any unfamiliar sounds, but nothing else happened. False alarm. He continued his work without his jailer noticing anything.

“What you’re asking of me, in the end, is to renounce my life’s work.”

“Just say the truth. That’d be a great step forward already.”

“A wife and two kids to feed. That’s the truth.”

“Don’t make me weep. Write something in prose and in French — without too many mistakes, of course — that’s all we’re asking.”

“It’d go faster if I could type it up . . .”

Gode looked at him, frowning.

“What I’m writing now is the draft,” Lavoie explained. “I’m going to have to make a copy of it in any case. I was a journalist once, you know . . . I could type up a first draft that wouldn’t be too bad at all.”

“Okay by me. You want me to bring you a typewriter?”

“Not on my knees, like this, here . . . I’d need a table.”

“There’s a card table in the other room. But there’s not much space here, unless I move the bed . . . I could set you up in the other room, maybe.”

“If you want.”

The old Underwood’s heightened, almost joyous clacking could be heard from the communiqué room. In a frenetic parallel to the constantly increasing flow of news of fresh arrests and arbitrary detentions that’d been coming in that morning, the staccato of Lavoie’s typing hammered through the house. The arrests made under the purview of the War Measures Act now numbered in the hundreds, and journalists, when they themselves were not in jail, worked to confirm names while rumours began swirling around a few familiar individuals: Godin, Pauline Julien, Chevalier Branlequeue. Lavoie was in the room through which he’d entered the house, the one with the secret passage in the wardrobe. The table was placed against the wall that separated the room from the garage. Under the window, two mattresses lay on the floor, covered in pillows and sleeping bags. Paul Lavoie hit the keys with rhythm and agility, a performance artist. He was enthusiastic, finding his voice, the old fever of the newsroom with a deadline approaching. As long as he kept typing he wasn’t a hostage, but a man free to write.

And he was still the same man who, in the fifties, had used such ten-dollar words as “concussion” and “prevarication” when condemning the Duplessis government’s scheming; the votes bought with refrigerators and asphalt, the iron and copper and natural gas barons, the salmon-spawning rivers under the control of the Americans, a banana republic indeed. And what had changed, really? Only this: it was now his own government that Paul Lavoie was denouncing.

But more than anything, he was aware that he was fighting the empire of Colonel Lapierre.

He stopped.

“May I have more tea, please?”

“Certainly.”

Gode shouted out to Ben, who made his way to the kitchen.

“What do you do when you’re not kidnapping people?” Lavoie asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you have a hobby?”

“Snowshoeing in winter. In summer I fish, when I can . . . and a bit of hunting, for small game.”

“Have you ever fished salmon?”

“Are you crazy? That’s for big shots, like you.”

“I’ve never been a fan of fishing, myself. I’m a golfer, really.”

“What a stupid sport. Running after a tiny ball.”

After having slipped his hood over his head, Desrosiers brought in a rose-patterned cup of steaming tea.

“I’m hungry,” Lavoie said, accepting the cup.

“Too bad, there isn’t much left to eat.”

“Why don’t you go to a grocer’s?”

“Because it’s not a good time to go out. They’re arresting everyone.”

“But we have to eat. Why not order something?”

Godefroid and Ben looked at each other.

“I’m hungrier than a rabid dog,” Ben said.

“I’d go for some fried chicken,” Lavoie added.

“Sure, a nice club sandwich wouldn’t hurt . . .”

“There were three twenty-dollar bills in my wallet. Have you spent it all?”

“There’s a twenty left,” Ben announced, looking at his comrade. “Not as dangerous this way, eh?”

René had joined them. Gode suddenly felt the weight of his weariness. Of accumulated tension, of the too rare hours of restless sleep. The army had practically set up outside their door, and they were all at the end of their ropes.

“Me,” René added, “I’d go for a nice chicken breast . . .”

He was already looking for a notepad to take down everyone’s orders.

“A carton of cigarettes, too, don’t forget the carton, okay?”

“The last meal,” Gode thought to himself. He turned toward Lavoie.

“We’re going to pick the order up at the end of the road, just in case you had any ideas.”

Lavoie slapped the Underwood’s carriage return back into position.

“I’m not done yet.”

The small red car from Baby Barbecue’s restaurant hadn’t even turned its motor off before René ran out of the house and made his way to the street. He paid, leaving a tip for the delivery man, who watched him walk back in with a brown paper bag that contained the chicken boxes.

He came back into the house, bringing with him the warm odour of perfectly roasted chicken, and walked into the kitchen, Gode at his heels. Two entire chickens, three club sandwiches, a carton of Export “A”: they’d pinched every penny out of that twenty-dollar bill. Something for everyone. Just as Gode, after taking the boxes out of the bag, was opening the containers to take an inventory of his goodies, Ben walked into the kitchen to take the hostage his meal. Gode threw him a look. He was about to say something, but it slipped his mind. For a moment. Just a moment.

“I don’t hear the . . .”

There came the noise of broken glass, right there, in the room, inside the horror show.