ECCE LYNX

GODE MOVES THROUGH THE NORTHERN savanna. Before him stretch sparse rows of black spruce, twelve feet high, all the way to the horizon. In this country, when you unleash a dog he becomes a wolf. And it’s a lynx Gode sees before him now, walking toward him in the silence and whiteness of the snow, on its large padded paws. He won’t attack me, he thinks, unable to move, as though paralyzed while the lynx comes so close he brushes up against him like a cat, then climbs a nearby tree and jumps on him, wraps himself around Gode’s neck and shoulders like a heavy purring fur collar emitting a warm, suffocating, throbbing heat. “He’s eating my brain,” Gode has time to think, in his dream.

When he opens his eyes, Gode’s head is buried under the sleeping bag and he’s breathing with difficulty. He emerges from the bag and takes a deep breath of the cold October night air, flowing into his room through the broken window. And as the lynx’s purring is transformed into the staccato growl of a helicopter overhead, it all comes back to him. He isn’t in the northern grasslands, but in some bungalow on the South Shore, near a street named Savane, with a hostage who had inflicted serious injuries on himself while trying to escape. That’s the truth of it. That’s the here and now.

He finds René fighting off sleep on the living-room couch. In front of him, Paul Lavoie sits on a chair, white as a sheet, his eyes closed, his chin against his chest, seemingly unconscious. On his forearms and hands, makeshift bandages crusted with half-coagulated blood. He wears the wool sweater Ben put on him instead of his old shirt, which was drenched in blood.

“How’s he doing?”

“As you can see.”

“We can’t leave him this way . . .”

“No. We’re going to have to make a decision.”

The previous night they’d heard Little Albert on television, justifying the imposition of martial law by the necessity of stopping the FLQ advancing to the fourth stage of its plan: selective assassinations.

Selective assassinations! Gode and René had shaken their heads in disbelief.

Then the premier had renewed his single and ultimate concession to the terrorists. Safe conduct to a country of their choice.

“We have to kill him,” René said, after a tense silence.

Gode grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall and held it out to him.

“You wanna blow his head off? Be my guest . . .”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, for Christ’s sake.” René rubbed his eyes. “We can’t just shoot him here. The neighbours will hear . . .”

“We don’t have neighbours anymore! Don’t you remember? They got thrown in jail by the cops!”

“Next door. But what about behind the house . . . ?”

“There’s no one there. You haven’t noticed?

“We have to end it,” René said again, examining the hostage prostrated on the chair. “But not with a gun, it’s too risky. We should have cobbled together some sort of silencer . . .”

“Do you have another idea?”

“Sure. We get him in the car while it’s still dark, we go to the end of the road and then keep going, driving right through the field, up to the trees over there. Then we stop, we get him out of the car, we shoot him with the M1 in the heart and leave him there.”

“And I’ve got another idea. We free him. We let him go . . . Or we leave him here and get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible.”

Suddenly, Lavoie moved his head and let out a muted wail, without opening his eyes. Frozen stiff, they stayed there a long moment, without moving, watching his reactions.

“Do you think he heard us?”

“I don’t know. Go rest a bit. I’ll look after him.”

René stopped in the room’s doorway and said without turning: “He saw us without our masks on. He’ll be able to identify us now.”

“Just go and get some rest.”

Saturday morning. The military base seems quiet, from a distance. Gode sits before the old Underwood on the card table. A sheet of blank paper in the platen. He’s had an idea for a new communiqué, addressed directly to the people. They could attach it to the first pages of Lavoie’s confession. But he looks at the keys and nothing comes out. Total block. And it’s as if they’d won.

The hostage sits without moving, as still as a wax statue. Gode stands in front of the chair on which he is collapsed. Gode nervously wrings his hands, then lifts them up to his face to look at them. He needs gloves. He thinks back to his dream and turns away to sit back down in front of the typewriter. He tries to remember a poem he’d written in grade seven. The time the teacher (in jail now, from what he’d heard) had read his homework in front of the entire class. He could only remember the two words of the title, now, which he types with two fingers. ECCE LYNX

“How much do you want?”

Gode gives a violent start. Lavoie has opened his eyes, and looks at him.

“Tell me how much you want,” the hostage insists.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ll give you money if you let me go. It can be taken care of easily. I could get the sum together right away, if you let me make a phone call. You don’t need to be afraid, I won’t give you up. You have my word of honour.”

“Your word? Whose honour? The Scarpinos’?”

Godefroid sneers. He doesn’t know whether he should find this spectacle revolting or simply sad. A cruel smile comes to his lips. The hostage in front of him has become the enemy once again.

“We know where your money comes from! You should be ashamed. After a week here, you still haven’t understood anything. As if we . . . we acted for our personal gain!”

“One hundred thousand . . . No, I’ll give you a hundred and fifty thousand bucks.”

“Stop it. Shut up.”

“I could find two hundred and fifty. Maybe even five hundred thousand, but it would take a bit longer . . .”

“You really are a desperate case. I pity you.”

“Pity,” Lavoie repeated like an echo, as if the word were a buoy. “Pity. Please, I beg of you, let me go, okay?”

And he begins to cry. Gode gets up, disgusted, his heart upended.

“I’m going to go and make you a nice cup of tea. A strong one . . . It’ll make you feel better.”

Lavoie nods his head. He closes his eyes again, his head falls back to his chest. He seems, once again, to fall into a profound apathy.

Gode leaves him there, crumpled in his chair, and walks to the kitchen. While the cold water streams from the tap into the kettle and the burner begins to redden, he hears sirens in the distance.

Talk about a fucking shit show. The kettle began to whistle, but I could still hear the siren coming closer and closer, as if the two sounds were becoming one, the whistling steam and the screaming siren, somewhere along avenue Savane, coming closer and closer, and I’d forgotten something and left the kettle on and heard the door to the back room open and the sound of someone running into the living room, and before I understood what was happening I ran out of the kitchen in time to see Lavoie running toward the front door, head down like a running back rushing through enemy lines, and I jumped like a linebacker and tackled him as he stepped in front of me, and he fell to the ground and began to yell, spread-eagled on the floor, and I saw René come into my field of vision on the right and fall over both Lavoie and me, trying to hold him down, unable to move but I couldn’t either and he was still yelling and yelling as if he wanted to drown out the goddamned siren that was now on our street, somewhere above me Ben took him by the shirt and twisted his collar and I heard Lavoie croaking, fall almost into silence, a gasp not a roar, René was tightening and tightening and so was I, “shut up, shut up,” René moaned and I held on for a long time while Lavoie, his body, struggled under me, and there was a jolt, like an earthquake, that lifted all three of us as if a wave had screamed through his blood, I’m holding him in my arms and his life is fleeing but not him, and there’s no longer the voice, and then under my chest it still moved, but like a fish, a last trickle of life that couldn’t stop, and the body keeps on, you feel him going, his salt water, his movement, his air is gone, gone nowhere, always waiting, the nerves, the goddamned nerves, shut up, you’ll stop. Shut up I told you, I said did you hear me.