Preston “Prez” Coleman Downs, now known as Douglas “Doug” Norberg to all but Isabelle, Jamie, and Marianne, had been walking for three blocks from the grocery store.
He lived in a triplex on the west side of De l’Esplanade Avenue in a spacious bright apartment he rented from Marianne “for a third of what the rent really should be,” Jamie—Marianne’s boyfriend—was fond of reminding one and all. “She wouldn’t even rent it to me for twice the legitimate rent even though I begged her on bended knee. She said it was better not to live too close to the person you’re involved with. What rubbish!”
“What rubbish!” was Jamie’s signature phrase. He came to Canada in 1965 as part of the first wave of American anti-Viet Nam war activists. He professed to be a pacifist and an atheist. He had confided to a not tight-lipped Marianne, however, that his New Jersey family was Jewish and wealthy. He, however, proclaimed himself to be an anti-establishment rebel who shunned materialism. And though he missed his mother and siblings, his father was another story. As early as Jamie’s Bar-Mitzvah his father had sought to control his future, going as far as actually trying to arrange his marriage to the daughter of another wealthy Jewish family.
Prez first heard “What rubbish!” that first night he landed in Quebec as he followed Jamie’s shadow through the airport chaos. As they approached Jamie’s cab parked outside the terminal, two Montreal cops nearly knocked Prez on his face as they rushed to confront Jamie. They argued heatedly in French. Then Jamie exclaimed, “What rubbish!” After arguing back briefly in French, Jamie gave them a card and screamed, “You don’t want to make the morning papers, do you?” The cops looked at the card and made no further attempt to stop him. The cops could have mistaken Jamie for a well-known fugitive Quebec nationalist whose organization had been planting bombs in front of the US Embassy. Or maybe they simply took offense at the “Off the Pig” slogan Jamie had painted in a bright white across the front of his Beetle cab’s psychedelic trunk lid. But what was certain was that they did not want to tangle with his lawyer, Raymond Bourgeois—“Who is also my girlfriend’s uncle,” he had screamed at them. Bourgie Ray was the notorious, feared, and celebrated labor, Mafia, and police-union lawyer so corrupt that his contagion was airborne.
Prez wondered if his Jamie flashback was connected to the realization that he was being followed by a black Pontiac. He paused often to shift the grocery bags in his arms as if they were heavy, but they weren’t. Even though it stayed almost a whole block behind, it was obvious that the car paused and resumed whenever he did.
When he crossed Villeneuve Avenue, he saw another black Pontiac fuming exhaust vapor parked at the end of the block in front of him. Its roof and windows were cleared of snow on this quiet street where all the other cars sat cold, quiet, and snow covered. The car behind got too close and he was able to see that the car’s insignia was Bonneville, not Parisienne, and that it bore New York license plates. As he neared his own building he was shocked to see a crouching figure on the roof aiming a rifle at him.
He dropped his grocery bags and sprinted ahead a few paces before making a sharp turn to his left and toward a laneway. Two bullets kicked up the snow just where he would have been. He emerged onto Saint Urbain Street, where he hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him downtown.
*
He got out at the intersection of Sainte Catherine Street and Saint Laurent Boulevard and walked in the opposite direction of his destination until the cab was out of sight. Then he went into Le Bijou Bleu, a sleazy blue-movie theater that sat in a fog of smokey blue light. There were rows of ornate wrought iron seating with plush velvet-like Onyx black seats. He marveled anew at the fat round marble columns that led the eye towards the raised stage over which the movie screen was suspended. And then there was that thickly slatted and polished rock-solid wooden flooring that was immune to squeaking. It was troubling that such a majestic place had become a scum collector, he had thought when he was first taken there as part of his emergency contingency plan tour. While the sordid little sex movies played on the screen, guys sat there and masturbated under their coats. Management didn’t care as long as the posted warning sign was heeded: DO NOT SOIL THE SEATS.
Prez went to the telephone booth beside the ladies’ washroom, a very private area, because no ladies, nor women of any type, came into the Bijou Bleu movie house.
He dialed the number they’d had him memorize, let the phone ring once, and then hung up. He waited five minutes, then dialed again. The phone at the other end was picked up almost before it had a chance to ring.
“Oui, âllo. Saint Eustache Home for Girls,” said a dusky female voice.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” replied Prez, “I thought this was the airport; I’m trying to catch a flight out. Good night.”
He hung up the receiver and looked at his watch. He would have to sit in that grimy theater for an hour and a half before “she” would come to pick him up. He went into the men’s washroom and opened a little black leather sack that he always carried with him. He shaved his sideburns off and also the little patch of hair he’d let grow under his bottom lip. With pomade and an Afro comb, he packed his hair down as tightly as he could so that it would fit under his camouflage-green army hat.
He suddenly felt very tired and wished that he could just go to sleep. But in that theater, you could watch all the sex movies you wanted, you could masturbate until it fell off; you could even get high. However, if you fell asleep, they’d kick you out.
Prez sat down in the back of the theater hidden from view of the entrance by a big square concrete pillar. He was determined to stay awake. Keep your eyes open and stay alert, his mind kept telling him. But he dozed off and was startled awake by a commotion in the front of the theater. Two guys were standing over another administering one hell of a beating. Thud, thud-thud, thud, thud, thud-thud, the licks were raining down on some poor sap. Prez almost thought it funny, noticing how frantically everyone was trying to get away from the beating, until he noticed the glint of flashing steel and realized it was a murder in progress. There was no way anyone could survive such a knife attack.
He scrambled for the side exit and rushed out into the brightness. “You’re late!” he heard a voice say. He looked over to the curb to see a dirty-white Saab station wagon with way-too-skinny tires and a long aerial on the roof. Under the dirt and grime, he could tell it was practically a new car. She reached over and swung the door open for him. The car was a mess inside. There were books and papers scattered all over the back seat. He hopped in and looked at his watch; an hour and forty minutes had passed.
“I’m sorry,” said Prez. He looked over, and behind the wheel was the little woman from the airplane who had shoved him down the chute. His mouth fell open.
“You know, fella,” she said, “I was generous. There’s a five-minute leeway on both sides of the appointed time. And you’re six-and-a-half minutes late. You would have been on your own. And suspect. None of us would have gone near you again. The network depends on no one making mistakes. And one mistake by a self-appointed, self-righteous ‘black nationalist’ leader such as yourself could prevent us from helping anyone ever again, and could even send some of us to prison!”
For someone in such a rush to pass judgment, she took her sweet time pulling away from the intersection as the light turned green.
“I’m not a black nationalist,” said Prez. “I dozed off. I was exhausted. I got shot at and had to run for my life and you talk as though I just took a stroll in the park.”
She double-checked her rear-view mirror.
“You know I’m here totally unarmed and vulnerable,” he continued. “I have to depend on you folks for everything, and I’m grateful, but I was almost killed today.”
“You folks,” he heard her say mockingly under her breath while shaking her head at the pathetic creature beside her. “You’re so American . . . ‘You folks.’ Just please, never say ‘y’all’ when I’m around. I swear I’ll shoot you.” The smile on her face as she said this was too wicked for him to fathom. “I am Isabelle.”
*
Isabelle had called him “fella,” and this was not lost on him. Did she mean “fellah” in the sense that prior to the Algerian Revolution, the Algerian peasants were considered to be passive, submissive, and ignorant victims of colonial oppression who had been conditioned to hate themselves and to do nothing to free themselves from under the yoke of French imperialism? In other words, was she calling him a “nigger”?
Or did she mean “fellah” in the sense of the great mass of Algerians, a lumpen-proletariat, with great revolutionary potential, who when properly ignited and channeled did indeed seize their own destinies and oust the French from their land?
Or, maybe she meant a bit of both.
He was told she wouldn’t like him, but was also told not to take it personally. She was a veteran member of the Communist Party of France who believed in the sanctity of the proletarian revolution, reviling nationalism as reactionary, even counter-revolutionary. She apparently reserved her greatest disdain for the FLQ, Pierre Vallières’ group. She thought them to be “charlatans” who put bombs in mailboxes instead of focusing their attack on the capitalist class. “They haven’t the faintest inkling of what it is to build a popular uprising, much less engineer an authentic revolution in which the dominant relations of production are overthrown and new productive forces arise leading to the qualitative transition from this capitalist epoch to the socialist one.”
Isabelle de la Fressange was the most experienced member of the group, with the kind of real experience in clandestine activities one can only get in the cauldron of a revolution. Born in 1939 in Paris, she was a petite woman with a head full of thick disheveled brunette hair that was interwoven with strands of premature silver as if by aesthetic choice. Her prettiness was hidden beneath layers of fierceness. Yet her eyes were a child’s, seemingly ever on the verge of a good cry. The effect was exaggerated by her eyelashes, which were so long that everyone wondered how she managed to wear her trademark black-framed sunglasses when she went out on the town to dance, dance, dance. Her finely chiseled features had been permanently bronzed by the North African sun. If no one knew that both her parents were French, no one would guess she was European.
Isabelle’s parents, both doctors, had been sympathetic to the Algerians’ cause after learning of the abject poverty, social debasement, and torture the Algerians suffered at the hands of the French colonialists. They left their respective practices in Paris and moved to Algiers.
Isabelle was eighteen years old in 1956 when she, against the advice of her parents, joined the French Communist Party in Algiers. The Battle of Algiers had begun and her parents were being secretly investigated.
Her mother had been forewarned of their imminent arrest for aiding and abetting the FLN. They received the warning at, of all places, a cocktail party for the head of the SDECE—the French government’s security service. Or, should it be said that it was Madame de la Fressange who received the warning from a young officer in the French Foreign Office with whom she had been intimate all over Algiers. Thus, straight from the party, Monsieur and Madame de la Fressange hopped aboard an oil-bearing vessel headed for Canada with young Isabelle in tow.
*
She drove like the proverbial bat-out-of-hell once she got out of downtown traffic. Prez marveled at her style, the way she shifted, her timing in overtaking and avoiding traffic, her quick up-shifts and down-shifts. He saw 90 mph on the speedometer with such regularity that it was no longer alarming.
Prez closed his eyes once he had gotten used to the speed and they both were satisfied they were not being followed. A new wave of exhaustion washed over him.
His eyes jerked open with the sickening thought that he was supposed to have been the victim. Washington’s not-so-secret war on black America was seeping across the border and he knew the stench when he smelled it.