Black Bird (27 page)

Jean-Baptiste was led into a small, windowless room. They sat him at an Arborite table on which lay a jumbled piece of cloth. The big, older cop, promoted to detective as he’d predicted himself that cold winter’s night, leaned across the table, staring Jean-Baptiste in the eyes. At the same time he unfolded the cloth and revealed a revolver.

“Pick it up,” he said.

Jean-Baptiste looked from the overhanging, mustachioed, pot-bellied detective to the gun lying on the table, its muzzle pointed towards him.

“Pick it up,” said the cop again.

“No,” said Jean-Baptiste.

The cop folded the cloth and put the gun in the desk drawer. “Okay, forget it.” He lit a cigarette, wordlessly offered one to Jean-Baptiste. He stood and walked around the room, behind Jean-Baptiste and back again. “Heard the news?” he asked.

“No,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“No? Don’t listen to the radio? Newspaper? Television?”

“No,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“Talk to the other inmates?”

“I keep to myself. I’ll be out soon.”

The cop laughed. And then he held his tongue with a smile on his face, long enough to make Jean-Baptiste wonder why. “Not soon enough for some,” he said.

“What?”

“Somebody’s trying to get you out.”

“Someone paid my bail? That’s ridiculous, I’m being released next week.”

“No,” said the cop. “No one’s paid any money for you.”

Jean-Baptiste waited as long as he could. “What are you talking about?”

“Who are your friends?”

“What friends?”

“Your buddies. Who do you hang out with? Drink beer with, smoke pot with?”

“You want me to snitch on pot smokers?”

“Maybe. If it makes you comfortable to put it that way.”

“I haven’t got a clue what you’re saying.”

The cop stood up and smacked his hand violently on the table. Jean-Baptiste flinched. “Who the hell are your friends? What are their names, where do they live?”

Jean-Baptiste said nothing.

The cop calmed down. “Okay. Let’s be straight with each other. You’re in here for spreading treasonous literature.”

“That was a mistake. Those weren’t my pamphlets. My own literature may be bad, but it’s not criminal.”

The cop sighed. “Right. Everyone’s innocent. That’s why we’re all here in this lovely resort hotel, as a reward for our virtue.”

“Whatever you say,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“Okay. You’re not a felquiste. You didn’t write those manifestos. I believe you. Too bad the felquistes don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me tell you the latest news. There’s been a kidnapping. A British diplomat. Not for money, not for ransom. He’s been taken by the FLQ. They’re threatening his life. And you know what they want to set him free?”

“I haven’t got a clue.”

“They want you out of jail.”

“What? You’re insane.”

The detective passed him a photocopied sheet of paper. A crude drawing of a Patriote formed the background, wearing a long toque, a pipe dangling from his mouth and carrying a long rifle. All the FLQ communiqués bore this image. He read the text. It was both a manifesto and a list of demands, written in a half-educated, proto-Marxist style. It rambled a bit, revealing its author’s uncontrollable anger, even calling the Canadian prime minister a fag. Most of its points were familiar to Jean-Baptiste from his sister’s rantings, and from newspaper reports of previous communiqués. But what was important was a single item on the list of demands: the release of all political prisoners.

“Who wrote that?” asked the cop.

“I don’t know. I don’t know these people.” But at last Jean-Baptiste realized he knew exactly who had written this one, and he understood very well why, and how it was just another wrong turn in a maze, a maze that might somewhere have a hidden exit, but was just as likely to have only wrong turns and unexpected collisions with mirrors.

“I don’t believe you. Are you sure you’ve never seen this gun before?”

“No.”

“It was found at the kidnapping scene.” He unwrapped it once more, but was careful to handle only the cloth, not the gun itself. He held it out to Jean-Baptiste. “Take a closer look. Many guns look alike.”

“I’ve never held a gun in my life and I won’t start now,” said Jean-Baptiste.

The cop put the gun away. “Okay. Just one more thing and you can go back to your cell where you belong. Get up.”

Jean-Baptiste stared.

“Get up, stand away from the chair. Come on, quick!”

Jean-Baptiste stood in confusion. He was scared. He knew the cop wanted his fingerprints on the gun, wanted to connect him to the kidnapping. My God, what had Marie done now? Was she really involved? Was it really some warped attempt to get him out of jail? It seemed hardly likely, when she knew he would walk free in only a matter of days; besides, there were other friends of hers still in prison, some in this very jail. She probably never thought he would be questioned, since she certainly knew he wasn’t in the FLQ. That is, if Marie even had anything to do with this kidnapping herself. But that manifesto …

The cop opened the desk drawer and took out a long, flat and slender length of polished wood, with a grip at one end long enough for two hands.

“All those manifestos and other treasonous crap are in French.” He walked around behind Jean-Baptiste. When Jean-Baptiste turned to follow him, the cop stopped him. “No, no. Stand still. But all your ‘literature’ is in English. You like the English? You like English games? Eh? You ever play cricket?”

The cop began to strike him, first across the shoulder blades and then up and down his backside. Jean-Baptiste’s knees buckled when he was hit on his calves, but he caught himself before he fell. He stood quivering under the blows and made sense of the pain by thinking how Grandfather had been right, that he was beginning to learn the way of the world and the hard lessons it offered. Right now he was learning how easy it was to be punished for someone else’s actions, and how little Justice cared who suffered its retribution, as long as someone suffered indeed.

Marie was sleeping only fitfully. She was nervous. Never before had she risked so much, carried such a burden so consciously over so long a time without relief. The fewer people who knew the whereabouts of the hostage, the better. Even her friends didn’t know.

She took pains to hide it from her family. She could never count on a time to fetch his meals or clean his waste. Father was keeping a regular schedule but Grandfather and Uncle were bound to be awake after dark. Even though Dr. Hyde wasn’t buying their corpses any more, those graves were still full of rings, diamond tie clips and gold teeth. And Aline seemed
to have as much trouble sleeping as Marie. Only Mother was really getting any rest.

It was starting to drag on. She cursed herself this time. Could she really have been so stupid as to think the authorities would capitulate according to her schedule? She should have seen it coming. Incompetent and shit-scared politicians furiously chattering among themselves instead of doing something—wasn’t that just the reason people like herself were necessary, to cut through all the hypocritical bullshit of the parasitical poseurs? Meanwhile, the thuggish Keystone Kops could think of nothing more effective to do than run around arresting all the usual suspects. And even that was an insult in its way: hundreds of supposed fellow-travellers were cooling their heels at the Parthenais Detention Centre. Musicians and singers, nationalist newspaper columnists and university professors—writers, for fuck’s sake. They’d corralled all the eggheads and hippies in town and thrown them all together in a giant conference centre, as if stifling the most eloquent portion of the population was the same as striking the most active or the most productive. They were all probably forming new committees in their jail cells right now, planning their sociological dissertations and avant-garde film scripts while listening to the first drafts of new pop songs and merrily enjoying this period of imposed self-importance at the taxpayers’ expense. It maddened her, even more so when she was struck by the realization that Hubert would have loved it. The only saving grace was that it showed just how
close Quebec was coming to open revolution: the authorities had jailed the intellectuals.

How in the world those fools confused academic status with bravery and conviction was beyond Marie. But at least it kept them from her door for the time being.

She poured the contents of the zinc pail into the toilet. It was the same pail Uncle had used to carry the heart up the mountain. This was what Cross and his kind produced, she thought. From birth to death, more and more of it every day. Piles of shit to stifle others with, to humiliate others with. And she was left to clean up after him.

Worse, when she’d returned the pail, he’d said, “Pray with me.”

“Mange de la marde, maudit tête carrée. Calice.” She threw the bucket to the floor.

Thereafter, every time she stole unobserved into the basement and opened the door on him, there he was on his knees with his head bowed, praying, with the gold crucifix that dangled from his neck held between his outstretched fingers. No more pleadings for freedom or newspapers or to write to his family. Just catechisms, and invitations to join him.

And then she’d have to go upstairs and listen to Aline reacting in shocked horror to the news reports about the growing alarm over the “crisis.” Whether the Quebec government was doing all it could, what the Canadian and British governments thought, what these anarchic madmen demanded in
their communiqués, and whether all this was going to have a positive or negative effect on any upcoming referendum.

And when Mother’s friends came visiting, how obviously frightened they were, even in broad daylight in their own hometown. “Who knows what’ll happen next?” asked the cigarette-puffing Mrs. Harrison, waving a column of ash precariously over the parlour carpet. “They’re crazy.”

And Mrs. Pangloss, with, “I’m telling you, God is punishing us. The world’s going to hell because we’ve reached too far. Ever since the Americans went to the moon, look what’s come to us: a separatist government, for Christ’s sake, and now this. We’re being punished.”

Yes, thought Marie. We’re being punished.

And then, incredibly, came a joint televised conference with the prime minister of Canada and the Péquiste premier: two long-time political enemies, two old university classmates, announcing the imposition of the War Measures Act.

Even as they spoke, Canadian troops were being deployed, in numbers not seen since the Second World War—Angus’s war—on Canada’s own soil. As she listened unbelievingly, Marie began to hear a thunder from the sky. Downtown Montreal was being invaded. Such drastic measures were deemed necessary in these extraordinary times, to protect the population and ensure the survival of Democracy itself. Neither Canada nor Quebec would be held
hostage by terrorists. Let the forces of evil do as they would; but the Péquiste premier assured all Québécois, of every political opinion, that he would have no dealings with criminals.

Marie was aghast. Through the window she could see the lights of a convoy of military vehicles passing on Park Avenue, right in front of her house. In the sky she saw the slow dance of enormous helicopters descending over downtown squares, and still, atop the mountain, the cross glowing in the early evening twilight.

So there it was: the Canadian government showing its true colours. Democracy? At the end of a gun barrel. They voted in the Soviet Union too. And also had these massive military parades.

She had to get away from everyone. She dashed to the basement and stood in darkness, trying to reconcile her conflicting, charged emotions. She was afraid. Damn it, she was scared. They’d just sent the whole fucking army after her. She paced and stumbled over things. Slowly her eyes grew more accustomed but she hardly noticed. She wasn’t thinking of her physical whereabouts. Why did everything turn out so contrary to her expectations? What was it that frustrated her ambitions even in her successes? She was caught now between her own prisoner and her family, an inescapable trap.

The whole of her life had been a trap, and it was her parents’ fault. Why did they have to mix up their marriage like that, the way Canada tried to impose a union between French and English? She hated the
English. They never understood, not from the first. She hated being partly English. It meant she was tainted; it meant she must hate what she was herself. It was just like being part of her frustrating, hateful family. She didn’t relish being poor, she didn’t relish listening to her friends when they railed against Anglos, because they all knew that somewhere deep inside her was something that hurt when prodded. She didn’t relish her family’s way of life either: their insular, provincial opinions, their acceptance of the English, their source of income. She didn’t want to belong to a family of body snatchers.

Yet she couldn’t escape them. Through the arguments and the bitterness, through the deprivation and discouragement, they supported her. They were familiar to her. She knew their faces and their habits, she knew how they spoke and what pleased them, she knew how little they cared for her ideals, how futilely they pursued their own ends against her wishes and advice. She had a place amongst them, and that was as stifling as it was comforting.

And the only way to make more room for herself inside her family was to strike back when their image of her contradicted her own image of herself. She must scream, she must argue, she must threaten violence, as she always had. As she had since infancy. She was not like Jean-Baptiste; it wasn’t possible for her to withdraw to some private reality where everything was mixed together fantastically and improbably, where things were never what they really were, where they changed into their opposites to suit his
understanding. Things meant something else for her brother, meant something she’d never imagine, because he was so Anglo. It made him think in another way, a way that conflicted with hers. She was Québécoise, French, and more so than some without English or other blood, because for her it was a conscious choice.

Still, if it weren’t for the English, she would be totally French. Quebec would be French. It would be New France, France with a new outlook, new opportunities, a new face. The best of all possible worlds. But history had been against it. Just at the moment when France itself had embraced the clearing away of the old in order to free itself for the future, Quebec had been grabbed by the English and stifled, held down and repressed. No wonder Quebec had been backward, poor, religious for so long. The Great Darkness.