River City (87 page)

He was nearly out the door when he remembered that he alone had the keys to lock up this place. He tossed them to her. “Keep them on you. Figure out the exchange later.”

“Good luck,” she called.

“This is destiny. It’s no longer a matter of luck.”

If you say so,
she was thinking, as he closed the door, but she didn’t believe him. His remark reflected his own combative energy, the primitive, involuntary pleasure he took in being thrust into the vortex of chaos. Everyone’s destiny was on the line, she knew, René's, Trudeau’s, Bourassa’s, the FLQ’s. Perhaps her own. Somewhere in that mix luck would play a role. Then all these warring men would see what destiny’s project really had in store for them.

She didn’t know where her sympathies might be rooted. Adrenaline’s high, the rhythm of change, the intoxicating momentum that the radicals could feel and she sensed, too—amid all that it was hard to think straight. For a while she was one of them, but she listened to other voices, also. She believed that René could effect real change, without the violence or the shame of it, without the manic, male zeal for bloodletting. Those poor kidnapped men. Their fearful families. Resorting to snatching a Quebecer after the abduction of the Brit meant that one of their own had been taken now, all because some people didn’t agree with his politics. And before entering politics, Laporte had been a journalist, one of the brave ones who had stood up against Duplessis.

Her mother’s struggles seemed nobler. A woman who had defied the system and demanded simple rights and fair wages. She boycotted, frustrated, flummoxed, barricaded and interfered with the system, with the flow of goods and the easy acquiescence to greed and exploitation. But she did not knowingly imperil another life.

Revolutions put the violent in charge. The FLQ assumed that someday they’d win.
“Nous vaincrons,”
they told each other—we’ll conquer. They’d be in charge, but honestly, who ever asked them to lead? And why can’t anyone discuss this anymore? René was right—and for that matter, so was Trudeau. If your cause is just, if it’s viable, convince the people of its authenticity, carry the whole of the nation, or at least a majority of it, on your back and let them validate your opinion. Win or lose, let that be your legacy.

Change can’t happen, some said. But look. Archbishops were once the crown princes of Quebec. Now they were court jesters. Duplessis once controlled the press. Now the press was out of control. The bosses were once exclusively English, but many were French now, and the English were hitting the highway to Toronto. To effect change, you had to believe in it, and if you
blew people up it was because you didn’t believe in it enough. All you had to do was be convinced of your stance and convince people to think accordingly.

Who would she fight for? Armand Touton had already called, wanting her to help him and the police. Her friends in the movement had called, wanting her to join them in demonstrations. René had called, wanting her to soothe him in his bed and listen to his troubles, even to counsel him. Everybody wanted a piece of her, while what she wanted was a piece of herself—a quiet, true, heartfelt portion so that she might truly examine her own desire.

This is what it was like, her mother had confided, towards the end of her father’s life. Everyone wanted a piece of him, too, and all he wanted was a piece of himself for his family. Anik hoped she’d fare better than him, and survive, not only for her own sake, but as homage to him.

She got out of bed, and dressed.

She knew that when she stepped outside, the streets would be animated and tense. She didn’t want to visit the bars where her friends would be overexcited and debating all this. She didn’t want to go home, where Armand Touton might find her. She just wished that she had somewhere to go, somewhere to be. And she wondered how Émile was doing, how he was making it through all this. As a junior cop, he must be on edge. Fortunately, she had stayed away from the demonstrations, or they’d probably have locked horns again by now.

Captain Touton knew that he was late, and despite having legitimate excuses, he would not be spared the jibes. He hobbled down the corridor within the RCMP’s Montreal headquarters as fast as he was able. Barely knocking, he entered the designated boardroom. Old friends, adversaries and a few recent acquaintances glanced up. One man headed for the coffeemaker as though the sight of Touton’s face indicated that he suffered a grim need for a cup.

This was a meeting of second-level cops, a slew of captains and lieutenants from the provincial police, the Mounties and his own municipal force. Catching the back of a chair and wheeling it around to sit in, Touton calculated quickly that he would not be the only late arrival.

To be expected. They were all run off their feet lately. Still, wisecracks commenced. He would have to pay for his tardiness. “Good of you to join us, Armand. I believe you know everyone. As you’re the captain of the Night Patrol, I hope we’re not getting you out of bed.” A few men around the table chuckled.

“I was looking forward to seeing you guys in the daytime for a change,” the captain struck back. “I thought you might look half-human. I guess I was wrong.”

“Four hours of sleep a day—” a Mountie, who was probably secretly in love with his own handsome reflection, commenced to explain.

“Who gets four hours?” Touton interrupted. “Even my dog doesn’t get four hours anymore.”

He was winning now, and enjoying that.

“Anyway, us city cops, we look like hell because we work like hell. You Mounties, you look like hell because you just do. Maybe if you didn’t drink so much, maybe if you didn’t spend all your meal money on hookers, you might have better luck with the ladies, live better lives.”

“Mounties sleep with hookers, city cops sleep with homely wives, but in the Sûreté,” one of the provincial police officers bragged, “we get the honeys. That’s the difference between us.”

“The difference between us is that we sleep with women who are over sixteen,” Touton fired back. “You should try it sometime, if you’re man enough.”

While cops were smirking and hooting, Touton shot a glance around the room and realized he was the only one there without a moustache. These guys really did care about their appearance, and they cultivated a certain cop look. They looked terrible. Worn. Bedraggled. Overcaffeinated. Poorly fed. Sleep-deprived. A miserable lot.

Someone put a cup down in front of him. Touton took a sip, not bothering with cream or sugar. They were all motoring on coffee now, the stronger the better, and getting each other’s goat served as another survival tactic. A few laughs, and they might endure their endless shifts without falling asleep or coming unglued.

Then a Mountie brought them to order. “The brass has been compiling lists,” he announced, patting down his moustache. “Maoists, Trotskyites, radical separatists, union guys who make trouble during demonstrations, and so on.”

“What do you mean, and so on?” Touton asked.

“Guys like that.”

“Guys like what?”

“Excuse me?” The Mountie looked confused. He hadn’t expected questions.

“You said union guys and political guys, and guys like that. So who are guys like that?”

“Political guys, and guys like that. What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know who guys like that are. You say ‘guys like that,’ and I think you mean everybody you want it to mean. I get nervous. So, anyway—what are these lists for again?”

Another officer tried to help his colleague. “Your mayor told us, Captain Touton, that he’s putting pressure on the prime minister to invoke the War Measures Act. So is Bourassa. If the War Measures Act goes through, then we can arrest whomever we want, whenever we want, and put that person away for just about as long as we want. So we’re compiling lists, to be ready, so we know who to go after when the time comes. We don’t want chaos. We want to be effective.”

Cops with infinite power. Politicians with even more. Touton wasn’t convinced that he relished either scenario. “That’s why I’m asking,” he stated, “who you mean by ‘guys like that.’ I don’t want to give orders to my men to go out and arrest radicals and ‘guys like that.’ Who knows who they’ll bring in? Anybody with long hair and a beard? Girls with cute behinds? It has to be clear.”

“I agree with you,” the older Mountie said. “It has to be clear. Sergeant Leduc is going to modify his statement to exclude phrases such as ‘and so on’ and ‘guys like that.’ From now on, he will be more precise in what he says.”

Touton didn’t know whether the older Mountie was politely calling him an asshole or was actually on his side and advising his colleague to do better. Either way, he had made progress, and words would have to mean what they were meant to mean in this room from this point forward.

“When does this War Measures Act take effect?” Touton wanted to know.

“What will it mean?”

The more junior Mountie spoke up again. “We can make arrests without interference from lawyers, judges, the courts or the law. We become the law, essentially.”

“I was afraid of that,” Touton murmured.

Everyone needed to assess the development. They’d been cops long enough to know that they did not operate within a perfect system, and that their own guys were as imperfect as the public they endeavoured to protect.

“Know why this stinks?” an officer asked, and Touton turned to see that it was a man from his own force speaking, a captain like himself, seated at the far end of the table. This was the man who had brought him coffee.

“Why does it stink, André?” Touton inquired.

The man shook his head and said, “It feels like a fucking war, and that’s fine, but we’re not the fucking army.”

They remained still awhile, mute. Then the senior Mountie told them, “When the War Measures Act is declared, they’ll bring in the army to help.”

He’d been looking for a way out, an alternative political device to provide the necessary security to the citizens of Montreal and Quebec. Dramatic enough, sending in the army, and he was in favour of doing so, but in truth, he had no other option. The law demanded that if he received a formal request from a provincial justice minister for military support, he was legally compelled to provide it. The War Measures Act, which suspended civil liberties and gave extraordinary powers to the police, was a different matter, and the burden of that extreme tactic pressed upon his conscience.

Drapeau wanted him to do it—the mayor of Montreal.

Back from New York, Premier Bourassa begged him to do it, the man sounding as though he was at the end of a short, frayed tether. On the phone with him each day Trudeau did his best to calm him, yet the request remained persistent. Bourassa wanted civil rights suspended.

Around him, counsellors were convinced that the time had come for drastic action. A violent, clandestine group had set itself up as a parallel government, and with each passing day its popular support increased. Yet the War Measures Act seemed too cumbersome, too draconian, and invoking it might seem like a move made in panic. Like hunting quail with a bazooka. “Let’s see what the army can do,” he argued. “They’ll patrol the streets. Give the police a chance to investigate.”

The demonstrations grew. They became better organized.

The police made no headway and were seen to be botching the job.

Then on October 15, 1970, an elite group of persons held a meeting in Montreal. Out of that discussion, they signed a document published in
Le Devoir.
Trudeau read the columns of signatories, an impressive list. René Lévesque, the president of the Parti Québécois; the president of Desjardins Life Assurance; half a dozen union heads; Claude Ryan, the editor of
Le Devoir,
the most prestigious French newspaper in the country; Camille Laurin, the parliamentary secretary of the Parti Québécois; four professors from the upper echelon of academia, representing the major French universities. Together they proclaimed that, in light of “the atmosphere of semi-military rigidity that can be detected in Ottawa,” and having expressed the concern that “in certain non-Quebec quarters in particular, the terrible temptation of a policy for the worst, i.e., the illusion that a chaotic and thoroughly ravaged Quebec would be easier to control by whatever means,” they espoused the desire to elicit the support of the population to oblige the government of Quebec to negotiate. Trudeau was already in a rage at the mention of a ravaged Quebec, but he reached a feverish moment when he first read that the signatories were offering “our most urgent support in negotiating an exchange between hostages and political prisoners.”

In print.

Black and white.

An elite of Quebec society had referred to gunmen, bank robbers and bombers—each individual fairly tried and convicted according to the actions of the judiciary—as political prisoners.

Some of the rhetoric he recognized. The part leading up to “a chaotic and thoroughly ravaged Quebec” was pure Lévesque, his diction and rhythm as
readily identified as the chip on his shoulder, and he hadn’t been at his best or most biting, either. Probably, Ryan had toned him down a tad. And Ryan had drafted the latter portion, he was sure, except that somebody had slipped him a mickey, then inserted the words “political prisoners.” He’d had to have been drugged or inebriated—what other explanation could there be? He’d been browbeaten. That was it.

Trudeau’s rant over the letter had to be brief and short-lived, although he considered it more offensive than the FLQ manifestos, which insulted him and the intelligence of the society more directly. He telephoned Bourassa and Drapeau both, and asked if they were willing to commit to writing that they believed they were under an apprehension of insurrection.

They promptly committed their demands to him in writing.

Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, then sat by the window in his study. The same law that had landed Mayor Houde in an internment camp had been brought back. Back then, he had personally bellyached against it. Now, he had invoked it himself. The army, its soldiers, its weapons, its troop transports, its Jeeps, its tanks already were rumbling into Quebec and taking up positions on the street corners of Montreal. He felt alone that night, as the army moved under cover of darkness. He knew that, while others had insisted on the manoeuvre, the results of this escapade would forever attach to him.