While extricating my mind from its solution of alcohol, I remembered finding it odd that a CEO of a company as huge as United Motors, and American to boot, would wear this rather working-class garment. The whole operation couldn’t have taken more than a minute. I took him down to the basement and tied him at the wrists and ankles to a chair next to the washing machine.
Afterwards, I must have made him inhale some ether and swallow three or four sleeping pills, because when I came upon him I found, next to the chair, Virgo’s bottle of Halcions and the pint of ether that Taurus uses as a solvent whenever the cabinet-making urge moves him. The CEO, his mouth sealed with tape, was still asleep.
I was aghast. Anyone would be for less. I didn’t even know this guy’s name. In fact, I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was humping the neighbour and was the American CEO of United Motors of Canada. Fat lot of good that could do me! I called United Motors to ask the name of their top manager. The night shift receptionist, who could never have suspected, kindly answered that his name was Robert Gagnon, which threw me for a loop because it doesn’t sound very American.
“That’s a funny name for an American,” I pointed out to her.
“Mr. Gagnon is not American,” she replied with a chuckle. “You must be confusing him with his predecessor. His name was James Taylor and he went back to the United States last year. Mr. Gagnon was VicePresident and became the first French Canadian to head the Canadian branch of United Motors.”
She said this with obvious pride in her voice. I stammered thanks and hung up. Either I had gotten it all wrong, or it was Taurus. But the results were the same: I was in absolute shit and didn’t even have the excuse of it being for a good cause. So I quickly had to find an alternate cause. OK, he wasn’t American, he wasn’t even an Anglo, though that didn’t prevent him from uttering those yes-yes’s when he was humping my neighbour. All the same, his fucking corporation did build the engines for those planes that were showering Indochina with napalm. It had been in the news again the week before: the UN had even lodged a protest because it found that, frankly, the Americans were inflicting far too much suffering on them before rubbing them out and that they were rubbing out far more of them than necessary if their dirty war was to become a clean, presentable war. Oh well, it was better than nothing.
I was thinking at breakneck speed the way you do when panic ties your guts up in knots. I could have simply put him back on the sidewalk as though nothing had happened, but it would have been too risky and I was chicken.
In the end, I got out Taurus’s old typing machine and drafted a communique explaining that the Movement for Solidarity with the People of Vietnam (MSPV)1 had kidnapped the CEO of United Motors of Canada, Robert Gagnon, and he would be freed only if the production of military engines at its Quebec plant were stopped. Then I took Virgo’s Polaroid and went down to the basement to take a mug shot of my hostage, who was still sleeping like a log. I put the press release and the photo in an envelope, being very careful not to leave any fingerprints on it, to make it look more authentic. I collected all my stuff and went out almost at a run, letter in hand. It wasn’t yet four in the morning. I needed to move - my heart and head and lungs were in danger of exploding.
I walked, robotically, toward the college. As I went by radio station CQFD, I slipped my letter under the door. Que sera sera. That’s how I ended up, long before daybreak, sitting on the ground in a porchway in front of Mother Missal’s stand, a woman I pestered every morning as a matter of honour, and this morning most of all. It was in return for the way she soothed me with her rosary of ready-made truths. She was priceless in her tiny newsstand, this inscrutable woman, serving her regular clients without taking her eyes off her blasted missal.
I waited in my niche for dawn to break and for the shabby plywood hatch of her stand to swing open.
I’d run from my house, wobbling, still sodden with the alcohol that had lured me into stupidity and horror. My legs could no longer carry me, I was exhausted from the darkness of the night and tortured by what I’d dared to do.
I’d walked for two hours to come to this place, where I looked out for the vendor’s arrival. Not her newspapers. My crime was too fresh to have already made the news. Only for her, who would be as grouchy and narrow-minded as ever. I was sure her faith, good or bad, would warm my heart like a blowtorch. Shaken as I was, I needed for someone to prod me.
I observed her from a distance piling her papers on the sidewalk and leaning her magazine racks against the brick wall of the shopping centre. She wasn’t surprised to see me there, at that ungodly hour. She hardly looked up.
“Did you fall out of bed or miss the last subway? Or was that your couch, you little roach?”
“Still lost in your blessed book?” I shot back at her in a forced tone of voice, for the hundredth time.
And for the hundredth time she answered, “This is all I read. Nothing comes close to it. It calms you down, it thinks for you about everything worth thinking about in this world.”
“And your newspapers, do you read them?”
“What for? I don’t need them to have nightmares. It’s enough for me to see your kisser every day on the street, my sweet.”
I bought La Presse from her every morning. I talked to her a while, generally about the day’s headlines, and as a bonus I let her have my comments and recriminations. She made a show of listening, never of understanding.
“I don’t get you, you youngsters. Everything’s a problem for you. Being so intelligent and educated, you ought to know that you have to be resigned down here on earth. That’s the whole thing. Resignation. When you don’t want anything, don’t expect anyone, you’re never disappointed.”
“That’s a wonderful attitude! If we let it, the world’ll go to hell, no doubt about it. As far as I’m concerned we’ve got to rock the boat with our last breath to keep this twisted world from sitting on its fat ass. Otherwise, it’ll end up believing it’s not spinning out of control, and us, we’ll be obliged to die to prove we’ve had a life.”
She didn’t like offensive language, she said, it made her nervous, disturbed her tranquility. But that was the only way to draw her out of her missal, if only for a few seconds. It was always the same: her large red ex-rubby’s face became even more flushed as it emerged from her badly combed mop of shoulder-length hair. And she roared:
“Little punks like you, make me run for the loo, Larry!”
That’s all she said when she got carried away. Her anger never pushed her beyond that limerick sentence. The words sometimes changed, the rhyme too, naturally. But the gist, rarely. She took a deep breath before going back to her missal, to her saintly certitudes and her resigned resignation. Admirable.
Given the agitated state I was in, I told myself it wasn’t a good idea to show up at the college. I left Mother Missal, and my feet dragged me up the hill, toward the big park on the mountain. The walk and the cool of the morning somewhat straightened out my thinking. And by the time the twitter of the sparrows started to get on my nerves, I’d gathered up enough courage to confront the situation and my hostage. So I went back home. My guest must have been awake, because I heard noise downstairs, a muffled growling. I right away turned on the radio and listened to the twelve o’clock news bulletin before going down to see him.
Naturally, it was the lead story. No one had ever heard of the kidnappers, the police had no clues, it wasn’t even known where, how, or when Robert Gagnon had been kidnapped. All they had was the communiqué claiming responsibility for the kidnapping and the attached photograph, showing the unconscious CEO tied to a chair. There followed the statements of the politicians, who assured the public and the victim’s family that everything possible would be done to find the hostage and punish those responsible for this vile act of terrorism, and that of a United Motors spokesman, who