I ran through brush and tall grass, heading for the machine gun site. I had my shoes on again, and my lumpy jacket, and I plunged through the ground cover with elephantine grace. The Marley automatic was in my right hand. A pocket contained the revolver Claude had been carrying. I raced down the side of the hill, broke through a patch of open ground, and kept going.
I shouted, “Jean! Jacques! Are you all right?”
They leaped out from a clump of brush, and for a bad moment I froze, the weight of the Marley so great suddenly that I could barely hold onto it. In my mind I raised the gun and dropped them with two quick shots-
“Evan, Comrade! Did you see it? Did you hear it? What a blow for Quebec, my brother!”
One of them was gripping me by the shoulders, lifting me into the air. The other danced like an Indian in war paint, whooping and cheering, filling the air with a combination of OAS and Quebecois oaths. I let go of the gun, delighted that I was not going to need it now.
“So they try to trick us,” Jacques roared. “A disguised vessel, a change in schedule. They think this will outwit us?” He pounded, his fists against his thighs. “And the fireworks! Never in my existence have I seen such a display. Fireworks for the Centennial? No, not now. Fireworks that accompanied England’s Queen to hell. Fireworks to tell the Devil to open the gates for her!”
We all shouted and danced and sang, all four of us. Arlette had come out of hiding. We embraced one another and talked of the heroism of Emile and the glory of French Canada. The brothers did not seem to have the slightest doubt that they had hit the right boat and had obtained the desired effect, with the added and unexpected bonus of the fireworks. So I did not have to make martyrs of them, and that was all to the good, because I am not sure I could have done it. They were no threat to us now, though. And, when they did eventually find out that the Queen had not been on the boat, they would probably fail to blame me for it. At any rate, I intended to be out of the country by then.
“And Claude,” said Jacques. “Where is the grim and brooding and valiant specter of Claude?”
I sighed. “You did not hear him?”
“The shots, of course.”
“The scream.”
“But no. He screamed?”
“When he fell from the cliff,” I said mournfully. “Carried away by an excess of patriotic enthusiasm, our friend Claude lost his footing and plunged to the rocks below.” I sighed, partly for effect, partly at the memory of his weight as I dragged him to the edge and sent him on his way. “He must have died instantly,” I said. “I’m sure he did not feel a thing.”
“Alas, for our comrade Claude,” Jean said.
“I never liked him,” Jacques said thoughtfully.
“Who could like him? An odious creature, no? But he died a hero’s death.” I took Arlette’s hand. “We must go now,” I said. “You two will return to the city?”
They exchanged glances. “But no, Evan. Since we have thus far avoided martyrdom, we thought to further prolong our lives. We have reservations on a flight to Mexico in just a few hours.”
“It is sad that we must leave Canada,” Jean said.
“But it would be sadder to die here. There will come a day when we return. And there are always other fights to be fought in other lands.” Jacques embraced me. “Believe me, my comrade, you will hear more of us.”
I could believe it.
They offered us a lift, but I said we had a car of our own nearby. The boys kissed me on both cheeks and kissed Arlette lingeringly upon the mouth, and then they went one way and we went the other, in a hurry.
I closed my eyes and took a mental picture of my little list. Minna, assassination, heroin, cops. I took a mental eraser and carefully rubbed out assassination.
Minna, heroin, cops –
Arlette found a way to get onto the new superhighway that led to Expo without going through much of Montreal. This turned out to be an extremely wise move because, from all indications, the city was in a state of utter chaos. Between my lunatic phone calls, the demonstration at the narrows, and the unscheduled fireworks display, every police and fire siren in the city was raising thirty kinds of hell. The traffic must have been unbelievable. We hit some slow stretches ourselves, but it wasn’t bad.
I had been afraid that Arlette would ask questions that I wouldn’t much want to answer. Questions about my role in Claude’s diving act, which I wanted to talk about even less than I wanted to think about, or questions about what we would do when we got to the fairgrounds, which I wanted to tell her at the last minute. But she surprised me. She chattered incessantly about the destruction of the barge, the nerveless manner in which Jean and Jacques had raked the craft with machine gun shells, the élan with which Emile had tossed his hat into the air an instant before he was disintegrated. It was a heady triumph for her. She no longer felt like a traitor; on the contrary, the display had overwhelmed her with furious patriotism.
At the fair we paid $2.50 each for one-day admissions and passed through the turnstiles. We were early, and neither the boys nor our man were at the Lost amp; Found booth. I had my sunglasses on again, and my cap, and I still felt frighteningly conspicuous in the crowd. I told Arlette to keep an eye on the booth and found my way to a men’s room.
I checked myself in the mirror. My nose was a mess, and I had to do what I could to reshape the putty on it. The ears were still pretty good, and the dye had remained in my hair. I locked myself in a stall and waited for it to become nine o’clock. The place provided in privacy what it lacked in comfort.
At five of nine Randy’s voice said, “Evan? You here?”
I emerged from my hiding place. I told him we had scored a direct hit on the fireworks barge and could put the expedition down as an unqualified success. He was quite proud of his end of things, and he had every right to be; the Modonoland demonstration had mobilized over seventy Canadian youths and had stopped the royal barge dead in its tracks for forty minutes. One girl had sprained her wrist, but that was the only casualty.
I didn’t tell him about the casualties in my area of the operation. Claude, Emile, and whoever had the ill luck to be on the fireworks barge. Figuring a four-man crew, I had helped create six martyrs to the cause of Free Quebec. And only two of them were voluntary ones.
“The pilot’s with Seth and Arlette,” Randy told me. “They’re waiting for us. You ready?”
“I guess so. How do I look?”
“I wouldn’t have too much trouble picking you out of a crowd.”
“Oh,” I said. “The hell with it. Let’s go.”
The helicopter pilot was standing with Seth and Arlette a few yards off to the side of the Lost amp; Found booth. His eyes were even more bloodshot than I remembered and his breath smelled inflammable. He had a hand resting in absentminded fashion upon Arlette’s bottom, and his eyes were focused – well, aimed, anyway – at Myra Teale, who was still riding shotgun on a batch of purposely lost children. He turned to me, hiccuped, and grinned.
“We meet again,” he said. “The fellow who was sick all over my little chopper. Got a haircut since, did you?”
“Uh,” I said.
“The chopper’s resting over that way. Shall we go to it?”
“That might be a good idea.”
“Do you know, I think it would be.” He slapped me heartily on the back. “You wouldn’t want anyone to have too good a look at you, would you, my friend?”
“Uh.”
“Leading them the devil of a chase, aren’t you, Mr. Tanner? Oh, don’t worry about me. The little mam’selle here said something about five hundred dollars-”
“That’s right.”
“-and for five hundred dollars I’d fly through a forest fire on the back of a chicken hawk. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Mr.-”
“Mr. Completely,” he said, and laughed vacantly. “Missed her completely, that is, that’s what we did. Your little girl, isn’t it? And you want to fly over that same ridiculous building again, is that so? And hop the border to the States when you find her?”
“More or less.”
“I’m your man. No doubt about it.” His Canadian accent made that come out No doat aboat it.
He led and we followed. I told him that Seth and Randy and I would be flying with him in the chopper for the time being, and he assigned places to the three of us. Arlette wanted to know where she was going to sit and I told her she wasn’t.
“I do not understand,” she said.
I took a deep breath. I had been saving this for the last minute, because if she had time to think about it, she would not possibly go through with it.
“You’re not coming with us,” I told her. “You have a special job to do. You will carry this in your purse” – I tucked the false ID into her bag – “and you will fasten this in your hair” – I clipped the little microphone into her hair – “and you will go to the Cuban Pavilion and enter the dungeon. You will stand where we stood before, and when no one is looking, you will throw the switch on the end and drop through to the dungeon below.”
She gaped at me. I rushed right on, not giving her a chance to interrupt. “They won’t dare hurt you because they’ll know you’re a Canadian agent. What they’ll do is panic. They’ll want to get you out of there, and they’ll want to do something with all the prisoners they’ve taken in the past little while. I’m almost positive they ship batches of them out of the country, or to some hiding place up in the north. As soon as they think the government is on to them, they’ll make a run for it. They’ll take you out of the dungeon and rendezvous with the other prisoners, and I’ll have this” – I showed her the receiving unit – “so we can trace you in the helicopter. We’ll wait until they lead us straight to Minna and the others. Then we’ll rescue you and Minna, and the helicopter will get us all the hell out of there.”
She bought it. Maybe the example of courage set by Emile and Claude was contagious. Maybe she was too simple to think it through and realize what a risk she was running. Maybe, as I prefer to think, she was just a very good girl. Whatever the reason, she bought it.
“When shall I go to the pavilion?”
“Right away.”
“I shall do it. May I kiss you first? And the boys?” She kissed all three of us, then kissed the pilot, too. “You will hear me with this thing, is it not so? And you will rescue me?”
“Definitely.”
We stayed in the helicopter with the engines off while she made her way onto the Expo Express and out to the Cuban Pavilion on the Ile de Notre Dame. I listened to the receiver and had no trouble telling where she was. Everything came through clear as a bell. Now and then she would talk to me, and once she expressed aloud the fervent wish that she could hear me as well as speak to me, if only to assure herself that the equipment worked.
“I am at the pavilion,” she said ultimately. “There is not too long a line. It should take me but a few minutes. Evan, which is the switch that I must throw? I cannot remember.”
“The one on the right,” I said aloud. As if she could hear me.
“As if you could answer me. It is all right. I will throw them all at once.”
“Oh, God,” I said. As if He were listening.
I told the pilot – damn it, I still didn’t know his name – to start the engines. He did, and I leaped from my seat and grabbed his arm. “Off!” I shouted. “My God, they’re noisy!”
“Can’t fly without ’em, Mr. Tanner.”
“But I can’t hear over them.” He cut them out, and I listened again to Arlette. I wondered if people had noticed that she was talking to herself. I suppose she wasn’t speaking in much more than a whisper, but she came through loud and clear.
With the engines off, that is. With them on, I couldn’t hear a thing. If the fool thing had come with earphones, we would have been all right, but it didn’t. I told the pilot to leave the engines off until we had a particular reason to start flying. For the moment, it was more important to maintain communication with Arlette.
Seth wondered aloud how we would be able to follow her in the copter if we couldn’t hear her. The same thought had already occurred to me. I said we would have to pick them up with aerial reconnaissance when they left the building and keep them under constant visual observation. Randy wanted to know if that wasn’t risky. I asked him if he had a better idea, and he said he didn’t. Neither did anyone else.
All we had to do was lose them. That would be the payoff, all right – we would scare them into skipping the country with all the prisoners, Minna and Arlette included. And then we would lose them, and that would be the last I would see of either of them.
Arlette’s voice, just a whisper: “I am within the building. There is a guard, I must wait until he goes away. He is not looking at me now. Did you say the switch on the left? I will throw them all, now-”
Then there was a lot of noise, all at once, shouts in Spanish and English and other languages, machinery noises. And then, over it all, Arlette’s voice ringing out: “In the name of J. B. Westley and the Dominion of Canada you are all under arrest! In the name-”
Halfway through the sentence some of the background noise stopped, as if the aperture leading from the dungeon to the first floor had been closed again. And then there was a sort of thunk, and Arlette stopped talking. I heard an excited babble of Cuban Spanish but couldn’t make out the words.
“What happened, man?”
“I think they knocked her out.”
“The poor chick-”
“Shhh…”
I hoped they hadn’t hurt her. As I saw it, she was well out of it; a bump on the head would be a small price to pay for an hour or so of unconsciousness. From our standpoint, it was both good and bad. She would be unable to tell me what was happening, but she would be equally incapable of answering any questions the Cubans might put to her.
I concentrated on the Spanish. “They’re going through her purse,” I said. “They found her ID card. They’re reading it. I hope the lighting down there is terrible… They believe the ID. One of them just told the other that she’s a Canadian agent.”
“Is she all right, Evan?”
“Just a minute. I think she must be coming to, because one just said they should chloroform her at once. That’s good, that’s damned good. She couldn’t have been badly hurt, and the chloroform won’t hurt her now. It’ll just keep her out. If she were awake now, she’d be terrified-”
“Do you blame her?”
“No, not a bit. This way she’ll sleep. Oh, hell!”
“What?”
“They found the bug in her hair. Damn it, they know what it is. I wonder if-”
A loud, ear-splitting noise came through the receiver, followed by absolute silence.
“They smashed it,” I announced. I tossed the useless receiver to the floor of the copter. “They smashed hell out of it. Better start the engines. There’s nothing to listen to anyway, not now. And we ought to get over toward the Cuban place right away.” I swallowed. “They’ll probably wait until the fair closes before they move her. But what if they don’t? If they move out before we get into position…”
The prop spun, the engines caught. They drowned out the rest of my sentence, but that didn’t matter. Everyone knew the ending.