October 1970 Read Free Page B

couldn’t look more French in her cream-coloured suit and charming red silk scarf.
    Corps is her real name, too. A patronymic fairly common in France, where she — let’s call her Ginette, and use her maiden name: Dufour — has remade her life. In Quebec, where her last name was Cardinal-Dufour, she’d been the legitimate wife of Jacques Cardinal, alias the Fat Cop, and the mother of his children. She was also the mistress of Marcel Duquet, the militant separatist, well known on the South Shore, who was condemned to eight years in prison for having aided and abetted the assassins of Minister Lavoie when they were fleeing the country in the fall of 1970.
    Thirty years ago, as Madame Cardinal-Dufour, she enjoyed quite a reputation for being, shall we say, hot. A heroine of the sexual revolution. In fact, she more or less was the revolution, a kind of Odette de Crécy from Longueuil. Today she lives in France, in one of most exclusive coastal resort towns, in a chic condo she shares with Monsieur Albert Corps, chaser of sedate widows’ petticoats, her chauvinistic husband.
    Coffee on the terrace of the Sables-d’Olonne. Two cigarettes already stubbed out in an ashtray shaped like a Coquilles Saint-Jacques shell. Madame Corps buys packs of menthols and transfers the cigarettes into a gold-plated case. She uses a cigarette holder that looks like it might be made out of ivory. Small wrinkles radiate from her lips, which she soaks in barley water or something. It’s still not polite to ask a woman her age, but Madame Dufour’s offspring numbered four in 1970. Say she’s somewhere between sixty and sixty-five and give her whatever hair colour you want.
    From the terrace he could watch the passing parade: girls, sports cars, mothers pushing baby carriages, tourists dragging suitcases on wheels.
    â€œYou didn’t cross the Atlantic just to see me.” It’s the first thing she’s said to him.
    Samuel smiles. “I don’t have that kind of money,” he says. “But in Quebec even a second-rate writer gets a lot of invitations. To sit on a jury for an obscure prize for short stories, for example, from anywhere in the French-speaking world, including those with tall, thin Africans. And if the jury meets in La Rochelle, the old slave port and supplier of fine French women for the colonies, not a hundred kilometres from here, then all the better!”
    â€œYou don’t look like a writer,” she says. “In France, writers look like writers. They dress like writers. I suppose you might be mistaken for a musician  . . . ”
    â€œSo I’m often told. But I’ll have you know that I don’t look like a regular at the Sables-d’Olonne, either. No smoking jacket. Which makes it hard for someone who’s supposed to be here squandering the family fortune at the roulette table.”
    â€œThat’s because when you think casino, you think Françoise Sagan, when in reality casinos are full of a bunch of retired suburbanites from Baltimore on a group tour. I haven’t read your books. I’ve never heard of you. How did you find me?”
    â€œI found a Jacques Cardinal in the phone book, called the number, and talked to his son, who didn’t want to know anything about anything. All he would tell me was that he’d burned all the bridges before his father croaked and that the last time he saw the old man he was snorting a line of coke. Then he let me squeeze your number out of him.”
    â€œThat man spread a lot of bad around. Coco, I mean. What are you writing? A book about the Lavoie Affair?”
    â€œI’m trying to.”
    â€œAnd  . . . do you mind if I ask why?”
    â€œI had a professor at university. He’s dead now. He wanted to know what happened. He started a kind of  . . . club. It would take too long to explain it to you. Anyway, it’s your story I want to