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“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. Mi
Mi
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 ma
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 gri
“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. Ta
“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 Mi
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 ru
“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.