A Very Bold Leap (25 page)

After two hours of searching, and despite the friendly assistance of a librarian, he had not succeeded in finding the slightest trace of a city called Gadatz-Katapunkt anywhere on the face of the earth.

In fact, the city didn’t exist.

By itself, the fact was of no importance whatsoever. But a conclusion Charles drew from the fact was of grave significance: Father Raphaël was a practical joker who was carelessly making fun of people, a man who had no compunction about making up childish, crude untruths for the simple pleasure of misleading his listeners — and Charles had been one of his victims!

When Charles had asked him to write down the name of the city, the preacher had done so with an impudent calm, as though totally unconcerned with what his assistant might think of him if he discovered his little fraud.

Another conclusion was consequent upon this small discovery: Father Raphaël clearly did not belong in the category of the sincerely religious, obsessed by mystical transports, but was rather just another professional manipulator; in fact, a crook, perhaps even worse than that. Fernand, in his naïve impetuosity, and without ever having laid eyes on the man, had been right.

After a while, another question arose in Charles’s mind, one that had no direct link with the first: what exactly was the relationship between Marcel-Édouard and Maxime and the preacher? The two companions had known Father Raphaël for a long time, and must have been aware of his true nature. But neither of them had ever made the slightest allusion to it in front of Charles. From their friendly, detached behaviour, one would assume they held the preacher in profound respect. They always spoke of him with admiration and obeyed his every whim with studious devotion. They were, then, his accomplices. But what was the nature of their complicity? he wondered. From the first day he had met them until now, he had never been able to form a precise idea of it. On the surface, they had the same relationship with the man as Charles himself had, and Father Raphaël had hardly ever shown a preference for either one of his three young helpers.

Every now and then either Maxime or Marcel-Édouard would disappear for a few hours without giving any reason for his absence; they would often come back looking haggard, as though they had been out moving mountains,
or else they would return in the state of feverish exaltation usually associated with cocaine addicts; however, the two young men always professed an absolute horror of drugs of all kinds. “Only God can give true bliss,” they said gravely. “All else leads to damnation.” Intrigued, Charles questioned them several times about these furtive, unexplained disappearances, but got nothing but dismissive laughter and shrugged shoulders for his trouble, and he began to notice that his curiosity annoyed Father Raphaël. “I’ll find out somehow,” he promised himself. “I’ll keep my eyes well peeled. The little cats will have to come out of the bag sometime.”

One day he asked Marcel-Édouard if he had a girlfriend.

“It’s not time for me to have one yet, buddy-boy,” the man had replied with a casual smile.

They were almost the exact words with which José Coïmbro had replied to the same question. But the silent, efficient, wary Marcel-Édouard had little else in common with poor, pathetic José.

Charles was soon going to get answers to all his questions, and under some very surprising circumstances.

O
n the evening of November the 1st, 1987, René Lévesque was felled by a heart attack in his apartment on Île-des-Soeurs. His death sent a violent Shockwave through the province, which since the 1980 referendum had slid into the kind of numbness that often precedes death. Everyone felt as though they had lost their father. The expression was used constantly. Even the politician’s most mortal enemies, who were no doubt secretly relieved at his removal, seemed to have been sincerely moved by his death.

That evening Charles was in a restaurant in Trois-Rivières, in the company of a female journalist who was trying to get him to tell her something unusual about Father Raphaël; the young woman would have preferred to meet the preacher, but he had had to be somewhere else.

When he heard about Lévesque’s death on the radio, Charles hurried to a telephone and called Fernand.

“What are we going to do now that he’s gone?” asked the hardware-store owner, devastated, forgetting that his idol had actually been out of politics for several years.

Charles remembered with extraordinary clarity the surprise visit the politician had paid to the hardware store during the 1980 referendum campaign. He could still feel the firm handshake the premier had given him while looking deeply and attentively into his eyes, which left the impression to anyone who was the object of his attention that his face and the words he spoke would be forever engraved in the politician’s memory.

When Charles left the journalist, who had received an urgent message on her pager, he ran to the hotel and asked the preacher for permission to leave immediately for Montreal, since Fernand had asked him to go with him to
pay his last respects to the chief of the
independantistes
— as tens of thousands of other Quebeckers would be doing over the next few days.

He found Father Raphaël alone, in a dressing gown, and more than a little annoyed at Charles’s impromptu visit. He had heard about Lévesque’s death (indeed, who in Quebec had not?). When he had listened to Charles’s request, he gave a mocking smile and refused outright, adding that he didn’t understand why everyone was shedding tears over the disappearance of a man who, to all intents and purposes, had been dead for some time.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Charles, shocked.

But the preacher brushed his question aside.

“I’m sorry, but you have to stay. Tomorrow is Maxime’s day off and I need you here.”

Furious, Charles went to his room, packed his bags, and took the next bus to Montreal. He was fully aware that his impetuosity would probably cost him his job. Well, so be it! He didn’t want to work for a faith healer anyway, certainly not for one who had such a low opinion of his political idol.

Two days later, Charles received a telephone call from Maxime.

“Father Raphaël wants to see you.”

“If it’s just to fire me, he can do that over the phone. It’ll save me the cost of a bus ticket.”

“He wants to
see
you,” was all Maxime replied, enigmatically.

Intrigued and succumbing to a secret desire to keep his job, Charles returned that night to Trois-Rivières. Father Raphaël and his two assistants received him cordially, as though nothing had happened.

“I guess we’ll have to count you among the bull-headed,” Father Raphaël said, laughing. “Well, what was it like? What happened? Quite a commotion, eh? It’s all anyone is talking about. There’s a lot there to think about, I see.”

And Charles described the atmosphere that reigned in Montreal.

Marcel-Édouard and Maxime, although smiling broadly, kept looking at each other in surprise at their boss’s reaction. Charles didn’t understand it either, but he recounted in great detail the small and large events he had attended, all the while feeling his resentment and mistrust for the preacher growing within him; as subsequent events would show, his feelings for the man were not ill-founded.

On the morning of December the 10th, God’s Messenger and his team arrived in Sorel. It would be one of the last assemblies of the year before the frenetic shopping that preceded Christmas.

Normally the meeting would have taken place in the Pentecostal church, a venerable neo-Gothic building facing Royal Square park, but a petty quarrel between the pastor of the church and Father Raphaël resurfaced, and the former refused to collaborate and launched a campaign against the preacher. They had to resort to the conference centre at the Auberge de la Rive, on rue Sainte-Anne, which looked out over the river, and was therefore considerably more expensive than the church would have been. Father Raphaël was consequently not in a good mood. He told Charles, as the press attaché, to do whatever was necessary to attract a minimum of eight hundred people to the meeting, if he wanted to see the Kingdom of God expand and their own operation make a profit.

And so Charles found himself sitting in a local radio station in front of a large, thick-lipped, apathetic man whose pate was surmounted by a ridiculous halo of lifeless hair and whose cheeks were flabby and sallow (the previous evening, an overdose of scotch had put his liver to the test, and today his mood was the worse for it).

With Styrofoam cup in hand, he listened to Charles for a minute, took a noisy sip of his coffee, and then stopped him with a gesture.

“I don’t want to hear it from you, kid, you’re not going to interest my listeners one bit. It’s Father Raphaël I want to see. If he can’t be bothered coming down here himself, then good day to you both.”

Charles phoned the preacher, who, breaking his usual routine, agreed to an interview. Half an hour later he walked into the studio and spoke during the interview with such eloquence that one of the technicians behind the glass partition broke down and cried.

“Now
that was
a great show,” the fat-lipped station manager declared with satisfaction. “You can come back any time you want, Father — there’ll always be a microphone waiting for you here.”

Next, Charles betook himself to the offices of the local newspaper,
The Two Shores
, and then to the VOX television station, where he came up against a major obstacle: the director had not included a time slot for spiritual programming in his schedule; after nearly talking himself hoarse, Charles finally
managed to get a short interview for his boss (who had suddenly become very accessible) early the next morning.

After that he began making the rounds of all the businesses in town, asking permission to put small announcements of the religious assembly in their store windows. Things went great guns everywhere except at the Éphrem Valiquette hardware store, an old, dilapidated building that seemed to have been gripped by the kind of listlessness that preceded either a closing of the doors or else bankruptcy.

By two o’clock, satisfied that he had done all he could for the day, and famished and numb with cold to boot — Sorel was shivering under a sharp cold spell that presaged a snowstorm — he went into the Omythos Restaurant, on rue Roy. The owner kindly allowed him to post his notice in the window, and also filled his stomach with a solid meal of souvlaki, roasted potatoes, Greek salad, and vegetable rice. The delightful sensation of being perfectly stuffed inspired him to go for a short walk, and he decided to make a tour of the Royal Square, one of the most charming spots in the town.

After sauntering through the park for a few minutes, taking huge gulps of frigid air, he stopped before a curious monument erected to the memory of one Dorimène Desjardins, wife of Alphonse Desjardins, the illustrious founder of the credit union. Stuck on a block of granite, a bronze bust crowned with an imposing coiffure gazed fixedly up into the sky with a haughty smile on its lips; slightly lower down, affixed to the granite, were two small, bronze hands, which made Charles immediately think of an axe murderer; still lower down was an inscription informing passersby that

WITHOUT HER, THE DESJARDINS CREDIT UNION WOULD PROBABLY NOT EXIST.

How many committee meetings, behind-the-scenes negotiations, compromises, and manipulations were implied by that perfidious word “probably,” Charles wondered, which called the whole meaning of the monument into question? Charles nodded to the bust, smiled, and continued on his way, whistling.

He then saw Maxime walking slowly across the other end of the park, hands in his pockets, unaffected, it seemed, by the cold. Charles had been thinking of
him during dinner, wondering what he could have been doing all day, since the first meeting wasn’t to take place until two days later and the setting up of the hall was being taken care of by the hotel. He waved his hand and called.

“Hey, I was just looking for you,” Maxime called back.

He turned towards Charles without changing his slow pace, then, bestowing upon him the curiously ironic and sickly sweet look that he had been giving Charles for some time, he said, “You’ve had a phone call from Montreal.”

“From whom?”

“Don’t remember … Lucie somebody, I think.”

Charles left the young man standing there and hurried back to his car, which was parked near the park. If Lucie had gone to the trouble of phoning him in the middle of the day, something serious must have happened. A few minutes later he was in the hotel, out of breath.

“Charles,” Lucie said, in a tragic voice he had never heard her use before, “your dog is dying. He’s dying because he misses you, Charles. We’ve tried everything — it’s impossible to console him. If you don’t come home by tomorrow, it’ll be the end.”

At first, Boff had seemed indifferent to his master’s absences. Then, bit by bit, a deep dejection had set in. Finally, a week before, this had expressed itself in anger: going back to his earlier ways, he had resorted to using his teeth. His first victim had been the beautiful china cabinet in the dining room, the cabinet that had belonged to Fernand’s mother. He had attacked its front legs and at two o’clock in the morning had knocked the whole thing over! Fernand had nearly had a heart attack. Luckily, the dining table had blocked its fall and only two or three pieces of china had been broken. But the bill from the cabinetmaker had been two hundred dollars. Fernand, white with rage, had taken the dog into the basement and tied him up with a leash. Boff had stayed down there for the rest of that day and the next. It was probably then that he had given in to his despair. He had stretched himself out on the floor, closed his eyes, and stopped moving.

“I went downstairs at the end of the second day, and when I saw him in such a state of course I brought him upstairs. I petted him, I told him he was forgiven — on condition that he didn’t do it again! — and I tried to get him to eat something. But he refused to open his mouth. Henri tried even harder, and Boff bit him! It’s been three days now since anything has gone into his stomach, solid or liquid. He can’t hold out much longer like this.”

“I’ll call you back,” Charles said, and hung up.

With his back against the wood panelling, he stared into the hotel’s lobby. An old, thin woman was sitting in an enormous, black leather chair that seemed to be swallowing her whole, staring at him with an astonished look.

A slight dizziness came over him.

Boff in agony. Boff dead. His old companion, faithful to him since he had been a small boy, stricken with despair by being abandoned by his master. Now he was leaving Charles forever, victim of ingratitude, heartlessness, frivolity.

He had to do something about it.

He went upstairs to Father Raphaël’s room and knocked on the door. No one responded. Returning to the lobby, he asked at the reception desk and was told that Father Raphaël had gone out an hour ago with a stranger, without leaving a message.

He made his decision on the spot.

Leaving the hotel, he nearly bumped into Maxime.

“Hey, wild man,” said the latter, “you could have given me a lift! Didn’t you hear me call you? Where are you going now?”

“To Montreal.”

“Does Father Raphaël know?”

“He’s not here. I left him a note.”

“So, what is it this time? Another separatist bit the dust?”

“No,” said Charles, forcing himself to remain calm, “this time it’s my dog. He’s sick.”