Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(11)
“They have served me just fine.”
“Seriously, I’d like to know how it’s working out at the Cove. I’m curious.”
She was. Curious about what held that operation together, what glue. Garibaldi’s Earth Seed Commune, a ’70s back-to-the-land venture which she’d joined as a teenager, had disintegrated in quarrels and petty jealousies. Most communers left the island; she stayed on, a pioneer organic farmer.
She promised to call him if the government fell next week. He seemed less than thrilled at the prospect of a campaign. Poor Arthur. So shy in public but so relaxed and engaging when he was on stage, in the courtroom. Or so she’d been told — she hadn’t met that other Arthur Beauchamp, never found the time to attend any of the several trials that kept interrupting his so-called retirement.
They exchanged vows of affection, Margaret’s more spirited than usual, prompted maybe by Lloyd Chalmers’s subtle come-on after that meeting.
A LADY HAS TO MAKE A LIVING
At midday, a lovely day — a warm spring sun in a cloudless sky, robins singing merrily in the trees — Lou Sabatino was trudging home to his haunted triplex, exasperated, in despair, scuffling along by the old residences of upper Visitation Street. In hoodie and dark glasses, he’d made it all the way from midtown without being assassinated. That was the only good news.
Lou felt like he’d just come out of a quadruple bypass after his encounter with the witness protection administrateur, a mindless, paper-pushing, closet separatist. He spoke English fluently, but expected Lou to pitch his case in his less-than-perfect French. At the end, after forty minutes, Lou had come away with dink.
He’d begged this cheeser to open up his heart — he was going slowly dérangé in the unsafe house, his wife hated it so much she’d left him, taking his two kids. He was desolate, alone, scared . . .
The bureaucrat had shed not a single tear. No, monsieur, you chose to take a place in the city.
But only so Celeste could be close to her customers. And now she was gone. Surely they could find them a comfortable rural place, a little bungalow, a cabin, a shack, a trailer home . . .
Nothing is available, sir. Comme on fait son lit, on se couche. Lou had made his bed. He must lie on it.
They call this witness protection? More like witness pretension. He had been abandoned by his family and by his government. And his employer. That shit Dexter, with his fancy King’s College journalism degree, had never worked in the trenches like Lou, who rose from the ranks.
A greeting from a front porch: “Bonjour, Monsieur. Une belle température, finalement.”
Lou kept it down to a simple d’accord. He was anxious to avoid even friendly contact with his neighbours, every one of whom seemed to be outside, on stoop or stairs, enjoying the sun after days of rain.
If Svetlana Glinka — you, the reporter, come — recognized him so easily, despite the beard, moustache, and dark glasses, wouldn’t other locals? They read the Journal de Montréal, watched the TV news. It was on YouTube! Lou in his former front yard, trembling, waxen, re-enacting for investigators how he fell flat on his ass beside his overturned recycle bin. The zoom lenses outside the ribbon barrier had caught it all.
If that video of the bad, bad boy of Parliament got released, the press would again swarm around Lou, in greater numbers, like wasps. That’s what he should have told that cookie cutter. Their so-called safe house in Centre-Sud could end up with its own Facebook page, half a million likes.
The memory stick was burning a hole in Lou’s pocket. He carried it everywhere, reluctant to make copies. Copies get copied. Or stolen. He’d played the video once to make sure it was glitch-less, but didn’t load it onto any of his computers, knowing government eavesdroppers were capable of wirelessly sucking everything from his hard drives into their massive electronic gullets.
He had no clear idea what to do with this blistering hot potato, this ball-breaker, as Svetlana called it. Anyway, the next step was up to her. He hadn’t had a chance to sit down with her since that first meeting because she’d been away a lot and had stopped receiving clients downstairs.
He felt some guilt about poaching her video, but not much — she seemed flighty, changeable. He had explained his situation to her, that he was going by the name of Robert O’Brien, and she had promised discretion — but what reliance could he put on that?
Svetlana’s Miata was in its usual place in front of their triplex, and she was on a bench on her terrace, in a sundress, blonde and bare-legged, painting her toenails.
She looked up as he passed. “Mr. O’Brien, come. Big change of plan.”
That didn’t sound good, but at least she remembered his pseudonym. He could sense eyes on him from nearby houses as he reversed himself and went up her walk.
She picked up her grooming tools and led him into her salon. According to Wikipedia, BDSM was the current approved initialism for the art she practised: bondage-dominance-sadism-masochism. A growth industry — you just had to look at the string of classifieds in the tabloids. He’d not found Svetlana’s among them; presumably she was too high-toned to advertise in such plebby outlets and gave her unlisted phone number only to a select clientele of the haute bourgeoisie.
She showed none of the prickliness of their first encounter as she chatted about the fine weather: “At last, sunshine. When normal, here is worse than Moscow.” Again, she poured him a whisky, not Johnny Red, but Black. A clothing box from an exclusive shop, Unicorn Boutique, sat under the shelf bearing the straps and shackles. Nestled in her cleavage was what looked like a very expensive jewelled pendant dangling from a silver necklace.