WHIPPED
AN ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP NOVEL
William Deverell
To Amy, Rachel, Will, Sophie, and David.
THE ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP NOVELS
Trial of Passion
April Fool
Kill All the Judges
Snow Job
I’ll See You in My Dreams
Sing a Worried Song
Whipped
ALSO BY WILLIAM DEVERELL
Fiction
Needles
High Crimes
Mecca
The Dance of Shiva
Platinum Blues
Mindfield
Kill All the Lawyers
Street Legal: The Betrayal
Slander
The Laughing Falcon
Mind Games
Non-fiction
A Life on Trial
CONTENTS
PART ONE
VERY BAD BOY, VERY BAD DAY
THE TRANSFORMATION MISSION
THE CHIEF WHIP
A LADY HAS TO MAKE A LIVING
LOVE ALL THINGS
THEMES OF SEX AND VIOLENCE
UNTESTED FAITHS
BAD NIGHT, WORSE DAY
BANGLES AND BEADS
WHO WE ARE IS WHO WE ARE
THE DRONE AND THE SCRUM
UNSAFE HOUSE
HORNY IN SEATTLE
SUCH SIGHTS AS YOUTHFUL POETS DREAM
PENNILESS IN PORCUPINE PLAIN
NO ONE NEEDS TO KNOW
TWEETS
PART TWO
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
PART THREE
EIGHT SECRETS TO A LASTING ORGASM
DOUBT THOU THE STARS ARE FIRE
LET WHAT COMES COME; LET WHAT GOES GO.
GRAVE SECRETS FROM THE MORGUE
LANDSLIDE LLOYD
EXODUS
THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
THE SPEAKER
PART FOUR
A VERY UNMERRY CHRISTMAS
ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP / THE FULL MONTY
BUGGED
DINING WITH THE ENEMY
LIONHEART
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
SUCKER PUNCH
CONFIDENTIALITY CLAUSE
SCRUM FLUSTER
PART FIVE
THE AWAKENING
HAPPY ENDING
MOVIE NIGHT
THE AFTER-PARTY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
PART ONE
VERY BAD BOY, VERY BAD DAY
“God help me! I was bad! Forgive me!” A thwack, as whip met bottom.
The bottom in question glowed pinkly at Lou Sabatino from the screen of a two-point-eight-gigahertz Toshiba Satellite laptop.
“I was a bad boy, very bad!” Thwack! “Please, Mother, I beg you! On my knees!” Which he was, in fact. On his elbows too, his wrists tied with thongs.
Lou figured it couldn’t hurt that much, despite the pain freak’s petitions for leniency. The voice was familiar. Someone he knew. Someone important? Whoever it was, he was on a gaudy Oriental carpet, his plump rear raised, his head down, out of view. In the background was a wall of rough-hewn logs, a blazing fireplace, a window overlooking an iced-over lake and looming hills clad with the skeletal trees of a boreal forest. The Laurentians, maybe.
The flogger was Svetlana Glinka, a professional dominatrix, whose elegant bared tits bobbed with every stroke. Other than those, her main adornment was something that looked like a leather corset. The real Svetlana, well clothed except for the apparent lack of underwear, was standing beside Lou, enjoying her little movie, exulting in the prospect of . . . What? Sweet revenge?
She had recorded this session with a hidden webcam, and was showing Lou her little docudrama in her therapy clinic, as she called it, in a ground-floor triplex in Montreal’s Centre-Sud. Lou had the misfortune to live in the apartment just above hers.
He asked, “How long does this last?”
“I think maybe seventy seconds.” Russian accent, a throaty voice that oozed sex. She made Lou nervous, and he drew away from her a little. “Watch this. He likes this specially.”
The Svetlana on the screen was greasing a king-size dildo.
“No, not that, Mother, I beg you!”
She piggybacked onto her victim, riding him, penetrating him with the dildo as he crawled on his knees and trussed hands, screaming his repentance while trying to toss her like a rodeo bull.
§
This episode had come toward the end of what was definitely not the finest day in the once unremarkable life of ace reporter Lou Sabatino. He’d spent most of the day, as usual, in the frigid climate of the Sabatino household. “I’ve had it with this hole!” Celeste had yelled at him. “C’est un trou, un dump!” This after the kids had backpacked off to school.
Celeste’s complaints were many and justified. The nineteenth-century triplex on Rue de la Visitation lacked the comforts of their former home in Côte-des-Neiges. It offered a covered, open balcony, but was cramped, worn, mouse-ridden, drafty, accessed only by an exterior staircase, a spiralling, wrought-iron, ice-slicked death trap. To top it off, sleep-disturbing thumps and howls regularly emanated from the poorly muffled ground-floor apartment. The top floor had remained empty ever since its tenant was busted a month ago in a drug sweep.
Lou escaped for a couple of hours into his computer room, then returned for lunch to more of the same. “I’m not going to be cooped up in this shithole for the rest of my life!” Celeste, a work-at-home couturière, had been threatening to pack up and ship out, take the kids to the crap mining town up north where her parents lived. Or out west. She had a sister in Calgary.
“We’ve got no choice,” he whimpered. “My hands are tied.” Which, he later recognized, put him in league with the flake in the video.
“You twerp! You’ve got the backbone of un ver de terre.” A worm.
Once again, Lou proved he wasn’t man enough to withstand her vivid detailing of his lack of manliness by fleeing into the relative comfort of a cold, drizzly mid-May morning, wishing he’d taken more than a scarf and a sweater. For most of his time in the house of horrors, he’d ventured out only at night, choosing ill-lit streets for the only exercise he was getting.
His fear was that he’d be recognized by one of his Quartier Centre-Sud neighbours or, worse, a Mafia hit man. There were assassins afoot. Lou’s face had been in the papers, on the tube, the internet. He always wore dark clip-ons over his glasses, even on murky days like this, to hide his myopic, mournful grey eyes.
Lost for somewhere to go, he meandered down toward the Gay Village, then west on busy St. Catherine, stopping occasionally at storefronts, his breath clouding the plate glass behind which leggy women sold lingerie or jewellery. Fodder for his masturbatory fantasies. Ultimately he found himself at a Métro stop, wondering if he dared make another quiet visit to the Canadian Press bureau.
On paid leave from the wire service, Lou spent most of his time these days online or fiddling with his computers. He was a nerd. A horny nerd, since Celeste cut him off a couple of months ago. An out-of-shape nerd: fifteen excess pounds on his five-nine frame. Only forty-one, and he already had a comb-over bald spot. In compensation, he’d grown a moustac
he and full russet beard that hid his weak chin. All part of his new identity. He was now Robert O’Brien, computer analyst, and he had the papers to prove it.
Lou’s fears were not delusions.
Three months ago, he had filed a four-instalment exposé of how deeply the Mafia had entrenched itself into the Montreal waterfront, buying off local politicians and public servants, some in Ottawa, at Transport Canada. He’d worked on this series for five months, a welcome long break from the rewrite desk. When the first instalment got play in every daily serviced by CP, there was champagne in the bureau chief’s office, there was back-slapping. Waterfrontgate!
He’d got a lot of quiet help from his sister’s husband’s uncle, Nick Giusti, a former lawyer for the mob. Despite Nick’s cunning, two of his Mafioso clients had been sent up for gunning down an informant, prompting the compagnia to withdraw their fat retainer, and he was pretty disgruntled.
Nick had an unsavoury reputation as a fixer, a washer of ill-gotten gains, but you take your sources where you find them. Jules “the Monk” Moncrief and his pals would fit him with cement shoes if they ever figured out he was Lou’s Deep Throat.
Nick had been the source of voluminous court records, bank statements, notes, ledgers, hard copies of paper exhibits from a dozen trials. He would not be suspected as the source because most of the material was on public record, but without his help the research would have taken a year. As it was, Lou had to painstakingly assemble the jigsaw puzzle of waterfront connections. He’d got no cooperation from the cops — they’d gruffly refused to talk to him.
After the third instalment went nationwide, someone fired a fusillade of bullets at Lou from a passing car, outside his home in Côte-des-Neiges.
§
Lou’s near-death experience, on a frigid ten-below evening in the midst of an unrelenting snowfall, had happened in mid-February. He was wheeling the big green recycle bin to the curb in front of his semi-detached. He’d had a few whiskys, celebrating his national scoop — heads were ducking, the Prime Minister was “concerned,” the Montreal Port Authority was scrambling, refusing comment. The series was perfectly timed, with Parliament in session and the Opposition pelting a Conservative government that had squeaked to a minority victory on an anti-graft platform.
Fortunately for the slightly tiddly ace reporter, he slipped on the icy walkway, and the bin went down and so did Lou, just as a black sedan cruised by, just before a burst of automatic fire went over his head and took out the snowman behind him.
When the police came, he was still holed up in the bathroom, throwing up. He gave a garbled, frantic account, Celeste a more coherent one — she had seen everything from an upstairs window. Amazingly cool, this unyielding, practical woman. The police posted a guard that night, adding to the posse of media outside.
The next day, Superintendent Malraux came by and stayed for a few hours, talking about motive, about the famously ruthless Montreal Mafia. He was pissed off that Lou declined to reveal his sources, and on parting handed him a subpoena: he could either tell all to Malraux now, or tell it to the judge under threat of contempt of court and jail time. Lou apologized; he was bound by ethics, by the promises made to his informants.
What Lou hadn’t realized was that his headline coup had almost blown a police task force’s long and arduous investigation into corruption on the docks. Charges were filed hurriedly, and over the next few days thirteen men, francophone, anglophone, several of Italian extraction, were apprehended. Among them was the capo, Monk Moncrief. Many prime suspects eluded arrest.
Lou was put under a vague and unappealing form of witness protection: the supposedly safe house in an ungentrified quarter of Centre-Sud, south of Sherbrooke. They’d offered a hideaway in a quiet village but Celeste had refused to move from Montreal, away from her customers — a decision she not only regretted now, but somehow blamed on Lou. So, for Lou, it was a life of hiding, lurking, and enduring her hostile emanations. For the kids, it meant a new school, which they claimed to hate. Meanwhile the whole family had to endure grunts and slaps until three in the morning from the apartment below.
Why had the authorities settled them above a dominatrix’s so-called therapy clinic? Was it some hideous kind of joke? The only perk was that Witness Protection paid the rent for this dump. But it was hard to explain to little Lisa and littler Logan what those muffled screams were all about. They couldn’t be persuaded the building wasn’t haunted.
§
And now the last gruelling three months had culminated in this one exponentially shitty spring day, the mid-morning of which found Lou sitting in the back of a subway car, fearfully listening to two men talking animatedly in Italian.
He peeked over his copy of Le Journal. Surely they were too modish for the Mafia, too sharply dressed. Almost everyone else was staring at phones and tablets — except for the big oaf in the ski jacket. He was reaching into a pocket! His hand emerged with an iPhone.
Lou got off at Place-d’Armes and, wet from the rain, glasses fogged, scarf over his nose, worked his way down to the ponderous old landmark that housed the national wire service to which he’d devoted the last twenty years of his life. Hired on at twenty-one, right out of Carleton with a journalism degree, he’d spent fifteen years in Ottawa then transferred to Montreal. He was the head rewrite guy now, doing political roundups and the occasional piece of real reporting.
Looking behind to make sure he wasn’t being followed, Lou stepped inside the offices and almost onto the toes of Louise, the shy copy girl. She blinked at him nervously until he slipped off the scarf. He tried to come up with something flip or jolly — nice to bump into you — but could only grin lamely. She hurried by, as if frightened.
Eight staffers were in the newsroom, at their monitors and keyboards, all pretending to be too busy to notice him and thereby giving off ominous vibes.
Those premonitions were validated when Hugh Dexter, bureau chief and living proof of the Peter Principle, beckoned Lou into his office. After the usual commonplaces about the crappy weather and their respective states of crappy health, Dexter let him know how deeply CP valued his two decades of service, whereupon Lou sagged.
He listened dully to Dexter’s prepared text, an obit, the kind that CP prepared pre-death for luminaries. Client newspapers across the country were on the rims. Belts had to be tightened. Were it up to Dexter, Lou would be kept on despite his long absences. Dexter had fought for him — after all, Lou had brilliantly exposed Waterfrontgate. No matter that the cops complained he jumped the gun a week before a planned mass arrest — that was journalism. Sorry, Lou, but the final decision had been made in Toronto.
Unfortunately, because of some nonsense in the union contract, Dexter was required to dismiss him for cause — his inability to work while under witness protection, with no end in sight. But that wouldn’t be mentioned among the many positive comments contained in the two-page letter of recommendation in this envelope. Along with a cheque for thirty-two thousand simoleons. Four months’ pay! That should allay his disappointment. And he’ll cut another cheque for the same sum after six months. Regrettably, the extra emolument would likely be held back if he went to the union. Sign here.
Before leaving, Lou scooped up a few items from his desk, a 500-gig external drive with all his Waterfrontgate research — he would hide it somewhere — and a few other electronic externals, a Bluetooth adapter, a 128-gig memory stick, a wireless mouse, stuffing them in his pockets. As he moped his way out, no one said goodbye.
And thus, as of about two o’clock that cruel afternoon, the ace reporter became the former ace reporter.
§
He began a soggy walk home, but soon was seized with such desolation that he stopped at a tawdry tavern on The Main, and quaffed a pint, then another, wondering if anything worse could happen on this black day in May. He was dizzy, he’d forgotten to eat, and ordered poutine.
The beer and thick fo
od warmed him long enough to make it back to his street, his triplex, and he wearily ascended the spiralling escalier, rehearsing how to explain to Celeste he’d been declared economically inactive. Maybe she would get off his back, feel his pain, regret her intemperate reproaches.
Fortunately, Lisa and Logan would be back from school by now, and Celeste rarely made scenes in front of them. Lisa, eight, and Logan, six, were the only truly good things that had ever happened to Lou. Other than Celeste, his love lingering despite everything, hers long fled.
The front door was locked. That was puzzling, and when he checked the street, he saw no sign of the family vehicle, Celeste’s actually, a Dodge Caravan. He fumbled in his pocket litter for his key, and entered to an unfamiliar stillness.
Her scribbled note was on the dining table. It simply said, We’re outta here.
§
The air in the apartment was stuffy, dense, choking, and after a while he had to escape to his balcony, where he removed his tear-smeared glasses and leaned on the heavy concrete railing, breathing hard, feeling like his lungs were collapsing, or maybe it was his heart exploding.
He was vaguely aware of the game of street hockey happening below, pre-adolescents with sticks and a tennis ball. They scrambled onto the sidewalks as a familiar car, a blue Mazda Miata, pulled up in front. The sexy, leggy downstairs tenant emerged from it, scowling and muttering to herself, apparently enduring her own bad day. Svetlana Glinka, the S&M artiste, back from one of her house calls. She did at least one overnight a week, always on Sundays, taking off mid-afternoon.
Lou had a nodding acquaintance with her from occasionally seeing her on her front stoop, having a smoke. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, with a doll-like face that seemed all wrong for a professional sadist. Her body was well honed from all that hard whipping and spanking and whatever else that went on.
Svetlana paused at her gate and looked up at him. “You, the reporter, come.”
Alarmed, Lou surfaced from his sea of gloom like a gasping swimmer. He gestured at her to be silent, holding a trembling finger to his lips. He nearly did a header coming down, the shinny players laughing as he stumbled against the iron railing, grabbing his glasses to keep them from sliding off his nose.
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