Margaret became aware only then that Farquist was within earshot, several feet away, awaiting his turn with a big, boyish, patronizing smile. She took a deep breath, carried on, firing more ammunition, excoriating him for defiling prime farmland by giving tax breaks to a massive program of natural-gas fracking. She lost it a bit at the end, her voice breaking.
Cameras quickly swung toward Farquist, who was already mocking her “hysterical” tone, her ignorance of the relatively benign effect of fracking on the environment.
Margaret walked off, but then turned back. “Frack you!” She couldn’t help it.
§
She isolated herself in her private office at the Green Party headquarters, numbly munching Chinese takeout until the six p.m. television news finished. She just couldn’t watch it and dreaded hearing the reviews from her staff. She fought an urge to call Arthur for consolation. It was too early; he would be doing afternoon chores.
Eventually she went back to the war room, where the big wall TV was flickering. Her indispensable aide, Pierette Litvak, a petite, perky, multi-tasking dynamo, clicked it off with a remote. Jennie Withers was on the couch beside her. A lawyer, a land-claims negotiator, an honorary chief of the entire Cree Nation, Jennie was the Green’s deputy leader and a catch for the party. She’d won a close four-way race in Ontario’s far north. Not yet forty, slim as a runway model, and bronze of skin, she was striking in her long black braids.
“Such a pompous ass,” she said, referring, Margaret hoped, to Farquist.
“You were brilliant,” Pierette said.
“I was awful.”
“I thought you got your point across,” said Jennie.
Faint praise. “Did they run the bit about the Liberals not daring to show their balls?”
Pierette nodded. “Chantal Hébert said she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to see them.”
“I suppose they caught my voice breaking. Hysterical female. That’s how they’re going to come after me.”
“Well, Margaret,” Jennie said, then hesitated. “Telling him to frack himself comes kind of close to the line. He was on the tube, blaring away at you, calling you a slanderous loose cannon.”
“Oh, come on, Jennie. It was just a sound bite.”
Jennie looked at her sharply, though her tone was soft. “Margaret, maybe you should try a new approach.”
“Like what?”
“Cooler.”
Pierette came to the rescue, bounding to her feet. “It’s seven o’clock, sweetie. You have the thing at the National Gallery tonight.”
Jennie got up to leave, and Margaret offered her a hug, warmly reciprocated, then fled into her office with her BlackBerry and speed-dialled Blunder Bay. She tended to call Arthur not when she was up but down — it must depress him. It rang three times, four times.
Maybe this wasn’t a good time to call. She was still feeling the discomfort of having encountered Lloyd Chalmers last night. She must not mention that. Her fling hadn’t been discussed since her teary confession. Arthur hadn’t wanted to hear more.
Seven rings, and Arthur picked up, out of breath, but full of good cheer. He’d raced in from his planting and weeding, guessing it was she. The potatoes were in, a bed of lettuce begun. A glorious sunny day. No mink visits. The two new baby goats were over their wobbles and already bounding like a pair of jumping jacks.
“Please don’t ask how my day was.”
He didn’t, and she told him anyway, a long dirge met with clucking, tut-tutting and other soothing sounds, a jest or two, and flattery twinned with a dig at the flatulent and overbearing toad who’d brought her to such despair. He narrated, with a Scottish burr, Tommy Douglas’s favourite quote from Burns: “I will lay me down and bleed awhile, and then I’ll rise and fight again.” The medicine worked well. She laughed at herself.
Mischievously, she asked. “Seen any more of Jason Silverson?”
“Yes, indeed. Daily I sit at the master’s feet, ingesting his pearls of wisdom.”
“You bullshitter. You’re about the most non-spiritual person I know. What are you afraid of — that you’re going to be liberated from your false values?”
“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 eaves
droppers 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.
“Am thanking from the heart your good advice, Lou. Too much exposing myself with that video. Forget you ever saw, okay?”
Lou stammered something about the tell-all book they were going to write.
“Maybe not so much profit. Not good for business. Police all over, like you say. Lawyers. A lady has to make living.”
Clearly, she had given up plans for long-term profit, opting for immediate gain. She’d been in Ottawa, making discreet approaches, maybe with Farquist directly. Half a million, darlink.
§
On Svetlana bidding him adieu, Lou made his way up the spiral stairs, gathering up the dailies tossed there, the Gazette and the Globe and the Post. Once a newsman, always a newsman, still a junkie for the printed word, the rustle of paper.
He put them aside for now, got some coffee going, went into his computer room, and laid his memory stick — precious now, invaluable — beside the juiced-up desktop he’d built, cut the power to his modem and router, and began the laborious process of encrypting a file for “Jan15.mpeg,” a complex code involving a thirteen-digit password that he carefully transcribed onto a slip of paper which, once memorized, he would eat. Then the Farquist skin-flick backup vanished into the cloud.
He removed the USB drive, stared at it. Does he keep it, does he trash it? He was stuck in a revolving door, going in circles, gripped by indecision. Does he go public with it and risk being whacked by those Mafia goombahs? Does he sit on it and continue with this witness unprotection joke? Or does should he do the brave thing? The right thing? He was a journalist, damn it — he’d scooped the juiciest political scandal of the decade.
Hugh Dexter would come crawling on his knees for such an exclusive, begging forgiveness, offering reinstatement. The fatuous ass had always been jealous of Lou. The only scoop he’d ever got was in a waffle cone.
On the other hand, could Lou be accused of seeking petty revenge? Farquist had diced him up pretty bad at a press briefing a couple of years ago. Lou had dared to challenge him about his frequent first-class flying at taxpayers’ expense. The minister had called his remarks inane and irresponsible. A Hill Times writer later overheard the minister referring to Lou as a “vacuous twerp.”
He stuck the drive back in his pocket, finished his coffee, opened a beer, and slid the remains of yesterday’s Polish-sausage pizza into the microwave. Lou missed Celeste’s fine cooking. Missed her, period. He loved her, couldn’t help it. As the weak love the strong. He even missed the scoldings, their own B&D sessions. But mostly he missed Lisa and Logan. A week had passed and there’d been no attempt to contact him. Nothing on the answering machine. Nothing in his inbox. Her iPhone not receiving.
When he called her parents, her dad answered gruffly. “That you again, Lou?”
“Simon, hello, bonjour. Yeah, it’s me. Just wondering —”
“For the umpteenth and last time, Lou, elle n’est pas ici.”
“If she was there, you wouldn’t tell me.”
“That’s right, but she ain’t here.”
Here was a house just outside Rouyn-Noranda, way up in Quebec’s northwest, on Lac Osisko, notable only because it was dead, poisoned by copper tailings. Simon Brault was a supervisor in the copper mines, a tough guy, unsympathetic.
Janine, her mom, came on the extension. “Oh, Lou, we’re just heartbroken. Maybe you have to give her and the kids a little room to think things over.”
Her and the kids? When were Lisa and Logan asked for their views? “Janine, please, I have a right to see my own children!”
This conversation, as had the many preceding it, ended nowhere. Janine was as tender-hearted as Simon was hostile, but clearly both were aiding and abetting in Celeste’s kidnapping of defenceless children. Lou ended the call stammering in frustration.
He took his pizza and beer out to his balcony, opened the Gazette, scanned it for political news. The NDP’s vote of non-confidence was set for next week while, asserted a metaphor-challenged pundit, weak-kneed Liberals were being strong-armed to support it. A photo popped out at him from an inside page: Emil Farquist facing off with Margaret Blake, the Green Leader, in a scrum in the Commons Foyer. A jocular head: “Battle of the Birders.”
Her “frack you” actually had him smiling.
§
Lou snapped open the double locks and the chain, set the alarm system’s ten-second timer, and slipped out the front door. It was mid-morning, another sunny day as May dwindled to a close. He blinked, stuck on his dark clip-ons, made his way down the spiral staircase, glancing at Svetlana Glinka’s doorway. He wondered if he should talk to her again, tell her the jig was up, add bribery to Emil Farquist’s sins, blackmail to hers.
It threatened to be another low-energy day. He was pallid, flabby with lack of exercise. He hadn’t been outside much, except for food, booze, girl-gazing in Parc Lafontaine, a few trips to the pay phone by the pharmacy a block away — his cell was too risky, too easy to trace. He’d made those calls to set a private time to talk to the Green Party leader’s chief of staff. He’d got to know Pierette Litvak pretty well two campaigns ago when he’d been on the Green bus, joining in her singalongs, sharing laughs and anecdotes and conspiracy theories. He trusted her but didn’t relate as well to Margaret Blake, who lacked discretion, he thought.
In his philosophy of living, Lou had never risen above a personal existentialism — the anguish of just surviving, of getting by — and had never quite got into the eco-consciousness thing that was au courant. He could tell a bird from a bat and a robin from a crow and knew that seagulls shat white, but that was about it. Wilderness was something for people to get lost in. On the other hand, the tedious act of recycling had saved his life, so, okay, protect the environment.
Those issues aside, he was a Margaret Blake fan. He liked her vitality, her plain talk, her lack of bullshit, even her occasional careless eruption in anger. During his time at the Ottawa bureau, he’d watched her in the House. Yes, he could have taken the video to the main opposition party, the NDP, and le
t them train their big guns on Farquist, but Blake had earned the prize by standing up to that twisted blunderbuss. The government whip. Who’d called Lou a vacuous twerp.
LOVE ALL THINGS
Arthur waited until a heavy shower ended, then shouldered his empty backpack and set out for his daily health walk: the two miles to the general store. Today’s list: chutney, lemons, eye hooks, an oven light, and traps for the rats that were seeking a beachhead at Blunder Bay.
His farm was at the dead end of Potters Road, and he could have taken that longer, drier route to Centre Road, across Breadloaf Hill to Hopeless Bay, but he chose the tougher trail along the rocky beach, then up the headland, forgetting, until he came upon it, that he had to work his way across a wet patch thick with nettles.
He was wearing hiking shorts, and it suited his persistently grumpy mood that the nettles lashed his legs — deservedly, he felt; penance for past sins. The stinging let up as he climbed the hill under tall firs still dripping from the rain shower, like tears. He couldn’t avoid getting wet, and that too fed his mood.
The sun pried a path between the clouds as he emerged onto moss-thick bluffs ornamented with swirls of Garry oak and arbutus. He was rewarded with a sweeping view of the Salish Sea, the snow-peaked Olympics, and, across a wide channel, Ponsonby Island, Garibaldi’s wilder cousin. A bald eagle soared past him at eye level, regal and serene. The sun was sucking up mists from the sea.
He felt slightly annoyed that what had promised to be a dull and sombre day had turned so bright and warm and lovely, defying his resolve to remain in a sulk. And the weather continued to improve as he continued on up Breadloaf Hill, with its own rolling views of farm and orchard, grazing sheep and cattle.
The sun banished the last of the clouds as his path finally took him to Centre Road, and on to the island’s funky six-shop downtown core and scatter of homes on small lots. Daffodils glowed from beside the driveways, between apple and pear trees dripping with rain and blossoms. Song sparrows trilled. Violet-green swallows darted over Evergreen Pond. Under these conditions, it was an act of valour to keep his grumpiness intact, but he was a determined fellow.
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