“Margaret, guilt is a futile, unnecessary, and terrible burden. You feel so much lighter when you drop it. So much freer. We made each other happy. No one suspects. Not remotely. What about later, at the hotel tonight, just to talk, to clarify our concerns and feelings? We’re both on the same floor.”
“Sorry, Lloyd. That’s not happening. It’s over.” She finished her wine, offered him her empty glass: a kind of symbolic gesture. He frowned, then accepted it.
“It all ended very suddenly, Margaret.”
She had to stop this. She wasn’t auditioning for the role of bashful maiden. Stand up, get tough, carpe diem. “I have a late meeting and you’re chairing a panel, I believe. What is it about? Climate-change denial?”
He sighed, as if in surrender. “The question I’ll be posing is whether denial is a neurosis or a form of insanity, the sickness of our times. Blinkers worn by the unmindful.”
“Nuts or not, Lloyd, they’re scary as shit and they want to kill all life on earth.”
She took a deep breath and hairpinned through the reception, a few minutes of meet-and-greet before heading off to her hotel to cool out, to steady herself for the evening. Her last view of Lloyd was of him extending a wine glass to the 34E-cup delegate he was courting, apparently as a backup.
§
By half past eight, the weather had turned ghoulish, dark clouds blotting the dying light of evening, a storm approaching. Margaret was wrapped in a hooded rain jacket as she stepped inside the bookstore and made her way into the adjoining café. Only a few customers, with their books and smartphones. Comfortable chairs. Muted lighting. The tang of fresh brew, gurgle of frothing milk.
She ordered a soy latte and looked about. Lou Sabatino was sitting at a table in the shadows, his back to the wall, and nursing what looked like a hot chocolate. He slipped off a pair of dark clip-on glasses, glanced at her, then quickly down at an open laptop.
She fetched her latte, sat beside him, and slipped off her hood.
“Thank you for coming, Ms. Blake.” In the years since Lou had been a regular on her campaign tours, he’d added a beard and a few inches under his belt and some lines on his puffy-eyed but not unpleasant face. He looked shy, sad, with his unkempt hair and aura of loneliness.
“It’s been a while, Lou. How are you?”
She shouldn’t have asked. There flowed from him a mournful cataloguing of his many sorrows. Deserted by wife and kids. Imprisoned in a cockroach-infested hovel. Under subpoena for a court case that might not go to trial for years. Mobsters gunning for him. He’d been screwed over by witness protection and callously fired by his long-time employer. The final outrage, after nearly twenty minutes of this: getting the runaround from a corrupt, self-serving dominatrix.
“A what?”
“Svetlana Glinka. Lives below me. You’re about to see her in action. Warning, the images you are about to see . . . well, you’ll see.” He handed her in a set of headphones.
Margaret scooched closer to him as he tapped his keyboard. The screen went dark for a moment, then opened to reveal a cozy winter scene, a log home, a fire blazing in a grate, a snowscape out the window, a frozen lake. But exponentially more fascinating was the action in the foreground: an upraised, thickly cheeked, obviously male pair of buttocks being slapped with a quirt by a blonde siren wearing nothing more than . . . what could that be? A chastity belt?
“I teaching you, you bad boy, you piece of shit. You want harder?”
“No, I beg you! God help me! I was bad! Forgive me!”
Margaret recognized that voice. She watched, gaping, breathless, her latte forgotten, as Ms. Glinka rode her victim out of view, then a long pause; then the Hon. Emil Farquist, Privy Councillor, Government Whip, Minister of the Environment to Her Majesty’s national government, entered the frame, pulling on his clothes with a blissful expression, then went off camera again.
Lou turned the computer off, palmed a memory stick. Margaret rose shakily, went to the counter, and ordered a triple shot espresso.
§
Wired on caffeine, reverberating with shock, of the sort she imagined a bomb victim might feel, Margaret gave up her quest for a taxi, couldn’t locate the nearest Métro, and walked the stormy streets of Montreal toward the old town, hood up, sheltering in doorways or under canopies while squalls came and went.
She stopped at a dépanneur on Bleury to buy some wine, and there she thumbed a text to herself on her BlackBerry. The highlights: the secret copying of the video, the conspiratorial chats between Lou and Svetlana Glinka, a woman wronged — until apparently bought off. She paused again in a bus shelter to call Blunder Bay. Seven-fifteen there, but Arthur didn’t pick up. She had to shout over the wind and thunder: “I have something crazy wild for you, darling. Make sure you’re sitting when you call.”
She had spent another half hour with Lou after viewing the lurid video for a second time, but then the coffee shop closed and he insisted on calling it an evening. He gave her his cell number, but for emergencies only. It was basically: don’t call me, I’ll call you.
She was grateful and flattered that Lou hadn’t shared this explosive material with anyone else. He trusted her above all others. She had earned this by her stout challenges to the perv, standing up to him in that dust-up in the Commons Foyer, by being an honest politician, a straight shooter.
Yeah, Jennie, cooler doesn’t always pay off. Still, she worried that Jennie had been right about bringing a witness. Someone to back her up in case some Mafia goombah took Lou for a walk. An ugly thought, quickly dismissed.
Lou had balked at making her a copy of the video until they agreed on a plan of action, so now she would have to sit down with staff and develop a strategy. If Lou liked the plan, and it wouldn’t put him in peril, Margaret Blake would earn an exclusive user’s licence.
What could have driven Farquist to this? Please, Mother, I beg you! What was that, some bent form of mother guilt? His mother had committed suicide when he was eighteen — that was widely known, but rarely talked about.
She tried to turn off the prissy little voice that kept whispering about ethics. Fairness. Nobility of mind. How could a self-respecting political leader stoop so low as to make profit from it? Why should Farquist’s private life, however bizarre his erotic fancies, compromise the public role entrusted to him by the electorate? Would she come out of this feeling like (or, horrors, being seen as) a spiteful witch? Yet if Farquist had bribed the dominatrix, that was a crime that merited exposure.
Without intending to, in the throes of her dilemmas, she carried on not to her hotel but to the Palais des congrès, a block nearer, and found herself standing dumbly among the throng of wildlife conventioneers wandering about the booths and book tables, or leaving receptions. The evening’s main events were just finishing.
And there, coming down an escalator from one of the meeting rooms, was Lloyd Chalmers, several chattering fans following, mostly women, the buxom blonde apparently discarded. Several of them were carrying a copy of his recent work, Climate Change Denial: The New Neurosis, to be signed.
His panel had obviously been well received, and run late. She tried to shrink, to somehow disappear; she didn’t want an encounter with him, and hurried to the nearest exit, phone to her ear.
“Sock it to me,” said Arthur, in an oddly merry voice.
“Okay, give me a minute to get my head organized. I am two minutes away from my hotel . . . Did I tell you I’d be in Montreal at the Wildlife conference? Anyway, the weather’s brutal here.” As if to underscore that observation, there was a loud thunderclap.
“Then I shall ring you back.”
“No! Just . . . just talk to me.”
“My goodness. Are you feeling okay, darling?”
“Never better. I love dodging lightning bolts. No, I’m fine, really. Just need to share a delightful tidbit. How’s your weather?”
“Sublime. The heavens are ablaze, the evening thrushes are competing with a chorus of pond frogs. I am on the veranda, witnessing a majestic sunset — a nine point five at least. The sun is just about to sneak behind that lovely old arbutus on the point — your favourite tree.”
“Don’t be cruel, Arthur.”
“Now, as Apollo’s fiery fingers reach beneath Flora’s swirling skirts, he hurls his golden shafts across the gentle fields of Blunder Bay.” Then came a burst of Latin poetry, lyrically translated: “‘Come trip it, Fauns, and Dryad maids withal, ’tis of your bounties I sing.’” The master curmudgeon was in a rare ebullient mood.
The St. James Hotel, a grand stone-faced monarch, loomed from the gloom, its warm lights beckoning, as Arthur poured forth like the rain. “‘Come, Minerva, thou virgin goddess of magic. Come gods and goddesses all, whose love guards our fields . . .’ Atrociously garbled, I’m afraid, I used to have it down. Virgil’s hymn to the rustic gods.”
“Why are you so happy?”
“Well, the sunset, hearing your voice, and . . . to tell the truth, I’m not sure. I’m not finding it as much fun being the island grouch.”
“Heavens be praised.”
“Tell me about the crazy wild thing. I’m sitting.”
Margaret kept the phone to her ear, hurrying past the doorman. “Okay, Lou Sabatino. He’s the reporter who did that Montreal waterfront exposé? Put a hold on that, I’m almost in an elevator.” She was joined by two couples, and put Arthur on hold.
On exiting on the fifth floor, she had a brief blank moment, then finally remembered her room number. We’re both on the same floor . . . She sped down the corridor. “Anyway, I just met with Lou this evening. Wait, I’m having trouble with the key card.” She finally pushed the door open, put the phone on speaker, and set it down and plugged it in, its battery low.
“What are you doing now?”
“I’m undressing, Arthur.” Teasingly: “I am taking everything off.”
“An image that eclipses even the glories of my sunset.”
Margaret was pleased with this vastly improved version of her husband. She began a long, spirited discourse as she peeled, everything wet, her panties sticking to her. She opened a Malbec she’d bought earlier, poured a glass, and picked up her BlackBerry again.
Arthur listened in silence to her recitation of the Sabatino exposé, apparently struck dumb, though she’d expected him to burst into laughter. By the time she finished he was his old sober self, and commenced a meticulous cross-examination, requiring her to retell every word spoken, pertinent or not. Margaret, aching for a hot shower, guzzled the wine.
“When was this video made?”
“It’s date-stamped January sixth. That was a Sunday.”
“Let me understand. This Svetlana person claims she was betrayed by Farquist? She was too old to be his mother?”
“I know it sounds a little . . .”
“Preposterous is the word I think we’re looking for. ‘I helped him through it.’ She also said that?”
“To Lou, yes. Her so-called therapy sessions, she meant, I suppose.”
“Helped him through what?”
“According to Lou, she was about to confide something about Farquist and his mother, but then she decided that would be breaking professional confidence. Fill in the blanks. His dad walked out on his mom when he was eight. She committed suicide when he was eighteen. Barbiturates or something. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud.”
A long pause. Margaret could almost hear him thinking. Then: “Can you be sure this wasn’t a Farquist look-alike?”
“Impossible. He’d have had to be a sound-alike too. Nor does he have an identical twin.”
“Does he own a log home somewhere up in the Laurentians? Or maybe the Gatineau Hills?”
“I’m sure going to find out.”
Another pause. “Dare I ask, darling, have you been drinking?”
She felt insulted by that, but admitted to just having poured a second glass of the Malbec. “Otherwise, Arthur, I’ve been dead cold sober all day.”
After a wordless few seconds — she suspected Arthur was carefully preparing his next remark — he said, “I hope you won’t do anything precipitous, darling, because if you don’t mind my saying —”
“I do mind your saying.” She quickly apologized for her sharp tone. “I’m not blind to the ethical considerations, Arthur. I won’t get involved in mindless mudslinging. If hiring a prostitute to whip his fat ass isn’t enough to disqualify him from his sworn task of destroying the environment, well, bribery definitely is. If we can prove it. I’ll want your advice, of course, and I’m sharing this quietly only with Pierette and Jennie. She’s a very good lawyer, as you know.”
“Fair enough, but Jennie is a land-claims lawyer. I can recommend one or two good Ottawa defamation lawyers who might acquaint you with, ah, certain risks.”
“Oh, please, darling. I’m married to a man thrice voted by his peers to be the nation’s top counsel, so forget —”
Her room phone rang from the nearby desk.
“Sorry, Arthur, can we talk about this more tomorrow? I’m exhausted and desperate for a shower. Is everything okay out there? How are the Woofers? Never mind. Tomorrow, before evening. Love you.”
She disconnected, but the phone on the desk continued to ring. She stared at it.
UNTESTED FAITHS
“I love you too,” Arthur said into his dead receiver, wondering at that abrupt ending. Another phone had been sounding in the background — maybe she was expecting an important call. He wiggled in his hammock, trying to get comfortable again, to regain the strange serenity he’d been enjoying.
It wasn’t easy to assimilate all Margaret had told him — the rara (but prominent) avis, his ritual scourgings, the secretly copied video, the apparent buying off of a double-dealing dominatrix. The sordidness of it all. The serious implications. The rights and wrongs of exposing a cabinet minister as a practitioner of peculiar sexual practices. If it wasn’t all just some weird joke.
Arthur was eternally fretting over Margaret’s political missteps — she was, to put it gently, somewhat accident-prone, so it concerned him that she’d closed her ears to his distress signals.
It was all too imponderable to ponder right now. The curious psyche of Emil Farquist had to be put aside, grappled with in the morning with brain cells quickened by a mug of strong coffee.
He tried to regain the pleasant state of mind that had unaccountably settled over him in recent days. A fine sunset was being wasted — still at least an eight point four: a scatter of clouds pilfering the afterglow, rose-petal pink turning a blander mauve. Musical accompaniment: the mellifluous song of a Swainson’s thrush.
Arthur was amazed by his swift turnaround from old grouch to a state verging on Pollyannaism. A transformation — dare he actually use that word? Just do it. Love all things. He’d got too close to them, he’d been infected by their fairy dust. He tried to laugh at this terrible notion.
He sat up, packed his Peterson bent with his favourite mix, a mellow burley. He had taken up a pipe on quitting alcohol, and it helped to quell that old, crueller addiction. Which was nagging at him now, eroding his serene mood.
Margaret was the source of this discomfort. Her loathing for Farquist. Her access to a weapon that could either drive the Minister ignobly from politics or explode in her face. Her proneness to let fly, to throw caution to the wind, to . . . just do it.
§
Arthur had been attending Sunday service regularly of late, to bolster the crowd — out of duty more to Reverend Al than God. Today, as always, he’d taken care to dress appropriately: black oxfords, dark suit, white shirt, muted blue tie. Locals, many of whom didn’t own suits, thought him a curiosity in such attire, or at best a tourist attraction, especially when he was at the wheel of his fender-bent, dirt-streaked 196
9 Fargo pickup.
He was a little late, the Fargo’s loose muffler wheezing as he chugged around the final bend to Mary’s Landing, a tiny community snuggled into a mist-thick nook with a public dock, a pebble beach, and a low-tide islet commandeered by nesting Canada geese. Its central feature was St. Mary’s Anglican, which squatted on a gentle rise, the Salish Sea to the east, the parking area to the west, and the island’s cemetery beyond it, hidden from view by big-leaf maples and weeping willows.
Arthur stepped inside, taking a back pew and noting that Al was already sermonizing but was off his game, riled and loud. Oblivious to the imperative to love thy neighbour, he was firing another bombardment against the occupiers of Starkers Cove, decrying their “brightly tinselled offerings of untested faiths” and scorning “followers of the fast-food road to enlightenment.”
Arthur picked up the sound of desperation. He counted barely twenty-five in the congregation, where on a normal Sunday there might be forty. Regulars like the Jespersons, and Brad and Barb from the gas station, had been seduced away, spending their weekends, and often evenings, receiving the communion of fast-food enlightenment. But, oddly, a woman Arthur recognized as a Transformer was also in the back row, a video camera on her lap.
Al’s florid rhetoric was causing discomfort, and many parishioners were staring out the windows at a gentler place, the placid waters off Mary’s Landing. Even Al’s ever-supportive wife, Zoë, looked ill at ease at her upright piano.
Arthur found himself distracted by riding whips and a bad boy’s buttocks, a volcanic scandal waiting to erupt, his impulsive partner unable to resist leaking this juicy scoop. He wondered if he ought to jump on a plane to Ottawa. He redoubled his effort to put it out of mind, at least until Margaret’s promised call.
Occasionally he sneaked rueful looks out the window at his Fargo with its ailing muffler. He dreaded the thought of leaving it with Bob Stonewell, self-proclaimed master mechanic. “Your off-road vehicle,” Stoney merrily called it. Because it was off the road at least four months of the year, in his repair shop.
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