Stung

by William Deverell

  Arthur’s hopes for acquittal deflated as he watched those several minutes of micro-camera surveillance. He fears that the defence is left with merely a vague, sneered-at principle called justification: the forgiveness of criminal behaviour. A defence mainly notable for its near-total lack of support in the courts.

  Given that these activists are guilty — in the strict, unforgiving language of the Criminal Code — the battle to be fought may only be for minimal jail times, as against the ten-year maximums the Crown will seek. Or more in the case of Rivie, who faces fourteen on her fraudulent passport count.

  “To amp up the pressure,” Nancy says, “Khan wants to turn the screws on Ray Wozniak. He’s hoping Archie Gooch will cop it so he can indict Ray for manslaughter.”

  Rockin’ Ray, who has been edgy and hyperactive while detoxifying, nearly falls off his chair. He scrambles to his feet, yelling: “Manslaughter? Of who, that dweeb, Gooch? — he OD’d, man, he slaughtered himself. Guy was a total junkie, smoking oxy-laced weed, a fucking belching volcano of second-hand smoke. My glasses had fogged, I never even seen him. What’s my crime? Like, I scared him to death? I was maxed out myself, tripping, man. I didn’t make re-entry until the afternoon. Goddamn Gully.” Suddenly he grins, a mood switch. He does a riff on an air guitar, invents lyrics: “When your dealer’s a souse get him outta the house.”

  “Shut up,” says Lucy Wales, though she joins in the laughter.

  Arthur pooh-poohs the manslaughter charge, assures Ray that Khan’s threat is a typical prosecutorial ploy to extort a guilty plea to a lesser charge.

  “Like what?” says Ray. “Pissing on a constable?”

  More laughter. Arthur can’t help but join in — the charge of assaulting a peace officer has become a source of much mean humour on social media, a viral knee-slapper. He assures the assemblage that Khan intends to stay it, along with the drug charges.

  “My head is banging,” Selwyn says. “Can we have some order, please.”

  Arthur continues: “It is only by dint of some delicate maneuvering that Mr. Khan shelved his plan to appeal your interim releases. On that issue, I must have your ear, Lucy.”

  “You can have both of them.” Leaning against a wall, dark glasses, green hair and matching lipstick. Braless under a Bee-Dazzle T-shirt. Rivie wears one too. And Amy and Ivor. The Sarnia Seven seem to have decided to exploit their sudden fame, legally and loudly, taking it to the streets.

  Nancy is dubious about that strategy. Her earlier warning to Arthur: “Some of these characters may enjoy the camera too much.” Now she hammers that point home: “Ditch your Bee-Dazzle T-shirts, people — beware, bee wary. The media are going to be all over you like black flies in June. Just like yesterday.”

  A media mob scene, Selwyn Loo tapping his way through them, creating a channel to the waiting van-sized taxi, Arthur and Nancy silencing their troops while tossing out platitudes about Canada’s fair and progressive justice system.

  “What you’re not going to say,” says Nancy, “is I did it and I’m fucking proud. You’re not going to talk about the case. That includes talking off the record.”

  Selwyn solemnly shakes his head. “I am no criminal lawyer, so this may sound heretical, but talking about the case, educating the citizenry from whom a jury panel is selected, may be exactly the right thing to do. Our little group will then seem — to the press, to the public — more authentic, true to themselves. Not trying to wiggle out of anything.”

  Nancy announces: “Okay, hold that thought, everyone. We’ll get back to you after we have our story straight.”

  As they break for coffee, carrot sticks, and gluten-free items from Montreal Bagels, Arthur gives thought to Selwyn’s aperçu. It strikes him as astonishingly risky. A rule of almost biblical severity decrees that clients must be told to shut up; it’s the First Commandment of the criminal bar. Yet the point of the Sarnia Seven’s action was to make a loud statement. Should they now be silent?

  Arthur takes Lucy aside. She quickly mutes him by pressing a slender forefinger to his mouth.

  “I got it,” she says. “We stay out of jail if I shut up about the blow job. My lips are sealed. Maybe a lot tighter than Gaylene Roberts’s were.” She laughs, heads for the coffee pot.

  Helmut Knutsen, looking purposeful and grave, replaces her, asking to meet alone with Arthur, who leads him into Nancy’s office.

  “If I’m Joe the plumber and I’m on the jury,” Knutsen says, “I’m going to convict.”

  The door is open to the balcony, a view of busy, eclectic Spadina Avenue, a couple of customers furtively exiting Fu-King Supplies.

  “I have some ideas to make this case relatively painless,” Knutsen says. “It’s me that they truly want. I’m the mad scientist who corrupted the minds of the well-meaning but gullible others. I can do the time. I’ve already lived long — they haven’t. Rivie, Lucy, Okie Joe, all of them — incarceration would scar and embitter them.”

  He is stiff, like a soldier at attention. Or a prisoner of war. He seems to want to be a martyr.

  “So you would plead guilty if the Crown declined to pursue jail time for the others?”

  “It would be the honest thing. I am guilty. Proudly guilty.”

  “You will be of no use to your comrades, Helmut, or to me, from behind bars. We need you to help prepare our defence for a trial that may be many months away.”

  “What defence?”

  Selwyn, who has been at the door, listening: “The defence of necessity.”

  Part Two

  Dead of Winter

  Chapter 13: Rivie

  1

  Tuesday, February 12, 2019

  “You may find her opinions hard to take but she’s easy on the eyes. I’ll be back with my feisty young guest after a word from my good buddies down at Etobicoke Dodge-Chrysler.”

  I snatch off my headphones to protect my ears from yet another inane commercial. Forty minutes more of this ordeal — live talk radio, a concept designed by the same creative minds who brought you the rack and thumbscrews. It sucks but we’ve got to do this media shit.

  It was Selwyn Loo who proposed that we not hide behind a wall of silence. Arthur and Nancy disagreed: it’s risky, it’s not done, defendants should be seen and not heard. But the whole point of our action was to raise awareness. And now we have an audience, it’s big and it’s growing — how can we waste this opportunity?

  So we’re waving banners, blitzing the press, posting on social media, and going on talk fucking radio. All but Ivor Trebiloff and Amy Snider — Nancy had told them there was no point in fanning the embers of the relatively weak case against them.

  The rest of us, caught red-handed, have little to lose by admitting we did the dastardly deed. But there are boundaries. We don’t mention Lucy’s Mix, or what went on, exactly, in Howie’s king bed on September 1, or my stealth attack in Howie’s so-called war room. We don’t mention Chase D’Amato at all, or the tryst in Algonquin Park. We focus on the bee holocaust. That trumps everything, including the risk of self-incrimination.

  “You’re listening to Open Mike with Mike Busco, AM with an attitude, on CXLR, the voice of West Metro. In my studio on this cold, cold morning, we’ve been discoursing with Rivke Levitsky, as she currently likes to be called, the femme fatale who—”

  “Just Rivie.”

  “Rivie? That’s the name you prefer today? You’ve been Rivke, Becky, and Marigold, and now it’s Rivie, so it’s a little confusing.”

  He’s fiftyish, a stout, bearded loud-talker, lacking couth and cool. His preferred debating tool is cheap sarcasm. For this, I dragged my ass out of bed in the dark and bitter cold.

  “Not as confusing as your last commercial. How can they claim to sell the car of the future? Cars are of the past. They’re last-century, they’ve done their damage.”

  “Yeah, I almost forgot, you’re one of those.
Rule number one on my station — you don’t diss my sponsors. So how did you get here at six a.m.? By dogsled?”

  “Pedal power.”

  “Pedal power? Is that like pedalling propaganda? Oh, oh, she doesn’t look so pretty when she wears a scowl. Joke, Rivie, sometimes I can’t help myself.”

  “No, honestly, Mike, I love your sense of humour. But seriously, back to bees, I assume you heard about the huge colony collapse in Africa. Humongous dump of Vigor-Gro on Ethiopian soya fields—”

  “Whoa, what’s that got to do with your case — last I heard, we’re not broadcasting to Ethiopia.”

  “This is a global catastrophe. Bees pollinate the plants we eat. Without pollination, Earth cannot sustain itself. Hundreds of millions will starve. Billions. That is why we went after the Chemican plant. So we could alert the world, this country, the government, the media, you, Mike Busco. That is why we rely on the defence called necessity. Any harm we did, any laws we broke, these are infinitesimal wrongs as against the good we did for planetary survival.”

  I machine-gun this speech, not giving him a millisecond to interrupt. Scripted, sure, but it’s our bullet-point message to the media, to the public, to the people of Toronto the Good, twelve of whom will try us.

  “So essentially you’re saying your crimes should be forgiven. But why is it so necessary to B and E some legitimate business and cause millions in damage and the layoff of three hundred hard-working men and women? Couldn’t you have put up a billboard? A full-page ad? Hey, wouldn’t a Super Bowl commercial get more attention? With all the funds you’re raising . . .”

  I break in before he gets into full rant mode. “I’m glad you mentioned that, Mike. Check out OperationBeekeeper, one word, dot org, you’ll find various ways to donate. Every cent goes into bringing in expert witnesses from five continents—”

  “Okay, that’s your free ad for the day. But let’s bring this home, here, southern Ontario. What about our bees? Where are they?”

  “It’s the middle of February, Mike.”

  “Right. There’s none around, so they must have had a huge colony collapse like in Ethiopia, except caused by the cold weather.”

  “It’s not colony collapse. The hives are still—”

  “What do bees do in the winter anyway? Do they hibernate like bears? Do they go south like . . . what’s that butterfly’s name?”

  “Monarch. You nailed it, Mike — bees are definitely going south, in the hundreds of millions, thanks to poisonous pesticides like Vigor-Gro.”

  “So if there’s a big die-off because of the weather, you want to blame Vigor-Gro? And keep on doing that even though Chemican is suing you for umpteen millions? They say it’s the weather, hotter summers, colder winters, that’s what’s causing the die-off.”

  “That’s fake science, Mike, and I’ll tell you why.”

  “Right after this word from the guys and dolls over at Chicken Little on Dundas in downtown Etobicoke. Traffic report coming up, news, and weather, then stay with us, folks, we’ll keep the lines open.”

  He flicks an off-air switch, sits back, examines me. “You wanna wait till after my show, we could throw your bike in my van and I’ll make you a gluten-free breakfast and you can seduce me and steal my secrets.”

  I look about — where did I hang my down jacket? “What’s the audience rating for this shit-show? Point zero zero two percent? Maybe half a dozen lonely dolts plus your mom and your brother-in-law?”

  He jerks back like I brushed him with a high slider. Guests aren’t supposed to show attitude. A woman in the control room, probably his producer, is frowning, listening.

  “Hey, sweetheart, in the last GTA survey we ranked eight in a crowded field. This may be your last chance to pitch your goods, because everyone in the media is bored with you guys.”

  “Not as bored as your audience. I haven’t seen a single one of your call lights go on. Like, hello, is anyone out there?”

  “They’re waiting for me to get you worked up, you arrogant skank. That’s when they like to pounce, when they smell blood.”

  “Do the dolls at Chicken Little know they’re advertised by a misogynist prick?”

  “When you get booked for a ten-spot, sweetie, you better pray your cellmate ain’t some sadistic bull dyke lifer.”

  This douchebag ranks up there with the flamers and troll-holes who infest my social media feeds. Colour me gone. The woman from the control room has anticipated that and is in the studio, holding my jacket and helmet.

  * * *

  I’m not even vaguely astounded that Richard Dewilliger-James is outside in his electric muscle car, a Tesla Model-X. Richard is my friendly ghost — omnipresent, clingy, dweebish — and because he’s also my surety he has to protect me, like an investment. He works for his family’s financial firm, runs their greenish-ethical funds. He yearns to be hip, a task that ranks up there with the cow jumping over the moon.

  A gullwing door opens to reveal, from behind a burst of condensation from the heater, a plump, pink-skinned nebbish wearing pyjamas under a coat. His complete name is Richard Dewilliger-James the Second, so of course that’s how we refer to him: Richard the Second, or often, Dick Two. Ponytail and earring, scared-rabbit eyes, a stupefying eagerness to please.

  “Mother rang me up twenty minutes ago to say you were on Open Mike with Mike Busco. Sorry, I didn’t have time to change. It was a kind of knee-jerk thing, but it’s minus twelve and there’s snow coming and it’s still dark. I hope you don’t think I’m being weird.”

  I am barely able to spin my bike lock’s combination. My fingers are about to freeze and drop off. The Tesla’s bike rack tempts, but I’d have to endure Richard’s sticky, heroine-worshipping neediness for at least half an hour, plus he’ll want to buy me breakfast and talk about how the world needs more love.

  Wait. Under his coat he’s in purple flannel pyjamas. He’s not taking me anywhere but to my building’s front door.

  “I was worried you could run into some bad characters. You probably think I’m overreacting, but one never knows.”

  That’s not Richard’s worst habit, questioning himself, but it’s up there. His major idiosyncrasy is he thinks he’s in love with me.

  “Okay, let’s blow this dump.” I hook up the bike and step in and the wing comes down and we are off.

  There’s no escape from Mike Busco, the radio on, the bearded brownshirt ranting: “. . . the Sarnia plant closed, maybe four hundred workers laid off, one brave young man dead, maybe from foul play — it’s no wonder Levitsky freaked out and ran, she can’t take the heat . . .”

  “Turn it off.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s gross. I’m sorry.”

  One brave young man dead . . . Three weeks ago they finally stopped tube-feeding Archie Gooch. His beater just petered out. When diced, sliced, and magnified, his heart appeared to have been normal, healthy. Also, the pathologist said he’d likely been brain-dead, literally, for several days before his heart stopped. As a result of some arcane reaction, his life force was extinguished by an opiate overload or fright or both.

  And, yeah, the prosecution has laid a manslaughter charge on Ray the avenger, whose unerringly stupid reaction to that has him seeking his own personal Jesus. In an effort to stay drug-free in this time of crisis he has joined a holy roller church on the Danforth called the Assembly of the Lord Saviour Divine.

  “I blew it,” I announce.

  “Oh, good gosh, no,” Richard goes, “Busco was the one got blown. Totally.” He reddens, embarrassed by his phrasing. “I mean you were all over him. Verbally, I mean.” Panic setting in.

  I succumb to my mean streak: “He offered to buy me breakfast for a fuck.”

  His cherubic face blooms like a red, red rose. “Oh, my good Lord, how did you handle that?”

  “I ordered poached eggs on multigrain.”

  He jerks a
look at me to see if I’m only kidding. Then he has to correct his steering as the Tesla announces it’s too close to the cycling lane.

  “I love your sense of humour. I love everything about you.”

  “Just drive, Richard.”

  Why does this continually happen to me? I’m a love magnet, if you don’t count Chase D’Amato (and where in hell is he?).

  But I’m not lovable. Even Lucy, my best bud, says that. An aggravating Joan of Arc complex is on display. I am an arrogant skank, I pulled a skanky number on poor Howie Griffin. Whom I carefully avoided last week when I saw him slouch down Harbourfront Park, thinner, worn, haggard, leaning into the cold wind off the lake.

  “I checked today’s schedule,” Richard says. “You have to sign a bunch of thank-you letters to donors. Then there’s the Writers’ Union All-You-Can-Read Book Auction at the Arts Centre. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? You’re expected to say a few words.”

  He’s like having a personal secretary. A very glutinous personal secretary.

  “Oh, yeah, and tomorrow you have to remember to sign in with the police.” Twice weekly, it’s a drag. “I can drive you there.”

  When we pull up to our building on Sorauren, I give him a dirty big smooch. He earned that, Dear Diary, so don’t call me a teasing bitch.

  2

  Lucy’s morning mess includes underwear on the bathroom floor, wet towel on a kitchen stool, cold toast in the popper, half-consumed mug of coffee, the pot still warm, all combining to create a sense of her having run sprints around the flat after getting up late for her eight-thirty chem class.

  An empty sardine can in the sink probably means she fed the cats, though Sinbad still looks hungry — he’s on a window ledge, staring rapaciously at the house sparrows. Sleepy is, as ever, sleeping.

  I spend twenty minutes straightening, though I don’t have time to clean — these are precious morning hours, when Lucy is out, when I get a chance to write. I do this in our only bedroom, which I have claimed for the final two months of our house-sit — coincidentally the last three months before jury trial, verdict, and probable imprisonment. Ms. Levitsky, I sentence you to ten years in an institution for the criminally sane.