Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel
William Deverell
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 C?te-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 moustache 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!