Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(12)
“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.