Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(17)
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.