Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(29)
He had not returned calls to his emergency number. He seemed not to have been at home all yesterday — Pierette saw neither him nor Svetlana Glinka while staking out their triplex from a rented car.
Pierette knew the neighborhood. A Montrealer, franco mom, anglais dad, she had lived not far from Centre-Sud. Still, being bilingual with local roots hadn’t helped her with Witness Protection. She’d talked to a sneering bureaucrat and got a quick, impolite brushoff.
Margaret had finally got up enough pluck to tell Arthur about her gaffe with the hot mike, though she desperately tried to minimize it: a peccadillo, without consequence. There’d been a bit of worry that Christie Montieth had been plugged in, but if so she would have been all over the front page; instead, her write-up was a typical put-down of Montieth’s least favourite politician.
Arthur had listened to this silently, though she could almost hear him boiling. As to Pierette’s sleuthing, he firmly urged discretion. Lou Sabatino attracted bad company, he was being targeted by the Mafia. Margaret and Pierette would be risking lives if they openly pursued him — his life, maybe theirs. Lou’s enemies wouldn’t care who got in the line of fire.
He’d reminded her there’d been another gangland murder last weekend in Montreal. Margaret had read the headlines: Nick Giusti, a former mob lawyer with a reputation for sleaze, had been gunned down outside his home in Laval, a fusillade from a passing SUV. He’d been returning from church.
Arthur had been relentless. Without Sabatino, without the tape, any mention of Farquist’s bizarre fancies could backfire with ruinous results. She had been lucky to escape blowback from the indignities she’d so blithely shared with Pierette last weekend — that should be a flashing red light.
Margaret smarted at the reproof, but gritted her teeth and promised to restrain herself.
Suddenly, after scolding her, Arthur had undergone a weird transformation, another attack of over-the-top ebullience. He sounded high — Arthur? High? — as he amused her with the latest local sagas: Nelson Forbish’s conversion to the Transformers, Zoller’s mission to punish them for their sins, the saga of Arthur’s excursion to Starkers Cove — the funny farm, he called it, agricultural anarchy — the spilled gupa, and Martha’s lustful attempt to mug the blond bombshell.
“Gupa? Did you drink it?” She didn’t let him answer, couldn’t stop laughing. She liked this version of Arthur Beauchamp. His scathing critique of the chaos at Starkers Cove had shattered her benign view of Jason Silverson’s bold experiment. It was all so comical and a relief from the daily strain of politics.
She’d been thinking a lot about her island lately. Not just the crazy stuff, like the Transformers, but its simple, homespun pleasures, its laid-back routines, its silliness, its lack of pretension, of urban slickness. The moist, salty air and the gentle breezes from the sea. She had started to ask herself: what the fuck am I doing here?
Xavier Martineau, the Drone, finally led his caucus in. Some looked defeated, some defiant, others dismayed — consensus had not been reached. Though Margaret was onside with the non-confidence vote, she was torn by the prospect of an election, of launching a campaign with loose ends hanging: Sabatino, the X-rated video.
The Liberals’ entry disrupted Question Period, and the NDP leader muffed his lines. Something about the Coast Mountains consortium being too cozy with the government.
The Prime Minister was equally distracted, studying the Liberals for some kind of signal, and he hadn’t quite grasped the question. “Once again, Mr. Speaker, my honourable friend demonstrates his penchant for wallowing in negativism. He very well knows my answer to his question.”
“What is it?” someone shouted.
“What’s the question?” someone else called.
“Order,” said the Speaker. “Recognize the member for Dorval.”
Xavier Martineau rose wearily, and received permission to make a brief statement.
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. While vigorously rejecting the slurs cast by the Honourable Leader of the Opposition — I need not recite them, but ‘panicking chickens’ might be the most egregious — I seek to assure this House that our caucus has sought to assess the Canadian public’s appetite for a summer election, with the season’s many pleasant distractions and the consequent inconveniences vacation-goers would be subjected to, and so . . .”
The die was cast. Boos and catcalls from the opposition side.
“And so we have asked the voters, we have asked our supporters to canvass for the general view, and it seems there is insufficient appetite for a midsummer election . . .”
He carried on awhile, the world’s longest sentence, but his words were drowned in hoots and boos from the Opposition side, while government members looked on grinning or yelling, “Call the vote!”
When it ultimately came — “Resolved that the government has lost the confidence of the House” — several Liberals of stouter heart voted for the affirmative, but the remainder abstained, and the nays won handily.
§
Margaret arrived in the Foyer late, expecting to see the Prime Minister holding the fort, but Win Fowler was a no-show and Emil Farquist, surrounded by a platoon of press, was subbing for him. The Opposition leader was waiting in the wings to reply. There was a pecking order to these media scrums, and the Green leader was always the last pecker, usually sharing her sound bites with ragtag remnants of the press.