Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(57)
For what it’s worth, I have a jump on the opposition. It appears that neither M. Brault nor his daughter have been visited by any detectives from the Puhl agency, so it’s unlikely they know the couple has split up.
Now I have wasted half that Escepcion — still burning but with a thick curl of ash — and allowed my wine to lose its chill.
Au revoir, my friend.
Francisco
THE SIERRA FILE
Tuesday, August 13
Dear Arthur,
I am sorry I missed you in Calgary, where you had a chambers motion to speak to, but on winding up my tasks there, I caught a flight back to Montreal.
Let me encapsulate my visit to Mrs. Celeste Sabatino. She and her children are temporarily with her sister, Lucille Wong, and her spouse, Langston Wong, a geophysical engineer, in a ranch-style home in Upper Mount Royal, a prosperous Calgary neighbourhood. Lisa, eight, and Logan, six, were in school when I came by. The Wongs are childless. Langston Wong was at work.
Though alerted by her father to expect me, Mrs. Sabatino seemed wary of me until satisfied I was who I am. Apparently some noxious fellow has been trying to lure children from school playgrounds in Calgary — it’s been in the news.
Mrs. Sabatino’s sister was a soothing presence during my interview, and helped Celeste open up. A fetching woman, Celeste, as blunt in speech as her dad, she has taken on part-time work as a designer for a downtown dress shop.
She hadn’t been aware her spouse had been laid off. She confessed to being worried about him and feeling guilty about her manner of leaving him. “I just had to escape from that shitty, cold flat. Even the mice were shivering.”
And she needed a break from Lou, who kept “dragging me down with his paranoia and gloomy vibes.” He had been more of a husband to his computer than her.
She conceded that he wasn’t at fault for his dire situation as a hunted man. Indeed, she had been proud of him for breaking the Waterfrontgate story.
And she ruefully admitted that her children missed him, for he’d been a loving, considerate father. “If only he wasn’t such a . . .”
An incomplete sentence, but her lips seemed to frame the word “twerp.”
She is shrewd, and at one point tested me with: “This [my investigation] wouldn’t have something to do with that vile dominatrix living below us?”
Lucille commented: “Yes, isn’t that so weird, it’s all over the news.”
Celeste said of Ms. Glinka: “I thought she was a poseur, une vache. The noise they made!”
I hedged by saying I was interested in Svetlana only insofar as she had also strangely disappeared, at about the same time as Lou.
Celeste: “I hope she didn’t get him involved in something.”
We let it go at that. Celeste promised to alert me if Lou made contact. I tried to assure her that the absence of any calamitous news about him showed he was alive and, hopefully, well.
My interview ended when Mrs. Sabatino apologized for having to run off to take her turn as a voluntary guard at her children’s schoolyard. (Several children at various Calgary schools have been approached by this suspected pedophile, but none molested.)
The ambivalence that Celeste displayed about her husband hints there is hope for reconciliation. If only I could reunite them — that might persuade him to do the right thing by Margaret.
I spent the entire last week in Calgary, which, despite the downturn in the energy sector, was bustling, its inhabitants friendly and accommodating. But of course I felt the general anxiety about the schoolyard prowler.
The other topic on most lips is Farquist v. Blake, and while the minister is widely supported, there were doubters, one of whom provided an enlightening background on Mr. Farquist.
Before introducing him, let me say I have spent far too much time in fruitless research into the plaintiff’s background. There is not much of value in the public record beyond the oft-repeated mention of his mother’s tragic suicide — it appears in his surprisingly brief Wikipedia entry, which focuses on his degrees and accomplishments, his political history.
Work has been his mistress all his life, and he has never married, though he has had relationships with women. Perhaps the trauma of his broken-hearted mother’s suicide deterred him from seeking a bride.
Assembling all the bits and pieces, I have this: his father, the late Dr. Sandor Farquist, fled from Communist Hungary during the revolt of 1957. His original surname was Farkas but on adopting a new country he adopted a new surname. He studied economics in the States and Canada, taught it in Calgary, and was a prominent polemicist of the Right.
Sandor Farquist remained a bachelor until 1969, when he married Lee Watters, a grade school teacher — he was 44, she half his age. She took his name on marriage. Emil was born in 1971, their only child. They divorced eight years later. Sandor remarried; Lee did not. He died of a stroke some time ago at 77.
Emil remained with his mother until she died at 40 of a barbiturate overdose. He was 18. Accounts describe him as having braved this loss, but there are hints he suffered severe depression. However, during the next several years, he buckled down, emerging at 25 from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in economics.
By the time he was 35, Farquist was chief economist for Mobil Canada, and went on to the Bow River Institute, rising through the ranks from Senior Staff Fellow to Executive Director. He then turned to politics, and the rest we know. Or think we know.