Sussex Drive: A Novel (14 page)
“Maid Martha,” he said, and grabbed her from behind, pulling her into the dark woods, and perhaps because she was confused by the correct use of “Maid,” coupled with the insight that Corporal Shymanski anticipated Martha would be
wearing this evergreen frock, these golden locks, she didn’t fight him because she was putting everything together. His kiss, a hungry exploration which involved a sweet sucking chew of her lower lip, a dance of tongue and a groin grind that rendered her moist in seconds, transported her through time and geography to her honeymoon in San José del Cabo, to Playa Santa Maria to be exact, a beach in the shape of a horseshoe, with pink sand, secluded, with Dos Equis bought out of a truck in a parking lot, and an afternoon dalliance with Aidan, her first husband, far enough away from the local families to not arouse suspicion, where it seemed they would never arrive at enough, and her nipples stung in her bikini, and the involved anatomy was titillatingly raw for the rest of the day, and the kiss was a painful reminder of the glory of surrender.
She’d started to kiss him back just as he was brutally pulling away.
“Mon Dieu!”
he said, the light illuminating her face, with only its vague resemblance to Martha.
And then his head was covered with a hood, he was kicked in the balls, and knocked off his real foot and prosthetic sneaker by operatives, in balaclavas no less, whom Becky couldn’t recognize, and didn’t. Although wasn’t that the Olympics-watching, nachos-chomping Corporal Robard from Harrington Lake?
“It’s a mistake,” she shouted. “Stop!”
They didn’t acknowledge her.
Shymanski shouted, “Madame Leggatt! Madame Leggatt! I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know!”
Shymanski was cuffed at the wrists and ankles.
“Stop this!” Becky said to the operatives. “Don’t you know who I am? ID! Where’s your ID?!”
An unmarked vehicle, a black SUV for Black Ops, Becky decided, careened up the drive from the little enclave of gift shop, guard’s gate and guesthouse. Becky realized nobody was around them; the kids and grown-ups must all be at Lady Byng’s séance. Where was her own security, anyway? And Shymanski, writhing, shouting, was thrown into the rear of the van by the four balaclavas, and the SUV sped away, lights turned off, through the Rideau Hall gate out to Sussex Drive.
Becky ran after to see which way they turned. East, away from the city.
“Becky?” Niko was panting. “Where’s Taylor?”
Becky turned to see him, his werewolf head dangling from his hand. Coming up behind, Peter, her junior Mountie, his fake taser drawn, pointing at her. And then her security arrived, their gazes insolent in the October night, their breath a ghostly fog.
“I haven’t seen him, guys,” Becky said in a maternal register.
Niko clearly wasn’t sold. He stared at the security.
“Brrrr, it’s cold. Should we fetch some cocoa before it’s all gone?” Becky grabbed Peter’s taser to pull him back to the party. “Niko, come on.”
He ignored her, and took off out the gate.
O
N THE MORNING OF THE
S
PEECH FROM THE
T
HRONE
, Lise discovered the note. There, in her underwear drawer, on top of the silks, a circus of scissored letters, upper case and lower, glued onto
la petite carte postale
, heavyweight bond.
Traître
.
What a feeling it was to know that a person with such ill will had full access to the frills of fabric, the thin sheer strips of civilization, that lived next to her very flesh. She dragged René—back in Canada for a viceregal cameo—from the shower, dripping wet, around the suitcases accruing for her African junket, to show him.
“N’y touche pas!”
he snapped. He’d acted in enough thrillers to understand the forensics, or believed he did. “Who would do this, Lise?”
“Je ne sais pas.”
“Call Margaret Lee.”
“Non!”
Lise wouldn’t stand for that—she wasn’t about to beckon
her
into their bedroom.
“Security then.” He grabbed a robe and covered his damp butt.
“Pas maintenant.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to call them,” she said. She wasn’t about to tell him she suspected the note might have been left by Niko. Ever since Corporal Shymanski had abruptly left in the middle of his shift (for emergency medical reasons, according to his superiors), on Halloween no less, and been replaced by Corporal Robard, Niko had become suspicious about the RCMP, even accusing her of complicity in fronting for a government that had turned to the “dark side.” All of this was extremely worrisome, with Dr. Pelletier, Niko’s psychiatrist, out of town and no appropriate time for a longer conversation with René.
“This is a threat,” René said. “I’ll call them.”
“First let me get through this Speech,” she said. “Where in hell is it?”
One hour later, the PMO still hadn’t provided the text, and Lise, dressed in her Montreal designer suit, in the stylish tar-sands carbon shade, with Labrador seal collar and cuffs, was now not only upset, she was rattled. She fretted in her foyer; they were to depart any second for the Senate. She’d asked Margaret Lee to deliver a rough draft so that she’d at least be able to skim the big ideas
(la perspective d’ensemble, pardon)
she’d be selling to the baker’s dozen of Canadians actually viewing the proceedings.
Margaret Lee finally appeared in her predictable Talbots Throne Speech suit, teal.
“Where is it?” Lise demanded.
“Embargoed.”
The stylist adjusting the military epaulettes on Lise’s gorgeous coat moved away from her, reading Lise’s energy.
“Not for me,” Lise said. “Impossible.”
“Trust me. It’s possible.”
“I am actually giving this Speech. I am speaking it. I am the messenger.”
Margaret Lee blinked mascara-starved eyes, then a call came in on her cell. She took it.
René, resplendent in his tuxedo, cute sash and badges, firmly guided Lise outside into the bleakly cold, minus-ten-Celsius morning. “Do you think the note was planted by one of the domestic staff?”
“Non.”
“An
aide-de-camp
?”
“Non.”
There was silence in their limousine as they passed 24 Sussex. Neither of them had got over
Jeune Levesque
.
“Aagh, ça m’fait vomir,”
René spat.
It had now been five weeks since the Prime Minister’s incredibly ridiculous election, for which he’d contravened his own limp four-year law, blown 30 million in tax dollars (excluding attack ads sent by his MPs to ridings held by the
opposition), alienated her province and most of the cities, and ended up back where he’d first blundered.
Minority, with a majuscule M, monsieur
.
In the interim, the new MPs had spent the last few weeks trekking to Ottawa, subletting the stale flats of the defeated, while Greg had chewed the fat with the outward-bound U.S. president Bush and his vice—what to do with Angela Merkel and her coalition? how to shrink-wrap Brown at warp speed until they crowned David Cameron? how to sink Brazil’s Lula? Or so Lise had speculated.
In the limo, René stared straight ahead. She knew it sometimes took him weeks to shed his film character. That, of course, could be quite exciting in bed, particularly when he was playing a conquering-libido sort—a Mark Wahlberg meets Gérard Depardieu—but Father Benedict wasn’t.
Quel dommage
. She wasn’t sure if he was still worrying about the note or if it was something else.
He’d really not been himself since leaving the second unit (and co-star Penélope Cruz) in Cluj-Napoca. He’d returned on the day of the U.S. election and he and Lise had cloistered themselves in their quarters, leashed to the television. They’d watched Senator Obama holding the hand of his gravely silent mother-in-law in the Marriott Hotel suite in Chicago, the
splendide
Madame Obama unable to sit or pace, and wept as he accepted the will of the American people, embracing his destiny with un-Greg-like eloquence in Grant Park. René had whispered to her that Obama would “get” Quebec, would see that Quebec was the nigger
of Canada. Lise said, speaking as an African-Canadian, that Quebec was not necessarily the blackest in the land. She gave that distinction—as she could, given the full complexity of her marriage to Brett Neeposh and as mother of a half-Cree youth—to the First Peoples. And then she and René had fallen asleep, without kiss or connubial celebration, with CNN replaying speech snippets, and Anderson, and Wolf, and Candy, and Donna, and James, and Anderson, and Wolf, ad infinitum. And since then, between them, she’d sensed a distance.
Two skateboarding boys blew kisses as the limo skimmed the U.S. embassy. Lise robo-waved back.
As they arrived at the Hill and turned right, proceeding past the Eternal Flame, where a group of evangelicals prayed daily with a beatific wickedness, an extraordinary gathering of police cars, lights flashing, sat parked with the troops before the door of the Centre Block, along with the broadcasters’ trucks. Lise looked up. On the roofs of Centre and West Block were a number of snipers, more than usual.
“Lise,” René said, leaning over and snagging her baby seal fur cuff, “I have to tell you.”
She shifted to take his hand in hers. It was rough, callused, not the hand of a thespian priest. She really hoped this confession wasn’t going to involve Ms. Cruz.
“I did some work for Foreign Affairs.”
“What?”
“Some meetings for them. In Romania. Days I wasn’t needed on the shoot.”
Past spouses of the Governor General had often been enlisted by Foreign Affairs; the public didn’t pick up on this because they were misdirected by the government press or, more often, preoccupied with pomp and puffery. Meanwhile, the consort with the deep oil profile pitched pipelines in overseas embassies or deconstructed
NATO
, in fluent Farsi, at a seminar in Tehran. That was how the government secured two intelligence assets that were, at the same time, considered expendable, frivolous, anachronistic extras by the public.
Lise’s consort, however, was an artist, a civilian, and one who’d been treacherously manhandled by the PMO.
“René, what were you thinking? Why would you do that?”
“I was thinking only of you in your job. The atmosphere here.” He waved his arms. “I thought I should build a bridge.”
“After what they did with your
Lévesque
cleep?”
“Yes.” René shrugged. “But they let me go do the film.”
“And I agreed to pull the plug on the government.”
“But that note in your drawer—”
“What about it?”
“Now I wonder if my meetings in Romania are connected to that note …”
He turned away from her, his left shoulder slightly raised.
The limo pulled up to their precise debarking spot. Lise was dry-mouthed and weak-kneed. The door opened and a stubby hand was proffered.
À bout portant
, it was Greg’s. René vanished out the opposite door. She could barely look at Greg. She’d last seen him on Remembrance Day, when
he jostled with her for prime position on the podium and even stole her designated wreath, which was larger than his, to place on the memorial. Since the election, he’d gained weight and his eyes were hooded. When he said “Lise” with his vein-shaded lips, it sounded to her like “Please.”
Lise spoke between clenched lips. “Speech.”
“Sorry about that. Between Chief and Doc, commas go nuclear.”
“Still,” Lise said, “an advance copy is common courtesy.”
“I’m sure the NGO Channel had its moments,” Greg said.
“Jamais.”
Lise lied. “Professionals.”
Briskly, because it was cold, the anthem was played, the flag raised, and Lise inspected her troops, the King’s Own Regiment. René filed behind her. The soldiers were only hiccups older than her own Niko, and the sight of them drained her. This was the hardest part of her job, the role of Commander-in-Chief, when she was essentially a pacifist, a believer in dialogue and consensus; and why wouldn’t she be after what had happened long ago and recently in St. Bertrand? The coup, the slaughter. The 21-gun salute, although expected,
lui a serré le coeur
. And then, with her secretive husband at her side, flanked by Greg and his cub-pack Cabinet, she climbed the red carpet with her winning smile, just after the Keeper of the Carpet finished his final whisk.