Deadline (20 page)

“That is one of the things I must consider,” she said. “Believe me, I don’t take that lightly.”

“There are some things I haven’t told you,” he said, making no move to stand. “I’ve been followed and my apartment has been searched, and not by the Ottawa Police. I have the feeling there are some dangerous people with an interest in this, so you should be very careful.”

“I will,” she said. “I promise you that. I’ll get in touch with you.”

He reluctantly stood up and she showed him the door.

Balusi got a glass of red wine at the bar and carried it over to a booth in the rear of Hy’s, where Bouchard was working his BlackBerry, a double Scotch on the rocks resting on the table in front of him.

“How’s it going?” said Balusi.

“I’ve had better fucking days,” said Bouchard, and nodded at his drink. “But it’s starting to get a little better.”

Balusi eased into the booth across from him. “It wasn’t pretty, but I think it could have been even worse.”

“Have you seen the clippings?”

“Yeah. Not terrific.”

“Here’s one I like,” said Bouchard, and read from his BlackBerry: “ ‘Mowat disgraced himself and his office today with his below-the-belt attack on the Liberals, an ineffective drive-by smear clumsily designed to draw attention away from the Auditor General’s devastating report. The move should give pause to any Conservatives hoping that Mowat would bring a kinder, gentler face to lead a government that too often seems pointlessly vicious.’ That’s from Taylor, usually one of the friendly columnists.” Bouchard shook his head in dismay. “At least the Simms piece was pretty good.”

“Well, from what I hear NTV news is going to be tougher tonight. Murphy thought she was too easy on the government and he’s doing the piece. I don’t think we’re going to like it.”

Bouchard laughed. “I guess the Stevens leak wasn’t such a great idea after all.”

Balusi nodded. “I outsmarted myself there. I admit it. I’m sorry, but I won’t underestimate the boss again.”

“You could have called me this morning,” Bouchard said. “Given me a heads-up.”

Balusi shook his head. “What would’ve been the point? So you could lube up? If I’d warned you, Knowles would have seen it in your eyes when he told you. He doesn’t miss much and he doesn’t trust me.”

Bouchard laughed, and held up his glass. “Well, he’s smarter than me then. Here’s to him.”

The two men clinked their drinks.

“Hey,” said Bouchard. “Look who’s here.”

Balusi turned to see Ellen Simms approaching, glass of white wine in hand. She had removed her business jacket and looked amazingly sexy in her tight silk blouse and pencil skirt.

“Hey, you scamps,” she said. “Gossiping as usual, I see.”

“We were talking about you,” said Bouchard. “Have a seat.”

She flopped down beside Bouchard, tossed her hair and took a weary look around the bar before focusing again on the two men.

“So, that didn’t go so well today for your team,” she said.

“I thought your piece was good,” said Bouchard.

Ellen laughed. “I guess it was a bit too good. Murphy yanked it and he’s putting a tougher piece on the air. It’s a humdinger. I did the reaction piece.”

“Well, you’ll all be on the same page then,” said Bouchard. “All shitting on my boss.”

Ellen stared at him. “Did you see the brief in the
Citizen
about Sawatski?”

Both of them looked at her blankly.

“The kid who worked in Donahoe’s office,” she said. “They pulled him out of the canal.”

“He goes out with Sophie Fortin, who works in your office, Claude,” Balusi said.

“I know. I went with the minister to the hospital to see how Sophie was doing.”

Ellen frowned at him. “You knew about it? You could have told me. I was trying to get the story today, calling the cops, but they wouldn’t give me anything.”

“I don’t know if it’s much of a story,” said Bouchard. “Drunk kid falls in canal.”

“That’s not what the cops think,” said Simms, and nodded to her phone.

“What’s the story say?” said Balusi.

“I’ll flip it to you,” said Simms, and she forwarded the story to both men.

They sat there reading it while she scanned the bar.

“Hey,” she said. “Is that tall guy at the bar Jack Macdonald?”

Balusi looked up. It was Jack standing at the bar, drinking with a couple of other reporters.

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s the guy with the Newfoundland paper. He’s the guy who got the story.”

Bouchard looked up. “The kid in the suit that doesn’t fit? That’s Macdonald?”

“I wonder how he got it,” said Ellen. “I would’ve thought that the cops liked me better than they like him.”

“What the story doesn’t tell you is that he was out drinking with Sawatski the night he ended up in the canal,” said Bouchard. “That’s how he got the story.”

Simms kept her eyes on Jack. “I wonder what else he knows. That’s a juicy story.” She looked at the two glum men with her for a moment, then grabbed her wine glass and got to her feet.

“I’m going to ask him,” she said. “See you scamps later.”

Bouchard groaned as she walked away. “I bet he tells her.”

Jack was leaning against the bar, accepting the good-natured, half-hearted congratulations of two colleagues who worked for Ontario papers when they suddenly fell silent and looked behind him.

He turned to see Ellen standing behind him, smiling at him.

“Hey, Scoop,” she said.

“Uh, hi,” he said, smiling and frowning and smiling again. “You’re Ellen Simms.”

She laughed. “I can see how you get your scoops. You don’t miss much.”

He leaned back nonchalantly against the bar, but with an effort. Being this close to her was making him nervous.

“I identified you from your television appearances,” he said, and winked. “That’s how I get a lot of my scoops.”

“That’s a good one today,” she said. “I was chasing that, too.”

“Oh, well, you know, got lucky. Really, it just fell in my lap.”

“Do things often fall in your lap?” she asked, and glanced quickly down at the front of his trousers. “What kinds of things?”

She smiled and looked away as he blushed.

“All sorts of odd things,” he said. “I never know what I’m going to find down there.”

She giggled and took a sip of wine, then propped herself against the bar, cutting him off from his colleagues. She spoke without looking at him. “If I invite you to my place for a glass of wine, will you tell me how you got the story?”

“Well, I never talk about my sources, but in this case there’s not much of a story,” he said.

“Is that a no?” she asked, and she turned her head and looked at him with sad puppy dog eyes.

“Nnnnno,” he stammered. “I’d be happy to accept your invitation. I’m just warning you the story might not be worth the wine.”

“Well, maybe you’ll find a way to make it up to me then,” she said, then leaned over until her hair brushed against his cheek and whispered in his ear. “700 Sussex. Buzzer 1483. Give me half an hour. I’m going to go say goodbye to my friends”

Then she gave him a tiny kiss on the cheek and walked over to Balusi and Bouchard, her hips swaying.

Jack watched and took a long drink of his beer.

Sophie eventually managed to convince the reluctant Sawatskis to go out for dinner and sighed with relief when they left. She turned down the stereo, which was playing a Newfoundland jig, and pulled our her iPod. She paused before she plugged it into the stereo’s iPod dock.

“Ed,” she said. “You don’t mind if I change the music, do you?”

He lay mute on his back, staring at the ceiling.

“I’m just going to put my music on for a bit. Okay?”

A Cowboys Fringants song started.

“Here,” she said. “We can work on your French.”

She lay next to him the bed, took his stiff hand in hers, gave him a small kiss on the cheek and put her head on his shoulder.

She started to sing along softly and sweetly, her mouth next to his ear, singing along to Les Étoiles Filantes.

“Got that?” she asked, when the tune ended.

“No? Well you never studied hard enough at French. Let’s see, in English, it says, um, ‘Even if we know that nothing lasts forever, I’d like if you were, for the moment, my shooting star.’ ”

She was quiet then, with her head on his shoulder, letting the pretty song play without singing along.

She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at Ed’s face. She smoothed his hair and kissed him on the mouth.

“That song is kind of right,” she said. “Nothing lasts forever. Our lives are like shooting stars. But I thought we’d have more time together than this.”

She started to cry silently, the tears running down her cheeks. She put her head back on his shoulder and her tears ran down her cheek and soaked into Ed’s hospital gown.

“I never told you, but I hoped you’d propose to me eventually. I was planning to say no, of course, because we modern Québécoise are too liberated to need a wedding ring.” She laughed through her tears for a moment. “But I would have liked you to propose, and I would have maybe, eventually, said yes.”

She stroked his hair back from his forehead and kissed him. “And I wanted to have your babies, not yet, but in a few years. I never told you that, but I used to think about it a lot. What they’d look like, how I’d make sure they grew up speaking French. Whether they’d be boys or girls.” She stayed still for a moment. “That’s why it’s important that you get better.”

She propped herself up again, meaning to give him a little lecture, but found she couldn’t speak.

A tear was running down his cheek.

Jack found it hard to believe he was headed to Ellen Simms’s apartment, in the most stylish condo building in downtown Ottawa.

After she buzzed him up, he took his time making his way up, dawdling over the subtle splendour of the carpets, admiring the lovely wallpaper, the quiet beauty of the glass elevator.

“Fix this in your mind, b’y,” he said to himself. “This is where the good life is at.”

When he got off on her floor, he stopped to appreciate a striking photograph hanging on the wall opposite. It was a beautifully framed, artful black and white photograph of the building.

“Very nice,” he said, as if he were being escorted by a realtor. “Nice touch.”

Finally, outside her door, he could think of no reason to delay any longer. He knocked, and heard the click of her shoes and then she was there in front of him, holding the door open, smiling. She was holding a glass of wine and had undone the top button on her blouse. She seemed a little drunker.

“Hello, Scoop,” she said. “You going to come in or you going to stand in the doorway?”

Jack stepped inside and she gave him the two-cheek kiss, leaning against him as she did so.

It was quite a place, with a marble and stainless steel kitchen on the right and a step down to the living room straight ahead. A buttery-looking leather couch and armchair were arranged around a steel and glass coffee table, where there was an open bottle of red wine and two empty wine glasses. A big TV hung on the wall. The art – expensively mounted photos of flowers – reminded Jack of the art in the building’s hallways: expensive and tasteful but bland. Behind the furniture was a glass wall and sliding door leading to a balcony.