“Florence, you’re going to Florence this evening,” Felicity jabbed at the keys, at once incredulous and deliciously hopeful? Things had not been going very well between them since he had become a VBI man. She secretly pined for the vagaries of their earlier existence, despite the lifelong aversion she has always harboured for wishful thinking. They were then intimate, passionate and engaged, the basic ingredients, neuroscientists have identified, in the recipe for love. All that remained from that happy time for Felicity were scraps. Meaningful confidences were no longer shared, selfless acts were mostly rare and sex uncommon.
“You’ll have to trust me,” he answered, “The Society is back and more, which I will tell you about in one week at noon, Chez Artois,” the small, famous for its goose confit, restaurant in the 13th arrondissement, in Paris. “Don’t forget to erase this exchange. I love you. See you next week.”
Abelard was mindful that Felicity would be an easy mark to follow and that Milly would do so, quite rightly expecting her to come to him. Chez Artois was indeed a fine little restaurant but it was also a code he had insisted that she remember, in spite of her objections to the cloak and dagger feel. The actual rendezvous was elsewhere, the following morning.
Abelard, however, was not sure that she would actually show up. He imagined her thinking that this was the last straw, another Abelard fantasy followed by a mechanical declaration of love. Her legendary tolerance for all things Abelard was badly frayed. She had been growing increasingly disenchanted with his obsessive campaign to reach the top. To her his methods, some of which she read about in hostile press coverage, and a good deal she heard from others, were an outright disgrace. She was tired of telling herself that very soon he too would eventually be revolted by a game whose rules were set in an ethical vacuum. He would soon withdraw from the constant territorial battles, settle down, spend more time with her and, perhaps, only perhaps since she was herself unsure, have children.
His apparent lack of scruples had left her uneasy. She had carefully nurtured, like an endangered species, the little hope that remained, until his latest brutal takeover battle finally pushed her to look more closely at his driving ambition. The turning point came less than two weeks earlier, when her doubts suddenly took a turn for the worse, a final signal added to the many that had been accumulating. It was the ElectroProd takeover celebration bash thrown by Milly at their condo that pushed her through the gate and hastened her slide down the slippery slope of looming despondency. It was picked up by the local business pages and there was not a newspaper literate person in Montreal who did not know about the event. Local 424 of the Allied Worker’s union also knew and they had a particularly rancorous grudge against Abelard. They had been employed by ElectroProd when Abelard closed the plant down, moved production to Mexico and dismissed everyone.
At the entrance to Abelard's prestigious building a more than modest crowd of determined people had gathered, some carrying unofficial placards with obscene anti-VBI slogans. 'FUCKING VBI BULLIES', 'M.Y. LORD THE VAMPIRE, 'M.Y. LORD, BEWARE THE WHITE KNIGHT', 'DEATH TO THE ARROGANT VBI BASTARDS' and, the one which most pleased Abelard, ‘CLOSE DOWN BUSH’. There was much jostling and the crowd was obviously in the mood for a fight and might even interfere with the guests. These were the disaffected, cast into the cold by the whimsical humour of a rapacious takeover. They were here to hit back.
The cloudless sky would have been beautiful to look at, a magnificent dark blue, this cold, end of winter evening, had it been visible through Montreal’s electric glare. Mindful of the hostile crowd the limousines dared not stop to disgorge their passengers. They would all be waiting around the bend to return after the trouble cleared up, and that it did, but in a most unexpected way.
Abelard was in the lobby watching, waiting and smiling. His unnatural self-assurance before the hostile mob had an easy explanation. At the end of the street, lined up for the charge, were two dozen mounted policemen and Abelard knew just how to mobilize them. His memories were fully loaded with the group dynamics of armed, trained and primed men on horseback. He had guessed the signal to which they would respond and he knew how they would do so; swiftly, violently and single-mindedly. An ancient consciousness was arising; a mixture of euphoria and alertness. He could soon no longer hold back.
Abelard stepped suddenly out the doors and with a smashing blow to the face sent one of the demonstrators who had been unlucky enough to be standing on the stone stairs tumbling to the sidewalk. The sharp crack was followed by pervasive silence as a thousand minds tried to digest and understand the sudden turn in the unfolding drama. The induced hesitation was but momentary, time enough for the fallen man to try unsuccessfully to rise, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Then, as Abelard had expected, the now grown unruly mob surged towards him as he retreated back into the lobby, and that was it. He had succeeded in precipitating the resulting battle.
The police line, taking its cue from the menacing gesture, began to move forward in two disciplined rows, spanning the entire width of the street. They started slowly, disciplined to keep tight formation, the clicking of metal shod hooves against hardened asphalt reverberating along the roadway and echoing off the massive brick of the building on one side and the rock face of Mount Royal on the other. The horses' heads were held high, bridled by their own impatient riders from the headlong rush for which they yearned, jets of white mist shooting from flared nostrils into the frigid night air.
Gradually, but perceptibly, the clicking rose and became a deafening clatter as the horsemen loosened their grips on the reins, letting their mounts accelerate towards a full run. They were a truly awesome sight; beauty, grace and belligerent power in a choreographed line, the glare of street lights twinkling over the polished white helmets and reflecting off the plastic face visors. Billy clubs swinging above their heads like fine battle maces, they fell upon a crowd that had by now lost its cohesion, had turned into a mindless, leaderless rabble and was agitating its frayed mass in the throes of fearsome panic; cavalry always had that effect on infantry formations. The rudderless mob was no match for the highly trained horsemen, experienced in the art of crowd control, experts in the precise application of brutality. Swinging their weapons, now to one side now to the other, they cracked bone and skulls at will, smashing those that had so arrogantly strutted their terror only moments before, denying them their desperate attempts to disperse.
Abelard loved it. He rushed back onto the street, now the odds in his favour. He was literally laughing out loud, at random grabbing fleeing, frightened, disoriented people, and smashing them to the ground. They were no longer the arrogant self assured parts of a single, unified threat. They were now only simple people, each pitiful in lonely, shivering isolation. If it wasn't for the doorman and Felicity, who had by this time also come down, struggling to pull him back, he would soon have had his own skull cracked by the horsemen, drunk with the thrill of victory, the pungent, intoxicating smell of fear.
It was very soon all over; the street now littered with debris and injured demonstrators groaning from broken bones, cuts and bruises. Ambulances had arrived to remove this flotsam, like so much unwanted debris. As the limousines began to return Abelard was arranging with the police to put off his statements and complaints until the following day, after the party. He didn’t, until it was all over, fully appreciate how much he had missed the excitement of battle and the exhilaration of complete victory.
Abelard, lord of the chateau, conquering hero, stood triumphantly under the green and white striped awning to receive the adulation of his peers. He felt, at that moment, closer than ever to the father in his memories, who more than six hundred and fifty years earlier at the massacres in Meaux, had also thrown himself against the peasant hordes and prevailed. John de Grailly III, the Captal de Buch and his erstwhile enemy, Gaston Phoebus, the Count of Foix were returning from a religious crusade in Germany when they were summoned to help free the French King’s wife and her ladies from the Jacquarie uprising. They were on
ly 25 knights up against thousands of peasants but they prevailed, slaughtering great numbers without any apparent losses. Skill at arms, Abelard knew, will always triumph over a leaderless, untrained rabble.
The mounted police were still milling about. Horses moving among the limousines, the radios of their riders squawking incomprehensible static, gave the evening's drama the allure of an anachronism. M.Y. Lord was standing beside him when scruffy, paunchy Sanschagrin, the antithesis of Abelard de Buch, the victor of the field, approached and began to speak.
"This is becoming a little tedious,” the ubiquitous Sanschagrin said. “Let me guess; hard day at the office; not thinking straight; a nobody gets too close; you’re afraid it might be another dangerous mugger; and without thinking the peaceful Mr. Bush decks him. Did I get that right, Mr. Bush?” he asked, flipping the pages of his notebook, looking for a clean patch on which to write. "Oh, yes, let me read you your rights," which he proceeded to do in a nasal, aching monotone.
"Well, did you assault the man,” he asked, losing the earlier sarcasm?
"Say absolutely nothing. Our lawyers will take care of everything tomorrow." Milly, who had been silent all the while, confidently, arrogantly intervened on Abelard's behalf.
"Ok, that's your right but you'd better ask for me when you come down to the station tomorrow to tell your side of the story." He handed him his card, yet again, his sad face reflecting what could only have been abject disgust.
"Hey, the party's upstairs, not here in the street, come on." Abelard’s triumphal tone resonated well with the murmuring, huddled guests.
The corridors and elevators were alive with deafening whispers and affected exclamations, the story of Abelard's physical prowess had captured the imagination of the elite. A legend was in the making. Other residents of the prestige building were pressed against the walls and behind thick, Doric supporting columns, gawked at the man who led the charge against the villainous rabble, who would surely have invested the building and committed unspeakable horrors.
Suddenly, silence, hushed anticipation as an elderly, patrician lady in sober but expensively cut dress moved out of the shadows to stand before Abelard. She took his hands in hers and gazed at him for a moment. "I have read about you in the newspapers," she began, her voice trembling slightly, not only because she was old but also from the emotion of the moment. "You are that young business genius who has just engineered, how did they say it, oh yes, one of the most elegant and brilliant takeovers in more than ten years now. Quite an accomplishment young man, and you do indeed look as young as they say. Extraordinary."
This set everyone off to supportive nodding and babbling approving noises. Abelard was truly overcome, the shining saviour being thanked by the matron of the rescued chateau, just as it may have happened in the old days. He was positively beaming at the assembled multitudes, a completely innocent smile unnaturally softening his features. Then, raising her head, with its exquisitely fine, porcelain like features, which she had momentarily bowed in apparent homage to the great warrior, she resumed her anticipated eulogy.
"I say extraordinary Mr. Bush," she continued with the same elegant, natural poise, "because it is to me a sad sign of our lost experiment in freedom and happiness that one as young as you is already able to wield enough destructive power to cripple large, respected institutions, put people out of work and then, with complete impunity engage yourself personally, almost as though it were a sport, along with the forces of law and order to brutalize those you have already brought to their knees. You behave, Mr. Bush, as though base instinct is your only guide. In fact, Mr. Bush, what I found most remarkable, was not your youth, although I still think it is extraordinary, but that unlike others of your ilk in this game, you don't even make any pretence of feeling sorry. In that respect Mr. Bush, you are certainly much more honest than the others of your species."
The verbal assault was thoroughly unexpected, falling leadenly on the soaring mood in the thin atmosphere of euphoria, on the high spirits of victory. A deafening silence hung over the complete confusion. It took some time to react. The old lady was still holding his hands in the frozen, stunned silence. Nobody moved. Nobody dared move. What would they do now? This old hag had broken the spell. They can't very well attack her. They were defenceless. Only Abelard seemed to remain utterly unperturbed, still smiling, no less expansively than a moment ago. He was now shaking his head from side to side in an expression of charitable pity at this otherwise pleasant old lady's unfortunate naiveté about such matters. He was skilfully manipulating the apparent, attempting to keep the victory of only moments earlier from turning to ash. Then they were saved.
"Mother, mother, please let me take you inside, you know what the doctor has told you about stress," a disembodied concerned voice from somewhere in the crowd suddenly intoned. And then the well groomed middle aged man in dark smoking jacket joined his advance words.
"Please forgive her," he continued, as his arms went around the old woman's frail shoulders, "she is on medication which sometimes provokes these sudden, bizarre outbursts. I saw the whole thing, Mr. Bush," his words measured with sufficient awe and respect to mould them into an appropriately lavish expression of thanks, "and I think I speak for all the building’s residents in congratulating your personal bravery in this ugly matter which could have turned nasty without your intervention. Thank you again." He led his mother away, now stoop shouldered and sunken, to recede into her world of civility and social responsibility, where being nice was everything.
The guests were like a living, interconnected organism, a renewed sense of well being rippling through their ranks in a slowly mounting crescendo of relieved murmurs. As one, they began to flow towards the elevators, only Abelard hanging back a moment to exchange some words with the concierge, who finished by whispering something in his ear and pointing towards the ceiling. Felicity had seen the brief exchange and inquired of the doorman as to its content. Abelard, it seems, had wanted to know the old lady's name and where she lived. Felicity squeezed onto the elevator fearing the worst.
It was as though she were suddenly jolted awake from a long deep sleep walk. Abelard, she accepted, for the first time, had always been like that. How could it be otherwise? The memories that defined his life were peopled by hard, ambitious men who knew no limits. Those were still the only recollections he possessed. No act was too outrageous, no lie too big, no odium out of bounds, if it was the swiftest means to his ends. She had let her obsession with the once helpless Abelard cast an opaque veil over her reason. No more. She was resolved to confront him at every transgression against common decency. If that led to irreconcilable differences, so be it. She was determined to never again embrace forlorn hopes; to love only those who met her own personal standards for integrity.
From the moment she chose to cast tolerance to the side endless bickering filled much of their time together. She objected to the disdain with which he treated others he considered beneath him. When he stayed late at the office she accused him of infidelity. She would no longer tolerate occasional drunken revelries with his ‘men’, the executives who reported directly to him. She picked on even the smallest things such as his cologne which she insisted made her want to throw up. When the constant squabbling had worn him down and he confronted her, she did not shirk and told him that she would not much longer be able to share her life with someone who was the gold standard for ruthless behaviour. That was just two weeks ago, before the incident at the Pharma plant.
*