by Louise Penny
They stared at each other.
“You’re right, of course,” Armand conceded. “But Jean-Guy stands with the best of them.”
“Does he really? I looked you up this morning, to get caught up on your career. A lot has happened, my friend.”
“True.”
“In my reading, I saw his record, too. He’s an alcoholic and drug addict—”
“In recovery,” snapped Armand. “He’s been clean for years. Don’t tell me you don’t have fine officers who’ve battled addiction. The incidence in our line of work is—”
“Yes. Yes,” admitted Dussault. “Too much damage done.”
“And often to the best,” said Gamache. “Those who care. Those who stand in the front line. Jean-Guy Beauvoir cares. There’s no better officer anywhere. And that includes here.” He paused for a moment. Challenging Dussault to challenge that. “I know no one braver.”
“Or smarter?” suggested Dussault. “I read that he jumped ship to go into private industry. He probably gets paid ten times what we make. And doesn’t get shot at. As you know, my own second-in-command also left. We’re the foolish ones, Armand.”
“Thank God we’re so good-looking,” said Armand, smiling.
Dussault clapped him on the arm. “Have you ever been tempted, mon vieux? To take a job with a private security firm, for instance? They’d pay a fortune for someone like you.”
“No. You?”
Dussault laughed. “Don’t tell anyone, but there’s only one thing I do well, and this’s it.”
He looked at his team, with fondness.
“That’s not true,” said Armand. “I seem to remember you took a sabbatical a couple of years ago to play saxophone in that polka band.”
Claude lowered his voice. “Shhhh. Everyone thinks I was studying international money laundering.”
“I think they might be onto you. Your mistake was telling them you’d joined the Interpol Anti-Terrorist Glee Club.”
“Yeah, they did find that hard to believe. Comforting, really, that I’m not surrounded by idiots. I seem to be the only one.”
Armand laughed.
The truth, and Armand was one of the few who knew it, was that Claude had suffered PTSD after a spectacularly brutal year of terrorist attacks. Culminating in the hit-and-run death of his mentor, the former Prefect.
Music, particularly his beloved saxophone, had helped heal the man.
“All right,” said Dussault. “Beauvoir stays, but in the background. And I deal with you, not him.”
“Agreed,” said Gamache.
“Will you excuse me? I see the Procureur wandering around.”
* * *
Jean-Guy was walking through the rest of the apartment, examining each room.
Irena Fontaine had gone back to supervising the team from the brigade criminelle.
Claude Dussault was standing by the window, conferring with the Procureur de la République, who was needed to officially launch any murder investigation.
The conference did not take long. Two bullets in the back was a pretty convincing argument.
No stranger to homicide investigations, Armand stood in the middle of the familiar room. Lost.
This space, this place, had always been safe for him. Almost sacred.
But no longer.
His eyes moved to the picture hooks on the walls and the paintings strewn on the floor.
The Gauguins and Monets, the Rothkos and the huge Cy Twombly ripped down from over the fireplace. The sublime Kenojuak Ashevak lying faceup.
And among them, easily overlooked, a little frame, like a single mullion in an old window. The watercolor was unspectacular in every way, except for the comfort it had offered a grieving child. The tiny window into the possible.
Smoke still rose from the cottages. Perpetual. Predictable. A river still wound through the village in the valley. There were thick forests filled, young Armand had been sure, with marvelous creatures. And in the very center of the painting of the village, there was a cluster of trees.
Armand looked across the crime scene, at the small frame on the floor, and had a nearly overwhelming desire to turn around and go home. Back to Québec.
To sit in the bistro with Reine-Marie. Henri, Gracie, and Fred curled together in front of the log fire.
Gabri would bring them café au lait, or something stronger. Olivier would grill maple-smoked salmon for their meal, while Clara and Myrna joined them to talk about books and art, food and what the Asshole Saint’s horse had done now.
Mad Ruth and her possessed duck Rosa would toss out insults, and sublime poetry.
I just sit where I’m put, composed
of stone and wishful thinking:
That the deity that kills for pleasure will also heal,
He could, even now, from what felt like an impossible distance, see through the mullioned windows of the bistro to the thick forests, and the leaves that would already be changing.
As everything eventually did.
Except in the picture tossed so casually on the floor.
That in the midst of your nightmare,
the final one, a kind lion will pick your soul up gently
by the nape of the neck,
Home. Home. He wanted to go home. And sit by the fire. And listen to their friends talking and laughing. To hold Reine-Marie’s hand and watch their grandchildren play.
And caress you into darkness and paradise.
But not quite yet.
Gamache went over to the tiny painting and replaced it safely on the screw in the wall. Where it belonged.
But before he did, he noticed, written on the back, For Armand.
CHAPTER 11
Reine-Marie Gamache sat in the Hôtel Lutetia’s bar Joséphine, her hand resting on the box beside her.
She stared past the elegant patrons, through the huge windows of the Lutetia, at the chic men and women of Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement.
They strolled by on rue de Sèvres. Many holding shopping bags from the nearby Le Bon Marché.
Reine-Marie was aware of the activity around her in the magnificent Belle Époque brasserie, but all she saw was the body on the floor and blood on a carpet where her children had played.
And she tried to recapture that scent. Would she ever be able to identify it again?
She could still, to this day, identify her mother’s scent. Not perfume, but ammonia cleanser. Clinging to her, ingrained in her very pores, from her job cleaning houses.
And Reine-Marie knew she’d go to her grave with Armand’s scent of sandalwood. At least, she hoped she would. That she’d go first. In his arms.
It was selfish of her. To make him go through that. To leave him behind. But she wasn’t sure if she could go on without him. If he …
She refocused her mind. Back to the events. The facts. The body.
As a trained librarian and archivist, she was used to not just sorting and cataloguing information but also making connections. What had made her so good at her job, and led to her rise within Québec’s Bibliothèque et Archives nationales, was that her mind worked on many levels.
Where others might see facts, Madame Gamache could see the relationship between them. She could connect two, three, many apparently disparate events.
Between the aboriginal name for “the Stargazer,” an account of a dinner party in 1820 with the geologist Bigsby, and a pauper’s grave in Montréal.
She’d put all that together and come up with David Thompson. An explorer and mapmaker who turned out to be possibly the greatest cartographer who ever lived. An extraordinary human who’d disappeared into history.
Until the librarian and archivist Madame Gamache had found him.
And now she was presented with a whole different set of facts, of events. Not safely residing in history, these had a pulse. And blood all over them.
She pulled the box closer and narrowed her eyes. Trying to see …
“Hello?”
Reine-Marie was jolted bac
k to the Joséphine and looked up into her husband’s smiling face.
“Désolé,” he said, bending to kiss her. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You were a million miles away.”
“Actually, not that far.” She kissed him back and heard him whisper, “Don’t react.”
She kept the smile on her face and tried not to betray any confusion.
He stepped aside and revealed Claude Dussault.
“Claude,” she said.
But she was confused. What had Armand meant? Was she not supposed to recognize this man she knew well?
Had seen the night before in the hospital?
But as the Prefect bent to kiss her on both cheeks, with an exaggerated politesse that had become a joke between them, she understood.
She tried not to react, but she feared she might have, momentarily, given it away. In the slight widening of her eyes. In surprise.
She was pleased to see Jean-Guy and focused her surprise on him.
Everyone got settled in the banquette and ordered drinks as Armand brought Reine-Marie up to speed.
She listened, asked a few questions that had no answers, then fell silent.
But her mind was racing. So quickly she actually felt it was spinning. Kicking up dust. Obscuring what should have been clear.
Jean-Guy pointed to her brioche. “Are you…?”
She pushed it toward her son-in-law, who was always, it seemed, ravenous.
“One big question is whether Monsieur Plessner was mistaken for Monsieur Horowitz, or whether the attack on him was deliberate,” said Claude Dussault. “What’ve you got there?”
He gestured toward the box, where Reine-Marie’s hand still rested, protectively.
“Oh, yes,” said Armand. “We wanted to show you.” He looked around and caught the maître d’s eye.
“Jacques.”
“Oui, Monsieur Armand?”
The two men went way back. Jacques had been a busboy when Stephen first brought Armand, at the age of nine, to the Lutetia. They were a decade apart in age, and while they’d known each other for almost half a century, there remained a formality between the two. A good maître d’hôtel was never overly familiar with guests. And Jacques was among the best.
“Is there somewhere we can go to talk privately?”
“Of course. I will find you a room.”
A few minutes later they found themselves in the presidential suite.
“I was expecting some basement storage closet,” said Dussault, looking around with amusement. “You clearly have some pull here, Armand.”
“As do you at the George V.”
Dussault laughed. “I wish. I haven’t been there in years.”
“My mistake. I thought you said you had.”
“No. You’re thinking of the flophouse around the corner from the Quai des Orfèvres.”
“Right. The Gigi V,” said Armand.
As Dussault laughed, Armand caught Reine-Marie’s eyes, with another warning. But he could see it was no longer necessary.
Claude Dussault sat on the deep sofa and, putting the box on his knees, he opened it with all the anticipation of a child on Christmas morning.
“Let’s see what we have here. This’s a hospital container, non? Monsieur Horowitz’s belongings. Sealed. You haven’t opened it? But I thought—”
“We opened it,” said Armand. “And resealed it.”
He explained for Dussault and Jean-Guy what had happened at the George V.
“Bon,” said Dussault. “Good thinking. So everything’s in here? Laptop, phone, clothing?”
“Everything that Stephen had on him last night, and that I could find in his study.”
Dussault paused, his hand hanging into the box and a perplexed expression on his slender face. “It’s so strange, that he’d be staying at the hotel. You have no idea why?”
“None.”
Dussault brought out the laptop. “I don’t suppose you know his password for this?”
“No. Nor the phone. Though it’s smashed.”
“The SIM card?” Dussault asked.
“Broken.”
He sighed. “That’s a shame.”
“Oui.”
“What’s this?” Dussault asked.
“Looks like an Allen wrench,” said Reine-Marie.
She’d assembled enough big-box furniture for Daniel and Annie when they’d gone away to university to know an Allen wrench.
“That was on the desk beside the laptop,” said Armand. “I just swept everything into the box.”
“Including these,” said Dussault, holding a few screws in his palm. “All we need is a roll of duct tape and we’ll know more than we want to about the George V.”
“This’s interesting.” Jean-Guy picked up a couple of Canadian nickels. “They’re stuck together.”
“Ha,” said Reine-Marie, reaching for them. “That’s fun. One of them must be magnetized. I used to show Daniel and Annie that trick when they were kids.”
“What trick?”
“Older coins have a high nickel content, which means they can be turned into magnets.”
As she spoke, Jean-Guy tried to pull them apart. “They’re not magnetized, they’re glued. Now why would Stephen have two old nickels glued together?”
“He probably found them on the street and picked them up,” said Armand.
“As a good-luck charm?” asked Dussault.
“You would’ve hoped,” said Armand.
Dussault tossed the soldered coins in the air, caught them, then put them in his pocket. “For luck.”
“Actually, Claude, if they are Stephen’s good-luck charm, I’d like to take them to the hospital. Put them by his bed.”
Most people, Armand knew, had some degree of superstition, and imbued objects and rituals with power. From crucifixes to the Star of David, from a rabbit’s foot to a lucky pair of socks.
This could be Stephen’s. Nickels stuck together. Money he could not spend.
“Of course,” said Dussault, and without hesitation he gave them to Armand. “Selfish of me, to want all the luck.”
He went back to the box and examined the torn and bloody clothing. Armand noticed that he looked for, and found, the hidden pocket. Which held Stephen’s passport. But not his agenda. That was sitting in Armand’s pocket. And would stay there.
Finally, from the bottom of the box, Claude Dussault brought out a publication.
“An annual report. You said he was here for meetings. Could this be one?”
Dussault placed the document on the sofa.
Armand watched as Jean-Guy picked it up. It was for GHS Engineering. Beauvoir’s company.
His face, at first, showed some confusion. That never lasted long with Beauvoir.
“Stephen?” he said quietly. “You?”
Armand was prepared for this, but no less dreading it. He’d known since the attempt on Stephen’s life, since they’d found the annual report on Stephen’s desk, since bringing it with them, since calling Beauvoir into the investigation, that this moment would come.
“What does this mean?” Jean-Guy asked, holding up the document.
There was no mistaking the barely contained anger in his voice.
“It means that Stephen helped find you your job, at my request.”
And there it was.
“You told Stephen to use his influence to get me my job at GHS?”
Armand stood up. “Let’s talk in the bedroom.”
Not waiting for Jean-Guy to agree, Armand walked across the huge living room, down the corridor, and into the farthest bedroom.
A moment later Beauvoir appeared, his lips thin. His eyes hard.
“Close the door, please,” said Armand.
Beauvoir gave it a sharp shove. Creating a bang that got the message across.
“I’m sorry,” said Armand.
Beauvoir opened his hands, indicating Is that it? while remaining mute. Partly because he didn’t know what to say. Partly out of fear of wha
t he would say.
This was a betrayal, on so many levels. To not just do this thing, but to keep it from him.
They’d been through Hell together. Crossed the River Styx together. Paid the boatman in blood and agony and sorrow. Together.
They’d come back to the land of the living together. Scarred. Marked.
They were as connected as two humans could be.
And Armand had played God with Jean-Guy’s and Annie’s lives? He’d conspired to get Jean-Guy his job at GHS Engineering, without asking first? Without consulting him?
Armand sat on the side of one bed, while Jean-Guy sat on the other. Facing each other.
“I was afraid if I told you I had anything to do with the job offer, that you’d think I wanted you to leave the Sûreté. That it was some sort of veiled message that you weren’t up to the job of Chief Inspector.”
“Was it?”
“Are you really asking that?” said Gamache. “You were a gifted Chief Inspector. A natural leader. At the time I believed I’d be fired, maybe even put on trial. My one consolation was that the homicide department was in good hands. Your hands. But the brutality of the situation weighed heavily on both of us. I could retire. I’d had a full life. A good life. Reine-Marie and I would live quietly in the country.
“You’re just beginning. You and your family. I wanted to give you a choice. That’s all. But I was wrong not to discuss it with you before approaching Stephen. I am sorry.”
“Is Stephen on the board of GHS?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. When I asked him to find you a job offer in private industry, I assumed it would be in Québec. Not Paris. And not specifically GHS.”
Jean-Guy nodded, rocking back and forth slightly on the bed.
“The offer was legitimate,” said Armand, reading his thoughts. “GHS would never have hired you for that position if they hadn’t known you were perfect for it.”
“Did Stephen approach Carole Gossette, my boss?”
“I honestly have no idea.” Armand hesitated before going on. “You leaving the Sûreté was painful for me. You and your family leaving Québec broke my heart.”
Jean-Guy nodded. He knew the truth of that.