The Nature of the Beast

by Louise Penny

  “I can send you a few pictures of it.”

  “If you’d like.” His interest was waning.

  He gave her his secure email and she knew when they’d arrived by the whispered “Merde” down the phone line.

  There was silence as he examined them.

  “Is that a person standing next to it?” Langelier asked, when he’d regained polite speech.

  “Oui.”

  “Tabernac,” he swore. “Are you sure?”

  “I took the photograph myself this afternoon. It is a missile launcher, non? Not a milking machine?”

  “Oui.” He sounded distracted, lost in thought. “I don’t know what to tell you, Chief Inspector. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before. Frankly, while it’s huge, it looks like an antique, something that might’ve been used in the Second World War.”

  “Could it be from then? Maybe something put there for defense and abandoned?”

  “We don’t just leave weapons scattered about in the woods,” he said. “And the defenses were out to sea, not pointing inland. Does it work?”

  “We don’t know that either. That’s why I’m calling you. We need help assessing this.”

  “Are there missiles with it?” he asked. “Is the weapon armed?”

  “We haven’t found anything, but we’re looking. So far it seems to be just the launcher itself. Do you have someone you can send?”

  There was a sigh down the line and she could almost imagine him scratching his head.

  “Honestly, our current ballistics and heavy weaponry specialists all deal with modern weapons. ICBMs. Sophisticated systems. This looks like a dinosaur.”

  Lacoste looked at the photograph on her screen. He was right. It was the literal truth. It looked like they’d unearthed some behemoth.

  But why was it hidden? And who in the world had built it? What was it for?

  And why was Laurent murdered to keep it secret?

  “Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you,” he said.

  “This is, of course, confidential,” she said.

  “I understand. I’ll do what I can.”

  She thanked him and hung up. She hadn’t told him about the other thing. The etching on the base.

  She steadied herself, wishing it wasn’t quite so dark and quiet and solitary in the old railway station, then she put up another photo and looked at the winged monster. Even in a picture, even at a distance, it was striking. And what it struck was terror.

  She stared at it and wondered why she hadn’t told the Commander of CFB Valcartier about the monster with the seven serpent heads. Perhaps because she remembered the boy running into the bistro. With the tale of the huge gun.

  As Gamache had said, had Laurent left it at that, they might, just might, have believed him. But then he took it that next, impossible, step too far. Into the unbelievable.

  Lacoste knew that General Langelier almost certainly did not fully appreciate the size of the weapon. No picture could capture it, even with the agent there for scale. She suspected he thought she was exaggerating. And she suspected the winged monster would not have helped her credibility.

  Isabelle Lacoste stared at the etching. It was, she had to admit, unbelievable.

  * * *

  Jean-Guy Beauvoir finished unpacking his satchel, hanging shirts and slacks in the closet of the B and B, folding garments in the pine dresser, and putting toiletries in the spacious en suite.

  He’d made arrangements with Gabri for Lacoste and him to stay at the B and B for as long as necessary. Gabri had put him in the room he normally had with the large bed and crisp linens and warm duvet. The wide-plank pine floors and oriental throw rugs.

  He pulled the curtain back and saw the light in the window of the old train station.

  The Incident Room had been sorted out. The evidence sent to the lab in Montréal. The local Sûreté detachment had agreed to provide protection for the huge gun, though no one had been very taken with the quality of agent they’d sent.

  “Fresh out of the academy,” Isabelle Lacoste had remarked. “They’ll learn.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “We were like that once.”

  “We were never like that,” Beauvoir had said. “It’s not hard to do the math, Isabelle. The Sûreté Academy has them for three years. That means these two, and everyone in their class, were recruited at the height of the corruption.”

  “You think they’re corrupt?”

  “I think they were looking for different qualities in recruits at that time,” he’d said.

  And now there’s a whole class of them, he thought, opening the window and feeling the cool breeze. Several classes of them. Scattered throughout the Sûreté. Scattered through the forest.

  That monstrosity was being guarded by, at best, incompetents and, at worst, agents chosen because they could be easily corrupted.

  He picked up the Bible he’d found in the bookcase of his room, and flipping through it he found Ecclesiastes. He was curious about the lyrics of that Pete Seeger song.

  Out the window he saw lights on at the Gamache home and imagined them sitting by the fireplace, reading.

  To everything there is a season, he read.

  And across the village green, at Clara’s place, there was a single light.

  A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

  He saw the three tall spires of the pines swaying slightly in the autumn breeze. He saw two dark figures leave the bistro.

  One was tall, stooped. The other had a cane and was cradling something to her chest.

  The two walked slowly across the village green, past the bench, past the pond, past the trees.

  As he watched, Jean-Guy saw Monsieur Béliveau accompany Ruth up to her front door. But then the grocer did something almost unheard of. He went inside.

  It was getting late, but Beauvoir wasn’t tired.

  A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

  He called home and spoke to Annie. They discussed buying a home, someplace with a backyard, close to schools and a park. And then they just chatted about their day. He lay on the familiar bed in the B and B and knew she was lying on their bed, her feet up.

  He could hear sleep in her voice and, reluctantly, he wished her bonne nuit, and hung up.

  A time to be born, and a time to die.

  His hand lingered on the receiver, and he thought about Laurent. And the Lepages. And what it must be like to have a child and then lose that child.

  Putting on his dressing gown, he went downstairs and plugged his laptop into the phone lines.

  He was still there when the lights went out at the bistro. He was still there when Olivier and Gabri arrived back. He was still there when every other home in Three Pines went dark, and every other person was asleep.

  Jean-Guy Beauvoir was there, his face bathed in the light from his laptop, until he found what he was looking for. Only then did he lean back, stiff and weary, to stare at the name his search had run to ground.

  He placed a phone call, left a message, and then climbed the stairs and crawled under the eiderdown. And slept. Curled around the little stuffed lion he took with him whenever he knew he’d be away from home.

  A time of war, and a time of peace.

  * * *

  “Bed and Breakfast,” the singsong voice answered the phone.

  “Bonjour. My name’s Rosenblatt. Michael Rosenblatt.”

  “Is it about a reservation?”

  “No, you called me. Something about missiles.”

  Rosenblatt heard laughter down the line.

  “I’m sorry,” said the man. “You must have the wrong number. This is a bed and breakfast. No missiles here. Not even a missus.”

  That much Michael Rosenblatt had figured out.

  “Désolé,” he said. “I must’ve taken the number down wrong.”

  He hung up and checked the number, shook his head and went back to preparing his breakfast. The call that morning from his former department at McGill Universi

ty had been garbled. Something about a message left at the department the night before, and old missiles.

  When the phone rang half an hour later, he picked it up and heard an unfamiliar voice.

  “Is this Professor Rosenblatt?” the man asked in English with a Québécois accent.

  “Yes.”

  “My name’s Jean-Guy Beauvoir. I’m an inspector with the Sûreté du Québec. McGill University gave me your home number. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “The Sûreté?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Beauvoir decided not to tell him he was with homicide. The professor already sounded rattled. And elderly. He didn’t want another death on his hands.

  “Are you the one who left the message at McGill?” Rosenblatt asked. “I tried to call you back but the man who answered said it was a bed and breakfast.”

  Beauvoir apologized.

  He sounds nice, Rosenblatt thought. Disarming.

  But the professor emeritus knew what that meant. The most dangerous people he knew were disarming. He immediately put up his defenses.

  “My cell phone won’t work where I am,” Inspector Beauvoir said. “So I had to leave the main number. I’m at a B and B, investigating a crime. We’ve come across something in the woods. Something we can’t explain.”

  “Really?” Rosenblatt felt his curiosity swarming over his defenses. “What?”

  “It seems to be a big gun.”

  His curiosity skidded to a halt.

  “I don’t deal with guns,” said Rosenblatt. “My field is, was, physics.”

  “Yes, I know. I read your paper on climate change and trajectory.”

  The professor leaned forward at his kitchen table.

  “Really.”

  Beauvoir chose not to tell him that “stared at” might have been a better description than “read.” Still, his Internet search the night before had yielded Rosenblatt’s name, and this article, and Beauvoir had understood enough to know that this was a man who specialized in great big guns.

  And he had one.

  “I doubt I can help you,” said Professor Rosenblatt. “That paper was written twenty years ago. I’m retired. If it’s a gun you’ve found, you might want to get in touch with a gun club.”

  He heard soft laughter down the line.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t described it well,” Beauvoir said. “I don’t have the vocabulary, especially in English. Or in French, for that matter. I’m not talking about a shotgun or a handgun. This seems like a sort of missile launcher, but of a design I’ve never seen before. It’s in the middle of the forest, in the Eastern Townships.”

  Professor Rosenblatt leaned back, as though shoved. “In the Townships?”

  “Oui. It was hidden under camouflage netting and overgrown. It seems to be old,” Beauvoir went on. “Probably been there for decades. Professor?”

  The silence down the line made Jean-Guy Beauvoir wonder if it had gone dead. Or Rosenblatt had.

  “I’m still here. Go on.”

  Beauvoir took a deep breath, then plunged ahead. “It’s huge. Bigger than any weapon I’ve ever seen. Ten times, a hundred times bigger. We needed ladders to get onto it, and even they aren’t long enough.”

  And again, the line appeared to go dead.

  “Professor?”

  Beauvoir did not expect an answer. What he did expect to hear was a dial tone.

  “I’m here,” said Rosenblatt. “Is there anything on it at all that might identify it?”

  “Not a serial number or a name,” Beauvoir said. “Though it’s possible we missed something. It’ll take a while to go over every inch.”

  Rosenblatt made a humming sound, like his brain was whirring.

  “There is one thing,” Jean-Guy said.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not exactly an identifying mark, but it is unusual. It’s a design.”

  Michael Rosenblatt stood up at his kitchen table, spilling his coffee over that morning’s Montréal Gazette.

  “An etching?” he asked.

  “Oui,” said Beauvoir, standing up slowly at his desk in the Incident Room.

  “At the base?”

  “Oui,” said Beauvoir, caution creeping into his voice.

  “Is it a beast?” Rosenblatt asked, finding it difficult to breathe.

  “A beast?”

  “Un monstre.” His French wasn’t very good, but it was good enough for that.

  “Oui. A monster.”

  “With seven heads.”

  “Oui,” said Inspector Beauvoir. He sat back down at his desk in the Incident Room.

  Professor Rosenblatt sat back down at his kitchen table.

  “How did you know?” Beauvoir asked.

  “It’s a myth,” said Rosenblatt. “At least, that’s what we thought.”

  “We need your help,” said Inspector Beauvoir.

  “Yes, you do.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Hello?”

  Michael Rosenblatt opened the wooden door and stuck his head in, without great optimism.

  This must be a mistake, he thought.

  The place looked abandoned, like most of the old train stations in Québec. But the guy at the bistro had pointed him in this direction.

  “Bonjour?” he called, louder this time.

  As his eyes adjusted, he saw the outline of something large and it stopped him from going further into the gloomy building.

  He peered at it. His eyes must’ve been playing tricks on him because it appeared to be a fire truck. Parked in the middle of an old train station. Which he’d been told was the Sûreté office. Nothing was making sense.

  He turned around, unsure what to do next.

  “That was fast,” said a man’s voice.

  From behind the fire truck came a man with his arm extended.

  “Professor Rosenblatt? I’m Jean-Guy Beauvoir,” he said. “We spoke on the phone.”

  “How do you do?” said Rosenblatt, taking the strong hand.

  Before him was a Sûreté officer in his late thirties. Attractive and well groomed. Slender but not thin, he gave the impression of immense suppressed energy. A slingshot about to be released.

  Jean-Guy Beauvoir saw a short elderly man in a tweed jacket and bow tie. His white hair was wispy on top and his midsection was comfortably rounded.

  With one soft hand, Professor Rosenblatt pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. With the other he clutched a battered leather satchel.

  But the eyes were bright. Sharp. Assessing. Despite his appearance, there was nothing muddled, nothing befuddled about this man.

  “Thank you for coming. I didn’t expect you so quickly,” Beauvoir said, and turned to walk back into the old railway station.

  “I don’t live all that far from here.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I retired down here, though I have to say this village comes as a bit of a surprise. I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s difficult to find,” said Beauvoir. “Hope you didn’t have trouble.”

  “I’m afraid I have no sense of direction,” said Rosenblatt, following Beauvoir. “It’s a source of some embarrassment. I suspect it undermines my credibility as a specialist in guided missiles.”

  He described how he’d wandered the back roads, pulling over now and then to consult maps and his GPS. But no village called Three Pines seemed to exist. He grew more and more anxious, turning, turning, turning at random, trying this road, that dead end.

  “Three Pines,” said Rosenblatt. “Even the name sounds slightly ridiculous in an area thick with pines.”

  But then, just as he was about to give up, he crested a hill, along a rutted dirt road, and put on the brakes.

  There appeared below him, like an apparition, a small village. And in the very center were three tall pine trees. Waving.

  He looked at his GPS. It showed him in the middle of nowhere. Literally. No where. No roads. No community. Not even a forest. Just blank. As though he’d driven off the face of the earth.

  Professor Rosenblatt got out of his car. He needed to gather his thoughts, his wits, before meeting that disarming Sûreté officer. He walked over to a bench on the brow of the hill and was about to sit down when he noticed two phrases, one above the other, carved into the wood on the back.

  A Brave Man in a Brave Country

  Surprised by Joy

  Professor Rosenblatt turned and looked at the village and noticed the people in their gardens, on their porches, walking their dogs. Stopping to chat with each other. It seemed both languid and purposeful.

  He wondered who they were, that they should choose to live in the middle of nowhere. And that those phrases should mean so much to them that they were carved at the entrance to the village.

  Now Michael Rosenblatt followed the Sûreté officer into the main body of the old train station, where men and women were on phones, at computers, conferring over documents. Chalkboards and corkboards were filling up with photographs and schematics. A huge map of the immediate area had been pinned to a wall.

  Inspector Beauvoir walked over to a young woman at a desk.

  “Chief Inspector Lacoste, this is the man I was telling you about. Professor Rosenblatt is a physicist. He specializes in ballistics and high altitude.”

  “Professor Rosenblatt,” said Lacoste, getting up to greet the older man. “High altitude? An astrophysicist?”

  “Well, not quite that high,” said Rosenblatt, shaking her hand. “Just a plain garden-variety physicist. And I’m afraid your colleague should have used the past tense. I’m an old academic.”

  “Well, we have an old gun,” said Lacoste with a smile. But he could feel her assessing him. Wondering if he’d gone gaga yet. “Inspector, would you call the Chief Inspector and see if he’d like to join us?”

  “I thought you were the Chief Inspector,” said Rosenblatt. He stood gripping his briefcase and willed himself to relax.

  “I am. He’s the man I replaced. He retired down here.”

  “So did I,” said Rosenblatt. “A peaceful place.”

  “I guess it depends where you live,” said Lacoste, taking a seat and indicating one across from her. “There’s something you need to know before we head into the woods. The site of the gun is also a crime scene. A boy was murdered there. We think he was killed because he found the gun. Someone wanted to keep its location a secret.”

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