by Louise Penny
As the two squabbled, Jean-Guy and Isabelle exchanged a grimace. Ottawa, and CSIS, could not have thought much of the find in the woods if this is what they sent.
Finally they handed the ID cards over to Beauvoir and Lacoste, who confirmed the two smiling middle-aged people across the conference table were Canadian intelligence agents.
“How did you hear about the gun?” Lacoste asked, sliding the cards back.
“Our boss told us,” said Delorme.
“How did he hear?” she tried again.
“I don’t really know.” Delorme looked at Ms. Fraser, who shook her head.
“Frankly, we just do as we’re told, and we were told to come here to look at the gun.”
Almost certainly this was the result of General Langelier “thinking about it,” thought Lacoste. He must’ve called someone in National Defence, who called CSIS, who sent it down the line until they ran out of line and came to these two.
“Why you?” asked Beauvoir. “Not that we aren’t thrilled to have you.”
“You know,” said Ms. Fraser. “We were wondering the same thing. We work in the same section, Sean and I. Have for years. Mostly filing.”
“But some fieldwork,” Delorme jumped in.
“Putting records on computer. Cross-referencing,” she said. “Seeing if any connections were missed. We’re quite good at that.”
“We are,” he admitted. “We see things others don’t.”
“Best not to tell them we see things,” she said, and Delorme laughed.
“Well,” said Lacoste, warming to them. “I imagine you’d like to see the gun.”
She sounded to her own ears like a 1950s housewife discreetly offering to show guests the facilities.
* * *
“Do you wish you were out there?” Reine-Marie asked, as her husband took a bite of the maple-smoked ham, apple and Brie sandwich, on a pain de campagne.
He looked out the bistro window, toward the stone bridge.
“You mean in the damp, cold woods at a crime scene?”
“Yes.”
“A little.”
“Monsieur Gamache,” said Reine-Marie, “you’re crazier than even my mother thought.”
“Your mother loved me.”
“Only because you made her own children look sane. Except Alphonse, of course. He really is nuts.”
Henri was curled under their bistro table. The shepherd’s head, resting on Armand’s shoes, was smattered with flakes of crusty bread.
“Isabelle’s doing a good job?” Reine-Marie asked.
“Not just a good job, a remarkable job. She’s completely taken control of the department. Made it her own.”
Reine-Marie watched him for signs of regret hiding beneath the obvious relief. But there was only admiration there for his young protégé.
“Jean-Guy seems to be accepting her as his boss,” she said, buttering a piece of fresh baguette from the basket that came with her parsnip and apple soup.
“I think it’s still a bit of a struggle,” said Armand. “But he at least respects Isabelle and knows he couldn’t possibly be made Chief Inspector, after what happened.”
“You mean after he shot you?” Reine-Marie asked.
“That didn’t help,” Armand admitted. He picked up his sandwich again, then put it down. “I was threatened yesterday by a young agent.”
“I saw him put his hand on his billy club,” said Reine-Marie, lowering her spoon.
Armand nodded. “Fresh out of the academy. He knew I was once a cop and he didn’t care. If he’d treat a former cop like that, how’s he going to treat citizens?”
“You look shaken.”
“I am. I’d hoped by getting rid of the corruption the worst was over, but now…” He shrugged and smiled thinly. “Is he alone, or is there a whole class of thugs entering the Sûreté? Armed with clubs and guns.”
“I’m sorry, Armand.”
She reached across the table and placed her hand on his.
He looked down at her hand, then up into her eyes, and smiled.
“It’s a place I no longer recognize. To everything there is a season. I’m thinking of talking to Professor Rosenblatt about his job at McGill.”
“You think he’s not who he claims to be?”
“Oh, no, not at all. I’m sure Isabelle and Jean-Guy checked him out. No, this is personal interest.”
“Really? Thinking about becoming a physicist?” asked Reine-Marie. When he didn’t answer, she looked at him closely. “Armand?”
She knew he wasn’t considering studying science, but now she understood what he was considering.
If the big question facing both of them was, What next? could the answer be, University?
“Would that interest you?” he asked.
“Going back to school?”
She hadn’t really thought about it, but now that she did she realized there was a world of knowledge out there she’d love to dive into. History, archeology, languages, art.
And she could see Armand there. In fact, it was a far more natural fit than the Sûreté ever seemed. She could see him walking through the hallways, a student. Or a professor.
But either way, he belonged in the corridors of academe. And so did she. She wondered if the killing of young Laurent had finally, completely, put paid to any interest he had in the disgrace that was murder.
“You like the professor?” she asked, going back to her soup.
“I do, though there seems a strange disconnect between the man and what he did for a living. His field was trajectory and ballistics. The main people who’d benefit from his research would be weapons designers. And yet he seems so, so, gentle. Scholarly. It just doesn’t seem to fit.”
“Really?” she asked, trying not to smile. It was what she’d just been thinking about him. A scholarly man who pursued murderers. “I guess we’re not all what we seem.”
“He does seem to know his stuff, though. He identified the weapon immediately. He said it was a Supergun.”
“A Supergun?”
He’d wondered if she’d laugh. Sitting in the warm and cheerful bistro, with fresh warm bread and parsnip and apple soup in front of them, the very word sounded ridiculous. “Supergun.” Like something out of a comic book.
But Reine-Marie didn’t laugh. Instead she remembered, as he did every hour of every day, Laurent. Alive. And Laurent, dead. Because of the thing in the woods. No matter its name, there was nothing remotely funny about it.
“It was built by a man named Gerald Bull,” said Armand.
“But what’s it doing here?” she asked. “Did Professor Rosenblatt know?”
Armand shook his head, then gestured out the window. “Maybe they can tell us.”
Reine-Marie looked out and saw Lacoste and Beauvoir walking across the dirt road, to the path into the woods. And with them were two strangers. A man and a woman.
“Who are they?” asked Reine-Marie.
“At a guess, I’d say National Defence, or maybe CSIS.”
“Or maybe more academics,” suggested Reine-Marie.
* * *
Once again, Jean-Guy Beauvoir attached the huge plug to the huge receptacle and heard the clunk as the huge floodlights came on.
He kept his eyes on the CSIS agents and wasn’t disappointed.
They’d gone from standing shoulder to shoulder, holding their briefcases like commuters at a train station, to looking like two people who’d lost their minds.
Their eyes flew wide open, their mouths dropped, their heads in unison slowly, slowly tilted back. And they stared up. Up. Had it been raining they would have drowned.
“Holy shit,” was all Sean Delorme could say. “Holy shit.”
“It’s real,” said Mary Fraser. “He did it. He actually built it.” She turned to Isabelle Lacoste, who was standing beside her. “Do you know what this is?”
“It’s Gerald Bull’s Supergun.”
“How did you know?”
“Michael Rosenblatt
“Professor Rosenblatt?” asked Sean Delorme, recovering enough to stop saying “holy shit.”
“Yes.”
“How did he know?” said Delorme.
“He’s seen it,” said Beauvoir. “He’s here.”
“Of course he is,” said Mary Fraser.
“I asked him to come,” said Beauvoir.
“Ahhhh,” said Mary Fraser, turning away. Her eyes dragged back to the giant gun. But she wasn’t looking at the weapon. The CSIS file clerk was staring at the etching.
“Unbelievable,” she said under her breath.
“The stories were true then,” said Delorme, turning to his colleague.
Mary Fraser took a few tentative steps forward and leaned into the image.
“That’s writing,” she said, pointing to, but not touching, the etching. “Arabic.”
“Hebrew,” corrected Lacoste.
“Do you know what it says?” Delorme asked Lacoste.
“By the waters of Babylon,” said Isabelle.
“We sat down and wept,” Mary Fraser finished the quote, taking a step away from the image. “The Whore of Babylon.”
“Holy shit,” said Sean Delorme.
* * *
Gamache and Henri walked toward the edge of the village. Henri had his ball, and Armand had his script.
He looked down at the title, smeared with dirt from the grave Ruth had dug for it. But it hadn’t rested in peace. He’d dug it up and now it was time he read it.
She Sat Down and Wept.
It could be a coincidence. Almost certainly was. That the title of a play by a serial killer was so similar to the phrase carved onto the side of the weapon of mass destruction.
Coincidences happened, Armand knew. And he knew not to read too much into them. But he also knew not to dismiss them altogether.
He’d planned to read the play at home, in front of the fireplace, but he didn’t want to sully his home. Then he thought he’d take it to the bistro, but decided against that too. For the same reason.
“Aren’t you giving it more power than it deserves?” Reine-Marie had asked.
“Probably.”
But they both knew that words were weapons too, and when fashioned into a story their power was almost limitless. He’d stood on the porch, holding the script.
Where to go?
To a place already sullied beyond redemption, he thought. Though the only place that came to mind was the forest, where a boy had been murdered and a gun designed to kill en masse had sat for decades. But there were too many people and he didn’t want to have to explain himself.
So if not a place that was damned, there was only the alternative. The divine. A place that could withstand the onslaught of John Fleming.
He and Henri walked to the edge of the village. They climbed the stairs to the doors of the old chapel, always unlocked, and stepped inside.
No one was in St. Thomas’s Church but it didn’t feel empty. Perhaps because of the stained-glass boys, there in perpetuity. Sometimes Armand would go up to St. Thomas’s just to visit them.
He sat now on the comfortably cushioned pew and put the play on his lap. Henri lay at Gamache’s feet, his head on his paws.
The two of them looked at the window, created at the end of the Great War. It showed soldiers, impossibly young, clutching guns and moving forward through no-man’s land.
Armand came here sometimes to sit in the light thrown by their images. To sit in their fear and to sit in their courage.
This place was sacred, he knew, not because it was a church but because of those boys.
He felt the weight of the script on his legs, and the weight of memory. Of what Fleming had done. It came crashing, crushing, down until the script felt like a slab of concrete, pinning him to those memories.
And he heard again the testimony of the shattered officers who’d finally found Fleming. And seen what he’d done. And Armand saw, again, the photographs from the crime scene. Of the demon another demon had created.
The seven-headed monster.
Armand dropped his eyes to the script, red and gold light spilling from the boys onto the title page.
He gathered his courage, took a breath, and opened the script.
CHAPTER 14
“I see you’re back. Do you mind if I join you?”
Jean-Guy Beauvoir sat down across from Professor Rosenblatt at the bistro. The elderly scientist smiled, clearly welcoming the company.
“I just unpacked my things at the B and B and thought I’d come over for lunch,” said Professor Rosenblatt.
“You’re making notes,” said Jean-Guy, looking at the open notebook. “On the gun?”
“Yes. And trying to remember all I can about Gerald Bull. Fascinating character.”
“I see you also stopped by the bookstore.”
A slim volume sat on the table between them.
“I did. Wonderful place. I can’t resist a bookstore, especially a secondhand one. I found this.”
He gestured to the copy of I’m FINE.
“I was actually going to buy something else, but some old woman stood by the cash register and said she wanted every book I chose. This was the only book she let me buy. Fortunately I’m a fan.”
Beauvoir smirked. “You like the poet who wrote I’m FINE?”
“I do. I think she’s a genius. Who hurt you once/so far beyond repair/that you would greet each overture/with curling lip.” Rosenblatt shook his head and tapped the book. “Brilliant.”
“Ruth Zardo,” said Beauvoir.
“Ahhh, I see you know her too.”
“Actually I was introducing you. Professor Michael Rosenblatt, may I present Ruth Zardo and her duck, Rosa.”
The elderly scientist looked up, startled, into the pinched face of the old woman who’d essentially bullied him into buying her book.
He struggled to his feet.
“Madame Zardo,” he said, and practically bowed. “This is an honor.”
“Of course it is,” said Ruth. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
Rosa, nestled against Ruth, stared beady-eyed at Professor Rosenblatt.
“I, well, I was just—”
“We asked him here to help,” said Beauvoir.
“With what?”
“With what we found in the woods, of course.”
“And what was that?” she demanded.
“It’s a—” Rosenblatt began, before Jean-Guy cut him off.
Ruth glared at the professor. “Have we met?”
“I don’t think so. I’d have remembered,” he said.
“Well,” said Jean-Guy, looking at the empty chair at their table, then at Ruth. “Good-bye.”
Ruth gave him the finger, then limped away to join Clara at a table by the fireplace.
“Well,” said the professor, regaining his seat. “That was unexpected. Is that her daughter?”
“The duck?”
“No, the woman she’s sitting with.”
The very idea of Ruth giving birth shocked Beauvoir. He was still struggling with the thought that she’d been born. He imagined her as a tiny, wizened, gray-haired child. With a duckling.
“No, that’s Clara Morrow.”
“The artist?”
“Yes.”
“I saw her show at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.” His eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute, did Madame Morrow do a portrait of Ruth Zardo? The old and frail Madonna? The one who looks so loathsome?”
“That’s the one.”
Professor Rosenblatt glanced at the other patrons. At the beamed and cheerful bistro, at the comfortable armchairs. He looked toward the bookstore, then, in the other direction, the boulangerie that carried moist madeleines that tasted like childhood.
Then he looked out the window to the old, solid homes, and the three tall pines like guardians on the green. Then back to Ruth Zardo sharing a table and a meal with Clara Morrow.
“What is this place?” he asked, almost beneath his breath. “Why did Gerald Bull choose to come here, of all places?”
“That’s one of the questions I came to ask you, Professor,” said Beauvoir.
“Salut, Jean-Guy,” said Olivier, standing at the table with his notepad and pencil. “Bonjour,” he said to the professor.
“Olivier, this is Professor Rosenblatt. He’s helping us with our investigation.”
“Oh, really?”
“I believe I spoke to your partner, Gabri,” said Rosenblatt. “I’ve arranged for a room at the B and B.”
“Wonderful. Then we’ll be seeing more of you.”
Olivier waited, clearly hoping for more information. But what he got was their lunch orders.
Jean-Guy, after a mighty struggle with himself, asked for the grilled scallop and warm pear salad. He’d promised Annie to eat more sensibly.
“Maybe Gerald Bull coming here is karmic,” said Rosenblatt, after Olivier left. “Yin and yang. Two halves of a whole?” he offered when he saw his companion’s scowl.
“Oh, I know what it means, but you don’t believe in that sort of thing, do you?”
“You think because I’m a scientist I don’t have a faith?” Rosenblatt asked. “You’d be surprised how many physicists believe in God.”
“Do you?”
“I believe for every action there’s an equal reaction. What else is yin and yang? Heaven and hell. A peaceful creative village, and a dreadful killing machine close by.”
“Where else would the devil go, but to paradise?” asked Beauvoir.
“Where else would God go, but to hell,” said Rosenblatt.
The elderly man raised his hands, blotched with age, and lifted first one then the other.
A balance.
“Merci, patron,” said Jean-Guy, leaning back to make room for Olivier to put down his plate.
The scallops were large and succulent and grilled golden brown. They lay on a bed of grains and fresh herbs and roasted pine nuts and goat cheese next to a warm grilled apple. He was about to ask about the pear but was distracted by the bacon club sandwich with thin, seasoned fries put before the professor.
He is smart, thought Beauvoir.
“Can I tempt you?” Rosenblatt asked, pushing his plate a millimeter closer to Jean-Guy.
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