The Nature of the Beast

by Louise Penny

He handed a printout to Chief Inspector Lacoste, who read it, her face growing graver and graver. After taking a deep breath, she handed it to Beauvoir, and then turned to Cohen.

  “Show me.”

  She followed him to his computer while Beauvoir read, then handed the page to Gamache.

  Al Lepage’s real name was Frederick Lawson. A private in the U.S. Army.

  “Not a draft dodger,” said Gamache, looking at Beauvoir over his reading glasses. “A deserter.”

  “Keep reading,” said Jean-Guy, his face solemn.

  Gamache did. He could feel his cheeks grow cold, as though a window had been left open a crack and an ill wind had slipped in.

  “Not just a deserter,” said Beauvoir, when Gamache had lowered the page to the table. “He was about to be tried for his part in a massacre.”

  “The Son My Massacre,” said Gamache. “You’re too young to remember, but I do.”

  Isabelle Lacoste had sunk into a chair and was scrolling through photographs on Cohen’s computer. Beauvoir joined her, as did Gamache, reluctantly. He’d seen them once before, as a young man, barely more than a child. Photographs of the atrocity were on the evening news in the late 1960s. It was something you never forgot.

  The four of them, three seasoned homicide detectives and one rookie, looked at the pictures, almost too horrific to comprehend. Hundreds and hundreds of bodies. Little limbs. Long dark hair. Bright clothing put on by men, women, children, infants that morning, not knowing what was approaching over the ridge.

  “Al Lepage was one of the soldiers who did this?” asked Lacoste.

  “Frederick Lawson was,” said Agent Cohen. “And he became Al Lepage when he came across the border.”

  “Not running from a war he didn’t believe in, but from justice,” said Beauvoir.

  Beside him he heard Gamache take a deep, deep breath and then sigh.

  “We now know Al Lepage’s capable of killing a child,” said Beauvoir.

  “What do we do with this information?” Adam Cohen asked Chief Inspector Lacoste.

  “We keep it to ourselves for now,” said Lacoste. “Until our investigation’s over. And then we decide what to do.”

  As they walked back to the conference table she glanced at Gamache, who gave her a subtle nod. It was what he’d do.

  “What’s this?” asked Beauvoir, reading another printout.

  “That’s the other thing I found,” said Cohen. “You asked me to look into Dr. Couture’s will, which I did. He left everything to his niece. That’s pretty clear, but then I got to wondering what ‘everything’ was. The contents of his home, a twenty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy and a bit of savings, and the house itself. But the real estate search showed he once owned another property.”

  “Just outside Three Pines?” asked Lacoste. “Where the gun is?”

  “No. A distance from here,” said Agent Cohen. “In a place called Highwater.”

  “Ahhhh,” said Gamache, putting his hands together on the table. “That is interesting.”

  “Isn’t that where the CSIS agents went the other day?” asked Lacoste.

  “And where I went after leaving you at the Knowlton Playhouse,” said Gamache. “I retraced their route. And this is what I found.”

  He handed his device with the pictures on it to Lacoste, and described what he’d done. And what he’d seen.

  “But what is it?” asked Lacoste, handing the device to Beauvoir via Cohen, who snuck a quick peek.

  “You remember the redacted information Reine-Marie found on Gerald Bull?” asked Gamache. “Most of the interesting information had been blacked out, but there was the one word the censors missed.”

  “Superguns,” said Beauvoir, his brows rising. “Ssssszzzz.”

  “Plural.” Gamache nodded toward the device in Jean-Guy’s hand. “I think that was another one of Gerald Bull’s, or Dr. Couture’s, missile launchers. A much smaller version, maybe a test model before building the real thing.”

  “Project Babylon wasn’t one gun, but two,” said Lacoste. “And the land belonged to Dr. Couture?”

  “Until he sold it to a numbered company,” said Cohen. “I’m trying to track it down.”

  “I think we’ll find it’s the Space Research Corporation,” said Jean-Guy. “Gerald Bull’s company.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Gamache. “But why abandon what looked like a perfect site on the top of a hill looking directly into the U.S.? Why move everything here? I’ve asked Reine-Marie to use her archive access and see what she can find out.”

  “And I’ll keep looking, if it’s okay with you,” Agent Cohen said, looking at Gamache, then over to Lacoste, then back again, like a confused puppy.

  Gamache however was not confused. He looked at Chief Inspector Lacoste, who nodded to Cohen.

  “Can your contact at CSIS help?” Beauvoir asked Gamache. “I know you don’t want to press her, but it seems important to know what CSIS really does have on Gerald Bull. The agents clearly knew about Highwater, or suspected.”

  But Gamache shook his head. “If Fraser and Delorme are who we suspect, then they’ll be monitoring things very closely. I don’t want them to know that we know.”

  “But you asked your contact at CSIS about their work and their real jobs,” said Beauvoir. “Aren’t you worried that Fraser and Delorme will find out about that?” He watched Gamache, then smiled. “I see. You want them to find out that you’ve been asking.”

  “I want them to think we’ve been, to once again use Mary Fraser’s word, misdirected. I think the one thing they don’t want us to find out about is that.”

  He pointed to his device with the photographs of another Babylon.

  Come hell or high water, he thought.

  “Hello? Bonjour?”

  They heard the voice before they saw the man, though they knew who’d called out. A moment later Professor Rosenblatt appeared around the big red fire truck that shared the space with the homicide unit. He wore a rumpled black raincoat and held a dripping umbrella that he’d furled up.

  “Am I interrupting?” he asked, shaking his umbrella. “I can come back.”

  “Not at all,” said Lacoste. “We were just finishing.” She got up and walked over to him. “How can I help you?”

  “This is so trivial I’m a little embarrassed.” And he looked it. “I was just wondering if I could use one of your computers? My iPhone won’t receive or send messages in the village.”

  “No one’s does,” said Beauvoir, joining them. “It’d be relaxing if it wasn’t so infuriating.”

  The professor laughed, until his attention was caught by the image on Agent Cohen’s screen.

  “Is that—?”

  Cohen quickly stepped in front of it.

  “Why don’t you use this computer, Professor,” said Lacoste, directing the elderly scientist to a desk across the room. “It’s hooked up but not in use right now. Need to check your email?”

  He might have laughed again, but all humor had withered in the face of the fleeting image on Agent Cohen’s computer.

  “No, no one really writes to me. I wanted to look up a reference.” He turned to Gamache. “You might know where it’s from.”

  “Is it obscure poetry?” asked Beauvoir.

  “As a matter of fact, it is,” said Rosenblatt, and saw the alarm on Beauvoir’s face. “Though I don’t think it’s all that obscure. I just can’t place it. The Bible, I think, or Shakespeare. Your friend Ruth Zardo wrote it in her notebook when we were told about that woman’s murder.”

  “One of hers, probably,” said Lacoste.

  “No, I don’t think so. Something about some rough beast moving toward Jerusalem.”

  “It sounds familiar,” said Gamache.

  “Oh, we’re in luck,” mumbled Jean-Guy.

  “But I don’t think it’s Jerusalem,” said Gamache.

  “No, you’re right,” said Rosenblatt. “It was Bethlehem.”

  The two men pulled chairs

up to the terminal, and while the others investigated murders and massacres, they looked up poetry.

  “Any luck finding the plans?” Rosenblatt asked, as they typed in a few words: rough beast, Bethlehem. Then hit search.

  “Not so far,” said Gamache. “We found some things belonging to Dr. Couture, but no plans and no firing mechanism.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Would you like to have a look?” Gamache asked, and brought over the box while they waited for the dial-up to download.

  Professor Rosenblatt poked through the things without great interest until he came to the Manneken Pis. He picked it up and smiled.

  “I bought one of these for my grandson. My daughter wasn’t impressed. David spent six months urinating in public after that. That child could pee for Canada.”

  He then picked up the desk set. Taking out the pens, he studied them, then rummaged through the box until he found the bookends. He turned one over, put it down and picked up the other. By now Lacoste and Beauvoir had joined the elderly scientist, watching as he toyed with the items.

  “What are you—” Lacoste began but stopped, not wanting to break his concentration.

  They watched as the professor manipulated the items, and then there was a small click. Rosenblatt frowned, then, picking up the two pens, he inserted them into holes at the base of the bookend.

  After studying it for a moment, he held it out, as a bright child might who’d made something for Mother.

  “Is it…?” Lacoste asked, taking it from him.

  “The firing mechanism? I think so,” said the professor, as astonished as everyone else. “Ingenious.”

  Gamache stared at the piece in Lacoste’s hand while she turned it over and over and around. It looked nothing like a pen set and bookend now. Just as the pen set and bookend had looked nothing like a firing mechanism.

  “How did you know?” asked Beauvoir, taking it from her and also turning it around and around, studying it.

  “I didn’t, I just tried. A prerequisite for being a physicist, I think. Good spatial reasoning. But the first clue was the pens, of course.”

  “The pens?” asked Beauvoir.

  “They don’t work,” Rosenblatt pointed out. “No nibs. They wouldn’t write.”

  Lacoste and Beauvoir looked at each other, then over at Gamache, who was staring at the firing mechanism in Beauvoir’s hand. Then he dropped his eyes to the computer screen, where the poem had appeared.

  In his line of sight, forming a tableau, were the firing mechanism, the Son My Massacre, John Fleming’s play on Beauvoir’s desk, and the words on the computer:

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  CHAPTER 31

  “The clock is ticking,” Gamache said quietly as he and Rosenblatt took seats at the back of the bistro. “Isn’t it?”

  Around them, young waiters set the tables for the dinner service. Out the window, dying leaves shuffled in the wind and rain, and two chipmunks sat up on their haunches, alert.

  Were they hearing it too? Gamache wondered. On the wind.

  The tick, tick, ticking of time running out.

  “Yes,” said the old scientist. He raised a hand and caught the attention of a server. “Chocolat chaud, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Have you considered a nice warm apple cider?” Olivier asked. “Please?”

  “Sounds good, patron,” said Gamache.

  “And one for me too. Nonalcoholic. I’m still recovering from last night,” he said to Armand once Olivier had left. “You know, I ordered a hot chocolate yesterday and they brought an apple cider.”

  Professor Rosenblatt extended his hands to the fire in the hearth, rubbing them together as though the warmth was water.

  “That was quite a trick,” said Gamache, when the cider arrived. He stirred the drink with the cinnamon stick, the warm apple and cinnamon scent mixing with the musky wood smoke. “Finding the firing mechanism.”

  “A trick?” Rosenblatt studied the man in front of him.

  They’d left the Sûreté officers to continue their research, galvanized by the findings, and Gamache had brought the elderly scientist to the bistro. People were beginning to arrive for drinks before dinner, but their table was tucked nicely away and few would even notice they were there. To be certain of privacy, Gamache had asked Olivier not to seat anyone too close.

  “This isn’t a magic act, you know, monsieur,” said Rosenblatt, as serious as Gamache had ever seen him.

  “And you’re not the magician?”

  The professor pursed his lips, contemplating. “Do you suspect me of something?”

  “What’s in Highwater?”

  Now the lips went taut and a stillness came over Rosenblatt. Gamache could almost smell the man’s mind working. It smelled a bit like apple.

  Rosenblatt smiled, more with resignation than humor.

  “You know about that?”

  “Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme went there shortly after seeing the gun,” Gamache explained. “We tracked their cell phones.”

  Rosenblatt shook his head. “File clerks.”

  “Well?” Gamache asked.

  “Highwater was the site of the first Supergun,” said Michael Rosenblatt. He watched Gamache as he spoke. “You’re not surprised.”

  Gamache was quiet, waiting to see what Rosenblatt would say, or do, next.

  “You went there, didn’t you?” said the scientist, once again fitting the pieces together. “You already knew. So why ask me?”

  But his companion remained silent, and once again Rosenblatt put it together.

  “It was a test? You wanted to find out if I’d tell you the truth. How did you even know I knew?”

  “The redacted pages,” said Armand at last. “You read them but didn’t mention the plural. The censors took out everything, except one reference. Superguns. Everyone else who read those pages saw it. I couldn’t believe you didn’t too. So why wouldn’t you point it out? There was only one answer. Because you already knew, and hoped I hadn’t seen it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want you to know?”

  “That’s a good question. Why didn’t you tell us this as soon as you saw the gun in the woods? Didn’t you think it might be important for us to know there’d once been another one, close by?”

  Michael Rosenblatt took off his glasses and rubbed his face, then he replaced his glasses and looked at Gamache.

  “I actually thought it didn’t matter, but hearing you say it like that, I can see how it might seem suspicious. Not many knew about the other part of Project Babylon,” said Michael Rosenblatt. “The two halves were called Baby Babylon and Big Babylon.”

  “Two halves?” asked Gamache. “Of a whole?”

  “No, better to call them two parts, but not of a whole. One led to the other. The first was Baby Babylon, the smaller of the two.”

  “The one in Highwater.”

  “Yes. It was conceived by Gerald Bull through his Space Research Corporation. Baby Babylon was a sort of open secret, like a lot of products in the arms market. Secret enough to be enticing, but out there enough to attract interest.”

  “And it did,” said Gamache. “Didn’t it?” he asked when Rosenblatt didn’t answer.

  “Of a sort. Baby Babylon was met with ridicule. It was called ‘Baby’ but it was so huge, so ungainly, unlike anything else out there, that it was dismissed as the product of a mind as unstable as the weapon. A fantasist. No credible engineer or physicist thought it could be built. And, if it was, it couldn’t possibly work. Only another unstable mind would commission it.”

  “Saddam Hussein,” said Gamache.

  “Yes. The fact Saddam was interested just confirmed everyone’s suspicion that the idea was crazy.”

  He turned his mug of warm apple cider around in a lazy circle.

  “They were wrong,” said Gamache.

  “Oh, no. They were right. Baby Babylon didn’t work. It was top-heavy, couldn’t sustain trajectory. With something like that, firing a missile into low orbit and having it travel tens of thousands of miles, if you’re off by one one-thousandth of a degree at launch, you wipe out Paris instead of Moscow on impact. Or Baghdad.”

  “Or Bethlehem.”

  Rosenblatt didn’t respond to that.

  “How did they know it didn’t work?” asked Gamache.

  “They fired it.”

  Gamache didn’t, or couldn’t, hide his surprise.

  “Not into the air,” Rosenblatt hurriedly assured him.

  “Then where?” asked Gamache.

  “Into the ground.”

  Now Gamache looked, and was, confused.

  “When you were there, did you happen to notice railway tracks?” the professor asked. “Not the Canadian National ones, but smaller, narrower?”

  “Yes. I followed them up the hill.”

  “Good. That’s how Bull did it. As with everything else about Project Babylon, it was brilliant in its simplicity. They couldn’t possibly test the missile launcher by actually launching a missile, so they put it on a flatbed on rails at the bottom of a hill and fired it into the ground.”

  “What good would that do?” asked Gamache.

  “The backward force,” said Rosenblatt. “They measured the degree of incline, the speed and distance traveled, and the depth and trajectory of the hole in the ground. It was so simple it was genius.”

  “It doesn’t sound simple to me,” Gamache admitted. Rosenblatt had lost him at “degree of incline.” Gamache considered what he’d heard.

  “Wouldn’t it make a lot of noise?” he asked. “So much for secrecy.”

  “Yes,” agreed Rosenblatt. Gamache waited for more, but nothing more came.

  “It didn’t work, you say?”

  “They tried it a few times, apparently, but while the force could be corrected, they couldn’t solve the trajectory problem. Eventually they abandoned the site.”

  That sounded like the end of the story, but Gamache knew it was really just the beginning. They weren’t even at the end now, thirty years later. But he had a feeling they were approaching it. Or it was approaching them.

  “What happened next?” he asked.

  “Project Babylon was closed down. Gerald Bull moved to Brussels and Guillaume Couture retired to his roses.”

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