The Madness of Crowds--A Novel

by Louise Penny

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  This book is dedicated to all those on the front line of the pandemic who have worked so hard, in often impossible conditions, to keep the rest of us safe.

  If ça va bien aller, it’s thanks to you.

  Louise Penny, 2021

  CHAPTER 1

  “This doesn’t feel right, patron.” Isabelle Lacoste’s voice in his earpiece was anxious, verging on urgent.

  Chief Inspector Gamache looked out over the roiling crowd, as the noise in the auditorium rose to a din.

  A year ago a gathering of this sort would have not only been unthinkable, it would have been illegal. They’d have broken it up and gotten everyone tested. But thanks to the vaccines, they no longer had to worry about the spread of a deadly virus. They only had to worry about a riot.

  Armand Gamache would never forget when the Premier of Québec, a personal friend, had called him with the news that they had a vaccine. The man was in tears, barely able to get the words out.

  As he’d hung up, Armand had felt light-headed. He could feel a sort of hysteria welling up. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. Not on this scale. It wasn’t just relief, it felt like a rebirth. Though not everyone, and not everything, would be resurrected.

  When the pandemic was finally, officially, declared over, the little village of Three Pines where the Gamaches lived had gathered on the village green where the names of the dead had been read out. Loved ones had planted trees in the clearing above the chapel. It would be called, from that day on, the New Forest.

  Then, to great ceremony, Myrna had unlocked her bookstore. And Sarah had opened the doors to her boulangerie. Monsieur Béliveau put the Ouvert sign in front of his general store, and a cheer rose up as Olivier and Gabri unlocked their bistro.

  Banks of barbecues on the village green grilled burgers and hot dogs and steaks and a cedar-plank salmon. Sarah’s cakes and pies and butter tarts were placed on a long table while Billy Williams helped Clara Morrow lug over buckets of her homemade lemonade.

  There were games for the children and, later, a bonfire and dancing on the village green.

  Friends and neighbors hugged, and even kissed. Though it felt strange, and even slightly naughty. Some still preferred to bump elbows. Others continued to carry their masks. Like a rosary, or rabbit’s foot, or a St. Christopher medal, promising safe passage.

  When Ruth coughed, everyone stepped away, though they probably would have anyway.

  There were vestiges, of course. That dreadful time had a long tail.

  And this event, in the former gymnasium at the University a few kilometers from Three Pines, was the sting in that tail.

  Chief Inspector Gamache looked across the large space to the doors at the far end, where spectators were still streaming in.

  “This should never have been allowed,” said Lacoste.

  He didn’t disagree. In his opinion everything about this was madness. But it was happening. “Is everything under control?”

  There was a pause before she replied. “Yes. But…”

  But …

  From the wing of the stage, he scanned the room and found Inspector Lacoste off to the side. She was in plain clothes, with her Sûreté du Québec ID clearly visible on her jacket.

  She’d climbed onto a riser, where she could better monitor the swelling crowd and direct agents to any trouble spots.

  Though only in her early thirties, Isabelle Lacoste was one of his most experienced officers. She’d been in riots, shoot-outs, hostage takings, and standoffs. She’d faced terrorists and murderers. Been badly wounded, almost killed.

  Very little, at this point, worried Isabelle Lacoste. But it was clear she was worried now.

  Spectators were jostling for position, trying to get a better view of the stage. Confrontations were flaring up around the large room. Some pushing and shoving was not unusual in a crowd with divided loyalties. They’d handled worse, and his agents were trained, and quick to calm things down.

  But …

  Even before Isabelle said it, he’d felt it himself. In his gut. In the tingle on his skin. In the pricking of his thumbs …

  He could see that Isabelle was focused on an older man and a young woman in the middle of the hall. They were elbowing each other.

  Nothing especially violent. Yet. And an agent was making his way through the crowd to calm them down.

  So why was Lacoste so focused on these two especially?

  Gamache continued to stare. And then he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  The man and woman wore the same outsized button on their winter coats that declared, All will be well.

  It was, he knew, a play on the word “well.” Since the pandemic, that word had taken on several meanings. Not all of them, in Gamache’s view, healthy.

  He grew very still.

  He’d been at many demonstrations and more than a few riots in his thirty-year career. He knew the flash points. The harbingers. And he knew how quickly things could spin way out of control.

  But, but in all his years as a senior officer in the Sûreté du Québec he’d never seen this.

  These two people, the man and woman, were on the same side. Those buttons declared their allegiance. And yet they’d turned their ire, normally reserved for the “other side,” on each other. Anger had become free-floating. Falling on the nearest neck.

  The atmosphere in the auditorium was stifling. Though dressing appropriately for the extreme cold outside, people were now inside and overdressed in parkas, heavy boots, scarves, and mitts. They were pulling off their woolen tuques and shoving them into pockets, leaving normally well-groomed people with their hair standing on end, as though they’d had either a great fright or a spectacularly good idea.

  Standing cheek by jowl, the crowd was overheating physically as well as emotionally. Chief Inspector Gamache could almost smell the frayed nerve ends frying.

  He looked in frustration at the tall windows behind Lacoste. They’d long since been painted shut, and there was no way to open them and bring in crisp fresh air. They’d tried.

  The Chief Inspector’s practiced eye continued to move over the crowd. Taking in things seen and unseen. It hadn’t yet, he felt, reached the boiling point, the tipping point. His job, as the senior officer, was to make sure it didn’t.

  If it came close, he’d stop it. But he knew that also had its risks. Never mind the moral issue of stopping a gathering that had every legal right to be held, there was, foremost in his mind, the issue of public safety.

  Having his agents move in and shut this event down could ignite the very violence he was trying to avoid.

  Managing a crowd so it didn’t turn into a mob wasn’t science. Strategies could be taught; he himself had instructed recruits at the Sûreté Academy on managing large, potentially volatile, events. But finally it came down to judgment. And discipline.

  Officers had to m
aintain control of the crowd, but also of themselves. Once, as a cadet, Gamache had seen trained officers at a demonstration panic, break ranks, and begin beating fellow citizens.

  It was horrific. Sickening.

  It had never happened under his command, but Gamache suspected that, given the right circumstances, it could. The madness of crowds was a terrible thing to see. The madness of police with clubs and guns was even worse.

  Now, one by one, he asked his senior officers for their reports. His own voice calm and authoritative.

  “Inspector Lacoste, what’s your read?” he spoke into his headset.

  There was a brief pause as she weighed her answer. “Our people are on top of things. I think at this point it’s riskier to stop it than to let it go on.”

  “Merci,” said Gamache. “Inspector Beauvoir, how are things outside?”

  He was always formal when speaking on an open frequency, preferring to use their ranks rather than just their names.

  Despite his protests, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir had been assigned, in his view banished, to the entrance.

  In his late thirties, Beauvoir was slender, fit, though beginning to flesh out a bit. He shared second-in-command duties with Isabelle Lacoste, and also happened to be Gamache’s son-in-law.

  “We’re going to exceed capacity, patron,” he reported from on top of the overturned crate he was standing on.

  Jean-Guy held his gloved hand up to his eyes to cut out the glare from the sun bouncing off the snow. Those still in line were stomping their feet, rubbing their mitts to keep the blood circulating, and staring at him, as though Beauvoir were personally responsible for winter.

  “I’d say there are a hundred and fifty, maybe hundred and eighty still to go. They’re getting pretty antsy. Some pushing, but no actual fights yet.”

  “How many are in now?” Gamache asked.

  “We’re at four hundred and seventy.”

  “You know the cutoff. What’s likely to happen when you reach it?”

  “Hard to tell. There’re some kids here, families. Though why anyone would bring a child to this…”

  “Agreed.”

  There were children in the auditorium now. Gamache had instructed his people to make them the priority, should the worst happen.

  That was the nightmare, of course. People crushing the life out of others in a mad rush to get into, or out of, a place should anything happen. And the children were the most vulnerable.

  “Any weapons?”

  “No guns. No knives,” Beauvoir reported. “A few bottles, and we’ve confiscated a whole lot of placards. People were pretty pissed about that. You’d have thought it was in the Charter of Rights to bring what amounts to a club into a crowded room.” He looked down at the pile in the snow by the brick wall.

  Most were homemade, in crayon, and stapled to sticks of wood. It was somehow worse when threats were in crayon. Some placards had even been made by children, with the phrase Ça va bien aller.

  All will be well.

  That alone was enough to make Beauvoir’s blood boil. The demonstrators had co-opted a phrase that had, through the recent pandemic, meant comfort. And now they’d twisted it into a code, a subtle threat. Or, worse, made their children do it.

  He looked out at the crowd and saw some pushing now, as spectators began to suspect they might not get in, and that their rival might.

  “Things are getting more tense here,” said Beauvoir. “I think we should shut it down, patron.”

  “Merci,” said Gamache, and sighed.

  While he’d certainly weigh what Beauvoir advised, and Jean-Guy might even be right, Gamache had to admit that in this rare instance, he didn’t trust his second-in-command’s judgment. It couldn’t help but be colored by his personal feelings. Which was why, despite Beauvoir’s protests, he’d been assigned the security outside, and not inside, the auditorium.

  Gamache looked at his watch. Five minutes to four.

  It was time for him to call it. To go ahead or not.

  Glancing behind him once again, he saw two middle-aged women standing together in the darkness.

  The one on the left, in black slacks and a gray turtleneck, held a clipboard and was looking anxious.

  But it was the other one who held Gamache’s attention.

  Professor Abigail Robinson was nodding as the other woman talked. She laid a hand on her colleague’s arm and smiled. She was calm. Focused.

  She wore a light blue cashmere sweater and a camel knee-length skirt. Tailored. Simple, classic. Something, Gamache thought, that his wife, Reine-Marie, would wear.

  It was not a comfortable thought.

  The university lecturer in statistics was the reason these people had come out on a bitterly cold late December day.

  They could be skiing or skating or sitting by the fire with a hot chocolate. But instead they were here, crowded together. Pushing and shoving. Hoping for a better view of this statistician.

  Some came to cheer, some to jeer and protest. Some to hear, some to heckle.

  And maybe some, maybe one, to do worse.

  The Chief Inspector had yet to meet the woman who was about to take the stage, though her assistant, who’d introduced herself as Debbie Schneider, had approached him when they’d arrived and offered what had sounded like a favor, a rare personal audience.

  He’d declined, explaining he had a job to do. And he had.

  But he was honest enough with himself to admit that had it been anyone else, he’d have wanted to meet them. Would have asked to meet them, to go over the security arrangements. To lay down some rules. To look them in the eye and make that personal connection between protected and protector.

  It was the first time in his career he’d declined, politely, to meet the person whose life was in his hands. Instead he’d gone through those arrangements with Madame Schneider, and left it at that.

  He turned back to the auditorium. The sun was setting. It would be dark in twenty minutes.

  “The event goes ahead,” he said.

  “Oui, patron.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Gamache once again walked the backstage area, getting reports from the agents stationed there. Checking the doors and dark corners.

  He asked the technician to turn the lights up.

  “Who are these people?” the sound technician asked, cocking her head to indicate the crowd. “Who holds an event between Christmas and New Year’s? Who comes out to one?”

  It was a good question.

  Gamache recognized a few faces in the crowd. They were, he knew, good, decent people. Some wore the buttons. Some did not.

  Some of them were neighbors. Friends even. But most were strangers.

  Québec was a society that felt things strongly and wasn’t afraid to express them. Which was a very good thing. It meant they were doing something right. The goal of any healthy society was to keep people safe to express sometimes unpopular views.

  But there was a limit to that expression, a line. And Armand Gamache knew he was standing on it.

  If he’d had any thoughts that he might be overreacting, his doubts had been banished earlier in the day when he, along with Beauvoir and Lacoste, had arrived for the final walk-through.

  As they’d pulled in, they were surprised to see cars already in the parking lot and people lined up at the door. They were shuffling from foot to foot, punching their arms, rubbing their mittened hands together in the bitter cold. Clouds of breath, like opaque thoughts, hung over them.

  It was still hours until the event.

  Taking off his own gloves, Gamache had pulled out his notebook and, ripping out pages, he’d given each a number depending on their place in line, with his initials.

  “Go home. Get warm. When you come back, show that to the officers at the door. They’ll let you in right away.”

  “Can’t,” said a woman at the front of the line as she took the paper. “We drove from Moncton.”

  “New Brunswick?” asked Beauvoir.

>   “Yes,” said her husband. “Drove all night.”

  Others were now pressing forward, reaching for a number as though they were starving and this was food.

  “The local café will be open,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “Go there, have lunch, and come back when the doors open at three thirty.”

  Some did. But most elected to stay, taking turns sitting in warm cars.

  As the Sûreté officers entered the building, Lacoste muttered, “When were these seeds of anger sown / And on what ground.”

  It was an apt quote, from a poem by their friend Ruth Zardo. Though the Sûreté officers knew perfectly well who’d sown the seeds that now had landed on the ground beneath their feet.

  It wasn’t joy, wasn’t happiness, wasn’t optimism that had propelled that couple almost a thousand kilometers from their home in a different province, through the night, along snowy and icy roads, to here.

  It wasn’t pleasure that had lifted others from their armchairs in front of their fires. Leaving behind their families. Their Christmas trees lit and cheery, the remnants of turkey dinner in the fridge. The preparations for New Year’s Eve unfinished.

  To stand in the biting cold.

  It was the seeds of anger, sown by a genteel statistician and taking root.

  The building caretaker, Éric Viau, was waiting for them in the old gymnasium. Gamache had met him two days before, when he’d first been given the unexpected assignment.

  Armand had been on the outdoor rink in the middle of the village of Three Pines with Reine-Marie and two of their granddaughters. He had his own skates on and was kneeling down, lacing up eight-year-old Florence’s skates, while Reine-Marie knelt in front of little Zora, doing up hers.

  They were the girls’ first pair. A Christmas gift from their grandparents.

  Florence, her cheeks glowing red from the cold, was impatient to join the other children on the rink.

  Her younger sister, Zora, was silent and leery. She seemed far from sure that strapping huge razors to her feet and stepping onto a frozen pond would be fun. Or a good idea.