by Louise Penny
“You have a choice. You could quit. You’re not indentured. And I suspect you’re not the fool you pretend to be.”
“I don’t pretend to be a fool.”
“No? Then what would you call failing to interview a key suspect in a homicide investigation? What would you call lying about it to someone you must have known would see through that lie?”
But it was clear that the agent never thought he’d be caught. It had certainly never occurred to him that he’d find himself alone in the Chief’s office, about to be chewed out.
But mostly, it never occurred to him that, instead of ripping into him, tearing him to shreds, Chief Inspector Gamache would simply stare at him, with thoughtful eyes.
“I would call it foolish,” admitted the agent.
Gamache continued to watch him. “I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t care what you think of your assignment here. You’re right, your being here wasn’t your choice, or mine. You’re not a trained homicide investigator. But you are an agent in the Sûreté du Québec, one of the great police forces in the world.”
The agent smirked, then his expression shifted to mild surprise.
The Chief Inspector wasn’t joking. He actually believed it. Believed the Sûreté du Québec was a great and effective police force. A breakwater between the citizens and those who would do them harm.
“You came from the Serious Crimes division, I believe.”
The agent nodded.
“You must have seen some terrible things.”
The agent sat very still.
“Difficult not to grow cynical,” said the Chief quietly. “Here we deal with one thing. There’s a great advantage in that. We become specialists. The disadvantage is what we deal with. Death. Every time the phone rings, it’s about a loss of life. Sometimes accidental. Sometimes it’s suicide. Sometimes it turns out to be natural. But most of the time it’s very unnatural. Which is when we step in.”
The agent looked deeply into those eyes and believed he saw, just for an instant, the terrible deaths that had piled up, day and night, for years. The young and the old. The children. The fathers and mothers and daughters and sons. Killed. Murdered. Lives taken. And the bodies laid at the feet of this man.
It seemed Death had joined their meeting, making the atmosphere stale and close.
“Do you know what I’ve learned, after three decades of death?” Gamache asked, leaning toward the agent and lowering his voice.
Despite himself, the agent leaned forward.
“I’ve learned how precious life is.”
The agent looked at him, expecting more, and when no more came he slumped back in his chair.
“The work you do isn’t trivial,” said the Chief. “People are counting on you. I’m counting on you. Please take it seriously.”
“Yessir.”
Gamache rose and the agent got to his feet. The Chief walked him to the door and nodded as the man left.
Everyone in the homicide office had been watching, waiting for the explosion. Waiting for Chief Inspector Gamache to rip into the offending agent. Even Lacoste waited, and wanted it.
But nothing had happened.
The other agents exchanged glances, no longer bothering to hide their satisfaction. The legendary Chief Inspector Gamache was a straw man after all. Not quite on his knees, but close.
Gamache looked up from his reading when Lacoste knocked.
“May I come in, patron?” she asked.
“Of course.” He got up and indicated the chair.
Lacoste closed the door, knowing some, if not all, of the agents in the large room would still be watching. But she didn’t care. They could go to hell.
“They wanted to see you tear into him.”
The Chief Inspector nodded. “I know.” He looked at her closely. “And you, Isabelle?”
There was no use lying to the Chief. She sighed.
“Part of me wanted to see that too. But for different reasons.”
“And what were your reasons?”
She jerked her head in the direction of the agents. “It would show them you can’t be pushed around. Brutality is all they understand.”
Gamache considered that for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right, of course. And I have to admit, I was tempted.” He smiled at her. It had taken him a while to get used to seeing Isabelle Lacoste sitting across from him, instead of Jean-Guy Beauvoir.
“I think that young man once believed in his job,” said Gamache, looking through the internal window as the agent picked up his phone. “I think they all did. I honestly believe most agents join the Sûreté because they want to help.”
“To serve and protect?” Lacoste asked, with a small smile.
“Service, Integrity, Justice,” he quoted the Sûreté motto. “Old-fashioned, I know.” He lifted his hands in surrender.
“So what changed?” asked Lacoste.
“Why do decent young men and women become bullies? Why do soldiers dream of being heroes but end up abusing prisoners and shooting civilians? Why do politicians become corrupt? Why do cops beat suspects senseless and break the laws they’re meant to protect?”
The agent that Gamache had just been speaking with was talking on the phone. Despite the taunts of the other agents, he was doing what Gamache had asked of him.
“Because they can?” asked Lacoste.
“Because everyone else does,” said Gamache, sitting forward. “Corruption and brutality are modeled and expected and rewarded. It becomes normal. And anyone who stands up to it, who tells them it’s wrong, is beaten down. Or worse.” Gamache shook his head. “No, I can’t condemn those young agents for losing their way. It’s a rare person who wouldn’t.”
The Chief looked at her and smiled.
“So you ask why I didn’t rip him apart when I could have? That’s why. And before you mistake it for heroics on my part, it wasn’t. It was selfish. I needed to prove to myself that I hadn’t yet fallen that far. I have to admit, it’s tempting.”
“To join Chief Superintendent Francoeur?” asked Lacoste, amazed at the admission.
“No, to create my own stinking mess in response.”
He stared at her, seeming to weigh his words.
“I know what I’m doing, Isabelle,” he said quietly. “Trust me.”
“I shouldn’t have doubted.”
And Isabelle Lacoste saw how the rot started. How it happened, not overnight, but by degrees. A small doubt broke the skin. Then an infection set in. Questioning. Critical. Cynical. Distrustful.
Lacoste looked at the agent that Gamache had spoken to. He’d put down the phone and was making notes on his computer, trying to do his job. But his colleagues were taunting him, and as Inspector Lacoste watched, the agent stopped typing and turned to them. And smiled. One of them, again.
Inspector Lacoste returned her attention to Chief Inspector Gamache. Never, ever, would she have believed it possible for her to be disloyal to him. But if it could happen to those other agents, who’d been decent once, maybe it could happen to her. Maybe it already had. As more and more of Francoeur’s agents were transferred in, as more and more of them challenged Gamache, believing him to be weak, maybe it was seeping into her too, by association.
Maybe she was beginning to doubt him.
Six months ago she’d never have questioned how the Chief disciplined a subordinate. But now she had. And part of her had wondered if what she’d seen, what they’d all seen, wasn’t weakness after all.
“Whatever happens, Isabelle,” said Gamache, “you must trust yourself. Do you understand?”
He was looking at her with great intensity, as though trying to place those words not simply in her head, but someplace deeper. Some secret, safe place.
She nodded.
He smiled, breaking the tension. “Bon. Is that what you came to say, or is there more?”
It took her a moment to remember and it was only in noticing the Post-it note in her hand that it came back to her.
“A ca
ll came in a few minutes ago. I didn’t want to disturb you. I’m not sure if it’s personal or professional.”
He put on his glasses and read the note, then frowned.
“I’m not sure either.” Gamache leaned back in his chair. His jacket opened and Lacoste noticed the Glock in the holster on his belt. She couldn’t quite get used to seeing it there. The Chief loathed guns.
Matthew 10:36.
It was one of the first things she’d been taught when she’d joined the homicide division. She could still see Chief Inspector Gamache, sitting where he was now.
“Matthew 10:36,” he’d said. “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. Never forget that, Agent Lacoste.”
She’d assumed he’d meant that in a murder investigation, the family was the place to start. But now she knew it meant much more than that. Chief Inspector Gamache wore a weapon. Inside Sûreté headquarters. Inside his own household.
Gamache picked the Post-it note off his desk. “Care for a drive? We can be there for lunch.”
Lacoste was surprised but didn’t need to be asked twice.
“Who’ll be left in charge?” she asked, as she grabbed her coat.
“Who’s in charge now?”
“You, of course, patron.”
“How nice of you to say that, but we both know it isn’t true. I just hope we didn’t leave any matches lying around.”
As the door closed, Gamache heard the agent he’d spoken with say to the others, “It’s about life…”
He was lampooning the Chief, in a high, childish voice. Making him sound idiotic.
The Chief walked down the long corridor to the elevator, and smiled.
In the elevator, they watched the numbers. 15, 14 …
The other person in the elevator got out, leaving them alone.
… 13, 12, 11 …
Lacoste was tempted to ask the one question that must never be overheard.
She looked at the Chief, watching the numbers. Relaxed. But she knew him enough to recognize the new lines, the deeper lines. The darker circles under his eyes.
Yes, she thought, let’s get out of here. Cross the bridge, get off the island. As far from this damned place as we can.
8 … 7 … 6 …
“Sir?”
“Oui?”
He turned to her and she saw, again, the weariness that came in unguarded moments. And she hadn’t the heart to ask what had happened to Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache’s second in command before her. Her own mentor. Gamache’s protégé. And more than that.
For fifteen years Gamache and Beauvoir had been a formidable team. Twenty years younger than the Chief Inspector, Jean-Guy Beauvoir was being groomed to take over.
And then suddenly, coming back from a case at a remote abbey a few months earlier, Inspector Beauvoir had been transferred out, into Chief Superintendent Francoeur’s own department.
It had been a mess.
Lacoste had tried to ask Beauvoir what’d happened, but the Inspector wanted nothing to do with anyone from homicide, and Chief Inspector Gamache had issued an order. No one in homicide was to have anything to do with Jean-Guy Beauvoir.
He was to be shunned. Disappeared. Made invisible.
Not only persona non grata, but persona non exista.
Isabelle Lacoste could hardly believe it. And the passage of time hadn’t made it more believable.
3 … 2 …
That was what she wanted to ask.
Was it true?
She wondered if it was a ruse, a way to get Beauvoir into Francoeur’s camp. To try to figure out what the Chief Superintendent was up to.
Surely Gamache and Beauvoir were still allies in this dangerous game.
But as the months passed, Beauvoir’s behavior had grown more erratic and Gamache had grown more resolute. And the gulf between them had grown into an ocean. And now they appeared to inhabit two different worlds.
As she followed Gamache to his car, Lacoste realized she hadn’t asked the question to spare his feelings, but her own. She didn’t want the answer. She wanted to believe that Beauvoir remained loyal, and Gamache had a hope of stopping whatever plan Francoeur had in place.
“Would you like to drive?” Gamache asked, offering her the keys.
“With pleasure.”
She drove through the Ville-Marie Tunnel, then up onto the Champlain Bridge. Gamache was silent, looking at the half-frozen St. Lawrence River far below. The traffic slowed almost to a stop once they approached the very top of the span. Lacoste, who was not at all afraid of heights, felt queasy. It was one thing to drive over the bridge, another thing to be stopped within feet of the low rail. And the long plunge.
She could see, far below, sheets of ice butting against each other in the cold current. Slush, like sludge, moved slowly under the bridge.
Beside her, Chief Inspector Gamache inhaled sharply, then exhaled and fidgeted. She remembered that he was afraid of heights. Lacoste noticed his hands were balled into fists, which he was tightening, then releasing. Tightening. Releasing.
“About Inspector Beauvoir,” she heard herself say. It felt a bit like jumping from the bridge.
He looked as though she’d slapped him. Which was, she realized, her goal. To slap him. Break the squirreling in his head.
She couldn’t, of course, physically hit Chief Inspector Gamache. But she could emotionally. And she had.
“Yes?” He looked at her but neither his voice nor his expression was encouraging.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
The car ahead moved a few feet, then put on its brakes. They were almost at the top of the span. The highest point.
“No.”
He’d slapped her back. And she felt the sting.
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a minute or so. But Lacoste noticed the Chief was no longer flexing his fists. Now he just stared out the window. And she wondered if she might have hit him too hard.
Then his face changed and Lacoste realized he was no longer looking at the dark waters of the St. Lawrence, but to the side of the bridge. They’d crested and could now see what the delay was. Police cars and an ambulance were blocking the far right lane, just where the bridge connected with the south shore.
A covered body, strapped to a wire basket, was being hauled up the embankment. Lacoste crossed herself, through force of habit and not out of any faith that it would make a difference to the dead or the living.
Gamache did not cross himself. Instead he stared.
The death had occurred on the south shore of Montréal. It wasn’t their territory, and not their body. The Sûreté du Québec was responsible for policing all of Québec, except those cities with their own forces. It still left them plenty of territory, and plenty of bodies. But not this one.
Besides, both Gamache and Lacoste knew that the poor soul was probably a suicide. Driven to despair as the Christmas holidays neared.
Gamache wondered, as they passed the body swaddled in blankets like a newborn, how bad life would have to be before the cold, gray waters seemed better.
And then they were past, and the traffic opened up, and soon they were speeding along the autoroute, away from the bridge. Away from the body. Away from Sûreté headquarters. Toward the village of Three Pines.
FOUR
The small bell above the door tinkled as Gamache entered the bookstore. He knocked his boots against the doorjamb, hoping to get some of the snow off.
It’d been snowing slightly in Montréal when they’d left, just flurries, but the snow had intensified as they’d climbed higher into the mountains south of the city. He heard a muffled thumping as Isabelle Lacoste knocked her boots and followed him inside.
Had the Chief Inspector been blindfolded he could have described the familiar shop. The walls were lined with bookcases filled with hardcovers and paperbacks. With fiction and biography, science and science fiction. Mysteries and religion. Poetry and cookbooks. It was a room filled with thoughts and feeling and creation
and desires. New and used.
Threadbare Oriental rugs were scattered on the wood floor, giving it the feel of a well-used library in an old country home.
A cheerful wreath was tacked on the door into Myrna’s New and Used Bookstore, and a Christmas tree stood in a corner. Gifts were piled underneath and there was the slight sweet scent of balsam.
A black cast-iron woodstove sat in the center of the room, with a kettle simmering on top of it and an armchair on either side.
It hadn’t changed since the day Gamache had first entered Myrna’s bookstore years before. Right down to the unfashionable floral slipcovers on the sofa and easy chairs in the bay window. Books were piled next to one of the sagging seats and back copies of The New Yorker and National Geographic were scattered on the coffee table.
It was, Gamache felt, how a sigh might look.
“Bonjour?” he called and waited. Nothing.
Stairs led from the back of the bookstore into Myrna’s apartment above. He was about to call up when Lacoste noticed a scribbled note by the cash register.
Back in ten minutes. Leave money if you buy anything. (Ruth, this means you.)
It wasn’t signed. No need. But there was a time written at the top. 11:55.
Lacoste checked her watch while Gamache turned to the large clock behind the desk. Noon almost exactly.
They wandered for a few minutes, up and down the aisles. There were equal parts French and English books. Some new, but most used. Gamache became absorbed in the titles, finally selecting a frayed book on the history of cats. He took off his heavy coat and poured himself and Lacoste mugs of tea.
“Milk, sugar?” he asked.
“A bit of both, s’il vous plaît,” came her reply from across the room.
He sat down by the woodstove and opened his book. Lacoste joined him in the other easy chair, sipping her tea.
“Thinking of getting one?”
“A cat?” He glanced at the cover of the book. “Non. Florence and Zora want a pet, especially after the last visit. They fell for Henri’s charms and now want a German shepherd of their own.”
“In Paris?” asked Lacoste, with some amusement.
“Yes. I don’t think they quite realize they live in Paris,” laughed Gamache, thinking of his young granddaughters. “Reine-Marie told me last night that Daniel and Roslyn are considering getting a cat.”