by Louise Penny
“With pleasure,” said the monk. He turned to Gamache. “Will you join us?”
“I think I’ll sit over here, quietly.”
Francoeur and Frère Sébastien took a pew near the front and Gamache sat a few rows back and across from them.
It was almost certainly discourteous, he knew. But he also knew he didn’t care. Gamache glared at the back of Francoeur’s head. His eyes drilling into it. He was grateful Jean-Guy had decided to pee instead of pray. One less contact with Francoeur.
God help me, Gamache prayed. Even in this peaceful place he could feel his rage grow at the very sight of Sylvain Francoeur.
He continued to stare, and Francoeur rolled his shoulders, as though feeling the scrutiny. Francoeur didn’t turn around. But the Dominican did.
Frère Sébastien turned his head and looked directly at Gamache. The Chief shifted his eyes from Francoeur to the monk. The two men stared at each other for a moment. Then Gamache returned to the Superintendent. Undeterred by the gentle inquiry of the monk.
Eventually, Gamache closed his eyes, and took deep breaths in. Deep breaths out. He smelled, again, the scent of Saint-Gilbert which was so familiar, but slightly different. A marriage of traditional incense, and something else. Thyme and monarda.
The natural and the manufactured, come together here, in this far-flung monastery. Peace and rage, silence and singing. The Gilbertines and the Inquisition. The good men and the not-so-good.
* * *
Hearing the bells had made Beauvoir almost giddy. Almost sick with anticipation.
Finally. Finally.
He’d hurried to les toilettes, peed, washed his hands then poured a glass of water. From his pocket he drew the small pill bottle and snapped off the top, no child-proof caps here, and shook two pills into his palm.
In one practiced move Beauvoir brought his hand to his mouth, and felt the tiny pills land on his tongue. One gulp of the water, and they were down.
Leaving the pissoire, he paused in the hallway. The bells were still sounding, but instead of returning to the Blessed Chapel, Beauvoir walked swiftly back to the prior’s office. He closed the door and leaned the new chair against the handle.
He could still hear the bells.
Sitting at the desk he dragged the laptop toward him and rebooted.
The bells had stopped, and there was silence now.
The DVD in the machine started up. Beauvoir turned down the sound. No need to draw attention. Besides he had the soundtrack in his mind. Always.
The images appeared.
* * *
Gamache opened his eyes as the first notes arrived in the Blessed Chapel, along with the first monk.
Frère Antoine carried the simple wooden cross ahead of him and placed it in the holder on the altar. Then he bowed and took his place. Behind him the rest of the monks filed in, bowing to the cross and taking their places. Singing all the time. All the live-long day.
Gamache glanced at Frère Sébastien in profile. He was staring at the monks. At the long-lost Gilbertines. Then Frère Sébastien closed his eyes and tilted his head back. He seemed to go into a trance. A fugue. As the Gregorian chants and the Gilbertines filled the chapel.
* * *
Beauvoir could hear the music, but softly, from very far away.
Men’s voices, all singing together. Growing more powerful as more voices joined in. While on the screen he watched his co-workers, his friends, his fellow agents, gunned down.
To the tune of the chants, Beauvoir watched himself gunned down.
The monks sang as the Chief dragged him to safety. Then left him. Dumping him there like—how had Francoeur described it? No longer useful.
And, to add to the injury, before leaving the Chief had kissed him.
Kissed him. On his forehead. No wonder they called him Gamache’s bitch. Everyone had seen that kiss. All his colleagues. And now they laughed at him, behind his back.
As the Gregorian chants were sung in the Blessed Chapel, Chief Inspector Gamache kissed him. Then left.
* * *
Gamache glanced again at the Dominican. Frère Sébastien seemed to have moved from a fugue to a sort of ecstasy.
And then Frère Luc entered the chapel, and the Dominican’s eyes sprang open. He was almost jolted forward in his seat. Drawn to the very young man with the divine voice.
Here was a voice in a million. A voice in a millennium.
The dead prior had known it. The current choirmaster knew it. The abbot knew it. Even Gamache, with his appreciation but limited knowledge, could hear it.
And now, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith knew it too.
* * *
Jean-Guy Beauvoir hit play, then pause. Then play again. Over and over he watched.
On the screen, time and again, over and over like a litany, a liturgy, Beauvoir saw himself fall. Saw himself dragged, like a sack of potatoes, across the factory floor. By Gamache.
In the background the monks chanted.
The Kyrie. The Alleluia. The Gloria.
While in the prior’s office Beauvoir was dying. Alone.
THIRTY
After Compline, the last service of the day, the abbot took Gamache aside. Dom Philippe wasn’t alone. To the Chief Inspector’s surprise, Frère Antoine was with him.
It would be impossible, looking at the men standing together, to know that they were enemies. Or at least, stood on opposite sides of a deep divide.
“How can I help you?” Gamache asked. He’d been led to a corner of the Blessed Chapel. It was empty now, though the Dominican remained in his seat. Staring ahead as though in a stupor.
Superintendent Francoeur was nowhere to be seen.
Gamache placed his back to the corner, so he could keep a watchful eye on the darkened Chapel.
“It’s about Mathieu’s last words,” said the abbot.
“‘Homo,’” said Frère Antoine. “Is that right?”
“It’s what Frère Simon reported, oui,” said Gamache. The monks exchanged a rapid glance, then returned their eyes to the Chief.
“We think we know what he meant,” said the abbot. He cleared his throat very loudly, then said, “Homo.”
“Oui,” said Gamache, staring at Dom Philippe and waiting for more. “That’s what the prior apparently said.”
The abbot did it again. This time with a monumental clearing of his throat and Gamache had a moment of concern for the man’s health.
“Homo,” Dom Philippe repeated.
Now Gamache really was puzzled. He could see Frère Sébastien, the Dominican, looking over. If the noise from the abbot’s throat had been loud to Gamache, it must have been monstrous when it hit the full glory of the chapel’s acoustics.
The abbot stared intently at Gamache, his blue eyes piercing, willing the Chief to understand something he just couldn’t.
Then beside the abbot, Frère Antoine cleared his throat. A guttural, desperate sound.
“Homo,” he said.
And the Chief Inspector finally began to grasp that it wasn’t the word they wanted him to understand, but the sound. But it still meant nothing to Gamache.
Feeling extremely thick, he turned back to the abbot.
“Désolé, mon père, but I honestly don’t understand.”
“Ecce homo.”
The words came not from the abbot, nor from Frère Antoine, but from the Blessed Chapel, as though the room itself had spoken.
Then the Dominican appeared around one of the columns.
“I believe that’s what the abbot and choirmaster are saying. Is that right?”
The two men stared at Frère Sébastien, then nodded. Their looks, if not outright belligerent, were uninviting. But it was far too late. This uninvited man from the Vatican was there. Indeed, he seemed everywhere.
Gamache turned back to the Gilbertines, standing side-by-side. Was that what had finally bridged the chasm between them? A common enemy? This pleasant, unobtrusive monk in white robes who sat so st
ill but took up so much space?
“We think the prior wasn’t clearing his throat,” said Frère Antoine, turning from the Dominican back to Gamache, “but that he actually said two words. ‘Ecce’ and ‘homo.’”
Gamache’s eyes widened. Ecce. Eee-chay. But with the guttural Latin pronunciation. It could be.
The abbot repeated it, as the prior might have sounded. A man struggling to get out a word. A dying man with a throaty word, caught there.
Ecce homo.
The words were familiar to Gamache, but he couldn’t call them up.
“What does it mean?”
“It’s what Pontius Pilate said to the mob,” said Frère Sébastien. “He brought Jesus out, bleeding, to show them.”
“Show them what? What does it mean?” Gamache repeated, looking from Dominican to Gilbertine and back again.
“Ecce homo,” said the abbot. “He is man.”
* * *
It was almost nine in the evening, late by monastery standards, and Frère Sébastien left the three men and walked toward the cells. Frère Antoine waited a minute, for the Dominican to disappear, then after a brief bow to the abbot, he also left.
“Things have changed,” observed Gamache.
Instead of denying that there was ever a problem, Dom Philippe simply nodded and watched the younger man stride off toward the door at the far end of the chapel.
“He’ll make a wonderful choirmaster. Perhaps even better than Mathieu.” The abbot’s eyes returned to Gamache. “Frère Antoine loves the chants, but he loves God more.”
The Chief nodded. Yes. That was at the heart of this mystery, he thought. Not hate. But love.
“And the prior?” asked Gamache as he walked the abbot to his rooms. “What did he love more?”
“The music.” The answer was swift and unequivocal. “But it isn’t quite that simple.” The abbot smiled. “As you might have noticed, few things here are actually simple.”
Gamache also smiled. He had noticed.
They were in the long corridor leading to the abbot’s office and cell. Where at first it had seemed perfectly straight from one end to the other, now he thought he noticed a very slight curve. Dom Clément might have drawn a straight line, but his builders had erred, ever so slightly. As anyone who’d built a bookcase, or tried to follow a detailed map, knew, an infinitesimal error at the beginning can become a massive mistake later on.
Even the corridors here, he reflected, weren’t as simple, as straight, as they appeared.
“For Mathieu there was no separation between the music and his faith. They were one and the same,” said the abbot. His pace had slowed and now they were barely moving down the darkened hallway. “The music magnified his faith. Took it to levels of near ecstasy.”
“Levels few achieve?”
The abbot was quiet.
“Levels you’ve never achieved?” Gamache pushed.
“I’m more the slow and steady type,” said the abbot, looking straight ahead as they walked the slightly flawed path. “Not given to soaring.”
“But neither do you fall?”
“We can all fall,” said the abbot.
“But perhaps not as hard and not as fast and not as far as someone who spends his life on the ascent.”
Again the abbot lapsed into silence.
“You obviously adore the Gregorian chants,” said Gamache. “But unlike the prior, you separate them from your faith?”
The abbot nodded. “I hadn’t thought about it until this happened, but yes, I do. If the music was somehow taken away tomorrow. If I could no longer sing, or listen to the chants, my love of God would be unchanged.”
“Not so with Frère Mathieu?”
“I wonder.”
“Who was his confessor?”
“I was. Until recently.”
“Who was his new confessor?”
“Frère Antoine.”
Now their slow progress stopped completely.
“Can you tell me what Frère Mathieu said, in his confessions to you? Before he switched confessors?”
“You know I can’t.”
“Even though the prior is dead?”
The abbot studied Gamache. “Surely you know the answer to that. Has any priest ever agreed to break the seal of the confessional for you?”
Gamache shook his head. “No, mon père. But I’ll never give up hope.”
That brought a smile to the abbot’s face.
“When did the prior switch to Frère Antoine?”
“About six months ago.” The abbot looked resigned. “I wasn’t completely honest with you.” He looked directly into Gamache’s eyes. “I’m sorry. Mathieu and I did have a disagreement about the chants, and that grew into an argument about the direction of the monastery and the community.”
“He wanted another recording, and for Saint-Gilbert to be more open to the outside world.”
“Oui. And I believe we need to stay on course.”
“A steady hand on the tiller,” said the Chief, nodding approval. Though both men knew, if you were heading into the rocks, a quick turn was often necessary.
“But there was another outstanding issue,” said Gamache. They’d started walking again, toward the closed door at the end of the corridor. “The foundations.”
Gamache had taken a step forward before he realized the abbot was no longer beside him. The Chief turned and saw Dom Philippe staring at him, surprised.
It seemed to Gamache that the abbot was on the verge of another lie, but in the breath he took before speaking he seemed to change his mind.
“You know about that?”
“Frère Raymond told Inspector Beauvoir. It’s true, then.”
The abbot nodded.
“Did anyone else know?” Gamache asked.
“I told no one.”
“Not even your prior?”
“A year ago, eighteen months ago, he’d have been the first person I told, but not now. I kept it to myself. Told God, but he already knew, of course.”
“Might have even put the cracks there,” suggested Gamache.
The abbot looked at the Chief, but said nothing.
“Is that why you were in the basement yesterday morning?” asked Gamache. “Not to examine the geothermal, but to look at the foundations?”
The abbot nodded and they began their slow progress again, neither man in a hurry to reach the door.
“I waited until Frère Raymond was gone. I’m afraid I didn’t need to hear him go on and on about the impending disaster. I just needed some quiet time to look for myself.”
“And what did you see?”
“Roots,” he said, his voice a study of neutrality. A plainchant voice, monotone. No inflection. No emotion. Just fact. “The cracks are getting worse. I’d marked where they’d been the last time I looked, a week or so ago. They’ve widened since then.”
“You might have even less time than you’d hoped?”
“We might,” Dom Philippe admitted.
“So what do you do about it?”
“I pray.”
“That’s it?”
“And what do you do, Chief Inspector, when all seems lost?”
Take this child.
“I pray too,” he said.
“And does it work?”
“Sometimes,” said Gamache. Jean-Guy hadn’t died that dreadful day in the factory. Covered in blood, gasping in pain. Eyes pleading for Gamache to stay. To do something. To save him. Gamache had prayed. And Beauvoir hadn’t been taken. But neither, Gamache knew, had he returned. Not completely. Beauvoir was still caught between worlds.
“But is all lost?” he asked the abbot. “Frère Raymond seems to think another recording would bring in enough money to fix the foundations. But you have to act quickly.”
“Frère Raymond is right. But he also sees only the cracks. I see the whole monastery. The whole community. What good would it do to fix the cracks but lose our real foundation? Our vows aren’t negotiable.”
&
nbsp; Gamache saw then what Frère Raymond must have seen. What the prior must have seen. A man who would not budge. Unlike the monastery, there were no cracks in the abbot. He was immovable, at least on this subject.
If the last Gilbertine monastery was to be saved it would have to be by divine intervention. Unless, as Frère Raymond believed, their miracle had been offered and the abbot, blinded by pride, had missed it.
“I have a favor to ask, Père Abbé.”
“Would you also like me to approve another recording?”
Gamache almost laughed. “No. I’ll leave that between you and your God. But I would like the boatman to come tomorrow morning, to take Inspector Beauvoir back with some of the evidence we’ve gathered.”
“Of course. I’ll call first thing. Assuming the fog lifts Etienne should be here shortly after breakfast.”
They’d reached the closed door. The wood pockmarked by hundreds of years of monks asking for admittance. But no longer. The iron rod was gone and would leave the abbey for good with Beauvoir in the morning. Gamache wondered if the abbot would have it replaced.
“Well,” said Dom Philippe, “good night, my son.”
“Bonne nuit, mon père,” said Gamache. The words sounded so strange. His own father had died when Gamache was a boy and he’d rarely called anyone that since.
“Ecce homo,” said Gamache, just as Dom Philippe opened the door.
The abbot paused.
“Why would Frère Mathieu say that?” Gamache asked.
“I don’t know.”
Gamache pondered for a moment. “Why did Pilate say it?”
“He wanted to prove to the mob that their god wasn’t divine at all. That Jesus was just a man.”
“Merci,” said Gamache, and bowing slightly he walked back down the slightly curved hall. To think about the Divine, the human, and the cracks in between.
* * *
“Dear Annie,” Beauvoir wrote in the dark. His light was out so that no one would know he was still awake.
He lay on his bed, fully clothed. Compline was over, he knew, and he’d retreated to his cell, until he could safely return to the prior’s office, when everyone was asleep.
He’d found a message from Annie on his BlackBerry. A light-hearted description of her evening with old friends.