by Louise Penny
Climbing the steps she turned and walked back. Leaning into the car window she asked, “If a person insulted someone you cared about, would you say something?”
Gamache thought about that. “I hope I would.”
She nodded and left. But she knew Gamache, and knew there was no “hope” about it.
TWENTY-NINE
After a luncheon of herbed cucumber soup, grilled shrimp and fennel salad and peach tarte Gamache and the Brunels settled into the bright living room of the second-floor apartment. It was lined with bookcases. Objets trouvés lay here and there. Pieces of aged and broken pottery, chipped mugs. It was a room that was lived in, where people read, and talked and thought and laughed.
“I’ve been researching the items in the cabin,” said Thérèse Brunel.
“And?” Gamache leaned forward on the sofa, holding his demi-tasse of espresso.
“So far nothing. Amazing as it sounds, none of the items has been reported stolen, though I haven’t finished yet. It’ll take weeks to properly trace them.”
Gamache slowly leaned back and crossed his long legs. If not stolen, then what? “What’s the other option?” he asked.
“Well, that the dead man actually owned the pieces. Or that they were looted from dead people, who couldn’t report it. In a war, for instance. Like the Amber Room.”
“Or maybe they were given to him,” suggested her husband, Jérôme.
“But they’re priceless,” objected Thérèse. “Why would someone give them to him?”
“Services rendered?” he said.
All three were silent then, imagining what service could exact such a payment.
“Bon, Armand, I have something to show you.” Jérôme rose to his full height of just five and a half feet. He was an almost perfect square but carried his bulk with ease as though his body was filled with the thoughts overflowing from his head.
He wedged himself onto the sofa beside Gamache. He had in his hands the two carvings.
“First of all, these are remarkable. They almost speak, don’t you find? My job, Thérèse told me, was to figure out what they’re saying. Or, more specifically, what these mean.”
He turned the carvings over to reveal the letters carved there.
MRKBVYDDO was etched under the people on the shore.
OWSVI was under the sailing ship.
“This’s a code of some sort,” explained Jérôme, putting his glasses on and peering closely at the letters again. “I started with the easiest one. Qwerty. It’s the one an amateur’s most likely to use. Do you know it?”
“It’s a typewriter’s keyboard. Also a computer’s,” said Gamache. “Qwerty is the first few letters on the top line.”
“What the person using Qwerty generally does is go to the keyboard and type the letter next to the one you really mean. Very easy to decode. This isn’t it, by the way. No.” Jérôme hauled himself up and Gamache almost tumbled into the void left by his body. “I went through a whole lot of ciphers and frankly I haven’t found anything. I’m sorry.”
Gamache had been hopeful this master of codes would be able to crack the Hermit’s. But like so much else with this case, it wouldn’t reveal itself easily.
“But I think I know what sort of code it is. I think it’s a Caesar’s Shift.”
“Go on.”
“Bon,” said Jérôme, relishing the challenge and the audience. “Julius Caesar was a genius. He’s really the cipher fanatic’s emperor. Brilliant. He used the Greek alphabet to send secret messages to his troops in France. But later he refined his codes. He switched to the Roman alphabet, the one we use now, but he shifted the letters by three. So if the word you want to send is kill, the code in Caesar’s Shift becomes . . .” He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the alphabet.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Then he circled four letters.
NLOO
“See?”
Gamache and Thérèse leaned over his messy desk.
“So he just shifted the letters,” said Gamache. “If the code under the carvings is a Caesar’s Shift, can’t you just decode it that way? Move the letters back by three?”
He looked at the letters under the sailing ship.
“That would make this . . . L, T, P. Okay, I don’t have to go further. It makes no sense.”
“No, Caesar was smart and I think this Hermit was too. Or at least, he knew his codes. The brilliance of the Caesar’s Shift is that it’s almost impossible to break because the shift can be whatever length you want. Or, better still, you can use a key word. One you and your contact aren’t likely to forget. You write it at the beginning of the alphabet, then start the cipher. Let’s say it’s Montreal.”
He went back to his alphabet and wrote Montreal under the first eight letters, then filled in the rest of the twenty-six beginning with A.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y S
M O N T R E A L A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
“So, now if the message we want to send is kill, what’s the code?” Jérôme asked Gamache.
The Chief Inspector took the pencil and circled four letters.
CADD
“Exactly,” beamed Dr. Brunel. Gamache stared, fascinated. Thérèse, who’d seen all this before, stood back and smiled, proud of her clever husband.
“We need the key word.” Gamache straightened up.
“That’s all,” laughed Jérôme.
“Well, I think I have it.”
Jérôme nodded, pulled up a chair and sat down. In a clear hand he wrote the alphabet once again.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
His pencil hovered over the next line down.
“Charlotte,” said Gamache.
Clara and Denis Fortin lingered over their coffee. The back garden of the Santropole restaurant was almost empty. The rush of the lunch crowd, mostly bohemian young people from the Plateau Mont Royal quartier, had disappeared.
The bill had just arrived and Clara knew it was now or never.
“There is one other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
“The carvings? Did you bring them?” Fortin leaned forward.
“No, the Chief Inspector still has them, but I told him about your offer. I think part of the problem is they’re evidence in the murder case.”
“Of course. There’s no rush, though I suspect this buyer might not be interested for long. It really is most extraordinary that anyone would want them.”
Clara nodded and thought maybe they could just leave. She could go back to Three Pines, make up a guest list for the vernissage and forget about it. Already Fortin’s comment about Gabri was fading. Surely it wasn’t that serious.
“So, what did you want to talk about? Whether you should buy a home in Provence or Tuscany? How about a yacht?”
Clara wasn’t sure if he was kidding, but she did know he wasn’t making this easy.
“It’s just a tiny thing, really. I must have heard wrong, but it seemed to me when you came down to Three Pines yesterday you said something about Gabri.”
Fortin looked interested, concerned, puzzled.
“He was our waiter,” Clara explained. “He brought us our drinks.”
Fortin was still staring. She could feel her brain evaporate. Suddenly, after practicing most of the morning what she’d say, she couldn’t even remember her own name. “Well, I just thought, you know . . .”
Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t do it. This must be a sign, she thought, a sign from God that she wasn’t supposed to say anything. That she was making something out of nothing.
“Doesn’t matter,” she smiled. “I just thought I’d tell you his name.”
Fortunately she figured Fortin was used to dealing with artists who were drunk, deranged, stoned. Clara appeared to be all three. She must, in his eyes, be a brilliant artist to be so unhinged.
Fortin signed for the bill and left, Clara noticed, a very large tip.
“I remember him.” Fortin led her back through the restaurant with its dark wood and scent of tisane. “He was the fag.”
VDTK?? MMF/X
They stared at the letters. The more they stared the less sense they made, which was saying something.
“Any other suggestions?” Jérôme looked up from his desk.
Gamache was flabbergasted. He was sure they had it, that “Charlotte” was the key to break the cipher. He thought for a moment, scanning the case.
“Woo,” he said. They tried that.
Nothing.
“Walden.” But he knew he was grasping. And sure enough, nothing.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. What had he missed?
“Well, I’ll keep trying,” said Jérôme. “It might not be a Caesar’s Shift. There’re plenty of other codes.”
He smiled reassuringly and the Chief Inspector had a sense of what Dr. Brunel’s patients must have felt. The news was bad, but they had a man who wouldn’t give up.
“What can you tell me about one of your colleagues, Vincent Gilbert?” Gamache asked.
“He was no colleague of mine,” said Jérôme, testily. “Not of anyone’s from what I remember. He didn’t suffer fools easily. Do you notice most people who feel like that consider everyone a fool?”
“That bad?”
“Jérôme’s only annoyed because Dr. Gilbert thought himself God,” said Thérèse, perching on the arm of her husband’s chair.
“Difficult to work with,” said Gamache, who’d worked with a few gods himself.
“Oh no, it wasn’t that,” smiled Thérèse. “It annoyed Jérôme because he knows he’s the one true God and Gilbert refused to worship.”
They laughed but Jérôme’s smile faded first. “Very dangerous man, Vincent Gilbert. I think he really does have a God complex. Megalomaniac. Very clever. That book he wrote . . .”
“Being,” said Gamache.
“Yes. It was designed, every word calculated for effect. And I’ve got to hand it to him, it worked. Most people who’ve read it agree with him. He is at the very least a great man, and perhaps even a saint.”
“You don’t believe it?”
Dr. Brunel snorted. “The only miracle he’s performed is convincing everyone of his saintliness. No mean feat, given what an asshole he is. Do I believe it? No.”
“Well, it’s time for my news.” Thérèse Brunel stood up. “Come with me.”
Gamache followed her, leaving Jérôme to fiddle with the cipher. The study was filled with more papers and magazines. Thérèse sat at her computer and after a few quick taps a photograph appeared. It showed a carving of a shipwreck.
Gamache pulled up a chair and stared. “Is it . . .”
“Another carving? Oui.” She smiled, like a magician who’d produced a particularly spectacular rabbit.
“The Hermit made this?” Gamache twisted in his chair and looked at her. She nodded. He looked back at the screen. The carving was complex. On one side was the shipwreck, then some forest, and on the other side a tiny village being built. “Even in a photograph it seems alive. I can see the little people. Are they the same ones from the other carvings?”
“I think so. But I can’t find the frightened boy.”
Gamache searched the village, the ship on the shore, the forest. Nothing. What happened to him? “We need to have the carving,” he said.
“This’s in a private collection in Zurich. I’ve contacted a gallery owner I know there. Very influential man. He said he’d help.”
Gamache knew enough not to press Superintendent Brunel about her connections.
“It’s not just the boy,” he said. “We need to know what’s written underneath it.”
Like the others this one was, on the surface, pastoral, peaceful. But something lurked on the fringes. A disquiet.
And yet, once again, the tiny wooden people seemed happy.
“There’s another one. In a collection in Cape Town.” The screen flickered and another carving appeared. A boy was lying, either asleep or dead, on the side of a mountain. Gamache put on his glasses and leaned closer, squinting.
“Hard to tell, but I think it’s the same young man.”
“So do I,” said the Superintendent.
“Is he dead?”
“I wondered that myself, but I don’t think so. Do you notice something about this carving, Armand?”
Gamache leaned back and took a deep breath, releasing some of the tension he felt. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. But this time not to look at the image on the screen. This time he wanted to sense it.
After a moment he knew Thérèse Brunel was right. This carving was different. It was clearly the same artist, there was no mistaking that, but one significant element had changed.
“There’s no fear.”
Thérèse nodded. “Only peace. Contentment.”
“Even love,” said the Chief Inspector. He longed to hold this carving, to own it even, though he knew he never would. And he felt, not for the first time, that soft tug of desire. Of greed. He knew he’d never act on it. But he knew others might. This was a carving worth owning. All of them were, he suspected.
“What do you know about them?” he asked.
“They were sold through a company in Geneva. I know it well. Very discreet, very high end.”
“What did he get for them?”
“They sold seven of them. The first was six years ago. It went for fifteen thousand. The prices went up until they reached three hundred thousand for the last one. It sold this past winter. He says he figures he could get at least half a million for the next one.”
Gamache exhaled in astonishment. “Whoever sold them must have made hundreds of thousands.”
“The auction house in Geneva takes a hefty commission, but I did a quick calculation. The seller would have made about one point five million.”
Gamache’s mind was racing. And then it ran into a fact. Or rather into a statement.
I threw the carvings away, into the woods, when I walked home.
Olivier had said it. And once again, Olivier had lied.
Foolish, foolish man, thought Gamache. Then he looked back at the computer screen and the boy lying supine on the mountain, almost caressing it. Was it possible, he asked himself.
Could Olivier have actually done it? Killed the Hermit?
A million dollars was a powerful motive. But why kill the man who supplied the art?
No, there was more Olivier wasn’t telling, and if Gamache had any hope of finding the real killer it was time for the truth.
Why does Gabri have to be such a fucking queer, thought Clara. And a fag. And why do I have to be such a fucking coward?
“Yes, that’s the one,” she heard herself say, in an out-of-body moment. The day had warmed up but she pulled her coat closer as they stood on the sidewalk.
“Where can I drive you?” Denis Fortin asked.
Where? Clara didn’t know where Gamache would be but she had his cell-phone number. “I’ll find my own way, thanks.”
They shook hands.
“This show’s going to be huge, for both of us. I’m very happy for you,” he said, warmly.
“There is one other thing. Gabri. He’s a friend of mine.”
She felt his hand release hers. But still, he smiled at her.
“I just need to say that he’s not queer and he’s not a fag.”
“He isn’t? He sure seems gay.”
“Well, yes, he’s gay.” She could feel herself growing confused.
“What’re you saying, Clara?”
“You called him queer, and a fag.”
“Yes?”
“It just didn’t seem very nice.”
Now she felt like a schoolgirl. Words like “nice” weren’t used very often in the art world. Unless it was as an insult.
“You’re not trying to censor me, are you?”
His voice had become like treacle. Clara could feel his words sticking to her. And his eyes, once thoughtful, were now hard. With warning.
“No, I’m just saying that I was surprised and I didn’t like hearing my friend called names.”
“But he is queer and a fag. You admitted it yourself.”
“I said he’s gay.” She could feel her cheeks sizzling and knew she must be beet red.
“Oh,” he sighed and shook his head. “I understand.” He looked at her with sadness now, as one might look at a sick pet. “It’s the small-town girl after all. You’ve been in that tiny village too long, Clara. It’s made you small-minded. You censor yourself and now you’re trying to stifle my voice. That’s very dangerous. Political correctness, Clara. An artist needs to break down boundaries, push, challenge, shock. You’re not willing to do that, are you?”
She stood staring, unable to grasp what he was saying.
“No, I didn’t think so,” he said. “I tell the truth, and I say it in a way that might shock, but is at least real. You’d prefer something just pretty. And nice.”
“You insulted a lovely man, behind his back,” she said. But she could feel the tears now. Of rage, but she knew how it must look. It must look like weakness.
“I’m going to have to reconsider the show,” he said. “I’m very disappointed. I thought you were the real deal, but obviously you were just pretending. Superficial. Trite. I can’t risk my gallery’s reputation on someone not willing to take artistic risks.”
There was a rare break in traffic and Denis Fortin darted across Saint-Urbain. On the other side he looked back and shook his head again. Then he walked briskly to his car.
Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir and Agent Morin approached the Parra home. Beauvoir had expected something traditional. Something a Czech woodsman might live in. A Swiss chalet perhaps. To Beauvoir there was Québécois and then “other.” Foreign. The Chinese were all alike, as were Africans. The South Americans, if he thought of them at all, looked the same, ate the same foods and lived in exactly the same homes. A place somewhat less attractive than his own. The English he knew to be all the same. Nuts.
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