A Great Reckoning

A Great Reckoning Page 3

by Louise Penny

  Chief Superintendent Brunel indicated the sitting area and they both took seats. In her late sixties now, the slight, elegant woman had come to policing late in life and had taken to it as though she had been born to investigate crime.

  She’d risen fast through the ranks, passing her old professor and colleague Chief Inspector Gamache, until she could rise no further.

  Her office had been redecorated in soft pastels since the former chief superintendent had been, what? “Replaced” was not really the word.

  While she’d been promoted beyond Gamache, they both knew it was a function of the politics within the Sûreté, and not competence. But still, she held the rank and commanded the office and the force with confidence.

  Armand handed her his dossiers and watched as she read. He got up and poured them both drinks, giving her one and taking his to the wall of glass.

  It was a view that never failed to move him, so much did he love Québec.

  “There’s going to be hell to pay, Armand,” she finally said.

  He remained where he was but turned and saw that while her face was serious, stern even, there was no criticism. It was simply a statement of fact.

  “Oui,” he agreed, and turned back to the view as she returned to the documents.

  “I see you’ve changed some of the students,” she said. “I’m not surprised. The problem will come from the faculty. You’re replacing at least half of them.”

  Now he walked back to his chair and sat, placing his almost untouched drink on the coaster and nodding. “How could there be significant change if the same people are in charge?”

  “I’m not disagreeing or arguing with you, but are you prepared for the blowback? These people will lose their pensions, their insurance. And they’ll be humiliated.”

  “Not by me. They’ve done it to themselves. And if they want to sue, I have the proof.” He looked not at all concerned. But neither was he triumphant. This was the tail end of a tragedy. And there was a sting in it.

  “I doubt they’ll sue,” she said, replacing the last file on the pile. “But neither will they go without a fight. It simply won’t be in public, or in the courts.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, sitting back. His face grim and determined.

  Armand watched as she turned to the final stack of dossiers. These were the files on the men and women he planned to invite to teach at the academy. To replace the men and women he was about to fire.

  Showing the list to Thérèse was a courtesy on his part. Chief Superintendent Brunel had no authority over the academy. The academy and the Sûreté were two separate entities, connected theoretically by a common belief in the need for “Service, Integrity, Justice.” The motto of the force.

  But the previous head of the school had commanded in name only. The reality was, he bowed to, then bent and finally broke under the demands of the former head of the Sûreté, who ran the school as his personal training ground.

  But Chief Superintendent Francoeur was no longer the head of the Sûreté. No longer with the force. No longer on this earth. Gamache had seen to that.

  And now Gamache was cleaning up the merde the man left behind.

  The first step was to establish autonomy, but also a courteous collaboration with his counterpart at the Sûreté.

  Commander Gamache watched as Chief Superintendent Brunel made her way down the pile of proposed professors, occasionally making notes or small comments, mumbling to herself. Until she reached the final dossier. She stared at it, then, without even opening it, she looked up at Gamache and held his eyes.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No.”

  She looked back down but didn’t touch the manila file. It was enough to see the name.

  Michel Brébeuf.

  When she looked up again, there was anger, bordering on rage, on her face.

  “This is madness, Armand.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Serge Leduc waited.

  He was prepared. All morning his iPhone had buzzed with text messages from colleagues, other professors at the academy, to say that the new commander was going to visit them.

  At eight in the morning they’d assumed it was a courtesy call. Armand Gamache was making the rounds to introduce himself and perhaps ask their opinions and advice.

  By nine o’clock a slight pall of doubt had descended, and the texts became more guarded.

  By eleven, the stream of information had become a trickle as fewer and fewer messages appeared in Professor Leduc’s inbox. And those that did were curt.

  Have you heard from Roland?

  Anyone know anything?

  I can hear him coming down the corridor.

  And finally, by noon, Leduc’s iPhone had fallen silent.

  He sat in his large office and looked at the books lining his walls. On weapons. On federal and provincial regulations. On common law and the Napoleonic Code. There were case histories and training manuals. The wall space not taken up with textbooks was allocated to his citations and an old etching of the parts of a musket.

  A small man in his mid-forties, but still powerfully built, Leduc had been moved to the academy after he’d been caught with drugs stolen from the Sûreté evidence locker.

  Leduc had nursed a slight suspicion that Chief Superintendent Francoeur had engineered the whole thing. Not that he wasn’t guilty. Leduc had been skimming from the mountain of seized drugs for years, selling them on to crime syndicates. What struck him as suspicious was that he’d suddenly been caught just as an opening for the number two position at the academy had come up.

  Francoeur had presented Inspector Leduc with a choice. Become second-in-command at the academy or be fired.

  Serge Leduc had navigated the realpolitik of the Sûreté by being a pragmatist. If this was what the Chief Superintendent wanted, then so be it. It was unhelpful and unhealthy to nurse a grudge or to fight the inevitable. Especially against Sylvain Francoeur. Leduc himself had been an enforcer long enough to know what being fired by Francoeur might mean.

  That had been almost a decade ago, and with his transfer a new era had dawned. Though not, perhaps, an Age of Enlightenment.

  On Francoeur’s orders, Serge Leduc had reshaped the academy. Picking and choosing the recruits. Changing the curriculum. Guiding, nurturing, and whipping the young men and women into shape. And the shape they took was that of Serge Leduc.

  Any recruit who resisted or even appeared about to question was marked for special treatment. Something guaranteed to create an attitude adjustment.

  The actual head of the academy had protested feebly but was just going through the motions. The Commander excelled at form without function. He was an impressive figurehead, a relic kept in place to calm worried mothers and fathers who naturally, though mistakenly, believed the primary danger to their children was physical.

  The Commander inspired confidence with his gray hair and straight back, in his dress uniform on entrance day when he smiled at the eager recruits, and on graduation when they smiled at him smugly, knowingly. The rest of the time he cowered in his office, afraid of the phone, afraid of the knock on the door, afraid of the night and afraid of the dawn.

  And now he was gone. And Chief Superintendent Francoeur was gone. “Fired,” as it were, in an irony not lost on Leduc.

  And now Professor Leduc waited for the knock on the door.

  He wasn’t worried. He was the Duke. And all this belonged to him.

  * * *

  Armand Gamache walked down the long corridor. They’d torn down the old academy, where he himself had trained, a few years earlier and relocated to the South Shore of Montréal to this new glass and concrete and steel structure.

  Gamache, while appreciating tradition and respecting history, had not mourned the loss of the former academy. It was only bricks and mortar. What mattered wasn’t what the building looked like but what happened inside.

  Two Sûreté agents walked behind Gamache, personally chosen for this detail and lent to him by T

hérèse Brunel.

  He stopped at the door. The final one on his list. And without hesitation, he knocked.

  * * *

  Leduc heard it and despite himself gave a tiny, involuntary spasm. And he realized that a small part of himself never thought the rap on the door would ever really come.

  But still, he wasn’t worried.

  He got up, and turning his back on the door, he folded his arms across his broad chest and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window at the playing field below, covered in a layer of undisturbed snow.

  * * *

  Gamache waited.

  He heard the agents beginning to shuffle and grow restless behind him. He could almost see them shooting glances at each other and frowning.

  But still he waited, clasping his large hands behind his back. No need to knock again. The man inside had heard and now was playing a game. But it was a game of solitaire.

  Gamache was declining to play. Instead, he used the time to think about the best way to implement his plans.

  Serge Leduc was not an issue. He was not even an obstacle. He was, in fact, part of the plan.

  * * *

  Leduc stared out the window and waited for the next knock. A sharper rap. An impatient little tattoo on his door. But none came.

  Had Gamache left?

  Sylvain Francoeur had always declared that Chief Inspector Gamache was a weak man who hid it well behind a thin façade often mistaken for wisdom.

  “His one real talent is fooling others into believing that he has talent,” the head of the Sûreté had proclaimed more than once. “Armand Gamache, filled with integrity and courage. Bullshit. You know why he hates me? Because I know him for what he is.”

  By this time, Francoeur was usually a few Scotches in and had become voluble and more than usually aggressive. Most subordinates knew enough to excuse themselves and get the hell out after the third drink. But Serge Leduc stayed, excited by this game of chicken and because he had nowhere else to go.

  Francoeur would lean across his desk, looking past the bottle of Ballantine’s, to whoever was left. His face suffused with blood and rage.

  “He’s a coward. Weak, weak, weak. He hires the goddamned dregs, you know. The agents no one else wants. The ones better men have thrown out. Gamache picks up garbage. And you know why?”

  Leduc knew why. He’d heard this story before. But just because the familiar words came out in a miasma of Scotch and malice didn’t make them untrue.

  “Because he doesn’t like competition. He surrounds himself with sycophants and losers to make himself look better. He hates guns. Afraid of them. Fucking coward. Fooled a lot of people, but not me.”

  Francoeur would shake his head and his hand would creep to his own handgun in the holster on his belt. The gun that Armand Gamache would one day use to kill him.

  “This isn’t a ‘police gentle,’” Francoeur liked to say at convocation, when the students graduated from cadets to agents, streaming into the Sûreté like water through a cracked hull. “It’s not a ‘police kindness.’ It’s a police force. It’s called that for a reason. We use force. We are a force. And one to be reckoned with.”

  That always brought wild applause from the students and slight unease from the families gathered in the auditorium.

  Chief Superintendent Francoeur didn’t care. His words weren’t for the parents and grandparents.

  During the term, Francoeur would visit the academy once a month, staying overnight in the lavish quarters reserved for him. After dinner he’d invite a select few to join him for drinks in the large living room overlooking the vast playing field. He’d regale the wide-eyed cadets with harrowing tales of great danger, of investigations wildly perilous, expertly leavened by the odd story of ridiculous criminals and silly mistakes.

  And then, when Francoeur judged the time was right, he’d insinuate the real message into his stories. That the Sûreté du Québec wasn’t there to be on guard for the population, but to be on guard against them. The citizens were the enemy.

  The only ones the recruits could really trust were their confrères in the Sûreté. And even then, they had to be careful. There were some intent on weakening the force from within.

  Serge Leduc would watch the unlined faces and wide eyes, and over the course of the months, the years, he’d see them change. And he would marvel at the skill of the Chief Superintendent, who could so easily create such little monsters.

  Chief Superintendent Francoeur was gone now but his legacy remained, in flesh and blood and in glass and steel. In the cold hard surfaces and sharp edges of the academy and the agents he’d designed.

  The new academy itself appeared simple, classic even. It was placed on land appropriated from the community of Saint-Alphonse, the Sûreté’s needs judged far greater than the population’s.

  It was designed as a quadrangle, with a playing field in the middle, enclosed by gleaming buildings on all four sides. The only way in was through a single gate.

  It gave the appearance of both transparency and strength. But in actuality, it was a fortress. A fiefdom.

  Serge Leduc stared out at the quadrangle. This was, he now suspected, his last day in that office. This was his final view of those fields.

  The knock on the door had confirmed that.

  But he would not leave meekly. If the new commander thought he could walk in there and take over his territory without a fight, then he wasn’t simply weak, he was stupid. And stupid people got what they deserved.

  Adjusting the holster on his belt and putting on his suit jacket, Leduc walked to his door and opened it. And came face-to-face with Armand Gamache. Though Leduc had to tilt his head back a little.

  “May I help you?”

  He’d never met the man in person, though he’d seen him often enough at a distance and in news reports. Now Leduc was surprised by how solid he was, though unlike Francoeur, Gamache did not exude force.

  But there was something there, something unusual about him. It was probably the scar at the temple, Leduc thought. It gave the impression of strength, but all it really meant was that the man was plodding and hadn’t ducked quickly enough.

  “Armand Gamache,” said the new commander, putting out his hand and smiling. “Do you have a moment?”

  At a subtle signal, the two large Sûreté agents stepped back across the corridor, but the man himself didn’t move, didn’t walk right by Leduc and lay claim to the office.

  Instead he stood there, politely waiting to be invited in.

  Leduc almost smiled. It would be all right after all.

  Here was the new commander, no better than the old one. One relic replaced by another. Put Gamache into a dress uniform and he would look impressive. But blow and he’d fall down.

  But then Serge Leduc met Gamache’s eyes, and in that instant he understood what Gamache was really doing.

  The new commander could, especially with the help of the large agents, force his way into Leduc’s office. But what Gamache was in fact doing was much more cunning and far more insidious. And for the first time, Serge Leduc wondered if Francoeur had been wrong.

  Gamache had killed the Chief Superintendent with Francoeur’s own gun. It was an act that was both final and symbolic.

  And now Serge Leduc looked into those calm, confident, intelligent eyes and he realized Gamache was doing the same thing to him. Not killing him. Not physically anyway. Armand Gamache was waiting for Leduc to invite him in. To voluntarily step aside.

  Because then the defeat would be absolute.

  Anyone could take something by force, but not many could get someone to surrender without a fight.

  So far, Armand Gamache had taken the academy without a fight. And this was the last hill.

  Professor Leduc moved his left arm, so that his wrist felt the butt of the handgun through his jacket. As he did that, he lifted his right hand and shook Gamache’s. Holding the man’s hand and his eyes. Both of which were steady, and displayed neither anger nor challenge.