A Great Reckoning Page 4

  “You’re here to fire me.”

  And now Gamache did something completely unexpected. He smiled. Not broadly. Not smugly. But with some amusement.

  “I can see how you’d expect that,” he said. “But in fact, I’m here to ask you to stay on.”

  The handgun hit the floor with a thud.

  “I believe you’ve dropped something,” said Gamache, getting to his feet. “You will not be my second-in-command, of course, but you will continue as full professor, teaching crime prevention and community relations. I’d like your course outline by the end of the week.”

  Serge Leduc sat there, unable to move or to speak, long after Commander Gamache’s footsteps had stopped echoing down the hall.

  And in the silence Leduc realized what Gamache exuded. It wasn’t force. It was power.

  CHAPTER 4

  “What’ve you found?”

  “Piss off,” said Ruth, and turned her bony back to protect what was in her hands. Then she shot a sly glance over her shoulder. “Oh, it’s you. Sorry.”

  “Who did you think it was?” asked Reine-Marie, more amused than annoyed.

  She’d been sitting beside Ruth every afternoon for almost two months, going through the documents in the blanket box, as Olivier had asked. Most afternoons, like this one, Clara and Myrna also came over and helped, though it never felt like a chore.

  The four women sat around the fireplace, sipping cafés au lait and Scotch, eating chocolatines and examining the mass of papers Olivier and Gabri had pulled from the walls of the bistro twenty years earlier, while renovating.

  Reine-Marie and Ruth, and Rosa, her duck, shared the sofa, while Clara and Myrna took armchairs across from each other.

  Clara was taking a break from her self-portrait, though privately Reine-Marie wondered if when Clara said she was painting herself, she didn’t mean it literally. Each afternoon Clara showed up with food in her hair and dabs of paint on her face. Today it was a shade of bright orange and marinara sauce.

  Across from Clara sat her best friend, Myrna, who ran the New and Used Bookstore next door to the bistro. She’d wedged herself into the large chair, enjoying every word of her reading and every bite of her chocolatine.

  A hundred years ago, when the papers were first shoved into the walls as insulation against the biting Québec winter, the women of the village would have gathered for a sewing bee.

  This was the modern equivalent. A reading bee.

  At least, Clara, Myrna, and Reine-Marie were reading. Reine-Marie had no idea what Ruth was doing.

  The old poet had spent the previous day and this one staring at a single sheet of paper. Ignoring the rest of the documents. Ignoring her friends. Ignoring the Scotch gleaming in the cut glass in front of her. That was most alarming.

  “What are you looking at?” Reine-Marie persisted.

  Now both Clara and Myrna lowered the pages they’d been studying to study Ruth. Even Rosa looked at the elderly woman quizzically. Though Reine-Marie had come to understand that ducks rarely looked anything but.

  Reine-Marie had fallen into a relaxed routine of sorting through the township’s archives in the morning, then heading to the bistro in the afternoon.

  On weekends, Armand would join her, sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs, nursing a beer and going over his own papers.

  Though the pine blanket box looked a little like a treasure chest and had yielded many fascinating things, none could remotely be considered treasure, not even by an archivist who saw gold where others saw insulation.

  When Ruth had started this project, the leaves outside had been bright amber and red and yellow. Now Christmas had come and gone and the trees were heavy with snow. A thick layer lay on the village so that the only way to get from one place to another was via trenches dug out by Billy Williams.

  It was now early January. A peaceful time of the year, when the cheery lights and wreaths were still up, but there was no longer the pressure of the season. Their fridges and freezers were full of shortbread and fruitcake and turkey casseroles. Their own form of insulation against the winter.

  Sitting in front of the bistro fire, looking from the snow outside to the stack of old documents, Reine-Marie felt a deep peace and contentment, marred only by the look she sometimes caught on Armand’s face.

  His first term as commander was just days away now. She knew the changes he’d implemented were controversial, even revolutionary.

  Against all logic, and advice, he’d kept on the most senior and corrupt professor, Serge Leduc. He’d gone to Gaspé and tracked down the quisling Michel Brébeuf. He’d brought in sweeping changes to the curriculum, and gone through each and every application for admission, changing many of the dots from green to red, and vice versa.

  He’d instituted a policy of allowing the community access to the magnificent facilities at the new academy, as well as an obligation for the students and staff to volunteer as coaches, as drivers. As visitors to the lonely and readers for the blind. As Big Sisters and Big Brothers. They would deliver meals where needed, and dig out driveways after blizzards. They would be at the disposal of the mayor of Saint-Alphonse in times of need. The mayor and the new commander would work together.

  The mayor had met these suggestions with a marked lack of enthusiasm, bordering on disdain.

  The community had, after all, greeted the arrival of the Sûreté Academy a few years earlier with unalloyed delight, helping them find an appropriate site on the outskirts of Saint-Alphonse.

  The mayor and the council had worked closely with Serge Leduc. Right up until the moment the mayor had received the notice that the academy would not be moving to the edge of town after all. Instead, it would be appropriating land right in the center. The plot Serge Leduc knew was reserved for their much-longed-for recreation center.

  The mayor could barely believe it.

  It was an act of betrayal not easily forgiven, and never forgotten. And the mayor, not being a stupid man, wasn’t going to be fooled again.

  The community didn’t want anything to do with the academy, the deceitful bastards. The professors didn’t want anything to do with the community, the great unwashed.

  In that they were in agreement.

  “All the more reason to reach out, don’t you think?” Gamache had said to Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his former second-in-command and now his son-in-law, as they’d sat together one evening at the Gamaches’ home in Three Pines.

  “I think you go out of your way to find mountains to climb,” said Beauvoir, who was reading a book on a particularly disastrous Everest ascent.

  Gamache had laughed. “I wish it was a mountain. At least they’re majestic. Conquering them brings some sense of triumph. The Sûreté Academy is more like a great big hole filled with merde. And I’ve fallen into it.”

  “Fallen, patron? As I remember it, you jumped.”

  Gamache had laughed again and bowed his head over his notebook.

  Beauvoir watched this, and waited. He’d been waiting for months now, ever since Gamache had told Jean-Guy and Annie about his decision to take over the academy.

  While some had been surprised, it had seemed the perfect move to Jean-Guy, who knew the man better than most. It had also seemed perfect to Annie, who was relieved her father would at least, at last, be safe.

  Jean-Guy had not told his pregnant wife that the academy was, in fact, the last shit pit in the Sûreté. And her father was in up to his neck.

  Beauvoir had sat in the study, quietly, and then taken his book on Everest into the living room and read, in front of the cheerful fire, of perilous ascents. Of oxygen sickness and avalanches and great jutting shards of ice ten stories high that sometimes toppled over without warning, crushing man and beast beneath.

  Jean-Guy sat in the comfortable living room and shivered as he read of bodies left on the mountain where they fell. Frozen as they reached out, for help or to drag themselves one inch closer to the summit.

  What had they thought, these ice men and women, in their final lucid moments?

  Would their last thought be why? Why had this seemed a good idea?

  And he wondered if the man in the study would one day ask himself the same thing.

  Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir knew that his mountain analogy with Gamache had been wrong. If you died on the side of a mountain, it was in the middle of a selfish, meaningless act. A feat of strength and ego, wrapped in bravado.

  No, the academy wasn’t a mountain. It was, as Gamache had said, a cesspool. But it was a task that needed to be done. As went the academy, so went the Sûreté. If one was merde, the other would be too.

  Chief Inspector Gamache had cleaned up the Sûreté, but he knew his work was only half done. Now Commander Gamache would turn his attention to the academy.

  So far, while firing former professors and hiring new ones, he had not named a second-in-command. Everyone assumed he’d approach Jean-Guy. The younger man had assumed that too, and waited. And was still waiting. And beginning to wonder.

  “Would you take it?” Annie had asked one morning over breakfast.

  Never a petite person, she had blossomed with pregnancy, which was one way of putting it. All Jean-Guy cared about was that she and the baby were healthy. He would kill if he had to, to get her that last tub of Häagen-Dazs.

  “Do you think I should?” Jean-Guy had replied, and seen Annie smile.

  “You’re kidding, right? Give up your position as inspector in the homicide division, one of the most senior officers in the Sûreté, to go to the academy? You?”

  “Then you think I should do it?”

  She’d laughed in that full-hearted way she had. “I don’t think ‘should’ has ever entered your thinking. I think you will do it.”

  “And why would I?”

  “Because you love my father.”

  It was true.

  He would follow Armand Gamache through the gates of Hell, and the Sûreté Academy was as close as Québec got to Hades.

  * * *

  Reine-Marie sat in the bistro and looked out at the darkness and the three great pines, visible only because of the Christmas lights festooned on them. The blue and red and green lights, luminous under a layer of fresh snow, looked as though they were suspended in midair.

  It was just five o’clock but it could have been midnight.

  Patrons had begun arriving at the bistro, meeting friends for a cinq à sept, the cocktail hour at the end of the day.

  Armand hadn’t joined her, preferring the peace and quiet of the study as the first day of term approached. She looked across the village green, past the cheerful trees, to their home, and the light at the study window.

  Reine-Marie had been relieved when she’d heard his decision to take over the academy. It seemed a perfect fit for a man more inclined to track down a rare book than a murderer. But find killers he’d done, for thirty years. And he’d been strangely good at it. He’d hunted serial killers, singular killers, mass murderers. Those who premeditated and those who meditated not at all, but simply lashed out. All had taken lives, and all had been found by her husband, with very few exceptions.

  Yes, Reine-Marie had been relieved when, after reviewing all the offers and discussing them with her, Armand had decided to take on the task of commanding the Sûreté Academy. Of clearing up the mess left by years of brutality and corruption.

  She’d been relieved, right up until the moment she’d surprised that grim look on his face.

  And then a chill had seeped into her. Not a killing cold, but a warning of worse to come.

  “You’ve been looking at that for a day now,” said Myrna, breaking into Reine-Marie’s thoughts and gesturing toward the paper in Ruth’s hand. The old poet held it delicately, at the edges.

  “May I see it?” Reine-Marie asked, her voice gentle, her hand out as though coaxing a lost dog into a car. Had she had a bottle of Scotch, Ruth would’ve been wagging her tail on the front seat by now.

  Ruth looked from one to the other, then she relinquished it. But not to Reine-Marie.

  She gave it to Clara.

  CHAPTER 5

  “It’s a map,” said Armand, bending over it.

  “What was your first clue, Miss Marple?” asked Ruth. “Those lines? They’re what we call roads. This”—she placed her knotted finger on the paper—“is a river.”

  She spoke the last few words slowly, with infinite patience.

  Armand straightened up and looked at her over his reading glasses, then went back to studying the paper on the table under the lamp.

  They’d gathered at Clara’s place this wintery night for a dinner of bouillabaisse, with fresh baguette from Sarah’s boulangerie.

  Clara and Gabri were in the kitchen just putting the final ingredients into the broth. Scallops and shrimp and mussels and chunks of pink salmon, while Myrna sliced and toasted the bread.

  A delicate aroma of garlic and fennel drifted into the living room and mingled with the scent of wood smoke from the hearth. Outside, the night was crisp and starless as clouds rolled in, threatening yet more snow.

  But inside it was warm and peaceful.

  “Imbecile,” mumbled Ruth.

  The fact was, despite Ruth’s comments, it wasn’t obvious what the paper was.

  At first glance, it didn’t look like a map at all. While worn and torn a little, it was beautifully and intricately illustrated, with bears and deer and geese placed around the mountains and forests. In a riot of seasonal confusion, there were spring lilac and plump peony beside maple trees in full autumn color. In the upper-right corner, a snowman wearing a tuque and a habitant sash, a ceinture fléchée, around his plump middle held up a hockey stick in triumph.

  The overall effect was one of unabashed joy. Of silliness that somehow managed to be both sweet and very affecting.

  This was no primitive drawing by a rustic with more enthusiasm than talent. This was created by someone familiar enough with art to know the masters, and skilled enough to imitate them. Except for the snowman, which, as far as Gamache knew, had never appeared in a Constable, Monet, or even Group of Seven masterpiece.

  Yes, it took a while to see beyond all that, to what it really was, at its heart.

  A map.

  Complete with contour lines and landmarks. Three small pines, like playful children, were clearly meant to be their village. There were walking paths and stone walls and even Larsen’s Rock, so named because Sven Larsen’s cow got stuck on it before being rescued.

  Gamache bent closer. And yes, there was the cow.

  There were even, faint like silk threads, latitude and longitude lines. It was as though a work of art had been swallowed by an ordnance map.

  “See anything strange?” asked Ruth.

  “Yes, I do,” he said, turning to look at the old poet.

  She laughed.

  “I meant in the map,” she said. “And thank you for the compliment.”

  Now it was Gamache’s turn to smile as he went back to studying the paper.

  There were many words he’d use to describe it. Beautiful. Detailed. Delicate yet bold. Unusual, certainly, in its intersection of practicality and artistry.

  But was it strange? No, that wasn’t a word he’d use. And yet he knew the old poet. Ruth loved words and used them intentionally. Even the thoughtless words were used with thought.

  If she said “strange,” she meant it.

  Though Ruth’s idea of strange might not be anyone’s. She thought water was strange. And vegetables. And paying bills.

  His brow furrowed as he noticed the celebrating snowman seemed to be pointing. There. He bent closer. There.

  “There’s a pyramid.” Armand’s finger hovered over the image.

  “Yes, yes,” said Ruth impatiently, as though there were pyramids everywhere. “But do you notice anything strange?”

  “It’s not signed,” he said, trying again.

  “When was the last time you saw a map that was?” she demanded. “Try harder, moron.”

  On hearing Ruth’s querulous voice, Reine-Marie looked over, caught Armand’s eye, and smiled in commiseration before going back to her own conversation.

  She and Olivier were discussing the blanket-box finds that day. A layer of Vogues from the early 1900s.

  “Fascinating reading,” she said.

  “I noticed.”

  Reine-Marie had long marveled at how much you could tell about a person by what was on their walls. The art, the books, the decor. But until now she had no idea you could also tell so much by what was in their walls.

  “A woman who loved fashion obviously lived there,” she said.

  “Either that,” said Olivier, “or a gay man.”

  He looked into the kitchen where Gabri was gesturing with a ladle as though dancing. Voguing, in fact.

  “Gabri’s great-grandfather, you think?” asked Reine-Marie.

  “If it’s possible to come from a long line of gay men, Gabri’s done it,” said Olivier, and Reine-Marie laughed.

  “Now,” she said, “what about the real find?”

  They looked over to where Armand and Ruth were huddled.

  “The map,” said Olivier. “Some marks on it. Maybe water damage. And dirt, but that’s to be expected. But being in the wall also preserved it. No exposure to sunlight. The colors are still vivid. It must be the same vintage as all the other stuff. A hundred years old or so. Is it worth anything, do you think?”

  “I’m just an archivist. You’re the antiques dealer.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t see selling it for more than a few dollars. It’s fun and the art is good, but basically it’s a novelty. Someone’s idea of a joke. And too local to be of interest to anyone but us.”

  Reine-Marie agreed. It certainly had a beauty to it, but part of that was its silliness. A cow? A pyramid, for God’s sake. And the three spirited pines.

  Dinner was announced, if Gabri shouting, “Hurry up, I’m starving,” could be considered an announcement. It certainly was not news.

  Over the scallops and shrimp and chunks of broth-infused salmon, they discussed the Montréal Canadiens and their winning season, they discussed international politics and the litter of unplanned puppies Madame Legault’s golden retriever had had.

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