A Great Reckoning (10 page)

She shifted her gaze and noticed that Professor Leduc had broken away from the small group around him and walked over to the new arrival. Shaking the old man's hand. Smiling. The two exchanged a few words, then the Duke glanced over at the Commander.

It was not a friendly look.

She kept her eyes, then, on Gamache.

Anyone who produced such loathing in another human being was worth watching.

Yes, she thought, taking another sip of her drink and hearing the clinking ice and the scratching of the blizzard outside, it might not be fun at the academy, but that Asian cadet was right. It was going to be interesting.

What Cadet Amelia Choquet didn't know, couldn't know, what no one in that room knew, was that before the snow melted one of them would be dead. And one of them would have done it.

“Interesting” didn't begin to describe what was about to happen.

 

CHAPTER 8

“Don't look now,” Beauvoir bent down and whispered in Gamache's ear. “Brébeuf and Leduc have found each other.”

Jean-Guy watched Leduc place a friendly hand on the older man's arm.
Confrères
, Beauvoir thought. Brothers. Two of a kind.

Commander Gamache didn't turn to look. Instead he gestured toward a chair recently vacated. Jean-Guy considered it. It was black leather and looked like a mouth about to snap shut.

Resigning himself to it, he sat down, sliding to the back of the seat.

“
Merde
,” he whispered.

It was, without doubt, the most comfortable chair he'd ever sat in.

It was just one of a number of unexpected things in the room.

So much had happened so quickly when Jean-Guy accepted the post as second-in-command, he hadn't had a chance yet to ask Gamache about keeping Leduc on. And bringing Brébeuf back.

Either decision would be considered ill advised. Together they seemed reckless, verging on lunacy.

Putting them on the same campus was bad enough, but inviting them to the same party? Then giving them alcohol?

Beauvoir wondered, in passing, if either man was armed. Gamache had forbidden firearms among the staff, even the Sûreté officers on loan to the academy. And so Jean-Guy, against his will and instincts, had left his pistol locked up at Sûreté headquarters.

As Beauvoir watched, the two men grew more and more chummy. Leduc animated, and Brébeuf more contained, nodding. Agreeing.

Michel Brébeuf, the former superintendent of the Sûreté, had been one of the most powerful officers in the force before his disgrace.

Serge Leduc had been the most powerful presence in the academy, turning out hundreds of cadets, giving them weapons even as he took away their moral compass.

To see the two heads bowed together was deeply disturbing.

“Should I go over there?” Jean-Guy asked, preparing to haul himself out of the spectacularly comfortable chair.

“Why?”

“To stop them,” said Beauvoir. “To break it up.”

“If they don't talk here, they'll talk somewhere else,” said Gamache. “At least they're doing it in plain sight.”

“This isn't some teenager learning to drink,
patron,
” said Jean-Guy, trying to keep his tone civil. “These men are…” he searched for the word.

“Merde?”
asked Gamache with a smile. Then the smile faded and his face grew serious. “Though I think the word you're really looking for is evil.”

“I wasn't,” said Beauvoir, quite truthfully. He didn't think in terms of good and evil. He didn't even think in terms of good and bad.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir's thinking was very clear and very simple. Did someone need to be stopped? Did their actions need to be arrested? Were they breaking the law, causing harm, intentionally or not?

And for those two men, no action would be unintentional. Every act was well considered.

But the same could be said, Beauvoir knew, about Armand Gamache, who had intentionally, Beauvoir now realized, placed his back to the door. To Brébeuf and Leduc.

As though to invite attack. Or to send a message.

Armand Gamache wasn't just in command, he was in total command. He was invulnerable. Serge Leduc and Michel Brébeuf could do their worst, and it would never overwhelm Gamache's best. He wasn't worried.

It might be the message Gamache was sending, but Jean-Guy Beauvoir knew it wasn't the truth. And he suspected Gamache knew that too.

The back, turned on evil, was symbolic. But nothing more.

Serge Leduc had greeted the former superintendent of the Sûreté with no sign of censure for what Brébeuf had done.

And Brébeuf? He'd know perfectly well what Leduc had done, and was capable of doing.

He greeted the Duke as a king in exile welcomed a loyal subject.

“You might not care,
patron,
” said Jean-Guy, “but what about them?”

Gamache turned in his chair to see a clump of students standing behind the two professors. Waiting to be tossed a crumb of attention.

Commander Gamache turned back to Jean-Guy.

“I didn't say I don't care. I care very deeply. That's why I'm here.”

His voice, while calm, carried a gravity and even a censure that Beauvoir didn't miss.

“
Désolé,
of course you care. But shouldn't we do something?”

“We are doing something, Jean-Guy.”

Gamache focused on the cadets who'd joined him and Madame Gamache and Jean-Guy around the fireplace. And Armand Gamache tried not to show his unease.

Michel Brébeuf had not been invited to the party. He wasn't even expected at the academy until the following day.

Yet here he was. Out of the storm. And into the arms of Serge Leduc. It wasn't, perhaps, surprising. But it was disappointing.

And then some.

He'd brought these two men together for a reason, but he thought he had some control over them. Now he saw he almost certainly had less than he thought.

As he turned back to the bright hearth, Gamache felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

*   *   *

Most of the staff and students had left and Amelia was heading for the door when she noticed the brown paper folded on the side table, with a picture on top. She picked it up.

“What do you think of it?” Commander Gamache asked, and Amelia started, then made to put the picture down, but it was too late.

He'd caught her.

She shrugged.

“You can do better than that,” he said, holding out his hand. She gave him the painting.

“It's a map,” she said. “Somewhere in Québec.” She pointed to the snowman with the hockey stick. “But what's with the pyramid?”

Gamache's eye never left her. Amelia Choquet had found the strangest thing in a strange picture.

“I have no idea.”

“I like the card,” she said. “Your friends expect you to fuck up?”

“Always.”

The ring piercing her lip twitched, betraying amusement.

“Again?” she asked, pointing to the word hanging off the end of Ruth's sentence.

“You don't get gray hair without having messed up a few times,” he said. “You know?”

He held her eyes, and for the second time that day she saw intelligence there.

He was, she told herself, just another large, white, middle-aged man. She'd had her fill of them. Literally.

“Have you figured out what the academy motto means?” he asked.

“
Velut arbor aevo
. ‘As a tree with the passage of time.' It means you have to put down roots.”

She was wrong, she knew. The motto might mean that, at a superficial level, but there was more to it. And more to this man.

She'd noticed something else in his gaze. A shrewdness, as though he knew her better than she knew herself. As though he saw something in her, something she didn't think he altogether liked.

*   *   *

“Well, that was interesting,” said Reine-Marie after they'd cleaned up and could finally collapse into the seats by the fire. “Did you happen to notice a slight tension?”

It was asked with wide-eyed innocence, as though she could be wrong.

“Maybe just a little,” said her husband, joining her on the sofa.

“Want some?” asked Beauvoir. He'd gone down into the kitchens and grabbed a tray of sandwiches, which he held with one hand while eating with the other.

Now he offered the tray to Armand and Reine-Marie, who each took one.

“I don't like it,” said Beauvoir, sitting in the Barcelona chair, which he now claimed as his own.

“What?” asked Reine-Marie.

“This whole thing,” said Beauvoir. “Socializing with cadets.”

“The lower orders?” asked Reine-Marie. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

“Well, maybe a little,” he admitted. “What's with that Goth girl? How did she get in? She doesn't seem to even want to be here. Some of the cadets might be a little soft, but at least they're eager. She's just…”

He looked for the right word, then turned to his father-in-law.

“No, not evil,” said Beauvoir, before Gamache could.

“I wasn't going to say that.”

“Then how would you describe her?” Beauvoir asked.

“Adrift,” said Gamache. Then he paused. “No, not adrift. Drowning.”

“Troubled, certainly,” said Reine-Marie. “Why did you admit her, Armand? When last I heard, she'd been rejected.”

“What?” Beauvoir struggled to sit forward on the chair. “She'd been rejected and you changed that? Why?”

“I went over the application for every first-year cadet,” said Armand. “They're all here because I saw something in them.”

“And what did you see in her?” Reine-Marie asked, getting in before Beauvoir could ask the same question, though not, she knew, with the same tone.

“A last chance,” he said. “A lifeline.”

There was a knock on the door and he got up.

“This isn't a reform school,” Beauvoir called after him. “The Sûreté Academy isn't a charity.”

At the door Gamache turned, his hand on the knob. “Who said the lifeline was for her?”

Armand opened the door and came face-to-face with Michel Brébeuf.

Reine-Marie stood up and walked to her husband's side.

“Armand,” said Brébeuf, then turning to her, “Reine-Marie.”

“Michel,” she said, her voice curt but courteous. She could smell the Scotch on his breath but he didn't seem drunk.

“I'm sorry I showed up uninvited to your party.” He gave her an embarrassed, almost boyish, smile. “I didn't mean to. I came in a day early because of the storm and wanted to drop by to let you know I was here. I walked right in on the party. I came back to apologize.”

“I'm a little tired,” Reine-Marie said to Armand. “I think I'll go to bed. Michel.”

She nodded toward him, and he smiled.

As Reine-Marie left the room, Jean-Guy caught a look pass between the Gamaches.

She was angry, livid, at this further incursion into their private space, their private time. Jean-Guy had rarely seen his mother-in-law angry. Armand knew it too and acknowledged it with a quick squeeze of her hand before she walked into the bedroom and closed the door. Firmly.

“You know Jean-Guy Beauvoir, of course,” said Armand, and the two shook hands.

“Yes, Inspector. How are you?”

“Fine,” said Beauvoir. “As are you, obviously.”

Superintendent Brébeuf had also been Beauvoir's boss, but so far up the ladder that they rarely met. And now here they were, as though equals. As though nothing had happened.

They were all playing the game. The charade.

One word. Sounds like hypocrisy.

But Beauvoir also knew there was more to it than that. Yes, the Gamaches were pretending to be civil. But there was history there. Not just of hurt, but of deep affection.

Would the affection win? Should it? Was such a thing even possible? Beauvoir wondered.

Jean-Guy watched as Gamache invited Brébeuf in. The former superintendent stood in front of the fire and waited for Armand to invite him to sit.

It was a long, ripe moment.

And then Armand gestured, and Michel sat.

And Beauvoir left, taking the sick feeling in his stomach with him.

 

CHAPTER 9

“Help yourself,” said Armand, waving toward the sideboard and the bottles lined up there.

Without waiting to see what Brébeuf did, he went into the bedroom and over to Reine-Marie, who was hanging up her clothes.

“You okay?” he asked, watching her fluid movements, her back to him.

Then she turned around and he could see she'd been crying.

“Oh,” was all he managed, taking her in his arms.

After a few moments, she pulled away and he handed her a handkerchief.

“It's just upsetting,” she said, waving the handkerchief as though to clear the air. “When I see Michel, and hear him, for a moment I forget. It's like nothing has happened. And then I remember what happened.”

She sighed. And looked toward the closed door.

“Do you know what you're doing?” she asked, dragging his handkerchief under her eyes to wipe away the mascara.

“Michel Brébeuf is no threat,” he said, holding her hands and holding her eyes. “Not anymore. He's a paper tiger.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “I'm sure,
ma belle
. Are you all right? Do you want me to ask him to leave?”

“
Non
. I'm fine. I have some reading to do. You go back and entertain that shithead.”

Armand looked at her with surprise.

She laughed. “I seem to be channeling Ruth. It's quite liberating.”

“That's one word for it. After I get rid of Michel, I'll call an exorcist.”

He kissed her and left.

At one in the morning, Reine-Marie turned out the light. Armand was still in the living room with Michel. She could hear their laughter.