Chapter 3
“Merci.” Myrna accepted the bowl of café au lait just as Gabri threw himself into the armchair beside the hearth.
“So how’s the painting going?” asked Gabri.
Clara moaned.
“Let’s talk about something more cheerful,” said Myrna. “Like the frost warning.”
“Why did I call it Just before something happens?” Clara asked. “How do you paint nothing? Why didn’t I call it Something happened?”
“Or Just as something happens,” suggested Gabri. Which was not helpful.
“But isn’t that life?” Myrna asked, moving her pain au chocolat away from Gabri’s reach. “We’re sitting here calmly. But I’m sure something’s about to happen. It always is. For instance, Gabri was about to take my pastry.”
“Oh, dear God,” muttered Clara. “I really am fucked.”
“Or,” said Gabri, “are you about to be fucked?”
Jean-Guy stepped closer until his nose was practically pressed against the map. Then he turned to Armand.
“We still don’t know why Charles visited this specific lake. There’re hundreds to choose from. Why this one? There’s nothing there.”
The two men stared, willing the map to cough up one, just one more, of its secrets.
Jean-Guy was right, and yet wrong. There was nothing at the lake itself.
They’d looked. But something had been written on the lake.
Numbers and symbols. In Charles’s hand. There were also numbers scrawled on other lakes, but they’d realized those were dossier numbers.
Approvals for the illegal sale of primary industries to foreign investors, given by Marcus Lauzon, the former Deputy Prime Minister, in exchange for massive payoffs.
Though illegal, it had nothing to do with the poisoning plot.
So what did those other numbers mean, on that one lake. The last one Charles Langlois visited before he was murdered. But stare as they might, the figures still held on to their secret.
Jean-Guy now pointed to the bottom of the paper. “It looks like he crossed into Vermont, but there’re no lakes or rivers marked up.”
Eager to make his point, he forgot to turn toward Armand, and now had to repeat himself.
“True.” Armand looked at the faint line the biologist had drawn leading from Canada into the States.
“What is it?” Jean-Guy asked.
Armand’s expression had become dissatisfied, even frustrated. “We still haven’t found Charles’s laptop. It’s possible the conspirators didn’t know about it and the map. I was only asked about the notebooks.”
“Asked”? thought Jean-Guy. Could putting a gun to Armand’s head really be called “asking”?
The deputy commissioner of the RCMP was beyond being questioned.
He’d been killed in the water-treatment plant.
The fact the second most powerful Mountie was involved in the plot had caused a national scandal and all but paralyzed the RCMP. They were still sorting out the mess.
“We need to find that laptop,” said Armand.
“Agreed. We’re trying. But if it was that important, wouldn’t Charles have told you where to find it?
We found his map in the monastery and the notebooks where he hid them with his family.
But no laptop. We’ve looked everywhere.” Beauvoir hesitated, hating to say what he suspected.
“Is it possible, patron, that they found the laptop and destroyed it? Maybe that’s why they didn’t ask. ”
Armand was quiet. That was a disconcerting thought.
He’d stared at Jean-Guy as the younger man spoke, but like most people talking to the deaf, Jean-Guy had started off slowly, clearly, then picked up speed, so that lip-reading became more and more difficult.
But the truth was, Armand only picked up a fraction of what was said that way. The rest he read in the raised brow, the slightly furrowed forehead, the narrowed eyes. The uncontrollable blush or pallor. The hands. The smile. Their body language spoke volumes.
As the head of homicide, Armand Gamache had interviewed enough witnesses, enough suspects, to not rely solely on what people said.
And now he’d become like the monks of the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups.
Saint Gilbert Between the Wolves. Who’d taken a vow of silence and yet communicated volumes with a raised brow, a frown, a grin.
A gesture. Though unlike the monks, the silence in Armand’s world was not a vow, not voluntary.
And he didn’t live in silence—that would have been a blessing. He lived with a permanent shriek. Like tinnitus on steroids.
At first Armand thought, feared, the screaming in his head would drive him mad.
Brought on by the report of the gun right next to his head, it meant he struggled to sleep, to read, to think.
He often felt off-balance, nauseous. There was now a buffer between himself and his family. His friends. His colleagues.
Reine-Marie.
It was lonely. He was lonely.
But with time, and help, he found himself more at peace with the shriek. He tried to think of it as a constant companion. Granted, one that seemed perpetually angry at him, but still, the perception seemed to help.
He wasn’t sure if it was that, or just time, but it seemed to Armand that the cicadas were leaving. The siren seemed to have diminished.
He still could not hear what was being said, but he had hope that one day he’d wake up to the soft sound of Reine-Marie’s breath on the pillow next to him.
It surprised him what he missed. The voices of family and friends were obvious. As was music. But who knew he’d miss the sound of sizzling bacon? Milk pouring into a glass for the children. The shuffle of leaves. The rustle of paper. The click of a light going on or off. A door opening.
Henri’s snore.
The minutiae. The soundscape of a life.
But for now, he had his other senses. And they all told him the same thing. Something was approaching. Something dreadful was about to happen.
He looked at his watch and was surprised by the time.
“Isabelle will be here soon,” he said.
“I hope she brings doughnuts,” said Jean-Guy.
“I hope she brings doughnuts,” said Armand.
As she approached the market, Evelyn saw the trucks being loaded.
She knew that they’d soon be heading toward the border with Ontario and the Maritime Provinces.
But most would cross, unchallenged, into the United States with loads of weapons, booze, drugs.
Some would stop on the way to take on human cargo.
And then they’d return, laden with contraband.
She couldn’t stop the trucks even if she wanted to, so she turned her back and scanned the stalls looking for Moretti.
There was his daughter, in her cheerful amber coat, and there was Moretti’s wife. A helpmate to her mobster husband. She too came from a crime family and understood the rules. As their daughter would one day. Already unwittingly being groomed for the family business.
And there was Don Moretti, looking especially benign that Saturday morning in his canvas field coat, his peaked cap. His black Lab on a leash and choke collar beside him.
Slender, athletic, in his mid-forties, dark hair greying just at the temples, Joe Moretti looked like a country gentleman.
Though no one was fooled. Everyone in Little Italy knew him. And knew him for what he was.
“Evelyn.” The shout came from two aisles over as he spotted her and nodded to the large men to let her pass. “Thank you for coming.”
Moretti greeted her with a kiss on each cheek. She wasn’t fooled.
If he chose to have her shot right then and there, no one would stop him. And no one would see or say anything. She would end up in a crate, then a field, feeding the next crop of gourds to be sold at market.
“Come.” He took her arm. “Whisper in my ear. Tell me everything it was not wise to say over the phone. Hold nothing back.”
The hand on her arm tightened until it was almost painful.
As she spoke, Don Moretti watched her, his gaze intense. Taking in not just her words but her tone. Her body language. Her pupils, the color in her cheeks, any furrows in her brow. Searching for the crack, the lie that lay beneath the words. The one he knew must be there.
As they strolled down aisles lined with pumpkins and leering jack-o’-lanterns, inhaling the scent of fresh produce and the musky undercurrent of incipient rot, Evelyn Tardiff, the head of the S?reté’s Organized Crime division, told Joseph Moretti, the head of the Montréal mafia, everything she knew about her friend and colleague Armand Gamache.
The head of homicide for the S?reté du Québec. The one she should have had killed.
Back at S?reté headquarters, Agent Yvette Nichol sat at her desk just outside Chief Inspector Tardiff’s office and thought for a long moment. Then she typed a text over Signal, the encoded messenger.
Armand Gamache’s phone vibrated. Taking it out, he read the message.
“Is that Isabelle?” asked Jean-Guy. “Tell her I want the raspberry jelly doughnuts this time.”
Armand smiled. “Raspberry it is.”
“Oh, and a double double.”
“Goes without saying, but I will anyway.”
He typed out a reply, then went back to contemplating the map.
Moretti checked the message that had just come in on his phone.
“Anything important?” asked Chief Inspector Tardiff, studying him.
“Nothing for you to worry about, Evelyn,” he said.
But she was always worried now.