Chapter 26
Agent Fontaine looked around the office.
She was not alone. A few of the Action Québec Bleu volunteers were also standing there, staring.
“What happened here?” asked one. “Did someone break in?”
“Why would anyone do that?” asked another.
“Why would anyone do this?” said the first, sweeping his arm around.
“This” was rifle their desks, rip maps off the walls, take their computers.
Fontaine had gone directly to Margaux Chalifoux’s office. It was empty. Not a piece of paper, not a pen, not a paperclip was left.
“Oh, fuck.”
She took a photo and sent it to Inspector Lacoste, her direct superior. Then she contacted the agents assigned to watch Chalifoux.
Is she still at home?
Hasn’t left.
Fontaine lowered her phone and considered. Chalifoux should have been in already.
Check.
Two minutes later came the reply. No answer at the door. No activity at windows.
She forwarded the information to Inspector Lacoste, who replied immediately:
Break down the door.
No warrant.
Break down the door!
Fontaine relayed the order and waited. It didn’t take long.
No one there.
Now it was Armand’s turn to stare at the painting of the skaters on the Rideau, the canal that wound through Ottawa.
The painting had been done well over a century ago, but except for the clothing, it could have been painted last winter. Skaters still glided for miles along the frozen waterway. Some civil servants even skated to work.
He smiled. The painting brought back one of his most vivid memories of his parents.
They’d come here on a bitterly cold day in February for a tour of the Parliament Buildings, but first, his mother explained, they were going skating.
She knelt at Armand’s feet and did up his laces, pulling them tight.
She smiled up at him as she patted the double-knotted bow.
“?a va?”
“Oui.” He’d never skated before, but he’d watched his heroes, the Canadiens de Montréal, play hockey. It looked easy enough.
He gripped his mother’s hands and she heaved him upright.
His father took one hand, his mother the other, as he stood wobbling between them. Then they’d ventured onto the ice together until first one, then the other, had let go.
When he realized he was unmoored, he had a moment of terror. And then … off he’d glided, half tripping. His arms out to keep his balance. A wide smile on his rosy-cheeked face. What exhilaration. What freedom, what—
Even now, half a century later, he could feel the shock as he realized he was airborne, then falling.
He could still feel the jarring as he hit the ice, and taste the blood as he bit his lip.
But mostly what he remembered was the burning of his tears.
They’d welled up partly from shock, partly from pain. Mostly from embarrassment.
And then his parents had hauled him to his feet, laughing.
And sent him off again. To fall again. But each time he went further and further.
And understood that falling wasn’t embarrassing, it was natural.
Expected. It was okay to fall. Which he did many more times.
Not just on the ice, but when learning to ride his bike.
When learning to ski. When climbing the apple tree at home.
He knew his parents would always be there to—
“Patron?”
He turned. “Désolé. Just thinking.”
He saw a look pass between Isabelle and Shona and wondered if his eyes were bloodshot.
Looking down at his phone, he composed a message.
Can we meet? I need your advice.
He considered, then amended the message.
Can we meet? I need your help.
His finger hovered over the send button; then he touched it and saw the message to Jeanne Caron disappear. And felt, just for a moment, his feet go out from under him.
“You’re a fool,” said Jeanne Caron.
“They’ll never find her,” said Moretti. “Even better if they do. It’ll be a warning to the CEOs, the judges, the cops, those fucking politicians. This is how we deal with anyone who betrays us.”
“Jesus, you sound like a mob boss.”
Don Moretti stared at her, then laughed. He didn’t like her any more than she liked him. But she was amusing. And useful. For now.
Caron studied him for a moment. “It’s one thing to kill Chalifoux, but you ordered incaprettamento? You’d better start praying they never find her. The New York mob will kill you for this, and incaprettamento will look humane.”
The corte de florero came to mind.
“They can’t. They need me.”
Sadly, that much was true. For now.
They were strolling through the forest on mont Royal, kicking the decaying leaves ahead of them. Moretti’s soldiers, in front and behind them, were trying to look like locals out for a stroll. And failing. Miserably.
Yeah, you blend.
They came to the lookout and stopped. A few tourists were milling around, trying to figure out the landmarks, though the infamous Olympic Stadium was all too obvious.
“The Olympics could no more have a deficit,” declared the Mayor of Montréal in 1976, “than a man can have a baby.”
For the rest of his life, he was portrayed in cartoons as heavily pregnant.
Caron’s phone pinged and she glanced down. “A message from Gamache. He wants to meet.”
“What’s that about?”
“He says he needs my help.” She replied to the message: Yes, where and when?
“I’m not surprised. Have you seen the feeds?” said Moretti.
Tardiff had done well to get it out so quickly, and so effectively.
The posts were going viral. Thousands, soon millions, would read that the revered head of the S?reté’s Homicide division believed the US was about to invade Canada.
He’d have been better off claiming he’d seen little green men in the woods.
Armand Gamache was fast becoming a laughingstock.
Caron had to admit it had been an unexpected stroke of genius from a man more accustomed to a sledgehammer than a stiletto.
But the thrust had been effective. Gamache’s credibility was bleeding out all over social media.
Jeanne Caron had worried for a while now that her sudden decision to save Gamache in the water-treatment plant had been a rare mistake. She’d done it because the poisoning plot had clearly failed. The perpetrators exposed.
In saving him, she’d saved herself. And allowed the second part of the plan, the real plan, to also survive. It had been a risk that looked, when Gamache realized there was more to come, as though it would not pay off. But now …
I need your help.
Now her phone vibrated with his reply. In Parliament now, needs to be later. Someplace private. Haskell Opera House? 4 p.m.?
“Don’t fuck this up,” said Moretti.
“Like you fucked up the whole Frederick Castonguay fiasco? The kid’s dead, his body found, and they have the laptop. And now this attack in the White House. It’s sloppy. If Whitehead had been able to tell her how far they’d gotten and made his request—”
“Well, he didn’t. Once again God is smiling on us.”
Caron shook her head. She knew that Moretti went to church every Sunday. His wife and mother more often. He’d better pray there is no God, she thought, because if there is, there won’t be a lot of smiling when Joe Moretti stands at the pearly gates.
Caron couldn’t wait for the moment when this shit-head would meet his maker. That day was coming, it was close. But for now, Joe Moretti still had his uses. Mostly as a distraction.
Gamache had stood right beside the Black Wolf and never realized it.
“You wanted to see me, Chief Inspector?”
An older man was standing beside Inspector Lacoste.
“We haven’t met,” Gamache put out his hand. “Armand Gamache.”
“Yes, I know. Douglas Walls.” They shook.
“I need your help, Senator.”
“Really?” The bushy grey eyebrows rose. It might have been a while since anyone sought his help. “Is what they say true? You actually think the Americans are about to invade us?”
He tried to keep a straight face as he asked.
“Well, not ‘about to.’ I think it’s already happening. I really hate to use the word, but I do think there’s a conspiracy.”
“You’re right. Probably best for someone just labeled nuts not to start babbling about conspiracies.”
“I didn’t realize I was babbling.”
“Well, at least you’re not drooling. Why me?”
“You’re the oldest person here.”
Walls looked around, then smiled. “That’s true. You need an éminence grise? Isn’t that what senators are supposed to be? The wise counsel. But every time I hear that expression, my mind goes to Marguerite d’Youville and her Grey Nuns. Les Soeurs grises.”
The senator couldn’t see Shona standing behind him, pretending to shoot herself.
Gamache opened his mouth to head off a history lesson, but the senator got there first.
“Did you know, Chief Inspector, that the name ‘Grey Nuns’ is a misnomer? They never wore grey, and at the time, back in the 1700s, ‘grise’ meant drunk. The Drunk Sisters.”
He laughed, though his eyes were sharp and clear and held Gamache’s.
“Then the Senate, being filled with éminences grises—” said Gamache.
“Bunch of drunks.”
“So much for sober second thought.” Which was how John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, described the Senate. Though he himself was rarely sober.
“Given what’s happening…” Senator Walls looked behind him at the television. A crawl across the bottom said that the President was safe but that the head of the Joint Chiefs had been critically injured when he took the shots meant for her. “How could my age possibly matter?”
When Gamache explained what he needed, there was a pause. Then Senator Walls turned his back on Gamache and returned to the group, shaking his head.
After whispering to the cabinet secretaries, Chiefs of Staff, functionaries, and politicians, they all looked back at Gamache, amused.
“This isn’t going to work. They’re laughing at you,” said Shona.
Though a few looked sad. Sorry that a fine career like the Chief Inspector’s should end in such ignominy. Even Shona Dorion was beginning to feel bad for him.
A few minutes later, while Armand was trying to get an update on Bert Whitehead’s condition, there was the sound of something shattering. He looked over and saw that Senator Walls had dropped his coffee mug.
The senator’s face went slack. Reaching out a veined hand, he tried to grab the arm of a chair before he sank to his knees. And fell over.
A cabinet minister ran to the door and pounded while others knelt beside the prone man, loosening the senator’s tie, feeling for a pulse.
When the door opened and the guard saw what was happening, he rushed over.
And Gamache and the others slipped out.