Kingdom of the Blind

CHAPTER 11

“So what’s the problem?”

“What makes you think there’s a problem?” Armand asked.

“You aren’t eating your … éclair.”

Each of her words was carefully enunciated, though they were still muffled, as though wrapped in too much care and cotton batting.

And her movements, as her hand brought her own pastry to her mouth, were also considered. Deliberate. Precise. Slow.

Gamache visited Isabelle Lacoste at least once a week at her home in Montréal. When the weather was good, they’d go for a short walk, but mostly, like today, they sat in her kitchen and talked. He’d gotten into the habit of discussing events with her. Getting her take on things. Her opinions and advice.

She was one of his senior officers.

He looked now, as he always did, for any sign of improvement. Real was best, but he’d even settle for imagined. He thought perhaps her hands were steadier. Her words clearer. Her vocabulary richer.

Yes. Without a doubt. Maybe.

“Is it the internal investigation?” she asked, and took a bite of the mille-feuille that Armand had brought her from Sarah’s Boulangerie, knowing it was her favorite.

“No. That’s just about over.”

“Still, they’re taking their sweet time. What’s the problem?”

“We both know the problem,” he said.

“Yes. The drugs. Nothing more there?”

She studied him. Looking for signs of improvement. Of reason to hope this really would all go away soon.

The Chief looked relaxed. Confident. But then he almost always did. It was what he hid that worried her.

Isabelle’s brow furrowed in concentration.

“I’m tiring you out,” he said, and made to get up. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no, please.” She waved him back down. “I need … stimulation. The kids are off school because of the storm and have decided I need to learn to count to a … hundred. We did that all morning before I kicked them outside. I tried to explain that I can count. Have been able to for … months, but still, they insisted.” She looked into Armand’s eyes. “Help me.”

It was said with a comically pathetic inflection, intentionally exaggerated. But still, it broke his heart.

“I’m kidding, patron,” she said, sensing more than seeing his sorrow. “More coffee?”

“Please.”

He followed her to the counter. Her gait was slow. Halting. Deliberate. And so much better than anyone, including her doctors, had dared hope.

Isabelle’s son and daughter were outside, building snow forts with the neighborhood children. Through the windows Armand and Isabelle could hear shrieks as one “army” attacked those who held the fort.

Playing the same games Armand had played as a child. The same ones Isabelle, twenty-five years later, had played. Games of domination and war.

“Let’s hope they never know … what … it’s really like,” said Isabelle, standing by the window, next to her boss and mentor.

He nodded.

The explosions. The chaos. The acrid stink of gun smoke. The blinding grit as stone and cement and brick were pulverized. Choking the air.

The screams. Choking the air.

The pain.

His grip tightened on the counter as it washed over him. Sweeping him up. Tossing and spinning. Drowning him.

“Does your hand still tremble?” she asked quietly.

He gathered himself and nodded.

“Sometimes. When I’m tired or particularly stressed. But not like it used to.”

“And the limp?”

“Again, mostly when I’m tired. I barely notice it anymore. It was years ago.” Unlike Isabelle’s wounds, which were mere months old. He marveled at that. It seemed both ages ago and yesterday.

“Do you think about it?” she asked.

“What happened when you were hurt?”

He turned to look at her. That face, so familiar from across so many bodies. So many desks, conference tables. So many hastily set-up incident rooms in basements and barns and cabins across Québec. As they’d investigated murders. Isabelle. Jean-Guy. Himself.

Isabelle Lacoste had come to him as a young agent, barely twenty-five. Rejected by her own department for not being brutal enough, cynical enough, malleable enough to know what was right and to do wrong.

He’d been the head of homicide then and given her a job in his department, the most prestigious within the Sûreté du Québec. To the astonishment of her former colleagues.

And Isabelle Lacoste had risen through the ranks, eventually taking over from Gamache himself when he’d become head of the academy and then head of the whole Sûreté. As he was now.

Sort of.

She’d aged, of course. Faster than she should have, would have, had he not brought her on board. Had he not made her Chief Inspector. And had that last action against the cartels not taken place. Mere months ago.

“Yes,” he said. “I think about it.”

Isabelle hitting the floor. Shot in the head. What had seemed her last act had given them a chance. Had, in fact, saved them all. But still, it had been a bloody nightmare.

He remembered that, the most recent action. But he also remembered, equally vividly, all the raids, the assaults, the arrests. The investigations over the years. The victims.

All the sightless, staring eyes. Of men, women, children whose murder he’d investigated. Over the years. Whose murderer he’d hunted down.

All the agents he’d sent, often led, into the gun smoke.

And he remembered his hand raised, ready to knock on the closed door. The rapping of the Grim Reaper. To do murder himself. Not physically, but Armand Gamache was realistic enough to know this was a killing nevertheless. He carried with him always the faces of fathers, mothers, wives, and husbands. Inquisitive. Curious. Politely they opened the door and looked at this stranger.

And then, as he spoke the fateful words, their faces changed. And he watched their world collapse. Pinning them under the rubble. Crushed under a grief so profound most never emerged. And those who did came out dazed into a world forever changed.

The person they were before his arrival was dead. Gone.

When a murder was committed, more than one person died.

Yes. He remembered.

“But I try not to dwell on it,” he said to Isabelle.

Or, worse, dwell in it. Take up residence in the tragedies, the pain. The hurt. To make a home in hell.

But leaving was hard. Especially his agents, men and women whose lives were lost because they’d followed his orders. Followed him. He’d felt, for a long time, that he owed it to them to not leave that place of sorrow. To keep them company there.

His friends and therapists had helped him to see that that was doing them a disservice. Their lives could not be defined by their deaths. They belonged not in perpetual pain but in the beauty of their short lives.

His inability to move on would trap them forever in those final horrific moments.

Armand watched as Isabelle carefully lowered her mug to the kitchen table. When it was just an inch away from the surface, her grip slipped and the coffee spilled. Not much, but he could see her anger. Frustration. Embarrassment.

He offered her his handkerchief to sop it up.

“Merci.” She grabbed it from him and wiped. He put out his hand to take it back, but she kept it. “I’ll w-w-w … wash it and get it back to you,” she snapped.

“Isabelle,” he said, his voice calm but firm. “Look at me.”

She lifted her eyes from the soiled handkerchief to his face.

“I hated it too.”

“What?”

“My body. I hated it for letting me down. For letting this happen.” He ran his finger along the scar at his temple. “For not moving fast enough. For not seeing it coming. For being on the ground, not being able to get up to protect my agents. I hated it for not healing fast enough. I hated when I stumbled. When Reine-Marie had to hold my hand to keep me steady. I could see people staring at me with pity as I limped or searched for a word.”

Isabelle nodded.

“I wanted my old body back,” said Armand. “The strong and healthy one.”

“Before,” she said.

“Before,” he nodded.

They sat in silence, except for the far-off laughter of the children.

“That’s how I feel,” she said. “I hate my … body. I hate that I can’t pick up my kids or play with them, or if I do get onto the floor with them, they have to help me up. I hate it. I hate that I can’t … read them to sleep, and that I get tired so easily, and lose my train of thought. I hate that some days I can’t add and some days I can’t … subtract. And some days—”

Isabelle paused, gathering herself. She looked into his eyes.

“I forget their names, patron,” she whispered. “My own children.”

It was no use telling her he understood. Or that it was all right. She’d earned the right to no easy answer.

“And what do you love, Isabelle?”

“Pardon?”

Gamache closed his eyes and raised his face to the ceiling. “‘White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, / Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; / Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust / Of friendly bread.’”

He opened his eyes, looked at Isabelle, and smiled, deep lines forming at his eyes and down his worn face.

“There’s more, but I won’t go on. It’s a poem by Rupert Brooke. He was a soldier in the First World War. It helped him in the hellhole of the trenches to think of the things he loved. It helped me too. I made mental lists and followed the things I love, the people I love, back to sanity. I still do.”

He could see her thinking.

What he was suggesting wasn’t a magic cure for a bullet to the brain. A huge amount of work, of pain, physical and emotional, lay ahead. But it might as well be done in the sunlight.

“I’m stronger, healthier now than I was before any of that happened,” said Gamache. “Physically. Emotionally. Because I’ve had to be. And you will be too.”

“Things are strongest where they’re broken,” said Lacoste. “Agent Morin said that.”

Things are strongest where they’re broken.

Armand heard again the impossibly and eternally youthful voice of Paul Morin. As though he were standing right there, in Isabelle’s sunny kitchen with them.

And Agent Morin had been right. But oh the pain of mending.

“I’m lucky in a way,” Isabelle said after a few moments. “I can’t remember anything about that day. Nothing. I think that helps.”

“I think it does.”

“My kids keep wanting to read me … Pinocchio. Something to do with what happened, but damned if it makes sense to me. Pinocchio, patron?”

“Sometimes being shot in the head is a blessing.”

She laughed. “How do you do it?”

“Remember?”

“Forget.”

He took a breath, looked down at his feet, then back up, into her eyes.

“I had a mentor once—” he said.

“Oh Jesus, not the one who taught you poetry,” she said in mock panic. He had that “poetry” look about him.

“No, but just for that.” He cleared his throat. “‘The Wreck of the Hesperus,’” he announced, and opened his mouth as though to launch into the epic verse. But instead he smiled and saw Isabelle beaming with amusement.

“What I was going to say is that my mentor had this theory that our lives are like an aboriginal longhouse. Just one huge room.” He swept one arm out to illustrate scope. “He said that if we thought we could compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.”

“That’s a pretty scary thought,” said Isabelle.

“Absolument. My mentor, my first chief inspector, said to me, ‘Armand, if you don’t want your longhouse to smell like merde, you have to do two things—’”

“Not let Ruth Zardo in?” asked Isabelle.

Armand laughed. “Too late for that. For both of us.”

In a flash he was back there. Running toward the ambulance. Isabelle on the gurney, unconscious. The old poet’s bony hands holding Isabelle’s. Her voice unwavering as she whispered to Isabelle over and over again the only thing that mattered.

That she was loved.

Isabelle would never remember that, and Armand would never forget it.

“Non. He said, ‘Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll be at perpetual war.’”

Armand smiled at the memory.

“I think he knew what an idiot he was dealing with. He could see I was getting ready to tell him my own theory of life. At twenty-three. He showed me the door. But just as I was leaving, he said, ‘And the enemy you’ll be fighting is yourself.’”

Gamache hadn’t thought of that encounter for years. But he had thought of his life, from that moment forward, as a longhouse.

And in his longhouse, as he glanced back down it now, he saw all the young agents, all the men and women, boys and girls, whose lives he’d affected.

He could also see, standing there, the people who’d hurt him. Badly. Almost killed him.

They all lived there.

And while he would never be friends with many of those memories, those ghosts, he had worked very hard to make peace with them. With what he’d done and what had been done to him.

“And are the opioids there, patron? In your longhouse?”

Her question brought him back with a jolt, to her comfortable home.

“Have you found them?”

“Not all, non. The last of it, here in Montréal, has disappeared,” he admitted.

“How much?”

“Enough to produce hundreds of thousands of hits.”

She was silent. Not saying what he knew better than anyone.

Each one of those hits could kill.

“Merde,” she whispered, then immediately apologized to him. “Désolé.”

She rarely swore and almost never in front of the Chief. But this one escaped, riding the wave of revulsion.

“There’s more,” she said, studying the man she’d gotten to know so well. Better than her own father. “Something else is bothering you.”

Weighing on him, was more like it, but she could not quite come up with that word.

“Oui. It’s about the academy.”

“The Sûreté Academy?”

“Yes. There’s a problem. They want to expel one of the cadets.”

“It happens,” said Isabelle. “I’m sorry, patron, but why is it your concern?”

“The one the Commander called me about, and wants to expel, is Amelia Choquet.”

Isabelle Lacoste settled back in her chair and considered him closely. “And? Why would he call you about this? You’re no longer head of the academy.”

“True.”

And she saw that this wasn’t just a weight on Gamache. It was close to crushing.

“What is it, patron?”

“They found opioids in her possession.”

“Christ.” And this time she didn’t apologize. “How much?”

“It seems to be too much for personal consumption.”

“She’s trafficking? At the academy?”

“It would appear so.”

Now Isabelle was quiet. Absorbing. Thinking.

Armand gave her time.

“Is it from your shipment?” she asked. She hadn’t meant to give him ownership, but that was the way it came out. And they both knew he did have ownership, if not of the actual drugs then of the situation.

“They haven’t been sent to the lab yet, but it’s possible, yes.” He looked down at his hands, one clasping the other. “I have a decision to make.”

“About Cadet Choquet.”

“Oui. And frankly, I don’t know what to do.”

She wished with all her heart she could help him.

“I’m sorry, Chief, but surely this is up to the Commander. Not you.”

Watching Chief Superintendent Gamache, Lacoste couldn’t fathom what he was thinking. He seemed to be asking for her help and yet keeping some information from her.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Let me ask you this, Isabelle,” he said, ignoring her statement. “What would you do if you were me?”

“And a cadet was found with drugs in her possession? I’d leave that up to the Commander of the academy. It’s not your business, patron.”

“Oh, but it is, Isabelle. If it’s my opioids, as you put it, in her possession.”

“Where did she get the drugs from?” Isabelle asked. “Has she told you?”

“The Commander hasn’t interviewed her yet. As far as he knows, Cadet Choquet doesn’t even realize they’ve been found. I’m going there now. If he expels her, she’ll die. I know that much.”

Lacoste nodded. She knew it too. What most didn’t know was why Gamache had let Amelia Choquet into the academy in the first place. Why that messed-up young woman, with the history of drug abuse and prostitution, had been given a coveted place at the Sûreté school.

But Isabelle knew. Or thought she knew.

The same reason he’d reached down into the bowels of her own career and given her a job.

Had reached down and dragged Jean-Guy up, a moment from being fired himself.

It was the same reason Chief Superintendent Gamache was now considering convincing the current Commander to keep Cadet Choquet.

This was a man who profoundly believed in second chances.

Except this wouldn’t be Amelia Choquet’s second chance. It would be her third.

And that was, in Lacoste’s view, one too many.

There was grace in second chances and foolishness in third. And perhaps worse than foolishness.

There was, or could be, outright danger. Believing a person capable of redemption when they’d proven they were not.

Amelia Choquet hadn’t been caught cheating on an exam or stealing some trinket from a fellow cadet. She’d been caught with a drug so potent, so dangerous, it eventually killed almost everyone who took it. Amelia Choquet knew that. Knew she was trafficking in death.

Chief Inspector Lacoste regarded the steady man in front of her, who believed everyone could be saved. Believed he could save them.

It was both his saving grace and his blind spot. And few knew better than Isabelle Lacoste what that meant. Some things hurtled. Some slithered. But nothing good ever came out of a blind spot.

Isabelle noticed that Gamache’s right hand wasn’t trembling. But it was clenched into a fist.