A Great Reckoning

CHAPTER 30

“What would you call a group of Sûreté cadets?” asked Myrna, nodding across the crowded bistro to the four students drinking Cokes and hungrily grabbing fries from the mounded platter in the center of their table.

“What do you mean?” asked Ruth, speaking into her glass so that the words came out muffled in a Scotch mist.

“Well, there’s a cackle of hyenas,” said Myrna, watching the cadets feed.

“A litter of puppies,” said Olivier, delivering two more bulbous glasses of red wine to their table by the fireplace. “These are for Clara and Reine-Marie. Don’t touch them.” He gave Ruth the stink eye, and got one in return. “They just finished walking the dogs. I expect them any moment.”

“Dogs?” said Gabri. “Aren’t you the optimistic one, mon beau.”

The Gamaches had had Gracie for a couple of days and she was not looking any more like a puppy. Nor, truth be told, was she looking like anything else. Except Gracie.

Gabri reached for a piece of baguette with aged Stilton and a dab of red pepper jelly on top, narrowly avoiding Rosa, who’d decided to peck him every time he went for food or drink.

“A flight of butterflies,” said Myrna.

“A confit de canard.” Gabri glared at Rosa.

“I see,” said Ruth, putting down her glass and picking up a red wine. “You’ve finally said something that interests me.”

“I can die happy now,” said Myrna.

Ruth looked at her expectantly and seemed disappointed when Myrna didn’t keel over.

“So what would you call a gathering of students?” asked Myrna.

“A disappointment?” asked Ruth. “No, wait. That’s children. Now, students? What would you call a group of them?”

“Hello,” said Reine-Marie, as she and Clara joined them. “A group of what?”

Myrna explained, then excused herself, returning a few minutes later with a thick reference book from her shop. She sat down heavily on her side of the sofa, almost catapulting Ruth into the air.

“I always suspected Ruth would end up a stain on the wall,” Gabri said to Clara. “But I never thought the ceiling.” He turned to Myrna. “I’ll give you five dollars to do that again. Maybe we can make this a game at the next fair. You win a stuffed duck.”

“Fag,” muttered Ruth, wiping red wine off Rosa. Not, they suspected, for the first time.

“Hag,” said Gabri.

“Do you know these people?” Clara asked Reine-Marie.

“Never met them before in my life,” she said, settling into the armchair and handing Clara the remaining glass of red wine.

“And to think,” said Clara, “we could’ve been having a quiet drink in my studio.”

That had in fact been the plan. Henri and Gracie and Leo would play together, while Reine-Marie went through a box of archival material from the historical society and Clara painted.

Until Reine-Marie had arrived and seen what Clara had done to her portrait.

It was, apparently, a self-portrait. But something had happened. It had shifted, evolved. And not in a Darwinian direction. This was not, Reine-Marie had to admit to herself, an improvement on the species.

For the first time since knowing Clara and seeing her astonishing portraits, Reine-Marie had the sinking feeling that Clara had lost her touch.

For a few minutes they sat in silence in the studio. Clara painted while Henri crawled onto the sofa, exhausted by the puppies, and laid his head on Reine-Marie’s lap. She kneaded his extravagant ears as they watched Gracie and Leo play.

Clara’s self-portrait looked not at all like Clara anymore. What had been brilliant was now distorted. The nose was off, the mouth was set in a strange expression, and there was something wrong with the eyes.

There was cruelty in them. A desire to hurt. They looked out at Reine-Marie as though searching for a victim. She looked at the mirror leaning against the armchair and wondered what Clara had seen there, to produce that.

“What do you think?” Clara asked, before putting the brush between her teeth like a bit and staring at her work.

Clara had said her portraits began as a lump in the throat, but it was Reine-Marie who felt like gagging.

“Brilliant,” she said. “Is it for a show, or for yourself?”

“For myself,” said Clara, getting off the stool.

Thank God for that, thought Reine-Marie, and had to remind herself that art is a process. Art is a process.

Art is a process.

“Let’s go over to the bistro,” she said, lugging herself off the sofa, unable to watch what Clara was doing anymore. “Armand’s on his way back and he’ll probably be looking for me there.”

“Does he even know he has a home here?” asked Clara, putting her brush down and wiping her hands.

Reine-Marie laughed and picked up the small box of old photographs she’d planned to go through. “He thinks our place is just another wing of the bistro.”

“He’s not far off,” said Clara.

While Clara washed up, Reine-Marie took Henri and Gracie back home, then met her friend just outside the bistro.

Through the window, they could see the four students gobbling fries and gesturing, arguing, the map on the table between them. They looked like generals arguing over a battle plan.

Very young generals, and a very strange plan.

“Has Armand told you why he has the cadets chasing down that map?” asked Clara.

“No. I think it started as a kind of lark. An exercise. But after the murder, it became something else.”

“But what?” asked Clara. “I don’t see what the map could possibly have to do with the killing of that professor.”

“Neither do I,” admitted Reine-Marie. “And I’m not sure Armand knows. Maybe nothing.”

“It’s funny how often nothing becomes something when Armand is around. But it’s at least kept the students busy. They were off all day.”

The two women had continued to watch the cadets through the windows. But Reine-Marie realized that Clara wasn’t watching the cadets. She was looking at just one. Closely.

“Is it much of an imposition, Clara? Putting her up?”

“Amelia?” Clara was quiet for a moment. Studying the girl. “I wonder how old she is.”

“Armand would know. Nineteen, twenty, I’d guess.”

“In certain light she looks very young. Maybe it’s her skin. But then she’ll turn and her expression will change. She’s like a prism.”

Feeling chilled standing in the damp March evening, the two women had gone inside to join the others around the fireplace.

“A clowder of cats?” said Gabri, reading the huge reference book open on Myrna’s lap.

“A misery,” said Ruth.

“Pardon?” asked Reine-Marie.

“The students,” said Ruth, cocking her wineglass in the direction of the cadets, who were talking animatedly among themselves. “A misery of cadets.”

“I think that’s a misery of poets,” said Gabri.

“Oh, right.”

“What’re we going to tell him?” asked Huifen, reaching for another fry, even though she was now feeling overstuffed and a little nauseous. One fry over the line, sweet Jesus. “It’s almost seven. He’s going to be here any minute. Oh, shit.”

Headlights flashed through the window.

“He’s here.”

The light caught their faces, and Reine-Marie, a few tables over, saw what Clara meant. There was anxiety in Huifen’s face. Nathaniel was clearly afraid. Jacques looked defensive, marshaling his excuses.

And Amelia looked resigned. Like she knew what was about to happen. Had been waiting a long time, a lifetime, for it. Perhaps even longer.

She looked old. And very, very young.

She looked a bit like the boy in the stained-glass window.

And she looked a bit like the portrait Clara was painting. Reine-Marie turned to her friend in astonishment.

Jean-Guy and Isabelle got out of the car. The snow, which had been melting during the day, was now freezing again as the sun and the temperature dropped.

“The sap’ll be running,” said Jean-Guy, knocking his gloves together in the chill. He turned to look back up the hill, where a car’s headlights had appeared, shining like eyes.

“A good year for maple syrup,” said Isabelle. “We’re taking the kids to a cabane à sucre this weekend.”

Jean-Guy felt a moment of utter joy, like a breath on his face. Next year, he and Annie would be taking their child to a maple sugar shack for the annual sugaring-off celebration. They’d get in a horse-drawn sleigh and go deep into the woods, to a log cabin. There they’d listen to fiddle music and watch people dance, and eat eggs and bacon and baked beans and sweet, sticky tire d’érable, the boiled maple sap poured over spring snow and turned into toffee. Then rolled onto a twig, like a lollipop.

Just as he’d done as a child. It was a tradition, part of their patrimoine. And one they would pass on to their child. His and Annie’s son or daughter.

He glanced toward the bistro and saw the cadets, someone else’s sons and daughters, staring at them.

And he felt an overwhelming need to protect them.

“He’s here,” said Isabelle, and Jean-Guy turned to see that the car had pulled up right behind theirs.

Deputy Commissioner Gélinas and Armand Gamache got out. Gélinas was walking toward them, his feet crunching on the refrozen ice and snow, but Gamache had paused to tilt his head back and look into the night sky.

And then he lowered his eyes and looked straight at Jean-Guy.

And in an instant, Jean-Guy understood how Chief Inspector Gamache must have felt for all those years when he was head of homicide. Commanding young agents.

And losing some of those agents, until the loss had become too great. Until his heart had finally broken into too many pieces to be cobbled together again. When that had happened, he’d come here. To find peace.

But Monsieur Gamache had traded in his peace for the cadets’ safety. He’d left here to go clean up the academy, so that the next generation of young agents might survive long enough to brush gray hair from their faces. And to one day retire, to find their own peace and enjoy their own grandchildren.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir watched Armand Gamache approach, and had the overwhelming need to protect him.

He immediately dropped his eyes, staring at his feet until he could control his emotions.

Hormones, he thought. Damned pregnancy.

Gamache and Gélinas had made small talk in the car on the drive down, until it had petered out and both men had been left to the company of their own thoughts.

Paul Gélinas had no idea what was going through Gamache’s head, but he himself was preoccupied with what he’d found. And what it meant. And how it could be pertinent, and useful.

Gélinas had spent the afternoon researching the backgrounds of Michel Brébeuf and Armand Gamache. It was like archeology. There was digging and there was dirt. And there were broken things.

He’d thought Brébeuf and Gamache had first met in the academy, as roommates, but he soon found out he was wrong. Their friendship went back to the streets of Montréal as children. They’d been neighbors. Attended the same kindergarten, played on the same teams, double-dated and went to dances together. Bummed around Europe for six months before joining the academy. Together.

The only time they were really apart was when Armand Gamache went to Cambridge to read history. That’s where he’d picked up his English. While Brébeuf stayed behind and went to Laval University in Quebec City.

They’d been each other’s best man at their weddings, and stood up for each other at christenings.

Michel Brébeuf had excelled in the Sûreté, rising quickly through the ranks to the position of Superintendent. Poised to become the next Chief Superintendent.

Armand Gamache had quickly achieved Chief Inspector in homicide, and built that department into one of the finest in the nation.

And then he’d stalled. And seen his best friend’s rise continue.

There had been no hint, though, of envy. They’d remained close friends outside of work, and collaborative colleagues at work.

Their lives had been lived side by side. Until the two roads, the personal and the professional, collided. And went downhill. Fast.

Armand Gamache had gotten whiffs of something wrong within the Sûreté. There were always scandals, of course. Misuses of power. But they’d been swiftly dealt with in the past by the senior officers, including Brébeuf.

But this was different. So huge as to be almost invisible, the scale impossible to comprehend.

At first Gamache gave little credence to the rumors. They’d come through back channels. People who had reason to smear the Sûreté.

But something stuck, and he started to quietly investigate.

It started in the northern territories. Among the Cree and the Inuit. Remote areas that were almost impossible to penetrate. And for good reason, Gamache knew.

Try as he might, he couldn’t get purchase on the rumors.

Until one day he’d met a Cree elder on a bench outside the Château Frontenac in Quebec City. Her community had spent months raising enough money to send her down south, to speak to the leaders. To tell them about the beatings and murders. The missing. So desperate was their need, they’d finally risked trusting the white authorities.

But no one would listen. No one would even let her past the front door.

And so she’d sat down. Exhausted, hungry, out of money and hope.

Until she was joined on the bench by the large man with the kind eyes. Who asked if she needed help.

She told him everything. Everything. Not knowing who he was, but having no choice. He was the last house, the last ear, the final hope.

He’d listened. And he’d believed her.

And so began a battle that lasted years and that landed at the door of the very person Gamache trusted the most.

Michel Brébeuf.

The rot went even deeper than that and ended in catastrophe. But not the great scale of disaster it would have been had Armand Gamache not stopped it.

Brébeuf had been banished and Gamache had resigned, losing his job and almost losing his life.

And it wasn’t over yet, Gélinas knew.

The Sûreté had been cleaned out, but there remained the academy. The training ground for cruelty and corruption.

The corrosion within the Sûreté and subsequent events were well known to the general public. The media had covered it to the point of their own brutality.

What interested Gélinas now was what was unknown. The men’s personal lives.

He’d dug and he’d dug that afternoon. Until he struck dirt.

For all his professional venality, Michel Brébeuf’s personal life appeared conventional. He’d married. Had three children. Joined service clubs.

Brébeuf was a model husband and father and grandfather. But his home life had shattered when the degree of his professional deceit became known. His wife had left him, and there was a rift with his children that had yet to be healed.

But the dirt the RCMP officer sought and found came from a different source.

Not Brébeuf. But Gamache.

Gélinas had found it when he’d dug deep enough into Armand Gamache’s personal life and found a few lines in a long-dormant document. The words had uncurled and re-formed. And walked off the page. Into the present.

Into the waiting hands of the man charged with ensuring a fair investigation.

“A shrewdness of apes,” Myrna read from the reference book, smiling and shaking her head in amusement, before looking up to see Armand and the others arrive.

Reine-Marie got up to greet her husband.

“We’re playing a game,” she explained. “Naming groups of animals.”

“We started off trying to come up with a collective name for a group of Sûreté cadets,” said Myrna, gesturing toward the students.

“I’m thinking it’s a gloom of cadets,” said Ruth.

Paul Gélinas rubbed his forehead and grinned. It was his first time in the bistro and he seemed a little stunned as he took in the beams and stone hearths and wide plank floors. And the old woman with the duck.

Then his eyes fell on the cadets.

Amelia Choquet was unmissable, unmistakable.

And while Gélinas stared at her, she was also staring. Past him. Her mouth open wide enough for him to see the stud through her tongue.

He turned to see who had so enthralled the Goth Girl.

It was Isabelle Lacoste. Amelia Choquet’s polar opposite.

“But then it evolved into animal groups,” Myrna was saying.

“A sleuth of bears,” said Gélinas, returning to the conversation. “That sort of thing?”

“Exactly,” said Clara. “Good for you. You’re on my team.”

“There’re teams?” asked Gabri, leaning away from Ruth.

“Who are you?” Ruth squinted at Gélinas.

Gamache introduced Deputy Commissioner Gélinas, of the RCMP.

“Bonjour,” he said, offering his hand to Ruth.

She gave him the finger, turning it sideways. “And one for the horse you rode in on, Renfrew.”

“Don’t get too close,” Gabri whispered to him. “If she bites you, you’ll go mad.”

Gélinas withdrew his hand.

“The only one I know is a murder of crows,” said Lacoste.

“You made that up,” said Beauvoir. “Why would crows be called that?”

“Funny you should ask,” said Myrna.

She flipped through the reference book and read out loud, “A murder of crows is believed to come from a folk tale, where crows will gather to decide the capital fate of another crow.”

“C’est ridicule,” said Beauvoir.

But his eyes slid across the crowded bistro to the gathering of cadets.

“A crowd of faults,” Ruth said with certainty. “That’s what they are.”

Gamache made a guttural sound, somewhere between amusement and astonishment.