How the Light Gets In

TWELVE

Pay attention, Jean-Guy Beauvoir begged himself. For chrissake, hold it together.

His knee jittered up and down and he placed his hand on it. Pressing down.

At the front of the room, Martin Tessier was instructing the Sûreté agents who’d soon be raiding the biker gang stronghold.

“These aren’t tattooed thugs,” said Francoeur’s second in command, turning away from the graphics on his tablet to face them. “Too many dead cops and mob bosses have underestimated the bikers. These’re soldiers. They might look like yahoos, but make no mistake, they’re disciplined and committed and highly motivated to protect their territory.”

Tessier went on, flashing images, schematics, plans.

But all Beauvoir heard was his own voice, pleading.

Dear God, don’t let me die.

Chief Inspector Gamache knocked on the door, then stepped into Thérèse Brunel’s office. She looked up from her desk as he entered.

“Close the door, please,” she said, removing her glasses. Her voice and manner were uncharacteristically brusque.

“I got your message but was out of town.” He glanced at the clock on her desk. Just past noon.

She indicated a seat. He hesitated a moment, then sat. She took the chair beside him. She looked tired, but was still perfectly turned out, and perfectly in command of herself and him.

“We’ve come to the end, Armand. I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. I’ve been thinking about it, and speaking with Jérôme, and we think there’s nothing there. We’ve been chasing our own tails.”

“But—”

“Don’t interrupt me, Chief Inspector. This whole video thing has gotten out of control and out of proportion. It’s done. The video’s out there, nothing we can do will get it back. You need to let it go.”

“I don’t understand…” He searched her face.

“It’s quite simple. You were hurt and angry and wanted revenge. Perfectly natural. And then you became convinced there was more there than just the video. You got yourself rattled and managed to rattle everyone around you. Including me. That’s my fault, not yours. I allowed myself to believe you.”

“What’s happened, Thérèse?”

“Superintendent,” she said.

“Désolé. Superintendent.” He lowered his voice. “Has something happened?”

“It certainly has. I’ve come to my senses and I advise you to do the same. I hardly slept last night, then I finally got up and made notes. Would you like to see them?”

Gamache nodded, watching her closely. She handed him a handwritten note. He put his reading glasses on and studied it. Then he carefully folded it in half.

“As you see, I listed all the evidence in favor of your contention that Chief Superintendent Francoeur leaked the video of the raid and has a larger, more malevolent purpose—”

“Thérèse!” Gamache exclaimed, leaning forward suddenly as though to physically stop her from saying more.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Chief Inspector, give it up. The office isn’t bugged. No one’s listening to us. No one cares. It’s all in your head. Look at my notes. There’s no evidence. The weight of our friendship and my respect for you clouded my judgment. You’ve connected dots that you yourself created.” She leaned toward him in a manner almost threatening. “Driven almost certainly by your own personal loathing for Francoeur. If you keep this up, Armand, I’ll go to him myself with evidence of your actions.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Gamache, barely finding his voice.

“I’m tired, Armand,” she said, getting up and taking her seat behind her desk. “Jérôme is exhausted. You’ve dragged us both into this fantasy of yours. Give it up. Better still, retire. Go to Paris for Christmas, think about it, and when you come back…”

She let the sentence hang in the air between them.

He stood up. “You’re making a mistake, Superintendent.”

“If I am, I’ll be making it in Vancouver with our daughter. And while there, Jérôme and I will also discuss my future. It’s time to step aside, Armand. The Sûreté isn’t falling apart, you are. We’re dinosaurs and the meteor has struck.”

“Ready?” Tessier clapped Beauvoir on the back.

No.

“Ready,” said Beauvoir.

“Good. I want you to lead the team into the second level of the bunker.”

Tessier was smiling as though he’d just given the Inspector a ticket to the Bahamas.

“Yessir.”

He just managed to get to a bathroom. Locking the stall door, he retched, and retched. Until only fetid air burped up, from deep down inside him.

“Call for you, Chief.”

“Is it important?”

His secretary looked through the open door into his office. In all the years she’d worked for Chief Inspector Gamache, he’d never asked that question. He’d trusted that if she put a call through, it was, in her judgment, worth taking.

But he’d seemed distracted since he’d returned from his meeting with Superintendent Brunel and had spent the past twenty minutes staring out the window.

“Would you like me to take a message?” she asked.

“No, no.” He reached for the phone. “I’ll take it.”

“Salut, patron,” came Olivier’s cheerful voice. “Hope I’m not disturbing you.” He went on without waiting for an answer. “Gabri asked me to call to make sure you still want your room for tonight.”

“I thought I’d already spoken with him about that.” The Chief heard the slight annoyance in his voice, but did nothing to change his tone.

“Look, I’m just passing along the message.”

“Has he double-booked or something?”

“No, it’s still available, but he wants to know how many you’ll be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, will Inspector Beauvoir be coming down?”

Gamache exhaled sharply into the receiver.

“Voyons, Olivier,” he began, then reined himself in. “Listen, Olivier, I’ve been through this as well. Inspector Beauvoir’s on another assignment. Inspector Lacoste will be staying in Montréal to continue the investigation from here, and I’ll be coming down to Three Pines, to look into that end of the case. I’ve left Henri with Madame Morrow so I have to come down anyway.”

“No need to get all upset, Chief,” snapped Olivier. “I was just asking.”

“I’m not upset”—though it was clear he was—“I’m just busy and have no time for this. If the B and B is available, fine. If not, I’ll collect Henri and come back to Montréal.”

“Non, non. It’s available. And stay as long as you want. Gabri isn’t taking any bookings leading up to Christmas. Too involved with the concert.”

Gamache wasn’t going to be dragged into that conversation. He thanked Olivier, hung up, and looked at the small clock on his desk. Almost one thirty.

The Chief Inspector leaned back in his chair, then he swung it around so that his back was to the office and he faced the large window that looked out onto snowy Montréal.

One thirty.

It was one thirty.

Beauvoir took another deep breath and leaned back against the rumbling van. He tried closing his eyes, but that made the nausea worse. He turned his face so that the cold metal was against his hot cheek.

An hour and a half and the raid would begin. He wished the van had windows, so he could see the city. The familiar buildings. Solid, predictable. Jean-Guy was always more comfortable with the man-made than the natural. He tried to imagine where they were. Were they over the bridge yet? Were there buildings outside, or forests?

Where was he?

Gamache knew where Beauvoir was. He was on a raid scheduled to begin at three.

Another raid. An unnecessary raid, ordered by Francoeur.

The Chief closed his eyes. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

Then he put on his coat. At the door to his office he watched Inspector Lacoste give orders to a group of agents. Or try to.

They were among the new agents, transferred in when Gamache’s own people had been transferred out and spread around the other divisions of the Sûreté. To everyone’s surprise, the Chief Inspector hadn’t protested. Hadn’t fought it. Had barely seemed to care or notice as his division was gutted.

It went beyond unflappable. Some had begun to wonder, quietly at first and then more boldly, whether Armand Gamache even cared anymore. But still, as he approached the group, they grew quiet and watchful.

“A word, Inspector,” he said, and smiled at the agents.

Isabelle Lacoste followed Gamache back to his office, where he closed the door.

“For chrissake, sir, why do we have to put up with that?” She jerked her head toward the outer office.

“We just have to make the best of it.”

“How? By giving up?”

“No one’s giving up,” he said, his voice reassuring. “You need to trust me. You’re a great investigator. Tenacious, intuitive. Smart. And you have limitless patience. You need to use that now.”

“It’s not limitless, patron.”

He nodded. “I understand.” Then, hands gripping the edges of his desk, he leaned toward her. “Don’t be bullied off course. Don’t be pushed from your center. And always, always trust your instinct, Isabelle. What does it tell you now?”

“That we’re screwed.”

He leaned back and laughed. “Then trust mine. All is not as I’d have wished, that much is certain. But it isn’t over. This isn’t inaction, this is simply a deep breath.”

She glanced out at the agents lounging at their desks, ignoring her orders.

“And while we’re catching our breath they’re taking over. Destroying the division.”

“Yes,” he said.

She waited for the “but,” but none came.

“Maybe I should threaten them,” she suggested. “The only thing a lion respects is a bigger lion.”

“Those aren’t lions, Isabelle. They’re irritating, but tiny. Ants, or toads. You step over them, or around them. But there’s no need to step on them. You don’t make war on toads.”

Toads, or turds. The droppings of some larger beast, thought Lacoste as she left. But Chief Inspector Gamache was right. These new agents weren’t worth her effort. She’d step around them. For now.

Gamache pulled his car into the reserved parking spot. He knew the employee who normally parked there wouldn’t need it. She was in Paris.

It was two o’clock. He paused, closing his eyes. Then he opened them, and with resolve he walked along the icy path to the rear entrance of the Bibliothèque nationale. At the door, he punched Reine-Marie’s code into the keypad and heard the clunk as the door unbolted.

“Monsieur Gamache.” Lili Dufour looked up from her desk, understandably perplexed. “I thought you were in Paris with Reine-Marie.”

“No, she went ahead.”

“What can I do for you?” She stood up and walked around to greet him. She was slender, self-contained. Pleasant but cool, bordering on officious.

“I have some research to do and I thought you might be able to help.”

“On what?”

“The Ouellet Quints.”

He saw her brows rise.

“Really. Why?”

“You don’t expect me to tell you that, do you?” asked Gamache, with a smile.

“Then you don’t expect me to help you, do you?”

His smile faded. Reine-Marie had told him about Madame Dufour, who guarded the documents in the National Library and Archives as though they were her own private collection.

“Police business,” he said.

“Library business, Chief Inspector,” she said, nodding toward the large, closed doors.

He followed her gaze. They were in the back offices, where the head librarians worked. Through those doors was the public area.

Most of the time, when he’d visited his wife, he’d contented himself with waiting in the huge new public library, where row after row of desks and reading lamps held students and professors, researchers and those simply curious. The desks had plugs for laptops, and wireless Internet gave access to the files.

But not all the files. The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec contained tens of thousands of documents. Not just books, but maps, diaries, letters, deeds. Many of them hundreds of years old. And most of them not in the computer system yet.

Scores of technicians were working long hours to scan everything in, but it would take years, decades.

He loved walking the aisles, imagining all the history contained there. Maps drawn by Cartier. Diaries written by Marguerite d’Youville. The bloodstained plans for the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

And maybe, maybe, the story of the Ouellet Quints. Not the one for public consumption, but their private lives. Their real lives, when the cameras turned off.

If it was anywhere, it was here.

And he needed it.

He turned back to Madame Dufour. “I’m researching the Ouellet Quints for a case, and I need your help.”

“I guessed that much.”

“I need to look at what you have in the private archives.”

“Those are sealed.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t read them. They’re sealed.”

Gamache felt a stroke of annoyance until he noticed a slight look of amusement on her face.

“Would you like to read them?” he asked.

Now she hesitated, caught between the correct response and the truthful one.

“Are you trying to bribe me?” she asked.

Now it was his turn to be amused. He knew her currency. It was the same as his. Information, knowledge. Finding things out that no one else knew.

“Even if I let you, you couldn’t use what you found in court,” she said. “It would be illegally obtained. The principals are still alive.”

By that she meant the Quints themselves, he knew.

When he said nothing she grew quiet, her intelligent eyes assessing him, and the silence.

“Come with me.”

She turned away from the large doors that led to the glass and metal public library, and took him in the opposite direction. Along a corridor. Down some stairs. And finally, she tapped a code into a keypad and a large metal door clicked open with a slight whoosh.

Incandescent lights went on automatically when the door opened. It was cool inside the windowless room.

“Sorry for the lighting,” she said, locking the door behind them and moving farther into the room. “We try to keep it to a minimum.”

As his eyes adjusted he realized he was in a large room, but only one of many. He looked right. Then left. Then ahead of him. Room after room, all connected, had been constructed under the bibliothèque.

“Coming?” she said, and walked away. Gamache realized if he lost her, he’d be lost. So he made sure not to lose her.

“The rooms are set out according to quarter centuries,” she said as she walked quickly from one to another.

Gamache tried to read the labels on the drawers as they walked by, but the dull lighting made it difficult. He thought he saw Champlain on one, and he wondered if Champlain himself was actually filed there. And later, in another room, War of 1812.

After a while he kept his eyes ahead of him, concentrating on Madame Dufour’s thin back. It was best not to know the treasures he was walking by.

Finally she stopped and he almost bumped into her.

“There.” She nodded to a drawer.

The label read Ouellet Quintuplets.

“Has anyone else seen the documents?” he asked.

“Not that I know of. Not since they were collected and sealed.”

“And when was that?”

Madame Dufour went to the drawer and looked closely at the label.

“July 27, 1958.”

“Why then?” he wondered.

“Why now, Chief Inspector?” she asked, and he realized that she was standing between him and what he needed to know.

“It’s a secret,” he said, his voice light, but his eyes not leaving hers.

“I’m good at keeping secrets,” she said, glancing down the long line of files.

He considered her for a moment. “Constance Ouellet died two days ago.”

Madame Dufour took in that information, her face troubled. “I’m sorry to hear that. She was the last of them, I believe.”

Gamache nodded, and now she studied him more closely.

“She didn’t just die, did she?”

“No.”

Lili Dufour took a long breath, and sighed. “My mother went to see them, you know, at that home that was built for them here in Montréal. She lined up for hours. They were just children at the time. She talked about it until the day she died.”

Gamache nodded. There’d been something magical about the Quints, and their extreme privacy later in life only added to the mystique.

Madame Dufour stepped aside, and Gamache reached for the drawer where their private life lived.

Beauvoir looked at his watch. Ten minutes to three. He was plastered against a brick wall. Three Sûreté officers were behind him.

“Stay here,” he whispered, and stepped around the corner. He had a brief glimpse at the surprise in their faces. Surprise and concern. Not about the biker gang they were about to raid, but the officer who was supposed to lead them.

Beauvoir knew they had reason to be afraid.

He leaned his head again the brick, hitting it lightly. Then he crouched down so that his knees were against his chest, and he began rocking himself. As he rocked he heard the rhythmic squeaking of his heavy boots on the snow. Like a rocking horse in need of oiling. In need of something.

Eight minutes to three.

Beauvoir reached into the pocket of his Kevlar vest. The one that held bandages and tape to staunch wounds. He pulled out two pill bottles and, twisting the top off one, he quickly swallowed two OxyContin. He’d thrown up the earlier ones and now he could barely think for the pain.

And the other. The other. He stared at the pill bottle, and felt like a man halfway across a bridge.

Afraid to take the pill and afraid not to. Afraid of going into the bunker, afraid of running away. He was afraid of dying and he was afraid of living.

Mostly, he was afraid that everyone would find out just how frightened he really was.

Beauvoir twisted off the cap and shook the bottle. Pills cascaded out, bouncing off his trembling hand, and were lost in the snow. But one was saved. It sat in the center of his palm. His need was so great, and it was so tiny. He couldn’t get it into his mouth fast enough.

Five minutes to three.

Gamache sat at a desk in the archive room, reading and making notes. Captivated by what he’d found so far. Diaries, personal letters, photographs. But now he took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and looked at the books and documents still to be read. There was no way he’d get through them that afternoon.

Madame Dufour had shown him the buzzer, and now he pressed it. Three minutes later he heard footsteps on the sealed concrete floor.

“I’d like to take it with me.” He nodded to the stacks on the desk.

She opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again. And considered.

“Constance Ouellet really was murdered?” she asked.

“She was.”

“And you think something in there”—she looked at the documents on the desk—“might help you?”

“I think it might.”

“I retire next August, you know. Mandatory retirement.”

“I’m sorry,” he said as she looked around her.

“Shelved,” she said with a smile. “I suspect neither I, nor that file, will be missed. Feel free to take it, monsieur. But please bring it back. Quite a steep fine, you know, if you lose it, or your dog eats it.”

“Merci,” he said, and wondered if Madame Dufour had met Henri. “There’s something else I need from you.”

“A kidney?”

“A code.”

A few minutes later they stood by the rear door. Gamache had his coat on, and held the heavy box in both hands.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for, Chief Inspector. Give my best to Reine-Marie when you see her. Joyeux Noël.”

But before the door closed and locked, she called him back.

“Be careful,” she said. “Light and moisture can do permanent damage.” She regarded him for a moment. “And I think, monsieur, you know something about permanent damage.”

“Oui,” he said. “Joyeux Noël.”

It was dark by the time Armand Gamache reached Three Pines. He parked not far from the B and B and barely had time to open the door before Olivier and Gabri appeared from the bistro. It seemed to Gamache that they must have been watching for his arrival.

“How was the drive?” Gabri asked.

“Not bad,” said Gamache, picking up his satchel and the heavy cardboard box. “Except for the Champlain Bridge, of course.”

“Always hellish,” agreed Olivier.

“Everything’s ready for you,” said Gabri, leading the way up the steps and along the verandah to the front door. He opened it, and Chief Inspector Gamache, instead of stepping inside, stepped aside to let his two companions in first.

“Welcome,” said Olivier.

Thérèse and Jérôme Brunel walked into Emilie Longpré’s home. The home Henri had found for them.