Kingdom of the Blind

CHAPTER 12

“Sit.”

The Commander of the Sûreté Academy did not stand when Cadet Choquet entered the office, and neither did Chief Superintendent Gamache.

Amelia waited at the door, defiant as ever, then walked across the room and dropped into the chair indicated, crossing her arms tight over her chest. Glaring straight ahead.

She looked exactly as Gamache remembered her.

Hair jet-black and spiky. Though perhaps not quite as belligerent in its cut. She was not, he suspected, softening so much as maturing. Or perhaps he was just getting used to it.

Cadet Choquet was in the final year of her training. Within months of graduation.

She was small but powerful. Not in her build but in her presence. She radiated aggression.

Fuck off.

The words fairly pulsed off her, a spiky aura.

Was a time, when Gamache first met her, that she’d actually say it. To his face. To anyone’s and everyone’s face. But now she simply thought it. Such was the force of the petite woman, though, that she might as well be screaming it.

Still, thought Gamache, it was progress. Of sorts.

She gave him one curt nod.

Fuck off.

He didn’t respond. Simply watched her.

The piercings were still in place. Through her eyebrow, her nose and cheek. Along the gristle of her ears.

And…? Yes. There it was.

The click, click, click as she moved the post in her tongue up and down, knocking it against her teeth.

In poker it would be considered a “tell.”

Click, click, click. Amelia’s unconscious Morse code.

One day he might tell her about her tell. But not just yet. Right now it served a purpose. His purpose.

Click. Click. Click.

SOS.

Clean sheets, thought Gamache. The scent of wood smoke. Feeling Henri’s head on my slippers. He went through his own private code. A sort of rosary.

Flaky croissants.

“Do you know why you’re here?” the Commander asked the cadet.

When Gamache had left the academy to take up the job of chief superintendent of the Sûreté, he’d had long discussions with his successor about the cadets. Including the suggestion that the students be allowed to be individuals. Amelia Choquet was certainly that. And more.

“No, I do not know why you wanted to see me.” Pause. “Sir.”

The Commander picked up an envelope from his desk, and from it he took a baggie.

“Recognize this?”

“No.”

The answer came too quickly for her to be surprised. She knew exactly why she was there. And she knew exactly what was in that little plastic bag.

Gamache knew Amelia well enough to know she’d prepared for this encounter. Perhaps a little too much. She wasn’t showing the natural curiosity, even astonishment, of the innocent.

Instead she displayed the rehearsed answers of the guilty.

He glanced at the Commander to see if he’d picked up on the same thing and saw that he of course had.

Gamache felt his heart speed up as he saw the point of no return approaching. He’d made up his mind what had to be done, though it seemed his heart remained unconvinced. But he knew he had to see this through.

Amelia Choquet’s breathing had changed. Shorter, more rapid.

She too could see the point of no return. Just there. On the horizon. Getting closer. Fast.

The clicking had stopped. She was alert. An animal who, after living with smaller creatures, suddenly discovered a world of giants. Suddenly discovered it was tinier than it realized. More vulnerable than it thought. More threatened than it believed possible. A creature looking for escape and finding only a cliff.

“It was in your room, under your mattress,” said the Commander.

“You searched my room?” She sounded indignant, and Gamache almost admired her rally.

Almost.

“That’s not exactly the lede, is it, Cadet Choquet?” The Commander lowered the baggie to his desk. “This is a narcotic. Enough to traffic.”

“It’s not mine. I have no idea where it came from. If I was going to do something as stupid as having shit in the academy, I’d find a better hiding place. Like maybe someone else’s room.”

“Are you suggesting someone planted it?” asked Gamache.

She shrugged.

“Intentionally?” he persisted. “Trying to set you up? Or just wanting to get it out of their own room?”

“Take your pick. All I know is, it isn’t mine.”

“The bag has been fingerprinted—”

“Clever.”

The Commander stared at her. Amelia, Gamache knew, had a rare ability to get up people’s noses. Though why she’d want to be there was anyone’s guess.

“—and we’ll have the results soon. Where did you get it from?”

“It’s. Not. Mine.”

The clicking had begun again. A rat-a-tat-tat now, designed to annoy.

Gamache could see the Commander struggling not to claw his way across his desk and reach for her throat.

And Cadet Choquet was doing nothing to save herself. In fact, just the opposite. She was taunting them. Arrogant, smug, almost certainly deceitful, she was demanding to be doubted. And worse.

An innocent cadet, when a Schedule 1 drug was discovered in her room, would protest innocence and try to work with them to find out whose it was.

A guilty cadet would almost certainly at least pretend to do the same.

But she was doing neither.

She’d gone from a vulnerable creature, trapped and frightened, to an aggressor, throwing out ridiculous and obvious lies.

Amelia Choquet was a senior cadet. She’d matured into a natural leader, not the bully Gamache feared she’d become.

She was quick-witted, alert. Someone others instinctively wanted to follow.

Which made Cadet Choquet as trafficker in narcotics all the more dangerous. But not, with her background, completely unbelievable.

Leaning closer to her, he saw the tattoos on her wrists and forearms, where the sleeves of her uniform had ridden up. Then his sharp gaze traveled to her face, and he saw something else. Something that might explain her lack of judgment, her self-destructive, erratic behavior in this meeting.

Her reactions had been wild. Unpredictable. The reactions of a junkie.

She hadn’t…?

His own eyes widened a little.

“You foolish, foolish woman.” His voice was practically a snarl. Then he turned to the Commander. “We need a blood test. She’s high.”

“Fuck you.”

He glared at her. “When did you last use?”

“I’ve taken nothing.”

“Look at her,” Gamache said to the Commander before turning back to Amelia. “Your pupils are dilated. You think I don’t know what that means? Search her room again,” he said, and the Commander placed a call.

“I have a mind to end it right now,” Gamache said, turning back to Amelia.

“Don’t you dare. I’ve come too far. We’re so close. I can do this.”

“You can’t. You’ve messed up. You’re messed up. You’ve gone too far.”

“No, no. These are eyedrops. Only eyedrops.” She was almost begging. “It looks like I’m stoned, but I’m not.”

“Tell the agents searching her room to look for eyedrops,” said Gamache, who wanted, was almost desperate, to believe her. To believe she hadn’t taken any of the drug herself.

“They won’t find any,” said Amelia. “I threw them away.”

There was silence as Gamache stared deep into the dilated eyes of the cadet.

Seeing the look on Gamache’s face, she turned away from him and spoke to the Commander. “If you think I’d deal in that shit, you’re a worse judge of character than I thought.”

“Drugs change people,” said the Commander. “Addiction changes people. As I think you know.”

“I’ve been clean for years,” she said. “I’m not stoned. Why the fuck would I enroll in the Sûreté, for God’s sake, if I was still a junkie?”

Gamache started to laugh. “You’re kidding, right? You get a gun and access to any amount of drugs. Most dirty agents at least have the sense to wait until they’ve graduated and are on the street before they turn. But then most don’t arrive as addicts.”

“I was never an addict, and you know it.” She was all but screaming at him now. “I used, yes. But I was never addicted. I quit. In time.”

Her own words seemed to give her pause as she remembered how and why she quit. In time.

It was because of this man. Who’d given her a home here. A purpose and a direction. A chance.

“I’m not trafficking,” she said. Her voice quieter. “I’m not using.”

Gamache examined her. Studied her. So much was riding on this.

He’d known, when he’d let her into the academy, that if she succeeded, she had the makings of a remarkable Sûreté officer. A street kid, a junkie turned cop.

It had given her a huge advantage. She knew things other agents never could. She knew them not just in her intellect but deep in her gut. She had contacts, credibility, the language of the streets etched into her very skin. She could get to places and people no one else could reach.

And she knew the despair of the streets. The cold, lonely deaths of opioid addicts.

Gamache had hoped Amelia Choquet shared his profound desire to stop that plague. But now he wondered just how big a misjudgment he’d made. And how big a mistake he was about to make.

While in the gutter, Amelia Choquet had read the poets, the philosophers. She was an autodidact, who’d taught herself Latin and Greek. Literature. Poetry.

Yes, if she succeeded, she’d go far. In the Sûreté. In life.

But he’d also known if she failed, it would be equally spectacular.

And it seemed, so close to the finish line, Amelia Choquet had failed. Spectacularly.

She knew, of course, when she walked in that they’d found the drugs.

Having them there was an act of self-destruction.

Gamache closed his eyes. A decision had to be made. No, he realized, that was wrong. The decision he’d already made had to be carried out. No matter how distasteful.

Sitting in the Commander’s office, he could smell wet wool and hear the tapping of snow as it fell.

Opening his eyes, he turned to the Commander. “We need a blood test, to confirm and to build the case against Cadet Choquet.”

“Look, give me another chance,” she said. “It was a mistake.”

“A mistake?” said Gamache. “Is that what you call it? A parking ticket is a mistake. This is…” He searched for the word. “Ruinous. You’ve ruined your life, and this time there’ll be no more chances. You’ll be arrested and you’ll be charged. Like anyone else.”

“Please,” she said.

Gamache looked at the Commander, who made a subtle gesture. It was the Chief Superintendent’s call.

“Where did you get the stuff?” Gamache asked.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Oh, I think you can, and you will. Tell us that and we might go easier on you.”

There was a pause, as everything hung in the balance.

And then Amelia Choquet tipped that balance.

“I got it from you.”

Gamache’s eyes widened just a little as he glared at her. Warning her.

Go no further.

The scent of fresh croissants. Holding Reine-Marie in my arms, in bed, on a rainy morning. Driving across the Champlain Bridge and seeing the Montréal skyline.

“What do—” began the Commander.

“You don’t even know, do you?” she said to Gamache, cutting off the Commander. “You don’t know if this’s the shit you let in. You’ve lost track of it, haven’t you?” Now she leaned toward Gamache, her pupils dilated. “What the fuck did you think would happen when you made that choice? Is that why you’re so angry? Is that why you want to punish me? For your own mistake?”

“This isn’t a punishment, Cadet, it’s a consequence. Do I want to find the drugs? Absolutely. But I never thought it would start with you.”

“Save it. You knew who I was when you let me in.”

“We should consider ourselves lucky, I suppose, that you didn’t burn the place down.”

“How do you know I haven’t?”

Her words froze him for a moment.

“Where did you get it from? Who sold it to you?” he asked, menace in his voice now.

“What a fucking shitshow you’ve made of being Chief Superintendent.”

“Cadet,” warned the Commander.

“Why’re you even consulting him?” she asked the Commander, acknowledging him again, jabbing her finger at Gamache. “He’s on suspension. You’re nobody now, patron.”

The last word was spit out. And in the silence the clicking began again. This time metronome-slow. Counting the passing moments. While Gamache sat perfectly still.

“If I’m going down, I’m just following you,” Amelia said, leaning even further forward. “You’re a ruin, old man.”

She must be out of her mind, thought the Commander. Stoned. Suicidal. Insane.

“Feel better?” asked Gamache, his voice steady. “Getting the bile out? Spewing over someone else?”

“At least I chose someone my own size,” said Amelia.

“Good. And now we can talk reasonably.”

While Chief Superintendent Gamache’s voice was calm, the Commander felt the force of his personality. So much stronger than the young cadet’s. If he wanted to, the Commander knew, Gamache could crush her.

But what he felt vibrating off the Chief Superintendent wasn’t what he expected. He expected anger, rage.

There was, certainly, some of that, but there was something else. Something even more powerful.

Concern. Far greater than Gamache’s anger was his caring.

Good God, thought the Commander. He’s going to try to talk sense into a junkie.

But the Commander was wrong.

“We will take a blood test,” said Gamache.

“You don’t have my permission,” said Amelia. “And unless you’re willing to tie me down, you won’t get anything out of me. And I’ll sue your ass.”

Gamache nodded. “I see.” He turned to the Commander. “I suggest Cadet Choquet wait outside, supervised, while we talk.”

Myrna set down her ham sandwich on croissant as the phone rang.

From deep in the armchair in her bookstore, she looked over at it. Hauling herself up with a grunt, she went to the counter.

“Oui, allô.”

“I spoke to the oldest son. Anthony Baumgartner. He’s arranged for his brother and sister to be at his place today at three o’clock.”

“Who is this?” asked Myrna pleasantly, though she knew perfectly well who it was.

“It’s Lucien Mercier. The notary.”

Out the bay window of her shop, Myrna Landers saw puffs of snow being lifted, then falling onto the massive banks that now circled the village green. They were so high, Myrna could no longer see who was doing the shoveling. Just the bright red shovel and the cloud of snow.

It felt as though she was ringed in by a newly formed mountain range.

“Three o’clock,” repeated Myrna, writing it down. She glanced at the clock. It was now one thirty. “Give me the address.” She wrote it too. “I’ll let Armand know to meet us there.”

Myrna replaced the phone and turned to look out the window again, watching the small eruptions all around the village green.

Then she put in a quick call to Armand, giving him the time and place of the meeting with the Baroness’s family. After wolfing down the last of her sandwich, she headed back outside.

“My turn,” said Myrna, taking the shovel from Benedict, who was both sweating and freezing.

“My God,” said Clara, leaning on her shovel and surveying the amount still left to be cleared. “Why do we live here?”

The day sparkled and their noses dripped and their feet froze, and their inner layer of clothing clung to their bodies in perspiration while their outer layer froze brittle. As they dug the village out.

Beside her, Myrna heard Clara muttering. Each word contained in a puff, accompanied by a shovelful of snow.

“Barbados.”

“St. Lucia,” said Myrna.

“Jamaica,” came the response.

“Antigua,” both women said, leaning into their job.

When they’d run out of Caribbean islands, they went on to food.

Mille-feuilles.

Lobster. Lemon posset.

These things they loved.

Armand hung up just as the Commander returned to his office.

“She’s sitting on the bench in the anteroom. My assistant is watching her.”

“Does your assistant have a Taser?”

The Commander gave one brief laugh and pulled a chair up to face Gamache.

“So what’re we going to do with her?”

“What would you suggest?” asked Gamache. “This is your academy. She’s one of your cadets.”

The Commander paused for a moment, watching the Chief Superintendent.

“Is she, Armand? She seems yours.”

Gamache smiled. “Do you think it was a mistake, letting her in?”

“A stoned former prostitute junkie who’s dealing opioids in the academy? Are you kidding? She’s a delight.”

Armand gave one, not altogether amused, chuckle.

“And yet not everyone sees it that way,” he said before his face grew serious again.

“You know, the truth is,” said the Commander, “until this happened, Cadet Choquet was a standout. Unconventional. Annoying as hell. But brilliant. And not given to deceit. I thought.”

The Commander looked at the door and imagined the once-promising young woman sitting on the other side.

Once again the fate of reckless youth was being decided by old men behind closed doors. Though neither man was old, they were probably, he thought, older than she would ever be.

Cadet Choquet hadn’t been just reckless. Chief Superintendent Gamache was right. Her actions had been ruinous. But ruins could, with great effort, be restored. Or they could collapse entirely, hurting everyone trying to help.

“What’re you thinking?” the Commander asked.

For Gamache was thinking something. Considering something.

“What would happen,” Gamache asked, “if we cut her loose?”

“Expel her, you mean.”

It was certainly one of the few options open to them.

He went through the possibilities. They could give Cadet Choquet a warning and forget this ever happened. Sweep it under an already fairly lumpy academy carpet.

Kids made mistakes and should not be handicapped the rest of their lives for them. Though this seemed considerably more than a “mistake.”

Or they could kick her out of the academy.

Or they could have her arrested and tried for possession and trafficking.

Chief Superintendent Gamache was considering the middle option. What would be, with any other cadet, a reasonable, even kind response.

It would be punishment, a consequence, but it would not blight the rest of their life.

Except they were talking about Amelia Choquet. A young woman with a history of prostitution. Of drug abuse. Who had fallen back into old habits.

The Commander reflected. “I’ve begun researching rehabs. Whichever route we choose, that’ll be necessary.”

When there was no response, he looked over at the Chief Superintendent, who was staring at him.

The Commander’s eyes widened.

“Non? But if we don’t—”

His mind retreated, back to the fork in the road. And then he took the other route.

His face flattened, all expression sliding from it, as he stared into Cadet Choquet’s future. If they took that road.

“You’d do that?” he asked, quietly. “Not even try to get her help?”

“I helped once, and look where it got us. If she wants help, she has to come to it herself. It’s more effective. We both know that.”

“No we don’t. What we know is that she’s a junkie who’s slipped. She’s our responsibility, Armand. We have to help her up.”

“She isn’t ready. You can see that. It would be wasting a precious rehab place. A place another kid could use. A kid who is ready.”

“Are you kidding me?” It was all the Commander could do to get the words out. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself, that this is some big favor you’re doing?”

“Carrying her is no favor.”

“Seems to me when you were hurt, you were carried to safety. No one expected you to crawl to the emergency ward.”

Gamache sat there, his entire body tingling. With the truth of it. But he needed to remain firm. Resolute.

“She’s wounded, Armand. Deep down. As surely as if she’d been shot. She needs our help.”

“She needs to know she can do this herself. If she can, there’ll be no more slips. That’s the help we give her now.”

“For God’s sake, Armand, if you cut her loose, you kill her. You know that.”

“No. If I cut her loose, I allow her to own her own life. She can do it. I know she can.”

“You came to that conclusion sipping scotch beside your fireplace, did you?”

The two men stared at each other. What the Commander said wasn’t far from the truth. Armand had sat in his living room, Henri’s head on his feet, Reine-Marie reading archive files across from him. While outside, snow gently fell. And Chief Superintendent Gamache considered the fate of reckless youth.

Amelia. And thousands of others. Maybe hundreds of thousands of others.

He’d weighed the options. In front of the hearth.

Safe and sound. Warm and loved. He’d considered his options and the atrocity he was about to commit.

Twenty minutes later they stood in the long hallway by the entrance, and exit, to the Sûreté Academy.

Amelia Choquet, no longer in her uniform, walked toward them, a member of staff on either side of her. A large knapsack was slung over her shoulder, bulging not with clothes, Gamache suspected by the sharp angles of the canvas bag, but with the only things Amelia considered worth keeping.

Books.

He watched her progress, and as she passed him, neither said a word.

She’d return to the streets, of course. To the gutter. To the drugs and prostitution necessary to pay for the next hit. And the next.

A few paces from them, Amelia stopped. She reached into her bag, then in one fluid motion she turned and threw something at them. It spun through the air with such speed the Commander, standing next to Gamache, barely had time to duck away.

But Gamache’s instincts were different.

He didn’t flinch. Instead his right hand shot up, and just before the object struck him in the face, he caught it.

The last he saw of Amelia Choquet was a sneer as she turned her back on him and, lifting her middle finger, she walked into her new life. Her old life.

Gamache stood there contemplating the empty rectangle of light, until the door closed and the place fell dark. Only then did he look down at the book in his hand. It was the small book he had offered her that first day at the academy. A lifetime ago.

His own copy. Marcus Aurelius. Meditations.

She’d turned it down, sneering at the offer. But now he looked at the slim volume. Amelia had gone out and bought her own. And hurled it in his face.

“Excusez-moi,” he said to the Commander, who was staring at him with something close to loathing. “May I use your office? Privately?”

“Of course.”

Gamache placed a call, though the door wasn’t quite closed and the Commander heard. Because he was listening.

“She’s left. Follow her.”

The Commander understood then what Gamache had done. What he was doing. What had almost certainly been the plan all along.

Chief Superintendent Gamache was releasing the young woman into the wild. And where would she go? Back to the gutter, certainly. And there, amid the filth, she would search out more dope.

She would lead them to the trafficker. And perhaps the rest of the opioids that the head of the Sûreté du Québec had allowed into the country.

Chief Superintendent Gamache would recover the drugs and save any number of lives. But he would have to step over the body of Amelia Choquet to do it.

As he watched Gamache leave the academy, the Commander didn’t know if he admired the head of the Sûreté more. Or less.

He also harbored an unworthy thought. And as much as he tried to dismiss it, the idea refused to leave.

The Commander wondered if the Chief Superintendent had planted the drugs himself. Knowing this would happen.

In his car, before heading to the rendezvous with Myrna and the others, Armand took off his gloves, put on his reading glasses, and held the book between his large hands.

Then he opened it, revisiting the familiar passages. An old friend.

As he flipped through the dog-eared pages, he found lines she’d underlined.

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”

And he thought of the click, click, clicking he’d heard as Amelia had passed him in the hallway. Her tell.

Save Our Souls.