The Beautiful Mystery

THIRTY

After Compline, the last service of the day, the abbot took Gamache aside. Dom Philippe wasn’t alone. To the Chief Inspector’s surprise, Frère Antoine was with him.

It would be impossible, looking at the men standing together, to know that they were enemies. Or at least, stood on opposite sides of a deep divide.

“How can I help you?” Gamache asked. He’d been led to a corner of the Blessed Chapel. It was empty now, though the Dominican remained in his seat. Staring ahead as though in a stupor.

Superintendent Francoeur was nowhere to be seen.

Gamache placed his back to the corner, so he could keep a watchful eye on the darkened Chapel.

“It’s about Mathieu’s last words,” said the abbot.

“‘Homo,’” said Frère Antoine. “Is that right?”

“It’s what Frère Simon reported, oui,” said Gamache. The monks exchanged a rapid glance, then returned their eyes to the Chief.

“We think we know what he meant,” said the abbot. He cleared his throat very loudly, then said, “Homo.”

“Oui,” said Gamache, staring at Dom Philippe and waiting for more. “That’s what the prior apparently said.”

The abbot did it again. This time with a monumental clearing of his throat and Gamache had a moment of concern for the man’s health.

“Homo,” Dom Philippe repeated.

Now Gamache really was puzzled. He could see Frère Sébastien, the Dominican, looking over. If the noise from the abbot’s throat had been loud to Gamache, it must have been monstrous when it hit the full glory of the chapel’s acoustics.

The abbot stared intently at Gamache, his blue eyes piercing, willing the Chief to understand something he just couldn’t.

Then beside the abbot, Frère Antoine cleared his throat. A guttural, desperate sound.

“Homo,” he said.

And the Chief Inspector finally began to grasp that it wasn’t the word they wanted him to understand, but the sound. But it still meant nothing to Gamache.

Feeling extremely thick, he turned back to the abbot.

“Désolé, mon père, but I honestly don’t understand.”

“Ecce homo.”

The words came not from the abbot, nor from Frère Antoine, but from the Blessed Chapel, as though the room itself had spoken.

Then the Dominican appeared around one of the columns.

“I believe that’s what the abbot and choirmaster are saying. Is that right?”

The two men stared at Frère Sébastien, then nodded. Their looks, if not outright belligerent, were uninviting. But it was far too late. This uninvited man from the Vatican was there. Indeed, he seemed everywhere.

Gamache turned back to the Gilbertines, standing side-by-side. Was that what had finally bridged the chasm between them? A common enemy? This pleasant, unobtrusive monk in white robes who sat so still but took up so much space?

“We think the prior wasn’t clearing his throat,” said Frère Antoine, turning from the Dominican back to Gamache, “but that he actually said two words. ‘Ecce’ and ‘homo.’”

Gamache’s eyes widened. Ecce. Eee-chay. But with the guttural Latin pronunciation. It could be.

The abbot repeated it, as the prior might have sounded. A man struggling to get out a word. A dying man with a throaty word, caught there.

Ecce homo.

The words were familiar to Gamache, but he couldn’t call them up.

“What does it mean?”

“It’s what Pontius Pilate said to the mob,” said Frère Sébastien. “He brought Jesus out, bleeding, to show them.”

“Show them what? What does it mean?” Gamache repeated, looking from Dominican to Gilbertine and back again.

“Ecce homo,” said the abbot. “He is man.”

It was almost nine in the evening, late by monastery standards, and Frère Sébastien left the three men and walked toward the cells. Frère Antoine waited a minute, for the Dominican to disappear, then after a brief bow to the abbot, he also left.

“Things have changed,” observed Gamache.

Instead of denying that there was ever a problem, Dom Philippe simply nodded and watched the younger man stride off toward the door at the far end of the chapel.

“He’ll make a wonderful choirmaster. Perhaps even better than Mathieu.” The abbot’s eyes returned to Gamache. “Frère Antoine loves the chants, but he loves God more.”

The Chief nodded. Yes. That was at the heart of this mystery, he thought. Not hate. But love.

“And the prior?” asked Gamache as he walked the abbot to his rooms. “What did he love more?”

“The music.” The answer was swift and unequivocal. “But it isn’t quite that simple.” The abbot smiled. “As you might have noticed, few things here are actually simple.”

Gamache also smiled. He had noticed.

They were in the long corridor leading to the abbot’s office and cell. Where at first it had seemed perfectly straight from one end to the other, now he thought he noticed a very slight curve. Dom Clément might have drawn a straight line, but his builders had erred, ever so slightly. As anyone who’d built a bookcase, or tried to follow a detailed map, knew, an infinitesimal error at the beginning can become a massive mistake later on.

Even the corridors here, he reflected, weren’t as simple, as straight, as they appeared.

“For Mathieu there was no separation between the music and his faith. They were one and the same,” said the abbot. His pace had slowed and now they were barely moving down the darkened hallway. “The music magnified his faith. Took it to levels of near ecstasy.”

“Levels few achieve?”

The abbot was quiet.

“Levels you’ve never achieved?” Gamache pushed.

“I’m more the slow and steady type,” said the abbot, looking straight ahead as they walked the slightly flawed path. “Not given to soaring.”

“But neither do you fall?”

“We can all fall,” said the abbot.

“But perhaps not as hard and not as fast and not as far as someone who spends his life on the ascent.”

Again the abbot lapsed into silence.

“You obviously adore the Gregorian chants,” said Gamache. “But unlike the prior, you separate them from your faith?”

The abbot nodded. “I hadn’t thought about it until this happened, but yes, I do. If the music was somehow taken away tomorrow. If I could no longer sing, or listen to the chants, my love of God would be unchanged.”

“Not so with Frère Mathieu?”

“I wonder.”

“Who was his confessor?”

“I was. Until recently.”

“Who was his new confessor?”

“Frère Antoine.”

Now their slow progress stopped completely.

“Can you tell me what Frère Mathieu said, in his confessions to you? Before he switched confessors?”

“You know I can’t.”

“Even though the prior is dead?”

The abbot studied Gamache. “Surely you know the answer to that. Has any priest ever agreed to break the seal of the confessional for you?”

Gamache shook his head. “No, mon père. But I’ll never give up hope.”

That brought a smile to the abbot’s face.

“When did the prior switch to Frère Antoine?”

“About six months ago.” The abbot looked resigned. “I wasn’t completely honest with you.” He looked directly into Gamache’s eyes. “I’m sorry. Mathieu and I did have a disagreement about the chants, and that grew into an argument about the direction of the monastery and the community.”

“He wanted another recording, and for Saint-Gilbert to be more open to the outside world.”

“Oui. And I believe we need to stay on course.”

“A steady hand on the tiller,” said the Chief, nodding approval. Though both men knew, if you were heading into the rocks, a quick turn was often necessary.

“But there was another outstanding issue,” said Gamache. They’d started walking again, toward the closed door at the end of the corridor. “The foundations.”

Gamache had taken a step forward before he realized the abbot was no longer beside him. The Chief turned and saw Dom Philippe staring at him, surprised.

It seemed to Gamache that the abbot was on the verge of another lie, but in the breath he took before speaking he seemed to change his mind.

“You know about that?”

“Frère Raymond told Inspector Beauvoir. It’s true, then.”

The abbot nodded.

“Did anyone else know?” Gamache asked.

“I told no one.”

“Not even your prior?”

“A year ago, eighteen months ago, he’d have been the first person I told, but not now. I kept it to myself. Told God, but he already knew, of course.”

“Might have even put the cracks there,” suggested Gamache.

The abbot looked at the Chief, but said nothing.

“Is that why you were in the basement yesterday morning?” asked Gamache. “Not to examine the geothermal, but to look at the foundations?”

The abbot nodded and they began their slow progress again, neither man in a hurry to reach the door.

“I waited until Frère Raymond was gone. I’m afraid I didn’t need to hear him go on and on about the impending disaster. I just needed some quiet time to look for myself.”

“And what did you see?”

“Roots,” he said, his voice a study of neutrality. A plainchant voice, monotone. No inflection. No emotion. Just fact. “The cracks are getting worse. I’d marked where they’d been the last time I looked, a week or so ago. They’ve widened since then.”

“You might have even less time than you’d hoped?”

“We might,” Dom Philippe admitted.

“So what do you do about it?”

“I pray.”

“That’s it?”

“And what do you do, Chief Inspector, when all seems lost?”

Take this child.

“I pray too,” he said.

“And does it work?”

“Sometimes,” said Gamache. Jean-Guy hadn’t died that dreadful day in the factory. Covered in blood, gasping in pain. Eyes pleading for Gamache to stay. To do something. To save him. Gamache had prayed. And Beauvoir hadn’t been taken. But neither, Gamache knew, had he returned. Not completely. Beauvoir was still caught between worlds.

“But is all lost?” he asked the abbot. “Frère Raymond seems to think another recording would bring in enough money to fix the foundations. But you have to act quickly.”

“Frère Raymond is right. But he also sees only the cracks. I see the whole monastery. The whole community. What good would it do to fix the cracks but lose our real foundation? Our vows aren’t negotiable.”

Gamache saw then what Frère Raymond must have seen. What the prior must have seen. A man who would not budge. Unlike the monastery, there were no cracks in the abbot. He was immovable, at least on this subject.

If the last Gilbertine monastery was to be saved it would have to be by divine intervention. Unless, as Frère Raymond believed, their miracle had been offered and the abbot, blinded by pride, had missed it.

“I have a favor to ask, Père Abbé.”

“Would you also like me to approve another recording?”

Gamache almost laughed. “No. I’ll leave that between you and your God. But I would like the boatman to come tomorrow morning, to take Inspector Beauvoir back with some of the evidence we’ve gathered.”

“Of course. I’ll call first thing. Assuming the fog lifts Etienne should be here shortly after breakfast.”

They’d reached the closed door. The wood pockmarked by hundreds of years of monks asking for admittance. But no longer. The iron rod was gone and would leave the abbey for good with Beauvoir in the morning. Gamache wondered if the abbot would have it replaced.

“Well,” said Dom Philippe, “good night, my son.”

“Bonne nuit, mon père,” said Gamache. The words sounded so strange. His own father had died when Gamache was a boy and he’d rarely called anyone that since.

“Ecce homo,” said Gamache, just as Dom Philippe opened the door.

The abbot paused.

“Why would Frère Mathieu say that?” Gamache asked.

“I don’t know.”

Gamache pondered for a moment. “Why did Pilate say it?”

“He wanted to prove to the mob that their god wasn’t divine at all. That Jesus was just a man.”

“Merci,” said Gamache, and bowing slightly he walked back down the slightly curved hall. To think about the Divine, the human, and the cracks in between.

“Dear Annie,” Beauvoir wrote in the dark. His light was out so that no one would know he was still awake.

He lay on his bed, fully clothed. Compline was over, he knew, and he’d retreated to his cell, until he could safely return to the prior’s office, when everyone was asleep.

He’d found a message from Annie on his BlackBerry. A light-hearted description of her evening with old friends.

I love you, she wrote, at the end.

I miss you.

Hurry home.

He thought about Annie having dinner with her friends. Had she told them about him? Had she told them about his gift? The plunger. What a stupid thing to do. A crass, boorish gift. They’d probably all laughed. At him. At the stupid Pepsi who knew no better. Who was too poor or cheap or unsophisticated to buy her a real gift. To go to Holt Renfrew or Ogilvy’s or one of the fucking snooty shops along Laurier and get her something nice.

Instead, he’d given her a toilet plunger.

And they’d laughed at him.

And Annie would’ve laughed too. At the dumb yokel she was screwing. Just for fun. He could see those eyes, shining, glowing. As she’d looked at him so often in the last few months. As she’d looked at him over the past ten years.

He’d mistaken that look for affection, love even, but now he saw it was simply amusement.

“Annie,” he wrote.

“Dear Reine-Marie,” Gamache wrote.

He’d returned to his cell, after looking for Beauvoir in the prior’s office. The lights were off and it was empty. The Chief had spent half an hour there, making notes, copying notes. Preparing the package of evidence for Beauvoir to take out the next morning.

It was eleven o’clock. The end of a long day. He’d turned the lights off and taken the package back to his cell, after first tapping on Beauvoir’s door. But there was no answer.

He’d opened the door and looked in. To be sure Jean-Guy was there. And sure enough, he could see the outline on the bed, and hear the heavy, steady breathing.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

Evidence of life.

It was unlike Jean-Guy to simply go to sleep, without a final check-in, a postmortem of the day. All the more reason, thought Gamache as he prepared for bed, to get him home as soon as possible.

“Dear Reine-Marie,” he wrote.

“Annie. My day was fine. Nothing special. The investigation is moving along. Thanks for asking. Glad to hear you had a fun night out with your friends. Lots to laugh about, I’d imagine.”

“Dear Reine-Marie. I wish you were here and we could talk about this case. It seems to swirl around the Gregorian chants and how important they are to these monks. It would be a mistake to dismiss the chants as simply music.”

Gamache paused and thought about that. He found even just writing to Reine-Marie helped clarify things, as though he could hear her voice, see her lively, warm eyes.

“We had a surprise visitor. A Dominican from the Vatican. The office that used to be the Inquisition. Apparently they’ve been searching for the Gilbertines for almost four hundred years. And today they found them. The monk says it’s just a loose end that needed to be tied up, but I wonder. I think, like so much else in this case, part of what he’s telling us is the truth, and part isn’t. I wish I could see more clearly.

“Good night, my love. Sweet dreams.

“I miss you. I’ll be home soon.

“Je t’aime.”

“Talk to U soon,” wrote Jean-Guy.

Then he hit send and lay in the dark.