The Nature of the Beast

  Armand Gamache looked at Sean Delorme and suddenly felt some concern that what had happened to Laurent, what happened to Gerald Bull, might happen to him. That reality would come calling. And once found, it would take his life. As it had taken theirs.

  “You said almost everyone had stopped looking for the Supergun,” said Gamache.

  “True.”

  “Almost,” Gamache repeated. “Almost everyone. But some would have kept going?”

  Who kept going when every reasonable person gave up, Gamache wondered, though he already knew the answer.

  The unreasonable. That’s who. The fanatics.

  “Who is still looking for the gun?” Gamache asked.

  “This is all just theory, supposition.”

  “Then theorize.”

  Delorme sighed. “Okay. The people who stopped looking were probably those who went on to other interests. They brokered other deals, found new clients, created new weapons. But there are some who can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” asked Gamache.

  “They don’t have the skills. There are some within the arms community who are bottom feeders. They live off the ideas of others. They’re opportunistic. Mercenary. They’re like grave robbers or treasure hunters. They don’t have to amass the treasure, they just have to find it. And steal it.”

  “Surely stealing from an arms dealer can’t be a good idea.”

  “No, but if the reward is big enough it might be worth the risk. And in this case, there was no risk. The man who designed the Supergun is dead.”

  “Is he?”

  Sean Delorme’s head fell to the side, as though the question had shoved him off-kilter. “Are we back there? We told you over breakfast, Gerald Bull took five bullets to the brain. He’s dead.”

  “Oui, you did. But suppose Dr. Bull was a great salesman, but not a great designer.”

  Delorme opened his mouth to speak, but Gamache held up his hand.

  “Hear me out. Isn’t there a certain amount of evidence suggesting just that? That Bull might’ve had the idea, but someone else had to actually design the gun? They’d make the perfect team. Gerald Bull would find a buyer and someone else would draw up the plans.”

  Sean Delorme was silent, taking this in. Then he smiled, breaking into a huge, goofy grin.

  “You’re kidding, right? Having fun with me?”

  Gamache said nothing.

  “Come on, there’s no proof of that at all. And who would it be? And please don’t say John Fleming.”

  Again, Gamache remained silent, but looked across the room. And Delorme’s smile faded.

  “You don’t think…” He glanced over toward Rosenblatt. “But that’s ridiculous. He’s not nearly smart enough.” He lowered his voice. “If he’s still here, it’s for a whole other reason.”

  Gamache remembered Delorme’s description of Rosenblatt. A leech. And his description of those who’d spent decades searching for the Supergun. As people who fed on the work of others. Leeches.

  “The gun no longer matters, does it?” said Gamache. “Once it was found, anyone looking for the Supergun would have shifted their search. After all, the gun’s being guarded. No one can steal it, or fire it.”

  “But someone might build another one,” said Delorme.

  “If they had the plans,” said Gamache.

  And if the gun was here, the plans might be too.

  They’d assumed Laurent had been murdered by someone who knew the gun was there and wanted to keep its location secret. After all, who else would believe his ridiculous story?

  But suppose Laurent was murdered by someone who’d spent decades searching for it? And when a dirty little boy came flying out of the woods yelling about a gun bigger than a house, with a monster on it, one person believed him. A plan had begun to form. For murder.

  And Gamache now had an answer to a question that had been bothering him. It seemed inexplicable that a Supergun, a massive missile launcher, could be found in the woods of Québec and CSIS only send two file clerks.

  No squad of soldiers. No team of scientists.

  Gamache now knew it was because they didn’t need anyone else. The gun was essentially a sculpture. All but useless. What CSIS needed were people who could find the plans.

  And that task fell to two middle-aged bureaucrats who knew more about Project Babylon and the beast marching to Armageddon than anyone else.

  With the possible exception of an elderly physicist.

  * * *

  Michael Rosenblatt sipped his Scotch and looked over at the fresh young Sûreté Chief Inspector, speaking with Mary Fraser, the dried-up CSIS agent.

  And they were looking at him, but averted their gaze when he met their eyes.

  Then he shifted his glance to the retired Chief Inspector speaking with Delorme.

  They too were looking at him. The CSIS agent quickly looked away, but Armand Gamache held his eyes.

  Professor Rosenblatt suddenly felt hemmed in.

  Turning to his companion, he said, “I wonder why they’re still here.”

  “The CSIS agents?” asked Beauvoir. “To gather information about the gun, of course. Why else?”

  “Yes,” said Rosenblatt. “Why else.”

  * * *

  Dinner was served, with the platters of game hens and bowls of grilled vegetables and baskets of sliced baguette put on the long pine table in Clara’s kitchen. The room was lit with candles, and in the middle of the table sat an exuberant centerpiece.

  Myrna had spent the afternoon collecting arching branches of bright fall leaves, and smaller branches still bearing tiny red crab apples. She’d collected pine cones from under the trees on the village green. Sticks and cones. A tribute to the boy who’d spent his whole life protecting Three Pines.

  CHAPTER 22

  Once dinner was over and the dishes done, the guests went their separate ways.

  “Coming, numbnuts?”

  “I just want to get the record, I’ll be over in a minute.”

  And he was. Within minutes Jean-Guy was carefully tipping the vinyl record out of the sleeve.

  “Here, give me that.” Ruth grabbed the LP from him and almost dropped it on the floor.

  Finding the A-side, she put it on the turntable, surprising Beauvoir by fitting the small hole onto the post effortlessly. But he stopped her before she swung the arm of the record player over the precious disc and scratched it.

  “Let me do that.”

  “Have you ever done it before?” Ruth demanded, shoving him aside with a sharp elbow.

  “Hey,” he said. “That hurt.”

  “You want to know hurt? Wait ’til your ears get a load of that.” She jabbed her finger at Al Lepage’s record, now going round and round on the turntable. Ruth lifted the arm and expertly, delicately, lowered the needle to the vinyl.

  A rhythmic crackling came from the speakers.

  And then the first song started with a simple guitar. Classical, melodic. And then a drumbeat, like a metronome. At first a slow march, then it gathered speed, intensity. It picked up more instruments as it began to race along. A piano, strings. Horns. The drum became almost militaristic, building to a vigorous, energetic, stirring crescendo.

  And weaving through it was the voice.

  Beauvoir sat on the lumpy old sofa and stared at the turntable, marveling at Al Lepage’s deep, gravelly voice.

  As the first song wound down, Jean-Guy turned to Ruth. “That was incredible. Even you must see that.”

  “Did you listen to the lyrics?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, if you thought they were great, more than your nuts are numb. Excuse me, I have to pee.” She rocked herself out of the chair. “I’ve been drinking tea all night.”

  When she left, Jean-Guy carefully lifted the arm and replaced the needle at the beginning of the record.

  A soldier and a sailor met in a bar, Al sang in his raspy voice. The one said to the other, there you are.

  Jean-Guy liste
ned as the soldier and sailor talked about war and love, parted ways, then ended up on different sides of a conflict.

  Ruth was right. It was painful, but not in the way Al Lepage probably intended. The story was clichéd, embarrassing, cringe-worthy. The rhymes were either obvious or tortured. But the music and voice obscured that, camouflaging it. Making it appear better than it was. Perhaps, thought Beauvoir, like the man himself.

  The next song was on. The music was powerful, with piano and banjo and harmonica. A fusion of folk and rock and country.

  Now Al was singing about a dog who gets lost and is just about to curl up and die when he’s found by a pack of wild dogs and saved. He’s accepted into the pack but, too late, he realizes they’re wolves and he’s expected to kill other animals. As they do. Not because they’re cruel but because it’s in their nature. Just as he’s about to kill a little lamb, his heart in despair, he sees a light through the trees and runs toward it. A door opens, and it’s his family. Calling to him. Waiting for him.

  Jean-Guy sat on the sofa marveling how a story that should have been, could have been, very moving had been rendered ridiculous by infantile and clunky lyrics and silly attempts to force words to rhyme. Beauvoir was not sure “dog” rhymed with “ideologue.”

  It was a shame. Lepage’s ideas, his voice, his music were powerful. His lyrics, on the other hand, were merde. They should never have been shared. Beauvoir wondered how the record had fared.

  Jean-Guy was having fun finding words that rhymed with merde, when Ruth reappeared. And glared.

  “Had enough?” she asked. “If you keep listening, your brain will turn into something soft and smelly.”

  “How do you know? Have you heard it before?”

  The mad old poet walked over to her stereo and returned to the sofa holding Al’s record. Her own copy.

  “How’d you get this?” Beauvoir asked, taking it from her.

  “It’s self-produced. I bought one and listened to it once to be polite, but it’s crap.”

  And yet, thought Jean-Guy, she’d kept it. The record didn’t end up in the church rummage sale. Or the dump. And since when was Ruth polite? Or perhaps the question should be, when did she become impolite?

  “He used to busk on the street in Cowansville, when he first arrived,” said Ruth. “Sometimes he’d play in the boîtes à chansons in Montréal, but mostly he sang in the coffeehouses around here. That was before Gabri and Olivier opened the bistro.”

  “He doesn’t play there now, though, does he?” asked Beauvoir.

  “No,” said Ruth. “He stopped singing, thank God.”

  Jean-Guy put the album facedown. He didn’t want to look at the smiling young man with the bushy red beard, who had no idea what heartbreak was waiting for him a few decades down the road.

  “How did Al Lepage get across the border?” Jean-Guy asked.

  “He ran, I guess. Probably chased by a gang of music lovers.”

  “Lepage claims he walked across the border from Vermont. But how’d he find Three Pines? He didn’t just stumble into it, did he? He had to have had help.”

  “Maybe he was meant to find Three Pines,” she said, getting up again and gathering Rosa in her arms.

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “You have no idea what I believe,” she snapped, then softened her expression as she made for the stairs to her bedroom. “Turn off the lights when you leave.”

  “Are you going upstairs to heave?” he called after her and heard, out of the darkness, a chuckle.

  Jean-Guy leaned back and listened to the music, trying not to hear the lyrics. Something about—

  Buy, buy this good apple pie.

  Oh no, thought Beauvoir, surely not.

  Drove my Honda, which I’m fonda …

  He tuned out the lyrics and replaced them with the conversation after dinner, when he and Isabelle had walked to the Gamaches’ from Clara’s so he could pick up the record and they could have a brief discussion about the evening.

  “What I find strange,” Isabelle had said, as they sat in the Gamaches’ living room, “is that neither the CSIS people nor Rosenblatt picked up on Dr. Bull’s poor academic record and that maybe there was someone else, the real designer, working behind the scenes. I mean, it was right there. Even Madame Gamache found it.”

  “Thank you, dear,” said Reine-Marie.

  “Désolé. But you know what I mean. These people are supposedly experts on Gerald Bull, and professionals at deciphering information, and yet they miss that?”

  Armand nodded. “Why do you think that is? Beyond the obvious answer that Reine-Marie is far smarter than all of them.”

  “Merci, mon cher,” said Madame Gamache. “You know, a lot of geniuses did poorly in school. Maybe that was Dr. Bull.”

  “Maybe,” said Jean-Guy. “But I think the CSIS people, and perhaps even Professor Rosenblatt, didn’t miss it. They were just hoping we would. I think they know perfectly well someone else was involved with Project Babylon.”

  “And that’s why they’re still here,” said Armand, nodding.

  “To look for the plans or the person?” asked Isabelle.

  “Both,” said Beauvoir.

  “You think the person who designed Project Babylon is here in Three Pines?” asked Lacoste.

  “I don’t,” said Beauvoir. “Not really. But maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Impressive,” said Lacoste.

  Jean-Guy smiled tightly and got up. “I’m heading over to Ruth’s place with Al Lepage’s record. I want to hear it. Coming?”

  “No, I’m going back to the Incident Room and see if any reports have come in. Both the Canadian government and the Americans are looking into Al Lepage. Does it seem odd that he arrived in Québec already having a French surname?”

  “What strikes me as odd,” said Beauvoir, “is that he said he walked across the border and just stumbled into Three Pines.”

  “How else would you find it?” asked Reine-Marie. She thought for a moment. “He was a draft dodger, right?”

  The Sûreté officers nodded.

  “From what I remember, they were welcomed in Canada,” said Reine-Marie. “I’m not sure they really had to sneak across the border.”

  “They were pardoned too,” said Armand. “By Jimmy Carter. Many returned.”

  “But not Al Lepage,” said Isabelle Lacoste.

  “I’ll ask Ruth if she knows anything,” said Beauvoir.

  “One other thing you might check out tomorrow,” said Armand, as he walked them down the path. “Where the CSIS agents disappeared to today. They weren’t in the village and I don’t think they were at the site of the gun.”

  That had been an hour ago, and now Jean-Guy found himself alone in Ruth’s living room, listening to Al Lepage’s record.

  When it was finished he placed the needle on the spinning vinyl again, but not at the beginning. Sitting back down, he listened, again, to the saga of the dog in the woods. The listener was meant to come away with the heartwarming image of the family not giving up hope, and the dog finding home. But what stayed with Jean-Guy was the image of an animal getting in touch with its true nature. Willing to kill if it had to.

  * * *

  The call came into the Incident Room in the old train station the next morning. It was from the local detachment of the Sûreté.

  “Since you’re already here, Chief Inspector, I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “A body was found this morning.”

  Lacoste grabbed a pen and motioned to Beauvoir, who came over.

  “Who?”

  She wrote the name on her notepad, and next to it the word murdered. And heard Jean-Guy whisper, “Merde.”

  “Where?” Lacoste wrote an address. “Is there a team there?”

  “The first response just reported in. I’ve told them not to touch anything.”

  Inspector Beauvoir had moved over to his desk and she could hear him calling for a Scene of C
rime unit from Montréal.

  “Bludgeoned to death at home,” the local agent said. “The place has been ransacked. Looks like robbery. I’ve dispatched an ambulance, of course, but it’s too late.”

  “Call the coroner,” said Lacoste.

  “Already done. She’ll meet you there.”

  “Good.”

  She hung up and looked down at her notepad, where a name was written and circled.

  Ten minutes later they were kneeling beside the body of Antoinette Lemaitre.

  CHAPTER 23

  “I recognize her,” said Sharon Harris, the coroner. “She runs the Knowlton Playhouse, doesn’t she?”

  Dr. Harris and Isabelle Lacoste were kneeling beside Antoinette, who was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. Surprised. Jean-Guy Beauvoir was crouched on the other side of the body.

  “Oui,” said Chief Inspector Lacoste. “The Estrie Players.”

  “They were doing the Fleming play,” said Dr. Harris, her gloved hands swiftly checking the body. “Community’s in a bit of an uproar about it.”

  The coroner grimaced as she spoke Fleming’s name, as though she’d put a rotten trout into her mouth. Here was a woman who worked with corpses in all states of decay and what disgusted her? The very mention of John Fleming.

  The grimace was, Lacoste knew, involuntary. Like being tapped on the kneecap. Flinching at the mention of Fleming was a healthy human reaction.

  “Not much damage that I can see,” said the coroner. “I don’t want to move her until your forensics people have arrived, but from what I see she’s been dead less than twelve hours, but more than six.”

  “Between nine thirty last night and two thirty this morning,” said Beauvoir. “And cause of death?”

  “At a guess, I’d say that.” The coroner leaned close to Antoinette’s head and pointed to the back of her skull where her purple hair was clotted and matted a deep red.

  “It looks like a single catastrophic blow. Crushed the skull. She probably didn’t know what hit her.”

  “And what did?” asked Lacoste.

  They looked around and quickly found blood staining the corner of the hearth.

  Beauvoir leaned closer. “Looks like it.”