The Nature of the Beast

  Myrna smiled. “Because he won’t tell us.”

  “So you’re trying to get me in trouble, ladies?” It was said with amusement and charm, but also without any weakening on his part.

  “You know something, don’t you?” said Myrna. “When Isabelle Lacoste told us about Antoinette you said something. A quote. About some rough beast, and Bethlehem.”

  “I wish I could take credit, but I was just reading what your friend Ruth had written in her notebook.”

  “It’s a quote, right?” said Myrna.

  “I believe so,” said Rosenblatt. “Shakespeare probably. Isn’t everything? Or the Bible.”

  “It must’ve meant something to you, for you to not just read what Ruth had written, but to say it out loud,” said Clara. “You must’ve agreed.”

  Michael Rosenblatt pressed his lips together and lowered his head, either in thought or against the particularly violent gust that hit them.

  “I don’t know what’s confidential and what’s public knowledge.” His words were whipped away as soon as they were out of his mouth, but Clara and Myrna were close enough to catch them.

  He studied Clara, obviously weighing some decision.

  “I was at your solo show, you know, at the Musée d’art contemporain a year or so ago. I thought what you did with portraits was brilliant. You reinvented the form. Reinvigorated it. Gave it depth and a kind of joyful spirit missing in most works today.”

  “Thank you,” said Clara.

  “You obviously know that art has power,” he said. “It can be freeing, but it can also be a weapon, especially when combined with something equally powerful, like war. Art’s been used to inspire all sorts of things. Public statues of brave soldiers. Paintings of heroic sacrifice. But it’s also been used to put the fear of God into enemies.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Clara asked.

  “Because you’ve been kind to me and I can see that not being told anything is making a terrible situation even worse. I can’t show you the gun or talk about it really, and I doubt it would help even if I could, but there is something you might be interested in, might even be able to help with.”

  He brought out his iPhone, tapped the screen, then handed it to her.

  “What is it?” she asked, looking at the photograph.

  “An etching. It’s on the side of the gun.”

  Myrna got up and moved to the other side of her friend for a better look. Professor Rosenblatt brushed his finger along the screen and the image changed to show another view of the etching.

  Both women stared at the serpent with seven heads, writhing and bucking. A woman on its back. She was even more terrifying than the monster. Hair flowing, back straight, she stared at Clara and Myrna and Professor Rosenblatt. Seeing not just them, but the village behind them and the whirlwind about them. But she herself was calm in the maelstrom. Confident.

  A cold drop tapped the top of Clara’s head, startling her. Then another. One fell on the screen, distorting the woman’s face, making it even more grotesque.

  “The Whore of Babylon,” said Myrna, and Professor Rosenblatt nodded.

  The women looked at each other while Professor Rosenblatt took back the device and slipped it into his pocket, out of the rain. Out of sight.

  “From the Book of Revelation,” said Clara.

  They were both aware of the reference. And the symbolism.

  It was a warning of catastrophe. Deliberate and inescapable. And complete.

  “We should get inside,” said Professor Rosenblatt.

  The rain was falling more heavily, in great big drops that splattered on the road, and on their backs, and on their heads as they hunched over and ran for it. The trees corkscrewed in the wind and they saw Reine-Marie with Henri racing to get home before the deluge.

  The three of them hurried into Myrna’s bookstore. Once inside she got towels to dry themselves off, stoked the woodstove, and poured tea, hot and strong.

  Rain now beat against the windows. Rattling them.

  “My God,” said Myrna, wiping her face. “If that drawing was meant to terrify, it worked. Isn’t the goddamned gun scary enough? Who needs to do that as well?”

  “Can I see it again?” Clara asked, and Professor Rosenblatt gave her his iPhone. She stared at the image, making it larger, then smaller.

  “It wasn’t signed?” she asked.

  “Nothing as convenient as that,” said the professor. “Why?”

  “Most artists sign their work in one way or another. There’s writing on it though.”

  “Yes, a biblical quote. In Hebrew.”

  “The one you and Ruth quoted?” asked Myrna.

  “No, another one. About Babylon.”

  “Why was the Whore of Babylon put on the gun?” Clara asked.

  “We think it was supposed to be a sales tool to appeal to the buyer.”

  “And who was the buyer? The devil?”

  “Pretty close.”

  “Some rough beast,” said Clara, staring at the etching. “Slouching toward Bethlehem.”

  “And his route took him right through Three Pines,” said Myrna.

  CHAPTER 29

  The wipers on Gamache’s car were working furiously, thumping and sweeping, thumping and sweeping away the rain, trying to clear a semicircle of visibility.

  When they arrived at the theater, Brian bolted out. Armand waited in the car until he got inside, but saw Brian put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, then bring them out and try other pockets. Then he looked over at Gamache.

  Armand turned the car off and dashed over, head down against the driving rain.

  “Do you have the keys?” he shouted.

  Once again Brian searched the pockets and shook his head. “They’re in my jacket. This’s yours.”

  Gamache tried the handle. It turned and the door opened.

  “Thank God,” he said, quickly following Brian inside. “But shouldn’t this be locked?”

  He closed the door against the beating rain.

  “Antoinette sometimes forgets to lock it,” said Brian, running his hands through his wet hair. “I’m okay now, you can go if you want to.”

  “I think I might wait until the storm passes,” said Armand, feeling a little bad since he knew Brian desperately wanted time alone. “I’ll just wait in the theater for a few minutes.”

  Brian went over to a panel and with a clunk turned on the stage lights, but not the house lights. While Armand took off his sodden overcoat and chose a seat in the darkness a few rows back, Brian sat on the sofa on the stage. Folding his hands on his lap, a calm seemed to come over him. He looked like a man meditating. Eyes closed, face tilted slightly upward, peaceful though not, Gamache supposed, at peace.

  This was Brian’s sanctuary and Gamache was aware he was an intruder. He felt like a voyeur. Watching an intimate act. An uninvited audience at a private play.

  He averted his eyes, looking around the set.

  It took him a while to realize what he was seeing. It started as a vague sense that something was different. Not wrong, not threatening, just a little different.

  Brian wouldn’t have noticed. His back was to the set and his eyes were closed. But Armand sensed it, then saw it.

  There were more items on the set. The tatty furniture was the same, but there were more books on the shelves, and little ornaments filled some of the empty spaces.

  Armand cocked his head to one side, looking at the items. They were too far away to see clearly, though one caught his eye. He stared at it, and then stood up.

  Walking to the wings, he climbed the few steps to the stage and into the floodlights. Brian, hearing the footsteps, opened his eyes.

  “Leaving?” he asked, with more than a little hope in his voice.

  “Not yet,” said Armand, distracted, staring at the items on the bookshelf. Then he took a step to his left and bent down, reading the spines of the books. Some were dusty old volumes that had been there before, no doubt bought in bulk
at a rummage sale and used for props in many productions. But there were a few others, including—he bent closer and put on his reading glasses—Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, Barrier Trajectories and one called Applied Physics, Theory and Design.

  Straightening up, his eyes moved swiftly over the bookshelf, the desk, the chest of drawers, all meant to convey the living room of a boardinghouse in the Fleming play.

  And then his eyes stopped. There, at the back of the desk behind a pen set, was a small photograph in a silver frame of a smiling man with a little girl in pigtails leaning against his knee.

  Gamache brought out the photo of the three scientists and compared the faces. Both smiling. Both slightly disheveled. Both Guillaume Couture.

  And the girl was almost certainly Antoinette Lemaitre, when she really was a girl and not a woman-child.

  He reached for his cell phone and called Isabelle Lacoste.

  “Antoinette brought her uncle’s things to the theater,” he said. “They’re scattered around the set on the stage.”

  “Are the plans there?” she asked immediately. “The firing mechanism?”

  “I don’t know yet, I just discovered it.”

  Brian had come over and was standing next to Gamache. He reached out for the framed photograph but Gamache stopped his hand.

  “We’ll be over right away,” said Lacoste. “Don’t touch anything.”

  It was out before she realized what she’d said.

  “We’ll try not to,” said Gamache, eyeing Brian.

  “I’m sorry, patron,” said Lacoste. “Of course you won’t.”

  After he’d hung up, Gamache asked Brian if he could point out which props had been there for a while and which ones might be new.

  Brian took his time, pointing to, but not touching, the pen set, the photo, some books, some bric-a-brac.

  When he finished, he turned back to Armand. “Did I hear you say Antoinette put these things out? That they belonged to her uncle?”

  “She must have,” said Armand. “The books were suggestive, but that photograph puts it beyond doubt. How about this?” Armand motioned to the ornament that had first caught his attention. Brian had pointed it out as something he’d never seen before. “Are you sure this isn’t from your props department?”

  Brian gnawed on his lower lip. “Pretty sure. It’s kind of memorable, isn’t it?”

  It was that, Gamache agreed. And it was manufactured to be just that. Memorable. He was certain it hadn’t been on the stage when he’d visited Antoinette a few days earlier. He’d have remembered.

  It was, after all, a souvenir. Bending closer, he came eye to eye with the statue. It was small and tacky and cheap. He knew because he’d bought one himself, but not for himself. Or Reine-Marie.

  They’d bought one each for their granddaughters when last they’d visited Paris. They’d taken the girls for a weekend away, to give Daniel and Roslyn time on their own.

  In a series of clear images, Armand saw little Florence and her littler sister Zora in front of the Eiffel Tower. In the Luxembourg Gardens. At a laiterie with dripping ice cream cones.

  Then little Florence and littler Zora on the train à grand vitesse, the TGV, in profile, side by side, looking wide-eyed out the window, the French countryside zipping by at great speed as they hurtled toward Belgium.

  And then little Florence and her littler sister Zora pointing to and laughing at the little bronze boy, peeing into the fountain in Brussels. The famous statue was called the Manneken Pis, which was also greeted with hilarity. Grandpapa had told them the story of the baby prince who, legend had it, in 1142 had peed on his enemies from a tree during battle. Legend also had it that somehow this act had led to victory. If only the arms dealers knew it wasn’t arms that won a war.

  The girls were so taken with the story and the silly statue that they’d pleaded for their own from a souvenir stand. It proved a little embarrassing to explain to their parents how the girls could have gone to the beautiful city of Brussels and their only memory, their only souvenir, was of a peeing boy.

  But Gamache now remembered something else from that trip. They’d taken the girls to the Atomium, a huge reproduction of an atom, shepherding in the atomic age. It was possible to go inside, to visit rooms, to look out the windows, and to travel up and down on the quite singular, indeed unique, escalators.

  And that’s what Reine-Marie had remembered when looking at the picture of the scientists.

  Once again Armand brought the photograph from his pocket and stared at it. Had there been a chair under him, he’d have sat. In his mind he replaced the three scientists with two teary, weary and bored girls and an exhausted Reine-Marie. At the top of the escalator. This escalator. At the Atomium.

  That was where the photograph was taken. At the Atomium. This picture placed Guillaume Couture in Brussels with Gerald Bull. Proving he’d stayed on to work with Dr. Bull while Project Babylon was being developed.

  Anyone familiar with Gerald Bull’s career, and the Atomium, would have seen that too.

  * * *

  Beauvoir and Lacoste arrived a few minutes later and Gamache showed them the new items on the stage set.

  “Brian confirms these pieces weren’t here before,” said Gamache. “And they certainly weren’t out when I was here last week.”

  “Where is he?” asked Beauvoir, unpacking his forensics kit and putting on gloves.

  “He’s gone downstairs to the greenroom, to be alone.”

  He also told them where the picture had been taken.

  “Brussels,” said Beauvoir, pausing in his search of the books. “Where Bull was murdered. But when Bull was murdered?”

  “We can’t be sure,” said Gamache.

  “Antoinette might’ve hid all her uncle’s things in the basement and then brought them here in the last few days,” said Lacoste. “That suggests she knew her uncle was involved with Gerald Bull and the gun. Why else hide the things? Why else bring them here?”

  “To get them out of the house, I agree,” said Beauvoir. “But why only in the last few days? What happened then? She didn’t do it when she took over his house. She didn’t do it when Laurent was murdered. What happened to make her get the wind up?”

  “The gun,” said Gamache.

  “But it was found when Laurent died,” said Lacoste. And then it dawned on her. “But no one knew what was under the netting. It was only three days ago that people found out it was Gerald Bull’s missile launcher.”

  Gamache nodded. “I think when Antoinette heard, she panicked. She must’ve realized it was her uncle’s gun and that was why Laurent was killed.”

  “She was afraid she’d be next,” said Beauvoir. “If the murderer found out about her uncle and his connection to Bull.”

  “And she was right,” said Lacoste. “But by the time she hid the things, it was too late.”

  “Which means,” said Gamache, “her uncle must’ve told her at least something about his work.”

  “Probably to warn her,” said Lacoste.

  “But how did the murderer find out about Dr. Couture? And that his niece was living in his home?” asked Beauvoir.

  “The photograph of them together in Brussels was published in his obituary, probably furnished by Antoinette, not realizing what it revealed,” said Gamache. “Anyone looking for the plans would see the significance immediately.”

  “But Dr. Couture died years after Gerald Bull was murdered,” Isabelle pointed out. “Was anyone still interested?”

  “In a fortune?” asked Beauvoir. “Even Professor Rosenblatt admitted there’d be people out there still looking for the mythical Supergun. What I’m not clear on is, after Laurent found the gun and was killed to stop him blabbing, why did the murderer wait a week or more to kill Antoinette and search her house for the plans? If he knew her uncle had worked on the Supergun, why not go there right away?”

  Gamache took a deep inhale, held it a moment, then exhaled.

  It was a very g
ood question. There was a reason, of course. And perhaps the answer was—

  “Maybe they aren’t the same person,” said Armand. “Maybe someone killed Laurent and someone else, on hearing of the find, came down to see it and look for the plans. They knew that Guillaume Couture was Antoinette’s uncle, and if anyone had the plans to Project Babylon it would be him.”

  “They?” asked Lacoste. “You’re thinking of Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not sure what I’m doing could really be called ‘thinking,’” said Gamache. “But yes, they’re a possibility. I put in that call to my contact in CSIS this morning. We should know more about them later today.”

  Lacoste looked around the stage. They’d printed, swabbed and bagged the items they knew were from Antoinette’s home but hadn’t found the firing mechanism or the plans.

  Gamache picked up a few of the bagged items and examined them. A pen set. A bookend. The peeing boy.

  “I don’t suppose…” Gamache turned the Manneken Pis around, and around.

  “You think that’s the firing mechanism?” asked Beauvoir, trying not to laugh.

  “I think if a weapon’s powerful enough to wipe out an entire region, and is worth billions, some effort might be made to disguise the one component that will make it work. And that”—Gamache handed the Manneken Pis to Jean-Guy—“is not it.”

  Beauvoir looked at it with distaste. “It does look familiar. Don’t Florence and Zora…?”

  “Oui,” said Gamache. “Reine-Marie bought them each one. Guess what you’re getting for Christmas.”

  They heard heavy steps on the stairs and turned around to see Brian emerging from the wings.

  “I was sitting in the greenroom when I realized that Antoinette has a desk down there. I almost looked but then thought you might want to do it yourselves.”

  “I’ll go,” said Beauvoir, handing the small statue back to Gamache. “I’m rethinking your gift now, patron.”

  He came back up twenty minutes later, shaking his head. “Just old scripts and crap. When’s the team getting here from Montréal? It’s a real rat’s nest down there with costumes and props.” He looked out into the body of the theater. “It’ll take hours to go through this place. Maybe days.”