A Great Reckoning

  “I would too, mon beau,” said Reine-Marie. “But I tell you what. If Ruth accepts the help, I’d love to do it.”

  After breakfast, she joined Ruth on the sofa and started on the blanket box, while Armand and Henri walked home.

  “Armand,” shouted Olivier, and when Gamache turned he saw the owner of the bistro at the door waving something.

  It was the dossier.

  Armand jogged back to get it.

  “Did you read it?” he asked. His voice was just sharp enough for Olivier to hesitate.

  “Non.”

  But under the steady stare, Olivier cracked.

  “Maybe. Okay, yes. I glanced at it. Just her picture. And her name. And a bit about her background.”

  “Merci,” said Armand, taking the file and turning away.

  As he walked home, Armand wondered why he’d snapped at Olivier. The file was marked “Confidential” but he’d shown it to Reine-Marie, and it wasn’t exactly a state secret. And who wouldn’t be tempted to look at something marked “Confidential”?

  If they knew anything about Olivier, it was that he had no immunity to temptation.

  Gamache also wondered why he’d left it behind. Had he really forgotten it?

  Was it a mistake, or was it on purpose?

  * * *

  The snow returned by early afternoon, blowing in over the hills and swirling around, trapped there. Turning Three Pines into a snow globe.

  Reine-Marie called and said she was having lunch at the bistro. Clara and Myrna had joined the excavation of the blanket box, and they’d be spending the afternoon eating and reading.

  It sounded to Armand pretty much perfect and he decided to do the same himself, at home.

  He poked the birch log freshly tossed on the fire in their living room grate and watched as the bark caught and crackled and curled. Then he sat down with a sandwich, a book, and Henri curled up beside him on the sofa.

  But Armand’s eyes kept drifting back to his study, crowded with impatient young men and women, cheek by jowl, staring at him. Waiting for the old man to decide what next for them, as old men had decided the fate of youth for millennia.

  He wasn’t old, though he knew he’d look old, perhaps even ancient, to them. The young men and women would see a man in his late fifties. Just over six feet tall, he was substantial rather than heavy, or so he told himself. His hair was more gray than brown and it curled slightly around his ears. While he’d sometimes had a moustache and sometimes a beard, he was now clean-shaven, the lines of his face visible for all to see. It was a careworn face. But most of the lines, if followed back like a trail, would lead to happiness. To the faces a face made when laughing or smiling, or sitting quietly enjoying the day.

  Though some of those lines led elsewhere. Into a wilderness, into the wild. Where terrible things had happened. Some of the lines of his face led to events inhuman and abominable. To horrific sights. To unspeakable acts.

  Some of them his.

  The lines of his face were the longitude and latitude of his life.

  The young men and women would also see the deep scar at his temple. It would tell them how close he’d come to dying. But the best of them would see not just the wound, but the healing. And they’d see, deep in his eyes, beyond the scar, beyond the pain, beyond even the happiness, something unexpected.

  Kindness.

  And perhaps, when their own faces were mapped, kindness would be discovered there too.

  That’s what he was looking for in the dossiers. In the photographs.

  Anyone could be clever. Anyone could be smart. Anyone could be taught.

  But not everyone was kind.

  Armand Gamache looked into the study at the young men and women assembled there. Waiting.

  He knew their faces, or at least their photographs. He knew their stories, or at least as much as they were willing to tell. He knew about their schooling, their grades, their interests.

  Among the crowd he spotted her. Amelia. Waiting with the rest.

  His heart lurched and he stood up.

  Amelia Choquet.

  He knew then why he was reacting as he was. Why he’d left her behind at the bistro, and why he’d gone back for her.

  And why he felt so strongly about her.

  He’d shown the dossier to Reine-Marie hoping she’d give him the permission he sought. To do what all reason told him to do. To reject this young woman. To turn his back. To walk away, while he still could.

  And now he knew why.

  Henri snored and drooled on the sofa, the fire murmured and crackled, the snow tapped the windowpanes.

  It wasn’t her first name he was reacting to. It was her last. Her family name.

  Choquet.

  It was unusual, though not unique. The normal spelling would be Choquette.

  He strode across to his study and, grabbing her file off the floor, he opened it. Scanning down the pathetically scant information. Then he closed it, his hand trembling.

  He glanced at the fire, and briefly considered laying her there. Letting her go up, or down, in flames. A witch for the burning.

  But instead he went downstairs, to the basement.

  There he unlocked the back room. Where all his files on old cases were kept. And at the very back of the back room, he unlocked a small box.

  And there he found it.

  Confirmed it.

  Choquet.

  Logic told him he could be wrong. What were the chances, after all? But in his heart he knew he was right.

  Returning upstairs, his feet heavy on the steps, he stood at the window and watched the snow falling.

  Children, in hastily unpacked snowsuits smelling of cedar, were running around the village green, chasing and tackling each other into the soft snow. Pelting anyone in their sights with snowballs. Rolling out snowmen. They shrieked and yelled and laughed.

  He went into his study and spent the next hours doing research. And when Reine-Marie arrived back, he greeted her with a large Scotch and the news.

  He had to go to the Gaspé.

  “The Gaspé?” she asked, making certain she’d heard correctly. It was the last thing she expected him to say. Go to the bathroom. Go to the store. Go to Montréal even, for meetings. But the Gaspé Peninsula? Hundreds of miles away, where the edge of Québec met salt water.

  “Are you going to see him?”

  When he nodded, she said, “Then I’m coming with you.”

  He returned to his study. Staring through the mullioned windows, he saw the exhausted children falling on their backs, one after the other, into the snow, sweeping their arms and legs up and down.

  Then they got up and trudged home, squirming as snow melted down their necks and trickled in rivulets down their backs. It stuck to their mitts and the back of their tuques. Their faces were bright red and their noses ran.

  They left behind them angels in the snow.

  And in the study, his hand trembling slightly, Armand took a deep breath and changed the dot on Amelia’s file. To green.

  CHAPTER 2

  Michel Brébeuf could see the car approaching along the cliff highway for quite a distance. At first he watched through his telescope and then with the naked eye. There was nothing to obscure his view. Not a tree, not a house.

  The wind had rubbed the land down to its essence. Some rough grass, and rock. Like a worry stone. Inundated in the summer by tourists and part-time residents who came for the rugged beauty of the area and left before the snow moved in, only a rare few appreciated the glories the Gaspé had to offer the rest of the year.

  They clung to the peninsula because they had no desire to leave, or nowhere else to go.

  Michel Brébeuf was among the latter.

  The car slowed and then, to his surprise, it stopped at the foot of his drive, pulling onto the soft shoulder of the provincial highway.

  It was true that he had a particularly spectacular view of Percé Rock, out in the bay, but there were better and safer places to pull
over for a photograph.

  Brébeuf grabbed his binoculars, sitting on the windowsill, and trained them on the car. It was a rental. He could tell by the plates. There were two people in it. Man and woman. Caucasian. Middle-aged, perhaps in their fifties.

  Affluent, but not flashy.

  He couldn’t see their faces, but quickly, instinctively, surmised this by their choice of rental and their clothing.

  And then the man in the driver’s seat turned to speak to the woman beside him.

  And Michel Brébeuf slowly lowered the binoculars and stared out to sea.

  The snow that had whacked central Québec had arrived the day before in the Gaspé Peninsula as heavy rain. The sort of drenching common in the Maritimes in November. If it were possible to render sorrow, it would look like a November gale.

  But then, like sorrow, it too passed and the new day arrived almost impossibly clear and bright, the sky a perfect blue. Only the ocean held on to the distress. It churned and broke against the stones of the shoreline. Out in the bay, standing all alone, was the magnificent Percé Rock, the Atlantic Ocean hurtling against it.

  By the time he dragged his eyes back, the couple had turned the car into his driveway and were almost at the house. As he watched, they got out. And stood there. The man had his back on the house and stared out to sea. To the great rock with the great hole worn through it.

  The woman went to him and took his hand. And then, together, they walked the last few yards to the house. Slowly. As reluctant, it would appear, to see him as he was to see them.

  His heart was throbbing now and he wondered if he might drop dead before the couple arrived at his porch.

  He hoped so.

  His eyes, trained to these things, went to Armand’s hands. No weapon. Then to his coat. Was there a bulge there by the shoulder? But surely he hadn’t come to kill him. If he’d wanted to do that, he’d have done it before now. And not in front of Reine-Marie.

  It would be a private assassination. And one Michel had, privately, been expecting for years.

  What he hadn’t expected was a social call.

  * * *

  After making sure no blood would be spilled, Reine-Marie had gone inside, leaving Armand and Michel to sit on the porch, wrapped in sweaters and jackets, on cedar chairs turned silver by time and exposure. As had they.

  “Why are you here, Armand?”

  “I’ve retired from the Sûreté.”

  “Oui, I heard.”

  Brébeuf looked at the man who’d been his best friend, his best man, his confidant and colleague and valued subordinate. He’d trusted Armand, and Armand had trusted him.

  Michel had been right. Armand had not.

  Armand stared out at the massive rock in the distance, its center hollowed out, worn away by eons of the relentless sea, until it was a stone halo. Its heart gone.

  Then he turned to Michel Brébeuf. The godfather to his daughter. As he was godfather to Michel’s firstborn.

  How often had they sat beside each other, as inspectors, discussing a case? And then across from each other, as Michel’s star had risen and Armand’s had waned? Boss and subordinate at work, but remaining best friends outside.

  Until.

  “All the way here I was thinking,” said Armand.

  “About what happened?”

  “No. About the Great Wall of China.”

  Michel laughed. It was involuntary and genuine, and for the brief life of that laugh the bad was forgotten.

  But then the laugh died away and Michel again wondered if Armand was there to kill him.

  “The Great Wall of China? Really?”

  Michel tried to sound disinterested, even irritated. More intellectual bullshit on the part of Gamache. But the truth was, as with all apparently irrelevant things Armand said, Brébeuf was curious.

  “Hmmmm,” said Armand. The lines around his mouth deepened. Evidence of a very slight smile. “It’s possible I was the only one on the flight thinking about it.”

  Brébeuf was damned if he was going to ask why the Great Wall.

  “Why?”

  “It took centuries to build, you know,” said Armand. “They started it in 200 BC, or thereabouts. It’s an almost unbelievable achievement. Over mountains and across gorges, for thousands of miles. And it’s not just a wall. They didn’t just slap it together. Effort was made to make it both a fortification and a thing of beauty. It kept China safe for centuries. Invaders couldn’t get past it. It’s an absolutely astonishing feat.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “But finally in the sixteenth century, fifteen hundred years after it was started, the Manchus broke through the Great Wall. Do you know how they did it?”

  “I’m thinking you’re going to tell me.”

  But the veneer of weariness and boredom had worn away, and even Michel could hear the curiosity in his voice. Not simply because he wanted to know about the Great Wall of China, something he had not spent a moment thinking about his entire life. But because he wanted to know why Armand was thinking of it.

  “Millions of lives were lost building the wall and defending it. Dynasties went bankrupt paying for it and maintaining it,” said Gamache, looking out to sea and feeling the bracing salt air on his face.

  “After more than a thousand years,” he continued, “an enemy finally broke through. Not because of superior firepower. Not because the Manchus were better fighters or strategists. They weren’t. The Manchus breached the Great Wall and took Beijing because someone opened a gate. From the inside. As simple as that. A general, a traitor, let them in and an empire fell.”

  All the fresh air in the world surrounded them, but Michel Brébeuf couldn’t breathe. Armand’s words, their meaning, clogged his passages.

  Armand sat with apparently infinite patience, waiting. For Michel to either recover or pass out. He would not hurt his former friend, at least not at the moment, but neither would he help him.

  After several minutes, Michel found his voice. “A man’s foes shall be they of his own household, eh, Armand?”

  “I doubt the Manchus would quote the Bible, but it does seem universal. Betrayal.”

  “Have you come all this way to taunt me?”

  “Non.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I want you to come work for me.”

  The words were so ridiculous Brébeuf couldn’t understand them. He stared at Gamache in undisguised confusion.

  “What? Where?” Brébeuf finally asked.

  Though the real question, they both knew, was why.

  “I’ve just taken over as the commander of the Sûreté Academy,” said Armand. “The new term starts right after Christmas. I’d like you to be one of the professors.”

  Brébeuf continued to stare at Armand. Trying to grasp what was being said.

  This was no simple job offer. Nor, he suspected, was it a peace offering. There’d been too much war, too much damage, for that. Yet.

  This was something else.

  “Why?”

  But Armand didn’t answer. Instead he held Brébeuf’s eyes, until Michel lowered them. Then Gamache shifted his gaze back out to the view. To the vast ocean and the massive rock it had worn down.

  “How do you know you can trust me?” asked Michel, to Armand’s profile.

  “I don’t,” said Armand.

  “You don’t know, or you don’t trust me?”

  Armand turned then and gave Michel a look he’d never seen before. There wasn’t loathing there. Not quite. It wasn’t quite contempt. But it was close.

  There was certainly knowing. Gamache saw him for what he was.

  A weak man. A Percé man. Hollowed out by time and exposure. Worn down and misshapen. Pierced.

  “You opened the gate, Michel. You could’ve stopped it, but you didn’t. When corruption came knocking, you let it in. You betrayed everyone who trusted you. You turned the Sûreté from a strong and brave force into a cesspool, and it has taken many lives and many years
to clean it out.”

  “Then why invite me back in?”

  Armand got up and Brébeuf rose with him.

  “The weakness in the Great Wall wasn’t structural, it was human,” said Gamache. “The strength, or weakness, of anything is primarily human. Including the Sûreté. And it all starts at the academy.”

  Brébeuf nodded. “D’accord. I agree. But again, even more so, why me? Aren’t you afraid that I might infect them?”

  He studied Gamache. Then smiled.

  “Or is there already an infection there, Armand? That’s it, isn’t it? Did you come all this way for the antidote? Is that why you need me? I’m the antivirus. The stronger infection sent in to cure the disease. It’s a dangerous game, Armand.”

  Gamache gave him a hard, assessing look, then went inside to get Reine-Marie.

  Michel accompanied them back down the drive. And watched them drive away, back to the airport and the flight home.

  Then he went inside. Alone. No more wife. No more children. No grandchildren. Just a magnificent view, out to sea.

  On the flight, Gamache looked down at the fields, and forests, and snow, and lakes and considered what he’d done.

  Michel was right, of course. It was dangerous, though it wasn’t a game.

  What would happen, he wondered, if he couldn’t control it and the antibiotic, the virus, went viral?

  What had he just sent in? What gate had he opened?

  * * *

  Instead of going back to Three Pines when they landed, Armand drove to Sûreté headquarters. But first he dropped Reine-Marie at their daughter’s home. Annie was four months pregnant with her first child and was showing now.

  “Coming in, Dad?” she asked from the door. “Jean-Guy will be home soon.”

  “I’ll be back later,” he said, kissing her on both cheeks.

  “No rush,” called Reine-Marie, and closed the door.

  At headquarters, Armand pressed the top button in the elevator and was swept up to the office of the Chief Superintendent.

  Thérèse Brunel looked up from her desk. Behind her, the lights of Montréal spread out. He could see three bridges and the headlights of cars filled with people heading home. It was a commanding view, and behind the desk was a commanding presence.

  “Armand,” she said, rising to greet her old friend with an embrace. “Thank you for coming in.”