“What was the reason?”
“He seemed to be looking for someone.”
“Someone?”
“Someone or something, or both. I don’t know,” said Chartrand.
“Why didn’t you tell us this last night?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it. Peter was an acquaintance, nothing more. Just another artist who came to Charlevoix hoping for inspiration. Hoping that what inspired these”—he gestured toward the Gagnons on the walls—“would also inspire him.”
“That Gagnon’s muse would find him and come out to play again,” said Gamache.
Chartrand considered for a moment. “Do you think he’s dead?”
“I think it’s very difficult for people to just disappear. Much harder than we realize,” said Gamache. “Until we try.”
“Then how’s it done?”
“There’s only one way. We need to stop living in this world.”
“You mean die?”
“Well, that would do it too, but I mean remove yourself from society completely. Go to an island. Go deep into the woods. Live off the land.”
Chartrand looked uncomfortable. “Join a commune?”
“Well, most communes these days are pretty sophisticated.” He studied his host. “What do you mean?”
“When Peter first visited the gallery, he asked after a man named Norman. I had no idea who he meant, but I said I’d ask around.”
“Norman?” Gamache repeated. The name sounded familiar. “What did you find out?”
“Nothing useful.”
“But you did find something?” Gamache pushed.
“There was a guy who’d set up an artist colony in the woods, but his name wasn’t Norman. It was No Man.”
“Noman?”
“No Man.”
They stared at each other. Repeating the same thing, almost.
Finally Chartrand wrote it down and Gamache nodded. He understood, though his puzzlement increased.
No Man?
* * *
Clara and Myrna came down a few minutes later, followed by Jean-Guy.
“No Man?” asked Myrna.
They’d left the gallery and were walking down a narrow street toward a local café, for breakfast.
“No Man,” Chartrand confirmed.
“How odd,” said Clara.
Beauvoir didn’t know why she was surprised. Most artists he’d met shot way past odd. Odd for them was conservative. Clara, with her wild food-infested hair and Warrior Uteruses, was one of the more sane artists.
Peter Morrow, with his button-down shirts and calm personality, was almost certainly the craziest of them all.
“Peter wasn’t looking for No Man. He was trying to find a guy named Norman,” said Chartrand.
“And did he?” asked Clara.
“Not that I know of.”
They’d arrived at the small restaurant and sat at a table inside. At Gamache’s request, Chartrand had taken them to the local diner where Peter sometimes ate.
“Oui, I knew him,” said their server when shown the photograph of Peter. “Eggs on brown toast. No bacon. Black coffee.”
She seemed to approve of this spartan breakfast.
“Did he ever eat with other people?” Clara asked.
“No, always alone,” she said. “What do you want?”
Jean-Guy ordered the Voyageur Special. Two eggs and every meat they could find and fry.
Chartrand ordered scrambled eggs.
The rest had blueberry crêpes and bacon.
When the server came back with their food, Gamache asked if she knew of a Norman.
“First or last name?” she asked, pouring more coffee.
“We don’t know.”
“Non,” she said, and left.
“Did Peter say where he knew this Norman from?” Jean-Guy asked.
Chartrand shook his head. “I didn’t ask.”
“Can you think of a Norman in Peter’s life?” Gamache asked Clara. “A friend maybe? An artist he admired?”
“I’ve been trying to think,” she said. “But the name means nothing.”
“Where does No Man come in?” Jean-Guy asked.
“He doesn’t really,” Chartrand admitted. “Just some guy who set up an artist colony around here. It failed, and he moved on. Happens a lot. Artists need to make money and they think teaching or doing retreats will help make ends meet. It almost never does.” He smiled at Clara. “The retreat was abandoned long before Peter came here. Besides, Peter didn’t seem the joining sort.”
“He travels the fastest who travels alone,” said Gamache.
“I’ve always wondered if that’s true,” said Myrna. “We might go faster, but it’s not as much fun. And when we arrive, what do we find? No one.”
No man, thought Gamache.
“Clara? You’re quiet,” said Myrna.
Clara was leaning back in her chair, apparently admiring the view. But her eyes had a glazed, faraway look.
“Norman,” she repeated. “There was someone.” She looked at Myrna. “A professor named Norman at art college.”
Myrna nodded. “That’s right. Professor Massey mentioned him.”
“He was the one who set up the Salon des Refusés,” Clara said.
“Do you think it could be the same person?” Gamache asked.
Clara’s brows drew together. “I don’t see how. Peter took his course and thought it was bullshit. It couldn’t be the same person, could it?”
“Might be,” said Myrna. “Is he the one Professor Massey said was nuts?”
“Yes. I can’t believe Peter would want to track him down.”
“Excuse-moi.” Gamache had been listening to this and now he got up and took his phone to a quiet corner. As he spoke he turned and looked out the window. To the west. He talked for a couple of minutes, then returned to their table.
“Who’d you call?” Clara asked.
But Jean-Guy knew, even before the Chief answered the question. He knew by Gamache’s body language. His stance, his face, and where he’d gazed as he spoke.
To the west. To a village in a valley.
Beauvoir knew because that’s where he turned, when speaking with Annie.
Toward home.
“Reine-Marie. I asked her to go to Toronto. To talk to your old professor, see the records if possible. Find out what she can about this Professor Norman.”
“But we could call from here,” said Myrna. “It’d be faster and easier.”
“Yes, but this is delicate and we have no right to the files. I think Reine-Marie will get further than a phone call. She’s very good at getting information.”
Gamache smiled as he said it. His wife had spent decades working in the national archives of Québec. Collecting information. But the truth was, she was far better at guarding it than giving it out.
Still, if anyone could wheedle classified information out of an institution, she could.
He glanced again to the west, and there he met Beauvoir’s gaze.
TWENTY-FIVE
The plane gathered speed and bumped down the runway at Montréal’s Trudeau International Airport.
Reine-Marie had booked on the airline that flew into the small Island Airport in downtown Toronto, rather than the huge international airport outside the city. It was far more convenient.
But it meant a prop plane and not everyone on board was comfortable with that. Including the woman sitting beside her.
She gripped the armrest and had a grimace on her face like a death mask.
“It’ll be all right,” said Reine-Marie. “I promise.”
“How can you know, turnip head?” the woman snapped. And Reine-Marie smiled.
Ruth couldn’t be that frightened if she remembered to insult her.
The plane popped into the air. If a jet took off like a bullet, the small turboprop took off like a gull. Airborne, but subject to wind currents. It bobbed and wobbled and Ruth started praying under her breath.
“Oh, Lord, shit, shit, shit. Oh, Jesus.”
“We’re up now,” said Reine-Marie in a soothing voice. “So you can relax, you old crone.”
Ruth turned piercing eyes on her. And laughed. As they broke through the cloud, Ruth’s talon-grip released.
“People weren’t meant to fly,” said Ruth, over the roar of the engines.
“But planes are, and as luck would have it, we’re in one. Now, we have an hour before landing, tell me more about your time in that Turkish prison. I take it you were a guard, not an inmate.”
Ruth laughed again, and color returned to her face. So afraid to fly, Ruth had come with Reine-Marie anyway. To keep her company. And, Reine-Marie suspected, to help find Peter.
Ruth gabbed away, nervous nonsense, while Reine-Marie placed her hand over Ruth’s, and kept it there for the entire flight of lunacy.
* * *
“Have you shown Chartrand those paintings?”
Gamache gestured toward the rolled-up canvases Clara carried with her all the time now, like a divining rod.
“No. I thought about it, but Peter could’ve shown them to him and chose not to. If he didn’t, then I don’t think I should.” She looked at Gamache closely. “Why? Do you think I should?”
Gamache thought about it. “I don’t know. I can’t honestly see how it could matter. I suppose I’m just curious.”
“About what?”
“About what Chartrand would make of them,” he admitted. “Aren’t you?”
“Curious isn’t the word,” said Clara with a grin. “More like afraid.”
“You think they’re that bad?”
“I think they’re strange.”
“And is that so bad?” he asked.
She thought about his question, bouncing the canvases in her hand. “I’m afraid people will see these and think Peter’s nuts.”
Gamache opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“Go on,” she said. “Say what’s on your mind. Peter is nuts.”
“No,” he said. “No. I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Then what were you going to say?”
Far from feeling defensive, Clara found she really did want to know.
“Warrior Uteruses,” he said.
Clara stared at him. She could have spent the rest of her life guessing what Armand would say, and she’d never have come up with those two words.
“Warrior Uteruses?” she repeated. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“You did a series of sculptures a few years ago,” he reminded her. “They were uteruses, all different sizes. You decorated them with feathers and leather and fancy soaps and sticks and leaves and lace and all sorts of things. And you put them into an art show.”
“Yes,” Clara laughed. “Oddly enough I still have them all. I considered giving one to Peter’s mother as a Christmas present, but chickened out.” She laughed. “I guess while I can sculpt them, I don’t actually have one. A warrior uterus, I mean.”
“That series wasn’t all that long ago,” Gamache reminded her.
“True.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Not at all. It was such fun. And strangely powerful. Everyone thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t.”
“What was it?” Gamache asked.
“A step along the way.”
He nodded and got up. But before leaving, he bent down and whispered, “And I bet everyone thought you were nuts.”
* * *
“He wasn’t just crazy,” said Professor Massey. “He was insane.”
He looked from one woman to the next. They were seated in his classroom studio. He’d given Ruth what was clearly his favorite chair. The one that looked across the open space filled with drop sheets and easels, old gummed-up palettes. Blank canvases were stacked in a corner and Massey’s own paintings, unframed, were here and there on the walls, as though stuck up casually. They were very good, enlivening and warming the space.
“And not the fun sort of insanity,” Professor Massey warned. “Not eccentric. This was the dangerous kind.”
“Dangerous? Like violent?” Reine-Marie asked.
Try as she might to catch and hold his eye, the elderly professor’s attention never stayed on her for long. His eyes kept drifting back.
To Ruth.
Ruth, for her part, seemed to have lost her mind. But found, Reine-Marie thought, her heart.
The old poet had actually giggled when Professor Massey had taken her hand in greeting.
They’d arrived half an hour earlier, unannounced, though Reine-Marie had called ahead to make sure that Professor Massey would be there.
He was.
He always was, it seemed. And now Reine-Marie started noticing other things. A pillow with blankets folded neatly on top of it, beside the worn sofa.
A microwave oven on the counter by the paint-encrusted sink. A hotplate. A small fridge.
She looked around the classroom and realized it felt less a classroom and more a studio. And less like a studio and more like a loft space. A living space.
Reine-Marie’s gaze returned to the elderly man. Perfectly turned out in pressed corduroy slacks, a crisp cotton shirt, a light sweater vest. Neat. Clean.
How did it happen, she wondered? Did he once have a wife and children? A home in the Annex?
Did the children move away? Did the wife pass away?
Did he just stop going home? Until this became home? In the company of familiar and comforting scents. And blank canvases. Where students dropped by at all hours. To ask questions. To have a drink and a sandwich and to talk pretentious nonsense.
She looked at the canvas on the easel.
How long, she wondered, had it sat there. Empty.
“Not violent,” he said. “Not physically anyway. Not yet. We couldn’t take the chance. Sébastien Norman was the messianic sort. The kind who held strong and inflexible views. We didn’t know that when we hired him, of course. He was to teach art theory. A fairly benign course, you’d have thought.” Massey smiled. “I suppose we weren’t clear that it was art theory he was to teach, not his own personal one. We began to realize fairly early on that we had a problem.”
“How so?” Reine-Marie asked.
“Rumbles in the corridors. I started overhearing what his students were saying. Most mocking him, laughing. My instincts are always to defend a fellow professor, so I asked them what was so funny. And they told me.”
“Go on.”
“Well, it sounds so silly now.” Professor Massey looked embarrassed, and glanced at Ruth. Reine-Marie simply waited, and finally he seemed to overcome his reluctance.
“Apparently Professor Norman believed in the tenth muse.”
He grimaced as though to apologize for the stupidity of what he’d just said.
Now Ruth spoke. “But there were only nine.”
“Yes, exactly. Nine daughters of Zeus. They personified knowledge and the arts. Music, literature, science,” he said.
“But not painting,” said Reine-Marie. “I remember now. There was no muse for art itself.”
Now Professor Massey turned his full attention to her. And what attention it was. Reine-Marie felt the force of his personality. Not violent, but overwhelming. Enveloping.
She felt his intelligence and his calm. And for the first time in her life she wished she’d been an artist, if only to have studied with this professor.
“Strange, isn’t it?” he said. “Nine Muses. That’s quite a gang. But not a single one for painting or sculpture. God knows the Greeks liked their murals and sculptures. And yet, they didn’t assign them a muse.”
“Why not?” asked Reine-Marie.
Massey shrugged and raised his white brows. “No one knows. There’re theories, of course.”
“Which brings us back to Professor Norman,” said Reine-Marie. “What was his theory?”
“I never spoke to him about it directly,” said Massey. “What I know was cobbled together from speaking to his students.
I’m not even sure I’ll get it right now. It’s been so long. All I know is that he believed there had in fact been a tenth muse. And that to be a great artist you had to find her.”
“Did he believe this tenth muse lived in an actual place?” Reine-Marie asked. “That you could knock on the door, and there she’d be?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what Professor Norman really believed. It was a long time ago. I should have known. It’s my fault. I actually encouraged the college to hire him.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’d seen a few of his works and thought they showed promise. He was new to Toronto, didn’t have much money or many connections. This seemed perfect. He could teach part-time, make some money, meet some people.”
His voice faded away. All that energy, all that force of personality, seemed spent and the quite magnificent man deflated. The very thought of Professor Norman seemed to sap him of life.
“It was a mistake,” the professor said. He was quiet for a moment, casting his mind back to that time. “Norman wasn’t fired for his crazy beliefs, you know. We were a very liberal institution then. Though his theories weren’t approved of, and the students had no respect for him. His appearance didn’t help.”
“He looked crazy?” asked Reine-Marie, and, unexpectedly, Professor Massey laughed.
“We all looked like lunatics. He looked like a banker. A prosperous banker. Everyone else was sorta seedy, or at least tried to be. It was the uniform of the time. Now we all try to look successful, respectable.”
He gazed down at his clothing, then over at seedy Ruth.
And Reine-Marie wondered if that canvas on the easel would have been so blank had Professor Massey not been so respectable.
“Why was he fired if not for this tenth muse theory?”
“I was on the Board of Governors and we agonized over it. Norman wasn’t violent, at least not yet. That’s the problem, isn’t it, with these things? Hard to fire someone on suspicion they might do something.”
“But what made you think he’d become violent?” asked Reine-Marie.
“We just didn’t know. He had outbursts, verbal. He shook with rage. I tried talking to him, but he denied there was anything wrong. He said that real artists are passionate, and that was all it was. Passion.”
“You didn’t believe it?”
“He might’ve been right. Maybe real artists are passionate. Lots are nuts. But the issue wasn’t whether he was a real artist, but if he was a good teacher.”