A Great Reckoning (50 page)

“It's possible I've always underestimated you, Armand. I've loved you and admired you, but maybe part of me has always seen you as a boy. Funny, isn't it? All that we've been through. I saw you go off to Cambridge, saw you get married, have children, become a senior officer in the Sûreté, and yet part of me will always think of you as the boy who lost his parents. The boy I needed to protect.”

“You betrayed me, Michel, years ago. I was almost killed because of you.”

“I never meant that to happen.”

“Really? The master tactician never saw that coming?”

“It was a mistake,” admitted Brébeuf.

“And was killing Leduc also a mistake?”

Brébeuf slowly shook his head, holding Armand's eyes the whole time. “
Non
. That was intended. I knew that would happen almost from the day I arrived. When I discovered two things.”

“Oui?”

Gamache knew he was being played, was being led. Guided or misguided, as Charpentier would have it. But he needed to know.

“Serge Leduc was a stupid man,” said Brébeuf. “A man driven by an infected ego. But he was also a powerful man, I'll give him that. A charismatic personality. Stupidity and power. A dangerous combination, as we've found out many times, eh, Armand? Especially for anyone young and vulnerable. He'd have made a good cult leader, if he hadn't joined the Sûreté and ended up here. In fact, he'd turned the academy into a sort of cult, hadn't he?”

Gamache listened, but didn't nod. Didn't agree or disagree. He was bending much of his will to disengaging from Brébeuf, while still listening closely.

“After that party in your rooms the first night, Serge Leduc decided to make me his best friend. Bound by a shared loathing of you. He assumed we had that in common. He had no idea of my depth of feeling for you.”

Michel Brébeuf looked at Gamache with undisguised tenderness.

But what, Armand asked himself, did that tenderness itself disguise? What was lurking, swishing its tail, in those depths?

“And yet you spent quite a lot of time with Leduc. You said it was because you were lonely.”

“That was part of it,” Brébeuf admitted. “And perhaps I was attracted by his obvious respect for me. Something I hadn't felt from anyone for a long time.”

Brébeuf smiled in the impish way Gamache knew well. Here was a man he'd known longer than anyone else on earth. A person he had loved, man and boy, for decades.

And despite all that had happened, he still felt that tug. As though Michel had coiled himself around Armand's DNA. What happened in childhood had fused itself to Gamache. The losses, but also the laughter and hilarity, the roaring freedom, the friendship. The friendship. The friendship. They were brothers-in-arms. Storming the castle.

And now he looked at that smile and could have wept.

“What happened, Michel?”

“That first night, he invited me back to his rooms. After too many drinks, Leduc brought out his revolver.”

Armand had actually been asking about their friendship. About where and when and how Michel had veered away. And fallen off a rampart in the darkness.

But the answer he got was far different.

“He told me what he did with the gun,” said Michel. “I've done many things I'm ashamed of. Many things that cannot and should not be forgiven. But what Leduc told me that night shocked and sickened even me.”

Brébeuf's gaze drifted beyond Gamache and above him, toward the door. His eye caught something and Michel suddenly smiled, as though surprised by something pleasant. He gestured toward it.

Armand tried to stop himself, but his head turned and his eyes followed.

There, above the door, was a small frame. And in it was what looked like a stylized red rose. But wasn't.

Gamache recognized it immediately. He himself had given it to Michel years, decades, ago.

It had once been Armand's most precious possession.

It was a handkerchief. A Christmas gift from Armand's mother to his father.

He remembered watching her embroider his father's initials, HG, in the corner of each one. Zora had offered to help. His mother thanked her, but refused. She wanted to do them herself. Not because it was easy, but because it was difficult. Embroidery did not come naturally to her. And so the HGs were slightly bizarre, and only really intelligible to someone who knew what they were meant to be.

Some looked like H6. Some looked like #Q. Some had tiny dots of blood, where she'd pricked herself.

But all said the same thing, if you knew how to read them.

HG, Honoré Gamache, was loved. By Amelia.

His father had carried one in his pocket every day of his life.

The morning after their deaths, Armand had gone into their room. The scent of them, the sense of them, almost too much to bear. The clothing. The book. The bookmark. The bedside clock, still ticking. He'd thought that strange. Surely it should have stopped.

And there, on the chest of drawers, a clean handkerchief for a day that would never come.

He'd shoved it in his pocket. And kept it with him always.

Until one day, while playing king of the castle, Michel had fallen and gashed his knee. Armand had taken the handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to the wound. And when the bleeding had stopped, he'd looked at it, then at Michel, who was wiping away tears with the sleeve of his sweater.

Armand brought out his penknife and made a very small cut in his own finger. Michel took a stuttering breath, tears stopping as he watched Armand dab his finger on the blood-soaked handkerchief.

On that day they had become more than brothers-in-arms.

“Blood brothers,” Armand had said, offering the handkerchief to Michel. Who took it. And kept it. All these years.

And now, a lifetime later, it had returned. Armand's
mappa mundi
. The map of his world. The mundane and the magnificent, fused.

The blood had made a sort of rose pattern, just touching the HG in the corner.

Armand looked away and met Michel's eyes.

“I'm many things,” said Michel. “But I am not a murderer.”

“Then who killed Serge Leduc?”

*   *   *

Paul Gélinas stood at the window, looking out across the fields. A few months ago, he'd been in Paris, looking out over the Jardin des Tuileries. He'd been in Luxembourg, admiring the medieval ruins. He'd stood on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.

Now he surveyed this endless, lifeless prairie.

“
Let's go fly a kite
,” he sang under his breath.

In showing him the laptop, Lacoste had shown him his fate. His barren future.

And now he waited for the knock on the door.

*   *   *

“I've done nothing,” said Huifen, hurrying along the corridor. “I should have, but I didn't. It's Jacques I'm worried about.”

“What did he do?” asked Nathaniel, running beside her.

“It's what he's about to do that worries me.”

“Where're we going?” asked Amelia. “Wait. We have to have a plan. We can't just run around looking for him.”

“I do have a plan,” said Huifen, staring straight ahead of her as she half walked, half ran. “I think I know where he is.”

“Where?”

“The factory. The mock-up.”

“Shit,” whispered Amelia. But she knew Huifen was probably right.

Where else would the Golden Boy, disgraced, go but to the place that had defeated him? That had exposed his flaws, his faults.

Where he had been killed. Over and over again.

What was one more death?

“
Merde
,” Amelia heard Nathaniel mutter.

And they picked up their pace.

*   *   *

“Tell me,” said Armand.

Like the ghost stories they'd once told on sleepovers, hoping to scare the
merde
out of each other, now Michel told his final story.

But was the boogeyman real this time? Was he in the room with them? Not hiding under the bed or in a closet, but sitting in plain sight? Unspectacular and always human.

“That first night, when he invited me back to his rooms, Leduc was talking about the new cadets, and not in glowing terms. But he said he knew how to fix them. After a few more drinks, he went into his bedroom and returned carrying a tray. There was something formal, ceremonial, about the way he held it in front of him. As a person might when handing out medals.”

Gamache could see Leduc, short and powerful, walking across the room, his stubby arms out, holding the tray. Making his offering to his hero. Thinking Michel Brébeuf, of all people, would appreciate what he had done. What he was doing.

“It was the last thing I expected to see,” said Michel. “An old revolver. But then I realized it wasn't really old. The design was. Classic. But the gun itself was fairly new. I picked it up.”

He mimicked weighing the weapon in his hand.

“I'd never held one. Have you?”

“Now, yes. But not before.”

Before a bullet was put in Leduc's brain.

“Makes our service pistols seem puny. Though I know they're actually far more effective.”

“Depends on the effect you're going for,” said Armand.

“True. And the revolver was perfect for Leduc's needs. He told me about the first time he'd handed it to a cadet. He'd had the revolver for a year but couldn't bring himself to do it. Not because he felt it was wrong, he was quick to assure me, but because he was worried the cadet would tell someone. But then he realized he had to work up to it. To choose the right student. Not a weak one, as you might expect. Those he could already control. No. He went for the strongest. The ones who might not bend to his will.”

Brébeuf thought for a moment, throwing his mind back to that night.

“I didn't know what he was talking about, and he could see that. Finally he came right out and told me. He had cadets play Russian roulette with that revolver.”

He looked down at his hand, as though he still held the gun. And then he raised his eyes.

“I came to your rooms that night, after I left Leduc. I wanted to tell you.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I thought by our conversation that you already knew. When I asked what you were going to do about Leduc, you told me to worry about my side of the street, and you'd worry about yours. I took that as a sign that you knew what Leduc was doing. And intended to act.”

Armand shook his head. “I only found out last night. I should've known earlier, but it honestly never, ever occurred to me someone could do that to the cadets. Not even a sadist like Leduc. But it does explain the revolver, and the special silencer he had made. In case.”

“One bullet, placed in one chamber, and spun,” said Michel. “Only a revolver does that. When that wretched little man told me what he was doing, smiling all the time, I understood why you were here.”

“Me?” asked Armand, surprised by the turn the conversation had taken.

“I knew what you were planning to do. You came to the academy to get rid of Serge Leduc. You'd fired all the other corrupt professors, but kept him. Why? I asked myself. Because you had other plans for him. Something more permanent. So that he could never torture anyone else.”

“But I told you, I didn't know about the Russian roulette,” said Armand. “I wish I had. I wish they hadn't gone through months of that, while I did nothing.”

“You'd have found out eventually. You were digging. Trying to get something on him. And when you dug past the corruption to the real horror, then what? What would you have done?”

Armand was silent.

“You'd have confronted him, and then I think you'd have killed him. You'd have had to, to save the cadets.”

“I could have arrested him.”

“For what? He'd never admit it, and he had those poor cadets so confused, so disoriented, they don't know up from down. They'd never admit to playing Russian roulette. Not while the Duke lived.”

He watched Armand and could see the struggle. Brébeuf spoke softly now. Quietly. Almost in a whisper.

“He had to die. He had to be killed. You'd have tried to find other options, as I did. But finally there would be no choice. You'd have visited him one night, asking to see the revolver. You'd have taken it and put bullets in the chamber, as he watched, mystified, trying to explain that you should only use one bullet. And then you'd have put it to his temple. And when it dawned on him what was about to happen, and he began pleading for his life, you'd have pulled the trigger.”

The two men held each other's eyes. The story had done the trick. It had horrified them both.

“But the worst would be yet to come, Armand. Pulling that trigger on an unarmed man, executing him, would have killed you too. You'd have done the unthinkable, you'd have damned yourself to save the cadets. I couldn't let that happen. So I did it for you. I owed you that.”

*   *   *

Deputy Commissioner Gélinas heard the footsteps before he heard the knock.

Picking up his pistol, he stood in the middle of the bedroom he'd been assigned in the academy. A junior professor's room, Gamache had explained. Apologizing. Bed, living room, kitchenette, all in one small space.

But Gélinas's needs, as it turned out, were simple. He enjoyed the fine dining and luxury hotels in Europe, but without the companionship of his wife, the pleasure was shallow and fleeting.

He found all he really needed was a bed, a small bookcase, and a place to put the photo of Hélène, which now lay facedown on the table.

She'd inspired him to be a better man than he actually was, and he wondered if she knew it. Knew what he was really like, beneath the layer of integrity, worn like a uniform.

On Hélène's death, there seemed no reason to keep it up. All the constraints fell away, and he was free. And he was lost.