The Nature of the Beast: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel (40 page)

“I don’t understand,” said Al. “I admit I did the drawing. They were very clear what they wanted, but they didn’t say what it was for and I didn’t ask.”

“And you didn’t notice the huge missile launcher you were using as a canvas?” demanded Beauvoir. “How much acid were you dropping? Look, I know you think you can get out of this, but you can’t. Stop wasting our time, stop making it worse for everyone.” Beauvoir glanced over at Evelyn, who was staring at her husband, dumbfounded. “Start at the beginning. Tell us about the gun and the etching.”

The shaggy head dropped and lifted a couple of times in what might have been assent or despair.

“It was a long time ago,” Lepage finally said. “Two men came to the boardinghouse and asked if I could do a commission. I thought they meant write a song. I agreed. But then they explained it was a drawing, and told me how much they’d pay. They gave me some special paper. One of the men said he’d be back in a few weeks. When he returned he seemed to like it. I bought the farm with the money and never saw him again.”

“You drew it on paper?” asked Lacoste. “Not directly onto the gun?”

“I knew nothing about a gun,” said Lepage. “No amount of money would have made me agree to that.”

“What were the men’s names?” Lacoste asked.

“It was thirty years ago,” said Lepage. “I can’t remember.”

Lacoste looked at Gamache. The photograph was sitting facedown on the conference table in front of him. He slid it over to her, and she handed it to Al Lepage.

“Anyone look familiar?”

Lepage studied it, though Gamache had the impression he was really just trying to figure out what best to say. How much to admit.

“This is one,” he pointed to Gerald Bull. “And this is the other. The one who came to get the work and to pay me.”

He was pointing at John Fleming.

Gamache listened to the words but also to the tone. Lepage seemed to be skimming across the surface of his feelings, reporting something factual that had no emotional content at all. And yet his etching of the Whore of Babylon had reeked of pain and despair. It was not simply lines on a piece of paper, or a gun. Each of those etched lines came from some horrific place and Armand could guess where.

“Didn’t you question why someone would want the Whore of Babylon?” asked Lacoste.

Al Lepage fell silent but they could hear him panting, like a man pursued.

“If you met him you wouldn’t wonder.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Beauvoir.

“He seemed like the sort of person who’d be drawn to that image.”

“As do you,” said Beauvoir.

He turned his laptop around so the Lepages could see the screen, then he hit a key and beyond the field of lambs in the foreground, a newsreel played out.

Beauvoir, Lacoste and Gamache couldn’t see the images, but they could see their effect. Evelyn Lepage put her hand to her mouth. Al Lepage closed his eyes for a moment, then forced them open. Sounds, so small they might have come from an infant, escaped his throat.

Jean-Guy had muted the reporter’s commentary so all the Lepages had were the pictures, made the more powerful by the silence.

Al Lepage’s framed lambs had their backs to the Sûreté officers, and Gamache read the writing on the back of each. Laurent, aged 2, Laurent, aged 3, and so on. But it was the very first one that caught his attention.

“My Son,” it said. Just that. And a heart. My Son.

Son My.

Had this man killed again? His own son this time, and Antoinette Lemaitre? To keep his secret safe? It was a hell of a secret, and a hell of a crime.

“Al?” Evie said, when the newsreels ended in a freeze frame. “Why’re they showing us this?”

“She doesn’t know?” asked Beauvoir.

Al shook his head then turned to her. He took her hand and looked down at it. So familiar. So unexpected. To have found her late in life, and fallen in love. And taken her hand.

“I’m not a draft dodger, Evie,” he said quietly. “And my name isn’t Al Lepage. It’s Frederick Lawson. I was a private in the army. I deserted.”

His wife looked from him to the screen, then back.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “It’s not true.” She stared at him, searching his face. Then her eyes returned to the pile of bodies on the path, the bright green fields behind them and the little lambs in front. Her hand slid out of his.

No one moved, no one spoke. There was complete and utter silence, as though they too had been paused. And then it was shattered by a single word, screamed.

“Nooooooo.”

It came out of her like a blast furnace and she began pounding his chest, no longer making words but just sounds. Howling.

Lacoste started to get up but sat back down.

Lepage did nothing to defend himself, except close his eyes. It seemed he even leaned in to the fists, welcoming the beating. The Sûreté officers watched as Evelyn Lepage’s life well and truly collapsed. Armand narrowed his eyes, not wishing to watch something so private, so intimate, so painful. But needing to see it.

He watched and wondered if little Frederick Lawson had raced through the woods, as Laurent had. A stick for a gun. Playing soldier. Fighting the enemy. Sacrificing himself in deeds magnificent and heroic.

One thing Gamache knew for sure. Little Frederick Lawson had not picked up his stick, pointed it, and slaughtered a village filled with old men, and women and children. So how did one become the other? How did a nine-year-old boy acting out heroics become a twenty-year-old man committing an atrocity?

Evelyn only stopped pounding on her husband’s chest when she was too exhausted to go on.

“You did that?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

He tried to take her hand again, but she batted him away, flailing her arms.

“Go away, get back,” she demanded.

“I was a different man back then,” he pleaded. “It was war, I was young. The platoon leader said they were Viet Cong.”

“The babies?” she said, her voice barely audible.

“I had no choice. It was strategic. They were the enemy.”

His voice petered out and with it the litany, the liturgy, the story he’d told himself every day, until he believed it. Until the miracle occurred, the transubstantiation. Until Frederick Lawson became Al Lepage. Troubadour. Raconteur. Organic gardener and aging hippie. Draft dodger.

Until a lie became the truth.

But the ghosts had pursued him over the border and across the years.

There had been no escape for Frederick Lawson after all. No second chance. No rebirth. His past had shown up one day, and knocked on his door, and asked him to do an etching. Looking into those dead eyes, Frederick Lawson knew this pretty village had offered him sanctuary but not pardon.

“There was one young girl—”

Al Lepage stopped, and Gamache thought he could go no further. Hoped he could go no further. But Lepage gathered himself, and his burden, and moved on.

“She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She knelt on the ground in front of me, her arms out. She said nothing. Not a word, not a sound. No begging, no crying. There was no fear. None. All I could see in her eyes was pity.”

Pity, thought Gamache. That was the expression Lepage had put on the face of the Whore of Babylon. The emotion he couldn’t quite name. It wasn’t contempt, it wasn’t arrogance, or amusement. It was pity. For the hell to come.

That was the root of that etching. The rot.

But Al Lepage wasn’t finished yet.

“I was alone,” he said, his voice detached, filled with wonder. “I could’ve let her go.”

Jean-Guy stood up suddenly. His face was contorted with rage and he looked about to pour it all over Lepage, but instead he walked swiftly, unsteadily away, knocking over a wastepaper basket and banging into a desk before making it to the bathroom.

Lepage lifted his eyes from the screen and looked at Gamache.

“But I didn’t.”

CHAPTER 35

After an all but silent dinner, Armand retired to his study, closing the door.

Jean-Guy and Reine-Marie sat in the living room in front of a fire that popped and danced and threw gentle heat.

They exchanged pleasantries, but Reine-Marie had been around homicide long enough to know there was a time to talk and a time to be silent.

From the study they could hear talking.

“He’s on the phone,” said Jean-Guy, putting down the newspaper.

“I hope so,” said Reine-Marie and saw her companion smile. “Is everything all right? You both looked a little pale when you came in.”

“Sometimes you hear and see things you never really want to know,” he said. “And can never forget.”

She nodded. Jean-Guy had called Annie as soon as he’d arrived back, and Armand had hugged her and then taken a shower. Something had happened. She knew Armand would tell her about it, if not today then one day. Or maybe not. Maybe it would go into that locked and bolted room.

“
Pardon
,” said Jean-Guy a few minutes later, when they could hear no more from the study.

He knocked, and without waiting for a reply he went in.

“Chief?” he said, closing the door behind him.

Gamache sat in his large, comfortable chair by the desk, a file box open on the floor and a dossier on his lap. The bookcase behind him contained not just books but photographs of the family in all stages. One, though, had been taken down and was now in Gamache’s hand.

It was a tiny sterling silver frame with a photograph of the grandchildren, Florence and Zora.

Gamache was staring at it, one hand holding the picture, the other up to his face, gripping his face. Trying to hold the wretched, wrenching feelings in. But they escaped through his eyes. Leaving them red and glistening.

And now he closed them, at first gently, and then he squeezed his eyes tight shut.

Jean-Guy sat heavily in the armchair across from him and put his own hands up to his own face, to cover his own grief.

The two men sat there for a long time, without a word or sound, except for the occasional ragged gasp for breath.

Finally Beauvoir heard the familiar sound of a tissue tugged from the box.

“Oh God,” sighed Armand.

Jean-Guy lowered his hands and instinctively drew his arm across his wet face before reaching for a tissue.

Both men wiped and blew and finally stared at each other.

Armand was the first to smile.

“Well, that feels better. We must do this again sometime.”

“Is that why you came in here,
patron
?” asked Jean-Guy, reaching for another tissue and wondering how many tears these books had seen while the rest of the world saw a calm, determined visage.

“No,” said Armand with a small laugh. “That was a surprise. I came in because there’s something I’ve known I should do for a while but haven’t wanted to. But after talking to Ruth, there was no way out of it.”

“What’s that?”

“I have an appointment at the SHU tomorrow morning. I need to speak to John Fleming.”

Gamache tried to make it sound like any other rendezvous, but couldn’t quite pull it off. The hand holding the tissue trembled slightly, until he closed it into a fist, crushing the moist tissue.

“I see,” said Beauvoir. And he did. He knew slightly more than the public about the Fleming case. He’d followed the trial and he’d heard the rumors swirling around Sûreté headquarters. And he knew, though he was never told outright, that there’d been a secret trial. A trial within a trial, and the Chief Inspector had been part of it, though in what capacity Beauvoir didn’t know.

“What’cha reading?” he asked, in an intentionally hyper-cheerful voice, and nodded toward the file on Gamache’s knees. “Is it about a serial killer?”

But he could see by the grim expression on Gamache’s face that he’d overstepped, in the question and in the ill-timed attempt to lighten the mood.

“It is,” said Gamache. He closed the file, resting a heavy hand on it, then he looked at Jean-Guy. “Why did you leave when Lepage was telling us about the Son My Massacre?”

“I was overcome,” he said. “I was afraid I was going to either be sick or attack him. That something awful was going to happen. I couldn’t believe anyone could do those things. And then the girl.”

His voice trailed off and he rubbed his face again.

He wanted with all his heart to tell this man everything, and he almost did. But then stopped himself.

“What did John Fleming really do,
patron
? What don’t we know that you do?”

Gamache felt the file folder under his hand, but didn’t look down at it.

As soon as they’d arrived home, Armand had gone to the locked room in the far corner of the basement. In the course of a long career investigating murder, he’d come across things that could not be used, were not pertinent. Other people’s secrets, their shames, even their crimes.

He’d kept them in files in his basement, under lock and key, where he could guard them, and hide them, and get at them if he needed to. And today, he needed to. The rest of the basement had bright lights, but this room had just the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. It swung a little when Armand pulled the chain, dirt and dead bugs baked onto the bulb. The light revealed boxes neatly arranged, like bricks in a wall. And bricked up, at the very back, was the box he was looking for.

He’d brushed off the dust and spiderwebs and brought it upstairs into the study. And then he’d had a long, long shower. And dinner. Only later did he return to the box sitting so innocently on the floor of the study.

Gamache had opened the lid, half expecting a shriek to escape. But of course there was only silence, except for the comforting murmur of Reine-Marie and Jean-Guy in the next room.

Closing his eyes for a moment and steeling himself, he opened the first file, and started to read. To remember. And then the screaming started. Not from the files, but from inside his own head as the sights and sounds from the trial of John Fleming burst out from where he’d locked them away.

He saw again the images and imagined the sounds. The crying and the pleading.

Had one of Fleming’s victims knelt silently, not begging for mercy? Not screaming in terror, not crying out for her mother, her father, her God? Had she instead looked at him with pity?