by Louise Penny
Armand paused for a beat, taking that in. “How do you know?”
“I found an old article in some American mercenary magazine. Let me show you.”
They returned to the living room and took seats side by side on the sofa, in front of the laptop.
Armand read, then looked up. “What are you thinking?”
“That GHS is using SecurForte to spy on other corporations.”
“And Stephen found out. It’s possible.”
Annie walked, waddled, into the room in her bathrobe.
“What time is it? Is it morning? What’s going on?” She looked at the clock on the mantel. “It’s eleven thirty. Why’re you here? Has something happened?” Her eyes landed on the cake. “Is that an Ispahan?”
“She seems to be giving birth to questions,” said Jean-Guy.
“Careful.” Annie placed a hand over her stomach. “You don’t want the baby to join the conversation, do you?”
Once they were all sitting down, Jean-Guy told her about the GHS guard.
Annie turned white. “You chased him? Are you crazy? Are you all right?” She took his hand. “You’re hurt.”
“No, no. I’m fine. They’re just trying to scare us.”
“Are you sure?” She looked at her father, who’d been silent. “Daddy?”
She only used that word when something awful had happened, or was happening.
Just then there was a knock on the door.
Jean-Guy went to it and returned a minute later. “It’s the cop, come to guard us.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Armand said, “that maybe you need to move into Stephen’s suite at the George V.”
“But will it be any safer?” asked Reine-Marie. “SecurForte’s there, too.”
“Mom’s right,” said Annie. “They’ll be all over the George V. Why would we be safer there?”
“Because you wouldn’t be alone,” said her father. “There’ll be other guests, staff. Support.”
“You mean witnesses? I see your point.” Annie turned to Jean-Guy. “A few days in a luxury hotel? If we must…”
“Just don’t order the caviar, dear,” said Reine-Marie. “Or toast. Or anything.”
“I need to show you something on the security cameras,” said Jean-Guy. “Something they didn’t erase.”
They huddled around his laptop while he showed them the clip, gone in the blink of an eye, of a woman arriving at the George V.
“This was yesterday, late afternoon,” he said.
“It’s the head of GHS,” said Reine-Marie. “I recognize her from the annual report.”
Eugénie Roquebrune was indeed recognizable. The only woman in the lobby, perhaps in the entire hotel, maybe in all of Paris, with gray hair.
“Now,” said Beauvoir, bringing up the next clip. “This’s half an hour later. Look at the reflection in the tray the waiter’s holding.”
They watched as the uniformed waiter put a teapot and a three-tiered tower of little sandwiches and petit fours on a table. While he spoke to the guests, he lowered the large silver tray to his side. So that it reflected the guests at another table.
They watched it twice through before Armand hit pause.
“It’s Claude Dussault,” he said, and sighed, staring at the screen. “Meeting with the head of GHS. That’s it then.”
His fear confirmed.
Despite the tension that evening, and Armand’s growing discomfort with his old friend and colleague, he’d still held out hope that he’d gotten it wrong.
But he could no longer hide from the truth.
Having afternoon tea with the head of an engineering giant was hardly a crime. But he was the Prefect of Police for Paris. And GHS appeared up to its neck in this business.
The business of murder. Attempted murder. And whatever it was Stephen had discovered.
Besides, when asked directly if he knew the CEO, Claude Dussault had denied it.
He’d looked Gamache in the eye and lied.
“Who’s the other man?” asked Annie.
They could see the back of his head and a bit of his face as he turned to listen to Madame Roquebrune.
Dark hair, close-cropped. Clean-shaven.
“Madame Roquebrune’s security?” asked Reine-Marie.
“I don’t think so. A security guard wouldn’t sit down for tea with a client,” said Armand. “He’s part of whatever meeting’s happening.”
“But what is happening?” asked Reine-Marie. “I can’t imagine the CEO herself is telling the Prefect of Police, in a public place, to go kill a man.”
“They obviously didn’t know that Stephen was actually staying right there,” said Jean-Guy. “Was just a few flights above them.”
Armand leaned closer to the image. And remembered the grainy photo of Himmler in bar Joséphine.
Terrible things were discussed by confident people in public places. And there was a reason this recording had been erased. When the killings and search were bungled, they had to kick over all trace.
Innocent people holding innocent meetings didn’t erase the evidence. As SecurForte had done. And deny that it ever happened. As Claude had done.
“What would they have to offer, to get him to do it?” asked Reine-Marie.
“He talked tonight about retirement,” said Armand. “They must’ve offered him more money than he could ever make as a cop. A lifetime of peace and security for himself and his family.”
Armand rubbed his forehead, his fingers naturally finding the long, deep scar at his temple.
What would it take?
“Ummm,” said Reine-Marie. “There’s something you should know. I asked Monique—” She turned to Annie and Jean-Guy and explained, “Dr. Dussault. Claude’s wife. I asked her tonight about his cologne. I’m sorry, Armand, but it seemed the only way.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m sure you were careful.”
“I think I was. I found out that it’s called 4711. I have a bottle of it at home that I bought this afternoon at the BHV.”
“You found it?” said Armand.
“Oui. I wanted to be able to confirm it really is the same scent we smelled, and that Claude really does use it. I didn’t show Monique the bottle, I just said I was looking for a gift for you, Armand,” she said, turning to face him directly. “It is Claude’s cologne. Monique confirmed it.”
He gave a very small nod.
“She told me his second-in-command bought some for him and for herself,” Reine-Marie continued, “when they were on a trip together in Cologne. They toured the place where it’s made. Monique says Claude only puts it on when they’re going to meet.”
There was silence as they took that in.
“That means,” Reine-Marie said, deciding they were taking too long to get there, “that it could’ve been Irena Fontaine we interrupted in Stephen’s apartment.”
“It could also mean they’re closer than we realized. We need to find out more about her,” said Jean-Guy.
“And SecurForte,” said Reine-Marie.
She took over the laptop and put the name in. Up came a website.
It was spartan, to say the least. All they could see was the home page. They needed a security code to access more.
The home page photo showed a handsome, well-groomed, muscular man in a suit standing alert beside a Maybach, while a woman, smiling but also alert, held the door open for a little girl and her mother.
In the bottom right corner was their logo.
“That’s the same emblem I saw on the guard’s uniform,” said Jean-Guy. “The same one in that article.”
“It looks like a snowflake,” said Annie. “Why would they have a snowflake as a corporate logo?”
“Look closer,” said Reine-Marie, doing just that. “Those are spears, tridents, in a circle.”
The spears were radiating out from a central point, as though protecting it.
“That’s no snowflake,” said Reine-Marie. “That’s a promise, and a warning. Clever.” She smile
d. “Making it look like one thing while actually being something else. Hiding its real nature. An insignia like that is more than just a corporate logo. It’s a symbol. It means something. Most paramilitary emblems do.”
After a few dead ends, she sat back and turned the screen to the others. “Voilà. The Helm of Awe.”
“You’re kidding, right?” said Annie, leaning in. “Sounds like a comic book.”
“The Helm of Awe,” Reine-Marie read, “is an ancient Norse symbol of protection and overwhelming might.”
“What’s the Sûreté du Québec logo again?” Jean-Guy asked as they stared at the Helm of Awe. “A kitten?”
“Playing with a ball of yarn, oui,” said Armand.
Annie laughed. They all knew the Sûreté logo was a fleur-de-lys. A flower. Appropriate, but hardly awe-inspiring.
Fortunately, they didn’t need a symbol to be inspired.
“Does it say who runs SecurForte?” asked Armand.
“No,” said Reine-Marie. “But I’m sure I can find out.”
“Actually, there’s something else we need you to look into,” said Armand.
He told her and Annie about the documents Irena Fontaine had produced, questioning which side Stephen was on in the war.
“But that’s ridiculous,” said Annie. “There’s no way he was a Nazi.”
“Those documents were supposedly suppressed by the Allies, you say?” said Reine-Marie. “Hidden in the Archives nationales. I have experience with those archives. They’re immense. If those documents were buried seventy-five years ago, they wouldn’t be easy to find. And yet she had them within hours of the investigation beginning. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Go on,” said Armand.
Reine-Marie thought. “They must’ve already had them, ready to use if necessary.”
“By ‘they,’ you mean Fontaine’s boss. The Préfet de Police,” said Beauvoir.
They were back to Claude Dussault. All leads led them there.
“Looks like it, yes,” said Armand.
“But why?” asked Annie.
“Suppose Stephen found out that GHS was, for example, stealing corporate secrets,” said her father. “They’d have to stop him before he exposed them. How would they do that?”
“They could kill him,” said Annie.
“Yes, that would do it. But it’s pretty drastic, and risky. I think they’d try something else first.”
“Blackmail,” said Jean-Guy. “They went looking for some dirt to hold over him. Maybe something criminal.”
“They found those documents from the war,” said Reine-Marie. “And threatened to use them. If he exposed them, they’d tar him as a collaborator.”
Jean-Guy nodded. He’d been in France long enough to know that the Second World War was never that far away. Especially the tender issue of who worked for the Resistance, and who claimed to but actually worked for the Nazis.
He’d learned early on that he should never suggest “collaborating” with a colleague. It was an incendiary word.
“Well, if that was the strategy, they don’t know him,” said Reine-Marie. “That would just make him more determined than ever.”
“So they moved to plan B.” Armand turned to Reine-Marie. “Is there a record of who asks for which files at the archives?”
“There is, and I can look it up.” She paused. “But I have to be there. There’s something else, Armand. Something Annie found out.”
“I asked a colleague at my law firm to look into the work we did for Alexander Plessner,” said Annie. “He got back to me late this afternoon. Monsieur Plessner had an agreement drawn up, to form a limited partnership here in France. This was earlier this year.”
When Annie hesitated, Armand said, “Go on.”
“The agreement was with a newly created department within the Banque Privée des Affaires. The venture capital division.”
“Daniel?” Armand said and saw Annie nod. “But maybe he didn’t actually know Plessner.”
“He did. His name’s on the incorporation certificate.”
Daniel had lied.
CHAPTER 26
Armand stood up. “I’m going over there.”
“You can’t,” said Reine-Marie. “It’s almost midnight.”
“Then he’s sure to be in.” He was walking to the door.
“Armand, stop.” It was a command. From Reine-Marie.
And he did. But he remained with his back to her. Not, for the moment, wanting her to see the rage, the outrage he felt toward their son.
The hurt.
“He lied.”
“Yes,” said Reine-Marie. “But storming over there isn’t going to help. You know that.”
Now he did turn and held her eyes. “He lied. Not just to the police, but to us.”
To me.
“He was probably in shock when Commander Fontaine said it was Alexander Plessner who’d been killed,” said Reine-Marie. “You know Daniel. He feels things deeply and takes his time to think things over. But he gets there.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Come home,” said Reine-Marie. “Sleep on it. You can speak with him in the morning. If you go over now, who knows what’ll happen. What’ll be said that can’t be unsaid. Please.”
She held out her hand. Armand looked at it. Then, nodding, he took it.
“You’re right. It’ll keep ’til morning.” He turned to Annie. “Will you be going to the hotel?”
“First thing in the morning, yes,” said Annie. “Once Honoré’s awake. Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Daniel’s a good man. He’s not involved in this. You know that, right?”
“I do.”
But he didn’t dare look Jean-Guy in the eye. He knew what he’d find there.
If anyone else in a homicide investigation had blatantly lied about knowing the victim, they’d move way up the suspect list.
And Daniel’s actions were suspect, at the very least.
* * *
Once home, they decided to leave the dishes for the morning and dropped into bed, exhausted.
Armand expected to toss and turn, but instead he fell into an immediate and deep sleep and awoke to the sound of rain pelting against the bedroom window.
It was dawn on a drizzly Sunday morning. As he closed the window, Armand looked out and into the living room of the apartment across the narrow street.
It belonged to a young couple with a child. He didn’t know their names, though they sometimes waved to each other. But it was too early for anyone to be up.
Except, maybe. He scanned the street below but saw no one watching their apartment. But then, anyone SecurForte-trained would make sure not to be seen.
Though, oddly, Jean-Guy’s man had not only been spotted, several times, but made sure he was recognized. No doubt a scare tactic.
It seemed, this Sunday morning, that no one was trying to scare him.
He looked at the bedside clock. Six fifteen.
As he showered, he thought about Daniel. As he dressed, he thought about Daniel. Then, leaving Reine-Marie fast asleep in the bedroom, he did the dishes as quietly as he could.
And thought about Daniel. About what to do. What to say.
Putting the coffee on to perk, he went for a walk.
Glancing casually about him, he could see no sign of surveillance. It was, he thought as he put up the umbrella, a bit of an insult.
Gamache strolled through the familiar streets of the Marais, the rain, heavy at times, hitting the umbrella. It was, in its familiarity, a restful sound. Pat. Pat. Pat.
He walked past rue du Temple, pausing, as he always did, to study it. His grandmother had explained that it was named not for a Jewish temple, as he might have imagined, but for the Templars. This was where the Knights Templar had their headquarters, eight hundred years ago.
“This is where,” she’d told the boy, “they hid the treasure looted from the Holy Land in the Crusades. And when there was the putsch, when
the Templars were rounded up and tortured, not one of them revealed where it was hidden.”
“The treasure?” young Armand had asked.
“Never found. Apparently still here, on rue du Temple, somewhere.”
Though by then Armand had understood that the treasure that was really lost were the lives.
Armand had gone to bed the night before hoping, praying, that he’d wake up to find a message from his son. Asking him to come around. Saying there was something he needed to tell his father.
But there was nothing.
Well, not nothing. There was an email from Isabelle Lacoste saying the engineer she’d consulted couldn’t find anything wrong with the Luxembourg plans.
And there was one from Mrs. McGillicuddy that he hadn’t read yet. Her messages tended to be long and rambling. And he couldn’t quite take that, first thing.
Gamache realized he’d have to tell Reine-Marie about the contents of Stephen’s will. But he wouldn’t, he thought, tell Daniel and Annie. Not yet.
Armand found himself on the Pont d’Arcole. The bridge that led across the Seine to the hôpital Hôtel-Dieu. Its name, Arcole, was a bit of a mystery, as with so much in Paris.
Some said it was named after a great victory by Napoleon over the Austrians, at the Battle of the Bridge of Arcole. Some said it was named for a young man killed in the French Revolution. He’d planted the tricolor and shouted, with his dying breath, “Remember, I am called Arcole.”
Daniel in particular had preferred that version, speaking as it did of valor and sacrifice.
The sort of heroics that would appeal to the young. And untested.
But it was, Armand thought as he continued his walk, an old and dangerous lie. There was nothing right or good in dying for your country. A necessity, sometimes, yes. But always a tragedy. Not an aspiration.
His anger toward his son had dissipated in the night, and now he thought of Daniel and how frightened he must have been, to lie like that.
Was he waiting in his apartment for the knock on the door? Knowing that, eventually, someone would discover the lie. Someone would come?
Armand walked over to the hôpital Hôtel-Dieu and spent half an hour with Stephen, rubbing the cream on his hands and feet. Then reading him the world news.
