The Nature of the Beast

by Louise Penny

  What warning could possibly be issued? What could a confined man have done?

  And then he had it.

  “She Sat Down and Wept,” he said, and saw Fleming’s face pale. “Why did you write it, John? Why did you send it to Guillaume Couture? What were you thinking, you little man?”

  Gamache reached into his satchel and dropped the script, with a bang, onto the metal table.

  Fleming unfolded one hand and caressed the title page with a finger that looked like a worm. Then a look of cunning crept into his face.

  “You have no idea why I wrote this, do you?”

  “If I didn’t, why would I be here?”

  “If you did, you wouldn’t need to be here,” said Fleming. “I thought Guillaume Couture might appreciate the play. He gave me the plans, you know. Wanted nothing more to do with Project Babylon. I thought it poetic that the only clue to the whereabouts of the plans would rest with the father who abandoned them. Have you read it?”

  “The play? I have.”

  “And?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  That surprised Fleming and he examined his visitor more closely.

  “And it’s dangerous,” Gamache added, placing a steady hand on the play and dragging it toward himself, out of Fleming’s reach. “You should not have written it, John, and you sure as hell should never have sent it to Dr. Couture.”

  “It frightens you, doesn’t it?” said Fleming.

  “Is that why you did it?” said Gamache. “To try to frighten us? Was this”—he poked the script as though it was merde—“meant as a warning?”

  “A reminder,” said Fleming.

  “Of what?”

  “That I’m still here, and I know.”

  “Know what?”

  As soon as the words escaped his mouth Gamache wished them back. But it was too late. He’d been wandering in the dark and now he’d walked off a cliff.

  His only hope had been in keeping Fleming guessing, making him believe he knew more than he did. Was one of “them.” But with that question he’d given himself away.

  The guard backed up against the door, and Beauvoir’s face went white. Gamache felt himself shoved in the chest by the force of Fleming’s personality. The back of the chair stopped him. Had it not, he had the overwhelming impression he’d have fallen, fallen. Straight to hell.

  Armand Gamache had been in the presence of malevolence before. Wretched men and women who’d tried to exorcise their demons by placating them. Feeding them terrible crimes. But of course it only made them more monstrous.

  But this was different. If Project Babylon had a flesh and blood equivalent, it was John Fleming. A weapon of mass destruction. Without thought, or conscience.

  “Who are you?” Fleming demanded.

  His gaze traveled over Gamache, taking in his face, his throat, his chest. His hair, his clothing, his hands. His wedding ring. “You’re not a cop. They have to identify themselves. Not a journalist. A professor writing a book on me perhaps? But no. Your interest isn’t academic, is it?” His eyes bored into Gamache. “It’s personal.”

  Fleming sat back, and Gamache knew that he’d lost.

  But it wasn’t over yet. Not for John Fleming. His fun had just begun. Fleming tilted his head to one side, coquettishly. It was grotesque.

  “You got in here, so you must have some pull.” He looked around before his eyes zipped back to Gamache. Studying him, like a butterfly pinned to cardboard. “You’re older, but not old enough to be retired.”

  Fleming’s gaze shifted to Gamache’s temple.

  “Nasty scar. Recent, but not immediate. And yet, you look healthy. Hearty even. Grain-fed. Free-range.”

  He was toying with him, prodding him, but Gamache wasn’t responding.

  “Your physical health wasn’t the issue, was it?” asked Fleming, leaning forward. “It’s emotional. You couldn’t take it. You’re broken. Something happened and you weren’t strong enough. You let down people who were depending on you. And then you ran away and hid, like a child. Probably in that village. What was its name?”

  Don’t remember it, Gamache prayed. Don’t remember.

  “Three Pines.” Fleming smiled. “Nice place. Pretty place. It was a kind of rock, with time moving around it, but not through it. It wasn’t really of this world. Is that where you live? Is that why you’re here? Because the Whore of Babylon was disturbing your hiding place? Marring Paradise?” Fleming paused. “I remember there was a woman who sat on her porch and said she was a poet. She’s lucky so many words rhyme with fuck.”

  He didn’t just remember Three Pines, every detail seemed etched in his memory.

  “I’m not the only prisoner in this room, am I?” Fleming asked. “You’re trapped in that village. You’re a middle-aged man waiting out his days. Do you lie awake at night, wondering what’s next? Are your friends growing bored with you? Do your former colleagues tolerate you, but cluck behind your back? Is your wife losing respect for you, as you grip the bars and look at her through the prison of your days? Or have you dragged her into the cell with you?”

  John Fleming was looking at him. Triumphant. He’d filleted Gamache after all. Eviscerated him. The man lay gutted before Fleming. And both knew it.

  Fleming throbbed, emitting malevolence on a scale Gamache had never known before.

  “Mary Fraser,” Gamache said, his voice low.

  He felt a slight hesitation in the force of personality across from him, and he used it to push forward.

  “She’s in Three Pines,” said Gamache. “Along with Delorme.”

  He thrust the words at Fleming, then followed them with his body. Ignoring the throbbing in his head, he stood up and leaned forward, hands splayed on the cold metal table, only stopping when his face was within an inch of Fleming’s.

  Fleming also stood and closed the tiny gap between them, so that his nose was actually touching Gamache’s. His fetid breath was in Gamache’s mouth in a mockery of intimacy.

  “I don’t care,” Fleming whispered.

  But what Fleming had done was confirm he knew who they were. Up until that moment it had been a guess on Gamache’s part.

  “They know everything,” said Gamache.

  “Now that’s not true,” said Fleming, and while Gamache was too close to see the smile, he felt it. “Or you wouldn’t be here. You might have the gun, but you haven’t found what really matters. What only I can find.”

  “The plans,” said Gamache. “You took them from Bull when you killed him in Brussels.”

  But by Fleming’s reaction, he could see that was wrong. He thought quickly, trying not to be distracted by Fleming’s face touching his. He stared into those eyes, their lashes almost intertwining.

  And then Gamache moved away, back across the table.

  “No,” he said. “Dr. Bull didn’t have them. He didn’t need them. They weren’t his plans, after all. They were Couture’s. The plans never left Québec.”

  “You’re getting closer,” Fleming said in a singsong voice, a parody of a children’s game of hide and seek.

  Fleming sat back down.

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” he said to Gamache. “You have the gun but not the plans. Funny, isn’t it? That little village has so many hiding places, and so much to hide. I wonder if it really is Paradise, or something else? What would hell look like? Fire and brimstone, or some beautiful place, in a glade or valley? Luring you in with the promise of peace and protection, before turning into a prison. The cheerful grandmother with the lock and key.”

  Fleming examined Gamache.

  “I know where the plans are. You might find them without me. Or you might not. Or…” Fleming paused, and smiled. “While you’re turning over every stone, someone else might find the plans to Project Babylon. And then what?”

  “What do you want?” Gamache asked.

  “You know what I want. And you’re going to give it to me. Why else would you be here?”

  “You t

hought I was someone else,” said Gamache. “Someone you’ve been waiting for all these years. Someone who terrifies you.”

  He looked at the black-and-white photo of the fathers of Project Babylon. Two dead men and one imprisoned for life. But there had been someone else in Brussels that day, Gamache realized. There had to have been.

  “Who took the picture?” he asked.

  Fleming leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. But something had shifted. Fleming’s fingers were closed tight around the bones of his arms. The sardonic smile was forced.

  Gamache had hit on something.

  “You helped create Project Babylon,” Gamache pressed. “On the orders of someone who wanted you to keep an eye on Gerald Bull. The same person who took the photograph. Who was there with you all in Brussels. But you lied to them, didn’t you, John? You told them about Highwater, but not the other. You killed Bull when he got too dangerous, started talking, starting hinting there was another gun. Then you stole the plans and hid them. Believe me, John, you don’t want freedom. You wouldn’t live a day outside these walls. You’re a polio victim and this is your iron lung.”

  “You think they’d harm me?” Fleming asked. “I’m their creation. I might’ve made my own Whore of Babylon, but they made me. They need me to do what they will not.”

  “They don’t need you. You’ve been discarded, left here to rot.”

  “How much more rotten do you think I can get?” asked Fleming with a grin, and Gamache could almost smell the decay. “If I’m the child, what must the parent be like? If I’m a branch, imagine the taproot.”

  The words seemed whispered directly into Gamache’s ear, on warm fetid breath.

  “There’s a purpose to everything under the sun. Isn’t that what you believe?” Fleming said. “I have a purpose. And so do you. Now go back to your pretty little village with all those hiding places and think about that. And then I want you to come back and let me loose so I can give you the plans for Armageddon, and then disappear. Never bother you again. You said I’ve been waiting for someone, and you were right. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Gamache got up. It was over.

  CHAPTER 37

  Jean-Guy wanted to say something, but couldn’t find any words that would make this better. And so he just drove while Gamache stared out the window.

  The Chief had once told him about the behavior of gorillas when faced with an attack. They met it head on, staring down the enemy. But every now and then they’d reach out to touch the gorilla beside them. To make sure they were not alone.

  Keeping his eyes on the road, Jean-Guy reached out and touched Gamache’s shoulder.

  Armand turned and smiled at Jean-Guy.

  “You all right?” Beauvoir asked.

  “Are you? At least I knew what we were in for.”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” Armand admitted with a tired grin. “I thought I did, but you can’t really prepare for that. Still, we learned some things. Fleming was the one who killed Gerald Bull.”

  “On someone’s orders. The ‘agency.’ I don’t suppose there’s much doubt which agency. He must mean CSIS.”

  Gamache nodded but seemed distracted. “Maybe. Probably. He certainly knew about Mary Fraser and Sean Delorme.”

  “Was one of them in Brussels?” asked Beauvoir. “Did Fraser or Delorme take that picture and then order the murder of Dr. Bull?”

  “I was wondering the same thing, though there are other possibilities.”

  “Professor Rosenblatt,” said Beauvoir. The elderly scientist who stood on the edge of so much of what had happened in the past, and was happening now. He glanced over at Gamache, whose eyes were narrowed, following a path, but not the road they were on.

  “Is there someone else, patron?”

  “There is one other person, Jean-Guy. Another possibility.”

  Beauvoir went through all the people in the case who were of the right age to have been active in Brussels in the early 1990s.

  “Monsieur Béliveau?” he asked. “He seems to know a lot about this, and really, what do we know about him? No one but Ruth even knew his first name.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of him,” said Gamache. “I was thinking of Al Lepage.”

  And as soon as he said it, Beauvoir could see the logic of it. In fact, it now seemed so obvious as to be almost unmissable.

  Frederick Lawson might have snuck across the border with the help of Ruth and Monsieur Béliveau, but he’d been able to stay, to make a life for himself, to become Al Lepage, get married. How did a deserter about to be tried for a war crime manage that except with the blessing of the government, or one of its agencies?

  Was that the price of admission to Canada? Every now and then Al Lepage would be called upon to do some of the government’s dirty work?

  Lacoste had let Lepage return to his home, but assigned agents to watch him around the clock.

  “Pardon,” said Gamache, taking his phone out of his pocket, where it must have vibrated, because Beauvoir hadn’t heard anything.

  Gamache looked at who was calling, then answered.

  “Chief Superintendent,” he said.

  “I take it you’re not alone, Armand,” said Thérèse Brunel. “I have some news.”

  “Oui?” By the tone of her voice he could tell he probably hadn’t won the lottery.

  “I had a call just now from the executive producer of the CBC national news.”

  Gamache took a deep breath, steeling himself.

  Beauvoir glanced over. The Chief was alert, tense.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s what you think,” she said. “They’ve found out about the gun.”

  “How much do they know?”

  “They know about Project Babylon, about Gerald Bull, they know the gun’s somewhere in Québec, which is why they called me.”

  “But they don’t know where it is?”

  “Not yet. They’re holding the story until the six o’clock national radio news tonight. By then they might know everything. And even if they don’t, it’ll still hit the headlines like a bomb. Every journalist will be all over the story. They’ll find out everything eventually. You might have a day from the time of broadcast, or you might have hours.”

  “Can you stop it?” he asked.

  “You know what’s involved in censoring the press, Armand. I have an urgent request in for an injunction but judges are loath to give them. We have to assume the story will run.”

  Gamache looked at his watch. It was already one thirty.

  “They don’t know about Guillaume Couture?” he asked.

  “No, but you found out within a matter of hours. They’ll have that soon enough. Once it airs, someone in the village will talk. It’s shocking that word hasn’t leaked before now.”

  Three Pines was good at keeping its secrets, thought Gamache. But this one was about to escape.

  “Merci.” He hung up. “Stop the car, please.”

  Beauvoir pulled over and Gamache got out, bending over, one hand on the car, one on his knee, as though he was about to retch.

  Jean-Guy hurried around the car. “Are you all right?”

  Gamache straightened up and caught his breath. Then he walked away, along the dirt shoulder of the back road.

  “What’s happened?” asked Jean-Guy, pursuing him, but stopping when Armand waved at him to give him space.

  Beauvoir had only heard Gamache’s end of the conversation, but it was enough to get the gist.

  Armand turned to Jean-Guy, his face pale and haggard. “We have four hours before word of the gun is all over the CBC national news.”

  “Shit.”

  Beauvoir felt his own stomach lurch. They both knew what that meant. Within moments of the broadcast it would be all over the Internet, social media, other media. NPR, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera. News of Gerald Bull’s gun would be blasted around the world.

  “They don’t yet know where it is,” said Gamache. “They don’t know about Three Pines. I’m not sure they know about Highwater yet. But they will. And when they do…”

  Pandemonium, thought Jean-Guy.

  Beauvoir studied his father-in-law and felt light-headed.

  “My God, you can’t be considering…”

  But he could tell by the expression on Gamache’s face that was exactly what he was considering.

  “You’d release Fleming?” asked Beauvoir, barely able to make the words audible.

  “We have to find the plans before the broadcast. The problem won’t be journalists or curiosity seekers. Every arms dealer, every mercenary, every intelligence organization, every terrorist group and corrupt dictator will hear about it. These people aren’t bumbling opportunists. They’re smart and motivated and ruthless. And they’ll be coming here. Jesus, Jean-Guy, you know what’ll happen if an arms dealer finds the plans before we do.”

  “If, if,” shouted Jean-Guy. “It might not happen, but we know for sure what’ll happen if Fleming’s let out of that hellhole. He’ll kill again. And again.”

  “Don’t tell me what Fleming will do. You have no idea what that man’s capable of. I do.”

  “Then tell me, for God’s sake. What did he do? What is that man capable of?”

  “He made the Whore of Babylon,” shouted Gamache.

  “The etching, I know.”

  “No, the real thing. Out of his victims.”

  Beauvoir stepped back, away from Gamache. From the words that had come out of his mouth and the image that came with them. Of what Fleming had done. Of what had been so horrific it was kept from the public.

  “Ohhhhh” escaped Beauvoir, a sigh, as though his soul had withered and was sliding out.

  “The children?”

  “Everyone. All seven victims,” said Gamache, and bent down again, his hands on his knees.

  Beauvoir sank to his knees in the dirt. He watched Gamache trying to catch his breath. He’d had no idea of the weight this man had been carrying all this time. The images he must have seen. There were even rumors of a recording. Gamache had stood in that courtroom and absorbed it so that no other citizen had to. A few sacrificed for the many.

  Gamache straightened up, stiffly, until he stood tall and resolute.

  -->