by Louise Penny
She’d never gone twenty-four hours without hearing her husband’s voice. Not once, in more than thirty years together. Then, next morning, at just after noon a coworker at the Bibliotheque Nationale arrived at work, her face stricken.
A bulletin on Radio-Canada. A shootout. Officers of the Sûreté among the dead, including a senior homicide officer. The race to the hospital, not listening to the reports. Too afraid. The world had collapsed to this imperative. To get there. To get there. Get there. Seeing Annie in the emergency room, just arrived.
The radio said Dad—
I don’t want to hear it.
Comforting each other. Comforting Enid Beauvoir, Jean-Guy’s wife, in the waiting room. And others arriving she didn’t know. The grotesque pantomime, strangers comforting each other while secretly, desperately, shamefully praying the other will be the one with bad news.
A paramedic appearing through the swinging doors from the emergency room, looking at them, looking away. Blood on his uniform. Annie grabbing her hand.
Among the dead.
The doctor, taking them aside, away, separating them from the rest. And Reine-Marie, light-headed, steeling herself to hear the unbearable. And then those words.
He’s alive.
She didn’t really take in the rest. Chest wound. Head wound. Pneumothorax. A bleed.
He’s alive was all she needed to know. But there was another.
Jean-Guy? she’d asked. Jean-Guy Beauvoir?
The doctor hesitated.
You must, tell us, Annie said, far more insistent than Reine-Marie expected.
Shot in the abdomen. He’s in surgery now.
But he’ll be all right? Annie demanded.
We don’t know.
My father, you said a bleed, what does that mean?
From the head wound, a bleed into his head, the doctor had said. A stroke.
Reine-Marie didn’t care. He’s alive. And she repeated that to herself now as she had every hour of every day since. It didn’t matter what the damned video showed. He’s alive.
“I don’t know what could be on it,” Gamache was saying. And that was the truth. He’d forced himself to remember, for the inquiry, but mostly what he was left with were impressions, the chaos, the noise, the shouting and screams. And gunmen, everywhere. Far more than expected.
The rapid gunshots. Concrete, wood exploding from the bullets all around. Automatic weapons fire. The unfamiliar feel of his tactical vest. An assault weapon in his hands. The people in his sights. The report as he fired. Aiming to kill.
Scanning for gunmen, issuing orders. Keeping order even in the storm.
Seeing Jean-Guy fall. Seeing others fall.
He woke at night with those images, those sounds. And that voice.
“I’ll find you in time. Trust me.”
“I do. I believe you, sir.”
“I’ll be home tomorrow,” Gamache said to Reine-Marie.
“Be careful.”
That was also something she never said before. Before all this happened. She’d thought it, he knew, every time he left for work, but never said it. But now she said it.
“I will. I love you.” He hung up, pausing to gather himself. In his pocket he felt the bottle of pills. His hand went to it, closing over it.
He closed his eyes.
Then taking his empty hand from his pocket he started calling the officers who’d survived, and the families of those who hadn’t.
He talked to their mothers, their fathers, their wives and a husband. In the background he could hear a young child asking for milk. Over and over he called, and listened to their rage, their pain, that someone could release a video of this event. Not once did they blame him, though Armand Gamache knew they could.
“Are you all right?”
Gamache looked up as Émile Comeau lowered himself into the seat opposite.
“What’s happened?” Émile asked, seeing the look on Gamache’s face.
Gamache hesitated. For the first time in his life he was tempted to lie to this man who had lied to him.
“Why did you say the Société Champlain meets at one thirty when it clearly meets at one?”
Émile paused. Would he lie again? Gamache wondered. But instead the man shook his head.
“I’m sorry about that Armand. There were things we needed to discuss before you came. I thought it was better.”
“You lied to me,” said Gamache.
“It was just half an hour.”
“It was more than that, and you know it. You made a choice, chose a side.”
“A side? Are you saying the Champlain Society is on a different side than you?”
“I’m saying we all have loyalties. You’ve made yours clear.”
Émile stared. “I’m sorry, I should never have lied to you. It won’t happen again.”
“It already has,” said Gamache getting to his feet and putting down a hundred dollars for the water and the use of the quiet table by the fireplace. “What did Augustin Renaud say to you?”
Émile got to his feet too. “What do you mean?”
“SC in Renaud’s journals. I’d taken it to mean an upcoming meeting with someone, maybe Serge Croix. A meeting he’d never make because he was murdered. But I was wrong. SC was the Société Champlain, and the meeting was for today at one. Why did he want to meet the Society?”
Émile stared, stricken, but said nothing.
Gamache turned and strode down the long corridor, his phone buzzing again and his heart pounding.
“Wait, Armand,” he heard behind him but kept walking, ignoring the calls. Then he remembered what Émile had meant to him and still did. Did this one bad thing wipe everything else out?
That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.
But not today. Gamache stopped.
“You’re right. Renaud wanted to meet with us,” said Émile, catching up to Gamache as he retrieved his parka from the coat check. “He said he’d found something. Something we wouldn’t like but he was willing to bury, if we gave him what he wanted.”
“And what was that?”
“He wanted to join the Société and have all the credibility that went with it. And when the coffin was found he wanted us to admit he’d been right all along.”
“That was all?”
“That’s it.”
“And did you give it to him?”
Émile shook his head. “We decided not to meet him. No one believed he’d actually found Champlain, and no one believed he’d found anything compromising. It was felt that having Augustin Renaud in the Société would cheapen it. He was blackballed.”
“An elderly man comes to you wanting acceptance, just acceptance, and you turn him away?”
“I’m not proud of it. That’s what we needed to discuss privately. I wanted them to tell you everything and said if they didn’t I would. I’m so sorry Armand. I made a mistake. It’s just that I knew it couldn’t matter to the investigation. No one believed Renaud. No one.”
“Someone did. They killed him.”
The meeting of the Société Champlain had been filled with elderly Québécois men. And what held them together as a club? Certainly their fascination with Champlain and the early colony, but did that explain a lifetime’s loyalty? Was it more than that?
Samuel de Champlain wasn’t simply one more explorer, he was the Father of Québec, and as such he’d become a symbol for the Québécois of greatness. And freedom. Of New Worlds and new countries.
Of sovereignty. Of separation from Canada.
Gamache remembered the extremes of the late 1960s. The bombs, the kidnappings, the murders. All done by young separatists. But the young separatists of the 1960s became elderly separatists, who joined societies and sat in genteel lounges and sipped aperitifs.
And plotted?
Samuel de Champlain was found and found to be a Protest
“How did you find the books?” Émile asked, dropping his eyes to the bag at Gamache’s side.
“It was his satchel. Why carry it just for a small map? There must have been something else in it. Then when we couldn’t find the books I realized he probably kept them with him. Augustin Renaud would have refused to let them out of his possession, even for a moment. He must have taken them to the Literary and Historical Society when he met his murderer. But they weren’t on his body. That meant the killer must have taken them. And done what?”
Émile’s eyes narrowed, his mind moving along the path Armand had laid out. Then he smiled. “The murderer couldn’t take them home with him. If they were found in his possession they’d incriminate him.”
Gamache watched his mentor.
“He could have destroyed them, I suppose,” Émile continued, thinking it through. “Thrown them into a fireplace, burned the books. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that. So what did he do?”
The two men stared at each other in the crowded hall of the hotel. People swirled around them like a great river, some bundled against the cold, some in formal wear off to a cocktail party. Some in the colorful, traditional sashes of the Carnaval, les ceinture fléchée. All ignoring the two men, standing stock-still in the current.
“He hid them in the library,” said Émile, triumphantly. “Where else? Hide them among thousands of other old, leather, unread, unappreciated volumes. So simple.”
“I spent this morning looking and finally found them,” said Gamache.
The two men walked out of the Château, gasping as the cold hit their faces.
“You found the books, but what happened to Champlain?” Émile asked, blinking his eyes against the freezing cold. “What did James Douglas and Chiniquy do with him?”
“We’re about to find out.”
“The Lit and His?” Émile asked, as they turned left past the old stone buildings, past the trees with cannonballs still lodged in them, past the past they both loved. “But why didn’t the Chief Archeologist find Champlain when he looked a few days ago?”
“How do you know he didn’t?”
TWENTY–THREE
When the Chief Inspector and Émile Comeau arrived at the Literary and Historical Society, Elizabeth, Porter Wilson, tiny Winnie the librarian and Mr. Blake were assembled in the entrance hall, waiting.
“What’s going on?” Porter launched right into it before Gamache and Émile had even closed the door behind them. “The Chief Archeologist is back with some technicians and that Inspector Langlois is also there. He’s ordered us to stay away from our own basement.”
“Had you planned to go down there?” Gamache asked, taking off his coat.
“Well, no.”
“Do you need to go down there?”
“No, not at all.” The two men stared at each other.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Porter, this is embarrassing,” said Elizabeth. “Let the men do their work. But,” she turned to Armand Gamache, “we would appreciate some information. Whatever you can give us.”
Gamache and Émile exchanged glances. “We think Augustin Renaud might have been right,” said the Chief Inspector.
“About what?” snapped Porter.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Mr. Blake. “About Champlain, what else?” When Gamache nodded Mr. Blake frowned. “You believe Samuel de Champlain is in our basement and has been all this time?”
“For the last 140 years anyway, yes. Pardon.”
The men squeezed past the gathering and made their way through the now familiar halls to the trap door into the first basement, then down another steep metal ladder to the final level.
Through the floorboards of the level above they could see glaring light, as though the sun was imprisoned down there. But once down they recognized it for what it was, a series of brilliant industrial lamps trained, once again, on the dirt and stone basement.
The Chief Archeologist was standing in the center of the room, his long arms hugging his chest perhaps trying, unsuccessfully, to contain his anger. The same two technicians who’d accompanied him before were there again, as was Inspector Langlois, who immediately took Gamache aside.
“I can explain,” Gamache began before being interrupted.
“I know you can, it’s not that. Let Croix stew for a while, he’s an asshole anyway. Have you heard?”
Langlois searched the Chief Inspector’s face.
“About the video? Oui. But I haven’t seen it.” Now it was Gamache’s turn to examine his companion. “Have you?”
“Yes. Everyone has.”
It was, of course, an exaggeration but not, perhaps, by much. He continued to examine Langlois’s face for clues. Was there a hint of pity?
“I’m sorry this has happened, sir.”
“Thank you. I’ll be watching it later this afternoon.”
Langlois paused, as though he wanted to say something, but didn’t. Instead he turned swiftly to look back at the Chief Archeologist.
“What’s this all about, patron?”
“I’ll tell you,” smiled Gamache, touching the man on the arm and guiding him back to the larger room and the gathering. He spoke to Serge Croix.
“You were here almost a week ago, I know, to see if maybe Augustin Renaud’s wasn’t the only body in this basement. To see if the man you considered a menace might actually have been right, that Champlain was buried here. Not surprisingly, you found nothing.”
“We found root vegetables,” said Croix to the snickers of the technicians behind him.
“I’d like you to look again,” said the Chief, smiling too, and staring at the archeologist. “For Champlain.”
“Not here I’m not. It’s a waste of time.”
“If you don’t, I will.” Gamache reached for a shovel. “And you must know, I’m even less of an archeologist than Renaud.”
He took his cardigan off and handed it to Émile then, rolling up his sleeves, he looked around the basement. It was pocked with fresh-turned earth, where holes had been dug and filled back in.
“Maybe I’ll start here.” He put the shovel in the earth and his boot on it.
“Wait,” said Croix. “This is absurd. We searched this basement. What makes you think Champlain would be here?”
“That does.”
Gamache nodded to Émile, who opened the satchel and handed the old bible to Serge Croix. They watched as the Chief Archeologist’s life changed. It began with the tiniest movement. His eyes widened, fractionally, then he blinked, then he exhaled.
“Merde,” he whispered. “Oh, merde.”
Croix looked up from the bible and stared at Gamache. “Where did you find this?”
“Upstairs, hiding where you’d hide a precious old book. Among other old books, in a library no one used. It was almost certainly put there by the murderer. He didn’t want to destroy it, but neither could he keep it himself, so he hid it. But before that it was in Renaud’s possession and before that it belonged to Charles Chiniquy.”
Gamache could see the man’s mind racing. Making connections, through the years, through the centuries. Connecting movements, events, personalities.
“How’d Chiniquy find this?”
“Patrick and O’Mara, those two Irish laborers I told you about, found it and sold it to Chiniquy.”
“You asked me to find out about digging sites in 1869, is this what that was about? They were working at one of the sites?”
Gamache nodded and waited for Croix to make the final connection.
“The Old Homestead?” the Chief Archeologist finally asked, then brought his hand to his forehead and tilted his head back. “Of course. The Old Homestead. We’d always dismissed it because it was outside the range we considered reasonable for the original hallowed ground. But Champlain wouldn’t have been buried in hallowed ground. Not if he was a Huguenot.”
Croix gripped the bible and seemed himself in the grip of something, a great excitement, a sort of fugue.
“There’d been rumors, of course, but that’s the thing with Champlain, so little’s known about the man, there were rumors about everything. This was just one more, and a not very likely one, we thought. Would the King put a Protestant, a Huguenot in charge of the New World? But suppose the King didn’t know? But no, it’s more likely he did and this would explain so much.”
The Chief Archeologist was now like a teenager with his first crush, giddy, almost babbling.
“It would explain why Champlain was never given a royal title, why he was never officially recognized as the Governor of Québec. Why he was never honored for his accomplishments, while others were honored for much less. That’s always been a mystery. And maybe it explains why he was sent here in the first place. It was considered almost a suicide mission and maybe Champlain, being a Huguenot, was expendable.”
“Would the Jesuits have known?” one of the technicians asked. It was a question that had puzzled Gamache as well. The Catholic Church played a powerful role in the establishment of the colony, in converting the natives and keeping the colonists in line.
The Jesuits were not famous for tolerance.
“I don’t know,” admitted Croix, thinking. “They must have. Otherwise they’d have buried him in the Catholic cemetery, not outside it.”
“But surely the Jesuits would never have allowed him to be buried with that.” Gamache pointed to the Huguenot bible, still in Croix’s grip.
“True. But someone must have known,” said Croix. “There’re all sorts of eyewitness accounts of Champlain being buried in the chapel, a chapel he himself had supported. Left half his money to them.”
The Chief Archeologist stopped, but they could see his mind racing.
“Could that be it? Was the money a bribe? Did he leave half his fortune to the church here so they’d give him a public burial in the chapel then later, let him be reburied beyond the Catholic cemetery, in a field? With this?” He held up the bible.
Gamache listened, imagining this great leader dug up in the dead of night, his remains lugged across the cemetery, across hallowed ground, and beyond.
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