Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #14)

by Louise Penny

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” she’d mumbled with each careful step down.

  “What do they think of Benedict?” Beauvoir asked.

  “They said he’s polite. Nice. Trustworthy. There’re a lot of older people in the building, and they seem to have adopted Benedict.”

  “He has that effect on people,” said Gamache. “He’s a good handyman?”

  “Yes,” said Lacoste. “According to the other tenants, he seems to know . . . what he’s doing. But he hasn’t been around for a couple of days.”

  This description of Benedict was far from conclusive. A handyman could fix a leaking faucet. He could not, necessarily, make a building collapse. At will.

  Although a carpenter might. A builder. And that was Benedict’s other job.

  “But if Benedict killed Anthony Baumgartner,” said Beauvoir, “he messed up. His plan couldn’t possibly have been to get trapped himself.”

  “Probably not,” said Gamache.

  “What do you mean ‘probably’?” snapped Beauvoir. “It’s obvious.”

  Both Lacoste and Gamache stared at him in surprise.

  “Is something bothering you, Jean-Guy?”

  Beauvoir took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m just hungry and tired.”

  His sponsor in AA had warned him about H.A.L.T. Hungry, angry, lonely, and tired were triggers.

  He’d readily admit to hungry and tired. And the meeting had angered him. But it was the lonely that was surprising and upsetting Beauvoir. Cournoyer’s final comment had left him feeling very alone.

  Ask Gamache.

  “It wasn’t too much for you, Isabelle?” Gamache asked. “Going to the apartment building?”

  “Are you kidding, patron? The best . . . therapy I’ve had in months.”

  She didn’t tell them that she’d slipped and fallen into a snowbank and had struggled to get back onto her feet. Then it had taken another ten minutes to flag down a taxi.

  She’d arrived at the restaurant frozen through and bushed.

  But it was the most fun she’d had in months. Since the shooting.

  She’d been afraid she’d be sidelined forever. Treated by well-meaning colleagues as a charity case. Someone to be patronized, coddled, pitied. And finally ignored.

  But Gamache had done none of those things. Instead he’d trusted her with this task, and she’d proven to herself and him that she could do it.

  “I’ve arranged to meet Baumgartner’s brother, sister, and ex-wife at his home.” Beauvoir looked at his watch. “At three o’clock. I’d like you there if possible, patron.”

  “Oui. Absolutment,” said Gamache. “They know he’s dead, of course. But do they know he was murdered?”

  “Not yet.”

  Though it was possible one of them knew perfectly well.

  * * *

  After Gamache headed to the archives to look up some documents, Lacoste was left alone with Beauvoir.

  “Okay, spill,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, don’t make me drag it out of you. You’re angry at the Chief about something. What is it?”

  He told her about the conversation with the man from the Ministère de la Justice.

  As he described what had happened, it all sounded ludicrous. And it would seem silly if he hadn’t seen the look on Francis Cournoyer’s face.

  What’s your endgame? Beauvoir had asked, the scent of disinfectant heavy in the air.

  Ask Gamache.

  With those two words, Cournoyer had thrown a bomb into Beauvoir’s world. Though it had been, really, more of a crumble than an explosion. As he’d stood there in the men’s toilet. Trying to grasp what was being said.

  Cournoyer had more or less said that the person at the center of it all wasn’t some vindictive politician. Wasn’t some shadowy government operative.

  It was Gamache. He wasn’t the target, he was the sharpshooter. He wasn’t the victim, he was the perpetrator. And he knew perfectly well what was happening. Why. And where it was leading.

  And he was keeping Beauvoir in the dark.

  And all of this—the investigation, the sneaking around, the threats—were meant to confuse, to dazzle. To misdirect. While something else was happening.

  That’s what Francis Cournoyer had said. With those two words.

  Ask Gamache.

  Jean-Guy could feel a headache coming on. The distant throbbing at the base of his skull. Like heartbeats at the birth of dark thoughts.

  “But it doesn’t mean that the Chief knows anything,” said Lacoste. “This Cournoyer man might’ve been messing with you. Probably not his first mindfuck in a public washroom.”

  And despite himself Beauvoir snorted. Then heaved a heavy sigh.

  He wanted to agree with her. But she hadn’t been there. Hadn’t seen Cournoyer’s triumph as he’d said it.

  “Gamache knows way more than he’s saying,” said Jean-Guy.

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” asked Isabelle. “You’re just pissed off that he didn’t tell you.”

  “Just?” demanded Beauvoir. “Just? I’m being grilled. My career possibly ruined. And he knows why all this is happening, and he’s not telling me?” Jean-Guy’s voice rose as he wound himself up. “Yes, I’m fucking angry.”

  There was silence for a long moment.

  “You do know,” she said, leaning across the table toward him, her voice so quiet he had to also lean in, “that he’s the head of the entire Sûreté? Of course he knows more than you. Or me. Or anyone else in the force. He’d better. He’s in charge. He’s had to navigate these waters for years. So yes he knows more, sees more, than you, or me. And thank God he does.”

  “He’s keeping secrets.”

  “And that surprises you, Jean-Guy?”

  “He’s playing me.”

  “Or maybe he’s protecting you. Have you thought of that? Can’t you see it?”

  “Of course I can’t see it,” snapped Beauvoir. “He’s keeping me in the dark. Letting me just waltz into these interrogations like an idiot. I’m tired, Isabelle. Just . . . tired.”

  And now he looked it. With an index finger, he pushed a fry around on his plate. Then looked up at her. And sighed. “You know?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m tired of playing catch-up,” Jean-Guy said. “Of wondering what monster is around the next corner. Not the murderers. Them I can handle. It’s the other stuff. The political games that aren’t games at all.” He shook his head, then looked down and spoke quietly. “I’m not good at it.”

  “You don’t have to be. He is.” She smiled then. “And you’re far better at it than you let on. I know that. He knows that.”

  “But he’s better.”

  “Monsieur Gamache is twenty years older than you. He’s been at it a lot longer, at a much higher level. But you’re up there now. He trusts you. And, more than that, he cares very deeply about you. For you. If you don’t know that by now, you never will.”

  She flagged down the server again.

  “I think we need some tea, don’t you?”

  She smiled at Beauvoir, who couldn’t help but smile back.

  Tea.

  The Anglos in Three Pines were always pressing tea on each other in times of stress. Even Ruth. Though her “tea,” while looking like it, was actually scotch.

  He’d thought it vile at first. The tea. But then, somewhere along the line, he found he looked for it. Hoped they’d offer it. And drank it with pleasure, though he didn’t show it.

  He found now that just the aroma of Red Rose calmed him. He didn’t even have to drink it.

  The waitress returned, and the scent of the tea enveloped him. Strong. Fragrant. Calming. And yet Jean-Guy could still feel the throbbing radiating from the base of his skull, until it covered his head like a membrane that kept tightening.

  He had to think. To be clear. To try to see what was really happening and not what others wanted him to see.

  Bu
t all that kept coming to mind was Matthew 10:36.

  His first day on the job, Chief Inspector Gamache had called him into his office.

  The two men were alone, for the first time. And Agent Beauvoir took in two things immediately.

  The sense of calm that came from the man behind the desk. It was unusual. Most senior officers Beauvoir knew gave off a “fuck you” energy. Something Agent Beauvoir had learned to copy.

  The other thing he noticed was the look in the Chief Inspector’s eyes.

  Smart, bright. Thoughtful. None of that was particularly unusual in a senior Sûreté officer. But it was something else, in those eyes, that had taken Agent Beauvoir by surprise.

  Kindness. Clear enough for a rattled young man to see.

  “Have a seat,” the Chief had said. And had proceeded to outline, quickly, clearly, what would be expected of Jean-Guy Beauvoir. It amounted to a code of conduct. It started with the four statements that lead to wisdom. I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong. I’m sorry. And ended with him saying, simply, “Matthew 10:36.”

  “You can take all of what I’ve said to heart,” the Chief had said, leading the young agent to the door. “Or none. It’s your choice. As are the consequences, of course.”

  Jean-Guy Beauvoir was used to being told what to do. Ordered around. By his father. His teachers. His superiors.

  The concept of choice was new. And more than a little baffling. As was the Chief’s habit of tossing what appeared to be random quotes into conversations.

  It wasn’t until a few years later, and many experiences with the Chief in horrific investigations, that Agent Beauvoir had looked it up.

  Matthew 10:36

  Jean-Guy had expected some inspirational biblical saying. From St. Francis, perhaps. Or something from one of those long letters to those poor, and almost certainly illiterate, Corinthians.

  Instead what he read struck dread into his heart.

  And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

  Far from inspirational, it was a harsh warning in a gentle voice. A whisper out of the darkness.

  Be careful.

  “I’m tired, Isabelle. Tired of all this.” He waved his hand, to indicate not the dingy diner but a world that couldn’t be seen. The world of suspicions. Of constant questioning. Of ground shifting.

  He just wanted to rest. No, he wanted more than that. He wanted to curl up on his own sofa, in front of the fireplace. With Annie and Honoré in his arms.

  And he wanted it all to go away.

  He drove her home. At the door she hugged him and whispered, “Be careful.”

  It was so close to what he’d been privately thinking a few minutes earlier that he felt the hairs go up on the back of his neck.

  “I’ve got Cournoyer’s number now,” he said. “Not to worry.”

  “Not of Cournoyer.”

  “Gamache,” said Beauvoir.

  “No. You.”

  As he drove back through Montréal, to pick up Gamache, he could smell a familiar, very, very faint scent. Of rose water and sandalwood.

  And he could see, again, those kind eyes. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Trying to communicate something to a hardheaded young agent who was radiating “fuck you.”

  He watched as pedestrians leaped away from the wall of slush splashed up by cars. As elderly men and women clung to each other to keep from falling. As people, neutered by the bitter cold, scuttled from shops.

  And Jean-Guy imagined walking along the Seine with his family. Taking them to the galleries and cathedrals and parks of Paris. Weekend trips to Provence. To the Riviera. Where sun gleamed off the Mediterranean and not off snow.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Ruth, what’re you doing?” asked Myrna.

  Clara and Gabri stopped tapping on their computers and looked up from their screens.

  All four had driven in to Cowansville and now sat in the computer room of the local library, each at a laptop around the large conference table.

  They’d come in not for the computers but for the high-speed connection.

  Ruth had joined them when she found out where they were going.

  Now the elderly poet sat at her laptop, fingers moving swiftly and noisily over the keys as she pounded rather than tapped. A look of satisfaction on her face that would have frightened Genghis Khan.

  “Nothing,” said Ruth.

  Far from being computer-illiterate, Ruth in her early eighties had embraced the Internet.

  “As a way,” Gabri had guessed, “of spreading her empire.”

  If there really was a darknet, Ruth Zardo would find it. Conquer it. Become its empress.

  “Queen of the Trolls,” Gabri had said, and Ruth had not contradicted him.

  Though they knew for whom she trolled. Not schoolchildren. Not people who were scorned for being different.

  She trolled people who trolled them.

  She attacked the attackers.

  “Madame Zardo,” the librarian had said, practically bowing when Ruth limped in. Elderly, unsteady. Stooped.

  But when she sat at the table, behind “her” laptop, she was nimble. Strong. Unyielding. Relentless. No bully could hide. Ruth’s hat was so black it was white.

  The library was in the process of renaming this room: A F.I.N.E. Place.

  “What’s she doing?” Clara whispered to Gabri.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Anything?” Myrna asked, and Clara turned her laptop around.

  Both Gabri and Myrna took a look.

  Clara was in the Austrian registry of births, deaths, and marriages. With a worldwide interest in ancestry, these records were being made available online.

  She was following the Baumgartner family, root and branch. Back in time.

  To where it grafted onto the Kinderoths.

  And then she followed them. To see where, and if, they became the Rothschilds.

  “It’s interesting, but I’m getting a bit lost. Who’s related to whom, and then names change not just with marriage but to avoid discrimination. Obviously Jewish names become Christian. In fact, not only do the names change, but lots of them actually converted. But you see here?”

  She pointed to one old document. A name changed from Rosenstein to Rose. But a Star of David remained above Rose. And followed it, through the generations.

  And then it stopped. And there was just blank space. Except for the notation “10.11.38.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Gabri.

  Myrna sat silent. Staring. She knew but couldn’t say it. She was looking at the names. The ages.

  Helga, Hans, Ingrid, Horst Rose. All born in the 1920s. With stars beside their names.

  And then the simple notation. 10.11.38

  And then nothing.

  “It’s a date,” Myrna finally said.

  Ruth leaned over and looked. Then returned to her computer.

  “Kristallnacht,” she said, tapping even harder. “November tenth, 1938. When good, decent people revealed themselves for who they really were and turned on their neighbors. The Jews.”

  “Kristallnacht,” said Myrna. “Because of all the broken glass.”

  “More than glass was broken that night,” said Ruth. “It was particularly brutal in Austria.”

  She spoke as though she’d been there, and while her face was blank and her voice flat, her fingers pounded the keys even harder. In pursuit.

  “The Baumgartners?” asked Myrna. “The Baroness’s family?”

  “Looks like they got out before the Holocaust,” said Clara. “I’m trying to track them. Interesting thing is, they aren’t called Baron and Baroness.”

  “So maybe they lost the case?” said Myrna.

  “Seems obvious they must have,” said Gabri.

  “Shlomo Kinderoth left his fortune to both his sons,” said Myrna. “You’ve found the part of the family that became the Baumgartners. How about the other branch?”

  Clara spent some moments clicking through. “It’s going
to take time, but so far I can’t find any more references to Baron or Baroness Kinderoth.”

  “You don’t think—” Gabri began.

  10.11.38

  “I don’t know,” said Clara.

  “Any luck with the will?” Myrna asked Gabri.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “I got into the archives, but they’re in German. I can’t read them.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Myrna.

  * * *

  Armand Gamache sat in the quiet back room of the National Archives. The records he was looking for weren’t Canadian. Or Québécois.

  He’d used his pass code to get into Interpol. Then over to the Austrian records. The ones he had access to were more detailed than those available to the public.

  But he quickly ran up against the same problem Gabri was having.

  He could read the names. Baumgartner. Kinderoth. But he couldn’t understand the court judgments.

  What he did understand was that there were judgments. Plural. Lots of them. From 1857. Then 1862. Then another. And another. All involving Baumgartners and Kinderoths.

  Against each other.

  They stopped for a few years. And then started up again. Like trench warfare, only pausing to retrench. And then the combatants went at it again. More fiercely each time, he guessed. Such was human nature.

  While he could understand the larger issues, the fact this was a case that was tried over and over again, he couldn’t get the details. And it was the details that interested him. Though it was far from clear that they’d lead him to whoever had killed Anthony Baumgartner, 161 years after the death of Shlomo, the Baron Kinderoth.

  Gamache knew he needed help. He did another search, and then, after finding what he was looking, for he got up and paced.

  He was alone in the room, so no one saw him muttering. Gesturing. Finally, after a few minutes, he pulled out his phone and placed a call.

  “Guten Tag,” he said, and asked for the Kontrollinspektor.

  * * *

  “Am pursuing powerful informations about a resolve. ”

  The voice at the other end of the line was deep, calm, apparently intelligent. And yet Kontrollinspektor Gund couldn’t help feeling he was dealing with a lunatic.

  “And you are who again?” he asked.