A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15)(70)

“Invite him in for tea and petits fours. What do you think we do?”

Is it true, is it kind, does it need to be said? Beauvoir held his tongue. Barely.

“You call the cops,” he finally said, through his own thin lips.

“Yeah, right. And wait the twenty minutes until they move their fat asses?”

“That’s not true,” said Gamache.

“Okay, that might be true, but not fast enough. Never fast enough when the guy’s pounding on the door.”

“So what do you do?” Beauvoir persisted.

“We take care of it.”

“How? Do you have a gun?”

“Are you kidding? Do I look crazy?”

Gamache cleared his throat in a warning to Beauvoir not to answer that.

“Believe me,” Madame Fleury continued, “those of us who managed to escape won’t put up with that bullshit ever again. No one gets through the front door. No one touches any of those women. Never. Ever.”

“Us?” asked Beauvoir. “You?”

“You don’t think I do this out of the goodness of my heart?”

Beauvoir did not think that.

“Listen, Chief.” She almost spit the word out. “Doctors go home and beat their wives. Lawyers. Cops. There’s a huge instance of abuse from cops.” She glared at him in what he realized, with some shock, was a warning. Maybe even an accusation.

“My father was a judge,” she continued, “and inside our big old house in our respectable neighborhood, he beat us kids. And worse. I married a banker at eighteen, to get away, and guess what? He beat me, too. Then he’d bring me flowers and jewelry and he’d cry. He’d sob and say how sorry he was. And that he’d be a better husband. He’d never do it again. And you know what?” Her eyes opened wide as she stared at Beauvoir. “I believed him. Because I wanted to. Because I had to. I put on the beautiful silk scarf he brought me, to hide the bruises, and went to the country club for lunch.”

She let that sink in.

“Without realizing it, we go to what’s familiar. When I finally told my best friend, she didn’t believe me. No one did. They didn’t want to know. There was only one shelter here at the time. Overflowing. But they took me in and gave me a mattress on the floor. I slept on it for three months. First time in my life I felt safe. You know why it’s safe? Not because the cops protect us but because we look after ourselves. We make sure it is.”

“‘We’ the workers?”

“‘We’ every woman there. You asked if we have a weapon? We do. And you gave it to us, with every blow. Every bruise. Every broken bone. It’s the toy at the bottom of the cereal box.” She clunked her mug down on the table so hard that tea shot out the top and other patrons looked over.

“Rage,” said Beauvoir.

“Baseball bats,” said Madame Fleury. “Next time you see a group of women in a park practicing their swings, you think about that.”

She wiped up the spilled tea with a thin paper napkin, then pointed to the words Gamache had just written in his notebook. “What you just wrote is true, but no excuse. Cycle of abuse. My husband was beaten by his father. He saw his mother hit. But he was an adult when he hit me, and responsible for his own actions. They all are. After a beating they feel horrible and buy presents and promise to be better men, but they don’t change. They don’t grow up. They remain out-of-control children in a man’s body.”

“Simone,” said Gamache, “a bag was found on the side of the river with some of her belongings in it, but it was a strange assortment. Summer clothing. Medication she probably didn’t need anymore.”

“So?”

“We’re wondering if she packed it herself.”

Madame Fleury considered. “Might’ve, in a panic. Some women leave suddenly, just take off. But most have thought about it for a while. They have a bag packed and hidden, ready to grab. I had one packed for almost a year before I got up the courage to leave.”

Beauvoir tried to imagine Simone Fleury as a frightened young woman. But then, he knew that few people would look at him and imagine the wreckage he’d crawled out of, not all that long ago.

Madame Fleury glanced at her watch. “I’m leaving. My hairdresser doesn’t like it when I’m late. If you need anything else, you know how to reach me.”

And leave she did. Armand did not offer her his hand, and she did not offer him hers.

But Beauvoir did. As a sort of peace offering.

Simone Fleury looked at it and walked away.

“She thinks every man’s an abuser,” said Beauvoir, dropping his hand to his side. “That’s unfair.”

“She was beaten by two men she trusted. That’s unfair. She works with abused women every day. She’s surrounded by it. It’s incredible she can even bring herself to look at us, never mind talk to us in anything close to a civil manner.” Gamache nodded toward Beauvoir’s hand, which was at his side, his fingers relaxed into a loose fist. “What would you do if a weapon were thrust at you?”

Beauvoir looked down. He saw a hand. One that wrote notes, and chopped vegetables, and bathed his son. But Madame Fleury saw something else.

Twenty-six thousand calls a year, he thought.

As they stepped into the sunshine and the unseasonably warm April day, Beauvoir instinctively scanned the faces and realized with some amazement why he always did that.