A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(12)

Gamache had laughed. “I wish it was a mountain. At least they’re majestic. Conquering them brings some sense of triumph. The S?reté Academy is more like a great big hole filled with merde. And I’ve fallen into it.”

“Fallen, patron? As I remember it, you jumped.”

Gamache had laughed again and bowed his head over his notebook.

Beauvoir watched this, and waited. He’d been waiting for months now, ever since Gamache had told Jean-Guy and Annie about his decision to take over the academy.

While some had been surprised, it had seemed the perfect move to Jean-Guy, who knew the man better than most. It had also seemed perfect to Annie, who was relieved her father would at least, at last, be safe.

Jean-Guy had not told his pregnant wife that the academy was, in fact, the last shit pit in the S?reté. And her father was in up to his neck.

Beauvoir had sat in the study, quietly, and then taken his book on Everest into the living room and read, in front of the cheerful fire, of perilous ascents. Of oxygen sickness and avalanches and great jutting shards of ice ten stories high that sometimes toppled over without warning, crushing man and beast beneath.

Jean-Guy sat in the comfortable living room and shivered as he read of bodies left on the mountain where they fell. Frozen as they reached out, for help or to drag themselves one inch closer to the summit.

What had they thought, these ice men and women, in their final lucid moments?

Would their last thought be why? Why had this seemed a good idea?

And he wondered if the man in the study would one day ask himself the same thing.

Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir knew that his mountain analogy with Gamache had been wrong. If you died on the side of a mountain, it was in the middle of a selfish, meaningless act. A feat of strength and ego, wrapped in bravado.

No, the academy wasn’t a mountain. It was, as Gamache had said, a cesspool. But it was a task that needed to be done. As went the academy, so went the S?reté. If one was merde, the other would be too.

Chief Inspector Gamache had cleaned up the S?reté, but he knew his work was only half done. Now Commander Gamache would turn his attention to the academy.

So far, while firing former professors and hiring new ones, he had not named a second-in-command. Everyone assumed he’d approach Jean-Guy. The younger man had assumed that too, and waited. And was still waiting. And beginning to wonder.

“Would you take it?” Annie had asked one morning over breakfast.

Never a petite person, she had blossomed with pregnancy, which was one way of putting it. All Jean-Guy cared about was that she and the baby were healthy. He would kill if he had to, to get her that last tub of H?agen-Dazs.

“Do you think I should?” Jean-Guy had replied, and seen Annie smile.

“You’re kidding, right? Give up your position as inspector in the homicide division, one of the most senior officers in the S?reté, to go to the academy? You?”

“Then you think I should do it?”

She’d laughed in that full-hearted way she had. “I don’t think ‘should’ has ever entered your thinking. I think you will do it.”

“And why would I?”

“Because you love my father.”

It was true.

He would follow Armand Gamache through the gates of Hell, and the S?reté Academy was as close as Québec got to Hades.

*

Reine-Marie sat in the bistro and looked out at the darkness and the three great pines, visible only because of the Christmas lights festooned on them. The blue and red and green lights, luminous under a layer of fresh snow, looked as though they were suspended in midair.

It was just five o’clock but it could have been midnight.

Patrons had begun arriving at the bistro, meeting friends for a cinq à sept, the cocktail hour at the end of the day.

Armand hadn’t joined her, preferring the peace and quiet of the study as the first day of term approached. She looked across the village green, past the cheerful trees, to their home, and the light at the study window.

Reine-Marie had been relieved when she’d heard his decision to take over the academy. It seemed a perfect fit for a man more inclined to track down a rare book than a murderer. But find killers he’d done, for thirty years. And he’d been strangely good at it. He’d hunted serial killers, singular killers, mass murderers. Those who premeditated and those who meditated not at all, but simply lashed out. All had taken lives, and all had been found by her husband, with very few exceptions.

Yes, Reine-Marie had been relieved when, after reviewing all the offers and discussing them with her, Armand had decided to take on the task of commanding the S?reté Academy. Of clearing up the mess left by years of brutality and corruption.

She’d been relieved, right up until the moment she’d surprised that grim look on his face.

And then a chill had seeped into her. Not a killing cold, but a warning of worse to come.

“You’ve been looking at that for a day now,” said Myrna, breaking into Reine-Marie’s thoughts and gesturing toward the paper in Ruth’s hand. The old poet held it delicately, at the edges.

“May I see it?” Reine-Marie asked, her voice gentle, her hand out as though coaxing a lost dog into a car. Had she had a bottle of Scotch, Ruth would’ve been wagging her tail on the front seat by now.

Ruth looked from one to the other, then she relinquished it. But not to Reine-Marie.