A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12)(130)

“Do you really believe that?” asked Amelia.

Huifen compressed her lips and nodded.

“And now that Leduc is gone?” asked Amelia.

But she knew the answer.

Jacques was directionless, rudderless. The grip on the tiller was gone. And Jacques was lost.

“I wish you’d known him before. He was…” Huifen searched for the word. “Glorious. Smart and funny. Sweet. A natural leader. The Duke saw that, and ruined it. Because he could.”

Huifen spoke with such venom the other two exchanged glances.





CHAPTER 41

“Come in.” Brébeuf stepped back from the threshold.

“You don’t seem surprised, Michel,” said Gamache.

He’d come directly there after speaking with Charpentier, Michel Brébeuf’s protégé and perhaps his greatest success.

“I wasn’t exactly expecting you, but I’m not altogether surprised either,” said Brébeuf, waving toward the sitting area.

Armand Gamache glanced around the little room, swiftly taking in the details. In the months since Michel had arrived at the academy, Armand had never once been in his private quarters.

He was surprised by how many things he recognized. The framed photographs of family. A couple of paintings that had once hung in the Brébeuf home.

Michel had brought his favorite chair too. Which he was now offering to Armand. Gamache sat, and Brébeuf took the chair across from him.

“What can I do for you, Armand?”

“You must have known I’d figure it out.”

“Ah.” Brébeuf sighed. “So that’s it.”

He managed a small, almost wistful, smile and studied his guest.

“It’s possible I’ve always underestimated you, Armand. I’ve loved you and admired you, but maybe part of me has always seen you as a boy. Funny, isn’t it? All that we’ve been through. I saw you go off to Cambridge, saw you get married, have children, become a senior officer in the S?reté, and yet part of me will always think of you as the boy who lost his parents. The boy I needed to protect.”

“You betrayed me, Michel, years ago. I was almost killed because of you.”

“I never meant that to happen.”

“Really? The master tactician never saw that coming?”

“It was a mistake,” admitted Brébeuf.

“And was killing Leduc also a mistake?”

Brébeuf slowly shook his head, holding Armand’s eyes the whole time. “Non. That was intended. I knew that would happen almost from the day I arrived. When I discovered two things.”

“Oui?”

Gamache knew he was being played, was being led. Guided or misguided, as Charpentier would have it. But he needed to know.

“Serge Leduc was a stupid man,” said Brébeuf. “A man driven by an infected ego. But he was also a powerful man, I’ll give him that. A charismatic personality. Stupidity and power. A dangerous combination, as we’ve found out many times, eh, Armand? Especially for anyone young and vulnerable. He’d have made a good cult leader, if he hadn’t joined the S?reté and ended up here. In fact, he’d turned the academy into a sort of cult, hadn’t he?”

Gamache listened, but didn’t nod. Didn’t agree or disagree. He was bending much of his will to disengaging from Brébeuf, while still listening closely.

“After that party in your rooms the first night, Serge Leduc decided to make me his best friend. Bound by a shared loathing of you. He assumed we had that in common. He had no idea of my depth of feeling for you.”

Michel Brébeuf looked at Gamache with undisguised tenderness.

But what, Armand asked himself, did that tenderness itself disguise? What was lurking, swishing its tail, in those depths?

“And yet you spent quite a lot of time with Leduc. You said it was because you were lonely.”

“That was part of it,” Brébeuf admitted. “And perhaps I was attracted by his obvious respect for me. Something I hadn’t felt from anyone for a long time.”

Brébeuf smiled in the impish way Gamache knew well. Here was a man he’d known longer than anyone else on earth. A person he had loved, man and boy, for decades.

And despite all that had happened, he still felt that tug. As though Michel had coiled himself around Armand’s DNA. What happened in childhood had fused itself to Gamache. The losses, but also the laughter and hilarity, the roaring freedom, the friendship. The friendship. The friendship. They were brothers-in-arms. Storming the castle.

And now he looked at that smile and could have wept.

“What happened, Michel?”

“That first night, he invited me back to his rooms. After too many drinks, Leduc brought out his revolver.”

Armand had actually been asking about their friendship. About where and when and how Michel had veered away. And fallen off a rampart in the darkness.

But the answer he got was far different.

“He told me what he did with the gun,” said Michel. “I’ve done many things I’m ashamed of. Many things that cannot and should not be forgiven. But what Leduc told me that night shocked and sickened even me.”

Brébeuf’s gaze drifted beyond Gamache and above him, toward the door. His eye caught something and Michel suddenly smiled, as though surprised by something pleasant. He gestured toward it.