Dead Cold (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2)(95)

‘The doorbell rang. I remember trying to decide whether I should answer the door or kill myself. But it rang again and I don’t know, maybe it was social training, but I roused myself enough to go. And there was God. He had some crumbs of lemon meringue pie on the corner of His mouth.’

Gamache’s deep brown eyes widened.

‘I’m kidding.’ She reached out and held his wrist for a moment, smiling. Gamache laughed at himself. ‘He was a road worker,’ she continued. ‘He wanted to use the phone. He carried a sign.’

She stopped, unable for a moment to go any further. Gamache waited. He hoped the sign didn’t say The End is Nigh. The room faded. The only two people in the world were tiny, frail émilie Longpré and Armand Gamache.

‘It said Ice Ahead.’

They were silent for a moment.

‘How did you know He was God?’ Gamache asked.

‘When does a bush that burns become a Burning Bush?’ Em asked and Gamache nodded. ‘My despair disappeared. The grief remained, of course, but I knew then that the world wasn’t a dark and desperate place. I was so relieved. In that moment I found hope. This stranger with the sign had given it to me. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but suddenly the gloom was lifted.’

She paused a moment, remembering, a smile on her face.

‘Annoyed the hell out of Mother, I’ll tell you. She had to go all the way to India to find God and He was here all along. She went to Kashmir and I went to the door.’

‘Both long journeys,’ said Gamache. ‘And Kaye?’

‘Kaye? I don’t think she’s made that journey and I think it scares her. I think a lot of things scare Kaye.’

‘Clara Morrow has painted you as the Three Graces.’

‘Has she now? One day that woman will be discovered and the world will see what an astonishing artist she is. She sees things others don’t. She sees the best in people.’

‘She certainly sees how much the three of you love each other.’

Em nodded. ‘I do love them. I love all this.’ She looked around the cheerful room, the fires crackling in the grates, Olivier and Gabri talking to customers, price tags dangling from chairs and tables and chandeliers. When he’d been annoyed at Olivier one day Gabri had waited on tables with a price tag dangling from himself.

‘My life’s never been the same since that day I opened the door. I’m happy now. Content. Funny, isn’t it? I had to go to Hell to find happiness.’

‘People expect me to be cynical because of my job,’ Gamache found himself saying, ‘but they don’t understand. It’s exactly as you’ve said. I spend my days looking into the last room in the house, the one we keep barred and hidden even from ourselves. The one with all our monsters, fetid and rotting and waiting. My job is to find people who take lives. And to do that I have to find out why. And to do that I have to get into their heads and open that last door. But when I come out again,’ he opened his arms in an expansive movement, ‘the world is suddenly more beautiful, more alive, more lovely than ever. When you see the worst you appreciate the best.’

‘That’s it.’ émilie nodded. ‘You like people.’

‘I love people,’ he admitted.

‘What was your God doing to the wall in the diner?’

‘He was writing.’

‘God wrote on the wall of the diner?’ Em was incredulous, though she didn’t know why. Her God walked around with a prefabricated construction sign.

Gamache nodded and remembered watching the grizzled, beautiful fisherman at the screen door to the fly-filled diner that smelled of the sea. He’d looked back at Gamache and smiled. Not the radiant, full frontal beam of a few minutes earlier, but a warm and comforting smile, as though to say He understood and that everything would be all right.

Gamache had gotten up and slid into the booth and read the writing on the wall. He’d pulled out his notebook, stuffed with facts about death, about murder and sorrow, and he’d written down the four simple lines.

He knew then what he had to do. Not because he was a brave man or a good man, but because he had no choice. He had to return to Montreal, to S?reté headquarters, and he had to sort out the Arnot case. He’d known for months he had to do it, and yet he’d run from it and hidden behind work. Behind dead bodies and the solemn, noble need to find killers, as though he was the only one on the force who could.

The writing on the wall hadn’t told him what to do. He knew that. It’d given him the courage to do it.

‘But how do you know you did the right thing?’ Em asked, and Gamache realized he’d said all that out loud.

The blue eyes were steady and calm. But something had shifted. The conversation seemed to have another purpose. There was an intensity about her that hadn’t been there before.

‘I don’t know. Even now I’m not absolutely sure. Lots of people are convinced I was wrong. You know that. I’m sure you read about it in the papers.’

émilie nodded. ‘You prevented Superintendent Arnot and his two colleagues from killing more people.’

‘I stopped them from killing themselves,’ said Gamache. He remembered that meeting clearly. He’d been part of the inner circle of the S?reté then. Pierre Arnot was a senior and respected officer in the force, though not by Gamache. He’d known Arnot since his days as a rookie and the two had never gotten along. Gamache suspected Arnot thought him weak, while he thought Arnot a bully.