A small man in his mid-forties, but still powerfully built, Leduc had been moved to the academy after he’d been caught with drugs stolen from the S?reté evidence locker.
Leduc had nursed a slight suspicion that Chief Superintendent Francoeur had engineered the whole thing. Not that he wasn’t guilty. Leduc had been skimming from the mountain of seized drugs for years, selling them on to crime syndicates. What struck him as suspicious was that he’d suddenly been caught just as an opening for the number two position at the academy had come up.
Francoeur had presented Inspector Leduc with a choice. Become second-in-command at the academy or be fired.
Serge Leduc had navigated the realpolitik of the S?reté by being a pragmatist. If this was what the Chief Superintendent wanted, then so be it. It was unhelpful and unhealthy to nurse a grudge or to fight the inevitable. Especially against Sylvain Francoeur. Leduc himself had been an enforcer long enough to know what being fired by Francoeur might mean.
That had been almost a decade ago, and with his transfer a new era had dawned. Though not, perhaps, an Age of Enlightenment.
On Francoeur’s orders, Serge Leduc had reshaped the academy. Picking and choosing the recruits. Changing the curriculum. Guiding, nurturing, and whipping the young men and women into shape. And the shape they took was that of Serge Leduc.
Any recruit who resisted or even appeared about to question was marked for special treatment. Something guaranteed to create an attitude adjustment.
The actual head of the academy had protested feebly but was just going through the motions. The Commander excelled at form without function. He was an impressive figurehead, a relic kept in place to calm worried mothers and fathers who naturally, though mistakenly, believed the primary danger to their children was physical.
The Commander inspired confidence with his gray hair and straight back, in his dress uniform on entrance day when he smiled at the eager recruits, and on graduation when they smiled at him smugly, knowingly. The rest of the time he cowered in his office, afraid of the phone, afraid of the knock on the door, afraid of the night and afraid of the dawn.
And now he was gone. And Chief Superintendent Francoeur was gone. “Fired,” as it were, in an irony not lost on Leduc.
And now Professor Leduc waited for the knock on the door.
He wasn’t worried. He was the Duke. And all this belonged to him.
*
Armand Gamache walked down the long corridor. They’d torn down the old academy, where he himself had trained, a few years earlier and relocated to the South Shore of Montréal to this new glass and concrete and steel structure.
Gamache, while appreciating tradition and respecting history, had not mourned the loss of the former academy. It was only bricks and mortar. What mattered wasn’t what the building looked like but what happened inside.
Two S?reté agents walked behind Gamache, personally chosen for this detail and lent to him by Thérèse Brunel.
He stopped at the door. The final one on his list. And without hesitation, he knocked.
*
Leduc heard it and despite himself gave a tiny, involuntary spasm. And he realized that a small part of himself never thought the rap on the door would ever really come.
But still, he wasn’t worried.
He got up, and turning his back on the door, he folded his arms across his broad chest and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window at the playing field below, covered in a layer of undisturbed snow.
*
Gamache waited.
He heard the agents beginning to shuffle and grow restless behind him. He could almost see them shooting glances at each other and frowning.
But still he waited, clasping his large hands behind his back. No need to knock again. The man inside had heard and now was playing a game. But it was a game of solitaire.
Gamache was declining to play. Instead, he used the time to think about the best way to implement his plans.
Serge Leduc was not an issue. He was not even an obstacle. He was, in fact, part of the plan.
*
Leduc stared out the window and waited for the next knock. A sharper rap. An impatient little tattoo on his door. But none came.
Had Gamache left?
Sylvain Francoeur had always declared that Chief Inspector Gamache was a weak man who hid it well behind a thin fa?ade often mistaken for wisdom.
“His one real talent is fooling others into believing that he has talent,” the head of the S?reté had proclaimed more than once. “Armand Gamache, filled with integrity and courage. Bullshit. You know why he hates me? Because I know him for what he is.”
By this time, Francoeur was usually a few Scotches in and had become voluble and more than usually aggressive. Most subordinates knew enough to excuse themselves and get the hell out after the third drink. But Serge Leduc stayed, excited by this game of chicken and because he had nowhere else to go.
Francoeur would lean across his desk, looking past the bottle of Ballantine’s, to whoever was left. His face suffused with blood and rage.
“He’s a coward. Weak, weak, weak. He hires the goddamned dregs, you know. The agents no one else wants. The ones better men have thrown out. Gamache picks up garbage. And you know why?”
Leduc knew why. He’d heard this story before. But just because the familiar words came out in a miasma of Scotch and malice didn’t make them untrue.
“Because he doesn’t like competition. He surrounds himself with sycophants and losers to make himself look better. He hates guns. Afraid of them. Fucking coward. Fooled a lot of people, but not me.”
Francoeur would shake his head and his hand would creep to his own handgun in the holster on his belt. The gun that Armand Gamache would one day use to kill him.
“This isn’t a ‘police gentle,’” Francoeur liked to say at convocation, when the students graduated from cadets to agents, streaming into the S?reté like water through a cracked hull. “It’s not a ‘police kindness.’ It’s a police force. It’s called that for a reason. We use force. We are a force. And one to be reckoned with.”
That always brought wild applause from the students and slight unease from the families gathered in the auditorium.
Chief Superintendent Francoeur didn’t care. His words weren’t for the parents and grandparents.
During the term, Francoeur would visit the academy once a month, staying overnight in the lavish quarters reserved for him. After dinner he’d invite a select few to join him for drinks in the large living room overlooking the vast playing field. He’d regale the wide-eyed cadets with harrowing tales of great danger, of investigations wildly perilous, expertly leavened by the odd story of ridiculous criminals and silly mistakes.
And then, when Francoeur judged the time was right, he’d insinuate the real message into his stories. That the S?reté du Québec wasn’t there to be on guard for the population, but to be on guard against them. The citizens were the enemy.
The only ones the recruits could really trust were their confrères in the S?reté. And even then, they had to be careful. There were some intent on weakening the force from within.
Serge Leduc would watch the unlined faces and wide eyes, and over the course of the months, the years, he’d see them change. And he would marvel at the skill of the Chief Superintendent, who could so easily create such little monsters.
Chief Superintendent Francoeur was gone now but his legacy remained, in flesh and blood and in glass and steel. In the cold hard surfaces and sharp edges of the academy and the agents he’d designed.
The new academy itself appeared simple, classic even. It was placed on land appropriated from the community of Saint-Alphonse, the S?reté’s needs judged far greater than the population’s.
It was designed as a quadrangle, with a playing field in the middle, enclosed by gleaming buildings on all four sides. The only way in was through a single gate.
It gave the appearance of both transparency and strength. But in actuality, it was a fortress. A fiefdom.