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.
Armand tried to stop himself, but his head turned and his eyes followed.
There, above the door, was a small frame. And in it was what looked like a stylized red rose. But wasn’t.
Gamache recognized it immediately. He himself had given it to Michel years, decades, ago.
It had once been Armand’s most precious possession.
It was a handkerchief. A Christmas gift from Armand’s mother to his father.
He remembered watching her embroider his father’s initials, HG, in the corner of each one. Zora had offered to help. His mother thanked her, but refused. She wanted to do them herself. Not because it was easy, but because it was difficult. Embroidery did not come naturally to her. And so the HGs were slightly bizarre, and only really intelligible to someone who knew what they were meant to be.
Some looked like H6. Some looked like #Q. Some had tiny dots of blood, where she’d pricked herself.
But all said the same thing, if you knew how to read them.
HG, Honoré Gamache, was loved. By Amelia.
His father had carried one in his pocket every day of his life.
The morning after their deaths, Armand had gone into their room. The scent of them, the sense of them, almost too much to bear. The clothing. The book. The bookmark. The bedside clock, still ticking. He’d thought that strange. Surely it should have stopped.
And there, on the chest of drawers, a clean handkerchief for a day that would never come.
He’d shoved it in his pocket. And kept it with him always.
Until one day, while playing king of the castle, Michel had fallen and gashed his knee. Armand had taken the handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to the wound. And when the bleeding had stopped, he’d looked at it, then at Michel, who was wiping away tears with the sleeve of his sweater.
Armand brought out his penknife and made a very small cut in his own finger. Michel took a stuttering breath, tears stopping as he watched Armand dab his finger on the blood-soaked handkerchief.
On that day they had become more than brothers-in-arms.
“Blood brothers,” Armand had said, offering the handkerchief to Michel. Who took it. And kept it. All these years.
And now, a lifetime later, it had returned. Armand’s mappa mundi. The map of his world. The mundane and the magnificent, fused.
The blood had made a sort of rose pattern, just touching the HG in the corner.
Armand looked away and met Michel’s eyes.
“I’m many things,” said Michel. “But I am not a murderer.”
“Then who killed Serge Leduc?”
*
Paul Gélinas stood at the window, looking out across the fields. A few months ago, he’d been in Paris, looking out over the Jardin des Tuileries. He’d been in Luxembourg, admiring the medieval ruins. He’d stood on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.
Now he surveyed this endless, lifeless prairie.
“Let’s go fly a kite,” he sang under his breath.
In showing him the laptop, Lacoste had shown him his fate. His barren future.
And now he waited for the knock on the door.
*
“I’ve done nothing,” said Huifen, hurrying along the corridor. “I should have, but I didn’t. It’s Jacques I’m worried about.”
“What did he do?” asked Nathaniel, running beside her.
“It’s what he’s about to do that worries me.”
“Where’re we going?” asked Amelia. “Wait. We have to have a plan. We can’t just run around looking for him.”
“I do have a plan,” said Huifen, staring straight ahead of her as she half walked, half ran. “I think I know where he is.”
“Where?”
“The factory. The mock-up.”
“Shit,” whispered Amelia. But she knew Huifen was probably right.
Where else would the Golden Boy, disgraced, go but to the place that had defeated him? That had exposed his flaws, his faults.
Where he had been killed. Over and over again.
What was one more death?
“Merde,” Amelia heard Nathaniel mutter.
And they picked up their pace.
*
“Tell me,” said Armand.
Like the ghost stories they’d once told on sleepovers, hoping to scare the merde out of each other, now Michel told his final story.
But was the boogeyman real this time? Was he in the room with them? Not hiding under the bed or in a closet, but sitting in plain sight? Unspectacular and always human.
“That first night, when he invited me back to his rooms, Leduc was talking about the new cadets, and not in glowing terms. But he said he knew how to fix them. After a few more drinks, he went into his bedroom and returned carrying a tray. There was something formal, ceremonial, about the way he held it in front of him. As a person might when handing out medals.”
Gamache could see Leduc, short and powerful, walking across the room, his stubby arms out, holding the tray. Making his offering to his hero. Thinking Michel Brébeuf, of all people, would appreciate what he had done. What he was doing.
“It was the last thing I expected to see,” said Michel. “An old revolver. But then I realized it wasn’t really old. The design was. Classic. But the gun itself was fairly new. I picked it up.”
He mimicked weighing the weapon in his hand.
“I’d never held one. Have you?”
“Now, yes. But not before.”
Before a bullet was put in Leduc’s brain.
“Makes our service pistols seem puny. Though I know they’re actually far more effective.”
“Depends on the effect you’re going for,” said Armand.
“True. And the revolver was perfect for Leduc’s needs. He told me about the first time he’d handed it to a cadet. He’d had the revolver for a year but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not because he felt it was wrong, he was quick to assure me, but because he was worried the cadet would tell someone. But then he realized he had to work up to it. To choose the right student. Not a weak one, as you might expect. Those he could already control. No. He went for the strongest. The ones who might not bend to his will.”
Brébeuf thought for a moment, throwing his mind back to that night.