The two men circled the lamp, alternately bowing and looking heavenward, like two monks on a very short pilgrimage.
‘Here’s the on switch.’ Gamache flipped it and, not surprisingly, nothing happened.
‘One more mystery.’ Beauvoir smiled.
‘Will it never end?’
Gamache looked toward Agent Lemieux sitting on the bleachers, blowing on his frozen hands, and writing in his notebook. The chief had asked him to put his notes in order.
‘What do you think of him?’
‘Lemieux?’ Beauvoir asked, his heart sinking. ‘He’s all right.’
‘But…’
How’d he know there was a but? Not for the first time Beauvoir hoped Gamache couldn’t actually read his mind. There was a lot of junk up there. As his grandfather used to say, ‘You don’t want to go into your head alone, mon petit. It’s a very scary place.’
The lesson had stuck. Beauvoir spent very little time looking around his own head, and even less looking into others’. He preferred facts, evidence, things he could see and touch and hold. He left the mind to braver men, like Gamache. But now he wondered whether the chief hadn’t discovered a way into his own mind. He’d find a lot of embarrassing stuff up there. More than a little pornography. A fantasy or two about Agent Isabelle Lacoste. Even a fantasy about Agent Yvette Nichol, the disastrous trainee from a year or so ago. That fantasy involved dismemberment. But if Gamache was ferreting around in Beauvoir’s mind, he’d only find respect for himself. And if he dug deep enough Gamache might eventually find the room Beauvoir tried to keep hidden even from himself. In that room waited Beauvoir’s fears, fetid and hungry. And slouching there, hidden below the fear of rejection and intimacy, sat the fear that someday Beauvoir would lose Gamache. And beside that fear, in that hidden room, sat something else. It was where Beauvoir’s love hid, curled into a tiny protective ball and rolled into the furthest corner of his mind.
‘I think he’s trying too hard. There’s something wrong. I don’t trust him.’
‘Is that because he defended the villagers who were trying to help Madame de Poitiers?’
‘Of course not,’ Beauvoir lied. He hated to be contradicted, especially by a kid. ‘He just seemed beyond his depth, and he shouldn’t be. Not for a S?reté officer.’
‘But he’s not trained in homicide. He’s like a GP who suddenly has to operate on someone. Theoretically he should be able to do it, and he’s probably better trained than a bus conductor, but it’s not what he does. I’m not sure how well I’d do if I was suddenly transferred to narcotics or internal affairs. I suspect I’d make a few mistakes. No, I think Agent Lemieux hasn’t done badly.’
Here we go, thought Beauvoir. ‘Not doing badly isn’t good enough,’ he said. ‘That’s a pretty low bar you’re setting, sir. This is homicide. The elite division in the S?reté.’ He could see Gamache bristle as he always did when that was said. For some reason unfathomable to Beauvoir, Gamache resisted this statement of the obvious. Even the top bosses admitted as much. The best of the best made it into homicide. The smartest, the bravest, the people who got up each morning from the comfort of their homes, kissed their children and went into the world to deliberately hunt people who deliberately killed. There was no place for the weak. And trainees, by their very nature, were weak. And weakness led to mistakes and mistakes led to something going horribly wrong. The murderer could escape to kill again, maybe even a S?reté agent. Maybe even you, maybe – the door crept open slightly and a ghoul escaped the well hidden room – maybe Armand Gamache. One day his need to help young agents will kill him. Beauvoir slammed the door shut, but not before feeling a bristling of rage against the man standing before him.
‘We’ve been through this before, sir,’ his voice now hard and angry. ‘This is a team. Your team, and we’ll always do as you ask. But please, please stop asking this of us.’
‘I can’t, Jean Guy. I found you at the Trois-Rivières detachment, remember?’
Beauvoir rolled his eyes.
‘You were sitting among the reeds in a basket.’
‘Weed, sir. How many times must I tell you, it was weed. Dope. I was sitting with stacks of dope we’d confiscated. And it wasn’t a basket, it was a bucket. From Kentucky Fried Chicken. And I wasn’t in it.’
‘Now I feel badly. I told Superintendent Brébeuf I found you in a basket. Oh dear. You do remember, though? There you were buried alive under stacks of evidence, and why? Because you’d so annoyed everyone they’d assigned you permanently to the evidence room.’
Beauvoir remembered that day every day. He’d never forget being saved. By this large man in front of him, with the trim graying hair, the impeccable clothes and the eyes of deepest brown.
‘You were bored and angry. I took you on when no one else wanted you.’ Gamache was speaking so softly no one else could hear. And he was speaking with open affection. Beauvoir suddenly remembered the lesson he always hurried to forget. Gamache was the best of them, the smartest and bravest and strongest because he was willing to go into his own head alone, and open all the doors there, and enter all the dark rooms. And make friends with what he found there. And he went into the dark, hidden rooms in the minds of others. The minds of killers. And he faced down whatever monsters came at him. He went to places Beauvoir had never even dreamed existed.
That was why Armand Gamache was their chief. His chief. And that was why he loved him. And that was why Jean Guy Beauvoir struggled every day trying to protect this man who made it clear he neither wanted nor needed protection. Indeed, every day he tried to convince Beauvoir the protection was a travesty, a ruse. All it did was block his view of whatever horrible thing was heading his way. Best to see it, and meet it. And not try to hide behind armor that won’t protect anyway. Not against what they hunted.
‘But I’ll tell you what, Jean Guy,’ now Gamache smiled brilliantly and completely, ‘if you don’t want Agent Lemieux I’ll take him. I won’t impose him on you.’
‘Fine, take him, but don’t come crying to me when you find out he’s the murderer.’
Gamache laughed. ‘I have to admit, I’ve made a lot of bad choices, especially recently,’ he meant, but would never say, Agent Yvette Nichol, ‘but that would be the winner. Still, better to risk than live in fear.’
Gamache patted him on the arm with such easy affection it almost took Beauvoir’s breath away. And then he was gone, walking purposefully across the ice, nodding to the other investigators, as he made his way to Agent Robert Lemieux, to make the young man’s day. His week. His career.
Beauvoir watched as Gamache quietly spoke with Lemieux. He saw the young man’s face open in a look of such astonishment Beauvoir felt maybe the angels had appeared. It was a look Beauvoir had often seen from people speaking to Gamache. And had never, ever seen from anyone looking at him.
Beauvoir shook his head in wonderment and returned to the task at hand.