Frère Raymond motioned the men into the room. It too was huge. Wide and long, running the balance of the corridor. The monk gave them a tour, explaining the geothermal system, the ventilation system, the hot water system, the filtration system. The septic system. All the systems.
Beauvoir tried to remain focused, in case anything useful was said, but eventually his mind grew numb. At the end of the tour Frère Raymond walked to a cabinet and brought from it a bottle and three glasses.
“This calls for a celebration,” he said. “It’s not often I meet a neighbor. A friend of mine is a Benedictine and sends me this.” Frère Raymond handed Beauvoir the dusty bottle. “Like a slug?”
Beauvoir examined the bottle. It was B&B. Brandy and Bénédictine. Not made, fortunately, from fermented monks, though he suspected there were enough of those. But by the Benedictines themselves, from a long-secret recipe.
The three men pulled chairs around a drafting table and sat.
Frère Raymond poured. “Santé,” he said, tipping the deep amber liquid toward his rare guests.
“Santé,” Beauvoir said and brought it to his lips. He could smell it, rich and full, sweet but also medicinal. His eyes burned from the strength of it. The B&B seared his throat as he swallowed, then the alcohol exploded into his gut, and brought tears to his eyes.
And it was good.
“So, mon frère,” Superintendent Francoeur cleared his throat, then began again. His accent was back to where Beauvoir recognized it, as though the B&B had burned the ancient dialect away. “Inspector Beauvoir here has some questions.”
Beauvoir shot him an annoyed look. It was a small dig. As though he needed Francoeur to pave the way. But Beauvoir simply smiled and thanked the Superintendent. Then he unfurled the scroll and watched Frère Raymond for a reaction. But there was none, beyond the polite nodding as the monk stood and bent over the old plan of the monastery.
“Have you seen this before?” asked Beauvoir.
“Many times.” He looked into Beauvoir’s face. “I consider this an old friend.” His lean hand hovered over the vellum. “Practically memorized it when we were looking to put in the geothermal.” He turned back to the plan, an affectionate look on his face. “It’s beautiful.”
“But is it accurate?”
“Well, not these bits.” The monk pointed to the gardens. “But the rest is surprisingly precise.”
Frère Raymond sat back down and launched into an explanation of how the first monks, back in the mid-1600s, would have built the monastery. How they did measurements. How they transported rocks. How they dug.
“It would’ve taken them years and years,” said Raymond, warming to his topic. “Decades. Just to dig the basement. Imagine that.”
Beauvoir found himself fascinated. It was indeed a feat of mammoth proportions. These men had fled the Inquisition to come here. Where they were met by a climate so savage it could kill within days. They were met by bears and wolves and all sorts of strange, feral beasts. By black flies so ravenous they’d strip a newborn moose. By deer flies so persistent they’d drive a saint to insanity.
How horrible was the Inquisition, that this was better?
And instead of building some modest wooden shelter, they’d built this.
It beggared belief.
Who had that sort of discipline? That sort of patience? Monks, that was who. But maybe, with Frère Raymond, it was also bred into him. Like Beauvoir’s grandmother’s patience. With blight, and drought, and hail, and floods. With unkindness. With encroaching towns, and clever new neighbors.
Beauvoir looked over at Superintendent Francoeur, a son of the same soil as the monk, and as Beauvoir’s grandparents.
What patient plan was he working on, even now? Was it years in the making? Was he constructing it stone by stone? And what part of that plan had brought the Superintendent here?
Beauvoir knew he himself would have to be patient if he was to find out, though he was not exactly overflowing with that quality.
Frère Raymond droned on. And on.
After a while Beauvoir lost interest. Frère Raymond had the rare gift of turning a mesmerizing story into tedium. It was a sort of alchemy. Another transmutation.
Finally, as silence penetrated Beauvoir’s now numb skull, he emerged from his reverie.
“Then,” Beauvoir grasped at the last relevant thing he remembered, “the plan is accurate?”
“It’s accurate enough so that I didn’t need to draw another plan when the new system was going in. The thing with geothermal—”
“Yes, I know. Merci.” Beauvoir was damned if he was going to be provoked by one man and bored to death by another. “What I want to know is, is it possible there’s a room hidden somewhere in the abbey—”
He was interrupted by a snort. “You don’t believe that old wives’ tale, do you?” asked Frère Raymond.
“It’s an old monks’ tale. One you’ve obviously heard.”
“As I’ve heard of Atlantis and Santa Claus and unicorns. But I don’t expect to find them in the abbey.”
“But you do expect to find God,” said Beauvoir.
Far from looking insulted, Frère Raymond smiled. “Believe me, Inspector, even you will find God here before you’ll find any hidden room. Or a treasure. You think we could put in a geothermal system and not have found a hidden room? You think we could put in the solar panels, electricity, running water and plumbing, and not have found it?”
“No,” said Jean-Guy. “I don’t think that’s possible. I think it would have been found.”
The meaning in his voice wasn’t lost on the monk, but instead of being defensive he simply smiled.
“Listen, my son,” said Frère Raymond, speaking slowly. Beauvoir was getting very tired of being spoken to as though he was their son. A child. “That was just a story the old monks told each other to pass the time on long winter nights. It was a bit of fun. Nothing more. There’s no hidden room. No treasure.”
Frère Raymond leaned forward, his hands together in front of him, his elbows resting on his thin knees. “What’re you really looking for?”
“The man who killed your prior.”
“Well, you won’t find him down here.”
There was a moment as the two men looked at each other, and the cool atmosphere crackled.
“I wonder if we’ll find the murder weapon down here then,” said Beauvoir.
“A rock?”
“Why do you think it was a rock?”
“Because that’s what you told us. We all understood Frère Mathieu was killed by a rock to the head.”
“Well, the coroner’s report says the weapon was more likely a length of pipe, or something like it. Do you have any?”
Frère Raymond got up and led him to a door. He switched on a light and they saw a room no larger than the monks’ cells. There was shelving on the walls, and everything was neatly arranged. Boards, nails, screws, hammers, old pieces of broken wrought iron, all the miscellanies of any household, though considerably less than most.
And leaning up in the corner were lengths of piping. Beauvoir moved over there, but after a moment he turned back to Frère Raymond.
“Is this all you have?” Beauvoir asked.
“We try to reuse everything. That’s it.”
The S?reté officer turned back to the corner. There were pipes there, all right, but none shorter than five feet, most considerably longer. The killer might have used one to pole vault over the wall, but not to actually brain the prior.
“Where could someone find another piece of pipe?” Beauvoir asked as they left the room and closed the door.
“I don’t know. It’s not the sort of thing we leave lying around.”
Beauvoir nodded. He could see that. The basement was pristine. And he knew if there was a length of pipe to be found, Frère Raymond would know about it.
He was the abbot down here. The master of this underworld. And while the abbey above seemed filled with incense and mystery, music and odd, dancing light, down here everything felt organized and clean. And constant. The temperature, the light, all unchanging.
Beauvoir liked it. There was no creativity, nothing beautiful in this netherworld. But neither was there chaos.
“The abbot says he came down yesterday morning, after Lauds, but that you weren’t here.”