“That’s it?”
“And what do you do, Chief Inspector, when all seems lost?”
Take this child.
“I pray too,” he said.
“And does it work?”
“Sometimes,” said Gamache. Jean-Guy hadn’t died that dreadful day in the factory. Covered in blood, gasping in pain. Eyes pleading for Gamache to stay. To do something. To save him. Gamache had prayed. And Beauvoir hadn’t been taken. But neither, Gamache knew, had he returned. Not completely. Beauvoir was still caught between worlds.
“But is all lost?” he asked the abbot. “Frère Raymond seems to think another recording would bring in enough money to fix the foundations. But you have to act quickly.”
“Frère Raymond is right. But he also sees only the cracks. I see the whole monastery. The whole community. What good would it do to fix the cracks but lose our real foundation? Our vows aren’t negotiable.”
Gamache saw then what Frère Raymond must have seen. What the prior must have seen. A man who would not budge. Unlike the monastery, there were no cracks in the abbot. He was immovable, at least on this subject.
If the last Gilbertine monastery was to be saved it would have to be by divine intervention. Unless, as Frère Raymond believed, their miracle had been offered and the abbot, blinded by pride, had missed it.
“I have a favor to ask, Père Abbé.”
“Would you also like me to approve another recording?”
Gamache almost laughed. “No. I’ll leave that between you and your God. But I would like the boatman to come tomorrow morning, to take Inspector Beauvoir back with some of the evidence we’ve gathered.”
“Of course. I’ll call first thing. Assuming the fog lifts Etienne should be here shortly after breakfast.”
They’d reached the closed door. The wood pockmarked by hundreds of years of monks asking for admittance. But no longer. The iron rod was gone and would leave the abbey for good with Beauvoir in the morning. Gamache wondered if the abbot would have it replaced.
“Well,” said Dom Philippe, “good night, my son.”
“Bonne nuit, mon père,” said Gamache. The words sounded so strange. His own father had died when Gamache was a boy and he’d rarely called anyone that since.
“Ecce homo,” said Gamache, just as Dom Philippe opened the door.
The abbot paused.
“Why would Frère Mathieu say that?” Gamache asked.
“I don’t know.”
Gamache pondered for a moment. “Why did Pilate say it?”
“He wanted to prove to the mob that their god wasn’t divine at all. That Jesus was just a man.”
“Merci,” said Gamache, and bowing slightly he walked back down the slightly curved hall. To think about the Divine, the human, and the cracks in between.
*
“Dear Annie,” Beauvoir wrote in the dark. His light was out so that no one would know he was still awake.
He lay on his bed, fully clothed. Compline was over, he knew, and he’d retreated to his cell, until he could safely return to the prior’s office, when everyone was asleep.
He’d found a message from Annie on his BlackBerry. A light-hearted description of her evening with old friends.
I love you, she wrote, at the end.
I miss you.
Hurry home.
He thought about Annie having dinner with her friends. Had she told them about him? Had she told them about his gift? The plunger. What a stupid thing to do. A crass, boorish gift. They’d probably all laughed. At him. At the stupid Pepsi who knew no better. Who was too poor or cheap or unsophisticated to buy her a real gift. To go to Holt Renfrew or Ogilvy’s or one of the fucking snooty shops along Laurier and get her something nice.
Instead, he’d given her a toilet plunger.
And they’d laughed at him.
And Annie would’ve laughed too. At the dumb yokel she was screwing. Just for fun. He could see those eyes, shining, glowing. As she’d looked at him so often in the last few months. As she’d looked at him over the past ten years.
He’d mistaken that look for affection, love even, but now he saw it was simply amusement.
“Annie,” he wrote.
*
“Dear Reine-Marie,” Gamache wrote.
He’d returned to his cell, after looking for Beauvoir in the prior’s office. The lights were off and it was empty. The Chief had spent half an hour there, making notes, copying notes. Preparing the package of evidence for Beauvoir to take out the next morning.
It was eleven o’clock. The end of a long day. He’d turned the lights off and taken the package back to his cell, after first tapping on Beauvoir’s door. But there was no answer.
He’d opened the door and looked in. To be sure Jean-Guy was there. And sure enough, he could see the outline on the bed, and hear the heavy, steady breathing.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
Evidence of life.
It was unlike Jean-Guy to simply go to sleep, without a final check-in, a postmortem of the day. All the more reason, thought Gamache as he prepared for bed, to get him home as soon as possible.
“Dear Reine-Marie,” he wrote.
*
“Annie. My day was fine. Nothing special. The investigation is moving along. Thanks for asking. Glad to hear you had a fun night out with your friends. Lots to laugh about, I’d imagine.”
*
“Dear Reine-Marie. I wish you were here and we could talk about this case. It seems to swirl around the Gregorian chants and how important they are to these monks. It would be a mistake to dismiss the chants as simply music.”
Gamache paused and thought about that. He found even just writing to Reine-Marie helped clarify things, as though he could hear her voice, see her lively, warm eyes.
“We had a surprise visitor. A Dominican from the Vatican. The office that used to be the Inquisition. Apparently they’ve been searching for the Gilbertines for almost four hundred years. And today they found them. The monk says it’s just a loose end that needed to be tied up, but I wonder. I think, like so much else in this case, part of what he’s telling us is the truth, and part isn’t. I wish I could see more clearly.
“Good night, my love. Sweet dreams.
“I miss you. I’ll be home soon.
“Je t’aime.”
*
“Talk to U soon,” wrote Jean-Guy.
Then he hit send and lay in the dark.