The Beautiful Mystery (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #8)

The Beautiful Mystery (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #8) Page 143

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.

THIRTY-ONE

Beauvoir awoke to the sound of the bells, calling the faithful. Though he knew the bells weren’t for him, still he followed them through his bleary brain. Up, up he crawled to consciousness.

He wasn’t even completely sure if he was awake, so vague was his border between conscious and unconscious. He felt confused, clumsy. Grabbing his watch he tried to focus on the time.

Five in the morning. The bells continued and if Beauvoir could’ve mustered the energy he’d have tossed his shoes at the monk who was ringing them.