The Madness of Crowds
- Автор: Пенни Луиза
- Серия: Chief Inspector Gamache #17
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- ISBN: 9781250145284
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Madness of Crowds». Краткое содержание книги:
You're a coward.
Time and again, as the New Year approaches, that charge is leveled against Armand Gamache.
It starts innocently enough.
While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines take advantage of the deep snow to ski and toboggan, to drink hot chocolate in the bistro and share meals together, the Chief Inspector finds his holiday with his family interrupted by a simple request.
He's asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting professor of statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university.
While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is, until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture.
They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Before long, Professor Robinson's views start seeping into conversations. Spreading and infecting. So that truth and fact, reality and delusion, are so confused it's near impossible to tell them apart.
Discussions become debates, debates become arguments, which turn into fights. As sides are declared, a madness takes hold.
Abigail Robinson promises that if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone.
When a murder is committed, it falls to Armand Gamache, his second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team to investigate the crime as well as this extraordinary popular delusion.
And the madness of crowds.
There was a brief pause as she weighed her answer. “Our people are on top of things. I think at this point it’s riskier to stop it than to let it go on.”
“Merci,” said Gamache. “Inspector Beauvoir, how are things outside?”
He was always formal when speaking on an open frequency, preferring to use their ranks rather than just their names.
Despite his protests, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir had been assigned, in his view banished, to the entrance.
In his late thirties, Beauvoir was slender, fit, though beginning to flesh out a bit. He shared second-in-command duties with Isabelle Lacoste, and also happened to be Gamache’s son-in-law.
“We’re going to exceed capacity, patron,” he reported from on top of the overturned crate he was standing on.
Jean-Guy held his gloved hand up to his eyes to cut out the glare from the sun bouncing off the snow. Those still in line were stomping their feet, rubbing their mitts to keep the blood circulating, and staring at him, as though Beauvoir were personally responsible for winter.
“I’d say there are a hundred and fifty, maybe hundred and eighty still to go. They’re getting pretty antsy. Some pushing, but no actual fights yet.”
“How many are in now?” Gamache asked.
“We’re at four hundred and seventy.”
“You know the cutoff. What’s likely to happen when you reach it?”
“Hard to tell. There’re some kids here, families. Though why anyone would bring a child to this…”
“Agreed.”
There were children in the auditorium now. Gamache had instructed his people to make them the priority, should the worst happen.
That was the nightmare, of course. People crushing the life out of others in a mad rush to get into, or out of, a place should anything happen. And the children were the most vulnerable.
“Any weapons?”
“No guns. No knives,” Beauvoir reported. “A few bottles, and we’ve confiscated a whole lot of placards. People were pretty pissed about that. You’d have thought it was in the Charter of Rights to bring what amounts to a club into a crowded room.” He looked down at the pile in the snow by the brick wall.
Most were homemade, in crayon, and stapled to sticks of wood. It was somehow worse when threats were in crayon. Some placards had even been made by children, with the phrase Ça va bien aller.
All will be well.
That alone was enough to make Beauvoir’s blood boil. The demonstrators had co-opted a phrase that had, through the recent pandemic, meant comfort. And now they’d twisted it into a code, a subtle threat. Or, worse, made their children do it.
He looked out at the crowd and saw some pushing now, as spectators began to suspect they might not get in, and that their rival might.
“Things are getting more tense here,” said Beauvoir. “I think we should shut it down, patron.”
“Merci,” said Gamache, and sighed.
While he’d certainly weigh what Beauvoir advised, and Jean-Guy might even be right, Gamache had to admit that in this rare instance, he didn’t trust his second-in-command’s judgment. It couldn’t help but be colored by his personal feelings. Which was why, despite Beauvoir’s protests, he’d been assigned the security outside, and not inside, the auditorium.
Gamache looked at his watch. Five minutes to four.
It was time for him to call it. To go ahead or not.
Glancing behind him once again, he saw two middle-aged women standing together in the darkness.
The one on the left, in black slacks and a gray turtleneck, held a clipboard and was looking anxious.
But it was the other one who held Gamache’s attention.
Professor Abigail Robinson was nodding as the other woman talked. She laid a hand on her colleague’s arm and smiled. She was calm. Focused.
She wore a light blue cashmere sweater and a camel knee-length skirt. Tailored. Simple, classic. Something, Gamache thought, that his wife, Reine-Marie, would wear.
It was not a comfortable thought.
The university lecturer in statistics was the reason these people had come out on a bitterly cold late December day.
They could be skiing or skating or sitting by the fire with a hot chocolate. But instead they were here, crowded together. Pushing and shoving. Hoping for a better view of this statistician.
Some came to cheer, some to jeer and protest. Some to hear, some to heckle.
And maybe some, maybe one, to do worse.
The Chief Inspector had yet to meet the woman who was about to take the stage, though her assistant, who’d introduced herself as Debbie Schneider, had approached him when they’d arrived and offered what had sounded like a favor, a rare personal audience.
He’d declined, explaining he had a job to do. And he had.
But he was honest enough with himself to admit that had it been anyone else, he’d have wanted to meet them. Would have asked to meet them, to go over the security arrangements. To lay down some rules. To look them in the eye and make that personal connection between protected and protector.
It was the first time in his career he’d declined, politely, to meet the person whose life was in his hands. Instead he’d gone through those arrangements with Madame Schneider, and left it at that.
He turned back to the auditorium. The sun was setting. It would be dark in twenty minutes.
“The event goes ahead,” he said.
“Oui, patron.”
CHAPTER 2
Gamache once again walked the backstage area, getting reports from the agents stationed there. Checking the doors and dark corners.
He asked the technician to turn the lights up.
“Who are these people?” the sound technician asked, cocking her head to indicate the crowd. “Who holds an event between Christmas and New Year’s? Who comes out to one?”
It was a good question.
Gamache recognized a few faces in the crowd. They were, he knew, good, decent people. Some wore the buttons. Some did not.
Some of them were neighbors. Friends even. But most were strangers.
Québec was a society that felt things strongly and wasn’t afraid to express them. Which was a very good thing. It meant they were doing something right. The goal of any healthy society was to keep people safe to express sometimes unpopular views.
But there was a limit to that expression, a line. And Armand Gamache knew he was standing on it.
If he’d had any thoughts that he might be overreacting, his doubts had been banished earlier in the day when he, along with Beauvoir and Lacoste, had arrived for the final walk-through.
As they’d pulled in, they were surprised to see cars already in the parking lot and people lined up at the door. They were shuffling from foot to foot, punching their arms, rubbing their mittened hands together in the bitter cold. Clouds of breath, like opaque thoughts, hung over them.
It was still hours until the event.
Taking off his own gloves, Gamache had pulled out his notebook and, ripping out pages, he’d given each a number depending on their place in line, with his initials.
“Go home. Get warm. When you come back, show that to the officers at the door. They’ll let you in right away.”
“Can’t,” said a woman at the front of the line as she took the paper. “We drove from Moncton.”
“New Brunswick?” asked Beauvoir.
“Yes,” said her husband. “Drove all night.”
Others were now pressing forward, reaching for a number as though they were starving and this was food.
“The local café will be open,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “Go there, have lunch, and come back when the doors open at three thirty.”
Some did. But most elected to stay, taking turns sitting in warm cars.