All the Devils Are Here
- Автор: Пенни Луиза
- Серия: Chief Inspector Gamache #16
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- ISBN: 9781250145253
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «All the Devils Are Here». Краткое содержание книги:
On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand's godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Walking home together after the meal, they watch in horror as Stephen is knocked down and critically injured in what Gamache knows is no accident, but a deliberate attempt on the elderly man's life.
When a strange key is found in Stephen's possession it sends Armand, his wife Reine-Marie, and his former second-in-command at the Sûreté, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, from the top of the Tour d'Eiffel, to the bowels of the Paris Archives, from luxury hotels to odd, coded, works of art.
It sends them deep into the secrets Armand's godfather has kept for decades.
A gruesome discovery in Stephen's Paris apartment makes it clear the secrets are more rancid, the danger far greater and more imminent, than they realized.
Soon the whole family is caught up in a web of lies and deceit. In order to find the truth, Gamache will have to decide whether he can trust his friends, his colleagues, his instincts, his own past. His own family.
For even the City of Light casts long shadows. And in that darkness devils hide.
“Yes. Yes,” admitted Dussault. “Too much damage done.”
“And often to the best,” said Gamache. “Those who care. Those who stand in the front line. Jean-Guy Beauvoir cares. There’s no better officer anywhere. And that includes here.” He paused for a moment. Challenging Dussault to challenge that. “I know no one braver.”
“Or smarter?” suggested Dussault. “I read that he jumped ship to go into private industry. He probably gets paid ten times what we make. And doesn’t get shot at. As you know, my own second-in-command also left. We’re the foolish ones, Armand.”
“Thank God we’re so good-looking,” said Armand, smiling.
Dussault clapped him on the arm. “Have you ever been tempted, mon vieux? To take a job with a private security firm, for instance? They’d pay a fortune for someone like you.”
“No. You?”
Dussault laughed. “Don’t tell anyone, but there’s only one thing I do well, and this’s it.”
He looked at his team, with fondness.
“That’s not true,” said Armand. “I seem to remember you took a sabbatical a couple of years ago to play saxophone in that polka band.”
Claude lowered his voice. “Shhhh. Everyone thinks I was studying international money laundering.”
“I think they might be onto you. Your mistake was telling them you’d joined the Interpol Anti-Terrorist Glee Club.”
“Yeah, they did find that hard to believe. Comforting, really, that I’m not surrounded by idiots. I seem to be the only one.”
Armand laughed.
The truth, and Armand was one of the few who knew it, was that Claude had suffered PTSD after a spectacularly brutal year of terrorist attacks. Culminating in the hit-and-run death of his mentor, the former Prefect.
Music, particularly his beloved saxophone, had helped heal the man.
“All right,” said Dussault. “Beauvoir stays, but in the background. And I deal with you, not him.”
“Agreed,” said Gamache.
“Will you excuse me? I see the Procureur wandering around.”
Jean-Guy was walking through the rest of the apartment, examining each room.
Irena Fontaine had gone back to supervising the team from the brigade criminelle.
Claude Dussault was standing by the window, conferring with the Procureur de la République, who was needed to officially launch any murder investigation.
The conference did not take long. Two bullets in the back was a pretty convincing argument.
No stranger to homicide investigations, Armand stood in the middle of the familiar room. Lost.
This space, this place, had always been safe for him. Almost sacred.
But no longer.
His eyes moved to the picture hooks on the walls and the paintings strewn on the floor.
The Gauguins and Monets, the Rothkos and the huge Cy Twombly ripped down from over the fireplace. The sublime Kenojuak Ashevak lying faceup.
And among them, easily overlooked, a little frame, like a single mullion in an old window. The watercolor was unspectacular in every way, except for the comfort it had offered a grieving child. The tiny window into the possible.
Smoke still rose from the cottages. Perpetual. Predictable. A river still wound through the village in the valley. There were thick forests filled, young Armand had been sure, with marvelous creatures. And in the very center of the painting of the village, there was a cluster of trees.
Armand looked across the crime scene, at the small frame on the floor, and had a nearly overwhelming desire to turn around and go home. Back to Québec.
To sit in the bistro with Reine-Marie. Henri, Gracie, and Fred curled together in front of the log fire.
Gabri would bring them café au lait, or something stronger. Olivier would grill maple-smoked salmon for their meal, while Clara and Myrna joined them to talk about books and art, food and what the Asshole Saint’s horse had done now.
Mad Ruth and her possessed duck Rosa would toss out insults, and sublime poetry.
He could, even now, from what felt like an impossible distance, see through the mullioned windows of the bistro to the thick forests, and the leaves that would already be changing.
As everything eventually did.
Except in the picture tossed so casually on the floor.
Home. Home. He wanted to go home. And sit by the fire. And listen to their friends talking and laughing. To hold Reine-Marie’s hand and watch their grandchildren play.
But not quite yet.
Gamache went over to the tiny painting and replaced it safely on the screw in the wall. Where it belonged.
But before he did, he noticed, written on the back, For Armand.
CHAPTER 11
Reine-Marie Gamache sat in the Hôtel Lutetia’s bar Joséphine, her hand resting on the box beside her.
She stared past the elegant patrons, through the huge windows of the Lutetia, at the chic men and women of Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement.
They strolled by on rue de Sèvres. Many holding shopping bags from the nearby Le Bon Marché.
Reine-Marie was aware of the activity around her in the magnificent Belle Époque brasserie, but all she saw was the body on the floor and blood on a carpet where her children had played.
And she tried to recapture that scent. Would she ever be able to identify it again?
She could still, to this day, identify her mother’s scent. Not perfume, but ammonia cleanser. Clinging to her, ingrained in her very pores, from her job cleaning houses.
And Reine-Marie knew she’d go to her grave with Armand’s scent of sandalwood. At least, she hoped she would. That she’d go first. In his arms.
It was selfish of her. To make him go through that. To leave him behind. But she wasn’t sure if she could go on without him. If he …
She refocused her mind. Back to the events. The facts. The body.
As a trained librarian and archivist, she was used to not just sorting and cataloguing information but also making connections. What had made her so good at her job, and led to her rise within Québec’s Bibliothèque et Archives nationales, was that her mind worked on many levels.
Where others might see facts, Madame Gamache could see the relationship between them. She could connect two, three, many apparently disparate events.
Between the aboriginal name for “the Stargazer,” an account of a dinner party in 1820 with the geologist Bigsby, and a pauper’s grave in Montréal.
She’d put all that together and come up with David Thompson. An explorer and mapmaker who turned out to be possibly the greatest cartographer who ever lived. An extraordinary human who’d disappeared into history.
Until the librarian and archivist Madame Gamache had found him.
And now she was presented with a whole different set of facts, of events. Not safely residing in history, these had a pulse. And blood all over them.
She pulled the box closer and narrowed her eyes. Trying to see …
“Hello?”
Reine-Marie was jolted back to the Joséphine and looked up into her husband’s smiling face.
“Désolé,” he said, bending to kiss her. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You were a million miles away.”