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.
How many bright young executives, fresh off an MBA, or a P.Eng., dreamed of mass murder? None. No, that sort of sickness took time and a certain environment.
Was GHS just such an environment?
Is that why Stephen had placed him there? He knew Jean-Guy Beauvoir could not read an engineering schematic, but he could read people.
Was GHS corrupt?
He’d have to admit, he didn’t think so. But he also knew his energies had been put into getting up to speed with the job. And in thinking about the imminent arrival of their daughter.
And, yes, maybe he’d been dazzled by the private jets, the luxury hotels, the exotic locations. Blinded to what was really going on.
“You say the new design is going into elevators around the world,” Gamache broke into his thoughts. “Office buildings, apartments?”
“Everything, yes.”
“When?”
“Next week.” Beauvoir blanched. “Oh, God, it is possible, isn’t it? It could be GHS’s finances, but it could also be the design. Oh, merde.”
They looked at each other.
Elevators. They were where both men’s fears intersected.
Heights for Gamache. Tight spaces for Beauvoir.
The thought of being stuck in a malfunctioning elevator, many stories up, made them both light-headed. The thought of it, of hundreds, thousands, plummeting, made them sick.
Gamache took a long, slow, deep breath. “We need those plans.”
“I’ll get them. You think maybe what Stephen found wasn’t a financial swindle, but some engineering flaw?”
“Maybe. But if he did, I doubt he’d bring it up at the board.”
“Why not?”
“If he somehow came across a serious flaw in a design, he’d go straight to the head of the company. He’d want to tell someone who could stop the projects and have the flaw fixed. Who’s the head of GHS?”
“Eugénie Roquebrune. Should I try to get a meeting?”
“Non, not yet. We need more information. If she’s behind the cover-up, she’ll deny it, and without hard evidence we’re just exposing ourselves.”
“Maybe that’s exactly what Stephen did,” said Jean-Guy. “And maybe that’s what triggered the attacks.”
“Do you know if GHS is owned by anyone else? Whether it’s a subsidiary of another corporation?”
“Not that I know of. GHS is massive. That would make the parent company the equivalent of”—he hesitated—“something really big.”
“You were going to say the Death Star, weren’t you.”
“Well, yes. If you can quote poetry, I can reference Star Wars. But it’s not a bad analogy.”
No, thought Gamache. It wasn’t.
He stared out of the Joséphine, onto the crowded sidewalk, and warned himself that they were manufacturing motives. Almost certainly with serious flaws.
“We’ve been through Stephen’s agenda,” said Jean-Guy, flipping the pages. “There’s no meeting with Roquebrune noted. Nothing at all about GHS until the board meeting.”
“True. But the one undeniable fact is that someone tried to kill Stephen, and someone succeeded in killing Alexander Plessner. Three days before the board meeting. The timing must be more than a coincidence.”
Whoever had killed Plessner had ripped Stephen’s apartment apart, searching for something. Whoever ordered the hits had the advantage of knowing what that was.
They did not. But Gamache knew he had perhaps an even greater advantage. He knew Stephen.
It was now a race.
“We need to figure out what Stephen’s been doing for ten days,” he said.
One person who might be able to help was Agnes McGillicuddy. Armand checked his phone, but there was still no message from her.
The other thing Armand really wanted to know, with increasing importance, was what Stephen had done for those four missing hours, between leaving the Lutetia and meeting them for dinner.
A rogue thought appeared. Was it possible he went up to his apartment? Was it possible Stephen killed Plessner? Is that what the AFP notation was about?
But no.
But …
Who knew what Stephen Horowitz was really capable of? What he’d done in his youth, with the Resistance. When there was so much at stake.
What he’d do in his extreme old age? When there was very little left to lose.
But what could possibly drive Stephen to murder?
He looked over at Beauvoir, to see if he was thinking along the same lines. Connecting phantom dots to form a monster.
Jean-Guy was watching him closely, but didn’t say anything.
Gamache shifted under the gaze. Then, putting his reading glasses back on, he flipped to the back of the agenda, where people often made random notes. They’d already looked, and there was nothing there.
He tipped the page up to the sunlight, to see if there was the imprint of something written there and torn out.
Nothing.
But …
Something had slipped out from under the back flap of the booklet. The corner of a tiny scrap of paper. Shoved there. Hidden there?
He pulled it out.
“What’s that?” asked Jean-Guy as he leaned closer.
There were numbers and letters on the paper. Not JSPS this time.
In his cramped, clear hand, Stephen Horowitz had written AFP.
“Alexander Francis Plessner,” said Jean-Guy. “And the numbers must be the dates they met.”
Just then Jean-Guy’s phone rang. It was Lacoste, from the Sûreté in Montréal.
He answered it, listened, thanked her, and after hanging up he turned to Gamache.
“Alexander Francis Plessner is, was, an engineer.”
“Is this it?”
The sales clerk had pulled out a Tom Ford bottle and spritzed it on Reine-Marie.
No.
Then Versace’s Eros.
Definitely not.
Then Yves Saint Laurent—
“No, those are all pretty common,” she said. “It’s something I’ve never smelled before.”
“Are you sure it was a cologne?” he asked. “Not something you stepped in? Some do smell like that.”
“Quite sure.”
They went through more. The young man spraying, or dabbing, various scents onto, or around, her.
Reine-Marie felt more and more queasy, but kept going. Finally, they came to the end. Without success. Unless the goal had been to make both of them nauseous. In which case it had been a triumph.
“Désolé,” she said. “But there is one more thing you can help me with.”
Fifteen minutes later, at the door to Le Bon Marché, she pressed a fifty-euro note into his hand.
He did not decline it. He had, he felt, earned every stinking centime.
Reine-Marie returned to bar Joséphine.
Armand and Jean-Guy’s plates had been taken away, but as soon as she sat down, Jacques put her lobster mayonnaise in front of her.
Normally without expression, and certainly without judgment, the maître d’s face now contorted into a scowl.
“Madame,” he said, and backed away.
“I’m sorry, Jacques. I’m no longer hungry. Can you package this up for me to take away?”
“Of course,” he said.
Taking a deep breath through his mouth, he leaned forward and whisked the plate off the table.
“Good God, Reine-Marie, what’ve you been doing?” Armand asked, his eyes almost watering.
She explained.
“It was a good try,” he said as he shoved a few inches away from her and gestured to Jacques to bring their bill. Quickly.
From a distance, Jacques waved the suggestion, or something, away.
Their food and drink were on the house.
As Reine-Marie and Beauvoir stepped into the fresh air and sunshine on boulevard Raspail, they noticed that Armand was still inside.
He’d paused at the entrance and was, once again, staring down at the mosaic in the floor.