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.
Primal and ancient. A new year, a new day dawning.
Armand often went to the little chapel on the hill. More for the silence than the sermons. And he almost always found Ruth already there. Sitting alone and scribbling in her customary seat, and sometimes on it. She sat under the stained-glass window of three of the village boys who’d gone to the Great War and never returned.
On the wall was the polished plaque with the unforgivably long list with names like Tommy and Bobby and Jacques. And below the names was engraved: They Were Our Children.
Then shall forgiven and forgiving meet again. Armand thought of Ruth’s seminal poem as he watched the children around the fire.
Our children, he knew, had much to forgive.
Or will it be, as always was, too late?
“What’re you thinking?” Reine-Marie asked, seeing the faraway look in his eyes.
“Actually, I was thinking about your poem about forgiveness,” he said to Ruth. “Have you ever met Abigail Robinson?”
“The madwoman?” asked Ruth. She turned to Stephen. “If she has her way, we’d both be put down.”
“Maybe not so crazy,” Gabri said to Olivier.
“My God,” said someone in the crowd. “I don’t believe it.”
Armand turned to see what they didn’t believe.
The whole room had grown quiet. Even the kids stopped running and shouting and slowed to a halt, gingerbread men halfway to their mouths. They too were staring toward the wide stairway that swept up from the foyer.
Haniya stopped, halfway down the stairs. And stood there. Perfectly still. Until every eye in the room was on her.
“Is that?”
“Can’t be.”
“But what’s she doing here?”
“My God, she’s magnificent,” Reine-Marie whispered.
And she was. Haniya Daoud, the Hero of the Sudan, was standing on the sweeping stairway, head high, chin up, body enfolded in a rich rose-and-gold abaya and hijab.
She was luminous.
It was Reine-Marie’s first glimpse of Haniya Daoud. After her conversation with Armand and her friends, and their less-than-flattering descriptions of the woman, Reine-Marie had expected someone gloomier. Certainly dimmer.
What she saw was a woman who seemed ageless, timeless. A powerful woman who commanded the room before she’d even entered it.
If this was broken, Reine-Marie thought, what must whole be like?
“I’m going to have to go over there soon,” said Myrna a few minutes later, looking across the room at Haniya, who was holding court next to the Christmas tree.
“Why?” asked Jean-Guy. He and Idola had joined them. She was in a chipmunk onesie, with little ears and a tail.
Olivier took and cradled her, turning away from Gabri’s outstretched arms as he reached for the child. “Mine.”
Parents were shoving their children forward, toward Madame Daoud. So that one day they could tell their own children they’d met a saint.
Photos were taken, while Haniya stared stone-faced into the cameras.
As a little girl walked away, they heard her ask her mother, “Do all saints have scars?”
“I can answer that,” said an older man who’d just joined their group.
“Hello, Vincent,” said Reine-Marie, smiling as they kissed on both cheeks, then turning to Stephen.
“I don’t think you’ve met. This’s Dr. Vincent Gilbert,” she said. “And this is Stephen Horowitz.”
“Ahhh,” said Stephen with a smile. “The Asshole Saint.”
“That’s me,” agreed Gilbert, as the two older men shook hands. “And you’re the failed billionaire.”
“Please, I’m now living off my godson and his family. Can’t call that a failure.”
Gilbert laughed. “Nice crowd.” His eyes scanned the room, looking, Armand thought, for someone.
Myrna took a swig of punch and said, “I think I’ll do the deed now before her mood completely sours. Such a shame she doesn’t drink.”
“What deed?” Vincent Gilbert asked.
“An apology.” She turned to Reine-Marie. “I’ll introduce you. Clara?”
“What?”
“Come on, you know what.”
“Oh, all right.” Clara drained her glass and gave it to Annie. “If we don’t come back, know that I loved you all.”
“Can I have your painting of Ruth?” asked Gabri.
“No, I want that,” said Ruth. “It’s the only one that isn’t crap.”
“So much for love,” said Myrna as they headed across the room.
“That’s the famous Hero of the Sudan,” said Dr. Gilbert, taking Reine-Marie’s place beside Armand. “I heard she might be here.”
The Asshole Saint was staring at Haniya with curiosity and unconcealed resentment.
Having lived for years not only in the forest, but in his spacious ego, Dr. Vincent Gilbert had grown to expect he’d be the center of wonderment and awe at any gathering.
“She’s younger than I thought.”
“She’s twenty-three,” said Armand. “Madame Daoud was kidnapped and sold into slavery when she was eleven.”
“Oui. Terrible story.”
Gamache was reminded why this man was known as the Asshole Saint. He was certainly part saint, but it wasn’t lost on anyone who met him that while his medical research had improved the human condition, he himself did not actually like humans.
“I didn’t expect to see the Hero of the Sudan in the dark hole of Québec,” said Gilbert. “What’s she doing here?”
“She’s visiting Myrna.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question, does it?”
“I thought it did.”
Vincent Gilbert was in his mid-seventies and looked every minute of that age, and then some. Slight, sinewy, his skin lined and leathery from his latter life as a recluse, living in a log cabin in the middle of the forest.
“You’re not normally this vague, Armand. I wonder if that event yesterday took something out of you.”
Despite the words, Vincent Gilbert’s tone was gentle. Inviting Armand to talk about it, if he wanted to. Every now and then, Armand thought, the saint part showed a bit of ankle.
But then something occurred to him. Maybe Vincent Gilbert didn’t want to listen, maybe he wanted to talk about the events at the University.
“Vincent, do you know Abigail Robinson?”
“Only by reputation. I’ve read her study.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I’m a doctor, not a statistician.”
“Then why did you read it?”
“I got tired of reading articles on compost. Interestingly, I did find that her recent research makes good fertilizer. Excusez-moi, Armand. Marc!”
Reine-Marie fought it, but finally had to admit that she found Haniya Daoud difficult.
She tried to look sympathetic as Haniya listened, stone-faced, to Clara’s apology. It didn’t help that Myrna’s apology had been met with silence. And now, into that abyss, Clara poured words that sounded, and probably were, less and less sincere.
As Reine-Marie watched Haniya, and saw the curling lip, all she could think of was the line from Ruth’s poem.
Who hurt you once, so far beyond repair?
Though they knew who’d hurt her. Not just her torturers. They all had, by their silence and inaction.
It was five past eleven. Almost time for the play.
Patting his pockets, Armand realized he’d left his phone in his parka and he wanted to take pictures. Coming out of the cloakroom with his phone, Armand heard one of their hosts, Dominique, talking to some late arrivals.
“You can put your coats in the room, just throw them on the bed, and then make yourselves at home.” But a slight flattening of Dominique’s normally cheerful voice made Armand look down the hall at the newcomers.