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.
This knifing would, at least, be figurative.
Beauvoir had hoped that, with the passage of time, Madame Arbour would come to accept him as head of the department. But all that had happened, in the almost five months he’d been there, was that they’d developed a mutual suspicion.
He suspected she was trying to undermine him.
She suspected he was incompetent.
Part of Jean-Guy Beauvoir recognized they both might be right.
Madame Arbour took the chair across from him and looked on, patiently.
It was, Beauvoir knew, meant to annoy him. But it wouldn’t work. Nothing could upset him that day.
His second child was due any time now.
Annie was healthy, as was their young son, Honoré.
He had a job he enjoyed, if didn’t as yet completely understand.
They were in Paris. Paris, for God’s sake.
How a snot-nosed kid went from playing ball hockey in the alleys of East End Montréal to being an executive in Paris was frankly still a bit of a mystery to him.
To add to Jean-Guy’s buoyant mood, it was Friday afternoon. Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache had arrived from Montréal, and tonight they’d all be having dinner together at one of their favorite bistros.
“Oui?” he said.
“You wanted to see me?” Madame Arbour asked.
“No. What gave you that idea, Séverine?”
She nodded toward his laptop. “I sent you a document. About the funicular project in Luxembourg.”
“Yes. I’m just reading it.” He did not say it was, in fact, the second time through, and he still didn’t understand what he was looking at. Except that it was an elevator up a cliff. In Luxembourg.
“Is there something you want to say about it?” He removed his glasses.
It was the end of the day and his eyes were tired, but he’d be damned if he’d pass his hand over them.
Instinctively, Jean-Guy Beauvoir understood it would be a mistake to show this woman any weakness. Physical, emotional, intellectual.
“I just thought you might have some questions,” she said. And waited. Expectantly.
Beauvoir had to admit, she was beginning to dull his sense of well-being.
He was used to dealing with criminals. And not petty thieves or knuckleheads who got into drunken brawls, but the worst of the worst. Killers. And one mad poet with a duck.
He’d learned how not to let them into his head. Except, of course, the duck.
And yet somehow Séverine Arbour managed to get under his skin. If not, as yet, into his skull.
But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
And he knew why. Even the brawling knuckleheads could figure it out.
She wanted his job. Felt she should have it.
He could almost sympathize with her. It was, after all, a great job.
Beauvoir had had his regular Friday lunch with his own boss, Carole Gossette, in a nearby brasserie. But the previous lunch had been at thirty thousand feet, on the corporate jet, as they flew to Singapore.
Two weeks before that, he’d gone to Dubai.
His first trip had been to the Maldives to look at the reef-protection system they were installing on the tiny atoll in the Indian Ocean. He’d had to look it up, and finally found the cluster of islands hanging off the southern tip of India.
A month earlier he’d been rolling around in the ice-encrusted muck in Québec, trying to arrest a murderer and fighting for his life. Now he was eating langoustine off fine china, and approaching a tropical island in a private jet.
On the flight, Madame Gossette, in her fifties, small, round, good-humored, filled him in on the corporate philosophy. On why they chose to do certain projects and not others.
A mechanical engineer herself, with a postdoc degree from the École polytechnique in Lausanne, she explained, in simple terms, the engineering, avoiding the infantile tone Madame Arbour used.
Beauvoir found himself turning to Madame Gossette more and more, for guidance, for information. To explain certain projects. Where perhaps he’d normally be expected to talk to his deputy head, he found he was avoiding Arbour and going straight to Madame Gossette. And she seemed to enjoy the role of mentor to the executive she’d personally recruited.
Though she did gently suggest he lean more on his number two.
“Don’t be put off by her attitude,” said Madame Gossette. “Séverine Arbour is very good. We were lucky to get her.”
“Didn’t her previous company go bust?”
“Declared bankruptcy, yes. Overextended.”
“Then she’s the lucky one, to find another job,” said Beauvoir.
Madame Gossette had simply shrugged, in an eloquent Gallic manner. Meant to convey a lot. And nothing.
Jean-Guy lapsed into silence, and went back to reading the documents Madame Gossette had given him when they’d boarded. About coral, and currents, and buoys. About shipping lanes and something called anthropogenic disturbance.
Finally, nine hours into the ten-hour flight to the Maldives, he’d asked the question he’d been dying to pose but was a little afraid of the answer.
“Why did you hire me? I’m not an engineer. You must’ve known that I can barely read these.”
He held up the sheaf of paper. Part of him suspected they’d hired the wrong Jean-Guy Beauvoir. That somewhere in Québec there was a highly trained engineer wondering why he hadn’t gotten the job with GHS Engineering.
“I was wondering when you’d ask,” said Madame Gossette, with a hearty laugh. Then, still smiling, she looked at him, her eyes keen. Intelligent. “Why do you think?”
“I think you think there’s something wrong in the company.”
That, of course, was the other possibility. That she had hired the right Jean-Guy Beauvoir. The senior investigator with the Sûreté du Québec. Skilled, trained. Not in engineering, but in finding criminals.
Madame Gossette sat back in her seat. Examining him. “Why do you say that? Has something come up?”
“Non,” he said, careful now. “It’s just a thought.”
To be fair, it wasn’t something that had occurred to him until he’d said it. But once it was out, he could see that it might be true.
“Why else would you hire a cop to fill a senior management job when clearly it should be taken by an engineer?”
“You undervalue yourself, Monsieur Beauvoir. We have plenty of engineers already. They’re thick on the ground. Eh bien, another engineer was the last thing we needed.”
“What did you need?”
“A skill set. An attitude. A leader. You convinced men and women to follow you into life-and-death situations. I’ve read the reports. I’ve seen the online videos.”
Beauvoir bristled at that. Those stolen videos should never have been posted. But they had been, and there was no undoing the damage.
“You’re not expecting me to do the same for you,” he said, managing a smile.
“Lead us into battle? I hope not. I’d make quite a target.” She laughed and put her hands on her substantial body. “No. You’re heading up a new department, created to provide another level of scrutiny. Each project is carefully evaluated before we choose to bid on it. It must be both profitable and have some benefit to the larger population.”
He had noticed that. It was one of the reasons he’d accepted to work for GHS. As the father of one child with another on the way, he was waking up to certain frightening truths about the state of the world.
GHS designed dams and highways, bridges and planes.
But at least half of its projects were water treatment plants, anti-erosion methods, reforestation. Alternatives to fossil fuels. Disaster relief modules.
“But,” said Madame Gossette, breaking into his thoughts, and leaning forward, “it’s always wise to have disinterested observers making sure all is going according to plan. That’s your department.”