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.
The lines from Ruth Zardo’s poem exploded in his head. In his chest.
Me, he realized with horror. I did.
“I used to have nightmares,” said Daniel.
“I remember.”
And he did.
Daniel crying out in his sleep. Armand and Reine-Marie had gone to him, gently waking the boy with hushed assurances. Then the look of horror on Daniel’s face when he saw his father.
He’d push Armand aside, and reach out thin arms for his mother.
Two, three times a week this happened. He never told them what the nightmares were about. Until now.
“It was always the same one. There was a knock on the door. I’d run to answer it, and there you were.” Daniel was heaving now, sobbing. Barely able to get the words out. “But. You. Were. Dead.”
Armand was pale, his breathing shallow and rapid. He reached out, but Daniel stepped back. Away.
“Every time I look at you, that’s what I see. A dead man. My friends knew their parents would live forever. But I knew that fathers and mothers leave home and never come back. Your parents did. And now you would, too.”
“Ohhh, no,” said Armand.
He’d deliberately not talked about the death of his parents in front of Daniel and Annie, for fear of scaring, scarring, his own children. Not until they were old enough to understand.
So how?
And then it came to him.
That rainy Saturday here in Paris, years, decades ago. They were visiting Stephen’s apartment and the kids were playing hide-and-seek. They’d found a false door in the armoire in Stephen’s bedroom and crawled in.
And heard. Their father and Stephen talking. About his parents, and about that day. About the knock on the door. About the very worst thing that can happen to a child. Annie must’ve been too young to understand. But Daniel did.
Parents died.
Nightmares came true.
“You couldn’t be a teacher, a plumber? Even a normal cop? You had to do the most dangerous thing. I know you never loved us. If you did, you’d have picked us.”
“But I did. Oh, my God. Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know—”
He moved toward his son. Daniel stepped back and raised the only thing he had. His umbrella. “Don’t come closer. Don’t you dare try—”
“I love you. With all my heart, I love you. I’m so sorry.”
He stepped forward, and Daniel swung, at the last moment leaning away so that the handle of the umbrella swept by his father’s face, close enough for Armand to feel the air ripple.
Armand hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t closed his eyes. Keeping them on his son the whole time. Though it was hard to see clearly.
Daniel looked like he was underwater.
Throwing the umbrella on the ground, Daniel strode away. Leaving Armand staring after him.
When Daniel was out of sight, Armand raised trembling hands to his face and wept. For all the pain he’d caused. For all those hours, days, years they’d lost.
For the happy, safe, contented little boy who’d died on the stairs that Christmas Eve, waiting for Père Noël.
CHAPTER 28
“Ah, look. There’s a second floor!”
Annie was standing in the living room of Stephen’s suite at the George V, wide-eyed. Marveling.
While the bellhop took their luggage upstairs to the bedroom, she turned serious eyes on Jean-Guy. “We must never leave.”
Jean-Guy parted the curtains and was looking outside as Annie gave the young man a tip and closed the door.
“Anyone?” she asked.
“No.”
“Now,” said Annie, picking up the room service menu. “What’ll we have, little man?”
“I hope you’re asking Honoré,” said Jean-Guy, and heard her laugh.
For all her apparent lightheartedness, he knew Annie was putting on a front. For Honoré. For him. In reality she was alert. Vigilant. And worried.
“I need to leave for a few hours,” he told Annie. “Are you and Honoré all right? The flic will stay outside the door.”
“I wonder what the other guests must think.”
“They’ll think that someone very precious is staying here,” said Jean-Guy, kissing her.
As he stepped out of the hotel, he looked to his right. Then to his left, as though trying to get his bearings.
He turned right and strolled, apparently aimlessly, along avenue George V. Pausing now and then to glance in the shop windows, he continued his walk, turning into a smaller street.
And there he stopped.
He’d lied to Annie. Loiselle had been outside, watching.
Reine-Marie slowly closed the dossier and looked across the table at the Chief Archivist.
“This file is inconclusive. It quotes anonymous sources as saying Stephen Horowitz was possibly a collaborator. That he claimed to have been working with the Resistance, but might have been turning them over to the Gestapo for interrogation in the Lutetia.”
“No, not the Gestapo. Common mistake. Many of the documents even from the time say Gestapo, but it was actually a division called the Abwehr that occupied the Lutetia,” said Madame Lenoir.
“Who were they?”
“Intelligence. As bad as the Gestapo. Their job was to wipe out the Resistance. They’d arrest suspected members, take them to a room in the Lutetia, and torture them until they gave up others. Then kill them and move on. Many, most, died without a word.”
Reine-Marie had to pause and gather herself. “You know a lot about it.”
“My grandmother was one of those killed. And the Lutetia, to its credit, has been very open about that time in its history. Many employees fled when the Nazis took over—”
“So they’d have to hire new people.”
“Oui. Maybe that’s where your Monsieur Horowitz comes in. The fact he was German would work in his favor for the Abwehr, but would’ve raised suspicions among other employees, and understandably so. Some were definitely working with the Resistance, but others were collaborators. And some were just trying to keep their heads down and survive. It was a confusing time.”
“To say the least. It would be easy to tar someone’s reputation, to make a false accusation.”
Madame Lenoir grunted agreement. “Many of the executions after the liberation were reprisals, but not for working with the Nazis. Neighbors took it as an excuse to do away with someone they just didn’t like, or who they felt had cheated them. Or whose property they wanted. Private vendettas. Hundreds were shot or hanged without any trial at all. Though serious effort has been made to go back and sort the real from the manufactured. But it’s hard. Documents were destroyed. The archives themselves were in a shocking state after the war. They’d been ransacked by the Nazis, who burned anything that contradicted their worldview. We lost countless irreplaceable manuscripts. For instance, their insistence on an Aryan race. We had document after document proving there’s no such thing. It was a construct, a myth, created hundreds of years ago and resurrected by the Nazis.”
“They destroyed anything proving it?”
“They tried. Fortunately the people they sent to do it weren’t exactly geniuses. Some evidence survived. Though, let’s be clear, the Germans weren’t the only ones to ransack and rewrite. It served the Allies well to bury, even destroy, much of the evidence. They needed former Nazis in their own programs. How do you think the Americans got to the moon?”
Reine-Marie shook her head. As a librarian and archivist herself, she knew that history wasn’t just written by the victors. First it had to be erased and rewritten. Replacing troublesome truth with self-serving myth.
“If Stephen was working for the Resistance,” she said, “wouldn’t he pretend to be a friend of the Abwehr officers? Wouldn’t that be the best way to get the information he needed?”