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.
“But I didn’t believe them,” Haniya said to Gloria’s swaying back. “I know they’re alive.”
They glided through the silent woods.
As the rails of the sleigh requested silence, shhhhh, Haniya spoke. “One night a particularly drunk soldier raped me, and then, as he beat me, his machete fell from his belt. When he passed out, I was able to saw through the rope. Took a long time, but I did it.” Haniya turned to face Isabelle. Her eyes steady, her voice soft, almost kindly. “I killed him. Then I killed them all. Then I released the others, and we escaped, taking their machetes with us.”
She paused then. “They had child soldiers guarding the camp.” Haniya stared ahead, at the pristine landscape. “Have you ever heard of brown brown?”
“Non.”
“When children are abducted, that’s how they turn them into soldiers. They’re given brown brown. It’s cocaine mixed with gunpowder.”
Isabelle inhaled deeply but said nothing. Dear God, she thought. Dear God.
“It … it … turns them into something else,” said Haniya. “When we went to get away, a boy tried to stop us. I could see that look in his eyes. His brown brown eyes.”
“What did you do?” Isabelle whispered.
Shhhhh went Gloria’s tail. Shhhhh went the rails of the sleigh.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” said Haniya.
Almost, thought Isabelle, and wondered how much of herself Haniya had left behind at the boundary.
“We finally crossed the border. And were safe.” Now Haniya smiled. “But you know as well as I do, Inspector, that no place is safe.”
Haniya Daoud tipped her head back again, closed her eyes, and let the cold snowflakes melt into her scars. To the sky she said, “I’m alive because of my children. I had to survive, to save them. Every woman and child I save is my baby.”
Isabelle wondered, but didn’t ask, if Haniya Daoud, once out, had turned her machetes into plowshares. But she was pretty sure she knew the answer.
Haniya opened her eyes and looked around, as though surprised to see the thick Québec forest, and the trees. Then her eyes came to rest on Isabelle.
“Your turn.”
CHAPTER 32
When Gloria stopped in front of the bistro, Haniya and Isabelle got out.
The village children crowded around, and while some wanted to get into the sleigh, others were far more interested in Gloria. Reaching up as she bent down, they rubbed her huge silky nose.
“Just a moment,” said Billy, laughing, as kids pushed and shoved to climb onto the sleigh. “Everyone’ll get a turn. I promise.”
It was, perhaps, not completely surprising that children understood every word Billy Williams said, while adults struggled.
Gloria started off, pausing to let the car pass as it came slowly down the hill into Three Pines. Billy touched his tuque, in a salute to them. But mostly to Myrna, who also understood him.
Then, with a cheerful jingle, they set off again.
“Papa,” Florence, Zora, and Honoré shouted a minute later as they passed their grandfather. He was walking from the Auberge back into the village and had stopped to wave to them. Then he continued, his hands behind his back, his head down. Thinking.
Haniya Daoud stared at the door that connected the bookstore to the bistro. A door she’d been through a few times. Then she looked at the long, beamed room with its wide-plank floors cut from trees that grew within sight of the building.
At the huge stone hearths at either end, made of rocks pulled from nearby fields.
At the men and women sitting there, including the demented poet and her fucking duck. Sons and daughters of Québec, whether born there or not.
Haniya Daoud, the Hero of the Sudan, had listened as Isabelle Lacoste told her what had happened. There. In this quiet place, in this quiet village.
Shhhhhh.
The gun placed at the base of her skull. The push through the bookstore door. Catching Gamache’s eye as he sat in the bistro, and that instant of mutual recognition. Of what she was about to do. Of what he had to let her do.
She was about to die. So that others in the bistro—including Armand and Jean-Guy, including Ruth and Gabri and Olivier—might have a chance.
Shhhhh. But Isabelle continued.
She told Haniya about that moment, frozen in time, as she held Armand’s eyes, and thought of her children. Then Isabelle braced and shoved with all her might, so that her body slammed into the gunman behind her. Throwing him, for one precious moment, off guard.
The last thing she saw, the last thing Isabelle believed she’d ever see, was Gamache lunging forward, toward the other gunmen.
She hoped he’d survived. Hoped Jean-Guy had. And the others.
Because she knew, as she felt the explosion, that she had not.
And then she described things she didn’t know, but had herself been told. How Ruth had, in the midst of the bedlam, crawled across the floor of the bistro, to hold her hand. So that she would not die alone.
How her husband, her colleagues, her friends, had taken turns at the hospital, holding her hand and reading to her.
Haniya listened, and wondered if someone, anyone, would hold her hand when her time came.
“Things are strongest where they’re broken,” she said, and wondered where that had come from.
“Yes.”
Neither woman had described their long, long journey back. But both recognized it had led them there. To that moment. In this quiet place, in this peaceful village.
Shhhhh.
The Hero of the Sudan looked around the bistro, at the villagers. At the friends and families. There were small cracks between them. She knew that because she could see the light.
Armand met Reine-Marie, Myrna, and Jean-Guy outside the bistro.
“How did it go?” he asked.
But he could tell by their expressions that it hadn’t gone well. Or, perhaps, “well” was not the word.
“Let’s go inside and talk,” he said. Putting his hand on Reine-Marie’s arm, he searched her eyes. “You okay?”
She nodded, but without conviction. “Actually, I’d like to go home. I want to go through that last box. With the kids on the sleigh ride it’ll be quiet.”
The truth was, she was a coward. Vincent Gilbert might be in the bistro, and she was terrified of what she might say, what she might do, if she met him. Home was the only safe place.
“Do you want company?” Armand asked.
“Non, merci, mon coeur. You need to hear what they have to say.”
He looked at Jean-Guy and Myrna, grim-faced. He probably did need to hear it, though he doubted he wanted to hear it.
While she went home, the rest headed into the bistro. Isabelle was sitting by the fire with Haniya, Ruth, and Clara. They got to their feet when the others arrived. Except Ruth, who took the opportunity to switch her empty scotch glass for Clara’s almost full one.
“Looks like you have things to talk about,” said Clara. It didn’t take a portrait painter to understand their expressions. “Why don’t we go back to my place?”
“What? We have the best seats in the house, right in front of the fireplace,” said Ruth. “Why would I leave to walk through a blizzard to your shack?”
Rosa, in her arms, nodded agreement and gave Clara the stink eye.
Clara glanced outside at the softly falling flurries. Hardly a maelstrom. “Well, I have a bottle of single malt.”
“So does Olivier.”
“I have chocolate cake.”
Ruth used Rosa to gesture toward the cake stand on the long bar.