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.
He looked around. There was no one else backstage except Madame Schneider and the sound person. In a moment of panic, Gamache thought it would fall to him.
And maybe, just to get her out and settle the now raucous crowd, he’d actually do it.
Professor Robinson glanced toward the door, then said, “No. I’ll go out alone. No need for an introduction. These people know who I am.” She smiled. “For better or worse.”
She’s waiting for someone, thought Gamache. That’s why she’d been stalling. Hoping someone shows up.
Someone who might, at that moment, be hiding under the covers, not answering her phone.
“Good luck. You’ll do great, Abby Maria,” said Debbie, and beamed at her friend.
Though it was obviously meant as support, it seemed to annoy the professor. Perhaps, thought Gamache, she was of the belief that saying “good luck” would jinx it.
Most of the scientists he’d met were profoundly superstitious. As were cops, for that matter.
“Come with me, please,” he said and walked her toward the opening in the heavy curtains. “I’ve seen the footage from your last event. We will not have a repeat here. If it looks like the audience is getting out of control, you will tell them to calm down. If that doesn’t work, I’ll come out onstage and repeat the request and warn people if they don’t behave with civility, I’ll end the lecture.”
“I understand, Chief Inspector. Believe me, I don’t want a repeat either.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes. If you didn’t just watch but listened to what I said, you’d know I don’t advocate violence. Just the opposite. This is about healing. Unfortunately, some people twist my words and meaning.”
Her statement was so appalling, so inaccurate, that he just stared at her for a moment. With all his heart, Armand Gamache wanted to challenge what she’d just said. But this wasn’t the place, the time, or his job.
For now, his job was to get everyone out of there in the same condition in which they’d arrived. Though he feared that could never be totally achieved. Many would leave with some terrible idea planted. Like a weed in a crack, weakening the foundation.
“Inspector Beauvoir, how’s the door?”
“There was some pushing when we announced no one else could get in,” reported Beauvoir. “But it’s quiet now.”
“Bon, merci. We’re about to begin.”
Beauvoir clicked off his microphone and looked at the closed door. He knew, in his bones, in his marrow, that he shouldn’t do this thing. But he also knew he would.
Turning to the Sûreté officer next to him, he said, “You’re in charge out here.”
“Sir?”
“I’m going inside.”
Chief Inspector Gamache watched as Abigail Robinson took a deep breath, composing herself.
It was the same thing he’d seen Olympic divers do, as their heels hung over the edge of the platform, their arms in the air, their backs to the pool.
That instant before the impossible plunge. The irrevocable.
It was exactly what he himself did when standing at the closed door. His hand, in a fist, lifted. He paused, giving the family inside that last moment of peace. Before the plunge.
And then his knuckles rapped the wood.
I’m sorry to inform you …
Abigail Robinson took a deep breath and stepped onto the stage.
Armand Gamache took a deep breath and let her.
CHAPTER 6
The reaction was immediate and so overwhelming that it almost knocked Gamache back a step.
He’d heard roars, uproars, before. From the stands during hockey playoffs when the Habs scored. Or Grey Cup finals. At concerts, when the group finally took the stage.
But this was a whole other creature.
He looked out.
Perhaps it was the density of the crowd, though he’d been careful to underestimate capacity. Perhaps it was the acoustics in the old gymnasium, but the noise was far more than five hundred people should have been able to produce.
And he quickly realized what was causing it.
There was cheering, shouts of support, chanting. But there were equal parts booing. Cries of “Shame!” Howls of derision.
And there were shrieks. It was impossible to tell if they were cries of support, of contempt, or just from people overwhelmed with emotion and needing to blow it off.
It all came together in an acoustic body blow.
He stepped farther out from behind the curtain, to get a better look. He expected to see Professor Robinson stopped in her tracks, or even turning back, backing up. Momentarily staggered, even paralyzed, by this assault.
Instead she kept walking. Slowly. Calmly. As though she were alone in the room.
Armand Gamache watched her measured progress through the cacophony, and recognized courage when he saw it. But this was not what he’d call valor.
It was the courage that came with conviction, with absolute certainty. When all doubt was banished. It was the courage of the zealot.
And then came the stomping, heavy winter boots hitting the old wooden floor. The place was heaving. Gamache spared a thought for the caretaker, who must have been in despair right about then.
At the back of the auditorium, Jean-Guy Beauvoir stood on tiptoes to see.
Everyone in front of him was doing the same thing, and he needed to sway back and forth to catch glimpses of the woman walking, almost strolling, across the stage.
Apparently oblivious to the sensation she was causing.
He’d watched the video of her event ten days earlier. That had been raucous. But nothing like this.
From her vantage point on a riser halfway down the room, Isabelle Lacoste took in the movement of the crowd. People were swaying back and forth, side to side. Like some great churning ocean. Had she suffered from seasickness she’d have been green.
Her sharp eyes scanned for trouble spots. For eddies and surges. This was one of the danger points. When the crowd first sees the focus of their adoration, and rage.
She looked at the agents she’d installed at various points around the walls and in the crowd itself. Some in uniform. Some in plain clothes.
Inspector Lacoste then turned to the stage. Not to the single person on it, almost at the podium, but to the Sûreté agents lined up in front of it.
And then, from the middle of the crowd like some tribal call to war, the stomping began.
“Chief,” she said. “This’s about to explode.”
“Hold on,” Gamache said, opening the channels so all officers could hear him. “Steady. Steady. This will pass.”
He was within twenty feet of the agents lined up in front of the stage. If there was a rush, they’d be the first to get it.
He looked at their faces. Mostly young. Strong. Determined. Eyes forward. He saw the officer in charge of that section say something, and they, as one, stepped their right legs back. A subtle move to brace themselves, while not threatening the men and women facing them.
None of his agents had a gun. It was far too easy, in an unpredictable and potentially violent crowd, to have someone take the weapon off them in the mêlée. And use it. He’d seen it happen, with tragic results.
So Gamache had ordered their firearms be left in the detachment. But they did have truncheons.
Before the doors had been opened to admit the spectators, he’d briefed the agents on the worst-case scenario. And he made it clear that the worst case was when the cops, there to restore order and protect people, escalated the violence.
“This”—he held up the bat-like truncheon—“is a tool, not a weapon. Understood?”