“That’s a pretty scary thought,” said Isabelle.
“Absolument. My mentor, my first chief inspector, said to me, ‘Armand, if you don’t want your longhouse to smell like merde, you have to do two things—’”
“Not let Ruth Zardo in?” asked Isabelle.
Armand laughed. “Too late for that. For both of us.”
In a flash he was back there. Running toward the ambulance. Isabelle on the gurney, unconscious. The old poet’s bony hands holding Isabelle’s. Her voice unwavering as she whispered to Isabelle over and over again the only thing that mattered.
That she was loved.
Isabelle would never remember that, and Armand would never forget it.
“Non. He said, ‘Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll be at perpetual war.’”
Armand smiled at the memory.
“I think he knew what an idiot he was dealing with. He could see I was getting ready to tell him my own theory of life. At twenty-three. He showed me the door. But just as I was leaving, he said, ‘And the enemy you’ll be fighting is yourself.’”
Gamache hadn’t thought of that encounter for years. But he had thought of his life, from that moment forward, as a longhouse.
And in his longhouse, as he glanced back down it now, he saw all the young agents, all the men and women, boys and girls, whose lives he’d affected.
He could also see, standing there, the people who’d hurt him. Badly. Almost killed him.
They all lived there.
And while he would never be friends with many of those memories, those ghosts, he had worked very hard to make peace with them. With what he’d done and what had been done to him.
“And are the opioids there, patron? In your longhouse?”
Her question brought him back with a jolt, to her comfortable home.
“Have you found them?”
“Not all, non. The last of it, here in Montréal, has disappeared,” he admitted.
“How much?”
“Enough to produce hundreds of thousands of hits.”
She was silent. Not saying what he knew better than anyone.
Each one of those hits could kill.
“Merde,” she whispered, then immediately apologized to him. “Désolé.”
She rarely swore and almost never in front of the Chief. But this one escaped, riding the wave of revulsion.
“There’s more,” she said, studying the man she’d gotten to know so well. Better than her own father. “Something else is bothering you.”
Weighing on him, was more like it, but she could not quite come up with that word.
“Oui. It’s about the academy.”
“The Sûreté Academy?”
“Yes. There’s a problem. They want to expel one of the cadets.”
“It happens,” said Isabelle. “I’m sorry, patron, but why is it your concern?”
“The one the Commander called me about, and wants to expel, is Amelia Choquet.”
Isabelle Lacoste settled back in her chair and considered him closely. “And? Why would he call you about this? You’re no longer head of the academy.”
“True.”
And she saw that this wasn’t just a weight on Gamache. It was close to crushing.
“What is it, patron?”
“They found opioids in her possession.”
“Christ.” And this time she didn’t apologize. “How much?”
“It seems to be too much for personal consumption.”
“She’s trafficking? At the academy?”
“It would appear so.”
Now Isabelle was quiet. Absorbing. Thinking.
Armand gave her time.
“Is it from your shipment?” she asked. She hadn’t meant to give him ownership, but that was the way it came out. And they both knew he did have ownership, if not of the actual drugs then of the situation.
“They haven’t been sent to the lab yet, but it’s possible, yes.” He looked down at his hands, one clasping the other. “I have a decision to make.”
“About Cadet Choquet.”
“Oui. And frankly, I don’t know what to do.”
She wished with all her heart she could help him.
“I’m sorry, Chief, but surely this is up to the Commander. Not you.”
Watching Chief Superintendent Gamache, Lacoste couldn’t fathom what he was thinking. He seemed to be asking for her help and yet keeping some information from her.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Let me ask you this, Isabelle,” he said, ignoring her statement. “What would you do if you were me?”
“And a cadet was found with drugs in her possession? I’d leave that up to the Commander of the academy. It’s not your business, patron.”
“Oh, but it is, Isabelle. If it’s my opioids, as you put it, in her possession.”
“Where did she get the drugs from?” Isabelle asked. “Has she told you?”
“The Commander hasn’t interviewed her yet. As far as he knows, Cadet Choquet doesn’t even realize they’ve been found. I’m going there now. If he expels her, she’ll die. I know that much.”
Lacoste nodded. She knew it too. What most didn’t know was why Gamache had let Amelia Choquet into the academy in the first place. Why that messed-up young woman, with the history of drug abuse and prostitution, had been given a coveted place at the Sûreté school.
But Isabelle knew. Or thought she knew.
The same reason he’d reached down into the bowels of her own career and given her a job.
Had reached down and dragged Jean-Guy up, a moment from being fired himself.
It was the same reason Chief Superintendent Gamache was now considering convincing the current Commander to keep Cadet Choquet.
This was a man who profoundly believed in second chances.
Except this wouldn’t be Amelia Choquet’s second chance. It would be her third.
And that was, in Lacoste’s view, one too many.
There was grace in second chances and foolishness in third. And perhaps worse than foolishness.
There was, or could be, outright danger. Believing a person capable of redemption when they’d proven they were not.
Amelia Choquet hadn’t been caught cheating on an exam or stealing some trinket from a fellow cadet. She’d been caught with a drug so potent, so dangerous, it eventually killed almost everyone who took it. Amelia Choquet knew that. Knew she was trafficking in death.
Chief Inspector Lacoste regarded the steady man in front of her, who believed everyone could be saved. Believed he could save them.
It was both his saving grace and his blind spot. And few knew better than Isabelle Lacoste what that meant. Some things hurtled. Some slithered. But nothing good ever came out of a blind spot.
Isabelle noticed that Gamache’s right hand wasn’t trembling. But it was clenched into a fist.
CHAPTER 12
“Sit.”
The Commander of the Sûreté Academy did not stand when Cadet Choquet entered the office, and neither did Chief Superintendent Gamache.
Amelia waited at the door, defiant as ever, then walked across the room and dropped into the chair indicated, crossing her arms tight over her chest. Glaring straight ahead.
She looked exactly as Gamache remembered her.
Hair jet-black and spiky. Though perhaps not quite as belligerent in its cut. She was not, he suspected, softening so much as maturing. Or perhaps he was just getting used to it.
Cadet Choquet was in the final year of her training. Within months of graduation.