“So what’re we going to do with her?”
“What would you suggest?” asked Gamache. “This is your academy. She’s one of your cadets.”
The Commander paused for a moment, watching the Chief Superintendent.
“Is she, Armand? She seems yours.”
Gamache smiled. “Do you think it was a mistake, letting her in?”
“A stoned former prostitute junkie who’s dealing opioids in the academy? Are you kidding? She’s a delight.”
Armand gave one, not altogether amused, chuckle.
“And yet not everyone sees it that way,” he said before his face grew serious again.
“You know, the truth is,” said the Commander, “until this happened, Cadet Choquet was a standout. Unconventional. Annoying as hell. But brilliant. And not given to deceit. I thought.”
The Commander looked at the door and imagined the once-promising young woman sitting on the other side.
Once again the fate of reckless youth was being decided by old men behind closed doors. Though neither man was old, they were probably, he thought, older than she would ever be.
Cadet Choquet hadn’t been just reckless. Chief Superintendent Gamache was right. Her actions had been ruinous. But ruins could, with great effort, be restored. Or they could collapse entirely, hurting everyone trying to help.
“What’re you thinking?” the Commander asked.
For Gamache was thinking something. Considering something.
“What would happen,” Gamache asked, “if we cut her loose?”
“Expel her, you mean.”
It was certainly one of the few options open to them.
He went through the possibilities. They could give Cadet Choquet a warning and forget this ever happened. Sweep it under an already fairly lumpy academy carpet.
Kids made mistakes and should not be handicapped the rest of their lives for them. Though this seemed considerably more than a “mistake.”
Or they could kick her out of the academy.
Or they could have her arrested and tried for possession and trafficking.
Chief Superintendent Gamache was considering the middle option. What would be, with any other cadet, a reasonable, even kind response.
It would be punishment, a consequence, but it would not blight the rest of their life.
Except they were talking about Amelia Choquet. A young woman with a history of prostitution. Of drug abuse. Who had fallen back into old habits.
The Commander reflected. “I’ve begun researching rehabs. Whichever route we choose, that’ll be necessary.”
When there was no response, he looked over at the Chief Superintendent, who was staring at him.
The Commander’s eyes widened.
“Non? But if we don’t—”
His mind retreated, back to the fork in the road. And then he took the other route.
His face flattened, all expression sliding from it, as he stared into Cadet Choquet’s future. If they took that road.
“You’d do that?” he asked, quietly. “Not even try to get her help?”
“I helped once, and look where it got us. If she wants help, she has to come to it herself. It’s more effective. We both know that.”
“No we don’t. What we know is that she’s a junkie who’s slipped. She’s our responsibility, Armand. We have to help her up.”
“She isn’t ready. You can see that. It would be wasting a precious rehab place. A place another kid could use. A kid who is ready.”
“Are you kidding me?” It was all the Commander could do to get the words out. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself, that this is some big favor you’re doing?”
“Carrying her is no favor.”
“Seems to me when you were hurt, you were carried to safety. No one expected you to crawl to the emergency ward.”
Gamache sat there, his entire body tingling. With the truth of it. But he needed to remain firm. Resolute.
“She’s wounded, Armand. Deep down. As surely as if she’d been shot. She needs our help.”
“She needs to know she can do this herself. If she can, there’ll be no more slips. That’s the help we give her now.”
“For God’s sake, Armand, if you cut her loose, you kill her. You know that.”
“No. If I cut her loose, I allow her to own her own life. She can do it. I know she can.”
“You came to that conclusion sipping scotch beside your fireplace, did you?”
The two men stared at each other. What the Commander said wasn’t far from the truth. Armand had sat in his living room, Henri’s head on his feet, Reine-Marie reading archive files across from him. While outside, snow gently fell. And Chief Superintendent Gamache considered the fate of reckless youth.
Amelia. And thousands of others. Maybe hundreds of thousands of others.
He’d weighed the options. In front of the hearth.
Safe and sound. Warm and loved. He’d considered his options and the atrocity he was about to commit.
Twenty minutes later they stood in the long hallway by the entrance, and exit, to the Sûreté Academy.
Amelia Choquet, no longer in her uniform, walked toward them, a member of staff on either side of her. A large knapsack was slung over her shoulder, bulging not with clothes, Gamache suspected by the sharp angles of the canvas bag, but with the only things Amelia considered worth keeping.
Books.
He watched her progress, and as she passed him, neither said a word.
She’d return to the streets, of course. To the gutter. To the drugs and prostitution necessary to pay for the next hit. And the next.
A few paces from them, Amelia stopped. She reached into her bag, then in one fluid motion she turned and threw something at them. It spun through the air with such speed the Commander, standing next to Gamache, barely had time to duck away.
But Gamache’s instincts were different.
He didn’t flinch. Instead his right hand shot up, and just before the object struck him in the face, he caught it.
The last he saw of Amelia Choquet was a sneer as she turned her back on him and, lifting her middle finger, she walked into her new life. Her old life.
Gamache stood there contemplating the empty rectangle of light, until the door closed and the place fell dark. Only then did he look down at the book in his hand. It was the small book he had offered her that first day at the academy. A lifetime ago.
His own copy. Marcus Aurelius. Meditations.
She’d turned it down, sneering at the offer. But now he looked at the slim volume. Amelia had gone out and bought her own. And hurled it in his face.
“Excusez-moi,” he said to the Commander, who was staring at him with something close to loathing. “May I use your office? Privately?”
“Of course.”
Gamache placed a call, though the door wasn’t quite closed and the Commander heard. Because he was listening.
“She’s left. Follow her.”
The Commander understood then what Gamache had done. What he was doing. What had almost certainly been the plan all along.
Chief Superintendent Gamache was releasing the young woman into the wild. And where would she go? Back to the gutter, certainly. And there, amid the filth, she would search out more dope.
She would lead them to the trafficker. And perhaps the rest of the opioids that the head of the Sûreté du Québec had allowed into the country.
Chief Superintendent Gamache would recover the drugs and save any number of lives. But he would have to step over the body of Amelia Choquet to do it.
As he watched Gamache leave the academy, the Commander didn’t know if he admired the head of the Sûreté more. Or less.
He also harbored an unworthy thought. And as much as he tried to dismiss it, the idea refused to leave.
The Commander wondered if the Chief Superintendent had planted the drugs himself. Knowing this would happen.
In his car, before heading to the rendezvous with Myrna and the others, Armand took off his gloves, put on his reading glasses, and held the book between his large hands.