But suppose Laurent was murdered by someone who’d spent decades searching for it? And when a dirty little boy came flying out of the woods yelling about a gun bigger than a house, with a monster on it, one person believed him. A plan had begun to form. For murder.
And Gamache now had an answer to a question that had been bothering him. It seemed inexplicable that a Supergun, a massive missile launcher, could be found in the woods of Québec and CSIS only send two file clerks.
No squad of soldiers. No team of scientists.
Gamache now knew it was because they didn’t need anyone else. The gun was essentially a sculpture. All but useless. What CSIS needed were people who could find the plans.
And that task fell to two middle-aged bureaucrats who knew more about Project Babylon and the beast marching to Armageddon than anyone else.
With the possible exception of an elderly physicist.
Michael Rosenblatt sipped his Scotch and looked over at the fresh young Sûreté Chief Inspector, speaking with Mary Fraser, the dried-up CSIS agent.
And they were looking at him, but averted their gaze when he met their eyes.
Then he shifted his glance to the retired Chief Inspector speaking with Delorme.
They too were looking at him. The CSIS agent quickly looked away, but Armand Gamache held his eyes.
Professor Rosenblatt suddenly felt hemmed in.
Turning to his companion, he said, “I wonder why they’re still here.”
“The CSIS agents?” asked Beauvoir. “To gather information about the gun, of course. Why else?”
“Yes,” said Rosenblatt. “Why else.”
Dinner was served, with the platters of game hens and bowls of grilled vegetables and baskets of sliced baguette put on the long pine table in Clara’s kitchen. The room was lit with candles, and in the middle of the table sat an exuberant centerpiece.
Myrna had spent the afternoon collecting arching branches of bright fall leaves, and smaller branches still bearing tiny red crab apples. She’d collected pine cones from under the trees on the village green. Sticks and cones. A tribute to the boy who’d spent his whole life protecting Three Pines.
CHAPTER 22
Once dinner was over and the dishes done, the guests went their separate ways.
“Coming, numbnuts?”
“I just want to get the record, I’ll be over in a minute.”
And he was. Within minutes Jean-Guy was carefully tipping the vinyl record out of the sleeve.
“Here, give me that.” Ruth grabbed the LP from him and almost dropped it on the floor.
Finding the A-side, she put it on the turntable, surprising Beauvoir by fitting the small hole onto the post effortlessly. But he stopped her before she swung the arm of the record player over the precious disc and scratched it.
“Let me do that.”
“Have you ever done it before?” Ruth demanded, shoving him aside with a sharp elbow.
“Hey,” he said. “That hurt.”
“You want to know hurt? Wait ’til your ears get a load of that.” She jabbed her finger at Al Lepage’s record, now going round and round on the turntable. Ruth lifted the arm and expertly, delicately, lowered the needle to the vinyl.
A rhythmic crackling came from the speakers.
And then the first song started with a simple guitar. Classical, melodic. And then a drumbeat, like a metronome. At first a slow march, then it gathered speed, intensity. It picked up more instruments as it began to race along. A piano, strings. Horns. The drum became almost militaristic, building to a vigorous, energetic, stirring crescendo.
And weaving through it was the voice.
Beauvoir sat on the lumpy old sofa and stared at the turntable, marveling at Al Lepage’s deep, gravelly voice.
As the first song wound down, Jean-Guy turned to Ruth. “That was incredible. Even you must see that.”
“Did you listen to the lyrics?”
“I think so.”
“Well, if you thought they were great, more than your nuts are numb. Excuse me, I have to pee.” She rocked herself out of the chair. “I’ve been drinking tea all night.”
When she left, Jean-Guy carefully lifted the arm and replaced the needle at the beginning of the record.
A soldier and a sailor met in a bar, Al sang in his raspy voice. The one said to the other, there you are.
Jean-Guy listened as the soldier and sailor talked about war and love, parted ways, then ended up on different sides of a conflict.
Ruth was right. It was painful, but not in the way Al Lepage probably intended. The story was clichéd, embarrassing, cringe-worthy. The rhymes were either obvious or tortured. But the music and voice obscured that, camouflaging it. Making it appear better than it was. Perhaps, thought Beauvoir, like the man himself.
The next song was on. The music was powerful, with piano and banjo and harmonica. A fusion of folk and rock and country.
Now Al was singing about a dog who gets lost and is just about to curl up and die when he’s found by a pack of wild dogs and saved. He’s accepted into the pack but, too late, he realizes they’re wolves and he’s expected to kill other animals. As they do. Not because they’re cruel but because it’s in their nature. Just as he’s about to kill a little lamb, his heart in despair, he sees a light through the trees and runs toward it. A door opens, and it’s his family. Calling to him. Waiting for him.
Jean-Guy sat on the sofa marveling how a story that should have been, could have been, very moving had been rendered ridiculous by infantile and clunky lyrics and silly attempts to force words to rhyme. Beauvoir was not sure “dog” rhymed with “ideologue.”
It was a shame. Lepage’s ideas, his voice, his music were powerful. His lyrics, on the other hand, were merde. They should never have been shared. Beauvoir wondered how the record had fared.
Jean-Guy was having fun finding words that rhymed with merde, when Ruth reappeared. And glared.
“Had enough?” she asked. “If you keep listening, your brain will turn into something soft and smelly.”
“How do you know? Have you heard it before?”
The mad old poet walked over to her stereo and returned to the sofa holding Al’s record. Her own copy.
“How’d you get this?” Beauvoir asked, taking it from her.
“It’s self-produced. I bought one and listened to it once to be polite, but it’s crap.”
And yet, thought Jean-Guy, she’d kept it. The record didn’t end up in the church rummage sale. Or the dump. And since when was Ruth polite? Or perhaps the question should be, when did she become impolite?
“He used to busk on the street in Cowansville, when he first arrived,” said Ruth. “Sometimes he’d play in the boîtes à chansons in Montréal, but mostly he sang in the coffeehouses around here. That was before Gabri and Olivier opened the bistro.”
“He doesn’t play there now, though, does he?” asked Beauvoir.
“No,” said Ruth. “He stopped singing, thank God.”
Jean-Guy put the album facedown. He didn’t want to look at the smiling young man with the bushy red beard, who had no idea what heartbreak was waiting for him a few decades down the road.
“How did Al Lepage get across the border?” Jean-Guy asked.
“He ran, I guess. Probably chased by a gang of music lovers.”
“Lepage claims he walked across the border from Vermont. But how’d he find Three Pines? He didn’t just stumble into it, did he? He had to have had help.”
“Maybe he was meant to find Three Pines,” she said, getting up again and gathering Rosa in her arms.