How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #9) - Louise Penny Page 0,37

tell you now?”

“That we’re screwed.”

He leaned back and laughed. “Then trust mine. All is not as I’d have wished, that much is certain. But it isn’t over. This isn’t inaction, this is simply a deep breath.”

She glanced out at the agents lounging at their desks, ignoring her orders.

“And while we’re catching our breath they’re taking over. Destroying the division.”

“Yes,” he said.

She waited for the “but,” but none came.

“Maybe I should threaten them,” she suggested. “The only thing a lion respects is a bigger lion.”

“Those aren’t lions, Isabelle. They’re irritating, but tiny. Ants, or toads. You step over them, or around them. But there’s no need to step on them. You don’t make war on toads.”

Toads, or turds. The droppings of some larger beast, thought Lacoste as she left. But Chief Inspector Gamache was right. These new agents weren’t worth her effort. She’d step around them. For now.

* * *

Gamache pulled his car into the reserved parking spot. He knew the employee who normally parked there wouldn’t need it. She was in Paris.

It was two o’clock. He paused, closing his eyes. Then he opened them, and with resolve he walked along the icy path to the rear entrance of the Bibliothèque nationale. At the door, he punched Reine-Marie’s code into the keypad and heard the clunk as the door unbolted.

“Monsieur Gamache.” Lili Dufour looked up from her desk, understandably perplexed. “I thought you were in Paris with Reine-Marie.”

“No, she went ahead.”

“What can I do for you?” She stood up and walked around to greet him. She was slender, self-contained. Pleasant but cool, bordering on officious.

“I have some research to do and I thought you might be able to help.”

“On what?”

“The Ouellet Quints.”

He saw her brows rise.

“Really. Why?”

“You don’t expect me to tell you that, do you?” asked Gamache, with a smile.

“Then you don’t expect me to help you, do you?”

His smile faded. Reine-Marie had told him about Madame Dufour, who guarded the documents in the National Library and Archives as though they were her own private collection.

“Police business,” he said.

“Library business, Chief Inspector,” she said, nodding toward the large, closed doors.

He followed her gaze. They were in the back offices, where the head librarians worked. Through those doors was the public area.

Most of the time, when he’d visited his wife, he’d contented himself with waiting in the huge new public library, where row after row of desks and reading lamps held students and professors, researchers and those simply curious. The desks had plugs for laptops, and wireless Internet gave access to the files.

But not all the files. The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec contained tens of thousands of documents. Not just books, but maps, diaries, letters, deeds. Many of them hundreds of years old. And most of them not in the computer system yet.

Scores of technicians were working long hours to scan everything in, but it would take years, decades.

He loved walking the aisles, imagining all the history contained there. Maps drawn by Cartier. Diaries written by Marguerite d’Youville. The bloodstained plans for the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

And maybe, maybe, the story of the Ouellet Quints. Not the one for public consumption, but their private lives. Their real lives, when the cameras turned off.

If it was anywhere, it was here.

And he needed it.

He turned back to Madame Dufour. “I’m researching the Ouellet Quints for a case, and I need your help.”

“I guessed that much.”

“I need to look at what you have in the private archives.”

“Those are sealed.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t read them. They’re sealed.”

Gamache felt a stroke of annoyance until he noticed a slight look of amusement on her face.

“Would you like to read them?” he asked.

Now she hesitated, caught between the correct response and the truthful one.

“Are you trying to bribe me?” she asked.

Now it was his turn to be amused. He knew her currency. It was the same as his. Information, knowledge. Finding things out that no one else knew.

“Even if I let you, you couldn’t use what you found in court,” she said. “It would be illegally obtained. The principals are still alive.”

By that she meant the Quints themselves, he knew.

When he said nothing she grew quiet, her intelligent eyes assessing him, and the silence.

“Come with me.”

She turned away from the large doors that led to the glass and metal public library, and took him in the opposite direction. Along a corridor. Down some stairs. And finally, she tapped a code into a keypad and a large metal door clicked open with a slight