The Nature of the Beast (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #11) - Louise Penny Page 0,105
asking.”
“I want them to think we’ve been, to once again use Mary Fraser’s word, misdirected. I think the one thing they don’t want us to find out about is that.”
He pointed to his device with the photographs of another Babylon.
Come hell or high water, he thought.
“Hello? Bonjour?”
They heard the voice before they saw the man, though they knew who’d called out. A moment later Professor Rosenblatt appeared around the big red fire truck that shared the space with the homicide unit. He wore a rumpled black raincoat and held a dripping umbrella that he’d furled up.
“Am I interrupting?” he asked, shaking his umbrella. “I can come back.”
“Not at all,” said Lacoste. “We were just finishing.” She got up and walked over to him. “How can I help you?”
“This is so trivial I’m a little embarrassed.” And he looked it. “I was just wondering if I could use one of your computers? My iPhone won’t receive or send messages in the village.”
“No one’s does,” said Beauvoir, joining them. “It’d be relaxing if it wasn’t so infuriating.”
The professor laughed, until his attention was caught by the image on Agent Cohen’s screen.
“Is that—?”
Cohen quickly stepped in front of it.
“Why don’t you use this computer, Professor,” said Lacoste, directing the elderly scientist to a desk across the room. “It’s hooked up but not in use right now. Need to check your email?”
He might have laughed again, but all humor had withered in the face of the fleeting image on Agent Cohen’s computer.
“No, no one really writes to me. I wanted to look up a reference.” He turned to Gamache. “You might know where it’s from.”
“Is it obscure poetry?” asked Beauvoir.
“As a matter of fact, it is,” said Rosenblatt, and saw the alarm on Beauvoir’s face. “Though I don’t think it’s all that obscure. I just can’t place it. The Bible, I think, or Shakespeare. Your friend Ruth Zardo wrote it in her notebook when we were told about that woman’s murder.”
“One of hers, probably,” said Lacoste.
“No, I don’t think so. Something about some rough beast moving toward Jerusalem.”
“It sounds familiar,” said Gamache.
“Oh, we’re in luck,” mumbled Jean-Guy.
“But I don’t think it’s Jerusalem,” said Gamache.
“No, you’re right,” said Rosenblatt. “It was Bethlehem.”
The two men pulled chairs up to the terminal, and while the others investigated murders and massacres, they looked up poetry.
“Any luck finding the plans?” Rosenblatt asked, as they typed in a few words: rough beast, Bethlehem. Then hit search.
“Not so far,” said Gamache. “We found some things belonging to Dr. Couture, but no plans and no firing mechanism.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Would you like to have a look?” Gamache asked, and brought over the box while they waited for the dial-up to download.
Professor Rosenblatt poked through the things without great interest until he came to the Manneken Pis. He picked it up and smiled.
“I bought one of these for my grandson. My daughter wasn’t impressed. David spent six months urinating in public after that. That child could pee for Canada.”
He then picked up the desk set. Taking out the pens, he studied them, then rummaged through the box until he found the bookends. He turned one over, put it down and picked up the other. By now Lacoste and Beauvoir had joined the elderly scientist, watching as he toyed with the items.
“What are you—” Lacoste began but stopped, not wanting to break his concentration.
They watched as the professor manipulated the items, and then there was a small click. Rosenblatt frowned, then, picking up the two pens, he inserted them into holes at the base of the bookend.
After studying it for a moment, he held it out, as a bright child might who’d made something for Mother.
“Is it…?” Lacoste asked, taking it from him.
“The firing mechanism? I think so,” said the professor, as astonished as everyone else. “Ingenious.”
Gamache stared at the piece in Lacoste’s hand while she turned it over and over and around. It looked nothing like a pen set and bookend now. Just as the pen set and bookend had looked nothing like a firing mechanism.
“How did you know?” asked Beauvoir, taking it from her and also turning it around and around, studying it.
“I didn’t, I just tried. A prerequisite for being a physicist, I think. Good spatial reasoning. But the first clue was the pens, of course.”