All the Devils Are Here (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #16) - Louise Penny Page 0,133
was wrong,” said Madame de la Granger.
“We have to get out of here,” said Pinot.
“Not yet,” said Gamache. “We have to find whatever proof Stephen and Plessner had.”
“Wait a minute,” said Judith, turning to Gamache. “You think it’s here? In the archives? We’re not just looking up references, you think the proof itself is hidden here.”
“Where would you hide a book?” Gamache asked her.
“In a library.”
“Where would you hide a document?” he asked.
“Here,” said Judith. “With other documents.”
“But this isn’t the only archive collection,” said Allida. “There’re different archives in buildings all over France. Why would you think Monsieur Horowitz would hide the proof here?”
“Because he’d want us to be able to find it, and this building is around the corner from our home. Reine-Marie knows it well. If he put it in any of the archives, it’d be this one.”
“That’s a big ‘if,’” said Judith.
Allida turned full circle, scanning the endless rows of files. “How do we even begin …”
“He’d have hidden them fairly recently,” said Armand. “Since they forged Daniel’s name. That’s in the last five weeks.”
Madame Lenoir took them over to the archivist’s desk. “The requests are logged here, but there’d be thousands from all over the world. You can’t possibly go through them all.”
“Can we search by name?”
“Of document?”
“Of the person requesting it.”
“Yes.” She showed him how.
Armand’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. “He wouldn’t have used his own name, or Plessner’s. Still—” He put them in. “Worth a try.”
It came up empty.
“Who else’s would he use?” asked Pinot. “Yours?”
Armand tried it. Nothing.
They huddled around and watched him put in names. Reine-Marie’s. Daniel’s. Annie’s. His desperation growing. Showing. In the increasingly unlikely attempts.
Zora. Florence. Honoré. He typed. Pinot.
Nothing.
Then Rodin. Calais. Burghers. Ariel. Ferdinand. Canaris. Lutetia. Eustache de Saint-Pierre. Luxembourg. Rosiers.
He was running out of ideas.
“What, what,” he mumbled. “Stephen, what name did you use? What would you use?”
Armand stared at the screen. At the black slash of cursor throbbing.
What name, what word?
Remembering his conversation with Stephen in the garden of the Musée Rodin, and his godfather’s apparent mistake. Stephen knew perfectly well that he hadn’t proposed to Reine-Marie in the jardin du Luxembourg.
It was in the jardin—
“Joseph Migneret,” Armand muttered as he typed.
And up flashed a request.
CHAPTER 40
Joseph Migneret,” read Judith de la Granger. “Who’s he?”
“One of the Righteous,” said Gamache, as he clicked through.
“The document was taken out at eleven twenty-five a.m., then almost immediately returned,” said Madame Lenoir, pointing at the times. “He had it out for only twenty minutes.”
“But what’s the document?” Judith asked.
They could only see the file number.
The head archivist typed in the reference number and shook her head in amazement and some amusement.
“He managed to request the most obscure of our documents. No one except your friend has asked for it in decades, probably centuries. Maybe ever.”
“What is it?” asked Pinot. Bending over, he read, “A survey of the number of hand-forged nails made in Calais in 1523? That’s the evidence? Nails in Calais? It doesn’t make sense.”
Calais, thought Armand and smiled. The burghers, you old devil.
“We need to see the file,” he said. “Where is it?”
She pointed down. “Purgatory. Where documents are put that can’t be thrown out, but neither are they likely to ever see the light of day.”
“This one has,” said Gamache. “And recently. Can you take us to it?”
Madame Lenoir made a note of the reference number. Then they followed her through another thick door, which Gamache quietly locked behind them, and down, down, down flights of stairs into a subbasement.
Turning on the overhead lights, they saw what looked more like a crypt than an archive. The brick ceilings were vaulted and the floor was dirt. But the temperature and humidity were constant and no daylight could penetrate. It was, in fact, the perfect place to keep very old, frail documents.
Allida Lenoir went looking for the file.
“You really think Stephen hid the evidence here?” Pinot asked, looking around.
“No.”
“No?”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said, but on seeing the name of that file, I think he had another idea. I think he’d get the evidence as far from him, as far from Paris, as possible. Wouldn’t you?”
“I guess so,” said Pinot. “So where is it?”
“Calais. That’s why he asked for that file. He’s not interested in nails in Calais. Who is? He’s telling us, telling me, where he hid the evidence.”
“It’s somewhere in Calais?” asked Pinot. “But that’s a city. How’re we supposed to know where to find the stuff, if it’s even there?”