All the Devils Are Here (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #16) - Louise Penny Page 0,31

acquaintance, to have this.”

He handed it back to Fontaine.

“Why?” she asked. “It’s just a simple business card.”

“But without an address?” said Beauvoir. “Not even a phone number or email? What business card has just a name?”

“Not just that,” Dussault pointed out. “Someone’s written JSPS after his name. What does that mean, Armand? ‘Justice of the Peace’? Is it an honorific?”

Gamache was smiling. “Not exactly.”

Bringing out his own wallet, he removed a dog-eared, slightly scruffy business card. The paper was thin and worn, but the printing was exactly the same.

Stephen Horowitz. And after the name exactly the same four letters. Written longhand.

JSPS.

“It’s something my grandmother Zora always called him,” Armand explained.

“But what does it mean?” asked Dussault.

“‘JSPS’ stands for ‘Just Some Poor Schmuck.’”

Dussault laughed. “Really? But ‘schmuck,’ that’s an insult, isn’t it? Why did your grandmother call him that? Was it a private joke, a term of endearment?”

“Just the opposite,” said Armand. “She loathed him. Did from the moment they met in the late 1940s. He was an easy man to dislike.”

Jean-Guy smiled. It was true. Stephen Horowitz could be a real piece of merde. And it wasn’t an act. It was genuinely who he was. But Beauvoir knew that was just one side of a complex man.

“How did she know him?” asked Fontaine. “Come to think of it, how did you?”

“My father hired him to do odd jobs. Stephen had nothing when he came to Québec after the war, but my father quickly saw his potential. They were roughly the same age, and only fate decided that one would lose his home and family, and the other would have both. My father had huge admiration for Stephen, but Zora hated him from the get-go. She called him—”

“Just some poor schmuck?” said Dussault.

“C’est ça. And that was when she was being polite.” Armand smiled, remembering her muttering “Alte kaker” whenever Stephen showed up.

“Why did she hate him so much?” asked Fontaine. “What did he do to her?”

“Nothing, except to be born German. I think it was asking a bit too much of her, at that time, to like or trust anyone who was German.”

“But you told me he fought for the Resistance,” said Dussault.

“I don’t think my grandmother ever believed it.”

Armand glanced out the window, at the Hôtel Lutetia. That was another reason Zora distrusted Stephen.

Because he chose to live right next door to the Lutetia.

It had taken Armand many years to understand her hatred of the beautiful hotel.

He knew he’d have to explain the complex relationships in his family, eventually. Now seemed as good a time as any.

“My father met Zora in Poland, in the final days of the war. She and her family had been deported from Paris and sent to Auschwitz. There were more than a thousand people in that transport. Three survived the war. Zora was one of them.”

He looked at Claude Dussault, who dropped his eyes.

Paris might have a lot of light, but there were also strong shadows.

“She never called it the Holocaust. It was, for her, ‘the Great Murders.’”

He’d been raised to consider Zora his grandmother, which he did to this day. She’d impressed on him that murderers had to be stopped. No matter the cost. That was, Armand knew, the reason he’d joined the Sûreté.

To stop them. No matter the cost.

“My father was with the Canadian Red Cross and was helping with the ‘displaced persons,’ as they were called. Those liberated from the death camps but with nowhere to go. No home left. He sponsored Zora to come to Montréal. She lived with us and raised me after they were killed.”

“They?” asked Fontaine. “Killed?”

“My parents. Car accident. I was nine years old. Stephen was my godfather and helped raise me. He brought me to Paris once a year. I practically grew up in this apartment.”

He looked around, trying to recapture that sense of security.

But it eluded him amid the wreckage. And the murder.

“So, wait a minute,” said Commander Fontaine, nodding toward the card. “Go back. If it was an insult, why would Horowitz write JSPS on his business card?”

“It was an inside joke. He actually liked Zora, and I think as he got more successful, it was a way for him to keep his considerable ego in check. It was also a code.”

“For what?” asked Fontaine.

“For his senior management, his bankers, his security. Most importantly, it was code to his secretary, Mrs. McGillicuddy. Whoever had that card was to be given all access. All help. No matter what was asked.”

“But what would stop anyone

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