All the Devils Are Here (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #16) - Louise Penny Page 0,43
through more. The young man spraying, or dabbing, various scents onto, or around, her.
Reine-Marie felt more and more queasy, but kept going. Finally, they came to the end. Without success. Unless the goal had been to make both of them nauseous. In which case it had been a triumph.
“Désolé,” she said. “But there is one more thing you can help me with.”
Fifteen minutes later, at the door to Le Bon Marché, she pressed a fifty-euro note into his hand.
He did not decline it. He had, he felt, earned every stinking centime.
Reine-Marie returned to bar Joséphine.
Armand and Jean-Guy’s plates had been taken away, but as soon as she sat down, Jacques put her lobster mayonnaise in front of her.
Normally without expression, and certainly without judgment, the maître d’s face now contorted into a scowl.
“Madame,” he said, and backed away.
“I’m sorry, Jacques. I’m no longer hungry. Can you package this up for me to take away?”
“Of course,” he said.
Taking a deep breath through his mouth, he leaned forward and whisked the plate off the table.
“Good God, Reine-Marie, what’ve you been doing?” Armand asked, his eyes almost watering.
She explained.
“It was a good try,” he said as he shoved a few inches away from her and gestured to Jacques to bring their bill. Quickly.
From a distance, Jacques waved the suggestion, or something, away.
Their food and drink were on the house.
As Reine-Marie and Beauvoir stepped into the fresh air and sunshine on boulevard Raspail, they noticed that Armand was still inside.
He’d paused at the entrance and was, once again, staring down at the mosaic in the floor.
Jostled and shoved by impatient guests, Armand stood his ground and contemplated the ancient symbol of Paris before it was Paris.
Jacques had quoted the Latin motto. Fluctuat nec mergitur.
Beaten by the waves, but never sinks.
For the first time, despite seeing it for decades, Armand realized the mosaic looked like a scene from The Tempest. Shakespeare’s play opened with a terrible storm, and a ship in peril.
As a young man leaped from a sinking ship to almost certain death, he screamed, “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
Armand raised his head and looked around.
Here, here? In the Hôtel Lutetia?
CHAPTER 14
Beauvoir sat on the Paris métro as it rumbled out of the center of the city to the area known as La Défense, where he worked.
The district sounded more romantic than it actually was.
When Jean-Guy heard that’s where he’d be working, he’d been excited. The very name, La Défense, conjured childhood images of chivalry. Of bold and brave deeds. Of towers erected to defend the City of Light.
There were indeed towers in La Défense. Incredible numbers of them. But they wouldn’t repel a rock, never mind an army. They were made of glass.
There was barely a tree, barely any grass to be seen. Just concrete. And glass. With helicopters droning overhead, ferrying presidents and CEOs to important meetings.
Beauvoir wondered if their feet ever actually touched the ground.
It was a place of industry, of finance, of unimaginable wealth.
Of inconceivable power.
And that, he suspected as the train approached his stop, was what they were defending.
As he got off, he looked around.
This man, born and raised in inner-city Montréal, was beginning to yearn for a tree. Or two. Or maybe even three.
* * *
Reine-Marie parted with Armand at the Quai des Orfèvres, but not before giving him the paper bag with her purchase from Le Bon Marché.
While she went home to take a long, long, hot, hot shower, he approached the old building overlooking the Seine.
The 36, as it was known, had once been the bustling headquarters of the Paris police. How many cops, how many criminals, had walked through that archway?
Most of the operations had been moved to more modern facilities, leaving just the BRI. The Brigade de recherche et d’intervention. The serious crimes squad.
It was also where the Prefect chose to have his main office.
As Gamache approached the door, his phone vibrated.
Before he even had a chance to bring it to his ear, he heard a gravelly voice say, “Is it Mr. Horowitz? Has something happened?”
It was Agnes McGillicuddy.
“He’s alive, but he was hit by a van last night.”
“Is he all right?”
He could hear the fear, and delusion, in that question.
How could a ninety-year-old man be all right after that?
“He’s in a coma,” Armand went on. His voice gentle. Though he knew nothing could soften the blow he was about to deliver to an eighty-year-old woman who also loved Stephen. “He might not recover.”