All the Devils Are Here (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #16) - Louise Penny Page 0,88
with someone they just didn’t like, or who they felt had cheated them. Or whose property they wanted. Private vendettas. Hundreds were shot or hanged without any trial at all. Though serious effort has been made to go back and sort the real from the manufactured. But it’s hard. Documents were destroyed. The archives themselves were in a shocking state after the war. They’d been ransacked by the Nazis, who burned anything that contradicted their worldview. We lost countless irreplaceable manuscripts. For instance, their insistence on an Aryan race. We had document after document proving there’s no such thing. It was a construct, a myth, created hundreds of years ago and resurrected by the Nazis.”
“They destroyed anything proving it?”
“They tried. Fortunately the people they sent to do it weren’t exactly geniuses. Some evidence survived. Though, let’s be clear, the Germans weren’t the only ones to ransack and rewrite. It served the Allies well to bury, even destroy, much of the evidence. They needed former Nazis in their own programs. How do you think the Americans got to the moon?”
Reine-Marie shook her head. As a librarian and archivist herself, she knew that history wasn’t just written by the victors. First it had to be erased and rewritten. Replacing troublesome truth with self-serving myth.
“If Stephen was working for the Resistance,” she said, “wouldn’t he pretend to be a friend of the Abwehr officers? Wouldn’t that be the best way to get the information he needed?”
“Yes. And that became the problem. Identifying those pretending and those who really were helping the Nazis.”
Reine-Marie sorted through the small pile of photos in front of her until she came to the one of Himmler. Repulsive. Toad-like at the table. And behind him? An impossibly young and impish Stephen in a waiter’s uniform. Beaming.
Putting her hand to her face, she stared at it. Thinking.
She knew Stephen wasn’t a collaborator. The question was, how to prove it. They couldn’t let the smear mar a courageous man’s legacy. And they sure couldn’t let a lie undermine whatever truth Stephen and Alexander Plessner had discovered.
But there was another question that came to mind as she stared at the photos.
“The police investigating the murder of Monsieur Plessner had copies of some of these documents within hours of his death. Is that possible?”
“Non.” The answer was unequivocal.
“Why not? It didn’t take you long to find them.”
“I’m the Chief Archivist. I was practically born in a file drawer. I know this place, these files, better than I know my own family.”
“But Allida, you can’t know all the documents in the archives. Even just the ones on the war. There must be hundreds of thousands.”
“Which is why I know there’s no way anyone could’ve put their hands on that”—she pointed at the file in front of Reine-Marie, with the doodle of the ship in peril—“so quickly. It would take weeks, months, to dig through all the documents. I think they found what they needed, then left them here, to be used when needed.”
“Which means—”
“Someone must’ve been planning this for a while.”
Not just someone, thought Reine-Marie. The file was in the possession of the police.
She felt physically sick. Her head was spinning with the effort of trying to grab hold of something too immense to grasp.
“When was this file last requested?” she asked.
Madame Lenoir got back on the electronic catalog. It didn’t take long before she looked up, meeting Reine-Marie’s eyes.
“Five weeks ago.”
“Does it say by whom?”
Madame Lenoir was no longer able to make eye contact.
“Daniel Gamache.”
* * *
Armand stood outside Daniel’s apartment and stared at the door.
Then he knocked.
It was opened by Roslyn, who stepped outside into the corridor and closed the door behind her.
“I’m sorry, Armand. He doesn’t want to speak with you. What happened? I’ve never seen him so upset.”
“He’ll have to be the one to tell you. But please, Ros, I need to speak with him. It’s urgent.”
Roslyn looked at her father-in-law. Normally so well-groomed, he was disheveled, his eyes red and his hair messy. Dark strands, mixed with gray, were plastered across his forehead, and his coat was smeared with something brown.
It looked like merde, but smelled, thankfully, of chocolate.
“Stay here. I’ll see what I can do.”
A few minutes later the door opened again and Daniel stepped out.
Armand took a deep breath.
“I can understand that you won’t believe me, but I want you to know that I love you. With all my heart. Always have. Always will. I didn’t join Task Force Two because I wanted to be there for