A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12) - Louise Penny Page 0,9

question was marked for special treatment. Something guaranteed to create an attitude adjustment.

The actual head of the academy had protested feebly but was just going through the motions. The Commander excelled at form without function. He was an impressive figurehead, a relic kept in place to calm worried mothers and fathers who naturally, though mistakenly, believed the primary danger to their children was physical.

The Commander inspired confidence with his gray hair and straight back, in his dress uniform on entrance day when he smiled at the eager recruits, and on graduation when they smiled at him smugly, knowingly. The rest of the time he cowered in his office, afraid of the phone, afraid of the knock on the door, afraid of the night and afraid of the dawn.

And now he was gone. And Chief Superintendent Francoeur was gone. “Fired,” as it were, in an irony not lost on Leduc.

And now Professor Leduc waited for the knock on the door.

He wasn’t worried. He was the Duke. And all this belonged to him.

* * *

Armand Gamache walked down the long corridor. They’d torn down the old academy, where he himself had trained, a few years earlier and relocated to the South Shore of Montréal to this new glass and concrete and steel structure.

Gamache, while appreciating tradition and respecting history, had not mourned the loss of the former academy. It was only bricks and mortar. What mattered wasn’t what the building looked like but what happened inside.

Two Sûreté agents walked behind Gamache, personally chosen for this detail and lent to him by Thérèse Brunel.

He stopped at the door. The final one on his list. And without hesitation, he knocked.

* * *

Leduc heard it and despite himself gave a tiny, involuntary spasm. And he realized that a small part of himself never thought the rap on the door would ever really come.

But still, he wasn’t worried.

He got up, and turning his back on the door, he folded his arms across his broad chest and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window at the playing field below, covered in a layer of undisturbed snow.

* * *

Gamache waited.

He heard the agents beginning to shuffle and grow restless behind him. He could almost see them shooting glances at each other and frowning.

But still he waited, clasping his large hands behind his back. No need to knock again. The man inside had heard and now was playing a game. But it was a game of solitaire.

Gamache was declining to play. Instead, he used the time to think about the best way to implement his plans.

Serge Leduc was not an issue. He was not even an obstacle. He was, in fact, part of the plan.

* * *

Leduc stared out the window and waited for the next knock. A sharper rap. An impatient little tattoo on his door. But none came.

Had Gamache left?

Sylvain Francoeur had always declared that Chief Inspector Gamache was a weak man who hid it well behind a thin façade often mistaken for wisdom.

“His one real talent is fooling others into believing that he has talent,” the head of the Sûreté had proclaimed more than once. “Armand Gamache, filled with integrity and courage. Bullshit. You know why he hates me? Because I know him for what he is.”

By this time, Francoeur was usually a few Scotches in and had become voluble and more than usually aggressive. Most subordinates knew enough to excuse themselves and get the hell out after the third drink. But Serge Leduc stayed, excited by this game of chicken and because he had nowhere else to go.

Francoeur would lean across his desk, looking past the bottle of Ballantine’s, to whoever was left. His face suffused with blood and rage.

“He’s a coward. Weak, weak, weak. He hires the goddamned dregs, you know. The agents no one else wants. The ones better men have thrown out. Gamache picks up garbage. And you know why?”

Leduc knew why. He’d heard this story before. But just because the familiar words came out in a miasma of Scotch and malice didn’t make them untrue.

“Because he doesn’t like competition. He surrounds himself with sycophants and losers to make himself look better. He hates guns. Afraid of them. Fucking coward. Fooled a lot of people, but not me.”

Francoeur would shake his head and his hand would creep to his own handgun in the holster on his belt. The gun that Armand Gamache would one day use to kill him.

“This isn’t a ‘police gentle,’” Francoeur liked to say at convocation, when the students graduated from