all to go away.
He drove her home. At the door she hugged him and whispered, “Be careful.”
It was so close to what he’d been privately thinking a few minutes earlier that he felt the hairs go up on the back of his neck.
“I’ve got Cournoyer’s number now,” he said. “Not to worry.”
“Not of Cournoyer.”
“Gamache,” said Beauvoir.
“No. You.”
As he drove back through Montréal, to pick up Gamache, he could smell a familiar, very, very faint scent. Of rose water and sandalwood.
And he could see, again, those kind eyes. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Trying to communicate something to a hardheaded young agent who was radiating “fuck you.”
He watched as pedestrians leaped away from the wall of slush splashed up by cars. As elderly men and women clung to each other to keep from falling. As people, neutered by the bitter cold, scuttled from shops.
And Jean-Guy imagined walking along the Seine with his family. Taking them to the galleries and cathedrals and parks of Paris. Weekend trips to Provence. To the Riviera. Where sun gleamed off the Mediterranean and not off snow.
CHAPTER 22
“Ruth, what’re you doing?” asked Myrna.
Clara and Gabri stopped tapping on their computers and looked up from their screens.
All four had driven in to Cowansville and now sat in the computer room of the local library, each at a laptop around the large conference table.
They’d come in not for the computers but for the high-speed connection.
Ruth had joined them when she found out where they were going.
Now the elderly poet sat at her laptop, fingers moving swiftly and noisily over the keys as she pounded rather than tapped. A look of satisfaction on her face that would have frightened Genghis Khan.
“Nothing,” said Ruth.
Far from being computer-illiterate, Ruth in her early eighties had embraced the Internet.
“As a way,” Gabri had guessed, “of spreading her empire.”
If there really was a darknet, Ruth Zardo would find it. Conquer it. Become its empress.
“Queen of the Trolls,” Gabri had said, and Ruth had not contradicted him.
Though they knew for whom she trolled. Not schoolchildren. Not people who were scorned for being different.
She trolled people who trolled them.
She attacked the attackers.
“Madame Zardo,” the librarian had said, practically bowing when Ruth limped in. Elderly, unsteady. Stooped.
But when she sat at the table, behind “her” laptop, she was nimble. Strong. Unyielding. Relentless. No bully could hide. Ruth’s hat was so black it was white.
The library was in the process of renaming this room: A F.I.N.E. Place.
“What’s she doing?” Clara whispered to Gabri.
“I have no idea,” he said.
“Anything?” Myrna asked, and Clara turned her laptop around.
Both Gabri and Myrna took a look.
Clara was in the Austrian registry of births, deaths, and marriages. With a worldwide interest in ancestry, these records were being made available online.
She was following the Baumgartner family, root and branch. Back in time.
To where it grafted onto the Kinderoths.
And then she followed them. To see where, and if, they became the Rothschilds.
“It’s interesting, but I’m getting a bit lost. Who’s related to whom, and then names change not just with marriage but to avoid discrimination. Obviously Jewish names become Christian. In fact, not only do the names change, but lots of them actually converted. But you see here?”
She pointed to one old document. A name changed from Rosenstein to Rose. But a Star of David remained above Rose. And followed it, through the generations.
And then it stopped. And there was just blank space. Except for the notation “10.11.38.”
“What does that mean?” asked Gabri.
Myrna sat silent. Staring. She knew but couldn’t say it. She was looking at the names. The ages.
Helga, Hans, Ingrid, Horst Rose. All born in the 1920s. With stars beside their names.
And then the simple notation. 10.11.38.
And then nothing.
“It’s a date,” Myrna finally said.
Ruth leaned over and looked. Then returned to her computer.
“Kristallnacht,” she said, tapping even harder. “November tenth, 1938. When good, decent people revealed themselves for who they really were and turned on their neighbors. The Jews.”
“Kristallnacht,” said Myrna. “Because of all the broken glass.”
“More than glass was broken that night,” said Ruth. “It was particularly brutal in Austria.”
She spoke as though she’d been there, and while her face was blank and her voice flat, her fingers pounded the keys even harder. In pursuit.
“The Baumgartners?” asked Myrna. “The Baroness’s family?”
“Looks like they got out before the Holocaust,” said Clara. “I’m trying to track them. Interesting thing is, they aren’t called Baron and Baroness.”
“So maybe they lost the case?” said Myrna.
“Seems obvious they must have,” said Gabri.
“Shlomo Kinderoth left his fortune to both his sons,” said