Beauvoir stopped.
“Why is the door locked?” he asked Frère Bernard.
“Tradition, nothing more. I expect lots of what we do seems senseless, but our rules and traditions make sense to us.”
Still Beauvoir stared.
“A door is locked as protection,” he finally said. “But who’s being protected?”
“Pardon?”
“You said your slogan could be ‘Just in case.’”
“Exsisto paratus, yes. It was a joke.”
Beauvoir nodded. “Lots of truth is said in jest, or so I’ve heard. Just in case of what, mon frère? What’re the locked doors for? To keep the world out, or the monks in? To protect you, or protect us?”
“I don’t understand,” said Frère Bernard. But Beauvoir could see by his expression that he understood perfectly well. He could also see that the monk’s basket, with its mother lode of berries, was now empty. The perfect offering gone.
“Maybe your precious abbot was neither a savvy politician nor a saint. But a jailer. Maybe that’s why he was so against another recording. So adamant about keeping the vow of silence. Was he just enforcing a long tradition of silence? Or was the abbot afraid of loosing some monster into the world?”
“I can’t believe you just said that,” said Bernard, trembling with the effort to contain himself. “Are you talking about pedophilia? Do you think we’re here because we violated little boys? Do you think Brother Charles, Brother Simon, the abbot—” he sputtered. “—I … You can’t possibly…”
He could go no further. His face was red with rage and Beauvoir wondered if his head might explode.
But still, the homicide inspector said nothing. He waited. And waited.
Finally silence was his friend. And this monk’s enemy. Because in that silence sat a specter. Fully grown. Fully fleshed. Of all the little boys. All the choirboys. The schoolboys. The altar boys. The trusting boys. And their parents.
That lived forever, in the silence of the Church.
When given a choice, given free will, the Church had chosen to protect the priests. And how better to protect those clerics than to send them into the wilderness. To an order all but extinct. And build a wall around them.
Where they could sing, but not speak.
Was Dom Philippe as much guard as abbot? A saint who kept watch over sinners?
NINETEEN
“Do you know why the Gilbertines have black robes and white hoods? It’s unique, you know. No other order wears it.”
Chief Superintendent Sylvain Francoeur was sitting behind the prior’s desk, leaning back casually in the hard chair, his long legs crossed.
Chief Inspector Gamache was now in the visitor’s chair, on the other side of the desk. He was trying to read the coroner’s report and the other papers Francoeur had brought with him. He looked up and saw the Superintendent smiling.
It was an attractive smile. Not slimy, not condescending. It was warm and confident. The smile of a man you could trust.
“No, sir. Why do they?”
Francoeur had arrived at the office twenty minutes earlier and given the reports to Gamache. He’d then proceeded to interrupt the Chief’s reading with trivial statements.
Gamache recognized it as a twist on an old interrogation technique. Designed to irritate, to annoy. Interrupt, interrupt, interrupt, until the subject finally exploded and said far more than they normally would have, out of frustration at not being allowed to say anything at all.
It was subtle and time consuming, this wearing away at a person’s patience. Not used by the brash young agents of today. But the older officers knew it. And knew, if they waited long enough, it was almost always effective.
The Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté was using it on his head of homicide.
Gamache, as he listened politely to Francoeur’s mundane observations, wondered why. Was it just for fun, to toy with him? Or was there, as there always was with the Chief Superintendent, some deeper purpose?
Gamache looked into that charming face and wondered what was going on inches from the smile. In that rotting brain. In that Byzantine mind.
As much as Jean-Guy might consider this man an idiot, Gamache knew he wasn’t. No one rose to be the most senior police officer in Québec, in one of the most respected forces in the world, without having skills.
To dismiss Francoeur as a fool would be a grave mistake. Though Gamache could never totally shake the impression Beauvoir was partly right. While Francoeur wasn’t an idiot, he wasn’t as clever as he appeared. And certainly not as clever as he thought he was. After all, Francoeur was skilled enough to use an old and subtle interrogation technique, but arrogant enough to use it on someone who’d almost certainly recognize what it was. He was really more cunning than clever.
