The Nature of the Beast
An old mongrel dog, Harvest, lay on the grass. He struggled to his feet, his tail wagging slowly.
“Clara,” Evie said, coming to the screen door, forcing a smile that looked painful.
“I didn’t want to disturb you,” Clara said, cradling the dishes. “But I know how much energy it takes to get out of bed in the morning, never mind shop and cook. There’re a couple bags of groceries in the trunk. They’re from Monsieur Béliveau. And Sarah sent some croissants and baguettes from her boulangerie. She says you can freeze them. I wouldn’t know. They never last that long in my house.”
Clara saw a hint of a genuine smile. And with it a slight relief, a loosening of the tight bands holding Evie Lepage in, and the world out.
* * *
Armand Gamache watched the old scientist leave the B and B dining room.
As soon as Gamache had asked about Gerald Bull’s real contribution to Project Babylon, Michael Rosenblatt had looked at his watch and slid awkwardly out of the banquette.
“I really must go. Thank you for the company.”
Armand had got up too.
Professor Rosenblatt offered his hand and Gamache, stepping into the handshake, had whispered in the scientist’s ear.
Then stepped back to look into the startled face.
Rosenblatt had turned and strolled away with forced leisure, and Armand had returned to the banquette, and his coffee, and his musings.
Had Gerald Bull designed his Supergun? Or was he just the clever front man? Was there another genius behind that one? Someone younger, smarter? And far more dangerous?
And perhaps still alive. According to Reine-Marie, Gerald Bull had been sixty-two when he’d been murdered. Gamache knew that most scientists did their best work, their most dynamic and creative work, by the time they were forty.
Did Bull have a silent partner? A scientist, a physicist, an armaments designer? Did they make the perfect team? One staying in the shadows, scribbling plans for a gun unlike any other? An elegant weapon? While the other schmoozed, moved about in powerful circles, made deals? Found buyers. Found Saddam?
Both brilliant and both commanding different fields.
Gamache did the math. Michael Rosenblatt would have been in his mid-forties when Gerald Bull was killed. The design of the Supergun must have been made half a decade earlier, perhaps more. Putting Rosenblatt in his thirties.
It fit. Was Michael Rosenblatt the father of the monster in the woods?
Armand Gamache noticed that Rosenblatt had left so quickly he’d forgotten the redacted papers. Armand gathered them up, and thought maybe it hadn’t been an oversight. Maybe there was nothing in them that could possibly be news to the elderly scientist.
Gamache sipped his coffee, and thought.
He had a sense that Rosenblatt was a scientist with a conscience. The question was, had Rosenblatt’s sense of right and wrong come too late? Had he already contributed to the balance of terror?
Or perhaps his sense of what was right was different from Gamache’s.
“We sat down and wept,” Gamache had whispered into Rosenblatt’s ear, as they’d said good-bye. And then he provided the next line of the psalm. The one not written on the weapon. “When we remembered Zion.”
Dr. Bull and Professor Rosenblatt might have their weapons of mass destruction, but so did Armand Gamache. And judging by the look on Rosenblatt’s face as they’d parted, he’d made a direct hit.
Had Rosenblatt had a hand in creating Project Babylon, and then, when he realized that it was intended for Saddam, and that Saddam intended to use it against Israel, had he also had a hand in trying to stop it? By killing Gerald Bull. Perhaps he hadn’t actually pulled the trigger, but who else would have intimate knowledge of Bull’s movements, except a close colleague? A whispered word was all it would take.
Mossad, the CIA, the Iranians, CSIS would do the rest.
But that was a twenty-five-year-old murder case. Armand Gamache’s responsibility wasn’t to the gun, and it sure wasn’t to Gerald Bull. It was to Laurent. Who’d warned them all, and been ignored.
* * *
Isabelle Lacoste was running out of village and villagers to interview.
The Sûreté investigators could finally talk openly about the Supergun, and while wildly interested, the villagers were not even remotely helpful.
Most had been either too young at the time the gun was built, or hadn’t lived there then. Like Myrna. And Clara. And Gabri and Olivier.
And now Isabelle took the black-and-white photograph of Dr. Bull and her questions into the general store, to speak with the last person on her list. The second oldest resident, Monsieur Béliveau, while Jean-Guy got the short straw and was interviewing the oldest resident.