The Nature Of The Beast Part 16

Beauvoir took a deep breath, then plunged ahead. "It's huge. Bigger than any weapon I've ever seen. Ten times, a hundred times bigger. We needed ladders to get onto it, and even they aren't long enough."

And again, the line appeared to go dead.

"Professor?"

Beauvoir did not expect an answer. What he did expect to hear was a dial tone.

"I'm here," said Rosenblatt. "Is there anything on it at all that might identify it?"

"Not a serial number or a name," Beauvoir said. "Though it's possible we missed something. It'll take a while to go over every inch."

Rosenblatt made a humming sound, like his brain was whirring.

"There is one thing," Jean-Guy said.

"Yes?"

"It's not exactly an identifying mark, but it is unusual. It's a design."

Michael Rosenblatt stood up at his kitchen table, spilling his coffee over that morning's Montreal Gazette.

"An etching?" he asked.

"Oui," said Beauvoir, standing up slowly at his desk in the Incident Room.

"At the base?"

"Oui," said Beauvoir, caution creeping into his voice.

"Is it a beast?" Rosenblatt asked, finding it difficult to breathe.

"A beast?"

"Un monstre." His French wasn't very good, but it was good enough for that.

"Oui. A monster."

"With seven heads."

"Oui," said Inspector Beauvoir. He sat back down at his desk in the Incident Room.

Professor Rosenblatt sat back down at his kitchen table.

"How did you know?" Beauvoir asked.

"It's a myth," said Rosenblatt. "At least, that's what we thought."

"We need your help," said Inspector Beauvoir.

"Yes, you do."

CHAPTER 11.

"h.e.l.lo?"

Michael Rosenblatt opened the wooden door and stuck his head in, without great optimism.

This must be a mistake, he thought.

The place looked abandoned, like most of the old train stations in Quebec. But the guy at the bistro had pointed him in this direction.

"Bonjour?" he called, louder this time.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw the outline of something large and it stopped him from going further into the gloomy building.

He peered at it. His eyes must've been playing tricks on him because it appeared to be a fire truck. Parked in the middle of an old train station. Which he'd been told was the Srete office. Nothing was making sense.

He turned around, unsure what to do next.

"That was fast," said a man's voice.

From behind the fire truck came a man with his arm extended.

"Professor Rosenblatt? I'm Jean-Guy Beauvoir," he said. "We spoke on the phone."

"How do you do?" said Rosenblatt, taking the strong hand.

Before him was a Srete officer in his late thirties. Attractive and well groomed. Slender but not thin, he gave the impression of immense suppressed energy. A slingshot about to be released.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir saw a short elderly man in a tweed jacket and bow tie. His white hair was wispy on top and his midsection was comfortably rounded.

With one soft hand, Professor Rosenblatt pushed his gla.s.ses up the bridge of his nose. With the other he clutched a battered leather satchel.

But the eyes were bright. Sharp. a.s.sessing. Despite his appearance, there was nothing muddled, nothing befuddled about this man.

"Thank you for coming. I didn't expect you so quickly," Beauvoir said, and turned to walk back into the old railway station.

"I don't live all that far from here."

"Really?"

"Yes, I retired down here, though I have to say this village comes as a bit of a surprise. I've never heard of it."

"It's difficult to find," said Beauvoir. "Hope you didn't have trouble."

"I'm afraid I have no sense of direction," said Rosenblatt, following Beauvoir. "It's a source of some embarra.s.sment. I suspect it undermines my credibility as a specialist in guided missiles."

He described how he'd wandered the back roads, pulling over now and then to consult maps and his GPS. But no village called Three Pines seemed to exist. He grew more and more anxious, turning, turning, turning at random, trying this road, that dead end.

"Three Pines," said Rosenblatt. "Even the name sounds slightly ridiculous in an area thick with pines."

But then, just as he was about to give up, he crested a hill, along a rutted dirt road, and put on the brakes.

There appeared below him, like an apparition, a small village. And in the very center were three tall pine trees. Waving.

He looked at his GPS. It showed him in the middle of nowhere. Literally. No where. No roads. No community. Not even a forest. Just blank. As though he'd driven off the face of the earth.

Professor Rosenblatt got out of his car. He needed to gather his thoughts, his wits, before meeting that disarming Srete officer. He walked over to a bench on the brow of the hill and was about to sit down when he noticed two phrases, one above the other, carved into the wood on the back.

A Brave Man in a Brave Country Surprised by Joy Professor Rosenblatt turned and looked at the village and noticed the people in their gardens, on their porches, walking their dogs. Stopping to chat with each other. It seemed both languid and purposeful.

He wondered who they were, that they should choose to live in the middle of nowhere. And that those phrases should mean so much to them that they were carved at the entrance to the village.

Now Michael Rosenblatt followed the Srete officer into the main body of the old train station, where men and women were on phones, at computers, conferring over doc.u.ments. Chalkboards and corkboards were filling up with photographs and schematics. A huge map of the immediate area had been pinned to a wall.

Inspector Beauvoir walked over to a young woman at a desk.

"Chief Inspector Lacoste, this is the man I was telling you about. Professor Rosenblatt is a physicist. He specializes in ballistics and high alt.i.tude."

"Professor Rosenblatt," said Lacoste, getting up to greet the older man. "High alt.i.tude? An astrophysicist?"

"Well, not quite that high," said Rosenblatt, shaking her hand. "Just a plain garden-variety physicist. And I'm afraid your colleague should have used the past tense. I'm an old academic."

"Well, we have an old gun," said Lacoste with a smile. But he could feel her a.s.sessing him. Wondering if he'd gone gaga yet. "Inspector, would you call the Chief Inspector and see if he'd like to join us?"

"I thought you were the Chief Inspector," said Rosenblatt. He stood gripping his briefcase and willed himself to relax.

"I am. He's the man I replaced. He retired down here."

"So did I," said Rosenblatt. "A peaceful place."

"I guess it depends where you live," said Lacoste, taking a seat and indicating one across from her. "There's something you need to know before we head into the woods. The site of the gun is also a crime scene. A boy was murdered there. We think he was killed because he found the gun. Someone wanted to keep its location a secret."

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said, sitting down. Reluctantly. He was anxious to get going.

"But you don't seem surprised," she said, watching him closely.

"If this gun is what I think it is, it would not be the first death a.s.sociated with it."

"You're not going to tell me it's cursed," said Isabelle Lacoste.

"No more than any gun."

Well, he thought. Perhaps a little more. For a gun that had never been fired, it had caused a shocking number of deaths. Of which the boy was just the latest, but not, perhaps, the last.

"And what have we found?" she asked.

"I need to see it first," he said. "To confirm."

"What do you suspect it is?" she pressed.

Through the mullioned windows, Professor Rosenblatt saw a man in his fifties walking over the stone bridge, toward the old train station. He was tall and more st.u.r.dy than heavy. He wore a cap and slacks and rubber boots and a warm waxed coat against the chilly September morning.

And he looked familiar.

Isabelle Lacoste turned to see who the professor was staring at with such intensity.

"That's Monsieur Gamache," she said.

Gamache, thought Rosenblatt. Chief Inspector Gamache. Of the Srete.

Yes, now he placed him. From news reports.

Watching the man approach with a strong, determined step, Rosenblatt suspected Gamache was no more retired than he himself was.

They walked through the woods, following bright yellow ribbons tied to the trees. Like crumbs leading to Grandma's great big gun.

Professor Rosenblatt was not used to forests. Or fields. Or lakes. Or nature of any kind. They'd walked for a few minutes and he was already tired. He skidded off another moss-covered rock and hugged a tree trunk to stop himself from falling.

"All right?" Gamache asked, reaching out to steady the older man and to pick up his briefcase, again. He'd offered to carry it but the professor had politely, but firmly, declined and took it back, again.

And so their progress through the forest became a sort of minuet, with Professor Rosenblatt lunging from tree to tree, like a drunk groping his way across a dance floor.

Lacoste and Beauvoir were now a distance ahead, almost swallowed up by the trees.

"This is not my natural habitat," said the professor, unnecessarily. "I prefer four walls, a computer and a plate of madeleines."

Gamache smiled. "Chocolatines for me."

"Oui. They'd do, in an emergency. I don't suppose..."

"Sadly, no," said Gamache with a smile.

Far up ahead Rosenblatt could hear, between his raspy gasping breaths, the two officers talking. Words familiar from television shows drifted back to him.

DNA. Forensics. Blood work.

He wondered how the boy had died, though at that moment he was concentrating on not dying himself, as he huffed and wheezed and stumbled through the forest.

And then, in the gloom, Rosenblatt saw something that made his heart leap. One of the trees moved. He stopped and removed his gla.s.ses, wiping sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand.