The Nature Of The Beast Part 50

Gamache tapped the photograph. "This man. Ruth recognized him."

His finger landed on the third man, whose face was turned away from the camera, and down.

"Oui?" said Lacoste, leaning in for a better look.

Beauvoir also studied it. He'd wondered about that third man and had harbored a suspicion that it was Professor Rosenblatt. But he couldn't make the contours of the face, the forehead, the chin fit. Even allowing for thirty years of food, and drink, and worry, it was not Michael Rosenblatt.

"Who is he, patron?" asked Beauvoir.

Isabelle Lacoste looked up from the picture and met Gamache's eyes.

"My G.o.d, it's John Fleming," she said, barely above a whisper.

"Please," said Beauvoir, with a dismissive snort. But Gamache hadn't laughed. Didn't correct Lacoste.

Jean-Guy looked more closely and remembered the coverage of the trial, years earlier. John Fleming had been both completely unremarkable and completely unforgettable.

And there he was again. Now that he knew, it seemed so obvious. And yet- "How could that be?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Gamache, putting the photograph back in his breast pocket. "But I do know he's the one who commissioned Al Lepage to create the Wh.o.r.e of Babylon."

They looked over at the couple waiting quietly at the table.

"Why don't you sit in, patron, while we interview him," said Lacoste.

Armand took a seat across from Al Lepage. He looked at the deep blue eyes, the powerful shoulders, the scored and weather-beaten face. Lepage's bushy gray beard still had a hint of the bright orange it had once been. It was loose today, not bound by a hair band. It gave him an untamed, wild appearance. His long hair was also loose and tangled so that he appeared to be some sort of missing link. Close, but not quite human.

Except for the eyes. Sharp and intelligent.

Al Lepage looked almost relieved. A beast of burden fallen to its knees, still carrying the load, but going no further. The end of the road.

And then Lacoste had asked him outright if he'd killed his son to keep his secret. He'd created the Wh.o.r.e of Babylon, and now it was marching to his own personal Armageddon. If discovered, it would lead straight to Al Lepage, who led to Frederick Lawson, which led to a village in Vietnam and a ma.s.sacre.

For an instant Al Lepage looked terrified. But then the expression retreated behind the beard and Gamache wondered if that was its purpose. It was a big, bushy mask behind which Frederick Lawson, the ma.s.s murderer, hid.

"What? What?" Lepage asked, looking from one to the other, apparently bewildered. "Hurt Laurent? I could never-"

"Now, we know that's not true, don't we?" said Beauvoir, glaring at the man.

Lepage's breath came in short gasps as he looked from Beauvoir to Lacoste and finally to Gamache.

"Look, I admit I did the drawing. They offered me a lot of money, how could I refuse?"

He stared as though expecting them to understand.

"But I knew nothing about a gun. I hate-"

He stopped himself and looked at them again.

"You hate guns, you were about to say?" said Beauvoir. He shoved his device across the table and Lepage's large hand instinctively stopped it from sliding off. He looked down at the glowing image.

"Is that your etching?" asked Lacoste.

Lepage nodded.

"As you see," said Lacoste. "It's on the gun. The great big gun, where Laurent was killed."

"I don't understand," said Al. "I admit I did the drawing. They were very clear what they wanted, but they didn't say what it was for and I didn't ask."

"And you didn't notice the huge missile launcher you were using as a canvas?" demanded Beauvoir. "How much acid were you dropping? Look, I know you think you can get out of this, but you can't. Stop wasting our time, stop making it worse for everyone." Beauvoir glanced over at Evelyn, who was staring at her husband, dumbfounded. "Start at the beginning. Tell us about the gun and the etching."

The s.h.a.ggy head dropped and lifted a couple of times in what might have been a.s.sent or despair.

"It was a long time ago," Lepage finally said. "Two men came to the boardinghouse and asked if I could do a commission. I thought they meant write a song. I agreed. But then they explained it was a drawing, and told me how much they'd pay. They gave me some special paper. One of the men said he'd be back in a few weeks. When he returned he seemed to like it. I bought the farm with the money and never saw him again."

"You drew it on paper?" asked Lacoste. "Not directly onto the gun?"

"I knew nothing about a gun," said Lepage. "No amount of money would have made me agree to that."

"What were the men's names?" Lacoste asked.

"It was thirty years ago," said Lepage. "I can't remember."

Lacoste looked at Gamache. The photograph was sitting facedown on the conference table in front of him. He slid it over to her, and she handed it to Al Lepage.

"Anyone look familiar?"

Lepage studied it, though Gamache had the impression he was really just trying to figure out what best to say. How much to admit.

"This is one," he pointed to Gerald Bull. "And this is the other. The one who came to get the work and to pay me."

He was pointing at John Fleming.

Gamache listened to the words but also to the tone. Lepage seemed to be skimming across the surface of his feelings, reporting something factual that had no emotional content at all. And yet his etching of the Wh.o.r.e of Babylon had reeked of pain and despair. It was not simply lines on a piece of paper, or a gun. Each of those etched lines came from some horrific place and Armand could guess where.

"Didn't you question why someone would want the Wh.o.r.e of Babylon?" asked Lacoste.

Al Lepage fell silent but they could hear him panting, like a man pursued.

"If you met him you wouldn't wonder."

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Beauvoir.

"He seemed like the sort of person who'd be drawn to that image."

"As do you," said Beauvoir.

He turned his laptop around so the Lepages could see the screen, then he hit a key and beyond the field of lambs in the foreground, a newsreel played out.

Beauvoir, Lacoste and Gamache couldn't see the images, but they could see their effect. Evelyn Lepage put her hand to her mouth. Al Lepage closed his eyes for a moment, then forced them open. Sounds, so small they might have come from an infant, escaped his throat.

Jean-Guy had muted the reporter's commentary so all the Lepages had were the pictures, made the more powerful by the silence.

Al Lepage's framed lambs had their backs to the Srete officers, and Gamache read the writing on the back of each. Laurent, aged 2, Laurent, aged 3, and so on. But it was the very first one that caught his attention.

"My Son," it said. Just that. And a heart. My Son.

Son My.

Had this man killed again? His own son this time, and Antoinette Lemaitre? To keep his secret safe? It was a h.e.l.l of a secret, and a h.e.l.l of a crime.

"Al?" Evie said, when the newsreels ended in a freeze frame. "Why're they showing us this?"

"She doesn't know?" asked Beauvoir.

Al shook his head then turned to her. He took her hand and looked down at it. So familiar. So unexpected. To have found her late in life, and fallen in love. And taken her hand.

"I'm not a draft dodger, Evie," he said quietly. "And my name isn't Al Lepage. It's Frederick Lawson. I was a private in the army. I deserted."

His wife looked from him to the screen, then back.

"Oh no," she whispered. "It's not true." She stared at him, searching his face. Then her eyes returned to the pile of bodies on the path, the bright green fields behind them and the little lambs in front. Her hand slid out of his.

No one moved, no one spoke. There was complete and utter silence, as though they too had been paused. And then it was shattered by a single word, screamed.

"Nooooooo."

It came out of her like a blast furnace and she began pounding his chest, no longer making words but just sounds. Howling.

Lacoste started to get up but sat back down.

Lepage did nothing to defend himself, except close his eyes. It seemed he even leaned in to the fists, welcoming the beating. The Srete officers watched as Evelyn Lepage's life well and truly collapsed. Armand narrowed his eyes, not wis.h.i.+ng to watch something so private, so intimate, so painful. But needing to see it.

He watched and wondered if little Frederick Lawson had raced through the woods, as Laurent had. A stick for a gun. Playing soldier. Fighting the enemy. Sacrificing himself in deeds magnificent and heroic.

One thing Gamache knew for sure. Little Frederick Lawson had not picked up his stick, pointed it, and slaughtered a village filled with old men, and women and children. So how did one become the other? How did a nine-year-old boy acting out heroics become a twenty-year-old man committing an atrocity?

Evelyn only stopped pounding on her husband's chest when she was too exhausted to go on.

"You did that?" she whispered.

"Yes."

He tried to take her hand again, but she batted him away, flailing her arms.

"Go away, get back," she demanded.

"I was a different man back then," he pleaded. "It was war, I was young. The platoon leader said they were Viet Cong."

"The babies?" she said, her voice barely audible.

"I had no choice. It was strategic. They were the enemy."

His voice petered out and with it the litany, the liturgy, the story he'd told himself every day, until he believed it. Until the miracle occurred, the transubstantiation. Until Frederick Lawson became Al Lepage. Troubadour. Raconteur. Organic gardener and aging hippie. Draft dodger.

Until a lie became the truth.

But the ghosts had pursued him over the border and across the years.

There had been no escape for Frederick Lawson after all. No second chance. No rebirth. His past had shown up one day, and knocked on his door, and asked him to do an etching. Looking into those dead eyes, Frederick Lawson knew this pretty village had offered him sanctuary but not pardon.

"There was one young girl-"

Al Lepage stopped, and Gamache thought he could go no further. Hoped he could go no further. But Lepage gathered himself, and his burden, and moved on.

"She couldn't have been more than ten years old. She knelt on the ground in front of me, her arms out. She said nothing. Not a word, not a sound. No begging, no crying. There was no fear. None. All I could see in her eyes was pity."

Pity, thought Gamache. That was the expression Lepage had put on the face of the Wh.o.r.e of Babylon. The emotion he couldn't quite name. It wasn't contempt, it wasn't arrogance, or amus.e.m.e.nt. It was pity. For the h.e.l.l to come.

That was the root of that etching. The rot.

But Al Lepage wasn't finished yet.

"I was alone," he said, his voice detached, filled with wonder. "I could've let her go."

Jean-Guy stood up suddenly. His face was contorted with rage and he looked about to pour it all over Lepage, but instead he walked swiftly, unsteadily away, knocking over a wastepaper basket and banging into a desk before making it to the bathroom.

Lepage lifted his eyes from the screen and looked at Gamache.

"But I didn't."

CHAPTER 35.

After an all but silent dinner, Armand retired to his study, closing the door.

Jean-Guy and Reine-Marie sat in the living room in front of a fire that popped and danced and threw gentle heat.

They exchanged pleasantries, but Reine-Marie had been around homicide long enough to know there was a time to talk and a time to be silent.

From the study they could hear talking.

"He's on the phone," said Jean-Guy, putting down the newspaper.