Page 144 of The Grey Wolf
“It seems unnecessary,” said the other. “They were in the middle of nowhere. Even if they screamed, no one would hear.”
Gamache was nodding. “If it was a mob hit, then this was part of the message. Sometimes they cut out the tongue. It means someone has broken the code of silence.”
“Or it’s a warning to someone not to,” said one of the investigators.
“But to who?” asked the other.
Gamache wondered, in passing, if Paolo Parisi might have been responsible. Was he trying to make his bones, gaining credibility with his capo by committing these murders?
But Parisi was still in New York at the time.
Gamache also now wondered if these murders were related to the death of Charles Langlois. All three killings, it seemed, had ties to the mafia. Though those ties were mere threads, and tenuous at best.
“I’m going to switch you around. Get to Chicoutimi and take over the Saguenay investigation, and Innez, you go to the Magdalen Islands. No reflection on either of you. I just want fresh eyes on both of the cases.”
It was the time-tested strategy of the desperate.
“D’accord, patron.”
Gamache hung up and reached for his coffee, then remembered he’d spilled it. He was tempted to get another but didn’t have time.
An update from Isabelle had come in while he’d been on the phone.
Sister Irene still wouldn’t tell her anything, but the nun had at least agreed to go to the monastery. Probably, Lacoste wrote, to try to warn or protect Brother Robert, but that was a problem for later. For now the immediate one was solved.
Lacoste, the nun, and Claude Dussault were heading to Grande Chartreuse.
Once again Gamache brought out the two pieces of the formula for the old liqueur. Flattening them on his desk, he slid them together and considered.
One part had been left by Dom Philippe, who Armand hoped to meet in Blanc-Sablon in a few hours. But the other was more problematic.
He was troubled by the question of why Jeanne Caron had sent it to him. It wasn’t like two halves of a decoder ring, where putting them together solved everything. When these two halves formed a whole page, it still did not make a whole lot of sense. They created a single page of a recipe that must be many pages long. It was useless but not, he knew, meaningless.
The only thing he could think of was that Caron was playing with him, trying to distract him with some archaic secret formula. Maybe even daring him to come to her. For her. To step into some trap he couldn’t yet see.
And soon he might have to.
Sweeping up the pages, he put them back in his pocket and drove to the airport to catch his flight to the Land God Gave to Cain.
The three passengers looked out the bubble-like glass of the helicopter as it made a pass over the monastery.
What they saw was extraordinary. Sitting in the cleft of a mountain range, holding the encroaching pine forests at bay by force of will and hard labor, was the monastery of Grande Chartreuse. As it had stood for centuries, a citadel in the wilderness.
There was a brutal beauty about it. It was a place where the fiercely independent lived in silence. A community of hermits, where few questions were asked. And where those wanting to disappear could hide.
“Are those the monks?” Isabelle asked.
A dozen men working in what looked like a huge vegetable garden in the center of the fortress held on to their straw hats and tipped their heads back to look up. At them.
“Lay monks,” shouted Sister Irene over the rotors. “They do most of the physical labor, freeing up the monks to spend their days and nights in their cells, praying.”
While magnificent, there was something ominous about the place. About the layers of concealment behind which these monks worshipped. First the mountain peaks, then the forest, then the high thick walls that encircled the abbey, and finally the cells, which the brothers rarely left. All served to separate them from the world.
They lived in silence and solitude. And wanted to keep it that way.
No visitors were allowed inside.
No vehicles were allowed on the roads around the monastery.
