Page 106 of The Grey Wolf
Gamache, reaching for the door handle, paused. He knew what Jean-Guy was asking. And he wasn’t sure how to answer. He leaned on the roof and looked at them.
“You mean to talk to Jeanne Caron.”
“Yes.”
“I can go,” said Isabelle.
“Non,” he said, quickly, almost harshly. Then backed off. “Thank you for the offer, but it’s a meeting I need to take myself. Though not just yet. I need to know more. You need to give me ammunition. Preferably a grenade.”
“We know that the package with your coat was sent by Caron. Which means she was involved in the break-in at your home. Isn’t that enough to at least charge her?”
“She’d be released within hours, minutes,” said Gamache. “And she’d know we’re onto her. As it stands, with luck, she doesn’t know we’ve gotten this far. She has no idea, I hope, that we saw her on the Mission security camera, talking to Charles.”
“I hope not,” said Beauvoir.
“Isabelle,” said Gamache, as a thought struck him. “If the letterBwas underlined in a note you received, what would you think?”
Instead of laughing at this seemingly ridiculous question, she paused. In that silence, Jean-Guy began humming an old Beatles song.
“The letterB?” she said. “I’d think the sender was trying to tell me something.”
“Yes, but what? Something to do with the Curia?”
She smiled. “Well, that wouldn’t be my first guess,patron.”
He too smiled. “Sorry. Context. The first note to Frère Sébastien was from someone working in the Curia. It had every letterBunderlined. It seems the way he identified himself to Sébastien.”
“Now that is interesting.”
“When you’re there, keep an eye out for something that might begin withB. Or someone.”
“You think it’s the monk’s name?” asked Lacoste.
“I think it’s probable.”
As it turned out, Chief Inspector Gamache was wrong. Very wrong.
CHAPTER24
Isabelle Lacoste boarded the connecting flight to Rome. It wouldn’t get her in until ten in the evening local time. Too late to go to the Vatican. It would have to wait until the next morning.
While she sat squeezed into a middle seat for the long flight, Jean-Guy Beauvoir stood in the records department of the main house of the Dominicans in Québec. Somewhere in their records was Frère Sébastien.
“Do many monks and priests change their names now?” he asked the registrar.
“Well, choosing a new name upon taking vows isn’t as common as it once was.”
“The man I’m looking for is fairly young, probably early thirties.”
“His name’s Sébastien, you say?”
“Well, I’m not sure whether that’s the name he was born with or chose.”
“‘Sébastien’ is one of our more common choices.” He made it sound like a pair of boots, or a vacation destination. “Guys love him. He’s the patron saint of soldiers and, for some reason, cyclists. Considered very manly, though he had to be rescued by a woman. Saint Irène. I think many of our Frère Sébastiens forget that part.”
Now they sounded like clones.
The Dominican brought up a photo on his computer. “It’s in the Louvre.”
