Ruth struggled out of the sofa. “I did.”
“You did what?” asked Clara.
“The answer to that question. All those years when I couldn’t write, I blamed John Fleming. But I was wrong.”
Clara watched Ruth and Rosa waddle away. She had no idea what the crazy old woman was talking about. But sitting in front of the canvas, it slowly sank in.
Who could do such damage? Who knew where the weaknesses, the fault lines lay? Who could cause all that internal bleeding?
Clara turned back to the portrait of Peter.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking into his faded face. “Forgive me.”
She placed it carefully against a wall, and put up a fresh canvas.
She knew now why she was blocked. She was trying to do the wrong painting. Trying to make amends by turning painting into penance.
Clara picked up her brush and contemplated the empty canvas. She would do a portrait of the person who had hurt her once, beyond repair.
With one bold stroke after another she painted. Capturing the rage, the sorrow, the doubt, the fear, the guilt, the joy, the love, and finally, the forgiveness.
It would be her most intimate, most difficult painting yet.
It would be a self-portrait.
Evelyn Lepage sat in her kitchen contemplating the gas oven. Trying to get up the strength to turn it on. But all the bones of her body had finally dissolved. And she couldn’t move. Not to save her life, and not to take it.
Out the window she saw a car pull up. Two elderly people got out.
“We’ve come to take you home, Evie,” came the elderly woman’s thin voice from the other side of the door. It was almost unrecognizable for its gentleness. “If you don’t mind living with a broken-down old poet and her duck.”
Jean-Guy held the phone to his ear and looked out the window of the Gamaches’ study, to the quiet village. Then he turned from the window to the papers, neatly stacked, on his father-in-law’s desk.
All the offers. The answer to “What next?” was in there.
And then the phone was answered.
“Oui, allô?” came Annie’s cheerful voice.
“Armand,” said Reine-Marie, as they finished the breakfast dishes. “Are you ever going to tell me what John Fleming did?”
Armand put the dish down and dried his hands on the towel.
“What John Fleming did is in the past. It’s over, gone.”
She studied him closely. “Is it?”
“Oui. But if, after this phone call, you still want to know about Fleming, I’ll tell you.”
Reine-Marie turned around and saw Jean-Guy in the doorway holding out the phone. She took it, perplexed. And listened.
As the two men watched, the lines of her face re-formed, and her eyes filled with wonder. And all thought of John Fleming, of the Supergun, of the Whore of Babylon vanished, overwhelmed by a far greater force.
Reine-Marie looked at Jean-Guy, who was overcome with emotion. Then she turned to Armand, who was smiling, his eyes glistening. Then Reine-Marie sat down at the old pine table, and wept.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Gerald Bull was a real man, a scientist, Canadian, an arms designer. I first came across his remarkable story in the mid-1990s when I worked as the host of a current affairs radio program for the CBC. My producer at the time, Allan Johnson, mentioned this man who’d built a massive gun called Baby Babylon right on the border with the United States, in Québec’s Eastern Townships. It was, he said, the largest effin (Allan is a great journalist with a vast vocabulary) missile launcher in the world. And it was pointed into the United States.
It was believed that Gerald Bull was building this missile launcher, called Project Babylon, for Saddam Hussein, as the Iraqi dictator edged toward a regional war.
According to reports, Baby Babylon was built but did not work. It was a failure. But Gerald Bull was not put off, and there were rumors in the arms community that Project Babylon was actually two missile launchers, not one. There was a brother to Baby Babylon, called Big Babylon. This was a missile launcher so massive it would make the first one look puny. And all the problems of Baby Babylon had been solved.
Big Babylon would work. It would fire a missile into low Earth orbit. The West was not happy. A weapon of that sort could not fall into the hands of an unstable dictator.
In early 1990, Gerald Bull was murdered in Brussels. Five bullets to the head—though, true to his life, even the manner of his death is mysterious. His killers were never found, though they were rumored to be Mossad, the Israeli enforcers.
Dr. Bull’s life, his work, his death, was a sort of open secret at the time, though not well known outside a certain circle. With time, more and more information has come out.
Where we live, in Québec’s Eastern Townships, many people remember the man, and many worked on the huge missile launcher. Indeed, my assistant Lise’s husband, Del, drove us to the site of Baby Babylon, still fenced and chained.
Such was the power of the man that people hereabouts are not anxious to talk about him or his gun even now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LOUISE PENNY is the #1 New York Times and Globe and Mail bestselling author of ten previous Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels. She has won numerous awards, including a CWA Dagger and the Agatha Award (five times), and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. She lives in a small village south of Montréal.
Visit her on Facebook or at www.louisepenny.com or sign up for email updates here.
The Long Way Home
How the Light Gets In
The Beautiful Mystery
A Trick of the Light
Bury Your Dead
The Brutal Telling
A Rule Against Murder
The Cruelest Month
A Fatal Grace
Still Life
Excerpts from “A Sad Child” and “Waiting” from Morning in the Burned House: New Poems by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1995. Published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company in the United States. Used with permission of the author and her publishers (in their respective territories) and the author’s agent, Curtis Brown Group Ltd., London, acting on behalf of Margaret Atwood. All rights reserved.