émile finally blinked. His eyes felt dry as though they’d been sandblasted and he took a deep breath.
He knew the rest of the story, of course, from calls to Reine-Marie and visits to the hospital. And the Radio-Canada news.
Four S?reté officers killed, including the first by the side of the road, four others wounded. Eight terrorists dead, one captured. One critically wounded, not expected to survive. At first the news had reported the Chief Inspector among the dead. How that leaked out no one knew. How any of it leaked out no one knew.
Inspector Beauvoir had been badly hurt.
émile had arrived that afternoon, driving straight from Quebec City to H?tel-Dieu hospital in Montreal. There he found Reine-Marie and Annie. Daniel was on a flight back from Paris.
They looked wrung out, nothing left.
“He’s alive,” Reine-Marie had said, hugging émile, holding him.
“Thank God for that,” he’d said, then seen Annie’s expression. “What is it?”
“The doctors think he’s had a stroke.”
émile had taken a deep breath. “Do they know how bad?”
Annie shook her head and Reine-Marie put her arm around her daughter. “He’s alive, that’s all that matters.”
“Have you seen him?”
Reine-Marie nodded, unable now to speak. Unable to tell anyone what she’d seen. The oxygen, the monitors, the blood and bruising. His eyes closed. Unconscious.
And the doctor saying they didn’t know the extent of the damage. He could be blind. Paralyzed. He could have another one. The next twenty-four hours would tell.
But it didn’t matter. She’d held his hand, smoothed it, whispered to him.
He was alive.
The doctor had also explained the chest wound. The bullet had broken a rib which had punctured the lung causing it to collapse and collapsing the second. Crushing the life out of him. The wound must have happened early on, the breathing becoming more and more difficult, more labored, until it became critical. Fatal.
“The medic caught it,” the doctor said. “In time.”
He hadn’t added “just,” but he knew it to be the case.
Now the only worry was the head wound.
And so they’d waited, in their own world of the third floor of H?tel-Dieu. An antiseptic world of hushed conversations, of soft fleet feet and stern faces.
Outside, the news flew around the continent, around the world.
A plot to blow up the La Grande dam.
It had been a decade in the planning. The progress so slow as to be invisible. The tools so primitive as to be dismissed.
Canadian and American government spokesmen refused to say how the plan was stopped, citing national security, but they did admit under close questioning that the shootout and deaths of four S?reté officers had been part of it.
Chief Superintendent Francoeur was given, and took, credit for preventing a catastrophe.
émile knew, as did anyone who’d had a glimpse inside the workings of major police departments, that what was being said was just a fraction of the truth.
And so, as the world chewed over these sensational findings, on the third floor of H?tel-Dieu they waited. Jean-Guy Beauvoir came out of surgery and after a rocky day or so, began the long, slow climb back.
And after twelve hours Armand Gamache struggled awake. When he finally opened his eyes he saw Reine-Marie by his side, holding his hand.
“La Grande?” he rasped.
“Safe.”
“Jean-Guy?”
“He’ll be fine.”
When she returned to the waiting room where émile, Annie, her husband David and Daniel sat, she was beaming.
“He’s resting. Not dancing yet, but he will.”
“Is he all right?” Annie asked, afraid yet to believe it, to let go of the dread too soon in case it was a trick, some jest of a sad God. She would never recover from the shock of being in her car, listening to Radio-Canada and hearing the bulletin. Her father . . .
“He will be,” said her mother. “He has some slight numbness down his right side.”
“Numbness?” asked Daniel.
“The doctors are happy,” she assured them. “They say it’s minor, and he’ll make a full recovery.”
She didn’t care. He could limp for the rest of his days. He was alive.
But within two days he was up and walking, haltingly. Two days after that he could make it down the corridor. Stopping at the rooms, to sit by the beds of men and women he’d trained and chosen and led into that factory.
Up and down the corridor he limped. Up and down. Up and down.
“What are you doing, Armand?” Reine-Marie had asked quietly as they walked, hand in hand. It had been five days since the shooting and his limp had all but disappeared, except when he first got up, or pushed too hard.
Without pausing he told her. “The funerals are next Sunday. I plan to be there.”
They took another few paces before she spoke. “You intend to be at the cathedral?”
“No. I intend to walk with the cortege.”
She watched him in profile. His face determined, his lips tight, his right hand squeezed into a fist against the only sign he’d had a stroke. A slight tremble, when he was tired or stressed.
“Tell me what I can do to help.”
“You can keep me company.”
“Always, mon coeur.”
He stopped and smiled at her. His face bruised, a bandage over his left brow.
But she didn’t care. He was alive.