“Are the plans there?” she asked immediately. “The firing mechanism?”
“I don’t know yet, I just discovered it.”
Brian had come over and was standing next to Gamache. He reached out for the framed photograph but Gamache stopped his hand.
“We’ll be over right away,” said Lacoste. “Don’t touch anything.”
It was out before she realized what she’d said.
“We’ll try not to,” said Gamache, eyeing Brian.
“I’m sorry, patron,” said Lacoste. “Of course you won’t.”
After he’d hung up, Gamache asked Brian if he could point out which props had been there for a while and which ones might be new.
Brian took his time, pointing to, but not touching, the pen set, the photo, some books, some bric-a-brac.
When he finished, he turned back to Armand. “Did I hear you say Antoinette put these things out? That they belonged to her uncle?”
“She must have,” said Armand. “The books were suggestive, but that photograph puts it beyond doubt. How about this?” Armand motioned to the ornament that had first caught his attention. Brian had pointed it out as something he’d never seen before. “Are you sure this isn’t from your props department?”
Brian gnawed on his lower lip. “Pretty sure. It’s kind of memorable, isn’t it?”
It was that, Gamache agreed. And it was manufactured to be just that. Memorable. He was certain it hadn’t been on the stage when he’d visited Antoinette a few days earlier. He’d have remembered.
It was, after all, a souvenir. Bending closer, he came eye to eye with the statue. It was small and tacky and cheap. He knew because he’d bought one himself, but not for himself. Or Reine-Marie.
They’d bought one each for their granddaughters when last they’d visited Paris. They’d taken the girls for a weekend away, to give Daniel and Roslyn time on their own.
In a series of clear images, Armand saw little Florence and her littler sister Zora in front of the Eiffel Tower. In the Luxembourg Gardens. At a laiterie with dripping ice cream cones.
Then little Florence and littler Zora on the train à grand vitesse, the TGV, in profile, side by side, looking wide-eyed out the window, the French countryside zipping by at great speed as they hurtled toward Belgium.
And then little Florence and her littler sister Zora pointing to and laughing at the little bronze boy, peeing into the fountain in Brussels. The famous statue was called the Manneken Pis, which was also greeted with hilarity. Grandpapa had told them the story of the baby prince who, legend had it, in 1142 had peed on his enemies from a tree during battle. Legend also had it that somehow this act had led to victory. If only the arms dealers knew it wasn’t arms that won a war.
The girls were so taken with the story and the silly statue that they’d pleaded for their own from a souvenir stand. It proved a little embarrassing to explain to their parents how the girls could have gone to the beautiful city of Brussels and their only memory, their only souvenir, was of a peeing boy.
But Gamache now remembered something else from that trip. They’d taken the girls to the Atomium, a huge reproduction of an atom, shepherding in the atomic age. It was possible to go inside, to visit rooms, to look out the windows, and to travel up and down on the quite singular, indeed unique, escalators.
And that’s what Reine-Marie had remembered when looking at the picture of the scientists.
Once again Armand brought the photograph from his pocket and stared at it. Had there been a chair under him, he’d have sat. In his mind he replaced the three scientists with two teary, weary and bored girls and an exhausted Reine-Marie. At the top of the escalator. This escalator. At the Atomium.
That was where the photograph was taken. At the Atomium. This picture placed Guillaume Couture in Brussels with Gerald Bull. Proving he’d stayed on to work with Dr. Bull while Project Babylon was being developed.
Anyone familiar with Gerald Bull’s career, and the Atomium, would have seen that too.
* * *
Beauvoir and Lacoste arrived a few minutes later and Gamache showed them the new items on the stage set.
“Brian confirms these pieces weren’t here before,” said Gamache. “And they certainly weren’t out when I was here last week.”
“Where is he?” asked Beauvoir, unpacking his forensics kit and putting on gloves.
“He’s gone downstairs to the greenroom, to be alone.”
He also told them where the picture had been taken.
“Brussels,” said Beauvoir, pausing in his search of the books. “Where Bull was murdered. But when Bull was murdered?”