“Home, I guess.” Havoc looked amused by the question.
“We know now that Olivier visited the Hermit late at night. Saturday nights.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right.” The young man’s composure was a little too perfect. A little too practiced, Gamache thought. “But someone else knew about the Hermit. Not just Olivier. There are a couple of ways Jakob could have been found. One was to follow the overgrown horse trails. The other was to follow Olivier. To the cabin.”
Havoc’s smile faltered. “Are you saying I followed Olivier?” The young man looked from Gamache to his parents, searching their faces, and back again.
“Where were you just now?”
“In the woods.”
Gamache nodded slowly. “Doing what?”
“Cutting wood.”
“And yet we heard no saw.”
“I’d already cut it and was just stacking it.” Now the boy’s eyes moved more quickly from Gamache to his father and back.
Gamache got up, walked a couple of steps to the door to the kitchen, bent down and picked something up. He sat back down and placed it on the polished table. It was a wood chip. No. A shaving. It curled back on itself.
“How did you afford this house?” Gamache asked Roar.
“What do you mean?” Roar asked.
“It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The materials alone are worth that. Add in designs and specifications for such an unusual house, then labor? You say you built it about fifteen years ago. What happened then that allowed you to do it? Where’d you get the money?”
“What do you think happened?” Roar leaned in to the Chief Inspector. “You Quebecois, so insular. What happened all those years ago? Let’s see. There was a sovereignty referendum in Quebec, there was a huge forest fire in Abitibi, there was an election in the province. Nothing much else to report.”
The shaving on the table trembled as his words brushed past on their way to Gamache.
“I’ve had it,” Roar said. “God, how can you not know what happened back then?”
“Czechoslovakia broke up,” said Gamache. “And became Slovakia and the Czech Republic. That actually happened twenty years ago, but the impact can take time. Those walls came down, and these ones,” he glanced at the bank of glass, “went up.”
“We could see our families again,” said Hanna. “So many of the things we left behind we could have again. Family, friends.”
“Art, silver, heirlooms,” said Beauvoir.
“Do you think those things mattered?” asked Hanna. “We’d lived without them for so long. It was the people we missed, not the things. We barely dared hope it was real. We’d been fooled before. The summer of ’68. And certainly the reports we were seeing in the West were different from the stories we heard from people back home. Here we only heard how wonderful it was. We saw people waving flags and singing. But my cousins and aunts told a different story. The old system was horrible. Corrupt, brutal. But it was at least a system. When it went they were left with nothing. A vacuum. Chaos.”
Gamache tilted his head slightly at the word. Chaos. Again.
“It was terrifying. People were being beaten, murdered, robbed, and there were no cops, no courts.”
“A good time to smuggle things out,” said Beauvoir.
“We wanted to sponsor our cousins but they decided to stay,” said Roar.
“And my aunt wanted to stay with them, of course.”
“Of course,” said Gamache. “If not people, what about things?”
After a moment Hanna nodded. “We managed to get some family heirlooms out. My mother and father hid them after the war and told us they were to be kept for barter, for bargaining, if things got bad.”
“Things got bad,” said Gamache.
“We smuggled them out and sold them. So that we could build the home of our dreams,” said Hanna. “We struggled with that decision a long time, but finally I realized both my parents would understand and approve. They were only things. Home is what matters.”
“What did you have?” asked Beauvoir.
“Some paintings, some good furniture, some icons. We needed a house more than we needed an icon,” said Hanna.
“Who did you sell them to?”
“A dealer in New York. A friend of a friend. I can give you his name. He took a small commission but got a fair price,” said Parra.
“Please. I’d like to speak to him. You certainly made good use of the money.” The Chief Inspector turned to Roar. “Are you a carpenter too?”
“I do some.”
“And you?” Gamache asked Havoc, who shrugged. “I’ll need more than that.”
