Page 43

Otto Pascal was looking more and more agitated. This was far beyond his understanding, which stopped sometime around 600 BC and the Sack of Thebes.

The twenty-first century was a cipher to the Egyptologist. He studied the Sûreté officer’s face, as though hoping he’d found the Rosetta Stone.

“You’ve arrested the man who took the shots. So why keep digging?”

“Why do you?” asked Gamache. “In case there’s something you missed. In case there’s something else to be found. Like you, we need to be thorough.”

Dr. Pascal was pale and looked like he wanted to sit back down. He also looked like he’d spent most of his life sitting down. Which he had.

As an authority on hieroglyphic literature, when he hadn’t been sitting for the last forty years, he’d been bending over. Some would say backward. Trying to first see, then convince the rest of the world, that such a thing as hieroglyphic literature existed.

Which is to say Dr. Pascal, now President Pascal, believed that some of what had been presumed to be nonfiction accounts of ancient Egyptian lives and events, etched carefully into stone, were actually the ancient equivalent of novels. Mostly thrillers.

Which is to say he’d spent his career, pinned his career, on the ability to turn truth into fiction. Which he seemed desperate to do in this meeting.

“Well, I,” stammered Roslyn. “Yes, I suppose that’s . . . I also design children’s—”

“Clothes for children?” asked Haniya. “Presumably children of the privileged. And what do they cost?”

Roslyn mumbled.

“Sorry, what?” said Haniya.

“Well . . .” Roslyn looked to Clara for help, but her friend and host had been through the wringer herself, several times that morning, and was already deflated.

She’d gotten out of bed partly reluctantly, partly excitedly.

Haniya Daoud, the toast of the Free World, was asleep in the next room.

Except she was not. Clara found her in her studio, going through the oil paintings propped against the wall.

“They’re from an earlier show,” Clara said from the doorway. “I haven’t gotten around to hanging them.”

Haniya, now in a splendid deep green silk caftan, turned to Clara and said, “I can see why not.”

It was then, as her scalp went cold but her cheeks burned, that Clara had composed the text to Myrna, Reine-Marie, Annie, and Roslyn. The SOS. To save her soul from the Asshole Saint.

Now she dropped her eyes to the phone in her lap and sent off a quick message to Myrna.

Where are you?

Sorry. Can’t come.

Can’t or won’t?

Yes.

Bitch, Clara typed and got a smiley face back.

“That’s a beautiful sari you’re wearing,” Annie said.

Roslyn turned a grateful face to her sister-in-law, who’d just distracted the ogre. But Clara suspected there was more to it than that.

It was a subtle rapier thrust, pointing out to Haniya the hypocrisy of criticizing Roslyn while enjoying the fruits of similar labor.

That sari must’ve cost a pretty penny, was probably a gift from a wealthy benefactor, and might even have been made by child laborers in some hellhole sweatshop in India.

“It’s called an abaya,” said Haniya. “It comes from a network of women’s co-ops I formed in Nigeria. It’s funded by a banking system I set up which is also run by . . .”