Come, Barbarians (10 page)

There were five of them, at least. Between five and seven. Heavy and inelegant steps. They were amateurs. Rue Santeuil was not lively at this
hour, in the mist and the fog. He closed his umbrella. It would be in the way. At her door Kruse was relieved; the men remained at a distance. So far he could only see the outlines of them, their slick jackets. They too had closed their umbrellas.

“Monsieur, I will use my free moments to research this. First, to discover the identity of the anonymous source. I shall go where that leads me.”

“Thank you.”

“If I find nothing, please know …”

“I know. It’s very kind, Madame Laferrière.”

She returned his jacket and kissed him once on each cheek, lingering a moment on each side. The two glasses of wine had opened one of the windows between a strange man and a strange woman in France. With a good night, she was through both sets of doors and gone. He remained with his back to them, watched her wait for the elevator. Her ankles were bare, below her dress and her jacket. The elevator arrived and she turned to him again and waved and stepped inside.

It smelled faintly of fish on the street, a maritime rather than a restaurant smell. The men were on the Sorbonne side, still in a group. Their steps were even heavier now, cavalier; they knew he knew. He walked northeast, toward Jardin des Plantes. They crossed the street, in behind him, and he turned and walked backwards for a moment as they sped up, as they began the transition from a walk to a run. The ugly Russian with the knife was among them, walking with a cigarette in his mouth.

The Great Mosque of Paris was across the street, a white wall designed with castle ramparts, a minaret. He had been in there once; a client had said the best tagines on the continent were served inside—chicken and prunes and nuts over rice, he remembered well. His stomach stirred. Annette had already eaten something with her daughter, Anouk—a new name for him, Anouk—so she had not been hungry. Eating in front of her had not seemed correct and he was hungry now, walking
briskly through the smell of slow-cooked meat. Tzvi would remind him to focus: every fight is a fight to the death.

He turned right, under a stone arch and into Jardin des Plantes. Now they ran. The gardens were lit up by flat yellow lanterns. “
Voleur!
” one of them called out behind him, with that accent.

The park was nearly deserted but not quite.

A bearded man in a sweatsuit, a vigilante jogger, stood waiting for Kruse in a splash of yellow light as he sprinted over the crushed gravel. Kruse dodged him and turned left, past the tulip field empty of tulips, and into the menagerie, which was closed for the night. Two men in suits stood in a clearing ahead, guards of some sort, so he stopped running and ducked into a grove of trees. The five who had been chasing him ran past and split up, turning around and cursing him. He was among the noisy animals now and the trees.

The ugly Russian who had stepped out of the car with the knife said nothing. One of the others spoke to the guards, who shrugged and did that thing with their lips that Frenchmen do before they say something other than yes.
“Mais non, Monsieur.”

Kruse moved through the trees, watching them and then watching him. Others had moved east, deeper into the park, toward the Seine. The ugly Russian lit a cigarette and walked past the orangutan enclosure. It smelled of wet cedar, an unplaceable scent from his childhood. When they were far enough from the guards and the others, Kruse stepped out of the cedars.

The last time he was in Paris he woke up early each morning and ran through either Luxembourg Gardens or Jardin des Plantes. He sprinted in a direction he knew well, to the modest labyrinth of shrubbery leading to the gazebo at the top of the hill—the garden’s small, open-air observatory—and hid in a bush.
Cache-cache.
There is no translation for “ready or not, here I come.” Lily would say, “
J’arrive!
” The Russian ran up the circular path toward him, alone. By the time he reached the
top of the little hill the Russian was breathing heavily, a cigarette still in his hand.

In one motion Kruse jumped out and kicked him in the stomach. The Russian bent and stumbled and fell backwards, heaving. The path and the gazebo up top were clear of observers. Kruse checked him for weapons and found two knives, the one he had been twirling on the street and another in his waistband. Kruse pocketed them.

“No gun, Monsieur?”

The Russian flailed for air like an overturned beetle. Kruse put his knee on the man’s neck and torqued his arm. No matter how far he turned it, the Russian did not cry out.

“Who is paying you?”

Nothing.

“Who do you work for? The Front National?” He switched to Russian. “Why are you doing this?”

Kruse lifted his knee, to let him respond. The Russian dragged up some phlegm and spit at him.

Tzvi had a theory: to torture a good man is pointless. It will suck the humanity out of you, if you try anyway, and haunt your nights and turn you grey. But a man without honour will always talk. He had trained Kruse in the strategies and techniques, thoughts to think as your man screams and writhes, lies first and then tells the truth. The Russian seemed bewildered not by the substance of the questions but that they had been asked at all. Kruse did not break his arm or put a blade in his spleen or threaten to dig his eye out with a dirty index finger. There was only one thing to do but he had never done it. In the distance there were footsteps, a soft conversation. Kruse stood up off him, released him.

The Russian wiped the mud from his jeans.
“Lâche,”
he said, and fixed his tiny blue eyes on Kruse.

Coward.

It was a one-storey drop to the street.

He walked up into the fifth arrondissement. When had it started to rain again? Where had he left his umbrella? The Great Mosque was open for dinner. If he had run for her or if they had left Villedieu at six o’clock, six thirty at the latest, they would be eating here some night before Christmas. Kruse would ask for a booster seat, though Lily now insisted she was too big for that.

He could not sleep at the Champ de Mars so he walked north across the river and stopped at a dark and smelly brasserie near Gare de Lyon, and ordered soup. A mother and father ate with a toddler at the next table over. There was some commotion, a squeal and a laugh, so the mother pulled down the boy’s pants and the father had him piss into one and then another empty wine glass as though it were the most delightful thing that had ever happened.

At the station he bought a first-class ticket south, and the moment after the train departed he walked from one end of it to the other, car to car, looking for Russians and aristocrats and Vichy men and Evelyn. When he found none of them he reclined his chair and closed his eyes. He did not sleep for long, a little more than an hour, with a knife in his hand. He dreamed: he is splashing in the Ouvèze river with Lily and Evelyn on some hot day, and then the flood comes. He swims as hard as he can, but they twirl helplessly away from him and into the night water. All he can do is float.

THE FRONT DOOR OF THE HORSE STABLE WAS OPEN. KRUSE CREPT IN
and knew immediately that whoever had been inside had gone. Every drawer was emptied onto the floor. Paper and utensils and broken tchotchkes were on the tile, with cushions and pillows and the linens from the daybed. The remaining pieces from Lily’s tea set were broken. He knew it was pointless, but he ran out and around the corner to the commercial route, Avenue Jules Ferry. The shops were open and pedestrians were about in their sunglasses, but none of them had just broken into his house.

Kruse inspected upstairs, the master bedroom and Lily’s room. The intruders had gone through the folder of paperwork but had not taken anything, no bank or insurance documents, criminal record checks, social insurance numbers or customs declarations. Nothing was missing, not even her least favourite scarf sprayed with perfume.

Lieutenant Huard came alone. “They often find you, people like you, by your rental cars. It’s in the licence plate numbers.”

“They didn’t break into the car.”

He shrugged. “Money?”

“None.”

“Liquor?”

“The de Mussets had some bottles of pastis in the cupboard.”

“Not taken?”

“And we had no exciting painkillers. They might have stolen the television set, or the old stereo system, but they didn’t bother.”

“You were right not to leave any money lying around.”

“They weren’t looking for money, Monsieur Huard.”

The lieutenant crossed his arms. He hadn’t taken out his notepad.

“What were they looking for?”

Instead of answering, Kruse tidied the room.

“What are you reporting missing?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you reporting?”

“I wanted you and Madame Boutet to see this, to know. Evelyn’s innocent. They’re after her.”

“They.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps it was your wife who did this. Have you received correspondence?”

“No.”

“Not even a phone call?”

“No.”

“
C’est des conneries.
”

“If she had phoned, Monsieur Huard, would I be here? Or would I be with her? Protecting her?”

“Can you imagine why someone would break into your house and steal … nothing?”

“I’m not a policeman.”

“What were they looking for?”

“Monsieur Huard, if you were to break into this house, today, you, the gendarme …”

“Yes.”

“What would you look for?”

“I’m a special case.”

“Why?”

“Because I have an interest in finding your wife.”

“And so …”

“So I might seek traces of her. Postcards, a phone number lying on or in a desk.”

Kruse tucked the covers around the daybed and replaced the pillows. He picked up the papers and brochures, all of them designed to help de Musset tenants find markets, routes, and pretty things in Northern Provence. He picked up the pieces of his daughter’s tea set and just held them, light and cool.

Monsieur Huard watched him and then he looked away. “Did you have a postcard in here? A phone number?”

“No.”

Monsieur Huard grasped Kruse by the arm and pulled him out of the horse stable and onto Rue Trogue-Pompée. It was a cool morning but the Atlantic storm had not followed him south. The sky was blue and clear and the dewy town smelled of cypress. A travel group of retired Brits in safari colours and hats were making their way along the black fence. The lieutenant waited until they approached the fence, smiled at each one and said, in his heavy accent, either “Hello” or “Welcome to Vaison-la-Romaine” in English. A guide spoke to them of Emperor Hadrian, who had been here in the Vaucluse. There were bigger towns in the area, like Arles and Orange, but this is where the super rich had lived. Some of the most luxurious houses in the Roman world were here. Why here? No one could say.

When the tourists were gone, the lieutenant’s smile disappeared. He whispered, “Someone is hunting your wife.”

“Yes.”

“Who, Monsieur Kruse?” The lieutenant seemed to like saying his name: Kruse-uh.

“I don’t know yet. The Front National?”

“Anything more from your Russians?”

Kruse told him about his encounter in Jardin des Plantes.

“You may be inventing this.”

“I may be.”

“So what, you think they work for the Front National?”

“Maybe they work for you.”

“We can’t pay ourselves, let alone mercenaries. Russians. I don’t understand. Your wife knew Russians?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Why break into the house, Monsieur Huard?”

He fussed with his moustache. “Maybe you messed up your own place, to create a mystery, to throw me off your wife’s trail.”

“And where are you, precisely, on the trail?”

The lieutenant looked out over the ruins. He took in two deep breaths, like a yogi, and sighed them out. “I’ve been told to back off.”

“To back off what?”

“Your wife. The murders.”

“Someone else is handling the case?”

“No one from our bureau. No one from Avignon or Orange or Arles.”

“What does that mean, Monsieur Huard?”

He pulled out a box of Gitanes and offered one to Kruse, who didn’t have to decline. “I’m just offering to be polite. I know the food you buy, the drinks you order, the paths you walk. Where you run up the hill, to the château, and where you do your ridiculous sit-ups and push-ups.” He lit a cigarette and pulled a speck of tobacco from his mouth.

“Who told you to back off?”

“My captain. But someone told him, the squadron leader I suppose. Maybe the colonel told him. And who told the colonel? One of the generals? Who told the general? Why?”

Together they leaned over the black fence.

“It’s older than the revolution, the Gendarmerie nationale. Before the revolution they called it the marshalcy. You know why it wasn’t disbanded? Even Napoleon just renamed it. You might say it’s because we’ve always been devoted to law and order. That’s what they tell you in school. The real reason is we’re fickle. We’re agnostic. We’re natural collaborators. We follow the leader. If you tell us to do something, and you’re more powerful than we are, we’ll do it. It doesn’t matter why, not really. I can ask why all I like but it’s insubordination to ask it of anyone but myself. Or perhaps you.”

“What do we do?”

“There is no ‘we,’ Monsieur Kruse.”

“Help me, Monsieur Huard.”

“I’m not married. I was married but I was no good at it. No kids. Most of my old friends are either dead or moved on, even the ones who still live around here. I’m nearly sixty. This is all I have.”

The gendarme remained at the fence for a long time, without another word. Then he patted Kruse on the back, turned right, and limped slowly up the cobbled street toward the gendarmerie. Kruse watched him go and then he went back inside to face the mess of the horse stable alone.

In Paris his clothes had been rained on and slashed with mud. He emptied his pockets upstairs, in front of the mirror of their foreign bedroom, and found the looping, handwritten call number for a magazine article about noselessness.

The library in Vaison-la-Romaine was in a complex called La Ferme des Arts, next to the swimming pool, on a street named after a poet. He had been here at least once a week with Lily, reading Astérix books. Evelyn found them too violent and disapproved, so it was a bit of
father-daughter intrigue. The library had a sunny outdoor courtyard; they would stack pillows on the stone bench and cuddle.

“
À
l’attaque!
” the Gauls scream.

“À l’attaque!”
Lily screams, and looks around to see if anyone apart from Papa heard, and nuzzles into him.

It was a small library but it did keep several years’ worth of popular periodicals. The librarian was dressed for a night at the symphony, in a long red dress and white scarf, though it was not yet eleven in the morning. She led him to the call number. The correct edition of
Le Figaro
magazine, from February 1992, was near the bottom of the pile.

“You’re the Canadian. The man who …”

“Just a curious man.”

She tilted her head. “Well. I am pleased they are still making curious men.” She wished him luck and left him to his magazine.

There was no one else in the library. He sat at a small table and leafed slowly through
Le Figaro.
It was a small, blurry photograph near the end of the magazine, in a section of miscellaneous feature news events. A funeral in Marseille. Two men were at the front of an entourage, carrying the casket of Paul Mariani, who had died of a heart attack in a seafood restaurant on the port. Kruse recognized the man on the left: Joseph Mariani. He was the athlete who had been watching him, in the navy blue suit, from the bleachers of the ancient arena in Orange. On the other side of the casket was a noseless man named Lucien Mariani.

He nearly toppled a stack of newspapers as he ran to the startled librarian’s desk. “Who are these people?”

The librarian looked down, up at Kruse again, and down again. “What do you mean, Monsieur?”

“The Mariani family. Who are they? It doesn’t really say. They’re famous enough to be in a magazine, evidently, but how? Why?”

“The Mariani family is the Mariani family.”

“And who are they?”

“Corsicans.”

“That’s it? Corsicans?”

The librarian looked around. There was no one else in the library. She whispered, “You honestly don’t know?”

She led him into the stacks and pulled a paperback book from the non-fiction section. It was called
Le milieu: les parrains corses.

“
Le milieu?
”

“Read the book, Monsieur.”

It only took an hour with the book, as an entire chapter was devoted to
la famille
Mariani.

They were not like the mafia he grew up with.
Le milieu
, in the South of France, was a web of quiet and polite men. Where gangsters in Montreal and Toronto were ostentatious, like their cousins in New York and Chicago, like the movie versions of themselves, dating supermodels and showing up on the front covers of gossip magazines, the Corsican was invisible. He gained more from subtlety than from shouting about how many chicks he banged last night—one of the quirks of a semi-retired Mafioso who had hired Kruse and Tzvi in Montreal. The traditional French gangster was the man in the Mini-Casino supermarket at lunchtime, wearing a baby blue sweater tied over his white Lacoste shirt, buying a tub of yogurt and a bit of dried sausage.

There was an epilogue at the end of the book, about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A British documentary had demonstrated that the Guérini and Mariani crime families, originally from Corsica and now operating in Paris and Marseille, had been approached about the contract to kill the American president in the early sixties. At that time, the head of the family was Paul Mariani, the father of the noseless one and the aristocrat. Kruse made two photocopies of the page and ran to Cours de Taulignan. The woman in uniform behind the counter at the gendarmerie said Lieutenant Huard had gone to Avignon. Kruse circled the photograph and in the margin he wrote, “Two of the men looking for Evelyn.” He kindly asked the woman for an envelope, put the page inside, sealed it carefully, and wrote, “Huard: confidential” on the front.

At the post office he sent the other photocopy to Annette at
Le Monde.

He bought a new lock system for the horse stable at the hardware store on Place Montfort, and installed it. He picked up everything that had been thrown to the floor, folded the clothes, and trashed the paper. He mopped the floor with a touch of chlorine and remembered trips to the Wallace Emerson Centre with Lily, who was nervous in crowded swimming pools, of the strange echo of eighty kids swimming in bleach-water. If Evelyn were to come back he wanted her to feel welcome in the horse stable, to appreciate what was left of its beauty. At six he phoned the gendarmerie and asked for Huard: he was back but too busy to speak, unless it was an emergency.

A man without a nose stood over him, breathing through his mouth. He wore a dark suit and a dark tie.

“Is he awake?” whispered a second man, in shadow.

The noseless man did not respond. Without looking at a clock, Kruse guessed it was midnight. He interrupted his body’s natural response—panic. He relaxed his breathing and his thoughts. He was at work again and it came with a rush of pleasure. It would take ten to thirteen seconds to subdue the noseless man, Lucien Mariani, in absolute silence. But he could not hurt the man, even this man, unless it was in self-defence. There was another, a man in shadow.

“I have a gun, Christopher.”

In the instant between this warning and the noseless man’s first movement, there was only one response: blind him and dart out of the room, forcing the other to hunt him in a house he knew well. There was something in the noseless man’s hand, a baton of some sort, and a wire. Kruse moved but it was too late. It came with a hum and a blast of light, sizzling on his chest. Every muscle in him flexed and
locked, and the headache threatened to explode. He had been electrocuted before, by Tzvi. This lasted longer. He was hot and then cold, an instant fever. It had immobilized him then and it immobilized him now. The noseless man, grunting through his open mouth, hot mouth, turned him over and bound his wrists. He yanked him over, onto his back again, and turned on the bedside lamp.

A man in a stylishly cut black suit and pressed white dress shirt, with no tie, sat in a dining room chair in the corner of the bedroom. Joseph Mariani opened and closed his eyes slowly. If he said anything, in the first while, Kruse did not hear it. He drifted out of and back into consciousness, and the man’s echoing voice solidified.

“Good morning, Christopher.”

It was not midnight. It was shortly after five in the morning. Kruse’s first thought was of a priest or, given the accent, an Anglican minister from Oxfordshire. It took a moment to realize the priest had spoken English. His noseless brother Lucien backed up and stood against the wall between the windows. He held a cattle prod or something like it, a police baton with two metal tips at the end. The baton was attached by wires to a small battery pack Lucien carried over his shoulder like a purse. They would have killed him if they had wanted to kill him. A Glock pistol rested on the priest’s lap. He introduced himself and his brother.