Come, Barbarians (18 page)

Across the newsroom the reporter who had been on the phone spoke to the white-haired woman and then her son, the janitors from Poland. The reporter shook his head and walked over, his right hand balled into a fist. Kruse stood up. He had been to France but not to the country Evelyn had described, not to the South of France, inside a composition by Claude Debussy, where the windows are always open and it always smells of lavender and no one grows old and you are in love and the tomatoes are always ripe. Figs fall from the tree as you pass under it, on your way home from École Jules Ferry, past the cathedral. Your daughter is warm on your shoulders and singing. A bottle has been opened. You will eat outside.

The reporter did not introduce himself. “You stole a notebook.”

“Two notebooks, actually.”

“Put them back on the desk and leave this place, before I call the police.”

Kruse did not have what he wanted, but he did not think he would find it. The reporter was in his fifties, bald and wild-eyed, in a white shirt with visible stains under the armpits, the buttons undone nearly to his belly. On the other side of him, the young Polish janitor looked on hopefully.

“I tricked them.”

“Well, they’re in big trouble, thanks to you.”

Kruse took a step toward the reporter. “No, they aren’t.”

“What are you? Some American thug?”

“I know who you are, Monsieur, and I know where to find you. This is not the janitors’ fault. I tricked them, as I said. I lied to them. I said I was a union representative.”

“What? You showed them a card?”

“Yes.”

“What have you taken?”

“Evidence.”

“I’m phoning the police.”

“Go ahead, please. My name is Christophe Kruse. You can tell them she is innocent and I will soon have the proof.”

“Who is innocent?”

“Remember what I said, about the janitors. Not a word. Or I’ll come for you.”

The mother continued to empty garbage bins, but the son stood in the middle of the newsroom watching. The hope had departed from his face. Kruse lifted his hand to wave, as he stepped around the reporter. Impersonating a janitor, a janitorial manager, a union representative, he had only been caught once before—in the head office of a clothing importer that was about to be taken over by a foreign multinational.

“Kruse?” The reporter smelled sour and peppery, like leftover food that hasn’t been refrigerated.

“You should go home, Monsieur.”

“Oh, that’s right: Kruse. The murder in Vaison.”

Two men entered the newsroom from the elevator, both in uniform.

“I called security.”

Kruse put his hand on the reporter’s shoulder. Close up, his smell was excruciating. “If the guards search me and find the notebooks, I’ll have to hurt them. Do you want that?”

“Son of a whore. You can’t intimidate me.”

This is what Evelyn despised about his work, the truth he could not undo. Some men he knew were overwhelmed by sexual desire. They sneaked out to lap dance clubs and eventually the escort agencies and
whorehouses on nearly every block in downtown Toronto. Aging men with money who did not take care of their bodies and draped them over girls on afternoons they said they were golfing. Sometimes Kruse followed them and made their weakness his strength. His own weakness was this: his hands were hot with a different sort of desire.

Kruse walked toward the guards, into their arms, and called, “I’m sorry,” across the newsroom to the Polish man. He said again, “I’m so sorry. It was the only way.”

“But you’ve ruined me,” he said.

Behind him, the reporter said, “Don’t worry, Jan.”

The security guards, a black man and a white man with mock confidence in their eyes, were not armed. They were not accustomed to this. If they were anything like their counterparts in Canada, they were poorly paid and barely trained. Kruse knew a fighter by his eyes and feet.

“I would prefer to take the stairs.”

The guards looked at one another. “It’s not what you prefer,” said the white man. “Do you want this to be easy, Monsieur, or do you want it to be difficult?”

“The stairs are fine,” said the black man.

Kruse waited for the reporter to mention the notebooks. He half-turned to face him. The reporter looked at Kruse and nodded and walked away, leaving him with the security guards, who would do whatever he asked. In the lobby, when the white man asked for his name, he said “Clint Eastwood” and the man wrote it down.

There was a record store at the train station. He had an hour to wait so he flipped through the selections under
D
in the classical music section and found it: “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.”

THE GENDARMERIE IN VAISON-LA-ROMAINE OPENED AT NINE. THERE
was a buzzer and a handwritten sign about after-hours police protection—for emergencies ONLY. A young man in uniform, with an agonizing crop of acne on his cheeks and forehead, unlocked the door a few minutes after eight and waited until he was behind the desk and in his chair before permitting Kruse to speak to him.

“Yes, Monsieur. How can I help you?”

“I would like to speak with Lieutenant Huard.”

“He is no longer with the force. Sous-lieutenant Boutet has taken over his work.”

The young gendarme picked up the phone and Kruse looked at the fading posters on the wall, imploring Vaisonnais to lock their vehicles at night and to stop drinking and driving. The young man’s voice went from unselfconsciously loud to quiet. Then he turned away from Kruse and whispered, before hanging up the phone.

Kruse put his hand on the door.

“Stop,” said the gendarme, his voice cracking.

The clouds had remained in the north, and the sidewalks of Cours de Taulignan were thick with men and women in sunglasses, with insurance brokers and hair stylists and bureaucrats and butcher’s assistants strolling to work ten minutes late. It was a Monday and the Vaisonnais moved like they were being dragged. Kruse weaved through them and then slipped between two cars, sprinted down the road. No one followed, at least not at first, so he jumped the fence in the post office parking lot into the Roman ruins and ducked into a corner of crumbling stone and cedars.

He watched the horse stable, waiting for a team of police to arrive with a warrant, batons drawn, as they had the morning after she was killed. It was just over two weeks ago—fifteen days—but it felt like either ten minutes or ten years.

They could arrest him for taking the notebooks at
Le Monde.
His encounter with Antoine Fortier was surely harassment by someone’s definition, and he had stolen several cars. No one came, not for more than half an hour, and then when someone in uniform did arrive, it was the postwoman in her shorts, T-shirt, and satchel, half-jogging up the street as she slipped envelopes through door slots and into mailboxes. She delivered something at the horse stable. Eventually the estate of Jean-François and Pascale de Musset would ask him—them—to leave.

The Russian who had been driving the car in Paris, down Villa de l’Astrolabe, stood up from the doorway of the closed jewellery shop, and walked down to the horse stable. He wore jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt with the words “Too Cool for Skool,” in English, whimsically screened on the front. He had not noticed, in Quimper, that the Russian’s steps were crooked, from a slight limp. He may have been anywhere from thirty to fifty-five, but prison had aged him, physically and otherwise. His skin was as grey as a smoked cigarette. At the horse stable he looked around, determined that he was alone, and opened
the mailbox. He pulled out whatever was in there and half-walked, half-jogged, down the path toward the cathedral. Lily’s path to school.

Kruse sneaked across two Roman streets and through a patch of grass, parallel to the Russian. The ruins were a level below the modern street. Kruse jumped and gripped the black fence. His palms slapped the iron bar and alerted the Russian, who ran toward the cathedral.

Kruse was up and over the iron fence, sprinting down the path. It ended at a generous pitch of grass in front of the church. On the left was École Jules Ferry. He could hear her say it as he ran, her first rolled
Rs, Ferry.
The Russian was not a runner. His destination, it seemed, was a municipal parking lot on the other side of the church lawn. The leaves of early November had been raked away. Kruse might have called after him but instead he jumped the slow, miserable Russian next to a small fountain. One warm afternoon, shortly after Lily had started school, Kruse had splashed water from this fountain on his face. Ten minutes later a woman arrived with a black Labrador retriever and washed the dog in the fountain. Kruse asked if this was the place to wash your dog and learned it was, yes, the best by far. It was not for people. He hadn’t used it, had he?

The Russian slammed into the short stone wall of the fountain with the right side of his torso, his ribs exposed. Kruse had trapped the man’s arms as he fell. It was not audible, the ribs cracking, but Kruse felt it as they toppled together. There was no fight: the Russian gasped and flailed, and threw the letters into the fountain in frustration. Kruse fished them out and waited as the Russian rolled to his front, his hands and knees, and tried to breathe. There was a knife in the front pouch of his hoodie. Kruse confiscated it.

“I am sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen, not exactly.”

The Russian’s breathing was poor.

“You should get it checked.” Kruse felt the right side of him. “I punctured a lung that way.”

The Russian tried to stand.

“The hospital’s the way you came, past the jewellery store. I can help you.”

“Fuck you,” he said, in English.

One of the letters was from the consulate, another from Evelyn’s mother, Agnes. There was a postcard with a photograph of Mont Saint-Michel on the front, its wet letters—her letters—fading.

A magic number

Two years before her birth

An October day for you

In three years I will be

“How many days have you been here, stealing my mail? You have more mail somewhere? In your car, maybe, your hotel room?”

A couple walked up the path to the cathedral, arm in arm. Kruse nodded to them. Now the Russian was mumbling, his face in the soil. It would smell of horse chestnuts, wet and dry at once. When they played
cache-cache
on these grounds, Lily had insisted he put his face against something to count. She did not trust him with mere hands over his face, as that was the method of her own cheating. He had smelled plane trees here, and this grass.

The Russian rolled onto his side and extended a hand for help. After reading and hearing Evelyn in the card, he bent the man’s arm and cranked it. “Do you have other postcards, anything, from her?”

“Stop.”

Not
arretez
but “stop,” in English. Lieutenant Boutet stood at the place where the path to the cathedral split. She walked across the grass. Kruse cranked the Russian’s arm and he called out.

“Release him.” She pulled her gun.

“Arrest this man.” Kruse stood up and kicked the Russian over. “He’s been stealing my mail. His partners have attacked me. I’m sure he’s already wanted by the gendarmerie.”

“Of the two of you, only one is wanted. Let’s go, Monsieur Kruse. You lead the way, back to the station. Let’s not advertise anything here: just keep walking at a regular pace, hands at your side.”

“This man works for the Mariani crime family.”

“Not now, Monsieur Kruse.”

“I’m not going.”

Lieutenant Boutet pointed the gun with both hands and aimed. She blew an errant lock of hair from her eyes. “Then I’ll shoot you.”

Kruse followed her directions, back toward Lily’s limestone path. She walked four paces behind him.

“What have I done wrong, Madame Boutet?” Her breaths were quick, as though she had been running. “You’ve been promoted to lieutenant. Congratulations.”

“Stop. Stop talking.”

His Moroccan neighbours were gathered at the place where the pedestrian path transitioned into Rue Trogue-Pompée. Boulders marked the separation. The men stopped speaking. Kruse left the fenceline and walked around them.

“Wait wait wait.” Boutet scrambled to keep her gun on him.

He doubled back and ducked, using his neighbours as a shield. He apologized to them and jumped the fence. Lieutenant Boutet’s voice cracked as she screamed for him to stop. “One warning,” she stuttered, as he broke into a sprint. “Final warning!” He was midway through the uneven remains of the Roman mansion, near the small grove of cypresses, when he heard the first shot. The bullet crashed into the soft stone in front of him.

The Moroccan men shouted after him,
“Allez!”

There were two police cars in the post office parking lot and a gendarme in uniform posted at the tabac and bus station. He looped back to the churchyard and hopped one stone fence and another. Two more shots echoed through the village, not behind him but everywhere. He did not stop running until he was past the graveyard, in the rusty detritus
of a mechanical shop on the west side of the village. He sat between three truck carcasses and went over the number again, her code, longing for a mobile telephone. He longed even more powerfully for the Russian mail thief, for an afternoon with him in a soundproof room.

Three is a magic number. Lily was born at the end of the month, this month, in 1988. Two years before: 1986. His own birthday had just passed, October 27. In three years Evelyn will be thirty-eight.

03 86 27 38

If he could figure it out, they could figure it out. Maybe not the magic number, as they would not have played
Schoolhouse Rock!
in the prisons of Siberia. If the Russian had picked up other postcards with easier codes, he wouldn’t be stealing mail in Vaison. Was three still a magic number? Two didn’t feel remotely magic. Clouds had moved over the village and, with them, a new wind and light rain. No one was in the mechanical shop, but through the window he could see a modern coffee maker and a television set, an open newspaper and bread crumbs. He smashed the window and opened the door. The phone was old-fashioned. Two police cars passed on the departmental highway, and two more. Gunshots and fugitives were uncommon in the retirement communities of the world. He stared at the phone, beige and chipped. He could calm his heart, his muscles, his stomach before a fight. Not now. It was the instant after the Mercedes hit Lily. It was a soft-armed, grey-haired woman from the foreign affairs department at the door to tell him his parents had died in some valley of the Paraguay River.

He dialed the number twice and both times the robot operator asked him for a code. He entered the Paris area code and a half-deaf woman answered. She had never heard of any Evelyn or Agnes. The northwest area code didn’t work either: the picture of Mont Saint-Michel on the postcard was not an obvious clue. The phone book in the mechanical shop was only for Vaison-la-Romaine and the vicinity, no help at all.

Yves Huard was in the Villedieu section of the phone book.

“Where are you?” said the lieutenant.

“Vaison.”

“You’re all over the scanners. There are probably forty gendarmes by now, from all over.”

“Madame Boutet shot at me.”

“We nearly always miss.”

“Why did they fire you?”

“They’re charging you for the de Musset murders. Amandine, Madame Boutet, is working with a detective from Paris.”

“But she knows …”

“What does she know? They’ve made a lieutenant of her. Monsieur Kruse, we don’t get requests and interference from Paris. I’ve been doing this since I was nineteen: not once before. Your story about the man they skinned in Marseille …”

“It was true.”

“When I investigated I was presented with an early retirement package, an honourable but non-negotiable discharge. Something strange and miserable has happened here.”

“I need you to look up a name for me.”

“It’s ruined your life and now it’s ruining mine.”

“He’s involved in this but I don’t know how. He might be Front National.”

“Whatever’s happening here, Monsieur Kruse, it’s too big for the Front National. They can’t tell the Gendarmerie nationale who to promote and who to fire, who to arrest. It’s something else. I can’t even speculate. The Socialists? It makes no sense.”

“Do you believe me now, about my wife?”

“No. And yes.”

“We’ll figure it out together.”

“They won’t take you into custody for long. They’ll find a way to get rid of you. Suicide, I guess. Before it didn’t matter but, whatever you’ve done, it matters now. My professional advice, Monsieur Kruse, is to get the hell out of here. Just hide far away, some old village in the
Auvergne everyone has forgotten. Make up a new name for yourself, say you’re British. The villagers will hate you but they won’t report you as a fugitive.”

“I had this Russian. He’s working for the Marianis. I can speak the language. If we could get him to talk he could lead us to them. We’ll find out why. But Madame Boutet—”

“You don’t understand: I can’t go after anyone. And if this Russian started talking to the police, it’d be the same. There would be an accident. He would trip and fall down several flights of stairs or choke on a bone.”

“It sounds like …”

The lieutenant grunted as he stood up or sat down. “Don’t take a train or a bus. The drivers and security personnel get the bulletins. Steal another car.”

“How did you know?”

“We had some reports. A Fiat, right? It’s what I would do if I were you. Though I wouldn’t have nicked a Fiat. The Italians can’t make a car worth shit. It doesn’t matter what you take, but when you abandon it don’t burn anything or piss on the upholstery. The owner gets the car back and the file is closed. No one even looks. Wait a while, Monsieur Kruse.”

“Christophe, if you like.”

“All right then, call me Yves. It means ‘yew.’ Yew tree. I know what Christophe means. Wait for some of the cops to go home for the day.”

“Will you help me, Yves?”

“You’re a fugitive.”

“Yes.”

“I’m a gendarme, Christophe, even if they don’t want me to be a gendarme.”

“Who are you working for? Who do you protect?”

“Let me think about it.”

“Yves: the name is Philippe Laflamme.”

The non-traditional stagette party, with white wine and kicking ass, was a line of self-defence business dreamed up by Tzvi shortly after his student became his partner. Kruse had officially despised the idea: it was dangerous and messy and no one ever learned a thing. One night in early August 1983, seven women arrived for their stagette package. All but one of them wore matching aerobics outfits, black leotards under something that resembled a one-piece bathing suit in yellow and hot pink. The odd one was Evelyn May, who wore a collared T-shirt buttoned to the top and a pair of her roommate’s grey nursing pants. She had been invited too late to buy into the special outfits. A “pity invite,” she called it.