Come, Barbarians (25 page)

Kruse parried it and tweaked the man’s arm at the elbow. He stiffened and Kruse went for his eyes, then his groin, took the knife and, as he went down, punctured his lower back. The boss shouted at him to stop. Kruse was calmer now than he had been at any time since Lily’s death, moving correctly from man to man in the hallway. There was a trick Tzvi had taught him, to make the world feel like it is operating in slow motion, the speed of a waltz. It was long ago, when he was still a kid, and he received the advice more literally than Tzvi had meant it. When he was fighting, really fighting, he heard his mother’s favourite song: “The Second Waltz” by Shostakovich. Only he, among the dancers, could move faster than the music.

This is how he had planned to feel in the Louvre, in the churches and cathedrals, in the amphitheatres and royal gardens and palaces, on the grand boulevards, in the pretty squares. The boss, who no longer carried a look of confidence, a muscleman with the right kind of salary and the right sort of car, a bully, took a step back.

“Mais attendez,”
said the boss, and turned away in retreat. “Others are coming.”

Kruse jumped up and kicked him in the side of his face. His head clonked against the wall. The man crouched, turtled, asked Kruse to give him a moment. Kruse cranked his big arm and stomped it just
below the shoulder. As the muscleman lay on the floor, spitting and then praying, Kruse kneeled down to ask questions.

Inside the apartment, they knew he had arrived. How many were there? Too many to defeat without a bomb: six in total. The muscleman was the security director, the best of them. Up here and downstairs, their job was to wound the intruder, to take him inside weak and woozy but alive.

“Did they tell you who I was?”

“A Canadian.”

“Did they say why I was coming, Monsieur?”

“The mother and the girl.”

“They’re inside?”

“You can’t get back out, now that you’re in. Not you and not the mother and not the girl. More are on their way. Lucien will make you suffer for this.”

Kruse bled on the security director, who was now recounting the ways Lucien might bring him to suffer.
If you destroy your tea set in your fury, darling, you’ll regret it.

He walked to the door and listened for a few minutes: nothing. He opened it into the smell of fresh herbs.

No one aimed a gun or a knife at him, or greeted him. The long room, with an antique dining table over an elaborate Persian rug, was populated by portraits instead of people. Bushels of herbs and vegetables, presumably from the market below, lay on the table: preparations for a feast. Several bottles of red wine and baskets of fruit and flowers were on adjacent serving tables.

There were voices on the other side of two French doors. It was dark in the long room, as the windows were blocked. Each of the lighted lamps was dearer than any car he had ever owned, and the tapestries were the sorts he had seen in the Rosedale mansions and Upper West Side apartments of his wealthiest clients.

“The Second Waltz” played in this room and through the doors. It was the sound of what he had become when he was fourteen years old. What Evelyn had not wanted him to be. There was no one here so he reached back for the blood and wet his hands with it, both hands and his arms, and called out for them to come. The voices quieted but the music did not. He opened the doors, to do what he had crossed the ocean to do.

Four men stood waiting in a white anteroom. None of them had a gun, so he moved quickly through them. One of the men sliced his left arm with a small knife and another punched him in the mouth while he was finishing the third man. The cut was deep but no more serious than the wound on his head.

The door at the other end of the anteroom was unlocked. He opened it into fire—a fire in a massive old hearth, dark walls.

Anouk ran across the cold room and he fell to his knees for her. She ran into his red arms. Her face was wet and warm with tears. The door slammed behind him. He apologized as he hugged her, for staining her pyjamas.

“Make it stop, Christophe,” she said, into his bloody ear.

“Take the baby away.”

Kruse recognized the voice at the first vowel: a man in the throes of the worst cold of his life.

Lucien stood at the back of the room, farthest from the windows, next to Annette. Annette: naked. Her hands were tied above her and her ankles were bound. She turned her body away from him, as demurely as she could manage. The rope squeaked. She was conscious but something had faded from her eyes.

“Take the girl away from him, Joseph.” Lucien had arranged his cutting tools on a folding table, just as he had in the small white apartment in Marseille. “This isn’t a family reunion.”

Joseph sat in near-darkness, his legs crossed. He wore a dark suit, as always, and a tie. He held a drink aloft, despite the hour. One side of
his face was lit by the fire burning next to him. Slowly he stood and crossed the room. With a few words in French, sweet words, Joseph leaned down and put a hand on her shoulder. That he would bring her here, touch her. Kruse took Joseph’s hand from Anouk, slapped the drink away, and bashed him into the wall, twice.

“Yes.” Joseph did not fight back. “Please.”

Behind and below him, Anouk cried quietly into her hands.

“I’m taking her out of here.”

“Release him or I kill her mother now, Monsieur Kruse.” Lucien spoke softly. “Quicker than I would like.”

There had been a boy in his neighbourhood, P.J. Banks, who suffered a speech impediment. Kruse was not one of the bullies but he had done nothing to stop them. One hot afternoon, as the boy wept on the railroad tracks before a bunch of them, calling out for mercy, Kruse had nearly been overwhelmed by a desire—it had a smell and a taste—to smash his head in with a rock. It was a thump of shame and fullness at once, a war feeling.

He was hugging her again. Kruse told Anouk he loved her and she whispered in his ear that she loved him.

“I’ll protect you.”

“Why are they doing this?”

“Because they’re scared, Anouk.”

“What are they scared of?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I’m scared of him.”

Lucien clapped his hands. “This is all very touching. Now: Monsieur Kruse. Stand up.”

A final kiss on her salty, soft cheek, and he stood.

“Surrender your weapons.”

He pulled the knife from his back pocket, tossed it on the rug.

“Joseph, pull yourself together and take the girl away from him. Now. The two of you, sit.”

Kruse untucked his shirt. With the bloodless side he wiped the tears and the snot from her face and told her she was going away now, with her mom. Back home.

Joseph laughed.

Lucien walked around his table of silver instruments, his hands folded before him like a professor at the beginning of a lecture. He addressed Anouk. “We’re here to bargain, little girl.”

“There’s no bargain,” said Kruse. “They give nothing.”

“You’ve seen how I like to work.” Lucien pulled an instrument from his tray and approached Annette with it. “There would, no doubt, be some pleasure in watching her punished. Even for you. It lives in all of us. We can’t look away.”

“Why should you punish her, Lucien? Punish her for what?”

Annette looked up at her hands and swung, softly.

“No one is innocent.”

“My daughter was innocent. Anouk is innocent.”

Joseph gave up on Anouk and crossed the room, sat back in his chair. He spoke in English. “Just get on with it, Lucien, you fucking lunatic.”

Lucien looked over at his brother, then back at Kruse. “It’s you or it’s this lovely woman.”

Kruse knelt to whisper in Anouk’s ear but there was nothing to say.

“Maman!”

The girl squeezed his hand with both of hers now, hung from it.

“Christopher, who did you tell?” Joseph put his palms together.

“Oh shut up,” said Lucien.

“It never ends. It’s a virus. The maniac will be chopping people up for years.”

Lucien spun the tool he had taken, a scalpel. “I thought I’d take her eyelids first, so she doesn’t miss a thing.”

Anouk screamed. Annette whispered a prayer.

“Cut her down.”

“And? And?”

“Take me.”

“Oh splendid choice! Joseph, tie his hands.”

Joseph sighed and said, “Jesus Christ almighty,” and stood up with his rope. “Is the gendarme dead?”

“Of course he’s dead,” said Lucien.

There were heavy footsteps outside the door, men’s voices. The stirred fire had a familiar odour about it: grape wood. The night Lily died had smelled of this. Kruse pulled his daughter’s blood and soil out of his pockets and kissed his hands. Joseph tied them behind his back. “It was an accident. You must know that.”

Lucien addressed himself to Annette’s wrists, almost giddily.

Annette stepped out of her leg binds and ran across the room to Anouk. They hugged and wept, both of them, and then Anouk told her to get dressed. Annette fastened a skirt into place, first, and turned around to put on her bra and step into her panties.

Joseph untied and restarted Kruse’s knot. “You heard of flunitrazepam? A marvellous drug. He was drinking Badoit, making such lovely, sincere eye contact with me. I told him I was in shipping. Then, when the drug kicked in, Monsieur de Musset was happy to drink wine. He was happy to do anything.”

“You phoned your contacts in the Gendarmerie nationale.”

“I phoned my contact in Paris, who phoned someone else. It was all very innocent, Christopher, I promise. A racist gets a drunk-driving conviction and his political career is over and everyone is happy.”

“An innocent man is ruined.”

“That depends on your politics and sense of history. My father put the family business on hold to kill Nazis. If he and others like him hadn’t, where would we be today?”

“Jean-François was hardly a Nazi.”

“I put him in a car and told him his wife needed him. He had a lot of
women—am I right?—but he did love his wife, deeply. It would have destroyed his political career but not his baking career. It would have weakened a fascist political party.”

“Endeared you to your clients and partners: the government-in-waiting.”

“It’s an easy choice, for me, between Philippe Pétain and Charles de Gaulle.”

“This is different. Jean-François was—”

“All right, all right, all right. Christopher, I mean this: it was the worst night of my life. When I learned the bastard had killed a little girl … there will never be another day I don’t think of it and tear at myself—metaphorically speaking, not really
tearing.
” Joseph stepped away and walked around, faced him. “All right. You’re done.”

“Hurry up,” said Lucien.

“Who knows what you know? The gendarme, but he’s dead. Anyone else?”

“No.”

Joseph pointed at Annette and Anouk. Both of them were looking out the window now, into the market. Annette held her hand and whispered to her.

“I didn’t let the lunatic torture Evelyn. I made him kill her quicker than he wanted. And she
had
cuckolded you. That’s no kind of wife. This one over there, now that’s a woman. You know what? She didn’t even complain. Her hands were up there for … what Lucien? Four hours?”

Instead of responding with words, Lucien walked across the room and did a little hop and kicked Kruse in the stomach. Kruse went down on his knees and stood back up, and Lucien slapped him in the face. Then he did it again, with the back of his hand. Blood from the gunshot wound had transferred to the back of Lucien’s hand and he wiped it on Kruse’s shirt. Then he grasped Kruse’s shoulder with his left hand and punched him in the face, twice, the eye and the mouth. The wound on his forehead opened up. After the first kick, Kruse had refused to fall again. Lucien looked in his eyes and Kruse watched him
watching. He watched himself, bleeding some more, from his mouth and his forehead, his ear, his right cheekbone. His arm throbbed.

“I’m going to kill you, very slowly, and then I’m going to kill her somewhat less slowly.” He spoke English, softly enough that Annette would not hear. “The girl will watch but we won’t kill her. We’re not barbarians.”

Lucien punched Kruse one last time, in the nose. Broken again. He blinked through the blood in his eyes and staggered and more dripped from his chin now.

“Lord,” said Joseph. “What a mess.”

“You’re familiar with the English phrase ‘hanging, drawing, and quartering’?” Lucien backed away, like a lecturer. “The word ‘drawing,’ I had always thought, referred to the drawing out of entrails—which is an important part of what we’ll do this morning, together. But it’s actually drawing the prisoner to the place of execution, through the streets, as a warning to others, publicity. Did you know that? Like I said when we first met: on an occasion like this, if torture is not a deterrent, what is it? Immoral entertainment. Of course, I have no trouble with singularity of purpose. What does art do, really?”

Lucien stood up on the chair and, with his left hand, fussed with the rope. He knotted it into a noose and continued in French. “We don’t have a horse and obviously this space is too small to drag you around. So we’ll go straight to the hanging. First I’ll cut your clothes off or Joseph will. Unless your girlfriend …”

“Girlfriend.” Annette cleared her throat and ordered Anouk to continue looking out the window, to look out the window no matter what. Annette picked up the knife Kruse had dropped, the knife he had taken from the agent in the hall, and gently cut off his jacket and his shirt. She looked in his eyes when she wasn’t at work. There was pity in her face and disgust, more. She transferred the knife to his empty hand.

“Remove his pants. And come on. Take the knife back. Throw it up here, you scamp.”

Annette slowly unfastened his belt, his buttons. She lowered his pants to the ground and went down on one knee and removed them leg by leg. She took off his socks and looked up, took the knife and lobbed it toward Lucien.

He couldn’t take any breath in through his nose. “I am sorry, Annette.”

There were tears in her eyes. He knew it would be difficult to look at him now, with a hood of blood over his face. “You came for us, even though you knew …”