Come, Barbarians (7 page)

For twenty minutes he walked around the Necker hospital again and focused more carefully, as Evelyn would, on architectural details, on art in bistro windows, on the confident manner of men selling newspapers and chocolate bars.

One mother pushed her son or daughter in a stroller away from the elementary school and leaned down to fix the child’s jacket. The running shoes were as small as plums, lovingly tied with laces in an era of Velcro. The mother, a small, brown-haired woman dressed more for a cocktail party than an afternoon stroll, cooed and clucked and groaned in an almost sexual manner. Kruse allowed himself to think she was flaunting her good fortune. He went back early to Rue Falguière.

“I know I said it was impossible, Monsieur, but she has arrived. Before two!” The receptionist handed Kruse a badge and asked him to fill in his name and phone number, the company he represented. He had done this so many times, in the austere lobbies of Toronto and Montreal and New York, he wrote “MagaSecure” without thinking.

Kruse shared the elevator with two young women who had just applied perfume. The scents gave him a headache that passed when the door opened and he followed them out into the mostly deserted newsroom. Men and women were in offices, along the sloping front windows, but most of the desks were empty. The newsroom was a
massive, open floor with interlocking cubicles. Every desk had a small Apple computer and a few had electric typewriters besides, holdovers of a dying era. Some of the beautiful women he had seen walking down Rue Falguière were here now, sitting at desks with newspapers, making notes, speaking clearly but quietly on the telephone. In the centre of the vastness was the only busy pod on the floor. Four men and two women sat writing or speaking on the telephone as police scanners bleeped in and bleeped out. Voices came and went, squelched away.

One of these women, who had perfected the art of intimidation, looked up as he passed. He asked if he might be directed toward a journalist: Annette Laferrière.

The woman frowned with her mouth but not with her eyes. With her eyes she was delighted. “Madame Laferrière is on this floor, but I don’t know if it’s correct to call her a journalist. Did someone tell you she was a journalist, Monsieur?”

“Not me. She told a man I know.”

“Oh she herself says she is a journalist. Splendid.” The woman stood up and flattened her skirt. Her legs were jarringly thin. She pointed across the newsroom to a cubicle against a grey wall. “That is Madame Laferrière, the great journalist.”

“Thank you.”

“No, no, Monsieur. Thank you.”

Her hair was a dark and curly cascade over the arm that held up her chin as she read. Her skin was the fortunate colour of a lightly roasted nut. She sat hunched over her desk, reading from a long page, with an orange pencil. He stood over her for a moment. There was a hint of her citrus perfume above her: grapefruit. It didn’t give him a headache.

“Madame Laferrière.”

She dropped the orange pencil, startled, and looked up. Kruse could feel people behind him, watching. His voice had been too loud. He had said the wrong thing to the thin woman. He leaned
down now and whispered, “My name is Christopher Kruse. My wife is Evelyn.”

Her eyes opened like a child’s before a surprise birthday cake. She stood up out of her chair. It squeaked and spun away. “What are you … why?”

They shook hands and dealt quickly with pleasantries. Madame Laferrière said she was concerned he might have come here, all the way to Paris, to speak to her.

“The hotelier at the Champ de Mars gave me your name.”

She reached up and slid an errant black curl behind her ear. “It’s not yet two. The boardrooms will be open.”

She led him down the aisle, her colleagues watching, and spoke like a tour guide. She pointed out the political editor, the cultural editor, the international editor, and they walked into the boardroom. She closed the door. One wall was glass and looked out over gloomy Rue Falguière.

“You spoke to Evelyn.”

“Yes.”

“Did she come here, Madame Laferrière?”

“No. No, not at all. She phoned.”

“Why you?”

“I answered the phone.”

“Where was she calling from?”

“A train station in the south. But she was coming here, to Paris, and she wanted to talk about the story. It was wrong, she said.”

“What was wrong?”

“She said the story was wrong. That’s all she said. To be honest, Monsieur Kruse, before I spoke to her I had not read the story. I couldn’t probe.”

“You made an appointment with her.”

“At the hotel, yes. She was using a different name at the hotel, she told me.”

“Agnes.”

“Agnes May.”

“And when you arrived to meet with her …”

“She was gone. Gone since the middle of the night, the hotelier said. Or at least very early in the morning.”

“Have you pursued the story since then, Madame?”

“Yes. Yes and no. I—”

The door opened abruptly, no knock, and startled her. A man in a suit, bald on top but long on the sides and in the back, a classy hobo, stood up military straight and huffed as though he had jogged there. His black shoes, recently shined, were the sort that give a man an extra inch.

“What are you doing, Annette?”

“Monsieur …”

“Who, I wonder, is on the copy desk?”

“Five minutes.”

“And this man?”

“A friend.”

“It is lovely to have friends but this isn’t a bistro. We need you on the copy desk. Speak to your friend on your own time, yes?”

Annette opened her mouth to respond but no sound came out.

Kruse would have been delighted to take a handful of the editor’s preposterous hair and slam his face into his knee. Behind him, the thin woman and a few others stood watching. Proud snitches.

“Unless you’re here because you have a story. Is that the case, Monsieur? You came with a story because Madame Laferrière represented herself as a reporter?”

“No.”

The editor tilted his head and smiled. Even saying the word
non
revealed his foreignness. “Ah, American?”

“Yes.”

Annette had gathered her papers. The editor stepped back so she could pass with short but quick, hectored steps through the door and into the newsroom. He remained close enough, with his haughty smirk, that as he passed, Kruse could smell his coconut shampoo. At Annette’s desk he apologized, not for the editor’s behaviour so much as for the inherent flaws in his gender.

There was a thin layer of moisture in her eyes and still she could not speak. She sat down in front of her computer with defiantly good posture. Her hands trembled. A young man in jeans and a T-shirt dropped some paper in a basket on her desk, his story, and walked away without a word.

Across the newsroom, the editor continued to watch Annette and him. Kruse picked up one of her notebooks and opened it to a blank page. He whispered as he wrote his name: “She is in trouble, and not only police trouble. Did she say anything that might help me find her?”

“I can meet you at the end of the day, Monsieur.”

Annette wrote an address on the back of her business card. Under it, “19h.”

It was no longer raining but the smell of it lingered as he walked out of the lobby and onto Rue Falguière. Cars lined the street and only one of them had passengers sitting in it, a window half-cracked as they smoked. Two large and homely men in a Citroën. There was a tabac and newspaper stand two doors away.

A shiny telephone booth had come with the glassy redevelopment of the newspaper office. Kruse inserted his calling card and dialed Tzvi. Immediately next to the phone was a frame set into the wall, with the words “
À
la une aujourd’hui.
” Yesterday’s
Le Monde
was inside. Kruse had read his own name in it. Tzvi answered breathlessly on the fifth
ring, and the moment he heard Kruse’s voice, for the first time in over six months, he launched a barrage of insults and indecencies—one of his talents.

Tzvi’s official role in his life was business partner. It had not begun that way.

Neither Kruse nor Evelyn had been blessed with a normal family. Her father, Tom, had died shortly after their wedding, of lung cancer; he had worked in an asbestos plant in Quebec in the summers between university semesters. After a brief period of mourning, Evelyn’s mother, Agnes May, dumped all of her old friends and clothes, lost fifty pounds, and took up marathon running.

Mother-daughter relations had soured since the marriage, especially since Tom May’s death, and Kruse—the cause of this discord—had been an unlikely negotiator and peacekeeper. It fit. He was a Mennonite. His people had long been slaughtered, first for their faith and then for their stubborn refusal to slaughter anyone else. One morning in 1977, Allan and Nettie Kruse were on their way to volunteer at a leper hospital funded by the Mennonite Church when their small airplane crashed in fog that had gathered in the valley of the Paraguay River. Losing his parents at seventeen made Kruse the sort of man who declares “I love you” to his daughter three to nine times a day, just in case. He generally defended Agnes, as her attacks were born out of loneliness and sorrow and a variety of middle-aged mental illnesses that ran in the May family as Anabaptism and perhaps palate abnormalities ran in his.

Kruse was not wounded by Agnes and Evelyn’s insinuation that Lily’s imperfect face was his doing; he understood it to be spiritually, if not genetically, true.

On a Wednesday evening when he was fourteen, between Christmas and New Year’s, Kruse tripped a larger, older boy named Matt Gibenus in the middle of a street hockey game. The boy skinned his elbows on the pavement. He roared and stood up and threw Kruse to the ground and, in front of several boys and girls—including one he
fancied—jumped on him. Matt Gibenus trapped his wrists under his plump knees and slowly removed his gloves as Kruse squirmed and bucked, begged and cried. The kids around them called out, some for blood and others for mercy. Matt Gibenus leaned over him and spat in his face and rubbed it in with his thumb. He ordered Kruse to say things and Kruse said them. It wasn’t the pain or the taste in the back of his throat when his nose exploded. It was the feeling of being entirely under someone else’s control, the weakness and helplessness and humiliation. He knew what his parents would have said: submit.

Matt Gibenus had long dirty-blond hair. He wore a Black Sabbath shirt and cussed in the hallway. He hung around the automotive shop. Every day and every night Kruse thought about Matt Gibenus and others like him, out there ready to hold him down and spit on him, make him say things about his mother. The stories Allan and Nettie told at the kitchen table were stories of unfairness, of elevating moral victories above physical defeat and destruction. Kruse grew to despise these stories. He studied self-defence schools in the Yellow Pages the way other boys sneaked porn magazines and found one far from his neighbourhood. It was not a popular sport like karate or tae kwon do or judo.

Krav Maga was the hand-to-hand combat system of the Israeli army. He walked into the studio and felt it was more home than home. The white and black walls, the smell of bamboo, the punching bags and gloves and mats, rubber knives and pellet guns answered a question he had been carrying around ever since the evening Matt Gibenus broke his nose.

The bald man in a tight military T-shirt told Kruse to come back when he was eighteen. He did not like children and he could not teach children. But Kruse would not leave. He watched the bald man train for ten minutes, kicking and punching and sneaking about, sweating, stalking himself in the mirror.

“Go,” said the bald man, when he stopped.

“No.”

“I told you …”

“But I’m not a child.”

“No?” The bald man bent over, panted. “All right. Come over here.”

Kruse remembered he was a child. This compact man terrified him. He was unlike any schoolteacher or soccer or hockey coach he had ever encountered.

“Prepare yourself,” said the bald man.

Kruse was in the middle of asking for a clarification—”Pardon?”—when the man slapped him in the face. A whip cracked inside his head. His eyes went hot and burst with tears. He backed away.

“Prepare yourself.”

“Wait, wait. How?”

The man moved in quickly and swept Kruse’s feet out from under him. He preferred this to the slap in the face, but he hadn’t expected it and he landed on his right elbow.

“Prepare yourself.”

Kruse stood up, lifted his hands. Far from his parents, at a friend’s birthday party, he had seen
Enter the Dragon.
He did what he remembered Bruce Lee doing. This time, the bald man stepped forward and kicked him in the stomach. Kruse fell and gasped and rolled about until the air came back.

It took some time to recover, for the panic to subside. All he wanted now was to admit his childishness, the stupid dominion of Matt Gibenus, and return to his warm bedroom. But he stood again and lifted his hands, this time aware the bald man could attack his legs, his abdomen, or his face. Somehow he had to protect all three.

“Prepare yourself.”

This time, instead of waiting for the next attack, Kruse stepped in with a swing. He had seen boxing on television but he had not really paid attention: he led with a wild roundhouse punch. The bald man dodged it. Kruse chased him in a semicircle, kicking and swinging.
Eventually, the bald man stopped hopping away and Kruse slammed into him, this rock of an ageless, happy man. He went for a clinch, a wrestling takedown. In gym class, wrestling was his best sport.

He could not budge him. With a
whoosh
the man tossed Kruse to the bright wood floor.

“All right, boy,” he said, in his thick accent. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“You have money, for classes?”

“No.”

“Your parents?”

“No.”

The bald man, Tzvi Meisels, leaned over and slapped him again, this time on the other cheek.

Allan and Nettie Kruse were outraged he would seek out and fold violence into his life, and they warned him of the consequences for his soul and for his humanity. When he argued that in learning to fight he would avoid fights—rhetorical advice Tzvi had given him—they pointed out the flawed logic of deterrence, which hadn’t done much to prevent the proxy wars in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America. They could go on and they did, nightly, passive-aggressively, academically, the default mode of frustrated Mennonites. They brought ministers and theologians home for dinner, for philosophical and scriptural backup. Eventually, disappointed and dishonoured, they stopped talking to him about anything more substantive than dinner. They would wait until he figured this out for himself and returned to them and to God.