Come, Barbarians (8 page)

Three years later, after the crash, Kruse mourned his parents with the self-possession and formality they would have expected. Then he set about looking for Matt Gibenus, who had long since dropped out of high school. Kruse found him in Markham, sixty pounds heavier, working as an autobody mechanic.

In school Kruse had been careful around Matt Gibenus. His strategy was to seem accepting of fate, invisible, to believe as his parents believed. He had studied the ritual movements in and around the automotive shop in Markham, and waited until the other mechanics were on a lunch break. Matt Gibenus, as the lowest-ranking employee, was the last to eat.

The mechanic recognized him, or seemed to recognize him. Kruse had grown. He had trained two hours a day, most weeknights, and all day Sunday; he had imagined this moment, something like it, hundreds of times. Matt Gibenus squinted and asked how they knew each other, when Kruse stepped closer.

School, Kruse told him. They were old friends.

In the seventies, security cameras were scarce. Kruse had twenty minutes before the owner or either of the two other mechanics returned to the shop. He introduced himself and avoided a handshake, invited Matt Gibenus to take the first punch.

“I don’t fight anymore.”

“Not after today.”

“I’m on probation for it. I can’t.”

Kruse reached up and flicked him in the forehead. “Now you can. I started it.”

At first, he made it seem like Matt could win. Kruse prolonged the fight, ducking and parrying around the oil pans and the shop vacuum. Matt Gibenus swore and spit, came into his old self, called him a fuckin’ pussy for wheeling about the blue Pontiac. Kruse saved his first strike the way he saved and coveted a chocolate-covered almond. A quick finger jab to the eyes. Then he began a slow but severe takedown.

The damage, the real damage, was an accident: Matt Gibenus, wounded and disoriented, stepped into an oil pan and slipped. He fell and cracked his head on the smooth concrete floor, convulsed, and lay still. For three months the man would be in a minimally conscious state. It was on the news, a robbery and vicious assault by a cowardly
gang of youths, all for less than three hundred dollars in the till. Kruse donated the money to his parents’ preferred charity, the centre for new immigrants. Matt’s wife quickly divorced him and remarried.

Kruse did not follow his parents into the Mennonite Church or any other. Yet thirteen years later he knew his daughter was born with a cleft palate because of what he had done that afternoon in Markham.

The man who had been his father nearly as long as his father, Tzvi, was the only one who knew what he had done to Matt Gibenus.

“I’m coming to help.”

“Tzvi, there’s nothing to help with. I’m going to find her and bring her home.”

“The cops have your passport?”

“Until she’s proven innocent.”

“She doesn’t sound innocent. I warned you about this, didn’t I? And who is this bastard without a nose?”

“A detective of some sort, maybe.”

“The men she saw drinking with … what was his name?”

“Jean-François.”

“Jean-François, the night he killed Lily. Do you know what these men look like? Who they were?”

“No.”

“Can you find out?”

“Not before I find Evelyn.”

“Before you find Evelyn! You have no idea what you’re doing, Chris. You have no experience.”

“Twenty years of—”

“Men like these, women, they’re different. They’re from hell. I didn’t train you for this.”

“Yes, you did.”

“You’re a goddamn sweetheart.”

“I’m not a sweetheart.”

“All they have to do is mistreat a kitten and you will surrender. It’s a catastrophe.”

“Tzvi.”

“Fuck it, I’m coming.”

“There’s a car across the street. A couple of men in it, watching me.”

“What are they doing?”

“Pretending not to watch me.”

“Cops.”

“Detectives maybe. They both have noses.”

Tzvi gave Kruse advice and insisted he write down every word. Kruse pretended to write. The line went silent, so silent Kruse thought they had been cut off. He was about to hang up when Tzvi’s voice rose again. “Lily,” he said. “Our girl.”

Kruse and Tzvi acted as bodyguards, analyzed and disrupted threats, and designed security arrangements for presidents and CEOs, paranoid billionaires, foreign celebrities, a few despots, and semi-retired gangsters. Clients hired MagaSecure to minimize the possibility of violence but it happened often enough; Kruse’s opponents tended to be the recently fired, the cuckolded, the mentally ill, the drunk and drugged. Often they were convinced they had nothing to lose and carried weapons. Scars were inevitable. Kruse would come home with wounds on his hands and arms and face. He would call from the emergency room. While his work was dangerous, his most potent challenges came from his sparring partners: Tzvi and a small but active community of current and former Mossad agents living in the Greater Golden Horseshoe.

In the fall of 1988 Kruse showed up on the nightly news for preventing a physical assault on the incumbent prime minister during the federal election campaign. He and Tzvi had been on retainer, to guide
and train a secondary detail of secret service agents. Neither the party nor the government had paid them to secure the rally in front of the gloomy county courthouse in Brantford, but the moment he and Tzvi arrived they understood the people who had been paid had done an abominable job. It was windy and raining and far too crowded. No one had been posted on top of the courthouse. Kruse and Tzvi abandoned their agents-in-training and escorted the prime minister and his wife through the crowd. Two large men who turned out to be drunken opponents of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States rushed the prime minister. Kruse was closest. In front of several television cameras, he took both attackers to the ground expertly and painfully. This had been spectacular for business.

Evelyn did not like it. She was eight months into her pregnancy. Until now the men and women who made decisions about tenure had been unaware of her husband’s vocation. If they were invited to an event and he had a bruise on his cheek or a split lip or a swollen eye, Evelyn would either cancel or go alone, making an excuse for him. Now it was impossible to hide him, to lie about him. Black eyes did not go well with art openings, book launches, conferences in Chicago. Kruse didn’t only work with his hands: he hurt people for a living, and after the television clip she could no longer explain it away as a boutique security service, an executive strategy company, white collar work. Kruse didn’t see how it mattered but Evelyn did. This is how academic Toronto worked, how academic everywhere worked, and it mattered even more now as they were on the verge of becoming parents. They had met when she was young and not concerned about such matters, but advancement in the academic world had as much to do with dinner party conversations as publications.

Evelyn’s interpretation of MagaSecure was, Tzvi assured him, emotional nonsense. It would fade after the pregnancy. Only it didn’t fade. Lily’s medical troubles didn’t consume Evelyn the way they consumed him: her number one worry remained tenure, which was linked to an
anxiety she never expressed aloud but one he felt so acutely it ached: she had married the wrong man.

Her revelation about the unearned sabbatical in France, to save their marriage and change their lives, had come at an imperfect time. When MagaSecure reached a point where it ran itself, with trained employees and a process that no longer needed him, it would make sense to take a year and travel the world. He lay in bed awake, debating with himself, as Evelyn mumbled in her sleep and kicked through her dreams. The winning argument was that if they did not try this soon, now, they would be in court within a year.

If twelve months away from MagaSecure and the house on Foxbar Road could save his family, it was worth any cost. He would swim to Europe with them on his back.

According to the pictures in
The Most Beautiful Detours in France
, which was published with a series of old poems, the most severe contrast to what Evelyn had come to see as North American ugliness was in the South of France. And of the Western European languages, French was the only one they could speak. If Lily wanted to be the prime minister one day, she would have to speak it properly.

Two days before the plane departed for Marseille, Kruse and Lily visited MagaSecure to say goodbye. Tzvi wore a suit for the occasion and stood in the middle of the office, on the shiny hardwood floor, hands behind his back, chest out, chin up, his usual stance—only he avoided eye contact.

Tzvi presented Lily with a stuffed pink chick. She hugged his legs and mumbled a nearly imperceptible thank you.

“I don’t think he heard you,” said Kruse.

Tzvi messed her hair. “Go play.”

A quarter of the original studio remained, in the adjacent room, for clients who wanted to pay several thousand dollars for private lessons. Lily sprinted to the wooden man, a training tool they had purchased at a kung fu school’s bankruptcy auction. She kicked and elbowed the man, shrieking with each strike, as they had taught her.

Tzvi had spent ten years fighting Arabs and another seven teaching close quarters combat and covert techniques to elite soldiers in the Israeli army; it had ruined him for subtlety. The office was decorated with his awards, citations for bravery, and signed photographs: Tzvi with Yitzhak Rabin, with Barbra Streisand, Tzvi and Kruse with Oprah Winfrey. Kruse had been Tzvi’s student and partner and friend for almost twenty years; he had spent much more time with him than either of his parents. Tzvi had given him one of the scars and had fractured his cheekbone and had shot him four times, about the chest and shoulder, with a pellet gun.

“You come back for the film fest.”

“No.”

“Julia Roberts wants us again.”

“It’s one year. With the private clients and …” Kruse had said all of this before. It hadn’t improved Tzvi’s mood then and wouldn’t now. It was ten thirty. “Let’s go for a walk. We’ll take you for lunch.”

“I’m not hungry.” Outside the window a man in several layers of grey clothing, muttering to himself, his hair soaked with sweat, or something like sweat, pushed a shopping cart full of bottles and cans. “Maybe I take a holiday.”

“Yes, visit us.”

“If I take a holiday, it will not be there. The Frogs sent two of my uncles to Auschwitz. You can have it.”

“This might not work. If we arrive and Evelyn isn’t any happier—”

“Stop.”

Tzvi had already tried to convince Kruse that running away to Europe would do absolutely nothing to improve his family life. When you stand close to “beauty and truth” you realize it’s just a bunch of old carved stone that some drunk fucker or gypsy has just pissed on. The stone is even older in his hometown, and Jerusalem is nobody’s idea of beauty and truth. If Evelyn did not want to be his wife anymore, Kruse
ought to write her a big cheque and let her go. He could take care of Lily himself. Uncle Tzvi would help, damn it.

They didn’t have lunch together. Tzvi couldn’t say goodbye.

He had walked around the Necker hospital enough that he knew where he might lure the men in the Citroën. He faked obliviousness and walked up Rue Falguière, toward the hospital and—if he went far enough—his hotel.

The car dieselled to life behind him, once he was half a block up the street, past the caviar shop and the Korean restaurant. Kruse stopped at a window of a travel agency, pasted with photographs of winter escapes, of Egyptian and Moroccan resorts, of Martinique, and of the Canadian Rockies—”ski champagne powder.” On the corner, an asymmetrical intersection of four streets with an apartment complex driveway and a metro stop, Kruse took his time deciding where to go. The car rumbled and stank behind him. He chose a neighbourhood filled with shops, Rue de Vaugirard, and turned right at a peculiar street just wide enough for one car.

He rushed into a doorway. The Citroën screeched around the corner and over the interlocking bricks of the little street, Villa de l’Astrolabe. It passed him and Kruse stepped out. The car stopped and the passenger door opened. A large man, with a pillar of a torso, stepped out. He wore dirty jeans and a ripped vinyl jacket. A tattoo crept up to his puffy neck, the peak of it visible.

There was no one behind Kruse and none of the windows of Villa de l’Astrolabe were open. He removed his jacket to meet the big man. He was two hundred and fifty pounds at least, a brawler. The man, who carried time in prison about him, unzipped his own jacket and pulled a knife out of the inside pocket. He wasn’t a cop.

And he wasn’t French. The driver in the Citroën called out to the brawler sternly, in Russian.

Kruse said, in Russian, “You’re looking for Evelyn?”

The brawler turned to his left and drew snot into his throat and spat, as though he had just discovered something poisonous in his sinus.

Kruse was close now. Everything about the brawler was ugly but his eyes, which were a ghostly, translucent blue. Whole neighbourhoods in Toronto looked just like him: Soviets. In the movies and spy novels, in his childhood imagination, this was the villain, the unknowable enemy of love and democracy.

The Russian was a wreck of muscle and fat, but he held the knife out in front of him and twirled it. Kruse thought briefly of that old Michael Jackson video. Maybe Kruse was a sweetheart but the man before him was untrained, a simple prison goon. With a frustrated shout, the driver leaned across and opened the passenger door. He held a cellular phone to his ear. The brawler called back and the driver held the phone aloft. It was an order.
An order!
Before the Russian was fully in his seat, the driver accelerated away. Kruse made a note of the licence plate number and jogged back to the intersection.

In Canada he knew what to do with a licence plate number. He had friends in police services. In France he had no friends at all, now that the de Mussets were gone and Evelyn was lost. He did have a business card.

The lieutenant told him he was not permitted to search for a licence plate number. His wife was a fugitive. For all the gendarme knew, Kruse was helping her.