Come, Barbarians (12 page)

“But they were wrong. He wasn’t like that at all.”

Lucien re-entered the salon with a folded wooden card table. He calmly set it up half a metre before the naked man and wiped it with a damp cloth. Then he walked into the kitchen, and returned with the stainless steel medical tray. Knives and other implements, all of them silver and clean, slid and screeched and chinked against one another. He tsked and rearranged them. Lucien opened a closet Kruse had not noticed, and pulled down a set of new white coveralls, the sort men wear to remove asbestos from old office towers, and matching booties that recalled Lily’s down-filled slippers from Mountain Equipment Co-op.

Joseph picked up his slender glass, refilled it, and stood. “I hope you don’t mind but … I’ll have to wait in the next room for this part.”

“You’ll wait here, Joseph.” Lucien’s accent was French yet also somehow German, and intensely nasal.

“I can’t.”

“Sit down.”

“Lucien, please.”

The noseless man looked at Kruse and back to Joseph. “Sit.”

Joseph did as he was told. “He’s the oldest, Lucien. He wanted to be a doctor. He didn’t even care that he was the most handsome man in Marseille. He volunteered at an animal shelter when he was a teenager. Can you believe it?”

“I don’t care about you and I don’t care about Lucien and I don’t care about this awful … thing you’re doing. Just tell me why you’re hunting my wife.”

The naked man hooted in triumph and spit out a wad of fabric he had been working on. His top lip sneaked up from the tape.

“Help me,” he said, in French. “They’ll do this to her.”

“Why?” Kruse stood up.

Lucien picked the cotton off the floor.

“She saw us. Tell Evelyn …” the man managed, with emphasis on the final syllable:
Eveline.

Calmly, in time with the violin music, Lucien balled up the cotton and shoved it back into the naked man’s mouth. He plugged his nose and the man stopped trying to speak, desperate to suck enough air in around the fabric. From the pocket of his coveralls Lucien produced a half-roll of duct tape, and it squelched as he wound it twice around the prisoner’s mouth. Overpowered, Frédéric went limp. His chest heaved as he sobbed.

A door opened behind them and new wind rushed into the apartment.

Kruse turned to see who had entered but no one was there. The door, the actual door, had not opened at all: neither Lucien nor Joseph had noticed. But something had opened: a seeming door.

Lucien selected an industrial-size vegetable peeler, which belonged in the kitchen of a well-compensated chef.

“Wait.” Kruse cut through another bit of rope.

With his left hand, Lucien grasped the prisoner’s neck. He screamed but they could not hear. Lucien placed the peeler against the naked man’s collarbone and apologized and said, “I love you, Frédéric,” and in a sure motion pulled straight down. The skin came away like the outer layer of an eggplant.

Joseph twitched but said nothing. His right leg was crossed over the left. He gulped his pastis. A coil of skin and blood gathered on the sheet of transparent plastic. The prisoner hummed something. When the second glass was empty, Joseph refilled it. He placed a hand in his hair, which was thinning on top.

“His nose—our father did it.”

“Why?”

“Shut up, Joseph.”

“A tiny betrayal, the smallest thing. Lucien complained of our father to one of his associates. He had made a few mistakes, our father, errors in strategy. It’s a changing business and Papa wasn’t changing quickly enough, for Lucien’s taste. Lucien told this man, his name isn’t important, that he wasn’t sure if our father was the man he once was. How old was Papa then? In his mid-fifties, I suppose. It got back to him, this conversation, and he had Lucien picked up. Papa brought him here, to this very room.”

“Shut up. Now.”

“It’s not so different from poor Frédéric’s error. He spoke to one of our associates about the night your Lily died and the politician and his wife. It’s a delicate situation. You see—”

Lucien turned and pointed the peeler at his brother. “Stop.”

Joseph lifted both hands.

As he peeled the man’s skin away in even strips, Lucien spoke. His voice aroused sympathy, or would have. That sad man, whose nose does not work. That sad man from Marseille who was once handsome, whose cruel father ruined him.

“They were ingenious punishers, the Romans who built your town, Professor Kruse. If you betrayed Emperor Tiberius, for example, he would have your urethra tied shut. Then you would sit down with him, like you and Joseph are doing now, civilized—or is this mock-civilized, Professor? What would your John Keats say?—and you would drink wine. A lot of wine. The emperor would drink with you, if you were close. You were usually close. Brothers. Best friends. Father and son. We read about lions tearing prisoners apart, and gang rapes in the coliseum, but that was really for entertainment. Imagine you’re drunk and you have to piss more than ever in your life. But you can’t. Pressure builds, you see.”

Lucien worked like an unhurried cook making, for the thousandth time, his signature dish. The associate, Frédéric, the old friend, ceased to ratchet his body away from the peeler and the knives, as Lucien
approached with them. Frédéric closed his eyes and, Kruse hoped, he prayed.

“The ancient Persians liked to throw men into the ashes. What they would do, the princes, for the most special betrayers, is lower them tenderly into a room with five downy centimetres of ash on the floor.”

Kruse had forgotten he had told them he was a professor. He knew nothing of Keats but “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and another bit Evelyn had on a poster in her office: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.”

Joseph had begun to sway, just faintly, in his chair.

“Do you see why?”

“Why what?”

“Why ash, Professor?”

A week before his daughter’s death Kruse had taken her into the small cheese shop on Rue Raspail, a dark street just off Place Montfort where the water drains during a rainstorm. They entered through the beaded door. He was not French, so he did not need an encyclopedic knowledge of unpasteurized cheeses and their appellations to qualify as a gentleman. The
fromagère
asked Lily what she might like. Something simple and mild, like comté? Kids love comté, the yellow cheddar of France. Lily looked at the world of cheeses in the display case and pointed to one covered in a thin layer of reddish-brown ash, a cendré, from Burgundy.

Cendré. Cinderella. Cendrillon.

Lucien removed the duct tape and the white fabric from the mouth of his friend and associate, and pulled his bottom lip away from his face. He sliced through it and then worked on the other. He cut off the man’s eyelids.

It was sixty francs, the little round of cendré, and it tasted like sour milk tossed in sand. The horse stable smelled for three days. Neither Kruse nor Evelyn could eat more than a sliver, but by the third night Lily had finished it.

“You really liked the cendré.” Evelyn had not been shy about her own feelings for the cheese.

“No,” said Lily. “I hated it.”

Lucien stepped back, as though he wanted perspective on the paint he had splashed on a canvas. He unzipped his coveralls, pulled off his bloody booties and his gloves, and left them on the plastic. Now he appreciated it, like a painting in the Louvre.

“The prisoner would stand, Professor, as long as he could. But eventually, without food and water, he would grow weary and collapse. He would breathe in the ash. First a little and then a lot.”

Kruse had been comforted by the idea that the man had died of shock and loss of blood. Now the blood beast jolted and hacked. His dripping chest heaved. He spoke, or tried to speak, without a tongue.

“Kill him. Please.”

“Here is what I find fascinating, Professor Kruse.” Lucien pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and touched his snuffling little nose. “Societies that developed in perfect isolation from one another, oceans and forests and great mountain ranges apart, had often devised the same ways to make a man suffer, to humiliate him in front of his community and—really the only justification for torture your Keats would support—to deter others from following his example. Lubricated stakes of wood, for example, rammed into a man’s anus in the middle of a public square. This is universal. Skinning, of course.”

The mutilated body before them, shivering in the cool of the apartment, had begun to smell.

“Kill him.”

Joseph sighed and turned back to the remains of the prisoner. He poured the last of the pastis into his glass and did not bother topping it with water. The smell of licorice, from the bottle, was merciful now.

Lucien turned on the faucet in the kitchen and washed his hands. “Where is your wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have received no correspondence?”

“None.”

“Our men who searched your little house—Russians, former Soviets, very troubled—they found nothing. I am inclined, and you are fortunate in this, to believe you. We’ve been watching and waiting, just as you have been. If Madame does contact you, and you don’t contact us immediately, with what you have learned, then … then I will get creative with you too, Professor Kruse.”

“Why Evelyn?”

“We want what you want: to find her and keep her safe.”

“The world,” said Joseph, “is complex.”

“Professor, what did she tell you?” Lucien allowed his hands to drip into the sink. “On the night your daughter died? She saw two men drinking with Monsieur de Musset.”

Kruse shook his head. Two men, one with long hair. The tips of Frédéric’s long hair were sticky with blood.

“She went out alone some hours later. Up the hill, yes? Did she come back, even briefly? Tell you what she had seen? Did she send you a note?”

“No. What did she see?”

Lucien removed his hands from the sink and turned off the faucet with his elbow. He dried his hands as a doctor would. “What did you tell the gendarme?”

“Which one?”

“Huard.”

“I told him what I’ve told you.”

“You don’t know where she is. This is the truth?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know to look for us?”

“In Paris …”

“The hotelier. Yes. Listen to me, Monsieur Kruse. We want to help
your wife, help you. She needs professional guidance and protection.”

“What did she see?” He spoke to keep them speaking. Kruse sliced through the last of the rope around his wrists. The tray of instruments was only a metre away. There was a scalpel in there and something smaller. If you know how to use a knife, you want it to be small. If it is an extension of your hand, the enemy will not easily take it from you.

The prisoner gurgled and grunted before them. Bells rang in the square. It was eight or nine or ten.

“This woman in Paris, the one from
Le Monde
, she spoke to Evelyn.”

“Yes.”

“And what did Evelyn tell her?”

“That the story in her newspaper had been full of lies. She was innocent.”

“Hardly innocent, Monsieur Kruse. I do worry for their safety, Madame Laferrière and her daughter. What is her name? Anouk. A tidy one-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor on Rue Santeuil. I worry, you see, because the larger this becomes, the more difficult it will be to contain. My brother and I, at the moment we are in the containment business. Do you understand?”

Kruse did not understand how this man, how men like him, slept at night. This is what had always confounded his parents, when they were exposed to old stories of ruined Mennonites or the Holocaust or shootings in Toronto. How did it work? How did the human heart allow such abomination?

“What will you do now, Monsieur Kruse?”

“Look for my wife.”

“And if you find her?”

“Take her home and start again.” It was not too late. They could have another baby, another girl on Foxbar Road. “That’s all I want.”

“We will help you.”

With Lucien, it would take four to eight seconds. Joseph, gently weaving, two seconds or three.

Lucien returned from the kitchen. Now he had the Glock. He helped Joseph up out of his chair and together they stood before Kruse, looking not at him but at the prisoner. It would be as simple as his mother’s favourite waltz: take the scalpel from the tray and cut Lucien’s wrist and throat. One-two-three. Violin music continued to play from the little speakers. Order. Beauty. Courage. To the gun, to the interrogation of Joseph, to the end of them both. For the rest of his life he would consider his hesitations in Vaison-la-Romaine and in Marseille as he fell asleep at night. One-two-three. He feared the gun but knew he need not fear the gun; by the time Lucien raised his arm, his wrist would be cut and his throat would be cut.

“I wanted to be a surgeon, when I was a young man.” Lucien said this in English, in a more posh tone than his French, as though he were pretending. Or perhaps now he was not pretending. “When I was being educated in London.”

Kruse watched him, to see which it was.

“My brother is going to give you a phone number, Professor Kruse.”

Joseph returned to his chair. His eyes were covered in a film of moisture. His hands trembled. “My personal number, Christopher. Call any time.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled from it a small white card. “If you find Evelyn or she finds you, later today or tomorrow or five years from now, you will call me. And if you don’t, well, maybe we won’t be such good friends anymore, sharing a jolly drink like this.”

“The note in the library?”

“I am an amateur calligraphist.” Joseph reached toward Kruse with the card. He dropped it on Kruse’s lap. “Can Lucien fix you something else? There’s a bottle of rosé. Likely some … cheese in the fridge. You can cut your own bonds, I trust.”

“Don’t hurt her.”

“What?”

“If you find Evelyn, don’t hurt her.”

Joseph looked at his brother and back at Kruse. There was something, a secret or a confession. He said nothing.

“If you hurt her, Monsieur Mariani …”

“Joseph, please.”

“I’ll kill you.”