Come, Barbarians (21 page)

Madame Lareau placed her glass of champagne on the table and
switched to American-accented English. “The republic, in its munificence, has chosen to see you as a victim. But all choice and all charity can be rescinded, Mr. Kruse. Do we understand each other?”

“No.”

“You can go to La Santé or you can help us, you see? And this is your reward.”

“Help you do what?”

Monsieur Meunier had saved three exterior shots for the last: a shiny new tricycle on the gravel driveway, a wooden swing set in the shade of a gigantic tree, an in-ground swimming pool.

Kruse took the photos. This is what he had imagined for them, from his bed on Foxbar Road: no cities, only the three of them. A garden, a small white truck. This was his South of France. “But they’re dead, Madame, Monsieur. My daughter’s dead and my wife is dead. None of this matters.”

“What matters to you?”

“I’m going to find them,” he said, in English, “and I’m going to kill them.”

The agents looked at each other for a moment; it was as though an unexpected smell had come in through an open window. “You are operating, whether you know it or not, at a very high level, Monsieur Kruse. The situation you’ve found yourself in is unique. Lucky, even.”

“Lucky.”

“You could be in prison already. A judge, any judge, would convict you.”

“Lucky.”

Monsieur Meunier pointed a triangle of cheese at him. “What did she see, that night?”

“What night?”

“The night of the murders? Your daughter was killed and, a few hours later …”

“I don’t know.”

Monsieur Meunier sniffed and sat back, crossed his legs. “It’s one of two things. Either he knows nothing or he’s lying. He can’t help us. He’s haughty and dismissive. I say La Santé for him.”

“We can help him help us,” said Madame Lareau.

“He’s too proud.”

“I don’t think so. He is an artist, deep down.”

“An artist, she says.” Monsieur Meunier stood up, refilled his glass of champagne again and refilled Madame Lareau’s glass. He strolled into the bedroom. “What did they give you to wear, Monsieur Kruse? Just one outfit, that old man outfit? I can help with that, you know. Get you something decent. What are you, a fifty-two?”

Madame Lareau presented Kruse with a business card emblazoned with the French flag and motto: “Corinne Lareau, Sous-directeur, Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense.” She continued to speak English.

“Our current president, as you know, is François Mitterrand, leader of the Socialist Party. Once he was popular and now he is not. This is entirely normal in politics, as you also know. But the depth of his unpopularity, at the moment, is rather special—at least in the Fifth Republic. There have been scandals and others will certainly be uncovered. He has been a naughty, if principled, president. My personal view: I like him. Others will not agree. All I want, in the coming years, is fairness. I want democracy to prevail. This is what we fought for, in the war, is it not?”

“What war?”

“Good point. War is different now. I was involved in Libya. My clandestine days.” She touched the nearly invisible scar, around her eyes. “Do you know much about politics, Christopher?”

“My wife did.”

“Yes, she did. She helped her friend—her boyfriend, yes?—Jean-François de Musset craft a wonderful little narrative. Didn’t she? Let me tell you, his interview on
Bouillon de culture
was the talk of Paris. I
will put it very simply. Let’s say you have one viable political party on the left, the Socialist Party. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“And, I don’t know, five on the right. Six, even. Still with me?”

Kruse crossed his arms.

“The old establishment, here in France, they are in love with the ghost of Charles de Gaulle. They will do anything to bring him back. Do you see? But where is he? If five parties are fighting with the socialists, even weakened socialists …”

“The socialists could win. Yes. What does this have to do with Evelyn?”

“There are many powerful people who want to grasp the coming opportunity, to destroy the Socialist Party and the legacy of President Mitterrand. Historically, you would call these men and women Gaullists, as I have said, republicans … businessmen and the ideological allies of businessmen. Even the ones who say they are not Gaullists are Gaullists. Those who feel born to lead, entitled by education and breeding. You have those in America. It’s the natural way of things, your late wife would have said. I read one of her publications. She sounded terribly French! Now, these men and a few women have been plotting for some time to stop arguing among themselves, over minutiae, and unite several parties into one. One party. This is an internal matter and ought to be very boring to someone like you. But there is one complication: the Front National.”

“Why don’t they join the other parties?”

“The Front National is unlike the others. They’re populists. Their historical alignment with fascists is distasteful to the men and women who worship, as I have said, the memory of brave generals. The party is growing in the south and in the industrial north. You know this from your wife: the Front National takes an extraordinarily dim view of immigration. Institutional racism is quite normal in Europe but rarely is it written up in a party’s vision statement. It is a party of stereotypes
and cartoons, angry men, fundamentalists. Then along comes Jean-François de Musset and his chief adviser, Evelyn May Kruse, the segment of
Bouillon de culture.
He says everything our men who live in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris would like to say only he’s a real man, a baker, a man of the provinces and of the people. He is handsome and reasonable and gallant, a romantic.”

“So.”

“So this is disruptive to our moderate right-wing government-in-waiting. What can they do to get the talking donkeys back on television representing the Front National?”

“The ghost of Charles de Gaulle killed Jean-François and Pascale?”

Madame Lareau did not say yes or no. She did not nod or smile. For some time she stared at him.

“So you work for Mitterrand.”

Madame Lareau stood up out of her chair and filled her glass of champagne again. She filled the third glass and handed it to him. “Have a drink.”

“Jean-François would have been a convicted drunk driver and, after he hit Lily, a murderer. Why kill him and Pascale?”

“Exactly. Why?”

“Why not just ruin his career? Discredit him. He slept with the wrong woman or stole money or snorted cocaine.”

“Yes, Monsieur Kruse. We think alike.”

He sipped the champagne. It was wasted on him, if it was an expensive bottle. Madame Lareau stood at the window, looking out over Lyon at night. The lights reflecting off the river, the bridge, and the waterfront. He watched her and she looked back at him, waiting. In the bedroom the television news was on, the explosion sounds between stories at the beginning of the program. It was seven o’clock. The truth arrived with his fourth or fifth sip of champagne and it all went sour with him.

“They got him drunk.”

“Somehow, yes.”

“Evelyn saw them: two men. Joseph Mariani and a man called Frédéric.”

“Frédéric Cardini. He joined the Mariani family business when he was seventeen. He began by hijacking transport trucks at the Spanish border and moved his way up.”

“Jean-François didn’t drink, not like that.”

“They drugged him first. We found it in his system. He would have drank anything.”

“I thought you didn’t do an autopsy.”

“They didn’t. They wouldn’t. We exhumed his body.”

“It was supposed to be a drunk-driving conviction, which would have been enough.”

“The call went out, to patrols, before your daughter was killed.”

“I was walking down to the car, with Evelyn and Lily. I heard the sirens.”

“They were sent to pick him up.”

“But who can do that, Madame? Organize a drunk-driving conviction? And why did it have to be Joseph, instead of one of his employees?”

“They wouldn’t have trusted anyone else, Monsieur Kruse. It had to be invisible, impossible. Imagine the finesse. Then, when Lily was killed they had to get rid of the politician and his wife. Quickly, quickly. The drugs in his system would have exonerated him. He would have remembered. Then, when it was finished, if someone like Frédéric got drunk with his friends and started talking …”

The television went silent and the pudgy agent rounded the corner with a thin brown briefcase. He placed it on the chair Madame Lareau had been sitting in and entered a six-digit combination. Inside there were four thick stacks of francs and a portfolio. Madame Lareau slowly removed a French passport, an identity card, bank cards, and a title deed to the property in the Var—under the regional authority of the
office in Brignoles. First she showed him the passport, which contained a photo of him with the name Claude Roulet, born in Lille, a current address in the Var. The identity card was also made out in the name of Claude Roulet, with his photo. The bank cards were Claude’s and Claude owned the house and land.

“Who’s Claude Roulet?”

“You are,” said Monsieur Meunier. “Don’t you already feel like Claude Roulet? Of course, your parents split up when you were a youngster and you were sent to live with your British mother in Rhode Island, United States. This explains your accent. But you are a Frenchman. You have always wanted to be a proper Frenchman, no? Retiring quietly at forty to a
bastide
in the country?”

Madame Lareau explained the investigation would be announced publicly in two months’ time.

“You’ll bring in Joseph and Lucien?”

“Who?”

“The murderers, the—”

“You don’t understand, Roulet. This plot was conceived in Paris and Marseille by some of the most powerful men in France. Return the Front National to cartoon status, unite the legitimate right wing, wipe out the Socialists.”

Madame Lareau had taken the liberty of printing out the story he was now obliged to tell, in a secret military tribunal in Paris. None of this would ever reach the public. For his trouble, he would stay in five-star hotels like this one. He would be guarded twenty-four hours a day, of course, until it was finished.

“Do you have any questions?”

“What’s in this for you, Madame? The Socialists stay in power?” She acted as though she had not heard him. “I want to leave you with one image.”

Madame Lareau reached for the large photo her partner had produced. She slapped it on the table next to him like a poker shark unveiling
the final hand of the night. It was Evelyn, cradling Lily on the cobblestones of Villedieu, ten minutes after the end of her life. His life.

“I have never lost a child. I have never lost a spouse. But I would not want my loved ones to die in the service of a conspiracy. Yes, children are killed and we are all terribly sorry for that. But their murderers are punished, in a modern democracy, and their parents are soothed, however imperfectly, by justice. I cannot say you would still be with your wife, but she would certainly be alive. And you, you would be what you came here to be.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know. A father?” Madame Lareau tilted her head. “A good man?”

There were so many guards travelling with Madame Lareau and Monsieur Meunier they had to take three black Citroën XM cars. Kruse was in the back seat of the middle vehicle, with Madame Lareau, who carried a small pistol and spoke on a cellular phone. The original plan was to take an executive airplane, but there was so much fog at the airport they switched to cars. She booked him in the Tuileries suite of the Hotel Regina in Paris for twelve nights, under the name Claude Roulet.

Madame Lareau told him about working in Libya to depose Colonel Gaddafi. The general was fighting a war against another lunatic, Hissène Habré, president of Chad. It was like dealing with autistic children, she said, only they had fighter jets and machine guns. Yet somehow, as always, Gaddafi survived. Some people are like that, she said; you see it in politics and war. They live through anything, while others—fine people, often enough—die by the first bullet. Madame herself was injured in an explosion in N’Djamena. The rail of an apartment terrace flew through the air and struck her in the face. She saw it
coming and she remembered thinking, “Duck,” but the thought was quicker than her reaction, and she woke up in a hospital with a very black, very beautiful woman in a yellow hijab reciting prayers for the dead over her body.

South of Auxerre, not far from Chablis, the three cars stopped in a convoy at a gas and restaurant complex so that various passengers might use the toilet. The plan was to practise his testimony between Auxerre and Paris, so it would seem natural. If it sounded like he was reciting a speech someone had written for him, the judge would throw them all out. He had not read it yet.

An armed guard stood at the side of the car, but he looked away often enough for Kruse to enter the combination and pull a stack of money out of his Claude Roulet briefcase. Monsieur Meunier, who carried the same small pistol as Madame Lareau, accompanied him to the toilet. Monsieur Meunier leaned against the bank of sinks while Kruse addressed himself to the urinal. “Have you heard of Philippe Laflamme?”

“Laflamme. Of course, Monsieur Kruse.”

“Who is he?”

Monsieur Meunier looked at himself in the mirror. “You’ll meet him in court. No hurry. He’s Rally for the Republic.”

“What is that?”

“A political party, Monsieur Kruse. It’s in your testimony. There are two large political parties that want to be one enormous political party. You’ll be speaking of them. The mayor of Paris—Laflamme is one of his … what would you call this in English? He holds the pitchfork for the devil.”

Monsieur Meunier inspected his left eyebrow in the mirror. A single grey hair was longer than the others. He licked his fingers and yanked at it as Kruse dried his hands. Two of the guards waited outside the door.

Kruse finished.

“You needn’t worry about Laflamme. Not after your testimony.”

“No?”

“He’ll be in prison soon enough. So tell me, honestly, what do you think of the place in the Var?”