Come, Barbarians (9 page)

“I am helping her. I’m trying.”

“Describe the men.”

Kruse told him what had happened, what they looked like.

“What did they say to you?”

“Nothing.”

“What language?”

“Russian.”

“Can you imagine why they’re following you?”

“Yes.”

The lieutenant laughed. “So?”

“They’re looking for Evelyn.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“When are you coming back to Vaison?”

“Soon.”

“Come tomorrow. I have to discuss something with you.”

“Discuss it now, Monsieur Huard.”

There was a rather long silence, apart from the sound of heavy fingers on a keyboard. Then a sigh. “Will you come see me tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Your Russians were driving a Citroën?”

“That’s right.”

“A family in Aix-en-Provence reported it stolen three days ago.”

So far, the rain had not returned, so he walked to the national library on Rue de Richelieu, a secular hall with a cathedral roof, north of the Louvre and the Palais-Royal. A teacher’s strike had been in the news, a companion to the metro strike, and he passed a parade of them in Place de la Concorde, shouting and singing. He recalled something Jean-François had said: if they’re striking now, against François Mitterrand, just wait until someone who isn’t a communist is running the country. Most of the chairs were taken in the Salle Ovale, but he found a desk and dropped the books and medical journals he and the reference librarian had found. No one spoke in a full voice, but the Salle Ovale echoed with whispers, rustled pages, high heels on the floor, sighs, coughs. He was overwhelmed by a feeling that had tormented him since arriving at the hotel: someone was watching him, and it wasn’t the coolly flirtatious reference librarian who had guided him toward
noselessness. There were over 150 Parisians at desks, reading books and magazines and comics, men alone and mothers with children, messy-haired students, and the elderly in bow ties and wool dresses.

No ugly Russians, no trim aristocrats in well-cut suits, no noseless men.

At his desk Kruse pushed aside thoughts of well-earned psychological imbalance, thoughts that had struck him on the night of Lily’s death—he could not endure this; he would go crazy with grief—and concentrated. The eyes on him were Evelyn’s. He would walk across the beautiful room, their last beautiful European room, and take her in his arms and forgive her and kiss her and lead her out of the library and into a taxi: Charles de Gaulle,
s’il vous plaît.

There wasn’t much to learn, in the medical literature, about noselessness. Cancer, usually. He found cases of motorcycle accidents, but in these it’s usually more than a nose that has been lost. The photographs were hideous. For twenty minutes he pretended to search for more periodicals and watched the readers. Several walked out and several walked in, but none of them held his gaze. Tzvi had been a spy, though he didn’t look like a spy. Kruse knew he would be unfit for the secret service, with his scars and what Evelyn had called his hunting little eyes.

He oriented himself toward the entrance and exit. As quickly and as gently as he could manage, he stood up and slipped across the floor. No one looked up as he passed and, when he reached his position and scanned the room, he recognized no one.

“Excuse me, Monsieur?” The reference librarian, with her playful half-smile, held a small envelope. She slid it across the desk and her hand rested on it a moment. She wore a wedding ring. “I was just about to bring this to you. Instead, you have come to me.”

On the front of the envelope, in luxurious calligraphy: “Christophe Kruse.”

“Who gave this to you?”

“A man.”

“Did he leave his name?”

“No. Perhaps it is inside, Monsieur.”

“What did he look like?”

The librarian had red hair and light freckles. She looked more Irish than French, but this was not her second language. She smiled and pointed. “I knew you’d ask, and after he left I realized I didn’t pay close attention. He wore a suit, no tie. White shirt. Handsome in a clean and soft sort of way. He had a nose, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Anything else?”

“Not a library man. I mean, not the sort we usually see. Neither are you, of course.”

Kruse thanked her for her help on the subject of lost noses, and for the envelope.

“I did find one last thing, Monsieur.” She handed him a code and told him where to hunt the stacks for a back issue of a glossy national magazine. “If it isn’t there, it may be on microfilm. I don’t know how long we keep them. Was anything else helpful?”

He decided to tell the truth.

“Check out this last one or don’t. Perhaps it’s the same as everything else. Good luck with your project.”

With the metro system down, he was not sure how long it would take to get back to the offices of
Le Monde.
He was more keen to open the letter than hunt through magazine stacks for another story about the unfortunate woman whose dog ate her face as she lay passed out drunk on the floor of her apartment in Lille. In the garden outside the library the benches were damp. He sat anyway, under naked branches surrounded by slick and fragrant shrubbery. A knotty statue of a man in spectacles, leaning heavily forward into the wind or, perhaps, literature, stared at Kruse. He opened the envelope and pulled out a card. The paper was bright and thick and smooth, expensive. Inside, it read, also in calligraphy, “
Oubliez votre femme. Rentrez chez vous immédiatement.
” Forget your wife. Go home now.

Under that, in English, written in regular blue pen: “You’ll be rewarded.”

He walked out of the garden and across the Île de la Cité, in front of what he had come to see as his daughter’s cathedral: Notre Dame. Five minutes could not pass without him thinking of her. First, the white Mercedes. Then something simple and wonderful, reading to her before bed or putting on her pyjamas or walking down some ugly wide Canadian sidewalk with her, holding her hand. Anything to hold her hand. Pushing her stroller through Queen’s Park in a thunderstorm. Sitting with her on a hill, overlooking a moat of phantoms, as she traces his scars. Run across the road when your instinct is to run across the road. Ignore Evelyn. Snatch Lily up and run. Go get her. Just go get her and none of this happens.

Old music played inside the cathedral. The violin and harpsichord of Handel, who believed, echoed out the open door and into the courtyard of tourists with cameras. He had read about believers who held photographs of lost children or lost lovers and looked at them as they jumped off bridges and skyscrapers, the Eiffel Tower. He would jump off the nearest bridge, Petit Pont, with gravel in his pockets. He watched everyone now, every Parisian and every tourist, and studied men in suits. Aristocrats. Noses. He would surrender to it, soon become another of the wandering loons unrescued by faith. The sky darkened, a cool wind howled across the Seine, and it began to rain again, to lash his face. He opened his umbrella and then closed it.

KRUSE WAITED ON RUE FALGUIèRE FROM 5:00 TO 5:18, WHEN ANNETTE
walked out the glass doors and came as close to jogging as any woman in Paris. In Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Boston he had followed bankers and lawyers, convicts, politicians, adulterous husbands and wives, mistresses, total mysteries. He had only been caught once, in the winter of 1986, by a clever woman who lured him through spooky Bryant Park and into the New York Public Library. He walked past the security man at the door and there she was, standing before him in the great hall with tears in her eyes. Kruse allowed her to slap him with the back of her left hand. The woman was rich, the wife of a less rich but suspicious man, and her elaborate diamond ring tore into his cheek.

Annette Lafferrière arrived at an
école maternelle
, near Luxembourg Gardens. She looked at her watch as she entered the courtyard. There was a small playground in the middle and around it some colourful wooden tricycles and bicycles and cruisers, soccer balls, potted palm trees. A sign on the courtyard’s tall metal door advertised the presence
of scarlet fever with a round drawing of a sad face. Annette emerged holding the hand of a little girl in a blue winter coat and scarf, with the same black ringlets and slightly darker skin. When Evelyn had been in the midst of sewing Lily’s fairy costume for Halloween, drinking wine and eating hard chèvre from a bowl next to the sewing machine she had borrowed from Pascale, she discovered her own French métier and the source of their pretend fortune: she would design children’s clothing, jackets like the one this little girl wore, clothes that belonged in the forties and fifties instead of the vulgar nineties. He could hear Tzvi’s voice: not a kitten, but close enough.

Mother and daughter walked through the wet leaves of Luxembourg Gardens in the early dark. Halfway through the park the rain stopped. The little girl wiped the rain from a swing and asked Annette for a push. There were times back home, agonizing to remember, when Lily had asked for a push and he said no: he was sitting, he was thinking, he was reading, he was eating a banana. Kruse had been here in Luxembourg Gardens on a hot day with the profane son of the pharmacy magnate, when the generous pool in the centre of the park was alive with little rented boats and children running along the side with sticks to find and push them and scream. Today it was too cold and too windy and too dark for a rented boat; the shack was closed up. The little girl ran all the way around the pool, shimmering with yellow light from the palace, and Annette checked her watch again.

It was another ten minutes up the slowly rising hill to the Panthéon. Men and women in business clothes gathered in cafés and bistros for an after-work apéritif. Paris is a northern city, like London, darker than Toronto at this hour and moodier in the mist and the rain. On the other side of the Panthéon, almost at Jardin des Plantes, Annette and the girl turned onto what was surely the ugliest street in this corner of the fifth arrondissement, Rue Santeuil, across from a humanities building of the Sorbonne. Ugly for Paris was somewhere between normal and vaguely attractive, by North American standards. The atypical
apartment building had been built for students and belonged, poetically, to the suburbs of Paris more than Paris itself—the things one lazy mayor can do. Laundry and flags from former colonies—including a Maple Leaf—hung over balconies. Across the street, in the courtyard of the squat university building, some students in bog jackets sat on a patch of wet grass, one of them with a guitar. They sang a Bob Marley song.

Annette found her keys in her purse, finally, and opened the door for the little girl. He waited forty minutes under the awning of an entrance to the Sorbonne. The rain had come again and the student troubadours had fled indoors. She walked out at 6:45 in a dark blue dress with a crisp tan overcoat, high heels. Her hair was dry now and arranged. Annette carried a handsome polka-dot umbrella with a wooden handle but no daughter. Kruse followed her back up the hill to Rue Mouffetard, close enough that he caught the outer cloud of her citrus perfume. She stopped at a pharmacy window, before the plaza, and deftly tucked the umbrella under her arm. The not-a-journalist reapplied her lipstick and licked her finger, dabbed at her right eye, and then just stared at herself and breathed, whispered something into the glass.

A masseuse had set up a mini-clinic under a big umbrella next to the fountain at Place de la Contrescarpe. Under the umbrella was a special chair and a hand-painted sign: “Free Massages with donation.” The old lanterns around the fountain had popped on. In the springtime, trees that bordered the fountain would blossom pink. Tonight the branches were bare and wet. Their shadows hung over the neglected masseuse, who was making eye contact with passing pedestrians like a lonely hound.

Café Delmas was designed as a library, with soft light and books on the shelves, leather chairs and an antelope’s head on the wall. Annette went immediately into the washroom, so Kruse found a table for them. His seat backed into the corner, faced the room. Some of what he had heard, from travellers and Bugs Bunny cartoons and American comedies
starring Chevy Chase, had turned out to be correct: the French are not afraid to smell the way men and women smell at six or seven o’clock at night, after a day of work. They are a musky people.

He stood up when she emerged and didn’t quite know whether to offer his hand or kiss her cheek. Neither perhaps. Neither. Before she sat down she began apologizing for what had happened in the newsroom, her voice shaky and her words so jumbled together he had to focus completely to understand.

“When Madame Kruse phoned it was early in the evening and I was on the late shift, you see, and she asked for a journalist and I am a journalist—I am, truly—so I believe I did nothing wrong, nothing unethical. The reporter who had written the story, he was not in the office. He rarely is. I might have transferred her, of course, but who was in at that hour? Interns. Contractors. I am a journalist, as I said. It was very kind of you, this afternoon, to lie for me. But please understand I know how to do this, what I am doing.”

“What would you like to drink, Madame Laferrière?”

“If you would prefer a journalist with a byline in
Le Monde
, a byline already I should say, it is only natural and correct. I will find someone for you, one of the
grands reporters.
”

Kruse looked up and gestured the waiter to their table. Annette breathed, somewhat regularly, and ordered a glass of white wine. The courtly waiter turned and leaned down. “And for your husband?”

Annette blushed and stuttered her way through an explanation of what they were: colleagues, friends, acquaintances, hardly more than strangers, in fact. The awkwardness gave Kruse an opportunity to scan the room. There were men in suits, half-hidden by cigarette smoke, but no one who matched the hotelier’s description of the Four Seasons gentleman. Finally, he was able to say what he wanted: a small bottle of sparkling water. When they were alone again, Annette closed her eyes in mock pain.

“I am sorry for that, for his assumption.”

“My people are famous for unnecessary apologies, not the French.”

“As I was saying, Monsieur Kruse, I would understand if you would like someone else.”

“No.”

“Thank you.”

He was not remotely interested in another story in the newspaper, a correction or an elaboration. “Can you find out about this anonymous source?”

“In our story?”

“It was the same in every story. How anonymous can it be?”

“Monsieur, I think not.”

“It was wrong. She could not have had an affair with Jean-François.”

For the first time in their conversation, she allowed a silence between them. She looked down at her notebook but didn’t write anything. Café Delmas was wild with conversation and laughter, curiously powered by the wind and the rain outside the sweating windows. Behind the noise, a woman sang sadly over a viola.

He would not say it again, or think it. The waiter arrived with their drinks and now he wanted a glass of wine. A million husbands and a million wives were sitting in bars, at this moment, telling themselves similar stories.

“I know for sure that Evelyn is incapable of murder, Madame Laferrière.”

“Then why doesn’t she present herself to the authorities? If she is innocent?”

“She was researching the Front National and working with them. It seemed everyone knew everyone, that they protected each other. I think she found this charming, at first, but if Evelyn … men are following me. Someone is threatening me.”

“Many of them are Nazis. Not real ones but Vichy men, men who seek opportunity above all things. Their humanity. The party has tried, I know, to get rid of them. I wrote about them in Bordeaux. But if a
thing is in your culture, does it not just sit and rot and smell forever? It was not so long ago.”

“What?”

“The war. The great humiliation. We can still smell it and this has always been the problem for the Front National.”

“Until Jean-François de Musset.”

“You know he descends from a very old, very wealthy French family? A family of the last king’s court? This would have been a big deal, if he had run for president.”

“Evelyn thought she could fix the party.”

“Who is following you, Monsieur Kruse?”

“Russians.”

“Why Russians?”

He regretted telling her. Tzvi was right. “I don’t know.”

Annette looked up, at the thick cloud of smoke in the room, and down at her blank paper. “When we consider the murder of Jean-François and …”

“Pascale.”

“Pascale de Musset, we can dream up reasons why others would want them killed. But your wife has two motives, or appears to. One, the man has just killed her daughter. Two, forgive me, Monsieur, they have had an affair. It went poorly, one might suspect. An emotional woman, one might suspect, mad with vengeance. She has nothing to lose. If I am an investigator, Monsieur Kruse, this does seem rather simple. Catch the furious woman. Maybe these Russians are working for the police or with the police. If you think your way through it, this is where you arrive. No?”

“No.”

“How can you be so sure of her innocence?”

Faith, he nearly said, but that would not have been precisely true.
Oubliez votre femme. Rentrez chez vous immédiatement.

Annette finished her glass of wine and ordered another.

Kruse walked her home in the darkness and the rain. On Rue Lacépède they walked down and against the flow of cars, but there was almost no traffic. Parisians were up in their apartments, before their fireplaces and television sets, drinking tea and wine, glancing occasionally at the rain tapping their windows. Annette’s voice echoed down this street and the next, the narrower and older and utterly deserted Rue de la Clef. A fog rose up from somewhere and further obscured the way ahead, a faint decline.

She was born and raised in the southwest. A lot of her friends, growing up and especially in university, wanted only to be in Paris. Not Annette: she didn’t think she would leave Bordeaux until she was already gone. After university, where she had studied political science, she started her career as a journalist. Her first job was with a newspaper called
SudOuest.
She became a well-read editorialist at a young age and fell in love with another writer. They married and had a child. Then she was fired for writing the wrong sort of article about Basque terrorists.

“What does that mean? The wrong sort of article?”

Her heels echoed in the corridor and she hugged herself in the wind. Kruse offered his jacket and she took it, wrapped it around her shoulders. “Families are connected by history, by marriage, by secret alliance. The president of the publishing group was somehow insulted or exposed.”

“You never learned how?”

“Our own lawyers deemed it libelous and worked out a compensation package for a man I had named, a terrorist. Part of that compensation package was my dismissal. It doesn’t normally work that way, in a nation with freedom of the press.”

Annette admitted, after a few quiet steps down foggy Rue de la Clef, past a bakery and a flower shop, she did not take it well. There were emotional and psychological stresses. Her husband, her ex-husband, a man so withdrawn she never once heard him pee, was now the editor-in-chief
of the newspaper. He had remarried a dancer in the ballet company attached to the Opéra National de Bordeaux.

Over 55 million people lived in France in 1992, but the community of journalists was small and intimate. Once a major newspaper fires a journalist for what it might falsely call libel, it is nearly impossible to find another job. As a writer, at least. This is why they treated her like trash at
Le Monde.

Three blocks from her apartment on Rue Santeuil, Kruse felt it. Someone was following them. He held out his hand and abruptly stopped her. It was not one footstep, back in the fog, but several.

They continued along.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing. Tell me about your daughter.”

“Anouk is her name. She is four. The same age, more or less, as—”

“Yes, Madame.”

He carried a small knife in a holster around his ankle, a gift from Tzvi. He bent down and pretended to tie his shoe, unsheathed the knife. In the early days of the school, young men would come in and, though they did not say it aloud, he knew they wanted to fight because it was impressive. Impressive to women, presumably. Sexy, maybe. Kruse, who had been doing it since he was fourteen, knew it was something else. It was grotesque, when it really happened. It turned you into a monster at the gate of the village, an enemy of quiet nights in the warm apartment, in the rain, proof. Evelyn was right to worry about what her sophisticated friends might think. In the movies it’s one punch and they’re out. In real life it’s ten and they’re lying on the sidewalk, looking like steak tartare pecked by pigeons. They were still two blocks from her apartment. She had continued talking about Anouk, a serious and studious girl, a watcher, like all only children. Annette seemed on the verge of asking about his only child. Was she like that?