Come, Barbarians (11 page)

“Are your muscles settling? I do apologize for Lucien and his toys. My preference was to knock on the door at eight in the morning, hat in hand.”

Kruse watched them and briefly despised himself for pausing when every instinct had said attack.
À l’attaque.
His wrists were well bound. Lucien took his wallet from the bedside table and handed it to Joseph. It looked like Joseph took something out of it, but Kruse was having trouble focusing. He thought of the gladiolas outside the windows; when had he last watered them? A week ago? Two weeks? How long ago had Lily died? The aftershocks wore off with a throb of nausea.

“We won’t bind your feet, because neither of us wants to carry you. You’re a big fellow. Strong!” Joseph lifted his gun as if it were a dirty dishrag. “But if you kick us, or try to run, I will shoot you—or Lucien will. And not with an electric stick.”

He had fallen asleep in his clothes, reading about
le milieu.
Joseph crossed the room and picked the book up.

“I like this story. It made me blush. Do you know why we’re here, Christopher?”

“No.”

“But you do know who we are. You’ve been doing some research, you scamp, sending letters.” Joseph looked away from Kruse and smirked at his brother. In French he said, quickly, “Look, you both have scars.”

Lucien looked down.

“Do you have plans today, by chance?” Joseph stood up off the chair and buttoned his jacket. “We were hoping to show you around our hometown this morning.”

“I had booked off some time to throw up.”

“A side effect of the electricity. You’re coming either way, Christopher. My hope is you’ll come willingly and happily, as we mean you no harm. On the contrary. We’re friends and allies, as you’ll see.”

“Marseille?”

Lucien walked over and pulled him off the bed and onto the floor, by his bound hands. Kruse landed on his elbows, a fresh riot of pain. Now Lucien pulled him up to his feet the same way. The bedroom tilted and spun. He slammed into the wall and threw up on the floor beside the bed.

“Well, mission accomplished,” said Joseph.

IN THE BACK SEAT OF A SILVER ALFA ROMEO SEDAN, KRUSE IMAGINED
what Tzvi would have done in the apartment. He would have immediately disarmed and disabled Lucien without allowing any other considerations to intervene. He would have used him as a shield long enough to get the knife he had hidden in a Kleenex box under the bed. He would have turned on the light and thrown the knife at Joseph’s face before the assassin’s eyes adjusted. One shot would be fired, and it would miss. Six seconds, at the most.

Then he would kill one, with maximum cruelty, in front of the other. Finally he would torture the second man into explaining everything. Maybe he would let him live, to spread a message among his masters.

Or maybe not.

“What do you do for a living, Christopher?”

“Nothing, at the moment.”

“A man of leisure.”

“Something like that.”

“Did you have a métier before you won the lottery?”

“I taught school.”

“What subject?”

If Evelyn had wanted him to be anything, it was a scholar: they could have dreamy arguments about beauty at the dinner table. “Literature.”

“Oh how lucky for us, Lucien. An intellectual like Madame. I never received a detailed report, from our Slavic friends in Paris. How did you evade them?”

“I ran.”

“A professor and an athlete, Lucien. Your sort of fellow.”

Lucien did not look away from the road. The noseless man’s posture was unnaturally stiff and every breath was an announcement. He was, Kruse supposed, the only man in France to follow the speed limit. They passed through a toll station and Joseph turned and watched Kruse equably, benevolently. None of the three men in the car said a word to the toll agent, who did not even look down. Despite all his years of training and, on security jobs, several encounters with what Tzvi called the enemy, Kruse had never met genuine assassins.

Signs began to appear for Marseille.

“What was your specialty?”

“My specialty?”

“In literature, I mean. Doesn’t one always specialize?”

“Shakespeare. Keats. Plato.”

“Plato is literature?”

“I taught optional courses in philosophy.”

“Having been educated here in France, my exposure to Shakespeare and Keats has been limited. But Plato I like. What do you think of Plato, Lucien?
Platon?
”

Again, Lucien did not respond.

“He prefers novels, Lucien. Strange and dirty ones. My brother is something of an
avant-gardiste.
Do you read French, Christopher?”

“Well enough.”

Joseph nodded cordially, and faced the road again. Exits to Marseille were approaching. “You’re not nervous.”

“Should I be?”

“Yes, Christopher. I’m afraid so. I’m nervous myself, to be honest. It has been an unusual
quinze jours.
Since our father died, it’s rare I get involved in any actual work. But this is special. You’re special.”

Lucien navigated slowly through the bland suburban bits Kruse remembered from their drive in from the airport, the part of France that annoys the romantic looking for
la France profonde.
They entered an in-between area, old stone across the street from post-war brutalism. The allies would have bombed here. They entered a hilly bit in the centre, close enough to the sea to sense the water somewhere on the other side of a roof. There was a plaza. It was still dark and the fountain was alive with pretty but mournful yellow floodlights. Two weeks ago, with Evelyn and Lily—to be a tourist again—he would have taken a photo of this spot.

Lucien parked in a tiny garage, and the brothers led Kruse down a thin, cobbled street, Rue de la Cathédrale. He had not seen the cathedral. Somewhere the sun was rising over old Marseille. A man approached in the distance and Lucien took a few steps ahead in his hard black shoes. The man stopped when he saw Lucien, turned around, and walked away. In the dimness, Kruse could see efforts had been made to reconstruct the lost nose. It was half the size of what it ought to have been, a difference of a couple of square centimetres. His brown eyes were bright, almost lovely.

Neither of them had wanted to accompany Kruse to the bathroom, after he threw up. He said he had other business to do. There was a box of blades in the drawer that held his razor. When neither of them were directly behind him, he worked on the rope.

Kruse knew what was coming, as they led him deeper into the medieval quarter. As a teenager he had attended Tzvi’s three-week summer
survival camps and then, when he turned twenty-one, he began to lead them. There is a colour and a smell to it, Tzvi’s specialty. You are walking down a long corridor followed by men with guns, the inquisitors, the brownshirts, and you know that eventually the lights will go out and when they do, in the cold and the damp, you are going to die. It will gallop from the darkness and take you before you can pray. Tzvi had conceived of the summer camps as a profit-making venture but also as a public service; Kruse’s first year, when he lied to his parents about the camp being devoted to outdoor education, he was the only non-Jew.

They stopped at a blue door. Kruse noted the number and the flower boxes across the corridor, a wall covered in scaffolding twenty metres farther along, the motorcycles and scooters. The staircase was wooden and crooked, and smelled wet. It led to another door on the second floor. Joseph opened it and turned on the light.

Lucien shoved Kruse inside an open studio. Its walls had been freshly painted white. In the apartment, a faint odour of vinegar filled the room. The ceiling and tall panelled windows at the end of the room were exquisitely moulded. Joseph fussed with a thermostat in the kitchen, which had Nordic cabinetry and a new dining table with six steel chairs. Kruse had done some work in Oslo and Stockholm; the apartment in Marseille looked like an import from the cool north.

Around the corner there was a muffled whine, like that of a well-trained dog keen to see its master. Joseph’s fine leather shoes clacked on the wood floor. Kruse had made progress on the rope.

“Do you know why we’re here, Christopher?”

“Fire up the bong, open a bag of Cheezies, watch
A Clockwork Orange.
”

Joseph turned to his noseless brother, who stared indifferently at the sink. “He’s an odd duck, no?”

He was through the first part of the knot. He tucked the rope around, so nothing would hang. “What happened to his nose?”

“Hey. Hey, enough with that, professor. You haven’t answered my question. We’re here so you can …”

“Lead a couple of gangsters to my wife.”

“I don’t like the word ‘gangster.’ Otherwise, you’ve reduced things like a good balsamic—bravo.”

“But why, Monsieur Mariani? Why go to all this trouble to find my wife?”

Lucien opened a cupboard door and pulled down a stainless steel medical tray. Joseph waved Kruse over, as though he were leading a tour of his sculpted gardens.

The kitchen led to a room he had not anticipated, a salon that expanded left and right into a T. On the left there was no dog but a naked man bound to a rectangular wooden apparatus that had been built into the corner of the room. His head was bowed before him and his long, curly hair fell into his face.

“What is this?”

“Good question, Christopher. Excuse me, Frédéric. Freddy: What is this?”

The man slowly lifted his head. His hands had been tied to a thick horizontal beam above. At first the man appeared unharmed, merely uncomfortable and sleepy. The damage was below. Both of his feet had been clamped into a metal contraption with heavy antique springs and a tightening lever. The machine belonged in a museum but it worked: his feet and ankles had been mashed into a white and purple pulp of skin, blood, and bone.

If he had not been tied to the ceiling, he could not have remained upright. White fabric had been stuffed into his mouth; a long line of drool hung from bits that had escaped from behind the duct tape. A thick, transparent plastic sheet had been stapled to the walls around him, the ceiling above, and the floor below. Blood pooled below both mangled feet, black and congealed. His penis was a snail teased out of its shell and into the awful light. Two wooden chairs sat before the
man and the chamber. It reminded Kruse of the theatre series he and Evelyn had subscribed to the first year they dated. She had wanted him to understand modern artistic motivation, the perversity of it, what she was up against in the academy.

The naked man’s eyes, when he looked up, were at once dead and ferocious. On the night Lily was killed, when Evelyn had shouted hopelessly and ungrammatically at the gendarmes who had arrived to take Jean-François away, her eyes had held the same look. All she could tell the gendarmes in proper French was, “
Il
l’a tué, il l’a tué.
” He killed her.

“Let him go.”

“Oh, Christopher.”

“This is disgusting and I have no idea what it has to do with me. Let him go, now, cover him up.”

Joseph’s eyes widened but it was too late to duck. From behind, Lucien slapped Kruse in the right ear. The dull pain in his head, from the electric shock, blew away. He was accustomed to being hit, but he had always been prepared; Tzvi felt it was more important to take a strike with dignity than to deliver one with precision.

Kruse went down on one knee and remained so until he could hear again, and prepared for the next blow. It did not come.

“I do apologize.” Joseph spoke quietly and evenly. He helped Kruse into one of the chairs and sat in the other.

He knew their weight, their weapons and potential weaknesses, their access to communications equipment, and he could deduce from the slap and from Lucien’s overall air of confidence that he was skilled, if not an expert, in close combat. There was one escape route: the way he had come in.

Though he did not understand the language they spoke between themselves—Corsican, evidently—Kruse could tell Joseph was now asking his brother to bring something. He did not speak again until it arrived: a bottle of pastis, a pitcher of water, some ice, and two long, skinny glasses. “Will you join me?”

Kruse shook his head.

The cathedral bell clanged once and echoed in the apartment. It revived the naked man somewhat, and he struggled in the only way he could, by twisting his torso. Each torque obviously brought great pain to his mangled feet, and his eyes watered with it. Through the white fabric in his mouth, the naked man cried out and wept.

“Will you turn on some music?” Joseph called out. He asked what Kruse preferred, what genre. “We have everything.”

“Who is he?”

“How about one of these new bands from Seattle everyone is talking about?” He clapped and growled an approximation of the lyrics to the song that had lived on the radio and on passing car stereos for the last six or eight months. Again he looked at Frédéric and closed his eyes for a moment. “Old friend.”

Frédéric shook his head, said something behind the tape.

“How long have you been a professor, Christopher?”

Kruse was incapable of answering, so Joseph called out to Lucien again, this time in Corsican. A violin and piano concerto began to play, at first quietly. It was not in any of the music appreciation courses and it wasn’t in Evelyn’s collection, so Kruse didn’t recognize it. It was pretty and old. If he had to guess: Vivaldi.

“Louder,” said Joseph. “Please.”

“Who is he?”

“We’re in a bit of a spot, Lucien and I, our enterprise. It’s our own fault, a spot of rotten luck, and it involves you, I’m afraid. Your wife. I want you to know, sincerely, what you see before you is not my preference. Lucien, well, he has research interests.” Joseph poured an ounce of pastis in each glass and filled them with water. He held one of the glasses before Kruse, and the smell of licorice was both nauseating and delicious.

No.

Joseph shrugged and took a long drink himself. “We’re generally a
careful operation. My father was a conservative man but we lost him. We took a risk, Christopher, and acted carelessly. The young man before you was part of that carelessness. It was not his fault, not entirely. Some of it was just awful timing, like the death of your daughter. Other bits: careless talk outside our small circle, which we cannot afford. I’ve known him, this man before you, since I was a teenager. We were working together, the night your poor daughter died. I’m desperately sorry about that, and for this.” Joseph lifted his glass in salute to Frédéric. “He knows how sorry I am, about all of this, and how sentimental.

Santé, mon ami.
”

“How could you do this?”

“You’re a literary man.” Joseph was nearly finished the glass of pastis and water. “Enter my heart.”

Small white speakers were attached to the ceiling in the four corners of the room. The music rose slowly.

“If I can convince you to tell us where she is, what you know about where Evelyn might be, so much of this—all of it—will go away.”

“What do you want with her?”

Joseph pointed at him. “I mean this sincerely: the less you know about that, the better. All that concerns you, Christopher, is that we most desperately need to talk to your beautiful, frustrating wife.”

“Putain.”
Lucien’s first word, delivered like a man suffering the worst cold of his life: whore.

“Easy, brother.” Joseph closed his eyes, in meditation. Kruse was nearly through the second layer of rope and tasted what he would do to the beast in the kitchen.
Putain.
Say it again.

“You asked about his nose. Well, when we were young, just out of school, Lucien was the most handsome man in Marseille. A good student, an athlete, a public speaker. Next to him, well, what could a boy like me do?”

The prisoner, Frédéric, fixed his gaze on Kruse and settled it there. His eyes were red and sore, with what looked like wet tea bags below
them. He had been here many hours, and sleep had not come.

“Everyone thought he was a … how do you say this in English? A cocksman.”

Joseph took a deep breath and finished his drink. His mastery had faded.