Come, Barbarians (20 page)

“Evelyn.”

“Don’t interrupt me. We’re here to love.”

“She loved you.”

“And I was ashamed.”

“Did you have an affair with Jean-François?”

“I’ll tell you everything.”

“Did you?”

“Come on, Chris.”

“So: yes. Yes?”

“It seems ridiculous now. It makes no sense. Just get in the car and—”

“Why?”

“He said things no one said, about my ideas, and he understood me and I could hear him say words I had given him that made him better. When he won I’d get a job in Paris, doing things I always dreamed I might do.”

One of the market stalls, the one selling vegetables, had run out of onions.
“Oignons!”
a man shouted to another, in a white truck.

And a moment later the second man appeared with a wooden tray.
“Oignons!
” he said.

It was charming to the small crowd, the call-and-answer routine, and a few people clapped.

“I never imagined.”

“And I love you for that, Chris. You never imagined.”

Static came in again like a wave, and if she was speaking now he didn’t hear her. His stomach had gone sour, his hands cold. Her voice returned, still under the sea. She finished a sentence: “… why I believe. Do you understand? Can you forgive me?”

There were twenty-five credits left on his card, which couldn’t be right. It had come with twenty-five credits. He was asking the wrong questions. If he knew what had happened in the farmhouse Halloween night, and if he knew why, he could tell someone.

“You’re coming now?”

“Yes.”

“Rue René Leynaud, in a neighbourhood called La Croix-Rousse. There’s scaffolding in front of the church. You’ll find me through the side door. It looks broken but it isn’t. Just shove. Kick it if you have to kick it.”

“I’m two or three hours south of you.”

“No one is watching?”

“I’m alone, Evelyn.”

“Her birthday would have been in a week. Less than a week. Our Lily: four years old. Can you believe it? Four.”

A woman tripped on a loose stone in front of the onion men and her basket of apples and sausage overturned. Several people helped her back up.

“I’m a different woman now, Chris. I want you to know that.”

“We can start over.”

“That’s what I want, to start over. I’m sorry. I didn’t get it before but I get it now.”

A blast of heat started in behind his nose and bloomed over his face, and he didn’t want her to hear him so he softly hung up the phone. He turned away from the plaza and stared at the small digital display of the phone box until the tears stopped and he could buy a peach for the road.

IT WAS A LIE.
He had imagined her in the arms of other men hundreds of times: in her ugly office at York, in their bedroom when he and Lily were at the Canadian National Exhibition or tobogganing, but mostly in downtown hotel rooms. Her official philosophy, what Evelyn taught and what she believed she believed, could never really account for the encroaching thump of middle age and how we surrender to it.

Evelyn was a stranger who called him Chris. He had not seen her in two weeks and he was forgetting her face.

It was a horror. He could not abide it. He thought he could not abide it. He could abide it. It was nothing. There were thousands of places to hide north of Saint-Nazaire-le-Désert, tiny roads plastered with dust that went into the past. Provence was lush but this was something else, more extreme, more familiar, more Canadian. It could snow here, any day now, and cover the brown grasses and thin trees, cover the spruce boughs white. Smoke was visible above chimneys. They could live in
an abandoned cabin along some green river, an hour from Grenoble, eat fish and boar and berries and nuts until all this was forgotten.

He entered Lyon from the south, along the glassy Rhône. Thick clouds and a thin mist crouched over the city but there was no wind and it was warm enough that walkers and motorcyclists went without jackets. Concrete apartment buildings, the jollier French versions of brutalism, faced the autoroute and the quay. Aging overpasses and graffiti, low-income towers, and young men driving like psychopaths, Dr. Dre and Nirvana and Pearl Jam thumping in their tiny cars, all the ruin of European romance, escorted him into the medieval city.

The quay was named after Jean Moulin. While Evelyn had read guidebooks to prepare for their year in France and Lily had looked at pictures of Paris, Kruse had read about the war. Jean Moulin was one of the country’s top Resistance leaders, betrayed and captured by the Germans. The head of the Gestapo here, Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, tortured him until he was just about dead. Then he died.

Before he entered La Croix-Rousse there was an accident. Two ambulances and a police car sneaked through the traffic and he waited in the Spanish Citroën for an opportunity to turn left. He looked around him, thinking about Evelyn’s question: “No one is watching?”

No one was watching. In just a few minutes he would see her, and the anticipation came with a purr of nausea. She had said it once before, when she was angry with him and a little drunk on white wine one evening on Foxbar Road, that without Lily they were nothing. Strangers. In front of the Citroën the traffic was now entirely gummed. The woman next to him, driving a small truck, honked her horn and slapped her steering wheel. No one is watching? But a thought shoved his sweeter anxieties away, like a silent blast:
no one is listening
? His calling card, twenty-five credits forever. It was either a mistake or it was not a mistake. The map was open on the passenger seat: four blocks ahead turn left. Take the first right and then … in the van the woman honked again and shouted so loudly he could hear her through two
windows.
“Mais non!”
Kruse grabbed the map and opened his door and ran past the cars and trucks and scooters and motorcycles. Someone shouted at him to stop. The accident was not serious: a woman and two men argued as a cop tried to calm them and a paramedic smoked a cigarette. They all turned to watch Kruse.

On the other side of the accident the quay opened up and he called out in frustration, a cuss word in English he had not said aloud since Lily was born. Rain started to fall, light and cool. Tzvi would abandon him for his stupidity, his fucking
fuck
stupidity. He turned left at a parking lot entrance and a pedestrian plaza and broke into a sprint, shouting nonsense now. At the end of the plaza he veered right and arrived at an intersection of five narrow routes, the sorts of streets Evelyn had described. Some Lyonnais watched him, backed away as he spun madly. “Saint-Polycarpe!” he said, to all of them. “Saint-Polycarpe!” He looked at his map for a moment, the absurdity of stopping to look at a map.

“Monsieur,” said a woman with a shopping bag on wheels. She pointed up at one of the blue signs: Rue Saint-Polycarpe.

The street rose gently to a church with scaffolding and a clock, Evelyn’s church. He dropped the map and ran past a group of young men and women, students, who mocked him for it. “Faster,” one said, in a silly voice.

“Faster,” they said together.

Birds sat hunched on a power line before Saint-Polycarpe, waiting for the rain to stop. One fluffed its feathers. The bird’s gesture convinced him the France Télécom card was simply broken. He was a mess, an idiot, a fabulist. He had abandoned the Citroën for nothing. Sleep was what he needed. “A little perspective!”—one of Evelyn’s phrases. The two heavy doors were wooden and pasted with a laminated piece of paper apologizing for the construction. Mass on Sunday would start as usual, at 11:00. What passed for a side door was a gate covered in plywood. Someone had written on the plywood, in black marker,
that God is dead. The gate was propped open. He didn’t have to kick it. Kruse shoved and it creaked for him, and then he was in the cool and the darkness of the place. Water dripped in a smelly puddle. He climbed a set of stairs, his heart audible. There were lights somewhere, enough to see Jesus suffering on his cross, carved arches and pillars and Renaissance balconies. A sign had been hung from two poles in front of the choir, below suffering Jesus:
“REVENEZ À MOI DE TOUT VOTRE COEUR.”
Come back to me with all your heart.

“Evelyn?”

His voice echoed. Water dripped. Beyond that, the sound of feet shuffling over a hard floor. She was in Jean-François’s bed, or perhaps in the sunshine of his garden, at the precise moment that Lily broke her last porcelain teacup. She was the shy athlete in his self-defence class, his abracadabra wife. Two is the magic number.

It was much colder in the church than outside, and it smelled faintly of candles and of diesel. Wet stone and something else, something dark and fresh.

“I’m here. Hey, I have the funniest story to tell you.”

The churches of his childhood were boxy and unadorned, homely vessels for a beautiful God. Peace was a fetish. There was no mystery or invitation in any of the banners or posters. His father had spent a teenage summer in southern Manitoba, in a city full of Mennonites, where two of the churches were split on whether or not it was a sin to put whitewall tires on a car. Men and women would hide record players in their attics, to play Chopin without being outed as ostentatious fools. Ceilings were not high and decorated, like this one, to make us feel little before God. They were just ceilings, with cheap lighting fixtures, because Jesus—the one true Jesus—would not have approved of anything fancy.

“Evelyn!”

To eat, she would have to leave. He had passed several unappealing African and Middle Eastern food stalls. Perhaps she had become
a Frenchwoman: perhaps she was sleeping. The pipes of a giant organ gleamed in the half-light, and a white statue of the virgin and her baby.

He ran up the stairs, to the organ, and looked down into the emptiness of the church and called out to her again. “Please,” he said. The vessel for holy water looked empty. Kruse went back down and lit a candle because it was too dark to see into the chapels, and he said a few words for Lily and meant them. He stepped closer to the chapels and prepared himself, said no out loud and no again, no no no.

It looked as though something had been stacked in a few of the chapels, for the renovations. The holiness of a holy place could be turned off, it seemed, and on again.

He fell to his knees in the chapel of St. Francis Xavier.

Evelyn had been tied to a wooden chair, her wrists bound in front of her with her favourite white scarf. He crawled to her, through the warm puddle, and said her name. There was a word for what they had done to her: garrotte. A bruise on the side of her neck, above the fishing line and the deep wound, still leaking, reminded him of a hickey. Marie-France, the turtle
doudou
, was in her pocket, so he took it out and kissed it and stuffed it in his own. He called for help and understood it was stupid. He touched her face with the back of his hand, and like her blood on the floor it wasn’t cold, not yet, there was still hope, and he kissed her and told her he forgave her, it didn’t matter what had happened, they would go off to Spain. It was his fault. All of it was his fault: their marriage, Lily’s death, and now this. He untied her wrists and used the scarf to stop up the flow of the blood on her neck. The left side of his wife, the white silk blouse and skirt, were soaked. They would never get these stains out. She must have been freezing in here. “Shh,” he said, though there was no sound outside him and he knew it. He had made an error, between Saint-Nazaire-le-Désert and here, out of the weakness in his heart. Before they had spoken on the phone, before she had said the words, his plan had been to bring her flowers. Red chrysanthemums, he had heard somewhere, these were autumn
flowers. An enormous bouquet, utterly useless. They would steal a new Volvo with Italian plates or German and go to some obscure border crossing in the Pyrenees, the flowers in the back seat like a sleeping child. Spaniards were relaxed about this sort of thing. He was so angry with her but he loved her and kissed her again, apologized for getting blood on her perfect face.

He barely heard it over his own voice, the foot behind him in the puddle, a bare foot. He turned and looked at it, at both feet, and up at Lucien who breathed into his swing: a bat but not for baseball.

Of all he had imagined these last weeks, nothing had led him to this. The taste of it, to kill this abomination of a man, and now to be killed. He did not lift his wet hands. It was too late, just long enough to close his eyes and reach with his mind for Lily and for Evelyn in forgiveness somewhere, in the Paris of their imaginations.

DID KRUSE UNDERSTAND THAT A LIFETIME IN A FRENCH PRISON WAS
a multitude of horrors? Did he understand what they did to Americans in there? Americans who think they’re smart and cool?

“I don’t know if he thinks he’s cool.” The larger of the two men did not raise his voice. He did not address Kruse. “He had a dolly in his pocket, a turtle dolly covered in blood, when they brought him in.”

There were no windows in the concrete room, the room he had expected all along. The walls were beige, the paint cracked and mottled. The floor was untreated, with a mouldy hole in the middle and a black stain leading to it. One of the fluorescent bars zapped on and off. It was an abattoir. The smaller of the two police was bald, his head cleanly shaved. He had thin legs but his chest was muscular. He spit when he spoke, like a stage actor.

“So you think you’re a big, tough American? How did you get those scars on your face? Tell us about it.”

Cops were called
flics
here. He had said nothing so far, not at the
church and not at the police station. No one had read him his rights, if he had any rights as a foreigner. No one had charged him with anything.

“The judge will have all of this in your confession, which is the easiest way to go about this, Monsieur Kruse. Your daughter is hit by a car and killed by Jean-François de Musset. That night you and your wife go to their house and kill Monsieur and Madame de Musset, in revenge. Then your wife, who had fallen in love with Jean-François, is so disturbed she runs. But you don’t know why she’s running until you see the newspapers. You had no idea! A cuckold! She had been sleeping with the prick. So you hunt her down and murder her in a chapel in Saint-Polycarpe.”

“No.”

The bald detective stood and shouted at him, his heavy shoe clanking on the metal-rimmed hole. Foam and slobber formed on his lips like snow on a curb. A pregnant vein was visible where his hairline had been. A foreigner comes to his city, kills his wife in a seventeenth-century church. This does not happen in Lyon. This is not New York City! Motherfucker, he called Kruse, in English.

Kruse nearly laughed, not at their theory but at the way the flic had said “motherfucker,” like in a
Saturday Night Live
sketch making fun of Frenchies. “The Marianis killed Evelyn. They killed the de Mussets too, and you know it.”

He sighed, the bald man who had been shouting, and walked to the reflecting window. “I see. The Marianis, the actual Marianis, would risk everything to come personally to Lyon to kill a woman in a church.

Why?”

“I don’t know, Monsieur.”

“He’s an assassin.” The larger and younger detective pulled out a card and handed it to his small explosion of a partner. One of the men wore the same cologne his father had worn, a drugstore cologne.

The bald one lifted his glasses to read the card. “MagaSecure, based in Toronto, hired by … a European client?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me this was business. How many others have you killed, here in my country? In Lyon. My city! The city of my ancestors and my children!” The bald detective leaned over the table and spoke softly into Kruse’s ear. “In certain cases, special cases, we can make sure you’re treated monstrously in prison. Like a pretty girl.”

“Je m’en fous.”

The policeman lingered over Kruse, as though he were wrestling with the idea of punching him in the face. He took a cigarette from his partner.

Kruse had worked through the concussion on a hospital bed, guarded by three young policemen in uniform. Why three? Kruse had spoken the truth: he didn’t care what happened to him now. Lily and Evelyn were gone. There was Tzvi but Tzvi was special—he needed no one and nothing. Kruse only had one thing left to do and he was impatient to do it.

“We have others here, unofficial police,” said the larger one, not at all the good cop. He sat with perfect posture, as though he had been too shy to say the ugly words. “Laws about treating murder suspects with decency and respect do not apply to these police. They don’t exist, you see.”

“I murdered no one.”

The bald policeman jumped and landed in a fighting stance. More screaming ensued. Lies, foreign lies, importing American values, the violent sodomy he was in for. It would hollow out his sore head and leave him a withering walnut-shell of a man. They had caught him in the room, with the knife, with a motive.

“With a concussion.”

“She fought back, brave woman. Brained you one.”

“It was a baseball bat. Lucien Mariani—”

“No one plays baseball in France, my friend.”

Kruse had not asked for a lawyer, a translator, or a representative of
the Canadian embassy. He would have been as happy in prison as on the streets, an eternal wanderer.

The large man finally stood and stretched. He turned on a tape recorder in the corner of the room and asked Kruse to begin at the beginning. At first the bald one mocked him for inventing a story. What they wanted was the truth, not some fairy tale. Then, slowly, both of them shrank into their hard chairs and stopped pretending to be hangmen. It had not suited them. These were family men, readers of detective novels, playing at being hard.

“We should … we must make a phone call.” The larger of the two policemen spoke softly when Kruse was finished. “In case there’s anything to this …”

“A call to whom?”

“
Merde.
”

“It’s all lies, I’m sure,” said the bald man, with fading conviction. They knew what a lie sounded like. “But it’s easy to test them. It’s easy to test your filthy stories, Christophe.”

A North African policeman in a new uniform, one of his guards from the hospital, escorted him to his cell. It had a small bed and a very clean stainless steel toilet. There were no bars, like in the movies, and no window. His door was another giant hunk of swinging concrete with a slot at the bottom for his trays of food. At dinnertime he received a small paper cup of red wine with his slab of meat, his bread and butter, his cooked beans.

Evelyn would have found that charming, wine in jail.

They brought him two changes of clothes: a navy blue suit and a typically French casual outfit of jeans, a well-ironed white short-sleeved shirt, and a sweater. Salon shampoo, a box of aftershave and eau de cologne by Christian Dior, a new electric razor, socks, and underwear
with the word “Givenchy” stitched on the white waistband were all in a white cotton bag. How sorry they were for his treatment—not just today but since his family’s arrival in France. In the basement of a hospital they introduced him to Evelyn’s blanched and waxy body, left him alone with it in the refrigerated room. The silent and bowing woman who tended the morgue had unzipped Evelyn’s bag too low and he was abandoned to all of her, from her dark eyebrows and little nose down to her knees. He didn’t know what to do or say.

Several times they assured him it was the best hotel in Lyon. Maybe not for men of business but certainly for men of taste. This was, he supposed, a compliment. It was a former convent, painted soft yellow like so many of the others in the pastel city, overlooking the river and downtown—the Presqu’île. It didn’t feel like a convent, with the arches and statues and tapestries. His own room was drunk with French classicism, la suite Médici: chandeliers, tapestries, gilded everything, and a view over a lush and fussy courtyard. Two men and a woman with walkie-talkies waited in the salon—for his protection, they said—while he showered the prison from his hair and skin, and sat in an ancient burgundy chair with the door closed and the lights out. It wouldn’t be difficult to escape now but he wanted to wait and see if he could do it without hurting any of these people. They were not the ones he wanted to hurt. He put on the clothes they gave him, the outfit every middle-class French father wears on a Sunday afternoon in Luxembourg Gardens, with his daughter in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other: new jeans, a polo shirt, and a soft blue sweater. The city of Lyon, from above, was butter and Easter eggs. He could see, from his terrace, the top of the church where the noseless man had cut the life out of her.

They returned the bloodstained turtle
doudou
to him in a plastic Ziploc bag. Kruse opened the bag and smelled Marie-France. It no longer smelled of Lily. At dusk the small party arrived, five bodyguards in suits to replace the others who had put in a full day, and their bosses—a man and a woman. The way they walked and smiled and dressed, the way
they watched him, he thought of meetings in Toronto and New York and Washington with senior bureaucrats and executives who hired him and feared him the way they feared a zoo tiger.

The agents introduced themselves, Monsieur Meunier and Madame Lareau, without stating their titles. Evidence of long-ago military training lived in their posture and in the confident but uncomfortable way they stood next to each other after the introduction. They inhabited a space between funeral director and tap dancer. Both wore conservative autumn suits. Monsieur Meunier was balding grandly, shamelessly. He was a man who had gone soft and fleshy, with girlish eyelashes and a careful manner of walking about the small hotel room, his feet pointed out, his pelvis and soft belly in the lead, his fingers knitting something small and invisible. What remained of his hair was a blow-dried black and grey hood of curls. Madame Lareau had been careful not to allow herself to be beautiful on the job. She wore no makeup. Her own deep brown hair had been pulled back so tightly it had an air of self-torture. One of her eyes was different than the other, and he didn’t concentrate on what she said because he didn’t care and because he was trying to figure them out. Neither agent asked for information about him, what he did back in Canada and what he had been doing here in France. Monsieur Meunier, who was either a homosexual or pretending, spoke of Lyon as though Kruse were here on holiday. Had he experienced dinner on historic Rue Mercière? In a
bouchon
, a classic little
restaurant Lyonnais
? This had been the Roman capital, the financial centre of Western Europe, a silk-weaving city, a publishing city and, today, an eating city.

One of the guards was actually a server in white gloves. When there was a knock on the door he worked with hotel staff to prepare the table and to open the champagne. The door was open as they worked. He thought of going now because none of this mattered, but one last sleep would be useful. The guard in white gloves poured three glasses of champagne and there was another knock on the door: crackers, cheeses
and fruit and charcuterie, grape tomatoes. He stood at attention for a moment, waiting for someone to compliment the spread. Finally the woman—Madame Lareau—dismissed the server.

Then all of the guards went out the door. Kruse knew which of them was armed, which had seen combat. The others were frightened.

“To France,” said Madame Lareau, and she lifted her glass. One of her eyes was smaller than the other. At the correct angle it was clear, the reconstructive surgery like playdough without dye. There had been an accident or not-an-accident. Her hand trembled, with the champagne in it.

Monsieur Meunier raised his glass and placed his right hand over his heart, stood comically at attention and chuckled. He said, in a mock-serious voice, “To France.” His partner glanced at him and his smile faded.

Kruse said nothing and did not drink. The agents prepared small plates of food, passing glances, and sat in two luxurious red and gold chairs made to look old. For a time Kruse didn’t sit and then he pulled the wing chair from the bedroom into the small salon of the suite, next to a decorative table. Soft horn music was playing on the clock radio in his dark bedroom, and he wished he could lie down into it instead of speaking to a couple of ruined functionaries.

Madame Lareau chaired the meeting.

“Let’s begin, shall we, by stating your crimes.”

Her partner took care of this, with both precision and a tone of apology: the murders of Jean-François and Pascale de Musset, several counts of auto theft, a grave assault on Antoine Fortier, the president of the Front National. An undocumented Russian man is in the hospital with fractured ribs and a punctured lung. He had slowly strangled his wife in the chapel of an historic church with fishing line, and he had kept tightening the line until it cut through her carotid artery. For each allegation, Monsieur Meunier produced a black-and-white photograph. He described the recommended penalty for each crime and
assured Kruse he would be convicted. The French Republic was certain. He would spend the rest of his life in La Santé. Had he by chance heard of La Santé? Monsieur Meunier described the prison, located in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, the way he had described Rue Mercière. Again he provided helpful photographs: this time blurry images of vomit- and feces-strewn concrete floors, suicides, murders, and—saving what he called the best for last—guard-sanctioned gang rape for the most visible enemies of good taste and the republic.

Madame popped a tomato in her mouth and chewed and stared at him. “Do we understand each other, Monsieur Kruse?”

“You have fabricated my guilt.”

“Guilt is guilt, Monsieur. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a glass of champagne? It’s from a lovely small producer south of Reims, a family friend.”

Meunier squinted and opened his arms.
Come on, man, it’s delicious.

“No, thank you.”

“But wait, Monsieur. Don’t despair.”

“I’m past despair.”

“We do have much prettier photographs to show you.”

The first pictures were of a landscape similar to that which surrounded Vaison-la-Romaine, minus the white patches of holiday houses: low mountains and green valleys, vineyards, a river. Meunier handed them over delicately, like religious objects: a soft-yellow two-storey farmhouse in the sunshine, a
bastide
, surrounded by its own small vineyard, with freshly painted blue shutters. Without consulting them, Madame Lareau described the images like a real estate agent crossed with a poet. Interior photos were of a modern kitchen, an old fireplace surrounded by the sort of furniture Evelyn adored: a boxy white couch, old wooden wing chairs, a dining table surrounded by contemporary, perhaps slightly over-designed chairs. Three bedrooms: one, curiously, with a crib.