by Todd Babiak
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, Ch
ristopher, 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.
“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?”