by Todd Babiak
“I don’t know.”
“You have received no correspondence?”
“None.”
“Our men who searched your little house—Russians, former Soviets, very troubled—they found nothing. I am inclined, and you are fortunate in this, to believe you. We’ve been watching and waiting, just as you have been. If Madame does contact you, and you don’t contact us immediately, with what you have learned, then … then I will get creative with you too, Professor Kruse.”
“Why Evelyn?”
“We want what you want: to find her and keep her safe.”
“The world,” said Joseph, “is complex.”
“Professor, what did she tell you?” Lucien allowed his hands to drip into the sink. “On the night your daughter died? She saw two men drinking with Monsieur de Musset.”
Kruse shook his head. Two men, one with long hair. The tips of Frédéric’s long hair were sticky with blood.
“She went out alone some hours later. Up the hill, yes? Did she come back, even briefly? Tell you what she had seen? Did she send you a note?”
“No. What did she see?”
Lucien removed his hands from the sink and turned off the faucet with his elbow. He dried his hands as a doctor would. “What did you tell the gendarme?”
“Which one?”
“Huard.”
“I told him what I’ve told you.”
“You don’t know where she is. This is the truth?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know to look for us?”
“In Paris …”
“The hotelier. Yes. Listen to me, Monsieur Kruse. We want to help your wife, help you. She needs professional guidance and protection.”
“What did she see?” He spoke to keep them speaking. Kruse sliced through the last of the rope around his wrists. The tray of instruments was only a metre away. There was a scalpel in there and something smaller. If you know how to use a knife, you want it to be small. If it is an extension of your hand, the enemy will not easily take it from you.
The prisoner gurgled and grunted before them. Bells rang in the square. It was eight or nine or ten.
“This woman in Paris, the one from Le Monde, she spoke to Evelyn.”
“Yes.”
“And what did Evelyn tell her?”
“That the story in her newspaper had been full of lies. She was innocent.”
“Hardly innocent, Monsieur Kruse. I do worry for their safety, Madame Laferrière and her daughter. What is her name? Anouk. A tidy one-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor on Rue Santeuil. I worry, you see, because the larger this becomes, the more difficult it will be to contain. My brother and I, at the moment we are in the containment business. Do you understand?”
Kruse did not understand how this man, how men like him, slept at night. This is what had always confounded his parents, when they were exposed to old stories of ruined Mennonites or the Holocaust or shootings in Toronto. How did it work? How did the human heart allow such abomination?
“What will you do now, Monsieur Kruse?”
“Look for my wife.”
“And if you find her?”
“Take her home and start again.” It was not too late. They could have another baby, another girl on Foxbar Road. “That’s all I want.”
“We will help you.”
With Lucien, it would take four to eight seconds. Joseph, gently weaving, two seconds or three.
Lucien returned from the kitchen. Now he had the Glock. He helped Joseph up out of his chair and together they stood before Kruse, looking not at him but at the prisoner. It would be as simple as his mother’s favourite waltz: take the scalpel from the tray and cut Lucien’s wrist and throat. One-two-three. Violin music continued to play from the little speakers. Order. Beauty. Courage. To the gun, to the interrogation of Joseph, to the end of them both. For the rest of his life he would consider his hesitations in Vaison-la-Romaine and in Marseille as he fell asleep at night. One-two-three. He feared the gun but knew he need not fear the gun; by the time Lucien raised his arm, his wrist would be cut and his throat would be cut.
“I wanted to be a surgeon, when I was a young man.” Lucien said this in English, in a more posh tone than his French, as though he were pretending. Or perhaps now he was not pretending. “When I was being educated in London.”
Kruse watched him, to see which it was.
“My brother is going to give you a phone number, Professor Kruse.”
Joseph returned to his chair. His eyes were covered in a film of moisture. His hands trembled. “My personal number, Christopher. Call any time.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled from it a small white card. “If you find Evelyn or she finds you, later today or tomorrow or five years from now, you will call me. And if you don’t, well, maybe we won’t be such good friends anymore, sharing a jolly drink like this.”
“The note in the library?”
“I am an amateur calligraphist.” Joseph reached toward Kruse with the card. He dropped it on Kruse’s lap. “Can Lucien fix you something else? There’s a bottle of rosé. Likely some … cheese in the fridge. You can cut your own bonds, I trust.”
“Don’t hurt her.”
“What?”
“If you find Evelyn, don’t hurt her.”
Joseph looked at his brother and back at Kruse. There was something, a secret or a confession. He said nothing.
“If you hurt her, Monsieur Mariani …”
“Joseph, please.”
“I’ll kill you.”
Joseph watched Kruse for some time, weaving gently, as his noseless but vain brother prepared himself for departure in front of a full-length mirror in the WC.
“I’ll kill you, Joseph. I’ll kill you all.”
The Mariani brothers walked out of the apartment together, Lucien helping his brother down the stairs. It took some time. Kruse crossed to the window and looked down, watched them walk up the street in the morning sun. They scared some white birds, which flew up in front of them and perched on a nearby roof.
He breathed quickly, the skinless man, like a small child who has finished a long and unexpected run. Kruse chose the scalpel and sliced the exposed carotid artery of the skinless man in one motion. A quick burst of his blood splashed on Kruse’s jacket, and then the rest of it pumped and flowed down the mutilated body, down the mess of leg, and onto the floor.
It was the smell of a butcher’s shop. Kruse walked down and out, to the opposite end of Rue de la Cathédrale. There it was, the great grey candy-cane church and the port. He felt the way he had felt after Lily was killed: it was obscene and ridiculous that all these people could keep walking, on their way to work or to a café, these teenagers with guidebooks and cameras, taxi drivers, lovers, dog walkers, fishermen. That a river could keep flowing. It was warm enough up the street, in Place de Lenche, away from the wind, that men and women in suits and dresses and sunglasses sat on the terraces of the square under green parasols in the dawn light, talking about the weather and moving their espresso cups about their tables.
Such a fine season here. Everyone said so.
Kruse climbed a set of stairs, randomly, past yellow buildings and around soft corners, on his way nowhere. He checked his wallet, to see what Joseph had taken, and it appeared he had taken nothing. Everything was as it had been. To sit at a terrace, to be a regular man for an hour, a husband, a father in a shirt someone who loved him had bought for his birthday, talking about the weather. He walked up the skinny maze of a road, past the garbage and graffiti. Children wept and a man shouted from an open window. Then the street opened up and there was another fountain. It was always a relief from some vague torment, seeing a fountain. He had said it in English: I’ll kill you both. I’ll kill you all. Kruse excused himself and sneaked in among the children dipping their fingers. He splashed water on his face and they backed away, laughed at him. He removed his blood-splattered jacket and dropped it in a garbage can. Two hobos sat under a plane tree, not yet cli
pped for the winter, sharing a bottle for breakfast. One of them struggled to his feet and pulled Kruse’s jacket out of the garbage, wiped it off, put it on, and returned to his wine.
He took a taxi from the train station in Orange to the gendarmerie in Vaison-la-Romaine. The driver was an unusually fat man from Nyons, where the olive oil is the best in the world. “This is a secret the Italians do not want revealed to the world: the microclimate in Nyons, Monsieur, is a kind of sorcery.” If you are an olive tree, that is. If you are a fat man in a taxi, without air conditioning, it is a different sort of thing. The driver played tour guide, explaining each village as they passed it in the sunshine. “A tip, Monsieur: if you want a spectacular wine, make it a Gigondas. Half the price of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and just as good. Better for my taste, Monsieur. And regardez: the Dentelles de Montmirail.” A mountain of lace.
The rocky tip looked, to Kruse, like an upside-down waterfall. This was not the sort of beauty Evelyn had prescribed. It would not transform him from a man of violence into a man of culture, this mountain peak or that perched village, any more than strolling through the October leaves of a Southern Ontario forest would fix him. He was nostalgic for old anxieties about saving his marriage, about being the sort of man Evelyn could be proud of, the right sort of dad, everything that had devilled him. From the taxi, with the smell of skin and blood in his nose and in his mouth, he longed for the simplicity of a divorce ultimatum, the image of another man fucking his wife, co-parenting, tension and awkwardness and too much champagne at his daughter’s wedding.
Lieutenant Huard was twenty minutes from the end of his workday, eight to four, when Kruse arrived at the gendarmerie. He sat in his cracked leather chair, tidying his desk, as Kruse spoke. Then he shook his head. Impossible.
“Why, Monsieur Kruse, would this man with no nose kill Pascale and Jean-François?”
“Lucien Mariani.”
“So you say.”
“You’re the investigator.”
“I’ve been removed from this file.”
“Why?”
“Don’t play-act for me, Monsieur Kruse. I know what you are now. I looked you up. You’re in the system. You’re some sort of, what, agent? Of something?”
“You asked if I thought people were looking for my wife. Yes, people are looking for my wife. Their names are Joseph and Lucien Mariani. They confessed to hiring Russian thugs to break into my house and toss everything on the floor, the same men who attacked me in Paris. They know about the photocopy I sent you yesterday. How could they know that?”
“They couldn’t know that. There’s no way …”
“But they did, Monsieur. And they just skinned a man, their childhood friend, in an apartment in Marseille.”
Huard tilted his head, as though he were eavesdropping on another conversation. He lifted his hand, for Kruse to stop. Then he said, a bit dreamily, “Who skinned a man? Your Russian thugs?”
“Lucien Mariani.”
Huard reacted to the word “Mariani” as though it were the sting of a small but determined bug. He refused to say the word himself. “But these men have hundreds of employees, family members. Why would they hire Russians? Did they tell you why they’re looking for Madame Kruse?”
“They said they want to protect her.”
“From what?”
“They weren’t telling the truth, Monsieur Huard.”
“This man they … skinned?”
“Yes.”
“Again: Why?”
“He was with them, I suppose, the night they killed Jean-François and Pascale. He said something he should not have said, to someone. They’re in the containment business.”
“What does that mean?”
“Aren’t you going to write any of this down?” Kruse opened his shirt and displayed the burn marks on his chest, from the electric baton.
“I’m done for the day. And as I told you, this is not my file. I’m investigating a shipment of illegally imported truffles.”
“Let me take you to the apartment in Marseille. You’ll see for yourself.”
“Perhaps you didn’t understand, Monsieur Kruse. Come back tomorrow morning. My commander—”
Kruse slammed the door behind him. “Did you order an autopsy of Jean-François and Pascale?”
“They were murdered by your wife.”
“Did you?”
Huard’s breathing had sped up and his neck was pink. He looked over Kruse’s shoulder and spoke softly. “I requested one, yes.”
“And?”
He slammed his palms on his desk and stood up. “Get out of my office.”
“No.”
Two other gendarmes, Madame Boutet and a slightly cross-eyed man in his twenties, in a uniform, knocked on the door and entered. Madame Boutet nodded at Kruse and addressed Huard. “Everything all right?”
“Have this man removed.”
Kruse stood up. “That’s all right, Monsieur Huard. I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you. I’ll tell Madame my story, and—”
“What story?”
“All right, fils de salope. We’ll go.”
Madame Boutet looked at Kruse. “Go where?”
“Nowhere!” said Huard. “Disneyland.”
She half-smiled and closed the door. Lieutenant Huard stared at Kruse and picked up his telephone receiver. “Where in Marseille, goddamn you?”
Men and women sat in Place de Lenche, in shorts and T-shirts and sweatsuits, and shouted at each other under cheap branded awnings. It was cool yet no one wore a scarf in Marseille. Adults dressed and drank like teenagers. This city and Paris had very little in common.
On skinny Rue de la Cathédrale, men slumped on white plastic chairs outside apartment doors. The play-by-play of a soccer match—l’Olympique de Marseille against tonight’s enemy—burst from fat little television sets and radios. There was no menace in the way the men watched them as they passed but they did watch, and when Kruse turned around to see if they were still watching, they were still watching.
A large, black-and-grey-bearded policeman was waiting for them at number twelve, and Huard shook his hand. He didn’t introduce Kruse, and the bearded Marseillais didn’t inquire. Instead he pulled deeply on his cigarette, tossed it on the ground, and pressed a button on the intercom. The street had seemed longer in the early morning, when his hands were bound and Joseph was talking. It was just a narrow corridor between Place de Lenche and the cathedral, whose towers were visible in the greying sky. How had he missed them?
Kruse asked Huard why so many people watched them, and the gendarme turned around, looked about him. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Watch us! Please!”
A voice came through the intercom and the cop said, “Police.” The door sang and he shoved it open. Huard followed the Marseillais and Kruse followed him.
“Up the stairs, you said?”
Kruse was not keen to see the body again, or to smell it. “Yes.”
There were three doors. Kruse pointed to the white one and the big policeman knocked. He identified himself, gruffly, as Marseille police and knocked again. He tried the door handle. “Did you lock it when you left, Monsieur Kruse?”
“No.”
The Marseillais turned to them and spoke sincerely, formally. “I have reason to believe, gentlemen, that someone is in danger inside.”
Huard pulled his gun. “Noted and agreed.”
Despite their air of confidence, both of them looked around—up the stairs and down—to see if anyone in the building was peeking out their doors. The bearded man kicked twice, next to the door handle, but lifting his leg that high was not easy. Despite his girth, there wasn’t much power behind his kicks. He stepped aside for Huard to do it and Huard pointed his gun.
“No, no, no. This is my paperwork, not yours.” The Marseillais looked at Kruse, from his feet to his eyes. “All right, my American friend.”
One kick and the door opened with a slam. The scent of a swimming pool passed into the hall
as the door swung open. The Wallace Emerson Centre, Lily in a life jacket, kick your legs, kick your legs. The bearded policeman led the way, his gun drawn, identifying himself to anyone who might be inside. Huard pushed Kruse into the apartment and walked backwards, scanning the stairwell. Everything in the kitchen had been shined. The smell was biting now, and painful, as though someone had dumped several bottles of chlorine on the floor. The Marseillais walked into the T and turned left, right. Then he walked to the window, open to the street, and looked out. “Does anyone need a cigarette?”
“It was here, in this corner.” Kruse stood where the prisoner had been. There was no trace of him or the contraption, not even a speck of blood between the floorboards.
“I had this fantasy,” said the Marseillais. “Joseph and Lucien Mariani would be in here, covered in blood, alone and unarmed, with the dead body of one of their associates. I’d be mysteriously fired for misconduct but also elected mayor.”
Huard checked the shower room where Lucien had preened. The cupboards were empty in the kitchen, but for four skinny pastis glasses. The fridge was clean inside and out.
“When my wife finally rejects me I might just move in here. It’s a hell of a location.” The bearded man looked out the window again. “Are you sure you didn’t dream all of this, Monsieur?”
Without any rumbles or even changes in pressure, it began to rain. Outside, some people laughed and jogged. Their soles clapped the cobblestones. “Your forensic team, I’m sure, could find something.”
“When Yves—our Lieutenant Huard—phoned me, I laughed, you know. There are hundreds of men working for Joseph and Lucien Mariani, directly and indirectly. Why, if any of this were true, would the Mariani brothers be personally involved? Maybe we should get a drink.”
Huard sat at the kitchen table and stared at the wall. The rain intensified and the smell of it was pleasant, on the other side of the bleach. Kruse went down on one knee, to inspect the meeting place between floor and wall. “There’s nothing you can do?”
The Marseillais finally lit his cigarette. “I was after Paul Mariani for twenty years, Monsieur Kruse. Any time I came close, he would throw some kid at me. The kid would confess to everything and serve two or three years and come out of prison harder. Soon he’d be a boss. These men don’t make mistakes. And when they do, honestly, someone very powerful in Paris will make a phone call and something will be arranged to suit everyone.”