Come, Barbarians

by Todd Babiak

  “Pack a bag.”

  She stepped forward and shoved him, with tears in her eyes. She wound up to slap him and he allowed it.

  “Be downstairs in ten minutes, Madame Laferrière. Please.” He took a pain au chocolat from the bag and pulled a coat hanger down from the recessed closet at the door.

  “Au revoir, Monsieur Kruse! Merci encore!”

  It was not the best time of day to steal a car. The sun was up and kids were everywhere, little ones on their way to school with their parents, and university students with backpacks and pimples, mussed hair, walking quietly up Rue Santeuil to the Sorbonne. Kruse struggled to slow his heart rate, to rid his mind of it—of them. His left cheek throbbed from the slap. He cried for just a moment and laughed it away. Three blocks away from Annette’s apartment he found a small pay parking lot and circled it, looking for the blandest, most forgettable car. He chose a beige and boxy Fiat, a Regata, tucked in behind a white microvan.

  The door was easy enough, no alarm. Cars he had used for practice in Toronto had been Fords and Chevrolets, but a car was a car. He braced himself against the passenger door, kicked the steering column four times until the bottom panel cracked and fell away, pulled the wires down and stripped them with his fingernails. Tzvi would have beaten him by twenty seconds.

  He pulled out of the lot, turned left and right, and moved slowly up Rue Santeuil. No one watched him until someone did, a man across the street in a long beige raincoat. The little girl’s voice had been a pretty song: Au revoir, Monsieur Kruse. He imagined Lucien or the Russians capturing her, leading them to her, and his hands went cold. For a moment he watched the elevator, then the man across the street, then the elevator. The man wasn’t a thug. He had an air of confidence about him, of contemplation: I know who you are and I know what you are doing.

  Ten minutes had passed and several people had come down the elevator, but there was no sign of Annette and Anouk. It occurred to him that someone could be up there already, this man’s partner, his team. They had followed him so slyly he had not seen or felt them. Kruse opened the door and walked across the street. At first the man didn’t notice and then he did, and backed away so quickly Kruse thought he would fall.

  “Who are you?”

  Kruse took a handful of his jacket. The man turned to run. “Please. Help!” He fell to the ground and covered his head with his hands.

  A small crowd had gathered.

  “If you want money, take it,” the man said, his voice muffled by the concrete of the Sorbonne sidewalk. He reached back into the pocket of his jacket, removed his wallet, and tossed it blindly into a puddle. “Take everything. Just don’t hurt me.”

  Kruse turned. Annette and Anouk were in front of the building. A black suitcase sat before them. He fetched the wallet and helped the man up and spoke loudly, for the crowd. “I was robbed yesterday. I thought you were the robber.”

  There were tears in the man’s eyes. He could barely speak.

  “I am sorry, Monsieur.”

  “Yes,” said the man, in a daze.

  “I’m American. I don’t mean to be rough.”

  The crowd dispersed and the man staggered a little, as though he were drunk. A scented woman with fresh lipstick crossed the street and broke into a run in her high heels, passed Kruse as he walked to the Fiat.

  “Doors are open!” he called out, to Annette.

  He turned around. The woman in heels grasped one of the man’s arms as though he would fall off an embankment otherwise, and he stuttered and flailed his available arm as he recounted the story. Annette and Anouk were strapped in and they were around the corner, in the Fiat, before anyone could get his licence plate number. Annette stared at him. “What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I ate three pains au chocolat, Monsieur. Three!”

  Kruse remembered he had left his own bread on top of the Fiat, as he broke into it. Annette pointed to the broken gearbox. “What happened?”

  He shook his head.

  “Where are we going?”

  Kruse had been foolish in the apartment.

  “What? You’re not going to talk anymore?”

  This was his first time driving in the core of a big city, in morning traffic, since May. Since Lily died and Evelyn left, his life in Toronto had become a detached and unbelievable thing, the life another man continued to lead. His memories and old rituals had become as foreign as the contents of Annette’s fridge. At its most miserable, driving in Toronto was never like this. Twice he made physical contact with other vehicles as they eased into half-lanes too small for two, a strong disincentive for spending 300,000 francs on a new German automobile. It didn’t matter how he reached the ring road, the Périphérique, as long as he reached it. To simplify his route, and to escape notice, he had chosen a hotel near Charles de Gaulle Airport, in the town of Roissy. The French will cut you off and bump you from behind. No one will ever let you in. But no one seems angry.

  Annette and Anouk discussed Euro Disney, which had opened in an eastern suburb of Paris shortly before Kruse and his family had arrived. It had been an inescapable story, even for a girl Anouk’s age, and since she had only been in the suburbs of Paris once or twice before, the autoroute signified the road to Disneyland. He tried not to listen but he listened.

  “We could go.”

  “Monsieur Kruse is taking us to a hotel. You will love living in a hotel, flea.”

  “But Disneyland is more fun. It is for kids.”

  “We cannot go to Disneyland.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that is not where we are going.”

  “If we are going somewhere, Maman, why not there?”

  “It is too far.”

  “This also is far. We have been in the car a long time. Monsieur Kruse: Can we go to Disneyland?”

  With every word, it would become more difficult. He would not look at her in the mirror. He looked at her in the mirror. She wore a red dress and shiny blue shoes with buckles, and her hair was in a ponytail. On her lap, a wool jacket with white and black squares. Anouk was dressed for dinner.

  “Monsieur Kruse?”

  “The Monsieur is concentrating on the road, Anouk. He cannot speak to you now.”

  “Bus drivers can talk and drive at the same time. Monsieur Kruse? Why not Disneyland? Monsieur?”

  The answer: I am forcing you to stay in your hotel room and it would drive you insane to stay in a hotel seven hundred metres from Disneyland. Kruse pretended not to hear the girl. They passed the Euro Disney sign, with its enormous arrow. Anouk shouted and pointed. All he wanted was to take that exit and follow the signs and buy them a three-day family pass and stay in some themed hotel, to forget all of this, to forget Evelyn because she was ashamed of him and didn’t love him and he didn’t know her, the murderer he married, not anymore if he ever did. There was one last Mickey and Minnie, the biggest sign of all. “Ici ici,” she begged. He stayed in the middle lane until it was gone. And Anouk quietly wept. Her mother crawled over the gearbox and into the back seat and held on to her.

  Roissy-en-France, the actual town, was overwhelmed by the airport. He pulled into the parking lot of the Mercure, slightly better than the Fiat Regata of hotels. The cloud cover was like potato water over the charmless town but the lobby was clean and modern. A man in a red suit jacket greeted him, and Kruse asked to see the manager. The man replied haughtily. His “Bien sûr, Monsieur,” was best translated as “I am not good enough for you? You are not good enough for me.”

  A woman in a tight business suit, the same age as her desk clerk, walked out of a windowless inner office. They might have been married, the way a husband and wife come to look like each other: thin but soft, too many cigarettes, dry hair in a humid town.

  “Madame, I do apologize for this intrusion.”

  “I am at your service.”

  “Perhaps you can tell by my accent: I am American.”

  “Very good, Monsieur.”

  �
�That may be good but this is not. Someone broke into my hotel room in Paris.”

  “Horrible. I am sorry.”

  “My wife and daughter are in a car a friend has loaned us. Our flight leaves in a week and we would like a room, a family room.”

  “Of course.”

  “But Madame I have no passport, at the moment, and no credit card.

  They are being sent to the American consulate.”

  “I see.”

  “Can we find a solution?”

  “There is always a solution, Monsieur. If you can pay for the room in advance, and leave us a deposit of three thousand francs for incidentals, we can certainly find a way around the rules.”

  “Marvellous. Thank you.”

  “Your name, Monsieur?”

  “Matt Gibenus. Mathieu, if you prefer.”

  The suite was enormous compared to anything in central Paris under five thousand francs a night: two rooms separated by a door. One room had two double beds and the other a sofa. The bathroom had an actual bathtub. Annette opened the curtains. The salon overlooked a small park and what appeared to be the old town hall. Anouk had recovered from the Disneyland tragedy, energized, as Lily always was, by the thrill of a hotel room. She climbed on one of the beds, with a white comforter, and bounced. “It’s so fancy, Maman. Look! A trampoline.”

  “No bouncing.” Annette spoke the way she had spoken in the newsroom, when her boss ordered her back to the desk. There was no fuel in it, no power. She looked out the window. “Be good, darling.”

  He might have assured Annette or encouraged her, touched her arm. Instead he looked into the bedroom, watched Anouk perform somersaults on the bed. Don’t roll off. It’s a long way to the floor.

  “Annette.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re registered as Carole Gibenus.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “You stay in the room. Order from in here, whatever you like. When the food comes and they knock, ask them to leave it in the hall. They will. Wait three minutes before you open the door.”

  She turned to face him.

  “Don’t open the door without looking through the peephole. If you want the chambermaid to clean the room, you stay inside with Anouk while she does it. You remember the photograph I sent you?”

  “What photograph?”

  “Of Lucien and Joseph.”

  “I received no photograph.”

  “Jesus. And don’t call the newsroom from here.”

  “When did you send this photograph? It might have been held up in the mailroom.”

  “Don’t use the phone at all.”

  She whispered a cuss word and laughed. “Prison.”

  Anouk walked into the mini salon and sat up on the sofa. “I love it here!”

  Her mother did not look away from Kruse. “You’re not staying with us?”

  “No.”

  “Not even today?”

  He pulled one of the knives he had taken from the Russian and gave it to her, blocking Anouk’s view. “When you open the door, to get your food—”

  “Enough, Monsieur Kruse.”

  On his way out of the room he willed himself to look straight ahead, not back at her and not back at Anouk, not another word.

  TEN

  Place Saint-Corentin, Quimper

  KRUSE ABANDONED THE FIAT AT THE RER STATION AND TOOK THE train into Paris. At three hotels he used the same story about a robbery, but the first two were unable to accept him without a passport number. At the third hotel, in Evelyn’s arrondissement, he invented one. The hotel was tucked between two African consulates—Ghana and Burkina Faso. There was no television, no radio. It smelled of mould and many years’ worth of cigarettes, the armpits of the singing Polish chambermaid who cleaned the adjacent room when he checked in. He stood in the room for a few minutes when he first arrived. A baby cried on the floor above and he thought, for an instant, that it was his. The radiator in his suite didn’t work. Roofs out his window were covered in sheets of tin, silver and grey and various shades of rust.

  First he walked, just looking for her—playing games. Where would she choose to be now, right now, in light rain? He went through her notated guidebook and paid the entrance fee at the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, looked for no art, no sculpture, only her. He stopped at a bank to check his accounts and take out as much as they would give him en argent liquide. Half his savings were gone and the other half would keep him going for another five months. In the Salle Ovale of the Richelieu, the reference librarian remembered him and led him to a desk of privilege reserved for a special cadre of academics.

  “Did you find your noseless man, Monsieur?”

  “I did.”

  She leaned so close to him, as she spoke, their faces nearly touched.

  “What can we help you with today?”

  “No messages for me?”

  “Not this time.”

  “I’m looking for information on the Front National.”

  She pushed herself up from the desk and her mouth transformed from flirtation to formality. “I see.”

  “The history. How it launched. The current leadership.”

  It seemed the librarian wanted to comment but it was not her place. There was not one perfect book on the Front National, but Kruse did find three comprehensive magazine articles with the names and addresses he was looking for. From behind her desk the librarian stared at him as though he had sprouted crab legs.

  In Canada Evelyn distrusted and despised the Reform Party for its populism, its regionalism, its anti-intellectualism, its evangelicals, and a quality she called “strategic bumpkinism.” She was no fan of official multiculturalism but she never spoke a word against immigration. All Kruse could figure out, after spending a few hours with the history and philosophy of the Front National, was that she saw an opportunity to build the Party of Evelyn out of an angry mess that happened to control fifteen percent of the popular vote.

  The metro strike had ended, so he didn’t have to steal a car or endure a taxi. Line 10 terminated at the Saint-Cloud bridge, in an altogether different suburb than Roissy: it was rich and magnificent, with a riot of Mercedes and BMWs. He exited the station and walked across the bridge toward a fusion of new glass office buildings and, on the right, a more typical Parisian neighbourhood. A miserable wind howled along the water, whipping him with light rain. It reminded him of walking to school in Toronto, the life Lily might have led. On the other side he retreated under a pedestrian passageway, free of graffiti, and along a concrete median planted with now-leafless aspen trees. This was close to Paris but not Paris: it was built entirely for cars.

  He reached his destination, Rue Vauguyon, and climbed to a rectangular building that seemed to float over the city and the river below like a yacht. A massive and new French flag waved on a clean white pole on the roof, but the building itself had a neglected quality, especially on a grey day, that also reminded him of home. He arrived at the door and for a moment wished he had stayed with Annette and Anouk, that he had taken them to Disneyland. He wanted to find his wife, but ever since he had read the article in Le Monde, perhaps even before that in some hidden chamber of his heart, he found her a mystery, a wild thing, a destroyer. Her secret life shrieked up from the river, terrifying and arousing. She had married the wrong man. To round a corner, inside this ugly building lit with dead fluorescent light, and find her entangled with a modern Chateaubriand. Their sex life these last years was dry and forced. The people she admired were almost exclusively well-spoken, pale men who had grown up wealthy. Her mentors and collaborators and partners in universities around the world were soft, sensual men. Lily was a reason to remain faithful, the ultimate reason, but when he walked across a bridge in France in the rain he remembered what Lily’s birth, her deformity, her scar, had meant to Evelyn: both love and defeat. To cry out and to win, to live a more adventurous life. He did not know her.

  A long corridor led to a receptionist, a woman in her late twenties or early thi
rties wearing braces. She watched him approach and smiled; they exchanged bonjours.

  “Welcome to the new headquarters of the Front National.”

  Once, this formality seemed strange. “Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.”

  “A pleasure, yes. How can I help you, Monsieur?”

  “My name is Matthew Gibenus and I’m on the board of the British National Party.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I was in Paris on some business and I hoped to drop in on Antoine Fortier. We’re old collaborators, you see.”

  The woman closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. “Oh I am dreadfully sorry, Monsieur Gibenus. He is in Quimper.”

  “Quimper?”

  “It’s a city in Brittany, not far from the coast. He’s meeting with some of our candidates.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “You can fly quickly, of course. Monsieur Fortier took the train. It’s a five- or six-hour drive, by car.”

  “Rotten luck. But you know, on my way back to the UK I do have the option of taking a ferry from the north coast of Brittany. Where is he staying, if I go that route?”

  The woman stopped smiling for a moment and met his eyes long enough to blink a couple of times. Kruse did not look away. She nodded and opened a folder. “Hotel Ys.”

  “Ys?”

  “They speak some Breton out there, contrary to Monsieur Fortier’s wishes.”

  “French is not good enough for them?”

  “Evidently, Monsieur. Perhaps ‘Ys’ is in Breton.”

  “Thank you. If I get the chance, Madame, I’ll look up Monsieur Fortier—Antoine—in Quimper.”

  “By the way, Monsieur. Do you have a card?”

  “No, Madame. I am only a volunteer in the British National Party. I do it because I believe in it, not because it earns me any money or business.”

  “Very admirable.” She stood up to shake his hand. “Until next time, good luck to you and to your cause.”

  On his way down the hall, he removed the coat hanger he had folded into the inside pocket of his rain jacket. The cloud over Paris had crashed on the suburb. There were no Fiat Regatas or any other middling cars in the neighbourhood, so he settled on a boxy black BMW. He started it without breaking the gearbox. That distorted Nirvana song started playing, the soundtrack for all the kids’ ripped jeans and uncombed hair. No matter how many times he had heard the song, Kruse had no idea what the singer was singing. His ear for English was failing. He stopped at a hardware store on the westernmost edge of Versailles, bought a universal screwdriver, and traded licence plates with an Audi from Belgium.