by Todd Babiak
The dusk sky alternated between bright and dark, as fast-moving clouds revealed and then hid the sun. It was cold enough to see his breath as he watched. Kruse crossed the street and introduced himself as a representative of the janitorial union. The woman, white-haired and so inviting a personality he worried for her sanity, took one of his hands in both of hers as he spoke. His mission, he said, was to observe them for a little while this afternoon and evening, as they worked. He wanted to be sure the people at Le Monde were treating them well. They were not to focus on him. His investigation, of their work and of the workplace, was holistic.
“Everyone is nice.” The woman had, at best, two operable teeth. Still, her smile was lovely. As always, when he encountered Europeans of her generation, he wondered where she and her family had stood during the war: with the Nazis or against them, as they marched through her village.
Her son raised his eyebrows skeptically. “They are French. They don’t see us.”
“But Monsieur, no one is cruel.”
“That’s a better way to put it, Mama.”
At five o’clock the receptionist in the lobby put on her jacket. Kruse stalled the mother and son, asking more questions, before he allowed them to walk through the security doors. The receptionist saw a lot of men, every day, but few with scars on their faces. Their cleaning carts were in large closets on each floor. Normally, the humourless son said, they started on the first. It was accounting and other services, and those people always left at four o’clock. On the upper floors, the newsroom and management, they tended to work longer hours.
“Then today let’s start on the upper floors. I want to see the way people interact with you.”
The son looked at his mother and back to Kruse. “I want to thank you, for taking this interest in us. It is hard to come to France with nothing.”
“No, thank you. Thank you, Monsieur. Madame.” Kruse pressed the up button on the elevator.
Inside, the white-haired woman looked up and pointed at his cheek. “What happened to you?”
“Car accident, when I was a child. My parents didn’t feel strongly about seat belts.”
“I thought it might be a fight.” The son, perhaps twenty-five, tended to focus on a spot ten centimetres in front of his shoes.
Observing human interaction on the sixth floor would be a challenge. It was an afternoon paper, so they were far from any deadlines. If reporters worked longer hours than others in the building they were not doing it at their desks. Four people were scattered through the newsroom. Two of them were on the phone. One man read with his glasses on his head and a woman in a thick fishing sweater and scarf was preparing to leave. Durrant’s cubicle and the others around it were empty.
The son apologized to Kruse. “Normally there are more of them. It is Sunday. Perhaps tomorrow is a holiday.”
“Perhaps.” Kruse pretended to be disappointed. “People or not, on a floor like this, what are some of the challenges you face?”
“Journalists are dirty and disorganized. We think well of them, these writers, but when you see how they work you understand, Monsieur, they are no better than jackals.”
Kruse pretended to write all of this down. “Their papers?”
“Yes, their papers. Their books and files.”
“When they conduct interviews, they take notes in …”
The young man walked across the corridor and picked up a thin flip notebook with a spiral top. “These things are everywhere because the reporters save them. If someone reads a story and sues the newspaper, the notebooks are important in court.”
His cart was filled with rags and cleaning fluids, and stocked with garbage bags. Kruse pretended to inspect the cart, to read the list of ingredients on a transparent plastic bottle filled with something pink and bubbly. “Now, go about your work as you normally would as I complete my inspection. I will be writing a report for Le Monde and for the union.”
“Make sure you write something about the notebooks.”
Durrant’s desk was an utter disaster, covered in letters opened and unopened, faxes and old editions of Le Monde and other newspapers. His notebooks were stacked haphazardly on the floor. Unlike the one the janitor had showed him, none of Durrant’s were dated. Kruse just started reading one after another until he found a name he recognized in the sixth: his own. The handwriting was as messy as the desk, but there was a kind of organization about the notes Durrant took.
Evelyn Kruse / May Kruse: tourist but partisan (staff?) of Front
National??
Arrived May, 1992 (photocopy of visa)
Husband Christopher.
Daughter Lily (died October 31, hours before the murders)
The murdered: Jean-François and Pascale de Musset, in their home
Old royal connections—de Musset (irrelevant?), star after Vaison-la-Romaine flood (see flood stories + video France 2). Bouillon de Culture.
See Front National: interview whom?
Check out Philippe Laflamme (transcribe phone message).
Kruse read the entire notebook and a few that surrounded it. He found information about the Front National, even quotations from an interview with Antoine Fortier: patriot, republican, man of intelligence and action, true Frenchman.
The actual quotations that had appeared in Durrant’s story, identical or near-identical to the quotations from the anonymous source that had appeared in the other stories, were not in any of the notebooks in the pile on the floor. One of the men, who had been on the phone when he entered the newsroom, stood up from his cubicle halfway across the newsroom and watched him. Kruse slipped two of the notebooks inside his shirt.
Night had fallen outside. It was cool in the newsroom and quiet. A radio or stereo somewhere in the fluorescent barn of a room played one of Evelyn’s favourites, by Debussy, a prelude to an afternoon. It was a slow and dreamy song, the sort of thing she had adored when she was pregnant. On the day they took possession of the house on Foxbar Road, which had seemed massive to them—larger than both of their childhood homes put together—she played a cassette of Debussy on a ghetto blaster in the living room. There was so much to do. The movers would be at the apartment soon and not all of the boxes were packed. But this impossible music, echoing from long ago but not so long, in a room of dark wood and stained glass, a chandelier, spoke fantasy to them. They were in love and a baby was coming and they were young. They were in love until Lily arrived, when they merely began to love one another on Foxbar Road, which was different. The difference had never been clear to him, though it had been to Evelyn. Move to France and fall back in love.
Across the newsroom the reporter who had been on the phone spoke to the white-haired woman and then her son, the janitors from Poland. The reporter shook his head and walked over, his right hand balled into a fist. Kruse stood up. He had been to France but not to the country Evelyn had described, not to the South of France, inside a composition by Claude Debussy, where the windows are always open and it always smells of lavender and no one grows old and you are in love and the tomatoes are always ripe. Figs fall from the tree as you pass under it, on your way home from École Jules Ferry, past the cathedral. Your daughter is warm on your shoulders and singing. A bottle has been opened. You will eat outside.
The reporter did not introduce himself. “You stole a notebook.”
“Two notebooks, actually.”
“Put them back on the desk and leave this place, before I call the police.”
Kruse did not have what he wanted, but he did not think he would find it. The reporter was in his fifties, bald and wild-eyed, in a white shirt with visible stains under the armpits, the buttons undone nearly to his belly. On the other side of him, the young Polish janitor looked on hopefully.
“I tricked them.”
“Well, they’re in big trouble, thanks to you.”
Kruse took a step toward the reporter. “No, they aren’t.”
“What are you? Some American thug?”
“I know
who you are, Monsieur, and I know where to find you. This is not the janitors’ fault. I tricked them, as I said. I lied to them. I said I was a union representative.”
“What? You showed them a card?”
“Yes.”
“What have you taken?”
“Evidence.”
“I’m phoning the police.”
“Go ahead, please. My name is Christophe Kruse. You can tell them she is innocent and I will soon have the proof.”
“Who is innocent?”
“Remember what I said, about the janitors. Not a word. Or I’ll come for you.”
The mother continued to empty garbage bins, but the son stood in the middle of the newsroom watching. The hope had departed from his face. Kruse lifted his hand to wave, as he stepped around the reporter. Impersonating a janitor, a janitorial manager, a union representative, he had only been caught once before—in the head office of a clothing importer that was about to be taken over by a foreign multinational.
“Kruse?” The reporter smelled sour and peppery, like leftover food that hasn’t been refrigerated.
“You should go home, Monsieur.”
“Oh, that’s right: Kruse. The murder in Vaison.”
Two men entered the newsroom from the elevator, both in uniform.
“I called security.”
Kruse put his hand on the reporter’s shoulder. Close up, his smell was excruciating. “If the guards search me and find the notebooks, I’ll have to hurt them. Do you want that?”
“Son of a whore. You can’t intimidate me.”
This is what Evelyn despised about his work, the truth he could not undo. Some men he knew were overwhelmed by sexual desire. They sneaked out to lap dance clubs and eventually the escort agencies and whorehouses on nearly every block in downtown Toronto. Aging men with money who did not take care of their bodies and draped them over girls on afternoons they said they were golfing. Sometimes Kruse followed them and made their weakness his strength. His own weakness was this: his hands were hot with a different sort of desire.
Kruse walked toward the guards, into their arms, and called, “I’m sorry,” across the newsroom to the Polish man. He said again, “I’m so sorry. It was the only way.”
“But you’ve ruined me,” he said.
Behind him, the reporter said, “Don’t worry, Jan.”
The security guards, a black man and a white man with mock confidence in their eyes, were not armed. They were not accustomed to this. If they were anything like their counterparts in Canada, they were poorly paid and barely trained. Kruse knew a fighter by his eyes and feet.
“I would prefer to take the stairs.”
The guards looked at one another. “It’s not what you prefer,” said the white man. “Do you want this to be easy, Monsieur, or do you want it to be difficult?”
“The stairs are fine,” said the black man.
Kruse waited for the reporter to mention the notebooks. He half-turned to face him. The reporter looked at Kruse and nodded and walked away, leaving him with the security guards, who would do whatever he asked. In the lobby, when the white man asked for his name, he said “Clint Eastwood” and the man wrote it down.
There was a record store at the train station. He had an hour to wait so he flipped through the selections under D in the classical music section and found it: “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.”
TWELVE
Rue Trogue-Pompée, Vaison-la-Romaine
THE GENDARMERIE IN VAISON-LA-ROMAINE OPENED AT NINE. THERE was a buzzer and a handwritten sign about after-hours police protection—for emergencies ONLY. A young man in uniform, with an agonizing crop of acne on his cheeks and forehead, unlocked the door a few minutes after eight and waited until he was behind the desk and in his chair before permitting Kruse to speak to him.
“Yes, Monsieur. How can I help you?”
“I would like to speak with Lieutenant Huard.”
“He is no longer with the force. Sous-lieutenant Boutet has taken over his work.”
The young gendarme picked up the phone and Kruse looked at the fading posters on the wall, imploring Vaisonnais to lock their vehicles at night and to stop drinking and driving. The young man’s voice went from unselfconsciously loud to quiet. Then he turned away from Kruse and whispered, before hanging up the phone.
Kruse put his hand on the door.
“Stop,” said the gendarme, his voice cracking.
The clouds had remained in the north, and the sidewalks of Cours de Taulignan were thick with men and women in sunglasses, with insurance brokers and hair stylists and bureaucrats and butcher’s assistants strolling to work ten minutes late. It was a Monday and the Vaisonnais moved like they were being dragged. Kruse weaved through them and then slipped between two cars, sprinted down the road. No one followed, at least not at first, so he jumped the fence in the post office parking lot into the Roman ruins and ducked into a corner of crumbling stone and cedars.
He watched the horse stable, waiting for a team of police to arrive with a warrant, batons drawn, as they had the morning after she was killed. It was just over two weeks ago—fifteen days—but it felt like either ten minutes or ten years.
They could arrest him for taking the notebooks at Le Monde. His encounter with Antoine Fortier was surely harassment by someone’s definition, and he had stolen several cars. No one came, not for more than half an hour, and then when someone in uniform did arrive, it was the postwoman in her shorts, T-shirt, and satchel, half-jogging up the street as she slipped envelopes through door slots and into mailboxes. She delivered something at the horse stable. Eventually the estate of Jean-François and Pascale de Musset would ask him—them—to leave.
The Russian who had been driving the car in Paris, down Villa de l’Astrolabe, stood up from the doorway of the closed jewellery shop, and walked down to the horse stable. He wore jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt with the words “Too Cool for Skool,” in English, whimsically screened on the front. He had not noticed, in Quimper, that the Russian’s steps were crooked, from a slight limp. He may have been anywhere from thirty to fifty-five, but prison had aged him, physically and otherwise. His skin was as grey as a smoked cigarette. At the horse stable he looked around, determined that he was alone, and opened the mailbox. He pulled out whatever was in there and half-walked, half-jogged, down the path toward the cathedral. Lily’s path to school.
Kruse sneaked across two Roman streets and through a patch of grass, parallel to the Russian. The ruins were a level below the modern street. Kruse jumped and gripped the black fence. His palms slapped the iron bar and alerted the Russian, who ran toward the cathedral.
Kruse was up and over the iron fence, sprinting down the path. It ended at a generous pitch of grass in front of the church. On the left was École Jules Ferry. He could hear her say it as he ran, her first rolled Rs, Ferry. The Russian was not a runner. His destination, it seemed, was a municipal parking lot on the other side of the church lawn. The leaves of early November had been raked away. Kruse might have called after him but instead he jumped the slow, miserable Russian next to a small fountain. One warm afternoon, shortly after Lily had started school, Kruse had splashed water from this fountain on his face. Ten minutes later a woman arrived with a black Labrador retriever and washed the dog in the fountain. Kruse asked if this was the place to wash your dog and learned it was, yes, the best by far. It was not for people. He hadn’t used it, had he?
The Russian slammed into the short stone wall of the fountain with the right side of his torso, his ribs exposed. Kruse had trapped the man’s arms as he fell. It was not audible, the ribs cracking, but Kruse felt it as they toppled together. There was no fight: the Russian gasped and flailed, and threw the letters into the fountain in frustration. Kruse fished them out and waited as the Russian rolled to his front, his hands and knees, and tried to breathe. There was a knife in the front pouch of his hoodie. Kruse confiscated it.
“I am sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen,
not exactly.”
The Russian’s breathing was poor.
“You should get it checked.” Kruse felt the right side of him. “I punctured a lung that way.”
The Russian tried to stand.
“The hospital’s the way you came, past the jewellery store. I can help you.”
“Fuck you,” he said, in English.
One of the letters was from the consulate, another from Evelyn’s mother, Agnes. There was a postcard with a photograph of Mont Saint-Michel on the front, its wet letters—her letters—fading.
A magic number
Two years before her birth
An October day for you
In three years I will be
“How many days have you been here, stealing my mail? You have more mail somewhere? In your car, maybe, your hotel room?”
A couple walked up the path to the cathedral, arm in arm. Kruse nodded to them. Now the Russian was mumbling, his face in the soil. It would smell of horse chestnuts, wet and dry at once. When they played cache-cache on these grounds, Lily had insisted he put his face against something to count. She did not trust him with mere hands over his face, as that was the method of her own cheating. He had smelled plane trees here, and this grass.
The Russian rolled onto his side and extended a hand for help. After reading and hearing Evelyn in the card, he bent the man’s arm and cranked it. “Do you have other postcards, anything, from her?”
“Stop.”
Not arretez but “stop,” in English. Lieutenant Boutet stood at the place where the path to the cathedral split. She walked across the grass. Kruse cranked the Russian’s arm and he called out.