Come, Barbarians

by Todd Babiak

  “Release him.” She pulled her gun.

  “Arrest this man.” Kruse stood up and kicked the Russian over. “He’s been stealing my mail. His partners have attacked me. I’m sure he’s already wanted by the gendarmerie.”

  “Of the two of you, only one is wanted. Let’s go, Monsieur Kruse. You lead the way, back to the station. Let’s not advertise anything here: just keep walking at a regular pace, hands at your side.”

  “This man works for the Mariani crime family.”

  “Not now, Monsieur Kruse.”

  “I’m not going.”

  Lieutenant Boutet pointed the gun with both hands and aimed. She blew an errant lock of hair from her eyes. “Then I’ll shoot you.”

  Kruse followed her directions, back toward Lily’s limestone path. She walked four paces behind him.

  “What have I done wrong, Madame Boutet?” Her breaths were quick, as though she had been running. “You’ve been promoted to lieutenant. Congratulations.”

  “Stop. Stop talking.”

  His Moroccan neighbours were gathered at the place where the pedestrian path transitioned into Rue Trogue-Pompée. Boulders marked the separation. The men stopped speaking. Kruse left the fenceline and walked around them.

  “Wait wait wait.” Boutet scrambled to keep her gun on him.

  He doubled back and ducked, using his neighbours as a shield. He apologized to them and jumped the fence. Lieutenant Boutet’s voice cracked as she screamed for him to stop. “One warning,” she stuttered, as he broke into a sprint. “Final warning!” He was midway through the uneven remains of the Roman mansion, near the small grove of cypresses, when he heard the first shot. The bullet crashed into the soft stone in front of him.

  The Moroccan men shouted after him, “Allez!”

  There were two police cars in the post office parking lot and a gendarme in uniform posted at the tabac and bus station. He looped back to the churchyard and hopped one stone fence and another. Two more shots echoed through the village, not behind him but everywhere. He did not stop running until he was past the graveyard, in the rusty detritus of a mechanical shop on the west side of the village. He sat between three truck carcasses and went over the number again, her code, longing for a mobile telephone. He longed even more powerfully for the Russian mail thief, for an afternoon with him in a soundproof room.

  Three is a magic number. Lily was born at the end of the month, this month, in 1988. Two years before: 1986. His own birthday had just passed, October 27. In three years Evelyn will be thirty-eight.

  03 86 27 38

  If he could figure it out, they could figure it out. Maybe not the magic number, as they would not have played Schoolhouse Rock! in the prisons of Siberia. If the Russian had picked up other postcards with easier codes, he wouldn’t be stealing mail in Vaison. Was three still a magic number? Two didn’t feel remotely magic. Clouds had moved over the village and, with them, a new wind and light rain. No one was in the mechanical shop, but through the window he could see a modern coffee maker and a television set, an open newspaper and bread crumbs. He smashed the window and opened the door. The phone was old-fashioned. Two police cars passed on the departmental highway, and two more. Gunshots and fugitives were uncommon in the retirement communities of the world. He stared at the phone, beige and chipped. He could calm his heart, his muscles, his stomach before a fight. Not now. It was the instant after the Mercedes hit Lily. It was a soft-armed, grey-haired woman from the foreign affairs department at the door to tell him his parents had died in some valley of the Paraguay River.

  He dialed the number twice and both times the robot operator asked him for a code. He entered the Paris area code and a half-deaf woman answered. She had never heard of any Evelyn or Agnes. The northwest area code didn’t work either: the picture of Mont Saint-Michel on the postcard was not an obvious clue. The phone book in the mechanical shop was only for Vaison-la-Romaine and the vicinity, no help at all.

  Yves Huard was in the Villedieu section of the phone book.

  “Where are you?” said the lieutenant.

  “Vaison.”

  “You’re all over the scanners. There are probably forty gendarmes by now, from all over.”

  “Madame Boutet shot at me.”

  “We nearly always miss.”

  “Why did they fire you?”

  “They’re charging you for the de Musset murders. Amandine, Madame Boutet, is working with a detective from Paris.”

  “But she knows …”

  “What does she know? They’ve made a lieutenant of her. Monsieur Kruse, we don’t get requests and interference from Paris. I’ve been doing this since I was nineteen: not once before. Your story about the man they skinned in Marseille …”

  “It was true.”

  “When I investigated I was presented with an early retirement package, an honourable but non-negotiable discharge. Something strange and miserable has happened here.”

  “I need you to look up a name for me.”

  “It’s ruined your life and now it’s ruining mine.”

  “He’s involved in this but I don’t know how. He might be Front National.”

  “Whatever’s happening here, Monsieur Kruse, it’s too big for the Front National. They can’t tell the Gendarmerie nationale who to promote and who to fire, who to arrest. It’s something else. I can’t even speculate. The Socialists? It makes no sense.”

  “Do you believe me now, about my wife?”

  “No. And yes.”

  “We’ll figure it out together.”

  “They won’t take you into custody for long. They’ll find a way to get rid of you. Suicide, I guess. Before it didn’t matter but, whatever you’ve done, it matters now. My professional advice, Monsieur Kruse, is to get the hell out of here. Just hide far away, some old village in the Auvergne everyone has forgotten. Make up a new name for yourself, say you’re British. The villagers will hate you but they won’t report you as a fugitive.”

  “I had this Russian. He’s working for the Marianis. I can speak the language. If we could get him to talk he could lead us to them. We’ll find out why. But Madame Boutet—”

  “You don’t understand: I can’t go after anyone. And if this Russian started talking to the police, it’d be the same. There would be an accident. He would trip and fall down several flights of stairs or choke on a bone.”

  “It sounds like …”

  The lieutenant grunted as he stood up or sat down. “Don’t take a train or a bus. The drivers and security personnel get the bulletins. Steal another car.”

  “How did you know?”

  “We had some reports. A Fiat, right? It’s what I would do if I were you. Though I wouldn’t have nicked a Fiat. The Italians can’t make a car worth shit. It doesn’t matter what you take, but when you abandon it don’t burn anything or piss on the upholstery. The owner gets the car back and the file is closed. No one even looks. Wait a while, Monsieur Kruse.”

  “Christophe, if you like.”

  “All right then, call me Yves. It means ‘yew.’ Yew tree. I know what Christophe means. Wait for some of the cops to go home for the day.”

  “Will you help me, Yves?”

  “You’re a fugitive.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m a gendarme, Christophe, even if they don’t want me to be a gendarme.”

  “Who are you working for? Who do you protect?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Yves: the name is Philippe Laflamme.”

  The non-traditional stagette party, with white wine and kicking ass, was a line of self-defence business dreamed up by Tzvi shortly after his student became his partner. Kruse had officially despised the idea: it was dangerous and messy and no one ever learned a thing. One night in early August 1983, seven women arrived for their stagette package. All but one of them wore matching aerobics outfits, black leotards under something that resembled a one-piece bathing suit in yellow and hot pink. The odd one was Evelyn May, who wore a co
llared T-shirt buttoned to the top and a pair of her roommate’s grey nursing pants. She had been invited too late to buy into the special outfits. A “pity invite,” she called it.

  She was athletic in a natural and rangy manner, almost apologetic about it next to her graceless art history colleagues. None of them knew that in her teens and early twenties she had been a biathlete in the winter and a cyclist in the summer. Her achievements in both sports had brought her so close to the Olympics that in later years she could not watch television during the games. Now it was a secret, this incongruous thing she had done when she was a kid. Kruse met her in the studio four years after her competitive days had ended, but there were photographs of her in a silver unitard stitched with old-fashioned logos, a rifle strapped to her back, her unknowable eyes behind a pair of sunglasses that had once seemed fashionable. He kept these photos during his search for her and afterwards. Afterwards he sneaked long looks at them at night, over a glass of something coarse and ashen, when everyone else in Paris was asleep.

  There was a speech he made, at the start of these boozy one-night courses. The women, who had already had a drink or two before arriving and now sipped cheap Australian Sauvignon Blanc from clear plastic picnic glasses, interrupted to comment on his musculature. Evelyn, who sat on the mats with royal posture, shushed them. When he needed a model, for demonstrations, Kruse used her. She was strong and fast and sober, with bright-green eyes and a crooked smile she doled out so sparingly it was a grand achievement every time he drew one out of her. At the end of the class he asked the poor blonde graduate student out for dinner. One of her friends heard and broadcast it through the room. When Evelyn answered, she answered for everyone.

  They were married four and a half years later in March, the off-season, one of the cheapest months of the year for a wedding. MagaSecure was not a martial arts school anymore: no more white wine stagettes. And Evelyn was no longer a graduate student. Their oddly matched friends, hers from the university and his from various dojos, studios, gun ranges, and security firms, and Tzvi’s bald comrades from Mossad, had collected cash at the reception so they wouldn’t return to the triteness—Evelyn’s word, during her thank-you speech—of their apartment on the most blissful night of their lives.

  Kruse had paid their landlord eighty dollars to light the path of tea candles he had hidden under red paper bags leading from the door to their bed. He had bought two dozen purple roses—her colour—and had tossed the petals on their bleached white duvet in the shape of a heart. The plan was to open the door and run in first to turn on the music—her favourite album at the time was a collection of cello adagios. He had just married a woman who knew what an adagio was.

  Triteness hurt.

  “Let’s go home,” he whispered between songs, under the disco ball in the Regatta Room.

  “They collected money, Chris. Let’s have an adventure.” Something by The Cure started up. She had been drinking champagne since picture time on the lakefront and had slurred her way through “adventure.” The bridesmaids hopped over; she pushed him away and twirled into them and danced for him.

  Tea candles burning out: a bad omen. Even worse, the apartment burning down, and with it all they had accumulated: records and cassettes, books, clothes, furniture, and weapons. He had read a book about the modern marriage, precarious and doomed, in preparation for the ceremony. As close as we can be to her, we can never really know her heart, her secret life, the thoughts she entertains as she falls asleep at night. Her eyes were thin and dark in the dance-floor light of the ballroom. She danced with abracadabra arms, as though she were putting a hex on him. Two was the magic number.

  Kruse walked into the hallway and called the landlord, who wanted another twenty dollars to blow the candles out, and they sealed themselves in the fourteenth-floor junior suite at the Westin Harbour Castle. She went in for a shower. Lights flickered out over the lake and at the airport beyond. They hosted three weddings per weekend at the Westin, fifty-two weeks a year, each of them perfectly unforgettable. A bellman brought a yellow bottle of champagne to the room in a bucket of fresh ice, and Kruse opened it, stared at it, poured it into two flutes, and handed one to her through the back of the shower curtain.

  “I’m sobering up in here. You aren’t helping.”

  He didn’t want to drink alone, or drink at all. All day and all night he had politely declined, sipping club soda. But the demands of the occasion, now that they were alone, threatened to undo him.

  For three and a half years they had lived together in a spacious but cheap apartment off St. Clair Avenue, close to MagaSecure. In the early days they couldn’t fall asleep without making love. Then it was once or twice a week, when they could arrange their schedules. Evelyn’s hours had become erratic, which offered them a fine excuse for allowing the days to pass. She was too tired, had a stomach ache, felt flustered, was obsessed; they’d have sex tomorrow—tomorrow for sure. By the time Kruse proposed to her, on a weekend cross-country skiing trip to upstate New York, they were doing it twice or three times a month. She said yes to his marriage proposal and, starting the following Monday, enforced Victorian Englishness. For six months before the wedding they would not sleep in the same bed or even look at each other naked. Kissing was all right, as long as it did not progress beyond lip-on-lip.

  They had lost something: youth, yearning, mystery. Evelyn wanted it back.

  On their wedding night, Kruse finished the glass of champagne, Veuve Clicquot, and poured another. It made him sneeze. What was an adagio anyway? Evelyn called out from the shower that the “till death do us part” bit had freaked her out a little. It didn’t have to be in there at all. Why couldn’t everyone just calm down for five to seven minutes? They were a couple of kids, pretty much, who had decided to throw an expensive party of a March evening and recite a couple of uncommon sentences in front of their friends. That’s it. “Billie Jean,” the best dance song ever written, played twice. Had he noticed?

  “‘Billie Jean’ times two was a call I had to make,” she shouted.

  It had been a windy day and the branches had not yet sprouted leaves. All but pockets of the snow had melted and most everything remained brown. Winter wasn’t the problem in Canada. Spring was the problem. He took off his shirt. The window was a mirror when he wanted it to be one. He did and he didn’t. Once, as a kid, he had discovered a turtle on Toronto Island; his father had taken him there, some church business.

  The disc jockey had tried to argue against Evelyn’s wish: playing “Billie Jean” twice could ruin his reputation. It would seem careless. He was the son of a client, a Sikh man who called himself Mister Music, and Kruse’s only real contribution to the wedding plan.

  She walked out of the shower in a white Westin robe. Her hair was not wet. “So I said to him: ‘Your reputation? You live in Mississauga!’ And he didn’t find me at all charming. Was that wrong?”

  Thirty wasn’t old. Why did all of this make her feel so old?

  She had not brushed her teeth in the bathroom. Her breath, hummus and champagne, was curiously delicious. After the wildness of the reception, thanks to Evelyn’s collection of smashed academics— Kruse’s eerie friends had long departed—the smallness and cleaning-fluid quiet of the room ambushed them. Who was this woman, really? The unexpected tension, the near vertigo of the occasion, inspired him to turn on the television. He helped her out of the bathrobe.

  So it was that Lily was conceived on their wedding night in March 1988 by the flat blue-and-white flashes of Murder, She Wrote.

  He drove just to drive on small departmental roads an hour and a half north and east, through Nyons and into the low, rocky hills of the Drôme. Evergreens and cypresses and cedars played against the clear blue of the autumn sky. In Ontario, on a day like today, it would be raining or snowing. The elevation past Nyons was too high for grapevines, but there were olive groves and fruit orchards. Houses built along the thin highway carried an exhausted look about them, as though the owners had finally
given up patching the mortar. Weeds grew up through the cracks on the narrow, unforgiving shoulders, a nightmare for cyclists but they didn’t seem to care. Every few kilometres he would pass one or two or twelve of them in neon outfits plastered with logos. Were they pretend-sponsored? Evelyn would know. Now and then a palm tree would show up on the side of the road, in some yard of hope. His car was a new Citroën BX Prestige with Spanish licence plates. He had waited four hours at the mechanical shop, until midway through the siesta, and then he had crept back into the centre of town. There were two gendarmes in front of the cathedral and more at the entrances and exits of the ruins. The rest were on their lunch breaks. He hid in the children’s park and watched the owners of the Citroën, a white-haired couple in out-of-season Lacoste pastels, park the car and get into a small van for a guided tour of the wine route.

  Saint-Nazaire-le-Désert is a tiny village with a small church, a bistro, and a plaza with a simple fountain. If Villedieu had not been close to a population centre, and so popular with a certain kind of tourist, it would look like this: a simple farm town with twisting roads to confound the mistral. The trees had been lovingly clipped but many of the stone buildings were falling apart. Blue had been drained from the shutters, red from the terracotta. An unneutered hound loped across the main street. In the plaza some old men played pétanque. A minimarket with white awnings had been set up to sell fruit, vegetables, and dried sausage across from a boulangerie-épicerie. The telephone booth looked as though it had been scrubbed clean earlier that morning. He had escaped the cloud and it was not only sunny now but warm. Villagers wandered with their baskets to the market, nodding at him as they passed. They wore short-sleeved shirts and held on to summer tans.

  In the square he leaned on the high, rusted fender of a tractor and stared at the telephone booth. He had stopped at a gas station outside Nyons and had copied the national area codes out of a more complete phone book.

  “Are you all right?” A man in a brown hat stained nearly black leaned over a cane. His plump wife stood nearby with a basket of zucchini and garlic, and a bottle of wine, in a floral dress and new shoes.