by Todd Babiak
“No.”
The bald detective stood and shouted at him, his heavy shoe clanking on the metal-rimmed hole. Foam and slobber formed on his lips like snow on a curb. A pregnant vein was visible where his hairline had been. A foreigner comes to his city, kills his wife in a seventeenth-century church. This does not happen in Lyon. This is not New York City! Motherfucker, he called Kruse, in English.
Kruse nearly laughed, not at their theory but at the way the flic had said “motherfucker,” like in a Saturday Night Live sketch making fun of Frenchies. “The Marianis killed Evelyn. They killed the de Mussets too, and you know it.”
He sighed, the bald man who had been shouting, and walked to the reflecting window. “I see. The Marianis, the actual Marianis, would risk everything to come personally to Lyon to kill a woman in a church.
Why?”
“I don’t know, Monsieur.”
“He’s an assassin.” The larger and younger detective pulled out a card and handed it to his small explosion of a partner. One of the men wore the same cologne his father had worn, a drugstore cologne.
The bald one lifted his glasses to read the card. “MagaSecure, based in Toronto, hired by … a European client?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me this was business. How many others have you killed, here in my country? In Lyon. My city! The city of my ancestors and my children!” The bald detective leaned over the table and spoke softly into Kruse’s ear. “In certain cases, special cases, we can make sure you’re treated monstrously in prison. Like a pretty girl.”
“Je m’en fous.”
The policeman lingered over Kruse, as though he were wrestling with the idea of punching him in the face. He took a cigarette from his partner.
Kruse had worked through the concussion on a hospital bed, guarded by three young policemen in uniform. Why three? Kruse had spoken the truth: he didn’t care what happened to him now. Lily and Evelyn were gone. There was Tzvi but Tzvi was special—he needed no one and nothing. Kruse only had one thing left to do and he was impatient to do it.
“We have others here, unofficial police,” said the larger one, not at all the good cop. He sat with perfect posture, as though he had been too shy to say the ugly words. “Laws about treating murder suspects with decency and respect do not apply to these police. They don’t exist, you see.”
“I murdered no one.”
The bald policeman jumped and landed in a fighting stance. More screaming ensued. Lies, foreign lies, importing American values, the violent sodomy he was in for. It would hollow out his sore head and leave him a withering walnut-shell of a man. They had caught him in the room, with the knife, with a motive.
“With a concussion.”
“She fought back, brave woman. Brained you one.”
“It was a baseball bat. Lucien Mariani—”
“No one plays baseball in France, my friend.”
Kruse had not asked for a lawyer, a translator, or a representative of the Canadian embassy. He would have been as happy in prison as on the streets, an eternal wanderer.
The large man finally stood and stretched. He turned on a tape recorder in the corner of the room and asked Kruse to begin at the beginning. At first the bald one mocked him for inventing a story. What they wanted was the truth, not some fairy tale. Then, slowly, both of them shrank into their hard chairs and stopped pretending to be hangmen. It had not suited them. These were family men, readers of detective novels, playing at being hard.
“We should … we must make a phone call.” The larger of the two policemen spoke softly when Kruse was finished. “In case there’s anything to this …”
“A call to whom?”
“Merde.”
“It’s all lies, I’m sure,” said the bald man, with fading conviction. They knew what a lie sounded like. “But it’s easy to test them. It’s easy to test your filthy stories, Christophe.”
A North African policeman in a new uniform, one of his guards from the hospital, escorted him to his cell. It had a small bed and a very clean stainless steel toilet. There were no bars, like in the movies, and no window. His door was another giant hunk of swinging concrete with a slot at the bottom for his trays of food. At dinnertime he received a small paper cup of red wine with his slab of meat, his bread and butter, his cooked beans.
Evelyn would have found that charming, wine in jail.
They brought him two changes of clothes: a navy blue suit and a typically French casual outfit of jeans, a well-ironed white short-sleeved shirt, and a sweater. Salon shampoo, a box of aftershave and eau de cologne by Christian Dior, a new electric razor, socks, and underwear with the word “Givenchy” stitched on the white waistband were all in a white cotton bag. How sorry they were for his treatment—not just today but since his family’s arrival in France. In the basement of a hospital they introduced him to Evelyn’s blanched and waxy body, left him alone with it in the refrigerated room. The silent and bowing woman who tended the morgue had unzipped Evelyn’s bag too low and he was abandoned to all of her, from her dark eyebrows and little nose down to her knees. He didn’t know what to do or say.
Several times they assured him it was the best hotel in Lyon. Maybe not for men of business but certainly for men of taste. This was, he supposed, a compliment. It was a former convent, painted soft yellow like so many of the others in the pastel city, overlooking the river and downtown—the Presqu’île. It didn’t feel like a convent, with the arches and statues and tapestries. His own room was drunk with French classicism, la suite Médici: chandeliers, tapestries, gilded everything, and a view over a lush and fussy courtyard. Two men and a woman with walkie-talkies waited in the salon—for his protection, they said—while he showered the prison from his hair and skin, and sat in an ancient burgundy chair with the door closed and the lights out. It wouldn’t be difficult to escape now but he wanted to wait and see if he could do it without hurting any of these people. They were not the ones he wanted to hurt. He put on the clothes they gave him, the outfit every middle-class French father wears on a Sunday afternoon in Luxembourg Gardens, with his daughter in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other: new jeans, a polo shirt, and a soft blue sweater. The city of Lyon, from above, was butter and Easter eggs. He could see, from his terrace, the top of the church where the noseless man had cut the life out of her.
They returned the bloodstained turtle doudou to him in a plastic Ziploc bag. Kruse opened the bag and smelled Marie-France. It no longer smelled of Lily. At dusk the small party arrived, five bodyguards in suits to replace the others who had put in a full day, and their bosses—a man and a woman. The way they walked and smiled and dressed, the way they watched him, he thought of meetings in Toronto and New York and Washington with senior bureaucrats and executives who hired him and feared him the way they feared a zoo tiger.
The agents introduced themselves, Monsieur Meunier and Madame Lareau, without stating their titles. Evidence of long-ago military training lived in their posture and in the confident but uncomfortable way they stood next to each other after the introduction. They inhabited a space between funeral director and tap dancer. Both wore conservative autumn suits. Monsieur Meunier was balding grandly, shamelessly. He was a man who had gone soft and fleshy, with girlish eyelashes and a careful manner of walking about the small hotel room, his feet pointed out, his pelvis and soft belly in the lead, his fingers knitting something small and invisible. What remained of his hair was a blow-dried black and grey hood of curls. Madame Lareau had been careful not to allow herself to be beautiful on the job. She wore no makeup. Her own deep brown hair had been pulled back so tightly it had an air of self-torture. One of her eyes was different than the other, and he didn’t concentrate on what she said because he didn’t care and because he was trying to figure them out. Neither agent asked for information about him, what he did back in Canada and what he had been doing here in France. Monsieur Meunier, who was either a homosexual or pretending, spoke of Lyon as though Kruse were here o
n holiday. Had he experienced dinner on historic Rue Mercière? In a bouchon, a classic little restaurant Lyonnais? This had been the Roman capital, the financial centre of Western Europe, a silk-weaving city, a publishing city and, today, an eating city.
One of the guards was actually a server in white gloves. When there was a knock on the door he worked with hotel staff to prepare the table and to open the champagne. The door was open as they worked. He thought of going now because none of this mattered, but one last sleep would be useful. The guard in white gloves poured three glasses of champagne and there was another knock on the door: crackers, cheeses and fruit and charcuterie, grape tomatoes. He stood at attention for a moment, waiting for someone to compliment the spread. Finally the woman—Madame Lareau—dismissed the server.
Then all of the guards went out the door. Kruse knew which of them was armed, which had seen combat. The others were frightened.
“To France,” said Madame Lareau, and she lifted her glass. One of her eyes was smaller than the other. At the correct angle it was clear, the reconstructive surgery like playdough without dye. There had been an accident or not-an-accident. Her hand trembled, with the champagne in it.
Monsieur Meunier raised his glass and placed his right hand over his heart, stood comically at attention and chuckled. He said, in a mock-serious voice, “To France.” His partner glanced at him and his smile faded.
Kruse said nothing and did not drink. The agents prepared small plates of food, passing glances, and sat in two luxurious red and gold chairs made to look old. For a time Kruse didn’t sit and then he pulled the wing chair from the bedroom into the small salon of the suite, next to a decorative table. Soft horn music was playing on the clock radio in his dark bedroom, and he wished he could lie down into it instead of speaking to a couple of ruined functionaries.
Madame Lareau chaired the meeting.
“Let’s begin, shall we, by stating your crimes.”
Her partner took care of this, with both precision and a tone of apology: the murders of Jean-François and Pascale de Musset, several counts of auto theft, a grave assault on Antoine Fortier, the president of the Front National. An undocumented Russian man is in the hospital with fractured ribs and a punctured lung. He had slowly strangled his wife in the chapel of an historic church with fishing line, and he had kept tightening the line until it cut through her carotid artery. For each allegation, Monsieur Meunier produced a black-and-white photograph. He described the recommended penalty for each crime and assured Kruse he would be convicted. The French Republic was certain. He would spend the rest of his life in La Santé. Had he by chance heard of La Santé? Monsieur Meunier described the prison, located in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, the way he had described Rue Mercière. Again he provided helpful photographs: this time blurry images of vomit- and feces-strewn concrete floors, suicides, murders, and—saving what he called the best for last—guard-sanctioned gang rape for the most visible enemies of good taste and the republic.
Madame popped a tomato in her mouth and chewed and stared at him. “Do we understand each other, Monsieur Kruse?”
“You have fabricated my guilt.”
“Guilt is guilt, Monsieur. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a glass of champagne? It’s from a lovely small producer south of Reims, a family friend.”
Meunier squinted and opened his arms. Come on, man, it’s delicious.
“No, thank you.”
“But wait, Monsieur. Don’t despair.”
“I’m past despair.”
“We do have much prettier photographs to show you.”
The first pictures were of a landscape similar to that which surrounded Vaison-la-Romaine, minus the white patches of holiday houses: low mountains and green valleys, vineyards, a river. Meunier handed them over delicately, like religious objects: a soft-yellow two-storey farmhouse in the sunshine, a bastide, surrounded by its own small vineyard, with freshly painted blue shutters. Without consulting them, Madame Lareau described the images like a real estate agent crossed with a poet. Interior photos were of a modern kitchen, an old fireplace surrounded by the sort of furniture Evelyn adored: a boxy white couch, old wooden wing chairs, a dining table surrounded by contemporary, perhaps slightly over-designed chairs. Three bedrooms: one, curiously, with a crib.
Madame Lareau placed her glass of champagne on the table and switched to American-accented English. “The republic, in its munificence, has chosen to see you as a victim. But all choice and all charity can be rescinded, Mr. Kruse. Do we understand each other?”
“No.”
“You can go to La Santé or you can help us, you see? And this is your reward.”
“Help you do what?”
Monsieur Meunier had saved three exterior shots for the last: a shiny new tricycle on the gravel driveway, a wooden swing set in the shade of a gigantic tree, an in-ground swimming pool.
Kruse took the photos. This is what he had imagined for them, from his bed on Foxbar Road: no cities, only the three of them. A garden, a small white truck. This was his South of France. “But they’re dead, Madame, Monsieur. My daughter’s dead and my wife is dead. None of this matters.”
“What matters to you?”
“I’m going to find them,” he said, in English, “and I’m going to kill them.”
The agents looked at each other for a moment; it was as though an unexpected smell had come in through an open window. “You are operating, whether you know it or not, at a very high level, Monsieur Kruse. The situation you’ve found yourself in is unique. Lucky, even.”
“Lucky.”
“You could be in prison already. A judge, any judge, would convict you.”
“Lucky.”
Monsieur Meunier pointed a triangle of cheese at him. “What did she see, that night?”
“What night?”
“The night of the murders? Your daughter was killed and, a few hours later …”
“I don’t know.”
Monsieur Meunier sniffed and sat back, crossed his legs. “It’s one of two things. Either he knows nothing or he’s lying. He can’t help us. He’s haughty and dismissive. I say La Santé for him.”
“We can help him help us,” said Madame Lareau.
“He’s too proud.”
“I don’t think so. He is an artist, deep down.”
“An artist, she says.” Monsieur Meunier stood up, refilled his glass of champagne again and refilled Madame Lareau’s glass. He strolled into the bedroom. “What did they give you to wear, Monsieur Kruse? Just one outfit, that old man outfit? I can help with that, you know. Get you something decent. What are you, a fifty-two?”
Madame Lareau presented Kruse with a business card emblazoned with the French flag and motto: “Corinne Lareau, Sous-directeur, Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense.” She continued to speak English.
“Our current president, as you know, is François Mitterrand, leader of the Socialist Party. Once he was popular and now he is not. This is entirely normal in politics, as you also know. But the depth of his unpopularity, at the moment, is rather special—at least in the Fifth Republic. There have been scandals and others will certainly be uncovered. He has been a naughty, if principled, president. My personal view: I like him. Others will not agree. All I want, in the coming years, is fairness. I want democracy to prevail. This is what we fought for, in the war, is it not?”
“What war?”
“Good point. War is different now. I was involved in Libya. My clandestine days.” She touched the nearly invisible scar, around her eyes. “Do you know much about politics, Christopher?”
“My wife did.”
“Yes, she did. She helped her friend—her boyfriend, yes?—Jean-François de Musset craft a wonderful little narrative. Didn’t she? Let me tell you, his interview on Bouillon de culture was the talk of Paris. I will put it very simply. Let’s say you have one viable political party on the left, the Socialist Party. Yes?”
“Yes.”
Kruse crossed his arms.
“The old establishment, here in France, they are in love with the ghost of Charles de Gaulle. They will do anything to bring him back. Do you see? But where is he? If five parties are fighting with the socialists, even weakened socialists …”
“The socialists could win. Yes. What does this have to do with Evelyn?”
“There are many powerful people who want to grasp the coming opportunity, to destroy the Socialist Party and the legacy of President Mitterrand. Historically, you would call these men and women Gaullists, as I have said, republicans … businessmen and the ideological allies of businessmen. Even the ones who say they are not Gaullists are Gaullists. Those who feel born to lead, entitled by education and breeding. You have those in America. It’s the natural way of things, your late wife would have said. I read one of her publications. She sounded terribly French! Now, these men and a few women have been plotting for some time to stop arguing among themselves, over minutiae, and unite several parties into one. One party. This is an internal matter and ought to be very boring to someone like you. But there is one complication: the Front National.”
“Why don’t they join the other parties?”
“The Front National is unlike the others. They’re populists. Their historical alignment with fascists is distasteful to the men and women who worship, as I have said, the memory of brave generals. The party is growing in the south and in the industrial north. You know this from your wife: the Front National takes an extraordinarily dim view of immigration. Institutional racism is quite normal in Europe but rarely is it written up in a party’s vision statement. It is a party of stereotypes and cartoons, angry men, fundamentalists. Then along comes Jean-François de Musset and his chief adviser, Evelyn May Kruse, the segment of Bouillon de culture. He says everything our men who live in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris would like to say only he’s a real man, a baker, a man of the provinces and of the people. He is handsome and reasonable and gallant, a romantic.”