Come, Barbarians

by Todd Babiak

  One more bullet.

  In the dark Kruse tossed the hatchet against the table and a fire twinkled in the darkness, the last shot. He remained silent for a moment, blood trickling down his face and arm, crouched on the hard floor.

  The lion tamer whispered in Russian, “Did you get him?”

  “Shut up, Sergei, shut up, shut up.”

  “Let’s turn on the light.”

  Kruse eased himself closer, and struck with the click of the light. First, the lion tamer. He allowed the boy to swing once, then twice, and hit him where he had hit him before. This time he only went down on one knee, so Kruse had to slam his head into the door.

  The ugly one threw the gun and Kruse dodged it and stalked him into the bedroom. He outweighed Kruse by fifty pounds, and he was scarred from prison. There was nothing to pick up. The gun was under the bed and the lamps were screwed down.

  “Did you hurt them?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl and her mother, when I was sleeping.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Where are they taking them? Where south?”

  No answer, only heavy breaths, so Kruse eased in. The Russian trapped himself behind the bed, without much room to fight, and when Kruse came for him he pulled a knife. In his flailing, before Kruse could disarm him, the Russian cut the back of his hand. They fought silently and Kruse loved this part and closed his eyes again, did it by feel. The ugly one was sure he could win and then he was sure he could not, and it was like a first kiss. Kruse said things to him, in his calm voice, and with the man’s face in the carpet Kruse barred his right arm and cranked it slowly, deliciously, in an unnatural direction and destroyed the muscles and tendons in it, and then he fetched the knife from the top of the bed and asked the ugly Russian another question. The Russian said he fucked his mother and Kruse cut tendons in his left arm and told him to stay quiet or he’d kill him. It didn’t matter now. Maybe the Russian knew that and maybe he didn’t.

  Kruse cut the rope in half and tied up both of them. The ugly one remained conscious and spit at him and said he would have his revenge. Kruse carried the lion tamer into the bathroom and lay him in the tub, on top of his bound hands. Then he dragged the ugly one inside, so they were all together. The pain of lying on his hands, and the brightness of the light, woke up the lion tamer. Kruse put a pillowcase over his head and detached the shower head. He turned on the water and adjusted its temperature to lukewarm, took off his own clothes and sat on the boy’s legs. How old was this one? Twenty-five maybe.

  “What are you doing? What is he doing?”

  “You’re going to tell me some things.”

  “Tell him nothing,” said the ugly one, in Russian. “Be strong. Die with honour. Don’t humiliate yourself, Sergei.”

  “What is happening?”

  “Sergei, don’t tell him anything.”

  Kruse spoke softly in Russian to Sergei, about what was about to happen. If Sergei did not answer his questions, honestly and clearly, he would drown him and then he would do the same to his partner.

  “Don’t listen to him, Sergei. He can’t kill you. He’s a coward.”

  Kruse sprayed the water in the lion tamer’s face, through the pillowcase. He could not move his arms or his legs and he could not scream. All he could do was turn his face away from the water. Kruse followed his face with the water and held him in place, by his hair. He told the lion tamer, as the water collected on his face, that if he struggled too much he would dislocate his own shoulders. It would not help anyway. Only the truth would help. He moved the water away and the lion tamer tried to scream, so Kruse shoved a bar of soap into his mouth, through the wet pillowcase, and hit him in the sore jaw again, twice, and told him if he called out it would only get worse for them both. There was only one way to make it stop, and that was by answering his questions.

  “I have experience in this. I know when you are lying.”

  “Sergei, say nothing.”

  “Please stop. Please don’t kill me.”

  “Sergei.”

  Kruse winked at the ugly Russian on the bathroom floor because they both knew Sergei would tell him everything.

  “Who the fuck are you?” said the ugly one on the floor, in a philosophical tone. “Just some dad?”

  “Yes.”

  SIXTEEN

  Route de Vaison, Villedieu

  AT THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING THE ALFA ROMEO HE HAD STOLEN was the only car on the narrow road, and the farmhouses were dark. His headlights surprised a deer on the border of a vineyard, just as the D94 rose up out of the valley. The animal looked into the light, petulantly. There were no other cars in the plaza.

  Kruse had not planned this. With his heel he loosened the cobblestones on the edge and pulled up five of them, gathered the soil where she had bled. He worked while the indifferent water of the fountain trickled and splashed behind him. When he was finished he gathered the soil into his pockets and for a moment he felt silly, like the devotee of a new religion, and then he didn’t feel silly at all. He replaced the cobblestones and stomped them back into the earth.

  The lieutenant’s house was at the bottom of the village, under the château.

  Bats swooped over the vines on each side of the house. In the darkness it smelled of rot: no one had harvested the lettuce in the small vegetable garden behind, and it had grown too tall and wilted and died. Terracotta roofing fixtures and some cut wood lay in a sun-bleached heap between the concrete shack and the road. At this hour, not even the bakers were awake. No cars passed.

  Under the lieutenant’s front window lay a burst of lavender that would have been pretty and fragrant in July. Apples fermented under the bare tree, and a blend of clover and native grass had not been cut in weeks. The window shutters were unpainted. Next to the door, peeling blue, was his house number and the words spelled vertically, top to bottom, “Bienvenue mes amis.”

  He unlatched the shutters at the side of the house, pushed a window open, and climbed in. It was warm and still, heavy with cigar and roasted meat. The small bathroom had been tagged with the lieutenant’s aftershave. Water dripped. His snores were loud enough that Kruse did not worry about his footsteps on the concrete floor. Street light filled the kitchen, which opened through sliding glass doors into a small clearing before the vines. The doors were open a crack and the kitchen was a tidy corridor with heavy handcrafted cabinetry that Kruse had always associated, a little sadly, with Ontario farm life.

  A police scanner lay in front of the television, turned down low. The lieutenant’s wallet was on the unwashed kitchen counter, in between the blender and a pile of drying chicken bones. A freshly cleaned and oiled service pistol—another Beretta 92—was in a shoebox. Kruse sat on a worn chair in the small salon and picked his way through the wallet: money, receipts, identification as a driver and as a lieutenant, a black-and-white photo of a young woman from long ago. Several minutes passed in the dark, with rustling sounds coming from the bedroom. We tell ourselves it is nothing even when we know.

  It took ten minutes for the gendarme to convince himself. “Who is it?”

  The light came on, in the bedroom. The lieutenant walked into the kitchen as he put on his glasses and stood before the bones and the blender, his chest as hairless as a baby’s. The lieutenant wrapped himself in a robe and turned his rocking chair away from the television so he would face Kruse. Huard rocked the chair without sitting in it. “I heard what they did to her.”

  “They.”

  “We? I don’t know. You must know, by now.”

  “It was my fault.” An enormous hairy insect wiggled with startling speed across the floor. “I led them to her.”

  “None of it is your fault.”

  “The morning they skinned that man of theirs in Marseille they looked in my wallet, as I’ve been looking in yours. I was woozy. They had stunned me with that cattle prod. I couldn’t tell what he was doing. He swapped my telephone card for another.”

  “A France T
élécom card?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listening, recording. So someone in the ministry of posts is working with them, someone senior.”

  “I led them to her.”

  “A lot of very senior someones.”

  Huard sat and rocked and stared at Kruse. His bare feet were dirty. Kruse told the lieutenant about Madame Lareau and Monsieur Meunier.

  “What did they want you to say?”

  “The Front National and the Gaullist coalition were working with the Mariani crime family to divvy up the southern half of the country and wipe out the Socialists, before the next election. They didn’t want to split the right-wing vote any longer. Jean-François de Musset wouldn’t go along with it, so they killed him and they killed his wife. Evelyn knew about it so they killed her too.”

  “It sounds plausible. Is it true?”

  “I don’t like the Front National but they are innocent. That part they invented. The agents had these photographs of a house they were giving me, in the Var. It doesn’t exist. They were going to have me speak and then there’d be an accident, no doubt.” Kruse pointed at the scanner. “What did you hear, the night Lily was killed? How did you get up the hill so fast?”

  “There was a drunk driver, up in Villedieu, on his way to Vaison-la-Romaine. In a white Mercedes. There’s only one white Mercedes around here. I was going to Jean-François’s party anyway, so I ran up the hill.”

  “You wanted to find him before anyone else did?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “When I was your age it was nearly blinding. All this moral force. I knew there would be some reward, some spiritual reward.” Huard closed his eyes and looked at the ceiling and rocked. Then he opened them again. “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing with the pistol?”

  “When Jean-François and Pascale were killed, I thought: this is it. I’ll catch the crazy woman, your wife, and make sure she’s punished. If I could leave off doing something right, then I could retire happily. Something like happily. As you can see, here in my kingdom, my life as a gendarme has come to shit. I kept thinking, for years and years now, that just on the other side of this season, this assignment …”

  “Yves.”

  “I’ve never been out of France. I have no heirs, no real friends left. I haven’t been with a woman in fourteen years. Now I’m at that age where I live entirely in the past, and with no pride, Monsieur Kruse. Especially now. I don’t even have the gendarmerie. And if I were to have it: the Gendarmerie nationale and the Mariani crime family, working together?”

  Huard went into his bedroom and walked out ten minutes later in his uniform. It looked both new and old, far more decorative than anything a police officer would wear in Canada, and gleamed darkly in the greasy fluorescent light of the salon. The medals were polished. He pulled a bottle of whisky from his cupboard and took a long drink. “We have a festival every year, in honour of Georges Brassens. It starts next week with a ceremony. Every year they ask me to be part of it. Not this year. I had the suit pressed anyway. Every day I’ve been putting it on and holding that pistol, in the chair you’re in. We’ve done away with our religion but it still lives with me, in my heart and in my bones. If I do it myself I’ll be damned, I know it. I know it even though, when you think on it hard enough, the Lord was himself a suicide.”

  Kruse wanted to say the correct thing, as it seemed the time to do it. There was no right thing, nothing the lieutenant hadn’t already considered. So he listened.

  “The other argument is to forget it, forget all that has governed my life. Everything I vowed to do for this country, since the war, since I was a teenager, has been a farce. My parents were collaborators, you know. I was a teenager, in school. The Americans came through.”

  “Were they killed? Your parents?”

  “Hung, you mean? Shot as traitors? No. It was more like cooked chicken left out to slowly spoil.”

  “That has nothing to do with you.”

  “It has everything to do with me.”

  The close smells of cooking and aftershave mixed with the deli-meat scent of a man who has been sleeping.

  “Let’s walk outside a moment, Yves.”

  “In the dark?”

  There was a worn path through the vines, half-lit by the moon and the street lights. Huard wore white gloves and rubbed his hands together as they walked.

  The lieutenant’s shoes were well shined. They were delicate things next to the stone and weeds. A helicopter flew over them, on its way to Avignon or Marseille. “Someone’s been hurt, probably in a car accident. The roads around Mont Ventoux are a mess, especially at night. The early morning.”

  Mont Ventoux was faintly visible in the moonlight, as it was during their first exhausted days in this place.

  “Will you do it to me?”

  “No.”

  “You can smell the morning coming, Christophe.”

  Kruse pulled the envelope out of his pocket. “I wrote this up. Excuse my grammar. It’s a summary of what they did to the de Mussets, to Lily, to Evelyn …”

  “To France.”

  “I’ve placed copies in a few places. There’s something else, Yves: in Canada I own a large house and a share of a profitable business. I never bothered with a will.”

  “You can go home to your house and your business and forget. Don’t you want …”

  Kruse continued between the grapes. “I want to turn a corner and see her there, ten metres away.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’ll say, ‘Daddy,’ because we’ve been away from each other a long time.”

  “‘Daddy.’ This is the English way, yes.”

  “And she’ll open her arms and run to me. I’ll take a few steps toward her, but only a few. I want to watch her run. It’s a beautiful thing, to watch your baby run.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And when she reaches me … she’s wearing a dress and tights, and her hair is up. I don’t know why. I think of her that way. I can hardly bear it, waiting for her. I love her so much I think it will destroy me.”

  The lieutenant stopped and reached for a vine. He looked away, mercifully.

  “When she reaches me I’ll hold her close and she’ll breathe on my neck, just here. Her breath smells like milk. And I’ll whisper questions to her and she’ll whisper answers. My clever girl. She was already learning how to read.”

  “Of course she was.”

  “Letters anyway, backwards half the time. And her name.”

  “She was still just little.”

  “And I’ll carry her home and make dinner for her. She’ll sit at the table watching me as I do it. Her favourite: spaghetti. Then we’ll eat together and I’ll give her a bath—with bubbles—and help her into her white pyjamas with butterflies on them, and brush her wet hair straight and read two books to her. Then, with the lights out, I’ll tell her a story about us. A perfect adventure, swashbuckling.”

  Huard pulled a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his uniform, and passed it to him. It had been a few days since the lieutenant had shaved.

  “There’s a journalist, from Le Monde. They took her and her daughter.”

  Huard looked at his watch. “Marseille?”

  “Aix-en-Provence.”

  “You want to find this journalist and her daughter, release them somehow.”

  “Yes.”

  “They know you’re coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Impossible, my friend.”

  Kruse told the lieutenant what he had done to the Russians, in the hotel room in Roissy. The men in Aix would have been up all night, like him, waiting. “They’ll be tired. As tired as me.”

  The lieutenant took the envelope from him. Back inside the small concrete house Kruse changed the bandages on his arm and forehead. The lieutenant read what Kruse had written. “So it started as mischief,” he said, in a whisper, as though he were admitting a secret.

  “They wanted to embarrass him and the
Front National, make him quit. That’s all.”

  “But they killed a little girl and then they got nervous. They would have tested his blood and discovered the drug. Your wife had seen them.” Huard smelled his gun. It had never been shot. “Now, in fact, it’s a coup d’état.”

  Another hairy insect, or the same one, scurried across the floor. It had a hundred tiny legs. Neither of them tried to kill the thing. It would have made a terrible mess.

  SEVENTEEN

  Place des Martyrs de la Résistance, Aix-en-Provence

  HE USED DEPARTMENTAL HIGHWAYS TO AVOID TOLLS AND EYES. IT was a Sunday and the parking lot at the train station in downtown Aix-en-Provence was nearly empty. A bearded man in ragged clothes sniffed at a discarded bag of chips that had blown into the side of the station.

  The narrow residential streets south of Place de la Rotonde, a majestic fountain topped by the statues of three women, were pink in the morning light. At the roundabout’s quietest entry point there was a carved carousel surrounded by mature trees, a hedge, a white food truck. His shadow was long and thin and alone. Windows above had been open to let in the night air; lucky families with early-rising children had already started their day. In one apartment, at the corner, the night had not yet ended. Arms flailed and young voices sang drunkenly along to “Losing My Religion,” a rare modern pop song Evelyn had approved of.

  On the grand boulevard of old Aix-en-Provence, the Cours Mirabeau, two young lovers dressed like farmers kissed and clutched at each other’s shirts on a bench under one of the clipped plane trees. A man who looked like he had slept in his suit sprayed the generous sidewalk in front of an estate agency. Kruse stopped to read a historical plaque. The black-and-white waiters were preparing the terrace of Les Deux Garçons, even now walking with stiff posture and raised chins. This café, this soft air, this picture-snapping place where Cézanne and his friend Émile Zola took crackers and wine, these trees, this empty cathedral of a city, was precisely, perfectly, why they had crossed the ocean. He sat down and ordered a coffee and a pain au chocolat.

  Waiters at Les Deux Garçons were pleased to fire up the espresso machine. It was warmer here than it had been in the Vaucluse. The gilded dog walkers began arriving on the Mirabeau.