Come, Barbarians (19 page)

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.

“Yes, Monsieur, Madame, thank you for your concern.”

“Do you need a glass of water, young man?”

“I have to make a phone call. Then I will fetch a glass of water.”

“You are not from here.”

“No.”

“Where are you from?”

“Toronto.”

The man shook his head.

“Canada.”

“Ah, our little cousins. Welcome, Monsieur. And I do hope you feel better. You look like …” Before he could finish, the gentleman’s wife apologized for him and pulled him away. Kruse wanted the frail little man to come back, to talk to him all day.

His France Télécom card was black and a little bent, warm from being in his pocket. He pushed himself off the tractor, unsure if he could walk, and made his way across the plaza to the telephone. The card went in and the robot woman welcomed him, and the European dial tone that would never sound right hummed in his ear. He tried three more area codes. One rang out, another was for a bakery in Cahors. The last geographic code didn’t work at all, as the number was unas-signed. Maybe two was the magic number. Before he started over he tried a mobile code. There was a click and static.

Behind the static, in the distance, “Chris?”

Her voice was Lily’s voice and the nighttime creaks of the house on Foxbar Road, the subway in the middle of the afternoon when almost no one is on it, the studio in MagaSecure, the smell of her shampoo, the skin on her neck, holding her hand in the soft seats of the O’Keefe Centre while someone from China or Israel plays the viola, the Westin Harbour Castle on their wedding night. He spoke and she did not hear him, as the static washed over the line.

“I hate cellphones.” The connection was weak and, in the distance, it sounded as though others were having a conversation. She was underwater. “Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“I can hear you now. It’s wonderful. Where are you calling from?”

“A little town in the Drôme.” All the things he wanted to say to her and they were talking geography. “They came for our mail. It’s criminals, Ev.”

“I know.”

“Hired criminals. Working for …”

“That’s the part I don’t understand. The men at the bar with Jean-François that night. He didn’t drink, not really, not like that. Did he?”

“You saw the noseless man.”

“At the farmhouse. He killed them. How did you know? Have you seen him?”

Kruse told her about the Marianis, about his suspicions, the Front National, his day and night in Quimper, Annette Laferrière. He didn’t say much about Annette Laferrière.

“Can you come?”

“I’m coming. Where?”

“There’s a narrow street in Lyon, Rue René Leynaud, one of those places the sun can’t get at. The church is called Saint-Polycarpe. It’s being renovated so it looks shut up. I’m in here.”

“Does anyone know you’re there?”

“Only the priest. He believes me.”

“Believes what, Evelyn?”

“I didn’t kill them. You know I didn’t kill them, don’t you? I couldn’t.”

“I believe you.”

“You had a funeral for her?”

“Yes.”

“And it was beautiful?”

“When it came time to talk, to say something, I just blubbered away.”

“Lily knew. I don’t know what I … part of me just wants them to come and take me. The police, this man without a nose.”

“She was happy enough.”

“I could have made her happier. I was ashamed of her.”

“You weren’t.”

Evelyn sobbed and spoke. “I thought people would look at her face and think the girl is flawed and the mother is flawed.”

“Stop.”

“Don’t interrupt me! I told the priest too. And I told him I blamed you for that. It was your fault and I had to live with it, to carry it. And the university. When I could have been playing with her like you did, dollies or what the fuck else, anything, just colouring or just sitting
and holding her as she watched
Sesame Street.
What are we here for, on this planet?”