Come, Barbarians (22 page)

“The pictures are pretty.”

“We did have options for you, Monsieur Kruse. A central apartment in any city but Paris. For you, with a German name and a French heart I was thinking Strasbourg. But isolation is always best for someone in your situation. The moment I saw the ad I knew it was the one … a lovely start to your new life, Monsieur Roulet. I inspected the bastide myself. Wine and a bit of music, some soft lights on the terrace, cicadas, memories. A man of our age, middle age, yes? Entering middle age? What else can you ask for? Love, of course, love. But that may come.”

“Thank you.”

“Je vous en prie.”
Monsieur Meunier moved to allow him a turn at the sink. “Your testimony will put you at no small risk. It would be better than prison no matter what, but you’ve had a rotten bit of luck here in France. A quiet bit of luxury is precisely what you deserve. And perhaps we can work together in the future. The more we read about you and your business in America, your skills and talents, the more appealing it all seems.”

“I do apologize.”

“For what, my friend?” Monsieur Meunier struggled to grasp at the errant eyebrow hair with his chubby fingertips.

Kruse hit him just hard enough, in the jaw, and dragged him into a toilet stall. An announcement came over the public address system that the restaurant would be closing at two o’clock. It was loud enough to overwhelm the sound of his footsteps. Kruse walked past the guards, drinking espressos, and into the crowd. One of them spotted him and stuttered, shouted, “Monsieur! Stop!” Kruse ran to the end of the white hall and out the automatic doors. There were two gas stations, one on each side of the highway, and both led to thick
evergreen forests. Kruse sprinted deeply into the trees, slicing his right arm on a branch, and hopped a fence. The forest opened up into a light industrial suburb, with filling stations for large trucks and a series of warehouses. On the other side, brown farmland, wet from recent rains, and a football pitch with white goalposts at each end. A thin fog rose from the grass.

The guards came out of the forest in a line with Madame Lareau in the middle. She shouted orders to her men in suits, as the trees opened into Burgundy. Then she spoke—screamed—into a cellular phone that it was not her fault.

Kruse removed his shoes and crept from one delivery truck to another in the wraparound parking lot of a wine co-operative. At the back of the warehouse one man in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with Kermit the Frog on it sat on a wine barrel and smoked a cigarette. The door was propped open. Kruse asked the man, politely, if he might hide from an intelligence agency inside. Before the man answered, Kruse pulled out the stack of money. “You can keep a thousand of it, when they’re gone.”

“What did you do?”

“They want me to testify against politicians.”

“What did the politicians do?”

“There isn’t time to discuss it, Monsieur. Yes or no?”

For too long the man stared at Kruse with his mouth open. He had lost one of his front teeth. Kruse didn’t want to hit him. Outside the warehouse, Madame Lareau told someone to run and hard shoes clacked on pavement, getting closer. The shop man smelled the stack of francs. “Two thousand.”

The warehouse was painted white, the walls and the mopped floor, and crowded with stainless steel bins and bladders. It was warm and humid, heavy with the scents of rot and fermentation. Kruse climbed to a white, rusting catwalk. The bins were open and most of them were full. Only one had a thick layer of must on top. There was nowhere else to go so he lowered himself into it, holding on to the rim.

Voices echoed through the warehouse. The man in the Kermit the Frog hoodie delivered one-word answers—one yes and a disinterested no, twice. Kruse knew the man wouldn’t tell the agents the truth, even though it would be to his financial advantage to walk away with all of the money now, though Kruse could not say why. They didn’t believe him. Two of the agents, in hard-soled shoes, walked through the warehouse.

“Where is everyone?” one of them said.

Kruse could not hear the answer, something about the end of the
vendange
and a holiday.

“How can you be sure?” someone else said, and he heard footsteps on the iron stairs.

Holding his breath underwater had been part of his training, his least favourite after deliberately ruining the nerve endings in his shins by kicking a hunk of wood wrapped with a yellow rope. Kruse grew up certain he would never have to wait underwater on the Jordanian coast of the Dead Sea, as his mentor had done, and pop up at two in the morning to kill a Palestinian bomber with a guitar string. The footsteps grew nearer and he slid all the way down through the must and into the juice. The cut he had opened on his arm stung in the wine.

He counted to sixty, to one hundred, to one hundred and forty. It had been a long time since he had done this and his body rebelled. His heart beat everywhere inside him. His chest was a balloon ready to pop. In Toronto, after Lily was born, he was often stricken in the night by the conviction that something was going wrong inside him: a tumour, a ruined heart, some disease of the brain invited by too many blows to the head. The thought of dying too young, of not seeing Lily move into school and find her way and thrive, not protecting her, tormented him. He hardly slept during the first week of school, when Lily was shut away from him in École Jules Ferry and some mental defective or even a teacher could say something to her, about her lip. Or in high school, where it would be worse. Where
men like Matt Gibenus stomped about waiting for a sign of fragility to pounce.

He floated gently to the top and took a shallow breath, out of the must, and sunk back down to the bottom of the tank. Some of it was in his mouth now and it did not taste right, the decomposing Chardonnay skins, so he spit them out and allowed his body for an instant to accept he was in danger. They might have shot him in the face just now, as his lips broke the surface of the juice. His uncle, his father’s brother, had jumped off the Prince Edward Viaduct after his wife had confessed she had fallen in love with a gym teacher. It was in Kruse and he didn’t fear it, especially now, but he was not yet finished.

When Tzvi was a soldier he was injured and captured. Some men tortured him in a jail in Beirut. At the height of it, when he was sure he was going to die, something or someone appeared at his side and told him to ease his heart and remain hopeful and focus on returning to these men and killing them, one by one, for all of this pain and indignity. It helped him survive the ordeal and it opened up a new world to him, a world still ungoverned by a God but filled with spirits. This was not a confession he delivered lightly. Kruse was the only one he had ever told, and Tzvi was open to the idea that he was slowly going crazy and this was the incitement of it. But Kruse, who had grown up in a church and with parents who did not know doubt, found it both plausible and comforting. No ghost or angel had come to Lily or Evelyn and nothing came to him now, at the bottom of the barrel of wine.

He could open his mouth and his nose to it and remain down here, fill his lungs with alcohol. This was the moment. Instead he floated again to the surface, his body burning and bursting with the emergency of it, and again he quieted his heart and breathed. This time he remained in the must, blind with it. He prepared to descend again when he heard a whisper.

“Monsieur?”

He remained with his face in the must.

“Monsieur?”

Kruse spit and tried, while treading juice, to manage a whisper himself. “Are they gone?”

“Yes. Where are you, Monsieur?”

The janitor helped him out of the juice and asked him to remain on the lid. He produced a small folded pile: a T-shirt with “La Chablisienne” on the front, a pair of rain pants, and aged canvas shoes. He had a plastic bag for Kruse’s wine-drenched outfit, his gift from the agents: Claude Roulet’s clothes.

Kruse paid him four thousand francs and promised him another two thousand if the janitor would drive him to Roissy.

“The airport?”

“A hotel near the airport.”

“Three thousand, which would bring our total to seven thousand francs.”

Kruse took the bills from the janitor and paid him. He washed his face and hair as best he could in the employee washroom, while the janitor drove one of the white Chablisienne trucks around to the back. Kruse stepped in. It rumbled and dieselled. Here in the cab of the truck, as everywhere, Nirvana was playing on the radio. The janitor, who introduced himself as Mehdi, pushed a cassette into the deck and they listened instead to Charles Trenet.

Mehdi had grown up in Tunis. His children went to a good school in Auxerre. If it weren’t for his name, he said, no one would know he is Arab. He named his daughter Roxanne and his son Tristan, gifts to them.

“You came to France to be French.”

“Of course, Monsieur.”

“Christophe, please, Mehdi. You know, you should send a letter to the Front National, telling them about your intentions.”

Mehdi slowly rolled down the window, spit on the autoroute, and closed the window back up again. Then he asked Kruse if he had a family.

“Not anymore, no.”

“You’re alone.”

“Yes, Mehdi.”

“May God intervene.”

NORTH OF BURGUNDY THE AFTERNOON WAS DARK AND SOAKED AND
wind-rocked, the flags alert, the tips of evergreens swaying along the autoroute, and the bare branches of everything else assailed and miserable. Mehdi stopped at a park in the centre of Roissy that so surprised Kruse with its beauty, he explained about Canadian airports, about how they were never so well loved as this.

“What sort of man would live in a place he does not love?” said Mehdi. “We are not on this earth long enough to make such errors.”

Kruse called him a true philosopher and shook his hand. Mehdi blessed him in his princely way and drove off. The park was filled with gracious old trees and a curving sidewalk and clipped bushes. There were a few cars but otherwise Roissy was as deserted as Vaison-la-Romaine during a mistral. It was the middle of the afternoon, a time of neither coming nor going. Kruse had begun to smell, in the cab of the truck, but when he apologized for it Mehdi had told him his nose was
no longer tuned to the smell of rotting grapes. We all have our rotting grapes, he said.

A men’s clothing store was at the end of the block, with a pleasing hint of liquor and cigar smoke inside. A small, white-haired man squinted at him from behind the counter, where he read a newspaper. He carried a long string of measuring tape around his neck, the last real haberdasher in the world.

The haberdasher, in a brown suit and a large yellow tie, stepped down from the counter. He greeted Kruse and then seemed torn between wanting to help him and kicking him out of the store. Roissy was not a town of vagrants. Perhaps he had never seen a man so dirty, in his store.

“I’ve had an accident.”

“Yes, Monsieur?”

“A wine-related accident, in Burgundy.”

“White Burgundy, I would say.”

“Chablis, in fact.”

The haberdasher crossed his arms. “Nothing you’re wearing fits you.”

“My clothes are here.” Kruse lifted the plastic bag. “All this is borrowed, from the winery.”

“When we’re done, all of it will go straight in the garbage. Fortunately, it is a slow day. My wife is watching television in the back, the best tailor in la métropole and nothing to do.”

The tailor knew his size by sight and pulled two suits down, a navy blue and a brown, and some white shirts. He was more a blue man than a brown. Twenty minutes later, Kruse was waiting for the haberdasher’s wife to finish his cuffs. He had come in to buy a pair of jeans, a simple shirt, and shoes that fit. The haberdasher stared at him, as though he were an object of study, and chose a trench coat to go with the suit.

Kruse walked swiftly through the hotel lobby and pressed the up button on the elevator, to avoid drawing attention to his hair or to his smell. The key was in his wine-drenched bag of clothes, and by the time he fished it out he could have knocked several times. If someone was inside, he wanted to surprise him—or them.

The room had been made up and their clothes were still here, Anouk’s books. He had ordered them to remain inside and they were not here, so all he could do was call her number at
Le Monde.
When the secretary answered at the end of the seventh ring he hung up. His hair itched with the rotting grape juice. He was furious with Annette and he would tell her so, that around every corner was a car coming for them or a Russian with a knife. He could not leave without doing it, so he showered the Chardonnay out of his hair and skin and plotted his immediate future: he would walk the streets of Roissy in a navy blue suit and trench coat, with a hotel umbrella, and find them. The suite was empty when he exited the shower. His underwear and socks were with the suit, so he wrapped a towel around himself and walked into the small salon just as the door opened.

Anouk clapped her hands. “
Bonjour
, Monsieur Christophe.”

All of his plans to be angry and victimized by circumstance and obsessed by men of cruelty were ruined by her, the way she half-skipped to him and stopped herself a foot or two away. She wore a small red peacoat with tiny drops of water resting on the wool.

“
Bonjour,
Anouk.”

Her mother looked at Kruse with new tears of defeat in her eyes and looked away. She emptied a plastic bag: milk, cereal with chocolate inside, a package of individual-sized yogurts, a bottle of Bordeaux, a colouring book, and a package of crayons.
“J’ai le cafard,”
she said. This phrase had something to do with depression, melancholy. Kruse didn’t chide her for leaving the room. Instead he apologized and carried his new clothes into the steamy bathroom. When he was dressed, he prepared himself and stepped out.

Anouk sat on the edge of the bed, directly in front of the bathroom door. “Have you seen
The Little Mermaid
?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“It was on TV last night. We watched in the dark.”

“What fun.”

“And pizza.”

“A movie and a pizza. That does sound wonderful.”

She whispered, “We can do it again tonight, Monsieur.”

“We’ll ask your mother.”

“
Non, non, et non.
Last night she said only this one time. Tonight would be more than one time.”

“It will take some sly manoeuvring.”

“What does that mean?”

“I might have said that incorrectly.”

“What?”

Anouk sat up straight and rested her hands on her knees. She had removed her wet peacoat and wore a pink dress and white tights. Her mother had brushed the knots out of her hair. Rather than pretend it did not fill him with joy and longing to see her, he sat next to Anouk on the bed and took her hand and together they looked at each other and at nothing, the doorway into the steamy bathroom. He had failed at everything he was charged by nature and by his heart to do. They were gone forever. Yet he allowed himself to feel good and useful, holding a little girl’s still-cool hand. He had grown addicted to sitting in quiet rooms with Lily, to seeing her at the end of a day of work, so addicted he found himself creating false reasons to home-school her, to keep her all to himself, his, to protect her as long as he could.

The unnecessary marriage counsellor in Toronto had said something he did not forget. At the moment it had seemed obvious and banal. He had been ignoring the counsellor, the four-syllable nouns poached from psychological experts on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
He had stared at an unhappy ficus on top of her gunmetal filing cabinet.

“There is nothing more attractive, and more comforting to ourselves and to our partners, than truth.” The counsellor had enormous and fragrant hair, teased up and blow-dried and treated with sprays and mousses. She wore a shirt with shoulder pads and several silver bracelets on each arm that clinked like wind chimes as she spoke with her arms. “As Hamlet tells us, ‘to thine own self be true.’”

Part of Evelyn’s education of her wretched thug were black-and-white film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet didn’t say, “To thine own self be true.” The windbag Polonius had said it, and clearly Shakespeare was making fun of a certain kind of person: the kind of person who says things like “To thine own self be true.” But he had thought about it, in the room with the ficus, and Polonius and the counsellor had been correct. It was good advice, windbaggery or not. Evelyn had wanted him to be a certain kind of man, his own self by her.

He put his arms around Anouk and gently lifted her onto his knee. He kissed her on the top of her head, which smelled of the outdoors and faintly of the herbal shampoo he had just used.

“I will die in France,” he said, in English, aloud by accident.

Anouk turned up to him as though he had burped in her hair. “What, Monsieur?”

“It makes me happy, to be with you.”

“Me too, Monsieur. Do you have a car that is also a dog?”

“No.”

“That is something I think about.”

“If I see one, I’ll buy it for you.”

“I still sit in a car seat.”

“Until you’re ready, I can drive the car that is also a dog.”

“That sounds like a good idea. Will you drive me to Disneyland?”

His favourite moment from any of the old movies Evelyn had made him watch was when sad old King Lear huddled with the daughter he had mistreated, his only true love in the world, Cordelia, and said sweet things that would never be: “We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.”

To lock the doors and all doors ten doors thick and remain here in this hotel room in Roissy with Anouk and her books and some
dou-dous.
Maybe a tea set could be arranged, their private Disneyland.

“Are you okay, Monsieur Christophe?”

He shifted Anouk back onto the bed and walked into the salon. He leaned on the door jamb and watched Annette, who had opened her bottle and had already finished half a glass. Her hand quivered. She had prepared, it seemed, to say something. She said it flatly and quietly. It was vicious, what Kruse had forced them to do. If they had gone to the police instead of coming here, to the goddamn airport, everything might have turned out beautifully. She might have written a story about it in the newspaper. Instead, Anouk had missed school and she had probably been fired
in absentia
from her degrading job, and now all she could do was go back to foggy Bordeaux and beg someone, a family friend or her philandering ex-husband, to take pity on them. No one can stay in a hotel room this long without going mental, in the same clothes, washing underwear in the sink and eating salty dinners every night.

“We’ll go in the morning.”

“Where?”

“The newsroom first. I will finalize our bill, downstairs. Then the concierge will find us a taxi and the three of us will go and we will stay safely in the newsroom until the story, your story, is published. Then it will be safe for you.”

“And you?”

“That doesn’t matter. I have to go south the moment your story goes to press.”

“You’re wanted for murder.”

“I am and I’m not.”

“It was on the television news.”

Kruse filled up her glass of wine, and filled a glass for himself. “I know what happened now, on the night Lily was killed, what really happened and why.”

“Who is Lily?” Anouk had followed him into the salon.

Without a word, Annette stood up and walked Anouk into the bedroom and turned on the television. It was the end of the day, so cartoons were on. “Monsieur Kruse said we could have pizza tonight again and watch a movie,” he heard the girl whisper.

When Annette was back in the room with him, the door closed, she pulled a notepad from her bag and pushed the wet hair from her eyes.

He had taken the copy of the story Madame Lareau wanted him to tell in the courtroom in Paris, to ruin the Gaullists. It had not mattered to him whether he told the true story or the false story, until he was in the toilet with Monsieur Meunier, who spoke so movingly of the farmhouse in the Var. Meunier had picked it out especially for Kruse, with a lovely feeling for the cicadas and the nighttime and maybe the smell of lavender and rosemary, grapevines, lemon trees. The old armoire of Provence meets the white countertops of Sweden. A dog? Why not?

But each of the photos had been stamped on the bottom with the date July 5, 1990.

Annette took a sip of her wine and prepared her pen. She looked up at him. “They killed your wife, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

They finished the Bordeaux and they did order a pizza, the final hotel-room pizza, Annette vowed, of her life. The only cartoon available on the movie channel was
The Little Mermaid
, so Anouk watched it again. Midway through each of the songs, she had learned the tune well enough to sing along. At the end, when the bad sorceress mermaid grew to gigantic proportions and threatened to kill them all, Anouk took his hand and squeezed.

When she had packed for this trip to the hotel, Annette had thrown four storybooks into the bag. Kruse volunteered to read the bedtime book Anouk had chosen, after brushing her teeth and putting on her mismatched flannel panda and Je t’aime pyjamas and trying to pee. The book,
Mimi Cracra
, was a series of tales about a little girl whose curiosity and naughtiness lead her into harmless messes. Anouk laughed at the typically Canadian way he pronounced words like
chien
and
viens.
The tradition in the Annette Laferrière household was to turn out the lights, after the book, and sing a song. Annette invited Kruse to lie beside her, on the double bed adjacent to Anouk’s, and sing. She smelled of sandalwood and they were both a little drunk and faintly touching, the skin of her arm on the skin of his arm. Annette’s swallow filled the small room.

One of the only songs he knew all the way through, apart from selections from the Mennonite hymnal, was “The Dock of the Bay.” Anouk did not know the song, and she particularly liked the whistling part. It did not bother her that it was in English.

“More,” she said, “please.”

Again he sang the simple song and when he was finished, the room was quiet but for the mother and daughter breathing. He turned and watched Annette by the parking-lot light that sneaked in through the curtains.

He whispered, “Are you awake?”

Annette smiled without opening her eyes. “I’m enjoying this enormously.”

It was nonsense, both a lie and drunken treachery, but he imagined living with them in the big farmhouse in the Var. He dozed off, and woke just before midnight in the midst of a bloody dream. The wine had left him with a touch of vertigo. Annette had fallen asleep on her side, her dark hand on his chest. He sneaked off the bed and took off his jacket and found the blanket he had used the last time he had slept here, on the couch. He covered Annette with it and watched Anouk
sleep for a while as his heart slowed. He slipped back into bed with her, and put her hand back on his chest.

A scream, a muffled scream. Half in and half out of a dream he sat up, or tried to sit up, and the ugly Russian from Villa de l’Astrolabe and Quimper whispered for him to stay exactly where he was. He grasped a handful of Kruse’s hair. At the door another man carried Anouk out of the bedroom, sprawled in his arms like she was sleeping there or worse. Kruse knocked the ugly Russian’s hand away and hit him and rushed across the room. He reached the doorway and shouted at the man with Anouk, to stop.