Come, Barbarians (24 page)

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.

Kruse was about to leave when the lieutenant, still in his dress uniform, sat across from him.

“Jesus Christ, Yves.”

“Don’t blaspheme. Not this morning.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I had not prepared a last meal, not once. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t go through with it. Eternal damnation and a precooked chicken, a bad combination. What are we waiting for, Christophe? Let’s go.”

Kruse lifted his coffee. He was nearly finished. “Yves, thank you, but—”

“If I were to have a last meal, and know it was my last meal, it would be my grandmother’s soupe au pistou. I would start with a glass of champagne and ease into a bottle of Château de Beaucastel, do you know it? And a steak tartare on the side, even though it makes no sense. For dessert, a simple flan and some melon and a glass of very good cognac. Oh and a cigar. And Catherine Deneuve.”

“Stop talking about last meals, my friend.”

“What would you have?”

Kruse looked down at the table. “Pain au chocolat, coffee.”

“Amuse me.”

“Maybe I’d have fish of some sort.”

Huard sat back in his chair. “Fish of some sort? You are such an American. Why not a hamburger then?”

“A hamburger would do.”

“‘Fish of some sort,’ he says!”

They had not yet turned on the music in the bistro. The waiter arrived with a coffee for Huard and he raised his tiny cup. “To France,
alors.
”

“And to your grandmother’s soup.”

“And to blood, Christophe. If we’re honest.” The gendarme reached over the table and took Kruse’s hand for a moment and squeezed it and released it and looked away.

“Are you sure about this, Yves?”

“Tell me what you want me to do.”

Kruse borrowed a slip of paper from the waiter, and drew a map based on what the drowning Russian had said. Huard would stay back with his gun, hidden.

Men and women with baskets and pull carts arrived in morning sweaters, from every direction, for the Sunday market. In the autumn sun it was warm and cool at once. Kruse led the lieutenant past city hall and a fountain. Nearly everyone on the old marble tiles stopped to look at the gendarme in his dress uniform, which had turned a magnificent blue in the sunlight. Kruse led him to the plaza, dedicated to martyrs of the Resistance, bursting with white tents and humming trucks and already, at this hour, hundreds of people. A breath of fish and cheese filled the square. Shoppers jostled them and vendors shouted claims about their sausages and chèvre, plump early tomatoes,
les fraises de Carpentras
, the best in the world. Women hugged, kissed three times, reeked of Shalimar perfume and therefore of Evelyn.

“What if the Russian lied to you? They could have her in London. Brussels.”

“He started by lying.”

Sun shone harshly off the upper windows of the plaza. He established north and scanned the apartments. A thin boy of nine or ten, hunching and glancing about him as though he had recently been punched, walked out of the shadow of the arcade and made straight for Kruse. His hair was nearly shaved, like a recent victim of lice, and his ears stuck out comically. “Excuse me, Monsieur, do you have the time?”

Kruse looked down at his watch and heard a rustle. The boy ran past Huard and darted between the women with their baskets, slammed into a wheelchair and disappeared behind a tent.

“Hey!” Huard had been eating samples from a fruit vendor. His hands were wet with strawberry. “He took my gun.”

Kruse saw his error. “I have a new plan. Go get your car and park in front of the café. When I come out—”

“No.” Huard looked up and around the plaza. “Why don’t they just shoot us, if they know we’re here?”

“The envelope. Who knows how many envelopes I made?”

Huard looked at the address and led Kruse toward it. “One thing I don’t understand: the Russians. Why hire foreigners?”

“To protect themselves, the family business. Remember how this started: two or three men. They couldn’t tell anyone.”

A small municipal vehicle marked the outer ring of the market. Kruse and Huard crouched behind it and looked up at the windows that rounded the top-floor apartment. No visible lights, no movement.

The lieutenant sat on the curb. “They know we’re here. Perhaps we knock?”

“Yves, please. Go get the car. Without a gun … my will is important. I’m ordering you.”

“You can’t order anyone. Not in this country.” Huard stood up and straightened his shoulders. “First I’ll use the toilet and then we’ll find our man without a nose.” He crossed the narrow street, his chin up and his chest out, and marched through the busy terrace of a bistro. Diners looked up at him and he nodded in benediction.

The heavy grey door was between a bakery and a children’s boutique. It was unmarked and controlled by a keypad. Kruse watched. The grey door opened shortly after nine. A man with dark hair falling over his eyes, viciously chewing gum, peeked out and looked around. He wore a suit without a tie. He was Mediterranean, not Russian. At that moment, the lieutenant stepped out of the bistro and looked directly at the young man—who stopped chewing and reached down in a hurry. Kruse sprinted to the door and slammed into it. The man grunted and slumped to the ground, half in and half out of the doorway, a gun in his hand.

Men and women and children on the terrace and on the street behind gasped and shouted. A child screamed. The lieutenant turned to them and announced that this was an operation of the Gendarmerie nationale.

The lieutenant took the gun from the fallen man, who moaned unconsciously. “Fall in behind me.”

“Yves, wait.”

Kruse dragged the man by his ankles into a long corridor cut out of stone, with a low ceiling, and shut the door behind him. At the end of the corridor, a burst of light. The lieutenant was nearly there, walking freely, each step an echo. It was uncommonly damp in the corridor, like a basement in a river town. Kruse pinched and slapped the young man to revive him but he remained out. A low consistent moan came from his nose. The lieutenant had paused a few paces from the end of the corridor. It was unnecessary now but Kruse crept along the stone wall in a crouch.

“Have you ever done anything like this before?”

“There is little call for storming a fortress in the villages of the Northern Vaucluse.”

Up ahead was an atrium, a courtyard covered with a massive skylight. Soil had been set into much of the space, and pots had been organized in swirls. It was an immaculate jungle, its watering system the source of
the dampness and of the perfume. “You stay here with the gun. If you see anyone who looks like they’re going to shoot me, shoot them first. Or just shoot. Then go out and phone this woman.” Kruse handed him the card: “Corinne Lareau, Sous-directeur, Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense.”

A busy collection of palms and ferns in terracotta began just past the end of the corridor. The floor was white marble.

“Is this a joke, Christophe? You don’t understand why I’ve come?” He refused the card and began counting down from ten.

“What are you doing?”

He continued to count down. Kruse prepared to knock him out to save him, before he reached one. But at five Huard dropped and rolled onto the spotless marble floor of the courtyard. He ended up off balance in front of a terracotta pot, his breaths rattled and his cheeks purple.

“Yves. Come back.”

“Go.”

A voice echoed through the courtyard. “We’re here to escort you upstairs. Don’t shoot.”

Kruse sprinted toward a low set of stairs, to draw attention away from the lieutenant. He saw no one until it was too late: the sun flickering off the silencer. His right ear and the back of his head burned. Kruse ran and went down behind a white angel statue tucked into the greenery.

“Christophe!”

“Shh.”

“Are you okay? I saw blood.”

“Yes, Yves. Quiet now.”

Bullets slammed into and ricocheted past the statue; half its white head crumbled away. Slowly and soundlessly he made his way closer to the man with the gun. Kruse was nearly close enough to pounce when a voice echoed through the courtyard.

“I am Lieutenant Yves Huard of the Gendarmerie nationale.” Huard stood in the open. “Monsieur: I will give you ten seconds to walk into this courtyard and surrender your firearm. Yes, you can lead us upstairs and, yes, your bravery will be remembered at your trial. One. Two.”

The first shot came at three. Huard howled and kneeled and shot his own gun several times. Kruse had a poor view of him, but it looked as though he was smiling through his wails. Huard’s gun clicked emptily now. The sniper, in a brown suit, stepped out of his hiding place and aimed.

Kruse took him from behind and dropped him from the riser onto the marble. The courtyard went silent, but for water dribbling somewhere and ambient noise from the market.

Huard was still smiling when Kruse arrived. His voice was small. “I got him.”

“You sure did.”

Both of the bullets had entered his abdomen.

“Yves, I’m going to take you to the hospital.”

“I’ll die and haunt you for the rest of your life if you do that.”

“The bullets have—”

“I know damn well what the bullets have done.”

“Then I’ll just take you to the street. Someone will call an ambulance.”

“I want to stay right here. With all my heart I do. You go.”

“You were very brave, Yves.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a splendid policeman.”

“Yes.”

“And an honourable man.”

“Go on now.”

Kruse fetched the sniper’s gun and pressed it into Huard’s right hand.

“If anyone tries to escape …”

“
Blammo
,” Huard said, as though a gunshot were an English word, and grimaced. “Sit me up.”

Kruse propped him against the base of the angel statue. It had one eye, one ear, and half a mouth. One of its shoulders was missing. Huard’s pretty blue uniform had turned a dark purple where the blood ran. Kruse borrowed the gendarme’s white sash and used it on his own wound. The bullet had chewed the top of his ear and ripped into the back of his head, painfully but superficially.

“Don’t think poorly of yourself for this, Christophe. I am dying well.”

“Yves.” Kruse placed a hand on his cheek. “You’re not permitted to die. I’ll be right back. We’ll go to the hospital together and they’ll fix us both.”

The lieutenant reached up with his bloody right hand, not for a shake but for a squeeze. Then he leaned back and readied his gun. “Excellent, son. Excellent. Until then!”

There was an inner stairwell, built from the same marble as the floor, and an elevator. Kruse took the stairs. On the first, second, and third levels there were planters filled with clipped herbs and flowers. The soil was black and moist from recent attention.

On the top landing he waited to restore his breathing and heart rate, to do what he had taught his students—what Tzvi had taught him when he was still a teenager. To turn his feelings into something else, something useful. He allowed himself to wonder if some of them on the other side of the door had studied savate, an old pirate art with odd kicks. He had never fought a savateur. This was why he had crossed the goddamn ocean.

Just as he reached for the door it opened on its own, into a hallway. Three men in suits, giants with shaved heads, stood before him. Brothers in this. None of them were Russian.

“Welcome, Monsieur Kruse,” said the one in the back, the oldest and most confident of them. “Joseph was expecting you hours ago. Your girlfriend and her daughter are here, and safe. They’re all very tired. Oh no: you’re really bleeding.”

The first man held a gun but it wasn’t yet aimed. His free hand was
still on the door handle and already he was off balance. He was not a savateur. The man lifted his gun and Kruse ducked it and disarmed him, hurt him with his knee and his elbows. The man was heavy and Kruse fell back with him, tossed him into the stairway.

“We can’t shoot him,” the older man said to the one between them. He changed his tone and said, “Monsieur Kruse, why are you doing this? If you make us kill you, Lucien will be furious.”

The man between them held a knife. He seemed confused by Kruse or by what his boss had said. He lowered himself into a fighting stance and jabbed the knife.