by Todd Babiak
Pascale did not seem to mind. “That all of this should come from a disaster. Good night. Good night, my little fairy.”
Traffic enters Place de la Libération on four thin medieval roadways that snake into and out of Villedieu. Nothing here had been built for cars.
They walked past the fountain and toward a parking lot at the bottom of the hill. Kruse and Evelyn walked along the houses while Lily skipped, in character, on the opposite side of the road. There was no formal sidewalk here, but the cobblestones did end in a rough path of gravel decorated with old trees. She swung her wand about and sang in French and in English, turned frogs into princes. In the distance, the sound of sirens. When they had first arrived, the French siren had been exotic and glamorous. Kruse called her over but either she ignored him or did not hear over the noise of the party and her own singing. He started to cross the street but Evelyn pulled him back.
“Let her be.”
Kruse would later wonder why he did not hear the engine sooner. Where had the sirens come from? He watched Lily and he watched Evelyn, her tan face and the veins on the back of her hand. In the plaza, under the inconsistent orange lights, he had studied the unlit pockets they created along the wall, the sloped path toward the broken château, entrances and escapes, hiding places, covered positions, until he took another glass of wine and forced himself to notice other things. Evelyn had succeeded: his business was no longer his business.
The headlights were not turned on.
Lily stopped skipping. She saw it first, swerving toward her, and froze. There would have been time, if Kruse had started at that instant, to run across and snatch her up and pull her into a doorway. By the time he started to run it was too late. The car roared up the old road, its new tires slapping the cobblestone. Evelyn screamed behind him and said no, as the white Mercedes of their landlord and best French friend accelerated into their daughter.
THREE
Cours de Taulignan, Vaison-la-Romaine
SOMEONE HAD BEEN IN BOULANGERIE J.F. SINCE THE MORNING. THE poster with “fasciste” over Jean-François’s head had been removed. Flowers were scattered about. Candles had been placed before the door, though they had blown out in the new wind. No one had left flowers and candles for Lily, not in Villedieu and not in Vaison-la-Romaine. Inside, the stone and stainless steel workshop shone in the faint light, most of the sun doused by stage one of the mistral: dust. Three nuns in their habits bent into it and either ignored him or couldn’t hear when he offered to help with an arm or directions. Cours de Taulignan was deserted. The people of Northern Provence had hunkered into their dim little houses to make stew.
By ambition Jean-François de Musset was a regional councillor on his way to the palace. By trade he was a baker, as his father had been. He held the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France—the best in the country. President François Mitterrand had bestowed the honour on him after a display of bread making, wine pairing, and historical speech making at a series of arduous competitions in Paris. He had been profiled in every major newspaper and magazine in France, and had merited a small piece in The New York Times in the eighties. These pieces had been fitted into wooden frames and hung on the interior walls of his bakery, where they were stained by the sun and warped by humidity. The converted horse stable they rented from Jean-François and Pascale was small but it was clean and safe. Morning baguettes from Boulangerie J.F. were delicious. The baker and his wife had been kind to their daughter. Through Jean-François, Evelyn had found something to study and Kruse had found something to make.
The lieutenant greeted him at the door of the gendarmerie in a clean shirt and blazer. “We were just about to send a bulletin, Monsieur Kruse.”
“I was in Villedieu.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten. Last night, a drunk man—”
“Yes, yes.” The lieutenant’s smile faded for a moment. “That crime has been solved.”
“It must be gratifying.”
The gendarme fussed with his moustache. He had a name tag: HUARD, Yves. Behind him, a woman in uniform sat on a raised chair behind a desk, smoking and watching them watch one another. Pop music played distantly inside the building. From somewhere else, a man’s heavy and exaggerated laugh. All was ridiculous, the day after his daughter’s murder.
“Have you found anything in my wife’s notebooks?”
“Only one of us reads English, and he’s slow about it. I’d ask you to translate for us but I fear you’d be conflicted.”
“You’re wasting your time. She’s no killer.”
“See? Conflicted. Follow me, Monsieur Kruse.”
He never wanted to talk for the sake of talking. In the hallway he did. “You’re married, Monsieur Huard?”
“Not me, no. I was and then I wasn’t.”
“Children?”
“We didn’t make it that far, Monsieur Kruse. I regret it but I would have been a miserable father. I’m miserable at most things. Even interrogation, as you’ll soon see.” The lieutenant stopped and turned around, fixed Kruse in the eyes. “And how are you?”
There was no way to answer.
“And now the winds have come. Just think, if they had arrived last night the party would have been cancelled.”
The interview cell was not the bare walls and raw concrete of his imagination. It was a conference room with potted plants and a white screen for overhead projections. There was a fax machine and, in the middle of the table, a speakerphone. Madame Boutet’s hair was still wet. She stood up, in a thick black police sweater, to shake his hand.
“We hear you’ve been looking for her.”
“She’s my wife.”
“Rather you find her than us.” Madame’s nose flared. “Is that it?”
The handshake had lasted too long. He retreated.
“You’ve eaten something since this morning, I hope.”
“Not yet, Madame, but it’s in my plans.”
Lieutenant Huard clapped his hands. “Sous-lieutenant Boutet, how would you like to go next door and order us a lovely fromage-charcuterie?”
It was evident Madame Boutet would not like to do that. She paused a moment and stared at her partner, flatly but malevolently, and then she walked out.
“You’re in for it now, Monsieur Kruse. She can’t take it out on me but she can punish you. Please sit.”
The chairs were mismatched but made of leather, with wheels on the bottom. Kruse sat and leaned forward over the table. “You interviewed him, your old friend, after he killed her.”
“Killed? You mean Jean-François. I didn’t mean to imply we were friends. He was a wealthy and powerful man, an artisan. Who am I?”
“What did he say?”
“He was destroyed, Monsieur. I promise you that. He had strong feelings for your daughter. He knew his future, his career and life as he imagined it, were as dead as your Lily. This one terrible moment. He said he didn’t remember.”
“What didn’t he remember?”
“He was barely coherent and then as he came out of the fog, his drunkenness, it was as though he didn’t know how it had all come to be. From late-afternoon to midnight: nothing.”
“He was preparing his legal defence, no doubt. Evelyn spoke to him in the tavern at the bottom of the hill, or tried to speak to him, while he was drinking. He was with two men, from Paris I think, and they were rude to her.”
“I would ask my old friend about these men.” Lieutenant Huard twirled his soft, crumpled package of cigarettes on the table. “Their names and addresses. But someone stabbed him, you see. Do you know how many times? Did you read about it?”
“No, Monsieur.”
“We are fragile creatures, aren’t we?” Lieutenant Huard waited a moment, for confirmation. Then he winked and lifted a plastic bag from a side table, next to the coffee machine, and dug his hand into it. He pulled out a fragrant pile of newspapers.
“You haven’t seen these yet.”
“No.”
; “While we wait for Madame Boutet, why don’t you take a look?”
There were two national newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, and two regional papers, La Provence and Le Dauphiné Libéré. Each carried a version of the story on its front page. He skimmed the first few paragraphs of each.
France is not a violent country by American standards, but enough people are murdered that it isn’t automatically news when a man in Toulouse strangles his wife or shoots his business partner in the head with a hunting rifle. It was news because Jean-François de Musset was a politician and, more recently, a national hero. This was the lead of all four stories. Lily was worth a sentence, a phrase. He pushed them aside.
“You didn’t read far enough, Monsieur Kruse.”
“I was in Villedieu last night. I know what happened.”
“Read all of the stories until the end. It will lead rather elegantly into some of our questions.”
A little more than a month earlier, Jean-François and Pascale had insisted the family spend a few days at their holiday home in Cassis, on the Mediterranean coast. Kruse had been volunteering at the bakery for two months, working as a free apprentice; if he was in France to change his life for Evelyn and for Lily, to learn how to make something beautiful, bread had seemed as beautiful as anything else. Evelyn was not one to work with her hands but she had been busy. She was studying Jean-François’s political party but also teaching him. She participated in meetings and events, provided advice, gently steered them away from extremes; his conservatism was her conservatism, even though he had never read Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand. She and Kruse accepted the offer of a beach vacation and drove their rental car to the pretty little town on the sea. Evelyn lay on a beach towel and read about the meeting place between French art and politics: a publishable paper, at least one, was revealing itself to her. He and Lily dug holes and buried each other in the sand. Even in September the sea was warmer than any Ontario lake.
One night in Cassis, Kruse and Evelyn hired a babysitter through the tourist office and spent way too many francs on food and wine in a waterfront bistro. Back in the apartment they made love so well they woke up Lily. The next morning the heat that sustained them on the Mediterranean moved north and smashed into the cool from the mountains, and Vaison-la-Romaine formed the unlucky centre of the most intense rainstorms and the most devastating flood since the seventeenth century. The Ouvèze river overflowed, knocking out everything in its path but one of the oldest bridges in the world: the Roman arch separating the lower and upper towns. Over thirty people, most of them campers east of Vaison, were swept to their deaths. The man who organized the rescue and pulled several people out from trees and smashed buildings, in front of television news cameras, was a baker and Front National regional councillor named Jean-François de Musset.
Two weeks after the flood in Vaison-la-Romaine, the first Sunday in October, Jean-François was invited to Paris. One of the country’s most famous television talk show hosts, Bernard Pivot, sat across from him in a bright studio. The show was called Bouillon de culture and the Kruses were invited to watch with Pascale, at the farmhouse behind the château.
It was a night of magic: Lily had never seen someone she knew on TV. The de Musset domaine was an enormous converted farmhouse between yellow and brown, with a faded almost-pink terracotta roof and a small vineyard, down a secluded road. They had dinner before the broadcast: a beet salad, bouillabaisse with aioli, tomates confites, and a roasted chicken with lemon and rosemary, every ingredient from their garden or a product of the Tuesday morning Vaison-la-Romaine market.
During dinner Evelyn said very little. Kruse caught her staring at Pascale, a tiny but beautiful woman with enough Italian ancestry to give her a permanent tan. She moved in a slow but lively fashion, as though she were always stopping herself from breaking into a run. If Kruse hadn’t known that Jean-François was fifty-one and that he and Pascale had been lycée sweethearts, he would have had trouble guessing her age. She spoke to Lily almost all the way through dinner, formally and sincerely, about Lily’s hopes and dreams, her mission in life, her favourite colour, favourite music, favourite food, favourite country.
La France, évidemment.
Kruse knew enough, from Evelyn, to understand that Jean-François’s political party was in a curious spot. Young people were apt to deface a poster with the word fasciste, and the Front National’s early incarnation had attracted men who were later outed as Nazi collaborators during the Second World War. The current leader had been caught on camera and on tape saying abominable things, and every few months the press found another anti-Semite or neo-Nazi member of the party, a skinhead or a Vichy man. But Vichy men were everywhere, embedded in every party and every institution in France, in its blood and bones, the architecture of its shame. The source of the Front National’s growing popularity in the last five years was its frankness about North African migration: the Moroccans on the sidewalk.
This was Evelyn’s port of entry into the Front National. She could help change its narrative, reposition it as the party best fit to return France to glory. Every great society in the history of the world has been a racist society by someone’s definition. If there were true racists in the party, Jean-François’s job was to isolate and remove them. But a culture needs coherence if it aspires to nobility, not a cult of fairness. Nostalgia is natural. Jean-François’s political party was only unique in its honesty. The changes that European leaders had proposed were dangerous, culturally and economically, and under Mitterrand, immigration in France had exploded while job growth had stopped. A conservative party could be honest and fair and open-hearted at once. Evelyn had worked with Jean-François on what he might say to Bernard Pivot and, by extension, several million French voters.
Kruse asked what Pascale thought of the newspaper editorials that predicted Jean-François would soon lead the Front National.
Pascale answered first with a sigh. “I am not a political woman.”
“No?”
“I am a woman who married a political man.”
“Sure. I can sympathize with that.”
Evelyn performed a long sigh. He knew what she was thinking in defence: substitute “political” with “violent.”
“I know what people say.” Pascale had hired a Moroccan woman and her son to cater the dinner. They silently filled the wineglasses. She waited until they were out of the dining room, back in the kitchen. “There are extremists in the party, crazies, but they’re a minority. Maybe one or two percent. Crazy people are everywhere. The newspapers hunt them down.”
“We have to remove them from the party,” said Evelyn.
“Is that democracy?”
Evelyn felt the word “democracy” was flawed. It was all things to all people, Soviets and Americans and African dictators. “It’s necessary.
“Jean-François did join the FN to transform it. The current leader, the man who must be replaced, is a clown and a buffoon. Please don’t tell Jean-François I said that, but it is true. If he changes the party, perhaps these people will simply melt away and start their own. A party of genuine crazies, like they have in England and Austria.”
“Clown.” The chocolate dessert had jolted Lily. “Buffoon.”
“What has France lost, in only a few years?” Evelyn could now talk politics in French the way she did it in English—with authority. “A powerful religion, the most rigorous school system in the world, genuine art by genuine artists, honour and strength and purity.”
“Don’t forget our spirit of individualism.”
Evelyn had grown up in a family that had once been wealthy, an old shipping family. Her grandfather May had turned out to be a drunk and a gambler. He lost everything but his sense of distinction. It had formed her politics and her work ethic. And her machine of judgment. Evelyn had confessed she thought Pascale was pompous, a phony who had grown up poor and now carried herself like a baroness. “Individualism, after the Second World War? Please do tell me more about that.”
To run off the cake and to avoid boring her with politics before a boring hour of television politics, Kruse took Lily outside.
Before the flood, they had a routine. On Wednesday and Saturday mornings, the Kruse family would walk to Place Montfort and visit the bakery for pain au chocolat, croissants, or maybe brioche with a spot of jam. The baker-politician-landlord would walk out from behind the counter to move a strand of blonde hair and kiss Lily on the forehead, leaving a trail of flour. Here, Kruse became comfortable with synonyms for “beautiful”: belle, jolie, ravissante, superbe. Other mornings, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Kruse volunteered at Boulangerie J.F.
The de Musset garden was spread out and concentrated in pockets of the best sun: ripe tomatoes grew here, lemons there. The fig tree had produced lovely fruit that Kruse would carry home from the bakery, his payment, after his mornings around the oven. After only a month in school Lily understood everything and she was learning the singsong Provençal accent: Bonjour-uh. Au revoir-uh. School, she said, was chouette-uh. When she played with the toys they had packed for her, she made nasal sounds—French sounds—if not words. They hunted for cicadas in the shrubbery around the de Musset house and failed to find any. They played hide-and-seek, cache-cache. Lily could not remain hidden for longer than a minute without giggling or singing, betraying herself. Hiding in silence made her lonesome and scared. The heat of the day had collapsed into the cool of the early October night. They inspected the grapes, which were just about ready to be picked. In neighbouring villages, the big harvest party—the vendange—had already begun.
Lily wore a grey cotton dress with short sleeves and her arms were covered in goosebumps. Kruse took her hand and led her back into the house.
There was a musical introduction and then Bernard Pivot. Pascale had explained about the famous man: he was a socialist, surely, if not a communist, but a very smart and curious one. The moment the camera revealed Jean-François, Lily screamed and clapped. Evelyn gave her an ultimatum. If she did not remain quiet for this very important show she and Papa would walk home early together. Lily promised—if, if, she could have one more tiny sliver of chocolate cake.
