by Todd Babiak
“I like to walk.”
“So long as you like to walk. Very good. Do you have a reservation?”
The lobby was designed and decorated like a cozy living room. Bookshelves surrounded a couch and chairs and a coffee table. Art and photography books were stacked carefully on the coffee table and all of it was bathed in warm lamplight. The noise of the traffic outside was softened by the thick front window. “I don’t, Monsieur.”
Monsieur put on his reading glasses and said, “Alors,” a few times. There was one room on the top floor, but the elevator was not working so well today. Technicians were coming. Would he terribly mind five flights of stairs?
As Monsieur spoke, Kruse scanned his workspace: it was cramped but orderly, with customized ledger books holding off the dread computer. The only piece of technical equipment was a central telephone router. The man was fifty, with a well-trimmed beard. Everything he said came off slightly ironic, as though he were playing the role of a hotelier to make a subtle point about hoteliers. His cards sat in an Eiffel Tower trolley: Guy and Dianne Balon. Monsieur Balon asked for Kruse’s passport.
“I don’t have it. I am a resident here.”
“Your identity card.”
“It has not arrived yet.”
“Typical.”
“Do you get a lot of Canadians?”
“A fair number, yes.”
“How about a woman, on the first of November?”
Monsieur Balon squinted at him.
“Evelyn May Kruse.”
“A popular woman, this Evelyn.”
“In what way?”
“You are the fourth person to ask after her. A journalist was here. Then the gendarmes. And just after lunch today, another gentleman. I’m afraid I can only tell you what I told the gendarmes: I can provide no information.”
“You took her credit card number but she paid with cash. Yes?”
The hotelier zipped his lips.
“She is my wife: Evelyn May Kruse.” The consulate in Toronto had said, wrongly, that customs and the prefecture in Avignon would demand to see a copy of their marriage certificate. Kruse had folded it into his wallet. He opened it on the desk.
Monsieur Balon scrawled tiny notes next to Kruse’s guest information—a sort of shorthand.
“What did the journalist want?”
“I run the hotel, Monsieur. That is all. The journalist, a woman, said she had a meeting with Madame at ten o’clock on the second of November. Our office opens at six but your wife had already departed by then. Madame Evelyn had left cash in our express checkout box.” Monsieur Balon pulled out a white business card from a drawer and slid it across the desk: Annette Laferrière, Le Monde. “You can take this with you.”
“What did Madame Laferrière look like?”
“Dark hair, thirty or forty.”
“The man who asked about her after lunch …”
Monsieur Balon took a deep breath. “Yes?”
“Another journalist?”
“No. Or I don’t think so.”
“Who was he?”
“Not a guest. He did not identify himself. I thought at first he was another policeman but the gendarmes were from the south, clearly. Their accents were unmistakable. There was something more thoughtful about this one. He had time. He was refined, and his interest in Madame Evelyn, Madame …”
“Kruse.”
“Madame Kruse. His interest in her had a kindly aspect.”
“How do you mean ‘kindly’?”
“He was seeking her to help in some way. And I remembered she had seemed sad, preoccupied. Downstairs, Monsieur Kruse, we have tables for our continental breakfast and, if you like, for a picnic lunch. I can learn a lot from a person by watching them eat. Your wife ate some fruit and cheese for dinner, when she arrived. I offered her a glass of wine. She said no. Normally, when a foreigner arrives in Paris—especially a woman—she is filled with delight. Madame was …”
“What?”
“Haunted. And this name, Evelyn, she did not use it. She called herself Agnes. It was the journalist and the police who used the name Evelyn. She registered as Agnes May, and since I had only taken her credit card number to hold the room …”
“Her mother’s name.”
“There you go, Monsieur. We long to be our fathers and they long to be their mothers.”
Two guests, a retired couple, arrived at the bottom of the stairs and walked hand in hand through the lobby. Kruse could tell, before they spoke, they were not French. “Hello,” they said, in American English, as they passed. They left the key with Monsieur Balon and he thanked them, also in English. When they were gone, Kruse continued.
“This kindly man who came to see her, did he represent anyone or anything?”
“He wore a well-cut suit. I remember thinking, as he walked in, he is much too wealthy to stay here. Not just the suit. He was a Four Seasons man. It was the way he walked and smelled, his tie, certainly the way he spoke. His accent was … do you know of the grandes écoles?”
“Yes.”
“Like that.”
“An aristocrat.”
“Yes, Monsieur. Like that. An air of noblesse oblige. Perhaps that is why I had assumed he was seeking her to offer help.”
“What did he want?”
“Like you: to see her. He asked several questions. Since he was not, like you, an immediate family member, I told him nothing.”
“Can I see her room?”
“The room where she stayed? It has long been cleaned since then, Monsieur, and another guest is in there.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“She wasn’t a talkative woman.” Monsieur Balon arranged some papers on his desk. “Perhaps I should be phoning the police instead of checking you in. They did say others would come looking for her.”
“And what did you tell them? These police?”
“Monsieur, please.”
Kruse pulled out his collection of photos: the passport shots of Evelyn and Lily and another of the three of them at Niagara Falls.
“I was there once,” said Monsieur Balon. “I took a ride in the boat, to get close to the falls. There was a wax museum as well. Tasteless, no?”
“Is there anything more you can tell me?”
“No.”
“Was the aristocrat alone?”
“All right, this is peculiar. A second man stood outside, smoking, Monsieur Kruse. I might not have noticed him at all but he had no nose.”
“No …”
“No nose, no nose. You see a lot of people with quirks, as an hotelier. This was the first time I had seen a man with no nose.”
“Young man? Old man?”
“I will call the police. Together you can sort this out.”
“Please, Monsieur Balon.”
“Thirties, maybe early forties. Your age. Both men were trim, like you. You look like a small team of football players, you three together.”
“No nose. And what did the aristocrat ask you, specifically?”
“When did she arrive and how long did she stay? Did anyone visit her? Did she make any calls?”
“And you didn’t answer.”
“No. Well, yes. I told the gentleman ‘I don’t know’ to all of them, to finish the conversation. He was charming but persistent.”
Kruse used the lobby telephone to call the journalist. She was out for lunch. The metro was not an option, with the strike, so Kruse asked if Monsieur Balon might call him a taxi.
“Taxi drivers are not on strike but I grant you they are difficult to find.” He tried to phone and shrugged. “You see? Nothing. A catastrophe. But please, take one of the hotel umbrellas. They’re much stronger in the wind.”
The newspaper headquarters was a sloping rectangle of glass tucked between typically Parisian apartment buildings: stone and stately if not as imposing as the beauties along Avenue de Breteuil, the route he had taken. Kruse arrived too early. The receptionist on the main floor chuckled a b
it cruelly at the idea that anyone in the newsroom would return from lunch before two. She handed him yesterday’s edition of the paper and he went for a coffee and an inferior croissant at a busy café on the corner.
His parents, Allan and Nettie Kruse, had left half their insurance policy to a centre for poor immigrants in Toronto. They were pure Mennonites, by blood and by heart, and carried a special feeling for refugees and poor newcomers. Stories around the dinner table were stories of settlement and flight, settlement and flight, as bad politics and swords and guns had chased their great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents all over Europe for centuries. Nearly all his clients in Toronto had been conservatives of some sort, from the old families Evelyn so admired to the newly rich who had trampled on friends and laws and now simply wanted to protect what they had earned—or had stolen—with a low tax regime. He had liked his clients, or most of them, and he had admired his daring wife; it wasn’t a normal woman’s mission, to transform conservative politics in a foreign country. But the Front National, at least the one he read about in the papers, sounded a lot like the sort of party that would have either repelled his ancestors at the border or discovered a religious or legal reason to chop off their heads.
A block away from the offices of Le Monde, there was an eighteenth-century hospital for sick children. At one in the afternoon a smoky dusk had fallen over the city. Commuters were out on their belching scooters and little cars honked peacefully at one another, but with the metro shut down it was a day for pedestrians. Even in the rain the city was a riot of finely dressed professionals, elegant grandmothers, and courageous dog walkers. It was never an amiable place but the Parisians did look up at him. In France, especially in Paris, eyes rested on his scars longer than at home, where the possibility of offending a stranger hovers like a weakly-chained dragon over Southern Ontario. Kruse walked around the children’s hospital after his coffee and croissant and settled on a park bench surrounded by hopeful, cooing pigeons. Now and then a mother and father would pass on the sidewalk, two umbrellas open, pushing their child in a wheelchair. One of the children, bald but for a few stray hairs, was so beautiful and so fragile Kruse could not look at her. Her tortured parents manufactured grins. He envied them. Nurses stepped out of taxis and walked through the hospital gates with determined sighs. There was an institute for children with blindness nearby, and they too were out for lunchtime strolls—arms linked or experimenting with a cane. Neighbourhood schools surrounded the hospital, an elementary and a lycée. The quarter was alive with laughing and crying children, exhausted parents, and tin-voiced adolescents and teenagers in the ripped jeans and flannel lumberjack shirts of Seattle.
Men in blue overalls had not yet picked up the shit from last evening’s dog walkers. In the entrance of a shuttered magazine shop, a man in layers of wet clothes lay sleeping on a pile of cardboard boxes. From Foxbar Road or from her dreary office overlooking a parking lot in the stark northern reaches of Toronto, Paris was, for Evelyn, art and wonder. She had never been to Paris but it was her definition of conservatism, the way we once lived and the way we ought to live again; children and parents and public institutions and food markets and bistros and architecture in harmony. In the Paris of her imagination she walked Lily to school in the morning and said hello to the baker and the butcher, bought a coffee and proceeded to the Sorbonne.
The first time he had come to Paris, in the early eighties, the sight of graffiti on the side of a hand-carved and flower-gilded building made him long to have been born in another time. He saw Evelyn now, somewhere in Paris, similarly afflicted. The imperfections in the most beautiful city in the world were, at least partly, a relief from the terrible theory every child in Canada learns as they come into adulthood: that their parents and ancestors, who had chosen to settle in this wild place, had made a mistake.
For twenty minutes he walked around the Necker hospital again and focused more carefully, as Evelyn would, on architectural details, on art in bistro windows, on the confident manner of men selling newspapers and chocolate bars.
One mother pushed her son or daughter in a stroller away from the elementary school and leaned down to fix the child’s jacket. The running shoes were as small as plums, lovingly tied with laces in an era of Velcro. The mother, a small, brown-haired woman dressed more for a cocktail party than an afternoon stroll, cooed and clucked and groaned in an almost sexual manner. Kruse allowed himself to think she was flaunting her good fortune. He went back early to Rue Falguière.
“I know I said it was impossible, Monsieur, but she has arrived. Before two!” The receptionist handed Kruse a badge and asked him to fill in his name and phone number, the company he represented. He had done this so many times, in the austere lobbies of Toronto and Montreal and New York, he wrote “MagaSecure” without thinking.
Kruse shared the elevator with two young women who had just applied perfume. The scents gave him a headache that passed when the door opened and he followed them out into the mostly deserted newsroom. Men and women were in offices, along the sloping front windows, but most of the desks were empty. The newsroom was a massive, open floor with interlocking cubicles. Every desk had a small Apple computer and a few had electric typewriters besides, holdovers of a dying era. Some of the beautiful women he had seen walking down Rue Falguière were here now, sitting at desks with newspapers, making notes, speaking clearly but quietly on the telephone. In the centre of the vastness was the only busy pod on the floor. Four men and two women sat writing or speaking on the telephone as police scanners bleeped in and bleeped out. Voices came and went, squelched away.
One of these women, who had perfected the art of intimidation, looked up as he passed. He asked if he might be directed toward a journalist: Annette Laferrière.
The woman frowned with her mouth but not with her eyes. With her eyes she was delighted. “Madame Laferrière is on this floor, but I don’t know if it’s correct to call her a journalist. Did someone tell you she was a journalist, Monsieur?”
“Not me. She told a man I know.”
“Oh she herself says she is a journalist. Splendid.” The woman stood up and flattened her skirt. Her legs were jarringly thin. She pointed across the newsroom to a cubicle against a grey wall. “That is Madame Laferrière, the great journalist.”
“Thank you.”
“No, no, Monsieur. Thank you.”
Her hair was a dark and curly cascade over the arm that held up her chin as she read. Her skin was the fortunate colour of a lightly roasted nut. She sat hunched over her desk, reading from a long page, with an orange pencil. He stood over her for a moment. There was a hint of her citrus perfume above her: grapefruit. It didn’t give him a headache.
“Madame Laferrière.”
She dropped the orange pencil, startled, and looked up. Kruse could feel people behind him, watching. His voice had been too loud. He had said the wrong thing to the thin woman. He leaned down now and whispered, “My name is Christopher Kruse. My wife is Evelyn.”
Her eyes opened like a child’s before a surprise birthday cake. She stood up out of her chair. It squeaked and spun away. “What are you … why?”
They shook hands and dealt quickly with pleasantries. Madame Laferrière said she was concerned he might have come here, all the way to Paris, to speak to her.
“The hotelier at the Champ de Mars gave me your name.”
She reached up and slid an errant black curl behind her ear. “It’s not yet two. The boardrooms will be open.”
She led him down the aisle, her colleagues watching, and spoke like a tour guide. She pointed out the political editor, the cultural editor, the international editor, and they walked into the boardroom. She closed the door. One wall was glass and looked out over gloomy Rue Falguière.
“You spoke to Evelyn.”
“Yes.”
“Did she come here, Madame Laferrière?”
“No. No, not at all. She phoned.”
“Why you?”
“I answered
the phone.”
“Where was she calling from?”
“A train station in the south. But she was coming here, to Paris, and she wanted to talk about the story. It was wrong, she said.”
“What was wrong?”
“She said the story was wrong. That’s all she said. To be honest, Monsieur Kruse, before I spoke to her I had not read the story. I couldn’t probe.”
“You made an appointment with her.”
“At the hotel, yes. She was using a different name at the hotel, she told me.”
“Agnes.”
“Agnes May.”
“And when you arrived to meet with her …”
“She was gone. Gone since the middle of the night, the hotelier said. Or at least very early in the morning.”
“Have you pursued the story since then, Madame?”
“Yes. Yes and no. I—”
The door opened abruptly, no knock, and startled her. A man in a suit, bald on top but long on the sides and in the back, a classy hobo, stood up military straight and huffed as though he had jogged there. His black shoes, recently shined, were the sort that give a man an extra inch.
“What are you doing, Annette?”
“Monsieur …”
“Who, I wonder, is on the copy desk?”
“Five minutes.”
“And this man?”
“A friend.”
“It is lovely to have friends but this isn’t a bistro. We need you on the copy desk. Speak to your friend on your own time, yes?”
Annette opened her mouth to respond but no sound came out.
Kruse would have been delighted to take a handful of the editor’s preposterous hair and slam his face into his knee. Behind him, the thin woman and a few others stood watching. Proud snitches.
“Unless you’re here because you have a story. Is that the case, Monsieur? You came with a story because Madame Laferrière represented herself as a reporter?”
“No.”
The editor tilted his head and smiled. Even saying the word non revealed his foreignness. “Ah, American?”
