Come, Barbarians

by Todd Babiak

  “Yes.”

  Annette had gathered her papers. The editor stepped back so she could pass with short but quick, hectored steps through the door and into the newsroom. He remained close enough, with his haughty smirk, that as he passed, Kruse could smell his coconut shampoo. At Annette’s desk he apologized, not for the editor’s behaviour so much as for the inherent flaws in his gender.

  There was a thin layer of moisture in her eyes and still she could not speak. She sat down in front of her computer with defiantly good posture. Her hands trembled. A young man in jeans and a T-shirt dropped some paper in a basket on her desk, his story, and walked away without a word.

  Across the newsroom, the editor continued to watch Annette and him. Kruse picked up one of her notebooks and opened it to a blank page. He whispered as he wrote his name: “She is in trouble, and not only police trouble. Did she say anything that might help me find her?”

  “I can meet you at the end of the day, Monsieur.”

  Annette wrote an address on the back of her business card. Under it, “19h.”

  It was no longer raining but the smell of it lingered as he walked out of the lobby and onto Rue Falguière. Cars lined the street and only one of them had passengers sitting in it, a window half-cracked as they smoked. Two large and homely men in a Citroën. There was a tabac and newspaper stand two doors away.

  A shiny telephone booth had come with the glassy redevelopment of the newspaper office. Kruse inserted his calling card and dialed Tzvi. Immediately next to the phone was a frame set into the wall, with the words “À la une aujourd’hui.” Yesterday’s Le Monde was inside. Kruse had read his own name in it. Tzvi answered breathlessly on the fifth ring, and the moment he heard Kruse’s voice, for the first time in over six months, he launched a barrage of insults and indecencies—one of his talents.

  Tzvi’s official role in his life was business partner. It had not begun that way.

  Neither Kruse nor Evelyn had been blessed with a normal family. Her father, Tom, had died shortly after their wedding, of lung cancer; he had worked in an asbestos plant in Quebec in the summers between university semesters. After a brief period of mourning, Evelyn’s mother, Agnes May, dumped all of her old friends and clothes, lost fifty pounds, and took up marathon running.

  Mother-daughter relations had soured since the marriage, especially since Tom May’s death, and Kruse—the cause of this discord—had been an unlikely negotiator and peacekeeper. It fit. He was a Mennonite. His people had long been slaughtered, first for their faith and then for their stubborn refusal to slaughter anyone else. One morning in 1977, Allan and Nettie Kruse were on their way to volunteer at a leper hospital funded by the Mennonite Church when their small airplane crashed in fog that had gathered in the valley of the Paraguay River. Losing his parents at seventeen made Kruse the sort of man who declares “I love you” to his daughter three to nine times a day, just in case. He generally defended Agnes, as her attacks were born out of loneliness and sorrow and a variety of middle-aged mental illnesses that ran in the May family as Anabaptism and perhaps palate abnormalities ran in his.

  Kruse was not wounded by Agnes and Evelyn’s insinuation that Lily’s imperfect face was his doing; he understood it to be spiritually, if not genetically, true.

  On a Wednesday evening when he was fourteen, between Christmas and New Year’s, Kruse tripped a larger, older boy named Matt Gibenus in the middle of a street hockey game. The boy skinned his elbows on the pavement. He roared and stood up and threw Kruse to the ground and, in front of several boys and girls—including one he fancied—jumped on him. Matt Gibenus trapped his wrists under his plump knees and slowly removed his gloves as Kruse squirmed and bucked, begged and cried. The kids around them called out, some for blood and others for mercy. Matt Gibenus leaned over him and spat in his face and rubbed it in with his thumb. He ordered Kruse to say things and Kruse said them. It wasn’t the pain or the taste in the back of his throat when his nose exploded. It was the feeling of being entirely under someone else’s control, the weakness and helplessness and humiliation. He knew what his parents would have said: submit.

  Matt Gibenus had long dirty-blond hair. He wore a Black Sabbath shirt and cussed in the hallway. He hung around the automotive shop. Every day and every night Kruse thought about Matt Gibenus and others like him, out there ready to hold him down and spit on him, make him say things about his mother. The stories Allan and Nettie told at the kitchen table were stories of unfairness, of elevating moral victories above physical defeat and destruction. Kruse grew to despise these stories. He studied self-defence schools in the Yellow Pages the way other boys sneaked porn magazines and found one far from his neighbourhood. It was not a popular sport like karate or tae kwon do or judo.

  Krav Maga was the hand-to-hand combat system of the Israeli army. He walked into the studio and felt it was more home than home. The white and black walls, the smell of bamboo, the punching bags and gloves and mats, rubber knives and pellet guns answered a question he had been carrying around ever since the evening Matt Gibenus broke his nose.

  The bald man in a tight military T-shirt told Kruse to come back when he was eighteen. He did not like children and he could not teach children. But Kruse would not leave. He watched the bald man train for ten minutes, kicking and punching and sneaking about, sweating, stalking himself in the mirror.

  “Go,” said the bald man, when he stopped.

  “No.”

  “I told you …”

  “But I’m not a child.”

  “No?” The bald man bent over, panted. “All right. Come over here.”

  Kruse remembered he was a child. This compact man terrified him. He was unlike any schoolteacher or soccer or hockey coach he had ever encountered.

  “Prepare yourself,” said the bald man.

  Kruse was in the middle of asking for a clarification—”Pardon?”—when the man slapped him in the face. A whip cracked inside his head. His eyes went hot and burst with tears. He backed away.

  “Prepare yourself.”

  “Wait, wait. How?”

  The man moved in quickly and swept Kruse’s feet out from under him. He preferred this to the slap in the face, but he hadn’t expected it and he landed on his right elbow.

  “Prepare yourself.”

  Kruse stood up, lifted his hands. Far from his parents, at a friend’s birthday party, he had seen Enter the Dragon. He did what he remembered Bruce Lee doing. This time, the bald man stepped forward and kicked him in the stomach. Kruse fell and gasped and rolled about until the air came back.

  It took some time to recover, for the panic to subside. All he wanted now was to admit his childishness, the stupid dominion of Matt Gibenus, and return to his warm bedroom. But he stood again and lifted his hands, this time aware the bald man could attack his legs, his abdomen, or his face. Somehow he had to protect all three.

  “Prepare yourself.”

  This time, instead of waiting for the next attack, Kruse stepped in with a swing. He had seen boxing on television but he had not really paid attention: he led with a wild roundhouse punch. The bald man dodged it. Kruse chased him in a semicircle, kicking and swinging. Eventually, the bald man stopped hopping away and Kruse slammed into him, this rock of an ageless, happy man. He went for a clinch, a wrestling takedown. In gym class, wrestling was his best sport.

  He could not budge him. With a whoosh the man tossed Kruse to the bright wood floor.

  “All right, boy,” he said, in his thick accent. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “You have money, for classes?”

  “No.”

  “Your parents?”

  “No.”

  The bald man, Tzvi Meisels, leaned over and slapped him again, this time on the other cheek.

  Allan and Nettie Kruse were outraged he would seek out and fold violence into his life, and they warned him of the consequences for his soul and for his humanity. When he argued that in learning to fig
ht he would avoid fights—rhetorical advice Tzvi had given him—they pointed out the flawed logic of deterrence, which hadn’t done much to prevent the proxy wars in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America. They could go on and they did, nightly, passive-aggressively, academically, the default mode of frustrated Mennonites. They brought ministers and theologians home for dinner, for philosophical and scriptural backup. Eventually, disappointed and dishonoured, they stopped talking to him about anything more substantive than dinner. They would wait until he figured this out for himself and returned to them and to God.

  Three years later, after the crash, Kruse mourned his parents with the self-possession and formality they would have expected. Then he set about looking for Matt Gibenus, who had long since dropped out of high school. Kruse found him in Markham, sixty pounds heavier, working as an autobody mechanic.

  In school Kruse had been careful around Matt Gibenus. His strategy was to seem accepting of fate, invisible, to believe as his parents believed. He had studied the ritual movements in and around the automotive shop in Markham, and waited until the other mechanics were on a lunch break. Matt Gibenus, as the lowest-ranking employee, was the last to eat.

  The mechanic recognized him, or seemed to recognize him. Kruse had grown. He had trained two hours a day, most weeknights, and all day Sunday; he had imagined this moment, something like it, hundreds of times. Matt Gibenus squinted and asked how they knew each other, when Kruse stepped closer.

  School, Kruse told him. They were old friends.

  In the seventies, security cameras were scarce. Kruse had twenty minutes before the owner or either of the two other mechanics returned to the shop. He introduced himself and avoided a handshake, invited Matt Gibenus to take the first punch.

  “I don’t fight anymore.”

  “Not after today.”

  “I’m on probation for it. I can’t.”

  Kruse reached up and flicked him in the forehead. “Now you can. I started it.”

  At first, he made it seem like Matt could win. Kruse prolonged the fight, ducking and parrying around the oil pans and the shop vacuum. Matt Gibenus swore and spit, came into his old self, called him a fuckin’ pussy for wheeling about the blue Pontiac. Kruse saved his first strike the way he saved and coveted a chocolate-covered almond. A quick finger jab to the eyes. Then he began a slow but severe takedown.

  The damage, the real damage, was an accident: Matt Gibenus, wounded and disoriented, stepped into an oil pan and slipped. He fell and cracked his head on the smooth concrete floor, convulsed, and lay still. For three months the man would be in a minimally conscious state. It was on the news, a robbery and vicious assault by a cowardly gang of youths, all for less than three hundred dollars in the till. Kruse donated the money to his parents’ preferred charity, the centre for new immigrants. Matt’s wife quickly divorced him and remarried.

  Kruse did not follow his parents into the Mennonite Church or any other. Yet thirteen years later he knew his daughter was born with a cleft palate because of what he had done that afternoon in Markham.

  The man who had been his father nearly as long as his father, Tzvi, was the only one who knew what he had done to Matt Gibenus.

  “I’m coming to help.”

  “Tzvi, there’s nothing to help with. I’m going to find her and bring her home.”

  “The cops have your passport?”

  “Until she’s proven innocent.”

  “She doesn’t sound innocent. I warned you about this, didn’t I? And who is this bastard without a nose?”

  “A detective of some sort, maybe.”

  “The men she saw drinking with … what was his name?”

  “Jean-François.”

  “Jean-François, the night he killed Lily. Do you know what these men look like? Who they were?”

  “No.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Not before I find Evelyn.”

  “Before you find Evelyn! You have no idea what you’re doing, Chris. You have no experience.”

  “Twenty years of—”

  “Men like these, women, they’re different. They’re from hell. I didn’t train you for this.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “You’re a goddamn sweetheart.”

  “I’m not a sweetheart.”

  “All they have to do is mistreat a kitten and you will surrender. It’s a catastrophe.”

  “Tzvi.”

  “Fuck it, I’m coming.”

  “There’s a car across the street. A couple of men in it, watching me.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Pretending not to watch me.”

  “Cops.”

  “Detectives maybe. They both have noses.”

  Tzvi gave Kruse advice and insisted he write down every word. Kruse pretended to write. The line went silent, so silent Kruse thought they had been cut off. He was about to hang up when Tzvi’s voice rose again. “Lily,” he said. “Our girl.”

  Kruse and Tzvi acted as bodyguards, analyzed and disrupted threats, and designed security arrangements for presidents and CEOs, paranoid billionaires, foreign celebrities, a few despots, and semi-retired gangsters. Clients hired MagaSecure to minimize the possibility of violence but it happened often enough; Kruse’s opponents tended to be the recently fired, the cuckolded, the mentally ill, the drunk and drugged. Often they were convinced they had nothing to lose and carried weapons. Scars were inevitable. Kruse would come home with wounds on his hands and arms and face. He would call from the emergency room. While his work was dangerous, his most potent challenges came from his sparring partners: Tzvi and a small but active community of current and former Mossad agents living in the Greater Golden Horseshoe.

  In the fall of 1988 Kruse showed up on the nightly news for preventing a physical assault on the incumbent prime minister during the federal election campaign. He and Tzvi had been on retainer, to guide and train a secondary detail of secret service agents. Neither the party nor the government had paid them to secure the rally in front of the gloomy county courthouse in Brantford, but the moment he and Tzvi arrived they understood the people who had been paid had done an abominable job. It was windy and raining and far too crowded. No one had been posted on top of the courthouse. Kruse and Tzvi abandoned their agents-in-training and escorted the prime minister and his wife through the crowd. Two large men who turned out to be drunken opponents of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States rushed the prime minister. Kruse was closest. In front of several television cameras, he took both attackers to the ground expertly and painfully. This had been spectacular for business.

  Evelyn did not like it. She was eight months into her pregnancy. Until now the men and women who made decisions about tenure had been unaware of her husband’s vocation. If they were invited to an event and he had a bruise on his cheek or a split lip or a swollen eye, Evelyn would either cancel or go alone, making an excuse for him. Now it was impossible to hide him, to lie about him. Black eyes did not go well with art openings, book launches, conferences in Chicago. Kruse didn’t only work with his hands: he hurt people for a living, and after the television clip she could no longer explain it away as a boutique security service, an executive strategy company, white collar work. Kruse didn’t see how it mattered but Evelyn did. This is how academic Toronto worked, how academic everywhere worked, and it mattered even more now as they were on the verge of becoming parents. They had met when she was young and not concerned about such matters, but advancement in the academic world had as much to do with dinner party conversations as publications.

  Evelyn’s interpretation of MagaSecure was, Tzvi assured him, emotional nonsense. It would fade after the pregnancy. Only it didn’t fade. Lily’s medical troubles didn’t consume Evelyn the way they consumed him: her number one worry remained tenure, which was linked to an anxiety she never expressed aloud but one he felt so acutely it ached: she had married the wrong man.

  Her revelation about the unearn
ed sabbatical in France, to save their marriage and change their lives, had come at an imperfect time. When MagaSecure reached a point where it ran itself, with trained employees and a process that no longer needed him, it would make sense to take a year and travel the world. He lay in bed awake, debating with himself, as Evelyn mumbled in her sleep and kicked through her dreams. The winning argument was that if they did not try this soon, now, they would be in court within a year.

  If twelve months away from MagaSecure and the house on Foxbar Road could save his family, it was worth any cost. He would swim to Europe with them on his back.

  According to the pictures in The Most Beautiful Detours in France, which was published with a series of old poems, the most severe contrast to what Evelyn had come to see as North American ugliness was in the South of France. And of the Western European languages, French was the only one they could speak. If Lily wanted to be the prime minister one day, she would have to speak it properly.

  Two days before the plane departed for Marseille, Kruse and Lily visited MagaSecure to say goodbye. Tzvi wore a suit for the occasion and stood in the middle of the office, on the shiny hardwood floor, hands behind his back, chest out, chin up, his usual stance—only he avoided eye contact.

  Tzvi presented Lily with a stuffed pink chick. She hugged his legs and mumbled a nearly imperceptible thank you.

  “I don’t think he heard you,” said Kruse.

  Tzvi messed her hair. “Go play.”

  A quarter of the original studio remained, in the adjacent room, for clients who wanted to pay several thousand dollars for private lessons. Lily sprinted to the wooden man, a training tool they had purchased at a kung fu school’s bankruptcy auction. She kicked and elbowed the man, shrieking with each strike, as they had taught her.

  Tzvi had spent ten years fighting Arabs and another seven teaching close quarters combat and covert techniques to elite soldiers in the Israeli army; it had ruined him for subtlety. The office was decorated with his awards, citations for bravery, and signed photographs: Tzvi with Yitzhak Rabin, with Barbra Streisand, Tzvi and Kruse with Oprah Winfrey. Kruse had been Tzvi’s student and partner and friend for almost twenty years; he had spent much more time with him than either of his parents. Tzvi had given him one of the scars and had fractured his cheekbone and had shot him four times, about the chest and shoulder, with a pellet gun.