by Todd Babiak
“You come back for the film fest.”
“No.”
“Julia Roberts wants us again.”
“It’s one year. With the private clients and …” Kruse had said all of this before. It hadn’t improved Tzvi’s mood then and wouldn’t now. It was ten thirty. “Let’s go for a walk. We’ll take you for lunch.”
“I’m not hungry.” Outside the window a man in several layers of grey clothing, muttering to himself, his hair soaked with sweat, or something like sweat, pushed a shopping cart full of bottles and cans. “Maybe I take a holiday.”
“Yes, visit us.”
“If I take a holiday, it will not be there. The Frogs sent two of my uncles to Auschwitz. You can have it.”
“This might not work. If we arrive and Evelyn isn’t any happier—”
“Stop.”
Tzvi had already tried to convince Kruse that running away to Europe would do absolutely nothing to improve his family life. When you stand close to “beauty and truth” you realize it’s just a bunch of old carved stone that some drunk fucker or gypsy has just pissed on. The stone is even older in his hometown, and Jerusalem is nobody’s idea of beauty and truth. If Evelyn did not want to be his wife anymore, Kruse ought to write her a big cheque and let her go. He could take care of Lily himself. Uncle Tzvi would help, damn it.
They didn’t have lunch together. Tzvi couldn’t say goodbye.
He had walked around the Necker hospital enough that he knew where he might lure the men in the Citroën. He faked obliviousness and walked up Rue Falguière, toward the hospital and—if he went far enough—his hotel.
The car dieselled to life behind him, once he was half a block up the street, past the caviar shop and the Korean restaurant. Kruse stopped at a window of a travel agency, pasted with photographs of winter escapes, of Egyptian and Moroccan resorts, of Martinique, and of the Canadian Rockies—”ski champagne powder.” On the corner, an asymmetrical intersection of four streets with an apartment complex driveway and a metro stop, Kruse took his time deciding where to go. The car rumbled and stank behind him. He chose a neighbourhood filled with shops, Rue de Vaugirard, and turned right at a peculiar street just wide enough for one car.
He rushed into a doorway. The Citroën screeched around the corner and over the interlocking bricks of the little street, Villa de l’Astrolabe. It passed him and Kruse stepped out. The car stopped and the passenger door opened. A large man, with a pillar of a torso, stepped out. He wore dirty jeans and a ripped vinyl jacket. A tattoo crept up to his puffy neck, the peak of it visible.
There was no one behind Kruse and none of the windows of Villa de l’Astrolabe were open. He removed his jacket to meet the big man. He was two hundred and fifty pounds at least, a brawler. The man, who carried time in prison about him, unzipped his own jacket and pulled a knife out of the inside pocket. He wasn’t a cop.
And he wasn’t French. The driver in the Citroën called out to the brawler sternly, in Russian.
Kruse said, in Russian, “You’re looking for Evelyn?”
The brawler turned to his left and drew snot into his throat and spat, as though he had just discovered something poisonous in his sinus.
Kruse was close now. Everything about the brawler was ugly but his eyes, which were a ghostly, translucent blue. Whole neighbourhoods in Toronto looked just like him: Soviets. In the movies and spy novels, in his childhood imagination, this was the villain, the unknowable enemy of love and democracy.
The Russian was a wreck of muscle and fat, but he held the knife out in front of him and twirled it. Kruse thought briefly of that old Michael Jackson video. Maybe Kruse was a sweetheart but the man before him was untrained, a simple prison goon. With a frustrated shout, the driver leaned across and opened the passenger door. He held a cellular phone to his ear. The brawler called back and the driver held the phone aloft. It was an order. An order! Before the Russian was fully in his seat, the driver accelerated away. Kruse made a note of the licence plate number and jogged back to the intersection.
In Canada he knew what to do with a licence plate number. He had friends in police services. In France he had no friends at all, now that the de Mussets were gone and Evelyn was lost. He did have a business card.
The lieutenant told him he was not permitted to search for a licence plate number. His wife was a fugitive. For all the gendarme knew, Kruse was helping her.
“I am helping her. I’m trying.”
“Describe the men.”
Kruse told him what had happened, what they looked like.
“What did they say to you?”
“Nothing.”
“What language?”
“Russian.”
“Can you imagine why they’re following you?”
“Yes.”
The lieutenant laughed. “So?”
“They’re looking for Evelyn.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“When are you coming back to Vaison?”
“Soon.”
“Come tomorrow. I have to discuss something with you.”
“Discuss it now, Monsieur Huard.”
There was a rather long silence, apart from the sound of heavy fingers on a keyboard. Then a sigh. “Will you come see me tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Your Russians were driving a Citroën?”
“That’s right.”
“A family in Aix-en-Provence reported it stolen three days ago.”
So far, the rain had not returned, so he walked to the national library on Rue de Richelieu, a secular hall with a cathedral roof, north of the Louvre and the Palais-Royal. A teacher’s strike had been in the news, a companion to the metro strike, and he passed a parade of them in Place de la Concorde, shouting and singing. He recalled something Jean-François had said: if they’re striking now, against François Mitterrand, just wait until someone who isn’t a communist is running the country. Most of the chairs were taken in the Salle Ovale, but he found a desk and dropped the books and medical journals he and the reference librarian had found. No one spoke in a full voice, but the Salle Ovale echoed with whispers, rustled pages, high heels on the floor, sighs, coughs. He was overwhelmed by a feeling that had tormented him since arriving at the hotel: someone was watching him, and it wasn’t the coolly flirtatious reference librarian who had guided him toward noselessness. There were over 150 Parisians at desks, reading books and magazines and comics, men alone and mothers with children, messy-haired students, and the elderly in bow ties and wool dresses.
No ugly Russians, no trim aristocrats in well-cut suits, no noseless men.
At his desk Kruse pushed aside thoughts of well-earned psychological imbalance, thoughts that had struck him on the night of Lily’s death—he could not endure this; he would go crazy with grief—and concentrated. The eyes on him were Evelyn’s. He would walk across the beautiful room, their last beautiful European room, and take her in his arms and forgive her and kiss her and lead her out of the library and into a taxi: Charles de Gaulle, s’il vous plaît.
There wasn’t much to learn, in the medical literature, about noselessness. Cancer, usually. He found cases of motorcycle accidents, but in these it’s usually more than a nose that has been lost. The photographs were hideous. For twenty minutes he pretended to search for more periodicals and watched the readers. Several walked out and several walked in, but none of them held his gaze. Tzvi had been a spy, though he didn’t look like a spy. Kruse knew he would be unfit for the secret service, with his scars and what Evelyn had called his hunting little eyes.
He oriented himself toward the entrance and exit. As quickly and as gently as he could manage, he stood up and slipped across the floor. No one looked up as he passed and, when he reached his position and scanned the room, he recognized no one.
“Excuse me, Monsieur?” The reference librarian, with her playful half-smile, held a small envelope. She slid it across the desk and her hand rested on it a moment. She wore a
wedding ring. “I was just about to bring this to you. Instead, you have come to me.”
On the front of the envelope, in luxurious calligraphy: “Christophe Kruse.”
“Who gave this to you?”
“A man.”
“Did he leave his name?”
“No. Perhaps it is inside, Monsieur.”
“What did he look like?”
The librarian had red hair and light freckles. She looked more Irish than French, but this was not her second language. She smiled and pointed. “I knew you’d ask, and after he left I realized I didn’t pay close attention. He wore a suit, no tie. White shirt. Handsome in a clean and soft sort of way. He had a nose, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Anything else?”
“Not a library man. I mean, not the sort we usually see. Neither are you, of course.”
Kruse thanked her for her help on the subject of lost noses, and for the envelope.
“I did find one last thing, Monsieur.” She handed him a code and told him where to hunt the stacks for a back issue of a glossy national magazine. “If it isn’t there, it may be on microfilm. I don’t know how long we keep them. Was anything else helpful?”
He decided to tell the truth.
“Check out this last one or don’t. Perhaps it’s the same as everything else. Good luck with your project.”
With the metro system down, he was not sure how long it would take to get back to the offices of Le Monde. He was more keen to open the letter than hunt through magazine stacks for another story about the unfortunate woman whose dog ate her face as she lay passed out drunk on the floor of her apartment in Lille. In the garden outside the library the benches were damp. He sat anyway, under naked branches surrounded by slick and fragrant shrubbery. A knotty statue of a man in spectacles, leaning heavily forward into the wind or, perhaps, literature, stared at Kruse. He opened the envelope and pulled out a card. The paper was bright and thick and smooth, expensive. Inside, it read, also in calligraphy, “Oubliez votre femme. Rentrez chez vous immédiatement.” Forget your wife. Go home now.
Under that, in English, written in regular blue pen: “You’ll be rewarded.”
He walked out of the garden and across the Île de la Cité, in front of what he had come to see as his daughter’s cathedral: Notre Dame. Five minutes could not pass without him thinking of her. First, the white Mercedes. Then something simple and wonderful, reading to her before bed or putting on her pyjamas or walking down some ugly wide Canadian sidewalk with her, holding her hand. Anything to hold her hand. Pushing her stroller through Queen’s Park in a thunderstorm. Sitting with her on a hill, overlooking a moat of phantoms, as she traces his scars. Run across the road when your instinct is to run across the road. Ignore Evelyn. Snatch Lily up and run. Go get her. Just go get her and none of this happens.
Old music played inside the cathedral. The violin and harpsichord of Handel, who believed, echoed out the open door and into the courtyard of tourists with cameras. He had read about believers who held photographs of lost children or lost lovers and looked at them as they jumped off bridges and skyscrapers, the Eiffel Tower. He would jump off the nearest bridge, Petit Pont, with gravel in his pockets. He watched everyone now, every Parisian and every tourist, and studied men in suits. Aristocrats. Noses. He would surrender to it, soon become another of the wandering loons unrescued by faith. The sky darkened, a cool wind howled across the Seine, and it began to rain again, to lash his face. He opened his umbrella and then closed it.
SIX
Rue Santeuil, Paris
KRUSE WAITED ON RUE FALGUIèRE FROM 5:00 TO 5:18, WHEN ANNETTE walked out the glass doors and came as close to jogging as any woman in Paris. In Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Boston he had followed bankers and lawyers, convicts, politicians, adulterous husbands and wives, mistresses, total mysteries. He had only been caught once, in the winter of 1986, by a clever woman who lured him through spooky Bryant Park and into the New York Public Library. He walked past the security man at the door and there she was, standing before him in the great hall with tears in her eyes. Kruse allowed her to slap him with the back of her left hand. The woman was rich, the wife of a less rich but suspicious man, and her elaborate diamond ring tore into his cheek.
Annette Lafferrière arrived at an école maternelle, near Luxembourg Gardens. She looked at her watch as she entered the courtyard. There was a small playground in the middle and around it some colourful wooden tricycles and bicycles and cruisers, soccer balls, potted palm trees. A sign on the courtyard’s tall metal door advertised the presence of scarlet fever with a round drawing of a sad face. Annette emerged holding the hand of a little girl in a blue winter coat and scarf, with the same black ringlets and slightly darker skin. When Evelyn had been in the midst of sewing Lily’s fairy costume for Halloween, drinking wine and eating hard chèvre from a bowl next to the sewing machine she had borrowed from Pascale, she discovered her own French métier and the source of their pretend fortune: she would design children’s clothing, jackets like the one this little girl wore, clothes that belonged in the forties and fifties instead of the vulgar nineties. He could hear Tzvi’s voice: not a kitten, but close enough.
Mother and daughter walked through the wet leaves of Luxembourg Gardens in the early dark. Halfway through the park the rain stopped. The little girl wiped the rain from a swing and asked Annette for a push. There were times back home, agonizing to remember, when Lily had asked for a push and he said no: he was sitting, he was thinking, he was reading, he was eating a banana. Kruse had been here in Luxembourg Gardens on a hot day with the profane son of the pharmacy magnate, when the generous pool in the centre of the park was alive with little rented boats and children running along the side with sticks to find and push them and scream. Today it was too cold and too windy and too dark for a rented boat; the shack was closed up. The little girl ran all the way around the pool, shimmering with yellow light from the palace, and Annette checked her watch again.
It was another ten minutes up the slowly rising hill to the Panthéon. Men and women in business clothes gathered in cafés and bistros for an after-work apéritif. Paris is a northern city, like London, darker than Toronto at this hour and moodier in the mist and the rain. On the other side of the Panthéon, almost at Jardin des Plantes, Annette and the girl turned onto what was surely the ugliest street in this corner of the fifth arrondissement, Rue Santeuil, across from a humanities building of the Sorbonne. Ugly for Paris was somewhere between normal and vaguely attractive, by North American standards. The atypical apartment building had been built for students and belonged, poetically, to the suburbs of Paris more than Paris itself—the things one lazy mayor can do. Laundry and flags from former colonies—including a Maple Leaf—hung over balconies. Across the street, in the courtyard of the squat university building, some students in bog jackets sat on a patch of wet grass, one of them with a guitar. They sang a Bob Marley song.
Annette found her keys in her purse, finally, and opened the door for the little girl. He waited forty minutes under the awning of an entrance to the Sorbonne. The rain had come again and the student troubadours had fled indoors. She walked out at 6:45 in a dark blue dress with a crisp tan overcoat, high heels. Her hair was dry now and arranged. Annette carried a handsome polka-dot umbrella with a wooden handle but no daughter. Kruse followed her back up the hill to Rue Mouffetard, close enough that he caught the outer cloud of her citrus perfume. She stopped at a pharmacy window, before the plaza, and deftly tucked the umbrella under her arm. The not-a-journalist reapplied her lipstick and licked her finger, dabbed at her right eye, and then just stared at herself and breathed, whispered something into the glass.
A masseuse had set up a mini-clinic under a big umbrella next to the fountain at Place de la Contrescarpe. Under the umbrella was a special chair and a hand-painted sign: “Free Massages with donation.” The old lanterns around the fountain had popped on. In the springtime, trees that bordered the fountain would blossom pi
nk. Tonight the branches were bare and wet. Their shadows hung over the neglected masseuse, who was making eye contact with passing pedestrians like a lonely hound.
Café Delmas was designed as a library, with soft light and books on the shelves, leather chairs and an antelope’s head on the wall. Annette went immediately into the washroom, so Kruse found a table for them. His seat backed into the corner, faced the room. Some of what he had heard, from travellers and Bugs Bunny cartoons and American comedies starring Chevy Chase, had turned out to be correct: the French are not afraid to smell the way men and women smell at six or seven o’clock at night, after a day of work. They are a musky people.
He stood up when she emerged and didn’t quite know whether to offer his hand or kiss her cheek. Neither perhaps. Neither. Before she sat down she began apologizing for what had happened in the newsroom, her voice shaky and her words so jumbled together he had to focus completely to understand.
“When Madame Kruse phoned it was early in the evening and I was on the late shift, you see, and she asked for a journalist and I am a journalist—I am, truly—so I believe I did nothing wrong, nothing unethical. The reporter who had written the story, he was not in the office. He rarely is. I might have transferred her, of course, but who was in at that hour? Interns. Contractors. I am a journalist, as I said. It was very kind of you, this afternoon, to lie for me. But please understand I know how to do this, what I am doing.”
“What would you like to drink, Madame Laferrière?”
“If you would prefer a journalist with a byline in Le Monde, a byline already I should say, it is only natural and correct. I will find someone for you, one of the grands reporters.”
Kruse looked up and gestured the waiter to their table. Annette breathed, somewhat regularly, and ordered a glass of white wine. The courtly waiter turned and leaned down. “And for your husband?”
