by Todd Babiak
When the tourists were gone, the lieutenant’s smile disappeared. He whispered, “Someone is hunting your wife.”
“Yes.”
“Who, Monsieur Kruse?” The lieutenant seemed to like saying his name: Kruse-uh.
“I don’t know yet. The Front National?”
“Anything more from your Russians?”
Kruse told him about his encounter in Jardin des Plantes.
“You may be inventing this.”
“I may be.”
“So what, you think they work for the Front National?”
“Maybe they work for you.”
“We can’t pay ourselves, let alone mercenaries. Russians. I don’t understand. Your wife knew Russians?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Why break into the house, Monsieur Huard?”
He fussed with his moustache. “Maybe you messed up your own place, to create a mystery, to throw me off your wife’s trail.”
“And where are you, precisely, on the trail?”
The lieutenant looked out over the ruins. He took in two deep breaths, like a yogi, and sighed them out. “I’ve been told to back off.”
“To back off what?”
“Your wife. The murders.”
“Someone else is handling the case?”
“No one from our bureau. No one from Avignon or Orange or Arles.”
“What does that mean, Monsieur Huard?”
He pulled out a box of Gitanes and offered one to Kruse, who didn’t have to decline. “I’m just offering to be polite. I know the food you buy, the drinks you order, the paths you walk. Where you run up the hill, to the château, and where you do your ridiculous sit-ups and push-ups.” He lit a cigarette and pulled a speck of tobacco from his mouth.
“Who told you to back off?”
“My captain. But someone told him, the squadron leader I suppose. Maybe the colonel told him. And who told the colonel? One of the generals? Who told the general? Why?”
Together they leaned over the black fence.
“It’s older than the revolution, the Gendarmerie nationale. Before the revolution they called it the marshalcy. You know why it wasn’t disbanded? Even Napoleon just renamed it. You might say it’s because we’ve always been devoted to law and order. That’s what they tell you in school. The real reason is we’re fickle. We’re agnostic. We’re natural collaborators. We follow the leader. If you tell us to do something, and you’re more powerful than we are, we’ll do it. It doesn’t matter why, not really. I can ask why all I like but it’s insubordination to ask it of anyone but myself. Or perhaps you.”
“What do we do?”
“There is no ‘we,’ Monsieur Kruse.”
“Help me, Monsieur Huard.”
“I’m not married. I was married but I was no good at it. No kids. Most of my old friends are either dead or moved on, even the ones who still live around here. I’m nearly sixty. This is all I have.”
The gendarme remained at the fence for a long time, without another word. Then he patted Kruse on the back, turned right, and limped slowly up the cobbled street toward the gendarmerie. Kruse watched him go and then he went back inside to face the mess of the horse stable alone.
In Paris his clothes had been rained on and slashed with mud. He emptied his pockets upstairs, in front of the mirror of their foreign bedroom, and found the looping, handwritten call number for a magazine article about noselessness.
The library in Vaison-la-Romaine was in a complex called La Ferme des Arts, next to the swimming pool, on a street named after a poet. He had been here at least once a week with Lily, reading Astérix books. Evelyn found them too violent and disapproved, so it was a bit of father-daughter intrigue. The library had a sunny outdoor courtyard; they would stack pillows on the stone bench and cuddle.
“À l’attaque!” the Gauls scream.
“À l’attaque!” Lily screams, and looks around to see if anyone apart from Papa heard, and nuzzles into him.
It was a small library but it did keep several years’ worth of popular periodicals. The librarian was dressed for a night at the symphony, in a long red dress and white scarf, though it was not yet eleven in the morning. She led him to the call number. The correct edition of Le Figaro magazine, from February 1992, was near the bottom of the pile.
“You’re the Canadian. The man who …”
“Just a curious man.”
She tilted her head. “Well. I am pleased they are still making curious men.” She wished him luck and left him to his magazine.
There was no one else in the library. He sat at a small table and leafed slowly through Le Figaro. It was a small, blurry photograph near the end of the magazine, in a section of miscellaneous feature news events. A funeral in Marseille. Two men were at the front of an entourage, carrying the casket of Paul Mariani, who had died of a heart attack in a seafood restaurant on the port. Kruse recognized the man on the left: Joseph Mariani. He was the athlete who had been watching him, in the navy blue suit, from the bleachers of the ancient arena in Orange. On the other side of the casket was a noseless man named Lucien Mariani.
He nearly toppled a stack of newspapers as he ran to the startled librarian’s desk. “Who are these people?”
The librarian looked down, up at Kruse again, and down again. “What do you mean, Monsieur?”
“The Mariani family. Who are they? It doesn’t really say. They’re famous enough to be in a magazine, evidently, but how? Why?”
“The Mariani family is the Mariani family.”
“And who are they?”
“Corsicans.”
“That’s it? Corsicans?”
The librarian looked around. There was no one else in the library. She whispered, “You honestly don’t know?”
She led him into the stacks and pulled a paperback book from the non-fiction section. It was called Le milieu: les parrains corses.
“Le milieu?”
“Read the book, Monsieur.”
It only took an hour with the book, as an entire chapter was devoted to la famille Mariani.
They were not like the mafia he grew up with. Le milieu, in the South of France, was a web of quiet and polite men. Where gangsters in Montreal and Toronto were ostentatious, like their cousins in New York and Chicago, like the movie versions of themselves, dating supermodels and showing up on the front covers of gossip magazines, the Corsican was invisible. He gained more from subtlety than from shouting about how many chicks he banged last night—one of the quirks of a semi-retired Mafioso who had hired Kruse and Tzvi in Montreal. The traditional French gangster was the man in the Mini-Casino supermarket at lunchtime, wearing a baby blue sweater tied over his white Lacoste shirt, buying a tub of yogurt and a bit of dried sausage.
There was an epilogue at the end of the book, about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A British documentary had demonstrated that the Guérini and Mariani crime families, originally from Corsica and now operating in Paris and Marseille, had been approached about the contract to kill the American president in the early sixties. At that time, the head of the family was Paul Mariani, the father of the noseless one and the aristocrat. Kruse made two photocopies of the page and ran to Cours de Taulignan. The woman in uniform behind the counter at the gendarmerie said Lieutenant Huard had gone to Avignon. Kruse circled the photograph and in the margin he wrote, “Two of the men looking for Evelyn.” He kindly asked the woman for an envelope, put the page inside, sealed it carefully, and wrote, “Huard: confidential” on the front.
At the post office he sent the other photocopy to Annette at Le Monde.
He bought a new lock system for the horse stable at the hardware store on Place Montfort, and installed it. He picked up everything that had been thrown to the floor, folded the clothes, and trashed the paper. He mopped the floor with a touch of chlorine and remembered trips to the Wallace Emerson Centre with Lily, who was nervous in crowded swimming pools, of the strange echo of eighty kids swimming in bleach-water. If Evelyn were to com
e back he wanted her to feel welcome in the horse stable, to appreciate what was left of its beauty. At six he phoned the gendarmerie and asked for Huard: he was back but too busy to speak, unless it was an emergency.
A man without a nose stood over him, breathing through his mouth. He wore a dark suit and a dark tie.
“Is he awake?” whispered a second man, in shadow.
The noseless man did not respond. Without looking at a clock, Kruse guessed it was midnight. He interrupted his body’s natural response—panic. He relaxed his breathing and his thoughts. He was at work again and it came with a rush of pleasure. It would take ten to thirteen seconds to subdue the noseless man, Lucien Mariani, in absolute silence. But he could not hurt the man, even this man, unless it was in self-defence. There was another, a man in shadow.
“I have a gun, Christopher.”
In the instant between this warning and the noseless man’s first movement, there was only one response: blind him and dart out of the room, forcing the other to hunt him in a house he knew well. There was something in the noseless man’s hand, a baton of some sort, and a wire. Kruse moved but it was too late. It came with a hum and a blast of light, sizzling on his chest. Every muscle in him flexed and locked, and the headache threatened to explode. He had been electrocuted before, by Tzvi. This lasted longer. He was hot and then cold, an instant fever. It had immobilized him then and it immobilized him now. The noseless man, grunting through his open mouth, hot mouth, turned him over and bound his wrists. He yanked him over, onto his back again, and turned on the bedside lamp.
A man in a stylishly cut black suit and pressed white dress shirt, with no tie, sat in a dining room chair in the corner of the bedroom. Joseph Mariani opened and closed his eyes slowly. If he said anything, in the first while, Kruse did not hear it. He drifted out of and back into consciousness, and the man’s echoing voice solidified.
“Good morning, Christopher.”
It was not midnight. It was shortly after five in the morning. Kruse’s first thought was of a priest or, given the accent, an Anglican minister from Oxfordshire. It took a moment to realize the priest had spoken English. His noseless brother Lucien backed up and stood against the wall between the windows. He held a cattle prod or something like it, a police baton with two metal tips at the end. The baton was attached by wires to a small battery pack Lucien carried over his shoulder like a purse. They would have killed him if they had wanted to kill him. A Glock pistol rested on the priest’s lap. He introduced himself and his brother.
“Are your muscles settling? I do apologize for Lucien and his toys. My preference was to knock on the door at eight in the morning, hat in hand.”
Kruse watched them and briefly despised himself for pausing when every instinct had said attack. À l’attaque. His wrists were well bound. Lucien took his wallet from the bedside table and handed it to Joseph. It looked like Joseph took something out of it, but Kruse was having trouble focusing. He thought of the gladiolas outside the windows; when had he last watered them? A week ago? Two weeks? How long ago had Lily died? The aftershocks wore off with a throb of nausea.
“We won’t bind your feet, because neither of us wants to carry you. You’re a big fellow. Strong!” Joseph lifted his gun as if it were a dirty dishrag. “But if you kick us, or try to run, I will shoot you—or Lucien will. And not with an electric stick.”
He had fallen asleep in his clothes, reading about le milieu. Joseph crossed the room and picked the book up.
“I like this story. It made me blush. Do you know why we’re here, Christopher?”
“No.”
“But you do know who we are. You’ve been doing some research, you scamp, sending letters.” Joseph looked away from Kruse and smirked at his brother. In French he said, quickly, “Look, you both have scars.”
Lucien looked down.
“Do you have plans today, by chance?” Joseph stood up off the chair and buttoned his jacket. “We were hoping to show you around our hometown this morning.”
“I had booked off some time to throw up.”
“A side effect of the electricity. You’re coming either way, Christopher. My hope is you’ll come willingly and happily, as we mean you no harm. On the contrary. We’re friends and allies, as you’ll see.”
“Marseille?”
Lucien walked over and pulled him off the bed and onto the floor, by his bound hands. Kruse landed on his elbows, a fresh riot of pain. Now Lucien pulled him up to his feet the same way. The bedroom tilted and spun. He slammed into the wall and threw up on the floor beside the bed.
“Well, mission accomplished,” said Joseph.
EIGHT
Rue de la Cathédrale, Marseille
IN THE BACK SEAT OF A SILVER ALFA ROMEO SEDAN, KRUSE IMAGINED what Tzvi would have done in the apartment. He would have immediately disarmed and disabled Lucien without allowing any other considerations to intervene. He would have used him as a shield long enough to get the knife he had hidden in a Kleenex box under the bed. He would have turned on the light and thrown the knife at Joseph’s face before the assassin’s eyes adjusted. One shot would be fired, and it would miss. Six seconds, at the most.
Then he would kill one, with maximum cruelty, in front of the other. Finally he would torture the second man into explaining everything. Maybe he would let him live, to spread a message among his masters.
Or maybe not.
“What do you do for a living, Christopher?”
“Nothing, at the moment.”
“A man of leisure.”
“Something like that.”
“Did you have a métier before you won the lottery?”
“I taught school.”
“What subject?”
If Evelyn had wanted him to be anything, it was a scholar: they could have dreamy arguments about beauty at the dinner table. “Literature.”
“Oh how lucky for us, Lucien. An intellectual like Madame. I never received a detailed report, from our Slavic friends in Paris. How did you evade them?”
“I ran.”
“A professor and an athlete, Lucien. Your sort of fellow.”
Lucien did not look away from the road. The noseless man’s posture was unnaturally stiff and every breath was an announcement. He was, Kruse supposed, the only man in France to follow the speed limit. They passed through a toll station and Joseph turned and watched Kruse equably, benevolently. None of the three men in the car said a word to the toll agent, who did not even look down. Despite all his years of training and, on security jobs, several encounters with what Tzvi called the enemy, Kruse had never met genuine assassins.
Signs began to appear for Marseille.
“What was your specialty?”
“My specialty?”
“In literature, I mean. Doesn’t one always specialize?”
“Shakespeare. Keats. Plato.”
“Plato is literature?”
“I taught optional courses in philosophy.”
“Having been educated here in France, my exposure to Shakespeare and Keats has been limited. But Plato I like. What do you think of Plato, Lucien? Platon?”
Again, Lucien did not respond.
“He prefers novels, Lucien. Strange and dirty ones. My brother is something of an avant-gardiste. Do you read French, Christopher?”
“Well enough.”
Joseph nodded cordially, and faced the road again. Exits to Marseille were approaching. “You’re not nervous.”
“Should I be?”
“Yes, Christopher. I’m afraid so. I’m nervous myself, to be honest. It has been an unusual quinze jours. Since our father died, it’s rare I get involved in any actual work. But this is special. You’re special.”
Lucien navigated slowly through the bland suburban bits Kruse remembered from their drive in from the airport, the part of France that annoys the romantic looking for la France profonde. They entered an in-between area, old stone across the street from post-war brutalism. The allies would have bombed here. T
hey entered a hilly bit in the centre, close enough to the sea to sense the water somewhere on the other side of a roof. There was a plaza. It was still dark and the fountain was alive with pretty but mournful yellow floodlights. Two weeks ago, with Evelyn and Lily—to be a tourist again—he would have taken a photo of this spot.
Lucien parked in a tiny garage, and the brothers led Kruse down a thin, cobbled street, Rue de la Cathédrale. He had not seen the cathedral. Somewhere the sun was rising over old Marseille. A man approached in the distance and Lucien took a few steps ahead in his hard black shoes. The man stopped when he saw Lucien, turned around, and walked away. In the dimness, Kruse could see efforts had been made to reconstruct the lost nose. It was half the size of what it ought to have been, a difference of a couple of square centimetres. His brown eyes were bright, almost lovely.
Neither of them had wanted to accompany Kruse to the bathroom, after he threw up. He said he had other business to do. There was a box of blades in the drawer that held his razor. When neither of them were directly behind him, he worked on the rope.
Kruse knew what was coming, as they led him deeper into the medieval quarter. As a teenager he had attended Tzvi’s three-week summer survival camps and then, when he turned twenty-one, he began to lead them. There is a colour and a smell to it, Tzvi’s specialty. You are walking down a long corridor followed by men with guns, the inquisitors, the brownshirts, and you know that eventually the lights will go out and when they do, in the cold and the damp, you are going to die. It will gallop from the darkness and take you before you can pray. Tzvi had conceived of the summer camps as a profit-making venture but also as a public service; Kruse’s first year, when he lied to his parents about the camp being devoted to outdoor education, he was the only non-Jew.
