Come, Barbarians

by Todd Babiak

  The city of Ys is under Douarnenez Bay on the northwest coast of France. King Gradlon once ruled the great city; his subjects were a race of ambitious, contented people. Decadence found Ys as it finds all people of piety and sophistication. King Gradlon’s grown-up daughter, Dahut, was not what he had hoped despite her perfect childhood. At the centre of aristocratic orgies she bedded the bravest, most handsome men of Ys and, in the morning, killed them. There was not a man worthy of her.

  Until there was.

  A knight arrived in Ys, dressed in red, and seduced Dahut. In the morning she did not run a blade across his neck. Instead, Dahut fell to her knees in love.

  The king was delighted. Long had he fretted for his daughter and knew if only she could settle into a glorious marriage, as once he had done, her abominations would end. King Gradlon organized a ball in the knight’s honour.

  A storm came in off the Atlantic, normal enough here on the western tip of the known world, le finistère. The people of Ys had built a most impressive dike to keep the angry waters away. There was only one key to the dike and King Gradlon carried it on a necklace.

  In the middle of the storm the red knight asked Dahut to take the key from her father. In her love for the knight, and aroused by the suggestion, Dahut stole into her father’s chamber, fragrant with wine, and took the key from the chain around his neck. The red knight snatched the key away and, despite Dahut’s tearful warnings, unlocked the gate. In that moment Dahut knew the devil had captured her heart.

  King Gradlon awoke just as the Atlantic rose over the city of Ys. In his sorrow he mounted his magical horse, Morvarc’h, and swept his daughter up with him. A spirit appeared to King Gradlon as he fled the mountain of water and the final screams of his beloved subjects. The spirit, Saint Guénolé, convinced the king to sacrifice his daughter to secure his own safety; if he did, one day the waters would recede and Ys would again become the greatest city in the world. King Gradlon pushed his daughter from the horse and into the water. The red knight transformed her into a mermaid. He punished her with eternal life, and still she lives in the Douarnenez Bay, overturning boats full of men in her frustration and loneliness and fury.

  In Quimper the king arrived, alone and ruined, the last resident of Ys, and proclaimed himself a servant of God. Kruse parked the BMW in an underground lot near the river and read the tale on a plaque in the central plaza, Place Saint-Corentin. The city’s cathedral was, like most cathedrals, a dark and cool cavern of intimidating beauty. He wandered about the entrance and dipped his fingers in the water. A woman had done it before him and had touched her forehead. He touched his forehead.

  Back outside, the sun was preparing to set over the valley, and the people of Quimper, the Bretons, sat on the heated terraces eating early dinners and drinking wine and beer. It was cooler than Paris and after some time in a city of ten million the air tasted like iceberg lettuce. Some kids rode down the stairs with skateboards, botching their tricks. A carousel, with a Jules Verne theme, spun in the corner of the plaza. The city beyond was oriented around the confluence of three rivers. One of them, the Odet, criss-crossed with a series of pedestrian bridges, had guided his way from the parking lot. He had seen giant green fish flashing in the late-day sun. The old town, a village to the west of the plaza, was a series of leaning half-timbered houses atop what was now a series of middle-class chain stores and crêpe restaurants.

  The tourist information office was closed but a kiosk of pamphlets, protected from the rain with a Plexiglas lid, had been well stocked. Hotel Ys was up the cobblestone hill. He walked and then he ran. A few metres from the lobby of the five-storey hotel, close enough to see the lamps lit in the lobby, he felt and then heard the footsteps behind him on the shadowed street too narrow for cars. The hotel door opened and a young man stepped out in a dark grey suit.

  No exits.

  “Much better,” Kruse whispered, in Russian. He turned. The one he had kicked in Jardin des Plantes wore navy or black. He could not tell in the failing light. Business attire didn’t detract from the brawler’s ugliness. “How did you know?”

  Neither responded. The brawler opened his suit jacket wide enough to display a small gun. He pointed to the door of the Hotel Ys. The cozy lobby was designed with a nautical theme, a net on the wall and black-and-white photographs. Joseph Mariani stood up from the couch and buttoned his suit jacket.

  “It makes sense now.”

  “Good evening, Christopher.”

  Bile and rust formed in the back of his throat. There was no one behind the counter. “The trap seemed a bit sophisticated for the Russians.”

  “Shh. They’re right behind you and they have guns. Let’s go upstairs.”

  It was three flights, long enough. The secretary at Le Paquebot, the National Front headquarters, had phoned Antoine Fortier to tell him about Monsieur Gibenus, the British fellow-traveller. Tzvi had warned him: he could never be a spook. The criss-cross scar on his left cheek was too easy to describe and his eyes were too blue to forget.

  “So you’re working for them.”

  “For whom, Christopher?”

  “The political party.”

  Joseph sighed demonstrably, and halted at the top of the stairs. He held up one finger, to catch his breath. Then: “What lung capacity.”

  The Russians huffed behind him.

  “A professor! I should have known it when you said Plato. No one studies Plato as literature. It’s dead boring, theatre without drama, pedantic. You lied with such an air of authority. Keep walking. It’s just at the end of the hall.”

  “Where is Antoine Fortier?”

  “Around here somewhere, I imagine.” Joseph opened the door. “After you.”

  “No.”

  “They’re not as bad as my brother, the Russians, but they’re bad. Obedient, lacking in sympathy. Soviet prisons were no fun at all.”

  “You couldn’t find French thugs?”

  Joseph leaned against the door jamb. “You and your wife both? It’s a curious irony: immigrants to France turn anti-immigrant, join an extreme-right political party.”

  The brawler kicked him into the room. It was a corner suite, as large as the rooms he had rented for Annette and Anouk. There was another net on the wall in the narrow salon, leading into the bedroom. Joseph switched back to English. “One thing I can’t grasp, intellectually, and perhaps I’ll speak to Evelyn about it: How can you be anti-immigrant, therefore anti-competition, yet also support a meritocracy? It’s either one or the other, no? I hire Russian goons because French goons, my brother excepted, aren’t goony enough for a mission like this. They’re gossips. Exhibit one: Frédéric. My Frédéric! If I could hire Frenchmen, I would. You must understand that, the business you’re in.”

  “What business is that?”

  “Come on.”

  “I protect people.”

  “Yes, the protection business. We have that in common, Christopher.”

  “You’re in the fear business.”

  “Chicken or egg, yes, yes, yes. Either way, this is what my family has done for several generations, and it truly is the reason I wanted to see you here in Quimper, without Lucien. I do apologize for my lack of professionalism the other day, in Marseille. One can’t drink reality away.”

  The Russians had settled, one at a window and the other at the door. No one was posted behind him in the bedroom. Joseph sat on the sofa and crossed his legs. The ugly man he had kicked and disarmed in the garden held a pistol at his side, a Beretta 92—a police gun. He breathed eagerly and changed his weight from one foot to the other.

  “We can work together, Christopher, instead of competing. I don’t want to follow you around, threaten you, read your mind. We both want the same thing.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  There were two clean file folders on the coffee table in front of Joseph. The table’s chips and scratches had been sanded and varnished. The wallpaper was white with baby blue stripes, above white wainscotting. A dark woode
n floor. Where the headquarters of the Front National had been ignored this place was loved, adored. One file folder had a yellow sticker with the initials “C.K.,” the other, “E.M.K.” Joseph opened Evelyn’s and went through her history, from her family’s wealth to her athletic years, university, her father’s death, marriage to the co-owner of a martial arts school and security firm, a job at York, and the birth of a superficially disabled daughter.

  “What, in her file, suggests murderess, Christopher?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So let’s brainstorm. I love this word. For me, a latecomer to your wonderful language, it still conjures an image: thunder and lightning. Perhaps we can figure it out together.”

  “There’s nothing to figure out, Joseph.”

  “All right.” He clapped his hands. “What can we take, from what you know and what I know, to help us find her?”

  The windows in the suite were small but simple to unlatch and open.

  “Let’s say you’re correct, Christopher. She didn’t murder Jean-François and Pascale. Why would she run and hide instead of going to the police, what any normal woman would do? If we were to help her, as a team, where would we look? Apart from the hotel on Champ de Mars? Perhaps you learned something from Madame Laferrière.”

  “Where did you learn to speak English?”

  “Boarding school in England and the United States. Stop changing the subject.”

  “Madame Laferrière did say something I’d like to share.”

  “Brainstorm!”

  “Why would you and your brother, the heads of a large organization, involve yourselves in this?”

  Joseph opened the second folder, with “C.K.” on the front.

  “If I can answer that, Joseph, I can also figure out why you’re paying Russian mercenaries instead of using members of your own syndicate.”

  “I must say, when I first read your dossier I felt a bit faint. We were so careless with you in Marseille. You could have taken us at any time.”

  “Tell me what this is all about and I’ll let you go.”

  Joseph grinned without a hint of malevolence. “Christopher, believe me, knowing is awful. It’s the reason our dear, clever Evelyn is living in some dank hole, under a pseudonym. But I assure you: a beautiful woman with a strong American accent can’t remain invisible forever.” Joseph looked down at the dossier again, turned the page. “I have an offer for you. This is why I flew here to meet you, when I learned you were coming.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “It’s a complex offer. Behind door number one: a trip home. I will supply you with a first-class airplane ticket and a fair sum of money to just … tell us what you know about Evelyn and go. This is, if I were you, an attractive offer. You have a successful business in Toronto. You’re still young. And when we find Evelyn, if she co-operates and agrees to our terms, she will be close behind you: innocent, pardoned by the state if not the media.

  “Door number two: you continue to sneak about with a third-rate journalist and a truculent old gendarme. To my great regret, we eliminate you from the game. You and everyone you touch.”

  “That isn’t much of a choice.”

  “It isn’t, is it?”

  Kruse extended his hand for a shake and Joseph stood up from the couch. The Russian’s gun remained at his side. Joseph began to speak about relief. The moment he touched Joseph’s soft hand Kruse went for the Russian with the gun. He was out in two blows. His younger partner stepped forward and Kruse blinded him with a finger jab, knocked him out.

  “Jesus Christ.” Joseph looked at his watch. “Spectacular.”

  Kruse picked up the gun. “Let’s go.”

  “Where, Christopher?”

  The gendarmerie. Kruse would explain about the Russians, this gangster chasing his innocent wife. The Mariani family’s relationship, still confusing to him, with the Front National. They were the detectives. They could ask Antoine Fortier, staying right here in the Hotel Ys, and solve it. Joseph opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

  “I’m not angry with you, Christopher. But I’ll have to come after you again. This has to be clean, for everyone’s sake.”

  The stairs down to the lobby formed a corkscrew until the second floor, which in France is called the first floor. Joseph leaned on the railing as he walked. Then he stopped. Someone was coming, a family of five. Six. A grandmother first, in an orange muumuu, climbed handover-hand.

  “Oh là là,” said Joseph. “Vacances en famille.”

  “No,” said Kruse, but it was already too late.

  Joseph grabbed the portly woman, the grandmother, by the face and neck and yanked her down three stairs with him. She wailed and tumbled on a forty-year-old man and woman, and a pre-adolescent boy and girl, who shouted and knelt by her and tried to pull her muumuu back down. The boy laughed and his mother smacked him. There was no room to jump over the family, and Joseph had already strolled whistling out of the hotel, so Kruse helped lift the grandmother to her feet. He pretended not to speak French when the parents asked him what he had seen.

  “A madman,” he said in English.

  The grandmother was bruised and humiliated but not seriously hurt. They helped her to the third floor and into her room at the opposite end of the hall from the Russians.

  Two gendarmes arrived to investigate Joseph’s stairway assault on the grandmother. While the manager escorted the police to the third floor, Kruse went behind the desk to read the ledger. Antoine Fortier was on the fifth floor. Two sets of keys to his room were in a marked cubbyhole at his knees.

  It was a corner suite with a view of Place Saint-Corentin: the spinning Jules Verne carousel and the cathedral lit up white and yellow for the evening. A trailer had arrived to sell snacks and candy. The chambermaid had been through and had tidied up Fortier’s papers. They were policy briefings and a communications strategy, stacks of pamphlets about the Front National and its squinting Mr. Magoo of a leader, financial statements. Kruse sat in a blue wing chair and read through it all by lamplight. Every time he heard footsteps in the hall he turned the light off. The communications strategy had several lines to repeat about Jean-François de Musset—he was a patriot, a republican, a man of intelligence and action, a true Frenchman—but nothing about Evelyn.

  When there was no more to read, Kruse opened Fortier’s small black suitcase to see if there was anything he had missed. And there was. The previous day’s Figaro and a glossy German magazine populated with photos of naked girls, little girls, some of them in sex acts with grown men. At first he didn’t understand what he was looking at. Then he did, and dropped the magazine as though he were touching a cut of rotten flesh.

  Kruse had not eaten since breakfast—an apple on his way to the Front National in Saint-Cloud, and he was beginning to feel it. Tzvi had taught him ways to stabilize himself, at least mentally, when his blood sugar was low—to trick his body into seeing every activity as crucial. In the hotel room he moved from furious to dreamy and forgetful. Hunger did something to the way time seemed to pass. Lily was with him in the room, reading an Astérix book on the bed. She didn’t read, not really. She looked at pictures and told a story to herself and, if he was listening, to him.

  “Where is Mommy?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Why aren’t you looking for her?”

  “I am looking, sweetheart. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What if something bad happens?”

  “I won’t let anything happen.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “What does she look like, again?”

  “You don’t remember? It’s only been two weeks.”

  But he could hardly remember: the hair, yes, and the eyes. Her legs in a dress. Putting Evelyn together and feeling her, the warmth of her, an embrace in the kitchen. It was so rare to see her parents hugging and kissing, and so pleasing, Lily would climb down from her chair and run across the hardwood in h
er socks and hop up, and he would lift her and the three of them would embrace together. There was a song from the Saturday morning cartoons, Schoolhouse Rock!: “Three is a magic number.” They would whisper-sing it together because the windows were open and Evelyn had come from an Anglican family and Anglicans did not sing in public.

  A beautiful woman with a strong American accent can’t remain invisible forever. Every hour that passed when he did not hear she had been caught by the police or murdered in some alley of a city he had not heard of, a city like Quimper, was the end of one fairy tale and the beginning of another. If he were Evelyn, where would he go? No borders, no hotels—at least not under her own name—no credit card. Through the looking glass.

  There were hard steps in the hallway, an unathletic man in leather-soled shoes. Kruse turned out the light. A key in the lock, and with a whisper of assurance the door opened and a silhouette of a man in a suit walked in: short and heavy, though not fat, with a moustache and glasses. A girl stumbled in with him, half-drunk. He closed the door behind them, tossed a plastic bag onto the bed, and turned on the light.

  “Monsieur Fortier.”

  “My God.” He dropped his keys from one hand and his briefcase from the other. “Who the hell are you?”

  The girl, a teenager, looked away.

  Kruse stood and walked across the room. Fortier backed up, into the space between the bed and the tall white table with the white lamp. Kruse put his hand on the door handle and said, to the girl, “You can go.”

  She looked at Fortier. “But …”

  “Pay her. Pay her what you were going to pay her.”