by Todd Babiak
“Wait a minute here. This isn’t at all what you’re thinking.”
“Pay the girl.”
Fortier pulled out his wallet and selected some bills. The girl took them from him and counted.
“Is that what he promised?”
She shook her head no.
Fortier cussed. “Do you have any idea who I am?”
“Pay her.”
He did and the girl, in dirty jeans and a tight, weathered motorcycle jacket, turned to go.
“Wait. How old are you?”
The girl turned to Fortier and said, “Eighteen.”
“I work for Interpol. Now that I’ve seen you, I’ll find you. I’ll know. How old?”
“Fourteen.”
“Where do you live?”
“Here. All over.”
“Your family?”
“Douarnenez.”
“Can you go back?”
Fortier laughed. “You’re going to save the day, Monsieur? Change the world? Congratulations. Three times, congratulations.”
The girl turned and Kruse called out after her to go home and back to school. He locked the door behind her and leaned against the rough wallpaper. The president of the Front National picked up the phone but Kruse had cut the line. Fortier sat and slouched on the bed. “You’re a real hero. She’s going to shoot up every franc.”
“No one will rape her tonight.”
“She propositioned me, Monsieur. How was I to know she was fourteen?”
The plastic bag on the bed, stamped with a hardware store logo, was nearly empty: a new role of duct tape and some rope. “You had some repairs to do?”
Fortier sighed. He reminded Kruse of a penguin.
“I’m looking for my wife.”
“I asked you before, Monsieur. Do you know who I am? I have friends in the Gendarmerie nationale.”
“Tell me about them. Where are these friends? In Vaison-la-Romaine, by chance?”
“Ah.” Fortier pointed at him. “I see.”
“You see what?”
“This is about de Musset.”
“It’s about the woman who is alleged to have murdered him and his wife.”
“The American.”
“Canadian.”
“One or the other, yes. Madame Evelyn. You are, what, her husband? One of her men? One of Jean-François’s sexual competitors?”
It was like a drug, not having eaten. He watched himself watching Fortier. “Husband.”
“Well, congratulations to you, Monsieur. She sounds like quite the creature. Now, I hope you’ll excuse me. I’m going downstairs to alert the hotelier about the intruder in my room, and I’m sure he’ll phone the police.”
Kruse put his hands on the man, shoved him back onto the bed.
“I will have you arrested.”
“I was there that night, in Villedieu, when your man killed my daughter. Ever since then I’ve been trying to figure it out. My wife, the Marianis, your man Jean-François, Pascale.”
“Figure what out?” Fortier pulled a silver cigarette case from an inside pocket and offered one to Kruse. “I listen to you speak and honestly, Monsieur, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re nuts, I suppose.” He lit his cigarette. “Here I am, stuck in a room with a madman. Is Kruse a Jewish name, by the way? Such a charming note for my memoirs.”
“You hired the Marianis.”
“And who are they, my Jewish friend? These Marianis I have hired?”
“Stop it.”
“Stop what, Monsieur?”
“Jean-François de Musset, your great hope for the next presidential election, was killed. By my wife, or so you think. So you hire the Marianis in revenge.”
For some time, Fortier smoked. Then he moved from the bed to a chair near the window, where Kruse had been sitting. There was an ashtray. “This is extraordinary.”
“Is it?”
“First of all, Monsieur, if I were to say anything to your wife it would be thank you. Of course, I could never. It would be beastly. Jean-François was a patriot. A republican.”
“A man of intelligence and action.”
“Jean-François de Musset was hijacking the FN. He believed in power for the sake of power, not change. He was a coward. If we had wanted to be a centrist party, we would have been a centrist party all along, an ice cream shop with twenty flavours. Gaullists. But I believe this weakness, this spirit of accommodation, is what brought France to the state of insurrection we’re in today. We are not all things to all people. Perhaps that is America.”
“Insurrection.”
“Jean-François did not have permission. It was not his party.”
Kruse was dizzy with hunger. He checked his pockets again, for a crumb, anything.
“I realize, Monsieur, that the history of a foreign country does not interest you and your people. But I grew up in Algeria, a city called Oran. My father owned grocery stores. In 1962 General Charles de Gaulle, the hero of our late friend Jean-François de Musset, surrendered Algeria—my French home—to the Arabs. That summer, the Muslims went through our neighbourhoods and cut our throats: men, women, children. Babies, Monsieur.”
“How did you escape?”
“My family had already fled. But our friends were killed, my uncle and aunt, my cousins. All for ice cream shop politics, something for everyone but nothing for France, for the French. This is at the heart of the Front National, why we exist. What did your de Musset try to do?”
Kruse backed against the dresser, held himself up.
“When you see her again, in prison, please give her my best regards. In fact, when our true leader wins the presidency, perhaps she will be pardoned. She is the patriot. A murderer of intelligence and action, in fact.”
The lights in the room were not bright but they were too bright. Fortier’s skin was the icing on a vanilla birthday cake that no one bothered to eat. He continued to speak but Kruse was no longer listening. He wanted the man to be lying but he was not. Why was Kruse here? Why, with a name like Kruse? Why not Germany? Or Israel, perhaps? Why not stay in his own country, with his own people? When he had dropped the pornographic magazine back in Fortier’s bag he had not buried the thing. Now, in the light, it shone up at him. He had come here to find Evelyn and she was more lost than ever.
At home he would open the fridge at moments like this, a fridge full of food, and he would have no idea how to proceed.
“Daddy. What are you doing?”
“I’m hungry.”
“What?” said Fortier.
I’m hungry, in English. “Take off your clothes.”
“Monsieur?”
“Take off your clothes, Fortier. Now.”
“No.”
Kruse lifted the aged birthday cake out of his chair, tossed him on the bed. Mattress springs quivered. “Do it or I’ll do it for you, and I won’t be gentle.”
“Please,” he said, several times, and spoke of his wife and children—a boy and a girl—now in school. All he wanted was the best for France, for his family, for French families. Kruse misunderstood him. He did not make much money, as president of a political party. It was a sacrifice, a public service. It was true he had a frailty of the heart, but what would a prostitute do, without clients? Steal? Simply die? Was there a society, in the history of the world, without men and whores?
He sat demurely on the edge of the bed in his loose-fitting white briefs and a pair of navy blue socks pulled up halfway to his knees. His belly was soft and his breasts were loose. Kruse imagined him with the girl, what he might have done with the tape and the rope. The girl in the cold morning, with her money and whatever else she carried. Others like her, in every city. Fortier trembled, cried silently.
“Speak to me, Monsieur.”
“No.”
“This is not fair. It’s my private life. In my public life …”
“Underwear too.”
“Monsieur. I beg forgiveness. I will never do it again and I swear it before God. Whate
ver you want, money. You want money? I can get some for you. And I will never tell the police.”
“Take off your underwear.”
Now he wailed. “Help me!”
Kruse put one hand in the man’s thinning hair and the other on his face, and squeezed. A roar rose up in him, an old feeling that replaced his hunger, and he looked at Fortier and now the man understood. He rose and removed his underwear and looked up at the ceiling and prayed in his blue socks. The cock that drove him to the magazine and to heroin girls was hardly there at all, hidden by grey-black hair and by the shadow of his stomach. Someone loved him and trusted him, that wife and those kids. Kruse pulled the duct tape out of the bag and Fortier continued to pray. The Lord’s Prayer, in French.
He wrapped the duct tape around Fortier’s head, covering his mouth but not his nose. “Yes, God has all kinds of time for you.” The man didn’t struggle as Kruse taped his hands together, behind his back. He bent Fortier over the bed and stood behind him for a while, shuffling unnecessarily, to let him think. Fortier bashed his forehead again and again on the mattress, and called out of his nose. It was a tall four-poster bed with a solid wood headboard. The art, above the bed, was of a storm coming into the bay. He shoved Fortier up on the bed and taped his thin legs together. By the time he was finished, half the roll of tape was gone. Kruse used the rope to tie him to the bed and opened the magazine in front of him. He had not felt so dirty in years, so he used Fortier’s room to shower and took one of his clean shirts. He wrote a note about the fourteen-year-old girl from Douarnenez and about the magazine, how he had found Fortier, and propped the door open with one of his shoes.
There was a beige phone kiosk in Place Saint-Corentin, made of a plastic that did not seem to exist on the other side of the ocean. It was close enough to the bistro, Le Finistère, to the smell of spiced meat and hot cheese, that he nearly called out in longing. The number for the police was on a faded sticker behind the phone box. He explained to the woman who answered the phone about the pedophile and rapist waiting in the Hotel Ys: a patriot, a republican, a man of intelligence and action.
ELEVEN
Rue Falguière, Paris
ROISSY WAS EMPTY. HE DROVE AROUND UNTIL HE WAS SURE NO ONE had followed him, and he parked two hotels away on the strip. It was a cool and still night. His shoes on the pavement broke the silence and inspired a dog, standing alone in the middle of the plaza, to bark. Kruse nodded at the desk clerk when she said hello and he took the stairs. For five minutes he listened at the door for any sound or movement. He prepared for a fight and opened the door into darkness, warmth, nothing. At the threshold of the bedroom he heard them first, their breathing, and when his eyes adjusted to the pale sliver of parking-lot light sneaking into the room, he saw them, both of them in one bed, on their right sides, like two sizes of the same woman.
In the closet he found a pillow and a blanket for especially cold nights and lay on the sofa. Earlier at Le Finistère he had been too hungry to eat; the egg of the croque madame seemed as ridiculous as a naked man’s moustache. Now he was too tired to sleep: unless Antoine Fortier was the greatest actor of his generation he had not hired the Marianis.
He would never sleep again. This is what he had become. He would seek Evelyn until either he found her or there was nothing left of him but dust, chalk, the outline of a phantom that a sick woman might see in a lonely rest stop in eastern Brittany. In the dream she was whispering to him, Evelyn and then Lily. Play with me. He could feel her breath on his face.
“Play with me.”
Close up, Anouk had tiny freckles atop her nose. The whites of her eyes were pure and perfect, less than a hand’s length from his own, which were so tired they felt glued. He wanted to hide her from men and Mercedes forever. He thought of Fortier in his room, with his vile magazine, a professional destroyer.
“Play with me.”
If he started playing with her, how would he stop? “Where is your mom?”
“Sleeping.”
He closed the door to the bedroom and folded the blanket and stuffed it back into the closet, with his pillow. Together they sat on the couch. “What would you like to play? It has to be a quiet game.”
“You are a horse and I am the rider.”
“Only if you can be a quiet rider. You can’t say ‘giddy-up.’”
“What is ‘giddy-up’?”
“It’s a thing we say in English.”
She prepared her mouth: “giddy-up.”
And without another word he assumed the familiar position and she climbed on his back and he walked on his hands and knees. Twice he tried to gallop but there was only a thin layer of carpet over the concrete floor. It hurt too much. It was time for another game, so he taught her an impromptu French translation of Simon Says and then, veering into too noisy, tag. In France you are not it. You are the wolf.
At the end of the game of wolf, Anouk climbed back onto the couch and announced she now had the hunger of a wolf. It was the first time since Halloween night that Kruse had allowed himself to be anything more than cursed; now, coming out of an hour with Anouk, he felt he had betrayed his daughter.
“We’ll wait until your mom wakes up.”
“But I’m hungry now.”
“What does she eat, usually?”
“Coffee.”
“What else?”
“Tartine.”
“And what do you eat?”
“Pain au chocolat, as you know. Every day I have it, with orange juice.”
“That doesn’t sound true.”
“With you it is true. Every day with you it is true.”
There was a notebook open on the coffee table, in front of the television. In it was written:
le Front national
le milieu corse
les de Mussets (aristocratie)
Villedieu???
la Gendarmerie nationale
A few minutes after he called down for room service, Annette stepped out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes. “I dreamt that a man came into the hotel room last night.”
“Madame, I did hear the sirens before she was hit.”
“Good morning, Monsieur Kruse.”
“Why, do you think? Before she was hit?”
“There may have been a heart attack in one of the seniors’ homes. The south is lousy with them.”
“Who is the anonymous source?”
“People have affairs. It’s normal. My husband—”
“I want to find out who told the reporters. The Front National, at least the senior leadership, they know nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I met with Antoine Fortier.”
“And?”
“A real charmer. But he didn’t hire the Marianis.”
“He could have been lying.”
“I don’t think so, Madame.”
Anouk watched them, back and forth, as they spoke. French children, this one included, were trained not to interrupt when adults were talking. By now, in a conversation like this, Lily would have interjected three times already. What is “anonymous”? Who was hit? How can someone attack a heart?
“You slept in my hotel room. You’ve endangered my life and my child’s life, and you’ve probably ruined my career. Call me Annette.”
Kruse had not kept any of the articles about Evelyn from November 1. “What’s the reporter’s name?”
“Monsieur Kruse.”
“Christophe.”
“He won’t tell you anything. If the anonymous source is truly an anonymous source, a reporter would rather die than tell.”
“What’s his name?”
“You do not seem the type to argue.”
“Not at the moment.”
“Nicholas Durrant.”
Kruse went to the desk and pulled out a piece of hotel stationery. “I need you to draw me a map of the newsroom.”
“Why?”
“Please, Annette.”
She stared at him long enough to blink a
couple of times. Her eyes remained small and strained with sleep or lack of it, and her body radiated heat from the bed. Her legs were bare and the Johnny Hallyday shirt was the length of a miniskirt. Soon she would be cold. In this light her skin was sprinkled with cinnamon. He had trouble focusing. As she drew, bent over the table, Kruse went to the bathroom and returned with a thin white robe for her. Anouk watched her mother work.
“This is appalling, Christophe.”
“The same anonymous source in seven newspapers? That’s appalling.” He offered her the robe and she looked up, caught him staring.
“I’m sorry.”
Again she looked at him a moment too long, a meeting place of curiosity and spite, something else he couldn’t read. On the other side of her, Anouk was handling the small plastic coffee maker.
“I ordered breakfast for you two.”
She looked away from him and finished the map.
Durrant’s name was in a bubble above his cubicle. She had marked her own desk, which he remembered, and the boardroom where they had talked. It was simple and thorough, with a clear route from the elevator into the middle of the room. The silence lasted long enough for Anouk to ask about the coffee maker. She wanted to make coffee for everyone.
“I have to go, so don’t make enough for me.”
“Why, Monsieur?”
“But I’ll be back.”
“When, alors?”
“Soon. Remember, Anouk, if someone knocks …”
She froze and whispered, “Be very still. Don’t move and don’t speak.”
“Correct.”
Annette’s arms were crossed over her chest. The robe had a hood and she had slid it over her appealing mess of morning hair. A white nun. Kruse was close enough to the door to hear the industrial hum of the hallway, to feel it in the concrete through the soles of his shoes.
“If no one wants coffee I will make some for myself. Maman: How do you make coffee?”
She spoke to the girl without looking away from him. “Put the carafe down, Anouk.”
“One last name, Annette, if you know it.”
“You want me to betray my colleagues and my principles even further.”
“‘Want’ isn’t the right word.”
In Toronto, when he used this trick, his accomplices were sometimes Sikh and sometimes Somali. In Paris that afternoon the secret to invisibility was Polish. He waited on Rue Falguière for the woman and the man, mother and son. It was just after four thirty and the son’s ritual was just as Annette had described: a cigarette on the bench in front of the newspaper building. His slouch was as formidable as his bald spot, surrounded by a riot of hair the colour of hay. Next to him his mother stood and smiled, apparently at nothing, her own version of the family slouch moulded into a stoop.
