by Todd Babiak
“Yes, Monsieur, Madame, thank you for your concern.”
“Do you need a glass of water, young man?”
“I have to make a phone call. Then I will fetch a glass of water.”
“You are not from here.”
“No.”
“Where are you from?”
“Toronto.”
The man shook his head.
“Canada.”
“Ah, our little cousins. Welcome, Monsieur. And I do hope you feel better. You look like …” Before he could finish, the gentleman’s wife apologized for him and pulled him away. Kruse wanted the frail little man to come back, to talk to him all day.
His France Télécom card was black and a little bent, warm from being in his pocket. He pushed himself off the tractor, unsure if he could walk, and made his way across the plaza to the telephone. The card went in and the robot woman welcomed him, and the European dial tone that would never sound right hummed in his ear. He tried three more area codes. One rang out, another was for a bakery in Cahors. The last geographic code didn’t work at all, as the number was unas-signed. Maybe two was the magic number. Before he started over he tried a mobile code. There was a click and static.
Behind the static, in the distance, “Chris?”
Her voice was Lily’s voice and the nighttime creaks of the house on Foxbar Road, the subway in the middle of the afternoon when almost no one is on it, the studio in MagaSecure, the smell of her shampoo, the skin on her neck, holding her hand in the soft seats of the O’Keefe Centre while someone from China or Israel plays the viola, the Westin Harbour Castle on their wedding night. He spoke and she did not hear him, as the static washed over the line.
“I hate cellphones.” The connection was weak and, in the distance, it sounded as though others were having a conversation. She was underwater. “Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“I can hear you now. It’s wonderful. Where are you calling from?”
“A little town in the Drôme.” All the things he wanted to say to her and they were talking geography. “They came for our mail. It’s criminals, Ev.”
“I know.”
“Hired criminals. Working for …”
“That’s the part I don’t understand. The men at the bar with Jean-François that night. He didn’t drink, not really, not like that. Did he?”
“You saw the noseless man.”
“At the farmhouse. He killed them. How did you know? Have you seen him?”
Kruse told her about the Marianis, about his suspicions, the Front National, his day and night in Quimper, Annette Laferrière. He didn’t say much about Annette Laferrière.
“Can you come?”
“I’m coming. Where?”
“There’s a narrow street in Lyon, Rue René Leynaud, one of those places the sun can’t get at. The church is called Saint-Polycarpe. It’s being renovated so it looks shut up. I’m in here.”
“Does anyone know you’re there?”
“Only the priest. He believes me.”
“Believes what, Evelyn?”
“I didn’t kill them. You know I didn’t kill them, don’t you? I couldn’t.”
“I believe you.”
“You had a funeral for her?”
“Yes.”
“And it was beautiful?”
“When it came time to talk, to say something, I just blubbered away.”
“Lily knew. I don’t know what I … part of me just wants them to come and take me. The police, this man without a nose.”
“She was happy enough.”
“I could have made her happier. I was ashamed of her.”
“You weren’t.”
Evelyn sobbed and spoke. “I thought people would look at her face and think the girl is flawed and the mother is flawed.”
“Stop.”
“Don’t interrupt me! I told the priest too. And I told him I blamed you for that. It was your fault and I had to live with it, to carry it. And the university. When I could have been playing with her like you did, dollies or what the fuck else, anything, just colouring or just sitting and holding her as she watched Sesame Street. What are we here for, on this planet?”
“Evelyn.”
“Don’t interrupt me. We’re here to love.”
“She loved you.”
“And I was ashamed.”
“Did you have an affair with Jean-François?”
“I’ll tell you everything.”
“Did you?”
“Come on, Chris.”
“So: yes. Yes?”
“It seems ridiculous now. It makes no sense. Just get in the car and—”
“Why?”
“He said things no one said, about my ideas, and he understood me and I could hear him say words I had given him that made him better. When he won I’d get a job in Paris, doing things I always dreamed I might do.”
One of the market stalls, the one selling vegetables, had run out of onions. “Oignons!” a man shouted to another, in a white truck.
And a moment later the second man appeared with a wooden tray. “Oignons!” he said.
It was charming to the small crowd, the call-and-answer routine, and a few people clapped.
“I never imagined.”
“And I love you for that, Chris. You never imagined.”
Static came in again like a wave, and if she was speaking now he didn’t hear her. His stomach had gone sour, his hands cold. Her voice returned, still under the sea. She finished a sentence: “… why I believe. Do you understand? Can you forgive me?”
There were twenty-five credits left on his card, which couldn’t be right. It had come with twenty-five credits. He was asking the wrong questions. If he knew what had happened in the farmhouse Halloween night, and if he knew why, he could tell someone.
“You’re coming now?”
“Yes.”
“Rue René Leynaud, in a neighbourhood called La Croix-Rousse. There’s scaffolding in front of the church. You’ll find me through the side door. It looks broken but it isn’t. Just shove. Kick it if you have to kick it.”
“I’m two or three hours south of you.”
“No one is watching?”
“I’m alone, Evelyn.”
“Her birthday would have been in a week. Less than a week. Our Lily: four years old. Can you believe it? Four.”
A woman tripped on a loose stone in front of the onion men and her basket of apples and sausage overturned. Several people helped her back up.
“I’m a different woman now, Chris. I want you to know that.”
“We can start over.”
“That’s what I want, to start over. I’m sorry. I didn’t get it before but I get it now.”
A blast of heat started in behind his nose and bloomed over his face, and he didn’t want her to hear him so he softly hung up the phone. He turned away from the plaza and stared at the small digital display of the phone box until the tears stopped and he could buy a peach for the road.
THIRTEEN
Rue René Leynaud, Lyon
IT WAS A LIE. He had imagined her in the arms of other men hundreds of times: in her ugly office at York, in their bedroom when he and Lily were at the Canadian National Exhibition or tobogganing, but mostly in downtown hotel rooms. Her official philosophy, what Evelyn taught and what she believed she believed, could never really account for the encroaching thump of middle age and how we surrender to it.
Evelyn was a stranger who called him Chris. He had not seen her in two weeks and he was forgetting her face.
It was a horror. He could not abide it. He thought he could not abide it. He could abide it. It was nothing. There were thousands of places to hide north of Saint-Nazaire-le-Désert, tiny roads plastered with dust that went into the past. Provence was lush but this was something else, more extreme, more familiar, more Canadian. It could snow here, any day now, and cover the brown grasses and thin trees, cover the spruce boughs white. Smoke was visible above chimneys. They could li
ve in an abandoned cabin along some green river, an hour from Grenoble, eat fish and boar and berries and nuts until all this was forgotten.
He entered Lyon from the south, along the glassy Rhône. Thick clouds and a thin mist crouched over the city but there was no wind and it was warm enough that walkers and motorcyclists went without jackets. Concrete apartment buildings, the jollier French versions of brutalism, faced the autoroute and the quay. Aging overpasses and graffiti, low-income towers, and young men driving like psychopaths, Dr. Dre and Nirvana and Pearl Jam thumping in their tiny cars, all the ruin of European romance, escorted him into the medieval city.
The quay was named after Jean Moulin. While Evelyn had read guidebooks to prepare for their year in France and Lily had looked at pictures of Paris, Kruse had read about the war. Jean Moulin was one of the country’s top Resistance leaders, betrayed and captured by the Germans. The head of the Gestapo here, Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, tortured him until he was just about dead. Then he died.
Before he entered La Croix-Rousse there was an accident. Two ambulances and a police car sneaked through the traffic and he waited in the Spanish Citroën for an opportunity to turn left. He looked around him, thinking about Evelyn’s question: “No one is watching?”
No one was watching. In just a few minutes he would see her, and the anticipation came with a purr of nausea. She had said it once before, when she was angry with him and a little drunk on white wine one evening on Foxbar Road, that without Lily they were nothing. Strangers. In front of the Citroën the traffic was now entirely gummed. The woman next to him, driving a small truck, honked her horn and slapped her steering wheel. No one is watching? But a thought shoved his sweeter anxieties away, like a silent blast: no one is listening? His calling card, twenty-five credits forever. It was either a mistake or it was not a mistake. The map was open on the passenger seat: four blocks ahead turn left. Take the first right and then … in the van the woman honked again and shouted so loudly he could hear her through two windows. “Mais non!” Kruse grabbed the map and opened his door and ran past the cars and trucks and scooters and motorcycles. Someone shouted at him to stop. The accident was not serious: a woman and two men argued as a cop tried to calm them and a paramedic smoked a cigarette. They all turned to watch Kruse.
On the other side of the accident the quay opened up and he called out in frustration, a cuss word in English he had not said aloud since Lily was born. Rain started to fall, light and cool. Tzvi would abandon him for his stupidity, his fucking fuck stupidity. He turned left at a parking lot entrance and a pedestrian plaza and broke into a sprint, shouting nonsense now. At the end of the plaza he veered right and arrived at an intersection of five narrow routes, the sorts of streets Evelyn had described. Some Lyonnais watched him, backed away as he spun madly. “Saint-Polycarpe!” he said, to all of them. “Saint-Polycarpe!” He looked at his map for a moment, the absurdity of stopping to look at a map.
“Monsieur,” said a woman with a shopping bag on wheels. She pointed up at one of the blue signs: Rue Saint-Polycarpe.
The street rose gently to a church with scaffolding and a clock, Evelyn’s church. He dropped the map and ran past a group of young men and women, students, who mocked him for it. “Faster,” one said, in a silly voice.
“Faster,” they said together.
Birds sat hunched on a power line before Saint-Polycarpe, waiting for the rain to stop. One fluffed its feathers. The bird’s gesture convinced him the France Télécom card was simply broken. He was a mess, an idiot, a fabulist. He had abandoned the Citroën for nothing. Sleep was what he needed. “A little perspective!”—one of Evelyn’s phrases. The two heavy doors were wooden and pasted with a laminated piece of paper apologizing for the construction. Mass on Sunday would start as usual, at 11:00. What passed for a side door was a gate covered in plywood. Someone had written on the plywood, in black marker, that God is dead. The gate was propped open. He didn’t have to kick it. Kruse shoved and it creaked for him, and then he was in the cool and the darkness of the place. Water dripped in a smelly puddle. He climbed a set of stairs, his heart audible. There were lights somewhere, enough to see Jesus suffering on his cross, carved arches and pillars and Renaissance balconies. A sign had been hung from two poles in front of the choir, below suffering Jesus: “REVENEZ À MOI DE TOUT VOTRE COEUR.” Come back to me with all your heart.
“Evelyn?”
His voice echoed. Water dripped. Beyond that, the sound of feet shuffling over a hard floor. She was in Jean-François’s bed, or perhaps in the sunshine of his garden, at the precise moment that Lily broke her last porcelain teacup. She was the shy athlete in his self-defence class, his abracadabra wife. Two is the magic number.
It was much colder in the church than outside, and it smelled faintly of candles and of diesel. Wet stone and something else, something dark and fresh.
“I’m here. Hey, I have the funniest story to tell you.”
The churches of his childhood were boxy and unadorned, homely vessels for a beautiful God. Peace was a fetish. There was no mystery or invitation in any of the banners or posters. His father had spent a teenage summer in southern Manitoba, in a city full of Mennonites, where two of the churches were split on whether or not it was a sin to put whitewall tires on a car. Men and women would hide record players in their attics, to play Chopin without being outed as ostentatious fools. Ceilings were not high and decorated, like this one, to make us feel little before God. They were just ceilings, with cheap lighting fixtures, because Jesus—the one true Jesus—would not have approved of anything fancy.
“Evelyn!”
To eat, she would have to leave. He had passed several unappealing African and Middle Eastern food stalls. Perhaps she had become a Frenchwoman: perhaps she was sleeping. The pipes of a giant organ gleamed in the half-light, and a white statue of the virgin and her baby.
He ran up the stairs, to the organ, and looked down into the emptiness of the church and called out to her again. “Please,” he said. The vessel for holy water looked empty. Kruse went back down and lit a candle because it was too dark to see into the chapels, and he said a few words for Lily and meant them. He stepped closer to the chapels and prepared himself, said no out loud and no again, no no no.
It looked as though something had been stacked in a few of the chapels, for the renovations. The holiness of a holy place could be turned off, it seemed, and on again.
He fell to his knees in the chapel of St. Francis Xavier.
Evelyn had been tied to a wooden chair, her wrists bound in front of her with her favourite white scarf. He crawled to her, through the warm puddle, and said her name. There was a word for what they had done to her: garrotte. A bruise on the side of her neck, above the fishing line and the deep wound, still leaking, reminded him of a hickey. Marie-France, the turtle doudou, was in her pocket, so he took it out and kissed it and stuffed it in his own. He called for help and understood it was stupid. He touched her face with the back of his hand, and like her blood on the floor it wasn’t cold, not yet, there was still hope, and he kissed her and told her he forgave her, it didn’t matter what had happened, they would go off to Spain. It was his fault. All of it was his fault: their marriage, Lily’s death, and now this. He untied her wrists and used the scarf to stop up the flow of the blood on her neck. The left side of his wife, the white silk blouse and skirt, were soaked. They would never get these stains out. She must have been freezing in here. “Shh,” he said, though there was no sound outside him and he knew it. He had made an error, between Saint-Nazaire-le-Désert and here, out of the weakness in his heart. Before they had spoken on the phone, before she had said the words, his plan had been to bring her flowers. Red chrysanthemums, he had heard somewhere, these were autumn flowers. An enormous bouquet, utterly useless. They would steal a new Volvo with Italian plates or German and go to some obscure border crossing in the Pyrenees, the flowers in the back seat like a sleeping child. Spaniards were relaxed about this sort of thing.
He was so angry with her but he loved her and kissed her again, apologized for getting blood on her perfect face.
He barely heard it over his own voice, the foot behind him in the puddle, a bare foot. He turned and looked at it, at both feet, and up at Lucien who breathed into his swing: a bat but not for baseball.
Of all he had imagined these last weeks, nothing had led him to this. The taste of it, to kill this abomination of a man, and now to be killed. He did not lift his wet hands. It was too late, just long enough to close his eyes and reach with his mind for Lily and for Evelyn in forgiveness somewhere, in the Paris of their imaginations.
PART THREE
FOURTEEN
Montée Saint-Barthélémy, Lyon
DID KRUSE UNDERSTAND THAT A LIFETIME IN A FRENCH PRISON WAS a multitude of horrors? Did he understand what they did to Americans in there? Americans who think they’re smart and cool?
“I don’t know if he thinks he’s cool.” The larger of the two men did not raise his voice. He did not address Kruse. “He had a dolly in his pocket, a turtle dolly covered in blood, when they brought him in.”
There were no windows in the concrete room, the room he had expected all along. The walls were beige, the paint cracked and mottled. The floor was untreated, with a mouldy hole in the middle and a black stain leading to it. One of the fluorescent bars zapped on and off. It was an abattoir. The smaller of the two police was bald, his head cleanly shaved. He had thin legs but his chest was muscular. He spit when he spoke, like a stage actor.
“So you think you’re a big, tough American? How did you get those scars on your face? Tell us about it.”
Cops were called flics here. He had said nothing so far, not at the church and not at the police station. No one had read him his rights, if he had any rights as a foreigner. No one had charged him with anything.
“The judge will have all of this in your confession, which is the easiest way to go about this, Monsieur Kruse. Your daughter is hit by a car and killed by Jean-François de Musset. That night you and your wife go to their house and kill Monsieur and Madame de Musset, in revenge. Then your wife, who had fallen in love with Jean-François, is so disturbed she runs. But you don’t know why she’s running until you see the newspapers. You had no idea! A cuckold! She had been sleeping with the prick. So you hunt her down and murder her in a chapel in Saint-Polycarpe.”
