Come, Barbarians

by Todd Babiak

  “Yes, Mehdi.”

  “May God intervene.”

  FIFTEEN

  Allée des Vergers, Roissy-en-France

  NORTH OF BURGUNDY THE AFTERNOON WAS DARK AND SOAKED AND wind-rocked, the flags alert, the tips of evergreens swaying along the autoroute, and the bare branches of everything else assailed and miserable. Mehdi stopped at a park in the centre of Roissy that so surprised Kruse with its beauty, he explained about Canadian airports, about how they were never so well loved as this.

  “What sort of man would live in a place he does not love?” said Mehdi. “We are not on this earth long enough to make such errors.”

  Kruse called him a true philosopher and shook his hand. Mehdi blessed him in his princely way and drove off. The park was filled with gracious old trees and a curving sidewalk and clipped bushes. There were a few cars but otherwise Roissy was as deserted as Vaison-la-Romaine during a mistral. It was the middle of the afternoon, a time of neither coming nor going. Kruse had begun to smell, in the cab of the truck, but when he apologized for it Mehdi had told him his nose was no longer tuned to the smell of rotting grapes. We all have our rotting grapes, he said.

  A men’s clothing store was at the end of the block, with a pleasing hint of liquor and cigar smoke inside. A small, white-haired man squinted at him from behind the counter, where he read a newspaper. He carried a long string of measuring tape around his neck, the last real haberdasher in the world.

  The haberdasher, in a brown suit and a large yellow tie, stepped down from the counter. He greeted Kruse and then seemed torn between wanting to help him and kicking him out of the store. Roissy was not a town of vagrants. Perhaps he had never seen a man so dirty, in his store.

  “I’ve had an accident.”

  “Yes, Monsieur?”

  “A wine-related accident, in Burgundy.”

  “White Burgundy, I would say.”

  “Chablis, in fact.”

  The haberdasher crossed his arms. “Nothing you’re wearing fits you.”

  “My clothes are here.” Kruse lifted the plastic bag. “All this is borrowed, from the winery.”

  “When we’re done, all of it will go straight in the garbage. Fortunately, it is a slow day. My wife is watching television in the back, the best tailor in la métropole and nothing to do.”

  The tailor knew his size by sight and pulled two suits down, a navy blue and a brown, and some white shirts. He was more a blue man than a brown. Twenty minutes later, Kruse was waiting for the haberdasher’s wife to finish his cuffs. He had come in to buy a pair of jeans, a simple shirt, and shoes that fit. The haberdasher stared at him, as though he were an object of study, and chose a trench coat to go with the suit.

  Kruse walked swiftly through the hotel lobby and pressed the up button on the elevator, to avoid drawing attention to his hair or to his smell. The key was in his wine-drenched bag of clothes, and by the time he fished it out he could have knocked several times. If someone was inside, he wanted to surprise him—or them.

  The room had been made up and their clothes were still here, Anouk’s books. He had ordered them to remain inside and they were not here, so all he could do was call her number at Le Monde. When the secretary answered at the end of the seventh ring he hung up. His hair itched with the rotting grape juice. He was furious with Annette and he would tell her so, that around every corner was a car coming for them or a Russian with a knife. He could not leave without doing it, so he showered the Chardonnay out of his hair and skin and plotted his immediate future: he would walk the streets of Roissy in a navy blue suit and trench coat, with a hotel umbrella, and find them. The suite was empty when he exited the shower. His underwear and socks were with the suit, so he wrapped a towel around himself and walked into the small salon just as the door opened.

  Anouk clapped her hands. “Bonjour, Monsieur Christophe.”

  All of his plans to be angry and victimized by circumstance and obsessed by men of cruelty were ruined by her, the way she half-skipped to him and stopped herself a foot or two away. She wore a small red peacoat with tiny drops of water resting on the wool.

  “Bonjour, Anouk.”

  Her mother looked at Kruse with new tears of defeat in her eyes and looked away. She emptied a plastic bag: milk, cereal with chocolate inside, a package of individual-sized yogurts, a bottle of Bordeaux, a colouring book, and a package of crayons. “J’ai le cafard,” she said. This phrase had something to do with depression, melancholy. Kruse didn’t chide her for leaving the room. Instead he apologized and carried his new clothes into the steamy bathroom. When he was dressed, he prepared himself and stepped out.

  Anouk sat on the edge of the bed, directly in front of the bathroom door. “Have you seen The Little Mermaid?”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “It was on TV last night. We watched in the dark.”

  “What fun.”

  “And pizza.”

  “A movie and a pizza. That does sound wonderful.”

  She whispered, “We can do it again tonight, Monsieur.”

  “We’ll ask your mother.”

  “Non, non, et non. Last night she said only this one time. Tonight would be more than one time.”

  “It will take some sly manoeuvring.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I might have said that incorrectly.”

  “What?”

  Anouk sat up straight and rested her hands on her knees. She had removed her wet peacoat and wore a pink dress and white tights. Her mother had brushed the knots out of her hair. Rather than pretend it did not fill him with joy and longing to see her, he sat next to Anouk on the bed and took her hand and together they looked at each other and at nothing, the doorway into the steamy bathroom. He had failed at everything he was charged by nature and by his heart to do. They were gone forever. Yet he allowed himself to feel good and useful, holding a little girl’s still-cool hand. He had grown addicted to sitting in quiet rooms with Lily, to seeing her at the end of a day of work, so addicted he found himself creating false reasons to home-school her, to keep her all to himself, his, to protect her as long as he could.

  The unnecessary marriage counsellor in Toronto had said something he did not forget. At the moment it had seemed obvious and banal. He had been ignoring the counsellor, the four-syllable nouns poached from psychological experts on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He had stared at an unhappy ficus on top of her gunmetal filing cabinet.

  “There is nothing more attractive, and more comforting to ourselves and to our partners, than truth.” The counsellor had enormous and fragrant hair, teased up and blow-dried and treated with sprays and mousses. She wore a shirt with shoulder pads and several silver bracelets on each arm that clinked like wind chimes as she spoke with her arms. “As Hamlet tells us, ‘to thine own self be true.’”

  Part of Evelyn’s education of her wretched thug were black-and-white film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet didn’t say, “To thine own self be true.” The windbag Polonius had said it, and clearly Shakespeare was making fun of a certain kind of person: the kind of person who says things like “To thine own self be true.” But he had thought about it, in the room with the ficus, and Polonius and the counsellor had been correct. It was good advice, windbaggery or not. Evelyn had wanted him to be a certain kind of man, his own self by her.

  He put his arms around Anouk and gently lifted her onto his knee. He kissed her on the top of her head, which smelled of the outdoors and faintly of the herbal shampoo he had just used.

  “I will die in France,” he said, in English, aloud by accident.

  Anouk turned up to him as though he had burped in her hair. “What, Monsieur?”

  “It makes me happy, to be with you.”

  “Me too, Monsieur. Do you have a car that is also a dog?”

  “No.”

  “That is something I think about.”

  “If I see one, I’ll buy it for you.”

  “I still sit in a car seat.”
<
br />   “Until you’re ready, I can drive the car that is also a dog.”

  “That sounds like a good idea. Will you drive me to Disneyland?”

  His favourite moment from any of the old movies Evelyn had made him watch was when sad old King Lear huddled with the daughter he had mistreated, his only true love in the world, Cordelia, and said sweet things that would never be: “We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.”

  To lock the doors and all doors ten doors thick and remain here in this hotel room in Roissy with Anouk and her books and some dou-dous. Maybe a tea set could be arranged, their private Disneyland.

  “Are you okay, Monsieur Christophe?”

  He shifted Anouk back onto the bed and walked into the salon. He leaned on the door jamb and watched Annette, who had opened her bottle and had already finished half a glass. Her hand quivered. She had prepared, it seemed, to say something. She said it flatly and quietly. It was vicious, what Kruse had forced them to do. If they had gone to the police instead of coming here, to the goddamn airport, everything might have turned out beautifully. She might have written a story about it in the newspaper. Instead, Anouk had missed school and she had probably been fired in absentia from her degrading job, and now all she could do was go back to foggy Bordeaux and beg someone, a family friend or her philandering ex-husband, to take pity on them. No one can stay in a hotel room this long without going mental, in the same clothes, washing underwear in the sink and eating salty dinners every night.

  “We’ll go in the morning.”

  “Where?”

  “The newsroom first. I will finalize our bill, downstairs. Then the concierge will find us a taxi and the three of us will go and we will stay safely in the newsroom until the story, your story, is published. Then it will be safe for you.”

  “And you?”

  “That doesn’t matter. I have to go south the moment your story goes to press.”

  “You’re wanted for murder.”

  “I am and I’m not.”

  “It was on the television news.”

  Kruse filled up her glass of wine, and filled a glass for himself. “I know what happened now, on the night Lily was killed, what really happened and why.”

  “Who is Lily?” Anouk had followed him into the salon.

  Without a word, Annette stood up and walked Anouk into the bedroom and turned on the television. It was the end of the day, so cartoons were on. “Monsieur Kruse said we could have pizza tonight again and watch a movie,” he heard the girl whisper.

  When Annette was back in the room with him, the door closed, she pulled a notepad from her bag and pushed the wet hair from her eyes.

  He had taken the copy of the story Madame Lareau wanted him to tell in the courtroom in Paris, to ruin the Gaullists. It had not mattered to him whether he told the true story or the false story, until he was in the toilet with Monsieur Meunier, who spoke so movingly of the farmhouse in the Var. Meunier had picked it out especially for Kruse, with a lovely feeling for the cicadas and the nighttime and maybe the smell of lavender and rosemary, grapevines, lemon trees. The old armoire of Provence meets the white countertops of Sweden. A dog? Why not?

  But each of the photos had been stamped on the bottom with the date July 5, 1990.

  Annette took a sip of her wine and prepared her pen. She looked up at him. “They killed your wife, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  They finished the Bordeaux and they did order a pizza, the final hotel-room pizza, Annette vowed, of her life. The only cartoon available on the movie channel was The Little Mermaid, so Anouk watched it again. Midway through each of the songs, she had learned the tune well enough to sing along. At the end, when the bad sorceress mermaid grew to gigantic proportions and threatened to kill them all, Anouk took his hand and squeezed.

  When she had packed for this trip to the hotel, Annette had thrown four storybooks into the bag. Kruse volunteered to read the bedtime book Anouk had chosen, after brushing her teeth and putting on her mismatched flannel panda and Je t’aime pyjamas and trying to pee. The book, Mimi Cracra, was a series of tales about a little girl whose curiosity and naughtiness lead her into harmless messes. Anouk laughed at the typically Canadian way he pronounced words like chien and viens. The tradition in the Annette Laferrière household was to turn out the lights, after the book, and sing a song. Annette invited Kruse to lie beside her, on the double bed adjacent to Anouk’s, and sing. She smelled of sandalwood and they were both a little drunk and faintly touching, the skin of her arm on the skin of his arm. Annette’s swallow filled the small room.

  One of the only songs he knew all the way through, apart from selections from the Mennonite hymnal, was “The Dock of the Bay.” Anouk did not know the song, and she particularly liked the whistling part. It did not bother her that it was in English.

  “More,” she said, “please.”

  Again he sang the simple song and when he was finished, the room was quiet but for the mother and daughter breathing. He turned and watched Annette by the parking-lot light that sneaked in through the curtains.

  He whispered, “Are you awake?”

  Annette smiled without opening her eyes. “I’m enjoying this enormously.”

  It was nonsense, both a lie and drunken treachery, but he imagined living with them in the big farmhouse in the Var. He dozed off, and woke just before midnight in the midst of a bloody dream. The wine had left him with a touch of vertigo. Annette had fallen asleep on her side, her dark hand on his chest. He sneaked off the bed and took off his jacket and found the blanket he had used the last time he had slept here, on the couch. He covered Annette with it and watched Anouk sleep for a while as his heart slowed. He slipped back into bed with her, and put her hand back on his chest.

  A scream, a muffled scream. Half in and half out of a dream he sat up, or tried to sit up, and the ugly Russian from Villa de l’Astrolabe and Quimper whispered for him to stay exactly where he was. He grasped a handful of Kruse’s hair. At the door another man carried Anouk out of the bedroom, sprawled in his arms like she was sleeping there or worse. Kruse knocked the ugly Russian’s hand away and hit him and rushed across the room. He reached the doorway and shouted at the man with Anouk, to stop.

  “Don’t worry. I’m coming.”

  There was a hiccup behind him and his left arm caught fire, sprayed blood. Another man, another Russian he had never seen, stepped into the bedroom from the salon and punched him in the face. Like the shot in the arm it was a graze. Kruse kicked this new man in the groin and when the man fell to his knees Kruse kicked him in the face.

  The ugly Russian was close. “Stop.”

  A younger man in silhouette, from the light of the salon, held a hatchet in one hand and a gun in the other.

  “We’re not supposed to kill you yet.” The ugly one spoke quietly and calmly, behind him. “But if we must, we must. It’s a dream of mine.”

  On the other side of the young one, Annette struggled in the salon. They had gagged her. In the two rooms he counted five men, four conscious. Kruse stepped into the salon and the ugly one hit him with the butt of his pistol, opened a cut on his forehead.

  It was difficult to see for a moment, with blood in his eyes. The man with Annette opened the door into the hallway and guided her out. She stopped herself at the threshold and reached out for Kruse.

  “I’m coming. I’m sorry.”

  “He’s right, Madame, though you might not recognize him when he arrives.” The ugly Russian stood close with his gun. Annette disappeared with her captor into the fluorescent hallway.

  The one with the hatchet copied his accent—”I’m coming. I’m sorry. I love you.”—and laughed.

  “Clean up,” said the ugly one, and the last man in the salon came into the bedroom to carry the unconscious one like a limp battering ram out of the suite.

  Now they were alone, the three of them, in the flat light of a cheap chandelier.

  “No sucker pu
nches this time, Monsieur Kruse.”

  “Where are you taking them?”

  “Tie him up.” He was so ugly he was handsome.

  Blood dripped on the floor from the wound on his arm. His left eye was a mess of gluey blood. “Can I tend to these first?”

  The ugly one eased in closer with his new Beretta, pointed it at his chest. “If you give me a good reason, we can hurt you and then kill you and what can they say?”

  “They: Joseph and Lucien?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What are you supposed to do?”

  “Tie you up. Beat on you awhile, for our pleasure. Take you south.”

  “Is that where you’re taking Annette and Anouk?”

  “Who?”

  The one with the hatchet laughed again.

  “So tie me up, then. Let’s get to work.”

  A first-time lion tamer, the one with the hatchet. Last time Kruse had seen him, in the hotel room in Quimper, he had poked him in the eye and knocked him out. The left side of his jaw had a blob of a bruise about it. He put his pistol and the hatchet on the table.

  To ease the lion tamer, Kruse turned around for him and put his hands behind his back. Kruse closed his eyes and waited for the first touch, on his wrists. He turned and slapped the rope out of the lion tamer’s hands, stunned him in the nose and wrapped the rope around his neck. The ugly one shot once. His partner the lion tamer screamed and bled from his nose. Kruse used him as a shield and guided him like a mule into the ugly one, who cussed at him and threatened him with death some more, something about murdering and fucking in confused French.

  The ugly Russian waved the gun about and took three more shots. The window clicked and then shattered behind them. Kruse stalked and trapped him and turned off the light. Cold blew into the room. He leapt away from the broken window, remaining low in the dark. He took the hatchet from the table, a moronic weapon, and threw the gun into the bedroom. The shot in the arm and the two blows in the head had replaced his faint Bordeaux headache. More shots popped into the drywall and the Russian cussed. A Beretta 92 had a nine-shot magazine. Kruse counted down and prepared himself.