Come, Barbarians (16 page)

“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 wooden 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 her 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.”

“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.”