FRENCH TODDLERS CHOOSE A SINGLE STUFFED TOY AND CARRY IT
wherever they go, a
doudou.
They remain devoted to the dirty, fading mound of dyed polyester until they reach elementary school. Then, in a ritual that changes from family to family but usually involves tears, they divorce themselves from it, an education in fidelity and loss. “Soft,” in French, is
doux.
A
doudou
is a “soft-soft.” On Lily’s first day of kindergarten, in 1992, when they were still a family, Christopher Kruse was sure he had heard the letter
r
in there. “I sleep,” in French, is
je dors.
Kruse heard
“dors-dors,”
and he convinced himself it made sense: a sleep-sleep. Even when the child says a public goodbye to her stuffed animal, at five or six or seven, the
doudou
can stay in bed with her for years—for the rest of her life.

At Lily’s school there was a wicker box just inside the classroom door for the damp-with-slobber cats and monkeys, bears, crocodiles, terriers, and fleece blankets with hawk and chicken heads. This was training for the eventual separation. In kindergarten, a three-year affair in France, the
doudou
and its consolations wait until the end of the day.

Lily had been a serial monogamist with stuffed animals back in Toronto: Ray the polar bear led to Goo the flying squirrel, to Anty the ant. In Vaison-la-Romaine she chose a blue dishrag of a turtle from her collection and, with her mother’s help, named it Marie-France.

Marie-France forever.

When they ordered him out of the house Kruse asked for a moment and tried to close the door. A gendarme in uniform blocked it with a heavy boot and a baton. In Kruse’s business the jokes about cops carried a single truth: these men, certainly the men, join the force to make up for some lack or agony, an unexpressed roar in their guts. Someone mistreated them at home. Too few people said I love you. The gendarme stood with his fellows behind, longing for and fearing at once, Kruse supposed, what might come next: hit the scar-face with the baton and stomp him with these shined black boots and bend over him and shout whatever they shout in French to make a man feel less than a man.

Kruse didn’t move. The gendarme’s breath quickened and he planted his back foot, lifted the baton.

The squat lieutenant in a grey sweater, the same sweater he had been wearing last night, elbowed the young gendarme out of the way. It was early in the morning, an hour after dawn. The smell of baking floated down from the plaza, diesel from the delivery trucks, sulphur and tobacco from the lieutenant’s freshly lit cigarette. Blood on the cuff of his old sweater had dried black. What was it? Seven, seven thirty. “Out of the house, Monsieur Kruse.”

“I need something first.”

“What?”

“It’s a private matter.”

The lieutenant had a large moustache and small eyes. He was five foot seven with a thick, boyish mess of grey-black hair that added an extra inch. His consent was a sigh.

Kruse led him across the main floor, a hard white tile that had destroyed Lily’s porcelain tea set. She was nearly four and dropped things out of a lack of focus more than clumsiness. It was not a forgiving wooden floor like the one on Foxbar Road. All she had left after six months in France were two cups, one for Daddy and one for Marie-France. Lily had been taking her own pretend tea from a miniature sugar bowl.

The stairs were marble. It was originally a horse stable, this dark little house on Rue Trogue-Pompée, attached to other horse stables behind a bourgeois street. In the early years of the twentieth century the French stopped riding horses and a researcher discovered a Roman city under a hill behind the stables. Vaison became Vaison-la-Romaine and an unnamed back alley became Rue Trogue-Pompée after a first-century historian, Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, born in one of the Roman houses. Then came the barbarians. When the tourist industry launched between the two wars, every horse stable on the block transformed into a
maison de village.
The haylofts became second floors with two generous but poorly insulated windows, marble stairways, and boxes of red gladiolas, overlooking two-thousand-year-old statues of dead emperors.

“I’ve been in here before.” The lieutenant waited for him at the threshold of Lily’s room. Fluff and plastic and torn bits of cotton lay on the floor—whatever he had not repaired with tape and glue. Kruse had planned to clean it up. Now it was evidence of something. The lieutenant bent over a moment for a better look. “You did this?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

The lieutenant stood up and adjusted his sweater, stared at Kruse for a moment and hummed. “When we were kids, Jean-François had a party and invited me. I was a few years older but he was rich. His parents were rich, and his parents’ parents. Did you know that about him?”

“No.”

“A Frenchman knows. We once knew. Today it’s more difficult, as we’re all pretending.”

“Pretending?”

“To be richer, smarter, more important than we are.”

“I suppose, Monsieur.”

“We were in here, drinking wine and singing, celebrating I can’t remember what. Maybe his engagement to Pascale. The early sixties, before everything went to shit. She was the prettiest girl in town, that black hair. That skin.”

Kruse waited until the lieutenant was finished and picked up Marie-France and stuffed it in his front pocket. He had not eaten and he had not slept, but he didn’t want food and he didn’t want sleep. The lieutenant walked down the hall to the master bedroom. One of his feet pointed in and he walked with a slight limp. Childhood polio, maybe. It was tough to imagine any force hiring a man like him today, but last night in Villedieu the younger officers had deferred to the lieutenant. He seemed to know blood better, and politics.

“You know why we’ve come to see you this morning, Monsieur Kruse?”

He did not know but he knew. “No.”

The lieutenant looked out over the gladiolas, which needed water, and the ruins. He was nearly finished his cigarette. It was cloudy and warm, a gentle mockery of a morning-after. Kruse looked out the other window. Some of his neighbours, the Moroccans and their children, gathered on the street and on the limestone gravel path that led to the cathedral and Lily’s school, École Jules Ferry, to stare at the gendarmes. It was a small town. They would have heard. They remained far enough away to avoid what the renovated horse stable now carried in its old walls, whatever virus or curse. It was a haunted house now. The Moroccans watched the gendarmes and the gendarmes looked up at the lieutenant above the gladiolas, waiting perhaps for a signal.

On the other side of the gendarmes there was a black iron fence and
beyond that statues of great forgotten men, half walls and pillars and latrines, the remains of a commercial street and a sewer, the bones of a two-thousand-year-old mansion.

The lieutenant looked at his watch. He had introduced himself the night before in Villedieu, city of God, the village down the road, but Kruse had forgotten his name. It started with a vowel. “Approximately four hours ago, someone stabbed your landlords to death in the salon of their farmhouse.” He turned slowly to Kruse. The lieutenant’s mouth was nearly always open, just slightly. He did not have the eyes of a policeman.

It was a test and Kruse received it in that spirit. The image came with a pulse of nausea but little more. He was a ruin too.

“Where were you last night, Monsieur Kruse?”

“Here.”

“All night?”

“When we left Villedieu we went to the hospital. The morgue. After that we came here.”

“At what time, please?”

“Before midnight.”

“You’ve been up there before? The farmhouse behind the château?”

“Yes.”

“Many times?”

“A few times.”

“You were involved in politics in some fashion, I think.”

“Not me.”

“Madame Kruse.”

“Yes.”

“And Madame Kruse isn’t here?”

“No, Monsieur.”

“You said ‘we.’ She came back here with you, after the hospital. You destroyed your daughter’s toys and clothes. You. Yes? And then she went out, if I may presume. When did she go out?”

Kruse wouldn’t answer that. Not yet. They looked at each other for some time, the exhaustion and lies between them like a bad odour. The lieutenant put the cigarette out in the soil of the window box and tossed the butt into the cobblestone street. It landed and bounced a foot away from Madame Boutet, the other gendarme from last night, his partner. Neither of them would have slept much.

“You have what you need? Your something?”

Kruse reached into his pocket, touched the
doudou.
“Yes, Monsieur.”

For some time the lieutenant remained at the window. “How did you know about this place?”

“This house?”

“Vaison-la-Romaine. Before you arrived, from America. How did you choose it?”

“It was in a book.”

“There is a book, in English, about Vaison. And people in America can read it. With pictures, I imagine, of this. Come to our village.” The lieutenant gestured out at the ruins, the swipe of his arm a bit of a flail. Come, barbarians, to our village. Burn it down.

It was warm and cool at once, like a Great Lakes September morning. He sat on the new sidewalk against the fence and Madame Boutet leaned against the horse stable, watching him. She looked down at Marie-France’s head and one of her legs, poking out of his front pocket. The cigarette butt the gendarme had thrown out the window sat half a metre away, a pinched wet thing speckled with soil.

His body betrayed him: coffee. Kruse didn’t want to want. He wanted to brush his teeth. Her blood remained under his fingernails and his throat was sore from shouting. The fatigue had a metallic edge, a taste. All of the shutters were closed on Rue Trogue-Pompée at this hour. One of the renovated horse stables was a jewellery store, locked down
with a metal garage door. It was November 1. Tourists had fled south to the coast, where it would be somewhere between warm and hot for another month. The crowd of Moroccan men and their sons continued to grow. Where were the girls and women? The sons, between fifteen and twenty-five, had variations on the same haircut—shaved close with razor patterns above their ears. Adidas was their brand of choice, and on a normal day their overall statement was “go fuck yourself,” an import from American hip hop. On a normal day they were tough and worldly men,
le football
and angry music, chins in the air. This morning they were boys. None of them smoked in front of their fathers. They were boys fascinated and embarrassed by Kruse, by the real thing that had happened to him last night in Villedieu.

Inside the horse stable, the phone rang. There were six gendarmes on the ground floor, all but the lieutenant in uniform. Those he could see, in front of the open window, froze. The lieutenant told everyone to shut their mouths and walked to the phone, picked it up. Evelyn would not phone. She was no idiot. Madame Boutet stepped through the open door, to listen. Kruse could not hear, from the sidewalk across the street.

Madame Boutet walked back out with cigarettes, Gitanes, and offered him one. Kruse shook his head no and she pulled one out. She used it to point inside. “A journalist.”

What if he stood up and ran around the corner, up Jules Ferry and into the graffitied alleys? Madame Boutet would scream his name and pull her gun with a shaky hand, bend her knees. Sweat would flash over her shoulders, and if she gathered the courage to pull the trigger she would miss.

Other books

Marrying Stone by Pamela Morsi

Coming Out by Danielle Steel

Jonesin' For Action by Samantha Cayto

Penniless and Purchased by Julia James

Adventurers Wanted 1) Slathbog's Gold by M.L. Forman

Ice Games by Jessica Clare

Sing as We Go by Margaret Dickinson

Champagne Toast by Brown, Melissa

Freefly by Michele Tallarita

El asesino de Gor by John Norman