Free Come, Barbarians by Todd Babiak Page A

sight of graffiti on the side of a hand-carved and flower-gilded building made him long to have been born in another time. He saw Evelyn now, somewhere in Paris, similarly afflicted. The imperfections in the most beautiful city in the world were, at least partly, a relief from the terrible theory every child in Canada learns as they come into adulthood: that their parents and ancestors, who had chosen to settle in this wild place, had made a mistake.
    For twenty minutes he walked around the Necker hospital again and focused more carefully, as Evelyn would, on architectural details, on art in bistro windows, on the confident manner of men selling newspapers and chocolate bars.
    One mother pushed her son or daughter in a stroller away from the elementary school and leaned down to fix the child’s jacket. The running shoes were as small as plums, lovingly tied with laces in an era of Velcro. The mother, a small, brown-haired woman dressed more for a cocktail party than an afternoon stroll, cooed and clucked and groaned in an almost sexual manner. Kruse allowed himself to think she was flaunting her good fortune. He went back early to Rue Falguière.
    “I know I said it was impossible, Monsieur, but she has arrived. Before two!” The receptionist handed Kruse a badge and asked him to fill in his name and phone number, the company he represented. He had done this so many times, in the austere lobbies of Toronto and Montreal and New York, he wrote “MagaSecure” without thinking.
    Kruse shared the elevator with two young women who had just applied perfume. The scents gave him a headache that passed when the door opened and he followed them out into the mostly deserted newsroom. Men and women were in offices, along the sloping front windows, but most of the desks were empty. The newsroom was amassive, open floor with interlocking cubicles. Every desk had a small Apple computer and a few had electric typewriters besides, holdovers of a dying era. Some of the beautiful women he had seen walking down Rue Falguière were here now, sitting at desks with newspapers, making notes, speaking clearly but quietly on the telephone. In the centre of the vastness was the only busy pod on the floor. Four men and two women sat writing or speaking on the telephone as police scanners bleeped in and bleeped out. Voices came and went, squelched away.
    One of these women, who had perfected the art of intimidation, looked up as he passed. He asked if he might be directed toward a journalist: Annette Laferrière.
    The woman frowned with her mouth but not with her eyes. With her eyes she was delighted. “Madame Laferrière is on this floor, but I don’t know if it’s correct to call her a journalist. Did someone tell you she was a journalist, Monsieur?”
    “Not me. She told a man I know.”
    “Oh she herself says she is a journalist. Splendid.” The woman stood up and flattened her skirt. Her legs were jarringly thin. She pointed across the newsroom to a cubicle against a grey wall. “That is Madame Laferrière, the great journalist.”
    “Thank you.”
    “No, no, Monsieur. Thank you.”
    Her hair was a dark and curly cascade over the arm that held up her chin as she read. Her skin was the fortunate colour of a lightly roasted nut. She sat hunched over her desk, reading from a long page, with an orange pencil. He stood over her for a moment. There was a hint of her citrus perfume above her: grapefruit. It didn’t give him a headache.
    “Madame Laferrière.”
    She dropped the orange pencil, startled, and looked up. Kruse could feel people behind him, watching. His voice had been too loud. He had said the wrong thing to the thin woman. He leaneddown now and whispered, “My name is Christopher Kruse. My wife is Evelyn.”
    Her eyes opened like a child’s before a surprise birthday cake. She stood up out of her chair. It squeaked and spun away. “What are you … why?”
    They shook hands and dealt quickly with pleasantries. Madame