Free Come, Barbarians by Todd Babiak Page B

Laferrière said she was concerned he might have come here, all the way to Paris, to speak to her.
    “The hotelier at the Champ de Mars gave me your name.”
    She reached up and slid an errant black curl behind her ear. “It’s not yet two. The boardrooms will be open.”
    She led him down the aisle, her colleagues watching, and spoke like a tour guide. She pointed out the political editor, the cultural editor, the international editor, and they walked into the boardroom. She closed the door. One wall was glass and looked out over gloomy Rue Falguière.
    “You spoke to Evelyn.”
    “Yes.”
    “Did she come here, Madame Laferrière?”
    “No. No, not at all. She phoned.”
    “Why you?”
    “I answered the phone.”
    “Where was she calling from?”
    “A train station in the south. But she was coming here, to Paris, and she wanted to talk about the story. It was wrong, she said.”
    “What was wrong?”
    “She said the story was wrong. That’s all she said. To be honest, Monsieur Kruse, before I spoke to her I had not read the story. I couldn’t probe.”
    “You made an appointment with her.”
    “At the hotel, yes. She was using a different name at the hotel, she told me.”
    “Agnes.”
    “Agnes May.”
    “And when you arrived to meet with her …”
    “She was gone. Gone since the middle of the night, the hotelier said. Or at least very early in the morning.”
    “Have you pursued the story since then, Madame?”
    “Yes. Yes and no. I—”
    The door opened abruptly, no knock, and startled her. A man in a suit, bald on top but long on the sides and in the back, a classy hobo, stood up military straight and huffed as though he had jogged there. His black shoes, recently shined, were the sort that give a man an extra inch.
    “What are you doing, Annette?”
    “Monsieur …”
    “Who, I wonder, is on the copy desk?”
    “Five minutes.”
    “And this man?”
    “A friend.”
    “It is lovely to have friends but this isn’t a bistro. We need you on the copy desk. Speak to your friend on your own time, yes?”
    Annette opened her mouth to respond but no sound came out.
    Kruse would have been delighted to take a handful of the editor’s preposterous hair and slam his face into his knee. Behind him, the thin woman and a few others stood watching. Proud snitches.
    “Unless you’re here because you have a story. Is that the case, Monsieur? You came with a story because Madame Laferrière represented herself as a reporter?”
    “No.”
    The editor tilted his head and smiled. Even saying the word
non
revealed his foreignness. “Ah, American?”
    “Yes.”
    Annette had gathered her papers. The editor stepped back so she could pass with short but quick, hectored steps through the door and into the newsroom. He remained close enough, with his haughty smirk, that as he passed, Kruse could smell his coconut shampoo. At Annette’s desk he apologized, not for the editor’s behaviour so much as for the inherent flaws in his gender.
    There was a thin layer of moisture in her eyes and still she could not speak. She sat down in front of her computer with defiantly good posture. Her hands trembled. A young man in jeans and a T-shirt dropped some paper in a basket on her desk, his story, and walked away without a word.
    Across the newsroom, the editor continued to watch Annette and him. Kruse picked up one of her notebooks and opened it to a blank page. He whispered as he wrote his name: “She is in trouble, and not only police trouble. Did she say anything that might help me find her?”
    “I can meet you at the end of the day, Monsieur.”
    Annette wrote an address on the back of her business card. Under it, “19h.”
    It was no longer raining but the smell of it lingered as he walked out of the lobby and onto Rue Falguière. Cars lined the street and only one of them had passengers sitting in it, a window half-cracked as they smoked. Two large and homely men in a Citroën. There was a tabac and newspaper