Come, Barbarians by Todd Babiak

reading books and magazines and comics, men alone and mothers with children, messy-haired students, and the elderly in bow ties and wool dresses.
    No ugly Russians, no trim aristocrats in well-cut suits, no noseless men.
    At his desk Kruse pushed aside thoughts of well-earned psychological imbalance, thoughts that had struck him on the night of Lily’s death—he could not endure this; he would go crazy with grief—and concentrated. The eyes on him were Evelyn’s. He would walk across the beautiful room, their last beautiful European room, and take her in his arms and forgive her and kiss her and lead her out of the library and into a taxi: Charles de Gaulle,
s’il vous plaît.
    There wasn’t much to learn, in the medical literature, about noselessness. Cancer, usually. He found cases of motorcycle accidents, but in these it’s usually more than a nose that has been lost. The photographs were hideous. For twenty minutes he pretended to search for more periodicals and watched the readers. Several walked out and several walked in, but none of them held his gaze. Tzvi had been a spy, though he didn’t look like a spy. Kruse knew he would be unfit for the secret service, with his scars and what Evelyn had called his hunting little eyes.
    He oriented himself toward the entrance and exit. As quickly and as gently as he could manage, he stood up and slipped across the floor. No one looked up as he passed and, when he reached his position and scanned the room, he recognized no one.
    “Excuse me, Monsieur?” The reference librarian, with her playful half-smile, held a small envelope. She slid it across the desk and her hand rested on it a moment. She wore a wedding ring. “I was just about to bring this to you. Instead, you have come to me.”
    On the front of the envelope, in luxurious calligraphy: “Christophe Kruse.”
    “Who gave this to you?”
    “A man.”
    “Did he leave his name?”
    “No. Perhaps it is inside, Monsieur.”
    “What did he look like?”
    The librarian had red hair and light freckles. She looked more Irish than French, but this was not her second language. She smiled and pointed. “I knew you’d ask, and after he left I realized I didn’t pay close attention. He wore a suit, no tie. White shirt. Handsome in a clean and soft sort of way. He had a nose, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Not a library man. I mean, not the sort we usually see. Neither are you, of course.”
    Kruse thanked her for her help on the subject of lost noses, and for the envelope.
    “I did find one last thing, Monsieur.” She handed him a code and told him where to hunt the stacks for a back issue of a glossy national magazine. “If it isn’t there, it may be on microfilm. I don’t know how long we keep them. Was anything else helpful?”
    He decided to tell the truth.
    “Check out this last one or don’t. Perhaps it’s the same as everything else. Good luck with your project.”
    With the metro system down, he was not sure how long it would take to get back to the offices of
Le Monde.
He was more keen to open the letter than hunt through magazine stacks for another story about the unfortunate woman whose dog ate her face as she lay passed out drunk on the floor of her apartment in Lille. In the garden outside the library the benches were damp. He sat anyway, under naked branches surrounded by slick and fragrant shrubbery. A knotty statue of a man in spectacles, leaning heavily forward into the wind or, perhaps, literature, stared at Kruse. He opened the envelope and pulled out a card. The paper was bright and thick and smooth, expensive. Inside, it read, also in calligraphy, “
Oubliez votre femme. Rentrez chez vous immédiatement.
” Forget your wife. Go home now.
    Under that, in English, written in regular blue pen: “You’ll be rewarded.”
    He walked out of the garden and across the Île de la Cité, in front of what he had come to see as his daughter’s cathedral: Notre