by Todd Babiak
He kissed them and ran out the door, down the hallway littered with fallen Corsicans and into the atrium. The lieutenant lay sprawled among the greenery, a gun in his hand.
EIGHTEEN
Place de la Porte-Maillot, Paris
THE PALAIS DES CONGRèS, IN THE SEVENTEENTH ARRONDISSEMENT, looked and smelled and felt like home. It was built with seventies concrete, with a food court and a mall and a tower. On a grey afternoon the concrete conspired with the low cloud to refute every pretty song about Paris.
He had registered as a Wall Street Journal reporter, in the city to write a series on the Maastricht Treaty—the new dream for a European Union. Annette had helped with the paperwork. At the desk in front of the conference hall they did not ask for his credentials. His name was on the list and they handed him a lanyard and a ticket for one free glass of wine at the reception. The doors to the hall were closed, but it sounded as though a war or an orgy were going on inside.
“What’s happening?”
The elegant black-haired woman at the conference desk pushed out her lips as she searched for the right phrase. “The anticipation of victory?”
There were almost five hundred delegates from two centre-right political parties, Rally for the Republic and Union for French Democracy. The coalition, and the conference, were called Union for France. A cartoonist had drawn exaggerated caricatures of the current president, François Mitterrand, and other Socialist Party ministers on the left side of the hall. On the right, even more ridiculous drawings of the Front National leader.
Kruse had expected an atmosphere of French reserve. The suit he had bought in Roissy had been cut to pieces, so he had bought another at a second-hand shop in the fifth arrondissement. He had prepared and practised questions about the common market, in case he was forced to play journalist. He carried a photograph of Philippe Laflamme into the hall and walked to the front of the room, as close to the podium as he could manage.
The mayor of Paris was speaking calmly and slowly and beautifully of his passion for the soul of France, and for a unified Europe. He spoke of a new alliance in the spring legislative elections and its vow to cut taxes and create jobs and ease the dominion of the labour unions seeking to stomp the talent and the creativity from the hearts of true Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. The lunacy and the hatred of the extreme left and the extreme right was intolerable in a country so great, so curious, so tolerant, so prepared to lead civilized nations, to lead Europe itself into the future. With each new idea and poetic flourish, the crowd before him hooted and shouted. While the mayor did not denounce President Mitterrand, the crowd did and he stepped back from the microphone and listened like a cardinal taking a communal confession.
“Oui, mes chers compatriotes. Oui.”
Three times Kruse walked around the rectangular mass of men and women standing and staring at the front of the room. Only a few of them made eye contact with him as he passed. His injuries had nearly healed; all that remained were yellowish bruises. Still, he did not have a political face and he would never learn to walk and stand like a Frenchman. If Philippe Laflamme was in the crowd he was somewhere in the middle, in brown camouflage. He was a difficult man to miss, tall and thin and entirely bald on top, with a ring of orange curls in the back and above his ears. After the speech delegates would move into another hall for l’heure de l’apéritif and, eventually, dinner.
On his way to the back of the hall, Kruse walked backwards. The mayor spoke of his close friend Charles Aznavour, who would perform for the delegates during dinner. It was rare in Canada, but from time to time, when he and Tzvi worked for politicians and celebrities, Kruse would feel that buzz of magic from certain men and women. The mayor of Paris had it, and it lived in every word. Three men and two women stood at the back of the stage, next to an enormous French flag, clapping along with everyone else. One of them, in a sombre grey suit, had a short ring of orange hair below his bald head. The moment Kruse spotted him, the mayor leaned forward and said, “Vive la république et vive la France,” and stepped away from the podium. The men and women before him behaved like well-dressed teenagers before Madonna.
Some of them moved to the stage, to touch the mayor or at least come closer to him. The rest moved to the doors, to the champagne in the hall. Kruse slammed into several of them, as he made his way toward Philippe Laflamme. He was in his early fifties, a man of confidence, a listener. Nearly as many surrounded him as the mayor, who had walked down from the stage to greet his admirers. Laflamme smiled and shook hands and nodded and peeked over the heads of everyone else—the privilege of the tall. Ten minutes later, the population had shrunk in the conference hall to twenty or thirty. Workers in dark uniforms removed chairs. Two of Laflamme’s colleagues carried the French flag down from the stage. Kruse stood in the corner, near the public restrooms, and watched.
Laflamme freed himself of the white-haired men and women who had surrounded him, and spoke to a couple of staff with clipboards. A moment later, they were escorting the mayor of Paris toward the exit. Laflamme didn’t follow. He crossed the floor to the restroom. He glanced at Kruse, who stood in shadow, but his eyes did not rest on him. His body stiffened just slightly before he pushed through the door.
A few others had gone in but all but one had left. A small man with an umbrella stood at the mirror, washing his hands and whistling. Kruse stood next to him and washed his own hands until the man departed. Laflamme was at the urinal. Kruse bent down and looked below the cubicles, to be sure they were alone, and locked the restroom door.
“Do you know who I am, Monsieur?”
Laflamme didn’t answer. Then he sighed. “I have no idea.”
“How much did you pay them to kill Evelyn?”
“You are mistaken. I’m not who you think I am, Monsieur.”
“I know you’ve spoken to Joseph Mariani, about Aix-en-Provence. You know what’s happened.”
The man did not respond.
“Do your bosses know? Were you hoping it would just go away?”
He finished at the urinal and took a step back, zipped himself up, flushed. Then he turned and sighed again, as though Kruse were a mosquito he could not squash, and approached the sink. He turned on the water without looking at Kruse or even himself in the mirror. There were a few stray orange hairs on the top of his head, and sun spots. He was a smoker. He smelled of cologne and of sour cigarettes at once. His eyes were red with fatigue.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to admit it.”
“Admit what, Monsieur?”
Kruse pulled a small tape recorder out of the inside pocket of his jacket.
“What are you planning to do with that? You are a madman. I have no idea who you are or what you are talking about. If you don’t allow me to pass and leave this room, I’ll phone the police.” He finished washing his hands and placed them under the dryer. There was a distinct tremble in his voice. When he turned away from the dryer, his breath in crisis, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a large cellular phone. Kruse took it from him and threw it up and over the cubicle doors; it crashed into the toilet.
“I’ll shout for help.”
“You have one choice.”
“No, Monsieur. You have one choice. You either let me out of here, immediately, without harming me in any way, or you go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“One choice.”
“Help!”
Kruse took a step forward, to shut him up, and Laflamme fell to his knees. He put up his hands and closed his eyes.
“You’ve taken everything from me, Monsieur Laflamme. I’m not afraid of prison or death. I’m not afraid of anything. You tell the truth—and believe me, I know the truth—and you walk out of this room and back into your life.”
“If I tell you the truth, my life is over.”
“The state will protect you.”
“In prison?”
The man’s face was at the perfect height. Every cell in Kruse’s body wanted to
crush it. “My wife was an art historian. You probably didn’t know that.”
Laflamme closed his eyes and kept them closed.
“A philosopher. A professional.”
“Please, Monsieur Kruse. Your view on all of this is naive. All I tried to do was stop an extreme political party, a party that would destroy modern France and the European Union, from—”
“Justice was one of her areas of interest. Are you listening?”
Laflamme pulled out his wallet and photographs of himself with a woman and two small children, in a garden, 1970s colours. “I’m just a man like you. I have a family. Believe me, I understand your anger.”
“She wanted me to be something else, someone else. An unsolvable problem, but we tried. One of the things she made me do was read. Read books I would have read in university, if I had gone. Plato, for example. A man has to understand Plato, in a superficial way, to survive at a dinner party with art history and philosophy professors. I read The Republic, and skipped a lot of it. Boring. Then I read Gorgias, which was much better. Do you know it?”
“Please let me go.”
“Monsieur Laflamme: focus. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“Who’s the hero of Plato’s dialogues?”
“Socrates.”
“Our Socrates didn’t like the criminal justice system, such as it was in Greece. It wasn’t effective. Do you know why?”
“Powerful people never got in trouble.”
“That isn’t it.”
“Jean-François de Musset was a Trojan Horse, Monsieur Kruse, if you want to talk about ancient Greece. He would have come in, handsome and reasonable, but the monsters were with him. French Nazis, Monsieur Kruse. He had to be stopped. And if you know anything, you know by now it was never supposed to happen the way it did. A drunk-driving charge: that is all we asked of Joseph.”
“I’ll turn on the tape recorder in a moment. Socrates thought all punishments, even capital punishments, were a level below the ultimate punishment.”
“What is that?”
“The ultimate punishment, Monsieur Laflamme, and the ultimate evil, is to commit a crime and get away with it. Do you know why?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Monsieur Laflamme.”
After ten or twelve seconds of silence he extended his hand and Kruse helped him to his feet. Laflamme corrected his posture and fixed his tie. “Turn on the tape recorder.”
Annette was nearly finished her article. All she needed was a source who wasn’t a member of a Corsican crime family to verify it, with some quotations. Kruse called her from a public telephone in the hotel attached to the Palais des congrès; he had transcribed sentences from Laflamme’s confession and repeated them to her.
When he finished saying the words and she finished writing them, her voice broke up.
“You’re okay, Christophe?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry, for all of this.”
“So am I.”
She had several photos of Lily, to use as an illustration. Le Monde would have first crack at it, but if they didn’t give her what she wanted—a full-time, senior reporter’s position—Annette would shop it elsewhere. The story began in Toronto, with a threatened marriage and its lavender-scented solution: a year in the South of France. Neither Joseph nor the Mariani family were named specifically; Joseph had agreed to speak candidly, but only as an anonymous source. Laflamme confirmed everything, claimed he acted alone.
After he phoned the quotations in to Annette, there was nothing left to do and he had nowhere to go, so he stayed for the last few minutes of the apéritif and sat at the media table for dinner, apologizing for forgetting his business cards in the hotel room. Laflamme was gone. All five hundred of them had killed Lily and Evelyn and soon the whole country would know. He sniffed and sipped their champagne, cut into their salmon. The mayor was scheduled to introduce his cher compatriote Charles Aznavour, but a gentleman from the other half of the coalition, the Union for French Democracy, said the mayor had been called away on an urgent matter.
“Fuck,” he said, out loud, in English.
His dinner companions, gentlemen and ladies in suits and dresses that had not been purchased at a second-hand shop, stood up with him. What had happened? Was he suddenly ill? Could they help in any way?
Kruse ran out of the hall and into the cool night. The driver of the first taxi he spotted, in front of the hotel, appeared to be sleeping with a newspaper opened on his face.
“Are you available?”
The newspaper moved with his voice. “Always.”
“How long will it take to get to Rue Santeuil?”
The driver, a bearded man with a thick accent, turned around and looked at him. “You’re a soldier.”
“No.”
“You look like a soldier, uncomfortable in a business suit.”
Kruse opened the door. “How long, Monsieur? I could take the metro.”
“Twelve minutes.”
It was long enough, as the driver spoke, to return to what he had been imagining: Evelyn walking up the broken path to the old yellow farmhouse behind the château, through spiderwebs, turning her ankle on a loose bit of rock, her dead daughter’s fairy wand in her hand.
She knocks on the door and Pascale answers. Women know what men do not know. Pascale allows her inside the vast foyer. Evelyn has taken something from her. Jean-François has taken something from them both. He is in the bedroom and calls out to them in the foyer and swears he does not remember, not a thing.
They do not knock. Two of them, one with long hair and another without a nose, both of them dressed like businessmen, like mayors, like priests, like generals, like fathers. Evelyn hides but she is not good at that, and these men do not speak. They walk in and Pascale screams and Lucien cuts her and says things to her dying body. They go into his bedroom and Evelyn runs out the front door. She is too frightened to be careful.
“Evelyn!” one of them calls, from Jean-François’s bedroom, where his blood smells fresh, “Darling!”
The ugly courtyard in front of the Sorbonne was deserted. He could see his champagne breath as he exited the taxi, whose driver was from Afghanistan and longed to be in London or New York, where a man could go from poor to rich in only a year or two. He could not marry and raise a child in this country of whores and faggots because a man does not own his wife and child in France—the state owns everything. La France, yes? La? Even the men are womanly. It is illegal to touch your own wife, to smack your own child if he is misbehaving. What sort of life is that, Monsieur?
Kruse did not give the driver a tip.
No one answered when he pressed the call button for the apartment. He pressed it again, and then he pressed all of them and waited for someone to buzz him in. A French elevator would never feel right. They were always too small, like mousetraps. At the top of the stairs he crept to the door and listened while he coaxed his heart and his breaths to slow. The voices of two men and a woman, not Annette. He could not make out what they were saying, not even the tone.
The door was locked. He tucked in his shirt, adjusted his brown tie, and knocked. The footsteps were heavy. One of the fighting systems he and Tzvi had folded into their work was Wing Chun, developed by a Chinese nun in the eighteenth century to circumvent other more aggressive, more masculine arts. The great innovation, in Wing Chun, is deflection: you use an opponent’s brute strength and overconfidence against him. Kruse prepared to deflect whomever or whatever opened the door, and then to attack. He had planned to teach Lily.
It would never end, as Joseph had warned him.
A tan woman in an expensive white dress opened the door, and her perfume blew over him. She was forty and severe, with a head full of blonde hair that was too big for her tiny body, like a Hollywood star. “What do you want?”
Over her shoulder he could see a man in a suit, standing in the front of the room. Others were sitting but he couldn’t make them out in the dim
orange lamplight. “Is Annette here?”
“She’s very busy. Are you a neighbour, perhaps?”
No one spoke in the apartment.
The woman closed her eyes for a moment, waiting for an answer. “Monsieur, to be frank, this is not a terrific time for a visit.”
Kruse stepped into the apartment and shoved the woman aside. She squeaked with indignation. He saw Annette but not Anouk. The large man who had been standing, with a communications device in his ear, approached Kruse with his hand straight out, to push him or warn him, something. His grip was strong, on the front of his suit, part lapel and part white shirt. Kruse looked for a moment at Annette; she appeared stunned. Was Anouk sleeping?
“This is a private conversation, Monsieur.” The man began to shove Kruse toward the door.
Kruse allowed himself to be shoved. He looked around the bodyguard. “Are you okay?”
Her eyes were red but no one had hurt her, not yet.
Kruse removed the big hand and torqued it and guided the big man to the floor by his wrist. The man squealed through his teeth. “Shh,” Kruse said, as he locked the man’s face to the white tile floor with his new black shoe. “The baby’s sleeping.”
The woman had backed into the apartment and one of the other men stood up. Whoever they were, they had come with one thug and he was on the floor. They were not accustomed to this, not the guard, not the woman, and not these men. Despite what the hotelier had said about Joseph, that he was an aristocrat, he was a pretender. Joseph vibrated with the business of his family, even if his suit fit perfectly and he spoke like the minister of culture. This woman and these men who stood up, soft around the belly, looked at him as though he had vomited.
“Christophe.” Annette stood up, from the half-shadow she had been sitting in. She lifted her own hands, slowly, and bent her knees as she approached him, as though he were an untamed animal. “They aren’t here to hurt us.”
Kruse released the man on the floor and he rolled away, cussing to himself. Annette put her hands on his chest and looked up at him.