by Todd Babiak
He knew, back when they accepted the deal, that it was not possible. He knew as Annette leaned over to kiss him on Christmas Eve it was not possible. One of these days it would be more than a simple security job. If he had sipped a glass or two of wine at dinner, on the top floor of splendid number 5, Rue Valadon, Kruse would have pushed the calculation aside and he would have kissed her. He would have stayed the night.
How often he wished he had done it.
Instead Kruse put his hands on her shoulders, to stop her. He tried to whisper an explanation about how badly he wanted to kiss her. But Kruse knew they would come for him. He didn’t want them to come for Annette and Anouk.
“You’re too dangerous for me, are you? You’ve already brought psychopaths into our lives. How much worse can it be?”
“No. I just mean . . .”
“You don’t have to explain, Christophe.” Annette went on the balcony for a cigarette.
Kruse gave Anouk a kiss and he closed the door and he washed the dishes. He practised the words he would say. When Annette came back in Kruse said them. As he rolled up his sleeves to wash a casserole dish, Annette asked him to leave.
• • •
Kruse had followed her boyfriend home enough times, to and from work and from bars and brasseries and restaurants and lectures, to know plenty about him. Annette had introduced them at the produce market up Rue Cler. It was a village, this neighbourhood; they had met three or four times since then, greeted one another frostily as Anouk hugged Kruse and Annette crossed her arms. Étienne Bonnet was an editorial writer at Le Figaro, the oldest and most conservative national newspaper in France. He appeared on nightly current affairs programs, to argue with socialists, and he wore his influence and fame like a medal. Kruse had broken into Bonnet’s white stone apartment twice, and had felt so miserable about it that he had not explored; the smell was enough. Bonnet was from such a steady line of wealth that money was charmingly irrelevant to him. His massive apartment was in an austere corner of the seventh arrondissement, though he would have referred to it by its more ancient, aristocratic name: le Faubourg. Étienne and Annette had met the second week of January at a conference on “smart cities” that both of them had deemed boring; the editorialist had found the story of their meeting so charming he had related it to Kruse twice.
On his walk home from Rue d’Andigné Kruse did it again. He broke into Étienne’s apartment at the Place du Palais Bourbon and hated himself for it. Lights were out, but there was enough shine from the streets and from his small flashlight that Étienne’s art collection, a blend of old and new, reminded him of what he had seen in the houses and penthouses of his clients in Toronto and New York: it was chosen by a professional, tasteful but impossible to love. The furniture was modern and the walls were white. Kruse startled himself when he walked into one of the bedrooms and shone a light on another man—himself. The walls were covered in mirrors, like a gym or a funhouse. The bed was round and in the middle of the room. He could see Annette in here, feeling . . . how would she feel?
Sick was how he felt, and blind and weak and limp and stupid. He didn’t want to sit on or in anything, so he turned off his light and leaned against a wall in the semi-darkness.
Just after eleven the door opened and Étienne entered the apartment in mid-lecture. Kruse thought at first, with horror, that it was Annette. He prepared to leave by the nearest window. But it was another woman, someone new, and Étienne was preparing to give her the tour. First, the provenance of the place: René de Chambrun, the famous lawyer and businessman of the famille Pineton de Chambrun, had lived in these rooms. The young woman, who spoke in a small and awed voice, seemed to understand little of what Étienne said. Or no more than Kruse, anyway. The need to extract noble blood in a country that had given up on nobility was a quirk the editorialist shared with others Kruse had met since moving to France: two or three clients, some of the mayor’s people. The man who had killed Lily, Jean-François de Musset, told similar stories after a bottle of wine. Everyone with ambition was secret royalty.
They moved from room to room, Étienne speaking with pretend humility about this petit piece or that petit discovery, vases and sculptures and paintings. They were nearing the room of mirrors when the woman asked if she might sneak into the bathroom for a moment. Kruse considered hiding, as Étienne Bonnet’s hard leather shoes clopped toward the room, but decided against it. The light clicked on and Kruse wrapped his arm across Étienne’s face, shushed his scream with his index finger in the mirror.
“Does Annette know?”
Étienne whispered too. “I am calling the police.”
“Go ahead. Please.”
The man breathed, considered. “What do you want?”
“If you’re going to do this, break it off with Annette. She thinks—”
“We aren’t married. She is free to do as she pleases, as I am.” Released from his grip, Étienne stepped far from Kruse and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a tall and thin man who reminded Kruse of an adolescent bloodhound, with a face ready to sag into real dignity. “And you, lecturing me. A typical American, preaching ethics while invading a man’s privacy. You’re a criminal who has broken into my apartment, an ugly nobody without the courage to—”
“She has a daughter. She needs—”
The door opened down the hall.
“She needs you, Christophe? Then why has she chosen me?”
It was not a question he could answer.
Étienne fixed his tie. “You’re pathetic.”
Kruse slipped toward the doorway, to be sure the young woman would not see him. She walked in the wrong direction, in a small black dress. Blond and thin, short, with high heels. “Enjoy yourself, Étienne.”
“Oh, I always do.”
The editorialist waited until Kruse was nearly out the door before he called out. “Are you lost, sweet darling?”
FOUR
Avenue Bosquet, Paris
BY SIX IN THE MORNING, KRUSE HAD ALREADY JOGGED AROUND THE perimeter of Champ-de-Mars park. He had sprinted through the dewy grass. His sit-ups and push-ups were finished and because sunrise, that April morning, was an actual sunrise, he shadowboxed with a comically long adversary.
It was not really a job offer. Zoé Moquin could not un-say what she had said, and she had said too much. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed across the river from his apartment. Instead of following the procedures and rituals of justice, the leading French security agency had sought the services of a mercenary. He could not un-know what he knew.
All he could do now was pack what he needed and fly to Toronto. It was a risk but he could not leave without a goodbye. He would wait on the sidewalk of Rue Valadon until they came down and he would pretend it was an accident and he would casually offer to walk Anouk to school.
He sweated in front of his own building on Avenue Bosquet, in his black hooded sweatshirt. There was a strong smell about the door. Kruse pulled the key out of the hole and stepped back. He crossed to the boulevard, then to the opposite boulevard, and looked up. It was still dark in the apartment, but in the sharp morning light, coming through the opposite windows, he saw a shadow move. The sweet smell remained in his nostrils, reminded him of something—someone. Men he knew in Paris who wore cologne did not wear this sort: the candy scent of a nightclub lineup, underneath the cigarette smoke. He thought about it for a moment and nearly smiled.
The smell was stronger in the stairwell, so strong that when he opened his apartment door he wondered if it would ever depart from his nostrils.
Tzvi Meisels stood in the kitchen, eating a croissant over a saucer. “This is not how I taught you to enter an apartment, Christopher. I was going to hide and jump out, like in the movies, test you. You would have failed. And then what?” Flakes of bread fell from his lips. “We would have to reconstruct our friendship.”
“I smelled you from half a mile away, Tzvi.”
“What do you mean?”
&nbs
p; “Your cologne. When did you put it on?”
“After they phoned me. Before I left for the airport. It is a new scent. You think too robust?”
“I think too robust.”
Though Tzvi had been his father since he was orphaned at seventeen, and though they had grappled and boxed and disarmed one another thousands of times, they had never actually hugged for the sake of hugging. It would have seemed bizarre to shake hands or to say “I’m so glad to see you,” though Kruse was so glad to see him his eyes glistened with it.
“But it is favourable, you think? It smells favourably?”
“Welcome to Paris, Tzvi.”
“You know this apartment is bugged. You know that, yes?”
Kruse did not know but he would not admit it now, out loud. It was as though he were carrying a piano up a long set of stairs and someone had finally offered to take it from him. He was comically tired. His legs were weak with the relief of seeing Tzvi. The front of his mentor’s suit jacket and tie were sprinkled with the beige destruction of a croissant.
In an instant he thought over everything he had done and said in the apartment since December. Their company, MagaSecure, had bugged offices and a few houses for clients, so Kruse knew well enough where to look: behind and around paintings and mirrors, in light fixtures. It took him less than a minute to find a microphone on top of a nineteenth-century painting of a Provençal landscape: a hunter dressed in layers of brown, off-brown, and almost-yellow with his hound.
“I don’t have visitors here. A few phone calls, but I’ve been careful.”
“So they are serious, these Frenchies?”
Kruse shrugged.
“There is no reason to discuss here, is there? In your bugged penthouse?”
“No.”
“It is a handsome home, I will admit.” Since he had last seen him, Tzvi’s accent sounded as though it had been dipped in glue. “You won the lottery?”
“Not exactly.”
“You can tell me all about it on the way to my hotel.”
“I’ll shower and get dressed.”
Tzvi walked across the kitchen and into the salon, stood next to him. He picked up a photograph of Lily and stared at it for some time. While he did, Kruse could not move. “Our beautiful girl.” Tzvi took in a deep breath. “I have been worried about you, my boy.”
If I leave, she dies.
“You are chasing phantoms in Paris, I think.”
Instead of blubbering a response, Kruse lifted a finger—a moment, a moment—and walked to the shower. On his way he stopped in Anouk’s bedroom, where she had never slept, which was really Lily’s bedroom, and closed the door and breathed. Through Tzvi he understood that by any objective analysis he was half a step away from clinical insanity.
After the shower he dressed in his finest suit, a blue one, and stared at himself in the sweaty mirror. On the other side of the wall he could hear Tzvi rooting about in his drawers and closets, singing “Personal Jesus.” Kruse couldn’t remember the name of the band. One of those bands with men who wear eye makeup. It had been popular a few years earlier and Tzvi had come to love it, though he had the lyrics all wrong. “I am a believer,” he sang. “You know I am at the gay bar.”
Outside, the brief morning interlude of sunshine had transformed to light rain.
Kruse opened the bathroom door and, to interrupt and hopefully stop “Personal Jesus,” shouted, “Where’s your hotel?”
“The Morris.”
“I’ve never heard of it. Where is it?”
“By the Louvre.”
“You’re staying at Le Meurice?”
“Well. Listen to you.” Tzvi walked into the hallway, stood at the bathroom door, and mimed climbing an invisible wall. “Le Meurice-uh. Only the best of accommodations for me.”
“Who’s paying?”
Tzvi winked. “I am here for a bit of gentle tourism, my boy, that is all. I took the liberty of packing for you. All you need are toilet things.”
“Toiletries.”
“That.”
“Where are we going, Tzvi?”
“Outside.”
The wind had come up and tossed the soft rain into their faces. Kruse handed Tzvi the heavier umbrella. They walked east along Rue du Champ de Mars, past the aromatic cheese shop.
“Who called you here? The DPSD?”
“It is my profound love of architecture that called me here.”
Kruse shook his head.
“You have not told me anything in a year. Not since you arrived in this bastard shithole of a country. Why should I tell you anything?”
They walked north toward the water, the Quai d’Orsay, where he hoped the new wind and the rain would overwhelm the tightness in his chest. The morning commute had not ended, so taxis were scarce. Tzvi vibrated with smugness. The city opened up at the river, past the roaring, honking madness at Les Invalides. The top third of the Eiffel Tower poked into a low cloud. In all their time together, Tzvi had avoided France. He would not forgive Parisians for betraying his uncle and sending him to Auschwitz, but when they arrived at the quay he whistled and slapped the concrete of the embankment and cussed and admitted defeat: he asked his protégé to hold his umbrella and took a photograph.
“What do you want to know?”
Tzvi looked at him the way he had always looked at him when he was slammed with Canadian imprecision. Then he looked up to the clouds. “How can I answer such a stupid question? I do not know what I want to know when I know nothing.”
There was time, so Kruse told him everything. In Vaison-la-Romaine, their landlord had been a baker and local titan named Jean-François de Musset. He had planned to run for the National Front in the coming elections. Evelyn worked for Jean-François and for the party. She was also, Kruse learned in the press, sleeping with him. On Halloween night, Jean-François accidentally killed Lily with his car. He was drunk. More than drunk. And when that night Jean-François de Musset was murdered the police assumed it was Evelyn—his lover, roaring with revenge. Only it was not Evelyn.
“It was the gangsters.”
“Yes.”
“And the gangsters worked for the mayor of Paris.”
“Yes.”
Kruse hunted Evelyn, just as the police and the gangsters hunted her. And he failed to save her, just as he had failed to save Lily.
“None of it was supposed to happen.” Kruse led him to the bridge. “They had drugged Jean-François, filled him with wine, hoping he would drive his Mercedes into a tree. This would end his political career. Only he didn’t run into a tree. He ran into Lily.”
“The mayor of Paris ordered this?”
“His chief of staff.”
“And this was not a national scandal?”
“Only because the journalist who knew about it agreed not to write the story.”
“At least de Musset is dead.”
“It was not his fault.”
“Only a Mennonite would defend his wife’s lover and the murderer of his child. It’s dangerous, the way you think.”
“And I know the journalist.”
He tumbled into embarrassment as he spoke of Anouk and Annette. It always pleased Tzvi to hear a confession. He folded his arm in with Kruse’s and they shared one umbrella, walked like elderly lovers across the Pont de la Concorde, crammed with cars and tourist buses. They stopped for a moment to look down at the Seine. Tzvi asked for clarification: his apartment, Annette’s apartment, their money, their deal, their “lifelong” protection deal from the City of Paris. All for holding on to their abominable secret. A Bateau Mouche hummed through the dark water.
“I am not a psychiatrist, Christopher, but you might have waited a few minutes before falling for another woman. A woman with a child, of all things. A dalliance I could see. Evelyn had betrayed you. You had ungentlemanly urges. But—”
“It wasn’t intentional.”
“What was not intentional?”
“Falling for her.”
Tzv
i lifted his nose, as though he had caught a whiff of the sewer. “Christopher?”
“Yes.”
“You did not even dally with her, did you?”
His mentor and business partner did not carry the romance gene. Tzvi was bisexual and, in the twenty years Kruse had known him, had never extended a relationship beyond a week. To live as he had lived in Paris these past months, watching Annette from an irritating distance, waiting for—for what?—would be incomprehensible to Tzvi. On the bridge, presented with Tzvi’s simple question, a question he would not answer, life since December was just as incomprehensible to Kruse.
“You wanted to keep them safe.”
“Yes.”
“So you reject them in some way, this little girl and her homely mother? To create a safe distance.”
“She isn’t homely.” Kruse pulled Tzvi along, to cross the bridge. “But I knew they would come for me and I was right.”
“You want to be the daddy.”
“She’s seeing another man.”
“Of course. Of course she is. And I imagine he’s dallying with her right now.” Tzvi looked up at the clouds again, asked in Hebrew for God to send a lightning bolt of correcting wisdom down to his student. “My boy, if you had done the correct thing, if you had asked me for advice, this would not have happened. As you know and appreciate, smarter men than you, much smarter and much richer, pay me thousands of dollars for my counsel. For you it is always free. But no. You have to be Monsieur Lies and Secrets, Monsieur Heartbreak.”
They passed the obelisk in Place de la Concorde and Tzvi tried to figure out where they must have put the guillotine for maximum theatrical impact.
To the right, at the fountain leading to the Tuileries and the Louvre, Kruse spotted a man in black walking into a grove of plane trees. He was the only one in the Tuileries without an umbrella, an amateur move, and he walked too quickly, on his tiptoes. He sneaked. Arm in arm again Kruse led Tzvi toward the fountain and positioned himself so he could watch the amateur spy and make it seem he was listening politely to the lecture about the importance of dallying-and-leaving and of listening to one’s mentor. Men and women stared as they passed. It was against custom, this far from the Mediterranean, for men to be affectionate in public. Tzvi was not working, not seeking invisibility, so he smirked. He wore a brown suit, a blue tie, and gleaming shoes, all new since Kruse had left Toronto. His head was freshly shaved.