by Todd Babiak
“Who are you watching?”
“No one.”
“You can bullshit the Frenchies but you cannot bullshit me.”
A waiter in a tuxedo leaned against the bar at one of the outdoor cafés, hugging a round tray. One silent couple sat under an umbrella with coffees, staring off in opposite directions. Kruse knew what Tzvi would say before he said it. They passed the fountain in silence, passed schoolchildren and busloads of seniors on their way to the Louvre.
“What kind of jackass builds a pyramid in the middle of all this?”
“The president of the republic.”
“This is why I never trust a socialist.”
“I like the pyramid.”
“Yes and you should have dallied with this woman once, maybe twice, and you should have come back to me, for Christ’s sake, because some of our clients—jackasses, yes, fools, the worst of them, the homosexuals and bored women—request you. It is so obvious, the truth of this: our Lily is gone. Gone, my darling Christopher. How did all of this machinery in your head go so wrong? And who are you looking for in the trees?”
“The people who phoned you.”
“These ghosts you are hunting, perhaps we could talk about this. I know a psychologist in Brantford.”
“Oh shut up, Tzvi.”
They turned left and walked on the limestone gravel toward the terrace and the street, Rue de Rivoli. They jaywalked and Tzvi addressed the bellmen in front of Hôtel Le Meurice as though they were old friends: handshakes, instant jokes in English, winks, and pretend handgun shots.
They entered the hotel and Tzvi straightened his already stiff posture. He walked slowly, lordly, past tapestries and Renaissance paintings toward the dining room. It smelled of bacon, Tzvi’s favourite, the angel and the devil married into slices of over-salted meat. Giant chandeliers hung over the white tablecloths and ornate tile floor. Outside, the cloud had thinned and the room glowed with golden light. They waited in silence for the maître d’ to notice them and lead them to a table near the window overlooking the street and the trees. MagaSecure was a successful company but not this successful: in all of their travels together they had never stayed at a five-star hotel.
Kruse tried to keep the displeasure from his voice. “When did they phone you?”
“Define they. Define phone.”
The waiter poured coffee in their cups and Kruse stared at Tzvi, a man who never smiled or laughed but whose eyes betrayed him.
“Yesterday. It was the middle of the afternoon. A client—you do remember those, I think?—had taken me for lunch at a sushi restaurant. I hate sushi, as you know, it is the food of the apocalypse, but what could I say? The green horseradish. If I could take that by itself, or with some brisket, then perhaps, perhaps. It was sometime after lunch when they called, as I was at the office being a bit sick. It was as though I could smell the dead fish of the Haifa port on a hot day, only it was inside me. What does Toronto have to do with Japanese fish? This is what I was thinking when they called.”
“Was it a man or a woman?”
“A man. A friend of yours. He spoke with a British accent.”
“Joseph.”
“He did not identify himself. A businessman, certainly. But he did make an offer. I countered.”
“Joseph works for the mayor of Paris.”
“He is your colleague, then.”
“His brother drugged the man who killed Lily. His brother killed Evelyn and he nearly killed me.”
“And this Joseph is your friend?”
“He’s the reason I’m still alive. His brother would have killed me. Joseph stopped it. He killed his own brother instead of me.”
“And now you both work for the mayor.”
Kruse leaned over the table and whispered, “I’m not a murderer.”
“If you’re working for the government, it isn’t murder.”
“What is it?”
“Justice.”
“The man who phoned you, Joseph Mariani, is the head of a crime family.”
“The question is, when someone offers you a million dollars, what is two million to them? Or ten? This is the morality of the story.”
“The moral.”
“Yes, yes.”
“No.”
The waiter returned to fill their cups with coffee and to take their orders. Kruse went for a French breakfast: bread, jam, a bit of cheese. Tzvi chose a variation on meat and eggs with menu language fancy enough to justify a three-hundred-franc price tag.
“My body thinks it is the middle of the night. But will that stop me from enjoying bacon? Negative.”
Behind Tzvi there was a heavy red-and-yellow tapestry, and above that an oil painting that either celebrated or mocked the British royal family as they prepared to ride out on horseback. Tzvi had a better view of the room, which comforted Kruse almost as much as having the view himself. His paranoia was, after all, a product of spending his life with Tzvi. If they were to come, whoever they were, Kruse would pull the tapestry down on them and open the window and go through the Tuileries Garden and into the grey labyrinths of the city. Now that Tzvi was here he was sure of it: they were watching, and if he refused this job they would come. The life he had imagined in December, when he allowed himself to do it, was as fanciful as the life Evelyn had imagined for them in the South of France.
He would never live a life with Annette and Anouk in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. No surgery would smooth his scars.
“My son.”
“Yes.” He realized Tzvi had been talking this whole time, about pork and the one true religion in our hearts, and how taking the step of eating pig while still loving God, the God of his own creation, made him a human being. And this is what was wrong with his crazy long-lost brothers of Arabia. They lacked the inner strength to say fuck it, I’m my own man. God can either like it or he can shove it up his ass. “Sorry, Tzvi. What?”
“Sure, it is completely halal to pick up a grenade and toss it into a restaurant. God is a flexible and encouraging fellow when you want to kill Jews. But bacon? No. No way. Not ever.”
“I’m not doing it.”
“Someone is going to do it. One of our competitors. And here is the other trouble, which you have surely considered: we know. We cannot know and not do it and go back to our lives.”
“We protect people. We don’t . . .” Kruse could not even say it out loud. “We had a deal, when we started MagaSecure.”
“No one ever asked us to hunt an anti-Semitic mass murderer.”
“There is a reason for that. Why us, really, Tzvi?”
“You do not have to believe in evil, as an absolute. But there is no word in my vocabulary for what they did in that restaurant, if not evil. And you were in it.”
“Revenge is—”
“It is not revenge, Christopher. It is justice. The simplest and most graceful justice. I’m not a young man anymore and there is something of my old work that I miss. We have protected some grotesque people. Why not un-protect some?”
“We don’t know who did it.”
“This is our job. Why us? No one is better suited.”
Kruse did not want to talk about it and said so. An organ concerto played quietly in the background. Organ music reminded him unhappily of his parents, of how they had narrowed their short lives. If he regretted his choice in career, which had led him down every one of his dark alleys, the source of his regret was Allan and Nettie Kruse’s religion. He did not know how, not precisely. If he had grown up regular, a regular boy with regular parents, he might have ended up an engineer.
“I had thirty minutes to pack. There was a chartered airplane waiting for me at Pearson, with a beautiful ageless server who spoke almost as many languages as me. My seat was a bed. She was not interested in joining me. At least that is what she said. We landed here and the Frogs picked me up at the airport. We negotiated a bit.”
“If you want to call them Frogs please do it quietly.”
“And they
brought me here. A deluxe suite. I will show you after breakfast.”
“You negotiated a bit. What does that mean, Tzvi?”
“They had negotiated with you. You had walked out. Somehow they knew I was empowered to negotiate on our behalf. They knew plenty about me.”
“Joseph.”
“And really. An Arab maniac blows up a bunch of Jews and my Christopher? This is difficult to refuse. Luckily, you had played your part.”
“We don’t know he was Arab. What was my part?”
“Hard to get. La coquette. I mean, they started with a million. I started with five.”
“Oh God.”
“We settled on three. You and I begin—”
“You. You begin.” Kruse whispered, in Hebrew: “It is not in my heart to kill.”
“My son. This century has brought us many things. Among them a truth I can relate with magnificent sincerity: it is in every heart.”
It was raining heavily again. Tourists ran from the gardens to Rue de Rivoli, the canopies of Le Meurice. Mothers and fathers crossed the street with their children, carrying them, holding their hands. Kruse longed, as ever, to trade places with them. He would be a pear-shaped man in blue jeans and sneakers with a fanny pack and a striped windbreaker that says POLO in giant letters on the front, a little girl or a little boy to protect, a wife to surprise with flowers and trips, to hold hands with at the movies.
After the blast at Chez Sternbergh there had been bloody wanderers, confused in the smoke. An elderly man, charred and ashen, picked up body parts and dropped them into a filthy garbage bag until a woman in uniform stopped him. Another woman recited devotional poetry in the corner.
In every heart.
The deluxe suite on the sixth floor was decorated with old satiny opulence. It was vast and airy, ten times larger than most hotel rooms in the capital. Tall glass-plated doors opened over the gardens. Neither of them was interested in a drink from the mini-bar, and Kruse was reluctant to sit. He leaned against the rough wallpaper, in one of the only spots on the wall he could find without a painting. The room smelled of plummy cigar smoke, one of Tzvi’s indulgences.
Neither of them removed their suit jackets. The way he was staring at him, with adoring menace, Kruse thought Tzvi might attack him for educational purposes.
“You heard about the World Trade Center?”
“Of course.”
“These Arabs have figured it out—the new way to fight. With a few shekels and an endless supply of boys with below-average IQs, you can start and sustain a war. How do we patriots respond? War planes? An army? That costs billions. And it’s exactly what the Arabs want.”
“Again, we don’t know it was Arabs.”
“Persians maybe. Anyway, your Frenchies are smart. Goddamn brilliant to ask us. We find out who did this and we kill the lunatic in semi-gruesome fashion, snap some pics, and word gets around ever so gingerly among the intelligence organizations. Next thing you know, MagaSecure does two or three of these a year. We prevent mass murders. I do something truly meaningful with the back end of my life. You retire at fifty.”
“I’m already retired.”
“Tell me, Christopher, how you are retired. Your patron has given you an apartment and a monthly stipend. Yes?”
“Yes.
“Furnished. Their furniture?”
“Yes, Tzvi.”
“Their furniture, their bugs. Maybe even video.”
Kruse looked out the window, over the gardens. Rain fell and snapped on Rue de Rivoli. Two little sisters cried in it as their parents pulled them along toward shelter. He opened the window so he might hear them. Evelyn had hated the sound of a crying child, even the sound of Lily fighting against sleep. While it did not please Kruse, it did please him to ease her into stopping. The best: get her laughing while she is still in the middle of a cry.
“And the stipend. Allow me to conjecture. I set these deals up in Mossad. Perhaps they stole my model.”
“Oh come on.”
“They say it is for services rendered. It is your reward. Bon voyage! But then . . . oops, guess what, my foreign friend? We need you to do this little thing for us. If not, no more money and no more sexy apartment. And that family you care for, down the way, one worries about their safety.”
“They haven’t threatened me yet.”
“What are you talking about? This woman—they will throw her out of her fancy new apartment and they will make sure she finds no suitable work. They will block all exits. They will invent crimes. I do not know how desperate they are but they could kidnap that little girl. She would be eating Nutella in a rented hotel room, watching Bugs Lapin with an agency goon. Close the window, please.” Tzvi stared at him, his arms crossed over his chest. “You have a house in Toronto. What else do you have, apart from me? MagaSecure and me? You cannot love a woman who is with another man. And her daughter? The more you feel for her, as you know, the more you hurt her. This, my boy, this job is how you start over.”
Tzvi had never said it, but when he spoke of his years as a government killer it was as though he were describing the best meals of his life. He was part of a group that had taken the name of the original Jewish assassins, the Sicarii, who tried to frighten the Romans out of Judea by slitting the throats of important men on the street and at parties.
But Tzvi had quit, fled, for reasons Kruse did not understand. When he discovered his teacher, in the little Krav Maga studio, Tzvi was not billing at three hundred dollars an hour. He had few students. He was a self-defence teacher with scant ambition and plenty of secret regrets, driving an eleven-year-old Volkswagen.
He said it so quietly he could not imagine his teacher would hear him. “We’re just not—”
“I am.” Tzvi moved across the room. He didn’t attack. Instead he reached for Kruse’s hand until he looked up and then he tenderly squeezed. “I always have been. And I trained you to be better than me.”
“Trained, maybe. But—”
“It is in you. As deeply as it is in me, maybe more. Otherwise you would have stopped long ago.”
Kruse wanted to argue but he did not know how. His parents had never believed him and neither had Evelyn. No matter what he said, they knew. And it frightened them. Why pretend with Tzvi?
“You can come in.”
Kruse backed into the corner, prepared himself. “Who can come in?”
The door of the deluxe suite opened and two young men he did not recognize, in well-fitted suits, led Zoé Moquin into the room. Tzvi’s French was imperfect but he understood everything and clients always understood him. His great talent, in other cultures, was a radical immersion into the manners of the place. For nearly two minutes he presented himself to Moquin and thanked her for the invitation and asked how she was faring this rainy morning. He complimented her on her red hair, pinned up again in a complex fashion, and her extraordinary dress. It was the colour of cream, the skirt shorter in the back than in the front, and open at the neck. It came with a wide and immaculate necklace.
Kruse tried so hard not to stare at Zoé that he knocked over an end table, interrupting the festival of politesse. “Why do you need us, Madame Moquin? Why not these perfectly capable men?”
Tzvi apologized for him and answered for her. “Because we are better. The best in the world. This is why they have hired us.”
For the next half-hour Kruse listened to the briefing from a distance. Zoé Moquin looked up at him every few minutes. Her perfume battled with Tzvi’s candy-factory cologne for supremacy in the room. When she suggested his apartment in the seventh would be the centre of operations, he said no. They would choose a hotel and submit the bill; it would do neither party any good to be listening in on each other. Kruse knew what Tzvi would say when they were alone and she was not listening: about her legs, her lips, the beauty mark under her left eye, the way she touched her neck when Kruse spoke to her. It was not complex, what she was asking of them. He had not closed the window all the way, and he listened to
families on the sidewalk below calling out to one another. The fundamental anxiety in the marvellous lives of the British tourists, just now, was rainwater. Mothers and fathers were creatures of hope: soon it would stop and they would go back into the gardens, all the way to the Louvre. Rain doesn’t last forever.
But it could last forever, said the children. It could.
FIVE
Rue Cujas
TZVI PROWLED THE LAMPLIT SALON OF THEIR SUITE LIKE A BOY WHO had just scored the winning goal. The childhood friend who had joined Mossad with him, and remained in Collections, was not being coy on the telephone.
“You must know this is a splendid gift you are giving me. It is a gift to me, and to you yourself, my friend, and to our great nation.”
Instead of listening to Tzvi celebrate, Kruse inspected the art on the walls. Every painting was a portrait of a French industrialist in the 1920s. The captions were mini-biographies: each of these unsmiling men had become wealthy during and after the First World War, manufacturing and selling armaments, rebuilding in the north. Together the paintings were an alternative history of the city from the one Evelyn had taught him: Paris of the poor American artist. The men on one side of the room profited from collaboration in the Second World War. The other side chose not to collaborate and their assets were nationalized by Vichy.
Tzvi repeated one name over and over into the cordless receiver: Khalil al-Faruqi. Kruse made his way to the door jamb of his bedroom, his stomach tight with worry. It was supposed to take them weeks or months to find the man who had thrown the grenade. Even as they had gone over the plan in Le Meurice, he had hoped this day would never come. His bedroom was wallpapered in white with a pattern of blueprints for fifteenth-century war inventions: a cannon with three barrels, a giant crossbow, an armoured cart, a revolving bridge. Above his bed was a black chandelier like melting wax.