by Todd Babiak
Halfway across the bridge he saw her, standing next to a silver Audi with its four-way flashers blinking. The sedan was half on and half off the sidewalk. Zoé Moquin wore a bright yellow jacket over a blue dress with a swoop about the bottom, a hint of Spanish dancing about it. He could not imagine Zoé clapping her hands, stomping her heels, and spinning around a fire. The rain began to fall. Her driver, who walked crookedly and wore a hat that seemed too large for him, opened an umbrella and held it over her. His mouth was open and his breath seemed to be making a faint hum.
“Can we give you a lift?”
“I’m enjoying the walk, thank you, Madame Moquin. Another unforgettable dress. Bravo.” Rain dripped from his nose.
She watched him and sighed. “You’ve had some early success with your research?”
“You know precisely what success we’ve had.”
“He is a very bad man.”
“How did you bug our room?”
“Room service. Your Tzvi must know.”
“I have a theory, Madame Moquin.”
“Would you like to share it?”
“We have had early success with our research because you gave it to us.”
“I gave you money, not research.”
The pedestrian and bicycle traffic on the bridge sped up around them as the rain fell harder. Her yellow jacket was immaculate. There was not even a speck on it. Zoé Moquin, he decided, did not have small children.
“You knew Tzvi would call his old colleagues in Mossad. You planted something.”
“I wouldn’t even know how to do that. You’re paranoid, Monsieur Kruse.”
It was strange to argue with a woman while a disabled man held an umbrella over her.
“You will pursue this bit of intelligence, I imagine. What will you need?”
“A car.”
“Anything else?”
“Weapons. We’ll contact you.”
“You can’t contact me, not about cars and weapons. There is a parking garage under the Louvre. I will leave an envelope at your suite, with the keys and instructions.”
“If you know who did this, Madame Moquin, why have you hired us at all?”
“First of all, I know nothing. We’re bound by certain laws and conventions, as you know. Whereas you and Monsieur Meisels . . .” She looked to her right, toward Notre-Dame. Its towers were hidden by the cloud that had dropped on the city.
“We’ll look into it.”
“And then . . .”
“Your instructions to us were quite clear, Madame. You were watching me at the library?”
“Not me. But yes.”
“Can you stop that, please?” Kruse walked past her, toward the grey Assemblée Nationale. The heavy rain bounced on its stone steps.
“Let us drive you.” Her voice sounded different when she raised it: “You may not like me but that’s no reason to soak yourself.”
Kruse soaked himself.
SIX
Allée Pierre et Marie Curie, Clichy-sous-Bois
ZOÉ MOQUIN HAD LEFT THE CAR IN A TIDY UNDERGROUND PARKING lot east of the Louvre. It was one twenty in the morning yet ballet-class piano played from hidden speakers. Kruse had a thin line of sweat along his hairline, remnants of his warm-up in the flat. It had been his tradition in Toronto, before they went out to a job: shadowbox the anxiety away. The car was supposed to be forgettable, a plain brown Renault with a dent in the driver’s door. But Moquin or her staff had tucked it in a crowd of immaculate black and silver German sedans. To park here for a day, between the palace and Les Halles, was over one thousand francs. It was not the natural habitat for a plain brown Renault.
Kruse slid their bags into the trunk next to a brown suitcase. There were two semi-automatic pistols inside the suitcase, two assault rifles, and two enormous knives.
“Jesus Christ.” Tzvi carried it into the passenger seat with him, tossed it in the back. “Who are these people?”
It felt natural to ease off into the darkness with Tzvi, the way another man might feel about going for a beer with a college pal. They had created nine strategies, based on what they might find in Clichy-sous-Bois. It was a lovely name for a suburb, but they expected everything but beauty. Tzvi, the navigator, whistled and opened the map. Kruse had studied the route and he knew the city well enough—if not les banlieues.
MagaSecure did dangerous work and he had the scars to prove it, but they had never before set forth on a job knowing that if they were successful someone would be dead before morning. It was a grotesque word: assassin. He could feel the blood pumping through his fragile stomach, but it nearly always felt this way on the night of a job—no matter what they were about to do. Kruse would not admit it aloud but Tzvi was right; he was surprised at his own confidence. He was a man of violence, no matter how much poetry he had read to please Evelyn.
The only other cars at this hour, on the north bank of the inky Seine, were taxis. The road was named after Georges Pompidou, whom Tzvi had met at a summit of European leaders in Israel after the Six Day War.
“He was prime minister at the time, the quietest. The least likely of them all, I thought, to be assassinated. He smoked a lot of cigarettes and wore too much cologne, like an awkward teenager.”
“I know someone like that.”
“Tiny mistress, minuscule, an elf princess.”
Lights twinkled off the water. Drunks and lovers walked along the quay. This is what Kruse had imagined, when he and Evelyn had planned a year in France to change their lives: quiet walks along the water, holding hands, kissing where it seemed right, returning to their apartment to dismiss the babysitter and peek on sleeping Lily.
At the walls of Bercy Park, another concrete city emerged. The splendour and peculiarity of Paris turned banal and modern and efficient, an everywhere and nowhere city, a place for cars. Paris became Canada, an almost-America, and it comforted him. He expected to see a Home Depot and a Wal-Mart. He turned onto the Périphérique and weaved between two all-night transport trucks. Tzvi did what he always did on his way to a job: he spoke his way through their progress, eventuality by eventuality. He did it with his eyes closed and moved his hands, acted it out, climbed the stairs they would climb, kicked in the door. They drove north and then northeast, on the autoroute that would take them all the way to Brussels or, if they liked, to London. The national highway was quieter than the Périphérique and the quay, with rectangular box buildings and more miserable trees, uglier signs for less-appetizing food and wares, nowhere to walk. Tzvi confirmed the last few turns and they entered a neighbourhood of long nine- and ten-storey apartment complexes, random piles of garbage, burned-out cars. On the ground floor, gathered around steps, young men and women stood drinking and smoking in the darkness. American hip hop played from a ghetto blaster. They turned to meet the headlights and their eyes shone.
Tzvi had spent another hour and a half on the phone with his contact in Mossad, going through the research the agency had collected on al-Faruqi and his French network, where he might be today. While he did, Kruse had stood on the balcony of the old abbey and looked out on the street: businesspeople with cellular phones, men and women with shopping bags, the white-haired Parisians out for a stroll, the after-school children in blazers and shirts and shorts. He envied every businessman with a briefcase, every man picking up a baguette and a basket of strawberries on his way home, every exhausted father on the cobblestones.
Their destination was down an alley and through a crumbling lot named after Marie and Pierre Curie. Someone had planted aspen trees unevenly along the fence. A narrow river of discarded water bottles, magazines, and beer cans had collected between them. For night jobs, Kruse and Tzvi wore dark grey and brown, the invisibility cloaks of vagrants, instead of black. They never wanted to be mistaken for police or commandos. To take the shine off his head, Tzvi had bought a knitted skullcap from an Arab merchant near Les Halles. It gave him the air of a devotee. The entrance was not marked with an address but it matched the descr
iption. Glass had long departed from the windows on the main floor, replaced by wood and cardboard and tape. No one loved the building enough, or hated it enough, to tag it with graffiti.
They put on their night goggles and armed themselves with the sharp, heavy, discreet knives Tzvi had brought from home. Unless there was a need for snipers, Tzvi’s philosophy was that a trained fighter always brings a knife to a gunfight. And not the Rambo bear-skinner with a compass that Zoé Moquin had included in their care package. If you have a gun or a machete, either you’ll use it or someone will use it on you. In their work, they were always outnumbered; the fewer guns in a theatre the better.
Kruse climbed the communications tower and disabled telephone service while Tzvi kept watch. They entered the building as they entered every building: silently, calmly, with authority, like telephone repairmen. The door did not have a lock and the elevator was out of order. Someone had abandoned a broken television set inside. Kruse found the electrical room at the back and popped off the breakers. Tzvi scanned the floor with his penlight to be sure there were no abandoned needles. Bits of thin glass from fluorescent tubes lay on the stairs. It smelled of fresh urine. In an alcove on the second floor a man wrapped in blankets rocked and murmured to himself.
They had expected a guard somewhere. The Mossad agent had said it was no longer a place to live so much as a gathering place for violent young men pretending to be refugees as they planned their next assault. The hallway was empty but for a cat and its shirtless owner passed out near an open door.
“Well, I am only a pretend scholar but that seems terribly un-Islamic,” said Tzvi.
Kruse dragged the man into the apartment and tried to close the door. It was broken, half off its hinges. The cat followed him inside and then back into the hall, meowed at him, rubbed against his legs as he walked. Kruse picked up the cat, loved it into a purr, and returned it to the apartment, told it to stay. He listened at each door, for French and for Arabic. Halfway down the corridor, they had heard nothing but the snores of the shirtless man.
If they were successful, if by some miracle Khalil al-Faruqi was here, their job was to “eliminate” him and take a photograph of his dead body. On every job there was a potential that someone would be killed. This is what Tzvi had told him, when he was fifteen, and what they told every student and every client: treat every fight like a fight to the death. While there was nothing his Mennonite parents could support about what he had chosen to become, Kruse tried to honour them in tonight’s true mission. If they can walk in and walk out with the information they came for and without killing any violent young men pretending to be refugees, they succeed. They remain good.
If Tzvi knew how he felt, he would try to forbid it. The spice of what they intended to do, here and elsewhere, hung heavily in the hall. They weren’t rescuing anyone or protecting anyone or preventing an attack, no matter what he tried to tell himself. Kruse stopped to breathe a moment. Tzvi pulled out the photographs one last time to shine his light on them, to stamp the images in their eyes. He kissed Kruse on the cheek. “Welcome back, my son. And to your future.”
The door of apartment 322 was, like the others, hollow. Tzvi pressed his ear to it and tried the handle. There was no point picking the lock of a door like this, so he stepped aside and counted down from five, in Hebrew. It was, as ever, Kruse’s job to kick it in. At achat he kicked and the door swung open and Tzvi whispered “My son” again and they sprinted into the apartment, into position. The main room was empty and so was the kitchen. Kruse set up. Streetlights flooded the room in flat yellow. A woman shouted in the darkness of the bedroom and a man mumbled.
Then a baby began to cry.
Tzvi cussed and ran into the bedroom. The woman screamed again but Tzvi shushed her, in Arabic. The baby cried louder. Kruse shone his light into the bedroom and opened the curtains. Tzvi was in position on the bed, behind the man. The woman—in a long white nightgown—cowered in the corner with the crying baby in her arms.
“He made a call. Fucking cell phones.”
“Should we take him out of here? Into the hall? Into the car?”
“Too late.” Tzvi addressed the man, bearded and handsome, with a Roman haircut. “We are looking for your boss, Mr. Khalil. Nothing sinister. He is an old friend from the country club.”
“Go ahead and kill me.”
Kruse sighed.
“I hate it when people say that.” Tzvi slammed his hand into the man’s ear. “Where are they coming from? This building or elsewhere?”
The man started to pray. Tzvi gave him five seconds to shut up and the man prayed all the way through. The woman joined him, rocking with her baby. Tzvi gave the man one last warning and knocked him out. The woman screamed, called them ugly devils. Kruse gently guided her by the arm out of the bedroom, and she shouted in his ear in Arabic. He was a motherless dog, an unbeliever, a murderer. She spit in his face and he calmed himself, fought his instincts. He lowered her to the couch with her baby, whispering.
It was a modest but clean apartment, a place of dignity, and when she stopped screaming Tzvi complimented her.
“You saw what just happened to your husband.”
She did not respond. The baby had stopped crying.
Tzvi pulled out his knife. “This is what I do for a living. I am paid to do it, by people who will ensure I never go to prison no matter what I do. Do you understand, Madame?”
“My baby.”
“Do you understand?”
Her voice shook. “Yes.”
“We are not here to hurt you. We love babies. We are mad for babies. We want your baby to be the president of the republic. We are only here for information. We want to leave you and your baby to get back to sleep. Your husband will wake up eventually, with a mild headache, but he will be fine too. Okay?”
“Yes.”
Kruse went into the kitchen and drew a glass of water for her, wiped the warm spittle from his face. He checked his watch. Speaking calmly had worked. The baby had fallen asleep in her arms. A girl, if the pink blankets meant anything. Kruse watched from afar. He did not want to crowd the woman.
“Now, the men your husband called.” Tzvi sat next to her. “When will they arrive?”
“They are a few kilometres away.”
“How many will come?”
“Ten, perhaps.”
“Now this is very important. Khalil al-Faruqi—where is he?”
“Monsieur, no one tells me things like this. He’s not here. Not in Paris. He is far from Paris.”
“But you have met him?”
“I have had that honour.”
“Does he travel with many men?”
“He is very wealthy. There are men and women, children.”
“Thank you. Thank you, Madame. The men who are coming, will they know where to find him?”
She looked up and prayed.
Kruse returned to the main room. “It’s a girl?”
“A girl.”
“Madame, Khalil al-Faruqi is not a real Muslim. He is an infidel himself, worse than us. He pretends. In reality, he is only a businessman.” Kruse handed her the glass of water. The baby had long eyelashes and, in the streetlight glow, a pink nose. Kruse nearly said aloud that he was always astonished by the perfection of a baby’s skin. “Think of your baby. Al-Faruqi is not mad for babies, like us. He kills them. That is his business.”
“All of you kill babies.”
Tzvi hid the woman in the closet, with her child. She insisted on covering her head, with men on the way. Tzvi tied up the groggy husband and slid a heavy bureau in front of the closet door while Kruse prepared his trap in the hall. He returned to the room and looked out the window while Tzvi stretched.
“They are coming to kill us, Christopher.”
“I know.”
“They will torture us, if they can.”
“I know.”
“They are little sadists. Ninety per cent chance they will fuck you in the ass with an inanimate objec
t. No lube. Do you want that?”
“Tzvi.”
“You cannot be thoughtful about this.”
“No.”
“I outlaw it. No thoughtfulness.”
“All right.”
“I spent a good part of my life, some of my finest years, training you to—”
“Yes yes yes.” The windows were open in the apartment. A wind had come up and it twinkled through the leaves of the parking lot aspens. The night air entered the room and cooled his neck.
“Listen to me. You know damn well why I am saying this. This is not like anything we have done before. To stop these men, you have to stop them.”
“I’ll stop them.”
“So they do not have another chance. No revenge. Not later tonight, not tomorrow, not ever.”
A white van arrived and skidded to a stop in front of the building. Seven armed men jumped out. Tzvi asked for details on the weapons and Kruse reported semi-automatic handguns, no automatic rifles, no flashlights. Tzvi kissed him on the mouth.
“Christopher, my boy, my son.”
“Yes, Tzvi. Yes.”
Tzvi slapped him. “Do not fuck around.”
Through the closet door he could hear the woman praying. He envied her. He could feel Tzvi watching him as he left the room. In the corridor he tested his trap again and crouched into position. He looked back toward the doorway at Tzvi, who winked and put his night goggles back on.
Kruse heard the clumsy, tentative footsteps on the stairs. His hands were cold, as always before a fight, and his face was hot. He willed his heart to slow. If he were to die, he was pleased he had visited Anouk one last time. He had held Annette’s hand for a moment, in her apartment. It was something.
The men were at the top of the stairwell now, quietly arguing with one another in the dark about who might go first, a communal beast of anxiety. Arabic was the fourth language Tzvi had forced him to learn, in his teens and early twenties, and it was by far the hardest to trick his mouth into speaking. But it was his favourite. One of the young men opened the door and squinted in the darkness, his chest heaving. He sprinted immediately down the hall, toward apartment 322 and Tzvi. There were no windows, so apart from some streetlight seeping under the doors it was altogether dark. The man didn’t make it. Blindly he ran straight into the taut metal cord Kruse had stretched across the hall, at neck height, and the back of his head hit the concrete floor with a hollow thock Kruse had heard too many times. The young man twitched once and lay still. Kruse gently moved him to one side of the hall.