by Todd Babiak
The men whisper-shouted into each other’s faces, spun like little boys at the lake mustering the courage to jump into the cold water. They called out for him. Ahmed! Ahmed! One punched another in the shoulder and ordered him to go. This one ran too, though he was still conscious when he hit the floor. He called out for help before Kruse could silence him. What Tzvi wanted him to do now was to finish each of them. The idea was nauseating. More shouting and calling out from the end of the hall. Ahmed! Naseer?
It took two years, when he was a teenager, to teach calm to his body. Before a fight or during a fight, when a larger man was mauling him, when every fibre in his brain was given to panic, he learned to breathe himself into stillness. Somehow the process had a smell, of the bamboo mat in the entrance of the Krav Maga studio off St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. It was nearly always wet, from melting snow in the winter and rain in the other three seasons, and fragrant. The third most courageous of the young men jogged into the rope and stumbled, hooted and swung at imaginary foes. Kruse took him down and covered him with a blood choke. The man hummed and squirmed and scratched at Kruse, tried to bite him until he went limp.
That left four, the four most frightened, to argue and call out for their fallen friends. One of them stepped forward and aimed into the darkness and shot three times. One of the bullets was so close Kruse could feel it pass.
“Who is it?” The shortest and stockiest of them had a deep voice. He switched from Arabic to simple French. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Kruse would not reveal his location or his accent. As quietly as he could manage, he disarmed and stacked the three fallen men against the wall to leave the corridor open. He crouched down again, the night vision goggles heavy on his face. The one who had spoken fell to his knees and crawled, feeling around as he made progress down the hall. Every five or six seconds, in a rhythm, he called back to his partners, “All is clear, all is clear.”
They would need someone to interrogate, so Kruse waited to see if this one would make it past him and his comrades. It was a wide hallway. The young man paused for a moment as he passed, but just for a moment. His fallen friends were breathing but the others at the back of the hall were questioning him incessantly. “What do you see, Walid? Who is there?”
Walid crawled through the corridor and touched nothing but the thin, filthy carpet underneath him, calling back, simply, “All is clear,” until it wasn’t.
At the end of the hall, Tzvi pounced on him and dragged him into the apartment.
It sounded like a gulp and a thump, and the other three shouted for him, for Walid, whose voice had been a comfort. The tallest pounded at the dead light switch and asked God to intervene. The other two did not bother to shut him up. They would not come, so Kruse sneaked toward them. No one spoke, not in words, but there was a muffled roar from the other end of the hall. Walid! The tall one took three bold steps and two timid ones. He took his gun back from his comrade and lifted it. There were tears in his eyes. With his free hand he reached out and swept invisible things aside. He was far enough from the others, so Kruse disarmed him, broke his arm, and knocked him out with hardly a whisper. His head hit the floor with another awful sound, which was enough for the remaining two. They were poorly trained, adolescents in a haunted house, feeling around for the stairwell door. The first man opened it. Kruse intercepted the second and he shrieked in fear. There was a pop and he stiffened and went limp in Kruse’s hands. In his panic the man had shot himself in the neck. Kruse wanted to undo it somehow, to start over. No, let’s try this again. But the man was dead. Kruse whispered a quick, barely conscious plea and dropped him and ran down the stairs, where he found the last of them on the first-floor landing, feeling around for the handrail.
He took the gun away from the last man and informed him, in Arabic, they were going back up the stairs together.
“I speak French, asshole,” the man said as he climbed. “Who are you?”
“A friend of Khalil al-Faruqi.”
“A friend? Have you killed my—”
“Please believe me. I really don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re not al-Faruqi’s friend.”
“Do you want to tell me where he is? I have a few questions to ask him. Then you’ll be my friend.”
The young man laughed. “I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t die. I promise.”
At the top of the stairs Kruse led him toward the suite at the end of the hall. He stopped to remove the trap. There was a shout and several shots from behind them. Kruse’s cheek burned and he spun around, knocked the gun out of the tall man’s hands and kicked him in the face. The one he had been escorting lay in the hall, two holes in his back and one in the back of his head.
He had promised.
Just outside apartment 322, dragging the unconscious tall one, Kruse realized the blood dripping from his face was his own. One of the bullets had grazed his cheek.
Tzvi shone a flashlight on him. “What the hell?”
“This one shot me.”
“How? When?”
“A moment ago.”
“How did he see you?”
“He shot blindly. Killed his friend.”
“I peeked out just a minute ago and this son of a bitch was on the floor. How could he have shot you?”
“He came to.”
“Came to from what? From death? The others out there, might they also come to? And what was he doing with a gun?”
Kruse showed Tzvi his collection of automatic handguns, tucked into the waist of his pants. “I have them all now.”
Walid was tied to a chair in the middle of the apartment, lolling and drooling. The tall one lay face-first on the floor, the end of the Persian carpet folded up in his hair. Tzvi turned him over.
“Press a wet towel to your disgusting face. We will have to stitch you.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“I learned that my beloved protégé lacks courage. Courage and intelligence.”
Kruse pointed at Walid, who looked as though he had fallen asleep in the chair.
“This is not how I raised you.”
“Enough.”
“None of those men in the hall should be alive.”
“Tzvi—”
“None! You are lucky the idiot did not kill you first and then walk in here and kill me. A man pulls a gun on you, you dispatch him. Quietly, carefully, coolly. It is legal, in fact! How do we walk past them now?”
“Quietly, carefully, coolly. What about the interrogation?”
“Al-Faruqi is on the continent somewhere, in France or Spain or Portugal. Maybe Italy. Super-helpful conversation.” Tzvi kicked the chair over. Walid hit the floor, head-first, and shouted that he would violate their mothers sexually. “Our pal here speaks Persian better than Arabic. He’s Iranian, it turns out. You know where he was last March? Buenos Aires. Do you know what he did? He convinced one of his lunatic pals to blow himself up at the Israeli embassy. He bragged about it! He called me a dirty Jew, right to my face. An absolute charmer, this one.”
“Walid.”
“What?”
“That’s his name, Walid.”
“Why do you know his name?”
“His friends were calling out to him.”
“My son, my dear son: his friends, all of them armed with handguns, drove across town to kill you. Why were they calling out in your vicinity? Now we have to walk through the hall, on our way out of here, and I don’t know how many of them are awake or asleep, dead or alive. Who has a gun?”
“No one.”
“Who will slit my wrist as I walk past?”
“Tzvi—”
“Ten minutes ago we discussed this.”
Kruse walked across the room and stood over Walid. The wound on his face throbbed as he bent over the young man.
“Walid, my friend.”
“Fuck you.”
“I can cut you out of here. I can let you stretch, drink a glass of water.”
He revived somewhat, wriggled against the ropes. “Yes. Yes. Let me go. I won’t hurt you.”
“No, no, you won’t hurt me, Walid.”
“But I can’t tell you anything. I don’t know!”
“I know your name and I know where to find you.”
“Liar.” A moment later, he squinted. “How do you know that?”
“Your friends in the hall, they decided to help me. And for my part, I don’t care if I leave you dead or alive. You did something terrible in Buenos Aires. My partner wants to make you suffer, then die.”
“He’s a Jew.”
“Oh just kill him,” said Tzvi. “Or I will.”
“Where is al-Faruqi?”
“Fuck you.”
Tzvi took out his knife and leaned over Walid. He prepared to dig into the young man’s right eye. Walid screamed and Kruse pretended to hold back Tzvi.
“Wait,” said Walid. “Wait wait.”
“I can’t hold him back much longer.”
Tzvi grunted, insulted the size of Walid’s penis in Persian, reached around Kruse and dug his fingers into the man’s face.
“He’s in Spain!”
“Where?”
“Castilla-La Mancha.”
Kruse sat up and Tzvi backed away. Castilla-La Mancha was a region, not a province or a town or a city. “Where in Castilla-La Mancha?”
“We’re not to know.”
“Who does know?”
“No one.”
Tzvi booted him in the side of the head.
“I forget the name of it. I forget!”
“The name of what, Walid?”
“There’s a bunch of them at an old farm or an old village. I was only there once.”
“It’s in Castilla-La Mancha?”
“Yes. Now let me go.”
Tzvi rummaged about for a map.
“Oh just kill me.”
“Don’t worry, Walid. They’ll never know you told me.” Kruse lay next to him. He whispered. “No one will tell them. I promise.”
Walid began to cry.
SEVEN
Paseo de la Alameda, Sigüenza
THE SIGNS IN CATALAN FADED AND DISAPPEARED. THEN CAME THE black bulls of Aragon. Kruse stopped the rented Jeep at a highway restaurant near Zaragoza and Tzvi woke up, refreshed from his nap and famished. They had both worked in Spain, and Tzvi openly complained, in the restaurant, that in recent years the enterprising Iberians had discovered a new strategy to keep the Jews away: menus.
“Ham with ham on the side with a delicate slice of ham on top, starting with a ham salad and concluding with a delightful slice of ham over melon and a steaming hot cup of ham.”
There was a forest fire in the hills; the cloudless blue sky glowed red beneath the smoke. Castilla-La Mancha was the arid world of the Don Quixote novel that had been on Evelyn’s list of books for him to read. Kruse had tried, but the story was sad in a way he did not like. Tzvi was asleep again; in a car, on the highway, he was like a baby.
It made no sense, living here. This province was central yet remote, with land too dry for decent farming and few rivers. Villages and towns were far apart. Yet it made wonderful sense, living here, if you didn’t want to be found. Just beyond the smoke of the fires, Kruse turned off the main highway and detoured north along a white-bleached secondary road. More hills, bald but for a few dark bushes, and the Jeep descended into a valley and a small city with a massive but plain medieval castle on the hill.
The outskirts of Sigüenza were dominated by warehouses and men at work in shirts that were once white. When they reached the medieval quarter Kruse pulled over in front of the right sort of hotel, El Doncel. Inside the dark lobby, set before a dark restaurant, he paid for two rooms.
The woman at the desk, in a red blazer that matched her lipstick and fingernails almost too perfectly, tilted her head at him. “Where are you from, Señor, originally? Your accent?”
Ethnicity, he had learned, was a European obsession. “What’s your guess?”
“Not American. Americans can’t speak other languages.”
“I don’t know if that’s true, Señora.”
“You’re trying so hard, enunciating so carefully. My first guess was Swiss German but you’re dressed like, I don’t know, a Belgian?” She squinted at the left side of his face, the new stitches from the gunshot, his scars. “Danish. You’re Danish.”
He wrote their made-up surnames, Olsen and Blum, on the registration card. “Does that help?”
“No, not French. Unless . . .”
Tzvi walked into the lobby. He winked at the woman behind the counter and slapped Kruse on the shoulder. “Where the hell are we?”
The clerk pointed. “Americans!”
They ate in the plaza, the only patrons, as bats flickered in the yellow-lit emptiness. Two adolescent boys, not yet old enough to care about appearances, leaned against the restaurant windows in football outfits and watched them, listened to them speak English. Tzvi chose the egg dish again, this one mixed with black pudding and peanuts and dried tomatoes. Kruse opened the map of the province of Guadalajara, where Walid had identified the compound, and that was the end of jokes about food.
Just before dawn, they drove through a protected park and, off-road, to the peak of a hill with the ruins of a Moorish tower. There was no movement about the houses and outbuildings below the tower. It was the best time of day to scout a place: in the light, before anyone was awake.
In his notebook Kruse sketched the buildings, set around a deserted chapel: three stone houses, freshly painted white and orange, with terracotta shingles and flowerpots in the courtyard. A modern yet more decrepit warehouse was on the edge of the grounds. They were delighted to find no dogs. Kruse had better eyes, so he kept watch with a rifle while Tzvi crept to the warehouse and toured the estate. Inside the warehouse, in a tidy corner, there was a long table and a chair with a computer and a printer, a fax machine. He tested doors, climbed ladders, and peeked into the windows of the hacienda.
A few automatic weapons were propped up against the wall. Tzvi spotted three women but no children, though he could not be certain. Two of the women looked young, late teens or early twenties.
“Did you see him?”
“Two of the girls were in bed with him, the bastard. There were two jugs, not bottles, of wine on the floor. A marijuana pipe on the bedside table. I might have walked into the room and smothered him with a pillow.”
They drove back into Sigüenza and completed the plan of al-Faruqi’s compound. It was a sleepy day, warm and cloudy. They visited the cathedral and the castle, spoke in near whispers, outlined their strategy. The El Doncel restaurant was mostly deserted, as the tourist season had not yet begun and, as the hotel manager had confirmed with a hint of anguish in her voice, Sigüenza was a detour for Don Quixote enthusiasts and few others. Baroque music played quietly. They sat by the window as the sun set over the tidy little city. Tzvi had grown tired of complaining and mocking the ham in every dish, and decided to order the house specialty no matter what was in it. Across the street, on the corner, black-haired lovers ducked into a doorway and kissed. In their walk through Sigüenza they had discovered that the calm and wise page of Queen Isabella, Martín Vázquez de Arce, had been killed in Grenada. With the rest of the Spanish army, he had been trying to wipe out the Moors. In the Gothic cathedral there was a statue of Vázquez de Arce, El Doncel, the Queen’s page, reading a book.
Kruse had waited for the correct moment. “If anything happens to me tomorrow—”
“A lot is going to happen. You’re going to wipe out some terrorists, bring great glory to MagaSecure and to the civilized world.”
“We’re on a mission to—”
“If you’re killing a killer, it’s not murder.”
“Oh no?”
“It’s an act of grace.”
“You say that like you actually mean it.” Kruse could not summon an appetite. The house specialty, a wine-drenched stew of mea
t and vegetables, looked and tasted and smelled like resignation. He stirred it, moved chunks of potato and turnip. “When that boy shot himself in front of me—”
“Everyone has to sleep at night.”
What Kruse could not explain to Tzvi is that he felt, felt or imagined, Lily watching him. She watched him from somewhere. And what could she see but a thug, splattered with another man’s blood? “A thug’s act of grace.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You know, in India, for hundreds of years, one of the finest things a low-born man could be was a thug. It was a calling. You had to train with a guru and if you were good enough and your heart was true enough, you would be accepted into the tribe.”
“And the point of this tribe?” Having spent a good part of his adult life with a PhD in philosophy who was not remotely proud of her husband’s profession, Kruse knew the answer to this question. It paid for her Gucci shoes.
“To eliminate the enemies of civilization so the children can sleep unharassed in their cozy beds tonight.”
“Very poetic. And entirely untrue.”
“I am comfortable with thug if it means stopping men like Khalil al-Faruqi.” Tzvi swirled his glass of wine unnecessarily, sighed. “Now, my tender savage, you were saying. If anything happens to you?”
“I want you to have the house in Toronto.” Kruse slid a letter he had prepared, as a will, along with his bank account information. “Please take care of Annette and Anouk in Paris.”
“Take care of them? I can’t take care of me.”
“Pretend they’re clients. The fee is my house.”
Tzvi looked at the letter for a moment, folded it, and put it in his inside pocket. “No one can hurt us. We can even sleep a few hours. Dream ourselves into it, like always.”