by Todd Babiak
“I’ve never done this.”
“In December you walked into an apartment full of professionals to do what? Oh yes, to kill a nose-less psychopath.”
“I walked into that apartment to rescue a woman and her daughter. And I didn’t kill the psychopath.”
“You just gave him permanent brain damage.”
“His own brother killed him, Tzvi.”
“Unharassed in their cozy beds tonight.”
• • •
Kruse could not sleep after two in the morning, when the first crack of thunder woke him into worry. He shadowboxed to an all-night political talk show on the radio and nearly fainted with hunger. If there was a heaven, a committee of judgment, he was not afraid of God. He was afraid of what his daughter would feel and what his Mennonite parents would say, watching him prepare to murder a man for money. Allan and Nettie would petition the Lord for a well-timed bolt of lightning, a heart attack, to prevent it. This was essential to their calculation: murder is evil, but if God chooses to kill a man it is a divine welcome.
The air was still but charged at four thirty, when they stepped out of the lobby of El Doncel into the darkness and quiet of Sigüenza. Not a drop of rain had fallen, but the smell of wet dust was in the air. Tzvi closed his eyes, whispered to himself like an Orthodox student. They passed through the park without seeing another vehicle. The rain began to fall, first in sprinkles and then in a torrent, as they neared the Moorish hill.
Already the soil had gone muddy. The Jeep slithered up to their parking spot on the distant side of the tower. He closed his eyes, breathed.
“Christopher. You are prepared?”
“Probably not.”
Tzvi rubbed his hands together. “You want me to tell you why I quit?”
“One never quits Mossad.”
Tzvi made quotation marks with his fingers. “Quit Mossad.”
Kruse turned off the Jeep and its wipers.
“An Israeli diplomat, a trade representative for agriculture, was in the embassy in London in 1972. He opened a letter. This was a bomb. His name was Shachori. He had known my father. Black September claimed it, and we tortured an asshole in Damascus until he ratted out the killer. I mean, the actual man who manufactured and sent the thing, the scientist. He lived in Cairo. We did our research, like this, we watched the place. Who goes in and who goes out. In the middle of the night we broke into the apartment like a couple of squirrels. There was no one else in the suite, we were sure of it. Until there was.”
“Who?”
“A boy. Eleven years old. He walked down the hall in his underwear. Nothing in our research suggested he would be in the apartment. But he was.”
“And?”
“The kid was tall. He did not look like a kid, not in the light we had.” Tzvi paused for a long time, so long that Kruse thought this was perhaps the end of the story. Then he took a deep breath and touched the digital clock on the truck radio. “I killed him. I killed him, and his father walked out of his bedroom, naked. It was a hot night. He knew we would come, the father. He did not beg for his life or try to fight us or escape. There were no declarations, no prayers. It no longer mattered that we were in his home. He bent over his son and rubbed his hair and wept so quietly, with—I do not know what to call it—terrible nobility.”
“What did you do?”
“I waited until he looked up at me and I told him who I was and I shot him in the forehead.”
Kruse watched him.
“So what, Christopher, can you do with that?”
It was not a question to answer but Kruse didn’t move for a few minutes as they watched the compound below, in the rain. When he was ready, Tzvi said so. There was nothing more to discuss about their plan, about what they would do first, then second, so they put on their grey rain jackets and gathered their weapons. They wished each other good luck and opened the doors and stepped into the mud. It was a blessing: the rain and the low cloud extended the night and drowned the noise of their footsteps. They entered the courtyard, freshly painted and decorated with spring flowers. There was a well in the middle of it, not a fountain, which seemed just then the difference between a French and a Spanish village: water is not worth celebrating if you cannot find any. No one stood guard, not in the rain and not in any of the windows. Tzvi crept around the well, and Kruse, who had been thinking it all morning, put his hand on his master’s wet shoulder and whispered, “This is wrong.”
Tzvi wiped the rain from his face. “Of course it is. And it is right too, Christopher.”
“We can go back.”
“We cannot go back. If it helps, for it does help me, think of all the people—children—he murdered. Or do not think of it as revenge at all. It is simply what we do. We are mountain vipers. In the village is our breakfast. We feel nothing. We kill and we go.”
Kruse stood in the rain.
“This is what I trained you to do.” If any of the men or women woke up and walked to the window they would be caught, but Tzvi waited at the well and held his eyes on Kruse’s until he nodded. “Yes?”
There was no way to answer.
“It will be over quickly. You can weep in the car.”
Tzvi ran over the wet stones to the open door of the stable, attached to the complex of two-storey houses. They removed their noisy rain jackets and their boots. It smelled of shit in the stable but there was only a cat and her kittens, curled up in the corner. The chickens slept elsewhere.
The first building, connected to the stable, was the kitchen. It was still a mess from the night before, or perhaps the night before that. Dirty dishes were stacked on both sides of the sink, and food that belonged in the refrigerator, yogurt and meat, sat open and stinking on the counter. Cockroaches moved over the dishes. Kruse walked past and a hidden world of fruit flies flew up in a cloud. Four men were sleeping in the living room, two on old chesterfields and two on slabs of foam. The wooden floor was cracked and dry and needed a sweep. There was a cache of six firearms—two rifles and four handguns—against the wall. None of the men was over twenty-five. They were pimply fraternity boys sleeping off last night’s kegger, dreaming of little victories. The room itself seemed to sleep. It smelled of last night’s wine, of cigarettes and marijuana and underarms, and it helped him hate them. This was an anteroom of hell. Tzvi crept to them and Kruse followed. They went back to the stable and buried the guns in a pile of hay, frightening two of the bony kittens, who stood up and stretched and went back to sleep. The next door led to a bedroom, not Khalil al-Faruqi’s but that of another man of his generation, perhaps sixty, sleeping with a very young woman with bleached blond hair. He snored unevenly, each inhalation a surprise.
At the other end of the bedroom, lousy with wine jugs and clothes and a pizza box, Tzvi reached the next door and pulled it open. The door creaked and a woman opened her eyes. Kruse put his finger to his lips and for an instant it seemed she would accept it, remain quiet and go back to sleep. She closed her eyes and opened them again, and this time she believed.
It was too dark in the room to make out much of what she saw, but she saw enough and turned to the man sleeping next to her. He wore a grey beard. The thick black hair, from the photographs of his youth, had disappeared from the top of his head. He snored noisily. Kruse had imagined a larger and more powerful man, muscles and battle scars. In the photographs he wore the fatigues of a revolutionary, like Fidel Castro, but he had the presence—even sleeping—of a flabby politician.
Before she could speak, Kruse put his hand over her mouth and dragged her off the bed. She only struggled for a moment. Tzvi opened the French doors and Kruse carried her out onto the balcony. She was naked and slight, just over five feet tall. Her skin felt and smelled warm with sleep. Tzvi closed the doors behind them. In the rain and the wind he could immediately feel her turning cold. In Spanish he called himself a soldier. He explained what they had come to do: to take away this man, a mass murderer. Her choice was simple: she could remain quiet out here o
r she could go to prison.
Kruse went back inside, yanked a blanket from the bed, and threw it out to the woman—the girl—on the balcony. Tzvi had pulled a little knife from the holster on his ankle. “I will wake him up first. He has to see my face.”
“Just do it.”
“Close the door.”
Kruse reached for the handle and saw movement in the adjacent room. The woman with the dyed blond hair reached for something beside the bed and lay back again, pretended to be asleep. He sprinted for her but not quickly enough and she sat up with a handgun. There was a yellow bruise under her left eye.
“Give it to me, Señora,” he whispered in Spanish. “No one will hurt you again.”
The woman glanced down at the man in bed, still snoring, and said, “Señorita.”
Kruse tiptoed around the bed, kept his distance. The woman was older than the other two but not by much. Perhaps she was twenty. She slipped out of bed, in panties and socks, and kept the gun on him. “What are you doing here?”
“We came for Khalil.”
“Americans?”
“Yes.”
“You will pay me how much to stay quiet?”
He was at the opposite door now. On the other side of the woman Tzvi crept into the room. His eyes were wide and hungry, as they always were before a fight. When it happened, it happened quickly: the wet girl walked into the room without any hesitation, her own eyes hungry, and startled Tzvi. He turned and hit her with the blunt end of the knife and she fell. The blond woman pulled the trigger before Kruse could hop out of the way completely and his left shoulder burned as he hit the floor. By the time he was back on his feet the fat man, al-Faruqi’s sweaty contemporary, held his own gun. Tzvi’s hands were up.
Before the thud came from behind, his shoulders tingled with it, with his error. He should have hopped on the blond woman in her bed. He should have thrown the other one over the balcony and onto the cobblestones. He should have slit al-Faruqi’s throat himself. They would have been halfway back to Sigüenza by now. They would have been halfway up the mountain with their meal.
• • •
Kruse emerged from a concussion the same way every time. It felt to him like hours had passed when it might only have been a minute or two. He woke out of a dream of the puppet theatre, Guignol and his friends mocking the kings and aristocrats, Lily laughing, Anouk.
His wrists were tied securely behind him to a straight-backed wooden chair. There were ropes around his ankles but they weren’t secured to anything. He could stand if he had to stand.
Kruse was in the corner of the living room where the men had been sleeping. One of them, with a wispy moustache and zigzags shaved in the side of his head, wore a dirty red T-shirt that said Fly Emirates. He stood smoking a cigarette. There was something in his free hand. “Good morning, American,” he said, in heavily accented English.
Pavarotti was singing “Nessun Dorma” in the kitchen. The opera itself, Turandot, didn’t make sense to him as a story but he could listen to “Nessun Dorma” all day. In this version, the chorus was sung by women—not just covered by violins. The aria rose to its marvellous conclusion and Kruse closed his eyes again, sleep on just the other side. Guignol and his little stick, whacking the fat king and flirting with the queen. Unlike Tzvi, who had always spoken of an epic battle, Kruse had always hoped to die anticlimactically, old and broken, in the palliative care unit of a Toronto hospital. Lily would have flown in from Paris or London or New York or Amsterdam to be with him. Evelyn would have brought his slippers from home. Somehow they would still be in love. She would read those poems he had always pretended to understand, Auden or someone, by a soft lamp. Maybe “Nessun Dorma” would be playing.
On the other side of his guard, in the distant bedroom, the muffled shrieks in Arabic: “You have one minute to think!”
The gauze had cleared from his view of the room. His head thumped. He could see now what the young man held: Lily’s little turtle, her doudou. Kruse carried it everywhere. It had become a part of him.
“Give the turtle to me.”
“Where did you Jews hide our guns?” The young man reached back and stuffed the doudou in his pocket. Then he opened a leather holster on his belt and pulled out a knife. It had an olive-wood handle, like the ones he had seen at the market in Vaison-la-Romaine. The young man stepped forward and leaned over Kruse, the cigarette in his mouth. With one hand he squeezed Kruse’s chin, digging deeply with his fingers. “Where?”
He placed the knife against Kruse’s cheek, at the bone. He pressed into the flesh, into the stitches from the bullet, and exhaled with a squeak of ecstasy. The blood dripped down the blade and onto his hand. A hot worm of it slid down Kruse’s face and neck and chest.
“Can I have a cigarette?” Kruse tried not to flinch, and to speak calmly. “Before you cut me again?”
The question seemed to stump the young man. He looked around but there was no one to ask.
“Smoking helps me remember where I hid things.”
The young man put the knife on the windowsill and reached again into his back pocket. For an instant Kruse thought he was going to pull out the doudou and hurt it in some way. In the distant bedroom, Tzvi shouted in Arabic cuss words and howled in pain and laughed—something like a laugh. Kruse closed his eyes, breathed himself out of panic. He wanted to call out to Tzvi, tell him he loved him, tell him God loved him, because he knew Tzvi’s secret. Secretly, Tzvi believed. It was like a sputtering engine, Tzvi’s moans in the distant room.
“What are they doing to him?”
“Cutting him up. And when they are done, they will cut you up. Then they will find your family and cut them up—everyone you love. This is what Ustaaz does to his enemies. If you hurt him he hurts you ten times.”
The young man pulled out a soft pack of cigarettes and a silver Zippo lighter. He put a smoke into Kruse’s mouth and flicked at the flint. The moment it was lit, Kruse thrust himself back in the chair and kicked up with all the force he could gather. His feet planted solidly in the young man’s groin and he squeaked and fell, dropped the cigarette and lighter. Kruse shoved himself forward and tumbled onto his side, slithered back until he could reach the lighter. The young man rolled in pain, then onto his hands and knees. He vomited and rolled onto his opposite side, told Kruse he was going to cut his fucking eyes out.
Kruse flicked the lighter on and held it as close to the rope as he could manage. The smell of his skin burning behind his back was stronger than the smell of the rope on fire but he could not stop. The young man was on his hands and knees again, spitting and mumbling. It was not a thick rope. It came free just when he thought he couldn’t take the flame another instant. He waited a moment, for the young man to retch again, and he reached quickly forward to burn the rope at his ankles.
“Wait.” The young man pointed at him, tried to stand. He spoke softly and eyed the door, worried perhaps that someone might come in and catch him in his shame. “Wait wait wait a minute.”
Kruse was up on his feet before his guard could manage it, and took two steps before he kicked him in the head. The young man didn’t move. Kruse rolled him over and pulled the doudou out of his pocket, kissed it, told it things, and put it in his jacket where it belonged. The young man had disarmed Kruse. His knives were on the coffee table, lined up like materials confiscated from a crime scene.
There was no more shouting in the distant bedroom but a man was speaking, softly and declaratively. “This is how it’s going to be, my friend.”
The door was half open. The room was crowded with the men who had been sleeping. Kruse could not see Tzvi. He could not see the blond woman. Khalil al-Faruqi wore a white robe, from a Ritz-Carlton, and matching white slippers. He pulled at his beard, as though he were trying to summon a bit of evidence. He held a tiny espresso cup between two fingers, as daintily as a prince. Kruse scanned the room for weapons.
From where he stood he could not see Tzvi but when he moved a few steps closer
he could hear him breathing hoarsely.
“Give me a name or we move on to the next arm, my friend.”
His head crunched with each beat of his heart. Behind al-Faruqi and his men: the balcony where he had taken al-Faruqi’s escort. Kruse crept back and, when he was far enough away, he ran through the living room and the kitchen. “Nessun Dorma” was finished. Pavarotti was on to that one from Tosca. He was halfway through the kitchen when he realized there were two men at a small table, eating eggs. The first to stand was a bit of a muscle man. He swung with everything he had and Kruse dodged it, pulled him off balance and stomped his knee from the side. Before the man could scream Kruse put his knee into his jaw. The second one was up and jabbed at Kruse with a knife. With his own knife Kruse simply sliced at the inside of the man’s wrist three times, up-down-up, and blood sprayed. The man backed away and ran for a tea towel, praying. Kruse knocked him out with the handle of his knife.
The balcony was just low enough to reach with a hop. Kruse pulled himself up and onto it as smoothly as he could manage and peeked into the room.
Tzvi stood in front of the opposite wall, his right arm tied to the bedpost. They had stripped him naked. There was something wrong with his left arm, hidden. It took time to understand Tzvi’s left arm was half gone. Pieces of it lay in a wretched pile of blood and flesh. From what remained of his arm, a fast drip. Tzvi stared at al-Faruqi with something like defiance. But Kruse could see what was behind it. Tzvi knew it was over. He was going to die.
The trick was to slow himself, to think. He breathed in the rain, scanned the room, made his plans. The blond woman was weeping. She held a massive set of bolt cutters.
“Cut again.”
“No!” The woman cried. The floor was uneven and the blood ran like twenty fingers. She stepped away so it would not touch her bare feet.
One of the younger men gripped the stub that remained of Tzvi’s arm and the woman lifted the bolt cutters.