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Son of France

Page 11

by Todd Babiak


  Kruse carried Tzvi out to the Jeep. The woman followed him.

  “And I know where he hid the key.”

  In the medieval centre of Guadalajara Kruse parked and found a copy shop. It was a modest place, designed for small entrepreneurs, students. There were no surveillance cameras inside or outside. He had taken twelve instant photographs of Khalil al-Faruqi on the floor of the hacienda salon. Three of them, taken together, were definitive. He blew them up and faxed them to the number Zoé Moquin had provided, without a covering letter.

  He paid his bill and he was about to leave when the clerk called out to him. A fax had come in, a rare occurrence, and it was in French. Perhaps it was for him?

  It was written in cursive, on an otherwise blank sheet.

  Revenez immédiatement. Come back immediately.

  • • •

  Santillana del Mar is a town built with old yellow stones on the North Atlantic coast of Spain. In 1879, in a cave not far from the town, a little girl discovered red paintings by paleolithic people. Between the cave and the town there is a five-star private convalescent home called Hospital Altamira. Kruse had followed the ambulance in the Jeep, a little longer than four hours. He could practically hear Tzvi cussing in Hebrew every time they hit a bump. It was not so terrible. What remained of his arm was in traction and he was attached to draining tubes; the nurse was not being miserly with painkillers.

  According to their passports they were Swiss Germans, the only sort of German Tzvi could allow himself to impersonate. His convalescent name was Hans Miller.

  The room was vast and overlooked cliffs, grand rocks, the ocean. Kruse left him with a stack of pesetas but the bill was prepaid for three weeks. Tzvi insisted on kissing him before he left.

  Kruse had already said he was sorry, hundreds of times. He knew how to disarm a woman with a gun just as he knew how to run across the street when he suspected a white Mercedes might slam into his daughter. But some miserable corner of his brain, some defect in his heart, inspired him to hesitate, and here they were. The window overlooking the sea was nearly the whole of the wall. The buttery tile was so clean the light shone off it, and soft techno music played through invisible speakers. Tzvi’s room smelled of eucalyptus. When he had arrived, a little card announced the thread count of his sheets and contained a small biography of this month’s guest chef—a Michelin-starred woman from Lyon. At five o’clock, if it all agreed with Señor Miller’s pharmaceutical cocktail, a porter would arrive with a glass of champagne.

  “My life is over,” he whispered.

  This had been a common theme: a one-armed man could no longer earn a living as a protector of the innocent.

  But little of what they did amounted to actual protection, and few of their clients were innocent. They were planners, strategy guys. The rest was usually theatre. “Stop saying that, Tzvi.”

  “In the ambulance, do you know what I thought about? What devilled me for five hours?”

  “Tzvi, stop.”

  “Hans. I am Hans from fucking Zürich.”

  “Sorry. Hans from Zürich. Stop speaking nonsense, Hans.”

  “I hope you are sorry.”

  “Hans, every cell in my body is sorry.”

  “I will never make love again, unless I pay for it. That. That is what I thought about. I think you know me. You know Hans. I am not given to wallowing.”

  “But the morphine.”

  “This is not the morphine. I am not wallowing. It is a fact. And even if I discover some ugly creature who wants, actually wants to make love to me, to gimpy old Hans, how ever will I do it? How do I balance myself on the bed, if I want to do it conventionally on some moonlit night?”

  Kruse did not want to say anything false. He had his own obsessions to contend with, on his drive north from Guadalajara.

  “Are you thinking prosthetics? If you are, you are poorer at thinking than ever I imagined.”

  “I was thinking Zoé Moquin will give us a lot of money. You don’t have to worry about work for some time, if ever. And love, if I am honest, Hans, has never been among your top considerations.”

  “So the morphine is having an effect.” He looked out the big window. The sun was a couple of hours from setting and the light was dully spectacular on the water. “I will use some of those pesetas, if I can. Perhaps a nurse will let me experiment.”

  “Perhaps, Hans. Perhaps.”

  Again they embraced, all this hugging after years of no hugging at all, and Kruse vowed he would be back soon. On his way out, he spoke with the hospital director about Hans. If any of the nurses or orderlies or doctors or physiotherapists or janitors or . . . accountants, anyone discovers herself, or himself, being propositioned by Hans they should not feel harassed. Not ideally. The morphine was having a curious effect on him.

  The director stared at him a moment, put a hand on his arm. “I understand.”

  On his way down to the Jeep, Kruse was certain he had made an error. It was an “I understand” filled with the sort of nuance he could not decipher in Spanish. He worried that by the time he was out of the parking lot someone would have quietly offered Hans a blowjob.

  It was a six-hour drive to Barcelona, to drop off the bloody Jeep and rent a room in an airport hotel. He thought of Anouk and he thought of Annette, how he had now and forever exempted himself from their lives. There would be a smell about him, assassin smell, and all good and pure people would know it. He returned to the moment he climbed onto the balcony of the hacienda: the blond woman, Bianca with the bolt cutters, and gore dripping from where Tzvi’s elbow ought to have been. If he had hopped back down, abandoned his mentor to death instead of walking in and slaughtering the masochists, would he feel better? Would he have held on to something? It grew dark and the routes were tricky in the mountains. Goats and cows were on the highway. The little war was over and there would be no more. In war we do not want to kill but we must, to protect our dear ones. He turned up the radio.

  EIGHT

  Place du Colonel Fabien, Paris

  ZOÉ MOQUIN SAT ALONG THE WALL OF THE EMPTY CAFÉ, BATHED IN grey light. It had rained constantly since Kruse’s return to Paris but just now the skies were not as dark. The clouds would soon break to allow the drowned tulips a moment to breathe. Back home they had clients in government and politics—in Toronto and Ottawa and in Washington—but none of them had ever looked like Zoé. Kruse did not know if he could make any generalizations about her: while she did not carry herself like a fashion model, she dressed like she was on a runway, with bulbs flashing about her. Her dresses were a combination of elegance and imagination he lacked the words to describe. This one: blue and soft and shimmering, with a matching hat. When he was close enough he could see the little dots on the fabric were not dots at all: they were moths, with visible legs and antennae. Insects. The blue of the dress matched the blue of her eyes. Weeks later he would congratulate himself when he remembered his thought, in this tired café of the tenth arrondissement: Surely you can’t buy a dress like that in a store.

  She did not stand to greet him when he arrived and she did not smile. In front of her, an empty espresso cup and half a glass of sparkling water. There was no music in the café, so he could hear the little echo of fizz inside the Badoit bottle. So far they had communicated only by fax: the photographs, the commandment to come back, a question, an answer.

  By the time he had reached his hotel room in Barcelona it was midnight and he was exhausted. He turned on CNN International. A story on the five men arrested for the World Trade Center bombing led into news of the mysterious death of Khalil al-Faruqi, a terrorist best known for hijackings and explosions and assassinations in the 1970s and ’80s. He had been linked to the Black September attacks at the Munich Olympics and the murder of an Israeli diplomat in Britain. One of his photos, doctored to avoid the grotesque, was included in the item. There were unconfirmed reports and rumours that the French government was planning a press conference to declare al-Faruqi the mastermind of t
he Chez Sternbergh bombing.

  A woman with a British accent, a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, declared al-Faruqi was murdered by either clandestine service operatives or, perhaps more likely, another terrorist group. The Americans could have done it, the Israelis, even the French if they were committed. Or perhaps, if he had executed the attack in Paris, al-Faruqi had done it without permission from the reigning extremists in the Middle East. “The idea that these people are united is nonsense. You can’t find two of them who agree, which is probably a blessing for the West. Al-Faruqi was not a well-loved man.”

  The segment ended with the presenter delivering some dopey aphorisms about living and dying by the sword, and a photomontage of al-Faruqi dressed like Fidel Castro, like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, with a small boy on his knee, and, finally, like a drunken gangster of the movies with a pot-belly.

  Zoé Moquin’s posture was as perfect as her lipstick. “Tell me how it happened.”

  It was something he wanted to cut out of himself. But he was honest enough. They might have been in and out like samurai in slippers. Instead it was chaos, with shrieks and with blood spraying against walls, new horrors to join with old ones that gathered in his mind before sleep.

  It did not matter to her, what they had done to Tzvi. She had waved him past it. “Tell me how he died.”

  “He begged.”

  “You see, these men are so tough when they are doing the killing.”

  “He claimed he was innocent. He said he knew nothing of the explosion on Rue des Rosiers.”

  “Really?”

  “I would say I believed him.”

  “A professional liar is bound to be good, Monsieur Kruse. And even if he were telling the truth, this was no innocent man.”

  “The DPSD is going to send assassins to find all the men you’ve judged?”

  “You saw what he was doing with your friend, with the bolt cutters? That was a specialty of his.” Her cheeks went red as she spoke. She slid her knuckles along the zinc tabletop. “It was of no strategic consequence. He would do these things, and videotape them, simply to show the Muslim Brotherhood—his clients—he was serious, cruel, that he lacked compassion. It was business. Like a job interview.”

  Apart from the Badoit bottle, the only noise in the café now was the dying rain, diesel engines on the roundabout of the plaza.

  “But what if he didn’t do it?”

  “Didn’t do what, Monsieur Kruse?”

  “Chez Sternbergh.”

  Zoé took a deep breath, righted her already stiff posture. The colour in her cheeks had faded to a soft pink. “There will be a press conference. We will neither confirm nor deny. But we will strongly hint.”

  “But what if he didn’t do it?”

  She investigated the fingernails of her left hand. “What if, indeed? What are you asking, Monsieur Kruse? You want me to pay you and then hire you to go after someone else? This is your operation. Is it complete or is it incomplete?”

  “I’m doing this for one reason.”

  “Not three million reasons?”

  “Annette and Anouk.”

  “Yes. They are in your file. What about them?”

  “I want a guarantee.”

  “What sort of guarantee? I don’t understand.”

  “You said they were in danger if I didn’t . . . take the job.”

  “I didn’t say that. Monsieur Kruse, I work for the Republic of France. I would never, never threaten the lives of innocent citizens. As what? Leverage? The money was my leverage.”

  The waiter arrived with another little coffee and bottle of Badoit.

  Zoé Moquin sighed. “It pleases me that the prostitute attacked him.”

  “Why?”

  “That it was a woman, that is all. Thank you for allowing that to happen.”

  “One thing he did say, Madame Moquin, and the women confirmed it. The CIA had paid him for information about the World Trade Center bombing. They had plans to do other work together. He had what he called proof. I don’t know if—”

  “Give it to me.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Where was he keeping this proof?”

  “Somewhere on the compound.”

  “We’ll take care of it.” She dabbed her face with the white serviette and stood up.

  “Madame. Do you have other suspects?”

  “Do we have other suspects? Again, this was your operation. It sounds to me like you have other suspects. Are you finished? If you are finished I will pay you and you will not hear from me again. It sounds to me like you aren’t finished.” She stepped away from the table. “Let me know, Monsieur Kruse.” Without saying goodbye she walked out of the café, her new heels clacking on the old wooden floor.

  Kruse drank his little coffee. When he stood up to leave he was no longer alone. Joseph stood in the doorway, in another of his crisp navy suits.

  “Good morning, my friend. It’s such a lovely coincidence to find you here, at one of my favourite cafés. And congratulations. I knew they were right to contact us. It was smooth, I imagine?”

  “You saw the news.”

  “Did Madame Moquin pay you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, that’s not so smooth. Not so smooth at all. And that face! More damned scars.”

  Kruse was so exhausted he nearly laughed.

  “I have an idea.” Joseph snapped his fingers. “How about Monsieur Claude and I drive you home?

  Outside, Joseph opened his umbrella and held it over both of them. He led Kruse across the street, past a couple of plane trees and a bus stop. There was a patch of grass and some shrubbery, then a bit of public art he could not fathom. On the other side of it, a rather bland modern building made of glass.

  “You know this place, Christopher?”

  “No.”

  “It was a big deal when they first constructed it. Even in Marseille, where I was living at the time, it was in the news. The architect was a foreigner, a sympathizer to the cause. This, my friend, is the headquarters of the Communist Party of France.”

  The word communist, to a Canadian, was an altogether different word than it would be to a Frenchman. Communists were movie monsters. Kruse remembered thinking, as a boy in bed, that every airplane passing overhead was a missile launched from the Soviets to destroy Toronto. He would die in the night, vaporized without a chance to say goodbye to his parents. In the end he did miss the chance to say goodbye to Allan and Nettie Kruse, but not because of Leonid Brezhnev.

  Although the president was still a socialist, these were not jolly times for the left wing in France. In the legislative elections, at the end of March, the Parti Socialiste had collapsed and voters had not chosen the communists as an alternative. The Soviet Union, which had once seemed a rival society, had fallen apart. The headquarters of the Communist Party was a capital of gloom.

  “Shortly after you left, I received an anonymous call. Now, who calls me anonymously? Who knows my phone number? I can’t say. It was a woman, and her number was untraceable.”

  “The call was about Khalil al-Faruqi?”

  “That’s it, Christopher—it wasn’t. The call was about one of these men.” Joseph pointed at the Communist Party headquarters. “He’s rather a loud figure, in the news quite often. A communist who is sometimes a socialist. Loud! Whenever you have a debate show, in the evenings, about unions and abortions and military spending, there he is.”

  Kruse could not remember his name but he could see him: a pudgy, red-faced, extraordinarily articulate man who leaned over tables and pointed as he spoke. In America he would not have been a politician at all. He would have been a talk show host.

  Before Joseph was through his first name, Kruse was with him. They finished it together: “Réné Chatel.”

  “What about Réné Chatel?”

  Joseph put his hand gently on Kruse’s back and they walked up the smooth concrete walk, past the blobs and sticks of white art in front of the buildin
g. They were not alone. Even in the rain, giddy American tourists took pictures. Just think of it, Helen: real life, actual communists. A large poster of Georges Marchais, leader of the party, remained in one of the central windows. In the poster his finger was up in the air, as though he was just about to deliver a devastating rebuttal.

  “That’s it, old man. I don’t know. This woman said she knew it concerned me. How? I can’t say. She spoke with an accent. A breathy German, maybe, like in the movies. She said she had evidence Réné Chatel had something to do with the Chez Sternbergh attack.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did she phone me? I don’t know. A vendetta against him? Guilt?”

  “No, I mean why would someone like Réné Chatel want to blow up a restaurant?”

  “Our dear mayor, as you know, is doing extraordinarily well. If the right can get it together, Christopher, these people—the socialists, the communists—may be finished. And I don’t mean an election cycle. I mean a generation.”

  Our dear mayor. “Can we get a meeting with him?”

  “Him?”

  “Monsieur le Maire.”

  “Why?”

  “How about this for why? My oldest friend was nearly killed, and so was I. A lot of others, none of them terribly good people, I’ll admit, are dead. Why? The mayor and his friends in the DPSD set it up. Set me up. Why, if they weren’t sure al-Faruqi did it?”

  “Let’s forget about the mayor. He’s the innocent party in this.”

  Kruse nearly laughed, to think of the mayor as an innocent party in anything. A man and a woman walked toward them on the sidewalk in thin matching raincoats. They spoke English. Kruse and Joseph stood on the fringe of the sidewalk while they passed. “A man like Chatel, a famous man, decides to risk his life and his legacy by blowing up a restaurant? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Joseph shrugged. “My mother is rather a devoted Catholic. Not a lick of it is rational, if you sit down and go through it with pen and paper. But my dear mother isn’t alone. There’s another billion of them. Religion, politics, the stock market—it’s all hocus pocus, more or less. Add some crazy into the mix.”

 

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