by Todd Babiak
“The final n is silent.”
“Yes, yes. Very French. But when you peel back just a little bit, you see the impostor.”
“Your interests are not exclusively French. What about the Italian who had a heart attack? The Greek parliamentarian, mysteriously run off the road. The Brit, the Belgians.”
“There is a phrase for you, in English. A conspiracy theorist.”
“Very good.”
“I was no friend of Pierre Cassin’s and your boss can go to hell but I’m just a modest businessman.”
Kruse looked at his watch. The others would arrive soon. A thump of fatigue hit him. He had not slept and the light was dim in the office. His head ached. “And an extremist.”
“I disagree with that word. Anyway, my political views are not a crime.”
“Unless you bomb a hostel full of refugees.”
“They weren’t refugees, you socialist asshole. They were regular immigrants like you, here to ruin the country. The Greek and the Brit wanted to ruin Europe, like your patron. How are you feeling?”
Outside it was not raining but the floodlights in the front yard illuminated a gentle mist. He knew they were coming but the room smelled sweetly of pipe tobacco and the liquor Alibert had poured. It was unusual, to feel so calm. His head thumped, exploded with pain, and then it subsided to nothing. A bed was what he wanted, more than anything, a warm, dark room. This was the sort of office Evelyn had hoped to inhabit, where she might speak with a man like this about Edmund Burke and Chateaubriand and her dead hero Benjamin Disraeli and Charles de Gaulle, about real conservatism. He yawned.
“Was it the mayor himself who sent you, Monsieur Kruse? Or one of his minions? You’ve been set up, you see. You’re a stooge.”
He looked around the room. It was difficult to focus. He could not say why he was here instead of Paris or Toronto, where he belonged. To discover something. To end something. The top of his head tingled, as though it were raining rice on him.
“You came here to, what, kill me? To punish me? Then why am I here, in my office, drinking an Armagnac? You could have killed me twenty times by now. And I know you’re capable. My worthless employees in the foyer: I am not a warrior, but I imagine it would have been much simpler to kill them than to destroy their spirits.”
“I am here . . .” he slurred. “I’m here to ask why you had instructed your men, Karl and Victor, to harass Pierre Cassin.”
“Who cares? He’s dead.”
“You killed him. And the others. The Maastricht Treaty. You’re trying to stop it. Your man threw two grenades into Chez Sternbergh, one for each mayor.”
Alibert laughed. “I like you, Monsieur Kruse. Even though you’re just like him, another one.”
“Another what?”
“A dishrag. A Trojan horse for . . . a Jew and a Mohammedan dressed up like a Frenchman? You know Cassin was off to represent us in the European Parliament. Think of it, the word represent. France represented by an impostor. A Trojan horse for globalization, Monsieur Kruse.”
“You’re going to stop globalization? You alone?”
“This is what I know. My factories can’t compete with those in Spain and Greece, in Turkey, in China and Mexico, in Poland. My children will inherit union enterprises that can only wither and die. We don’t make anything anymore. We say this, men like us, as though it were something miserable that simply happened to France. But you know what? This was a decision. Someone, somewhere in my country, made that decision. And they’re about to make it again. This European Union . . .”
“So who made that decision, Monsieur Alibert?”
“Men like you and Cassin.”
“So you wanted him eliminated. And me.”
“Monsieur Kruse, I don’t want you eliminated. Not necessarily. I quite enjoy speaking to you. You’re sage for an American, your accent is charming, and I admit you are unusually good with your hands. Maybe you could stay here in Nancy, replace my head of security. He’s the man whose nose you just exploded in the dining room.”
The fire was cozy. He wanted to ask Alibert something but forgot the question. It flew across the room like a paper airplane. Evelyn was calling him from the next room. Why didn’t she come into this room and ask him a question instead of shouting from afar? You come here! The room spun and went fuzzy. For an instant he forgot where he was, whether it was day or night. Kruse bit the inside of his cheek to remain alert.
Alibert sat back in his chair, a new sparkle in his eyes. “Who had the most to gain from the violent erasure of a young, handsome, well-spoken, well-funded, pretend-conservative? You’ve not considered your mayor? Our glorious president-in-waiting? That he might use you to camouflage his dirty business? Oh poor boy. Can I make up a bed for you?”
“It was in the ortolan.”
“You wouldn’t drink the wine.”
He braced himself on the side of the desk, sleep leaking into every pore. “You drugged us all?”
“Just your side of the table. And don’t worry: it’s only sleeping pills. You’ll wake up in entirely different circumstances, of course. I imagine my men will be slaves to their vengeful feelings.”
There was a screech of tires outside, on the horseshoe driveway. Alibert looked at his watch again. “Et voilà. Thank you for coming this evening, Monsieur Kruse, for ruining my birthday dinner and unmanning my staff. Now I will have the pleasure of unmanning you. I will have the honour of sending the note to your employer personally. With profound sadness and regret, Monsieur le Maire . . .”
Kruse reached inside his jacket pocket, for the package he and Tzvi had made up in Paris, before driving out to the suburbs. It was deep in his new pocket. Too deep. He stood up out of his chair and stumbled into the window. More men in bomber jackets jumped out of a white van. “Skinheads.”
“Oh, that’s an ugly word.”
“You’re Nazis.”
“Even uglier. No one in this country was ever a Nazi, not ever. But looking back, we traded a German Disneyland for an American one. Are we better off? Are French people happier today than they would have been if the Germans had won the war?”
The sleeping pills had poked something in him. He remembered where he had seen the photographs of the men in the hall: Vichy men, collaborators.
“I am not against eliminating my enemies. But I would never do it with grenades, not as long as there are genuine French citizens in the same room. You’ve failed and you’re finished. It’s a pity no one mourns an invisible man but I do vow to propose a toast to you, a little later tonight. While it’s not a funeral, it’s something, Monsieur. It’s something.”
The window was a work of art, bordered at the top and bottom by colourful, almost hallucinatory panels of stained glass flowers and insects. There was a small but heavy statue on the corner of the desk, of an eagle. Kruse scratched himself, to stay conscious, and picked it up. Alibert shouted, and with what remained of his strength Kruse tossed the statue through the window and with his arm he cleared the shards away. The rest of what Alibert said were underwater sounds. The old man’s hands were on him now, one gripping him for support and the other slapping and punching him. Kruse did something he had taught hundreds of women: he dug into Alibert’s cuticles with his fingernails and dragged deeply toward his knuckles. As Alibert backed away, into the desk, with a roar, Kruse flopped out the window and landed in some shrubbery. He crawled as far as he could and reached again into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Against every sleepy instinct, he pulled the pack out with the tips of his fingers and opened the Velcro. The needle was already loaded with the liquid. He shot the flumazenil into his arm and crawled as far as he could crawl, into the darkness.
When the flumazenil jolted him awake he could not tell if he had been asleep two minutes or a year. The men in bomber jackets were about him now, their flashlights scanning the side of the house and the garden. He was in the messy branches of a tree that had just begun to lose its spring blossoms, the fragrance a leap to his ow
n childhood. Alibert was shouting at someone. Kruse had collected the little flowers for his mother, and she had put them in a glass of water and had smelled them and had said I am so lucky to have a sweet little boy like you. His head throbbed from the punches and slaps Alibert had dealt him, and his lip was bleeding. He was groggy but no longer dizzy. Tzvi had insisted they carry the flumazenil on every mission, as an antidote to sedatives, and though he never saw himself falling for any tricks, Kruse adopted it along with nearly everything else his teacher had taught him.
The man nearest Kruse wore giant black boots. He carried one of the new silver handguns. An elderly woman with a small white puffball of a dog walked past the property. Kruse picked up a handful of cedar chips and tossed them toward the woman and the dog, who barked. The skinhead turned toward the sound and Kruse stunned him from behind, in the neck. He went down with a moan just loud enough to alert the others.
He ran past the elderly woman, past the dog. Two shots fired behind him: one hit the van and the second broke a window across the street. The woman bent down and covered her head, screamed “Police!”
Heavy black boots clomped along behind him, on Rue des Brice.
Clarity returned with a jolt, and nausea. He leaned against an Audi and threw up and felt better. He slowed down so Alibert’s skinheads could follow, south and east, until he encountered a stone wall. There were trees on the other side. With two men half a block behind him, Kruse reached a black iron gate and hopped it and landed in a cemetery. He waited until the men, smokers, huffing and wheezing in the mist, reached the fence and found just enough strength to get over the gate. One pulled a knife and Kruse kicked it away.
“Any more weapons?”
The bald men looked at one another, their heads shiny and slick in the pale light. One was more frightened than the other. Kruse jabbed the brave one in the eyes, and when the man reached with his hands Kruse went after his undefended genitals. The man fell to his knees and, watching the frightened one, Kruse kicked the man of courage in the head and that was that.
“Tell me.”
The coward backed away, toward a headstone.
Kruse leapt at him, took him to the ground. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Henri Alibert, your boss. Does he order you to hurt people?”
“I can’t talk about that.” The man smelled of beer. He tried to squirm away, each effort another opening: his neck, his straight arms. It may not have been fair but Tzvi had taught Kruse to think of skinheads as bullies and rapists. He went to work on the man’s left arm and put a knee on his face, ground him into the wet gravel.
“Yes you can.”
• • •
He was not yet finished with the skinheads when he heard an explosion, softer than the one on Rue des Rosiers. Kruse hopped the gate and walked three blocks back toward the art nouveau home of Henri Alibert. The mist was now a fog and the red glow in the distance was a terrible sunrise. A young man walked stiffly past him without making eye contact, muttering to himself. Kruse was not yet around the corner when he saw flames roaring about the pretty house. Three men and a woman staggered out. The woman rubbed furiously at her smoking hair. Two of the bald guards walked out and kept walking. Neighbours were beginning to gather in their nightclothes. Kruse frantically scanned the crowd: six people escaped the dinner party.
None of them was Henri Alibert.
TWELVE
Calle Altamira, Santillana del Mary
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, AND THROUGH THE GIANT WINDOW OF Tzvi’s recovery room the sky was seamlessly, dreamily blue. The glass was too thick to hear the waves crashing against the rocks below. A friendly mist rose up.
“Have you heard of phantom pains?”
“Only the phrase.”
“Close your eyes, Christopher. Do it! Now reach out with your left hand and make a fist. That is not a fist. Are you a newborn? Strong. Tight. Make it hurt. You can open your eyes. Now, you can see a hand. Congratulations, you smooth arm-having bastard. This happens to me every hour, my left hand doing preposterous things, only it is not actually there. My brain betrays me.”
Tzvi sat on the side of his bed, in a pair of cotton pants stamped with the centre’s logo and a hospital T-shirt. The bandaged stub of his left arm moved like the clipped tail of a big dog. He moved it up and down, made a circle with it. “I blame you.”
“And you should.”
“If you had just stepped in and hit her.”
“And al-Faruqi. It’s all I think about. If only I’d walked in like a robot and slit his throat. You could have snapped the photo. We might have hopped right out of the hacienda, undetected.”
“Like vipers.”
Kruse looked out over the Atlantic. Pink was sneaking into the afternoon light. “We have to go.”
“Why?”
Kruse told him about Agent Peach.
“His security clearance is not high enough, Christopher. He does not know what he does not know, this is all. The man would never get permission to come after us. The DPSD hired us to take out al-Faruqi.”
“He isn’t DPSD. Besides, they hired us to find and eliminate the Chez Sternbergh killer. Not to murder Khalil al-Faruqi. We have no proof he did it, Tzvi. Your contact from Mossad, I didn’t even speak to him. I don’t think Khalil al-Faruqi did anything in Paris. In fact, I’ve done more work for the client.”
Tzvi stood up off the bed. “Write this down before I forget: I want a fake arm with a knife at the end instead of a hand.”
“Your contact in Mossad, someone fed him information about al-Faruqi. The information was wrong. Purposely wrong. And we—”
“One of your Corsican friends visited me. Biff or Andreus or something. He wanted to know if anyone was harassing me. We played whist for an hour.”
“I don’t know what whist is.”
“You brought me a suit?”
“It’s in the closet.”
“It had better goddamn well be Italian. Or what’s the point of anything?” Tzvi reached for the ceiling with both arms, to stretch. “Everything I do looks hilarious, doesn’t it?”
Kruse told the truth about the suit—Canali—and then he lied about how Tzvi looked when he stretched.
“You think we have become stooges?” Tzvi unfastened his hospital sweats, stepped into the suit pants.
“I know it. But whose stooges?”
“The government lady, Zoé, did she pay you yet?”
Kruse told him about Réné Chatel, the unfortunate communist, and he told him about the mayor of Nancy’s little chief of staff, the neo-Nazis, the club of establishment men who seemed to be killing off promoters of the Maastricht Treaty and the European Union. He told him about the night on Rue des Brice in Nancy, Henri Alibert and the explosion.
Tzvi looked in the mirror. “Who the hell blew up the house?”
“I don’t know. I passed a man, but when I ran back after him he was gone.”
“You think there were cameras? Pictures of you?”
“Possibly. Probably.”
“Did anyone know you were meeting with Chatel?”
“Étienne Bonnet, the editorialist. The man who is with Annette.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Kruse helped him into the Canali.
For some time Tzvi looked at himself in the mirror. “The arm looks more ridiculous in the suit, hidden, than when it is just out there—the quivering stub. The children of the world will have nightmares about me.” Tzvi moved what was left of his arm and his dangling sleeve swung about. “What does it say in the newspapers?”
“About al-Faruqi? Sweet revenge. So far, Étienne hasn’t written anything about Réné Chatel. But I flew here. I didn’t see the French papers’ treatment of the Alibert business.”
“You know what it looks like?”
“Your arm?”
“No, for Christ’s sake. It is obvious what my arm looks like: a deranged puppet.”
“I know what this looks like.”
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“If the newspapers put together that a scarred-up thug from Toronto has shown up on surveillance footage near Chez Sternbergh, then in Luxembourg Gardens, then in Nancy, you are a dead man.”
Kruse didn’t say anything for a minute. Behind him, Tzvi sat back on the bed and made the sound he made when he was thinking: he sucked at his teeth. “Your mafia man—Joseph.”
It was Joseph who had organized the meeting with Zoé. It was Joseph who had threatened Annette and Anouk, Joseph who had steered him toward Réné Chatel. Kruse wished he had held on to his hair, in the back of the Mercedes, a bit longer.
“I thought he was my friend.”
“Someone like that, he would not understand your definition of friend. He thinks only of his client. His protector. He is like us.”
“No. Not like us.”
“Pierre Cassin was not a genuine friend of Monsieur le Maire. Was he? It was make-believe. A bit of that political party nonsense, where we pretend to be someone we are not for the sake of theatre.”
“The socialists are more or less finished. The conservative leader will be president.”
“Your mayor, then. But then this Cassin shows up, young and handsome, full head of hair. Did he have support?”
“Plenty. And the mayor has rivals—a lot of them.”
“Think like the mayor. If we start eliminating rivals, why stop at one? This Alibert, it sounds like he wanted to destroy Monsieur le Maire. He was organized. Fearless, with an army of skinheads, connections all over Western Europe. If he was planning something and your Joseph knew it, perhaps it was time to clean every room in the house . . .”
“Réné Chatel was no rival.”
“You do not know what you do not know. Perhaps he had information on Monsieur le Maire. Or perhaps the poor raving communist was just designed to remove you.”
Kruse waited as Tzvi fussed with his new suit in the mirror. Then he said it. “I bought you a plane ticket.”
“For Paris?”
“Toronto.”
“Fuck you, Toronto.”
“Finish recuperating, safely, put on your spooky knife prosthetic, and come back if you like. But with Agent Peach and now with Joseph, we have two well-funded enemies who fear no one.”