by Todd Babiak
He had almost forgotten she was there.
“What about oxygen, Christophe?”
The breeze was genuinely cold now. He turned back to the city. What was left of the setting sun had been overwhelmed by new Atlantic cloud. Soon the streetlamps would pop on below and the children would go to bed and only the whispering adults of Paris would remain. A group of Japanese tourists in matching fleece jackets, with heavy cameras over their necks, walked across Avenue Bosquet—from the Eiffel Tower to dinner. Their leader spoke into a miniature megaphone. Kruse wanted to go back in time, to hold everything and start over with Evelyn and Lily. It had been a year since they had arrived in France to change their lives, and while it had certainly worked—within minutes the last of the Kruse family would disappear from the continent—he could not have imagined any of it. He closed his eyes and tasted his champagne again, and made a wish. Why believe in wishes and not the God of his parents?
There was one thing. “Zoé?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve not yet told Annette or Tzvi anything I’ve discovered. Maybe you and Franck could just . . .”
She looked at her brother and back at Kruse. “I’m afraid not, Christophe.”
The Québécoise had worked so hard on redesigning and refurnishing the apartment, he didn’t want to bleed on the floor and furniture. He remained on the stone patio, with the bottle.
“Annette helped you find what you have found.”
“No, she didn’t.”
She sighed and whispered something to Franck, who took a step forward and kicked Kruse’s chair over. The bottle of Krug fell off the table and smashed next to him. Zoé slapped her brother, who backed away from her like an abused child. She stepped onto the patio and cleared her throat and shouted down: “I am so sorry, neighbours. Clumsy!”
The fizz of the champagne on the patio was the sound of sorrow. While they had worked hard, the cleaners and renovators had not swept out here, so bits that had fallen from his flowerpots, and dust, and a dead fly floated in the wine. He lay in it and then slowly raised himself on his hands and knees. The champagne was cold and fragrant. Zoé seemed to realize all at once that he could reach up and snatch her. She scrambled back into the apartment in her Roman heels.
When he first heard her voice, echoing behind Zoé and Franck, he thought he was imagining it. When he was tired, or jogging in the cold mists of the park, he could hear Lily. Perhaps this was a call from another place.
Then it happened again.
He looked up. Both Zoé and Franck had turned away from him. They were looking into the near darkness of the apartment.
“Bonjour, Madame.” Zoé spoke calmly. “Where is your lovely little girl this evening?”
• • •
If he had acted on his first and most powerful instinct on the night his daughter was killed, he would not have been on his hands and knees in a puddle of blood and champagne on Avenue Bosquet. He would have taken her hand, pulled her off the side of the medieval road, and lifted her up on his shoulders. Jean-François de Musset, their drugged landlord, his wife’s lover, would have crashed his Mercedes into a plane tree instead of Lily.
“Is . . .” Annette paused a moment. “Is Christophe here?”
“He is, Madame. But unfortunately, he’s in no position to receive you.”
“Perhaps I’ll come back.”
Kruse did not wait to hear Zoé’s answer. He knew what it would be.
Before he had heard her voice, he had wanted to sleep. It was his only choice. They continued to speak in the apartment but all he could hear, now, was his heart beating in his ears. His face was hot. It hurt to move but he raised himself to his feet, reached for the door jamb.
“But you said she has a lovely little girl.” Franck spoke as though he had just learned each word.
“Do it.”
He lowered his gun. “No.”
“I promise this is the last night. This woman, and Christophe, and you’re finished.”
“I can’t.”
“Then you’re going back.”
“No!”
Kruse sprinted into the room but the long muscle at the top of his leg failed him. He fell on the parquet.
“Shoot him.”
Franck aimed but shook his head. “I’m not going back to the home.”
Zoé took the gun from her brother. Franck fell to his knees. His face was in his hands now.
A few minutes earlier, Kruse was certain he was going to die. It had come with freedom, a syrupy end to pain, a feeling of dreaminess. He would enter, however briefly, a warm and blameless place.
Now he could not pause. Whatever there was left in him, of blood and honour, was for them. He leapt up. Zoé had time to shoot once but he did not feel anything. He tackled her into the end table and a vase toppled on them as they hit the floor. Kruse stripped the gun out of her hand and it slid across the polished floor. Someone ran above him: Franck, maybe. Beneath him, Zoé squirmed and scratched and slapped but he was too heavy and even weakened he could control her. Any minute now Franck would shoot. Zoé’s eyes opened wide and then she closed them.
“Do I call the police?” It was Annette.
He rolled off Zoé, stood up and took the gun from her. He didn’t know how to answer. The police? No, not the police. He told her the number to call, the passwords in London and Marseille. Her voice turned sour. She made it all the way through to Joseph, or to his man. “Yes. The apartment on Bosquet.”
Her voice trailed off and Kruse slid closer to Franck. He rubbed his back and tried to console him but he couldn’t summon the energy to speak.
SEVENTEEN
Place des Vosges
THERE WAS ONCE A PUPPET THEATRE IN PLACE DES VOSGES. IT WAS a miniature leaf-shrouded cottage with a wooden carousel on one side and a waffle trailer on the other. He had seen the theatre ten years earlier on a client trip, long before he imagined living here, and he had thought: Someday, when I’m a dad. Now he was a Parisian, not quite a dad, and the puppet theatre was gone.
“I’m sorry, Anouk.” Kruse stood in the middle of the damp square holding her tiny hand, warmer than his. There was a scrape on her wrist, from a recent tumble on the cobblestones in front of his apartment. It had pleased her to have a small version of what he carried on his face, his arms and chest, the new one on his leg.
She shrugged. Too sad, he thought, to speak.
“I was certain.”
A pigeon slowed and landed on the head of the silver statue, a king on horseback. They had come a long way, fourteen metro stops, and he had promised. For a week he had been preparing Anouk for this trip to Place des Vosges. There were no tears, in the end. She did not ask for an explanation but she looked keenly into his eyes. The world of our imagination does not always match the world we live in, he said. The daughter he had lost, his own daughter, Lily, would have cried. She would have launched an assault of questions. If he was certain the theatre was here, why was it not here? How could he have been certain? Where had they taken the puppets?
Anouk simply stared, as though she knew all along this would happen and only came along to see how he would react to the truth. It broke his heart a little, how she had been wired for disappointment. He worried it was his fault.
Lunch was not for an hour but there was nothing else to do in Place des Vosges. Paris is designed for adult pleasures: it had rained that morning and the aged, austere playground equipment was wet. It would rain again soon enough; the smell of wet soil hung drearily in the Marais. April blossoms in the flower garden would not interest her. Neither would a historical note about the statue, the fountain, the age of the linden trees.
No one could say when the theatre had last been here, if it had ever been here, not the white-haired woman with the yellow scarf and the Yorkshire terrier, not the war veteran on the bench with the missing fingers.
“Perhaps you’re thinking of the Champ-de-Mars, Monsieur?” The war veteran had caught Kruse’s accent in the question.
“It is much more touristic.”
There were cafés on the arcade. They could sit and watch the rain when it rained, drink hot chocolates for twenty minutes. School was always out on Wednesday, a delicious French tradition, so Kruse—the only male au pair in the seventh arrondissement—took no jobs on Wednesdays.
He had done his research: Victor Hugo had lived in one of the pretty houses facing the park, and a marquise had written memorable letters from here. Kruse had read about the letters somewhere, in a book Evelyn had included in her list of great works that would make him into a man of culture, a giant novel in which almost nothing happened. He abandoned the novel. There was nothing he could say about Victor Hugo that interested her. It was too cold to splash one another with the water from the fountain.
There was nothing wrong with her raincoat, a red one with yellow polka dots, but her fancy white suede shoes were all wrong for this weather. He squeezed her hand and led her down Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. The rain began to fall just as they reached a children’s boutique. A woman welcomed them and asked how she might help. Kruse pointed to Anouk’s feet. Did she have pretty options for a pretty girl?
He sat and watched Anouk interact with the woman in the store, which smelled of peaches. Her confidence, speaking to the woman and choosing what she liked and did not like, made him proud. Forty minutes later, Anouk walked out of the store with a pair of yellow rubber boots with red polka dots.
It was not easy to get a reservation at L’Ambroisie. The mayor himself made a call for him, and had promised the maître d’ that Anouk was an unusually quiet and well-behaved little girl who would not ruin anyone’s luncheon. Annette waited for them in the dry arcade, leaning against a stone pole. The end of April was upon them. Soon it would change. The sun would win. But for now, under the heavy cloud, it felt like evening and all the soft lights of the art galleries and boutiques were on. Kruse had bought another dark suit when they released him from the hospital, to make up for the one Zoé had ruined in his apartment.
Zoé had not waited for Joseph and his men to arrive in the apartment, to do what they quietly do with betrayers. She had stood up, even as they shouted at her to stay down, and she had walked to the balcony and had climbed up on the chair and had adjusted her posture and had silently jumped—dived, like her sister. Another flying tailor. She had not said goodbye or anything else to her brother, Franck, doomed to return to his group home for the mentally disabled in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Zoé had landed on the curb between the sidewalk and the boulevard, and when Annette had walked over to see what had happened everyone in the café on the other side of Avenue Bosquet was standing as though a national anthem was about to play. She broke her back and some ribs, and suffered a severe concussion, but the fall had not killed her.
The moment she spotted her mother on the arcade, Anouk ran to show off her new boots. They argued, quietly, about how appropriate they were for L’Ambroisie. Anouk lost and hugged Kruse to launch an appeal. She looked up at him and whispered, “Please?” in English, knowing how it would delight him.
Kruse put the boots in the bag and promised they would splash in some puddles in Place des Vosges right after lunch. The sun might be out by then. Did he promise promise promise? He did, and he taught Anouk how to pinky swear. He knew these moments of regular beauty were nothing to regular people but if he could capture them and put them in a bottle, to hold and sip forever, he would. He held Anouk’s pinky and her eyes sparkled with the crazy novelty of their locked fingers and Annette sighed.
“It’s time for us to go in, Monsieur Au Pair. Mademoiselle Polka Dots.”
Kruse followed with the wet boots in a white plastic bag. Inside, Annette greeted the maître d’, an aggressively handsome man in a tuxedo. She had been here before, with Étienne. Today, thanks to the mayor, they would have a finer table. They would have more fun.
At the door, Kruse turned. There was an orderly black fence around the plaza. The trees were clipped. A man on the corner walked a Weimaraner and wiped the rain from his eyes.
He hoped their fine table was against a wall, so he could watch. The door opened behind him. Annette did not sound impatient or exasperated.
“No one is there, Christophe.”
“I want to be sure.”
Annette reached for his arm, gave it a gentle pull, and released it. “Wanting will never make it so.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Martha Magor Webb and Jennifer Lambert. Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts and to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, for their support and encouragement. Thank you—yes, you—for reading and (I hope) recommending this novel and this series. Invite me to your book club and if I can come I’ll bring hummus and a decent bottle of Côtes du Rhône. I’m not joking, ask around.
And thank you to Gina and Avia and Esmé, for allowing me to do this.
Someday I will design and perform an opera for you, Martha. Or something.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TODD BABIAK is an award-winning author and screenwriter. His most recent novel, Come Barbarians, was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year and an Edmonton Journal #1 bestseller. His earlier work includes The Garneau Block, which was a #1 regional bestseller, a longlisted title for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the winner of the City of Edmonton Book Prize; and Toby: A Man, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal and won the Alberta Literary Award for Fiction. Todd Babiak is the co-founder of Story Engine, a consulting company based in Edmonton and Vancouver.
WEB: toddbabiak.com
TWITTER: @babiak
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at harpercollins.ca.
CREDITS
COVER IMAGE BY FRANÇOISE LACROIX/PANOPTIKA.NET
COPYRIGHT
SON OF FRANCE
Copyright © 2016 by Todd Babiak
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition: January 2016 ISBN: 9781443443845
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-44344-382-1
WEB 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com