by Todd Babiak
“So.”
“So this is disruptive to our moderate right-wing government-in-waiting. What can they do to get the talking donkeys back on television representing the Front National?”
“The ghost of Charles de Gaulle killed Jean-François and Pascale?”
Madame Lareau did not say yes or no. She did not nod or smile. For some time she stared at him.
“So you work for Mitterrand.”
Madame Lareau stood up out of her chair and filled her glass of champagne again. She filled the third glass and handed it to him. “Have a drink.”
“Jean-François would have been a convicted drunk driver and, after he hit Lily, a murderer. Why kill him and Pascale?”
“Exactly. Why?”
“Why not just ruin his career? Discredit him. He slept with the wrong woman or stole money or snorted cocaine.”
“Yes, Monsieur Kruse. We think alike.”
He sipped the champagne. It was wasted on him, if it was an expensive bottle. Madame Lareau stood at the window, looking out over Lyon at night. The lights reflecting off the river, the bridge, and the waterfront. He watched her and she looked back at him, waiting. In the bedroom the television news was on, the explosion sounds between stories at the beginning of the program. It was seven o’clock. The truth arrived with his fourth or fifth sip of champagne and it all went sour with him.
“They got him drunk.”
“Somehow, yes.”
“Evelyn saw them: two men. Joseph Mariani and a man called Frédéric.”
“Frédéric Cardini. He joined the Mariani family business when he was seventeen. He began by hijacking transport trucks at the Spanish border and moved his way up.”
“Jean-François didn’t drink, not like that.”
“They drugged him first. We found it in his system. He would have drank anything.”
“I thought you didn’t do an autopsy.”
“They didn’t. They wouldn’t. We exhumed his body.”
“It was supposed to be a drunk-driving conviction, which would have been enough.”
“The call went out, to patrols, before your daughter was killed.”
“I was walking down to the car, with Evelyn and Lily. I heard the sirens.”
“They were sent to pick him up.”
“But who can do that, Madame? Organize a drunk-driving conviction? And why did it have to be Joseph, instead of one of his employees?”
“They wouldn’t have trusted anyone else, Monsieur Kruse. It had to be invisible, impossible. Imagine the finesse. Then, when Lily was killed they had to get rid of the politician and his wife. Quickly, quickly. The drugs in his system would have exonerated him. He would have remembered. Then, when it was finished, if someone like Frédéric got drunk with his friends and started talking …”
The television went silent and the pudgy agent rounded the corner with a thin brown briefcase. He placed it on the chair Madame Lareau had been sitting in and entered a six-digit combination. Inside there were four thick stacks of francs and a portfolio. Madame Lareau slowly removed a French passport, an identity card, bank cards, and a title deed to the property in the Var—under the regional authority of the office in Brignoles. First she showed him the passport, which contained a photo of him with the name Claude Roulet, born in Lille, a current address in the Var. The identity card was also made out in the name of Claude Roulet, with his photo. The bank cards were Claude’s and Claude owned the house and land.
“Who’s Claude Roulet?”
“You are,” said Monsieur Meunier. “Don’t you already feel like Claude Roulet? Of course, your parents split up when you were a youngster and you were sent to live with your British mother in Rhode Island, United States. This explains your accent. But you are a Frenchman. You have always wanted to be a proper Frenchman, no? Retiring quietly at forty to a bastide in the country?”
Madame Lareau explained the investigation would be announced publicly in two months’ time.
“You’ll bring in Joseph and Lucien?”
“Who?”
“The murderers, the—”
“You don’t understand, Roulet. This plot was conceived in Paris and Marseille by some of the most powerful men in France. Return the Front National to cartoon status, unite the legitimate right wing, wipe out the Socialists.”
Madame Lareau had taken the liberty of printing out the story he was now obliged to tell, in a secret military tribunal in Paris. None of this would ever reach the public. For his trouble, he would stay in five-star hotels like this one. He would be guarded twenty-four hours a day, of course, until it was finished.
“Do you have any questions?”
“What’s in this for you, Madame? The Socialists stay in power?” She acted as though she had not heard him. “I want to leave you with one image.”
Madame Lareau reached for the large photo her partner had produced. She slapped it on the table next to him like a poker shark unveiling the final hand of the night. It was Evelyn, cradling Lily on the cobblestones of Villedieu, ten minutes after the end of her life. His life.
“I have never lost a child. I have never lost a spouse. But I would not want my loved ones to die in the service of a conspiracy. Yes, children are killed and we are all terribly sorry for that. But their murderers are punished, in a modern democracy, and their parents are soothed, however imperfectly, by justice. I cannot say you would still be with your wife, but she would certainly be alive. And you, you would be what you came here to be.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t know. A father?” Madame Lareau tilted her head. “A good man?”
There were so many guards travelling with Madame Lareau and Monsieur Meunier they had to take three black Citroën XM cars. Kruse was in the back seat of the middle vehicle, with Madame Lareau, who carried a small pistol and spoke on a cellular phone. The original plan was to take an executive airplane, but there was so much fog at the airport they switched to cars. She booked him in the Tuileries suite of the Hotel Regina in Paris for twelve nights, under the name Claude Roulet.
Madame Lareau told him about working in Libya to depose Colonel Gaddafi. The general was fighting a war against another lunatic, Hissène Habré, president of Chad. It was like dealing with autistic children, she said, only they had fighter jets and machine guns. Yet somehow, as always, Gaddafi survived. Some people are like that, she said; you see it in politics and war. They live through anything, while others—fine people, often enough—die by the first bullet. Madame herself was injured in an explosion in N’Djamena. The rail of an apartment terrace flew through the air and struck her in the face. She saw it coming and she remembered thinking, “Duck,” but the thought was quicker than her reaction, and she woke up in a hospital with a very black, very beautiful woman in a yellow hijab reciting prayers for the dead over her body.
South of Auxerre, not far from Chablis, the three cars stopped in a convoy at a gas and restaurant complex so that various passengers might use the toilet. The plan was to practise his testimony between Auxerre and Paris, so it would seem natural. If it sounded like he was reciting a speech someone had written for him, the judge would throw them all out. He had not read it yet.
An armed guard stood at the side of the car, but he looked away often enough for Kruse to enter the combination and pull a stack of money out of his Claude Roulet briefcase. Monsieur Meunier, who carried the same small pistol as Madame Lareau, accompanied him to the toilet. Monsieur Meunier leaned against the bank of sinks while Kruse addressed himself to the urinal. “Have you heard of Philippe Laflamme?”
“Laflamme. Of course, Monsieur Kruse.”
“Who is he?”
Monsieur Meunier looked at himself in the mirror. “You’ll meet him in court. No hurry. He’s Rally for the Republic.”
“What is that?”
“A political party, Monsieur Kruse. It’s in your testimony. There are two large political parties that want to be one enormous political party. You’ll be speaki
ng of them. The mayor of Paris—Laflamme is one of his … what would you call this in English? He holds the pitchfork for the devil.”
Monsieur Meunier inspected his left eyebrow in the mirror. A single grey hair was longer than the others. He licked his fingers and yanked at it as Kruse dried his hands. Two of the guards waited outside the door.
Kruse finished.
“You needn’t worry about Laflamme. Not after your testimony.”
“No?”
“He’ll be in prison soon enough. So tell me, honestly, what do you think of the place in the Var?”
“The pictures are pretty.”
“We did have options for you, Monsieur Kruse. A central apartment in any city but Paris. For you, with a German name and a French heart I was thinking Strasbourg. But isolation is always best for someone in your situation. The moment I saw the ad I knew it was the one … a lovely start to your new life, Monsieur Roulet. I inspected the bastide myself. Wine and a bit of music, some soft lights on the terrace, cicadas, memories. A man of our age, middle age, yes? Entering middle age? What else can you ask for? Love, of course, love. But that may come.”
“Thank you.”
“Je vous en prie.” Monsieur Meunier moved to allow him a turn at the sink. “Your testimony will put you at no small risk. It would be better than prison no matter what, but you’ve had a rotten bit of luck here in France. A quiet bit of luxury is precisely what you deserve. And perhaps we can work together in the future. The more we read about you and your business in America, your skills and talents, the more appealing it all seems.”
“I do apologize.”
“For what, my friend?” Monsieur Meunier struggled to grasp at the errant eyebrow hair with his chubby fingertips.
Kruse hit him just hard enough, in the jaw, and dragged him into a toilet stall. An announcement came over the public address system that the restaurant would be closing at two o’clock. It was loud enough to overwhelm the sound of his footsteps. Kruse walked past the guards, drinking espressos, and into the crowd. One of them spotted him and stuttered, shouted, “Monsieur! Stop!” Kruse ran to the end of the white hall and out the automatic doors. There were two gas stations, one on each side of the highway, and both led to thick evergreen forests. Kruse sprinted deeply into the trees, slicing his right arm on a branch, and hopped a fence. The forest opened up into a light industrial suburb, with filling stations for large trucks and a series of warehouses. On the other side, brown farmland, wet from recent rains, and a football pitch with white goalposts at each end. A thin fog rose from the grass.
The guards came out of the forest in a line with Madame Lareau in the middle. She shouted orders to her men in suits, as the trees opened into Burgundy. Then she spoke—screamed—into a cellular phone that it was not her fault.
Kruse removed his shoes and crept from one delivery truck to another in the wraparound parking lot of a wine co-operative. At the back of the warehouse one man in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with Kermit the Frog on it sat on a wine barrel and smoked a cigarette. The door was propped open. Kruse asked the man, politely, if he might hide from an intelligence agency inside. Before the man answered, Kruse pulled out the stack of money. “You can keep a thousand of it, when they’re gone.”
“What did you do?”
“They want me to testify against politicians.”
“What did the politicians do?”
“There isn’t time to discuss it, Monsieur. Yes or no?”
For too long the man stared at Kruse with his mouth open. He had lost one of his front teeth. Kruse didn’t want to hit him. Outside the warehouse, Madame Lareau told someone to run and hard shoes clacked on pavement, getting closer. The shop man smelled the stack of francs. “Two thousand.”
The warehouse was painted white, the walls and the mopped floor, and crowded with stainless steel bins and bladders. It was warm and humid, heavy with the scents of rot and fermentation. Kruse climbed to a white, rusting catwalk. The bins were open and most of them were full. Only one had a thick layer of must on top. There was nowhere else to go so he lowered himself into it, holding on to the rim.
Voices echoed through the warehouse. The man in the Kermit the Frog hoodie delivered one-word answers—one yes and a disinterested no, twice. Kruse knew the man wouldn’t tell the agents the truth, even though it would be to his financial advantage to walk away with all of the money now, though Kruse could not say why. They didn’t believe him. Two of the agents, in hard-soled shoes, walked through the warehouse.
“Where is everyone?” one of them said.
Kruse could not hear the answer, something about the end of the vendange and a holiday.
“How can you be sure?” someone else said, and he heard footsteps on the iron stairs.
Holding his breath underwater had been part of his training, his least favourite after deliberately ruining the nerve endings in his shins by kicking a hunk of wood wrapped with a yellow rope. Kruse grew up certain he would never have to wait underwater on the Jordanian coast of the Dead Sea, as his mentor had done, and pop up at two in the morning to kill a Palestinian bomber with a guitar string. The footsteps grew nearer and he slid all the way down through the must and into the juice. The cut he had opened on his arm stung in the wine.
He counted to sixty, to one hundred, to one hundred and forty. It had been a long time since he had done this and his body rebelled. His heart beat everywhere inside him. His chest was a balloon ready to pop. In Toronto, after Lily was born, he was often stricken in the night by the conviction that something was going wrong inside him: a tumour, a ruined heart, some disease of the brain invited by too many blows to the head. The thought of dying too young, of not seeing Lily move into school and find her way and thrive, not protecting her, tormented him. He hardly slept during the first week of school, when Lily was shut away from him in École Jules Ferry and some mental defective or even a teacher could say something to her, about her lip. Or in high school, where it would be worse. Where men like Matt Gibenus stomped about waiting for a sign of fragility to pounce.
He floated gently to the top and took a shallow breath, out of the must, and sunk back down to the bottom of the tank. Some of it was in his mouth now and it did not taste right, the decomposing Chardonnay skins, so he spit them out and allowed his body for an instant to accept he was in danger. They might have shot him in the face just now, as his lips broke the surface of the juice. His uncle, his father’s brother, had jumped off the Prince Edward Viaduct after his wife had confessed she had fallen in love with a gym teacher. It was in Kruse and he didn’t fear it, especially now, but he was not yet finished.
When Tzvi was a soldier he was injured and captured. Some men tortured him in a jail in Beirut. At the height of it, when he was sure he was going to die, something or someone appeared at his side and told him to ease his heart and remain hopeful and focus on returning to these men and killing them, one by one, for all of this pain and indignity. It helped him survive the ordeal and it opened up a new world to him, a world still ungoverned by a God but filled with spirits. This was not a confession he delivered lightly. Kruse was the only one he had ever told, and Tzvi was open to the idea that he was slowly going crazy and this was the incitement of it. But Kruse, who had grown up in a church and with parents who did not know doubt, found it both plausible and comforting. No ghost or angel had come to Lily or Evelyn and nothing came to him now, at the bottom of the barrel of wine.
He could open his mouth and his nose to it and remain down here, fill his lungs with alcohol. This was the moment. Instead he floated again to the surface, his body burning and bursting with the emergency of it, and again he quieted his heart and breathed. This time he remained in the must, blind with it. He prepared to descend again when he heard a whisper.
“Monsieur?”
He remained with his face in the must.
“Monsieur?”
Kruse spit and tried, while treading juice, to manage a whisper himself. “Are they gone?”
“Yes. Where are you, Monsieur?”
The janitor helped him out of the juice and asked him to remain on the lid. He produced a small folded pile: a T-shirt with “La Chablisienne” on the front, a pair of rain pants, and aged canvas shoes. He had a plastic bag for Kruse’s wine-drenched outfit, his gift from the agents: Claude Roulet’s clothes.
Kruse paid him four thousand francs and promised him another two thousand if the janitor would drive him to Roissy.
“The airport?”
“A hotel near the airport.”
“Three thousand, which would bring our total to seven thousand francs.”
Kruse took the bills from the janitor and paid him. He washed his face and hair as best he could in the employee washroom, while the janitor drove one of the white Chablisienne trucks around to the back. Kruse stepped in. It rumbled and dieselled. Here in the cab of the truck, as everywhere, Nirvana was playing on the radio. The janitor, who introduced himself as Mehdi, pushed a cassette into the deck and they listened instead to Charles Trenet.
Mehdi had grown up in Tunis. His children went to a good school in Auxerre. If it weren’t for his name, he said, no one would know he is Arab. He named his daughter Roxanne and his son Tristan, gifts to them.
“You came to France to be French.”
“Of course, Monsieur.”
“Christophe, please, Mehdi. You know, you should send a letter to the Front National, telling them about your intentions.”
Mehdi slowly rolled down the window, spit on the autoroute, and closed the window back up again. Then he asked Kruse if he had a family.
“Not anymore, no.”
“You’re alone.”
