by Todd Babiak
Kruse was about to leave when the lieutenant, still in his dress uniform, sat across from him.
“Jesus Christ, Yves.”
“Don’t blaspheme. Not this morning.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I had not prepared a last meal, not once. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t go through with it. Eternal damnation and a precooked chicken, a bad combination. What are we waiting for, Christophe? Let’s go.”
Kruse lifted his coffee. He was nearly finished. “Yves, thank you, but—”
“If I were to have a last meal, and know it was my last meal, it would be my grandmother’s soupe au pistou. I would start with a glass of champagne and ease into a bottle of Château de Beaucastel, do you know it? And a steak tartare on the side, even though it makes no sense. For dessert, a simple flan and some melon and a glass of very good cognac. Oh and a cigar. And Catherine Deneuve.”
“Stop talking about last meals, my friend.”
“What would you have?”
Kruse looked down at the table. “Pain au chocolat, coffee.”
“Amuse me.”
“Maybe I’d have fish of some sort.”
Huard sat back in his chair. “Fish of some sort? You are such an American. Why not a hamburger then?”
“A hamburger would do.”
“‘Fish of some sort,’ he says!”
They had not yet turned on the music in the bistro. The waiter arrived with a coffee for Huard and he raised his tiny cup. “To France, alors.”
“And to your grandmother’s soup.”
“And to blood, Christophe. If we’re honest.” The gendarme reached over the table and took Kruse’s hand for a moment and squeezed it and released it and looked away.
“Are you sure about this, Yves?”
“Tell me what you want me to do.”
Kruse borrowed a slip of paper from the waiter, and drew a map based on what the drowning Russian had said. Huard would stay back with his gun, hidden.
Men and women with baskets and pull carts arrived in morning sweaters, from every direction, for the Sunday market. In the autumn sun it was warm and cool at once. Kruse led the lieutenant past city hall and a fountain. Nearly everyone on the old marble tiles stopped to look at the gendarme in his dress uniform, which had turned a magnificent blue in the sunlight. Kruse led him to the plaza, dedicated to martyrs of the Resistance, bursting with white tents and humming trucks and already, at this hour, hundreds of people. A breath of fish and cheese filled the square. Shoppers jostled them and vendors shouted claims about their sausages and chèvre, plump early tomatoes, les fraises de Carpentras, the best in the world. Women hugged, kissed three times, reeked of Shalimar perfume and therefore of Evelyn.
“What if the Russian lied to you? They could have her in London. Brussels.”
“He started by lying.”
Sun shone harshly off the upper windows of the plaza. He established north and scanned the apartments. A thin boy of nine or ten, hunching and glancing about him as though he had recently been punched, walked out of the shadow of the arcade and made straight for Kruse. His hair was nearly shaved, like a recent victim of lice, and his ears stuck out comically. “Excuse me, Monsieur, do you have the time?”
Kruse looked down at his watch and heard a rustle. The boy ran past Huard and darted between the women with their baskets, slammed into a wheelchair and disappeared behind a tent.
“Hey!” Huard had been eating samples from a fruit vendor. His hands were wet with strawberry. “He took my gun.”
Kruse saw his error. “I have a new plan. Go get your car and park in front of the café. When I come out—”
“No.” Huard looked up and around the plaza. “Why don’t they just shoot us, if they know we’re here?”
“The envelope. Who knows how many envelopes I made?”
Huard looked at the address and led Kruse toward it. “One thing I don’t understand: the Russians. Why hire foreigners?”
“To protect themselves, the family business. Remember how this started: two or three men. They couldn’t tell anyone.”
A small municipal vehicle marked the outer ring of the market. Kruse and Huard crouched behind it and looked up at the windows that rounded the top-floor apartment. No visible lights, no movement.
The lieutenant sat on the curb. “They know we’re here. Perhaps we knock?”
“Yves, please. Go get the car. Without a gun … my will is important. I’m ordering you.”
“You can’t order anyone. Not in this country.” Huard stood up and straightened his shoulders. “First I’ll use the toilet and then we’ll find our man without a nose.” He crossed the narrow street, his chin up and his chest out, and marched through the busy terrace of a bistro. Diners looked up at him and he nodded in benediction.
The heavy grey door was between a bakery and a children’s boutique. It was unmarked and controlled by a keypad. Kruse watched. The grey door opened shortly after nine. A man with dark hair falling over his eyes, viciously chewing gum, peeked out and looked around. He wore a suit without a tie. He was Mediterranean, not Russian. At that moment, the lieutenant stepped out of the bistro and looked directly at the young man—who stopped chewing and reached down in a hurry. Kruse sprinted to the door and slammed into it. The man grunted and slumped to the ground, half in and half out of the doorway, a gun in his hand.
Men and women and children on the terrace and on the street behind gasped and shouted. A child screamed. The lieutenant turned to them and announced that this was an operation of the Gendarmerie nationale.
The lieutenant took the gun from the fallen man, who moaned unconsciously. “Fall in behind me.”
“Yves, wait.”
Kruse dragged the man by his ankles into a long corridor cut out of stone, with a low ceiling, and shut the door behind him. At the end of the corridor, a burst of light. The lieutenant was nearly there, walking freely, each step an echo. It was uncommonly damp in the corridor, like a basement in a river town. Kruse pinched and slapped the young man to revive him but he remained out. A low consistent moan came from his nose. The lieutenant had paused a few paces from the end of the corridor. It was unnecessary now but Kruse crept along the stone wall in a crouch.
“Have you ever done anything like this before?”
“There is little call for storming a fortress in the villages of the Northern Vaucluse.”
Up ahead was an atrium, a courtyard covered with a massive skylight. Soil had been set into much of the space, and pots had been organized in swirls. It was an immaculate jungle, its watering system the source of the dampness and of the perfume. “You stay here with the gun. If you see anyone who looks like they’re going to shoot me, shoot them first. Or just shoot. Then go out and phone this woman.” Kruse handed him the card: “Corinne Lareau, Sous-directeur, Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense.”
A busy collection of palms and ferns in terracotta began just past the end of the corridor. The floor was white marble.
“Is this a joke, Christophe? You don’t understand why I’ve come?” He refused the card and began counting down from ten.
“What are you doing?”
He continued to count down. Kruse prepared to knock him out to save him, before he reached one. But at five Huard dropped and rolled onto the spotless marble floor of the courtyard. He ended up off balance in front of a terracotta pot, his breaths rattled and his cheeks purple.
“Yves. Come back.”
“Go.”
A voice echoed through the courtyard. “We’re here to escort you upstairs. Don’t shoot.”
Kruse sprinted toward a low set of stairs, to draw attention away from the lieutenant. He saw no one until it was too late: the sun flickering off the silencer. His right ear and the back of his head burned. Kruse ran and went down behind a white angel statue tucked into the greenery.
“Christophe!”
“Shh.”
“Are you okay? I saw blood.�
�
“Yes, Yves. Quiet now.”
Bullets slammed into and ricocheted past the statue; half its white head crumbled away. Slowly and soundlessly he made his way closer to the man with the gun. Kruse was nearly close enough to pounce when a voice echoed through the courtyard.
“I am Lieutenant Yves Huard of the Gendarmerie nationale.” Huard stood in the open. “Monsieur: I will give you ten seconds to walk into this courtyard and surrender your firearm. Yes, you can lead us upstairs and, yes, your bravery will be remembered at your trial. One. Two.”
The first shot came at three. Huard howled and kneeled and shot his own gun several times. Kruse had a poor view of him, but it looked as though he was smiling through his wails. Huard’s gun clicked emptily now. The sniper, in a brown suit, stepped out of his hiding place and aimed.
Kruse took him from behind and dropped him from the riser onto the marble. The courtyard went silent, but for water dribbling somewhere and ambient noise from the market.
Huard was still smiling when Kruse arrived. His voice was small. “I got him.”
“You sure did.”
Both of the bullets had entered his abdomen.
“Yves, I’m going to take you to the hospital.”
“I’ll die and haunt you for the rest of your life if you do that.”
“The bullets have—”
“I know damn well what the bullets have done.”
“Then I’ll just take you to the street. Someone will call an ambulance.”
“I want to stay right here. With all my heart I do. You go.”
“You were very brave, Yves.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a splendid policeman.”
“Yes.”
“And an honourable man.”
“Go on now.”
Kruse fetched the sniper’s gun and pressed it into Huard’s right hand.
“If anyone tries to escape …”
“Blammo,” Huard said, as though a gunshot were an English word, and grimaced. “Sit me up.”
Kruse propped him against the base of the angel statue. It had one eye, one ear, and half a mouth. One of its shoulders was missing. Huard’s pretty blue uniform had turned a dark purple where the blood ran. Kruse borrowed the gendarme’s white sash and used it on his own wound. The bullet had chewed the top of his ear and ripped into the back of his head, painfully but superficially.
“Don’t think poorly of yourself for this, Christophe. I am dying well.”
“Yves.” Kruse placed a hand on his cheek. “You’re not permitted to die. I’ll be right back. We’ll go to the hospital together and they’ll fix us both.”
The lieutenant reached up with his bloody right hand, not for a shake but for a squeeze. Then he leaned back and readied his gun. “Excellent, son. Excellent. Until then!”
There was an inner stairwell, built from the same marble as the floor, and an elevator. Kruse took the stairs. On the first, second, and third levels there were planters filled with clipped herbs and flowers. The soil was black and moist from recent attention.
On the top landing he waited to restore his breathing and heart rate, to do what he had taught his students—what Tzvi had taught him when he was still a teenager. To turn his feelings into something else, something useful. He allowed himself to wonder if some of them on the other side of the door had studied savate, an old pirate art with odd kicks. He had never fought a savateur. This was why he had crossed the goddamn ocean.
Just as he reached for the door it opened on its own, into a hallway. Three men in suits, giants with shaved heads, stood before him. Brothers in this. None of them were Russian.
“Welcome, Monsieur Kruse,” said the one in the back, the oldest and most confident of them. “Joseph was expecting you hours ago. Your girlfriend and her daughter are here, and safe. They’re all very tired. Oh no: you’re really bleeding.”
The first man held a gun but it wasn’t yet aimed. His free hand was still on the door handle and already he was off balance. He was not a savateur. The man lifted his gun and Kruse ducked it and disarmed him, hurt him with his knee and his elbows. The man was heavy and Kruse fell back with him, tossed him into the stairway.
“We can’t shoot him,” the older man said to the one between them. He changed his tone and said, “Monsieur Kruse, why are you doing this? If you make us kill you, Lucien will be furious.”
The man between them held a knife. He seemed confused by Kruse or by what his boss had said. He lowered himself into a fighting stance and jabbed the knife.
Kruse parried it and tweaked the man’s arm at the elbow. He stiffened and Kruse went for his eyes, then his groin, took the knife and, as he went down, punctured his lower back. The boss shouted at him to stop. Kruse was calmer now than he had been at any time since Lily’s death, moving correctly from man to man in the hallway. There was a trick Tzvi had taught him, to make the world feel like it is operating in slow motion, the speed of a waltz. It was long ago, when he was still a kid, and he received the advice more literally than Tzvi had meant it. When he was fighting, really fighting, he heard his mother’s favourite song: “The Second Waltz” by Shostakovich. Only he, among the dancers, could move faster than the music.
This is how he had planned to feel in the Louvre, in the churches and cathedrals, in the amphitheatres and royal gardens and palaces, on the grand boulevards, in the pretty squares. The boss, who no longer carried a look of confidence, a muscleman with the right kind of salary and the right sort of car, a bully, took a step back.
“Mais attendez,” said the boss, and turned away in retreat. “Others are coming.”
Kruse jumped up and kicked him in the side of his face. His head clonked against the wall. The man crouched, turtled, asked Kruse to give him a moment. Kruse cranked his big arm and stomped it just below the shoulder. As the muscleman lay on the floor, spitting and then praying, Kruse kneeled down to ask questions.
Inside the apartment, they knew he had arrived. How many were there? Too many to defeat without a bomb: six in total. The muscleman was the security director, the best of them. Up here and downstairs, their job was to wound the intruder, to take him inside weak and woozy but alive.
“Did they tell you who I was?”
“A Canadian.”
“Did they say why I was coming, Monsieur?”
“The mother and the girl.”
“They’re inside?”
“You can’t get back out, now that you’re in. Not you and not the mother and not the girl. More are on their way. Lucien will make you suffer for this.”
Kruse bled on the security director, who was now recounting the ways Lucien might bring him to suffer. If you destroy your tea set in your fury, darling, you’ll regret it.
He walked to the door and listened for a few minutes: nothing. He opened it into the smell of fresh herbs.
No one aimed a gun or a knife at him, or greeted him. The long room, with an antique dining table over an elaborate Persian rug, was populated by portraits instead of people. Bushels of herbs and vegetables, presumably from the market below, lay on the table: preparations for a feast. Several bottles of red wine and baskets of fruit and flowers were on adjacent serving tables.
There were voices on the other side of two French doors. It was dark in the long room, as the windows were blocked. Each of the lighted lamps was dearer than any car he had ever owned, and the tapestries were the sorts he had seen in the Rosedale mansions and Upper West Side apartments of his wealthiest clients.
“The Second Waltz” played in this room and through the doors. It was the sound of what he had become when he was fourteen years old. What Evelyn had not wanted him to be. There was no one here so he reached back for the blood and wet his hands with it, both hands and his arms, and called out for them to come. The voices quieted but the music did not. He opened the doors, to do what he had crossed the ocean to do.
Four men stood waiting in a white anteroom. None of them had a gun, so he moved qui
ckly through them. One of the men sliced his left arm with a small knife and another punched him in the mouth while he was finishing the third man. The cut was deep but no more serious than the wound on his head.
The door at the other end of the anteroom was unlocked. He opened it into fire—a fire in a massive old hearth, dark walls.
Anouk ran across the cold room and he fell to his knees for her. She ran into his red arms. Her face was wet and warm with tears. The door slammed behind him. He apologized as he hugged her, for staining her pyjamas.
“Make it stop, Christophe,” she said, into his bloody ear.
“Take the baby away.”
Kruse recognized the voice at the first vowel: a man in the throes of the worst cold of his life.
Lucien stood at the back of the room, farthest from the windows, next to Annette. Annette: naked. Her hands were tied above her and her ankles were bound. She turned her body away from him, as demurely as she could manage. The rope squeaked. She was conscious but something had faded from her eyes.
“Take the girl away from him, Joseph.” Lucien had arranged his cutting tools on a folding table, just as he had in the small white apartment in Marseille. “This isn’t a family reunion.”
Joseph sat in near-darkness, his legs crossed. He wore a dark suit, as always, and a tie. He held a drink aloft, despite the hour. One side of his face was lit by the fire burning next to him. Slowly he stood and crossed the room. With a few words in French, sweet words, Joseph leaned down and put a hand on her shoulder. That he would bring her here, touch her. Kruse took Joseph’s hand from Anouk, slapped the drink away, and bashed him into the wall, twice.
“Yes.” Joseph did not fight back. “Please.”
Behind and below him, Anouk cried quietly into her hands.
“I’m taking her out of here.”
“Release him or I kill her mother now, Monsieur Kruse.” Lucien spoke softly. “Quicker than I would like.”
There had been a boy in his neighbourhood, P.J. Banks, who suffered a speech impediment. Kruse was not one of the bullies but he had done nothing to stop them. One hot afternoon, as the boy wept on the railroad tracks before a bunch of them, calling out for mercy, Kruse had nearly been overwhelmed by a desire—it had a smell and a taste—to smash his head in with a rock. It was a thump of shame and fullness at once, a war feeling.
