Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  DEDICATION

  I guess it is strange to dedicate a novel like this to Gina and

  Avia and Esmé but I am doing it anyway.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Rue des Rosiers, Paris

  THE WINTER AFTER HIS DAUGHTER DIED, CHRISTOPHER KRUSE SLEPT poorly. He would awaken out of a dream at four in the morning, forget all but its mood, and jog through the park thinking of her. At this time of day, only the most haunted were about the city. They walked slowly, smoking cigarettes while he ran, but none of them were going anywhere. He would do sit-ups and push-ups on the wet and cool grass and shadowbox by the light of an old lantern near a monument to the dead. No one watched him, or even noticed he was there. A mist would rise up off the Seine or fall from the sky, and the phantom legs of the tower would return him to the feeling of his forgotten dream. In the fog, anything was possible. He spoke to his dead daughter. He worried he was going crazy and then he stopped worrying.

  There was enough time after his workout to shower and put on a suit, to be the first customer at the bakery. He grew up with the church and came to adore ritual if not faith. On his way from the apartment on Avenue Bosquet to the bakery, through the dark of January and the wind of February, the rains of March, through hot yeast and diesel exhaust, too much perfume, and the occasional flash of dog shit, he passed a travel agency. It was small and shabbily furnished. The woman at the desk in Voyages du Septième was always alone at this hour. She wore a crashing wave of teased-up white-blond hair and shoulder pads in her bright polyester dresses. In the absence of customers or even a book to read she stared out the window, her chin in her hand. Over time the woman began to recognize him, to seek him. It would not be French for her to smile or to wave, but now that spring had begun and there was enough light in the mornings, she would hold eye contact and exhale, faintly nod. They were together the loneliest people in Paris. All he had to do was open the heavy blue door, enter the fluorescent room decorated with tropical posters. Just buy a ticket, pack a bag, and go home, you coward, where you belong. There was nothing to pack but an urn, filled with his daughter’s ashes, Lily’s ashes, and seven suits. What remained of Evelyn was already in Toronto, buried in the Park Lawn Cemetery. He could follow her tomorrow. Today. This afternoon. Who needs the suits? There were plenty in the closet of the house on Foxbar Road. It would be dusty and quiet in there, quieter than quiet: no daughter, no wife, the hum of the refrigerator when he plugged it in and maybe, just maybe, the smell of them in the walls, on the beds and in the linens, in the cushions of the chesterfield where he had rocked his baby to sleep.

  Kruse could not say this aloud to anyone but he stayed in France because Lily was here in the fog, around one of these corners, in one of these bakeries. She was older than when he had last seen her, on Halloween night, and her French was better. There would be no more mistakes. He would do everything correctly, with pure intentions. He would properly believe. He would bring her back to life.

  If he walked into Voyages du Septième and bought a ticket from the lonely agent, if he carried the urn across the Atlantic, he would forfeit its magic. Lily would be gone forever.

  While he did not need the money, Kruse worked: he protected the mayor and a few senators, potential leaders of potential parties, judges, executives, and four neglected Parisian wives on a sexual adventure in Antibes.

  On the day it began again, the fourth of April, he had been thinking of the four neglected wives. He was on the metro, where it was important to have something to think about. They had flown down in a Learjet, drinking cocktails with vodka and shaved ginger and making suggestive comments he barely understood. The resort, a secret place, was on the water. All of the men were tall and young and tanned, free of scars, prostitutes with health benefits and five weeks’ vacation. The women spent two nights in Antibes with these beautiful men and on the flight back to Paris they were quiet and miserable. It had not been what they had imagined. They were not better afterwards. Thinking of the women, he daydreamed his way past his metro stop and exited at the Chemin Vert station on the far side of Place des Vosges.

  On his way to the restaurant he stopped in the plaza, lined with connected houses and arcades, a square of tan and peach gingerbread with morning smoke rising from the chimneys. Famous people had lived here, though he could not remember any of their names.

  He walked along a thin, pleasant pedestrian street of boutiques, Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. Kruse decided to return with Anouk, to buy her a dress or a pair of shoes if her mother would allow it. The event was set to begin at eleven thirty and it was not yet ten. A few of the shopkeepers swept the sidewalk while others leaned on the doorways and smoked. The radio news, France Info, played through open windows above, along with the clank of cutlery on plates, laughter, an argument about funerals.

  Baron Haussmann didn’t get around to razing the medieval Jewish quarter, the Pletzl, in the nineteenth century, so the streets were narrow and lacking in epic vistas. In Paris this was where he felt the most magic, at dusk, when his eyes had not yet adjusted to the shift in light. He could walk through any door, down any street, and find her waiting. “Papa,” she would say, the little Frenchie. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  There were Stars of David on the baby blue awning above the restaurant on Rue des Rosiers. He checked the windows opposite Chez Sternbergh, the crossroads, the men’s clothing store. He would not have chosen this restaurant, but no one had asked him.

  In the late 1970s, his career moved from self-defence into the active defence of others. Most of these others were extraordinarily wealthy. His meetings with them were in luxury hotels, with harpsichord music playing at the right volume, or on the top floors of office towers in New York and Toronto. There was only one sort of camouflage in these places: he began wearing suits. Tzvi Meisels, his partner in Krav Maga, worked out an accounting solution so the company could purchase high-quality Italian wool suits for its principals; a man cannot fight in jeans. His wife, Evelyn, had not liked the men and women he protected. She had not liked his job. She had designed their unearned sabbatical in the South of France as a complete transformation. She had urged him to leave both fighting and his fighting suits in the walk-in closet of the house on Foxbar Road. Now, with his monthly stipend from the City of Paris and his freelance contracts, he had replenished his collection.

  At the entrance a tiny woman in a mourning dress watched him. She wore a black wig and black stockings, and her eyebrows were painted on. From the briefing he knew this was Miriam Sternbergh. It was too cool to go without a jacket but she went without one, slightly hunched but also regal.

  “Are you Monsieur Kruse?”

  “I am.”

  The tiny woman stepped out onto the sidewalk, in a bulky set of high-heel shoes that echoed in the street. She shook his hand. “What dangers do you see?”

  Security work was different in France because France was different. “They pay me to be paranoid, Madame Sternbergh.”

  “So . . .”

  “I see dangers everywhere.”

  Madame Sternbergh took two steps back and leaned on the side of her restaurant. She pulled a package of cigarettes from a bulky pocket of her dress, fumble
d one into her mouth. It felt wrong, as though she was a child with a toy handbag. In the briefing Kruse learned she had worn black her entire adult life. She had never married, though in the 1950s an affair with Jean-Paul Sartre had lent her a sheen of local fame. Her parents had opened the restaurant before the Second World War, and though she was just seventeen years old, she had taken over as proprietor afterwards. She was the only member of the Sternbergh family who had survived.

  “My problem is I don’t know what a danger looks like.” Madame Sternbergh lit her cigarette with a match, and the scent filled their corner of Rue des Rosiers. “I can only tell you what it feels like. Feelings are my specialty. This has been my trouble, Monsieur Kruse, how I have become insufferable. Would you come in?”

  “I shouldn’t yet.” The restaurant was on a corner and exposed on three sides, with plenty of windows.

  “Monsieur Kruse, if someone wants to hurt us today he will hurt us. It has always been so.”

  This had been Evelyn’s philosophy. “That doesn’t leave me with many career prospects.”

  “Come talk to me. My leg hurts. I have to sit. Kruse—you’re German?”

  “Mennonite.”

  “Oh I like Mennonites. You don’t hurt people.”

  “I’m a terrible Mennonite.”

  “If you will permit me, Monsieur Kruse, it is the contrary. By the look of your face you allow people to hurt you.”

  There were tulips on every table, which were covered in bright white cloths. He could smell cooking oil, roasted meat. From inside, the stencils on the windows made it difficult to see onto Rue des Rosiers or the cross street, Ferdinand Duval. Madame Sternbergh led him to the back of the restaurant, to the only table that was not set and decorated for the party. There was a simple soundboard on it. At the other end of the room, near the entrance, a podium and speakers. Kruse had fought against this placement, as it exposed the mayors to danger from behind, but the interests of the photographers and television cameras came before safety. These were vain and ambitious men, and elections were coming.

  For a moment, somehow, the sun broke through and the sad restaurant turned jolly, the reds of the walls dancing with the tablecloths and tulips, the smoke. Madame Sternbergh clapped and sat up straight, but then the sun faded again to nothing. Now the restaurant seemed even darker. She put out her cigarette, sat back again, and sighed.

  “You often work for the mayor?”

  Kruse answered with a shrug.

  A man in a tuxedo presented Kruse and Madame Sternbergh with two little coffees and a small plate of biscuits made with coconut.

  “He’s lived his entire life in Paris and this is his first time, his first time, in my family’s restaurant.” She pushed her lips out, emitted a gentle sound like boeuf. “Paris has rather a few restaurants, I understand. I understand. But you’d think, as a gesture.”

  “Does it please you to have him here?”

  Madame Sternbergh flattened the creases in her wool dress. “Finally and enormously, yes. I am part of a committee, you see, trying to convince the mayor to apologize for the rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv.”

  Rafle he understood: roundup. The rest of the phrase was incomprehensible to him and, with an apology, he admitted it. This had not been in his briefing.

  She picked up a biscuit, inspected it, and tossed it on the floor. Almost immediately, one of the waiters arrived with a broom. “This is what infuriates me. That a man like you does not know. That millions of you do not know. Thirteen thousand of us were arrested and held in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. I was just a girl. How can anyone not know?”

  “When?”

  “This was in 1942.” She chose another cookie, smelled it, smiled in apology. “You know, before the war, I hated this food. I was a teenager. I didn’t even care, frankly, if my blood was Jewish or Somali. I loved bacon. I was French, Monsieur.”

  Kruse was not French, not by blood. But he shared their shame, for sending their neighbours away, as his parents had taught him. Every one of us owns every atrocity. He could hardly look her in the eyes as she spoke. “Your family . . .”

  “They had painted the glass roof of the velodrome blue, so the bombers wouldn’t destroy the place. It was summer, and unbearably hot. There was no food, no toilets. All of us, we went from civilization into a hot bath of shit. Both my parents and my two brothers went to Auschwitz.”

  “The mayor had something to do with this?” It would not have surprised Kruse.

  “He would have been a little boy in ’42. But he does have the power to apologize for it, to tell the story to people like you, and he has not. You know what he says, our mayor? ‘It wasn’t us! Those weren’t real Frenchmen who did that. The republic had dissolved. Those bad Vichy men . . .’”

  “So you reopened the restaurant.”

  “When you have something to protect, Monsieur Kruse, you protect it.”

  “I’ll speak to the mayor if I can.”

  “He is not only your employer? He is also your friend?”

  “I would not say friend.”

  “People like him, I think, they do not have friends.”

  “Not the way you and I would define the word, Madame Sternbergh.”

  “And our guest of honour, do you know him?”

  Pierre Cassin, the luncheon speaker, had been chosen to represent France in Brussels in some fashion. He was one of the politicians from across the country who had joined the mayor to build a new party, to save France from socialist ruin, restore it to glory. Kruse had worked many of their dinners and cocktail parties and tense conferences in miniature ballrooms. The conversations between the mayor and Monsieur Cassin were unofficial, too unofficial for the regular security machine. Kruse got the job not because the mayor trusted him, but because he and the mayor were bound to one another by ruinous secrets. The luncheon speaker, from what Kruse knew of him, was a much better man than the mayor. It would be his undoing. “I don’t know him at all, Madame.”

  Again she shrugged, boeuf. Her small cup of coffee was empty but, for something to do, she lifted it to her mouth. Kruse was anxious to finish his work: identifying the weaknesses and finding ways to overcome them.

  “Monsieur Kruse, I don’t mean this as an insult, but you don’t seem a bureaucrat.”

  “The bureaucrats are at another event today. He’s a busy fellow, our mayor.”

  “Ah. So if this were football you would be Ligue 2.”

  Kruse did not want to sound arrogant but he found the mayor’s regular security team a collection of overconfident dullards. “Yes, Madame. I suppose.”

  “Do we still have spies and assassins? I was wondering this the other day, when they asked to book the restaurant.” Madame Sternbergh snapped a biscuit in half and chewed it. “The wall has fallen. The Soviets are capitalists now.”

  “Perhaps Europeans felt similarly after the First World War.”

  “Touché. All right, Monsieur.” She placed one of her hands on his for a moment. “Go do your job. I’ll stop pestering you.”

  If he were honest, there was not much to do. He had already lost several arguments about how the luncheon was to proceed. With Tzvi he had invented a system of scenario testing, to think and act like Madame Sternbergh’s spies and assassins, like terrorists, like the aggrieved maniac. Thinking like a maniac was, for him, the most rewarding. He did it on paper and he still had twenty minutes, so he browsed a children’s shoe boutique down the street.

  At eleven the men in suits and women in dresses began to arrive. Kruse inspected them, one by one, at a short distance. Most were in their fifties and sixties, calm and prosperous people without any hint of threat about them. This would not be a difficult assignment. Two thirty-something couples arrived together with small children. Madame Sternbergh knew them and said “Coucou” to the babies. The guest of honour showed up fifteen minutes early, unescorted. He was not a recognized star, so he was able to walk straight to the back of the restaurant and address himself to a bowl of cornichons.
Even so, everyone turned to watch him. It was simply like that for some people.

  Kruse introduced himself, congratulated the young man on his recent appointment. Cassin chewed a cornichon and stared at Kruse, amusement in his eyes. Pierre Cassin, mayor of Nancy and a newly appointed negotiator for the Maastricht Treaty in Brussels, carried no superficial glamour about him: no handlers, no portable phone. He was just under forty, with shiny Mediterranean skin and a full head of hair. For a politician he was short and slight, and his head appeared much too large for the rest of his body. Kruse had noticed this “lollipop effect” with Hollywood stars in his protection, and wondered if perhaps it was an evolutionary advantage, part of the chemistry that makes up charisma.

  “An American security executive. If only this were to hit the papers. More lousy foreigners taking jobs from Parisians. A scandal for Monsieur le Maire.”

  “Canadian, actually.”

  “Our little cousins. That’s okay, then. Where is His Highness?”

  Kruse had been with these people long enough to know how they felt about the mayor of Paris. They were allies and enemies at once. Years of thwarted ambition were baked into every word Cassin said, and it would only get worse. The man had already lost some key battle; the mayor of Paris would slowly ruin his fondest dreams and Cassin knew it and there was nothing he could do about it. Kruse carried no political hopes, but the mayor had similarly trapped him—had linked their futures. When the mayor succeeds, we all succeed. For a moment Kruse and Cassin spoke without speaking, the scent of sweet pickle in the air. “He’s not far, Monsieur Cassin.”

  “No. No, he never is.”

  There was time to introduce Pierre Cassin to Madame Sternbergh, and they quietly chatted while Kruse returned to the door. Cassin eased in close as he spoke and made genuine eye contact. He asked questions. In half of the jobs Kruse had done for the mayor of Paris since December, the man himself had not shown up. There were always traffic problems. He was once out with an inner ear infection, and he missed the opening of a theatre because Muammar Gadhafi was in town and, at the last minute, the president requested his presence at a state dinner. These excuses were almost never genuine. The mayor had girlfriends, side projects, financial deals, off-the-books meetings.