Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  Two of the mayor’s assistants entered first and consulted with Kruse. The great man would introduce Cassin and leave immediately afterwards. A television crew was doing a story on top contenders for the next presidential election and they wanted an interview with him at the Grand Palais before his speech.

  The mayor’s car arrived, a black Renault. Kruse stepped out to meet it, opened the door for him, greeted him formally.

  “Any media?” As he spoke to Kruse, the mayor scanned the little plaza. He smiled and waved to the locals.

  “Not enough to justify the exposed position, Monsieur le Maire. It isn’t too late to move the microphones to—”

  “This is an in-and-out, it’s nothing. I’d hoped for no reporters, to teach the petit con a lesson.”

  Kruse did take advantage of his special relationship to ask the sorts of questions no one else asked. “Then why are you doing it?”

  The mayor’s driver straightened his jacket for him, brushed his shoulders.

  “His office insisted.” The mayor watched a flash of dandruff fall to the cobblestones. “A magnificent entrance into the world of international diplomacy. Our little Cassin wants my job, you see. He wanted the announcement at the Grand Palais this afternoon. I think a Jewish restaurant is more his size.”

  “Your job? But he doesn’t live here.”

  “Not my current job.” The mayor stepped toward the open door. “My future job.”

  The mayor opened his arms to greet Madame Sternbergh with kisses as though they were the oldest and finest of friends. “One of my favourite spots in Paris,” he told her, as three newspaper journalists made notes.

  Kruse had expected her to take this with polite cynicism, but she turned pink before the mayor and stuttered that it was an honour and a thrill to have him. He shook every hand in the room and stepped up to the microphone. With a lovely blend of formality and informality, he welcomed his good friend Pierre Cassin to Paris, the historic Marais, and to the finest Jewish restaurant in the city.

  “What we have before us, mes chers compatriotes, is the future of France. Her true soul. Pierre Cassin was born of a Muslim mother and a Jewish father. Yet he is one hundred per cent a Frenchman.” The audience, many of them from the city’s Jewish community, applauded.

  Kruse understood the air of resignation about the guest of honour. This was not really a celebration of his achievement. It was the mayor’s victory party. Cassin stood in the corner near the door to the kitchen. He waved them to their seats. “That’s just who I am,” he said, loud enough to be heard without a microphone. “Imagine what I’ll do.”

  The mayor paused and looked away from Cassin, as though it were a moment of unspeakable vulgarity. Kruse thought for an instant he might roll his eyes. Then he spoke of Cassin’s coming work on the European Union, which would benefit France not only economically. It would also prevent what had happened in the 1930s and ’40s on this continent, when good French families like the Sternberghs were destroyed by hate.

  Madame Sternbergh yanked on Kruse’s sleeve, to whisper in his ear. She was far enough away from the mayor that she was outside his spell. “Hear that? Hate destroyed my family. Not French policemen and their Nazi friends.”

  Kruse had no organized way to speak of the spirit world. But he would never forget the snap of panic that passed through him in the quiet before it happened. Madame Sternbergh’s coffee-and-cigarettes breath hung in the air. She had more to say but he could not listen. There were footsteps outside the restaurant, in an irregular pace. He felt them before he heard them. At first he saw no one in the cluttered windows facing Rue des Rosiers. He would try to explain it to himself that night and in other miserable moments of darkness in Paris and he would fail. There was nothing yet to see or hear. Then he saw it—him. A man’s head bobbed along the side of the restaurant, at a bizarre speed, not quite crooked but not straight either. He was in between walking and jogging. There was an instant, as he ran, that Kruse caught a look at more than the top of his head. Two of the windows broke, one after the other. And then two thumps, like dropped apples. He couldn’t see where the apples had rolled but he shouted, “Get down and cover your ears!”

  At the far end of the restaurant, Pierre Cassin dove.

  The mayor’s hands were up, to stop Kruse. “What are you doing?”

  Kruse shoved the mayor out the open door of the restaurant, and he tripped and fell backwards onto the cobblestones. Inside, Cassin was too far away. Kruse couldn’t see him. Madame Sternbergh was close so he tackled her into the near wall and she screamed and three flowerpots fell on top of them.

  It began with a brief inhale, a contraction, as though the room were preparing to sneeze. The blast itself, two folded into one, was more powerful than he could have imagined. It was as though he had been kicked into the wall by the largest foot in the world, and when he removed his fingers from his ears there was blood on his hands and dirt from the flowerpots and Madame Sternbergh’s face was a charred wreck. He tried to stand and he fell, dizzy from the blast. His head hurt and all he could hear was a high bee buzzing. He reached down to help Madame Sternbergh to her feet but she was unconscious.

  A thick fog of hot ash filled the room. It felt like the hook of a coat hanger was stuck in his throat, and when he reached in to pull it out there was nothing. He threw up. Madame Sternbergh was not breathing. A woman stood directly in front of him, shouted in his face, but she was speaking underwater. Cordite. That was the word he was trying to remember. His left arm was wet with blood, and his hands. The fog began to settle. Kruse rubbed the ash from his eyes and, as he looked out at what the restaurant and its people had become, he reached for something to hold and tripped over a body and returned to the floor of Chez Sternbergh.

  TWO

  Rue du Champ de Mars

  THE MAYOR’S SENIOR SECURITY MAN HAD POSTED HIMSELF OUTSIDE Chez Sternbergh. Instead of watching for threats he had sat in the car with the previous day’s Le Figaro. He wept while the police questioned him. Rien, Messieurs. I saw nothing. My life is over. The paramedics inspected Kruse, wiped the blood and soot from his face and hair, none of it his, and poked him. Kruse had nothing helpful to tell the investigators. The man who threw the grenades was shorter than six feet and he had black hair, which narrowed their search to eight million men. He was young, or youngish. There was something about the way he had moved: crooked. How, he could not say. The man had straight posture but Kruse kept wanting to say bossu—hunchback. There had been five seconds. If he had followed the grenades instead of watching the top of the attacker’s head he might have picked the bombs up and tossed them right back outside. The mayor was treated for a minor laceration, from his fall on the cobblestones. He stared at Kruse as the doctor worked on him, four stitches. If Pierre Cassin had not jumped on the grenades it would have been much worse.

  The survivors gathered to talk and to cry. An elderly woman with blood on the side of her face and in her hair said, to a man in a suit, wearing a knitted kippa, “It was a young Frenchman. A Frenchman in blue jeans and a light jacket.”

  A sooty man pointed his broken cigarette at her. “No, no, no, Madame. I saw an Arab running. It was an Arab in blue jeans.”

  Sirens, more sirens, overwhelmed the conversation. Madame Sternbergh had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, from the blast. One of the two babies had died and the other was on its way to the Hôtel-Dieu. When they were finished with him, Kruse refused a ride and walked north and west, up Rue Montmartre and along busy Boulevard Haussmann. It was pleasant to be among other people attending to their lives, sitting at cafés and reading newspapers, as his hearing returned to something like normal. An electric bird continued to coo in his ears, but not so insistently. He went farther north and west, away from his apartment.

  Evelyn had commissioned a modern closet in the second-floor master bedroom of the house on Foxbar Road. When he opened the door the light turned on automatically, which never stopped feeling like sorcery. One of Evelyn’s posters fro
m her graduate school days hung at the end of the magic closet in a red IKEA frame: a reproduction of Gare Saint-Lazare by Claude Monet. Two locomotives rest under a triangular roof, with almost-people standing nearby and faintly, through the steam, a block of pretty apartments.

  Hattemer, Anouk’s school, was adjacent to Gare Saint-Lazare. The mayor of Paris had arranged it so Anouk could go for free, part of his payment to Annette and to Kruse. A train was starting toward Normandy when he arrived. The steam was gone, replaced by nuclear electricity, and Monet was dead and Evelyn was dead, but the almost-people and the buildings were here. He leaned over the wrought iron fence, near the end of Rue de Londres, and he watched the trains and then he watched the sidewalks and the windows. Hattemer was a private school, for the richest parents in Paris if not precisely for the children.

  He was far enough away that they would not see him. The bell rang and Annette, who had been waiting in the lobby, emerged with Anouk. Three times in January he had picked her up, when Annette had still allowed it. The children were eerily quiet inside the school, even in the early grades. They would remain in their desks until Madame Fournier, the teacher, made eye contact with the chauffeurs in uniform and governesses in Dior, one by one.

  Today was different. The parents had come. German town cars were parked up and down Rue de Londres. Mothers and fathers had emerged like prophets among the faithful. Word had already spread through Paris that a man had tossed grenades into a restaurant, that a baby had died.

  Anouk had just turned five, two years older than Lily when she died. Five seemed impossibly old. She wore a big-girl backpack, simple pink canvas with no cartoon animals. Kruse could hear himself saying something bland to Evelyn, at Lily’s fifth birthday party, about the astonishing speed of time. Anouk turned and said a formal goodbye to her teacher. The school vibrated with old values, methods, aesthetics, a sneer at the vulgarity of Mitterrand France. It wasn’t a terribly relaxing place for a little girl. On the sidewalk Anouk exhaled as though she had been holding her breath all day.

  Kruse followed Annette and Anouk down into Saint-Lazare station and watched them weave through the tiled columns of the rotunda. Even in the middle of the day the pillars carried the glow of soft lamps. They went through the turnstiles and he watched them until the last moment, the final flash of backpack pink. He stopped himself from running through and hugging them, kissing them, saying I love you without actually saying it. He returned to the street, feeling lonelier and more lost than before he had watched them. While he had trained himself to take a punch, the swing of a knife, a fall, even a bullet, Kruse had no idea how to survive a day like today. He walked south, conscious now that people stopped as he passed. They walked wide arcs around him, this man in a bloody, dusty blue suit. It was garbage. The paramedic had wiped a bit of brain from his shoulder.

  On the Pont Alexandre III, just as he passed the gold winged statues, a police car pulled over. The two young flics appeared genuinely frightened. One was breathless, as though he had been sprinting, only he had just stepped out of the little white car. They insisted on driving him home because someone had called in to complain that a ghoul had just crossed the Champs-Élysées.

  • • •

  His wife would have been horrified to see him living in one of the great culinary cities of the world yet eating every day at the same little brasserie three blocks from his apartment, the same dinner: a salad with two modest rectangles of baked goat cheese. Café du Marché was a cramped, always-busy sort of place a Canadian has to learn to appreciate, as he was nearly always touching and smelling strangers, hearing them chew, sharing their secrets and their cigarette smoke. That night, the only free seat was at the bar. His neighbours wanted, even more than usual, to share a warm room with one another. It had been too late in the day for the explosion to make the afternoon papers but it was on every radio station and led the evening newscasts.

  The story on France 2 began silently, with images from the explosion on Rue des Rosiers. Café du Marché was never quiet, but patrons shushed each other and the shushes spread through the main room and out to the covered terrace. Diners and drinkers stood and gathered to smoke and watch the television. Madeleine, the heavily tattooed rockabilly girl who spent all day every day behind the bar, turned the volume as high as it would go. More gathered at the entrance, under the awning.

  Nine people were killed, twenty-two injured. The chief of police suggested another six Parisians were in precarious condition, which could affect the statistics. Shaky diners at Chez Sternbergh who had survived the attack were sure of what they had seen but no two of them could agree. A man or men had tossed the device into the restaurant, two of them or four of them, French or foreigner, as the mayor was introducing Pierre Cassin. No no, there were no men. It was hidden under a table all along. Someone shouted a prayer to Allah just before it blew up. No one had said a word. A man had laughed. A retired American intelligence agent in Paris tied the attack to the recent explosion in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York, which had killed six and injured over one thousand. If we are to understand why it is happening, he said, we need only remember the Munich Olympics. There is a diaspora of homeless and humiliated Palestinians out there and they have sons with money, foreign passports, and weapons.

  One thing was certain: it would have been far worse if Pierre Cassin had not dived on top of the grenades.

  The mayor of Paris appeared, surrounded by other survivors of the blast. It looked as though one of his handlers had mussed his hair, smeared a bit of ash on his forehead, tousled his suit and shirt so he would look battle-worn. The last Kruse saw him, behind the ambulance, the mayor had been much cleaner than this. His short speech, about how the people who did this have only made us stronger, was memorized from a script. “There is a murderer in Paris.” The mayor looked around him, opened his arms. “But he is up against ten million of us, citizens of the most civilized city in the world. We will hunt him and we will find him.”

  Spontaneous applause erupted around him. It would play around the world, just as he had surely planned.

  The segment ended with two short tributes, to Madame Sternbergh and to Cassin, who had a wife and two children, but when it was over the anchorman repeated two lines from the mayor’s speech. He spoke of the hunt.

  Madeleine turned off the television. Conversations in the room restarted low, in little more than whispers. The two men at the bar next to Kruse didn’t speak at all, yet their silence was somehow louder than anything they might say. He hadn’t noticed they were North African until now. No one said anything to them, not at first, but several people stared. They couldn’t have ordered anything more French: a bottle of Sancerre and a plate of cured meats, nuts, and cheese. Madeleine slowly turned up the music, a violin concerto instead of her usual repertoire.

  “I’m feeling sentimental.” She winked at him, her regular.

  The stares from behind were not driven by curiosity. Kruse could feel a sort of heat on his back and neck. Ten minutes after the news ended, the man next to Kruse, with a layer of sweat at his hairline, asked him if he would like to finish their bottle. They had decided to leave.

  “Please don’t.” Madeleine put her hand on the bottle.

  Kruse heard and felt the change behind him. A large man, red-faced with liquor, slid his chair away and stood up. Two others joined him. They murmured to each other and approached the bar.

  “What do you say to that?” The bald man spoke to the backs of the North Africans. His forearms were thick and hairy and freckled.

  Madeleine asked her clients to ignore the big man and his supporters. She tilted around and asked the soldier and his friends, with royal politesse, to sit down and enjoy their evening. A half-litre of whatever they were drinking would be on the house. The man next to Kruse was breathing quickly and shallowly. The other had closed his eyes.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” The soldier waited. Neither of the men turned around. “We’ve be
en sitting here trying to figure you out. Why can’t you debate, like the rest of us, instead of blowing up restaurants and office towers? You’re cowards? Is that it?”

  “Monsieur, I’m French.” The one with the sweaty forehead turned slowly. “I was born here, in Paris. My parents were born in Paris. My father fought in the war. My first language is French and my second language is Italian.”

  “What about Arabic?”

  “I’m proud to speak enough to make it through my prayers.”

  “And what do you pray for?” The soldier pointed to the television.

  Madeleine cussed and looked around. Her fellow servers, two women and thin men with stylish haircuts, were no good to her at all. “I’m calling the police.”

  It was time for the soldiers to sit, but Kruse knew men like this. There was only one way.

  “Get out.” The soldier pointed to the door, at the street in the rain, as though the men were dogs who had soiled the floor.

  “Let’s go,” said the sweaty man to his friend. “If Madame could package dinner for us.”

  Madeleine told the soldier and his compatriots to piss off, called them monsters, but they ignored her. She put a styrofoam package on the bar and the North African man who had not spoken to the soldier began filling it with the meat and pickles and dried figs and cheese. The leader folded his big arms. Kruse wiped his fingers and put his hand on the sweaty man’s arm, asked him to stay.

  “I don’t want to stay. Not now.”

  Kruse slid off his stool and stood in front of the soldier, who was several inches taller and much thicker. But something in the soldier’s eyes changed. Something always changed. Tzvi, his teacher, had taught him how to do this when he was not yet twenty, when his face was still free of scars, how to stand and how to stare. There was no anger in it, only the poise that comes with absolute confidence. Much of the bulk in the soldier’s chest had migrated into his belly, as much as he tried to suck it in. Kruse took a step forward. “They’re staying, Messieurs. I’m afraid you’re not. Pay your bill and go.”