Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  “You’re what? American? Pay your bill and go,” said the soldier, mocking Kruse’s accent. His friends laughed with him. “Sit down, Woody Allen.”

  Both of the men at the bar pleaded with Kruse to leave this alone. They were happy to leave. Madeleine was behind him, in the middle of phoning the police.

  “What are you going to do, American? Fight three of us for your Arab boyfriends?”

  “Yes, Monsieur. That is exactly what I’m going to do. Though I think we should do it in the rain, rather than break anything in here. We all like this place.”

  A few others stood up from their seats now, men and women, including a giant in a navy blue suit. The giant slipped past the soldiers and stood next to Kruse. All the soldiers could do now was find enough money in their pockets and, with some parting words about France becoming an Islamic republic, walk out into the rain.

  There was a moment of relief, for those who had not wanted to see a fight. Madeleine vowed to report the men anyway, when the police arrived. The giant congratulated Kruse for doing what no one else would do, and returned to his seat. For two or three minutes the men remained at the bar with Kruse and then, without a word of deliberation with each other, they stood up. Kruse was careful not to make eye contact with them. He waited until they were on their way out before he said sorry.

  The sweaty one who had spoken to the soldier, whose grandfather had fought in the war, shook his head. “Why are you apologizing, Monsieur?”

  His French would never be subtle enough.

  The men shook hands with Kruse, in the French fashion—limp, without ceremony—and opened their umbrellas at the door.

  “I would have left too,” said Madeleine.

  Kruse nodded.

  She pulled a couple of glasses down and poured a splash of the leftover Sancerre into each one. “Chin-chin,” she said, and drank, and stared at him for a moment. “You weren’t frightened?”

  “You think I should have been?”

  “He was as big as two of you and ugly and stupid as a turnip. He would have killed you. Plus, he had friends.”

  “Men like that don’t actually fight.”

  The electric birdcall in his ears had mostly faded. One of the paramedics had told him it could take weeks, if not forever. The single sip of Sancerre had been enough, though he knew it would do him well to drink more, ease him into sleep. He did not want to leave but there was no reason to stay, apart from avoiding the silence of his apartment. He had furnished and decorated the second bedroom himself, with a small single bed and art Lily had loved: pictures of bugs, original sketches from Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. All of the Astérix books were on the shelf, up to the point where René Goscinny died, and he had recently bought Les Malheurs de Sophie, a novel about a curious little girl who lives in a castle.

  He stood up to leave, to say goodbye to Madeleine, but her eyes changed. She pointed behind him.

  “My young friend. I just heard.”

  Only one man in Paris spoke to him in English. They met here, once a week, usually in a corner where no one would hear them. Kruse never understood why he had become a confessional for Joseph Mariani, who could hire as many real psychologists as he wanted, but he knew Joseph’s heart: they were bound by what had happened to them in Aix-en-Provence, by blood.

  Joseph joined him at the bar, switched to French for Madeleine’s benefit. “You’re abandoning a bottle of Sancerre?”

  “I’ve tried to convince him to drink with me.” She poured a glass for Joseph.

  “He could use one.”

  “Why?”

  “Surely you know our brave boy was in Chez Sternbergh today. He saved the life of our beloved mayor.”

  Madeleine looked at him.

  “To you.” Joseph touched the tip of Kruse’s glass and drank.

  “Nine people died. I made an error. If I’d focused on the grenades instead of the—”

  “You saw him?”

  “The top of his head.”

  Madeleine continued to stare at Kruse, even as one of the waiters waved for her attention. “What are you doing here, Christophe? Shouldn’t you be . . . Where do you go when you’ve survived an explosion?”

  “He comes with me. But first he takes a drink.”

  If he took a drink, a real drink, a red-cheeked racist from the military would swing and he would not see it. But this was not the genuine reason he avoided the Sancerre, which smelled faintly but deliciously of newly mowed grass.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You shall see.”

  Kruse pulled francs out of his wallet and Madeleine reached out, stopped him. “It’s on me tonight.”

  “I don’t deserve it.”

  She turned away from him, addressed the waiter. Kruse thanked her and she sighed, brushed him away as though he were a mosquito.

  “Goat cheese salad and verbena tea. Jesus Christ, man.” At the door, Joseph opened his umbrella and handed a second one to Kruse. It was an hour before sunset but it was dark. Rain roared on the cobblestones. Just beyond it, the sound of the pianist above the café who played with the window open: Brahms. He knew it was Brahms because his late wife, whom he had failed to protect, had taught him. He had learned to play it, though not nearly this well. The black Mercedes was parked illegally on Rue du Champ de Mars. Monsieur Claude, in his classic chauffeur’s uniform, stood at attention.

  If he had not dreaded the thought of being alone in the apartment, waiting for sleep to arrive, he would not have gone. The leather seats squeaked as he slid into place. It smelled of Joseph’s cologne. “What’s happening?”

  Joseph pretended he had not heard the question.

  THREE

  Rue d’Andigné, Paris

  KRUSE HAD NEVER BEEN INSIDE JOSEPH’S APARTMENT IN PARIS, BUT he had secretly followed him home so he would know where to find him. It was on the top floor of a stone building on Rue d’Andigné, in the sixteenth arrondissement. The street was lined with luxury sedans, German-made for one sort of Parisian and French-made for another. The apartment was a high-ceilinged four-thousand-square-foot art deco palace of dark wood and gold fixtures, pink highlights, curved ceilings, and streamlined appliances. The furniture was dark leather, as though it had come from a movie between the wars, and the massive chandelier hanging over the dining room table was the shape and colour of a honeycomb.

  They weren’t alone. A scent, a presence, made the tour difficult to follow: a list of designers, eras, famous guests who had been through. Joseph was leading him to something, to someone. A woman in soft-soled shoes and a black dress presented them with a tray of cheeses and a bottle of champagne, two full flutes.

  “No, Madame, thank you.”

  “For Christ’s sake, haven’t you taken enough verbena tea for one night?” Joseph chose a glass. “This is Louis Roederer Cristal, the 1990.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “I could slap you.”

  “You could.”

  “Except I . . . couldn’t.”

  Joseph adjusted his tie and continued. The bedrooms were named for famous Corsicans: Tino Rossi, Pasquale Paoli, Napoléon Bonaparte. The Mariani family was famous, but not for entertainment or statecraft. Joseph’s father had worked in Bastia until the mid-1950s, when he moved the family business to Marseille: prostitution and protection, loan-sharking and illegal gambling, large-scale theft, and, eventually, the heroin trade. They invested the profits in legitimate ventures like real estate, restaurants, bars and nightclubs, tour companies, wineries, and luxury fashion. Now that Joseph’s cruel father and sadistic brother were dead, he was selling off his family’s traditional lines of business to focus on activities that would neither land him in jail for the rest of his life nor see him shot in the head and dumped in the Seine by rivals in the Brise de Mer gang. But Joseph Mariani had a few attachments to illegal activity he would never escape. At the end of the hall was a library and lounge. Joseph stopped him at the doorway.

  “
If this is . . . I’m sorry, Christopher.”

  “For what?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. They have me the way they have you.”

  “Who?”

  Joseph led him into the room, and a stately woman stood up from a red-brown couch. Her eyes were small and fierce. In this light Kruse could only guess her age, somewhere between thirty and forty. She carried the severity and the confidence of a lawyer, but she did not wear a lawyer’s clothes.

  “I’m sorry it took so long to snatch him up, Madame Moquin. He wasn’t at home. I had to do some detective work.”

  “It was as pleasant a wait as I could imagine.” Madame Moquin wore a layered black dress with a hint of Gothic carnival about it. Her high boots and stockings completed the outfit: she was a raven. Her red hair had been clipped up extravagantly. She gestured toward her glass of champagne. “Thank you.”

  “Christophe Kruse, this is Zoé Moquin.”

  They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. They sipped their drinks until the time was right for Joseph, as host, to explain why this raven of a woman was here, waiting. “She works with the Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense. Le DPSD, we call it. I think you have some experience with them.”

  Kruse had not only met men and women of the DPSD, one of France’s clandestine agencies. He had escaped from them in a vat of wine. It was always his first thought when he smelled Beaujolais. “It’s an honour to meet you, Madame Moquin.”

  “We have quite the file on you, Monsieur. As you can imagine.”

  Kruse could speak the language but he couldn’t yet decipher the codes. He had no idea what he was supposed to be imagining. “Yes, Madame.”

  “Rather a large team is working on this, obviously. I should say teams.”

  “Working on what?”

  The woman turned to Joseph and sipped. Then back to Kruse. “The attack on Chez Sternbergh. Joseph didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Our chief, the chief of the DPSD, furnished us all with a briefing one hour ago. While we have witnesses, none are terribly reliable.”

  “It was a young man with dark hair.”

  “I say this with the greatest affection, but every law enforcement agency in France will be falling over themselves and each other to solve this. And I fear, I know, Monsieur Kruse, from experience that . . .” Zoé Moquin smiled weakly, turned to Joseph. “I wonder, Monsieur Mariani, if you might find us something to eat with our champagne.”

  There was a plate of cheese, crackers, tapenade, and grapes on the table. Joseph was careful not to look at it, to pretend it was not there. “The strawberries of Plougastel are in season, Madame. I believe we have a basket or two.”

  Once they could no longer hear Joseph’s shoes on the wood, Zoé Moquin pulled a silver cigarette holder from her purse and offered him one. “Would you like to sit?”

  “No, Madame.”

  “I’ve watched you, Monsieur Kruse. I’ve read everything.”

  He did not know how to respond to this so he didn’t. “You work with the mayor?”

  “Yes wouldn’t be an entirely correct answer. Neither would no.”

  “If you work with Joseph you work with the mayor.”

  She looked away from him, at an oil painting of a long-ago street riot. “Maybe we should start over.”

  “If you can’t tell me why I’m here, I’m not sure that would make a difference, Madame.”

  “The other security men come from another place. And I don’t mean your Americanness sets you apart, necessarily.”

  “I’m not American.”

  “They’re ignorant and empty. It’s part of their training. I see you as different from them.”

  “Two of your colleagues, last fall—”

  “I know. Your company in America. And yes, the ugly business some months ago. All you have lost. It’s etched in your face.” She ran a finger down her own cheek, the line of his longest scar. “What happened? Or is that a rude question?”

  “Lots of things happened to my face.”

  “Let’s leave it to my imagination, then.” She smoked and sipped her champagne and watched him. “You and I have something in common, Monsieur Kruse. Neither of us is obliged to work for financial reasons. We simply do, because it lends meaning to our lives. A sense of order, yes?”

  The adrenaline of the day was suddenly draining from him, and the void was filling with annoyance. How did this woman know where his money came from? He was too tired for one of these conversations. “You’ve asked me to come here for a reason, Madame.”

  “These beasts killed a baby today. And for what? While we call in forensic experts from Lyon and London, and profilers from New York, and ask fat men behind computers to go through databases, the people who did this fly off to . . . wherever mass murderers go.”

  “What can I do?”

  “You were there. You saw it and smelled it. You no doubt tasted it. Pierre Cassin was our friend. Madame Sternbergh and others from our Jewish community—have we not hurt them enough?”

  “Madame Moquin, what do you want?”

  She leaned forward over the heavy oak table and spoke slowly and quietly. “We want you to find out who did this.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re nobody. You’re not police or military. You work for the city, for the republic from time to time, but we don’t know you. The press doesn’t know you. You’re a ghost.”

  “You think I can move faster than hundreds of investigators with credentials.”

  “We know you can. We want you to find them.” Now she whispered: “And we want you to eliminate them.”

  Kruse waited a moment. “Madame, you’ve mistaken me for someone else. Our friend in common, Joseph Mariani, has access to—”

  “He’s not my friend, Monsieur Kruse.”

  “And I’m not in the elimination business.”

  She reached for his hand and took it in hers. Her skin was soft and cool and wet from the champagne flute. He could see down the front of her raven dress as she leaned forward, and she knew it. “I understand precisely who you are.”

  Perfume did not interest him, not normally. Walking through the scents in a department store gave him a faint headache. But the smell about her was different, like something he might encounter on a beach or in a forest that would inspire him to stop and try to remember. It was a thing he couldn’t grasp. He liked having his hand in hers. “Thank you for this invitation, Madame. It was pleasant to meet you.”

  “Wait. Monsieur Kruse . . .”

  He was already at the door and he kept walking.

  Joseph was in the dining room alone, leaning on the back of a chair with his champagne flute at his mouth. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m not a murderer.”

  Joseph sighed, looked in the direction of the library. “What do you most love in the world?”

  “My daughter. My wife.”

  “Of course. Nothing else?”

  “You know what else, Joseph.”

  “Annette Laferrière and her daughter, Anouk, who live at number 5, Rue Valadon. And I am not the only one who knows. In my business, in Madame Moquin’s business, with someone like you . . .”

  “Someone like me?”

  “A man who loves. It’s all we—they—need to know. Why else have you stayed in Paris, my friend?”

  Kruse walked to the door and did not respond or even slow his stride when Joseph called his name. When he reached the sidewalk and the rain he ignored Monsieur Claude’s offer to drive him home and refused an umbrella.

  • • •

  It had snowed in Paris on Christmas Eve.

  Annette invited Kruse to her apartment. He didn’t know much about wine and food, compared with a genuine Frenchman, so he had asked his friends at Café du Marché to prepare something festive for him to take. With Anouk he decorated a little Christmas tree with homemade ornaments that would have seemed old-fashioned in Canada: popcorn,
balls of coloured thread. Annette took pictures and drank good wine. After dinner he read to Anouk in English, A Visit from St. Nicholas. That morning he had found an eighty-year-old illustrated copy of the poem among the dust bunnies and cats at Shakespeare and Company. Then it was time to put Anouk to bed. He sang to her, one of the only songs he knew by heart, the inappropriate “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” and Annette had taken his hand in the almost-darkness. The wine in her breath was delicious to him, and the sound of Anouk’s breathing, the warmth of her shoulder against his.

  Anouk fell asleep and her mother leaned over to kiss him. There was no escaping it. Once they kissed it could not be undone. He wanted to kiss her, to stay in this apartment rather than return to the quiet of his own on Christmas Eve. But the elegance of Anouk’s pink bedroom was manufactured, and not by them. The mayor owned this apartment—and he owned Kruse.

  Annette Laferrière was a journalist when they met. She had wanted to write about his wife, Evelyn, who was at that time hiding somewhere in France. The police wanted to charge Evelyn for murdering her lover, and they weren’t the only ones hunting her.

  When he met Annette, Kruse was not sleeping, he was barely eating, trying to find and save his lost, unfaithful wife.

  When it came time to publish the story—the truth about Evelyn May Kruse, her lover, and the people who had actually killed him—the mayor of Paris offered them a deal. Annette could remain quiet, give up journalism, and her daughter would go to the best school in the country. They would move from the worst apartment in Paris to one of the finest. Annette would have a rewarding career at the Carnavalet Museum, and a stipend from the city so she might live an altogether different life—the life of a rich woman. They would be safe from harm, forever.

  The mayor of Paris guaranteed it. They would never ask for anything ugly or untoward from Kruse, from Annette, from Anouk.