Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  The call ended and Tzvi took his time walking across the carpets of the salon. He rubbed his hands for a while, feigned disinterest. “And how are you, jeune homme?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You look a bit white. Have you contracted consumption in the last hour?”

  “Tzvi.”

  “My boy, my wonderful boy, you will never guess what I have learned.”

  “You were right.”

  “Who might have guessed it? I was right! And it could not be more perfect. My oldest, filthiest bastard of an enemy, going back to Munich, did this to us. I cannot believe our luck—to earn three million dollars killing a man I have dreamed about killing since I was twenty. Christopher, sweetheart. When we find this ben zona I am going to cut a hole in him somewhere, maybe in his sternum, and fuck it.”

  “I won’t allow that.”

  “Right in the sternum.”

  “You can’t already be sure. You make one phone call and—”

  “Mossad is the best in the world for a reason. They do not play by any sentimental rules. As for al-Faruqi, this is the work of his life. Some people build houses. Others work on computers. Maybe they are farmers, merchants, veterinarians, beekeepers. Khalil al-Faruqi kills Jews. We begin tomorrow.”

  “How would your contact know already that—”

  “The French security apparatus, whatever it’s called.”

  “Tzvi—in this, we are the French security apparatus. If someone in French intelligence has informed Mossad already, then how could they know what they know? And why wouldn’t Madame Moquin pass it all to us?”

  “You make me tired, Christopher. This is a Canadian disease you suffer from. It is like those happy maniacs who come by my house with their brochures and ask me to join their religion.”

  “The Mormons?”

  “Not those happy maniacs.”

  “The Jehovahs?”

  “Yes, those ones. The Witnesses of Jehovah. With photographs of lions and baboons and people of all different colours having a permanent cocktail hour together in paradise, only with no cocktails. There is no such place, no such world. Some people, my boy, are simply bad people.”

  “I think this is a dangerous line of reasoning, Tzvi.”

  He clapped his hands. “You make me tired. But not too tired to go out and celebrate. On y va.”

  “I have nothing to celebrate.”

  “The opportunity to eliminate a mass murderer and make three million dollars? You are a grump of astonishing passion.”

  “It’s too fast.”

  “What’s too fast?”

  “They’re paying us three million for nothing. If they know who did it . . .”

  “No one knows. My old friend does not know. But he knows.”

  “How?”

  “They listen in on everything, including this conversation you and I are having just presently. Hello, fat men with headphones and potato chips in Haifa! And whose Arabic is better? Your friends in French intelligence or my friends in Israeli intelligence?”

  “It feels wrong.”

  “That feeling is fear. Come out with me. We shall dance it away.”

  Kruse shook his head and watched Tzvi walk down the narrow corridor in a dark suit, the walk of a man who has never been stopped. A splash of new cologne hung in the suite. Kruse stood in silence for a moment and then he called down for a bottle of red wine, whatever they recommended, and turned on the television. In the neighbourhood, Allan and Nettie Kruse were the only parents who didn’t drink. There was a religious imperative, but neither of them were orthodox or even terribly rigid Mennonites. It was something else: fear of losing control.

  He watched the news. In a town called Waco a religious group had done something to inspire a gigantic military siege. The woman who brought up the bottle, a Vacqueyras, spoke with a stutter. She had chosen it herself, she said, and stared at the scar on his cheek. The wine was a dehydrated plum. He turned off the television and sat in the couch and closed his eyes and remembered the man whose head had bobbed alongside Chez Sternbergh: his hair, his eyes, his nose, his ears.

  For most of his life, he did not take a drink. It was not a fear of losing control that stopped him. He worried his senses would be dulled, that it would slow his feet and hands, make him a fool. But he was safe in the hotel, with nowhere to go. Nowhere to go until his third glass, just after midnight, when he decided to put his tie back on and go out.

  The hotel was a converted thirteenth-century abbey with a clock tower on top. He walked backwards a few paces to watch it grow smaller in the pale evening spotlights. While he had no destination, there was nowhere else to go. He walked north and west through the tranquil old city, from the fifth to the seventh. It reminded him, after a certain hour, of a church: there were people on the streets but they spoke in careful murmurs, as though everything were a secret.

  Rue Valadon was deserted. No people, no cars. He knew the code on the door by watching her, and though he didn’t have the key he didn’t need one. In the foyer he took off his shoes. Piano played softly toward the bedrooms. Annette had heard that falling asleep to classical music taught children to concentrate in school or to be kinder to one another, something. He stopped at her door and pushed it open wide enough to see she was alone; Étienne was presumably out with one of his other girlfriends.

  Anouk’s room smelled like her shampoo and conditioner, faintly of apples. It had an en suite, and the humidity of a recent bath hung in the air. Kruse sat against the wall, near her bed, and watched her in what streetlight leaked in through the curtains. In December she had been kidnapped. Anouk had watched a man without a nose strip her mother naked and attach her arms to a hook on the ceiling. It was all his doing and he knew, from daytime television talk shows, that episodes of fear and anxiety in childhood led to weakness and victimhood later in life.

  So in the dark, with the piano in the background, he whispered strength to her.

  By the time he heard the bare feet on the wood floor it was too late. The only exits were windows: two in her bedroom and one in the bathroom. Three glasses of wine had made it a philosophical option, nothing more. What would it mean to sneak out a window?

  Annette always slept in a long white T-shirt. She now had the money to afford the finest lingerie in Paris, but instead she stayed with the Johnny Hallyday shirt. To him, Johnny Hallyday represented French extremes. They may have been more sophisticated than Canadians, but when they were tasteless they were really tasteless.

  She waved him out of the room and leaned against the wall in the corridor, in between small works of what Étienne called l’art-pompier. Her eyes were small in the light and he could tell she had just brushed her hair.

  “I could call the police.”

  “You could.”

  “This is an invasion. It is below you and an insult.”

  “I wanted to say goodbye.”

  She reached up for her black hair, pulled her fingers through her curls at the back. “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a job I have to do. And when I do it, I may not come back.”

  “Why not?”

  “The apartment, what I have. They can take it away.”

  “Four months? Monsieur le Maire said we could have these forever.”

  “You can. I can’t.”

  “I could still write the story, the truth about what the mayor’s men did to you. To us.”

  “Monsieur le Maire has prepared himself, I’m sure.”

  Annette looked away, furrowed her brows as though she were working through a math problem. “You were chanting.”

  “Not chanting, not exactly.”

  “Another cowboy song?”

  “No.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Annette’s breathing sped up. When he fought, Kruse watched his opponents’ chests. All but the best-trained fighters telegraphed with their breath. He knew when they were about to swing, and he always wanted
to hit them before they hit him. Annette did not hit him. Her lips quivered and she reached up to block the view with her hand, as if there was something hideous in her teeth.

  He knew someone like Zoé Moquin would arrive. Only it happened much sooner than he had imagined. But if he knew a Zoé Moquin would arrive, why didn’t he just do what he had most wanted on Christmas Eve? If Kruse had lived here with them, whispering truths to Anouk in the night, whispering to Annette, everything would be the same. Tzvi would be out prowling. He would be thinking about a man named Khalil al-Faruqi. Everything would be the same but this: Annette standing before him with trembling lips, confused and hurt and perhaps worse.

  Kruse had never kissed her but he had hoped to, someday. He had been a fool.

  “I am sorry.”

  “For what?”

  Kruse reached for her hand. Her skin was hot from sleep. Annette slept with her window opened, and did not smell of apples. She smelled of rain. For a few moments, magical moments, she allowed him to hold her hand. There was no way to say what he was thinking—I will do anything to be sure you and this girl are safe—without either sounding like an idiot or scaring her, so he said nothing.

  Annette looked down at their hands, one in the other, and slowly pulled hers away. “It’s very simple between men and women like you and me. You’re either together or you’re not. You can’t be friends, not really. You’re either in all the way, Christophe, or you’re all the way out. It seems to me you’re out.”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “There are no maybes. And if you do this again I’ll call the police.”

  It was not yet raining but soon it would. Thunder rumbled in the north. On the corner a new car gently rocked back and forth. Inside, two lovers moved on one another. Kruse arrived at the abbey just as the rain began to fall. The woman with the stutter, who had brought the Vacqueyras to the suite, asked how it was and offered him a towel for his hair. He said it was delicious and dangerous.

  It took her a while to get it out but she said, “Like all the finest things.”

  • • •

  The Salle Ovale of the National Library was as solemn as a cathedral. It smelled of dust and wood and of something that had been drenched long ago and might never dry. Natural light came in through the roof and a series of glass portholes to the sky. Yet like all of his favourite places in Paris the grand hall carried its beauty and grandeur with an unpretentious shrug. The scholars who showed up with him at ten in the morning to snatch their spots were hunched and unattractive. A few of them mumbled to themselves. These were Evelyn’s, his wife’s, people more than his, the doomed intellectuals, and as always he envied them for the simple ways they dove into complexity. He had queued with them in the courtyard, near the leaning statue of Jean-Paul Sartre, and when he had entered with them they rushed like roaches. The red-haired reference librarian with the freckles and the enormous wedding ring picked him out and pointed.

  “One of these things is not like the other,” she sang, in English, with an accent he would always find adorable.

  “I forgot my plastic bag full of paper clips and discarded eyeglasses.”

  He and the librarian had never asked each other’s names, but for months she had been helping him in the Salle Ovale. When Evelyn was on the run and he was trying to find her before the government and the Marianis, the librarian taught him the tricks of the place. Since then, preparing for client work, he came in once every couple of weeks. As long as they didn’t know each other’s names, her flirtation with him held its innocence.

  “What is it today?”

  Kruse did not have a regular spot. He was never here early enough to choose. The least attractive spaces were desks facing one another in the middle of the floor. He placed a pad of writing paper on the most attractive of the least attractive and pulled a piece from the top, wrote “Khalil al-Faruqi” on it.

  For some time the librarian stared at the paper. She did not yet dye her hair, even though a two-centimetre-wide stripe of grey had appeared to the right of her forehead. If Kruse knew her well enough to say so he would tell her it was lovely. “I’ve just been reading about him.”

  “I wonder if I could look at that.”

  She winked at him and walked across the room. While he knew how to operate in a library, thanks to the academic he had married, the librarian had opened up new avenues. She had even taught him how to search on a computer. When she wasn’t around, he was good. When she was around, Kruse found more than he ever needed.

  The article was from Le Monde Magazine: a rundown of what had happened at the end of February in the basement of the World Trade Center. Two men drove a van filled with a six-hundred-kilogram bomb into the underground parking garage, lit a fuse, and ran. The men who did it had not acted alone. Someone had wired them money and advice; Khalil al-Faruqi was chief among the suspects.

  “This is your man?”

  “Yes.”

  One of her eyelids drooped just slightly lower than the other. The librarian wrote something in the small notebook she carried. “What would you like to know about him in particular?”

  They split up the work of finding the books and magazines and newspapers that had not yet been transferred to microfiche. His table was soon stacked so high the librarian asked a porter to move him to a staff desk. This appeared to upset a few of her fellow librarians, who greeted him coolly. His option, in these moments, was to do what came naturally to him—apologize and thank them to the point of absurdity—or to do what a French person would do: pretend he didn’t care.

  Before she allowed him to sit, the librarian organized the material according to its comprehensiveness. On the top, a long profile about al-Faruqi in The New Yorker. The article came with a black-and-white photograph that at first appeared to be something else. Then he understood it: a pile of dead people, some in clothes and some not. It was artful and less gruesome than what he had seen in Chez Sternbergh, but once he realized what he was seeing it was similar enough that he could not breathe for a moment. He could taste the explosion in the back of his throat again. The caption described flatly that it was the result of a grenade attack on Israeli adolescents on a school exchange in Brussels: nine dead and seventy-four injured.

  The librarian remained beside him. “Khalil al-Faruqi did that?”

  “It seems so.”

  While they had never discussed his job in any precise way, the librarian knew he was not a journalist and not a bureaucrat. She called him a hunter. “I’d like to ask why you’re interested in him. But I won’t.”

  “Oh, it’s just simple curiosity, Madame.”

  “That’s what you always say.” She looked at the awful photograph again. “In this case I do hope your curiosity, or someone’s, leads to his capture.”

  Another woman, in a sweater with shoulder pads, arrived and whispered sternly to her. His librarian sighed, wished him luck, and followed her superior into the stacks.

  The terrorist was born in Jaffa, probably in 1931. His father had been a doctor and had owned both an orange grove and a large share in a diamond business. Khalil al-Faruqi had several brothers and sisters, and his father had thirteen wives. He grew up in the ancient port city and, variously, in New York and Marseille and London. In 1948, with Palestine divided and Arab and Jewish militias fighting in the streets, blowing up cars and shops, the teenage son of wealth ended up in a refugee camp. His father was killed and the family ended up poor and miserable in Cairo. For several years he disappeared. Competing mythologies had al-Faruqi in jail in Saudi Arabia, working in Egypt, spying for the Ba’ath Party, launching an arms-smuggling enterprise. He helped plan the hostage-taking and massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972; Mossad would pursue him, unsuccessfully, for fifteen years.

  In 1973, three weeks after the Yom Kippur War, al-Faruqi led a group called the New Arab Nation to hijack a Swissair flight between London and Geneva. Three Saudi Arabian government officials were killed, five Palestinian prisoners were released
from Swiss prisons, and he got away with a “secret” payment of twelve million dollars from King Hussein of Jordan. In the next ten years he became the most feared Palestinian terrorist in the world, everywhere and nowhere at once, blowing people up in Europe and the Middle East. The peers of his youth softened into middle age, and al-Faruqi was ultimately rejected by movements easing toward political legitimacy: recognized parties, bank accounts, property.

  The central question of the New Yorker article, from 1988, was whether or not al-Faruqi was still in business. It had always been his habit to claim an atrocity, to make a wily celebrity of himself. In recent years, unsolved attacks had led to al-Faruqi, yet he had remained silent and invisible. No one knew where he was, or even if he was still alive.

  On his notepad, Kruse kept track of the number of people the Palestinian had admitted to murdering: it was over two hundred. It was not a successful expedition to the Salle Ovale; newspapers and magazines pegged al-Faruqi’s location as somewhere on earth.

  It was another rainy day, so far without rain. He used his umbrella as a cane and walked through the Tuileries. The tiny nightingales had arrived on their route from Nairobi to Oslo and serenaded him as he moved through the park. He chose Pont de la Concorde, not because it was the most beautiful but because of what he could see from it. A year in France had not made him immune to its beauty. Kruse had grown up in a house built after the Second World War among other houses built after the Second World War: boxy and efficient, with scant attention to beauty. For his parents, beauty was a cruel extravagance as long as children were going to bed hungry. He could never remember thinking, as a child: I live in an ugly place. If anything, he felt enveloped by warmth, if not beauty, and its pleasures were related. On Pont de la Concorde he did not feel warm. Every thought in his mind, when he reached the bridge, was of turmoil: bodies ripped apart by men who could, somehow, find a way to sleep at night. But from the bridge, with the Élysée Palace behind him and the Assemblée Nationale in front, the columns and statues and flecks of gold, beauty was a comfort. It was a government’s trick, a religious feint. The citizens of Paris had been slaughtered many times. Heads had rolled into baskets. Babies had starved. But let us not forget the grand monuments of the republic.