Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  “Unless you want to tell me who sent you, my old friend. There isn’t much left of this arm. We’ll switch to the other one after this? Then we’ll go for your little zayin. One little chop. Chip chop.” Khalil al-Faruqi looked around. “Yes?”

  The men around him were not as keen as he was.

  Only one of them had a gun: the man in his sixties who had been sleeping with the blonde. He held it on Tzvi.

  The French doors were open slightly. Kruse entered, the sound camouflaged by the rain, and the only one who saw him, at first, was Tzvi. His eyes changed.

  This was precisely what Allan and Nettie Kruse had spoken of, night after night, after he had begun his training. To fight back is weakness. It is the road to damnation. The only honour is in leaving the weapon on the table and closing your eyes and praying when the murderers come for you. You ask the Lord to forgive them. Then you. It is the finest achievement of the human heart, to die with the dignity that comes with saying no. I will die in pain, in flames, rather than hurt another.

  At the bamboo-scented Krav Maga studio where he grew up there was a practice wall for small but heavy knives like the one he held, forged without handles. He had thrown knives the way other teenagers skateboarded. Kruse moved behind one of the young men and threw his knife. It hit the old man with the gun in the side of the neck just as he turned and pulled the trigger. The young man, Kruse’s shield, fell before him. Kruse drew his second knife, the one he cut with, and he cut them as they came. Al-Faruqi tried to run and Kruse tripped him. The two younger women ran out of the room, over al-Faruqi, as Kruse finished the other men. One of them had trained. He cut Kruse in the chest and in his roaring confidence he said something vile about fucking him. Kruse cut his throat. They were finished, all but al-Faruqi, and the blond woman was on her knees holding the bolt cutters like a teddy bear and apologizing to the bloody floor.

  Tzvi spoke like a drunk man. “I can wait.”

  Kruse put the guns on the balcony, in the rain, and ordered the blond woman to untie Tzvi, to find clean towels and ice, and when she hesitated he wanted to kick her into the wall but instead he embraced her for a moment and she shivered in his arms and she said, “I want my mom. Will you take me to her?”

  “Whatever you like.” He spoke sweetly into her ear. “But first the towels, the ice.”

  In the living room, Khalil al-Faruqi stood at the window with the olive-handled knife the young man had used to cut Kruse’s face. “Stay back.”

  Kruse did not stay back.

  “I have money.” He held the knife up, close to his body. He understood how to fight better than his guards, even if he had not done it in decades. “I have proof.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “You will see. The most glorious proof. We can work together.”

  “Where were you on April fourth?”

  “Almost seven million pesetas. Some American money. How about that? Just let me go and it’s all yours.”

  “April fourth.”

  “Here! I’m always here, Mossad. You saw the girls. They can’t get enough of me. I’m an old man with wine and girls, favoured by God. Why would I go anywhere?” Khalil al-Faruqi dropped the knife and lowered himself to his knees and took off the robe so he was as naked as Tzvi. The blond woman passed behind him, with the ice and towels. The two younger women watched from the kitchen doorway. The only guns on that side of the hacienda were buried in the hay, but he wanted to be sure.

  “Come in here, where I can see you.”

  At first they didn’t move, or respond. Kruse had a vivid imagination but he knew there was no way to conjure what these men had done to them. Together they huddled in the corner, where he pointed.

  Al-Faruqi ignored the women as they padded across the filthy room in bare feet.

  “Everything I have done—it has been in a state of war. In war everything is permissible, Mossad. You know that. Who knows better than Israelis?”

  “I’m Canadian.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “We’re here for the restaurant.”

  “What restaurant?”

  “You know what restaurant. In Paris. Rue des Rosiers. Chez Sternbergh.”

  Al-Faruqi sighed. “I have ordered many things. I have . . . killed men, of course, in war.”

  “And women. And children. Babies.”

  “In war! In war! Someone blows up my children and I blow up their children. But I did not order any operation in Paris, not for years. It was not me. I swear it, Mossad, I didn’t blow up any Jew restaurant. And if you kill me here, naked, like a thief, a dog, like a fucking bitch, you are killing an innocent man.”

  He looked up at Kruse, wiping the tears from his eyes. There were no scars on Khalil al-Faruqi, not on his face or on his arms or on his chest. He was clean and rich, and he would live a long life with teenage girls and good food, jugs of wine and pipes of dope. For a time he lowered his head and his body quivered and Kruse thought he was crying. Then al-Faruqi looked up and laughed.

  • • •

  His grandfather, Heinrich Kruse, had arrived in Canada as a Krause. He was the son of a grain farmer and that is what he did in Canada, first in a Mennonite community in southern Manitoba. It was not a story anyone told in full, but Heinrich became involved with a married woman and was either banished or fled to Ontario, where he dropped a vowel from his name and went back to work. One afternoon at harvest season, on his forty acres, the swather picked up a tree branch. It was large enough to stop the blades. Heinrich climbed down off the old swather and reached in to dislodge the branch. The machine lurched forward and one of the rusted blades bit deeply into his arm.

  At this time he was not yet married. It was only a bit of luck that he was discovered at all, by a neighbour who had come to borrow—of all things—a Bible. The gentleman was hosting a prayer session that evening and he wanted a few on hand, as inevitably one of the attendees would forget. The neighbour untangled Heinrich from the blades and carried him to his car and drove him to the Stratford General Hospital.

  On the way to Guadalajara, Kruse formulated the story he would tell and practised it on the blond woman who lay shivering under a blanket in the back. The two black-haired women had fled south in a Toyota truck. It was different for her. She had been forced to cut a man’s arm off, in three pieces. Her name was Bianca.

  Tzvi lay in the reclined front seat of the dirty Jeep, the stub of his arm wrapped and sitting in a bowl of ice. He mumbled a story about the day his parents had taken him to swim in the Sea of Galilee and a little boy drowned. They were about the same age. Ever since that day he knew God was either cruel or an imagined thing, like Mickey Mouse, and that none of us was special and one day he would die in some banal, absurd manner. Some stringy-haired woman would cut his limbs off in a farmhouse in dusty ham-laden Spain and he would bleed to death in a Jeep. “But, my friend, but when the bitch—sorry, Bianca, I cannot forgive you—was cutting me and I thought I would die I could feel him out in the rain. He was on the margins of my senses. Can I say that? He was out there, knocking gentle at my door, waiting for me to let him in. Christopher?”

  “Yes, Tzvi?”

  “What do you think of that?”

  “Bianca was cutting off your arm at the time.”

  “Prevarication. You are afraid of the great truths. I was like that once. I was like that two hours ago. I think I can still eat bacon. It felt to me like he—He—was agnostic about that.”

  Bianca had told him to go to Guadalajara instead of Sigüenza. It was not much farther and the hospital was finer. On the way, Kruse saw a few grain farms. It was plausible. He noted landmarks and learned the word in Spanish for swather by describing it to her: hileradora.

  The concussion and blood loss, the lack of food in his belly, the panic, Tzvi’s talk of God and bacon, the men he had killed, whatever it was, threw a wave of dizziness at him. On the outskirts of the town of Valdenoches he pulled over and threw up. Then he opened his window and the faster he drove t
he better he felt. It was still morning, somehow. His chest and arm had finally stopped bleeding and all he needed on his face was a few more stitches. Tzvi was in and out of consciousness now that Guadalajara was visible in the distance. He told Kruse he was his father and that he loved him. Tzvi coughed and grasped at something. The bowl of ice tumbled on the floor. Kruse reached over and took his master’s free hand in his and kissed it and sang “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” He remembered the first part of “You Are My Sunshine” so he sang it three times. He sang as loud as he could sing, to keep Tzvi awake.

  “You are crazy people,” said Bianca.

  His parents encountered Tzvi only once, in his second year of training. A blizzard and a transit strike had arrived on the same night. Kruse had walked across the city to arrive at the studio with mild frostbite on his left cheek, the one with the open stitches, and for three hours Tzvi taught him to break arms. It was dark when they were finished. Eventually it would be part of his training, learning to drive, but for now he was too young. Tzvi had just bought a used four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, dark sky-blue, Israel blue, and as he drove across Toronto he quizzed him, in Russian, on what they had been discussing in the strategic portion of their time together: how to sneak into a well-guarded foreign palace. When they arrived at their little house on the east side, Allan Kruse ran out to fetch his son. He had been waiting at the window, watching what he could watch for in the blizzard.

  His father, who would be dead in less than two years, and this man who would become his father, did not speak. Allan did not thank Tzvi for driving him home. Kruse was still a teenager but he understood how his choices had hurt and had shamed his parents, who did not have many rules other than help ever, hurt never, which was not an official Mennonite axiom or a line from the Bible but words on a postcard the missionaries of an Indian guru had left in their mailbox. From his Land Cruiser, in the blizzard, Tzvi did not ingratiate himself or even say hello to Allan. They were, Kruse understood, competitors. He opened the door of the Land Cruiser while his father stood in a cheap grey sweater on the sidewalk and his mother wrapped a shawl around herself on the front steps. Tzvi reached over the gearbox and took his hand for a moment and squeezed in the cold, squeezed like this.

  The university hospital was on the east side of Guadalajara. He stopped fully at every intersection, drove the speed limit into the hospital complex, hemmed in by stained concrete and fir trees. Kruse parked in the employees’ area, as close to the emergency room as he could manage, and released Tzvi’s hand. A garbage truck designed for needles backed up the hill. A woman pushed an elderly man past him, in a wheelchair.

  He took off his bloody shirt and put on a clean one. Bianca watched him in the rear-view mirror.

  “Do you want to go inside?”

  “I’m not hurt, Señor.”

  Bianca had cried, shivered, and talked to herself for at least half of the drive from the bloody hacienda to the hospital. “It might help to talk to someone.”

  “Talk about what? I don’t want to be arrested with you lunatics.”

  “You’re right. That’s not a terrific idea.”

  She opened the back door and held up the two stacks of bills he had given her—two hundred thousand pesetas. “I want more.”

  The wet one, the one Tzvi had hit, knew where al-Faruqi had hidden the money. The peseta was a weak currency—seven million was less than seventy thousand American—but two hundred thousand would give each of the women a start.

  Kruse ran to the front door of the hospital, where two wheelchairs sat abandoned. He pushed one back to the Jeep and gently lowered Tzvi into it.

  “I could have killed you, Señor. The gun was on the floor, just sitting there.”

  There were two backpacks full of money in the back of the Jeep, and a black leather briefcase. “If you speak of us, to anyone, I’ll come for you.”

  “I’ve already forgotten.”

  He pulled another five stacks of pesetas out of the backpack and she stuffed them into her pockets. She jogged across the parking lot toward a chain-link fence. Bianca had told them everything she knew: Khalil al-Faruqi had spoken on satellite and cellular phones, a lot. Arabic and English, mostly. And it was true: on April 4 he had been at home in Spain, stoned or drunk or both, watching some awful American movie dubbed into a language she did not speak.

  Khalil al-Faruqi had kept a file. The proof, he had called it. When they were leaving, Kruse stuffed the proof into the briefcase.

  Inside the emergency room he prepared to stutter his way through a shaky, emotional explanation of what had happened. He shook up his Spanish, weakened it. His friend’s arm had been caught in the damned hileradora. They rushed Tzvi down the hall.

  Passports, yes, of course. Medical insurance? They had rushed here! Who thinks of insurance when a man’s arm has been cut off by the blades of a tractor? He had cash. Yes, he had cut his own face extracting his friend from the blades. No, no he was fine. Well, he could use a bottle of peroxide and some cotton balls, maybe some stitches.

  In the washroom Kruse took off his shirt. The gunshot wound on his shoulder was a mess. His chest was not so bad and his face was still his face.

  An intern stitched him up. She said she didn’t believe the story about the swather blades. It took three hours for the news to arrive: his friend would have months of therapy ahead of him but he would survive. Tzvi was sedated. If Kruse wanted to go, spend the night in Guadalajara and come back the next morning, he could visit his friend. They regretted to inform him that if his friend was not insured, the procedures and his stay in the hospital would cost approximately two and a half million pesetas.

  The outer circle of Guadalajara was 1960s precast concrete apartment complexes, bland row houses, parking lots, gas stations, cheap hotels, and unwelcome restaurants. At the train station he rented a locker and stuffed the proof inside.

  It had arrived only a month earlier.

  Back in Sigüenza Kruse had known there wasn’t much time for Tzvi. He held the terrorist to the floor and locked his arm at the elbow. The women stood next to them in the corner. He could smell their perfume. One looked away, out the window, and mumbled to herself. The other watched. Hungrily, he might say. When the man did not answer quickly enough, Kruse turned his arm to the point of snapping the tendons. The woman who watched clapped her hands softly. “Do it, Señor.”

  Khalil al-Faruqi laughed and cussed. Why did it matter who had given him the money? “Just take it, Mossad.”

  “I’ll ruin your right arm first.” Kruse turned it. “And then—”

  He screamed. “It was your people—the CIA, you asshole. Mossad doesn’t speak to the CIA? You can’t break my arm. You can’t kill me. We’re allies.” Spittle leapt onto his beard. “These kids who blew up the parking garage in the towers, in New York—these aren’t my people. You think I’m a man of God? I’m like you. Ask these women what I did to them last night.”

  The woman who looked out the window covered her ears.

  “Mossad, who told you it was me who attacked your restaurant?” Khalil al-Faruqi tried to look up, to meet Kruse’s eyes.

  Before he had a chance to reflect on Mossad, on French clandestine services, Kruse thought of one man: somehow, impossibly, Monsieur le Maire.

  “This man who told you—think of him.”

  It was quiet in the house but for Tzvi drowsily telling Bianca how to bandage the stub of his arm.

  “I kept all the paperwork. When they were last here, I had my men take the papers from them. I know things about you, about what your government is doing.”

  “My government?”

  “Señor.” The woman who watched stepped forward, touched Kruse’s shoulder. “He made a request. Ask us what he did to us last night.”

  In a monotone she described how he had routinely violated them, two sisters it turned out, from Valladolid. When she was finished she said what he had done to them the night before was not unique. All they ho
ped, night after night, was that he would be too drunk or too stoned.

  “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “He said he would have us killed. His boys with the guns. First they would fuck us with their guns and then they would kill us. Then our brother and our parents. What he says, Señor, about being innocent? He is not innocent.”

  “I didn’t blow up any Jew restaurant. And these girls . . . it was sex talk.”

  “It was not sex talk.”

  Kruse had learned all he was going to learn from Khalil al-Faruqi. In the adjacent room there was a thump.

  “Señor!” the blond woman called out. “Your friend fainted!”

  The camera was in his vest. He carried four knives. Kruse released the killer’s arm and stood up off him and pulled out his favourite knife. It was quiet for an instant. The dark-haired woman, the one who had been watching, had gone into the kitchen. Kruse suppressed an urge to pray, to make a ritual of this.

  Al-Faruqi scrambled to his skinny knees, naked and hairy, put his hands together. “I will do anything, say anything. Whatever they’re paying you I can find so much more.”

  Kruse heard the woman walk back into the room behind him. He turned, prepared to protect himself from her, but she walked past him and with a scream thrust a kitchen knife into Khalil al-Faruqi’s right eye. The man fell on his back, his hands on his face, and she leapt on him and thrust it into his stomach nine times. They were both naked and covered in blood. She rolled off him and stood up and he reached and gurgled. She dropped the knife and turned to her sister and said, “I’ll need a shower. Then we can go.”

  Kruse shot him with one of the guns from the balcony, to finish it, and took the photographs. The bloody sister cleared her throat. “What he said about the Americans was true. They came. He was helping them.”

  “With what?”

  “The men who set the bomb in the tower in New York. Señor Khalil knows who did it and how to find them. They wanted to work out something else with him, for money. It was going to make him very rich. It is all locked in a cabinet in the computer room.”