Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  Kruse introduced himself to the woman, who looked straight ahead as though none of this were happening. She did not take his hand.

  “She doesn’t speak French. Or English,” Joseph whispered across her. “An Estonian girl, a recent arrival. She grew up a communist, just across the water from Finland. A Nordic princess. I’m sure she thinks you’re a cop. She thinks everyone is a cop. We’re dropping her off at her apartment, on the other side of the river, and then I have a business meeting.”

  Monsieur Claude remained beside Joseph. He would have alerted others through some electronic means, because there were now three men on the sidewalk. Only one was properly dressed.

  “We can go, dear Monsieur Claude.” Joseph waved at the others and they retreated back into the apartment. “All is well. All is well, isn’t it, Christopher?”

  “No, Joseph, I’m afraid all is not well.”

  Monsieur Claude entered the driver’s side door and his seat squeaked with regret. He looked up in the rear-view mirror, dished eyes of fury at Kruse, and started the car.

  Kruse reached around the Nordic princess and took Joseph by the hair. “It was a set-up. Why? Did the mayor order this?”

  “Christopher.” Joseph tilted his head in Kruse’s direction so it wouldn’t hurt quite so much. There was a faint grimace about his mouth but he spoke as though they were waiting for a chamber music concert to begin. “I know how good you are at what you do, I know. But if you—”

  “You’re going to threaten me? Make my life worse?”

  Monsieur Claude shouted, “Let him go or I pull over and shoot you in the face!”

  The Nordic princess scrambled between the seats, into the front. She wrenched on the door, to get out, but Monsieur Claude had locked her in.

  “Why are you so angry with the only true friend you have in this country?” Joseph lay on the seat, like a napping child. “Why would you pull my hair like this, diminish me in front of Inga?”

  Inga turned around. “Vabandust?”

  “Oh my darling.” Joseph reached into the front, touched her arm even as Kruse yanked his hair. “We’ll get you some French lessons. Now, Christopher, what has happened? Is this about Monsieur Chatel?”

  “You told me to go after Chatel but he knew I was coming. He was ready. Someone had warned him, someone who knew he was paranoid. If you want to get rid of me, why don’t you—”

  “Christopher. Take your hand out of my hair so we can talk like gentlemen. Someone fucks us, we fuck them back. It’s a very simple calculation.”

  His calls to Joseph were routed through receptionists in Marseille, London, and Brussels, and each one required a password dropped into a simple request. He would not progress past the London receptionist, who worked at a genuine art gallery Joseph owned in Whitechapel, if he did not thank her for her “kind attention.” Over his beer, five glasses in the brasserie on Rue du Bac, he came to understand that no breathy German woman could have phoned Joseph anonymously. It would have been easier to phone the president.

  “You lied. This woman who called you—”

  “The German.”

  “No one calls you.”

  “I will show you everything, tell you the truth as I understand it. But you’ll have to let me go, before the affection I carry for you drains completely from my heart.”

  Kruse released him. Joseph sat back up in his seat, adjusted his hair and suit, and breathed. He could hear Tzvi: only a weak man loses his temper. Three blocks they passed in silence and hit the quay. At the Trocadéro, blooming in the morning sunlight, they turned right across a bridge that did not have to be pretty—the Pont d’Iéna—because it seemed to run under the Eiffel Tower. Joseph looked in the rear-view mirror, to adjust his tie.

  “No one, no one in France, would pull my hair. Maybe our Nordic princess, in another context. But in anger! Only you, my friend. My friend with nothing to lose.”

  “Who has already lost everything, thanks to you.”

  “Not everything. Your little Anouk.”

  “She isn’t mine.”

  “Let’s just wipe out the editorialist, Étienne What’s-his-name . . .”

  “Bonnet.”

  “Bonnet, and you can be a beautiful little family. And let’s not forget the Israeli.”

  Kruse told him about Agent Peach, what he had said about Tzvi.

  “I’ll send one of my Bilbao guys to look after him. Is that what’s bothering you? You think I sent you off to wipe out an innocent terrorist? First of all, it wasn’t me. Second—”

  “Réné Chatel is dead.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s in all the newspapers, on television.”

  Monsieur Claude confirmed it and tossed a copy of Le Figaro into the back. It was on the front page. “He went crazy and pulled a knife on the police?”

  “On me. Then the police. I asked him about Chez Sternbergh and he went bananas.”

  “So he did do it?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Someone told him I would come for him, ask him about it. Your German woman—”

  “My breathy German.”

  “—who somehow just called you up, prepared him. He is—was—already wired for paranoia, which everyone in France seems to know. I don’t think Monsieur Chatel was supposed to be shot by the police. He was supposed to try to stab me, protect himself from a scar-faced man who meant to harm him. Maybe the breathy German understood I would never allow him to stab me. Maybe she thought I would at least hurt him or that he would kill me. Either way, he was set up and so was I. Why?”

  Joseph spoke to Monsieur Claude in Corsican and the driver leaned over. They were on the quay now. Monsieur Claude opened the glovebox and pulled out a pile of papers, handed them back. Joseph put on his reading glasses and went through them, found an envelope, handed it to Kruse.

  It was an Easter card.

  “I received it through the bistro in Marseille.”

  Inside was a short note. It was written in calligraphy.

  Monsieur Mariani: I have information about the explosion on Rue des Rosiers. I can go to the police or I can go to you. Please call.

  He read it a few times. The number was not local. “Where is this phone from?”

  “Lorraine. Christopher, if I wanted to hurt you, wouldn’t I just hurt you?”

  “And you called?”

  “I called. Let’s call again, shall we?”

  TEN

  Place Stanislas, Nancy

  THE FLAGS WERE AT HALF-MAST IN THE PLAZA, TO COMMEMORATE their lost mayor, Pierre Cassin. In the centre was the statue of Stanislas, the stout Polish king and duke of Lorraine. The duke leaned on a sword with one hand and with the other he pointed to the north, like an eighteenth-century Babe Ruth predicting a diplomatic home run. Plazas were comfortable and pleasant to normal people, but there was enough room on this expanse of cobblestones to land an airplane. Every rooftop was a perfect location for an observer, and Kruse had come to see himself as observed. The trees on the outskirts of Place Stanislas and on the low hills surrounding the old town were deep green, and the city itself smelled more like the countryside than his seventh arrondissement.

  The bearded security man in the lobby of the ornate Hôtel de Ville was taking a photograph for a group of tourists wearing too much perfume, un, deux, trois, et voilà, so Kruse went for the stairwell as though he had been here hundreds of times. On the top floor the route to the Office of the Mayor was lined with flowerpots and flags. A woman with black hair, her scalp evident as she bent over to work, sat at a grand desk in the entrance. There was no computer.

  Without looking up she said, “Oui, Monsieur?”

  “I am an investigator from Paris, serving at the pleasure of the mayor. I was hoping to speak with Monsieur Cassin’s chief of staff.”

  She had looked up from her desk at the fourth word in his first sentence. As ever, his accent inspired all the French calculations of forei
gnness. She pointed at the new wounds on his cheek. “You? You work for the mayor of Paris?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “But you are American.”

  He performed the Gallic gesture; he pushed out his lips just slightly and shrugged and said, just faintly, “Ben.”

  “Your name?”

  “Mathieu Gibenus.”

  The woman crossed her arms and appraised him like his mother on the day she caught him on the refrigerator eating from a bag of chocolate chips. How did you get up there? “You didn’t think to call for an appointment?”

  “No, Madame.”

  “And that, evidently, Monsieur, is why you people rule the world.” She pushed herself away from the desk, on the wheeled chair, and asked him to wait while she spoke to Monsieur Lévy. He was alone for almost ten minutes, so he went through a big black book of condolence in the hallway. Citizens of Nancy, and visitors, wrote of their ruined hopes for Mayor Cassin and what he might have achieved were it not for les Beurs—the Arabs.

  In the margin of one of these notes, someone else had written, “The mayor was half an Arab, you idiot.”

  A man walked tentatively into the reception area, through a heavy oak door. He was short and rotund, with a skein of sweat where his hairline once extended. He was ill or frightened. Definitely frightened. His handshake was soft but his eyes were not.

  “What do you want?”

  It was unusually abrupt for a Frenchman. Kruse tried on a smile. “Just a conversation, Monsieur Lévy.”

  “You work for the mayor?”

  The way he said the word mayor was beyond Kruse’s comprehension. “Yes.”

  Lévy took a step back, adjusted his tie, looked around. “I received no advance warning from your office.”

  “I don’t work in the office. It’s different, what I do.”

  “Of course. Of course it’s different. I should have expected you would come. I knew someone would come, eventually.” His skin was pale even for a cloudy northern spring.

  “Can we walk and talk?”

  “I would prefer to stay here, Monsieur . . .”

  “Gibenus. It isn’t raining. The air is quite warm and still.”

  This seemed to confuse Lévy. “I probably can’t say no, can I? It’s a dance we’re doing. You didn’t receive your scars at charm school, did you? As ever, we do what you want to do no matter what I say. Give me a moment.” Lévy opened the heavy door, sighed, and it closed behind him. The building was silent but for the slip of Kruse’s soles on the marble. In less than a minute, the chief of staff had returned, wearing a thin beige overcoat with something heavy in the right pocket. “I can give you ten minutes.”

  They went down an interior stairwell and entered Rue des Dominicains, a tidy commercial street of banks and boutiques. Monsieur Lévy hugged a beige folder to his chest with one arm and with the other, his right, he cracked his chubby knuckles.

  “Gibenus. This is your real name?”

  “No.”

  “But you genuinely work for the mayor.”

  “You know him, Monsieur Lévy?”

  “Of course I know him.”

  “So as genuinely as one can work for him, I work for him.”

  “A very French thing to say. Bravo. What do you want?”

  “The explosion.”

  He pushed out his lips and shrugged with so much style Kruse was jealous. “I was supposed to be there. My daughter is at Sciences Po in Strasbourg. Her Parisian asshole boyfriend broke up with her, and she was inconsolable. My wife was worried and wanted to go to her, but she was stricken with a gastrointestinal tragedy. Pierre, that is, Mayor Cassin, he insisted I go to Strasbourg to be with my daughter. And after all, the trip to Paris wasn’t essential business. He was supposed to meet your man that evening, for dinner, to talk about Brussels.”

  “The mayor of Paris invited him?”

  “Absolutely. Chez Sternbergh was an add-on, a little conference with a few party donors.”

  This was not part of the security briefing from the mayor’s office. It wasn’t how the mayor had described the meeting. “I thought you had requested a public announcement.”

  Lévy passed the folder to Kruse. The first page was a photocopy of a memo from the mayor’s office, in Paris, confirming the details of a luncheon with party donors from the Jewish community. The second page was from Lévy’s counterpart in Paris, requesting a meeting. It was not on City of Paris letterhead.

  “Your daughter is okay?”

  “Not her heart. Everything else is fine.” He took a step back, painted in the air a few of the scars on Kruse’s face. “How is it, Monsieur, that a trusted advisor to the mayor of Paris could be so ill-used? And look at those hands. The suit, however, is a lovely camouflage. It looks bespoke. The mayor must treat you well.”

  “Tell me about Pierre Cassin.”

  “Your employer knows everything there is to know.”

  “I don’t. Please.”

  “He worked hard. He was always prepared for the questions. Jewish and Arab, all wrapped in French, you know the story. He was confident but not preening. He didn’t care about money, not excessively anyway. I could go on. But of all the political jobs one could have, working with Pierre . . . well, we had the finest hopes for him.”

  “Brussels.”

  “According to the mayor, your mayor, yes.” They passed a store devoted exclusively to cellular phones. Lévy looked in as they passed. “We did the deal for Brussels. But we had other ambitions. We would be in Belgium five years, then back here. Or maybe we wouldn’t bother with Brussels at all. There was money. A lot of support.”

  “For what?”

  He cocked his head at Kruse. “You must know.” He whispered it: “The Élysée.”

  Kruse stopped walking. “This was common knowledge, that he had presidential ambitions?”

  “Many assumed, of course. Party leaders, for sure. He was handsome, well spoken, young but not too young, the symbolic value of his ethnic background. We have this obsession, as you must know, an outsider yourself: integration. How do we make our immigrants French? My mayor, the mayor of Nancy, was a model for the old French and the new.”

  “And my mayor—”

  “Everyone knows what your mayor wants. Pierre was more careful. Not careful enough, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lévy looked around, pretending to be lost. They were in front of a fragrant boulangerie-pâtisserie. “I’ve said enough. It was Arabs, they say. Islamists? I caught some of the news conference.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  The dead man’s chief of staff looked into the bakery. Then he whispered again. “There were death threats.”

  “When?”

  “Over the past year or so.”

  “Letters?”

  “Phone calls, unforgettable things.”

  “You took some of these calls?”

  “We began recording them. They would torture and kill Pierre, rape his wife and children if . . .” He reached up to sort out hair that had fallen out long ago. Kruse had met men like this, policemen and soldiers who had seen too much. It seemed odd in a bureaucrat, the anxiety. He was about to offer to take him for a petit blanc when Lévy cussed. “Other calls were different. Pierre was supposed to retire from politics, take a job, if he wanted to . . . thrive. This wasn’t ridiculous. He was probably the most employable man in France. He could have been very wealthy. These callers, two different men, two voices, were keen to encourage him.”

  A tall woman walked out of the bakery with a brown bag and Lévy reached for the door, went inside. Kruse followed. It was warm and smelled of yeast and sugar, of childhood. The line was long, a quiet horseshoe.

  “It’s made me crazy. I thought, I think . . . They’re everywhere.”

  “These men who made the death threats? Who were they?”

  Lévy shrugged. Inside, they whispered. “Perhaps all I need is a week on the beaches of Egypt.”

&nb
sp; “Who do you imagine is listening, Monsieur Lévy?”

  “Who do you imagine, Monsieur Mercenary?”

  “You traced the calls?”

  “Just one. The others were too short. These are sophisticated psychopaths. But they messed one up, missed the receiver or pressed the wrong button. There was a click but the line didn’t go dead.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  The chief of staff took the folder back from Kruse and turned the memo over. On the back, in neat handwriting, was an address and a phone number. “We gave it to the police as well.”

  “And what did they do?”

  “I have no idea. Chez Sternbergh blew up two days later, didn’t it?” Lévy addressed himself to the displays, to some vanilla cream and chocolate combinations. “You’ll buy me a pastry now, I think. In fact, you’ll buy pastries for my family. A box.”

  They did not speak for the next few minutes as they neared the cash register. There were two women behind the counter in white cotton dresses and aprons, somewhere between thirty and fifty. It did not appear as though either of them had smiled since the end of the 1980s. They wore matching deep red lipstick. Lévy looked around several times, for others in the shop. His right hand was in his pocket, awkwardly. At the register he asked for a box of eight pastries and stepped back so Kruse could pay. The box was white and tied with a red ribbon, the red of the women’s lipstick, and sealed with a sticker.

  Back on the street, he opened the box and offered one to Kruse. “There are only three of us in my family. And only because my daughter is visiting.” They each chose one and ate as they walked together, back to city hall.

  “Can you give me something else, Monsieur Lévy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A list of your staff. Actually, anyone who could answer a phone call to the Office of the Mayor of Nancy.”

  “Why?”

  Kruse told him about Réné Chatel, the Lorraine phone number. Someone from his office had implicated Chatel in the explosion in Chez Sternbergh.

  “In my office? I can’t imagine who would do that. I fear this is a sabotage.”

  “We received instructions to phone.”