Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  The butler entered the reception area from a second door, nearer the wing chairs and the magazines. Kruse stood up and the gentleman handed him an envelope. “An invitation.”

  “To what?”

  “Monsieur Alibert is hosting a dinner tomorrow, at his residence. He apologizes that he does not have the time to meet with you today, Monsieur Meisels. Were you planning to stay the night?”

  “I was.”

  “And where are you staying? I have been instructed to send you a basket, a gesture of welcome.”

  “I do appreciate the gesture, but I am not yet sure where I will be staying.”

  “Well, then. Monsieur Alibert owns a hotel of very good standing. I would be delighted to reserve the finest room for you. Vigner Industries will take care of the cost, of course.”

  “Thank you, but we must preserve our independence.”

  “We, Monsieur?”

  “La Direction.”

  The butler nearly smirked. “Monsieur Alibert went to school with the defence minister, in fact. I’m sure he would appreciate your integrity in this matter. Can I tell Monsieur Alibert you will come?”

  “It’s an honour, thank you.”

  “I can have a car pick you up, wherever you would like. If you provide me with an address, when you find a suitable hotel?”

  “You’re too kind, Monsieur.” Kruse opened the envelope. The invitation was a gold-embossed card. “But I can find my way to the party.”

  Kruse excused himself with another handshake, and they exchanged more wishes and words of concern and absurd goodbyes, all of them laced with degrees of irony and distrust he could feel more than understand. He understood enough, and as the elevator descended he looked into the camera and wished Tzvi were with him.

  There was a bank of payphones near the drunk men on cardboard. He slipped his card into the slot and phoned Zoé Moquin.

  • • •

  Kruse passed the courtyard in front of Nancy’s public library, where a teacher and twenty students in black-and-white uniforms stood listening to a woman on a bench, reading aloud from a picture book. Since it was nearly five o’clock, he imagined it was an after-school program for well-behaved children. Lily would have been one of these, one of the rare ones who still possessed the ability to concentrate. There was a vast building on the next corner, the first private bank he had seen in France. A man and a woman in beautiful overcoats walked out, wealth in their posture and in the flat appraising looks in their eyes, and in the way the gentleman helped the lady down the stairs. Some of the richest people in the world lived in New York, and he had worked for them, but none of them looked like this.

  It was bright inside the train station, all that was old and grand stripped away to lease retail space: a Vigner wine store, a mini-grocery, clothing chains, an electronics shop. He brushed his teeth, left the washroom, and returned to brush his tongue. The train arrived on time. A small crowd had formed: husbands and wives, children, parents, drivers. Kruse waited against a pillar, to watch her before she saw him.

  The first-class car was at the front. At the back of a crowd of businessmen and businesswomen she walked slowly, with a small bag on wheels. From the waist up, her dress had three thick and repeating horizontal stripes: black, orange, beige. On the bottom half, the skirt portion, the stripes were the same colour but vertical. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat with a veil, and a lacy black cape over her shoulders, white Doc Martens boots.

  Kruse had never said anything, out loud, about her clothes. But even in a country of women who took fashion seriously, Zoé was a flamingo. A security agency in America would never hire someone who looked and dressed like Zoé Moquin.

  “Our appointment is in fifteen minutes.” Zoé walked out in front of him, through the automatic doors and onto Rue Piroux. It smelled as though it might rain. She waved at the first taxi and opened the back door, settled into the back seat with her bag.

  The driver stepped out of the car and looked at Kruse. It was as though a multicoloured thunderstorm had just sat in the gentleman’s car. “Where are we going, Monsieur?”

  “Place Carnot.”

  “But that is only a few minutes’ walk.”

  Kruse opened the driver’s side rear door. “Madame Moquin. The driver says—”

  “I heard him. I know where it is. Perhaps he could just get in the car and drive.”

  The driver mumbled to himself as he started off, squealing his tires in frustration. It was as though Zoé and the driver had been married for twelve years and had just finished arguing about money. Kruse waited a moment.

  “You had the press conference?”

  “The minister of the interior had it.”

  “So how, officially, did Monsieur al-Faruqi meet his end?”

  “A military operation.”

  “And the CIA, did they participate in the press conference?”

  Zoé looked away from him, out the window as the first flash of rain hit the glass. “Of course not. Why do you ask?”

  When he had phoned Zoé to tell her he had discovered a new line of inquiry, Victor and Karl, she had resisted him. When he had said the name Henri Alibert there was a long pause on the line. It was so long that Kruse had asked if she was still with him. Zoé had a contact at the university, one of the “best minds in European politics and economy.” She could set up a meeting but—long sigh—Professor Saussure would not meet alone with a stranger. As busy as she was, Zoé would have to join him.

  The conference room was on the top floor of the pretty mansion on Place Carnot, furnished not with office chairs but antiques from an old court. Zoé sat across from the ageless woman in enormous sunglasses, with grey hair bleached blond and wearing a blue dress that would best belong in a dark, smoke-filled cocktail lounge. There was a stack of books in front of her. She and Zoé had kissed, called each other by their first names.

  Zoé accepted Marie Saussure’s compliments on her dress, and reciprocated, but she did not want to talk about clothes.

  “It was a huge loss.”

  “Yes.”

  “To wear her, in a sense, must be some consolation.”

  “Yes, Marie.”

  The professor removed her sunglasses. “I had wanted to be there, for the funeral, Zoé. I was ready to cancel everything. But the negotiations—”

  “Funeral?” said Kruse.

  Zoé wiped at the air in front of them, as though she wanted to clear away a puff of sewer gas. “A personal matter. I apologize, Monsieur Kruse. Shall we?”

  Madame Saussure lit a cigarette. “Let me begin to answer your questions, as I understand them, with a bit of a history lesson. Yes?”

  “Thank you, Madame Professor.”

  She started with the horrors of the Second World War, early conversations about economic partnership. It resulted in something called the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s. This led to the Treaty of Rome and broader economic ties between the countries of Europe. Did they follow? The road to economic integration was like the Autobahn. “There are, in any deal like this, winners and losers. Men who were already thinking about markets outside their borders, about cooperation and growth, they benefited radically. Some old families have become fabulously wealthy since the war. Others, who were focused on France, on the quirks of postwar France, did not. Why not? They were and in some cases are chauvinists. They would like to sell their wares internationally but they would prefer not to compete with foreign companies inside France, you see. There were legitimate concerns, then as now, that the Germans would do as the Germans have always done: use cooperation to achieve a dominant position. Who won these arguments? I think we know. Slowly and cautiously, and now not so slowly and cautiously, we move toward total economic union—a shared market here in Western Europe. Europeanism as a step toward complete globalization.”

  Madame Saussure, who had spent twenty or thirty or forty years lecturing, enunciated carefully and spoke with a lovely singsong rhythm. Kruse had actually heard her
before, on the radio. But he did not yet understand what this history lesson had to do with a couple of neo-Nazis and their boss.

  “But Henri Alibert, in the articles about him, is the richest man in Lorraine.”

  “Perhaps in assets, Monsieur Kruse. But they’re worth less and less every year. Every week, in fact. We have seen, since the seventies, a sharp decline in French families like the Aliberts. The old industrialist has not adapted. Some who cannot adapt go away quietly. Their sons and daughters spend the last of their fortunes on yachts and cocaine. Others, like Monsieur Alibert, they organize.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean a resistance movement, powerful people working against European integration and globalization. People who would prefer to protect the way things are. Better yet, the way things were forty years ago. We understood France then. We understood capitalism. Imagine what one hundred or five hundred Henri Aliberts could do if they pooled even one-tenth of their wealth. Each of these old European fortunes, even as they decline, are more than you and I or our children will ever see—by many multiples. Imagine if they put a fraction of their resources together to fight what is coming in just a few months.”

  “Maastricht,” said Zoé.

  “Precisely, Madame.”

  Kruse knew Maastricht was a Dutch city, but he didn’t understand what they were talking about.

  “And the mayor—”

  “Yes, Zoé. Your beloved mayor of Paris supported Maastricht in the referendum. As did my late mayor.”

  Kruse put his hand up. “What referendum? What do you mean by Maastricht?”

  “You said he was in . . .” Madame Saussure looked at her cigarette, switched to English for a phrase. “American intelligence.”

  “I don’t think I used the word intelligence.” Zoé spoke slowly now, as though he had suffered brain damage. “Weren’t you living here in September, Monsieur Kruse?”

  In September he had lived in Vaison-la-Romaine. His life consisted of taking Lily to and from school, learning how to bake bread, training in the evenings. He did not watch the television or read the newspapers. When Evelyn spoke of politics, he would suggest an imaginary tea party with his daughter.

  Madame Saussure cleared her throat. “No reason to feel any chagrin, Monsieur Kruse. A shocking number of my students, whose parents would have campaigned for or against Maastricht, don’t understand its significance. In September, fifty-one per cent of French voters said yes to ratifying the Maastricht Treaty, which will create an economic union of European countries. Many people, like our Henri Alibert, put a lot of money into the No campaign. They felt the mayor of Paris had betrayed his party and the Gaullists and, ultimately, France. They feel fifty-one per cent is not enough to hand over our sovereignty. They feel it’s Mitterrand’s legacy project and a socialist nightmare. They’re sure Germany will soon dominate this union. They feel it will open, Americanize, and, as I said, globalize Europe. It will certainly hurt their business interests. And, most importantly, these people are not alone. They have fellow travellers in Denmark, whose referendum failed, and in the United Kingdom, in Belgium and the Netherlands, in Austria and Spain and Italy and Portugal and even Germany.”

  Zoé opened her notebook, raised her pen. “Is this an official coalition?”

  “There are many official coalitions.”

  “I mean the one you’re hinting at. One hundred or five hundred men like Henri Alibert.”

  “You will not find its address in the phone book, dear Zoé, but it does exist. You’ll discover it has been active for some years. And it has failed, spectacularly. Maastricht represents its final defeat, yes? I will not be surprised to see acts of desperation.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Surely not.”

  “Who is its leader?”

  Madame Saussure removed her sunglasses and smiled. Despite the air of elegance about her, a spot of her lipstick had transferred to her perfectly white teeth. Dentures. “I have felt pressure from these men—and they are men, to be sure—for much of my career. It was only in the early days, the less careful days, that it seemed to originate somewhere.”

  “Where?” said Kruse.

  “Nancy.”

  • • •

  They had walked through a gilded gate into Place Stanislas and the 1950s. The bistro was of brass and heavy red velvet, carved mirrors. Three horse-faced musicians in tuxedos and unnecessary sunglasses, whom he imagined as brothers, played soft jazz in the corner: a mini drum set, an acoustic guitar, a clarinet.

  Locals in suits and dresses filled the tables and banquettes. The tourist season had not yet begun; no one had cameras or dressed in what the French saw as the comically informal manner of Americans. Yet even for the French, who do not tend to stare in public, Zoé’s striped dress and veil were irresistible.

  Without asking, their waiter brought each of them a flute of champagne. A house rule, apparently.

  “You must be accustomed to it.”

  She shrugged.

  “Madame Saussure said something about you wearing her. What did she mean, if I may ask?”

  For a long time, Zoé watched the musicians. When she answered she hardly answered. “My sister.”

  “You’re wearing her clothes?”

  “Yes.”

  On their walk from the university to the hotel, the air was still and charged and warm, though a heavy Atlantic mist had arrived. He knew the reputation of Lorraine—cold, cold, cold—and as a Canadian he sympathized and quietly cheered for the gentle weather of Nancy. The hotel was a vast house next to the cathedral. It had been a home for the prelates until they no longer merited such extravagance. When few believed in God, what was the purpose of the prelates’ magnificent robes and rings and rooms?

  “My sister was a designer, Monsieur Kruse. For a year, to honour her, I am wearing the dresses she created.”

  “She died recently?”

  Zoé nodded, and for a moment it was quiet between them. She looked out the window. Kruse imagined lymphoma, leukemia, a miserable thing that can take a thirty-year-old. The waiter arrived with his notepad.

  They ate white asparagus soup and salad with a lemony vinaigrette and capers. Zoé chose a bottle of Séguret, a village he knew well from his time in Vaison-la-Romaine. When there was a strike at the post office in Vaison, he and Lily would drive to the one in Séguret. He might have mentioned it, his special feelings for Séguret, but Zoé barely paused to eat. She stared intently at him as she spoke. If Kruse looked away, she would stop speaking and wait for him to return to her. They decided to give up Monsieur and Madame, to become Christophe and Zoé. He had met people like her at cocktail parties and receptions at the university, through Evelyn, people with a devouring sort of intelligence. Despite her beauty, Zoé would not have had many friends in school. She was too much.

  It was dark, the light outside the windows of the bistro streaked. The weather had turned violent. Zoé spoke mostly of Henri Alibert and how Kruse ought to prepare himself for an evening with the wily industrialist who was probably a neo-Nazi. She did not want to talk about her sister and Kruse did not want to talk about Evelyn or Lily or Tzvi—any of their losses. In the morning he would go to the library and learn what he could about Alibert and far-right politics in Lorraine, antiglobalization movements. The dress code was formal. On the square, rain fell in an echoing roar that overwhelmed the horse-faced jazz brothers. When the wine was gone they decided they were plenty drunk enough.

  Were it not for the wine he might not have mentioned it directly, but when Zoé returned from a visit to the washroom he asked about the threats to Annette and Anouk.

  She leaned over the table, spoke just loud enough that he could hear. In the washroom she had reapplied her eye makeup and lipstick. “I did inquire.”

  “With whom?”

  “My superiors, Christophe. At the agency. I know it is nothing, nothing you could say overtly. But do you have a deal with the mayor of Paris?”


  Kruse had assumed she knew this all along. “Of sorts, yes.”

  “You did something for him. And he has rewarded you.”

  “In my file you read about my daughter and my wife? How they died?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know about the mayor, but the mayor’s office was not blameless. I knew the story and Annette knew the story.”

  “When she worked for the newspaper.”

  “Yes.”

  “She spiked it?”

  “For protection. For a better life.”

  “And by now you must know these sorts of deals are . . . what is the word?”

  “Ephemeral.”

  “Yes, Christophe. Though Monsieur le Maire is a good bet. I imagine the gentleman is already picking out the furniture for his office in the Élysée. The heads of the agencies know he is the next president. The police. The armed forces. Monsieur le Maire can do exactly as he wishes. Everyone wants to be on his list of benefactors.”

  “So you’re saying the threat, if it is a threat, originates with him?”

  Zoé shrugged. “As we learned today, he has a great many enemies. And he is not sentimental. In times of war we think as warriors. Who are you, after all, to the mayor?”

  Neither of them had taken an umbrella from the hotel so they had to walk under the awnings and cornices. The cathedral, at the end of the street, was lit with pale yellow floodlights. No one else was out walking, and there were few cars. When they arrived at the hotel, the strangeness between them undone by the grapes of Séguret and by the preposterousness of two adults soaking like children, they took the stairs and, on the third floor, she stopped at her door and leaned back into it.

  “I’m sorry for what happened in Spain.” The water had released her perfume. “Monumentally sorry for your business partner. And for you. You know I did not intend for that to happen.”

  Kruse didn’t see what her intentions had to do with it.