Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  “And thank you for tonight, Christophe. I’ve had a miserable year. It’s rare for me.”

  “To eat?”

  “No, no. I generally eat.”

  “My humour doesn’t work in French.”

  “Perhaps it’s your accent. We always assume you’ve made a syntactic error.”

  “To be funny, one must project authority.”

  “You project plenty of that. It just isn’t through language, Christophe.” With her heels on, she was only a couple of inches shorter than him.

  Here again he was lost. The wine had not sharpened his senses but it had seemed, during dessert, as though she might at any moment take him by the collar and kiss him. Now it seemed even more likely, alone in the dim hallway. He had been with Evelyn so long he had forgotten about moments like these. Should he walk away? There was no uncertainty with Annette: they had been thrown together by violence, and Anouk had wiped away the possibility of flirtation. With Annette, a kiss was everything. Either move in together, share a towel, or don’t bother.

  Zoé took his hand in hers and whispered something he did not hear, but to ask her to repeat it would have ruined things. He thought of Annette again. It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. He nearly laughed out loud.

  “I feel like a teenager.”

  “If you were a Frenchman, Christophe, you would have already . . . well, I might already be pushing you away. I’m rather old-fashioned. I work for conservatives. I am a conservative.”

  “Most conservatives, in France, would be socialists in America.”

  “I’m not a libertine, that is all I mean.”

  Kruse did not want to talk about it. If Zoé was going to ask him into her room, he wanted her to do it. Now. The more they dissected and intellectualized it, the less likely it would be. Of course, Kruse could ask her. As she had already noted, if it seemed vulgar he could retreat and claim he had made a syntactic error.

  When you are learning to fight, it is essential to throw the first punch. One day, you become good enough to believe the opposite. When your opponent throws the first punch, and you dodge or intercept it, he gives you all the information you need to defeat him.

  There was a drop of rainwater on his nose. Zoé reached up and transferred it to her finger before it dripped.

  “Let’s think about this a moment.”

  “Zoé. Let’s not think about it. If we have to think about it—”

  “Quite right.” She adjusted on her heels, stepped an inch forward so he could feel her breath on him. It smelled sweetly of wine. “You work for me.”

  “I thought I worked for the mayor.”

  “It would be unprofessional. And in the morning light, grey no doubt, in the fog of a champagne-red-wine headache, this time we are spending together now will be difficult to . . . to justify.”

  A portly man with a trim beard and a suit bag stepped out of the elevator and waddled past them, said good night. He was a lonely salesman. Industrial curtains, maybe. Kruse nearly made himself laugh again. He wanted to go into her room. He wanted to remove the veil from her and drape it over the back of a chair, slowly unzip her dress and kiss the back of her wet neck.

  “No matter what happens here, Christophe, I have money for you. You’ve finished your job, at least officially. When you’re back in Paris . . .”

  “Back in Paris. And this is finished.”

  “Yes, Christophe. When this is finished.”

  He backed away, out of her orbit, and opened his mouth to say good night but some other sound came out of his throat. He needed a glass of water. A toothbrush. A symphony. At his own door at the other end of the hall, across from the curtain salesman, he watched her enter her room. She moved carefully, with grace, even after champagne and half a bottle of wine. Zoé took one final look back at him because she knew Kruse was watching and she closed her door, locked it with a snap.

  ELEVEN

  Rue des Brice, Nancy

  FOR TWENTY MINUTES HE STOOD NEAR HIS DOOR, LISTENING FOR HER in the hall. He found himself believing, with the wine in him, that he could will her to come. In the morning, groggy and somewhat pained, as though a bottle had broken in his head, he stopped by her room on the way to breakfast and knocked. There was no answer, so he asked the woman at the front desk. Madame had checked out at six in the morning.

  “What was she wearing?”

  “Pardon, Monsieur?”

  “Madame Moquin is my friend. She dresses elaborately. If you noticed . . .”

  The woman tilted her head just slightly. “Have you been to Chenonceau, Monsieur, the castle on the Cher River?”

  “No.”

  “There is a room where Queen Louise of Lorraine mourned after her husband died. It is black and decorated with white feathers and teardrops. I don’t remember precisely what your friend was wearing but her dress reminded me of the queen’s room.”

  Kruse thanked her and made his way outside. The morning smelled of last night’s rain. It was cool but not cold. Steam rose from the wet stones. The library was on Rue Stanislas, busy with cars at this hour. He took a tartine and a coffee in a café where retired men in hats were already up for their morning wine and soccer highlights. He was tempted to join them, to chase his headache away.

  In the library he tried to think of Henri Alibert and the mayor and Joseph, not Zoé Moquin in a black dress of white feathers and teardrops, walking to the train station in the dewy dawn. The back of her wet neck, how he might have kissed it. The Alibert family had owned coal mines and coke furnaces. They moved into iron and steel. Lorraine was not always a terrific place to do business, as it had passed back and forth from France to Germany and back to France. Henri’s father, Georges Alibert, used this in his defence after the war, when he was asked why he had chosen to supply the Germans. He was a businessman. His other option, to flee and allow his factories to be nationalized by foreigners, was more distasteful. The Nazis and Vichy had been good to the Alibert family. Henri was sixteen when the war ended, and suddenly he was not so popular.

  The Fourth Republic nationalized the coal industry immediately after the war, in 1946. The iron and steel business never returned to its prewar glory and in 1978 the government nationalized it too, without compensation. Vigner Industries was into wine retailing and real estate but it was selling off and, in some cases, shuttering factories. Kruse guessed the Alibert family had slipped, in one generation, from a place in the top ten in France to somewhere in the unfortunate end of the top one thousand. In 1978, when a centre-right president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, decided to seize his family’s assets and his mother died “of a broken heart,” Henri Alibert became a supporter of the Front National—financially and spiritually.

  In the popular press, Alibert was rich and racist, right-wing, given to sweaty outbursts during political campaigns. There were two reports, in L’Est Républicain and in Le Monde’s Saturday magazine, linking him to the Parti Nationaliste Français et Européen, a neo-Nazi group that liked to smash up Jewish cemeteries and, in 1989, burned down a hostel in Nice filled with workers from Tunisia. Three of its leaders were in prison. Alibert denied it and sued both newspapers and lost. There were no mentions, in any media, of his wine-store employees—the men who had threatened to kill the mayor of Nancy.

  If the mayors of Nancy and Paris were pro-Maastricht and Henri Alibert and his club were anti-Maastricht, perhaps there had been others—other Chez Sternberghs. Kruse changed his search terms. On his seventh newspaper, a copy of La Repubblica, he discovered that a pro-Maastricht leader from Italy, a politician who had made a fortune importing children’s clothing from China, had died of heart failure a few days before his fifty-third birthday, while singing karaoke. He was physically fit.

  The story speculated that the next president of the European Parliament would almost certainly come from one of the left-wing coalitions. A parliamentarian from Greece, Giorgos Kafatos, who had quite a following in his own country and in Cyprus, was in the best position to be the n
ext coalition leader. Three weeks before the Italian died, Kafatos’s car was run off the road in Santorini. Kruse looked him up: authorities had no idea who might have done it. He was well loved, apart from people who oppose Greece’s membership in the European Union.

  In January a handsome British parliamentarian who wanted to drop the pound sterling for the new European currency was robbed and beaten nearly to death on his way home from the pub. During the referendum fight in Belgium about ratifying Maastricht, two of the pro-Europe leaders died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a village hotel.

  Joseph Mariani and the mayor of Paris were scoundrels but they were no more guilty in any of this than Khalil al-Faruqi. Kruse was sure he had found the man—the men—who had blown up Chez Sternbergh.

  Just before the library closed for lunch, when there was nothing more to read about Henri Alibert, Kruse searched Zoé’s sister—Catherine Moquin. There were short, nearly identical obituaries in Le Parisien and Le Monde, both celebrating her work at Chanel, her rare imagination, and her potential. There were quotes, in both stories, from Karl Lagerfeld and by the CEO of Chanel.

  Neither of the stories mentioned how Catherine died. This nearly always meant suicide.

  • • •

  Henri Alibert lived on a street of art nouveau mansions. Kruse skipped the cocktail portion of the evening and walked in his new tuxedo up Rue des Brice as dusk turned to darkness. At this hour, the whimsical ironwork and stained glass dragonflies of the houses and fences and gardens were lit by floodlights. He passed two grey-haired British couples with cameras and guidebooks. “Brilliant,” they said, “brilliant,” pointing at details that reminded him of childhood nightmares: twisting figures, flowers drunkenly blooming, vampire awnings.

  There were two men on the driveway at Chez Alibert, keeping guard: les voyous, bald thugs in suits and ties. They stiffened when they saw him, glanced at each other. Kruse and Tzvi had worked parties like this in Toronto and New York and Boston, for politicians, for visiting dignitaries who had offended dangerous people, and his favourite: the paranoid billionaires. He wondered where Alibert fit into this client profile.

  The heavier and shorter of the two men, with a freshly shaved head, stepped forward. “This is a private residence.”

  “Of course. Monsieur Alibert asked me to come.”

  Kruse reached inside his jacket for the invitation, and the tall one reached for him and grunted into his lapel, “Homme armé, homme armé.”

  “He’s finally here?” It was another man’s voice in the guard’s earpiece, loud enough that Kruse heard it as a whisper.

  “Wait.” Kruse put his hands up. “I’m a guest.”

  “Homme—” the guard started to say again as he took a handful of Kruse’s tuxedo jacket. He reached back with his free hand, grunted, made a fist.

  Kruse locked the guard’s hand and his elbow in place, pulled, and slammed him into the sloped pavement. The guard’s right hand, still preparing for the punch, was not available to soften the landing. He hit the concrete with his face, and Kruse, in one motion, dislocated his shoulder and went after the second guard, who had taken out a gun.

  “I was invited.”

  The second guard pointed the gun and tried to disable the safety mechanism with a “Merde, merde!” just as Kruse kicked it out of his hand. He elbowed the second guard, to stun him, and took him down backwards. This one was not so tall, and a better athlete, and the fall itself did not immobilize him. Kruse put his knee on the man’s neck and cranked his arm.

  “I wasn’t on the list?”

  “Nique ta mère.”

  “What did they say about me?”

  The guard said something equally vulgar about Kruse’s mother, so he cranked his arm harder, felt where the tendons would give way. Knocking a man out, without killing him or leaving him permanently maimed, was tricky. Kruse drove the guard’s arm as far as it would go and kicked it the rest of the way. As the man screamed, Kruse jumped toward the house and hid behind the two cedars next to the front door. It opened and two thinner bald men in suits came out.

  One of the two forward guards was unconscious, face-first on the paving stones. The other was on his side, immobile and delivering something in between a grunt and a scream. The two men from the house ran to him.

  “He’s here.”

  Just as they started to turn, Kruse was upon them. These two had less training but they did have guns. He disarmed them first and avoided using his fists. The tuxedo was five hours old. He didn’t want blood on anything. Before he went into the house, Kruse gathered the three weapons and their communications equipment, tossed it all in the shrubbery.

  The door was open. No one was in the foyer to welcome him. It was fragrant with poultry. Off to the left, in the grand salon, a woman played Erik Satie on a polished grand piano by soft lamplight—apparently for no one but herself. Another woman appeared in a red cocktail dress with a tray of four champagne flutes. She nearly dropped the tray when she saw him.

  “Where did all the men go?”

  “Outside, Madame.”

  “Are you one of the guests?”

  Kruse took out his invitation and showed it to her.

  “I’m so sorry, Monsieur. I had been told everyone had already arrived. Please, let me announce you.”

  Kruse followed her.

  “What . . .” She looked back, a hint of annoyance in her voice. “What are the men doing outside?”

  “Exercising.”

  The woman slowed and turned for a moment, examined his face. “What happened to you?”

  “I’m prone to accidents, Madame.”

  There was historical art on the wall, royal scenes, but most of the frames held black-and-white photographs of battles he did not recognize and puffy men in suits shaking hands. He had seen these men before. The sounds of conversation grew as he entered the core of the house.

  “Who are these people?”

  “I never ask, Monsieur.”

  The music followed him and then, as he drew closer to the centre, transformed. In an anteroom another woman played not a piano but a harpsichord. A thin gentleman, the first he had seen who was not a bouncer, played a cello, and two more women, young twins, held violins. None of them made eye contact as they played a song that sounded, to him, like it had been plucked from the Middle Ages. At a sliding red wooden door the woman asked him to wait among the musicians. On the other side was a dining room, the sounds of laughter and conversation, men in tuxedos and women in cocktail dresses. She closed the door behind her and he was left with the musicians. It was the sound of long-abandoned courts of queens and kings, filled with dignity and sadness, long and careful notes. Evelyn would have adored this music of doom and the funhouse quality of the art nouveau house. From its core he could feel the bass and drum of boots: more bald men with weapons.

  The conversations quieted on the other side of the door and it slid open. Henri Alibert, some years older than his photograph, was six and a half feet tall. He kept his chin aloft, not the sort to bend down to meet a shorter man’s eyes. His white hair was cropped short on the sides, where it continued to grow. There were flakes of dandruff on what Kruse could see of his shoulders.

  “Our American friend.”

  “Henri Alibert?”

  “I am delighted to welcome you to my modest home.”

  “My name is Mathieu Meisels.”

  Alibert closed his eyes for a moment, as though the name was a spasm he had learned to endure, and opened them slowly. “You spoke to the men outside?”

  “I showed them my invitation.”

  “And they were welcoming?”

  “A typically warm, typically French introduction to your modest home, Monsieur, yes.”

  Behind Alibert, a crowd of seven women and five men in business attire stood behind their chairs. They were in their fifties and sixties. The scents of cooking blended with perfumes and colognes.

  “I had neglected to tell my greeters you were coming. A terri
ble oversight, so I’m delighted they were so good to you. Please, join us.”

  “Why did you invite me, Monsieur?”

  Alibert was not accustomed to this. His breathing changed and he reached back for the space between the pretty harpsichord and the wall. His forehead bloomed pink. “Perhaps you could tell me why you’re harassing elderly ladies and bothering Cassin’s poor old chief of staff.” Alibert’s lips trembled, as though he were on the verge of weeping. He was not a young man and, despite his posture, it was as though something within seemed ready to cut him down. “If you want to know about me, Monsieur Meisels, why not ask?”

  “I tried. If you remember, I visited your office yesterday. You invited me to this party. And then when I arrived it seemed your men had been ordered to—”

  The door slid open all the way now, and a fat man in a white tuxedo stepped into the anteroom. His eyebrows were enchanted forests.

  “Come, Henri. Sit down. And you are?”

  “Mathieu Meisels. Enchanté, Monsieur.”

  The man shifted his glass of champagne, clearly not his first, into his left hand. “A foreigner, yet. Henri Alibert, fraternizing with a foreigner on his birthday. And a handsome devil. A young something-or-other. Remember, Henri, when we were young and handsome and clever?”

  “Monsieur Alibert, you did not tell me it was your birthday. What a magnificent honour to be invited.”

  The fat man with the eyebrows escorted Kruse into the dining room. “Everyone, this is Henri’s friend . . . what did you say your name was again?”

  Alibert walked in behind them. “His name is Meisels, an American business acquaintance of mine.”

  There was half a place setting in the middle of the table. A woman in black hustled in to complete it. If he were to sit here, his back would be to the door: a security man’s least favourite position. The group quieted as Alibert took his place at the head of the table, calmed himself, stared at Kruse for a moment, and prepared to speak. He was like a priest before the congregation, the sermon already buzzing at the back of his throat. “Alors, mesdames et messieurs—”