Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  “They will fear us.”

  “Take a few weeks in Toronto. Even better, Montreal. You can stay at the Ritz-Carlton, as Hans Miller.”

  “What a stupid fucking name. Nice one.”

  “I insist. And so would you, in my position.”

  Tzvi tried to tie his tie with one hand, and failed, and failed again. He tossed it on the floor and cussed in Hebrew. “I’m not going back to Toronto.”

  Both of the doctors on call thought it foolish to check out of the hospital just as Tzvi’s rehabilitation was beginning. They appeared to invent, on the spot, a number of administrative levies instead of refunding the money Kruse had paid up front. Tzvi slept much of the way to Guadalajara. It was just after eight when they arrived at the train station. Tzvi remained sleeping in the car, a Peugeot 405 Turbo, while Kruse retrieved the file, al-Faruqi’s proof, from the locker. There was a queer feeling in the station at this hour: there were only a few people waiting, and three of them—two men and a woman, all in business suits—watched him. On his way out of the station, at the door, they stood up. He ran to the Peugeot.

  “Who are they?” Tzvi had awakened and started the car. All Kruse had to do was put it in gear and go. “What is that?”

  “Proof.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “I don’t know yet. I took it from al-Faruqi’s place. It has something to do with the CIA.”

  One of the men and the woman had blond hair, and Kruse thought—but he couldn’t be sure—he had heard one of the men say “Let’s go,” in English. He said so while Tzvi worked the map. The flight to Toronto departed from Madrid at ten the following morning, but Kruse didn’t want to lead them to Madrid. So they left the city in a northwesterly direction, following the signs to Segovia.

  Soon they were alone on a more or less empty secondary highway, apart from the Range Rover following them.

  “This Agent Peach, are you sure he is a CIA man?”

  “No.”

  “How did he introduce himself? What actual words did he use?”

  Kruse told Tzvi what he could recall. The Peugeot was a luxury liner of a sedan, so despite the big engine there was no way they could outrun the Range Rover.

  “That is not at all a CIA vehicle, Christopher. The CIA I know.”

  “Should we pull a McGeachy?”

  “Perhaps it is our only option.”

  “You stay in the car, Tzvi.”

  “And you go ahead and fuck yourself.”

  One afternoon, they were following a man named William McGeachy on Highway 87 from New York City to Albany. He was head of a lobbying group for real estate developers, and according to their client a man who intimidated his enemies and near enemies with violence. Their client, a state representative with gubernatorial ambitions, had wept as he recounted stories of McGeachy threatening to turn his knees into baby food. And if the representative complained about it, he’d do the same to his wife and son. They had been hoping to meet with McGeachy in a public place, a café or hotel lobby. But as they were following him, McGeachy opened his window and reached out, pointed at the shoulder, and pulled over. He got out of his car, an Audi, pulled up his pants, took off his suit jacket, and began shouting. Tzvi got out to speak to him and McGeachy made rather a crucial mistake: he took a swing at Tzvi. He was on his back, on the hardtop, seven seconds later. From then on, confronting someone on the highway was pulling a McGeachy.

  Kruse made a U-turn and parked, facing the Range Rover. The landscape was entirely flat, with cultivated soil on one side of the highway and a hayfield on the other. In the distance there was a farmhouse and some outbuildings. The sun was about to set. No one exited the Range Rover. Kruse and Tzvi stood together just in front of the Peugeot. They would be difficult to see, between the headlights.

  “Is there a word in English for after dusk but not-quite-night?”

  “Gloaming, maybe.”

  “How do you use that word? It is gloaming?”

  “I don’t know, Tzvi. I’m sorry. I’ve never said it out loud. The gloaming.”

  “It is currently the gloaming? That sounds unnecessarily poetic. Useless word.”

  “Ask someone else, then.”

  The driver’s side door opened, slowly. The blond man stepped out. He was speaking on a cellular phone. “Affirmative,” he said. “Affirmative.”

  Tzvi spoke with a mock American accent, gave the vowels something special: “Affirmative. Affirmative. You just know he’s an asshole.”

  The moon was three-quarters full. His conversation finished, the blond man folded the phone closed and slipped it into a holster on his belt. The other two doors opened. Sound carried well on the plains. “Okay, team. Let’s be circumspect here.”

  “What does that mean?” Tzvi whispered.

  “Cautious, I think,” Kruse whispered back.

  With his right hand, Tzvi waved. “Howdy, neighbours.” He continued to speak in what he seemed to think was an American accent. It veered, at times, into his Indian accent and his British accent. “Seems like one hell of a night to drink brewskis, watch a game. Why are you all following a couple of yokels like us?”

  The blond man stopped before he entered hand-shaking range and so did the other two. They blocked the light with their forearms. “We work with Agent Raymond Peach. I believe you had a conversation with him, Mr. Kruse.”

  “I did.”

  “We were involved in an information-extraction situation with Mr. al-Faruqi. That situation came to an abrupt halt. I don’t want to outright accuse anyone of malfeasance. Perhaps you two can tell us what happened to him.”

  Tzvi whispered, loud enough for Agent Peach’s friends to hear: “What language is this man speaking?”

  “In addition, there are certain resources, our resources, we have reason to believe you have confiscated from Mr. al-Faruqi. We thank you for that, for keeping a watchful eye on assets of the American government. And while we would like nothing more than to take . . . brewskis with friends from Canada, we are on the clock here. It’s against regulations. You can keep the money. I was hoping, gentlemen, we could take the file and be on our way.”

  “It seems you know us.” Kruse had slipped one throwing knife into each pocket of his suit jacket. He bumped his wrists against them, for comfort. “But we have no idea who you are.”

  “Like I said. We work with Raymond Peach.”

  “Frankly, sir, I didn’t see his badge or even a business card. You work with Raymond Peach of the . . .”

  Tzvi patted his pocket square, a flash of pink silk. “We are taping this conversation, to be sure you three are not partaking in any malfeasance.”

  The blond woman did not move, but the man to her left, the dark-haired agent who had been shifting his weight from foot to foot, reached clumsily inside his suit jacket. His hand caught on the lining and he cussed. It was plenty of time for Kruse to pull out his knives. He threw one as the young man pulled out his gun, and it stuck into his right shoulder. The young man dropped his gun and called out in pain. The two blonds, the man and woman, ran back to the Range Rover to take cover behind the open doors. Hunched over, the black-haired agent did the same. Kruse ran for the gun the man had dropped and dove into the ditch. The straw was tall enough, if he crouched, to hide him. Tzvi tried to run around the car but he careened to his right and slammed into the hood of the Peugeot and fell on the pavement like a drunk.

  With the doors open and the engine still running, the Range Rover’s interior lights were on. The woman aimed for the straw while her blond partner stepped away from the four-by-four, his gun on Tzvi, who had fallen in the middle of the two-lane highway. The blond agent was shouting orders at Tzvi to keep his hands, his hand, visible. Kruse calmed himself and aimed. The gun was one he had used quite often, with Tzvi’s Mossad friends north of Brampton: a Beretta 92. He had intended to hit the agent in the arm. Instead, the bullet hit him in the hand. There was an explosion about the gun, of blood in the headlights. The agent fell to his k
nees and moaned.

  The woman began firing into the straw. Two of the bullets missed him by less than a foot. Like quick breaths he heard them pass. At the Range Rover it was now chaos: the woman shouted at the wounded man, who took cover in the back seat.

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “Close your door. That’s why he can see us, you moron.”

  Kruse liked the way this conversation was going. He shot the rear-view mirror, next to the woman, who screamed and ducked. She jumped into the Range Rover and slammed the door shut. The other door was open so he could still see her. He shot again, to break the window.

  Kruse couldn’t see much. Tzvi had hidden behind the Peugeot. He had abandoned his American accent. “You want to tell us who you are? Who you really are?”

  The blond man stood up and limped into the flat pool of light at the driver’s side door of the Range Rover, one destroyed hand cradled in the other. Once he was inside, it was as though all three of them had forgotten Kruse and Tzvi. The blond man and woman changed places, so she was in the driver’s seat.

  “What should we do?” Kruse stood up in the straw, walked over to Tzvi. “Just let them go?”

  Tzvi took the gun from him and aimed: two pops and a double whoosh. The Range Rover slouched.

  “As you like to say, my son: we aren’t murderers.”

  The light inside the Range Rover had gone dark. Kruse could hear them talking inside, shouting at one another. The woman, at least, could still shoot, so Kruse took back the Beretta and kept it pointed at them. Tzvi stepped into the Peugeot and started it, reached over to open the driver’s door.

  Kruse jumped in, put the car in reverse, ducked and steered. He turned around. The back window of the Peugeot cracked into a spider web but did not burst, and a bullet hit the stereo between them. It went black. For a few kilometres, neither of them spoke.

  Then Tzvi cleared his throat.

  “When I was a boy I often visited my uncle’s farm in the Hula Valley. Once, in the autumn, it was time to slaughter some turkeys. We cut their heads off with an axe, over a stump, and we released their bodies and they ran about for a while—headless. Running just then, when you needed me: I was a headless chicken.”

  “I’m so sorry, Tzvi, for all of this.”

  “It made no sense, so I thought it was God, giving the turkeys thirty crazy seconds of life after death. Here I am with no sense of balance, no—”

  “Doing a hell of a lot better than headless.”

  “Let me say this was a proud moment—that asshole’s hand blowing up. I saw a bit of bone in the gloaming. He would have killed me and you did not hesitate.”

  “Did you hurt yourself, falling?”

  “I have felt better, Christopher.”

  “Should you see a doctor?”

  “It would be foolish to pay someone five hundred dollars to tell me what I already know. Blood loss and trauma are bad for a body, deep revelation. This is also what I know: I am no longer a young man. Neither are you, my boy. My genuine boy! Armless in that bright room, I began to feel I am on the final leg of a journey to decrepitude. Thirty crazy seconds from God.”

  “No.”

  “Look.” He wiggled the stub of his left arm in his jacket. “You’re not looking.”

  “Those three. What should we have done, Tzvi?”

  “Precisely what we did, only smoother. Without any falling down. We did not take a bullet and we did not kill them like a couple of panicked amateurs. Now they know we are serious. And I know I am not leaving.”

  “You are, at least for now. When you’re ready to fight again, come back. Or just give me advice when I call and I don’t know what to do.”

  “I had thought we were the hunters when I arrived in Paris. We are the prey.”

  “I thought I understood.”

  “It’s coordinated, Christopher. The explosion at the restaurant. Al-Faruqi and his minions, the communist, the anti-Semite in Nancy. This woman from the DPSD. I am sure it is not personal, but the mayor and your splendid Corsican friend are using you as a grenade.”

  “What about Agent Peach?”

  “If what we have in this file is so damned important, and the agency knows about it, we would not have been accosted by three fuckups in a Range Rover. If they are genuine I will eat my other arm. We will figure it out together, my boy.”

  “You’re leaving.”

  “I am not.”

  “And I am coming with you.”

  “What?” Tzvi turned to him, said nothing more for a while. “What about your secret girlfriend who does not know she is your girlfriend? What about her daughter who does not need you? And the Frogs in general, with their love for blowing up Jews? You would leave all of this truth and beauty to go home to Toronto where you belong?”

  In Madrid they spent al-Faruqi’s pesetas at the Palace Hotel. They rented the Royal Suite, with its sitting room and dining room and library, a grand balcony overlooking leafy treetops and the church spires. Tzvi slept.

  A basket on the dining room table was filled with meats and cheeses, a cakey local bread, small jars of jam, and a cool bottle of cava with two champagne flutes. There was a radio on the credenza. Kruse messed around on the dial until he found a station that pleased him, a romantic pop song from the 1980s called “More Than This.” It had once seemed boring, music for old people. Now it pleased him, especially with the cava warming him and taking away the throb of his new wounds. He thought of Annette and then he thought of Annette and Étienne. He thought of Zoé Moquin in one of her sister’s baroque dresses, nearly kissing her in the hallway of the prelates’ house. He really should have kissed her.

  French doors opened onto a vast stone balcony. The evening was warm enough to open the doors and sit half in and half out of the suite, with the music and the cava and Khalil al-Faruqi’s file on his lap—the proof of something that had been valuable enough that two men and a woman had staked it out and had fired shots in the night to retrieve it. When the song was finished and a less romantic one began, Kruse took a long sip and opened the file.

  • • •

  They were a security company, not a training school. Perhaps it was time to give up the studio and take an office downtown. With the money from Zoé Moquin they could even buy something near the university and rent out half of it. At least half. Cash flow, my son. More and more of the calls came from the Americans these days. At some point they would have to decide between Toronto and New York. Would they expand or remain small?

  “I am not sure I could say it to a client, or anyone but you, this word people use for small businesses: boutique. A boutique security firm. I feel like a teenage girl. Let’s not put it on our business cards.”

  Tzvi watched him as he spoke, without pauses, all the way to the airport. He did not invite Kruse’s thoughts or opinions on their future together. It was as though Tzvi had not spoken in months and had to make up for the awful lack. At the international departures terminal Kruse pulled in behind a taxi.

  “So you will drop me off here, the old invalid, and you will return the rental and meet me inside. Let’s upgrade to first class, yes? Why the hell not?”

  “Last night, while you were sleeping—”

  “Just wait.” Tzvi stared at him in the Peugeot. His eyes were red and he was pale in the morning sunlight. “What was in the file, my boy?”

  “Like you suspected. I don’t think these are genuine CIA agents.”

  “We can sort it out in Washington.”

  “No.”

  “That is your counter-argument? No?”

  “You don’t want a counter-argument. You knew I wasn’t coming. I’ll collect the money from Madame Moquin, open an account in Zürich, and then maybe . . .”

  “Then maybe what? I’m not your mother, Christopher, or your lover. You don’t have to spare my feelings.” Tzvi sighed. “I taught you so much, and I am so proud of you. Even in this frustrating moment, as much as I want to break your nose again, I am proud of you.
But I knew in our first week together, back when you were a boy, I would never strip one thing from your fragile brain. Your heart, I suppose. It is the thing that will kill you. And you know it. You know one day it will kill you.”

  They got out of the car together and embraced. This is what they did now: they embraced. Tzvi kissed him three times and there were tears in his eyes even though he claimed he did not share any of Kruse’s weakness. He blamed it on the mysteries of blood loss. Kruse made promises to him and from the car he watched Hans Miller of Switzerland walk to the Air Canada desk. He was lopsided and looked small. For the first time in his life Kruse felt the need to protect him.

  At the rental kiosk, Kruse exchanged the Peugeot for another one. He claimed to have parked just outside downtown Madrid. In the morning, he had returned to a broken window and—believe it or not—a bullet in the radio.

  “Kids maybe, or Basques.” The man at the kiosk carried few teeth in his mouth. His lisp was stronger than most. “We like to congratulate ourselves. Democracy wins. Capitalism wins. But I see it coming. This country, the entire continent is eating itself.”

  THIRTEEN

  Avenue Montaigne

  THE APARTMENT SMELLED OF SPOILED DAIRY AND SWEET MUSK. Couches and chairs and mattresses and pillows had been ripped open with knives. Feathers and polyester fluff lay on the floor. Paintings were broken. Every cupboard in the kitchen was empty and, quite unnecessarily, so was the refrigerator. There was a safe in his bedroom. It had been blasted open. Kruse had never used it; he didn’t even know the combination. The room he cared about most was a special mess. The bookshelves in Anouk’s room, which was also secretly Lily’s room, were broken on the floor and the bed was upside down. The sketches from Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice in Wonderland were ripped, the glass of their frames shattered. There wasn’t much to throw about in the bathrooms but the toiletries he had left behind had been yanked from the shelves; he didn’t wear cologne but the bottle Annette had bought for him, at Christmastime, was broken and stinking. He opened the windows and cleaned what he could, took out the broken eggs and spilled yogurt and closed the bathroom door. It had been like this for some time. Even if the mattresses had not been disembowelled he could not imagine sleeping in his apartment. The smell was a clamp around his temples. It turned his throat sour.