Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  He put the file in his briefcase and turned left on Rue Valadon. It was just after seven. Annette would have begun Anouk’s bedtime ritual. The lights were on up there. Kruse pressed her button on the intercom and considered what he might say. He did not want to alarm her.

  “Oui allô?” It was the aristocratic voice of Étienne.

  Kruse backed away, off the sidewalk and onto the thin and shadowed street. He was exhausted from driving for thirteen hours and dizzy from the cologne. He scanned the windows, the doorways. He was sure someone was watching him. He was sure of nothing. His address book was still in the inside pocket of his suit jacket, from the trip south. There were payphones at Rue de Grenelle, across from the Café Rousillon. He walked backwards up Valadon, watching the windows on the top floor.

  The last time he had spoken to the capitaine was in an apartment in Marseille. Kruse recalled another powerful smell, of bleach. That day it had felt like the insides of his nostrils were being cooked. Hours earlier, a young man named Frédéric had been skinned alive in the apartment and the capitaine had not wanted to believe him. The capitaine was a massive crow with a beard and a cigarette, he remembered that, and a stoop. Kruse had two numbers for the Marseillais. The first one, at the station, rang out. On the fourth ring of the second number the capitaine answered in the middle of a coughing fit.

  “Who is this? Who?” The capitaine did not recall him until Kruse described the rainy day they had met on Rue de la Cathédrale: the smell of bleach.

  There was a long pause. A rugby match was on and the home team had evidently scored. Applause and shouts of joy exploded from Café Rousillon. Even over this, Kruse could hear the giant policeman’s raspy breaths.

  “I didn’t see you at Huard’s funeral.”

  Kruse could not tell him where he had been at the time: in Paris, trying to destroy the men who had killed Lieutenant Huard. “He’s been avenged.”

  The policeman laughed. “It’s that simple, is it? He has been avenged. The world is in order. In my career I have not come across anything so clean and so pleasing, Monsieur Kruse. Thank you for this. You did the avenging, I imagine?”

  “I have to ask you a favour.”

  “Do you know what Huard said you were? An assassin. Let me see. It is late in the evening. I am at home with a glass of wine. And an assassin calls to ask me a favour.”

  “I’m working for the mayor of Paris.”

  “Another assassin! Two assassins in one phone call.” The Marseillais began and tentatively halted another coughing fit. “I am blessed this evening.”

  Kruse explained he had been hired to find the people who had blown up Chez Sternbergh. One of the agents who had hired him had left two phone numbers: an office number, which would be useless just now, and a home number.

  “Why don’t you phone this agent?”

  “I have. I called her before I called you, of course. But she was not home.”

  “It is not in my power to make a woman go to her home.”

  “I need her address.”

  “This is against the law.”

  “How much will it take? I have money.”

  “Assassins always seem to have money.” Over the phone came the sounds of the Marseillais lighting a new cigarette. “Monsieur Kruse, I’m not a young man anymore. The people who ruin my beautiful city and my beautiful country, our gangsters, our businessmen, our politicians, they are—I have discovered—unstoppable. All I can do is intercept their little stooges from time to time, rough them up, toss them in jail for a year or two. I have become a terrible cynic, I will admit it. But even so, I don’t see why I should help a thug go around dispensing justice in my country.”

  “This woman: I won’t hurt her. I want to help her. Help you. Help France.”

  “Help yourself.” The Marseillais was quiet for a moment. Then he began to sing a song Kruse had heard somewhere before. “Nous sommes des dégourdis, nous sommes des lascars. Des types pas ordinaires.”

  We are sneaky. We are rogues. We are not ordinary men. “What song is this?”

  “Mais, c’est ‘Le Boudin.’”

  “Blood pudding?”

  “The fight song of the French Foreign Legion, Monsieur Kruse. This is where I started my career—as a commander. Men like you, lost men, would arrive. My job was to make something of you. But I have a feeling, listening to your voice, you are more lost than lost.”

  “You’re probably correct.”

  The Marseillais agreed to search the address attached to Zoé Moquin’s personal phone line and to call him back with it, at Café Rousillon. Kruse crossed the street and ordered a glass of Gigondas and waited for the call.

  • • •

  He had bought two of his suits on Avenue Montaigne, where many of the haute couture houses had addresses. It did not take long to get into the building, an extraordinarily well-kept nineteenth-century block with cut stone and, on the top floor, pretty domes and turrets. It was not a bureaucrat’s building. The boutiques were closed at this hour but people were filing out of the door in fine suits and tight dresses, their perfumes a reminder of his apartment, on their way to opera and theatre.

  Her suite was on the fourth floor but there were no addresses on the fifth. First he knocked and waited, and knocked again. One of her neighbours, a man in a tuxedo carrying a bouquet of flowers, said hello as he passed. When they released Kruse from the Lyon jail, after Evelyn was murdered, he was allowed to take her wallet. It was easy to throw some of it away but not her driver’s licence. They had gone into the registration office together, to get their cards, and when it was her turn to have her photograph taken he had lowered his shirt to show his nipple. It was unlike him to be silly, and her smile—her laugh—in the photograph was so true that her eyes were tiny. It was flimsy and flexible, still valid for another eight months. For slipping locks open it was better than any credit card.

  It was more like a warehouse loft in New York City than a Paris apartment. He did not turn on any lights but enough flooded in from the street. There were few walls on the vast floor, and instead of furniture there were tables of fabric and elaborate dresses on unusual mannequins. It smelled of hot glue. Kruse called out for Zoé, for anyone. The art on the wall was enormous and enormously moody, night upon night. He pulled out his flashlight and inspected it: crows and cliffs and houses and abstractions and white faces, dark eyes.

  A spiral staircase led up to the second floor, the living quarters. Despite all the space, the apartment had only two bedrooms. Both had closets filled with elaborate dresses. The kitchen was black and silver with fixtures that looked like they had been pulled from an advanced alien civilization; like the dresses, he had never seen anything like it. He wondered at the sort of mind that could imagine and demand and produce all of this.

  In the dining room there was a large black-and-white photograph from the era when we did not smile for the camera. It was a man with a moustache. His arms were at his sides. He had wrapped himself in thick fabric and there were poles behind him like the thin bones in wings.

  He examined the photograph with his flashlight. Thunder cracked and rolled; a steady rain began. Kruse opened the window in the apartment’s only typically French room, a spacious salon with antique couches and chairs, a grand piano, busy wallpaper, and portraits. From buildings on both sides of Avenue Montaigne, men and women dashed from doorways into luxury sedans waiting out front. He thought again of Evelyn, who had dreamed of this room and its warmth, the view of the generous street below, the promise of an evening of elegance and sophistication hand in hand. Of course, he doubted that she ever dreamed of it with him. Another philosopher, perhaps, or a banker. As part of Kruse’s transformation into an escort she could take to a dinner party, Evelyn had signed him up for piano classes before Lily was born. It turned out he was good at it, that his training as a fighter had something in common with musical apprenticeship. The rhythm of it, maybe, or just focus. He was never a star at reading notes, and his teacher, Ms. Zipp,
had recognized that about him, so she focused on teaching him how to play by ear.

  To stay awake as he waited for Zoé he sat at the black shiny piano and slowly lifted the fallboard. The idea was he would play for Lily and with her, so when it came time for her to take her own lessons it would not seem a chore. Music was simply a thing we humans make, as natural as fighting.

  He had memorized a bit of the famous Beethoven and Bach and some movie soundtrack songs. At Zoé’s piano Kruse played the only Chopin nocturne he had learned, one of the easiest ones, opus 9, number 2, which starts quiet and mostly stays quiet. He had learned it because Lily had asked for a “song about rain” and this is what Ms. Zipp had recommended. He had not played it in more than a year, but it returned to him in the silence of the apartment. Near the middle he heard footsteps behind him and he made an error. His timing was off. He found his rhythm again and calmed himself and finished quietly and prettily. She knew to wait a few seconds after the final note. Then she clapped.

  “To arrive home to music like this. A woman could get used to such a thing, Christophe. But you didn’t have to do it in the dark.”

  “I didn’t want to frighten you.”

  “Sincerely, there is not another person in my life I would have suspected.”

  “And this prospect is not at all worrying?”

  She pulled the cord on a brass floor lamp with a shade that belonged in a Dr. Seuss book. Her dress was red, ruffled and short, with a thin strap that crossed over her shoulders. It looked like she had been out on a date but she was home too early for that. “I was just out for an aperitif in your neighbourhood. The mayor hosted an evening for Plácido Domingo and Charles Aznavour.”

  “Did they sing?”

  “They sing tomorrow. They’re doing a benefit concert for the families of sick children who have to stay in Paris for treatment. Hotels in this town aren’t cheap, as you know. There were actual sick children at the party, bald ones with cancer. One, a twelve-year-old, spoke about her family’s suffering. She didn’t mention her own troubles. I was so miserable about it I drank three glasses of champagne and ate nothing, so I couldn’t stay long.” Her cheeks were flushed. “I would have embarrassed myself eventually.”

  “You get along well with the mayor?”

  Zoé was going to answer immediately but then she stepped back from it, out of the lamplight. “Would you like a drink, Christophe? Or did you already help yourself?”

  “I’ll have what you’re having.”

  He followed her into the black and silver kitchen, where she turned on a set of four hanging lights. She pulled a bottle of red wine from a humming wine cooler. “A colleague gave this to me last week. I don’t know enough about wine. Perhaps it is good and perhaps it is not. A 1990 Bordeaux. He’s quite fancy, so I imagine it’s good. ‘For your cellar,’ he said. So I don’t think he intended this.” She slid the bottle and the corkscrew over the concrete counter, and Kruse opened it. She poured two glasses and they touched the rims softly and looked at each other. “Did you sneak into my apartment to ravage me, Christophe? Should I phone the police?”

  “It’s up to you, really.”

  “Is it?”

  “Phoning the police.”

  “To ravage or not to ravage: that part is out of my control?”

  Kruse turned away from her, to look at the rooms in the light. He walked into the dining room.

  “Catherine, my sister, worked for Chanel, for Monsieur Lagerfeld. He may have said this to other young designers, I cannot know, but he had told her that she would be his successor. She travelled. Men loved her, of course.”

  “This was her apartment?”

  “It was.”

  Kruse took his glass of wine and returned to the black-and-white photograph of the raven man.

  Zoé stood beside him, her arm touching his. “Franz Reichelt. It was taken in 1911. He was a tailor obsessed with flight. He clothed dummies in this outfit and tossed them from roofs. They had flown gently to the ground. When he was pleased with his experiments he petitioned the Paris police to allow him to try something at the Eiffel Tower.”

  “He jumped?”

  “On a cold February morning. There was a crowd. He went to the first platform and stood on a stool and made a declaration and hurled himself off. It isn’t pretty, what happens to a body when it drops from a great height. There were plenty of photographers, even a filmmaker. All the newspapers had photographs the next day. They called him the Flying Tailor.”

  “It’s macabre.”

  “Catherine was attracted to his ambition, of course, the audacity of it. You can see it in her clothes: elegance and absurdity at once. And the macabre. Her plan was not to be creative director of Chanel, no matter what Karl Lagerfeld said about her. She wanted to make clothes for regular people. She registered the name Flying Tailor, as her clothing line. She wanted to be in boutiques and department stores.”

  There was genuine pain in her voice. He imagined intelligence agents weren’t supposed to feel pain. Perhaps it was the wine. He said nothing more and turned away from the flying tailor, even though he wanted to continue looking at him. There was more thunder, a quiet flash.

  “The mayor did this, Zoé. All of it.”

  “All of what?”

  “He’s eliminating his enemies. And I’ve helped him. You and your agency are paying for it. When there are no enemies left, I become the enemy.”

  “How is that?”

  “I know about it. And Monsieur le Maire will need a crazed loner, his Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  “A Canadian assassin who dislikes Jewish restaurants and Palestinian terrorists and communists and ultra-right-wing industrialists?”

  “Close.”

  Zoé led him across the room. Her heels clicked on and off the parquet floor, interrupted by red Persian rugs.

  “If I’m right, the mayor’s team will have footage of me at Chez Sternbergh, in Sigüenza, in Luxembourg Gardens, on Rue des Brice in Nancy. When he is finished with me, he will send it to the Gendarmerie Nationale, a few newspapers and television stations. My friend Étienne Bonnet will get the scoop. I’ll see myself on the news. There will be witnesses. Then, before I can make any official statements, they’ll come for me. And they’ll come for Tzvi in Toronto. There won’t be a trial or even an arrest. They threatened Annette and Anouk, to make me do this. Maybe they’ll assume I told Annette. Maybe they have to get rid of her, too.”

  She sat on the gold and red couch that was so magnificent he worried about going anywhere near it with his glass of wine. For more than a minute she said nothing. She looked out the window. “If you’re correct, Christophe, he has manipulated us both. What will he do to me?”

  “You’re a professional. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps we both die in an accident.”

  “Then we shouldn’t be in the same room together. It’s too easy for him. All it takes is a gas leak and his problems are over. Did anyone follow you here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.”

  There was only a hint of light on her face, from the adjacent lamp. He could not see her expression but she seemed perfectly relaxed, not at all perturbed by his revelations. Her question—What will he do to me?—was not a real question. Did she know? There was a flair about her voice, quiet as it was. She whispered, as though her parents were asleep in the bedroom.

  Kruse had come here because he had thought Zoé could help. She could alert her superiors at the agency, launch an investigation, put him in some sort of protective custody. But she sounded amused by what he had told her, not frightened or even concerned. He had encountered this sort of cynicism in New York, when CEOs were threatened by lawsuits and criminal charges or even physical threats by the leaders of organized crime families.

  “What’s in the briefcase, Christophe?”

  “Proof.”

  Zoé sat up. “Proof of what you say the mayor has done?”

  “No.”

  “P
roof of what, then?”

  He had planned to tell her everything, to give her the briefcase. “Another matter, quite unrelated.”

  “Do you like the wine?”

  It was delicious but he did not want to talk about wine. Why was she talking about wine? If she wore perfume he could not smell it. Now and then the wet air from the street would move through the room and it would take him, momentarily, somewhere else. The sleep in Madrid had helped but he remained exhausted. Exhausted and, now, confused. “It’s fine. Thank you.”

  She slid closer to him, on the couch.

  “You’re a spy, Zoé. Is that right?”

  “I don’t pretend to be anyone I am not, if that’s what you mean. No fake names, nothing undercover. But I do work in a clandestine service. The work you did for us—for France, Christophe, not for the mayor, at least not in any official way—did not actually happen. I’m not worried that you’ll suddenly be charged with a crime for eliminating Khalil al-Faruqi. You did not eliminate him. You don’t exist, you see.”

  “But the others . . .”

  “This will take some research on my part, some activity, but it’s late in the evening. The computers are turned off. The bureaucrats have gone home. It seems to me, Christophe, that you have entirely succeeded. You have done what we, the republic, asked of you. It’s time to celebrate, not worry.”

  The way she sat on the couch, her short dress was even shorter. The fabric crinkled against the couch as she slid closer to him. She wore patterned stockings. Zoé watched him so intently he did not know where to look so he looked at her legs.

  She whispered. “Would you like to be elsewhere?”

  Kruse answered without actually saying it: no.

  “I don’t want to embarrass myself, Christophe.”