Son of France

by Todd Babiak

He turned to her and she reached for his cheek and pulled him in for a kiss. He had forgotten how, how to really kiss a woman. But it returned to him and he did not think about the mayor and Joseph or his ruined apartment or Tzvi or Evelyn or Lily. Somewhere across the city, he imagined briefly that Annette was kissing Étienne, which only made him want to kiss Zoé better. She pulled off his jacket and pawed at him through his white shirt, still damp from the rain, and she lay back while they kissed and then, with a growl of frustration, she shoved him off. She stood up, one shoe on and one shoe off, breathing deeply, her hair wild.

  “Wait. What are you doing here?”

  “My apartment’s destroyed.”

  “Why? Who destroyed it?”

  “Some Americans.”

  Zoé looked at his briefcase. “Your proof.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have gone to a hotel.” She pulled down her dress, reached up to fix her hair. “Did you come here for the money? It’s not here. Where is the Israeli, Monsieur Meisels? In Toronto, really? Or is he here somewhere, waiting with a knife?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t plan this. This wasn’t in my plan.” She walked into the kitchen, drew a glass of water, drank it all at once, and returned to him. “Is this . . . What are you thinking, Christophe?”

  If he were honest with her, he wasn’t thinking at all. He had gone to Annette’s apartment but she was with the editorialist. There were a thousand hotels between Avenue Bosquet and Avenue Montaigne. He had hoped Zoé would say he had nothing to worry about. Joseph’s men would not come after him or Tzvi. The mayor would not punish Annette and Anouk. Until he saw Zoé, in her dress, Kruse had planned to share al-Faruqi’s file with her. He could hide here, in this carnival apartment, and she would take care of everything.

  He stood up. “I came because I wanted to see you.”

  Zoé put her hand on her heart. “That means you have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “If you are in earnest, Christophe, and I do hope you are, we cannot . . . I cannot make love to you until all this is settled. Tomorrow I will see about what you have told me. I will get your money.”

  “Should I . . . ?”

  Zoé looked at her watch. It wasn’t late. “You should go.”

  • • •

  Three taxis were lined up at the end of her building, in front of a white-walled boutique. Scarves and handbags were posed under loving spotlights. Kruse stood in the rain for a few minutes to cool off, to clear himself of desire, before he rapped on any windshields. In the rain and in the wind that came with it, his feelings for Zoé twisted into fury. They had made a murderer of him: he was not free to fall in love. He looked up at the windows, to see if anyone was watching him. If anyone was watching him, they were in darkness.

  The driver took him west in the rain, to Joseph’s impossibly quiet neighbourhood. Kruse asked the driver to wait for him a moment and he ran out to press the buzzer in the dark and the wet. One of the giants who acted as gatekeeper opened the door. He wore a shirt and tie but his blazer was on his chair. His partner sat at a small card table, waiting. It smelled of pizza in the foyer. A checkerboard was open and the second giant sat studying it.

  “Good evening, Monsieur Kruse.”

  Kruse apologized for coming without any notice and asked if Monsieur Mariani was home. He felt like a nine-year-old asking if Joey could come out for a bike ride.

  “No, no. He’s out.”

  Without looking away from the checkerboard, the second giant called out: “At his fundraiser!”

  “What fundraiser?” said the man at the door. “I thought he was at church.”

  “He is in a church but it isn’t church. It’s a church with music inside. That old stuff he likes.”

  “You can’t make a church not a church. It’s still a church even if it isn’t church. If he’s in a church he’s at church.”

  “Jesus Christ. My point is—”

  “What church is it?” Kruse interrupted.

  This inspired another back-and-forth that reminded him of married couples he and Evelyn had known back in Toronto. They would be over for dinner and the husband and wife would argue without emotion about items in the news they had remembered differently, or the way they had met, the caterers at their wedding, summer holidays, what they had been wearing that cold night in February. There were so many Notre-Dames and so many saints in the Roman martyrology, Kruse thought it could go on all night. Notre-Dame de Passy, non non, de l’Assomption de Passy, non Notre-Dame-d’Auteuil. Non. Non? Saint-Honoré de Something, Saint-François, Sainte-Thérèse. They agreed it was somewhere in the sixteenth arrondissement. The one at the little card table closed his eyes in concentration, clapped his hands.

  “I remember him saying something about choosing the church because it was on a street named for a player.”

  “A football player?”

  “No, you idiot. A music player. It’s a music night, for Christ’s sake.”

  Kruse doubted a street in old Paris would be named after a non-French musician, so he named all the composers he could remember. Chopin? Berlioz? That was close but no. Satie or Debussy? Saint-Saëns didn’t sound like a street but Saint-Saëns? He had read somewhere that Stravinsky had become a Parisian. No? Kruse was about to open it up to other European nationalities when he remembered Georges Bizet.

  “That’s it!”

  Kruse ran back to the taxi. His driver, a handsome young man from Côte d’Ivoire, did not know of the church but he knew of Rue Georges Bizet. Just that morning he had taken a woman to a business meeting at the Egyptian embassy on Bizet. They entered from its northern tip, at a quiet plaza full of cars. It was a residential street with few shops. They passed a clinic with some trees out front and then the street grew thinner and older, the details on the front of the mansions more magnificent. There was one restaurant on the corner, probably Italian, and a dry cleaner. Kruse tried to calm himself, tried to wipe the memory of his ruined and reeking apartment away. If Tzvi were with him he would suggest subtlety and stealth: sit at the back of whatever room it is, or stand. Wait for the right moment. Let as few people as possible see you.

  It was not a church but a Greek Orthodox cathedral, and it surprised both Kruse and the driver. From eye level, on the street, it did not appear to be much. Kruse paid the driver, who said he did not look at all Greek. “But I haven’t learned to tell the difference between you,” he said, sincerely.

  Kruse reached for his briefcase and realized there was no briefcase. He had forgotten it, in his dreaminess, back at Zoé’s apartment. The cab had already pulled away. He waved but the cab did not stop.

  It didn’t matter. Not now.

  There were more elegant strategies. Perhaps Tzvi was right: doing all of this from Toronto, somehow, might have been better. Joseph would be well guarded. He would deny everything. But Kruse wanted him to know he had ruined the wrong man.

  Joseph had started all of this on the evening of the explosion, an explosion he himself had planned. This is why the mayor was standing close to the door: so Kruse could save him. If he had faltered, the mayor might simply have run out. Joseph or one of his retired armed forces staff would have told him how many seconds to count after the grenades had toppled to the floor. One, two, three. Only a diabolically paranoid journalist or investigator would consider the mayor a suspect. Politics were always competitive. The mayor had won many races in the past without resorting to violence. And why would a man go anywhere near a restaurant that was going to blow up?

  To be certain.

  From the beginning, the plan would have included false suspects. The traditional route might have been to plant evidence, but there was always a chance—a good chance—that all other suspects had wonderful alibis. Police and military, bound by laws and processes, would have delivered men like Khalil al-Faruqi, Réné Chatel, and Henri Alibert into the nimble hands of lawyers. A couple of foreign mercenaries, however, would be quiet about it and allow the g
overnment to build a story of clandestine triumph. We cannot tell you, for security reasons, how we found and killed al-Faruqi. But he was an enemy of France, the murderer of noble Pierre Cassin and other innocents.

  The cathedral was named after a saint named Stéphane. He could hear the music even before he opened the door. Nearly every pew in the cathedral was full. A soprano sang under a massive chandelier and a mural of Jesus. There were nine or ten chairs at the front of the cathedral, in the raised altar. Zoé’s shampoo, the scent of it, remained about him. One of the people seated on the altar was Joseph, his legs crossed, in a grey double-breasted suit. One of his girlfriends was next to him, in a simple but elegant black dress. Joseph saw him, made a subtle gesture of surprise with his hands, and smiled. In his perfectly symmetrical smile he carried health and a boyish joy that probably made it easy for him to meet women even if they had not yet seen his car and his apartment.

  In the rain, on the evening of the explosion, Joseph had found Kruse in the café and he had taken him to the apartment on Rue d’Andigné. This is the smile he had worn that night. Now that they had killed the mayor’s only authentic rival, they would have to find—and eliminate—some other possibilities: the terrorist, the communist radical, the right-wing extremist.

  The vast room and its echoes magnified the single violin and harpsichord. The music was somehow light and dark at once, happy and tragic. “Selig ist der Mann,” the soprano sang. Blessed is the man. And then she sang of death, how happy she will be to depart this earth. “Hier hast du die Seele, was schenkest du mir?”

  You have my soul. What do I get?

  If there was an answer in the aria, Kruse did not hear it. He thought of Tzvi, grotesque lines of muscle and vein and skin hanging where his elbow ought to have been, the terrible woman and al-Faruqi, the smell of the unclean hacienda. The smell, now, of his own apartment. What he had mistaken as his own. Perhaps the mayor was here too. They had killed his daughter and they had killed his wife and now they had removed the arm of his true father and here they were smiling with God.

  Zoé’s lipstick was on his lips. Calm, calm. He breathed and remembered the word for the neck of the cathedral: sanctuary. The woman sang of death in the sanctuary.

  He walked up the centre aisle like a priest with a tall candle, like a husband.

  “What do you get, Joseph?”

  Everyone turned. He was sensitive to it, with the exploded bottle in his apartment, but the sudden movement in the pews had released a new cloud of perfume. He had said it in English. The harpsichordist stopped but the violinist continued. The soprano looked about her.

  Joseph stood up. The smile was gone.

  Kruse had hoped to embarrass the truth out of him but Joseph did not seem to care what anyone else in the cathedral was thinking. There was something else in his eyes. He looked up past Kruse for an instant, at the bodyguards. Wait.

  “You did it. You did it for the mayor.”

  Joseph stepped down and into the aisle before him, his hands up in surrender. His skin was more tanned than the last time Kruse had seen him. His pocket square was expertly poufed.

  Men were behind him now. He could hear and feel their weight, the eagerness in their heels on the old floor. Kruse turned and prepared himself. The music had ended now but its ghost haunted the room. This is what he most loved: three large men stepping in to take him. They were hired goons in the uniforms of hired goons, not Joseph’s staff. “Monsieur.” The one in front reached for him, spoke in a bored voice as if this were the tenth time he had retrieved Kruse from a church. “Let’s step out into the street.” There wasn’t much room between the pews. The big men were lined up single file.

  Joseph called out to them. “No no, don’t try—”

  Like too many men who frequent the gym, this one didn’t bother with his legs. They were cartoonishly thin compared with the size of his upper body. Kruse knocked his reaching hand away to throw the man off balance and went after his right knee, where he was carrying all his weight. His kick made a dull, unpleasant sound. The security guard’s howl of pain was worse. Joseph’s guests called out in horror. Some on the opposite sides of the aisle stood up to leave. The big man tumbled onto a white-haired couple and went down calling for an ambulance.

  “My goodness, Christopher.” Joseph stepped between Kruse and the two remaining guards, over the fallen man, switched to French. He pointed to the guards, who were in that miserable place between wanting to run away and wanting to shoot someone. They panted, mouths open. “Back away. This man means us no harm.” Now he spoke to everyone: “Please relax. This was a simple emotional disturbance. It’s over now! And really, as we listen to this music, let’s pause for a moment to remember Monsieur Bach wrote it to turn us away from violence and destruction and toward the best of our natures.”

  For a moment, it worked. Some of those who had stood up to leave returned tentatively to their places in the pews. Joseph turned to the front of the room, to the musicians and the soprano.

  “We’re terribly sorry for the interruption, Madame.”

  The soprano raised her hands, to block the apology. There were banners at the back of the room, advertising for Les Petits Frères des Pauvres. Kruse had seen them at work in his neighbourhood, helping isolated and hungry senior citizens with money and companionship. Three women and a man, at long tables below the banners, were standing to watch him. Everyone watched him. On the floor, the security guard moaned. It was otherwise silent for long enough that the guard called out to the room again. “An ambulance, lord please. He broke my knee.”

  Someone called out, a man with a shaky voice. “Leave us, you con.”

  Others joined in, ordered Kruse to leave. There were enough voices now that Joseph could speak without being heard. “What’s happened to you?”

  “The mayor happened. You happened.”

  “This is a fundraiser for—”

  Kruse did not want to hear it. He knew. There was no room to walk past the remaining beefy guards, and he did not want to step over the man on the floor, so he walked to the altar. The soprano shouted “No!” and closed her hands in prayer. She seemed to be looking for someone to embrace or shield her. No one sitting on the altar stood up to comfort the soprano.

  He could do it at once, in three seconds. Maybe five. Joseph would have just enough time to feel it and know it.

  The philanthropists watched him as though he was the opposite of a priest, and he was the opposite of a priest. He had told himself otherwise, as an answer to his parents’ accusations, but he was no one’s saviour. He comforted and shielded no one. The guards helped the big man with the spoiled knee to his one good leg and they walked him sideways down the aisle. He moaned and asked why. The men and women at the Petits Frères des Pauvres table had settled back into their folding chairs. They looked miserable. He had made them all miserable.

  Joseph stood alone in the aisle, watching him. The philanthropists had gone quiet. Kruse was a jack-in-the-box and this was the final turn of the crank.

  The Mariani cousin who would take his place as chief murderer, if Kruse broke his neck in the aisle, would not spend any of his free time with the little siblings of the poor. There was nothing Kruse could say to these people. He was not made to be at the front of the room, on the altar or under the chandelier of the sanctuary. When they were still teaching self-defence, young men who had seen Bruce Lee movies or popular bits of preposterousness like Gymkata would come into MagaSecure because they hoped it would transform them. Learning to fight, and actually fighting, would make them powerful and sexy because that’s what it did in the movies. In real life, it’s abominable. Tzvi would shout at him when Kruse tried to dissuade teenage boys with wealthy parents. Fighting is not what you think it is. It will impress no one. If you do not quit within a month, like most do, it will make a horror of you.

  It was finished. Joseph had succeeded, as he had always succeeded and always would. Pierre Cassin was dead and Khalil al-Faruqi, the main sus
pect, could not answer for himself. Réné Chatel and Henri Alibert could not defend themselves. There was no side door, so Kruse walked around the left side of the cathedral. The words were returning to him, now that his heart had slowed: the epistle side of the nave. No one said anything. His footsteps echoed and they watched him. The lunatic, the monster. On Rue Bizet it was raining again and he did not have an umbrella and it didn’t matter.

  Three doors of a silver car opened at once and three men in suits pointed pistols at him. Agent Peach was in the lead. He wore a bulletproof vest and his cheeks were red. He shouted orders. Kruse did not run and he did not fight. They wanted him on his knees so he fell to his knees and put his hands behind his back and his forehead on the wet stone. It felt like he ought to pray but he did not know how to begin.

  FOURTEEN

  Parc de Belleville, Paris

  THE BLACK HOOD WAS STITCHED TIGHTLY WITH WOOL. IT MADE GOOD sense. His balaclava in elementary school, when winter blew in off Lake Superior, was loosely knitted, permanently wet cotton. It didn’t matter if the eyeholes were in place; he could still see in a snowball fight, or sliding down that hill on the east side of Riverdale Park. The agents, or whatever they were, didn’t want him peeking through the stitches. The handcuffs were real even if Agent Peach and his crew were something else. If he was under arrest, no one had read him his rights. One of them had kicked him in the face after the hood was over his head. It had hit him on the right cheek, which was better than his nose or his mouth, but he could feel the heat of an ugly bruise forming. He suspected they would kill him before it amounted to much.

  His family was gone. Tzvi was back in Toronto. Annette and Anouk did not need him. His only real friend in France had betrayed him. The apartment was a smelly ruin. It would have been nice to make love to Zoé with the windows open to the thunderstorm.

  When he was a kid he had made lists of girls in the neighbourhood. When things were really bad between the Americans and the Soviets and he was sure a nuclear holocaust would be going down any day, he was moved to find the girls, in their backyards or walking home from school, and pitch them. Do you want to die a virgin? I don’t. Maybe we can work something out. Luckily, he had lacked that sort of boldness.