Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  The van was the tall, thin, top-heavy sort that was unlike anything in America, the baby giraffe of vehicles. While he did not see the van before they had shoved him inside, he imagined it was white. It smelled of new plastic. On the corners, as he toppled about, the tires squealed. In the back of the van with him, near the doors, was a box. Inside it, there were desperate scratches and squeals.

  They went up a hill. Kruse could not hear much, through the strip of metal that separated him from the cabin, but two men spoke English. They shouted directions to one another, argued over them.

  It was not a terribly long drive—between twelve and fifteen minutes. Five doors opened and closed, echoed. The air changed. They were in a garage of some sort, or a warehouse. He felt the way he had felt in the early days of MagaSecure, when Tzvi had signed him up for underground fighting competitions in Toronto. The only rule was to stay away from the groin. On the way to these fights, on Saturday afternoons in boxing gyms that had closed for maintenance and renovations, Kruse was always nauseated. He never lost a maintenance and renovation fight, not even close, because Tzvi was his teacher and no one else’s, but he never stopped feeling sick before the match began.

  The door opened. He was both nauseated and ready. Though he had been convincing himself that dying would be all right, he had still counted the distance. He had learned the captors by their voices. There were five of them. At least three had semi-automatic pistols.

  “Out.”

  Kruse knew it was Agent Peach but he wanted him to say it, to confirm. “Agent Peach.”

  “Pull him out.”

  There was nothing he could do, not now, so he concentrated on remaining conscious. He tried not to fall as they pulled him out. Someone whispered, “Can he see through that thing?”

  The floor was concrete. There was a slippery layer of grit on it. He could hear birds up high, in the rafters. Someone else dragged the wooden box. Even through the hood he could smell dust in the air, and shit and mould.

  His captors, four men and one woman, spoke English quietly. He could tell by the way the echoes changed that they eventually reached a wall. The hands released him and gently pushed him against a brick wall. “Okay,” a man said. It was not Agent Peach. “One, two, three.”

  In one pull the hood came off his head. It was a delicious relief to escape the heat of it, the moisture of his breath. The woman from the rural road in Spain was the first he spotted, on the far left. In the middle, Agent Peach. Both pointed guns at him. Both were frightened, which pleased him. It was dim, from the fading daylight and whatever leaked in from the street. Then, with a pop, a spotlight flashed on him and he saw nothing but bright yellow.

  “Where is it?” Now that he heard Agent Peach’s voice, without seeing him, it was obvious. Something had felt wrong.

  “You’re not an agent.”

  “Where’s the file, Chris?”

  These were his people. No strangers in Europe, not even jerks with handguns, would call him Chris. “What file?”

  A shot echoed through the warehouse and the instant of it stretched. He was dead. He was not. Not even hurt. The shot had missed. Another shot, this one a few inches from his feet and a puff of dust rose up. They laughed on the other side of the light and there were more shots. Two of the men ordered him to dance.

  He did not dance, and when there were no more gunshots and the echoes stopped, the laughter faded from the warehouse too. No one spoke. There was something embarrassing about their demands to dance, dance, even for Agent Peach. Too many cowboy movies.

  Agent Peach cleared his throat before he spoke again. “We’ll find it whether you tell us or not.”

  “You’re wrong about that.”

  Agent Peach entered the beam of light. “Now I know you’re thinking: this asshole hasn’t met me yet. I’m me, Chris Fucking Kruse. But here’s the thing. You all think you’re the toughest and the baddest before you remember that in your heart you’re a kid who wants to make it all go away. I know about you. You’ve had a hard run, and—”

  “I’m quite aware of my biographical information.”

  With a sigh, Agent Peach backed out of the light and spoke softly with his compatriots. There was at least one door to the warehouse, where they had come in. If he ran, it would take time for his eyes to adjust. They would shoot, but they too would have to contend with darkness. He had to assume at least a couple of them were trained. Given the light, the open space, and uncertain exits, the odds were not good for him. But the odds were worse in the spotlight.

  “You noticed you weren’t alone in the van, Chris.”

  If he went left, there would be less room to run. He was sure the van had entered the warehouse from the right: he counted the paces.

  “That hood we put over your head—we’re going to use it again. What I want to do, Chris, is ensure you understand us. Our personality. Where we’re coming from.”

  “New England?”

  “Honestly, in different circumstances you and I could be fabulous friends. New England, he says.”

  Two of the other men, the ones who had been asking him to dance, laughed a bit too enthusiastically at this. They were not here for their intelligence.

  “Near Les Halles there’s a little shop that specializes in traps, poisons, consulting services. Some of their do-gooder clients, bless them, don’t like the idea of killing rats. So the exterminators will instead come out and catch your rats. These are honourable people. It would be easy for them to drown the rats, or poison them in the shop, but instead, once a week, they drive southwest of the city and dump the rats in a field. Unless, unless, someone from a university comes by with a good reason to buy the rats. Now that’s what we did. The CIA Research Consortium.”

  “You can stop pretending.”

  “How did we know about the file we gave to al-Faruqi?”

  “You’re blackmailing someone.”

  “Where is it?” Agent Peach shouted the question. It was powered by frustration. “Where? Where? Where?”

  The others joined in, shouting and threatening him in all the usual ways: fucking his ass, fucking his mother, fuck fuck fuck.

  Agent Peach told them to shut up and sighed, allowed a pause, and continued. “We bought ten mean-looking rats for two hundred and fifty francs. Some street-fighting rats. Real pricks. That was three days ago. They’ve been in this box ever since, without any food or water. They are going nuts, Chris.”

  On the other side of the light, he could hear them now: the squeaking and the scratching. One of the men cussed and another said, “Oh I’ll do it for Christ’s sake, you tit.”

  “What the idiots are doing, Chris, is putting three of the maddest, hungriest rats in your hood. Then we’re going to shake it up nicely, really rattle them, and tie it back on your head. How does that sound?”

  Agent Peach went on but Kruse didn’t fully listen. After the rats ate his face for a while, he would have another chance to tell them where to find the file. Then, if he still refuses and Agent Peach gives up, well, that is when things get tasty. They tie him down and open up his stomach with a paring knife and put the rats in him and leave him there. Goodbye, goodbye.

  Since he was a child in church he could not imagine death as darkness, as the end. He could not even imagine dying. Even when he gave up on what Allan and Nettie Kruse believed, he held on to the idea that his thoughts and, when Lily was born, his love were so powerful, so everywhere and everything, that the world could not go on without him. Of course it would. The world went on without Leonardo da Vinci. But it would not. Somehow he would live forever.

  His magical feelings died with Lily. A bullet could kill him, or lymphoma. Or starving rats. He was a failed protector with no one to protect.

  Agent Peach had asked him a question, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. One of the dullards entered the light with the hood full of twisting rats. He shook the bag and stopped briefly and said, “Quit fuckin’ scratchin’, for fuck sakes.” Kruse decided no
t to wait. He took two quick steps forward, into the light, and kicked the distracted man in the face. Three shots boomed and echoed.

  “He’s coming your way!”

  All he could see were shifting blots of yellow as he ran.

  The yellow faded into white—the white van. He had thought he was running toward the warehouse door but he was still far from it. With his hands cuffed behind his back he struggled with his balance. On the opposite side of the van he leaned on it and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. It was cool on his forehead, and wet. They had shot at him so many times he could not believe they had not hit him. Then he realized they had hit him. A chunk of his pants was gone and the skin on the right side of his hip throbbed and burned. Blood ran down his thigh. They ran from behind, with the spotlight turned in his direction. And from the door three more approached, their flashlights shaking about. If he had started in the correct direction from the beginning, he would have run into them.

  Glass shattered beside him, in the passenger side window. Agent Peach screamed that it was a goddamn rental and for a moment all was quiet. There was no running board around the van so he couldn’t jump up on anything, hide his feet. And soon they would come around. There was nowhere else to hide, that he could see, and the route to the warehouse door was blocked. The big light shifted and yellow flooded under the van. His feet made shadows. It began again, with a single shot that ricocheted to the right of his feet and then many shots. It seemed to come from all directions, like July 1 fireworks. They shouted and he couldn’t hear. All he could do was run, so he ran again: a chicken with its head cut off. They would shoot him before he hit the far wall. They would shoot him in the back and he would fall to the ground and Agent Peach would stand over him and ask him one last time for the file and he would insult Agent Peach and think about Lily, think about Lily, think about Lily, think only of Lily because he had been wrong about what happens to people when they die with love about them and there was a place he could go to be with her.

  All at once the shooting stopped. Kruse was four metres from the wall. The only wound he could feel was on his hip, thumping and bleeding. There were footsteps behind him. He could hear heavy breaths. For a moment he thought perhaps he was dead and invisible to the world. When you die instantly it doesn’t hurt. He was sure he had seen a ghost in the basement of the house on Foxbar Road one night when Evelyn asked him to find a bottle of white wine. It was a child, an adolescent or teenager, a girl. He hadn’t told anyone.

  The flashlights were on the concrete floor. Bodies had fallen nearby. The woman dragged herself along. “I’m so fucking thirsty,” she said, “please,” but no one was listening to her. There were sirens in the distance.

  Kruse returned to the light.

  “Christopher!” Five footsteps: leather-soled shoes on gritty concrete. Joseph put his hands on Kruse’s shoulders. “They didn’t get you. Oh—they got you a little.”

  Agent Peach was on his knees, just outside the spotlight. Two of Joseph’s men stood over him. “Please, please, arrêtez. Je suis américain. Je suis CIA.”

  • • •

  He understood why people went to the top of the Eiffel Tower—to say they had done it—but the view was disappointing. Paris is not like New York City. It is most magnificent from below, à pied, from the parks and plazas. In Paris, social class is a subtler affair. There are no kings and queens on the penthouse floors, looking down on their subjects. They share the sidewalk. It’s not that they don’t judge. They simply don’t see you.

  This is why the view from Parc de Belleville, which he had seen only in the daytime, was not terribly belle. The apartment blocks on the edges of the park were made of concrete, a flashback to the least beautiful architecture in Canada. The city below was a rippling sea of rain-rusted roofs.

  Kruse sat in the back of the car, next to Agent Peach. Joseph had removed the agent’s handcuffs. They had taken a tarp fron the warehouse; Kruse bled on it to spare the Mercedes. Monsieur Claude explained that when he was a police officer, here in Paris, Belleville Park at night was one of the top five places to buy drugs and sex. He didn’t know if it was like that anymore. Agent Peach, who was not fluent in French, sighed and lowered his face into his hands. He did work for the CIA but he wasn’t an agent and his name wasn’t Peach. He was an archivist and researcher. Nothing much happened in the Paris office, but it was an information hub. Agent Peach knew how to intercept communications destined for the actual agents, who were thirty-year-old drunks with well-connected parents. None of the real spies wanted to be in the Paris office. But every month, one or two briefs would come through that could topple a government.

  In the past eighteen months Agent Peach and his team, all from his hometown of Louisville, had worked with Khalil al-Faruqi to, yes, blackmail the American government for $100 million. They supplied the information. Al-Faruqi would run the scam.

  Of his seven comrades from Louisville, four were dead in the warehouse. The others were wounded. César, one of Joseph’s largest and most powerful bodyguards, had pulled Agent Peach out of the warehouse by his hair, and he kept reaching up and touching the top of his head, to examine what he had lost.

  When they were sure no one was watching, César exited from the front passenger side of the Mercedes and opened the door for Joseph, helped him out. Then he reached in, much less gently, for Agent Peach.

  He had finished begging. Now he was threatening them. He would bring the full power and menace of the American government down upon them, crush them into a fine white sand.

  As they walked into the darkness of the park Joseph informed Agent Peach in a calm voice about his own contacts in the agency. He was a source, in fact. He had his own core collector, who would be keenly interested in this file Agent Peach had collected. Agent Peach was quiet for a time. They found a poorly lit spot.

  “I’ll do anything you want,” Agent Peach whispered.

  Kruse leaned against a plane tree, touched his new bruise.

  “Yes,” said Joseph. “You will.”

  “Don’t kill me.”

  “Tell me what you can do for me,” said Joseph.

  The car was not so far away. Kruse walked back to it, to the American folk song Monsieur Claude played with the driver’s door opened. They did not speak, but Monsieur Claude reached out and put a hand on Kruse’s shoulder. The rain had stopped but it remained humid and cool.

  It was not long before Joseph returned, alone.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Christopher.”

  Monsieur Claude had watched Agent Peach and his friends from Louisville kidnap Kruse in front of the church. He had followed the van and rental car behind it to the warehouse and he had called César and the team. By then, the fundraiser Kruse had ruined was finished. Joseph joined the expedition.

  “I don’t even care, Joseph. I don’t even care if you started this whole thing, sent me off to ruin. All I care about, now, is—”

  “My friend, what are you talking about? This is why you accosted me in the cathedral? You think I betrayed you?”

  “You’re a businessman. You have your reasons.”

  Joseph took his hand. “Christopher. I am a crook. I descend from a long line of crooks. You know that about me. But I don’t betray my friends unless . . . unless they decide they no longer want to be friends.”

  On the drive across the Right Bank, to Rue d’Andigné, Kruse told him what had happened in Spain and in Nancy. It was obvious what came next: he would be arrested for mass murder. And there was only one person it could possibly benefit.

  Joseph picked up his car phone, dialed. “I need to see him tomorrow. No, it cannot wait. Monsieur, I have never made a demand like this before. Either we see him tomorrow or something rather untoward happens. Yes. Yes, that would be fine. I’ve always been fond of gravel quarries.”

  • • •

  The mayor of Paris stood in a quarry on the outer limits of the Boulevard Périphérique, twelve kilome
tres west of the Seine. His bodyguard remained at the car. A young woman with a clipboard stood behind the mayor, not speaking to him. The sun was in its natural position for April, once again hidden by blankets of white-grey cloud, and a wind was up. What remained of the mayor’s hair stayed in place, slicked back with a concretizing solution. In the car, César begged Joseph to ask the mayor what extraordinary cream he used.

  “I’m not asking that.”

  “Come on. Mine never stays in place. It can’t be Brylcreem.”

  “No, César.”

  “Please.”

  “No.”

  “Damn it.”

  It was a Sunday, so the actual workers were at home or at church. Surrounded by piles of rock and sand, by tractors and transport trucks, in his suit and with his public posture, the mayor made him think of a prisoner of the Roman circus waiting to be devoured by lions. From across the street they watched him, and scanned the hiding places about him. There was no way the mayor could allow him to continue, knowing what he knew. This would be the end of one of them. Kruse had been less than careful and he would not make a similar mistake. He designed their security arrangement: Joseph had sixteen of his men and women, dressed for pretend industrial work, monitoring the quarry.

  Everyone called in to report there were no snipers or clandestine service agents in the area. There was no one at all, unless they were hiding under the gravel. It made no sense. Kruse and Joseph got out of the car and walked across the street. The mayor pointed to his watch. He shouted into the wind.

  “I have nine other appointments today. And why did we have to meet in person? There are secure lines.”

  Joseph did not speak until their hands met. “We have reason to believe, Monsieur le Maire, that very little is secure.”

  “What reason to believe?”

  “We . . .” Kruse was bashful about his grammar in front of him. “I began working on a project the day we last saw one another.”