Son of France

by Todd Babiak

“Her organization hired Tzvi and me to . . .” He had trouble finding the words. “To find out who had blown up Chez Sternbergh and do something about it. We were led, by someone, to do something about Khalil al-Faruqi. Then, when it seemed he had not done it, the investigation continued.”

  “You said you agreed to this assignment because Joseph hinted Anouk and I would be in danger if you refused. But Joseph was working for this woman, responding to her demands. So what you meant to say is Zoé Moquin, your sort-of-girlfriend, hinted we would be in danger.”

  “Yes.”

  He felt a familiar anxiety. Like Annette, Evelyn was given to intellectual pursuit. When she had caught him in something she did not like, a secret that left a trace of betrayal, Evelyn would stalk and trap him at the dinner table or in bed, take him apart, leave him there.

  “Have you made love to her? This woman who means us harm?”

  “No.”

  Annette nodded. “You’ve kissed?”

  “Yes.”

  Annette returned to the newspapers and magazines. So did Kruse. His hands were cold. He wanted to tell her what he knew about Étienne, that her boyfriend carried on a number of affairs.

  “I regret . . . not being with you, when I had the chance.”

  Annette did not look away from her papers.

  “I don’t like it, that you’re with Étienne. I want . . .” He decided not to say what he wanted. “I could tell you things.”

  Though she heard him, Annette did not register it with anything more than a delicate nod. She tucked her hair behind the ear closest to him, her left ear. Though she was now rich, in a relationship with a man who was beyond rich, Annette still wore a cheap brass earring. She licked her lips, prepared to speak, but it was not for some time that she said it. “We’re in a fine fix, aren’t we?”

  There was nothing about Zoé in anything he had read. Catherine popped up every fashion season in the last five years, in stories and less often in photographs: at launches and parties and an industry showcase or two, in Paris and in Milan and beyond. In every photo she wore peculiar yet sophisticated, sexy dresses. She was in the French and American editions of Vogue several times. Apparently, it was customary for female fashion designers to dress with restraint, to leave the flamboyance for the models and the runway. Catherine was an exception, and the fashion journalists seemed to like that about her, especially the Americans. They nearly always mentioned she would soon be the creative head of a large house, if not her own. None of the stories mentioned the Flying Tailor, her line-to-be. After a while, Kruse began to skim the articles. They revealed nothing important and neither did the photographs.

  His chair, like all the chairs in the Salle Ovale, drained the blood queerly from his legs. He stood up, walked in a circle, and at the limit of it the librarian was upon him. “Can I help you with anything, Monsieur?”

  “No, Madame, but thank you kindly for the offer.”

  “Is this your girlfriend?”

  “I’m afraid not. My friend.”

  Her eyes brightened. “A fellow investigator.”

  “She was a journalist for much of her career. She knows what to look for.”

  “And what are you looking for today?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do let me know, Monsieur.” The librarian winked and returned to the circulation desk. She walked slowly, with careful posture. She knew he watched.

  Kruse returned to Annette and stood over her. “I don’t think there’s anything here. At least there was nothing in my pile.”

  “Fascinating woman. The obituaries are vague. Cancer?”

  “Zoé didn’t say.”

  Without another word, Annette stood up and walked to the circulation desk. She spoke to the librarian, who sighed and led her to a computer. Kruse continued to skim his material. The second-last newspaper article was not about Catherine. He didn’t see, immediately, any mention of Zoé. The headline was: Ramadier accusé d’être au coeur de la corruption.

  The article, dated June 6, 1983, was about a candidate in the legislative elections named Christiane Ramadier. She had been accused of taking a bribe from a property developer. Réné Chatel, her Communist Party competitor, who held the seat, was quoted extensively in the article. “It is only an accusation, of course. We shall see what happens in court. But I would say it is an accurate reflection of Madame Ramadier’s values, her social circle. If these are the people one travels with and fights for, how can we trust her to stand up for us—regular people—in the capital?”

  Ramadier did not represent herself in the article. The only quotation was from her twenty-two-year-old executive assistant, Zoé Moquin. “We’re flabbergasted,” she told the reporter. “Madame Ramadier was obviously set up. The charge is ridiculous, based on a fabrication by her political enemies. She looks forward to defending herself.”

  The next article was a follow-up, after the election. Réné Chatel had defeated the incumbent Christiane Ramadier, who had fallen into scandal. There was no comment from her executive assistant.

  Kruse put the articles aside and flipped through the rest of his material. Nothing. There were another four newspapers on Annette’s desk. On top, an account of Catherine Moquin’s triumphant show in New York. Next, a copy of L’Est Républicain—the regional paper from Nancy. It was a photograph, from a fundraiser at the Muséum-Aquarium, of Catherine Moquin arm in arm with Pierre Cassin. The mayor of Nancy’s hand was up, as though to stop the photographer from pressing the button.

  Annette leaned over him. “You look pale. Are you all right, Christophe?”

  “Fine. Yes, I’m fine.”

  “You found something?”

  “We have to look at bit deeper into Zoé’s past.”

  “There are bulletin boards on the Internet—newsgroups. There’s a newsgroup for everything. Some are absolutely ghastly. One of them is a gathering place for suicide obsessives. All I had to do was search her name.”

  “What did you learn?”

  Annette didn’t say it right away, as though she wanted to suck the juice out of it first. “Catherine Moquin jumped off the Eiffel Tower.”

  SIXTEEN

  Avenue Bosquet

  THE RAIN HAD STOPPED AND THE SUN HAD COME OUT. WITH IT: genuine heat, a hint of hope, of summer. Kruse carried her jacket and they walked along the Tuileries, through Place de la Concorde. It was not pleasant, what he had learned, but he could slow the engine of paranoia. No one would shoot at them, run them down with a Citroën, hide on the bridge and toss them into the Seine. He allowed himself to pretend they were walking for the sake of walking on a pretty afternoon.

  “It would be nice if Anouk were with us.”

  Annette shook her head. “You do know, Christophe, that Frenchmen aren’t supposed to say things like that. Even if they believe it. Even if their hearts are bursting. They do not want to appear weak. You can say it to me, of course, but if you are courting a Frenchwoman you should beware. Loving children the way you do—it has a maternal aspect.”

  “Not paternal?”

  “At its foundation, paternal in this country is really just sperm and money.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “Perhaps I’ve been blessed with a certain kind of man in my life: a father who ran off with a woman from Bangkok and a husband who took up with a teenage ballerina. Anouk’s father, he doesn’t even call.”

  “And now? What about the current man in your life?”

  They entered the giant sidewalk of Pont de la Concorde. Dancing rollerbladers grooved to techno music from a silver stereo plugged into a diesel generator. A crowd watched them, clapped along. Annette pretended she didn’t hear his final question. She ignored the performers. While Kruse did not worry about appearing weak before her, or maternal, he did not want to seem heartbroken and humiliated. In his pocket was a list of people he had helped destroy on the left column. On the right, Zoé’s reason for having them destroyed.

  His own name was the imaginary final
entry at the bottom.

  For years he had wondered why Evelyn, an elegant and beautiful and intelligent woman, would have anything to do with him. The answer he feared—youthful indiscretion—was probably correct. In the beginning, when she was still a graduate student, he would have seemed a peculiar mystery. She had liked his muscles and the simple way he saw the world, divided into only a few sorts of people. Everything at the university was complicated. Kruse was not. He was supportive, even—the word did not insult him—maternal when she was working long hours on her PhD and teaching and maintaining a relationship with her parents. If he was in Toronto Kruse would cook her dinner, clean the house, prepare take-away lunches for her, run errands. When Lily was born he became the primary parent. Of course, there was little left of mystery about him. Peculiar and refreshingly simple were no longer attractive. All that remained were muscles and take-away lunches. The world she entered, as a professor, was no place for him. Her efforts to turn him into a man of culture were, she occasionally admitted, clownish. He had read about Evelyn’s affair with Jean-François de Musset in the newspaper—not in her eyes. Jean-François would not have been the first.

  Zoé Moquin was not an adventurous graduate student seeking the opposite of the men she knew in school. She knew exactly who he was; she had hired him. Kruse had far more scars on his face and hands than in the mid-1980s, when Evelyn had met him. He still couldn’t carry on a conversation about Stravinsky or David Mamet or Virginia Woolf. Zoé had kissed him despite all of that, and had hinted that she wanted more. This had been a glow inside Kruse since he had left her strange apartment: that he might see her and touch her again.

  He felt a fool.

  West of the National Assembly, along the Quai d’Orsay, the sun warmed a wet bush of blooming lilac and Annette stopped to smell them. She leaned for a moment against the fence, closed her eyes. “I’m a kid again.”

  “How old?”

  “Nine, maybe. Just old enough to go exploring on my own.”

  Annette had wanted to take the story of Zoé Moquin to her former editors at Le Monde, pitch it as an exposé for the weekend magazine. With the connections to America, through the rogue CIA group, it would surely spread around the world. All she needed was the briefcase Kruse had forgotten in the apartment on Avenue Montaigne. The trouble was: the mayor and Joseph. There was no easy way to leave them out of it. Annette thought of herself as a journalist, but she also understood how her deal with the mayor had improved her daughter’s life and prospects: an apartment in the seventh arrondissement, a space in the city’s best private school, a group of peers that would—by 2020—run the country.

  Hundreds of Parisians were out on the fields and grasses before Les Invalides, playing soccer and throwing Frisbees, laying out picnics, reading paperbacks, drinking wine out of plastic glasses. Annette talked herself through the story as Kruse imagined himself out here with a simple goal: have fun with his family. His daughter. Her daughter. Anouk was with her au pair, a student from Ho Chi Minh City. At the apartment on Rue Valadon, Kruse asked if he could come up and see her, and Annette looked at him with something like pity.

  “I want to be careful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s a little girl. It’s easy to confuse her. She has a father in Bordeaux. I’m with Étienne. She prefers you, of course, but what are you to her? Is it fair to Étienne, or even to Anouk?”

  “You don’t need an au pair, Annette. I’d do it for free. It won’t confuse Anouk if I have a role that makes sense in her life. Babysitter is enough for me. I’ll feed her whatever you like, continue her English lessons, take her on trips, teach her—”

  “I don’t think so, Christophe.”

  Annette kissed him on each cheek and gently pushed him away, down the street and toward the sun setting on Rue du Champ de Mars. When he reached the end of Valadon, Kruse turned to see if she was watching him. She was not.

  Children shouted from open windows, from the balconies and courtyards, from the park in the distance, from the cafés and bistros on both sides of Avenue Bosquet. On the other side of the ocean, Tzvi was learning how to live with one arm. Men and women had died in Spain, in Luxembourg Gardens, in Nancy. But it was finished now. He hoped, as he had hoped in December, that the simple noisy pleasures of life in the seventh arrondissement could restart for him. Maybe, one of these days, Annette would see Étienne was as much a rascal as her father and her husband had been. He and Annette and Anouk could join these families at sidewalk cafés and worry, simply and gloriously, about money and stomach aches and holiday destinations and office politics and pets and public art.

  Or he could do the right thing: walk into the travel shop and buy that ticket to Toronto, where he belonged.

  Kruse opened the heavy door off the sidewalk, and the smell of cologne in the stairwell was a stiff jab to the forehead. But it came with paint. As he walked up the stairs, three men in white overalls walked down, carrying buckets and toolboxes. After them, a woman on a cellular phone. She said, into it, “Let me call you back, my little cabbage.” And she shouted down, over the men, waving: “Monsieur Kruse. Christophe! What luck, that you’ve arrived just now. Please, come up.”

  It was a narrow stairwell but he was able to negotiate past the three men. The woman, who spoke with a Québécois accent, referred to him as tu—not vous; in Montreal fashion they were immediate friends. She took his hand and pulled him up the stairs. Two more men with paintbrushes and clear plastic tarps, their overalls splattered, waited silently for them. The woman, who introduced herself as Julie, asked him to be sure he thank his generous patron on her behalf. Imagine: a girl from Ville d’Anjou designing for the mayor of Paris. At his door she asked him to wait a moment, not to look yet. She walked into the apartment and closed the door behind her. Kruse could hear her high heels clicking on the parquet.

  “Entrez!”

  She had put in his Yo-Yo Ma disc, so Carnival of the Animals played as he entered—the one about the swan. The apartment smelled as the stairwell had smelled, of cologne and paint, but less powerfully. The walls were white. In his sunken salon the couch and chairs, the tables, the lamps were new.

  “I was thinking for you, a bit of an enigma, a man who knows winter, some Nordic cool.”

  The kitchen was the same, but with new paint and a new toaster and an espresso machine. The dining room table, as well as he could remember, had not been ruined but she had moved in a new one—apparently, Nordic cool. She explained the goons had ripped the telephone cord from his wall but that France Télécom had reinstated it an hour ago. The art on the walls was entirely different. Nothing came from before the nineteenth century. His own bedroom was all white. Lily’s bedroom, or Anouk’s, the little girl bedroom, was far too pink and princessy for what he had imagined them liking, but there was a small table with an elaborate porcelain tea set and a much grander library of classic children’s literature. Both bathrooms were immaculate. Julie had even replaced his broken bottle of cologne, which he would remove from the apartment at his earliest opportunity.

  Afterwards she stood in the hall, her little hands clasped at the thin leather belt that cinched her dress around the waist. She wore diamond rings so large and fingernails so long he did not see how she could peel an orange.

  “Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

  “I know it smells, Christophe. Let’s just open the windows.”

  “Oh that’s okay. I can do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll tell Monsieur le Maire, next time I speak to him, that you did a lovely job.”

  “Would you? My God, Christophe. My God!”

  He wanted to be alone so he looked away from her, pretended to evaluate the art in the hall. It was an abstract blob. Before he went to bed tonight, he would take it down. When she started to tell him about the artist he walked away, back toward the door. She followed him and, in the foyer, had no choice but to give him two more kisses.

  “I’ll be b
ack to check on you, Christophe.”

  “I am blessed.”

  Julie winked and walked out, and he could hear her through the door ordering the last of the men to carry the ladder doucement, doucement, down the stairs. She called someone a monster. Kruse was pleased to have the smelly apartment to himself. There was a set of French doors, looking west. He opened them and every other window in the apartment, found his stack of business cards, and dialed the numbers of his two contacts at the Direction de la Protection et de la Sécurité de la Défense, Madame Lareau and Monsieur Meunier. The last time he had seen them was in Beaujolais. He had hidden from them in a vat of white wine.

  Neither of them answered. It was France and it was after five on an unusually warm and sunny spring Sunday. He stood on his balcony, to breathe in unpolluted air. There were two hotels on Rue du Champ de Mars. He would leave these doors and all the windows open for three days, and pretend to be a tourist.

  The knock on his door came with a voice: Julie again, surely. He did not hurry to unlock it. On his way he scanned the dining room, kitchen, and salon for what she may have forgotten: her address book, cellular phone, a few more giant rings. He opened it to Zoé Moquin, who performed her best rendition of a smile. Her matching shoes snaked up nearly all the way to her knee. On each side of her there was a briefcase.

  “Christophe. I’m sorry to just show up like this. I had tried to leave a message on your telephone. I thought I would hear from you after—”

  “I ran into some trouble after I left your apartment last night.”

  She reached up to his face. “More wounds.”

  “They’re noticeable?”

  “Does it have anything to do with our work together?” Her green dress was high in the front and low in the back, with sequins along the top—where her bra would be. There must have been a word for that part but he could not ask her. The straps were thin. It was, he imagined, her sister’s interpretation of a spring dress.

  “Can I take those?”

  “Of course. They’re yours. One you forgot in my apartment. The other is your fee. Would you like to count it?”