Son of France

by Todd Babiak

  “I don’t have to count it. Thank you.”

  “No, thank you, and Monsieur Meisels. I know money is no consolation for what he has lost, but . . . What, Christophe?”

  “Would you like something to drink? I don’t know if I have anything as nice as that wine you served me.”

  “Perhaps something cold?”

  “Sorry for the smell. A cologne bottle broke. Then the cleaners . . .” Kruse opened the refrigerator. It was clean, with the less complicated scent of a swimming pool, and empty but for a bottle of Krug Grand Cuvée. Julie was a thoughtful woman. He pulled it out.

  “Well.” Zoé put her hands together, rubbed them. “That’s not so bad, is it?”

  The plan he had worked out with Annette was simple enough: he would phone the DPSD, tell them what he and Annette had learned about Zoé, and send them off to discover the rest. He had briefly fallen in love with the idea of confronting her at her offices, of punishing her. While every one of his clients had used him to do what they could not imagine doing themselves, none had been so deceitful, so murderous. Certainly, none had kissed him. Why had she done that? Now that she was in his apartment, he was not at all sure what he ought to do.

  He pulled two champagne glasses down, wiped them with a cloth, and opened the bottle with a pop. Wind blew into his apartment and ruffled her dress, layered like a green cake. She wore eye makeup and a ring on her left thumb.

  “Your driver is downstairs?”

  “I released him, for now. I am to call when I’m finished here.”

  “How did you know I was home?”

  Zoé tilted her head. “You figured me out. My driver and I were parked across the street, watching. When we saw you arrive . . .”

  “You waited until I was alone.”

  “Yes, Christophe.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m here to deliver three million dollars. I wasn’t terribly interested in speaking to your interior designer. Quite a flamboyant woman.”

  Kruse poured the glasses. On his balcony there were two chairs and a small but heavy table, designed to mimic Parisian café furniture. Zoé followed him outside and he handed her a glass. She straightened her posture. “To the families who lost so much on April fourth, in Chez Sternbergh.”

  “To the . . .” He took a breath of the fresh air, cool now as the sun hinted at setting on the other side of the tower. “To the families.”

  He could not tell the difference between Krug Grand Cuvée and the cheap Vouvray Pétillant they served at Café du Marché. They sat, first Zoé and then Kruse, and for nearly half a minute they looked out over the neighbourhood. The upper half of the Eiffel Tower was visible, the Paris version of a mountain or a sea view.

  “Who threw the grenades, Zoé?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The grenades, in Chez Sternbergh. Who threw them?”

  “That was your job, to figure it out. It’s what we paid you to do. Khalil al-Faruqi’s men, officially. But perhaps the new-Nazis working for Henri Alibert. I’m not sure, in the end, if Réné Chatel was capable of it. I know you looked at the mayor himself, and there’s still a chance—”

  “Pierre Cassin said he would marry your sister, didn’t he? He would divorce his wife and marry her.”

  She would not look at him. When she did respond, there wasn’t much energy in it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Please.”

  Zoé took a deep breath and a longer than elegant drink of champagne. “I know there is nothing peculiar about a politician having a mistress. It would be bigger news—would it not?—if a French politician did not have a lover. Catherine was not his first girlfriend. She knew the rules. Pierre was devoted to his wife and family. I warned her. She did seem prepared.”

  “But . . .”

  “She was pregnant.”

  “Couldn’t you have destroyed him without . . . destroying him? And all those other people? Madame Sternbergh herself. If Cassin hadn’t jumped on the grenades, so many more would have—”

  “I can imagine the calculation in his disgusting mind: I’m going to die anyway so why not die a hero?”

  “Zoé . . .”

  “I did try. But you can’t stop someone from falling in love.” She continued to look out over the city, not at him, as she spoke. “This is what made Catherine Catherine. She committed fully to an enterprise—a dress, a job, a holiday, a love affair. When Pierre told her he was unhappy but committed in his marriage, she interpreted it as an opening. She would save him, change his life. When she discovered she was pregnant, Catherine phoned me. She was ecstatic.”

  Her glass was empty so Kruse went back into the kitchen for the bottle. Its dark neck was cold and sweating in the heat. Soft music continued to play. With every step it felt as though the stitches on his hip would open. The window in his kitchen, at this hour, was as reflective as a mirror. Since the night in Clichy-sous-Bois, when the young militant shot him in the face, he had tried to avoid looking at himself. He wondered how many of history’s grand conspiracies and tragedies were really about an affair of the heart that had turned.

  Kruse opened the heavier of the two briefcases. It was filled with brass bars wrapped in white facecloths. He carried the bottle of champagne to the terrace.

  Zoé sat with stiff posture, her left leg crossed over her right. She did not appear nervous.

  “I cannot call him a coward. No coward jumps on a grenade, even if it is for glory. But Cassin cussed and hung up the phone when my sister told him about the pregnancy and he refused to speak to her again. The secretary, who knew her, who had helped plan their liaisons, suddenly pretended she had never heard of Catherine. Her work suffered. She closed herself up. While I despised him and the situation, I agreed with him in one sense. The only thing to do was to seek an abortion and forget about him. But that was not Catherine. One morning she took the train to Nancy, to see Cassin.”

  “She went to his office.”

  “Imagine her in there alone, her steps echoing in that great hall. While she had learned to take risks, she had rarely been humiliated. She had never been ignored. You will have seen photos of her, in your research.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wear her clothes but poorly. She was an abnormally beautiful woman. Her eyes were a translucent blue. When we were young it was not easy to be her sister. We would enter a room together and everyone would turn to her. It was fine training for my eventual career, to learn to be content with invisibility. On the day she travelled to Nancy, to meet Pierre Cassin without an appointment, Catherine wore her loveliest dress. It was the one that made her reputation in New York. Pierre walked past, with Monsieur Lévy, to the car waiting for them out front. For a moment his eyes rested on her and without a flinch he turned away. This lovely, talented, sensitive, smart, mysterious girl had become nothing to him. And that, I imagine, is how she felt. Like nothing. This is how Pierre Cassin murdered my sister.”

  “That was the day she jumped?”

  “Catherine did not phone me or come see me. She didn’t leave a note. We had become so close, after our parents died, that even now it seems unimaginable. If she poked her finger with a sewing needle or broke a heel she would phone me. That day she took a taxi to the airport north of Nancy, bought a fantastically expensive one-way trip to Orly on Air Corsica, and hired a limousine to the Eiffel Tower. It was dusk when she did it, on a wet and windy day. There weren’t thousands of tourists to witness her . . . shame.”

  “I understand vengeance, Zoé. When my daughter was killed—”

  “There is a point when you become nothing and your mission, your only mission, is justice.”

  “But each of those families who lost someone in Chez Sternbergh, don’t they also deserve justice? Madame Sternbergh’s children will want justice.”

  “I gave it to them. Or you did. Khalil al-Faruqi, a mass murderer, a career killer of Jews, died so they might all sleep tonight. Thank you, Christophe.”

  Whe
n Kruse and Annette widened their search of the name Moquin, and went back in time, they discovered Zoé and Catherine were not the only children in the family. The oldest sibling was their brother Lucas, who had died on December 8, 1988, in a Douglas DC-7. He was an economist completing a study of the Western Sahara for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The small airplane, deployed to spray insecticide for locusts, was shot down over the Moroccan border by a group called the Polisario Front. Leaders of the Polisario Front released a statement apologizing for the accident. They had thought it was full of Moroccan military. The American magazine Atlantic Monthly had published a long story about the crash. In 1988, the Polisario Front was a military client of Khalil al-Faruqi.

  Leaders of the movement blamed the incident entirely on al-Faruqi.

  In the western sky and in the air, there were hints that the interlude of summer would be brief. A gust of wind knocked Kruse’s flute off the table; he caught the glass but lost the champagne. Behind him, there was noise in the apartment. New things fell from new furniture.

  “Your brother . . .”

  “Was a saint. He was better than all of us.”

  “But it was a mistake.”

  “It’s never a mistake to shoot down an airplane.”

  Her top lip rose in a new way, above her teeth as she spoke, and seemed to quiver. Kruse had not noticed it before but she wore a great deal of foundation under her eyes. Her hands shook. His apartment no longer felt like his. It felt haunted by strange men and women, by designers and workmen and spies, by the dead. Now that Zoé was with him he didn’t know what to do with her. He wanted to phone Annette, for advice. But then Étienne would answer, smugly. Yes? Can I help you?

  “Are you all right, Zoé?”

  “I did not expect to be interrogated when I entered your home.” She turned to him, for the first time since they sat, and placed a hand on his chest. “Let’s go back to when you didn’t know what you know. It wasn’t me. It was . . . invisible forces.”

  “If I can discover this, anyone can.”

  She whispered. “No one else is looking.”

  “Henri Alibert—”

  “Every gendarme, every lawyer, every journalist in Nancy will be pleased, Christophe. Besides, you didn’t find any connection between Monsieur Alibert and me.”

  “The others, yes.”

  “All solved crimes.”

  “But not Alibert. Unless it was just his odiousness in general.”

  “My parents were middle-class people. My father worked for the government, and my mother, when we children reached a certain age, ran a candy shop. But my father did have ambitions. He had saved a percentage of his salary, as a retirement fund, and in 1979 he bought a plot of land outside Paris. His plan was to find a partner and develop the land.”

  “He found a partner.”

  “Alibert’s lawyers put together a byzantine contract for him to sign. Now, I will admit my father did not have to sign it. He might have taken it with him, for his own lawyer to inspect. But they had trapped him in a large conference room with a pen and this notion that a clock was ticking. But it wasn’t a partnership agreement.”

  “He agreed to sell.”

  “At Alibert’s price. This sale was executed automatically two years later, when they broke ground on the land. So instead of my parents owning one-third of a residential and business development south of Paris, they soon owned nothing but a bit of cash. My father was entirely humiliated, of course, and it was too late for his own lawyer to do much of anything. It would have cost him the entire amount to seek retribution, and Alibert had been clever. All my father could do, really, was claim ignorance and naivety. He was too proud for that. My sister had inherited her capacity for obsession from him. He mourned that day, that deal, the way other people—you, perhaps—mourn a lost child. He died two years later. Officially, it was a heart attack.”

  “So when you decided to go after Cassin, you thought . . . why not make a list?”

  “It’s a good list.”

  “Why me?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You decided to destroy some people. Why the Office of the Mayor?”

  “There was a special file on you, Christophe, after what had happened last fall. You and your company, your business partner from Mossad. I knew the way to find you was through the mayor and his gangsters.”

  “Who called Tzvi?”

  “Your Joseph. I told him he could negotiate up to four million.”

  “We left a million on the table.” He looked away from her. “How did you convince Joseph to help?”

  “Anything for his boss. His boss wanted to catch the killer. They think highly of you.”

  “Why pretend to like me?”

  “I wasn’t pretending, Christophe. Please, no matter what happens now, you must believe that.”

  “What happens now?”

  “It’s up to you, I think. You had planned something, I imagine, before I arrived today.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I was going to your superiors at the agency.”

  She laughed. “My superiors have not likely heard of me. I’m an analyst, not a spook. And there’s no need, Christophe. You have money you didn’t have before. The world is rid of four odious men.”

  “And others who happened to be in the same room as them.”

  “I studied war craft in university. What I learned is we cannot allow ourselves to be undone by sentimental feelings. Was every citizen of Dresden, in February 1945, a Nazi? Every citizen of Hiroshima a kamikaze? No, but we must force ourselves to include those deaths in the larger project. It ended the war.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “I ended the war. I know the world is safer today than it was on the third of April.”

  “You’re a murderer, Zoé. And thanks to you I am a murderer too.”

  “Many great men and women were murderers, by some calculation. I do hope, Christophe, you can accept my apology and keep our secret a secret. You haven’t told anyone else. Have you?”

  His long walk home from the library with Annette: of course she had watched. Zoé reached for his hand. “Our kiss . . . it’s all I’ve been able to think about.” Her hand was cool and moist, from the wine. He reached with his index finger for her wrist and felt her pulse. Her heart was beating quickly. When they had kissed in her apartment she had been calm. “We can forget all of this, address ourselves to the future. The war is over.”

  “Zoé. I opened the briefcase.”

  She sighed. “May I have some more champagne?”

  Again over the soft horns and violins he heard something behind him, from within the apartment. One of his ghosts. The wind had calmed. He finished pouring her glass and stood up, to investigate. “Excuse me.”

  “Of course,” she said, and adjusted her position to let him get around her. She reached into her purse and he thought, first, of lipstick or a small makeup kit. By the time he saw what she had pulled out it was too late. He moved quickly enough that she missed his stomach, where she had aimed. But she did plunge the knife deeply into the top of his left leg. She was quick and strong. He put his hand over the wound and she cut his wrist. Kruse backed into the stone rail. There, next to the gauzy curtain that covered the door to his balcony, stood the answer to his first question. He recognized her driver. Without his hat, Kruse saw it: this was the young man who had thrown two grenades into Chez Sternbergh. He pointed a handgun.

  The driver helped Zoé around her chair and into the apartment. A splash of Kruse’s blood was on her hand and arm, on the sleeve of her dress. She looked down at it and tsked. “Do you have any soda water?”

  The blood ran down his leg and into his shoe. It dripped from his fingers. It would pool on the soft stone pad of his balcony. “Try the champagne.”

  “It’s ruined.”

  There was plenty of blood but she had not hit a major artery. He leaned on the rail, to
preserve his strength.

  Zoé tossed her champagne flute back into the apartment. It crashed on the parquet floor. She fished around in her purse and pulled out a pair of gloves and an envelope of photographs. “Christophe in Chez Sternbergh.” She pulled out a picture. It was too far away for him to see. “Christophe in Luxembourg Gardens, on Rue des Brice.”

  “You were there that night, in Nancy.”

  Zoé looked at her driver, back at Kruse. “I had the camera and Franck had the bomb. The things I’ve been able to find in the agency warehouse! I’m sorry. Let me introduce you two. Christophe Kruse, this is my younger brother, Franck.”

  “Bonjour, Monsieur.” Franck spoke slowly, as though a wad of cheese were in his mouth, and waved his gun. He was a small and curiously misshapen man.

  Kruse made his way around the table. Zoé’s chair was bloody now so he sat in his. He filled his champagne glass. On television, one evening, a guest on a talk show damned champagne flutes. They were not wide enough to let oxygen in. Good wine needs oxygen to come alive. Flutes were an insult. But Kruse liked them anyway, the daintiness of them. He drank and looked up and wondered how much time had passed since they had last spoken. Had he said this bit about champagne flutes aloud, or had he just thought it?

  And really: perhaps the man who had vilified champagne flutes on television was simply selling his own version, his clever update. The fat flute. What was wrong with Franck? His head was somehow too thin, and his black suit jacket hung crookedly off him. Kruse could not say what it was about Franck but he felt charitably toward him. The kids would have teased Franck, who lacked all of his sisters’ beauty and grace.

  They had to kill him now. It would be a simple matter for Franck, who had become rather good at it rather quickly. Kruse added up the grenades in Chez Sternbergh and whatever he had done to Henri Alibert’s art nouveau funhouse. In only a few weeks Franck had killed fifteen people. Soon, sixteen.

  Perhaps he could tell the difference between good and bad wine. As the blood left him, the champagne tasted better. Or perhaps the oxygen had done its work.

  “What?” said Zoé.