I noticed my nostrils beginning to twitch nervously.
‘Chen, normally it would be my duty…’
‘Oh, come on! I’ll tell you what your duty is: familiarizing yourself with the arguments of international terrorists and the way they talk. How are you ever going to convict anyone or uncover a secret operation if you turn as pale as a Jesus-date the first time someone questions your nice little Chez Max world?’
I had to pull myself together so as not to let fly childishly. This wasn’t the first time Chen had described me as a Jesus-date, and a woman I’d been courting a few months ago, with flowers and chocolates and all the rest of it, had made the same comparison the last time we met. Since North America, except for New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Post-Modern Life, had become an almost entirely agricultural area, the traditional Christian faith, already widespread there anyway, had developed into a kind of state religion among the population. Only the European government and its military presence in the area had so far prevented the New Testament from being adopted as the Civil Code between Kentucky and Death Valley. Various fundamentalist American groups were all the keener on sending missionaries to preach to the European population, putting pressure on our government over the legal status of the Bible, trying to get it to make a confession of faith. Armies of half-veiled young women preaching the Gospel were regularly sent across the Atlantic. You saw them swamping pedestrian zones, singing and praying, and they were known for their rather abstracted smiles and the composure that they showed, ranging from brave to slightly dogged, when their beliefs didn’t meet with a suitably serious response. Because of the veils, sunlight seldom reached their faces, most of which were white, and if one of these young missionaries lifted her veil during a conversation designed to convert you, her skin was usually translucent with a faint tinge of pink. When such girls turned pale or blushed, it was extremely obvious, especially as the change was so very distinct from their otherwise sternly controlled and almost entirely unemotional facial expressions. One of the favourite slogans of these preachers of the faith, who concentrated on the young people of Europe in particular and were often not much older than twenty themselves, was: ‘I’m dating Jesus.’ All this had led to the coining of the expressions ‘pale (or red) as a Jesus-date’, which had now become part of the colloquial language. I cleared my throat and slowly and carefully clasped my hands on the table.
‘Maybe I’m just worrying. After all, not everyone in these offices knows you as well as I do, and I’m pretty sure few are as kindly disposed to you. I’m not shocked by what you said – nothing you say is going to shock me very easily – only by the idea that you might repeat such nonsense in front of one of our colleagues, someone who may be just waiting for a chance to get back at that arrogant arsehole Chen.’
To my surprise, he laughed. ‘That was fun, right? Calling me an arrogant arsehole with the best of intentions.’
‘Oh. Chen.’ I closed my eyes briefly, as if exhausted. ‘Not everyone relishes strong language as much as you do. If I wanted to insult you, believe me, I’d know how to go about it more subtly than that.’
‘Sure, you’d know how to go about it if you wanted to…’ He had pursed his lips and was batting his eyelids in a silly way like a parody of a prim and proper young girl. ‘Well, let’s hope I understand what you’re talking about if you’re going to be so subtle about it. Maybe you’re insulting me the whole time and I’m so thick I just think: wow, there goes Max, what a refined fellow he is, always well-behaved, ever so pernickety, never says a bad word… could he be beating the crap out of me and I just don’t notice?’
Chen beamed cheerfully at me. If anyone had taken a photo of him, people seeing it at some future date would very likely have come to the conclusion that he had just that moment announced his engagement, or something similar.
I looked out of the window at the Eiffel Tower, and all at once a deep sense of kinship with the building came over me. As if I were at a party, surrounded by complete strangers, and suddenly saw a familiar, beloved face. For a moment the Tower seemed to free me from the fact that I had to sit in an office with a poisonous dwarf like Chen. And immediately I thought of Leon. He would have understood how I felt. I could have said to him, ‘The Tower is over a hundred and fifty years old and it still makes an architectural and aesthetic statement – isn’t it a wonderful, uplifting thought to be part of a creation capable of erecting such a mighty building with all its beauty and elegance?’
And Leon, as a sensitive artist, would have known exactly what I meant.
‘Right,’ I said, looking at the floor and nodding in an understanding way. ‘I suppose that brings down the curtain on our weekly performance. Can we get around to discussing our operations now, or do you want to go on familiarizing me with the arguments of international terrorists and the way they talk a bit longer?’
‘Tut-tut-tut.’ Chen clicked his tongue in a friendly manner. ‘No sarcasm. I’ve said it a hundred times, that’s why you don’t get anywhere with women either. You want to emphasize your strong points instead of fretting about your weaknesses. And you want to keep well away from anything in the least like humour – it’s simply not your bag. No one can do anything about that. Now I, for instance, don’t know the first thing about soufflés.’
I looked out of the window at the Eiffel Tower again. Surely the Fête Arc-en-Ciel should be starting soon. Loud music, the rainbow, a boisterous atmosphere all over the city – those, I thought, would be suitable reasons for ending our meeting. There wasn’t much to discuss on my side anyway. And then basically the meeting would have passed off very well. Because although Chen had staged his usual show, the blow below the belt I’d feared over Leon’s arrest hadn’t come. Perhaps he simply hadn’t clicked on my list of candidates for examination plus descriptions of their cases over the last few days. It wouldn’t have been so surprising; after all, there’d been nothing on my list for weeks on end. So perhaps he didn’t even know about Leon’s arrest.
I really must make sure I uncover something genuinely important some time soon, I thought, and then everyone else, more particularly Chen, could get lost!
‘Hey, Max, don’t look so fierce. It was only a joke. Ha, ha, ha. Get the idea?’
‘Okay, Chen.’ I sat up straight and pulled a pen and paper towards me. My sign that I wanted to get down to business at last. And then I mentioned the only thing I knew worth mentioning. ‘I suppose you’ve been informed about the building in the Rue de la Roquette, next to that Saffron Shop?’
‘The Saffron Shop,’ he repeated slowly. ‘No, I haven’t. Why should I, and who’d have informed me?’
‘It seems there are illegals living there.’
‘Aha.’ He began picking his teeth with his fingers. ‘Who says so?’
‘Task-Force Safeguarding Peace. They’ve arrested an Iranian at the Fence who had a note with that address on it. They’ve been watching the house ever since. Funny they didn’t tell you anything. But they probably think it all falls into my half of the area.’
In many places, the line between my area of operations and Chen’s ran right through buildings. But instead of keeping double watch on these borderline buildings, I for one hardly bothered about them. Unconsciously, I was probably deliberately leaving them to Chen.
‘That’s against all the rules.’ He pulled a dark strand of something out of his mouth. ‘Suppose we were keeping watch on the place too, with a ploy of our own up our sleeve?’
‘Well, they’ve told us about it now.’
‘Not me.’
‘All right, I’ve told you now, I can’t do more than that. Anyway, I check the building and that whole block regularly, but all the same I never noticed anything. So far as that goes, then, I’m actually grateful to the task force.’
‘Hmhm.’
Chen looked at the strand of whatever it was he’d removed from his mouth, flicked it out of the window and went on picking his teeth. He didn’t look pleased. Did he by an
y chance feel he’d been passed over? Instead of informing Super-Chen they’d turned to unimportant Max Schwarzwald? Or had he in fact thought up a ploy, as he put it, and he was afraid our colleagues from the Safeguarding Peace outfit might muck it up for him? But what kind of a ploy, and why hadn’t he told me about it? After all, we were both responsible for the building. Did he want to claim any success for himself alone? And did he think he needed more arrests to his credit? Because this morning, of course, I had clicked on his last week’s list of candidates for investigation plus accounts of their cases. I wanted to know how his self-confidence was doing. After all, even Super-Chen must feel he was under pressure after a time when he didn’t have too many results that really counted. And what had counted for him last month? A backyard workshop manufacturing simultaneous translation buttons for several banned African languages, a cosmetic surgeon who’d planned to kidnap a girl from the neighbourhood, give her the face of a famous Chinese actress, and keep her as a slave in his basement – the cell in the basement had already been equipped with costumes and screenplays – a woman trying to give her seventy-four-year-old husband a heart attack by strapping him into the sexomat suit whenever he was drunk and making him have sex for hours on end, and finally an ordinary burglar who had kept watch on a lawyer’s city villa for several days.
Of course Chen was more successful than I was, but when you compared that list with his reputation, the month of May left a lot to be desired. I remembered times when he was bringing two cases before the Examining Committee almost daily.
Anyway, whatever the reason for it, I could tell from his expression that something had soured his mood. Against my will – because I had told myself to keep any emotions out of this – I felt a certain glee, and considering all I’d had to put up with in the last fifteen minutes even a kind of elation. That must have been why now, of all times, I tried a joke.
I cleared my throat and grinned in a way intended to make it clear that I was being ironic.
‘Or perhaps you smuggled the people in there? Poor, starving illegals, just to help you get a realistic picture of the arguments of international terrorism, so to speak?’
He didn’t react, just kept picking about inside his mouth fretfully.
My grin began to feel forced. Why didn’t he look at me? I hoped he didn’t think I meant it seriously. Nothing was further from my mind than to provoke Chen now, when I hoped we were both almost on the point of leaving. Probably what he’d said this afternoon about my sense of humour – not that it was the first time he’d said such a thing, but in the past I’d always been able to put it out of my mind at once – well, that had probably hurt me more than I’d been willing to admit at first. That was the only way to explain why I’d ventured on to such thin ice as the result of a brief whim. As if I’d said, ‘Hey, see what cutting things I can say after all!’ And, probably, in the back of my mind: ‘All you good looking single women out there, don’t think there’s no fun with Max Schwarzwald!’ Because of course the really annoying part of it was Chen’s routine linking of his disparagement to my success with the opposite sex, which certainly was nothing much to speak of at the moment.
Anyway, I was now hoping that he’d been fully occupied with his teeth, hadn’t heard what I said, and we could simply go on with our discussion.
Sure enough, the first remark he made, which probably also explained his facial expression, was, ‘My teeth are like a network of caves. I always have provisions for two days left in them every time I eat a meal.’
I breathed a sigh of relief. My joke seemed to have sunk like a stone, unnoticed. To make sure it didn’t come up again I quickly picked up on what Chen had said and recommended him my dentist, as I had so often done before. Because Chen’s trouble with his teeth was nothing new, and I used every opportunity to recommend her anyway, a simple and yet often long-term way of showing sympathy. By now the name of Dr Williams probably sounded like a corny old pun to Chen. It was still a mystery to me why such an ice-cold character was as scared as a small child of going to the dentist. Even though these days there were anaesthetics that meant you really didn’t feel anything at all. But the sweat could literally stand out on Chen’s brow at the mere mention of the dentist’s chair.
So I smiled and was about to say, for the umpteenth time, ‘So here we are talking about my wonderful Dr Williams again. If you were just to call her some time …’ And so on.
At that very minute, instead, Chen turned, looked at me as if I were something the dog had thrown up, and said, ‘Yes, I do know about the illegals there, and I’m watching them to find whoever smuggled them in. In case you’ve forgotten, that kind of thing is part of our job. But you only ever pick up on anyone if they hang silly posters on the wall in front of your nose or announce plans for some kind of cigarette deal in your restaurant.’
My unconscious mind had probably been on watch for any mention of Leon all the time, because I replied at once, ‘It wasn’t just about cigarettes!’
And now came that blow below the belt after all. Perhaps Chen had just been waiting for the right moment.
‘Okay, so your friend was big in the drugs trade too. I’ve heard he was an unsuccessful painter of kitschy pictures who was looking to earn something on the side. But you’d know better, of course, and the way our colleagues tell it makes no sense. Well, I mean…’ Here he cast me a brief, expressionless, but somehow weary glance. ‘I mean, who would shop a friend because of a little cigarette dealing? And you don’t have that many friends. Be that as it may, maybe your recent results as an Ashcroft agent do not matter to you much, and so far as I’m concerned you can loaf around all you like, but when some jerks from another department start getting active in ours, and I hear about it only when we have our weekly meeting, and then only because you don’t have anything else to your credit – well, we’ll soon be reaching the point where I go to Youssef for a change and tell him about your working morale, and how it’s a hindrance to me in my job.’
I stared at him. That wasn’t just a blow below the belt, it was as if he’d slapped me in the face and then pulled a gun on me. Chen, of all people, threatening to grass on me to Commander Youssef!
Only at a great distance did the question of why this stupid observation bothered him so much emerge in my mind.
‘I want to be informed about that kind of thing right away – is that clear?’
‘Perfectly clear,’ I replied. He was speaking to me the way I spoke to my kitchen staff.
And then, at last, the Veterans’ Band began to play. The tune of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ came in through the window, and at the same time coloured arch after coloured arch of the rainbow appeared in the sky. Seen from where I was sitting, it was soon arching in all its many colours over both the Eiffel Tower and Chen’s head. It looked great.
‘Look.’ I pointed to the window.
Chen turned, and even that monster had to smile and couldn’t take his eyes off it for a while. But I stared at his smooth black hair, the hair that clogged up the sink all the time, and to my slight alarm found that I was imagining splitting his skull with an axe.
3
An hour later, I was sitting on the terrace of a brasserie near the Eiffel Tower, drinking my fourth Brooklyn Organic – a New York beer now quite widely distributed in Europe, not least because of state subsidies. Another aspect of the effort not to let the population here forget our North American friends entirely. I was vaguely aware of groups passing along the streets around me, singing, celebrating and waving rainbow-coloured flags, while in the background the Veterans’ Band had gone back to playing jazz classics after the much-applauded air ballet, and with every new round of drinks, glasses were raised again at the tables near me in toasts to the rainbow, half of which was now hanging in the sky above the buildings and our heads as if firmly screwed to it.
After that clash with Chen, I’d really meant to drink just one or two beers to calm my nerves before I went to work. But then the questions relatin
g to Chen’s bad mood, and my doubts of his rather too smooth explanation that he was observing the illegals to get at the people-smugglers, became more and more pressing and important in my mind, and I had called the head waiter at Chez Max and told him I’d be later than usual today.
I reminded myself of what Chen had said: ‘But that’s against all the rules,’ and ‘Suppose we were keeping watch on the place too, with a ploy of our own up our sleeve?’ My vague idea that I’d wrong-footed him somehow was getting stronger. Since when did it bother Chen that something was against all the rules? Or why would he describe a state of affairs only hypothetically in the first instance when he planned to present it later as fact? If he really was watching the building, then why, when I said with the best of intentions but untruthfully, hoping to pacify him, ‘Anyway, I check the building and that whole block regularly,’ why hadn’t he reacted in line with his character and his usual mode of conduct? Then he’d have said, ‘You check the building regularly? Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of it!’ Instead there’d been that long period of picking his teeth, apparently absent-mindedly, and then suddenly he went on the attack: ‘Yes, I do know about the illegals there, and I’m watching them to find whoever smuggled them in. In case you’ve forgotten, that kind of thing is part of our job.’ Didn’t that look as if he were in a jam, and the only way to change the subject he could think of was to insult me, finally even threaten me? But what kind of a jam? Or rather: how big a jam was it? Because one thing was clear: Chen had wanted to keep the illegals secret from me. That undoubtedly counted as a crime, if not necessarily a serious one. In addition, I’d suspected for a long time that now and then Chen let some poor sod or other get away with something. He simply brought too few of them before the Examining Committee. And to be honest, I even chalked that generosity up to his credit.
Chez Max Page 5