I thought for a moment of Chez Max and wondered whether to call again and say I probably wouldn’t be in at all this evening. But then I decided that my absence wasn’t going to be any particular surprise to my staff, most of whom had been there for years. After all, not so long ago I was often away from the place all evening. But a point came when I was tired of inventing new Mireilles and Ninas in the interests of my Ashcroft investigations, and meeting my employees’ risqué queries and comments with the same meaningful smile. Especially at times when the only Mireilles and Ninas with whom I had any contact – well, contact of a kind – were those I’d stored in the sexomat. Quite possibly that was even the main reason for the neglect of my Ashcroft work. It had been so undignified to be teased all day about some romance or other, and then at night – often after hours spent alone in the windy entrance to some building – to climb into the sexomat suit behind carefully drawn curtains. So I had begun to cross the occasional suspect off my list, then all cases in which the likelihood of success seemed slight, and so on, until criminals actually had to drop from the sky in front of my feet before I would pay them any attention.
And on this mild spring evening it wasn’t likely I’d be spared one of the head waiter’s little quips, such as ‘Ah, the merry month of May, Max our boss wants a good lay’.
So instead of listening to silly jokes, I tapped the number of the Ashcroft Agency Localization Office into my mobile. Every Ashcroft agent had a tiny transmitter through which he could be located precisely by satellite anywhere in Europe, to the square metre. If you didn’t have the transmitter with you and were caught without it, you needed very good reasons to escape disciplinary measures. Officially the system was ‘for urgent cases’, but first and foremost, of course, it was for checking up on us. No wonder that the idea came from Self-Protection.
A woman’s voice answered the phone. ‘Ashcroft Localization Office, my name is Bonnet, may I ask you for voice identification, please?’
I recited the password employed for the purpose, quoting the wording of the Treaty of Europe: ‘Liberté, égalité, sécurité.’
A few seconds later the woman replied, ‘Good evening, Monsieur Schwarzwald. What can I do for you?’
‘Good evening. I’m looking for my partner Chen Wu, eleventh arrondissement.’
‘Would you tell me your reasons, please?’
‘It’s about a group of illegals living in a building in our area of operations. We’re after the people-smugglers who got them in, and just now it looks as if the illegals are about to leave the house. I need Wu to help me keep them under surveillance.’
‘Why don’t you call him?’
‘I’ve tried, but he must have switched his telephone off. I only wanted to know if he’s anywhere near just now. Then I could get hold of him in a hurry.’
I very much hoped the woman wasn’t too quick on the uptake and wouldn’t ask for Chen’s number, so that she could check what I said. Getting information out of the Localization Office was always a dodgy business. If it wasn’t a genuine emergency, they were quick to suspect you of trying on something a little crooked with whoever you were looking for. It was a fact that agents quite often tried cornering annoying colleagues that way, or even ruining their lives by surprising them in delicate situations. Generally there was sex of some kind involved.
‘I should tell you that I’m putting your reasons on record.’
‘Of course.’
I didn’t suppose that Chen would be applying to see the localization records over the next few days. And after that he wouldn’t be able to apply to do anything any more.
‘One moment, please… Monsieur Wu is at present in a small park on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, corner of the Rue Pelée.’
I thanked her and set out.
*
Normally it wouldn’t have surprised me to see Chen still gardening at nine in the evening or even later. Everyone knew, and it always caused our colleagues to shake their heads, between amusement and surprise, that Chen gardened with as much commitment and devotion as if plants were considerably closer and more valuable to him than human beings. I had actually seen him talking to a broom bush. Apart from that – say what you like about him, and offhand as his behaviour could be – Chen was extremely disciplined and conscious of his duty. If he had made up his mind in the morning to lay out a flower bed or prune trees before supper but got around to it rather late because of the Fête Arc-en-Ciel or something of that kind, he would put off eating until midnight if necessary.
But when I went down the Boulevard Richard Lenoir and saw Chen in the park mentioned by Madame Bonnet, on his knees among a number of wooden pots containing rose bushes, digging holes by the light of the street lamps and filling them with water from a hose, I was absolutely baffled for a moment.
He couldn’t be serious! Did he really have nothing better to do this evening? I almost had to prevent myself from obeying my first impulse and simply going over to bawl him out, ask if he still had all his marbles? The illegals, the TFSP team, our argument that afternoon – did he really not care a fuck, as he would put it, about any of that?
I stopped short, and after a moment I walked on with my face averted. A young woman was sitting on a bench near Chen. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that he was talking to her as he took a rose bush and placed it carefully in one of the holes.
Fifty metres away there were bright neon lights; an ad for sparkling water and the name of a café. The café was right opposite the park, and I hoped I could keep watch on Chen and the woman through its window.
When I went in I was met by the smell of stale beer and washing-up water. The café was empty except for the owner. He was washing glasses. I sat down at the bar, ordered an espresso, and turned to the window. Chen and the woman were about seventy metres away. When I put my special binocular-lensed glasses on, I might have been right there with them.
Chen was just saying something, glancing over his shoulder as he spoke, and the woman laughed. Looking through the binocular glasses, I could see she was attractive. She must have been about ten years younger than Chen, with a pretty, round, cheerful face, and she was wearing a close-fitting red suit with a glittering cape and a velvet band in her hair, all very fashionable at the time. It looked as if she’d prettied herself up for a dinner date.
A dinner date with Chen? He was wearing grey working clothes, and was spattered with mud.
Although God knows I had other things to think about, I couldn’t help reflecting that this wasn’t the first time I’d seen Chen with a woman who looked as if she played in a much higher league. As these women were always Europeans, I assumed that his Asian origin gave him the attraction of exoticism. On the other hand, I’d often approached Chinese women who hadn’t been tempted to go out with me because of my white skin. Perhaps it really was something to do with a sense of humour. I was always reading, in the singles magazines, how important that was to women. You want to keep well away from anything in the least like humour – it’s simply not your bag.
I turned to the café owner. ‘And a double Calvados, please.’
And he kept his pretty companion waiting because he wanted to finish a rose bed that could just as well have been planted tomorrow or next week!
Apart from everything else. For it couldn’t be ruled out that this might be his last date for a long time.
Or was that my problem? Was I too keen to impress, did I try too hard with women? I’d read a fair bit about that too.
‘Cheers.’
The café owner put my espresso and Calvados down in front of me, casting me an unfriendly glance. Perhaps he’d really wanted to close the place.
I sipped the Calvados and wondered what was going on in Chen’s mind at this moment. Nothing at all? All his appointments for the day duly discharged? Discussion at Ashcroft Central Office, then planting flowers and meeting a woman, and the undercover assassins could wait until tomorrow? Work is work and strong liquor is strong liquor?
But
how did all that fit the picture of the idealist that he must be, somewhere deep inside him, an idealist who, though in a negative sense, was risking his freedom and possibly his life to change the world? Or was he active as a terrorist in the same cold-blooded way that he worked as an Ashcroft agent? Because for Chen his Ashcroft work seemed to be nothing but an intellectual game. At least, that was roughly what he had said once, when I plucked up my courage after some new tirade of his against the government, the mayor, or something else, and asked him, ‘Then why are you still doing this work? I mean, why do you of all people spend so long in the service of our society? You’ve been an Ashcroft man for over ten years, you could sign your undertaking of silence and retire now, you’d get a good pension and be a free man. You’d have all the time in the world to do nothing but look after your beloved bushes and flowers.’
As so often, he had looked up from a plastic container of Chinese junk food and replied, as if speaking to a rather stupid child, ‘Well, sweetie-pie, you ought to have worked that out over the last few years. I like our job. Not all that shit about defending democracy and safeguarding the future, that’s your cup of tea. But I like to sit around watching people, trying to make sense of their behaviour, now and then seeing a crime coming in advance. I haven’t been among the Ashcroft agents with the best quotas in Paris every year because I have aims and values of some kind; it’s because I know my trade. And I know it because I like it.’
If he liked his trade, could he possibly be organizing suicide bombings at the same time? Did he see everything as just a game? Yet he was neither a megalomaniac – at least, not in the sense of being paranoid, really round the bend – nor tired of life. Far from it: he liked eating, even if most of what he ate was revolting, he liked women, loved plants, was a classical music fan, read books, played table tennis, flew to the Highlands of Scotland once a month to go fishing and drink whisky, had a beautiful apartment with a view of the Père Lachaise cemetery, and was a regular visitor – not just because of his Ashcroft work, I felt sure – to the bars and nightclubs of the eleventh arrondissement. Strictly speaking, there wasn’t a pleasure in life I’d heard of – or at least something he would consider a pleasure – that he had ever declined. Basically, then, it was a joke that Chen of all people would so often bewail the decadence and craving for pleasure of the Western world, with particular reference to me and my restaurant. It wasn’t that he had chosen that oysters, kidneys fried to just the right shade of pink, and a good espresso didn’t mean anything to him. And this evening I wasn’t even sure about that any more: perhaps it was all part of the great game of Hallsund hide-and-seek that he’d been playing for years. At this point I wouldn’t have been totally astonished to hear through the grapevine that, after some successful coup like the death of dozens or sometimes hundreds of white ‘oppressors’ or the blowing up of the Paris foreign bureau of the Resource Islands Department a few months ago, Chen would go to the Bofinger to celebrate with a contact from the Far Southern or Middle Eastern area, the pair of them scoffing shellfish and drinking Sancerre.
However, even if everything was as it appeared: Chen really didn’t appreciate good food himself but on the other hand would fly to Scotland to fish and enjoy rare whiskies, at the same time bad-mouthing his fellow man for thinking no further than the next superficial pleasure – even if the contradiction between his words and his actions couldn’t be denied, well, if Chen were asked about it then of course he would come up with some slippery answer. And that was exactly what he’d once given me.
It was one afternoon four years ago, just after we began working as a team: ‘What do you mean, how can I reconcile my political stance with a five-room apartment with a roof garden?’
‘What can it mean…?’ I said. ‘How does someone who’s always talking about self-indulgence and immorality fix it with his conscience, as a single man and someone working outside the office, to ask the Ashcroft accommodation people for living space enough for a large family in the most densely populated city in Europe with the worst housing shortage per capita?’
‘Easy, mein Führer! What does it mean? Oh, me stupid primitive slitty-eyes!’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry. But the question remains…’
I was still naïve enough at the time to think that if I could only summon up enough patience and sweet reason, I could get Chen to have a grown-up relationship with mutual respect for each other.
‘Achtung! The Führer is apologizing!’
‘Please, Chen, if I took the wrong tone…’
‘Oh, come off it – the wrong tone! So you think my apartment and what I have to say about human beings contradict each other?’
‘No, I just think it’s rather striking.’
‘Rather striking, well, well!’ He gave an affected little cough.
‘If you don’t like the way I put it, that’s no reason to – ’
‘Then again,’ he interrupted me, ‘of course it does work the other way around: someone living in a hovel with nothing to eat can’t be expected to spare the time to lean back at his ease, thinking about the state the world’s in and how to improve it. That would be like saying heart surgery ought to be performed by stroke patients.’
‘I don’t know what that’s got to do with – ’
‘With my apartment? Simple: a man who lives in an apartment like mine has the chance – and thus the duty – to think about morality more. People like you are the contradiction: you earn a pot of money with your restaurant but you still pay only the usual Ashcroft rent for an apartment which isn’t exactly tiny itself, you have a holiday home on the Adriatic, you regularly overrun your leave, so I’ve heard, and with all that relaxed, luxury living, and when you look at the rest of the world you never stop to wonder if everything is really fair and right and proper.’
It was the first time since we’d been put in a team together that Chen had gone beyond the usual grumbling and said something that sounded like propaganda. I was shocked.
As if in a trance, I repeated, ‘The rest of the world?’ and my heart began to thud at the thought that by the rest Chen might mean the part of it that even we were recommended to mention only in certain circumstances. I was already beginning to fear that I’d have to report my new partner to Commander Youssef after only a few weeks of working with him. That wouldn’t make a very good impression on our colleagues, however grave my reasons. Team spirit in large quantities was expected in the Ashcroft agency, and rightly so.
Chen smiled as if he were planning to test me with some kind of cunning trap. ‘Well, take the Paris suburbs. Ever been there to see how the other half lives, or rather how the vast majority live? Probably not, because what could you talk to them about? They’re not all that interested in recipes for ceps.’
Now I knew that Chen had indeed meant the rest of the world on the other side of the Fence. Presumably my sudden uneasiness hadn’t escaped him, so he had mentioned the suburbs just to tease me. Or else, he was being a bit more cautious on such subjects at the time.
Later I did visit the suburbs, and if the quality of life couldn’t be compared with living in the city centre, there was no real poverty. Far from it: in spite of crowded quarters, food from cheap supermarkets and chains of snack bars, what to me seemed an unusual amount of rubbish in the streets – but that was their own fault, after all – and the ever-present aircraft noise because of the proximity of Subaru Airport, I saw more people publicly laughing, drinking and in lively conversation with each other in that one day than in a whole year in the eleventh arrondissement. That might be because of the hotter, somehow livelier Oriental blood that still unmistakably flowed through the veins of the majority of the people living there, even fifty years or more after the construction of the Fence, which meant without any refreshing of the gene pool. But for me, as I walked around, the noisy, colourful, cheap sparkle of all that hustle and bustle proved one thing above all: however great your outward wretchedness, what counted most in life was your inner a
ttitude. And in purely practical terms, homes in the old quarters of Paris just weren’t possible for everyone, even in a society where the government, as our President had once put it, ‘guarantees everyone the maximum possible amount of health, comfort and culture.’
But that afternoon four years ago, I hadn’t been thinking much about such matters, and I hardly noticed Chen’s insulting remark about the ceps recipes. First and foremost, I was relieved that in mentioning the Paris suburbs he’d brought up a subject that could be tackled critically. Hardly a week went by when the media didn’t discuss the social ills in the suburbs and their effects: drug crimes, child labour, secret workshops where both legal and illegal immigrants made clothes, where proprietary branded goods were forged, or texts glorifying violence and supporting terrorism were printed. There was prostitution (because of course very few could afford a sexomat), there were gangs of young people, and naturally there were the regular unauthorized demonstrations. In fact the term ‘unauthorized demonstrations’ was only a synonym for public anti-Israel rallies. It was an open secret in Eurosecurity that, during the Wars of Liberation, the Euro-Asian leadership, by arrangement with the interim US American government, had deliberately left the Israel/Palestine conflict unresolved to provide a safety-valve for their own population if, at a later date, the need to be politically engaged became overwhelming. So it was that at the end of the Wars not only Israel but also the Palestinian territories became part of the Euro-Asian and North American world. To this day, the European government provided both sides with financial and diplomatic support, as well as armaments and secret service information, helping now one and now the other, so that the country – or countries, depending on your political standpoint – was or were never at peace.
So when discontent looked as if it was spreading among the population for some reason or other, for instance a rise in the cost of heating or the taxes on alcohol – and of course that hit the suburbs almost exclusively, because hardly anyone who lived in the city centre would even notice another few cents on a bottle of spirits – when the bars and the places where young people gathered began to seethe with unrest and the Ashcroft agents there gave warning of possible protests against the government, the subject of Israel automatically came up in the news. Ever since the Wars of Liberation a lot of thought had gone into ensuring that nothing in the public mind changed the familiar picture of the mighty Jewish oppressors on one side and the Arab Palestinian freedom fighters on the other. First, anything more complex was of course no use for rousing popular anger and second, in our modern society it was a humiliating but unfortunately undeniable fact that large parts of the population were still not free of prejudice towards our fellow citizens of Jewish descent. Or as an internally-circulated Eurosecurity memo said: ‘If we cannot entirely root out the evil of anti-Semitism, we will at least exploit it to protect European democracy and thus, necessarily, our Jewish minority.’
Chez Max Page 8