Chez Max (10 page)

There were curtains over the other windows, and now and then I saw shadowy forms moving behind them.

Obviously our conversation at the office had not made Chen decide to take immediate steps. On the other hand, it couldn't be so easy to find somewhere else to take the illegals in a hurry, and very likely there were explosives and weapons to be organized. After all, you couldn't just carry bundles of such things through the city. And then, of course, there were the TFSP men. On the whole they weren't fools;
you had to trick them.

I had walked up and down the street twice, searching the windows of the building opposite the illegals' apartment for any signs of the surveillance team. A device of some kind placed on the window pane to hide a camera; suspiciously dimly lit rooms; or simply someone half-hidden behind a curtain looking across the street. But they could have preferred to plant bugs on the floors above or below the illegals.

It was nothing out of the ordinary for Eurosecurity departments to take a place over for a short time. Usually the public health authority was sent ahead, citing the risk of termite or fungal infestation on the building structure as the reason why interior and exterior walls, and any exposed beams in the apartment, had to be investigated and observed around the clock for a certain period of time.

I looked at the time. It was nearly eight-thirty. Around me, the first shops were closing for the night, the aperitif bars were beginning to empty and the restaurants were filling up.

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?'