Chez Max (12 page)

‘Tell me,' I said to the café owner in a deliberately casual voice and with a heavy German accent, as I put my money on the plate, ‘is there another bar with a view of that lovely little park over there, a bar that would be open at this time of night? I'm a town planner, I come from Germany, we don't see parks like that much at home.'

The café owner, who had been wiping down the counter, stopped in mid-movement and looked at me, frowning. I remembered his unfriendly glance earlier, and even before he could reply I guessed what was coming, and froze. This café was much too close to Chez Max.

‘Town planner,' said the man. ‘Well, that's a good one!' The expression on his face didn't tell me how he meant it, and I had no alternative but to smile gormlessly and hope my presentiment was wrong. My hopes were in vain.

‘In that case,' he said, ‘I needn't have spent a king's ransom on three tiny meatballs in piquant sauce at your place the other day. But my wife was dead set on going to that smart German restaurant for once.'

I just went on smiling. Perhaps he'd think better of it. After all, I was his customer.

‘So now the restaurateur who only recently shook my hand as I left comes into my own café, keeps watching our gardener and his girlfriend all the time, and tries to tell me he's a town planner from Germany. Talk about weird.'

‘Listen…'

But he wouldn't let me get a word in. ‘Either this is something to do with Wu's girlfriend, even if you seem to me a little old for the part of jealous husband, or…' He looked me up and down, my glasses with the lenses that were rather too thick, my unobtrusive clothes, my comfortable shoes, ‘or you're a snoop. One of that lot.' He gestured in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.

Even though the Ashcroft Central Office was camouflaged as a scientific institute, and in part of the building several research labs did in fact work on ways to extract energy from the earth's core, most of the population of Paris knew or guessed who was really based there. Not that people talked about it. Certainly not to someone thought to be one of its employees. The café owner had definitely gone too far.

My expression froze. Without taking my eyes off the man, I took off my binocular-lensed glasses, placed them slowly in their case and put them away in my jacket pocket.

I let a couple more seconds pass before saying, in a menacingly quiet tone of voice, ‘One of what lot?'

The café owner, who had held my eyes until now, looked away. He obviously realized what might be in store for him if I really was an Ashcroft man.

‘And suppose I
was
“one of that lot”, who do you imagine
you
are? Maybe someone whose miserable little café can't be closed down double quick? Who can't have any tax dodges or infringements of the hygiene regulations proved against him? Who can simply break the social contract with impunity? Since when does anyone talk about the people over there,' I concluded, gesturing to the Eiffel Tower as he had done, ‘as if they were the dregs of society?'

‘I didn't mean it like…'

‘Keep quiet.'

He bit his lip.

I was in full flow now. It wasn't only that this was a way for me to work off the pressure that had built up over the last few hours – above all, I had to put enough of the fear of God into the man to keep him from going straight to ‘our gardener' and telling him about me. All I needed was for Chen to hear that the proprietor of Chez Max was probably an Ashcroft man and was after him.

‘And what do you mean, “our gardener”? Do you pay his wages? No, the state pays them. The same state whose employees look after our security, though you describe them as snoops.'

‘I only meant…'

‘So why “our gardener”?'

Admittedly that wasn't just a peg to hang something on in order intimidate him. It annoyed me to find that it sounded as if in this sphere at least, Chen was an accepted or even popular member of society. I'd never heard anyone say of me ‘our restaurateur' or ‘our German'. (Or only one man, and he was the one I'd had jailed for a few cigarettes.)

‘Well, because that's what he is,' said the café owner in an anxious but slightly surprised tone of voice. ‘I mean, he's our gardener in this part of the city. He just belongs here. I've known him quite a while. He often has his coffee in here. A nice guy.'

A nice guy.
It wasn't the first time I'd heard that Chen found it easy to make friends with ordinary people, after a fashion. Of course it was all just a trick. In reality, he probably thought the café owner a primitive proletarian. I'd have liked to tell him who that nice guy actually was: not just one of the ‘snoops' he disliked, but a terrorist, a man who despised the human race if ever I saw one. But blowing a colleague's cover was punishable by a prison sentence of no less than two years. And Chen was still my colleague. I pulled myself together.

‘A nice guy. If I were one of “that lot”,' I said, pointing to the Eiffel Tower again, ‘do you think I'd go spying on a nice guy?'

The café owner was visibly squirming with discomfort. ‘Well, I'm sure you'd have your reasons. I mean, I hardly know Wu. But he's always friendly to me. However, I've heard here in the café how he can be rather nasty to other people.'

‘Nasty in what way?'

‘Well…' He looked at the floor. ‘If he thinks they're talking twaddle. Repeating something parrot-fashion, truisms of some kind or what they read in the papers. If they talk big and act as if they know all sorts of stuff. For instance, once he lost his temper because someone said something – I can't remember what – was the truth. “The truth!” Wu snapped at him. “
A
truth or
your
truth, but not
the
truth – what a fool.”'

That sounded much more like the Chen I knew.

‘I guess,' said the café owner, glancing briefly at me, ‘that could be one reason the state security services might be interested in him. Because he sometimes talks about political stuff.'

‘Oh, does he?'

‘Nothing actually forbidden, but now and then he brings up some very unusual subjects.'

‘For instance?'

The café owner hesitated. He was nervously kneading his fingers. ‘You won't close my café down, will you?'

I gave him a chilly smile. ‘Who am I? How would I be in any position to do so? Forgotten already? I own the Chez Max. I'm a café proprietor like you. But of course, like any other citizen, I can go to the police if I notice anything wrong.'

He quickly glanced around: a reflex action. His café was as faded and grubby as many of its kind. And as in most of them, there were sure to be a few frozen dishes in the storeroom freezers which were past their use-by date, or some mould in a fridge, if not even a crate of spirits with a forged brand name.

‘Well?'

He kneaded his fingers again, staring straight ahead of him as if looking down a hole.

‘… it's really only that he – well, normally nobody talks about the countries the other side of the Fence and life there. But Wu does. He doesn't give any opinion or suchlike, he just says certain things are fact.'

‘The truth,' I derisively suggested.

‘I don't know. I guess he just tries to see things the way they are. For instance, he once said – seeing we're talking about the truth – he said how that brown sugar there, you have it in your own restaurant to go with coffee too…'

He tried a conspiratorial smile. The attempt failed dismally.

‘Well, anyway, that sugar, the kind everyone says is the best and healthiest, Wu once listed all the people it wouldn't be good for, he said it could sometimes be lethal.'

‘Lethal sugar?' I laughed briefly. As I did so I looked across at the park. Chen had risen to his feet and was knocking the earth off his trousers.

‘He said how in the sugarcane plantations or in the factories it must be, like, back-breaking work. And of course all the plants are sprayed, and the workers are always in contact with that poisonous stuff. And seems like they get very low pay, they live in huts without running water and all that – almost like slaves. Well, so then if their truth about brown sugar is different from ours, that makes sense.' The man looked up, saw my expressionless face, and hastily added, ‘I mean, I don't have any idea myself, that's just what Wu said. And I'm not really interested. I'm only telling you so you'll know the way he sometimes talks.'

There was no end to Chen's surprises. Here he was, publicly engaging in agitation and discussion of the Second World! Had he no scruples at all? No conscience? No sense of common decency? Because of course the sugarcane story was sheer propaganda, a fairy tale. And because Chen couldn't know the first thing about working conditions in the Caribbean islands. And the reason for that was that no one knew anything about them, for the islands had been a quarantined area ever since repeated epidemics of Bodo disease had broken out there, killing thousands. I myself had heard about it only because I knew someone who worked in the Health Ministry. The Bodo virus, for which no treatment had yet been found, attacked the gastro-intestinal tract and led to over eighty per cent of victims literally puking themselves to death within a few weeks. The only certain thing was that the sugar itself didn't carry the virus, and our supplies were thus secure for now. All the same, the state laboratories were working flat out in their search for a vaccine, while the local authorities were doing all they could, as my acquaintance put it, to protect and care for the native population. Special clothing and face masks were being distributed, water pipes were being laid even in the most remote villages, and centres known as Welcome Camps had been set up, where the last weeks of the lives of the infected were made as tolerable as possible with films, concerts and computer games.

Lethal sugar
– if the subject hadn't been so serious, I'd have laughed out loud.

I looked out of the window again.

Chen had put his spade and bucket in a wheelbarrow and, with the woman, was turning to go.

I turned to the bar counter and looked hard into the café owner's eyes.

‘I have to leave now. You'll forget our little talk, is that clear?'

‘Of course.'

‘Because if I ever hear that you've been saying anything about this to anyone at all, or that you ever expressed a certain suspicion in connection with me, then…' and here I leaned towards the window and read the name of the café in lights on the neon sign above the door ‘... then it'll be curtains for La Palombe. And I get to hear a lot.'

‘I should think you do,' said the café owner, with awe in his voice.

‘Thinking is exactly what we don't want you doing. You're not to think anything about me, you're to forget me.' I picked up the glass sugar-caster from the bar. ‘And to make sure you understand that…' I swung my arm back and threw the sugar-caster into the array of spirits lined up in front of a mirror on the wall. Bottles and bits of broken mirror-glass crashed to the floor, as the café owner jumped out of the way in alarm. ‘Understand? That was your shelf of spirits, and your life is just as fragile.'

Then I turned and hurried out of the café. Outside, I saw Chen pushing the wheelbarrow ahead of him, walking slowly down the boulevard with the woman towards the Bastille. He had his tool-shed somewhere there.

I followed them under cover of the trees and shrubs. As I passed the flowerbed that Chen had been planting, I stopped and looked at the result of his labours, feeling oddly moved. The red roses were planted in the shape of a heart, and the name ‘Natalia' was written in the middle of it in daisies.

 

Twenty minutes later I was hiding behind an advertising billboard near Père Lachaise, watching Chen on the other side of the road giving an order in a Vietnamese restaurant with a takeaway service. The woman – Natalia, I assumed – was standing close to him, nodding to everything he showed her on the menu.

As they waited for the food to arrive Natalia moved away from him, went to the door of the restaurant, stepped out into the street and glanced around. She was probably looking for a wine merchant. Perhaps she didn't fancy cheap Asian beer.

I quickly felt in my pockets for the contact lenses with the built-in camera. But I must have left them at Chez Max, and all I had on me that I could use to take her picture was the sexomat shooter. I felt a little uncomfortable about that, but I knew it was for purely professional reasons, after all.

Keeping it under my jacket, I set the shooter to a distance of fifteen to twenty metres away, held it at half height beside the billboard, got Natalia in the viewfinder, and pressed the Shoot button. I filmed her as she clattered a little way down the street on her high heels, looked down the next side street, turned and went back to the restaurant.

I automatically glanced at the time and movement gauge. Natalia had been in the picture for over a minute, and the sexomat would be able to reproduce seventy-three per cent of her possible movements. But of course that didn't interest me. I only needed her face. I was going to feed it into the Ashcroft computer and find out if she had ever come to our attention for forbidden political activities or showing sympathy with terrorist groups.

A little later the two of them left the restaurant with a bag full of food containers, and went hand in hand towards Chen's apartment. Chen was still wearing his work clothes, and Natalia's high heels made her a little taller than he was. An odd couple. Beauty and the Beast. Not that Natalia, so far as I could conclude from my observations, was my type – I preferred self-assured women, women of character who ordered their own food and didn't lie down, so to speak, in front of a man's bedroom door in their clickety-clack heels and clothes saying
ooh, here I am, eat me all up!
All the same, there was no denying that objectively speaking Natalia was attractive, in the same way as, objectively speaking, Chen was a little slitty-eyes wearing trousers caked with mud. Extraordinary.