Chez Max (16 page)

I jumped. ‘You were boasting about it?'

Chen sighed. ‘Joke, Max, joke! Since when do we go around proclaiming that we even exist? I'll be with you in half an hour. And don't forget: I want to know the truth.'

The truth
, I thought as I put my phone back in my jacket pocket. Why did he of all people keep talking about the truth? How had that café owner quoted Chen yesterday? ‘A truth, or your truth – but
the
truth, what nonsense.' And there, just for once, he was right. Could my truth be his as well?

As I took a table out into the courtyard and put it down near the barbecue, I was thinking: even if he admits everything, we're still worlds apart. Even if he doesn't deny the facts – there was, after all, a kind of moral truth. And if he had ever known what that was, how could he have come around to organizing suicide bombings?

I laid the table, stuck the bug under its surface, opened a bottle of Franconian wine and went into the kitchen to warm up the sauerkraut. Then I sat down near the glazed door again, poured myself more white wine, and looked up at the walls now clear of ivy. No one living in the rest of the building had a view down into the courtyard. When I had the former laundry converted to make it a restaurant, Ashcroft got me an order whereby all windows looking out on the yard must be bricked up. Otherwise I could hardly have put any tables outside without disturbing people. There were protests at first, of course, but after the first tenants were taken to court for rebuilding their living-room without a permit and in a manner calculated to offend against the Protection of Historic Monuments law, the others soon calmed down.

My eyes went to the barbecue. As I laid the table, I'd seen the handle of the axe in passing. Of course I hoped fervently it wouldn't come to that, but if Chen really did run amok, I had a means of self-defence handy.

Ten minutes later there was a knock at the front door.

 

*

 

‘Are we on a date or something?' Chen looked from the elegantly laid, flower-bedecked table in the courtyard to me and winked. ‘I thought we were more likely to be at daggers drawn, and all this time you've been wanting to marry me!'

‘I just thought this was an important moment, and so…'

‘Sure. Getting married is a very important moment indeed.'

‘I thought we had a few things to clear up, so I tried to create a suitable setting.'

‘What, in this courtyard?'

‘Why not? It's such a lovely day. And don't worry, no one can hear us.'

‘I'm not worrying.' He looked sceptically at me. ‘But you look just the way I imagine someone who is shitting their pants.'

Then he went out into the courtyard, over to the heap of ivy, and looked around. I stayed by the door.

‘Would you like an aperitif? Or shall I get our lunch at once?'

Ignoring my question, he pointed to the ivy and asked, ‘Is that by any chance my funeral pyre?'

‘Oh, please, Chen! Do be serious for once!'

‘Serious?' He raised his glance from the ivy and looked sharply at me. ‘Very well then – let's be serious. Seriously then, this whole thing looks like you've set a trap for me. No staff on the premises, key turned twice in the lock of the front door, no one who can see or hear us here, and a man who's already unsuccessful anyway and must now be afraid he'll be informed on to his superior. Apart from all the rest of it… after all, there has to be some reason why you, having done hardly anything recently as an Ashcroft agent, start investigating me. You must have quite a backlog of resentment there?'

‘I've no idea what you're…' ‘Oh, come off it!' He sighed, and said wearily, ‘Let's not have any more of this stupid stuff.' Then he raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated way, and shook his head as if rhetorically. ‘What, no years of fury with your clod of a partner? No jealousy, no envy? No constant feeling that you're more upright, better behaved, more correct in general, but it still doesn't pay off? Not even with women, in fact least of all with them. They'd rather go out with your clod of a partner. I saw you filming Natalia with your sexomat shooter. Incidentally, I would dislike it very much if we were to get into bed with the same woman, however indirectly…'

‘I was only filming her to…'

‘I don't want to know why you did it,' he interrupted me. ‘I just want you to know I saw you. Let's hope you remember that when you get into the suit, and let's hope it will spoil the idea of Natalia for you and you'll feed some other woman into the simulator.'

I moved out into the yard myself, went over to the table and poured wine from the squat bottle. ‘Sure you wouldn't like a drink before we eat?'

‘No, I would not like a drink. I'd like to know what's going on around here.'

‘Don't get so worked up,' I replied, perhaps a little too energetically. But what on earth was he thinking of? When I'd gone to all that trouble with the table and the meal! ‘Let's have a glass of wine together. And if you really distrust me…' Suppressing my fury, I took off my jacket at a deliberately leisurely pace. ‘Here, look, all clean, no weapon, no trap.'

Chen stopped short and then shook his head incredulously. ‘Well, if I didn't distrust you before, then I definitely do now. Maybe I need that drink after all.'

He came towards me, and I could sense the tension in him. As if he were ready to leap at me any moment. I wondered briefly whether to raise my glass to him, but then I was afraid my hand might shake. Chen drank without taking his eyes off me.

When he put the glass down on the table again, he said, ‘Right. We've had a glass of wine together. Now do I finally get an explanation?'

I put my hand in my trouser pocket and switched the bug on. At the same time I glanced to one side briefly, checking my distance from the barbecue. Chen was about five metres away from me. Was it his sweat I could smell?

I heard myself say huskily, ‘I know about you.'

Chen put his head to one side and opened his mouth as if we were in some comedy show. I'd seen him assume that expression so often. Always when something really mattered to me.

‘Oh yes?' he said casually. ‘So what about it?' We looked each other in the eye, and I suddenly felt my head was empty. And then it was anything but. My whole body felt as if it were on some kind of rack. All the same I knew this must go on, I must bring this business to an end. There was no going back.

My words sounded as if I'd learnt them by heart. ‘I know you're a terrorist. You plan assassinations, you hide Iranians, no one except for suicide bombers comes out of Iran…' I stopped and took a deep breath. Chen was still staring fixedly at me. ‘And you've managed to hide for years behind the things you say, because of course no one ever thought that someone in conflict with our society would proclaim his hatred so openly. For instance, those Iranians…'

‘The Iranians,' he interrupted me in a loud voice, although I registered a slight tremor in it, ‘are refugees! Deserters from the Iranian army. The father of the family refused to go to a training camp for…'

‘Oh, Chen! Stop it, for goodness' sake!' And suddenly I let fly. It all poured out of me. ‘Stop telling your lying tales! I've seen through you! You're a danger! A subversive! An enemy of the system! A terrorist living a life of luxury! Women and whisky and planting bombs on the side! And then there's your alleged success rate! You've probably just been hauling poor innocent souls before the courts over the years so that no one would get on your trail! Super-Chen! You of all people! You arrogant, spoilt bastard! You don't know anything about human beings! I'm going to look into all your cases, and then we'll see how many innocent men and women you've sent to labour camps! As if you could ever predict crimes in advance! You have to like human beings for that, you have to be able to put yourself in their place! And what can you do? You despise them, make them look small and ridiculous, nothing more!'

I was struggling for air. Chen had retreated a metre or so, and his face was strangely distorted, by fury as much as by fear. Of course! What else? I had him by the throat!

He said, ‘I'm going now. You're right, I don't particularly like you, and very likely it's a fact that I can't put myself in your place, but I can see that you'd like to murder me. And do you know something?' He took another step back. ‘This is a case for the Ashcroft agency.
You
are the danger. You're a crazed fanatic. You ought not to be on the loose.'

I laughed as I had never heard myself laugh before. This was total lunacy! Was I the fanatic? Was I the murderer?

And to show even more clearly how mad he was, I laughed. ‘Ha ha ha! Ho, ho! Ha ha ha!'

He turned to the glazed door.

‘Stay here, you bastard! We still have things to discuss!'

He turned his head to look at me, and once again I could see the fear in his face. I felt immense satisfaction. Let him crawl to me, the swine!

‘Stay where you are,' he said tonelessly. ‘You're overexcited. I'm going to send someone along to help you. Try to calm down. Drink another glass of wine. And don't try following me. I'll climb out through the window. It's all okay – maybe you're simply a little overwrought…'

So he was advising me to drink another glass of wine, was he? What did he think this was, just a heated argument? No, this was good against evil! This was… And suddenly the scales seemed to fall from my eyes…
We will crush the motherfuckers before they crush us!
Yes, I'll crush him! I want to crush him! I would love to crush him! It's necessary to crush him! He will not crush me!

And as Chen was still looking at me anxiously, but at the same time almost imploringly, I stepped back and reached behind the barbecue for the handle of the axe.

The rest was merely a kind of choreography. As if I'd been rehearsing what followed for years. Every move was right, every step was purposeful, everything was confined to what had to be done. I left no traces.

Some two hours later, when I let the rubbish bags drop into the Seine at a deserted place on the bank, it was as if I were ridding myself at a stroke of all the encumbrances of my life. As if my fears were sinking into the water before my eyes, all my pangs of conscience, all the injuries and humiliations, all the painful baggage of my life over the last few years. Suddenly I understood what people meant when they said they felt born again. Washed clean.

And even more important: I had done my duty. I was a worthy heir of John Ashcroft. The world was rid of Chen. And I had no doubt whatsoever that the world was now a better place.

7

 

I spent the next few days partly in a state of euphoria, partly on tenterhooks. Because however carefully and conscientiously I had gone about it, of course there was always the possibility of a witness or some stupid coincidence. Suppose the bags with Chen in them were fished up by an angler, or found by one of the boats that dredged sludge out of the Seine? The brief time-span between his visit to Chez Max and the discovery of his remains would at least have raised questions.

So far as the Localization Office computer was concerned, and as long as the bags remained undiscovered, Chen was still moving around the eighth arrondissement, although on an erratic course. Near Natalia's apartment I had attached his transmitter to the collar of a dog tied up outside a food store. I naturally put it down to chance that the first dog I saw with no one watching it happened to be a Pekinese. Well, to chance in one way. In another – and I am far from being a religious man – perhaps there was someone up there after all playing games with Fate. In any event, I thought on the way back to Chez Max, this is exactly the kind of joke that Chen enjoys – that Chen would have enjoyed, I corrected myself. I had to grin. He would certainly have appreciated the humour of it, and I was glad I knew that and thought it as funny as he would. I even imagined us sitting together, both of us laughing at it.

Only that night, as my tension subsided, did the first unsettling questions come into my mind. Had I perhaps been seen from the other side of the river? Would one of my staff notice the dark stains on the terracotta tiles paving the courtyard? I hadn't been able to get them out in spite of repeated scrubbing. Or would someone notice the absence of a few ornamental stones which I'd taken from the fountain behind the barbecue to weight the bags?

However, my fears were unfounded. Nothing happened for the next three days. I even went to Ashcroft Central Office twice to pick up any information I could about Chen. I was expecting something like, ‘Can you tell me where Wu is? I was supposed to be meeting him yesterday.' Or: ‘You can tell your partner that Youssef has been trying to reach him for the last two days, and he's not very happy about it.' But no one said anything of the kind. Nor was anyone behaving oddly to me, avoiding me in the corridor or looking away when our eyes met. I had twice in the past seen what it was like when almost all agents except the man concerned knew he'd soon be coming before the Ashcroft tribunal for some offence or other. As if a dead man were walking around the building, and as if death was infectious.

But it seemed as if, at least for now, Chen's last appearance in this world had been with that drop into the Seine and the bubbles that rose from him.

On the fourth day I called Commander Youssef at about eleven in the morning and told him I'd been trying to get hold of Chen for four days, but his phone was either switched off or still out of order, and up to yesterday evening the Localization Office had given me only some very odd locations for him, and he hadn't stayed long in any of them: dog-exercising areas in public parks, pavements outside butchers' shops, and according to the data found on the Ashcroft computer, an apartment belonging to a gay electrician.

‘… Anyway, Chen – or I suppose it must be Chen – was nowhere around when I went to look for him in the places the Localization Office gave me. And I didn't want to ring the electrician's doorbell because… well, as far as I know there's nothing wrong with the electricity in Chen's apartment at the moment, and even if there were… I mean, why an electrician from the eighth arrondissement?'