Chez Max (3 page)

Not that any of that, now I knew about Leon's smoking, kept me from emailing my colleagues in Palermo a few days later and mentioning in a tone of mild reproof that, as I had recently discovered, there was obviously still no difficulty in getting hold of cigarettes in their part of the world. There had been a total ban on smoking for over thirty years now. Anyone selling cigarettes faced jail, and for the last fifteen years smoking had also been a criminal offence for the consumer. However, I often heard that in the outlying regions of Europe – Sicily, eastern Russia, Turkey – smoking was still a part of everyday life for some sections of the population. Historically, Sicily had always been a problem when it came to enforcing pan-European laws and regulations, and I didn't expect any reaction to my email. But I wanted our colleagues at least to know that their lax attitude to cigarette smuggling did not go unnoticed. Only in passing, and to prevent it from looking as if I'd made the whole thing up to make myself look important, did I mention Leon's name. So I was all the more surprised when I had an answer from Palermo two weeks later, giving information about a gang of smugglers who were planning to set up a kind of chain of sales outlets for all banned drugs, from heroin to cigarettes, in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. And not only that: the painter Leon Chechik, whom I had mentioned, had been a close acquaintance of one of the gang bosses for about a year.

It wasn't the first attempt to distribute drugs on a large scale and systematically, so to speak – hence the term ‘chain of sales outlets' – and it certainly wouldn't be the last, although such attempts had proved unsuccessful in north-west Europe for many years now. For one thing, because there was a much denser network of Ashcroft agents here than in the south and east, for another because of different mindsets, or at least that was my own view, and many of my colleagues in Paris shared it.

At first the information from Palermo just made me extra watchful for drug-dealing, because where Leon was concerned, so I told myself after my first mild shock on hearing that he knew the gang boss, well, of course he had to find a source of supply for his cigarettes, and ultimately it didn't matter if he got them that way or from some old lady topping up her pension.

But the next week I saw Leon in Chez Max having a noticeably discreet conversation with a stranger. Although I'd have liked to overlook it or dismiss it as meaningless, all the alarm bells rang. Rather reluctantly, and with a queasy feeling in my guts, I took over serving from one of the waiters, went to the washroom and fitted the skin-coloured simultaneous translation button specially made for my inner ear into place – you could spot it only in bright light and from an almost impossible angle – and then I started working on Ashcroft business.

Even as I approached their table and caught a few sentences, my premonition that there was something fishy going on proved right. The stranger was speaking bad Italian with a strong accent.

My button translated. ‘Gallery have to be small, not showy, same like with pictures – nothing trendy.'

‘Maybe we can set up as specialists in charcoal drawings, something like that?' replied Leon.

‘Yes, that good, that sound boring.'

Why wasn't he speaking his own language? After all, Leon had a simultaneous translation button too – you could get them for less than a thousand euros these days – and I knew he always carried his with him in his inside jacket pocket. Not such a small and sophisticated device as the buttons handed out to the Ashcroft people, of course; those could translate all languages and dialects faultlessly, even the texts of songs and the sound tracks of feature films. But the cheaper kinds were fine for a conversation in a restaurant, if you didn't mind about the grammatical niceties.

Or perhaps the stranger's mother tongue wasn't one of the Euro-Nineteen or Asia-Seven to which the European linguistic area had been restricted twenty-three years ago? They were the only languages allowed for civilian use by the simultaneous translation buttons. There remained certain tolerated languages – including Albanian, Catalan and Swiss German – plus the languages from what was known as the ‘conflict area', Hebrew and the Arabic spoken in Palestine, and then there were the banned languages. All other forms of Arabic fell into that category, as well as all African and some Asian languages. Anyone using them on European soil faced a fine or imprisonment.

So what category might the stranger's mother tongue belong to? To my surprise, he turned out to speak almost faultless French.

‘Hello, Max, how's it going?' Leon said in German. He had been born and brought up in Brussels, and spoke German, French and Italian as well as Flemish, a tolerated language. He went on in French. ‘Meet my friend Benoît. He owns a gallery in Rome and he's going to open a branch in Paris. I'm going to run the place for him.'

I nodded and smiled at them both. ‘Good idea.' And I added, to Benoît, ‘If I may say so, I don't know anyone who knows as much about art and loves painting as fervently as Leon.'

Leon laughed. ‘Oh, come off it! You sound like my old granny. And like my granny, you don't know any other painters. It's like me saying I've never met another German restaurateur who knows more than you about good food and a pleasant atmosphere. Of course, very likely there really isn't anyone better, but…'

I dismissed this and told Benoît, ‘No comparisons are needed to do justice to something special.'

‘But
cher monsieur
, that's a contradiction in terms,' objected Benoît in his lightly accented French, looking at me a little more keenly than this apparently innocuous situation warranted.

‘Very well, then I'll tell you this: you don't have to be a connoisseur of roast venison to enjoy the venison we have on the menu today.'

‘Aha!' cried Leon. ‘Like I said, Max is the best! Gets his guest involved in some exchange of wisecracks, then sells him a steak that is as tough as old boots and filling up his freezer.'

They laughed, and then ordered fish soup Günter to start with, followed by the roast venison.

On the way to the kitchen, I could think of only one good reason why they weren't speaking French: they didn't want the other guests in the restaurant listening to them. While I served the fish soup, I took a couple of photos of Benoît with the camera in my contact lens.

Next morning the Ashcroft office in Rome told me that there was no gallery owner or art dealer by the name of Benoît in the city. Then I fed the photographs I'd taken into the Eurosecurity computer, and read all about Leon's acquaintance:
Abdel Aziz, Greater Southern area (Algerian or Moroccan), birthplace unknown, fishmonger, married, three children, two attempts to cross the sea to Europe, when arrested for the second time was sentenced to four years' hard labour in the mines of Namibia (Greater Far Southern area), last known place of residence Casablanca, has contacts with cannabis and tobacco growers.

So he'd succeeded at the third attempt. I looked at the BTL wall showing ‘Apples In Front of a Blue Sofa'. It was a fact that Leon's lifestyle was expensive, and he had sometimes said ruefully that without support from his family he'd have landed in the gutter long ago. But surely he couldn't be stupid enough to believe that doing business with this Abdel was the way to get out of that situation!

He could, though. That same week I listened in on parts of a conversation at the bar of Chez Max between Leon and one of his well-heeled girlfriends, in which he said, among other things, ‘In a month's time at the latest I'll be able to get you as much of it as you want.'

And the week after that, during my daily walks through the neighbourhood, I twice saw Leon and Abdel outside a brasserie in the Place Léon Blum with their heads together.

Next time Leon brought a girlfriend to Chez Max for dinner, I fixed a bug under the table, and the next day, heavy at heart, I took the case to the Examining Committee. You could hear Leon on the recorder, speaking Flemish and saying things like, ‘Cigarettes, hashish, even genuine coke – but that'll take a little longer.' And, ‘I'm going to take over a gallery in the Place des Vosges and sell the usual tourist tat at the front of the shop.'

The Examining Committee did not for a moment doubt that Leon was on the point of committing a crime of moderate gravity, the duty lawyer raised hardly any objections, and sentence was passed swiftly and unanimously: three years in jail.

 

Four police officers in blue uniforms came out into the street through the open front door of the apartment building, with Leon in handcuffs between them. There was movement behind the windows in the buildings to the left and right. Curtains were drawn further aside, arms signalled to people back inside the apartments, even more faces were glued to the panes. I instinctively took a step back. I felt like turning to disappear into the restaurant. But Leon might happen to see me, and I wanted to spare him that.

The police officers raised the side door of the TEF, pushed Leon in, and three of them followed him while the fourth went round the vehicle to the driver's cab. At that moment I realized that they were going to drive right past me.

The engine started, humming quietly, and the TEF began to move. It slowly glided up the street towards Chez Max. Just before my place the street went round a bend, and the driver braked briefly. For a couple of seconds I could see Leon's head in the long armoured glass window. When he caught sight of me, a despairing smile flitted over his face, and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘Sorry about this.'

I took care to look both surprised and encouraging. I'd have liked to call out, ‘It must be some mistake! It'll all be cleared up!'

Just before the TEF picked up speed again, Leon raised his cuffed hands and waved slightly. I waved back.

When the TEF had disappeared around the next street corner, I turned and went into the restaurant. I sat down at Leon's favourite table with a glass and a bottle of plum schnapps. My heart was thudding and my throat felt dry. Surprisingly, I felt neither shame nor regret, only fear. I drank the first glass straight down. At the second or third glass, an odd thought occurred to me. I had never in my life smoked, I had never knowingly broken any law, but now I could imagine lighting a cigarette in Leon's honour.

That was nonsense, of course. Instead, I decided to make copies of his pictures and hang them over the bar instead of one of the Matisse posters. They would stay there, at least until Leon was free again. In three years' time or, with good conduct, two.

2

 

The first Ashcroft offices had opened in 2029 in Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid, Rome and Moscow. By now a dense network covered Europe and North America, as well as parts of Asia. In the Greater Paris area alone there were twelve offices, plus our headquarters on the Place Sarkozy, where Chen and I had been allotted a room with a view of the Eiffel Tower.

The name Ashcroft derived from one of the last US Attorney Generals. There were two reasons why first Eurosecurity and then Asiasecurity had called their crime prevention departments, strange as it might seem, after an American politician who had been relatively quickly forgotten after the end of his four-year term in office in 2005. First, a name was required that would symbolize the beginning of efforts to set up a new world order, and it was generally considered that 11 September 2001 marked the birth of that new order. Second, the choice of an American name was a tribute to what had once been the most powerful country in the world, and one to which our new society undoubtedly owed a great deal. It was true that when the US went bankrupt, so to speak, turning from an industrial state into an agrarian society, it had lost a great deal of its importance, but no one had ever questioned its place as a part of Western civilization. That was why, in their annual governmental statements, the various European presidents said, using almost identical words: ‘And I am also especially glad to address myself to our friends, sisters and brothers in North America.' Ashcroft was one of a whole series of once-famous Americans after whom organizations, squares, buildings or technical innovations had been named in Europe and China, so that the country's glorious past would not lapse into oblivion. Hence the Robert de Niro Suspension Bridge between Sicily and the Italian mainland, the Kurt Cobain Children's Holiday Camps, the Paris Hilton Dental Water Jets, and so on.

John Ashcroft himself had been known beyond the borders of the US for two things: first, for getting the bare breasts of the ‘Spirit of Justice' statue in the reception area of his ministry covered up for moral and religious reasons, and second, of course, for his reflections on the legal possibility and social necessity of identifying and eliminating criminal elements before they actually got around to committing their crimes. Those reflections had been prompted by the moment, mentioned above, when the new world order came into being after the first great shock of the twenty-first century. On 11 September 2001 several of the spiritual forebears of today's Islamo-Fascist terrorist groups had hijacked four passenger aircraft, and in a kamikaze operation had flown them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing over three thousand people and declaring war on the Western world and its values in the name of Muslim fanatics of all nations. As a result, of course, any number of measures to prevent similar attacks in the future were undertaken in the US and Europe by the secret services, the police and the military, but the vital theoretical new approach to the safeguarding of freedom and democracy came from Ashcroft. The words he is alleged to have uttered at the time, within the close circle around the US President, were still on the walls of almost every Ashcroft office toilet in their original English:
Let's crush the motherfuckers before they crush us
. Whether Ashcroft, who was well known for his deep Christian faith and strict morality – see the story about the statue – had ever really spoken the word
motherfucker
in the presence of the American president or anyone else is something that I have always doubted, but the gist was certainly appropriate, at least if by ‘us' he meant a modern, liberal society in line with the ideas of the Enlightenment, constantly striving for progress not only in technology but also on a moral and spiritual level. A man who, let's say, pulled an insurance scam might not be crushing the whole of society, but he was spreading uneasiness and suspicion among at least some part of the population. And, as everyone knows, many small parts make up one large whole sooner or later. Averting that was the job of us Ashcroft women and men.