Chez Max (4 page)

Ironically enough, it was John Ashcroft's ideas of preventative crime-fighting that, in their own time, were to lead indirectly to the downfall of the US as a world power. For the 9/11 assassins did not come from Los Angeles or Louisville, and their potential successors were not planning further terrorist attacks from some base in New Orleans. So if they were to be crushed first, the US had to invade foreign countries to get at them. First was Afghanistan (now part of the Greater South-Eastern Area), where the operation went relatively smoothly and successfully, if we leave aside the fact that the man behind the assassins, Osama bin Laden, the most important of the radical Muslim leaders, was not captured despite the best efforts of the ultra-modern US army and any number of special task forces. (Incidentally, we still feel the after-effects of this failure today: bin Laden's body was never found either, and so he became a sort of immortal prophet in the religious fantasies of the terrorist groups that we regularly confronted. Only last month I had brought a sympathizer with the potential for providing a terrorist hide-out before the Examining Committee, after noticing from my balcony that he had hung a poster of bin Laden in his living-room.)

But what, as everyone knows, really broke the US was the subsequent war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, now part of the Greater Middle-Eastern Area. Ashcroft's ideas were especially prominent in providing the theoretical and moral framework for the war, since up to that point Iraq posed no threat to the United States. However, of course there were Islamist leaders and groups in Iraq who
could
have become a threat at some point, and if you looked at it that way, it was quite right in the Ashcroftian sense to bring the country under control as a preventative measure.

But a consequence of the American victory over Saddam's army that had not been foreseen – and in my view it couldn't logically have been foreseen – was the massive influx into Iraq of opponents of the US from all over the world, flooding in to raise hell for the occupying forces with their sniping and suicide bombings. The rest is history. The mightiest army in the world was worn down over the years in bloody skirmishes, the duties of occupation, and a vain attempt to get the Iraqis to recognize them as saviours who had brought democracy to the country. All the same, the US government stuck to its plan to usher in a new order and thus a lasting peace in Iraq and the entire Middle East of the time, while the two other great powers, China and Europe, concentrated entirely on economic progress. The Franco-Chinese Treaty of Hong Kong followed, and a little later the Euro-Chinese Confederation, which started by cancelling all loans to the exhausted and deeply indebted US and soon afterwards was in a position, as it were, to buy up the whole of North America.

Still feeling the force of the American failure in the Middle East, the Confederation undertook the construction of a fence around the world as the logical implementation of Ashcroftian ideas, excluding most potential enemies of our liberal and democratic society once and for all. Where US governments had gone on working, as one might say, to resocialize the problem zones of the world by waging war, hunting down dictators, holding elections and hoping for values to change in favour of democracy and the free market economy, the Confederation really did ‘crush the motherfuckers'. At the same time as the Fence was being built, the armies of Europe and China began disarming the rest of the world. There followed the Great Wars of Liberation, lasting just under five years, at the end of which all military equipment in the southern hemisphere was either destroyed or rendered non-viable, and the Fence was completed. The Fence divided the world for all time, roughly speaking, into areas of progress and regress - or, at least, stagnation, although conditions in the two parts could not, of course, be described as one hundred per cent progressive or regressive. But the general gist was correct, and without the Fence the radical elements of the Second World would long ago have dragged us down into their own abyss of primitive religion, the glorification of violence, and contempt for anything different – if only because at some point we would have been ready to confront them, trying perhaps to negotiate with them, to compromise, to give up our own freedom in the vague hope of peace. But you don't discuss
with fanatics, and there are some negotiating tables where you have lost as soon as you sit down at them. Let them tear each other to pieces, and so indeed they did.

It was a shame that Ashcroft was to know no more of the fruits of his ideas than the American failure in Iraq. The grand old man of crime prevention had died in his home state of Missouri long before the erection of the Fence, and even longer before the first offices named after him were opened.

But perhaps his strict religious faith means that the good Lord sometimes lets him take a look at the world below. If so, Ashcroft could feel justifiably proud to see the Western world protected from dangers abroad and kept in order at home on the basis of his ideas. I won't go so far as some and claim that in the twenty-first century we, the heirs of Voltaire, Mozart, Picasso, owed not just our intellectual survival but our survival
tout court
, as the French say, solely to John Ashcroft, but the notion cannot be dismissed out of hand. I for one could only welcome the efforts of our Mental Health Department, MHD for short, to establish Ashcroft in the public mind as one of the spiritual fathers of the modern world. It's true that the population at large still regarded Ashcroft agents as mere informers, better avoided if you had identified them as what they were. But all that was to change. The papers outlining the strategy for that change were already in the Eurosecurity pigeon-holes. The plan was to bring general mobilization to bear to transform our society into a single great Ashcroft organism, in which everyone would have so much social and moral responsibility for himself and his fellow women and men that, with such a dense network of actively public-spirited feeling, crime would simply no longer be possible. With that end in view, MHD was supplying the music and fashion media with cool, witty quotations from Ashcroft, anecdotes about him, and working hard to get T-shirts with his picture on them into the clothes stores where mostly young people shopped. Perhaps the time wasn't ripe for that yet, but some day Ashcroft would take his place on the clothes rails beside Che Guevara and Elvis; I didn't doubt that for a moment.

 

Two days after Leon's arrest, I met Chen in our room at Ashcroft Central Office, as I did every Friday. I was feeling terrible. Something in me must have snapped when Leon was taken away before my very eyes. Even though I knew better, I felt like a traitor. For the first time in over fifteen years as an Ashcroft man, I seriously doubted the point of it all, and kept asking myself why I hadn't turned a blind eye to Leon's smoking. There'd have been no problem about that; smoking, after all, was one of those crimes that didn't really endanger anyone or anything. But I was set on showing our Sicilian colleagues that the Ashcroft outfit had a really tough guy here in Paris, right on the ball.
I have recently discovered that there is obviously still no difficulty in getting hold of cigarettes in your part of the world.

But I knew very well that lately I'd been anything but tough and right on the ball. On the contrary, I'd been neglecting my Ashcroft duties for my work at Chez Max and my increasingly desperate search for a woman to share my life with. That was probably why I'd passed my information on to the Sicilians. If I'd been informing on a terrorist every week, I'd hardly have thought it worth reporting an acquaintance's occasional indulgence in cigarettes. Instead, the last four weeks had come up with only the young man whose bin Laden poster had happened to catch my eye from my balcony.

But could I have expected the message I sent to Sicily to have such consequences? Of course not. All the same, I still felt guilty.

And now Chen. In my present frame of mind, he was about the last person I wanted to see. Still less, however, had I wanted to cancel our appointment and thus show that something wasn't quite right. I just hoped we'd get through our meeting without any mention of Leon. I could hardly have suppressed the urge to justify myself, and there was no doubt at all that Chen would have made use of that to stage an intellectual bloodbath. Remarks about friendship, trust, loyalty, the duties of an Ashcroft agent, social responsibility, priorities and conscience would all have been left lying on the field of battle, charred, mutilated and smeared with blood, while Chen marched up and down waving flags and beating drums of vanity, cowardice, profit and heartlessness.

So I firmly made up my mind to meet any provocation offered by Chen over Leon's arrest with total indifference. I just wanted to get home quickly.

 

As I sat at the desk waiting for Chen to join me so that we could exchange our news on suspicious factors and any overlapping operations in our area, he was standing at the window with a plastic container of noodles and a fork, his back turned to me, looking out at the Eiffel Tower. With his mouth half full, he said: ‘People are swine, it's always been like that, it always will be, and the world they create is a pig of a world. No laser projection of artificial rainbows on the sky or any other new technological crap is going to change that.'

He shovelled the next forkful of noodles into his mouth and smacked his lips noisily as he munched. Nothing interested me less at that moment than another of Chen's misanthropic tirades, but all the same I thought: I really ought to tell him I can't help agreeing, when I see and hear him eating like that. Humanity hasn't made much progress since we were crouching in caves devouring wild animals.

As Ashcroft agents, we'd been sharing responsibility for Quadrate Three of the eleventh arrondissement in Paris for over four years, we met once or twice a week, and Chen nearly always brought some item of fast food with him, consuming it in a way that made me wonder whether he'd had any parents or guardians as a child. But I didn't have the courage to say anything to Chen about it. Yet, even if it had come to a real quarrel I'd have had nothing to fear. Chen wasn't popular with our Ashcroft colleagues, and even our boss, Commander Youssef, a man who normally refrained from expressing personal opinions, had let it slip a couple of times that Chen got on his nerves with his sarcasm, his coarse language and constant air of superiority.

But I wasn't thinking of any official consequences that disagreement within an Ashcroft team might have, I was just thinking of Chen's possible retorts. He might say, ‘Oh, does the way I eat bother you? You ought to hear me fart – and smell me too!' (And if I knew Chen, he would indeed fart as often as possible from then on.) Or perhaps, ‘Oh, sweetie, I'm ever so sorry! I do realize I can't quite emulate the table manners of the posh customers in your restaurant who stuff their faces with birds' tongues in oyster sauce!' (He hardly ever missed an opportunity of referring to the high prices at Chez Max and the rather fashionable, slightly arty customers who came there). Or then again he might say (in German), ‘
Ach, mein Führer!
' and then (reverting to French), ‘So sorry, but it's my race. We Asians guzzle like pigs – it's in the genes, see? I do see that's bound to upset a refined Aryan who'd sooner bump people off than slurp his soup. Oh dear, are you sending me to the gas chamber now,
mein Führer?
'

There were no limits to Chen's wealth of invention when he wanted to offend someone. He could take half an ingredient and turn it into an entire menu of the most varied insults in no time at all. I was always on my guard with him. If the espresso from the Ashcroft cafeteria in the building was a thin, watery brew yet again, I refrained from comment so as not to give Chen another chance of denouncing the spoilt, snooty ways of the world in general and his pernickety German colleague in particular. For similar reasons, I took care not to keep my desk too tidy, or polish my shoes before going to the office, or wipe Chen's hairs out of the dirty wash-basin too often. Similarly, as far as possible, I avoided giving my own opinion on any subject, showing emotions, or expressing any serious wish. The more anything mattered to someone, the keener Chen was to pounce on it, pick it to pieces and make it look ridiculous. Once, over two years ago, I had announced at the office, bubbling over with happiness, that I was in love. She was a new assistant in the kitchen at Chez Max, and it didn't take Chen ten minutes to paint a picture, by dint of a few questions and comments, of an ambitious young future head chef for whom Chez Max was just the right step up on the ladder of her career. ‘Or why do you think she'd want anything to do with a man twenty years older than she is? You still look quite good for your age, but you're more of a quite good-looking father figure.'

What was so nasty about this, in retrospect, was that it turned out exactly as he'd predicted. I gave Yasmin the job of second chef six months later – causing some discontent among the rest of the staff who had been there longer, because Yasmin's talent for making sauces and assessing the right cooking time was not by any means entirely beyond reproach – and then three months after that a large hotel near the Palais Royal snapped her up from under my nose. About two weeks later she wrote to me saying that her new job as section chef for soups and starters in the restaurant, which boasted two hundred covers, left her hardly any time for private life; on the other hand, she said, her relationship with me was ‘too important' to her to ‘suffer, perhaps, from being relegated to the sidelines', so she would like ‘a kind of time out' until she had established herself in her new job. I never heard any more from her.

And that was probably the main problem with Chen: he was usually right. As an Ashcroft agent, he was the best I'd met in over fifteen years of crime prevention at spotting crimes before they were committed. If he'd only been barking up the wrong tree a few more times in the last four years, I'm sure I'd have felt braver about disagreeing with his generally sweeping and simplistic judgements and analyses. No doubts of any kind ever seemed to trouble him. I often felt like saying: ‘You really do over-simplify. As if everyone functioned by the book, in exactly the same way. But we're all different, we're very complicated and full of surprises. Take a closer look for once.' However, I knew what Chen would say to that. ‘My job is preventing crime, not exploring the human psyche. And every idiot thinks he has an amazingly complex interior life. But then he feels ravenously hungry, sees his neighbour with a piece of meat and strikes him dead. And of course he'll come up with some very subtle reasons for it.'