Chez Max (7 page)

Of course Chen was more successful than I was, but when you compared that list with his reputation, the month of May left a lot to be desired. I remembered times when he was bringing two cases before the Examining Committee almost daily.

Anyway, whatever the reason for it, I could tell from his expression that something had soured his mood. Against my will – because I had told myself to keep any emotions out of this – I felt a certain glee, and considering all I'd had to put up with in the last fifteen minutes even a kind of elation. That must have been why now, of all times, I tried a joke.

I cleared my throat and grinned in a way intended to make it clear that I was being ironic.

‘Or perhaps
you
smuggled the people in there? Poor, starving illegals, just to help you get a realistic picture of the arguments of international terrorism, so to speak?'

He didn't react, just kept picking about inside his mouth fretfully.

My grin began to feel forced. Why didn't he look at me? I hoped he didn't think I meant it seriously. Nothing was further from my mind than to provoke Chen now, when I hoped we were both almost on the point of leaving. Probably what he'd said this afternoon about my sense of humour – not that it was the first time he'd said such a thing, but in the past I'd always been able to put it out of my mind at once – well, that had probably hurt me more than I'd been willing to admit at first. That was the only way to explain why I'd ventured on to such thin ice as the result of a brief whim. As if I'd said, ‘Hey, see what cutting things I can say after all!' And, probably, in the back of my mind: ‘All you good looking single women out there, don't think there's no fun with Max Schwarzwald!' Because of course the really annoying part of it was Chen's routine linking of his disparagement to my success with the opposite sex, which certainly was nothing much to speak of at the moment.

Anyway, I was now hoping that he'd been fully occupied with his teeth, hadn't heard what I said, and we could simply go on with our discussion.

Sure enough, the first remark he made, which probably also explained his facial expression, was, ‘My teeth are like a network of caves. I always have provisions for two days left in them every time I eat a meal.'

I breathed a sigh of relief. My joke seemed to have sunk like a stone, unnoticed. To make sure it didn't come up again I quickly picked up on what Chen had said and recommended him my dentist, as I had so often done before. Because Chen's trouble with his teeth was nothing new, and I used every opportunity to recommend her anyway, a simple and yet often long-term way of showing sympathy. By now the name of Dr Williams probably sounded like a corny old pun to Chen. It was still a mystery to me why such an ice-cold character was as scared as a small child of going to the dentist. Even though these days there were anaesthetics that meant you really didn't feel anything at all. But the sweat could literally stand out on Chen's brow at the mere mention of the dentist's chair.

So I smiled and was about to say, for the umpteenth time, ‘So here we are talking about my wonderful Dr Williams again. If you were just to call her some time …' And so on.

At that very minute, instead, Chen turned, looked at me as if I were something the dog had thrown up, and said, ‘Yes, I do know about the illegals there, and I'm watching them to find whoever smuggled them in. In case you've forgotten, that kind of thing is part of our job. But you only ever pick up on anyone if they hang silly posters on the wall in front of your nose or announce plans for some kind of cigarette deal in your restaurant.'

My unconscious mind had probably been on watch for any mention of Leon all the time, because I replied at once, ‘It wasn't just about cigarettes!'

And now came that blow below the belt after all. Perhaps Chen had just been waiting for the right moment.

‘Okay, so your friend was big in the drugs trade too. I've heard he was an unsuccessful painter of kitschy pictures who was looking to earn something on the side. But you'd know better, of course, and the way our colleagues tell it makes no sense. Well, I mean…' Here he cast me a brief, expressionless, but somehow weary glance. ‘I mean, who would shop a friend because of a little cigarette dealing? And you don't have that many friends. Be that as it may, maybe your recent results as an Ashcroft agent do not matter to you much, and so far as I'm concerned you can loaf around all you like, but when some jerks from another department start getting active in ours, and I hear about it only when we have our weekly meeting, and then only because you don't have anything else to your credit – well, we'll soon be reaching the point where
I
go to Youssef for a change and tell him about
your
working morale, and how it's a hindrance to me in my job.'

I stared at him. That wasn't just a blow below the belt, it was as if he'd slapped me in the face and then pulled a gun on me. Chen, of all people, threatening to grass on me to Commander Youssef!

Only at a great distance did the question of why this stupid observation bothered him so much emerge in my mind.

‘I want to be informed about that kind of thing right away – is that clear?'

‘Perfectly clear,' I replied. He was speaking to me the way I spoke to my kitchen staff.

And then, at last, the Veterans' Band began to play. The tune of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow' came in through the window, and at the same time coloured arch after coloured arch of the rainbow appeared in the sky. Seen from where I was sitting, it was soon arching in all its many colours over both the Eiffel Tower and Chen's head. It looked great.

‘Look.' I pointed to the window.

Chen turned, and even that monster had to smile and couldn't take his eyes off it for a while. But I stared at his smooth black hair, the hair that clogged up the sink all the time, and to my slight alarm found that I was imagining splitting his skull with an axe.

3

 

An hour later, I was sitting on the terrace of a brasserie near the Eiffel Tower, drinking my fourth Brooklyn Organic – a New York beer now quite widely distributed in Europe, not least because of state subsidies. Another aspect of the effort not to let the population here forget our North American friends entirely. I was vaguely aware of groups passing along the streets around me, singing, celebrating and waving rainbow-coloured flags, while in the background the Veterans' Band had gone back to playing jazz classics after the much-applauded air ballet, and with every new round of drinks, glasses were raised again at the tables near me in toasts to the rainbow, half of which was now hanging in the sky above the buildings and our heads as if firmly screwed to it.

After that clash with Chen, I'd really meant to drink just one or two beers to calm my nerves before I went to work. But then the questions relating to Chen's bad mood, and my doubts of his rather too smooth explanation that he was observing the illegals to get at the people-smugglers, became more and more pressing and important in my mind, and I had called the head waiter at Chez Max and told him I'd be later than usual today.

I reminded myself of what Chen had said: ‘But that's against all the rules,' and ‘Suppose we were keeping watch on the place too, with a ploy of our own up our sleeve?' My vague idea that I'd wrong-footed him somehow was getting stronger. Since when did it bother Chen that something was against all the rules? Or why would he describe a state of affairs only hypothetically in the first instance when he planned to present it later as fact? If he really was watching the building, then why, when I said with the best of intentions but untruthfully, hoping to pacify him, ‘Anyway, I check the building and that whole block regularly,' why hadn't he reacted in line with his character and his usual mode of conduct? Then he'd have said, ‘You check the building regularly? Well, that's the first I've heard of it!' Instead there'd been that long period of picking his teeth, apparently absent-mindedly, and then suddenly he went on the attack: ‘Yes, I do know about the illegals there, and I'm watching them to find whoever smuggled them in. In case you've forgotten, that kind of thing is part of our job.' Didn't that look as if he were in a jam, and the only way to change the subject he could think of was to insult me, finally even threaten me? But what kind of a jam? Or rather: how big a jam was it? Because one thing was clear: Chen had wanted to keep the illegals secret from me. That undoubtedly counted as a crime, if not necessarily a serious one. In addition, I'd suspected for a long time that now and then Chen let some poor sod or other get away with something. He simply brought too few of them before the Examining Committee. And to be honest, I even chalked that generosity up to his credit.

But now an entirely different and incomparably graver suspicion reared its head: was it possible that Chen had been fooling me and the entire Ashcroft department for years? Was this perhaps something like the case of the Malmö diamond dealer? The instructor running an advanced training course for Ashcroft agents had cited that case to us, years ago, as an example of a special kind of criminal camouflage. The context had been the Wars of Liberation of 2030, and today of course the story could never have happened so far as the actual circumstances went. Technology for the identification and classification of objects by means of three-dimensional registration is far too advanced for that. But nothing could ever be done, however great the technological innovations, about the spirit animating the diamond dealer's actions. And if my suspicion was confirmed, I saw that spirit and no other in the behaviour of my Ashcroft partner.

For a while during the Wars of Liberation, on account of worldwide economic insecurity, diamonds, along with gold and platinum, were among the only really reliable means of payment, just as they had been in the Middle Ages. It very soon became one of the most pressing tasks of the Euro-Chinese Confederation to get control of, not just the various remaining oilfields around the world, but also all the diamond mines, and defend them. For that reason, the Resource Islands Department, a part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and responsible for ensuring supplies of raw materials to the Western and Asian world – the ‘islands' themselves, of course, being surrounded not just by water but by Second World nations usually hostile to us – well, the Resource Islands Department then employed hundreds of building contractors, including Björn Hallsund of Malmö. Many of the diamond mines and diamond-cutting works that had come under Euro- Chinese administration needed new buildings, since they had often been cut off from the surrounding country overnight in the course of the fighting and now required villas for the business managers, terraced houses for the workers and administrative staff, barracks for the military, easily isolated accommodation for communities of local workers and other employees, as well as swimming pools, tennis courts, canteens, an airport that could be used for military purposes, streets, bridges and so on. Hallsund and his wife regularly flew between building sites in the Congo and his native Sweden, and the local police (there were no Ashcroft offices yet at the time) soon began to suspect that Hallsund was smuggling diamonds on his weekly flights. He and his wife were observed by the police visiting illegal Stockholm bureaux de change where diamonds were exchanged for gold or euros. Furthermore, Hallsund also met receivers and diamond dealers known in the city, and bought apartment block after apartment block in Sweden and Denmark, transactions which he could never have afforded on his officially declared income.

But in spite of the early initial suspicion, and a whole series of clues backing it up, it was over a year before the investigators worked out how the Hallsunds were getting the diamonds past airport security, and then they were finally caught in the act. Their trick was so simple and obvious that one of the investigators described it in an article entitled ‘Losing the Glasses on Your Nose', written for a specialist criminological magazine, and commented: ‘When I think of the case, I still shake my head even years later, feeling bewildered and slightly ashamed.'

It went like this: when Hallsund and his flamboyant wife Inga, who was always showily dressed even in everyday life, left Sweden to fly to the Congolese mines, Inga wore necklaces, rings, bracelets, sometimes even a tiara, as if they were flying not to a remote mine but to some sultan's wedding. However, as Inga hardly ever appeared in public anyway without being decked out like some kind of Christmas tree worth millions, the investigators thought of it only at the start. Her jewellery was inspected and registered twice, on leaving the country and on coming in again, and neither time could anything be found wrong: Inga came back with the same stones and necklaces as she had worn when she flew out. In addition, at the second check on her jewellery the couple began acting to the officials searching them and their baggage with such maliciously sarcastic condescension, virtually mounting a savage attack on them, that the security officers on all the day and night shifts were soon glad to give up checking the two of them too thoroughly. At the airport, Hallsund would often address them, even from a distance, with remarks such as, ‘Well, dirty pigs, want to get your sweaty hands on my wife's underwear again? Diamonds? You must be joking! You probably don't get too many dates, not on your salaries, so you have to do a bit of groping and pawing at work – gives you something to fantasize about later, right? And you let the gay ones loose on me! Last week one of them was stroking me right down there when he did the body search – is that why you join the border security troops, to get those opportunities?'

(Such, anyway, were his words as reported by the lecturer taking our training course, who had enjoyed recounting the story in detail, and but for whose dramatic presentation the parallel with Chen's behaviour wouldn't have been very likely to occur to me.)

In addition, the fuss he made always attracted a crowd of passengers and airport employees, and the security officer not only had to put up with insults and obscenities but also the attention of members of the public, watching with expressions ranging from sympathy to amusement. And the more members of the public there were, the more Hallsund stepped up the pace. In the process, of course he never forgot to mention that he had governmental backing.