Chez Max (8 page)

‘… Would you dirty pigs like to know who's having to keep dinner waiting for me while you fumble us?'

‘Mr Hallsund, we're only doing our job.'

‘Ah, well, I'll tell that to the Minister for Economic Affairs: the dirty pigs are only doing their job, and their job is feeling up my lovely Inga's breasts and between her legs. The Minister won't like it. Because shall I tell you why he invites me so often? For Inga's sake, of course. He'd like to feel her up himself, but seeing that he's not a border security officer but only Minister for Economic Affairs, he…'

‘Would you open your bag, please, Mr Hallsund?'

‘By all means. Look, chock-full of diamonds – smelly sock diamonds, sweaty T-shirt diamonds, the famous and unique aftershave diamond… Anyway, all the Minister for Economic Affairs can do with my Inga is stare at her neckline like an idiot the whole time. He's kind of in love all the same, and jealous, and what he
can
do, on account of his position, is to get certain persons – his rivals of a sort - fired from airport security and customs…'

‘What's in this package, Mr Hallsund?'

‘Oh God, now you've caught me after all! A whole box full of diamond chocolates! Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh my God!'

‘Can't you keep your silly gob shut for half a minute?'

‘Help! Police! I'm laying big juicy charges, I've been insulted! Keep my silly gob shut! Is that any way to speak to a man travelling on government business? May I see your name badge, please? You over there, ladies and gentlemen, you're my witnesses…'

Meanwhile Inga Hallsund didn't say a word, but stretched lasciviously on tables and chairs, touching herself and the security officers sensually during the search, sometimes with deliberate provocation, sometimes apparently unintentionally, moaning and squealing, running her tongue over her lips, putting pens, plastic water bottles or anything else that came to hand in her mouth, and playing her part in what the airport staff were soon calling the Inga and Björn Show. A good many of them arranged to take a break on Friday evenings when the flight from Barcelona arrived so as to be near the security area, in the hope of seeing a new turn added to the show.

You also had to know that at the time Barcelona was the major transit airport for flights from the Greater South, Far South and Farther South regions newly created after the Wars of Liberation, comprising all of what had previously been Africa. Flights from those regions landed in Barcelona without mention of any place of departure, only a numerical code that for the airport staff contained all they needed to know in order to handle the aircraft. Apart from that, it was much the same as with fruit: the airport of a plane's or passenger's departure was always given as the first airport where it landed on Euro-Asian territory. For passengers who lived in Barcelona or simply wanted to stay there after landing, that meant going the long way round through Valencia or Montpellier so that they would have the right to leave Barcelona airport. That was why the Hallsunds officially flew back from Spain every Friday evening, and not even they, with the provocative scenes they staged, would have dreamed of proclaiming to the world that they had been in the Greater Far South region. Although the Civil Code did not yet have the clause about attacks on the Euro-Asian community of values on its statutes, so you couldn't be charged with offences against it, it was already taken for granted in Europe that you didn't mention the world beyond the Fence unless you were willing to run the risk of being lumped in with the likes of terrorists.

The security officers, anyway, soon preferred to wave the Hallsunds through, and even refused to be provoked by Björn Hallsund's challenging references to the jewellery that his wife was still wearing like a proud savage.

‘Hey, dirty pigs, take a look at all those kilos of sparkly stuff my Inga is carrying around with her again. The best possible place to hide a few fine stones from Barcelona, wouldn't you say?'

‘Please go on through, Mr Hallsund.'

‘Or don't you at least want a quick look at Inga's genital piercing? Where's the security dyke to check up on it? Maybe we've fitted a few superb diamonds in those parts too. And look closely – don't you think it's all hanging down a little too heavily there, almost like a cow's udder?'

‘Mr Hallsund, you are holding the other passengers up.'

‘Oh, come on! I can remember days when we were held up for over an hour, just because the security dyke…'

‘Piss off, Hallsund.'

But with time, evidence piled up that diamonds were being smuggled out of the mines that Hallsund visited. More and more frequently, cameras or members of the security service saw workers there in the process of stealing. All the same, the stones were seldom found during the obligatory search when anyone left the diamond-cutting workshops. It was noticeable, however, that between the moment of theft and the time of their body search, the workers always paused briefly somewhere in Hallsund's vicinity as he inspected a wall, a roof, or something of the kind.

So at the airport they began looking closely at the Hallsunds again, although playing it down as far as possible. In that, as it turned out later, they made a bad mistake: they were looking for hiding-places. The more unusual and unimaginable a place seemed to be for hiding diamonds, the more hopefully did the security officers set about examining it. The wheels on suitcases, shoelaces, inside aspirin tablets, Hallsund's dental crowns, match-heads, and all kinds of other things.

Weeks passed in which neither the X-ray devices nor searches of the checked bags produced any result; the Hallsunds were clean. The border security officers, who still kept getting evidence pointing to them from the security services in the mines, began to despair.

Until one day, one of them simply blew his top. Yet again, Hallsund was loudly carrying on about breasts and his government mandate or something, his voice echoing all over the customs area, when the aforesaid officer suddenly went red in the face, started shouting at Hallsund and didn't stop, so that Hallsund's vulgarities and threats were almost drowned out and for the moment he couldn't intimidate anyone. Still bawling them out, the official forced the couple, at gunpoint
, to hand over all their jewellery, watches and piercings – Björn Hallsund too would be wearing a ring or a pearl or something of the kind. While Hallsund immediately phoned his lawyer, and the officials were afraid his connections really would lead to governmental powers of some kind showing up and taking the jewellery, the whole case and their own jobs away, a quick examination showed that Inga's necklaces did indeed contain stolen diamonds.

 

‘Another small contribution to the water supply?'

The waiter had stopped at my table with a friendly and rather mischievous smile. Brought abruptly back from my thoughts, I didn't understand what he was saying at first. I looked into his round, benevolent face, and vaguely grasped that in some way or other his question was meant to be a joke. I felt a momentary pang.

It was incredible: not only did I loathe Chen from the bottom of my heart, I had just been weighing up the possibility that he might have been in the service of international terrorism for years, and yet he and his derisive remarks kept getting me down.
You want to keep well away from anything in the least like humour – it's simply not your bag.

Not for the first time I was judging myself without wanting to – and, if I thought about it for a second, even against my will – by Chen's comments, which were probably just arbitrary and intended to be coarse. Yes, there were situations in which he almost seemed to me to embody some kind of higher authority to which I must answer. That was the only way of explaining why the possibility of my failing to understand the waiter's not particularly cryptic utterance at once almost paralysed me for a moment.

‘I was asking whether you'd like another,' said the waiter, ending the short silence, and at the same moment the penny dropped. I quickly interrupted him. ‘Yes, please, a double.' I winked at him in a knowing and ironic way to smooth over my brief moment of bafflement.

‘On its way,' he replied, took my empty glass and disappeared into the bar.

If you bought a bottle or a 0.5 glass of Brooklyn Original beer, fifteen cents went to support the maintenance of a clean water supply all over the world. It was one of the countless Buy&Help products now available. For instance, if you bought a fermentation-powered SMW (Shanghai Motor Works) car, you were saving half an Asian elephant – which was why those who could afford it would buy two SMWs at once, save a whole elephant and get the right to give it a name, which would be tattooed behind its left ear. Or when you bought a jar of Illy coffee you were donating ten per cent to a medical research project aiming to enable men to get pregnant through uterus implants. In principle, of course, all these were extremely praiseworthy ventures, although it was clear that sales-based calculations were very much to the fore, which was why I took hardly any notice of the Buy&Help campaigns. At least, I was not always automatically aware that the consumption of Brooklyn Organic helped to maintain the water supplies of the world. And at Chez Max, I reflected, we served Jever beer instead.

The waiter soon came back with a 0.5 tankard, put it down in front of me and said, ‘Cheers.'

Although I already had four small beers inside me, I drained half the tankard in a single draft. I needed to feel slightly tipsy, or I couldn't bear the suspicion that Chen's more or less banned political propaganda and pseudo-moralising digressions could also have been just a trick. Could he really have been deliberately expressing himself so frankly and outrageously all this time to keep people from thinking he was doing anything but indulging a taste for sour jokes? Had I been falling for a latter-day Hallsund over the last four years? And above all: would I be able to unmask Super-Chen, the pride of Ashcroft Central Office, Paris, as a criminal enemy of the state?

‘Hey, dirty pigs, take a look at all those kilos of sparkly stuff my Inga is carrying around with her again.' Surely that, quite apart from a similar association between humans and animals, was in principle much the same as saying, ‘People are swine, it's always been like that, it always will be, and the world they create is a pig of a world.' At least it was if you were in the service of international terrorism, the sole aim of which was the destruction of our Western ‘pig of a world' – the very same words used by many of its supporters.

And what was the first step, what had been the foundations of almost all attacks carried out on Euro-Asian territory since the Fence went up? Getting their people in. Wretched desperados, ready for anything, to be accommodated in hiding for a while, for instance in an ordinary-looking building in the Rue de la Roquette, before they blew themselves sky-high at a popular festival or in a place as internationally well known as possible. Or as Chen had put it a little while ago, when I couldn't have guessed what an ambiguous meaning it might have for him: ‘Once it was said that half of humanity lived below the poverty line; today it's said that half of humanity are potential terrorists.'

Even here among us, of course, there were people frustrated by the world in general who let themselves be recruited by religious fanatics or preachers of revolution. But experience showed that for the really lethal attacks – such as the blowing up of Cologne Cathedral with over a thousand dead, or the chemical bombing of the Belgrade Love Parade, death toll over two thousand – the hopelessness, ignorance and hatred of a few young men fresh from some Second World slum were needed. For even the most fervent Euro-Asian sympathiser with so-called freedom movements was probably glad, in some hidden corner of his heart, that over thirty years ago his parents or grandparents had either managed or opted to stay this side of the Fence. For instance, if he could sit quietly here on the terrace of this brasserie while he sympathised, drinking a beer or something else, enjoying the sight of the new rainbow, or maybe for all I know deploring the decadence of such an expensive and useless invention – well, at least he didn't have to fear being shot by the soldiers of some dictator or religious leader for his pro-opposition views, as they did in the Far South or Southeast. Apart from the fact that most of the potential assassins born in the Confederation were of course rendered harmless by Ashcroft agents before they committed any terrorist offences.

I drank some of my beer and looked at the time. Lieutenant Gilbert, our colleague from the Task-Force Safeguarding Peace responsible for surveillance of the building in the Rue de la Roquette, had promised to call me back over half an hour ago. Almost everything depended on why Chen had not been told about the surveillance.

And suppose it had just been an oversight? What if, for instance, Gilbert said, ‘Oh yes, our mistake. If we'd known you divide the buildings on the borderline half and half between you, of course we'd have informed Monsieur Chen too. Why on earth wouldn't we? Several of my people would have been glad to exchange a few words with the famous Chen of the Ashcroft Agency. What did you say your name was again?'

I emptied my glass and signalled to the waiter to bring me another large beer.

… Well then, I was just unlucky.

 

*

 

‘Max Schwarzwald?'

‘Speaking.'

‘Lieutenant Gilbert here. Sorry, our meeting took a little longer than expected. You wanted some information about our operation in your area?'

‘Well… it's about my partner Chen Wu.'

‘Hmhm.'

‘You know, the famous Chen of the Ashcroft Agency.'

‘Of course.'

‘Yes, well… I hope I'm not interfering with anything…'

‘Oh, come on, Monsieur Schwarzwald, we're all pulling together.'

He was right there, of course, but the Task-Force Safeguarding Peace, answering directly to the Ministry of Defence, ranked much higher in the pecking order – or should I say pulling order? – than most of the other Eurosecurity departments. Since TFSP was internationally active, and besides safeguarding the Fence was really responsible for everything in the nature of illegal trafficking between the First and Second Worlds, it was regarded as a kind of James Bond unit. Its members were always on call to go anywhere around the globe, risking their lives on daring missions and snapping up the really tough nuts from Cape Town to Vladivostok. That was why what TFSP said traditionally carried a little more weight than anything similar coming from other departments. For instance, the Three Element Fighter had been developed mainly in response to pressure from the top brass of TFSP. They had been complaining for years that their security people on the sixty-thousand-kilometres-long border were occupied more with the coordinated deployment of shipping, jeeps and aircraft, and ensuring communication between them all, than with pursuing smugglers and terrorists. In addition – and as far as my business was concerned this was far from being the least of it – it was no secret that TFSP, as a department operating internationally with a world-wide network of informants, always worked closely with Eurosecurity Self-Protection, the department that policed the police forces.