I had no idea what Leon was talking about. Once again I looked at his profile and didn’t move a muscle myself. Not for fear of saying something wrong this time, however, but out of respect. Obviously Leon was fighting his own inner demons.
After a while I asked, ‘So how did those six months go?’
Leon looked up as if he wasn’t sure where he was. ‘What?’
‘The six months Junowicz & Kleber gave you to paint their series – what did you do?’
‘Oh, that.’ Leon picked up his glass of wine and drained it. As he poured more, he said, ‘After a month I stopped drinking, just like that, not another drop and then…’ he smiled sardonically, ‘then I reinvented myself. Painted my fruit as if painting fruit was the biggest joke in the world. Exaggerated the colours until they were sheer kitsch, put the fruit in rubbish bins or on paintings in galleries with visitors eating the fruit off the canvas, that sort of thing. I still had this mental picture of myself sitting with the Junowicz & Kleber people in the room behind the gallery, drinking champagne and making brilliant conversation. In my mind I was already so famous, my work was so highly thought of, that it struck me as extremely clever to make fun of my own stuff.’
He paused, and I took my chance to say quickly, ‘Well, I can imagine it was very funny to have people eating the fruit.’
‘Yes, exactly,’ agreed Leon, nodding slightly, and I couldn’t guess from his expression just how he really meant his ‘Yes, exactly’. Then he added, ‘But that doesn’t matter. After another month I came to, and then I finally began working properly.’
Leon stopped and took a deep breath, as if he had to steel himself before he went on. ‘And it worked. They wanted twenty pictures, three weeks later I had the first ten finished, and if I’m not much mistaken they were the best still lifes I ever painted. It was as if I had new eyes, as if I were suddenly seeing strong, living, startling colours again, and the arrangements and perspectives were so easy, it all came as naturally as if there wasn’t any other way to put flowers or fruit down on the canvas. Friends who came to my studio couldn’t take their eyes off those pictures. As if the fruit on my canvas had more juice in it, more magic about it, than the real fruit in their kitchens. Or as if my pictures showed them, for the first time, what marvels Nature or God or whatever you like to call it creates. I had the feeling I’d found my way to the heart of it all. My pictures were the truth. So yes, they were only fruit and flowers, but the good Lord didn’t start out with human desperation or couples locked in amorous frenzy, he began with single-cell organisms and photosynthesis – fish and leaves.’
For a moment Leon looked as if his words were little living creatures and he was watching them go, waiting expectantly to see if they’d be walking upright after this speech or slinking away, ashamed. Then his face suddenly changed, he cried angrily, ‘Yes, I felt like God Almighty! Except that God didn’t collapse after three days out of sheer terror that he couldn’t keep the standard up. Or else he simply didn’t realize what amazing stuff he was creating. As for me, I stood looking at my ten pictures, ten out of the twenty, I could already see the delighted faces of visitors to the gallery, I heard the critics’ praise – and then suddenly, literally, I could hardly move any more. It began with numbness, first in my shoulders, then in my arms, and a few days later the shaking began. To this day the doctors haven’t found out what’s wrong. My muscles, my sinews, my brain – apparently they’re all fine, but as soon as I pick up a brush or a pencil and get in front of a canvas, or just sit down with a pad of paper…’ He raised his arm and mimed an uncontrollable tremor. ‘No kidding. It’s been like that for over fifteen years. I can write letters by hand, I can even thread a needle, but the moment I so much as think of drawing or painting… Oh, I still have my studio in Palermo, sometimes I fly there for an evening, sit by the sea, drink a couple of glasses of wine, act as if everything was normal, try to relax, to dream, I talk to a waiter I’ve known for the last fifteen years, I listen to the waves, and when the wine and the salty sea air have made me feel strong enough I pay the bill, and the waiter, who doesn’t know anything about my block, wishes me good luck with my painting in his usual way. Then I go over to the studio in the old warehouse, just to sit with my easels and canvases for a while, breathing in the smell of paint and turpentine and smoking a cigarette or two. I have a cleaning lady who comes in once a month, there’s no dust lying around, and it looks as if I’d painted my last picture only yesterday. So I sit there, I look around me, I smoke – everything’s fine. Until I suddenly think of a flower or something like that. Usually it’s flowers, always something really simple like daisies. And I see the flower more and more clearly in my mind’s eye, I know just where to position it, how the shadow will fall, how I’ll use the colours, and then I tell myself: no, just a simple sketch. No colours, no background, no shadowing. A quick drawing of a flower, the sort of thing you’d doodle while you’re talking on the phone. After all, when I made a note of something yesterday I could still use a pencil…’
I looked at the TEF and sighed. What a disaster! What Leon had told me that evening still seemed to me total proof of his artistic vocation, even more so at this moment, when he was probably already in handcuffs. The honesty of his description of his torments and his megalomania, his contempt for his own corrupt nature, the intensity he devoted to everything. And of course the pictures. I’d looked on the Internet the next day, and through various roundabout links I’d finally tracked down two reproductions of works by Leon Chechik in a Budapest gallery: ‘Apples In Front of a Blue Sofa’, and ‘Almond Blossom Ecstasy’. I downloaded them to my smart three-by-three metres BTL original-reflection wall, and was fascinated. Sure enough, I’d never seen such fantastic almond blossom in real life. It positively exploded into the room out of a blue, sunny sky; it seemed as if I could touch the sea of flowers bathing me in a clear, pale pink light. I automatically thought of springtime, youth, being in love. I seemed to smell the sweet scent of the blossom. To think that an oil painting could do something like that! And because of the zero per cent additional lighting of the original-reflection wall, I could be sure that the colours in Budapest were at least as bright as those I saw here. How I would have liked to tell Leon the next day what an impression his pictures had made on me! I even left ‘Apples In Front of a Blue Sofa’ as a permanent wall-saver; the sight of those apples rolling out of the basket as it tipped over, scattering apparently at random over the tiled floor and around the legs of the sofa, made me feel so calm and happy. But when Leon came into Chez Max that evening with a girlfriend, greeted the waiters as cheerfully as usual and joked about my Teutonic dive and German dumplings, I instantly dismissed the idea. For I knew what pain was hidden behind that façade. Any compliment paid to Leon, however heartfelt, would only remind him of fifteen years of artist’s block. And a cheerful façade, I said to myself, is better than no cheerfulness at all.
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 sm
ugglers 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 towa
rds 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.
Chez Max Page 2
