Chez Max

by Jakob Arjouni

  ‘… those hypocritical bastards! “Oh, there’s a man in our cellar! Not that we want to get him into trouble, but perhaps he needs help…” Aha, and what do you know, here comes dear nice Max!’

  ‘Good day, Chen.’

  ‘Wow, good day, Che-e-en! More like good morning to you! My word, dear Max has bags under his eyes too! Been having it off with the sexomat all night long?’ He circled his hips provocatively. ‘Oooh, aaah – come on, you pale, pretty leisure-time photographer with the A1 tits straight out of the catalogue, I’m going to do you doggystyle and call you a slag…’

  ‘That’s okay, Chen.’

  ‘What’s okay?’

  I didn’t answer, just put my briefcase on the desk and started unbuttoning my trench coat.

  ‘Oh, do tell me what’s okay. Is anything okay? Something okay would be a nice change. Well? You can’t just burst in here saying “That’s okay,” and stop at that. Let’s hear it – what’s okay?’

  ‘Oh, Chen!’ I sighed. ‘You’re in a bad mood, and I get it, that’s all I meant.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s “okay” for you if you just get something. Well, I don’t know. Me, I keep getting things, I really get just about everything except space travel and physics and all that crap – but do I always think it’s “okay”? There’s far too much fuss made about getting things anyway. Enlightenment and all that shit. I mean, everyone thinks…’ here Chen adopted a naïve, squeaky tone like a small child, ‘everyone thinks, ooh, if I’m going to improve anything I must get it first, getting things is ever so subtle, look at little me, aren’t I wonderful? Yup, the fact is,’ he concluded, scratching his head like a monkey, ‘getting things is all you need to do.’

  ‘Look, Chen, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Well, human beings, of course, affinities, systems, relationships – the whole filthy world. You were probably thinking of cooking sauerkraut.’

  And so on. When Chen was in the mood for it he would carry on with this verbal cut-and-thrust until I put my trench coat on again and left. At our next meeting he sometimes apologized for his behaviour, sometimes he didn’t.

  In fact the pitiful state of the world and the stupid, brutish nature of human beings and their leaders were among Chen’s favourite subjects. In our early weeks working together, that had both surprised and shaken me. After all, Chen was an Ashcroft man, and thus part of Eurosecurity. We were doing our bit to defend the values and interests of Europe in Quadrate Three of the eleventh arrondissement. We were – as the Ashcroft oath put it – ‘duty bound to show moral, spiritual and active devotion to the government and its laws.’ Chen could afford to talk the way he did only because his contribution to the statistics of crime prevention in the heart of Paris was regularly sensational. Of course some of our colleagues muttered privately that in the ‘noodle-soup alleys’ frequented by Chen, there was no difficulty in foreseeing a crime a week, but I considered that plain racism.

  In the first few years after the Peking Treaty of 2038, which had both eased travel between China and Europe and greatly increased the annual quota of legal immigration, over a million Chinese had moved to the Greater Paris area. Of course many illegal immigrants also arrived and stayed, but most immigrants had the right papers. Generally they settled in the suburbs, but there were also several parts of the city centre where the population was now ninety per cent Chinese, or European of Chinese descent. The dividing line between Chinatown Voltaire and the part of the eleventh arrondissement where the population was mainly white ran through the quadrate that Chen and I covered. Apart from the fact that I had been operating successfully in my own area there for over fifteen years and had set up ideal cover in the form of Chez Max, it had been only natural to recruit Chen for surveillance of the Chinese area because of his family origins and his knowledge of Mandarin. He worked there as a municipal gardener tending public parks, trees and flowerboxes. The job meant that he was out of doors most of the time, could stand around observing things without arousing any suspicion, dropped easily into conversation with passers-by on innocuous subjects such as flower varieties or the height of hedges, and never needed to come up with an explanation if he thought it a good idea to take a closer look at an apartment or a cellar. There was always a handy tree with an allegedly diseased crown that had to be inspected from the balcony or window of the apartment concerned, or Chen might invent an underground watercourse to be laid out for the shrubs in the nearby playground: he had to examine the floor of the suspect cellar with a special instrument, he said, to decide just where the watercourse would run.

  In my own view, Chen’s success as an Ashcroft agent was based on excellent cover, familiarity with the customs and habits of the local inhabitants, his special gift for observation, his intelligence, and what, when I thought of his frequently unpleasant and contemptuous assessment of other people, was a remarkable ability to empathise.

  In addition, it had been statistically proven that in districts with a high percentage of Chinese inhabitants, on average just as many crimes of just the same kinds were committed as in socio-economically comparable white areas. And since the population of Chinatown Voltaire consisted largely of sole traders, white-collar workers, craftsmen, restaurateurs, lawyers, doctors and artists, the crimes detected by Chen in advance were mainly cases of insurance and tax fraud, child abuse, rape, blackmail and murder motivated by avarice or jealous rage. What envious colleagues said about him was thus nonsense in every way. On the contrary: if there was one weak point in Chen’s activity as an Ashcroft agent, and this had struck me over and over again during the years we’d been working together, it was that in his advance detection work, the crimes usual in immigrant quarters, those that our colleagues had in mind when they tried to smear his success rate, were hardly ever committed. Theft, extortion and gambling were thin on the ground, as were drug-related crimes – although the weakness of many Chinese for cigarettes was notorious, and smoking was still regarded as a mere peccadillo in China. And there was little illegal immigration or terrorist propaganda. So little, in fact, that anyone other than Super-Chen would probably long ago have laid himself open to suspicion of taking bribes or actually conniving in crime. For of course Chinatown Voltaire had its gangs of young tearaways, its drug dealers, people-smugglers and radical political activists. It almost seemed as if Chen wanted to portray his area of operations in a certain light – oddly enough, as I sometimes reflected in surprise, in the gentle, all-enveloping light of the upper middle class that he liked to deride at the top of his voice. A light that blurred the lines.

  ‘… let them think everything’s fine for another few days. Sure, we can project rainbows on the sky! Next thing you know we’ll be reconstructing the Lord God himself, giving him a bit more authority and assertiveness, and then all that love-your-neighbour stuff will work properly at last.’

  Chen raised the plastic container to his mouth and slurped up what was left of the sauce. I looked out of the window. I wished I could have listened out of the window too.

  Scarcely three hundred metres away, the Eiffel Tower rose against the radiant blue of the spring sky. Muted shouting and laughter floated up from the Champ de Mars. Soon the moment would come. The event had been announced in all the media weeks ago: an artificial rainbow to arch above the Eiffel Tower. Technically that was nothing very new; in principle it worked just like the Cinema In The Sky that had existed for years now. The difference was that films could be shown on Cinema In The Sky only after dark, so that after the first flush of enthusiasm its popularity with the public had waned relatively quickly. Senior citizens and families with children soon found it far from pleasant to have the night sky turned into a single huge cinema screen every other summer evening. You did need to wear headphones to hear the sound track, but groups of spectators on balconies and in roof gardens still made so much noise that those who weren’t watching the film could hardly hope to get to sleep until it finished. And then there was the light problem. Although
the regional departments of Cinema In The Sky tried to pick films that suited the evening atmosphere, almost every movie had some scenes set in daylight out of doors, and often bathed an entire city or a country area in bright sunlight for minutes on end at eleven at night. The one way to escape the show was to close your windows and shutters in the middle of summer. Only in Spain had Cinema In The Sky enjoyed unbroken popularity for years. By dint of collecting signatures on petitions and staging public protests, the people in many towns there had even managed to get the films shown later, on the grounds that if they began at nine or ten in the evening hardly anyone would get to eat an evening meal. However, in the rest of Europe the Cinema In The Sky technology was now used only on special and usually serious occasions, for instance for important government announcements or the promulgation of new laws. As a means of entertainment and amusement it had largely lapsed into oblivion. That had to be the explanation for why so many Parisians were wild with excitement at the prospect of seeing an artificial rainbow over the city. Since six in the morning, people had been queuing for tickets to the great Fête Arc-en-Ciel which was to begin in half an hour’s time under the Eiffel Tower and on the Champ de Mars, with the appearance of the rainbow and a performance by the Veterans’ Band of the Border Guards. After that there would be speeches by several members of the Brussels government, as well as the Governor of France and the Mayor of Paris, followed by an aerial ballet performed by the famous Danone School of Dance from Montpellier, a TEF air show, and finally the opening of the Peace Buffet, which was one and a half kilometres long. For the rainbow was to symbolise, not least, Europe’s progress from the building of the Fence and the Wars of Liberation into an ever more peaceful and better future in which life would be more and more worth living.

  Without taking my eyes off the Eiffel Tower I said, in the patient and forbearing tone that I had determined to adopt for this meeting, ‘Well, it’ll be nice if the rainbow makes a few people happy.’

  ‘Why will it be nice? I’ve known people who were made happy by beating their own children or gunning someone down.’

  ‘Oh, Chen …’ I sighed. ‘That’s nonsense. It didn’t make them happy. Such people are sick. And even if it did make them happy, surely it’s better for them to look at a rainbow.’

  ‘You mean that’s the choice? Gunning someone down or the rainbow? Maybe you’re right. Many might see it that way. But I’m afraid most wouldn’t want to commit themselves. And then again: just how brutal is it, looking at a rainbow when someone’s snuffing it next door?’

  Oh please, I thought, not that stupid stuff again. Sometimes Chen really did talk like a depressive sixteen-year-old, or a rabble-rouser at some provincial university. After four years it was still a mystery to me how a man of his intelligence could seriously come out with such hollow, outmoded ideas. He probably just wanted to provoke me, but sometimes he took a tone that made me feel that these were the only ideas he really believed in.

  Maintaining my equable tone, I replied: ‘No one will be snuffing it next door. What ideas you think up! Far from it. We’ve never had it so good. There’s enough food to eat – and although that doesn’t interest you, it’s quality food – there’s enough work, nature is healthy, our seas are clean, medicine is making progress all the time, soon we’ll have an average life expectancy of a hundred, and according to the latest surveys seventy per cent of the population consider themselves happy.’

  Chen looked expressionlessly at me for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, threw the empty plastic container into the waste paper basket and the fork into the washbasin and said, sounding bored, ‘I don’t know if you’re suffering from some kind of partial memory loss. Let me remind you that there’s no question that there is not enough food in many areas behind the Fence, let alone “quality food”.’

  I felt the blood drain from my face. And I’d firmly determined not to let that happen in front of him today. Because Chen registered everything, and once he’d exposed my emotions he’d find it easy to hit me below the belt, if that was what he wanted to do, by the mention of Leon’s arrest, enriched by a wealth of allusions. And in fact I’d been surprised that he didn’t bring the subject up as soon as we were in the office together. ‘Well, my dear Max, busy protecting society again? Hauling a friend in front of the Examining Committee because he wanted to buy cigarettes! I suppose we all have our priorities.’

  I’d been prepared for that, but not for what he’d just said. Because in spite of his unconcealed dislike of many aspects of present conditions, during the years we’d worked together Chen had seldom overstepped a certain line, and then only when he was drunk – which had always given me a good reason to forget the incident quickly. But the mere mention of certain global subjects ought to make me report him to Commander Youssef. Of course we could talk about the Fence – in fact we had to, since after all it was one of the duties of an Ashcroft agent to make sure it was maintained in good order and no one could get over it, and we did that by tracking down organizations that aimed to destroy it. A line had to be drawn, all the same. It wasn’t laid down in law or stipulated in any decree, but everyone knew it. Commander Youssef had once put it this way in a lecture that he gave in-house: we had to think of the regions beyond the Fence as we thought of the Moon – politically speaking, there was just as little to be discussed. The Moon couldn’t be liberated either, and no one was doing it any wrong. In the course of an Ashcroft investigation we could, of course, pretend to express certain views to a suspect for the purpose of gathering evidence, but otherwise the rule was: anything said about the regions beyond the Fence, other than the geographical facts, counted as propaganda and an attack on our Euro-Asian community of values.

  That was the official formula in the Civil Code: ‘Attacks on our Euro-Asian community of values.’ Quite a lot could come under that heading, and sometimes even I wondered if the point couldn’t have been made a little more precisely. In most cases it depended on your personal judgement whether something was an attack or just thoughtless talk. Of course I knew that behind it all was the aim of bringing the population up to have a sense of responsibility, motivating citizens to think about what they did and said and examine it, instead of just stolidly keeping the rules. But an Ashcroft agent could sometimes find himself floundering. For instance, was my greengrocer’s casually ironic throwaway remark about ‘A1 bananas from sunny Nantes’ just a joke, or could it be seen as the beginnings of a verbal attack on the Euro-Asian community of values? Because of course Nantes was only one of the ports where fruits and other produce from South America and Africa arrived. But as both Africa and large parts of south America lay beyond the Fence, the only way of describing the origin of the bananas was by their last point of delivery, in this case the northern French port of Nantes with its heavy average rainfall. Then there was the lady who lived next door to me and mentioned her Senegalese grandfather whose native land she’d so much like to visit, adding bitterly that unfortunately Senegal was now under water, so she supposed her distant relations had evolved into fish. It was a fact that on official maps, like those shown on the TV news, all areas beyond the fence were plain blue, as if they were part of the oceans.

  But talk about an alleged lack of food among the population living beyond the Fence – without a doubt, that was a deliberate attack on our joint Euro-Asian values. Because even if, on closer examination, living conditions there might be approaching some critical point or other, claiming hunger was ridiculous. After all, everyone knew that almost all our nutritional requirements were supplied by goods from South America, Africa and Asia. North America did make a contribution, but few thought much of its predominantly symbolic significance. Since the bankrupt USA had been excluded from Europe, European governments had always tried to point out the importance of North America as a supplier of grain and meat to the Euro-Asian world, for one thing in order to justify, to their own people, the huge subsidies granted annually to US agriculture, for another to encourage a sense of communit
y with our ‘poor relation’ Uncle Sam overseas. The logic of this increasingly escaped most Euro- Asians of the younger generation.

  But being poor – or at least not as prosperous as the Euro-Asian community – didn’t mean starving, not by a long way. Neither in North America nor in the areas commonly known as ‘the fluid regions’ because they were shown in blue. On the contrary, even during the war or during periods of great over-population, farmers and herdsmen had naturally always been the last to run short of food. So what Chen had said was pure propaganda. Dangerous, too. I had no idea what was bugging him to make him say such a thing to me.

  Chen had crossed his arms and was watching me with a lurking half-smile. I didn’t know where to look. Why was he displaying such smug self-satisfaction now of all times? I felt like getting to my feet and saying, ‘Right, I’m going to visit Commander Youssef and tell him we have a terrorist cell here in Ashcroft Central Office.’ Just to see Chen’s face.

  At that very moment his mouth stretched in a genuine grin, and he shook his head. ‘Sometimes I really wonder why they ever recruited you as an Ashcroft agent. You’re easier to see through than my seven-year-old niece. But probably that’s just why you’re successful. No one can imagine that there’s anything shady about you. Right now you’re thinking of going to our superior officer. And what do you think I’ll tell him myself?’