Chez Max

by Jakob Arjouni

  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.

  ‘… 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 wa
s 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 ble
w 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.