‘I should think you do,’ said the café owner, with awe in his voice.
‘Thinking is exactly what we don’t want you doing. You’re not to think anything about me, you’re to forget me.’ I picked up the glass sugar-caster from the bar. ‘And to make sure you understand that…’ I swung my arm back and threw the sugar-caster into the array of spirits lined up in front of a mirror on the wall. Bottles and bits of broken mirror-glass crashed to the floor, as the café owner jumped out of the way in alarm. ‘Understand? That was your shelf of spirits, and your life is just as fragile.’
Then I turned and hurried out of the café. Outside, I saw Chen pushing the wheelbarrow ahead of him, walking slowly down the boulevard with the woman towards the Bastille. He had his tool-shed somewhere there.
I followed them under cover of the trees and shrubs. As I passed the flowerbed that Chen had been planting, I stopped and looked at the result of his labours, feeling oddly moved. The red roses were planted in the shape of a heart, and the name ‘Natalia’ was written in the middle of it in daisies.
Twenty minutes later I was hiding behind an advertising billboard near Père Lachaise, watching Chen on the other side of the road giving an order in a Vietnamese restaurant with a takeaway service. The woman – Natalia, I assumed – was standing close to him, nodding to everything he showed her on the menu.
As they waited for the food to arrive Natalia moved away from him, went to the door of the restaurant, stepped out into the street and glanced around. She was probably looking for a wine merchant. Perhaps she didn’t fancy cheap Asian beer.
I quickly felt in my pockets for the contact lenses with the built-in camera. But I must have left them at Chez Max, and all I had on me that I could use to take her picture was the sexomat shooter. I felt a little uncomfortable about that, but I knew it was for purely professional reasons, after all.
Keeping it under my jacket, I set the shooter to a distance of fifteen to twenty metres away, held it at half height beside the billboard, got Natalia in the viewfinder, and pressed the Shoot button. I filmed her as she clattered a little way down the street on her high heels, looked down the next side street, turned and went back to the restaurant.
I automatically glanced at the time and movement gauge. Natalia had been in the picture for over a minute, and the sexomat would be able to reproduce seventy-three per cent of her possible movements. But of course that didn’t interest me. I only needed her face. I was going to feed it into the Ashcroft computer and find out if she had ever come to our attention for forbidden political activities or showing sympathy with terrorist groups.
A little later the two of them left the restaurant with a bag full of food containers, and went hand in hand towards Chen’s apartment. Chen was still wearing his work clothes, and Natalia’s high heels made her a little taller than he was. An odd couple. Beauty and the Beast. Not that Natalia, so far as I could conclude from my observations, was my type – I preferred self-assured women, women of character who ordered their own food and didn’t lie down, so to speak, in front of a man’s bedroom door in their clickety-clack heels and clothes saying ooh, here I am, eat me all up! All the same, there was no denying that objectively speaking Natalia was attractive, in the same way as, objectively speaking, Chen was a little slitty-eyes wearing trousers caked with mud. Extraordinary.
Outside Chen’s apartment building, there was a front garden with a gravel path leading through it. As the two of them went towards the door, I was standing about twenty metres away behind a refuse separator. Chen suddenly bent down, picked up a handful of gravel, turned towards the street and threw it my way. I ducked, the gravel hit the refuse separator and the parked bicycles. Natalia laughed.
What was that stupid stuff for? To impress her? But Chen was too old for such things. Or had Natalia perhaps said, ‘This is a really posh pad you live in!’ That would have matched her garish get-up. On seeing something really tasteful and stylish – and you couldn’t describe the nineteenth- century architecture of the building where Chen lived as anything else – the common suburban princess, hairdresser or tanning salon hostess by trade with dreams of a career as a film star and her own home could resort only to a silly adolescent pose and call it a ‘posh pad’ on account of her lack of education and culture. And Chen, his brain totally flooded by testosterone, would cheerfully go along with her and say something like, ‘Yes, how about we wake up the stuffed shirts who live here?’ Whereupon Natalia would go into fits of laughter and say, ‘Man, are you ever crazy!’
What an undignified exchange!
When I leaned forward again, the two of them had disappeared. Soon after that the light went on in Chen’s apartment. I saw him appear at the window two or three times, and once I had a feeling that he was looking straight at me. I ducked back behind the refuse separator. Then he drew the curtains, and the light inside changed as if they’d lit some candles.
I watched the shadows moving back and forth behind the curtains for a while, until they too disappeared, and an odd feeling overcame me: incredulity at first, then an increasingly empty sense of depression.
So that was it for today. No haul of ‘diamonds’, no sighting of Chen meeting any suspiciously Middle Eastern characters, and no busy preparations to move the illegals.
Instead I suddenly saw myself, lurking alone and rather pointlessly behind a refuse separator, my shoes in a foaming puddle, the smell of the bio-refuse bin in my nostrils. And up there Chen was having a good time.
I stepped out of the puddle and wiped my shoes on a strip of grass. But of course his conduct was an almost perfect imitation of Björn Hallsund: ice-cold, brazen, ignorant. He acted in the firm belief that all the rest of the human race were fools. How else could he simply go to bed with a girlfriend on an evening like this? Suppose the TFSP had finally had enough of it, picked up the illegals and subjected them to high-urgency interrogation? Within half an hour they’d have a description of the Iranians’ Chinese contact man. Blowing yourself sky-high was one thing, quick and presumably painless, standing up to a high-pressure interrogation was something else.
But his very ignorance, I felt sure, would finally be Chen’s downfall. I just had to hope the TFSP people wouldn’t snap this titbit up from under my nose.
On the way home I stopped at Le Canard and bought myself an artichoke sandwich with a thick slice of foie gras and truffles. A festival for the taste buds, as the ad for the famous bistro put it. I felt I’d earned it.
5
Next morning I was standing in the interior courtyard of Chez Max with Alexi, one of my waiters, a young man in his early twenties, examining the ivy growing up the walls and now reaching the roof, where it was beginning to raise and shift some tiles.
I had a hangover. It had taken me a long time to calm down last night, and once home I’d drunk two bottles of Franconian wine before I was finally able to get to sleep. All the same, I had woken at seven in the morning even without an alarm. After a quick breakfast I’d called Alexi, got him out of bed, and asked him to come in early to get the courtyard in order. Of course it could have been put off until next day or next week, but I had to stay at Chez Max until we began serving lunch, and I was too nervous just to sit around or to concentrate on paperwork and the accounts. I could hardly wait to carry on shadowing Chen, and until then I thought it would be a good idea to occupy my mind with something practical like the ivy.
‘Boss, why is our fish soup called Soup Günter? There was a customer asked me that again yesterday.’
‘It’s the first name of a German winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The recipe was his.’
‘When did he live, then?’
‘Beginning of the century.’
The ivy had to go. The problem was that over the years the stems, some of them by now up to twenty centimetres thick, had practically grown into the natural stone walls and merged with them. We weren’t getting anywhere with the saw we’d borrowed from a neighbour.
‘For liter
ature?’ said Alexi, yawning. His hair was still untidy from his night’s sleep. ‘Kind of a shame he’s only remembered for a soup recipe, then.’
‘He isn’t.’
Alexi thought about it. He was a nice lad, but not all that bright.
‘Someone was asking about it, though,’ he finally said.
‘We need an axe.’
‘Yup.’
‘Right. You go round to the garden centre and buy one.’
‘Maybe we could borrow one from next door.’
‘Kindly just go and buy one!’
Alexi gave me a funny look. I didn’t know myself exactly why I wanted an axe of our own, but I did. Surely Chez Max could afford its own axe!
‘Go on, get moving.’
‘Okay, boss.’
When Alexi had left I went into the restaurant and made myself a double espresso behind the bar. As I did, I was thinking of the surprised look on Alexi’s face when I insisted on buying the axe. Had I sounded impatient, even angry? I mean, was wanting to buy an axe anything out of the ordinary?
It was probably just the typical Ashcroft reflex, which was to regard any action as suspicious if there was no obvious reason for it – but I suddenly thought I ought to come up with a more plausible explanation than simply saying that Chez Max could afford its own axe.
And it didn’t take me long to think of one either: I certainly didn’t want to start any rumours that we had to scrimp and save over even the smallest purchases. Of course, this was rubbish. On the other hand, our takings at Chez Max had been steadily dropping for over a year now, and my waking nightmare from the evening before was still weighing on my mind.
When I’d come home from shadowing Chen, and after I had indulged myself for a while, over that Franconian wine, imagining how different, how easy life without Chen would be, the balance of the whole thing had suddenly shifted. All at once I was thinking about sharing duties in Quadrate Three of the eleventh arrondissement with a new partner, one who couldn’t be expected to achieve such a high quota as Chen’s or anywhere near it. And that could mean I’d be on the way out myself. Because in the eyes of our colleagues and superiors I was, without a doubt, the quiet force at Chen’s side who always represented the voice of reason, thus making his success possible in the first place. Of course, for a while I could live on my reputation as the man who unmasked Super- Chen, but how long would that last? Within a few months Commander Youssef was bound to remember our successful operations of the past. And at some point he might say, ‘I’m sorry, Schwarzwald, but it looks as if you’re not much good to us without Chen. Why don’t you think of taking early retirement?’ Which would mean closing down Chez Max, because without my Ashcroft subsidy for setting up and maintaining a convincing long-term façade, I couldn’t keep the restaurant with its twelve permanent employees going.
And that nightmare hadn’t surfaced in my mind out of nowhere, either. A few weeks ago Youssef had summoned me to his office.
‘Listen, Schwarzwald,’ he had said, coming straight to the point, ‘considering that Wu is your partner, your own operational success rate may never look particularly good, but I think you’re letting things slide a bit at the moment.’
It was like a slap in the face. Youssef didn’t have the reputation of being especially picky, nor was he considered a really tough guy. Far from it: he generally let things take their course, left us to do our work in whatever way we thought right, and intervened only when he feared that the conduct of an individual might damage the department’s good name. Most people saw him as being in full command. Myself, I was more inclined to share the opinion of Chen, who had once said, ‘Youssef has a seaside villa in Perpignan, a pretty wife, and two more years to go until retirement. So he’s not going to let any kind of shit upset him.’
‘I’m sorry, Commander, but over these last few weeks I’ve had…’
‘Don’t give me reasons, please,’ he interrupted me. ‘In the last month alone, inhabitants of your area have murdered one man, raped two women, and raided two business premises – and you didn’t give me so much as a word of warning about the perpetrators of any of those crimes.’
‘But it’s been proved that the murder was committed in a moment of strong emotion, and the rapist was only fifteen.’
‘I said no reasons please. And what do you mean, he was only fifteen?’
‘Well, he was still a child. You can say it’s wrong of me, but when it comes to children I’m still convinced of the fundamental goodness of humanity.’
‘Are you, indeed? How nice. And what do you think those two women would say about it? Furthermore, your “child” was getting on for six foot tall, and only two months earlier he’d been caught giving a false age while trying to buy a sexomat. If you don’t think that’s enough to arouse suspicion…’
A little later I had stepped out of Youssef ’s office, feeling dazed, and stopped at a bar on my way home. And my success rates hadn’t improved since then either.
I stirred sugar into my espresso and thought: well, let’s hope all that’s about to change over the next few days.
At any rate, considering my smouldering existential fears of the last few months, it seemed to me only sensible to rule out any possibility that our neighbour might go around saying we were always borrowing tools from him, just as if we were penniless students or sub-tenants.
The axe had a handle about fifty centimetres long, and its blade was sharp as a knife.
‘Go carefully,’ I told Alexi as he started hacking at the ivy stems. ‘And then dig out as much of the roots as you can.’
Alexi let the axe drop and looked up at the walls of our inner courtyard. ‘I kind of feel there ought to be something growing here, all the same. I think the walls will look very bare without that ivy.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I was thinking of Virginia creeper or wisteria instead. And perhaps a few climbing roses.’
‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘And we could plant olive or lemon trees in the corners. It never gets too cold for them here in the courtyard. Or little bay trees, bay always smells nice and it keeps its leaves in winter. If you like – well, a friend of mine is a gardener, I could ask him some time.’
‘Thanks, Alexi, but…’ I hesitated. A totally absurd idea had just occurred to me. Or maybe it wasn’t so absurd after all? When I came to think of it – why not at least take advantage of knowing Chen for once? Yes, it was a little macabre just before I was going to expose him, but did the two really have anything to do with each other? Chen was still a gardener, a good one too, and he could hardly refuse to design me a planting plan for the courtyard. I almost grinned gleefully: so at the very end of our partnership we’d for once be working almost as a team for an afternoon. Not that I seriously imagined it, let alone wanted it, but perhaps it wouldn’t have been entirely unthinkable if Chen hadn’t said, on our first meeting four years ago, ‘Oh, and all that teamwork guff, it doesn’t work with me.’
‘Teamwork guff?’
‘You know what I mean: shadowing suspects together, hanging around in some café waiting for something, putting on a big double act in front of the suspects – I’d really rather have as little as possible to do with your area.’
‘Okay.’
To Alexi, I said, ‘As it happens I know a gardener myself. An old acquaintance of mine. He’ll do it for free.’
‘Oh, that’s all right, then.’
Once again he looked as if there was something unusual about my behaviour. This time I couldn’t help myself. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’
He started slightly. ‘Oh, no reason.’
‘Come on, tell me.’
‘It’s just that … you seem so absent-minded today. But I guess you’re just over-tired. All that business can’t have been easy for you.’
‘All what business?’
‘Well, I mean your friend being arrested and all. The painter. It must have come as quite a shock. And him going behind your back too. I’ve heard he kind of r
an his sales from the restaurant. It’s not fair to go dragging your friends into a thing like that.’
I couldn’t think what to say in reply.
‘Anyway, I’d have thought he could just as well have done his drug dealing in one of the cafés down on the boulevard, instead of giving your restaurant a bad name.’
‘What do you mean, a bad name?’
‘Well, people talk, of course. And there’s a whole lot of artists and suchlike come here – but if you mention Chez Max these days, everyone comes out with stories about wild parties and sniffing coke.’
‘Really?’ I asked in surprise.
Alexi leaned forward, lowering his voice, and said, ‘So that’s why I’m pretty sure that one of that lot over there…’ and he pointed in the direction of the Eiffel Tower, ‘… comes in here to eat quite often.’
‘Hm. Yes, I see.’ I nodded. ‘Well, no need for us to worry about that. After all, we don’t have wild parties here, or coke-sniffing either.’
‘Be careful, boss. If they want to catch someone at it, they’ll find something. For instance, your friend,’ he was almost whispering now, ‘I’ve heard from other people that all he really did was smoke a cigarette now and then.’
‘Oh, come on, Alexi,’ I snapped. ‘First you tell me how unfair it was of Leon to peddle his drugs in my restaurant, now you suddenly say he only smoked occasional cigarettes.’
‘I don’t know which is right, boss. I’m only saying, mind your back. It would be too bad if anything happened to Chez Max.’
Too bad! I repeated that in my head.
‘Thanks, Alexi. But now would you get to work on that ivy? I’d like to see the first wall cleared by the time we start serving lunch.’
I made myself another espresso in the restaurant, and after I’d made sure that Alexi couldn’t see me I added a shot of Calvados.
Chez Max Page 10
