Chez Max Read Online Free PDF Page B

tough guy here in Paris, right on the ball. I have recently discovered that there is obviously still no difficulty in getting hold of cigarettes in your part of the world.
    But I knew very well that lately I’d been anything but tough and right on the ball. On the contrary, I’d been neglecting my Ashcroft duties for my work at Chez Max and my increasingly desperate search for a woman to share my life with. That was probably why I’d passed my information on to the Sicilians. If I’d been informing on a terrorist every week, I’d hardly have thought it worth reporting an acquaintance’s occasional indulgence in cigarettes. Instead, the last four weeks had come up with only the young man whose bin Laden poster had happened to catch my eye from my balcony.
    But could I have expected the message I sent to Sicily to have such consequences? Of course not. All the same, I still felt guilty.
    And now Chen. In my present frame of mind, he was about the last person I wanted to see. Still less, however, had I wanted to cancel our appointment and thus show that something wasn’t quite right. I just hoped we’d get through our meeting without any mention of Leon. I could hardly have suppressed the urge to justify myself, and there was no doubt at all that Chen would have made use of that to stage an intellectual bloodbath. Remarks about friendship, trust, loyalty, the duties of an Ashcroft agent, social responsibility, priorities and conscience would all have been left lying on the field of battle, charred, mutilated and smeared with blood, while Chen marched up and down waving flags and beating drums of vanity, cowardice, profit and heartlessness.
    So I firmly made up my mind to meet any provocation offered by Chen over Leon’s arrest with total indifference. I just wanted to get home quickly.
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    As I sat at the desk waiting for Chen to join me so that we could exchange our news on suspicious factors and any overlapping operations in our area, he was standing at the window with a plastic container of noodles and a fork, his back turned to me, looking out at the Eiffel Tower. With his mouth half full, he said: ‘People are swine, it’s always been like that, it always will be, and the world they create is a pig of a world. No laser projection of artificial rainbows on the sky or any other new technological crap is going to change that.’
    He shovelled the next forkful of noodles into his mouth and smacked his lips noisily as he munched. Nothing interested me less at that moment than another of Chen’s misanthropic tirades, but all the same I thought: I really ought to tell him I can’t help agreeing, when I see and hear him eating like that. Humanity hasn’t made much progress since we were crouching in caves devouring wild animals.
    As Ashcroft agents, we’d been sharing responsibility for Quadrate Three of the eleventh arrondissement in Paris for over four years, we met once or twice a week, and Chen nearly always brought some item of fast food with him, consuming it in a way that made me wonder whether he’d had any parents or guardians as a child. But I didn’t have the courage to say anything to Chen about it. Yet, even if it had come to a real quarrel I’d have had nothing to fear. Chen wasn’t popular with our Ashcroft colleagues, and even our boss, Commander Youssef, a man who normally refrained from expressing personal opinions, had let it slip a couple of times that Chen got on his nerves with his sarcasm, his coarse language and constant air of superiority.
    But I wasn’t thinking of any official consequences that disagreement within an Ashcroft team might have, I was just thinking of Chen’s possible retorts. He might say, ‘Oh, does the way I eat bother you? You ought to hear me fart – and smell me too!’ (And if I knew Chen, he would indeed fart as often as possible from then on.) Or perhaps, ‘Oh, sweetie, I’m