Chez Max by Jakob Arjouni Page B

week!
    Apart from everything else. For it couldn’t be ruled out that this might be his last date for a long time.
    Or was that my problem? Was I too keen to impress, did I try too hard with women? I’d read a fair bit about that too.
    â€˜Cheers.’
    The café owner put my espresso and Calvados down in front of me, casting me an unfriendly glance. Perhaps he’d really wanted to close the place.
    I sipped the Calvados and wondered what was going on in Chen’s mind at this moment. Nothing at all? All his appointments for the day duly discharged? Discussion at Ashcroft Central Office, then planting flowers and meeting a woman, and the undercover assassins could wait until tomorrow? Work is work and strong liquor is strong liquor?
    But how did all that fit the picture of the idealist that he must be, somewhere deep inside him, an idealist who, though in a negative sense, was risking his freedom and possibly his life to change the world? Or was he active as a terrorist in the same cold-blooded way that he worked as an Ashcroft agent? Because for Chen his Ashcroft work seemed to be nothing but an intellectual game. At least, that was roughly what he had said once, when I plucked up my courage after some new tirade of his against the government, the mayor, or something else, and asked him, ‘Then why are you still doing this work? I mean, why do you of all people spend so long in the service of our society? You’ve been an Ashcroft man for over ten years, you could sign your undertaking of silence and retire now, you’d get a good pension and be a free man. You’d have all the time in the world to do nothing but look after your beloved bushes and flowers.’
    As so often, he had looked up from a plastic container of Chinese junk food and replied, as if speaking to a rather stupid child, ‘Well, sweetie-pie, you ought to have worked that out over the last few years. I like our job. Not all that shit about defending democracy and safeguarding the future, that’s your cup of tea. But I like to sit around watching people, trying to make sense of their behaviour, now and then seeing a crime coming in advance. I haven’t been among the Ashcroft agents with the best quotas in Paris every year because I have aims and values of some kind; it’s because I know my trade. And I know it because I like it.’
    If he liked his trade, could he possibly be organizing suicide bombings at the same time? Did he see everything as just a game? Yet he was neither a megalomaniac – at least, not in the sense of being paranoid, really round the bend – nor tired of life. Far from it: he liked eating, even if most of what he ate was revolting, he liked women, loved plants, was a classical music fan, read books, played table tennis, flew to the Highlands of Scotland once a month to go fishing and drink whisky, had a beautiful apartment with a view of the Père Lachaise cemetery, and was a regular visitor – not just because of his Ashcroft work, I felt sure – to the bars and nightclubs of the eleventh arrondissement. Strictly speaking, there wasn’t a pleasure in life I’d heard of – or at least something he would consider a pleasure – that he had ever declined. Basically, then, it was a joke that Chen of all people would so often bewail the decadence and craving for pleasure of the Western world, with particular reference to me and my restaurant. It wasn’t that he had chosen that oysters, kidneys fried to just the right shade of pink, and a good espresso didn’t mean anything to him. And this evening I wasn’t even sure about that any more: perhaps it was all part of the great game of Hallsund hide-and-seek that he’d been playing for years. At this point I wouldn’t have been totally astonished to hear through the grapevine that, after some successful coup like the death of dozens or sometimes hundreds of white ‘oppressors’ or the