Chez Max Read Free Page B

the next day what an impression his pictures had made on me! I even left ‘Apples In Front of a Blue Sofa’ as a permanent wall-saver; the sight of those apples rolling out of the basket as it tipped over, scattering apparently at random over the tiled floor and around the legs of the sofa, made me feel so calm and happy. But when Leon came into Chez Max that evening with a girlfriend, greeted the waiters as cheerfully as usual and joked about my Teutonic dive and German dumplings, I instantly dismissed the idea. For I knew what pain was hidden behind that façade. Any compliment paid to Leon, however heartfelt, would only remind him of fifteen years of artist’s block. And a cheerful façade, I said to myself, is better than no cheerfulness at all.
    Not that any of that, now I knew about Leon’s smoking, kept me from emailing my colleagues in Palermo a few days later and mentioning in a tone of mild reproof that, as I had recently discovered, there was obviously still no difficulty in getting hold of cigarettes in their part of the world. There had been a total ban on smoking for over thirty years now. Anyone selling cigarettes faced jail, and for the last fifteen years smoking had also been a criminal offence for the consumer. However, I often heard that in the outlying regions of Europe – Sicily, eastern Russia, Turkey – smoking was still a part of everyday life for some sections of the population. Historically, Sicily had always been a problem when it came to enforcing pan-European laws and regulations, and I didn’t expect any reaction to my email. But I wanted our colleagues at least to know that their lax attitude to cigarette smuggling did not go unnoticed. Only in passing, and to prevent it from looking as if I’d made the whole thing up to make myself look important, did I mention Leon’s name. So I was all the more surprised when I had an answer from Palermo two weeks later, giving information about a gang of smugglers who were planning to set up a kind of chain of sales outlets for all banned drugs, from heroin to cigarettes, in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. And not only that: the painter Leon Chechik, whom I had mentioned, had been a close acquaintance of one of the gang bosses for about a year.
    It wasn’t the first attempt to distribute drugs on a large scale and systematically, so to speak – hence the term ‘chain of sales outlets’ – and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, although such attempts had proved unsuccessful in north-west Europe for many years now. For one thing, because there was a much denser network of Ashcroft agents here than in the south and east, for another because of different mindsets, or at least that was my own view, and many of my colleagues in Paris shared it.
    At first the information from Palermo just made me extra watchful for drug-dealing, because where Leon was concerned, so I told myself after my first mild shock on hearing that he knew the gang boss, well, of course he had to find a source of supply for his cigarettes, and ultimately it didn’t matter if he got them that way or from some old lady topping up her pension.
    But the next week I saw Leon in Chez Max having a noticeably discreet conversation with a stranger. Although I’d have liked to overlook it or dismiss it as meaningless, all the alarm bells rang. Rather reluctantly, and with a queasy feeling in my guts, I took over serving from one of the waiters, went to the washroom and fitted the skin-coloured simultaneous translation button specially made for my inner ear into place – you could spot it only in bright light and from an almost impossible angle – and then I started working on Ashcroft business.
    Even as I approached their table and caught a few sentences, my premonition that there was something fishy going on proved right. The stranger was speaking bad Italian with a strong accent.
    My button translated. ‘Gallery have to