Chez Max by Jakob Arjouni Read Free Book Online

and over again during the years we’d been working together, it was that in his advance detection work, the crimes usual in immigrant quarters, those that our colleagues had in mind when they tried to smear his success rate, were hardly ever committed. Theft, extortion and gambling were thin on the ground, as were drug-related crimes – although the weakness of many Chinese for cigarettes was notorious, and smoking was still regarded as a mere peccadillo in China. And there was little illegal immigration or terrorist propaganda. So little, in fact, that anyone other than Super-Chen would probably long ago have laid himself open to suspicion of taking bribes or actually conniving in crime. For of course Chinatown Voltaire had its gangs of young tearaways, its drug dealers, people-smugglers and radical political activi sts. It almost seemed as if Chen wanted to portray his area of operations in a certain light – oddly enough, as I sometimes reflected in surprise, in the gentle, all-enveloping light of the upper middle class that he liked to deride at the top of his voice. A light that blurred the lines.
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    â€˜â€¦ let them think everything’s fine for another few days. Sure, we can project rainbows on the sky! Next thing you know we’ll be reconstructing the Lord God himself, giving him a bit more authority and assertiveness, and then all that love-your-neighbour stuff will work properly at last.’
    Chen raised the plastic container to his mouth and slurped up what was left of the sauce. I looked out of the window. I wished I could have listened out of the window too.
    Scarcely three hundred metres away, the Eiffel Tower rose against the radiant blue of the spring sky. Muted shouting and laughter floated up from the Champ de Mars. Soon the moment would come. The event had been announced in all the media weeks ago: an artificial rainbow to arch above the Eiffel Tower. Technically that was nothing very new; in principle it worked just like the Cinema In The Sky that had existed for years now. The difference was that films could be shown on Cinema In The Sky only after dark, so that after the first flush of enthusiasm its popularity with the public had waned relatively quickly. Senior citizens and families with children soon found it far from pleasant to have the night sky turned into a single huge cinema screen every other summer evening. You did need to wear headphones to hear the sound track, but groups of spectators on balconies and in roof gardens still made so much noise that those who weren’t watching the film could hardly hope to get to sleep until it finished. And then there was the light problem. Although the regional departments of Cinema In The Sky tried to pick films that suited the evening atmosphere, almost every movie had some scenes set in daylight out of doors, and often bathed an entire city or a country area in bright sunlight for minutes on end at eleven at night. The one way to escape the show was to close your windows and shutters in the middle of summer. Only in Spain had Cinema In The Sky enjoyed unbroken popularity for years. By dint of collecting signatures on petitions and staging public protests, the people in many towns there had even managed to get the films shown later, on the grounds that if they began at nine or ten in the evening hardly anyone would get to eat an evening meal. However, in the rest of Europe the Cinema In The Sky technology was now used only on special and usually serious occasions, for instance for important government announcements or the promulgation of new laws. As a means of entertainment and amusement it had largely lapsed into oblivion. That had to be the explanation for why so many Parisians were wild with excitement at the prospect of seeing an artificial rainbow over the city. Since six in the morning, people had been queuing for tickets to the great Fête Arc-en-Ciel which was to begin in half an hour’s time under the Eiffel