I Am Max Lamm (10 page)

Lamm always used the hotel’s back entrance. According to a client that he met in the lobby, the big danger was the private investigators camped across the street, waiting to shoot the incriminating photo for a jilted rich wife. Up in the room, they started with small talk. Lagaya asking what he liked, setting the timer, riding him until the disabling climax. Lamm’s ingenuity: soliciting so many dreamlike positions in so short a time.

Of course they didn’t kiss. The working girl’s unofficial code of practice. It took four appointments until, in a disorientated, dehydrated instant, Lagaya permitted an impulsive peck as she felt the rare, rare seed of an orgasm stir yet swiftly subside. Barely ten seconds, yet as their lips intertwined she didn’t push him away. She wanted it. This inhalation of animal intimacy, born of misshapen mutual desire, piercing her humdrum schedule of commercial copulation. In Max Lamm’s vulnerability, his pathetic infatuation, did she see a way out? This was Lagaya’s first moment of pleasure since she arrived in New York and the sexual act became as unremarkable as touching your nose. As Lamm departed into the corridor, she called out.

‘Wait!’ she yelled from the sofa, halfway through rolling a joint. ‘I no kiss client. Okay? Big mistake.’

At the elevator Lamm paused, in case she added anything more. The corridor silent but for the rattle of trucks on Broadway and, down the hall, infrequent groans from a client visiting the Guatemalan lady with removable teeth, which was apparently her drawcard. The door ajar, Lamm peeked back into Lagaya’s room. On the couch, the joint unravelled in her lap, she gazed deep in thought at the venetians pierced by dirty sunlight.

Wednesdays approached; she intoxicated him. His disgraceful, delicious indulgence. Lagaya’s clinical availability reduced a modern man’s striving – the obsession with a good job, flat abs, a nice car, sparkling conversation, the right moment to kiss her, the tactful invitation back to his apartment – to the elaborate sham that it is. On the tennis court, in the locker room, in the gym, the lecture theatre or awake alone in bed, she was everywhere. Her glossy angular face, her tiny hands, her arresting vernacular of shantytown Spanish and the streetwise jibes she learnt from reruns of
Law and Order
. The taut golden bridge of skin he licked, between her perineum and the cleft of her arse, that mystifyingly remained unsullied despite three or four clients a day. Lagaya’s narrow brown body beneath him, bare. Compulsively, addictively, deliciously, she justified to Lamm the Western world’s limitless preoccupation with sex. But it wasn’t just the sex; he was fascinated by her past too. The horrific adolescence in El Salvador that she wouldn’t –
couldn’t?
– describe to him.

Ferocious lust and sufficient ignorance to facilitate the mystery. Is love, in its embryonic stages, ever anything more?

Sentimental, reckless Lamm! If the four horsewomen of the apocalypse – Hilary, Oprah, Condoleezza and Maggie Thatcher – galloped into that brothel, mid-coitus, to amputate his dick live on the
NBC Today
show,
he wouldn’t have objected in theory. He knew he’d lost control. The animal desire tramples your better judgement like a jackboot upon a weed. At first Lagaya’s aquiline body was enough, her moist obsequiousness rented at reasonable rates. Their unspoken agreement that she’d do anything up to the mildly depraved. The looks she shot him mid-blowjob, perhaps copied from a French porno at the pimp’s orders. And her lingerie! Straps, hooks, bras, garter belts, corsets. Sheer panties of a quality incongruous for this shitty hotel. Silk hosiery in three shades of cream, knickers in satin, chiffon, lace. A fancy bra, a good Dior fake so tight it embossed swirling flowers upon her nipples. The textures, fabrics, fits, transparencies . . . so bewitching!

Max Lamm: a dirty old man before his time. The way the panties embraced her explicit hipbones, the extras she wore to turn him on like a bar heater. Red silk thongs shrinking inside her. G-strings so thin they twanged like a slack double bass. Bustiers; their exciting contrast against her tight roasted skin. Push-up bras ramming her small breasts neckwards, so accentuating their circumference that sometimes he wouldn’t unhook the hook. Couldn’t predict the colour! Burgundy red. Creamy white. Navy blue. Sometimes she wore a teddy of all three; how patriotic. Who else in her hometown of San Salvador, apart from the mistresses of the generals, possesses fancy tricolour underwear like that?

Despite her star-spangled tits, the immigration department wants her deported.
Injusticia!
With two other girls from San Salvador, Lagaya was locked into an unrefrigerated truck smuggling counterfeit DVD players across the hottest, driest, shittiest part of the US–Mexican border between Nuevo Progreso, Tamaulipas and Progreso Lakes, Texas. Three hours down a dirt track two hundred miles north of the Rio Grande, the fat driver with a scarred right cheek – she never learnt his name – orders the girls to get out. They wait in the heat, near a ransacked trailer rusting in the organ cactus and Mexican feather grass.
Desperado!
The girls weep. Stranded, forgotten, they’ll die of thirst.
Nuestro lecho de muerte –
it’s our deathbed!

Four hours later, a battered Toyota van trundles through the sagebrush against the unbroken blue horizon.
Salvation!
The mules – two Coahuila cowpokes who can’t be older than twenty – lock the girls in the back. They get three bottles of water, two loaves of hard bread, a few brown bananas. Occasionally they stop on a deserted stretch, so the cargo can pee in a bush. Three days later, the girls are delivered to the Manhattan whorehouse.

Lagaya gets an hour’s rest in a spare suite. Then Carlos inspects her, barking in Spanish; her lack of English is an asset in this line of work. He demands a blowjob, and the pig of a pimp groans agreeably. She’s allowed to make a phone call (if Carlos dials the number and listens in). She calls the youngest of her three sisters in San Salvador. Tell mother I’ve got a job as a
ninera –
a nanny. She will be so pleased! When the money starts coming in, her father will get his medication. Antibiotics for the tuberculosis, and the Inderal beta blockers – at US$55 a pack – to alleviate his heart condition. Lagaya’s sisters know that she’s pleasuring fat crooks for fifteen dollars a day, but they promise not to tell
padre.

This was Lagaya Aranxta Marguelis’s escape from the slash and burnt slums of San Salvador, where the death squads of the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista murdered peasants, dissidents, missionaries, nuns, children.
Her
slum, where three thousand
gauchos
share a pit for a sewer, wide as an Olympic pool, sometimes a bloated pig or dog rotting in the middle. Eight years ago, Lagaya’s kid brother Miguel scratched his forearm on a mess of chicken wire protruding from that cesspool. It didn’t hurt, he thought nothing of it and twelve days later he was dead from septicaemia. Her uncle Pedro disappeared one evening in 1981; his body was never recovered. But nobody was surprised, because a month earlier he’d shown mass graves to a
Newsweek
journalist who’d arrived after government soldiers raped and murdered Jean Donovan, a Catholic nun from Connecticut. A girl like Lagaya had a choice: get out or face the Torquemada gangs armed with machetes and M16s left over from the war. Those teenage thugs who graduated from petty robbery to the cocaine routes, who raped three of her friends and shot her neighbour Ronaldo dead because he wouldn’t give them a pack of cigarettes.

A few blocks uptown from her brothel, the Lagayas of New York – tanned and skinny as she, yet the product of childhoods a universe apart – yabber over organic kiwi juice and seaweed salad. Esssential rations for these shiny young things toting Jackie O’s big sunglasses and nasal voices of undiluted vacuity. Their manicures unblemished despite the sushi at Nobu or last night’s handjob for the new guy at Goldman Sachs. It’s lunchbreak from sub-editing a fashion mag or kissing ass at a PR firm, and time to discuss when Mr Perfect’s gonna pop the question, or the bitch of a receptionist over at
Vogue
,
or this season’s hots and nots, or the new books they purchased for their summer reading up at the Hamptons: the latest 700-page bestseller about a geisha and the collected works of D Brown, C Bushnell, Dr Phil and the Ya Ya Sisterhood.

Meanwhile with her mouth Lagaya sucks pearly aggression out of Carlos the pimp’s buddies. She resists the urge to teach the bastards a lesson, to take a bite so the blood and Viagra flow. She calms these stupefyingly hairy Latino criminals from the Bronx, disassociating herself from her own skin as they grope, grip, groan, defiling beauty they neither deserve nor understand. She imagines that she is swimming, in a jungle lagoon that she once saw in a 1970s tourist brochure about El Salvador. As the clients ram her face into the mattress, she tells herself to dive –
Nadar! Nadar! –
and marvels at the warm clear water bubbling off the sand bed. The clients leave a tip, then return to their bored wives and screaming kids, where, sated for another week, they don’t get so horny that they’ll shoot a guy dead during a poker game.

Indirectly, Lagaya’s preventing murders. For that she – and throughout the five boroughs ten thousand Latin American sex slaves like her – deserves an award from the mayor, just like the stockbroker who saved that disgraced athlete from drowning in the East River. Lagaya deserves the keys to the city, or at least to a safe clean apartment. But she’s the enemy. If her pimp stops bribing the right cops and the NYPD springs a midnight raid, she’ll get arrested, imprisoned, deported.

You should hate America
,
Lamm tells her one Wednesday evening after they’ve finished. Relaxed, his pink handprints fading from her arse, he offers his advice. You should hate everything in this country, everything in this fucking city! Broadway and Forty-Second Street, the Empire State, slices of pizza the size of a steering wheel, 9/11 souvenirs three for ten bucks in Chinatown. You should hate the government, the treasury, the immigration department, the Minutemen at the border, NAFTA, the average American Joe in the average American street. Because they don’t want you here. They want you in your stinking shantytown in San Salvador. You should hate American food: pretzels, French fries, burritos, sushi, chop suey, Coca-Cola in a Big Gulp cup the size of your head. This is the big generous stuff that America doesn’t want to share with you. You should hate the men who raped your homeland: Reagan the Great Communicator, George the First, Don Rumsfeld, Oliver North; they armed the death squads. You should hate Americans as a species: Thomases Jefferson, Paine, Cruise and Hanks, OJ Simpson, Arnold Shwarzenegger, the cast of
Miami Vice
who taught you how to speak English. They fucked your homeland. And Australia is among the White House’s closest allies, so you should hate us too. You want justice? Oliver North’s a rich TV host! You
have
to hate this country. Hate the SUVs, skyscrapers, clean streets, hospitals. The finest hospitals in the world, on the same continent as your father wheezing from tuberculosis in a street flowing with shit.

You should hate me
. I’m one of them.

‘
I do
,’ Lagaya whispered.

She was born in 1984, but the armour in her voice could have been a thousand years old.

The night following Malik Massawi’s death. Underneath the barbeque, Lamm slept, awoke, slept, awoke. Whispering at the glowing coals, on his back like a corpse in its coffin, he debated how to escape. The infuriating problem: his passport was hidden in the bottom of his sock drawer at his flat in Golders Green. And his money – the last two pay checks from the bagelry in Hendon where he worked overnight Tuesdays to Thursdays – was stashed next to the passport. His account was almost empty after paying rent; he’d planned on banking the cheques that Monday. In Lamm’s wallet was £33.35, the change from the £50 note he used at the convenience store. He had a Visa card, but that was too dangerous. If the police had notified the credit card company, they’d get the call within minutes.

This headache! The vivid hurricane of a migraine enveloping Lamm’s skull, brought on by the intermittent sleeplessness, the subterranean airlessness, the attempt to think a way out. He pulled up his jacket hood, trudged fifteen minutes to the convenience store at Great Cumberland Place, and bought a pack of maximum-strength aspirin and two newspapers.

Hurrying through the scrub bordering Bayswater Road, Lamm noticed three unwashed men sitting on the benches opposite Lancaster Gate. At one man’s feet lay a Jack Russell terrier, filthy and asleep, looking like a taxidermist’s mouldy mistake. The men gripped plastic bags, plastic cartons, plastic forks. Around midnight Wednesday through to Saturday, local vagrants gathered here to receive leftovers from a few cooks who worked in the cafés on Edgeware Road. At the padlocked gate crested by an iron griffin, the three bums patiently awaited their donated dinner of overcooked pizzas, cold fries or collapsed cheesecakes.

The homeless men weren’t interested in the young fugitive. Two of them mumbled incessantly, consumed by voices of the deceased, CIA wiretaps in their skulls, telepathic orders from invisible masters.
Look at their minds
,
thought Lamm, as if their skulls were glass-bottom boats. Minds mashed by alcohol, pills, mania, schizophrenia, psychosis. Mashed like tomatoes in a blender. About twenty square centimetres of their bodies, surrounding the lips and eyes, was skin-coloured; the rest a dirty overgrown lot repossessed by disorder. Madness is a careless landlord.

One of the homeless men coughed through his voluminous beard. All that biblical white hair; he resembled Moses at the shores of the Red Sea, as depicted in the watercolour by Chagall on the cover of Lamm’s childhood Haggadah. Look at these unfortunate juggernauts of hair, skin, sweat! Refugees from lives unlived, swathed in their mismatched absurdity of discarded running shoes, tourists’ lost hats, sweaters dropped by joggers on the walking paths. One of the vagrants wearing a frayed school blazer, another in a Tommy Hilfiger ski parka expelling foam from its seams.