I Am Max Lamm (17 page)

He crossed Seymour Street to the synagogue entrance. Hesitation scrambled his resolve. Enough! Walk through the fucking door!

A hunched grey figure shuffled inside. Eighty-five years old in a woollen overcoat, two hearing aids beneath a frayed fedora. The old man smiled, genuine as any greeting Lamm had ever received.

‘
Shabbat Shalom
. We’re both running late!’

Spontaneously, Lamm laughed. Tried to stop himself. Not now, on the way to saying
kaddish
for the boy you recently killed. The security guards might suspect that you’re a madman terrorist, giggling about the nail bomb you hid beneath the kosher buffet. Still, he kept laughing and in a moment strange as anything yet in the strangest week of his life, Lamm stopped in the circular driveway, beneath the statue of Raoul Wallenberg the righteous gentile, and he let it all out. Quietly laughing at everything; the oily tennis shoes cladding his sponsorless feet, his heated hovel beneath a hotplate, the famous senator’s blonde nymphomaniac daughter he’d just fucked, the hairy Iranian barber in Queensway who sold genuine wigs and fake passports, the riot-fuelled hysteria in the
Sun
as accurate as soothsaying from the guts of a rabbit, the police searching for a neo-Nazi murderer when you, the culprit, are the maternal grandson of Alma Weinraub who survived Auschwitz, the old man who just wished you
Shabbat Shalom
like you’re a regular at this synagogue. Out trickled Lamm’s hoarse laugh, dripping from the well-spring of humanity, of resilience, of a great fuck-you to the unforeseen, that wells within us and doesn’t disappear until our final breath.

Lamm caught his reflection in a glass pane embossed with the Star of David. Not bad; you look halfway respectable. You’re not carrying a suspicious backpack. Bareheaded, but they should let you in. A few congregants passed by, running late. These respectable Jews with their tallit bags and whingeing kids! Exemplars of order with clean soft hands facilitated by their day job at the surgery or the law chambers or the accountancy practice, with
siddurim
stacked in the wooden box beneath their member’s plaque and atop their heads yarmulkes monogrammed with their initials. A big crowd; must be a bar mitzvah today. Remembering that he hadn’t eaten breakfast, Lamm envisaged the
Kiddush
that would follow the service. All that deli food! Pickles, falafels,
hatzolim
dip, blintzes, latkes,
kugelhopf
, fresh sweet
challa
that you haven’t tasted in years. Good thing your jacket’s got big pockets. Swiftly the hunger cleaved his gut, up his throat; the impossible feeling to shake.

At the door, Lamm spoke to the taller of the two security guards. A young Sephardi, just out of his mandatory two years in the Israeli army. The guard wore a numbered badge:
ALON BEN-DAVID NO.
253.

‘
Shabbat Shalom
,’ Lamm offered.

In the guard’s thick accent, the bludgeoning question. ‘You been here before?’

‘First time.’

‘Where you from?’

‘Australia.’

The guard noticed Lamm’s dusty hair, greasy pants, scuffed shoes. The clues in this young stranger’s eyes: shadowy circles, premature lines, bloodshot pink whites hollowed into a poorly shaven face. Probably slept in the park last night. He wants the free food. But there was something else, something creepily engaging about this shabby visitor claiming to be a citizen of the Commonwealth. His desperate gaze, silently disturbing as anything the guard saw during his three years in an IDF reconnaissance unit when he’d stared into the remorseless eyes of foiled suicide bombers at a Gaza jail full of unsuccessful terrorists, or seen the bodies of Hamas riflemen spilling guts beneath tanks in the territories, Palestinian children wearing mock suicide belts at a parade in the Jenin refugee camp, or the gruesome remnants of the 2002 suicide bombing that killed thirty Jews at a Passover Seder in Netanya. This tough, world-weary guard was disturbed by Max Lamm, enough to prolong the interrogation.

‘Why you here?’

‘To say
kaddish
.’

‘
Why?
’

Good question.
Why?
Funny, how useless trivia resurfaces at your most dangerous moments. Lamm recalled the answer that Edmund Hillary famously gave to a journalist who asked why he’d conquered Mt Everest.
Because it’s there
.

‘Because I should.’

The guard removed his sunglasses, staring at the stranger. ‘My father died last week,’ Lamm added. ‘I’m saying
kaddish
for him.’

‘What’s your Hebrew name?’

‘Gedalya BenYehuda.’

The guard frisked Lamm, then opened the door.

‘Sorry, extra security because of the riot. We had a bomb threat yesterday.’

The
Jewish News
was stacked in a pile by the door. Lamm read the front page headline:

CAMDEN MURDER PROVOKES
ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS IN HENDON,
GOLDERS GREEN

The guard handed Lamm a black yarmulke.

‘Go to your right. The service has begun.’

Rachel Samuels. Her rusty auburn hair, aqua-green eyes so rare for a Jewish girl. Unfailingly, inartificially luminescent, never plastered in make-up. This girl whose fantastic unclothed possibilities, fuel and fire to the hormonal upheaval in her pubescent admirers, were imagined by Lamm most nights of his twelfth year. Alone in bed beneath his
Star Wars
blankets, he’d envisage the magical moment – his triumph – when finally they’d kiss. You’ll do it on school camp? At this weekend’s sleepover? At Rachel’s thirteenth birthday party? For a year, her birthday invitation remained pinned on Lamm’s cupboard, his beacon.

Unlike his older friends in ninth grade, Lamm rarely imagined going all the way with Rachel. The other boys loved to envisage her deflowerment: those glistening amber shoulders, precocious perfect breasts, legs akimbo gleaming their hypnotic chocolate sheen. Invariably, the boys hardened up when she walked through the school canteen. Their favourite discussion topics: who’s kissed her? Who’s fingered her? Who’s humped her? Rachel Samuels watered the wet dreams of nearly all the eighth- and ninth-grade boys at Mount Scopus College.

Then, one unseasonally cold Wednesday in December 1988, she flew to New York after visiting her brother in London. Thirty-eight minutes after take-off, Rachel was blown out of the aircraft at 31,000 feet when a Samsonite briefcase exploded in the left flank or the fuselage. Almost two minutes later, she landed in a fallow tract near the village of Tundergarth, a few miles outside Lockerbie in the southern fields of Scotland.

And nobody ever learnt that on the last night of first semester, 1988, Max Lamm
had
kissed her. Briefly – but on the lips! – in the moonlit schoolyard during the intermission of
Fiddler on the Roof
, the school musical that year. First day back at class, Lamm would have told his friends the triumphant news. Would’ve been the thirteen-year-old king of the schoolyard. But he didn’t tell anyone, not when the school was engulfed by the stark indelible shock of Rachel Samuels’ famous death. Lockerbie was, up to that point, the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated against the United States: 259 passengers and crew killed when about 450 grams of Semtex plastic explosive detonated in a luggage container. Within ten seconds, according to the flight investigators, the 747’s cockpit, fuselage and wings were plummeting separately. The wing section – containing 91,000 kilograms of jet fuel – crashed into a street called Sherwood Crescent, causing a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale. Two families and an entire block of houses were vaporised into a crater forty-seven metres long.

And Rachel Samuels –
his
Rachel Samuels – sat in seat 3A on that airliner. After her brother told him, Lamm never forgot her seat number. Even now, sixteen years on, if he saw a word containing three As – aardvark, Arkansas, caravan – her exquisite spectre returned, together with the lump in his throat. Rachel’s playful voice in his ear, asking when he would kiss her again.

For six months, Lamm didn’t touch a tennis racquet. The coach gave up calling, his parents tried and failed. Wouldn’t leave his bedroom except for school or the library to do research into the bombing. Lamm was obsessed by anything,
everything
about the crime. The FAA investigation, the FBI investigation, the conspiracy theories, the lucky ones who missed the flight. The millisecond, that otherwise ordinary instant, when the suitcase bomb detonated and its supersonic shockwaves ruptured the cockpit’s bulkhead wall. The type of timer the bombmaker used; a precision piece manufactured by Mebo, a Swiss firm that exported to Libya. And Lamm’s unforgettable imagining of the fuselage roof peeling back, tornado-strength winds ripping into the cabin, transforming untethered items – trolleys, cups, cutlery – into lethal flying objects. Rachel’s final moments. Was she conscious? Did she absurdly, fleetingly, think of
you
? Or the sudden drop in atmospheric pressure collapsed Rachel’s lungs, as the experts suggested had occurred to the victims, so she’d already blacked out when the 747’s nose section hit the moors. Apparently, an airline steward and a male passenger were found alive near the cockpit door, but succumbed before the ambulances arrived. Lamm’s eternal engrossing question:
what was it really like?

And the conspiracy theories! Only a month’s mourning, a month’s obsession, until Lamm – a thirteen-year-old bar mitzvah boy who had, up to that point, never memorized anything more complicated than his multiplication tables – knew the mysterious details by heart:

1.  Four CIA agents were victims on Pan Am 103. One of them, Major Charles McKee, had been in Beirut trying to locate the American hostages kidnapped by Hezbollah. In a Lockerbie field, a police dog handler found McKee’s scorched briefcase. It contained classified maps of terrorist hideouts in Lebanon. Witnesses reported seeing American agents removing documents from the briefcase, then replanting it for ‘discovery’ by Scottish constables.

2.  The South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, was booked on Pan Am 103. He was en route to New York for the signing of a treaty relinquishing control of Namibia to the United Nations. A few hours before take-off, the South African delegation changed their booking. But the UN Ambassador to Namibia, Bernt Carlsson – who organized the Namibia treaty against South African opposition – died aboard Pan Am 103. A British diplomat, Patrick Heseldine, petitioned the UN to investigate whether the apartheid regime had plotted the bombing.

3.  Juval Aviv, an ex-Mossad officer employed as lead investigator for Pan Am airlines, claimed that the CIA ran a protected drug route from Europe to the United States. Codenamed Operation Corea, allegedly the CIA permitted the Syrian drug dealer Monzer al-Kassar to smuggle heroin on Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on Palestinian terrorist groups. But on 21 December, 1988, so the theory claimed, terrorists swapped the contraband suitcases: one containing drugs for one containing a bomb.

Lamm gorged himself on the bombing’s facts, figures, conspiracy theories. In his bed in the dark, there was Rachel plummeting thirty-thousand feet, aflame in her flight slippers. Her exquisite face gazing down, down, down to the end. Finally one morning in February 1989, following a typically sleepless night of watching Rachel burning amid the glare of his desk lamp, Lamm stopped the spiral. The lightning bolt of common sense; cease the fixation on her death, or you
will
destroy yourself as mercilessly as the bombers destroyed that airliner. Iran, Syria, Libya, Hezbollah, the PLO or South Africa; whoever is the culprit, they won’t suffer justice. They’ve got impunity in their state sponsors, their black gold or gold gold. Fuck them.
Move on
.

To the relief of his parents, teachers, coaches and friends, Lamm stopped buying the
Journal of the National Military Intelligence Association
at a military book stall in the Camberwell Market, stopped cutting clippings of every Pan Am 103 investigation published in the newspapers, stopped subscribing to newsletters sent by a dozen crank conspiracy theorists. Rachel Samuels –
his
Rachel Samuels – wasn’t coming back. The excruciating truth: she’s gone.

Hungry, haunted Lamm! In the hole beneath Hyde Park, he couldn’t stop yearning for agnostic redemption from his crime. But now, in the Western Marble Arch synagogue reciting
kaddish
with the rabbi and ninety-seven respectable Jews,
Rachel’s
was the face visiting him. Not Malik’s, but Rachel’s! Venus charred in the jet fuel flames, mourned like she fell from the sky not seventeen years ago, but yesterday. It was Lamm’s recollection of the girl that he still tried not to love, that he tried to forget –
not
the memory of the Pakistani boy that he’d bludgeoned to death – that compelled him to remain in this grand synagogue of oak benches, silver lamps and marble corridors, to keep listening, reciting, remembering. He had to stay through the Torah portion, through the
aliyahs
, until the rabbi invited the congregation’s mourners to recite the
kaddish
memorial for the recently deceased.

Yitgaddal v’yitqaddash sh’meh rabba, B’al’ma di v’ra khiruteh v’yamlikh malkhuteh . . .

Lamm mumbled these sacred words for Rachel Samuels, whose soft fulsome lips he imagined the Hebrew verses streaming into.
Kaddish
, the ancient hymn of mourning, of praise, of exultation that every observant Jew knows by heart, that announces always the same bleak truth; a Jew has died. The prayer missed Malik Massawi’s corpse, flying from Lamm’s lips into his memory of Rachel Samuels the night he kissed her, into the bewitching green eyes that were his adolescent lifeblood until the day she fell to earth.

. . . itbarakh v’yishtabbach v’yitpaar v’yitromam
v’yitnasse v’yithaddar v’yitalle v’yithalla
sh’meh d’qudsha . . .

Not merely saying
kaddish
, but
praying
it for the first time since . . . ever? You love her more than ever, but she won’t return. Seventeen years is a day.