I Am Max Lamm (20 page)

But after eighteen months on the job, Jacqueline yearned for Washington. She wanted to again work with her stepdad’s grizzled Reaganites who could teach her more than make-up tips and bedroom technique, for whom the whole world isn’t a designer boutique in Mayfair but a precious American oyster being hacked open by Al-Qaeda and the Chinese. She wanted to learn. So the morning of Chanel’s spring parade on the Champs Élysées, Jacqueline LaRoy made up her mind. She gave her VIP laminate to a teenage girl gazing longingly at the red carpet, took the 3 p.m. Eurostar and arrived at Victoria Station a day early. The Saturday her stepfather was to land in London en route from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

‘You’re back
now
?’ Kelly stammered into the phone. ‘You said he was visiting Monday!’

Kelly lay a fingertip upon Lamm’s lips;
be silent on pain of death
. Painfully, Kelly gazed at the living room, apprehending the challenge ahead. Château d’Yquem spilt on the rug, takeaway cartons strewn about, charcoal dust in the carpet, powder traces on the coffee table, Marlboro butts clogging the sink, a fugitive homeless Jew on the sofa.

‘Fine, we’ll do dinner.’ Kelly slammed down the phone. ‘We have to clean up!
Now!
’

Scrubbing wine stains, packing the dishwasher, scouring the sink, replenishing Jacqueline’s Valium with identicallooking aspirins and, hardest of all, checking there wasn’t a grain of contraband powder left on the coffee table or the nightstand; it took longer than expected. Seventeen minutes later, they were cleaning when the door bell beeped. Kelly scrambled for the remote control, flicking to the surveillance channel on TV. Onscreen was a middleaged man in a suit, standing in the lobby.

‘I
cannot
fucking believe this! He’s here!’

Kelly rushed Lamm into the master bedroom. She opened the walk-in wardrobe.

‘Hide on top. He
will
check everywhere.’

‘It won’t hold my weight.’

‘Ha! His rope will. Get up there!’

She darted out to the corridor, glancing up at the closet.

Their eyes met. For the first time since their confrontation in the park, they stared relentlessly into each other’s faces. Of course they had watched each other in bed, confirming the mutual release. But now, their gaze was undistracted by the imminent act. What Lamm and Kelly saw was immense vulnerability, the embryonic connection of two damaged vessels mending themselves with a single gauze. They saw their loneliness obliterated
and
emphasized in the hours they spent together, enraptured by the infatuated other. She the lifeboat, he the squall. In Lamm’s unblinking gaze, he said: even if I had never encountered that Pakistani mugger at 4 a.m. in a Camden street, you would be my salvation. In your generosity, your appetites, your wonderful, horrible history, in your bewildering desire, I’m a success and not fleeing a life that was already spent before that bottle struck the boy’s skull. You are a blessing for a neglectful Jew who forgets the
mitzvoth
and only visits a synagogue because he killed someone. After humiliation, exile, catastrophe, after the deathly embrace of New York’s river, I deserve you. Not for my virtues but my sins, because suffering must end. With darkness comes light.

She saw it. The premature outline of love that coalesced immeasurably into the axis of their gaze. Their unwavering stare of about eleven seconds, conveying her ascension, her redemption in assisting this statuesque stranger whose secret, apart from his expert caress, drew her further in. Damaged by some event of unimagined consequences, battered by a ghastly truth – she saw the evidence in Lamm’s failure to ejaculate while he watched his victim’s ghost – that was fascinating and frightening. Fascinating
because
it was frightening. In their exchange of words, opinions, interests – everything but the concealed facts of Lamm’s crime and Kelly’s sadistic rebirth in the National Guard – their relationship was effortless, unforced. Their bond of choosing life amidst suicide and not understanding why, of forever betraying their family’s expectations, of being dumbstruck by the animal catharsis of their dim hot hours in that four-poster bed –
that
, in their rebirth, in the shrapnel of their trauma, in their primitive love incinerating loneliness – that is what kept Lamm and Kelly staring at each other for eleven seconds while the doorbell rang out.

This wardrobe was bigger than your average African’s shack. Lamm closed the door, then scrambled onto the top shelf packed with pillowslips, sheets, blankets, a green National Guard sleeping bag. He pulled himself into the corner; the support beams felt strong enough. Now you’ll hear – see? – Dick Wesson in the flesh. The Minotaur. If that bastard discovers you, he’ll unleash the CIA. They’ll fly you to Cairo where an interrogator drowns you until you confess that Bin Laden’s your ping-pong partner. Lamm lay tight against the wall, concealed behind laundered blankets the way his cat Misty used to sleep among his mother’s scarves.

What’s your life compared to this? She’s got three Tuscan lambswool blankets wrapped in plastic. Never been used; still got the price tag from Harrods. One hundred and fifteen pounds each. Your father would fly these rugs from a flagpole.

Voices reverberated down the corridor.

Don’t let the blankets fall
.

Don’t move
.

Don’t breathe
.

Lamm gasped.

Touching his right thigh, there was a handgun wrapped in the mohair rug.

A .45. Silver, cold to the touch. Lamm knew nothing about guns, but noticed that the safety was on. Surely, she doesn’t know that it’s here. Senator Wesson, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, can’t be so stupid as to assign a loaded weapon to a girl so tempestuous, tumultuous, drug-addled as his daughter. No, it’s here for his own protection. The Minotaur applies the Second Amendment to whichever country he’s in.

Never had Lamm been closer to a pistol than the nearest policeman’s holster. The diaspora Jews don’t keep guns; they’ve got lawyers. He gripped the stock and unclicked the clip. The cartridges slipped onto the blanket. Lamm crammed the pistol and ammunition into his jeans pocket.

‘So how are my favourite girls in London?’

Snatches of conversation resonating through the plaster walls. Five million pounds and it’s not solid brick.

‘How did the wine get on the rug?’

A woman’s voice; must be the half-sister.

‘Steve, how about a cold drink?’

‘Thank you, Miss. I’d appreciate that.’

Steve’s was a dull, deep voice, emotionless in the military sense. Must be the bodyguard.

The voices faded; they’re out on the balcony. Lamm waited twenty-three minutes by his watch, sweating into the blankets. Finally the talking got louder.

‘Gimme the number for The Ivy in Covent Garden . . . Thank you.’

The senator speaking into his mobile phone.

‘Table for three . . . eight o’clock. That’s right . . .’

Kelly’s voice echoed down the marble corridor.

‘I’ll get my coat.’

Bright light flooded the master bedroom. Lamm piled the blankets over his torso. Through the venetian door, he glimpsed Jacqueline. Different than what he’d imagined, so unlike her stepsister. A tall big-boned brunette in stilettos, a skirt to the knees, a white shirt. The Amazonian build of a women’s basketball pro, and on her chin a mole discernable from Lamm’s vantage.

The senator walked in, clasping Kelly’s shoulders. Immediately Lamm felt this gargantuan presence unleashed from the CSPAN screen. The Minotaur’s brute aura, all bluster, rambunctiousness, unhindered confidence. A living incarnation of the Bill of Rights, starkly there in the Reaganesque way he talked, in his Washington-via-Texas drawl dripping in the unwavering numbskull doggedness that politicians call resolve. No wonder he’d come so far, finally a credible contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Sixty years old, silver-haired, with a hooknosed profile that would’ve landed him a role as the villain in a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. One of the Minotaur’s harshest critics, Senator Max Cleland of Georgia (who lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam), once joked on
Meet the Press
that Dick Wesson was the other most disabled member of the Senate, owing to his leg injury inflicted in 2003 by an insolent riding colt (long since dog food) down at George W’s ranch at Crawford. Despite his knee reconstruction, Dick Wesson marched into the master bedroom like Napoleon victorious at the Battle of Austerlitz.

Look at the father of the girl you’re screwing. Look at what’s gotten him where he is
.

It’s the razor contrast of his sky-blue eyes to the leathery fatherly brow; the avuncular grey tips of his eyebrows, the drill sergeant’s voice so unrepentantly decisive. A man accustomed to getting his way, whether it’s creationism in Kansas schools, tariffs against Chinese grain imports, federal legislation against gay marriage or tonight’s short-notice table for three at The Ivy in Covent Garden.

The Minotaur inspected the master bedroom.

‘This place looks rough. The guests won’t come in here.’

The guests.
That’s
the reason for the deli in the refrigerator! Must be a dinner party here tomorrow night. Tony and Cherie, Messrs Branson, Lord Levy and Al Fayed.

The senator glanced at the crumpled bedspread, the crooked pillows.

‘In the National Guard, they never taught you how to make a bed?’

‘Make the fucking bed yourself.’

A numb silence. The Minotaur laughed.

If I didn’t need you
, his chuckle told Kelly,
I’d throw you out onto the fucking street
.

Light exploded into the wardrobe.
Don’t breathe!
Three feet away, the Minotaur. His helmet of gunmetal-grey hair, his liver-spotted forehead, craggy cheekbones, capped teeth, pink bull’s neck, an American flag pinned to his herringbone sports jacket’s lapel.

‘No boys hiding in the closet! Oh, my visit was in vain!’

Through a sliver in the blankets, Lamm watched Kelly crack a smile.

You’re not just her new boy. You’re a game to her
.

The Minotaur strolled into the corridor.

‘Steve, we’re going! Call the maître d’, tell him we don’t sit near the window.’

Kelly stepped into the closet, grabbed a Jil Sander coat and winked at the top shelf. Gone without a word. The front door slammed shut. Lamm heard the car starting outside, a fearsome guttural rumble. Probably an armoured limo from the US embassy.

He waited fifteen minutes. Hearing the blood in his ear canal and the faint hum of Oxford Street traffic, Lamm decided to climb down. Yet beyond the usual anxiety pervading his universe like the ether, something was wrong. He couldn’t move one foot. Buried beneath blankets, Lamm’s right leg had gone to sleep. He rubbed his numb calf, trying to get the circulation back, then fully stretched the leg. The shelf’s load of blankets crashed down, scattering Kelly’s Italian heels.

‘
Arghhhhh!
’ Lamm bit his tongue to stop himself cursing.

Squeezing, rubbing, the sensation returned to Lamm’s tingling prosthesis. Gingerly, he crept down to clean up the mess.

You have a gun
. Your last resort via ultimatum, selfdefence or suicide. Compulsively, Lamm checked it was unloaded. Go hide it in the barbeque! He tried to re-stack the blankets, but again they tumbled down. A closet the size of a Cadillac, still the rugs don’t fit! He pulled them out for another try, and noticed something wedged way back on the shelf. Another gun? Lamm climbed up and yanked the mystery object from beneath the pillowcases. An old shoebox. There’s something inside, too light to be shoes.

This must belong to the senator. It’s CIA secrets on microfilm? The identity of whoever really bombed Pan Am 103, sold Saddam the phantom WMDs, or killed JFK, Vince Foster, Dr David Kelly, Yasser Arafat? Hopefully it’s cash, enough to buy a passport from Zayed the barber.

Lamm pulled off the lid. A shoebox of family photos. Old school snaps of Kelly and her brother, and a few yellowing portraits of the senator in his Skull & Bones days. Newspaper clippings of Wesson’s election victories, a signed Christmas card from Nancy Reagan, and holiday photos – Hawaii when Kelly was fifteen, and Puerto Rico nine years ago – showing a happy family on the beach. A lie as it often is: Kelly’s dull eyes and flatlined lips expressed how she hated the sand, the sun, the sagging swimsuits. Nothing extraordinary here; just memories amassed in a dusty shoebox that will keep its shape longer than your neurons destined to be mush. No photo more provocative than the holiday photos that millions of Americans keep in their shoeboxes.

Except for one.

Deep in the box, way down the bottom, a photograph stole Lamm’s attention. It featured a blonde man, perhaps twenty-five years old, sitting on a bar stool. A tight white singlet accentuated his muscular arms, rock-hard abdominals, toned hairless chest. Up top, buzz-cut fair hair framed his exquisitely proportioned face; sharp chin, pursed full lips, prominent cheekbones, narrow aqua-blue eyes. The captivating bone structure of the alpha-male; strikingly symmetrical, unmistakably masculine. Look at what testosterone’s done to this beautiful boy! One hand dangled a cigarette, the other touched the belt buckle of his tight blue jeans. He stared into the lens. Fearless, feisty, fuck-ready, like the angelic young Brando in
The Wild One
asking, ‘Whattya got?’

On the back of the photo, a name and number in red ink.

BOBBY.
0207 968 965.
CALL AFTER NINE

Lamm buried the photo in the shoebox, but couldn’t resist another peek. One of Kelly’s toyboys? Had to be, but couldn’t be. Despite the sky-high cheekbones, the washboard stomach, Lamm knew that beautiful Bobby wasn’t Kelly’s type. He looked too perfect, too calculatingly submissive. Too damn easy. Whereas Kelly – ceaselessly drunk on her lifeblood of transgression, dissent, disorder – always thirsted for the challenge. To fuck the guy she shouldn’t; that’s why
you’re
here. No, she wouldn’t like the blonde figurine in this photograph. The type of Aryan idol – a pure pink sculpture of muscle, sweat, skin – who’s been the perennial pin-up for the Wehrmacht, the Red Army, the US Marines, the Ivy League. Kelly, Lamm was sure, hated clean-cut specimens like Bobby, the type of boy the Minotaur would invite home for a beer out on the back porch.