I Am Max Lamm (22 page)

A way out!

Lamm’s father appeared, floating above the dewy lavender bushes. Wearing his favourite Reebok tracksuit, wielding a racquet. The fire of this remarkable opportunity burning in his ghostly eyes. Mel Lamm’s deep spectral voice was really many voices, combining the intonation of his son, of Mr Lewski, of Lamm’s grandparents, school friends, doubles partners, teachers, coaches, neighbours . . . of everybody the young fugitive had ever met! The gestalt supernatural voice of Max Lamm’s everything and nothing, of his past stripped naked and future unknown. What his father’s ghost – hallucination? – suggested was what Lamm knew, clear as the moonlight.

‘
Max, here’s your chance! Blackmail the rich bastard!
’

The Minotaur would dig deep to stop Barbara Walters from frowning at his oral adventures. Enough for a fake passport and an extra few million too. Lamm crept from the bushes. Your camera phone won’t work; the battery is empty. But at the convenience store on Great Cumberland Place, atop the counter next to the cigarette lighters and phone cards, there is, you will recall, a rack of Kodak disposable cameras on sale for £7 each.

Four minutes later, after the fastest, darkest sprint of his life, Lamm scaled the wrought-iron fence by Marble Arch, ran to the 24-7 store and purchased a camera. How much would the tabloids cough up if Wesson didn’t? Unscrupulous, of course. A vicious, unethical thing to do. But hasn’t the Minotaur’s CIA done worse? Didn’t the spooks plot to kill Castro, Allende, Trujillo and the other Latin leftists? Didn’t they conjure Saddam’s WMDs to justify their phony war?

Over the fence, through the carnation bed, down the embankment, onto the path, past the fountains, right at the weeping willow, into the lavender bushes. Where’s the gardener’s shed? Lamm backtracked, listening. There, the soft ecstatic groans! Creeping through the chrysanthemums, he made certain the camera’s flash was turned on.

Snap!

In the half-second of illumination, Lamm recognized the craggy Mount Rushmore jaw, the Caesarean nose, the silver hair starkly framed by the shed wall on one side, Larry’s hairy thighs on the other. The libidinous diorama of two trouserless men, frozen in the flash of Lamm’s doomsday flare. Immediately, he wound the film and snapped again. The senator turned, his lips embracing Larry’s scrotum, as the mystery photographer escaped into the bushes. A scream curled from Wesson’s lips: pure horror.

How many times, Lamm wondered as he tore through the undergrowth, has Wesson recklessly fucked at 2 a.m. in a park, or in a hotel room or a motel cabin, and never been caught? Nevertheless, Washington’s most powerful men are capable of decisions that would make a toddler blush.

Wet branches whipping his face, Lamm fled through the chrysanthemum bed. The Minotaur’s bodyguards will be here soon! Go underground, hide the camera! He rounded a bend, looking for the deformed rubbish bin that signposted the path to the barbeque.

There it is!

As Lamm ran onto the brambled path, a black mass of desperation sprang from the trees, tackling him to the ground. The silver hair, the owl’s eyebrows, the unbuttoned fly.

‘Give me the camera!’

A sticky fist struck Lamm’s face; blood sputtered out his left nostril. But the Pentagon hawk wasn’t as strong as he sounded, softened by thirty years of long limos and longer lunches. No match for a twenty-eight-year-old vagrant who, despite his encroaching madness and unwashed decrepitude, still retained the explosive guile of a tennis ace. Again, Lamm was in gym class at high school, wrestling Marty Weinberg in a half-circle of classmates who had bet five dollars on the winner. He remembered an old trick; the right-handed half-nelson. Lamm slammed his torso onto the grass, gripping the senator’s neck so hard that surely his fingernails drew blood, and kicked the hyperventilating warhorse backwards into a juniper bush. Free, the fugitive sprang into the trees.

‘
Stop or I’ll shoot your fucking head off!
’

In the magisterial American rumble that transfixed his thirty-five thousand dollar-a-speech audiences, the Senator howled into the blackness.

But why hasn’t he shot you already? Because his .45 is hidden beneath your barbeque. The senator doesn’t bring his bodyguards on this type of excursion.

Lamm scrambled into the hole. He faintly heard the senator yelling into his mobile phone.

‘Steve, I’m in Hyde Park! I’ve been attacked!’

Underground, Lamm lay in the charcoal dust. Waiting. Listening. Feeling the cold dangerous bulge of the camera in his right trouser pocket. Within minutes, he heard voices nearby. The faint crackle of a radio, the type used by secret service agents with a wire in their ear.

They’re looking for you
.

Those bodyguards might have walked right past the barbeque. For nine hours, Lamm remained underground; falling asleep, waking, sleeping, pissing into an orange juice bottle. What excuse had the senator cooked up? That he was mugged during a midnight walk? He wouldn’t tell the police; they’re too indiscrete. Only Wesson’s bodyguards are on your trail, searching for the paparazzi pauper who might undo a potential president.

Dusk. Reddish light drained through wormlike cracks in the barbeque’s limestone walls. Finally, hearing only the murmur of traffic bending around Marble Arch, Lamm pushed the grate ajar. He inhaled a deep dustless breath, stretching his limbs. Hooded, Lamm waited until Bayswater Road was clear both ways. He jumped the fence and hurried down Queensway, past the shawarma stands, pirate DVD merchants and adolescent hoodlums amassed outside the subterranean bowling alley, into a shopping emporium where, he remembered, there was a one-hour-photo stall in the same arcade as Zayed the barber.

Quickly, Lamm used up the twenty-one shots remaining on the camera’s film. He photographed the arcade’s ceiling; its mouldy patches, cobwebs, old whirring fans that might any moment fly off and decapitate an unsuspecting shopper as they haggled the price of a baklava. He photographed the CCTV cameras photographing everybody, the masonite floor minutely cracked like a dry riverbed, the shops full of plastic from China – £5 clock radios, £10 CD players, kitchen appliances stamped with imitation insignias (Sonny, Palsonic, Sonyo) – hawked by a bearded vendor wearing a
keffiyeh
scarf and a white linen robe who, were it not for his mobile phone with a wireless earpiece, could have been a nineteenth-century Bedouin tribesman magically dumped in West London’s oasis of crap.

Further in, Persian women in hijabs bought pistachios, dried figs, treacly yellow hummus, green peppers a forearm’s length long. Iraqi men sold second-hand laptops, mostly to Indian students recently arrived in London to study software engineering and work at convenience stores. An internet café too, crowded by precociously moustached teenage boys looking at porn websites and gossiping online in Arabic and Farsi. These kids, taking a breather from skulking outside the bowling alley, wore plastic diamond studs in their left ears, imitation gold bracelets, and usually baggy windbreakers printed with some logo incorporating the US flag, presumably to the chagrin of the Islamists who, the
Daily Mail
reported, came to Queensway Road from the Finsbury Park mosque to hand out flyers espousing the heavenly merits of martyrdom.

Lamm found the one-hour-photo shop. At the counter was a grey Iranian woman wearing tortoiseshell reading glasses and engrossed in a Farsi newspaper. The front page featured a colour photograph of President Ahmadinejad in his safari suit, standing at a flowery podium, his outstretched right hand seemingly stroking the nose of the Ayatollah in a giant hagiographic portrait onstage. This lady won’t closely examine your photos. And if she does, so what? Is it illegal to photograph a prominent man sucking off a stranger in a public park?

For an hour, Lamm waited in the lounge at the rear of the arcade. For £3 he ate a tangy mash of yellow beans and couscous, and watched Al Jazeera on a flickering TV perched on a metal frame above a faded poster of Mount Damavand, the highest peak in Iran. The regular customers were men in sandals, beige slacks and open pastel shirts showcasing their stupefyingly hirsute chests. Their businesses, Lamm guessed, being imports back to Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, Baghdad. Speaking what sounded like ten different Arabian dialects, the men argued, laughed, ate pita with baba ghanoush, drank pungent black tea made from a Middle Eastern dried shrub, and played cards with a deck Lamm didn’t recognize. They rarely glanced at the TV blaring in Arabic; the mundane news of car bombs, dead babies in Basra, a firestorm in Fallujah or the invader’s latest proclamation of victory as another five thousand high school drop-outs from the foreclosing farmland of Kansas or the ghettos of Detroit surged into the Sunni Triangle, motivated not by patriotic bloodlust but by the military pension, subsidized healthcare and college tuition guaranteed by the Pentagon if they get back home alive.

The Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi businessmen only looked at the TV, finally distracted from their pungent tea and sweet halva, when the anchorman – a moustached square-jawed specimen of Arabian masculinity who would have made Lawrence of Arabia hard beneath his cream robes – reported the race riots in Bethnal Green. As the TV showed the grieving family of the Pakistani boy whose death had precipitated London’s hot-headed disaster, the men in the coffee lounge cursed at the screen. Lamm watched too, noticing the hard, fresh creases in the face of Malik Massawi’s weeping mother, the teary shellshock in the eyes of Malik Massawi’s sisters and the black resignation sunk deeply into the stare of Malik Massawi’s father, Nawaz, who glared at the TV cameras as he left the Brick Lane mosque the morning of his son’s funeral. Nawaz Massawi who had escaped the death stalking every cranny of Kandahar, who had built a steady income as a house-painter by day and taxi driver by night, who had embraced the opportunities of the colonial motherland and raised a healthy young family until disorder met his eldest son at 4 a.m. in a deserted Camden street.

The hour had passed. Lamm left his plate empty, returned to the photo stall, paid the fee, then hurried to a public toilet by the entrance to Kensington Gardens. In a cubicle, he shuffled through the photos. Mostly they showed the arcade’s scratched floor, fluorescent lights, bored shopkeepers looking out for shoplifters with one eye and at the Arabic newspaper with the other. Then the prize. Three photographs. Dim, a bit blurry, but the participants nevertheless recognizable as a tall, dark-haired man leaning on the shed wall while the US Senate’s wealthiest representative knelt in damp leaves and breathed ferociously through his nose.

Lamm stopped by the souvenir shop next to the Hilton. For £1.80, he purchased a blue laundry marker and a postcard with an envelope. A postcard (manufactured near Shanghai) of the giant Ferris wheel at South Bank – bone white, four storeys high, impassively hollow against the grey London sky – that he promptly dropped in a rubbish bin. In Kensington Gardens, Lamm sat amid the knee-high grass. He marked the envelope:

ATTENTION: SENATOR RICHARD WESSON.

Taking care not to leave fingerprints, Lamm slid one of the incriminating photographs face-down into the envelope. On the back of the photo, he wrote in a thin, uneven slant deliberately unlike his own.

SENATOR,

I HAVE MORE PHOTOS. GIVE ME WHAT I WANT.

Lamm paused.
What do you want?

A way out.

A passport.

Therefore, you need cash. But how do you get it?

If you demand that he leaves a million dollars in the park, or in a rubbish bin, or in a phone box, then you’re dead. His guards will catch you at gunpoint.

Tell him to deposit the money into your account
.

Then he’ll know your identity
.

Tell him to register a new bank account, so you can withdraw the money
.

But to withdraw cash, you need a bankcard
.

Tell him to wire you the money
.

But to what address?

Was your identity caught by a surveillance camera?

Have the police identified you?

Lamm lay in the grass, thinking.

What you need is an intermediary
. Someone you know intimately, who can collect the money. Someone who wants to rattle the senator, who knows how the old warhorse thinks and hates him for it.

No limousine parked outside the penthouse. Lamm pushed the intercom button inlayed with polished walnut burl. She answered drowsily.

‘Who is it?’

‘Me.’

The pause. She wonders why you’re here now.

‘You’re alone?’

‘Yeah.’

Lamm lifted his finger off the talk button. She’s calculating the risk? Or she’s too drunk, too tired from what she did or didn’t do today, to push the buzzer that opens the door.

The snap of the lock. Walking to the elevator, he looked at the marble floor. Hooded, face concealed from the CCTV camera in the lobby.

You heard her via the intercom. She
is
exhausted, though not from a night of fashionable excess, nor sleeplessness induced by indigestion after the Minotaur made her eat the £35 bowl of glorified macaroni last night at The Ivy. No, the creases bordering her eyes are the shock, the unwelcome prick of responsibility, recollection, reality that stepped out of the US Embassy limousine on Park Lane yesterday afternoon. The trauma – that, and the suicidal memories – revived by talking to, listening to,
justifying
herself to the famous silver statue who begot her, yet who remains as foreign as Easter Island’s monoliths bearing his emotionless likeness.

Does she know his secret?

Surely she’s suspected it.

Lamm recalled Kelly describing her father’s weekly relaxation: drinking beer on the back porch with his divorced Washington buddies.
Now you can see it:
the unmasked physicality of those preened, powerful men at the Minotaur’s palace, his Satyricon, talking, touching, teasing each other! The Pentagon’s closet-lurkers, the gay armchair generals who decant their sexual frustration into military aggression. Everything comes from something.