Seventy-Two Virgins (14 page)

‘Two.’

It does not take much to rob a British tabloid reporter —or indeed a broadsheet reporter — of his dignity, even if he has a hairstyle like Michelangelo’s Moses. ‘We’re all going to fucking die,’ shrieked Barry White as he hurled himself into the ditch, knocking over the last geranium as he went.

‘Three.’

Because he had no choice, Jason Pickel opened fire, first at the windscreen and then at the bonnet.

‘It’s all right, Jason,’ said Indira, touching his hand and noticing the vibration for the first time. It would be just her luck, she thought, if she and Jason actually had to DO something today.

Oh come on Cameron, darling girl, thought Adam Swallow. He looked at the ambulance and strained his ears for the sound of Islamic prayer. On no account must she see the mutilated man, or even see the men coming out of the ambulance.

He looked at his watch and yearned for the sight of her; partly because he was anxious, and partly because his feeling for her was turning day by day into the most heart-squeezing, throat-choking crush he had ever had on a woman.

In the office of the Speaker of the House of Commons there was a flap. The doorman at St Stephen’s Entrance had just rung to say the President was on his way, and by their calculations he was almost ten minutes early.

The telephone rang again. ‘It’s the French Ambassador,’ said Sir Edward Luce, the Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms, a spare, kindly man. ‘He says it’s about his partner, and he wants to speak to you personally.’

‘His partner? What am I supposed to be doing with the French Ambassador’s floozy?’

‘He calls her his
petite arnie.
You remember — Miss Benedicte al-Walibi. We had that trouble with the American Embassy.’

‘Nnnggh,’
the Speaker groaned. It was a low Scottish groan, an act of self-psyching-up, accepted within the Presbyterian sect to which he belonged as an expression of direct communication with the Almighty. Just such a noise had he produced in his youth, in the 1970s, when as an adroit convenor of the TGWU he had prepared to broker a deal between his lads and a once-great Coventry car firm. The deal might be inflation-busting; it might be unaffordable; it might accelerate the bringing of the hallowed marque to its knees. But with his broken prize-fighter’s weariness he usually persuaded all sides that no better bargain could be struck. ‘Tell him I’ll call him right back,’ said the Speaker. ‘We’ve got the President coming in now.’

There was a silence in the Speaker’s glorious apartments. The clock ticked a beat or two. Out of his nostrils came the soft, stertorous noise of a man digesting the traditional sheet-metal worker’s breakfast of chitterlings and black pudding. But the Speaker’s mind whirred with great precision as he worked on the problem of the French Ambassador’s mistress.

Outside the Thames ran softly in the sun; inside the velvet brocaded wallpaper soared in plum and bottle green, like the luxurious trousers of some nineteenth-century clown, until it met the demented whorls and volutes of the Pugin entablature. Ranged at the back of the room was a glass-fronted case containing the gifts which successive Speakers had received from visiting dignitaries: a silver spittoon from the Speaker of the Chinese People’s Assembly; a whip, its handle inlaid with topaz and jacinth, from the Majlis of Free Afghanistan; a drum from Uganda; a model ship from Moscow, and so on.

There was a rapping on the oak without. The Speaker stood.He clenched his buttocks. He stitched on his broadest smile.

But it was not the President who entered. It was— Sir Perry Grainger, an MP for more than a quarter of a century, Chairman of the All-Party Foreign Affairs Committee, and a man of almost stratospheric pomposity.

‘I am so sorry to raise this now, but the matter has only just come to my attention.’ Sir Perry advanced to the middle of the carpet and beamed. It was an amphibian Roy Jenkinsesque beam of frightening intensity and insincerity.

‘Someone has this morning informed me of the nature of the token which you will present on behalf of the House of Commons to the President. Is, ah, that it?’

Sir Perry’s eye fell on the frankly unmissable object that stood on the Speaker’s desk.

‘Sir Perry,’ said the Speaker, as patiently as he was able. ‘You may not like it, but the President is going to be here any second.’

‘My views are in a sense immaterial, but I think that there are many people, on both sides of the Atlantic, who might describe it as vulgar tat.’

‘But I chose it myself,’ said the Speaker, ‘didn’t I, Sir Edward?’

‘You did, sir. You went to some considerable trouble.’

‘I think it’s just the job,’ said the Speaker.

‘It’s certainly rather jolly,’ said Sir Edward.

‘The Americans are nuts about Churchill,’ explained the Speaker. ‘He’s a hero to them. They canna get enough of him.’

Sir Perry looked at the enormous Toby jug of the wartime leader: mauve-cheeked, gooseberry-eyed and waving a V sign. ‘But the gesture is obscene.’

‘Not in America,’ said the Speaker. ‘In America,’ he demonstrated for Sir Perry’s benefit — ‘they use only one finger. I tell you what,’ he continued, with the arm-round-the shoulder voice he used for when the fix was coming, ‘I believe that many colleagues on all sides of the House would think it right if you, Sir Perry, were to present him with this sign of transatlantic good wishes.’

‘Well, I am not sure, Mr Speaker …’ Vanity began to struggle with good taste in Sir Perry’s mind, a short, one-sided conflict.

‘The President is on his way now, sir,’ said a man in tights, sticking his head round the door.

‘And furthermore,’ said the Speaker, as he reached into a humidor and produced a gorilla’s fistful of nine-inch cigars, we will stuff it with Sir Winston’s personal smokes.’

‘But surely those aren’t Winston’s cigars?’

‘They are now. Wah. I have spoken,’ said the Speaker.

‘But do you—?’

‘I have spoken. That’s what I’m paid to do,’ and he raised his palm like a chief.

‘Sir Edward, please ring the French Ambassador with my compliments, and tell him that he and his Palestinian doxy are fully expected in Westminster Hall. Their seats will be in the diplomatic section. This is the House of Commons, and no one tells us what to do, and certainly no foreign government.’

 ‘Mr President, sir, it is an honour.

And still Cameron sat on the bench in the corridor outside the Pass Office, not twenty yards from where Adam waited. She stared at the photos, of Jones with his livid mask, the slightly fatter one in the skullcap, the one with the killer eyes, and a young, good-looking boy. Was this really a TV crew?

Then she began to persuade herself that it must be, mainly because she had never known Adam to be wrong about anything.

Now that the President had gone inside, the shouting died down a little. The hard-core chanters continued to curse America, assisted by a steel band, but other protesters were taking things easy.

The July morning sun was gaining heat, and here and there it was almost what newspapers call a carnival atmosphere in Parliament Square. Some began to disrobe, to flop down on the chlorous stringy grass. The smell of fried onions rose from a pair of mobile hamburger stalls. Spliffs and cigarettes were produced, and soon the gathering had created a nice little nephos of polyaromatic hydrocarbons and benzopyrenes, as noxious in its way as a Kyoto-flouting gas-guzzling American traffic jam.

There were girls with bare belly buttons, and girls with rings through their belly buttons. There were girls with rings through their eyebrows, and young men with shaven skulls and beards so ridiculously sculpted that they ran like hairy caterpillars down their chins. There were pikeys with whippets and Sloanes with toe-rings. Here was a dreadlocked young black man flogging the
Socialist Worker;
here were Sir Harold and Lady Antonia, fingering cans of Special Brew; and everywhere were people for whom this was only their second act of public protest, the first having been the countryside march. There was a curious confluence, in some old-fashioned English minds: a simultaneous hatred of government interference in country pursuits, and a hatred of interference in Iraq.

Odd friendships were being forged and new romances beginning. Here was Raimondo Charles, a forty-two-year-old American website journalist with a dashing picture by-line, in which he appeared to be cupping his hands around a joint.

Raimondo liked to think of himself as a womanizing international dog of war. One moment he might be ferried around the backstreets of Beirut, blindfolded, in a Hezbollah taxi, with a gun to his neck. At another he might be in a darkened room in Rpublika Srpska, hearing the whingeing confessions of an ex-warlord. Raimondo had once persuaded a woman to go to bed with him by claiming to be an investigative reporter from
Rolling Stone
magazine. This was only true in the sense that he had contributed an interview (spiked) with an interesting fellow who claimed to have slept with Madonna’s sister.

Now Raimondo had become part of the general anti-war movement — the people who thought the Pentagon was the greatest threat to global stability, and he was standing next to a very good-looking young woman, with an aristocratic manner. She had badges saying, ‘Keep Britain Farming’, ‘Blair Doesn’t Care’, and ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’. Raimondo busily stoked her indignation.

‘Yah,’ she said, ‘I think it’s just outrageous the way America refuses to sign that Tokyo protocol on climate change.’

‘Tchah.’ Raimondo shook his head in disgusted assent, and offered her a cigarette.

‘And then there’s that other thing, that Hague thingummy about war criminals. What I’d like to know is why the hell we have to sign up for it and they don’t.’

‘You bet.’

‘I’ve been reading this really good book, and you know what I think?’ Her eyes appeared particularly lustrous. Raimondo inched his muzzle closer.

‘I think America is a rogue state!’

‘You said it.’

‘And all we do in this country is poodle, poodle, poodle, like’ — she didn’t want to say poodle again — ‘like children who don’t know any better. I mean, why the hell this government had to do what it did, and the Opposition, ugh. I tell you one thing,’ she said, ‘I bet you they wouldn’t try to ban hunting in Iraq, whatever they say about Saddam.’

Not for the first time when making himself pleasant to a beautiful woman, Raimondo felt a fleeting challenge to his intellectual good faith. What she had said was balls. There have been only two governments in history that have preceded Britain’s Labour Party in initiating a ban on hunting with dogs, and they are Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Saddam banned the packs as somehow un-Baathist, though they have been a part of Mesopotamian life since Assurbanipal or Tiglath-Pileser set off in his chariot in search of a lion; and hunting survived only in the limited sense that Uday and Qusay Hussein would sometimes get up into a Hind Soviet-made helicopter gunship, fly over the marshes, and machine-gun anything larger than a rat.

He could have pointed this out, but for tactical reasons did not. ‘So where have you guys come from this morning?’ he asked, indicating the little coagulation of toff-ish protestors. Raimondo was a stealthy but dedicated snob.

‘Oh, we’re all down from Northamptonshire.’

‘Oh yes, whereabouts?’

‘From Knout, actually,’ she said, meaning the famous stately home.

At once Raimondo seemed to see something familiar in that freckled little nose. Could this be — but of course it was! — Sharon, Marchioness of Kettering.

Raimondo’s plans began to develop. He envisaged evenings with Sharon at Annabel’s; he seemed to see invitations to shoot. Perhaps, yes, why not, if he played it right, she might have him up to Northamptonshire for some eco-friendly blamming of the pheasant.

So he told her a little about Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and Somalia, and depleted uranium shells.

‘Talking of which,’ said the posh girl, finding a break in his recitation, ‘guess what I’ve got in my knapsack.’ She pulled it out. ‘Freshly laid this morning. And I’m jolly well going to chuck it at someone!’

‘Hold on,’ said Raimondo, and just as he was about to say what he thought of this plan, there was a blaring of sirens in the corner of the square. There were police cars, and then ambulances, and they were screaming round from Victoria towards the Embankment.

‘That’s funny,’ said Raimondo.

‘I wonder what happened?’ said the girl.

‘There’s a lot of violent men around,’ said Raimondo.

‘Crumbs,’ said the posh girl. ‘Shall we go and find out?’

‘Come on,’ said Raimondo, and began to lead her through the craning crowd. ‘I didn’t get your name.’

‘I’m Sandra. I work for her ladyship. I’m the nanny,’ said the girl.

The essence of being Raimondo is to get over this kind of disappointment quickly. ‘Sandra,’ he said, ‘now whatever you do, don’t throw that egg.’ He waved not just at the British policemen, but at fridge-sized Matt, and Joe, and the other American security men. ‘This place is swarming with security men from the most dangerous government on earth.’

Round the corner, outside Church House, assorted clerics were ministering to a sobbing woman, who had found a pool of blood on the pavement.

News of the horror fanned through the crowd, and was relayed to Purnell and Bluett in the Ops Room.

‘Right,’ said Bluett. ‘That certainly stands up this guy’s story.’

‘Colonel,’ said Purnell, ‘I hate to admit defeat, but I think discretion may be the better part of valour here.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I mean let’s knock this ceremony on the head.’

‘You gotta be shitting me, Mr Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

OK, thought Cameron, let’s get on with this; and she prepared to get up from the bench. She just hoped to God that Roger didn’t find out about it. After all, these passes were in his name, and if something went wrong, he would be in serious trouble.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

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