Seventy-Two Virgins (2 page)

‘Oh please,’ she wailed.

She was dressed with terrific chic. She had long blonde hair, dark eyebrows, a tight black T-shirt over a willowy figure and a belt made out of copper plates. It was hard to believe she could be the mother of a ten-year-old.

‘I am very sorry,’ he said and continued to tap.

‘I’ll be literally THREE minutes.’

‘It is not for me to say. It is de rule.’ Eric had caught a glimpse of himself in the smoked Pajero pane, and he knew what she was looking at: six foot two of anthracite handsomeness and power, as richly accoutred with high technology as an American infantryman. He had a smart peaked cap with the cap-badge of the council; he had metallic silver numbers on his epaulettes. He carried a TDS Huskie minicomputer. He had a two-way T8 288 Motorola radio. He had a Radix FP4O printer, ready to discharge his literary efforts, and he was about to print the ticket now.

‘Oh please,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to drop him off at school, and he’s got an exam.’

Eric smiled. ‘What kind of exam?’

‘It’s a maths exam, isn’t it, darling? Oh please, he’s going to be late.’

‘I don’t care,’ said the child.

‘Oh darling.’

Eric approved of maths exams. A cadet branch of Eric’s family had made a great deal of money by scamming arithmetically untalented Europeans, and he was generally in favour of encouraging our children to better themselves.

‘Just one minute,’ wheedled the woman.

The parkie considered. Many traffic wardens are traumatized by the verbals, as they are called. COON. NIGGER. MONKEY. APE.

Those were some of the names Eric had been called, shorn of their participial expletives.

IS THIS YOUR IDEA OF POWER? WHY DON’T YOU GET A BETTER JOB? These were some of the questions he was asked.

Faced with such disgusting behaviour, some traffic wardens respond with a merciless taciturnity. The louder the rant of the traffic offenders, the more acute are the wardens’ feelings of pleasure that they, the stakeless, the outcasts, the niggers, are a valued part of the empire of law, and in a position to chastise the arrogance and selfishness of the indigenous people.

Eric was unusual in that he liked sometimes — every once in a while — to show mercy, as befitted his kingly lineage.

The scars on his cheeks denoted that he was a prince of the royal blood in the Hausa tribe, and it was only the evil of primogeniture that debarred him from substantial estates outside Lagos.

Sometimes he would exercise clemency, if he were offered a really rococo excuse, as a bored tutor will indulge a crapubus undergraduate if his reason for missing a class is truly bizarre and degenerate. Sometimes, as today, he could be moved by the appeal of a damn good-looking woman. But today he had a peculiar reason of his own for not wanting to prolong the conversation.

The night before Mrs Onyeama had been very good to him. She had made him his favourite meal, a chicken Kiev with a kind of special West African garlic called kulu, rather like the North American ramps, and he had slept well on it. But he knew from experience that Mrs Onyeama’s chicken Kievs had an amazing effect on the digestive system. There was nothing normally detectable, but from time to time the kraken would wake, and then a globule of air would force itself up the oesophagus and press on the palate … until he was obliged to let it go.

It had happened to him at a wedding party recently. He had been telling a joke, and he came to the punchline, and everyone was crowded around him, like maternity unit staff, waiting for the birth of the joke, and he had suddenly felt —
whup
— this thing come out of him, involuntarily, rather like the thing in
Alien
coming out of John Hurt. His audience had reacted in much the same way as the characters in the movie.

So he beamed at her, without a word.

‘Mmm-hmmm,’ he murmured, and put down the Huskie.

‘Really?’ She couldn’t believe it.

‘Mmmmbmm.’

She gushed her thanks and was gone. And it was therefore with a faint sense of a hunter-gatherer who has missed one easy kill that he turned into Tufton Street, for the second time that morning.

He could hardly believe his eyes. It was still there.

It was the big one, el gordo. This was the white whale, and he was Ahab.

It had been there, to his certain knowledge, for half an hour, and probably far longer. The ambulance was on a single yellow. That was a Code 01 offence, and it was on the footway — that was Code 62. But what made it a legitimate target, in Eric’s view, was that it was blocking the thoroughfare, in the sense that two cars could certainly not pass abreast.

It was not true — as the tabloids hinted — that he received a bounty for every car he successfully caused to be plucked from the streets. But it certainly was true that he received bonuses for ‘productivity’, and productivity was measured —well, how else could it be measured?

Eric and Naaotwa Onyeama were ambitious for their children, and on the televised urgings of Carol Vorderman they were currently investing in a series of expensive ‘Kumon’ maths text books. Since Eric Onyeama only made £340 per week, working from 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., this was not an opportunity he could responsibly pass up.

He reached for his Motorola and summoned the dampers. Then, since there could be no question of the vehicle staying where it was, he rang the tow-truck company.

Hee hee hee,
chortled Eric, and he laughed at the multiple pleasures of the morning.

He knew all the tow-truck men, and Dragan Panic, the Serb, was the hungriest of the lot. Unless the mysterious crew of this ambulance returned within five minutes, the vehicle was a goner.

In the Tivoli café on the corner of Great Peter Street and Marsham Street three men and a kid of about nineteen were coming to the end of breakfast. The restaurant was non-posh to the point of affectation. Up the nostrils of its diners rose the tang of vinegar, mothering in its bottle, mingling with the ammoniacal vapours that hummed from the cloth that was used to wipe the Formica.

But the four dark customers had done well. They had eaten a meal of Henrician proportions: eggs, beans, chips, chops, schnitzels, steaks. The proprietor was amazed, especially considering it was not yet nine in the morning.

They had swallowed draughts of milkless tea, turned into a kind of sugary quicksand, and then they had eaten the Danish pastry and the doughnuts, ancient thickly iced things that had been in the display so long he had feared he would have to reduce the price.

They had eaten, in fact, as if there were no tomorrow; but today their mortal frames required relief. Owing to their eccentric bivouac they had been unable to pass water all night.

‘Quickly,’ said the one called Jones, coming back from the toilets. ‘The traffic wardens will be here.’ There was certainly something lilting and eastern about his accent; but if you shut your eyes and ignored his brown skin, there were tonic effects — birdlike variations in pitch — that were positively Welsh.

‘I must go too,’ said one of his colleagues, who had a moustache.

‘Well, hurry, God help us.’

Haroun scowled. It was obviously inequitable for their leader so to privilege his own requirements, but no doubt he was under pressure.

‘Sir, please can I go?’

It was the kid. ‘Quickly, Dean,’ said the man called Jones.

There was only one toilet, identified by a pictogram on the door, of a Regency buck and a crinolined dame, to show it was for the use of both sexes, and by an unspoken agreement Dean went in first.

Full though his bladder was after a night of appalling discomfort on a stretcher in that airless vehicle, he found he was trembling too much.

‘What is going on?’ hissed the man called Jones.

‘What are you doing in there?’ Haroun banged on the door and Dean felt that any hope of micturition was gone. He respected Jones, but he was seriously frightened of Haroun, who had the pale blue eyes and tiny black pupils of a staring seagull.

Jones saw a traffic warden pass the window. Their researches had already established that the wardens around here were sticklers, and he had a sense of impending disaster.

He ran out and round the corner. He stood still. He shut his eyes. He clenched his fists.

‘Nooo,’
he called. ‘Stop it, you!’

Already a clamp had appeared on the right-hand front wheel of the ambulance, a green clamp, moronic, infernal. He swore in Arabic.

Hmar.
Jackass.

Yebnen kelp.
Son of a bitch.

Hee hee hee,
chortled Eric Onyeama.

Jones ran back into the Tivoli and rounded up his men. By now only Haroun had failed to make use of the facilities.

‘Come,’ said Jones.

‘I must just go …’ said Haroun, but such was the power of Jones, and so contemptuous was the expression in his eyes that Haroun followed him like a lamb and Jones ran back into the sunlight.

And now he couldn’t believe it … He couldn’t flipping well believe it. Surely he had been gone only seconds, and now the clamp had gone but the ambulance was being hoisted up into a kind of hammock by a hydraulic lift, and the parkie was standing there, still scribing zealously away into his Huskie computer.

‘I am sorry, sir,’ recited Eric, ‘but once all four wheels are off the ground, you have lost control of the vehicle. It is now the responsibility of Westminster City Council.’

Jones waved the keys. ‘But it is ours. Put it down.’

‘All the craps are on,’ said Eric.

‘The craps?’

‘Yessir, these are the craps. The metal craps.’

‘You mean the crabs.’

‘That is right, sir, they are the craps.’

Jones gave up. ‘Did you say all four wheels?’

‘Yes, that is correct, sir. Now that all four wheels are off the ground, it is the law that you no longer have any control over this vehicle.’

This was a big ambulance. Fully laden it weighed not far short of three and a half tonnes, with a 3.5 litre Rover V8 engine and bulky aluminium chassis, so that it was already astonishing that the tow-truck had been able to hoist it.

At that moment Jones had an inspiration. It was technically true that the wheels were off the ground. But the front pair were only a few inches up.

‘What about now?’ asked Jones. He and Haroun jumped on the bonnet of the Leyland Daf vehicle, painted with a blue star and caduceus, and it sunk its nose until the front offside wheel brushed the ground.

‘See!’ shouted Jones. ‘Now it is ours again!’

CHAPTER THREE

0832 HRS

‘Whose ambulance did you say it was?’ asked Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, who was, today, in charge of anti-terrorist and security operations throughout the Metropolis.

Grover entered the room with an air of satisfaction. ‘What did I tell you? We’ve got it. An ambulance from the Bilston and Willenhall NHS Trust was seen at the Travelodge in Dunstable at one a.m.’

‘Good. And it’s still there, is it?’

‘Er, no. It left.’ ‘Aha.’

‘We’re on the case.’

A second later, he was back again. ‘I’ve got Bluett on the line.’

The two London policemen looked at each other. They knew — or strongly suspected — that the Americans were tuning in to their frequencies.

‘Put him through,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

He listened with half-closed eyes to the American’s demands.

‘You want a sniper on the roof of the Commons? What did you say his name was?’ On a piece of headed notepaper Purnell printed ‘PICKLE’. Then he crossed it out and wrote ‘PICKEL’.

‘I see, yes,’ he said, ‘I see, yes.’

He listened some more, and then said: ‘Well, I can understand if the First Lady is a bit anxious but … Right you are, Colonel … Okeycokey, chum. Yep. See you later, I expect … No, no, everything else is, um, fine. We have no evidence of anything, you know, untoward.’

He disconnected with a groan.

‘They want a sniper on the roof of the Commons, above New Palace Yard. I’ve said we’ll oblige. Someone answering to this name will be presenting himself in a few minutes. Whatever happens, I am not having him sitting up there alone.’

He handed over the sheet of paper. ‘And I want the choppers to start scanning Westminster for this flaming ambulance.’

High above Soho a Metropolitan Police Twin Squirrel Eurocopter AS 355N banked and turned down Shaftesbury Avenue.

It passed directly over the head of Roger Barlow, who looked up and felt vaguely resentful. Why did they hover in that threatening way over innocent streets? It was like some dreary lefty movie about Thatcher’s Britain.

Then he continued to thread his way through the cars. That’s what he loved about bicycles: the autonomy, the ability to put your wheel wherever you chose. As you looked over the handlebars you could see your front tyre as a snub-nosed cylinder, nosing at will down the open streets of London. He passed an
Evening Standard
hoarding, announcing full coverage of the state visit.

Uh-oh. The
Standard.
He had forgotten about the
Standard.
How would he stop his wife seeing that one?

The traffic was getting heavier. Now he understood. It was the exclusion zone. The American security people had insisted on a total ban on traffic in the area to be honoured by their presence, and the result was that a freeborn Englishman could not even move down the Queen’s highway.

‘Strewth,’ he cursed, and used a disabled ramp to mount the pavement. He knew he shouldn’t do it, but there you go. In any case, his political career might be over by tomorrow morning.

Then he was back on the road again, watching the shimmer starting to rise from the hot bonnets of the backed-up traffic, and
thugga thugga whok whok
the helicopter was ceasing to impinge on his consciousness.

CHAPTER FOUR

0833 HRS

In the Twin Squirrel Eurocopter the two sun-goggled officers peered into the hot canyons and smoking wadis of the city. ‘So who’s meant to be driving this ambulance?’ said the pilot, as they passed over Trafalgar Square and made for the river. ‘He’s called Jones,’ said Grover from New Scotland Yard.