I Am Max Lamm (19 page)

‘Nobody eat zis food, it gets bad. Take it home.’

He pushed a bowl of avocado dip into Lamm’s hands.

‘My name is Eli Kohn.’

‘I’m George.’

‘
Shabbat Shalom
, George.’ The
shammas
drew his breath.

‘Are you sleeping in ze park?’

Glaring into Lamm’s pupils, at the truth, Eli chewed a pickle. The fugitive was stunned.

‘I’m staying in a flat on Queensborough Terrace.’

‘You’re not sleeping under ze barbeque?’

Nobody here
looked
like an undercover cop. Too old, too young, too chatty, too soft. The
shammas
peered at Lamm’s jeans.

‘Your trousers have dust. It’s iron oxide and calcium carbonate from ze old barbeque in Hyde Park. I do not forget ze colour. I used to cook a fish zer wiz my daughter.’

Biscuit snagged in Lamm’s throat.

‘I vas a geologist for thirty years. Have you been sleeping in ze barbeque? People do.’

A scrap of repentance for inadvertently killing a Pakistani teenager so he might sleep. That’s what Lamm wanted. Not this interrogation from a rock expert with the elocution of Dr Strangelove. Eli Kohn peppered Lamm with breath scented by the salmon dip. Definitely no undercover cop, the old Jews from the old country, they all smell like this! How much you’ve missed! Proust tasted a
petite madeleine
dipped in tea, you sniff a
frum
bearded sleuth marinated in herring. Your descent is complete. With a glance, this
chochem
of a geologist sees what you’ve become. He recognizes your bottomlessness. You’re Esau deprived of his father’s birthright, you’re Jonah in the belly of the whale.

And you’re surprised it feels strange!

But strange things are happening all the time. Later that Saturday afternoon, four days after Max Lamm’s catastrophe, they met in the master bedroom. She was pleasured more by the lines of cocaine she’d hoovered up, he suspected, than his dick inside her. Still, if this was his final conquest before twenty years of avoiding randy inmates in the prison shower, so be it.

‘
Keep doing that
,’ she moaned. And in Kelly’s insatiability he felt what? Perverse pride that she chose to fuck him instead of Donald Trump Jr in a Fifth Avenue penthouse? Gratitude, that with her carnal addiction was the five-star daycare centre for a homeless fugitive? Gasping, she pulled him in. This, Lamm presumed, is the way princesses moan on the wedding night of their arranged marriage. They’re invigorated not only by the instinctive thrust, by the animal catharsis of seeing your Prince Charming going at it like a dog in heat, but also by hot reprieve from the decorum, pomp, pretence that pervades a royal life – a life not unlike Kelly Wesson’s – like a fog.

‘Come
now
!’ Kelly whispered again. Her spidery amber legs pirouetted roofwards, engorging him.
Okay
, Lamm decided. He stopped looking at the framed photograph that prolonged his virility, in which Senator Wesson and Newt Gingrich shook hands with North Korea’s Dear Leader on a junket to Pyongyang.

‘Just a second,’ Lamm stammered. Nudging Kelly against the Versace bolster, he found a groove.

‘That’s
good
,’ she murmured. Lamm kept going from behind as she arched her back, oohing melodramatically as he sensed the hint of ejaculation.

He lurched forward, gasping. She presumed it was his climax, the impossibility of containing the wad any longer. But shock was the culprit. Because there, sitting on the pillow by Kelly’s right shoulder, was the deceased Pakistani boy. Another ghost in Lamm’s kingdom.

Malik Massawi looked as he did the night
it
happened. Red baseball cap, black Nike windbreaker, cheap gold chain around his neck, plastic diamond in his left ear. Blood streaming from his right temple, running its ruby signature of foreclosure down his cheek. Most disturbing were the eyes. Malik’s body appeared living, undecayed, but his eyes were horrific. The deep brown pupils shooting that glance of astonishment from the moment the bottle cracked his skull.

Malik Massawi’s eyes were bleeding. Not just bleeding, but writhing, swelling, seeping with larvae, fat white worms, maggots. The dead boy’s pupils oozed blood, bile, pus, cum, tears. Seeping scarlet chunks, this blood torrent of infection, infarction, infestation slopping down his cheeks onto the bone-white bedspread. Bleeding, ejaculating, shitting out his ghostly eyes, Malik’s posthumous excretia stained the sheets and the lovers’ naked bodies. The red filth rained onto Kelly’s breasts, running a crimson stream into her belly button.

Lamm stared ahead at Malik, at the living dead boy’s spiral of fluids dripping upon Kelly’s left kneecap. ‘Keep going,’ she heaved. Mindlessly Lamm re-entered, following orders. It
did
feel good, so good, yet as he fucked harder, closer to the end, his victim’s ghost came on stronger. Impossible to ignore. And Malik’s spectre didn’t say a word; infuriatingly silent like all the others!

‘
Harder!
’ she gasped. Astonishing that she’s not faking this. And that, Lamm recognized amid Malik Massawi’s ghostly eruption, is your attraction. Your misshaped animal magnetism, your degenerate chaos, invigorates this princess via her thirst for self-destruction. The reason you’re here.

Again, Lamm tried to look away from the slain teenager’s horrifying phantom. Ignore the bloodstains! Feel Kelly’s tits, her fleshy outcrops swollen like the Hindenburg moments before disaster. Look at her white white teeth, spindly waxed arms, tanned concave stomach assured of skinniness by a daily half-hour’s sit-ups (a disciplinary relic of the National Guard)
and
the bulimia. The slender exclamation point of waxed pink flesh just above her pussy; the things that teenage boys dream of!

‘C-c-come on!’ she stammered.

Why’s it taking you so long? Don’t I turn you on?

The problem: Lamm gazed not at the exquisite crimson gash below, at her velvety delectation exciting his reproductive urge, life and death incarnate. Instead he stared into Malik’s writhing bleeding eyes, into the dead boy’s shattered skull, his soul.

Ghost! Say something! Let me fuck her!

If you’re the reaper bringing death, bring it!

But Malik Massawi didn’t gesture nor speak. He stared at Lamm, the ghastly cascade of wriggling maggots, putrefied blood plasma, festering skin, bulbous pus slopping out his eyes, over his eyelashes, down his nose, cheeks, chin onto the bloodstained sheets. All over Kelly’s thighs, her pussy and Lamm’s abdomen, the ghost’s excretory waterfall of decay, decortication, decomposition.

‘
Do it!
’

But Lamm couldn’t, not with her breasts painted sickening scarlet by the juices from his victim’s skull.

‘
Fuck me!
’

She stammered the magic words, arousing as anything Lamm ever saw in a men’s magazine or imagined as a schoolboy. She must have snorted some great stuff earlier. Digging her fingernails into his arse, she forced him in so hard it seemed her midriff would collapse. Arching her pelvis, heels scraping the backs of his thighs. But Lamm couldn’t look away from the boy’s ghost.

‘
Now!
’

Finally – as Malik’s face erupted blood, maggots, pus, mucous, bile – the semen flowed too. Not from Lamm, however much he wanted to,
needed
to, but from the dead boy. A pearl trail of ejaculate squirted out of the ghost’s eyes, out from his hollow pupils. Flowing down his cheeks onto Kelly’s stomach, these white tears of semen stolen from Lamm’s testicles.

‘What’s wrong?’ Kelly pushed him away with her knees. ‘You can’t finish up?’

Her National Guard tone of voice. She was
ordering
her boy to ejaculate; they had been fucking for thirty-five minutes already. Maybe he’s gay.

‘Gimme a second,’ Lamm whispered. He thrusted quicker, smoother. Finally feeling the surge of the climax when, once again, he saw his victim’s ghost. Malik Massawi sitting cross-legged on the pillow, his bashed-in forehead draining blood, piss, pus, cum, shit down onto the girl, cloaking her sensuality, concealing all that Lamm – all that anybody but a necrophiliac, coprophiliac madman! – would want from her angelic body. And amid the blood, his precious dollops of white! Kelly’s chest glistened with the pearl drops of semen, thieved from Lamm’s own vesicles by the teenage ghost.

Kelly sat up, sighing.

‘Honey, that’s enough or I’ll need an ice pack.’

Lamm mumbled affirmatively. The sheets a drippainting of blood, piss, pus, tears, shit, maggots and worms from Malik’s freshly buried coffin.
There’s a pattern in the bloodstains
. In the mosaic of vile fluids amassed upon the mattress, there was an image that Lamm recognized. Goya.
Saturn Eating His Son
. Painted in Malik Massawi’s blood, Goya’s deranged portrait of Saturn, the Roman sun-god, tearing the limbs off his own child. Eating his offspring, his future, in a cavernous hell.

Kelly pulled on her underwear.‘I’m taking a shower. Let’s hope that next time you have a happy ending.’

She staggered onto the carpet, cupping her breasts. When Lamm looked back at the bed, the sheets were white as ever.

Kelly’s stepsister, Jacqueline LaRoy, worked in public relations. She too had escaped Washington, London being her sabbatical from a lobbying job at Covington & Burling, the powerful K Street law firm where her uncle Jim was a senior partner. She was a future White House press secretary, her mother reminded her, if she travelled in the right circles; those circles, tight as a hangman’s noose, restricted to career sycophants or journalists who write the right things about the right people. Jacqueline didn’t mind the work; preparing briefs, taking calls, meeting congressmen for lavish long lunches at Signatures, the Penn Quarter restaurant owned by the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff before his downfall. She’d fly first class to hobnob with important clients like Chevron, Halliburton or Phillip Morris, and occasionally watch baseball games in a skybox with Republican fat cats. Not a lawyer – she majored in media communications at Penn State – and not quite a lobbyist, yet on account of her mother’s second husband, she was invited to meet and greet the big players.

Talking was Jacqueline LaRoy’s greatest attribute. Like her powerful stepfather, she was a cloistered thinker offering few new insights yet wielding an astonishing talent for bluster and hype. She’d cut her teeth at bullshit when she worked for an internet start-up in Fresno before the dotcom crash. The way she talked up that web firm with its tantalizing pay-offs, its impossible profit margins on poster graphs showing volcanic market capitalization! She did the work with such gusto and, it couldn’t be ignored, flirtatiousness in a short skirt and pumps, that before it went belly-up and got sold to AT&T for peanuts, the business attracted millions in investment from two yoga-loving venture capitalists down in San Francisco.

But Jacqueline needed a rest. A rest from stalking the holidaying Bushes up at Kennebunkport, a rest from the Capitol catfights, from saying yes to fossilized Pentagon sleazeballs who, deep in the autumn of their virility, achieved a hard-on from contemplating bunker-busting bombs and her breasts. While Kelly tortured the cleaning staff at the Maryland National Guard, Jacqueline decamped to her stepdad’s luxury London apartment. Conveniently abroad during the Abramoff scandal (her number was in his mobile phone), she couldn’t take the journalists’ calls. London was Jacqueline’s recuperative break from the usual Washington chores: digging dirt on her stepfather’s enemies, taking Big Oil execs for long lunches with the Secretary of the Interior, or organizing weekend hunting trips for Dick Cheney, Justice Scalia, her stepfather and other formaldehyde Republicans, watching the red-faced warmongers breaking grouse necks as they fumed about the Syrians, the Iranians, missile defence shields, same-sex spouses . . .

It wasn’t that Jacqueline and her stepfather didn’t agree about the defence budget, tax cuts for the rich, gay marriage, family values, the whole conservative hootenanny; but she was
sick
of agreeing. Sick of the daily rhetorical engagement about healthcare, Saudi oil, Guantanamo, unilateralism, the liberal bias in the
Post
or her clients’ interviews on Fox News. Sick of the incessant incendiary blabber that stole her weekends, weeknights and dreams. Worse, Jacqueline’s job extinguished her desire for a man. Within her Beltway circles, the guys were stiffs, Phi Beta Kappa big mouths more interested in lunch with Bill O’Reilly than a Brazilian model on all fours. Clever young conservatives, professed Baptists or Likudnik Jews, these All-American men drove Jacqueline LaRoy
and
Kelly Wesson nuts. One of the few things the stepsisters agreed upon.

In London, Jacqueline was a strategic director at Green & Dwyer, a high-end PR firm in Greek Street. There she captivated the clients with a sultry purr uncannily like her stepsister’s. Jacqueline extolled the TV spots, magazine covers, newspaper profiles, product endorsements . . . all the promotional gems obtainable if only you jump through the flaming shit-drenched hoops. Not biologically a Wesson, but, more than his real daughter, Jacqueline possessed her stepfather’s knack for advertising, for the essential effluent of capitalism sludging through the newsstands, the airwaves, the city streets until the whole world’s its neon sewer. Makes such a stink we don’t notice the smell.

The afternoon Kelly invited home the boy from the barbeque, Jacqueline was away on a junket to Paris. Her hectic week at the spring fashion parades, amid the seasonal maelstrom of expressionless teenage models, hyperventilating designers, B-list film stars, professional hangers-on and everywhere Columbia’s most prominent cash crop. Jacqueline’s assignment: to build recognition for Dior’s new handbag, a crocodile skin lesson in how to throw two-and-a-half-thousand quid down the toilet. She faced the usual conundrums. Who should get the gilded handbags for free? Where’s the blonde daughter of Mick or Keef who’s in the magazines this week?

The narcissistic inanity of the wealthy quarry never troubled Jacqueline, nor her rival PR queens, expert at blowdrys and blowjobs, for whom life resembled a DVD; you fast-forward through the boring bits. And the party boys! Those chiselled
ubermenschen
, the longhaired Aryan stags in Slimane leathers who would have sent Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebells gaga, for whom catastrophe isn’t Stalingrad but a botched photo shoot or an uneven tan. Jacqueline enjoyed the London–Paris–NYC axis of drunk fucks, pricey powders, secret nightclubs; of cynical post-everything doubletalk, of everyone being an aspiring fashion designer, of dance floors with strobe lights simulating the amphetamine pulse of a racehorse. A peerlessly vacuous world of beauties transfixed by beauty, blind to the written word, unable to read between the lines unless they’re snorted. Embrace the bullshit! Eat it, drink it, swim in it, love it! Jacqueline hadn’t previously realized that so many words can say so little.