I Am Max Lamm (24 page)

And staring into the ageless remembered universe of Mr Lewski’s eyes, Rachel’s eyes, Malik Massawi’s eyes, George and Lennie’s eyes, his mother’s eyes, his own eyes, Lamm couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pull the trigger, any more than Kelly Wesson could when she spent every afternoon staring at the gun she stole from beneath her father’s bed in a Georgetown mansion. To endure, you have to live.

A voice outside. Half-man, half-robot.

‘Metropolitan Police! Come out with your hands in the air!’

Hands pulling at his ankles. They’ll drag you out and skin you like a snake.

‘Get the bastard out!’

That familiar voice. Its razor Texan Rs mashed into the anglified burr of verdant Connecticut. No hint of the camp, the queer, the cock-hungry. Here was the Minotaur’s macho American oratory, the voice of the eagle on the presidential seal if that bird acquired the power of human speech.

‘That’s him! The thief!’

Lamm left the gun in the charcoal dust. Live ammo with the safety off, next to the juice bottle of his urine. The senator will get a shock when he recognizes that gun. Might want to change his sheets too.

‘You’re certain that’s him, sir?’

Three unarmed policemen wearing knife-proof vests, rainjackets, bobby helmets. Handcuffs bit Lamm’s wrists. He saw his own painting of the fox fleeing the hunting party, scarlet haemorrhages of terror in the animal’s eyes.

‘That’s the kid who mugged me.’

The silver hair, the pink bull skin, the hard blue eyes drinking you in.
You photographed me last night
. The senator removed his herringbone jacket. He crouched, took a peek, then crawled halfway into the hovel.

‘Sir, we’ll do that. It’s filthy down there!

‘No, I’ll take a look myself.’

There she is. At the mouth of the overgrown path, Kelly watched the arrest. Hair unbraided, wearing the black jeans and tan sweater that he tore off her in bed. Usually she never wore the same outfit in a week. No eyeliner, no blush. Her cheeks washed clean by a splash of water or tears. She gazed at Lamm, motionless, as the three constables wondered why an important man like the senator would scramble about in a bum cave.

The Minotaur had threatened to cut her off? But he’s not so stupid. He doesn’t need a family bunfight in the newspapers. Lamm watched Kelly watching him. Her pale barbed face, obscenely pretty for the maelstrom beneath. The living apology welling in her eyes.

I’m saving him because I need to
.

Because I want to
.

Underneath the barbeque, her father searched for his future.

‘There’s no wallet down here. It’s trash.’

Strewn in the long grass, these were the things the senator threw out of the hole: a mohair blanket from his own apartment; empty packets of nuts, biscuits, batteries; a juice bottle of urine wrapped in the
Daily Telegraph
. On the front page:
POLICE MANHUNT FOR RACIST RIOT KILLER.

Only Lamm noticed the subtle rectangular protuberance in the senator’s trouser pocket, the size and shape of the photographs in their paper sleeve.

And the Minotaur looked at Lamm. Enormously relieved, pleased with himself, but grudging admiration in there too.
You fucked my daughter, you stole my gun, you photographed my recklessness, you tried to blackmail me. You would have destroyed me
. A vulnerable glance from this old Washington hand at the subtle crimes of deception, subterfuge, statecraft, who’d learnt his lessons from Henry Kissinger and Roy Cohn when he was a fresh-faced intern at a Manhattan law firm in 1966. A disgraced tennis player – not the Syrians, the Iranians, the Clintons or Ralph Nader – had come closest to destroying Richard Wesson, the senator who might bear the secret of the scabs on his knees all the way to the Oval Office.

‘That’s the kid who robbed me. Take him in.’

The constables led Lamm to the car.
They don’t know who you are
.

He looked back at the path. Kelly was gone.

She won’t stay. Not now.

He’ll take her back to Washington. Back to the mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, to the ten thousand dollar a table galas, to add her sultry presence to meet and greets with the fat cats who finance American royalty. The Minotaur will shake hands and prosper, his war chest will fatten with gifts from big oil, tobacco and pharma, and he’ll take a shot at the nomination. Because he found the photographs in your barbeque. You thought that was the safest place! JFK was torpedoed in the Pacific, Reagan took a bullet from Jodie Foster’s stalker, but Richard Wesson came close to something worse: his ignominious booting from the closet as the American people see Billy Graham’s favourite senator on his knees at 3 a.m. in Hyde Park. The Minotaur’s living death as an international laughing stock – even
worse
than your disgrace – was averted by the daughter whom he has, for twenty-one years, tethered like a prizewinning poodle.

Lamm wanted her
now
. To grab her scarred hands, her exquisite gazelle neck, to swallow her lips and scream the truth into Kelly’s insides.

You weren’t just saving him. You were saving yourself
.

You are your father
.

Kelly won’t destroy her destroyer; she
is
what she is. The war with the warmonger defines her. The hostility, the tension, the thirst to prove her father wrong; it’s her soul, her fuel. She needs him as much as she hates him.
That’s
what she loves. The hatred.

You saw her tears. The betrayal, the cold resignation. She had changed. You were a fool, intoxicated by her flesh. A desperate, infatuated fool. One of millions.

The policemen pushed Lamm into the patrol car, locking the cuffs onto a grate separating the front seats from the rear. In the belly of the whale.

The ginger-haired constable – Griffith, according to his nametag – yelled into his radio.

‘Disturbance at Alpha Bravo. Received. We’re on the way.’

Griffith grimaced at the other policemen. ‘Bad news. They want backup.’

Up Bayswater Road, the car blazed its sirens through the bottleneck, veered right at Marble Arch and cleaved a throng of two thousand protestors marching to the rally. Lamm noticed the latest edition of the
Sun
folded behind the gear stick. Its front page headline:
ARAB SUSPECT ARRESTED FOR RIOT MURDER
. Beneath those crimson words, there appeared a skinny, sick-looking boy of about fifteen, wearing a hooded tracksuit, staring into the lens at a police station, clearly terrified. The boy was light-skinned – that is, light-skinned enough to be the culprit in the CCTV video – but unmistakably of Middle Eastern ethnicity. Their antidote to the poison. Lamm read the smaller accompanying headline.

PRIME MINISTER: ARREST PROVES
THAT RIOT MURDER WAS NOT
RACIALLY MOTIVATED

Whatever was happening around the corner, it was louder. Shouts, shrieks, screams. Cheap jagged bells of broken glass.

Griffith barked into the radio. ‘We’ve got a brawl a block west from Marble Arch. Reinforcement needed
now
!’

The constables prepared to leave the car, fastening their helmets and body armour, gripping truncheons. As they unlocked the doors, the crowd surged. About a hundred youths – white
and
black – pelted the sedan with stones, bottles, cans, their feet and fists.

‘Send backup! We’re being attacked!’ Griffith screamed into the radio handset.

At Marble Arch, five police cars couldn’t get through. Their sirens blared, but thousands of protestors wouldn’t – couldn’t – clear a passage. Park Lane’s residents watched aghast from their penthouse balconies. Kids smashing the frontage of a Ferrari dealership, chairs hurled through the windows of a svelte café, overturned rubbish bins blocking traffic, ripped garbage bags spilling their rancid guts amid the papery smoke of recycling bins set on fire.

The protestors’ chant boomed in unison: ‘
The people, united, will never be defeated!
’

A riot. Disorder for disorder’s sake, the metamorphosis of infectious rage into this polyheaded hydra of destruction, multiplying faster than bacteria as thousands of people vented their anger at Blair, Bush, Britain, Iraq, Malik Massawi’s murder, the shameless wealth of Park Lane, the jobs and universities closed to people like them who never scored top marks at a top school, their own precarious employment as cleaners or kitchen hands on the minimum wage;
everything
. Dozens of youths gleefully attacked the police car, rocking it, trying to turn it over, gurning menacingly through the windscreen at the terrified constables.

Griffith screamed into the radio. ‘
Fucking send backup now!
’

A decorative garden rock smashed a fist-sized hole in the rear windscreen. The policemen lowered their windows a crack, unleashing capsicum spray at the rioters. But the foul mist didn’t exit the car, instead wafting inside the cabin. Within a second, Lamm and the three policemen started to choke, their eyes burning like chilli paste was rubbed onto their pupils.

Lamm shut his eyes, breathing hot daggers down his throat. So this is the experience of a gas attack, like when Saddam gassed the Kurds at Halabja. It’s an 8.0 earthquake too. The police car’s right wheels left the asphalt as nine protestors heaved their collective weight against the chassis. Two hooded boys hurled a steel fence pole at the windscreen, its crystallized web spitting glass fragments onto Lamm’s cheek. Sirens screamed, the gilded avenue bursting with horns, shouts, squeals, a man on a megaphone telling the protestors to attack the pigs, while a policeman’s robotic voice threatened tear gas if the crowd didn’t move back. The police car rocked past forty-five degrees; amid the flash of photographers’ cameras, Lamm watched the street – the rioters, the smashed shop windows, the flashing lights, the drizzling faceless sky – turn topsy-turvy. Topsy-turvy as Jan Juc’s waves, the East River’s deathly rip, the unrequited hopes of Lamm’s disappeared years when his whole earthly sphere was a tennis court, bar mitzvah lessons, Mr Lewski’s classroom and Rachel Samuels’ promising lips. Topsy-turvy because the police car had tipped over. Upside down, strapped into their seats, Lamm and the policemen choked for air.

The people, united, will never be defeated!

Fuck the police! Fuck the police! Fuck the police!

The excruciating din as fence posts battered the car’s upturned belly. A white teenager, wearing a balaclava and a Chelsea football jersey, happily smashed the headlights’ Perspex shell.

Finally the crowd cleaved as police surged in on horseback. Screams as truncheons and hooves battered bodies in every direction. But a volley of projectiles caught the officers off-guard. A mounted constable felt the brunt of a glass bottle striking his helmet, shattering shards over the horse’s sodden mane. Concussed, the policeman tugged the reins and the horse reared, kicking an Indian protester in the back. Lamm watched the spooked mare raise its hind legs, its violin-bow tail thrashing, and stomp a hoof upon the protester’s head. Unmistakably a fatality. The victim still gripped his cardboard sign, showing Malik Massawi’s coffin cut out from a newspaper pictorial. Written below in red paint:
NEVER AGAIN.

Fuck the police! Fuck the police! Fuck the police!

The chanting swelled deafeningly. Rocks, bottles and a few Molotov cocktails hurtled at a riot van. The TV crews sheltered at its flank, four intrepid cameramen breathlessly filming the nation’s headline news.

In front of the cameras, a Pakistani teenager approached the upturned police car. The newspapers later revealed that he was Malik Massawi’s cousin who had helped to organize the first demonstration earlier that week.

‘
The people, united, will never be defeated!
’

Holding a homemade sign proclaiming
NO RACISM NO
war, his face wrapped in a
keffiyeh
scarf to keep out the gas, Malik Massawi’s cousin reached through the car window and gripped Lamm’s handcuffed hand.

Feverishly, the cameramen and photographers shot the front-page picture. This fearless young protestor embraces his captured comrade!

‘
The people, united, will never be defeated!
’

As the policemen unleashed their batons, the furious chorus yelled louder.

His right hand grabbed in triumph by Malik Massawi’s cousin, his throat stinging from the gas, eyes dazzled by flashing cameras, Lamm began to laugh.

I wish to thank the literary agents Donica Bettanin and Jenny Darling in Melbourne and Piers Russell-Cobb in London; Madonna Duffy, John Hunter, Christina Pagliaro and everyone at UQP; James Gurbutt and Sarah Castleton at Constable & Robinson; and Leon Turnbull, John Safran and Bram Presser for their insightful comments on the manuscript in progress.