I Am Max Lamm (3 page)

Kelly’s new boy admired the Jacuzzi of black marble, but she declined to run the tub. That was too risky, in case her stepsister Jacqueline returned home as they enjoyed the bubbles. Then where would he hide? The walk-in wardrobe? But, naked and wet, cupping his sodden prick, he’d drip a tell-tale trail on the carpet, just as heroic Ariadne unspooled his thread to navigate the Minotaur’s labyrinth on Crete. So it was safer not to fuck in the tub.

But in this penthouse ideally suited to their luxurious tryst, when she pulled him in that warm Saturday afternoon in April 2005, he couldn’t enjoy it. Not after he identified the inhibitory absence. Where was Kelly’s giggle? The throaty seductive giggle she was coveted for, that from Washington to West London drove men nuts, that drove him nuts, that proclaimed ‘
every day handsome
,
wealthy
,
clean bachelors try to pick me up. The most eligible bachelors in London try to pick me up. But mysteriously
,
I’ve chosen you
’. Suddenly Kelly’s playfulness had disappeared; no stripteasing, no shots of blueberry vodka, no sniffs of amyl nitrate, no cocaine snorted off the Phillipe Starck coffee table, no massages slowly descending their bodies, no tequila with lemon that she devilishly squirted upon his cock, no blowjobs, no languidly eating her pussy, no fooling about in the ways she normally initiated and they mutually enjoyed. The bedroom an army barracks, Kelly spat his orders in a sterile whisper.

‘She’ll be home soon.
Do it
.’

So Kelly Wesson’s latest, poorest catch obsequiously slid off his jeans – black Levi’s marinated in charcoal dust, sausage fat, stale canola oil – and followed her commands. He was Max Lamm; disgraced wunderkind, forgotten sporting prodigy, exiled laughing-stock, frustrated painter, currently pursued with the a £10,000-reward posted for his arrest. A libidinous failure long ago hailed, in the September 1996 edition of the
Australian Jewish News
, as the Jewish world’s greatest hope for the pro tennis circuit since Aaron Krickstein, the Michigan rabbi’s grandson who made the top ten in 1990. But Max Lamm no longer resembled a tennis champ; he hadn’t since the frigid night in Manhattan, two Novembers earlier, when he was wheeled into the ICU at Beth Israel North, unconscious and hypothermic, after resolutely marching off a wharf at Battery Park.

Formerly muscular, once unmistakably an athlete, for two years he’d been a gaunt rake. The sole upshot of this metamorphosis being that new acquaintances, even those with a keen memory for public disgrace, seldom matched his lean, desolate face to the cherubic tennis ace who once answered to the name Max Lamm. His dark wiry hair, patchy stubble and broad plateau of a nose were unremarkable for a twenty-eight-year-old Jewish male. The yellow paint beneath Lamm’s fingernails – still there though he hadn’t touched a canvas in three months – were the gravestones of a talent that never bore fruit. The sensitive reddened skin encircling his nostrils – scarlet owing to a flare-up of rosacea, although for three months he’d been cold turkey – was conspicuous to nobody but a dermatologist or an observant fellow drunk. Just as subtly revealing was the slight downward elongation at the left corner of Lamm’s mouth; the classic neurological indication of a bout with Bell’s Palsy. The palsy – induced in London by a mystery virus
and
the drinking, back when he could at least half-finish a painting – that might return any moment.

‘You’re lucky,’ declared the neurologist at University College hospital three weeks after Lamm walked into the A & E, tipsy at 1 p.m., with half his face numb. ‘The paralysis is almost gone. In about a third of cases, it never wears off. To your dying day, you’re tipping your cup sideways so the coffee doesn’t run out your mouth.’

What
was
obviously unusual in Lamm’s face? The eyes. His mournful hazel eyes, bleary with insomnia and perilously indiscrete. He, unlike Kelly, hadn’t a fake tan, or whitened teeth from Washington’s priciest orthodontist, or a covergirl hairstyle to divert a stranger’s attention from
that
look. The tortured, condemned look that Lamm couldn’t hide. Eyes watery, jittery, bloodshot, the pupils fogged with guilt.
It was me
, his look confessed to anybody, anything. The giveaway glance at every passerby, at every hallucinatory policeman, at every ghost, at his reflection in a cracked mirror in a public toilet in Hyde Park. He stared at that mirror for twenty-three minutes the night it happened, incredulous that suddenly his face belonged to Britain’s newest, most despised murderer. A murderer who hated killing, who hadn’t eaten meat since the afternoon six years ago when he visited his cousin’s farm in rural Victoria and spent hours talking to the gentle cows. A real nightmare had
really
occurred, and Lamm’s bloodshot pupils wouldn’t stop saying so.

I did it
. Something irreversible, horrific. Otherworldly yet sickeningly real. Stopping me from sleeping.

Brutal.

Unforeseen.

It’s making me look like
this.

That confession alive not just in Lamm’s eyes, but in the puffy bags beneath them, in his constant checking over his shoulder, in the efflux of colour from what stubbornly remained – no matter the stubble, the barbeque grease, the scarred red nose, the numb right corner of his lips – the face of a decent-looking kid from Caulfield, the leafy Melbourne suburb where in many streets, every house has a
mezuzah
nailed to its front doorpost. The
mezuzah
– a tiny scroll of Torah scripture wrapped inside a cigar-sized cylinder – that proclaims to the passerby:
this is not merely a house. It is a home. A Jewish home. So watch what you do and say
.

Lamm’s fucking eyes. They hadn’t shut up in three nights since the alleged murder, and they said it was too late to fix anything. Much too late.

Tottenham Court Road, the morning
it
happened. Start at the grimy gridlocked junction at Oxford Street, arguably the sickest of central London’s arteries. Dirt, dust, refuse, rubbish flood the street like the grey clouds rain polystyrene. A wraparound billboard, the breadth of a 737’s wingspan, showcases a pale prepubescent model pouting in her Calvin Klein underwear. Opposite, the cavernous
G-A-Y
club at the Astoria where, a cold April night five years earlier, the deranged neo-Nazi David Copeland stalked his quarry until he planted a nail bomb in a nearby gay pub, the Admiral Duncan, killing two men and a pregnant woman.

By the early years of the new millennium, London had arisen from the operating table and its cosmetic surgery was botched. Like other financial centres, the capital got a tummy tuck, a facelift and a colostomy bag, separating the healthy flesh from the shit. A few blocks north of the crime scene, Chalk Farm’s decrepit council estates shelter hooded teenagers who aspire to the cheap martyrdom of hip-hop assassination. Ten minutes’ walk south reveals Primrose Hill’s velvety boutiques, cute coffee bars and terraces with a lap pool. This whitewashed island of affluence assured by good schools, trust funds and the institutionalized apprehension of disorder.

Now ride the N5 bus back west. Wednesday through Saturday nights, Soho’s Old Compton Street is jammed by tourists on pub crawls, gay men revelling in their unashamed abundance, lycra-clad backpackers hawking rides on fibre-glass rickshaws, shivering transsexual hookers sucking cigarettes in stilettos; all crowding the pavements, cafés, bars, dance floors until 4 or 5 a.m. when finally the cost of one more vodka, the purifying limits of the human kidney, and the pervasive stench of all that piss – nine parts ethanol to one part water, pooled in doorways stinking like an unwashed kennel – sends everyone home to bed or to sleep in the gutter.

It was 4.34 a.m. by Lamm’s wristwatch when a horde of drunk backpackers – Spaniards, Italians, Israelis, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders yelling uproariously after a typical Soho beer binge – boarded the bus for their short ride to Bayswater. Back to their budget hostels or decrepit digs in crumbling Edwardian mansions rented, room by room, to frugal travellers or to pimps and their duped doped girls smuggled in from Albania. Amongst the hirsute twentysomethings yabbering in six languages, Lamm couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t deconstruct, reconstruct, couldn’t re-live the worst fifteen seconds of his life, couldn’t recall the moment when the boy collapsed, couldn’t work out what had
really
just happened, or strategize a way out through the tightening net –
couldn’t think –
when three feet away in the intoxicated prime of their unjaded youth, the toothy backpackers laughed like hyenas, smooched each other, translated ‘fuck I’m drunk’ into their mother tongues, admired each other’s henna tattoos, facial piercings and dreadlocks, or, underneath the seats, submitted to what their beer-saturated guts naturally had to do. It’s always a party at the United Nations of vomit.

Lamm decided to sit on the upper deck. He pulled up his jacket hood and shuffled though the crowd. But the stairs were blocked by a heap of enormous backpacks belonging to five Spaniards asking the way to Heathrow. In the driver’s perspex booth, Lamm noticed, was a Siemens ticket machine with a computer screen, a GPS receiver, an LCD display of traffic updates, weather reports, police alerts, ticket prices . . . a glowing array befitting the control room of a nuclear submarine. And there, flashing on the screen in bold type:
METROPOLITAN POLICE ALERT
.

Straining his neck, Lamm overheard the driver’s shortwave radio.
Police are investigating a fatal attack on Mornington Cre
. . . – a passenger’s Spanish yelp eclipsed the next few words –
a search is underway. The suspect is described as light-skinned
,
approximately six feet tall
,
wearing black jeans
,
a dark red jacket
. . .

The boy’s dead.

The surveillance cameras saw you.

Two blocks down Bayswater Road, blue lights flashed. A police van.

The driver’s already made the call? You’re
that
conspicuous?

At Lancaster Gate the doors opened. Yielding to the same instinct for self-preservation that propelled the bottle into the teenage mugger’s skull, Lamm joined the backpackers disembarking. Twenty sozzled Swedes staggered to their hostels as he scampered over the fence into Hyde Park. Hunted, haunted Lamm! Run through the flowerbed, behind a knobbled birch. Headlights approaching;
stay still!
Crouching in bushes, Lamm allowed himself a piss that, during the past hour’s giddy recollection of not much at all, somehow hadn’t innervated the nerve pathways from his swollen bladder up to his brain. His bewilderment so total, he hadn’t felt the need to urinate. Hadn’t
felt
that he felt the need to urinate.

Soaking the scrub and probably his sneakers, Lamm saw the police lights on Bayswater Road. Lights that – owing to a suspicious vehicle, a terrorist alert or a constable’s pizza getting cold – might any moment spin 360 degrees, flashing, sirens hollering, thereby reassuring the residents of West London’s best streets (the PM’s newly purchased mansion only a few blocks away in Connaught Square) that they could sleep soundly, if they could get back to sleep. Degenerate, disorientated Lamm! He stared at the blue and white glare atop the police car’s roof, and only then – hollowed by hunger and exhaustion into an unresponsive vessel, seeing blurry lilac dots flashing at the back of his eyelids – did he realize that this piss-soaked shrub, and the knee-high lavender bushes surrounding it, was, in fact, a very foolish place to hide.

Into bushes sticky, black as tar, running, ducking, until he collapsed beneath a weeping willow.
Keep going?
He got up, paced circles, trying to believe what he knew had happened, was happening, could happen, then sat again, stood again, collapsed, got up, debating where to flee and how and when. The why was unquestionable. Drenched in sweat amid the cold fogging his breath, Lamm staggered into the frigid starlit undergrowth, hearing the whirring rat-a-tat of a helicopter – a police helicopter – not far off, getting louder, that might sweep its floodlight through Hyde Park.
They knew he was here?
How? Could the bus driver really have identified the murder suspect among the throng of passengers?

Another ten minutes Lamm stumbled left, right, left, left . . . fleeing the German shepherds that might enter the park, might catch his scent . . . run deeper into this labyrinthine dark of necessity! Into this darkness timelessly dark, so unsettlingly natural in the midst of London’s neon plastic playground. Yet after nightfall who gives a shit?
Who’s here?
Only squirrels, foxes, birds at roost, the homeless schizophrenics asleep beneath a tree in summer and occasionally frozen dead in winter, and perhaps a few Tory MPs fucking anonymous men in the shrubbery.

At the park’s eastern corner, the helicopter hovered down. Two silvery searchlights rupturing its belly, rotors blurring the starless sky.
They’ve seen you?
Into the brush, thorns ripping Lamm’s forearms. Blood.
Faster!
Another path (or the overgrown semblance of a path) marked by a brambleless cleavage through the bushes. Running, swerving as the deathly glare chopped closer. What did your bastard of a tennis coach always say?
Choose the path of least resistance.

Finally a clump of undergrowth thick enough for a hiding place. Like a fox eluding bloodthirsty toffs, into the bush Lamm crawled, refreshed by the fertile embrace of dew upon his cheeks. Who ventures here but the rats?
Now wait.
For a deafening few seconds, the silhouettes of leaves projected onto the muddy backs of his hands while the blinding searchlight hovered above.

Darkness. The pitch of the thundering rat-a-tat dropped precipitously as the helicopter veered north.

Lying in the wet dirt, absurdly Lamm recalled the scientific explanation: as the helicopter hovers away, its noise decreases in pitch because the soundwaves stretch as they travel farther to your ears. That’s why the chopper made a lower-pitched sound as it flew off. Simple. Elegant. Eternal.