Seventy-Two Virgins (18 page)

‘I could go on,’ said the don, ‘and I will.’

‘Go on then,’ said Cameron.

‘I give you Skybolt. Remember how they decided to get rid of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, back in 1963, wasn’t it? And who was responsible for that infamy? It was Kennedy, of course, the adored JFK, the son of the disgusting wartime Ambassador.’

Again Cameron had a vague feeling that there must be more to this story. Was it entirely America’s fault that Britain hadn’t been able to hack it as a nuclear power? But she had neither the inclination nor the knowledge to protest. She had never heard of Skybolt, this luckless British firecracker, jilted on the launching pad by JFK.

‘Your witness,’ said the don loudly to Adam.

Adam leant back. ‘I tell you what amuses me. It’s the way everybody sees everything through this roseate prism called the special relationship and people completely misremember events. Everybody now thinks of Reagan and Thatcher as this inseparable duo, she in her pearls, he in his aviator’s jacket, each incarnating the eternal Anglo-Saxon struggle against tyranny, each pledged in blood to come to the aid of the other. Britain and America contra mundum, to the ends of the earth: that’s how you remember it, isn’t it? But look at what actually happened in 1982, when a deranged Argentinian junta violently seized a piece of sovereign British territory.

‘Did Britain and America storm the beaches together? Like hell. If you look at the record the Americans — that includes Reagan — repeatedly refused to describe themselves as allies. British ships were being blown up in San Carlos Bay, British troops were being fried alive in the
Sheffield
and the
Sir Galahad
and the
Atlantic Conveyer
and what the hell were the Americans doing? They sent General Al Haig down to Peru to cook up some nauseating plan for shared sovereignty.’

‘The Peruvian Peace Plan!’ shouted the don. ‘I spit on the memory of the Peruvian Peace Plan.’

‘And people have forgotten Jeanne Kirkpatrick,’ said Adam, and his voice, though not drunk, was also full of excitement.

‘Jeane Kirkpatrick, my Gawd,’ said the don. Cameron felt impelled to ask who this person was.

‘Jeane Kirkpatrick was the US Ambassador to the UN during the Falklands Crisis. Irish,’ said the don.

‘Now, now,’ said his wife.

‘And there was one point at which Britain drew up a UN motion calling for an unconditional Argentinian withdrawal, and she actually vetoed it,’ said Adam.

‘Well,’ said the don who had learned from the unparalleled viciousness of the academic world that you must never trifle with fact. ‘She didn’t actually veto it. She just said afterwards that if she had been asked again she would have abstained.’

‘Frankly, I think that’s just as bad,’ said Adam.

‘You’re right,’ said the don, anxious not to seem unpatriotic. ‘Death to Jeane Kirkpatrick, always assuming her husband hasn’t by now done the sensible thing and put ground glass in her tea.’

And the don and his wife laughed in the Brussels restaurant, weeping and guffawing like some masterpiece of Flemish tavern merriment, painted by Jan Steen. Adam laughed too, but more briefly, and that was just the point.

He took life seriously. To a man like Roger Barlow, the whole world just seemed to be a complicated joke, an accidental jumbling of ingredients on the cosmic stove, which had produced our selfish genes. For Barlow, everything was always up for grabs, capable of dispute; and religion, laws, principle, custom — these were nothing but sticks we plucked from the wayside to support our faltering steps.

That wasn’t good enough for Adam, and Cameron thought it wasn’t good enough for her. Clutching the reserved tickets, she now re-entered Portcullis House from the Embankment. She passed through the cylindrical glass security doors. She used her electronic pass to enter the main concourse, graciously received the smiles of the security men and descended the escalator towards the colonnade that leads to the Commons. Cameron walked fast, but MPs were now overtaking her in their haste to claim their seats.

She saw Ziggy Roberts zipping along ahead of her. He appeared to be wearing morning dress.

In one of the cafés in the Portcullis House concourse a large group of researchers and gofers — the taxpayer-funded clerisy of Parliament — was watching a live TV feed.

‘Omigod,’ shouted one excitable young man, as Sir Perry Grainger handed over the Staffordshire pottery tribute of both Houses of Parliament to the most powerful man in the world. ‘What’s he supposed to do with that?’

Raimondo squeezed his way through to the west of the square, the girl following.

‘What’s the story?’ he asked a policeman.

‘No idea,’ said the copper, with a tight-lipped Knacker of the Yard expression.

Sandra had more luck. Another policeman said, ‘Looks like they found a lot of blood in Tufton Street.’

‘What did he say?’ everyone asked.

‘That girl just said the cops found a body in Tufton Street.’

‘The police killed someone?’

‘Somebody said the cops killed someone in Tufton Street.’

‘A police horse killed somebody in the road.’

A death! Someone had paid with his life! Someone had come to London SW1 this fine July morning of argent and azure, and offered all he had for the cause. As so often, it took a death to give point to their campaign. The vaporous resentments — of America, the Pentagon, McDonald’s, globalization, zero tax on air fuel, the Windows spell-check —suddenly achieved a crystalline form. Eyes that had been dulled with dope or hangover now gleamed fever-bright. On the brows of middle aged, Middle England protesters, people whose homes were called ‘Whitt’s End’ or ‘Jessamine’, veins began to throb as they called for the martyr to be avenged. Killers. Pigs.
Oink oink oink,
leered the crusties at the police, and the police showed their customary restraint.

‘We’ve got a bit of crowd trouble in Parliament Square, sir.’ Grover indicated one of the monitors.

‘Ricasoli,’ said Colonel Bluett of the USSS, dialling up the Black Hawk, still in permahover, ‘what’s the story?’

‘Can’t say, sir,’ yelled Ricasoli. ‘Looks like they’re kind of mad at something.’

To and fro the mob now began to wave, like a tentacled anemone under an incoming tide of rage. They knew not who their martyr was. They would have been interested to discover that the police had nothing to do with his injuries, but in no way deterred. Death had transformed an event into history, and at once they were glad they were there.

‘Bastards!’ yelled Sandra the nanny at no one in particular.

‘Yeah,’ said Raimondo, ‘assholes.’

Thanks to the fluid dynamics of the crowd, they had ended up at the bottom left-hand corner of the square, the nearest point to St Stephen’s Entrance. Ambassadors and other dignitaries were being dropped by car and scuttling into the porch, scalded by the blast of hate. A big blue limo of curious design drew up. Had Sandra but known it was a Renault, she might have stayed her hand. Had she spotted the blue, white and red tricolour on the bonnet, she might have thought twice.

A man got out, and there was something about his ineffable air, his swept-back hair, the weary glance he directed at the crowd; something which left her with no choice. She pulled the egg from her sack, and before Raimondo could do anything about it, she flung it.

As she had said, it had been laid that morning by the pride of the Knout flock, a seven-foot hen called Kimberly. The egg weighed 1.9 kilos and was eleven inches in diameter and fourteen inches long.

Kimberly was an ostrich.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

0942 HRS

‘Oh, by the way,’ said Bluett, ‘there’s one other thing I meant to ask you.’

Purnell was on the point of asking him not to smoke, but, maddeningly, he noticed that the cigar was unlit.

‘Oh yes,’ he replied. In only a matter of hours this wretched day would be over.

‘I jes wanna check that you fellows blocked that Arab woman, al-Walibi, from getting into the hall today.’

‘You mean Benedicte al-Walibi? I thought we’d told you: we really didn’t feel able to do anything there. She was vouched for personally by the French Ambassador.’

‘Sheee …’ said Bluett. ‘Of course the Frog vouched for her. She’s his fucking girlfriend. We don’t like the look of some of the people she’s been talking to lately.’

‘Well, it’s out of my hands. You’ll really have to take it up with the Speaker.’

Barlow had been on the phone to the
Daily Mirror
for so long the receiver was blood warm and his fingers were beginning to ache. He kept remembering his duty to ring the House of Commons security people, or possibly just the police. He kept intending to put down the receiver, with a jovial farewell. But that was the trouble with these people. They had a way of draining your autonomy. It was as though they’d found a way to flip open the top of your head and pour in a bottle of ink to sink and settle in the fjords of your brain. The reporter was a woman with an Asian name, and from the minute she introduced herself, Barlow feared her.

He feared her as British soldiers on the Northwest Frontier once feared the Afghan daughters, and their knives, and their traditional knowledge of how to cut a live human being. ‘I’m reely sorry,’ she said, after his initial evasions, ‘but I reely do feel you are going to be better off talking to me ‘cos I’ve been asked to do this piece and your name’s gonna be in it anyway.’

Barlow had asked her with a croak what the story was. ‘Well, of course it’s very embarrassing for me to talk to you like this,’ she said, and then recited what purported to be a recent series of events in Barlow’s life.

It was not the truth. It was an abstract impressionist representation: crude, impasto blotches that might or might not stand for an object in the ‘real world’. But she knew she had enough to go on, and Barlow knew it, too.

At length he said: ‘It’s all rubbish, and besides, it was ages ago.’

The reporter went for the crack. ‘It’s either all bollocks or it happened ages ago. It can’t be both.’

As when a stag is chased down the river, and his eyes roll, and the foam spackles his flanks, and the bracken and the alder hang in his antlers, and he drags himself to the bank and turns to face the music of the hounds in the knowledge that he can run no further, so Roger Barlow MP, almost fifty-one and pretty washed up, decided to speak his mind.

He thought of this woman, and all her ambition and aggression, and the pointless misery she was trying to cause him.

‘Oh honestly,’ he said, ‘why can’t you go and do something useful, like jump off a cliff?’ As the seconds ticked away, he improvised a series of alternative careers for his tormentor.

‘Where are they, anyway?’ said the first policeman to the second policeman, as they wandered through Norman Shaw North car park in the direction of the ambulance. ‘Are they all hiding in the back?’

‘Tell you what,’ said the second policeman, ‘I reckon we should have a bet on this.’

‘OK matey. Two pints of London Pride says yer gotta have a Koran in every ambulance.’

‘Done.’

‘Hang about,’ said the first policeman. ‘Is that the phone ringing in our booth?’ They stopped and listened hard, turning back to look at the little black hut by the metal boom. The phone stopped and started again.

‘I reckon it is and all.’ Hands behind back, they drifted in the opposite direction.

The first policeman looked up at the sparkling morning. The clouds were still high and fleecy, but getting a little greyer and heavier about the bottom.

Jason Pickel’s rooftop narrative had by now become so torpid and charged with horror that Indira, a sensible girl from Balham, was starting to feel quite tense.

‘You know what a holocaust is?’ said Pickel. Indira listened to the ambulance sirens in the square, and the unintelligible roar of the protesters.

Yeah, she said, it was a kind of terrible massacre, like what Hitler did to the Jews. She studied his hands. They were leaving damp marks on the barrel, but at least the safety catch was on.

‘No, that’s not a holocaust,’ he said. ‘In the ancient world a holocaust was when you sacrificed an animal and the flames took every part of it. It was wholly burned — holocaust — and every portion of the beast was offered to the god.’ When the M16 bullets hit the fuel tank of the Datsun Sunny, said Jason, that was a holocaust.

There were six young Iraqi men in the car. Then there was this ball of flame. It was so big and so close that he smelt burning hair and realized it was his own eyebrows. The hairs shrivelled up on the back of his hands, like the nature films of ferns growing, except in reverse. When he came to describe the fate of the Iraqis, how they were first caramelized, then carbonized, and how their molten fat ran in rivulets down the sides of their incinerated car seats, Indira took a decision. She was going to report Jason. Someone should be told about this guy before he did any harm.

The fires had scarcely died down, said Jason, when the demonstrations began. They came from all sides, men slapping their hearts and their heads. They surrounded the torched car and screamed defiance when the Americans tried to approach it. They stuck their faces as close as they could to the Robocop-like Kovac and others, noses to chinstraps, and the curses spewed from their stained brown teeth and tongues that vibrated in the pink cavern of their mouths like a furious bird of prey.

It was a wedding party, they said. How could the GIs have failed to see that?

It was a victorious five-a-side soccer team.

Or they had just all passed their legal exams. They were brothers, uncles, fathers, sons, and they had been killed in cold blood by the crass and cowardly conquerors. It wasn’t long before Captain Koch de Gooreynd came from his quarters and took charge. Shots were fired in the air. The mob drifted away. Jason was left with the car, and its contents, like something terrible left in the oven. Now he noticed Barry White, the British journalist, who at some stage had emerged from his ditch and was filling his notebook.