Seventy-Two Virgins (19 page)

Jason was putting the geraniums back in a row and pathetically trying to patch up an earthenware pot.

‘Ah, excuse me,’ said the reporter, ‘could I have my phone back, please?’ The connection had been broken but a masochistic urge made him press the redial button.

The reporter was standing there with his arm held out as Jason listened first to the roaring of the electrons, and then to the effortful click as it dialled the phone number in Iowa. Someone picked it up.

‘Honey,’ said Jason. Whoever it was decided not to talk. After a short silence Jason disconnected and gave the satphone back. He stood in the orange dust, blinking back sweat with his singed lids, and jealousy began its throttling work on his gorge.

He wasn’t listening as the Brit journalist — about six feet away — had a conversation with the foreign desk of his newspaper. Slowly, however, it permeated his consciousness that a story was being composed. What newspapermen call a piece, an article, was being dictated, about him and in his very presence.

‘Yeah, OK, give me fifteen minutes,’ said White. ‘Tell you what, put me straight over to copy. Hello there, yes, Barry White for
Mirror
News. Let’s call it “Massacre”. Are you ready? Begins.’

 ‘By Barry White in Baghdad

Six Iraqis set off for a wedding yesterday morning.

They cleaned their shabby car. They put on their best suits.

They spent the day singing and dancing, as they celebrated a ritual as old as humanity, and tried to forget the misery which British and American forces have brought to their country.

And they were still singing when they came up to an American checkpoint at 5 p.m. local time.

They were told to stop.

They were ordered to get out of their car.

They were told to put up their hands and lie on the sand.

They were told to do these things in a language they did not understand.

They were screamed at by men who have no right, under international law, to be in their country.

For whatever reason, they did not obey. They continued to drive, waving and cheering.

When I saw the first 9mm parabellum round pass through the windscreen, and I saw the cloud of blood in the cabin, I shrieked at the Americans to stop.

I was ignored.

Burst after burst the huge American fired at the car, and I swear he smiled when the fuel tank went up.

There are no words to describe the fate of those six men. We cannot begin to imagine the agony of their mothers, deprived even of a body to cradle.

There is now no way to tell them apart, save perhaps for the teeth which grin in their blackened skulls.

If you could come with me, and gaze at the dreadful cargo of this vehicle,, and smell the unmistakable odour of burnt human being, you would never again tolerate the lie, that this was a war for the people of Iraq.

Is this the Pentagon’s idea of liberation? What happened here today was evil.

It was a massacre. If there were any justice, it would join the list of other acts of brutality by American troops against Third World people.

It won’t, of course. There will be no court-martial. There will be no inquiry.

The trigger-happy cowards who killed these six young men will say they were threatened.

They will say there were weapons in the car.

There were no weapons in the car, and none will be found.

And that, of course, is the central deception on which this war was fought.

Ends.

OK? Got that? Just whack that across to
Mirror
News and tell them I’ll be filing more later.’

Before Jason could do anything to stop him, the reporter raised his camera and squeezed off several shots in his direction.

Then Barry White nodded amiably at Jason Pickel and strolled off down the road in the direction he had come. Jason looked up and down the street. A man on a donkey was approaching. The fisher boys had returned to their pitches on the Tigris.

Apart from the wreck of the car, and a helicopter buffeting the air overhead, it was as though normality had returned. He saw Kovac draw near, and the mere thought of talking to Kovac was enough.

He turned his carbine round, and would have added to the US fatality rate. But Kovac was quick, and knocked his arm down, and the bullet whanged aside. Not harmlessly, however. For the first time in his narrative, Pickel began to blub. The donkey stopped it, he said.

The donkey took the carbine round in his grizzled little donkey chest. They’d brought Jason over from Iowa. They’d screwed up his marriage. They’d equipped him with the most technically advanced weaponry in the world, and he’d ended up killing six young men who may or may not have been wedding guests, and he’d whacked a donkey.

Indira was no longer listening. She sidled away along the duckboards. Her orders were very clear. If you were in the slightest doubt about the mental state of anyone, it was your duty to get help.

Adam Swallow at last found his way through the corridors in Norman Shaw South, and could see his way out to New Palace Yard. It occurred to him that the route would present a considerable challenge to the Arab torture victim and his companions. Should he go back? He decided against. No doubt Benedicte had thought it through.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

0944 HRS

Cameron was feeling irritated. The gloomy hall was starting to fill now, and it was with some difficulty that she had made her way to the steps at the far end. Why the hell had Adam given her these silly forged tickets? Where was she supposed to put them? Every seat in the place had ‘reserved’ on it. At length she found a seat, twenty feet away from the dais on the right, snaffled a reserved card, and sat down.

‘Excusez-moi, madame,’
said a voice immediately. ‘I believe I am here. But I think we have met before. Yves Charpentier,’ he said.

Cameron stood up. She saw a figure of Gallic nattiness, with the little red thread of the Légion d’Honneur, and a sense of disorder about his coiffure. ‘I am the French Ambassador,’ he explained. ‘I believe we met in the company of the good Dr Swallow.’

It took Cameron a second or two to remember, but a man does not rise to the top of the French diplomatic service without possessing the nimblest grasp of situation. In a trice M. Charpentier had rearranged the placement in Westminster Hall, finding a place not only for Cameron but for a beautiful dark-skinned woman, who appeared to be his girlfriend, and two friendly Arabs in djelabahs.

‘And here,’ he said, sweeping up the place cards like a professional palmist, ‘is the space for the good Swallow and his friends.’ Cameron found herself sitting behind this comforting fellow, who kept up a lively chatter over his shoulder. But how could he forget meeting her, he asked? She had been there for his
petit yin d’honneur,
had she not? As she spoke, Cameron observed that his coat appeared to have been freshly sponged, and that there was some yellow gunk adhering to his hair.

‘Ah yes,’ said His Excellency, ‘I was attacked. That is to say, I was ambushed by the cretins outside. Fortunately they did not hit me directly. That honour belonged unambiguously to my Dutch colleague, Mr Cornelijus.’

‘What did they hit you with?’

‘I cannot say. That is a question currently under investigation by the police. But I have my suspicions. It was a large white object containing a great quantity of albuminous matter. If I were forced to express an opinion, I should say it was an egg. It is so sad, of course,’ said the Ambassador, smiling at her. ‘They do not understand how many of us there are inside the hall, who sympathize with the objectives of those outside.’

M. Charpentier’s girlfriend smiled. The two Arabs smiled.

‘How true,’ said Cameron. She shifted in her chair, and looked up at the stained glass of the north end. She deliberately set her mind upon a historical meditation, something about the antiquity of this hall, how it predated the discovery of her own country by 300 years. It was no use.

Soon she was once again daydreaming, in a happy mental fug, about the events of yesterday. She had been so frightened yesterday, with that row outside NATO, and the horrible pockmarked Flemish policeman going for his gun. She’d been impressed by the way Adam dealt with the guy, and at lunch, frankly, she had been dazzled.

Several times she almost cried out with anger at the coarseness and cynicism of their anti-American views. Every time she thought she would have to walk out or pop, they all laughingly paid out some slack and made her feel good again; and then slowly, ironically, gently, they’d begin the business of winding her up.

At one point she thought she was actually going to cry, when she heard her boyfriend — she had even had nesting thoughts about him — say that ‘Osama bin Laden was more morally serious’ than the American President.

They made jokes about American food, the cheese processed to the point of macrobiotic extermination, the bleached bread that bore no relation to wheat. Cameron looked around the smoky restaurant, where harassed Croats were dishing out steaming pots full of goo, the summit of Belgian civilization. There was waterzooi, a frightening salmonella-rich soup of fish and raw egg. There was steak tartare, so eloquent of toxoplasmosis that in her country it would have been banned by the Food and Drug Administration.

Yeah, she said, she had to hand it to the euros. They still had the edge when it came to lunch. Then they started laying into the American farm system that produced these culinary disasters, the depopulated prairies, harvested at night by huge computerized combines, the robot-controlled pig farms with their slurry lagoons. Did she not know that America was now the world’s number one villain in dumping cotton on sub-Saharan Africa? Americans were obese. Americans were ignorant. They needed two airline seats per buttock. Most of them had never been to Yurp. Most of them didn’t have passports.

Some of them, like Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis, were too terrified to get on a plane. Those that did travel abroad did not always leave their destination as they found it. Sometimes they blew up commuter trains on Balkan bridges, and sowed the fields with depleted uranium shells. Sometimes they bombed aspirin factories in the belief that they were making aflatoxin.

‘Did I ever tell you about the whisky bottling plant?’ said the don.

No, go on, they said.

‘It was the funniest thing you ever heard.’ They craned forward, their faces lurid and eerie in the half-light of the restaurant, and they awaited the nativity of the funniest thing you had ever heard.

‘Some CIA guy was scanning the internet for suspicious sites and he came across this promotional video from Jura. He saw all these horrible bottles being filled with a mysterious yellow fluid. And you know what they did? They actually sent a team to Britain, in the belief that they were looking at weapons of mass destruction.’

The don put back his head and howled, and his wife howled back, like a pair of intellectual coyotes.

‘Weapons of mass destruction is right,’ she said.

Adam laughed, too. ‘More dangerous than anything Saddam had,’ he pointed out.

‘Yeah,’ said Cameron and her patriotic feelings evaporated as she joined their happy scorn. There was something adolescent about their laughter, as if they were conscious, for the first time, of mocking the pretensions of the grown-ups. And that was why their giggling was so intense, she decided.

Because it was only a few years ago that America would have inspired their undivided affection and respect. That was what made their ideological rebellion so naughty and so compulsive.

So she was in excellent fettle after lunch, when they went for a walk, and she found herself linking arms, first with the don and then with Adam. They walked down Boulevard Adolf Max, and Cameron felt the sun on her cheeks. Then they doubled back down the Rue Neuve and walked in the shade.

The pavement was cracked and bemerded, and she was watching her feet when she became aware of what she took, at first, to be a life-size poster of a naked woman on the wall. She turned her head and saw a window, and behind that window was indeed a semi-naked black girl.

She was reading a book, and as they walked past she looked up for a fraction of a second. ‘Hey look,’ whispered Cameron, ‘is she doing what I think she’s doing?’

‘She’s reading
Le Rouge et le Noir,’
said Adam.

That night they sat in the bar of the Amigo hotel drinking whisky, and she had not been surprised when he followed her up to her room.

And that was what Cameron was really thinking about, gawping up at the mutilated form of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the TV lights turning her hair into points of gleaming gold, until her eyes focused again on the person in front.

It was one of the Arab men, and he had disposed the skirts of his djelabah so that they were pushed out all the way through the hind legs of his chair. He appeared to have dropped something. He was leaning forward and scrabbling underneath himself. Cameron wondered whether she could help, and as she watched through a crack in the djelabah, she saw his hand at work. His chair was placed directly over a bronze plaque recording the spot where Sir Thomas More, the patron saint of politicians, was executed. She saw him finger the edge of the plaque and she saw — or thought she saw — him slip a key under the metal rim and lift it up.

She felt a panic, as one feels when coming across something secret and frightening in the place one doesn’t expect it. She emitted the kind of noise you might hear from some tumbledown outside privy in Italy, where a well-brought-up girl has secluded herself on a hot day, and looked down to see a snake coiled in the bowl below.

The Arab straightened up. The crack in his skirts disappeared, and he was probing her with his brown eyes when they were interrupted. Hermanus Van Cornelijus was here, his thinning grey hair still wet from the sponge, and a band-aid on his Brueghelian nose.