Seventy-Two Virgins (31 page)

‘Or no they should stay in Guantanamo Bay?’

‘Idiot!’ barked Jones. ‘Just answer the question.’

‘Of course I’m going to answer the question.’ The TV chef stared hopelessly around the chamber, as out of his depth as a soup-soaked crouton. Like all despairing examination candidates, he tried to get some extra purchase on the phrasing of the question.

‘Should the ILLEGALLY HELD prisoners go back FOR TRIAL?’ He stopped histrionically, hoping that he would give the impression that he was a man who knew exactly what he was about to say.

‘Spit it out, pal,’ said the President.

‘Well,’ said Chester, ‘if you want my honest opinion . .

‘That’s right,’ said Jones, flashing his teeth. ‘That’s the one we want. The honest one.’

‘My honest opinion is, er, yes. Yes, of course the prisoners should go back and I say that without having an anti-American bone in my body. In fact some of my best friends are Americans.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

1040 HRS

It was the tipping point. Chester’s moronic answer, arrived at with all the ratiocination of a donkey hesitating between two equal piles of hay, was colossally influential. Across the word this mere cook, this faux-naïve student of onions and gravy, had given cover and legitimation to the millions who wanted to vote to give America a bloody nose.

As the calls poured in, TV bosses started opportunistically whacking up the cost per minute and even though the higher prices were flashed on the screen, the viewers kept on calling.

In the upper reaches of the BBC, the hierarchs were in semi-continuous delirium of self-importance as they wondered what to do with the data. Could they responsibly publish the news? Could they not?

‘Basically this is a devil and the deep blue sea job,’ said the Political Director (Editorial) to the Director of Political Editorial. ‘I mean, we’re stuffed if we do and stuffed if we don’t. If we suppress what’s coming in, everyone will say we’ve been leant on by the government, and if we just go ahead and publish the news, everyone will start screaming about anti-American bias of the BBC.’

‘Yeah,’ said the Director of Political Editorial with a look of joy. He knew, they all knew, everyone who cared to look up the internet political wonk sites knew that the news was bad for America. China had recently seen a prodigious growth in the number of TVs and telephones of all kinds, not that the Chinese saw any particular need to thank America for the benefits of capitalism.

‘Yes,’ cried liberated young Chinese girls in pencil skirts as they dialled the TV stations. ‘Yes,’ said Chinese Human Rights activists into their snazzy new Sony Ericssons. Never mind all that American think tanks had done to campaign against the Laogai, the Chinese gulags.

Yes, now was the time to hold America to account. They wanted those guys sent back from Cuba. Slowly, like some storm being incubated in the armpit of Africa before it starts swirling round and round, gaining speed as it moves over the Atlantic, drenching Bermuda, then breaking out with hurricane force over the coast of North Carolina, the unthinkable was starting to become the politically correct. A global conviction was being born, that it was forgivable, this once, to comply with a terrorist stunt.

‘But just because I love America,’ said Chester de Peverill, ‘that does not mean I support American foreign policy or American farm policy. They fill their beef with hormones and then they dump it on the markets of developing countries and destroy the livelihood of those farmers. Do you know what happened to the Vietnamese catfish industry?’ he demanded.

The audience in the hall coughed and fidgeted. The audience at large watched him with fascination. Even the Vietnamese catfish fishermen watching from their pool tables wondered quite how this was relevant.

‘The Americans wanted to encourage their own catfish producers, so they slapped such prohibitive duties on Vietnamese catfish that, you know, they had a very tough time of it.’ Chester was conscious that this was perhaps not the most powerful point he could make, given that the anti-globalization movement, to which he was in theory affiliated, was also in favour of tariffs and protection, but he ploughed on, amid general expressions of disbelief.

‘Do you know how many Americans have food poisoning every day? Two hundred thousand, and it’s no wonder when you consider the kind of gloop they eat. Have you ever eaten American cheese?’

‘Listen, Chester,’ said Roger Barlow, ‘why don’t you just put a sock in it for the time being?’

Chester paused. He was being heckled and he knew from the studio audience at
Chester Minute
that a good heckle can be turned to gold.

‘Well, my friends, what do we have here? It’s my old friend Roger. He’s a politician, you know.’

‘Do shut up, Chester,’ said Roger. ‘These people are murderers.’

‘And my old friend Roger doesn’t want to hear my view of American cheese, which strikes me in a way as being not that surprising, because what you get from politicians like Roger is just like American cheese, processed and heat-treated to the point of macrobiotic extinction; and what you get from me is raw, unpasteurized — and you know, for some people like Rog here, I suppose I may be just a little bit too pungent for his taste.’

The TV chef looked down almost affectionately at the politician. Chester was quite oblivious to his surroundings, with the Asperger’s syndrome, the quasi-refusal to relate to the feelings of other people, that begins to afflict those who spend their evenings in star dressing rooms and their days absent-mindedly scanning the face of everyone they pass to see if they have been ‘recognized’.

‘Its good to see you, Rog. You know, folks, at university he was known as Roger the Artful Todger and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s been up to some kind of beastliness again, whanging the old donger in the kedgeree I have no doubt, no offence, Rog.’

Roger grabbed de Peverill’s tie and pulled down hard.

‘Stop,’ cried Jones, who could hardly believe his good fortune in finding this advocate of his cause. ‘You there, leave him alone and you, yes you, Mr Cook, please continue with your interesting remarks.’

‘And do you know,’ said Chester, scowling at Roger with magnificent disdain, ‘that in spite of their pasteurized, homogenized, sterilized, emulsified, genetically modified and hormone-pumped food, the Americans eat so much of it that they are the fattest country on earth. We all know about the evils of the tobacco industry. We all know about the creeps and saddos who defend the right of every American school kid to bear arms, even if it means bearing an AK47 into the maths class and wiping out teach and sixteen pre-pubescent school children. But what, my friends, are we going to do about the real enemy of our values, I mean our European values, that have produced in France a country with 258 cheeses? The real enemy is not big oil, it’s not big tobacco, it is big food.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

1043 HRS

Across the Far East the debate was going badly for America, or at least for the President. The Chinese were now voting for the return of the gagged and ski-goggled Guantanamo prisoners by 68 per cent to 32 per cent. In Malaysia the Yes vote reached a staggering 98 per cent. Even in South Korea, the country for which many young American soldiers had died, there was a 52 per cent majority of TV viewers in favour of the return of the prisoners and the story was certainly no better in Vietnam, where an apathetic public were scandalized afresh by the American insult to their catfish.

In Europe the polling was closer, and in some countries, notably Denmark, there was already strong and implacable opposition to anything that sounded like cooperation with a bunch of Islamic nutcases. Britain was proving staunch, at least so far, in that many people understood that a yes vote was a victory for the terrorists. As for America, slowly waking up, it was a different story.

Americans looked at this lank-haired chef, condescending to them about their diet, and decided they liked him about as much as they liked Osama Bin Laden. Of course, it was still early days, and even in countries like China people were delaying before casting their votes, as families feuded about the meaning of what they were doing. Phone sockets were ripped out of walls, handsets were hidden under cushions while decent people wrangled about the limits of respectable anti-Americanism. One Chinaman told his brother to go and copulate with a pangolin in a lake. He was stabbed with a letter-opener in the duodenum.

In Pakistan a man was so scandalized by his wife’s refusal to vote against the awful Rumsfeld Stalag in Cuba that he shouted
‘Ju te Marunga!’
which means ‘I hit you with my shoe, woman’, an insult she requited by braining him with an iron. All told, the internet number crunchers calculated that of the world’s TV viewers who had so far expressed an opinion, a staggering 61 per cent were ready to rub America’s nose in it, even if it meant going along with the boys from the Brotherhood of the Two Mosques.

And Chester de Peverill jawed on, protected by Jones. He began on the infamy of America’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol. He went on to America’s disgusting attempt to patent seeds that were the intellectual property of Third World farmers. Barlow and others had at one point tried to slow handclap him, but Jones was having none of it.

Jones wanted the debate, and yet he was growing increasingly antsy. For more than twenty minutes now he had held the Western world at his mercy, and he knew it would not be long before the imperialists struck back.

A man in a muddy tracksuit was being shown into the Ops Room in New Scotland Yard, accompanied by Sergeant Louise Botting of Horseferry Road. It was Dragan Panic, the tow-truck operative. He really didn’t like being surrounded by so many policemen, but he had been told that his cooperation was essential, especially if he wanted Indefinite Leave to Remain in Britain.

He was plonked in front of a TV, which appeared to be showing some boring parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall. Nobody watched the debates in Westminster Hall, not even the MPs who took part in them.

‘Is that them?’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

At that moment the cameras were panning across the hall, to take in Benedicte and the two other Arabs, and so Dragan began to shake his head.

‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, when the President and Jones the Bomb suddenly filled the frame. ‘I know him anywhere, that creepy man.
Bozhe Moi,
my God,’ he said, when he identified the man in the other handcuff as the President of the United States.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked numbly.

‘That,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, ‘is something we are having a look at now.’

It is well known that in his younger days Henry VIII of England was very far from the bloated fat-kneed creature of caricature. He was tall and lithe, with blond locks, constantly springing into the saddle and faring forth for a spot of falconry, and then springing down again to strum his lute and knock up some imperishable masterpiece like ‘Greensleeves’. He danced and sang in his lusty tenor and he also played tennis, which comes, as everyone knows, from ‘tenez’, the word you called out at courtly matches as you prepared to serve and as you instructed your opponent to get a grip on his racket. In 1532 he built a splendid indoor facility at Hampton Court, but at some point before that date he must have seen the possibilities of Westminster Hall, with its hard flat surface and its sheer walls offering the perfect ricochet shot. We know he must have played here because in 1923, when they were making repairs to the hammerbeams, they came across some brown and shrivelled objects in the eaves. They were of leather and stuffed with hair. They were among the first tennis balls. Their hair was shown on examination to be taken partly from a dog and partly from a human being, perhaps because the Tudors, like future generations, had a superstitious faith in composite materials.

One can imagine the scene.

It is a bright morning in the springtime of his reign, the sun strong enough outside to fill the hall with a blue smoky light. Enter Henry, determined to work up an appetite for swans stuffed with goose stuffed with vole, or whatever he is proposing to eat for lunch.

After a suitably deferential pause, he is followed by his partner, a nervous silken-haired young courtier called Sir Charles de Spenser. The King announces that he will serve. Sir Charles says this is a first-class plan.

The King is inspired to make a joke: ‘I may be born to rule,’ he says, ‘but I was also born to serve.’ Sir Charles laughs so much he appears to be on the point of vomiting. ‘Tenez!’ yells the King. He then bounces the ball with his racket for an off-puttingly long time. Sir Charles sways like an osier on the chalked baseline, feebly wondering which stroke it would be most politic to play.

Twang!
The monarch’s first serve sails past his ear, comfortably out on all directions. ‘Bien joué, sire,’ cries Sir Charles, but the King is having none of it.
Phtunk!
He hits the next one with the wood and it dribbles into the net.

‘Good shot, my liege,’ exclaims the courtier, but no amount of flattery will coax Henry’s ball into the service court. The King is beginning to go red. A certain jowly savagery is creeping over his features, later to be captured by Holbein. He serves, he misses, his racket vainly harvests the air and yet the fruit drops on his head. A sinking dread is forming in the pit of Sir Charles’s belly. The King is angry.

‘I’ faith,’ he cries, snapping his racket over his vast knee, ‘I don’t believe it,’ and commands Sir Charles to serve. Palms wet, the courtier tosses up the little leather sphere and it plops over the net in a slow undulating dolly that even a maddened monarch cannot miss; and the King makes the most of it.

He brings his new racket forward in a gigantic forearm sweep and crashes the catgut into the leather with all the impetus of his seventeen stone. For a fraction of a second the ball is sucked back into the web of the racket, as the enormous physical force turns the strings into a kind of warpo model of the space-time continuum, and then
kapoing,
it breezes off and away, far over the head of the extravagantly cowering Sir Charles, off one of the side walls, up over the hammerbeams and then
honk honk bonk,
it bounces into some cranny known only to the architects.