Seventy-Two Virgins (36 page)

Crikey, thought Barlow.

‘Typical Frog,’ said the President.

Jones the Bomb frowned.

‘Since the hour advances, and since I repose no faith in the mental equilibrium of our captors, let me speak only to the nation which I have the honour of representing.
Français, françaises, concitoyens de la République,
there may be many millions of you who are watching and indeed preparing to vote. There may be some of you who have already made up your minds, and are doing as these people would have you do — ringing up to express your wish to release the prisoners held by the Americans. If you have already voted, that is your privilege. If you have yet to decide, I beg you to listen.

‘We have a tradition, over the last fifty years or so, of providing the intellectual opposition to what is called
le défi américain,
which I might call the challenge of American cultural and political dominance. We have our own modest culture in France, our own literary, artistic and scientific achievement, which over the centuries some foreigners have been kind enough to praise. But it would be fair to say that sometimes we become so paranoid about America, which we call the hyperpuissance, that we become exuberant in our language.

‘One senior French politician recently attained notoriety by declaring that the ambition of the United States was nothing but, I quote, the organized cretinization of the French people. Our good friend the cook, who has just regaled us with his views at such generous length, alluded to the problem of the malbouffe, the hamburgerization of European cuisine. That is a discussion familiar to us in France.

‘It is also true that many intelligent people, and not just in France, but also in America, are sceptical of the manner in which the US government handles the problems of the Middle East. It is my belief that an injustice has been done to the Palestinian people, that Israel could remedy that injustice, and that America could do more to assist this process. There are also many of us who believe that there were better ways of handling Monsieur Saddam — no doubt a very bad man — than the invasion and all the problems it has brought in its train.

‘But, my friends, it is one thing to find fault with America. It is another thing to wish her destruction, and that, tragically, is the ambition of the deluded men, and woman, who hold us hostage today.’

Darn right, thought the President. Until that last bit, he had been meditating the modalities of a strike on Paris.

‘I do not know where he has gone, the strange personage who handcuffed himself to the President. But before he went, he compared the American head of state to Caesar, and I wish to dwell for an instant on that richly suggestive analogy. Yes, it is probably true that in her pandominance, modern America surpasses the Rome of the Antonines. She has bases in countries which only fifteen years ago were part of the Soviet Union. It is a fact that Rome never conquered Scotland. It has been one of my pleasures, as Ambassador to this country, to walk along the wall the empire built to keep out the painted tribes; and yet American planes flew from Lossiemouth to Iraq.

‘We all know the figures: the increment in US defence spending, the amount by which the Pentagon decided to increase defence spending last year, is greater than the combined defence budgets of Britain, France and Germany. It is surely right to call America in some sense an empire. But is she an evil empire?’

‘Of course she is evil, you conceited French stupidity!’ Jones the Bomb leapt up, trailing the President, and almost rubbed noses with the TV screen. ‘Benedicte, you must make him shut up and sit down.’

But the French Ambassador was coming to the point.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

1112 HRS

‘So you expect me to believe that?’ said Cameron to Adam. ‘You thought they were going to wheel in some torture victim, just to embarrass the President?’

She paused, and scanned the face of her loved one, and was amazed by how much she wanted to believe him.

‘I know it sounds crazy now, but it’s all I’ve got to say,’ said Adam. ‘Now let’s just concentrate on getting out of here alive.’

Over the scuffed green carpet of room W6 Dean slithered in his trainers. He was now only a couple of yards from the handle. He turned and mouthed at Cameron. ‘Come with me.’

Cameron looked at him, and then looked quickly back at Adam.

‘Dean, my fine young friend.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Dean instinctively. Jones the Bomb was still watching the TV, but he had good peripheral vision.

‘I will not stand in your way. I will always remember you fondly.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ He edged a foot closer to the door.

‘Your mother will be filled with joy over your heavenly wedding,’ said Jones.

‘My mother, sir?’

‘The same.’

‘Sir, what wedding?’

Jones smiled and slid his gunhand into the suicide jacket, and checked the Nokia.

Now Haroun was lost. He was sure he had been here before. Surely it was the same marble staircase, the one where he had met the policewoman. But if he had been here before, would he not have remembered that giant painting? It depicted the infidel Queen Elizabeth, her orange hair and pasty face, all lit up as she plotted some new act of aggression. Haroun spat and swore, and tottered on. He looked into the office of someone called the Rt Hon. John Prescott MP, and thought of urinating in the waste paper basket, but there was the risk of being interrupted by the woman. Heaven help me, he begged. Come down, O Power Divine, and give me the blessing of release. In the nuclear reactor in his loins the last carbon rod had blown out of the pile; the last drop of coolant had evaporated, and the corrupt and incompetent director had leapt into his jalopy and begun to drive for the coast.

Far above the Atlantic the boomerang of Stealth bombers was making good time, as Rome might once have sent her quinquiremes to crush a rebellion.

Jupiter Pluvius continued his percussion on the roof, and now the beat turned up again, as though the rain god were moving to some symphonic finale. Immediately beneath the tiles, Jason Pickel stared down at the sweating domes, the hats, the comb-overs and shilling-sized bald patches of the audience, ninety feet below. He looked through the sights for the umpteenth time and lined up the cross-hairs on two prominent objects, first Benedicte’s left nipple, then her right nipple. ‘Did e’er such love and sorrow meet?’ he hummed, ‘Or thorns compose so rich a crown?’ He couldn’t miss, he told himself. Well, he could, but he couldn’t.

Away at the back, Roger Barlow was partly hoping to speak, and partly hoping that he would be spared the ordeal, not least since the Frenchman was being so colossally sound. Yves Charpentier had a slightly irritating way of pushing out his lips and making an udder-milking gesture with his hands, but what he had to say was good.

‘Way to go, Froggie!’ he thought.

Barlow was also wondering what the hell was going on with Cameron. To judge by the way the Arabs had treated her and that fogeyish boyfriend of hers, there seemed to be some element of complicity. Oh dear, oh dear.

And she had seemed such a nice girl. Belief, idealism, fanaticism, mania: in Barlow’s mind they were all part of the same ghastly continuum. Would they blame him? Would they investigate the lackadaisical way in which he had hired her and supervised her?

Probably: once they’d finished ripping him to shreds about Eulalie. What should he do? Fire her?

Probably.

‘All right,’ said Cameron. She decided she would make up her mind about Adam later. ‘So whose spy are you? The Russians? The Chinese?’

Adam gave a rueful smile. He pointed to something on his lapel.

‘See that?’

‘What is it? A microphone?’

‘No, no. What does it look like?’

She shrugged. It looked like something from a game, a little red token of some kind. Maybe part of an army from Risk.

‘It is a florette of the Grand Croix of the Légion d’Honneur.’

Cameron noticed the rather too professional way he said it, with plenty of rolling of the rs.

‘So you are spying for the Froggies.’

‘C’est ça.’

‘Bien je jamais.’

‘And one last thing, Dean,’ said Jones as the teenager turned the handle of the door. ‘I hope you will enjoy the attentions of the black-eyed ones, and remember that the black of their eyes is blacker than black, and the white of their eyes is whiter than white; and I hope that you will find them comely and submissive.’ Dean shivered. He looked at Cameron and opened the door.

‘Hey, Dean, wait up,’ said the President.

Dean halted in amazement.

The President turned to Jones the Bomb. ‘Hey, this black-eyed one stuff. Is that the black-eyed virgins, the seventy-two virgins in Paradise that you guys talk about?’

‘Such is the reward of the shahid,’ said Jones, stiffly.

“Cos I read something interesting ‘bout that,’ said the President.

‘Silence,’ said Jones. ‘You know nothing of this.’

‘Wait, wait. This might be useful for Dean to know. I read that there was a scholarly controversy about this black-eyed phrase, a real big fight.’

‘Shut up,’ said Jones.

‘It seems, from what I read, that black-eyed ones might not mean seventy-two virgin girls. They looked at the old Arabic there, and they now think it’s a mistranslation, and it really means .

‘What?’ said Dean.

‘Idiot,’ said Jones the Bomb.

‘… raisins.’

‘Raisins?’ said Dean.

‘Isn’t that something?’ said the President. ‘You blow yourself up thinking you’re going to get seventy-two black-eyed virgins, and instead you get seventy-two raisins. Kind of makes a difference, I’d have thought.’

‘Fool,’ said Jones, and raised the Browning as if to whack him again.

‘And another thing,’ said the President bravely, ‘is why is it so great if they’re virgins? Most folks would say that a little experience is… you might want to think about that, Dean.’

‘Enough,’ said Jones the Bomb.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

1114 HRS

‘Non, concitoyens de France,
I do not think America is an evil empire,’ said the French Ambassador. Out of that grey thatch a single drop of perspiration appeared and rolled down that high, pale forehead. He was a good-looking man, but certainly not a young man any more.

‘And
franchement, mes amis,
I do not think the comparisons with Rome are apt…’

Cameron got up and led Adam towards the television. The President glanced at them incuriously. Jones was muttering to himself; he sounded like a bag lady.

‘Look, Adam, he’s got the same thing as you.’ The cameras had a tight head shot, and the red thread of the Légion d’Honneur — a more discreet version of Adam’s florette — was just visible on the Frenchman’s lapel.

‘Why don’t you listen to what he has to say?’ There was a strained, almost giggling note to her voice.

The Ambassador continued. He had been trained at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in the ancient art of the suasoria, of arguing for whatever side of the case he happened to be on. Should Hannibal have crossed the Alps by the Iser Valley? Or should he have stuck to the Riviera? There was a time when Yves Charpentier would have been equally learned and fluent in support of either case. Today, as happens with all of us from time to time, he found his voice taking on the choky timbre of absolute sincerity.

‘Our friend the cook has told us that America would dominate the world with her nasty fast food. He deplores the hamburger, and so do I. And yet I must ask you all: Are you forced to eat this thing? Are you obliged to buy the dreaded Newman’s Own Balsamic Vinegar, instead of making your own vinaigrette? Are you obliged to support the ruthless profiteering of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream? But no!

‘Yes, the men from McDonald’s have built their triumphant yellow arches across Europe, and it may interest you to know that in our country, people of France, the hamburger chain is growing faster than anywhere else on earth. But do they compel us to erect these monstrosities, as the victorious Roman generals erected their triumphal arches over the defeated Gauls?
Non, mes amis.
We build the arches ourselves, to gratify our own appetites.

‘Our friend the cook — whose recipes for dock leaf soup and placenta pie I have not yet had the good fortune to sample — told us of the many American soldiers who are deployed overseas. Well, I should not have to remind you, but there are many thousands of American soldiers still in France . .

‘Say what?’ said the President, scandalized for a second that his extensive briefing on Yurp did not contain this fact.

‘Chap doesn’t know what he’s on about,’ said Silver Stick, who had once been something in NATO.

‘Yes of course,’ said the Frenchman to those around him. ‘Do not look so surprised. Go to Normandy; go to Omaha, and Gold and Juno and Sword; and then go to see the receding vistas of white crosses on the huge green lawns which contain the remains of thousands upon thousands of the Americans who gave their lives for the freedom of my country, of our country, who sacrificed themselves for the freedom of Europe. Go to Flanders, and the Ardennes; go there, you fools who despise and deprecate America, go there and tell me that we the people of France do not owe the Americans an eternal debt, a debt which it is our privilege, in some small way, to pay back today.’

‘Well I’ll be danged,’ said the President, breathing out. He snapped a salute.
‘Allons, enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé.’

The Frenchman was about to make some other points; for instance that the ideological links between the American and French republics were in some ways stronger than the link between the United Kingdom and her former colony. He was going to point out that the Statue of Liberty had been presented to the people of America by the people of France, in 1885, in recognition of the centenary of America’s war of liberation from government by the very place in which they stood.