I Am Max Lamm (11 page)

After the merciless silence underground, Lamm
had
to stop here, to hear another man’s voice. The muttering homeless hulks looked like they’d sat here a hundred years. Their universal uniform of chaos; these poor stinking men were the vagrants of New York too, or Rome, Moscow, Beijing, Melbourne,
anywhere.
Watery eyes, trembling porous lips, vacant stares; the incarnation of breakdown.

That’s how you’ll look?

They don’t notice you. You’re nothing to Hyde Park’s derelict monarchs. Collapsed on wooden thrones, crowned by festering dreadlocks of spittle and grime, they rule their kingdom of pigeons and ghosts.

Lamm hadn’t felt as sick, as unsettled, since the police helicopter last night. Not the mundane middle-class abhorrence at this homeless stink of sweat, piss, shit. No, Hyde Park’s stammering wrecks so disturbed Lamm because their unremarkable disintegration was only a few rungs down from what he’d survived in New York. The living dead. Look at the flagrant fragrant hopelessness in these broken men.
There’s
life’s malfunction! Their nothingness is too familiar, now that you’re their closest neighbour. Unlike Lewski last night, these ghosts don’t disappear when you turn away. Meet your comrades in disorder: admire their yellow claws, piss-stained trousers, relentless red eyes, dead futures.
They’re the actor behind your mask.

The crinkling of a newspaper. There was a fourth man too. A grey hunchback, sitting cross-legged on the bench behind the dreadlocked hulks. Browsing through a
Daily Telegraph
fished from a garbage bin, he was Jerzy Panklowski, an arthritic bookmaker from Łódz who – way back when the mentally infirm weren’t drowning beneath the tsunami of DSM diagnoses, case management reports, psycho-pharmaceutical magic bullets, mandatory institutionalization – the British would have considered a lovable eccentric.

Twenty years ago, a constable would have laughed at Jerzy’s typical afternoon in Hyde Park taunting squirrels with almonds; now the police regularly bundled the hunchbacked bootmaker into a public psych ward for overnight evaluation.
The residents have complained about you.
Never once violent in his life, Jerzy was nevertheless the bogeyman to the hyper-manicured Wives of Fund Managers in townhouses opposite the park, who suspected that the hobbling old gentleman yelling insults in Polish at the pigeons was really a vicious paedophile waiting to snatch their adorable toddlers Zac and Zara Jane.

The hunchback’s unintelligible mumbling suggested that, like the squirrel food, he was irreversibly nuts. The old man’s life skills – his capacity to get anything done at all – falling far short of the seven habits of effectiveness as practised by Park Lane homeowners. Silver-haired in a torn oxblood suit, mouldy scarlet pullover, mud-caked loafers, Jerzy croaked hello through his ragged white beard and the smoke from half a rotten cigarette he’d found on the footpath.

‘
Młody człowiek!
’

He stared at Lamm, the way he’d check a lottery ticket. The intriguing encounter – this taste of an imminent revelation? – momentarily trumped the fugitive’s better judgement. Lonely, reckless Lamm! The deathly silence underground and now this crackled greeting in Polish – dulling Lamm’s headache, unlocking his stiff jaw a little – induced him to sit with a crazed bootmaker who sought the same anaesthesia in conversation.

And for seventeen minutes, Lamm took in Jerzy’s story with barely a breath between sentences. That the hunchback slept beneath the loading bay behind a Sainsbury’s on Edgware Road, or in a Hyde Park gazebo when the weather was warm. That for sixteen years until his
katastrofa
,
Jerzy was a bootmaker with his own shop on Queensway Road. Back in Łódz, he worked as a mechanic on the train lines for twenty-two years, until the wall came down and with it his contracts on the Polski Koleje Panstwowe engines thundering east to the Siberian coalfields. Spending his life savings on fake papers, Jerzy emigrated to join his older brother Janek, who tutored violin at a girls college in Shepherds Bush until his sudden death from a brain aneurysm in December 1999. Then the arthritis worsened, getting so bad that Jerzy couldn’t hammer a heel without biting his tongue.

On that park bench awaiting free pizza, Max Lamm and Jerzy Panklowski sighed at the ageless phenomenon of the
annus horribilis.
Also in 1999, Jerzy’s Lithuanian wife Rona – for sixteen years a seamstress in a Putney curtain factory until it relocated a hundred miles south of Beijing – returned to Vilnius to care for her ailing mother. Without his wife conscientiously regulating his medication, Jerzy ran out of his Risperidal and Zyprexa tablets. After a decade’s absence, the voices returned, the paranoia resurged, and again Jerzy became convinced that the Stasi were listening to his thoughts. His angular features – the hooked nose, pinprick hazel eyes, mottled quartz skin that Heinrich Himmler condemned as subhuman in the Polish peasantry – degenerated into the hollow face that marked his four months in a Łódz schizophrenia ward during the winter of 1982.

Jerzy drank his rent money, ignored the pink eviction notices. One summer’s morning he awoke in Hyde Park with his loyal friend: a one-litre mix of ginger beer and Spanish bourbon. He drank to silence the Stasi, to silence his brother’s ghost playing bad notes on a broken violin, and he slept beneath the willows. That was four years ago. All this Jerzy recounted in a torrent of preformed astonishment, tinged with perverse satisfaction that he’d survived.

Jerzy crushed the empty wine cask, inhaling and clenching his fists, angry about the dungeon hell of the Łódź? asylum, the estranged wife in Vilnius who had probably remarried, the bastard Moscow oligarchs who terminated his employment at the train depot, the disloyal customers who took their boots elsewhere – or wore cheap Chinese sneakers – and ruined his business. Expunging his downfall the way he’d vomit a piece of fish.

Zródlo twierdzenia!

My disaster!

Then Jerzy’s twelve-minute dissertation on how you fix a pair of boots. This was Lamm’s first real distraction since the Pakistani boy’s skull struck the Camden pavement. You have to know the types of boot polish: naptha, turpentine, gum arabic, Kiwi Dark, Shinola, Boy Scout’s, Cherry Blossom. You need a bootmaker’s knowledge of scalping knives, long-nose pliers, leather shucks, flathead chisels, glued wedges, heelscrews, lacepokes, jackboots, nailguns, half-inch tacks . . .

And the bad times, the worse times, the unforgettable times in Jerzy’s workshop when he heard the heavenly voice of Saint Crispin, the patron saint of bootmakers. Saint Crispin whispering in his ear canal; so clear, so
real
that Jerzy was certain it was a visitation from beyond the earthly realm. But the saint criticized Jerzy’s handiwork:
your stitching is weak
,
the soles will split
,
the bootstraps will break
,
the toecaps will crack!
It drove the poor bootmaker to tears, to constant thoughts of suicide. Jerzy yelled at his hands, at the walls:
Kwita!
Enough! But Saint Crispin wouldn’t stop the taunting. Not until the business failed.

Jerzy remembered the boots: Chelsea, cowboy, knee-high, go-go, hessian, mukluks, rigger, vlahboots, Wellingtons, giekas. You don’t fix them the same way – you learn what each boot needs!
Rzeczoznawstwo!
Expertise! And the customers the bootmaker hadn’t seen in five years: Tamara Kravitsky, a Russian escort who wore cherry stiletto heels that he mended three times in 1998. Elvira Eliakis, a millonaire’s wife with a shoe habit to rival Imelda Marcos. Guido Guilomedes, the nightclub singer who got silver toecaps custom-moulded onto his Texan snakeskins. Eliot Katz the dentist, who every two months got his sandals steam-cleaned . . .

Lamm stared at Jerzy’s eyes. Look at the spider web of wrinkles in the bootmaker’s brow, etched chaotically as the memories beneath his leatherskin scalp.

‘Now where are my customers?
Zdrajca!
They go to Shonofsky on Princes Square! He cannot fix a fucking heel!’

Jerzy howled, tears softening the riverbeds in his cheeks. He squeezed a final drop from the cask, then hurled it at the gate. Pop as the silvery wine-bag struck a steel spike.

The fucking Stasi broadcasting into the bootmaker’s ear canal, German whispers rattling the change in his skull. Agents in the streets, snipers atop buildings, informants in the shops, buses, trains, hotels, restaurants. In Hyde Park too.
That’s
why Jerzy looks at you suspiciously. You’re Stasi. The old bootmaker’s reason wrung like sweat from sodden clothes. Nonetheless, he tearfully remembered customers – their faces, families, jobs, shoes – that he last encountered ten years ago.

‘Now the boots come from China! The
krawiecs
don’t give a fuck for workmanship!’

The bootmaker remembered another customer: Zayed Salazer, the Algerian barber in Queensway who wore sandals hand-stitched from mauve Moroccan felt.

‘Zayed is a
zbrodniarz
.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A criminal! He makes papers, passports, visas.’

The sputter of a motorcycle engine. Lamm and Jerzy spun around. Five cold pizzas were stacked at the gate.

‘God bless you!’ The motorcyclist wore a cook’s white smock.

‘
Podziekowanie!
Bless you!’

Jerzy hobbled over to the pizzas. Lamm remained on the park bench.

Tomorrow, you must visit Zayed the barber.

Lamm’s uneasy sleep. The dream playing like a looped video tape: Malik Massawi dead on the pavement, then rising like a zombie until the bottle smashed into his skull and he died another death. For a few awful seconds, he lay still until he stood up. Then the fatal blow, he fell dead, and again stood up, got hit, fell down, got up and so on. Three hours of the jack-in-a-box nightmare, or three minutes? When Lamm awoke, basted in sweat, he remembered every bloody detail.

10.37 a.m.

Time for your excursion.

On the way, Lamm stopped at an underground public toilet. He shaved, brushed his teeth, dispensed liquid soap upon his palms and rubbed the lather onto his underarms, forearms, face, neck. He washed his T-shirt and shirt in the basin, wrung them dry beneath a hand-dryer. You must make a good impression.

Wearing his jacket hood, blending among the tourists, shoppers, pedestrians, Lamm emerged from Kensington Gardens at the blunt top of Queensway Road. This shopping strip incorporating the Tube station, the beige sandstone Hilton and a subterranean bowling alley where, four nights a week, teenage gangs congregate outside to swap stolen phones, compare their elephantine jeans and steal each other’s fake gold chains. On the same block: a Western Union booth where janitors and taxi drivers send money home to East Africa; tourist shops selling Princess Di aprons and Union Jack coffee mugs made in Taiwan; two discount supermarkets for the backpackers, five souvlaki bars, and three velvety Persian lounges where Egyptian men recline on tasselled cushions, watch Al Jazeera and smoke hookahs like the gigantic slug in
Alice in Wonderland.

Lamm entered Queensway Arcade. A miniature shopping mall with creaky plywood floors, housing Ukrainian leather merchants hawking the fashions of 1981; a tobacconist selling the usual assortment of bongs, flick-knives and Bob Marley T-shirts; two foreign-language DVD stalls (one Russian, one Arabic) trading pirated discs; a plasterboard internet café crowded with Australian backpackers updating their résumés; a coffee lounge frequented by local businessmen wearing unbuttoned silk shirts, spitting specks of hummus upon their furry chests as they argued in Farsi about the war, the bastards at the immigration department, or the crazy hook-handed preacher spruiking Bin Laden’s vitriol at the Finsbury Park mosque.

Deep in the arcade opposite a tarot stall, a tiny barber shop rattled to Egyptian pop music. Here was Zayed Salazar; a tall, bald Algerian wearing a lilac shirt and the Moroccan felt sandals that so fascinated Jerzy the bootmaker. No customers; the barber attended to a fax machine spitting out an official-looking document. He turned as the masonite floor creaked beneath Lamm’s sneakers.

‘My second customer today! How much you want off?’ Zayed glanced at Lamm’s hair. His smile faded.

‘The shampoo cost you extra.’

‘I’m not here for a haircut.’

The barber’s eyes narrowed to slits.

‘Come into my office.’

Lamm stood in a warm little room crammed with a laptop, fax machine, colour laser printer and scanner on the desk, unopened boxes of shampoo on the floor, a digital camera on a tripod. With slender bony hands, the barber frisked Lamm from his collar to his ankles.

‘Who told you about me?’

The barber glared into Lamm’s bloodshot eyes. Does he see your sleeplessness, your guilt, your nightmare?

‘Jerzy. The Polish bootmaker.’

Zayed’s eyebrows shot skywards. He laughed.

‘Jerzy! The old Polish nut! Where is he? I heard he’s living on the street?’

‘He’s not well:

‘Not well? I
loved
that man. Tell him to see me, give him my number. Tell him my sandals need fixing.’

The barber scrawled his mobile phone number onto a card specked with a customer’s hair, then slid it into Lamm’s shirt pocket.

‘I don’t ask questions. Payment must be in advance. An EU passport is £5,000. An American is eight, they’re harder to get. I also do Pakistan and India. It takes two months, usually longer. You won’t find a better price in London, but if you do, I will go five per cent cheaper and give you three months’ free haircuts. Understand?’

Lamm nodded. The impossibility – the dangerous futility of it all! – churning his gut.

Eight thousand pounds.

He knows you’re broke. It’s written on your face.

‘If you don’t want a haircut, goodbye. Call me if you get the money.’

Eight thousand pounds. What the home entertainment system in Kelly Wesson’s penthouse cost her father. His presidential ambition everywhere in that Park Lane apartment, the Minotaur’s home away from home when he visited Europe to speak at Tory fundraisers, attend NATO talk fests or shout scarlet-faced tirades at the naïve peaceniks from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Antique oak sideboards, walnut floorboards, burgundy velvet drapes, by the front door a US flag (a restored relic from an Iwo Jima gunboat), in the master bedroom a fourposter bed carved during the Civil War (of the same vintage as the bed in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom) where the senator’s daughter got to work on her intriguing new boy from the barbeque. Only the best here: a gleaming Miele kitchen that Kelly never used; a £2 million view of Hyde Park, but she preferred the curtains drawn. The shelves lined with unread first editions inscribed with the author’s best wishes to the senator. Fat autographed books by Dr Kissinger, Samuel Huntingdon, Norm Podhoretz, Margaret Thatcher, Tom Clancy . . .