I Am Max Lamm (12 page)

In the master bedroom, Lamm was fascinated by the mantelpiece. A procession of framed photographs showing the Minotaur shaking hands with Gorbachev, Putin, Mitterand, Chirac; with the Chinese premier surrounded by henchmen in penguin suits, with Yitzhak Rabin and every Israeli PM since, and with every US president back to Nixon except for Clinton. Were these photographs, Lamm wondered, what Wesson’s wife Janet LaRoye, manicured K Street lobbyist and potential first lady, gazed at when the Minotaur bent her over and fucked her the way he fucked the Chinese over steel tariffs? Did the photo of the senator hunting with Dick Cheney help Mrs Wesson to come, whilst her husband groaned like a walrus during a pastime almost as satisfying to him as shooting doves with the vice-president?

Or were the photos on the mantelpiece the
senator’s
turn-on, so he climaxed upon looking at himself and Newt Gingrich meeting the crazy dictator of North Korea in his Mao-suit? What Senator Wesson did in his London penthouse to his wife, he’d do to the communist madmen in Pyongyang. Fuck them up the arse. So hard that the sneaky bastards can’t sit at the nuclear negotiating table. Fuck them mercilessly, so they know who’s really the boss in East Asia!

This occurred to Lamm during his first bewildering tryst with Kelly, who was surprisingly resistant down there despite her ravenous appetites. Eyes shut, she arched her fake-tanned legs around his shoulders. ‘More,’ she breathed. That grenade of a word stimulating the sex-crazy homunculus in a man’s mind that’s resistant to rationality, common sense or cynicism. Lamm obeyed the request, moaning incoherently as his lips clasped the sweet hollow of her neck.

They met that Friday afternoon. Lamm hunched in the uncut grass by the barbeque, eating cold pumpkin pie, listening to the Radio 4 news on his pocket radio while he examined the
Guardian
,
the
Sun
and the
Evening Standard
for news of the manhunt. Probably Hyde Park’s most secluded grove; the tourists kept to the grand leafy avenues, the joggers to the tracks. So when he heard twigs crushing behind him, Lamm jolted upright. The adrenaline surge: dilated nostrils, sudden sweat, a tight chest.

Something poked the bare skin above Lamm’s belt. A soft wet nudge that was, in the half-second before he spun around, not unpleasant.

A white Scottish terrier. The dog’s bottomless black eyes looked up, requesting a pat, a snack, a walk. The terrier licked Lamm’s outstretched arm.

‘Hello, doggie.’

The dog whimpered, shuffling into Lamm’s lap. Look at the collar:
CASPAR
. After two days alone in stale grease, there was resurrective pleasure in scratching a little dog’s hairy ears.

‘
Caspar! Casp-aaar! Caspar!
’

A girl shouting. An American girl, perhaps five minutes’ walk away. Her voice taut with the finest pedigree of Northeastern pronunciation. A Kennedy-esque dialect as exclusively reared as this snow-white terrier.

‘
Caspar!
’

The dog jumped, barking. But Lamm grabbed its collar. Insanely, recklessly, but there was something – so much! – intriguing about the girl’s voice. Her sugary babyish affectation, the anglified clipped vowels characteristic of Andover or Phillips Exeter or some other prep school, nevertheless tinged with desperation. Her enunciation of anxiety; of a powerlessness temporarily akin to Lamm’s own. Anxious, overwhelmed because her pampered little dog had chased a squirrel into the shrubs.

‘
Casp-aaar! Caspar!
’

Listen to the shaky timbre in her voice; she’d do anything to get Caspar back.
Anything.
Crafty, conniving Lamm! His second brain hardened as the girl called for her beloved.

The terrier barked, Lamm gripped its collar. You’re properly excited now, and why not? It’s the voice of a classy, vulnerable girl, up against the odds. Pandora ignoring her better judgement. Don’t let the dog go. Keep barking, Caspar, and reel her in! The girl’s voice reminded Lamm of two women especially: Barbara Walters, the hypermanicured anchorwoman embalmed like Lenin although she’s alive and well, and a talented porno star named Haley Wilde whom he once watched on DVD at a buck’s night and later mentally resurrected while he took a hot spa.

Through the flowerbeds, bushes, trees, Kelly Wesson followed the barking to its source.

‘Caspar! I was worried about you!”

She grabbed the dog. No hesitation shoving her fingers into the lap of a dirt-streaked stranger.

‘You arsehole! You were holding him from me!”

Up to Lamm’s eye level, she wore vintage cowboy boots – pilfered from her father’s collection – and navy riding pants that could have easily cost £1,000 at a Saville Row tailor appointed to Her Majesty. A grey T-shirt masterfully hugged Kelly’s slim midriff and the small hard precipice of her breasts. Nothing printed on the T-shirt, but the way it fit suggested that its price tag wasn’t far behind the riding pants. Her hair tied up at the back, strawberry-gold wisps blurry in the fading sunlight. Lips glossy despite the wind. And her neck! A graceful marvel of physiology, surely containing twice as many vertebrae as the average girl’s. Sweat glistened off Kelly’s bare skin; the innumerable watery diamonds that already Lamm wanted to lick off, to taste her salt. No eye shadow nor eyeliner, though her eyebrows were expertly shaped; not a rebellious stray hair on her face to betray that undiluted femininity.

And her eyes! Immense yet fragile vitality in there, burning amid the world-weariness of having learnt things the hard way. The hard, insensible, destructive way; Lamm recognized that look. Most captivating in Kelly’s stare: insatiability, adventurousness, recklessness. Her eyes promising, before another word was said, that she wasn’t the usual Park Lane princess who’d run home to cry about the nasty bum who stole her doggie. Sure, she resembled a Boston Brahmin pampered ever since she swallowed the silver spoon. But, Lamm sensed, this girl was no stranger to transgression. He stared into her pale blue eyes, definitely for too long, and she didn’t flinch a bit.

‘Your dog wanted to run away from you. I kept him here.’

She cocked a sliver of an eyebrow.

‘I bet. And why would my Caspar want to run away from
me
?’

‘Ask him.’

She’s staring at you.
Really
staring. Your face, hands, body. Doesn’t believe a word of your shit. Can she tell that you’re nuts? That you were an athlete before you became a vagrant? That you’re a murderer? A Jew?

Lamm folded the
Guardian
shut. On the front page was Malik Masawi’s funeral. He flipped the paper upside down.

‘Take a seat. We’re both foreigners in a foreign land.’

‘I prefer to stand.’

The terrier purred like a cat while she scratched its ears. Never seen that before.

‘So why is a girl like you talking to someone like me? You got your teddy bear back.’

Kelly rubbed the dog’s neck. Her tight brow softening, tension draining from her face. That dog’s like the Chinese relaxation balls you grind in the palm of your hand.

Or
you’re
her relaxation?

‘Let’s say that I suffer from an insatiable addiction to ruining my life, and the lives of those around me. Sound familiar?’

She didn’t look away from his eyes. Didn’t flinch. Curious, emboldened.

‘So Mr Crocodile Hunter, why are you sleeping in the park? Already shot this week’s rent money up your arm?’

‘I’m having a picnic.’

‘Some picnic.’

She glanced at Lamm’s lunch. ‘You sleep under the barbeque, don’t you?’

Tell her to go away. It’s safer that way
.

Look at the new permutation in her formerly sarcastic features. Fascination. Is it pity prompting this princess to engage with a bum like you? Or the prospect of a new game? You’re today’s diversion from her emptiness. From the truth. The hunger for what she shouldn’t have.

Was it so easy for the Sirens to lure sailors to their deaths?

‘Aren’t you gonna ask me for a shower and a hot meal? My name’s Kelly. Today I’m your good Samaritan.’

He expected her to ask his name. Instead, she untangled Caspar’s leash, then walked through the overgrown path. Ha! Only a fool, a sex freak or a madman would follow her!

They approached the apartment building; she hadn’t spoken another word. Hadn’t asked Lamm why, on a sunny day, he was wearing a hood. Probably guessed.

Walking up the steps, Lamm nearly fell backwards. His father was floating by the door.

Lamm’s father’s ghost – the living have ghosts too? – wore a blue tennis shirt, white shorts and sneakers. His face salmon-pink, moustache quivering furiously, right arm brandishing a racquet like a policeman’s truncheon.

‘Max, I
cannot
believe this! Would Krickstein throw his life down the drain for a
shtup
? Look what happened to Boris Becker when he got a blowjob in the closet of a Japanese restaurant! And
you
! You’ve only got your life to lose!’

But Lamm’s father always talked too much. As the parental tirade reverberated in Lamm’s ear canal, he’d already entered the gilded lobby. Too late, and not a policeman in sight.

Kelly hit the polished walnut button for the top floor.

‘Get in. Take your shoes off at the door.’

‘Don’t come yet,’ she breathed. Lamm marvelled at how Kelly’s incendiary moans lured him against his better judgement. But many smarter, greater men than you have risked everything for a clandestine fuck. Profumo. Mitterand. JFK. Clinton. As usual during the business end of their business, Lamm stared at the mantelpiece. At the photograph of Senator Wesson and Newt Gingrich shaking hands with the crazy North Korean dictator. It helped to postpone Lamm’s climax, seeing those wrinkled carpetbaggers greeting the Dear Leader on a flowery podium in Pyongyang.

Everything in the apartment was chrome, gold or wrapped in an endangered skin. The whole place – twice featured in the UK edition of
Vogue Living
– had been decorated (at £100 an hour) by an interior designer described by Kelly’s father as ‘the queer who did Princess Di’s restrooms’. Typical décor for one of the US Senate’s wealthiest representatives, no less extravagant in his London getaway where occasionally he entertained Westminster’s cabinet ministers. Kelly’s father was her rock, her ball and chain, her blank cheque. Silver-haired with a horse’s shaggy eyebrows, small blue eyes, capped teeth and a pink trunk for a neck, Senator Wesson was an orator renowned for soapbox tirades that reminded historically astute listeners of the Nuremburg rallies, or George Wallace assailing the desegregationist protesters at the University of Alabama, or both. For eleven years, ever since a
Washington Post
cartoonist caricatured him as an enraged bull wearing a pinstriped suit, Senator Wesson had been dubbed ‘The Minotaur’ by his eternal enemies – the lefty editors at the
New York Times
,
the lefty essayists at the
New York Review of Books
,
and the lefty yid hacks every Sunday on
Meet the Press
. And the nickname stuck.

Amongst his many enemies, the Minotaur was truly hated. Hated with vehemence exceptional even for the gutters and pork barrels of Capitol Hill. Disliked for his neoconservative allegiances (dating back to his Skull & Bones days at Yale), for his apocalyptic fear mongering about Saddam’s WMDs all through 2002, for his tireless efforts at destroying the Clintons from Gennifer Flowers through to Paula Jones through to Whitewater through to Monica’s cumstained cocktail dress.

Of course, he never gave a shit about the tree-hugging, bagel-fucking, chardonnay-quaffing, jihad-sympathising unAmericans forever sneering down from their solar powered rats’ nests up on the Upper East Side or the Hollywood hills. A deputy Secretary of Defence from ’88 to ’92 under George the First, worth $150 million from golden handshakes and Pentagon oil contracts, a long-time mentor to Oliver North, hunting partner to the vice-president and Jim Baker, patron of the American Enterprise Institute, for decades a favourite houseguest at Ron and Nancy’s Californian ranch, Senator Richard Wesson was the man most likely to eulogize Dr Kissinger when that leather-skinned warhorse goes to the great US Embassy in the sky. And if he could convince a sceptical Washington press corps that he wasn’t out to repeal
Roe v Wade
and unilaterally nuke the Iranians, if the Republican National Committee might just ignore his draft-dodging in 1968, the messy $10 million divorce from his first wife and a 1985 conviction for drunk driving, then one day, it was suggested by those in the know, the Minotaur would get a shot at the Oval Office.

In return for her allowance of a thousand dollars a week – most of it spent on cocaine, an unremarkable indulgence among the rich bored children of Washington’s elite – Kelly played her vital, phony role. Her first and only job, pretending to be the Minotaur’s happy, perfect, patriotic twenty-year-old daughter at Capitol Hill galas and GOP fundraisers. She’d met three Mr Presidents, dined four times in the Long Room of the White House, attended movie premieres at the handwritten invitation of Mel Gibson or Charlton Heston, played mixed doubles on the grass court at Dick Cheney’s holiday ranch, even landed in a Chinook on an aircraft carrier for a photo-op with Daddy. And she hated every minute of it.

Kelly was bored by her polite familiarity with America’s – the world’s – most powerful men and she could predict, to a word, the patronising comments these upstanding grey fat cats invariably uttered to her. Her father’s dinner guests – the four-star generals, Fortune 500 CEOs and campaign donors of outstanding generosity – loved meeting Kelly, loved mentally undressing her firm amber body, loved flirting with her, and she fuelled Lolitaesque fantasies for these sixtysomething Roger Ramjets during the final futile sorties of their virility. Perhaps one day she’d fuck one of the rich decorated sleazebags, just to irk Daddy. Some of the generals still had taut stomachs and the features of John Wayne. She liked to imagine these humourless, All-American military types whimpering like kittens as they ejaculated, their stony faces suited to Mount Rushmore, not to licking a twenty-year-old heiress’ pussy. It’d be kinky, and even more fun if she snorted a little blow beforehand.