I Am Max Lamm (16 page)

During nine months of recovery from her bottomless despair, from the drug habit that would have ended in jail, overdose or aneurysm, from the desire not to exist that once hollowed her every breath, Kelly Wesson was resurrected. Resurrected by grinding five decent men into the same powerlessness, the same shit of self-hatred, the same hopeless logic of no exit that compelled her so close to suicide. Did those unfortunate soldiers, enduring their lieutenant’s cruel whims for $12.75 an hour, realize that their humiliation fuelled her rebirth? That Kelly got stronger, healthier every day she observed their degradation?

No, they scrubbed the floors, did their sit-ups, ran their laps, stood like statues under the midday sun. They agreed that Lieutenant Wesson was a mean fucking bitch, obviously spoilt as a kid, and laughed when the peanut farmer from Mississippi explained the sadistic tendencies down to her needing a good, long, old-fashioned fuck in the ass. These men endured her. They endured the same breed of dark instincts that, six thousand miles away, simultaneously possessed the young National Guard reservists guarding Abu Graib. The same cruel, indelibly human impulses that Kelly’s father, the Minotaur, employed like a guillotine as he rose through the oil business, the Pentagon and the Senate. Effortlessly, she had become what she hated.

‘
Forget if the faucets are gold and fuck me
.’

It’s an order. They embrace on the antique four-poster bed in the master bedroom of her London penthouse. She speaks in a serrated Midwestern drawl, like her father.

Two months out of the National Guard, Kelly Wesson commands a homeless, hunted murderer not to ask dumb questions about the decor and instead stick his dick between her thighs. In many ways she had changed, but in others she remained the same as ever.

And with every direction she writhed, every moan, Max Lamm wordlessly asked the baffling question:

What does she see in you?

It’s your otherness, the lure of your transgression. Fuel to the motor of this girl slavishly in thrall to chaos, dysfunction, irredeemable failure; those exotic things in her privileged circles. Of course, she’s trying to hurt the megalomaniac father, she wants to destroy him. But his pedigree is her birthmark.
She is what she is
.

Digging into Kelly, into the fertile scarlet grove of this archetypal blonde
shiksa
, Lamm became one of
them
. One of the cumstruck admirers sending her chocolates on Valentine’s Day that she threw unopened into the trash. Amid the groping, the sucking, the primal addiction, the sexual act devolved into a hollow glorification of her renovated body, a paean to her moans, a worship of her glistening thighs from afar – though they were inches from his lips – like she was the centrefold in the first porno magazine he ever saw, hidden in the sock drawer belonging to his class-mate Jake Steinberg’s father.

‘Why are you hiding?’ she whispered as Lamm licked the cleft of her navel, then traced her inner thighs with the distal tip of his tongue.

‘You killed someone?’

In the absence of his answer, in the exquisite imminence of her release as he found the right spot, Kelly savoured the ambiguity; that her handsome new boy from the barbeque – showered, wearing her father’s monogrammed bathrobe and nothing else – could be a dangerous fugitive. A thief or a rapist or a murderer. A stranger, but it’s your strangeness that she needs. You’re the proxy for her self-destruction.

In this gilded master bedroom, Lamm acceded to her unspoken requests, did what she wanted, what his unthinking urge wanted . . . but he wasn’t really there. Was she? Or this was
her
act, a rebellious cathartic act, yet ultimately less than real. London was Kelly’s masquerade, her transformation to escape the forces that shaped her: the years contemplating suicide in her luxurious Georgetown bedroom; the daily yearning to blow her brains out with her father’s secret gun; the orgasmic sadism in the National Guard that revived her innermost will to live. Returned from suicide’s brink, Kelly’s recovery was a metamorphosis in reverse, like she’d gone to bed a giant cockroach and woken up a princess.

Yet beneath her skin, nothing had changed. You are what you are.

Their first afternoon together. Her bedroom the same as usual. Prada jeans splayed on the carpet, the plasma TV showing a BBC documentary about the chameleons of Madagascar. On the bedside table, unsnorted powder shook to the recoil off his thrusts.

‘You don’t want any? It’s fun.’

She cut a line on the chrome coffee table.

‘No. I already can’t sleep.’

Lamm answered from the kitchen. She had offered him lunch. The refrigerator a chrome behemoth suited to the galley of a five-star ocean liner. Inside was a thousand quid worth of food: salmon steaks, oysters, cartons of marinated tomatoes, olives, artichokes, peppers, dolmades, mushrooms. The next shelf down: capers, preserved lemons at seven pounds a pot, baguettes, focaccias, linseed rye, three bowls of gnocchi beneath plastic wrap. Dom Pérignon, Château d’Yquem, chardonnay, three six-packs of Belgian beer. And American food too: hot dogs, coleslaw, chilli con carné, cooked fries.

‘Look at this! Is Louis the Fourteenth coming for dinner?’

A £20 note stuck up her right nostril, Kelly’s voice was ridiculously nasal.

‘Maybe. I don’t know him. The maid brought that stuff today. Eat what you want.’

Lamm opened the freezer. Among the vodka and watermelon sorbet, there was Kelly’s sustenance. Eight boxes of Weight Watchers microwave pizza.

Lamm hadn’t felt so hungry since the nightmare night of Malik’s death. He sliced a baguette the length of his forearm, cramming its soft trunk with mushrooms, sundried tomatoes, zucchini, pickles, a spread of seeded mustard. He took a beer from the cooler, the same type of bottle that he’d smashed on the teenager’s skull. Lamm replaced it and grabbed a Pilsner instead.

‘This is
good
.’ Kelly’s ecstatic exhalation. She knelt by the Philippe Starck coffee table, snorting powder from a groove probably designed for that purpose.

‘When did you get into that stuff?’

Fascinating, these pricey powders. He’d seen cocaine in Lagaya’s brothel, but never indulged. He was an athlete then; one snort and he’d have failed the urine test. A lot of good the caution did him.

‘Oh, when I was, maybe, sixteen. Nothing better to do in DC. I stopped for six months while I was in the National Guard. Then a sergeant got back from destroying plantations in Columbia, and he had
bags
of the stuff. Got me hooked again.’

From her expensively tattered handbag, Kelly removed a credit card. A Visa of some ultra-exclusive mineral: diamond, platinum, double-diamond double-platinum. The card announced:
sell this person whatever the hell they want
. She cut a dot of powder with the Visa’s edge, making two lines the length of a matchstick. The remnant she scooped onto a moist fingertip and speckled on her gums.

‘My last week in the Guard, the sergeant threw a party at a hotel room in Bethesda. He blew some coke up my ass with a straw. It is
the
most amazing high.’

Kelly unrolled the £20 note, wiping her nose for leftovers.

‘How about turning down the TV, Mr Mystery? Let’s talk.’

Afterwards, they lay on the four-poster bed. Upon the mantelpiece, Senator Wesson smiled like a Halloween pumpkin.

‘Yes, he’s my father. Don’t give me a fucking sermon about Iraq. Back home, I get one, like, every time I go
anywhere
.’

Lamm blinked. His own father was floating above the bed. Face red, moustache quivering. Again wearing the salmonpink tennis shirt, white shorts, white sneakers, brandishing a tennis racquet with the Star of David stencilled on its strings.

‘Max, you follow this
meshuggeneh
to her apartment. You risk
everything
! What’s worse, she’s the daughter of Richard Wesson! The Klan’s bosom buddy, the next Republican arsehole president! You’re the
Jew
who’s fucking Richard Wesson’s crazy daughter in his own bedroom! If the Muslims don’t murder you, the CIA will! And you didn’t tell her that you’re Jewish, I’ll bet she’s a closet anti-Semite like her old man!’

The indelible need for a ritual. For ‘
closure
’; the word beloved by TV anchormen when they report national tragedies. Lamm couldn’t ignore Malik Massawi’s spectre in the newspapers, on the radio, in Hyde Park’s shadows and shimmering back of his eyelids when he tried in vain to sleep.

The indispensible need to repent.
That’s
what keeps you awake, that summons your living Father’s ghost. Repent to whom? Yourself? The disorder, degeneration, delirium essential to a nervous breakdown; it drove through the weedy entrance to Lamm’s memory and neglected to shut the gate. His mad yearning to atone for a murderous misdeed, to satisfy the strange outpouring of guilt that, millennia by millennia, has fuelled the confessional fire at the crux of the great religions. Contrary to the newspapers, you’re no psychopath. But somehow you
need
to say sorry, to cleanse yourself. Your conscience draws you to God. Your conscience is God?

Tomorrow morning – a Saturday – you will go to that synagogue on Great Cumberland Street
.

For the dead boy, you’ll recite
kaddish
. The ancient Jewish prayer for the dead. Is it acceptable to say
kaddish
for a Muslim? Don’t tell the rabbi.

The Western Marble Arch synagogue. Probably the capital’s most distinguished congregation, with its mumbling rows of judges, QCs, assorted medical specialists, prominent businessmen and their children studying for their parents’ professions. Men on the ground floor, women up top. The regular pulpit of the Chief Rabbi, Baron Jonathan Sacks, who earlier that week had co-authored the multifaith condemnation against the Camden Hate Killer. On the bus, Lamm had often passed that grand temple guarded by two Israeli security men at the door. But he’d never gone inside.

During his schooldays at Mount Scopus Memorial College, Lamm wasn’t particularly observant. Nor were his classmates, except the Religious Zionist kids who wore knitted yarmulkes, scored the best grades and on Friday nights drank enough kosher wine to fell the Pharaoh’s most fearsome slavedriver. After seven years of Hebrew classes, Lamm knew four words (apart from the mandatory blessings).
Ken
,
lo
,
kelev
,
kisev
. Yes, no, dog, money. Four words in a peerlessly ancient language that sounds like clearing your throat. The Hebrew teachers were young Israeli women just out of National Service. Tough leatherfaced
sabras
who could dispatch you with their bare hands. At this Jewish school, like most of the others, synagogue was primarily a social event. Every Saturday morning, two hours of gossiping, making faces at the girls upstairs, or sticking witty notes – e.g.
I EAT POO
– on the back of the boy in front of you.

Confused, contrary Lamm! Suddenly he felt this unfamiliar urge:
go to the synagogue this Saturday
. Visit synagogue to say the memorial
kaddish
prayer, and not for your late grandmother Alma Lippmann who scented your childhood with baked
rougelach
, not for great-uncle Harry who died from a botched triple-bypass on the operating table, but for the Pakistani teenager that you dispatched with an empty beer bottle.

Lamm’s Day of Atonement had arrived six months early, although he had never really observed Yom Kippur. That one day a year when nearly all Jewish families go to synagogue, even the irreligious ones. The day the synagogue seats are reconfigured to accommodate the High Holidays crowds. When most Jews neither eat nor drink for twenty-five hours, but
schmooze
when they should be praying, then during the closing minutes of the final
ne’ila
service they repent for another year of pointlessly arguing with their children/spouses/parents/siblings, of giving too little to charity, of seldom visiting great-uncle Eugene at the nursing home, of anonymously driving away from the parked Saab they reversed into, of sometimes being selfish, rancorous, mendacious, spiteful, untrustworthy . . . Together, the Jews repent for a year of being a human being. Then within a day, sometimes an hour if the family starts arguing at the dinner table, most everybody gets back to the morally imperfect zigzag of day-to-day life. Every Jew makes mistakes, but not like Max Lamm.

And if you don’t visit the synagogue to repent for Malik’s death? A lightning bolt will strike you down? Spectres of guilt will invade your dreams, as Jacob saw angels ascend his ladder while he slept upon a rock at Mount Moriah? Will you see portents of your destruction, as did the Pharaoh, who dreamt of the seven lean cows that rose from the river and devoured seven fat cows, and seven withered ears of grain that devoured seven fat ears? Tired, tortured Lamm! The thoughts of divine retribution, of a worse catastrophe inflamed by his guilt, were, of course, what the vehement opponent of religious atonement – communist, Satanist, atheist – would dismiss as pious paranoia, mumbo jumbo, a fairytale of self-doubt.

But Lamm had already decided: tomorrow morning, you will visit the synagogue to recite
kaddish
for Malik Massawi. Might this prayer of repentance offer intangible peace? You’ll be doing
something
. You can’t visit the boy’s family to apologize for killing their son. You can’t bring him back. So you
will
recite the Jewish prayer for the dead, the ancient prayer that even the don’t-give-a-fuck-about-being-Jewish Jews, the trendy young ones contemptuous of their heritage,
still
mumble over the death of a loved one. Malik wasn’t Jewish, but
you killed him
. That boy was the future, now he’s a slab of cold flesh devoid of anything but the past.

All along Great Cumberland Street, Lamm was haunted by the ghosts of why. His proximity to a synagogue so unnerving. He’d evaded Jewish life, swathed in his repellent of one part cynicism, three parts disgrace. Now, a failure, he was
voluntarily
visiting a congregation. Not being bornagain, not a Jewish version of Bob Dylan’s
meshuggeneh
conversion to Christianity when he saw a cross glistening in the crowd at a rock arena. Lamm was attending a
minyan
of ten Jewish men, simply to atone. He’d long thought himself too smart for rituals, traditions, ancient law, ‘spirituality’. And where’s being so clever got you? Ten thousand pounds on your head. A grease trap for a home.