Seventy-Two Virgins (17 page)

Soon the blood started to dry between his toes. Protective calluses formed. The soi-disant vice-captain of the school water polo team finally began to show some of the athleticism one might expect. He even started to look quite authentic, in his dish-dash and turban, and somewhat against their better judgement Haroun and Habib decided it was time to mount an operation. Dean would now prove his worth by striking a blow against the Western society he claimed to reject. The blow was to be all the more significant for being simultaneously vicious and pointless.

It was at a Chaikhana in the Panjshir valley that they came across their target. They were sitting at breakfast, Dean morosely drinking what he took to be fermented asses’ milk, the wolves wolfing their nan, when they heard a voice on the stair. It was a high, camp, Oxonian voice, of a kind Dean had heard most often on TV in the mouths of characters who were meant to be absurd.

‘I’ve got to go, darling, because I’ve just got to have breakfast and then go off and look at the Buddhas. Love you too. Big kiss.
Mwah mwah.’

First down the stairs came a pair of sandals so evidently travel-worn that one imagined they must be softer than the inner thigh of the sultan’s favourite houri. Next were the infinitely fashionable baggy Afghan trousers and the Afghan waistcoat and then the long skinny brown arms decorated at the wrist with those epicene string bracelets affected by Prince William; and then six-foot, curly-haired Jamie Davenport emerged and embraced the whitewashed breakfast room with his radiant smile.

Not since the days of Eric Newby had a professional travel writer been through these parts, and come up with so much that was hilarious, fascinating, warm, witty and wise. At the age of twenty-three Davenport had dazzled London with his tale of escape from a shotgun marriage in the Khyber Pass, entitled ‘A quick poke in the Hindu Bush’. Three years later ‘Alph — the search for Kubla’s Sacred River’ had won just about every gong going. Now he was back on the ancient literary trail, in search of the usual farrago of wily Pathans and almond-eyed beauties with lotus-stud noses and peach-like bottoms and truculent, jezzail-wielding tribesmen who move, in the space of five pages, from desiring to cut your throat to desiring you to marry their sisters.

Wherever he went, his aerial was tuned for anything usable: snatches of sufi mumbo-jumbo, religious syncretism, gobbets of recondite fact, and if all else failed there were the charming mis-spellings of the menus. When he came down to breakfast, he was ready for anecdote, colour, quotes, personalities. What he found was Haroun, Habib and Dean, all in a pretty foul mood.

Dean was about to croak a greeting when Haroun kicked him under the table.

‘But how,’ asked Dean, when the team had assembled outside, ‘and, you know, why?’

He stared into the fathomless brown eyes of the Islamofascists.

‘He is a foreign pig,’ said Haroun.

‘He is part of the infidel desecration of this country,’ said Habib.

‘He is a Zionist pig,’ said Haroun. The last was especially unfair, since Jamie Davenport’s sympathies were very much in the opposite direction. Indeed, he had been known to attend parties with a little Arab tea towel at his throat.

‘All right, all right,’ said Dean. ‘But how am I meant to do it?’ In their hearts, the two Arabs were hoping he might be talked into the suicide option. Go off into the hot white noonday with the other irritating Englishman, take him to some deserted wadi, pull the ripcord and boom.

However, they doubted his competence, and whatever they said about sherbet and sloe-eyed virgins, they doubted his appetite for the job. So half an hour later Jamie Davenport found himself being driven in a Daewoo pick-up by two effusive Arabs, who swore they knew the whereabouts of a lost Buddha, and a seeming deaf-mute whose ethnic origins were not at all obvious.

‘Look, is it much further?’ he asked, after Dean had driven them erratically into the desert for several miles.

‘Just five minutes, five minutes,’ said Haroun.

‘And did you say that this Buddha had Hellenistic influences?’

‘Assuredly it is most Hellenistic.’

‘Really? Does it have curly hair?’

Haroun appeared scandalized by the question. ‘It is as curly as mine. Of course it is curly.’

Jamie Davenport settled back in his seat for a second. A syncretic Buddha. Good. Might be worth a couple of paragraphs, especially if he could contrive some kind of colourful incident or exchange with his guides.

‘And you are sure it is syncretic?’ he said absently.

‘It is profoundly syncretic,’ said Habib.

Dean was rehearsing his lines as he drove. In fact he had decided on only one line, the better to conceal his English voice. At a signal from Haroun and Habib he would stop. While the Englishman got out, he would take the automatic from the glove compartment. They would all four walk a little way. Then, when it was obvious that there was no Buddha, he would pull the automatic out, force the man of letters to his knees, hands behind back, head forward in the traditional position of execution, and he would say, with all due fanaticism, ‘Die, foreign dog!’

Or should that be ‘pig’? He was trying the words to himself, hunched over the steering wheel and moving his lips, when he saw an obstruction in the road. In fact, there were several obstructions, a row of boulders, each bigger than a melon.

After that things happened very fast.

Haroun and Habib screamed at him to reverse. Just as Dean was selecting the gear, a hairy face protruded itself through the driver’s window, with dentition that was poor even by English standards, and an AK 47 was jammed beneath his jaw. Fifteen minutes later the team — Haroun, Habib, Dean — were standing by the side of the road. All three appeared to have been rolled in the dust like gingerbread men rolled in flour. They were minus their wallets, their mobiles, their car, and in Habib’s case a tooth and a small amount of blood. They were also minus their shoes and their intended assassinee.

At one point during the exchanges, when Habib and Haroun had failed to persuade the badmashes to let them be, Dean had yelled at the robbers: “Ere, mush, what’s the matter with yow? Don’t you know we wuz going to kill him anyway?’

After that Jamie Davenport the explorer was driven away by his new proprietors, his eyes wide with terror and his wits so scattered that he believed he had made an important discovery. Never mind the lost descendants of Alexander’s hoplites. Here was a tribesman in the Panjshir valley who spoke with a strong Black Country accent. It was his most syncretic adventure for years.

Which wasn’t exactly the opinion of Haroun and Habib. Never the jolliest pair, their eyes had bored into Dean, lacquered black and glittery with hatred.

So now, in the gloom of the back of the ambulance, Jones the Bomb did his usual trick. He took Dean’s side. Over the recumbent form of the leaking Eric Onyeama, he put his hand on Dean’s shoulder. He looked at him sympathetically. He gave him a kind of Vulcan nerve pinch.

‘Come on, Dean, my son,’ he said. ‘We all need you. By tonight you will be world famous, and your name will be on every TV station and every newspaper on earth. We are all depending on you, and we cannot do it without you.

‘O Lions of Islam,’ he continued, addressing them all in a sacerdotal voice, ‘may our appointed time be today and every day in the prayer niches of the exalted one, so that we may align our feet before Allah.’

We all have in our lives someone who controls our emotional thermostat. There is always someone whose function is to supply the pipette drops of praise, the intermittent goo’ boy choc drops of external affirmation that get us through the day. The story of our lives is essentially the rotation of that person’s identity: mother, father, teacher, girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse and so on. Dean’s emotional thermostat was controlled by Jones, and had been ever since his arrival at the Islamic Welfare Centre.

‘Yeah, man,’ he said now, nodding. ‘Come on then. Let’s do it to it.’

He began again with the gear.

Roger Barlow was just about to shut the door of his office, and report the ambulance, when the phone started ringing. He hesitated. He ought to go straight down to the Pass Office, and get the police, but what if it was Felix Thomson? It was.

He sounded happy. ‘Just thought I’d let you know that I’ve looked at the newslist.’

‘Oh yes.’ Barlow tried to inject a note of exquisite detachment into his voice, as though discussing the future of NATO.

‘And there is a story about you listed at number 23.’

‘Number 23?’

‘Yes, it means, roughly speaking that there are twenty-two more important stories today, in the view of the news editor, many of them to do with the current festivities.’

Roger laughed, in what he hoped was a dry, amused chuckle. ‘And, er, what does it say?’

‘It just says, 23: Roger Barlow MP shocker.’

‘Shocker?’ said Barlow. It sounded like a frivolous media expression, that might be attached to a story of no real importance. ‘Does that mean … .

‘Yeah,’ said Felix Thomson. ‘Or it could mean, you know, a shocker.’

In a transport of shame, Barlow thanked his journalistic contact, and ended the connection. He was about to dial security when the phone rang again.

It was Debbie from the
Daily Mirror.

The ambulance would have to wait a tick.

‘This is doing my head in,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. ‘We’ve got footage of the flaming thing going up Whitehall, and we’ve got two cameras at the top end of Whitehall and they haven’t seen it. This’ll teach us to rely on those blasted CCTV things. It’s just disappeared.’

‘That sucker must have turned off somewhere,’ said Bluett. He twizzled the map around to face him, spreading his hairy palm across it and pointing. ‘It could have gone here, King Charles Street.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Purnell gloomily. ‘That runs between the Foreign Office and the Treasury.’

‘Or here. This little street called Downing Street?’

Purnell ground his teeth. ‘You can’t get in there,’ he said.

‘Commissioner Purnell,’ said Bluett, ‘we’re running out of time here. We’ve got twenty minutes before the speech begins, and I really don’t want to interrupt the President during his speech.’

‘I know,’ said Purnell. ‘But I’m the one who wants to pull the plug on it all now.’

‘Hey man!’ said Bluett, suddenly jovial and pulling out a cigar. ‘We’ll find it!’ He clapped Purnell on the shoulder.

In the car park of Norman Shaw North the two policemen drifted closer to the mysterious vehicle.

Cameron heard the ambulances and the police cars but thought nothing of them. To anyone who lived in London a yowling police car was as banal as a bus. Perhaps her eyes were sensitized to beauty, but the capital did seem lovely today: the pattern of the sun on the river, like molten chicken wire, the whole thing a Monet of fluttering flags and snatches of cloud. There were Boadicea and her daughters, arms flung back in brazen-breasted defiance, shortly before they were crucified and flayed by the imperial power. Adam would know the history. He would have some mordant point to make. That was what she liked about him.

Ever since she had been in high school Cameron had a deep and sexist reverence for men who really knew stuff. It amazed her sometimes how little appearances mattered. He could be bald, he could be spindly or sweaty or tubby, but if that man’s disquisition had enough interest, fluency and authority, it would speak directly to her groin. And Adam had the additional merit of good looks.

Such had been her wine-flown feelings yesterday in the Ogeublick restaurant, Brussels. There had been four of them: she, Adam and some kind of rumpled tobacco-wreathed Englishman who gave instruction in mediaeval something at a seminary in Rome, and his wife, who looked like the kind of woman who owns fifteen cats. The waiters finally removed the big glass bowl of chocolate mousse (licked out, in a hardcore performance, by the don’s wife), and as they pompously swirled their calvados and tapped off fat turds of cigar ash, Adam Swallow and the dirty don started to rap about Britain and America.

The more they talked, the more keenly she desired to sit in Adam’s lap. Their theme was not just that the special relationship was rubbish, an ignis fatuus, an unreciprocated teenage crush for America on the part of the British foreign policy establishment: that was taken for granted. The thought they developed by means of antiphonal examples was that at several key junctures in the twentieth century the Americans had actively sought to demolish the Empire and do down the British.

Adam: ‘Look at what they did in the 1920s …’

The don: ‘Stinging us for debt repayments …’

Adam: ‘Making us reduce the Imperial fleet …’

The don: ‘Swiping the Virgin Islands …’

Adam: ‘. . . Think of Joe Kennedy during the war.’

The don: ‘What a louse…’

Adam: ‘Telling Roosevelt the Germans would win …’

The don: ‘Irish bootlegger …’

Adam: ‘And what about poor old Halifax in New York in 1940?’

The don: ‘Pelted with eggs …’

Adam: ‘To say nothing of Suez …’

The don: ‘Leaving us twisting in the wind …’

Adam: ‘Gangbanging the pound …’

The don: ‘They still think they went to war to save Europe!’

Adam: ‘. . . Total balls!’

The don: ‘When the truth is that Hitler declared war on America!’

Adam: ‘They’d have stayed out if they could …’

Cameron knew there was an answer to this, a simple answer, but the nuisance of it was that she couldn’t remember and she didn’t really care. Invisibly as she stared at the interesting veins in Professor Swallow’s hands, and that place in his neck where the pulse was beating, just above the clavicle, her endocrine system was re-ordering her loyalties and her geo-political assumptions.

‘And now we just do whatever they tell us,’ said the dirty don, and Cameron noticed that although the academic’s cheeks were ruby coloured, the tip of his nose had become oddly white and protuberant. It was astonishing how much he could remember, but perhaps that was the alcohol, too. Perhaps each fact was pickled and preserved in the runnels of his cerebrum.