Still, among those apartment windows, Lamm expected – hoped! – to see the silhouette of a face contorted in horror. Call 911! A man’s drowning! Screams, shrieks, sirens. Then strong hands yanking him to safety; he’d be waterlogged, hypoxic, hypothermic yet breathing. The trouble was, in their living rooms Lamm’s potential saviours couldn’t hear the gurgled cries of a drowning delinquent above Tom Brokaw’s good-gollys blaring from twenty TVs on the same floor. The night owls were too engrossed by the televised shocking and awing of Baghdad, too hypnotized by the green night-vision bombardment of that miserable bulls-eye on the Tigris, to hear Max Lamm screaming through a mouthful of dirty water.

  Do you really want to die?

  The current tugged him down – so cold! – as toxic mud crumbled underfoot. Lamm was choking, drowning, swept by the backwash of a trash barge chugging two hundred metres downriver. Go with it. The end. Spalding Gray did. January 2004: Acclaimed writer, actor Spalding Gray commits suicide by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. His corpse drifted undiscovered for two months. A substantial, respectful obituary in the New York Times. In the same body of water, the same time of year. The cruel difference, Lamm instantly recognized, being that until his fatal depression, Spalding Gray was a success. Whereas in a town like New York, the watery demise of a scandalous whoremonger like yourself – a fallen idol known best for your precocious depravity, whose lasting legacy is your disservice to the Jewish people, the war on drugs, American tennis and sportsmanship in general – is unlikely to inspire a dignified obit like Spalding Gray’s.

  Another reason for killing yourself!

  Or a reason against it?

  Despite the unchallengeable reasons – the necessity! – for sinking, for swallowing putrid water, for letting go, for letting it happen, Lamm’s hands waved above the surface. Should’ve tied them behind your back. Worse, when his head bobbed up a peculiar sound hollered from his lips. A gargle and a scream, unmistakably opposed to his deathly intentions.

  Arghhhhh! He-e-lp!

  Now somebody else – the sly agent of self-preservation buried within us, appointed to our lives like a judge – was controlling Lamm’s limbs the way a hijacker commandeers an aircraft. Unlike the suicidal Saudis responsible for the hole in the skyline nearby, Lamm’s hijacker prevented the untimely demise. His eyes floated ahead, a ghostly buoy of awareness, and he watched himself screaming, fighting the current, sucking air against the frigid swell. What he could do to stay alive.

  Disgraced, decrepit Lamm! How infuriating that liberation in death might be thwarted by some natural impulse, or by fear, or his stubborn stupid attachment to life. But he wasn’t surprised. Like Kelly Wesson that week in her Georgetown mansion, staring at Daddy’s gun every afternoon yet unable to swallow the barrel and pull her trigger finger, the suicidal resolve was less than concrete.

  Is this your survival instinct?

  Is it God?

  Blurry figures approached on the Battery Park boardwalk.

  ‘He’s drowning!’

  Shouts, screams, splashes. Amid the glowing apartment blocks, had a silhouette turned off the TV, heard Lamm’s cries and called 911? Or a Tribeca yuppie, walking his labradoodle after a late night cooking spreadsheets at Morgan Stanley, had noticed the young outcast drowning a hundred yards off the Battery Park boardwalk? You should’ve jumped off a thirty-storey ledge. Swan-dived from the deck of the New York Times tower. Intentional Death of an Anarchist.

  But you want to be rescued.

  Putrid mud squashed underfoot, Lamm’s head submerged in the East River’s chilled thickshake of seawater, stormwater, wastewater and the bubbles of carbon dioxide exiting his blue lips.

  It’s not too late. Die.

  Fragments of shouts piercing the deadly swell. But whoever it was, they took too long and Lamm kept drowning, perhaps dead already by a coroner’s criteria. Down, down, down beneath the warm clear waves that stung his fifteen-year-old nostrils when the swell pitched him into the seabed on Jan Juc beach. His mother on the hot dunes, watching over the rim of a Harper’s Bazaar, upon her beach towel the wet trove of cockles that he’d combed up from the foam. Deeper, further he’d swim for shells, feeling his creased fingertips along the Bass Strait sandbank, never afraid of biting crabs nor poisonous jellyfish, nor the waves breaking thunderously above, because the beach was a friendly place. His place, where the Southern Ocean’s translucent wash swept him to shore. Back to his mother, where she sunbaked under the good umbrella she reserved for vacations. Among the phantoms of long-gone summer days, Lamm was dying in Manhattan’s moat, cold and grey as a morgue.

  He drowned until he was bitten. Not by the small gummy sharks that occasionally spooked Jan Juc’s swimmers, nor an errant sea lion if a school of mullet swam uncommonly close to shore. In the East River, it was a fish of five fingers, painfully strong, that chomped his shoulders and pulled him up. Back to the pontoon on the Battery Park foreshore. Lamm’s lungs, full of black muck, recoiled as hands compressed his chest.

  ‘Can you hear me? Breathe!’

  An excruciating force crushing his sternum. Lips – a man’s lips – sealing his own. Musty air down his throat.

  ‘Two . . . four . . . six . . . eight.’

  The weight compressing Lamm’s chest. Cold goo hurtling up his trachea. An unendurable pain in his skull.

  ‘Can you hear me? Wake up!’

  Blackness.

  The ambulance roof. Fluorescent tubes buzzing on, off, on. White glare piercing his hypoxic skull. The pain in Lamm’s temples! A serrated throb slightly above his ear, at the coronal suture where the frontal and parietal bones fuse. The exact spot where, two years later in London, a beer bottle smashed into a Pakistani teenager’s skull.

  Hot jagged needles replaced the follicles on Lamm’s scalp. A bright white room. Voices, the precise monotone of professional agreement. ‘Maintain intubated oxygen . . . note that severe laryngospasm has occurred . . .’ Electronic beeping, a penlight in his pupils, the vital slipperiness of latex fingers invading his throat.

  Four days in the coma.

  Breakdown.

  SEVEN

  Endgame. In New York, Lamm threw himself beneath disorder’s brakeless train and got dismembered on the tracks. He’d be sodden buried bones, weren’t it for a beefcake of a bonds trader with a blonde fashion publicist of a wife, a young Mr and Ms Manhattan, who at 3 a.m. were strolling back to their love nest loft on the Battery Park boardwalk.

  The hero – his name was Scott Greer, fresh at Goldman Sachs via Stanford Business School – leapt into the river and freestyled three hundred yards to the drowning stranger. Leapt into the newspapers too; Scott Greer, first the New York Post’s man of the week, then interviewed by Barbara Walters under her sugary lights. Tell me Scott, what does it feel like to be a hero? Are you bothered that you saved a person like Max Lamm? Later, Greer reappeared on the Post’s front page when he received a bravery award from the mayor.

  Not to say that Scott Greer, the gallant dreamboat bearing striking resemblance to a young Jimmy Stewart, didn’t deserve the adulation. He was New York’s newest public hero, whose courage was refreshingly unrelated to the twin towers. The rookie stockbroker who lunged fully clothed into a dark, dangerous current to save a stranger’s life. And how ironic, how Kafkaesque – as noted by fossilized columnists in the New York Times magazine, by Hitchens bleary-eyed on the talk show circuit and Larry King straight down the barrel – that Greer, a genuine hero, had rescued a genuine disgrace.

  Scott Greer, thirty-four – brains and brawn who served as a young Marine in Kosovo, who wore a flagpin on his lapel, who had, according to rumour, already been approached by aides to Mayor Giuliani – had rescued from the East River the infamous former tennis champ whose primary anaesthetic was the bottle and the cock. The disgraced degenerate who, seven months earlier, had received his own half-page in the New York Post sports section for behaviour that, were his punishment meted out by the US Marine Corps and not the Association of Tennis Professionals, would have seen him court-martialled and sentenced to ten years of peeling potatoes in a Navy brig. Possession of illegal narcotics. Solicitation of illegal prostitution. The secretly filmed sex tape that, a week after Lamm’s scandal broke, had already logged 805, 000 plays on www.pornotube.com and had since hit three million. You’re ejaculating on her tits 115, 000 times a day; no wonder you feel tired. Lamm remained in fourth place on the website’s ‘most viewed’ list:

  1. Horny teen lesbians

  2. Hot pornstar fuck

  3. Amateur anal surprise

  4. Max Lamm sex tape

  5. Swedish shower blowjob

  How many millions of fifteen-year-old boys had stared gape-mouthed at Lamm groaning atop that glistening Salvodorian sculpture of ideal female proportions, at his tongue wrapped lasciviously around her insides like the serpent guarding Eve’s apple, and gasped not merely at the masturbatory impulse but the insurmountable pleasures of adulthood incarnate on their laptop screens! Lamm mirrored their adolescent desperation, sucking the call-girl dry like a desert explorer at an oasis. Not for five years, since Lewinsky’s testimony to the grand jury, had the quality newspapers reported such useful material for truck drivers alone in the restroom. She was hypnotic, this hourglass of a girl pirouetting upon Lamm’s cock; slow, wet, engrossing. Her golden body so narrow, she’d break in two if he went any harder. Of course, he never knew he was being filmed.

  It often takes a lifetime to become famous through the honourable means – such as painting great paintings, writing literature worth reading, doing innovative science or charitable public works – but three days of a sex scandal makes you better known than most Nobel laureates put together. Thirty years henceforth Lamm would be remembered, at least by tennis aficionados and men in raincoats. Already, millions of internet voyeurs had enjoyed his thirst for that graceful Salvadorian girl; they savoured his desperation, the moist catharsis he pursued unapologetically. Onscreen, Lamm’s obvious drive for fucking was temporarily quenched by this Latino whose beauty far exceeded the requirements of her profession, unforgettable for her green eyes and a lilting voice unsuited to the sterility of the Queen’s English yet exercising otherworldly power when she cooed in Spanish mid-blowjob.

  The disgrace burnt mercilessly, rendering Lamm a charred shell long after his heart and balls had melted in the witch hunt’s flames. To the endangered species of upstanding American unswayed by perky young flesh, he was irredeemably abhorrent. Max Lamm, the degenerate slavemaster to a penniless Salvadorian girl, patron to an exploitative pimp, a precociously depraved disappointment who, on the popular online video, spent thirteen mesmerising minutes massaging his prick between her greased breasts.

  Lamm’s loudest critics – the right-wing radio Rottweilers led by Rush Limbaugh and the Norman Rockwell revivalists at the American Family Association – loved tying him to a stake, a quintessentially American stake usually reserved for important men (Bill Clinton, Gary Condit, Gary Hart), then burning him alive on Fox News. Lamm was condemned with editorial vehemence usually reserved for OJ Simpson, the Taliban and the French.

  Beneath Hyde Park, Lamm was interred in charcoal and sausage fat, but, he recognized, the burying alive had commenced the year before. In Brooklyn, when the dirt clods were shovelled in by his tormenters. The vicious ringleaders: his conniving doubles partner, Grey Pierce III. His mercenary turncoat of a coach, Sid Einfeld. And once the scandal broke, the popular columnist Anna Cunningham, a rakish blonde Medusa known for her Prada knee-boots and an ubermenschen profile that would’ve made the womanizer Goebbels blush. She’d most recently made news by advocating an electric fence and moat along the Mexican–American border. In a syndicated tirade published by the Wall Street Journal, she compared Max Lamm’s sexual depravity to Clinton’s and his vegetarianism to Hitler’s, then she strung him up, condemned his oft-downloaded crimes against womankind, sportsmanship, Reagan’s legacy and civilization in general, and cut off his fists and balls with the blunt scalpel named family values. She left Lamm hanging there, a gruesome example to the oversexed Hollywood liberals, so he’d bleed to death from his wrists and amputated dick.

  Hopeless, anchorless Lamm! He hadn’t seen enough? What Hyde Park’s underworld might teach him, he didn’t want! He’d suffered the classic creative triptych of depression, alcoholism, attempted suicide. The three-pronged affliction of genius endured by Goya, Van Gogh, Pollock, Francis Bacon, Rothko . . . yet what masterpieces had Lamm painted? He was nothing. Hadn’t touched a brush in seven months. The great artists suffered for their art; Lamm’s art was to suffer. Disgrace, despair, near-death, banishment . . . that was supposed to lead up the frayed rope ladder of self-improvement, resilience, artistic inspiration . . . not to this! Not Lamm’s newest worst incarnation: murderer. More than murderer: hate killer, lucrative bounty, white-supremacist bogeyman, psychopathic death-mask.

  New York was enough!

  Underground, he turned over in his jacket.

  Sleep! Please!

  Lamm smelt the beer staining his sleeve. Exhibit A: a trace of the murder weapon.

  After nightfall, the park’s bushes again became living Rorschach blots. Lamm crawled through the scrub without his route muddied by the voices, hallucinations and tremors of sleeplessness. Nevertheless, when he looked into the moonlight’s glint or a streetlight’s glare, Lamm saw Mr Lewski’s ghost rematerialize. A hallucination? A warning of worse to come? He remembered the CCTV cameras, so he wore his hood as the hoodlums do. Pulled over his forehead, a phantom. One of millions.

  Lamm felt dizzy from hunger. At the 24-7 convenience store on Great Cumberland Place, he paid £16.65 for three microwaved pumpkin pies, two litres of water, three bananas, two flapjacks, four chocolate bars, a keyring flashlight, a few razors, a toothbrush, toothpaste, batteries, and a £3 Chinese pocket radio imported from a bargain-basement cornucopia by the Yangtze . . . all purchased without a credit card, from his last £50 cash, thereby evading another electronic eye. A fast efficient spree until Lamm glanced at the magazine rack, at the latest edition of the Evening Standard.

  HATE MURDER TRIGGERS EAST

  LONDON RACE RIOT

  A remarkable headline. A headline that, to Lamm, was no less stunning than the tasers the police used to electrocute the rioters. Beneath the sickening scarlet letters was an unforgettable triptych of three images: a Pakistani grocery engulfed by an arsonist’s flames, seven hundred Muslims rallying outside their MP’s office, and a bystander’s cameraphone photograph of Malik Massawi collapsed on the Camden pavement while the paramedics took his pulse. His body draped in a grey ambulance blanket – a child’s blanket, too short for the six foot three inches of this lanky teenage goalie – that left his feet sticking out one end. The boy’s white Nike trainers pointing skywards.

  Those sneakers spoke to Lamm:

  I should be playing football with my friends.

  In a photo on page two, the bus shelter was examined by two forensic investigators wearing white plastic jumpsuits, collecting glass fragments, traces of blood, saliva, hairs. The murderer’s genetic cipher was, perhaps, encoiled within a stray strand’s innumerable double helixes.

  If these people only knew a little about the culprit! That unsensationally, he wasn’t an Islamist fanatic deliberately catalysing ethnic discord, nor a bottle-wielding waxwork of Oswald Mosely the aristocratic pre-war fascist. Malik Massawi’s killer was merely an exiled Jewish failure pickled in limestone and barbeque grease. A squandered sporting prodigy, wasted scholarly talent, unfulfilled painter, libidinous disgrace, whose insatiable thirst for transgression (until yesterday the central force of his being) had suddenly dissolved like sugar cubes in boiling water.

  Lamm stood motionless, staring at the front page. The photos – especially Malik’s basketball boots protruding from the body bag – were unforgettably real. Obscenely real. Wait until they identify you, until they know that you’re a Jew. You’ll be on the same accursed page of Jewish infamy as Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin and that nutcase Goldstein who attacked the Hebron mosque with a machine gun.

  The microwave beeped.

  ‘Today is a bad day,’ remarked the man at the register. London’s typical convenience store attendant: a skinny moustached guy over from Bangalore to study software engineering.

  ‘The murder, the riot. It is a very bad day.’

  The microwave beeped again. The attendant’s eyebrows arched at his bewildered customer.

  ‘Sir! Your pie is ready!’

  Lamm read the front page. Couldn’t help himself. These riots he never anticipated! A colossal manhunt? The PM’s condemnation? That he expected. The vengeance of Pakistani vigilantes? Terrifying yet unsurprising. The boy was dead, so Lamm predicted his lynch mobs the way a ruined man envisages his bank balance. Of course the tabloids were incendiary. Hysterical, so dangerously sensationalist that Lamm would have agreed to whatever Faustian bargain that Murdoch as Mephistopheles might demand in exchange for averting the journalists’ hangman impulses. Give them half a chance, the redtop hacks would re-erect the Tyburn gallows, on the traffic island where two hundred years ago they stood at Marble Arch, and swing Lamm the unconvicted suspect from a noose.

  What was shocking was the burning drycleaners on Bethnal Green’s high street, the BBC van battered by fence posts, the Bangladeshi bystander crushed by a toppled barrier. The proof that what had happened had happened. The East End riots were Britain’s most destructive civil disturbance since Saturday 11 April, 1981, when Operation Swamp 81, the Metropolitan Police’s clumsy crackdown on black street-crime in Brixton, provoked the night of fiery violence indelibly associated with the hard heel of South London. Brixton had petrol bombs, fire engines trashed, more than 300 police injuries, thirty buildings burned . . . but the East End riots wrought all that and one bystander in a coma, another paralysed, East Aldgate on police lockdown and a fifteen-year-old murdered the night before. Had a morsel occupied his stomach, Lamm would’ve thrown up, right there in the 24-7 convenience store on Great Cumberland Place. Hold it in until you’ve eaten something.

 

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