I Am Max Lamm Page 2
CAMDEN HATE MURDER TRIGGERS
RACE RIOT
In the surveillance footage, a woollen cap concealed the murderer’s face. Four million CCTV cameras in Britain, four hundred thousand in London. Thirty-three glass eyes surveyed that four-hundred-metre stretch of pavement, but Max Lamm pulled down his hat! No forensics expert at New Scotland Yard, no digital-imaging supercomputer, can reconstruct a face the cameras never glimpsed. Now the hat was underwater in Camden Lock, its cotton lining stuffed with rocks. Or had a police diver recovered it?
Had Scotland Yard identified the murder weapon? The empty Heineken bottle that cracked a Pakistani teenager’s skull.
Since his metamorphosis into Britain’s most wanted new criminal, into the imagined Aryan supremacist bogeyman who, the Daily Mail reported, had already scared a third of the usual commuters off riding the N5 bus to Camden after dark, Max Lamm hadn’t slept an hour since awakening from the nightmare of reliving his life’s worst fifteen seconds. A nightmare – not merely a bad dream – because it was true. The insomnia a merciless affliction, strange after ten years of early bedtimes and 7 a.m. tennis drills, ten years of slumber assured by physical exhaustion. That physical peace was a lifetime away, as sleeplessness curdled into the pink whites of Lamm’s eyes and the quartz glaze upon his cheeks. The shock all too apparent, this mistake undoing a young man who had never been violent, who hated killing and didn’t eat meat for that reason, who had always brushed disorientated cicadas off the floodlit tennis court rather than squash the defenceless insects beneath his sneakers.
And this new catastrophe – the latest proof of Lamm’s irrepressible predilection for disaster – had hardly begun! As he recovered from his worst year, a year of unhindered disappointment, disgrace, near-death, madness, breakdown . . . again the worst had happened! And a worst far worse than any worst yet! Astonishing. That so unreasonably soon after New York, after his disintegration there, after all that had happened and just as cruelly all that hadn’t, Max Lamm was descending further into the unforeseen, into the abyss he once believed would hit a rocky floor but was proving to be bottomless.
That terrifying first hour of his terrifying new life – never had an hour seemed to him so slow, so sickeningly real – Lamm collapsed on the N5 night bus. Boarding in Camden near the murder scene, he flashed an expired ticket, huddled up back against the heating vents, and half-drunk, he tried to think things through . . . the kid was holding a knife . . . wasn’t he? . . . he tried to steal my wallet . . . didn’t he? Already Lamm’s tepid breathing, his tightened gut, the way he couldn’t dismiss the catastrophe outright, told him that yes, the worst had happened. Let me change the past! That most mundane of prayers, desired by Max Lamm as much as anyone in the world. In the furnace of the Australian summer, he used to compulsively look for dying insects – moths, bees, scarabs, ground beetles – when he walked past dry lawns. Sometimes he spat a goblet of saliva onto a beetle stranded on its back, six legs stiff in the stifling air. Refreshed, the insect would scramble to safety. On the N5 bus, Lamm remembered a beetle resurrected by his moist embrace, yet he knew that the boy was dead. It was the way his head struck the gutter; motionless within moments, every autonomic reflex, every instinct of self-preservation, swiftly dissolved by the unintentionally fantastic accuracy of your beer bottle smashing the teenager’s right temple.
Because freakishly, unintentionally, Lamm’s empty Heineken bottle struck a weak spot in Malik Massawi’s skull, where the temporal fossa borders the zygomatic arch of the cheekbone. As the culprit ran away, telling himself that the teenage mugger was only concussed and half-believing it too, inside the boy’s skull bone fragments had in fact lesioned a cerebral artery and induced a massive subarachnoid haemorrhage. As a light rain blanketed Mornington Crescent, Malik Massawi died beneath the bus shelter.
THREE
Saturday 9 April
‘Forget if the faucets are gold and fuck me.’
Her orders in the master bedroom. Don’t ask me about the bathroom fittings. Let’s do what we’re here to do. What I want you to do. So Max Lamm did, in the finest apartment he had ever visited. Fake-tanned and contorted against the bedpost, wearing a black Gucci bra and knee socks, she was Kelly Marie Wesson. If Picasso lived in the age of the Playboy channel, his prostitutes of Montmartre would have resembled her, painted as surgically enhanced marionettes instead of real women. She posed in the way that has for millennia lured men against their better judgement, ever since antiquity’s first hooker lay in reeds beside the Euphrates in 5000 BC.
But Kelly Wesson wasn’t a prostitute and her favourite new boy hadn’t paid a cent. To begin, we’ll cut to the bones of this daughter of one of the most powerful senators in Washington. Notably statuesque among Georgetown’s A-list, renowned for her wickedly suggestive smile and a sculpted peroxide bob that reminded her older admirers of Marilyn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Jackie Kennedy circa Camelot, she was unmistakably the product of a regal American upbringing.
Kelly lived on Washington’s Massachusetts Avenue, a grand leafy promenade where America’s robber-barons – the Carnegies, the Morgans, the Mellons – built their faux-Roman palaces a century ago. Overlooking the stately beeches of Rock Creek Park, a pillared Victorian mansion was the cell for her solitary confinement. Kelly’s only guest, once a fortnight, was L’Wren Jacques (real name: Lauren Johnson), an ex-Vogue stylist stuffed like a Christmas turkey with botox and collagen, who visited as a ‘fashion doctor’ for ninety bucks an hour. L’Wren secured next season’s Prada trenchcoat, got the Lagerfeld leggings soon to hit the Parisian catwalks, or snaffled the sold-out Manolo stilettos that the other blonde socialites couldn’t find, so Kelly invariably looked gorgeous in the paparazzi shots. Her sole constant accessory was enormous Dior sunglasses, inspired by Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. Essential on cloudy and clear days alike, these sunglasses hid Kelly’s eyes. Her pink, sick, bloodshot eyes, searching to satisfy the addictions.
Of course the money was her problem. Kelly Wesson was a petroleum heiress, not yet famous but known to upscale gossip columnists from Manhattan to the Beltway. Notorious as a seductress, she was renowned for the throaty laugh that aroused her father’s friends, her male friends, even her stepbrother Dennis when he wasn’t too drunk to get a boner. That femme fatale giggle, provocatively reminiscent of Lauren Bacall teasing Bogey in a smoky bar – and her firm bronzed breasts the shape of upturned cupcakes – did it to nearly every straight man that Kelly met, hardening them upon her command the way Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the dinner bell.
And the London penthouse where she entertained the fugitive Max Lamm? On Park Lane, overlooking the junction of Hyde Park at Marble Arch, its contents befitted the address. Teak floors swathed in handwoven rugs from a seventeenth-century Umbrian farmhouse, the stereo a futurist sculpture by Bang & Olufsen, the bathrooms awash in potpourri costing £8 a jar at Selfridges. A David Hockney landscape above the fireplace, in the study a Tiffany reading lamp (circa 1916), in the lounge room a baby Steinway (a hired pianist played it for dinner guests). Up on the roof, the hedge garden. It all belonged to Kelly’s father, Senator Richard Davis Wesson. A Republican power-broker in the 2004 senate, former board member of an oil multinational and current chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Kelly’s new boy admired the Jacuzzi of black marble, but she declined to run the tub. That was too risky, in case her stepsister Jacqueline returned home as they enjoyed the bubbles. Then where would he hide? The walk-in wardrobe? But, naked and wet, cupping his sodden prick, he’d drip a tell-tale trail on the carpet, just as heroic Ariadne unspooled his thread to navigate the Minotaur’s labyrinth on Crete. So it was safer not to fuck in the tub.
But in this penthouse ideally suited to their luxurious tryst, when she pulled him in that warm Saturday afternoon in April 2005, he couldn’t enjoy it. Not after he identified the inhibitory absence. Where was Kelly’s giggle? The throaty seductive giggle she was coveted for, that from Washingt
on to West London drove men nuts, that drove him nuts, that proclaimed ‘every day handsome, wealthy, clean bachelors try to pick me up. The most eligible bachelors in London try to pick me up. But mysteriously, I’ve chosen you’. Suddenly Kelly’s playfulness had disappeared; no stripteasing, no shots of blueberry vodka, no sniffs of amyl nitrate, no cocaine snorted off the Phillipe Starck coffee table, no massages slowly descending their bodies, no tequila with lemon that she devilishly squirted upon his cock, no blowjobs, no languidly eating her pussy, no fooling about in the ways she normally initiated and they mutually enjoyed. The bedroom an army barracks, Kelly spat his orders in a sterile whisper.
‘She’ll be home soon. Do it.’
So Kelly Wesson’s latest, poorest catch obsequiously slid off his jeans – black Levi’s marinated in charcoal dust, sausage fat, stale canola oil – and followed her commands. He was Max Lamm; disgraced wunderkind, forgotten sporting prodigy, exiled laughing-stock, frustrated painter, currently pursued with the a £10,000-reward posted for his arrest. A libidinous failure long ago hailed, in the September 1996 edition of the Australian Jewish News, as the Jewish world’s greatest hope for the pro tennis circuit since Aaron Krickstein, the Michigan rabbi’s grandson who made the top ten in 1990. But Max Lamm no longer resembled a tennis champ; he hadn’t since the frigid night in Manhattan, two Novembers earlier, when he was wheeled into the ICU at Beth Israel North, unconscious and hypothermic, after resolutely marching off a wharf at Battery Park.
Formerly muscular, once unmistakably an athlete, for two years he’d been a gaunt rake. The sole upshot of this metamorphosis being that new acquaintances, even those with a keen memory for public disgrace, seldom matched his lean, desolate face to the cherubic tennis ace who once answered to the name Max Lamm. His dark wiry hair, patchy stubble and broad plateau of a nose were unremarkable for a twenty-eight-year-old Jewish male. The yellow paint beneath Lamm’s fingernails – still there though he hadn’t touched a canvas in three months – were the gravestones of a talent that never bore fruit. The sensitive reddened skin encircling his nostrils – scarlet owing to a flare-up of rosacea, although for three months he’d been cold turkey – was conspicuous to nobody but a dermatologist or an observant fellow drunk. Just as subtly revealing was the slight downward elongation at the left corner of Lamm’s mouth; the classic neurological indication of a bout with Bell’s Palsy. The palsy – induced in London by a mystery virus and the drinking, back when he could at least half-finish a painting – that might return any moment.
‘You’re lucky,’ declared the neurologist at University College hospital three weeks after Lamm walked into the A & E, tipsy at 1 p.m., with half his face numb. ‘The paralysis is almost gone. In about a third of cases, it never wears off. To your dying day, you’re tipping your cup sideways so the coffee doesn’t run out your mouth.’
What was obviously unusual in Lamm’s face? The eyes. His mournful hazel eyes, bleary with insomnia and perilously indiscrete. He, unlike Kelly, hadn’t a fake tan, or whitened teeth from Washington’s priciest orthodontist, or a covergirl hairstyle to divert a stranger’s attention from that look. The tortured, condemned look that Lamm couldn’t hide. Eyes watery, jittery, bloodshot, the pupils fogged with guilt. It was me, his look confessed to anybody, anything. The giveaway glance at every passerby, at every hallucinatory policeman, at every ghost, at his reflection in a cracked mirror in a public toilet in Hyde Park. He stared at that mirror for twenty-three minutes the night it happened, incredulous that suddenly his face belonged to Britain’s newest, most despised murderer. A murderer who hated killing, who hadn’t eaten meat since the afternoon six years ago when he visited his cousin’s farm in rural Victoria and spent hours talking to the gentle cows. A real nightmare had really occurred, and Lamm’s bloodshot pupils wouldn’t stop saying so.
I did it. Something irreversible, horrific. Otherworldly yet sickeningly real. Stopping me from sleeping.
Brutal.
Unforeseen.
It’s making me look like this.
That confession alive not just in Lamm’s eyes, but in the puffy bags beneath them, in his constant checking over his shoulder, in the efflux of colour from what stubbornly remained – no matter the stubble, the barbeque grease, the scarred red nose, the numb right corner of his lips – the face of a decent-looking kid from Caulfield, the leafy Melbourne suburb where in many streets, every house has a mezuzah nailed to its front doorpost. The mezuzah – a tiny scroll of Torah scripture wrapped inside a cigar-sized cylinder – that proclaims to the passerby: this is not merely a house. It is a home. A Jewish home. So watch what you do and say.
Lamm’s fucking eyes. They hadn’t shut up in three nights since the alleged murder, and they said it was too late to fix anything. Much too late.
FOUR
Thursday 7 April
Tottenham Court Road, the morning it happened. Start at the grimy gridlocked junction at Oxford Street, arguably the sickest of central London’s arteries. Dirt, dust, refuse, rubbish flood the street like the grey clouds rain polystyrene. A wraparound billboard, the breadth of a 737’s wingspan, showcases a pale prepubescent model pouting in her Calvin Klein underwear. Opposite, the cavernous G-A-Y club at the Astoria where, a cold April night five years earlier, the deranged neo-Nazi David Copeland stalked his quarry until he planted a nail bomb in a nearby gay pub, the Admiral Duncan, killing two men and a pregnant woman.
By the early years of the new millennium, London had arisen from the operating table and its cosmetic surgery was botched. Like other financial centres, the capital got a tummy tuck, a facelift and a colostomy bag, separating the healthy flesh from the shit. A few blocks north of the crime scene, Chalk Farm’s decrepit council estates shelter hooded teenagers who aspire to the cheap martyrdom of hip-hop assassination. Ten minutes’ walk south reveals Primrose Hill’s velvety boutiques, cute coffee bars and terraces with a lap pool. This whitewashed island of affluence assured by good schools, trust funds and the institutionalized apprehension of disorder.
Now ride the N5 bus back west. Wednesday through Saturday nights, Soho’s Old Compton Street is jammed by tourists on pub crawls, gay men revelling in their unashamed abundance, lycra-clad backpackers hawking rides on fibre-glass rickshaws, shivering transsexual hookers sucking cigarettes in stilettos; all crowding the pavements, cafés, bars, dance floors until 4 or 5 a.m. when finally the cost of one more vodka, the purifying limits of the human kidney, and the pervasive stench of all that piss – nine parts ethanol to one part water, pooled in doorways stinking like an unwashed kennel – sends everyone home to bed or to sleep in the gutter.
It was 4.34 a.m. by Lamm’s wristwatch when a horde of drunk backpackers – Spaniards, Italians, Israelis, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders yelling uproariously after a typical Soho beer binge – boarded the bus for their short ride to Bayswater. Back to their budget hostels or decrepit digs in crumbling Edwardian mansions rented, room by room, to frugal travellers or to pimps and their duped doped girls smuggled in from Albania. Amongst the hirsute twentysomethings yabbering in six languages, Lamm couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t deconstruct, reconstruct, couldn’t re-live the worst fifteen seconds of his life, couldn’t recall the moment when the boy collapsed, couldn’t work out what had really just happened, or strategize a way out through the tightening net – couldn’t think – when three feet away in the intoxicated prime of their unjaded youth, the toothy backpackers laughed like hyenas, smooched each other, translated ‘fuck I’m drunk’ into their mother tongues, admired each other’s henna tattoos, facial piercings and dreadlocks, or, underneath the seats, submitted to what their beer-saturated guts naturally had to do. It’s always a party at the United Nations of vomit.
Lamm decided to sit on the upper deck. He pulled up his jacket hood and shuffled though the crowd. But the stairs were blocked by a heap of enormous backpacks belonging to five Spaniards asking the way to Heathrow. In the driver’s perspex booth, Lamm noticed, was a Siemens tick
et machine with a computer screen, a GPS receiver, an LCD display of traffic updates, weather reports, police alerts, ticket prices . . . a glowing array befitting the control room of a nuclear submarine. And there, flashing on the screen in bold type: METROPOLITAN POLICE ALERT.
Straining his neck, Lamm overheard the driver’s shortwave radio. Police are investigating a fatal attack on Mornington Cre . . . – a passenger’s Spanish yelp eclipsed the next few words – a search is underway. The suspect is described as light-skinned, approximately six feet tall, wearing black jeans, a dark red jacket . . .
The boy’s dead.
The surveillance cameras saw you.
Two blocks down Bayswater Road, blue lights flashed. A police van.
The driver’s already made the call? You’re that conspicuous?
At Lancaster Gate the doors opened. Yielding to the same instinct for self-preservation that propelled the bottle into the teenage mugger’s skull, Lamm joined the backpackers disembarking. Twenty sozzled Swedes staggered to their hostels as he scampered over the fence into Hyde Park. Hunted, haunted Lamm! Run through the flowerbed, behind a knobbled birch. Headlights approaching; stay still! Crouching in bushes, Lamm allowed himself a piss that, during the past hour’s giddy recollection of not much at all, somehow hadn’t innervated the nerve pathways from his swollen bladder up to his brain. His bewilderment so total, he hadn’t felt the need to urinate. Hadn’t felt that he felt the need to urinate.