Authors: Raphael Brous
Had this rally occurred at night, the horde of flashing cameras would have outshone the streetlights. The photographers were especially fond of a nine-year-old Pakistani girl wearing a blue hijab, white stockings and a floral smock to her ankles. She stood at the police line, staring imploringly into a thug’s lantern-jawed face and screaming in high-pitched Urdu. Nearby, a few skinheads talked into mobile phones, telling their wives or bosses that they were ill and off the job this afternoon.
Finally, the show commenced. Someone pitched two glass bottles at the police, striking a constable in the chest, and the violence erupted during a baton charge by officers who had never faced such a volatile throng outside a football pitch. The police line breached, a hundred Pakistani and Afghani men charged at their xenophobic provocateurs. A gang of local hoodlums joined in the fun, yelling numerous permutations of
fucking Paki terrorists
at the conspicuously devout protestors in beards or burqas.
Within a minute, anything at hand was a weapon: placards, umbrellas, rocks, glass bottles, drink cans, rubbish bins, steel poles pilfered from the flimsy barricade. Dozens of windows smashed, three police cars pelted with stones, a BBC news van damaged beyond repair and two picket fences torn apart to yield makeshift batons, as sixty police, armed with truncheons, tasers and pepper spray, couldn’t contain the violence.
Fifteen minutes later, five police vans were stuck at the intersection of Patriot Square, four blocks from the riot’s epicentre, as a thousand locals – chanting in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, Farsi and English – took to the streets. At the head of the rally, the dead boy’s cousins led the thunderous chorus . . .
Racist Murder! Racist Blair! Racist Murder! Racist Blair!
The skinheads, and the local hoodlums who had tripled in number, replied with their fists, boots and palings broken from the picket fence. But amongst the many, many images of the riots headlining the news bulletins that night, the most talked-about footage worldwide – appearing on every major TV network from San Francisco to Sydney to Santiago – wasn’t the Bangladeshi children staring gape-mouthed at their fathers battering a police car with steel poles, nor an elderly Irish shopkeeper, his off-licence looted, defiantly scolding three white teenage thieves like the lone activist confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square. No, the most-broadcast footage of the 2005 East End riot featured an ITV reporter – wearing an absurdly nice Saville Row suit, wielding his microphone like a dapper Robert Capa at the D-Day landings – getting knocked out cold by a flying milk bottle as he solemnly intoned ‘Who would have thought this could happen in Londo—’
At his press conference, the mayor condemned London’s worst race riot since the Brixton uprising of April 1981. Nine policemen and twenty-three protestors were hospitalized, including a Bangladeshi engineering student bashed into a coma and a British-Iranian teenager critically injured by a brick thrown at his head. A Scottish bystander suffered spinal injuries from being trampled beneath a barricade; her physicians suspected that paraplegia would result. Dozens of storefronts were smashed, with three electrical retailers, a Nike outlet, an off-licence and a mobile phone dealership looted amid the chaos.
That night in Tower Hamlets, three Pakistani shops were firebombed by vigilantes who scrawled racist graffiti on the walls. A Bangladeshi social club was burnt down; on the front pages, its smoking ruins appeared like the charred exoskeleton of a monstrous alloy spider. Near Brick Lane, five turbaned Sikh teenagers were attacked by a mob of white youths. For the next forty-eight hours, police patrolled the East End from horseback and riot vans, enforcing the curfew from dusk. The damage bill exceeded £20 million and the glass-strewn streets, littered by torn cardboard packaging from looted stereos and TVs, attracted journalists in hordes unrivalled in London until the Tube bombings four months later.
For the remainder of that week at the Finsbury Park mosque, afternoon prayers overflowed not only through piety, but because hundreds of young men (and a few undercover police and investigative journalists) crammed in for the sermon by Abu Hamza al-Masri, known in the tabloids as ‘The Hook’. Hamza the Egyptian-born imam who disfigured his face and lost both forearms in an explosion in Afghanistan, who delighted in looking monstrous with a milky shattered eye and two steel hooks for hands. At his pulpit, Hamza accused the prime minister of ordering the murder of a Muslim teenager in order to provoke the riot, demonize British-Muslims and win support for the unpopular alliance with Washington. Captivatingly employing the Arabic-English vernacular of the immigrant street, the handless preacher repeated his notorious sermon that was burnt onto CDs, sold at mosques from London to Leeds, and reprinted in the February 2008 issue of
Vanity Fair
.
‘My dear brothers, if you can go, then go! If you can’t go, sponsor! If you can’t sponsor, speak! If you can’t do all of this, do all of that! If you can send your children, send them! You must have a stand – with your heart, with your tongue, with your money, with your hand, with your sword, with your Kalashnikov! . . . Just do it! If it is killing, do it! If it is paying, pay! If it is ambushing, ambush! If it is poisoning, poison! You help your brothers. You help Islam any way you like, anywhere you like! They are all kuffar, and can all be killed! Killing a kuffar who is fighting you is okay! Killing a kuffar for any reason, you can say it is okay! Even if there is no reason for it!’
And not just Abu Hamza’s infamous sermon, spoken to his audience of jobless, visaless, passportless young men who were fed at the Finsbury Park mosque, who slept at the mosque, who fled the scorched dirt of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan to discover that Britain wasn’t a bucolic pasture of full employment, but a cold concrete maze of CCTV cameras where, with a glance, the stranger in the street convicts you. No, the triggers were everywhere. The morning of the East End riot, the BBC broadcast the notorious surveillance footage that, like four white cops bashing Rodney King outside an LA truckstop, or OJ fleeing from the choppers in his Ford Bronco, or two thirteen-year-olds at a Liverpool supermarket coaxing the toddler Jamie Bulger to his death, came to encapsulate a famously reprehensible crime. The video showed a young white man, his face obscured beneath a woollen cap, fleeing through Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, while a block away the fifteen-year-old Pakistani boy bled to death beneath a bus shelter. This image was reproduced on the
Sun
’s front page, next to Malik Massawi’s most recent school portrait and a photograph of the riot in full bloody bloom. In huge red letters, the headline:
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.
‘
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.