Balkan bridges, and sowed the fields with depleted uranium shells. Sometimes they bombed aspirin factories in the belief that they were making aflatoxin.
‘Did I ever tell you about the whisky bottling plant?’ said the don.
No, go on, they said.
‘It was the funniest thing you ever heard.’ They craned forward, their faces lurid and eerie in the half-light of the restaurant, and they awaited the nativity of the funniest thing you had ever heard.
‘Some CIA guy was scanning the internet for suspicious sites and he came across this promotional video from Jura. He saw all these horrible bottles being filled with a mysterious yellow fluid. And you know what they did? They actually sent a team to Britain, in the belief that they were looking at weapons of mass destruction.’
The don put back his head and howled, and his wife howled back, like a pair of intellectual coyotes.
‘Weapons of mass destruction is right,’ she said.
Adam laughed, too. ‘More dangerous than anything Saddam had,’ he pointed out.
‘Yeah,’ said Cameron and her patriotic feelings evaporated as she joined their happy scorn. There was something adolescent about their laughter, as if they were conscious, for the first time, of mocking the pretensions of the grown-ups. And that was why their giggling was so intense, she decided.
Because it was only a few years ago that America would have inspired their undivided affection and respect. That was what made their ideological rebellion so naughty and so compulsive.
So she was in excellent fettle after lunch, when they went for a walk, and she found herself linking arms, first with the don and then with Adam. They walked down Boulevard Adolf Max, and Cameron felt the sun on her cheeks. Then they doubled back down the Rue Neuve and walked in the shade.
The pavement was cracked and bemerded, and she was watching her feet when she became aware of what she took, at first, to be a life-size poster of a naked woman on the wall. She turned her head and saw a window, and behind that window was indeed a semi-naked black girl.
She was reading a book, and as they walked past she looked up for a fraction of a second. ‘Hey look,’ whispered Cameron, ‘is she doing what I think she’s doing?’
‘She’s reading
That night they sat in the bar of the Amigo hotel drinking whisky, and she had not been surprised when he followed her up to her room.
And that was what Cameron was really thinking about, gawping up at the mutilated form of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the TV lights turning her hair into points of gleaming gold, until her eyes focused again on the person in front.
It was one of the Arab men, and he had disposed the skirts of his djelabah so that they were pushed out all the way through the hind legs of his chair. He appeared to have dropped something. He was leaning forward and scrabbling underneath himself. Cameron wondered whether she could help, and as she watched through a crack in the djelabah, she saw his hand at work. His chair was placed directly over a bronze plaque recording the spot where Sir Thomas More, the patron saint of politicians, was executed. She saw him finger the edge of the plaque and she saw — or thought she saw — him slip a key under the metal rim and lift it up.
She felt a panic, as one feels when coming across something secret and frightening in the place one doesn’t expect it. She emitted the kind of noise you might hear from some tumbledown outside privy in Italy, where a well- brought-up girl has secluded herself on a hot day, and looked down to see a snake coiled in the bowl below.
The Arab straightened up. The crack in his skirts disappeared, and he was probing her with his brown eyes when they were interrupted. Hermanus Van Cornelijus was here, his thinning grey hair still wet from the sponge, and a band-aid on his Brueghelian nose.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
0946 HRS
As soon as she had shot-putted the egg, Sandra melted away as efficiently as a Balkan bomb-thrower. Raimondo had been left watching at the railings as the sphere arced through the air.
‘Yay,’ he shouted, as it detonated on the dome of the Dutchman. ‘Way to go,’ he shouted, as if hailing some improbably brilliant piece of aerial billiards.
So it was not surprising that Matt, standing only an axe-handle away, should decide he was the culprit. As the cry died on his lips, the 2201b former linebacker lunged at Raimondo, not even bothering to draw his weapon, and flattening the crash barrier like an encephalopathic bullock. ‘Sir!’ shouted the White House man with instinctive extraterritoriality, ‘you are under arrest.’
Raimondo had always scorned demonstrators. Nothing he liked more in his younger days than seeing the fuzz break up some lefty protest. He remembered a pro-abortion march he’d seen in London, and his feeling of disgust at these scuzzy rentamob characters screaming for the right to kill the unborn. He remembered the way their voices rose to a studied shriek as soon as the police laid hands on them.
Now he yodelled at Matt in identical tones. ‘Don’t you touch me, you faggot!’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said the people next to him. ‘Get off him!’
‘Tosser!’
‘Bastard!’ they cried. When Matt, who did not like being called a faggot, began to use reasonable force to restrain the perp, the noise grew louder still. And when they saw the blood begin to stream down Raimondo’s face, the crowd began to buck and sway. In no time there were two police helicopters overhead, and cops in Star Wars riot gear were climbing over towards them from the other side of the square. Even Jason Pickel was distracted from his daydream, and pointed his scope vaguely at the noise.
Debbie Gujaratne of the
She imagined, because she had known them in her own childhood, all the longueurs of bourgeois domesticity, so boring and yet so desired. She pitied him, although she had no family herself (she was of course sleeping with her married news editor). And yet even as she pitied him, she knew she would have no mercy. It would be more than her job was worth.
Barlow had strayed outside the weird and hypocritical matrix that the tabloid imposed on the conduct of public and semi-public figures. He was a goner. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Barlow, I don’t want to be rude because I’ve reely enjoyed our chat, but I’ve got to go now.’
‘You’ve got to go?’ yipped Roger. ‘You’ve got to go now, have you? Well, I haven’t finished with you yet.’ And he prepared to say what he thought.
‘Oh for the Lord’s sake,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell, more to himself than to Bluett or anyone else. ‘This isn’t the Bermuda Triangle. This is Westminster and we’ve got 14,000 men on the job. It must have turned right on to Grosvenor Terrace and gone down the Embankment, but what I don’t get is how we could have missed it.’
‘Wait up,’ said Bluett. He was bent over the map, and Purnell noticed that he was sweating, so that his scalp started to gleam under his thinning buzzcut hair like some denuded alpine forest. ‘What’s that in there? That kind of inlet thing?’
Purnell looked over. ‘Oh that’s Derby Gate. It’s a place where loads of MPs have their offices. But I can assure you, Colonel, that it is crawling with my men, and they would all have been put in the picture by now.’
‘Well, let’s try them again,’ said Bluett.
Purnell had eaten cornflakes for breakfast, and it is one of the world’s great unreported truths that cornflakes give you indigestion. On even the most stress-free mornings, they are apt to send a vicious little acid flooding over your uvula, and today they were backing up something rotten on Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell. He prayed — since he was a religious man — that he would not be rude to the American.
‘Colonel — can I call you Stuart?’
