Seventy-Two Virgins

Look, I know it’s annoying, sir,’ said the copper, seeing his expression, ‘but please try to bear with us. We’re all doing our best, but the whole caboodle has been agreed with the Americans.’

And so Roger Barlow tacked ever round and west, until he found himself in Pimlico and puffing up Tufton Street.

Where he saw Dragan Panic standing by the tiplift of his Renault 150, heaving some large white vehicle aboard.

‘Come on, droogie moi, come on, my friend,’ said Dragan to himself in Serbo-Croat.

In theory the Renault could lift 4,450 kilos, but the hydraulics were puffing a bit and the stabilizing rods were biting into the tarmac the way a heart attack victim clutches his chest.

Dragan wanted to take this bleeding ambulance, and then he wanted to scarper. Personally, he thought Eric the parkie was mad.

OK, so it was dangerously parked. But you didn’t lift an ambulance. Nah, not an ambulance. Since fleeing Pristina in 1999 Dragan had slotted in nicely in the East End. His knuckles were richly scabbed and crusted with doubloons, and he dressed in trackie bums. At Christmas he sold Christmas trees on the street corner, thumping his mittened hands together. He did a bit of gamekeeping for some toffs out in Essex, place called Rayleigh, and he did like a high bird.

But lifting an ambulance — well, it was like shooting a white pheasant, wasn’t it? He wasn’t on for that. And above all he didn’t like being in the company of Muslims. That wasn’t just because he was a Serb killer from Pristina, and a former member of Arkan’s Tigers.

It was also because he was as big a coward as ever set fire to a Muslim hayrick in the dark, and experience had taught him that you had to keep an eye on the sneaky bastards. Speaking of which…

A couple of them seemed to have vanished. Now there was just the young kid and the spooky-looking fellow, and the parkie taking his time.

CHAPTER SIX 0837 HRS

Eric Onyeama was struggling with the urge not to burp.

This man was rude, and Eric had to maintain his poise and dignity. It was impossible to do this while burping.

‘Please … Oh you bastard,’ said the man called Jones. ‘Just do what I say or I’ll . .

‘I must warn you that it is the policy of our company to take legal action against anybody who uses the verbal or physical ab—’

As when scuba divers find a pocket of stale air in a sunken submarine, and the bubble rises to the surface in a distended globule, so the garlic vapours were released from Eric’s stomach.

‘Abuu—’

They passed in a gaseous bolus through his oesophagus, and slid out invisibly through the barrier of his teeth.

‘Abuse,’ he said, and a look of mystification, and then horror passed over the face of the man called Jones. He staggered back.

Ah yes, thought Roger Barlow, a classic scene of our modern vibrant multicultural society, a group of asylum seekers in dispute with a Nigerian traffic warden.

Poor bleeders, he thought. What were they? Albanians, Kosovars, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Martians? Now their day was wrecked. They would have to find the thick end of ?200 just to spring their motor. How many windscreens would they have to wash to earn that back?

He composed a sorrowful speech in his head, to the effect that the law was cruel, but that its essence was impartiality. Hang about, he said to himself as he drew nearer. That’s bonkers. They can’t take an ambulance.

Barlow rescues ambulance, he said to himself reflexively. Have-a-go hero MP in mercy dash. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ said Mr Barlow last night. The Mail asks: Has the world gone mad? He was thinking Newsroom Southeast, he was thinking Littlejohn. He was thinking Big Stuff. Well, this was a story, all right. That should get that awful Debbie woman off his back.

He saw the traffic warden say something to the olive-skinned man, and the olive-skinned man reeled; and no wonder he reeled, poor dutiful fellow. He could imagine that they were already late for a mission.

Across London, the mere act of getting up was taking a terrible toll. People were braining themselves in the shower, slicing their nostrils with Bic razors, brushing their teeth with their children’s poisonous Quinoderm acne cream, sustaining cardiac infarcts at finding themselves misreported in the paper — and where was the ambulance?

It was outrageous! Roger braked and spoke in the mellow bedside tones of the MP’s surgery.

CHAPTER SEVEN 0839 HRS

‘Excuse me. I wonder if I can help.’

The traffic warden smiled bashfully. ‘It’s OK, sir, we do not need any help here. De law is de law.’

‘I know it’s none of my business, but are you seriously going to remove that ambulance?’

‘Please, sir, do not get involved. I cannot make de rules. I can only enfoooo — oo excuse me, I can only enforce them.’

Barlow blinked as he was engulfed. ‘But this is absurd,’ he said, turning to the victims. ‘I know this shouldn’t make any difference,’ he said superbly, ‘but I am an MP.’

For the first time the olive-skinned man faced the MP. His passport said his name was Jones, and that he had been born in Mold, Clwyd. Though it was true that he was currently a student at an institution implausibly called Llangollen University, these biographical details seemed unlikely.

Roger Barlow noticed something about his eyes. They had a kind of wobble. It was as though he was watching a very close-up game of ping-pong.

‘Piss off,’ he said. ‘Piss off and die.’

‘Eh?’ Barlow gasped.

‘Not necessarily in that order,’ said Jones.

Barlow looked for guidance to the warden. There was something badly out of whack here. When all was said and done, were they not, he and the warden, part of the same team?

He made the law, the warden enforced it. They were like two china dogs, bracketing the sacred texts of statute.

‘I’m sorry … ?’ he said, pathetically.

Tee hee hee, sniggered Eric Onyeama, and shook his head at the busybody. He felt sure he had seen dis man before, maybe in church, or at a meeting of parents and teachers. But if Roger was looking for an ally now, he was out of luck.

‘De man is right,’ he said. ‘You must go away.’ And Roger did. For once he felt he could have made a difference. He could have improved things here. He cycled on. Was it getting hotter, or was that the sweat of embarrassment?

That man told me to piss off, he told himself. And die, too. He wondered whether anyone had seen his humiliation.

Had Barlow not been so mortified, he might have seen Haroun issue from the side of the van and pass something to Jones. The leader of the gang of four now looked at his watch and decided it was time to bring matters to a close.

‘Please be so kind as to put the ambulance down now, and stop this damnfoolery.’

Hey dere, said Eric to himself. The Huskie was chirruping back to him.