Seventy-Two Virgins Read online

  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.

  I knew it, he thought. The ambulance had been reported stolen last night, from Dymock Street, Wolverhampton.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Jones’s voice had an evil snit to it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Eric, thinking fast, ‘but you must come with me to the pound.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you one last time: give us back our vehicle.’

  ‘You have broken de law.’

  ‘No,’ sneered Jones: ‘you broke de fucking law. You lifted the thing off the ground while we were here.’

  ‘I am sorry, but that is wrong.’

  ‘You IDIOT! Tell him to put the ambulance down. Tell him to do it now.’

  In defence of its parking attendants, men and women who must put up with some of the worst abuse known to this coarsened, selfish and irresponsible age, Westminster Council gives them cameras.

  These are used not just to record the offence, but also to deter the protesting traffic offender just as he is about to bust a blood vessel or commit a common assault. Now Eric took out his Sony DSU-30 digital camera, and left the Huskie hanging by his neck. As he was doing this Haroun was creeping unseen up the side of the tow-truck.

  In his hand he held a nasty-looking piece of medical equipment which was, did he but know it, a thorax draining kit. The man called Jones began to swear — never a good sign for those who had dealings with this horrid person.

  ‘Omak zanya fee erd.’ Your mother committed adultery with a donkey.

  ‘I am sorry?’ beamed Eric, who had decided to call the police.

  ‘Yen ‘aal deen ommak!’ barked Jones. Damn your mother’s rooster — a deadlier insult than you might think, if only to an Arab.

  ‘What for do you need an ambulance anyway?’ asked Eric, and he took a couple of quick shots of Jones: billhoo
k nose, grubby neck, short grey-flecked hair and peculiar eyes.

  ‘It is for the disabled,’ said Jones.

  ‘Who are the disabled?’

  Haroun tiptoed round the front of the Renault and prepared to lunge at Dragan Panic.

  ‘I don’t see a disabled person anywhere,’ repeated Eric. ‘Show me the disabled person.’

  ‘Here is the disabled person,’ said Jones.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  The last noise Eric heard before he fainted with shock was the ripping of his own pericardium as it was punctured by the pericardial puncture unit. Then there was a scraping noise as the spike hit something hard that might have been bone.

  ‘Help me,’ shouted Jones to Dean, the nineteen-year-old, as he caught the falling warden.

  Dean watched, mouth agape, as his boss buckled under the weight; and then leapt forward to help him arrange the traffic warden in the gutter.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  0841 HRS

  Dragan the Serb had been weaned on tales of heroic assassination and glorious betrayal. From the Battle of Kosovo Pole onwards, Serbs have learned to glory in a sense of victimhood. But today he decided to give the national myth a miss.

  He pushed away Haroun and his spike, and thudded off, weaving and shoulders hunched, as though with every yard he expected a bullet in his back from the Kosovo Liberation Army.

  He sprinted from the Muslim extremists, down Tufton Street, past the (former) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701, and turned on to Great Peter Street. He weaved one way, he ducked the other. Haroun watched him go.

  ‘Leave him,’ called Jones. ‘We have no time.’

  Dean already felt he had good reason to be admiring of Jones, but he was amazed at the self-possession with which his boss now began to unload the ambulance from the tow-truck.

  ‘Whoa,’ he called, as the telescopic arm of the crane jerked into life, and the vehicle was thrust out into the street.

  The arm was powered by three separate hydraulic lifts, the first capable of carrying 2,500 kilos, the second 1,700 kilos and the third 1,300 kilos; and in theory they were well capable of lifting a three-and-a-half-tonne ambulance.

  But Jones was in such a hurry that he neglected the basic laws of physics.

  ‘Hey!’ said Dean, as the white machine was swung out over the street, like some mad mediaeval siege engine.

  Haroun gave a curse — something nasty about a dog, Dean guessed — and even Habib broke off from flossing with his juniper twig.

  ‘Yow need to come back a bit,’ shouted Dean over the roar of the Renault engine.

  The front wheels of the tow-truck were now on the verge of leaving the ground; black smoke was coming from the exhaust; the whole thing was about to keel over, and Dean instinctively ran to drag the body of Eric the warden out of the way.

  ‘It is fine, it is fine,’ shouted Jones, and flipped the next toggle, so that their stolen machine crashed back towards them and bust a taillight on the bed of the tow-truck.

  ‘Do it like this,’ called Habib quietly in Arabic. Habib was also called Freddie, and came from a good Lebanese family.

  He was a Takfiri, a man who masked the ferocity of his faith with a sympathetic worldliness; and he had spent enough time in gambling houses to understand the principles of the grabby machines you use to pick up a watch or a fluffy toy.

  Together, and with what Dean thought was remarkable coolness, he and Jones worked out how to ease in the last extender arm and, in hydraulic pants, the van was lowered to the ground.

  With the speed of Formula One pitstopmen they now undid the metal crabs and hessian straps, bunged them on the back of the tow-truck, and loaded poor Eric in the back of the ambulance.

  Haroun paused only to read the sign on the side of the Renault.

  ‘How ees my driving?’ he said, and laughed, a horrible carking yelp.

  It says something for the tranquillity that has descended on the Church of England that no one else observed these events outside Church House.

  No one took any notice of them as they drove in full conformity with the laws of the road — apart from the taillight — in the direction of the Palace of Westminster.

  They began thereby to catch up with Roger Barlow, who was waiting with his bike at a red traffic light, as all good lawmakers must.

  CHAPTER NINE

  0843 HRS

  Barlow’s thoughts of political extinction had taken a philosophical turn. Did it matter? Of course not. The fate of the human race was hardly affected. The sun would still, at the appointed date four billion years hence, expand to the girth of a red giant and devour the planet. In the great scheme of things his extermination was about as important as the accidental squashing of a snail. The trouble was that until that happy day when he was reincarnated as a louse or a baked bean, he didn’t know how he was going to explain the idiotic behaviour of his brief human avatar.

  It wasn’t the sex comedy side of things. It wasn’t the waste of money, the cash that should have gone into Weetabix and plastic guns for shooting him in bed.

  It was the gullibility — that was what worried him.

  Should he wait for the papers to present this appalling Hieronymus Bosch version of his life? Or should he try to give his account first, and thereby win points for frankness?

  Hang on a tick: there was a colleague. Swishing down the pavement, hair cut by Trumpers, suit cut by Savile Row — it was Adrian (Ziggy) Roberts. Bright. Forceful. Decisive. Very far from completely unbearable; in fact, by any standards really rather nice.

  Roger conceived a desire to talk to him, not least because he could see under his arm the early edition of the Evening Standard.

  ‘Ziggy, old man,’ called Roger Barlow, kerb-crawling on his bike.

  ‘Hombre!’ replied Ziggy.

  ‘You going to this Westminster Hall business?’

  ‘God no,’ said Ziggy, who had benefited from the most expensive education England can provide. ‘Can’t be arsed.’

  Roger felt welling up in himself the urge to confide in a friend. A problem shared, he whispered to himself, is a problem halved.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Zigs?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Roger looked at his colleague, his high, clear forehead, his myriad certainties. On second thoughts, no.

  Ziggy counted as a friend, but it was, in the end, your friends who did you in. And quite right, too. That was what friends were for.

  ‘That posh suit,’ said Barlow. ‘Just tell me roughly how much.’ But Ziggy’s answer was lost in the noise of the Twin Squirrel Eurocopter. Blimey, thought Barlow: this was worse than the helicopter paranoia scene in Goodfellas.

  ‘Wait a sec,’ said the co-pilot of the chopper, as they bullocked over towards the Embankment. He craned backwards the way they had come, and the City of Westminster — touching in its majesty — was reflected in the black visor of his helmet.

  ‘I just realized . .

  ‘Say again?’ yodelled the pilot into the mike on his chin.

  ‘I think we just flew over it. It was on a tow-truck. I didn’t really take it in…’

  ‘On a tow-truck?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, a council truck.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said the pilot. ‘No one lifts an ambulance.’

  ‘Go on, it’ll take thirty seconds. Just back there in that little street near Marsham Street.’

  The pilot sighed and turned the joystick. ‘Well,’ he said a little later. ‘There’s your tow-truck, but I don’t see any ambulance.’

  The co-pilot stared. It may have been unusual for an ambulance to be hoisted, but it was positively unheard of for a vehicle of any kind to escape the clutches of a tow-truck operator.

  ‘Where’s the driver, anyway?’ he asked himself.

  Here, thought Dragan Panic. Down here! Look this way!

  For a couple of seconds he jumped up and down, waving and staring at the police hel
icopter until his eyeballs began to ache from the glare.

  No use. They couldn’t see him.

  Dragan had a pretty good idea what he had witnessed: the shambolic beginning of something that might end with eternal loss and heartache for thousands of families. He had read about the idiotic punch-up outside Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of 9111 itself, when the Islamic headcases left their maps and their Koran and their flight manuals in the stolen hire car. But mere incompetence was no guarantee of failure, as he knew from his own soldiering.

  Dragan looked down towards Marsham Street. He saw a building site; he saw men in yellow hats and muddy boots. Tough men, who could help.

  He was older and fatter than he had been as a purple pyjamaed Serb MUP man, and he was soaked with sweat; and though he had absolutely no reason to love the United States, not after what they had done to Serbia, he stamped and grunted as fast as his Reeboks would carry him.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Help, please!’

  Dark faces looked up.

  Dragan put his hands on his knees in exhaustion, and began to explain to the immigrant builders that there was a plot against America.

  CHAPTER TEN

  0844 HRS

  ‘I’m starting to think we should warn the Yanks,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell.

  ‘You mean about the ambulance?’ said Grover. ‘What makes you think they don’t know already?’

  But when Purnell came to dial Bluett he once again found himself changing his mind. Why raise the temperature?

  He cleared his throat when Bluett picked up, and was on the point of improvising some excuse when the American cut in.

  ‘Mr Deputy Commissioner, we have a problem.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Purnell, ‘I know. I mean, what problem?’

  ‘We got reports of helicopter activity right over the cavalcade route, and the Black Hawk needs to go that way,’ said Purnell.