I Am Max Lamm Read Online Free

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