I Am Max Lamm Read Online Free Page A

the street like the grey clouds rain polystyrene. A wraparound billboard, the breadth of a 737’s wingspan, showcases a pale prepubescent model pouting in her Calvin Klein underwear. Opposite, the cavernous
G-A-Y
club at the Astoria where, a cold April night five years earlier, the deranged neo-Nazi David Copeland stalked his quarry until he planted a nail bomb in a nearby gay pub, the Admiral Duncan, killing two men and a pregnant woman.
    By the early years of the new millennium, London had arisen from the operating table and its cosmetic surgery was botched. Like other financial centres, the capital got a tummy tuck, a facelift and a colostomy bag, separating the healthy flesh from the shit. A few blocks north of the crime scene, Chalk Farm’s decrepit council estates shelter hooded teenagers who aspire to the cheap martyrdom of hip-hop assassination. Ten minutes’ walk south reveals Primrose Hill’s velvety boutiques, cute coffee bars and terraces with a lap pool. This whitewashed island of affluence assured by good schools, trust funds and the institutionalized apprehension of disorder.
    Now ride the N5 bus back west. Wednesday through Saturday nights, Soho’s Old Compton Street is jammed by tourists on pub crawls, gay men revelling in their unashamed abundance, lycra-clad backpackers hawking rides on fibre-glass rickshaws, shivering transsexual hookers sucking cigarettes in stilettos; all crowding the pavements, cafés, bars, dance floors until 4 or 5 a.m. when finally the cost of one more vodka, the purifying limits of the human kidney, and the pervasive stench of all that piss – nine parts ethanol to one part water, pooled in doorways stinking like an unwashed kennel – sends everyone home to bed or to sleep in the gutter.
    It was 4.34 a.m. by Lamm’s wristwatch when a horde of drunk backpackers – Spaniards, Italians, Israelis, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders yelling uproariously after a typical Soho beer binge – boarded the bus for their short ride to Bayswater. Back to their budget hostels or decrepit digs in crumbling Edwardian mansions rented, room by room, to frugal travellers or to pimps and their duped doped girls smuggled in from Albania. Amongst the hirsute twentysomethings yabbering in six languages, Lamm couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t deconstruct, reconstruct, couldn’t re-live the worst fifteen seconds of his life, couldn’t recall the moment when the boy collapsed, couldn’t work out what had
really
just happened, or strategize a way out through the tightening net –
couldn’t think –
when three feet away in the intoxicated prime of their unjaded youth, the toothy backpackers laughed like hyenas, smooched each other, translated ‘fuck I’m drunk’ into their mother tongues, admired each other’s henna tattoos, facial piercings and dreadlocks, or, underneath the seats, submitted to what their beer-saturated guts naturally had to do. It’s always a party at the United Nations of vomit.
    Lamm decided to sit on the upper deck. He pulled up his jacket hood and shuffled though the crowd. But the stairs were blocked by a heap of enormous backpacks belonging to five Spaniards asking the way to Heathrow. In the driver’s perspex booth, Lamm noticed, was a Siemens ticket machine with a computer screen, a GPS receiver, an LCD display of traffic updates, weather reports, police alerts, ticket prices . . . a glowing array befitting the control room of a nuclear submarine. And there, flashing on the screen in bold type: METROPOLITAN POLICE ALERT .
    Straining his neck, Lamm overheard the driver’s shortwave radio.
Police are investigating a fatal attack on Mornington Cre
. . . – a passenger’s Spanish yelp eclipsed the next few words –
a search is underway. The suspect is described as light-skinned
,
approximately six feet tall
,
wearing black jeans
,
a dark red jacket
. . .
    The boy’s dead.
    The surveillance cameras saw you.
    Two blocks down Bayswater Road, blue lights