CHAPTER 2
The UK
Sophie kept her eyes down, concentrating on pushing the stroller at speed along the pavement. Freddie, her two-year-old, chatted happily to himself and played with a toy. At least he did not have to worry or concern himself with urban squalor and crime – he had years to acquire the defensive adult cynicism that carried her through daily existence in SW18. Gentrification – some joke. It was simply the overlay of middle-class money on traditional inner-city decay, the uncomfortable juxtaposition of renovated and over-priced Victorian housing stock with the abject ugliness of council tenements. And the joins showed. Christ, how she wanted to move, to find space, to flee the city like her friends, to attain a quality of life for herself and her small family beyond the confines of fucking Soweto-on-Thames. Poor bloody middle classes. They were always used to papering over the cracks, bringing civilization, eateries, their schools, their Volvos, their highly leveraged lifestyles, their direct-debit tax payments, to the margins of the metropolis. Cash cows to be milked, to subsidize the rest; pioneers without the protective luxury of a wood stockade or a local cavalry unit. Yes, poor bloody middle classes. A thankless role.
She reached her street. Graffiti spray-scrawled on a garage door proclaimed Kill White Youth. Freddie giggled to himself. She had lost her sense of humour, she was losing her soul. In wartime – war zones – such things happened. At Number 18, an intruder had burgled a pensioner and broken his jaw as an afterthought. Cars had been broken into, their bodywork and interiors vandalized, outside Numbers 5, 9, 22 and 36. The door of Number 25 was smashed down in a daylight raid by kids who took valuables, were caught, and handed sentences to be worn as a badge of honour. Two housewives had been mugged on the same day at opposite ends of the road; a young teenager had been kicked unconscious by a gang who wanted his BMX and cellphone; a local shopkeeper and his wife were held at knifepoint, their takings stolen. A day in the life. It was always the same, always them. And no one would tell, no one dared. The police stood back, looking on, their hands tied, while the politicians spoke of harmony. A myth wrapped up in deceit, cocooned in bullshit. Two thousand years of white European narrative, centuries of shared perspective, political power, common purpose and nationhood junked, trashed, in the blink of the eye, displaced by imposters and their promoters. She hated blacks – period – for what they had brought to her city, for the engagement ring that had been pulled from her finger, for the handbag snatched from her grasp in a busy market. Sod hypocrisy. If it was such fun in the sunlit uplands of black–white neighbourliness, why did house prices plummet wherever they congregated? So her thoughts were incorrect, unacceptable, so the liberal-left would seek to hang her from a lamppost or send her for re-education and integration. Or they were too snug and smug in their North London coffee houses and Chianti bars to notice. She didn’t care. Her opinions were buried, closed to the mind monitors.
Infestation, that was the word for it. Not multiculturalism, not immigration, but infestation. A brave new dawn, cowardly new consensus, in which the indigenous population were expected to creep about with apology on their lips and hatred hidden deep in their hearts. Sophie drove the pushchair in front of her. A bad hormone day. She existed in a state of resentful indignation, in a state she no longer recognized. Housing projects were ethnic hatcheries, English was a second language, England a vanished civilization with a vanished creed, the cowed Caucasians exhorted to greet their fate with equanimity, to meet the incomers with open minds and open cheque books. Ethnically cleansed, cleaned out, majority to minority status in a matter of decades. It had come to be without so much as a vote being cast or her opinion being sought. Overnight, her value system had been questioned, her history dismissed, culture denigrated, the sacrifice of her forebears ignored. Overnight, she had become a foreigner. Where was decency in the blank stares she received from hooded delinquents massing shiftless on the pavements? Where was fair play in the drivers who floored their car accelerators while she attempted to traverse crossings? Where was her England, her Britain, her Union flag? Minicab drivers who could not understand her; hospital queues groaning with migrants who knew their rights but did not know their place, did not know gratitude; schools burdened with the education needs of the subcontinent. Fuck them all. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She owed them little, but was forced to give everything. Social engineering – engineering the end to identity. Another country. Kill White Youth. It said it all.
The truck was delivering cement, the driver pulling up outside the house to help offload and chat with the building team. Nice guys. They were a welcome diversion, a distraction from daily chores and toddler-talk, a relief from coffee mornings with other mothers and Woman’s Hour broadcasts on thrush, phallocentrism and female victimhood. BBC sanctimony she could do without. A smile and a wave from the men. Freddie shouted with delight. They were his new friends. At the end of their stay, she would have an extra bathroom, a playroom for Freddie and the next baby, and a kitchen-conservatory. Makeover. It was either a vote of confidence or an act of folly, nest-building or a declaration of wealth to the criminal fraternity. Ambivalence was part of the London residential experience. It had been Hugh’s idea. He had to spend his money somehow. Her husband was always dreaming of extensions, extra floors; she was always dreaming of the countryside. She stopped to talk to the crew; she would miss them when they went.
At first, no one noticed the Mercedes. They were too busy shifting sacks, swapping pleasantries. A long, aggressive blast on the horn – their heads turned – a second, a third, at maximum volume, close proximity. The engine revved, blaring continuously, provocation and urgency full-on, fully intended. One of the builders shrugged, indicated the bag slung on his shoulder and held up three fingers. Relax, wait a few minutes, or reverse, was the message. It was received as an insult. The car juddered, inch-accelerated threateningly, the Klaxon-barrage of noise repeating. It broke off abruptly as the driver flung wide the door, jumping out to confront, face off, face down. Road rage, pure rage. This was his cut-through, their mistake. The veins were livid, eyes wide.
‘Sorry mate, I’ll be out of here in a second.’
‘I don’t need a fuckin’ second, man. You hear me? You fuckin’ move, you fuckin’ move.’
‘Hey, cool down, okay?’
‘Don’t you fuckin’ tell me, man.’
Neurotic fury – narcotic fury – creased the face, the hands pumping at the sides, stoking pressure, ramping tension, expletives and frenzied incoherence delivered as a tumbling eruption. An uncompromising, irrational wall of hostility. Dangerous, truly dangerous. It was not worth it, not worth the blade in the chest, the pain, the convalescence, the funeral, on a point of principle. Best to move aside.
The killer watched from the rear passenger compartment, dark face, dark eyes hidden behind shades and darkened glass. These whites were not so much capitulating as melting before his driver’s screamed onslaught. An amusing game. The British always did the right thing. It was why he despised them so totally. They would roll over, get fucked, and still say thank you, still R-e-s-p-e-c-t. Sure, they whispered discreetly of their concern, sure they mumbled amongst themselves of their fears, their dislike for the brothers, but could do nothing. He had been patted down at Heathrow, his bags rifled by Customs officials and Drugs Squad officers, his documents checked against Criminal Intelligence and Security Service records. Incoming from Los Angeles. He never travelled direct from Jamaica. The flights attracted attention like no others, overloaded the system like no others, invariably carrying Caribbean mules, illegals, gangsters, puff-seeking tourists, those who would distract and divert the authorities. He slipped through clean, had done so many times, disappearing in the margin between officiousness and political sensitivity. Black – the most effective camouflage of all.
He stared at the woman. Late twenties, fitness fading with urban motherhood, her pretty face flushed with anger and shock. Her loathing was obvious, contempt for his driver expressed in her curled lip, narrowed eyes, jutting chin, folded arms. Nigger, the pose said. Oh yes, that’s what it said. Nigger. Disdain was in her breeding, in the pores of her fair skin, would be in her dictionary vowels were she to speak. Prejudice confirmed. He would like to hear her voice, would like to experience the full sound range of her throat. It merited a return. Not yet. He had other work, other murders to perform; he would pace himself. Pay was generous, deniability for his backers assured. Yesterday, he had been a Yardie hitman – the best – today he was a millionaire, a Tiger drawn to a cause, to the smell of fresh meat, drawn to start a revolution. His driver, victorious, loped back to take the wheel and press the advantage. The cement-delivery truck was moving away. Not fast enough, my friend. The British were never fast enough. They had once expected rivers of blood. He would give them rivers of fire.
Instinct had warned her to get Freddie into the hallway. Such encounters were to be expected these days. Her sense of outrage flared. She closed the door and remained outside, the child’s questioning voice muted against the intensity of the confrontation. Witnesses might be needed, statements required. But the surrender came, her builders phlegmatic in defeat and climb-down. She gave a weary sigh, half-wishing they had stamped on the man’s head, taught him a lesson in manners. Everyone in the street would have joined in. VE Day, one for the scrapbook. The van crashed gears and raced off, making room, giving ground. As the Mercedes slid by, the rear window lowered, framing a head set above a large torso clad in designer clothes. It did not move, did not express emotion. A hand came up to remove the wrap-around sunglasses. Eyes looked at Sophie, appraising her. She felt targeted, suddenly vulnerable. Then the spit, a gobbet projected, landing direct at the feet of the workmen. Kill White Youth. Inside the house, Freddie was crying.
* * *
Some great coverage. A comedy masterstroke – punch-line – to lose the head like that. He had toyed with impaling it on railings somewhere in a smart residential area of London, perhaps Westminster or Kensington, but opted for tipping it from a carrier bag into the river. Pooh-sticks, apple-bobbing, this was just another family-friendly game. The torso had been found first. It had taken another week for the head to appear, surfacing somewhat unexpectedly in the workings of the Thames Vitality London barge moored opposite Battersea Park; it operated ceaselessly to clean and oxygenate the capital’s river. Bringing his particular offering back to life might prove a little more problematic. Still, the police now had the relevant pieces, the start of their jigsaw – not a corner section, or an edge, but something akin to a patch of sky – the press were wringing their hands, the politicians beginning to beat their breasts. Everyone had to do their bit. He would deliver a thousand fragments, ten thousand statements, keep them all busy and employed. They would cluck, and they would scratch, they would run around, squabble, picking at grain, producing shit. And he would go on, and on, and he would laugh. It was good to keep things in perspective, to have a sense of humour. He folded the newspaper and went to get coffee.
* * *
The USA
‘So, Janet, would you say you’re a screamer or a moaner?’
The caller thought for a moment. ‘A bit of both, I guess.’
‘Does your husband ever take a crack at your ass?’
‘Sure. Why not?’
Intellectual deficit, the staple of Talk FM, of Californians in general. Krista Althouse (one-time Krista Kemp) ignited the tip of a Camel filter and edged the black open-top BMW into the outer lane of the Pacific Coast Highway. She didn’t even enjoy smoking. It was gesture politics, a statement, a finger-flick to the control freaks and behavioural snoops who patrolled offices, imposed fines, castigated anyone with a nicotine craving. Land of the free. Some joke. Land of the fucking sanctimonious. There would come a day when you were fined for having a point of view, arrested for drinking a beer in front of a minor, charged with a bodily discharge of methane which might or might not have added to global warming. It was a world of inversion, hypocrisy. They could tolerate drive-bys, crack-heads, the possession of private arsenals for private pleasure, their streets clogging with beggars and bag-ladies, but put a match to tobacco and you were doomed. Horseshit piled on bullshit, the foundations of a shallow urban society, the basis on which people made a living, constructed their timber-framed houses. Unsurprising when the main industries were movies and the law. She inhaled, savouring the smoke. Yup, inversion, that was the word, the key to it all. Take her liberal Angelino friends, unwilling to give offence, quick to take it, tip-toeing round every issue, anxious to believe passionately in absolutely nothing. Jesus, they had the saccharine minds and emotional consistency of Gummy Bears. Most had even referred, self-consciously, to the ’92 riots as The Uprising. How quaint, how right on, how cross-cultural, how aware, how totally frigging absurd. It must be the first uprising in history in which the leaders of popular revolt were street heroin-traffickers armed with Glock 9mms, where the camp followers were fat Mexicans pushing shopping-trolleys crammed with looted television sets and fashion accessories, where rioting eased while freedom fighters took breathers to cash their welfare cheques. Her own outlook was a touch more cynical, a little more bleak.
Christ, she hated the West Coast, truly loathed Los Angeles. Two-storeys and double standards stretching for eighty miles, hell mapped out in the relentless monotony of bungalows, warehouses, laundromats, 7-Elevens, used car lots, pancake joints and chicken shacks, crossed and re-crossed by eight-lane freeways. It could have been thrown up yesterday, could be pulled down tomorrow. California – paradise – and America had dumped this city right in its midst. Even the Garden of Eden had its cesspit, she supposed. She let the smoke drift extravagantly from her mouth and disintegrate into the slipstream. She was owed holiday, had used it to visit her parents in Santa Barbara, went there to recharge, to sleep in her old bedroom, listen to blues at Crystal Springs, reach back to a time before Josh, before Emmy, to be someone’s daughter. Odd how security and claustrophobia came in the same experience, how the push and pull of family, privilege, comfort and mock-Spanish architecture could encourage a desire both to stay and to flee. Routine indolence had never been her thing. Her father understood that, her mother contrived to misunderstand. But they were close, and she loved them for it. When Emmy died – a teenager on an illicit boating and recreational drugs trip to Catalina with school friends, victim of an accidental gun discharge – they grieved with her, gave her strength. Josh had tried too, but the loss of their daughter had removed the final common denominator, a reason for contact, filling the chasm between them with seething guilt and distancing recrimination. She blamed herself, blamed him, LA, anything but a random meaningless act of fate. After all, she was an investigator: searching for clues – reasons – was first and second nature. And she had found only listlessness, a cutting off, a closing down. The funeral had been a parting of ways, of everyone. He returned to England, to another life, to that boat she and Emmy had once shared with him; she remained in the house overlooking the beach in Playa del Rey. A burial. Neat conclusion, as tidy as the rows of tooth-white headstones creeping across the lawns of the LA National Cemetery beneath her office window. Symmetry and cemetery. They gave order, squared the circle, rationalized the irrational, brought order and peace to the confusion of war, dignity to the blown-apart bodies buried beneath. It was best not to dig too deep, best to let Emmy go on sleeping, best to forget Josh. The End.
She watched the palms and beaches reel past on the right, headed for the County Line and Malibu. The air was silk-balm smooth off the ocean, gulls and gannets wheeling above the shoreline, surfers in maverick colours beginning to reappear for the spring and the withdrawal of bacteria-activity notices. Hypochondria was the favourite state pastime, the norm. If it wasn’t fire-ants it was killer bees; if it wasn’t a Chromium-6 in drinking water panic it was a low-saturated fat causes cancer alert; if it wasn’t school buses are a health hazard it was an exhortation to parents to watch for signs that their children were planning to machine-gun the school prom. She pursed her lips on the cigarette. Risk-management, it was all about risk-management. FBI Special Agent Krista Althouse, former lover-turned-wife of British Security Service officer Josh Kemp, previously seconded to the US Intelligence base and Joint Refugee Operations Centre at Tempelhof in West Germany, currently working out of the Federal Building on 11000 Wilshire, was part of that process, part of the effort in creating a risk-free nirvana for the American people. There was a long way to go, a lot to learn. Those white tombstones flashed up bright in her mind again.
A toddler paddled with her mother in a rockpool far off on the foreshore, stooped to peer at a new discovery. It was a glimpsed vignette, a recollection and pain jolt. Krista averted her gaze back to the road. She wished the two well, wished the little girl happiness, a full life, a realization of potential, dreams, wished she could pick up her cellphone and punch the number for Emmy still kept in its memory. Then the tears pricked. The cigarette tasted sharp. She stubbed its remnants in the ashtray. A Cherokee Jeep was building revs aggressively behind, would weave and cut in and out from the flank unless she moved across. She eased the BMW onto the inside and let it pass. No rules, no manners in this town. A bullet-head, neckless torso and thick arms accelerated by, the sort of suburban tractor-pull-trash who enjoyed beating down on a female, beating up anyone. Barely worth a thought, let alone direct eye contact. Off on a spur track, a police patrol car had corralled a roadster for an impromptu bout of harassment and document checks. One officer performed the rousting routine, face provokingly non-committal behind aviator shades, his colleague sat in their vehicle searching for prompts on the police computer. DWB – Driving While Black – was the chief unwritten offence. Anything else was extra. Krista drove on. The closer you got to town, the more pronounced became the paramilitary ethos of law enforcement, the more menacing its executors. The police were not your friends, they had no friends – unless you counted South Korean storekeepers who would advocate fuel-air explosives and napalm for crime-control if they thought their businesses could escape unscathed, unscorched. Out there, it was low-level warfare teetering on criticality, fired by mutual antipathy. The LAPD had long since given up on hearts and minds, had replaced it with flak jackets and Kevlar vests, retreated to their bunkers and armoured vehicles, relied on special weapons and tactics, on basic containment and armed response. Target contact counted more than local contact, ‘throw-down’ guns kept clean, untraced, in ankle-holsters could aid a conviction or justify a shooting, drug kickbacks were standard, plaques and trophies celebrating high-kill ratios adorned white cop housing throughout Simi Valley. Aspirational, dispiriting. The mistakes of ’Nam had migrated to the metropolitan streets of the United States. She wondered if there would be a winner, wondered if the days of infants paddling innocently in a Southern Californian rock pool were numbered.
Mr Angry from Orange County was shouting on the radio. Phone-ins were a public service, ranked alongside hookers and counselling as a safety valve, a means to reduce cases of puppy mutilation and Unabombing. Mr Angry was getting angrier. Something had set him off. Krista half-listened, half-ignored. Ahead, the squat, flat-roofed beach houses of Malibu backed onto the roadside or poked discreetly from the shrubbery and snobbery of stunted peninsulas and moneyed havens set back in the coastline corrugation. Paradise Cove, the Colony, Malibu Beach, to the left the sparkling ocean-view campus and proclamatory Catholic obelisk of Pepperdine University set smug and affluent on its outcrop of moral high ground. She might drop in to Gladstone’s for sashimi and a Cortez Island oyster infusion of iodine and sea-salt, watch the rollers shimmy in and drain away, draw out the break, delay her return. Mr Angry should learn to mellow; he had been blanked mid-flow.
Detonation. It was a car bomb. She registered the fact in the same instant she braked and shied down beside the steering column, at the moment that sound and light erupted, collided, fused, in a solar shock-ball that transformed and vaporized with a single brilliant pulse. Appearance, suck back, then vanishing. The Cherokee Jeep had gone, replaced by a crater and burning metal fragments. The tremor stilled, reverberations washing and fading over an instant snarl-up, before other noises – the tuneless din of disaster, of horns, screams, tyre screeches and bodywork impacts – intruded. Krista stayed low, keeping the BMW’s engine running. The sounds were mute, meaningless, on over-pressured ears and a trauma-desensitized brain. She would get out to look around, check for casualties. Others had been closer to the blast, were less protected. Talk about product placement, talk about being in the right car in the wrong damn setting. Had to move, had to dominate the whip-lashed nervous system. The acrid hydrocarbon smog of blazing fuel and rubber smoked its way to her sinuses. Somewhere, a police siren squealed. She reached for the handle, noting the tremor in her fingers.
The windscreen imploded, jettisoning inwards, showering glass laminate as the high-calibre rounds struck. Surround sound, three-dimensional unreality. She recoiled. Single shots, full automatic, short bursts – a full-scale, full-on fucking gunfight, and she was in the killing zone. Oysters postponed, probably cancelled. She found her cellphone – would try to find her voice – thumbed a key, the battering-ram effects of big city madness ricocheting and shattering the day’s clearly defined Do Not Disturb request. Lying beneath a crystalline blanket of broken glass, she guessed they had failed to notice it, failed to notice her status as unarmed non-combatant. She deactivated the device and slipped it into her pocket, willing it to transform itself into a concealed weapon. There was more sense to making a hair appointment than calling emergency services, her office, or whoever emerged from the alphabetical list. She could always send a round-robin text-message detailing her last minutes and final thoughts – if she wanted, if she had any. The joy of technology, of living in a civilized society. Damn it, people came to California to find themselves, self-discovery occurring in dark places way up their own backsides where even a tow-hook would fail to dislodge them. It was not meant to happen on the PCH, in the stark epicentre of a random fire-fight. In the distance, a sustained popping; in the distance, the police siren had terminated – or been terminated. Safer to be in London, to be with Josh, she thought. ‘We’re going live to Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway, where news is coming in …’ Breaking story.
* * *
The warrior-priest stood high on a summit, dark-suited, black-skinned, waiting and motionless. Inspiration Point. Fine place for a meeting, fine place to observe. And my, was he inspired. The Reverend Al Azania allowed himself a slow smile. On top of the world. Before him, the mountainside residences of the Pallisades stretched down to a Pacific Ocean iridescent with afternoon sunlight, the vista arcing around to embrace the lowlands, the distant sights of the city of Los Angeles, its towers and offices jutting incidental from Downtown to Century City. Cheap dental implants forced into a decaying base. And he would pull them, uproot them, make the country scream. Already, the press and media were crowding in, crowding round, speculating at the motive behind the simultaneous and savage slaying of leading white supremacists in California’s four major maximum security jails of Pelican Bay, Folson, Chino and San Quentin, the timing of car bombings and machine-gun attacks against their compatriots on the streets.
Prison vendettas could often overspill into the ghettos, drug-ramped gangland tension cross-fertilizing grievances on either side of the wall. Black posses fought with Aryan groupings; black posses fought with Latinos and the predatory Mexican MA mafia gangs; black posses fought with the Armenians, the Russians, the Asians. A contract ordered on the inside would lead to a contract hit on the outside. It was the law, beyond the law, a chance for aspiring gangland youngsters to ape their seniors and betters in prison uniform. Something to aim for, to be proud of. So it went on, killing after killing, grudge following grudge, from the chapters of Pontiac State Prison, Illinois, to the faeces- and self-eating crazies of the SHU in Pelican Bay. They would carve up a prison superintendent in his office as easily as they would drop his family into acid baths beyond. Blood in and blood out, that was the code, the only one. Cradle to grave: usually premature and unmourned. And there was a lot of blood.
Yet this was different. America, its federal agencies, its news agencies, were unwise to the event, unaware of the true meaning. Al Azania knew, knew with the religious fervour of a fanatic, of a Black Power leader, of a commander. It had gone far beyond civil rights, mere politics, exceeding the wildest fantasies of activists, the dreams of the Panthers now old and middle-class in Oakland. He was the chosen among the chosen, the teacher and general for whom so many had waited. Shake people enough and they would lose their moral compass; really rattle them, and tolerance and decency would fall away. Harness the hatred. Then would he lead the charge – not of protest, awareness, empowerment and affirmative action, nor for the limited goals and gimmicky gains of the respectably subservient negro. No, he had come for retribution, to tear down the status quo, rip the heart from the enemy, and to rule.
Other leaders had been weak, their motives undermined by lack of means, their rhetoric betrayed by loss of courage. To the public, to the world, he was one of them, a high-profile, high-wire act, a first-class asshole and circus turn, preacher and proselytizer, persistent self-promoter, establishment thorn and sound-bite showman. He was all of those, had the face and the front, the organization – his Union League, its resurrected title hinting at the secret nineteenth-century black vigilantism and white racism of post-bellum Reconstruction – that lent familiarity, respectability. He was recognized, interviewed, talked about. Damn it, he was on television, he was famous, a safer kind of radical. It bred complacency in the viewers and pundits. It was how he wanted it. They had never heard of the Tigers.
Burning bright. When slavery still flourished in Brazil, when the lowest-of-the-low carried on their heads their masters’ sewage from household to beach, the containers would leak putrid crap acid and streak-bleach the skins of the human beasts. Tigers. His Tigers had teeth and claws, artillery and attitude, his Tigers would take no shit from the white man. Caucasian is a capital offence. His creed, his mission, his ministry. It was a basic truth that activism thrived on division, on inequality. There was nothing to be gained in harmonious race relations, nothing positive in talking up the positive. Tension was good for recruitment, conflict good for business at his Washington, New York and LA bureaus, a slide into anarchy good for his strategic ambition. By 2100, there would be an estimated 86 million blacks in the United States. They would praise his name, revere his memory.
A shoe scuffing on dirt. He did not turn to meet the sound. The visitor was expected, his arrival at the base of Will Rogers State Historic Park reported up by a surveillance team. One principal, two bodyguards, the minders remaining behind and vehicle-bound as their chief made the ascent alone. Brave man. Azania looked out to sea, focusing on a small sailboat butting its way through a rip-tide.
‘How’s Palm Springs?’ he asked eventually.
‘You can get tired of golf.’
‘I never got to like it.’
