OK matey. Two pints of London Pride says yer gotta have a Koran in every ambulance.
Done.
Hang about, said the first policeman. Is that the phone ringing in our booth? They stopped and listened hard, turning back to look at the little black hut by the metal boom. The phone stopped and started again.
I reckon it is and all. Hands behind back, they drifted in the opposite direction.
The first policeman looked up at the sparkling morning. The clouds were still high and fleecy, but getting a little greyer and heavier about the bottom.
Jason Pickels rooftop narrative had by now become so torpid and charged with horror that Indira, a sensible girl from Balham, was starting to feel quite tense.
You know what a holocaust is? said Pickel. Indira listened to the ambulance sirens in the square, and the unintelligible roar of the protesters.
Yeah, she said, it was a kind of terrible massacre, like what Hitler did to the Jews. She studied his hands. They were leaving damp marks on the barrel, but at least the safety catch was on.
No, thats not a holocaust, he said. In the ancient world a holocaust was when you sacrificed an animal and the flames took every part of it. It was wholly burned holocaust and every portion of the beast was offered to the god. When the M16 bullets hit the fuel tank of the Datsun Sunny, said Jason, that was a holocaust.
There were six young Iraqi men in the car. Then there was this ball of flame. It was so big and so close that he smelt burning hair and realized it was his own eyebrows. The hairs shrivelled up on the back of his hands, like the nature films of ferns growing, except in reverse. When he came to describe the fate of the Iraqis, how they were first caramelized, then carbonized, and how their molten fat ran in rivulets down the sides of their incinerated car seats, Indira took a decision. She was going to report Jason. Someone should be told about this guy before he did any harm.
The fires had scarcely died down, said Jason, when the demonstrations began. They came from all sides, men slapping their hearts and their heads. They surrounded the torched car and screamed defiance when the Americans tried to approach it. They stuck their faces as close as they could to the Robocop-like Kovac and others, noses to chinstraps, and the curses spewed from their stained brown teeth and tongues that vibrated in the pink cavern of their mouths like a furious bird of prey.
It was a wedding party, they said. How could the GIs have failed to see that?
It was a victorious five-a-side soccer team.
Or they had just all passed their legal exams. They were brothers, uncles, fathers, sons, and they had been killed in cold blood by the crass and cowardly conquerors. It wasnt long before Captain Koch de Gooreynd came from his quarters and took charge. Shots were fired in the air. The mob drifted away. Jason was left with the car, and its contents, like something terrible left in the oven. Now he noticed Barry White, the British journalist, who at some stage had emerged from his ditch and was filling his notebook.
Jason was putting the geraniums back in a row and pathetically trying to patch up an earthenware pot.
Ah, excuse me, said the reporter, could I have my phone back, please? The connection had been broken but a masochistic urge made him press the redial button.
The reporter was standing there with his arm held out as Jason listened first to the roaring of the electrons, and then to the effortful click as it dialled the phone number in Iowa. Someone picked it up.
Honey, said Jason. Whoever it was decided not to talk. After a short silence Jason disconnected and gave the satphone back. He stood in the orange dust, blinking back sweat with his singed lids, and jealousy began its throttling work on his gorge.
He wasnt listening as the Brit journalist about six feet away had a conversation with the foreign desk of his newspaper. Slowly, however, it permeated his consciousness that a story was being composed. What newspapermen call a piece, an article, was being dictated, about him and in his very presence.
Yeah, OK, give me fifteen minutes, said White. Tell you what, put me straight over to copy. Hello there, yes, Barry White for Mirror News. Lets call it Massacre. Are you ready? Begins.
By Barry White in Baghdad
Six Iraqis set off for a wedding yesterday morning.
They cleaned their shabby car. They put on their best suits.
They spent the day singing and dancing, as they celebrated a ritual as old as humanity, and tried to forget the misery which British and American forces have brought to their country.
And they were still singing when they came up to an American checkpoint at 5 p.m. local time.
They were told to stop.
They were ordered to get out of their car.
They were told to put up their hands and lie on the sand.
They were told to do these things in a language they did not understand.
They were screamed at by men who have no right, under international law, to be in their country.
For whatever reason, they did not obey. They continued to drive, waving and cheering.
When I saw the first 9mm parabellum round pass through the windscreen, and I saw the cloud of blood in the cabin, I shrieked at the Americans to stop.
I was ignored.
Burst after burst the huge American fired at the car, and I swear he smiled when the fuel tank went up.
There are no words to describe the fate of those six men. We cannot begin to imagine the agony of their mothers, deprived even of a body to cradle.
There is now no way to tell them apart, save perhaps for the teeth which grin in their blackened skulls.
If you could come with me, and gaze at the dreadful cargo of this vehicle,, and smell the unmistakable odour of burnt human being, you would never again tolerate the lie, that this was a war for the people of Iraq.
Is this the Pentagons idea of liberation? What happened here today was evil.
It was a massacre. If there were any justice, it would join the list of other acts of brutality by American troops against Third World people.
Is this the Pentagons idea of liberation? What happened here today was evil.
It was a massacre. If there were any justice, it would join the list of other acts of brutality by American troops against Third World people.
It wont, of course. There will be no court-martial. There will be no inquiry.
The trigger-happy cowards who killed these six young men will say they were threatened.
They will say there were weapons in the car.
There were no weapons in the car, and none will be found.
And that, of course, is the central deception on which this war was fought.
Ends.
OK? Got that? Just whack that across to Mirror News and tell them Ill be filing more later.
Before Jason could do anything to stop him, the reporter raised his camera and squeezed off several shots in his direction.
Then Barry White nodded amiably at Jason Pickel and strolled off down the road in the direction he had come. Jason looked up and down the street. A man on a donkey was approaching. The fisher boys had returned to their pitches on the Tigris.
Apart from the wreck of the car, and a helicopter buffeting the air overhead, it was as though normality had returned. He saw Kovac draw near, and the mere thought of talking to Kovac was enough.
He turned his carbine round, and would have added to the US fatality rate. But Kovac was quick, and knocked his arm down, and the bullet whanged aside. Not harmlessly, however. For the first time in his narrative, Pickel began to blub. The donkey stopped it, he said.
The donkey took the carbine round in his grizzled little donkey chest. Theyd brought Jason over from Iowa. Theyd screwed up his marriage. Theyd equipped him with the most technically advanced weaponry in the world, and hed ended up killing six young men who may or may not have been wedding guests, and hed whacked a donkey.
Indira was no longer listening. She sidled away along the duckboards. Her orders were very clear. If you were in the slightest doubt about the mental state of anyone, it was your duty to get help.
Adam Swallow at last found his way through the corridors in Norman Shaw South, and could see his way out to New Palace Yard. It occurred to him that the route would present a considerable challenge to the Arab torture victim and his companions. Should he go back? He decided against. No doubt Benedicte had thought it through.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
0944 HRS
Cameron was feeling irritated. The gloomy hall was starting to fill now, and it was with some difficulty that she had made her way to the steps at the far end. Why the hell had Adam given her these silly forged tickets? Where was she supposed to put them? Every seat in the place had reserved on it. At length she found a seat, twenty feet away from the dais on the right, snaffled a reserved card, and sat down.
Excusez-moi, madame, said a voice immediately. I believe I am here. But I think we have met before. Yves Charpentier, he said.
Cameron stood up. She saw a figure of Gallic nattiness, with the little red thread of the Légion dHonneur, and a sense of disorder about his coiffure. I am the French Ambassador, he explained. I believe we met in the company of the good Dr Swallow.
It took Cameron a second or two to remember, but a man does not rise to the top of the French diplomatic service without possessing the nimblest grasp of situation. In a trice M. Charpentier had rearranged the placement in Westminster Hall, finding a place not only for Cameron but for a beautiful dark-skinned woman, who appeared to be his girlfriend, and two friendly Arabs in djelabahs.
And here, he said, sweeping up the place cards like a professional palmist, is the space for the good Swallow and his friends. Cameron found herself sitting behind this comforting fellow, who kept up a lively chatter over his shoulder. But how could he forget meeting her, he asked? She had been there for his petit yin dhonneur, had she not? As she spoke, Cameron observed that his coat appeared to have been freshly sponged, and that there was some yellow gunk adhering to his hair.
Ah yes, said His Excellency, I was attacked. That is to say, I was ambushed by the cretins outside. Fortunately they did not hit me directly. That honour belonged unambiguously to my Dutch colleague, Mr Cornelijus.