The Satanic Verses (68 page)

           
Rah! Rah! Rah!

           
And lastly, when they had returned to London, and Allie was absent at the ceremonial
opening of a freezer food mart in Hounslow, the last rhyme.

           
Violets are blue, roses are red,

           
I've got her right here in my bed.

           
Goodbye, sucker.

           
Dialling tone.

           
* * * * *

           
Alleluia Cone returned to find Gibreel gone, and in the vandalized silence of
her apartment she determined that this time she would not have him back, no
matter in what sorry condition or how wheedlingly he came crawling to her,
pleading for forgiveness and for love; because before he left he had wrought a
terrible vengeance upon her, destroying every one of the surrogate Himalayas
she had collected over the years, thawing the ice-Everest she kept in her
freezer, pulling down and ripping to shreds the parachute-silk peaks that rose
above her bed, and hacking to pieces (he'd used the small axe she kept with the
fire extinguisher in the broom cupboard) the priceless whittled memento of her
conquest of Chomolungma, given her by Pemba the sherpa, as a warning as well as
a commemoration.
To Ali Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again
.

           
She flung open sash windows and screamed abuse at the innocent Fields beneath.
"Die slowly! Burn in hell!"

           
Then, weeping, she rang Saladin Chamcha to tell him the bad news.

           
* * * * *

           
Mr. John Maslama, owner of the Hot Wax nightclub, the record chain of the same
name, and of "Fair Winds", the legendary store where you could get
yourself the finest horns―clarinets, saxophones, trombones―that a
person could find to blow in the whole of London town, was a busy man, so he
would always ascribe to the intervention of Divine Providence the happy chance
that caused him to be present in the trumpet store when the Archangel of God
walked in with thunder and lightning sitting like laurels upon his noble brow.
Being a practical businessman, Mr. Maslama had up to this point concealed from
his employees his extracurricular work as the chief herald of the returned
Celestial and Semi-Godlike Being, sticking posters in his shop windows only
when he was sure he was unobserved, neglecting to sign the display
advertisements he bought in newspapers and magazines at considerable personal
expense, proclaiming the imminent Glory of the Coming of the Lord. He issued
press releases through a public relations subsidiary of the Valance agency,
asking that his own anonymity be guarded carefully. "Our client is in a
position to state," these releases―which enjoyed, for a time, an
amused vogue among Fleet Street diarists―cryptically announced,
"that his eyes have seen the Glory referred to above. Gibreel is among us
at this moment, somewhere in the inner city of London―probably in Camden,
Brickhall, Tower Hamlets or Hackney―and he will reveal himself soon, perhaps
within days or weeks."―All of this was obscure to the three tall,
languid, male attendants in the Fair Winds store (Maslama refused to employ
women sales assistants here; "my motto," he was fond of saying,
"is that nobody trusts a female to help him with his horn"); which
was why none of them could believe their eyes when their hard-nosed employer
suddenly underwent a complete change of personality, and rushed over to this
wild, unshaven stranger as if he were God Almighty―with his two-tone
patent leather shoes, Armani suit and slicked down Robert de Niro hair above
proliferating eyebrows, Maslama didn't look the crawling type, but that's what
he was
doing
, all right, on his goddamn
belly
, pushing his staff
aside,
I'll attend to the gentleman myself
, bowing and scraping, walking
backwards, would you believe?―Anyway, the stranger had this
fat
money-belt
 under his shirt and started hauling out numbers of
high-denomination notes; he pointed at a trumpet on a high shelf,
that's the
one
, just like that, hardly looked at it, and Mr. Maslama was up the ladder
pronto
, I'll-get-it-I-said-I'll-get-it, and now the truly amazing part,
he tried to refuse payment, Maslama!, it was no no
sir
no charge
sir
,
but the stranger paid anyway, stuffing the notes into Maslama's upper
jacket-pocket as if he were some sort of
bellhop
, you had to be there,
and last of all the customer turns to the whole store and yells at the top of
his voice,
I am the right hand of God
.―Straight up, you wouldn't
credit it, the bloody day of judgment was at hand.―Maslama was right out
of it after that, well shaken he was, he actually fell to his actual
knees.―Then the stranger held the trumpet up over his head and shouted
I
name this trumpet Azraeel, the Last Trump, the Exterminator of Men!
―and
we just stood there, I tell you, turned to stone, because all around the
fucking insane,
certifiable
bastard's head there was this bright glow,
you know?, streaming out, like, from a point behind his head.

           
A halo.

           
Say what you like
, the three shop-attendants afterwards repeated to
anyone who would listen,
say what you like, but we saw what we saw.

           
3

           
The death of Dr. Uhuru Simba, formerly Sylvester Roberts, while in custody
awaiting trial, was described by the Brickhall constabulary's community liaison
officer, a certain Inspector Stephen Kinch, as "a million-to-one
shot". It appeared that Dr. Simba had been experiencing a nightmare so
terrifying that it had caused him to scream piercingly in his sleep, attracting
the immediate attention of the two duty officers. These gentlemen, rushing to
his cell, arrived in time to see the still-sleeping form of the gigantic man
literally lift off its bunk under the malign influence of the dream and plunge
to the floor. A loud, snap was heard by both officers; it was the sound of Dr.
Uhuru Simba's neck breaking. Death had been instantaneous.

           
The dead man's minuscule mother, Antoinette Roberts, standing in a cheap black
hat and dress on the back of her younger son's pick-up truck, the veil of
mourning pushed defiantly back off her face, was not slow to seize upon
Inspector Kinch's words and hurl them back into his florid, loose-chinned,
impotent face, whose hangdog expression bore witness to the humiliation of being
referred to by his brother officers as
niggerjimmy
and, worse,
mushroom
,
meaning that he was kept permanently in the dark, and from time to
time―for example in the present regrettable circumstances―people
threw shit all over him. "I want you to understand," Mrs. Roberts
declaimed to the sizeable crowd that had gathered angrily outside the High
Street police station, "that these people are gambling with our lives.
They are laying odds on our chances of survival. I want you all to consider what
that means in terms of their respect for us as human beings." And Hanif
Johnson, as Uhuru Simba's solicitor, added his own clarification from Walcott
Roberts's pick-up truck, pointing out that his client's alleged fatal plunge
had been from the lower of the two bunks in his cell; that in an age of extreme
overcrowding in the country's lock-ups it was unusual, to say the least, that
the other bunk should have been unoccupied, ensuring that there were no
witnesses to the death except for prison officers; and that a nightmare was by
no means the only possible explanation for the screams of a black man in the
hands of the custodial authorities. In his concluding remarks, afterwards
termed "inflammatory and unprofessional" by Inspector Kinch, Hanif
linked the community liaison officer's words to those of the notorious racist
John Kingsley Read, who had once responded to news of a black man's death with
the slogan, "One down; one million to go." The crowd murmured and
bubbled; it was a hot and malicious day. "Stay hot," Simba's brother
Walcott cried out to the assembly. "Don't anybody cool off. Maintain your
rage."

           
As Simba had in effect already been tried and convicted in what he had once
called the "rainbow press―red as rags, yellow as streaks, blue as
movies, green as slime", his end struck many white people as rough
justice, a murderous monster's retributive fall. But in another court, silent
and black, he had received an entirely more favourable judgment, and these
differing estimations of the deceased moved, in the aftermath of his death, on
to the city streets, and fermented in the unending tropical heat. The
"rainbow press" was full of Simba's support for Qazhafi, Khomeini,
Louis Farrakhan; while in the streets of Brickhall, young men and women
maintained, and fanned, the slow flame of their anger, a shadow-flame, but one
capable of blotting out the light.

           
Two nights later, behind the Charringtons Brewery in Tower Hamlets, the
"Granny Ripper" struck again. And the night after that, an old woman was
murdered near the adventure playground in Victoria Park, Hackney; once again,
the Ripper's hideous "signature"―the ritual arrangement of the
internal organs around the victim's body, whose precise configuration had never
been made public―had been added to the crime. When Inspector Kinch,
looking somewhat ragged at the edges, appeared on television to propound the
extraordinary theory that a "copycat killer" had somehow discovered
the trademark which had been so carefully concealed for so long, and had therefore
taken up the mantle which the late Uhuru Simba had let drop,―then the
Commissioner of Police also deemed it wise, as a precautionary measure, to
quadruple the police presence on the streets of Brickhall, and to hold such
large numbers of police in reserve that it proved necessary to cancel the
capital's football programme for the weekend. And, in truth, tempers were
fraying all over Uhuru Simba's old patch; Hanif Johnson issued a statement to
the effect that the increased police presence was "provocative and
incendiary", and at the Shaandaar and the Pagal Khana there began to
assemble groups of young blacks and Asians determined to confront the cruising
panda cars. At the Hot Wax, the effigy chosen for
meltdown
was none
other than the perspiring and already deliquescent figure of the community
liaison officer. And the temperature continued, inexorably, to rise.

           
Violent incidents began to occur more frequently: attacks on black families on
council estates, harassment of black schoolchildren on their way home, brawls
in pubs. At the Pagal Khana a rat-faced youth and three of his cronies spat
over many people's food; as a result of the ensuing affray three Bengali
waiters were charged with assault and the causing of actual bodily harm; the expectorating
quartet was not, however, detained. Stories of police brutality, of black
youths hauled swiftly into unmarked cars and vans belonging to the special
patrol groups and flung out, equally discreetly, covered in cuts and bruises,
spread throughout the communities. Self-defence patrols of young Sikh, Bengali
and Afro-Caribbean males―described by their political opponents as
vigilante
groups
―began to roam the borough, on foot and in old Ford Zodiacs and
Cortinas, determined not to "take it lying down". Hanif Johnson told
his live-in lover, Mishal Sufyan, that in his opinion one more Ripper killing
would light the fuse. "That killer's not just crowing about being
free," he said. "He's laughing about Simba's death as well, and that's
what the people can't stomach."

           
Down these simmering streets, one unseasonally humid night, came Gibreel
Farishta, blowing his golden horn.

           
* * * * *

           
At eight o'clock that evening, a Saturday, Pamela Chamcha stood with Jumpy
Joshi―who had refused to let her go unaccompanied―next to the
Photo-Me machine in a corner of the main concourse of Euston station, feeling
ridiculously conspiratorial. At eight-fifteen she was approached by a wiry
young man who seemed taller than she remembered him; following him without a
word, she and Jumpy got into his battered blue pick-up truck and were driven to
a tiny flat above an off-licence in Railton Road, Brixton, where Walcott
Roberts introduced them to his mother, Antoinette. The three men whom Pamela
afterwards thought of as Haitians for what she recognized to be stereotypical
reasons were not introduced. "Have a glass of ginger wine,"
Antoinette Roberts commanded. "Good for the baby, too."

           
When Walcott had done the honours Mrs. Roberts, looking lost in a voluminous
and threadbare armchair (her surprisingly pale legs, matchstick-thin, emerging
from beneath her black dress to end in mutinous, pink ankle-socks and sensible
lace-ups, failed by some distance to reach the floor), got to business.
"These gentlemen were colleagues of my boy," she said. "It turns
out that the probable reason for his murder was the work he was doing on a
subject which I am told is also of interest to you. We believe the time has
come to work more formally, through the channels you represent." Here one
of the three silent "Haitians" handed Pamela a red plastic briefcase.
"It contains," Mrs. Roberts mildly explained, "extensive
evidence of the existence of witches' covens throughout the Metropolitan
Police."

           
Walcott stood up. "We should go now," he said firmly.
"Please." Pamela and Jumpy rose. Mrs. Roberts nodded vaguely,
absently, cracking the joints of her loose-skinned hands. "Goodbye,"
Pamela said, and offered conventional regrets. "Girl, don't waste breath,"
Mrs. Roberts broke in. "Just nail me those warlocks. Nail them through the
heart
."