The Satanic Verses (69 page)

           
* * * * *

           
Walcott Roberts dropped them in Notting Hill at ten. Jumpy was coughing badly
and complaining of the pains in the head that had recurred a number of times
since his injuries at Shepperton, but when Pamela admitted to being nervous at
possessing the only copy of the explosive documents in the plastic briefcase,
Jumpy once again insisted on accompanying her to the Brickhall community
relations council's offices, where she planned to make photocopies to
distribute to a number of trusted friends and colleagues. So it was that at
ten-fifteen they were in Pamela's beloved MG, heading east across the city,
into the gathering storm. An old, blue Mercedes panel van followed them, as it
had followed Walcott's pick-up truck; that is, without being noticed.

           
Fifteen minutes earlier, a patrol group of seven large young Sikhs jammed into
a Vauxhall Cavalier had been driving over the Malaya Crescent canal bridge in
southern Brickhall. Hearing a cry from the towpath under the bridge, and
hurrying to the scene, they found a bland, pale man of medium height and build,
fair hair flopping forward over hazel eyes, leaping to his feet, scalpel in
hand, and rushing away from the body of an old woman whose blue wig had fallen
off and lay floating like a jellyfish in the canal. The young Sikhs easily
caught up with and overpowered the running man.

           
By eleven pm the news of the mass murderer's capture had penetrated every
cranny of the borough, accompanied by a slew of rumours: the police had been
reluctant to charge the maniac, the patrol members had been detained for
questioning, a coverup was being planned. Crowds began to gather on street
corners, and as the pubs emptied a series of fights broke out. There was some
damage to property: three cars had their windows smashed, a video store was
looted, a few bricks were thrown. It was at this point, at half-past eleven on
a Saturday night, with the clubs and dance-halls beginning to yield up their
excited, highly charged populations, that the divisional superintendent of
police, in consultation with higher authority, declared that riot conditions
now existed in central Brickhall, and unleashed the full might of the
Metropolitan Police against the "rioters".

           
Also at this point, Saladin Chamcha, who had been dining with Allie Cone at her
apartment overlooking Brickhall Fields, keeping up appearances, sympathizing,
murmuring encouraging insincerities, emerged into the night; found a
testudo
of helmeted men with plastic shields at the ready moving towards him across the
Fields at a steady, inexorable trot; witnessed the arrival overhead of giant,
locust-swarming helicopters from which light was falling like heavy rain; saw
the advance of the water cannons; and, obeying an irresistible primal reflex,
turned tail and ran, not knowing that he was going the wrong way, running full
speed in the direction of the Shaandaar.

           
* * * * *

           
Television cameras arrive just in time for the raid on Club Hot Wax.

           
This is what a television camera sees: less gifted than the human eye, its
night vision is limited to what klieg lights will show. A helicopter hovers
over the nightclub, urinating light in long golden streams; the camera
understands this image. The machine of state bearing down upon its
enemies.―And now there's a camera in the sky; a news editor somewhere has
sanctioned the cost of aerial photography, and from another helicopter a news
team is
shooting down
. No attempt is made to chase this helicopter away.
The noise of rotor blades drowns the noise of the crowd. In this respect,
again, video recording equipment is less sensitive than, in this case, the human
ear.

           
- Cut.―A man lit by a sun-gun speaks rapidly into a microphone. Behind
him there is a disorderment of shadows. But between the reporter and the
disordered shadow-lands there stands a wall: men in riot helmets, carrying
shields. The reporter speaks gravely; petrolbombs plasticbullets policeinjuries
water-cannon looting, confining himself, of course, to facts. But the camera
sees what he does not say. A camera is a thing easily broken or purloined; its
fragility makes it fastidious. A camera requires law, order, the thin blue
line. Seeking to preserve itself, it remains behind the shielding wall,
observing the shadow-lands from afar, and of course from above: that is, it
chooses sides.

           
- Cut.―Sun-guns illuminate a new face, saggy-jowled, flushed. This face
is named: sub-titled words appear across his tunic.
Inspector Stephen Kinch
.
The camera sees him for what he is: a good man in an impossible job. A father,
a man who likes his pint. He speaks: cannot-tolerate-no-go-areas better-protection-required-for-policemen
see-the-plastic-riot-shields-catching-fire. He refers to organized crime,
political agitators, bomb-factories, drugs. "We understand some of these
kids may feel they have grievances but we will not and cannot be the whipping
boys of society." Emboldened by the lights and the patient, silent lenses,
he goes further. These kids don't know how lucky they are, he suggests. They
should consult their kith and kin. Africa, Asia, the Caribbean: now those are
places with real problems. Those are places where people might have grievances
worth respecting. Things aren't so bad here, not by a long chalk; no slaughters
here, no torture, no military coups. People should value what they've got
before they lose it. Ours always was a peaceful land, he says. Our industrious
island race.―Behind him, the camera sees stretchers, ambulances,
pain.―It sees strange humanoid shapes being hauled up from the bowels of
the Club Hot Wax, and recognizes the effigies of the mighty. Inspector Kinch
explains. They cook them in an oven down there, they call it fun, I wouldn't
call it that myself.―The camera observes the wax models with
distaste.―Is there not something
witchy
about them, something
cannibalistic, an unwholesome smell? Have
black arts
been practised
here?―The camera sees broken windows. It sees something burning in the
middle distance: a car, a shop. It cannot understand, or demonstrate, what any
of this achieves. These people are burning their own streets.

           
- Cut.―Here is a brightly lit video store. Several sets have been left on
in the windows; the camera, most delirious of narcissists, watches TV,
creating, for an instant, an infinite recession of television sets, diminishing
to a point.―Cut.―Here is a serious head bathed in light: a studio
discussion. The head is talking about
outlaws
. Billy the Kid, Ned Kelly:
these were men who stood for as well as
against
. Modern mass-murderers,
lacking this heroic dimension, are no more than sick, damaged beings, utterly
blank as personalities, their crimes distinguished by an attention to
procedure, to methodology―let's say
ritual
―driven, perhaps,
by the nonentity's longing to be noticed, to rise out of the muck and become,
for a moment, a star.―Or by a kind of transposed deathwish: to kill the
beloved and so destroy the self.―
Which is the Granny Ripper?
a
questioner asks.
And what about Jack?
―The true outlaw, the head
insists, is a dark mirror-image of the hero.―
These rioters, perhaps?
comes the challenge.
Aren't you in danger of glamorizing, of
"legitimizing"?
―The head shakes, laments the materialism of
modern youth. Looting video stores is not what the head has been talking
about.―
But what about the old-timers, then? Butch Cassidy, the James
brothers, Captain Moonlight, the Kelly gang. They all robbed―did they
not?―banks
.―Cut.―Later that night, the camera will return
to this shop-window. The television sets will be missing.

           
- From the air, the camera watches the entrance to Club Hot Wax. Now the police
have finished with wax effigies and are bringing out real human beings. The
camera homes in on the arrested persons: a tall albino man; a man in an Armani
suit, looking like a dark mirror-image of de Niro; a young girl
of―what?―fourteen, fifteen?―a sullen young man of twenty or
thereabouts. No names are titled; the camera does not know these faces.
Gradually, however, the
facts
emerge. The club DJ, Sewsunker Ram, known
as "Pinkwalla", and its proprietor, Mr. John Maslama, are to be
charged with running a large-scale narcotics operation―crack, brown
sugar, hashish, cocaine. The man arrested with them, an employee at Maslama's
nearby "Fair Winds" music store, is the registered owner of a van in
which an unspecified quantity of "hard drugs" has been discovered;
also numbers of "hot" video recorders. The young girl's name is
Anahita Sufyan; she is under-age, is said to have been drinking heavily, and,
it is hinted, having sex with at least one of the three arrested men. She is
further reported to have a history of truancy and association with known
criminal types: a delinquent, clearly.―An illuminated journalist will
offer the nation these titbits many hours after the event, but the news is
already running wild in the streets: Pinkwalla!―And the
Wax
: they
smashed the place up―
totalled
it!―Now it's
war
.

           
This happens, however―as does a great deal else―in places which the
camera cannot see.

           
* * * * *

           
Gibreel:

           
moves as if through a dream, because after days of wandering the city without
eating or sleeping, with the trumpet named Azraeel tucked safely in a pocket of
his greatcoat, he no longer recognizes the distinction between the waking and
dreaming states;―he understands now something of what omnipresence must
be like, because he is moving through several stories at once, there is a
Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia Cone, and a Gibreel hovering over
the death-bed of a Prophet, and a Gibreel watching in secret over the progress
of a pilgrimage to the sea, waiting for the moment at which he will reveal
himself, and a Gibreel who feels, more powerfully every day, the will of the
adversary, drawing him ever closer, leading him towards their final embrace:
the subtle, deceiving adversary, who has taken the face of his friend, of
Saladin his truest friend, in order to lull him into lowering his guard. And
there is a Gibreel who walks down the streets of London, trying to understand
the will of God.

           
Is he to be the agent of God's wrath?

           
Or of his love?

           
Is he vengeance or forgiveness? Should the fatal trumpet remain in his pocket,
or should he take it out and blow?

           
(I'm giving him no instructions. I, too, am interested in his choices―in
the result of his wrestling match. Character vs destiny: a free-style bout. Two
falls, two submissions or a knockout will decide.)

           
Wrestling, through his many stories, he proceeds.

           
There are times when he aches for her, Alleluia, her very name an exaltation;
but then he remembers the diabolic verses, and turns his thoughts away. The
horn in his pocket demands to be blown; but he restrains himself. Now is not
the time. Searching for clues―
what is to be done?
―he stalks
the city streets.

           
Somewhere he sees a television set through an evening window. There is a
woman's head on the screen, a famous "presenter", being interviewed
by an equally famous, twinkling Irish "host".―What would be the
worst thing you could imagine?―Oh, I think, I'm sure, it would be, oh,
yes
:
to be alone on Christmas Eve. You'd really have to face yourself, wouldn't you,
you'd look into a harsh mirror and ask yourself,
is this all there is?
―Gibreel,
alone, not knowing the date, walks on. In the mirror, the adversary approaches
at the same pace as his own, beckoning, stretching out his arms.

           
The city sends him messages. Here, it says, is where the Dutch king decided to
live when he came over three centuries ago. In those days this was out of town,
a village, set in green English fields. But when the King arrived to set up
house, London squares sprang up amid the fields, red-brick buildings with Dutch
crenellations rising against the sky, so that his courtiers might have places
in which to reside. Not all migrants are powerless, the still-standing edifices
whisper. They impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own
coherence to the new-found land, imagining it afresh. But look out, the city
warns. Incoherence, too, must have its day. Riding in the parkland in which he'd
chosen to live―which he'd
civilized
―William III was thrown
by his horse, fell hard against the recalcitrant ground, and broke his royal
neck.

           
Some days he finds himself among walking corpses, great crowds of the dead, all
of them refusing to admit they're done for, corpses mutinously continuing to
behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting, going home to
make love, smoking cigarettes.
But you're dead
, he shouts at them.
Zombies,
get into your graves
. They ignore him, or laugh, or look embarrassed, or
menace him with their fists. He falls silent, and hurries on.

           
The city becomes vague, amorphous. It is becoming impossible to describe the
world. Pilgrimage, prophet, adversary merge, fade into mists, emerge. As does
she: Allie, Al-Lat.
She is the exalted bird. Greatly to be desired
. He
remembers now: she told him, long ago, about Jumpy's poetry.
He's trying to
make a collection. A book
. The thumb-sucking artist with his infernal
views. A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian
contract, he'd told Allie. Dr. Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two
dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains
(but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either
way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.