Joseph Anton: A Memoir (50 page)

In the end Elizabeth did not go to the service at Putney Vale Cemetery. There was not a single press photographer at the event. The police had been wrong about that. They did not say so, of course. They were planning for the worst-case scenario as they always did. He would not live his life by the worst-case scenario. That would turn him into their prisoner. He was nobody’s prisoner. He was an innocent man trying to lead a free man’s life.

Michael Berkeley told him afterward that the presence of so many policemen in the crematorium grounds on the day of the funeral had provoked the following exchange among the congregation emerging from the previous cremation: “Must be someone really important on next.” And, just as Michael was about to interject, yes, someone
really
important, Angela Carter, he heard the reply. “Nah. Probably just some villain let out of the Scrubs for the morning to bury his mother.”

The protection officers themselves continued to be as friendly, sympathetic and helpful as they could. When Zafar wanted to demonstrate his prowess at rugby the new guy, Tony Dunblane—he of the dashing mustache and tweed jackets, like a pirate from the suburbs—took father and son to the police sports ground at Bushey and the guys lined
up like a three-quarter line so that Zafar could run and pass the rugby ball. (Zafar had done his entrance exam and interview for Highgate School and, to his parents’ great joy and infinite relief, won himself a place. He knew he had achieved a big thing for himself and his confidence soared, just as his mother and father had hoped.) Elizabeth was methodically going about the business of choosing furniture and wallpaper for the new house as if they were any couple setting up home together and Tony brought back pictures of the latest, state-of-the-art sound systems and TV sets and offered to assemble everything they selected once they had all moved in. And when Robert McCrum finally did exchange contracts and the deal to sell 41 St. Peter’s Street was done the police took him back to what was no longer his home and helped him box up his possessions and take them out to a waiting van to be stored at a police lockup until they could be brought to the new house. The ordinary human kindness of these men toward a fellow human being in “one hell of a jam,” as Tony Dunblane put it, never ceased to move him.

It took almost five hours, with Elizabeth’s help, to pack up Marianne’s effects. Hidden among her belongings he found all the pictures he had taken on his trip to Nicaragua in 1986, about which he had written his short book of reportage,
The Jaguar Smile
. And all the negatives, too. (Later, Gillon’s colleague Sally Riley, appointed by Marianne to receive her possessions, returned other discoveries—an antique stone Gandhara civilization head that his mother had given him, and a bag of his photographs—not the ones from the missing albums, but the spares, rejects and double prints. At least these few reminders of his life before Marianne had been salvaged. Images of Zafar’s birth and early moments were especially good to regain. The main body of the missing photographs, the ones pasted into the lost albums, was never recovered.)

The difficulties of the everyday—or that calamitous distortion of the quotidian that had become “everyday” to him—continued, like an invader, to occupy him. Andrew Wylie had been trying to buy a new apartment; when the co-op board learned that he was the literary agent for the author of
The Satanic Verses
, it turned him down. Communicating this news, trying to sound as if it didn’t matter, Andrew had never
sounded so low. It was a poor reward for all he had done, and was doing, on his author’s behalf. This story, at least, had a happy ending. Not long after his rejection, Andrew found a better apartment, and this time the co-op board did not refuse him.

Then, a bombshell. Helen Hammington came to visit and the iron fist emerged from the velvet glove. After he and Elizabeth had settled into the new house, she said, police protection would be withdrawn, because Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Howley was not willing to risk the safety of his men in what would inevitably become an overt protection.

It was a breathtaking betrayal of trust. From the first day of the protection he had been assured that it would continue until the intelligence services’ threat assessment came down to an acceptable level. That had not happened. Moreover, it had been Howley and his henchman Greenup who had suggested that the time had come when he should buy a place. They had specifically assured him that if the proper security systems were installed the protection could continue in that location even if it became known as his house. They had obliged him to buy a detached property, with a forecourt and two separate gates, one electronic and one manually operated (in case of power cuts), an integral garage whose automatic wooden door would conceal a sheet of bulletproof metal; he had been obliged to install the expensive bulletproof windows and alarm systems they had insisted upon, and, most of all, had had to buy a house more than double the size he and Elizabeth needed for themselves, so that four police officers—two protection officers and two drivers—could sleep on the premises, and have their own living room as well. He had spent a huge amount of money and effort satisfying every requirement, and now that he had spent that money and was nailed to the spot they were saying, “Okay, we’ll be off, then.” The immorality of it was almost impressive.

The real reason was cost, he knew that; cost, and the tabloid mentality that believed he didn’t deserve what it might cost to protect him properly, overtly, as they protected everyone else.

Certain things about the
fatwa
were known at that time: not publicly known, but known among the people who needed to know, including himself and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Howley. The
threat was not merely theoretical. There was a special task force inside the Iranian intelligence ministry whose duty was to make and carry out a plan to put the Khomeini order into effect. The task force had a code name, and there was a chain of approval in place. A plan would be developed, then approved by different levels up to and including the president, and finally signed off on by the religious leadership. That was the normal Iranian modus operandi. The task force that had executed Shapur Bakhtiar had almost certainly operated the same way. That Howley should be prepared to withdraw protection knowing what he knew, and so soon after the Bakhtiar killing, revealed a lot about his thinking.
We’ve never lost anyone
, the members of his protection team had told him, proudly, but Howley was telling him something different.
We don’t care if we lose you
. That felt … bad.

He said to Elizabeth that she should consider her own safety. If the police left there was no saying how dangerous life might become. “I’m not leaving you,” she replied.

Somehow he managed to do a little work. He completed a synopsis of
The Moor’s Last Sigh
that finally made some sort of sense. It had taken him a long time to get right. Now all he needed was the peace of mind that would allow him to write it.

He had been invited by the writer Scott Armstrong to speak at the Freedom Forum in Washington, D.C., in late March, and he wanted to go. It seemed probable that meetings with senior American politicians and journalists could be arranged while he was in D.C. He decided he would use the platform to express his doubts about the British commitment to his safety—to begin the fightback in a place where the media were more likely to give him a sympathetic hearing. Andrew told him he would do everything in his power to get him a copy of the paperback of
The Satanic Verses
in time for the forum. That would be a reply to the censors that the forum might very well wish to hear. The book was actually at the printer at last. It had been delayed by Penguin, who had somehow failed to sign the reversion document until the eleventh hour, and had then argued that the now-famous cover image of the two grappling, tumbling figures, a prince and a demon, belonged
to them (it had actually been taken from an old Indian miniature,
Rustam Killing the White Demon
, from the
Shahnama
, or Book of Kings, the original now preserved in a Clive Album at the Victoria & Albert Museum). Eventually Penguin had given up being obstructive and signed on the required dotted lines and the printing and binding machines had been turned on. After all these years, paperbacks were actually beginning to exist.

After much reluctance the RAF agreed to fly him to Dulles and back on one of their regular transport flights—just this one more time. The service would not be available to him in the future. Also, on this occasion they would ask him to pay not only for his own seat but for the seats of the two RAF security personnel who would travel to America and back with him. Humbly, having no alternative, he paid up. He thought often of a line from a song by John Prine:
There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes
. The
fatwa
was his heroin. It made him spend everything he earned and, though it might end up killing him, it didn’t even give him a high.

Before he left for America, Fat Jack “wanted a word” on behalf of the lads. They were all worried about proposed changes in the status of “A” Squad that, if put into effect, would push them out of Special Branch and strip them of their detective status. Some of their Tory principals were working to have these changes scrapped but there was a general election imminent and what if the Labour Party got back into power? The latest polls showed Labour leading the Tories by 3 percent. Might he perhaps be able to talk to his chum Neil Kinnock on their behalf if Kinnock became prime minister? “Frankly,” he said, “vis-à-vis Labour, you’re just about all we’ve got.”

The alarm rang at half past five in the morning and they creaked out of bed. The protection team took Elizabeth to Swiss Cottage so that she could catch a train to Heathrow and then he was driven to RAF Brize Norton through the pretty Cotswolds dressed in early morning mist and began his second trip abroad in three years.

At Dulles he was met by a private security firm hired by the Freedom Forum at the shocking cost, he later learned, of $80,000. His
detail chief was a sweet-natured fellow who asked if he could have copies of the paperback edition for himself and his team. The total number of copies he wanted was over fifty. That was alarming: How big
was
this team? “Sure,” he said. “I’ll get them for you.”

He met Elizabeth and Andrew at a conference center called Westfields six miles from Dulles. He was to do his interviews in the Windsor suite. He had grown up in Bombay in a house called Windsor Villa, a part of the Westfield Estate. The coincidence made him smile. Long days of interviews followed, and all the journalists were excited, even aroused, by the cloak-and-daggery. They had been brought to this location by security and had not known where they were going in advance. A big thrill. The
fatwa
was the only subject that interested most of the media. Only Esther B. Fein of
The New York Times
actually wanted to talk about his writing, and how he managed to do it in these extraordinary conditions.

Scott Armstrong, burly, businesslike, every inch the D.C. insider, had bad news: The meeting with congressmen planned for the next day had been canceled after, according to his information, an intervention by Secretary of State James Baker himself. Why was Baker doing this? The answer became clearer in the following days, when the George H. W. Bush administration refused all requests for meetings and declined to make a statement on the case. The White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, said, “He’s just an author on a book tour.”

Andrew lost his temper and accused Scott of having tricked them. Voices were raised. Scott was furious with Andrew but rightly suggested they shelve their anger and see what could be salvaged. They had dinner with Mike Wallace and a few others. Here, in confidence, and to enlist the sympathies of these august journalists, the true nature of the Consortium was revealed, as well as the hostility of the U.S. administration and the possibility of the British withdrawing protection.

It was time for his speech. He was wearing a burgundy linen suit that was by now spectacularly crumpled but there was no time to change. He looked like a nutty professor but maybe that was okay. He was
more worried about his words than his appearance. The language of political speeches was alien to him. He believed in pushing language, making it mean as much as he could make it mean, listening to the meaning of its music as well as its words; but now he was supposed to speak plainly.
Say what you really mean
, he had been told;
explain yourself, justify yourself, don’t hide behind your fiction
. Did it matter if a writer was denuded in this way, stripped of the richness of language? Yes, it did, because beauty struck chords deep within the human heart, beauty opened doors in the spirit. Beauty mattered because beauty was joy and joy was the reason he did what he did, his joy in words and in using them to tell tales, to create worlds, to sing. And beauty, for now, was being treated as a luxury he should do without; as a luxury; as a lie. Ugliness was truth.

He did the best he could. He asked for American support and help, for America to show itself to be “the true friend of liberty,” and spoke not only of the freedom to write and publish but also of the freedom to read. He spoke of his fears that the British were prepared to abandon him to his fate. Then he announced that after many adversities it had finally been possible to publish a paperback of
The Satanic Verses
, and he held up a copy of the book. It was not an attractive edition. It had a hideous gold cover with large thick black and red lettering that looked a little too much like Nazi typography. But it existed, and that felt very good. Three and a half years after the novel was first published he had managed to complete the process of publication.

There were journalist friends in the audience, Praful Bidwai from
The Times of India
and Anton Harber, whose
Weekly Mail
had tried to invite him to South Africa in 1988. But he was not able to linger and chat. The security team spoke of the “risk of snipers.” The building across the street “had Libyan connections.”
Ah, yes, Colonel Gadhafi, my old friend
, he thought. He was spirited away.