The Satanic Verses (44 page)

They met for the last time just before Chamcha took off for Bombay: Sunday lunch at the flag-waving Highgate mansion. Rosewood panelling, a terrace with stone urns, a view down a wooded hill. Valance complaining about a new development that would louse up the scenery. Lunch was predictably jingoistic:
rosbif, boudin Yorkshire, choux de bruxelles
. Baby, the nymphet wife, didn’t join them, but ate hot pastrami on rye while shooting pool in a nearby room. Servants, a thunderous Burgundy, more Armagnac, cigars. The self-made man’s paradise, Chamcha reflected, and recognized the envy in the thought.

After lunch, a surprise. Valance led him into a room in which there stood two clavichords of great delicacy and lightness. ‘I make ’em,’ his host confessed. ‘To relax. Baby wants me to make her a fucking guitar.’ Hal Valance’s talent as a cabinet-maker was undeniable, and somehow at odds with the rest of the man. ‘My father was in the trade,’ he admitted under Chamcha’s probing, and Saladin understood that he had been granted a privileged glimpse into the only piece that remained of Valance’s original self, the Harold that derived from history and blood and not from his own frenetic brain.

When they left the secret chamber of the clavichords, the familiar Hal Valance instantly reappeared. Leaning on the balustrade of his terrace, he confided: ‘The thing that’s so amazing about her is the size of what she’s trying to do.’ Her? Baby? Chamcha was confused. ‘I’m talking about you-know-who,’ Valance explained helpfully. ‘Torture. Maggie the Bitch.’ Oh. ‘She’s radical all right. What she wants – what she actually thinks she can fucking
achieve –
is literally to invent a whole goddamn new middle class in this country. Get rid of the old woolly incompetent buggers from fucking Surrey and Hampshire, and bring in the new. People without background, without history. Hungry people. People who really
want
, and who know that with her, they can bloody well
get
. Nobody’s ever tried to replace a whole fucking
class
before, and the amazing thing is she might just do it if they don’t get her first. The
old class. The dead men. You follow what I’m saying.’ ‘I think so,’ Chamcha lied. ‘And it’s not just the businessmen,’ Valance said slurrily. ‘The intellectuals, too. Out with the whole faggoty crew. In with the hungry guys with the wrong education. New professors, new painters, the lot. It’s a bloody revolution. Newness coming into this country that’s stuffed full of fucking old
corpses
. It’s going to be something to see. It already is.’

Baby wandered out to meet them, looking bored. ‘Time you were off, Chamcha,’ her husband commanded. ‘On Sunday afternoons we go to bed and watch pornography on video. It’s a whole new world, Saladin. Everybody has to join sometime.’

No compromises. You’re in or you’re dead. It hadn’t been Chamcha’s way; not his, nor that of the England he had idolized and come to conquer. He should have understood then and there: he was being given, had been given, fair warning.

And now the coup de grâce. ‘No hard feelings,’ Valance was murmuring into his ear. ‘See you around, eh? Okay, right.’

‘Hal,’ he made himself object, ‘I’ve got a contract.’

Like a goat to the slaughter. The voice in his ear was now openly amused. ‘Don’t be silly,’ it told him. ‘Of course you haven’t. Read the small print. Get a
lawyer
to read the small print. Take me to court. Do what you have to do. It’s nothing to me. Don’t you get it? You’re history.’

Dialling tone.

Abandoned by one alien England, marooned within another, Mr Saladin Chamcha in his great dejection received news of an old companion who was evidently enjoying better fortunes. The shriek of his landlady –
‘Tini bénché achén!’ –
warned him that something was up. Hind was billowing along the corridors of the Shaandaar B and B, waving, it turned out, a current copy of the imported Indian fanzine
Ciné-Blitz
. Doors opened; temporary beings popped out, looking puzzled and alarmed. Mishal Sufyan emerged from her room with yards of midriff showing between shortie tank-top and 501s. From the office he maintained across
the hall, Hanif Johnson emerged in the incongruity of a sharp three-piece suit, was hit by the midriff and covered his face. ‘Lord have mercy,’ he prayed. Mishal ignored him and yelled after her mother: ‘What’s up? Who’s alive?’

‘Shameless from somewhere,’ Hind shouted back along the passage, ‘cover your nakedness.’

‘Fuck off,’ Mishal muttered under her breath, fixing mutinous eyes on Hanif Johnson. ‘What about the michelins sticking out between her sari and her choli, I want to know.’ Down at the other end of the passage, Hind could be seen in the half-light, thrusting
Ciné-Blitz
at the tenants, repeating, he’s alive. With all the fervour of those Greeks who, after the disappearance of the politician Lambrakis, covered the country with the whitewashed letter
Z. Zi: he lives
.

‘Who?’ Mishal demanded again.

‘Gibreel,’
came the cry of impermanent children.
‘Farishta bénché achén
.’ Hind, disappearing downstairs, did not observe her elder daughter returning to her room, – leaving the door ajar; – and being followed, when he was sure the coast was clear, by the well-known lawyer Hanif Johnson, suited and booted, who maintained this office to keep in touch with the grass roots, who was also doing well in a smart uptown practice, who was well connected with the local Labour Party and was accused by the sitting MP of scheming to take his place when reselection came around.

When was Mishal Sufyan’s eighteenth birthday? – Not for a few weeks yet. And where was her sister, her roommate, sidekick, shadow, echo and foil? Where was the potential chaperone? She was: out.

But to continue:

The news from
Ciné-Blitz
was that a new, London-based film production outfit headed by the whiz-kid tycoon Billy Battuta, whose interest in cinema was well known, had entered into an association with the reputable, independent Indian producer Mr S. S. Sisodia for the purpose of producing a comeback vehicle for the legendary Gibreel, now exclusively revealed to have escaped the jaws of death for a second time. ‘It is true I was booked on the
plane under the name of Najmuddin,’ the star was quoted as saying. ‘I know that when the investigating sleuths identified this as my incognito – in fact, my real name – it caused great grief back home, and for this I do sincerely apologize to my fans. You see, the truth is, that grace of God I somehow missed the flight, and as I had wished in any case to go to ground, excuse, please, no pun intended, I permitted the fiction of my demise to stand uncorrected and took a later flight. Such luck: truly, an angel must have been watching over me.’ After a time of reflection, however, he had concluded that it was wrong to deprive his public, in this unsportsmanlike and hurtful way, of the true data and also his presence on the screen. ‘Therefore I have accepted this project with full commitment and joy.’ The film was to be – what else – a theological, but of a new type. It would be set in an imaginary and fabulous city made of sand, and would recount the story of the encounter between a prophet and an archangel; also the temptation of the prophet, and his choice of the path of purity and not that of base compromise. ‘It is a film,’ the producer, Sisodia, informed
Ciné-Blitz
, ‘about how newness enters the world.’ – But would it not be seen as blasphemous, a crime against … – ‘Certainly not,’ Billy Battuta insisted. ‘Fiction is fiction; facts are facts. Our purpose is not to make some farrago like that movie
The Message
in which, whenever Prophet Muhammad (on whose name be peace!) was heard to speak, you saw only the head of his camel, moving its mouth.
That –
excuse me for pointing out – had no class. We are making a high-taste, quality picture. A moral tale: like – what do you call them? – fables.’

‘Like a dream,’ Mr Sisodia said.

When the news was brought to Chamcha’s attic later that day by Anahita and Mishal Sufyan, he flew into the vilest rage either of them had ever witnessed, a fury under whose fearful influence his voice rose so high that it seemed to tear, as if his throat had grown knives and ripped his cries to shreds; his pestilential breath all but blasted them from the room, and with arms raised high and goat-legs dancing he looked, at last, like the very devil whose image he had become. ‘Liar,’ he shrieked at the absent Gibreel.
‘Traitor, deserter, scum. Missed the plane, did you? – Then whose head, in my own lap, with my own hands …? – who received caresses, spoke of nightmares, and fell at last singing from the sky?’

‘There, there,’ pleaded terrified Mishal. ‘Calm down. You’ll have Mum up here in a minute.’

Saladin subsided, a pathetic goaty heap once again, no threat to anyone. ‘It’s not true,’ he wailed. ‘What happened, happened to us both.’

‘Course it did,’ Anahita encouraged him. ‘Nobody believes those movie magazines, anyway. They’ll say anything, them.’

Sisters backed out of the room, holding their breath, leaving Chamcha to his misery, failing to observe something quite remarkable. For which they must not be blamed; Chamcha’s antics were sufficient to have distracted the keenest eyes. It should also, in fairness, be stated that Saladin failed to notice the change himself.

What happened? This: during Chamcha’s brief but violent outburst against Gibreel, the horns on his head (which, one may as well point out, had grown several inches while he languished in the attic of the Shaandaar B and B) definitely, unmistakably, – by about three-quarters of an inch, –
diminished
.

In the interest of the strictest accuracy, one should add that, lower down his transformed body, – inside borrowed pantaloons (delicacy forbids the publication of explicit details), – something else, let us leave it at that, got a little smaller, too.

Be that as it may: it transpired that the optimism of the report in the imported movie magazine had been ill founded, because within days of its publication the local papers carried news of Billy Battuta’s arrest, in a midtown New York sushi bar, along with a female companion, Mildred Mamoulian, described as an actress, forty years of age. The story was that he had approached numbers of society matrons, ‘movers and shakers’, asking for ‘very substantial’ sums of money which he had claimed to need in order to buy his freedom from a sect of devil worshippers. Once a confidence man, always a confidence man: it was what Mimi Mamoulian would no doubt have described as a beautiful sting. Penetrating
the heart of American religiosity, pleading to be saved – ‘when you sell your soul you can’t expect to buy back cheap’ – Billy had banked, the investigators alleged, ‘six figure sums’. The world community of the faithful longed, in the late 1980s, for
direct contact with the supernal
, and Billy, claiming to have raised (and therefore to need rescuing from) infernal fiends, was on to a winner, especially as the Devil he offered was so democratically responsive to the dictates of the Almighty Dollar. What Billy offered the West Side matrons in return for their fat cheques was verification: yes, there is a Devil; I’ve seen him with my own eyes – God, it was frightful! – and if Lucifer existed, so must Gabriel; if Hellfire had been seen to burn, then somewhere, over the rainbow, Paradise must surely shine. Mimi Mamoulian had, it was alleged, played a full part in the deceptions, weeping and pleading for all she was worth. They were undone by overconfidence, spotted at Takesushi (whooping it up and cracking jokes with the chef) by a Mrs Aileen Struwelpeter who had, only the previous afternoon, handed the then-distraught and terrified couple a five-thousand-dollar cheque. Mrs Struwelpeter was not without influence in the New York Police Department, and the boys in blue arrived before Mimi had finished her tempura. They both went quietly. Mimi was wearing, in the newspaper photographs, what Chamcha guessed was a forty-thousand-dollar mink coat, and an expression on her face that could only be read one way.

The hell with you all
.

Nothing further was heard, for some while, about Farishta’s film.

It was so, it was not
, that as Saladin Chamcha’s incarceration in the body of a devil and the attic of the Shaandaar B and B lengthened into weeks and months, it became impossible not to notice that his condition was worsening steadily. His horns (notwithstanding their single, momentary and unobserved diminution) had grown both thicker and longer, twirling themselves into fanciful arabesques, wreathing his head in a turban of darkening bone. He
had grown a thick, long beard, a disorienting development in one whose round, moony face had never boasted much hair before; indeed, he was growing hairier all over his body, and had even sprouted, from the base of his spine, a fine tail that lengthened by the day and had already obliged him to abandon the wearing of trousers; he tucked the new limb, instead, inside baggy salwar pantaloons filched by Anahita Sufyan from her mother’s generously tailored collection. The distress engendered in him by his continuing metamorphosis into some species of bottled djinn will readily be imagined. Even his appetites were altering. Always fussy about his food, he was appalled to find his palate coarsening, so that all foodstuffs began to taste much the same, and on occasion he would find himself nibbling absently at his bedsheets or old newspapers, and come to his senses with a start, guilty and shamefaced at this further evidence of his progress away from manhood and towards – yes – goatishness. Increasing quantities of green mouthwash were required to keep his breath within acceptable limits. It really was too grievous to be borne.