The Satanic Verses (73 page)

Pass it on
. He returned as innocent as ever, giving birth to a turmoil of butterflies in Gibreel’s knotting stomach. After that the rhymes came thick and fast. They could have the smuttiness of the school playground:

or, once or twice, the rhythm of a cheerleader’s chant.

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.

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
.

T
he 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.’