Joseph Anton: A Memoir (97 page)

He was standing in the doorway of the Halcyon Hotel watching the police Jaguars pull away. Then he remembered that he ought to go to see the real estate agents in Westbourne Grove, sign the rental papers for the Colville Mews house, and take another look at the place. “All right then,” he thought, “here goes.” He walked out of the Halcyon Hotel onto Holland Park Avenue and stuck out an arm to hail a passing cab.

I would like to thank all those whose help and advice shaped this memoir: everyone at Emory University’s MARBL archives, without whose ordering and cataloging work over the last several years my papers would have been in far too chaotic a condition to allow me even to think about this project, and thanks to whom it became possible to write it; Vanessa Manko, for her invaluable media research; my editors at Random House, Louise Dennys, Dan Franklin, Will Murphy, and Susan Kamil, for their commentary on the draft text; and the book’s other early readers, Andrew Wylie, Sameen Rushdie, Elizabeth West, Aimee Mullins, Taryn Simon, Hanan al-Shaykh, Bill Buford, Ian McEwan, Pauline Melville, Reggie Nadelson, Min Katrina Lieskovsky, Francesco Clemente, Deepa Mehta and Christopher Hitchens, for their helpful responses. A few of the passages in these pages have appeared before, in somewhat different form, as essays and articles in various newspapers and magazines, notably
The New Yorker
and
The New York Times
. Thanks to Universal Studios for permission to quote from Evan Hunter’s screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds;
to Harvill Secker for permission to quote a passage from Mikhail Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita
, translated by Michael Glenny; to New Directions for permission to quote parts of “The Ivy Crown” by William Carlos Williams; to George Braziller for permission to quote from the anthology
For Rushdie;
and to Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, editors of
The Rushdie File
, Carmel Bedford, editor of
Fiction, Fact, and
the Fatwa
, as well the many other commentators whose thoughts and opinions are quoted throughout.

Some people’s names have been changed, for the most part those of the serving members of my protection teams, to all of whom, finally, I would like to express my very special thanks. If it had not been for the efforts of the officers of “A” Squad, Special Branch, Metropolitan Police, and their colleagues in the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of the United Kingdom, I might not have been in a position to write this—or indeed any other—book.

S.R
.

S
ALMAN
R
USHDIE
is the author of eleven novels—
Luka and the Fire of Life
,
Grimus
,
Midnight’s Children
(for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker),
Shame
,
The Satanic Verses
,
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
,
The Moor’s Last Sigh
,
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
,
Fury
,
Shalimar the Clown
, and
The Enchantress of Florence
—and one collection of short stories,
East, West
. He has also published three works of nonfiction—
The Jaguar Smile
,
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991,
and
Step Across This Line
—and coedited two anthologies,
Mirrorwork
and
Best American Short Stories 2008
. He is a former president of American PEN.