The Satanic Verses (74 page)

Down these simmering streets, one unseasonally humid night, came Gibreel Farishta, blowing his golden horn.

At eight o’clock that evening, a Saturday, Pamela Chamcha stood with Jumpy Joshi – who had refused to let her go unaccompanied – next to the Photo-Me machine in a corner of the main concourse of Euston station, feeling ridiculously conspiratorial. At eight-fifteen she was approached by a wiry young man who seemed taller than she remembered him; following him without a word, she and Jumpy got into his battered blue pick-up truck and were driven to a tiny flat above an off-licence in Railton Road, Brixton, where Walcott Roberts introduced them to his mother, Antoinette. The three men whom Pamela afterwards thought of as Haitians for what she recognized to be stereotypical reasons were not introduced. ‘Have a glass of ginger wine,’ Antoinette Roberts commanded. ‘Good for the baby, too.’

When Walcott had done the honours Mrs Roberts, looking lost in a voluminous and threadbare armchair (her surprisingly pale legs, matchstick-thin, emerging from beneath her black dress to end in mutinous, pink ankle-socks and sensible lace-ups, failed by some distance to reach the floor), got to business. ‘These gentlemen were colleagues of my boy,’ she said. ‘It turns out that the probable reason for his murder was the work he was doing on a subject which I am told is also of interest to you. We believe the time has come to work more formally, through the channels you represent.’ Here one of the three silent ‘Haitians’ handed Pamela a red plastic briefcase. ‘It contains,’ Mrs Roberts mildly explained, ‘extensive evidence of the existence of witches’ covens throughout the Metropolitan Police.’

Walcott stood up. ‘We should go now,’ he said firmly. ‘Please.’ Pamela and Jumpy rose. Mrs Roberts nodded vaguely, absently, cracking the joints of her loose-skinned hands. ‘Goodbye,’ Pamela said, and offered conventional regrets. ‘Girl, don’t waste breath,’ Mrs Roberts broke in. ‘Just nail me those warlocks. Nail them through the
heart
.’

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 cover-up 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 them 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 ruck and become, for a moment, a star. – Or by a kind of transposed death-wish: 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.