The Satanic Verses (76 page)

The fire is an arch across the sky. Saladin Chamcha, the adversary, who is also
Spoono, my old Chumch
, has disappeared into the doorway of the Shaandaar Café. This is the maw of the black hole; the horizon closes around it, all other possibilities fade, the universe shrinks to this solitary and irresistible point. Blowing a great blast on his trumpet, Gibreel plunges through the open door.

The building occupied by the Brickhall community relations council was a single-storey monster in purple brick with bulletproof windows, a bunker-like creation of the 1960s, when such lines were considered sleek. It was not an easy building to enter; the door had been fitted with an entryphone and opened on to a narrow alley down one side of the building which ended at a second, also security-locked, door. There was also a burglar alarm.

This alarm, it afterwards transpired, had been switched off, probably by the two persons, one male, one female, who had effected an entry with the assistance of a key. It was officially suggested that these persons had been bent on an act of sabotage, an ‘inside job’, since one of them, the dead woman, had in fact been an employee of the organization whose offices these were. The reasons for the crime remained obscure, and as the miscreants had perished in the blaze, it was unlikely that they would ever come to light. An ‘own goal’ remained, however, the most probable explanation.

A tragic affair; the dead woman had been heavily pregnant.

Inspector Stephen Kinch, issuing the statement in which these facts were stated, made a ‘linkage’ between the fire at the Brickhall CRC and that at the Shaandaar Café, where the second dead
person, the male, had been a semi-permanent resident. It was possible that the man had been the real firebug and the woman, who was his mistress although married to and still cohabiting with another man, had been no more than his dupe. Political motives – both parties were well known for their radical views – could not be discounted, though such was the muddiness of the water in the far-left groupuscules they frequented that it would be hard ever to get a clear picture of what such motives might have been. It was also possible that the two crimes, even if committed by the same man, could have had different motivations. Possibly the man was simply the hired criminal, burning down the Shaandaar for the insurance money at the behest of the now-deceased owners, and torching the CRC at the behest of his lover, perhaps on account of some intra-office vendetta?

That the burning of the CRC was an act of arson was beyond doubt. Quantities of petrol had been poured over desks, papers, curtains. ‘Many people do not understand how quickly a petrol fire spreads,’ Inspector Kinch stated to scribbling journalists. The corpses, which had been so badly burned that dental records had been required for identification purposes, had been found in the photocopying room. ‘That’s all we have.’ The end.

I have more.

I have certain questions, anyhow. – About, for instance, an unmarked blue Mercedes panel van, which followed Walcott Roberts’s pick-up truck, and then Pamela Chamcha’s MG. – About the men who emerged from this van, their faces behind Hallowe’en masks, and forced their way into the CRC offices just as Pamela unlocked the outer door. – About what really happened inside those offices, because purple brick and bulletproof glass cannot easily be penetrated by the human eye. – And about, finally, the whereabouts of a red plastic briefcase, and the documents it contains.

Inspector Kinch? Are you there?

No. He’s gone. He has no answers for me.

Here is Mr Saladin Chamcha, in the camel coat with the silk collar, running down the High Street like some cheap crook. – The same, terrible Mr Chamcha who has just spent his evening in the company of a distraught Alleluia Cone, without feeling a flicker of remorse. – ‘I look down towards his feet,’ Othello said of Iago, ‘but that’s a fable.’ Nor is Chamcha fabulous any more; his humanity is sufficient form and explanation for his deed. He has destroyed what he is not and cannot be; has taken revenge, returning treason for treason; and has done so by exploiting his enemy’s weakness, bruising his unprotected heel. – There is satisfaction in this. – Still, here is Mr Chamcha, running. The world is full of anger and event. Things hang in the balance. A building burns.

Boomba
, pounds his heart.
Doomba, boomba, dadoom
.

Now he sees the Shaandaar, on fire; and comes to a skidding halt. He has a constricted chest; –
badoomba! –
and there’s a pain in his left arm. He doesn’t notice; is staring at the burning building.

And sees Gibreel Farishta.

And turns; and runs inside.

‘Mishal! Sufyan! Hind!’ cries evil Mr Chamcha. The ground floor is not as yet ablaze. He flings open the door to the stairs, and a scalding, pestilential wind drives him back.
Dragon’s breath
, he thinks. The landing is on fire; the flames reach in sheets from floor to ceiling. No possibility of advance.

‘Anybody?’ screams Saladin Chamcha. ‘Is anybody there?’ But the dragon roars louder than he can shout.

Something invisible kicks him in the chest, sends him toppling backwards, on to the café floor, amid the empty tables.
Doom
, sings his heart.
Take this. And this
.

There is a noise above his head like the scurrying of a billion rats, spectral rodents following a ghostly piper. He looks up: the ceiling is on fire. He finds he cannot stand. As he watches, a section of the ceiling detaches itself, and he sees the segment of beam falling towards him. He crosses his arms in feeble self-defence.

The beam pins him to the floor, breaking both his arms. His chest is full of pain. The world recedes. Breathing is hard. He can’t speak. He is the Man of a Thousand Voices, and there isn’t one left.

Gibreel Farishta, holding Azraeel, enters the Shaandaar Café.

What happens when you win
?

When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong. –
‘Spoono,’ Gibreel nods at the fallen man. ‘You really fooled me, mister; seriously, you’re quite a guy.’ – And Chamcha, seeing what’s in Gibreel’s eyes, cannot deny the knowledge he sees there. ‘Wha,’ he begins, and gives up.
What are you going to do
? Fire is falling all around them now: a sizzle of golden rain. ‘Why’d you do it?’ Gibreel asks, then dismisses the question with a wave of the hand. ‘Damnfool thing to be asking. Might as well inquire, what possessed you to rush in here? Damnfool thing to do. People, eh, Spoono? Crazy bastards, that’s all.’

Now there are pools of fire all around them. Soon they will be encircled, marooned in a temporary island amid this lethal sea. Chamcha is kicked a second time in the chest, and jerks violently. Facing three deaths – by fire, by ‘natural causes’, and by Gibreel – he strains desperately, trying to speak, but only croaks emerge. ‘Fa. Gur. Mmm.’
Forgive me
. ‘Ha. Pa.’
Have pity
. The café tables are burning. More beams fall from above. Gibreel seems to have fallen into a trance. He repeats, vaguely: ‘Bloody damnfool things.’

Is it possible that evil is never total, that its victory, no matter how overwhelming, is never absolute?

Consider this fallen man. He sought without remorse to shatter the mind of a fellow human being; and exploited, to do so, an entirely blameless woman, at least partly owing to his own impossible and voyeuristic desire for her. Yet this same man has risked death, with scarcely any hesitation, in a foolhardy rescue attempt.

What does this mean?

The fire has closed around the two men, and smoke is everywhere.
It can only be a matter of seconds before they are overcome. There are more urgent questions to answer than the
damnfool
ones above.

What choice will Farishta make?

Does he have a choice?

Gibreel lets fall his trumpet; stoops; frees Saladin from the prison of the fallen beam; and lifts him in his arms. Chamcha, with broken ribs as well as arms, groans feebly, sounding like the creationist Dumsday before he got a new tongue of choicest rump. ‘Ta. La.’
It’s too late
. A little lick of fire catches at the hem of his coat. Acrid black smoke fills all available space, creeping behind his eyes, deafening his ears, clogging his nose and lungs. – Now, however, Gibreel Farishta begins softly to exhale, a long, continuous exhalation of extraordinary duration, and as his breath blows towards the door it slices through the smoke and fire like a knife; – and Saladin Chamcha, gasping and fainting, with a mule inside his chest, seems to see – but will ever afterwards be unsure if it was truly so – the fire parting before them like the red sea it has become, and the smoke dividing also, like a curtain or a veil; until there lies before them a clear pathway to the door; – whereupon Gibreel Farishta steps quickly forward, bearing Saladin along the path of forgiveness into the hot night air; so that on a night when the city is at war, a night heavy with enmity and rage, there is this small redeeming victory for love.

Conclusions.

Mishal Sufyan is outside the Shaandaar when they emerge, weeping for her parents, being comforted by Hanif. – It is Gibreel’s turn to collapse; still carrying Saladin, he passes out at Mishal’s feet.

Now Mishal and Hanif are in an ambulance with the two unconscious men, and while Chamcha has an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth Gibreel, suffering nothing worse than exhaustion, is talking in his sleep: a delirious babble about a magic
trumpet and the fire that he blew, like music, from its mouth. – And Mishal, who remembers Chamcha as a devil, and has come to accept the possibility of many things, wonders: ‘Do you think – ?’ – But Hanif is definite, firm. ‘Not a chance. This is Gibreel Farishta, the actor, don’t you recognize? Poor guy’s just playing out some movie scene.’ Mishal won’t let it go. ‘But, Hanif,’ – and he becomes emphatic. Speaking gently, because she has just been orphaned, after all, he absolutely insists. ‘What has happened here in Brickhall tonight is a socio-political phenomenon. Let’s not fall into the trap of some damn mysticism. We’re talking about history: an event in the history of Britain. About the process of change.’