The Satanic Verses (40 page)

           
"Mimi," he said, "something's happened to me," but she was
still protesting too much and missed it. He put the receiver down without
giving her his address.

           
She rang him once more, a few weeks later, and by now the unspoken precedents
had been set; she didn't ask for, he didn't give his whereabouts, and it was
plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart, it was time
to wave goodbye. It was still all Billy with Mimi: his plans to make Hindi
movies in England and America, importing the top stars, Vinod Khanna, Sridevi, to
cavort in front of Bradford Town Hall and the Golden Gate
Bridge―"it's some sort of tax dodge, obviously," Mimi carolled
gaily. In fact, things were heating up for Billy; Chamcha had seen his name in
the papers, coupled with the terms
fraud squad
and
tax evasion
,
but once a scam man, always a ditto, Mimi said. "So he says to me, do you
want a mink? I say, Billy, don't buy me things, but he says, who's talking
about buying? Have a mink. It's business." They had been in New York
again, and Billy had hired a stretched Mercedes limousine "and a stretched
chauffeur also". Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh
and his moll. Mimi tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy's lead.
At length he said, You like that one? It's nice. Billy, she whispered, it's
forty
thousand
, but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday
afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. "Well, by
now they know he's an oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the coat, and
he takes me into another store right around the block, points to the coat, and
says, I just bought this for forty thousand dollars, here's the receipt, will
you give me thirty for it, I need the cash, big weekend ahead."―Mimi
and Billy had been kept waiting while the second store rang the first, where
all the alarm bells went off in the manager's brain, and five minutes later the
police arrived, arrested Billy for passing a dud cheque, and he and Mimi spent
the weekend in jail. On Monday morning the banks opened and it turned out that
Billy's account was in credit to the tune of forty-two thousand, one hundred
and seventeen dollars, so the cheque had been good all the time. He informed
the furriers of his intention to sue them for two million dollars damages, defamation
of character, open and shut case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out
of court for $250,000 on the nail. "Don't you love him?" Mimi asked
Chamcha. "The boy's a genius. I mean, this was
class
."

           
I am a man, Chamcha realized, who does not know the score, living in an amoral,
survivalist, get-away-with-it-world. Mishal and Anahita Sufyan, who still
unaccountably treated him like a kind of soul-mate, in spite of all his
attempts to dissuade them, were beings who plainly admired such creatures as
moonlighters, shoplifters, filchers: scam artists in general. He corrected
himself: not admired, that wasn't it. Neither girl would ever steal a pin. But
they saw such persons as representatives of the gestalt, of how-it-was. As an
experiment he told them the story of Billy Battuta and the mink coat. Their
eyes shone, and at the end they applauded and giggled with delight: wickedness
unpunished made them laugh. Thus, Chamcha realized, people must once have
applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws, Dick Turpin, Ned Kelly,
Phoolan Devi, and of course that other Billy: William Bonney, also a Kid.

           
"Scrapheap Youths' Criminal Idols," Mishal read his mind and then,
laughing at his disapproval, translated it into yellowpress headlines, while
arranging her long, and, Chamcha realized, astonishing body into similarly
exaggerated cheesecake postures. Pouting outrageously, fully aware of having
stirred him, she prettily added: "Kissy kissy?"

           
Her younger sister, not to be outdone, attempted to copy Mishal's pose, with
less effective results. Abandoning the attempt with some annoyance, she spoke
sulkily. "Trouble is, we've got good prospects, us. Family business, no
brothers, bob's your uncle. This place makes a packet, dunnit? Well then."
The Shaandaar rooming-house was categorized as a Bed and Breakfast
establishment, of the type that borough councils were using more and more owing
to the crisis in public housing, lodging five-person families in single rooms,
turning blind eyes to health and safety regulations, and claiming
"temporary accommodation" allowances from the central government.
"Ten quid per night per person," Anahita informed Chamcha in his
attic. "Three hundred and fifty nicker per room per week, it comes to, as
often as not. Six occupied rooms: you work it out. Right now, we're losing
three hundred pounds a month on this attic, so I hope you feel really
bad." For that kind of money, it struck Chamcha, you could rent pretty
reasonable family-sized apartments in the private sector. But that wouldn't be
classified as temporary accommodation; no central funding for such solutions.
Which would also be opposed by local politicians committed to fighting the
"cuts".
La lutte continue
; meanwhile, Hind and her daughters
raked in the cash, unworldly Sufyan went to Mecca and came home to dispense
homely wisdom, kindliness and smiles. And behind six doors that opened a crack
every time Chamcha went to make a phone call or use the toilet, maybe thirty
temporary human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent.

           
The real world.

           
"You needn't look so fish-faced and holy, anyway," Mishal Sufyan
pointed out. "Look where all your law abiding got you."

           
* * * * *

           
"Your universe is shrinking." A busy man, Hal Valance, creator of
The
Aliens Show
and sole owner of the property, took exactly seventeen seconds
to congratulate Chamcha on being alive before beginning to explain why this
fact did not affect the show's decision to dispense with his services. Valance
had started out in advertising and his vocabulary had never recovered from the
blow. Chamcha could keep up, however. All those years in the voiceover business
taught you a little bad language. In marketing parlance,
a universe
was
the total potential market for a given product or service: the chocolate
universe, the slimming universe. The dental universe was everybody with teeth;
the others were the denture cosmos. "I'm talking," Valance breathed
down the phone in his best Deep Throat voice, "about the ethnic
universe."

           
My people again
: Chamcha, disguised in turban and the rest of his
ill-fitting drag, hung on a telephone in a passageway while the eyes of
impermanent women and children gleamed through barely opened doors; and
wondered what his people had done to him now. "No capeesh," he said,
remembering Valance's fondness for Italian-American argot―this was, after
all, the author of the fast food slogan
Getta pizza da action
. On this
occasion, however, Valance wasn't playing. "Audience surveys show,"
he breathed, "that ethnics don't watch ethnic shows. They don't want 'em,
Chamcha. They want fucking
Dynasty
, like everyone else. Your profile's
wrong, if you follow: with you in the show it's just too damn racial.
The
Aliens Show
is too big an idea to be held back by the racial dimension. The
merchandising possibilities alone, but I don't have to tell you this."

           
Chamcha saw himself reflected in the small cracked mirror above the phone box.
He looked like a marooned genie in search of a magic lamp. "It's a point
of view," he answered Valance, knowing argument to be useless. With Hal,
all explanations were post facto rationalizations. He was strictly a seat-of-the-pants
man, who took for his motto the advice given by Deep Throat to Bob Woodward:
Follow
the money
. He had the phrase set in large sans-serif type and pinned up in
his office over a still from
All the President's Men
: Hal Holbrook
(another Hal!) in the car park, standing in the shadows. Follow the money: it
explained, as he was fond of saying, his five wives, all independently wealthy,
from each of whom he had received a handsome divorce settlement. He was
presently married to a wasted child maybe one-third his age, with waist-length
auburn hair and a spectral look that would have made her a great beauty a
quarter of a century earlier. "This one doesn't have a bean; she's taking
me for all I've got and when she's taken it she'll bugger off," Valance
had told Chamcha once, in happier days. "What the hell. I'm human, too.
This time it's love." More cradlesnatching. No escape from it in these
times. Chamcha on the telephone found he couldn't remember the infant's name.
"You know my motto," Valance was saying. "Yes," Chamcha
said neutrally. "It's the right line for the product." The product,
you bastard, being you.

           
By the time he met Hal Valance (how many years ago? Five, maybe six), over
lunch at the White Tower, the man was already a monster: pure, self-created
image, a set of attributes plastered thickly over a body that was, in Hal's own
words, "in training to be Orson Welles". He smoked absurd, caricature
cigars, refusing all Cuban brands, however, on account of his uncompromisingly
capitalistic stance. He owned a Union Jack waistcoat and insisted on flying the
flag over his agency and also above the door of his Highgate home; was prone to
dress up as Maurice Chevalier and sing, at major presentations, to his amazed
clients, with the help of straw boater and silver-headed cane; claimed to own
the first Loire ch‰teau to be fitted with telex and fax machines; and made much
of his "intimate" association with the Prime Minister he referred to
affectionately as "Mrs. Torture". The personification of philistine
triumphalism, mid-atlantic-accented Hal was one of the glories of the age, the
creative half of the city's hottest agency, the Valance Lang Partnership.
Like Billy Battuta he liked big cars driven by big chauffeurs. It was said that
once, while being driven at high speed down a Cornish lane in order to
"heat up" a particularly glacial seven-foot Finnish model, there had
been an accident: no injuries, but when the other driver emerged furiously from
his wrecked vehicle he turned out to be even larger than Hal's minder. As this
colossus bore down on him, Hal lowered his push-button window and breathed,
with a sweet smile: "I strongly advise you to turn around and walk swiftly
away; because, sir, if you do not do so within the next fifteen seconds, I am
going to have you killed." Other advertising geniuses were famous for
their work: Mary Wells for her pink Braniff planes, David Ogilvy for his
eyepatch, Jerry della Femina for "From those wonderful folks who gave you
Pearl Harbor". Valance, whose agency went in for cheap and cheerful
vulgarity, all bums and honky-tonk, was renowned in the business for this
(probably apocryphal) "I'm going to have you killed", a turn of
phrase which proved, to those in the know, that the guy really was a genius.
Chamcha had long suspected he'd made up the story, with its perfect ad-land
components―Scandinavian icequeen, two thugs, expensive cars, Valance in
the Blofeld role and 007 nowhere on the scene―and put it about himself,
knowing it to be good for business.

           
The lunch was by way of thanking Chamcha for his part in a recent, smash-hit
campaign for Slimbix diet foods. Saladin had been the voice of a cutesy cartoon
blob:
Hi. I'm Cal, and I'm one sad calorie
. Four courses and plenty of
champagne as a reward for persuading people to starve.
How's a poor calorie
to earn a salary? Thanks to Slimbix, I'm out of work
. Chamcha hadn't known
what to expect from Valance. What he got was, at least, unvarnished.
"You've done well," Hal congratulated him, "for a person of the
tinted persuasion." And proceeded, without taking his eyes off Chamcha's
face: "Let me tell you some facts. Within the last three months, we
re-shot a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black
kid in the background. We re-recorded a building society jingle because
T'Chairman thought the singer sounded black, even though he was white as a
sodding sheet, and even though, the year before, we'd used a black boy who,
luckily for him, didn't suffer from an excess of soul. We were told by a major
airline that we couldn't use any blacks in their ads, even though they were
actually employees of the airline. A black actor came to audition for me and he
was wearing a Racial Equality button badge, a black hand shaking a white one. I
said this: don't think you're getting special treatment from me, chum. You
follow me? You follow what I'm telling you?" It's a goddamn audition,
Saladin realized. "I've never felt I belonged to a race," he replied.
Which was perhaps why, when Hal Valance set up his production company, Chamcha
was on his "A list"; and why, eventually, Maxim Alien came his way.

           
When
The Aliens Show
started coming in for stick from black radicals,
they gave Chamcha a nickname. On account of his private-school education and
closeness to the hated Valance, he was known as "Brown Uncle Tom".

           
Apparently the political pressure on the show had increased in Chamcha's
absence, orchestrated by a certain Dr. Uhuru Simba. "Doctor of what, beats
me," Valance deepthroatcd down the phone. "Our ah researchers haven't
come up with anything yet." Mass pickets, an embarrassing appearance on
Right
to Reply
. "The guy's built like a fucking tank." Chamcha
envisaged the pair of them, Valance and Simba, as one another's antitheses. It
seemed that the protests had succeeded: Valance was "de-politicizing"
the show, by firing Chamcha and putting a huge blond Teuton with pectorals and
a quiff inside the prosthetic make-up and computer generated imagery. A
latex-and-Quantel Schwarzenegger, a synthetic, hip-talking version of Rutger
Hauer in
Blade Runner
. The Jews were out, too: instead of Mimi, the new
show would have a voluptuous shiksa doll. "I sent word to Dr. Simba: stick
that up your fucking pee aitch dee. No reply has been received. He'll have to
work harder than that if he's going to take over
this
little country.
I," Hal Valance announced, "love this fucking country. That's why I'm
going to sell it to the whole goddamn world, Japan, America, fucking Argentina.
I'm going to sell the arse off it. That's what I've been selling all my fucking
life: the fucking nation. The
flag
." He didn't hear what he was
saying. When he got going on this stuff, he went puce and often wept. He had
done just that at the White Tower, that first time, while stuffing himself full
of Greek food. The date came back to Chamcha now: just after the Falklands war.
People had a tendency to swear loyalty oaths in those days, to hum "Pomp
and Circumstance" on the buses. So when Valance, over a large balloon of
Armagnac, started up―"I'll tell you why I love this
country"―Chamcha, pro-Falklands himself, thought he knew what was
coming next. But Valance began to describe the research programme of a British
aerospace company, a client of his, which had just revolutionized the
construction of missile guidance systems by studying the flight pattern of the
common housefly. "Inflight course corrections," he whispered
theatrically. "Traditionally done in the line of flight: adjust the angle
up a bit, down a touch, left or right a nadge. Scientists studying high-speed
film of the humble fly, however, have discovered that the little buggers
always, but always, make corrections
in right angles
." He
demonstrated with his hand stretched out, palm flat, fingers together.
"Bzzt! Bzzt! The bastards actually fly vertically up, down or sideways.
Much more accurate. Much more fuel efficient. Try to do it with an engine that
depends on nose-to-tail airflow, and what happens? The sodding thing can't
breathe, stalls, falls out of the sky, lands on your fucking allies. Bad karma.
You follow. You follow what I'm saying. So these guys, they invent an engine
with three-way airflow: nose to tail, plus top to bottom, plus side to side.
And bingo: a missile that flies like a goddamn fly, and can hit a fifty p coin
travelling at a ground speed of one hundred miles an hour at a distance of
three miles. What I love about this country is that: its genius. Greatest
inventors in the world. It's beautiful: am I right or am I right?" He had
been deadly serious. Chamcha answered: "You're right." "You're
damn right I'm right," he confirmed.