Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  After her father died she sat on the Shaker chair in the vestibule of her apartment, for how long, an hour, a year, looking straight ahead, seeing nothing, while in the corridors and by the courtyard pool the old ladies gossiped and on the sidewalk the “guy community” of whom Olga Volga idly and not ill-naturedly complained came to scope out the scene of the crime, the guy gym rats, the guy girls in the haircut business, the guy Hispanic builders whose work a block away was never done, the guy Emperor of Ice Cream who woke the street up every morning when he reversed his van out of its parking bay, its tinkling ice-cream melodies turned up high like a mechanical dawn chorus or his empire’s national anthem. The (straight) young man who wanted to marry India had climbed across onto her balcony from the apartment next door and hammered on her sliding glass doors but he was an irrelevance now, she was done with him, he didn’t even have a name, and what did he think he was doing hammering like that out there, what was she supposed to do, open up and put out? but that was disgusting, this was no time for sex.

  Where was justice? Shouldn’t justice be done? Where were the forces of justice, where was the Justice League, why weren’t superheroes swooping down out of the sky to bring her father’s murderer to justice? But she didn’t want the Justice League, really, those goody-goodies in their weird suits, she wanted the Revenge League, she wanted dark superheroes, hard men who wouldn’t meekly hand the killer over to the authorities, who would gladly kill the bastard, who would shoot him down like a dog, or like wild dogs themselves tear him to bloody bits, who would take his life from him slowly and with pain. She wanted avenging angels, angels of death and damnation, to come to her aid. Blood called out for blood and she wanted the ancient Furies to descend shrieking from the sky and give her father’s unquiet spirit peace. She didn’t know what she wanted. She was full of thoughts of death.

  We don’t fully understand his motivation, Ms. Ophuls, it looks political at this point, your father served his country in some hot zones, he swam for America through some pretty muddy water, yes ma’am, and the assassin’s a pro, no doubt. Used to be the case that they didn’t make war on women and children, it was kind of a code-of-honor thing, the target was the target and you got no points in heaven for killing kids or spouses. But things are rougher now, some of these guys aren’t so squeamish anymore, and in this case there’s some stuff we don’t understand yet, we have some blanks to fill in, so we’ve got to have a degree of concern, ma’am, we respect your feelings but we want to get you to a secure location.

  Stern men offered her stiff-backed police-officer comfort and advice, some of them—all of them—secretly wanting to offer comfort of a more personal, informal kind: uniformed police officers and plainclothesmen from previously-unknown-to-her counterterrorist outfits, hunting for answers and issuing disgraceful interim warnings. You owe it to the neighborhood. They were siding with the jumpy residents. This wasn’t right. She was an innocent woman. She owed nobody anything and to suggest otherwise was ugly. It was, gentlemen, unattractive. She imagined the circling officers in oiled Full Monty undress, wearing police hats and studded leather posing pouches with their badges pinned on the front, imagined them swarming around her seated body, caressing her without touching her, and placing, against her unsurprised cheek, their cold, long-barreled guns. She imagined them in white tie and tails, soft-shoe shuffling—gumshoe shuffling—or tap-dancing with top hats and canes, imagined herself a ginger to their freds, being tossed lightly about from hand to manly hand. She imagined them as a second chorus to go with the cassocked gossips. Her thoughts were acting up, she couldn’t help it. She was a little crazy right now.

  After a further while—a week, or a decade—she picked up her golden bow and drove to Elysian Park and rained arrows on a target hour after hour. She opened the little wall-safe where she kept her firearms and drove the DeLorean, her father’s absurd last gift to her, into the desert for a weekend at Saltzman’s range. She taped her hands and booked ring time at Jimmy Fish, where the other boxers watched her with the deferential respect accorded to those wearing the numinous mantle of tragedy, with the religious adoration accorded to those who have had their picture on TV and in People magazine as well. They looked like the citizens of Mycenae scrutinizing their grief-maddened queen after her daughter had been sacrificed, Iphigenia offered to the gods by Agamemnon to summon up a wind to blow his fleet to Troy. She felt like Clytemnestra, cold, patient, capable of anything. She went back to her Wing Chun master to practice her close combat skills and he spoke appreciatively of the new venom of her forehand smash. (Her defensive weaknesses, however, continued to be a concern.) She couldn’t sleep until she was physically exhausted and when she finally slept she dreamed of circling choruses. Her younger self was being reborn in her. She went out by herself at night looking for trouble and once, twice, had rough sex with strangers in anonymous rooms and came home with dried blood under her fingernails. She showered and went back to Elysian Park, to Santa Monica and Vine, to 29 Palms. Her arrows hissed into the heart of the target. Her handgun shooting, never of the highest quality, always a tad wild, grew a little more accurate. In Fish’s boxing ring she ordered her instructor to glove up, to put down the pads he wore on his hands, the flat pads she was supposed to hit without being at risk of being hit back. That was bullshit, she told him. She wasn’t showing up for exercise anymore. She was showing up to fight.

  She had been planning a documentary feature called Camino Real, the Discovery Channel had been this close to green-lighting it. The idea was to examine the contemporary life of California by following the trail of the first European land expedition, from San Diego to San Francisco, an expedition led by Captain Gaspar de Portola and Captain Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, whose diarist had been Fray Juan Crespi, the same Franciscan priest who named Santa Monica after the tears of St. Augustine’s mother, and who, for good measure, named L.A. as well. She hadn’t thought of the historical angle as much more than a hook, she wasn’t really interested in the twenty-one Franciscan missions established along the trail, because the now stuff was what she was after, the changing gang culture of the barrios, the trailer-park families in the shadow of the freeways, the swarming immigrant armies that fed the housing boom, the new pleasantvilles being built in the firetrap canyons to house the middle-class arrivistes, the less-pleasantvilles in the thick of the urban sprawl filling up with the Koreans, the Indians, the illegals; she wanted the dirty underbelly of paradise, the broken harp-strings, the cracked haloes, the narcotic bliss, the human bloat, the truth. Then her father died and she stopped working on the film and sat on her Shaker chair and got up and went out and shot arrows and bullets and worked the punchball and tangled with her martial arts teacher and fucked strangers once each and drew blood and came home to shower and what she kept thinking was where are the angels, where were they when he needed them, the truth being that there weren’t any, no winged marvels keeping watch over the City of Angels. No guardian spirits to save her father. Where were the goddamned angels when he died.

  The city’s angels were far away, in another earthquake zone. They were Italian and had never seen the city. Along with the Virgin Mary they were painted on the altar wall of St. Francis of Assisi’s first, little church of La Porziuncola, porciúncula in Spanish, meaning the “very small plot of land.” On Wednesday, August 2, 1769, the Portola expedition had reached the purlieus of what was now Elysian Park and made camp on Buena Vista Hill, and Fray Juan Crespi, struck by the beauty of the valley, named the river after St. Francis’s church, whose memory he carried with him like a cross. He was forty-eight years old and already bore within himself the worm of a slowly approaching death, but whenever the worm stirred in him the image of the angels of La Porziuncola acted as an antidote, pushing away morbidity and reminding him of the joyous and everlasting life to come. He named the Los Angeles River after the angels of Assisi and their holy mistress and twelve years later, when a new settlement was established here, it took its title from the river’
s full name, becoming El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Very Small Plot of Land. But the City of Angels now stood on a Very Large Plot of Land Indeed, thought India Ophuls, and those who dwelt there needed mightier protectors than they had been given, A-list, A-team angels, angels familiar with the violence and disorder of giant cities, butt-kicking Angeleno angels, not the small-time, underpowered, effeminate, hello-birds-hello-sky, love-and-peace, sissy-Assisi kind.

  The murder of Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls was being mourned worldwide. The French government officially lamented the fall of one of the last surviving heroes of the Resistance, and the French press glowingly retold the story of the flight of the Bugatti Racer. India’s fragmenting, infighting leadership united to praise Max as a true friend of the country, committed to “an honorable Indo-Pak détente,” and the scandal that had ended his ambassadorship was barely mentioned. There were tributes from the White House and from the U.S. intelligence community as well. As with the invisible man in the movie, death restored Max to something like full visibility, declassifying many details of his life; the lengthy obituaries and effusive encomia revealed his long service to his country at the heart of the invisible world during his last, hidden career as a senior spook, in the Mideast, the Gulf, Central America, Africa and Afghanistan. Three years after the ignominious termination of his New Delhi posting he was deemed to have atoned for his sins, to have been cleansed by the temporary withdrawal of power, and he was offered a chance to serve in a new capacity. The post of U.S. counterterrorism chief, which Max agelessly went on to hold for longer than anyone else, under several different administrations, was of ambassadorial rank, but was never spoken of in public. The person who held the job could not be named, his movements were not mentioned in the newspapers; he slipped across the globe like a shadow, his presence detectable only by its influence on the actions of others. India Ophuls had believed herself to have grown close to her father in his last years but she learned, now, of another Max, about whom the Max she knew had never spoken, Max the occult servant of American geopolitical interest, Your father served his country in some hot zones, he swam for America through some pretty muddy water, Invisible Max, on whose invisible hands there might very well be, there almost certainly was, there had to be, didn’t there, a quantity of the world’s visible and invisible blood.

  What then was justice? Was she, in mourning her butchered parent, crying out (she had not wept) for a guilty man? Was Shalimar the assassin in fact the hand of justice, the appointed executioner of some unseen high court, was his sword righteous, had justice been done to Max, had some sort of sentence been carried out in response to his unknown unlisted unseen crimes of power, because blood will have blood, an eye demands an eye, and how many eyes had her father covertly put out, by direct action or indirect, one, or a hundred, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, how many trophied corpses, like stags’ heads, adorned his secret walls?

  The words right and wrong began to crumble, to lose meaning, and it was as if Max were being murdered all over again, assassinated by the voices who were praising him, as if the Max she knew were being unmade and replaced by this other Max, this stranger, this clone-Max moving through the world’s burning desert places, part arms dealer, part kingmaker, part terrorist himself, dealing in the future, which was the only currency that mattered more than the dollar. He had been a puissant speculator in that mightiest and least controllable of all currencies, had been both a manipulator and a benefactor, both a philanthropist and a dictator, both creator and destroyer, buying or stealing the future from those who no longer deserved to possess it, selling the future to those who would be most useful in it, smiling the false lethal smile of power at all the planet’s future-greedy hordes, its murderous doctors, its paranoid holy warriors, its embattled high priests, its billionaire financiers, its insane dictators, its generals, its venal politicians, its thugs. He had been a dealer in the dangerous, hallucinogenic narcotic of the future, offering it at a price to his chosen addicts, the reptilian cohorts of the future which his country had chosen for itself and for others; Max, her unknown father, the invisible robotic servant of his adopted country’s overweening amoral might.

  Her telephones rang but she didn’t answer them. Her buzzer buzzed but she didn’t respond. Her friends were concerned, they left urgent expressions of concern on her voice mail, they shouted their concern from the street below her balcony, Come on, India, let us in, you’re scaring us here, but she kept her defenses up, her defenses being Olga Volga and the pairs of police officers guarding her floor in two-hour shifts, No visitors, she told them, banishing her increasingly angry friends from her presence. Her beloved friend the high-powered executive headhunter, a gesticulating Italian woman with acute foot-in-mouth disease, sent her an e-mail expressing the general exasperation, Okay, darling, so your dad is dead, okay, it’s sad, I agree, it’s horrible, no question about it, but what, are you going to kill us all as well, we’re dying here with worry, how many deaths do you want on your conscience? But even her closest intimates didn’t feel real to her anymore, not even her film producer friend who had only just survived a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight and who now, restored to health, had taken to recommending the quadruple-bypass operation enthusiastically to all his colleagues, not even her friend the personal trainer, presently unattached, whose eggs had made babies for four other women but who had no children of her own, not even her friend (and former lover) who managed a band whose name changed every day and who kept signing contracts with indie outfits that immediately went belly-up so that the band was getting an unfortunate reputation as a jinx, not even her friend who broke up with her husband because he got angry when she complained about his snoring, not even her friend who left his wife for a man of the same name, not even her geek friend who was losing his dot-com fortune, not even her broke friends who were always broke, not even her cameraman, her sound guy, her accountant, her lawyer, her therapist, these were stories she couldn’t relate to right now, she was the only person who felt real to herself, apart from her dead father and the assassin, they were real, and when she was in the ring with her instructor Jimmy Fish he briefly felt real as well.

  Fish was a stocky middle-aged man with thick bottle-black Italian hair, heavy in the gut, his face still handsome in a flat-nosed Marciano way, and he was pulling his punches, which didn’t mean they didn’t hurt. The first time he hit her, in the stomach, avoiding her breasts, she was badly shocked and a little scared, but she stayed calm, the ice didn’t leave her veins, and moments later she connected with a pair of fast left jabs to the chin and had the satisfaction of seeing the anger flare up in his eyes, seeing him working to fight it down. He called a time-out. They were both breathing heavily. “Listen,” he said. “You’re a beautiful lady, you don’t want me to damage anything you can’t fix.” She shrugged. “Seems to me,” she said, “that you’re the one who just got himself cluster-punched in the mouth by a woman.” He shook his head mournfully, and spoke more slowly, like a parent. “You’re not paying attention,” he said. “I was a ranking light-heavy. You know this. I was ranking. I got in the ring with people you don’t want to even imagine getting in the ring with, not even to hold up the card saying what round. You think you can take me? Lady, I’m a professional fighter. You follow? You’re a Sunday driver. Don’t make me hit you. Let me put the pads back on my hands and you can get yourself a great workout, tone that body you got there, that’s like a national treasure. You work with what God gave you and stop dreaming. You think I’m fighting you here? Baby, you can’t fight me. You fight me, you’re dead. Pay attention now. This is serious. You’re not in the family business. You’re a civilian. You’re Kay Corleone. You can’t fight me.”

  She touched gloves with him and backed off, going into her crouch, shuffling, dancing. “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” she said. “I don’t come here to talk.”

  Her father’s ki
ller was her mother’s husband. The investigation had uncovered this one immense, all-explaining, devastating thing. The crime, which had at first looked political, turned out to be a personal matter, insofar as anything was personal anymore. The assassin was a professional, but the consequences of U.S. policy choices in South Asia, and their echoes in the labyrinthine chambers of the paranoiac jihadi mind, these and other related geopolitical variables receded from the analysis, could with a high percentage of probability be eliminated from the equation. The picture had simplified, becoming a familiar image: the cuckolded and now avenged husband, the disgraced and now very nearly decapitated philanderer, locked in a final embrace. The motive, too, turned out to be conventional. Cherchez la femme. India had learned the murderer’s real name, which sounded more like an alias than his alias, and the reports confirmed his wife’s name as well, her mother’s name, which India knew already because she had found it in an old copy of the Indian Express preserved on microfiche at the British Museum’s newspaper library in Colindale. Neither India’s father nor the woman she lived with when she was a child had ever spoken that name: not once in a quarter-century. Her father had once accidentally referred to his lover by the name of her greatest role, Anarkali, and India, watching him as only children watch their parents, saw an expression cross his face that only crossed it when he thought about her mother, an expression in which his undimmed desire for the young dancing girl mingled with shame, nostalgia and something darker, a premonition of death, perhaps, an intuition of how this particular Anarkali’s story would end. As for the woman who was not her mother, the woman she had lived with when she was a child, on the rare occasions when that woman was forced by India’s questions to allude to the birth mother she used the term paramour, as in your father’s paramour, and when irked by India’s insistence she would say in a tone of finality, We will not speak of her. But now the wheel had turned and it was that woman’s name which was never spoken, not by India, anyhow, whereas Bhoomi a.k.a. Boonyi Kaul Noman’s name was traveling the world’s airwaves on, for example, CNN.