Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

India’s head ached. Insomnia was still her most attentive, cruelest lover, demanding and possessing her selfishly whenever it chose to do so. Light-heartedness was beyond her today. A man of middling quality was trying to marry her and there was something wrong with her father’s voice on the phone. There was no time for Olga Simeonovna’s mock-bigotry. The Russian super was as broad of mind as she was of behind, and her ritual fulminations were soaked in European irony. She pretended that in the privacy of her little apartment she was trying to alter her neighbors’ sexual orientation by casting potato spells but in fact she was majestically uninterested in what went on behind closed doors. Sex, doggy or bitchy fashion, missionary or convert style, was no longer a concern of hers. In love, however, she continued to affect an interest. “Say him yes, my gorgeous. Sure, why not. You will be very happy, ten percent probability minimum, and if not, bah. Marriage I remember from when it was God’s great sacrament, the unbreakable promise, but I am extinct Russian dinosaur. Marriage now is what, car rental. Thank you for using our service, we’ll pick you up, when you’re done with the vehicle we’ll take you home again. Get all the insurance you can get up front, loss damage waiver, whatever, and the risk is nothing. You crash the car, you walk away without nothing to pay. Go for it, baby, who you gonna save it for? They don’t make no glass slippers no more. They already closed the factory. They don’t make no princes neither. They shot the Romanovs in a cellar and Anastasia too is dead.”

Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. This unsettled people. There were collisions and explosions. The world was no longer calm. She thought of Housman in Shropshire. That is the land of lost content. For the poet, happiness was the past. It was that other country where they did things differently. England, England. An air that kills. She had had an English childhood too, but she did not remember it as a golden place, she had no sense of a better before. For her that disenchanted after-land was where she had lived all her life. It was all there was. Contentment, contentedness, content, these variant forms were the names of dreams. If he could offer her such a dream, her suitor, maybe it would be a greater gift than love. She went back to her apartment to consider his proposal, damn it, what was his fucking name. Judd Flood.

Another beautiful day. The road where she lived, leafy, bohemian, moved through the indolent light, dawdling, taking its time. The city’s greatest illusion was of sufficiency, of space, of time, of possibility. Across the hall from her apartment Mr. Khadaffy Andang’s door was open as usual, standing about two feet ajar, affording a glimpse into a darkened vestibule. The silver-haired Filipino gentleman had lived in the building longer than anyone else. India had once surprised him at the washing machines when she returned from a rare late night out, and had herself been surprised to see how nattily turned out he was in that predawn hour: the silk dressing-gown, the cigarette holder, the perfume, the slicked-back hair. After that, on occasion, they talked while the laundry was being done. He told her about the Philippines, about his home province of Basilan, a word that meant “iron trail.” Once there had been a legendary ruler there, he said, Sultan Kudarat, but then the Spanish came and overthrew him, and the Jesuits came too, just like the discovery of California. He told her about Yakan weddings and Samal fisherfolk’s stilt-houses and the wild ducks of Malamawi. He said that it had been a peaceful place but now there was trouble between Muslims and Christians and he had come away from that, he and his wife wanted only to make their life good, but unfortunately that had not been his fate. Still, in America, life was la dolce vita, wasn’t it, even for the people for whom it wasn’t. He accepted his fate, he said, and then the laundry was ready. She was touched by this sweet, shuffling gentleman and looked forward to their talks, even telling him something of her own life, overcoming her natural reserve.

Sometimes in the lobby there were fashionable mail-order catalogs waiting for him. Yet, as Olga Simeonovna confirmed, he rarely left the building except to buy essential groceries and supplies. His wife, the wife he had brought to America in search of a good life, had left him some years ago for a loan company repo man. India imagined the music of the Filipino language, of its insults. She thought of it as a softer, more flowing Japanese. A language of rolling, curvaceous obloquies, like woodwinds. “He keeps himself ready,” Olga confided, “in case Mrs. Andang returns. That’s why the open door policy. But she won’t be coming back.” The repo man had pals in the insurance game. “They fixed her up good. She’s covered from dollar one all the way up the wazoo. Health, teeth, accidents. She has now her comfort zone. This Mr. Andang was unable to provide. At her age such things signify.” In spite of which Mr. Andang left his door ajar. The city sang its love songs, deluding him, making him hope.

The ambassador’s Bentley was turning in to the street. There were parking restrictions in force on India’s side of the street because it was the day the garbage trucks came to collect the trash. The sidewalk was broad. India’s building had an entry-phone system. All this slowed things down, increased his window of vulnerability. There were procedures Max Ophuls knew intimately from his days in the secret job, the job whose name could not be spoken, the job that didn’t exist except that it did, but the ambassador was not thinking about those procedures. He was thinking about his daughter and how strongly she would disapprove of his just-terminated liaison with the woman who looked like her, who looked like her mother as well as her. The procedures required advance men to precede him, to block off a parking space right in front of the venue, to pre-enter the address and secure it, to hold the door open. Any professional in this area knew that the so-called principal was easiest to attack in the space between the door of his vehicle and the door of the location he planned to enter. But the threat assessment against Max Ophuls was not high nowadays and the risk assessment was lower. Threat and risk were not the same. Threat was a general level of presumed danger, while the level of risk was particular to any given activity. It was possible for the threat level to be high while at the same time the risk attached to a given decision, for example a last-minute whim to go see your daughter, could be negligibly low. These things had once been important. Now he was just an old man investigating a cock-and-bull story about underground lizard people, a sexually inactive individual, recently rejected by his lover, a father paying an unpremeditated house call on his child. This was within established safety parameters.

Like any other professional in this field, Max knew that there was no such thing as complete security. The videotape of the shooting of President Reagan was the illustrative tool that best demonstrated this. Here was the president moving from building to car. These were the positions of the members of the security detail. All of the positions were ideal. Here came the assailant. These were the reaction times of the officers in the team. The times were extraordinary, the officers’ responses exceeding what was expected of them. The president was not shot because of a mistake. There had been no mistake. But the president had been shot. POTUS was down. The most powerful man in the world, surrounded by the planet’s security elite, was not secure between the door of the secure building and the door of the armored car. Security was percentages. Nothing was ever one hundred percent.