Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

In a distant part of her consciousness India knew that she was filling the hole in Olga Simeonovna’s heart left behind by the two departed daughters whose names she never spoke, the twin sisters who had offended against their mother’s moral code by posing for saucy pictures and developing an innuendo-rich blond bombshell sister act to go with them, and who were probably languishing now in some Vegas flea pit or worse, some Howard Johnson hell of multiple ruinations, their noses ruined by drug habits, their mouths and breasts ruined by cheap plastic surgery gone wrong, their finances ruined by the managers slash husbands who ran off with such pathetic assets as they had managed to amass. They had dropped off the map, probably too ashamed to come home and face the mother who daily cursed their names but in whose ample bosom they might nevertheless find redemption, or, at least, themselves.

People were moving out of the building in a hurry, and some of the remaining tenants had suggested unkindly that India should be the one to move, that she was putting them all in danger by staying. Olga reacted to these suggestions with unconcealed maternal fury. “They say me it once, maybe, if they dare,” she told India, bridling, “but, I swear, they don’t gonna say me it twice.” There was a large sign outside the apartment building advertising vacancies but blood takes time to wash away. The arrest, or, to use his preferred word, the word his lawyer used, the surrender of Mr. Khadaffy Andang had spooked many residents already rendered fearful by the murder on their doorstep, the, to use a word that had appeared in the newspaper, execution. The word sleeper was frightening. “All that time I thought he was only waiting for his wife,” Olga Simeonovna marveled in her dark apartment with postcards of Roublev icons and travel agency posters of the Caspian Sea pinned to the wall, pouring India many cups of dark tea-the cups were glasses, really, glass receptacles held in beaten-metal frames-and sighing a deep, Caspian sigh. “Turns out he was a bad guy in spite of his silk dressing-gowns. Asleep, like Rip Van Winkle, but gone over to the Dark Side.” Mr. Khadaffy Andang had shouted up at India as she stood on her balcony and watched his last shuffling exit, his hands cuffed behind his back, the burly LAPD officers ungentle all around him, the street ablaze with the flashing lights of police cars and journalists’ cameras, the air full of megaphoned orders and microphoned reports, everybody go inside, but she stayed on her balcony with her arms crossed over her heart, with her hands hugging her shoulders, not caring about the upturned snouts of the cameras in the street, looking at the police operation, the white vans of the information media with the uplink dishes on their roofs, the police snipers on the building across the road, the crime reporters filing copy, the pool photographers taking her picture; and because she was out there, floating above the event, feeling a little crazy, she heard what Mr. Khadaffy Andang shouted out, twisting himself around and looking right at her just before a police officer put a hood over his head, I don’t buzz him in, Miss India, he shouted. Miss India, he want me to buzz him but I don’t buzz.

She guessed then that Mr. Khadaffy Andang might have surrendered in part on her account, partly because he had chatted to her in the laundry room and she had listened to his tales of his homeland and he didn’t want her blood on his hands, but probably also because he was just a silver-haired cuckolded old gent nowadays, a loser with a fondness for silk who might have agreed to be a sleeper years ago but who never expected to “awake,” and he just wanted out of the sleeper business, because it scared him, too.

After that she accepted she was possibly in danger herself, just as the police officers had told her she was, she knew she should move out in spite of her obstinate desire to stick around here just to spite her cowardly neighbors, Maybe a few weeks with a family member or friend, the police officers suggested, you could use the emotional support, she was her father’s only heir, the lawyers told her, all of it came to her, starting with the big house on Mulholland Drive, fully staffed, with all the latest high-security equipment and twenty-four-hour Jerome security, all the codes had already been changed, procedures reviewed, and personnel numbers would be augmented if she moved in, so Shalimar’s inside knowledge of the property, of security configurations and staffing levels, wouldn’t help him. But she wasn’t ready to move back, to live up there on the skyway again, to step into her dead father’s outsized shoes and sleep in his bed and go through the papers in his mahogany-paneled study, she wasn’t ready for the smell of his cologne or the secrets in his safe, so she stayed on in her apartment and found herself thinking that if the killer showed up to finish the job she really didn’t care, let him come, she might even welcome him in.

The world does not stop but cruelly continues, the widows chorused in the hallways. At a time of tragedy you wonder at it, the world’s capacity for continuing. When our husbands left us we expected the planet to cease its spinning so we could all float off into space, we expected silence, respect, but the traffic doesn’t care what the heart needs, the billboards don’t care, things move right along. There’s a new giant lady holding a golden beer bottle up near the Château. There’s a new place a mile east, women dance on the bar while the smart kids howl with lust. Lust continues, sure it does, honey, power continues, bargains are struck, hands are shaken and arms are twisted, winners and losers continue, honey, dog walking continues, right on our block the dogs walk past the scene of the crime every morning, dogs don’t care, they move on. The new horror movies open every Friday, business is business, and real-life horror continues too, here it is on TV, the unexplained sacrifice of goats at the Hollywood Bowl in the middle of the night, the discovery in the morning of maybe forty stinking carcasses and the blood, all that congealing blood, craziness continues, black magic continues, the darkness never ends. Clothes are on sale all around. Clothes go on, also goes on the hunger of the citizens and the relief of hunger. There is fine pizza to be had. Valet parking continues. The stars come out to play. A woman’s father dies, she mourns alone. His death is already old news.

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.