Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

He called the chauffeur and asked him to drive the lady home. It is probable that this telephone call sealed his fate, or rather that what had been waiting to happen was finally precipitated by the anger that spilled out of Zainab Azam into the driver’s ears. After the assassination, when she was briefly under suspicion as the possible perpetrator of a crime of passion, the great movie star remembered the fellow’s last words to her. “For every O’Dwyer,” he had said in excellent Urdu as she got out of the car, “there is a Shaheed Udham Singh, and for every Trotsky a Mercader awaits.”

Because she was wallowing in the tar pits of her own anger Zainab had not taken this boastful statement seriously. The name Mercader meant nothing to her anyway. The story of the death of Trotsky was not among her personal golden treasury of tales, but as for the story of the man who murdered the imperialist lieutenant-governor who had sanctioned the Amritsar massacre, the story of Udham Singh who went to England and waited for six years and then shot O’Dwyer at a public meeting, this was well known. It didn’t occur to Zainab that the driver was being serious. Men were always trying to ingratiate themselves with her, after all, and yes, maybe she had said something to the effect that Max Ophuls was a bastard and she wished he was dead, but that was just her way of talking, she was an artist of passion, a hot-blooded woman, and how else should such a woman speak of a man who had proved himself unworthy of her love? She herself was incapable of murder, she was a woman of peace and also, excuse me, a star, there was the responsibility to her public to consider, a person in her position had to set an example. So soulful was her deposition, so vast and innocent were her eyes, so profound was her guilty horror at the thought that the assassin had confessed his crime to her before he committed it, and that if she had been paying attention to the confession she could have saved a human life, even if it was only the life of a human worm like Max Ophuls, so self-evidently genuine was her self-criticism, that the police officers investigating the crime, hard, cynical men inured to the wiles of American movie queens, became her loyal fans for life and spent substantial portions of their spare time learning Hindustani and hunting down videos of her movies, even the early terrible ones when she was to be frank a little on the chubby side.

The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophuls at breakfast, handed him his schedule card for the day, and gave in his notice. The ambassador’s drivers tended to be short-term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in pornography or hairdressing, and Max was accustomed to the cycle of acquisition and loss. This time, however, he was shaken, though he did not care to show it. He concentrated on his day’s appointments, trying not to let the card tremble. He knew Shalimar’s real name. He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past, this man with a gymnast’s body and a tragedian’s face who had slowly become more of a valet than a mere driver, a silent yet utterly solicitous body servant who understood what Max needed before he knew it himself, the lighted cigar that materialized just as he was reaching for the humidor, the right cuff-links that were laid out on his bed each morning with the perfect shirt, the ideal temperature for his bathwater, the right times to be absent as well as the correct moments to appear. The ambassador was carried back to his Strasbourgeois childhood years in a Belle Époque mansion near the old synagogue, since destroyed, and found himself marveling at the rebirth in this man from a distant mountain valley of the lost traditions of service of the pampered prewar culture of Alsace.

There seemed to be no limits to Shalimar’s willingness. When the ambassador, to test him, mentioned having heard that the Prince of Wales made his valet hold his penis while he urinated, to control the direction of the flow, the man whose real name was not Shalimar inclined his head an inch or so and murmured, “I also, if you wish.” Later, after what had to happen had happened, it became clear that the assassin had deliberately drawn his victim almost as close as a lover, had effaced his own personality with the strategic discipline of a great warrior in order to study the true face of the enemy and learn his strengths and weaknesses, as if this vicious killer had been gripped by the need to know as intimately as possible the life he planned so brutally to terminate. It was said in court that such despicable behavior proved the murderer to be a person so inhumanly cold-blooded, so calculatingly icy of heart, so fiendishly diseased of soul that it would never be safe to return him to the company of civilized men.

The schedule card did begin to tremble in Max’s hand in spite of all his efforts to restrain it. Once, in the interregnum between the scandal that had deprived him of his Indian ambassadorship and his appointment to the covert ambassadorial-level job that remained a secret even from his daughter until after his death, Max Ophuls had lost his way. The sudden shapelessness of his days, after long years in which they would be planned and programmed in fifteen-minute segments, shook and bewildered him, until his secretary had the brainwave of reinstating the little daily appointment cards to which he had grown so accustomed, and filling them with things to do. Gone, inevitably, were his appointments with ministers and captains of industry, his invitations to upper-echelon conferences and his ambassadorial receptions for visiting notables. This was a humbler schedule-eight a.m., get up, go to bathroom, eight-twenty, walk dog, eight-thirty, read newspaper-but it restored a semblance of shape, and Max Ophuls held on to that shred with intense determination and slowly pulled himself out of the depression that had threatened to claim his life. Ever since his recovery from that minatory bout of mental illness Max Ophuls made sure there would always be a little white card waiting for him each morning, the little white card that meant that the universe had not descended into chaos, that the laws of men and nature still held sway, that life had direction and purpose, and that the inchoate outlaw void could not swallow him up.

Now the void was yawning again. It was Shalimar’s arrival in Max’s life that had reawakened Kashmir in him, had brought back that paradise from which he had been expelled long years before. It was in a way for Shalimar, or rather for the love they had once shared, that Max had found his way to the television studios to deliver his last oration. It was on account of Shalimar, then, that he had lost Zainab Azam. And now Shalimar too was leaving. Max had a vision of his open grave, of a rectilinear black hole huddling in the ground, as empty as his life, and felt the darkness measuring him for his shroud. “We’ll discuss this nonsense later,” he said, affecting nonchalance even though sudden terror had risen in his throat like bile. He tore up the schedule of the day’s events. “I’m going to see India. Get the goddamn car.”

When they were on Laurel Canyon the Himalayas began to rise around them, at high speed, like special effects. This was the third portent. Unlike his daughter and her mother Max Ophuls did not possess the gift or curse of occasional second sight and so when he saw the white eight-thousand-meter giants smashing up into the sky, bearing away the neighborhood’s split-level homes, designer pets and exotic plant life he trembled with fear. If he was seeing visions it meant that trouble was coming. It would be extreme in nature and would not be long delayed. The murderous illusion of the Himalayas persisted for a full ten seconds, so that the Bentley seemed to be skidding down a spectral ice-valley toward certain destruction, but then as if in a dream a traffic light reared up out of the snow and guided by that red beacon the whole city came back unscathed. Max’s throat felt sore and raw, as if he had caught a chill in the thin Karakoram air. He pulled out his silver hip-flask, gulped down a burning mouthful of whiskey and called his daughter on the phone.