Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Then for a moment there were Elvis and Tony T-shirts for sale on Melrose and at Venice Beach. One of the television networks announced plans for a movie about the manhunt, with the parts of Tony and Elvis to be played by Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz. With astonishing speed Shalimar the clown had become a bit player in the story of the policing of Los Angeles, and Kashmira Ophuls, who was always Kashmira now, who was making everyone she knew use the name, Kashmira whose mother and father he had foully killed, grew steadily angrier. She had knelt by her mother’s grave in Shirmal and something got into her there, something that mattered, but now the meaning of the great events of her life was being leached away, all the talk was of police corruption and rotten apples and good honest officers called Hilliker and Geneva. The world did not stop but cruelly continued. Max no longer signified in it, and nor did Boonyi Kaul. Tony and Elvis were the heroes of the hour and Shalimar the clown was their property, their villain. He was, you could say, their happy ending, their last big bust, the one that gave meaning to their lives, that took meaning from her life and handed it to them. Alone in her apartment bedroom Kashmira beat her fists against a wall. It felt, how did it feel, it felt obscene. I want to write to him, she thought. I want him to know I’m out here waiting. I want him to know he belongs to me.

I am going to tell you about my father, she wrote. You should know more about the man you killed, with whom you established so intimate a relationship, becoming the bringer of his death. He didn’t have long to live but you couldn’t wait, you were in a hurry for his blood. It was a grand life you took and you should know its grandeur. I am going to teach you what he taught me about entering the house of power, and what he was like when I was a small girl, how he put his lips against my neck and made bird noises, and I am going to tell you about his foolish obsession with the imaginary lizard people who, or so he thought, once lived below L.A. I am going to take you with him on a plane flight across France and into the Resistance which will be interesting for you I believe. I am sure you think of your violent deeds as having been done in the cause of some sort of liberation so you will be interested to know that he was a warrior too. I want you to know the songs he sang -je te plumerai le cou!- and the food he liked best, the sauerkraut with Riesling and the honeyed lamb of his Alsatian youth, and I want you to know how he saved his daughter’s life and that his daughter loved him. I am going to write and write and write to you and my letters will be your conscience and they will torture you and make your life a living hell until if things go as they should it is brought to an end. Even if you do not read them, even if they are never given to you or, if they are, even if you rip the envelopes to shreds, they are still spears that will transfix your heart. My letters are curses they will shrivel your soul. My letters are threats they should frighten you and I will not stop writing them until you are dead and maybe after you die I will go on writing them to your spirit as it burns and they will torment you more agonizingly than the inferno. You will never see Kashmir again but Kashmira is here and now you will inhabit me, I will write a world around you and it will be a prison more dreadful than your prison, a cell more confined than yourself. The hardships I send you will make the hardships of your imprisonment seem like joys. My letters are poisoned arrows. Do you know the song of Habba Khatoon in which she sings about being pierced? Oh marksman my bosom is open to the darts you throw at me, she sang. These darts are piercing me, why are you cross with me. Now you are my target and I am your marksman however my arrows are not dipped in love but hatred. My letters are arrows of hate and they will strike you down.

I am your black Scheherazade, she wrote. I will write to you without missing a day without missing a night not to save my life but to take yours to wind around you the poisonous snakes of my words until their fangs stab your neck. Or I am Prince Shahryar and you are my helpless virgin bride. I will write to you and my voice will haunt your dreams. Every night I tell the story of your death. Can you hear me? Listen to my voice. Every day I will write to you. Every night for however many nights it takes I will whisper in your ear until the story’s done. You can’t get into my head anymore. I’m in yours instead.

Shalimar the clown spent a year and a half in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail on Bauchet Street waiting for his trial to begin. He was segregated from other prisoners and housed in the jail’s 7000 section where the high-profile inmates were kept. He wore ankle chains and was given his meals in his cell and permitted three one-hour exercise periods per week. In the early weeks of his confinement he was in a highly disturbed condition, often screaming out at night, complaining about a female demon who was occupying his head, jabbing hot shafts into his brain. He was placed on suicide watch and given a high dosage of the tranquilizer Xanax. He was asked if he would like to receive visits from a priest of the Islamic faith and he said that he would. A young imam from the USC mosque on Figueroa Street was provided and reported after his first visit that the prisoner had genuinely repented of his crime, stating that owing to his poor command of the English language he had misunderstood certain statements regarding the Kashmir issue made by Maximilian Ophuls on a television talk show and had been quite erroneously driven to assassinate a man he had mistakenly thought of as an enemy of Muslims. The killing was therefore the result of an unfortunate linguistic lapse and he was consequently consumed with remorse. On the young imam’s second visit, however, the prisoner was in a heightened state of agitation in spite of the Xanax and seemed at times to be addressing an absent person, apparently female, in English which, while not by any means perfect, was nevertheless good enough to undermine his earlier assertions. When the young imam pointed this out the prisoner became menacing and had to be restrained. After that the imam declined to return and the prisoner refused to see another priest even though a qualified member of the Latino Muslim Association of Los Angeles, Francisco Mohammed, was occasionally at the Men’s Central Jail to counsel other inmates and had indicated that he would be available if required.

The new district attorney, Gil Garcetti, who had replaced Ira Reiner after the riots, argued when Shalimar the clown’s case came up before the Los Angeles County grand jury that the accused’s statements to the Figueroa Street imam confirmed that he was a devious individual, a professional killer with many work-names and alter egos, whose protestations of remorse and repentance were not to be taken at face value. Shalimar the clown was duly indicted by the grand jury for the murder of Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls and returned to Bauchet Street to await trial. It was accepted by the grand jury that the special circumstances attached to the case made him eligible for the death penalty. If found guilty he would therefore be liable to execution by lethal injection unless he opted for the gas chamber, which was still being offered as an alternative method if the subject so preferred.

Shalimar the clown had initially refused legal representation but later accepted a court-appointed defense team led by the attorney William T. Tillerman, well known for his fondness for defending the indefensible, a brilliant courtroom performer, slow and weighty, reminiscent of Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution, who first rose to prominence as a junior member of the team defending Richard Ramirez, whom the tabloid press renamed the Nightstalker, several years before. There were persistent rumors that Tillerman had been the “hidden hand” shaping the defense strategy in the notorious Menendez brothers trial, even though he was not a named attorney in the case. (Erik and Lyle Menendez were, like Shalimar the clown, inmates of cell block 7000, where, later in Shalimar the clown’s captivity, the former football star Orenthal James Simpson would also spend some time.) When letters addressed to Shalimar the clown and written by Max Ophuls’s orphaned daughter started arriving in large numbers at 441 Bauchet Street, it was Tillerman who saw the connection between these letters and his client’s alleged nocturnal persecution by the so-called female demon, and so devised what became widely known as the “sorcerer’s defense.”