Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

‘You concede, then, that he's exploiting you,’ Chamcha interposed, but the torrent swept him away. ‘What's the fuckin’ diff?’ she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. ‘Billy's a funny boy, a natural scam artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is? I'll tell you some notions I do not require: patriotism, God and love. Definitely not wanted on the voyage. I like Billy because he knows the score.’

‘Mimi,’ he said, ‘something's happened to me,’ but she was still protesting too much and missed it. He put the receiver down without giving her his address.

She rang him once more, a few weeks later, and by now the unspoken precedents had been set; she didn't ask for, he didn't give his whereabouts, and it was plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart, it was time to wave goodbye. It was still all Billy with Mimi: his plans to make Hindi movies in England and America, importing the top stars, Vinod Khanna, Sridevi, to cavort in front of Bradford Town Hall and the Golden Gate Bridge – ‘it's some sort of tax dodge, obviously,’ Mimi carolled gaily. In fact, things were heating up for Billy; Chamcha had seen his name in the papers, coupled with the terms fraud squad and tax evasion , but once a scam man, always a ditto, Mimi said. ‘So he says to me, do you want a mink? I say, Billy, don't buy me things, but he says, who's talking about buying? Have a mink. It's business.’ They had been in New York again, and Billy had hired a stretched Mercedes limousine ‘and a stretched chauffeur also’. Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy's lead. At length he said, You like that one? It's nice. Billy, she whispered, it's forty thousand , but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. ‘Well, by now they know he's an oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the coat, and he takes me into another store right around the block, points to the coat, and says, I just bought this for forty thousand dollars, here's the receipt, will you give me thirty for it, I need the cash, big weekend ahead.’ – Mimi and Billy had been kept waiting while the second store rang the first, where all the alarm bells went off in the manager's brain, and five minutes later the police arrived, arrested Billy for passing a dud cheque, and he and Mimi spent the weekend in jail. On Monday morning the banks opened and it turned out that Billy's account was in credit to the tune of forty-two thousand, one hundred and seventeen dollars, so the cheque had been good all the time. He informed the furriers of his intention to sue them for two million dollars damages, defamation of character, open and shut case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out of court for $250,000 on the nail. ‘Don't you love him?’ Mimi asked Chamcha. ‘The boy's a genius. I mean, this was class.’

I am a man, Chamcha realized, who does not know the score, living in an amoral, survivalist, get-away-with-it-world. Mishal and Anahita Sufyan, who still unaccountably treated him like a kind of soul-mate, in spite of all his attempts to dissuade them, were beings who plainly admired such creatures as moonlighters, shoplifters, filchers: scam artists in general. He corrected himself: not admired, that wasn't it. Neither girl would ever steal a pin. But they saw such persons as representatives of the gestalt, of how-it-was. As an experiment he told them the story of Billy Battuta and the mink coat. Their eyes shone, and at the end they applauded and giggled with delight: wickedness unpunished made them laugh. Thus, Chamcha realized, people must once have applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws, Dick Turpin, Ned Kelly, Phoolan Devi, and of course that other Billy: William Bonney, also a Kid.

‘Scrapheap Youths’ Criminal Idols,’ Mishal read his mind and then, laughing at his disapproval, translated it into yellowpress headlines, while arranging her long, and, Chamcha realized, astonishing body into similarly exaggerated cheesecake postures. Pouting outrageously, fully aware of having stirred him, she prettily added: ‘Kissy kissy?’

Her younger sister, not to be outdone, attempted to copy Mishal's pose, with less effective results. Abandoning the attempt with some annoyance, she spoke sulkily. ‘Trouble is, we've got good prospects, us. Family business, no brothers, bob's your uncle. This place makes a packet, dunnit? Well then.’ The Shaandaar rooming-house was categorized as a Bed and Breakfast establishment, of the type that borough councils were using more and more owing to the crisis in public housing, lodging five-person families in single rooms, turning blind eyes to health and safety regulations, and claiming ‘temporary accommodation’ allowances from the central government. ‘Ten quid per night per person,’ Anahita informed Chamcha in his attic. ‘Three hundred and fifty nicker per room per week, it comes to, as often as not. Six occupied rooms: you work it out. Right now, we're losing three hundred pounds a month on this attic, so I hope you feel really bad.’ For that kind of money, it struck Chamcha, you could rent pretty reasonable family-sized apartments in the private sector. But that wouldn't be classified as temporary accommodation; no central funding for such solutions. Which would also be opposed by local politicians committed to fighting the ‘cuts’. La lutte continue ; meanwhile, Hind and her daughters raked in the cash, unworldly Sufyan went to Mecca and came home to dispense homely wisdom, kindliness and smiles. And behind six doors that opened a crack every time Chamcha went to make a phone call or use the toilet, maybe thirty temporary human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent.

The real world.

‘You needn't look so fish-faced and holy, anyway,’ Mishal Sufyan pointed out. ‘Look where all your law abiding got you.’

‘Your universe is shrinking.’ A busy man, Hal Valance, creator of The Aliens Show and sole owner of the property, took exactly seventeen seconds to congratulate Chamcha on being alive before beginning to explain why this fact did not affect the show's decision to dispense with his services. Valance had started out in advertising and his vocabulary had never recovered from the blow. Chamcha could keep up, however. All those years in the voiceover business taught you a little bad language. In marketing parlance, a universe was the total potential market for a given product or service: the chocolate universe, the slimming universe. The dental universe was everybody with teeth; the others were the denture cosmos. ‘I'm talking,’ Valance breathed down the phone in his best Deep Throat voice, ‘about the ethnic universe.’

My people again : Chamcha, disguised in turban and the rest of his ill-fitting drag, hung on a telephone in a passageway while the eyes of impermanent women and children gleamed through barely opened doors; and wondered what his people had done to him now. ‘No capeesh,’ he said, remembering Valance's fondness for Italian—American argot – this was, after all, the author of the fast food slogan Getta pizza da action . On this occasion, however, Valance wasn't playing. ‘Audience surveys show,’ he breathed, ‘that ethnics don't watch ethnic shows. They don't want ‘em, Chamcha. They want fucking Dynasty , like everyone else. Your profile's wrong, if you follow: with you in the show it's just too damn racial. The Aliens Show is too big an idea to be held back by the racial dimension. The merchandising possibilities alone, but I don't have to tell you this.’

Chamcha saw himself reflected in the small cracked mirror above the phone box. He looked like a marooned genie in search of a magic lamp. ‘It's a point of view,’ he answered Valance, knowing argument to be useless. With Hal, all explanations were post facto rationalizations. He was strictly a seat-of-the-pants man, who took for his motto the advice given by Deep Throat to Bob Woodward: Follow the money . He had the phrase set in large sans-serif type and pinned up in his office over a still from All the President's Men : Hal Holbrook (another Hal!) in the car park, standing in the shadows. Follow the money: it explained, as he was fond of saying, his five wives, all independently wealthy, from each of whom he had received a handsome divorce settlement. He was presently married to a wasted child maybe one-third his age, with waist-length auburn hair and a spectral look that would have made her a great beauty a quarter of a century earlier. ‘This one doesn't have a bean; she's taking me for all I've got and when she's taken it she'll bugger off,’ Valance had told Chamcha once, in happier days. ‘What the hell. I'm human, too. This time it's love.’ More cradlesnatching. No escape from it in these times. Chamcha on the telephone found he couldn't remember the infant's name. ‘You know my motto,’ Valance was saying. ‘Yes,’ Chamcha said neutrally. ‘It's the right line for the product.’ The product, you bastard, being you.