The Satanic Verses

Chamcha said neutrally. ‘It’s the right line for the product.’ The product, you bastard, being you.
    By the time he met Hal Valance (how many years ago? Five, maybe six), over lunch at the White Tower, the man was already a monster: pure, self-created image, a set of attributes plastered thickly over a body that was, in Hal’s own words, ‘in training to be Orson Welles’. He smoked absurd, caricature cigars, refusing all Cuban brands, however, on account of his uncompromisingly capitalistic stance. He owned a Union Jack waistcoat and insisted on flying the flag over his agency and also above the door of his Highgate home; was prone to dress up as Maurice Chevalier and sing, at major presentations, to his amazed clients, with the help ofstraw boater and silver-headed cane; claimed to own the first Loire château to be fitted with telex and fax machines; and made much of his ‘intimate’ association with the Prime Minister he referred to affectionately as ‘Mrs Torture’. The personification of philistine triumphalism, midatlantic-accented Hal was one of the glories of the age, the creative half of the city’s hottest agency, the Valance & Lang Partnership. Like Billy Battuta he liked big cars driven by big chauffeurs. It was said that once, while being driven at high speed down a Cornish lane in order to ‘heat up’ a particularly glacial seven-foot Finnish model, there had been an accident: no injuries, but when the other driver emerged furiously from his wrecked vehicle he turned out to be even larger than Hal’s minder. As this colossus bore down on him, Hal lowered his push-button window and breathed, with a sweet smile: ‘I strongly advise you to turn around and walk swiftly away; because, sir, if you do not do so within the next fifteen seconds, I am going to have you killed.’ Other advertising geniuses were famous for their work: Mary Wells for her pink Braniff planes, David Ogilvy for his eyepatch, Jerry della Femina for ‘From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor’. Valance, whose agency went in for cheap and cheerful vulgarity, all bums and honky-tonk, was renowned in the business for this (probably apocryphal) ‘I’m going to have you killed’, a turn of phrase which proved, to those in the know, that the guy really was a genius. Chamcha had long suspected he’d made up the story, with its perfect ad-land components – Scandinavian icequeen, two thugs, expensive cars, Valance in the Blofeld role and 007 nowhere on the scene – and put it about himself, knowing it to be good for business.
    The lunch was by way of thanking Chamcha for his part in a recent, smash-hit campaign for Slimbix diet foods. Saladin had been the voice of a cutesy cartoon blob:
Hi, I’m Cal, and I’m one sad calorie
. Four courses and plenty of champagne as a reward for persuading people to starve.
How’s a poor calorie to earn a salary? Thanks to Slimbix, I’m out of work
. Chamcha hadn’t known what to expect from Valance. What he got was, at least, unvarnished. ‘You’ve done well,’ Hal congratulated him, ‘for a person of thetinted persuasion.’ And proceeded, without taking his eyes off Chamcha’s face: ‘Let me tell you some facts. Within the last three months, we re-shot a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black kid in the background. We re-recorded a building society jingle because T’Chairman thought the singer sounded black, even though he was white as a sodding sheet, and even though, the year before, we’d used a black boy who, luckily for him, didn’t suffer from an excess of soul. We were told by a major airline that we couldn’t use any blacks in their ads, even though they were actually employees of the airline. A black actor came to audition for me and he was wearing a Racial Equality button badge, a black hand shaking a white one. I said this: don’t think you’re getting special treatment from me, chum. You follow me? You follow what I’m telling you?’ It’s a goddamn audition, Saladin realized. ‘I’ve never felt I belonged to a race,’ he replied. Which was perhaps why, when Hal Valance set up his production company, Chamcha was on his ‘A list’; and why, eventually, Maxim Alien came his way.
    When
The Aliens Show
started coming in for stick from black radicals, they gave Chamcha a nickname. On account of his private-school education and closeness to the hated Valance, he was known as ‘Brown Uncle Tom’.
    Apparently