The Satanic Verses

Saladin pointed. ‘There the bastard goes.’ He turned towards Gibreel: but Gibreel had gone.
    Allie Cone reappeared, angry, frantic. ‘Where is he? Jesus! Can’t I even leave him for a fucking
second
? Couldn’t you have kept your sodding
eyes
on him?’
    ‘Why, what’s the matter – ?’ But now Allie had plunged into the crowd, so that when Chamcha saw Gibreel crossing ‘Southwark Bridge’ she was out of earshot. – And here was Pamela, demanding: ‘Have you seen Jumpy?’ – And he pointed, ‘That way,’ whereupon she, too, vanished without a word of courtesy; and now Jumpy was seen, crossing ‘Southwark Bridge’ in the opposite direction, curly hair wilder than ever, coathanger shoulders hunched inside the greatcoat he had refused to remove, eyes searching, thumb homing in on mouth; – and, a little later, Gibreel headed across the simulacrum of that bridge Which Is Of Iron, going the same way as Jumpy went.
    In short, events had begun to border on the farcical; but when, some minutes later, the actor playing the role of ‘Gaffer Hexam’, who kept watch over that stretch of the Dickensian Thames for floating corpses, to relieve them of their valuables before handing them over to the police, – came rowing rapidly down the studio river with his stipulated ragged, grizzled hair standing straight up on end, the farce was instantly terminated; for there in his disreputable boat lay the insensate body of Jumpy Joshi in his waterlogged greatcoat. ‘Knocked cold,’ the boatman cried, pointing to the huge lump rising up at the back of Jumpy’s skull, ‘and being unconscious in the water it’s a miracle he never drowned.’

    One week after that, in response to an impassioned telephone call from Allie Cone, who had tracked him down via Sisodia, Battuta and finally Mimi, and who appeared to have defrosted quite a bit, Saladin Chamcha found himself in the passenger seat of a three-year-oldsilver Citroën station wagon which the future Alicja Boniek had presented to her daughter before leaving for an extended Californian stay. Allie had met him at Carlisle station, repeating her earlier telephonic apologies – ‘I’d no right to speak to you like that; you knew nothing, I mean about his, well, thank heavens nobody saw the attack, and it seems to have been hushed up, but that poor man, an oar on the head from behind, it’s too bad; the point is, we’ve taken a place up north, friends of mine are away, it just seemed best to get out of range of human beings, and, well, he’s been asking for you; you could really help him, I think, and to be frank I could do with the help myself,’ which left Saladin little the wiser but consumed by curiosity – and now Scotland was rushing past the Citroën windows at alarming speed: an edge of Hadrian’s Wall, the old elopers’ haven Gretna Green, and then inland towards the Southern Uplands; Ecclefechan, Lockerbie, Beattock, Elvanfoot. Chamcha tended to think of all non-metropolitan locales as the deeps of interstellar space, and journeys into them as fraught with peril: for to break down in such emptiness would surely be to die alone and undiscovered. He had noted warily that one of the Citroën’s headlamps was broken, that the fuel gauge was in the red (it turned out to be broken, too), the daylight was failing, and Allie was driving as if the A74 were the track at Silverstone on a sunny day. ‘He can’t get far without transport,
but
you never know,’ she explained grimly. ‘Three days ago he stole the car keys and they found him heading the wrong way up an exit road on the M6, shouting about damnation.
Prepare for the vengeance of the Lord
, he told the motorway cops,
for I shall soon summon my lieutenant, Azraeel
. They wrote it all down in their little books.’ Chamcha, his heart still filled with his own vengeful lusts, affected sympathy and shock. ‘And Jumpy?’ he inquired. Allie took both hands off the wheel and spread them in an I-give-up gesture, while the car wobbled terrifyingly across the bendy road. ‘The doctors say the possessive jealousy could be part of the same thing; at least, it can set the madness off, like a fuse.’
    She was glad of the chance to talk; and Chamcha lent her a willing ear. If she trusted him, it was because Gibreel did, too; he had no intention of demanding that trust.
Once he betrayed my trust; now let him, for a time, have confidence in me
. He was a tyro puppeteer; it was necessary to study the