The Satanic Verses

– probably in Camden, Brickhall, Tower Hamlets or Hackney – and he will reveal himself soon, perhaps within days or weeks.’ – All of this was obscure to the three tall, languid, male attendants in the Fair Winds store (Maslama refused to employ women sales assistants here; ‘my motto,’ he was fond of saying, ‘is that nobody trusts a female to help him with his horn’); which was why none of them could believe their eyes when their hard-nosed employer suddenly underwent a complete change of personality, and rushed over to this wild, unshaven stranger as if he were God Almighty – with his two-tone patent leather shoes, Armani suit and slicked down Robert de Niro hair above proliferating eyebrows, Maslama didn’t look the crawling type, but that’s what he was
doing
, all right, on his goddamn
belly
, pushing his staff aside,
I’ll attend to the gentleman myself
, bowing and scraping, walking backwards, would you believe? – Anyway, the stranger had this
fat money-belt
under his shirt and started hauling out numbers of high-denomination notes; he pointed at a trumpet on a high shelf,
that’s the one
, just like that, hardly looked at it, and Mr Maslama was up the ladder
pronto
, I’ll-get-it-I-said-I’ll-
get
-it, and now the truly amazing part, he tried to refuse payment, Maslama!, it was no no
sir
no charge
sir
, but the stranger paid anyway,stuffing the notes into Maslama’s upper jacket-pocket as if he were some sort of
bellhop
, you had to be there, and last of all the customer turns to the whole store and yells at the top of his voice,
I am the right hand of God. –
Straight up, you wouldn’t credit it, the bloody day of judgment was at hand. – Maslama was right out of it after that, well shaken he was, he actually fell to his actual
knees. –
Then the stranger held the trumpet up over his head and shouted
I name this trumpet Azraeel, the Last Trump, the Exterminator of Men! –
and we just stood there, I tell you, turned to stone, because all around the fucking insane,
certifiable
bastard’s head there was this bright
glow
, you know?, streaming out, like, from a point behind his head.
    A halo.
    Say what you like
, the three shop-attendants afterwards repeated to anyone who would listen,
say what you like, but we saw what we saw
.

3

    T he death of Dr Uhuru Simba, formerly Sylvester Roberts, while in custody awaiting trial, was described by the Brickhall constabulary’s community liaison officer, a certain Inspector Stephen Kinch, as ‘a million-to-one shot’. It appeared that Dr Simba had been experiencing a nightmare so terrifying that it had caused him to scream piercingly in his sleep, attracting the immediate attention of the two duty officers. These gentlemen, rushing to his cell, arrived in time to see the still-sleeping form of the gigantic man literally lift off its bunk under the malign influence of the dream and plunge to the floor. A loud snap was heard by both officers; it was the sound of Dr Uhuru Simba’s neck breaking. Death had been instantaneous.
    The dead man’s minuscule mother, Antoinette Roberts, standing in a cheap black hat and dress on the back of her younger son’s pick-up truck, the veil of mourning pushed defiantly back off her face, was not slow to seize upon Inspector Kinch’s words and hurl them back into his florid, loose-chinned, impotent face, whose hangdog expression bore witness to the humiliation of being referred to by his brother officers as
niggerjimmy
and, worse,
mushroom
, meaning that he was kept permanently in the dark, and from time to time – for example in the present regrettable circumstances – people threw shit all over him. ‘I want you to understand,’Mrs Roberts declaimed to the sizeable crowd that had gathered angrily outside the High Street police station, ‘that these people are gambling with our lives. They are laying odds on our chances of survival. I want you all to consider what that means in terms of their respect for us as human beings.’ And Hanif Johnson, as Uhuru Simba’s solicitor, added his own clarification from Walcott Roberts’s pick-up truck, pointing out that his client’s alleged fatal plunge had been from the lower of the two bunks in his cell; that in an age of extreme overcrowding in the country’s lock-ups it was unusual, to say the least, that the other bunk should have been unoccupied, ensuring that there were no witnesses to the death except for prison officers; and that a nightmare was