The Satanic Verses

different cloth! ‘My good fellows,’ he began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off from that undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart and a soft tumble of his own excrement all about him, ‘my good fellows, you had best understand your mistake before it’s too late.’
    Novak cupped a hand behind an ear. ‘What’s that? What was that noise?’ he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, ‘Search me.’ ‘Tell you what it sounded like,’ Joe Bruno volunteered, and with his hands around his mouth he bellowed: ‘Maa-aa-aa!’ Then the three of them all laughed once more, so that Saladin had no way of telling if they were simply insulting him or if his vocal cords had truly been infected, as he feared, bythis macabre demoniasis that had overcome him without the slightest warning. He had begun to shiver again. The night was extremely cold.
    The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at least the primus inter pares, returned abruptly to the subject of the pellety refuse rolling around the floor of the moving van. ‘In this country,’ he informed Saladin, ‘we clean up our messes.’
    The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled him into a kneeling position. ‘That’s right,’ said Novak, ‘clean it up.’ Joe Bruno placed a large hand behind Chamcha’s neck and pushed his head down towards the pellet-littered floor. ‘Off you go,’ he said, in a conversational voice. ‘Sooner you start, sooner you’ll polish it off.’

    Even as he was performing (having no option) the latest and basest ritual of his unwarranted humiliation, – or, to put it another way, as the circumstances of his miraculously spared life grew ever more infernal and outré – Saladin Chamcha began to notice that the three immigration officers no longer looked or acted nearly as strangely as at first. For one thing, they no longer resembled one another in the slightest. Officer Stein, whom his colleagues called ‘Mack’ or ‘Jockey’, turned out to be a large, burly man with a thick roller-coaster of a nose; his accent, it now transpired, was exaggeratedly Scottish. ‘Tha’s the ticket,’ he remarked approvingly as Chamcha munched miserably on. ‘An actor, was it? I’m partial to watchin’ a guid man perform.’
    This observation prompted Officer Novak – that is, ‘Kim’ – who had acquired an alarmingly pallid colouring, an ascetically bony face that reminded one of medieval icons, and a frown suggesting some deep inner torment, to burst into a short peroration about his favourite television soap-opera stars and game-show hosts, while Officer Bruno, who struck Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his hair shiny with styling gel and centrally divided, his blond beard contrasting dramatically with the darker hair on his head, – Bruno, the youngest of thethree, asked lasciviously, what about watchin’ girls, then, that’s my game. This new notion set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed anecdotes pregnant with suggestions of a certain type, but when the five policemen attempted to join in they joined ranks, grew stern, and put the constables in their places. ‘Little children,’ Mr Stein admonished them, ‘should be seen an’ no hearrud.’
    By this time Chamcha was gagging violently on his meal, forcing himself not to vomit, knowing that such an error would only prolong his misery. He was crawling about on the floor of the van, seeking out the pellets of his torture as they rolled from side to side, and the policemen, needing an outlet for the frustration engendered by the immigration officer’s rebuke, began to abuse Saladin roundly and pull the hair on his rump to increase both his discomfort and his discomfiture. Then the five policemen defiantly started up their own version of the immigration officers’ conversation, and set to analysing the merits of divers movie stars, darts players, professional wrestlers and the like; but because they had been put into a bad humour by the loftiness of ‘Jockey’ Stein, they were unable to maintain the abstract and intellectual tone of their superiors, and fell to quarrelling over the relative merits of the Tottenham Hotspur ‘double’ team of the early 1960s and the mighty Liverpool side of the present day, – in which the Liverpool supporters incensed the Spurs fans by alleging that the great Danny Blanchflower was a