Shalimar the Clown

by Salman Rushdie

  The élite Special Forces officers, looking a little disgusted at the case’s turn toward the ordinary, handed over responsibility for the investigation to Central Homicide, the regular, nonterrorist, crime-related-elimination guys, and two new detectives, Lieutenant Tony Geneva and Sergeant Elvis Hilliker, sad-eyed men with high mileage numbers on their clocks, came to inspect the murder scene, but they weren’t interested in briefing India on the status of the search for the man she was now trying to think of as “Noman,” maybe there was classified material which they were keeping to themselves but the only things they came out with were bland, ready-to-wear formulations like the manhunt is intensifying, ma’am, and snippets of useless facts, He planned his day carefully, took a change of clothing along in the trunk, we found the soiled garments in there, Lieutenant Geneva said, and Sergeant Hilliker added, He abandoned the car just a few blocks east of here, on Oakwood near Crescent Heights, and if he’s on foot in this town he’s going to be hard to miss, plus if he tries to steal himself a ride we’ll have him in our sights, so we’ll get him, ma’am, don’t doubt it, this isn’t Indian country, it’s ours.

  She understood their remarks to mean that they were under pressure from their senior officers and needed to sound effective. (When she innocently used the term superiors to describe their bosses at City Hall, they had plenty to say, they momentarily achieved something like volubility, They’re not our superiors, ma’am, senior officers is all they are, Lieutenant Geneva rebuked her, and Sergeant Hilliker vehemently added, Which doesn’t make them our betters. Everybody was sensitive nowadays. Everybody had a vocabulary to peddle. Words had become as painful as sticks and stones, or maybe skins had grown thinner. India blamed the ozone layer, apologized and changed the subject.) Max’s death was a big story, and they had more than just the commissioner on their backs, the TV audience was impatient, too, it wanted the pictures right away, a shoot-out, preferably, or a car chase with helicoptered cameras, or at the very least a good, close-up look at the captured murderer, manacled, shaggy haired, and in orange or green or blue prison fatigues, pleading to be put to death by lethal injection or cyanide gas because he didn’t deserve to live.

  She had no way of knowing if an arrest was near because she wasn’t fully in the information loop. But the truth—the impossible truth, the truth that proved to her she was more than a little crazy right now, the truth she couldn’t share with anyone, and which consequently sealed her off from the people who loved her—the insane, segregating truth was that she knew things about the fugitive which the police did not, because she had begun to hear his voice inside her head. Or not exactly a voice but a disembodied nonverbal transmission, like a wild screech full of static and internal dissension, hatred and shame, repentance and threat, curses and tears; like a werewolf howling at the moon. She had not experienced anything like this before, and in spite of her occasional power of second sight she was made greatly afraid by this auditory manifestation, by her transformation into a medium for the living. She locked her apartment door and sat in darkness, doubting her own sanity, until she slowly came to terms with what was happening. The shouted, argumentative, out-of-control babble in her head was the cry of a deranged soul, a man in a state of elated horror, He might be a professional, she thought, but he’s not reacting professionally this time, something about this hit has unhinged him, this wasn’t done in cold blood. This was hot.

  I am for Ambassador Max and my name is Shalimar the clown. The sentence with which the murderer had introduced himself and named his quarry, quoted by one of the Mulholland Drive security guards to the police, had somehow found its way into the papers, and she had been worrying away at it, trying to unlock its secrets. Shalimar the clown. What did that mean. He was her mother’s husband. What was she to do with information of such power. Now she understood what he had been staring at in the elevator that first day, her birthday, he had been seeing in her what she herself could not see, what her survival instincts, her private defense mechanisms, had made her block out of her vision. He had found her mother in her and now that mother within was hearing his silent demented scream.

  She went to her bedroom, stripped off her clothes and examined her body in the mirrored closet doors, kneeling on her bed, stretching, leaning, trying to see in her unclothed form what he had seen in her when she was fully attired, straining to look beyond the echoes of her father and find the woman she had never been able to see. Slowly her mother’s face began to form in her mind’s eye, blurry, out of focus, vague. It was something. A gift from a killer. He had taken her father but her mother was being given to her. She felt angry all of a sudden. In a rage she called out to him, naked, with her eyes closed, like a witch at a séance. Tell me about her, she cried. Tell me about my mother, who wanted to go back to you, who was ready to give me up, who would have left me for you if she hadn’t died first. (This cruel fragment of knowledge had been imparted long ago by the woman who was not her mother, the woman who did not give her life but gave her her name, the name she did not like.) Tell me, she cried into the night, about my mother who loved you more than me. Then came a thought unbidden: She’s still alive. Maybe it wasn’t true about her dying, and she’s still alive. Where is she, she asked the voice in her head. Is this what she wanted, to kill her lover, to allow her husband to regain his honor by murdering the man she left him for. Did she send you to do this. How she must hate me, to abandon me and then have my father killed. What is she like. Does she ask about me. Have you sent her photographs of me. Does she want to see me. Does she know my name. Is she still alive.

  Her desire to understand the killer had been fighting against more vengeful longings. A part of her believed that the act of taking a life was never trivial, always profound, wanted to believe it even in an age of interminable slaughter, a primitive age in which hard-won ideas, the sovereignty of the individual, the sanctity of life, were dying beneath the piles of bodies, buried beneath the lies of warlords and priests, and this part wanted to know in full the why of it, not to excuse the deed but at least to comprehend, to know the other who had with such finality altered the condition of her self. For another, possibly larger part, the memory of her father subsiding in blood was all the knowledge that was required. What was justice? Was comprehension necessary before judgment could be made and sentence passed? Had Shalimar the clown understood the man he killed? And if he felt he had, would that make his actions defensible? Did understanding drag justice in its wake? No, she told herself, understanding and justice were unrelated things, like repentance and forgiveness. An understanding man could also be unjust. A woman might see her father’s killer repent, truly repent, and still be unable to forgive.

  He had no answers for her. He was inchoate, contradictory, storm clouded. He was a hunted animal living in a ravine, like a coyote, like a dog. He was starving and thirsty. He was venom and blood. Is my mother here too, she asked him, over and over again. Did you bring her with you, is she waiting for you somewhere, holed up in some cheap freeway motel, to celebrate my father’s death. What do you do to celebrate your kills, do you drink yourself stupid, no, you wouldn’t drink, or is it sex, is that how you release your brutal delight, or do you pray, you and my mother, will you both get down on your knees and bang your joyful foreheads against the floor. Where is she, take me to her, let me look her in the face. She has to look me in the face. She cut me loose and never looked back and she has to look me in the face. She’s here, isn’t she. She wouldn’t miss this. She’s here, in a neon motel, waiting. Did she ask you to cut off his head. Did she want him decapitated but he was too tough for you, he didn’t give you that satisfaction. His head stayed on his shoulders and thwarted your obscene aims, your attack against humanity. Where is she. If she sent you she has to face me.

  This isn’t over. I’m still here. I have to be reckoned with. I will call you to account. Blood will have blood. Sooner or later I will have to be faced.

  He had no answers for her. He faded, like a dream. The sudden
silence in her head was like a theft. For a moment she could not breathe, and gasped asthmatically for air. Then she cried. She thrust her face into her pillow and wept the first tears she had shed since her father’s death, wept for three hours and seventeen minutes without stopping and then fell into a deep sleep, from which she was only awakened fifteen and a quarter hours later by Olga Simeonovna, who had let herself into the apartment with her master key, accompanied by a specter from the past. Massed choruses encircled her in her dreams, but the dreams were not frightening, they were entertaining, she watched them like movies and forgot them when she awoke. India Ophuls had no need for nightmares anymore. The waking world was nightmarish enough.

  The cassocked chorus of gossipy old women moved clockwise around her, keening softly, Ah, the orphaned princess, what will she do now, she’s a little crazy, we think, she may have all the money in the world but it won’t buy back what she lost, she’s just human like the rest of us, she’ll have to deal with that, she’ll have to come down to earth; we fear she’s planning to take a terrible revenge, but beware!, princess, beware!, this guy is a bad guy!, the worst!, and you’re not even in the family business, you can’t fight him, you’re Kay Corleone. Around the first circle, the chorus of the widows, she could see a second circle, moving widdershins, the flaccid unhappy torsos of sack-bellied police officers, the hard-bodied Chippendales élite had disappeared, leaving these middle-aged Tonys and Elvises behind, We’re closing in, ma’am, they chanted, a definite sighting on Ventura Boulevard, his days are numbered, uh-huh, uh-huh, a hundred percent make in a computer store on Pico, he may run ma’am but he can’t hide, reports of a vagrant in Nichols Canyon, reports of a vagrant near Woodrow Wilson, reports of a vagrant on Cielo Drive, uh-huh, uh-huh, it’s just a matter of time. And again the cassocked women raised their voices, Justice would be meaningless without injustice, they first intoned, and then, secondly, Justice is strife. War makes us what we are. Even though she was asleep she recognized Heraclitus speaking through the widows’ mouths—Heraclitus the Greek Buddha, the lost poet of broken wisdom, part philosopher, part fortune cookie, bubbling up from the days when she read such things, the days when she read, to add his two cents’ worth. Now, around the Eastern crone and the sagging policemen, she perceived a third circle, an outer circle made up of her friends, who were moving clockwise, like the old women, and singing in electronic voice-mail voices a yearning beseeching song. Come back, her friends sang in tinny harmony, baby, come back. Her friends singing the old Equals hit, Oh won’t you please! Come back. I’m on my knees! Come back. Baby come back.

  Olga Simeonovna was shaking her. “Wake up,” Olga Volga said. “And don’t say you tell me no visitors, because this is different, okay? Here is good news. Here is your mother who has crossed an ocean and a continent to be beside her daughter when trouble comes. Wake up, India, please. Here your mother waits.” Was this a part of the dream, she wondered. No, she was awake, the pounding in her chest could not be dreamed. Excitedly she turned toward Olga and saw the trousered, septuagenarian woman who stood behind her and a little to one side, her hair an unkempt grey haystack under which a rat might safely hide. The sucker punch of disappointment hit India hard. She turned away and pulled the comforter over her head, ignoring Olga the abandoned parent’s frown of disapproval: Olga, for whom, in spite of all her abuse of her departed children, an embrace between a long-separated mother and daughter was a cherished fantasy. “Ha! A fine welcome, I must say,” chided Margaret Rhodes. “You may not like it, my dear, but—ahah! hah!—it’s true, your darling mother’s in town.”

  Ratetta, sweet Ratetta. Peggy Rhodes had returned to England with a baby girl in her arms and a look on her face that made it impossible for anyone to ask after her husband or even to speak his discarded name. The adopted child was baptized India Rhodes and, as her mother’s work with orphanages was well known, there was little need to explain her provenance. The Rumplestiltskin truth, that she had disposed of a husband and taken his love child in his place, was so strange that nobody suspected it. She had forced Max to swear to keep the secret, to relinquish all parental rights and responsibilities, and to stay away from mother and child alike. She was cleaning up his mess, she told him, and she didn’t want him making things messy again. Hanging his head, ashamed, he did not argue. He tried to express his feelings. “Don’t apologize, for God’s sake,” she said. “D’you imagine an apology can make up for what you did?” He was silenced. For seven years he vanished from her life.

  The only other people who knew the facts were Father Joseph Ambrose, whose Evangalactic Orphanage depended for its financial well-being on Peggy Rhodes’s largesse, and the pander Edgar Wood, who was tragically hit by a car in a Long Island country lane fifteen months after his return from New Delhi, and was killed outright. Peggy herself did not return to the United States. She bought a town house in Lower Belgrave Street, SW1, from a straitlaced English lady who was escaping the permissive society of late-sixties London and immigrating to Falangist Spain in search of a country with a little more discipline. In the years that followed the Grey Rat became a figure of fear in the street, snapping at noisy children playing on the pavement, complaining about the freshness of the produce at the greengrocers, calling the police when the noise from the Plumber’s Arms, the pub across the road, became too loud, knocking on her neighbors’ door to accuse them of blocking her drains by putting tampons down the toilet and refusing to accept their argument that their property did not share drainage facilities with hers.

  She began to wear men’s clothing: loose corduroy pants and white linen shirts. She hacked at her wiry hair and left it to do as it pleased. In the season she went to the grouse moors and shot copious numbers of birds. She smoked heavily, drank scotch and soda, became a single-digit-handicap golfer and developed a fondness for gambling, spending many evenings at the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square playing baccarat and chemin de fer. She knew that her divorce had damaged what was womanly in her but did nothing to mend what was broken. In spite of what she had done, the lengths she’d gone to in order to acquire a child, in spite of the strangeness of her actions, she became a careless, negligent mother, whose relationship with her adopted daughter was, at best, vague, who began to believe that she had made a terrible mistake, because whenever she looked at her adopted daughter she saw her own humiliation made flesh, she imagined Max and Boonyi making love and her husband’s seed wriggling toward the ruthless, desperate egg. So India was handed over to a series of nannies (none of whom lasted long, for Peggy Rhodes had turned into an intolerant, choleric employer), and began to run wild.

  By the age of seven the young girl was becoming a problem child, a savage, kickboxing playground scrapper who seemed, at times, like a creature possessed by demons, and a vicious biter, who caused at least one serious injury to a classmate at her exclusive Chelsea girls’ primary school. On two occasions she came close to being expelled for “unacceptable behavior.” The first time expulsion was threatened, however, she immediately and somewhat alarmingly changed her ways completely, adopting, for the first time, the cool, restrained, disciplined persona that would become her preferred disguise throughout her life. She became solemn, nonviolent, still, and her transformation scared her classmates into something like reverence, gave her the electric charisma of a leader. The mask slipped only once, just before her seventh birthday, when she assaulted the school bully, a sadistic eleven-year-old thug named Helena Wardle, hitting her on the back of the head with a large grey stone. Helena was known to the staff as a girl whose behavior was often brutish, and who had a habit of accusing her victims of bullying before they could accuse her, so when she ran to the school matron with a cut head, India, who claimed Helena had fallen and hurt herself accidentally, was given the benefit of the doubt, especially as her lie was verified by several of her classmates, who all disliked Helena Wardle as heartily as she did.

  There was no denying her dark hair, her un-English complexion, the absence in her fac
e of any trace of Peggy Rhodes’s genes. Three days before her seventh birthday the troubled girl found out she was adopted, discovered it by plucking up her courage and asking, after her injured victim had started a playground whispering campaign. Peggy Rhodes had flushed angrily when challenged, but had given India an answer of sorts. I’m very sorry, the Grey Rat told her, but, hmmm, hmmm, I don’t know the name of the woman who bore you. Hang it! I believe she died shortly after you were born. The identity of the father is likewise not confirmed. You must—eh? hah!—stop asking these questions. I am your mother. I have been your mother since the first days of your life. You have no other mother or father, there’s just me, I’m afraid, and I will not have these blasted questions. So she was trapped inside a lie, far away from the truth, held captive in a fiction; and within her the turbulence grew, an unquiet spirit moved, like a giant coiled serpent stirring at the bottom of the sea.