Fury

by Salman Rushdie

  Solanka was still in Washington Square at closing time that night, sitting wretchedly on a bench. As a patrol car was ordering him to leave, his cell phone rang. “I’m really sorry, honey,” Neela said. “He was so unhappy, and it is my work, we did need to talk. Anyway, I don’t need to explain. You’re a smart man. I’m sure you worked it out. You should meet Babur. He’s so full of passion it’s scary, and after the revolution he may even be president. Oh, can you hold on, honey? It’s the other line.” She had spoken of the revolution as an inevitability. With a deep rumble of alarm, Solanka, on hold, remembered her own declaration of war. I’ll fight alongside them if I have to, shoulder to shoulder. Ira not kidding, I really will. He looked at the bloodstains drying on the darkened square, evidence here in New York City of the force of a gathering fury on the far side of the world: a group fury, born of long injustice, beside which his own unpredictable temper was a thing of pathetic insignificance, the indulgence, perhaps, of a privileged individual with too much selfinterest. And too much time on his hands. He could not give Neela up to this higher, antipodean rage. Come back, he wanted to say. Come to me, my darling, please don’t go. But she was back on the line, and her voice had changed. “It’s Jack,” she said. “He’s dead, his head’s been blown off, and there’s a confession in his hand.” You’ve seen the headless Winged Victory, Solanka dully thought. You’ve heard of the Headless Horseman. Give it up for my headless friend Jack Rhinehart, the Wingless, Horseless Defeat.

  Part Three

  15

  Nothing made sense. Jack’s body had been found in the Spassky Grain Building, a Tribeca construction site on the corner of Greenwich and N Moore whose developers had recently come under union fire for employing scab labor. It was a fifteen-minute walk from Jack’s Hudson Street apartment, and he had apparently strolled here with a loaded shotgun in his hand, crossed Canal—still busily crowded in spite of the late hour—without attracting attention, then broken into his chosen location, taken an elevator to the fourth floor, positioned himself by a west-facing window with a good view of the moonlit river, placed the snout of the gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and fallen to the rough, unfinished floor, dropping the weapon but somehow holding on to the suicide note. He had been drinking heavily: Jack Daniel’s and Coke, an absurd drink for an oenophile like Rhinehart. When he was discovered, his suit and shirt were folded neatly on the floor, and he was wearing only his socks and underpants, which, for some reason, or perhaps by chance, were on back to front. He had recently cleaned his teeth.

  Neela decided to make a clean breast of it and told the detectives everything she knew—the fancy-dress costumes in Jack’s closet, her suspicions, everything. She could have been in trouble, withholding information being a serious offense, but the police had bigger fish to fry, and, besides, the two officers who came to her Bedford Street apartment to interview her and Malik Solanka were having troubles of their own in her presence. They kept breaking pencils and stepping on each other’s feet and knocking over ornaments and bursting into simultaneous speech and then falling blushingly silent, to none of which Neela paid the slightest attention. “The point is,” she concluded as the two detectives bumped heads in eager agreement, “this so-called suicide smells strongly of fish.”

  Malik and Neela had known that Jack owned a gun, though they had never seen it. It dated from the black-Hemingway hunting-and-fishing period that had preceded his Tiger Woods phase. Now, like poor Ernest, most feminine of great male American writers, destroyed by his failure to be the phony, macho Papa-self he had chosen to inhabit, Jack had gone hunting for himself, the biggest game of all. That, at least, was what they were being invited to believe. On closer examination, however, this version of events became less and less convincing. Jack’s building had a doorman, who had seen him leave the premises alone at around seven P.m., carrying no bags and dressed for an evening on the town. A second witness, a plump young woman wearing a beret who had been waiting on the sidewalk for a taxi, came forward in response to a police appeal to say that she had seen a man answering to Jack’s description getting into a large black sports utility vehicle with smoked windows; through the open door, she had briefly glimpsed at least two other men, with, and she was quite clear on this point, large cigars in their mouths. An identical SUV was seen driving away along Greenwich Street soon after the established time of death. A couple of days later, analysis of the technical data from what was already provisionally being called the crime scene revealed that the damage to the Spassky Grain Building’s temporary access door had not been inflicted by Rhinehart’s shotgun. No other instrument capable of breaking down the very solid door-wooden, with a reinforcing metal frame—was found on or near his body. Moreover, it was strongly suspected that the damage to the door had not been the means of gaining entry to the premises. Somebody had had a key.

  The suicide note itself was instrumental in establishing Jack’s innocence. Rhinehart was famous for the polished precision of his prose. He rarely made an error of syntax, and never, never made a spelling mistake. Yet here among his last words were solecisms of the worst kind. “Ever since my war correspondent days,” the note read, “I have had a violent streak. Sometimes in the middle of the nite I smash up the phone. Horse, Club and Stash are innocent. I killed their girls bee they would not fuck me, probably bee I was of Color.” And, finally, heartbreakingly, “Tell Nila I love her. I know I fucked up but I love her true.” Malik Solanka, when his turn came to be interviewed by the police, told them emphatically that even though the note was in Jack’s strong, unmistakable hand, it could not have been his freely written work. “Either it has been dictated by somebody with a far lower level of language skills than Jack or else he has deliberately dumbed down his style to send us a message. Don’t you see? He has even told us his three murderers’ names.”

  When it was established that Keith “Club” Medford, last lover of the late Lauren Klein, was the son of the wealthy developer and unionized workers’ bete noire Michael Medford, one of whose companies was handling the conversion of the Spassky Grain Building into a mixture of high-end lofts and townhouse-style residences, and that Keith, who had been asked to plan the project’s opening-night party, possessed a set of keys, it became clear that the killers had made an irretrievable mistake. Most murderers were stupid, and a life of privilege was no defense against folly. Even the most expensive schools turned out badly educated dolts, and Marsalis, Andriessen, and Medford were semi-literate, arrogant young fools. And murderers, too. Club, faced with the accumulating facts, was the first to confess. His buddies’ defenses collapsed a few hours later.

  Jack Rhinehart was buried in the depths of Queens, thirty-five minutes’ drive from the bungalow he’d bought his mother and still unmarried sister in Douglaston. “A house with a view,” he’d joked. “If you go to the end of the yard and lean all the way over to your left, you can just catch a what?, call it a whisper, of the Sound.” Now his own view would forever be of urban blight. Neela and Solanka got a car to drive them out. The cemetery was cramped, treeless, comfortless, damp. Photographers moved around the small group of mourners like pollution floating at the edges of a dark pond. Solanka had somehow forgotten that there would be media interest in Jack’s funeral. The moment the confessions had been made and the story of the S & M Club became the society scandal of the summer, Professor Solanka lost interest in the event’s public dimension. He was mourning his friend Jack Rhinehart, the great, brave journalist, who had been sucked down by glamour and wealth. To be seduced by what one loathed was a hard destiny. To lose the woman you loved to your best friend was perhaps even harder. Solanka had been a bad friend to Jack, but then it had been Jack’s fate to be betrayed. His secret sexual preferences, which he had never inflicted on Neela Mahendra, but which meant that not even Neela would finally have been enough for him, had led him into bad company. He had been loyal to men who did not merit his loyalty, had persuaded himself of their innocence—and what an effort that must have
been for a natural finder-out and muckraker, what delusionary brilliance he must have employed!—and consequently had helped to shield them from the law, and his reward was to be killed by them in a clumsy attempt at scapegoating: to be sacrificed on the altar of their invincible, egomaniacal pride.

  A gospel singer had been hired to sing a farewell medley of spirituals and more contemporary material: “Fix Me, Jesus” was followed by Puff Daddy’s tribute to Notorious B.I.G., “Every Breath You Take (I’ll Be Missing You)”; then came “Rock My Soul (In the Bosom of Abraham).” Rain looked imminent but was holding off. The air was moist, as if full of tears. Here were Jack’s mother and sister; also Bronislawa Rhinehart, the ex-wife, looking simultaneously devastated and sexy in a short black dress and high-fashion veil. Solanka nodded at Bronnie, to whom he’d never found anything to say, and muttered empty words at the bereaved. The Rhinehart women didn’t look sad; they looked angry. “Jack I know,” Jack’s mother said briefly, “would’ve seen through those white boys in nine seconds flat.” “Jack I know,” his sister added, “didn’t need no whips or chains to have himself some fun.” They were mad at the man they loved for the scandal but even madder at him for having put himself in harm’s way, as if he had done it to hurt them, to leave them with the lifelong pain of their bereavement. “The Jack I know,” Solanka said, “was a pretty good man, and if he’s anywhere at all right now, I’d say he’s happy to be set free from his mistakes.” Jack was right there with them, of course. Jack in the box from which he would never rise up. Solanka felt a hand tighten around his heart.

  In his grief’s eye Solanka pictured Jack stretched out in an upscale loft conversion while the whole world gossiped over his corpse and photographers frothed about. Next to Jack lay the three dead girls. Released from the fear of his own involvement in their deaths, Solanka mourned them too. Here lay Lauren, who had become afraid of what she was capable of doing to others and allowing others to do to her. Bindy and Sky had tried and failed to keep her inside their charmed circle of pleasure and pain, but she had sealed her fate by threatening the club’s members with the shame of a public expose. Here lay Bindy, the first to comprehend that her friend’s death had been no random killing but a cold-blooded execution: which comprehension was her own death warrant. And here lay Uptown Sky, game-for-anything sexual athlete Sky, the wildest of the doomed three and the most sexually uninhibited, her masochistic excesses—now meticulously detailed in the delighted press—sometimes alarming even her sadistic lover, Brad the Horse. Sky, who believed herself immortal, who never thought they would come for her, because she was the empress of their world, they followed where she led, and her levels of tolerance, her thresholds, were the highest any of them had ever known. She knew about the murders and was crazily aroused by them, murmured in Marsalis’s ears that she had no intention of blowing the whistle on so much man, and whispered to both Stash and Club in turn that she would be happy to stand in for her dead friends in any way they wanted, just name it, baby, it’s yours. She also explained to all three men, in separate, luridly retold encounters, that the killings bound them together for life; they had passed the point of no return, and the contract of their love had been signed in her friends’ lifeblood. Sky, the vampire queen. She died because her killers were too scared of her sexual fury to let her live.

  Three scalped girls. The public talk was of voodoo and fetishism, and above all of the icy ruthlessness of the crimes, but Solanka preferred to ponder the death of the heart. These young girls, so desperately desirous of desire, had only been able to find it at the outside extremes of human sexual behavior. And these three young men, for whom love had become a question of violence and possession, of doing and being done to, had gone to the frontier between love and death, and their fury had worn it away, the fury they could not articulate, born of what they, who had so much, had never been able to acquire: lessness, ordinariness. Real life.

  In a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand horrified conversations buzzing over the dead like stench-seeking flies, the city discussed the murders’ most minute details. They killed one another’s girls! Lauren Klein had been taken out by Medford for one last grand night on the town. She sent him home, as he had planned, because of a quarrel he’d deliberately provoked near the evening’s end. A few moments later he phoned her, pretending to have had a car accident just around the corner. She ran out to help him, found his vintage Bentley unmarked and waiting with its door open. Poor babe. She thought be wanted to apologize. Annoyed at the deception but not alarmed, she climbed in, and was hit repeatedly on the head by Andriessen and Marsalis, while Medford drank margaritas in a nearby bar, announcing loudly that he was drowning his sorrows because his bitch wouldn’t put out, obliging the bartender to ask him to shut up or leave, and making sure his presence would be remembered. And then the scalping. They must’ve put down plastic sheeting to make sure the car wasn’t stained. And the body thrown like garbage in the street. The same technique worked on Belinda Candell.

  Sky, however, was different. As was her way, she took the initiative, whispering her plans for the night to Bradley Marsalis over their last supper. Not tonight, he said, and she shrugged. “Okay. I’ll call Stash or Club and see if they’re up for some fun.” Furious, insulted, but obliged to stick to the game plan, Brad said good night at her lobby door, and phoned her a few minutes later, saying, “Okay, you win, but not here. Meet me at the room.” (The room was the soundproofed five-star hotel suite booked year-round by the S&M Club for the use of its noisier members. Bradley Marsalis, it was revealed, had made the booking several days in advance, which went to prove premeditation.) Sky never reached the room. A large black sports utility vehicle pulled up beside her and a voice she recognized said, “Hi, princess. Climb aboard. Horse asked us to give you a little ride.”

  Twenty, nineteen, nineteen, Solanka counted. Their combined age had been just three years more than his.

  And what of Jack Rhinehart, who lived through a dozen wars only to die miserably in Tribeca, who wrote so well on much that mattered and so stylishly on much that didn’t, and whose last words were, deliberately or by necessity, both poignant and inane? Jack’s story was all out in the open, too. The theft of the shotgun by Horse Marsalis. Jack’s invitation to his S&NI Club induction ceremony. You made it, man. You’re in. Even when they arrived at the Spassky Grain Building, Rhinehart had no idea he was close to death. He was probably thinking of the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, imagining masked girls naked on podiums, waiting for the sting of his sweet lash. Solanka was weeping now. He heard the killers insist that, as part of the ritual, Rhinehart needed to drink a brimming jug of Jack and Coke, the spoiled kids’ tipple, at high speed. He heard them order Jack to strip and reverse his underpants, in the name of club tradition. As if it were being tied around his own eyes, Solanka felt the blindfold they had used on Jack (and afterward removed). His tears soaked through the imagined silk. Okay, Jack, are you ready, this’ll blow you away.—What’s happening, guys, what’s the deal? Just open your mouth, Jack. Did you clean your teeth like we said? Good Job. Say aah, Jack. This’ll kill you, doll. How pathetically easy it had been to lure this good, weak man to his death. How willingly—giving five high, getting five low—he stepped into his own hearse and took his brief last ride. Lord, rock my soul, the singer cried. Good-bye, Jack, Solanka said silently to his friend. Go on home. I’ll be calling you.

  Neela took Malik back to Bedford Street, opened a bottle of red wine, drew the curtains, lit many scented candles, and disrespectfully selected a CD of Bollywood song classics from the fifties and early sixties music from his forbidden past. This was an aspect of her profound emotional wisdom. In all things pertaining to feeling, Neela Mahendra knew what worked. Kabhi meri gali aaya kard. The teasingly romantic song lilted across the darkened room. Come up and see me sometime. They hadn’t spoken since they left the graveside. She drew him down onto a cushion-strewn rug and laid his head between her breasts, wordlessly reminding him of the
continued existence of happiness, even in the midst of grief.