Also at this point, Saladin Chamcha, who had been dining with Allie Cone at her apartment overlooking Brickhall Fields, keeping up appearances, sympathizing, murmuring encouraging insincerities, emerged into the night; found a testudo of helmeted men with plastic shields at the ready moving towards him across the Fields at a steady, inexorable trot; witnessed the arrival overhead of giant, locust-swarming helicopters from which light was falling like heavy rain; saw the advance of the water cannons; and, obeying an irresistible primal reflex, turned tail and ran, not knowing that he was going the wrong way, running full speed in the direction of the Shaandaar.

Television cameras arrive just in time for the raid on Club Hot Wax.

This is what a television camera sees: less gifted than the human eye, its night vision is limited to what klieg lights will show. A helicopter hovers over the nightclub, urinating light in long golden streams; the camera understands this image. The machine of state bearing down upon its enemies. – And now there's a camera in the sky; a news editor somewhere has sanctioned the cost of aerial photography, and from another helicopter a news team is shooting down. No attempt is made to chase this helicopter away. The noise of rotor blades drowns the noise of the crowd. In this respect, again, video recording equipment is less sensitive than, in this case, the human ear.

– Cut. – A man lit by a sun-gun speaks rapidly into a microphone. Behind him there is a disorderment of shadows. But between the reporter and the disordered shadow-lands there stands a wall: men in riot helmets, carrying shields. The reporter speaks gravely; petrolbombs plasticbullets policeinjuries water-cannon looting, confining himself, of course, to facts. But the camera sees what he does not say. A camera is a thing easily broken or purloined; its fragility makes it fastidious. A camera requires law, order, the thin blue line. Seeking to preserve itself, it remains behind the shielding wall, observing the shadow-lands from afar, and of course from above: that is, it chooses sides.

– Cut. – Sun-guns illuminate a new face, saggy-jowled, flushed. This face is named: sub-titled words appear across his tunic. Inspector Stephen Kinch. The camera sees him for what he is: a good man in an impossible job. A father, a man who likes his pint. He speaks: cannot-tolerate-no-go-areas better-pro-tection-required-for-policemen see-the-plastic-riot-shields-catching-fire . He refers to organized crime, political agitators, bomb-factories, drugs. ‘We understand some of these kids may feel they have grievances but we will not and cannot be the whipping boys of society.’ Emboldened by the lights and the patient, silent lenses, he goes further. These kids don't know how lucky they are, he suggests. They should consult their kith and kin. Africa, Asia, the Caribbean: now those are places with real problems. Those are places where people might have grievances worth respecting. Things aren't so bad here, not by a long chalk; no slaughters here, no torture, no military coups. People should value what they've got before they lose it. Ours always was a peaceful land, he says. Our industrious island race. – Behind him, the camera sees stretchers, ambulances, pain. – It sees strange humanoid shapes being hauled up from the bowels of the Club Hot Wax, and recognizes the effigies of the mighty. Inspector Kinch explains. They cook them in an oven down there, they call it fun, I wouldn't call it that myself. – The camera observes the wax models with distaste. – Is there not something witchy about them, something cannibalistic, an unwholesome smell? Have black arts been practised here? – The camera sees broken windows. It sees something burning in the middle distance: a car, a shop. It cannot understand, or demonstrate, what any of this achieves. These people are burning their own streets.

– Cut. – Here is a brightly lit video store. Several sets have been left on in the windows; the camera, most delirious of narcissists, watches TV, creating, for an instant, an infinite recession of television sets, diminishing to a point. – Cut. – Here is a serious head bathed in light: a studio discussion. The head is talking about outlaws. Billy the Kid, Ned Kelly: these were men who stood for as well as against. Modern mass-murderers, lacking this heroic dimension, are no more than sick, damaged beings, utterly blank as personalities, their crimes distinguished by an attention to procedure, to methodology – let's say ritual – driven, perhaps, by the nonentity's longing to be noticed, to rise out of the ruck and become, for a moment, a star. – Or by a kind of transposed deathwish: to kill the beloved and so destroy the self. – Which is the Granny Ripper? a questioner asks. And what about Jack?– The true outlaw, the head insists, is a dark mirror-image of the hero. – These rioters, perhaps? comes the challenge. Aren't you in danger of glamorizing, of ‘legitimizing’? —The head shakes, laments the materialism of modern youth. Looting video stores is not what the head has been talking about. – But what about the old-timers, then? Butch Cassidy, the James brothers, Captain Moonlight, the Kelly gang. They all robbed – did they not? – banks. – Cut. – Later that night, the camera will return to this shop-window. The television sets will be missing.

– From the air, the camera watches the entrance to Club Hot Wax. Now the police have finished with wax effigies and are bringing out real human beings. The camera homes in on the arrested persons: a tall albino man; a man in an Armani suit, looking like a dark mirror-image of de Niro; a young girl of – what? – fourteen, fifteen? – a sullen young man of twenty or thereabouts. No names are titled; the camera does not know these faces. Gradually, however, the facts emerge. The club DJ, Sewsunker Ram, known as ‘Pinkwalla’, and its proprietor, Mr. John Maslama, are to be charged with running a large-scale narcotics operation – crack, brown sugar, hashish, cocaine. The man arrested with them, an employee at Maslama's nearby ‘Fair Winds’ music store, is the registered owner of a van in which an unspecified quantity of ‘hard drugs’ has been discovered; also numbers of ‘hot’ video recorders. The young girl's name is Anahita Sufyan; she is under-age, is said to have been drinking heavily, and, it is hinted, having sex with at least one of the three arrested men. She is further reported to have a history of truancy and association with known criminal types: a delinquent, clearly. – An illuminated journalist will offer the nation these titbits many hours after the event, but the news is already running wild in the streets: Pinkwalla! – And the Wax: they smashed the place up – totalled it! – Now it's war.

This happens, however – as does a great deal else – in places which the camera cannot see.

Gibreel:

moves as if through a dream, because after days of wandering the city without eating or sleeping, with the trumpet named Azraeel tucked safely in a pocket of his greatcoat, he no longer recognizes the distinction between the waking and dreaming states; – he understands now something of what omnipresence must be like, because he is moving through several stories at once, there is a Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia Cone, and a Gibreel hovering over the death-bed of a Prophet, and a Gibreel watching in secret over the progress of a pilgrimage to the sea, waiting for the moment at which he will reveal himself, and a Gibreel who feels, more powerfully every day, the will of the adversary, drawing him ever closer, leading him towards their final embrace: the subtle, deceiving adversary, who has taken the face of his friend, of Saladin his truest friend, in order to lull him into lowering his guard. And there is a Gibreel who walks down the streets of London, trying to understand the will of God.