Little buds of flame spring up on the concrete, fuelled by the discarded heaps of possessions and dreams. There is a little, rotting pile of envy: it burns greenly in the night. The fires are every colour of the rainbow, and not all of them need fuel. He blows the little fire-flowers out of his horn and they dance upon the concrete, needing neither combustible materials nor roots. Here, a pink one! There, what would be nice?, I know: a silver rose. – And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their neighbours, forming hedges of multicoloured flame. It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivalling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago.
But here, there is no beauty, sleeping within. There is Gibreel Farishta, walking in a world of fire. In the High Street he sees houses built of flame, with walls of fire, and flames like gathered curtains hanging at the windows. – And there are men and women with fiery skins strolling, running, milling around him, dressed in coats of fire. The street has become red hot, molten, a river the colour of blood. – All, all is ablaze as he toots his merry horn, giving the people what they want, the hair and teeth of the citizenry are smoking and red, glass burns, and birds fly overhead on blazing wings.
The adversary is very close. The adversary is a magnet, is a whirlpool's eye, is the irresistible centre of a black hole, his gravitational force creating an event horizon from which neither Gibreel, nor light, can escape. This way, the adversary calls. I'm over here.
Not a palace, but only a café. And in the rooms above, a bed and breakfast joint. No sleeping princess, but a disappointed woman, overpowered by smoke, lies unconscious here; and beside her, on the floor beside their bed, and likewise unconscious, her husband, the Mecca-returned ex-schoolteacher, Sufyan. – While, elsewhere in the burning Shaandaar, faceless persons stand at windows waving piteously for help, being unable (no mouths) to scream.
The adversary: there he blows!
Silhouetted against the backdrop of the ignited Shaandaar Café, see, that's the very fellow!
Azraeel leaps unbidden into Farishta's hand.
Even an archangel may experience a revelation, and when Gibreel catches, for the most fleeting of instants, Saladin Chamcha's eye, – then in that fractional and infinite moment the veils are ripped away from his sight, – he sees himself walking with Chamcha in Brickhall Fields, lost in a rhapsody, revealing the most intimate secrets of his lovemaking with Alleluia Cone, – those same secrets which afterwards were whispered into telephones by a host of evil voices, – beneath all of which Gibreel now discerns the unifying talent of the adversary, who could be guttural and high, who insulted and ingratiated, who was both insistent and shy, who was prosaic, – yes! – and versifying, too. – And now, at last, Gibreel Farishta recognizes for the first time that the adversary has not simply adopted Chamcha's features as a disguise; – nor is this any case of paranormal possession, of body-snatching by an invader up from Hell; that, in short, the evil is not external to Saladin, but springs from some recess of his own true nature, that it has been spreading through his selfhood like a cancer, erasing what was good in him, wiping out his spirit, – and doing so with many deceptive feints and dodges, seeming at times to recede; while, in fact, during the illusion of remission, under cover of it, so to speak, it continued perniciously to spread; – and now, no doubt, it has filled him up; now there is nothing left of Saladin but this, the dark fire of evil in his soul, consuming him as wholly as the other fire, multicoloured and engulfing, is devouring the screaming city. Truly these are ‘most horrid, malicious, bloody flames, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire’.
The fire is an arch across the sky. Saladin Chamcha, the adversary, who is also Spoono, my old Chumch, has disappeared into the doorway of the Shaandaar Café. This is the maw of the black hole; the horizon closes around it, all other possibilities fade, the universe shrinks to this solitary and irresistible point. Blowing a great blast on his trumpet, Gibreel plunges through the open door.
The building occupied by the Brickhall community relations council was a single-storey monster in purple brick with bulletproof windows, a bunker-like creation of the 1960s, when such lines were considered sleek. It was not an easy building to enter; the door had been fitted with an entryphone and opened on to a narrow alley down one side of the building which ended at a second, also security-locked, door. There was also a burglar alarm.
This alarm, it afterwards transpired, had been switched off, probably by the two persons, one male, one female, who had effected an entry with the assistance of a key. It was officially suggested that these persons had been bent on an act of sabotage, an ‘inside job’, since one of them, the dead woman, had in fact been an employee of the organization whose offices these were. The reasons for the crime remained obscure, and as the miscreants had perished in the blaze, it was unlikely that they would ever come to light. An ‘own goal’ remained, however, the most probable explanation.
A tragic affair; the dead woman had been heavily pregnant.
Inspector Stephen Kinch, issuing the statement in which these facts were stated, made a linkage’ between the fire at the Brickhall CRC and that at the Shaandaar Café, where the second dead person, the male, had been a semi-permanent resident. It was possible that the man had been the real firebug and the woman, who was his mistress although married to and still cohabiting with another man, had been no more than his dupe.
Political motives – both parties were well known for their radical views – could not be discounted, though such was the muddiness of the water in the far-left groupuscules they frequented that it would be hard ever to get a clear picture of what such motives might have been. It was also possible that the two crimes, even if committed by the same man, could have had different motivations. Possibly the man was simply the hired criminal, burning down the Shaandaar for the insurance money at the behest of the now-deceased owners, and torching the CRC at the behest of his lover, perhaps on account of some intra-office vendetta?
That the burning of the CRC was an act of arson was beyond doubt. Quantities of petrol had been poured over desks, papers, curtains. ‘Many people do not understand how quickly a petrol fire spreads,’ Inspector Kinch stated to scribbling journalists. The corpses, which had been so badly burned that dental records had been required for identification purposes, had been found in the photocopying room. ‘That's all we have.’ The end.
I have more.
I have certain questions, anyhow. – About, for instance, an unmarked blue Mercedes panel van, which followed Walcott Roberts's pick-up truck, and then Pamela Chamcha's MG. – About the men who emerged from this van, their faces behind Hallowe'en masks, and forced their way into the CRC offices just as Pamela unlocked the outer door. – About what really happened inside those offices, because purple brick and bulletproof glass cannot easily be penetrated by the human eye. – And about, finally, the whereabouts of a red plastic briefcase, and the documents it contains.