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Goodbye, sucker.
Dialling tone.
Alleluia Cone returned to find Gibreel gone, and in the vandalized silence of her apartment she determined that this time she would not have him back, no matter in what sorry condition or how wheedlingly he came crawling to her, pleading for forgiveness and for love; because before he left he had wrought a terrible vengeance upon her, destroying every one of the surrogate Himalayas she had collected over the years, thawing the ice-Everest she kept in her freezer, pulling down and ripping to shreds the parachute-silk peaks that rose above her bed, and hacking to pieces (he'd used the small axe she kept with the fire extinguisher in the broom cupboard) the priceless whittled memento of her conquest of Chomolungma, given her by Pemba the shcrpa, as a warning as well as a commemoration. To All Bibi. We were luck. Not to try again.
She flung open sash windows and screamed abuse at the i
Then, weeping, she rang Saladin Chamcha to tell him the bad news.
Mr. John Maslama, owner of the Hot Wax nightclub, the record chain of the same name, and of ‘Fair Winds’, the legendary store where you could get yourself the finest horns – clarinets, saxophones, trombones – that a person could find to blow in the whole of London town, was a busy man, so he would always ascribe to the intervention of Divine Providence the happy chance that caused him to be present in the trumpet store when the Archangel of God walked in with thunder and lightning sitting like laurels upon his noble brow. Being a practical businessman, Mr. Maslama had up to this point concealed from his employees his extracurricular work as the chief herald of the returned Celestial and Semi-Godlike Being, sticking posters in his shop-windows only when he was sure he was unobserved, neglecting to sign the display advertisements he bought in newspapers and magazines at considerable personal expense, proclaiming the imminent Glory of the Coming of the Lord. He issued press releases through a public relations subsidiary of the Valance agency, asking that his own anonymity be guarded carefully. ‘Our client is in a position to state,’ these releases – which enjoyed, for a time, an amused vogue among Fleet Street diarists – cryptically a
A halo.
Say what you like, the three shop-attendants afterwards repeated to anyone who would listen, say what you like, but we saw what we saw.
3
The death of Dr Uhuru Simba, formerly Sylvester Roberts, while in custody awaiting trial, was described by the Brickhall constabulary's community liaison officer, a certain Inspector Stephen Kinch, as ‘a million-to-one shot’. It appeared that Dr Simba had been experiencing a nightmare so terrifying that it had caused him to scream piercingly in his sleep, attracting the immediate attention of the two duty officers. These gentlemen, rushing to his cell, arrived in time to see the still-sleeping form of the gigantic man literally lift off its bunk under the malign influence of the dream and plunge to the floor. A loud snap was heard by both officers; it was the sound of Dr Uhuru Simba's neck breaking. Death had been instantaneous.
The dead man's minuscule mother, Antoinette Roberts, standing in a cheap black hat and dress on the back of her younger son's pick-up truck, the veil of mourning pushed defiantly back off her face, was not slow to seize upon Inspector Kinch's words and hurl them back into his florid, loose-chi