The modest white-walled cottage with the pitched slate roof was called Tyn-y-Coed, the house in the woods, a common name for a house in those parts. It was near the village of Pentrefelin in Brecon, not far from the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons. There was a great deal of rain. When they arrived it was cold. The police officers tried to light the stove and after a good deal of clanking and swearing succeeded. He managed to find a small upstairs room where he could shut the door and pretend to work. The house felt bleak, as did the days. Margaret Thatcher was on television, understanding the insult to Islam and sympathizing with the insulted. He spoke to Gillon Aitken and Bill Buford and they both warned that there would be a backlash of public opinion against him for a while. He read the statements of support by the world’s great writers published in The New York Times Book Review and took some comfort there. He spoke to Michael Foot on the phone and was uplifted by Foot’s jerky, exclamatory declarations of absolute solidarity. He pictured Michael’s long white hair flapping vehemently and his wife, Jill Craigie, by his side, serenely ferocious. “An outrage. All of it. Jill and I both say so. Yes, indeed.”
There had been a change of protection team. Stan, Benny, Dennis and Mick had gone back to their families and he was now in the care of Dev Stonehouse, a “character” with a face suffused by the color of what looked like a drinking problem, full of scurrilous loose-tongued tales about other “principals” he had taken care of: the night the Irish politician Gerry Fitt drank sixteen gin and tonics, the intolerably high-handed behavior of the minister Tom King toward his prot team, “that chap might get a bullet put in his back one of these days,” and, by contrast, the gentlemanly behavior of the firebrand Ulsterman Ian Paisley, who remembered everyone’s names, asked about their families, and prayed with his protection officers at the start of every day. In Dev’s team were two more smiling, gentle-natured drivers, Alex and Phil, who turned a deaf ear to Dev “spouting his nonsense,” and a second protection officer, Peter Huddle, who clearly loathed Detective-Sergeant Stonehouse. “He’s like hemorrhoids,” he said loudly in the kitchen, “a royal pain in the arse.”
They took him for a walk in the Black Mountains—the landscape in which Bruce Chatwin had set his best book, On the Black Hill—and, out for once in the open air, with countryside and a skyline to look at instead of the interior walls of a house, he felt his spirits lift. This team liked to talk. “I can’t buy my wife presents,” mourned Alex, a lowland Scot. “She dislikes whatever I get her.” Phil had been left to take care of the cars. “He’ll be all right,” said Alex. “OFDs like sitting in their vehicles.” And apropos of nothing Dev announced that he had got laid the previous night. Alex and Peter’s faces acquired expressions of distaste. Then suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his lower jaw. It was his lower wisdom teeth acting up. The pain faded after a while, but it was a warning. He might need to see a dentist.
They had told him they didn’t like the idea of him going to London too often but they also understood that he needed to see his son. His friends made their homes available and he was driven in to meet Zafar there, at the Archway home of his old Cambridge friend Teresa Gleadowe and her husband, the gallerist Tony Stokes, at whose little Covent Garden gallery the launch party for Midnight’s Children had been held in another lifetime, or at the Kentish Town home of Sue Moylan and Gurmukh Singh, who had met and fallen in love at his wedding to Clarissa and would never be apart again. They were an ideally suited odd couple: she the judge’s daughter and classic English rose and he the tall, handsome Sikh from Singapore, a pioneer in the nascent science of computer software. (When Gurmukh decided to learn gardening he built a computer program that told him exactly what to do every day of the year. His garden, planted and maintained according to the program’s instructions, thrived mightily.) Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser opened their doors to him and so did many other friends. Bill Buford told him: “Your friends are going to close around you like an iron circle, and inside that ring you will be able to lead your life.” That was exactly what they did. Their code of silence was unbreakable. Not one of them ever inadvertently let slip any details of his movements, not once. He wouldn’t have survived six months without them. After much initial mistrust, the Special Branch came to rely on his friends, too—to appreciate that these were serious people who understood what needed to be done.
This was what had to happen for him to meet his boy. The team’s “fifth man,” who was based at Scotland Yard, would visit the “venue” in advance, assessing it for security, instructing the homeowners on what they had to do, lock those doors, draw those curtains. Then he would be driven to the venue, always by the most circuitous route, with many countersurveillance tricks being employed, a process known as “dry-cleaning”—making sure they weren’t being followed. (Countersurveillance driving involved, in part, driving as weirdly as possible. On a motorway he was sometimes driven at wildly varying speeds, because, if anyone else did the same thing, it meant they had a tail. Sometimes Alex would get into an exit lane and drive very fast. Anyone following would not know if he was going to leave the motorway or not and would have to drive very fast behind them, thus revealing his presence.) Meanwhile another car would collect Zafar and bring him to the meeting place, also after being “dry-cleaned.” It was a lot, but then he saw the joy in his child’s eyes and that told him everything he needed to know.
He saw Zafar for an hour at the Stokes household. He spent another hour with his mother and Sameen at the Pinters’ home in Campden Hill Square and in his mother’s iron self-control he saw again the woman she had been in the days before and after his father’s death. She hid her fear and worry behind a tight but loving smile, but her fists often clenched. Then, because it was too late to drive all the way back to Wales, he was taken to Ian McEwan’s cottage in the village of Chedworth in Gloucestershire, and was able to spend a night in the company of good and loving friends—Alan Yentob and his partner, Philippa Walker, as well as Ian. In an interview with The New Yorker, Ian later said, “I’ll never forget—the next morning we got up early. He had to move on. Terrible time for him. We stood at the kitchen counter making toast and coffee, listening to the eight o’clock BBC news. He was standing right by my side and he was the lead item on the news. Hezbollah had put its sagacity and weight behind the project to kill him.” Ian’s memory was slightly at fault. The threat on the news that day did not come from the Iranian-financed Hezbollah group in Lebanon but from Ahmad Jibril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command.
Commander John Howley of the Special Branch—the high-flying police officer in charge of “A” Squad, who afterward rose to the rank of deputy assistant commissioner and became the head both of the Special Branch and the antiterrorism work of Scotland Yard—came to see him in Wales, accompanied by Bill Greenup, the officer whom Marianne, in her Welsh story, had renamed “Mr. Browndown.” Mr. Greenup’s attitude toward him was unfriendly. It was plainly his view that they were dealing with a troublemaker who had got more than he bargained for and now good police officers had to risk their necks to save his, to rescue him from the consequences of his own actions. And the troublemaker was a Labour voter too and had criticized the very government, the Thatcher administration, which was now obliged to sanction his protection. There were hints from Mr. Greenup that the Special Branch was thinking of handing over his protection to regular uniformed police, and he could take his chances. It looked now as though he would be at risk for a very considerable time and that was not what the Special Branch had foreseen, or wanted. This was the bad news that Commander Howley, a man of few words, had come all the way to Wales to give him. It was no longer a matter of lying low for a few days to let the politicians sort it out. There was no prospect of his being allowed (allowed?) to resume his normal life in the foreseeable future. He could not just decide to go home and take his chances. To do so would be to endanger his neighbors and to place an intolerable burden on police resources, because an entire st
reet, or more than one street, would need to be sealed off and protected. He had to wait until there was a “major political shift.” What did that mean, he asked: Until Khomeini died? Or: Never? Howley did not have an opinion. It was not possible for him to estimate how long.
He had been living with the threat of death for one month. There had been further rallies against The Satanic Verses in Paris, New York, Oslo, Kashmir, Bangladesh, Turkey, Germany, Thailand, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia and West Yorkshire. The toll of injuries and deaths had continued to rise. The novel had by now also been banned in Syria, Lebanon, Kenya, Brunei, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, and across the Arab world. A Muslim “leader” named Abdul Hussain Chowdhury asked the chief metropolitan magistrate in London to grant him a summons against Salman Rushdie and his publishers, alleging “blasphemous libel and seditious libel,” but the injunction was not granted. Fifth Avenue in New York had to be sealed off because there was a bomb scare in a bookstore. In those days there were still bookstores up and down Fifth Avenue.
The united front of the literary world cracked, and it caused him real pain to see his own world fracturing under the pressure of these events. First the West Berlin Academy of Arts refused to allow a “pro-Rushdie” solidarity rally to take place on its premises because of security concerns. This led Germany’s greatest writer, Günter Grass, and the philosopher Günther Anders, to resign from the academy in protest. Then, in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy, which awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, decided not to issue a formal statement condemning the fatwa. The eminent novelist Kerstin Ekman resigned her seat at the table of eighteen academicians. Lars Gyllensten also withdrew from the academy’s deliberations.
He felt awful. “Don’t do it, Günter, Günther, Kerstin, Lars,” he wanted to shout. “Don’t do it on my account.” He didn’t want to split academies, to injure the world of books. That was the opposite of what he wanted. He was trying to defend the book against the burners of books. These small battles of the bookish seemed like tragedies at a time when literary freedom itself was so violently under attack.
On the Ides of March he was flung without warning into the lowest circle of Orwellian hell. “You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” The worst thing in the world was different for every individual. For Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, it was rats. For himself in a cold Welsh cottage it was an unanswered phone call.
He had established a daily routine with Clarissa. At seven o’clock every evening, without fail, he would call to say hello to Zafar. He was talking to his son as openly as he could about everything that was going on, trying to put an optimistic spin on it, to keep the monsters in his child’s imagination at bay, but keeping him informed. He had quickly learned that as long as Zafar heard the news from him first, the boy was able to handle it. If by some mischance they failed to speak and Zafar heard something shocking from friends in the school playground, he became very upset. It was vital to communicate. Hence the daily call. He had agreed with Clarissa that if for some reason she couldn’t be at home with Zafar at seven she should leave a message on the St. Peter’s Street answering machine telling him when they would be back. He called the Burma Road house. There was no reply. He left a message on Clarissa’s machine and then interrogated his own. She had not left a message. Oh, well, he thought, they’re a little late. Fifteen minutes later he called again. Nobody picked up. He called his own machine again: nothing there. Ten minutes later he made a third call. Still nothing. By now he had begun to worry. It was almost 7:45 P.M. on a school night. Not normal for them to be out so late. He called twice more in the next ten minutes. No response. Now he began to panic.
The day’s events faded away. The Islamic Conference Organization had called him an apostate but had avoided supporting the Iranian death order. Muslims were planning a march in Cardiff. Marianne was upset because her just-published novel John Dollar had sold exactly twenty-four copies in the preceding week. None of it mattered. He called Burma Road repeatedly, dialing and redialing like a madman, and his hands began to shake. He was sitting on the floor, wedged up against a wall, with the phone on his lap, dialing, redialing. The prot team had changed over again; Stan and Benny were back with two new drivers, a cheeky-chappie good sort called Keith, a.k.a. “Stumpy,” and a red-haired Welshman named Alan Owen. Stan noticed his “principal’s” agitated phone activity and came to ask if everything was all right.
He said no, it didn’t seem to be. Clarissa and Zafar were by now an hour and a quarter late for their phone appointment with him and had left no word of explanation. Stan’s face was serious. “Is this,” he asked, “a break in routine? That’s one of the things to be concerned about, any unexpected break.” Yes, he said, it was a break in routine. “Okay,” said Stan, “leave it with me. I’ll make some inquiries.” A few minutes later he came back to say he had spoken to “Metpol”—the London Metropolitan Police—and a car would be sent to the address to do a “drive-by.” After that the minutes moved as slowly and coldly as glacial ice and when the report came it froze his heart. “The car drove by the premises just now,” Steve told him, “and the report, I’m sorry to say, is that the front door is open and all the lights are on.” He was unable to reply. “Obviously the officers did not attempt to go up to the house or enter,” Steve said. “In the situation as it is they would not know what they might encounter.”
He saw bodies sprawling on the stairs in the front hall. He saw the brightly lit rag-doll corpses of his son and his first wife drenched in blood. Life was over. He had run away and hidden like a terrified rabbit and his loved ones had paid the price. “Just to inform you on what we’re doing,” said Stan. “We will be going in there, but you’ll have to give us approximately forty minutes. They need to assemble an army.”
Maybe they were not both dead. Maybe his son was alive and taken hostage. “You understand,” he said to Stan, “that if they have him and they want a ransom, they want me to exchange myself for him, then I’m going to do that, and you guys can’t stop me doing it. I just want that to be clear.”
Stan took a slow, dark pause, like a character in a Pinter play. Then he said, “That thing about exchanging hostages, that only happens in the movies. In real life, I’m sorry to tell you, if this is a hostile intervention, they are both probably dead already. The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want to die as well.”
The police in the kitchen had fallen silent. Marianne sat facing him, staring at him, unable to offer comfort. He had no more to say. There was only the crazy dialing, every thirty seconds, the dialing and then the ring tone and then Clarissa’s voice asking him to leave a message. That beautiful, long, green-eyed girl. The mother of his gentle, lively, loving son. There was no message worth leaving. I’m sorry didn’t begin to cover it. He hung up and redialed and there was her voice again. And again.
After a very long time Stan came and said quietly, “Won’t be long now. They’re just about ready.” He nodded and waited for reality to deal him what would be a fatal blow. He was not aware of weeping but his face was wet. He went on dialing Zafar’s number. As if the telephone possessed occult powers, as if it was a Ouija board that could put him in touch with the dead.
Then unexpectedly there was a click. Somebody had picked up the receiver at the other end. “Hello?” he said, his voice unsteady. “Dad?” said Zafar’s voice. “What’s going on, Dad? There’s a policeman at the door and he says there are fifteen more on the way.” Relief cascaded over him and momentarily tied his tongue. “Dad? Are you there?” “Yes,” he said, “I’m here. Is your mother all right? Where were you?” They had been at a school drama performance that had run very late. Clarissa came on to the phone and apologized. “I’m sorry, I should have left you a message, I just forgot. I’m sorry.”
The usual aftershock biochemicals ran in his veins and he didn’t know if he
was happy or enraged. “But what about the door?” he asked. “Why was the front door open and all the lights left on?” It was Zafar on the other end again. “It wasn’t, Dad,” he said. “We just got back and opened the door and turned the lights on and then the policeman came.”
“It would seem,” said Detective-Sergeant Stan, “that there has been a regrettable error. The car we sent to have a look, looked at the wrong house.”
The wrong house. A police mistake. Just a stupid mistake. Everything was all right. The monsters were back in the broom cupboard and under the floorboards. The world had not exploded. His son was alive. The door of Room 101 swung open. Unlike Winston Smith, he had escaped.
This had been the worst day of his life.
The message on his machine was from the novelist Margaret Drabble. “Do call if you can.” And when he did call she made, in her brisk, efficient, no-nonsense way, an offer as impossibly generous in its way as Deborah Rogers’s had been. She and her husband, Michael Holroyd, the biographer of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw, had been doing up a cottage in Porlock Weir on the Somerset coast. “It’s done now,” she said, “and we were just about to move in, and then I said to Michael, maybe Salman might like it. You could certainly have it for a month or so.” The gift of a month, the chance of being able to stay in one place for that long, was precious beyond words. For one month he would be a person from Porlock. “Thank you,” he said, inadequately.