Shalimar the Clown

  The question that nobody could answer in the days after the assassination was why, after the long years of the self-denying ordinance that had removed him from the banalizing, hollowing-out effects of the public eye, Max Ophuls chose to go on television to denounce the destruction of paradise in the florid language of a fading age. On an impulse he had telephoned an acquaintance, the West Coast’s most celebrated late-night talk-show host, to ask if he might appear on the program as soon as possible. The great media celebrity was both astonished and delighted to accommodate him. The talk-show host had long wanted Max on his show because of his fabled gifts as a raconteur. Once at the home of Marlon Brando the famous television personality had been entranced by Max Ophuls’s anecdotal genius—by his stories of how Orson Welles would arrive at and depart from restaurants through their kitchens, to ensure that while he was amazing his dining companions by ordering nothing but a plain green salad the kitchen staff were filling his waiting limousine with boxes full of profiteroles and chocolate cake; and of Chaplin’s Christmas dinner for the Hispanics of Hollywood, at which Luis Buñuel had solemnly, in the spirit of surrealism, completely dismantled Chaplin’s Christmas tree; and of a visit to Thomas Mann, exiled in Santa Monica with the air of a man guarding the crown jewel of himself; and of a drunken night’s carousing with William Faulkner; and of Fitzgerald’s despairing transformation into the hack scenarist Pat Hobby; and of the improbable liaison between Warren Beatty and Susan Sontag, which allegedly took place on an unspecified date in the parking lot at the In-N-Out Burger eatery on Sunset and Orange.

  By the time the ambassador, an amateur of local history, had launched into an account of the subterranean lives of the mysterious lizard people who supposedly dwelt in tunnels below Los Angeles, the talk-show host had become possessed by the idea of getting this reclusive extrovert to reveal himself on television, and had pursued him down the years with a fidelity that bore a close resemblance to unrequited love. That a man who despised the movies was also an encyclopedia of Hollywood lore was enjoyably odd; when the man in question had also lived a life as rich as Max Ophuls’s—Max, the Resistance hero, the philosopher prince, the billionaire power-broker, the maker of the world!—this made him irresistible.

  The talk show had been recorded in the late afternoon, and things did not go as the famous host had planned. Ignoring all invitations to repeat his most enjoyable anecdotes, Max Ophuls launched instead into a political diatribe on the so-called Kashmir issue, a monologue whose excessive vehemence and total lack of wit distressed his interlocutor more than he was able to express. That Ophuls of all men, this brilliant storyteller of infinite charm, should finally emerge from the shadows into the redemptive and validating light of television, but then turn at once into a ratings-sapping current-affairs bore, was unimaginable, unbearable, and yet it was happening right before the studio audience’s suddenly soporific eyes. The talk-show host had the feeling that he was watching the drowning of one reality, the reality in which he lived, by a sudden flood from the other side of the world, an alien deluge in response to which his beloved viewers would form a flood of their own, pouring over in the midnight hour of the show’s transmission to the channel where his bitter rival, the other talk-show host, the tall bony gap-toothed one from New York, would be dancing in a rain of gold.

  “We who live in these luxury limbos, the privileged purgatories of the earth, have set aside thoughts of paradise,” Max was roaring into the camera in a series of high-flown locutions, “yet I tell you that I have seen it and walked by its fish-rich lakes. If thoughts of paradise do occur to us, we think of Adam’s fall, of the expulsion from Eden of the parents of humanity. However, I have not come to speak of the fall of man, but the collapse of paradise itself. In Kashmir it is paradise itself that is falling; heaven on earth is being transformed into a living hell.” Thus, in the unambassadorial language of a gospel-pulpit fire-eater, which was a world away from the veiled verbiage of diplomacy and came as a shock to everyone who knew and admired the habitual suavity of his speech, Max ranted about fanaticism and bombs at a time when the world was briefly full of hope and had little interest in his killjoy news. He lamented the drowning of blue-eyed women and the murder of their golden children. He railed against the coming of cruel flames to a distant city made of wood. He spoke too of the tragedy of the pandits, the Brahmins of Kashmir, who were being driven from their homeland by the assassins of Islam. The rapes of young girls, the fathers set alight, burning like beacons prophesying doom. Max Ophuls could not stop speaking. Once he had begun it was plain that a great tide had risen in him which would not be denied. Across the face of the celebrated talk-show host on whose program this diatribe was delivered, and for whom the legendarily media-shy Ambassador Ophuls’s agreement to be interviewed had represented the culmination of a decade-long pursuit, there now spread a red choleric glow, in which the fury of a disappointed lover mingled with the panic of an entertainer who could hear the future, the sound of channels being changed all over America round about midnight.

  After Max’s host finally managed to break into his guest’s soliloquy and terminate the interview, he briefly considered both suicide and murder. He committed neither solecism, contenting himself, instead, with television’s best revenge. He thanked Max for his fascinating views, guided him courteously to the exit, and then personally supervised the editing of the Ophuls interview; which he cut, to shreds, to the bone.

  That night in Max’s hotel suite the ambassador and Zainab Azam watched a greatly abbreviated version of the paradise monologue, and it was probably true that the heavy cuts had changed the sense of what was said, that this truncated remnant had tilted the balance of the argument and distorted the ambassador’s meaning, but at any rate when Max’s image faded from the screen his lover rose from their bed for the last time in her life, quivering with anger, cured of both worship and desire. “I didn’t mind that you didn’t know a damn thing about me,” she told him, “but it’s too bad you had to prove you were dumb about something that really matters.” Then she let fly a fusillade of dirty words that earned Max Ophuls’s respect, so much so that he forbore to mention that it was strange that someone suddenly claiming to be speaking as an outraged Muslim should have so foul a mouth; nor did he argue that her behavior in recent weeks had not indicated that matters devotional often featured prominently in her thoughts. He understood that the cause of her anger was his “bias” toward the Hindus, and that it would do him no good to explain that his equal and fervently expressed horror at the slaughter of innocent Muslims had been deleted from the program by the vindictive scissors of the network apparatchiks, because the rage of religion had risen up in her and the very rarity of her ardor made it impossible to quell.

  As to the truth about herself, which she believed she had so carefully concealed from him, he knew it all, had discovered her identity weeks ago from the chauffeur who went by the name of Shalimar. Back home in India there were tens of millions of men who would have cut off their right ears or little fingers for the privilege of five minutes of Zainab Azam’s company. She was the hottest box-office star in that distant firmament, a sex goddess such as the Indian cinema had never seen, and was consequently unable to leave her design-magazine home in the Pali Hill district of Bombay without a phalanx of bodyguards and a convoy of armored limousines. In America, where nobody then knew that the Indian movies existed, she had found her freedom, and during the affair with Max Ophuls she had reveled in her luxurious anonymity, in his beautiful unknowing, which was why he had never revealed to her that he knew everything there was to know, for example about the broken heart she was nursing and for which he was no more than a temporary palliative, and about the gangsterish movie-star boyfriend who had broken that heart as insouciantly as he crashed and wrote off vintage American motorcars, Stutz Bearcats, Duesenbergs, Cords. Even now at the end of the affair old Max Ophuls in his generosity allowed her to go on believing in the cloak of secrecy beneath which she had permitted herself
to do so much that had been so pleasurable in his bed.

  He called the chauffeur and asked him to drive the lady home. It is probable that this telephone call sealed his fate, or rather that what had been waiting to happen was finally precipitated by the anger that spilled out of Zainab Azam into the driver’s ears. After the assassination, when she was briefly under suspicion as the possible perpetrator of a crime of passion, the great movie star remembered the fellow’s last words to her. “For every O’Dwyer,” he had said in excellent Urdu as she got out of the car, “there is a Shaheed Udham Singh, and for every Trotsky a Mercader awaits.”

  Because she was wallowing in the tar pits of her own anger Zainab had not taken this boastful statement seriously. The name Mercader meant nothing to her anyway. The story of the death of Trotsky was not among her personal golden treasury of tales, but as for the story of the man who murdered the imperialist lieutenant-governor who had sanctioned the Amritsar massacre, the story of Udham Singh who went to England and waited for six years and then shot O’Dwyer at a public meeting, this was well known. It didn’t occur to Zainab that the driver was being serious. Men were always trying to ingratiate themselves with her, after all, and yes, maybe she had said something to the effect that Max Ophuls was a bastard and she wished he was dead, but that was just her way of talking, she was an artist of passion, a hot-blooded woman, and how else should such a woman speak of a man who had proved himself unworthy of her love? She herself was incapable of murder, she was a woman of peace and also, excuse me, a star, there was the responsibility to her public to consider, a person in her position had to set an example. So soulful was her deposition, so vast and innocent were her eyes, so profound was her guilty horror at the thought that the assassin had confessed his crime to her before he committed it, and that if she had been paying attention to the confession she could have saved a human life, even if it was only the life of a human worm like Max Ophuls, so self-evidently genuine was her self-criticism, that the police officers investigating the crime, hard, cynical men inured to the wiles of American movie queens, became her loyal fans for life and spent substantial portions of their spare time learning Hindustani and hunting down videos of her movies, even the early terrible ones when she was to be frank a little on the chubby side.

  The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophuls at breakfast, handed him his schedule card for the day, and gave in his notice. The ambassador’s drivers tended to be short-term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in pornography or hairdressing, and Max was accustomed to the cycle of acquisition and loss. This time, however, he was shaken, though he did not care to show it. He concentrated on his day’s appointments, trying not to let the card tremble. He knew Shalimar’s real name. He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past, this man with a gymnast’s body and a tragedian’s face who had slowly become more of a valet than a mere driver, a silent yet utterly solicitous body servant who understood what Max needed before he knew it himself, the lighted cigar that materialized just as he was reaching for the humidor, the right cuff-links that were laid out on his bed each morning with the perfect shirt, the ideal temperature for his bathwater, the right times to be absent as well as the correct moments to appear. The ambassador was carried back to his Strasbourgeois childhood years in a Belle Époque mansion near the old synagogue, since destroyed, and found himself marveling at the rebirth in this man from a distant mountain valley of the lost traditions of service of the pampered prewar culture of Alsace.

  There seemed to be no limits to Shalimar’s willingness. When the ambassador, to test him, mentioned having heard that the Prince of Wales made his valet hold his penis while he urinated, to control the direction of the flow, the man whose real name was not Shalimar inclined his head an inch or so and murmured, “I also, if you wish.” Later, after what had to happen had happened, it became clear that the assassin had deliberately drawn his victim almost as close as a lover, had effaced his own personality with the strategic discipline of a great warrior in order to study the true face of the enemy and learn his strengths and weaknesses, as if this vicious killer had been gripped by the need to know as intimately as possible the life he planned so brutally to terminate. It was said in court that such despicable behavior proved the murderer to be a person so inhumanly cold-blooded, so calculatingly icy of heart, so fiendishly diseased of soul that it would never be safe to return him to the company of civilized men.

  The schedule card did begin to tremble in Max’s hand in spite of all his efforts to restrain it. Once, in the interregnum between the scandal that had deprived him of his Indian ambassadorship and his appointment to the covert ambassadorial-level job that remained a secret even from his daughter until after his death, Max Ophuls had lost his way. The sudden shapelessness of his days, after long years in which they would be planned and programmed in fifteen-minute segments, shook and bewildered him, until his secretary had the brainwave of reinstating the little daily appointment cards to which he had grown so accustomed, and filling them with things to do. Gone, inevitably, were his appointments with ministers and captains of industry, his invitations to upper-echelon conferences and his ambassadorial receptions for visiting notables. This was a humbler schedule—eight a.m., get up, go to bathroom, eight-twenty, walk dog, eight-thirty, read newspaper—but it restored a semblance of shape, and Max Ophuls held on to that shred with intense determination and slowly pulled himself out of the depression that had threatened to claim his life. Ever since his recovery from that minatory bout of mental illness Max Ophuls made sure there would always be a little white card waiting for him each morning, the little white card that meant that the universe had not descended into chaos, that the laws of men and nature still held sway, that life had direction and purpose, and that the inchoate outlaw void could not swallow him up.

  Now the void was yawning again. It was Shalimar’s arrival in Max’s life that had reawakened Kashmir in him, had brought back that paradise from which he had been expelled long years before. It was in a way for Shalimar, or rather for the love they had once shared, that Max had found his way to the television studios to deliver his last oration. It was on account of Shalimar, then, that he had lost Zainab Azam. And now Shalimar too was leaving. Max had a vision of his open grave, of a rectilinear black hole huddling in the ground, as empty as his life, and felt the darkness measuring him for his shroud. “We’ll discuss this nonsense later,” he said, affecting nonchalance even though sudden terror had risen in his throat like bile. He tore up the schedule of the day’s events. “I’m going to see India. Get the goddamn car.”

  When they were on Laurel Canyon the Himalayas began to rise around them, at high speed, like special effects. This was the third portent. Unlike his daughter and her mother Max Ophuls did not possess the gift or curse of occasional second sight and so when he saw the white eight-thousand-meter giants smashing up into the sky, bearing away the neighborhood’s split-level homes, designer pets and exotic plant life he trembled with fear. If he was seeing visions it meant that trouble was coming. It would be extreme in nature and would not be long delayed. The murderous illusion of the Himalayas persisted for a full ten seconds, so that the Bentley seemed to be skidding down a spectral ice-valley toward certain destruction, but then as if in a dream a traffic light reared up out of the snow and guided by that red beacon the whole city came back unscathed. Max’s throat felt sore and raw, as if he had caught a chill in the thin Karakoram air. He pulled out his silver hip-flask, gulped down a burning mouthful of whiskey and called his daughter on the phone.

  It had been months since India had seen him but she had made no reproach. These hiatuses were not unusual. Max Ophuls had saved her life once but these days his sense of family was weak and his need for contact with his own blood was intermit
tent and easily satisfied. He was happiest when immersed in worlds of his own making or discovery, busying himself in these years of his retirement with the revised version of his classic book on the nature of power which India had received in the form of bedtime stories, and lately on a bizarre quest—one that his daughter at first dismissed as the obsession of an old fellow with too much time on his hands—for the rumored tunnel complexes of those apocryphal lizard people of Los Angeles whose subterranean lives he had once conjured up at dinner with the famous talk-show host, and which led him in his expensive chauffeur-driven vehicles into some unsavory neighborhoods whose armed gangs he and Shalimar had at least once been obliged to flee at high speed. The ambassador had always been insatiably curious, and also possessed a dangerous, abiding belief in his own indestructibility, so that in the course of his lizard odyssey around South Central Los Angeles and the City of Industry he commanded Shalimar to stop the car outside the gates of an embattled high school past which even police cars would fearfully accelerate at certain times of day, and using field glasses through a wound-down window he commenced in his penetrating voice to forecast who amongst the emerging youngsters would end up in jail and who would go to college, until the driver, seeing the weapons emerging from their hiding places, the unsheathed knives like sharks, the unholstered snouts of the handguns, decided without waiting to be told to floor it and get out of there before the bad guys could start up their motorbikes and hunt them down.

  When India heard her father’s voice on the telephone, however, she understood that it was not the usual, confident Max Ophuls, dipped at birth like Achilles in the magic waters of invulnerability, who was coming to pay her a visit. Her father’s voice sounded hoarse and weak, as if it were finally buckling under the weight of all Max’s eight decades, and there was a new note in it, a note so unexpected that it took India a moment to realize that it was fear. She herself was in a preoccupied frame of mind that morning. Love of all things was pursuing her and she had an aversion to being hunted in general and to love in particular. Love was coming after her in the form of the young man in the neighboring apartment, literally the boy next door, an idea so comical that it would have been endearing had she not erected steel walls of plate armor against the very concept of being endeared. She had begun to think she would have to move house to escape this inescapably claustrophobic assault. She could not remember his name even though he told her repeatedly that it was easy because it rhymed. “Jack Flack,” he said. “See? You’ll never forget it. You’ll never get me out of your mind. You’ll think of my name in bed, in the bathtub, driving the freeways, at the grocery store. You might as well marry me. It’s inevitable. I love you. Face the facts.”