Then for a moment there were Elvis and Tony T-shirts for sale on Melrose and at Venice Beach. One of the television networks announced plans for a movie about the manhunt, with the parts of Tony and Elvis to be played by Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz. With astonishing speed Shalimar the clown had become a bit player in the story of the policing of Los Angeles, and Kashmira Ophuls, who was always Kashmira now, who was making everyone she knew use the name, Kashmira whose mother and father he had foully killed, grew steadily angrier. She had knelt by her mother’s grave in Shirmal and something got into her there, something that mattered, but now the meaning of the great events of her life was being leached away, all the talk was of police corruption and rotten apples and good honest officers called Hilliker and Geneva. The world did not stop but cruelly continued. Max no longer signified in it, and nor did Boonyi Kaul. Tony and Elvis were the heroes of the hour and Shalimar the clown was their property, their villain. He was, you could say, their happy ending, their last big bust, the one that gave meaning to their lives, that took meaning from her life and handed it to them. Alone in her apartment bedroom Kashmira beat her fists against a wall. It felt, how did it feel, it felt obscene. I want to write to him, she thought. I want him to know I’m out here waiting. I want him to know he belongs to me.
I am going to tell you about my father, she wrote. You should know more about the man you killed, with whom you established so intimate a relationship, becoming the bringer of his death. He didn’t have long to live but you couldn’t wait, you were in a hurry for his blood. It was a grand life you took and you should know its grandeur. I am going to teach you what he taught me about entering the house of power, and what he was like when I was a small girl, how he put his lips against my neck and made bird noises, and I am going to tell you about his foolish obsession with the imaginary lizard people who, or so he thought, once lived below L.A. I am going to take you with him on a plane flight across France and into the Resistance which will be interesting for you I believe. I am sure you think of your violent deeds as having been done in the cause of some sort of liberation so you will be interested to know that he was a warrior too. I want you to know the songs he sang—je te plumerai le cou!—and the food he liked best, the sauerkraut with Riesling and the honeyed lamb of his Alsatian youth, and I want you to know how he saved his daughter’s life and that his daughter loved him. I am going to write and write and write to you and my letters will be your conscience and they will torture you and make your life a living hell until if things go as they should it is brought to an end. Even if you do not read them, even if they are never given to you or, if they are, even if you rip the envelopes to shreds, they are still spears that will transfix your heart. My letters are curses they will shrivel your soul. My letters are threats they should frighten you and I will not stop writing them until you are dead and maybe after you die I will go on writing them to your spirit as it burns and they will torment you more agonizingly than the inferno. You will never see Kashmir again but Kashmira is here and now you will inhabit me, I will write a world around you and it will be a prison more dreadful than your prison, a cell more confined than yourself. The hardships I send you will make the hardships of your imprisonment seem like joys. My letters are poisoned arrows. Do you know the song of Habba Khatoon in which she sings about being pierced? Oh marksman my bosom is open to the darts you throw at me, she sang. These darts are piercing me, why are you cross with me. Now you are my target and I am your marksman however my arrows are not dipped in love but hatred. My letters are arrows of hate and they will strike you down.
I am your black Scheherazade, she wrote. I will write to you without missing a day without missing a night not to save my life but to take yours to wind around you the poisonous snakes of my words until their fangs stab your neck. Or I am Prince Shahryar and you are my helpless virgin bride. I will write to you and my voice will haunt your dreams. Every night I tell the story of your death. Can you hear me? Listen to my voice. Every day I will write to you. Every night for however many nights it takes I will whisper in your ear until the story’s done. You can’t get into my head anymore. I’m in yours instead.
Shalimar the clown spent a year and a half in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail on Bauchet Street waiting for his trial to begin. He was segregated from other prisoners and housed in the jail’s 7000 section where the high-profile inmates were kept. He wore ankle chains and was given his meals in his cell and permitted three one-hour exercise periods per week. In the early weeks of his confinement he was in a highly disturbed condition, often screaming out at night, complaining about a female demon who was occupying his head, jabbing hot shafts into his brain. He was placed on suicide watch and given a high dosage of the tranquilizer Xanax. He was asked if he would like to receive visits from a priest of the Islamic faith and he said that he would. A young imam from the USC mosque on Figueroa Street was provided and reported after his first visit that the prisoner had genuinely repented of his crime, stating that owing to his poor command of the English language he had misunderstood certain statements regarding the Kashmir issue made by Maximilian Ophuls on a television talk show and had been quite erroneously driven to assassinate a man he had mistakenly thought of as an enemy of Muslims. The killing was therefore the result of an unfortunate linguistic lapse and he was consequently consumed with remorse. On the young imam’s second visit, however, the prisoner was in a heightened state of agitation in spite of the Xanax and seemed at times to be addressing an absent person, apparently female, in English which, while not by any means perfect, was nevertheless good enough to undermine his earlier assertions. When the young imam pointed this out the prisoner became menacing and had to be restrained. After that the imam declined to return and the prisoner refused to see another priest even though a qualified member of the Latino Muslim Association of Los Angeles, Francisco Mohammed, was occasionally at the Men’s Central Jail to counsel other inmates and had indicated that he would be available if required.
The new district attorney, Gil Garcetti, who had replaced Ira Reiner after the riots, argued when Shalimar the clown’s case came up before the Los Angeles County grand jury that the accused’s statements to the Figueroa Street imam confirmed that he was a devious individual, a professional killer with many work-names and alter egos, whose protestations of remorse and repentance were not to be taken at face value. Shalimar the clown was duly indicted by the grand jury for the murder of Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls and returned to Bauchet Street to await trial. It was accepted by the grand jury that the special circumstances attached to the case made him eligible for the death penalty. If found guilty he would therefore be liable to execution by lethal injection unless he opted for the gas chamber, which was still being offered as an alternative method if the subject so preferred.
Shalimar the clown had initially refused legal representation but later accepted a court-appointed defense team led by the attorney William T. Tillerman, well known for his fondness for defending the indefensible, a brilliant courtroom performer, slow and weighty, reminiscent of Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution, who first rose to prominence as a junior member of the team defending Richard Ramirez, whom the tabloid press renamed the Nightstalker, several years before. There were persistent rumors that Tillerman had been the “hidden hand” shaping the defense strategy in the notorious Menendez brothers trial, even though he was not a named attorney in the case. (Erik and Lyle Menendez were, like Shalimar the clown, inmates of cell block 7000, where, later in Shalimar the clown’s captivity, the former football star Orenthal James Simpson would also spend some time.) When letters addressed to Shalimar the clown and written by Max Ophuls’s orphaned daughter started arriving in large numbers at 441 Bauchet Street, it was Tillerman who saw the connection between these letters and his client’s alleged nocturnal persecution by the so-called female demon, and so devised what became widely known as the “sorcerer’s defense.”
When the letter avalanche began Shalimar th
e clown was asked first by prison officials and afterward by his attorney if he wished to see them, was warned of their tone of exceptional anger and hostility, and was firmly instructed by William Tillerman not to reply no matter how strongly he wished to do so. He insisted on being given the envelopes. “They are from my stepdaughter,” he told Tillerman, who noted that his client’s English was heavily accented but competent, “and it is my duty to read what she wishes to say. As for answering her, it is not necessary. There is no answer she wishes to hear.” The system worked slowly, and the letters were usually two or three weeks old by the time he received them, but that didn’t matter, because the moment he read the first one Shalimar the clown identified their author as the female bhoot who had been pursuing him through his terrifying nightmares. He understood at once what Boonyi’s child was telling him: that she had set herself up as his nemesis, and whatever the judgment of a Californian court might be she would be his real judge; she, and not twelve Americans in a jury box, would be his only jury; and she, not a prison executioner, would somehow carry out whatever sentence she imposed. It wasn’t important to know the how or when or where. He braced himself for her nocturnal assaults, screaming through the sedation, but enduring. He carefully read her daily indictments, read them over and over, memorizing them, giving them their due. He accepted her challenge.
After the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York—eight years later this would be remembered as the first bombing—he sat across a table from his lawyer in a stinking meeting room and expressed his fears for his safety. Even in his maximum-security, solitary-confinement wing, it was a dangerous time in prison for a Muslim man accused by the state of being a professional terrorist. Shalimar the clown dressed up for his meeting with Tillerman, as finely as prison allowed, wearing his “bonneroos,” prison-issue blue jeans and a prison-issue denim overcoat. There was a sign on the wall of the room saying HOLDING HANDS ONLY and another saying 1 KISS 1 HUG AT THE START 1 HUG 1 KISS AT THE FINISH. These messages did not apply to him. He avoided Tillerman’s eyes and spoke in a low voice in halting but serviceable English. Men died all the time in the MCJ. The sheriff blamed budget cuts but so what, that didn’t make anyone feel any safer. A convicted killer somehow managed to walk the halls at night and murder another inmate who had testified against him at his trial even though their cells had been on different floors. The other prisoners in their cells, six thousand of them, acted on gang instructions and turned their backs and saw nothing. News of such things reached Shalimar the clown even in cell block 7000. A Korean gang member was stabbed thirty times and stuffed into a laundry trolley and nobody found him for sixteen hours, until the laundry began to stink. A wife-beater had been kicked to death. Two hundred men had taken part in a race riot started by an argument about using a pay phone. In the argument one inmate was stabbed a dozen times. And now after the attack in Manhattan maybe a guard would leave a door to 7000 unlocked one night and some godzilla called Sugarpie Honeybunch or Goldilocks Ali or Big Chief Bull Moose or Virginia Slim or the Cisco Kid, some OVG—Old Valley Gangster—would wreak an American revenge. Tillerman shrugged. “Okay. I’ll take it up.” Then he leaned across the table and changed the subject. “Tell me about the girl.” Initially reluctant to reply, Shalimar the clown yielded slowly to his lawyer’s coaxing, and began to talk.
The case of the People v. Noman Sher Noman came to trial six months later at the Los Angeles County Superior Court at the San Fernando Valley Government Center in Van Nuys, before Judge Stanley Weissberg, who had been on the bench in the Simi Valley Rodney King trial, when the four LAPD officers were acquitted, precipitating the riots. He was a mild, professorial man in his middle fifties and seemed unshaken by the Simi Valley experience. Because of the heightened atmosphere created by the events in Lower Manhattan the security at the courthouse was unprecedented. Shalimar the clown arrived and left each day, shackled and chained, in a white armored van surrounded by a police operation reminiscent of a presidential motorcade. Roadblocks, motorcycle outriders, police snipers on the rooftops, an eleven-vehicle procession. “We don’t want a Jack Ruby situation here,” the city’s new chief of police, Willie Williams, told the press. What would he compare the operation to in terms of its scale, a reporter asked him. He replied with a straight face, “It’s what we’d do for Arafat.”
The court had initially summoned five hundred people for jury duty. To ensure a fair trial all five hundred had been asked to complete a hundred-page questionnaire, and on the basis of these questionnaires and the usual courtroom challenges twelve jurors and six alternates had been empaneled. Four men and eight women would try the case of Shalimar the clown. Their average age was thirty-nine. Tillerman had wanted a young jury with a female bias. He considered himself a student of human nature, and was certainly a barroom philosopher of the usual, disenchanted variety. It was his view that the young, believing themselves immortal, had less respect for human life and so were less likely to be vengeful toward a killer. And after all—this was the reasoning behind loading the jury with women—Shalimar the clown was a highly attractive man, and had a tragic tale of heartbreak and betrayal to recount. The crime of passion was not a legal category in California, in spite of which such extenuating circumstances could only help the defense.
The thirtysomething prosecutors, Janet Mientkiewicz and Larry Tanizaki, looked like baby-faced innocents next to the much older, more corpulent, worldly-wise Tillerman, but they were hardened lawyers who were determined to get their man. Tanizaki had privately expressed some doubts about the death penalty, knowing that many jurors didn’t like imposing it, but Mientkiewicz bolstered his resolve. “If this isn’t a hanging offense, nothing is,” she said on the steps of the courtroom on the day of the pretrial hearing. Tanizaki and Mientkiewicz’s greatest concern was that the defense might try to deny the crime. Strangely, even though the murder of Maximilian Ophuls had taken place on a bright, sunny L.A. day, there were no eyewitnesses. It was as if the whole street had turned its back on the event, just as the inmates of the MCJ had done on the night of the revenge killing. The prosecution had the fingerprinted knife, the bloodstained clothes, the motive, the opportunity and the evidence of Mr. Khadaffy Andang, who was cooperating fully with the state. They did not have a witness to the crime. However, William Tillerman informed them at the pretrial hearing that his client would not deny responsibility for the death of Ambassador Ophuls; but he added that if the charge were not reduced from murder in the first degree, then a not-guilty plea would have to be entered. “My client is a severely disturbed man,” he averred. What was he suffering from, Judge Weissberg wanted to know. “The effects,” Tillerman solemnly replied, “of witchcraft.”
A woman, my mother, died for the crime of leaving you, Kashmira wrote. A man, my father, died for taking her in. You murdered two human beings because of your egotism your amazing egotism that valued your honor more highly than their lives. You bathed your honor in their blood but you did not wash it clean it’s bloody now. You wanted to wipe them out but you failed, you killed nobody. Here I stand. I am my mother and my father I am Maximilian Ophuls and Boonyi Kaul. You achieved nothing. They are not dead not gone not forgotten. They live on in me.
Can you feel me inside you mister assassin mister joker? At night when you close your eyes do you see me there? At night who is it that stops you sleeping and if you do sleep who stabs at you until you awake? Are you screaming mister killer? Are you screaming mister clown? Don’t call me your stepdaughter I’m not your stepdaughter I am my father’s daughter and my mother’s child and if I’m inside you then so are they. My mother whom you butchered torments you now and my slaughtered father too. I am Maximilian Ophuls and Boonyi Kaul and you are nothing, less than nothing. I crush you beneath my heel.
Early in 1993 she tried briefly to go back to work, her friends had urged her to restart her life, and for a time she had traveled up and down US-101, south to San Diego where the route began in Presidio Park and north as far as the S
onoma Mission, past the concrete bells hanging from their hook-shaped posts that marked the route of the old trail taken by Fray Junipero Serra in the 1770s, looking for the stories she wanted to tell in her projected documentary Camino Real. But her heart hadn’t been in it and she abandoned the project after a few weeks. The underwear model got in touch and asked her to go out to dinner, which, under pressure from her girlfriends, she agreed to do, but even though he brought her flowers and wore a blazer and tie and took her to Spago and told her she was prettier than any of the movie actresses and tried not to talk about himself, she didn’t make it to the end of the meal, she made her apologies—“I’m not fit for human company right now”—and fled.
She decided that the time had come to move out of her apartment, and returned to the big house on Mulholland Drive to live with her father’s ghost. Olga Simeonovna, whose daughters had returned, moving into one of the building’s many vacant apartments, gave Kashmira a loud, honkingly tearful farewell and promised she would “make it up there into the lap of luxury” whenever she could. In the lap of luxury Kashmira lived an increasingly reclusive life. The domestic staff was familiar with its duties and the household ran itself, there was food on the table three times a day and clean sheets on the beds twice a week. The heavily armed security specialists from the Jerome risk-consulting company went about their business silently and reported daily to the firm’s operations executive vice-president. The day shift concentrated on the front and rear gates in the perimeter wall and the larger night-shift detachment patrolled the grounds with the aid of night-vision goggles and roving searchlights that made the house look like a movie theater on the night of a red-carpet première. It was not required of Kashmira to give them orders. They, on the other hand, instructed her: in the use of the armored panic room—actually the immensely long and mostly empty walk-in closet, built to accommodate a movie star’s wardrobe, in which she kept her few, inadequately glamorous, clothes—and in the importance, should there be a “breach,” of not trying to take on the intruder herself. “Don’t be a heroine, ma’am,” the Jerome guy said. “Lock yourself in here and leave it to us to do what it takes.” There had recently been a scandal at Jerome. One of their top men had seduced two extremely wealthy women, both Jerome clients, one in London, one in New York. He gave both of them the same private love-name, “Rabbit,” as in “Jessica,” to minimize the risk of a pillow-talk slipup. But in the end he was caught out, and the discovery of his affair with the two Jessica Rabbits had led to lawsuits that badly damaged the firm’s reputation as well as its profitability, and led to the introduction of draconian new rules of engagement that forbade the specialists from speaking to their “principals” at all except on professional business, and then always in the company of a third party. Kashmira had no problem with this. Detachment was what she wanted. On one occasion, when she asked a Jerome operative for a pair of night-vision goggles, “just for fun,” he gave them to her surreptitiously, guiltily, like a boy meeting a girl for a secret assignation. “This’ll just be between us, ma’am,” he told her. “I’m not even supposed to look in your general direction unless I have to take down a bad guy standing behind you.”