‘Shameless from somewhere,’ Hind shouted back along the passage, ‘cover your nakedness.’

‘Fuck off,’ Mishal muttered under her breath, fixing mutinous eyes on Hanif Johnson. ‘What about the michelins sticking out between her sari and her choli, I want to know.’ Down at the other end of the passage, Hind could be seen in the half-light, thrusting Ciné-Blitz at the tenants, repeating, he's alive. With all the fervour of those Greeks who, after the disappearance of the politician Lambrakis, covered the country with the whitewashed letter Z. Zi: he lives.

‘Who?’ Mishal demanded again.

‘Gibreel,’ came the cry of impermanent children. ‘Farishta bénché achén.’ Hind, disappearing downstairs, did not observe her elder daughter returning to her room, – leaving the door ajar; – and being followed, when he was sure the coast was clear, by the well-known lawyer Hanif Johnson, suited and booted, who maintained this office to keep in touch with the grass roots, who was also doing well in a smart uptown practice, who was well connected with the local Labour Party and was accused by the sitting M P of scheming to take his place when reselection came around.

When was Mishal Sufyan's eighteenth birthday? – Not for a few weeks yet. And where was her sister, her roommate, sidekick, shadow, echo and foil? Where was the potential chaperone? She was: out.

But to continue:

The news from Cinée-Blitz was that a new, London-based film production outfit headed by the whiz-kid tycoon Billy Battuta, whose interest in cinema was well known, had entered into an association with the reputable, independent Indian producer Mr. S. S. Sisodia for the purpose of producing a comeback vehicle for the legendary Gibreel, now exclusively revealed to have escaped the jaws of death for a second time. ‘It is true I was booked on the plane under the name of Naj-muddin,’ the star was quoted as saying. ‘I know that when the investigating sleuths identified this as my incognito – in fact, my real name – it caused great grief back home, and for this I do sincerely apologize to my fans. You see, the truth is, that grace of God I somehow missed the flight, and as I had wished in any case to go to ground, excuse, please, no pun intended, I permitted the fiction of my demise to stand uncorrected and took a later flight. Such luck: truly, an angel must have been watching over me.’ After a time of reflection, however, he had concluded that it was wrong to deprive his public, in this unsportsmanlike and hurtful way, of the true data and also his presence on the screen. ‘Therefore I have accepted this project with full commitment and joy.’ The film was to be – what else – a theological, but of a new type. It would be set in an imaginary and fabulous city made of sand, and would recount the story of the encounter between a prophet and an archangel; also the temptation of the prophet, and his choice of the path of purity and not that of base compromise. ‘It is a film,’ the producer, Sisodia, informed Ciné-Blitz, ‘about how newness enters the world.’ – But would it not be seen as blasphemous, a crime against ... – ‘Certainly not,’ Billy Battuta insisted. ‘Fiction is fiction; facts are facts. Our purpose is not to make some farrago like that movie The Message in which, whenever Prophet Muhammad (on whose name be peace!) was heard to speak, you saw only the head of his camel, moving its mouth. That– excuse me for pointing out – had no class. We are making a high-taste, quality picture. A moral tale: like – what do you call them? – fables.’

‘Like a dream,’ Mr. Sisodia said.

When the news was brought to Chamcha's attic later that day by Anahita and Mishal Sufyan, he flew into the vilest rage either of them had ever witnessed, a fury under whose fearful influence his voice rose so high that it seemed to tear, as if his throat had grown knives and ripped his cries to shreds; his pestilential breath all but blasted them from the room, and with arms raised high and goat-legs dancing he looked, at last, like the very devil whose image he had become. ‘Liar,’ he shrieked at the absent Gibreel. ‘Traitor, deserter, scum. Missed the plane, did you? – Then whose head, in my own lap, with my own hands... ? – who received caresses, spoke of nightmares, and fell at last singing from the sky?’

‘There, there,’ pleaded terrified Mishal. ‘Calm down. You'll have Mum up here in a minute.’

Saladin subsided, a pathetic goaty heap once again, no threat to anyone. ‘It's not true,’ he wailed. ‘What happened, happened to us both.’

‘Course it did,’ Anahita encouraged him. ‘Nobody believes those movie magazines, anyway. They'll say anything, them.’

Sisters backed out of the room, holding their breath, leaving Chamcha to his misery, failing to observe something quite remarkable. For which they must not be blamed; Chamcha's antics were sufficient to have distracted the keenest eyes. It should also, in fairness, be stated that Saladin failed to notice the change himself.

What happened? This: during Chamcha's brief but violent outburst against Gibreel, the horns on his head (which, one may as well point out, had grown several inches while he languished in the attic of the Shaandaar B and B) definitely, unmistakably, – by about three-quarters of an inch, – diminished.

In the interest of the strictest accuracy, one should add that, lower down his transformed body, – inside borrowed pantaloons (delicacy forbids the publication of explicit details), – something else, let us leave it at that, got a little smaller, too.

Be that as it may: it transpired that the optimism of the report in the imported movie magazine had been ill founded, because within days of its publication the local papers carried news of Billy Battuta's arrest, in a midtown New York sushi bar, along with a female companion, Mildred Mamoulian, described as an actress, forty years of age. The story was that he had approached numbers of society matrons, ‘movers and shakers', asking for ‘very substantial’ sums of money which he had claimed to need in order to buy his freedom from a sect of devil worshippers. Once a confidence man, always a confidence man: it was what Mimi Mamoulian would no doubt have described as a beautiful sting. Penetrating the heart of American religiosity, pleading to be saved – ‘when you sell your soul you can't expect to buy back cheap’ – Billy had banked, the investigators alleged, ‘six figure sums’. The world community of the faithful longed, in the late 1980s, for direct contact with the supernal, and Billy, claiming to have raised (and therefore to need rescuing from) infernal fiends, was on to a winner, especially as the Devil he offered was so democratically responsive to the dictates of the Almighty Dollar. What Billy offered the West Side matrons in return for their fat cheques was verification: yes, there is a Devil; I've seen him with my own eyes – God, it was frightful! – and if Lucifer existed, so must Gabriel; if Hellfire had been seen to burn, then somewhere, over the rainbow, Paradise must surely shine. Mimi Mamoulian had, it was alleged, played a full part in the deceptions, weeping and pleading for all she was worth. They were undone by over-confidence, spotted at Takesushi (whooping it up and cracking jokes with the chef) by a Mrs. Aileen Struwelpeter who had, only the previous afternoon, handed the then-distraught and terrified couple a five-thousand-dollar cheque. Mrs. Struwelpeter was not without influence in the New York Police Department, and the boys in blue arrived before Mimi had finished her tempura. They both went quietly. Mimi was wearing, in the newspaper photographs, what Chamcha guessed was a forty-thousand-dollar mink coat, and an expression on her face that could only be read one way.

The hell with you all.

Nothing further was heard, for some while, about Farishta's film.