Read Online Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie - Free Book Online

insurance game. “They fixed her up good. She’s covered from dollar one all the way up the wazoo. Health, teeth, accidents. She has now her comfort zone. This Mr. Andang was unable to provide. At her age such things signify.” In spite of which Mr. Andang left his door ajar. The city sang its love songs, deluding him, making him hope.
    The ambassador’s Bentley was turning in to the street. There were parking restrictions in force on India’s side of the street because it was the day the garbage trucks came to collect the trash. The sidewalk was broad. India’s building had an entry-phone system. All this slowed things down, increased his window of vulnerability. There were procedures Max Ophuls knew intimately from his days in the secret job, the job whose name could not be spoken, the job that didn’t exist except that it did, but the ambassador was not thinking about those procedures. He was thinking about his daughter and how strongly she would disapprove of his just-terminated liaison with the woman who looked like her, who looked like her mother as well as her. The procedures required advance men to precede him, to block off a parking space right in front of the venue, to pre-enter the address and secure it, to hold the door open. Any professional in this area knew that the so-called principal was easiest to attack in the space between the door of his vehicle and the door of the location he planned to enter. But the threat assessment against Max Ophuls was not high nowadays and the risk assessment was lower. Threat and risk were not the same. Threat was a general level of presumed danger, while the level of risk was particular to any given activity. It was possible for the threat level to be high while at the same time the risk attached to a given decision, for example a last-minute whim to go see your daughter, could be negligibly low. These things had once been important. Now he was just an old man investigating a cock-and-bull story about underground lizard people, a sexually inactive individual, recently rejected by his lover, a father paying an unpremeditated house call on his child. This was within established safety parameters.
    Like any other professional in this field, Max knew that there was no such thing as complete security. The videotape of the shooting of President Reagan was the illustrative tool that best demonstrated this. Here was the president moving from building to car. These were the positions of the members of the security detail. All of the positions were ideal. Here came the assailant. These were the reaction times of the officers in the team. The times were extraordinary, the officers’ responses exceeding what was expected of them. The president was not shot because of a mistake. There had been no mistake. But the president had been shot. POTUS was down. The most powerful man in the world, surrounded by the planet’s security elite, was not secure between the door of the secure building and the door of the armored car. Security was percentages. Nothing was ever one hundred percent.
    And nothing on earth could protect you against the inside job, the loyal traitor, the protector turned assassin. Ambassador Max Ophuls allowed Shalimar the driver to open the car door for him, crossed the sidewalk and dialed his daughter’s code. Upstairs in her apartment the entry-phone rang. India picked it up and heard a voice she had only heard once before in her life, on the tape recorder she had left running by her bedside to capture her sleep-talk night-language. When she heard that gurgling, incoherent, choking noise she recognized it as the voice of death and began to run. Everything around her became very slow while she ran, the motion of the trees outside the windows, the noises of people and birds, even her own movements seemed to be in slow motion as she hurled her body down the sluggish stairs. When she arrived at the glass double doors to the outside world she saw what she knew she would