Fury by Salman Rushdie Page A

scientists of the world? In what insula or cortex does the blood flow increase when one shouts “I love you” at a total fucking stranger? And how about hypocrisy? Let’s get to the interesting stuff here ...
    He shook his head. You’re avoiding the issue, Professor. You’re dancing all around it when what you have to do is stare it down, look it right in the face. Let’s get to anger, okay? Let’s get to the goddamn fury that actually kills. Tell me, where is murder bred? Malik Solanka, clutching his newspaper, hurtled east along Seventy-second Street, scattering pedestrians. On Columbus he made a left and half-ran another dozen distraught blocks or so before coming to a halt. Even the stores hereabouts had Indian names: Bombay, Pondicherry. Everything conspired to remind him of what he was trying to forget-of, that is, home, the idea of home in general and his own home life in particular. In not Pondicherry but, yes, it cannot be denied, Bombay. He went into a Mexican-themed bar with a high Zagat ’s rating, ordered a shot of tequila, and another, and then, finally, it was time for the dead.
    This one, last night’s corpse, and the two before. These were their names. Saskia “Sky” Schuyler, today’s big picture, and her predecessors Lauren “Ren” Muybridge Klein and Belinda “Bindy” Booken Caudell. These were their ages: nineteen, twenty, nineteen. These were their photographs. Look at their smiles: these were the smiles of power. A lump of concrete put out those lights. These were not poor girls, but they’re penniless now.
    She was something, Sky was. Five-foot-nine, stacked, spoke six languages, reminded everyone of Christie Brinkley as the Uptown Girl, loved big hats and high fashion, could’ve walked for anyone Jean-Paul, Donatella, Dries had all begged her, Tom Ford had gone down on his knees, but she was just too “naturally shy”-this was code for naturally upper-crust, too much a member of that old-money snobberia that thought of couturiers as tailors and runway models as just one small step better than whores-and, besides, there was her scholarship at Juilliard. Just last weekend she was in a hurry to get out to Southampton, needed something to wear, no time to choose, so she rang her great pal the high-end designer Imelda Poushine, asked her to just send over the whole collection, and messengered back, in return, a personal check for four count ‘em four hundred thousand dollars.
    Yes, says Imelda in Rush &Molloy, the check cleared two days ago. She was a great girl, a living doll, but business is business, I guess. We’ll all miss her dreadfully. Yes, it’ll be at the family plot, right there in the best part, right across from Jimmy Stewart. Everybody’s going. Big security operation. I hear they decided to lay her to rest in the wedding gown. So honored. She’ll look beautiful, but that girl would’ve looked beautiful in rags, believe me. Yes, I’ll be dressing her. Are you kidding? My privilege. It’s an open-casket situation. They’ve booked the best: Sally H. for the hair, Rafael for the makeup, Herb for the photographs. Sky’s the limit, I guess, no pun intended. Her mother’s handling it all. That woman is made of iron. Not a tear. Just fifty herself and dropdead got, excuse me, don’t print that, okay. No pun intended.
    The inheritors disinherited, the masters made victims: that was the angle. All that wasted training! For Saskia at nineteen was not only a linguist, pianist, and dedicated fashionista; she was also already an expert horsewoman, an archer with hopes of making the Sydney Olympic team, a long-distance swimmer, a fabulous dancer, a great cook, a happy weekend painter, a bel canto singer, a hostess in her mother’s grand manner, and, to judge by the openly worldly sensuality of her newspaper smile, skilled, too, in other arts to which the tabloid press was utterly devoted but whereof it dared not speak freely in such a context. The papers contented themselves