Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie Page B

Storm was in danger of being bravoed and Mayor Fast was furious; but as it happened the very next day the wannabe reality-star adoptive father brought the baby back to the adoption services, saying, Take her back, she’s diseased, and literally ran out of the room, but not before everyone had seen the sore on his face, the putrescent, decaying area that looked as if a part of his cheek had died and begun to rot. Baby Storm was taken back to hospital for checks but given a clean bill of health. The next day, however, one of the nurses who had held her began to rot as well, patches of malodorous decaying flesh sprang up on both forearms, and as she was rushed weeping hysterically into the emergency room she confessed that she had been stealing prescription meds and fencing them to a dealer in Bushwick to make a little extra money on the side.
    It was Mayor Rosa Fast who first understood what was happening, who brought the strangeness into the arena of what could be properly spoken about, of news . “This miracle baby can identify corruption,” she told her closest aides, “and the corrupt, once she has fingered them, literally begin to show the signs of their moral decay on their bodies.” The aides warned her that kind of talk, belonging as it did to the archaic old-Europe world of dybbuks and golems, probably didn’t sit too well in the mouth of a modern politician, but Rosa Fast was undeterred. “We came into office to clean this place up,” she declared, “and chance has given us the human broom with which we can sweep it clean.” She was the kind of atheist who could believe in miracles without conceding their divine provenance, and the next day the foundling, now in the care of the foster care agency, came back to the mayor’s office for a visit.
    Baby Storm reentered City Hall like a tiny human minesweeper or drug-sniffing Alsatian. The mayor enfolded her in a big Brooklyn-Ukrainian hug, and whispered, “Let’s go to work, baby of truth.” What followed instantly became the stuff of legend, as in room after room, department after department, marks of corruption and decay appeared on the faces of the corrupt and decaying, the expenses cheats, the receivers of backhand payments in return for civic contracts, the accepters of Rolex watches and private airplane flights and Hermès bags stuffed with banknotes, and all the secret beneficiaries of bureaucratic power. The crooked began to confess before the miracle baby came within range, or fled the building to be hunted down by the law.
    Mayor Fast herself was unblemished, which proved something. Her predecessor was on TV deriding the mayor’s “occult mumbo jumbo” and Rosa Fast issued a brief statement inviting Flora Hill to “come on down and meet this little sweetheart,” which invitation Hill did not take up. The entry of Baby Storm into the council chamber induced a panic among the individuals seated therein, and a desperate rush for the exits. Those who remained proved immune to the baby’s powers and were revealed as honest men and women. “I guess we finally know,” said Mayor Fast, “who’s who around these parts.”
    Our ancestors were fortunate in such an hour to have a leader like Rosa Fast. “Any community that cannot agree on a description of itself, of how things go in the community, of what is the case, is a community in trouble. It is plain that events of a new kind, events of a type we would have described until very recently as fantastic and improbable, have begun, provably and objectively, to occur. We need to know what this means, and to face the changes that may be taking place with courage and intelligence.” The 311 phone lines, she declared, would for the time being be available to people wishing to report unusual occurrences of any kind. “Let’s get the facts,” she said, “and move forward from there.” As for Baby Storm, the mayor herself adopted her. “Not only is she my pride and joy, she’s also my secret