Free Fury by Salman Rushdie Page A

of that mole hole,” Rhinehart said. “But if you plan to root for the Serbs, stay home.” Solanka felt refreshed today: less burdened, and, yes, in need of a friend. Even in these days of his retreat, he still had such needs. A holy man up a Himalaya could do without soccer on TV. Solanka was not so pure of heart. He shed the slept-in suit, showered, dressed quickly, and rode downtown. When he climbed out of the cab at Rhinehart’s building, a woman in shades rushed into it, jostling him, and he had, for the second time in as many days, the unsettling feeling that the stranger was someone he knew. In the elevator he identified her: the squeeze-me-and-l-talk doll-woman whose name was the contemporary byword for tacky infidelity, Our Lady of the Thong. “Oh Jesus, Monica,” Rhinehart said. “I run into her all the time. Around here it used to be Naomi Campbell, Courtney Love, Angelina Jolie. Now it’s Minnie Mouth. There goes the neighborhood, right?”
    Rhinehart had been trying to get divorced for years, but his wife had made it her life’s work to deny him. They had been a beautiful, perfectly contrasted ebony-and-ivory couple, she long, languid, pale, he equally long, but a pitch-black African-American, and a hyperactive one at that, a hunter, fisherman, weekend driver of very fast cars, marathon runner, gym rat, tennis player, and, lately, thanks to the rise of Tiger Woods, an obsessive golfer too. From the earliest days of their marriage Solanka had wondered how a man with so much energy would handle a woman with so little. They had married splashily in London - Rhinehart had for most of his war years preferred to base himself outside America - and, in a ceramic-and-mosaic palazzo rented for the occasion from a charity that ran it as a halfway house for the mentally troubled, Malik Solanka had made a best-man’s speech whose tone was spectacularly misjudged-at one point, doing his then-celebrated W. C. Fields impression, he compared the risks of the union to those of “jumping out of an airplane from twenty thousand feet and trying to land on a bale of hay” - but prophetically apt. Like most of their circle, however, he had underestimated Bronislawa Rhinehart in one essential respect: she had the sticking power of a leech.
    (At least there were no children, Solanka thought when his, everybody’s, misgivings about the union proved justified. He thought of Asmaan on the telephone. “Where’ve you gone, Daddy, are you here?” He thought of himself long ago. At least Rhinehart didn’t have to deal with that, the slow deep pain of a child.)
    Rhinehart had done her wrong, no denying that. His response to marriage had been to begin an affair, and his response to the difficulty of maintaining a clandestine relationship had been to initiate another one, and when both his mistresses insisted that he regularize his life, when they both insisted on occupying pole position on the grid of his personal auto rally, he at once managed to find room for yet another woman in his noisy, overcrowded bed. Minnie Mouth was perhaps not such an inappropriate local icon. After a few years of this, and a move from Holland Park to the West Village, Bronislawa-what was it with all these Poles who kept cropping up in various positions?-moved out of the apartment on Hudson Street and used the courts to force Rhinehart to maintain her in high style in a junior suite at a tony Upper East Side hotel, with major credit card spending power. Instead of divorcing him, she told him sweetly, she intended to make the rest of his life a misery, and bleed him slowly dry. “And don’t run out of money, honey,” she advised. “Because then I’ll have to come after what you really like.”
    What Rhinehart really liked was food and drink. He owned a little saltbox cottage in the Springs with, at the back of the garden, a shed that he’d equipped as a wine-storage facility and insured for consider ably more money than the cottage, in which the