WE SWERVED around a traffic island, through a red light and on to O'Connell Bridge at great speed just before 4 p.m. yesterday afternoon. "Sometimes," Salman Rushdie said, "I want to shout out, `I'm a novelist. Stop all this!'"
Five sirens wailed to the front, to the rear and to the side as a Garda security detail hurried Mr Rushdie through standstill Dublin traffic. Mr Rushdie is not a political leader racing to and from summit meetings. He writes books.
We got from Dublin Airport to Iveagh House on St Stephen's Green in just over 10 minutes. I tried to ask Mr Rushdie questions and hold a tape recorder close enough so his answers could be recorded above the din.
Just as he was saying, "To an extent I have managed to regain the ability to lead a professional and private life ..." the sirens came so close he had to raise his voice to be heard and we jolted around the corner from Nassau Street into Kildare Street.
He smiled at the irony. "Clearly it's not a normal life, but I do think it's very important to show people that such threats don't mean that one has to hide under the bed. But it also means that just because I'm not hiding under the bed nothing needs to be done about it.
"Because the day that I'm looking forward to is the day we can sit in a traffic jam and we don't have to have all of this." I looked out at the blur of bumper-to-bumper cars and tried to imagine thinking like that.
"On the other hand," he added as the Garda outriders beckoned us through a very small-looking gap in the traffic at the top of Kildare Street, "this isn't about me. This is about Dick Spring wanting to leave town."
It may partly have been about Mr Spring wanting to leave town, and get Mr Rushdie to arrive quickly for his meeting. But it was also about Mr Rushdie. For eight years now he has been protected by police everywhere he goes.
"The reason that it happens is that the police advise that it should. It's not because I want it, because frankly I don't want it."
He regularly talks down notions that he lives in a state of subterfuge and fear. The security situation around him has eased somewhat, particularly over the past two years. "It was always somewhat exaggerated," he says. He says the threat to his life does not bother him emotionally, and that he does not regularly think about being killed.