The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Read online

  “So you’re saying sour grapes.”

  “Sure.” He didn’t mean this. He was an optimist. He tried to think of something optimistic to say. “Jammu is…Did you bring that bottle?”

  “No.”

  “Jammu’s tackling problems. She’s doing a fine job, completely apart from the terrorist investigation. Nobody thought it was possible. She’s doing it. Crime’s dropping. We’ll discuss the figures at the next MG meeting. I think you’re jealous of her. I think we’re all a little jealous.”

  “I don’t deny that she’s a ruthless cop,” Norris said. “But what you can’t deny is that there weren’t any terrorists before Jammu came to town. I see no accidents.”

  “I do. Where does that leave us?”

  “I’m saying grant me the possibility. Don’t work against me, don’t cast aspersions. I was sorry Jammu got the nod in July but this ain’t personal. I didn’t know nothing in July. So do me a favor. Take my signal detector and sweep your house and your office and your car. Do it today, before they know you got the technology. Then call an emergency MG meeting. Talk to Hutchinson, Hammaker, Meisner, Wesley, and for God’s sake talk to Ripley. Wake up. Get the facts. We need you.”

  “I’m glad you think so, General.”

  “Sam, if you want.”

  “Sure. Sam.”

  Few men were invited to use the General’s first name; it was said to be an honor.

  Later, when he and Probst left the health club, everything was changed. Three inches of snow had fallen and more was coming down, whole airborne valleys, white peaks, blue forests and gray fields. It was 10:30. The car Probst had dented must have left just moments earlier. There was a black, snowless oblong on the pavement, an exhaust smudge to the rear, fresh tire tracks, and footprints. Probst stared through the falling snow at the footprints. They were nondescript.

  “Have to beg off, old chap. Sorry, but. P’raps in January.” Rolf stuck the old pegs into his trousers and zipped up. He viewed his timepiece with mock dismay. “Blast. How’d it get to be so late?”

  “You insisted on another set,” Martin hissed. “That’s how.”

  “Carried away, what. Manly competition.” Rolf chuckled, and donned his overcoat.

  “Cut it out, Rolf,” Martin said. Still in his shorts, he advanced predatorily. “You weren’t in any hurry half an hour ago.”

  “But I was, old chap. I was. I just didn’t let on. ’Twas politeness pure and simple.”

  “Don’t give me that.” Martin took another step, and Rolf was obliged to issue a cough, of high denomination, in self-defense. Martin recoiled. “Cover your mouth, why don’t you.”

  “Came too quick.”

  “One hour, Rolf.”

  “Would if I could but I can’t.”

  Martin’s hand clutched his arm. He brushed it off, coughing, gave his scarf a jaunty flip, and turned to leave.

  “Look, Rolf. I don’t know what kind of lies you’ve been spreading—”

  “Ignorance is bliss, old boy. Must run. Business calls. Cheerio!”

  And away he went down the warm and paneled hallways of the Club. Only at the door did he remember the Sno. It was still falling from a tarnished afternoon sky. He plunged into it. His steps were chopping, oblique, as he fought his way up the drive to the garage. All this Sno. He liked Sno even less than he liked Petz.

  Lies? What could Martin have had in mind? Surely not the little anecdote about the brat. He’d merely embellished the facts handed him by Audreykins. Scarcely much point in scampering off like this if that was all the trouble was. But probably there was more. Martin seemed frightfully queer today. First he’d rung to break their date. Then at noon he’d rung to insist they play after all. His game was queer, too. Usually he played like a robot—“Heh! Heh! Your! Point!”—but today, the broken finger perhaps ruining his backhand, he’d become a lunger. And then in the dressing room he’d charged at Rolf like a fist-shaped doggie. “I wanna tawk to yew.” Seemed to have got wind of something. Tee hee. Wonder what. Tee hee.

  Rolf tobogganed merrily in fourth gear up Warson Road, his shoulders hunched, his nose at the windshield. He wasn’t going home; Martin might track him down there. Thump!

  An object had struck the back window. Sno-ball?

  Thump, thump! Two of them hit the car broadside. They’d come from the school, Ladue High. Thump! He was losing control of the car. Thump! Gad, he detested this substance. He slid through an intersection. There was no braking. More Sno-balls landed in the brown slush to his left.

  But he reached the Marriott without further travail. He had a key to her suite, and he entered softly. She sat in underthings, a collection of rounded angles draped across an armchair, reading a magazine. She looked up. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Rolf.” He winked.

  While she changed he noted the room’s untidiness, the inside-out laundry and scattered Tarot cards, the Tab cans and ashtrays. An aroma of curry. Badly out of character. Later he would have to discipline.

  She came back in a green wool business suit and low-heeled shoes. “So what brings you here, on—?” She frowned a bit.

  “On such a yucky day?” he prompted.

  “On such a yucky day.”

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “Thought I’d stop in. Martin isn’t here?”

  “No, he’s at a football game. Let me take your coat.” She flicked Sno off the collar. He pinched her fanny. “Oh, you prick!” she whispered, close to his ear, as she moved to the closet. He grabbed her hand. She dug her thumbnail into his palm and wrenched free. “How dare you?”

  Suddenly he coughed, shaking his head to deny validity to the interruption.

  “Pneumonia,” she said.

  He sighed. “Do we have to start all over again?”

  “I’m sorry.” She blinked. “It’s such a yucky day.”

  “Isn’t it, though. You must be lonely here.”

  She turned and reached up to hang the coat, and with one sharp tug he had her skirt down.

  She squealed very convincingly. “Rolf Ripley!” She backed into the empty, swinging hangers, tangled her feet in the skirt, and fell against the back wall of the closet. He knelt. “At last,” he said.

  “Oh Rolf. Oh Rolf. Here?”

  He made ready. “Here.”

  She took his fingers into her mouth and nibbled. She frowned. “But what if Martin—”

  “He’s at the game. The game just started.”

  She relaxed. A hanger fell, belatedly, and bounced off his shoulder. He bore down with his Eveready. She cupped the glans and began a slow, beckoning stroke with the flat of her index finger. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve wanted you.”

  Probst was awake at dawn the next morning and frying himself breakfast by 7:15. Mormons chorused on KSLX. Barbara was still sleeping. He’d tied his laces in square knots, using his teeth.

  He made phone calls, appointments, slots in the day ahead of him. He was wearing a black suit with narrow lapels, a red tie, and a white button-down with fine gray stripes. In the bathroom mirror he looked diplomatic, upper-echelon. His hair was definitely going gray, and his face was narrower than usual, more of a prominence, less of a plate. Its heat felt unvanquishable when he walked out the back door into the icy air. The engine caught at once and roared.

  Driving this morning was like boating, the dips and sprays, with every surface equally navigable. The roads were empty. Under snow the city looked nineteenth-century.

  Probst was still trying to process the information the General—Sam—had given him yesterday. It took longer when he had to do it by himself, without Barbara’s help. He’d come home from the health club with an almost physical need to divulge and discuss, but the need died when he saw her, the simmer of resentment in her eyes, the dark fire. Even sweeping the house gave him no joy (it didn’t turn up any bugs, either) when she paid no attention. She sat reading and smoking until the den smelled like Canadian bacon.

  “Entrez-vous,” Chuck Meisner
said, holding open the storm door. Probst entered stomping, scuffing snow into the rug. Even on a Sunday morning the Meisner living room seemed freshly vacuumed, freshly dusted, the cushions freshly plumped. Chuck was wearing shapeless country clothes, corduroy and wool.

  “Can I get you something? Coffee? Bloody Mary?”

  “Nothing, thanks, Chuck.” His body was primed. He needed nothing.

  “Is this—something you want to talk about upstairs?”

  “Yes. That would be good.”

  Probst and Barbara had seen quite a lot of the Meisners this fall. Chuck was president of the First National Bank and a director at First Union and Centerre. If people had been withholding facts from Probst, for whatever reason, then Chuck was likely one of them. Of course in private Chuck had always been as tight-lipped about professional matters as a funeral-home owner. And Probst did all his banking at Boatmen’s, the Hammaker bank, which, his regard for Chuck notwithstanding, he’d long felt was the best managed in St. Louis. He didn’t believe in socializing with bankers. Pure money, like pure sexuality, was an evil demon in friendship. Other contractors in St. Louis tended to bank incestuously with brothers or brothers-in-law and they often had highly flexible credit lines, which were legal but rather unethical; Probst did not. He enjoyed seeing Chuck because Chuck was a Democrat, and Probst liked oddities, men who ran against the grain a little. A Democratic banker—it was a mild sensation, like fresh papaya.

  Chuck planted himself behind the massive antique desk in his study and indicated the correct chair for Probst. Outside the window, a cloud of windborne snowflakes, marvelously tiny, a heavenly host, swirled in the sunlight. The walls creaked in the wind. Probst hoped Chuck assumed he’d come for personal advice, an investment question, a tax shelter, a sewage bond. He didn’t like to mislead a friend, but the confrontation with Rolf yesterday had made him leery of stating his business prematurely. Now he was ready to come straight to the point. He began by taking a good look at his friend, and he got no further than this.

  Chuck looked terrible.

  He knew it, too. He met Probst’s eyes expectantly, with the guilt, the sad candor, of a man detected engaging in a vice. His eyelids were puffed and folded, the whites a solid pink. There was a purple crack in his upper lip. His hair was lifeless.

  “I don’t look so great, do I?”

  “Have you been sick?”

  “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in over two months.”

  Probst recognized the controlled fury in Chuck’s voice. Over two months. The phrase was cruel self-propaganda, a complaint spoken silently again and again, an inner goad (You know, that den smells like Canadian bacon) until the complaint became so meaningful, so powerful, that voicing it could only lessen it, and having it was defeat.

  “I don’t remember you seeming that tired,” Probst said.

  “Sometimes I’m OK.” Chuck closed his eyes. “You think you’re getting by. And then one bad night.” He shook his head.

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Yes. I have pills. And amino acids. Last week I saw a hypnotist. Bea has me started with an analyst. And the result is, I slept about twenty minutes last night. On Tuesday I got six hours. The next night, zero.” It seemed to tax Chuck to speak at any length. It took an ugly effort.

  “Do they know what the problem is?” Probst said.

  “I tried cutting out booze, coffee. I didn’t eat meat for a while. I went all-protein for a while. I switched beds, which actually helped, but only for one night. I did all right at the ABA conference in San Francisco, but that was only three days, I came back, and wham. I tried meditation. Yoga, jogging, no jogging, hot baths. Warm milk, bedtime snacks, lots of Valium. I’m totally unconscious, I’m in a stupor, but the sleep part of me, Martin—” He raised his hands and, with his fingers, caged what he was describing. “The sleep part of me is wide awake.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “That’s the thing. Everything seems like it might be important. The side of the bed I sleep on. Working too hard. Not working enough. Do I need to get angry? Or do I need to stay calm? Weekend versus week night, red wine versus white. You know? Because there’s got to be a reason for this, and any part of my life, anything I do every day—There are so many variables, so many combinations. I can’t pinpoint the important ones by any process of elimination. What if the reasons I can’t sleep are eating sugar, going to bed too early, and watching sports on the weekend? I could never isolate that. But I lie there for hours turning over the variables. I can’t remember when I ever slept well. As if my whole life had been this way.”

  Probst was stuck now. This was no time for a confrontation, no matter how friendly. He cleared his throat and remembered the box in his pocket. He lifted it out and set it on his knee.

  “What’s that?” Chuck said.

  “A toy I got yesterday.” Probst pressed the Test button. Red light. The red light! Had he damaged it?

  “What is it?”

  Probst rose and circled his chair. As he passed the window, the box began to squeal like a quartz alarm clock. He backed away from the window, and the squeal faltered. “I think this room is bugged,” he announced. He scanned the wall to the left of the window, playing games with the squeal, to locate the center of the electronic irritation. At waist level he found a spot on the wall where the paint was a shade lighter than the rest. He tapped on the spot. Hollow. He punched his finger right through. It was stiff gauze, glued over a hole and painted to match the wall. He tore it away. The hole was an inch in diameter and half an inch deep. In the center, its legs embedded in rough plaster, was a bug. He opened his penknife and pried it free. A hair-thin wire, eight or ten inches long, peeled away from under the fresh paint. He dumped it on Chuck’s desk.

  “Did you know this was here?” Chuck said.

  “Of course not. But I think you should know that Sam Norris found a bug identical to this one in his office.”

  “Oh did he?” The sharpness of Chuck’s reply surprised him. “Are you sure he really found it?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning are you sure he didn’t just get it from a friend and say he found it?” Chuck’s croaking was repellent. “Sam Norris, as you call him, has been courting the hell out of Bobby Caputo and Oscar Thorpe at the FBI. My first reaction to this thing here”—Chuck swept the bug off the desk onto the Persian rug—“is the name Hoover. Norris doesn’t trust me anymore. My behavior is suspect. And since when are you on good terms with him? I thought you weren’t even speaking.”

  “Well…”

  “You’re surprised I mention the FBI. So I don’t suppose you heard Norris flew a private investigator to Bombay to dig up muck on Jammu, either. Or that he’s a handshake and two signatures away from outright buying the Globe-Democrat, because nobody prints him anymore.” Chuck sighed and rocked in the stationary chair. He waved his arms weakly. “So there’s a bug in here. I don’t imagine it’s the first time. But what Norris doesn’t know, what the FBI doesn’t know, is that not everyone is a sneak like them. I have nothing to hide.”

  Except from me and Barbara, Probst thought. You hid your exhaustion. “Then tell me what’s going on in North St. Louis.”

  “Nothing more than what’s in the papers every night.” Chuck raised his voice, as if many stupid people had been asking him this very question. “Nothing more than business as usual. The public invests more than just money in us, Martin. It invests its trust, and that’s a pretty important thing. We’ve a responsibility to our investors to use that money—that trust—in the most productive way possible. We’d be negligent not to. Now, to my knowledge, there’s been no excessive speculation on the North Side. Property values have risen, and the various institutions I serve have seen fit to protect their future and the future of the depositor—the little man, Martin—by making some selected and I believe wise purchases in the area. To add to what we already had. And, of course, to replace what we’d sold before we properly assessed
the market’s strength. There’s some very choice property down there, and it’s about time the city made something of it. We’re in the business of encouraging development. It’s part of our public trust. I think the time is coming. We’re certainly quite satisfied with the crime situation at present.”

  Probst, with a hypothetical wave of his fingers: “But this has no adverse effect on the overall economy of the region?”

  “How can increased investment have an adverse effect?” Chuck grinned like a kindergarten teacher.

  “Well, for instance, in West County.”

  “Oh, Martin. That particular region is still so healthy. So healthy. You have nothing to worry about on that score. Is that what’s worrying you? Goodness! West County? Nothing to worry about, nothing at all.”

  Probst’s next stop was back in Webster Groves, in Webster Park, behind the library. He kicked his way up the unshoveled walk and rang the doorbell. He waited. He hadn’t heard the bell. The bell was broken? He knocked. Soon the door was opened by an unshaven man, Probst’s age, wearing jeans and a green collarless surgeon’s smock. “Martin Probst? Howdy.” The man extended a hand and pulled Probst inside. “Rodney Thompson.”

  In intermingling piles along the baseboards of the Thompson living room were hundreds of magazines, mostly of the sort with text but no pictures on the cover. The air smelled strongly of dated pancakes. Plants in the windows had shed a mulch on the wooden floor, and someone had spilled a cup of coffee on the wool rug by the television set. The cup still lay on its side.

  “This room doesn’t get much use,” Thompson said. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and walked back to the kitchen. Probst also did.

  “So you’re Luisa’s father.”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess our wives have spoken.” Thompson sat down and drank from a tall glass of orange juice and, swallowing, signaled an offer of the same to Probst, who shook his head. “And you’re the man who built the Arch.”

  “Not singlehandedly.” Standard comeback.

  “Of course not. It’s an achievement nonetheless. I’m very impressed. Impressed with Luisa, too. I like her.”