The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Read online

  Barbara

  Probst stood up. His body leaned towards his dresser and his legs went along. He threw his wallet and keys onto it.

  “Well, all right,” he said.

  He put his hands in the pockets of his coat and drew it tight around his waist. His chest went in and out. “OK.”

  After its moment of warm-up the television spewed rich laughter, the studio sounds of the Tonight Show. Probst turned it off just as the picture came slanting onto the screen. He turned on Barbara’s nightstand light. He turned on the ceiling light. Then the small reading lamp by the rocking chair seemed to give him offense. He closed in on it and turned it on. “You—”

  His mouth made words, but few had sound. In a man who’d been speaking all day long, this was illogical.

  He went to the study and turned on more lights. There was a hesitancy in his pacing. He’d strike out in one direction and then draw up, bouncing on the balls of his feet, arrested by some new consideration. At each light, too, he paused and turned his head to one side, as if cocking some internal trigger. Then he turned on the light. “I respect you?” He took the picture of Barbara from his desk and threw it against the wall. “I respect you?”

  In the living room he turned on the spotlights aimed at the three still lifes. He circled the room, and the ceiling brightened. Each new source of light showed up remnants of cobweb or the traces of a spackled crack. The dust on bulbs rarely used gave the air a burnt taint. When all the lights were on—the lamps on the end tables, the lights embedded in the mantel, the chrome tube lamp in the corner, the antique banker’s lamp with the green glass shade, the sunken spots above the window seats, the small bulbs in the recessed bookcase—he left the room.

  Dropping onto the sofa in the den, he dug the heels of his shoes into an embroidered pillow, but this didn’t seem to satisfy him. He swung his legs onto the coffee table. A magazine slid from the stack of them. Another followed. He kicked the rest onto the floor. “You—” The pitch of his voice wasn’t much lower than a woman’s. But then, men’s seldom really are. He drew his jaw back hard. Crowded by their neighbors, the middle two of his lower teeth overlapped somewhat. His skin, which had retained a taut uniformity for many years, was mottled and faulted, and covered with whiskers like dark sand, briny ocean sand which couldn’t be brushed off. By themselves, his eyes were gray and gentle. Eyes hardly age; they’re a window on the soul. But the face shut the window with an ugly convulsion, and Probst thanked his wife very much. The voice dropped into lower registers. “You stinking, stinking bitch,” he said. He looked at the writing desk across the room from him, he looked at the cubbyholes organized for long storage, he looked at the ashtray she had washed and dried. He looked, in his overcoat and misery, like a tramp.

  He went to make coffee. “I respect you, too,” he said as he filled the reservoir of the device with water. He removed the lid from the coffee canister and began to open drawers, yanking them out one after another, and heaving them shut.

  “Where does she keep the filters?” he whispered.

  Where?

  Where?

  Where?

  He stalked from room to room, flashing angry and cooling off in the archetypical cycle of storm and lull, with pauses for whiskey, muddy coffee, chocolate cookies, until there was light in the eastern trees. He was a man who hadn’t been alone in his house, not really, for more than twenty years. His movements were driven by something more elemental than anger or grief, by the unleashing, maybe, of the self itself. At times he almost looked like he was having fun; what he did alone he alone could know. Though the temperature never fell below 65 all night, he left his coat on, kept it buttoned at the neck. It was as if sidewalks and open spaces and wind had been let inside his house.

  In the morning he went to work and spent five hours at his desk, mainly barking into the telephone. Outside, the weather grew more menacing by the hour. The wind was blowing hard from the east, spraying the city with an oily coat of water which instantly congealed. Walkers clutched their heads, and squad cars leaving the precinct house and speeding west were overtaken by their own exhaust like women whose skirts billowed up under their armpits.

  Traffic on I-44, normally light by six o’clock, was crawling. Probst had been downtown to sign a contract and had spent nearly an hour inching out to the black methane storage tanks at the city limits. Here the cause of the backup came into view. An eastbound semi had plowed into the double guardrail and half ripped, half flipped, to land in pieces in the westbound lanes, where at least six cars and another truck had struck it.

  People had died, Probst could tell. When he passed through the one free lane he fixed his eyes on the car ahead of him, but the car braked. A stretcher moved into his vision and showed him, not six feet away, an inert body covered entirely by a blanket. The brake lights had plastic spines and vertebrae for reinforcement. They dimmed at last. Attendants were wresting ambulance doors out of the grip of the wind, and Probst broke free into the dark, unclogged lanes.

  He was in the second lane when he saw his exit, Berry Road. His hands started to turn the wheels, but some danger or paralysis, either the ice on the road or the lactic acid in his muscles, seemed to prevent him from changing lanes in time. He sailed past. He sat up straighter and looked where he was going. He was going west. He shook his head and missed the Big Bend exit, missed the Lindbergh, too. The next cloverleaf slung the Lincoln north onto I-270.

  “We’ll see what it looks like,” he was saying half an hour later. He’d parked the car on the snow at what had been the truck entrance to Westhaven, where the mixers had left deep ruts when they came to pour concrete in December. The Lincoln rocked on its springs in the wind. Snowflakes, dry ones, skidded across the windshield.

  Wired to the gate above the heavy padlock was a sheet metal sign reading, PROPERTY OF THE U.S. BANKRUPTCY COURT OF MISSOURI, EASTERN DISTRICT. TRESPASSING IS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.

  Probst slogged south from the gate, breaking the crust on the snow with his knees, until he came to the culvert that crossed under the fence. He ducked under the fence himself, in violation of federal law, and doubled back to the road. Ahead lay the foundations of Westhaven. It was a project tremendous and abandoned and now, in the winter, buried. It left a large white negative in the woods, an image of contemporary disaster, like a town bombed flat, or a pasture ostracized for harboring dioxin. The acres had been cleared and terraced, the foundations poured, and retaining walls built to separate the levels. Now the snow stuck to these walls in patches, in oval spots, in feathery ribbed fern formations, in vertical lines along the tar-sealed joints, in all the patterns of neglect. It was more desolate than a sod house on the prairie. It was a disappointment specific to the times. No project was begun with failure in mind; the spirit was eager; but the flesh was proverbial.

  Trudging and resolute, Probst followed a branch of the road that curled down to the center of an excavation into what would have been—and might still somehow become?—the entrance to a parking garage. He plowed through drifts as high as his breastbone, aiming purposefully for the eastern wall. When he couldn’t go any farther, he turned and raised his face. He was a speck in a bowl. From where he stood he could see only gray sky and, in angry motion, a horde of black flakes that looked radioactive but felt like snow, when they melted and ran down his cheeks.

  It was still nighttime. Undressing, he kicked his briefs over his shoulder and caught them. He froze. An anxious look crossed his face. The briefs dropped to the floor.

  He got into bed. “How you doin’, hands?” he said to his hands, and grimaced. His eyes were roving the room. As if shying from something, he leaned to find a magazine to read. He heard Mohnwirbel’s car in the driveway, the crunch of tires on ice as he took it around to his parking space behind the garage. The door thumped. In his head Probst heard a German voice say, Martin Probst. On the cover of Time was a drawing of missiles, missile chess, black Russian missiles, white American missiles, the face of the Presi
dent on the white-king missile, the face of the Soviet premier on the black-king missile, and above them the word STALEMATE?

  With a jerk, Probst turned out the light and pulled the pillow over his head.

  There had been nights, in every year of their marriage, when Barbara had waked him up and told him she was scared and couldn’t sleep. Her voice would be low and thick. “I’ve got to know when it’s coming. I’ve got to. I can’t stand it.” Then he’d held her, his fearless wife, in his arms. He’d loved her, because through the skin and bone of her back he could feel her heart beating, and he felt sorry. I respect you, Martin. That was the point. He respected her, too. She was the woman he slept with and faced death with. He’d thought they agreed. That they were modern only to the extent of not being vitalists, of facing the future and hoping that if love was organic then it could be synthesized out of respect, out of the memory of being in love, out of pity, out of familiarity and physical attraction and the bond of the daughter they both loved as parents. That they would not leave each other. That the project mattered. He’d thought they had an agreement.

  How could she have left him? He launched the question into space in a thousand directions and it hit everything but her. A magic shield protected her, something he’d never experienced before: an adamant incredulity. She didn’t. She couldn’t.

  “God damn this country,” Probst said.

  The resonance traveled through his skull to his ears. He heard himself from the inside. He heard the country answer, the muffled booms, the thousand reports. Get with the times, Martin Probst. You think she never looked at another man? I’m always rationalizing attractions. Because there’s plenty of pubic parking, Mr. Boabst. Plenty indeed. Women these days, they need that extra—I don’t know. Overtures of a, em, physical character. Are we quits? That region is so healthy, Martin. My game, old chap. This isn’t good and evil, Daddy.

  He could see by the clock that it was only 12:30. He was wide awake again. He was lying on his back. His right arm was bent over his ribs, and the curve of his fingers fit the curve of his breast, covering his heart. His left hand lay flat between his legs, resting on his penis and thigh. Had he always lain with his hands in these positions? Or only now that he was alone? A peaceful feeling settled over him. Through his fingertips he felt the hair over his heart and his heart’s amazing labor. He felt the ribs. Hands sent messages via nerves to the brain. He felt the crinkly hair between his legs, and the pliant genital flesh. He was dropping off, into a state woolly and primitive, because now he knew what his hands covered while he slept and the world did not and he was vulnerable.

  If he was awake when the missiles fell, there was a chance he could run. He could find shelter, protect his head from falling things. But when he was asleep, his head couldn’t know its importance. Asleep, he protected something else. Asleep, he was an animal. This knowledge warmed him for several waking days, while he was working to defeat the city-county referendum.

  14

  “My dear, dear Colonel,” Rolf Ripley said. “You’ve surely heard the story of the chicken and the egg.”

  “Chicken and the egg.”

  “Well, which came first.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well? Do you get my drift?”

  “Don’t waste my time,” Jammu said, her eyes on her wall clock. The sounds of a large and impatient crowd washed against the closed door of her office. “You wouldn’t be moving to the city without everything I’ve done for it. I wouldn’t be making a case for the merger if you and Murphy weren’t moving. That’s understood. But the fact is, the blacks were here before either of us. I think it’s rather childish to try to wish that fact away. In any case, I don’t see what you think I can do to help you.”

  Ripley raised an interruptive hand and looked at the ceiling with a kind of fondness, as if his favorite song were running through his head. His big hips filled the crook of the leather chair. “I’ve made a perplexing discovery, Colonel.”

  Jammu’s intercom buzzed. “Hold on,” she told it.

  “It had come to the attention of my purchasing department that certain key pieces of city real estate were in the hands of colored speculators. This seemed right and proper to me until I discovered that they’d acquired most of these tracts very recently. I was quite taken aback to discover who from. It seems that Mrs. Hammaker has invested between twenty and thirty million dollars in real estate since October.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well my dear, dear Colonel. I had no inkling she was that wealthy.”

  “She is from a royal family, Mr. Ripley.”

  “Thirty million dollars, and if you’ll pardon me, she isn’t an only child, and if you’ll pardon me, no one puts all their eggs in one basket, and if you’ll pardon me, I don’t believe her estate is anywhere near as large as it would have to be for thirty million to be only a fraction of it.”

  “Naturally I myself have no clear idea,” Jammu said.

  “Mm. Naturally.”

  “Although I’d venture to guess the capital is largely the Hammaker family’s.”

  “The facts would seem to show otherwise. But she’s covered her tracks very well. I daresay we’ll never know for certain.”

  “Which makes sense, since it’s none of our business.”

  “It’s entirely our business,” Ripley said. “Now this will doubtless astound you—nearly everything I say astounds you—but I and the Ripley Group and Urban Hope are being blackmailed with those very tracts of land. There’s scarcely a block in the entire zone where Cleon Toussaint or Carver-Boyd or Struthers Realty hasn’t somehow acquired a strategically central lot or two.”

  “I’d think Pete Wesley could persuade the city to condemn those lots for you whenever necessary.”

  “The mayor is more than willing to do so. But of course you aren’t aware that any project where the city condemns becomes a city project with absurd racial quotas for every construction gang from beginning to end.”

  “I wouldn’t think the racial composition of the gangs would concern you as long as the work gets done at a fair price.”

  “No, of course you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t think it mattered to a group of businessmen if all hiring and letting of contracts on their own projects were no longer in their hands. You wouldn’t think that.”

  “Why not just buy the lots you need?”

  Ripley glared at her. “You know bloody well what they’re asking. They want a black majority on Urban Hope. They want written commitments to proportional representation on our respective payrolls—if the city’s sixty percent colored, in five years we’d have to employ sixty percent colored workers. And they insist on a guarantee of an ungodly percentage of colored families in Urban Hope-sponsored developments.”

  It was 35 percent—the figure Jammu had suggested. “Low-income families,” she said.

  “So-called low income.”

  “What, are there no poor whites in the city? Let me repeat, Mr. Ripley, that I can’t be expected to intercede between you and the black leadership of the city. My role is limited. I’m in law enforcement.”

  “But you’re so resourceful. There surely must be ways. Because if all I get in return is badgering from the coloreds, I shan’t contribute to your merger crusade, and your support from the rest of Urban Hope will be precious tepid. And without a merger, many of us might find it pointless to stay in the city. You’ll have your chance to see which came first—”

  “Naturally,” Jammu said, as the voices outside her door grew even louder, “I’d appreciate the aid of Urban Hope in a campaign for the common good of all St. Louisans, city and county. From informal talks with some of your fellow members I’ve gained the impression that the merger is viewed very kindly. Yes, the blacks want a majority membership of Urban Hope. Currently they’re a minority of zero. Yes, they want a commitment to equal-opportunity hiring. Currently your own payroll is eleven percent black. Above the median income it’s two percent. We’re living in the 1980s, Mr. Ripley, an
d your corporation is now based in a city nearly two-thirds black. And yes, they want 35 percent low-income units in Urban Hope projects. Currently the plans I’ve seen call for levels between zero and ten percent. Meanwhile the office and luxury-housing developments your group is sponsoring are displacing black families at a rate of eight per day. Your refusal to take Mr. Struthers seriously seems less than fair. Perhaps I’m not attuned yet to your American way of thinking, but this strikes me as a golden opportunity for St. Louis businessmen to actually do substantial good for the urban black community.”

  Ripley was nodding and smiling at this lecture. “If I believed it,” he said, “your naïveté would appall me. But I’m confident I’ve made my position clear.” He stood up. “Cheerio.” He opened the door, revealing a cluster of eager faces, and vanished in their surge.

  “Wait,” Jammu snapped. “Wait five minutes. Can you wait?”