The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Read online

  “But the people who engage in it. Where are they now?”

  “That really isn’t my concern. They’re spread much more evenly over the rest of the population in Missouri and Illinois. The crime rate has risen in places like University City and Webster Groves, but the local forces can easily handle the work. And if some poor families have moved to the county, then the county welfare apparatus now has a somewhat heavier caseload to process. This doesn’t sound nice. But you must admit it’s more efficient and more fair than having the entire region’s underside concentrated in the city. Doesn’t this make sense to you?”

  It made sense. But Probst didn’t see where all the frightening black young men of North St. Louis had vanished to. He’d seen their faces. He knew that none of them had ended up in Webster Groves or in any of the other nice county towns. Where were they? Somehow the reality had gone underground.

  “How come everyone likes you?” he asked.

  “Not everyone does.”

  “Most seem to. I’m talking about the fact that you’re the political linchpin in St. Louis now, and you only got here seven months ago. What have you done for both the black politicians and the Quentin Spiegelmans that they’re so willing to work for you?”

  “They aren’t working for me. They just need me.”

  “Why you?”

  “You mean, what have I got that other people haven’t?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. Ambition. Luck.”

  “Loads of people have ambition. Are you saying you’re in the position you’re in just because you’re lucky?”

  “No.”

  “Where are your enemies? Where are the people whose toes you’ve stepped on? The people you’ve offended.”

  “There are plenty—”

  “There aren’t. You know there aren’t. There’s only the rightwing Republicans and some old women and they only hate you out of principle. And because they’re jealous. The thing is, Colonel—”

  “Ess.”

  “The thing is, I can understand why Ripley and Meisner get along with you now, given the decisions they’ve made, and I can see why the situation is stable now, why the only people against you are criminals or crackpots, and I can see how the war on crime and the war on blight work hand in hand now, I can even see the motives behind the union of Democrats and industrialists. We’re at point B. You hand it to me. It’s a fait accompli. It makes sense. But I don’t see how you got here from point A. I don’t understand what possessed so many of my acquaintances to desert Municipal Growth. I don’t understand how you knew enough and where you found the leverage to plan and execute this complete, this bizarre reversal of the city’s fortunes. I refuse to believe a total stranger, no matter how lucky and ambitious, can come to an American city and change its face in less than a year. I don’t know what I expect you to say in reply, but I find there’s a huge gap between the person I’m sitting here with and the person who’s done all the things she’s done. I wonder how you see yourself.”

  “I don’t know, I just did it.”

  “Well, you can see why I wonder who you really are.”

  “I don’t know. Who do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They stared at each other. The problem had become impersonal.

  “I don’t ask,” she said. “I just do things. I wanted the city to go places. I did everything I could. Why don’t you understand? You’ve been rather successful here yourself.”

  “I was born here. I skipped college.” Probst’s voice trembled at the drama of his life. “I worked fourteen-hour days for ten years, and I didn’t change anything. I just made do with what was already there.”

  “And it sounds to me as if you therefore feel a necessary attachment to what was already here. You’re a little bit in love with troubles. Isn’t it so? Isn’t that what’s behind these questions? A bankrupt, crime-ridden inner city is fundamental to your outlook as an old St. Louisan, and you don’t want it to change.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “I don’t mean to imply that you’re heartless. You’re just a pessimist, that’s all. You give to UNICEF, but you don’t believe it will stop African governments from letting their children starve. You build these bridges in St. Louis but not because you think it will make the people who drive their cars over them any less odious to you—”

  “Or to you.”

  “Am I right? Isn’t this how you feel?”

  “You are saying I’m selfish.”

  “Only insofar as you deny the validity of what I’ve done for the city. If you’d just accept that things have changed, you’d support the referendum. I can see you on television saying, Yes, I, Martin Probst, have changed my mind. I believe this can be a great city if everyone works together. If we all share the burden, the burden disappears.”

  She was sitting up straight, her eyes questing for the good, the brave, and the true. Probst was embarrassed for her.

  “Who’s John Nissing?” he said abruptly.

  “John—” She frowned. “Nissing. The writer.”

  “You know him, then.”

  “Yes. He wrote the article for Sunday’s PD Magazine, which he’d hoped the New York Times Magazine would take but didn’t. I haven’t seen the piece, but it should be everything you wanted—oh, you know. All that crap about my mother and the sweltering streets of Bombay. I gave him too many interviews earlier in the year.”

  “He’s from India?”

  “No. I hadn’t heard that. Not American, but I don’t believe Indian. But he’d been to Bombay and bombarded me with facts. A real cosmopolitan, independently wealthy. A snob and a know-it-all. He kept weaving in all the places he’d seen, Antarctica, the Ryukyus, Uganda, that sort of thing.” Jammu bit her thumbnail. “And forty-six of the fifty states. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondered. He photographed my house for an architectural magazine.” A snob and a know-it-all: exactly Barbara’s type. “He looked Indian,” Probst added recklessly.

  “I’d say more like Arab.”

  Later that night he watched her take off her clothes. Her hair hung over her face in ebony blades as she supervised her fingers, her short square hands, which were fighting with the catch on her puckered bra. The blinds were raised. Snow fell outside. Probst couldn’t believe he was going to see it all now. She was even thinner than she looked in clothes, and when she lowered her underpants, the fabric taut between her fingers like a string game, his jaw felt as if it were dropping open down to his waist. There was no hair between her legs. There was just a crater with a plumped rim, a second navel. She was a virgin. She looked at him. “This is it,” she said. Where the bullet entered.

  Probst was the bullet.

  The room was full of moonlight. He’d been dreaming on his back, half sitting, propped on both the pillows, his and Barbara’s. The moon was full. He couldn’t remember its ever having filled the room this way. Its light flooded in through the western windows so brightly that it made the room seem small and portable. The bed extended nearly to the walls on all sides. Probst shut his eyes and tried to return to where he’d been, to the dream, to Jammu, and deflower her.

  He opened them again. There was something on his lap, under the blankets and bedspread. He peeled them back and felt a claw, a tiny claw, and the weight of something warm on his pajamas at his hip.

  It was a kitten. There was a kitten in his bed. Furry and imploring, its small paw reached up towards his face.

  This time he really woke up. He was lying on his stomach, his eyes shielded by pillows. He’d ejaculated in his sleep. Nudging aside a pillow, he saw moonlight, in the eastern window, not the western, slipping in below the bottom of the heavy shade, which he hadn’t quite pulled down all the way. It was different from the moonlight he’d dreamed. It was hard and modest, just a bluish glare on the sill.

  When he went to work at Vote No in the morning, the fun was gone. As usual, the volunteers brewing coffee offered him a
share of the first pot. While he waited, he savored his mild hangover, the vestige of the long evening that seemed, now, to have leeched the wicked pleasure from his elephant act. Holmes and the others had made him the repository of the cause’s rightness and purity, and he despised them for it. He waved away his coffee when it came.

  Feathered shafts of tobacco smoke pierced the air. At the highrise Holiday Inn across the street the revolving doors worked like ventricles, admitting tubby travelers with baggage, ushering out others with showered hair and pink faces and baggage less sleek. The spectacle had decadence. The participants in the purchasable pleasures of hotel stays, room service and ice machines, a pool on the roof, were interchangeable. The doors revolved.

  To fly on a jet was a nice thing. (Millions thought so.) To stay in a hotel was a nice thing. To dine out was a nice thing. (Not many citizens of India dined out.) Vote No had assigned Probst the task of fashioning sentiments to sway the great plane-taking, hotel-utilizing, restaurant-going middle classes. To vote no was a nice thing. To vote yes was a nice thing. Did it really matter? Both arguments ran like tops. (To own a Buick was a nice thing.) This was decadence.

  Sometimes Probst thought immediate action must be taken to rid the world of nuclear arms lest a war accidentally start. At other times he thought the only path to safety lay in constructing more arms, a deterrent so frightening that neither side dare accidentally start something. He only knew he was frightened. He could argue both sides. He didn’t want to argue. He found it ludicrous and burdensome that the Post-Dispatch and maybe thousands of other people cared what he thought. Those people adored Jammu, and he had been with her. People had stared in the Palm Beach Café. She cast a silver light on him. In his mind she was a silver chain he couldn’t stop pouring back and forth between his hands. Barbara had her cosmopolitan lover and her new, liberated version of herself. Luisa had her malleable artiste boyfriend. Probst had something coming to him, too.

  Excitedly the volunteers were heading from the main office room into the conference room. Holmes was showing a red-hot video, a series of two-minute campaign ads they’d be running on prime time over the next three weeks. Tina tapped Probst on the shoulder. “Showtime, Mart.” He gave her a look devoid of expression. She turned on her heel. (To get laid was a nice thing.) What a state he was in.

  19

  “There’s a man.”

  “No.”

  “I can hear it in your voice, Essie. A mother can tell.”

  “You’ve been getting the money, haven’t you?”

  “It’s Singh again. Isn’t it.”

  “I hardly see Singh.”

  “Well. It’s your life.”

  “I said I hardly see him. I don’t know what your problem is.”

  “You can tell me. I’ve reconciled myself.”

  “I asked if you’d been getting the money.”

  “Some money, yes.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You’ve been clearing a hundred twenty percent and the rate is climbing. He sends you photocopies of every—”

  “Photocopies, yes.”

  “Send Karam back here if you don’t believe me.”

  “I will. You can be sure I will. And I do hope you’re more civil to him this time.”

  “Ho. I wasn’t civil.”

  “Karam isn’t one to complain, but I had the impression. His feelings were hurt. He’s a sensitive man, Essie. Very tender where you’re concerned. Like a father. I understand that Singh was violent. I’m not surprised. But you’re thirty-five years old now. There comes a time.”

  “It’s over between Singh and me, Maman. He’s leaving in a month and I doubt I’ll ever see him again.”

  “All the more reason to watch him. I was given to understand a hundred percent was a minimum figure. I was sure you’d do better.”

  “Singh isn’t stealing your money. No one cares about your money. No one’s as greedy as you are.”

  “Nor as naïve as you. Think about that.”

  “You make two-twenty on every dollar you spent in September. The exchange rates are good. As for the taxes, well, I warned you. Don’t think you’re the only one getting taxed. I’m having enough trouble with—”

  “Karam will be with you next week. If you warn Singh he’s coming I’ll be very unhappy with you. But not surprised. A mother can tell.”

  “I will remind you I’ve known Singh for nineteen years.”

  “A mother can tell.”

  Who’s Singh? Norris asked.

  Dunno. Dozen Thinghth on our litht and fifty aliathes.

  What’s the money?

  Thupposedly Asha’s, actually the mother’s.

  Anything we can nail her for?

  Not yet.

  Jammu left the lights on in her office, ducked into the bathroom, and changed into long pants and a leather patrolman’s jacket. She pinned her hair and put on a cap, pulling down the bill. Operatives of Pokorny had been following her movements—General Norris had enough wealth to fund an army of spies—and she had to be more careful now. She crossed the walkbridge to the Police Academy, exited onto Spruce, and got in the unmarked Plymouth that Rollie Smith had left at the curb for her. It was a good thing she didn’t need to make surprise inspections often. She drove for twenty minutes before she was sure she wasn’t being tailed. Then she crossed the Mississippi on the MLK Bridge and entered East St. Louis, Illinois.

  East St. Louis was a small-scale version of the South Bronx, of Watts, of North Philly. These cratered streets three miles east of the Arch would have been a menace or a social issue for people in St. Louis if they weren’t protected by a wide river and a state line. Singh had done well to imprison Barbara Probst in his loft here. The town was a black hole in the local cosmos, a place so poor and vicious that even organized crime stayed away. No one would expect a finicky psychopath like John Nissing to take his pretty hostage to an area where stepping out of one’s car—where even letting up on the gas pedal—invited death. Jammu parked by the rear loading dock of the warehouse and walked quickly to the door. Asha had given her a set of keys. On the top floor she unlocked a steel door and, to make sure Singh didn’t shoot her by mistake, whistled a fragment of an old drinking song:

  Who put the doxy in orthodoxy,

  Who put the sad in saddbu?

  Then she went in.

  Singh did not look up from the papers spread around him on the floor. He was punching with a single finger, rustically, on the keyboard of a calculator. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said.

  “My mother thinks you’re skimming some of her profits.”

  “How is the dear old woman?”

  “Bhandari’s coming to do another audit next week.”

  “Interesting that you warn me.”

  She sighed. “I appreciate your doing all this for me.”

  “Not at all, not at all.” He drew a red line through a column of figures and stood. “You came to view the merchandise?”

  “Yes.”

  He opened a door and they passed through an empty room. “The word is mum,” he whispered. He parted a set of curtains to reveal the door. Jammu looked up at the peephole, which was set near the top. Singh went away. He returned with a small stepladder with pads of grooved black rubber. She climbed it and peered into the last room.

  It was also empty, or nearly so, its walls and floor and ceiling curving together in the peephole’s optics like the skin of a bubble. The woman and the mattress appeared to cling, suspended, to the floor. She lay on her stomach reading in the light of a dim lamp. Her hair hung loose and overgrown and shaded the rest of her body from the light. Jammu could just barely make out the legs extending to the foot of the bed, the cable connecting her ankle to the wall. But the face was unmistakable. This was Martin’s wife. Jammu had heard her and heard about her as a free person moving through St. Louis. Now she might have been a butterfly tickling Jammu’s palms. Jammu wanted to crush her. Your husband doesn’t love you. Your daughter doesn’t need you. You
r Nissing’s an old fairy. She couldn’t remember why she’d objected to the kidnapping. She hated to think of letting Barbara go, of throwing away a thing bought at such a price. She didn’t see how she could survive without moments such as this, without total control. Who are you? This was Martin’s question. When she was with him she forgot the answer, but she remembered now. Barbara glanced up from her book and gazed at the door.

  Satisfied, Jammu stepped off the ladder and crossed the room again. Singh followed. “Exactly as advertised,” he said, shutting the second door. “Safe and sound.”

  “I know she’s safe. As long as the release goes smoothly.”

  “Quite.” He hovered at the outside door, waiting for her to leave.

  “It will go smoothly.”

  “Should.”

  “You’re still a psychopath.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I’m not ready to leave, you know.”

  “Oh.” He walked to the middle of the room and sat down on the floor. “You make it with Probst yet?”

  Jammu entered the kitchenette. “What do you have to drink here?”

  “Tap water. Tang.”

  “Aren’t we pure these days.” She put one of his clove cigarettes between her lips and leaned over the gas stove. “Do you find him attractive, Singh?” she said in a conciliatory voice, dragging.