The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Read online

  “No,” Probst said. “Not since I stopped living with my parents.”

  “Oh, long time. Long time. Huh. Well, listen. You’re going to say here I go again with this late-notice business, but—do you have any Easter plans yet?”

  “Ah.”

  “See, Elaine and I were thinking you might be all alone there, or you and Luisa, and, Well, I don’t know, it’s a family holiday. It’s a quiet holiday. Let me just tell you what we’re thinking of. We are going to go to early church, darn it—if we can get the kids out of bed—and vee have vays, heh—which would get us home by 10:30 or so. Dinner would be around two, and in the meantime, heh, we’re going to have the old egg hunt on the lawn. Elaine and I, we tell the kids they’re getting way too old for it, but every year they insist on having it. It’s more of a game now, of course. Well, like bridge. They take it real seriously, and I’m usually out there half the night hiding eggs. There’s a strategy, you know, whether you’re going to psych ’em out by using some of the old standard places, or not. Anyway, if you think this is something Luisa would enjoy, she could—”

  “I don’t know, Jack—”

  “She could come early. Or both of you. Otherwise, about 12:30.”

  Probst crossed his eyes until they hurt. “I probably should have stopped you sooner, Jack, because unfortunately I do have some—”

  “Oh, OK,” Jack readily agreed.

  Anger leapt in Probst. “I do have some plans. I’m having Chief Jammu here for dinner.”

  “Hey! From the cover of Time magazine to the table of Martin Probst.”

  Was Jack insulting him?

  “I mean, that’s great! Two people like you with such a lot on the ball, it’s great to think about. We saw your name in that article, by the way. Still doin’ the old neighborhood proud. And it’s pretty neat, you abandoning ship like that at the last minute. Heckuva surprise. I think you did the right thing, getting on the winning side. I call it the winning side because—remember how I used to be pretty good at calling elections?”

  “Yes,” Probst said. He had no memory of it.

  “I’ve gotten even better in the last few years. Ninety, ninety-five percent accurate. Anyways, this referention looks like a cinch.”

  “That’s what the surveys would indicate.”

  “Yep, and you know what made my mind up? I and Elaine always look for you on TV, and we listen to what you say. I thought you had some good arguments—that’s Martin, we always say—but what you said on Thursday or whenever. I really liked that.”

  “Thanks, Jack. I hope you’re not the only one.”

  There was a pause. Probst still had to do the grocery shopping for Sunday before the last stores closed, because it didn’t look like his schedule would allow him any time for it in the next two days. “Well,” he said.

  “You doing anything right now?” Jack said.

  “Right now?”

  “Sure. We were going to have some coffee and cake.”

  “Unfortunately—” Probst felt his knees weakening. With sudden resolve, he said, “Listen, Jack. Have you noticed that I haven’t had time to accept a single one of your invitations this year?”

  “No, Martin.” The reply came in a new, sarcastic package. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  They could turn vicious on you, just like that. Jack had done it as a teenager, too, flashed the bitter superiority of the less advantaged.

  “I’m just trying to be honest with you,” Probst said. “I don’t want to waste your time.”

  “Didn’t seem wasted.”

  “Well, I guess then I don’t want you to waste mine.”

  “OK.”

  I’m Martin Probst. I’m chairman of Municipal Growth. I’m the builder of the Arch. I’m the friend of Jammu, I’m the Veiled Prophet, and I might just be the new county supervisor if I feel like it. “I’m sorry, Jack. I just think it might be better for both of us. It’s no reflection on—”

  A dial tone.

  “Bastard!” Probst slammed the receiver onto its hook. He collected his keys, coat and shopping list and fled the house before the phone could ring again. You try to be the least bit nice and—

  They know what the score is, and still they—

  And Barbara thought him spineless, patted him on the cheek. He was going to make her damn sorry she left him. He was in good shape. He was in very good shape.

  He was going to broil lamb chops, bake potatoes, make a green salad and use the bottle of balsamic vinegar he’d discovered a week ago in a silver-colored box in the cupboard. It was what his salads lacked which Barbara’s hadn’t. In the last few weeks he’d begun to eat salads again. His steady diet of restaurant food had been adding a pound to his weight every five or six days, and suddenly he’d run out of places to hide the extra pounds.

  He pulled into the Schnucks parking lot, took a cart from the queue outside, and entered the temple of light. He’d been coming here so often that he could now arrange his shopping lists sequentially, according to the aisles in which the foods were shelved. Vegetables fruits deli coffee cereals sauces dressings meat. Was it too early to buy the lamb? Not at all! Meat was tenderized by aging, and besides, by Saturday night Schnucks might have run out. He chose two packages of the best. He thought of the irony of slaughtering innocent lambs to celebrate Easter. He remembered when he’d known Jammu so casually he’d been afraid she was a vegetarian.

  The lines at the only two checkout lanes still open curved around an extensive candy display. Probst put a large, hollow chocolate egg in his cart, edible bric-a-brac for Jammu’s appreciation. (But who would be fooled by these hollow eggs? Kids, that was who. Kids were fooled. The economy was fueled by the stupidity of kids.) As usual, he’d gotten in the slower of the two lines. (That bastard Jack.) He took a closer look at the graphics in the candy display. The chocolate bunnies came in flimsy cardboard cartons, brightly colored, wrapped in cellophane. Somewhere on every box were the words hollow milk chocolate and a list of enes and benzos and phosphos and lactos. But these weren’t ordinary bunnies. They were individualized, the box illustrations picking up on the creations within. A bunny on a chocolate motorcycle was identified as Chopper Hopper. A bunny with a magnifying glass carried the moniker Inspector Hector. There was a Jollie Chollie and, with a tennis racket, a Willie Wacket. Manning a chocolate fire engine was a group of bunnies collectively known as Binksville Fire Control; its higher price reflected its greater net weight. There was a Rolly Roller on skates. (“Excuse me!”) Super Bunny with a cast brown cape. Busy Bigby. Peter Rabbit—so they remembered Peter Rabbit, did they? And they sold these things to children and did not go to jail. Little Traveler. Parsnip Pete. Horace H. Heffelflopper. (“Excuse me!”) McGregor, simply. Mr. Buttons…. Probst was pawing through the cartons, seeking out fresh slaps in the face. He found yet another: Timid Timmy. (We are the greatest nation on earth.)

  “Excuse me!”

  Probst turned towards the voice, which seemed to be addressing him. He saw no one. He looked down and saw a little boy, nine or ten years old. “Yes?” he said.

  “Excuse me,” the boy said, “are you Mr. Probst?”

  “Yes?”

  The boy pushed a curling cash register receipt into his hands. “Can I have your autograph?”

  Probst groped in his coat pocket for a pen.

  21

  It had been a hot day, the hotter end of a long warming trend. Downtown, Jammu twisted in her weary swivel chair, trying to shift some of her weight off the calluses that eight months of desk work had inscribed on her ass. She had a backache that neither standing up nor lying down nor even, she imagined, traction could relieve. At night now she was too tired to sleep or to get a kick from any sort of pills, stimulant, narcotic, or depressant. She could feel the chemicals turning and slipping, as if they were bolts and she a nut whose threads were stripped.

  But she could function. She was running, at the moment, on the six hours of sleep she’d stolen on Wednesday night. She’d had Martin
over to her apartment for fried chicken. As soon as her stomach was full her eyes had closed. She told Martin she had to lie down for a few minutes. She awoke three hours later, a little after midnight, to find him twisting the knob on her television set. She wasn’t sick, but she felt as if she’d been sweating out a fever while he sat by her side. Too weak to be embarrassed, she sent him home and slept another three hours, as long as the faint protective smell of his visit lasted. She dressed at 4:00, her heart pounding. There was so much work to do.

  She wanted to sleep with him again, just sleep.

  The soft air lolling in through the open windows carried with it some of the heat the streets had trapped during the day. Traffic was sparse for a Friday, engines passing singly down below, not in packs. The latest issue of Time lay on the floor to her right. Cover headline: THE NEW SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS. Beneath the headline was a picture of her. Her lips were tight and her eyebrows raised; Time gave bizarre expressions to figures it considered bizarre.

  Adroit as Jammu has been in dissociating herself from her Subcontinental origins, a wave of immigrants from the urban centers of Bombay, New Delhi and Madras has washed ashore on the banks of the Mississippi in seeming pursuit of her. The ensuing slew of curry joints, saris, saffron robes, and especially the parade of exotics spotted in the company of Jammu have produced pangs of paranoia in many St. Louisans, including Samuel Norris, the fiery sovereign of St. Louis-based General Synthetics. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a political leader who pretends she’s not political,” says Norris. “Jammu is animated by a deep-seated and foreign socialism, and I see no reason to apologize for being concerned about a non-St. Louisan calling the shots around here.”

  Jammu, for her part, sees no reason to apologize…

  She imagined Brett Stone interviewing Norris for hour after hour, ripening him until at last he yielded one quote mature enough to meet the presses. She could remember when she’d felt a deep-seated and foreign animosity towards journalists. She could remember being a committed socialist, being passionate about a variety of intellectual issues, as Singh still was. She could see that as an adult she still bore the scars of a younger anger, could remember a time when this Time article would have delighted her, infuriated her, called up a flood of critical insights. It didn’t now. She’d read it twice and thrown it aside. She only wanted to finish her operation. Her unideological, unscientific, inconclusive, wholly personal operation.

  “We would have been a normal family, I think, if there had been more of us. None of my father’s siblings survived adolescence, and my mother had only one sister, my maiden aunt, who was blind. The Army moved my father around until he retired and we settled in Kashmir. By then there was no extended family left at all—and no more Sikhs than there’d ever been in Kashmir. I had a younger brother who died when I was four. My older brother had no thought apart from becoming an officer, the fifth generation of the family to do so, and the last. He was gung-ho. He was sent to a military academy in Delhi while I went to school in town, so I was an only child of sorts. I weighed seventy-eight pounds on my fourteenth birthday. My diet was very rich in butterfat, but it didn’t help. My mother worried. I started at the university in 1960, and within three years there’d been martial law in Kashmir and a dismal war with China. My father never left the house. He wore a silk jacket with sleeves he had to roll up half a dozen times. When they were unrolled it looked like a straitjacket waiting to be tied. My brother became a cadet. I hardly remember if there were summers. The streets were cold, winter always seemed to be coming on, troops always freezing in their insufficient bedding up in Ladakh. And I would go home to see my parents and I would be wearing perfectly ordinary clothes, and my mother would chide me.

  “Balwan, she would say, it’s cold out there. How long have you been clearing your throat like that? Ibraim Masood’s second son has tuberculosis of the spine, and you in nothing but flannel. The son spent himself with low women, and now instead of inheriting the rug business he’ll be lucky to see his twenty-first birthday. He’s been in bed since he lost the use of his legs, and they tried to move him and he bent in two, backwards, Balwan, like a rotten banana. It ruptured his lower bowel, which had to be removed, and now they have him on a plastic bag. And they consider themselves lucky to have that plastic bag! I heard him on Tuesday, twelve degrees of frost and he with his window open shouting to the boys in the street: Don’t make the same mistake I did! Don’t spend yourself with low women!

  “To which I would have to reply, Are you sure this is TB, Motherji?

  “And she would say: That lump in your father’s abdomen is growing, I feel it every night when he’s snoring, and I can tell. The worst mistake I ever made in my life was sending him to that Anglo doctor Smythe. He wrote a ten-page report on your father’s health and it was all just words. But now your father has something to use against me, he waves that silly report in my face and says Smythe gave him a clean bill of health. And meanwhile, whatever it is he has in his stomach is only getting larger. I can feel it. I’m not stupid, no matter what your father says to you and I’m sure he says the worst. That man is very sick. And then there’s your brother’s growth.

  “I would smile and say, Growth?

  “In his mouth, she would say. He’s always had canker sores, you know, but this is something else. He wouldn’t open his mouth the last time I saw him because he doesn’t want to face the truth. Some fine, brave officer! He won’t even open his mouth for his mother. It’s the suicidal business that hurts me, Balwan. They refuse to take their problems seriously, and look what happened to Ibraim Masood’s son.

  “But I didn’t spend myself with low women. My health has always been excellent. As has hers. She’s fading now, in the bitterness of justified fears, in the luxury of a fat Army pension. Her health remains good. My brother’s was also good, until a sniper shot him in Dacca in 1971. I believe he did have a benign form of herpes. My father’s tumor was benign. And still it killed him, in 1964, it hemorrhaged. The magic of suggestion, eh? Which could be your own Webster Groves, your own family. When there are no problems, the problems must be invented. I’m pleased to think my mother talked my father to death. I know she didn’t like him.”

  She reached for the telephone, precognitively, grasped the receiver and raised it so quickly that she heard only one grain of its granular ring. “Jammu,” she said. The needle of the wiretap detector she’d installed on Monday rested calmly on the zero.

  “Can I talk?”

  “Yes, Kamala.”

  “Well, there isn’t any sign of her. But I wondered about the house in St. Charles.”

  “Gopal goes there regularly.”

  “I have no more ideas then.”

  “It’s not your concern. We’ll find her. You catch your plane.”

  “I hate to go when—”

  “Catch your plane.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “And go see my mother when you’re back, first thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good-bye, Kamala.”

  “Bye, Jammuji.”

  And so the book on Allied Foods chairman Chester Murphy, opened in September, was closed at last. A visit from a Punjabi trade representative. A doctored X-ray at Barnes. A forged intra-hospital memo and two herbal poisons. And, finally, a desertion of Municipal Growth and the panicked purchase of South Side riverfront property. A neat job, to which Jammu had scarcely needed to pay attention.

  Devi, on the other hand, had made a mess of her job. She’d called Jammu on Wednesday, spoken indirectly of blackmail, and hung up before Jammu could even think of having the call traced. She hadn’t called again. Jammu lacked the manpower to search every hotel and flophouse in greater St. Louis. She could only ask all her agents to keep their eyes open in the hope that Devi would turn up at one of the meeting places. Gopal periodically checked on the safe houses and the communications warehouse, and Suresh was slowly working through the more promising hotels. But their primary responsibility
was to avoid capture themselves. Their caution slowed them down.

  It was Singh who should have been hunting for Devi. But even though Martin had become Jammu’s ally, Singh continued to devote all his time to Barbara. He’d drawn a distinction between Jammu and the operation and declared his allegiance to the latter. He said Barbara posed a graver threat than Devi did. He said extreme care had to be taken in preparing Barbara for her release. (Jammu wondered what the fuck he was up to over there.) He seldom left that apartment now. He said the operation must culminate cleanly, he said Jammu’s assumption of power must be seamless. He said they could learn more from Martin’s reintroduction to Barbara than from anything else they’d done in St. Louis. He said all of this easily; his neck wasn’t on the line.

  Jammu didn’t want Barbara reintroduced to Martin. She wanted Barbara to disappear and never return.

  This was what Martin wanted, too.

  But he might change his mind. He’d changed it once already.

  All week Jammu had teetered on the brink of picking up the phone and giving Singh the order. It was true, of course, that America could change one’s perspective. In a sparsely populated country the individuality of the victim glared, as did the extremity of the sentence, since death seemed almost an anomaly here. But Jammu had long ago shed her scruples. The old murders hadn’t kept her from playing the enlightened leader of St. Louis, and a new one wouldn’t keep her from continuing to play the desirable woman Martin felt her to be. She was only afraid that if she gave the order, Singh would not obey.

  She couldn’t quite see herself doing the job with her own hands. Her role was to stay at her desk, the constant center of the operation. Singh and only Singh had the time, information and imagination to plan an unsuspicious death. But Singh wouldn’t do it. Barbara had taken him away. Next Wednesday he would set her free. Then she’d take away Martin as well, and Singh would return to India, and Martin would return to his old life.