The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Page 50

  There were other matters. Acting on a tip from a Washington University professor of law, a researcher at KSLX-TV had turned up a slight constitutional hitch in the real-estate transactions tax approved by city voters in November. The law apparently could, if challenged, be struck down by an unsympathetic court—for instance, by the conservative Missouri State Supreme Court. But no KSLX reporters were willing to write the information into a story. And when the researcher thereupon wrote it up herself, station executives close to general manager James Hutchinson delayed its airing for more than a week, penciling it in for broadcast on Tuesday, after the polls closed.

  Rumor also had it that a private detective agency was compiling a massive dossier on Chief Jammu and her allies, with evidence suggesting that the Chief’s rise to power owed less to her popularity and more to crass horsetrading than was generally supposed.

  Barroom cynics maintained that the incorruptible Martin Probst had switched sides on the referendum solely in exchange for sexual favors from a certain somebody in whose cruiser he had been seen to ride.

  And then there were the Osage Warriors, those local terrorists who had made the national news repeatedly in the fall and winter. Now their attacks had simply ceased, and investigations by the police and the FBI had turned up no substantial leads. If their sudden appearance had been surprising, their disappearance was even more so. What had it all meant? County conservatives were beginning to wonder why an armed revolutionary group should have tailored its battle plan to suit so neatly the political needs of Jammu and the pro-merger forces.

  But the fourth estate heard none of this. It was Saturday, March 31, and the only sounds in the city were the applause and calliopes of special events and the clamor of the fêtes to which the major media representatives had been treated.

  Late Saturday afternoon a hostage situation developed at a Pizza Hut in Dallas. Many of the reporters decamped for Texas. But many remained. There was nothing to do but see the sights and praise them. On the streets, in the seductive spring twilight, phrases whispered provocatively. The new spirit of St. Louis…Farewell to the blues…Arch-rivals no more…A great Indian chief…A classic example of wise urban planning…The cardinal virtues…Delightful mix of old and new…First truly modern city in the Midwest…And then from a hundred hotel rooms, later in the evening, came the impassioned sounds of typing. A new city, a new national image, was being conceived in the night.

  Why us?

  Those who might once have asked the question, in the rubble of their late great city, now saw the prospect of a more satisfactory fate, the elimination of the political split which for over a century had halted St. Louis’s progress towards greatness. St. Louis had stepped into the limelight. It had cured its ills. Against the odds and contrary to expectations, it was making something of itself.

  The local prophets were in twenty-seventh heaven.

  But the city? Its self-pitying, self-exalting essence? That part of the place which would not forget and which had asked, Why us?

  It was dead. Prosperity, Jammu, and national attention had killed it. St. Louis was just another success story now, happy in the one-dimensional way that all thriving cities are. If it had ever had anything extraordinary to tell the country, anything admonishing or inspiring, it would say it no more.

  Oh, St. Louis. Did you ever really believe that Memphis had no history? That citizens of Omaha considered themselves unexceptional? Were you ever really so vain that you hoped New York might one day concede that, for all its splendor, it could never match your tragic glory?

  How could you have thought the world might care what became of you?

  Herb Pokorny had laid off all his extra help and driven his family out for a weekend of relaxation at Lake St. Louis. He didn’t stay there. Sam Norris had gone to Lambert with a briefcase chained to his wrist and caught a plane to Washington. He, likewise, didn’t stay there. By noon on Saturday they were both in St. Louis, with all the pertinent files and instruments stored in the back of Herb’s souped-up station wagon, the color and plates of which had been changed on Friday night.

  Herb had cracked the last nut, the mystery of where all the Indians were concealing themselves, their weapons, their receivers and their records. The break had come very late, by process of elimination. After wasting upwards of four hundred man-hours engaging in surveillance on the residences of all the likely aliens and tailing the likeliest ones to see where they’d lead, he’d realized that once again Asha Hammaker was the key. The Indians could only be hiding in Hammaker-owned properties.

  Sam and Herb now had a complete catalogue of those properties. The list was long, but not too long. In three days, four days max, they’d be able to scout and search every one of them.

  Sam gave no thought to sleep. Every hour counted, what with Jammu already beginning to bail out. To date, she’d sent home five of her operatives and had tried to send a sixth, the girl, Devi Madan.

  Herb had photographs of the two men with Madan at the airport, and would have had the girl herself if she hadn’t, as he told Sam, pulled a gun on him.

  So Sam knew Jammu was sending them home. But he also knew his quarry’s psychology. She wasn’t secure enough to let go of everyone and all her tools. Maybe on Wednesday she would be. But on Wednesday the game would be up. They’d have worked through the list of properties.

  On Saturday afternoon they scored on item one, an eleven-acre tract along the Meramec River in Jefferson County. Searching the wooded ground methodically, they turned up the trace of an old road. Fifty yards from the river, by the side of the trace, they found three crates of cordite and a box of caps under a heavy tarpaulin. The explosives matched the description of those used in the stadium scare. It was a cold scent, but a scent nonetheless. Herb figured there might be other evidence on the property, but it would have to wait.

  The next stop was in St. Charles County. Four and a half acres. Developed. This turned out to mean a secluded farmhouse set into a hill off a gravel county road. Dusk fell while they watched it. In an hour, one vehicle came by on the road, an old man on a tractor. They moved in. Sam had a heavy outer heart, his pistol in its shoulder holster.

  They observed fresh tire tracks on the driveway, but the garage was empty. They broke into the house and found a smell of fried onions and cumin. The only furnishings in the place were mattresses and blankets. The refrigerator was running. Vegetables in it. Herb pulled open the fruit drawer and let out an uncharacteristic gasp. There was a machine pistol in the parsley.

  A car was coming up the driveway, flashing blue lights in the kitchen windows. Too late, Sam and Herb noticed the blinking red eye in the living-room thermostat and realized the place was burglar-proofed.

  It took them two hours to talk themselves out of the St. Charles police station, with a Thursday court date. A St. Charles squad car escorted them to the county limits. But it was only a small delay. When the squad car turned around, they doubled back to the house on the hill, found it unguarded, clipped the power line where it entered on the side, and went back in.

  Probst hadn’t slept well. Upset by the humid, changing weather, he’d tossed in the grip of a dream that felt like awakeness, interminable variations on the concept of opinion polls in which each part of his body had a percentage attached to it, meaninglessly, his legs 80 percent and stiff, his back a knotted 49 percent, his swollen eyes coming in at 22 percent each, and so on through the unraveling of the night.

  At sunrise the bells at Mary Queen of Peace had rung in Easter and proceeded, all morning, to repeat the announcement. Trees were budding in a green fog. It was also April Fools’ Day. The blasphemy of the coincidence had been shooting little spitball-like jokes into Probst’s head. The tomb is empty? Oh. April Fools’.

  He wasn’t a churchgoer, of course, but he’d long allowed the Resurrection a certain margin of credence, maybe 37 percent in a random sampling of his mind’s constituents. Faith was a ticket, and he split his. An event like the creation of Eden scored a
zero, while the parting of the Red Sea polled a solid 60 percent, carrying easily. The sea had parted for Moses but swallowed the chariots. The idea of a people being Chosen had the ring of truth, as did the entire Old Testament, whereas the New had the flat clank of the robotic young men and women with leaflets who bothered people on the streets downtown. Probst didn’t believe in God. Fortunately a comfortable silence on the matter had surrounded him for all his adult life. Men might discuss politics at Probst & Company, but never religion. At home, Barbara was the warden of the silence. “God?” she wouldn’t say. “Don’t be silly,” she wouldn’t add.

  He heard the toilet flush and the bathroom door open. Jammu appeared in the kitchen doorway, stopping before she entered. For half an hour she’d been hanging in doorways and sticking close to walls, like a small animal that shuns open spaces for fear of predators. She was shy today, and rather pretty, in new jeans, a lavender cashmere cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons, and only a bra underneath, the straps of which raised faint boundaries fencing the meadows of her back from the slopes of her shoulders and sides. She flipped through the scraps and cards on the refrigerator door, neither idle nor overcurious. Probst, soaping his hands at the sink, didn’t worry about what she’d see. He’d removed the more visible evidence of Barbara from all the downstairs rooms. And from the bedroom.

  “Do you need some help?” Jammu said.

  He pushed the pan of lamb chops under the broiler element and noted the time: 2:38. Even on holidays he didn’t like to eat dinner this early, but Jammu had functions to attend in the evening. “No,” he said. “Thank you. You can sit down.”

  She strolled into the breakfast room, changing it as she went, shedding a light whose wavelength only Probst was equipped to see, revealing force vectors in the furniture and a saturation in the blueness of the curtains’ piping. He joined her at the windows. In the driveway, losing its sheen to the mist, stood the unmarked car she’d driven. Mohnwirbel had gone to Illinois for the holiday. Probst suspected there was some woman he saw over there.

  “We bought the house for the yard,” he said. “In another couple of weeks you’ll see why.”

  Jammu gazed coolly at the flower bed where Norris and Pokorny had appeared a month earlier. A gap in the daffodils marked the spot. Staring out into the static yard, Probst remembered the one or two lucky Sunday afternoons a year when Ginny and his parents had all happened to be out and he, as a teenager, had had their small house completely to himself. The sky and world lapped against it. He stood looking out window after window in an expectancy larger than boredom, more mysterious, and needing an object. Was this how Barbara had felt every weekday of her married life? Was this where John Nissing came in?

  Jammu’s arm brushed his. A clean coconutty shampoo smell rose from her hair. She looked up at him just as he leaned, without strain, and slipped his arms under hers. She shook her hair back and looked past him in the last second before he placed his lips on hers and realized he was finally kissing her.

  She turned her head back and forth, presenting her nose, her forehead and her eyes to his lips, and her fingers combed through his hair, pulling him down to kiss her harder. The cashmere was warm and shifted on her skin, bunching at her straps. Her breasts flattened softly, through cashmere, against his chest while her mouth, a busy metaphor of hunger, opened and closed. He raised one of his hands and filled it with her hair, her personal hair. He drew her head away from his to see her face. She swallowed and released a breath, coming up for air, and something popped. It was the lamb under the broiler. Probst pulled away.

  Jammu laughed voicelessly, bending over a little. “I’m very hungry.” She laughed again. It was an aspirated smile. “And I’ve brought you something.”

  He made his way back to the oven. “What is it?”

  “A surprise. You’ll see.”

  He turned the chops and opened the refrigerator for the salad. He tried to hand the teakwood bowl to Jammu, but she stepped around it, pressing him into the refrigerator. Its light, which smelled like pickles, glared down into his eyes. Her tongue opened his lips and brought the sweet tastelessness of her mouth into his. Did she want to do it right here on the floor while the ketchup and mayonnaise watched? He was willing. But she backed away, with a glance at the oven. “You’re going to have a fire in here.”

  They ate in the dining room. The food tasted good, but not as good as the feeling of power he had now: she wouldn’t escape the house without making love. She knew it, too. Their forks clattered in a chaste somberness. Separated by a corner of the table, their bodies couldn’t feel what their minds knew for certain, where their love would lead them as soon as they touched again.

  She told him how she would bring economics to bear on the close-in suburbs of Maplewood, Affton, Richmond Heights and University City, Ferguson, Bellefontaine Neighbors, Jennings and others to force them to accept outright annexation by St. Louis, once the merger had paved the way. “Because the referendum per se does nothing to relieve the city’s lack of land,” she said. “The shortage is already critical.”

  “So you’re going to make Webster Groves a semi-autonomous part of St. Louis.” Probst filled her wineglass. “The Family of St. Louis.” He grimaced. “I can already hear Pete Wesley with a slogan like that in his mouth.”

  “You really don’t like him, do you?”

  “I can’t stand him.”

  Jammu nodded ambiguously.

  “What kind of terms are the two of you on?” he asked.

  She turned to the windows. “You mean, what kind of woman am I?”

  “Not exactly…”

  “Wesley didn’t consider me attractive.”

  “More fool he.”

  “But if he had, and if I needed to, I’d have slept with him.”

  Probst was appalled.

  She seemed to observe this with satisfaction. “I told you I wasn’t pure.”

  His voice grew chalky. “So who’ve you done it with?”

  “No one. But that was mere chance.”

  Probst set his fork down and stared at the peppery pools of juice on his plate.

  “Don’t be dramatic, Martin. I’m not the married one here.”

  “You want me to drag my wife into this.”

  “Of course.”

  “You want me to divorce her.”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Yes.”

  She tipped her chair onto two legs. “Oh, I know. This is horribly unbecoming of me.”

  “No, it’s natural.”

  “Well. Where is she?”

  “In New York,” he recited. “With someone you’ve met. Remember John Nissing?”

  She frowned. “Who?”

  “John Nissing, the cosmopolitan. Of PD Magazine fame.”

  “Yes, yes.” She was squinting at something unpleasant. “But you didn’t mention that.”

  “Can you blame me? We’d only just—What is it?”

  Her frown was deepening. Outside, a car passed on the wet street. “Nissing is a homosexual,” she said.

  Probst couldn’t help chuckling. “I doubt it.”

  “You haven’t been out to dinner with him and his gay lover.”

  “What?”

  “Are you in communication with her? Does she call? Have you seen her with him?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We talk. She seems happy. Happy and busy.”

  Jammu shrugged. “Well. You never know. But from everything I saw of the man I’d be very surprised if this turns out to be a long-term understanding.” She shook her head, puzzled. “It’s strange. I don’t often misjudge people this badly.”

  “Maybe we’re talking about two different Nissings.”

  “Maybe. Or two different sides of him.”

  Probst didn’t believe Barbara was in trouble, but he begrudged her the very possibility. He didn’t want a disaster to complicate his life, and he didn’t want Barbara pathetic and remorseful and returning home to make him feel guilty about throwing her o
ver, which was what he was going to do no matter what. He was through with guilt. He’d forgiven her. He’d removed her from his life.

  Jammu was twirling her glass sadly by its stem. Probst wished there were some way to assure her he wouldn’t renege on his commitment to her. But there was no way. He couldn’t prove it until the time came. He reached and raised her chin with his thumb, something he’d seen done in movies. “You can sound so tough,” he said.

  “I am tough.” She smiled startlingly, at a wall. “I’m just out of my element here. I’ve never—oh.”

  “Never what,” he fished.

  “I feel great, Martin. I do feel great.”

  Her tone would not have been much different if she’d said she felt sick, Martin, she did feel sick. But he felt a little sick himself. The surrender to love, at his age, pulled certain muscles in the stomach and the neck, muscles connecting the will to the frame, because there was another, more final surrender which they’d already contracted to resist.

  He cleared the table. In the kitchen he turned on the coffee maker and took the chocolate egg out of a cabinet. He brought it back to the table.

  “Happy Easter,” he said.

  “Happy Easter yourself.” She pushed a large brown envelope across the table to him. She tested the egg’s weight.

  “Real imitation milk chocolate,” he said, raising the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. “This is the surprise?”

  “Yes.”

  He peered in and saw signatures, hundreds of signatures, and his name in capital letters.

  “They’re yours if you want them,” she said. “The filing deadline is Friday noon. I think you should run.”

  He was swept up in a rush of passion, pure transparent happy passion, as he drew the petitions from the envelope and read the hundreds of names in hundreds of handwritings, and one name, his own, at the top of every page. FOR THE OFFICE OF SUPERVISOR, ST. LOUIS COUNTY. The woman in the lavender cardigan was peeling foil off the egg. He drank her in small sips. He would run. With her helping him, he’d win. He’d marry her. And then see what Brett Stone had to say.