The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Read online

  Bhandari refilled her glass. “Drink, drink,” he said. His own glass he brought to his lips awkwardly, as though pouring, not sipping. Seemingly as an afterthought, he raised the glass. “To your endeavor.”

  Jammu was going to have to speak with Maman. She was sure that if Maman had known how Bhandari would behave she would have sent a more competent spy. Or would have come herself. Jammu raised the cuff of her cardigan. Two o’clock. The day was evaporating. She took a deep breath, and as she let it out, Bhandari, from behind her, inserted his hands beneath her arms and placed them on her breasts. She jumped away.

  Bhandari straightened his back, an attorney again, a trusted family advisor. “I assume,” he said, “that the proper security measures have been taken vis-à-vis our Negro liaisons.”

  Jammu turned back to the river with a smile. “Yes,” she said. “Boyd and Toussaint weren’t any trouble. They had plenty to hide already. But Struthers, as I said, was expensive. He was the obvious choice—a broker and a politician too, a popular alderman, even something of a crusader. But we managed to dig up a dirty secret, a mistress he’s been keeping for nearly a decade. It was clear that he’d racked up a number of conflict-of-interest violations on behalf of the woman’s family, which is quite well off. So I had some leverage when I approached him, enough to protect me if he wasn’t interested. Which he wasn’t, until we came to the money part. Maman cleared the bribes personally, by the way. We don’t skimp when my own neck’s on the line.”

  Jammu felt Bhandari’s breath on her neck. His face was sifting through her hair, seeking skin. She twisted around in his arms and let him kiss her throat. Over his slicked-back hair she saw the hotel room’s “luxurious” bedspread, its “contemporary” art print, the “distinctive” roughcast ceiling. He unbuttoned the top of her blouse, snorting intermittently. Probably the best metaphor for the State was sexual obsession. An absorbing parallel world, a clandestine organizing principle. Men moved mountains for the sake of a few muscle contractions in the dark.

  The phone rang.

  Bhandari made no sudden motion. He was unaware that it had rung. Jammu arrested the fingers working at her bra and disengaged herself. She moved to answer the phone, but stopped, reconsidering. “You’d better take it,” she said.

  Bhandari stretched his neck muscles carefully and seated himself on the bed. “Hello?” He listened. “Why yes!”

  From his condescending tone, Jammu guessed it was Princess Asha. Another postponement? She buttoned her blouse and fixed her hair. They’d be missing her at the office.

  “Was it an open coffin?” Bhandari tittered. He’d been tittering for twenty-four hours. Late last night their talk had turned to JK Exports, Maman’s wool business and her primary cash conduit between Bombay and Zurich. Bhandari had described a recent incident. “Some Sikhs got in one of your mother’s warehouses last week.” He’d made Sikhs sound like little moths.

  He covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said to Jammu: “Asha can’t come until this evening. Shall we make a date?”

  “I’m busy tonight. Tell her after midnight. Say one o’clock.”

  KSLX general manager Jim Hutchinson rode home that night with his wife Bunny, who, as chance would have it, was downtown when the bomb went off. She was a comforting presence. When she showed up at his office, an hour after the blast, she was not the bundle of nerves another woman might have been. She looked glum, almost peeved. She wrinkled her nose. She paced. She didn’t kiss him. “Good thing you weren’t in the car,” she said.

  “Damn good thing, Bunny.”

  Having satisfied herself that he was unharmed, she left again to shop, returning only at 5:30 to take him home. He let her drive. As soon as they were tucked into traffic on Highway 40 she said, “Do they know who did it?” She turned on the wipers. Rain was falling from the prematurely dark sky.

  “No,” he said.

  “Good thing we’ve got a police department we can trust.”

  “Are you talking about Jammu?”

  Bunny shrugged.

  “Jammu’s all right,” he said.

  “Is that so?” A band of red lights, a lava flow, flashed on in front of them. Bunny braked.

  “You may object to her nationality,” Hutchinson said, remembering as he spoke that Jammu was an American, “but she’s turned the entire Bomb and Arson Squad loose on the case.”

  “Isn’t that what anybody would do?”

  “That’s the point, my lovely wife.”

  “What have they found?”

  “There’s not much to go on. Somebody tipped off the police at six this morning, but it wasn’t much of a tip.”

  “Mm?”

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Somebody tipped off the police at six this morning but—”

  “They didn’t know what to make of it. Somebody called up and said: When it happens, that’s us. The fellow at the switchboard had the presence of mind not to hang up. He asked who was calling, and the caller said, Ow! The fellow asked again. The caller said, Ow! And that was the tip.”

  “Some tip.”

  “And it’s not as if I have enemies. I told the detectives it almost had to be a random thing, except—”

  “Except there are a lot of cars parked downtown.”

  “So why ours?”

  Bunny swung the car into the right lane, which seemed a little bit better lubricated. Hutchinson continued: “There were effectively no witnesses, and there was almost nothing left of the bomb. But they did figure out how it was planted. Detective I spoke with after lunch said it was one of those tape decks black kids carry around. A boom box.” Now she’ll start in on the blacks, he thought. But she didn’t. He kept talking. “Said they found pieces of one scattered around the lot. It looks like the thing was hollowed out and filled with explosives, then shoved under the car and detonated from a distance. It wasn’t dynamite, though.”

  “Mm?”

  “It was plastic. Which is strange. It’s hardly amateur.”

  “Oh, huh. Can you run stories on it?”

  “It’s news, why not? We can do whatever we want.”

  “Maybe Cliff Quinlan?”

  “And turn up foul play in Jammu’s administration? Is that the idea?”

  “I’ve just never heard of cars being bombed in St. Louis, that’s all.”

  Half an hour later they escaped Highway 40, exiting onto Clayton Road. Rain continued to fall. Giant plastic jack-o’-lanterns leered from windows in the older stores on Clayton.

  At home their youngest daughter, Lee, was chatting in the kitchen with Queenie, their maid and cook. Two television-sized pumpkins awaited slaughter near the door. Lee toyed with a warty gourd from a basket of autumn objects. Bunny and Hutchinson washed their hands and went to sit down in the dining room, but the dinner table wasn’t set. Queenie had apparently not yet finished waxing it. She’d set the table in the breakfast room. She sliced the rump roast and doused each serving with béarnaise. There was steamed yellow squash and a salad with red lettuce, scallions, and hearts of palm.

  After grace, muttered by Lee, Hutchinson dug into his beef and began telling Lee the bomb story, although she’d already seen it on TV. Bunny eyed her squash disks dispiritedly. She could hear a helicopter outside. Perhaps the KSLX Trafficopter. It sounded close, though it might have been the rain or wind that carried the sound.

  No. It was very close, practically on top of them. They could hear the straining motor as well as the blades. Lee leaned back in her chair and looked out the window. She couldn’t see anything.

  “Wonder what this is all about,” Bunny said.

  As Hutchinson shrugged, the firing began. The living-room windows went first. They shattered almost quietly beneath the screaming of the copter’s metal parts. Bullets banged on the front door. They struck brass and shrieked.

  As if following a script, Hutchinson dragged Lee to the floor and huddled with her under the breakfast table. Bunny dropped to her knees and join
ed them. She was gasping, but she stopped as soon as she threw up. Chop suey she’d eaten in bed with Cliff Quinlan splattered in front of her. She shut her eyes. Queenie was screaming in the pantry.

  The dining-room windows burst. Bullets pounded the walls. The china display in the antique breakfront hit the floor with a mild crash. The Norfolk pine near the kitchen doorway toppled off its trivet. Hutchinson clutched Lee’s head.

  Within seconds of the attack the first Ladue squad car pulled up. Already the street was teeming with hysterical neighbors, the Fussels, the Millers, the Coxes, the Randalls, the Jaegers, and all of their domestic help. Red lights cut the darkness. A pair of pumpers arrived, but nothing was burning. An ambulance made a disappointed U-turn and drove off. No one was hurt.

  The police found the Hutchinsons’ front yard dotted with flyers xeroxed on shiny paper and covered with a childish scrawl. Chief Andrews picked one up.

  Andrews assigned two patrolmen the task of picking up all the litter and reminded them not to get their fingerprints on it. Then he radioed the St. Louis police. Chief Jammu, he was told, was already on her way.

  Residents in six other communities in and around St. Louis—Rock Hill, Glendale, Webster Groves, Affton, Carondelet, and Lemay—reported hearing a low-flying chopper in the minutes following the attack. The Illinois Highway Patrol was alerted, but it was too late. The chopper had vanished in the steady rain east of the river.

  “I’m not especially worried about the FBI. It took them years to catch those Puerto Ricans in Chicago, and even then they bungled it. This is a two-man show, Gopal and Suresh, they have no identities, their actions have no pattern, and they’d already stolen all the supplies six weeks ago. The only person who ever caught Gopal at anything was me. The FBI is out of its element. They’re more in their element when it comes to what I’m doing in the city, but even if they look, which they won’t, they won’t find much, some transmitters maybe, but you can’t trace the destination of their signals. Same with the retransmitting stations, and only a professional would even know what they are. The professionals aren’t looking. Sometimes I’m tempted to shut down all the electronics anyway, but the wires do more to prevent discovery than encourage it. The people in the field—Singh, Baxti, Sarada, Usha, Kamala, Devi, Savidri, Sohan, Kashi—they need the information for their work and their own safety. Nice try, but don’t bother.

  “If someone stumbles onto the pattern in Asha’s North Side purchases they’ll find the name Hammaker. It’s Maman’s cash but Hammaker’s bank checks. In this city, that’s a real red herring. And the media like me. So do the prosecutors, all the DA’s young lawyers collecting scalps. We have a rising arrest rate, and convictions bring promotions. And there’s no reason to be suspicious of me. The worst police can do supposedly is beat and cheat. We don’t beat people, and we don’t take bribes, at least not upstairs. Does my mother squeak?

  “Yes, land’s expensive downtown, the city’s cramped and can’t annex, but what really scares off the county wealth is crime. It’s a fear reinforced by racism. The city-county split is a form of discrimination. Elbow. What’s surprising is that the city doesn’t want reunification any more than the county does. The blacks are afraid of being outvoted in a more regional government, especially when they still don’t even have control of the city. It’s incredible, but St. Louis has never had a black mayor. But it’s only a matter of time before it gets one, another election or two, and then no one will ever get the county and city back together.

  “The industries are already established in the county, so why move? Ouch. Greed. We have tapes where you’ll hear bank board members inform their friends that city land has suddenly become a red-hot commodity. This isn’t just courtesy. The banks have a vested interest in land prices, and in the city’s prosperity. They own the bulk of the civic bonds. Therefore the banks are already on our side.

  “Maman can sell out in April for no less than thirty million. We’ll take a quarter of that in taxes, but she’ll still have fifty percent. Elbow! There’s a law called Missouri 353 that lets the city offer long-term tax abatements to anyone who’ll develop a blighted area. Blighted means anything—ten years ago they declared all of downtown blighted, so you can imagine. And our new tax plan will sweeten the deal. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?

  “Of course, the police chief has no business dictating city tax policy. But how am I supposed to know that? I’m new here. And the penalty for my political activity is media exposure and personal popularity! It’s completely contradictory. The reason I can take liberties with my office is the very same reason no one’s afraid of me: I’m a woman, I’m foreign, I’m irrelevant. You know, the Kama Sutra enjoins you to linger.”

  Bhandari rolled off. The sheet clung to his damp back and followed him, exposing her right shoulder and right arm. She let her hand remain between her legs. For the moment she was a refractory adolescent again, at home with the autoerotic. She stared at the ceiling, on which the bedside lamp cast a conic section of light pierced by odd spokes of shadow, projections of the crossbars of the lampshade.

  Stirring in his sleep, Bhandari brushed her flank. She was filled with the unpleasant conviction that when in Maman’s house, when called upon, he made talkative and charming love.

  But tomorrow Jammu would be free again, and the particles of her past, roused to flame by Bhandari, would grow cool and dim as she made her way back into the darkness, into her scheme, into the distance of St. Louis. Her shuddering came and went unnoticed.

  Asha was due at 1:00. Jammu looked at her watch, her only clothing. It was 12:20. She trailed a hand along the floor, found underwear and swung her legs out of bed.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  She stumbled to her feet and ripped the sheet off Bhandari, who lay like a beached whale, flippers half buried in percale sand. She shoved his head. “Up,” she said. “She’s here.”

  He rose dreamily, gazing at her chest.

  The knocking grew fierce and the doorknob rattled. This didn’t sound like Asha. Jammu could hardly turn her blouse right side out. She zipped up her skirt. Bhandari was tentatively knotting the belt of his robe. “Get the goddamned door,” she hissed, heading into the bathroom. After a moment she heard him shuffling to the door and unlocking it. There was a squeal, his. “What are you doing here?”

  Jammu turned away from the sink. Singh was standing close to her in the bathroom doorway. He stared at her in blank distress, and she was pleased to see a man whom she was still capable of injuring straightforwardly. She rolled her shoulders, flaunting her dishevelment.

  “Indira is dead,” he said. “Shot.”

  “What?”

  “They shot her.”

  “Sikhs!” Bhandari said. He had come up behind Singh, and in an anti-Sikh fury he swung his fist at the younger man. With grace, almost delicacy, Singh threw him against the wall and choked him with his forearm. He let up, and Bhandari looked around vacantly. Then he ran to the phone by the bed.

  “Operator. Operator.”

  “I thought you’d want to know,” Singh said to Jammu.

  “Romesh?” Bhandari’s voice shook. “Romesh, it’s you? Listen to me. Listen. All files, all files—you’re listening—all files marked C—C as in Chandigarh—all files marked C. Listen to me. All files—”

  Something was mechanically wrong with Jammu’s mouth. A hard combination of tongue and palate held it open and kept air from reaching or escaping her lungs. She felt a bullet in her spine and couldn’t breathe.

  5

  “Barbie?”

  “Hi. I was going to call you.”

  “Are you in the middle of something?”

  “No, I haven’t started yet. I have to bake a cake.”

  “Listen, did the package come?”

  “Yeah, on Monday.”

  “You know, the receipt’s in the box.”

  “She’ll like it, Audrey. She saw something similar the other day at Famous that she liked.”

&nbs
p; “Oh good. Do you have any special plans for tonight?”

  “Lu’s going over to a friend’s after dinner to spend the night.”

  “On a week night?”

  “It’s her birthday. Why would she want to stick around here?”

  “I just thought. You used to do special things. I just thought—How are you feeling?”

  “Well, I’m tired. My cold kept me awake last night. I could hear myself starting to snore—”

  “Snore!”

  “I’ve always snored when I’ve had a cold. It used to drive Martin crazy. That terrible infection I had, whenever it was, the three-month infection, I remember he’d wake me up in the middle of the night with this completely crazed look on his face and he’d say something like IF YOU DON’T STOP SNORING—Dot dot dot.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then he’d go sleep on the couch.”

  “That’s funny.”

  Dropping the receiver into its stirrup, disposing of Audrey for another couple of days, Barbara rested in a kitchen chair. It was the first of November, and she had a spice cake to bake before Luisa came home. Although she was going out after dinner, Luisa had a keen sense of responsibility for juvenile ritual (a willingness to use hotel swimming pools, to eat the chicken drumsticks) and she might insist on doing something traditional as soon as Martin came home, something like watching home movies of herself (there were no other home movies) or even (conceivably) playing Yahtzee. At the very least she would demand (and receive) a cocktail, and Martin would bring down the gift Barbara had bought for him to give (a typewriter) and add it to the boxes from relatives and to Barbara’s own more ordinary (more motherly) contributions (socks, sweaters, tropical-colored stationery, Swiss chocolate, a silk robe, the much-discussed set of birdsong recordings, hardcover Jane Austen and, for the hell of it, softcover Wallace Stevens) which Luisa, demanding a refill (and receiving it) would unwrap. Then the three of them would make formal conversation as if Luisa were the adult which the gifts at her feet, their ready enjoyability, indicated she had not yet become. Grandparents would have helped tonight. But Barbara’s parents had just left for a month’s vacation in Australia and New Zealand, and even before Martin’s mother died she never left Arizona for anything but funerals. Martin himself would not help tonight. He’d been on the outs with Luisa lately. On Monday night he’d come home deep in thought (about the Westhaven project, he said), and at the dinner table, still thinking, still off in his world of timetables and work crews, he’d begun to grill Luisa on what she wanted to major in at college. The grilling went on for ten minutes. “English? If somebody with a degree in English comes to me looking for a job, I just shake my head.” He cut a neat rhombus of veal. “Astronomy? What do you want to do that for?” He speared a bean. Luisa stared hopelessly at the candles. Barbara said: