The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  The General opened his own window and threw his cigar into the rain. It landed in the far gutter, like a roll of dog dirt. The traffic light turned green. Through the green-tinted windows it looked almost white. The engine hummed as the General accelerated up a wet empty ramp onto the Inner Belt. Probst looked again at the note he’d been given when he got in the car.

  Don’t say anything. This car

  is bugged. Mexico is a ruse.

  We’ll be local. I’ll explain.

  Probst slapped his thigh. “Gosh, it’s been ages since I was in Mexico.”

  Norris gave him a severe look, but handed him another doughnut.

  “So how’s Betty?” Probst said, munching.

  “Betty’s well. President of the school board now.”

  “I guess that means textbook hearings?”

  “Not if she can avoid it.”

  The northern extension of the Inner Belt cut between young apartment complexes and young windowless commercial facilities and brown morsels of parkland. In St. John, in the rain, Probst caught a glimpse of a tall old man in a bathrobe hanging a wreath on his balcony railing.

  “Do you mind if I use your phone?” he asked.

  “Go right ahead.”

  He punched in the Ripleys’ number and got Audrey. He couldn’t resist telling her: “I’m calling from a car.”

  “Oh really.” Her voice was dull.

  “Could you tell Rolf I have to cancel this morning?”

  He hung up with a pleasant feeling of irresponsibility. He turned to the General, who was wearing a black raincoat and, underneath, a very fine-looking cotton shirt with broad vertical stripes, maroon and black.

  “Where’d you get that shirt?”

  “Neiman.” The General was now driving through an industrial park somewhere east of the airport. At the rear of the park was a high fence with green plastic slats woven through its mesh and a cantilever gate at one end. He lowered his window, consulted a card, and pecked a string of numbers onto a telephone plate. The gate rose and they entered a lot in which eight or nine cars were parked. Behind the cars stood an unmarked hangar-like building with bulging Plexi-glas skylights. The pavement ran straight up to the bottom tier of its cinder-block walls without even token bordering, as if the building, like the cars, merely rested on the surface and could be moved.

  Stepping out, Probst caught his bad hand on the door. His knee jerked, knocking the door into a neighboring car and making a sizable crease. The car was a green LeSabre, with rays of mud behind the wheels. He considered his responsibility to leave a note, but found himself following Norris instead. It wasn’t much of a car anyway.

  At the door Norris punched more numbers, the last of which caused the lock to buzz. Inside, all was carpeted and dim. Shapes near the top of a low-gradient ramp defined themselves, step by step, as a desk with chrome legs and a man in silvered wraparounds. The man sat sideways with his feet poking out to the right of the desk. “Name?” he said. He had a flattop.

  “Bancroft,” Norris said. “And a friend. I have a reservation, Suite 6. I’d like a different one.”

  “Suite 12.” The man slid keys across the desk. He swiveled in his chair and faced the wall behind him. “Two lefts, follow the stairs, and another left.”

  The walls were unpainted cinder block, the ceilings indeterminately high. The carpeting smelled new. Halfway down the second corridor they met an Oriental girl wearing only a T-shirt, black as her triangle of pubic hair. She was going the other way. Her fingers trailed along the wall. She looked up, and Probst tried to avert his eyes. She looked right through him.

  “Was she blind?” he whispered.

  “They’re all blind.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “This place is seedy as shit. But very private.”

  “What kind of thing is it?”

  “Health club.”

  Between the corridor and suite were two doors outfitted with deadbolts and enclosing a small vestibule. The suite itself was spacious. Probst backed up to take it all in. There was a kitchenette, a Universal bodybuilder, a king-sized bed, an Exercycle, a sunken whirlpool, a tanning unit, and a number of sadistic-looking machines he couldn’t identify. Near the door stood a white enamel box, roughly coffin-shaped, somewhat larger than a deep freeze. He knocked on it. “What’s this?”

  “Sensory deprivation.”

  Probst moved away from it. Warm air was pouring out of a heating vent behind him. The air smelled funny. Spiced.

  “Seedy as shit,” the General repeated.

  Probst walked to the bed and shed his coat. He glanced at the ceiling. There was a mirror. He looked one foot tall.

  “So you found—”

  The General covered his mouth with a scented hand. “I couldn’t even tell you what membership costs,” he said loudly. “I borried Pavel Nilson’s card.” From his raincoat he took two black boxes with a deluxe sheen to them. He touched a button. A red light flickered and gave way to a steady green light. He touched a button on the other box. “And that’ll keep us silent.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier just to meet in the woods?”

  “I’m sixty years old. I like comfort. I’ll admit it. You?”

  “Who doesn’t.”

  The General sat down and removed his shoes. Probst shook off a tingling adulterous sensation. “You were in the woods on Tuesday, though.”

  “Let’s not talk about that.” The General laid his striped shirt on the bed and Probst continued to admire it. “I mean to take a sauna. You join me.”

  “Sure. Been quite a while.”

  “Let me just give you some answers right off the bat. Yes, I shot at that plane. Yes, it was a mistake. No, I don’t regret it. No, I don’t think that fire was any accident. Yes, Buzz Wismer refused to take me back to town. No, I couldn’t care less. The reason you’re here is that there ain’t no point in conversing with Buzz Wismer.”

  “You smell something?” Probst said.

  Norris sniffed. “Incense.”

  “Smells like a burning spice cake.”

  “I smelt a whole lot worse in here. They got promiscuous heating.” Norris, now in boxer shorts, lit a cigar.

  “So you found a bug.” Probst began to undress. Norris reached again into his raincoat and handed him a small transparent bag. Probst had a revelation. Bugs were called bugs because that was what they looked like. This one was tiny, about the diameter of a nickel and less than twice as thick. Eight leg-like prongs protruded from one of its faces.

  “That’s high technology, Martin. That is very high technology.”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “My office.”

  “How?”

  Norris nodded at the metal boxes. “Counter-technology. Which I will be glad to loan you.”

  This was too alien for Probst. He was glad when Norris dug a more humane piece of goods from his raincoat, a bottle of whiskey, something Irish. “And you found a bug in your car,” he said.

  “Yep. But I don’t want ’em to know it. This one here, I had the custodian find it accidentally.”

  “What about your house?”

  Norris shook his head as he walked to the kitchenette. “They got no use for my house.”

  “‘They’ being your industrial competitors.”

  “Don’t be dumb, Martin. You know who they is.” He selected a tumbler from the cabinets and poured himself a drink of whiskey. “Can I pour you something?”

  “Whatever you got,” Probst quipped.

  He received less than a tablespoon. This was the first time he’d ever been social and private with Norris, and he was finding him less stupid than the public General, more genteel. In the sauna they sat on opposing benches, their bodies slack in anticipation of the load of heat. Steam insinuated itself through the floorboards. Slowly it coaxed open Norris’s towel and granted a view of the boneless wealth, pink and furry, between his legs. His private parts. He’d been born with them.

  “T
ime was,” he said, “I could phone a police department and get facts. But the city police won’t talk to me now. Jammu ain’t dealing with the Bureau much either. She’s got a headlock on the stadium investigation. You could say she don’t want to share the glory when she nails the terrorists. Or you could say she’s trying to protect them. I say the latter. But it’s still possible to find things out in this town. There were three tons of cordite in the stadium, in two batches, with a tank of nitrogen on each of them. There were eight smaller charges in the structure, enough to collapse most of the upper deck. There was also industrial chlorine, pressurized, enough to kill a battalion and blind a division. The timing devices were independent and not remote control. No receivers. The timing was coordinated and sequential, not simultaneous, with the gas last, to maximize lethality. It was set to commence at 2:25 p.m., CST. The explosion that did occur, the one that blew out the baseball statue—”

  “Which I won’t miss,” Probst said.

  “Anti-tank mine. Soviet apparently. The Bureau’s not sure.”

  Probst leaned steeply into the wooden wall and shut his burning eyes.

  “Conclusions,” the General said. “First, overnight security at the stadium leaves a lot to be desired. But we knew that. Security stinks everyplace. Second, these Warriors got international connections. The Soviet mine—”

  “If it’s Soviet,” Probst said.

  “And more telling, the tank of N2. That’s Middle East. Born there, popularized there. Three, and this is where it gets bad, Martin, you with us?”

  “I’m with us.”

  “Three: very pointed steps were taken to kill upwards of ten thousand civilians and injure thirty thousand more. I ask you for a second to imagine that kind of carnage in downtown Saint Louie.”

  Probst could not.

  “Meanwhile a warning was communicated, to the city police, at 1:17 p.m., CST, sixty-eight minutes before the bombs were set to detonate. Now the police required four minutes to arrive at the scene, and an additional fifty-seven minutes to locate and defuse every charge. They didn’t miss a one, and there weren’t any accidents. So as it happened there were only seven minutes to spare. You smell some choreography in this? I do. But there’s another problem—and I seen not a mention of this, I heard not a line in any of the news media: why the hell spend a fortune on some very sophisticated materiel, run substantial risks in planting it, and then give a warning? Why bomb a car with no one in it? Why fire a machine gun into the only dark windows in a house? Why bomb an unmanned transmission tower? Sure there’s been some bloodshed, and I almost envy you the privilege of shedding it, Martin—”

  “Thanks.”

  “But if you pardon my saying, it’s not enough. Including that little attack on the tower, there’ve been four separate scenarios and no one even nicked by a bullet. To me it smells like somebody mighty squeamish is at work. Smells like a lady. It smells like Jammu.”

  “She hasn’t struck me as particularly squeamish.”

  “Sure, but that’s all show.”

  “Come on,” Probst said. “You can’t have it both ways. If the terrorists are squeamish, if they’re just trying to disrupt things, with credible threats, then we’re OK. But if they’re serious, and nitrogen tanks sound pretty serious to me, then Jammu’s doing a good job and they’re running scared.”

  “That’s dead wrong. That’s god-damned wrong.” The General balled up his towel, threw it into the steam, threw himself to his feet and began to pace in a tight square. “It ain’t just disruption. Too much money in it, too much foreign equipment, too much know-how. But it ain’t exactly serious either. It’s Jammu, Martin. It’s the oldest trick in the book. You create the illusion of terror, then you get credit for stamping it out; you get funds, you get power. And that’s exactly what’s going on. Jammu’s riding high. Look at Jim Hutchinson, would you. Nobody can figure out why the Warriors went after him and his station. And nobody asks why he’s still alive. It makes me weep it’s so obvious. Hutchinson backs Jammu. He didn’t two months ago. Now he’s her biggest fan, and there ain’t no talking to him anymore. That’s why he ain’t been killed. KSLX is just one editorial after another in favor of the police, in favor of the funding increases, in favor of Jammu personally, and you know as well as I do every dinkhead thinks KSLX is the voice of St. Louis. But it ain’t, it’s the voice of Jim Hutchinson, and look what’s happened!”

  “But,” Probst said. The sweat was running now, a thousand shallow worms. “It seems to me that nothing much has changed. Hutch was always a liberal. Jammu’s a liberal, at least partly, to read the paper. Hutch supports her now. He’s still a liberal. You were thinking about conspiracies three months ago. You’re still thinking about them. You knew it before it started. You haven’t changed. All I see is coincidences. Indians and Indians. A princess, a policewoman, both from Bombay. The first Big Red game I’ve been to in years happens to be the fateful one. Coincidence, nothing else. I could make something of it, but why bother. ‘God is Red.’ You probably think that means communist.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I don’t see any compelling reason for them to give hints like that. I see some reasons not to. I don’t see any compelling reason for Jammu to start planting bombs when she’s doing just fine the way she is. I don’t think she’s even capable of it. I don’t think real people act that way. I don’t think one person by herself—remember she’s new to the force—I don’t think she even has time to do much more than her job. Obviously I haven’t changed either. I was saying this three months ago.”

  There was a pause. Dark gaps in the light steam writhed and rose, closed and opened. Then the General said, “You haven’t been paying much attention, Probst.”

  The remark hurt. Its vagueness.

  “Do you even read a newspaper?”

  He was distracted by a flare of pain in his broken finger. Sweat and condensation had soaked the green sponge of the splint. “I, uh.” He clenched his teeth to clear his head. “Usually.”

  “Know anything about North Side real estate?”

  “It’s—what? Doing pretty well?”

  “You better find out. Know anything about the Hammaker Corporation?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the announcement they’ll be making on Tuesday—”

  Tuesday was Probst’s birthday.

  “—that the City of St. Louis will own twenty-one percent of its common stock, in other words a third of the stock now in the hands of the Hammaker family.”

  “That’s outrageous,” Probst said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Facts. Granted, it’s a special arrangement, no voting privileges. Granted, it’s hush-hush. But it’s a gift. To the city. Which is heading for a financial crisis.”

  “They can’t do that. It’s not granted in the Charter.”

  “They can so.” The General’s teeth gleamed in the steam. “That paragraph they voted in when they thought they’d have to buy the Blues to keep ’em here. They can own part or all of any enterprise, I quote, that’s manifestly a civic institution. And Hammaker plainly qualifies as a civic institution.”

  “That’s outrageous,” Probst repeated.

  “Facts. After all, who’s really running Hammaker these days? The royal bimbo, is who. The one who’s also coming on to Buzz Wismer.”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Conspiracy. Now I don’t mean this quite as unkind as it may sound, but. You’re the chairman of Municipal Growth—you’re supposed to pay attention.”

  “I have been paying attention, General. I’ve paid attention to the hospitals. I’ve paid attention to desegregation. To the bond renegotiations.”

  “Fiddling while the city burns. While the Reds hire ninety percent blacks for the city police. While a pair of bitches nationalize a private industry. While your brother-in-law double-crosses Municipal Growth. While somebody perverts your own daughter.”

  The sauna seemed to spin, Norris filling it centrifug
ally, in tangents, a bodily swastika. There was a leg in front of Probst, an arm in one corner, another against the opposite wall, trunk, neck, head vaulting over him, and dangling in the focus of his vision was a somber white-haired scrotum. “I’ve had enough sauna,” he said.

  “I haven’t.”

  “My private life is none of your business.”

  “Martin, I know it ain’t. But people talk. People hear things. You ought to know what people say.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “God Almighty. I never seen so many ostriches.” The voice shook with emotion. “Haven’t you ever met somebody whose guts you hated but everybody else thinks she’s the hottest thing this side of the sun? And you know you’re right, you know you see something. How’s it make you feel? Everybody cheering, and here she’s putting fifty thousand innocent folks in danger. You think it’s a thrill to get your legs blown off? People don’t think. And Buzz Wismer? Sure, he’s getting a little soft around the edges, but he still manages to keep that company in the black, year in, year out. And I see this phony Asian princess rubbing up against him, and him interested. I try to do something, all right? I see my city in trouble. I try to shore up. You and me ain’t friends. Our paths wouldn’t ordinarily cross. But I had this pitcher, when I heard you bled, I had this pitcher, and it got me hoping again. We’re at the center of things, you and me.”

  Probst felt calm. The danger was past. He could handle abstractions. He raised his glass, but only a single drop reached his tongue, watery sweet.

  “It ain’t the blacks that get me,” Norris said. “It ain’t even the Reds so much. It’s these Asians, the industrial Japs and these Injuns here. They got no morals, it’s me me me me me. Me win, me first. You know they don’t even go to movies in Japan?”

  “It’s funny you say that.” Probst smiled. “Because that’s probably what the British thought about the Americans fifty years ago. No culture, everything for business. Not playing fair. It feels bad when you’re not on top anymore. We can’t compete with Japanese industry. Or—or communist athletes. So we turn to finer things. Movies. Ethics.”

  “So you’re saying sour grapes.”