The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  Five stories below the windows of Buzz’s office, on the drive outside the main entrance, reporters laughed in groups of three and four, making a social event of their siege. Buzz had tried to reach Asha at all the numbers she’d given him. Nobody knew where she was. In his one hour of greatest need she was unavailable. He grew desperate and indiscriminate and tried calling Bev. She didn’t answer, though she’d indicated she’d be at home all day, as Miriam Smetana had canceled their luncheon date for reasons unclear at the time. Perhaps the media had been pestering Bev as well and she’d simply unplugged the phone.

  “We’ll have to continue this on Thursday,” Jammu told her district commanders. Stiffly, the nine majors returned the narrow chairs to their places against the walls and took their leave singly, clogging the doorway like marbles in a funnel.

  As she’d expected, Singh was close to the phone in his place across the river. “What now,” he said.

  “Gopal just called from London. Devi’s taken care of, but they got her to talk first, and it sounded like she’d sent a letter to Probst before she left. Probst was fine this morning, but I’m afraid the letter’s in his mailbox in Webster Groves.”

  She waited. In the silence on the line she could feel Singh thinking, weighing her story and deciding whether to believe her.

  “What do you think she said?”

  “Any letter at all is bad,” Jammu said. “The only way your release of Barbara works is if there’s no hitch, no suspicion of any kind.”

  “This is the last thing I’m doing for you.”

  “Thanking you in advance, then. But call me at three.”

  In her purse was a hammer for the deed, and also a revolver in case Singh hadn’t really bought the story and hadn’t left the apartment. She stopped and told Mrs. Peabody that she was going to lunch with Mrs. Hammaker. Mrs. Peabody told her she must be starving. She went out into the drizzle, unlocked Car One, and drove south to the brewery, where Asha had left a Sentra for her without knowing the reason. Once in the Sentra, she put on a curly red wig. The disguise was token; Singh’s building stood on a block where, day or night, she’d never seen another soul.

  At 2:45 Sam and Herb arrived in East St. Louis. Five minutes later they located the last item in their catalogue, a fireproof storage warehouse. It had no windows, but it did have skylights, in which, from a block away, against rainclouds, they could see light.

  As they pulled closer, they saw someone enter.

  “That’s him!” Sam said. “That’s Nissing. They’re in there.”

  Herb parked the station wagon behind a deserted filling station across the street and down a hundred yards. It was the only cover for blocks around, clear out to the surrounding expressways. He and Sam forced entry to the office with a wrecking bar, bringing gray light to bear on plaster rubble, fallen ceiling tiles, roaches, glass daggers, Fram and STP stickers, a 1977 Pennzoil calendar. They carried in two folding chairs. They set up the video camera and the infrared source, aiming both through a chink in the boards on the glassless windows, and while Herb went back out for the thermos and field telephone, Sam peered up the street at the target, a tall and slender building, a castle in this barbarian wilderness. He focussed the camera and settled in to wait. There was no place left to go.

  After a late lunch at the local grill with Bob Montgomery, Probst was at his office with the rest of the company, with the draftsmen, clerks and secretaries who were beginning the last leg of their day, their afternoon coffee breaks behind them. He was letting everyone leave thirty minutes early today to give them a jump on the evening rush at the polls, and to judge from the absence of laughter or even conversation leaking into the hall outside his office, they were returning the favor with special diligence. Metal drawers rumbled in the silence as Carmen filed. Probst was proofreading and signing her morning production of letters. Typewriter bells rang faintly in the hall, the patter of rain and keys blending. Someone in narrow heels was walking briskly towards him. The heels reached the carpeting of the outer office and fell silent.

  “Oh, Mrs. Probst,” Carmen said.

  Probst’s arms went numb. He stared through the open door to the outer office and saw her shadow, the back of a familiar skirt.

  “Hi, is he here?”

  “Yes, go right in. Mr. Probst—?” Carmen sang.

  “Thank you,” Barbara said.

  He spun in his chair to the window, and reflected in the glass he saw his wife shut the door behind her, rest a closed umbrella against the wall and stand looking at him, her hands at her sides. “Martin?”

  Her real voice was different from her phone voice, more nasal and clipped. He’d forgotten her. He’d been wrong to think she’d have no power over him when she returned.

  “Martin, help me.”

  He spun around.

  It wasn’t Barbara. It was a woman with Barbara’s light hair, her body, her clothes, her hairstyle and posture and something like her fair skin, except where raindrops had eaten it away. Her hands were dark.

  She smiled at him hopefully. “I’m back,” she said, tossing her raincoat on the coatrack. He shrank away. She sat down on his lap sideways and put her arms around his neck. The arms were damaged, purple and black, with scabs and ulcers and long fingers of green beneath the dark skin. She smelled of rotten perspiration. Her lips touched his like ice. She was Barbara’s corpse.

  “Who are you?” He tried to stand, dumping her off his lap. She landed in a crouch.

  “I’ll be yours,” she said.

  “Out, get out.”

  “I’ve been with Rolf,” she explained.

  Clumsily he put on his coat. Devi Madan. He opened the door and marched past Carmen, and Devi Madan followed.

  “Where are we going?” She slipped her arm around his waist.

  Jammu made her first pass around Singh’s building and saw that his car wasn’t in the fenced-in lot. He’d gone to Webster Groves. Could he have taken Barbara with him? Hardly likely. She was inside this building, unprotected, and Jammu had time to circle the block once more, to let the criminal pressure build up in her, and to rehearse the scene again. She would give Barbara a chance to speak. One sentence, a few words, enough to fill her killer’s ears with the slick, vulnerable intelligence she so hated, and then it was a Beatles song. Bang, bang—

  No.

  A Country Squire, repainted but inevitably Pokorny’s, was parked behind a low boarded-up building across the street. Jammu stepped on the gas, shifting up. She would have done it, but she wouldn’t now. She went back to her desk on Clark Avenue.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Martin.”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  They squared off in the parking lot, on the white football grid of the spaces reserved for Probst’s project managers, who were all still out on the job. Devi Madan leaned forward, her eyes wide and more hopeful than ever, with the overexcitement of a friendly dog about to lose control and yelp, and bite. “Martin.”

  Rain was falling on the outer layer of his hair and draining onto his scalp. He didn’t know what to do, but he had to do it quick. The reality of this Indian girl’s presence pelted him, sought gaps in his protection, tried to get inside and drench him. He turned away and unlocked his car.

  She ran around to the passenger side. “Where are we going?”

  “Go away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Go anywhere,” he said. “You can’t be here.”

  It was too late. Each word they exchanged confirmed her right to speak to him and make demands. He couldn’t even tell her to leave without implicating himself. She was in his life.

  She looked angrily at the sky, up into the rain pouring down on her eyeglasses. “I’m getting kind of wet.” She was so familiar. She’s insane, he thought. It made no difference.

  “Use your umbrella,” he said.

  “I left it in your office.”

  His was in his office, too.

  “Hurry up,” she said.
“Get in.”

  She knew him. She knew him as surely as if a Hyde-like second Probst had been leading a life with her unbeknownst to the first. He got in the car and leaned across the front seat to raise the lock button on her door. She jumped in and shivered. “Where to?”

  Wet clothes, wet skin. Perfume and sweat and cold automotive plastic. Wet exhaust from passing cars. He leaned back and closed his eyes, only dimly aware that he’d made a mistake in letting her into the car. She curled one hand around his neck, laid the other on his leg, and put her mouth to his. Would he kiss her? He was already doing it. The taste of a new mouth didn’t surprise him now. Barbara, Barbara, Barbara, Barbara.

  In the street a car door opened.

  It was the police. Barbara pulled away from Probst, and through the windshield the two of them watched a patrolman cross the street to the precinct house. His companion remained in the squad car and rested his eyes on them uncuriously. Probst gave him a dumb smile. Barbara’s face had assumed the blankness of a reasonably law-abiding citizen’s. The cop looked away.

  Jammu had said Devi Madan was an innocent girl who’d returned to Bombay several weeks ago. Jammu had lied. But Probst loved Jammu. He would be calm. He’d try to help.

  He started the engine, backed out, and made a right turn onto Gravois. Two blocks up the street he pulled in alongside the taxi stand outside the National. Old women were wheeling caged groceries away from the automatic doors. He set the brake. “You need money.”

  “Yes.”

  He opened his wallet and counted bills. “Here’s two hundred twenty.” This wasn’t enough. He took out his checkbook. She was folding up the bills and tucking them in her purse: just another domestic transaction.

  “There’s a Boatmen’s right over there,” he said. “Will a thousand be enough?”

  She nodded.

  He wrote out the sum in numerals and then in words. He paused. After Barbara had moved out, he’d stopped using their joint account. “Who should I make this out to?”

  She was watching a taxi drive away. She didn’t bother answering. He penned in the words Barbara Probst.

  Singh had not driven to Webster Groves. He’d merely moved his car to a lot near the river and returned to his apartment on foot. He hadn’t for a moment believed there was a letter in Probst’s mailbox. Jammu, he expected, would come to East St. Louis and see that his car was gone. She would enter the building planning to murder Barbara and pin the blame on him.

  But Jammu had not arrived. He was beginning to wonder if he’d given her too little credit, if perhaps she had no objection to the experiment of releasing Barbara as he’d arranged. Perhaps Devi had sent a letter after all. Then his telephone rang.

  “It’s me.”

  “I called at three o’clock,” Singh said.

  “I was over at your building. Do you have the letter?”

  “There wasn’t any letter.”

  “Did you notice who’s watching your building?”

  “Sure.” Singh took a guess: “Our favorite detective.”

  “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “It means it will be trickier getting Barbara out.”

  “No. It means you kill her.”

  Singh laughed lightly. “Oh, does it?”

  “Yes. How do you think you’re going to get her out?”

  “The back door, late tonight.”

  “No way, Singh. Sorry. They’ll have the entire area bathed in infrared and a pair of men watching the back side of the building. They know you’re in there. They’ll stop you if you try to leave with anything more than the shirt on your back. The only way out is empty-handed.”

  “They’ll tail me anyway.”

  “You think you can’t shake them? Don’t be modest.”

  Singh swallowed. Had she known in advance that Pokorny had found out about this building? No. She wouldn’t have come over here herself if she’d known Pokorny would be here. Clearly the only thing she’d known for sure was that she wanted Barbara dead.

  “This is great,” he said.

  “Do you think I wanted Pokorny on our ass like this? Do you think I want that woman’s body turning up over there? Two miles from my office? I’m telling you, this is the only way to save both our necks—”

  Yours and Probst’s, Singh thought.

  “—You do the job, you take the fall, you get out of the country.”

  “I could just release her over here.”

  “Are you serious? Your plan was bad enough without letting her know she’d been in East St. Louis all this time. You can’t let her out alive anyplace but New York. And that won’t work now.”

  “Death is messy, Susan. You’ll regret it.”

  As she walked up the long driveway she saw a gaunt and red-faced man in the window of a garage in the back yard, on the second floor. He gave her a wave and a friendly smile. She waved back. A friendly smile! She felt better, but she went to the side door of the house so he wouldn’t see her. She punched her gloved hand through the window in the door. The flying glass surprised her, which was silly considering that was why she’d punched it. She reached through and turned the bolt. They had a fence to keep out burglars, but they left the gate wide open. One of these days she’d have to fix that.

  Probst drove aimlessly, following the path of least resistance—straight through green lights, right at red ones, left when he found a left-turn lane empty—while he waited for the turmoil in his head to condense into thought and resolution. The defroster circulated strange perfume through the car. A feeling of deep evil had descended on him as soon as he’d written his wife’s name on the check. The feeling intensified his longing for Jammu. He was her accomplice, and he missed her. He loved that she had lied to him about Devi Madan, because it meant she shared the evil. At the same time he wondered if she’d really lied. Maybe she hadn’t realized the extent to which Rolf had perverted the girl. Yes. That was it. Rolf had perverted the girl. Yes. And if Jammu was innocent, Probst would love her for that, too. Her childlike purity.

  Way up north, on Riverview Drive, where rain blew like blue sand off the flat Mississippi and collected in puddles on the empty bicycle path, he turned on the radio. The many voices of the city urged him south again. He was guilty. He’d betrayed his city. Jack DuChamp had been right to hang up on him on Maundy Thursday. Now at last he felt that it was necessary to go to Jack’s house, to pay that long-deferred visit, to hear Jack’s judgment on him and see if it was final. He almost hoped that Jack could not forgive him.

  A woman’s place was in the home. A gray Tuesday afternoon, the gutters gulping quietly, swallowing rain. Cigarettes burned in several ashtrays. A cookbook fell open to a cake recipe, everything in its place. Martin would be home, upset, at dinnertime. Men spent half their lives thinking women were a nuisance and the other half thinking they were special. Right now she had to bake him a special treat. The rest of dinner would come in good time. Men liked to come home and smell something baking and hear little splashes upstairs, a sensuous woman in the tub.

  She opened all the cabinets and took out the spices and the silver teaspoons and tablespoons and a colander for sifting. She found a bag of potatoes. They were covered with big white sprouts. Just like men, they couldn’t help it—they were supposed to act that way—but it could still be disgusting. She looked in every cabinet for the flour. Would wheat germ be OK? She unscrewed the lid and sniffed it and saw some tiny beige worms in the germ. Germs made you sick. She put the jar back and looked everywhere. What did flour come in? Every minute counted if she wanted the cake baking when he came home.

  She ran down to the basement, where it seemed she kept many extras, but all the coffee cans were empty. There were piles of boxes spilling onto rows of plastic bags, metal wardrobes, wooden filing cabinets. Spiders grew on the walls, unmoving, like mildew. So many things to digest!

  She opened a flat box of pictures in which she looked rather stern. She frowned sternly. The pictures were a manual on how
to act if you lived in Webster Groves. How to hold your head when you got out of the car. How to kneel when you cut fresh roses from the garden. How to be a perfect wife. How to take a bath! How to frown in concentration when you baked a cake! How to smoke cigarettes. She had to practice right away. She ran upstairs and came back down with a package. She shook all the cigarettes out and looked into a nearby mirror.

  When school let out, Luisa saw her friends Edgar Voss and Sara Perkins walking south on Selma, the way they did every day. She hurried to catch up with them. She was going to Clark School to vote.

  “Wow, that’s right,” Sara said. “You’re old.”

  Sara and Edgar were still seventeen, and to prove their irresponsibility they started grilling each other. Sara asked what Afghanistan was. Edgar said it was a territory in Risk, sort of an olive green. He asked her who the state senator from Webster Groves was. She couldn’t even make an educated guess. Edgar didn’t know either. Luisa didn’t know. But a ninth-grader in copper-framed glasses who was passing them on the sidewalk said, “Joyce Freehan,” and hiked up his books in embarrassment.

  This sounded correct. “He’s her son,” Edgar told Luisa in a stage whisper. The kid jogged a few steps to put some space between them.