The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist)

by Jonathan Franzen

  “The middle-sized leather bag will be ideal. Take your black silk dress, the green dress with copper threads, and another winter dress. A pair of jeans, and your gray corduroys. T-shirts. You’ll want T-shirts. Six changes of underwear, a swimsuit, a nightgown, and your light robe. Am I going to have to do this for you?”

  “John.”

  “Pick three sweaters, three shirts, and a pair of decent shoes. The ones you’re wearing will be adequate. Canvas shoes, too, space permitting. I have the feeling you aren’t even listening to me.”

  She turned again to try to leave, and she heard only one footfall before he punched her in the face. He hit her in the stomach. She fell to her knees. He kicked her in the collarbone and knocked her over backwards. She felt the pressure of his heel on her throat. It was gratuitous. He was getting even.

  “I’ll be ever so happy to shoot you in the knees if you try to run,” he said. “And in the spinal cord if you make a fuss when we’re outside. You understand I mean this.”

  The heel went away. She heard him slide her suitcase off its shelf in the closet, and heard him packing. She heard the clink of cologne bottles, and the click of a latch.

  What was left of Municipal Growth hardly filled the conference room at the offices of Probst & Company. Seventeen of the thirty-two active members had jumped ship without so much as offering Probst an explanation. Quentin Spiegelman, St. Louis’s premier financial guardian, a man whose name appeared on the dotted lines of a thousand wills, had twice assured Probst that he wouldn’t miss a meeting, and twice now he’d missed one. His lies were so childish that only an implicit hatred could explain them. Probst had not thought he was Quentin’s enemy. But he was willing to think so now. He was the chairman, and felt personally betrayed.

  It was seven o’clock. On the far side of the oval conference table, Rick DeMann and Rick Crawford peered over their half-glasses, ready to begin.

  “Let’s give Buzz another few minutes,” Probst said.

  He had called the meeting here at his offices to create an impression of good attendance and to ensure a businesslike atmosphere. The walls were hung with photographs of the major projects he’d worked on over the years, framed exempla of municipal growth: the Poplar Street Bridge, the 18th Street interchange, the terminal at Lambert, the county government building, the Loretto-Hilton complex, West Port, the convention center. The air smelled faintly of electricity and typewriter oil.

  P. R. Nilson and Eldon Black, archconservative allies of General Norris, were conferring with Lee Royce and Jerry Pontoon, real-estate-made men. The only remaining banker in the group, John Holmes, was trying to attract the attention of County Supervisor Ross Billerica. Jim Hutchinson, still tan from a holiday vacation, was leaning way back in a chair between Bud Replogle and Neil Smith, nice men, railroad men. An awkward movement at Probst’s right shoulder caused him to turn. General Norris was removing a bug detector from his jacket pocket. Green light. He put it back. “We start?” he said to Probst.

  “We can wait a few more minutes.”

  “Righty-o.” The General’s head swooped closer. “Don’t look now, Martin,” he said in his 30-hertz voice, “but there seem to be some interesting dishes there across the street, I said don’t look,” for Probst had turned to see out the window. “It’s conceivable they have direct means of listening. Maybe casually draw the curtain, why don’t you?”

  Probst frowned at him.

  “Just do what I say, Martin.” The voice was mud—mud baked by a hot sun and cracked into tiles. “Safety’s cheap.”

  There had always been communications dishes on the roof of the precinct house. They were antennas, not mikes. Probst shut the curtains, and a draft flattened them against the window: the outer door had opened. Carmen was letting a huffing and puffing Buzz Wismer into the room. Probst nodded to her. She could leave now.

  Buzz brushed off his coat and hung it on the rack in the alcove. He took the last empty seat, to Probst’s left.

  “I’m glad you made it,” Probst said with feeling. He gently slapped his friend’s bony knee. Buzz nodded, his eyes on the floor.

  A week ago Barbara had eaten lunch with Bev Wismer and come home with the news that Buzz was having an affair with Mrs. Hammaker. Probst rejected the possibility out of hand. He was sick of the whole notion of unfaithfulness, of the double standards and the way people talked. He wanted to be left alone.

  “Martin,” the baked voice growled.

  “Yeah yeah.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Probst raised his head and saw gray eyebrows, cheeks age-spotted or cold-bruised, eyeglass lenses bending the ceiling’s lambent panels into bows and bars. He saw neckties in cautious colors, raked hair and bald spots, executive hands on the table with executive pens poised. Municipal Growth, waiting. A few smiles had developed like fault lines in the tension.

  “I assume we all know what the big news is,” Probst said. “Is there anyone who hasn’t seen a paper today?”

  The day before, the lower house of the Missouri General Assembly had begun to consider a bill which, if passed, would authorize a binding referendum to decide if the boundaries of St. Louis County should be redrawn to include the city again.

  “We’ll have a lot to say about this,” Probst continued. “But for a while I’d like to stick to the agenda you received yesterday. We can’t afford to spend the whole night bickering like last time. We need to get some work done.”

  This drew gestural responses from everyone but Buzz.

  Rick Crawford delivered the first report. The city of St. Louis, he said, was living dangerously but doing well. City Hall had met its December and January payrolls by diverting moneys ordinarily spent on servicing the city’s debt. It had prepared for this move by using the city’s new Hammaker stock, in conjunction with the dramatic rise in the value of city-held lands, as leverage for a bond renegotiation. Its rating had improved to AA, and in essence it had taken out a second mortgage on the civic improvements of the past. This maneuver, which required neither voter approval nor tinkering with the Charter, was mainly Chuck Meisner’s work. He and his friends in the city banking circles had effectively guaranteed that the refurbished bonds would find buyers. Everything had happened quickly. Leading up to the “Christmas Announcement” of municipal solvency had been a 72-hour marathon meeting attended by the mayor, the comptroller, Meisner, the budget director, Quentin Spiegelman, Asha Hammaker, Frank Jordan of Boatmen’s, and S. Jammu.

  “I guess that makes Chuck’s position with regard to us fairly clear,” Probst said.

  “It also makes clear what put him in the hospital,” Crawford said. “The terms of the refinancing run to more than two hundred pages, and they did the whole thing in three days.”

  Probst pictured the little group at work. The presence of women in it made him feel particularly excluded. It was a reminder of his high-school days, of the Saturday nights he’d spent throwing rocks in the river in the company of nobody but Jack DuChamp.

  The mayor, Crawford said, had made many promises to many different constituencies, and the only cheap promise was to finance good middle-income housing for displaced families. “I needn’t remind anyone how beautifully timed that transaction tax was. She—that is—well, yes, she got it on the November ballot and got it passed with no more than a month to spare. Imagine the resistance if she proposed it now. As for paying for the other promises, we can expect a transformation of the city’s revenue-generating structure, beginning with the elimination of the sales tax and the corporate-earnings tax—”

  “Oh, the bastards,” Norris said. Rolling his shoulders, he disencumbered himself of his jacket. Underneath he had on black suspenders and one of those tight shirts by Christian Dior that Probst thought generally looked bad on people. It didn’t on Norris. His formidable rib cage gave it shape. Probst wondered if he himself could carry off suspenders.

  “—As well as continuing to waive the city income tax for city residents. This might not be as suici
dal as it sounds. Property-tax revenues for the fiscal year will be up at least forty percent on the strength of the North Side boom alone. Of course, once the developments are further along, income will fall again because the city’s going full steam ahead with its tax-abatement program. The way out appears to be twofold. In the first place, a bond issue—”

  “To raise general revenues?” Ross Billerica interrupted. Words left his mouth as if expelled for bad behavior. “That will take a constitutional hamendment, Hi’m afraid.”

  “No, it won’t,” Crawford said. “They’ll still have enough tax income for payroll and operating expenses. It’s stretching the law a little, but even routine maintenance, if it’s been postponed long enough, can be written into a bond improvement. The voters will approve and the city should find plenty of takers for the bonds. But the news today is what really counts. If the merger goes through, then the county will have to assume much of the cost of providing services, at a comparatively small cost to the city.”

  Crawford concluded his report speculatively. He said the history of the St. Louis area seemed to be a seesaw between the city and the county, as if this site at the confluence of rivers had never been and never would be productive enough to make both halves simultaneously viable. The city’s rise and the county’s fall were the same event, and it was occurring now for two simple reasons: the altered investment policies of a handful of executives, and the drastic drop in the city’s crime rate.

  Everyone began to speak at once, but Probst cut them short and nodded to John Holmes. Holmes bore a strong facial resemblance to FDR, but wore modern glasses. His bank had joined with Probst and Boatmen’s and a dozen other creditors in a suit against Harvey Ardmore. “You want to give us the bad news now, John?”

  The bad news was county finances. Six months ago, Holmes said, only one of the area’s five largest corporations had been headquartered in the city: Hammaker. Six months from now, three of the Big Five would be there: Hammaker, Ripley, and Allied Foods. Only Wismer and General Syn would be left in the county, and only they would still be within commuting range of most of the county’s newer high- and middle-income housing developments.

  Men looked at Probst, who was sandwiched between these two steadfast giants. The General was staring at the ceiling, his lips closed and inflated. Buzz hadn’t moved when his name was mentioned. His thighs spread like flat tires on the seat of his chair. Probst was struck by the contrast between the modesty of Buzz’s figure and the power he wielded. He had direct control over thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars. He had dandruff on his glasses.

  Since October, Holmes continued, nineteen other firms had relocated in the city or taken steps in that direction. Eight of them employed two hundred or more people. These were Data-Rad, Syntech, Utility Software, Blanders Electric, Newpoint Systems, Hedley-Carlton, Heartland Control, and—the largest—Kelly Richardson’s Compunow. In other words, the high-tech industries, the new firms, the ones with the highest median salaries. They were leading the way and clustering, as it were, around Ripley’s new research division, which was already operating in temporary quarters on the North Side.

  “We could have expected this from Ripley,” Holmes said. “In thirty years in business in St. Louis he’s never once taken a false step.”

  In November and December the seasonally adjusted rate of housing starts in the county had declined for the first time since the last recession, and declined by nearly 20 percent. There had also been a slew of highly visible bankruptcies, Westhaven chief among them. Real property values were in steep decline, with West County by far the hardest-hit region; this was especially cruel because the statewide reassessment, just completed in August, had left assessed valuations at an all-time high. In the many new office buildings west of I-270, occupancy was shrinking.

  “From a vacancy rate of seven percent a year ago, we’re already up to sixteen and it’s accelerating. I’d guess the March figures will show us above twenty-five percent, and that means we’re hurting, gentlemen, palpably hurting.”

  It was true that in many respects the county was unchanged from a year ago, with retail and service enterprises substantially unaffected. To look at Webster Groves or Ladue or Brentwood you would never guess what was going on. But the poor performance of the economic indicators was creating self-fulfilling prophecies. A front-page article in the Wall Street Journal had glowingly described the city’s efforts to attract new business, darkly delineated the county’s consequent problems, and forecast more of the same, only better, only worse.

  “We’ve been able to count no fewer than five middle-sized firms from out of state who had planned to locate in the county, or at least were seriously considering it, but are now committed to a city location. And they’re building, not renting, in the city. The city may ultimately go bust, but it’s rigged things so those companies can hardly afford to pass up the inherent tax advantages in building. As for why the county didn’t ever provide similar incentives, the answer is because there was never any local competition until this year.”

  Probst was watching the county supervisor’s reaction to the report. Ross Billerica was a few years younger than Probst. His hair was Greek black and he wore it in a long crewcut, a short pompadour, with the ends of the hairs all diving for cover at once, uniformly, glistening. A lawyer by training and a millionaire by inheritance of his family’s liquor-store chain, he had a (HA!) belligerency that led many people to think him highly able. But if he was so marvelous, you had to wonder why he was also (HA! TAKE THAT!) so highly dislikable, and why after twenty years of being hailed as senatorial or even presidential material, he was still just the county soup and had to campaign hard before every election.

  “Stop right there, John!!!” Billerica, as if he could stand no more inaccuracy, was correcting Holmes. “For your information, we’re still hrunning a neat surplus. Maybe you’re forgetting that neither the tax rates nor the hassessed valuations have changed.”

  Holmes turned patiently to Billerica. “What I’m saying, Ross, is that with real property values and profitability making a sharp downturn—especially in your unincorporated areas, which have always been your mainstay revenue-wise—I don’t see how you can avoid lowering taxes at some point. You’re talking about maintaining current revenue levels. I can guarantee you that will send a number of firms either into bankruptcy or into the city. If you want to keep the default rate down—and I sure hope you do—and if you want to keep businesses in the county, I think that you and most of the municipalities are going to have to make deep cuts in services in the next year or two. In the county’s case, I’d recommend as soon as possible.”

  Billerica smiled as if conceding a technical point.

  Bud Replogle reported on hospitals. Suddenly, he said, the chief of police had become a leading advocate of improving the two city hospitals. Bud stressed the word “two” and got a round of smiles, because for twenty years the revival of City Hospital Number Two, renamed Homer G. Phillips, had been a matter of burning concern to the city’s black community. For twenty years mayoral and aldermanic candidates had promised action, and for twenty years the hospital had sunk into ever worse disrepair, losing first its accreditation and then its ties with the medical schools. Municipal Growth’s own study had concluded that Homer Phillips was unsavable. But now Jammu was using that very study as the basis for her own, more ambitious proposals. Foremost among them: the preservation and revitalization of Homer Phillips.

  “What in God’s name,” Eldon Black said, “is the police chief doing in hospital planning?”

  “What she’s doing,” Replogle answered, “is she’s liquidating our assets. She’s making a public show of what we’ve been doing privately for years.”

  Lee Royce’s report on black politics reached a similar point: “Here for twenty years we’ve been cultivating a relationship with the urban blacks, and then she waltzes in here, with no personal affection for them, and proceeds to buy them off. They’ve let the
mselves be bought, for a new Homer Phillips, for tax concessions and a hundred favors to black property owners. For a political stake. It’s a buyer-seller relationship. When they dealt with us, it was as equals.”

  “Emotion aside, Lee…?” Probst prompted.

  “We based our relationship on the fact that since the city has a large black population, a majority even, they should be given our support in every responsible effort to improve the quality of life there. They’ve been happy with this. It is their city, regardless of the color of the mayor’s skin.”

  “Yeller, last I checked,” the baked voice told Probst. “With a long streak of red.”

  “Jammu has worked them into a position where they’ll vote pro-merger, I believe, and if she succeeds in creating a more regionally oriented government, it’s the blacks who’ll lose the most in terms of political say-so. But she’s telling them a different story.”

  Rick DeMann gave his report on city schools. The prosperity of the St. Louis school district was keyed to property values, he said, and so naturally it stood to be among the boom’s chief beneficiaries. “What galls me, though, what really galls me, is Jammu’s attitude. It takes cash, she says, and lots of it, to improve the schools. Only good money will attract the good young teachers, reduce class size, improve discipline. And it’s like, ‘You ninnies. Don’t you understand it takes money?’ Of course we understand. But there was never any money until this year.”

  A merger of the suburbs and the city, Rick added, would render moot the touchy legal questions raised by regional desegregation. This could have serious demographic implications. “A big reason the white middle class moved out to the county is, as we all know, their desire for good schools and, more specifically, their fear of black areas. If the city comes back into the county, there won’t be anyplace to run.”

  “Except to other cities,” said Eldon Black.

  “To start the next discussion—” Probst raised his voice, hastily trying to invent a new discussion topic. “I’d like to pick up on some of these questions. It seems to me, now, that, ah, we should look at this realistically.” Yes. Realistically. He cleared his throat. “Realistically. Haven’t we, as a group, never really been opposed to the merger of the city and county? The current layout is full of inequities. If someone had proposed a merger a year ago, we would have done everything in our power to help win voter approval for it. Because it makes sense. We stand for what makes sense. As for the supposed damage to the county economy—”