The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist)

by Jonathan Franzen

  But after her second cup of coffee Jammu stood up and, leaving the dining room, said she had to go.

  It was four o’clock. Rain was ticking on the storm windows.

  “I can’t, Martin,” she was saying. “I really shouldn’t. You know the kind of schedule I have.”

  She was fetching her trench coat from the closet for herself. She was putting it on. She was in the living room, speaking loudly for some reason. Probst hadn’t left the table. Each of his fifty years of unblemished right living hung from his limbs, his shoulders and his hands. This was how it felt to sit on heavy Jupiter. Where was the woman who would let him shed the weight?

  She was bending over to kiss him good-bye.

  At six, in a booth against which rain pelted steadily, Jammu placed a call. “It’s me,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear?”

  “No. I told you it’s been no use listening. That mike has a range of two meters.”

  “Well: forget the subjective correlative.”

  “Poor you.”

  “I’m only calling because I thought you wanted to know. For reasons of science. He switched on the merger, but not on Barbara. He’s running for supervisor but he won’t touch me.”

  “You must not have tried very hard.”

  “I tried hard enough. So now you know. It’s only a question of her release.”

  “Yes. Tuesday after sundown. I’m driving her to New York. The world should begin hearing from her sometime Thursday morning.”

  “Poor you.”

  Jammu hung up. Martin’s semen was falling into her underwear. Cars wallowed by on Manchester Road, their taillights smearing in the glass of the booth. The plan was laid. She’d decided to do it herself. She was giving Singh the best reason he’d ever had for fleeing a country. And maybe it was the scientific sin of falsifying his data on the Probsts, or maybe her sudden betrayal of her lifelong partner in crime; but to look at her standing in the phone booth, twisting her hair and trembling, one might almost have thought she’d never killed anyone before.

  23

  Tuesday morning, eight o’clock. RC sat on the living-room sofa watching Today and eating Cheerios. Annie came out of the kitchen in a yellow rain slicker. Robbie wore a red Big Red poncho. They kissed RC good-bye.

  Today was reporting live from St. Louis, from Webster Groves, no less. It focussed on a boxy Lincoln joining a line of parked cars in the playground of a red brick school. An umbrella got out of the car, followed by Martin Probst. Today zoomed in. Around Probst large cardboard yes’s and no’s bobbed on sticks. He seemed to recognize Today and went out of his way to meet it. Lesser men and women with cameras fell away behind him, the pros and cons craned their wooden necks, and out of Today came an all-weather microphone held by a hand with raw skin and purple knuckles. Probst made a joke. Smiles opened in the rain. And what about that rain? Probst didn’t think it would be much of a factor in the election. He excused himself; he had to perform his patriotic duty. The crowd parted for him and his umbrella, and Today’s gaze lingered on him before shifting, by way of a short and zany interlude of visual static, to a nationally known face. The black Arch behind her had lost its crown in low clouds. What about that rain? The Chief’s joke was even funnier than Probst’s. And now back to New York.

  RC turned off the set and stared at the screen, trying to shake the desolation of Today. He’d been feeling lonely and stunned on and off for two weeks now, ever since Clarence and Kate and the boys had left St. Louis. After more than forty years, they’d pulled up their roots and moved to Minneapolis, just like that. Clarence’s cousin Jerome had invited him to move north and buy into his contracting firm, and before he had a chance to say no or maybe not, the Gallo Company, his main South Side competition, offered to buy him out completely on advantageous terms. After six hours on the market his four-bedroom house was sold to a white family of three, and on the day between the third and fourth quarters he pulled the boys out of the St. Louis school district and whisked them north to suburban Edina. That rhymed with China. RC still couldn’t believe they were really gone for good.

  He got up and washed the dishes, cleaned his revolver, got dressed and ate a strip of raw bacon (bad, bad habit of his) with some Townhouse crackers. Then he left to vote. He had an appointment at two o’clock to have a mole taken off his back, and then at three his patrol shift started. On the sidewalk in front of his building he passed a blond kid with a camera who looked vaguely familiar. RC got halfway through the word “Hello” before the kid’s swift “How’s it going?” cut him off.

  All Sunday, all Monday, picking locks and scaling walls, they ran into the same phenomenon at every turn: a fresh scent, but the quarry vanished. They took fingerprints, but they’d never nail Jammu on fingerprints alone. They turned up weapons, food, clothing, hair dye, gas masks, burglar tools, traces of controlled substances, boxes of radio guts, a miniature forging kit, and some phony IDs: one hundred percent diddly-twat. They killed half of Sunday night staking out a ranch-style house on Highway 141 where lights went on and off behind the curtains and a television flickered, and when they finally broke in, the sum total of the house’s contents turned out to be timed lights and a television. The people had been there. But the people were gone, as surely as if they’d been warned of the imminence of Sam and Herb’s arrival. It didn’t seem to matter that Herb’s car was clean. It didn’t seem to matter that they were working through their catalogue randomly, doubling back and forth across three counties, taking twice as much evasive action as they had to, approaching some of the properties on foot from strange directions, changing course abruptly and returning to places they’d already raided. Despite all these precautions, the Indians were eluding them.

  At dawn on Monday they busted into a condo in Brentwood which contained a darkroom rigged for printing microfilm, a bed with sheets still warm under the blankets, and utterly no evidence of a specific and compelling nature. If they’d raided this place on Saturday instead of the place in St. Charles, or on Sunday instead of four homes and two office buildings in neighboring towns, or if they’d raided it even just one hour earlier, they could easily have hit pay dirt. How were the Indians dodging them? How could the conspiracy be closing down with such infernal timing? How could it be closing down, period, when they were dealing with a woman who for eight whole months hadn’t gotten through a single day without recourse to her agents? It was driving Sam crazy. He shouldn’t ever have listened to Herb. They should have sent every man they had into all the properties in the catalogue at the same hour on Saturday. But it was too late now. They had to keep going.

  By Tuesday morning their stock of unhit targets had dwindled to three commercial properties, two in the county and one across the river. The printout listed the first one as undeveloped, but when they got there they saw a two-story warehouse behind a fence off a Mopac spur and some rusty sidings. Gray, cracking sheets of plywood had warped away from the nails fastening them to the building’s doors and windows; on the roof, aluminum and brazen, stood three brand spanking new radio antennas. Herb looked at Sam. Sam looked at Herb. This was the communications center they’d been hunting for.

  Buzz Wismer arrived at his headquarters late in the morning and found his employees curiously transformed. He said good morning to the pretty lobby receptionist and she smiled weakly. He said good morning to a pair of voluble custodians who traded glances in sudden silence as if a ghost had passed through the room. In the elevator he tried out a few pleasantries on his friend Ed Smetana, and Ed punched the button for the Accounting floor, where he almost never had business. Buzz said good morning to his secretary, and she dove under her desk, groping around near the Dictaphone pedal. He stopped in his private washroom and inspected his face. Same old Buzz. His nose was a little red from the wet wind outside, but then, it usually tended towards the red. He went into his office. A big blue-and-orange Federal Express envelope was lying on his desk. It held a single sheet of paper.
<
br />   TO: Edmund C. Wismer, Chairman

  FROM: Steven Howard Bennett, et al., Stockholders

  Buzz skimmed.

  Resolved April 2 extraordinary meeting those present included proxies registered mail March 26 54% with deep regret long history of service recent pattern of decisions move of headquarters questionable judgment unfeasible fiscally unrealistic without consulting violation Chapter 25 Corporation bylaws relinquish duties Friday April 6 plenum proxies April 16 to select new chairman and officers…

  Sinking into his chair, Buzz was young again, skydiving and poor, and he felt the abrupt tug of a golden parachute, the crush of straps across his chest. His secretary was bringing him a glass of water.

  The trail was so fresh that the rain hadn’t even blurred the tire tracks or washed away the muddy footprints on the loading dock. Once again, the footprints were feminine. Herb photographed them and spoke into his pocket recorder. “Eleven-fifteen a.m., now twenty-theven hourth thince we thaw a fresh thet of male printh, the loading-dock door wide open but apparently it’th been clothed judging from the concrete. We enter with flashlighth…”

  His running commentary was getting on Sam’s nerves. More and more Sam questioned whether he’d hired the best St. Louis had to offer.

  Whoever had left the footprints had made sure the warehouse was emptied. In the second-floor office, coaxial antenna cables dangled from the ceiling, pointing obliquely at two flats of Orange Crush cans, yellow junk-food crumbs, a pile of Maxell and Memorex reel-to-reel tape cartons and floppy-disk boxes, a set of foldup aluminum tables, and some tubular lawn chairs.

  “I don’t underthtand it.”

  Sam aimed a gratuitous kick at the sody cans, scattering them across the room. “Well,” he said. “I suspect if the materiel ain’t here it ain’t anyplace. But we got two more properties to try. See if we can’t still catch us a couple of personnel.”

  Jammu was at home in her apartment changing out of her smelly interview clothes. She put on a white linen skirt and a white blouse to match her mood, which was bright. She’d even slept a few hours; Devi Madan was out of the country.

  Gopal’s man Suresh had located her on Sunday afternoon. Registered as Barbara Probst, she’d been staying at the Ramada Inn on I-44 near Peerless Park, out by Weiss Airport. She wasn’t in her room when Gopal arrived, so he and Suresh waited in the bathroom for her. Eventually she drove up in a rented car. She entered the motel lobby and then hastened back out. Through the bathroom window Gopal fired at her tires with a silenced automatic, but the angle was wrong and the car was moving. When they followed her, the holiday traffic on I-270 prevented them from forcing her off the road. She reversed her direction on a cloverleaf, drove south ten miles, reversed again, and again, ending up at Lambert just in time to pass through the document checks at the international gate and board a British Airways jet before it took off for London. Under orders to follow her wherever she went, Gopal and Suresh flew to Washington, lucked into a Concorde flight, and reached London just thirty-five minutes after her plane had landed. This morning she was still in England. Gopal and Suresh would kill her when they found her and return directly to Bombay.

  The operation was closing like a wound miraculously healed. Of the twenty-one men and women who had followed Jammu’s orders in St. Louis, only Singh and Asha remained, and Asha was staying. For the last three days she and her personal maid had been collecting hardware and printed matter from the houses and relay stations and storage facilities. At this moment they were driving south in a borrowed Pevely milk truck to detonate the operation’s more damaging side effects in an abandoned lead mine in the Ozarks. Asha was accustomed to manual labor; she’d been running guns when Jammu got to know her in Bombay.

  Jammu straightened her white cuffs and parted the curtains on her bedroom window. Singh was due here with a carton of financial records, the only written vestiges of the operation not yet in her apartment. All the paper and magnetic tape now fit easily into two four-drawer file cabinets. You threw away the preparations for an overtaken future.

  A fat man in sunglasses was toiling up the alley with a soggy cardboard box. Jammu went to the door.

  Singh entered her front door glaring at her, panting, dripping. He’d put on three jackets and two pairs of pants, tucking them neatly under a set of overlarge clothes, and it looked like he’d stuffed a pillow under his shirts as well. Dried spit had caked in the corners of his mouth: the suffering man.

  Jammu took the box from him and set it on the floor. “You’re going back now to close up that apartment?”

  “It’s nearly closed,” he said. “I’ve changed a few things.”

  “In the apartment?”

  “In the plan as well. I’m no longer psychopathic or Iranian. I couldn’t sustain it.”

  “Now you tell me.” Jammu turned in a full circle on her heel. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Quite a while. She thinks I’m straight with her now. She feels an allegiance—”

  “An affection, an attraction, a tenderness—”

  “She won’t tell Probst the real story when she gets out. She’ll say she’s been living in New York with John Nissing. She’s that proud. And yes, there’s affection.”

  Jammu stared into his sunglasses. He was crazy to think a plan like this was good enough for her. She’d never met Barbara, but she knew her. She’d ruin everything. The solution was more obvious than ever.

  “It made all the more sense,” Singh continued, “as soon as Probst refused to get involved with you sexually. There’s no other woman in his life, nothing to make her angry, and certainly no Indian woman to make her suspicious.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I guarantee you this was the only way to play her.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have left Bombay.”

  “You shouldn’t have snatched her.”

  “You might not be winning this election if I hadn’t.”

  “All right.” There was nothing more to say. Jammu raised her hands for some kind of farewell contact with him, an embrace or a handshake, but he left her standing. He limped down the stairs, wheezing and obese.

  Probst was spending the day at the office to keep his mind off the election and to let the company know he was still its president and guiding spirit. He was revising timetables for his first, cautious entry into the downtown building spree, a pair of North Side office projects on which ground would be broken in May. Carmen typed speedily at her desk.

  It pleased him to spot in the timetables a number of redundancies and avoidable delays which even Cal Markham had overlooked; it demonstrated that he still had a function in the company and it drove home the reason: he had great intelligence and experience. How easily a man could lose sight of this. How easily, when his home and milieu fell apart, he could disdain the consolations of pure activity, pure work, the advancement of physical and organizational order.

  Of course, he could also see that for thirty years he’d worked too hard, could see himself in hindsight as a monstrosity with arms and hands the size of Volkswagens, legs folded like the treads of a bulldozer, and his head, the true temple of the soul, a tiny black raisin on top of it all. He’d failed as a father and husband. But if anyone had ever tried to tell him this he would have shouted them down, since the love he felt for Barbara and Luisa at the office had never waned. He had a heart. All the things he’d been unable to throw away, all the memorabilia and useful spares and fixable wares, these objects and annals of childhood and honeymoon, early and later parenthood—he’d saved them all in the hope of one day finding time to participate more fully in the stages they represented.

  But he wouldn’t change. He loved Jammu because she accomplished things. With her he’d start afresh, wise enough never to expect the opportunity to resurrect the past. A year from now they’d be living together, not in a house (what did he really care about gardens?) but in a spacious modern condominium on Hanley Road o
r Kingshighway to which they would both return late in the evening, and in which there would be no junk.

  All women were equal in the eyes of the airlines, except maybe those with babies or wheelchairs. Floating above the earth, flight attendants brought her pillows, blankets, drinks. The only problem was between flights, when she couldn’t tilt her seat back and the ground made her knees wiggle. But all it took to get back in the air was cash, and cash had been as simple as selling most of her strength to the boyfriend of the maid at the Marriott, until suddenly she found herself in Edinburgh with only enough to last through the coming weekend and too few pounds and two silly friends who were trying to kill her. They’d all been flying and flying in a huge misunderstanding. She flew for the pleasure and the dinners in their comprehensible plastic trays, while her friends believed it was a chase. As far as she was concerned, their intent to kill her had merely provided an itinerary.

  Now she was home again, bewildering the immigration officer by brushing through the gate and running away and disappointing the cabdriver because she had no suitcase to tip him extra for. There had been bewilderment and disappointment in her friend’s eyes in the Edinburgh ladies’ room when he’d opened the stall where she’d left her tall boots standing and turned around right into the blade which she, in bare feet, stood holding against his neck. He’d pulled the trigger anyway, and she couldn’t be blamed for the gurgling in his windpipe, or for the funny pop the gun made when the other friend came in afterwards and fell to the floor, which was dirty. They were terrorists. If Rolf could have seen her saving her life like that, her cool practicality, he would have been so proud and would have knelt and kissed her hands. But logically she knew she was losing everything. When she shot up she dozed without sleeping, and though they didn’t bother her, that gurgle and that pop never left her. They were waiting for her strength to fail. How much misery could a living woman deaden before she stopped wanting to? She remembered when Devi was thirteen on an exciting vacation with her parents when they visited a beauty consultant in Paris and the Alhambra in Spain and the pyramids in Egypt. She’d never seen anything as heavy as the great chops, built by slaves. Now the cabdriver was stopping to let her try her luck with her signature at Webster Groves Trust, where she hoped she had an account and people knew her or at least were trusting. That was all she really wanted, for people to treat her right. Because no one did. Everything was the great chops turned upside down with its point pressing into her.