The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist)

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Where to?” the driver said.

  Nashville music whispered in the stereo speakers behind her. “Anywhere,” she panted. “I’m lost. Police station.”

  “I don’t know about that. How about our place instead?”

  “Nigs givin’ you shit?” his companion asked her.

  “I was just scared,” she murmured. The air smelled of aftershave and engine heat. At her feet were Burger King bags and two aluminum suitcases. To make room for her legs she started to move one of them aside.

  “Don’t touch,” the companion said.

  The driver turned the steering wheel hand over hand, languidly, and looked back over the headrest. “We’re nice boys, honey, but fair’s fair. I reckon you owe us one gratis. Those nigs wouldn’t of been gentle.”

  He returned his attention to the road. They were driving fast, but Barbara closed her fingers around the door handle anyway. The side of the driver’s hand slammed down on the button of the lock, his fingertips trailing on the window. His companion was kneeling on the front seat, smoothing back his straight hair with both hands. He grabbed Barbara’s wrist as she lunged for the other door. He started to climb into the back seat but dropped his head to peer out the rear window. He frowned. “That company we got?”

  The driver turned around to look. His face hardened. “You bitch, what is this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Just let me out.”

  Red light filled the car. She turned. The station wagon was still following her. On the roof, above the driver’s window, a flasher had appeared.

  The Lufthansa woman in Chicago rested her fingers on the computer keyboard. “Mit Film oder ohne, Herr St. John?”

  “Was für ein Film?”

  Your attention, ladies and gentlemen, Flight 619 nonstop service to Frankfurt will begin boarding in—

  “Ein Clint Eastwood.”

  “Ohne.”

  “Ja, dann haben Sie mehr Ruhe. Gepäck?”

  “Die Aktentasche nur.”

  RC and Sergeant Luzzi had chosen to spend the last half hour of their shift parked under the I-70 overpass at the head of the Martin Luther King Bridge, while they listened to the force’s own account of this St. Louis Night. A grill fire at one of the booths on Chestnut. Disorderly parties trying to crash the invitation-only Election Night Ball. An escort for Bob Hope’s limo. A detail to keep spectators away from the fireworks barge in case spectators showed up.

  The big display would be starting in twenty minutes, and RC and Luzzi would have a primo view out over Laclede’s Landing and Eads Bridge. RC couldn’t figure out, though, why there weren’t more people heading for the waterfront. On the Fourth of July this intersection always swarmed with pedestrians, all tromping to the Arch. Tonight the traffic, what there was of it, was confined to cars, mainly VIPs arriving for the Ball. They’d seen Ronald Struthers drive up Broadway in a Caddy decorated for a wedding getaway, with crepe paper and tin cans and the words Just Hitched on a soggy cardboard plaque, meaning city and county. RC guessed the Chief was already at the Ball, playing hostess. Luzzi had dryly predicted she wouldn’t be with the force much longer, to which RC had replied that that might be so but she’d never forget where she got her start. When it came to Jammu, even RC and Luzzi could be civil to each other.

  Out over the Mississippi on the MLK a couple of cars were heading towards them. One of them had a flasher, which probably meant it was the East St. Louis force, since the dispatcher hadn’t mentioned any chases, and anyway not too many of them lasted across the river and back. RC turned to Luzzi, who’d already switched on their flashers and made contact with the dispatcher. “…Over the MLK. We’ll take appropriate action to stop the vehicle.”

  They pulled square across the exit lane and looked at each other in the light of the Seagram’s billboard by the Embassy Suites. “Better draw,” Luzzi said. He took the rifle and got out of the cruiser, crouching behind the left front fender. RC unholstered his revolver. All at once this looked like action as real as any he’d been through yet. The lead car on the bridge had picked them up and was weaving in its lane as if trying to make up its mind. But the tail car had slowed down, stopping in the middle of the bridge. A station wagon. There were no official markings on it.

  The lead car hit. It squealed and jumped the curb onto the lane divider, right in front of RC. Luzzi was standing up. A muzzle flashed twice as the car skidded sideways across the length of the divider.

  “Tires, hit the tires,” Luzzi shouted, diving back inside. He’d taken a bullet in the right shoulder. RC got out and scrambled up to the right front fender. The car had stopped moving not more than twenty feet from him. There were three people in it, two of them struggling in the back seat. RC fired twice at the rear tire and hit the hubcap twice. Luzzi’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker. “Come out with your hands high.”

  Tires bit pavement. RC took aim again, raising the gun and bringing it down as the car gained speed and distance, twenty, thirty, fifty feet, heading up Third Street. The back door opened and a female jumped out headlong just as he pulled the trigger. He plainly saw her head jerk as the bullet entered. Luzzi was shouting incoherently. RC dropped his revolver and howled.

  Leaving the Arch, turning off Lucas, Jammu heard Luzzi’s voice on her radio. She wheeled around the corner and saw traffic piling up on Third Street. A black officer knelt clutching his head. Luzzi leaned against Cruiser 217 with his arms crossed, one hand pressing on his wounded shoulder, the other hand holding a microphone on the end of a stretched spiral cord. In the middle of Third Street, all alone, a woman lay in faint headlight beams.

  Jammu heard herself walking. Her knees bent into view beneath her as she crouched by the woman, whose eyes were wide open. A crumpled slip of paper had fallen from her open hand, and from a flaring oval hole where her nostrils had been, blood fanned down her cheek and collected, orange and oily, on the weathered white paint of a lane line. A crowd was gathering around her at a respectful distance. Press badges were pinned to most of the lapels and purses. “Oh God,” a woman said. Behind her Jammu heard the sobbing of the black officer, evidently the one who’d fired. He’d just guaranteed himself a series of promotions. She pocketed the slip of paper. With her index finger she touched the warm blood streaming from the woman’s nose. “Stand aside,” she told the reporters. Fresh officers were arriving from every direction. They pushed back the crowd, and no one noticed when Jammu, turning to confer with them, put her bleeding finger in her mouth and drew it out clean.

  24

  After midnight, as the merrymakers gravitated towards the seventy-inch television screen off the ballroom proper, the character of their drinking began to change, to cross the line between lubrication and anesthesia. Mixers were omitted. Whole bottles of champagne were hogged. Men danced with men, and women with their drinks. Peripheral guests and out-of-town celebrities departed discreetly, leaving the hard core of the pro-merger campaign, the Struthers-Meisner-Wesley axis, to shake their fists at the silver screen, wrangling with it, until the channel was changed to His Girl Friday, the late-night movie on KPLR.

  The referendum had needed to carry both city and county by simple majorities. In the city, where less than 17 percent of registered voters had cast ballots, it was failing narrowly. In the county, with voter turnout barely 14 percent, it was missing by a four-to-one margin. Overall, the merger was receiving just over 20 percent of the vote. But even Vote No declined to term its victory a landslide. When little better than one eligible adult in seven had bothered to go to the polls, the only thing anybody could say had carried by a landslide was apathy.

  Apathy? The analysts frowned. After all, the campaign had generated extraordinary publicity. Both sides had put forth cogent arguments, and neither had shied from unleashing the more vicious incentives, the racism and jealousy and greed, that tended to flush voters out in droves. The brightest lights in the St. Louis sky, the Jammus and Probsts, the Wesleys and the Hammakers, had guided the campaign. N
o one who paid the slightest attention to local news could have failed to grasp the importance of deciding whether the city and county should be reunited in a single new county. And yet no one, in effect, had voted.

  It was a night when men and women paid to face the public would have paid to stay home in bed. The election was a Comet Kohoutek, a Super Bowl XVIII. Commenting on the returns as they came in, apparently still believing themselves to be heard at one and two in the morning, the local newspeople sensed their responsibility for the excess hype and did everything but apologize. Their eyes scurried back and forth like panicked mountaineers on Rushmore faces, appealing to their associates for help, coming to rest again on the camera only after they’d succeeded in obtaining it.

  Don, uh, you wanna try and explain this?

  Take a crack at this, Mary?

  Bill. What would you say?

  To the media, with their ethos of combat, St. Louis looked suddenly and inexplicably craven. Threatened with the prospect of thinking and deciding, the body politic had surrendered. It embarrassed the commentators—but only because they failed to place the election within the larger context. Their shame was a measure of their obsolescence. They did not understand that America was outgrowing the age of action.

  With a maturity gained by bitter experience, the new America knew that certain struggles would not have the happy endings once dreamed of, but were doomed to perpetuate themselves, metamorphically foiling all attempts to resolve them. No matter how a region was structured, well-to-do white people were never going to permit their children to attend schools with dangerous black children. In any system devisable by mortals under lobbying pressure, taxes were bound to hit the unprivileged harder than the privileged, the exact nature of the unfairness depending only on who happened to be privileged at any given moment. The world would either end in a nuclear holocaust, or else not end in a nuclear holocaust. Washington would uphold repressive regimes overseas unless it decided not to, in which case communism would spread, unless it didn’t. And so on. All political platforms were identical in their inadequacy, their inability to alter the cosmic order.

  Enlightened Americans accepted the world as it came. They were willing to pay a high price for the food they ate—dense buttery ice creams, fresh pastas, chocolate truffles, boneless chicken breasts—because high-quality foods went down easily, leaving the mind free for more philosophical pursuits. By the same token, sexual promiscuity was passing out of fashion. The threat of AIDS ensured that the spirit would no longer be a slave to the passions. Instead of making love, instead of making war, young people were mastering their base instincts and going to professional schools. The national economy played to perfection its role in this trend. It also came to the aid of investors uncertain about how best to spend their money, as times of instability called for greater inwardness, for devotion to arbitrage and tax-free bonds and leveraged buy-outs, to profits devolving from mathematics itself, the music of the spheres. Entrepreneurship was spiritually and financially polluting. Americans seeking purity wisely left the toxic wastes and consumer complaints and labor unrest and bankruptcies to other nations, or to the remnants of the original merchant caste. The path to enlightenment led through the perception that all communal difficulties are illusions born of caring and desire. It led through non-action, non-involvement, and individual retirement accounts. The new generation had renounced the world in return for simplicity and self-sufficiency. Nirvana beckoned.

  At dawn the brain trust gathered in Jammu’s office for damage assessment. Seasoned campaigners, familiar with setbacks, they took the long view, eschewing childish outbursts. They paced in shirtsleeves. They smoked cigarettes. They gazed out the eastern windows at the gray streets and the fog-locked Arch. Only in their solicitude towards Jammu did they betray their awareness of the magnitude of the catastrophe.

  Pete Wesley had brewed coffee, stepping back from the 30-cup pot and scowling at its controls, forcing proficiency in a field of endeavor with which he was not that well acquainted. He brought steaming conical cups in plastic zarfs, two by two, to the craving, sobering hands all around him. He pointed at Jammu. “Do you, ah,” he swallowed, nearly garbling his question, “want coffee?”

  She shook her head.

  The men milled with their cups, drinking. Each time one of them stopped at the big pot for a refill he glanced at Jammu. Coffee?

  She shook her head.

  Her foreignness and gender heightened the innate pathos of the moment, complicating, with paternal tenderness, the unwanted superiority most underlings feel when their commander has met defeat. Because it was her first American election, and she was bound to have seen it as a referendum on her personally, they were afraid she might be taking all the blame. But they were even more afraid of trying to forestall this, since in their circle the intimacy of alibis and consolation was considered bad form. They waited for her to come around, to remember again that up until the last minute the opinion polls had continued to show both city and county residents giving her very high approval ratings. If every resident had been compelled to vote, or if the sun had done them a favor by shining on Tuesday, or if the campaign had induced less boredom and more grass-roots participation, the merger would have carried easily, for the simple reason that she supported it. In the practical sense, too, the election hadn’t constituted a referendum on her, because her strength had never depended on her effectiveness in getting out the vote. The merger’s failure took nothing away from the motives her various followers had for remaining in her camp. She still formed the nexus between the industrialists like Chet Murphy and the Democrats like Wesley, between the bankers like Spiegelman and the informationalists like Jim Hutchinson, between the planners and the blacks: between private maneuvering and public opinion. In September she’d had only an aging ex-lover named Singh to comfort her in her early-morning depressions. Now she had the cream of the St. Louis elite, doting on her, trying to keep one another tactful for as long as she was gloomy, and she was still the kind of woman, brooding and brilliant, grand, who merited these attentions. The great wouldn’t have become great if they were easily satisfied with themselves.

  “Hey.” Ronald Struthers stopped in the middle of the room and spread his arms, facing her. “Only thirteen more years.”

  The others looked away. She raised her head. “Thirteen more years?”

  “Until you’re eligible to run for the office of U.S. President.”

  Her weary smile deepened the lines dividing her mouth, her soft beak, from her cheeks. The others squirmed, wishing Struthers hadn’t tried.

  Then Asha Hammaker breezed in, kissed Jammu, and set a large waxed-paper bag of croissants and pains au chocolat on her desk. Wesley dumped the grounds and made a second pot of coffee with greatly enhanced self-confidence. The party grew lively, its participants finding their second wind as the light of the new day filled the office. They chatted around Jammu. Asha had left a smear of lipstick on the Chief’s forehead, a small red feather. This morning the graying zone above her left ear reached further back around her head than it had on mornings in the past.

  She began to test inappropriate facial expressions, to wince, widen her eyes, stretch her lips taut across her mouth, frown deeply, balloon her cheeks and cross her eyes, all in a manner acutely reminiscent of her mother, who often, when conferring with lawyers or entertaining legislators, could not help making faces which had utterly no bearing on the matter at hand. It was a sleepy heedlessness, but also a senility, the open contempt shown for the world by people with few years remaining in it. Her friends tried not to notice.

  “It’s the county’s loss, not ours.”

  “Where’s Ripley?”

  “We’ll just buy some of those towns. Out and out buy them.”

  “Start with the county-level police force, by July, the whole thing step by step.”

  “He left with his wife, I think around eleven.”

  “I’d like to see some of those town councils politicized.”<
br />
  “Careful, careful.”

  “We’ve got the momentum.”

  “You say that this morning?”

  “You hear about Probst’s house?”

  “The second quarter will make believers out of them.”

  “From the roof, the finale.”

  “Coffee, Ess?”

  “This hardly qualifies as a democracy anymore.”

  “Like a baby, Jim.”

  “What?”

  “Burnt my tongue.”

  “I need a hot shower, first and foremost.”

  “They’re better in France.”

  They all began to sing the Marseillaise. Only Asha knew the words. The rest filled in the lyric slots with dums and doos, covering their hearts with their hands, simulating Frenchmen. Jammu rose and left the room. Singing, they looked after her and realized they might have gone a little too far. She was opening a cabinet in the outer office. She took out a black leather jacket, her holster, and a folded pair of blue serge pants. Could she be planning to do a day’s work as police chief? She never let up.

  She stopped in the bathroom, pumped on the metal button above the sink until the spigot produced a pink ooze, and began to wash her hands.

  She was clean. Barbara and Devi were dead, the wound of the operation was closed and the scar was only faintly visible. Jammu had made a few mistakes, perhaps. At the very least she should have ordered Singh to move Barbara from his building. Her failure to do so had resulted in a less than perfect murder. But in terms of the operation the murder was harmless. At her request, the East St. Louis police had already performed a warranted search of the building and informed her that they’d found nothing out of the ordinary, just a loft apartment in which a man and woman appeared to have been living on an irregular basis. Nothing pointed to duress, everything to normal urban life. Singh had left open the possibility of the story that would now be used: Barbara had occasionally been accompanying Nissing on his trips to St. Louis, staying in the apartment without telling her husband. One evening while Nissing was away she came out and got spooked, got in trouble, and ran. She’d certainly behaved peculiarly, of course, but as Jammu had warned Probst, Nissing was a peculiar man. It didn’t matter that the story was full of holes. With no one left to dispute it, the police had no reason to scrutinize it. The parties actually involved in the murder were in custody. The officer who’d fired the fatal shot would be given a short leave of absence for any counseling he might need, and Brian Deere and Bobby Dean Judd, the two small-time narcotics dealers who’d picked Barbara up, would be charged with second-degree murder under the principle of reasonable force. As long as there was some explanation for Barbara’s presence in East St. Louis, any explanation at all, the detectives would not be forced to use their imagination. The same went for Devi Madan’s presence in Probst’s house when it burned. Here, Rolf Ripley was the explanation. And Ripley wouldn’t be called to testify in any criminal proceeding, because there would be no criminal proceeding, because the firebug herself was dead. Jammu also believed that Probst would let sleeping dogs lie and not attempt to initiate any civil action or public crusade against her. To forge a comprehensible case, he’d have to acknowledge that he and she had had sexual relations and then advance the more or less fantastical hypothesis that she’d arranged the shooting of his wife for personal reasons. Either that, or make reference to the full story of the operation, a story she’d now placed immovably within the realm of fiction.