The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Jammu.” RC had had enough of this stuff. He wanted another swat at the golf ball.

  “That’s right. Jammu. This raid on Thursday where Hooper got it, they wouldn’t never done that under Bill O’Connell. Too damned dangerous, and what’s the point? But now they’re taking that neighborhood lot by lot, cleaning out the junkies and the derelicts and some families too and throwing them on the street. They’re fencing it all off. I knocked down some two-fams behind a ten-foot fence last week. A ten-foot fence! And no genius required on my part to see that’s where these new clients of Ronald is doing their buying. Same thing’s happening in those bad blocks east of Rumbold. Jammu’s fighting house to house, and somebody is buying up the lots as she goes. Ronald is in on it, I swear to that. And somebody else, somebody named Cleon.”

  Cleon, RC knew, could only be Cleon Toussaint, an unabashed slumlord, an old enemy of Ronald Struthers. He went around in a wheelchair but nobody felt sorry for him. “Says who?” RC asked, fingering his driver.

  “Says the city recorder. Mr. Toussaint is now proud owner of one and a quarter miles of frontage south of Easton that wasn’t his four weeks ago. A whole neighborhood, RC. He even bought that garbage dump on Easton. And bought it all since the first of October, and doesn’t care if the whole world knows.”

  “Where’d he get the money?”

  “I was waiting for you to ask me that. Nobody knows where he got the money, not me, not anybody. What I do know is what his brother do for a living.”

  RC shivered in his sweat. John Toussaint, brother of the more odious Cleon, was the commander of the seventh police district, except he wasn’t the commander anymore; Jammu had promoted him downtown in September.

  “Not to mention the way Ronald talk about Jammu. It’s almost like she’s some kind of religion. She’s—”

  The head of a golfer appeared from behind the bushes. “You fellas want to play through?”

  Clarence turned to the man, astonished. “That’s very kind of you.” To RC in a whisper, he said, “We’ll return to this.”

  The men on the tee were restively shuffling the clubs in their bags, perhaps regretting their offer. Clarence teed up, spat on his palms, dug in, and whacked a moon shot across Art Hill, the fat first leg of this par five. The pond at the bottom of the hill lay as calm as an uncut jello salad. Leaves speckled it, motionless. At the top of the hill early sunlight inhabited the museum’s stonework. Keeping his head down, his eye on the ball, RC hit his first clean shot of the morning. His ball bounced near Clarence’s and rolled up the next hill. “Keep it,” Clarence advised.

  After Clarence sliced his second shot into some poplars near an arm of the pond, RC hit a blistering fairway wood over the second hill and out of sight. He walked over the crest of the hill, hoping against hope to see his ball in the vicinity of the pin. Instead he saw a multitude of sycamore leaves. They covered the green and the fairway approach. Glossy and whitish, they all looked like golf balls.

  He began to search the green. Clarence’s third shot sailed over his head and cracked into a sycamore trunk, ricocheting favorably.

  “Lost it, huh?” Clarence was cheerful as he crossed the green, his club heads clicking in his bag. “You see mine?”

  RC walked in tight circles, kicking leaves and getting dizzy; the green began to tilt. He looked into the sky and saw the negative images of a zillion leaves. Finally he had to drop a new ball in the bunker, take the penalty, and play from there.

  Clarence foozled his chip, but he managed to hole out for a bogey. When he pulled the flag pin to retrieve his ball, he froze. “RC, boy.” He spoke to something in the hole. “Be honest now. What ball you playing?”

  RC thought. “Wilson. Three dots.”

  “Down in two.” Clarence was still bent over the hole. “Double eagle. You one hell of a lucky sucker.”

  Six months after he finished high school, RC had gotten drafted and sent to Fort Leonard Wood, where sergeants taught him everything he needed to know to become good mortar fodder for gook insurgents. When the rest of his unit was shipping out, though, the higher-ups had transferred him to the uniformed infirmary staff, sparing him a long round trip. Grateful for the break, and by nature a man who left well enough alone, RC reenlisted twice. His war experience consisted of nothing more than typing histories. But when he got back to St. Louis he had a hard time readjusting. Supposedly the Army turned boys into men, but often it turned men into babies, because unlike a monastery or university or profit-making organization, the Army had no ethic. When the pressure let up, you goofed off; it was automatic. RC didn’t drink often, but when he did he got plastered. The word “pussy” was major. He giggled and yukked and slept at every opportunity. It was a trash outlook. In St. Louis old friends of his stayed away from him. Potential new ones were skeptical. They’d ask him what his name was, and he’d shrug and say, “Richard, I guess.” You guess? They tried Ricky, Rick, Rich, Richie, Dickie, Dick, White and White Man. They tried Ice, because he’d found a job with the Cold Ice Company on North Grand. He wasn’t stupid; just uncertain. Eventually he settled on the name RC, short for Richard Craig, his first two names. He became plant manager at Cold Ice. When he was thirty he got to know a young forklift driver named Annie Davis. Four years later he and Annie had a good apartment and a three-year-old son, and then, in July, in the very month you’d least expect it, Cold Ice went out of business. Clarence quickly offered RC a job, which he quickly refused, because either Clarence would have had to lay off some otherwise OK man to make room for him, or else he would have been paying RC out of profits, out of charity.

  So for three months now RC had been working as the parking-lot attendant at the downtown offices of KSLX-TV and KSLX-Radio. It was a joke of a job, but not bad for a stopgap, and not without a certain maddening challenge. KSLX had expanded its workforce by nearly one-third in the last decade without adding any area to its parking lot. RC was required to juggle a lot of cars, and to juggle them fast, especially during the two rush hours. When you parked cars four-deep, getting one out of the back row was like doing one of those sliding plastic puzzles where the object was to arrange the eight little squares among nine little spaces in various orders, but with an important difference: cars couldn’t move sideways the way those little squares could. You had to keep track of exactly who wanted exactly what car at exactly what hour. And you had to keep the patterns loose. In August, Mr. Hutchinson, the station’s general manager and the network’s top man in the Midwest, had asked for his Lincoln four hours after he’d said he was flying to New York for three days, and RC freed the Lincoln in less than (he’d clocked it) fifty seconds by spiriting three four-door yachts into slots that he once might have thought too narrow for a ten-speed.

  But on the Monday morning after he’d humbled Clarence with That Double Eagle, on the morning of the day before Halloween, a VIP asked him to perform the unperformable. This VIP, a dark-skinned foreigner, had sworn up and down that he wouldn’t need his Skylark before two in the afternoon; he had business inside with top management. So RC had put him in one of the longish-term deep spaces right up front, and let Cliff Quinlan park his Alfa in front of it. Quinlan, the station’s hotshot investigative reporter, had mentioned a ten o’clock rendezvous and taken his keys inside with him. This was fine with RC, seeing as two o’clock was a good four hours later than ten o’clock.

  At 9:30 the VIP came out and demanded the car. Suppressing his first impulse, which was to scream, RC urged him to be patient for one half hour.

  “No my good man!” The VIP pointed at his Skylark as if it were a stick to be fetched. “You get me the car immediately.”

  RC rubbed the bristly backside of his head. What with his big eyebrow bones, his long ears and complicated nose, he saw fit to keep his hair short. “You have a problem,” he said, “that I can’t solve.”

  It was a gray, sultry morning in St. Louis. Passersby on Olive Street had slowed to inspect the Skylark in question. The VIP waited until they were
out of earshot. Then he straightened his necktie, a shiny silver thing tied in a real potato of a knot, and said: “Know that I am from All-India Radio. I am here on a courtesy visit, and courtesy is my expectation.” A horizontal palm approached RC. On it lay a fifty-dollar bill.

  “Oh man. You got me wrong, man. This ain’t economics. This physics.”

  The palm did not recede or waver.

  “Well,” RC mumbled, taking charge of the bill. “I ain’t saying this be easy now.” He squeezed past Cliff Quinlan’s Alfa and climbed into the Skylark, rubbing his hands. Fifty! The guy better learn his exchange rates. RC concentrated. If he could rock this baby back and forth and move it two feet to the left, he could rev it and get the front wheels over the parking-stop, angle it around, get the back wheels over the parking-stop, brake hard, and back it down the sidewalk to the VIP.

  Starting up, he wrenched the wheels hard to the left and moved forward till he touched the metal guardrail. Easy, easy. He reversed the wheel full to the right, the steering column whimpering protest, and backed up to within a millimeter of the Alfa, then reversed the wheel again and repeated the process. He did this six times, back and forth. Then came the hard part. He had to give the engine gas and, by means of the brake, leap the concrete parking-stop and stop immediately. And now Quinlan’s fender, not his bumper, was at stake. RC backed up in tiny jerks, another inch, another half an inch. He was close to that fender, but he took it back a mite further, and then he heard the bump.

  The impact was catastrophic.

  The ground shook the car shook the building hammered in his skull. He panicked in reverse before he hit the brake. A painful deafness was fading. He heard glass and metal, large fragments, crashing into cars.

  The far corner of the lot was an inferno of black smoke and orange flame. RC threw the door open, scraping it on the parking-stop, and ran to the VIP. The VIP was stretched out flat on the ground with his hands over his head. He was right on top of a grease puddle. The flames crackled and rumbled, some only visible as a wildness of air. RC could see that the inferno was none other than Mr. Hutchinson’s Lincoln. The front two-thirds of it was missing. Mr. Strom’s Regal lay on its side. Cars all around had lost windshields and windows.

  The sirens were already coming. RC looked around. In an agony of helplessness, he jumped up and down.

  The VIP stirred. RC knelt. “Man, are you all right?”

  The VIP nodded. His eyes were wide open.

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” RC said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing—”

  “Nothing?”

  “I saw nothing. It exploded.”

  “Jesus.” RC paused to consider the man’s probable religion and added, “No offense.”

  The air itself seemed to have generated police radio static. A fire truck pulled up. The firemen began spraying the carnage casually, men watering a giant lawn with giant hoses, before they even climbed off the truck. A squad car pulled off Olive Street and nearly ran over RC and the VIP. It braked urgently. Doors opened.

  “Are you in charge here?”

  RC looked up. The person who’d spoken was Jammu. “I park cars,” he said.

  “Is this man hurt?”

  “Far’s I can tell he isn’t.”

  RC followed Jammu with his eyes as she bent down over the VIP. What a small woman she was. Smaller than she ever looked in pictures. She wore a light gray trench coat. Her hair was loose and tucked behind her ears. Though only a welterweight himself, RC stared. Such a small little woman.

  The VIP struggled to his knees. The front of his suit was stamped with a large, creased grease stain.

  Jammu turned to RC. “Whose car was that?”

  “Mr. Hutchinson’s. He’s—”

  “I know who he is. How did it happen?”

  “No idea.”

  “What do you mean, no idea?”

  RC sweated. “I was trying to get this guy’s Skylark out of, you know, a tight spot. Next thing I know—”

  He told her everything he’d seen. He hadn’t seen anything. But she never took her eyes off him. He felt like he was being memorized. When he gave her his name and address she thanked him and, in leaving, brushed his wrist with her fingers. The skin burned. She walked over to the wreck, which was now smoldering and roped off by the cops. RC looked around helplessly again. He still didn’t know what to do. He noticed that the VIP and squad car had disappeared.

  The bad thing was, he’d put a dent in Cliff Quinlan’s fender. He knew without going to check. As a job, this joke was getting old, and RC wasn’t stupid. They were taking applications at the Police Academy.

  One-fifteen in the afternoon. Jammu stood at the window of a twenty-second-floor room in the Clarion Hotel and directed a yawn at the Peabody Coal and Continental Grain installations across the Mississippi. On the near side of the river, conventioning Jaycees in paper boaters straggled along the footpaths to the Arch. Jammu looked at the reflection of her guest in the window. Karam Bhandari was sitting on the end of the double bed peeling the foil off the bottle of Mumm’s between his legs. Bhandari was Jammu’s mother’s personal attorney and sometime spiritual advisor. Though he came from a family of Jains, he was all carnivore, his eyes lidded, his skin saurianly faceted. Jammu had never liked him, but she felt obliged to show him a good time in St. Louis. She’d let him detonate a bomb this morning.

  The cork popped. Bhandari brought two stemmed plastic glasses fizzing to the window. He’d changed his grease-stained shirt but not the undershirt, and the grease was seeping through onto the pinpoint cloth. He raised his glass and showed his sharp, small teeth. “To your endeavor,” he said.

  Jammu returned the toast with her eyebrows and drained her glass. Bhandari had a vested interest in her endeavor. If she was sleepy today (and she was), it was the aftereffect of their meeting in her office last night. Bhandari specialized in intractable silences and bad-tempered sighs. Maman had sent him over to inspect the management of her investments, to confer with Jammu and with Asha Hammaker, and, in her phrase, “to get a sense of the situation.” Maman had every right to send him, since she was dumping fourteen and a half million dollars into the St. Louis real-estate market and spending another five hundred thousand in silence money. But Bhandari was being hosted by Jammu, the very person whose judgment he had come to confirm or dispute. This made for tensions.

  “It’s quite impossible,” he’d said at one point. “You simply must have a full-time accountant.”

  “I’ve told you,” she said. “I have Singh, I have Asha’s—”

  “I see. May I ask why this—Mr. Singh—is not present this evening?”

  “Balwan Singh, Karam. You know Balwan. He’s in Illinois tonight.”

  “Oh. That Singh. He isn’t to be trusted, Essie. Surely there’s someone else.”

  “There’s Asha’s accountant and her attorneys, whom unfortunately she considered it unwise for you to meet. But Singh is very capable. And regardless of what Maman may have told you, he’s completely trustworthy.”

  Bhandari had pulled a long, dull donkey face, blinking. “Surely there’s someone else.”

  Returning now with the Mumm’s bottle, Bhandari reached around her and refilled her glass. His chin lingered at her shoulder. He was in a better mood today, since she’d let him do the bomb. She gave his cheek a filial pat. “Thanks, Karam.” She took a sip of champagne. “You have the transmitter?”

  He stepped back and fished in his jacket pocket, produced the transmitter and set it on the windowsill. “Yes. There it is.”

  A pause. The sky darkened a shade.

  “Is the transmitter your own work?”

  “The design is.”

  “And you still have time to be chief of police.”

  Jammu smiled. “It’s an old design. Standard issue.”

  “And the automobile?”

  “It belonged to a man named Hutchinson, the station’s general manager.”

  “And you attempt to extort, em, e
xtort a certain—I take it this is an act of extortion?”

  “No. We make no demands.”

  A veil of rain drifted into view from the west, applying itself to the Arch. “No demands,” he repeated.

  “That’s right. This is senseless.”

  “But you wished me to make sure no one was hurt.”

  “We aren’t hurting people yet. We want to scare them. In this case, scare Hutchinson. But we’ll go as far as we need to.”

  “I must confess I don’t see the point.”

  Last night, he’d failed to see the point of her strategy with North Side real estate. It was simple, she’d told him. Since even Maman didn’t have enough cash to start a legitimate panic, Asha’s men were buying up little lots throughout the area, from the river to the western limits, creating the impression of many parties acting on inside information. And they magnified the impression by buying only property owned by local banks. This left as much land as possible in the hands of local black businessmen—politically, this was vital—while leading the banks to believe the sum of these investments was much greater than the fourteen million dollars it actually was. Because who would suspect that someone would make a point of buying exclusively from banks?

  Bhandari’s fingertips floated over the stains on his shirt pocket. The real problem was his innate inability to comprehend ideas voiced by a woman; he retreated into a mental closet which seemed to grow the more asphyxiating the longer Jammu spoke. She decided to torment him further. “Formalisms,” she said. “You know. Real-estate speculation is a formalism, Karam. Essentially ahistorical. Once it gets going—once we set it in motion—it works by itself and drags politics and economics along after it. Terror works the same way. We want Hutchinson in the State. We want to strip his world of two of its dimensions, develop a situation that overcomes all the repressions that make him think in what the world calls a normal way. Do you hear me, Karam? Do you hear the words I am speaking to you?”

  Bhandari refilled her glass. “Drink, drink,” he said. His own glass he brought to his lips awkwardly, as though pouring, not sipping. Seemingly as an afterthought, he raised the glass. “To your endeavor.”