The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  He took another look at his lunch. Ten more minutes, he told himself, picking at the rip in the vinyl cushion of his chair. On the green wall two desks to his right was a 12×15 glossy of Chief Jammu with Sergeant Luzzi, taken in August on the steps of the precinct house. RC himself had only talked to the Chief that one time after the explosion, before he’d signed up, and he’d only seen her in person one other time, when she gave a talk to the new recruits at the end of their first week. He couldn’t remember a word of what she’d said, but it was good, whatever it was. And he had no problem with how they’d been treating him, aside from some superciliousness on the part of the younger white officers. It was a tight ship, this department, a lot more electrifying than the Cold Ice Company and a lot less dumb-assed than the Army. When they tested his gun skills here and he passed the test, they told him to stop going to the range and assigned him extra hours of office work. He put in thirty hours a week—work-study, the Chief’s idea. With all this plus the classes too, he was busy. But in February he’d graduate and things would be a little easier.

  Luzzi was still gabbing on the phone. Didn’t look like his wife was delivering yet. It would have taken Luzzi nearly an hour (plus however long he spent on the phone) to type this report that RC could do in ten minutes. As far as RC knew he was the fourth-best typist in the whole first precinct. He’d heard officers say: “In a hurry? Take it to White there, if you don’t mind his lip.”

  The only real ragging these days came from Clarence. “I swear to God,” he said, “I never thought I’d be sorry to see you moving up. But even ice beats the heat. I hate to see you playing their game.” Their game was the Chief’s game. Lately Clarence had been hitting his golf drives too fat. He wasn’t on speaking terms with Alderman Struthers, and his business was hurting. Not hurting too bad (this city never ran out of junk to demolish) but still hurting. RC couldn’t make Clarence see that this had nothing to do with the Chief.

  “Read it back, White?”

  Luzzi had returned, and RC turned back to the typewriter. “Colfax,” he read, “stated that the suspect was carrying…”

  “A weapon,” Luzzi said. “A weapon.”

  “Big surprise,” RC said, and waited to be told to shut up.

  At company headquarters in South St. Louis, Probst watched Bob Montgomery and Cal Markham, his vice presidents, file into his office and take chairs. They were here to plan Westhaven strategy. “Well?” Probst said.

  “We get a day like this,” said Cal, “it changes things. This is snow weather.”

  Outside the window, in an afternoon sky that was almost black, a pigeon spread its wings and decelerated, like a newspaper unfolding in the wind. They always flocked around the precinct house across the street.

  “It’s not snowing in Ballwin, is it?”

  “No,” Cal said.

  Bob gave Cal a sharp glance. “Flurries.”

  “How’d we get into this mess?” Probst said.

  “We didn’t know how big the sucker was. We knew, but we didn’t.”

  “Or how far out it was,” Bob added. “Those last three miles.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is, it’s we didn’t think we’d get the contract.”

  “Let’s think a minute,” Probst said.

  “I’ve been thinking all month,” Cal said.

  “Let’s think.”

  The problem was concrete: how to get 23,000 cubic yards of it mixed, transported to Westhaven and poured for foundations, all in the next four weeks. By Christmas or New Year’s snow and ice would make further pouring impossible, and without foundations no further work could be done. But further work had to be done. The contract called for model units to be completed by April, the entire development by next October. And Cal was right. They’d known, but they hadn’t known. They’d known it was a huge amount of acreage, they’d known it was too far out in the country (and the last three miles of road were maddeningly roundabout), they’d known they were under time pressure, but no single factor had seemed prohibitive. They’d bid high, padding every figure except the time estimates. They’d won the contract anyway, and now they were in trouble. The obvious solution—

  “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Probst,” said his secretary Carmen on the intercom, “but your wife is on the phone.”

  “Tell her I’m in conference. I’ll call her back.”

  The obvious solution was to subcontract. But Probst hated to subcontract, hated to spend the money, hated to give up any control over the quality of the work, hated to endanger his reputation for doing complete jobs. There was a cash problem, too. The developer, Harvey Ardmore, wasn’t scheduled to pay the second 25 percent of the contract until the foundation was laid, and Ardmore was notorious for refusing to renegotiate. Probst didn’t want to pay the subcontractor out of his own cash assets. And worse, it would be hard to find someone willing to buck the unions. Only Probst could buck with impunity, and not even he, really, because the other solution to the concrete problem was to hire extra shifts for a month and do the work himself. He’d need drivers. Drivers were Teamsters. Even if they did agree to work for him—

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Probst,” said Carmen on the intercom, “but she says—”

  Probst grabbed the phone and took the call. “Is this an emergency?”

  “No, not exactly,” Barbara said. “Although—”

  “I’ll call you back, I’m sorry.” He hung up. Barbara knew damned well he didn’t like to have his train of thought broken, and just this morning he’d told her how tense he was…

  The Teamsters. If they did agree to work for him—never before had he had to ask, and they’d probably refuse just to spite him—they would drive a hard bargain. They might demand the right to approach Probst’s men again. At the very least, they’d drag their heels. So if Probst didn’t subcontract, the only acceptable way of keeping the job in the house would be to use what manpower he had now, spend the eight weeks it would take, and risk getting stung by bad weather. Cal, the daredevil, favored this alternative. Bob preferred to subcontract. Either way, they sacrificed something, either reputation or security. The problem was the very idea of Westhaven, the grandness of the conception. It was too large a project, too far out in the western boondocks, and the market out there was too cutthroat. Harvey Ardmore set deadlines (not that you could blame him, he was racing his competitors and creditors) that Probst couldn’t meet without compromising himself.

  “Have you sounded out the Teamsters, Bob?”

  “I have.”

  “And?”

  Bob smiled. “I think they’d sooner haul for the devil.”

  From the black trees along Swon Avenue snowflakes swirled like tiny lovers, meeting and parting, falling, melting. Luisa shivered in her jacket, breathing easily in the cold outdoor air. She’d gone straight from Sonnenfeld’s room to the vice-principal’s office, but when she got there she found that the vice-principal had already left to supervise the Rally. The vice-principal’s secretary sent her to her counselor, and her counselor accepted her ridiculously sincere apologies and said, “We’ll let it go this time.” She felt rescued; she’d been given special treatment; she felt all right.

  She stopped in the plot of land called the Plant Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary (it was dedicated to a man, a Mr. Plant, not a kingdom) and casually looked for birds. She spotted a female cardinal and a woodpecker, but mostly there were jays and starlings. Since she met Duane, she hadn’t once gone seriously birding.

  A gust of snowflakes flew by. This little park had been the destination of many of the walks she took with her father when she was little. She remembered she was always surprised when he held out his hand and said, “Would you like to go for a walk with me?” Sure, she would think, but we never go for walks. But apparently they did go for walks. But there was something fake about them. Her father seemed to have some other daughter in mind.

  She proceeded up Jefferson Avenue. Around Duane she’d been acting critical of her parents. She had to give him
reasons why he couldn’t call her at home or meet the folks, and there weren’t any obvious reasons. So she talked about the way her father had treated her and Alan, his phony respect. For the purposes of mocking her, he’d acted like she and Alan might get married. He made everything seem ridiculous. It was like he couldn’t bear to let Luisa forget that her friends weren’t as important as he was, that nobody but he had built any Arch.

  Her mother was the opposite. From the very beginning she’d felt obligated to find Alan even more interesting than Luisa did. Wasn’t Alan cute and funny and sweet? And awfully smart, too? It made Luisa uncomfortable. Her mother was lonely.

  With an ache in her throat she crossed Rock Hill Road, which was so deserted that the snowflakes dotted the pavement uniformly, undisturbed by tires. The reasons she came up with for keeping Duane to herself never seemed quite good enough to justify climbing out her window and missing so much sleep. The main thing was, she hadn’t felt like sharing Duane. But now she wondered. Maybe when she got home now she should let her mother have a piece of him. Not say she’d been lying, just that she’d seen Duane a couple of times at Stacy’s and really liked him. The ache faded from her throat. She was getting butterflies instead. She wasn’t sure she’d have the nerve to tell her mother as soon as she walked in.

  A triangle of blue sky had opened in the black clouds above her house. Mr. Mohnwirbel was digging up the brick border along the front walk. “Hi, Mr. Mohnwirbel!”

  He looked up. “Hi,” he said in his gruff German voice.

  “Going to the game tomorrow?” she asked loudly.

  He shook his head.

  “Going to have a turkey dinner?” she said, even louder.

  He shook his head.

  “Going to take the day off?”

  “I make a vacation.”

  “You’re going to make a vacation? Wow. Where to?”

  “Illinois.”

  “Boy.” Luisa rocked on her heels. “I sure hope you have a good time.”

  He nodded and picked up another brick.

  The butterflies were rising higher in her stomach. She marched around to the back door, gathering courage, and crashed inside.

  The kitchen was dark and smelled. Her mother had been smoking. It smelled like grade-school afternoons, when she’d smoked all the time. She was sitting at the table and looking bad, all pinched and pasty. This probably wasn’t the time to tell her.

  “Hi,” Luisa said.

  Her mother gave her a baleful glance, and brushed some ashes off the table. Had her counselor called about the smoking after all?

  “What’s up?” Luisa said.

  Her mother looked at her again. “I don’t understand you.”

  “What?” Maybe it wasn’t the smoking. Maybe—Her stomach fell a mile.

  Her mother looked at the sink. “I was picking up the turkey at Straub’s,” she said, speaking to a nonexistent person. “I was standing in the checkout line. The woman ahead of me was looking at me. She seemed vaguely familiar. She said, You’re Barbara Probst, aren’t you? I said, Yes, I am. She said, I guess our daughters are good friends. I said—”

  Enough. Luisa ran down the hall and locked herself in the bathroom. In the mirror she caught a glimpse of herself smelling her hand and spun away.

  “Luisa!” Her mother’s voice was harsh. “Luisa, what kind of stunt is this?”

  “I have to go to the bathroom.” She hoped the tinkling would drive her mother away. Arguing was out of the question. Anything she said would humiliate her.

  She jerked up her pants and flushed the toilet. Under the cover of the rushing water, she cleared her mother’s bud vases off the windowsill and parted the curtains. Snow was falling again. From the dark bathroom the sky looked light and unbounded.

  The toilet fell silent.

  “Luisa, I’m not going to be understanding this time. I’m sorry, but I’m not, because for one thing, I don’t understand, and for another, I don’t think you want me to. But if you want me to treat you like an adult you’d better come out here and start acting like one. What are you doing in there?”

  Luisa hardly heard the words. It was just pathetic bleating to her. She felt evil and she wanted Duane. She was glad she’d lied. She was sorry she’d been caught.

  “Imagine how I felt,” her mother said. “Imagine me standing there trying to smile and hold up my end of the conversation while this woman I don’t even know is telling me—”

  She flushed the toilet a second time, for noise, and unlatched the window. Fortunately it didn’t stick. She raised it and eased up the storm window. The toilet bowl gurgled as it emptied. She planted one foot on the tiled sill, squeezed through the window, and jumped into the yews outside. Her mother was still talking to her.

  6

  Singh was all smiles; like a boy inventor, he’d used the word “results” a dozen times in half an hour. Blinking the eternal clove smoke from his eyes, he pressed the Rewind button on the tape deck, puffed, and tapped his ash onto Jammu’s office carpeting. With a lazy toe he smeared the ash to dust. He had just played, for Jammu, the scene of the arrival of Luisa Probst at the apartment of her boyfriend Duane Thompson, and then the recording of a phone call shortly following her arrival: an exchange between Thompson and Barbara Probst. “Tell her I called,” Barbara had said. “She does have our number, I believe. And if you change your mind about tomorrow, just come on over. We’d like to have you.”

  Jammu had bitten off so much thumbnail that it seemed only a single layer of cells kept the red flesh from bleeding. Though not intense, the pain was like an itch, inviting aggravation. She pressed the rough end of the nail into the exposed flesh and felt the pressure far away, in her anus.

  She’d never heard Barbara Probst’s voice before, or any local voice that sounded so aware of the wiretap and so contemptuous of its presence. The voice was controlled and dispassionate, its tones unmelodious but pure, as if in the woman’s throat there were a low-pass filter that eliminated the overtones, the rasp and tremor, the nasals, flutter, fear. The clarity made Jammu anxious. Not once in five months had she considered that there might be hidden elements of control in St. Louis, that behind Martin Probst there might stand not a twangy Bunny or a vapid Biz but a woman with a voice like her own. How could a voice like Barbara’s restrict itself to speaking only on domestic issues? It was impossible. In the recorded conversation Jammu could hear the workings of an undercover operation dedicated to the preservation of order. The girl wouldn’t come to the phone, but the mother assured the boyfriend, in phrases lulling and impersonal, that everything was fine. It was clear that St. Louis had Thought Police, and that Singh, with bizarre blitheness, had flushed out the voice of a master agent.

  “Get any sleep last night?” Singh asked.

  “Don’t ever play that voice for me again.”

  The tape ran off the take-up reel. “Barbara’s? You should have heard her before she—”

  “Never again, do you understand?”

  It was Thanksgiving morning. At three o’clock Jammu was due at the mayor’s brownstone for dinner, a tête-à-tête for which she’d planned to spend these hours preparing. Already she could see that she wouldn’t have time even to brush her teeth beforehand, let alone pick out clothes. No doubt she’d end up going in her stretched cardigan and a drab wool skirt.

  Singh cleared his throat. “As I was about to say—”

  “What’s the Bonfire?”

  He sighed. “Not important.”

  “Who’s Stacy?”

  “Last name Montefusco. A little friend of Luisa’s. She’s been lying for her.”

  “Where does Thompson live?”

  “University City.”

  “How will she get to school if she stays with him?”

  “Bus, I guess.”

  Jammu nodded. “You guess. The director of Bi-State owes me one. If you think she needs a bus line to the high school, just tell me.”

  “Thanks. There’s a good connection. She�
�s been taking a bus at night to sleep with him. Since the twenty-second of October they’ve had intercourse eleven times. On five of those occasions she was able to spend the night. Once outside during the daytime, the remaining five times in the evening, in his apartment.”

  “Thank you for counting, Singh. I respect your thoroughness. But why didn’t she tell Barbara to begin with? If she’d told her, she wouldn’t have had to sneak around, or run away. How did you manage to set it up this way?”

  “How did I set it up?”

  “Yes.”

  “The deceptions started slowly,” Singh said. “There was a conversation—November eight. Evening. Luisa, and Barbara, who tried to draw her out and overdid the ‘cool’ bit. I could understand the girl’s response.”

  “Which was?”

  “Heavy sigh. As if it were too late to start explaining. So she lied. Only-children sometimes feel oppressed and very often they’re duplicitous. They have no sibling rivals. Luisa doesn’t have to worry about losing favor, so she goes ahead and takes exactly what she wants. She’s also going through a typical adolescent rebellion.”

  “So the family is less happy than it looked.” Jammu smiled wanly. “Who is Duane Thompson?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “You haven’t told me, I’ve been busy, how should I know?”

  “But surely you’ve seen his pictures?”

  “Don’t treat me like a baby, Singh. I’ve seen his pictures. But who is he? How well do you know him?”

  Singh rolled a chair up against Jammu’s desk, sat down, and looked across the papers at her. “Not at all. Never met him. He has no connection with us—‘no taint.’ Luisa knew him from school. It came as a rude shock, because I’d spent an entire week setting her up to meet me—”