The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Five minutes. For God’s sake. Please shut the door.”

  The door wavered and retreated. Someone pushed on it again, but the latch had caught.

  Jammu dialed a number. “Listen,” she said. “I’ll get this to you in writing soon, but I wanted you prepared in case you see Rolf today. He was just here making threats. Tell him I’m taking the threats very seriously. Tell him I’m scared. But I still have to make a pretense of helping out Struthers. They’re making three demands of Urban Hope. Rolf should grant the first two. He’ll know why I couldn’t afford to tell him so myself. The black majority on Urban Hope—”

  “Yes,” Devi said.

  “He should grant it. That’s a transition group anyway, and we can replace it with a smaller board when we need to.”

  “And the proportional hiring?”

  “That’s the second one to grant. He should let Struthers pin him to the quota Struthers wants—the same percentage of blacks as are living in the city. Struthers doesn’t realize this will be an all-white city in another ten years.”

  “You’re double-crossing Struthers.”

  “You can suggest as much. The concessions needn’t be total. Urban Hope can knock the figures down. I told Struthers to make them high and hope to compromise. Say forty percent of Urban Hope and full quotas in ten years, not five. Rolf will still have bargaining power for the housing demand. That’s the key to a white city. I think Struthers will back down if Ripley tells him the projects simply won’t attract financing with more than fifteen percent low-income units.”

  Devi repeated it all back.

  “Good,” Jammu said. “I really don’t take his threats too seriously. His investments here started out as tax shelters, and if he pulls out now, capital gains will murder him. I think a move is unlikely. On the other hand, he hasn’t made a firm commitment to the Ripley Center yet—”

  “He hasn’t?”

  “No. Once he does, he can’t pull out. So what you need to do is leave him alone on the issue—just don’t ever even mention it. Let him assume I think he’s committed.”

  “Easy enough.”

  “The other thing is the State. I think Rolf’s Probst animus is one of the main reasons he’s gotten to be so central in Urban Hope. We have to keep developing that situation. Are you still in it?”

  “Very much” was the reply.

  “Good. We need it, and it’ll work for us as long as Probst is in charge of the resistance. You understand? Develop that situation.”

  “I understand.”

  Jammu turned the key in her desk, put her coat on, and opened the door. “Joe Feig, I’m sorry,” she said. “You must hate me but we’ll have to say four o’clock now. Drop in, and I’ll give you what you need. Randy, talk to Suzie. I don’t have time to look it over now, Suzie, but Randy needs it and I’ll take your word for it. Go ahead and get the signatures. Rollie, tell Farr he’s got to come and see me today. Say eight o’clock, and if I’m not here, that’s his problem. Annette, is it life and death?”

  “Sort of, yes. Strachey was on the front page this morning—”

  “Write a memo with a guarantee. Word it strongly, and I’ll check it over tonight and Pete will sign it. No city employees will lose jobs in a merger. Zero. At worst they might be moved to different positions. If you can work in something subtle about patronage, so much the better. And the rest of you get out of my way, I’ll be back at two-thirty and free until four. My apologies to everyone, I’m eternally grateful.”

  The Corvette was waiting at a hydrant on Tucker Boulevard. Jammu got in with a word of apology to Asha, who peeled off her reading glasses and stepped on the gas pedal. She was wearing sable and emeralds. She dodged a U.S. Mail truck and headed up the ramp onto Highway 40. Practically, this engagement was the least important of the day for Jammu, but as she saw less and less of Singh she was coming to rely heavily on her weekly lunch with Asha.

  The cars they passed looked stationary, bouncing in place on the winter-stained surface of the road. Beyond them, buildings lumbered backwards through a cold haze. Asha’s hands left the wheel to rearrange her hair, and the Corvette steered itself into the innermost lane. She was at home in speed—in love with it. She was licensed to fly, she rode horses, she bet avidly. She was one of the terrible people who used speedboats on Dal Lake in Kashmir. She was speeding now, and when they passed the city limits, into the jurisdiction of other forces less willing to fix her tickets, Jammu made her slow down.

  “Ripley?” Asha said.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you have guessed in July how important he’d turn out to be?”

  “Not exactly. He was a maybe. They were all maybes.”

  Jammu remembered July, the intimate and air-conditioned days. She’d spent her mornings with the Police Board; her early afternoons at the circulation desk of the St. Louis Library watching her book and magazine orders sucked down by the pneumatic tubes to the stacks; her late afternoons in one of the library’s musty ground-floor tunnels feeding dimes to xerox machines; her evenings in motion with Asha in the county, with Asha downtown among little boats of hollandaise, with Asha and bourbon on her hotel balcony; her nights reading the day’s photocopies. Would she have guessed? At the head of every discussion of civic decision-making were two words: Municipal Growth. In every list of influential locals were the names Wismer, Hutchinson, Ripley, Meisner, Probst, Murphy, Norris, Spiegelman, Hammaker…And Asha pumped Sidney, relayed more names to Jammu. All maybes, but the sum a sure thing. In few American cities is fundamental policy determined by such a small and tightly knit nonpartisan group. In few American cities has the mode of policy-making survived unchallenged from the early nineteenth century to the present. Though the names have changed, the pattern of rule by a handful of established families with a romantic vision of westward progress has successfully replicated itself…Political science, pregnant words, summer thoughts, engorged with possibility. Miss Jammu, we’ve decided, Asha, they’ve decided, Maman, I’ve decided. A city to ravish, in July.

  Asha shook her coat off her shoulders. “How’s Devi?”

  “She’s done very well. But it’s rather a weakness of our approach that she’s turned out to be important because Ripley has.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing that’s visible to me. Nothing exactly wrong, I mean. She’s as bright as anyone and she’s too dependent on me, substancewise and otherwise, to blow things open. But I wish we had another agent in her spot. I guess I wish you could do it all for me.”

  “I would if I could.”

  “It was easy enough to move Baxti off Probst in October. But we can’t ask Ripley to switch sex partners at this stage.”

  “It sounds like you think something’s wrong.”

  “I don’t know. Ripley is surprisingly demanding. I feel a loss of contact. With Devi. With—Well, you’re about the only one who’s maintained a complete perspective.”

  Asha was accustomed to collecting Jammu’s anxieties. She kept her eyes on the road. Brentwood spread to allow the highway through, the walls of its low square buildings as dirty as if road salt had splashed all the way up to them. Jammu saw nothing new. “Isn’t this the exit?”

  She was thrown forward as Asha took the Corvette what seemed like sideways across four lanes and onto the ramp. Asha’s gold bracelets floated on her wrists. “Norris?” she said.

  “He’s warm but he isn’t hot. He isn’t making any new friends or converts.”

  “Buzz says he and Probst have gotten friendly.”

  “Probst doesn’t have the loser’s ethic it takes to believe in conspiracy. He found that bug in Meisner’s place and made nothing of it. His daughter found a bug in her boyfriend’s apartment and the boyfriend gave it to his landlord.”

  “God’s on your side, Ess.”

  Jammu looked into the tire, deeply recessed, of a towering dump truck. All at once the Corvette seemed squashable. The dump truck was black. Written in red on the driver—s
ide door were the words PROBST & CO. The driver, a black man in a baseball cap, glanced down at the Corvette’s hood and then at Jammu. He winked. Asha passed him.

  “The Warriors are doing a bridge on Sunday,” Jammu said.

  “What fun.”

  “Tell me about Buzz.”

  “He’s cute,” Asha said. “He’s a genuine dear.”

  “So you’ve been saying. Is it good news or bad?”

  “Indifferent. He’s still one of the maybes. It’s part of your random variation in moral strength. Buzz has relatively a lot of it. In principle, if not in his gut, he feels an allegiance to what’s left of Municipal Growth, to the old dispensation. He’s very narrow-minded on the city-county question. Or it’s more than narrow-minded, it’s—”

  “The State. But the wrong elements hypostatized.”

  “Anything you say. It isn’t political and it’s only formally economic. What it really is is talismanic. All of a sudden he reveres Martin Probst. I find it frustrating. The more time I spend with him, the more interesting Probst becomes to him. It’s hardly fair.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “On the other hand, it’s personal and gets steadily more so. If you get Probst to support you, Buzz will too.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “If I’m on your side and Probst is too—well, you’ll have Buzz.”

  “You’re sure. You’re sure he’ll move his operations to the city.”

  Asha rolled her shoulders. “I don’t know, Ess. It’s asking a lot of him. He will do something. He’d be lobbying for the merger right now if it weren’t for Probst.”

  “I want him in the city.”

  “To clinch the merger?”

  “Just to have him in the city. This merger is perceived more apocalyptically than it deserves to be. I mean, yes, I want it badly. But if it fails, I at least want the city and the elite. So don’t lose sight of what counts.”

  “Getting Buzz to move.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do when you have what you want?”

  Jammu smiled. “More of same.”

  Asha rolled down her window and took a ticket from the electric dispenser at the parking garage at West Roads. She handed the ticket to Jammu. The time was printed in bruised purple: 1:17 p.m. They’d have an hour to eat. “You know,” Asha said, as she drove up the ramp, “I’ve been very impressed with how keenly Singh saw the outlines of Buzz’s life in September. He didn’t intervene, he only listened, and he still hit every parameter on the nose, even the role of the Probsts.”

  “I’m hungry,” Jammu said.

  The hundred lights in the Junior League dining room had reflected mates in the fogged windows, and lit the fresh flowers on every table and the pollen-dry makeup on every woman’s face. Glasses chimed, laughter pealed. The room smelled vaguely carbonated. A girl in a white wool skirt and a kelly-green jacket and a pink cotton blouse and a knotted plaid scarf jumped up from a table and screamed, “Asha!”

  Suddenly Jammu was looking at their backs.

  “I thought your phone was out of order!”

  “I just love those!”

  “If it’s all right with Joey!”

  Asha led Jammu by the elbow to a table. They sat. “The youngest of the Jaeger girls,” she explained. “We’re going dancing tomorrow.”

  “This isn’t interfering with you and Buzz.”

  “No.”

  They began to speak in Hindi. The noise of the women consuming circled them, the chewing of the communal sentence, so nice how the cute, interesting Saturday drives to Frontenac Billblass Powell Hall, I saw small slams, I brunch divorced (Hilary Fontbonne, Ashley Chesterfield), but listen on Wednesday (touch wood), Eric sales, London Saks, cancer, curtains, Vail, six pounds.

  “mere sir mem dard hai”

  Every time Jammu’s eyes left her friend she had to beat back invasions from neighboring tables. “Sinful” desserts on plates, caustic glances. The women were attractive and lively. She attacked her salad with a fork and said, in her hard Hindi, “Singh has kidnapped Barbara Probst.”

  A head turned. Ears had recognized the name, maybe.

  “Let’s talk about this later, Ess.”

  “Now,” Jammu said. “We’ll keep the names out of it. Eat up. Come on. Eat. In the future we won’t come here. But my time is short. He kidnapped her on Tuesday.”

  “Where is he keeping her?”

  “His place across the river.”

  “I don’t like that.” Asha touched her lips with her napkin. “I don’t like that at all. Hammaker owns that building.”

  “I don’t like the whole idea. But she doesn’t know where she is. Singh has a story going in New York. He found a woman who is a reasonable facsimile of her, showed her around his apartment building, to the doorman, the neighbors. He’ll do it periodically.”

  “But kidnapped,” Asha said. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m glad we agree.”

  “You didn’t approve it?”

  “I approved it. Singh had a good case. P. thinks she’s left him. There was nowhere to go with the operation except the kidnapping route. The State makes its peculiar demands. And B. has been the P. most opposed to me. State or no State, it’s good to get her out of P.’s life.”

  “So she’s just lying over there drugged?”

  “I wish. I told him to drug her. I told him very plainly. He said it won’t work in the story. He’s posing as an Iranian psychopath. He needs a story because eventually, of course, he’ll have to let her go.”

  “After the election. After P. has played his part.”

  “Presumably.”

  “But this must mean—What will he do after he’s let her go?”

  Jammu laid an anchovy on the side of her plate.

  “You’re sending him back?” Asha said.

  “He’s going back.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  Jammu, chewing, said, “I can stand it.” She swallowed. “He’s different these days. He has a very narrow set of concerns, and he’s always sniping at me. He’s too involved in the P. operation. I told him to hire a thug to kidnap B. He wouldn’t. And everything in the name of doing the job right. As if trusting a chain and some locked doors to restrain B. were doing the job right.”

  “Why so bitter, Ess?”

  Jammu shrugged. Singh was going back. By kidnapping Barbara himself he’d burned the bridges. This is America, Chief. Pretty soon you’ll have to leave off with the clandestine stuff or you’re going to get caught. When you stop, you won’t need me. I don’t like being in this country. It makes me feel bad. If I thought you wouldn’t survive without me, I wouldn’t kidnap her. If I even thought you might miss me a little. Every arrival is a departure, Chief. You’ll find me in Bombay if you need me.

  “It’s Saturday morning. We’ve made savage love at dawn and I’ve gone off to the Midwest for the weekend to work on a story. You get up late, shower away my smell, and go out for a walk. You pick up the clothes you’ve had dry-cleaned. Buy a grapefruit, a couple of bagels, and a pound of fresh-ground Colombian. Yum. Smell it. You come back and eat. Have a cigarette and ‘collect yourself.’ It’s a partly cloudy day, not too cold. We’re twelve floors up, remember, and the traffic is very distant. You think about what has happened to your life. How so much has changed in five days, and what the next few months will bring. You wonder what you’re going to do with yourself while I’m away. Find a job? Write a book? Be a journalist like me? Take a screen test? You’re a little lonely, but it’s exciting. It’s a new kind of loneliness. You think about Luisa. She must have had Saturday mornings like this at Duane’s, must still be having them. How new everything must seem to her. You gather your courage because you want to call her. You think about Martin’s birthday party, and the scene you had with him in front of her. You think this might be the best way of explaining to her how it’s happened that you’ve left him. You want to explain that you of all women don’t have to
take whatever your husband gives you. That some things are simply beyond the pale. You don’t want Luisa to get the idea you’ve left him for purely selfish reasons. Of course, you’re nervous, because you have a lot to explain to her, and because if you say any of the things I’ve told you not to say or if I think you’re speaking in code I’m going to kill you and she’s going to hear it. But you pick up the phone.”

  Nissing tapped the phone with the muzzle of his gun. Then he leaned back in his folding chair, and Barbara, in hers, facing him, picked up the receiver. The dial tone made her jump a little. Her eyes followed the phone cord across the carpeted floor of her cell to the locked door. The arrangement was the same as it had been the first day, when she’d called her supervisor at the library. She heard Nissing breathing, heard a cooing on the skylight above her.

  “And you dial, of course. Three one four—”

  She dialed the area code and paused, listening to the longdistance surf.

  “You simply couldn’t live with him anymore.”

  She dialed the rest of Duane’s number.

  “You lean back in my leather chair. It’s already a favorite.”

  Duane answered.

  “Hi Duane, it’s Barbara’s Probst.”

  Nissing raised his eyebrows sharply at the slip. He held a monitor plug in his ear with the index finger of his left hand. In his other hand he held the gun. The safety catch, a metal flag, was off. In five days she’d learned when it was and when it wasn’t.

  “She just went out,” Duane was saying. “Can you call back in an hour?”

  Nissing nodded.

  “Yes, of course. I’ll call back. How is everything?”

  Nissing smiled with approval.

  “Fine,” Duane said. “Nothing much changes. Things are pretty good. I, uh—you’re in New York?”

  “Yes. I’m in New York. I guess Luisa must have spoken to her father. I—” The gun was shaking its muzzle. “I’ll call you back in an hour, then. You can tell her I called.”

  “I will. She’ll be glad.”

  “Thanks, Duane.”

  Nissing took the receiver from her hand. “You’re disappointed,” he said. “You’d psyched yourself. Your hand stays poised, reflectively, on the phone, and while your adrenaline is up you decide to make that call to Martin you’ve been dreading. If it goes well, you’ll call Audrey, too. You feel sorry for Martin, not having your address. He’ll want to know where not to send letters.”