The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  West County was slipping, a little, in public opinion.

  Meanwhile Chief Jammu was rising. Even though she’d been in the news for months, she hadn’t really been a phenomenon. Like so much of the ephemera of American popular culture, from funk rhythms to rollerskates, her popularity began to blossom only after sinking roots in the inner-city black community. It was in the ghetto that the first tank tops stenciled with the Chief’s image were marketed. It was in the Delmar paraphernalia shops that the first Jammu posters were sold (she was fully clad), in the windowless unisex hair salons on Jefferson Avenue that kinks were straightened and bangs pulled back to form the stark, easy-care “Jammuji,” and in the studios of KATZ-Radio that Titus Klaxon’s irreverent “Gentrifyin’ Blues” began its climb to the top of local charts.

  But the Jammusiasm spread. It spread through the young people, the high-school and college kids. Somehow the Chief always found time to play to yet another crowd of young people. She spoke at concerts and basketball tournaments, at science fairs and Boy Scout expositions, at student art shows and Washington University debates. Her messages were contingent on the circumstances. Science is important, she would seem to say. Sports are important. Boy Scouts are important. Chess is important. Civil rights are important…Wherever she went there were cameras and reporters, and it was they who sent her message to the youths: I am important.

  The rest of the city, the upper two-thirds of the demographic pyramid, respected and admired its youthful underpinnings. Youth got around. Youth knew the score. Youth was beauty, and beauty youth. That was all that mature St. Louisans needed to know before joining the parade. Jammu became the star of a hitherto glamourless city. Earlier, the city’s “stars” had been talented older men or married female politicians; following their nightly movements hardly thrilled. But Jammu was a nova, a solid-gold personality, as bright (in the eyes of St. Louis) as a Katharine Hepburn, a Peggy Fleming, a Jackie or a Di. She wasn’t pretty, but she was always where the action was. The typical middle-aged man of the suburbs could hardly help loving her.

  This man was Jack DuChamp.

  Jack’s idea, propounded mainly during coffee breaks, was that Jammu would win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate as soon as she was eligible, and would handily beat whatever Republican opposed her. He said it made sense. She was a good cop, but she was obviously more than that. He said he wasn’t sure he’d vote for her, in the eventuality. But darn it. He might.

  If he did, it would be a million-dollar vote. Jack DuChamp possessed a God-given aptitude for calling elections. If you checked the results of all the state, local and national elections of the thirty years Jack had been voting, and if you read the voting histories of all St. Louis County residents, and if you hunted for the closest correlation, Jack’s was it. With an instinctive jerk he’d yanked the Kennedy lever in 1960. After a last-minute struggle with himself he’d gone Republican in the very close ’84 senatorial election. Bond issues, special propositions, referenda, Crestwood city-council votes—in every case his ballot turned out to be the list of winners.

  He knew his record was good. He bragged about it, sometimes even staked small sums of money on the strength of it. What he didn’t realize was that it was perfect. Perfect, that is, in every election in which he’d bothered to vote. And the frequency with which he’d voted (rather less than half the time) bore a suspicious resemblance to the average voter turnout for the average election over the years.

  On the merger issue, Jack was undecided. He figured he still had a few months to weigh the options. If the vote had been held on Valentine’s Day he supposed he would have voted for the merger, although now that Martin Probst was on TV opposing it he knew he had to do some serious thinking. As the typical voter, he faced this task with little relish.

  Sam Norris had no patience with public opinion. Constitutional processes were all very fine when only policy was at stake. But fire had to be fought with fire.

  There were three orders of actualization.

  Traffic regulations, in the lowest order, you trusted to the police. This was the province of modular rationality, of right and wrong, granted the requisite fudge factors of “yellow light” and so forth at the upper limits, at the blurring of law and a more rarefied authority.

  This authority warred, in the second order, with its counterpart—call it politics, call it self-interest, call it clouds, call it what you would—and floated in the atmosphere. Public opinion had its place in this mezzanine.

  In the highest order, planetary law and playful airborne strife were subsumed and transcended. Call it power, call it plasma, call it cryogenic circuitry. Agencies, in any event, no longer obeyed grim constitutional dictates or the inertial tuggings of the policy dynamic, but flowed without resistance, the energy of reason but a corollary of the deeper quantum-mechanical numen and free to run backwards in time. A button was pushed and twenty million dead people unburned themselves, stood up, stopped, and went on living.

  In short, Sam Norris smelled it. Conspiracy. He’d smelled it from Day One, he’d sniffed it: something was up. But no one else could smell it. Even Black and Nilson were unenthusiastic, and the rest were even more obtuse. Good-hearted people, they trusted the Soviets, they trusted the Sandinistas, and they trusted Jammu. They wanted to believe in niceness. Prime example was Martin Probst, and Norris was not without affection for the boy. He was a classic man-woman, a champion of the hearth and so of all those lovely side effects to which Norris returned after a long day at the center of the universe. But the universe would be a mighty poor place if every man were Martin Probst. It would grind to a standstill. Smell the flowers. Watch a sunset. Read a book.

  There was a conspiracy, but it was difficult. The fact consoled Norris. All great ideas were difficult. All great ideas were also simple, as this conspiracy was simple: Jammu had St. Louis by the balls and she wouldn’t let go. This fact was true. And yet it was difficult.

  Jammu was not acting communist. (Here was further proof of the philosophical insufficiency of public life.) Asha Hammaker did not act communist either. The one was a tough cop and moderate Democrat, the other had a solid non-socialistic profile, even taking into account her transfer of stock to the city.

  Asha’s engagement to Hammaker predated Jammu’s arrival, and the marriage would sustain no causal connection with Jammu’s rise to power. (Here was proof of the insufficiency of cause and effect.)

  The elaborate bomb scare at the stadium, the expense of it, made no sense whatsoever. (Proof of the insufficiency of ordinary human reason.)

  The FBI would not investigate. They claimed to have no evidence of wrongdoing or subversion, and no orders from the police or from Washington. (Proof of the insufficiency of the ways of the mezzanine.)

  St. Louis lacked the international strategic value that would make it a likely target of the evil empire. In October Norris, on a hunch, had pulled strings and persuaded the DOD to audit the protection of defense secrets at Ripleycorp and Wismer, and the auditors had given both companies high marks. Assistant Undersecretary Borges had said he wished all his contractors protected national security type secrets as well as the St. Louis firms did. It was possible that Jammu was waiting until she had control of those companies and could simply crack the Classified seals herself, but Norris knew the politics of espionage. If her employers were after secrets, they would expect at least a few small payments before continuing to finance the operation. There was no evidence of espionage, none. The mystery remained: why St. Louis? (Proof of the irrelevance of Newtonian space-time.)

  Why Ripley and Meisner and Murphy and the other traitors to Civic Progress had done what they’d done was inexplicable—apart from the fact that they were bastards. They were still businessmen. Could money itself (that noble gas) be subject to the bio-logic of this day and age?

  The conspiracy had taken off too quickly. It was in the air on the day Jammu took office. Norris had performed an extremely thorough inquiry into the Police Board—or
rather, into those members who didn’t owe him fealty—and found no evidence of foul play. Jammu’s selection had not been rigged from outside. She must have been at least somewhat surprised. But the conspiracy sprang to life as soon as she arrived. It must have existed beforehand. This confirmed an axiom of Norris’s alchemy of the spirit: individuals were vectors, not origins. But it left the question: Who had planted the seeds? Ripley? Wesley?

  It made no sense. The conspiracy was a substanceless region of pungency, maddening him. It had no flanks, no promising point of entry, promised nothing within. But it was instinct that had won Norris his silver stars in the war, and instinct told him how to pursue his theory now.

  Working his federal connections to the bone, he got his hands on the USIA’s list of Indian visa recipients and other India-originated entries to the U.S. since June 1. It came on a diskette, delivered by messenger.

  His private investigator, Herb Pokorny, specialized in detective telecommunications. Pokorny lisped as badly as platypuses would if they could talk, he’d run into all sorts of legal and linguistic obstacles while snooping in Bombay, but when he was working in St. Louis he was a good man. He tapped into airline ticketing records, into hotel reservations, car rentals, credit card and telephone and utility accounts. What emerged was a list of 3,700 Indians now living in the St. Louis area who hadn’t been there eight months ago. Even after children under eighteen were eliminated, the list had 1,400 entries. But Pokorny didn’t despair. Ordinary foreign immigrants left a signature on the records entirely different from the signature of spies, and while a few conspiring individuals might slip through his net, most wouldn’t. By mid-February the list contained fewer than a hundred names.

  Pokorny’s operatives began a program of systematic surveillance. Prime targets were Jammu, Ripley, Wesley, Hammaker and Meisner. They paid especially close attention to Jammu’s office and apartment. (The apartment, they discovered, had an anti-break-in system for which Jammu appeared to change the magnetic card combinations daily. The good news was, she had something to hide. The bad news was, she was hiding it well.) All visitors to the parties under surveillance were identified and catalogued.

  A net of connections began to emerge. The beast which Norris had been smelling for months began to take on shape.

  Deft fieldwork by Pokorny turned up the source of the cordite used in the stadium bomb scare. The theft had occurred on August 7 in the warehouse of a blasting company based in Eureka, Missouri. The timing pointed plainly, for a change, to Jammu.

  Then on February 15 Pokorny solved the mystery of Asha Hammaker’s early engagement. Speaking by phone with his brother Albert, who ran a detective bureau in New Orleans, Pokorny happened to bring up the mystery, how she’d already been engaged by the previous April. Albert chuckled and said: shrewd lady; in that very same April she’d been engaged to Potter Rutherford, the reigning sultan of securities in New Orleans. Immediately Pokorny got on the horn to all his nephews and cousins and uncles at their respective agencies across the country. By mid-evening, five of them had called back with corroborative evidence.

  Pokorny phoned Norris, lisping liberally. “We’ve cracked it, Mythter Norrith. Asha got herthelf engaged to the motht eligible thun of a bitch in every town from Bothton to Theeattle.”

  Norris clenched his fist in triumph. So that was it! But the fist came unclenched, his cosmic triumph giving way to injured local pride: if Jammu had been willing to go anywhere, then chance alone had brought her to St. Louis.

  16

  Probst was glad to have landed in the thick of the anti-merger crusade, but he wasn’t glad enough to be willing to act as director of Vote No, Inc. Directing a campaign was an endless, thankless job. John Holmes had directed the Prop One fight a few years back, and towards the end he was putting in more than sixty hours a week as he attended to the last-minute minutiae singlehandedly (he did the voice-overs for television ads, personally fetched the Kentucky Fried dinners for phone-a-thon volunteers), because when the heat was on no responsible director could delegate responsibility, or even find anyone to delegate it to. The failure of Prop One had brought Holmes many pats on the back, many dewy-eyed shows of gratitude. (“You deserve a month of R and R in Acapulco, old buddy.”) A week later, his work was utterly forgotten. In the partisan world, dedication earned a man a salary, and success a sinecure. In the nonpartisan world, the world of Municipal Growth and its causes, the sole reward was the opportunity to run the next campaign. This was what happened to John Holmes. Probst made him the executive director of Vote No, Inc.

  Even so Probst wasn’t safe. When the campaign grew more demanding and the volunteers quit, he’d still be around and would probably get touched for some particularly odious job, such as recruiting new volunteers. Caution dictated that he determine the boundaries of his role right away. He decided to see himself as a costly and essentially immobile fixture. He saw himself as an elephant.

  Elephants weren’t very articulate. Probst did not participate in strategy sessions at Vote No, Inc. Elephants didn’t zip around, didn’t retrieve shotgunned ducks; Probst would not run errands for Holmes. Elephants were heavy, however, and Probst agreed to trample whatever influential needed trampling. When practicable, he did this by telephone, in the evenings, from his choice desk at Vote No headquarters on Bonhomme Avenue in Clayton. Often, though, he would rise majestically from his desk, nod across the room to Holmes (if Holmes wondered where he was going, he had to stand up and follow and ask, because Probst would not stop) and drive, at low speeds, to the home of the mayor of Richmond Heights, or the chancellor of Washington University, or the president of Seven-Up.

  Since the night in January when Municipal Growth decided to fight it, Probst had become much more convinced of the wrongness of the merger. The driving economic force behind it—speculation—offended him profoundly. The North Side boom was built on paper, on being in the middle, on buying low and hoping, later, to sell high. The spirit of the renaissance was the spirit of the eighties: office space, luxury space, parking space, planned not by master builders but by financial analysts. Probst knew the kind of thing. And now that Westhaven had failed he could criticize.

  He’d always spoken well when facing microphones, and he was at his best when he was angry. He alone, of all the faces on television, dared to mention the party aspects of the referendum. He alone employed elementary arguments. He described in calm detail the syndicate in which he’d chosen not to participate. (Grudgingly, the day after his statement, Mayor Wesley confirmed Urban Hope’s existence.) He stated that the referendum had been drafted far too hastily to allow a realistic assessment of its consequences. What was the rush? Why not postpone the election until a thorough study had been conducted? He stated that countyites should not trust the word of popular political figures. Did they believe that Jammu and Wesley cared personally about the quality of their lives? If so, where was the evidence? It was the Deplorable Question, the charm that silenced politics. There was nothing the reporters could do but change the subject.

  Afterwards, while showering or eating, Probst would feel his heart leap a little: he was an anarchist!

  John Holmes didn’t complain about his approach. The phone polls revealed a steady swing of public opinion towards the Vote No camp, and since it was too early for anything besides Probst’s appearances to have made an impact, too early for massive advertising and door-to-dooring to have begun, the swing could be attributed only to Probst. Still, Probst did not feel loved. He was something apart, the self-styled elephant. He didn’t fraternize with the volunteers as he once might have done, never made late-evening doughnut runs. He sat at his choice desk and read Time and Engineering News-Record and the city papers. The polls had proved his value and he was learning—it was never too late to learn—to ask for what he wanted (a choice desk and no responsibilities), to claim the rewards of his unique position and not feel so damn guilty about it.

  He was glad to have two full-time concerns. His days he spent at hi
s office, his dinners he ate at Miss Hulling’s or First National Frank & Crust, often with his vice president Cal Markham, and his evenings he spent in the rented space on Bonhomme Avenue. The Sherwood Drive house—he thought of it as the Sherwood Drive house now, as if he’d lost custody of it and only visited to sleep—was nearly always empty. His days were full. Barbara had judged rightly. He didn’t really miss her, not after the first week. When people asked about her, he said she was on vacation in New York and let them wonder. It was in her absence that he’d learned to follow her example and say no to what he didn’t want and to wear his crown unabashedly. He could have done without her weekly phone calls.

  SHE: You’re home.

  HE: ???

  SHE: I called earlier and there was no answer.

  HE: I wasn’t home.

  SHE: That’s what I said. You weren’t home.

  HE: No.

  SHE: You’re still angry, aren’t you?

  HE: What’s to be angry about?

  SHE: Well, I mean is there any point in my calling?

  HE: I wonder that myself. But it’s pretty quiet around here.

  SHE: Do you see Luisa?

  HE: We ate dinner on Thursday. She’s healthy. She’s into Stanford.

  SHE: I know. It’s funny to think. Have you spoken with Audrey?

  HE: They’re incommunicado, or whatever the expression. Rolf. gets to her first. It’s very complicated.

  SHE: So he’s still trying to screw you? Well of course why wouldn’t he be.