The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  The door to his inner sanctum stood ajar, its polished surface reflecting the light rectangle of one of his windows. He pushed it open and walked in.

  General Norris was sitting at his desk. He was reading some sort of large-format technical journal. He flipped it onto the desk and looked at Probst. Probst looked at the floor, but the General’s features, the grooves on his forehead, at his eyes and around his mouth, his disappointment, had left an imprint on his retinas. He sighed. “You have a thing about showing up on other people’s property, don’t you?”

  “You mind?”

  “No-o-o—” Probst set his briefcase on the floor. He wasn’t used to being received in his own office. He did mind that.

  “You probably got work you want to do,” Norris said. “I won’t keep you. I just wanted to ask why you done what you done.”

  Probst looked out the window at the stark precinct house. “I think the papers will state my case pretty clearly.”

  “Oh, your case, yes. Yes indeed. You’ve always got a case. You know something, Martin? I never seen anybody like you before. I’ve seen a lot of self-interest and a lot of cynicism and a lot of weakness, but you—you’re the feller with the finger in the dike who somebody offers you a sandwich and you take your finger out to eat it. And you know the water’s gonna drown you too. You’re really something.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “Yes, there was. Like to give you a piece of good advice.” The General stood and rolled his magazine into a tube. “Call it a sixth sense, but I ain’t giving up on you just yet. I’d like you to stay in one piece for what’s gonna happen pretty soon.”

  “The advice.”

  “Don’t be snippy with me. I’m civil, you be civil. My advice is, do whatever you have to in private with that woman but don’t make it public.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Don’t make it public.” With his magazine Norris tapped a black plastic binder on Probst’s desk. “I’m leaving you a copy of the interim report we sent the IRS and FBI yesterday, and you can judge for yourself. Maybe you’ll get the idea of handing it over to her. I hope you don’t. But I can tell you we’ll find out if you do and it won’t hurt the investigation any but it’ll sure as hell hurt you. Don’t be any stupider than you been already.”

  The General left.

  Probst read the label on the binder. Preliminary Report on the Indian Presence in St. Louis. Commissioned by S. S. Norris. H. B. Pokorny & Sons. He riffled through the pages and saw lists, transcripts, financial breakdowns, in all about 250 pages, a bulk that scared him. If this was all make-believe, their imaginations must have been working in very high gear. He decided to read one page. He opened to what looked like a Who’s Who section.

  MADAN, Bhikubai Devi, born 12/12/61, Bombay. Prostitute. Residing Airport Marriott Hotel, St. Louis, 9/19—present. Visa #3310984067 (tourist) exprd 11/14. Indian psprt #7826212M. Documented encounters: Jammu, 10/8, 10/22, 10/24, 11/6 (am & pm), 11/14, 11/24, 11/27, 12/2, 12/12, 12/14, 12/29, 1/17, 1/21, 2/20, 2/27, 3/15 (see chronology, Appendix C). Ripley, 50 + encounters beginning 9/19 through present. A probable heroin addict, Madan would appear to be the primary and perhaps sole liaison between Jammu and Ripley. (See Transcript 14, Appendix B.) Justiciable offenses: possession of Class 1 narcotics, violation of visa (Sec. 221 [c], Act of 1952, 8 U.S.C. [c]), prostitution. Criminal record in India: not available.

  The phone was ringing, and he read no more. He could guess who was calling.

  “It takes guts to do what Martin did,” Buzz Wismer said.

  Friday had passed without Martin’s having backed away at all from the severe pro-merger stance he’d adopted on Thursday. It was Saturday now, and Martin had been selected at the eleventh hour to deliver the keynote speech at the pro-merger rally to be held on the Mall downtown at three o’clock.

  “It takes real guts,” Buzz repeated. With a spoon he depressed the cheese skin on the French onion soup Bev had taken out of the oven. He wanted lunch, but lunch was molten and dangerous. The single-serving earthenware crock was too hot to touch. “Yes sir,” he said, pinching his napkin in hungry frustration. “It takes real guts.”

  Bev cut the cheese strands out from under her raised spoon with a stoned-wheat cracker and took her first bite. Her mouth slackened at the corners. He heard the unwillingness in her swallow. She coughed, explosively, and gagged. Something in her throat. He leaned across the table to slap her on the back but she waved him away, coughing and shaking her head. When she’d recovered, she picked up her crock with a pot holder and set it in the sink. She sat down and broke a cracker in two.

  “You shouldn’t have made yourself any if you weren’t going to eat it,” Buzz said.

  “It takes guts all right,” she said. “Now that he’s done it, you can do it too. Right? Now that he’s done the hard part. You can follow suit. It would take guts not to. Wouldn’t it.” She’d broken each half cracker into halves. Four equal squares lay on her placemat. She took another cracker from the basket. “You can follow suit. If he leads clubs, you play a club. Just follow suit. Except for the fun part. Barbara made that easier for him. Didn’t she.”

  She swept the eight squares of cracker into a cupped hand and went and dropped them in the wastebasket. Buzz managed a bite of soup, shuttling it around inside his mouth before it could burn anything too badly. He took a gulp of Guinness. Bev sat. “I’d like to help you, Buzz, I honestly would. I’m your helpmeet. But there’s no one in sight to take me off your hands. Not for miles around.”

  “Maybe you should lie down.”

  “I just got up.”

  “Oh.”

  Once he’d emptied the crock, he got hers from the sink and ate most of her soup, too. She served him a large slice of Grand Marnier-impregnated Bundt cake for dessert. (Her cooking was too rich for him, but it gave her something to do, measuring the substantial pounds of butter, the substantial cupfuls of grated cheese.) He put the crocks in the dishwasher, making a mental note to check after the dishwasher had run to see if it had actually cleaned the crusted cheese from the rims. (Their latest maid had quit after six days.) It was one o’clock. He gargled with Listerine and put on a leather jacket and called to Bev that he was leaving for the office. She came to the front door with a glass of sherry on ice.

  “I guess I’ll see you when I see you,” she said. “Guess I’ll be seeing you around. Be seeing you. See you later.”

  He smiled. “I won’t be gone that long.”

  There was no practical reason for Buzz to copy Martin and make public statements in support of the referendum. The campaign had for all intents and purposes come to an end at noon on Thursday. It was now just a matter of waiting another nine days until it was official. Nevertheless, Buzz wanted to do something. In the first place, it never hurt one’s public image and executive credibility to be on the winning side. In the second place, Martin had done a brave thing, and Buzz felt that giving him his full support was the least he could do to make it up to him (“it” was a litany of shadowy, late-night offenses). In the third place, there was Asha. As he drove up the road to headquarters he saw a cream-colored Rolls-Royce idling in the middle of the vast empty parking lot, and as he coasted up to it he could almost hear the news: Edmund “Buzz” Wismer, chairman of the board of Wismer Aeronautics, today stunned the city by announcing his intention to move his operations, based for the last forty years in suburban St. Louis County, to downtown St. Louis. The announcement, following on the heels of a related announcement by Wismer’s longtime friend and confidant Martin Probst, comes at a time when Asha was growing impatient with him. Her engine was running, after all, and he wondered whether if he’d come a few minutes later she still would have been here. From the smile on her internationally renowned face, however, Wismer can tell she was glad she’d waited.

  The countdown to Election Day had entered the single figures. On the whole, Probst’s former allies at Municipal Growth and Vote No had shown commendable understanding and
patience with him, at least to judge by their silence. Partly, no doubt, they were recalling his refusal to sully himself with the practicalities of the campaign. They wouldn’t miss his labors, and he’d made himself so unlikable (he knew this) that not many would miss him personally either. Beyond that, St. Louisans naturally respected well-reasoned changes of heart, even surprising and hurtful changes, and perhaps especially in the case of a man with a reputation so unimpeachable. People were used to Probst by now. Their latest reaction, as he imagined it, amounted to an Oh jeez, Martin Probst, he’s done it again. As usual, events had conspired to keep his actions in character.

  By Sunday night there remained only one last unpleasant task. He had to clean out his desk at Vote No headquarters and turn in his keys. He’d put it off as long as was seemly, and then a little longer still; it was midnight by the time he left the house on Sherwood Drive.

  The night was warm. He pulled on a switch to lower all four of the Lincoln’s windows, allowing in air that had risen off soft, recuperating lawns and banks of daffodils and jonquils and snowdrops. Spring had come all at once and in full force, having sent no red herrings in February or January. This spring, the city had earned.

  Probst had read Pokorny’s document cover to cover, and he hadn’t been afraid to test Jammu on every point. These were serious charges. She understood that she had to answer them, and she did, over IHOP pancakes Friday morning, over a dinner at Tony’s on Saturday. He studied her for the least sign of vagueness or bluff. He observed none.

  “You have to understand the context, Martin. Devi Madan is a twenty-three-year-old who had the misfortune, sometime in September, of falling into the hands of a very experienced and unscrupulous abuser of young women. The first thing Ripley did was take away her passport, supposedly for safekeeping. He installed her in the Airport Marriott, and he left her there. Even after her passport stamp expired he wouldn’t let her go home to Bombay. That’s where I came in. As Joe Feig pointed out in his feature last month, a good many Indians have immigrated to St. Louis, and one of the reasons they’re coming here appears to be me. Families that want to leave India for America find out that St. Louis has welcomed at least one Indian, namely me, in a big way. So then they come here and immediately they find themselves in all sorts of trouble, some of it with the law but most of it with the customs and language and institutions and impersonality of the place. And in India there’s a very old tradition of intercession. At any agency you go to in Bombay you’ll find mediators who for a fee which is sometimes reasonable but usually not will fix things for you with the bureaucrats inside. That’s not how it works in St. Louis, though, so to all these Indians here, especially the ones like Devi who really are in bad shape, I’ve been the next best thing to a paid mediator. Not to compare myself to Mrs. Gandhi, but she also used to devote time every week to hearing the grievances of ordinary people. It was a Mogul tradition she reactivated, in her regal way. Devi certainly isn’t the only one I’ve had to take care of, although she is one of the ones I’ve seen the most of, up until a few weeks ago. I suppose Pokorny doesn’t mention that she’s finally been able to fly home to Bombay, after I did everything but have Ripley arrested as a thief.”

  “Including blackmailing him?”

  She took the question seriously. “I’m not a blackmailer, Martin. On the other hand I’m not as pure as you are. I can tell you exactly to what extent Devi figured in some of the moves Ripley made.”

  “Save it.”

  In deference to Norris, he hadn’t let her see the actual report. (Not that she’d shown any interest in seeing it.) He’d sliced it in two, lengthwise, with Carmen’s paper cutter, and disposed of the halves in two trash cans, one at work and one at home.

  There were no lights in the windows of the office on Bonhomme Avenue. Probst parked, took the elevator, and let himself in, turning on the lights. The place was dead. It looked deserted for more than just the night.

  He began to load sheaves of yellow legal-sized paper into his briefcase, the drafts of his old speeches. As souvenirs he took some Vote No pencils, an SX-70 snapshot of him at his desk (working hard, his head bowed), and a copy of every document he’d had a hand in writing. He took down the picture of Luisa Duane had given him. He left all the drawers half open as a sign. Then he sat down to write John Holmes a note to leave with the keys.

  Dear John,

  “Don’t bother.”

  Probst jumped in his chair and turned to see Holmes himself, unshaven, in shirtsleeves, standing at his shoulder.

  “Sorry if I scared you.”

  “It’s all right,” Probst said. “I—”

  “Yeah. I went out for a drink.” Holmes took a seat on his desk, leaving one foot on the floor. “Pretty quiet here, isn’t it?”

  “It’s late.”

  “A week ago there were still plenty of people around after midnight, even on a Sunday.” Holmes smiled. “We’ve lost a lot of volunteers in the last three days.”

  “My fault?”

  “Your fault. Evidently.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to lay any guilt trip on you. But in some way you might be pleased to know it meant a lot to have you in our corner here.”

  “Thanks, John.”

  “And for purely selfish reasons, I’m loath to complain. You and I are both off the hook now.”

  “How so?”

  “This should be the last campaign I’ll be asked to run, and the last one you’ll be asked to work for.”

  Grateful for the joke, Probst said, “You think anyone suspects we planned it this way?”

  Holmes looked into the fluorescent lights. “I’ll take your keys now, Martin.”

  Soft snores made their way into Rolf’s ears from under the pillows to his right. An unfamiliar clock radio was blinking at him, and a framed photo of middle-aged parents cast its benignancy upon the bed. He’d surfaced suddenly, his blue somnolence vanishing like liquid oxygen as he shed it. He was wide awake. A divan and a love seat loomed beyond the bunched bedspread and its lacy fringe, in the living end of this living room-cum-bedroom. It was too dark to make out the words on the piece of embroidery hanging by the kitchenette door, but he remembered its message: Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life. That was the kind of girl Tammy was. Rolf had revealed to her that the feminine orgasm was a mere figment of fashion-magazine editors’ imaginations. True, perhaps a certain sort of woman did feel something like…Tammy wasn’t that sort of girl. She’d believed him. She’d found it to be true.

  The air of the room tasted clear and clean. All things considered, Rolf was well pleased with his condition. Gelatron, and now Houstonics as well, were his. And the level of indebtedness was so low it made him blush. The Texas immovables of Gelatron and Houstonics had been sold in a highly favorable tax context, while the companies moved into Ripley-owned property in Saint Louis, thus avoiding any need to sell out in Saint Louis and take the tax punishment there. The corporation had grown painlessly. Even Martin Probst’s conversion to the pro-city point of view could not diminish Rolf’s pleasure in the maneuvers—because all at once, as if he’d awakened from deep sleep, Rolf didn’t care a jot about what Martin did. He could have his Barbie back now (if he could find her, tee hee). Rolf was well pleased. It was not just any man who could fund a sexual theme park and sample the wares of the man down the street. Nor could just any man have cut his losses so neatly when at length he grew sick of it and shut it down. Rolf was even more admired for his timely bailouts than for his shrewd acquisitions. Devi had left his life—at a cost to the contingencies fund of nothing but a few hundred dollars in cash and ten minutes of his secretary’s time spent reporting the theft of his plastic. And for once Jammu had been a dashed good sport about things, informing him on Wednesday that Devi was addicted to drugs and reminding him that as an illegal alien she had no rights. It was a likely thing, of course, that Jammu had finally realized Devi was stealing her secrets. Jammu wasn’t one to perform selfless favors.

  Now Tam
my, on the other hand…She stirred, rolling onto her side. A delectable boobie looked Rolf in the eye. She was a stewardess with Ozark. One of Rolf’s goals in life was to take a girl in the bathroom of a commercial airliner at 30,000 feet, and he was sure that he could now look forward to fulfilling that goal. There was much to look forward to in life, and little to regret. Ripleycorp today stood on the firmest financial footing it had known in twenty years, footing that would only get firmer in the future, now that Ripley had replaced Wismer and General Syn as the pacesetting industrial giant in Saint Louis. His profit motive had lost none of its potency. In fact, if he didn’t fall asleep soon he’d have to wake Tammy up; she’d be too impressed to be cranky.

  The most splendid thing about making money, of course, was the leverage it gave a chap playing the morality market. Devi had lived high on the hog off Rolf’s munificence, and she knew it. He’d bought her many fine things. She could scarcely have done better, and ever so easily have done worse. It was a general phenomenon. When he looked back on all the dears he’d shared bliss with in forty years, he could say to himself, in full candor, that he’d been square with every one of them.

  “Jack. How are you.”

  “Pretty dang good.” It was Thursday evening, a week since Probst’s announcement. “Just got back from the Maundy Thursday service at our church. Beautiful service. The new choirmaster has a real sense of taste, you should come sometime. I was never much of a church booster really, but I tell you, in the last few years—Do you still go to that little Lutheran church there on—where was it?”

  “No,” Probst said. “Not since I stopped living with my parents.”