The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

9

Titus Klaxon and his Steamcats, local men who’d made the big time and beat it to LA, were playing an exclusive gig at Shea’s Lounge on Vandeventer Avenue, an event of a must-see nature. RC and Annie left their son Robbie with Clarence and Kate’s kids and let Clarence drive the four of them through a white-out winter storm and park in a vacancy whose identity and ownership (a lawn? a lot? a street?) were concealed by a foot of snow. This was the second storm in two days and still the sky was not exhausted. Passing the mute bouncer, RC watched Annie’s glasses grow foggy and blind her. She removed them and smiled, and he kissed her and squeezed her shoulders. On the darkened dais somebody was playing a fast beat on the high hat, which meant the show was nowhere close to starting. Ernie Shea, a friend of Clarence’s, ushered them all to a well-situated table and personally fetched a pitcher of Hammaker. The highhatter ceased. RC and Clarence, Kate and Annie all talked for a while about everything and nothing, like in the old days, a double date, except there hadn’t ever been old days like this. RC was ten and Annie two when Kate and Clarence married.

Soon enough Clarence walked his chair back a couple feet for a one-on-one with RC. “So, Off-sir,” he said. “How’s life?”

RC reflected. The main thing in his life right now was that he and Annie were getting squeezed out of their apartment by their landlord Sloane. There were new ordinances to keep the rent halfway reasonable, but Sloane was charging fees, doing noisy nighttime renovation in vacant apartments, and offering a tidy sum to anybody willing to move out. Already there’d been a lot of takers.

Clarence sniffed up a cigar and clamped down. “Not a hundred percent wonderful?” How bloodshot his eyes were was visible even in the low orange light and smoke. “What could be bad, Off-sir?”

“You interested, Clarence, or you just making fun of me?”

“I’m interested, Off-sir.”

“Then stop calling me that.” These Q&A sessions made RC nervous when Annie was right there in front of them. Clarence had an ulterior concern, as in, How’s life treating my little sister? “I’m fine,” RC said. “Except we’re getting squeezed out of our place.”

“That a fact?” Clarence puffed.

“Sloane was up on Saturday talking to Annie. He said supposedly he couldn’t afford not to.”

“Sloanes’ll be Sloanes.” Clarence’s eyes looked like it hurt for them to see. “What else is new.”

It wasn’t a question, but RC answered it. “Annie got that job, you know. I aced my communications test.”

“So you two all set to pay that nice high rent.”

RC drank his beer. The players moving at the back of the dais wore fishnet shirts and tank tops, while outside it was blizzarding to kill derelicts. It was no fun, RC thought, to hang around with a pessimist who was seeing his predictions confirmed, and that was what Clarence was, exactly that. It made RC want to apologize for the world, for all the bad things in it. He could live with the troubles and expenses of his life, but watching them match up with Clarence’s low expectations just killed him.

Yesterday RC had actually called up Struthers, Alderman Rondo, to ask what could be done about Sloane. Smooth, smoother, smoothest, Struthers said there was replacement housing in the works, but RC asked who’d want to live in a project if they could help it, even it was a “good” project for “good” folks, like Struthers said, which was probably a lie, one way or another, knowing projects and knowing Struthers. Struthers said the new replacement housing fund would pay three months’ rent, not until February or March, but you could borrow on the chit. And RC said, “So what? We live three months in a motel. Then what? There be places to live in this city three months from now if everybody like us is in the same boat?” And Struthers said, “It’ll all work out in the end, brother. Nobody’s getting permanently shafted anymore.” Struthers, the exact opposite of Clarence, made RC hope the worst would happen. Everything was shiny as a dime in the world of Ronald Struthers, now the richest man RC knew or had ever met.

Annie and Kate were looking at snapshots out of Kate’s purse.

“We knocked down a building on Biddle on Tuesday, RC,” Clarence said, putting on his anecdotal face, the narrowed eyes, the lingering cigar. “Tuesday and Wednesday. Place was stripped as they ever is, pipes, fuse boxes, hardware, doors, and a lot of the brick. Some nice old doors, I suspect. Anyway, we made sure there wasn’t a thing worth taking or leaving, and we let loose with the ball, and what do you know if there ain’t a little basement we overlooked. One of these real old setups, dirt floor, used to keep potatoes and pickles and coal down there, turn of the century. I mean, just a little nothing hole, and what should come crawling out but a family of three.”

Clarence gave RC the awful smile he’d been smiling lately, that no-surprise-to-me. “Little lady not much older than Stanly, got a three-year-old, and a baby on her tit, sucking right while we talked.” He paused again to assure himself of RC’s attention. “These things affect me, RC. They still affect me. I backed off with the ball for a sec and talked to her. She come up in August from Mississippi, town called Carthage, never been to St. Louis for more than visits, but looking for the father of her kids. One thing leads to another, and come December she’s living in a coal cellar and eating soup-line, too dumb or too shy to do any better, and living, at the present, in a coal cellar. I said I’m real sorry, little girl, but we got a job here, and where you people gonna go? She didn’t know. She didn’t know. Off-sir. Now, not that people should be living in coal cellars. It’s that I was tearing down to make room for office space. It’s people like this exist, and there’s a winter coming on.”

RC knew Clarence. “She back in Carthage?”

“I can only vouch as to her getting on the bus.” Suddenly Clarence sat up straight, like a pointer. “Lookee here.” He nodded, and across the room, speak of the devil, was Ronald Struthers. He was wearing turtleneck and corduroy and his gold chain with the big clenched-fist medallion, and stood talking with Ernie Shea. Both faced the dais. Behind the curtains a preliminary quiet had fallen. Points of light gleamed on the waiting trap set, on stands holding saxes and trumpets without the mouthpieces. The lounge was full and restless, the smoke so thick it would have to rain tar pretty soon.

“Ooooo,” Clarence said, very unimpressed. “What’s he doing here?”

“Maybe come for the music,” RC answered, with sarcasm but also a little apprehension, caught as he was in a feud that was not of his making. Struthers and Shea moved towards the dais on a political assembly line, pausing at each table to let Struthers cop a handshake, grin and flatter. They ducked behind the curtains and became two lumps with feet. RC moved his chair back to the table and touched Annie’s shoulder.

“Mm?” she said, smiling at a remark of Kate’s.

“You see Struthers?”

“Should I want to?” She turned back to Kate.

RC filled his glass, he filled the ladies’ glasses, reached and filled Clarence’s too, and winked at a waitress for a fresh pitcher. He’d pay for this drinking at 6:00 tomorrow morning when he caught the bus to the Academy. Annie needed the car now. He’d be parched and shivering, and the new snow sharp as filings.

Steamcats parted the curtains, taking their places. The drummer, a bare-chested Rastafarian or Rastafarian look-alike, knocked off a few self-important fragments of rhythm, adjusted his chair, flipped a stick, and played a rustle on the snare, building to a roll. Out came Titus, fatter than ever, in a silver sequined tunic and a feathered headdress, Indian. He bobbed to the assembled guests, to scattered applause. But then, with a cautionary wink to the crowd, he stepped back and lunged behind the curtains again.

“He’s the cool one,” Annie whispered.

Clarence was chewing his cigar and looking ill.

Making their way through the players now were Ernie Shea and Ronald Struthers, Ernie leading Ronald by the elbow, a guide in hostile untracked territory. They stopped at the mike and surveyed the crowd. Steamcats crossed their arms, hunched their shoulders, and stared at Struthers as if he were a white bank president. The houselights were dimming. The light retreated to the dais, coalesced in a purple bath in which the Steamcats sidled and licked their lips. Shea tapped the mike. “It’s always a great pleasure,” he said, “to welcome home these gentlemen who bring back such fond memories to me and I’m sure to you. Now our star just spoiled a climax by entering and withdrawing a little hastily…”

Laughter all around.

“But we’ve got all night and we’ll try it again. Let’s do it right this time. Ladies and gentlemen, friends, Romans, countrymen, I give you Saint Louie’s own — Titus Klaxon!”

Titus came back less jaunty. Face down, he walked to Shea and Struthers and dwarfed them with his musical bulk. He stood between them. He hugged them to his sides like dolls. “Thank you,” he said when the clapping began to subside. “Thank you very much.”

People dying in that blizzard outside. Every blizzard, people died.

“I’d like to say a word if I may,” Struthers told the mike.

Silence fast. The crowd embarrassed.

“I know we’re going to give Titus the welcome he deserves,” Struthers said. “I know this because I know Titus Klaxon, I know him for a man who won’t forget his roots, and I know the same of every man and woman in this room…”

Someone snickered at RC’s right shoulder; at his left, Clarence was chewing his thumb now, not the nail, the thumb itself.

“I remember when these cats were just getting started, playing the—”

CRACK. The drummer hit a rim shot and Struthers jumped. The Steamcats looked at the ceiling.

“Well.” Struthers cleared his throat. “It sounds as if we’re all itching to get on with it, we’ll all cherish the memories tonight brings, so without further ado—” Draping an arm around Shea and an arm around Titus, he cast his smile across the room like he was fishing for photographers, and then, in a blue flash, he was photographed. Were cameras even allowed here? RC craned his neck, looking for the source of the flash. He found it. Pressed against the wall three tables over was a kid, curly-haired and white, with a camera and a girl. Young, suburban-looking. Types.

“That’s the kid took the picture of Benny Brown,” Clarence whispered.

Struthers had vanished and Shea was swimming through the tables to the photographer. They spoke. The girl looked worried. The kid took out a card and Shea nodded, but not happily.

While Steamcats screwed in mouthpieces and plucked strings, Titus took the mike. “My good friend Ronald Struthers here,” he said, “just asked me to dedicate a song to a little lady I guess a lot of you know, and this first number’s as good as any.” Titus stretched his stomach and took a huge breath, as if keeping some bad food down. “This is a brand-new song. It’s been a while since we saw the old streets and it may be — I want you all to consider — it may be that being an outsider now I can see things you all can’t. If that’s the case, I don’t apologize, because I’m glad, real glad, to be with you tonight. My rule is blues is truth, and so, my men, let’s show these wonderful people which blues I’m talking about.” The drummer snapped to. “Here’s a song for the lady in blue, it’s called”—his voice dropped down to a deep bass—“Gentrifyin’ Blues.”

Probst was sick. He had a bad cold, the worst in several years, complete with chills and sizzling headaches, a sore throat, and a general sense of injury and injustice. The usual drugs hardly helped. Over the weekend he had touched some surface, or some surface had touched him, and then he’d touched his eyes or nostrils and the viruses had entered. It could have been any surface. Every thing had surface, and active germs were waiting, hopping eagerly into the air, on an indeterminate number of them — on pens and seat cushions, on shoes and sidewalks, streets and floors, on tumblers and towels and parking meters. Telephones crawled with viruses. Quarters taken as change were warm, a swarm. Elevator buttons were pustules glowing with received virulence. Rolf Ripley had wiped wads of living goo on his sleeves and Probst had grasped them. There were secretions of Buzz all over his office. Hutchinson had taken Probst’s coat, Dr. Thompson had shaken his hand, Meisner had had a runny nose, and the General — Sam—had handed him doughnuts. In retrospect he trusted no one.

It was 3:00 in the afternoon, December 12. Bundled in his overcoat, a scarf beneath his chin, he pushed through two sets of doors in Plaza Frontenac, his and Barbara’s shopping center of choice. The people entering with him had empty hands and a bounce in their steps. Those leaving had packages, Saks bags swinging at shin level, wrapped books or records in the crooks of arms, the serrated tops of small paper bags poking from coat pockets. Probst stopped to orient himself. Malls were never executive-friendly, and he felt especially unwanted at this hour on a weekday afternoon. Normally even a bad cold would not have kept him from going in to the office. But he’d also come down with a birthday, which was likewise the worst he’d had in several years. He was fifty. A boy in a green loden coat chased an errant red balloon right up to his toes, and he sneezed down onto the boy’s whorled blond hair.

“Gesundheit!” said the precocious voice.

“Well! Thank you.”

His words left a bad taste in his mouth. People were jostling him. He took refuge at the nearest plate-glass window, behind which white torsos displayed black lingerie. Well! Well! Well! He was sounding like his father. His father had made constant recourse to the word “well,” using it not as a dilatory particle but as an exclamation signifying both surprise and approval. If a customer at the Gamm’s shoe store where he worked complimented the suit and tie he was wearing (he was very particular about his clothes), he began his reply with a hearty, if occasionally somewhat baffling, “Well!” When Ginny or Martin came to Gamm’s to ask for money, the word expressed his delight at recalling his possession of such a pretty and vivacious young daughter, or such a serious and courteous young son. “Well!” The word put his customers on hold; these were his important young children; his children, mind you, not his grandchildren. From the store he brought home other usages, usages which did not seem at all distinctive at the time, but which forty years later were coming out of Martin’s mouth with increasing frequency, as he approached the age his father had been when Martin first became conscious of him as a person weaker than himself. In recent months he’d caught himself using the word “good” as an adverb, and worse, the construction “question whether,” a phrase characteristic of a man thinking aloud (there was an arrogance in thinking aloud) rather than addressing those around him. At the dinner table Ginny and Martin and their mother might have been discussing whether to replace their mutt Shannon, who one night had failed to return from his evening run; their father would sit silently with his beer while the table was cleared and freestone peaches were served in their syrup, and then, with a grunt: “Question whether it wouldn’t be simpler to get a stuffed animal for Gin and a sweetheart for Martin.”

In the show window, right before Probst’s eyes, a white torso was coming alive. It rocked and spun as if in a frenzy over its lack of limbs; two saleswomanly hands had taken hold of it by the stump of its neck and were removing the bra from its conical alabaster breasts. He saw the saleswoman reading the size label on the bra. She turned to a customer, shook her head, and shrugged.

To his left a little girl was crying. Her mother knelt and tugged her ringlets as if adjusting the picture. She wiped the tears with her thumb, obviously not realizing that this was an excellent way to introduce viruses to her daughter’s bloodstream. Probst moved on.

He’d come to buy Christmas presents for Barbara, to make sure he got at least one thing finished today. On his list were books, bath products, and diamond earrings. He planned to let Plaza Frontenac give shape to his other, more abstract gift ideas. Fortunately Barbara was the only person he ever had to go shopping for.

Yesterday evening, when he was trying to show his body who was boss by helping Mohnwirbel clear the latest eight inches of snow from the driveway, Barbara had called him inside. Jack DuChamp was on the phone. Jack hadn’t called since the night of the stadium incident. He said that he and Elaine always — heh, well, for years — threw a Christmas party on the twenty-third. Sorry about the late notice, but they’d sure like to have Martin and Barbara.

Probst, under surveillance by Barbara, managed to tell Jack that it looked like they might not be able to make it, some relatives of Barbara had said they might be in town, that kind of thing, although they would definitely make an effort—

“Great, great,” Jack said as Barbara, apparently satisfied, left the room. “We’re really looking forward to seeing you. Be sure and bring Luisa too, it’ll be a lot of families. Our kids would love seeing her.”

On his way back out into the snow, Probst stuck his head in the smoky den. He said it looked as though they wouldn’t have to go. Wouldn’t have to go? Good grief, Martin. Of course they wouldn’t go.

This morning he’d phoned in an additional order to the Florida citrus concern that provided for most of his and Barbara’s out-of-town gift needs. The DuChamps would get grapefruit in wintry February; the announcement should arrive by the day of the party. Probst hoped the citrus, the formality of the payoff, would somehow have the desired effect.

Which was that Jack leave him alone.

Dodging a pair of cannonballs — squat boys in jean jackets hurtling into a video outlet — he gained the escalator, where he sneezed into his hand and then clutched the black plastic handrail for balance, infecting it. He saw the handrail race extrusively out ahead of him and round the horn into the mechanics of the operation. He saw his germs spreading out along the entire band. He turned. Ten faces looked up at him, some of them with tenuous recognition (Morton Priest…?). He’d made them sick.

A shop projecting science and plenitude, a tobacconist’s, caught his eye. Gallon jars with bevelled glass stoppers were labeled and stationed on shelves as in a museum of soil types, some of the tobaccos as black as Iowa, some red as Arkansas, others austere and blond, others sandy, others loamy and variegated. The store sold candy and magazines, too. An olde time shoppe. Probst went in, acknowledged the proprietor, and shook his head — just looking. Running up and down the steps of the candy display, his eyes were tripped up by triangular boxes of Toblerone. He turned one over in his hands and saw messages in German, French, and Italian, one language on each side.

No English? Well! How neat, how imported, how Swiss of these chocolatiers, to use all three languages of Switzerland. A minor mystery — why were the boxes triangular? — was clarified. He’d buy some. They came in Christmas colors.

From the periodical display he took a copy of House magazine. He wanted a sense of the people who on Friday would be photographing his living room, breakfast room and kitchen. The proprietor rang up the purchase. Probst asked him if he’d ordered the Toblerone straight from Switzerland.

How so?

Well, there was no English on the boxes.

The proprietor frowned and looked. “Yes there is.”

Probst looked. There was English. Also German and Italian. How on earth had he mistaken the English for French?

“Yes, English, French and German,” the proprietor said. Probst shrugged and made to leave, but he couldn’t help seeing the man rub his nostrils with two of the fingers with which he’d just taken a five-dollar bill—

“Everything all right?”

Nodding over his shoulder, Probst found himself running into something which he grabbed to stabilize and came even closer to toppling before he saw what it was: a wooden cigar-store Indian, nearly as tall as he, rocking violently. He made it stop. The proprietor was shaking his head with annoyance and disapproval. Probst had overestimated his stamina today.

He crossed the atrium and sat down on a polished oak bench beneath a miniature tree with waxy leaves. He was in no condition to be shopping. But if he didn’t shop now he’d have to come back another time. Barbara had asked how long he’d be out and he’d said at least an hour. He couldn’t barge in on birthday preparations. Besides, if he went home, he’d go to bed. He hated to go to bed, on his birthday.

But what was a birthday anyway? All he could picture, when he thought of being born, was his head emerging from a hole between his mother’s legs. The picture became remarkably vivid when he thought about it, as if he really had seen it on TV or in a theater and was remembering. What camera, at bed level, had captured the emergence of his head? It was a flickering old film, from an old, old camera. No history seemed more ancient.

In the days when she still fed him nice questions, Luisa had asked what his earliest memory was. That would have to have been, he said, the streetcar accident when he wasn’t yet three. He remembered flying through the air and hitting a silvery bar. Yes. He’d been standing on a seat, not yet three…

The shoes and murmurs of shoppers passing him sounded impatient, as pedestrian movements always do to someone at rest, creating a patter so unbearable that only joining it can bring relief. Nevertheless Probst resisted. His throat was a tube of pain. He needed to sit a while longer. Then he’d shop, buy bath oil, books and earrings. He might not have the strength today to shop for bargains, but colds made him extravagant. He was sick, it was his birthday, he could do what he pleased. He could recall that for years he was haunted by the memory of propulsion, of collision with a bar, as by a nightmare undispelled by identification as such, without knowing that a thing like this had actually happened to him. People put accidents behind them, and it was only by chance that his mother, years later, had mentioned a time on the Grand Avenue line when you, Martin, were thrown and given a concussion.

He could reach back even further, into the history of his father. Carl Probst had had a farm and a house in Stillwater, he was young and unindebted and owned shares in the largest local bank, when the hard times blew into Oklahoma. His wife died, and the rain stopped falling. The banks began to foreclose on mortgages. He sold his shares in protest (so he later claimed, though undoubtedly he needed the cash, too) and sold them, moreover, in the face of what the whole town knew: there was oil in the area. By 1940 the bank was among the wealthiest in Oklahoma. By 1940 Carl Probst was in St. Louis handling the feet of strangers. If he’d hung on to his shares he’d have been not fabulously rich but not so poor that he couldn’t have weathered the dust-bowl years, and leased his land, and made it. He didn’t make it. Probst saw him trying to break that red brick dirt in February using two horses and his only son — Carl Jr. — to make way for seed on which no rain, or not enough, would fall, while on every horizon, on every unblacklisted tract, derricks rose. He heard him telling the young children of his young second wife that he’d done the Right Thing. And he remembered, as a child, believing him.

He popped a Sucret. Tennis shoes squeaked on the parquet floor. The feeling he had now was a feeling he’d had as a younger man sitting on benches, the feeling of being an old man sitting on a bench and able to watch the world go by. The world was Frontenac women in boots with salt stains, flitting typists who glanced at their watches, businessmen fueling one another’s laughter, small children unraveling from mothers to point at the lavender elephants in the window opposite Probst, to paw from a distance. But there were parallel worlds — worlds of the invisible, of viruses, of latent behavior, of phrases of his father’s. On Sunday when Wesley had made his pitch and mentioned the world “circle” and Probst had decided to leave at once, it had not actually been a decision. He had found himself below the threshold of cause and effect, following an action that came straight and swiftly from the soul of what he was, as he reenacted his father’s central denial: I won’t be a part of this; no matter what it costs me, I won’t be a part.

An elderly woman in red rubber boots was sitting down beside him on the bench. He began to make more room between them and heard her say, quite distinctly, “Little prissy.” He made it a whole yard between them.

We’re at the center of things, Martin.

Probst had not stopped thinking about his morning in the sauna with the — with Sam. Sam found it important that Probst had bled at the stadium. Probst found it strange that his injuries had not been listed in the papers or on the airwaves. The more he thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed. He was Municipal Growth chairman, he’d been as seriously hurt as some of those other twelve; how much more did it take to get yourself counted? Had some police sergeant or hospital clerk refused to count a thirteenth injury for the same reason that high-rises lacked thirteenth floors? Probst didn’t mind not having his name in the papers, it appeared there often enough in other contexts, but he wondered why the powers of information had seen fit, for once, to ignore him. If Trudy Churchill’s name and address and broken leg were Known to them, then Probst’s broken finger and blood loss must have been equally Known. A suppression had obviously occurred.

Conspiracy. Coincidence. Conspiracy.

Jammu controlled the police. Hutchinson, who’d spoken ominously of professional courtesy, controlled KSLX. Duane Thompson’s parents were both powerful figures at Barnes, where Probst had been treated. Pete Wesley controlled the city press office. The owners of the Big Red were intimate with everyone else who mattered, with Meisner, Norris, Buzz, Ross Billerica, Harvey Ardmore.

Probst trusted no one. He had no knowledge of anyone’s motives. How could he be central when he was so abysmally ill-informed? Was he uninformed because he was central? If so, then the conspiracy was working both ways, excluding him from the news and the news from him. He was sick. Men kept away from him. He could hear them laughing and shouting and whispering like schoolboys outside the window of his inner sickroom. He was sick, and he could no more clear his head than he could find his way back into an involvement in the city’s public life, though he was nominally still at the center of it. All was treachery all of a sudden, Wesley, Meisner, Ripley, Ardmore, his own daughter, much of Municipal Growth. They wanted to use him without letting him in on the secret. He wasn’t counted because the conspiracy didn’t want him to count.

The thousand quiet voices of Plaza Frontenac could have been hospital visitors, mourners in a mausoleum, refugees, evacuees, late-night travelers or watchers at the scene of a crime or accident, such was the implacable unselfconsciousness of their collective voice. As Probst listened, a great waste seemed to open in the soundscape. Perceptual capillaries filled the entire indoor space, superexfoliating, dully aching, all of them translucent, and all of them Probst’s own; or had the shopping center shrunk, in that sick sensation of tininess, until it fit in Probst’s ear and reduced the thousand sounds to auditory dots, compressing them, in the shell of his cranium, into the pure white rushing of a lifeless ocean? The birthday feeling nagged him. His conception grew dropsical and comprehensive. What if he was the city? More than centrally located: the thing itself?

Born in the very pit of the Depression, he had groped and bullied his way into some kind of light, demolishing and steam-rolling and building higher, building the Arch, building developments of the most youthful and prosperous nature, the golden years of Martin Probst. Inside, though, he was sick, and the city was sick on the inside too, choking on undigested motives, racked by lies. The conspiracy invaded the city’s bloodstream while leaving the surfaces unchanged, raged around him and in him while he sat apparently unseen, uncounted, uninvolved, and it was right here, in this identity of his life with the city’s life, that he could see himself disappearing. The more he was a figure, the less he was a person. The more complete the identity, the more completely it excluded him. There were two Probsts, it seemed, and always had been; who else had run the camera in the delivery room, and who else was sitting thinking on this bench right now? But the personal Probst was disappearing. As his head had appeared fifty years ago, so he was disappearing now. He was a conspirator himself, as responsible for his disappearance as anyone else was. He let a childhood friend pester him, an old struggle with Barbara wear him down, he let anything and everything distract him, and meanwhile bugs were falling out of walls, personalities collapsing in the space of weeks, and everywhere Indians — planting bombs, teasing executives, dazzling the press and transferring stock and stopping traffic, like harbingers and furies both, storming back up the trail from the old Indian Territory, from which the Osage Warriors were telling him now there was no permanent escape. I’ve no use for cliques. It was a phrase of his father’s. The son should have said: I don’t have any use for. Nothing was safe from his xenophobia now, not even his own heart, not even the heart of his own city.

He heard a splash of water.

It was the old woman in red boots. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all,” she sang. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all.” She was swinging her legs, her coat spread open, and in a pale splashing flood she was urinating through the slats of the bench onto the polished parquet floor, gushing urine as if she’d been punctured. Probst staggered to his feet. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all!” She swung her legs, still splashing when he finally got out of earshot.

He wound up in Crabtree & Evelyn, a gift box of a store wrapped in subdued colors and drenched with scents that blended in an almost caustic potpourri. Unlike Barbara, Probst seldom lost his sense of smell. He saw brushes and sponges. Soap lozenges. Pink crystals. He was shaking all over.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Yes, I’d like to buy some bath oil.”

A woman with a greenish frost was smiling, trying to help. She looked simple and good. “What sort of thing did you have in mind?”

Probst allowed himself to be shown around. Usually he wasn’t so humble with sales help, but he wanted to be led. He answered questions about Barbara’s preferences. He took four different bottles, ridiculously many, but they were all flavors he’d seen at one time or another on the shelf by the tub. The more bottles he took, the more solicitous the woman became. Buying, he was calming down.

“This will be plenty,” he said pleasantly.

“Oh, I did want to show you one—”

“Thanks. This will be all.” He accompanied her to the cash register. Payment was an agreeable business. He used American Express. The woman spoke of snow. Much, he agreed. It would melt soon enough, however. As she handed him the form to sign, the telephone rang. She excused herself.

He stared at the words he had made. As always, he’d formed each letter individually, printing it. There were twelve of them, six letters in each name. The date was 12/12. Luisa was born on 11/1 and Barbara on 4/8. “Luisa” had five letters and “Barbara” had seven. Martin, born on 12/12, was both the average and the sum, and he was disappearing in the sudden blaze of schemes. Here the schemes were so perfect that there was no remainder at all, nothing left for him to do but die, his life explained.

“There you are, sir, all set.” The woman with the green frost was humoring him. “Have a good day.”

He tapped his card into its slot in his wallet as he left and slid the wallet into his pants as he entered the main hall. He had to get out of here. But he’d assured Barbara he wouldn’t barge in. He stopped in front of the little Johnston & Murphy store, where a salesman stood like a penguin in shiny black shoes. Neiman or Saks? That was the question. Saks was larger, but the path to it led past the woman in red boots. Well then, Neiman it was. He remembered Sam Norris’s striped cotton shirt.

I love you, Barbara. I love you, Barbara.

That was difficult, but ultimately he could manage it, because ultimately he could believe she was finite, ultimately he might see her on a stretcher and believe that she was dead.

But I am Martin Probst? I am Martin Probst?

There were limits — the speed of light, the moment of birth — and to pronounce his name to himself, to say it with conviction, was to pass the limit, split in two, and see himself being born. He disappeared in the crowd he saw around him. On his right was a rouged darling in sweat pants and pink running shoes and a long mink coat. On his left, two dowagers in blouses that buttoned at the neck were viewing with haughty distaste the places where they bought their gifts. Passing now, the pendular arms of a fat black man pumped affirmative glottals through his mouth. How easy it would be for a roving reporter, a Don Daizy or Cliff Quinlan, to stop these people one by one and say to each in turn, “I don’t want you to tell me your name, I want you to tell yourself who you are,” and for the camera to record the given face as the person did so, whatever surprise or discouragement crossed it as he or she confronted a world that was not a spherical enclosing screen on which pictures were projected, but a collection of objects to which the given person was dared to belong. It was a dreadful vision: in the mall and beyond, an infinity of carriers of latent awareness. The infection of the earth by seeing human beings.

But Probst had reached Neiman-Marcus and entered the dappled silence produced by serious shopping. He took an escalator, careful with his hands this time. He looked at the people around him in a new way: as co-conspirators. The General was right. His vision was too crude, though; he could only think in literal terms, in listening devices and docudramatic subterfuges. There weren’t any bugs in Probst’s house.

There were shirts galore. A line of rustic colors, woolly blends, by Ralph Lauren. Calvin Klein pastels. Outlandish Alexander Julians. Probst met the eyes of a deeply tanned man wearing frameless glasses. The eyes widened a little. There was suspicion between him and Probst. Suspicion of recognition. Probst looked for his size, which was medium in casuals and otherwise 15½–34.

There weren’t any bugs. But there was worse, patterns too internal and personal to trace to a plotting human, too cohesive to be accident. It was a matter of simple arithmetic that Luisa should turn eighteen the same year Probst turned fifty. But why should this also have been the year that Jack DuChamp re-entered his life? Why not last year, or next year, or no year? Why had Barbara started smoking again after a decade of good health? Why had Dozer died? And Rolf Riplcy turned suddenly the soul of malevolence, and the whole city a thing of foreignness and menace? Why was it all happening at once?

There was an answer. Silky plaids, six or eight variations on a red and yellow theme. They made him want to own them all and wear them all together, to do justice to the spectrum of the designer’s inventiveness. He glanced into the face of a girl Luisa’s age. She replaced the shirt she’d been feeling and glanced back. She could have been a Hatfield and he a McCoy…. Ugly shirts by Christian Dior which were made, as was clear on the shelf, for men with round manikin chests and wasp waists.

There was an answer: if you looked for patterns, you found them. If you didn’t look, they weren’t there. Probst wasn’t born yesterday, after all. He knew there was no God, no conspiracy, no meaning; there was nothing whatsoever. Except shirts. By gravitation, seemingly, he’d found the shirts he wanted. They came in three colors, the maroon and black, a green and black, and a yellow and black. The latter two looked clownish, and another man already had his hands on them. The man had a mustache. It was Harvey Ardmore.

They scrimmaged. Angry looks and mutters of surprise and consternation. They backed off.

The man was not Harvey Ardmore. Probst turned on his heel and left Plaza Frontenac.

Substantial ramparts of snow ringed the parking lot. In the west the sun was setting, and to the south the lights were coming on in the windows of the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children.

After he’d stashed the packages in his study he returned to the kitchen. “I thought maybe I should go and see S. Jammu,” he said.

“Jammu?” Barbara compared opposite sides of the cake she was frosting. “What for?”

Probst reinflated all the little sacs in his lungs and tried, without success, to form words with the air he blew back out. In the warm kitchen, in the persevering warmth of Barbara today, he couldn’t begin to reconstruct the patterns he’d seen at Plaza Frontenac. He couldn’t think in this house.

“Would you like to lick the bowl?” Barbara asked.

“I’ll see.”

“Did you have the radio on in the car?”

“No.”

“I wondered if you’d heard about the attack.”

“No.”

“I think it was out in Chesterfield, at three or something. The Indians. You can turn the radio back on. I got tired of the repetitions.” She spun the cake, apparently finished with it. “Somebody was hurt but nobody was killed. It was at some kind of telephone installation. Rockets. Hand-held…rockets. I guess I wasn’t really listening.”

“Huh.” With a spoon Probst scraped frosting from the side of the bowl. Barbara was peeling strips of foil out from under the cake. She didn’t think much of Jammu. Sometimes it seemed like she didn’t think much of anyone. “I’m working on the agenda for Municipal Growth in February,” he said. “I thought we might invite Jammu. She’s done surprisingly well.”

“Surprisingly?” Barbara licked her thumb. “You mean, ‘for a woman’?”

“For anyone. But yes, especially for a woman. She’s very able.”

Able. It was another inherited usage, and Barbara turned to him. If he’d become self-conscious, it was largely her doing.

“By all means go and see her, then.” She patted his cheek and pushed his hair off his forehead. “How are you feeling?”

“I think I’ll do just that. She’s remarkably communicative from what I hear.”

Barbara waited a second. “Is it still in your throat?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes a long way here,” he continued. “She certainly shows us up a little.”

“You’ll probably want to shower and change,” Barbara said. “We might have visitors.”

“I guess she comes from a place where women do this sort of thing.”

“I want to wash a few of these dishes, and then I’m going to get cleaned up myself.”

“It’s hard to believe she’s only thirty-five.”

“Martin.” She pinned his cheeks between her thumb and fingers and made him look at her. “Just shut up, all right?”

He wrenched free.

“Please go take a shower or whatever you need to do.”

He tapped the edge of a counter thoughtfully, preparing to leave the kitchen, content to let the danger pass. But it was too late. Barbara was pacing in a fury, snatching dishes and dumping them in the sink, unknotting her apron and balling it up. What was wrong with him? (She wondered.) He was turning into a monster. (She claimed.) She could tolerate his thick head, she could tolerate the silences, but she would not be insulted like this; she was sorry to act this way on his birthday, but there came a point where she couldn’t help it. (She explained.) Why was he standing there? Why didn’t he go change? (She asked.) Get out of here.

Probst frowned. “What did I say? I don’t remember what I said.”

“You don’t remember what you said?” She moved closer. “You don’t remember what you said? You don’t remember what you said?”

Come on. He’d heard her the first time. He smiled a little, and perceived that this worked to his detriment. The style of her pacing changed. She circled the kitchen with her hands behind her back, her brows knitted, her shoulders hunched, like Peter Falk’s Columbo. She stopped and stared at him. “Why do you treat me like such shit?”

“I simply said,” he said, “that it might be a good idea to go and see Jammu. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Just simply as a matter of civic responsibility.”

“Oh jesus.” She fell, sideways, into a chair.

“Now, what? I don’t understand.”

“Go take a shower. Go, go, go, go, go.”

He was not an insensitive person. If he thought for a moment, as he was doing now, he could locate the solid logical underpinnings of his actions. When he’d praised Jammu he hadn’t meant it nicely. He just didn’t want to be treated like a baby, to have his face patted. Barbara was “nice” to him, so that when the explosion occurred anyway he would be the one to take the blame. He wasn’t as nice as she was, but he wasn’t sneaky either.

“I never asked you to spend all day in the kitchen,” he said.

At this, her hands reached into the space around her, closing on invisible things. She caught something finally, and her fists dropped to her knees. “My life is in order, Martin.” She paused. “Sometimes I try to do things to make people happy. I don’t ask that they actually be happy, I only want a little credit for the effort, like any first-class citizen.”

“I’m still not clear on what the issue here is.”

“I’ve been saying for two months that I don’t like that woman, and you come home — you’re always coming home, you notice that? You come home and you act like you’ve just discovered her. Like the world was created on Monday, and you’re the first to notice. She acts like she’s the first one. She oh forget it. You’re hopeless.” Barbara’s eyes scanned the kitchen table, her head faintly echoing their movement as they followed the scurrying invisible things. Outside, a dog started barking. “But you know what, Martin?” She looked up with a puzzled smile, her eyes moist and bright. “I really like myself.” It was a different woman speaking now, a Barbara much younger. She smoothed her skirt across her lap, gathering the slack under her thighs. Then she sobbed. “I really love myself.”

Probst no longer felt the least bit sick. When she sobbed, he got erections. “I do, too,” he said.

“No you don’t!” She leaped to her feet and kicked backwards, shoving the chair into a cabinet. “How dare you compare that woman to me? How dare you compare Luisa?”

Frightened, he pressed his back against the refrigerator. She was advancing on him with an index finger raised and her head turned to one side, as if he were flames or a bitter wind. “You better not try it again,” she said. “You better watch out. You better start appreciating that girl because if you don’t I’m getting out of here and I’m taking her with me. I love you, too, but—” She drew back. “Not as much.”

“I’m glad we’re clear on that.”

“You’re going to hold that one against me, aren’t you? I can see it in your face. You’re going to save that.”

“Well, what if I do?” The volume of his voice surprised him. “You know I have a cold. I didn’t come home to fight with you. I won’t fight with you. You play as dirty as you say I do. You tell me to go. What, the pain is too great? Something like that. You’re like your sister. It’s all an act. I won’t try to figure out what you pretend you mean. I won’t play that game. You’re just daring me to go upstairs. I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. This is your fault. You were just asking for it.”

“Well, for God’s sake, the oracle speaks! The sphinx has spoken!”

“You cunt.”

“Is this dignified?”

He stamped on the floor. “You cunt.”

Something hard, a penny or an acorn, struck the outside of the window above the sink, and Barbara shrieked. She grabbed his arm and half pushed, half pulled him towards the door. “Go, go, get upstairs, go.”

He resisted. “Oh, I’m interrupting something?”

Another object struck the window.

“Go upstairs, come down, and be civil, or—” She looked at her hands. “Or I’m going to stick a knife in you.”

“If I don’t kill you first.”

They looked at each other.

“Go!”

He went. He heard her opening the back door and guessed it was Luisa, coaxed home for his birthday, maybe Duane too, and he bolted up the steps two and three at a time.

Calmer after his shower, he took his time dressing. The registers poured heat into the bedroom and carried a faint smell of childhood, of early winter evenings when he was sent upstairs before the pinochle guests arrived. He felt chastened and young. He worked on his shoelaces. The floorboards were alive with the sound of news downstairs; he should have been watching it, to stay informed.

When he did go down he found Luisa sitting in the den watching The $10,000 Pyramid. From the hall, while the television filled her eyes and ears, he had a moment to observe her unobserved. She was leaning to the left on the sofa, in a shallow slouch, with her right leg partially crossed over the left, held in place by the friction of her black cotton pants, and her left arm folded up between her ribs and the cushion. She seemed to have been arrested in a fall towards the screen. If he startled her, she would assume a more comfortable position. She was wildlife, not a daughter; he was seeing in the flesh, in a natural habitat, some exotic antelope he’d hitherto known only from pictures in National Geographic. The studio crowd groaned. She shook her head, once, as if shaking water from her ear. Under the pressure of her unawareness, Probst cleared his throat and saw, as she turned to him, what falseness was expected of him now. He was supposed to act like Dad in a television movie, to let the seriousness show in his face when he said — the significant gesture—Mind if I watch, too? He stiffened. “Well!”

“Happy birthday,” she said, without inflection.

“Thank you.” He took the chair across the room from her. “Mind if I watch, too?”

“I was going to turn it off.”

“Yes. It’s a dumb show. Here.” He turned it off. Barbara was blending something in the kitchen.

“Well?” Luisa said. “Are you surprised?”

“Oh, very.” He smiled. “It’s a nice surprise. Is, uh, Duane coming, too?”

“He’s working.”

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“St. Louis Magazine wants him to print some pictures. It’s for their January issue and they’re due tomorrow. He’ll be in the darkroom all night.”

“Oh really. You want a beer or something?”

Her face and bearing underwent a mild death, a loss of vitality characteristic of Barbara. “Not right now, thank you.” Soon, at any moment, she would leave the room, and with an air of reproach that extended to herself, because she didn’t really want to go.

“So,” Dad said, “he’s working, is he? That’s good to hear.”

She nodded. “He still doesn’t make much money, though.” (Money? Barbara gave her money, and she had a credit card, too.) “I guess I eat too much.”

“Sure, you’re still growing.”

From the smile she gave him he could tell this was a good line, though he couldn’t have said why. He asked her some easy questions about her grades, and calculus, and transportation, enticing questions to lure an antelope closer, to accustom her to a more domestic habitat. She gave him another smile, and he was feeling more and more like Marlin Perkins when Barbara’s voice pealed in the kitchen: “Lu, you want to give me a hand here?”

She was gone like a shot.

Not as much. For eighteen years, in battles more vicious than tonight’s, Barbara had managed to avoid saying that, and now, needlessly, she’d gone and done it. A sportsmanlike sympathy made him reluctant to damn her for the blunder. But she would do the same to him.

Luisa reappeared. “Mommy says we should go in the living room.”

Probst followed her down the hall. When she turned east he headed north into the kitchen. Barbara was pouring frozen daiquiris. She set the pitcher down and without meeting his eyes kissed him hard, raking his neck with her nails. Into his ear she said, “I want to make love after dinner.”

So did he. He always did. But he hadn’t expected this, he’d expected instructions or an apology. This was a threat. This was the big gun, her attempt to save the evening. And certainly it was attractive bait.

“I wouldn’t want to infect you,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s the same thing I had.” She spun to the counter where the daiquiris stood. “Do you want to take the brie in?”

There were many presents in the living room by the fire she had made. The uppermost gift, wrapped neatly in newspaper, was obviously books. Probst claimed the last daiquiri on the tray and sat down. Luisa stood warming her back, her glass already half empty. Barbara sat on the sofa in the watchful pose she used to adopt when they played Charades at parties. The silence was made possible by Luisa, who had graduated into self-consciousness and joined them; not long ago, she would have been chattering. She sipped her tropical drink. Track-mounted lamps cast spots on the primitive still lifes. On Sherwood Drive the Probsts were in the jungle, and the flames and shadows vaulted up the walls and gave them a mystic depth. There had never been a moment like this before. The family had changed, and this could be either. Either the last of the old groupings, the last gathering, or the first of the new ones, the first of many. To Probst it seemed the room hung by a thread, and twisted slowly, the flames slanting and stretching. He was dizzy.

“SO HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” Luisa said, raising her glass.

“Yes, Martin, really,” Barbara loading her words with portent. He felt the concentration of her will on him, the reins of desire and threat. Her feet were on the floor. Her legs were somewhat spread.

“Thank you. Should I open these?”

They indicated that he should. He slid out a shirt box and popped the ribbon. A shirt. He thanked. Luisa went and fetched the pitcher of daiquiris, which Barbara said she’d made because she thought they would feel good on his throat.

“They do,” he said. He placed the books wrapped in newspaper on his lap. “It’s a pair of shoes. No, it’s a lunchbox.” He smiled and read the label. To Daddy from Luisa and Duane. Tactful indeed. He’d never even met Duane. He thought of Dr. Thompson; why wasn’t his name here, too? And Pat, for that matter. To Daddy from Pat. He smelled roasting beef.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Luisa said.

He’d returned it to the pile. “I’m saving it. Best for last.”

“Why don’t you open it, Martin?”

He put it back on his lap. It was pleasant taking orders from her. He often imagined how he could have arranged his life differently, been more of a dog when at home, and lived from her hand. “Well! Thank you.”

“What is it?” Barbara asked, suddenly smoking a cigarette.

Probst slid the books across the floor to her and slit an envelope from New York. The card fell out, a black-and-white Happy Birthday from Ginny and Hal, also Sara and Becky and Jonathan. They’d all signed, which was a nice touch. Ginny usually did things right.

“Have you read these?” Barbara asked Luisa.

“Yes,” Luisa said.

Probst waved his fingers for the books. “Can I see ’em again?”

Barbara slid them back to Probst and said, “For school?”

Paterson, by William Carlos Williams. The Winter’s Tale, by Shakespeare.

“Sort of. I’m writing my poetry paper on Paterson.” Luisa glanced at Probst. “Duane recommended them.”

A receipt fell out of the Shakespeare. Paul’s Books, $3.95, plus $5.95, plus tax. $10.50. The waste of money hurt his throat. He put the newspaper in the fire.

“I thought Daddy would like them.” She turned. “We thought you’d like them.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“The big box is from Audrey,” Barbara said.

“Whose husband is trying to ruin me.”

“What?” Luisa said, while Barbara shook her head and tried to be noticed.

“It’s true,” he said. “Your Uncle Rolf has been doing his best to put me out of business.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to ask your mother about that.” His heart was pounding. As he lifted the next package onto his lap he tried to list reasons for controlling himself. All he came up with, literally the only item, was Barbara’s offer. Her whorish offer.

“So are you home for a while?” he asked Luisa. “Or is this only a visit?”

A dark hole opened across the room. It was Barbara’s mouth.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Luisa said, apparently sincere.

“Of course not,” Barbara said.

“Of course not? Maybe you haven’t really thought about where you’ve been sleeping for the last three weeks either.”

“I have, Daddy. You know I have.”

“You know she has.”

“You keep the hell out of this,” he said. The command, with Luisa watching, was like a sock in Barbara’s mouth, and she recoiled. “Have you considered apologizing to us?” he said. “Explaining? Promising not to do it again?”

“This isn’t good and evil, Daddy. This is just what I’m doing right now, all right?”

“No. I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“You’re just worried about how things look. You want things to look a certain way. You never called me, or anything. We’ve been — I’ve been waiting. You should apologize, too. How can I think something’s wrong if you don’t tell me?”

“You should know. I shouldn’t have to tell you. I’m very, very, very disappointed in you.”

“Well, what do you think I came home for today?”

“I have no idea.”

“Because Mommy said you wanted me to. She said you loved me and you missed me. I love you and I miss you. So.”

Why wasn’t she crying?

“I can go if you want me to,” she said. “You want me to go?”

Barbara spoke. “Don’t go. It’s your father who should go.”

“I told you to shut up.”

No answer.

He did want to leave. He was standing up. But Luisa beat him to it. She was already out in the hall, and then she was back, and to Probst’s relief and satisfaction she was screaming at Barbara, her fists clenched and body bent, while Barbara simply sat there. “Why don’t you make him shut up? Why don’t you make him? You let him say these things. Mommy! You let him do these things, you let him treat you—” She kicked Barbara in the ankle, and shrank, covering her face. “Oh,” she said. She ran upstairs and her bedroom door slammed.

Doors could be identified by their resonance when slammed; the latches also had specific frequencies.

There was a shriek, Luisa, probably some words overamplified. Her door opened, and after a pause a pile of magazines hit the bottom of the stairs, sliding over one another, rolling and flipping, right up to the front door. (Probst had been storing a few things in her room in her absence.) The door slammed again.

Barbara shook her head.

“I’m sorry I told you to shut up,” Probst said. “But you were teaming up on me.”

She continued to shake her head.

He was calm and tired. He headed upstairs to apologize. Barbara spoke:

“My fault, huh?”

He went upstairs and knocked. He knocked again.

“Who is it?”

He cleared his throat.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Luisa said.

He tried the knob, but it was locked. His mouth was busy. I’m sorry. You’re my daughter. I love you. I’m sorry. To him, the words counted. But they wouldn’t come out, not without help, not when he was out alone in the hall, listening.

Singh had told Jammu that Probst intended to visit her. When the visit failed to materialize by Thursday night, however, it was clear that he was in less of a hurry to see her than she was to reach a decision on his fate, and that she would have to decide without having personally inspected him. She was annoyed, feeling peculiarly stood up.

The last doors and toilets in her building had fallen silent. Friday was already two hours old. In hers, the only sleepless cell, she was filing away Singh’s reports on the Probsts — wicked, gloating documents — and her own notes on the mayor. She locked a drawer and put on a red down jacket, a woolen stocking cap, and “wilderness” snowboots. She looked quite American in the mirror. This wasn’t her intent. Her intent was to stay warm and guard her health, although given the recent performance of her sinuses, her health was a lost cause. The few times she’d gone to bed this week, she’d gotten up again soon to pop Sinutabs.

Outside, in the bitter air, she breathed through her mouth, spitting frequently. In November they had told her that Decembers were mild in St. Louis. But this year was hers; this December was not mild. A diminished moon was setting beyond the trees in Forest Park, casting light the color of the skim milk she’d been drinking by the quart. Most of the windows in the Chase-Park Plaza shared the milkiness, but lamps still burned in a few of the rooms. The discernibility of habitation at night in the city in a compartmentalized world, where floor plans show in the faces of the buildings, here the bedroom, here the kitchen, here the bath, this correspondence of windows to dwellings and dwellings to dwellers, of structure and humanity: this formed, tonight, a burden to Jammu.

As she crossed Kingshighway she watched a tractor-trailer starting up from the Lindell intersection. It labored interminably in first gear, interminably in second, approaching at a crawl that seemed to defeat momentum more than build it. Jumping a black bank of crud, she began to jog through the park in her boots of lead. This December wasn’t mild. At 2:15 on this winter morning, when bare trees drew wind like fossil bronchi, the rock of the continent was very visible to Jammu. Resistance to her operation had developed after all, a natural and predictable counterreaction on the part of the community, and it was precisely now and here that she had lost a sense of herself. She was worn out, feeling far from her motivating hatreds, farther still from her animating desires. Martin Probst was in her thoughts. He’d reacted to Wesley’s proposal with mindless hostility. At the Municipal Growth meeting six hours ago he’d demanded facts and assigned each of the remaining members the task of investigating a facet of Jammu’s agenda. And he hadn’t come to visit her this week.

Without Martin Probst, the resistance would have had a very feeble core, consisting of Sam Norris, County Supervisor Ross Billerica, and assorted extremists. But with Probst aboard, they no longer seemed like a minority. If St. Louis public life was the court of a Mogul, then Probst was the elephants. Jammu had to steal him. But in losing herself she was also losing the capacity to view others as mere characters. Some at least were people, and the knowledge oppressed her. She couldn’t muster the resolve to give Singh the final go-ahead for continuing the assault on the Probsts. It wasn’t fear that stopped her, it was a thing more like awe, the unasked-for awe of the saboteur who, in some corporate vault, comes face to face with an instrument whose very complexity or delicacy acts as a charm against damage. In this context, any tampering at all, no matter how sophisticated, becomes an act of violence.

She ran, avoiding ice. Her running confused her, this activity of her childhood, this helter-skelter dash along a road. It did not become a chief. Her foot fell on ice — black ice.

She went flying through the air. She twisted and landed hard on her shoulder in the clean snow beyond the road. It was more than a foot deep. She realized she was warm.

She moved her arms. She flapped them, packing down the snow and making wings. Twenty-five years ago in Kashmir her mother had taken her skiing where few Indians went. They’d seen American children on their backs in the snow, and Maman, the expert on all things American, informed Jammu that they were making butterflies; but to Jammu they looked more like angels, Christian angels, with skirts and wings and halos, fallen from the sky.

The image pleased her. She felt restored to herself, indomitable again. Just after three o’clock she rang Singh out of bed and told him to go ahead with the job.

“Thanks, Chief,” he said. “It’ll be a piece of cake. Candy from a baby.”