The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

13

In the first days of the new year, a bitterly cold weather system had descended on St. Louis and established itself with a sequence of record low temperatures. The high on January 3 was zero degrees. On the fourth the high was 2. On the fifth the sky clouded and the temperature climbed into the teens to allow another half a foot of snow to fall, and then on the night of the sixth the mercury dipped to—19. For the next week, salt trucks alternated with snowplows on the streets, like gloom with anxiety. By the week of the thirteenth, more than three feet of snow was lying on the lawns of the suburbs and the urban construction sites and the levees overlooking the ice-covered Mississippi. The longer the bad weather lasted, the more aggressively it shouldered murders and politics out of the spotlight of the local news, out of the headlines, the lead-story slots. It exploited the advantage of all weather: its constant availability for comment.

Barbara had at first followed the cold spell’s progress in a circus-going spirit, but eventually even she succumbed to the portents and began to believe that the reports all somehow pointed inwards, as a neighborhood’s concentration of freaks and deformities might point underground, to a reservoir of toxic waste. Wind-chill, degree days, inches of precipitation, former records, consecutive days below x degrees, below y degrees, integers positive and negative — the numbers infected minds. There were broken pipes in warehouse sprinkler systems. Termination of gas service, and outcries. Frozen stiffs in East St. Louis. Ice-locked barges. The heart attacks of shovelers. Stalled cars abandoned on freeways. And always the search for precedents, the delight in finding none, and the feeling of specialness, the growing conviction that attendance at such a winter certified a claim to unusual fortitude and vision. The city, on the news, in the news, behaved like a witness. There was a mood. The weather oriented itself along the polar lines of the previous six months’ political trends. All tendencies hung together. A peculiar watchfulness had descended on St. Louis in the first weeks of the new year.

The sixteenth brought some relief, however, in the form of temperatures only just below freezing and a breeze from the south, off the Gulf, much attenuated. It was Tuesday. Though average for January, the weather felt relatively springlike, and Barbara was cleaning. In her closet she applied the Two Year Rule, throwing onto the bed every article of clothing she hadn’t worn since Christmas two years earlier. She made no exceptions, not for gifts from Martin, not even for her swankiest evening gowns. If she liked something, the rule ensured that she wore it at least once every twenty-four months. Her closet lodged no “dogs,” nothing unworn or unwearable, and she was in possession of far fewer clothes than Luisa or Martin, fewer clothes, undoubtedly, than anyone she knew.

Emptied hangers stabilized on the bar. The usable skirts and blouses she slid to the left impatiently. She was looking for victims, and she found one in a foolish winter suit she’d bought four months ago. She’d never worn it.

Out it went, flapping its pleats as it flew to the bed. It was followed by a linen skirt too big in the waist, a brown dress she didn’t love, and an $80 pair of shoes, accessories to a crime of impulse.

She moved to her dresser and dropped to her knees. She took a last look at the Christmas present from Audrey, the sweater. She’d worn it once, at lunch last week. Once was enough. Poor Audrey. Out it went.

Via the charitable conduit of the Congregational Church, these clothes would end up in the inner city or the Missouri Bootheel. Barbara imagined driving into some tiny town southeast of Sikeston and seeing all the decade’s fashions, all of her mistakes and all of Audrey’s and Martin’s modeled on the dirt streets by poor black women. But the clothes could have been bound for a landfill for all she cared. She deposited an armload of gifts and badly stained underwear on the bed.

The house was quiet. Mohnwirbel had driven away after lunch and not returned. A busy bee he was. Martin had dropped the idea of suing him, and the box of unclean pictures had found its way into one of Martin’s storage lairs, where it would probably stay until it molded. Barbara yearned to go beyond her strikes on his study and closets, to hit the third floor and the basement and attack those hard-core bunkers of junk. She envisioned a life untyrannized by objects, a life in which she and Martin would be free to leave at any time and so by staying prove the choice was freely made. In truth, she hoped that even death might become bearable if everything she still wanted to own when it came could fit in two suitcases; because sometimes the airlines lost your suitcases, and by the time you realized they were gone you’d reached your destination.

She added a sheaf of receipts to the piles of paper she would take downstairs to process at her desk. A little sun shone on the carpeting. Second-story branches nutated in the windows, seeking gaps in the soft assault of the southern wind, paths back to their natural positions. Squirrels paused. The house was very quiet.

As she opened her box of everyday jewelry a pair of earrings caught her eye, the earrings John had given her. She hadn’t even thought to return them. With a feeling of uneasiness she glanced into the mirror. The eyes that met hers weren’t her own.

She gasped. John was standing in the bathroom doorway. She stamped on the floor, trying to stamp out her fright. “How did you get in here?”

“Door’s unlocked!” he said.

“I told you. Go away. I told you.”

“Yes, yes.” He swept into the room and sat down on the bed. “I know what you told me.” He crossed his legs and looked up at her engagingly. “You persist in treating me like a substance that comes out of a faucet that you can turn off with your gentle smile or your firmness and maturity, no no, John, please. You’re very sweet John but. — And yet I find you here with my little gift…”

“I can do the same to you,” Barbara said hotly. It no longer took any effort not to like him. “I can do exactly the same to you. I can say you’re a creep and a jerk. You may be articulate, but you can’t make me feel comfortable around you. You can just go to hell, in fact. Get out of here. Take your damned earrings. You shouldn’t walk in people’s back door. Your manners are lousy. Who do you think you are?”

He sighed and put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. “You aren’t entirely wrong,” he said. “But there’s a fine line between effrontery and simple persistence.”

“Get out.” She picked up the earrings and reached and dropped them over his hand into one of his pockets. She reeled back. Her ears roared. There was a gun in his pocket. She took deliberate steps towards the bathroom.

“Stop.”

She turned back and saw the gun pointing at her. He was a total stranger.

“Get down a suitcase,” he said.

“Listen—”

“The middle-sized leather bag will be ideal. Take your black silk dress, the green dress with copper threads, and another winter dress. A pair of jeans, and your gray corduroys. T-shirts. You’ll want T-shirts. Six changes of underwear, a swimsuit, a nightgown, and your light robe. Am I going to have to do this for you?”

“John.”

“Pick three sweaters, three shirts, and a pair of decent shoes. The ones you’re wearing will be adequate. Canvas shoes, too, space permitting. I have the feeling you aren’t even listening to me.”

She turned again to try to leave, and she heard only one footfall before he punched her in the face. He hit her in the stomach. She fell to her knees. He kicked her in the collarbone and knocked her over backwards. She felt the pressure of his heel on her throat. It was gratuitous. He was getting even.

“I’ll be ever so happy to shoot you in the knees if you try to run,” he said. “And in the spinal cord if you make a fuss when we’re outside. You understand I mean this.”

The heel went away. She heard him slide her suitcase off its shelf in the closet, and heard him packing. She heard the clink of cologne bottles, and the click of a latch.

What was left of Municipal Growth hardly filled the conference room at the offices of Probst & Company. Seventeen of the thirty-two active members had jumped ship without so much as offering Probst an explanation. Quentin Spiegelman, St. Louis’s premier financial guardian, a man whose name appeared on the dotted lines of a thousand wills, had twice assured Probst that he wouldn’t miss a meeting, and twice now he’d missed one. His lies were so childish that only an implicit hatred could explain them. Probst had not thought he was Quentin’s enemy. But he was willing to think so now. He was the chairman, and felt personally betrayed.

It was seven o’clock. On the far side of the oval conference table, Rick DeMann and Rick Crawford peered over their half-glasses, ready to begin.

“Let’s give Buzz another few minutes,” Probst said.

He had called the meeting here at his offices to create an impression of good attendance and to ensure a businesslike atmosphere. The walls were hung with photographs of the major projects he’d worked on over the years, framed exempla of municipal growth: the Poplar Street Bridge, the 18th Street interchange, the terminal at Lambert, the county government building, the Loretto-Hilton complex, West Port, the convention center. The air smelled faintly of electricity and typewriter oil.

P. R. Nilson and Eldon Black, archconservative allies of General Norris, were conferring with Lee Royce and Jerry Pontoon, real-estate-made men. The only remaining banker in the group, John Holmes, was trying to attract the attention of County Supervisor Ross Billerica. Jim Hutchinson, still tan from a holiday vacation, was leaning way back in a chair between Bud Replogle and Neil Smith, nice men, railroad men. An awkward movement at Probst’s right shoulder caused him to turn. General Norris was removing a bug detector from his jacket pocket. Green light. He put it back. “We start?” he said to Probst.

“We can wait a few more minutes.”

“Righty-o.” The General’s head swooped closer. “Don’t look now, Martin,” he said in his 30-hertz voice, “but there seem to be some interesting dishes there across the street, I said don’t look,” for Probst had turned to see out the window. “It’s conceivable they have direct means of listening. Maybe casually draw the curtain, why don’t you?”

Probst frowned at him.

“Just do what I say, Martin.” The voice was mud — mud baked by a hot sun and cracked into tiles. “Safety’s cheap.”

There had always been communications dishes on the roof of the precinct house. They were antennas, not mikes. Probst shut the curtains, and a draft flattened them against the window: the outer door had opened. Carmen was letting a huffing and puffing Buzz Wismer into the room. Probst nodded to her. She could leave now.

Buzz brushed off his coat and hung it on the rack in the alcove. He took the last empty seat, to Probst’s left.

“I’m glad you made it,” Probst said with feeling. He gently slapped his friend’s bony knee. Buzz nodded, his eyes on the floor.

A week ago Barbara had eaten lunch with Bev Wismer and come home with the news that Buzz was having an affair with Mrs. Hammaker. Probst rejected the possibility out of hand. He was sick of the whole notion of unfaithfulness, of the double standards and the way people talked. He wanted to be left alone.

“Martin,” the baked voice growled.

“Yeah yeah.”

“Let’s go.”

Probst raised his head and saw gray eyebrows, cheeks age-spotted or cold-bruised, eyeglass lenses bending the ceiling’s lambent panels into bows and bars. He saw neckties in cautious colors, raked hair and bald spots, executive hands on the table with executive pens poised. Municipal Growth, waiting. A few smiles had developed like fault lines in the tension.

“I assume we all know what the big news is,” Probst said. “Is there anyone who hasn’t seen a paper today?”

The day before, the lower house of the Missouri General Assembly had begun to consider a bill which, if passed, would authorize a binding referendum to decide if the boundaries of St. Louis County should be redrawn to include the city again.

“We’ll have a lot to say about this,” Probst continued. “But for a while I’d like to stick to the agenda you received yesterday. We can’t afford to spend the whole night bickering like last time. We need to get some work done.”

This drew gestural responses from everyone but Buzz.

Rick Crawford delivered the first report. The city of St. Louis, he said, was living dangerously but doing well. City Hall had met its December and January payrolls by diverting moneys ordinarily spent on servicing the city’s debt. It had prepared for this move by using the city’s new Hammaker stock, in conjunction with the dramatic rise in the value of city-held lands, as leverage for a bond renegotiation. Its rating had improved to AA, and in essence it had taken out a second mortgage on the civic improvements of the past. This maneuver, which required neither voter approval nor tinkering with the Charter, was mainly Chuck Meisner’s work. He and his friends in the city banking circles had effectively guaranteed that the refurbished bonds would find buyers. Everything had happened quickly. Leading up to the “Christmas Announcement” of municipal solvency had been a 72-hour marathon meeting attended by the mayor, the comptroller, Meisner, the budget director, Quentin Spiegelman, Asha Hammaker, Frank Jordan of Boatmen’s, and S. Jammu.

“I guess that makes Chuck’s position with regard to us fairly clear,” Probst said.

“It also makes clear what put him in the hospital,” Crawford said. “The terms of the refinancing run to more than two hundred pages, and they did the whole thing in three days.”

Probst pictured the little group at work. The presence of women in it made him feel particularly excluded. It was a reminder of his high-school days, of the Saturday nights he’d spent throwing rocks in the river in the company of nobody but Jack DuChamp.

The mayor, Crawford said, had made many promises to many different constituencies, and the only cheap promise was to finance good middle-income housing for displaced families. “I needn’t remind anyone how beautifully timed that transaction tax was. She — that is — well, yes, she got it on the November ballot and got it passed with no more than a month to spare. Imagine the resistance if she proposed it now. As for paying for the other promises, we can expect a transformation of the city’s revenue-generating structure, beginning with the elimination of the sales tax and the corporate-earnings tax—”

“Oh, the bastards,” Norris said. Rolling his shoulders, he disencumbered himself of his jacket. Underneath he had on black suspenders and one of those tight shirts by Christian Dior that Probst thought generally looked bad on people. It didn’t on Norris. His formidable rib cage gave it shape. Probst wondered if he himself could carry off suspenders.

“—As well as continuing to waive the city income tax for city residents. This might not be as suicidal as it sounds. Property-tax revenues for the fiscal year will be up at least forty percent on the strength of the North Side boom alone. Of course, once the developments are further along, income will fall again because the city’s going full steam ahead with its tax-abatement program. The way out appears to be twofold. In the first place, a bond issue—”

“To raise general revenues?” Ross Billerica interrupted. Words left his mouth as if expelled for bad behavior. “That will take a constitutional hamendment, Hi’m afraid.”

“No, it won’t,” Crawford said. “They’ll still have enough tax income for payroll and operating expenses. It’s stretching the law a little, but even routine maintenance, if it’s been postponed long enough, can be written into a bond improvement. The voters will approve and the city should find plenty of takers for the bonds. But the news today is what really counts. If the merger goes through, then the county will have to assume much of the cost of providing services, at a comparatively small cost to the city.”

Crawford concluded his report speculatively. He said the history of the St. Louis area seemed to be a seesaw between the city and the county, as if this site at the confluence of rivers had never been and never would be productive enough to make both halves simultaneously viable. The city’s rise and the county’s fall were the same event, and it was occurring now for two simple reasons: the altered investment policies of a handful of executives, and the drastic drop in the city’s crime rate.

Everyone began to speak at once, but Probst cut them short and nodded to John Holmes. Holmes bore a strong facial resemblance to FDR, but wore modern glasses. His bank had joined with Probst and Boatmen’s and a dozen other creditors in a suit against Harvey Ardmore. “You want to give us the bad news now, John?”

The bad news was county finances. Six months ago, Holmes said, only one of the area’s five largest corporations had been headquartered in the city: Hammaker. Six months from now, three of the Big Five would be there: Hammaker, Ripley, and Allied Foods. Only Wismer and General Syn would be left in the county, and only they would still be within commuting range of most of the county’s newer high- and middle-income housing developments.

Men looked at Probst, who was sandwiched between these two steadfast giants. The General was staring at the ceiling, his lips closed and inflated. Buzz hadn’t moved when his name was mentioned. His thighs spread like flat tires on the seat of his chair. Probst was struck by the contrast between the modesty of Buzz’s figure and the power he wielded. He had direct control over thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars. He had dandruff on his glasses.

Since October, Holmes continued, nineteen other firms had relocated in the city or taken steps in that direction. Eight of them employed two hundred or more people. These were Data-Rad, Syntech, Utility Software, Blanders Electric, Newpoint Systems, Hedley-Carlton, Heartland Control, and — the largest — Kelly Richardson’s Compunow. In other words, the high-tech industries, the new firms, the ones with the highest median salaries. They were leading the way and clustering, as it were, around Ripley’s new research division, which was already operating in temporary quarters on the North Side.

“We could have expected this from Ripley,” Holmes said. “In thirty years in business in St. Louis he’s never once taken a false step.”

In November and December the seasonally adjusted rate of housing starts in the county had declined for the first time since the last recession, and declined by nearly 20 percent. There had also been a slew of highly visible bankruptcies, Westhaven chief among them. Real property values were in steep decline, with West County by far the hardest-hit region; this was especially cruel because the statewide reassessment, just completed in August, had left assessed valuations at an all-time high. In the many new office buildings west of I-270, occupancy was shrinking.

“From a vacancy rate of seven percent a year ago, we’re already up to sixteen and it’s accelerating. I’d guess the March figures will show us above twenty-five percent, and that means we’re hurting, gentlemen, palpably hurting.”

It was true that in many respects the county was unchanged from a year ago, with retail and service enterprises substantially unaffected. To look at Webster Groves or Ladue or Brentwood you would never guess what was going on. But the poor performance of the economic indicators was creating self-fulfilling prophecies. A front-page article in the Wall Street Journal had glowingly described the city’s efforts to attract new business, darkly delineated the county’s consequent problems, and forecast more of the same, only better, only worse.

“We’ve been able to count no fewer than five middle-sized firms from out of state who had planned to locate in the county, or at least were seriously considering it, but are now committed to a city location. And they’re building, not renting, in the city. The city may ultimately go bust, but it’s rigged things so those companies can hardly afford to pass up the inherent tax advantages in building. As for why the county didn’t ever provide similar incentives, the answer is because there was never any local competition until this year.”

Probst was watching the county supervisor’s reaction to the report. Ross Billerica was a few years younger than Probst. His hair was Greek black and he wore it in a long crewcut, a short pompadour, with the ends of the hairs all diving for cover at once, uniformly, glistening. A lawyer by training and a millionaire by inheritance of his family’s liquor-store chain, he had a (HA!) belligerency that led many people to think him highly able. But if he was so marvelous, you had to wonder why he was also (HA! TAKE THAT!) so highly dislikable, and why after twenty years of being hailed as senatorial or even presidential material, he was still just the county soup and had to campaign hard before every election.

“Stop right there, John!!!” Billerica, as if he could stand no more inaccuracy, was correcting Holmes. “For your information, we’re still hrunning a neat surplus. Maybe you’re forgetting that neither the tax rates nor the hassessed valuations have changed.”

Holmes turned patiently to Billerica. “What I’m saying, Ross, is that with real property values and profitability making a sharp downturn — especially in your unincorporated areas, which have always been your mainstay revenue-wise — I don’t see how you can avoid lowering taxes at some point. You’re talking about maintaining current revenue levels. I can guarantee you that will send a number of firms either into bankruptcy or into the city. If you want to keep the default rate down — and I sure hope you do — and if you want to keep businesses in the county, I think that you and most of the municipalities are going to have to make deep cuts in services in the next year or two. In the county’s case, I’d recommend as soon as possible.”

Billerica smiled as if conceding a technical point.

Bud Replogle reported on hospitals. Suddenly, he said, the chief of police had become a leading advocate of improving the two city hospitals. Bud stressed the word “two” and got a round of smiles, because for twenty years the revival of City Hospital Number Two, renamed Homer G. Phillips, had been a matter of burning concern to the city’s black community. For twenty years mayoral and aldermanic candidates had promised action, and for twenty years the hospital had sunk into ever worse disrepair, losing first its accreditation and then its ties with the medical schools. Municipal Growth’s own study had concluded that Homer Phillips was unsavable. But now Jammu was using that very study as the basis for her own, more ambitious proposals. Foremost among them: the preservation and revitalization of Homer Phillips.

“What in God’s name,” Eldon Black said, “is the police chief doing in hospital planning?”

“What she’s doing,” Replogle answered, “is she’s liquidating our assets. She’s making a public show of what we’ve been doing privately for years.”

Lee Royce’s report on black politics reached a similar point: “Here for twenty years we’ve been cultivating a relationship with the urban blacks, and then she waltzes in here, with no personal affection for them, and proceeds to buy them off. They’ve let themselves be bought, for a new Homer Phillips, for tax concessions and a hundred favors to black property owners. For a political stake. It’s a buyer-seller relationship. When they dealt with us, it was as equals.”

“Emotion aside, Lee…?” Probst prompted.

“We based our relationship on the fact that since the city has a large black population, a majority even, they should be given our support in every responsible effort to improve the quality of life there. They’ve been happy with this. It is their city, regardless of the color of the mayor’s skin.”

“Yeller, last I checked,” the baked voice told Probst. “With a long streak of red.”

“Jammu has worked them into a position where they’ll vote pro-merger, I believe, and if she succeeds in creating a more regionally oriented government, it’s the blacks who’ll lose the most in terms of political say-so. But she’s telling them a different story.”

Rick DeMann gave his report on city schools. The prosperity of the St. Louis school district was keyed to property values, he said, and so naturally it stood to be among the boom’s chief beneficiaries. “What galls me, though, what really galls me, is Jammu’s attitude. It takes cash, she says, and lots of it, to improve the schools. Only good money will attract the good young teachers, reduce class size, improve discipline. And it’s like, ‘You ninnies. Don’t you understand it takes money?’ Of course we understand. But there was never any money until this year.”

A merger of the suburbs and the city, Rick added, would render moot the touchy legal questions raised by regional desegregation. This could have serious demographic implications. “A big reason the white middle class moved out to the county is, as we all know, their desire for good schools and, more specifically, their fear of black areas. If the city comes back into the county, there won’t be anyplace to run.”

“Except to other cities,” said Eldon Black.

“To start the next discussion—” Probst raised his voice, hastily trying to invent a new discussion topic. “I’d like to pick up on some of these questions. It seems to me, now, that, ah, we should look at this realistically.” Yes. Realistically. He cleared his throat. “Realistically. Haven’t we, as a group, never really been opposed to the merger of the city and county? The current layout is full of inequities. If someone had proposed a merger a year ago, we would have done everything in our power to help win voter approval for it. Because it makes sense. We stand for what makes sense. As for the supposed damage to the county economy—”

“The actual damage,” John Holmes said.

“—We’re not here to take sides. We’re here to determine what the right thing to do is. What’s right for the city and county as a whole. What makes sense.”

“Martin—”

“Martin—”

“Martin,” Holmes said, “it sounds to me as if you’re saying we should continue doing nothing at all.”

“I don’t agree. I’m just trying to eliminate the sour grapes from the discussion, and to point out the strength of our pro-county bias.”

“Fiddling while the city burns,” the baked voice said.

Probst ignored it. “Jim,” he said. “You had something to say?”

Jim Hutchinson was looking at the three-foot-tall scale model of the Arch on the rear windowsill. “Yes.” He squared himself with the table. “We’ve been following—”

“Who’s we?” P. R. Nilson immediately demanded.

Hutchinson lowered his head an inch or so, as if to let the question sail over his head, over the Arch, and out the window. “We at KSLX,” he said, “have been following the development of a group called Urban Hope since its inception last month. In essence it seems to be a commercial redevelopment agency with close ties to the mayor and board of aldermen. The mayor has acknowledged privately that such a group exists, and while no one has been able to determine even approximately who’s in it, my guess is that it consists of all the MG members who aren’t here tonight. The ex-members, that is. Now, I thought it might be of interest if we took a straw poll here to see how many of us had been approached by a syndicate soliciting our involvement.”

“Of interest to who?” Norris said, full strength.

“Much obliged, General. Of interest to all of us. Since our topic is whether or not to take sides, I thought—”

“All right,” Probst said. “The mayor approached me last month and offered me some sort of role in planning and constructing some of the North Side projects. I told him to go to hell. At that point, of course, I assumed not everyone was being offered special privileges. Otherwise, heh, they wouldn’t be special. Can I see a show of hands?”

All but two of the men raised their hands.

“So everybody but me and Hutch,” Norris said. “What do we make of this?”

Probst was disappointed. He hadn’t been the only one.

“I invite you all to review the facts,” Hutchinson said. “The city now stands where Clayton stood in the early sixties. The county now stands where the city stood in 1900. Yes, I agree, the county isn’t dead. But in the space of six months, a newcomer to St. Louis has reversed — reversed, not just altered — the balance of power in greater St. Louis. The reports tonight, and the show of hands, provide proof for another of the General’s contentions: Jammu is at the center of this, and she’s aware of our existence. Given her control of everything else, I find it highly unlikely that she isn’t the motivating force behind the syndicate called Urban Hope.”

“Urban Warriors, Osage Hope,” Norris said.

“And yes, there are those of us who infer an involvement in the terrorist group as well. But when all her other activities — and gentlemen, I can’t help saying again how remarkable it is that this woman has been here only five months — when all her other activities are both legal and extremely effective, why on earth should she be mixed up with the Osage Warriors? Now, to the fact that over half of MG appears to have left and joined a quasi-commercial syndicate, and to the fact that economic forces alone are speeding the city’s rejuvenation, we add today’s news that the General Assembly is about to authorize a merger referendum.”

“Is about to consider authorizing, Jim.”

Hutchinson looked at Probst. “Is about to authorize. We have an overwhelmingly Democratic House, a Democratic governor, and almost a Democratic majority in the Senate. If you haven’t noticed the strong party flavor to what’s been going on, you haven’t been thinking much.”

Probst narrowed his eyes.

“Because the Democratic leadership has never been more than marginally opposed to the idea of a merger, and Jammu knows how to counter what few objections they’ve had. They see it, and rightly so, as their chance to knock the Republicans out of power in the county. And the numbers make clear that they can do just that. Consider, further, that the mayor has gotten more attention this fall and winter than all the other prominent Democrats in Missouri combined. Consider that the attention has been 95 percent positive. Consider that this is the best thing to happen to the Missouri Democratic Party since Harry Truman. Consider that the mayor can make the merger vote out to be vital to his continued success. And then consider that the mayor owes his success entirely to one person. It started with the crime statistics. She was right there in the Christmas Announcement. And she’s right there now, and she wants this merger, and consider, if nothing else, her skill as a witness at the police hearings last month. I think we’d better accept that there’s going to be a special election in April.”

There was a silence.

“And you love it, don’t you,” the General said.

Probst cleared his throat explosively. “It’ll get hung up in the Senate.”

“Aw, Martin,” Holmes said, “not with Clark Stallhamer co-sponsoring it.”

“Yeah,” said Probst, a little unsteady. “What about that?”

“Stallhamer’s on the same boards as Chuck Meisner,” Lee Royce answered wearily. “He’s never let his constituency get in his way. His wife’s brother is Quentin Spiegelman. He owns a mountain of Ripley stock.”

“You see, Martin,” Hutchinson said (now that the form of the meeting had become Make It Comprehensible to Martin), “that’s why the county Republicans are in trouble. The shift of Ripley’s and Murphy’s operations to the city is simply bottom-line corporate thinking. Urban Hope is not a radical group — although I imagine it gives Ross no joy to contemplate the fact that Meisner’s a registered Democrat. You see what we’re up against here?”

“A double whammy,” Probst said.

“You got it. Someone has studied the political dynamics of eastern Missouri and seen an opportunity to form a coalition. That someone is Jammu. In the history of St. Louis there’s never been a phenomenon like her, nothing even close. She’s masterly.”

There was another silence — Hutchinson had a newsman’s flair for the dramatic — which Probst allowed to lengthen before he spoke.

“What I’d like to do now,” he said, “is hear some other opinions on whether it’s worth our while to try to block action in the legislature, or whether, as Jim has implied, we should concentrate on the inevitable election. I for my part—”

“Don’t you think—”

The small voice checked him. It was Buzz. “Don’t you think,” he asked the rim of the table, “that we should determine if a merger would be so bad in the first place?” He retracted his head, and coughed a little.

“Good point,” Probst said. He found his eyes drawn helplessly towards Hutchinson for more information. “I should think it depends on how—”

“What you can depend on,” the General boomed, “is that the wording and effect of the referendum will, like every other action in the city since July, further the aims and power of one group, the group led by the Queen of the Blacks, the King of Toasters and the Princess of Darkness (and I mean she’s a slut, Buzz boy, and we all know it).”

Here the General stood up. He hooked his thumbs in his black suspenders. “This group makes me damn impatient,” he confided, “and so help me, I ain’t gonna stay muzzled one second longer.” He snapped the suspenders magnificently. “For two whole hours we been ignoring the main fact, and the main fact is motives. It’s all very nice to talk about what’s happening, and how it’s happening, and through the agency of who, whom, whomever, and God knows what else it’s happening, but what counts, ladies and gentlemen, is the whys and the wherefores.”

He began to pace, circling close behind the ring of heads, each of which nodded forward at his approach like a daisy in a shower. “I see before me a group of human beans that’s refusing to come to grips with the fact that there’s a conspiracy here in St. Louis, dedicated to anarchy and socialistic propositions and the overthrow of the government and the values we all cherish deeply. I defy any man among you to prove it ain’t so. The very fact of Jammu’s sponsorship of this merger referendum faggotry is proof to me it stinks, proof enough.”

He had stopped at the rear window, laid his hands on the model of the Arch, and lifted it from the sill. He turned with it and held it at arm’s length like a man warding off a vampire with a cross. One of the tiny plastic trees at the base of the Arch shook loose, rolled across the plaster river and fell to the carpeting. The model was old and fragile. Probst was relieved when the General set it down again.

“Now, some of you still seem to need reasons to oppose this merger, and for your convenience and peace of mind I’ll list me the many reasons and defy any man among you to contravene a one of ’em.” He winked at Probst. Probst winked back involuntarily. “First thing, it’s a power play and nothing but. We already seen from the municipalization of Hammaker that she has no respect for the sanctity of corporate structure. Your way of life and that of your workers ain’t no concern of hers. The only reason she gives a damn about anybody’s way of life is votes. ’Course, the way she’s drawn the lines, you may see the merger as making sense, but that don’t make it right. I can’t stop thinking about Adolf Hitler. The way he drew the lines, total war made sense. OK, number two, it violates the spirit of St. Louis. I think you know what I’m talking about. Let me ask you this, Martin. How many times you reckon you been lied to, outright lied to, in the last four months?”

“More times than I’d care to count.”

“And before that? Pick a year. 1979. How many times in a whole year in 1979 did a man you trusted lie to you?”

Probst believed he hadn’t been lied to at all in 1979.

“Right. What’s it tell you about the spirit of these developments? What’s it tell you about the quality of the city’s new leadership, this Urban Hope, when all them fellers are too yeller to show their faces here tonight? If they had a good case for the merger, or even just a honorable case, they’d be arguing it here right now. But they ain’t. And then there’s a practical case against it, number three.” Norris was completing his circuit, reading over shoulders. He stopped at the chair of Billerica and bathed him in pity and contempt. Billerica grinned bizarrely, a dental demonstration, which seemed to throw the General. He looked at a picture on the wall, of Probst and former senator Symington shaking hands in Washington.

“Number three,” he repeated. “S’posedly it’s now to the county’s advantage to take on the burden of the city, because s’posedly the city’s going to be making more money and the county s’posedly less, and this is s’posedly the county’s last chance ever to claim its fair share. All righty. Now let’s forget the good chance this is all a flash in the pan. Let’s forget that the reason the merger looks good now is that you all are projecting these rates. If the businesses keep moving to the city. If the real estate keeps falling in the county. Forget that these rates of change are based on one single solitary bit of do-daddling, namely Ripley and Murphy’s move. Forget that if the trend stops in March — and, my boys, it will, it will — then the county will get plain swindled in a merger and only Jammu will come out on top. Let’s us forget all this and let me ask: What the hell difference will it make to West County if we merge? Are the powers of economics so miserly and our hearts so weak and faithless that only one half the region can be on top at a time? Listen to me. Look at Martin, sitting there like the Mona Lisa smiling. Ain’t he the pitcher of the average man, the common man? Our fellow man? He’s centrally located, Martin is, he’s the man to watch, and so I ask you as a fellow man here, Martin: if there isn’t any merger, are you going to move out of — excuse me, uh—”

“Webster Groves.”

“Out of Webster Groves? You going to start hurting for contracts? How much would a cut in county services really mean to you?”

“He may be ordinary,” Billerica interposed, “but Webster Groves hisn’t Valley Park. The close-in suburbs are hnot the problem.”

“Neither are the outlying areas,” Norris said. “I mean yes they is. But merging ain’t going to help them much more than not merging is. The only folks really hurting is the speculators and the live-dangerous real-estate men, no offense, Lee and Jerry, I don’t mean you. You understand us, Ross? We’re saying merger is bad. The status quo is good.”

“Hexactly my point, General. That’s hexactly what I’m saying.”

Fellow Man was thinking about his visit in December to Wesley, and Wesley’s gall in taking him for a man of average moral means, of ordinary scruples, in even suggesting he join the fellowship of the syndicate. Fellow Man needed this parable, this clear-cut arrangement of right and wrong, to cinch his decision: the merger deserved opposition. It was the right thing to do. He owed it to the loyal men around him.

“How do we stop it?” Fellow Man asked.

Hutchinson tried to give him an answer. He said he didn’t share the group’s abhorrence of the merger. His view was that once a good thing, always a good thing. But he was willing to act as a consultant for as long as he was welcome. Assuming the wisdom of writing off the legislative action as a foregone conclusion, he suggested that the city voters also be written off. The 1962 consolidation scheme had failed in the city too, of course, but by a smaller margin than in the county, and circumstances had changed a great deal; even the mayor hadn’t supported the scheme in 1962. It would be a far wiser allocation of resources to focus on defeating the referendum in the county, and that (if you asked Hutchinson’s opinion) was do-able, if not exactly easy.

“KSLX is conducting a phone survey tonight,” he said, “and I think it will show the county opposed by two to one. But that stands to turn around once the issue is publicized and once the big guns — Jammu, Wesley, Stallhamer, the Hammakers — get involved in pushing it. In the case of Jammu and the Hammaker family, popularity transcends the city-county split. Jammu’s popular no matter how you slice the cake. To stand a chance of defeating the referendum, I’d say it will take more than the dollar contributions of your respective companies and the Republican Party. The cause is going to require a spokesman who’s widely known and absolutely trustworthy, someone to take your case before the public and give it some weight. Your side has to have a voice.”

All eyes were on Fellow Man.

Home, and turning to drive up the driveway, he was a little surprised to see that the house was dark. Usually Barbara left at least the kitchen light on. He parked the Lincoln by her BMW and activated the garage door, ducking out ahead of it. The wind, in the time it had taken him to drive home, had turned cruel. It had the brutality of a certain kind of bleeding, not the spurt of a severed artery, but the cold seep and puddling of a mangled limb. It dragged over the neighbors’ eaves and gables, rent itself on chimneys, carried sirens and a throbbing from the Mopac tracks to the north. Like a wind in Chicago or Boston, some city on open water, it brought more of an ache than a sting to his cheeks. He hurried into the house.

The kitchen was too warm.

He noticed it immediately. It was downright stifling for such a late hour. She never failed to lower the heat before she went to bed. Wasn’t she home? Was she sick? Hurt? Had she gone out? Was someone hurt? Was someone dead? Had she fallen in the tub? Choked? Electrocuted? Asleep in the wrong room? Dead? The ever-latent questions coalesced. He dispelled them, but the house was too warm. They came back.

He stopped in the living room to turn down the heat (yes, 70°) and climbed the stairs. Was she home? He heard nothing, smelled neither the soap nor the toothpaste that haunted the hallway near the bathroom door at night. Still he expected to enter the bedroom and find her, the bed mussed and her body raising the blankets, to accept her presence instantly and totally.

But the bed was smooth. He’d expected this as much as he’d expected to find her. She simply couldn’t sleep with the heat set this high. He bent his back, and his fingers found the switch on his nightstand lamp. Its light revealed an envelope on the pillows.

She’d cleaned the bedroom. Her sneaker prints dotted the freshly vacuumed carpeting in methodical angles. Against the wall by the television stood four paper grocery bags, from Schnucks, from Straub’s, full of clothes. A note was pinned to one of them. He crossed the room and read it. CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, it said.

Would she pin this note to remind herself? Of course not. Time itself was panic here. He’d been in the house only sixty seconds, and he was aware of the largest bite of experience he could safely swallow whole. This was just about the limit. He saw time as corporeal. He was a tube of man with a man-shaped cross-section, the one-dimensional squeezure from the kitchen to this point, where he paused in his heavy winter coat, in the heat, and then sat down on the bed. He picked up the envelope with a sportive flick of his wrist, as he might lift an envelope with happy contents: careful, it might contain a check. He played with its weight, its center of gravity, shrugged, and flipped it. Sealed. There was a trace of lipstick. She’d sealed the envelope. He slit it with his finger, sundering the BARBARA PROBST from the rest of the engraved return address.

Dear Martin,

This will seem so sudden to you that I hardly know where to begin explaining it, or whether I should even try. I’ve been seeing John a lot, practically every day. That’s where I was on Saturday afternoon. And most days, though you couldn’t know it. I know I told you I didn’t plan to make a habit of it, but it’s turned into a habit anyway. Which doesn’t mean you and I couldn’t keep hobbling along together for the rest of our lives, but every time I sit still I hear you telling me to shut up and I hear me telling you I don’t really love you, and I wonder what the point is anymore. I never intended to have a stupid life. I’m leaving for New York this afternoon. Maybe that’s stupid. If I thought this would kill you, if I thought it even might mess up your life for a while, I probably wouldn’t be doing it. But I don’t see you having a hard time without me. That’s almost reason enough for me to leave. I’m tired of taking care of you when you don’t even need me. I don’t want to sneak around like everyone else in this city. You hardly seemed to notice Lu was gone. You’ll hardly notice me gone either. You have your work. I’ll call you soon. I respect you, Martin. You deserve better than to have me meeting a lover in a hotel room. You deserve the truth, and this is it. Don’t expect me back.

Barbara

Probst stood up. His body leaned towards his dresser and his legs went along. He threw his wallet and keys onto it.

“Well, all right,” he said.

He put his hands in the pockets of his coat and drew it tight around his waist. His chest went in and out. “OK.”

After its moment of warm-up the television spewed rich laughter, the studio sounds of the Tonight Show. Probst turned it off just as the picture came slanting onto the screen. He turned on Barbara’s nightstand light. He turned on the ceiling light. Then the small reading lamp by the rocking chair seemed to give him offense. He closed in on it and turned it on. “You—”

His mouth made words, but few had sound. In a man who’d been speaking all day long, this was illogical.

He went to the study and turned on more lights. There was a hesitancy in his pacing. He’d strike out in one direction and then draw up, bouncing on the balls of his feet, arrested by some new consideration. At each light, too, he paused and turned his head to one side, as if cocking some internal trigger. Then he turned on the light. “I respect you?” He took the picture of Barbara from his desk and threw it against the wall. “I respect you?”

In the living room he turned on the spotlights aimed at the three still lifes. He circled the room, and the ceiling brightened. Each new source of light showed up remnants of cobweb or the traces of a spackled crack. The dust on bulbs rarely used gave the air a burnt taint. When all the lights were on — the lamps on the end tables, the lights embedded in the mantel, the chrome tube lamp in the corner, the antique banker’s lamp with the green glass shade, the sunken spots above the window seats, the small bulbs in the recessed bookcase — he left the room.

Dropping onto the sofa in the den, he dug the heels of his shoes into an embroidered pillow, but this didn’t seem to satisfy him. He swung his legs onto the coffee table. A magazine slid from the stack of them. Another followed. He kicked the rest onto the floor. “You—” The pitch of his voice wasn’t much lower than a woman’s. But then, men’s seldom really are. He drew his jaw back hard. Crowded by their neighbors, the middle two of his lower teeth overlapped somewhat. His skin, which had retained a taut uniformity for many years, was mottled and faulted, and covered with whiskers like dark sand, briny ocean sand which couldn’t be brushed off. By themselves, his eyes were gray and gentle. Eyes hardly age; they’re a window on the soul. But the face shut the window with an ugly convulsion, and Probst thanked his wife very much. The voice dropped into lower registers. “You stinking, stinking bitch,” he said. He looked at the writing desk across the room from him, he looked at the cubbyholes organized for long storage, he looked at the ashtray she had washed and dried. He looked, in his overcoat and misery, like a tramp.

He went to make coffee. “I respect you, too,” he said as he filled the reservoir of the device with water. He removed the lid from the coffee canister and began to open drawers, yanking them out one after another, and heaving them shut.

“Where does she keep the filters?” he whispered.

Where?

Where?

Where?

He stalked from room to room, flashing angry and cooling off in the archetypical cycle of storm and lull, with pauses for whiskey, muddy coffee, chocolate cookies, until there was light in the eastern trees. He was a man who hadn’t been alone in his house, not really, for more than twenty years. His movements were driven by something more elemental than anger or grief, by the unleashing, maybe, of the self itself. At times he almost looked like he was having fun; what he did alone he alone could know. Though the temperature never fell below 65 all night, he left his coat on, kept it buttoned at the neck. It was as if sidewalks and open spaces and wind had been let inside his house.

In the morning he went to work and spent five hours at his desk, mainly barking into the telephone. Outside, the weather grew more menacing by the hour. The wind was blowing hard from the east, spraying the city with an oily coat of water which instantly congealed. Walkers clutched their heads, and squad cars leaving the precinct house and speeding west were overtaken by their own exhaust like women whose skirts billowed up under their armpits.

Traffic on I-44, normally light by six o’clock, was crawling. Probst had been downtown to sign a contract and had spent nearly an hour inching out to the black methane storage tanks at the city limits. Here the cause of the backup came into view. An eastbound semi had plowed into the double guardrail and half ripped, half flipped, to land in pieces in the westbound lanes, where at least six cars and another truck had struck it.

People had died, Probst could tell. When he passed through the one free lane he fixed his eyes on the car ahead of him, but the car braked. A stretcher moved into his vision and showed him, not six feet away, an inert body covered entirely by a blanket. The brake lights had plastic spines and vertebrae for reinforcement. They dimmed at last. Attendants were wresting ambulance doors out of the grip of the wind, and Probst broke free into the dark, unclogged lanes.

He was in the second lane when he saw his exit, Berry Road. His hands started to turn the wheels, but some danger or paralysis, either the ice on the road or the lactic acid in his muscles, seemed to prevent him from changing lanes in time. He sailed past. He sat up straighter and looked where he was going. He was going west. He shook his head and missed the Big Bend exit, missed the Lindbergh, too. The next cloverleaf slung the Lincoln north onto I-270.

“We’ll see what it looks like,” he was saying half an hour later. He’d parked the car on the snow at what had been the truck entrance to Westhaven, where the mixers had left deep ruts when they came to pour concrete in December. The Lincoln rocked on its springs in the wind. Snowflakes, dry ones, skidded across the windshield.

Wired to the gate above the heavy padlock was a sheet metal sign reading, PROPERTY OF THE U.S. BANKRUPTCY COURT OF MISSOURI, EASTERN DISTRICT. TRESPASSING IS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.

Probst slogged south from the gate, breaking the crust on the snow with his knees, until he came to the culvert that crossed under the fence. He ducked under the fence himself, in violation of federal law, and doubled back to the road. Ahead lay the foundations of Westhaven. It was a project tremendous and abandoned and now, in the winter, buried. It left a large white negative in the woods, an image of contemporary disaster, like a town bombed flat, or a pasture ostracized for harboring dioxin. The acres had been cleared and terraced, the foundations poured, and retaining walls built to separate the levels. Now the snow stuck to these walls in patches, in oval spots, in feathery ribbed fern formations, in vertical lines along the tar-sealed joints, in all the patterns of neglect. It was more desolate than a sod house on the prairie. It was a disappointment specific to the times. No project was begun with failure in mind; the spirit was eager; but the flesh was proverbial.

Trudging and resolute, Probst followed a branch of the road that curled down to the center of an excavation into what would have been — and might still somehow become? — the entrance to a parking garage. He plowed through drifts as high as his breastbone, aiming purposefully for the eastern wall. When he couldn’t go any farther, he turned and raised his face. He was a speck in a bowl. From where he stood he could see only gray sky and, in angry motion, a horde of black flakes that looked radioactive but felt like snow, when they melted and ran down his cheeks.

It was still nighttime. Undressing, he kicked his briefs over his shoulder and caught them. He froze. An anxious look crossed his face. The briefs dropped to the floor.

He got into bed. “How you doin’, hands?” he said to his hands, and grimaced. His eyes were roving the room. As if shying from something, he leaned to find a magazine to read. He heard Mohnwirbel’s car in the driveway, the crunch of tires on ice as he took it around to his parking space behind the garage. The door thumped. In his head Probst heard a German voice say, Martin Probst. On the cover of Time was a drawing of missiles, missile chess, black Russian missiles, white American missiles, the face of the President on the white-king missile, the face of the Soviet premier on the black-king missile, and above them the word STALEMATE?

With a jerk, Probst turned out the light and pulled the pillow over his head.

There had been nights, in every year of their marriage, when Barbara had waked him up and told him she was scared and couldn’t sleep. Her voice would be low and thick. “I’ve got to know when it’s coming. I’ve got to. I can’t stand it.” Then he’d held her, his fearless wife, in his arms. He’d loved her, because through the skin and bone of her back he could feel her heart beating, and he felt sorry. I respect you, Martin. That was the point. He respected her, too. She was the woman he slept with and faced death with. He’d thought they agreed. That they were modern only to the extent of not being vitalists, of facing the future and hoping that if love was organic then it could be synthesized out of respect, out of the memory of being in love, out of pity, out of familiarity and physical attraction and the bond of the daughter they both loved as parents. That they would not leave each other. That the project mattered. He’d thought they had an agreement.

How could she have left him? He launched the question into space in a thousand directions and it hit everything but her. A magic shield protected her, something he’d never experienced before: an adamant incredulity. She didn’t. She couldn’t.

“God damn this country,” Probst said.

The resonance traveled through his skull to his ears. He heard himself from the inside. He heard the country answer, the muffled booms, the thousand reports. Get with the times, Martin Probst. You think she never looked at another man? I’m always rationalizing attractions. Because there’s plenty of pubic parking, Mr. Boabst. Plenty indeed. Women these days, they need that extra — I don’t know. Overtures of a, em, physical character. Are we quits? That region is so healthy, Martin. My game, old chap. This isn’t good and evil, Daddy.

He could see by the clock that it was only 12:30. He was wide awake again. He was lying on his back. His right arm was bent over his ribs, and the curve of his fingers fit the curve of his breast, covering his heart. His left hand lay flat between his legs, resting on his penis and thigh. Had he always lain with his hands in these positions? Or only now that he was alone? A peaceful feeling settled over him. Through his fingertips he felt the hair over his heart and his heart’s amazing labor. He felt the ribs. Hands sent messages via nerves to the brain. He felt the crinkly hair between his legs, and the pliant genital flesh. He was dropping off, into a state woolly and primitive, because now he knew what his hands covered while he slept and the world did not and he was vulnerable.

If he was awake when the missiles fell, there was a chance he could run. He could find shelter, protect his head from falling things. But when he was asleep, his head couldn’t know its importance. Asleep, he protected something else. Asleep, he was an animal. This knowledge warmed him for several waking days, while he was working to defeat the city-county referendum.