The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

18

Probst was just sitting down to breakfast on the first Sunday in March when he noticed a pair of trespassers in his back yard.

One was Sam Norris, a lesser yeti in a blue loden coat. The other was a stranger, a short man in a green parka with the furlined hood thrown back. Probst saw Mohnwirbel plodding out of the garage, the legs of his pajamas bunched between his overcoat and the tops of his black rubber boots, and making his way stiffly across the snow to Norris and his companion. Words were exchanged. Probst took a bite of sticky bun. Norris pointed at something in a bank of leafless azaleas. Mohnwirbel shook his head and made emphatic little karate chops. Norris smiled and looked directly at Probst without a trace of recognition.

Mohnwirbel returned to the garage. Arms akimbo, Norris and the short man squinted and stamped. Probst could see himself finishing breakfast and reading the paper and never bothering to find out what was going on out there. But now Norris was beckoning impatiently.

He went out in shirtsleeves. “Morning, Sam. What brings you here?”

“Herb,” the General said, “Martin Probst. Martin, like you to meet Herb Pokorny.”

The little man folded his arms behind his back. He wore a thin helmet of blond, wet-looking hair. His nose was flat and small, his skin pockmarked like weathered stone, his eyes shallow-set and practically lashless, and his lips the same beige color as the rest of his face. He reminded Probst of the famous sphinx whose nose Napoleon’s soldiers had shot off.

“Glad to meet you,” Probst said.

Pokorny looked at Norris.

“Looks like a tasty breakfast you have there,” Norris said. “Herb and myself were just talking about a little hole here in your yard, Herb, you show him the little hole?”

Pokorny took a step and pointed with a duck-booted toe at a patch of snowless, freshly turned earth between two azalea bushes.

“You want to show him the footprint?”

Pokorny pointed out a footprint in the snow to the left of the azaleas.

“That your foot, Martin?”

Several smart cracks occurred to him, but he said, simply, “No.”

“It ain’t your gardener’s either.”

Probst looked into the slowly churning sky. Four crows launched themselves from a hickory tree, their wingbeats wrenching out caws.

“You been using that detector like I told you, Martin?”

“I can’t say I have,” Probst said. “The novelty wore off after the first few months.”

Pokorny scowled at this mild joke.

“When’s the last time you swept your house?” Norris said.

“Maybe three weeks ago,” he lied.

“That’s very interesting. Because there’s been a receiver-transmitter buried in this here hole until last night about two-thirty a.m.”

“We heard the thignalth.”

“Oh really,” Probst said.

“Yep. Digitized and coded, or we’d have been able to tell you what exactly they picked up. Not that we can’t guess.”

“So there was a transmitter in what you’re calling this hole. It was transmitting coded messages. Now it’s gone.”

“We only tuned in yesterday. They had one hell of a little processor buried there.” Norris nodded at the loose dirt. “Received signals from your house, digitized ’em, compressed ’em by a factor of a hundred or so, and sent ’em off in a burst every two hundred seconds at a variety of very high frequencies — that is, when it was active. Not a peep until you came home, I’d guess voice-actuated. So give Herb some credit. That ain’t a easy thing to discover.”

“Very impressive,” Probst told Pokorny. “But then someone came in the night, dug it up, left one single footprint, and ran away.”

“Bingo.”

“You’ll pardon me if I don’t believe any of this.”

“Show him the list, Herb.”

Pokorny knelt in the snow and opened a cracked leather satchel. He handed Norris a folder from which Norris took a pair of dot matrix printouts, stapled together. He gave them to Probst.

“Yes?” Probst said.

“Suspects.”

He yawned. “I see. What kind of suspects?”

“All persons of Indian origin and Type Q profile known to have been in St. Louis between July 1 and — how up-to-date are we, Herb?”

“Tuethday.”

“Tuesday the, uh, twenty-seventh of February.”

“What do the stars mean?”

“They’re the ones that either we or reliable witnesses have seen meeting with Jammu. Now, have you—”

“You’ll pardon me if this makes me a little ill, Sam.”

The General’s eyelids twitched. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve raised no objections to your looking into something illegal like the stadium bombs, but this is something else entirely. Some kind of McCarthyesque stunt, if you ask me. This is guilt by association, by place of birth.”

“You can spare us the editorial. I want you to read through this and tell me if you heard of or know of any of the persons on it. Do me that favor?”

Probst gave the printout back to Norris. “Apart from Mrs. Hammaker, I can’t help you.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Norris exchanged a glance with Pokorny. “Well now, that’s interesting. Because from what I understand this one here — John Nissing — took some pitchers of your house.”

“Oh did he.” Probst could see that Norris knew Barbara had left him. But how much more did he know? Had Pokorny seen her with Nissing? Snooped in New York? Probst saw no reason to discuss his private life here in the back yard with Pokorny making faces at him. “I never met the photographers,” he said truthfully. “Barbara dealt with, uh, them.”

“And how is Barbie?”

Norris knew. The whole world knew. Probst’s eyes wandered across the twig-strewn snow, up the walls of the garage to Mohnwirbel’s windows. “Fine. She’s in New York.”

“Oh yes?”

“With relatives.”

A wind whispered in the azaleas. Probst’s arches were cramping in his tennis shoes, in the snow.

“Okey-doke,” Norris said. Pokorny nodded, snapped his satchel shut and walked to the driveway. “I suppose I’m a little sorry about this, Martin.”

“Sam—” Probst’s voice cracked; he realized he was angry. “Sam, I’d say that if you want to mess around with this kind of thing you’re going to get what you deserve.”

“But don’t moralize with me.”

“Private investigators deal in dirt. You give them enough time and money—”

“Damn it, Martin, don’t moralize with me.”

“I’ve been as good a listener as you’ve got. When you want help with a legitimate project, you know where to come. But an episode like this is what I’d call an abuse of—”

“You do me a disservice. I apologize for disturbing you, but you do me a disservice. I already told you I could care less what goes on in your family. I told you that and—”

“I want that little weasel off my property.”

“I’ll let that pass. I’ll let that pass. Now listen. I’ve apologized for any embarrassment. Will you accept my apology.”

Norris’s fingers dug almost desperately into Probst’s elbow. He couldn’t help feeling flattered. “All right.”

“Thank you. Now just two things before you eat your breakfast and spend your day in Clayton, just two things. Will you listen?”

Probst sighed.

“One. You got to believe there was a device buried in your yard here. This ain’t conjecture, I can play you our tape if you like. Now I don’t guess you’d allow Herb — he’d do a neat job, of course — and it’d be very beneficial if he could do a search in your house right now—”

“Not a chance.”

“But you do believe me about the device.”

“I suppose. I believe there’s a South Pole. I haven’t seen it and I don’t care, but I believe it’s there.”

“You oughta work on your attitude — but but but but. The second thing is, just a simple yes or no. Was Mrs. Hammaker honest to God the only element on the list you’ve heard of?”

“Quite frankly,” Probst said, wondering what he’d say. He found he didn’t care. “Yes, she was.”

“All right. Sorry to bother you.” Norris walked to the driveway and kicked his feet clean of snow pellets. He turned. “You understand I believe what you say. You understand that.” Then he was gone.

Probst went inside, finished his cold breakfast, and paced the kitchen trying to walk away his shaking, as he had over the years in the wake of various Sunday morning quarrels. He placed his cup and saucer on the Rubbermaid mat in the sink. A few days ago he’d turned over the mat to discover yellow patches of slime, clouded like the chicken fat in cooling soup.

He went upstairs to his study, heaved a pyramid of second-class mail off his chair, and began to work through the three-inch stack of résumés his personnel director Dale Winer had given him. There were applicants for four new positions, one managerial, three clerical. His practiced eye homed in on misspellings, patterns of instability, overqualification, North Side high-school diplomas (affirmative-action-wise, they could really use two black women), wanton preening, irrelevant experience. Not that most of these applicants couldn’t have handled the jobs. But you had to pick and choose.

The telephone rang.

It was Jack DuChamp. Just checkin’ in, Jack said. Now that Laurie was confirmed she didn’t go to Sunday school, so he and Elaine and Laurie had started going to late church instead of early church because the kids were turning into late sleepers on the weekend. Elaine liked to sleep in too sometimes. Mark was taking a semester off from college, trying to get his act together, practice-teaching deaf children, enjoying it. But it was funny to have the extra hour or two on Sunday morning, funny to see new faces at late church, and Jack and Elaine had both made New Year’s resolutions to try to do something worthwhile in the extra time, which wasn’t really extra since late church meant coming home later too, but anyways, to try to improve life in little ways, as best they could, on Sunday mornings. Which explained why Jack was calling.

“Yes,” Probst said.

Laurie worked thirty hours a week now at the Crestwood Cinema on top of high school and rehearsals for Brigadoon, the spring musical, and — Did Luisa work?

“She—”

All the more time for her schoolwork. And it showed on the report cards, Jack was sorry to say, although he thought colleges these days were interested in more than just grades, that maturity and independence must count for a lot, and if they didn’t, then that said something about the college, didn’t it? Anyways, with Laurie working and Elaine with a light course load this semester, the two of them had been rediscovering their evenings and they wondered if Probst and Barbara — just the four of them — some night this week — maybe a restaurant so no one had to cook?

Helping deaf children, Probst thought. Helping deaf children. Helping deaf children.

Or next week, if this wasn’t enough notice.

“Jack,” Probst said. “Barbara and I are separated.”

Oh.

It was the first time Probst had used the word “separated,” even in his thoughts, and the word rang in his head as if he were practicing it after the fact. Jack said some more things to which, unlistening, he replied that it was OK, it was OK. And as soon as they’d recovered, Jack said maybe a Blues game, the two of them, Saturday night. The Canucks.

Then Luisa called. Duane was showing pictures at a gallery and the opening was Friday night. Could Daddy come? Daddy would love to come, he said. He sensed that she hadn’t called to chat, but he made her chat anyway. He cast out snare after snare, heard about her college choices, her grades, her eyes, her latest cold, her conversations with Barbara, Duane’s dealings with the gallery, Duane’s car’s new exhaust system. By the time they said good-bye it was 10:30.

The phone rang again immediately. It was a woman, Carol Hill, calling from the West County Journal to confirm the quotes he’d given her the day before.

“…The last one is, Ultimately we have to look at this in terms of democracy taxation without representation is a very old issue in this country and it’s a valuable perspective to keep in mind will the merger create a more or a less representative government for the residents of the county and I think the answer is pretty clearly no.”

“Yes. That’s fine. I appreciate your checking this with me, Carol.”

“No problem. Thank you.” Her voice became a dial tone.

Probst looked into the hickory tree outside the window and cried, “Wait! It’s less! The answer is clearly less!” He shook his head.

MARY ELIZABETH O’KEEFE. Born 6/16/59.

The phone rang.

He tossed the receiver onto his shoulder, pinned it with his ear, and heard Barbara’s voice. He spoke. She spoke. He spoke. She spoke. “…Maybe make this more formal,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this is sort of an uncomfortable situation for both of us. I’ve been asked at parties and I don’t even know how to refer to it.” Parties. She was really ruthless. “Not to bring up a sore point, but if we could agree to call it—”

“A separation,” he said. “I’ve been referring to it as a separation when people ask.”

“That’s probably adequate.”

Adequate: the term “separation” adequate on its own strength to induce them to hate each other where they otherwise might not have.

“Look,” he said. “Do you want to divorce me?”

There was a silence on her end of the line. But the silence was not complete, for Probst heard the vowelly edges of at least one murmured sentence. Nissing was in the same damn room with her! While they talked! She and Nissing discussing it! She spoke again. “It’s kind of—”

“Because I don’t care if I ever see you again this side of hell.”

“Martin. Please.”

“Are you alone?” he said.

Her silence hummed with pictures, the frantic glances at her lover, the hand waving him from the room, Nissing taking his time. “I — no, and you’re right. You’re right. This isn’t the time to be discussing this. Can I call back?”

“Take your time.”

“Don’t say that.”

He swiveled in his chair. “I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to talk to you, I just, don’t, want, any of this. I’m sitting in my chair. I’m just trying to sit here. I’m.”

Out of the receiver came the words “Martin, I love you,” and she hung up.

I love you? What was that supposed to mean?

All at once Probst had doubts. Her haste, the consultations. It was possible, he realized, that Nissing was somehow keeping her in New York against her will. That Nissing was a criminal or conspirator, that there really had been a transmitter in the back yard. That Probst as Municipal Growth chairman had been singled out for psychological torture in order to influence his decisions, that Jammu was behind it, that Norris was right about something damned peculiar happening to the local leadership and that Probst, since Luisa left — since Dozer was hit by a van! — had been a target, that the ongoing crisis in his family was not the inevitable product of its history, but a condition imposed from without: that Barbara did love him.

Hastily he dug through the papers on his desk and found the number she’d given him. He’d never used it. He dialed the 212 and the other seven alien digits, and after a pause that seemed unusually long to him, the connection went through. “Hello!” said a plangent male voice.

“This is Martin Probst. I’d like to speak to my wife.”

“It’s your husband,” Nissing said. Probst heard Barbara laugh. “Yes?” she said.

“It’s me. Are you alone?”

He heard her say, “Get out of here, please,” and the rest muffled except for a laugh from Nissing. He heard her lips return to the phone. She was breathless. “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me.”

“I don’t. Believe me. But I’d like to see you for a little while and get some things straightened out. Do you think you could manage to fly here for a day this week?” He thought to add, on the chance of its hurting: “I’d pay.”

She sighed. “As I was about to explain when I called, John and I are flying to Paris for a week and a half, we’re leaving tomorrow. We’ll be back on the fifteenth. So maybe then, if you think it would help.”

“I don’t know. You see what I mean about not wanting to get into it. It’s not as if I don’t have plenty to do myself.”

“After your election, how about. I told Lu I’d like to see her on my birthday. Maybe then. Early April. Time’s been going very fast, at least for me.”

Probst cleared his throat. “All right.” A headache was developing behind his eyes. “Why did you hang up on me?”

After a pause she said: “Use your imagination, Martin. Picture a small apartment, all right?”

She didn’t sound like his wife. She sounded like a different woman. Maybe the woman she’d always wanted to be. Maybe that was the idea.

As soon as he’d hung up, the phone rang yet again.

“Probst,” he said.

“Hello. Mr. Probst. George Snell. Newsweek. Sorry to bother you at home on a Sunday. Like to see if we can arrange an interview for tomorrow or Tuesday. Your press secretary indicated you’d be agreeable.”

“Well!” Probst said. “Certainly. My schedule’s plenty packed, but I’m sure we can arrange something.”

“Glad to hear you say that. Tomorrow?”

“We’d better say Tuesday. Breakfast time? Lunch time? After hours? It’s up to you.”

“Could you give me an hour in the middle of the day?”

Probst reached and parted résumés to find his appointment book. His recollection was that Tuesday was wide open, but—

A woman broke into the conversation. “This is the operator, I have an emergency call for 962-6605.”

“That’s me,” Probst said.

“Fine,” said George Snell. “If I don’t catch up with you, we’re listed. Newsweek.”

“Thanks, uh. George.”

He broke the connection and waited for the next call. It was John Holmes.

“Martin, I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. I’ve got some very bad news.”

“What.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Ross is dead.”

Probst stared at Tuesday. “I see. An accident?”

“No. He was shot in his home last night, late last night. It looks like he interrupted a burglary.”

He wrote NEWSWEEK between noon and one o’clock as though this were his last chance ever to do so. “I can’t believe this, John.”

“None of us can.”

No one had witnessed it, but the house was half ransacked. A single shot had been fired, through Billerica’s throat, and this was all it took to make Probst love a man he’d never been able to stand, his death revealing all his faults and effronteries as mere symbols for the final, forgivable weakness. Billerica’s parents were handling the arrangements, but Holmes wanted Probst at Vote No headquarters. He wanted everyone there.

It began in August, in living color. He was looking out of a swimming pool into the face of an obese and idiot-eyed tabby whose paws rested on the pool’s concrete lip and whose tail lay flat and parallel to a single leg, a woman’s, on a lounger in the background. Two grade-school boys opened their lunchboxes on raised knees and showed him their contents, the apples red, the Twinkies orange. The faces were bleached to nostriled spectres with dried eyes and checkered teeth. And the city turned black and white. All was hilltop or valley now, the horizons, no matter how broken, falling away at the margins of his vision as if, out of sight, the remaining world were gathering like a storm. A black man gestured obscenely, an Indian tried to grope out from under the scope of what was seen, and distant boys played football, their feet planted in earth that seemed no more stable than a tilt-o-whirl. Luisa, in high contrast, smiled. Geese flew like happy thoughts at her shoulder. Under her shirt her breasts fell away from each other, rolling towards her locked elbows. Why was there danger in the smile she gave him? Three golfers, marked by their serene grayness and puffiness as retired, posed and mugged while a fourth golfer appeared, in the flatness of the vision, to swing his driver into their heads. The city lurked in the trees beyond the tee. In November the days fell thick and fast. Ghetto ten-year-olds straddled a chain-link fence as the cable of a wrecking ball went slack with the ball’s impact and a tenement teetered into the sky. The women were haggard. They looked like miniatures of themselves, three feet tall, package-laden and well-to-do. One was speaking to him, tossing him words with a flick of her head. The Plaza Frontenac parking lot died behind them at the edge of a flash, and neither the sky nor the windows of Shriners’ Hospital were lighted. He looked at a young policeman and saw nothing but face; above the bill of his cap, beyond his large pale ears, south of his receding chin, in the darkness behind his metal front tooth, in the material underneath the rays of his eyeballs, lay terra incognita. Ronald Struthers’s cheeks ballooned when he saw him, and his arms hung limp as a scarecrow’s over larger figures, one a balding apoplectic, the other a sad man in a lamé tunic and paisley robes. What was happening to the city? He saw Luisa’s naked back and paid as little attention to it as if it were a bathroom door; the funny ripples and blades turned livid as his stare lengthened in time and the snow falling outside the window faintly scuffed the nighttime. She was an object. This was what was happening. At the top of the Arch he captured the chubby hand of a baby stopped, by glass, from touching St. Louis. Chief Jammu and Asha Hammaker linked arms outside the Junior League, gl’amour, gl’amour, and Binky Doolittle, emerging through the door, sealed their union with a dirty look. A volunteer youth displayed a fistful of Vote No bumperstickers while a man in Fortrel climbed into a Cougar, hurriedly, to escape being pasted.

Probst was impressed. He lingered in the front corner of the gallery, alone behind the flats on which the pictures hung. Beyond the flats, coffee splashed, the guests of honor and assorted friends pattered, and Joanne, the gallery owner, dropped her r’s. Probst didn’t look forward to sitting in a folding chair with no place to put his elbows. He glanced at the work of the young woman with whom Duane was sharing the gallery space. Duane was better, he decided.

It sounded like several new visitors had come in while Probst was behind the flats. “They’re the first thing I look for when I open the paper,” he heard a familiar voice say. He stepped into the area behind the last flat. The voice was Jammu’s.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” She was sitting in a trench coat between Duane and Luisa, both of whom were twisting napkins on their laps.

“I’m twenty,” Duane said.

Luisa saw Probst peeking. He had to step out. “What do you think?” she said.

Jammu and Duane looked up.

“They’re excellent,” he told Duane. “I can see a lot of hard work.” To Jammu he said, “Hello.”

“I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting your daughter.”

Luisa turned away. Her dress was silk, dark purple and dark green, with tassels on the hem and cuffs. It looked secondhand. What was she doing with the money he sent?

“I think I’ll have a look.” Jammu touched Duane’s knee. “If you’ll excuse me.” Probst stepped aside to let her past, but with a jerk of her head she made him follow. “I’d like to talk to you.”

He gave Luisa and Duane a smile of distaste: business. Jammu had folded her coat over her arm. She was wearing a gray knit dress, surprisingly well cut for a woman he’d considered couturially drab, and a string of pearls. “Yes?” he said.

“As I mentioned the last time we met,” she said in a very low voice, “I think it’s ridiculous that in seven months we haven’t managed to speak to each other.”

“Yes, scandalous,” Probst replied. “We should be ashamed of ourselves.” She’d charmed the city and most of its leaders. She wouldn’t charm him.

“But I mean it,” she said. “I think we should talk.”

“Oh, certainly.” He turned his gaze to Duane’s pictures, encouraging her to do likewise so he could look at her. She was small, he saw, much smaller than news photos or television let on. Her body had an unusual prepubescence, as if she were a girl wearing adult clothes from a costume bin, and so her face, though normal for a thirty-five-year-old, looked sick with age. Casually, he predicted she’d be dead in ten years.

The gallery door opened, and Duane’s parents, Dr. Rodney and Dr. Pat, hurried in. Luisa sprang to her feet to greet them. Duane stayed with the cookies and drinks. His nose disappeared in a styrofoam cup. Rodney kissed Luisa. Pat hugged Luisa. Probst blamed them. Luisa handed Pat coffee and stood with her hands on her hips, shaking her hair back at regular intervals. When had she learned to act so at ease?

Jammu had proceeded without Probst to the last of the pictures. “You know,” he said, joining her, “I’m not really doing anything later on—”

“Tonight?” Jammu looked at her watch. “I have a visit to pay at Barnes Hospital. You’re welcome to come along, of course, but if you’ll be here a while, I should drop in again. I live just around the corner anyway. We could have a drink or something. You’re here alone?”

“Yes. My wife’s out of town.”

Rodney and Pat had taken center stage between Luisa and Joanne, forcing Duane to come to them. Luisa turned and looked through Probst.

“I’ll come along,” he told Jammu.

She left him standing on the second floor of Barnes while she consulted at the information desk. The Wishing Well, the hospital gift shop, was fully lit, but the security portcullis had been lowered. In the lobby carpeting a flesh color predominated, a background for abstract organs of pale blue and ochre and pale yellow connected by mazes of red arteries and deep blue veins.

Jammu was autographing a page of a notebook for a high-school-aged boy. Probst heard the boy thank her. He hoped that sometime, once, before he retired, someone would approach him for an autograph.

“We only have a few minutes,” Jammu told him.

The room was on the fourth floor. In the bed nearer the door, amid potted mums and a small forest of Norfolk pines, lay the officer. Bandages circled his head, winding from his ears on up. He had no pillow. His whiskers had been growing for at least a week. A white sheet was draped across his chest and legs too neatly, the even lines of the hems on either side of the bed testifying to an inability to move. From the IV tube rising from his hand his arm seemed to have contracted a terminal slenderness.

Probst hung in the doorway while Jammu moved along the side of the bed until she could look straight down into the officer’s open eyes. The head rolled a few degrees towards her.

“How’s it going, Morris?” she said levelly.

“Awr,” said the officer.

Probst read the clipboard. PHELPS, Morris K.

“You’re looking good,” Jammu said. With a tiny fierce movement of her head she forced Probst to join her at the bedside. “I was at your home today. I spoke with your wife. I understand she’s been spending almost all her time here with you.”

Probst looked down and felt paralyzed. The eyes were on him but in a line perpendicular to that of his own. No meeting was possible. He didn’t dare turn his head sideways to meet the eyes for fear of seeming to condescend. “Sheerft,” the mouth said. “Nadir.”

“I understand,” Jammu said. “But she seems to be holding up very well. You have some great kids.”

A nurse appeared behind them in the doorway and raised a monitory finger. She didn’t leave. It was still fifteen minutes before 9:00. Probst wished it was one minute before 9:00.

“This is Martin Probst.”

Phelps released a breath. “Huh.”

Probst felt himself imploding around the lack of words to speak. “Hello,” he attempted. Why had she taken him here? Or not warned him not to come? He wanted to hit her. The nurse came a step closer to them.

“Adit ove,” Phelps said. “Dunsim.”

“I know you would have. You’re a good man, Morris. They’ll have you up and around in no time.”

The nurse put an end to it. In the hall, Probst asked what the prognosis was.

“Probably full-time care for the rest of his life,” Jammu said. “From the neck down he has the muscles of an ox. But one little bullet in the head…”

They were crossing the lobby downstairs, heading for the street, when Probst veered into the men’s room.

Earlier that evening, before he’d driven to the gallery, he’d read an editorial in the Post-Dispatch.

…The public has not been well served by the discussion thus far. Jammu’s case for a merger would be far stronger if she were willing to discuss the referendum’s impact on the county. We believe the facts will show a moderately negative impact far outweighed by the benefits to the region’s truly needy, its collective economic health, and its deteriorating infrastructure. Jammu has no reason to fear the facts.

We can only speculate why Probst, while correct in pointing up the need for careful study, has steadfastly refused to enter into a responsible discussion with Jammu. An attempt to deny legitimacy to the pro-merger forces is surely beneath him.

Probst claims that the proposed debate would focus too heavily on personalities. The claim has merit. But with the public starving for input, he must be faulted for overfastidiousness. He is hiding behind his scruples. Must the present confusion persist merely because one man refuses to lower his sights a little?

Let Jammu acknowledge the need for study. Let Probst come down to earth. Let the final month of the campaign be a model of spirited, informed discourse.

The piece had delighted him, and not just because he enjoyed ignoring the advice of editors. It was another example of the magical capacity of public life to magnify his person faithfully. Vote No ran a clean campaign. It stuck to the facts. If he had any doubts about whether he was a stickler when it came to ethics, he only had to open the newspaper. There they said it: Martin Probst is a stickler when it comes to ethics.

He and Jammu went straight from the hospital to the Palm Beach Café, a restaurant peopled by the generation of St. Louisans halfway behind Probst and Barbara’s. They ordered drinks, and after a very awkward silence Jammu looked up at him.

“Why don’t you tell me in one sentence,” she said, making no effort to clear the hoarseness from her throat, “what you have against the merger. We can debate in private, can’t we? Our personalities aren’t swaying anyone here.”

“One sentence,” Probst said. “Given that I and the rest of Municipal Growth used to advocate city-county consolidation ourselves.” He thought a moment, looking for other bases to cover. “Given that the referendum was drafted in response to the county’s own fear of missing the boat. Given that the context is a free political market and the question is whether the market will bear a merger—”

“You haven’t touched on any of this in your statements.”

“Didn’t need to, with you hammering away at it. I’m simply trying to show you I’ve mastered your arguments. And what it comes down to, then, is that my intuitive distrust of this referendum — since everything indicates that I should favor it — my intuitive distrust means a lot.”

Jammu’s eyes widened. “That’s your argument?”

“And to articulate this, then,” he said, “the first thing is the knee-jerk quality of what’s been going on. The voters can’t vote intelligently, and you have to be afraid of drastic change, an unregulated marketplace of ideas, just like you have to be afraid of new toys that could maybe hurt children. Now, I trust you—” He tried to engage Jammu visually, but she was playing with her drink. “And I’d like to mention that that’s what I’ve been telling Municipal Growth all along. But in the case of Urban Hope, it’s as if Municipal Growth had suddenly begun to make policy recommendations based purely on the profit motives of its member chief executives. Rolf Ripley wants it to pass for trickle-down welfare, supply-side progress, which is what I myself practice at work, except that I’m employing men while Ripley is making real-estate killings. Plus the fact that he’s allied himself with populist public-sector Democrats like the mayor! Somewhere, somebody isn’t telling the real story.”

“None of this makes the merger a bad idea,” Jammu said.

“The thing is, we don’t know. Aren’t your convictions pretty intuitive, too? Taxes won’t fall. The city payroll won’t shrink, it might even expand. But you see this all somehow transmuting into an urban utopia. All of today’s sinecure holders out in droves tomorrow clearing weeds from railroad tracks on the South Side. The North Side blacks happily filling the pockets of the Rolf Ripleys. This is what I mean by unrealistic. And it’s far worse in the county. You’re trying to hook people intuitively yourself. With your vision of a united greater St. Louis.”

“What you’re saying is that we’re in conflict over the potential for positive change. You’re pessimistic. I’m optimistic.”

Probst didn’t like how this sounded. He’d thought it was the other way around. He sanguine and St. Louisan, she dour and tired. She (in the words of Barbara’s friend Lorri Wulkowicz) unconcealably Third World. At closer range everything she wore — her fine pearls, her fine dress, her fine makeup — seemed cheapened by her face and figure. She looked (Probst couldn’t have said exactly why) like she needed a bath. He watched her swallow a pill with her wine. “Antihistamine,” she explained, snapping her purse. The purse was a black clutch. Like someone determined to pay for the drinks, she kept it ready on her lap.

“Who are you?” Probst asked.

She coughed. “What do you mean?”

“Well, for example, what’s your first name?”

“Colonel.” She smiled.

“No. What is it?”

“I don’t like my first name. It isn’t ‘me.’ I would have changed it if people hadn’t got used to calling me by my first initial, which is S. I don’t mind S. You can call me Ess. That’s what my mother calls me, that and Essie. Can I call you Martin?”

“Your mother,” he said conversationally. “Where is she?”

“She lives in Bombay. You can read all about it in the Post on Sunday. Everything you always wanted to know about my private life but were too bored to ask.”

He paused to admire how this blocked further questions. Then he said, “I’m not bored, and I don’t trust what I read in the paper. And anyway—”

“And anyway, I should be more polite. I’m sorry. Rough day.”

Another deft block. He tried an end run. “Why did you leave India? Does anyone ever ask you that?”

“Well, all the reporters do.”

He gave up. Soft light still bathed the tables, the piano still appealed to moods, but to him the room now had the ambience it must have had at 10:00 in the morning when the extra lights were on and the vacuum cleaner was run. Some tables, some chairs. He looked around Jammu to catch the waiter’s attention, and it was then that he noticed that the couple at the next table were speaking to each other but facing him and Jammu. Other faces at other tables, too. People were watching them. He hunched his shoulders and retracted his head.

“It was a typical midlife career change,” Jammu said. “I had the opportunity to come and work here, and I took it. I like this country — I’ve said as much to the reporters, only it sounded bad in print.”

Probst nodded. “How did it happen that you didn’t forfeit your U.S. citizenship by holding public office in India?”

“They bent the rule for me.”

“You mean they broke it.”

She looked at the piano. “Unwittingly, though. They could have revoked my passport, but my mother took care of the renewals. She never mentioned that I worked for the police service, and the INS never asked. Now I don’t hold office in India, so there’s nothing they can do.”

“Didn’t the Police Board wonder?”

“They said if I could prove my eligibility they wanted to have me. It was up to me.”

“But if the INS had been awake you wouldn’t have had citizenship in July.”

“I suppose not. Why are you asking me these questions?”

“I’m still trying to tell you what I have against the merger.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“How did you win the war on crime? What’s happened to all the muggers and heroin addicts? And the Mafia. I can’t believe they’re all in jail, and, pessimist that I am, I know they haven’t reformed. Are the crime figures for real?”

“They’re for real. And you know I’ve come under very close scrutiny because of it. We’ve had police chiefs from all the major cities here asking the same question. We’ve had the ACLU breathing down our necks. We’ve had the media looking for a scandal. And as you’ll have noticed, we’ve had no serious complaints. Why not? Mainly I’d say that for once the small size of St. Louis has worked in its favor. It simply isn’t large enough to produce an endless supply of places for crime to breed. What in other cities would be just a major rejuvenation here amounts to something nearly total. The North Side redevelopment currently covers about fourteen square miles. That’s one-fourth of the entire city. In a city like Philadelphia or Los Angeles or Chicago it would be about five percent. Here a large percentage of the city land has become so valuable that the owners themselves do most of the policing. On property worth a hundred fifty dollars a square foot, you don’t see much crime, apart from the white-collar variety. So the rate drops.”

“But the people who engage in it. Where are they now?”

“That really isn’t my concern. They’re spread much more evenly over the rest of the population in Missouri and Illinois. The crime rate has risen in places like University City and Webster Groves, but the local forces can easily handle the work. And if some poor families have moved to the county, then the county welfare apparatus now has a somewhat heavier caseload to process. This doesn’t sound nice. But you must admit it’s more efficient and more fair than having the entire region’s underside concentrated in the city. Doesn’t this make sense to you?”

It made sense. But Probst didn’t see where all the frightening black young men of North St. Louis had vanished to. He’d seen their faces. He knew that none of them had ended up in Webster Groves or in any of the other nice county towns. Where were they? Somehow the reality had gone underground.

“How come everyone likes you?” he asked.

“Not everyone does.”

“Most seem to. I’m talking about the fact that you’re the political linchpin in St. Louis now, and you only got here seven months ago. What have you done for both the black politicians and the Quentin Spiegelmans that they’re so willing to work for you?”

“They aren’t working for me. They just need me.”

“Why you?”

“You mean, what have I got that other people haven’t?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Ambition. Luck.”

“Loads of people have ambition. Are you saying you’re in the position you’re in just because you’re lucky?”

“No.”

“Where are your enemies? Where are the people whose toes you’ve stepped on? The people you’ve offended.”

“There are plenty—”

“There aren’t. You know there aren’t. There’s only the rightwing Republicans and some old women and they only hate you out of principle. And because they’re jealous. The thing is, Colonel—”

“Ess.”

“The thing is, I can understand why Ripley and Meisner get along with you now, given the decisions they’ve made, and I can see why the situation is stable now, why the only people against you are criminals or crackpots, and I can see how the war on crime and the war on blight work hand in hand now, I can even see the motives behind the union of Democrats and industrialists. We’re at point B. You hand it to me. It’s a fait accompli. It makes sense. But I don’t see how you got here from point A. I don’t understand what possessed so many of my acquaintances to desert Municipal Growth. I don’t understand how you knew enough and where you found the leverage to plan and execute this complete, this bizarre reversal of the city’s fortunes. I refuse to believe a total stranger, no matter how lucky and ambitious, can come to an American city and change its face in less than a year. I don’t know what I expect you to say in reply, but I find there’s a huge gap between the person I’m sitting here with and the person who’s done all the things she’s done. I wonder how you see yourself.”

“I don’t know, I just did it.”

“Well, you can see why I wonder who you really are.”

“I don’t know. Who do you think I am?”

“I don’t know.”

They stared at each other. The problem had become impersonal.

“I don’t ask,” she said. “I just do things. I wanted the city to go places. I did everything I could. Why don’t you understand? You’ve been rather successful here yourself.”

“I was born here. I skipped college.” Probst’s voice trembled at the drama of his life. “I worked fourteen-hour days for ten years, and I didn’t change anything. I just made do with what was already there.”

“And it sounds to me as if you therefore feel a necessary attachment to what was already here. You’re a little bit in love with troubles. Isn’t it so? Isn’t that what’s behind these questions? A bankrupt, crime-ridden inner city is fundamental to your outlook as an old St. Louisan, and you don’t want it to change.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“I don’t mean to imply that you’re heartless. You’re just a pessimist, that’s all. You give to UNICEF, but you don’t believe it will stop African governments from letting their children starve. You build these bridges in St. Louis but not because you think it will make the people who drive their cars over them any less odious to you—”

“Or to you.”

“Am I right? Isn’t this how you feel?”

“You are saying I’m selfish.”

“Only insofar as you deny the validity of what I’ve done for the city. If you’d just accept that things have changed, you’d support the referendum. I can see you on television saying, Yes, I, Martin Probst, have changed my mind. I believe this can be a great city if everyone works together. If we all share the burden, the burden disappears.”

She was sitting up straight, her eyes questing for the good, the brave, and the true. Probst was embarrassed for her.

“Who’s John Nissing?” he said abruptly.

“John—” She frowned. “Nissing. The writer.”

“You know him, then.”

“Yes. He wrote the article for Sunday’s PD Magazine, which he’d hoped the New York Times Magazine would take but didn’t. I haven’t seen the piece, but it should be everything you wanted — oh, you know. All that crap about my mother and the sweltering streets of Bombay. I gave him too many interviews earlier in the year.”

“He’s from India?”

“No. I hadn’t heard that. Not American, but I don’t believe Indian. But he’d been to Bombay and bombarded me with facts. A real cosmopolitan, independently wealthy. A snob and a know-it-all. He kept weaving in all the places he’d seen, Antarctica, the Ryukyus, Uganda, that sort of thing.” Jammu bit her thumbnail. “And forty-six of the fifty states. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondered. He photographed my house for an architectural magazine.” A snob and a know-it-all: exactly Barbara’s type. “He looked Indian,” Probst added recklessly.

“I’d say more like Arab.”

Later that night he watched her take off her clothes. Her hair hung over her face in ebony blades as she supervised her fingers, her short square hands, which were fighting with the catch on her puckered bra. The blinds were raised. Snow fell outside. Probst couldn’t believe he was going to see it all now. She was even thinner than she looked in clothes, and when she lowered her underpants, the fabric taut between her fingers like a string game, his jaw felt as if it were dropping open down to his waist. There was no hair between her legs. There was just a crater with a plumped rim, a second navel. She was a virgin. She looked at him. “This is it,” she said. Where the bullet entered.

Probst was the bullet.

The room was full of moonlight. He’d been dreaming on his back, half sitting, propped on both the pillows, his and Barbara’s. The moon was full. He couldn’t remember its ever having filled the room this way. Its light flooded in through the western windows so brightly that it made the room seem small and portable. The bed extended nearly to the walls on all sides. Probst shut his eyes and tried to return to where he’d been, to the dream, to Jammu, and deflower her.

He opened them again. There was something on his lap, under the blankets and bedspread. He peeled them back and felt a claw, a tiny claw, and the weight of something warm on his pajamas at his hip.

It was a kitten. There was a kitten in his bed. Furry and imploring, its small paw reached up towards his face.

This time he really woke up. He was lying on his stomach, his eyes shielded by pillows. He’d ejaculated in his sleep. Nudging aside a pillow, he saw moonlight, in the eastern window, not the western, slipping in below the bottom of the heavy shade, which he hadn’t quite pulled down all the way. It was different from the moonlight he’d dreamed. It was hard and modest, just a bluish glare on the sill.

When he went to work at Vote No in the morning, the fun was gone. As usual, the volunteers brewing coffee offered him a share of the first pot. While he waited, he savored his mild hangover, the vestige of the long evening that seemed, now, to have leeched the wicked pleasure from his elephant act. Holmes and the others had made him the repository of the cause’s rightness and purity, and he despised them for it. He waved away his coffee when it came.

Feathered shafts of tobacco smoke pierced the air. At the highrise Holiday Inn across the street the revolving doors worked like ventricles, admitting tubby travelers with baggage, ushering out others with showered hair and pink faces and baggage less sleek. The spectacle had decadence. The participants in the purchasable pleasures of hotel stays, room service and ice machines, a pool on the roof, were interchangeable. The doors revolved.

To fly on a jet was a nice thing. (Millions thought so.) To stay in a hotel was a nice thing. To dine out was a nice thing. (Not many citizens of India dined out.) Vote No had assigned Probst the task of fashioning sentiments to sway the great plane-taking, hotel-utilizing, restaurant-going middle classes. To vote no was a nice thing. To vote yes was a nice thing. Did it really matter? Both arguments ran like tops. (To own a Buick was a nice thing.) This was decadence.

Sometimes Probst thought immediate action must be taken to rid the world of nuclear arms lest a war accidentally start. At other times he thought the only path to safety lay in constructing more arms, a deterrent so frightening that neither side dare accidentally start something. He only knew he was frightened. He could argue both sides. He didn’t want to argue. He found it ludicrous and burdensome that the Post-Dispatch and maybe thousands of other people cared what he thought. Those people adored Jammu, and he had been with her. People had stared in the Palm Beach Café. She cast a silver light on him. In his mind she was a silver chain he couldn’t stop pouring back and forth between his hands. Barbara had her cosmopolitan lover and her new, liberated version of herself. Luisa had her malleable artiste boyfriend. Probst had something coming to him, too.

Excitedly the volunteers were heading from the main office room into the conference room. Holmes was showing a red-hot video, a series of two-minute campaign ads they’d be running on prime time over the next three weeks. Tina tapped Probst on the shoulder. “Showtime, Mart.” He gave her a look devoid of expression. She turned on her heel. (To get laid was a nice thing.) What a state he was in.