The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

22

The national press arrived in a stream that widened from a trickle on Thursday to a flood on Saturday, in numbers hitherto seen only in Octobers when the Cards had reached the World Series. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and NPR had sent big names. All the nation’s major papers found reporters to spare for St. Louis that weekend, and many minor papers did, too. The Wichita Eagle-Beacon and the Toledo Blade, the Little Rock Gazette and the Youngstown Vindicator. Internationally, the Toronto Star and L’Express of Paris had correspondents on hand, and a German crew from Norddeutscher Rundfunk stopped in long enough to be counted and, laughing, to unpack a video camera at one of the baggage-claim carrousels in Lambert Airport.

The network crews were hosted and herded by their local affiliates. The men and women from the large-circulation dailies, all of whom had covered events in St. Louis before, claimed the interviews they’d reserved in advance and set about writing stories from premeditated angles.

The lesser newspeople weren’t sure what to do. They’d been assigned to cover the goings-on in St. Louis. But what was going on? All anyone could say for sure was that the police chief was a female of Indian extraction named S. Jammu.

Cradling this knowledge and hoping for a chance to talk to her, small units of reporters began to appear in the dim cubical vestibule of police headquarters, where the guard, austerely denying them entry to the elevator, directed them to the information officer down the dim hall to their right. After the first twenty inquiries, it dawned on this officer that special circumstances were the order of the weekend; he phoned upstairs and received instructions to send the visitors across the street to the PR director’s office at City Hall. There they helped themselves to stacks of press releases and three-color brochures on glossy paper, free coffee and doughnuts, a twenty-minute documentary film on the reorganization and current practices of the St. Louis Police Department, unlimited access to Jammu’s right-hand officer Rollie Smith, and lottery blanks for the drawing to be held on Sunday morning to determine which thirty-six reporters, in groups of twelve, would be granted twenty-minute interviews on Monday morning with the great lady herself.

As a consolation prize the others would get passes to the press conference she was holding on Monday evening.

The PR director, noting what a marvelously vital and multifaceted place St. Louis had become, urged the out-of-towners to wander about, acquaint themselves with the city’s layout, and sample such pleasures and edifications as appealed to them. Interested parties were told which bars and restaurants the local press corps frequented. To the younger female reporters the word was dropped that senior Post-Dispatch editor Joe Feig was throwing a Tex-Mex fiesta on Saturday night in his Webster Groves home, nothing formal, come as you are, byob, strictly private, but feel free to crash.

The real newshounds could refer to a three-page list of special events scheduled for the upcoming days and plan to cover whatever they considered most newsworthy. The list included the grand opening of a string of boutiques and bistros in the exciting Laclede’s Landing area; a nonstop Lasarium program at the Planetarium entitled “The City and the Stars” a pops concert in the fine all-purpose Stadium featuring music by Missouri composers; the maiden voyage on Sunday of the completely rebuilt Admiral, St. Louis’s unique and enormous aluminum-plated Mississippi-cruising pleasure palace; the third and final referendum debate between Mayor Peter D. Wesley and Citizen John Holmes; the opening at 3:00 p.m. Tuesday of an Election Information Center at Kiel Auditorium, free admission to all holders of press cards; and, finally, St. Louis Night.

St. Louis Night was a gala extravaganza to be held from 6:00 until midnight on Tuesday. All of downtown St. Louis would be lit up in celebration of itself. Three soundstages would provide continuous live music and laughter, including appearances by Bob Hope, Dionne Warwick, and the pop group Crosby, Stills & Nash. A dixieland band and an oompah band would rove the streets, spreading good cheer. Favorite sports personalities from the Cardinals, Blues and Big Red would hold autograph sessions. Fifteen of the city’s top restaurants would open sidewalk cafés and also booths at which their wares could be sampled by the spoon or by the cup. At midnight a Grucci family fireworks display would cap the festivities. St. Louis Night would unfold regardless of the outcome of the special election. In the event of rain, tents would be erected on the Mall.

Highlights, tabulations and analyses of the special election would become available in printed form at the Election Information Center at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday.

Insiders could hardly fail to see the thinking behind all these activities. Tuesday’s election promised to be a laugher. The most conservative local pollsters projected that the merger would pass in the city by a four-to-one margin, and in the county by three to one or better, depending on which way the many undecideds went. At this stage of the game, only a public-relations catastrophe of the first order could alter the outcome.

Yet an idle brain is the Devil’s workshop. Within hours of arriving, every reporter had fired off to his or her editors a story about the St. Louis equivalent of Amsterdam’s brothels or Berlin’s Wall. Chief Jammu is a woman driven and Chief Jammu is a woman with a vision were the two most common lead-paragraph disclosures greeting readers the next day, and as substantiation the reporter would offer his or her top choices from the sayings and confessions of Jammu collected in Handout #24 at City Hall. But after they’d cashed in this journalistic blue chip, the more bored reporters might have sent out feelers of their own, might have spoken with disgruntled cubs and searched back issues of the local papers for dissenting voices. Naturally, if the man from the Fresno Bee were to find anything, the news wouldn’t reach many ears. But if Erik Tannenberg of The New York Times, for example, began turning over large stones and discovered something ugly or even simply peculiar underneath one of them, the consequences for Jammu, the pro-merger campaign, and the city as a whole could be most painful.

There was the little matter of the nine black families illegally occupying a pair of four-bedroom homes in Chesterfield. A removal agency in the employ of Urban Hope had displaced the families from their North Side homes without finesse or compassion. As restless and downtrodden Americans have been doing for two centuries, the families headed west. Construction on the Chesterfield homes had proceeded to the point of drywalling before the builder went bankrupt. Ownership had passed, by default, into the hands of a bank of which Chuck Meisner was director. Happily, the homes were situated in a remote corner of West County accessible only by way of Fern Hill Drive, the new street. Since no one yet lived on Fern Hill Drive, and since Meisner had financed the hasty installation of an eight-foot fence around the entire construction area, the families’ presence had not become public knowledge. They’d boarded up the windows and barricaded the doors. They appeared to have enough water to hold out for several weeks. They had plenty of food as well, in the form of the sacks of flour and rice which the Allied Food Corporation had quietly been selling in East St. Louis at a large discount because of unacceptable levels of ethylene dibromide. Armed with shotguns, carbines and a small cannon, the squatters were being held under discreet siege by Missouri state troopers and St. Louis city police, the involvement of the latter rendered legal by direct orders from Missouri’s governor. Negotiations had proved fruitless. The families were offered firstclass housing in a public project, immunity from prosecution, and a sizable cash damages award. Incredibly, they declined. Their leader turned out to be Benjamin Brown, perennial 21st Ward aldermanic candidate on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. Brown refused to resume negotiations until he’d been given a chance to speak to the media. The siege force requested time to mull this over. It appeared likely that no decision would be reached before Wednesday. Meisner spent the weekend arranging new conduits for the inconveniently large campaign donations his banks wished to make to fund the last-minute pro-merger television blitz.

There was also the little matter of East St. Louis, Illinois. The crime situation on that side of the river had gotten out of hand. It was, to be sure, common knowledge that under Jammu’s administration the city of St. Louis had grown markedly less hospitable to bookies, pimps, narcotics dealers and their victims, and that some of these individuals had moved east. The Globe-Democrat had printed an editorial lamenting the deterioration of law and order in East St. Louis (not that law and order had ever been that municipality’s long suit) and expressing the hope that those people might at last find the courage to face up to their very real problems. But no Globe reporter had actually seen the situation firsthand. Nor had any other reporters. People who went to East St. Louis often got shot, and this was a risk that members of the Missouri journalistic community were in no special hurry to take. Illinois was a totally different state, after all. An investigation could wait until after the election on the western side of the river had been covered and analyzed.

There were other matters. Acting on a tip from a Washington University professor of law, a researcher at KSLX-TV had turned up a slight constitutional hitch in the real-estate transactions tax approved by city voters in November. The law apparently could, if challenged, be struck down by an unsympathetic court — for instance, by the conservative Missouri State Supreme Court. But no KSLX reporters were willing to write the information into a story. And when the researcher thereupon wrote it up herself, station executives close to general manager James Hutchinson delayed its airing for more than a week, penciling it in for broadcast on Tuesday, after the polls closed.

Rumor also had it that a private detective agency was compiling a massive dossier on Chief Jammu and her allies, with evidence suggesting that the Chief’s rise to power owed less to her popularity and more to crass horsetrading than was generally supposed.

Barroom cynics maintained that the incorruptible Martin Probst had switched sides on the referendum solely in exchange for sexual favors from a certain somebody in whose cruiser he had been seen to ride.

And then there were the Osage Warriors, those local terrorists who had made the national news repeatedly in the fall and winter. Now their attacks had simply ceased, and investigations by the police and the FBI had turned up no substantial leads. If their sudden appearance had been surprising, their disappearance was even more so. What had it all meant? County conservatives were beginning to wonder why an armed revolutionary group should have tailored its battle plan to suit so neatly the political needs of Jammu and the pro-merger forces.

But the fourth estate heard none of this. It was Saturday, March 31, and the only sounds in the city were the applause and calliopes of special events and the clamor of the fêtes to which the major media representatives had been treated.

Late Saturday afternoon a hostage situation developed at a Pizza Hut in Dallas. Many of the reporters decamped for Texas. But many remained. There was nothing to do but see the sights and praise them. On the streets, in the seductive spring twilight, phrases whispered provocatively. The new spirit of St. Louis…Farewell to the blues…Arch-rivals no more…A great Indian chief…A classic example of wise urban planning…The cardinal virtues…Delightful mix of old and new…First truly modern city in the Midwest…And then from a hundred hotel rooms, later in the evening, came the impassioned sounds of typing. A new city, a new national image, was being conceived in the night.

Why us?

Those who might once have asked the question, in the rubble of their late great city, now saw the prospect of a more satisfactory fate, the elimination of the political split which for over a century had halted St. Louis’s progress towards greatness. St. Louis had stepped into the limelight. It had cured its ills. Against the odds and contrary to expectations, it was making something of itself.

The local prophets were in twenty-seventh heaven.

But the city? Its self-pitying, self-exalting essence? That part of the place which would not forget and which had asked, Why us?

It was dead. Prosperity, Jammu, and national attention had killed it. St. Louis was just another success story now, happy in the one-dimensional way that all thriving cities are. If it had ever had anything extraordinary to tell the country, anything admonishing or inspiring, it would say it no more.

Oh, St. Louis. Did you ever really believe that Memphis had no history? That citizens of Omaha considered themselves unexceptional? Were you ever really so vain that you hoped New York might one day concede that, for all its splendor, it could never match your tragic glory?

How could you have thought the world might care what became of you?

Herb Pokorny had laid off all his extra help and driven his family out for a weekend of relaxation at Lake St. Louis. He didn’t stay there. Sam Norris had gone to Lambert with a briefcase chained to his wrist and caught a plane to Washington. He, likewise, didn’t stay there. By noon on Saturday they were both in St. Louis, with all the pertinent files and instruments stored in the back of Herb’s souped-up station wagon, the color and plates of which had been changed on Friday night.

Herb had cracked the last nut, the mystery of where all the Indians were concealing themselves, their weapons, their receivers and their records. The break had come very late, by process of elimination. After wasting upwards of four hundred man-hours engaging in surveillance on the residences of all the likely aliens and tailing the likeliest ones to see where they’d lead, he’d realized that once again Asha Hammaker was the key. The Indians could only be hiding in Hammaker-owned properties.

Sam and Herb now had a complete catalogue of those properties. The list was long, but not too long. In three days, four days max, they’d be able to scout and search every one of them.

Sam gave no thought to sleep. Every hour counted, what with Jammu already beginning to bail out. To date, she’d sent home five of her operatives and had tried to send a sixth, the girl, Devi Madan.

Herb had photographs of the two men with Madan at the airport, and would have had the girl herself if she hadn’t, as he told Sam, pulled a gun on him.

So Sam knew Jammu was sending them home. But he also knew his quarry’s psychology. She wasn’t secure enough to let go of everyone and all her tools. Maybe on Wednesday she would be. But on Wednesday the game would be up. They’d have worked through the list of properties.

On Saturday afternoon they scored on item one, an eleven-acre tract along the Meramec River in Jefferson County. Searching the wooded ground methodically, they turned up the trace of an old road. Fifty yards from the river, by the side of the trace, they found three crates of cordite and a box of caps under a heavy tarpaulin. The explosives matched the description of those used in the stadium scare. It was a cold scent, but a scent nonetheless. Herb figured there might be other evidence on the property, but it would have to wait.

The next stop was in St. Charles County. Four and a half acres. Developed. This turned out to mean a secluded farmhouse set into a hill off a gravel county road. Dusk fell while they watched it. In an hour, one vehicle came by on the road, an old man on a tractor. They moved in. Sam had a heavy outer heart, his pistol in its shoulder holster.

They observed fresh tire tracks on the driveway, but the garage was empty. They broke into the house and found a smell of fried onions and cumin. The only furnishings in the place were mattresses and blankets. The refrigerator was running. Vegetables in it. Herb pulled open the fruit drawer and let out an uncharacteristic gasp. There was a machine pistol in the parsley.

A car was coming up the driveway, flashing blue lights in the kitchen windows. Too late, Sam and Herb noticed the blinking red eye in the living-room thermostat and realized the place was burglar-proofed.

It took them two hours to talk themselves out of the St. Charles police station, with a Thursday court date. A St. Charles squad car escorted them to the county limits. But it was only a small delay. When the squad car turned around, they doubled back to the house on the hill, found it unguarded, clipped the power line where it entered on the side, and went back in.

Probst hadn’t slept well. Upset by the humid, changing weather, he’d tossed in the grip of a dream that felt like awakeness, interminable variations on the concept of opinion polls in which each part of his body had a percentage attached to it, meaninglessly, his legs 80 percent and stiff, his back a knotted 49 percent, his swollen eyes coming in at 22 percent each, and so on through the unraveling of the night.

At sunrise the bells at Mary Queen of Peace had rung in Easter and proceeded, all morning, to repeat the announcement. Trees were budding in a green fog. It was also April Fools’ Day. The blasphemy of the coincidence had been shooting little spitball-like jokes into Probst’s head. The tomb is empty? Oh. April Fools’.

He wasn’t a churchgoer, of course, but he’d long allowed the Resurrection a certain margin of credence, maybe 37 percent in a random sampling of his mind’s constituents. Faith was a ticket, and he split his. An event like the creation of Eden scored a zero, while the parting of the Red Sea polled a solid 60 percent, carrying easily. The sea had parted for Moses but swallowed the chariots. The idea of a people being Chosen had the ring of truth, as did the entire Old Testament, whereas the New had the flat clank of the robotic young men and women with leaflets who bothered people on the streets downtown. Probst didn’t believe in God. Fortunately a comfortable silence on the matter had surrounded him for all his adult life. Men might discuss politics at Probst & Company, but never religion. At home, Barbara was the warden of the silence. “God?” she wouldn’t say. “Don’t be silly,” she wouldn’t add.

He heard the toilet flush and the bathroom door open. Jammu appeared in the kitchen doorway, stopping before she entered. For half an hour she’d been hanging in doorways and sticking close to walls, like a small animal that shuns open spaces for fear of predators. She was shy today, and rather pretty, in new jeans, a lavender cashmere cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons, and only a bra underneath, the straps of which raised faint boundaries fencing the meadows of her back from the slopes of her shoulders and sides. She flipped through the scraps and cards on the refrigerator door, neither idle nor overcurious. Probst, soaping his hands at the sink, didn’t worry about what she’d see. He’d removed the more visible evidence of Barbara from all the downstairs rooms. And from the bedroom.

“Do you need some help?” Jammu said.

He pushed the pan of lamb chops under the broiler element and noted the time: 2:38. Even on holidays he didn’t like to eat dinner this early, but Jammu had functions to attend in the evening. “No,” he said. “Thank you. You can sit down.”

She strolled into the breakfast room, changing it as she went, shedding a light whose wavelength only Probst was equipped to see, revealing force vectors in the furniture and a saturation in the blueness of the curtains’ piping. He joined her at the windows. In the driveway, losing its sheen to the mist, stood the unmarked car she’d driven. Mohnwirbel had gone to Illinois for the holiday. Probst suspected there was some woman he saw over there.

“We bought the house for the yard,” he said. “In another couple of weeks you’ll see why.”

Jammu gazed coolly at the flower bed where Norris and Pokorny had appeared a month earlier. A gap in the daffodils marked the spot. Staring out into the static yard, Probst remembered the one or two lucky Sunday afternoons a year when Ginny and his parents had all happened to be out and he, as a teenager, had had their small house completely to himself. The sky and world lapped against it. He stood looking out window after window in an expectancy larger than boredom, more mysterious, and needing an object. Was this how Barbara had felt every weekday of her married life? Was this where John Nissing came in?

Jammu’s arm brushed his. A clean coconutty shampoo smell rose from her hair. She looked up at him just as he leaned, without strain, and slipped his arms under hers. She shook her hair back and looked past him in the last second before he placed his lips on hers and realized he was finally kissing her.

She turned her head back and forth, presenting her nose, her forehead and her eyes to his lips, and her fingers combed through his hair, pulling him down to kiss her harder. The cashmere was warm and shifted on her skin, bunching at her straps. Her breasts flattened softly, through cashmere, against his chest while her mouth, a busy metaphor of hunger, opened and closed. He raised one of his hands and filled it with her hair, her personal hair. He drew her head away from his to see her face. She swallowed and released a breath, coming up for air, and something popped. It was the lamb under the broiler. Probst pulled away.

Jammu laughed voicelessly, bending over a little. “I’m very hungry.” She laughed again. It was an aspirated smile. “And I’ve brought you something.”

He made his way back to the oven. “What is it?”

“A surprise. You’ll see.”

He turned the chops and opened the refrigerator for the salad. He tried to hand the teakwood bowl to Jammu, but she stepped around it, pressing him into the refrigerator. Its light, which smelled like pickles, glared down into his eyes. Her tongue opened his lips and brought the sweet tastelessness of her mouth into his. Did she want to do it right here on the floor while the ketchup and mayonnaise watched? He was willing. But she backed away, with a glance at the oven. “You’re going to have a fire in here.”

They ate in the dining room. The food tasted good, but not as good as the feeling of power he had now: she wouldn’t escape the house without making love. She knew it, too. Their forks clattered in a chaste somberness. Separated by a corner of the table, their bodies couldn’t feel what their minds knew for certain, where their love would lead them as soon as they touched again.

She told him how she would bring economics to bear on the close-in suburbs of Maplewood, Affton, Richmond Heights and University City, Ferguson, Bellefontaine Neighbors, Jennings and others to force them to accept outright annexation by St. Louis, once the merger had paved the way. “Because the referendum per se does nothing to relieve the city’s lack of land,” she said. “The shortage is already critical.”

“So you’re going to make Webster Groves a semi-autonomous part of St. Louis.” Probst filled her wineglass. “The Family of St. Louis.” He grimaced. “I can already hear Pete Wesley with a slogan like that in his mouth.”

“You really don’t like him, do you?”

“I can’t stand him.”

Jammu nodded ambiguously.

“What kind of terms are the two of you on?” he asked.

She turned to the windows. “You mean, what kind of woman am I?”

“Not exactly…”

“Wesley didn’t consider me attractive.”

“More fool he.”

“But if he had, and if I needed to, I’d have slept with him.”

Probst was appalled.

She seemed to observe this with satisfaction. “I told you I wasn’t pure.”

His voice grew chalky. “So who’ve you done it with?”

“No one. But that was mere chance.”

Probst set his fork down and stared at the peppery pools of juice on his plate.

“Don’t be dramatic, Martin. I’m not the married one here.”

“You want me to drag my wife into this.”

“Of course.”

“You want me to divorce her.”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Yes.”

She tipped her chair onto two legs. “Oh, I know. This is horribly unbecoming of me.”

“No, it’s natural.”

“Well. Where is she?”

“In New York,” he recited. “With someone you’ve met. Remember John Nissing?”

She frowned. “Who?”

“John Nissing, the cosmopolitan. Of PD Magazine fame.”

“Yes, yes.” She was squinting at something unpleasant. “But you didn’t mention that.”

“Can you blame me? We’d only just — What is it?”

Her frown was deepening. Outside, a car passed on the wet street. “Nissing is a homosexual,” she said.

Probst couldn’t help chuckling. “I doubt it.”

“You haven’t been out to dinner with him and his gay lover.”

“What?”

“Are you in communication with her? Does she call? Have you seen her with him?”

“Yes,” he said. “We talk. She seems happy. Happy and busy.”

Jammu shrugged. “Well. You never know. But from everything I saw of the man I’d be very surprised if this turns out to be a long-term understanding.” She shook her head, puzzled. “It’s strange. I don’t often misjudge people this badly.”

“Maybe we’re talking about two different Nissings.”

“Maybe. Or two different sides of him.”

Probst didn’t believe Barbara was in trouble, but he begrudged her the very possibility. He didn’t want a disaster to complicate his life, and he didn’t want Barbara pathetic and remorseful and returning home to make him feel guilty about throwing her over, which was what he was going to do no matter what. He was through with guilt. He’d forgiven her. He’d removed her from his life.

Jammu was twirling her glass sadly by its stem. Probst wished there were some way to assure her he wouldn’t renege on his commitment to her. But there was no way. He couldn’t prove it until the time came. He reached and raised her chin with his thumb, something he’d seen done in movies. “You can sound so tough,” he said.

“I am tough.” She smiled startlingly, at a wall. “I’m just out of my element here. I’ve never — oh.”

“Never what,” he fished.

“I feel great, Martin. I do feel great.”

Her tone would not have been much different if she’d said she felt sick, Martin, she did feel sick. But he felt a little sick himself. The surrender to love, at his age, pulled certain muscles in the stomach and the neck, muscles connecting the will to the frame, because there was another, more final surrender which they’d already contracted to resist.

He cleared the table. In the kitchen he turned on the coffee maker and took the chocolate egg out of a cabinet. He brought it back to the table.

“Happy Easter,” he said.

“Happy Easter yourself.” She pushed a large brown envelope across the table to him. She tested the egg’s weight.

“Real imitation milk chocolate,” he said, raising the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. “This is the surprise?”

“Yes.”

He peered in and saw signatures, hundreds of signatures, and his name in capital letters.

“They’re yours if you want them,” she said. “The filing deadline is Friday noon. I think you should run.”

He was swept up in a rush of passion, pure transparent happy passion, as he drew the petitions from the envelope and read the hundreds of names in hundreds of handwritings, and one name, his own, at the top of every page. FOR THE OFFICE OF SUPERVISOR, ST. LOUIS COUNTY. The woman in the lavender cardigan was peeling foil off the egg. He drank her in small sips. He would run. With her helping him, he’d win. He’d marry her. And then see what Brett Stone had to say.

But after her second cup of coffee Jammu stood up and, leaving the dining room, said she had to go.

It was four o’clock. Rain was ticking on the storm windows.

“I can’t, Martin,” she was saying. “I really shouldn’t. You know the kind of schedule I have.”

She was fetching her trench coat from the closet for herself. She was putting it on. She was in the living room, speaking loudly for some reason. Probst hadn’t left the table. Each of his fifty years of unblemished right living hung from his limbs, his shoulders and his hands. This was how it felt to sit on heavy Jupiter. Where was the woman who would let him shed the weight?

She was bending over to kiss him good-bye.

At six, in a booth against which rain pelted steadily, Jammu placed a call. “It’s me,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Did you hear?”

“No. I told you it’s been no use listening. That mike has a range of two meters.”

“Well: forget the subjective correlative.”

“Poor you.”

“I’m only calling because I thought you wanted to know. For reasons of science. He switched on the merger, but not on Barbara. He’s running for supervisor but he won’t touch me.”

“You must not have tried very hard.”

“I tried hard enough. So now you know. It’s only a question of her release.”

“Yes. Tuesday after sundown. I’m driving her to New York. The world should begin hearing from her sometime Thursday morning.”

“Poor you.”

Jammu hung up. Martin’s semen was falling into her underwear. Cars wallowed by on Manchester Road, their taillights smearing in the glass of the booth. The plan was laid. She’d decided to do it herself. She was giving Singh the best reason he’d ever had for fleeing a country. And maybe it was the scientific sin of falsifying his data on the Probsts, or maybe her sudden betrayal of her lifelong partner in crime; but to look at her standing in the phone booth, twisting her hair and trembling, one might almost have thought she’d never killed anyone before.