The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

23

Tuesday morning, eight o’clock. RC sat on the living-room sofa watching Today and eating Cheerios. Annie came out of the kitchen in a yellow rain slicker. Robbie wore a red Big Red poncho. They kissed RC good-bye.

Today was reporting live from St. Louis, from Webster Groves, no less. It focussed on a boxy Lincoln joining a line of parked cars in the playground of a red brick school. An umbrella got out of the car, followed by Martin Probst. Today zoomed in. Around Probst large cardboard yes’s and no’s bobbed on sticks. He seemed to recognize Today and went out of his way to meet it. Lesser men and women with cameras fell away behind him, the pros and cons craned their wooden necks, and out of Today came an all-weather microphone held by a hand with raw skin and purple knuckles. Probst made a joke. Smiles opened in the rain. And what about that rain? Probst didn’t think it would be much of a factor in the election. He excused himself; he had to perform his patriotic duty. The crowd parted for him and his umbrella, and Today’s gaze lingered on him before shifting, by way of a short and zany interlude of visual static, to a nationally known face. The black Arch behind her had lost its crown in low clouds. What about that rain? The Chief’s joke was even funnier than Probst’s. And now back to New York.

RC turned off the set and stared at the screen, trying to shake the desolation of Today. He’d been feeling lonely and stunned on and off for two weeks now, ever since Clarence and Kate and the boys had left St. Louis. After more than forty years, they’d pulled up their roots and moved to Minneapolis, just like that. Clarence’s cousin Jerome had invited him to move north and buy into his contracting firm, and before he had a chance to say no or maybe not, the Gallo Company, his main South Side competition, offered to buy him out completely on advantageous terms. After six hours on the market his four-bedroom house was sold to a white family of three, and on the day between the third and fourth quarters he pulled the boys out of the St. Louis school district and whisked them north to suburban Edina. That rhymed with China. RC still couldn’t believe they were really gone for good.

He got up and washed the dishes, cleaned his revolver, got dressed and ate a strip of raw bacon (bad, bad habit of his) with some Townhouse crackers. Then he left to vote. He had an appointment at two o’clock to have a mole taken off his back, and then at three his patrol shift started. On the sidewalk in front of his building he passed a blond kid with a camera who looked vaguely familiar. RC got halfway through the word “Hello” before the kid’s swift “How’s it going?” cut him off.

All Sunday, all Monday, picking locks and scaling walls, they ran into the same phenomenon at every turn: a fresh scent, but the quarry vanished. They took fingerprints, but they’d never nail Jammu on fingerprints alone. They turned up weapons, food, clothing, hair dye, gas masks, burglar tools, traces of controlled substances, boxes of radio guts, a miniature forging kit, and some phony IDs: one hundred percent diddly-twat. They killed half of Sunday night staking out a ranch-style house on Highway 141 where lights went on and off behind the curtains and a television flickered, and when they finally broke in, the sum total of the house’s contents turned out to be timed lights and a television. The people had been there. But the people were gone, as surely as if they’d been warned of the imminence of Sam and Herb’s arrival. It didn’t seem to matter that Herb’s car was clean. It didn’t seem to matter that they were working through their catalogue randomly, doubling back and forth across three counties, taking twice as much evasive action as they had to, approaching some of the properties on foot from strange directions, changing course abruptly and returning to places they’d already raided. Despite all these precautions, the Indians were eluding them.

At dawn on Monday they busted into a condo in Brentwood which contained a darkroom rigged for printing microfilm, a bed with sheets still warm under the blankets, and utterly no evidence of a specific and compelling nature. If they’d raided this place on Saturday instead of the place in St. Charles, or on Sunday instead of four homes and two office buildings in neighboring towns, or if they’d raided it even just one hour earlier, they could easily have hit pay dirt. How were the Indians dodging them? How could the conspiracy be closing down with such infernal timing? How could it be closing down, period, when they were dealing with a woman who for eight whole months hadn’t gotten through a single day without recourse to her agents? It was driving Sam crazy. He shouldn’t ever have listened to Herb. They should have sent every man they had into all the properties in the catalogue at the same hour on Saturday. But it was too late now. They had to keep going.

By Tuesday morning their stock of unhit targets had dwindled to three commercial properties, two in the county and one across the river. The printout listed the first one as undeveloped, but when they got there they saw a two-story warehouse behind a fence off a Mopac spur and some rusty sidings. Gray, cracking sheets of plywood had warped away from the nails fastening them to the building’s doors and windows; on the roof, aluminum and brazen, stood three brand spanking new radio antennas. Herb looked at Sam. Sam looked at Herb. This was the communications center they’d been hunting for.

Buzz Wismer arrived at his headquarters late in the morning and found his employees curiously transformed. He said good morning to the pretty lobby receptionist and she smiled weakly. He said good morning to a pair of voluble custodians who traded glances in sudden silence as if a ghost had passed through the room. In the elevator he tried out a few pleasantries on his friend Ed Smetana, and Ed punched the button for the Accounting floor, where he almost never had business. Buzz said good morning to his secretary, and she dove under her desk, groping around near the Dictaphone pedal. He stopped in his private washroom and inspected his face. Same old Buzz. His nose was a little red from the wet wind outside, but then, it usually tended towards the red. He went into his office. A big blue-and-orange Federal Express envelope was lying on his desk. It held a single sheet of paper.

TO: Edmund C. Wismer, Chairman

FROM: Steven Howard Bennett, et al., Stockholders

Buzz skimmed.

Resolved April 2 extraordinary meeting those present included proxies registered mail March 26 54 % with deep regret long history of service recent pattern of decisions move of headquarters questionable judgment unfeasible fiscally unrealistic without consulting violation Chapter 25 Corporation bylaws relinquish duties Friday April 6 plenum proxies April 16 to select new chairman and officers…

Sinking into his chair, Buzz was young again, skydiving and poor, and he felt the abrupt tug of a golden parachute, the crush of straps across his chest. His secretary was bringing him a glass of water.

The trail was so fresh that the rain hadn’t even blurred the tire tracks or washed away the muddy footprints on the loading dock. Once again, the footprints were feminine. Herb photographed them and spoke into his pocket recorder. “Eleven-fifteen a.m., now twenty-theven hourth thince we thaw a fresh thet of male printh, the loading-dock door wide open but apparently it’th been clothed judging from the concrete. We enter with flashlighth…”

His running commentary was getting on Sam’s nerves. More and more Sam questioned whether he’d hired the best St. Louis had to offer.

Whoever had left the footprints had made sure the warehouse was emptied. In the second-floor office, coaxial antenna cables dangled from the ceiling, pointing obliquely at two flats of Orange Crush cans, yellow junk-food crumbs, a pile of Maxell and Memorex reel-to-reel tape cartons and floppy-disk boxes, a set of foldup aluminum tables, and some tubular lawn chairs.

“I don’t underthtand it.”

Sam aimed a gratuitous kick at the sody cans, scattering them across the room. “Well,” he said. “I suspect if the materiel ain’t here it ain’t anyplace. But we got two more properties to try. See if we can’t still catch us a couple of personnel.”

Jammu was at home in her apartment changing out of her smelly interview clothes. She put on a white linen skirt and a white blouse to match her mood, which was bright. She’d even slept a few hours; Devi Madan was out of the country.

Gopal’s man Suresh had located her on Sunday afternoon. Registered as Barbara Probst, she’d been staying at the Ramada Inn on I-44 near Peerless Park, out by Weiss Airport. She wasn’t in her room when Gopal arrived, so he and Suresh waited in the bathroom for her. Eventually she drove up in a rented car. She entered the motel lobby and then hastened back out. Through the bathroom window Gopal fired at her tires with a silenced automatic, but the angle was wrong and the car was moving. When they followed her, the holiday traffic on I-270 prevented them from forcing her off the road. She reversed her direction on a cloverleaf, drove south ten miles, reversed again, and again, ending up at Lambert just in time to pass through the document checks at the international gate and board a British Airways jet before it took off for London. Under orders to follow her wherever she went, Gopal and Suresh flew to Washington, lucked into a Concorde flight, and reached London just thirty-five minutes after her plane had landed. This morning she was still in England. Gopal and Suresh would kill her when they found her and return directly to Bombay.

The operation was closing like a wound miraculously healed. Of the twenty-one men and women who had followed Jammu’s orders in St. Louis, only Singh and Asha remained, and Asha was staying. For the last three days she and her personal maid had been collecting hardware and printed matter from the houses and relay stations and storage facilities. At this moment they were driving south in a borrowed Pevely milk truck to detonate the operation’s more damaging side effects in an abandoned lead mine in the Ozarks. Asha was accustomed to manual labor; she’d been running guns when Jammu got to know her in Bombay.

Jammu straightened her white cuffs and parted the curtains on her bedroom window. Singh was due here with a carton of financial records, the only written vestiges of the operation not yet in her apartment. All the paper and magnetic tape now fit easily into two four-drawer file cabinets. You threw away the preparations for an overtaken future.

A fat man in sunglasses was toiling up the alley with a soggy cardboard box. Jammu went to the door.

Singh entered her front door glaring at her, panting, dripping. He’d put on three jackets and two pairs of pants, tucking them neatly under a set of overlarge clothes, and it looked like he’d stuffed a pillow under his shirts as well. Dried spit had caked in the corners of his mouth: the suffering man.

Jammu took the box from him and set it on the floor. “You’re going back now to close up that apartment?”

“It’s nearly closed,” he said. “I’ve changed a few things.”

“In the apartment?”

“In the plan as well. I’m no longer psychopathic or Iranian. I couldn’t sustain it.”

“Now you tell me.” Jammu turned in a full circle on her heel. “How long has this been going on?”

“Quite a while. She thinks I’m straight with her now. She feels an allegiance—”

“An affection, an attraction, a tenderness—”

“She won’t tell Probst the real story when she gets out. She’ll say she’s been living in New York with John Nissing. She’s that proud. And yes, there’s affection.”

Jammu stared into his sunglasses. He was crazy to think a plan like this was good enough for her. She’d never met Barbara, but she knew her. She’d ruin everything. The solution was more obvious than ever.

“It made all the more sense,” Singh continued, “as soon as Probst refused to get involved with you sexually. There’s no other woman in his life, nothing to make her angry, and certainly no Indian woman to make her suspicious.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I guarantee you this was the only way to play her.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Then you shouldn’t have left Bombay.”

“You shouldn’t have snatched her.”

“You might not be winning this election if I hadn’t.”

“All right.” There was nothing more to say. Jammu raised her hands for some kind of farewell contact with him, an embrace or a handshake, but he left her standing. He limped down the stairs, wheezing and obese.

Probst was spending the day at the office to keep his mind off the election and to let the company know he was still its president and guiding spirit. He was revising timetables for his first, cautious entry into the downtown building spree, a pair of North Side office projects on which ground would be broken in May. Carmen typed speedily at her desk.

It pleased him to spot in the timetables a number of redundancies and avoidable delays which even Cal Markham had overlooked; it demonstrated that he still had a function in the company and it drove home the reason: he had great intelligence and experience. How easily a man could lose sight of this. How easily, when his home and milieu fell apart, he could disdain the consolations of pure activity, pure work, the advancement of physical and organizational order.

Of course, he could also see that for thirty years he’d worked too hard, could see himself in hindsight as a monstrosity with arms and hands the size of Volkswagens, legs folded like the treads of a bulldozer, and his head, the true temple of the soul, a tiny black raisin on top of it all. He’d failed as a father and husband. But if anyone had ever tried to tell him this he would have shouted them down, since the love he felt for Barbara and Luisa at the office had never waned. He had a heart. All the things he’d been unable to throw away, all the memorabilia and useful spares and fixable wares, these objects and annals of childhood and honeymoon, early and later parenthood — he’d saved them all in the hope of one day finding time to participate more fully in the stages they represented.

But he wouldn’t change. He loved Jammu because she accomplished things. With her he’d start afresh, wise enough never to expect the opportunity to resurrect the past. A year from now they’d be living together, not in a house (what did he really care about gardens?) but in a spacious modern condominium on Hanley Road or Kingshighway to which they would both return late in the evening, and in which there would be no junk.

All women were equal in the eyes of the airlines, except maybe those with babies or wheelchairs. Floating above the earth, flight attendants brought her pillows, blankets, drinks. The only problem was between flights, when she couldn’t tilt her seat back and the ground made her knees wiggle. But all it took to get back in the air was cash, and cash had been as simple as selling most of her strength to the boyfriend of the maid at the Marriott, until suddenly she found herself in Edinburgh with only enough to last through the coming weekend and too few pounds and two silly friends who were trying to kill her. They’d all been flying and flying in a huge misunderstanding. She flew for the pleasure and the dinners in their comprehensible plastic trays, while her friends believed it was a chase. As far as she was concerned, their intent to kill her had merely provided an itinerary.

Now she was home again, bewildering the immigration officer by brushing through the gate and running away and disappointing the cabdriver because she had no suitcase to tip him extra for. There had been bewilderment and disappointment in her friend’s eyes in the Edinburgh ladies’ room when he’d opened the stall where she’d left her tall boots standing and turned around right into the blade which she, in bare feet, stood holding against his neck. He’d pulled the trigger anyway, and she couldn’t be blamed for the gurgling in his windpipe, or for the funny pop the gun made when the other friend came in afterwards and fell to the floor, which was dirty. They were terrorists. If Rolf could have seen her saving her life like that, her cool practicality, he would have been so proud and would have knelt and kissed her hands. But logically she knew she was losing everything. When she shot up she dozed without sleeping, and though they didn’t bother her, that gurgle and that pop never left her. They were waiting for her strength to fail. How much misery could a living woman deaden before she stopped wanting to? She remembered when Devi was thirteen on an exciting vacation with her parents when they visited a beauty consultant in Paris and the Alhambra in Spain and the pyramids in Egypt. She’d never seen anything as heavy as the great chops, built by slaves. Now the cabdriver was stopping to let her try her luck with her signature at Webster Groves Trust, where she hoped she had an account and people knew her or at least were trusting. That was all she really wanted, for people to treat her right. Because no one did. Everything was the great chops turned upside down with its point pressing into her.

Five stories below the windows of Buzz’s office, on the drive outside the main entrance, reporters laughed in groups of three and four, making a social event of their siege. Buzz had tried to reach Asha at all the numbers she’d given him. Nobody knew where she was. In his one hour of greatest need she was unavailable. He grew desperate and indiscriminate and tried calling Bev. She didn’t answer, though she’d indicated she’d be at home all day, as Miriam Smetana had canceled their luncheon date for reasons unclear at the time. Perhaps the media had been pestering Bev as well and she’d simply unplugged the phone.

“We’ll have to continue this on Thursday,” Jammu told her district commanders. Stiffly, the nine majors returned the narrow chairs to their places against the walls and took their leave singly, clogging the doorway like marbles in a funnel.

As she’d expected, Singh was close to the phone in his place across the river. “What now,” he said.

“Gopal just called from London. Devi’s taken care of, but they got her to talk first, and it sounded like she’d sent a letter to Probst before she left. Probst was fine this morning, but I’m afraid the letter’s in his mailbox in Webster Groves.”

She waited. In the silence on the line she could feel Singh thinking, weighing her story and deciding whether to believe her.

“What do you think she said?”

“Any letter at all is bad,” Jammu said. “The only way your release of Barbara works is if there’s no hitch, no suspicion of any kind.”

“This is the last thing I’m doing for you.”

“Thanking you in advance, then. But call me at three.”

In her purse was a hammer for the deed, and also a revolver in case Singh hadn’t really bought the story and hadn’t left the apartment. She stopped and told Mrs. Peabody that she was going to lunch with Mrs. Hammaker. Mrs. Peabody told her she must be starving. She went out into the drizzle, unlocked Car One, and drove south to the brewery, where Asha had left a Sentra for her without knowing the reason. Once in the Sentra, she put on a curly red wig. The disguise was token; Singh’s building stood on a block where, day or night, she’d never seen another soul.

At 2:45 Sam and Herb arrived in East St. Louis. Five minutes later they located the last item in their catalogue, a fireproof storage warehouse. It had no windows, but it did have skylights, in which, from a block away, against rainclouds, they could see light.

As they pulled closer, they saw someone enter.

“That’s him!” Sam said. “That’s Nissing. They’re in there.”

Herb parked the station wagon behind a deserted filling station across the street and down a hundred yards. It was the only cover for blocks around, clear out to the surrounding expressways. He and Sam forced entry to the office with a wrecking bar, bringing gray light to bear on plaster rubble, fallen ceiling tiles, roaches, glass daggers, Fram and STP stickers, a 1977 Pennzoil calendar. They carried in two folding chairs. They set up the video camera and the infrared source, aiming both through a chink in the boards on the glassless windows, and while Herb went back out for the thermos and field telephone, Sam peered up the street at the target, a tall and slender building, a castle in this barbarian wilderness. He focussed the camera and settled in to wait. There was no place left to go.

After a late lunch at the local grill with Bob Montgomery, Probst was at his office with the rest of the company, with the draftsmen, clerks and secretaries who were beginning the last leg of their day, their afternoon coffee breaks behind them. He was letting everyone leave thirty minutes early today to give them a jump on the evening rush at the polls, and to judge from the absence of laughter or even conversation leaking into the hall outside his office, they were returning the favor with special diligence. Metal drawers rumbled in the silence as Carmen filed. Probst was proofreading and signing her morning production of letters. Typewriter bells rang faintly in the hall, the patter of rain and keys blending. Someone in narrow heels was walking briskly towards him. The heels reached the carpeting of the outer office and fell silent.

“Oh, Mrs. Probst,” Carmen said.

Probst’s arms went numb. He stared through the open door to the outer office and saw her shadow, the back of a familiar skirt.

“Hi, is he here?”

“Yes, go right in. Mr. Probst—?” Carmen sang.

“Thank you,” Barbara said.

He spun in his chair to the window, and reflected in the glass he saw his wife shut the door behind her, rest a closed umbrella against the wall and stand looking at him, her hands at her sides. “Martin?”

Her real voice was different from her phone voice, more nasal and clipped. He’d forgotten her. He’d been wrong to think she’d have no power over him when she returned.

“Martin, help me.”

He spun around.

It wasn’t Barbara. It was a woman with Barbara’s light hair, her body, her clothes, her hairstyle and posture and something like her fair skin, except where raindrops had eaten it away. Her hands were dark.

She smiled at him hopefully. “I’m back,” she said, tossing her raincoat on the coatrack. He shrank away. She sat down on his lap sideways and put her arms around his neck. The arms were damaged, purple and black, with scabs and ulcers and long fingers of green beneath the dark skin. She smelled of rotten perspiration. Her lips touched his like ice. She was Barbara’s corpse.

“Who are you?” He tried to stand, dumping her off his lap. She landed in a crouch.

“I’ll be yours,” she said.

“Out, get out.”

“I’ve been with Rolf,” she explained.

Clumsily he put on his coat. Devi Madan. He opened the door and marched past Carmen, and Devi Madan followed.

“Where are we going?” She slipped her arm around his waist.

Jammu made her first pass around Singh’s building and saw that his car wasn’t in the fenced-in lot. He’d gone to Webster Groves. Could he have taken Barbara with him? Hardly likely. She was inside this building, unprotected, and Jammu had time to circle the block once more, to let the criminal pressure build up in her, and to rehearse the scene again. She would give Barbara a chance to speak. One sentence, a few words, enough to fill her killer’s ears with the slick, vulnerable intelligence she so hated, and then it was a Beatles song. Bang, bang—

No.

A Country Squire, repainted but inevitably Pokorny’s, was parked behind a low boarded-up building across the street. Jammu stepped on the gas, shifting up. She would have done it, but she wouldn’t now. She went back to her desk on Clark Avenue.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Martin.”

“Don’t touch me.”

They squared off in the parking lot, on the white football grid of the spaces reserved for Probst’s project managers, who were all still out on the job. Devi Madan leaned forward, her eyes wide and more hopeful than ever, with the overexcitement of a friendly dog about to lose control and yelp, and bite. “Martin.”

Rain was falling on the outer layer of his hair and draining onto his scalp. He didn’t know what to do, but he had to do it quick. The reality of this Indian girl’s presence pelted him, sought gaps in his protection, tried to get inside and drench him. He turned away and unlocked his car.

She ran around to the passenger side. “Where are we going?”

“Go away.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go anywhere,” he said. “You can’t be here.”

It was too late. Each word they exchanged confirmed her right to speak to him and make demands. He couldn’t even tell her to leave without implicating himself. She was in his life.

She looked angrily at the sky, up into the rain pouring down on her eyeglasses. “I’m getting kind of wet.” She was so familiar. She’s insane, he thought. It made no difference.

“Use your umbrella,” he said.

“I left it in your office.”

His was in his office, too.

“Hurry up,” she said. “Get in.”

She knew him. She knew him as surely as if a Hyde-like second Probst had been leading a life with her unbeknownst to the first. He got in the car and leaned across the front seat to raise the lock button on her door. She jumped in and shivered. “Where to?”

Wet clothes, wet skin. Perfume and sweat and cold automotive plastic. Wet exhaust from passing cars. He leaned back and closed his eyes, only dimly aware that he’d made a mistake in letting her into the car. She curled one hand around his neck, laid the other on his leg, and put her mouth to his. Would he kiss her? He was already doing it. The taste of a new mouth didn’t surprise him now. Barbara, Barbara, Barbara, Barbara.

In the street a car door opened.

It was the police. Barbara pulled away from Probst, and through the windshield the two of them watched a patrolman cross the street to the precinct house. His companion remained in the squad car and rested his eyes on them uncuriously. Probst gave him a dumb smile. Barbara’s face had assumed the blankness of a reasonably law-abiding citizen’s. The cop looked away.

Jammu had said Devi Madan was an innocent girl who’d returned to Bombay several weeks ago. Jammu had lied. But Probst loved Jammu. He would be calm. He’d try to help.

He started the engine, backed out, and made a right turn onto Gravois. Two blocks up the street he pulled in alongside the taxi stand outside the National. Old women were wheeling caged groceries away from the automatic doors. He set the brake. “You need money.”

“Yes.”

He opened his wallet and counted bills. “Here’s two hundred twenty.” This wasn’t enough. He took out his checkbook. She was folding up the bills and tucking them in her purse: just another domestic transaction.

“There’s a Boatmen’s right over there,” he said. “Will a thousand be enough?”

She nodded.

He wrote out the sum in numerals and then in words. He paused. After Barbara had moved out, he’d stopped using their joint account. “Who should I make this out to?”

She was watching a taxi drive away. She didn’t bother answering. He penned in the words Barbara Probst.

Singh had not driven to Webster Groves. He’d merely moved his car to a lot near the river and returned to his apartment on foot. He hadn’t for a moment believed there was a letter in Probst’s mailbox. Jammu, he expected, would come to East St. Louis and see that his car was gone. She would enter the building planning to murder Barbara and pin the blame on him.

But Jammu had not arrived. He was beginning to wonder if he’d given her too little credit, if perhaps she had no objection to the experiment of releasing Barbara as he’d arranged. Perhaps Devi had sent a letter after all. Then his telephone rang.

“It’s me.”

“I called at three o’clock,” Singh said.

“I was over at your building. Do you have the letter?”

“There wasn’t any letter.”

“Did you notice who’s watching your building?”

“Sure.” Singh took a guess: “Our favorite detective.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

“It means it will be trickier getting Barbara out.”

“No. It means you kill her.”

Singh laughed lightly. “Oh, does it?”

“Yes. How do you think you’re going to get her out?”

“The back door, late tonight.”

“No way, Singh. Sorry. They’ll have the entire area bathed in infrared and a pair of men watching the back side of the building. They know you’re in there. They’ll stop you if you try to leave with anything more than the shirt on your back. The only way out is empty-handed.”

“They’ll tail me anyway.”

“You think you can’t shake them? Don’t be modest.”

Singh swallowed. Had she known in advance that Pokorny had found out about this building? No. She wouldn’t have come over here herself if she’d known Pokorny would be here. Clearly the only thing she’d known for sure was that she wanted Barbara dead.

“This is great,” he said.

“Do you think I wanted Pokorny on our ass like this? Do you think I want that woman’s body turning up over there? Two miles from my office? I’m telling you, this is the only way to save both our necks—”

Yours and Probst’s, Singh thought.

“—You do the job, you take the fall, you get out of the country.”

“I could just release her over here.”

“Are you serious? Your plan was bad enough without letting her know she’d been in East St. Louis all this time. You can’t let her out alive anyplace but New York. And that won’t work now.”

“Death is messy, Susan. You’ll regret it.”

As she walked up the long driveway she saw a gaunt and red-faced man in the window of a garage in the back yard, on the second floor. He gave her a wave and a friendly smile. She waved back. A friendly smile! She felt better, but she went to the side door of the house so he wouldn’t see her. She punched her gloved hand through the window in the door. The flying glass surprised her, which was silly considering that was why she’d punched it. She reached through and turned the bolt. They had a fence to keep out burglars, but they left the gate wide open. One of these days she’d have to fix that.

Probst drove aimlessly, following the path of least resistance — straight through green lights, right at red ones, left when he found a left-turn lane empty — while he waited for the turmoil in his head to condense into thought and resolution. The defroster circulated strange perfume through the car. A feeling of deep evil had descended on him as soon as he’d written his wife’s name on the check. The feeling intensified his longing for Jammu. He was her accomplice, and he missed her. He loved that she had lied to him about Devi Madan, because it meant she shared the evil. At the same time he wondered if she’d really lied. Maybe she hadn’t realized the extent to which Rolf had perverted the girl. Yes. That was it. Rolf had perverted the girl. Yes. And if Jammu was innocent, Probst would love her for that, too. Her childlike purity.

Way up north, on Riverview Drive, where rain blew like blue sand off the flat Mississippi and collected in puddles on the empty bicycle path, he turned on the radio. The many voices of the city urged him south again. He was guilty. He’d betrayed his city. Jack DuChamp had been right to hang up on him on Maundy Thursday. Now at last he felt that it was necessary to go to Jack’s house, to pay that long-deferred visit, to hear Jack’s judgment on him and see if it was final. He almost hoped that Jack could not forgive him.

A woman’s place was in the home. A gray Tuesday afternoon, the gutters gulping quietly, swallowing rain. Cigarettes burned in several ashtrays. A cookbook fell open to a cake recipe, everything in its place. Martin would be home, upset, at dinnertime. Men spent half their lives thinking women were a nuisance and the other half thinking they were special. Right now she had to bake him a special treat. The rest of dinner would come in good time. Men liked to come home and smell something baking and hear little splashes upstairs, a sensuous woman in the tub.

She opened all the cabinets and took out the spices and the silver teaspoons and tablespoons and a colander for sifting. She found a bag of potatoes. They were covered with big white sprouts. Just like men, they couldn’t help it — they were supposed to act that way — but it could still be disgusting. She looked in every cabinet for the flour. Would wheat germ be OK? She unscrewed the lid and sniffed it and saw some tiny beige worms in the germ. Germs made you sick. She put the jar back and looked everywhere. What did flour come in? Every minute counted if she wanted the cake baking when he came home.

She ran down to the basement, where it seemed she kept many extras, but all the coffee cans were empty. There were piles of boxes spilling onto rows of plastic bags, metal wardrobes, wooden filing cabinets. Spiders grew on the walls, unmoving, like mildew. So many things to digest!

She opened a flat box of pictures in which she looked rather stern. She frowned sternly. The pictures were a manual on how to act if you lived in Webster Groves. How to hold your head when you got out of the car. How to kneel when you cut fresh roses from the garden. How to be a perfect wife. How to take a bath! How to frown in concentration when you baked a cake! How to smoke cigarettes. She had to practice right away. She ran upstairs and came back down with a package. She shook all the cigarettes out and looked into a nearby mirror.

When school let out, Luisa saw her friends Edgar Voss and Sara Perkins walking south on Selma, the way they did every day. She hurried to catch up with them. She was going to Clark School to vote.

“Wow, that’s right,” Sara said. “You’re old.”

Sara and Edgar were still seventeen, and to prove their irresponsibility they started grilling each other. Sara asked what Afghanistan was. Edgar said it was a territory in Risk, sort of an olive green. He asked her who the state senator from Webster Groves was. She couldn’t even make an educated guess. Edgar didn’t know either. Luisa didn’t know. But a ninth-grader in copper-framed glasses who was passing them on the sidewalk said, “Joyce Freehan,” and hiked up his books in embarrassment.

This sounded correct. “He’s her son,” Edgar told Luisa in a stage whisper. The kid jogged a few steps to put some space between them.

They wanted Luisa to come along with them to Edgar’s house to watch Gilligan’s Island and drink lime Kool-Aid, two activities that seemed to have come into vogue since she stopped spending time with them. She wondered what else was in vogue. Group sex? Riflery? They gave no hint of disappointment when they turned up a side street off Glendale Road and she kept on towards Clark. She watched them shoving each other, playing chicken with the puddles, and not looking back at her. It was just like the day before, when no one at school would comment on her hair, not even Stacy. In a bleak mood on Saturday she’d had it cut very short, shorter than she’d ever worn it before. She was positive everyone had noticed — she looked like a punk where three days earlier she’d looked like Stanford material — and it hurt her that they should be so freaked out they couldn’t say anything at all. Maybe they were being delicate because they thought she had emotional problems. But she couldn’t have had emotional problems if she tried.

Wet weather didn’t stop cigarettes from burning. In war footage soldiers smoked through the muddiest of battle scenes. Luisa wondered if anyone passing in a car now, any of her mother’s friends, would recognize her with her glasses and her hair like this, and the cigarette. It wasn’t really her friends who hurt her. She herself, when she got home on Saturday and locked herself in the bathroom, had almost cried at the sight. Her scalp showed white all over. Her lenses were coated with soapy light. She looked so strange and old and unhappy. But what really hurt was that the new style matched the inside of her. This was how she’d look on the inside, too, if anyone could see in there.

Worst of all was that Duane had come home with his cameras and said she looked great. She more or less agreed. She wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t get a haircut that destroyed her looks. It just seemed unfair that the person who sympathized with her the most was someone she didn’t even get along with anymore.

“Light rain is falling,” Nissing said to Barbara in a calm, accessible voice. “We sit in this room like two lifelong friends, having this last conversation.”

Last? She raised herself onto two elbows. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you, but you should know by now. Can’t you feel? In this room that could be anywhere in the world when the rain falls and the afternoon is dark? You’ve said it yourself. You’re still as lonely as you were when you left your husband. Some things can’t be changed, and it seems that you are one of them. It was a happy dream for a while, when you’d broken free and everything was new, living in Manhattan or wherever it was, living with a man who understood you. It was fun while it lasted, until the problem of originality put an end to it and you became, conceptually, what you’d actually been all along: just another forty-three-year-old woman who’d left her home for a younger man and a life of more complete self-expression. Just another victim of the age, with too little youth remaining in you to dismiss your entire past as a prelude and then fashion another life. Maybe other women are braver than you, maybe their stories at this point are the stories of looking bravely to an uncertain and difficult future. But other women aren’t Barbara Probst, and you don’t want to be those other women. And if nothing else you’ve recognized that the apparent novelty of taking up with me and leaving Webster Groves hasn’t been novel at all. The emancipation will begin when you go home. You’re telling me, as we sit here, that you’ve decided to return to St. Louis. Admit it. That’s what you’ve wanted to do all along.”

“But not for any reasons like this.”

He slowed his words even more. “Are you saying you don’t miss your husband and daughter?”

She shook her head. “I hate this game. But if I’d been doing all the things you say I have, I don’t think I’d be making this decision.”

“While I’m saying it’s the easiest decision you’ve ever made.”

“Because you’re making it for me.”

“Leave me out of this. These are thoughts you might think. If my presentation isn’t perfect you should blame it on my not being in your head. I don’t believe I’m that far off the mark.” He stood up and fished in the pocket of his sport coat. He came up with a syringe and a glass bottle with a silver cap.

“What’s that,” she said dully.

“It is immaterial. We continue to talk in our quiet room.” He knelt by her bed and laid the syringe and bottle on the carpeting. He ripped open a small packet, grasped her left forearm, and wiped a patch of skin with an antiseptic swab. She didn’t resist — but she did remember that if anyone had tried to shoot something foreign into her before she’d done time in this cell she would have gone down biting and kicking. Hadn’t she tried to run from him when he kidnapped her? Hadn’t she screamed when he drugged her?

Had she?

“Everyone has secrets,” he said, plunging the needle into the bottle’s cap. “They’re good for the soul. They’re a form of nourishment for the grimmer days. I have a feeling that for the sake of your pride you will recall only the brighter days we’ve spent together, and let Martin believe you’ve had the best time a woman could have had.”

She felt the needle enter. “You’re letting me go?”

“That’s right.” He held her hand ominously. “I’m giving you your freedom, though it hurts us both. There’s no place like home. A funny notion. There’s no place like home. You say it.”

Her blood ran cold. “What are you doing to me?”

“There’s no place like home.”

Already the room was turning. There’s no place like home. He was speaking from the other side, and a pounding heart moves poisons all the faster. This was her last thought.

“…Jack Strom. We’re very pleased to have as our guest Dr. Carl Sagan on the topic of nuclear winter. We have time for just a few more calls from our listeners. Hello, you’re on the air—”

“Thank you, Jack. I wonder if I could ask Dr. Sagan whether he thinks that publicizing this issue might not force the U.S. and Russia to invest more heavily in weapons like the, the neutron bomb. That is, instead of making war unthinkable, whether your research might actually be putting even more stress on destroying soft targets instead of on weapons that would, you know, start fires. Uh?”

“Thank you very much. Doctor?”

“Well. In the first place—”

“An overnight low down around forty. Tomorrow should be mostly sunny and much warmer, with highs in the low to mid sixties. The outlook for Thursday and the weekend calls for—”

“K-A-K-A, Music Radio, closing in on four o’clock on a durreary Tuesday afternoon, the Moody Blues with a song by the same name. We have a traffic report coming up at a little after four, and Kash Kallers remember the number one thousand, six hundred and three dollars and eighteen cents, that’s one thousand—”

“Cannot simultaneously reduce the number of warheads in the arsenal and introduce a new doctrine like the one the caller—”

“Jesus didn’t turn his back on these people. Jesus said—”

The gym was miniature. In the entryway, on either side of the inner doors, a volleyball pole stood on an inverted metal dish with a bite taken out for a pair of wheels. The pole on the left had the net wrapped around it, the one on the right just a rope. Luisa wiped her feet on the rubber mat.

The American flag was planted in a weighted wooden base which had reminded her, when she went here, of one of the disks in her Tinkertoy set. There were curtained voting machines against the stage, against the low trellised doors that swung open to let barges laden with folding chairs roll out. The pollwatchers sat at tables from the cafeteria, doll tables. Thick climbing ropes looped from rafter to rafter at a height no longer dizzying; wires attached to the cranks on the gym’s pale green walls held the knotted ends aloft.

The clerks smiled when Luisa stepped up to their tables. She was the only citizen voting in the gym. When they paged through the rolls and found her name, she could see that her father had been checked off as voting while her mother, of course, had not.

Cakes could be confusing. The directions called for cream, but there wasn’t any in the list of ingredients or in the refrigerator. And she couldn’t see how to mix the sticks of butter in with the sugar and spices and wheat germ. She decided to melt them, leaving them in their paper so they wouldn’t drip into the stove element. She wasn’t really thinking clearly. She was starting to care again. She needed to make a trip to the ladies’ room. She needed to step out for a minute. She needed to excuse herself for just one sec. She had to make a call. She could use a breath of fresh air. She had to fix her face. She required a moment to compose herself. The directions called for cream, but there wasn’t any in the list of ingredients or in the refrigerator. She went upstairs.

All through the house something rustled like dogs in autumn leaves. She opened her purse and looked for a vein, and started to regret undertaking a cake, if only because the smoke was so bad. But in a minute she’d forget all about it. She’d take a luxurious bath. Splash, splash. When Martin came home. Splash, splash. The many bottles of colorful fluids suggested their own scents, orange blossom, musk, and nature’s pure honey. The sensuous woman knew how to please her husband when he came home from work. She’d seen it in a book. A peignoir could be very sexy.

When Jack DuChamp came home from work, Elaine was studying in the living room. “Did you vote?” she asked.

“No.”

“Oh, for pete’s sake.”

“It’s too crowded at the polls.”

“It sure wasn’t crowded when I went,” she said. “You better go.”

Jack opened the closet door and smiled bitterly. “You mean for Martin’s sake?”

“Jack,” Elaine said. “How come everything always has to be so personal?”

Singh left Barbara lying in the corner while he carried the dresser and chairs into the room and arranged her clothing and jewelry. He’d patched and repainted the bullet hole in the wall a month ago. He’d taken the lock and peephole off the door a week ago. All that remained was the cable by the bed. With a screwdriver he removed the cable anchor from the electrical box to which it had been bolted, and replaced the original outlet, wiring it nervously, as blue sparks popped on the tips of the live wires. He raised his pants leg and fastened the fetter around his calf; it was the only article besides the needle kit that he had to take with him. The cable he left coiled tightly in the cupboard with the household tools.

He reflected on how fortunate Jammu was. He doubted there were five thousand people in the entire world conscientious enough to have prepared the apartment for evacuation as he’d prepared it.

Taking Barbara on a slow trip through the three rooms and the kitchen, he applied her fingerprints to walls, dishes, fixtures, ashtrays, handles. He plucked hairs from her head and distributed them. Using her extra shoes he dotted the carpeting with footprints. A bachelor pad nevermore. He was just putting her back to bed, along with his own pillow, when Indira called him. “Well?” she said.

“Throttled. Clearly at the hands of a strong and passionate man.”

He heard a sigh of relief.

The fire had begun in the basement when a forgotten cigarette, losing its ash, lost its balance and fell into the excelsior in which a Christmas fruitcake had been packed. The pine shavings and wrapping paper burned fiercely, igniting adjacent boxes. They were good sturdy boxes. Some of them were more than ten years old.

Strengthened by a diet of magazines, books and clothing, the fire had climbed up the paneled walls and burned out a window, venting smoke on the front side of the house. Given fresh air, the flames sprawled in all directions, consuming the stairs and within minutes the ceiling above them, rupturing into the staircase between the first and second floors and developing, then, an intense circular draft which carried them on up to the third-story rooms. At this juncture it still seemed a peculiarly selective fire, having started in the first of Probst’s storage areas and traveled by the shortest route to the second. Box after box of unlabeled Kodak slides fed the flames. His collection of restaurant menus from around the world, from each of the countries he’d had the privilege of visiting, sets of towels and linen given as gifts and worn out but not thrown away, board games and books that Luisa had outgrown, World Series and World’s Fair ticket stubs, twenty sets of anniversary cards, small Halloween costumes, Salvation Army paper roses, it was the thin organic matter that was burning, the ephemera.

But at approximately the same time Betsy LeMaster called the fire department, the blaze became a storm, indiscriminate and unstoppable. Probst’s passport burned in an instant. Flames engulfed Luisa’s bed, eating the dust ruffle and searing the mattress with a wolfing sound. Barbara’s letters to Probst disappeared in a yellow flash. Portraits of the family continued to smile up until the last moment, when a wave of ash-in-progress crossed their faces. Oil paintings blistered like marshmallows, blanched, and hung until the wires tore loose from their burning frames. Luisa’s old orthodontic retainers melted into pink plastic pools which boiled and took fire, the wires within them white hot. Barbara’s underwear burned, Probst’s favorite pajamas, Luisa’s two formal dresses, the toilet paper in the bathroom, the toothbrushes and bath mats, Paterson and The Winter’s Tale, the book of erotic verse hidden and forgotten in Luisa’s nightstand, the ribbons in the family typewriters, the pasta in the kitchen, the gum wrappers and sales slips beneath the sofa cushions. In a third-floor window, an Indian woman screamed in a low unnatural voice, a contralto, a word that began but didn’t end. Mohnwirbel staggered, drunk, from the garage and thought he saw Barbara.

Luisa heard the sirens as she was walking down Rock Hill Road to catch the bus. By the time she crossed the Frisco tracks they were coming from every direction. She’d never heard so many all at once. They mounted from behind the horizon and rang from every house, in jarring keys and rhythms, punctuated by the difficult speeding of fire trucks. Two pumpers roared past her and headed down Baker.

To the right of the front door was a grooved oblong button. Probst pressed it, hoping he’d found the right house. He hadn’t been here in nearly fifteen years.

The door was opened by a woman with silvering hair and tiny burst capillaries in her cheeks. He identified her tentatively as Elaine DuChamp. “Martin?” He was dawning on her. “Why, come in!”

They clasped hands and brushed cheeks, a form of greeting for which they’d both grown old enough in fifteen years. Probst caught a glimpse of a girl running down the hall to the bedrooms. A door closed sharply. Ground beef and onions were cooking in the kitchen, imparting a mildly nauseating atmosphere to the living room, where notebooks and notecards were spread out on the floor. Elaine sidled away from him, untying her apron in back. “This is sure a surprise,” she said, not unkindly. She dropped to her knees and with a few swift strokes gathered the notes into a pile.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Probst said. “I thought I’d stop in and see Jack — see all of you. I’ve had to pass up your invitations lately, but the campaign’s over, the—”

“He’ll be thrilled.” Elaine tucked the pile of notes into a niche in the wall unit. “He forgot to vote, but he’s just around the corner. Can I offer you something?”

“No, thanks.”

She left to attend to matters in the kitchen, and Probst, dumped on the sofa as if by time machine, scratched his head and looked around. The furniture had new slipcovers, but the shapes of the major pieces, of the couch and the three larger chairs, hadn’t changed since the last time he’d sat in the DuChamp living room. The closest thing in sight to plant life was a giant blown-glass snifter half filled with waxy plastic fruit. Little joysticks from a computer game protruded at cocky angles from the shelf above the television.

He turned and studied the three pastel portraits in brass frames on the wall behind him. They must have been done at least seven years ago, because the younger girl didn’t look any older than ten. A spot of white chalk in each eye made her radiant. The boy had sat for the artist in a blue blazer, a white shirt, and a red necktie, each of which unraveled into squiggling chalkstrokes at the bottom of the portrait, above the artist’s black initials. The older girl had worn a pale pink dress with a high lace collar; she’d already had some chest, seven years ago, and the sheen on her lipstick was yellow-orange. Probst recalled that once upon a time the major department stores like Sears had hired portraitists who gave appointments at the various branches on a rotating basis and turned out drawings at very reasonable prices. It seemed to him that these itinerant artists had rendered something essential, that these three children would always live as they looked here, forever happy.

“This has been one hell of a pincer movement. One half a pincer and nobody to pinch.”

“At leatht we got Nithing trapped.”

Herb’s brother Roy was parked on the far side of the target, ready to spot any and all action on that side and to follow anyone who tried to leave. In case things were still hopping in Missouri, Herb had also assigned three operatives to cover the Indian outposts that had looked the most heavily used. He’d assigned a fourth to keep an eye on Jammu.

“Sure,” Sam said, peering down into the mirrored depths of the thermos. “After we give the rest of ’em four whole days to ditch their equipment and fly home to Katmandu.”

“I’m thorry, Tham. You’re free to dithcontinue our relationship.”

“Oh, never mind me.” Sam patted the small detective on the back. “We got a good enough shot at nailing Jammu if we quit right now. But I can just see ’em in there with their shredders.”

“You’re free to terminate.”

“No need to cry, Herb. You reckon there’s an open liquor store in these parts?”

“Shhh!”

Sam heard the zoom of Herb’s video camera. “What is it?”

“Nithing!”

Eagerly Sam pressed his eyes to the chink. Nissing was standing on the street under a red and white golf umbrella, looking left and right as though checking to see if the coast was clear. Sam raised the telephoto lens to the chink, aimed through the viewfinder, and depressed the shutter release, letting the auto-advance motor whiz while Nissing walked purposefully west towards the river. In his mind he was already writing the caption for the photos: John Nissing, close Jammu associate, leaving property owned by Hammaker. Property contains—What did it contain? Sam looked at his watch; it was 5:15. A swarm of heavily armed aliens? Regardless, in another four hours he and Herb were going in.

It was bound to happen one of these years. The chief executive of a publicly held corporation couldn’t expect to continue running things forever. Buzz regretted only that he hadn’t stepped down before they forced him to. His failing grasp of the concept of profit should have tipped him off. How could he ever have made the mistake of letting his feelings for Asha and Martin influence his policy decisions? What had he been thinking this spring? At the time, to be sure, his actions had made sense. And now they didn’t matter. He was retiring on Friday. Of course, as the major stockholder, he’d surely be allowed to continue whatever personal projects he chose. If need be, he could liquidate a few assets and fund the research out of his own pocket. He looked forward to having more time for his dear friends, and better yet, in a way, to having time to devote to the queer assemblage that was his family. When the top priority ceased to obtain, all the lower priorities moved up a notch.

He escaped headquarters in a company car without being accosted by the press. Rain was spattering the ground with forsythia petals. He’d long envisioned himself being retired on a different sort of day, a crisp and blue Novembery day, with a warm fire and brandy at the end of it. Spring was more the time of year when great men died.

He drove first to the Hammaker complex to inquire after Asha. She hadn’t been seen at the office all day. He called the Hammaker estate once more, spoke with the same vague servant he’d been speaking with since 9:00 in the morning, who said that no, Asha wasn’t there yet either. She’d gone out with her maid. Shopping? Buzz drove home.

Finding Bev’s Cadillac parked by the gatehouse, he smiled a small smile of gratitude, his lips joining like a fortune cookie. When all else failed, he could count on Bev. He went inside, called to her, went upstairs, and saw her lying on the bed. On her nightstand stood an empty Seconal bottle and an empty fifth of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.

As soon as she saw that her father’s car wasn’t in the garage, Luisa lost interest. She inched back through the crowd. In the bad light, none of the neighbors recognized her, not even Mrs. LeMaster. Though she saw something familiar and significant in Luisa’s face, though she stared, screwing up her eyes until it seemed she might cry, Mrs. LeMaster was so unsure of her identification that she couldn’t bring herself to collar a cop and say: that’s no towhee, that’s Luisa Probst, she used to live here. Luisa turned and walked back up Baker. It wasn’t her mess.

She thanked her luck that she’d moved all her favorite things into Duane’s apartment before this happened. She thought of various dresses and purses in her closet that were better off burned. She wondered what it would be like to move to another city and introduce herself using a different name. Her first name would be McArthur. Her last name would be Smith. She tried to imagine what kind of job she could get, and then for some reason she thought of her father’s National Geographics.

She stopped on the sidewalk and set down her purse, turned to an oak tree and socked the trunk as hard as she could. She bit her lip and looked at her knuckles. Shreds of white skin were bunched up and hanging ragged from the edge of pits into which blood was starting to seep. She hit the tree again with the same hand. It stung more but overall hurt less. She hit the tree two more times, and with each blow she could feel how solid it was, how its roots went deep enough to hold it powerfully vertical. The smell of burned wood was strong in her nose.

On Lockwood she sat waiting for a bus while cars rolled by, the commuting men shadowy in their interiors. Car after car, man after man, always one driver, starting up from the Rock Hill intersection. If you put together all the men in Webster Groves in the darkness of their cars at five o’clock, it added up to a mystery with the power of a crowd, but divided and more secret, a mystery like the business section of the newspaper and its esoteric concepts, like futures and options, which every day the men were privately assimilating. Did they understand it? In libraries Luisa had looked into just about every kind of field at least once, a psychotherapists’ journal, the bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, invertebrate morphology, the works, and the only kind of thinking she couldn’t begin to follow was the kind the men with their loosened neckties in their expensive cars were presumably involved in as she watched.

The bus came. She threw a new cigarette into a puddle — you grew up to be a litterer — and got on, dropping her quarters into the box. She sat down across from the rear doors and looked forward at the black cleaning women sitting in the seats for the handicapped and elderly, returning home to their families. One of them leaned forward, her chin and hands propped on the handle of her umbrella, and spoke in a low voice to the others, who sat with their heads bowed to the no-slip floor and the collapsed umbrellas lying at their feet like drenched, docile pets. Lights in store windows on Big Bend drifted by, solitary and painful, burning in the greater darkness.

Three hundred officers had been assigned to patrol on foot to ensure that St. Louis Night proceeded in an orderly manner, as a crowd in excess of 500,000 was expected to pour into the downtown area for the festivities. Sidewalk duty wouldn’t have been too bad if the weather was nice, but the rain was still coming down and a mean wind was kicking up. RC and Sergeant Dom Luzzi sat snug and lucky in their squad car, listening to the radio and skirting the main event, the authorized forklifts and vans plowing back and forth between the reserve parking zones and festival sites, the white tents on the Mall, the canopied booths and tables. The St. Louis skyline was lit up in sections, the floors like illuminated aquariums on shelves in a dark room. But where were the fish?

At 5:25 RC and Luzzi responded to a call from the offices of KSLX, where a group of street people were harassing employees as they left for home. Luzzi pulled the car around the police line blocking the inbound lanes of Olive Street and sped to the scene. Their arrival scattered the street people. They saw the soles of shoes flying up the alleys. A crowd of KSLX employees, many of whom RC recognized, dispersed and headed for the parking lot. Whoever was working the lot would have his hands full for a couple of minutes. RC craned his neck and saw they now had a woman there doing the parking.

Luzzi spoke with the security guard and got back in the car. “Something about a Benjamin Brown,” he said.

“Huh.”

“Are you familiar with the individual?”

“It’s a name you hear.”

“If these people stick around and make trouble in the crowd tonight, they’ll be picked up separately. They aren’t local.”

“No, sir?”

Luzzi shook his head and jotted on his pad. “East St. Louis.”

“The root of all evil.”

“We’ve had enough of your humor, White.”

When Gopal failed to make his scheduled call at 4:00 and another hour passed without her phone ringing, Jammu began to worry, routinely. She wondered what had been going on in England in the last twenty-four hours. She wondered what was going on in St. Louis. If her phone didn’t ring she had no way of knowing. She called the Hammaker residence and found out nothing, called Singh’s place and got no answer. She tried Martin at his office.

“No,” his secretary said. “He left a while ago with Mrs. Probst.”

It took Jammu a moment to find her voice. “When was this?”

“Oh, three o’clock or so.”

“All right, thank you.”

Things had been too quiet.

Either Singh had released Barbara to destroy the operation, or else Devi had returned. Knowing Devi to be resourceful, Gopal to be punctual, and Singh to be loyal if not to her then at least to the operation, Jammu concluded that Mrs. Probst was Devi and that Gopal, her strong arm, quite possibly was dead.

Where was her authority now?

Jack came in the front door shaking his umbrella. His coat was a woolen carapace, a tall gray bell without tucks or flaps. Probst looked up from the sofa with a smile, aware that his presence here was surprising. But Jack only nodded. “Hello Martin.” The pitch of his voice rose on the last syllable. A hint of angry tears.

Probst crossed the room and extended a hand. “Hi, Jack.”

“Good to see you.” Jack’s grip was weak. “What’s the occasion?”

“No occasion. Just thought I’d drop in.”

Jack wouldn’t look at him. “Great. Excuse me a second.” He swung around, and with a nonchalance undermined by little hitches in his stride, like the grabbing of a wet chamois on a windshield, he walked to the kitchen. He was obviously nursing a grudge. But perhaps he would abandon it. Probst sat down on the sofa again. He didn’t mind waiting. Waiting rooms were places in which it was impossible to think.

In the kitchen, where melted cheese had joined the hamburger and onions, there were murmured consultations. Probst had already accepted Elaine’s invitation to stay for dinner, and her murmurs were placating. Jack’s were upbraiding. Then hers became more heated, and Jack’s more resigned. He returned to the living room composing his hair and adjusting the cuffs of his baby blue sweater. “Do you want a beer, Martin?”

Again his voice rose as he spoke and cracked on the last syllable.

“Sure, thanks,” Probst said. “I’m not interrupting anything?”

Jack didn’t answer. He went to the kitchen and returned with a can of Hammaker, set it on the coffee table in front of Probst, turned on the television, and marched back to the kitchen. Probst was amazed. He never got the silent treatment from anyone but Barbara and Luisa.

“Oh, for pete’s sake, Jack.” Elaine was angry.

“…tonight as fire fighters from three communities continue to pour water on his three-story house, which burned to the ground late this afternoon. Cliff Quinlan has a live mini-cam report.”

“Don, no one knows how the fire started, Webster Groves fire chief Kirk McGraw has said it’s too early to speculate on the possibility of arson, I don’t think anyone here really thinks the blaze was in any way related to Probst’s recent political activities, but this has been a deadly fire. When Webster Groves fire fighters arrived, they witnessed a man believed to be Probst’s, ah, gardener entering the house. He did not come out again. The intensity of the heat has made recovery of the body impossible thus far, and it may be another one to three hours before it’s determined whether any other persons were in the house at the time of the blaze. The one known victim is the, ah, gardener, who lived on the property and has not been seen. However, neighbors say that Probst’s car is not on the property, so it appears unlikely that he himself was in the house. I’ve asked Chief McGraw how a fire could burn out of control for as long as it did in this residential neighborhood.”

“Well, Cliff, first I’d have to point up the secluded nature of the residence, you see the hedges and the fence, the residence is set well back from the street, and at the period of time in question, namely the late afternoon, with visibility being what it was—”

Telephones rang throughout the house.

“Yes, he is,” Jack said in the kitchen. He appeared in the doorway. “Martin, it’s for you.” He pointed — jabbed — a finger at the phone on the console in the hall. Then he withdrew again to the kitchen.

Probst retrieved his coat from the closet and walked out the front door into the rain. He’d hardly recognized the Webster Groves scene on the news. But he could identify the phone call with certainty. It was the summons he’d been waiting for. Only Jammu would have thought to look for him here. He’d mentioned Jack to her once, and once, he was learning, was all she needed.

She woke up with a headache and some grogginess, but basically the substance he’d given her had treated her as gently as he himself had. For a while she lay breathing experimentally, accustoming herself to consciousness, expecting dinner. But when she shifted her legs and opened her eyes she saw that everything had changed. The fetter was gone, the sheets were clean, a big lamp with a shade stood on a dresser by a chair on which her clothes—

She’d nearly fainted. On her next try, she stood up in increments, raising her head gradually, as if placing it atop the statue of her body. She crossed the room and opened the door. The lock she’d heard turn so many times was gone. And now, where for all the weeks she’d been led to the bathroom she’d heard the unmistakable echoes of vacancy, she was walking through an apartment very much like the New York apartment John had been forcing her to imagine.

Books of hers lay on the arms of Scandinavian chairs. She’d hung lingerie up to dry in the bathroom. On a desk in the dining room, above a pack of her Winstons and a dirty ashtray, she’d filed away her letters from Luisa and Audrey in a set of modular shelves. She’d stocked the refrigerator with her preferred brands of yogurt, diet chocolate soda, martini olives. (She was starving for real food, but she didn’t touch anything.) She’d written a grocery list and left it on the counter. On the floor near the outer door she found a scrap of white paper.

Bhimrao Ambedkar

Barrister at Law

Chowpatty, Bombay

The nurses, orderlies and candy stripers gave Buzz a wide berth. In the waiting area on the ICU floor at Barnes he sat hunched and trembling, a small, hungry old man. He hadn’t eaten anything since his Reuben sandwich at noon. What the intercoms were saying he didn’t understand. A nurse manipulated jumbo file cards and a telephone pealed electronically. A thin, even layer of scar tissue covered the walls and floors, the residue of the artificial light that had been falling twenty-four hours a day for twenty years.

The chief neurologist had told Buzz that any brain damage would not become evident until Bev regained consciousness, but that he should begin to prepare himself for a long and arduous recovery period. Asha had told him, when he finally got in touch with her, that she wouldn’t be able to see him tonight because she’d made a commitment to appear at the election festivities downtown. And Martin’s phone wasn’t working.

Strain was building in his throat and behind his nose when he heard a familiar voice. He stifled a sob, looked up and saw his urologist strolling with another doctor at a conversational pace. Both of them peeled off green caps and massaged their scalps. Buzz raised his head further and uncrossed his arms to let himself be recognized and spoken to. They didn’t speak to him. Dr. Thompson said, “Kids get side-aches.”

The other doctor said, “Kids eat candy.”

Dr. Thompson said, “Candy causes side-aches.”

Both men laughed and walked onto the elevator, which had opened for them as they approached it.

Tired of driving but not of moving, Probst parked the Lincoln in one of the Convention Center garages, counted five other cars on the entire Lemon level, and set out from there on foot. It was nine o’clock. He’d spent two hours at the police station in Webster Groves, speaking to Allstate, thanking firemen, accepting coffee and condolences from Chief Harrison, and giving information to a series of lesser officers who transferred his statements onto dotted lines. He was told there would soon be a body to identify. He was left by himself in a corridor to wait, gratefully, on a carved walnut bench. Then an officer called his name: he was wanted on the telephone. It was the second summons, and again he walked away, got in his car, drove east.

Rock music, so loud it could only be live, reverberated inside the Convention Center and through the walls across the plaza. The song’s chorus seemed to go, You love you won you win. Maybe the Center was packed with young people dancing and waving their arms above their heads, but maybe not; the plaza and surrounding streets were barren of stragglers. Pairs of policemen in mackintoshes turned their heads back and forth with an air of defensiveness. They stamped their feet and blew on their hands. Probst crossed Washington Street in the middle of a block and didn’t see a car coming in either direction. The downtown streets, of course, were off limits to private cars tonight. Pedestrians were expected to carry the party into every square yard of the area. But there were fewer pedestrians in sight than on an ordinary Tuesday night.

A dixieland band was playing beneath a plastic awning in front of the Mercantile Tower, next to the chromium sculpture, which gleamed cheaply, a household knickknack grossly enlarged. Three teens in ski jackets stood listening to the music. The washboard player took a short solo, hunkering down and giving a vigorous rub to the slats of his instrument. He winked at the kids.

At the empty sidewalk cafés on 8th Street, waiters sat smoking, dozing, playing cards. Rain pelted the canopies, which shivered in each gust of wind like dogs that had evacuated. Probst stepped up to the sampling booth for Jardin des Plantes and ordered a slice of quiche from a short man with a bullet-shaped head.

“Five.”

“Five dollars?”

“It’s a benefit.”

He bolted the quiche before it got too cold to stomach, crunching the bean sprouts and miniature shrimps embedded in it, squeezing the oils through his mouth and down his throat.

In another booth, above a tank of water, in a seat connected by springs to a bull’s-eye at which passersby could pay to throw tennis balls, Sal Russo sat reading the Post-Dispatch. Sal was a city alderman from the ward in which Probst & Company were located. He looked quite toasty, his hair dry and styled, between a pair of radiant heaters. “Hey, Martin.”

“Hi, Sal.” Probst turned to the attendant. “How much?”

The attendant pointed to a sign. “Five bucks a throw. Sir. Or ten for three. It’s a benefit.”

He bought six balls, and then six more. Before Sal could surface in the tank, Probst had hastened around the corner onto Market Street. Here he stopped in his tracks, shocked by the Arch.

Colored lights were playing on the stainless steel, mottling it garishly. They shifted, the reds and greens and yellows intermingling on the flat integral sections. It wasn’t Probst’s Arch anymore. It was the National Park Service’s.

Games and German sausages, clowns and unicyclists, raffles, accordionists, and elected representatives waited for a throng of visitors who, since they hadn’t come by 9:00 in the evening, would surely not come at all. Probst himself had come only to seek necessity, to let himself be guided to Jammu. The Arch blushed as red lights rose and deepened to purple. He walked east, down the center of the Mall, under the eyes of lone policemen with billies.

Beneath the largest tent on the Mall, Bob Hope was speaking to a meager gathering with a peculiar demographic profile. It consisted entirely of youngish men. Probst couldn’t find a single woman in it, nor any man under twenty or over forty. Two hundred rather small young men in London Fogs and Burberrys, in white shirts with tab collars and neckties of median width, in brown walking shoes with crepe soles, laughed on cue. Pete Wesley and Quentin Spiegelman and other dignitaries stood in a phalanx on the stage behind Hope, who was saying, “No, seriously, folks, I think it’s just great to see what’s been done in St. Louis. When you think what it looked like thirty years ago — of course, I only know from pictures. I was still a teenager in California.”

The youngish men erupted in laughter, clapped their hands and nodded to each other.

“You know, I was in Washington the other day—”

Barbara hadn’t meant to leave. She’d picked up the Bombay address from the floor and stepped into the hall, intending to explore the building, find a window and figure out where she was, and then return to the apartment and try some numbers besides her old one, which seemed to be out of order. She had to know the address before anyone could come and get her. But the apartment door had fallen shut behind her, locking.

There were no windows in the hall, only brick and steel, the brick painted gray and the steel a ferric orange, all lit by bulbs in cages. She boarded an elevator, stamping nervously on its worn wooden floor, descended to the ground floor and entered a hallway identical to the one on the top floor. The air was chilly and stale, the building completely silent. She walked to one end of the hallway and pushed open a heavy door, hanging at the threshold and looking out.

Beyond a wet empty street was an elevated highway. Trucks with small amber lamps around the margins of their trailers were passing in the rain. Clouds beyond the highway captured the bright lights of a city, but whatever skyline loomed there was obscured.

She shivered in her pants and sweater as the flavorless air blew in. On the floor lay a fragment of cinder block. She kicked it onto the threshold, against the jamb, stepped outside and carefully eased the door back against the cinder block. She looked up and down the street. It was a Hiroshima neighborhood in the spring of ’46, so flat and lifeless that it seemed almost to promise safe passage. She saw distant streetlights, traffic lights, vehicle lights, some very distant office lights, but not one sign of commerce, no light in the shape of letters. She could find an entrance to the highway and flag someone down. But she hesitated. Somewhere in the warehouse there might be another telephone, or at least some tool with which she could force her way back into the apartment. She’d call the operator and have the call traced. She didn’t want to leave.

A hundred yards away from her a thin man in a dark coat without luster crossed the street on a diagonal. He approached her steadily, implacably, with the hypnotic steps of a frog-gigger who’d “fixed” his prey. She stepped away from the doorway, wringing her hands. It was a matter of balance. She broke in the direction she’d been leaning — away from the door. The man walked faster and she fled along the front of the building, away from the city lights. The pace of his steps matched hers. She began to run. He began to run.

“Myth Madan!” he shouted.

Her sneakers slapped the broken pavement, bending around irregularities to average them and overcome them. She was stretching muscles she hadn’t used since January. She kept running even when she heard the man stop, far behind her, with a scrabble of leather soles. Looking back, she saw him heading towards the warehouse. She ran between two sets of pillars beneath the highway, through a very black space, and suddenly into light.

The light came from fires, from flames licking out of barrels and from bonfires built on the pavement of a narrow street, flames oppressed by the rain but not subdued, sprouting sideways, clinging to the square-edged boards that fed them. At the far end of the street a single filament shone on an intersection with what appeared to be a similar street. In between, in tents and under lean-tos on the sidewalk, in the hulks of four-door cars and vans without tires, leaning from frameless windows of blackened buildings, were many more people than Barbara could count. There were hundreds.

She heard a few isolated voices, but for the most part the people sat and stood quiescent, crossing a leg here, raising an arm there, as if deep in thought. She looked back towards the warehouse. A pair of headlights had appeared in the gloom, expressionless disks of luminance, the distance between them slowly increasing as the car moved swiftly closer. She entered the street in front of her, and with a relief she tasted in her mouth and felt in her chest she realized that most of the people were women. She turned to the nearest group, a threesome on the corner, but the car was almost upon her. It was a station wagon. She ducked into an alley where more women stood warming their hands at a barrel. The smoke lacked the green aromatic complexity of nature; it smelled of old wood, of lumber, not logs. The women were lost in their clothing. They wore fishnet tights, platform heels of lacquered glitter, boots of licorice leather that hugged ankles and calves, leather mini-skirts and polyester hot pants, and short, padded jackets. Their faces, some black, some white, peered out from between mounded hair and fake fur collars. Two by two their eyes were coming to rest on Barbara. She pressed against a brick wall, catching her breath, as the station wagon passed in the street.

Closed shop, sister!

The laughter was loud and hit her like stones, fell dead on the ground. Two women threw cigarettes into the barrel, ritually. They were all looking at her.

“Where am I?” she asked.

You in Jammuville.

There was no laughter.

She was beginning to breathe normally. “I mean what state am I in?”

Same state we’s in!

You lookin for work?

Closed shop, closed shop.

They fell silent.

“I’m looking for the police,” she said.

The police? She lookin for the po-lice? Oh ho.

One of them pointed.

See dat highway? You just follow it over the bridge.

They laughed again. Somewhere deeper in Jammuville a gun was fired. Barbara headed up a cross street even more populated than the one she’d just left. Puppets paced the sidewalks, their seductions creaky in the cold, their turnings stiff and grindings labored, while male eyes gleamed in the shadows. Not a word was spoken. Barbara passed sore-looking breasts bared to the weather, ecstasies in which only the agony wasn’t simulated, a skirt raised above a meaningless vulva framed by black straps. She stepped off the curb into the street, where automobiles were cruising in a steady stream, almost bumper to bumper. One of them drew even with her. Through the open driver-side window she saw a jowly white man in a red blazer with an unlit cigar between his teeth. He removed the cigar and looked her over.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m—”

He shook his head. “Tits.” The word was final, the voice prophetic. “I need mammoth tits.” He had a vision of them. “Monster tits.”

The next car honked her out of the way, but the one after that stopped, and she rapped on the window with her knuckles. The meek-eyed man inside frowned and shook his head. She looked down into his lap. He followed with his eyes, smiling modestly at his exposure.

Near the end of the street she saw the city. It was St. Louis. The Arch stood huge and stationary against a backdrop of brightly colored mists. It was St. Louis. It was the city in which her dreams had taken place all her life, all through the last two and a half months, the city which whenever John left the room she peopled with her family and her friends, the city she’d never stopped trying to remember and imagine: this was the city itself, and it was completely different from the city in her head though identical in detail, completely itself, the quality of reality overpowering all the more specific landmarks. But even now she couldn’t shake the feeling — didn’t want to — that she was about to wake up in John’s arms.

Beneath the Arch, Probst faced the river and the unconstellated urban stars that twinkled in Illinois. A northbound barge spanned invisibly the four hundred yards between its lighted cabin and its lighted bow. Cars were moving at sixty miles an hour across the Poplar Street Bridge, but their progress looked painfully slow. In the depths of downtown a metallic man barked to muted cheers.

Piercing the seawall and leading down to Wharf Street was a long, wide set of concrete stairs. Probst sat down on the top step. He watched a familiar sedan travel along the street, halt, and back into a parking space between him and the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, both of which were moored at their docks. The car door opened. Jammu stepped out.

On Easter she’d lain on top of him, hipbones on hipbones, knees on knees, and he’d held his arms around her narrow body trying less to stop her shaking than to make it match his own. The shaking was steady, unprogressive, Brownian. They smiled to acknowledge it, but it didn’t stop. It excluded them, reduced them, made them equal in their mutual submission, and this was ideal, because in the ideal bed, in the twilight that came peculiarly to bedrooms, one wanted only to submit.

Don’t tell me this is just a midlife infatuation. Don’t tell me the lights are shining anyplace but here.

Halfway up the stairs Jammu stopped and sat down on the retaining wall on the right side of the landing. Probst felt the rainwater seeping through the seat of his pants. She drew the flaps of her trench coat together, crossed her arms, and put her hand to her mouth. He watched her chew her thumbnail. There was nothing left to want but her. And he could see how the year had happened, how a man in his prime, the envy of a state, could lose everything without even putting up a fight along the way: he hadn’t believed in what he had. Something had always been missing, or interposed, between possession and glory, a question: Why me?

Maybe if he’d known that all the things around him that he loved could vanish like this, he might have succeeded in controlling himself, in making himself love them, or in losing control, in letting himself believe. But how could any man know when the end was coming?

What remained was a room in his mind, all around which the world had fallen away to a whistling galactic distance. The eye of the camera had shifted from a December delivery room to a Main Street location a week after the bomb had dropped, beholding now the rubble in which the living Martin and Susan had vaporized, and beaming the image back to the room, where the world, in them, made love. He might wander through the remembered forms of a city, but the only future that would happen would happen in this room.

She was going to wait for him to come down the stairs. She would never have won him in the first place, even for one afternoon, without some basic readiness on his part, some identity between her planned and executed destruction of his life and his acceptance of each stage of the destruction. In its purest realization the State was an exhaustive sense of fate. But she, who’d ordered Barbara killed, who’d arranged this one minor violation, couldn’t share it. She’d thought she would be climbing these stairs all the way to the top and embracing him. But that wasn’t how it worked.

Election Tuesday, the underwater throbbing of tug engines, the river’s shallow sucking at the banks, the shrill of trucks, the sighing of tires in the sky, the vapid mutterings of St. Louis Night all lacked the volume to drown out the creature growing inside her, a creature glimpsed occasionally in mirrors or heard in fevers, a small, sad child. The child spoke aloud in her labors, able only, like Jammu, to plan and speak and work, to construct a life. Who of the two was the terror? Clearly the woman had fabricated the child as much as the child the woman. Both were cheap Taiwanese goods like everything else she’d ever thought or had a hand in, but the child, at least, had a name: Susan.

Gathering strings of lint from the inner folds of her coat pockets, glancing up at Martin, who sat like Patience at the top of the stairs, beneath the Arch, she began to cry. She pitied the child. She lacked the capacity, the basic instrumentation, the hardware, to love Martin as he loved her. But although the artifices had forever displaced the emotions, the child was making plans—I had no idea Devi was back in the country, she’d sent me a letter from Bombay, very self-dramatizing, you must believe me, you do believe me, I can see—only because she hadn’t yet learned the emotions.

Somehow Probst had imagined that obeying her summons and meeting her here, meeting her eyes and accepting with her the lovely evil of caring only about each other, would be as easy as facing her in bed had been, as uninhibited by shame and selfconsciousness, as purely a matter of compulsion. But when he saw that she was crying and that specific and ordinary words of comfort were required, he knew the affair was over.

He became impatient. The wind off the river was picking up again, and he noticed that his hands were cold, his feet wet, his butt sore, his bladder full. He noticed where he was. He raised his face to the shape above him, to the beams of yellow, blue and violet light streaming into it and cut, terminated, in the form of the great black curve. It merely stood. Raindrops fell on his eyes. While in the room in his head the pleasure could not relent, because if it did it would beg the question of what became of it when it was over. Sex wasn’t a life-prolonging satisfaction like food, and at their age the idea of reproduction couldn’t rationalize the pleasure. Only repetition could. After all, in that room on the edge of space, he and she weren’t just sitting around. They were eternally fucking. In an Eastern room, in a mode of existence in which the present life, the persistent problem of identity, was skirted by reference to past and future incarnations. But in Missouri you lived only once.

He stood up, finding in the stiffness of his shoulders an indication that he was ultimately not an evil person. His body was able to distract him. He was capable of growing impatient. He was not compelled. Actions emptied of meaning, feelings ceased to matter. The story of his life could not be all exclamation marks. He needed to find a bathroom or at least some secluded weeds, and it was with this practical haste that he shouted at the woman below him, who was slumped on the retaining wall, her posture shattered as if she’d fallen from the sky and landed in a heap: “Good bye!”

Without looking up she waved an arm at him, throwing an invisible stone.

Fear was getting the better of Barbara as tires squealed in the streets around her and people argued in the dark buildings. She wanted to walk briskly, purposefully, confidently, but walking required muscle control to maintain momentum. She started to jog. Relative to the warehouse she’d started from she was totally lost, but she could hold the Arch and part of the St. Louis skyline in view and she kept moving towards it. Only when she came to a block where there were men she didn’t like the looks of did she change direction and run tangentially, south. Jammuville. She waited in vain for a police car to pass or a police station to rise out of the darkness.

If she could have figured out where the warehouse was she would have run there more eagerly than she was running to St. Louis. For more than two months she’d lived there in safety, a safety she appreciated now that she saw what lay all around. There was no place like home. John brought her meals. Oh, she was crazy, but she couldn’t help it. She was lost in the place of her nightmares, of the nightmares of every citizen of Webster Groves, in a skeletal maze where every kid had a gun and every woman a knife, and a white female face was a ticket to gang rape after she’d been bludgeoned if she’d let them know she was afraid. Barbara was a good-hearted person and had never allowed herself to believe this. Who would hurt a defenseless woman without a purse? But the threat was physical and it surrounded her.

Still clutching the soggy slip of paper with John’s new address, she jogged towards the Interstate, through one block and into another, thinking, Get back, get back home. She jogged almost to the end of the street, close enough to see the bright green sign with its arrow pointing to ST. LOUIS, she came within a hundred steps of the chain-link fence she would climb to reach the shoulder from which she would flag down a car, before she spotted the four loitering black men. Keep running right past them. She couldn’t. She was making the Mistake but she couldn’t help it. She was turning around and running away from them, showing her fear, and she heard the reports on concrete of their feet as they skipped to keep up.

“Hey there—”

“Hey—”

A rattling black Continental was passing through the intersection. She ran right in front of its headlights. It swerved and screeched. She let herself glance back. The four men were standing in a line, their faces inexpressive as they looked at her. The car started to drive away, but she grabbed the mirror on the driver’s side. The window unrolled. A pair of white men in polyester jackets and pastel sport shirts were sitting in the front seat. The driver looked out the window at the men behind her. “Need a lift, honey?” The voice was sedated, confident.

“Yes. Please.”

The driver consulted his companion, who gave her the once-over, shrugged, and unlocked the back door. As Barbara got in she saw a station wagon slowing to a stop halfway up the block behind the car. It was the same station wagon that had followed her away from John’s building. The four men crossed the intersection, waving through the rear window, receding swiftly.

“Where to?” the driver said.

Nashville music whispered in the stereo speakers behind her. “Anywhere,” she panted. “I’m lost. Police station.”

“I don’t know about that. How about our place instead?”

“Nigs givin’ you shit?” his companion asked her.

“I was just scared,” she murmured. The air smelled of aftershave and engine heat. At her feet were Burger King bags and two aluminum suitcases. To make room for her legs she started to move one of them aside.

“Don’t touch,” the companion said.

The driver turned the steering wheel hand over hand, languidly, and looked back over the headrest. “We’re nice boys, honey, but fair’s fair. I reckon you owe us one gratis. Those nigs wouldn’t of been gentle.”

He returned his attention to the road. They were driving fast, but Barbara closed her fingers around the door handle anyway. The side of the driver’s hand slammed down on the button of the lock, his fingertips trailing on the window. His companion was kneeling on the front seat, smoothing back his straight hair with both hands. He grabbed Barbara’s wrist as she lunged for the other door. He started to climb into the back seat but dropped his head to peer out the rear window. He frowned. “That company we got?”

The driver turned around to look. His face hardened. “You bitch, what is this?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Just let me out.”

Red light filled the car. She turned. The station wagon was still following her. On the roof, above the driver’s window, a flasher had appeared.

The Lufthansa woman in Chicago rested her fingers on the computer keyboard. “Mit Film oder ohne, Herr St. John?”

“Was für ein Film?”

Your attention, ladies and gentlemen, Flight 619 nonstop service to Frankfurt will begin boarding in—

“Ein Clint Eastwood.”

“Ohne.”

“Ja, dann haben Sie mehr Ruhe. Gepäck?”

“Die Aktentasche nur.”

RC and Sergeant Luzzi had chosen to spend the last half hour of their shift parked under the I-70 overpass at the head of the Martin Luther King Bridge, while they listened to the force’s own account of this St. Louis Night. A grill fire at one of the booths on Chestnut. Disorderly parties trying to crash the invitation-only Election Night Ball. An escort for Bob Hope’s limo. A detail to keep spectators away from the fireworks barge in case spectators showed up.

The big display would be starting in twenty minutes, and RC and Luzzi would have a primo view out over Laclede’s Landing and Eads Bridge. RC couldn’t figure out, though, why there weren’t more people heading for the waterfront. On the Fourth of July this intersection always swarmed with pedestrians, all tromping to the Arch. Tonight the traffic, what there was of it, was confined to cars, mainly VIPs arriving for the Ball. They’d seen Ronald Struthers drive up Broadway in a Caddy decorated for a wedding getaway, with crepe paper and tin cans and the words Just Hitched on a soggy cardboard plaque, meaning city and county. RC guessed the Chief was already at the Ball, playing hostess. Luzzi had dryly predicted she wouldn’t be with the force much longer, to which RC had replied that that might be so but she’d never forget where she got her start. When it came to Jammu, even RC and Luzzi could be civil to each other.

Out over the Mississippi on the MLK a couple of cars were heading towards them. One of them had a flasher, which probably meant it was the East St. Louis force, since the dispatcher hadn’t mentioned any chases, and anyway not too many of them lasted across the river and back. RC turned to Luzzi, who’d already switched on their flashers and made contact with the dispatcher. “…Over the MLK. We’ll take appropriate action to stop the vehicle.”

They pulled square across the exit lane and looked at each other in the light of the Seagram’s billboard by the Embassy Suites. “Better draw,” Luzzi said. He took the rifle and got out of the cruiser, crouching behind the left front fender. RC unholstered his revolver. All at once this looked like action as real as any he’d been through yet. The lead car on the bridge had picked them up and was weaving in its lane as if trying to make up its mind. But the tail car had slowed down, stopping in the middle of the bridge. A station wagon. There were no official markings on it.

The lead car hit. It squealed and jumped the curb onto the lane divider, right in front of RC. Luzzi was standing up. A muzzle flashed twice as the car skidded sideways across the length of the divider.

“Tires, hit the tires,” Luzzi shouted, diving back inside. He’d taken a bullet in the right shoulder. RC got out and scrambled up to the right front fender. The car had stopped moving not more than twenty feet from him. There were three people in it, two of them struggling in the back seat. RC fired twice at the rear tire and hit the hubcap twice. Luzzi’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker. “Come out with your hands high.”

Tires bit pavement. RC took aim again, raising the gun and bringing it down as the car gained speed and distance, twenty, thirty, fifty feet, heading up Third Street. The back door opened and a female jumped out headlong just as he pulled the trigger. He plainly saw her head jerk as the bullet entered. Luzzi was shouting incoherently. RC dropped his revolver and howled.

Leaving the Arch, turning off Lucas, Jammu heard Luzzi’s voice on her radio. She wheeled around the corner and saw traffic piling up on Third Street. A black officer knelt clutching his head. Luzzi leaned against Cruiser 217 with his arms crossed, one hand pressing on his wounded shoulder, the other hand holding a microphone on the end of a stretched spiral cord. In the middle of Third Street, all alone, a woman lay in faint headlight beams.

Jammu heard herself walking. Her knees bent into view beneath her as she crouched by the woman, whose eyes were wide open. A crumpled slip of paper had fallen from her open hand, and from a flaring oval hole where her nostrils had been, blood fanned down her cheek and collected, orange and oily, on the weathered white paint of a lane line. A crowd was gathering around her at a respectful distance. Press badges were pinned to most of the lapels and purses. “Oh God,” a woman said. Behind her Jammu heard the sobbing of the black officer, evidently the one who’d fired. He’d just guaranteed himself a series of promotions. She pocketed the slip of paper. With her index finger she touched the warm blood streaming from the woman’s nose. “Stand aside,” she told the reporters. Fresh officers were arriving from every direction. They pushed back the crowd, and no one noticed when Jammu, turning to confer with them, put her bleeding finger in her mouth and drew it out clean.