The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

2

In 1870 St. Louis was America’s Fourth City. It was a booming rail center, the country’s leading inland port, a wholesaler for half a continent. Only New York, Philadelphia and Brooklyn had larger populations. Granted, there were newspapers in Chicago, a close Fifth, that claimed the 1870 census had counted as many as 90,000 nonexistent St. Louisans, and granted, they were right. But all cities are ideas, ultimately. They create themselves, and the rest of the world apprehends them or ignores them as it chooses.

In 1875, with local prophets casting it as the nation’s natural capital, the eventual First City, St. Louis undertook to remove a major obstacle from its path. The obstacle was St. Louis County, the portion of Missouri to which the city nominally belonged. Without the city, St. Louis County was nothing — a broad stretch of farmland and forest in the crook of two rivers. But for decades the county had dominated city affairs by means of an archaic administrative body called the County Court. The Court’s seven “judges” were notoriously corrupt and insensitive to urban needs. A county farmer who wanted a new road built to his farm could buy one cheap for cash or votes. But if parks or streetlights were needed for the city’s common good, the Court had nothing to offer. To a young frontier town the Court’s parochialism had been frustrating; to the Fourth City, it was intolerable.

A group of prominent local businessmen and lawyers persuaded the framers of a new Missouri state constitution to include provisions for civic reform. Despite harassment by the County Court, the group then drafted a scheme for the secession of St. Louis from St. Louis County, to be voted on by all county residents in August 1876.

Pre-election criticism focussed on one element of the scheme in particular: the expansion of the city’s landholdings, in a kind of severance payment, from the current twenty-one square miles to sixty-one square miles. Countyites objected to the city’s proposed “theft” of county property. The Globe-Democrat denounced the unfairness of annexing “divers and sundry cornfields and melon patches and taxing them as city property.” But the scheme’s proponents insisted that the city needed the extra room for tomorrow’s parks and industry.

In an election run by the County Court, voters narrowly rejected the secession scheme. There were cries of fraud. Activists had no trouble convincing a Circuit Court judge (one Louis Gottschalk, who had personally drafted the reform provisions for the 1875 constitution) to appoint a commission to investigate the election. In late December the commissioners reported their findings. The scheme had passed after all, by 1,253 votes. Immediately the city claimed its new land and adopted a new charter, and five months later the County Court, its appeals exhausted, dissolved itself.

Time passed. Sixty-one square miles of land soon proved to be less ample than the secessionists had supposed. As early as 1900 the city was running out of space, and the county refused to give it more. Old industry fled the messes it had made. New industry settled in the county. In the thirties, poor black families arrived from the rural South, hastening the migration of whites to the suburbs. By 1940 the city’s population had begun to plummet, and its tax base to shrink. Stately old neighborhoods became simply old. New housing projects like Pruit-Igoe, begun in the fifties, failed spectacularly in the sixties. Efforts at urban renewal succeeded in attracting affluent county residents to a few select zones but did little to cure the city’s ills. Everyone worried about the city’s schools, but it was an exercise in hand wringing. The seventies became the Era of the Parking Lot, as acres of asphalt replaced half-vacant office buildings downtown.

By now, of course, most American cities were in trouble. But compared with St. Louis, even Detroit looked like a teeming metropolis, even Cleveland like a safe place to raise a family. Other cities had options, good neighbors, a fighting chance. Philadelphia had land to work with. Pittsburgh could count on help from Allegheny County. Insular and constricted, St. Louis had by 1980 dwindled to America’s Twenty-Seventh City. Its population was 450,000, hardly half the 1930 figure.

The local prophets were defensive. Where once they’d expected supremacy, they now took heart at any sign of survival. For forty years they’d been chanting: “St. Louis is going to make it.” They pointed to the Gateway Arch. (It was 630 feet tall; you couldn’t miss it.) They pointed to the new convention center, to three tall new buildings and two massive shopping complexes. To slum-clearance projects, to beautification programs, to plans for a Gateway Mall that would rival the mall in Washington.

But cities are ideas. Imagine readers of The New York Times trying in 1984 to get a sense of St. Louis from afar. They might have seen the story about a new municipal ordinance that prohibited scavenging in garbage cans in residential neighborhoods. Or the story about the imminent shutdown of the ailing Globe-Democrat. Or the one about thieves dismantling old buildings at a rate of one a day, and selling the used bricks to out-of-state builders.

Why us?

Never conceding defeat, the prophets never asked. Nor did the old guiding spirits, whose good intentions had doomed the city; they’d moved their homes and operations to the county long ago. The question, if it arose at all, arose in silence, in the silence of the city’s empty streets and, more insistently, in the silence of the century separating a young St. Louis from a dead one. What becomes of a city no living person can remember, of an age whose passing no one survives to regret? Only St. Louis knew. Its fate was sealed within it, its special tragedy special nowhere else.

After his meeting with Jammu, Singh took the heavy Probst file to his West End apartment, read the file’s contents, called Baxti eight times for clarifications, and then, the following morning, drove out to Webster Groves for a visit to the scene of future crimes.

The Probsts lived in a three-story stucco house on a long, broad street called Sherwood Drive. Barbara Probst had driven off punctually. Tuesdays, like Thursdays, she worked in the acquisitions department of the St. Louis University Library, returning home at 5:30. Tuesday was also the gardener’s day off. When the beeping in Singh’s earphone had faded into static (Baxti had equipped Barbara’s BMW with a transmitter that had a range of one kilometer) he checked the two channels from the mikes inside the house and, finding everything quiet, approached on foot. During school hours pedestrians were as scarce on Sherwood Drive as in a cemetery.

Singh was dressed approximately like a gas-meter reader. He carried a black leather shoulder bag. Ready in his pocket were surgical latex gloves for fingerprint protection. He descended the rear stairs and entered the basement with the key Baxti had given him. Looking around, he was impressed by the great quantity of junk. In particular, by the many bald tires, the many plastic flower pots, and the many coffee cans. He went upstairs to the kitchen. Here the air had the smell of recent redecoration, the composite aroma of new wallpaper, new fabrics, new caulking and new paint. A dishwasher throbbed in its drying cycle. Singh removed the screen from the heating register above the stove, replaced the battery in the transmitter, adjusted the gain of the mike (Baxti never failed not to do so), replaced the screen, and repeated the procedure for the transmitter in the dining room.

Baxti had already gone through Probst’s study and Barbara’s desk and closets, the address books and cancelled checks and old correspondences, so Singh concentrated on the girl’s — Luisa’s — bedroom. He shot up six feet of microfilm, recording every document of interest. It was noon by the time he finished. He mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve and opened a bag of M & M’s (they didn’t leave crumbs). He was chewing the last of them, two yellow ones, when he heard a familiar voice outside the house.

He moved to a front window. Luisa was walking up the driveway with a female friend. Singh entered the nearest spare bedroom, pushed his shoulder bag under the bed, and slid in after it, stilling the dust ruffle just as the girls entered the kitchen below him. He switched channels on his receiver and listened to their movements. Without speaking, they were opening the refrigerator and cabinets, pouring liquids into glasses and handling plastic bags. “Don’t eat those,” Luisa said.

“Why not?”

“My mother notices things.”

“What about these?”

“We’d better not.”

They came upstairs, passed the spare bedroom, and settled in Luisa’s room. Singh lay very still. Three hours later the girls tired of television and went outside with binoculars. Back at the front window, Singh watched them until they were a block away. Then he returned to the basement and came up the outside stairs jotting on his meter-reader’s pad.

In his second apartment, in Brentwood, he developed and printed the film. He stayed inside this apartment for three nights and two days, reading the documents and working through some of the hundred-odd hours of Probst conversations recorded thus far. He warmed up frozen preprepared dinners. He drank tap water and took occasional naps.

When Luisa went out on Friday night he was waiting on Lockwood Avenue in the green two-door LeSabre he’d leased two months ago. To himself, willfully, he gave the name its French pronunciation: LeSob. Luisa picked up four friends from four houses and drove to Forest Park, where they sat on — and rolled down, and scampered up, and trampled the grass of — a hill called Art. Art Hill. The museum overlooked it. When darkness fell, the youths drove ten miles southwest to a miniature golf course on Highway 366 called Mini-Links. Singh parked the LeSob across the road and studied the youths with his binoculars as they knocked colored balls through the base of a totem pole. The faces of the two boys were as soft and downy as those of the three girls. All of them giggled and swaggered in that happy ascendancy, repellent in any land, of teens on their turf.

The next night, Saturday, Luisa and her school-skipping friend Stacy shared marijuana in a dark park and went to a soft-core pornographic movie, the pleasures of which Singh opted to forgo. On Sunday morning Luisa and a different girl loaded birdwatching equipment into the BMW and drove west. Singh followed no farther than the county limits. He’d seen enough.

On the no man’s land bounded by the sinuous freeway access ramps of East St. Louis, Illinois, stood the storage warehouse in which Singh had a loft, his third and favorite apartment. Princess Asha had found it for him — the building numbered among the Hammaker Corporation’s real-estate holdings — and she had paid for the green carpeting in the three rooms, for the kitchen appliances and for the shower added to the bathroom. The loft had no windows, only skylights of frosted glass. The doors were made of steel. The walls were eleven feet high, fireproof and soundproof. Locked in the innermost room, Singh could be anywhere on earth. In other words, not in St. Louis. Hence the attraction of the place.

A dim shadow of a pigeon fell on the skylight, and a second shadow joined it. Singh opened the Probst file, which lay near him on the floor. All week Jammu had been calling him, pressuring him to set in motion a plan to bring Probst into her camp. She was in a terrible hurry. Already, with the help of the mayor and a corrupted alderman, she was designing changes in the city tax laws, changes which the city could not afford to enact unless, in the meantime, some of the county’s wealth and population had been lured east again. But the county guarded its resources jealously. Nothing short of reunification with the city could induce it to help the city out. And since voters in the county were adamantly opposed to any form of cooperation, Singh and Jammu agreed that the only way to catalyze a reunification was to focus on the private individuals who did the shaping of policy in the region, who determined the location and tenor of investment. No more than a dozen catalysts were needed, according to Jammu, if they could all be made to act in unwitting concert. And if her research was to be trusted, she’d identified all twelve. Not surprisingly, all were male, all attended Municipal Growth meetings, and most were chief executives with a strong hold on their stockholders. These were the men she “had to have.”

What she would do when she “had” them, when she had cured the city’s ills and risen above her role in the police department to become the Madam of the Mound City, she wouldn’t say. Right now she was concerned only with the means.

Fighting her enemies in Bombay and furthering the interests of her relatives, Jammu had developed the idea of a “State” in which a subject’s everyday consciousness became severely limited. The mildest version of the State, the one most readily managed in Bombay, exploited income-tax anxiety. To the lives of dozens of citizens whose thinking she wished to alter, Jammu had had the Bureau of Revenue bring horribly protracted tax audits. And when the subject had reached a state in which he lived and breathed and dreamed only taxes, she’d move in for the kill. She’d ask a favor the subject would ordinarily never dream of granting, force a blunder the subject six months earlier would not have committed, elicit an investment the subject should have had a hundred reasons not to make…The method couldn’t work miracles, of course. Jammu needed some sort of leverage initially. But often the leverage consisted of little more than the subject’s susceptibility to her charm.

The State had two advantages over more conventional forms of coercion. First, it was oblique. It arose in a quarter of the subject’s life unrelated to Jammu, to the police, and, often, to the public sphere in general. Second, it was flexible. Any situation could be developed, any weakness on the subject’s part. Jammu had transformed the dangerous Jehangir Kumar, a man who liked to drink, into an incorrigible alcoholic. When Mr. Vashni Lal, a man with recurring difficulties with his underpaid welders in Poona, had attempted to have Jammu unseated as commissioner, she’d given him a labor crisis, a bloody uprising which her own forces were called in to help quell. She’d taken liberals and made them guiltstricken, taken bigots and turned them paranoid. She’d preyed on the worst fears of energetic businessmen by preventing them from sleeping, and on the gluttonous tendencies of one of her rival inspectors by sending him a zealous Bengali chef who cooked up a gallbladder operation and an early retirement. Singh personally had entered the life of a philanderer, a Surat millionaire who died not long after, and rendered him impotent in the service of Jammu’s Project Poori.

Given the interchangeability of corporate executives, Jammu insisted that her subjects in St. Louis remain functional. They had to stay in power, but with their faculties impaired. And it was here — looking for a path to the State, for a means of impairment — that Singh ran into the problem of Martin Probst.

Probst had no weaknesses.

He was viceless, honest, capable, and calm to the point of complacency. For a building contractor, his business record was unbelievably spotless. He bid only on projects for which there was a clear-cut need. He hired independent consultants to review his work. Every July he sent his employees an itemized accounting of company expenditures. The only enemies he had today were the labor unions he’d thwarted back in 1962—and the unions were no longer a factor in St. Louis politics.

Probst’s home life also seemed to be in order. Singh had overheard a few domestic tiffs, but they were nothing more than weeds, shallow-rooted, sprouting from seams in solid pavement. The tranquil image of Probst’s family was, in fact, what St. Louis seemed to admire most about him. Singh had gleaned an assortment of citations from the library of tapes that R. Gopal had been cataloguing for Jammu. In one, Mayor Pete Wesley was speaking with the treasurer of the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council.

WESLEY (+ R. Crawford, Sat 9/10, 10:15, City Hall)

PW: No, I haven’t talked to him yet. But I did see Barbara at the ball game on Thursday and I asked her if he’d given it any thought.

RC: At the ball game.

PW: Isn’t that something? If she was any other lady, you’d think she was nuts.

RC: Going alone, you mean.

PW: I don’t see how she pulls it off. Anybody else…Can you imagine seeing somebody like Betty Norris sitting by herself in the box seats?

RC: What did Barbara say?

PW: We talked for quite a while. I never actually found out how Martin feels, but she certainly had her mind made up.

RC: Which way?

PW: Oh, for. Definitely for. She’s a great little lady. And you know, for a small family, isn’t it amazing how often you run into them?

Ripley (Rolf, Audrey, Mon 9/5, 22:15)

RC: Doesn’t Luisa seem like one of those children that something could happen to? She was so sweet today. Everything’s so perfect about her, isn’t it hard not to think something terrible will happen? (Pause.) Like a doll you could break. (Pause.) Don’t you think?

RR: No.

Meisner (Chuck, Bea, Sat 9/10, 01:30)

CM: That was Martin. He wanted to make sure we made it home all right. (Pause.) I’m sure he couldn’t sleep till he’d called. (Pause.) Did I really look that drunk?

BM: We all did, Chuck.

CM: It’s funny how you don’t notice it so much with them. I mean, they make you comfortable.

BM: They’re a very special couple.

CM: They are. A very special couple.

It was unfortunate, Singh thought, that R. Gopal would no longer have time to sort these recorded conversations and put them into such a usable form. “I think we’re past that phase,” Jammu had said. “I have something else for Gopal.”

Murphy (Chester, Jane, Alvin, 9/19, 18:45)

JANE: Know who I saw today, Alvin? Luisa Probst. Remember her?

ALVN: (chewing) Sort of.

JANE: She’s turned into a very pretty girl.

ALVE: (chewing)

JANE: I thought it’d be nice if you called her up sometime. I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear from you.

ALVN: (chewing)

JANE: I’m just saying, it might be a nice thing to do.

ALVN: (chewing)

JANE: I remembered her as being a little chubby. I hadn’t seen her in, oh, three years. I never get to Webster Groves anymore. I see her mother all the time, though. (Pause.) I think it would be very, very nice if you gave her a call.

CHES: Drop it, Jane.

A very pretty girl. A special couple. Singh was careful not to infer that Probst’s lovely family contributed to his actual power in the city, but the family was obviously a source of unusual strength. Strength like this could amount to a weakness. Even Baxti had recognized this. In his summary he’d written:

UnCorrupted in 72, and worse.

(In 1972 someone on the Slum Removal Board had requested a kickback and Probst had gone to the press with the story.)

He is haveing no sins but morality. He will die: every man is moral. This is the key to this. Death in air. Step one: dogg. Step two: doghter. Step Three: wife. Patterne of loss. And standing a lone. He loving his dogge. Calling it petname. And no doge…???

This was Baxti’s inspirational mode. His informational, in Hindi, was somewhat easier to follow.

Singh closed the folder and glanced at the blurry pigeons on the skylight. Baxti was clumsy, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d started in the right direction. As a citizen of the West, Probst was a priori sentimental. In order to induce the State in him, it might be necessary only to accelerate the process of bereavement, to compress into three or four months the losses of twenty years. The events would be unconnected accidents, a “fatal streak,” as Baxti put it elsewhere. And the process could occur in increments, lasting only as long as it took Probst to endorse Jammu publicly and direct Municipal Growth to do likewise.

Very well then. The daughter was the next step. Filling in the last gap in Baxti’s research, Singh had read Luisa’s letters and diaries and notebooks, he’d heard the testimony of her possessions, and though he was no expert on American youth he judged her to be quite typical. Her teeth were orthodontically corrected. She had no diseases or parasites. She was blond, more or less, and five and a half feet tall, and she wore her affluence to good effect. She’d attracted boyfriends and had dropped the most recent one. She owned a TEAC stereo set, 175 phonograph records, no car, no computer, an insect net and cyanide jar, a diaphragm in its original box with a tiny tube of Gynol II, a small television set, 40 + sweaters, 20 + pairs of shoes. She had $3,700 in her personal savings account and, though it didn’t matter, nearly $250,000 in joint accounts and trust funds. This ratio—2,500 to 37—was a mathematical expression of her distance from adulthood. She cut school and used intoxicants; she was a sneak.

Singh had to decide how to detach her from the family. “Nothing fancy,” Jammu insisted. The least fancy technique was violence. But while it was one thing for Baxti to kill Probst’s dog, it was quite another to apply trauma to the family as a first resort. Trauma induced grief, cathartic convulsions. Very nice. But it did not induce the State.

Few of the other standard techniques fit Luisa either. Singh couldn’t abduct her; abduction involved too much terror and grief. He couldn’t use blandishments, couldn’t persuade her that she had great talent in some particular field, because she didn’t, and she was too sarcastic to be conned. Bribery was also out. Jammu had a Talstrasse banker who’d be happy to open an account, but Luisa hadn’t learned the meaning of cash. She was also too young to be persuaded, à la Mission Impossible, that a close associate or relative was plotting against her. She wasn’t too young for narcotics, of course, and Singh was an excellent pusher, but drugs were just another form of trauma. Political indoctrination might conceivably have worked, but it took too much time.

He was left with little choice but to seduce the girl. Though a rather fancy technique, seduction was ideal for lusty young targets, targets at the age where they were sneaky and looking for fun or trouble. The only real problem was access. Luisa was never alone except at home, or in the car or in stores or birdwatching or at the library (and Singh already knew enough not to make acquaintances in American public libraries). Where was the opportunity for a strange man to get to know her?

The man would have to be Singh, of course. There was no one else. Imagine Baxti: she’d sooner do it with an alligator. But Singh was clean. He’d modeled neckties in harder times. He projected Clean. People told him it was his teeth. Maybe so. In any event, he was clean. Clean and — not to overstate the point — irresistible. He was an old pro with Americans. Why, just last week…

The problem was access. No matter how he lured her out — mailing her free passes to a bar, free tickets to a concert — she’d bring a friend. Sometimes, it was true, she did go birdwatching by herself, but Singh knew nothing of birds. It would take him weeks to learn the “lore,” and the idea of wasting his time on willful squirters of liquid excrement (Singh did not love Nature) was wholly repugnant to him. It was a shame Luisa’s hobby wasn’t knives. He had some items that seasoned collectors would sell their sisters for. The Burmese Flayer…

The problem was access. One hour alone with the girl would suffice. The Mystique of the East would take care of the rest. Jade figurines, Moët, a dozen roses. Then debauch; take to New Orleans; feed cocaine.

Singh reclined on the soft green carpeting.

An out-of-state friend, for example a pen pal, comes unexpectedly to town. Calls Luisa, asks her to a bar. Is gone when Luisa arrives. She gets to know a courteous stranger.

A representative of a popular teen magazine, an intriguing man with good teeth, gives her a call. Would like to interview her. In depth. Would like her to be a stringer for the magazine. Invites her to closed-door editorial sessions.

A Nature-lover with some very appealing physical attributes meets her in the field one day when she is alone. Following some innocent badinage, they go for a walk in dense woods.

Singh lay isolated on the floor, in a room that brought him to his senses. His stomach gurgled softly, a hungry sound track for the silent pigeon shadows on the skylight. Of the people he’d come of age with, his comrades in Srinagar, the People’s Reading Group, at least ten were in jail. A dozen were dead and another ten were organizers in Madras, Sri Lanka, Bombay. Several lived comfortably in West Bengal. There was one in Angola, three in South Africa, one in Ethiopia, half a dozen still in Moscow, and at least two in Central America, while Balwan Singh, the brains of the group, the kid who’d bayoneted the vice-governor, had gone farther than anyone else. All the way to East St. Louis, Illinois, where now, on his back, he plotted the most decadent of subversions. The only other member of the old cadre even in the U.S.A. was Jammu. Jammuji, mountain flower, unlikely perfume. And she didn’t have to plot. She amassed power and left the soiling details to subordinates, her dignity untarnished. Singh wanted to be in action, in action he’d forget this planning. He wanted Luisa Probst, too, with sudden criminal force. Wanted to break her. He removed a shoe and winged it fiercely at the skylight. The shadows dispersed.

Martin Probst had grown up in St. Louis proper, in an old German neighborhood on the south side. When he was eighteen he started a demolition business, and two years later he began to expand it into a general contracting company. At twenty-seven he shook up the local building establishment by winning the contracts to erect the Gateway Arch. Soon he was the busiest contractor in St. Louis, his low bids preferred by local governments, his high standards of workmanship much in demand among private groups. Newspapers often listed him as a potential candidate for state and local offices — not because he ever showed any inclination to run, but because observers couldn’t see him working all his life within the somewhat shabby confines of the contracting world. Unlike many contractors, he was not a “character,” not a bony and drawling daredevil, not a red-faced cigar-smoking operator. He was six feet tall, a good speaker, a Missouri-born executive whose face was memorable only for having appeared all over town for thirty years. Like a medieval mason, essential but aloof, he went wherever the construction was.

At the moment, the construction was mainly in West County, the exurban part of St. Louis County beyond the Interstate outer belt. Within the last five years Probst had built the St. Luke’s West Hospital, a junior high school in the Parkway West school district, and an office-entertainment-hotel-shopping-center complex called West Port. He’d built the Ardmore West condominiums, western extensions of five county roads, and extra lanes on U.S. 40 out to the western county limits. Recently he’d begun work on Westhaven, a “comprehensive work and lifestyle environment” whose four million square feet of rental space were specifically intended to put West Port to shame.

On the third Saturday of October, a week after Singh had formulated his plans for Luisa, Probst was driving his little Lincoln home from a Municipal Growth meeting, listening to KSLX-Radio’s Saturday-night jazz program. Benny Goodman was playing. The full moon had been rising five hours ago when Probst left home, but the weather had soured in the meantime. Raindrops spattered on the windshield as he drove down Lockwood Avenue. He was speeding, keeping pace with Goodman’s racing clarinet.

The Municipal Growth meeting had been a bust. Hoping to build some esprit de corps, Probst had had the idea of scheduling a session on a Saturday night — a dinner meeting, beef Wellington for twenty-five in a private room at the Baseball Star’s restaurant. It had been a terrible idea. They didn’t even have a quorum until Probst called Rick Crawford and persuaded him to give up an evening at the theater. Everyone drank heavily while they waited for Crawford to arrive. The evening’s discussion of city hospital care was confused and interminable. And when Probst was finally about to move for adjournment, General Norris stood up and spoke for a full forty minutes.

General Norris was the chief executive officer at General Synthetics, one of the country’s foremost chemical producers and a pillar of industry in St. Louis County. His personal wealth and extreme political views were almost mythical in magnitude. What he wanted to discuss tonight, he said, was conspiracy. He said he found it alarming and significant that during the same week in August two women from India had assumed positions of command in St. Louis. He pointed out that India was essentially a Soviet satellite, and he invited Municipal Growth to consider what might happen now that Jammu had control of the city police and the Princess had control of the man who ran the Hammaker Brewing Company and owned many of its assets. (Fortunately for all concerned, Sidney Hammaker was among the absentees tonight.) Norris said there were strong indications that Jammu, with the help of the Princess, was engaging in a conspiracy to subvert the government of St. Louis. He urged Municipal Growth to form a special committee to monitor their actions in the city. He spoke of the FBI—

Probst suggested that the FBI had better things to do than investigate the chief of police and the wife of Sidney Hammaker.

General Norris said that he had not finished speaking.

Probst said that he had heard enough and believed that everyone else had too. He said that Jammu appeared to be doing a fine job as police chief; it was merely a coincidence that she and the Princess had come on the scene at the same time. He said that furthermore, as a matter of policy, Municipal Growth should avoid taking any action that might jeopardize its effectiveness by polarizing its membership and calling attention to itself as something other than a strictly benevolent group.

General Norris drummed his fingers on the table.

Probst noted that it was Norris himself who had stood behind Rick Jergensen’s candidacy for chief of police. He noted that Jergensen’s candidacy — or, rather, the strength of his backers — had been a major factor in the stalemate, and that the stalemate had led directly to Jammu’s selection—

“I resent that!” General Norris leaped to his feet and pointed at Probst. “I resent that! I resent that inference!”

Probst adjourned the meeting. He knew he’d offended the General and his cronies, but he didn’t stick around to patch things up. For one thing, the General had already stalked out ahead of him.

It was raining hard by the time he got home. Reluctantly he left the warm and jazz-filled privacy of his car, shut the garage door, and hurried across the lawn to the house. Wet dead leaves were in the air.

Upstairs he found Barbara asleep in bed with the latest New Yorker drooped over her stomach. The television was on, but the sound was turned down. He avoided the known squeaky boards underneath the carpeting.

In the bathroom, as he brushed his teeth, he noticed some gray hairs behind his right temple, a whole patch of them. They held his eyes like a running sore. Why, he wondered, should he suddenly be going gray? He was ahead of schedule on the Westhaven project, somewhat short of manpower, maybe, concerned about the weather to a certain degree, but definitely ahead of schedule and not worrying about it, not worrying about anything at all, really.

Then again, he was almost fifty.

He relaxed and brushed vigorously, straining to reach the back sides of all four wisdom teeth, danger zones for cavities. Recalling that Luisa wasn’t home yet, he padded down the hall to her room, which seemed colder than the rest of the house, and turned on her nightstand light and turned back her covers. He padded out into the hall and down the stairs. He unlocked the front door and switched on the outside light.

“Is that you, honey?” Barbara called from the bedroom.

Probst padded patiently up the stairs before he answered. “Yes.”

Barbara had turned up the TV volume by remote control. “Do I call you ‘honey’?”

Forty-second Street may not be the center of the universe but—

“How was the meeting?” she asked.

“A total bust.”

And I’d tell you the whole story but we’ve got censors—

The picture crumpled as Probst turned off the set. Barbara frowned, briefly annoyed, and picked up her magazine. She was wearing her reading glasses and a pale blue nightgown through which he could just make out her breasts, their tangential trajectories, their dense brown aureoles. Her hair, which lately she’d been letting grow a little longer, fell in a broad S-curve across the right side of her face, shading her eyes from the reading lamp.

When he climbed into bed she listed towards the center of the mattress but kept her eyes on the page. He couldn’t believe she was really concentrating this hard. Hadn’t she been asleep two minutes ago? He fanned a stack of magazines on the nightstand and selected an unread National Geographic. On the cover was a smiling stone Buddha with sightless stone eyes. “Your brother-in-law missed the meeting,” he told Barbara. “It’s the kind of favor I’ve really come to appreciate.”

Barbara shrugged. Her older sister Audrey was married to Rolf Ripley, one of St. Louis’s more prominent industrialists. Neither Probst nor Barbara enjoyed Rolf’s company (to put it mildly) but Barbara felt a responsibility towards Audrey, who was emotionally disaster-prone, and so Probst, in turn, was required to be civil to Rolf. They had a weekly tennis date at the old Racquet Club. They’d played this morning and Rolf had slaughtered him. He frowned. If Rolf had time for tennis, then why not Municipal Growth?

“Do you have any idea where he was? Did you talk to Audrey today?”

“Yesterday.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Did they have any plans for tonight?”

Barbara pulled off her glasses and turned to him. “Rolf is seeing another woman. Yet again. Don’t ask me any more questions.”

Probst looked away. He felt a curious lack of outrage. Barbara always got mad enough at Rolf for the two of them combined; he’d ceased to bother. Rolf ran the Ripleycorp electrical appliances empire (only Wismer Aeronautics had a longer payroll) and was acknowledged to be the grand financial wizard of St. Louis, but he had the habits of an idle playboy and a seedy slenderness to match. About ten years ago he’d begun to speak with a British accent. The accent grew thicker and thicker, as if with each of his affairs. He was too weird to really offend Probst.

“And here we played tennis this morning,” he said. “Where’s Lu?”

“I’m surprised she isn’t here. I told her to be in early. Her cold’s getting worse.”

“She’s out with Alan?”

“Good grief, Martin.”

“Of course, of course, of course,” he said. Luisa had terminated her relationship with Alan. “So where is she?”

“I have no idea.”

“What do you mean you have no idea?”

“Just that. I don’t know.”

“Well didn’t you ask her?”

“I was up here when she left. She said she wouldn’t be gone long.”

“When was that?”

“Around seven. Not long after you left.”

“It’s almost midnight.”

A page turned. Rain was splashing on the windows and pouring through the gutters.

“I thought it was our policy to know where she is.”

“Martin, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Just let me read for a while, all right?”

“All right. All right. I’ve got policy coming out of my ears, I’m sorry.”

Practically, in appearance, in the verifiable fact of never having sinned much, Probst had an undeniable claim to moral superiority over Rolf Ripley. From the very beginning his ambitions had kept him moving like a freight train, hurried and undeviating. By the time he was twenty, his married friends had to take steps to make sure he got out for dinner at least once a month. Chief among these early friends was Jack DuChamp, a neighbor of Probst’s and a sharer of his loneliness at McKinley High. Jack had been one of those boys who from puberty onwards want nothing more than to be wise older men like their fathers. Marriage and maturity were Jack’s gospel, and Probst, inevitably, was one of the first savages he tried to convert. The attempt had begun in earnest on a muggy Friday night in July, in the tiny house that Jack and his wife Elaine were renting. Jack’s chest still had its matrimonial swell. All through dinner he smiled at Probst as though awaiting further congratulation. When Elaine began to clear the table, Jack opened fresh Falstaffs and led Probst onto the back porch. The sun had sunk behind the haze above the railyards beyond the DuChamps’ back fence. Bugs were rising from the weeds. “Tsk,” Jack clucked. “Things can be pretty nice sometimes.”

Probst said nothing.

“You’re going places, old buddy, I can tell,” Jack continued, his voice all history-in-the-making. “Things are happening fast, and I kind of like the way they look. I just hope we can still see some of you once in a while.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well.” Jack pulled a fatherly smile. “I’ll tell you. You’ve got a lot going for you, and I know for damn sure we’re not the only ones who can see that. You’re twenty years old, you’ve finally got a little money to throw around, you’ve got looks, brains…”

Probst laughed. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I, personally, Jack DuChamp”—Jack pointed at himself—“kind of envy you sometimes.”

Probst glanced at the kitchen window. Dishes plopped in the sink.

“Not like that,” Jack said. “I’m a lucky man, and I know it. It’s just we like to speculate.”

“About what?”

“Well, we like to speculate — you ready?” Jack paused. “We like to speculate about your sex life, Martin.”

Probst felt his face go pale. “You what?”

“Speculate. At parties. It’s kind of a party game whenever you’re not around. You should’ve heard what Dave Hepner said last Saturday. ‘Satin sheets and three at a time.’ Yeah, Elaine was really mad, she thought it was getting kind of dirty—”

“Jack.” Probst was aghast.

A moment passed. Then Jack shook his head and gripped Probst’s arm. He had always been a kidder, a winker, a prankster. “No,” he said, “I’m only teasing. It’s just sometimes we worry you might be workin’ a little too hard. And — well. We know a girl you might be interested in meeting. She’s actually a cousin of mine. Her name’s Helen Scott.”

For nearly a month Probst did nothing with the number Jack had given him, but the name Helen Scott slowly gave birth to a vision of feminine splendor so compelling that he had no choice, in the end, but to call her. They made a date. He picked her up on a Sunday afternoon at the rooming house where she was living (she’d moved to the city to take a job with Bell Telephone) and drove to Sportsman’s Park to watch the Browns play the Yankees. There was nothing wrong with Helen Scott. As Probst had hoped, she bore little resemblance of any kind to her cousin Jack. She had a throaty rural voice. Her hair was waved and her skirt high-waisted in accordance with the fashion of the era, which, more democratic than later fashions, at least did not detract from any woman’s native looks. Probst’s preconceived love kept him from apprehending her any more specifically. They sat in the bleachers. The Browns, whom the Yankees immediately jumped all over, were the perfect team to be watching on a first date, their wobbly pitching and general proneness to error giving them an innocence that the Yankees seemed wholly to lack. Probst, with a pretty girl at his side, felt a charity bordering on joy.

After the game he and Helen went to Crown Candy for sandwiches and milkshakes (here he was able to observe that she had a wide mouth and no appetite) and then they stopped in at his apartment, which was actually the basement of his Uncle George’s house. There, on his daybed, with an alacrity that implied she’d been impatient with the long preliminary afternoon, Helen kissed him. As soon as he felt how she moved in his arms he knew he could have her. His head began to pound. She let him take her blouse and bra off. His uncle’s footsteps, gouty and halting, depressed the floorboards above them. She unzipped her skirt and Probst kissed her ribs, and pinched her nipples, which he had heard women found intensely pleasurable.

“Don’t do that.”

There was pain in her voice. She drew away and they sat up on the bed, panting like swimmers. Probst thought he understood. He thought she meant he’d gone too far. And then she really did change her mind; as he sat there, mortified and uncertain, she put her clothes back on, defending herself (as he saw it) against his hurtful male hands.

He drove her back to the rooming house, where she kissed him on the forehead and ran inside. For a while he waited in the darkness, somehow hoping she might come back out. He found it too cruel that his business accomplishments had counted for nothing on the daybed, that to be a man in the world did not make him a man of the world. And either then, as he sat in the car, or in later years, as he remembered sitting in the car — the location of the moment had the shifting ambiguity, now you see it, now you don’t, of a self-deception one is conscious of committing — he resolved to wait until his accomplishments were so great that he no longer needed, as the male, to make the moves. He wanted to be desired and taken. He wanted to be all object, to have that power. He wanted to be that great.

And so it happened that he was a virgin when he met Barbara and had been faithful to her ever since.

Barbara turned out her light.

“You’re going to sleep?” Probst asked.

“Yes. You’re not?”

He tried to make his voice sound casual. “No, I think I’ll wait up for Luisa.”

She kissed him. “Hope it won’t be long.”

“Good night.”

The bedroom windows rattled in the wind. It was 12:40, but Probst wasn’t worried about whether Luisa could take care of herself. He was all too certain that she could. Her control over her life was almost unnatural; the only thing that exceeded it was her control over other people’s lives, over the lives of boys like Alan. When Alan would come to see her, as he had nearly every day in the spring, she would talk on the phone with other friends for as long as an hour at a time. Alan would sit in the breakfast room smiling and nodding at the funny things he could hear her saying.

Rolf is seeing another woman. Yet again.

Luisa had dropped Alan in June, on her last weekend at home before flying to France. She made the announcement at the dinner table. It had seemed a very industrial decision, as if she’d been running cost/benefit analyses all along, and Alan had finally failed one. Though Probst approved of the decision, he didn’t let on. He believed that virtue grew best in an austere medium, in an atmosphere of challenging disapproval, and in Webster Groves, when one’s father paid himself a comfortable $190,000 annually and employed a full-time gardener and a part-time cleaning woman, austerity and challenges were hard to come by. He therefore took it upon himself to play the role of hostile environment for Luisa. He refused to give her a car. He said no to private school. He’d made her try Girl Scouts. He did not buy her the best stereo available. He imposed curfews. (She’d already trashed her weekend curfew of midnight to the tune of forty minutes.) She received a weekly allowance, which he sometimes pretended to forget to leave on her dresser. (She would go and complain to Barbara, who always gave her whatever she needed.) He made her cry when she got a B — in social studies. He made her eat beets.

Barbara had begun to snore a little. As if he’d only been waiting for this sort of signal, Probst heaved himself out of bed. He opened his closet and put on his robe and slippers. He was tired, but he was not going to sleep before Luisa got back. She’d gone out at seven and said she’d be home soon. It was nearly one o’clock now. It was the hour of Rolf Ripley, the hour of ugly men for whom strangers unaccountably shed their inhibitions, the hour of getting it.

Was Luisa getting it? Where was she? Her regular friends knew enough not to keep her out much past her curfew, so maybe she’d gone somewhere without them. She had a will of her own. She’d inherited Probst’s desires but not his disadvantages. She’d been born a girl — she was desired — and she hadn’t had to earn it. She hadn’t had to wait.

Downstairs, the air was cold, the weather seeping in at the windows. Mohnwirbel, the gardener, hadn’t put the storms on yet. Probst imagined Luisa someplace in the rain beyond the house’s walls, making it easy for some undeserving young man. He imagined himself slapping her in the face when she finally came in. “You’re grounded forever.” A spray of rain hit the windows in the living room. A hot rod turned off Lockwood Avenue and raced up Sherwood Drive. By the time it passed Probst it was doing at least fifty, and the blap-blap of the cylinders had become a hot moan. He felt a draft.

The front door was open. Luisa was slipping in. Turning back the knob with one hand and pressing on the weather strip with the other, she slowly eased the door shut. A hinge made a soft miaow. He heard a click. She switched off the outside light and took a cautious step towards the stairs.

“Where have you been?” he said conversationally.

He saw her jump and heard her gasp. He jumped himself, frightened by her fright.

“Daddy?”

“Who else?”

“You really scared me.”

“Where have you been?” He saw himself as she did, in his full-length robe, with his arms crossed, his hair gray and mussed, his pajama cuffs breaking on his flat slippers. He saw himself as a father, and he blamed her for the vision.

“What are you doing up so late?” she said, not answering his question.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“I’m sorry I’m—”

“Have a good time?” He got a strong whiff of wet hair. She was wearing black pants, a black jacket and black sneakers, all of them wet. The pants clung to the adolescent curves of her thighs and calves, the intersecting seams gleaming dully in the light from upstairs.

“Yeah.” She avoided his eyes. “We went to a movie. We had some ice cream.”

“We?”

She turned away and faced the banister. “You know — Stacy and everyone—. I’m going to bed now, OK?”

It was clear that she was lying. He’d made her do it, and he was satisfied. He let her go.