The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

4

Behind the first tee of the 18-hole Forest Park golf course, the starter emerged from his hut and called two names.

“Davis and White?”

RC White and his brother-in-law Clarence Davis rose from a bench and retrieved their cards.

“Twosome,” the starter said, disapproving. He fixed his eyes on his left shoulder. He had no left arm.

“We play slow,” RC averred. “We’re patient men.”

“Uh huh. Just wait till the kids up there hit again.”

“We appreciate it,” Clarence said.

Five or six groups milled behind them waiting to tee off. It was Saturday morning, the air already steamy though the sun wouldn’t clear the trees for another half an hour. RC popped the tab on a can of Hammaker, sampled the contents, and tucked the can under the strap on his cart. He removed the mitten from his driver and took some colossal warm-up swings.

“You watch that,” Clarence said, wiping the spray of dew and grass off his arm. He wore black chinos, a tan sport shirt, and bearded white golf shoes. RC was in jeans and sneaks and a T-shirt. He squinted down the fairway, from the various corners of which the members of a young white foursome were eyeing one another. The first green floated far and uncertain in the par-four distance, like a patch of fog that the foursome was trying to stalk and pin down.

Clarence was wagging his hips like a pro. He was RC’s wife’s oldest brother. He’d given RC his old set of golf clubs two Christmases ago. Now RC had to join him in a game every Saturday.

“You go on and hit,” RC said.

Clarence addressed his ball and drew his driver back over his head with a studied creakiness. Everything by the book, RC thought. Clarence was like that. When he was fully wound up, he uncoiled all at once. His club whistled. He clobbered the ball and then nodded, accepting the shot like a personal compliment.

RC planted tee and ball, and without a practice swing he took a swipe. He staggered back and looked skyward. “Shit.”

“Sucker’s a mile high,” Clarence said. “You got great elevation, say that for you.”

“I got under it. Under it is what I got.”

The ball landed sixty yards from the tee, so close that they could hear its deadened impact. They slid their drivers into their bags and strode off the tee. It turned out Clarence had caught a bunker. Good with his irons, RC reached the green in three. They had to kick sycamore leaves out of the way before they could putt. Already RC’s feet were soaked. When he putted, his ball resisted with the hiss of a wet paint roller, throwing spirals of water droplets off to either side.

On the next hole they played through the kids ahead of them and took bogies. Finding a fivesome camped on the third tee, they sat down on a bench. The hole, a par three, required a long drive over a creek and up a steep, bald hill. The fivesome was pounding ball after ball into the hazard. Clarence lit a cigar and observed them with a very eloquent suppression of a smile. He had drooping, kindly eyes, skin about the color of pecan shells, and eyebrows and sideburns dusted with gray. RC admired Clarence — which was a way of saying they were different, a way of excusing the difference. Clarence owned a demolition business and had plenty of contracts. He sang in a Baptist choir, he belonged to the Urban League, he organized block parties. His wife’s brother was Ronald Struthers, a city alderman who one day would be mayor; the connection didn’t hurt Clarence’s business any. His oldest boy, Stanly, was a star high-school halfback. His wife Kate was the prettiest lady RC knew, prettier than his own wife Annie (Clarence’s kid sister) though not half as sexy. Annie was only twenty-six. In the three years since RC married her, Clarence had been “making an effort” with him. Sometimes, like when he gave RC his golf clubs, his friendliness seemed premeditated, a little too aware that RC had lost his only real brother in Vietnam. But Annie told RC not to flatter himself, because Kate would have vetoed new clubs if Clarence still had his old ones.

“Hear about Bryant Hooper?” Clarence puffed serenely on his cigar.

“What about him?”

“Got shot in the head,” Clarence said. “Thursday morning.”

“Aw, Jesus.” Hooper was a police detective. Drug squad. “Dead?”

“No, he’ll make it. Lost a cheek and teeth, ugly ugly wound, but it could’ve been worse. I was by the hospital last night.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Oh, very routine, RC. Very routine. Some dealer dude with a weapon. Some ex-dude.”

“Yeah?”

“They slaughtered him.” Clarence shut his eyes. “And there was seven others in the building. This a place just north of Columbus Square. An ex-place.”

“Yeah?”

“Owner requested a raid, and after Hoop got hit his buddies fired tear gas. Place burned to the ground before anyone quite noticed.” Clarence turned to RC. “You wonder what the point is?”

RC shrugged.

“The point is Ronald Struthers owned that building.”

“He got insurance?”

“Naturally. Good deal for him. Something for nothing.”

“Sounds like an accident,” RC said, finishing his beer.

“Sure. It was an accident. But part of a pattern, brother. Part of a pattern.”

The group on the tee beckoned to Clarence. He laid the cigar on the bench, picked up his 7-iron, and thanked them. After a few gentle practice swings he lofted a perfect shot up onto the green.

The image of smooth Alderman Ronald Struthers in a three-piece disturbed RC’s control. He shut his eyes on his downswing and—under it, baby—hit a line drive. But the ball cleared the hazard and bounded up the hill. Clarence sank his putt for a birdie. RC missed his first putt by a mile. He missed his second putt. He missed his third. Clarence stood with the flag pin clutched to his breast, his expression as sad and abstracted as if he were watching another man drown puppies. Members of the fivesome cleared their throats. RC felt lawless. The rising sun was in his eyes, and his beer buzz made his arms feel about eight feet long. He topped his fourth putt. Once he was on the wrong side of par, once deep in bogey country, he started rushing, pressing, choking, and he cared less and less. When Clarence got in trouble he bore down. RC just said bag it.

His ball was still two feet from the hole when Clarence said, “I’ll give you that one.” RC kicked it off the green.

No fewer than eight golfers were standing around on the fourth tee. Clarence led RC off behind some overgrown evergreens. “RC, man,” he whispered. “You’re closing your eyes.”

RC closed his eyes. “I know.”

“Head down, eye on the ball. That’s standard.”

RC spat. “I know. I just gotta settle down. You wait.” With a tee, he scraped strings of hardened grass pulp out of the grooves on the face of his driver. Shouldn’t be any grass on a driver.

“Head down. It’s worth twenty strokes a round.”

“So what about Struthers?” RC said.

Clarence relit his cigar and inspected it professionally. Tiny pearls of sweat hung on his sideburns. “Ronald,” he said, “is much changed.”

“He’ll never change.”

“He’s changed,” Clarence said. “He belongs to our new chief of police.”

“Where do you get that from?”

“From the way he talk and the way he be. He’s like a robot, RC. He’s a hollow man. He’s got money from somewhere. The little office on Cass? Gone. He rented a whole floor in that place by the Adventists. He’s put on nine new employees since the first of October, and he ain’t making no secret about it. And I say to him, Hey there, Rondo, you win somebody’s lottery? And he get all stiff and say to me, It’s just commissions, Clarence, I’n breakin’ no laws.”

RC nodded.

“That’s right,” Clarence said. “As if I was accusing him of something. That’s OK, though. I got thick enough skin. But then I say, you know, your standard polite question: Who’s buying what property? All right? And he give me this look.” Clarence, demonstrating the look, squinted meanly. “And he go, Certain parties. Like I’m from the IRS, not from his own extended family. So I go, OK, Rondo, be seeing you, but he go, Wait a minute there, Clarence — and this is not the Ronald Struthers that’s trying to save Homer Phillips Hospital — he go: They be razing buildings something fierce next month. I go: That so? And he go: Yep. And I go: Who’s they? And he go: Folks that don’t like questions. And I go: I don’t like working for that kind. And he go: You’ll learn to love ’em before this year is out.”

“Tell him to shove it,” RC said.

Clarence shut his eyes and licked his lips. “I hesitate, brother. I hesitate. I got four growing kids. And you didn’t ask me about Jammu.”

“Jammu.” RC had had enough of this stuff. He wanted another swat at the golf ball.

“That’s right. Jammu. This raid on Thursday where Hooper got it, they wouldn’t never done that under Bill O’Connell. Too damned dangerous, and what’s the point? But now they’re taking that neighborhood lot by lot, cleaning out the junkies and the derelicts and some families too and throwing them on the street. They’re fencing it all off. I knocked down some two-fams behind a ten-foot fence last week. A ten-foot fence! And no genius required on my part to see that’s where these new clients of Ronald is doing their buying. Same thing’s happening in those bad blocks east of Rumbold. Jammu’s fighting house to house, and somebody is buying up the lots as she goes. Ronald is in on it, I swear to that. And somebody else, somebody named Cleon.”

Cleon, RC knew, could only be Cleon Toussaint, an unabashed slumlord, an old enemy of Ronald Struthers. He went around in a wheelchair but nobody felt sorry for him. “Says who?” RC asked, fingering his driver.

“Says the city recorder. Mr. Toussaint is now proud owner of one and a quarter miles of frontage south of Easton that wasn’t his four weeks ago. A whole neighborhood, RC. He even bought that garbage dump on Easton. And bought it all since the first of October, and doesn’t care if the whole world knows.”

“Where’d he get the money?”

“I was waiting for you to ask me that. Nobody knows where he got the money, not me, not anybody. What I do know is what his brother do for a living.”

RC shivered in his sweat. John Toussaint, brother of the more odious Cleon, was the commander of the seventh police district, except he wasn’t the commander anymore; Jammu had promoted him downtown in September.

“Not to mention the way Ronald talk about Jammu. It’s almost like she’s some kind of religion. She’s—”

The head of a golfer appeared from behind the bushes. “You fellas want to play through?”

Clarence turned to the man, astonished. “That’s very kind of you.” To RC in a whisper, he said, “We’ll return to this.”

The men on the tee were restively shuffling the clubs in their bags, perhaps regretting their offer. Clarence teed up, spat on his palms, dug in, and whacked a moon shot across Art Hill, the fat first leg of this par five. The pond at the bottom of the hill lay as calm as an uncut jello salad. Leaves speckled it, motionless. At the top of the hill early sunlight inhabited the museum’s stonework. Keeping his head down, his eye on the ball, RC hit his first clean shot of the morning. His ball bounced near Clarence’s and rolled up the next hill. “Keep it,” Clarence advised.

After Clarence sliced his second shot into some poplars near an arm of the pond, RC hit a blistering fairway wood over the second hill and out of sight. He walked over the crest of the hill, hoping against hope to see his ball in the vicinity of the pin. Instead he saw a multitude of sycamore leaves. They covered the green and the fairway approach. Glossy and whitish, they all looked like golf balls.

He began to search the green. Clarence’s third shot sailed over his head and cracked into a sycamore trunk, ricocheting favorably.

“Lost it, huh?” Clarence was cheerful as he crossed the green, his club heads clicking in his bag. “You see mine?”

RC walked in tight circles, kicking leaves and getting dizzy; the green began to tilt. He looked into the sky and saw the negative images of a zillion leaves. Finally he had to drop a new ball in the bunker, take the penalty, and play from there.

Clarence foozled his chip, but he managed to hole out for a bogey. When he pulled the flag pin to retrieve his ball, he froze. “RC, boy.” He spoke to something in the hole. “Be honest now. What ball you playing?”

RC thought. “Wilson. Three dots.”

“Down in two.” Clarence was still bent over the hole. “Double eagle. You one hell of a lucky sucker.”

Six months after he finished high school, RC had gotten drafted and sent to Fort Leonard Wood, where sergeants taught him everything he needed to know to become good mortar fodder for gook insurgents. When the rest of his unit was shipping out, though, the higher-ups had transferred him to the uniformed infirmary staff, sparing him a long round trip. Grateful for the break, and by nature a man who left well enough alone, RC reenlisted twice. His war experience consisted of nothing more than typing histories. But when he got back to St. Louis he had a hard time readjusting. Supposedly the Army turned boys into men, but often it turned men into babies, because unlike a monastery or university or profit-making organization, the Army had no ethic. When the pressure let up, you goofed off; it was automatic. RC didn’t drink often, but when he did he got plastered. The word “pussy” was major. He giggled and yukked and slept at every opportunity. It was a trash outlook. In St. Louis old friends of his stayed away from him. Potential new ones were skeptical. They’d ask him what his name was, and he’d shrug and say, “Richard, I guess.” You guess? They tried Ricky, Rick, Rich, Richie, Dickie, Dick, White and White Man. They tried Ice, because he’d found a job with the Cold Ice Company on North Grand. He wasn’t stupid; just uncertain. Eventually he settled on the name RC, short for Richard Craig, his first two names. He became plant manager at Cold Ice. When he was thirty he got to know a young forklift driver named Annie Davis. Four years later he and Annie had a good apartment and a three-year-old son, and then, in July, in the very month you’d least expect it, Cold Ice went out of business. Clarence quickly offered RC a job, which he quickly refused, because either Clarence would have had to lay off some otherwise OK man to make room for him, or else he would have been paying RC out of profits, out of charity.

So for three months now RC had been working as the parking-lot attendant at the downtown offices of KSLX-TV and KSLX-Radio. It was a joke of a job, but not bad for a stopgap, and not without a certain maddening challenge. KSLX had expanded its workforce by nearly one-third in the last decade without adding any area to its parking lot. RC was required to juggle a lot of cars, and to juggle them fast, especially during the two rush hours. When you parked cars four-deep, getting one out of the back row was like doing one of those sliding plastic puzzles where the object was to arrange the eight little squares among nine little spaces in various orders, but with an important difference: cars couldn’t move sideways the way those little squares could. You had to keep track of exactly who wanted exactly what car at exactly what hour. And you had to keep the patterns loose. In August, Mr. Hutchinson, the station’s general manager and the network’s top man in the Midwest, had asked for his Lincoln four hours after he’d said he was flying to New York for three days, and RC freed the Lincoln in less than (he’d clocked it) fifty seconds by spiriting three four-door yachts into slots that he once might have thought too narrow for a ten-speed.

But on the Monday morning after he’d humbled Clarence with That Double Eagle, on the morning of the day before Halloween, a VIP asked him to perform the unperformable. This VIP, a dark-skinned foreigner, had sworn up and down that he wouldn’t need his Skylark before two in the afternoon; he had business inside with top management. So RC had put him in one of the longish-term deep spaces right up front, and let Cliff Quinlan park his Alfa in front of it. Quinlan, the station’s hotshot investigative reporter, had mentioned a ten o’clock rendezvous and taken his keys inside with him. This was fine with RC, seeing as two o’clock was a good four hours later than ten o’clock.

At 9:30 the VIP came out and demanded the car. Suppressing his first impulse, which was to scream, RC urged him to be patient for one half hour.

“No my good man!” The VIP pointed at his Skylark as if it were a stick to be fetched. “You get me the car immediately.”

RC rubbed the bristly backside of his head. What with his big eyebrow bones, his long ears and complicated nose, he saw fit to keep his hair short. “You have a problem,” he said, “that I can’t solve.”

It was a gray, sultry morning in St. Louis. Passersby on Olive Street had slowed to inspect the Skylark in question. The VIP waited until they were out of earshot. Then he straightened his necktie, a shiny silver thing tied in a real potato of a knot, and said: “Know that I am from All-India Radio. I am here on a courtesy visit, and courtesy is my expectation.” A horizontal palm approached RC. On it lay a fifty-dollar bill.

“Oh man. You got me wrong, man. This ain’t economics. This physics.”

The palm did not recede or waver.

“Well,” RC mumbled, taking charge of the bill. “I ain’t saying this be easy now.” He squeezed past Cliff Quinlan’s Alfa and climbed into the Skylark, rubbing his hands. Fifty! The guy better learn his exchange rates. RC concentrated. If he could rock this baby back and forth and move it two feet to the left, he could rev it and get the front wheels over the parking-stop, angle it around, get the back wheels over the parking-stop, brake hard, and back it down the sidewalk to the VIP.

Starting up, he wrenched the wheels hard to the left and moved forward till he touched the metal guardrail. Easy, easy. He reversed the wheel full to the right, the steering column whimpering protest, and backed up to within a millimeter of the Alfa, then reversed the wheel again and repeated the process. He did this six times, back and forth. Then came the hard part. He had to give the engine gas and, by means of the brake, leap the concrete parking-stop and stop immediately. And now Quinlan’s fender, not his bumper, was at stake. RC backed up in tiny jerks, another inch, another half an inch. He was close to that fender, but he took it back a mite further, and then he heard the bump.

The impact was catastrophic.

The ground shook the car shook the building hammered in his skull. He panicked in reverse before he hit the brake. A painful deafness was fading. He heard glass and metal, large fragments, crashing into cars.

The far corner of the lot was an inferno of black smoke and orange flame. RC threw the door open, scraping it on the parking-stop, and ran to the VIP. The VIP was stretched out flat on the ground with his hands over his head. He was right on top of a grease puddle. The flames crackled and rumbled, some only visible as a wildness of air. RC could see that the inferno was none other than Mr. Hutchinson’s Lincoln. The front two-thirds of it was missing. Mr. Strom’s Regal lay on its side. Cars all around had lost windshields and windows.

The sirens were already coming. RC looked around. In an agony of helplessness, he jumped up and down.

The VIP stirred. RC knelt. “Man, are you all right?”

The VIP nodded. His eyes were wide open.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” RC said. “What happened?”

“Nothing—”

“Nothing?”

“I saw nothing. It exploded.”

“Jesus.” RC paused to consider the man’s probable religion and added, “No offense.”

The air itself seemed to have generated police radio static. A fire truck pulled up. The firemen began spraying the carnage casually, men watering a giant lawn with giant hoses, before they even climbed off the truck. A squad car pulled off Olive Street and nearly ran over RC and the VIP. It braked urgently. Doors opened.

“Are you in charge here?”

RC looked up. The person who’d spoken was Jammu. “I park cars,” he said.

“Is this man hurt?”

“Far’s I can tell he isn’t.”

RC followed Jammu with his eyes as she bent down over the VIP. What a small woman she was. Smaller than she ever looked in pictures. She wore a light gray trench coat. Her hair was loose and tucked behind her ears. Though only a welterweight himself, RC stared. Such a small little woman.

The VIP struggled to his knees. The front of his suit was stamped with a large, creased grease stain.

Jammu turned to RC. “Whose car was that?”

“Mr. Hutchinson’s. He’s—”

“I know who he is. How did it happen?”

“No idea.”

“What do you mean, no idea?”

RC sweated. “I was trying to get this guy’s Skylark out of, you know, a tight spot. Next thing I know—”

He told her everything he’d seen. He hadn’t seen anything. But she never took her eyes off him. He felt like he was being memorized. When he gave her his name and address she thanked him and, in leaving, brushed his wrist with her fingers. The skin burned. She walked over to the wreck, which was now smoldering and roped off by the cops. RC looked around helplessly again. He still didn’t know what to do. He noticed that the VIP and squad car had disappeared.

The bad thing was, he’d put a dent in Cliff Quinlan’s fender. He knew without going to check. As a job, this joke was getting old, and RC wasn’t stupid. They were taking applications at the Police Academy.

One-fifteen in the afternoon. Jammu stood at the window of a twenty-second-floor room in the Clarion Hotel and directed a yawn at the Peabody Coal and Continental Grain installations across the Mississippi. On the near side of the river, conventioning Jaycees in paper boaters straggled along the footpaths to the Arch. Jammu looked at the reflection of her guest in the window. Karam Bhandari was sitting on the end of the double bed peeling the foil off the bottle of Mumm’s between his legs. Bhandari was Jammu’s mother’s personal attorney and sometime spiritual advisor. Though he came from a family of Jains, he was all carnivore, his eyes lidded, his skin saurianly faceted. Jammu had never liked him, but she felt obliged to show him a good time in St. Louis. She’d let him detonate a bomb this morning.

The cork popped. Bhandari brought two stemmed plastic glasses fizzing to the window. He’d changed his grease-stained shirt but not the undershirt, and the grease was seeping through onto the pinpoint cloth. He raised his glass and showed his sharp, small teeth. “To your endeavor,” he said.

Jammu returned the toast with her eyebrows and drained her glass. Bhandari had a vested interest in her endeavor. If she was sleepy today (and she was), it was the aftereffect of their meeting in her office last night. Bhandari specialized in intractable silences and bad-tempered sighs. Maman had sent him over to inspect the management of her investments, to confer with Jammu and with Asha Hammaker, and, in her phrase, “to get a sense of the situation.” Maman had every right to send him, since she was dumping fourteen and a half million dollars into the St. Louis real-estate market and spending another five hundred thousand in silence money. But Bhandari was being hosted by Jammu, the very person whose judgment he had come to confirm or dispute. This made for tensions.

“It’s quite impossible,” he’d said at one point. “You simply must have a full-time accountant.”

“I’ve told you,” she said. “I have Singh, I have Asha’s—”

“I see. May I ask why this — Mr. Singh — is not present this evening?”

“Balwan Singh, Karam. You know Balwan. He’s in Illinois tonight.”

“Oh. That Singh. He isn’t to be trusted, Essie. Surely there’s someone else.”

“There’s Asha’s accountant and her attorneys, whom unfortunately she considered it unwise for you to meet. But Singh is very capable. And regardless of what Maman may have told you, he’s completely trustworthy.”

Bhandari had pulled a long, dull donkey face, blinking. “Surely there’s someone else.”

Returning now with the Mumm’s bottle, Bhandari reached around her and refilled her glass. His chin lingered at her shoulder. He was in a better mood today, since she’d let him do the bomb. She gave his cheek a filial pat. “Thanks, Karam.” She took a sip of champagne. “You have the transmitter?”

He stepped back and fished in his jacket pocket, produced the transmitter and set it on the windowsill. “Yes. There it is.”

A pause. The sky darkened a shade.

“Is the transmitter your own work?”

“The design is.”

“And you still have time to be chief of police.”

Jammu smiled. “It’s an old design. Standard issue.”

“And the automobile?”

“It belonged to a man named Hutchinson, the station’s general manager.”

“And you attempt to extort, em, extort a certain — I take it this is an act of extortion?”

“No. We make no demands.”

A veil of rain drifted into view from the west, applying itself to the Arch. “No demands,” he repeated.

“That’s right. This is senseless.”

“But you wished me to make sure no one was hurt.”

“We aren’t hurting people yet. We want to scare them. In this case, scare Hutchinson. But we’ll go as far as we need to.”

“I must confess I don’t see the point.”

Last night, he’d failed to see the point of her strategy with North Side real estate. It was simple, she’d told him. Since even Maman didn’t have enough cash to start a legitimate panic, Asha’s men were buying up little lots throughout the area, from the river to the western limits, creating the impression of many parties acting on inside information. And they magnified the impression by buying only property owned by local banks. This left as much land as possible in the hands of local black businessmen — politically, this was vital — while leading the banks to believe the sum of these investments was much greater than the fourteen million dollars it actually was. Because who would suspect that someone would make a point of buying exclusively from banks?

Bhandari’s fingertips floated over the stains on his shirt pocket. The real problem was his innate inability to comprehend ideas voiced by a woman; he retreated into a mental closet which seemed to grow the more asphyxiating the longer Jammu spoke. She decided to torment him further. “Formalisms,” she said. “You know. Real-estate speculation is a formalism, Karam. Essentially ahistorical. Once it gets going — once we set it in motion — it works by itself and drags politics and economics along after it. Terror works the same way. We want Hutchinson in the State. We want to strip his world of two of its dimensions, develop a situation that overcomes all the repressions that make him think in what the world calls a normal way. Do you hear me, Karam? Do you hear the words I am speaking to you?”

Bhandari refilled her glass. “Drink, drink,” he said. His own glass he brought to his lips awkwardly, as though pouring, not sipping. Seemingly as an afterthought, he raised the glass. “To your endeavor.”

Jammu was going to have to speak with Maman. She was sure that if Maman had known how Bhandari would behave she would have sent a more competent spy. Or would have come herself. Jammu raised the cuff of her cardigan. Two o’clock. The day was evaporating. She took a deep breath, and as she let it out, Bhandari, from behind her, inserted his hands beneath her arms and placed them on her breasts. She jumped away.

Bhandari straightened his back, an attorney again, a trusted family advisor. “I assume,” he said, “that the proper security measures have been taken vis-à-vis our Negro liaisons.”

Jammu turned back to the river with a smile. “Yes,” she said. “Boyd and Toussaint weren’t any trouble. They had plenty to hide already. But Struthers, as I said, was expensive. He was the obvious choice — a broker and a politician too, a popular alderman, even something of a crusader. But we managed to dig up a dirty secret, a mistress he’s been keeping for nearly a decade. It was clear that he’d racked up a number of conflict-of-interest violations on behalf of the woman’s family, which is quite well off. So I had some leverage when I approached him, enough to protect me if he wasn’t interested. Which he wasn’t, until we came to the money part. Maman cleared the bribes personally, by the way. We don’t skimp when my own neck’s on the line.”

Jammu felt Bhandari’s breath on her neck. His face was sifting through her hair, seeking skin. She twisted around in his arms and let him kiss her throat. Over his slicked-back hair she saw the hotel room’s “luxurious” bedspread, its “contemporary” art print, the “distinctive” roughcast ceiling. He unbuttoned the top of her blouse, snorting intermittently. Probably the best metaphor for the State was sexual obsession. An absorbing parallel world, a clandestine organizing principle. Men moved mountains for the sake of a few muscle contractions in the dark.

The phone rang.

Bhandari made no sudden motion. He was unaware that it had rung. Jammu arrested the fingers working at her bra and disengaged herself. She moved to answer the phone, but stopped, reconsidering. “You’d better take it,” she said.

Bhandari stretched his neck muscles carefully and seated himself on the bed. “Hello?” He listened. “Why yes!”

From his condescending tone, Jammu guessed it was Princess Asha. Another postponement? She buttoned her blouse and fixed her hair. They’d be missing her at the office.

“Was it an open coffin?” Bhandari tittered. He’d been tittering for twenty-four hours. Late last night their talk had turned to JK Exports, Maman’s wool business and her primary cash conduit between Bombay and Zurich. Bhandari had described a recent incident. “Some Sikhs got in one of your mother’s warehouses last week.” He’d made Sikhs sound like little moths.

He covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said to Jammu: “Asha can’t come until this evening. Shall we make a date?”

“I’m busy tonight. Tell her after midnight. Say one o’clock.”

KSLX general manager Jim Hutchinson rode home that night with his wife Bunny, who, as chance would have it, was downtown when the bomb went off. She was a comforting presence. When she showed up at his office, an hour after the blast, she was not the bundle of nerves another woman might have been. She looked glum, almost peeved. She wrinkled her nose. She paced. She didn’t kiss him. “Good thing you weren’t in the car,” she said.

“Damn good thing, Bunny.”

Having satisfied herself that he was unharmed, she left again to shop, returning only at 5:30 to take him home. He let her drive. As soon as they were tucked into traffic on Highway 40 she said, “Do they know who did it?” She turned on the wipers. Rain was falling from the prematurely dark sky.

“No,” he said.

“Good thing we’ve got a police department we can trust.”

“Are you talking about Jammu?”

Bunny shrugged.

“Jammu’s all right,” he said.

“Is that so?” A band of red lights, a lava flow, flashed on in front of them. Bunny braked.

“You may object to her nationality,” Hutchinson said, remembering as he spoke that Jammu was an American, “but she’s turned the entire Bomb and Arson Squad loose on the case.”

“Isn’t that what anybody would do?”

“That’s the point, my lovely wife.”

“What have they found?”

“There’s not much to go on. Somebody tipped off the police at six this morning, but it wasn’t much of a tip.”

“Mm?”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Somebody tipped off the police at six this morning but—”

“They didn’t know what to make of it. Somebody called up and said: When it happens, that’s us. The fellow at the switchboard had the presence of mind not to hang up. He asked who was calling, and the caller said, Ow! The fellow asked again. The caller said, Ow! And that was the tip.”

“Some tip.”

“And it’s not as if I have enemies. I told the detectives it almost had to be a random thing, except—”

“Except there are a lot of cars parked downtown.”

“So why ours?”

Bunny swung the car into the right lane, which seemed a little bit better lubricated. Hutchinson continued: “There were effectively no witnesses, and there was almost nothing left of the bomb. But they did figure out how it was planted. Detective I spoke with after lunch said it was one of those tape decks black kids carry around. A boom box.” Now she’ll start in on the blacks, he thought. But she didn’t. He kept talking. “Said they found pieces of one scattered around the lot. It looks like the thing was hollowed out and filled with explosives, then shoved under the car and detonated from a distance. It wasn’t dynamite, though.”

“Mm?”

“It was plastic. Which is strange. It’s hardly amateur.”

“Oh, huh. Can you run stories on it?”

“It’s news, why not? We can do whatever we want.”

“Maybe Cliff Quinlan?”

“And turn up foul play in Jammu’s administration? Is that the idea?”

“I’ve just never heard of cars being bombed in St. Louis, that’s all.”

Half an hour later they escaped Highway 40, exiting onto Clayton Road. Rain continued to fall. Giant plastic jack-o’-lanterns leered from windows in the older stores on Clayton.

At home their youngest daughter, Lee, was chatting in the kitchen with Queenie, their maid and cook. Two television-sized pumpkins awaited slaughter near the door. Lee toyed with a warty gourd from a basket of autumn objects. Bunny and Hutchinson washed their hands and went to sit down in the dining room, but the dinner table wasn’t set. Queenie had apparently not yet finished waxing it. She’d set the table in the breakfast room. She sliced the rump roast and doused each serving with béarnaise. There was steamed yellow squash and a salad with red lettuce, scallions, and hearts of palm.

After grace, muttered by Lee, Hutchinson dug into his beef and began telling Lee the bomb story, although she’d already seen it on TV. Bunny eyed her squash disks dispiritedly. She could hear a helicopter outside. Perhaps the KSLX Trafficopter. It sounded close, though it might have been the rain or wind that carried the sound.

No. It was very close, practically on top of them. They could hear the straining motor as well as the blades. Lee leaned back in her chair and looked out the window. She couldn’t see anything.

“Wonder what this is all about,” Bunny said.

As Hutchinson shrugged, the firing began. The living-room windows went first. They shattered almost quietly beneath the screaming of the copter’s metal parts. Bullets banged on the front door. They struck brass and shrieked.

As if following a script, Hutchinson dragged Lee to the floor and huddled with her under the breakfast table. Bunny dropped to her knees and joined them. She was gasping, but she stopped as soon as she threw up. Chop suey she’d eaten in bed with Cliff Quinlan splattered in front of her. She shut her eyes. Queenie was screaming in the pantry.

The dining-room windows burst. Bullets pounded the walls. The china display in the antique breakfront hit the floor with a mild crash. The Norfolk pine near the kitchen doorway toppled off its trivet. Hutchinson clutched Lee’s head.

Within seconds of the attack the first Ladue squad car pulled up. Already the street was teeming with hysterical neighbors, the Fussels, the Millers, the Coxes, the Randalls, the Jaegers, and all of their domestic help. Red lights cut the darkness. A pair of pumpers arrived, but nothing was burning. An ambulance made a disappointed U-turn and drove off. No one was hurt.

The police found the Hutchinsons’ front yard dotted with flyers xeroxed on shiny paper and covered with a childish scrawl. Chief Andrews picked one up.

Andrews assigned two patrolmen the task of picking up all the litter and reminded them not to get their fingerprints on it. Then he radioed the St. Louis police. Chief Jammu, he was told, was already on her way.

Residents in six other communities in and around St. Louis — Rock Hill, Glendale, Webster Groves, Affton, Carondelet, and Lemay — reported hearing a low-flying chopper in the minutes following the attack. The Illinois Highway Patrol was alerted, but it was too late. The chopper had vanished in the steady rain east of the river.

“I’m not especially worried about the FBI. It took them years to catch those Puerto Ricans in Chicago, and even then they bungled it. This is a two-man show, Gopal and Suresh, they have no identities, their actions have no pattern, and they’d already stolen all the supplies six weeks ago. The only person who ever caught Gopal at anything was me. The FBI is out of its element. They’re more in their element when it comes to what I’m doing in the city, but even if they look, which they won’t, they won’t find much, some transmitters maybe, but you can’t trace the destination of their signals. Same with the retransmitting stations, and only a professional would even know what they are. The professionals aren’t looking. Sometimes I’m tempted to shut down all the electronics anyway, but the wires do more to prevent discovery than encourage it. The people in the field — Singh, Baxti, Sarada, Usha, Kamala, Devi, Savidri, Sohan, Kashi — they need the information for their work and their own safety. Nice try, but don’t bother.

“If someone stumbles onto the pattern in Asha’s North Side purchases they’ll find the name Hammaker. It’s Maman’s cash but Hammaker’s bank checks. In this city, that’s a real red herring. And the media like me. So do the prosecutors, all the DA’s young lawyers collecting scalps. We have a rising arrest rate, and convictions bring promotions. And there’s no reason to be suspicious of me. The worst police can do supposedly is beat and cheat. We don’t beat people, and we don’t take bribes, at least not upstairs. Does my mother squeak?

“Yes, land’s expensive downtown, the city’s cramped and can’t annex, but what really scares off the county wealth is crime. It’s a fear reinforced by racism. The city-county split is a form of discrimination. Elbow. What’s surprising is that the city doesn’t want reunification any more than the county does. The blacks are afraid of being outvoted in a more regional government, especially when they still don’t even have control of the city. It’s incredible, but St. Louis has never had a black mayor. But it’s only a matter of time before it gets one, another election or two, and then no one will ever get the county and city back together.

“The industries are already established in the county, so why move? Ouch. Greed. We have tapes where you’ll hear bank board members inform their friends that city land has suddenly become a red-hot commodity. This isn’t just courtesy. The banks have a vested interest in land prices, and in the city’s prosperity. They own the bulk of the civic bonds. Therefore the banks are already on our side.

“Maman can sell out in April for no less than thirty million. We’ll take a quarter of that in taxes, but she’ll still have fifty percent. Elbow! There’s a law called Missouri 353 that lets the city offer long-term tax abatements to anyone who’ll develop a blighted area. Blighted means anything — ten years ago they declared all of downtown blighted, so you can imagine. And our new tax plan will sweeten the deal. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?

“Of course, the police chief has no business dictating city tax policy. But how am I supposed to know that? I’m new here. And the penalty for my political activity is media exposure and personal popularity! It’s completely contradictory. The reason I can take liberties with my office is the very same reason no one’s afraid of me: I’m a woman, I’m foreign, I’m irrelevant. You know, the Kama Sutra enjoins you to linger.”

Bhandari rolled off. The sheet clung to his damp back and followed him, exposing her right shoulder and right arm. She let her hand remain between her legs. For the moment she was a refractory adolescent again, at home with the autoerotic. She stared at the ceiling, on which the bedside lamp cast a conic section of light pierced by odd spokes of shadow, projections of the crossbars of the lampshade.

Stirring in his sleep, Bhandari brushed her flank. She was filled with the unpleasant conviction that when in Maman’s house, when called upon, he made talkative and charming love.

But tomorrow Jammu would be free again, and the particles of her past, roused to flame by Bhandari, would grow cool and dim as she made her way back into the darkness, into her scheme, into the distance of St. Louis. Her shuddering came and went unnoticed.

Asha was due at 1:00. Jammu looked at her watch, her only clothing. It was 12:20. She trailed a hand along the floor, found underwear and swung her legs out of bed.

Someone knocked on the door.

She stumbled to her feet and ripped the sheet off Bhandari, who lay like a beached whale, flippers half buried in percale sand. She shoved his head. “Up,” she said. “She’s here.”

He rose dreamily, gazing at her chest.

The knocking grew fierce and the doorknob rattled. This didn’t sound like Asha. Jammu could hardly turn her blouse right side out. She zipped up her skirt. Bhandari was tentatively knotting the belt of his robe. “Get the goddamned door,” she hissed, heading into the bathroom. After a moment she heard him shuffling to the door and unlocking it. There was a squeal, his. “What are you doing here?”

Jammu turned away from the sink. Singh was standing close to her in the bathroom doorway. He stared at her in blank distress, and she was pleased to see a man whom she was still capable of injuring straightforwardly. She rolled her shoulders, flaunting her dishevelment.

“Indira is dead,” he said. “Shot.”

“What?”

“They shot her.”

“Sikhs!” Bhandari said. He had come up behind Singh, and in an anti-Sikh fury he swung his fist at the younger man. With grace, almost delicacy, Singh threw him against the wall and choked him with his forearm. He let up, and Bhandari looked around vacantly. Then he ran to the phone by the bed.

“Operator. Operator.”

“I thought you’d want to know,” Singh said to Jammu.

“Romesh?” Bhandari’s voice shook. “Romesh, it’s you? Listen to me. Listen. All files, all files — you’re listening—all files marked C–C as in Chandigarh — all files marked C. Listen to me. All files—”

Something was mechanically wrong with Jammu’s mouth. A hard combination of tongue and palate held it open and kept air from reaching or escaping her lungs. She felt a bullet in her spine and couldn’t breathe.