The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (17 page)

“Barbara made it,” Martin said, deadpan.

“Where are the girls?”

“They are in the kitchen.”

“And Luisa?”

“She’s spending the weekend with her boyfriend.”

Rolf looked up from his glass. Martin’s eyes were glassy. “I confess that I’m surprised, Martin.”

“Let’s go watch some football, Rolf.”

“Really quite surprised.”

They left the living room and watched football. Martin refused to acknowledge that Rolf was sick. Not that Rolf needed sympathy, but in the family room, while hominid Bears clashed with hominid Jets, he began to feel as though he really did belong in bed with his heating pad, a bottle of cheer, and the telly tuned in to the most explicit of the cable channels. Football was not his cup of tea. Down the hall in the kitchen the girls twittered ad nauseam, and the setting sun cast a spindly claustrophobic sort of light through the windows. All at once the light blinked out. It was night, though somehow the sky above Chicago was still glowing, the clouds still pink and violet. Had the game been taped? Rolf sank deeper and deeper into the corduroy-covered easy chair. A beastly spot of itch was developing in his chest. He coughed.

“You have a cold?” Martin was watching him severely.

He attempted a smile but saw that he was only being told to cover his mouth. “Yes.” He projected a full-bellied cough in Martin’s direction.

Audreykins appeared in the doorway, her third shoulder now an extra breast, and announced dinner. Rolf guessed it must be at least eight o’clock. He looked at his watch.
Five-thirty!
This house was hell.

Barbie had laid out a goodly spread, however. The turkey rested on a platter in front of Martin’s chair, and on the white tablecloth were silver bowls and trays stocked with yams, peas and
hominy, mushroom-studded stuffing, steaming gravy, an unidentifiable whitish something, and craggy mashed potatoes. A bottle of superior Muscadet stood by. Rolf helped his wife into her chair, taking care not to touch her, and took his place on the opposite side. He rubbed his hands. “Goody!”

“Barbara made an oyster pudding for you,” said Audreykins.

“For me?” He scowled. Audreykins’s face was lost in candle flames. Didn’t she know he hated oysters? Surely she did. “There’s been some mistake,” he said. “Not…plum pudding?” Which he adored.

“You don’t like oysters?” Barbie said, making oyster eyes.

“Oh, I don’t
mind
them—”

“Rolf!” squeaked the candles. “Be polite, won’t you. She made it especially for you.”

“Do help yourself,” Barbie purred. “Take a lot.”

While Martin concentrated on not severing a finger with the carving knife, Rolf dutifully spaded up a helping of pudding and dumped it on his plate. It would be sandy. Oysters were always sandy.

The other bowls made the rounds, and Martin loaded each plate with sawtoothed slices. Rolf found himself face to face with several pounds of tradition. He coughed on it, his private blessing. Politely, then, for Barbie, he sank his fork into the pudding and took a bite.

Ish.

A fat oyster, and a sandy one at that.

No one else was eating. He looked up. Audreykins cleared her throat. Dear Lord! She was going to say grace.

“Maybe we should all hold hands,” she said.

He could sooner say grace than swallow this oyster. He reached for his napkin, but they were waiting for him to join them in the daft rite of holding hands. He extended his arms and winced as his left hand met Martin’s right, which was dangerously taut. But Barbie’s hand was small and muscley and warm.

“Dear God,” Audreykins quavered. “Bless this food that we are about to receive…”

He worked his fingers down between Barbara’s to the sweaty webs of skin, and tightened his grip.

“We give thanks for another harvest. For the goodness of your bounty, and the gifts around us, the blessings of family and home…”

She squeezed back, driving her diamond into his skin and bone. What a gem she was. He refused to loosen his grip. She loosened hers.

“Also, we remember the Pilgrims, and the first Thanksgiving, and Miles Standish, and the Indians, your loving help in times of need…”

This was a jolly third-grader’s grace. He gave the oyster another chew, his teeth grating. He stroked Barbara’s palm with his thumb. She snatched her hand away.

“…with Mom and Dad in New Zealand, and with Luisa, and with Bill and Ellen, and in New York, in New York…” Inevitably, she was blubbering. “And so we pray.”

His fingers crept around the gravy boat in search of Barbara’s. Then, sharply and with little warning, he coughed.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…”

He prayed they had their eyes closed. He prayed the oyster hit the plate. Good to be rid of it in any case.

“But deliver them from evil, amen.”

“Amen!” Martin barked, clapping his hands. “Rolf, why don’t you do the honors with the wine?”

No one said a word while he filled the glasses. The oyster had alighted in his potatoes. Audreykins sniffled and held a silent dialogue with God, who seemed to be located in her napkin. This was becoming a memorably wretched evening. Without the brat around, things got rather more hostile. “Shame Luisa couldn’t be here,” he said. “Delectable vino, by the way. I shouldn’t have minded meeting this beau of hers.”

“Stop talking like that,” the candles whispered.

Barbara gave him a ghoulish non-smile. “She said she’s sorry she missed seeing you.”

“Did she now? Tebbly sweet of her.” He flayed his slice of breast and spread the skin ornamentally over the pudding. “Young love, what?”

“Yep,” Martin said. “You have enough gravy there?”

“Oodles, thanks.”

Having seen to the derailment of further conversation, he turned to his dinner, filling his stomach while Martin filled the minutes with one of his fatuous technical monologues. For a topic this evening he’d chosen the obscenity known as Westhaven. Rolf repeatedly thrust his knife at him in agreement.
Yes
, it was a fabulous amount of floor space.
Yes
, it represented quite an investment on the part of the suburban banks.
Yes
, it would singlehandedly alter the economic structure of the area.
Yes
, it would be a hundred years before blight extended that far.
Yes, yes, yes—
Martin clearly had no inkling of the plans of the Hammaker coterie. It still seemed to him that the westward development of the county would have no end. Uncle Rolf, having been apprised of the impending about-face of county property values, had staked out his twelve blocks in North Saint Louis while the staking was good, and was savoring this ass’s lecture on the region’s economic future. As soon as Barbara moved to clear the table, however, his romantic urges surfaced. “Mind if I use your phone, Martin?”

“Sure, go right ahead.” Martin nodded at the kitchen.

“Your study phone. I need to ring up my commodities man.”

“On Thanksgiving?”

“Markets are open tomorrow.”

“You never slow down, do you? The light’s at the top of the stairs.”

The study was lined with more books than Martin Probst could read in five lifetimes. There were big-bottomed chairs, a green and gold broadloom, a photo of a younger Barbara in a chrome-plated frame on the desk. The cold upstairs air sobered Rolf. Swiveling in Martin’s chair, rehearsing his call, he thumbed through the papers stacked on the desk and on the floor along the bookcase. Westhaven, Westhaven, Westhaven. He picked up the phone and dialed. While it rang, he turned the key stuck in the bottom drawer and pulled the drawer open.

There were letters. He riffled them. At the back, he found three small bundles tied with gray ribbons. Love letters?

He was disappointed to recognize Barbara’s handwriting, disappointed the letters hadn’t come from someone else. But he selected one of the thicker missives from the middle of the pack and tucked it in his breast pocket. It might come in handy.

Devi’s phone continued to ring. Where on earth could she be? He shut the drawer and dug through the papers on top of the desk. He found a stack of pages from the
Post
, a good dozen of them, with the brat’s face on every one. What kind of clown would keep so many copies? Her nose was her mother’s nose. He coughed unhappily.

Devi answered on about the twentieth ring.

She said she’d been in the bathroom. For twenty rings? She said she might be getting the flu. Rolf frowned. But she was already feeling better, she said, just hearing his voice, and perhaps he could drop by? Rolf assured her this would be most agreeable to him. He might even bring her a few small tokens of—

She made a kissy noise and rang off. She was obviously in a mood.

Pausing at the top of the stairs before descending, Rolf noticed a soft glow in the master bedroom and wondered if the brat might be hiding out here after all. Stealthily, he backtracked. The bedroom was empty. A lamp was burning above Barbara’s vanity.

From down in the dining room he heard a gentle murmur, like the happiness of water in a fountain. He heard Audrey’s voice distinctly. The murmur was repeated. They were laughing.

From the vanity he picked up one of Barbara’s combs but set it down again, afraid he might weep if he smelled it. He touched her perfume bottles one by one. He noted the differing levels of the liquids in them, the witness borne to a continuum of purchases and applications, to a selection and alteration of scent unique to this woman, unique in all the world. At the back of the vanity, among bottles of lotion and jars of cream, stood a triptych of recent photos of the brat. Rolf shivered and stared, and Luisa stared back at him, fair-haired and frank, like a girl from the reserved stocks, the girl one couldn’t touch. Larger than life, like the kiwi in the living room below him.

But this was silly. With a more vigorous shiver he shook off the spell and opened the bottom drawer of the vanity. It offered him a large assortment of lingerie. He selected a pair of black panties and pressed them to his face, inhaling. Would they fit Devi? Most definitely they would.

Monday night, the holiday over. Jammu switched on her flashers when she gained the inner lane of Highway 40. Guardrail posts lurched in the bursts of blue light. She cruised at eighty.

Her day had begun with a call from Nelson A. Nelson, the Police Board president. Nelson had just learned that since September she’d recruited 190 blacks for the force and only 35 whites. “Yes…?” she said. Nelson muttered for several seconds before choking out the question: “Don’t you think there’s an inequality there?” Oh yes, she said. Thirty-five was too many. Whites had accounted for barely ten percent of the applications. “And why,” Nelson wanted to know, “are so few whites applying?” Jammu promised a thorough inquiry. Calls from the rest of the Board followed. Even her supporters were angry, though in August they’d unanimously backed her proposal for the manpower increase. Now that she’d delivered, they treated her like a dumb broad, a naughty girl. It took a real effort to remain disingenuous. A meeting was scheduled for Wednesday.

In the afternoon the Office of Budget and Finance raised its ink-stained veils to reveal, unblushingly, a $2.4 million “oversight.” The Board had transferred jurisdiction over the office to Jammu in late August. Now she saw she’d made a tactical error in assuming responsibility for finances before she’d sufficiently consolidated her
control over operations. The accounting officer, Chip Osmond, one of Rick Jergensen’s cronies, had grown reckless in the power vacuum. Rick Jergensen had been hoping to be named chief in July; the “oversight” had overtones of spite. The city comptroller showed up in a blaze of snideness, with budget director Randy Fitch hot on his heels. Osmond wheeled all his books into her office on a cart, and the four of them wrangled and reassessed through the dinner hour and into the evening. Finally Jammu lost her patience and stated, flatly, that the mayor would have to add the $2.4 million to her budget.

The comptroller said, “So much for your good news.”

Osmond called home to his wife.

Randy Fitch giggled.

The comptroller said the mayor wouldn’t do it. Jammu knew the mayor would.

Randy Fitch continued to giggle.

The men were closing their briefcases when Singh strolled into the office. “Who are you?” the comptroller asked. “The janitor,” Singh replied, lighting up one of his clove things. Jammu rebuked him as soon as they were alone. His response: “Your administration lacks arrogance.”

Reaching Kingshighway, she exited past Barnes Hospital. An ambulance streaked by her silently. She radioed the dispatcher. “Car One,” she said. “I’m at home for the night.”

“Roger, Car One.”

She parked Car One in a loading zone and turned up her jacket collar. The sky was an orange urban overcast, the air metallic on her tongue. In the alley behind her apartment two gay waiters from Balaban were screaming at each other.

Inside, she sorted her mail and played her answering machine. Only Gopal had called. He spoke in Marathi confused with English code terms. He said he’d seen a trailer full of apples in a vacant lot near Soulard Market. Would the police please watch out?
Apples
meant cordite.

From the two-door refrigerator Jammu took a bottle of vodka and the drumstick left over from Thanksgiving dinner with the mayor. A loose pane in one of the bedroom windows buzzed to the beat of a television commercial upstairs. She kicked off her
shoes, stretched out on the bed, and ripped open the Federal Express envelope from Burrelle’s, a clipping service in New Jersey. The envelope contained a half-inch pile of clippings, an increase over last week. Fortified with a swallow of vodka, she riffled through them.

She unfolded a long
New York Times
article by Erik Tannenberg, who’d taken her to lunch at Anthony’s ten days ago.

“We’re Scared”

She stopped reading. She threw the half-eaten drumstick into her wastebasket and drank more vodka. Two weeks ago these clippings had still amused her and edified her; now they made her sick to her stomach. Reporters knew too much. There were treacherous undercurrents of knowledge in Tannenberg’s tone, in the casualness with which he’d tossed off words like “visibility” and “canniness.” Tannenberg knew her type. In New York she wouldn’t be original. The superficiality of his treatment held both her and St. Louis at arm’s length, allowing the possibility that she might dupe these Midwesterners—it takes all kinds of cities to make a nation—while assuring readers in New York that everything was fine, that the nation as a whole was regulated—

A car was idling in the street. A car door had slammed. Jammu went to the living room and depressed a slat in the blinds. Snow was falling, seeming to climb as it fell through the streetlight and through the headlight beams of a taxi. The taxi’s wipers smeared the melting snow. Her doorbell rang.

Lakshmi? Devi? Kamala?

She opened the door, and Devi Madan stepped in. Her hair was tucked under the collar of a full-length red fox coat. “I have a cab waiting,” she said.

“You can send it on. The neighborhood is full of them.”

“No.”

“Go get rid of it.”

Devi slammed the door behind her. Jammu put away the vodka, shaking her head, and turned the gas on under the tea kettle. Devi Madan had made one fundamental mistake in her life, when without her parents’ knowledge she’d answered an advertisement in
The Bombayite
(“The Fun One”).

Girls!

Devi was rattling the doorknob. Jammu crossed the kitchen and let her in. “I’ll take your coat,” she said.

Devi hunched her shoulders. “No.” She tried to shake back her hair, but it didn’t move; the collar held it close against her head. Her gloved hands trembled and sought relief in touching her face, her very exquisite face, and found none.

“How are you?” Jammu said.

Devi dropped onto the sofa and dug her wet heels into the cushions. She peeled off her gloves and balled them into wads. “You know.”

“You’re very early.” She got no answer. “Wait here.”

The safe was under the counter in the kitchen. Her spare safe and the uncut heroin she’d brought from Bombay were buried in Illinois. What was here was cut to 6 percent. She punched in the lock combination, released the latch, and rolled out the drawer. The gas elements were visible through the mesh the drugs and passports rested on, ready to burn if the safe was tampered with. Sick of Devi’s frequent visits, Jammu did not bother measuring out the usual amount but returned with a 50-gram bag.

The living room was chokingly perfumed. Devi snatched the bag from her fingers and locked herself in the bathroom.

While the teapot warmed, Jammu parted the curtains on the tiny kitchen window and raised the shade. Snow had collected on the outer sill. In the alley, glass clattered. A Balaban employee had dropped some bottles in a dumpster. Standing on tiptoe, he reached in after them. His shoulder jerked. Something smashed, tinkled, smashed. He was breaking the bottles on each other.

Devi came out of the bathroom with her coat over her arm and her purse in her hands. “I want to stay here tonight,” she said.

Jammu sat down on the sofa and poured tea. “I get up at five-thirty.”

“I can sleep on the divan. Do you have a cigarette?”

Jammu nodded at the kitchen. “On top of the refrigerator.”

“Do you want one?”

“No.”

Devi’s youth was showing. She was twenty-two. In Bombay Jammu had been thrifty with her labor force, mothering her girls instead of just using them until they wore out. She’d regulated
Devi’s habits, handled her money, given her an allowance, and paid for monthly medical checkups. Now, in St. Louis, she was trying to wean her.

Devi returned French-inhaling and swinging her hips. “These are stale.”

Jammu laughed. “Where are yours?”

“I quit yesterday. I’m a Sagittarius.” She flicked her ash into the rug. “What are you?”

“Leo, I suppose.”

“What’s your birthday?”

“August nineteenth.”

“You’re almost a cusp. Mine’s next week. Tuesday.” She saw the tea and made a face. “Do you have anything else?”

Jammu nodded again at the kitchen and gloomily regarded the cup and saucer on her lap. She wanted to be asleep. In the kitchen a beer bottle gasped. Devi came back with an Amstel Light and a cigarette in one hand, a jar of olives in the other. She drank from the bottle and Jammu winced at how close to her eye she brought the coal.

“This is ninety-five calories, but it’s all carbohydrate. I was under a thousand until this.” She tried to remove a boot using her other foot, stumbled for balance, and finally got it off by wedging the heel against a sofa leg. She smiled and blinked at Jammu. “I’d rather have thirty olives than a martini. It’s the same amount of calories. I found out the other day how they tell how many calories food has? It’s called a calorimeter. Rolf’s company makes them.”

She paused. Don’t answer, Jammu told herself.

“They
burn
food. They burn it and they see how much extra heat it gives off.” Devi propped her beer dangerously on the seat of the rocking chair and yanked off the other boot. “So I said, How do they
burn milk
? I thought I had him. He said they heat it until it boils and then they boil it until it burns. I had a picture of scientists in white coats standing around watching milk burn, and I don’t know what came over me, I started laughing, and then he spanked me.” She frowned at the smoked-out butt in her hand.

“Tell him to cut it out.”

Through a smile, Devi mouthed a sentence.

“What?”

“I’m going to shoot his wife.”

Jammu closed her eyes.

“I’m only joking.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“I said I was only joking.”

She heard Devi open the refrigerator. She looked and saw her digging in the yogurt carton with a spoon. “Right between the eyes, Audreykins!”

“Don’t eat that,” Jammu said.

Startled, Devi turned, her eyes wide. “Why not?”

“Because I said.”

Devi stood frozen with indecision, the loaded spoon poised above the carton. Jammu set down her tea. She shut the refrigerator door, took the spoon from Devi and tapped the glistening yogurt back into the carton. “Listen,” she said. “You’re probably exhausted. I’m going to call you a cab, and you can go back and get lots of sleep, and I’ll tell you what. We’ll see if you can fly home to Bombay for your birthday.”

Devi’s head shook no. “He’s my only friend,” she said.

“He’s a rotten spoiled bastard.”

The slap caught Jammu off guard. She spun into the sink, and the pain sprang like an answering hand from within her cheek. She looked back with lidded eyes.