The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (36 page)

Duane had on the Hawaiian shirt she’d given him. He was trying to slice some of her parents’ salami with his Swiss Army knife. “I never use the little blade,” he said, “because I want to keep it really sharp for that Special Job. But it’s too short. I’m taking the tomato knife under advisement.”

“How about a pair of scissors,” she said, opening an envelope.

“Fittingly,” he said, “this is the one holiday my parents do know how to celebrate. My father used to buy cherry bombs—”

“Brown has not received my application yet! Has not received it! They must think I’m applying or something.”

An airmail envelope fell out of a glossy mailing from Baylor. The stamps were French. It was a Christmas card from the Girauds. Luisa tore it open. “This is so nice,” she said. “Everything but a subscription to Elle.” Mme Giraud had written a long note on the back. “But Duane—”

“Ai ai ai ai ai!” He danced and sucked his finger.

“Duane—”

“This knife isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

“Duane, Paulette Giraud, her mother says she spent this fall in England.”

He looked at her, his finger in his mouth, his ears wiggling.

“Listen. Étudié depuis septembre jusqu’à décembre en Angleterre!”

“That’s peculiar.”

“But she called me.” Luisa read the note again. Could Paulette
have come to the States without her mother’s knowing it? No way. Paulette was too stupid to do anything that crazy. But if she wasn’t in St. Louis, then who had that been on the phone? Why would anybody want to say they were Paulette?

“Maybe Stacy faked it,” Duane said.

Luisa started to shrug, but then she shook her head. “She would have told me eventually. Anybody I know would have told me, because that’s when I met you. They’d want the credit.”

“Hm. Right. Yeah.”

“This is so weird,” she said.

Duane began to clear the table, working around her.

“This is so weird.”

He set out some carrots and celery. He set out rye bread, French bread, cheddar cheese, dill pickles, Doritos, dip. He set out two glasses and took the champagne out of the freezer. He wrapped it in a towel, peeled back the foil, untwisted the wire, and popped the cork.

It stuck in the ceiling.

“Hey!”

They both looked at the ceiling.

“It went right through.”

“It’s just paper or something up there.” As soon as he’d filled the glasses, Duane got up on a chair and probed the hole the cork had made. Plaster fell in his face, and then something dropped out of the hole, not the cork, something metal. Luisa picked it up. It was a heavy, shiny slug with pinpricks on one side, like a microphone, and a wire dangling from it. “What is this?”

Duane took it from her. “Looks like a bug.”

“What?”

“A bug, don’t you think? The FBI or somebody. This was always a student place. Maybe there used to be some radicals here.”

Luisa climbed onto the chair. The cork came loose, bouncing off her nose. “The paint’s fresh,” she said.

“I wonder who lived here before me.”

“
We
live here now.”

“I kno-o-ow we do. But we’re not subversive elements.”

She looked down from the chair at Duane, the homebody, who was brushing bits of plaster off the tablecloth and picking
flakes of paint off the dip. Then she stepped off the chair and sat down. She’d just remembered something else. At Dexter’s on the first night, the night she’d met Duane, she’d been spooked by someone she’d thought was an Algerian. But for all she knew he could have been Indian, and he was actually fairly cute. She remembered how he’d wanted to talk to her but wouldn’t come inside the bar. How many Indians could there be who hung around at Dexter’s?

Duane lit the candles and turned out the light. “I mean it’s obviously weird,” he said. “But it’s also obvious that it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“What about me?”

“Or with you.” He put the bug on top of the refrigerator. “We can take it apart or something after dinner.”

On the refrigerator door were black-and-white pictures of Luisa that Duane had taped up before she moved in with him. She looked away from them. Someone had faked a phone call and a postcard. She wasn’t making this up; there was a postcard, too. Maybe it was Duane’s man. Maybe he’d wanted her and Duane to get together because he could tell that Duane needed a girl, not a man. But then why was he hanging around outside the bar? And what was the bug in the ceiling for? Did the guy get thrills from listening to her and Duane eat? She was getting confused.

“What’s wrong?” Duane said.

She looked up at him. He had no idea what she knew about him, no idea what connections she was making in her mind. All at once his ignorance seemed terribly pathetic.

“Nothing.” She said it with finality, and pulled her chair up to the table. “Are we going to have a toast?”

“Sure. What do you want to toast?”

“Chips. Nachos-flavored corn chips.”

He raised his glass. “To chips,” he said.

As soon as she raised her glass, she felt herself stop thinking. It was easy. Duane had told her once how a jetliner could lose power in two of its engines and still keep flying smoothly. Behind the curtains in the cockpit there was consternation, pilots pulling switches, yanking levers, but in the main cabin the passengers were finishing their dinners as if nothing had happened. They ate salami
and compared their parents. Everything was ordinary as soon as you stopped thinking. There was no mystery about how they’d met and no magic in the candlelight on the silverware and no longer any heart-stopping difference between the sink in Duane’s kitchen and the sink in her parents’ kitchen. The food on the table was what people everywhere had to eat, and Duane loved her because she was smart and pretty and had come along at the right time, and she was just a girl who had lied to her parents and lied to her boyfriend and would do it all again if she needed to, the way she might sleep again and again on bloody sheets, because they were ruined. And then the plane landed safely, of course, and the passengers joined the crowds in the terminal and drove home to their ordinary houses, and never even stopped to think that just an hour earlier they’d been sitting on seats that were seven miles off the ground.

In the first days of the new year, a bitterly cold weather system had descended on St. Louis and established itself with a sequence of record low temperatures. The high on January 3 was zero degrees. On the fourth the high was 2. On the fifth the sky clouded and the temperature climbed into the teens to allow another half a foot of snow to fall, and then on the night of the sixth the mercury dipped to—19. For the next week, salt trucks alternated with snowplows on the streets, like gloom with anxiety. By the week of the thirteenth, more than three feet of snow was lying on the lawns of the suburbs and the urban construction sites and the levees overlooking the ice-covered Mississippi. The longer the bad weather lasted, the more aggressively it shouldered murders and politics out of the spotlight of the local news, out of the headlines, the lead-story slots. It exploited the advantage of all weather: its constant availability for comment.

Barbara had at first followed the cold spell’s progress in a circus-going spirit, but eventually even she succumbed to the portents and began to believe that the reports all somehow pointed inwards, as a neighborhood’s concentration of freaks and deformities might point underground, to a reservoir of toxic waste. Wind-chill, degree days, inches of precipitation, former records, consecutive days below x degrees, below y degrees, integers positive
and negative—the numbers infected minds. There were broken pipes in warehouse sprinkler systems. Termination of gas service, and outcries. Frozen stiffs in East St. Louis. Ice-locked barges. The heart attacks of shovelers. Stalled cars abandoned on freeways. And always the search for precedents, the delight in finding none, and the feeling of specialness, the growing conviction that attendance at such a winter certified a claim to unusual fortitude and vision. The city, on the news, in the news, behaved like a witness. There was a mood. The weather oriented itself along the polar lines of the previous six months’ political trends. All tendencies hung together. A peculiar watchfulness had descended on St. Louis in the first weeks of the new year.

The sixteenth brought some relief, however, in the form of temperatures only just below freezing and a breeze from the south, off the Gulf, much attenuated. It was Tuesday. Though average for January, the weather felt relatively springlike, and Barbara was cleaning. In her closet she applied the Two Year Rule, throwing onto the bed every article of clothing she hadn’t worn since Christmas two years earlier. She made no exceptions, not for gifts from Martin, not even for her swankiest evening gowns. If she liked something, the rule ensured that she wore it at least once every twenty-four months. Her closet lodged no “dogs,” nothing unworn or unwearable, and she was in possession of far fewer clothes than Luisa or Martin, fewer clothes, undoubtedly, than anyone she knew.

Emptied hangers stabilized on the bar. The usable skirts and blouses she slid to the left impatiently. She was looking for victims, and she found one in a foolish winter suit she’d bought four months ago. She’d never worn it.

Out it went, flapping its pleats as it flew to the bed. It was followed by a linen skirt too big in the waist, a brown dress she didn’t love, and an $80 pair of shoes, accessories to a crime of impulse.

She moved to her dresser and dropped to her knees. She took a last look at the Christmas present from Audrey, the sweater. She’d worn it once, at lunch last week. Once was enough. Poor Audrey. Out it went.

Via the charitable conduit of the Congregational Church, these
clothes would end up in the inner city or the Missouri Bootheel. Barbara imagined driving into some tiny town southeast of Sikeston and seeing all the decade’s fashions, all of her mistakes and all of Audrey’s and Martin’s modeled on the dirt streets by poor black women. But the clothes could have been bound for a landfill for all she cared. She deposited an armload of gifts and badly stained underwear on the bed.

The house was quiet. Mohnwirbel had driven away after lunch and not returned. A busy bee he was. Martin had dropped the idea of suing him, and the box of unclean pictures had found its way into one of Martin’s storage lairs, where it would probably stay until it molded. Barbara yearned to go beyond her strikes on his study and closets, to hit the third floor and the basement and attack those hard-core bunkers of junk. She envisioned a life untyrannized by objects, a life in which she and Martin would be free to leave at any time and so by staying prove the choice was freely made. In truth, she hoped that even death might become bearable if everything she still wanted to own when it came could fit in two suitcases; because sometimes the airlines lost your suitcases, and by the time you realized they were gone you’d reached your destination.

She added a sheaf of receipts to the piles of paper she would take downstairs to process at her desk. A little sun shone on the carpeting. Second-story branches nutated in the windows, seeking gaps in the soft assault of the southern wind, paths back to their natural positions. Squirrels paused. The house was very quiet.

As she opened her box of everyday jewelry a pair of earrings caught her eye, the earrings John had given her. She hadn’t even thought to return them. With a feeling of uneasiness she glanced into the mirror. The eyes that met hers weren’t her own.

She gasped. John was standing in the bathroom doorway. She stamped on the floor, trying to stamp out her fright. “How did you get in here?”

“Door’s unlocked!” he said.

“I told you. Go away. I told you.”

“Yes, yes.” He swept into the room and sat down on the bed. “I know what you told me.” He crossed his legs and looked up at her engagingly. “You persist in treating me like a substance that comes out of a faucet that you can turn off with your gentle smile
or your firmness and maturity, no no, John, please. You’re very sweet John but.—And yet I find you here with my little gift…”

“I can do the same to you,” Barbara said hotly. It no longer took any effort not to like him. “I can do exactly the same to you. I can say you’re a creep and a jerk. You may be articulate, but you can’t make me feel comfortable around you. You can just go to hell, in fact. Get out of here. Take your damned earrings. You shouldn’t walk in people’s back door. Your manners are lousy. Who do you think you are?”

He sighed and put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. “You aren’t entirely wrong,” he said. “But there’s a fine line between effrontery and simple persistence.”

“Get out.” She picked up the earrings and reached and dropped them over his hand into one of his pockets. She reeled back. Her ears roared. There was a gun in his pocket. She took deliberate steps towards the bathroom.

“Stop.”

She turned back and saw the gun pointing at her. He was a total stranger.

“Get down a suitcase,” he said.

“Listen—”

“The middle-sized leather bag will be ideal. Take your black silk dress, the green dress with copper threads, and another winter dress. A pair of jeans, and your gray corduroys. T-shirts. You’ll want T-shirts. Six changes of underwear, a swimsuit, a nightgown, and your light robe. Am I going to have to do this for you?”

“John.”

“Pick three sweaters, three shirts, and a pair of decent shoes. The ones you’re wearing will be adequate. Canvas shoes, too, space permitting. I have the feeling you aren’t even listening to me.”

She turned again to try to leave, and she heard only one footfall before he punched her in the face. He hit her in the stomach. She fell to her knees. He kicked her in the collarbone and knocked her over backwards. She felt the pressure of his heel on her throat. It was gratuitous. He was getting even.

“I’ll be ever so happy to shoot you in the knees if you try to run,” he said. “And in the spinal cord if you make a fuss when we’re outside. You understand I mean this.”

The heel went away. She heard him slide her suitcase off its shelf in the closet, and heard him packing. She heard the clink of cologne bottles, and the click of a latch.

What was left of Municipal Growth hardly filled the conference room at the offices of Probst & Company. Seventeen of the thirty-two active members had jumped ship without so much as offering Probst an explanation. Quentin Spiegelman, St. Louis’s premier financial guardian, a man whose name appeared on the dotted lines of a thousand wills, had twice assured Probst that he wouldn’t miss a meeting, and twice now he’d missed one. His lies were so childish that only an implicit hatred could explain them. Probst had not thought he was Quentin’s enemy. But he was willing to think so now. He was the chairman, and felt personally betrayed.

It was seven o’clock. On the far side of the oval conference table, Rick DeMann and Rick Crawford peered over their half-glasses, ready to begin.

“Let’s give Buzz another few minutes,” Probst said.

He had called the meeting here at his offices to create an impression of good attendance and to ensure a businesslike atmosphere. The walls were hung with photographs of the major projects he’d worked on over the years, framed exempla of municipal growth: the Poplar Street Bridge, the 18th Street interchange, the terminal at Lambert, the county government building, the Loretto-Hilton complex, West Port, the convention center. The air smelled faintly of electricity and typewriter oil.

P. R. Nilson and Eldon Black, archconservative allies of General Norris, were conferring with Lee Royce and Jerry Pontoon, real-estate-made men. The only remaining banker in the group, John Holmes, was trying to attract the attention of County Supervisor Ross Billerica. Jim Hutchinson, still tan from a holiday vacation, was leaning way back in a chair between Bud Replogle and Neil Smith, nice men, railroad men. An awkward movement at Probst’s right shoulder caused him to turn. General Norris was removing a bug detector from his jacket pocket. Green light. He put it back. “We start?” he said to Probst.

“We can wait a few more minutes.”

“Righty-o.” The General’s head swooped closer. “Don’t look
now, Martin,” he said in his 30-hertz voice, “but there seem to be some interesting dishes there across the street, I said don’t
look
,” for Probst had turned to see out the window. “It’s conceivable they have direct means of listening. Maybe casually draw the curtain, why don’t you?”

Probst frowned at him.

“Just do what I say, Martin.” The voice was mud—mud baked by a hot sun and cracked into tiles. “Safety’s cheap.”

There had always been communications dishes on the roof of the precinct house. They were antennas, not mikes. Probst shut the curtains, and a draft flattened them against the window: the outer door had opened. Carmen was letting a huffing and puffing Buzz Wismer into the room. Probst nodded to her. She could leave now.

Buzz brushed off his coat and hung it on the rack in the alcove. He took the last empty seat, to Probst’s left.

“I’m glad you made it,” Probst said with feeling. He gently slapped his friend’s bony knee. Buzz nodded, his eyes on the floor.

A week ago Barbara had eaten lunch with Bev Wismer and come home with the news that Buzz was having an affair with Mrs. Hammaker. Probst rejected the possibility out of hand. He was sick of the whole notion of unfaithfulness, of the double standards and the way people talked. He wanted to be left alone.

“Martin,” the baked voice growled.

“Yeah yeah.”

“Let’s go.”

Probst raised his head and saw gray eyebrows, cheeks age-spotted or cold-bruised, eyeglass lenses bending the ceiling’s lambent panels into bows and bars. He saw neckties in cautious colors, raked hair and bald spots, executive hands on the table with executive pens poised. Municipal Growth, waiting. A few smiles had developed like fault lines in the tension.

“I assume we all know what the big news is,” Probst said. “Is there anyone who hasn’t seen a paper today?”

The day before, the lower house of the Missouri General Assembly had begun to consider a bill which, if passed, would authorize a binding referendum to decide if the boundaries of St. Louis County should be redrawn to include the city again.

“We’ll have a lot to say about this,” Probst continued. “But for a while I’d like to stick to the agenda you received yesterday. We can’t afford to spend the whole night bickering like last time. We need to get some work done.”

This drew gestural responses from everyone but Buzz.

Rick Crawford delivered the first report. The city of St. Louis, he said, was living dangerously but doing well. City Hall had met its December and January payrolls by diverting moneys ordinarily spent on servicing the city’s debt. It had prepared for this move by using the city’s new Hammaker stock, in conjunction with the dramatic rise in the value of city-held lands, as leverage for a bond renegotiation. Its rating had improved to AA, and in essence it had taken out a second mortgage on the civic improvements of the past. This maneuver, which required neither voter approval nor tinkering with the Charter, was mainly Chuck Meisner’s work. He and his friends in the city banking circles had effectively guaranteed that the refurbished bonds would find buyers. Everything had happened quickly. Leading up to the “Christmas Announcement” of municipal solvency had been a 72-hour marathon meeting attended by the mayor, the comptroller, Meisner, the budget director, Quentin Spiegelman, Asha Hammaker, Frank Jordan of Boatmen’s, and S. Jammu.