The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (41 page)

“He’s cute,” Asha said. “He’s a genuine dear.”

“So you’ve been saying. Is it good news or bad?”

“Indifferent. He’s still one of the maybes. It’s part of your random variation in moral strength. Buzz has relatively a lot of it. In principle, if not in his gut, he feels an allegiance to what’s left of Municipal Growth, to the old dispensation. He’s very narrow-minded on the city-county question. Or it’s more than narrow-minded, it’s—”

“The State. But the wrong elements hypostatized.”

“Anything you say. It isn’t political and it’s only formally economic. What it really is is talismanic. All of a sudden he reveres Martin Probst. I find it frustrating. The more time I spend with him, the more interesting Probst becomes to him. It’s hardly fair.”

“Uh huh.”

“On the other hand, it’s personal and gets steadily more so. If you get Probst to support you, Buzz will too.”

“You’re sure.”

“If I’m on your side and Probst is too—well, you’ll have Buzz.”

“You’re sure. You’re sure he’ll move his operations to the city.”

Asha rolled her shoulders. “I don’t know, Ess. It’s asking a lot of him. He will do something. He’d be lobbying for the merger right now if it weren’t for Probst.”

“I want him in the city.”

“To clinch the merger?”

“Just to have him in the city. This merger is perceived more apocalyptically than it deserves to be. I mean, yes, I want it badly. But if it fails, I at least want the city and the elite. So don’t lose sight of what counts.”

“Getting Buzz to move.”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do when you have what you want?”

Jammu smiled. “More of same.”

Asha rolled down her window and took a ticket from the
electric dispenser at the parking garage at West Roads. She handed the ticket to Jammu. The time was printed in bruised purple: 1:17 p.m. They’d have an hour to eat. “You know,” Asha said, as she drove up the ramp, “I’ve been very impressed with how keenly Singh saw the outlines of Buzz’s life in September. He didn’t intervene, he only listened, and he still hit every parameter on the nose, even the role of the Probsts.”

“I’m hungry,” Jammu said.

The hundred lights in the Junior League dining room had reflected mates in the fogged windows, and lit the fresh flowers on every table and the pollen-dry makeup on every woman’s face. Glasses chimed, laughter pealed. The room smelled vaguely carbonated. A girl in a white wool skirt and a kelly-green jacket and a pink cotton blouse and a knotted plaid scarf jumped up from a table and screamed, “Asha!”

Suddenly Jammu was looking at their backs.

“I thought your phone was out of order!”

“I just love those!”

“If it’s all right with Joey!”

Asha led Jammu by the elbow to a table. They sat. “The youngest of the Jaeger girls,” she explained. “We’re going dancing tomorrow.”

“This isn’t interfering with you and Buzz.”

“No.”

They began to speak in Hindi. The noise of the women consuming circled them, the chewing of the communal sentence,
so
nice how the cute, interesting Saturday drives to Frontenac Billblass Powell Hall, I saw small slams, I brunch divorced (Hilary Fontbonne, Ashley Chesterfield), but listen on Wednesday (touch wood), Eric sales, London Saks, cancer, curtains, Vail, six pounds.

“
mere sir mem dard hai
”

Every time Jammu’s eyes left her friend she had to beat back invasions from neighboring tables. “Sinful” desserts on plates, caustic glances. The women were attractive and lively. She attacked her salad with a fork and said, in her hard Hindi, “Singh has kidnapped Barbara Probst.”

A head turned. Ears had recognized the name, maybe.

“Let’s talk about this later, Ess.”

“Now,” Jammu said. “We’ll keep the names out of it. Eat up. Come on. Eat. In the future we won’t come here. But my time is short. He kidnapped her on Tuesday.”

“Where is he keeping her?”

“His place across the river.”

“I don’t like that.” Asha touched her lips with her napkin. “I don’t like that at all. Hammaker owns that building.”

“I don’t like the whole idea. But she doesn’t know where she is. Singh has a story going in New York. He found a woman who is a reasonable facsimile of her, showed her around his apartment building, to the doorman, the neighbors. He’ll do it periodically.”

“But kidnapped,” Asha said. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m glad we agree.”

“You didn’t approve it?”

“I approved it. Singh had a good case. P. thinks she’s left him. There was nowhere to go with the operation except the kidnapping route. The State makes its peculiar demands. And B. has been the P. most opposed to me. State or no State, it’s good to get her out of P.’s life.”

“So she’s just lying over there drugged?”

“I wish. I told him to drug her. I told him very plainly. He said it won’t work in the story. He’s posing as an Iranian psychopath. He needs a story because eventually, of course, he’ll have to let her go.”

“After the election. After P. has played his part.”

“Presumably.”

“But this must mean—What will he do after he’s let her go?”

Jammu laid an anchovy on the side of her plate.

“You’re sending him back?” Asha said.

“He’s going back.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Jammu, chewing, said, “I can stand it.” She swallowed. “He’s different these days. He has a very narrow set of concerns, and he’s always sniping at me. He’s too involved in the P. operation. I told him to hire a thug to kidnap B. He wouldn’t. And everything in the name of doing the job right. As if trusting a chain and some locked doors to restrain B. were doing the job right.”

“Why so bitter, Ess?”

Jammu shrugged. Singh was going back. By kidnapping Barbara himself he’d burned the bridges. This is America, Chief. Pretty soon you’ll have to leave off with the clandestine stuff or you’re going to get caught. When you stop, you won’t need me. I don’t like being in this country. It makes me feel bad. If I thought you wouldn’t survive without me, I wouldn’t kidnap her. If I even thought you might miss me a little. Every arrival is a departure, Chief. You’ll find me in Bombay if you need me.

“It’s Saturday morning. We’ve made savage love at dawn and I’ve gone off to the Midwest for the weekend to work on a story. You get up late, shower away my smell, and go out for a walk. You pick up the clothes you’ve had dry-cleaned. Buy a grapefruit, a couple of bagels, and a pound of fresh-ground Colombian. Yum. Smell it. You come back and eat. Have a cigarette and ‘collect yourself.’ It’s a partly cloudy day, not too cold. We’re twelve floors up, remember, and the traffic is very distant. You think about what has happened to your life. How so much has changed in five days, and what the next few months will bring. You wonder what you’re going to do with yourself while I’m away. Find a job? Write a book? Be a journalist like me? Take a screen test? You’re a little lonely, but it’s exciting. It’s a new kind of loneliness. You think about Luisa. She must have had Saturday mornings like this at Duane’s, must still be having them. How new everything must seem to her. You gather your courage because you want to call her. You think about Martin’s birthday party, and the scene you had with him in front of her. You think this might be the best way of explaining to her how it’s happened that you’ve left him. You want to explain that you of all women don’t have to take whatever your husband gives you. That some things are simply beyond the pale. You don’t want Luisa to get the idea you’ve left him for purely selfish reasons. Of course, you’re nervous, because you have a lot to explain to her, and because if you say any of the things I’ve told you not to say or if I think you’re speaking in code I’m going to kill you and she’s going to hear it. But you pick up the phone.”

Nissing tapped the phone with the muzzle of his gun. Then he leaned back in his folding chair, and Barbara, in hers, facing
him, picked up the receiver. The dial tone made her jump a little. Her eyes followed the phone cord across the carpeted floor of her cell to the locked door. The arrangement was the same as it had been the first day, when she’d called her supervisor at the library. She heard Nissing breathing, heard a cooing on the skylight above her.

“And you dial, of course. Three one four—”

She dialed the area code and paused, listening to the longdistance surf.

“You simply couldn’t live with him anymore.”

She dialed the rest of Duane’s number.

“You lean back in my leather chair. It’s already a favorite.”

Duane answered.

“Hi Duane, it’s Barbara’s Probst.”

Nissing raised his eyebrows sharply at the slip. He held a monitor plug in his ear with the index finger of his left hand. In his other hand he held the gun. The safety catch, a metal flag, was off. In five days she’d learned when it was and when it wasn’t.

“She just went out,” Duane was saying. “Can you call back in an hour?”

Nissing nodded.

“Yes, of course. I’ll call back. How is everything?”

Nissing smiled with approval.

“Fine,” Duane said. “Nothing much changes. Things are pretty good. I, uh—you’re in New York?”

“Yes. I’m in New York. I guess Luisa must have spoken to her father. I—” The gun was shaking its muzzle. “I’ll call you back in an hour, then. You can tell her I called.”

“I will. She’ll be glad.”

“Thanks, Duane.”

Nissing took the receiver from her hand. “You’re disappointed,” he said. “You’d psyched yourself. Your hand stays poised, reflectively, on the phone, and while your adrenaline is up you decide to make that call to Martin you’ve been dreading. If it goes well, you’ll call Audrey, too. You feel sorry for Martin, not having your address. He’ll want to know where not to send letters.”

RC was cremating Clarence, he was in a groove, he was a juggernaut in gym shorts. As he took his sixth straight point with a fader in the corner, Clarence slapped his thigh and laughed: “What’s happening to me?” In reply, RC served a high hard one. Clarence pivoted and stumbled, flailing at the ball, letting the score advance to 9-1. RC drilled his next serve flat off the wall and back at Clarence, who threw up his arms to protect his face. “Time! Time!” RC bounced on his feet to keep his rhythm going and watched impersonally as his opponent dropped to his knees. “Your game,” Clarence gasped.

RC wasn’t even winded. He ripped the Vel off the Cro of his handball gloves and stretched his punished fingers. From the other courts came grunts and rumbles, heavy shuffling, the erratic ponk! Ponk! of racquetballs, squash balls, handballs. Clarence was still kneeling and shaking his head, as if heaping abuse on himself for losing could make him a winner. He rose resignedly. “Let’s get cleaned up, Off-sir.”

They climbed through the little door and walked down the passageway single file to the showers. You had to pay for fresh towels here. Clarence took two from the man in the cage and gave one to RC. There were red threads in his eyes. “Played a damn
fine match,” he said. He turned back to the man in the cage. “My brother-in-law played a damn fine match, Corey.”

RC would have sworn the look he got from Corey was dirty.

He stepped under a shower head and faced the wall, as usual, to avoid the sight of Clarence’s layered back flesh and the profile of his hairy gut. As the hot water poured, he blinked and rotated his head, his vision like a movie where the cameraman dropped the camera, tumbling, blurring together glimpses of tiled floor and reaching steam, toes and elbows, a third man showering two heads over. The sound track was courtesy of Clarence, who was singing.

Today was the fourth day of February, which would make tonight the fourth night for RC and Annie in their new apartment in University City. They’d moved on Wednesday with one of Clarence’s trucks, and by now they’d emptied all the boxes except the ones with broken toys at the bottom, or summer equipment, the barbecue tools, the snorkel and fins. RC couldn’t complain about the new building itself. There was a nice mix of people in it. But the footsteps above him and the voices downstairs were busy and foreign, and the rooms were just rooms. He felt like a TV actor sitting at a table that was plunked down wherever, using forks and spoons from a box of props. His actions lacked smoothness, he couldn’t make things work the way they’d worked a week ago. Last night, when he and Annie were watching
Saturday Night Live
on the living-room couch, he’d reached over and taken off her glasses. Immediately the TV laughed, and Annie grabbed her glasses back and put them on crooked. She straightened them. “I can’t
see
.”

“What do you need to see for?” RC flopped onto the bare floor and stuck his head in the middle of the screen. “It’s me,” he said. “Live from U-City.”

Annie leaned to one side. “Richie get out of the way.”

“We have some very special guests tonight—”

“Get out of the
way
.” She sat tight in the gray light, her legs folded up underneath her and her arms crossed across her sweat-
shirt. She’d been tired for two months, ever since she took a job with one of the new companies in the old neighborhood. She’d learned word processing. Words like: I’m fatigued, RC. There’s a psychological toll. We’re a two-career household now…. But if she was fatigued, RC was even more so. He’d come home at 10:00 after a long shift on patrol and two hours of desk work.

“So OK,” he said. “OK.”

“Richie don’t.”

“Hey, don’t mind me.”

He put on his coat. Annie kept watching the TV while they played games with the blame. She asked him where he was going, and he remembered that they weren’t in the old neighborhood anymore. They were in U-City. He didn’t know where he was going. “Walking,” he said.

Annie stuck her tongue out at him, and he almost laughed, which was the idea; his mouth twitched, but the laugh came out as a cough. “You get some sleep,” he said. “You get all nice and rested.”

Outside, he hurried up the street. After a few blocks, as the buildings grew larger, institutional, he started seeing students. In the few lighted windows there were test tubes, blackboards, gray enamel instruments, computer screens. Girls in jeans and long wool coats pulled a little closer together when they passed him. He veered down a path among trees, away from the buildings, and cut across the snow on the big front lawn that led down to Skinker. At the top of the hill, to his right, stood the crenellated towers you could see from the golf course when the leaves were down. He reached the walk that split the lawn in two, and stopped and leaned against a tree. The shower poured on him, the water so hot it felt cold. Clarence changed key.

RC was eighteen years old when he finally licked his older brother Bradley wrestling. They had a mat, a mattress they’d saved from a hide-a-bed broken by him and Bradley using it as a tram
poline. It lay on the floor of the storeroom off the garage in their mother’s house. Bradley was a varsity wrestler at school and used the room as his workout salon. When he dropped out of school to be assistant manager at a Kroger, he kept the salon. Besides the mat, he had a set of barbells he’d found two-thirds complete by the side of a road, and a bench press he’d bought with the part of his paycheck he didn’t hand over to their mother. The room’s two windows, looking into the dark garage, were filled with his beercan collection. Under a loose floorboard was a Sterno can that never ran out of dope, and all around the baseboards ran a white dusting of DDT from a rotten cardboard can off a shelf in the garage. DD-Tox was the brand name. The dying bugs in the picture on the can were black with white eyes.

It was June. Bradley had taken to sleeping in the little room and partying there with his buddies. The transistor, always tuned to KATZ, was playing posthumous Otis Redding on the Sunday afternoon when RC crossed through their back yard, past the nasturtiums his mother tried to make grow every summer, past five kids’ worth of towels and underwear, the netless hoop and Brad’s Dodge, and knocked on the wall. He needed a room for the night.

“What for?” Bradley asked.

“Fiona.”

“Mama won’t like that.”

“Mama won’t know.”

Bradley had a perverse reverence for certain rules. He smiled. “You can take my car keys.”

“I want a room.” RC was a determined kid. He had plans, images of scenes, how they should go.

“I’ll rassle you for it.”

“What’s it to you, Brad? What’s one night?”

“I’ll rassle you for it.”

They kicked the magazines off the mat and stripped to their underpants. RC got points for a takedown, but they weren’t counting. On, the mat, his fingers sought the borders of his brother’s rounded muscles, any groove or bone or ligament to get a grip on. He locked the crook of his arm in the crook of Bradley’s knee and pushed with all his might, his neck bending and his cheeks to Bradley’s ribs and his lungs filling with the smell, scalpy and strong,
which he’d thought was Bradley’s distinctive smell, the smell of the sheets in the bunk above him, until he turned twelve and started to smell that way himself. Bradley had never looked pretty in wrestling meets. His style was defensive, the turtle’s tactic of stomach flush with the ground and back unassailable. It didn’t look like the way a man should wrestle; the other school would murmur and boo him until, when his opponent changed grips, Bradley exploded, often lifting the boy clear off the mat and heaving backwards, pinning him immediately. So RC was wary. He got Bradley to his side and turned him around in a full circle. The mat’s buttons tore at his skin. He thought Bradley’s puffing was just suppressed laughter, he thought Bradley wasn’t trying, and then suddenly, for the first time in his life, he had both his brother’s shoulders on the mat and words were coming out his mouth, four, five,
SIX, SEVEN
, triumphant and surprised, as if he’d won the room purely by chance, and he realized Bradley had been fighting after all.

Bradley giggled a frightening thin giggle, slapped the mat, pointed. “You beat me, bro!” His eyes were beaded slashes. “You beat me clean.”

That night, while his mother and sisters slept, RC wrestled with Fiona like a real man in a real bed. With space to roll in, smells and liquids and limbs could intermingle. He licked yeasty, vinegary, salty flavors off her belly (in fifteen years she’d be obese, a teller at a Mercantile branch that RC avoided), his tongue gliding without friction and then lodging in her navel. She scooted into him, making noise. He closed his fingers over her mouth and bent them backwards. Sex is in the mind, RC. Later on he watched her fall asleep. The room was stuffy as a jar, and looking at Fiona’s rump and shoulders and neck, he saw how pretty girls, without changing, might not be pretty anymore. Just lyin’ there. It was horrible. That these curves would stay curves but empty of meaning. That Annie could be a brittle bitch in glasses, too boring to even fight with. He put on his shorts and went out walking in the alleys, through ragweed and rodents. The soles of his bare feet were thick enough to take the chips of broken glass.

Somebody’s dog barked.

It was July, and the garage room was his now, Bradley gone to war. RC smoked through the contents of the Sterno can with
new girls and took shit from the activists for not getting involved. It was September, October, November, and Bradley, without seeing action, became a number. Drowned, in ten feet of water, in an ambushed APC.

RC’s own number—twenty-two—came up. In February, at Fort Leonard Wood, he overheard a conversation between lieutenants. “He’s a bright kid. His brother came home in a coffin two months ago.” He found himself transferred, a typist, the only black soldier on the infirmary staff. He almost took it for granted. He was a bright kid.

A pair of headlights towed a car across the lawn, approaching him over the snow. The bumper stopped a yard from his knees. White uniformed men, campus security, got out. “What can we do for you?” one of them said.

“I’m fine,” RC said. “How ’bout yourself?”

“You here for any reason?”

“Just taking a walk, thank you.”

“You want to get in the car?”

“I said I was fine, thank you.”

“We’ll give you a ride.”

“Thanks but no thanks.”

“Let’s get in the car.”

“I’m taking a walk, man. I’m a St. Louis cop.”

The other man spoke. “Just get in the car, boy.”

“RC, you be turning into a prune.” Clarence, flushed and dripping, wound his soap-on-a-rope around his wrist. The shower room was quiet, RC’s water splashing in a solitary way. He turned it off, and they went to dress.

“Something on your mind?” Clarence said.

“Nah. Just stuff. The move and everything. It’s like we’re some sort of refugees.”

“You mean the off-sir ain’t happy?”

“Cut it out.”

“Never thought I’d see the day.”

For three months Clarence had been saying he’d never thought he’d see the day. The day the
bright kid
complained. RC pulled his shoes off. “Are you really sorry I’m a cop?” he said.

“Me? Sorry?” Clarence went to a mirror and teased his hair.
“Sorry? Me?” With a finger he dabbed at the skin behind his ear and along his jawbone. “I’m just sorry if you’re taken in by all the hoopli-do.”

Sitting on the bench, RC discovered how tired he was. “No hoopli-do,” he said. “I just don’t see what your problem with Jammu is.”

“Right. You just don’t see. Neither does Ronald, which is the reason I’m so pissed with him.”

“You pissed with me?”

Clarence sighed. “You don’t count. It’s Ronald has the mayoral aspirations. He thinks he’s got a future, and in the county too, no less, just because Jammu says he does. I been feeling almost sorry for him. He’s underestimated that woman, same as you’ve overestimated her.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I mean it’s the same thing. She doesn’t give a damn about you or Ronald or anybody else. She’s just a bomb. She’s going off, and it’s us who take the brunt of it, ’cause we happen to live here. Look at the hospital thing. For twenty years we been fighting for Homer G., and now we got a promise from everybody who matters, and this time it’s not just one of Schoemehl’s promises to do a study. They’re really going to save the place, signed sealed and delivered, and now everybody says Hooray! We’re gonna vote for this merger! We’re gonna vote for Jammu and Wesley and Ronald! And shit, RC,
they’s so blind
. Because that ain’t gonna be our hospital anymore. It’ll be a first-class white folks’ hospital, because that’ll be a first-class white folks’ neighborhood. The whole city’s gonna be first class, but whose it gonna be? You’re already in U-City. You’re already gone. You think you ever gonna make it back? You’re in the county now. You think a merger’s gonna do you a damn bit of good? But you’re still a city cop, and I bet you, RC, I bet you, you’ve been thinking it be a good idea to vote yes in April, because Jammu says so and her word is law. Am I right?”

RC pulled his pants on. “You know I ain’t even registered, Clarence.”

Every time it looked as if they might talk about RC’s life, Clarence turned it into politics. Just like the Panthers fifteen years ago, just like everybody, always. All the things that happened to
him, floating into his present out of what had been the future, all the death and moving, the jobs and breaks good and bad, the turns of his life—these all had to be part of something bigger. You weren’t allowed to have a life that belonged to you unless you belonged to the majority. It wasn’t fair. All his life he’d known it wasn’t fair, and he’d tried to ignore it, tried to play the man of independent means. Only now did he see what Clarence and the rest of them were driving at.