The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (54 page)

The phone was ringing, and he read no more. He could guess who was calling.

“It takes guts to do what Martin did,” Buzz Wismer said.

Friday had passed without Martin’s having backed away at all from the severe pro-merger stance he’d adopted on Thursday. It was Saturday now, and Martin had been selected at the eleventh hour to deliver the keynote speech at the pro-merger rally to be held on the Mall downtown at three o’clock.

“It takes real guts,” Buzz repeated. With a spoon he depressed the cheese skin on the French onion soup Bev had taken out of the oven. He wanted lunch, but lunch was molten and dangerous. The single-serving earthenware crock was too hot to touch. “Yes sir,” he said, pinching his napkin in hungry frustration. “It takes real guts.”

Bev cut the cheese strands out from under her raised spoon with a stoned-wheat cracker and took her first bite. Her mouth slackened at the corners. He heard the unwillingness in her swallow. She coughed, explosively, and gagged. Something in her throat. He leaned across the table to slap her on the back but she waved him away, coughing and shaking her head. When she’d recovered, she picked up her crock with a pot holder and set it in the sink. She sat down and broke a cracker in two.

“You shouldn’t have made yourself any if you weren’t going to eat it,” Buzz said.

“It takes guts all right,” she said. “Now that he’s done it, you can do it too. Right? Now that he’s done the hard part. You can follow suit. It would take guts
not
to. Wouldn’t it.” She’d broken each half cracker into halves. Four equal squares lay on her place
mat. She took another cracker from the basket. “You can follow suit. If he leads clubs, you play a club. Just follow suit. Except for the fun part. Barbara made that easier for him. Didn’t she.”

She swept the eight squares of cracker into a cupped hand and went and dropped them in the wastebasket. Buzz managed a bite of soup, shuttling it around inside his mouth before it could burn anything too badly. He took a gulp of Guinness. Bev sat. “I’d like to help you, Buzz, I honestly would. I’m your helpmeet. But there’s no one in sight to take me off your hands. Not for miles around.”

“Maybe you should lie down.”

“I just got up.”

“Oh.”

Once he’d emptied the crock, he got hers from the sink and ate most of her soup, too. She served him a large slice of Grand Marnier-impregnated Bundt cake for dessert. (Her cooking was too rich for him, but it gave her something to do, measuring the substantial pounds of butter, the substantial cupfuls of grated cheese.) He put the crocks in the dishwasher, making a mental note to check after the dishwasher had run to see if it had actually cleaned the crusted cheese from the rims. (Their latest maid had quit after six days.) It was one o’clock. He gargled with Listerine and put on a leather jacket and called to Bev that he was leaving for the office. She came to the front door with a glass of sherry on ice.

“I guess I’ll see you when I see you,” she said. “Guess I’ll be seeing you around. Be seeing you. See you later.”

He smiled. “I won’t be gone that long.”

There was no practical reason for Buzz to copy Martin and make public statements in support of the referendum. The campaign had for all intents and purposes come to an end at noon on Thursday. It was now just a matter of waiting another nine days until it was official. Nevertheless, Buzz wanted to do something. In the first place, it never hurt one’s public image and executive credibility to be on the winning side. In the second place, Martin had done a brave thing, and Buzz felt that giving him his full support was the least he could do to make it up to him (“it” was a litany of shadowy, late-night offenses). In the third place, there was Asha. As he drove up the road to headquarters he saw a cream-colored Rolls-Royce idling in the middle of the vast empty parking lot, and
as he coasted up to it he could almost hear the news: Edmund “Buzz” Wismer, chairman of the board of Wismer Aeronautics, today stunned the city by announcing his intention to move his operations, based for the last forty years in suburban St. Louis County, to downtown St. Louis. The announcement, following on the heels of a related announcement by Wismer’s longtime friend and confidant Martin Probst, comes at a time when Asha was growing impatient with him. Her engine was running, after all, and he wondered whether if he’d come a few minutes later she still would have been here. From the smile on her internationally renowned face, however, Wismer can tell she was glad she’d waited.

The countdown to Election Day had entered the single figures. On the whole, Probst’s former allies at Municipal Growth and Vote No had shown commendable understanding and patience with him, at least to judge by their silence. Partly, no doubt, they were recalling his refusal to sully himself with the practicalities of the campaign. They wouldn’t miss his labors, and he’d made himself so unlikable (he knew this) that not many would miss him personally either. Beyond that, St. Louisans naturally respected well-reasoned changes of heart, even surprising and hurtful changes, and perhaps especially in the case of a man with a reputation so unimpeachable. People were used to Probst by now. Their latest reaction, as he imagined it, amounted to an Oh jeez, Martin Probst, he’s done it again. As usual, events had conspired to keep his actions in character.

By Sunday night there remained only one last unpleasant task. He had to clean out his desk at Vote No headquarters and turn in his keys. He’d put it off as long as was seemly, and then a little longer still; it was midnight by the time he left the house on Sherwood Drive.

The night was warm. He pulled on a switch to lower all four of the Lincoln’s windows, allowing in air that had risen off soft, recuperating lawns and banks of daffodils and jonquils and snowdrops. Spring had come all at once and in full force, having sent no red herrings in February or January. This spring, the city had earned.

Probst had read Pokorny’s document cover to cover, and he hadn’t been afraid to test Jammu on every point. These were serious charges. She understood that she had to answer them, and she did, over IHOP pancakes Friday morning, over a dinner at Tony’s on Saturday. He studied her for the least sign of vagueness or bluff. He observed none.

“You have to understand the context, Martin. Devi Madan is a twenty-three-year-old who had the misfortune, sometime in September, of falling into the hands of a very experienced and unscrupulous abuser of young women. The first thing Ripley did was take away her passport, supposedly for safekeeping. He installed her in the Airport Marriott, and he left her there. Even after her passport stamp expired he wouldn’t let her go home to Bombay. That’s where I came in. As Joe Feig pointed out in his feature last month, a good many Indians have immigrated to St. Louis, and one of the reasons they’re coming here appears to be me. Families that want to leave India for America find out that St. Louis has welcomed at least one Indian, namely me, in a big way. So then they come here and immediately they find themselves in all sorts of trouble, some of it with the law but most of it with the customs and language and institutions and impersonality of the place. And in India there’s a very old tradition of intercession. At any agency you go to in Bombay you’ll find mediators who for a fee which is sometimes reasonable but usually not will fix things for you with the bureaucrats inside. That’s not how it works in St. Louis, though, so to all these Indians here, especially the ones like Devi who really are in bad shape, I’ve been the next best thing to a paid mediator. Not to compare myself to Mrs. Gandhi, but she also used to devote time every week to hearing the grievances of ordinary people. It was a Mogul tradition she reactivated, in her regal way. Devi certainly isn’t the only one I’ve had to take care of, although she is one of the ones I’ve seen the most of, up until a few weeks ago. I suppose Pokorny doesn’t mention that she’s finally been able to fly home to Bombay, after I did everything but have Ripley arrested as a thief.”

“Including blackmailing him?”

She took the question seriously. “I’m not a blackmailer, Martin. On the other hand I’m not as pure as you are. I can tell you
exactly to what extent Devi figured in some of the moves Ripley made.”

“Save it.”

In deference to Norris, he hadn’t let her see the actual report. (Not that she’d shown any interest in seeing it.) He’d sliced it in two, lengthwise, with Carmen’s paper cutter, and disposed of the halves in two trash cans, one at work and one at home.

There were no lights in the windows of the office on Bonhomme Avenue. Probst parked, took the elevator, and let himself in, turning on the lights. The place was dead. It looked deserted for more than just the night.

He began to load sheaves of yellow legal-sized paper into his briefcase, the drafts of his old speeches. As souvenirs he took some Vote No pencils, an SX-70 snapshot of him at his desk (working hard, his head bowed), and a copy of every document he’d had a hand in writing. He took down the picture of Luisa Duane had given him. He left all the drawers half open as a sign. Then he sat down to write John Holmes a note to leave with the keys.

“Don’t bother.”

Probst jumped in his chair and turned to see Holmes himself, unshaven, in shirtsleeves, standing at his shoulder.

“Sorry if I scared you.”

“It’s all right,” Probst said. “I—”

“Yeah. I went out for a drink.” Holmes took a seat on his desk, leaving one foot on the floor. “Pretty quiet here, isn’t it?”

“It’s late.”

“A week ago there were still plenty of people around after midnight, even on a Sunday.” Holmes smiled. “We’ve lost a lot of volunteers in the last three days.”

“My fault?”

“Your fault. Evidently.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to lay any guilt trip on you. But in some way you might be pleased to know it meant a lot to have you in our corner here.”

“Thanks, John.”

“And for purely selfish reasons, I’m loath to complain. You and I are both off the hook now.”

“How so?”

“This should be the last campaign I’ll be asked to run, and the last one you’ll be asked to work for.”

Grateful for the joke, Probst said, “You think anyone suspects we planned it this way?”

Holmes looked into the fluorescent lights. “I’ll take your keys now, Martin.”

Soft snores made their way into Rolf’s ears from under the pillows to his right. An unfamiliar clock radio was blinking at him, and a framed photo of middle-aged parents cast its benignancy upon the bed. He’d surfaced suddenly, his blue somnolence vanishing like liquid oxygen as he shed it. He was wide awake. A divan and a love seat loomed beyond the bunched bedspread and its lacy fringe, in the living end of this living room-cum-bedroom. It was too dark to make out the words on the piece of embroidery hanging by the kitchenette door, but he remembered its message: Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life. That was the kind of girl Tammy was. Rolf had revealed to her that the feminine orgasm was a mere figment of fashion-magazine editors’ imaginations. True, perhaps a certain sort of woman did feel something like…Tammy wasn’t that sort of girl. She’d believed him. She’d found it to be true.