The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (59 page)

A fat man in sunglasses was toiling up the alley with a soggy cardboard box. Jammu went to the door.

Singh entered her front door glaring at her, panting, dripping. He’d put on three jackets and two pairs of pants, tucking them neatly under a set of overlarge clothes, and it looked like he’d stuffed a pillow under his shirts as well. Dried spit had caked in the corners of his mouth: the suffering man.

Jammu took the box from him and set it on the floor. “You’re going back now to close up that apartment?”

“It’s nearly closed,” he said. “I’ve changed a few things.”

“In the apartment?”

“In the plan as well. I’m no longer psychopathic or Iranian. I couldn’t sustain it.”

“
Now
you tell me.” Jammu turned in a full circle on her heel. “How long has this been going on?”

“Quite a while. She thinks I’m straight with her now. She feels an allegiance—”

“An affection, an attraction, a tenderness—”

“She won’t tell Probst the real story when she gets out. She’ll say she’s been living in New York with John Nissing. She’s that proud. And yes, there’s affection.”

Jammu stared into his sunglasses. He was crazy to think a plan like this was good enough for her. She’d never met Barbara, but she knew her. She’d ruin everything. The solution was more obvious than ever.

“It made all the more sense,” Singh continued, “as soon as
Probst refused to get involved with you sexually. There’s no other woman in his life, nothing to make her angry, and certainly no Indian woman to make her suspicious.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I guarantee you this was the only way to play her.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Then you shouldn’t have left Bombay.”

“You shouldn’t have snatched her.”

“You might not be winning this election if I hadn’t.”

“All right.” There was nothing more to say. Jammu raised her hands for some kind of farewell contact with him, an embrace or a handshake, but he left her standing. He limped down the stairs, wheezing and obese.

Probst was spending the day at the office to keep his mind off the election and to let the company know he was still its president and guiding spirit. He was revising timetables for his first, cautious entry into the downtown building spree, a pair of North Side office projects on which ground would be broken in May. Carmen typed speedily at her desk.

It pleased him to spot in the timetables a number of redundancies and avoidable delays which even Cal Markham had overlooked; it demonstrated that he still had a function in the company and it drove home the reason: he had great intelligence and experience. How easily a man could lose sight of this. How easily, when his home and milieu fell apart, he could disdain the consolations of pure activity, pure work, the advancement of physical and organizational order.

Of course, he could also see that for thirty years he’d worked too hard, could see himself in hindsight as a monstrosity with arms and hands the size of Volkswagens, legs folded like the treads of a bulldozer, and his head, the true temple of the soul, a tiny black raisin on top of it all. He’d failed as a father and husband. But if anyone had ever tried to tell him this he would have shouted them down, since the love he felt for Barbara and Luisa at the office had never waned. He had a heart. All the things he’d been unable to throw away, all the memorabilia and useful spares and fixable
wares, these objects and annals of childhood and honeymoon, early and later parenthood—he’d saved them all in the hope of one day finding time to participate more fully in the stages they represented.

But he wouldn’t change. He loved Jammu because she accomplished things. With her he’d start afresh, wise enough never to expect the opportunity to resurrect the past. A year from now they’d be living together, not in a house (what did he really care about gardens?) but in a spacious modern condominium on Hanley Road or Kingshighway to which they would both return late in the evening, and in which there would be no junk.

All women were equal in the eyes of the airlines, except maybe those with babies or wheelchairs. Floating above the earth, flight attendants brought her pillows, blankets, drinks. The only problem was between flights, when she couldn’t tilt her seat back and the ground made her knees wiggle. But all it took to get back in the air was cash, and cash had been as simple as selling most of her strength to the boyfriend of the maid at the Marriott, until suddenly she found herself in Edinburgh with only enough to last through the coming weekend and too few pounds and two silly friends who were trying to kill her. They’d all been flying and flying in a huge misunderstanding. She flew for the pleasure and the dinners in their comprehensible plastic trays, while her friends believed it was a chase. As far as she was concerned, their intent to kill her had merely provided an itinerary.

Now she was home again, bewildering the immigration officer by brushing through the gate and running away and disappointing the cabdriver because she had no suitcase to tip him extra for. There had been bewilderment and disappointment in her friend’s eyes in the Edinburgh ladies’ room when he’d opened the stall where she’d left her tall boots standing and turned around right into the blade which she, in bare feet, stood holding against his neck. He’d pulled the trigger anyway, and she couldn’t be blamed for the gurgling in his windpipe, or for the funny pop the gun made when the other friend came in afterwards and fell to the floor, which was dirty. They were terrorists. If Rolf could have seen her saving her life like that, her cool practicality, he would have been so proud and would have knelt and kissed her hands. But logically she knew she
was losing everything. When she shot up she dozed without sleeping, and though they didn’t bother her, that gurgle and that pop never left her. They were waiting for her strength to fail. How much misery could a living woman deaden before she stopped wanting to? She remembered when Devi was thirteen on an exciting vacation with her parents when they visited a beauty consultant in Paris and the Alhambra in Spain and the pyramids in Egypt. She’d never seen anything as heavy as the great chops, built by slaves. Now the cabdriver was stopping to let her try her luck with her signature at Webster Groves Trust, where she hoped she had an account and people knew her or at least were trusting. That was all she really wanted, for people to treat her right. Because no one did. Everything was the great chops turned upside down with its point pressing into her.

Five stories below the windows of Buzz’s office, on the drive outside the main entrance, reporters laughed in groups of three and four, making a social event of their siege. Buzz had tried to reach Asha at all the numbers she’d given him. Nobody knew where she was. In his one hour of greatest need she was unavailable. He grew desperate and indiscriminate and tried calling Bev. She didn’t answer, though she’d indicated she’d be at home all day, as Miriam Smetana had canceled their luncheon date for reasons unclear at the time. Perhaps the media had been pestering Bev as well and she’d simply unplugged the phone.

“We’ll have to continue this on Thursday,” Jammu told her district commanders. Stiffly, the nine majors returned the narrow chairs to their places against the walls and took their leave singly, clogging the doorway like marbles in a funnel.

As she’d expected, Singh was close to the phone in his place across the river. “What now,” he said.

“Gopal just called from London. Devi’s taken care of, but they got her to talk first, and it sounded like she’d sent a letter to Probst before she left. Probst was fine this morning, but I’m afraid the letter’s in his mailbox in Webster Groves.”

She waited. In the silence on the line she could feel Singh
thinking, weighing her story and deciding whether to believe her.

“What do you think she said?”

“Any letter at all is bad,” Jammu said. “The only way your release of Barbara works is if there’s no hitch, no suspicion of any kind.”

“This is the last thing I’m doing for you.”

“Thanking you in advance, then. But call me at three.”

In her purse was a hammer for the deed, and also a revolver in case Singh hadn’t really bought the story and hadn’t left the apartment. She stopped and told Mrs. Peabody that she was going to lunch with Mrs. Hammaker. Mrs. Peabody told her she must be starving. She went out into the drizzle, unlocked Car One, and drove south to the brewery, where Asha had left a Sentra for her without knowing the reason. Once in the Sentra, she put on a curly red wig. The disguise was token; Singh’s building stood on a block where, day or night, she’d never seen another soul.

At 2:45 Sam and Herb arrived in East St. Louis. Five minutes later they located the last item in their catalogue, a fireproof storage warehouse. It had no windows, but it did have skylights, in which, from a block away, against rainclouds, they could see light.

As they pulled closer, they saw someone enter.

“That’s him!” Sam said. “That’s Nissing. They’re in there.”

Herb parked the station wagon behind a deserted filling station across the street and down a hundred yards. It was the only cover for blocks around, clear out to the surrounding expressways. He and Sam forced entry to the office with a wrecking bar, bringing gray light to bear on plaster rubble, fallen ceiling tiles, roaches, glass daggers, Fram and STP stickers, a 1977 Pennzoil calendar. They carried in two folding chairs. They set up the video camera and the infrared source, aiming both through a chink in the boards on the glassless windows, and while Herb went back out for the thermos and field telephone, Sam peered up the street at the target, a tall and slender building, a castle in this barbarian wilderness. He focussed the camera and settled in to wait. There was no place left to go.