The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (43 page)

It made no sense. The conspiracy was a substanceless region of pungency, maddening him. It had no flanks, no promising point of entry, promised nothing within. But it was instinct that had won Norris his silver stars in the war, and instinct told him how to pursue his theory now.

Working his federal connections to the bone, he got his hands on the USIA’s list of Indian visa recipients and other India-originated entries to the U.S. since June 1. It came on a diskette, delivered by messenger.

His private investigator, Herb Pokorny, specialized in detective telecommunications. Pokorny lisped as badly as platypuses would if they could talk, he’d run into all sorts of legal and linguistic obstacles while snooping in Bombay, but when he was working in St. Louis he was a good man. He tapped into airline ticketing records, into hotel reservations, car rentals, credit card and telephone and utility accounts. What emerged was a list of 3,700 Indians now living in the St. Louis area who hadn’t been there eight months ago. Even after children under eighteen were eliminated, the list had 1,400 entries. But Pokorny didn’t despair. Ordinary foreign immigrants left a signature on the records entirely different from the signature of spies, and while a few conspiring individuals might slip through his net, most wouldn’t. By mid-February the list contained fewer than a hundred names.

Pokorny’s operatives began a program of systematic surveillance. Prime targets were Jammu, Ripley, Wesley, Hammaker and Meisner. They paid especially close attention to Jammu’s office and apartment. (The apartment, they discovered, had an anti-break-in system for which Jammu appeared to change the magnetic card combinations daily. The good news was, she had something to hide. The bad news was, she was hiding it well.) All visitors to the parties under surveillance were identified and catalogued.

A net of connections began to emerge. The beast which Norris had been smelling for months began to take on shape.

Deft fieldwork by Pokorny turned up the source of the cordite used in the stadium bomb scare. The theft had occurred on August
7 in the warehouse of a blasting company based in Eureka, Missouri. The timing pointed plainly, for a change, to Jammu.

Then on February 15 Pokorny solved the mystery of Asha Hammaker’s early engagement. Speaking by phone with his brother Albert, who ran a detective bureau in New Orleans, Pokorny happened to bring up the mystery, how she’d already been engaged by the previous April. Albert chuckled and said: shrewd lady; in that very same April she’d been engaged to Potter Rutherford, the reigning sultan of securities in New Orleans. Immediately Pokorny got on the horn to all his nephews and cousins and uncles at their respective agencies across the country. By mid-evening, five of them had called back with corroborative evidence.

Pokorny phoned Norris, lisping liberally. “We’ve cracked it, Mythter Norrith. Asha got herthelf engaged to the motht eligible thun of a bitch in every town from Bothton to Theeattle.”

Norris clenched his fist in triumph. So that was it! But the fist came unclenched, his cosmic triumph giving way to injured local pride: if Jammu had been willing to go anywhere, then chance alone had brought her to St. Louis.

Probst was glad to have landed in the thick of the anti-merger crusade, but he wasn’t glad enough to be willing to act as director of Vote No, Inc. Directing a campaign was an endless, thankless job. John Holmes had directed the Prop One fight a few years back, and towards the end he was putting in more than sixty hours a week as he attended to the last-minute minutiae singlehandedly (he did the voice-overs for television ads, personally fetched the Kentucky Fried dinners for phone-a-thon volunteers), because when the heat was on no responsible director could delegate responsibility, or even find anyone to delegate it to. The failure of Prop One had brought Holmes many pats on the back, many dewy-eyed shows of gratitude. (“You deserve a month of R and R in Acapulco, old buddy.”) A week later, his work was utterly forgotten. In the partisan world, dedication earned a man a salary, and success a sinecure. In the nonpartisan world, the world of Municipal Growth and its causes, the sole reward was the opportunity to run the next campaign. This was what happened to John Holmes. Probst made him the executive director of Vote No, Inc.

Even so Probst wasn’t safe. When the campaign grew more demanding and the volunteers quit, he’d still be around and would probably get touched for some particularly odious job, such as recruiting new volunteers. Caution dictated that he determine the
boundaries of his role right away. He decided to see himself as a costly and essentially immobile fixture. He saw himself as an elephant.

Elephants weren’t very articulate. Probst did not participate in strategy sessions at Vote No, Inc. Elephants didn’t zip around, didn’t retrieve shotgunned ducks; Probst would not run errands for Holmes. Elephants were heavy, however, and Probst agreed to trample whatever influential needed trampling. When practicable, he did this by telephone, in the evenings, from his choice desk at Vote No headquarters on Bonhomme Avenue in Clayton. Often, though, he would rise majestically from his desk, nod across the room to Holmes (if Holmes wondered where he was going, he had to stand up and follow and ask, because Probst would not stop) and drive, at low speeds, to the home of the mayor of Richmond Heights, or the chancellor of Washington University, or the president of Seven-Up.

Since the night in January when Municipal Growth decided to fight it, Probst had become much more convinced of the wrongness of the merger. The driving economic force behind it—speculation—offended him profoundly. The North Side boom was built on paper, on being in the middle, on buying low and hoping, later, to sell high. The spirit of the renaissance was the spirit of the eighties: office
space
, luxury
space
, parking
space
, planned not by master builders but by financial analysts. Probst knew the kind of thing. And now that Westhaven had failed he could criticize.

He’d always spoken well when facing microphones, and he was at his best when he was angry. He alone, of all the faces on television, dared to mention the party aspects of the referendum. He alone employed elementary arguments. He described in calm detail the syndicate in which he’d chosen not to participate. (Grudgingly, the day after his statement, Mayor Wesley confirmed Urban Hope’s existence.) He stated that the referendum had been drafted far too hastily to allow a realistic assessment of its consequences. What was the rush? Why not postpone the election until a thorough study had been conducted? He stated that countyites should not trust the word of popular political figures. Did they believe that Jammu and Wesley cared personally about the quality of their lives? If so, where was the evidence? It was the Deplorable Question,
the charm that silenced politics. There was nothing the reporters could do but change the subject.

Afterwards, while showering or eating, Probst would feel his heart leap a little: he was an anarchist!

John Holmes didn’t complain about his approach. The phone polls revealed a steady swing of public opinion towards the Vote No camp, and since it was too early for anything besides Probst’s appearances to have made an impact, too early for massive advertising and door-to-dooring to have begun, the swing could be attributed only to Probst. Still, Probst did not feel loved. He was something apart, the self-styled elephant. He didn’t fraternize with the volunteers as he once might have done, never made late-evening doughnut runs. He sat at his choice desk and read
Time
and
Engineering News-Record
and the city papers. The polls had proved his value and he was learning—it was never too late to learn—to ask for what he wanted (a choice desk and no responsibilities), to claim the rewards of his unique position and not feel so damn guilty about it.

He was glad to have two full-time concerns. His days he spent at his office, his dinners he ate at Miss Hulling’s or First National Frank & Crust, often with his vice president Cal Markham, and his evenings he spent in the rented space on Bonhomme Avenue. The Sherwood Drive house—he thought of it as the Sherwood Drive house now, as if he’d lost custody of it and only visited to sleep—was nearly always empty. His days were full. Barbara had judged rightly. He didn’t really miss her, not after the first week. When people asked about her, he said she was on vacation in New York and let them wonder. It was in her absence that he’d learned to follow her example and say no to what he didn’t want and to wear his crown unabashedly. He could have done without her weekly phone calls.

SHE:
You’re home.

HE:
???

SHE:
I called earlier and there was no answer.

HE:
I wasn’t home.

SHE:
That’s what I said. You weren’t home.

HE:
No.

SHE:
You’re still angry, aren’t you?

HE:
What’s to be angry about?

SHE:
Well, I mean is there any point in my calling?

HE:
I wonder that myself. But it’s pretty quiet around here.

SHE:
Do you see Luisa?

HE:
We ate dinner on Thursday. She’s healthy. She’s into Stanford.

SHE:
I know. It’s funny to think. Have you spoken with Audrey?

HE:
They’re incommunicado, or whatever the expression. Rolf. gets to her first. It’s very complicated.

SHE:
So he’s still trying to screw you? Well of course why wouldn’t he be.

HE:
It’s very complicated.

SHE:
This is strange, Martin.

HE:
It’s very strange.

SHE:
I mean talking like this. Isn’t it strange?

HE:
Strange is the word all right.

Transcontinental hiss

SHE:
Are you in the middle of something? It sounds like I’m interrupting—

HE:
No. No. Very quiet around here.

But it was less quiet when he’d hung up, when he could talk to himself again. It was Saturday. Noon shadows cupped the potted plants on the kitchen windowsill. They were dying from the roots up. He’d directed Emerald to take care of them and she appeared to have overwatered.

He ate a large even number of Fig Newtons and two bananas. Then he drove to Clayton and sat at his desk, from which he had a view of Bonhomme Avenue to his right and a Formica partition at his back, screening him from the activities of the rank and file. There was no activity this afternoon. A male volunteer sat on the
desk of a female volunteer, a paid secretary waited for the phones to ring. Probst worked through the messages that had accumulated since Thursday.

At 4:00 he drove to Eldon Black’s home in Ladue to beg another donation. At 4:30 Black wrote him a check.

By 5:00 he was back at the Sherwood Drive house and dressing. Earlier in the week he’d finally procured a black-and-red-striped shirt of Egyptian cotton, like the General’s, and while he was waiting for his receipt from the Neiman salesgirl, a pair of prewashed black denim jeans attracted him. They completed the ensemble. They fit him well, hugging his butt and thighs as no pants of his had for years. The difference was remarkable. He looked forty. Thirty-nine, even.

But he had no shoes to match. Lunging, on his hands and knees, he pulled dusty shoes off the back of the rack in his closet. Everything was leisure or oxford or rubber-toed or tasseled.

He went down to the cardboard carton in the basement and burrowed through sixty pairs of footwear, shoes, fins, skates, rubbers, thongs, mukluks. They smelled like a condemned house. Green mildew had erupted on the leather. Many of the soles had holes.

He climbed three flights of stairs to one of the storage closets on the top floor. He had to clear magazines and business gifts out of the way, but at length he found what he wanted: the Exotic Shoe Collection. There were white espadrilles from Spain, embroidered Oriental mules, painted shoes from Holland, the three sets of clogs he’d bought for the family in Sweden, moccasins from the Sioux Veneer store in South Dakota, straw sandals from Mexico, alligator shoes from some Caribbean stopover, ballet slippers he’d never set eyes on before, and, just as he’d remembered, a pair of suede desert boots from Italy. Perfect.

In the car, the fashionable clothes surrounded him with a thin layer of self-awareness, like a cushion of air that reduced both the friction and the precision of his movements. The boots insisted on depressing the gas pedal further than necessary. Soon he was approaching the Arena, and the vapor plumes above it, white against the deepening twilight, were blotting out an ever larger arc of sky. He parked. The vapor came from a long column of grills set up
outside the Arena’s rear entrance. The grills were 55-gallon drums split in two and mounted on sawhorses. He read the plastic words on the marquee:
FIRST ANNUAL GREATER ST. LOUIS LIONS CLUB BARBECUE AND FISH FRY
.

Elephant, he told himself.

Tricolor bunting hung from the Arena’s rafters and the railings at the base of the seats. A portrait of a lion had replaced the scoreboard, and beneath it stretched a banner reading
LIONS
, each letter a capital with a lower-case tail, iberty, ntelligence, ur, ation’s, afety. On the floor, where Blues had lately skated, children and their parents sat eating at aluminum tables with white paper tablecloths. Well-barbered, well-shaven, well-fed men in dirty aprons moved back and forth through the rear doors like executive coolies, the inbound toting tubs heaped with brown food, the outbound holding empty tubs on their hips or thighs.
LEMONADE
, a banner at the serving tables declared.
SOFT DRINKS. SLAW
. At the foot of the podium beneath the giant lion a crowd of perhaps a thousand legs swished and mingled. Probst saw orange-and-yellow paper cups and a smattering of ceremonial hats. The noise was oddly subdued.

He checked his coat, laid a twenty on the ticket seller’s desk and walked away without waiting for his change. He wondered why the Lions hadn’t held their functions separately in their respective towns. There couldn’t possibly be many Chesterfielders willing to make the long trip in, especially with Route 40 out. It didn’t make sense.

It made sense. He was passing through the fringe of the standing group when he saw the reason: Jammu was here. She was sitting in the middle of a crescent of folding chairs occupied by Ronald Struthers, Rick Jergensen, Quentin Spiegelman, some men in uniform and some Lions in hats. Probst recognized Norm Hoelzer, president of the Webster Groves chapter.

Turning away, he searched the crowd around him for a friendly face and found one in Tina Moriarty, the press secretary at Vote No. His palms moistened. Tina stood embracing a clipboard and craning her neck. She was a dark, pretty woman in her late twenties, somewhat prone to an anchorwomanly glibness, perhaps, but humanized by her paid efforts on behalf of Vote
No (the underdog) and by her knees. It didn’t show when she walked or wore pants, but when she wore a skirt and stood still, her kneecaps became concavities and the backs projected. She approached Probst sideways and began to speak without looking at him.

“You’re here,” she said. “For a while I thought I’d be the only damn one. You see Jammu beat us here. It’s going to make things more difficult. You haven’t met her, have you? I just did. I’ll never wash this hand again. John was supposed to come at five and I haven’t seen him. Literally, I thought I’d be the only damn one. These affairs are obsolete, Mart. I swear they don’t affect the standings. This is not the press. This is not the public. This is the
Lions
. Goes to show how much I know, I thought the Lions were a carnival. Ringling Brothers, literally, a carnival. You understand my confusion. This is where the circuses come when they come, the Arena, formerly the Checkerdome, formerly the Arena. I guess maybe I saw one at some stadium once, the Shriners. At Wash U., the field there. That’s a nice shirt.”

“What are we going to do?” Probst said. After criticizing Jammu on TV he was more reluctant than ever to meet her.

“Press some flesh,” Tina said. “Wait, wait.” She held his shirtsleeve. “Don’t go anywhere yet. I don’t want to lose you. Oscar’s here somewhere, but I lost him. He’s got his equipment, so at least we’ll get some pix out of this. Butch Abernathy, he’s the organizer. President of the Hazelwood chapter? He was sitting with Jammu but he isn’t now. Be forewarned about the food, by the way. They’re heavy-handed in terms of salt. It’s a wonder these women aren’t literally blimps if they eat like this all the time. Let me write your name down, I’m getting paid for this. Probst. I love monosyllables for names. East meets west. At least you dress better than she does. But my hand, my God, I’ll never wash it. The weird thing is there’s nothing wrong with them. People talk about double-jointedness, but the word has no meaning. I’ve asked. It means literally nothing. This is one extreme within the range of normal. What you see is a hundred ninety degrees. Most are a hundred seventy. It’s a natural variation.”

A large hand gripped Probst’s left deltoid and drew his head towards Tina’s. Ross Billerica stuck his face between them and
kissed her cheek. After scanning the crowd he inclined his head confidentially. “We’ve got our work cut out for us, kiddos.”