Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

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.

Dear John ,

“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.

The air of the room tasted clear and clean. All things considered, Rolf was well pleased with his condition. Gelatron, and now Houstonics as well, were his. And the level of indebtedness was so low it made him blush. The Texas immovables of Gelatron and Houstonics had been sold in a highly favorable tax context, while the companies moved into Ripley-owned property in Saint Louis, thus avoiding any need to sell out in Saint Louis and take the tax punishment there. The corporation had grown painlessly. Even Martin Probst’s conversion to the pro-city point of view could not diminish Rolf’s pleasure in the maneuvers — because all at once, as if he’d awakened from deep sleep, Rolf didn’t care a jot about what Martin did. He could have his Barbie back now (if he could find her, tee hee). Rolf was well pleased. It was not just any man who could fund a sexual theme park and sample the wares of the man down the street. Nor could just any man have cut his losses so neatly when at length he grew sick of it and shut it down. Rolf was even more admired for his timely bailouts than for his shrewd acquisitions. Devi had left his life — at a cost to the contingencies fund of nothing but a few hundred dollars in cash and ten minutes of his secretary’s time spent reporting the theft of his plastic. And for once Jammu had been a dashed good sport about things, informing him on Wednesday that Devi was addicted to drugs and reminding him that as an illegal alien she had no rights. It was a likely thing, of course, that Jammu had finally realized Devi was stealing her secrets. Jammu wasn’t one to perform selfless favors.

Now Tammy, on the other hand…She stirred, rolling onto her side. A delectable boobie looked Rolf in the eye. She was a stewardess with Ozark. One of Rolf’s goals in life was to take a girl in the bathroom of a commercial airliner at 30,000 feet, and he was sure that he could now look forward to fulfilling that goal. There was much to look forward to in life, and little to regret. Ripleycorp today stood on the firmest financial footing it had known in twenty years, footing that would only get firmer in the future, now that Ripley had replaced Wismer and General Syn as the pacesetting industrial giant in Saint Louis. His profit motive had lost none of its potency. In fact, if he didn’t fall asleep soon he’d have to wake Tammy up; she’d be too impressed to be cranky.