Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

She reached for the telephone, precognitively, grasped the receiver and raised it so quickly that she heard only one grain of its granular ring. “Jammu,” she said. The needle of the wiretap detector she’d installed on Monday rested calmly on the zero.

“Can I talk?”

“Yes, Kamala.”

“Well, there isn’t any sign of her. But I wondered about the house in St. Charles.”

“Gopal goes there regularly.”

“I have no more ideas then.”

“It’s not your concern. We’ll find her. You catch your plane.”

“I hate to go when—”

“Catch your plane.”

“Yes, all right.”

“And go see my mother when you’re back, first thing.”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, Kamala.”

“Bye, Jammuji.”

And so the book on Allied Foods chairman Chester Murphy, opened in September, was closed at last. A visit from a Punjabi trade representative. A doctored X-ray at Barnes. A forged intra-hospital memo and two herbal poisons. And, finally, a desertion of Municipal Growth and the panicked purchase of South Side riverfront property. A neat job, to which Jammu had scarcely needed to pay attention.

Devi, on the other hand, had made a mess of her job. She’d called Jammu on Wednesday, spoken indirectly of blackmail, and hung up before Jammu could even think of having the call traced. She hadn’t called again. Jammu lacked the manpower to search every hotel and flophouse in greater St. Louis. She could only ask all her agents to keep their eyes open in the hope that Devi would turn up at one of the meeting places. Gopal periodically checked on the safe houses and the communications warehouse, and Suresh was slowly working through the more promising hotels. But their primary responsibility was to avoid capture themselves. Their caution slowed them down.

It was Singh who should have been hunting for Devi. But even though Martin had become Jammu’s ally, Singh continued to devote all his time to Barbara. He’d drawn a distinction between Jammu and the operation and declared his allegiance to the latter. He said Barbara posed a graver threat than Devi did. He said extreme care had to be taken in preparing Barbara for her release. (Jammu wondered what the fuck he was up to over there.) He seldom left that apartment now. He said the operation must culminate cleanly, he said Jammu’s assumption of power must be seamless. He said they could learn more from Martin’s reintroduction to Barbara than from anything else they’d done in St. Louis. He said all of this easily; his neck wasn’t on the line.

Jammu didn’t want Barbara reintroduced to Martin. She wanted Barbara to disappear and never return.

This was what Martin wanted, too.

But he might change his mind. He’d changed it once already.

All week Jammu had teetered on the brink of picking up the phone and giving Singh the order. It was true, of course, that America could change one’s perspective. In a sparsely populated country the individuality of the victim glared, as did the extremity of the sentence, since death seemed almost an anomaly here. But Jammu had long ago shed her scruples. The old murders hadn’t kept her from playing the enlightened leader of St. Louis, and a new one wouldn’t keep her from continuing to play the desirable woman Martin felt her to be. She was only afraid that if she gave the order, Singh would not obey.

She couldn’t quite see herself doing the job with her own hands. Her role was to stay at her desk, the constant center of the operation. Singh and only Singh had the time, information and imagination to plan an unsuspicious death. But Singh wouldn’t do it. Barbara had taken him away. Next Wednesday he would set her free. Then she’d take away Martin as well, and Singh would return to India, and Martin would return to his old life.

“Who cares?” Singh disingenuous. “You have him now, and after Tuesday it won’t matter whether you do or don’t. Trying to keep him, in fact, is one sure way to guarantee that Barbara makes the connection between you and me.”

He gloated. See how neatly it works out? How the operation prohibits selfish deviations? When Jammu was with Martin she was forever thinking: I can’t control Singh.

Who cared?

She did. She wanted Martin Probst, the genius of the place to which chance had brought her. She wanted his love and fealty. Martin still couldn’t see how she belonged in St. Louis, how she had the right and the means to make a place for herself. He was the key he couldn’t see. When he saw himself, if she could make him, then Barbara would be dead to him anyway.

Luisa slammed the door behind her, slammed it again to make the bolt catch, and ran down the stairs to the street. Music was blaring in the building next door. Through a set of second-floor windows she could see a big party in progress, a crowd of people older than she but not much older, dancing with beer bottles. She walked up towards Delmar.

Her fight with Duane hadn’t lasted long. For a while, in the cold part of the winter, the arguments had gone on for hours, from kitchen to bedroom to hallway; one time she’d had to sleep on the floor in the living room, under coats. Now the fights were short again, like they’d been in the first month or so when she was afraid a single yell would mean going back to her parents. Now a single yell was about all she could stand to invest.

Tonight Duane thought he’d found the answer (he was always thinking he’d found some answer) to how to fight fascism (he didn’t know what fascism was; she’d asked him) in extrapolitical (he liked to make up words that weren’t in the dictionary) institutions like organized religion, because only a cultural extremism could combat the bourgeois (she told him he’d better stick to foreign languages he could pronounce) liberalism that could, if left unchecked, develop into the kind of nationalistic myopia that developed in Germany ( what?? Suddenly he was talking about Germany in 1933, as if she knew all about it) and took the form of Nazism. She said she didn’t understand. He said it was no wonder when she kept interrupting him.

The fight had started because it was Good Friday and he’d decided to give her a religious quiz after dinner. He felt he had the right to give her these quizzes because he was older and more learned. It was the Socratic Method. (He never exactly called himself her mentor, but whenever she wanted to whip up her dislike of him she’d repeat the word in her head: MEN-TOR, MEN-TOR, MENTORMENTORMENT.) Did she believe in God?

“Give me a break, Duane.”

Did she believe in the sanctity of human life?

“Yes.”

Why?

“Because I’m alive and I like myself.”

But that didn’t satisfy him. He hemmed and hawed and tried a different approach to making her say what he wanted to hear. (He wanted to hear her be an example of all the things wrong with boozh-wah Webster Groves.) And about three questions into the abortion quiz (it was going to turn out to be somehow hypocritical to be pro-choice) she threw a glass of milk at him. He sat there nodding, indulgent and furious, while she put her sweatshirt on.

She went into Streetside Records. An oldie was playing on the store stereo (“Jackie Blue”?), and graying men in beards and army jackets were pawing through the bins. There used to be about twenty groups and singers whose records Luisa would check on whenever she went to record stores, to see if anything new or pirated or live had arrived. Now there were only about fifteen. She stayed away from the Rolling Stones because Duane admired their honesty and the integrity of their sound. She stayed away from the Talking Heads because Duane had interpreted all their lyrics for her, and from The Clash because whenever Duane played them he made her be quiet. She stayed away from the Eurythmics just because Duane liked them.