Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

She nodded.

He wrote out the sum in numerals and then in words. He paused. After Barbara had moved out, he’d stopped using their joint account. “Who should I make this out to?”

She was watching a taxi drive away. She didn’t bother answering. He penned in the words Barbara Probst .

Singh had not driven to Webster Groves. He’d merely moved his car to a lot near the river and returned to his apartment on foot. He hadn’t for a moment believed there was a letter in Probst’s mailbox. Jammu, he expected, would come to East St. Louis and see that his car was gone. She would enter the building planning to murder Barbara and pin the blame on him.

But Jammu had not arrived. He was beginning to wonder if he’d given her too little credit, if perhaps she had no objection to the experiment of releasing Barbara as he’d arranged. Perhaps Devi had sent a letter after all. Then his telephone rang.

“It’s me.”

“I called at three o’clock,” Singh said.

“I was over at your building. Do you have the letter?”

“There wasn’t any letter.”

“Did you notice who’s watching your building?”

“Sure.” Singh took a guess: “Our favorite detective.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

“It means it will be trickier getting Barbara out.”

“No. It means you kill her.”

Singh laughed lightly. “Oh, does it?”

“Yes. How do you think you’re going to get her out?”

“The back door, late tonight.”

“No way, Singh. Sorry. They’ll have the entire area bathed in infrared and a pair of men watching the back side of the building. They know you’re in there. They’ll stop you if you try to leave with anything more than the shirt on your back. The only way out is empty-handed.”

“They’ll tail me anyway.”

“You think you can’t shake them? Don’t be modest.”

Singh swallowed. Had she known in advance that Pokorny had found out about this building? No. She wouldn’t have come over here herself if she’d known Pokorny would be here. Clearly the only thing she’d known for sure was that she wanted Barbara dead.

“This is great,” he said.

“Do you think I wanted Pokorny on our ass like this? Do you think I want that woman’s body turning up over there? Two miles from my office? I’m telling you, this is the only way to save both our necks—”

Yours and Probst’s, Singh thought.

“—You do the job, you take the fall, you get out of the country.”

“I could just release her over here.”

“Are you serious? Your plan was bad enough without letting her know she’d been in East St. Louis all this time. You can’t let her out alive anyplace but New York. And that won’t work now.”

“Death is messy, Susan. You’ll regret it.”

As she walked up the long driveway she saw a gaunt and red-faced man in the window of a garage in the back yard, on the second floor. He gave her a wave and a friendly smile. She waved back. A friendly smile! She felt better, but she went to the side door of the house so he wouldn’t see her. She punched her gloved hand through the window in the door. The flying glass surprised her, which was silly considering that was why she’d punched it. She reached through and turned the bolt. They had a fence to keep out burglars, but they left the gate wide open. One of these days she’d have to fix that.

Probst drove aimlessly, following the path of least resistance — straight through green lights, right at red ones, left when he found a left-turn lane empty — while he waited for the turmoil in his head to condense into thought and resolution. The defroster circulated strange perfume through the car. A feeling of deep evil had descended on him as soon as he’d written his wife’s name on the check. The feeling intensified his longing for Jammu. He was her accomplice, and he missed her. He loved that she had lied to him about Devi Madan, because it meant she shared the evil. At the same time he wondered if she’d really lied. Maybe she hadn’t realized the extent to which Rolf had perverted the girl. Yes. That was it. Rolf had perverted the girl. Yes. And if Jammu was innocent, Probst would love her for that, too. Her childlike purity.

Way up north, on Riverview Drive, where rain blew like blue sand off the flat Mississippi and collected in puddles on the empty bicycle path, he turned on the radio. The many voices of the city urged him south again. He was guilty. He’d betrayed his city. Jack DuChamp had been right to hang up on him on Maundy Thursday. Now at last he felt that it was necessary to go to Jack’s house, to pay that long-deferred visit, to hear Jack’s judgment on him and see if it was final. He almost hoped that Jack could not forgive him.

A woman’s place was in the home. A gray Tuesday afternoon, the gutters gulping quietly, swallowing rain. Cigarettes burned in several ashtrays. A cookbook fell open to a cake recipe, everything in its place. Martin would be home, upset, at dinnertime. Men spent half their lives thinking women were a nuisance and the other half thinking they were special. Right now she had to bake him a special treat. The rest of dinner would come in good time. Men liked to come home and smell something baking and hear little splashes upstairs, a sensuous woman in the tub.

She opened all the cabinets and took out the spices and the silver teaspoons and tablespoons and a colander for sifting. She found a bag of potatoes. They were covered with big white sprouts. Just like men, they couldn’t help it — they were supposed to act that way — but it could still be disgusting. She looked in every cabinet for the flour. Would wheat germ be OK? She unscrewed the lid and sniffed it and saw some tiny beige worms in the germ. Germs made you sick. She put the jar back and looked everywhere. What did flour come in? Every minute counted if she wanted the cake baking when he came home.

She ran down to the basement, where it seemed she kept many extras, but all the coffee cans were empty. There were piles of boxes spilling onto rows of plastic bags, metal wardrobes, wooden filing cabinets. Spiders grew on the walls, unmoving, like mildew. So many things to digest!

She opened a flat box of pictures in which she looked rather stern. She frowned sternly. The pictures were a manual on how to act if you lived in Webster Groves. How to hold your head when you got out of the car. How to kneel when you cut fresh roses from the garden. How to be a perfect wife. How to take a bath! How to frown in concentration when you baked a cake! How to smoke cigarettes. She had to practice right away. She ran upstairs and came back down with a package. She shook all the cigarettes out and looked into a nearby mirror.

When school let out, Luisa saw her friends Edgar Voss and Sara Perkins walking south on Selma, the way they did every day. She hurried to catch up with them. She was going to Clark School to vote.

“Wow, that’s right,” Sara said. “You’re old.”

Sara and Edgar were still seventeen, and to prove their irresponsibility they started grilling each other. Sara asked what Afghanistan was. Edgar said it was a territory in Risk, sort of an olive green. He asked her who the state senator from Webster Groves was. She couldn’t even make an educated guess. Edgar didn’t know either. Luisa didn’t know. But a ninth-grader in copper-framed glasses who was passing them on the sidewalk said, “Joyce Freehan,” and hiked up his books in embarrassment.

This sounded correct. “He’s her son,” Edgar told Luisa in a stage whisper. The kid jogged a few steps to put some space between them.