Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Hey.” Ronald Struthers stopped in the middle of the room and spread his arms, facing her. “Only thirteen more years.”

The others looked away. She raised her head. “Thirteen more years?”

“Until you’re eligible to run for the office of U.S. President.”

Her weary smile deepened the lines dividing her mouth, her soft beak, from her cheeks. The others squirmed, wishing Struthers hadn’t tried.

Then Asha Hammaker breezed in, kissed Jammu, and set a large waxed-paper bag of croissants and pains au chocolat on her desk. Wesley dumped the grounds and made a second pot of coffee with greatly enhanced self-confidence. The party grew lively, its participants finding their second wind as the light of the new day filled the office. They chatted around Jammu. Asha had left a smear of lipstick on the Chief’s forehead, a small red feather. This morning the graying zone above her left ear reached further back around her head than it had on mornings in the past.

She began to test inappropriate facial expressions, to wince, widen her eyes, stretch her lips taut across her mouth, frown deeply, balloon her cheeks and cross her eyes, all in a manner acutely reminiscent of her mother, who often, when conferring with lawyers or entertaining legislators, could not help making faces which had utterly no bearing on the matter at hand. It was a sleepy heedlessness, but also a senility, the open contempt shown for the world by people with few years remaining in it. Her friends tried not to notice.

“It’s the county’s loss, not ours.”

“Where’s Ripley?”

“We’ll just buy some of those towns. Out and out buy them.”

“Start with the county-level police force, by July, the whole thing step by step.”

“He left with his wife, I think around eleven.”

“I’d like to see some of those town councils politicized.”

“Careful, careful.”

“We’ve got the momentum.”

“You say that this morning?”

“You hear about Probst’s house?”

“The second quarter will make believers out of them.”

“From the roof, the finale.”

“Coffee, Ess?”

“This hardly qualifies as a democracy anymore.”

“Like a baby, Jim.”

“What?”

“Burnt my tongue.”

“I need a hot shower, first and foremost.”

“They’re better in France.”

They all began to sing the Marseillaise. Only Asha knew the words. The rest filled in the lyric slots with dums and doos, covering their hearts with their hands, simulating Frenchmen. Jammu rose and left the room. Singing, they looked after her and realized they might have gone a little too far. She was opening a cabinet in the outer office. She took out a black leather jacket, her holster, and a folded pair of blue serge pants. Could she be planning to do a day’s work as police chief? She never let up.

She stopped in the bathroom, pumped on the metal button above the sink until the spigot produced a pink ooze, and began to wash her hands.

She was clean. Barbara and Devi were dead, the wound of the operation was closed and the scar was only faintly visible. Jammu had made a few mistakes, perhaps. At the very least she should have ordered Singh to move Barbara from his building. Her failure to do so had resulted in a less than perfect murder. But in terms of the operation the murder was harmless. At her request, the East St. Louis police had already performed a warranted search of the building and informed her that they’d found nothing out of the ordinary, just a loft apartment in which a man and woman appeared to have been living on an irregular basis. Nothing pointed to duress, everything to normal urban life. Singh had left open the possibility of the story that would now be used: Barbara had occasionally been accompanying Nissing on his trips to St. Louis, staying in the apartment without telling her husband. One evening while Nissing was away she came out and got spooked, got in trouble, and ran. She’d certainly behaved peculiarly, of course, but as Jammu had warned Probst, Nissing was a peculiar man. It didn’t matter that the story was full of holes. With no one left to dispute it, the police had no reason to scrutinize it. The parties actually involved in the murder were in custody. The officer who’d fired the fatal shot would be given a short leave of absence for any counseling he might need, and Brian Deere and Bobby Dean Judd, the two small-time narcotics dealers who’d picked Barbara up, would be charged with second-degree murder under the principle of reasonable force. As long as there was some explanation for Barbara’s presence in East St. Louis, any explanation at all, the detectives would not be forced to use their imagination. The same went for Devi Madan’s presence in Probst’s house when it burned. Here, Rolf Ripley was the explanation. And Ripley wouldn’t be called to testify in any criminal proceeding, because there would be no criminal proceeding, because the firebug herself was dead. Jammu also believed that Probst would let sleeping dogs lie and not attempt to initiate any civil action or public crusade against her. To forge a comprehensible case, he’d have to acknowledge that he and she had had sexual relations and then advance the more or less fantastical hypothesis that she’d arranged the shooting of his wife for personal reasons. Either that, or make reference to the full story of the operation, a story she’d now placed immovably within the realm of fiction .

The operation’s concrete appurtenances had been destroyed. So had every financial record to which American investigators might have obtained access. All of Jammu’s agents were either dead or in India, where, if their emotional loyalty ever waned, they could easily be bribed into silence. The evidence Pokorny and Norris had gathered was purely circumstantial — the circumstances were, to be sure, sometimes rather damning on the surface, but Jammu had at her disposal a complete array of plausible justifications for everything from her meetings with Devi to the real-estate transactions her mother had made through Asha, and more important, she knew how to play a paranoid public inquiry to her own advantage by raising the spectres of McCarthyism and sexism and racial prejudice and such. What worried her more at the moment was the publicity that Barbara’s death would bring to bear on East St. Louis. Theoretically a city with an exceptional police force could not be faulted for having diverted unwanted elements into a neighboring community. But Jammu had staked much of her reputation as a problem-solver on her apparent ability to make street crime simply disappear. The real story would soil her in the eyes of the public. She was ready, naturally, to present a new aspect of her personality, the aspect of a woman calm under fire and willing to accept all the responsibility she bore, however indirectly, for Barbara’s death and for the situation as a whole in Illinois. A small scandal would humanize her; already, as of this morning, she’d lost her aura of invincibility. Public life required that popular figures sometimes play the sacrificial victim. It was a part she could handle and survive. Hadn’t Indira bounced back strong after the Emergency? As for the defeat of the merger and the squatters in Chesterfield and all the other minor bitches — well, as police chief, she of course could not be expected to take the blame in any way. She might even be allowed to accumulate political capital as the voice of moderation in these and other crises. No one would stop her from using her office like this, from venturing out to solve problems far afield and then retreating to her humble official position in the face of difficulties, so long as she was deft enough to avoid charges of hypocrisy and opportunism, and successful enough to reap the region’s love and appreciation for her efforts…