Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

He covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said to Jammu: “Asha can’t come until this evening. Shall we make a date?”

“I’m busy tonight. Tell her after midnight. Say one o’clock.”

KSLX general manager Jim Hutchinson rode home that night with his wife Bunny, who, as chance would have it, was downtown when the bomb went off. She was a comforting presence. When she showed up at his office, an hour after the blast, she was not the bundle of nerves another woman might have been. She looked glum, almost peeved. She wrinkled her nose. She paced. She didn’t kiss him. “Good thing you weren’t in the car,” she said.

“Damn good thing, Bunny.”

Having satisfied herself that he was unharmed, she left again to shop, returning only at 5:30 to take him home. He let her drive. As soon as they were tucked into traffic on Highway 40 she said, “Do they know who did it?” She turned on the wipers. Rain was falling from the prematurely dark sky.

“No,” he said.

“Good thing we’ve got a police department we can trust.”

“Are you talking about Jammu?”

Bunny shrugged.

“Jammu’s all right,” he said.

“Is that so?” A band of red lights, a lava flow, flashed on in front of them. Bunny braked.

“You may object to her nationality,” Hutchinson said, remembering as he spoke that Jammu was an American, “but she’s turned the entire Bomb and Arson Squad loose on the case.”

“Isn’t that what anybody would do?”

“That’s the point, my lovely wife.”

“What have they found?”

“There’s not much to go on. Somebody tipped off the police at six this morning, but it wasn’t much of a tip.”

“Mm?”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Somebody tipped off the police at six this morning but—”

“They didn’t know what to make of it. Somebody called up and said: When it happens, that’s us. The fellow at the switchboard had the presence of mind not to hang up. He asked who was calling, and the caller said, Ow! The fellow asked again. The caller said, Ow! And that was the tip.”

“Some tip.”

“And it’s not as if I have enemies. I told the detectives it almost had to be a random thing, except—”

“Except there are a lot of cars parked downtown.”

“So why ours?”

Bunny swung the car into the right lane, which seemed a little bit better lubricated. Hutchinson continued: “There were effectively no witnesses, and there was almost nothing left of the bomb. But they did figure out how it was planted. Detective I spoke with after lunch said it was one of those tape decks black kids carry around. A boom box.” Now she’ll start in on the blacks, he thought. But she didn’t. He kept talking. “Said they found pieces of one scattered around the lot. It looks like the thing was hollowed out and filled with explosives, then shoved under the car and detonated from a distance. It wasn’t dynamite, though.”

“Mm?”

“It was plastic. Which is strange. It’s hardly amateur.”

“Oh, huh. Can you run stories on it?”

“It’s news, why not? We can do whatever we want.”

“Maybe Cliff Quinlan?”

“And turn up foul play in Jammu’s administration? Is that the idea?”

“I’ve just never heard of cars being bombed in St. Louis, that’s all.”

Half an hour later they escaped Highway 40, exiting onto Clayton Road. Rain continued to fall. Giant plastic jack-o’-lanterns leered from windows in the older stores on Clayton.

At home their youngest daughter, Lee, was chatting in the kitchen with Queenie, their maid and cook. Two television-sized pumpkins awaited slaughter near the door. Lee toyed with a warty gourd from a basket of autumn objects. Bunny and Hutchinson washed their hands and went to sit down in the dining room, but the dinner table wasn’t set. Queenie had apparently not yet finished waxing it. She’d set the table in the breakfast room. She sliced the rump roast and doused each serving with béarnaise. There was steamed yellow squash and a salad with red lettuce, scallions, and hearts of palm.

After grace, muttered by Lee, Hutchinson dug into his beef and began telling Lee the bomb story, although she’d already seen it on TV. Bunny eyed her squash disks dispiritedly. She could hear a helicopter outside. Perhaps the KSLX Trafficopter. It sounded close, though it might have been the rain or wind that carried the sound.

No. It was very close, practically on top of them. They could hear the straining motor as well as the blades. Lee leaned back in her chair and looked out the window. She couldn’t see anything.

“Wonder what this is all about,” Bunny said.

As Hutchinson shrugged, the firing began. The living-room windows went first. They shattered almost quietly beneath the screaming of the copter’s metal parts. Bullets banged on the front door. They struck brass and shrieked.

As if following a script, Hutchinson dragged Lee to the floor and huddled with her under the breakfast table. Bunny dropped to her knees and joined them. She was gasping, but she stopped as soon as she threw up. Chop suey she’d eaten in bed with Cliff Quinlan splattered in front of her. She shut her eyes. Queenie was screaming in the pantry.

The dining-room windows burst. Bullets pounded the walls. The china display in the antique breakfront hit the floor with a mild crash. The Norfolk pine near the kitchen doorway toppled off its trivet. Hutchinson clutched Lee’s head.

Within seconds of the attack the first Ladue squad car pulled up. Already the street was teeming with hysterical neighbors, the Fussels, the Millers, the Coxes, the Randalls, the Jaegers, and all of their domestic help. Red lights cut the darkness. A pair of pumpers arrived, but nothing was burning. An ambulance made a disappointed U-turn and drove off. No one was hurt.

The police found the Hutchinsons’ front yard dotted with flyers xeroxed on shiny paper and covered with a childish scrawl. Chief Andrews picked one up.

Andrews assigned two patrolmen the task of picking up all the litter and reminded them not to get their fingerprints on it. Then he radioed the St. Louis police. Chief Jammu, he was told, was already on her way.

Residents in six other communities in and around St. Louis — Rock Hill, Glendale, Webster Groves, Affton, Carondelet, and Lemay — reported hearing a low-flying chopper in the minutes following the attack. The Illinois Highway Patrol was alerted, but it was too late. The chopper had vanished in the steady rain east of the river.

“I’m not especially worried about the FBI. It took them years to catch those Puerto Ricans in Chicago, and even then they bungled it. This is a two-man show, Gopal and Suresh, they have no identities, their actions have no pattern, and they’d already stolen all the supplies six weeks ago. The only person who ever caught Gopal at anything was me. The FBI is out of its element. They’re more in their element when it comes to what I’m doing in the city, but even if they look, which they won’t, they won’t find much, some transmitters maybe, but you can’t trace the destination of their signals. Same with the retransmitting stations, and only a professional would even know what they are. The professionals aren’t looking. Sometimes I’m tempted to shut down all the electronics anyway, but the wires do more to prevent discovery than encourage it. The people in the field — Singh, Baxti, Sarada, Usha, Kamala, Devi, Savidri, Sohan, Kashi — they need the information for their work and their own safety. Nice try, but don’t bother.