Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

In the afternoon the Office of Budget and Finance raised its ink-stained veils to reveal, unblushingly, a $2.4 million “oversight.” The Board had transferred jurisdiction over the office to Jammu in late August. Now she saw she’d made a tactical error in assuming responsibility for finances before she’d sufficiently consolidated her control over operations. The accounting officer, Chip Osmond, one of Rick Jergensen’s cronies, had grown reckless in the power vacuum. Rick Jergensen had been hoping to be named chief in July; the “oversight” had overtones of spite. The city comptroller showed up in a blaze of snideness, with budget director Randy Fitch hot on his heels. Osmond wheeled all his books into her office on a cart, and the four of them wrangled and reassessed through the dinner hour and into the evening. Finally Jammu lost her patience and stated, flatly, that the mayor would have to add the $2.4 million to her budget.

The comptroller said, “So much for your good news.”

Osmond called home to his wife.

Randy Fitch giggled.

The comptroller said the mayor wouldn’t do it. Jammu knew the mayor would.

Randy Fitch continued to giggle.

The men were closing their briefcases when Singh strolled into the office. “Who are you?” the comptroller asked. “The janitor,” Singh replied, lighting up one of his clove things. Jammu rebuked him as soon as they were alone. His response: “Your administration lacks arrogance.”

Reaching Kingshighway, she exited past Barnes Hospital. An ambulance streaked by her silently. She radioed the dispatcher. “Car One,” she said. “I’m at home for the night.”

“Roger, Car One.”

She parked Car One in a loading zone and turned up her jacket collar. The sky was an orange urban overcast, the air metallic on her tongue. In the alley behind her apartment two gay waiters from Balaban were screaming at each other.

Inside, she sorted her mail and played her answering machine. Only Gopal had called. He spoke in Marathi confused with English code terms. He said he’d seen a trailer full of apples in a vacant lot near Soulard Market. Would the police please watch out? Apples meant cordite.

From the two-door refrigerator Jammu took a bottle of vodka and the drumstick left over from Thanksgiving dinner with the mayor. A loose pane in one of the bedroom windows buzzed to the beat of a television commercial upstairs. She kicked off her shoes, stretched out on the bed, and ripped open the Federal Express envelope from Burrelle’s, a clipping service in New Jersey. The envelope contained a half-inch pile of clippings, an increase over last week. Fortified with a swallow of vodka, she riffled through them.

ST. LOUIS TO HOST MODEL RRERS CONVENTION

SW Bell Dividends Down

Snow Bunnies , a Musical, to Premiere in Midwest

Dip in SW Bell Dividends

Bottlers Reject Contract Offer

St. Louis Museum to Acquire Two by Degas

Changing Times at Ripleycorp

RIPLYCORP TO DIVERSIFY

Parker Will Head Cheese Commission

She unfolded a long New York Times article by Erik Tannenberg, who’d taken her to lunch at Anthony’s ten days ago.

On the same day, Mr. Hutchinson’s home in suburban Ladue was strafed by automatic fire from a circling helicopter. Two days later, KSLX’s primary transmitting tower was put out of service for five hours by a third attack, this one involving hand grenades…

In the tense atmosphere, attention has focused on St. Louis’s new police chief, S. Jammu, who in mid-July left her post as Commissioner of Police in Bombay, India, to head the St. Louis force.

Colonel Jammu, a 35-year-old woman who has maintained her U.S. citizenship, attracted widespread interest in 1975 as the architect of Bombay’s “experiment in free enterprise,” a police-run assault on private-sector corruption.

Initially many civic leaders here expressed skepticism that Colonel Jammu, as a woman and as one unfamiliar with American law-enforcement practices, could adapt to her new role. But with a canniness that has all but silenced such critics, she has set about reinvigorating the police department and transforming the office of chief into a political platform.

Colonel Jammu, who holds a master’s degree in economics from Chicago University, has made high personal visibility her trademark. She has appeared regularly throughout the city and spoken on topics as diverse as family planning and handgun legislation.

In mid-September patrolmen on their beat began sporting sky-blue buttons on their caps, a reference to the “St. Louis Blues,” the force’s nickname, inspired by the popular television show Hill Street Blues . The nickname also appeared on bumper stickers donated by local businessmen and applied to squad cars…

Even before the attacks began, Colonel Jammu asked for and received authority to bolster the force’s manpower by 30 percent. Civic leaders were astounded by the size of the projected increase, but it now appears that Colonel Jammu, for the moment at least, has won her point.

Figures for the third quarter of the year show the city’s arrest rate jumping by 24 percent overall, and 38 percent for violent crimes.

The courts and prosecutor’s office have promised to cooperate, pledging to streamline the justice system and to “substantially reduce” the waiting period between arrest and trial by year’s end.

This has caused the American Civil Liberties Union to file a class-action suit with the Eighth U.S. Court of Appeals seeking an injunction that would freeze the average waiting period at its present rate until such time as the prosecutor can demonstrate that the right to due process is not being violated.

Charles Grady, spokesman for the local chapter of the ACLU, said that “the civil rights establishment in St. Louis is absolutely unable to cope with all that’s happened since Jammu took over as police chief. We’re swamped. We’re scared.”

Addressing a gathering of Washington University students last week, Mr. Grady renewed his call for Jammu’s dismissal, stressing the importance of “Indian justice for Indians, American justice for Americans.”

She stopped reading. She threw the half-eaten drumstick into her wastebasket and drank more vodka. Two weeks ago these clippings had still amused her and edified her; now they made her sick to her stomach. Reporters knew too much. There were treacherous undercurrents of knowledge in Tannenberg’s tone, in the casualness with which he’d tossed off words like “visibility” and “canniness.” Tannenberg knew her type. In New York she wouldn’t be original. The superficiality of his treatment held both her and St. Louis at arm’s length, allowing the possibility that she might dupe these Midwesterners — it takes all kinds of cities to make a nation — while assuring readers in New York that everything was fine, that the nation as a whole was regulated—

A car was idling in the street. A car door had slammed. Jammu went to the living room and depressed a slat in the blinds. Snow was falling, seeming to climb as it fell through the streetlight and through the headlight beams of a taxi. The taxi’s wipers smeared the melting snow. Her doorbell rang.

Lakshmi? Devi? Kamala?

She opened the door, and Devi Madan stepped in. Her hair was tucked under the collar of a full-length red fox coat. “I have a cab waiting,” she said.

“You can send it on. The neighborhood is full of them.”

“No.”

“Go get rid of it.”

Devi slammed the door behind her. Jammu put away the vodka, shaking her head, and turned the gas on under the tea kettle. Devi Madan had made one fundamental mistake in her life, when without her parents’ knowledge she’d answered an advertisement in The Bombayite (“The Fun One”).