Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

At the door Norris punched more numbers, the last of which caused the lock to buzz. Inside, all was carpeted and dim. Shapes near the top of a low-gradient ramp defined themselves, step by step, as a desk with chrome legs and a man in silvered wraparounds. The man sat sideways with his feet poking out to the right of the desk. “Name?” he said. He had a flattop.

“Bancroft,” Norris said. “And a friend. I have a reservation, Suite 6. I’d like a different one.”

“Suite 12.” The man slid keys across the desk. He swiveled in his chair and faced the wall behind him. “Two lefts, follow the stairs, and another left.”

The walls were unpainted cinder block, the ceilings indeterminately high. The carpeting smelled new. Halfway down the second corridor they met an Oriental girl wearing only a T-shirt, black as her triangle of pubic hair. She was going the other way. Her fingers trailed along the wall. She looked up, and Probst tried to avert his eyes. She looked right through him.

“Was she blind?” he whispered.

“They’re all blind.”

“That’s terrible.”

“This place is seedy as shit. But very private.”

“What kind of thing is it?”

“Health club.”

Between the corridor and suite were two doors outfitted with deadbolts and enclosing a small vestibule. The suite itself was spacious. Probst backed up to take it all in. There was a kitchenette, a Universal bodybuilder, a king-sized bed, an Exercycle, a sunken whirlpool, a tanning unit, and a number of sadistic-looking machines he couldn’t identify. Near the door stood a white enamel box, roughly coffin-shaped, somewhat larger than a deep freeze. He knocked on it. “What’s this?”

“Sensory deprivation.”

Probst moved away from it. Warm air was pouring out of a heating vent behind him. The air smelled funny. Spiced.

“Seedy as shit,” the General repeated.

Probst walked to the bed and shed his coat. He glanced at the ceiling. There was a mirror. He looked one foot tall.

“So you found—”

The General covered his mouth with a scented hand. “I couldn’t even tell you what membership costs,” he said loudly. “I borried Pavel Nilson’s card.” From his raincoat he took two black boxes with a deluxe sheen to them. He touched a button. A red light flickered and gave way to a steady green light. He touched a button on the other box. “And that’ll keep us silent.”

“Wouldn’t it have been easier just to meet in the woods?”

“I’m sixty years old. I like comfort. I’ll admit it. You?”

“Who doesn’t.”

The General sat down and removed his shoes. Probst shook off a tingling adulterous sensation. “You were in the woods on Tuesday, though.”

“Let’s not talk about that.” The General laid his striped shirt on the bed and Probst continued to admire it. “I mean to take a sauna. You join me.”

“Sure. Been quite a while.”

“Let me just give you some answers right off the bat. Yes, I shot at that plane. Yes, it was a mistake. No, I don’t regret it. No, I don’t think that fire was any accident. Yes, Buzz Wismer refused to take me back to town. No, I couldn’t care less. The reason you’re here is that there ain’t no point in conversing with Buzz Wismer.”

“You smell something?” Probst said.

Norris sniffed. “Incense.”

“Smells like a burning spice cake.”

“I smelt a whole lot worse in here. They got promiscuous heating.” Norris, now in boxer shorts, lit a cigar.

“So you found a bug.” Probst began to undress. Norris reached again into his raincoat and handed him a small transparent bag. Probst had a revelation. Bugs were called bugs because that was what they looked like. This one was tiny, about the diameter of a nickel and less than twice as thick. Eight leg-like prongs protruded from one of its faces.

“That’s high technology, Martin. That is very high technology.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“My office.”

“How?”

Norris nodded at the metal boxes. “Counter-technology. Which I will be glad to loan you.”

This was too alien for Probst. He was glad when Norris dug a more humane piece of goods from his raincoat, a bottle of whiskey, something Irish. “And you found a bug in your car,” he said.

“Yep. But I don’t want ’em to know it. This one here, I had the custodian find it accidentally.”

“What about your house?”

Norris shook his head as he walked to the kitchenette. “They got no use for my house.”

“‘They’ being your industrial competitors.”

“Don’t be dumb, Martin. You know who they is.” He selected a tumbler from the cabinets and poured himself a drink of whiskey. “Can I pour you something?”

“Whatever you got,” Probst quipped.

He received less than a tablespoon. This was the first time he’d ever been social and private with Norris, and he was finding him less stupid than the public General, more genteel. In the sauna they sat on opposing benches, their bodies slack in anticipation of the load of heat. Steam insinuated itself through the floorboards. Slowly it coaxed open Norris’s towel and granted a view of the boneless wealth, pink and furry, between his legs. His private parts. He’d been born with them.

“Time was,” he said, “I could phone a police department and get facts. But the city police won’t talk to me now. Jammu ain’t dealing with the Bureau much either. She’s got a headlock on the stadium investigation. You could say she don’t want to share the glory when she nails the terrorists. Or you could say she’s trying to protect them. I say the latter. But it’s still possible to find things out in this town. There were three tons of cordite in the stadium, in two batches, with a tank of nitrogen on each of them. There were eight smaller charges in the structure, enough to collapse most of the upper deck. There was also industrial chlorine, pressurized, enough to kill a battalion and blind a division. The timing devices were independent and not remote control. No receivers. The timing was coordinated and sequential, not simultaneous, with the gas last, to maximize lethality. It was set to commence at 2:25 p.m., CST. The explosion that did occur, the one that blew out the baseball statue—”

“Which I won’t miss,” Probst said.

“Anti-tank mine. Soviet apparently. The Bureau’s not sure.”

Probst leaned steeply into the wooden wall and shut his burning eyes.

“Conclusions,” the General said. “First, overnight security at the stadium leaves a lot to be desired. But we knew that. Security stinks everyplace. Second, these Warriors got international connections. The Soviet mine—”

“ If it’s Soviet,” Probst said.

“And more telling, the tank of N 2. That’s Middle East. Born there, popularized there. Three, and this is where it gets bad, Martin, you with us?”

“I’m with us.”

“Three: very pointed steps were taken to kill upwards of ten thousand civilians and injure thirty thousand more. I ask you for a second to imagine that kind of carnage in downtown Saint Louie.”

Probst could not.

“Meanwhile a warning was communicated, to the city police, at 1:17 p.m., CST, sixty-eight minutes before the bombs were set to detonate. Now the police required four minutes to arrive at the scene, and an additional fifty-seven minutes to locate and defuse every charge. They didn’t miss a one, and there weren’t any accidents. So as it happened there were only seven minutes to spare. You smell some choreography in this? I do. But there’s another problem — and I seen not a mention of this, I heard not a line in any of the news media: why the hell spend a fortune on some very sophisticated materiel, run substantial risks in planting it, and then give a warning? Why bomb a car with no one in it? Why fire a machine gun into the only dark windows in a house? Why bomb an unmanned transmission tower? Sure there’s been some bloodshed, and I almost envy you the privilege of shedding it, Martin—”