Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

Devi repeated it all back.

“Good,” Jammu said. “I really don’t take his threats too seriously. His investments here started out as tax shelters, and if he pulls out now, capital gains will murder him. I think a move is unlikely. On the other hand, he hasn’t made a firm commitment to the Ripley Center yet—”

“He hasn’t?”

“No. Once he does, he can’t pull out. So what you need to do is leave him alone on the issue — just don’t ever even mention it. Let him assume I think he’s committed.”

“Easy enough.”

“The other thing is the State. I think Rolf’s Probst animus is one of the main reasons he’s gotten to be so central in Urban Hope. We have to keep developing that situation. Are you still in it?”

“Very much” was the reply.

“Good. We need it, and it’ll work for us as long as Probst is in charge of the resistance. You understand? Develop that situation.”

“I understand.”

Jammu turned the key in her desk, put her coat on, and opened the door. “Joe Feig, I’m sorry,” she said. “You must hate me but we’ll have to say four o’clock now. Drop in, and I’ll give you what you need. Randy, talk to Suzie. I don’t have time to look it over now, Suzie, but Randy needs it and I’ll take your word for it. Go ahead and get the signatures. Rollie, tell Farr he’s got to come and see me today. Say eight o’clock, and if I’m not here, that’s his problem. Annette, is it life and death?”

“Sort of, yes. Strachey was on the front page this morning—”

“Write a memo with a guarantee. Word it strongly, and I’ll check it over tonight and Pete will sign it. No city employees will lose jobs in a merger. Zero. At worst they might be moved to different positions. If you can work in something subtle about patronage, so much the better. And the rest of you get out of my way, I’ll be back at two-thirty and free until four. My apologies to everyone, I’m eternally grateful.”

The Corvette was waiting at a hydrant on Tucker Boulevard. Jammu got in with a word of apology to Asha, who peeled off her reading glasses and stepped on the gas pedal. She was wearing sable and emeralds. She dodged a U.S. Mail truck and headed up the ramp onto Highway 40. Practically, this engagement was the least important of the day for Jammu, but as she saw less and less of Singh she was coming to rely heavily on her weekly lunch with Asha.

The cars they passed looked stationary, bouncing in place on the winter-stained surface of the road. Beyond them, buildings lumbered backwards through a cold haze. Asha’s hands left the wheel to rearrange her hair, and the Corvette steered itself into the innermost lane. She was at home in speed — in love with it. She was licensed to fly, she rode horses, she bet avidly. She was one of the terrible people who used speedboats on Dal Lake in Kashmir. She was speeding now, and when they passed the city limits, into the jurisdiction of other forces less willing to fix her tickets, Jammu made her slow down.

“Ripley?” Asha said.

“Yes.”

“Would you have guessed in July how important he’d turn out to be?”

“Not exactly. He was a maybe. They were all maybes.”

Jammu remembered July, the intimate and air-conditioned days. She’d spent her mornings with the Police Board; her early afternoons at the circulation desk of the St. Louis Library watching her book and magazine orders sucked down by the pneumatic tubes to the stacks; her late afternoons in one of the library’s musty ground-floor tunnels feeding dimes to xerox machines; her evenings in motion with Asha in the county, with Asha downtown among little boats of hollandaise, with Asha and bourbon on her hotel balcony; her nights reading the day’s photocopies. Would she have guessed? At the head of every discussion of civic decision-making were two words: Municipal Growth. In every list of influential locals were the names Wismer, Hutchinson, Ripley, Meisner, Probst, Murphy, Norris, Spiegelman, Hammaker…And Asha pumped Sidney, relayed more names to Jammu. All maybes, but the sum a sure thing. In few American cities is fundamental policy determined by such a small and tightly knit nonpartisan group. In few American cities has the mode of policy-making survived unchallenged from the early nineteenth century to the present. Though the names have changed, the pattern of rule by a handful of established families with a romantic vision of westward progress has successfully replicated itself… Political science, pregnant words, summer thoughts, engorged with possibility. Miss Jammu, we’ve decided, Asha, they’ve decided, Maman, I’ve decided. A city to ravish, in July.

Asha shook her coat off her shoulders. “How’s Devi?”

“She’s done very well. But it’s rather a weakness of our approach that she’s turned out to be important because Ripley has.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Nothing that’s visible to me. Nothing exactly wrong, I mean. She’s as bright as anyone and she’s too dependent on me, substancewise and otherwise, to blow things open. But I wish we had another agent in her spot. I guess I wish you could do it all for me.”

“I would if I could.”

“It was easy enough to move Baxti off Probst in October. But we can’t ask Ripley to switch sex partners at this stage.”

“It sounds like you think something’s wrong.”

“I don’t know. Ripley is surprisingly demanding. I feel a loss of contact. With Devi. With — Well, you’re about the only one who’s maintained a complete perspective.”

Asha was accustomed to collecting Jammu’s anxieties. She kept her eyes on the road. Brentwood spread to allow the highway through, the walls of its low square buildings as dirty as if road salt had splashed all the way up to them. Jammu saw nothing new. “Isn’t this the exit?”

She was thrown forward as Asha took the Corvette what seemed like sideways across four lanes and onto the ramp. Asha’s gold bracelets floated on her wrists. “Norris?” she said.

“He’s warm but he isn’t hot. He isn’t making any new friends or converts.”

“Buzz says he and Probst have gotten friendly.”

“Probst doesn’t have the loser’s ethic it takes to believe in conspiracy. He found that bug in Meisner’s place and made nothing of it. His daughter found a bug in her boyfriend’s apartment and the boyfriend gave it to his landlord.”

“God’s on your side, Ess.”

Jammu looked into the tire, deeply recessed, of a towering dump truck. All at once the Corvette seemed squashable. The dump truck was black. Written in red on the driver — side door were the words PROBST & CO. The driver, a black man in a baseball cap, glanced down at the Corvette’s hood and then at Jammu. He winked. Asha passed him.

“The Warriors are doing a bridge on Sunday,” Jammu said.

“What fun.”

“Tell me about Buzz.”

“He’s cute,” Asha said. “He’s a genuine dear.”

“So you’ve been saying. Is it good news or bad?”

“Indifferent. He’s still one of the maybes. It’s part of your random variation in moral strength. Buzz has relatively a lot of it. In principle, if not in his gut, he feels an allegiance to what’s left of Municipal Growth, to the old dispensation. He’s very narrow-minded on the city-county question. Or it’s more than narrow-minded, it’s—”

“The State. But the wrong elements hypostatized.”

“Anything you say. It isn’t political and it’s only formally economic. What it really is is talismanic. All of a sudden he reveres Martin Probst. I find it frustrating. The more time I spend with him, the more interesting Probst becomes to him. It’s hardly fair.”

“Uh huh.”

“On the other hand, it’s personal and gets steadily more so. If you get Probst to support you, Buzz will too.”