Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“You’re sure.”

“If I’m on your side and Probst is too — well, you’ll have Buzz.”

“You’re sure. You’re sure he’ll move his operations to the city.”

Asha rolled her shoulders. “I don’t know, Ess. It’s asking a lot of him. He will do something. He’d be lobbying for the merger right now if it weren’t for Probst.”

“I want him in the city.”

“To clinch the merger?”

“Just to have him in the city. This merger is perceived more apocalyptically than it deserves to be. I mean, yes, I want it badly. But if it fails, I at least want the city and the elite. So don’t lose sight of what counts.”

“Getting Buzz to move.”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do when you have what you want?”

Jammu smiled. “More of same.”

Asha rolled down her window and took a ticket from the electric dispenser at the parking garage at West Roads. She handed the ticket to Jammu. The time was printed in bruised purple: 1:17 p.m. They’d have an hour to eat. “You know,” Asha said, as she drove up the ramp, “I’ve been very impressed with how keenly Singh saw the outlines of Buzz’s life in September. He didn’t intervene, he only listened, and he still hit every parameter on the nose, even the role of the Probsts.”

“I’m hungry,” Jammu said.

The hundred lights in the Junior League dining room had reflected mates in the fogged windows, and lit the fresh flowers on every table and the pollen-dry makeup on every woman’s face. Glasses chimed, laughter pealed. The room smelled vaguely carbonated. A girl in a white wool skirt and a kelly-green jacket and a pink cotton blouse and a knotted plaid scarf jumped up from a table and screamed, “Asha!”

Suddenly Jammu was looking at their backs.

“I thought your phone was out of order!”

“I just love those!”

“If it’s all right with Joey!”

Asha led Jammu by the elbow to a table. They sat. “The youngest of the Jaeger girls,” she explained. “We’re going dancing tomorrow.”

“This isn’t interfering with you and Buzz.”

“No.”

They began to speak in Hindi. The noise of the women consuming circled them, the chewing of the communal sentence, so nice how the cute, interesting Saturday drives to Frontenac Billblass Powell Hall, I saw small slams, I brunch divorced (Hilary Fontbonne, Ashley Chesterfield), but listen on Wednesday (touch wood), Eric sales, London Saks, cancer, curtains, Vail, six pounds.

“ mere sir mem dard hai ”

Every time Jammu’s eyes left her friend she had to beat back invasions from neighboring tables. “Sinful” desserts on plates, caustic glances. The women were attractive and lively. She attacked her salad with a fork and said, in her hard Hindi, “Singh has kidnapped Barbara Probst.”

A head turned. Ears had recognized the name, maybe.

“Let’s talk about this later, Ess.”

“Now,” Jammu said. “We’ll keep the names out of it. Eat up. Come on. Eat. In the future we won’t come here. But my time is short. He kidnapped her on Tuesday.”

“Where is he keeping her?”

“His place across the river.”

“I don’t like that.” Asha touched her lips with her napkin. “I don’t like that at all. Hammaker owns that building.”

“I don’t like the whole idea. But she doesn’t know where she is. Singh has a story going in New York. He found a woman who is a reasonable facsimile of her, showed her around his apartment building, to the doorman, the neighbors. He’ll do it periodically.”

“But kidnapped,” Asha said. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m glad we agree.”

“You didn’t approve it?”

“I approved it. Singh had a good case. P. thinks she’s left him. There was nowhere to go with the operation except the kidnapping route. The State makes its peculiar demands. And B. has been the P. most opposed to me. State or no State, it’s good to get her out of P.’s life.”

“So she’s just lying over there drugged?”

“I wish. I told him to drug her. I told him very plainly. He said it won’t work in the story. He’s posing as an Iranian psychopath. He needs a story because eventually, of course, he’ll have to let her go.”

“After the election. After P. has played his part.”

“Presumably.”

“But this must mean — What will he do after he’s let her go?”

Jammu laid an anchovy on the side of her plate.

“You’re sending him back?” Asha said.

“He’s going back.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Jammu, chewing, said, “I can stand it.” She swallowed. “He’s different these days. He has a very narrow set of concerns, and he’s always sniping at me. He’s too involved in the P. operation. I told him to hire a thug to kidnap B. He wouldn’t. And everything in the name of doing the job right. As if trusting a chain and some locked doors to restrain B. were doing the job right.”

“Why so bitter, Ess?”

Jammu shrugged. Singh was going back. By kidnapping Barbara himself he’d burned the bridges. This is America, Chief. Pretty soon you’ll have to leave off with the clandestine stuff or you’re going to get caught. When you stop, you won’t need me. I don’t like being in this country. It makes me feel bad. If I thought you wouldn’t survive without me, I wouldn’t kidnap her. If I even thought you might miss me a little. Every arrival is a departure, Chief. You’ll find me in Bombay if you need me.

“It’s Saturday morning. We’ve made savage love at dawn and I’ve gone off to the Midwest for the weekend to work on a story. You get up late, shower away my smell, and go out for a walk. You pick up the clothes you’ve had dry-cleaned. Buy a grapefruit, a couple of bagels, and a pound of fresh-ground Colombian. Yum. Smell it. You come back and eat. Have a cigarette and ‘collect yourself.’ It’s a partly cloudy day, not too cold. We’re twelve floors up, remember, and the traffic is very distant. You think about what has happened to your life. How so much has changed in five days, and what the next few months will bring. You wonder what you’re going to do with yourself while I’m away. Find a job? Write a book? Be a journalist like me? Take a screen test? You’re a little lonely, but it’s exciting. It’s a new kind of loneliness. You think about Luisa. She must have had Saturday mornings like this at Duane’s, must still be having them. How new everything must seem to her. You gather your courage because you want to call her. You think about Martin’s birthday party, and the scene you had with him in front of her. You think this might be the best way of explaining to her how it’s happened that you’ve left him. You want to explain that you of all women don’t have to take whatever your husband gives you. That some things are simply beyond the pale. You don’t want Luisa to get the idea you’ve left him for purely selfish reasons. Of course, you’re nervous, because you have a lot to explain to her, and because if you say any of the things I’ve told you not to say or if I think you’re speaking in code I’m going to kill you and she’s going to hear it. But you pick up the phone.”

Nissing tapped the phone with the muzzle of his gun. Then he leaned back in his folding chair, and Barbara, in hers, facing him, picked up the receiver. The dial tone made her jump a little. Her eyes followed the phone cord across the carpeted floor of her cell to the locked door. The arrangement was the same as it had been the first day, when she’d called her supervisor at the library. She heard Nissing breathing, heard a cooing on the skylight above her.

“And you dial, of course. Three one four—”

She dialed the area code and paused, listening to the longdistance surf.