Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

On the merger issue, Jack was undecided. He figured he still had a few months to weigh the options. If the vote had been held on Valentine’s Day he supposed he would have voted for the merger, although now that Martin Probst was on TV opposing it he knew he had to do some serious thinking. As the typical voter, he faced this task with little relish.

Sam Norris had no patience with public opinion. Constitutional processes were all very fine when only policy was at stake. But fire had to be fought with fire.

There were three orders of actualization.

Traffic regulations, in the lowest order, you trusted to the police. This was the province of modular rationality, of right and wrong, granted the requisite fudge factors of “yellow light” and so forth at the upper limits, at the blurring of law and a more rarefied authority.

This authority warred, in the second order, with its counterpart — call it politics, call it self-interest, call it clouds, call it what you would — and floated in the atmosphere. Public opinion had its place in this mezzanine.

In the highest order, planetary law and playful airborne strife were subsumed and transcended. Call it power, call it plasma, call it cryogenic circuitry. Agencies, in any event, no longer obeyed grim constitutional dictates or the inertial tuggings of the policy dynamic, but flowed without resistance, the energy of reason but a corollary of the deeper quantum-mechanical numen and free to run backwards in time. A button was pushed and twenty million dead people unburned themselves, stood up, stopped, and went on living.

In short, Sam Norris smelled it. Conspiracy. He’d smelled it from Day One, he’d sniffed it: something was up. But no one else could smell it. Even Black and Nilson were unenthusiastic, and the rest were even more obtuse. Good-hearted people, they trusted the Soviets, they trusted the Sandinistas, and they trusted Jammu. They wanted to believe in niceness. Prime example was Martin Probst, and Norris was not without affection for the boy. He was a classic man-woman, a champion of the hearth and so of all those lovely side effects to which Norris returned after a long day at the center of the universe. But the universe would be a mighty poor place if every man were Martin Probst. It would grind to a standstill. Smell the flowers. Watch a sunset. Read a book.

There was a conspiracy, but it was difficult. The fact consoled Norris. All great ideas were difficult. All great ideas were also simple, as this conspiracy was simple: Jammu had St. Louis by the balls and she wouldn’t let go. This fact was true. And yet it was difficult.

Jammu was not acting communist. (Here was further proof of the philosophical insufficiency of public life.) Asha Hammaker did not act communist either. The one was a tough cop and moderate Democrat, the other had a solid non-socialistic profile, even taking into account her transfer of stock to the city.

Asha’s engagement to Hammaker predated Jammu’s arrival, and the marriage would sustain no causal connection with Jammu’s rise to power. (Here was proof of the insufficiency of cause and effect.)

The elaborate bomb scare at the stadium, the expense of it, made no sense whatsoever. (Proof of the insufficiency of ordinary human reason.)

The FBI would not investigate. They claimed to have no evidence of wrongdoing or subversion, and no orders from the police or from Washington. (Proof of the insufficiency of the ways of the mezzanine.)

St. Louis lacked the international strategic value that would make it a likely target of the evil empire. In October Norris, on a hunch, had pulled strings and persuaded the DOD to audit the protection of defense secrets at Ripleycorp and Wismer, and the auditors had given both companies high marks. Assistant Undersecretary Borges had said he wished all his contractors protected national security type secrets as well as the St. Louis firms did. It was possible that Jammu was waiting until she had control of those companies and could simply crack the Classified seals herself, but Norris knew the politics of espionage. If her employers were after secrets, they would expect at least a few small payments before continuing to finance the operation. There was no evidence of espionage, none. The mystery remained: why St. Louis? (Proof of the irrelevance of Newtonian space-time.)

Why Ripley and Meisner and Murphy and the other traitors to Civic Progress had done what they’d done was inexplicable — apart from the fact that they were bastards. They were still businessmen. Could money itself (that noble gas) be subject to the bio-logic of this day and age?

The conspiracy had taken off too quickly. It was in the air on the day Jammu took office. Norris had performed an extremely thorough inquiry into the Police Board — or rather, into those members who didn’t owe him fealty — and found no evidence of foul play. Jammu’s selection had not been rigged from outside. She must have been at least somewhat surprised. But the conspiracy sprang to life as soon as she arrived. It must have existed beforehand . This confirmed an axiom of Norris’s alchemy of the spirit: individuals were vectors, not origins. But it left the question: Who had planted the seeds? Ripley? Wesley?

It made no sense. The conspiracy was a substanceless region of pungency, maddening him. It had no flanks, no promising point of entry, promised nothing within. But it was instinct that had won Norris his silver stars in the war, and instinct told him how to pursue his theory now.

Working his federal connections to the bone, he got his hands on the USIA’s list of Indian visa recipients and other India-originated entries to the U.S. since June 1. It came on a diskette, delivered by messenger.

His private investigator, Herb Pokorny, specialized in detective telecommunications. Pokorny lisped as badly as platypuses would if they could talk, he’d run into all sorts of legal and linguistic obstacles while snooping in Bombay, but when he was working in St. Louis he was a good man. He tapped into airline ticketing records, into hotel reservations, car rentals, credit card and telephone and utility accounts. What emerged was a list of 3,700 Indians now living in the St. Louis area who hadn’t been there eight months ago. Even after children under eighteen were eliminated, the list had 1,400 entries. But Pokorny didn’t despair. Ordinary foreign immigrants left a signature on the records entirely different from the signature of spies, and while a few conspiring individuals might slip through his net, most wouldn’t. By mid-February the list contained fewer than a hundred names.

Pokorny’s operatives began a program of systematic surveillance. Prime targets were Jammu, Ripley, Wesley, Hammaker and Meisner. They paid especially close attention to Jammu’s office and apartment. (The apartment, they discovered, had an anti-break-in system for which Jammu appeared to change the magnetic card combinations daily. The good news was, she had something to hide. The bad news was, she was hiding it well.) All visitors to the parties under surveillance were identified and catalogued.

A net of connections began to emerge. The beast which Norris had been smelling for months began to take on shape.

Deft fieldwork by Pokorny turned up the source of the cordite used in the stadium bomb scare. The theft had occurred on August 7 in the warehouse of a blasting company based in Eureka, Missouri. The timing pointed plainly, for a change, to Jammu.

Then on February 15 Pokorny solved the mystery of Asha Hammaker’s early engagement. Speaking by phone with his brother Albert, who ran a detective bureau in New Orleans, Pokorny happened to bring up the mystery, how she’d already been engaged by the previous April. Albert chuckled and said: shrewd lady; in that very same April she’d been engaged to Potter Rutherford, the reigning sultan of securities in New Orleans. Immediately Pokorny got on the horn to all his nephews and cousins and uncles at their respective agencies across the country. By mid-evening, five of them had called back with corroborative evidence.