Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City

Probst’s home life also seemed to be in order. Singh had overheard a few domestic tiffs, but they were nothing more than weeds, shallow-rooted, sprouting from seams in solid pavement. The tranquil image of Probst’s family was, in fact, what St. Louis seemed to admire most about him. Singh had gleaned an assortment of citations from the library of tapes that R. Gopal had been cataloguing for Jammu. In one, Mayor Pete Wesley was speaking with the treasurer of the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council.

WESLEY (+ R. Crawford, Sat 9/10, 10:15, City Hall)

PW: No, I haven’t talked to him yet. But I did see Barbara at the ball game on Thursday and I asked her if he’d given it any thought.

RC: At the ball game.

PW: Isn’t that something? If she was any other lady, you’d think she was nuts.

RC: Going alone, you mean.

PW: I don’t see how she pulls it off. Anybody else … Can you imagine seeing somebody like Betty Norris sitting by herself in the box seats?

RC: What did Barbara say?

PW: We talked for quite a while. I never actually found out how Martin feels, but she certainly had her mind made up.

RC: Which way?

PW: Oh, for. Definitely for. She’s a great little lady. And you know, for a small family, isn’t it amazing how often you run into them?

Ripley (Rolf, Audrey, Mon 9/5, 22:15)

AR: Doesn’t Luisa seem like one of those children that something could happen to? She was so sweet today. Everything’s so perfect about her, isn’t it hard not to think something terrible will happen? (Pause.) Like a doll you could break. (Pause.) Don’t you think?

RR: No.

Meisner (Chuck, Bea, Sat 9/10, 01:30)

CM: That was Martin. He wanted to make sure we made it home all right. (Pause.) I’m sure he couldn’t sleep till he’d called. (Pause.) Did I really look that drunk?

BM: We all did, Chuck.

CM: It’s funny how you don’t notice it so much with them. I mean, they make you comfortable.

BM: They’re a very special couple.

CM: They are. A very special couple.

It was unfortunate, Singh thought, that R. Gopal would no longer have time to sort these recorded conversations and put them into such a usable form. “I think we’re past that phase,” Jammu had said. “I have something else for Gopal.”

Murphy (Chester, Jane, Alvin, 9/19, 18:45)

JANE: Know who I saw today, Alvin? Luisa Probst. Remember her?

ALVN: ( chewing ) Sort of.

JANE: She’s turned into a very pretty girl.

ALVN: ( chewing )

JANE: I thought it’d be nice if you called her up sometime. I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear from you.

ALVN: ( chewing )

JANE: I’m just saying, it might be a nice thing to do.

ALVN: ( chewing )

JANE: I remembered her as being a little chubby. I hadn’t seen her in, oh, three years. I never get to Webster Groves anymore. I see her mother all the time, though. (Pause.) I think it would be very, very nice if you gave her a call.

CHES: Drop it, Jane.

A very pretty girl. A special couple. Singh was careful not to infer that Probst’s lovely family contributed to his actual power in the city, but the family was obviously a source of unusual strength. Strength like this could amount to a weakness. Even Baxti had recognized this. In his summary he’d written:

UnCorrupted in 72, and worse.

(In 1972 someone on the Slum Removal Board had requested a kickback and Probst had gone to the press with the story.)

He is haveing no sins but morality. He will die: every man is moral. This is the key to this. Death in air . Step one: dogg. Step two: doghter. Step Three: wife. Patterne of loss. And standing a lone. He loving his dogge. Calling it petname. And no doge …???

This was Baxti’s inspirational mode. His informational, in Hindi, was somewhat easier to follow.

Singh closed the folder and glanced at the blurry pigeons on the skylight. Baxti was clumsy, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d started in the right direction. As a citizen of the West, Probst was a priori sentimental. In order to induce the State in him, it might be necessary only to accelerate the process of bereavement, to compress into three or four months the losses of twenty years. The events would be unconnected accidents, a “fatal streak,” as Baxti put it elsewhere. And the process could occur in increments, lasting only as long as it took Probst to endorse Jammu publicly and direct Municipal Growth to do likewise.

Very well then. The daughter was the next step. Filling in the last gap in Baxti’s research, Singh had read Luisa’s letters and diaries and notebooks, he’d heard the testimony of her possessions, and though he was no expert on American youth he judged her to be quite typical. Her teeth were orthodontically corrected. She had no diseases or parasites. She was blond, more or less, and five and a half feet tall, and she wore her affluence to good effect. She’d attracted boyfriends and had dropped the most recent one. She owned a TEAC stereo set, 175 phonograph records, no car, no computer, an insect net and cyanide jar, a diaphragm in its original box with a tiny tube of Gynol II, a small television set, 40 + sweaters, 20+ pairs of shoes. She had $3,700 in her personal savings account and, though it didn’t matter, nearly $250,000 in joint accounts and trust funds. This ratio—2,500 to 37—was a mathematical expression of her distance from adulthood. She cut school and used intoxicants; she was a sneak.

Singh had to decide how to detach her from the family. “Nothing fancy,” Jammu insisted. The least fancy technique was violence. But while it was one thing for Baxti to kill Probst’s dog, it was quite another to apply trauma to the family as a first resort. Trauma induced grief, cathartic convulsions. Very nice. But it did not induce the State.

Few of the other standard techniques fit Luisa either. Singh couldn’t abduct her; abduction involved too much terror and grief. He couldn’t use blandishments, couldn’t persuade her that she had great talent in some particular field, because she didn’t, and she was too sarcastic to be conned. Bribery was also out. Jammu had a Talstrasse banker who’d be happy to open an account, but Luisa hadn’t learned the meaning of cash. She was also too young to be persuaded, à la Mission Impossible , that a close associate or relative was plotting against her. She wasn’t too young for narcotics, of course, and Singh was an excellent pusher, but drugs were just another form of trauma. Political indoctrination might conceivably have worked, but it took too much time.

He was left with little choice but to seduce the girl. Though a rather fancy technique, seduction was ideal for lusty young targets, targets at the age where they were sneaky and looking for fun or trouble. The only real problem was access. Luisa was never alone except at home, or in the car or in stores or birdwatching or at the library (and Singh already knew enough not to make acquaintances in American public libraries). Where was the opportunity for a strange man to get to know her?

The man would have to be Singh, of course. There was no one else. Imagine Baxti: she’d sooner do it with an alligator. But Singh was clean. He’d modeled neckties in harder times. He projected Clean. People told him it was his teeth. Maybe so. In any event, he was clean. Clean and—not to overstate the point – irresistible. He was an old pro with Americans. Why, just last week …

The problem was access. No matter how he lured her out – mailing her free passes to a bar, free tickets to a concert—she’d bring a friend. Sometimes, it was true, she did go birdwatching by herself, but Singh knew nothing of birds. It would take him weeks to learn the “lore,” and the idea of wasting his time on willful squirters of liquid excrement (Singh did not love Nature) was wholly repugnant to him. It was a shame Luisa’s hobby wasn’t knives. He had some items that seasoned collectors would sell their sisters for. The Burmese Flayer …