The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

it, they wouldn’t never done that under Bill O’Connell. Too damned dangerous, and what’s the point? But now they’re taking that neighborhood lot by lot, cleaning out the junkies and the derelicts and some families too and throwing them on the street. They’re fencing it all off. I knocked down some two-fams behind a ten-foot fence last week. A ten-foot fence! And no genius required on my part to see that’s where these new clients of Ronald is doing their buying. Same thing’s happening in those bad blocks east of Rumbold. Jammu’s fighting house to house, and somebody is buying up the lots as she goes. Ronald is in on it, I swear to that. And somebody else, somebody named Cleon.”

      Cleon, RC knew, could only be Cleon Toussaint, an unabashed slumlord, an old enemy of Ronald Struthers. He went around in a wheelchair but nobody felt sorry for him. “Says who?” RC asked, fingering his driver.

      “Says the city recorder. Mr. Toussaint is now proud owner of one and a quarter miles of frontage south of Easton that wasn’t his four weeks ago. A whole neighborhood, RC. He even bought that garbage dump on Easton. And bought it all since the first of October, and doesn’t care if the whole world knows.”

      “Where’d he get the money?”

      “I was waiting for you to ask me that. Nobody knows where he got the money, not me, not anybody. What I do know is what his brother do for a living.”

      RC shivered in his sweat. John Toussaint, brother of the more odious Cleon, was the commander of the seventh police district, except he wasn’t the commander anymore; Jammu had promoted him downtown in September.

      “Not to mention the way Ronald talk about Jammu. It’s almost like she’s some kind of religion. She’s—”

      The head of a golfer appeared from behind the bushes. “You fellas want to play through?”

      Clarence turned to the man, astonished. “That’s very kind of you.” To RC in a whisper, he said, “We’ll return to this.”

      The men on the tee were restively shuffling the clubs in their bags, perhaps regretting their offer. Clarence teed up, spat on his palms, dug in, and whacked a moon shot across Art Hill, the fat first leg of this par five. The pond at the bottom of the hill lay as calm as an uncut jello salad. Leaves speckled it, motionless. At the top of the hill early sunlight inhabited the museum’s stonework. Keeping his head down, his eye on the ball, RC hit his first clean shot of the morning. His ball bounced near Clarence’s and rolled up the next hill. “Keep it,” Clarence advised.

      After Clarence sliced his second shot into some poplars near an arm of the pond, RC hit a blistering fairway wood over the second hill and out of sight. He walked over the crest of the hill, hoping against hope to see his ball in the vicinity of the pin. Instead he saw a multitude of sycamore leaves. They covered the green and the fairway approach. Glossy and whitish, they all looked like golf balls.

      He began to search the green. Clarence’s third shot sailed over his head and cracked into a sycamore trunk, ricocheting favorably.

      “Lost it, huh?” Clarence was cheerful as he crossed the green, his club heads clicking in his bag. “You see mine?”

      RC walked in tight circles, kicking leaves and getting dizzy; the green began to tilt. He looked into the sky and saw the negative images of a zillion leaves. Finally he had to drop a new ball in the bunker, take the penalty, and play from there.

      Clarence foozled his chip, but he managed to hole out for a bogey. When he pulled the flag pin to retrieve his ball, he froze. “RC, boy.” He spoke to something in the hole. “Be honest now. What ball you playing?”

      RC thought. “Wilson. Three dots.”

      “Down in two.” Clarence was still bent over the hole. “Double eagle. You one hell of a lucky sucker.”

      Six months after he finished high school, RC had gotten drafted and sent to Fort Leonard Wood, where sergeants taught him everything he needed to know to become good mortar fodder for gook insurgents. When the rest of his unit was shipping out, though, the higher-ups had transferred him to the uniformed infirmary staff, sparing him a long round trip. Grateful for the break, and by nature a man who left well enough alone, RC reenlisted twice. His war experience consisted of nothing more than typing histories. But when he got back to St. Louis he had a hard time readjusting. Supposedly the Army turned boys into men, but often it turned men into babies, because unlike a monastery or university or profit-making organization, the Army had no ethic. When the pressure let up, you goofed off; it was automatic. RC didn’t drink often, but when he did he got plastered. The word “pussy” was major. He giggled and yukked and slept at every opportunity. It was a trash outlook. In St. Louis old friends of his stayed away from him. Potential new ones were skeptical. They’d ask him what his name was, and he’d shrug and say, “Richard, I guess.” You guess? They tried Ricky, Rick, Rich, Richie, Dickie, Dick, White and White Man. They tried Ice, because he’d found a job with the Cold Ice Company on North Grand. He wasn’t stupid; just uncertain. Eventually he settled on the name RC, short for Richard Craig, his first two names. He became plant manager at Cold Ice. When he was thirty he got to know a young forklift driver named Annie Davis. Four years later he and Annie had a good apartment and a three-year-old son, and then, in July, in the very month you’d least expect it, Cold Ice went out of business. Clarence quickly offered RC a job, which he quickly refused, because either Clarence would have had to lay off some otherwise OK man to make room for him, or else he would have been paying RC out of profits, out of charity.

      So for three months now RC had been working as the parking-lot attendant at the downtown offices of KSLX-TV and KSLX-Radio. It was a joke of a job, but not bad for a stopgap, and not without a certain maddening challenge. KSLX had expanded its workforce by nearly one-third in the last decade without adding any area to its parking lot. RC was required to juggle a lot of cars, and to juggle them fast, especially during the two rush hours. When you parked cars four-deep, getting one out of the back row was like doing one of those sliding plastic puzzles where the object was to arrange the eight little squares among nine little spaces in various orders, but with an important difference: cars couldn’t move sideways the way those little squares could. You had to keep track of exactly who wanted exactly what car at exactly what hour. And you had to keep the patterns loose. In August, Mr. Hutchinson, the station’s general manager and the network’s top man in the Midwest, had asked for his Lincoln four hours after he’d said he was flying to New York for three days, and RC freed the Lincoln in less than (he’d clocked it) fifty seconds by spiriting three four-door yachts into slots that he once might have thought too narrow for a ten-speed.

      But on the Monday morning after he’d humbled Clarence with That Double Eagle, on the morning of the day before Halloween, a VIP asked him to perform the unperformable. This VIP, a dark-skinned foreigner, had sworn up and down that he wouldn’t need his Skylark before two in the afternoon; he had business inside with top management. So RC had put him in one of the longish-term deep spaces right up front, and let Cliff Quinlan park his Alfa in front of it. Quinlan, the station’s hotshot investigative reporter, had mentioned a ten o’clock rendezvous and taken his keys inside with him. This was fine with RC, seeing as two o’clock was a good four hours later than ten o’clock.

      At 9:30 the VIP came out and demanded the car. Suppressing his first impulse, which was to scream, RC urged him to be patient for one half hour.

      “No my good man!” The VIP pointed at his Skylark as if it were a stick to be fetched. “You get me the car immediately.”

      RC rubbed the bristly backside of his head. What with his big eyebrow bones, his long ears and complicated nose, he saw fit to keep his hair short. “You have a problem,” he said, “that I can’t solve.”

      It was a gray, sultry morning in St. Louis. Passersby on Olive Street had slowed to inspect the Skylark in question. The VIP waited until they were out of earshot. Then he straightened his necktie, a shiny silver thing tied in a real potato of a knot, and said: “Know that I am from All-India Radio. I am here on a courtesy visit, and courtesy is my expectation.” A horizontal palm approached RC. On it lay a fifty-dollar bill.

      “Oh man. You