The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

had flushed out the voice of a master agent.

      “Get any sleep last night?” Singh asked.

      “Don’t ever play that voice for me again.”

      The tape ran off the take-up reel. “Barbara’s? You should have heard her before she—”

      “Never again, do you understand?”

      It was Thanksgiving morning. At three o’clock Jammu was due at the mayor’s brownstone for dinner, a tête-à-tête for which she’d planned to spend these hours preparing. Already she could see that she wouldn’t have time even to brush her teeth beforehand, let alone pick out clothes. No doubt she’d end up going in her stretched cardigan and a drab wool skirt.

      Singh cleared his throat. “As I was about to say—”

      “What’s the Bonfire?”

      He sighed. “Not important.”

      “Who’s Stacy?”

      “Last name Montefusco. A little friend of Luisa’s. She’s been lying for her.”

      “Where does Thompson live?”

      “University City.”

      “How will she get to school if she stays with him?”

      “Bus, I guess.”

      Jammu nodded. “You guess. The director of Bi-State owes me one. If you think she needs a bus line to the high school, just tell me.”

      “Thanks. There’s a good connection. She’s been taking a bus at night to sleep with him. Since the twenty-second of October they’ve had intercourse eleven times. On five of those occasions she was able to spend the night. Once outside during the daytime, the remaining five times in the evening, in his apartment.”

      “Thank you for counting, Singh. I respect your thoroughness. But why didn’t she tell Barbara to begin with? If she’d told her, she wouldn’t have had to sneak around, or run away. How did you manage to set it up this way?”

      “How did I set it up?”

      “Yes.”

      “The deceptions started slowly,” Singh said. “There was a conversation—November eight. Evening. Luisa, and Barbara, who tried to draw her out and overdid the ‘cool’ bit. I could understand the girl’s response.”

      “Which was?”

      “Heavy sigh. As if it were too late to start explaining. So she lied. Only-children sometimes feel oppressed and very often they’re duplicitous. They have no sibling rivals. Luisa doesn’t have to worry about losing favor, so she goes ahead and takes exactly what she wants. She’s also going through a typical adolescent rebellion.”

      “So the family is less happy than it looked.” Jammu smiled wanly. “Who is Duane Thompson?”

      “You don’t know?”

      “You haven’t told me, I’ve been busy, how should I know?”

      “But surely you’ve seen his pictures?”

      “Don’t treat me like a baby, Singh. I’ve seen his pictures. But who is he? How well do you know him?”

      Singh rolled a chair up against Jammu’s desk, sat down, and looked across the papers at her. “Not at all. Never met him. He has no connection with us—‘no taint.’ Luisa knew him from school. It came as a rude shock, because I’d spent an entire week setting her up to meet me—”

      “For you to seduce.”

      “Correct.”

      “Good.” Jammu liked to see her employees planning in accordance with their capacities. Singh was seductive, and she was glad he knew enough to exploit it.

      “I lured her to a bar, and she came alone, which was gratifying. Unfortunately I’d stepped into the bathroom when she arrived. When I came out she was talking to Thompson. They stuck together. I had no chance. And forty-eight hours later they—”

      “Were having intercourse, yes. Why did you step into the bathroom?”

      “It was an error.”

      Interesting. Singh didn’t usually make errors like that. He had bladder control. “I ask again,” Jammu said. “Who’s Thompson?”

      “A youth. Unrelated to us, apart from the fact that I got him his photo job.”

      “When?”

      “The same night they met.”

      “Why?”

      “When a man wins a million dollars, he kisses the first person he sees.”

      “So I take it you weren’t opposed to their liaison.”

      Singh smiled. “I wasn’t looking forward to the mechanics. Your dictum, Chief. Nothing fancy. An affair with a local boy was clearly preferable. A matter of verisimilitude. If I take credit for the results, it’s only because I did get her to the bar. And she met him there.”

      “If you didn’t know him before that night, how did you know he had pictures to sell the Post?”

      “I eavesdropped. Thompson was whining about it. I left, confirmed the story at the Post, and—forged ahead.”

      “Amazingly quick thinking. Will she go home again?”

      “Judge for yourself. To me it sounded as if she was making plans for an extended stay.”

      “Are there precedents for this? Sociologically?”

      “Yes and no. No, it isn’t normal for ‘better-class’ girls, or boys, to move out of their homes while they’re still in high school. Certainly Probst thinks it’s abnormal. On the other hand, Barbara is at pains to accept it. Her niece—Ripley’s daughter—moved out at age fifteen. She had a clinical problem, of course,” Singh added, “but there is a precedent in the family.”

      “She’ll be homesick. She’ll be back in a week.”

      “I agree it’s difficult to imagine her missing the ‘holidays.’ But she may very well hold out until then. She has her pride. She’s been away before, in France. I’d guess a month. Thirty days. That gives us time.”

      “Time for what?”

      “Well, assuming that the State is developing—”

      “You’ve given me no evidence to suggest that it is.”

      “Well, naturally, the signs are small. But I assume they’re significant, what with Probst having lost both his dog and his daughter. As early as October twenty-four—but not before, not in the September recordings—I picked up a line like this from Barbara: What’s wrong with you? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

      “From Barbara,” Jammu repeated grimly.

      “And he’s begun to sermonize with Luisa. It sounds a bit mad when he does it—speaks of ‘opportunity’ and ‘self-discipline.’ Masterpieces of irrelevance. He isn’t paying attention. Other men talk about him—they even set him up in opposition to you, as if already there are, de facto, two camps, yours and his. And I listen to him every day, I listen for an awareness of what you’re doing to the city, for a leaning one way or the other, any glimmering of historical consciousness—and there’s nothing. Zero. This could be last year, or the year before that. Your name simply isn’t spoken, except to tell someone else to forget about you. It isn’t unreasonable to believe we’re getting results.”

      Jammu gave Singh a long, hard look. “And how, exactly, are you planning to get him to start working for us? What is the next step you plan to take?”

      “We should go for the kill right away,” Singh replied. “Someone from your syndicate should approach him. Mayor Wesley, for example. Sometime before Luisa gets homesick—sometime